The Bad Guys had found Maria’s apartment empty, then had begun systematically breaking into every apartment in the building. As Nohar escorted Maria and Henderson through the crowded lobby, he heard at least two stories about gunfire being exchanged.
They had to make their way outside the parking lot to meet their taxi, because the police—real ones this time—had dressed up in riot gear and set up barricades around the building to keep people and vehicles out. Nohar worried about the three of them looking obvious in the sea of Hispanic rodents, but the cops were as overwhelmed as the reporters.
The cops had it worse than the reporters, the residents at least liked the reporters. Nohar had the feeling that if the cops weren’t armed, they might not have survived being this close to Pastoria Towers.
They passed through the confusion, and to the taxi, without much difficulty. It was another automated cab, and Nohar let Maria direct it while he fell into an exhausted slumber.
• • •
Nohar dreamed of his father. They weren’t pleasant dreams.
Nohar had been sired by Datia Rajasthan, commander of the mutinous airlift that brought almost all of Nohar’s species into the U.S. just as the Indian military began collapsing. His mother had never told him who his father was. That was something he had to unearth himself, after she was gone.
He was only fifteen, still part of a street gang, when he’d found Datia. At first the discovery had impressed him. Datia had become, by then, a national figure advocating moreau rights. It wasn’t until Nohar had met him that he’d discovered that Datia was a fanatic, more interested in controlling the destiny of the nonhuman population than he was in any family he might have had.
Datia couldn’t have given a shit for Nohar.
They had only met once, and shortly after that the country erupted into riots—which many blamed on Datia Rajasthan. Datia was gunned down by the National Guard only a few dozen blocks from where Nohar was living. The only thing Nohar had ever gotten from his father was the gun he carried—something he received after Datia’s death.
Datia Rajasthan hadn’t even acknowledged Nohar as his son until he was dying in a burned-out building in Cleveland’s Moreytown. There he mentioned his son to an audience of police, paramedics, and National Guardsmen. Nohar hadn’t even been there.
In his dream, Nohar walks through the ruins of the building where his father had been killed. He looks for his father’s body. He finally finds a corpse, high up in the building, where no roof lies between him and a black rolling sky.
Nohar turns the corpse over. Manuel’s face stares up at him.
Someone laughs behind him, and Nohar spins around to confront whoever it is.
Datia Rajasthan is laughing at him. In his arms he holds a young Maria Limón. She laughs at him, too. “Now,” his father says, “you know how it feels.”
Nohar crouches and growls. “Lying bastard. You’re the one who died.”
Datia shakes his head. “No. You died.”
Datia points the Vind at Nohar and fires.
• • •
Maria’s friend was an old canine named Beverly who lived on the fringes of Compton. Her eyes were clouded over, and Nohar thought she was nearly blind. Her eyes reminded him of Elijah, the half-blind dog in the hills.
But she walked with her nose forward, and it was hard to tell she couldn’t see.
“Come on in, Maria. Introduce your friends.” Beverly ushered them all into a two-room apartment. The inside was better kept than the hallway, which was wrapped in stains, trash, and graffiti. Beverly lived in a neat pair of whitewashed rooms. The apartment was in the basement, so there weren’t many windows. Beverly compensated by having plants hanging from the pipes that ran across the ceiling.
The apartment smelled like a garden.
Maria rolled in first and said, “Sara, and Nohar.”
“Pleased to meet both of you.” She extended a hand and patted Nohar’s forearm. “I’m afraid you’ll have to duck a little. The ceiling’s a bit low in here.”
Nohar let Henderson go in first, then he ducked inside himself. He had to bend over more than a little. Not only was the ceiling low, but there were pipes, and below them the plants. He had to bend almost double, and he still set one begonia swinging.
Beverly shut the door and faced them. Her ears perked up, and Nohar saw her tail wag, a smile in compensation for her lack of facial expression. “Can I get anyone some tea?”
“I think we can all use something to settle our nerves,” Henderson said.
“Sure, my dear.” Beverly turned around and began opening cabinets in the other side of the living room. Nohar realized now that there was a kitchen hidden in that wall. As she filled a pot at a sink hidden behind a cabinet door, she asked, “Maria, what brings you here? The room’s thick with worry.”
Nohar could smell it himself. He just hadn’t been noticing it since he’d been living with it for the past twelve hours.
“I’m sorry,” Maria said, “I don’t want to bring trouble to your doorstep, Bev.”
“Shush. I’ll take trouble to have some visitors. Tell me about it.” She fiddled a few more minutes, then put the pot into another cabinet that apparently doubled as a microwave. “You aren’t going to scare me after living in this neighborhood for twenty-five years.”
“It’s about Manuel,” Maria began.
“Our son,” Nohar said, almost involuntarily.
“Oh, dear,” Beverly said. “This is going to be interesting.”
• • •
Beverly fed them on Chinese green tea and a package of processed meat that Nohar supposed once bore some relationship to a pig or a cow. It was what passed for carnivore food in Compton. After all his years away from processed food, Nohar was glad that the strongest taste it had was the salt.
Maria gave Beverly an abbreviated version of what happened. At the end of it, Beverly shook her head and said, “Isn’t this exciting?”
“That’s one word for it,” Henderson said. Her voice was weak and frustrated. Nohar looked down at her and saw how fatigued she looked. Her fur was sticking out at odd angles, and she seemed to have shrunk within her ill-fitting clothes. Looking at her, Nohar realized how bad off he must look. His fur was matted and still smelled weakly of algae. His shirt was an opaque gray, and his pants were torn badly enough to see his leg all the way up to the hip.
“Well, you all need some rest,” Beverly said. “And to clean yourselves up. You’re all welcome to my bathroom.” She walked past Nohar and into the bedroom. “I’ll find some comforters for all of you.”
Her nose wrinkled as she passed Nohar.
“Did you fall in a sewer, my friend?”
“Reservoir,” Nohar said.
Beverly shook her head. “Those clothes go in a disposal chute. And you get the shower first.” She patted his shoulder. Even sitting, it was about even with her own. “I don’t want to sound ungracious, but I don’t want that smell sinking into my furniture.”
Nohar chuckled a bit. It was the first time he had felt any real lightness since before this had all started. “Yes, ma’am.”
Beverly chuckled herself. “I’ll get you something else to wear,” she said as she walked on into the bedroom.
Nohar pulled off his shoes and began making a compact pile of his wasted clothes. He emptied his pockets onto the coffee table. He used coasters to rest his possessions on, since most were still streaked with algae.
When he peeled off his shirt, Henderson looked across at him and said, “What are you doing?”
“You heard her. And I’ve wanted this pink crap off for days.” He could feel the fabric adhering to his fur as he pulled off his shirt and stuffed it in one shoe. He began unhooking his holster, was stymied for a place to put it, then finally he hooked it on an overhead pipe next to a spider plant.
“But
you’re, you’re . . .” Henderson seemed unnaturally flustered, and when Nohar started undoing his belt she just turned away from him. Maria was looking at her oddly, as if she was surprised at the way Henderson was acting, too.
It took a few long moments for Nohar to realize what was the matter. And realizing it made him feel all the more alien.
Henderson had inherited the human neurosis about clothing. To Nohar’s generation, clothing was a contrivance used solely to appease the humans that most moreys had to deal with. To someone whose body was covered in fur, pink clothing was often useless and annoying, something to be used only when necessary.
To his generation, Maria’s, too, stripping in front of someone meant as little as a pink taking off his hat.
Now, however, it was sinking in that, in his first foray into Compton, a place almost completely absent of pinks, he hadn’t seen one morey going without the human-mandated clothing. When he was living back in Cleveland’s Moreytown, half of the moreys he’d see would be going around with as little as possible.
Henderson’s embarrassment made him want to cover himself up.
He sighed and shoved his pants into his other shoe. “I better go and shower off—” He glanced at Henderson, who still wasn’t looking at him.
Maria looked at Henderson and nodded, as if she had just realized what was bothering her.
Nohar sighed and ducked into a bathroom that was much too small for him.
• • •
It took him nearly an hour to clean himself and dry out his fur. He could only fit part of his body in the shower at a time. He borrowed way too much of Beverly’s soap. And he almost clogged the john with the clumps of fur he brushed off his body. He spent another fifteen minutes returning the bathroom to the shape he’d found it in.
He left feeling better now that the algae was out of his fur. He used the wall-mounted body dryer, but before he left, he grabbed one of the towels and wrapped it around his waist for Henderson’s benefit.
When he left, Henderson wasn’t there anymore. The only one in the living room was Beverly, who sat in a small easy chair in the corner of the room. She didn’t look at him when he entered the room, but her ears perked up.
She held a canine finger to the tip of her muzzle, telling him to be quiet. Nohar nodded, even though he didn’t think she could see him. He ducked into the living room, dropped the towel on the couch, and sat down next to it. It felt good to have his body relax for once, even in a space this small. The few snatches of rest he had gotten up to now didn’t really count. He’d been too exhausted to receive any comfort. Even in the taxi coming here, his body wasn’t so much resting as refusing to function.
Beverly spoke quietly. “I put Maria and her friend in my bedroom. They needed to get some rest.” She raised a cup of tea to her muzzle and delicately lapped at it.
“That’s good,” Nohar’s voice rumbled deep in his chest. “I wish they weren’t involved—”
“From the sound of it, they involved you.” She cocked her head as if daring him to tell her different.
“The Bad Guys involved me.” Nohar sighed and reached for his own tea. The cup was small and nearly hidden in his hands. “They tried to kill me before I even knew Manuel had anything to do with me.”
“You didn’t know you had a son?”
Nohar stared into the cup he held in his hand, at the dark swirling liquid, and felt the knot of anger again. “How could you keep that from anyone?”
“I don’t know, my friend. I won’t condone it. But I’ve known Maria for years, and I knew she loves Manuel. Maybe she thought she was protecting him.”
“We have it all mapped out.” Nohar kept staring into the tea, the words pouring out uncontrolled. “We make kids at a Bensheim Clinic. It’s so fucking common that fatherhood is reduced to a couple of sperm cells, even when—” The words choked off, and Nohar sipped his tea. He didn’t know why he was babbling to this old canine. He was tired.
He shook his head. “It’s as if it’s abnormal to care about it.”
“We’re caught,” Beverly said, “between nature, culture, and engineering.” She made a small sound that was between a muffled bark and a sad laugh. “The balance we’ve struck seems equally unworkable on all three levels.”
“I shouldn’t unload on you.” Nohar finished off his tea.
Beverly stood up and picked up the teapot. She managed to find his cup and refill it by touch. “Nonsense. You’ve had a trial. You can’t bury feelings. . . .”
Nohar shook his head. “I’ve been doing fine till now.”
How could someone do that?
How could a mother deny her child his father?
Why didn’t she tell him?
When Nohar had that thought, he wasn’t sure if he was thinking of Maria, or his mother.
Chapter 12
Nohar talked to Beverly longer than he expected. After sidestepping his personal life, they managed a few hours discussing the way things were twenty years ago, and how the changes since then weren’t all for the best. It was the first real conversation he’d had with anyone in the past ten years. It made him fell a little less alien.
He could identify with Beverly. He had gone off into the woods, but she’d been as much in exile in this apartment, just as isolated, just as alone. Just as lonely.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t free to converse. There was still Bad Guys out there, and there was still Manuel, somewhere.
Beverly had a comm and after they had finished their second teapot, Nohar planted himself behind it and began working on digging out of the hole they had all fallen in.
His first call was to a place in Cleveland that he hoped was still in business.
The line flashed a few times; the screen was distorted and out of focus. Nohar doubted that Beverly had ever gotten the picture properly aligned.
The blue AT&T test pattern dissolved into a shot of an office. Nohar saw the paneled walls and decided that Budget Surplus and his old friend Bobby were both long gone. He was about to cut the connection when he heard a familiar voice say, “Coming . . .”
The voice’s owner walked in front of the screen, “International Systems and Surplus—”
The man on the other end of the comm stopped talking and just stared at the screen.
Nohar was equally speechless. The last time he’d seen Robert Dittrich, his old friend had been confined to a wheelchair—like he’d been since childhood. But there was no question that the man staring blankly at him was the same person, and he was standing.
“Good God!” Bobby exclaimed. “Is that you, Nohar?”
Nohar shook his head and said, “Bobby?”
Bobby pulled up a chair and sat down in front of the comm and shook his head. “And you still don’t put on clothes to talk on the comm. Christ, what’ve you been doing with yourself? What, five, ten years?”
“Well, haven’t been doing as well as you. What happened to ‘Budget Surplus’?”
Bobby shrugged. “Got in on the ground floor of a good deal—passed someone on to a hacker acquaintance on the West Coast, and the deal was rich enough for the finder’s fee to set me up for life. Managed to jack the place up a few notches on the respectability scale.”
Nothing remains the same, Nohar thought. “Your legs—” He didn’t quite know how to finish the question.
Not that Bobby needed him to. “Oh, I was still in the chair last we talked.” He stood and slapped his thigh. “Good old American cybernetics—remember when there wasn’t such a thing? But we actually managed to get a project going at the Cleveland Clinic a few years ago, reverse-engineering some old Japanese prewar technology. Finally got it working.”
Nohar shook his head. He had known Bobby since they’d been kids. And even though Bobby had been wheelchair-bound, he’d always been the one who was going to take on the world. Nohar had never thought Bobby
might actually win. . . .
“Hey, enough about me. What can I do for you, old friend?” He glanced at the bottom of the screen, where the transmit information usually scrolled by. “You’re still in La-la land, I see.”
Nohar swallowed. He didn’t feel quite right about dropping stuff into Bobby’s lap after so long. But there wasn’t anyone else he knew to call. “This wasn’t a social call, Bobby.”
Bobby sat down, and there was a grave expression on his face. Of all the pinks that he had ever known, Bobby had always been the best at reading Nohar’s facial expression. Right now it was obvious that Bobby could still read him like a book. “What’s the matter, old friend?”
“Do you still do miracles on the net?”
Bobby smiled weakly and shook his head. “You’re talking to someone ten years behind the curve. That’s a young man’s game. I do software, but I’m mostly a manger now.”
“Oh . . .” Nohar frowned, wondering where he would go next.
Bobby smiled. “But there’re perks to managing. I have a half-dozen bright young hackers on my payroll. What do you need?”
“I just have a number off the display from a satellite uplink. I don’t know if it’s an access code, a location, or what—but I want to know who was on the other end of the satellite.”
“You don’t go for simple, do you?” Bobby was smiling. “Give me the number, and the location of the uplink—I might be able to get the skunk works to pull something up for you.”
Nohar passed on the information, and added, “Thanks for helping me out, after all this time.”
“You’re still a friend. And you have no idea how much I owe you. Now, where do I get hold of you?”
“I’ll get hold of you.”
Bobby frowned slightly. “Okay. Are you in some sort of trouble?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“That bad?”
Nohar nodded.
“Well, I hope I can help you with this. When will I hear from you?”
“I don’t know. Next couple of days.”
The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1 Page 36
