The Mocking Program

by Alan Dean Foster

  Mingas looked away. "I don't know anything about what you are talking about, Inspector-sir."

  "You're lying."

  "That is not a crime." Mingas remained defiant. "If you believe that one person dead is one too many, consider that my own death would make you feel twice as bad."

  Cardenas cast a perfunctory glance over his shoulder. "There's nobody here but tourists and local cleanies. The girl is twelve and hasn't harmed a soul. I'd like to see her, at least, safe and seguro."

  "I know my rights. You cannot arrest me for pleading ignorance." Mingas stared back at him.

  "No, I can't. But I can for something else." Cardenas started to draw his spinner. "Give me a couple of minutes."

  It was a contest of wills the shopkeeper was preordained to lose. Mingas slumped. "I like to listen to things. People, adverts, vit clips, waftwire. All kinds of things." He was apologizing for a legal but socially disreputable addiction. "A place like the Mocceca is perfect for that."

  Cardenas paid for the necklace. "What have you heard? Do you have any idea where they might be now?"

  The proprietor glanced out his rear window. The young Amerind couple sitting at one of the porch tables were intent on their drinks, their snakesnacks, the view across the lake, and each other. Not once had they looked away from one another to peer into the shop. Mingas lowered his voice anyway.

  "The lady and her daughter could be anywhere. I have no idea where, or if, they are. There's vapor about them, that's all. Gazehaze. But this woman's toyman Anderson, the dead one?" Cardenas nodded encouragingly. "He had a rep for throwing lots of credit around, and not always with his lady. Vapor is that he was a habitual at half a dozen sextels from Agua Pri to Sonoyta." Mingas leaned closer. "Vapor says he had one special seguro in his stable. Hooker named Coy Joy, who pines her bliss regular at a registered copulation citadel called the Cocktale."

  "I can find it," Cardenas murmured dispassionately.

  "Find it by yourself, sir." Mingas moved back behind the counter, as if it could somehow shield him from the Inspector's penetrating gaze, and from a category of perception people knew about but did not understand. "But however you do, please do not mention me or my business."

  "What establishment?" Cardenas picked up the packaged necklace and left as quietly as he had come.

  The fact that the Cocktale was registered made it easy to find. It was one of a dozen similar establishments scattered among bars, love shops, and restaurants that featured private booths with accessories far more sophisticated than salt and pepper shakers. There were also a couple of sanctioned gloomers. The latter did not advertise their presence, but those in need of their special services knew how and where to find them. Designed to accommodate heavy hitters, they provided a safe place for users to indulge their addictions without fear of hurting themselves or any innocent citizens. A client could bring his own paraphernalia, or rent. Same went for the hit of choice. Designer straitjackets were available in all sizes, or custom-fitted.

  Compared to the wary atmosphere that hung over the gloomers, the sextels were positively sedate. Within the individual or group rooms that honeycombed the larger establishments, Cardenas knew, the ambiance would be another matter. There, colors and sounds and scents would fill the air, suffusing the senses with an aura of unhindered and unrestrained desire. Or one could liberate oneself in surroundings that reeked of quiet tradition. Whatever a customer wanted, the sextels were ready to supply. There were still some things, Cardenas reflected, that could never be simulated no matter what grams or how much crunch your home box had at its disposal.

  The induction tube had deposited him just outside the Sexxone. On one side of the station stretched a row of maquiladoras, within whose regimented bowels the evening shift was still laboring away. Exiting, the workers could go home, have something to eat, or indulge in more lubricious pursuits according to individual tastes. Cardenas headed in the opposite direction from the station. According to his spinner, the Cocktale was located at the far end of the xone.

  It was busy, though the real crush would come when there was a shift change at one of the nearby assembly plants. Better to find the woman he sought before her schedule was booked. That was assuming, he knew, that she was onsite now. Just like the maquiladora plants, the amative establishments that served their employees operated on a twenty-four-hour work schedule.

  A detour heads-up appeared in front of him. Following its instructions, he turned down a side walkway. He had gone less than twenty meters before it struck him that something was not as it should be with his fellow pedestrians. Probably no one else would have noticed it. But an intuits schooling involved the sharpening of all the senses, not just those commonly employed by a fellow human.

  The people moving around him, enjoying the warm evening air, looked normal, acted normal, sounded normal. Only one component of normalcy, in fact, was missing.

  None of them smelled.

  Stopping, he reached out to grab the arm of a solitary, well-dressed oldster who was heading in the opposite direction. His fingers closed around a fistful of air. At the same time, the old man smiled wickedly at him—and vanished. So did the couple approaching from behind. So did the walls, and street, and the glowing signs advertising the delights of the amatory establishments he was passing.

  Except—he was not passing well-lit public businesses. He was not on a designated detour, but in an alley. Not proceeding according to a route prescribed by the department of public works, but heading down an increasingly narrow and isolated serviceway that was little more than a crack between buildings. The detour was an illusion. A very adroit one at that, he reflected as he turned to retrace his steps. Nothing more than an expensive miragoo.

  The woman holding the projector that she had just switched off slipped it into the small pack that rode on her back. Silver-and-niobium earrings jangled softly as she brushed long black hair away from her face. Standing next to her was a second Amerind, a tall male. The headband encircling his forehead and holding back his dark hair flashed a steady stream of readily recognizable, three-dimensional southwestern symbols. Reaching up, he idly brushed the tips of his fingers across one side of the band.

  Harmless, virtually touristic symbols for rain, for the four sacred plants (corn, beans, squash, and tobacco), for lightning and for thunder, for Mother Earth and Father Sky, abruptly gave way to an ominous mélange of glowing lines of lightning crossed with knives, spears, lasers—all dripping ethereally luminous blood. Cardenas recognized the symbols immediately. The man and woman were Inzini—the Southwest Amerindian equivalent of the Japanese Yakuza or the Italian Mafia.

  Begun as a pseudo-religious organization back around the turn of the century, they had spread their influence throughout the Four Corners area and beyond, riding a wave of prosperity and illegal income born of the explosive development of the Strip. Disdaining Yakuza-style tattoos in favor of far more modern and flexible projectible symbology, they were deeply involved in illegal immigration, credit laundering, trade in endangered species, and half a dozen other antisoc activities. Essentially leaderless and free-wafting, they had proven exceptionally difficult for the NFP to suppress. Known in Navajo as the hooghan hazanigii nit'chi bee iiniziinii, or "family of evil spirits," friends and enemies alike called them simply the Inzini.

  The pistol in the man's hand was not as versatile as the one Cardenas wore in his shoulder holster. It could not dissemble, mask, or drug a target. Packing explosive shells, it could only kill. The assassin was ready to use it, the Inspector knew. He did not have to wonder. Intent and capability were amply evident in every facet of the man's posture, in his respiration, in his eyes.

  "That's an expensive little toy," he began conversationally, referring to the portable projector the woman had just put away. "Usually they don't fool me, but I was preoccupied."

  "Don't move," the man ordered him. "Raise your hands and put them on top of your head. Don't lock the fingers. If you reach inside your jacket or your pan
ts, I'll kill you. If you move to touch your jacket or your pants, I'll kill you. Keep your movements slow and steady. Don't touch one leg with the other."

  As he spoke, the woman had drawn a weapon of her own. Approaching Cardenas, she gave him a thorough pat-down, removing first his own gun and then his spinner. She proceeded to check the latter.

  "It's open, but only sending location. He didn't have a chance to get anything off," she told her companion. As Cardenas looked on, she slapped a para-site over the unit and used it to finger in instructions. When she had finished her work, she slipped the device back into Cardenas's pocket. She did not smile. "The override gram I entered will tell your station monitor that everything's fine and normal for the next hour. Things will stay that way in actuality as long as you cooperate."

  "What do you want?"

  "You're NFP."

  He nodded. "Inspector Angel Cardenas. I wish I could say it was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. and Ms....?"

  The man gestured in the direction of the real street. "You spent some time talking with a shop owner in Mocceca's Mall. We have just come from there, where we had a short—chat—with him." Mention of the recently visited shopkeeper jogged Cardenas's memory. He recognized them now: they were the same couple who had been sitting on the porch behind Mashupo Mingas's shop.

  While he had been interviewing the shopkeeper, they had been watching him.

  "We know that you are in charge of the search for a woman named Surtsey Mockerkin, who is wafting with her daughter. Please tell us what the proprietor of the shop told you. If you will do that for us, we will just lie you down for half a day. Straight narcolep, nothing serious or addictive." He indicated the building to their left. "This is a comfortable place. We'll rent you a day room and inform the establishment's administrator that you are sleeping off a good time. No one will bother you. When you wake up, you'll feel more rested than you have been in weeks, and no harm done. By then we will have completed our follow-up on the information you provide and gone on our way."

  The muzzle of the compact pistol shifted slightly. "If you do not tell us what we want to know, I will have to begin shooting your various appendages. Eventually, you will tell us. Why not spare yourself the pain and physical damage and save my ammunition?"

  It was a nice speech, Cardenas thought. Intended to be reassuring. Except that it was a serene, efficiently delivered lie. As soon as they had the information they sought, they would kill him. Having made no effort to conceal their faces, they could not let him live to report their actions and presence. He would be shot and left in the alley to be scavenged, just as Wayne Brummel-Anderson had been. All this he could tell from the look in the couple's eyes, from the way they held themselves, and from the subtlest of inflections in the man's voice.

  If he had half a minute he could expel the override gram from his spinner and call for assistance. Since the device knew his location at all times, help would be forthcoming within minutes. The narrow serviceway offered no place to hide, and the walls were too high and too slick to scale. The alley was a dead end in more ways than one.

  Hands atop his head, he tried to stall for time. If he could somehow distract them long enough to get a finger on the spinner, or speak to its vorec—but the woman was as attentive to his movements as was her companion. If he so much as twitched wrong, they could easily shoot him in the arm that was moving. That would prevent him from reporting his position, but not from talking. He didn't think feigning a faint would fool them. They would simply keep on hurting him until he responded to their demands.

  The pistol shifted again. "Talk." The man glanced back in the direction of the main street. "And don't lie. If I think you're lying, I'll shoot something. Nothing essential—to begin with. You strike me as a reasonably fit fedoco. I would imagine you can handle six or seven carefully placed shots before passing out. They will not kill you, but you will become progressively more uncomfortable."

  "I wish I had something useful to tell you, but the owner of the shop in question didn't know much of anything."

  This time it was the woman who replied. "So you got bored, and just decided to visit the Poremas Sexxone to relax. A long way to come, so to say. And while on duty, too." Her expression remained unchanged. "Why travel all this way, to this particular Sexxone?" She indicated the street behind her. "What makes this xone so special? You don't look the type, anyway."

  "No more delays." Lowering the muzzle of his pistol, her companion aimed it at the Inspector's left foot. "Limping is good for getting sympathy, but not for living the rest of a man's life. Talk to me, fedoco. And this time, give me the real verdad."

  Out of options, Cardenas nudged an upper molar with the tip of his tongue. He was about to adjust its opposite number when a dull thumping sound filled part of the air. A look of mild surprise washed over the Inzini's face as he toppled forward. His face shattered as it struck the paving. The back of his skull, the Inspector noted with interest, had been caved in as if it had been struck by a bowling ball shot from a cannon. Blood and compressed brains splattered in all directions. With an effort, he held his tongue.

  Whirling, the dead Inzini's companion raised her own weapon. As she brought the pistol up and around, something pushed her face in. The sight was unsettling enough to make even a federal Inspector with thirty years' experience wince noticeably. The faceless body stumbled backward and collapsed onto the unyielding pavement of the alley. Stuffed in her shirt pocket was Cardenas's own gun, ineffective until it could again be brought within range of the biochip key that was implanted beneath the skin of his right hand. He made no move to recover the weapon. He made no move at all.

  Shapes began to emerge from the shadows. Two of them carried pistols while the remaining pair held long, serpentine lengths of what appeared to be tree branches. As the four men drew nearer, Cardenas saw that what he had initially suspected to be made of wood was in fact plastic designed to mimic. The tubes were decorated with colorful designs of animals and plants. Each of the men was clad in a jumpsuit boasting a distinctively different pattern of brightly colored specks and circles. The illuminated dots flashed in pointillist patterns sufficiently bold to give pause to a French impressionist.

  Two of the newcomers were white and blond, while their companions were blacker than any men the Inspector had previously encountered. One of the latter boasted a kinked white beard that made him look like a dusky version of the Ancient Mariner. He carried one of the strange, ornamented tubes, a much younger blond companion the other.

  The older blond holstered his pistol as he stepped over the ruined body of the female Inzini. In so doing, he avoided looking at her romped face. Despite the threat she had posed to him, Cardenas could not.

  "Nasty business, this." The blond smiled encouragingly at Cardenas. "You can put your hands down, mate." As the Inspector lowered his arms, the newcomer nodded in the direction of the other lifeless Inzini. "Those two wankers won't bother you anymore."

  "Thanks for your help," Cardenas replied guardedly. "I was in a bad spot." His tongue moved over the second molar, but did not push. Not yet.

  "Strewth." The blond mustered a ready laugh. "Lucky thing for you me and the boys happened to be around."

  "Interesting coincidence," the Inspector observed noncommittally.

  "Too right, mate. 'Course, you're probably thinkin' right now that it weren't much of a coincidence."

  "The notion had occurred to me," Cardenas said. He indicated the artfully embellished tube the eldest among them carried. "What is that thing? And who are you people?"

  "Us?" The blond embraced his companions with a sweep of one hand. "Why, we're the Ooze from Oz, mate. Visitin' your great Namerican Southwest, we are, and couldn't hardly leave without seein' that eminent engine of world commerce, the Montezuma Strip."

  "You've been following me," Cardenas said accusingly.

  "Not at all, mate, not at all." The blond pointed to the two dead bodies lying motionless on the alley paving. "Dinkum, we've been f
ollowing those drongos. Won't have to do that any longer." His gaze returned to search the Inspector's face. "Won't have to follow anyone much longer, I hope. Want to get back home, we do. But first we're charged with finding and having a chat with a certain sheila and her kid. You wouldn't know anything about how we might go about doin' that, now would you?"

  "No, I wouldn't." Nothing to lose by trying lying, Cardenas determined.

  It didn't work. Gesturing with one hand, the blond beckoned his younger counterpart forward. The skinny foreigner held the painted tube firmly in both hands. "Now this here is what we call a didgeridoo, mate. Back where I come from, it's a traditional Aboriginal musical instrument. Not what you'd call real hitech-complex, like. You blow in one end, music comes out the other. These two beauties here, however, they're amplified. When they're charged up, you blow in one end, and a ball of sound shoots out the other. More like a shaped sonic wave, actually." He indicated the back wall of the nearby building.

  "Bloke who knows what he's doing with it can blow a hole through concrete. Just depends on the level of amplification you specify. When it's boosted enough, the mechanism sort of becomes more of a, well—a didgeridie." A glance singled out the dead Inzini. "Bone doesn't stand up to it real well."

  He nodded slightly and the younger man raised the tube. Putting the smaller end to his lips, he aimed the other at the Inspector's forehead.

  "There's this traditional roo-tune we'd like to play for you, policeman. It's up to you whether we play it on the sidewalk—or on your head. You know something about where the Mockerkin sheilas are fled, or these two yobbos wouldn't have been tracking you. Tell us and we'll call it a fair go." When Cardenas continued to hesitate, the blond favored him with a smile anyone else would have believed genuine. "C'mon, mate. We don't mean to hurt the ladies. It's just business. And unlike these two wankers lyin' here, we really will let you go. Got no interest in vaping a Namerican cop. We'll never see you again, and you'll never see us. Once we've had our high tea with the sheilas, it's back to the Never-Never for us."