The Mocking Program

by Alan Dean Foster

  His companions were less flashy in both dress and appearance. The girls tracked the Inspector's approach uneasily. The smaller boy tried to make up for his lack of subgrub size and stature with inflated bravado.

  "Whatch you wereing, homber?" the kid piped up brazenly.

  "Yia, it suits you," added one of the girls. Her companion giggled. Both of them were still salvageable, Cardenas decided. But preado recovery was not his job.

  "Nice night," he offered conversationally.

  "Was," growled the bigger boy, the evident leader of the loitering quartet. "Until you arribed." His was not a very intimidating growl. The subgrub's voice had not yet changed yet.

  "Still is." Hands in the pockets of his lightweight windbreaker, Cardenas smiled back. "I wouldn't portage a chopwire like that in my back pocket. Somebody waves the wrong sine wave and you're likely to lose a piece of your ass, egoista."

  The kid's boldness drained away like hygen gas from the belly of a long-range Gemmer as one hand whipped reflexively to the single wide pocket sewn into the rear center of his pants. "Chingaringa!" one of the girls exclaimed. "The homber's a bomber!"

  "I don't want what you got," Cardenas continued reassuringly. "I want what you don't got."

  "Habla me," the boy muttered warily. "What you need, fedoco?"

  Ignoring the ebb and flow of laughing, chattering, squealing nightlife that flowed around them, Cardenas concentrated on the leader. So thoroughly deflated by now was the subgrub that he did not even glance up as a befuddled blancblanc, or anglo-saxon male, came stumbling out of the Wanrow parlor. The two girls and the other boy fought hard to avoid staring in the dazed cleanie's direction. The citizen staggered off into the brightly lit Sonoran night, unaware that he had just avoided a likely spizzing.

  "I'm looking for a Vetevenga subgrub about your age goes by the name of Wild Whoh. Skinny Afranglo, green brush hair with a querymark, venerates the Muse. Also a twelve girl, nonzafado, who likes to vete with him. Katla Anderson."

  By turns sullen and fearful, the boy's voice had shrunk to a whisper. "Don't sabe the grub. Same for the girl-child."

  Cardenas could lower his voice as well. "Don't try to fak yakk me. You get hauled downtown with a chopwire, you'll end up spending a couple of noches in the blender. You know what happens in there."

  This time when the boy looked up there was real fear in his expression. One of the girls plucked at his hand, but he shook her off. "Wild Whoh thinks he's chingaroon, but he's not real nin. He just likes to play at it so the Vetevengas will let him ambulate with them. I don't know the girl. That's verdad, homber."

  Cardenas knew it was so, just as he had known that the boy had been lying earlier. "Where can I find him?"

  Clearly tired of the federale's inhibiting presence, the other boy finally spoke up. "Whoh's a major Noburu guru. He's got a completed belt and maybe half a dozen nodes to go with it. When he's not floating with the nins, he likes to drift around the Melarium. You know the Melarium?"

  The Inspector nodded. It was a popular meeting place offering a thousand different kinds of libations, many legal; loud music, occasionally legal; and magsuit dancing for those who wanted to float rather than cling, legal depending on the degree of mutual consent.

  He straightened. "Thanks. You've all earned a couple of bene points. Might come in handy someday." He turned to go, but not before favoring the deflated leader with a final, unflinching stare. "Go owling if you must, but I'd ditch the chopwire. That's so so serioso."

  The Melarium was one of the most popular nightspots in Greater Nogales, as well-known to the police as to the public. It was another place where cleanies and toilers could mix, where engineers and mask artists and humble assemblers could mingle and converse without laboring beneath the burden of class preconceptions. In the glow of alcohol and stims, all citizens were equal.

  He stood for a while watching the parade of people that flowed into the building and oftentimes came wobbling out. Hygen-powered private vehicles pulled up outside the entrance, emptied their excited, chattering passengers, and whisked themselves off to the nearest available parking spot. Assemblers and other commuters too poor to afford private transport arrived on foot from the nearest induction station, as well-dressed or better so than their more affluent fellow citizens.

  Cardenas amused himself by observing and cataloging the amazing range of body language on display. When he'd had enough, he headed for the main building. Not for the main entrance but the side, away from the crowd. He was looking for wannabes, for those too poor or too young or too agro to be granted admission to the Melarium. He was looking for nins, and it didn't take long to find them.

  With their tattooed skulls or elaborately braided hair, their sometimes wispy and often in-your-face-insulting attire, their threatening accoutrements, the ninlocos intimidated ordinary citizens without speaking a word. They knew it, and so when a lone middle-ager sauntered casually in among them, the assumption on their part was that he was either insane, drunk, stim-stymied, or something else. This outsider didn't act insane, did not totter as if drunk, did not babble incoherently like one stim-stymied. That left Something Else. They were instantly suspicious.

  No one was surprised to learn that the man who had boldly come among them was a federale. But federales were too smart to plunge solo into a ninloco congregation. That suggested a fedoco who packed Something More on his Something Else. Along with their hate, there was hesitation. Cardenas used the time to ask questions.

  Directed from the side to the rear of the Melarium, whose very structure seemed to pulse with the music and energy pounding within, the Inspector fixed Wild Whoh in his stare the instant he set eyes on him. The crossoed querymark was a dead giveaway. That, and the finished Noburu belt the kid wore proud and prominent around his waist. An integrated caster would link it to the muse glasses that covered much of the boy's face. His lightweight Striker slack strips rainbowed from deep purple to transparent according to how the light from the street struck the phototropic material. He wore no underwear. A plain filtered vest glowed with a series of querymarks that matched the one shaved into his head. While several girls were clustered around the prominent subgrub, none was Katla Anderson.

  Placating muse motes or no, Whoh didn't like what he could see of the heavily mustachioed man who was striding toward him. With his prepube Rare Birds clustered protectively around him, he waited to see what words would bring.

  "Hoyo, homber," he essayed from behind his glasses. "This is a free street, and we're not bothering anyone."

  "You Security?" The girl who spoke indicated the throbbing mass of the Melarium, whose minimum age limit she and her companions did not meet.

  Cardenas shook his head and ignored her to focus on the boy. "You Wild Whoh?"

  "Who asks?" the boy responded warily.

  By way of reply, the Inspector lifted his left arm. The sleeve slipped down to reveal his ident bracelet, flashing with a much wider than usual sequence of LEDs. Cardenas had adjusted them to pulse to the opto. Though he tried not to show it, the boy was impressed.

  "Like I said-so, it's a free street." Stepping to one side, he made a show of making room for the adult to pass. "Don't step in any fedoco." A couple of the girls giggled.

  Cardenas ignored the predictable juvenile rudeness. "I understand you like to vete with a prepube named Katla Ander—"

  The mention of the girl's name produced an instant and extraordinary change in the hitherto confident nin. He shoved the nearest girl at Cardenas, who caught her reflexively to keep her from falling. At the same time, the subgrub's vest blew up as its owner pulled a tab that deliberately destabilized the composite magnesium fibers woven within. Momentarily blinded by the light, the equivalent of several dozen prehistoric camera flashes going off at once, Cardenas flinched. The girls screamed and rubbed frantically at their eyes as Wild Whoh spun and made a mad dash for the looming architectural mass of the Melarium.

  As he fought to clear the fading purple and y
ellow spots from his eyes, Cardenas followed on the run. How the kid expected to get inside the building, the Inspector wondered as he gave chase, he did not know. But the subgrub would not have fled in that direction without having a specific rata hole in mind. Anyone else would have remained dazed by the disorienting flash, wondering which way the boy had fled. Cardenas knew where the kid was going because he had been looking and leaning in the direction of the Melarium just before imploding his shirt.

  Certainly the subgrub was startled to see the police Inspector bearing down on him as he struggled with the old-style latch that secured the rear service door. Before he could slide the illegal desense patch over the lock, Cardenas had him by the shoulder. Expecting a struggle, or at least some form of defiance, the Inspector was surprised when the kid broke out crying. Tears spilled from behind the muse lenses. He was not scared of Cardenas—something else had him utterly terrified. Embedded miragoos rippled on his slim chest.

  "Leemee 'lone! I didn't do nada... I don' know nada! Por favor, madre, please . . . !"

  "Easy, nino, everything's vacan. Calm down." Gradually, the tears subsided. Breathing hard, his sallow, elaborately decorated chest heaving, Wild Whoh flipped up the muse lenses to blink uncertainly at the surprisingly strong homber who held him tightly by one arm. Without letting go of his quarry, Cardenas stepped back slightly, trying to give the still-apprehensive kid as much personal space as possible.

  "You . . . you really are a federale, aren't you? Verdad?"

  Nodding slowly, Cardenas ventured his most professional paternal smile.

  "You're not gonna hurt me because . . . because I sabe Katla?"

  Gently, deliberately, the Inspector let go of the kid's arm. Rubbing it, Wild Whoh gazed back at him. For an instant, Cardenas thought the subgrub was going to bolt again. But having already fired his flashirt to disorient his captor, his chances of getting away were now much reduced, and he knew it.

  "Why would I, or for that matter anybody, want to hurt you just because you know Katla Anderson?"

  "Chingame," the boy muttered. "Maybe because Katla talks to me, tells me stuff, and somebody's maybe afraid I'm a snaffler, a horicon."

  "A jaw-jacker?" Cardenas smiled. "Why? Do you talk too much?"

  Whoh shook his head rapidly. "No way. But there's people don' believe nothing an homber says, sabe? I know how to keep my mouth shut. But there's always those who want to shut it for you." His fear finally beginning to fade, he regarded Cardenas much as had Anderson's erstwhile friends at soche. "She all right, Katla?"

  "We don't know. She didn't show up at soche today."

  Whoh nodded slowly, as if this revelation was half anticipated. "I was afraid—I've always been afraid for her. Such a quiet one, Katla-key. Sweet sugar Katla." The Inspector was afraid the kid, uncharacteristically, was going to start crying again. "She used to—tell me things."

  The throbbing din from within the depths of the Melarium was starting to give Cardenas a headache. He did not much care for contemporary music. As far as he was concerned, adding electronics, echoverb, and heavy bass to marimba was a puta-tive corruption of a fine tradition. In this he knew he was an exception. Most of his colleagues reveled in the thunderous amplified throbbing.

  "What kinds of 'things'?" he encouraged the subgrub as considerately as he could.

  A little of the boy's previous defiance resurfaced. "Why should I tell you anything, fedoco? If you're verdad, you ain't gonna do nothin' to me. Everything I got on me is legale." He tapped his skinny miragooed chest. "I'm not hiding anything."

  Cardenas indicated the flamboyant belt that still encircled the boy's waist. "That's an impressive accumulation."

  Slightly taken aback by the change of subject, Wild Whoh recovered quickly. With the muse lenses still flipped up, the Inspector noted that the boy had one blue eye and one black one. "No mierde, homber. Took most of a year to put together."

  "But you're missing something." Cardenas pointed to a gap on the belt's right-hand side. "I can get you the Seventh Node."

  Avarice replaced the last vestiges of real fear in the boy's eyes. "You're chinging with me, fedoco. Nobody can get a Seven Node. They're gone, muertoed, finished, expiated. Noburu only shipped a few before the safety boardos made 'em cease an' defist."

  Cardenas looked away, as if utterly indifferent to anything Whoh might think. "That's what I heard. You know, in the course of our work, we find ourselves confiscating all kinds of illegal materials that people try to sneak through places like Sanjuana and Penasco."

  "You can really get your hands on a Seventh Node?" When Cardenas maintained his silence, Wild Whoh rubbed a recently embedded miragoo with the palm of his left hand and muttered, "What you want to know, homber?"

  "You're afraid for Katla because she knows certain 'things.' You're afraid for yourself because she told those things to you." Cardenas locked eyes with the subgrub and would not let go. "Now you can pass them on to me. Don't worry. I'll keep your name out of anything that follows."

  Wild Whoh nodded slowly. "You better, fedoco, or you're liable to find me at the end of a calle someday with all seven nodes shoved down my voice-hole. Katla, she was always talking about her family."

  "She had family problems?"

  "Not Katla, homber, not Katla!" The kid made shushing motions and Cardenas resumed listening. "She was fine. Real fine. But tranquilo, like I said. Not a kid anymore, not a woman yet either. But here"—he tapped the side of his head, just above where the muse strap encircled it and below the hedge of green hirsuteness—"she was metal, homber. Metal an' Muse and wetbox, you sabe?

  "So she was smart."

  "Not just smart, fedoco. Me, maybe I'm antisoc, but I got good crunch, you know? Tightlike. But compared to Katla, me and my compadres, we're krill. She wasn't the one with the problemas. It was the rest of her family." Leaning forward, he lowered his voice to a whisper, as if some vast, ominous presence might be lurking close, watching and listening. "You ever hear of an homber named Cleator Mockerkin?"

  Cardenas thought a moment before shaking his head no.

  "Katla's papa. A real caracter feo, a bad homber, sabe? A verdad chingaringa. That's what Katla used to tell me, anyway. He—"

  "Wait a minute." Cardenas's tone was compassionate as always, but it still stopped the subgrub in mid-sentence. "Are you sure? 'Cleator Mockerkin'?"

  The kid did not hesitate. "Hey, fedoco, you think I could mess up a name like that?"

  The Inspector persisted. "Did she ever mention a George Anderson?"

  The boy's expression contorted. "Anderson? He's the homber Katla said lives with her mother. What do you know about him?"

  It was a question that had been much on Cardenas's mind. One to which the details, it seemed, were not to be forthcoming from this defiant yet fearful youth. "Never mind. So Katla didn't like her papa, told you he was a malo. What about him? What did she tell you?"

  From the start, Wild Whoh had not seemed particularly wild. Now he just looked worried. "Stuff I promised not to tell anybody else. Hoy, I know you can get a warrant for a truth pump." Manchild eyes implored the watchful interrogator. "I'm asking you not to do it, man. Don't make me ratatattle on her."

  "Take it easy." Cardenas did his best to reassure the kid: as much as any federale could reassure a ninloco. "I'm asking you back, not pressing."

  Whoh gazed past the Inspector, past the looming, booming mass of the Melarium, into the night. "He's rich, her papa. Dines on dinero. Keeps to himself. Katla, she didn' know a whole lot about his business. Sometimes, she would hear him yelling into a vorec. Bad words, homber. Sewer brew. An' not just bad nasty, but bad threatening, sabe? She told me he would say horrific things, make terrible threats, if he thought he wasn't getting his way. Once, she was up late and she passed by his office, and she told me she thought she heard screams from inside. Screams, and loud noises."

  "What kinds of noises?" Cardenas asked patiently.

  Wild Whoh thought a moment. "Like this." Bringing
his right hand down, he slapped the smooth pavement hard. "Loud but muffled, like something soft and heavy hitting the ground. She ran the rest of the way to her room. This Mockerkin, he fought with her mother, too. Surtsey?" The Inspector nodded. "Used to hit her with his hands as well as with words. Katla, she said her mother told her that the words were worse than the hands. I met her mama a couple times." The kid made an automatic, perhaps unconscious, gesture that signified mildly obscene approval. "What a mira-kel, man!" He hastened to qualify the compliment. "For an old lady, I mean."

  "So Mockerkin used to beat up Katla's mother. And maybe other people. Anything else? What about Katla herself?"

  Whoh looked away. "I promised I wouldn't tell, man."

  Cardenas could be very persuasive. He leaned forward. "Just me, homber. I promise it won't go beyond here-and-now."

  Still, Whoh hesitated. Finally, he pushed his mouth closer to Cardenas's ear. What he whispered made the skin crawl on the back of the Inspector's neck. He said nothing, just listened, and when the jittery subgrub was finished, stood back and regarded the boy solemnly.

  "Did she say how often it happened?"

  The kid looked away. "Too often. Once a week. Sometimes more. 'Playing friendly,' she said he called it. Said being touched like that made her sick, sometimes she'd go into her bathroom and throw up. But she never told. Never.

  "So you see, man," the kid continued, "why she ain't real fond of her papa. That is what it was, that made her mama decide to waft, first chance she got. Even though Katla says her mama knew this Mockerkin would explode when he found out."

  "So they've been running." The ghost of a gist of an explanation for at least a few previously impenetrable imponderables began to agglutinate among the eddies of the Inspector's thoughts. "From her husband and Katla's father, this Mockerkin character."