Spares (11 page)

They tried their best, David and Suej in particular. They’d all sat up nights and dreamed aloud of some day setting foot beyond the fence. I used to hear snatches of these conversations sometimes, as I dozed over a book at the other side of the control room. I’d let them talk, though I knew—or thought I did—that it could never happen. A release from pain, some better place. Everyone needs a religion, some unseen good to yearn toward.

The moment I actually got them out, they froze. It was too much. Way, way too much. Most stopped dead
in their tracks, trying to inventory the new things one by one. As the new things started with the black road at their feet and continued indefinitely in every direction, I sensed it could take a while. Ragald went to the other extreme, tuning everything out and thrumming instead with a blind and nervous joy which pulled each limb in a different direction and threatened to tear him apart. Mr. Two gazed meditatively across the hill, turning in a slow circle and intoning the word “spatula” at regular intervals, and Jenny stood slightly apart, trying to occupy as little space as possible.

I got them moving eventually, but it was like trying to hurry a group of children on acid through a toy factory. Every step was too magical to understand, never mind leave behind.

There was a T-junction thirty yards up the hill. I couldn’t remember where the two choices went, and squinted in both directions. One seemed to head round a hill, probably toward the town; the other looked as if it headed off toward the south end of the Blue Ridge Parkway. We didn’t want to go to Roanoke—hell, who does?—so I took them right instead.

It was impossible. By dint of shouting at them I managed to focus David and Suej, but that was all. Mr. Two wouldn’t walk in a straight line, but in large bowing curves like a cat. Nanune was still trying to hide behind Ragald, and whenever the male spare turned to stare at something new, she shuffled round behind him until they were suddenly walking in another direction altogether. I could have made quicker progress walking backward on my hands. It was pitch-dark, and the temperature was dropping like a stone. I was torn between a rising panic and insane calm. The two emotions fed each other, melding together until they were transformed into some larger feeling of swift and glittering dread.

Then two yellow eyes appeared ahead, and I bundled the spares rapidly off the road. By the time the car
had passed I knew that we couldn’t simply keep on walking.

I got us a half mile up the Parkway, to a point where the trees were thickening on either side of the road. Then I collected the spares into a group, led them into the trees, and impressed upon them the importance of shutting the fuck up.

It was like being in the tunnels when the operating men came, I said—only even more important.

I walked away, turned back to check they were out of sight, and saw Ragald obliviously following me. I returned him to the group under Suej’s supervision, and then walked away again. From twenty yards they were invisible. They’d be safe for a little while—at least until SafetyNet came with dogs. Holding the gun up against my chest, conscious of how few cartridges I had left, I ran off to see what I could find.

I was too wired then to feel what I experienced the following morning in the CybTrak compound—a sudden delirious joy at being back in the world. Instead, I concentrated on keeping myself invisible, trying to work out a way we could get out of the area. The fact that the road wasn’t crawling already with SafetyNet security or Roanoke police was almost eerie. We had very little time to vanish.

I found the CybTrak rails after about ten minutes and ran back to collect the spares. They were terrified by then, and so cold they could barely walk, but I got them back to the track. We waited, and it was not long before a train meandered past. I walked alongside the train hauling the spares one by one into a carriage full of computer parts.

Then I jumped up myself, pushed the panel shut and we left the Farm behind forever.

Howie sat staring at his hands, as he had for much of the second part. I’d seldom met his eye, just let my mouth run. It was the first time in five years I’d had a real conversation
with someone who wasn’t a droid or a spare. Even though I’d been describing a disaster area, it had felt good. Except now I’d finished I remembered it was all true, and that there were people who wanted to punish me for it.

I told Howie the rest, how we’d fetched up in a backwoods CybTrak compound that morning, and how Ragald had been cut in half by two security droids which had disguised themselves as an abandoned snow-covered carriage. Then I stood up, bones creaking, and fetched another beer from the fridge.

When I sat back down at the table Howie raised his eyes and looked at me. Then he started slowly shaking his head.

I woke the next morning from dreams which had been confused and bitter. When my eyes blinked open and I found myself lying stiffly on the floor with my head on a balled-up coat I was seized for a moment with weary dread, the kind you get when you find yourself somewhere you have no recollection of going, somewhere you can’t even understand, and all you know is a churning confidence that you have done something wrong which you don’t even remember.

Then I realized where I was, lying on the floor of Howie’s storeroom, and fragments of dreams danced in front of my eyes. Trees, alive with flame, blackening leaves flicking back and forth with faces which were not there. Then real faces, faces ruptured with fear, studded with eyes which wore terror like milky cataracts. A smell, like the worst of the tunnels, but with a downward slope toward death, a stench which had nothing to do with healing and everything to do with a final dissolution. A flock of mad, happy orange birds, disappearing behind a hut.

I screwed my eyes up and pushed my fists into them, morphing the flames into geometric patterns which swirled and jumped. Then I let go and they disappeared. I sat up, reaching for a cigarette, and looked around.

Suej was still asleep. After Howie and I had finished I carried her through and laid her on the sacks which looked softest. She woke and we had a talk, mainly about David and where he might be. It felt different, being with her. She was just one person in the world now. After years of being there for her and the spares all the time, I’d started to go away. Maybe it wasn’t my fault. Perhaps it was just an inevitable consequence of returning here, like my increasing desire for Rapt. Ratchet once told me that you remember things best in the state that you learned them in the first place. Being back in New Richmond and trying to remember how to behave while straight was like trying to balance a chain saw on my chin while bombed out of my mind.

I’d lain, on the floor thinking of Rapt the previous night, thinking of it for hours. Thinking of how the worst addictions are the easiest to get hold of. Like alcohol. There it is, in stores, in bars, in people’s homes. It’s right there. You can see it, reach out for it, fall into it. People don’t have Rapt in their drinks cabinets, but it’s not too hard to get hold of it if you know where to go, and I knew.

I could hear the sound of revelry from the bar, and checked my watch. Seven a.m. The first shift. I watched the smoke from my cigarette curl into the air, and wondered what I was going to do. Just about every part of my mind knew that I shouldn’t be here, that I should take Howie’s advice and get out. I’d had no right to bring the spares into this in the first place, into a city they didn’t know and problems they couldn’t understand. Now the city had stolen them, and at three a.m. there’d still been no word on where they might be.

I was finding it increasingly hard to believe it was
SafetyNet who’d taken them. Before we’d gone to sleep I’d pressed Suej hard on exactly what happened when the men came to Mal’s apartment. There was something about the way she described events that made me wonder if they hadn’t been bargaining on finding the spares. I was also intrigued by the fact they’d blundered round the apartment before they went. I’m not a small guy—it would have been fairly evident if I’d have been standing there, not least because I would have been firing a gun. Finally, only leaving one guy to finish me off: why not two, or more?

Maybe it was some gang making good on the contract Howie had warned me about, and then just picking the spares up as booty. All of them, except maybe the half-spare, could have been sold on for some purpose. Jenny alone was worth good money.

I needed to know which was true. If it was SafetyNet, chances were it was all over. If not, then maybe there was still time to get the spares back before anything happened to them.

But first Mal needed burying. I wasn’t going to leave him spread over his apartment to rot.

I rose quietly, used the men’s room for a shave, and then sat for a while on a bench in the street outside the bar, with a café au lait bought from a food stand on the corner. I knew there were only two questions worth answering—who the killers were and where they’d gone—but I felt as if I’d missed some train in the night. It was like I knew the rules but not the game anymore; or maybe it was the other way around.

The newspost on the corner kept distracting me, burbling the day’s current factoids. Another woman had been found dead, this time on the 104th floor. The story rated slightly longer than the previous day’s, because the victim lived on the right side of a certain horizontal line. Her face had also suffered “unspecified damage.”

I frowned—two homicides with the same MO, on different floors, on consecutive days. “Unspecified damage”
smacked of the cops holding back something distinctive to weed out hoax confessors. For just an instant my mind clicked into an old frame of reference, stirred sluggishly toward interest.

Then I told myself it was none of my business anymore.

The rest of the bulletin was fluff. New advances in some technology or other, recent statistics on something else. Some guy believed to be a mob figure had been found dead, and someone had discovered that Everest wasn’t the highest mountain after all.

“Beignet?”

“No,” I said. I hate breakfast. I turned to see Howie standing beside me, contentedly munching.

“You should eat something. It gives you a good start on the day.”

“It gives you brain tumors,” I said. “I read it somewhere.”

Howie sat on the bench next to me and took a sip of my coffee. He chewed for another few moments, ostensibly watching the newscast. Then he turned his round face toward me.

“I know this is turning into a constant refrain,” he said, “but what you’re thinking about is not a good idea.”

“What am I thinking about?”

Howie pointed at me with a
beignet
“You should go bury Mal, if that’s what you’re going to do. Then find some wheels, and I’ll get Paulie to deliver Suej to wherever you are. You could be in the mountains by lunchtime, who knows where by tomorrow. That’s what you
should
do. To be frank, Jack, you’re not the guy you used to be—and I mean that as a compliment. I don’t look at you and think ‘Christ—a psycho’ anymore. You’ve already fucked off the guys who owned your Farm. Topping that by paying a visit to a certain spaghetti-eater of our mutual acquaintance isn’t such a hot idea.”

“What makes you think I’d do that?”

“Your head gives you away. It glows when you’re about to do something stupid. And that would be
really
stupid.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It would.”