Novahead (5 page)

 

At the hotel Murphy fixed herself an October Surprise and sat on a smashed TV whose innards looked like a city with kidney-coloured streets. I sat on the edge of the bed and opened a can of water. My left hand felt like a wedge of poison sticks. I
'
d wrapped it in a strip of rotten curtain patterned with brown roses. The beating was enough to prompt me to put everything else aside and deal with the pain.
‘
I think my eye
'
s blown.
'

‘
Lose much blood?
'

‘
I
'
ve got DNA base pairs I haven
'
t even used yet. That was nice of you to haul my chestnuts out of the blaze back there. Kind of a miracle.
'

‘
So
'
s bleeding upwards.
'

‘
Was I doing that again? They seemed determined to find me mistaken. Their ancient form of wonder-working depends on it. Pretending you
'
re not helpless is just a coping strategy. I would have died for nothing.
'

‘
All do.
'

I lit a shock absorber. My alertness was for her sake - as was the fact that I was awake atall.

‘
As for the broken nose, I
'
ve decided to take it as a distinction - one of many bad decisions in my life. How
'
d you find me?
'

‘
Hole in the gap. You reversed into the story like a Florida gran, Atom. What
'
s the connective tissue?
'

‘
No mystery there. A slabhead warned me off the kid so I got serious. Then I found the Mexicans fiending for him at the Gate. They screwed up with a chronobomb. I
'
ve seen better timing from a stuffed olive. But the banditos caught me off-balance - I
'
ve been out of town a long time. There seems to be way less torque under the hood these days, but maybe I haven
'
t engaged enough to feel it yet.
'

‘
Fed training says the most dangerous town is one where the advent of crime is very recent and its novelty keeps everyone wasteful and imprecise, thinking they
'
re proving something. I don
'
t think there are any towns like that anymore. Why
'
d you leave?
'

‘
I figured out what the cops were doing right. But when I incorporated the lesson, they didn
'
t care for it. Now I get back and find Cortez is growing human in the ground.
'

She smiled.
‘
Yup. Neon headstone, flashing arrow pointing jauntily down. Casket with a half-lid, the works. Inscription says
“
This Tombstone is Not a Toy
”
. I guess there
'
s justice if you dig deep enough in a graveyard.
'

‘
No, that
'
s just forgetting.
'
I dragged on the shocker.
‘
Well, you
'
ve given me no cause to doubt you
'
re human, at least. How long you been here?
'

‘
When bad things happen to good people.
'

‘
Always? Thought you were from out of town.
'

She humphed.
‘
I got assigned right here on the seamy side of life.
'

‘
It
'
s the seams that hold it together.
'

‘
What I kept telling them. They interpreted it as dud loyalty tuning. Got a burn notice from the ruin.
'

‘
Can they afford to burn anyone these days?
'

‘
There was some knock-on when the Pentagon went up five years ago. Thank god the populace hadn
'
t the balls to take over even when there was a corpse at the wheel.
'

‘
When payback has atrophied for that long, it loses its spring.
'

‘
But meanwhile years of my life were run under those wheels. I
'
d earned the wrong things, obviously. Even my compromises are in ruins. I want to live the sort of life that
'
ll have consequences, Atom. A free agent.
'

There was something in back of her explanation but I didn
'
t know what it was. I watched the smoke pirouette upward from my gasper.
‘
Or maybe you
'
re keeping their deals warm for them.
'

She stood up and started moving with a sort of evasive aimlessness. She was a bullet of a girl, a design classic. Her weight would have doubled if she grew her hair. She lifted the cover of the Gamete book with the tip of a finger.
‘
What
'
s the book about?
'

‘
Amnesia conceals a killing, as usual,
'
I lied.

‘
Why does humanity always err to the boring,
'
she said, turning to me.
‘
To such extremes that it seems to want to be dead, or appear dead? Like an insect that looks like a dead twig so it
'
s passed over by predators. Maybe humanity
'
s instinctively doing the same, to be passed over by hostile aliens or something.
'

I flashed on sacrificial spatial topology, the notion that the existence of a dense idea-space requires the sacrifice of a large adjacent near-vacuum. It was based on the unproven premise that there were a limited number of ideas and was fashionable because humanity wanted to believe that premise.
‘
Come on, we
'
re too far along for that. Crappy
'
s the default, so what.
'

She stood close, looking into my face. Her hair solarised under the room
'
s single lightbulb. But she smelt red as an aniseed ball.
‘
You
'
re not like that, are you.
'

It didn
'
t seem like a question.

‘
I don
'
t overlap. I
'
m old-fashioned.
'

‘
I heard otherwise, lots.
'

‘
Evolution, you mean.
'

‘
What could be more old-fashioned?
'

‘
Don
'
t click on an empty gun. It
'
s unattractive.
'

She slapped me, twice. The first slap knocked the cigarette out of my mouth, the second put it back.
‘
I want to believe that,
'
I said.
‘
I really do.
'

Someone was stumping sloppily up the hotel
'
s bent stairs to our atrophied door.
‘
Doors come toward and around me without great effort on my part,
'
a voice rumbled from the other side.
‘
This much I know.
'
Behind the warped wood hung a heart black as an antique telephone. Blince was so fat he
'
d never heard it beating.

‘
Out the window,
'
the girl hissed.
‘
On the ledge.
'

‘
You
'
re making a simple deal very complicated,
'
I whispered, but I did as she said, sitting out of the window on to the flaked paint of the concrete ledge as Blince entered with a parrot key. I shuffled aside a little until I was within the O of the dead neon HOTEL. Night was creeping in and the air smelt of fresh sulphur. Behind me they were speaking, each smithereen to the other.

‘
Hands up,
'
said the chubby enforcer.
'
Obvious, but it doesn
'
t hurt to be reminded. Pivot, this is Lux Murphy, a Fed, such as they are. Murphy, you did the right thing calling me.
'

‘
I didn
'
t call you.
'

‘
Then you
'
re under arrest. Pivot, give her some cheese or whatever these things eat.
'

Pivot sighed.

‘
And frisk her. Dollars to donuts she
'
s flawed.
'

‘
Let
'
s both of us humour him, Miss Murphy,
'
said Pivot in a tone flat as a Cuban steak.

I watched the jagged distance of the skyline, the pinlight of guns firing like synapses across the city surface. A murder of squad cars was parked below, rooflights pulsing. It was summertime, I think. I looked to my wrist and remembered the beamer was gone.

Then the tangled noise of their speech continued. Pivot sounded indifferent.

‘
Girly gun with a joke grip. Ammo in her coat.
'

‘
Gun used to be a heavy black oily concern like a carburetor,
'
Blince remarked.
‘
Now it
'
s like a toy, looka this. What
'
s it fire, mink-lined bullets? Entry wounds probably dotted with little hearts, I right?
'

I hadn
'
t seen Murphy stow the Bohr or the judex broom. She was good.

‘
This ammo
'
s got a frog on the label. What kinda pills people firin
'
these days?
'

‘
I was taught by my mother it was impolite to talk about one
'
s ammunition.
'

‘
You talk with the safety on. Kinda passive aggressive.
'

‘
You wouldn
'
t like the alternative.
'

‘
Yeah? We saw you with Atom, grinning like a gash and firing a bigger piece than this. That
'
s the stuff eh - bullets galore and cordite blowing up your pants leg. So what happened? It was all going dandy then you withdrew your participation.
'

‘
It seemed to be doing you good.
'

‘
You
'
re like a spy in a colouring book aint ya Murphy? Cuter
'
n a glue-eyed baby sloth I reckon. What
'
d Atom do, give you a single longstem silencer? Watch out, he
'
ll make a fridge magnet of your nose.
'

‘
I
'
d like that.
'

‘
Well, Murphy, ah, this aint so good, this is looking pretty bad. You conspired with a known ... well, we better decide. What
'
s his form, Pivot?
'

Pivot, whoever the guy was, tapped at a handset. I heard my biography. Hours of legend were absent but some of it was true. Pivot
'
s voice was diffident and dignified.
‘
His correlated intel jacket starts in mid-air. Nothing early on, no birth record, blank as Sanctus. Travelled under a false flag. Known aliases: Atman, The Malamatic, Man of the Blank Hands -
'

‘
Acid dabs,
'
Blince commented.

‘
Probably. He
'
s described as a
luftmenschen
, man of air, an interbeing, creature of absolute activity, lungs like a helicopter, living purely by his wits. He acknowledged no sanction or hierarchy.
'