Tears in Rain (23 page)

“Husky, something terrible has happened. It’s...it’s...”

He was so upset that he seemed to be choking on his words.

“Valo has...has exploded a bomb on a travelator. There are many dead. Dead humans. And children.”

Bruna could feel a chill running down her spine. And she suddenly realized that around her all the public screens were broadcasting the same images of blood and slaughter.

“But how? And what about her? Was she wearing the explosive device?”

“Yes, of course. She’s blown herself up. Do you remember what we talked about, Husky? This is horrible. We need to find out what’s happening. Check out Hericio! We’ve heard he’s asking for a funding permit, and he’s trying to raise funds for his party. He’s getting ready for something. By the great Morlay, Husky, we have to do something or they’ll finish all of us off. Listen, I have to go. It looks like the supremacists are trying to assault our headquarters. Be careful. The humans are enraged.”

Habib’s face disappeared. Bruna connected to the news on her mobile. Again, the flames, the confusion, the cries, the broken bodies being transported by medical services. But this time, the detective knew what she was looking at: the destruction caused by Valo Nabokov.
Revenge
, she’d said.

The news services were talking about the antirep wave of violence that had been unleashed throughout the entire region. Supremacists armed with clubs and knives had encircled the RRM building in a menacing way. It seemed to Bruna that the angry reactions of the humans were too well organized to be spontaneous. By all the damned species! The supremacists were even carrying 3-D banners! Once again, she was disturbed by the loathsome suspicion of a conspiracy in the making.

She felt the weight of someone’s gaze on her and raised her head. A small child was looking at her with a frightened expression on his face. When their eyes met, the child clung to his mother’s legs and started to cry. The woman tried to calm him down, but it was clear that she was as scared as her son. Bruna glanced around. The humans were avoiding her; they were switching sidewalks.

Dismay. It wasn’t as if Bruna were an idealistic supporter of happy coexistence between the species; she did not in fact believe in happiness, and even less in coexistence. But she detested violence. In her years of military service, she’d had enough to last her a lifetime. Now all she wanted was tranquility. She wanted
them to let her be. And a society on the brink of civil disturbance wasn’t exactly the most suitable environment for that.

Four years, three months, and eighteen days.

She couldn’t rid her mind of the image of the wasted, spaced-out face of Valo Nabokov. Dying and lethal. The worst part was that children had died. Humans went berserk if you touched their children. Those children that replicants could never have.

Four years, three months, and eighteen days.

The detective felt she was on top of an avalanche. She felt she was caught up in a slippery mass that was hurtling into an abyss and growing exponentially by the minute, swallowing everything in its path. Scarcely a week and a half had passed since Caín had tried to strangle her, and things were moving with a terrifying speed.

Four years, three months, and eighteen days.

Enough, Bruna!
she thought, cursing herself mentally. Enough of this mechanical litany, this nervousness, and this anxiety. The detective was still standing in the middle of the sidewalk, and the passersby were making their way round her like the sea around a rock. They were all humans; the technos must be hiding under their beds. The humans were looking at her and shivering. They were looking at her and whispering. A monster was reflected in the eyes of those men and women, and she was that monster. She missed Merlín with an acute longing. If he were still alive, she’d have a place to go to.

Four years, three...Oh shut up, you stupid rep
, she said to herself, shaking her head. She suddenly realized she was hungry. The monster’s stomach was empty.

She caught the sky-tram to Oli’s bar, and as soon as she reached the rear section, the rest of the passengers began to migrate toward the front half of the vehicle, some brazenly and as quickly as possible, others with ridiculous stealth, moving one tiny step at a time, as if they were playing that ancient human game What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf? Two stops farther on, the
android was totally alone in her half of the tram and the remaining passengers were crammed into the other half.
I could put in some contact lenses
, thought Bruna. Of course she could disguise herself, wear a wig and cover her vertical pupils in order to avoid the humans’ fear and anger. That wasn’t hard to do, and there were bound to be some disguised technos out there already. Maybe one of those characters who had rushed to move to the other end of the tram was a camouflaged rep obliged to behave like the others so as not to give himself away. How humiliating. No, she would never disguise herself out of fear, she decided. She wouldn’t pretend to be someone she really wasn’t.

Just then, the sky-tram stopped abruptly next to one of the emergency staircases. The doors opened and a robotic voice ordered an immediate evacuation. It was a Risk Level 1 recording. Against a soothing background of harp music that had presumably been designed to calm things down, the soft voice repeated “Vacate the tram quickly and calmly, imminent danger” in the same banal tone used to read the results of the Planetary Lottery. Bruna always found the risk recordings counterproductive and ridiculous; each time people heard the harp riff, they panicked. The mob of passengers jumped chaotically onto the emergency platform and began to go down the stairs, pushing one another out of the way in their desire to distance themselves from the android. Suddenly, an explosion was heard somewhat farther down, shrieks, thuds. Then came smoke, a stinking smell, and information loudly exchanged by the passengers: “It’s not reps; calm down, it’s just an Ins who’s blown himself up.”
They prefer those damned terrorist morons to us
, thought Bruna.
Damned shit of a world!

When the obese mulatto welcomed her with her usual smile, Bruna realized that it wasn’t just physical hunger that had driven her to Oli’s bar, but also a need to find an unaffected spot, a small refuge of normality.

“Hi, Husky. You were the only one missing.”

Oli pointed with her chin toward the end of the counter, and Bruna spotted Yiannis and RoyRoy, the billboard-lady. And for some reason, she wasn’t surprised to see them together. She went over to where they were. A sort of muffled whispering, a surreptitious murmur, was emerging from the woman’s body: “Texaco-Repsol, always at your service.”

“Did you notice? It was my idea. She bothers people a lot less like this,” said Yiannis.

The advertising screens were taped over with various adhesive sheets of insulation.

“It was absolute torture,” stressed the old man.

“I’m sorry,” said the woman.

But she said it with a smile.

Without asking, Oli served everyone a beer and placed a platter of snacks on top of the counter.

“I’ve just taken them out of the oven. Don’t let them get cold. And tell me, Husky, how’s it going out there?”

“Looks bad.”

A shadow passed over RoyRoy’s face.

“They attacked a billboard-man, a techno colleague. They set him on fire and we don’t know if he’ll survive. The company has sent all the billboard-technos home. They say it’s for their own safety, but in reality it’s a mass layoff.”

“Did you know Nabokov?” asked Yiannis.

“Yes. And I saw her just before the attack. TTT had taken hold and she was dying and totally insane. She must have had a brain tumor.”

“It’s a tragedy,” reflected Yiannis sadly.

The screen in the bar showed the police charging the demonstrators surrounding the RRM. On the right of the screen stood Hericio, the leader of the Human Supremacist Party, who was being interviewed again.

“And what’s unacceptable is that the police are protecting those monsters and attacking our boys, instead of protecting
humans from those murderers who, at this stage—because there’s no question some of the wounded will die—have killed seven people, including three children.”

Seven victims! Including three children!
Bruna shuddered at the thought of the enormity of the act.
Oh, Valo, Valo. What a terrible deed.
And meanwhile, here was José Hericio again, appearing opportunely on the scene and taking advantage of the drama. She thought about Habib’s words and about Myriam’s intuition regarding the involvement of the leader of the HSP. Her suspicion didn’t seem so absurd now.

“Those supremacists should be investigated. I have to find a way of getting close to them,” she said with her mouth full of a delicious little ersatz-partridge pie.

“There’s...there’s a bar in Colón Square where I know they hang out,” said RoyRoy hesitantly. “As you know, I spend the whole day on the street thanks to these billboards. I once ran into problems at that bar and then I found out it was a supremacist hangout. In my line of work you really have to know where you can go, so I make myself a list of the good spots and the places to avoid. And that’s one of the ones to avoid. Here, I’ll give you the address. It’s called Saturn. But be careful. If you’re thinking of putting in an appearance over there now, who knows what could happen. They really scared me.”

“And it’s precisely because people feel this lack of protection that the populace is arming itself and taking on its own defense. A legitimate and absolutely necessary attitude, given the total absence of the authorities,” railed Hericio emphatically from the screen.

“Oli, please, I beg you, switch him off,” Bruna pleaded.

The woman muttered something at the screen and the picture immediately changed to a soothing panoramic view of dolphins swimming in the ocean.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like listening to home truths?” screeched a nervous, high-pitched voice.

Silence spread through the bar like a bucket of spilled oil. Bruna kept chewing. Without moving, looking at him sideways from under her eyelashes, she studied the character who had just spoken. He was a small and fairly scrawny human. Possibly somewhat drunk. He was close to her, about three feet away.

“Does it bother you to know that we’re sick of putting up with you? That we’re not going to let you go on taking advantage of us? And on top of that, what are you doing here? Haven’t you realized that you’re the only monster here?”

It was true: she was the only rep in the bar. She bit into another canapé. The man was badly dressed and had the look of an unskilled laborer. When he spoke, he tensed his whole body and stood on his toes, as if he wanted to appear taller, more menacing. She almost felt sorry for him; she could knock him to the ground with one smack. But graveyards were full of people overly confident in their own strength, so the rep analyzed her options with all the caution of a professional. First, the exit. The guy was blocking her path to the door, but if push came to shove, she’d be able to jump over to the other side of the counter, which also offered her a perfect refuge. The most worrying thing, because of its very recklessness, was that a little man like this one would dare to confront a combat rep. Could he be armed? Maybe with a plasma gun? He didn’t look the type to be carrying something like that, and she couldn’t see a weapon anywhere on him. Or maybe he wasn’t alone. Could there be other henchmen in the bar? She did a quick sweep of the place and rejected that possibility too. She knew just about everyone by sight. No, he was just a poor, slightly drunk idiot.

“Get lost, you revolting monster. Clear off, and don’t come back. We’re going to exterminate the lot of you, just like rats.”

Yes, indeed, the most disturbing thing was that someone like him would feel confident and supported enough to insult someone like her. Bruna didn’t want to confront him, didn’t want to hurt him, didn’t want to humiliate him, because all of that would
merely strengthen his paranoid delusions, his antitechno fury. She preferred to wait until he got bored and stopped talking. But the little man was getting redder and angrier by the minute. His own rage was inflaming him. Suddenly, he moved one step toward her and threw an awkward punch that the rep had no difficulty in avoiding.
Damn
, she thought, annoyed,
I’m going to have no other option but to whack him
.

It wasn’t necessary. Suddenly a wall of flesh materialized next to them. It was Oli, who had come out from behind the bar and was now grabbing the guy from behind and lifting him off his feet as if he were a doll.

“The only rat around here is you.”

Fat Oli carried the little man—legs kicking—to the door and threw him out onto the street.

“If you show your ugly snout around here again, I’ll split it in two,” she barked, raising a menacing, chubby forefinger.

And then she turned around and looked defiantly at her clientele, like someone expecting a protest. But no one said a word, and people even seemed to agree with her on the whole. Oli relaxed, and a smile lit up her moon-face as she wobbled her way back to the counter. Bruna had never seen her away from the counter. She really was immense, colossal, considerably bigger in her lower extremities than in the majestic opulence on display above. A primitive goddess, a human whale. So gigantic, in fact, that Bruna wondered for the first time if she might not be a mutant, if that mountain of flesh was the product of atomic disorder.

Scarcely had the prickly waves of concern that any incident gives rise to died down within the bar when they heard a racket of sorts outside. Initially, the rep thought it was some kind of maneuver on the part of the recently expelled little man, so she headed to the door of the bar to see what was happening. A few feet away, a redheaded woman was shrieking and wriggling in an attempt to free herself from the grip of a pair of tax police, the
feared “blues.” A little girl, less than six years old, was observing the whole thing, wide-eyed with terror and clutching a grubby toy rabbit. A third “blue”, a woman, came up and grabbed her by the hand. It was an imperious gesture: she literally yanked the little girl by the wrist. The child began to cry and the redheaded woman softly followed suit, instantly abandoning her impulse to fight, as if the tears of the little girl—clearly her daughter—had been the signal to surrender. The police headed up the street with the two of them while the pedestrians kept watch out of the corners of their eyes, as if they were dealing with a slightly shameful scene, something it would be embarrassing to watch directly.