Nemo

by Ron Goulart

  Splat!

  That was depilatory foam.

  “Schmuck, prop me up so I can find the goddamn finger myself.”

  Ted helped the old man rise to a sitting position. “You ought to have them better labeled. These two both look more or less red, so—”

  The old cyborg jerked his hand away from Ted, thrust his little finger into his mouth, and squeezed a knuckle.

  “Well, I hope you get to feeling better soon.” Ted removed his supporting arm and the old man fell out flat again. Ted hurried on.

  “Good morning, Evriman shoppers,” said an affable voice from the ceiling. “Our Saturday-morning special in our New Westport store today is neochocolate cake. A big one-half-pound layer cake for only two dollars. You’ll find ‘em in our Food Division. Yes, that’s exactly what you’re smelling right now throughout our vast ten-acre complex. Remember that if you don’t like chocolate cake we have a million and one other things for you. As we like to say . . . ‘At Evriman Centers You’ll Find Something for Every Man!’”

  “Oy,” gasped the old cyborg, far behind Ted.

  Ted kept moving forward. On the walls glowed hundreds of small clear-wall cubicles, each filled with a sample of a food product for sale.

  “I should have let the old bastard lie there in the first place,” Ted told himself, slowing. The chocolate smell wasn’t so bad here. “What am I supposed to get?” He took his memoball from his pocket, stuck it in his ear.

  “I know,” said the recorded voice of his wife, “I ought to do the shopping sometimes, Ted, but this emergency came up at the hospital and I’ll have to be there most of the weekend. So if you could do it again this time . . . and, please, don’t argue with me, because—”

  “How can I argue with you? You didn’t leave any space on the talkdisc.”

  “. . . tired of Spanish-style food. So, please, don’t buy any more tamales, tacos, fritos or—”

  “That’s Mexican-American-style food. Spanish food would be. . . .” An interesting display of foods attracted his attention on the wall. Ted dropped the memoball back away, approached the displays. “What’s this stuff?” he asked aloud.

  A speaker grid lit up. “Special this week only. Taste-tempting African-style cuisine, based on the stomach-filling recipes of mysterious Angola, where the black culture and the remnants of centuries of Portuguese domination blend to—”

  “They all starved to death in Angola,” Ted pointed out to the wall. “So I don’t see how the food could be very filling or—”

  “Keep looking at the estruma,” said a feminine voice. A warm hand touched his.

  “I don’t know which food that is.”

  “The green soupy business in the red bowl.”

  Ted chanced a side glance. There was a tall, pretty auburn-haired girl standing next to him. She was wearing one of those new plyosinglets. Swallowing, Ted said, “What exactly did you—?”

  “Act as though you’re telling me something about the prices,” said the girl. “I’ll, on my side, pretend to be your typical shit-for-brains housewife. Okay?”

  “I still don’t—”

  “Reverend Ortega wants to see you.”

  “Huh?” said Ted. “Listen, if it’s about that stungun, I can’t do anything. He’ll have to arrange to catch up on the back pay—”

  “It’s about you. He wants to talk to you about those special talents of yours, Briar.”

  Ted turned toward her. “Talents?”

  The girl smiled at him. “I think I understand what they cost now,” she said. “Point at one of the cubicles, Briar. That’s right. Reverend Ortega can tell you why you have those dreams.”

  Ted remembered to point at a sample of food. “How can he know about—?”

  “Tonight in the park. That’s when he can see you.”

  “What park?”

  “Central Park, NYC. Ten tonight.”

  “New York City? You mean Manhattan? Nobody goes there . . . the whole island is a slum, full of thieves and—”

  “Be sure you get rid of your tail before you come.” She walked away, mingling with the other shoppers.

  How could she know about the dreams? Nobody knew about that but Haley. “Hey, wait.” The auburn-haired girl was a hundred yards away, pushing through a group of part-time nuns. Ted nudged around a chubby black family, edged through a troop of boy scouts who were stocking up for a bivouac. By the time he got to the nuns there was no sign of the girl. She’d gone off down another corridor, but Ted wasn’t sure which.

  “I can breathe again,” said the old cyborg as Ted went trotting by.

  “Good, that’s nice.”

  “No thanks to you, schmuck.”

  Ted searched the Evriman Center for an hour. He never saw the girl again.

  “Nobody,” his house told him.

  “You certain?” Ted was standing in the living room, watching the twilight spread across his front yard. “That girl could have been lying . . . but she knew about the dreams.”

  “Uh . . . which girl might that be?” inquired the voice of the house computer.

  “Nobody, none of your business.” Eyes narrowed, Ted scanned the lawn, the shrubs. “You’re positive there’s nobody lurking out there?”

  “Not a soul, no one.”

  “Check again. I have a feeling there is somebody watching me. I didn’t spot anyone at the Evriman and yet—”

  “We’ve checked and double-checked. You don’t think your own house would lie to you? That would violate one of the basic laws of robotics.”

  “You’re not a robot.”

  “The same code of ethics applies to houses.”

  “Yeah, okay. You didn’t notice that spade with the black box either.” Ted left the window, wandered around the room. His chair began following him. “Scat, I’m in a mood to pace.”

  If Haley were home maybe he could talk this all over with her. About who might be watching him and whether or not he ought to try to make it into Manhattan tonight to talk to Rev O.

  “She never listens to me even when she is here. She’s always up at that damn hospital helping the lame and the halt. A lot she cares about me. I could be lame, halt, and tattooed and she. . . . Hell, I’ll call her at Dynamo Hill. This is important.”

  “Is that wise?” asked the voice of the house.

  “Yeah, it’s wise.” He strode to the pixphone.

  “A call now might upset the routine of the hospital, endanger the life of some poor ailing little tyke who—”

  “Haley’s not a doctor, she’s only a volunteer.” He punched out the number.

  “Far be it from me to interfere with—”

  “Shut up,” Ted told the house, fists clenching.

  The speaker suddenly made a loud awking sound. Silence spilled out, no further words.

  “How’d that happen?”

  A smiling medirobot appeared on the phone screen. “Dynamo Hill.”

  “I want to speak with Haley Briar. She’s—”

  “Mrs. Briar is no longer working here, sir.”

  “No, she’s there right now. For the special emer—”

  “Mrs. Briar has not done volunteer work for us since December of last year, sir.”

  “Could you have somebody confirm—”

  “It’s been confirmed,” replied the smiling robot. “I’m rigged in with our personnel computer. Is there anything else, sir?”

  “No, nothing.” Ted put down the phone. The house remained silent.

  “If she hasn’t been there nights,” he said, “where was she . . . Jesus, am I that stupid? Boy.” He returned to circling the room. “Haley off sleeping with somebody . . . my own house bullshitting me. . . . Yeah, I will go see Rev O.” He made one more circle. “First I’ve got to get rid of my tail.”

  Chapter 7

  On the other side of the carhut, that’s where they were.

  Back pressed against the side of his house, shrouded by shadows, Ted listened. The last of the day was fading, the floating
streetbulbs were coming on up above the trees which lined the curving road. Ted couldn’t actually see who it was, the carhut blocked his view. He wasn’t even sure he could actually hear them when they shifted position. He sensed they were there, though.

  Who were they exactly? The cops had grabbed the last guy who was lurking around, and it wasn’t likely they’d miss these two. Ted was certain, somehow, there were two of them. The girl in Evriman had warned him he was being followed and watched, which meant this pair wasn’t on Rev O’s side. Whose side then?

  Maybe Haley had hired them, some kind of private cops. To make sure he stayed stupid and didn’t take to following her or finding out where she went when she was supposed to be going to Dynamo Hill. No, improbable. He was the one who should have her watched.

  “Who the hell is she sleeping with?” Could be someone in the TF group. No, she thought most of them were. . . .

  “Forget about her,” he told himself. “You’ve got to get to Manhattan by ten.”

  There were still landtrains running into New York, hauling freight, some food and medical supplies. He had no idea what kind of schedule they followed. He’d have to get to the station in South Norwalk. That’s where the Manhattan trains were supposed to stop on their way in.

  Ted clenched his fists. How was he going to ditch these two? If he took his landcar they’d follow. They probably had all kinds of tracking gear with them. So even slipping away on foot might—

  “I spot him first.”

  “Shit, I going to get hims clothes.”

  The smoke made Ted cough. The cook fire was made up of branches, pieces of old building, old books. An animal, skinned and headless, was being roasted on a spit over the flames. It looked something like a dog.

  Ted was standing on a weedy slope a few feet from the fire. A scatter of dead trees made a backdrop to the cook fire and the six bone-thin boys huddled around it.

  “Get hims money, too,” said the oldest, a one-eyed Negro of about eleven.

  “Sell him,” suggested another of the squatting boys. He wore a cracked plyojacket and nothing else. “Sell hims body to meds.”

  “Shit, no,” said the oldest. “After take hims money and clothes, be better sell hims to—”

  “This isn’t,” asked Ted, frowning at them all in turn, “Connecticut, is it?”

  “Sell hims head to meds, plenty good shape,” said a one-armed Chinese boy of seven, dressed in a pair of running shorts. “Let me cut it off.”

  Ted had a just-awakened feeling. As though he’d been sleepwalking and ended up here, wherever here was. “Hey!” All at once he realized where he must be. “Hey, this is Manhattan.”

  “Cut hims balls and dinger off,” said the black boy, “put in jar for good luck.”

  But that wasn’t too very possible. You couldn’t simply get from Connecticut to New York like that, in seconds, just by thinking about it. That was what he’d done, though. Since it had really happened, that meant . . . what? That he’d been teleported . . . somehow . . . from his place to here. Who’d done that? And how? Something like teleportation wasn’t even—

  “Me stick him first.”

  The boys were getting up, moving away from their roasting dog, coming toward Ted, knives sliding out of tattered clothes.

  “This has got to be Central Park,” Ted said to them. “Okay. Now where’s Reverend Ortega?”

  “Shit.”

  The boys halted, knife hands dropping. “Who you say?” asked the one-eyed Negro boy.

  “Reverend Ortega. Rev O. He wants to see me. Tonight, here in Central Park. Reverend Ortega.”

  “LP,” ordered the oldest, “take him over to the hangout.”

  “Not cut him?”

  “No. Take him there.” LP was the one-armed Chinese boy. He beckoned to Ted with his only hand, went climbing off into the darkness beyond the cook fire.

  “Shit,” LP complained as Ted caught up with him. “Something wrong?”

  “They going eat that whole spaniel before me get back.”

  “You guys live on dog meat?”

  “Shit, no. That’s first dog in month,” answered the boy. “Something been killing them off. Can’t get squirrels much no more, too. First came here, they had plenty.”

  “How long have you lived in the park?”

  LP shrugged. “Born here, left here.”

  Down the next slope was a large building, a composite of chunks of other buildings. A jigsaw of brick, wood, neowood, lucite, aluminum, noryl, rusted iron.

  “That the hangout?” asked Ted.

  LP wasn’t beside him. He was running, single arm flapping, back toward the cook fire.

  The first room had walls of synboard and rat-skin. A small, low-ceilinged room, not quite square. Illuminated by a twisted lightstrip lamp, which squatted on the dirt floor.

  Head ducked slightly, Ted watched a sack-covered doorway. “I’m Ted Briar,” he announced to the empty room.

  After a silent moment he decided to go through the doorway into the next room. Two hanging lamps provided the light, the walls were surfaced with carton sides and cloth samples. There was a sprung neofab armchair, a barrel, and an altar made out of planks and oildrums. No one in here either.

  Ted circled the plank floor once, cleared his throat, sat down in an armchair. He sighed, took a deep breath, the way you do after a long climb. Everything was getting out of control. Haley was . . . seeing some other guy . . . spending whole nights, whole weekends with him. People were watching him . . . mysterious spades, policemen with strange new weapons, pretty girls. . . . Jesus, it was all falling apart. Or maybe it had fallen apart a long time ago . . . and he was only noticing it now. But how had he gotten here to Central Park? People simply didn’t have powers like that, did they?

  Well maybe seeing Reverend Ortega was going to help. Rev O was antigov, but he was supposed to believe in helping people. Sure, traditionally priests were sympathetic, they helped you with your prob—

  “That’s my chair, asshole.” A long, lanky man in a two-piece black worksuit came striding in, a last-century briefcase swinging in his knobby right hand. He was chewing on some kind of cigar, puffing out swirls of smoke.

  “Reverend Ortega?”

  “I’d better be, Teddy, or we’re both in trouble.”

  “I . . . can you help me? A girl I met in the—”

  “You can help me, Teddy. That’s the important thing,” said Reverend Ortega. “Get your butt out of my chair now. Sit on the barrel, if you have to sit.”

  Ted rose slowly, watching the renegade priest. “I’ve heard about the kind of things you do,” he said, “and I don’t think I want to—”

  “Then let’s talk about the murders.”

  “Which murders?” Ted perched on the barrel. “You’re always accusing the government of ordering assassinations down in Brazil and—”

  “I mean the murders you’ve committed, Teddy.” Ted stared at him. “Who, me?”

  Reverend Ortega laughed, a grating laugh. “That’s not much of a defense.” Unfastening the buckles of the briefcase, he pulled out a pile of papers and memos. “Let’s start with Joao Rebolar. Know him, Teddy?”

  “No, I don’t, never heard of him. Nobody calls me Teddy, by the—”

  “How about Joseph Sapperstein?”

  “I think I know that name,” admitted Ted. “Yeah, he was an attorney in Old Hartford, defended some fairly controversial clients. He killed himself about a year ago or so. Sure, I remember. It was a suicide.”

  “Bullshit,” said the priest. “You killed him, Teddy.”

  Ted jumped up, took a step forward. “I’ve never killed anyone,” he told Ortega, voice thinning. “You were supposed to have something important to say to me. I don’t have to listen to this crap. Talk about killing people, some of these raids you’ve pulled off have—”

  “Sit down, Teddy.”

  After exhaling through his nose twice, Ted sat again on the old barrel. “I thought you knew something about
the dreams. That’s why—”

  “Ever hear of the Total Security Agency?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “The government formed TSA about. . . . What’s wrong, Teddy?”

  “TSA. Those initials sound familiar . . . but I can’t figure why.”

  “TSA came into being approximately seven years ago,” continued the priest. “It has several functions. One is to keep an eye on people who may be dangerous to the administration, people who are possibly antigov.” He laughed his unsettling laugh again. “That includes a lot of people these days. This clandestine agency has also arranged accidents for its opponents, here and abroad.”

  “Accidents?”

  “Such as the one which happened to the late Joe Sapperstein.”

  “The guy committed suicide, jumped off an Evriman tower in Old Hartford. Yeah, I remember the story now. There were witnesses, nobody was anywhere near him when he jumped.”

  “You were on the floor below, Teddy.”

  “No, I wasn’t. We shop at the Evriman in New Westport. I haven’t been anyplace near Old Hartford in—”

  “Bullshit. You were there the day Sapperstein died, you made him jump.”

  “How could I do anything like that?” Ted demanded. “I’m not a hypnotist or—”

  “Same way you made the TF machine jump the other night.”

  Ted ran his tongue along his upper lip. “Yeah, I guess I did do that to the machine. But I never—”

  “TSA loves guys like you, Teddy. Since it began they’ve been recruiting certain special types of agents. People with exceptional abilities, people with special powers,” said Reverend Ortega, exhaling smoke.

  “Is that real tobacco in that thing?”

  “Yeah, it is. I get them from friends in Latin America.”

  “That’s going to kill you.”

  “It’ll have to stand in line. And you’re dodging the truth, Teddy.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call. . . . Look, I don’t have any special powers. If I did, do you think I’d be wasting my time with. . . ?” Ted began to pace the room. “Do you know how I got here tonight?”

  “Tell me.”

  “This is sort of crazy. But I think . . . well, I was standing by my house . . . you know, in Brimstone, Connecticut. There were a couple of guys watching the house. They aren’t yours, are they?”