by Carl Sargent
"Sounds dangerous," Serrin said dubiously.
"Not at all. I'm too valuable for my employers to consider killing me. Of course, they do know that from time to time I might crack something they wouldn't want known, and pass it on to other employers, but I don't
have anything to worry about for at least a couple of years yet."
"Why's that?" Serrin was starting to feel like his mission in life was to pump out ever more questions.
"Because that's when I'll probably be over the hill and less valuable than I am now," the man said serenely. "Then I'll probably retire to some ghastly little country estate in Scotland, grow conifers, marry someone called Morag, and produce two-point-seven horribly over-intelligent children. Possibly." He sat back and rubbed at his lips with his index finger, half-concealing a sardonic smile.
"Anyway, that's not important now. Let's get back to the matter at hand. We know as far as anyone can know that someone wishes to abduct you. It does not seem likely that this is for ransom, right?"
"I don't have that much money. I don't have relatives with any money, either," the mage replied.
"So there's some other reason. If we want to take this message seriously, then that reason applies to other people also. The message referred to 'others in the same situation.' The question has to be, what does your mysterious informant mean by that? I would be inclined to take the most obvious thing about you: the fact that you're a magician. Of course, it could be because you're an elf, but then that's less statistically discriminating. We'll keep that as a back-up option. But it might be both: that you are an elven mage. Which greatly narrows the field. So, I'll have to get to work looking at cases of elven mages kidnapped in, say, the last year. Then work further backward if I get too few positive cases."
"Surely that will take you an age," Serrin wondered.
"Oh, hours" Michael replied, quite seriously. "I'll have to get back to Manhattan to do it. I have a remote here, and I can fire up the smart frames for the obvious stuff, but I need my Fairlights for this. As I'm sure you'll appreciate, I don't move them around."
"Fairlights?" Serrin was astonished, not least by the plural. Any decker he knew would have killed his own mother to get his hands on just one of the most advanced cyberdecks on the market. To even dream of owning more than one was somewhere between hallucinatory and criminal hubris.
"Not the standard variety," Michael replied airily. "I had to spend a year upgrading them. Excuse me a moment." He headed for the bathroom of his suite.
"He's too clever," the troll grumbled as the door clicked behind the Englishman.
"I need that cleverness," Serrin said defensively, thinking that the troll felt inferior to the racing-car speed of Michael's thoughts. Again, Tom sensed his feelings.
"I mean that he doesn't have much of a heart, that one," the troll said quietly. "I'm not sure I would trust him. It's all a game to him."
"Tom, if he finds out who's trying to get me, I don't care too much how he does it." Serrin replied drily. The troll shrugged his shoulders and picked up his porcelain coffee cup, scowling in disdain at its ridiculously small size. Very carefully, he filled two cups and set them out for Serrin and Michael. Then he flipped up the top of the silver coffeepot, poured some milk into it, and raised it to his lips.
"Will you come with me, Tom?" Serrin asked again. "I'll probably have to go back to New York with him, but I'm still shaken up and scared. It's not that I distrust him, but I've only just met him. You, I know. Please."
The troll finished the contents of the coffeepot and licked his lips. "You gonna pay me?"
"Three hundred nuyen a day. If we get into real danger, we can renegotiate."
"It's not for me," the troll added. "It'll all go back into Redmond."
"I know. Thanks."
There wasn't time to say more before Michael re-emerged, fastidiously wringing his freshly washed hands.
"There is a problem with going back to New York," Serrin said to him. "I mean, I'd like to, but "
"Definitely," Michael interrupted him. "I'll need you there to answer all kinds of questions when the data starts coming in. You're worried about being recognized, right?"
"Maybe it won't be a problem. Hopefully, I'm not news anymore," the elf said.
"Well, no. But with all that stuff in Newsday, think of the options! The book! The trid! The smisense well, no, not that, I shouldn't think. But we can't ignore the New York media's desire to wring dry every last dollar from something before they go on to exploit something else. Some little chancer may still find you a worthwhile target for harassment, but I've got an idea." He beckoned and Serrin followed, uncertainly. Michael threw open the doors of an absurdly large closet.
"I only have what I threw into a suitcase," Michael said apologetically. Staring at the number of suits and shirts, Serrin thought that this was excessive if Michael thought he was only going to be gone from home for a single day. This collection looked more like the traveling wardrobe of some bubble-brained simsense star.
"I know," the Englishman grinned. "It's my only vice. I can't be bothered with fast cars, I don't fry my brain with chips, drink, or dope, and since you seps think Englishmen don't know how to have fun, I don't bother with women either. Better for the image, old boy. Now, I must say I think you would look ritzy in those tweeds. You're the same height as me and even thinner. And, I think, the fedora would be a nice eccentric touch. The deerstalker would be a safer bet, though. No one would ever recognize you in that!"
A deep rumbling chuckle came from the huge frame lurking in the doorway behind them. By the time Serrin had placed one uncertain hand on the lapel of the tweed jacket, Tom was almost helpless with laughter.
Kristen was awakened at ten, having seriously overslept. Thundering blows on the door told her she'd have to pay fifteen rand for another night if she didn't get her butt out of the room within five minutes. She also realized to her dismay that she wouldn't even have time to wash up before getting kicked out. She pulled on her sweaty clothes and hissed at the ork as she opened the door. He raised an arm as if to cuff her, but she ducked under and scooted into the street.
As she started on her way, the first thing she remembered was the little computer, or whatever it was. She hoped she hadn't totally slotted it up while playing around with it, but all she could do now was try to get it to Manoj. She bent down to rub at a bug-bitten ankle, yawning in the sunshine. She needed kaf and this would, after all, be a good time to scrounge some from Manoj. He wouldn't be busy yet.
By the time she reached the Longmarket warren, the streets were crawling with tourists. Walking here, she'd done a lot of thinking about what had happened the night before. There were certainly enough maybe's. Maybe she'd left a fingerprint on the wallet before dumping it. Maybe the police already had a lock on her for the killing. They'd certainly fingerprinted her enough times. Oddly, it wasn't the uniformed police who worried her. It was the plainclothes stinkers hunting pickpockets and muggers among the crowds who did. Keeping her head down among the throng, she shuffled down the refuse-strewn back alley to the rear door of Manoj's shop. She knocked once, then pulled at the doorknob and stuck her head around the side of the door.
The usual mix of smells greeted her: sweat, incense, the residue of the oil lamps Manoj burned to save electricity, a bundle or two of lemongrass or drying proteas. The shop's owner was behind the counter, using his mix of subtle harassment and persuasion to extract a few extra rand for some trinket or other.
"From the San people, the real bushmen, madam. They exist in only a few enclaves near Namibia these days and it's very difficult to obtain such fine work now. They allow so few of these fertility charms to leave their lands."
The obese white woman in the horribly inappropriate pink-checked gingham elbowed her equally overweight husband, who was mopping sweat from his lobster-complexioned brow. "Oooh, Chuckle," she cooed in an American accent. "Look it's a fertility charm!"
Kristen smiled and slipped past them
, heading for where Manoj kept the kettle and coffee in a tiny room no bigger than a wall cupboard. He wouldn't be able to bag her out now, not in the middle of a sale that was obviously going well, so she got cheeky and slid a hand across his rump as she went by. His eyes widened a little, but otherwise he didn't react at all.
By the time the couple had waddled to the door and squeezed their way out, clutching their worthless piece of junk, Kristen had two cups of scalding soykaf ready. Manoj had probably paid some sweatshop worker a few rand to stitch up the fertility doll as part of a batch of fifty or so, which he'd then sell for forty, fifty rand apiece. He was clever, yet he never managed to get rich. His shop was always being broken into, three times in the last year alone. And who could get insurance in this district? Once, the premiums had simply been too high, but now the insurance companies simply refused to issue it. That was why Manoj was careful not to leave any money on the premises after he closed up for the night. And after the last beating, he'd found himself a cheap room where he slept rather than risk being here when the tsotsis called.
"You got a nerve, girl," he growled at her, accepted the offered cup and taking a sip of the dark bitter liquid.
"Got something this morning," Kristen said brightly.
"Huh. Is it curable?"
She chuckled and took the tiny computer from her bag. Manoj looked interested in spite of himself.
"Can I go upstairs and wash up?" she asked as he turned the little box over in his hands. Taking his grunt for a yes, she clambered up the rickety steps to the dusty, disused room with its cracked washbasin. The pipes groaned as they always did whenever anyone turned on the faucet. Manoj had been letting Kristen use the place for freshening up ever since he'd quit living here, and so she kept some clean clothes here as well. He wouldn't let her sleep in the shop, though, but she didn't blame him for that. He'd never be fool enough to let someone stay here who could just as easily run downstairs to unlock the door for any thieves who might slip her a few rand for the favor.
By the time Kristen rejoined him downstairs, fresher and feeling much better, Manoj had the guts of the thing dismembered on a table top in the back of the shop.
"Huh. Can't find anything wrong with it," he said, putting the pieces back into the case in a way that suggested that they were going in exactly in the same way they'd come out. "It's slotted up, though. First it spewed out a list of names and some IDs, but now it won't do a fraggin' thing."
She picked up the small coil of paper that had scrolled from the tiny printer he'd connected to the device.
"Look, girl what you getting me into?" he said almost angrily. "One of these names here, it's the guy who got kidnapped last night down by Ocean View. What do you know about that, honey?"
Kristen wanted to bluff her way out, but she paused just an instant too long trying to look innocent. She'd hosed it.
"Look, Manoj, I just picked it up off the ground, yeah? It was lying by the other guy's body. The one who got scragged. Frag it, you know me better than to think I'm into scragging people. Me?"
He looked at her s'uspiciously. "Who else knows about this?"
"No one. I brought it straight to you," she said miserably.
"Well, I ain't gonna buy it. You know there ain't much I won't handle in the way of stolen goods, but if it's been within a whiff of a stiff, then you can forget it." He almost slammed the last small screw into the casing and shoved it roughly back at her.
Kristen was almost to the doorway on her way out when his tone softened.
"Look, maybe we can do each other a favor. I was on the lookout for somebody to run me an errand anyway. Get the bus to Simon's Town and fetch something for me, yeah?"
She turned round and looked at him with a wide-eyed smile. There was going to be money in this.
"Take that to my half-brother John. The white one, you've met him," Manoj said with only a little bitterness. Like her, he was of mixed race, but being half-Indian rather than half-Xhosa, he didn't face quite the same
scale of problems as she did. He still got more than enough to be resentful, though.
"Here's the address," he said, scribbling something on the top leaf of a notepad. "Oh, frag it, I forgot you can't read. Look, get a cab at the bus station and show the driver this, got it? No, better still, I'll tell you and you memorize it, yeah?"
"I can do that," she said happily. Being illiterate, she'd had to learn to.
"He might buy this for junk value. The parts might be worth something to him, I don't know. Anyway, he'll give you something to bring back with you, you got it? Fifty rand for you when you get it back here. If you don't come back, girl, you end up in the harbor after I've dealt with you. You scan?"
Drugs, probably, she thought. It wasn't much money for risking five years in Parliament. The city had converted the old Houses of Parliament into a prison twenty years ago, but that irony did nothing to make the idea of spending time there any more pleasant.
When he'd finished reciting the address to her, and she'd proved that she could parrot it perfectly, Manoj mused over the printout for a moment.
"Strange collection of names here. Some big cheese from Vienna, someone from London, England, some weirdo with an elven name from Seattle. All over the place. Huh." He was about to crumple up the piece of paper when, on impulse, Kristen stopped him. It was impossible, obviously, but she had to know.
"The elf. What's his name?"
"Serrin Shamandar. What's it to you?"
Kristen felt like she'd been kicked by a Ramskop buck.
"Jack squat," she managed to lie, picking up the piece of scrunched paper. "I'll get this to your brother. Be back by nightfall."
"You'd better be," he growled.
8
When they crawled in, bleary-eyed, at breakfast time the following morning, Serrin and Tom were astounded by Michael's fifteenth-floor apartment in Soho. The Englishman looked as dapper as usual, unaffected by sleeplessness. Serrin felt like a shop dummy in his ridiculous clothes, but Tom assured him that he looked really flash. Serrin hadn't turned round fast enough to see the smile, never suspecting Tom had a talent for sarcasm.
Michael had six rooms, half the building's top floor. Two of them were filled entirely with cyberdecks and associated tech, machines cannibalized and rewired until they looked like something from another planet.
"It's a bit Heath Robinson, but it works," the Englishman said as he swept in and flicked on the lights. Serrin noticed there weren't any windows, at least not in the rooms he could see.
"What's Heath Robinson?" he asked.
"An artist who designed ridiculous machines that looked like they might work."
"What, you mean, like, Rube Goldberg?" Serrin asked.
Michael gave him a smile. "Yes, folks, it's that old 'One nation divided by a common language' time again," he chuckled. "Anyway, you two can catch some sleep if you want. I've got work to do. I think Gerald will have finished the business in Germany by now."
"Gerald? Who's he?" Serrin demanded irritably. It was becoming tiresome the way this Englishman always seemed to be so far ahead of it all.
"Gerald's a smart frame. I like to give them names after designing them. Anyway, I got Gerald off to his stuff last night with the remote while you were changing
clothes. I must say, old boy, you look spiffing in them." The troll sniggered.
"A smart frame working from here? Spirits, isn't that risky? Surely there'll be trace 1C in a military system," Serrin said doubtfully.
"That's why Gerald was re-routed through BIG in Dallas/Fort Worth. If the Germans trace him, they'll think it was someone in the Texas corp who's been snooping on them. From past experience I know that Gerald can infiltrate BIC and that they won't be able to trace him. I'll download what he's got. By then, Tracey should have finished analyzing flight schedule data and setting up options for MP checks," Michael replied smoothly.
"Don't even ask about Tracey," Tom whispered to Serrin.
"Chummer, what is th
ere that you can't do?" Serrin asked caustically.
The Englishman paused to think for a moment. "I wouldn't want to try busting into Aztechnology in Aztlan, old boy. Not unless someone gave me a million up front and I had a top-notch team of paramedics sitting around me at the deck. Apart from that, and one or two of the hush-hush Japanese sculpted systems, I'm not intimidated by anything, really.
"Geraint says I'm a controlled hypomanic. That's when he's being nice. And if you ask him after his latest affaire d'amour has gone down the tubes, he'll probably say that I'm crazy," Michael said. "But if I do something, it gets done. Now let me order out for some bagels and let's see what we've got here."
Even on a cool winter's day, it was an unpleasant ride out to Simon's Town. A bus that was supposed to carry only sixty people was stuffed with nearer to a hundred, and the interior was hot, sweaty, and stifling. At first Kristen thought she was seated among half a dozen jockeys headed for the ostrich races, but soon she realized that they were just wannabes, kids hoping to attract the attention of the right person at the track. They chattered and laughed and pointedly ignored her, which suited her; she stayed quiet and just waited, increasingly miserably,
for the trip to end. The ride took nearly two hours, the bus crawling around the western coastline before it veered east past Da Gama Park on the way to the broken-down old naval port. Next time, she thought, I'll make Manoj give me the extra rand for the train.
The big old houses on Main Street had long since decayed into a warren of ghettos. Azania didn't maintain much of a navy these days and more than half the people of the town were unemployed, most of the rest having to commute into Cape Town itself to find work. The few who were lucky, or trusted, enough to get work as gem-stone polishers in Topstones lived in their own arcology, far from their fellows down the hillside. There were too many empty eyes in the streets looking for people whose money might buy them a few hours of oblivion in some wretched indulgence or other.
