The Hormone Jungle

by Robert Reed

“Oh. I see.” She sounds profoundly disappointed. “I guess you’ve caught me by surprise. You don’t want to return to Morning?”

  “I’ve thought it through—”

  “I would hope!”

  “—and it’s too much a shithole. All things considered.”

  There is a long, studied pause. Gabbro hears the clicking of an autodoc, then nothing, then she tells him, “You know, we can’t care for you here. We don’t know how to—to reapply your body, for one thing. We simply lack the experience. And then there’s the matter of who will pay for such a thing—”

  “Listen,” he says. “Try listening.”

  She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak.

  “I don’t want the hyperfiber. A minimum of prosthetics when the time comes, and the usual strength training for my limbs. Okay? Nothing more. I don’t expect anything more.” He informs her, “That way has to be cheaper for everyone. Morning. You. Everyone.”

  “And this is what you want? Honestly?”

  “I do.”

  “Because what I am hearing is not what I expected. People are going to be quite startled.”

  “They’ll live.”

  “Yes, well…” She has run out of words. Gabbro detects a whiff of disgust coming from her direction, as if she blames him for causing her enormous trouble. Finally, her professional calm up and running, she asks, “Is there anything I might do for you?”

  “Leave a message at my apartment. For anyone who calls or comes by.” He says, “Have them tell April to visit me here. When she has a chance.”

  “April?”

  “A friend.” He says, “I haven’t seen her for a few days.” That much is true in a literal sense. There were two voices when he was flat on his back last night, so terribly weak that he couldn’t focus his eyes or move his smallest finger or make out the other voice well enough to remember it. He doesn’t care about identities. What he does know is that April was surprised and sick when she realized what was to happen, that someone had used her to get at him…that what happened—and this is the best guess he can make after many hard hours of thought—is that she met up with some sadistic bastard and got pulled into his fun. Poor April. Poor, poor Gabbro. He sighs and tells the woman, “April may not know about my accident. Tell her to come here and we’ll talk. I just want to talk.”

  There is a pause. Then she asks, “Is there anything else? Any other messages?” She doesn’t want any more trouble. That shows in her voice.

  He says, “Nothing.”

  She says, “Well then.”

  “Thanks for everything,” he tells her. “I mean it.”

  “Thank you for your time. Someone will be in contact with you soon,” and the autodoc unplugs his ears and sound box with a spluttering splash. Gabbro feels exhausted now. He needs rest. Sleep comes easily in this new world, his dreams peaceful and long and full of colors brighter than life. No, he thinks, he’s made the right choices. He can’t explain them to anyone, not even to himself, but they’re his choices and he intends to stick with them.

  He’s not returning to Morning. Not when he has to go through hell just to get a new body, and not when the only thing he’s got waiting for him is a shithole job in the mines.

  And yes, he’ll talk to April. Tell her that he doesn’t blame her. Not really. Tell her to forget things, including him, and get on with it. And no, he won’t ask who she was with. He’s confident it’s someone sick, because who would hate him so much that they’d do such a wicked thing? God, he thinks. He doesn’t want to know. He just doesn’t.

  And now he is close to sleep, drifting back into the friendly warm blackness. Sometimes he dreams about Steward, and he’s always dreaming about Steward’s Flower. Once it was both of them and him, and the three of them were in the little swimming pool together, nothing happening, and it all seemed so real that when he woke he was sad. For a long time he was sad. They hadn’t said anything or done anything special. It was just the three of them sharing the water, but oh God was he ever sad…

  The crest of the bluff is finally won. She halfway staggers up out of the jungle, up into the hot driving wind, the long grass nodding and the far lights of Brulé showing to the west. This is the place, she remembers. This is where she started to get lost. Don’t do it again, she tells herself. Don’t get fancy. Don’t panic. Sit and carefully read the map, and find cover before the storm comes. That’s what’s important now.

  It had been Dirk chasing her this afternoon.

  Thinking back, Chiffon is certain that she heard his voice among the buzzing and screeching jungle sounds. And a shot. And by then she had been so terribly tired, and dry, a Flower’s body not designed for marching or long runs. So she had climbed beneath a downed tree, leveling her pistol at the place where she imagined Dirk would appear. She had told herself that she’d shoot him, only that wasn’t so easy to imagine. She hated him; he had no worth; yet she laid in that damp hiding place and struggled to get a grip on the trigger.

  And in the end, no one came.

  An enormous floater lifted off the clearing below Chiffon, lazily vanishing over the treetops, and when she could breathe again she stood and tried to find her bearings. Ever since she has been wandering or resting, and now at last she has herself plotted. Exactly. The glowing map drawn by Steward is precise and unmistakable.

  She walks north on the trail.

  So many meters, she thinks, and then there will be trees in a distinct arrangement. She doesn’t hurry, hopes no one is watching, and tries to recall Steward’s exact instructions on how to enter his hideaway.

  He will probably be waiting there, she tells herself.

  Waiting for her and worried.

  She doesn’t have to consider what she will say. She knows. She won’t have to feign any moods or tell any fables. Not now. Dirk is on their heels and she’s never been so happy to be with someone. She will cling to him, honestly weeping. Even now she feels weak in her knees to be so close to him. He has to be waiting for her, she thinks. He has to be! Her aching legs carry her along, her poor bare feet cut and bruised and glad to be on the trail’s bare earth, and suddenly, without warning, she imagines eyes—stopping and turning and studying the empty trail behind her for a long, long moment.

  Lightning and a blue-lit wall of towering clouds cover the southern horizon. The wind dampens the rumbling of thunder. There are no watching birds tonight. Nothing wants to fly, it seems. She remembers the last time she felt eyes, hating the sensation. She had drunk warm rainwater from a natural stone basin, sharing it with a single enormous stone-colored toad. She remembers napping for a little while and then waking with a jerk, knowing someone was close by and staring at her. She sat up. The toad was gone. She looked around and sniffed, smelling herself—the pheromones, the soul-robbing chemicals manufactured by her rested body—and then she happened to look upward, spotting the eyes she had felt. It wasn’t a crime lord or Farmer perched on that high branch. It was a wild tailored ape. In one of its hands, sharp and new, was a stone knife. The ape was watching Chiffon and using the knife to carve something in the stump of another branch—a stubby ivory-colored stump made to resemble a male organ thoroughly aroused.

  She shivers in spite of the heat, remembering the moment.

  She turns to look toward Brulé and sees the trees she was hunting. What luck! she thinks. She might have walked straight past them.

  The new trail is hidden and halfway impassable. She wishes for shoes, any two shoes, wading into the underbrush and concentrating on every step. She can see no one. There’s no one to see. She almost forgets the sensation, and then someone is standing straight in front of her, appearing without noise or apparent motion. She gives a little shout and falls backward. She starts to fumble for the pistol, and Steward says:

  “Chiffon.”

  “Steward? Oh, goodness. It’s you! I knew it was you!” She stands and moves toward him, reaching and feeling so terribly happy. It’s him! It’s him! “Look at you,” she says. “How are you?
” Her hands close around him, but suddenly all she can grab is air.

  She says, “Darling?”

  He has stepped away. She can make out his face in the lightning’s glare, and she feels startled and honestly concerned. “What happened to you? Darling, what is it?”

  He says, “Nothing.”

  She says, “It’s something. What is it?”

  “Don’t touch me,” he says. “Stay there!”

  She freezes, squinting at him while the panic rises inside her. She sees hands dressed in flexible splints, rubbery and strange, and there are bandages on his face and something wrong in the way he stands there. He doesn’t say anything else. She can’t tell what he’s thinking, but she can guess. She can’t know what’s happened, yet she does. “What did they do to you? They found you?”

  “They found Gabbro first.” His voice is tight and dry.

  “I know they did. I didn’t know how to warn you, love. But I was afraid—”

  “You ran.”

  “Of course.” She says, “What did they do to you?”

  “Well,” he tells her, “we had a conversation.”

  She freezes. She cannot move or breathe or even think, watching the man while he stares at her. She is suddenly so cold, so weak, trembling and wondering when her legs will collapse.

  “Minus told me some things,” he begins. “About a girl and a Ghost.”

  “Steward—?”

  There is a delicate silvery knife in one of his hands. He says, “I saw one of your accomplices. Some magician—”

  “I’m sorry,” she tells him.

  He asks, “What should I think?”

  “The worst,” she says without hesitation. “About me, the very worst.”

  “Okay.” He lifts the knife and then flips it down to the ground, the motion quick and exact. He says, “I don’t want to touch you.” He says, “Show me.”

  “Show you,” she says.

  “Right now.”

  She sits. She takes the knife in one hand and looks up at him, at his face, and then uses the other hand to probe at her leg. No painkillers this time. No preparations. She takes a breath and holds it and pushes once, the blade cutting without resistance, and then she feels the quiver chips halfway to the bone, nestled in the special cavity, and she grimaces and moans and tells herself that the sharp blade means something. If Steward were truly angry he would have given her a jagged dull blade. She very nearly dies for the pain, bending forward and starting to weep now, dropping the knife and reaching into the bloody wound with two fingers. It takes an age to remove all twelve chips. They are nothing in her hands. She throws them on the ground before her, and then the knife, and then she finds her pistol in her pocket and tells Steward, “You know, if I were the person you think I am…I bet…I wouldn’t do this now. I bet.”

  She tosses the pistol on top of the quiver chips.

  And Steward seems surprised for an instant. A flash of lightning shows him looking at her and then the gun again. Then he kneels and picks up everything, saying nothing. He counts the twelve quiver chips with slow deliberation, and he cleans each of them by placing them in his mouth for a few seconds. Then he says, “I don’t know,” with the same tight, dry voice. “I just don’t know.” And he stands and slowly walks away.

  24

  A minister and Flower are riding up a skyhook together…

  —from a Quito joke

  They’re out in the front room telling lies about women, about the kills they’ve made, about people neither of them have met and places that would never let them past the front door. All lies. Dirk listens to them without actually hearing the words. He hates this shit, not knowing what to do, what move to make, needing to go back to that Farmstead again and not trusting these jerks to do what’s needed. It’s as if Minus abandoned him. That’s how he feels. It’s like he left him here with these jerks and doesn’t give a good shit as to what’s going to happen now, to the chips or anything. By what right does Minus get free of this job? I trust the son-of-a-bitch all these years, he tells himself, and when I need him most he’s gone. Damn him! Damn!

  He is sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, a picked-over plate of cold food on his nightstand. He is dressed but barefooted and running both hands through his matted hair. It’s night now. He has scarcely slept. When he isn’t angry the tiredness drags him down, so he nourishes the anger in plenty of ways. The Freestater. The Flower/Ghost. Minus and the jerks in the next room. Plus Mayor Pyn and that hard bitch of a police chief. There’s no end of reasons to keep awake and alert.

  “A call for you.” The AI’s voice grates on him. Good.

  “Who is it?” he asks.

  A pause. Then, “The Rain.”

  He stands and turns toward the largest wall, breathing in and forcing himself to relax, to let out the air, to use a natural voice when he tells the AI to trace the call when The Rain speaks.

  The Freestater, Steward, is sitting in a small, bland windowless room. He might be alone, might not, wearing splints and clotting foams and big bandages and clean clothes. His expression shows nothing. He stares out at Dirk and with a hard clipped voice he says, “We need to meet.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Get this business over and done.”

  Dirk waits, acting confident and cool. He agrees. “You’re absolutely right,” and he nods and tells him, “You’ve got something of mine. I hope you’re ready to give it back.”

  “I count twelve things,” he answers.

  And Dirk’s ready. He had figured that the Freestater would have the chips by now. Sure. “Twelve?” he says. “I count thirteen. I want the Flower too.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Then the body. Give it to me.”

  “We’ll see.” Steward has the chips in one hand, in a neat white stack. “Sorry about your man,” he says, something showing in his eyes. Something half-wild and unbeaten.

  “Forget it,” says Dirk. “That’s business.”

  “I’m going to want a finder’s fee. A share of these.”

  Dirk says, “I guess that’s fair.”

  “Half.”

  “Half of one,” he says.

  Steward shakes his head. “I don’t have to bring them in, you know. I can just keep them and let you come after me.”

  “I can do better than that.” Dirk tells him, “I know a hundred hungry people in Quito who’d love a shot at you. You think you can hold them off forever?”

  “Three.”

  “One.”

  “Two,” says Steward.

  “One.”

  For a full minute Steward does nothing, says nothing, simply staring out at Dirk. Dirk thinks about Minus again, then the Flower. Then Steward tells him, “All right. One quiver chip.”

  “And the body. I want to see the body.”

  “Maybe I’ll flush your chips down the toilet. Your hundred hungry friends would have their work cut out for them then.”

  So she’s alive, Dirk thinks. She’s fooled both of us, he wants to scream. One of us has to fucking kill her! But he resists, saying instead, “One chip and here’s where we meet.” He lays out the terms. Two hours from now, on the roof, chips and no one has weapons. “Agreed?”

  “Sure,” and the image dissolves into whiteness. Dirk drops back onto the bed and finds socks and shoes, and the AI calls to report that the Rain’s line couldn’t be traced. No surprise there, thinks Dirk. He goes into the front room and tells the jerks to get themselves together. He wants them to gather all the hardware they can carry and stash it on the roof of the Cosgrove. “Make diagrams,” he warns them. “I want to know what I can reach when I need it.”

  “He dies?” asks one of them.

  “What do you think?”

  The two of them look at each other, halfway smiling.

  “If you can,” says Dirk, “do him quick and neat. Don’t let him have anything free. Nothing free.”

  “Who is he?” says the other one. “He’s nobody. We’ll take
him.”

  Muscled jerks, thinks Dirk. From their skin to their bones they’re nothing but jerks, and this is all that’s left him.

  Chiffon sits with her sore leg extended and a med-kit at her side, watching Steward prepare. He takes a worn round box from his shirt pocket and carefully counts out the twelve chips, putting them into the box and securing the lid and returning the box to the pocket. Then he removes the splints from both hands, his face hard and his motions precise. He places small metal blades against his swollen flesh and refastens the splints. She can hear him breathing for a moment. She sees him slip another blade into his clothing, and then he takes a funny twist of metal and stuffs it into his mouth, up between his gum and cheek. That seems to be all. He gives the little room a quick look, his expression impassive. His hands hang at his side, touching nothing. She wonders how he feels. The outer door is shut and she’s sitting with her back against it. She couldn’t see Dirk from where she sits, but she heard him bargaining with Steward; there isn’t a doubt in her mind as to what he intends. “He’s going to kill you,” she tells Steward. “You’ve got to realize that!”

  He says nothing. He doesn’t look in her direction or in any way act as if she has spoken.

  “Are you going to listen? Hey!” She says, “Why are you going? Why? He isn’t going to let you live two minutes—”

  Steward lifts a hand, making her stop. Then he turns and says, “I owe this to someone. Okay?”

  “To who? To Gabbro?” She shakes her head. No more sweet words. No more patience. This is the honest Chiffon/Wisp/Zebulina talking now. Mostly Chiffon. “So what are you planning? You go straight at Dirk, on his home ground, to get some sort of justice for something he did to your neighbor.” She tells him, “That’ll do Gabbro some good, won’t it? You’re dead and Dirk has the chips, has won, and Gabbro’s still skinned alive. Is that what you’ve got planned tonight?”

  With a slow, careful voice Steward tells her, “I don’t know you.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  He says, “Never mind.” He says, “Move. I’m leaving now.”