Parallax View (15 page)

She stops before a large wooden door and palms its scanner.

Her room is like something from a historical drama set: the walls are panelled with a material that looks like real wood, and paintings and brass ornaments are suspended at regular intervals around the room. The bed is three times as big as Jiang’s cage-bunk in the dorm, yet it’s still dwarfed by the room itself. Windows on two of the walls would have offered views across Sundeck, but now they’re phased out to show tridees of off-planet landscapes: yellow pus-eruptions that might be Io, a Martian dome at the foot of Olympus, twin moons hanging over a swamp dotted with plastic dwellings raised on stilts.

“Addenbrooke 365,” says Leila, coming to stand beside Jiang, two drinks in her hand. She passes one to the girl and continues, “I was there last year, checking out a smuggling ring for a corporate client.”

Jiang sips at her drink and suddenly her tongue is alive with a fizzing sweetness like nothing she’s ever tasted. A hand on her arm steadies her and she turns to Leila. “You’re an investigator?” she asks.

Leila nods, then gestures with her drink at a slender velveteen case lying on a dresser. About the length of her forearm, it could easily contain an item of jewellery, but with a sickening certainty Jiang knows that it does not. She’s seen such cases in the flix.

Jiang reaches for the case, thumbs it open. It contains a heavy silver loop. “A ferroniere,” she murmurs. She looks at Leila. The woman’s expression is neutral.

“You’re a snoop,” Jiang says. “A reader.” Then her mind takes the next leap. “Are you reading me now?” she demands, edging away.

Leila spreads her hands. “You have the loop,” she reminds Jiang, her tone gentle.

Jiang stares down at the object, resting so innocently in her hands. On the inner surface, where it rests against the back of the wearer’s neck, is a double groove concealing two microscopic finder leads that work their way under the skin and into the snoop’s implanted suboccipital socket.

“Who do you work for?” Jiang demands, holding the ferroniere as if it were her hostage. “Are you with the police?” Jiang has nothing to hide, but like any kid from the Levels she has an in-bred distrust of the authorities.

“I told you, Jiang: I’m a freelance, I follow the contracts wherever they take me. I’m on a case now, working for a private individual, trying to trace a missing child. Maybe that brought out some kind of instinct in me, made me want to rescue you.”

She reaches out a hand, which Jiang eyes distrustfully.

Suddenly she makes the connection... Leila’s words in the bar: she
had
called her ‘kiddo’. The rage and confusion explode within her and she hurls the ferroniere at Leila. With a casual movement, the snoop catches it and returns it to its case.

“What the fuck are you doing to me?” Jiang demands. “What do you
want?
” She’s backing away again, working her way towards the door.

“It was you!” she cries. “The voices in my head, urging me to come up from Three. The dreams... You bastard. What do you want with me?”

“Listen to me, Jiang.” She’s leaning forwards, her eyes beseeching. “Just calm down and listen to me.” She waits, then continues. “Good, that’s better. Listen, I know it’s a shock, but think how it is for me: I have to go through this shitty little scene with everyone I get close to, and I’ve learnt from that. Just consider the facts: I left the loop behind tonight, ergo I wasn’t reading you. I showed you the loop as soon as I could, so you know the position. I’m not trying to trap you, Jiang. I don’t want to harm you, darling. I want to
protect
you, for Christ’s sake!”

“But you did bring me up here, didn’t you?”

Leila looks uneasy at this. She nods. “I had to,” she says. “I had to get you out of there. It’s no place for a young woman, believe me, I know all about it. If an accident doesn’t kill or maim you first then the toxins will kill you before you’re thirty. I had to get you away from the yards. I was down there a month ago, following leads, searching for the missing girl... but the only lost girl I found was you.”

“So you summoned me up to Sundeck.”

She nods again. “I couldn’t get you out of my mind: you had a purity of thought that’s so rare in this shabby world. I started calling to you, I put the name of the bar where we met into your head. Forgive me for all that, please, Jiang.”

What does Leila see in her? She still doesn’t know. She’s thin and scarred from the life she led on Three. Her ribs suck in her skin in jaundiced corrugations.

But Leila has seen beyond all that,
within
all that.

“When this case is over, I’ll take you away,” she murmurs. “We’ll find new worlds, Jiang. I’ll show you sights you’ve never even dreamed of.”

One week later, Jiang is drinking espresso on Sundeck. Life’s been... well, almost
too
good to be true.

She should have known...

She’s seen enough flix to know that whenever anything is going well you can be certain something will come along to spoil it.

Her nemesis has arrived in the form of the slick Italian prick sitting opposite her in his executive greys and smug face. It’s when he smiles that she knows she’s in trouble.

Somehow his looks don’t quite line up, and she knows he’s had them remoulded so many times his own mother would walk past him in the street. He has the look, and the attitude, of the worst kind of cop, or the worst kind of crook – at that end of the scale there’s little difference between the two.

It’s the smile that does it. “I think it’s best if we talk,” he says, leaving no room for argument.

She finishes her coffee and makes as if to leave, but the prick reaches out like a snake striking. He holds Jiang’s wrist in a bruising grip and says, “No, I don’t think you want to go just yet. I think you want to talk.”

Jiang slumps back in her seat and he lets go. She resists the urge to rub at her wrist, even though it feels like he’s broken it.
Is he going to rape me?
she wonders frantically. It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon and the plaza, with its breathtaking views across the silver and glass glitter of the Buildup to the sea, is crowded. Would anyone try to stop him if he dragged her away to some more private place? Somehow she doubts it.

Then she sees that he’s wearing a ferroniere, the loop of silver only partly concealed beneath a tumble of oily curls. He’s a snoop.

She should have known: it’s not her body he’s after, he wants to rape her mind.

She wonders how long he’s waited for this opportunity. It’s the first time she’s been out of Leila’s sight for nearly a week. Her head’s barely stopped spinning as they’ve rushed about from boutique to plush restaurant to shabby dives down in the Levels, combining Leila’s case with the task of grooming Jiang for her new life up here.

Only today Leila had to go and meet her employer and she didn’t want Jiang tagging along, complicating things. Today she gave Jiang a purse full of creds and programmed a hire-buggy to the girl’s palmprint and left her on her own.

And today this prick has made his move.

He’s studying her, still grinning smugly.

She tries to stay cool, tries to imagine what Leila would do in such a situation. She nods at his loop, says, “That’s a waste of time, mister.” Leila has given her a small metal disc, which she wears close to her heart. It carries a picture of Leila, but its real purpose is to shield Jiang from snoops.

“I am aware of that,” he says. “It would be far more convenient if you would allow me to scan you, but if you insist, then I will settle for conversation, instead.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to tell Leila Kundera that I’m one step ahead of her and I’m going to beat her this time, do you hear? I’m going to get to Hannah first.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He inclines his head. In the softest of voices, he says, “Don’t fuck with me.” Still smiling. “Just pass on the message, okay?”

Revulsion floods through Jiang. On an impulse, she snatches a knife from the table and lunges at him.

For an instant he is shocked, then in a single movement he swats the knife from Jiang’s hand and grabs her by the collar. She cries out as her ribs strike the table edge, then she’s falling to the floor as he drops her. She lands on her face and her nose begins to bleed.

From her position on the floor she checks the faces all around her. They glance at her, then look away, as if nothing has happened, and she realises that, despite the new clothes and Leila’s careful grooming, she’s still a half-starved Chink from down in the Levels and none of these people could give a damn.

The buggy takes Jiang straight back to Leila’s apartment. She so desperately wants Leila to be there, but she is not and after a moment of disappointment, Jiang decides this is no bad thing. In the bathroom she showers away the blood and the day’s grime. She won’t tell her, she resolves. Leila has enough to contend with, without Jiang crying to her about what has happened. That’s one thing Jiang is learning from her: how to be tough. It’s an important lesson up here.

But it’s one she’s still learning...

As soon as the door swings open, Jiang starts to blubber. Leila strokes her hair, whispering to her, until she calms herself.

Then Leila holds her at arms’ length and stares at her battered face. “What happened?” she says.

Jiang manages a weak smile. “Friend of yours,” she says. “Italian. Face that’s not his own. Wearing a loop.”

Leila’s expression hardens. “What did he do?” she asks. “What did he say?”

Jiang swallows. “He says he’s one step ahead of you, says he’s going to beat you,” she tells Leila.

Leila holds Jiang tighter, rocks her back and forth. “He’s lying,” she tells her. “I know where she is. I – “

Suddenly, she straightens. Her eyes widen and she leans towards Jiang.

“Listen, Jiang: did he touch you?”

“No,” she wisecracks. “He just gave me a very hard stare – I bruise easy.”

“I mean apart from hitting you. Did he do anything else?”

Jiang recalls her first mistaken assumption about his intentions. She remembers him grabbing her, to stop her from leaving, his powerful grip on her wrist. She holds up her arm. “He grabbed my wrist...”

Leila examines her arm minutely. Then she reaches into Jiang’s shirt and removes the shield. “Trust me,” she says, tossing the metal disc onto the bed and turning away to slip into her ferroniere.

She reaches into Jiang’s head, a warm, near-subliminal presence. Jiang wonders why she wants to read her now, whether she suddenly doesn’t trust her.

It’s okay, kiddo, just relax.

Jiang’s arm starts to get heavy and she realise what Leila’s doing. Soon she can’t feel a thing from the elbow down.

Leila produces a small medkit and extracts a scalpel.

“Hold still,” she says. “I don’t want to damage you.”

Jiang watches the blade sink into her skin. Her brain tells her this should be hurting, but she feels nothing other than a curious lethargy.

“Look,” Leila says.

Jiang does so, and after a second or two she makes out a tiny silver nodule embedded under the skin.

With a pair of tweezers, Leila teases the thing free. Using the same technology as the ferroniere, the implanted device has extruded microscopic filaments several centimetres deep into the blood vessels of Jiang’s arm.

Expertly, Leila extracts the device and spreads it out on a piece of tissue.

Then she folds the thing carefully into the tissue and takes it to the bathroom. Seconds later, the toilet is flushed and Leila emerges smiling.

“My ‘friend’ Giordano gave you a little present,” she says. “He sent you back to me carrying both a message and a bug in your arm. He thought he could use you to eavesdrop on my investigations and lead him to the girl.”

“But why doesn’t he just go after the girl directly – he’s a telepath, after all – ”

“A third rater,” Leila sneers. “He couldn’t read an orgy in the next room. He’s only got this far by following me, not by reading heads. I thought I’d thrown him off way back.”

She seals the wound with a spray from the medkit and within a short time Jiang can feel the lethargy lifting and a numb throbbing start up in her arm.

“You up to moving?” Leila asks. “I think we’d better be quick.”

“Where are we going?”

Leila looks at her triumphantly. “To get the girl,” she says.

“You know where she is?”

“Roughly. We’ll find her, then get the hell out.”

She leads Jiang down to the foyer, then they pause in the entrance of the hotel as Leila surveys the crowded street.

“Okay,” says Leila. “Time to move.”

They plunge into the crowd, Leila hauling Jiang the short distance to the waiting buggy. They collapse into its padded seat, Leila still surveying the crowd. “I didn’t see him,” says Leila, as the buggy starts up. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

“Where are we going?” asks Jiang.

Leila smiles. “You’re gonna love me, kiddo,” she says. “I’m taking you back down the Levels.”

Jiang pulls a monkey-face. “How far?”

“Level Zero.”

“Ha ha,” Jiang says, sarcastically. “I thought you were a snoop: don’t you know the bottom level is Level One?”

But Leila is shaking her head. “There’s always a level lower,” she tells Jiang. “Rule of life: no matter how far you sink, there’s always someone grovelling in the shit below you.”

They stop a short time later, climb out of the car. They enter a goodsyard, rank upon rank of warehouses crammed with goods from below awaiting transportation. Holding hands tightly, they leap aboard the giant cage of an industrial funicular that winds its way down steeply spiralling tracks, deep into the Levels. In the feeble light of the glo-tubes Jiang can see that the cage is crammed full of worn and scrapped starship parts, en route to the smelting plant on Level One. The clanking descent of the cage is deafening, matching the thunderous pounding of Jiang’s heart.

The two sit knee to knee in the gloom. The lights of the levels and the service decks in between pass by in a slow strobe as steadily the air becomes more humid, its taste more oily.