Novahead (15 page)

 

The city was creaking with corners. It had become a place where every step I took was goodbye. Gamete had been right about that.

I found the block, parking the beat-up Mantarosa and sinking its anchor. The walls were tagged with code salad. I stepped out of the rain into the stench of wet charcoal. The building had burned pretty thoroughly at some point. Rain was dripping through its dilapidated innards, falling storeys past me as I put my hand to a black wrought iron stair rail and started up a downflowing stream. Roaches the size of tortoises clung here and there, and one the size of a knightly shield hung on a landing wall. No, every apartment was a shell. Returning to ground level, I was walking against the flow again - there was a tilt to the floor. Behind the stairwell the flagstones sloped to a door so rotten it seemed to have ochre feathers. Beyond this was another door which looked to have been cast from pewter. I entered with a patented Panacea parrot key.

Posh place. Windows on the ceiling. Carpet on the walls. Tiles on the floor. I
'
d been prepared to discover any kind of aberration but this. Corridors were hung with gold-framed paintings of baffled-looking land owners halted rigid in mud and smoke. On a dark stand was set a creepy statue of Saint Velociro in high gloss, her tilted head gleaming like liquefying wax. I poked my head into a chamber containing a skull-shaped jacuzzi, the glossy floor made of interfitted human teeth. Another room was given over to a grand mural of an eagle gliding through a canyon, which a plaque explained was symbolic of fascism moving through the democratic process. After a minute of doping out the place I cracked a small door and peered down into an illuminated basement where Heber was strapped to a table. On a large plasma screen a couple of cowboys indulged in a quickdraw which made a lot of noise and effectively destroyed the happiness of both. Murphy the Fed was leaning to look Heber in the face and spoke above the thrum of a generator.
‘
You
'
re hazardous materials, kid. Concentrate because you are sick. Concentrate because you will soon die. Remember. Remember hard.
'

I should have gone straight in but I wanted to leave a message first. I found a study lined with shelves that bore legal texts bound in cream imitation skin. On a wooden mount was the tusk of a senator. Pivot
'
s desk felt like a wedding shrine of malignancy. It was the work of a few moments to prime and place the voodoo bomb in back of a small side-drawer.

Something flashed in the doorway - Murphy raised a gun and her eyebrows, as if raising a toast. It was another of those small-boned pistols she seemed to favour, I don
'
t know which brand. She seemed amused.
‘
How
'
d you get in here, hotshot?
'

‘
The front door.
'

‘
It
'
s a good enough story, I can
'
t prove it wrong.
'

There was some noise behind her - Pivot entering the apartment.

‘
Hey, Pale!
'

Pivot appeared, taking his coat off.
‘
Eh, what
'
s all this?
'

‘
You won
'
t believe it, I just found him playing the sleuth in here.
'

‘
Oh? Well, he played it wrong.
'

‘
When I get up in the morning I know I
'
ve already made at least one mistake,
'
I told him, edging away from the desk.

‘
Tie him in a chair,
'
Pivot said.

Murphy lowered her glint pistol a little and shot me in the right leg.

So I was distracted as she pushed me into a chair that looked to have been fashioned out of blackstrap molasses and tied my hands behind it with some sort of plastic wire. Only then did she frisk me and obtain the machine pistol and mundane mags.

Pivot stood near the desk, observing silently.

‘
You
'
re in a bad mood, Pivot,
'
Murphy observed.
‘
Shall I come back when you
'
ve had time to sneer?
'

‘
Yes,
'
he said, the simplicity of his reply taking the wind out of her. She left us. He scrutinised me a while.
‘
I see one whose face is the exhausted finale of evolution along several quite different lines: the fish, the reptile, and the snail or gastropod. Features of all these are evident in your expression. And you
'
re a stretched wreck. What happened to your head?
'

‘
When your plant called you and everyone else cottoned on, it was a regular jawcar jamboree.
'

‘
Well, you
'
ve caused me considerable trouble. The round in your thigh from the purse gun, it
'
s pocket ammo, what do the hard men call it ...?
'

‘
A placeholder.
'

‘
Placeholder ammo, that
'
s it. But we could do something more permanent. My coke girl keeps her finger off the trigger only by effort of will. Her philosophy is
“
Don
'
t think of it as losing a life, but as gaining a bullet.
”
Or you could be strangled until you have the blue face of a Vedic deity. I could afford either.
'

He was stood there with his hands in his pockets, wondering what to do with me. He combined stillness with precision in a way that creeped me out by suggesting he was forever held in readiness for something.

Fear - I
'
d forgotten what it was like, that it wasn
'
t a decision. I tested whether I could discreetly shift the chair back by degrees. Maybe the desk itself would direct the blast the other way. I was sat hostage to Pivot and his suction-mounted morality.
‘
Siddown, Pivot, you
'
re straining my neck.
'

‘
I won
'
t, for the moment. My ass was removed in childhood. On the plus side, the acuity of my remaining senses has increased a hundredfold. I read the gap better than almost anyone. Pattern recognition.
'

‘
I wondered how you
'
d got where you are.
'

‘
Yes, I don
'
t really have anything else when it comes down to it. Ract has an art-collection marriage and two full-blown sons. Darkwards has his ballroom dancing or whatever he calls it. They go along that way and ignore the little jump to either side that would take them into a joke. While I have a silence barely worth coming home to, and not a ray of suspicion to enliven me.
'

‘
All this dead stock,
'
I said, shucking my head at the surlyguy busts and books ignored by the yard. These vacuum-sealed keepsakes were markers of a sense of entitlement, though I
'
d never seen the effect in so pronounced a form. Pivot was beside himself with it.
‘
Nice home for the ornaments. Where do you live?
'

‘
Exactly. No-one suspects a living creature could dwell in such a museum. So I
'
m at peace outside the narrowly seething bandwidth of bomb-zombies and perseverants. I wouldn
'
t usually discuss it with someone who behaves as you have. There are two types of people in the world, Atom.
'

‘
Two? Used to be there was over a thousand; then twelve; pretty soon they
'
ll have it down to one. For damn sure it
'
s America.
'

‘
Oh, you
'
re breaking my heart,
'
he said, going around the desk and sitting down.
‘
Are you alright? You look almost scared. Not what I expected. Your intel jacket implies you
'
ve been translated through several dimensions side-on to ours and are probably a much more exotic creature than we can see, the Atom we all know being its prick, merely.
'

‘
I
'
ve been described as a prick, that
'
s true.
'

‘
Well I don
'
t hold with urban legends about interbeings and so forth. At this stage people will claim anything.
'

‘
I
'
ve said nothing about it either way.
'

He casually shunted a drawer on the opposite side from the primed one and retrieved a Bernardelli P-018 pistol which he pointed negligently in my general direction, his hand resting on the desk. He looked odd with a sender, like he didn
'
t know which end went in his gob.
‘
This is not really a necessary preface to what I have to do, but you
'
ll hear me out, I know it.
'

I was nauseous from the new wound and the stress of waiting for the two face salute. I
'
d been hoping it would be over quickly but the bastard was eloquent.

‘
I was unconnected, pigmentless and poor in Beerlight, which is a textbook debtropolis if you take out the headcrime. Here
'
s a rule for remembering numbers: if it
'
s high, it
'
s a bill and beyond you; if it
'
s low, it
'
s a wage and perhaps within your grasp. The devil; the police - I could not take one and leave the other. I could have gone the British route of guns and whisky - but why not go direct? Why not trade in money? It
'
s prestige without content but that only means you can fill in the details according to your taste.
'

‘
Did you do anything interesting with it?
'

‘
Ofcourse not - look around you - nobody does when it actually comes to it. By the time I realised with horror that life was no mere passing fancy, I
'
d grown attached to its compensatory malices. It
'
s easiest to boost from above, and it gave me a very special feeling when I made my first bet - on a company called Ramatagen which sold novelty gun grips and textured gripcovers cloned from the owner
'
s skin, or the owner
'
s lover
'
s or enemy
'
s skin. And other stuff like hammerless placebo guns and T-shirts bearing random phrases in a language few could read. One of them said
“
Mind the gap
”
, I remember.
'
He chuckled.

‘
We all find our consolation somewhere.
'

‘
Then I needed a legitimate front, but not so legitimate that I
'
d seem unbelievable. At first the law and its frankly incalculable demands upon the people seemed merely another arena for career ambition. I moved among senators, semi-local officials, military generals and others in on the deception, attempting to emulate their moral words and immoral acts, and finally achieved this balance by trial and error. Out winning claws and minds, demanding money, naming for it destinations which were not always false but which never justified its source. Civilisation had purported to regard crime as a disease rather than a part of its metabolism. It was never outwardly acknowledged that certain acts might be a reasoned response. For centuries authority had thought to collapse the calculus of crime by pressing the centre of its gravity, until it realised this was also its own centre of gravity. This is only one challenge of fighting something that travels like a sand-dune, shedding cells constantly. Optimists viewed the law as no more than a desperate measure of continuity, until it began changing every week. Most then assumed the law was capricious because it varied with time, geography, funds, influence, interpretation and so on from one day to the next. But the
motives
for law are common and unchanging - that
'
s the continuity. Take, sympathise, control. But the middle one has become a luxury. It gives nothing back.
'