Xing was talking, something about overloading the city’s environmental systems. ‘Too many people in Urbis for Carnival now. That is the point. Purging plants work at full time to clear ketones and butyrates from the air. If one breaks down, the whole city smells like an old shoe in a day. Heat exchangers the same, though at least they generate electricity.’
‘Yeah,’ Suzy said, thinking it was a funny thing for an actor to be concerned about.
A handful of Golden were moving through the ordinary tourists, each gorgeous and singular, like flamingos strutting amongst a flock of house sparrows. There was a man with a kind of metal helmet wrapped around his entire head, fretted into a dozen or more thin rings that Suzy realized must be meant to represent the rings of Saturn. Someone else moved inside a twisting column of bloody vapour, a dark knee, a hand, visible in momentary rents in the red fog. A girl in a pleated sarong, round breasts bare and sprinkled with sweat, danced a few steps with a leonine young fellow in coveralls that churned with storms of clashing colours, then linked arms with a bearded boy in a shimmering toga. Someone threw up a ball which exploded when it touched the luminous ceiling, releasing a snow of golden flakes and a scent like burning geraniums.
Xing watched Golden jostle each other at the escalator’s maw. ‘People like that think they get away with anything. Releasing proscribed narcotics into atmosphere.’
Suzy breathed deeply, feeling blood vessels in her face dilate. Air suddenly turbocharging the jelly in her skull, as if she’d taken a draught of pure oxygen. ‘Maybe they just want to cheer up the suits there. Make their day.’
‘In twenty minutes we could be foaming at the mouth with withdrawal symptoms. Golden have a funny sense of humour.’
Suzy looked at Xing. Whatever it was in the golden flakes, it was powerful stuff. Things were coming together in her head all of a sudden, like machine parts sliding together on frictionless oil.
Bonadventure. Levels within levels.
She said, ‘You don’t like the Golden?’
‘The older ones, I think, are growing beyond humanity.’ Xing spoke slowly and carefully, like he was holding something in his mouth he had to get the words around. The stuff had got to him, too. ‘They don’t see us as human. Our lives are too short to count for anything. I had a dog. When I was a boy. On Earth. She died when I was fifteen, of old age. I loved that dog, but I never confused her with a human being. That’s how it is with us and the Golden. Why do they watch fliers so avidly, Suzy?’
‘You’re going to tell me, right?’
‘They fear death and are attracted to it at the same time. The more you have, the greater even the vicarious thrill of loss becomes. We are all players in their games, in Urbis. I don’t know, maybe the drag makes me ran on like this.’
Suzy looked at him. Tall smiling man, cap of glossy black hair, a roostertail scuffed up at the back. An actor talking about atmospheric recycling, a stranger who had suddenly glued onto her life, right at this critical minute…
She said, ‘Who are you? Who are you really?’
His smile did not waver. ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘I mean who are you working for? The Navy? RUN police?’
People were looking at her. ‘Please,’ Xing said, ‘not so loudly. We don’t want a scene.’ He grabbed one of her wrists, and she found she couldn’t pull away from his grip, he was stronger than he looked. His face was centimetres from hers. He’d shed his accent, looked ten years older all of a sudden. ‘Just keep quiet, Seyoura Falcon. You will be all right. You are just a pawn, not a player. There will be no real trouble. We just need you to play out your part.’
‘You lucking set me up, man.’ As if she was standing beside herself, amazed at this.
‘Just a little pheromone transfer, nothing permanent. It’s already wearing off. Trick of the trade. I’ve been working deep cover for years now, watching those Golden you work for. Service engineer, go anywhere, see everything. What I know, Seyoura Falcon, is that your life is in danger. Bonadventure’s plan is not all it seems. He’s a front for a cartel of Golden that want to use you to get at Barlstilkin. They want stability. They want to eliminate Barlstilkin without fuss, without scandal.’ Xing took Suzy’s hands, a strong grip. ‘You’re a pawn sacrifice, but I am here to help you.’
Suzy kicked out, but Xing danced back neatly, swung her around and put his forearm across her throat like a bar of iron. Which was the wrong thing to do. Suzy flexed her grafted muscle and he went sprawling and she kicked him in the throat, yelling, ‘Bastard! Bastard!’ and hurting her toes on his skull. He was curled up, eyes rolled back as he tried to breathe. Suzy said, ‘I should throw you over the fucking rail.’
But she saw a couple of cops running around the gallery’s circle, red uniforms flickering through the crowds—must have come up on the escalator—and she took off in the other direction, dodging around astonished tourists. A mass of tanglewire shot past her, hit the rail and threw out a hundred writhing threads. Suzy saw a service corridor and went down it. Wrong move. It was a dead end.
She turned, saw one of the cops coming towards her. His pistol was held up by the side of his head. He was smiling. And then something dropped on him from the high ceiling and he collapsed under it, yelling and kicking. Cybernetic cross between a spider and a scorpion, moving with swift sinister grace, the thing pinned the cop with its jointed legs, sprayed him with stuff that looked like blood. It darkened his red tunic, puddled all around him.
Behind and above Suzy, a voice said, ‘This way, Seyoura. Quickly now.’
A knotted rope dropped from a ventilation shaft as tanglewire erupted in a frantic dance around the robot and the cop it pinned. Suzy saw the second cop take aim again, grabbed the rope and swarmed up it. A hand reached down and helped her over the edge into murmuring dusty darkness.
7
* * *
She was in a narrow crawlspace, crouching face to face with the guy who’d hauled her up. He was the mechanic she’d glimpsed at Bonadventure’s place, tall and incredibly thin, his head shaven except for a crest of spiky blond hair, the front part flopped down over washed-out blue eyes. Black pants, tight as hell, bare-chested under a black leather jacket, the left sleeve torn away to show off his augmented arm.
While Suzy got her breath back, the mechanic pulled up the rope and fixed the grill back in place, the elongated multijointed digits of his prosthetic hand blurring over the fastenings.
Suzy said, ‘I guess I should thank you for saving my ass.’
‘Don’t thank me until you know what I want.’ He had a loop of braided wire in his prosthetic hand. ‘You hold still a moment,’ he said, and waved the wire up and down Suzy’s body.
Her implanted speakers jabbed painful spikes of pure noise into her ears: she clutched at her head, but the sound was gone. She said, ‘What the fuck did you do?’
‘Just a precaution.’ The mechanic’s eyes seemed to film over for a moment. ‘Yeah. They’re all running now.’ His wide happy smile showed a scattering of brown teeth in pale, pulpy gums. ‘Man, I’ve been waiting to turn on this town my whole life. They run…’
‘Hey,’ Suzy said, and shook him by his meat arm. ‘Those cops out there have friends, okay?’
The mechanic looked through the grill. Light and shadow shifted over his thin white face, his spikily-crested shaven scalp. Old scars seamed the left side, like someone had once tried to take his head apart. He said, ‘My little helper down there is kind of blocking the way. But you’re right. We go get a ship now.’
‘You want a ride. I got a ship, but I don’t think you want to go with me. No way I can fit in a passenger, anyhow.’
‘I’d go anywhere. Been in this town too long, me. But you don’t want Bonadventure’s ship. Leastwise, not the one his friends want you to ride. I know all about that, and we’d better find us another. You come on with me.’
There was a long and dirty scramble through a maze of ducts and crawlspaces. Suzy learned that th
e mechanic called himself Robot; he was a good old boy from Galveston, not two hundred klicks from where she’d been raised. By the time they’d quit the ducts for a cableway where they could at last walk instead of scrabbling along on hands and knees, they had switched to English; five minutes more, and Suzy remembered why the name was so familiar.
‘You’re that artist! The one that set that machine on…who was he?’
Robot smiled at her, pushing at his spiky crest. His pants were held together with a piece of twisted wire. A seam had gone along one thigh; pale moments of flesh glimmered between taut strands of thread. ‘Some old dingbat used to be RUN representative for Elysium.’
‘It was an advertisement? I kind of remember.’
‘It was what back in the twenty hundreds they used to call a snare. Bundle you into its sensorium, give you the hard fast sell, let you go. Mine were kind of like that, but mobile, and they reacted to the way you reacted to them. This old dingbat started arguing when it tried to sell him its religion, so it argued right back, and that made him yell louder…Well, I think he’d still be there if the cops hadn’t busted him loose. They broke the damn machine, too.’ Again, his eyes seemed to film over for a moment. ‘I got better ones working now. Been planning this since I went freebreather.’
‘I thought they deported you.’
‘Tried. I persuaded their prison to let me go. They took my arm, see, but Machine could talk to the prison circuits, and they couldn’t take him away from me. Got my arm back and been living in the walls since then, and you’d better believe I’m not the only one. We better keep walking, I reckon.’
‘All you have to do is take me back to Bonadventure’s house. Don’t tell me you don’t know the way, ’cause I saw you there.’
‘I’ve been working for him and his friends, which is why I know you don’t want to be flying that ship. Ever heard of the pyramids?’
‘Just take me to his station then. I guess I can manage to ride a car out there.’
‘You got things to learn. Bonadventure’s house is the last place you want to go. For one thing Bonadventure’s gonna be hard put to help himself. He was close to bankrupt, you didn’t know that? Too much investment in exploration that didn’t pan out, too much in conventional orthidium mining, he lost heavily when the price went through the floor. His friends were propping him up, which is why he was front man for this thing. What you and I saw of his partners were only simulacra. I bet they didn’t even look like the real people.’
Suzy said, ‘Hold on now. Bonadventure’s bankrupt?’
‘You probably got more hours than he has. And the other reason you don’t want to go to his house is the cops’ll be busting him now they know they can’t get anything more out of you. I’ll bet they planted a homeostatic circuit in you, by the way. That’s why I ran the superconductor loop over you. Induced flux will’ve shut any transmitter down.’
‘I’m wired for sound, you jerk! You’re out about a hundred days you fucked that up.’
‘You can try get it, but the only air I own is in my lungs. Flux shouldn’t hurt speakers anyway. We don’t have much time. You coming?’
‘Well, shit, what choice do I have.’
‘None that I can see,’ Robot said.
They went down a steel ladder that seemed to drop a vertical kilometre through the service levels, stepped off after about ten minutes’ descent into a duct between looped pipes, part of the heat equilibrium system.
A glimmer of bright light a long way ahead. Sounds of a crowd, muffled and botched by metallic echoes.
‘I just want to eyeball a few things,’ Robot said. ‘Seems it’s going well, though.’
‘You sure the cops aren’t following us? I just as soon get to the port, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Honey, I’m the centre of the biggest piece of interactive art you can imagine, and I want to give you at least a peek at it, y’know. Don’t you worry about the cops. I’m keeping watch on them.’ Robot gestured with his augmented arm, a weirdly balletic movement, and Suzy saw a little rat-sized machine, bristling with sensors fore and aft, clinging to the ribbed steel roof of the duct. ‘I’m plugged into half a dozen like it,’ Robot said, ‘and I can tell you the area’s clean. You come on now. This won’t take long.’
The little rat-machine followed them with the dumb persistence of a pet animal as they went down the dark tunnel, its clawed extensors ticking and scratching overhead. Suzy felt a kind of dreamy floating detachment, as if she was plugged into a saga instead of real life. Robot’s stories of people living in the ducts, a marginal alternative society largely propped up by Golden who came slumming in search of illicit thrills, were fantastic yet immediately credible, like the parameters of the most expensive kind of saga. Freebreathers, Robot called them.
‘On Earth we say free as air, but out here breathing time is the economic medium. So it’s a seriously radical thing, being a freebreather.’
‘You sound like you approve.’
‘Sure. Not that I didn’t have a choice, y’know. But yeah, it’s ideologically correct as far as I’m concerned. Urbis is super-artificial, everything human-made, regulated. Every plant in the city has a machine code, you know that? No wilderness, no randomness. That’s what my machines are for, especially the predators. Put some adrenalin surge into the routines, some unpredictability. We’ve three levels in our brains, we should use them all.’
The clarity of the Golden’s drug was leaving Suzy, burned off by adrenalin maybe, and she was confused by Robot’s talk, half street slang, half artistic theory, switching from Badlands drawl to something close to no accent at all and back again. It was as if he was trying to sell her something, or convert her to an obscure faith. She said, at random, ‘Predators?’ And remembered the machine that had jumped the cop.
‘That’s what we’re going to see. Hear that noise ahead? It’s started. I started it back when I picked you up.’
Suzy had to run to keep up with Robot’s eager lope. Light and noise grew. They came out onto a narrow balcony, squeezed beside the humming multigridded maw of an air recirculator. Three floors below was the vast circular floor of the Central Stack. People sat at clusters of cafe tables, wandered like grazing animals between market stalls. Suzy and Robot were at about the same level as the tops of the tallest of the pulsing fountains which spouted here and there from sprawling freeform pools, higher than the crowns of clipped bay trees scattered across the paved plaza.
Robot pointed with his augmented arm. ‘Over there,’ he said.
Suzy barely glimpsed it, an elusive star of light in the middle air far across the plaza. It drifted down as lazily as a snowflake, kissed the blue water of a pool—and exploded into a vast bank of white foam that spewed across the entire surface of the pool in a moment, was sucked into the fountains and spattered high into the air. Faint shrieks, mostly of laughter, as people scrambled out of the way of foam spilling over the banks of the pool, spreading its white tide across the plaza’s multicoloured tiles. Other pools were erupting in banks of froth too; the air was suddenly full of drifting foam, like a blizzard of sticky snow.
‘Little machine, no bigger than your hand,’ Robot said. ‘Catalytic.’ He touched Suzy’s arm, pointed.
But Suzy had already seen the human-sized metal spider skitter out of one of the tunnels that punctured the rim of the plaza. People scattered before it: then it pounced, caught and cradled its victim with its forelimbs and squirted her with symbolic blood, dropped her and went after new prey. There were other spiders in the plaza now, sending colliding wavefronts of panicky people tangling and untangling amongst foamy pools, sliding and slipping, swallowed by burgeoning banks of bubbles.
‘We can go now,’ Robot said, and clipped something to the rail, a little spool with a kind of grip protruding from it. ‘Monofilament,’ he explained, clambering over the rail (his split pants leg splitting further), ‘so take care.’ And then he fell towards the plaza, swaying to and fro on the invisible line. W
hen he reached the bottom he let go of the grip and it shot back up, clattering against the rail. Suzy followed him down, her whole body a tingling target. The cops had to be somewhere about, and none of this was exactly inconspicuous.
When she got down, Robot was talking to an s&v remote that hovered a metre in front of his face like a huge hypnotized insect while he rambled on about some kind of art theory until Suzy lost patience and struck at the remote, which promptly shot up towards the distant ceiling of the stack, vanishing amongst the storm of slow-falling flecks of foam.
‘I was just signing the piece,’ Robot explained. He was looking around at the chaos with a kind of idiotic satisfaction.
‘This is some kind of art?’
‘Sure. I call it Urban Terrorism. Back in the twentieth century, when technology was spreading like ghostweed through every layer of society, individuals suddenly found that they had the power to subvert the status quo. One person could hold a whole city to ransom, if he or she was fanatical and cunning enough. You had every kind of splinter group resorting to violently aimless protest, from groups which believed that animals had the same civil rights as human beings, to tiny religious sects who figured it was better to blow infidels to bits than waste time converting them. Of course, that wasn’t really art. For one thing, they mostly never gave proper attribution to their work.’
‘This is great. I guess I’m not going to escape, but at least I’ll have plenty of time to check the critical reviews of this thing. If I’m allowed net access after they sling me in jail.’
Eternal Light Page 8
