Streetlethal

by Steven Barnes

  Steinbrenner met them there. Her thin, flat face was flushed with excitement. Her eyes flashed from Tomaso to Nadine with swiftly veiled hostility.

  Possessive! Nadine realized with a jolt. She has her little secret, her little piece of techno-wizardry, and she doesn't want Tomaso to share it with any other woman. It's their baby.

  "So. I understand that you have something for me." Tomaso had adopted a somewhat fatherly air, and it was almost amusing to see this cold, homely little woman fall into the child role so easily. "If you called me all the way out here to show me some doped-up hamsters, I'm going to be rather irritated."

  "No way. Follow me, Mr. Ortega."

  The thin brunette trotted on ahead of them, and Nadine watched the way the woman's buttocks shifted under her lab smock. Tight, prim, and full of repressed energy.

  The lab to which she guided them was almost bare. Klause was there, and Tacumsi, the computer specialist. There was a flatscreen projector and a screen at the far end of the room, and three vacant chairs.

  Nadine let Tomaso hold the chair for her. "All right, Klause. What do you have for me?"

  "Everything." The man's receding hairline had left an impassive expanse of forehead, but now it was crinkling in excitement.

  Tomaso sat next to Nadine, taking her hand. "Everything? That could be quite a lot."

  "I doubt you'll be disappointed. Tacumsi—?" Nadine thought that she had seen, and participated in, enough sex in its many forms that nothing she saw now could shock her. She was wrong. "As you can see from the color-coding here—" A light-point stabbed out, indicating part of a shifting color spectrum superimposed over the images. ".. .the threshold dose seems to be fairly constant—"

  "Absorption pattern?" Here the pointer moved to the breasts of a girl who seemed barely into her teens.

  "We have a tracer working here. Our pattern works a lot like this—" A young man arched his back, struggling to control his muscles, as a purplish stain began to glow in his body, beginning in his stomach region, spreading outward in tendrils which snaked through his circulatory system and reached up for his brain.

  "Straight for the medulla oblongata, which, as you know, is the most primitive portion—"

  "That might be an explanation for the psi phenomenon. We've got what looks like primitive telepathy—"

  "—crazy. Increased sensitivity to body language at the max. The rest is just hallucination. It has to—"

  A finger tapped Nadine on the shoulder, and she almost jumped from her seat. "Coffee?" The offending voice belonged to a young Oriental girl with a bright, inquisitive smile.

  "—does absorption rate vary with age?"

  "Metabolic changes vary with—"

  "Cocaine seems to diminish the effects somewhat—"

  "—Skin-popped?"

  "Nobody at the party was into that—"

  "Then, we'll have to find a volunteer—" (Grim laughter.)

  Tomaso's expression suggested Christmas mornings and freshly unwrapped toys. His infectious eagerness made him seem years younger.

  Nadine sank back into her chair, watching him, watching Steinbrenner, and Tacumsi, and Klause speak with calculating coolness about overdoses, probable addiction patterns, and more, and more, until the names and numbers and probabilities and suppose-this's and suppose-that's heaped up in her mind like a pile of nasty letters daring to be read aloud.

  "I've done a voice scan on the party guests who've called in the past few days, and I would say that better than sixty percent of them are undergoing severe stress already. If the trend continues in anything like a direct progression—"

  The voices were becoming indistinct, and Nadine's vision began to spin, the sour taste in her stomach rising to her mouth again and again, until she knew that if she didn't get out of the room, she was going to be ill.

  She rose from her seat, bent over, and whispered in Tomaso's ear—"I have to go to the powder room. Will you excuse me?"

  Steinbrenner watched her leave, and wasn't quite able to get the grin off her thin face by the time Tomaso turned back around. He glared at Steinbrenner and the grin shallowed a bit, but its ghost remained.

  Out in the hall, Nadine felt the door hiss shut behind her. The air seemed cleaner, sweeter, away from the endless analysis of what should have been, well—

  Sacred?

  She almost laughed at herself, sinking down on one of the variable couches in the lobby, dropping her head down to her knees. Crazy. It was all so crazy. What was supposed to be sacred? Sex? What right did she have to say that, having parlayed sex into power and position, wealth and comfort, used it to manipulate Tomaso Ortega into marrying her? If that wasn't sheer prostitution, what in the world was? So, what right did she have to complain, or criticize?

  None, perhaps, but still, she did. And meant it. There was something evil in what was going on in there.

  What was it? What was the drug? She closed her eyes and tried to find the images, the words. The twisting bodies; the screams of pleasure; the maniacal focus of the eyes; the single-minded driving motions; the begging; the expressions of glazed contentment...

  They were talking about a love drug. She looked up with a start. That was exactly what they were talking about, and if that was what they had, why in the world was she so scared of it? What was so wrong about—?

  She thought about the pleading voice of the publishing woman, Chyrmin Russell, begging for more of die drug. The need on her face had etched and drawn that flawless, photogenic skin until it seemed little more than flesh-colored plastic stretched over a skull. Tomaso had laughed and hung up the phone.

  She remembered what Klause said just before she left: "We estimate a fifty percent addiction rate on the first application—"

  "Love for Sale." The words of an old song, ancient before her mother was born, ran through her mind. Somehow she could see Tomaso standing on a street corner, holding a bucket of pills in one hand and a gas lantern in the other. "Looove for sale..." he crooned, turning to look at her, and his face was a death's-head. •

  She jumped when a hand gripped her arm. "Come along," Tomaso said flatly, and escorted her to the elevator. Only when the doors shut did he make further comment. He looked at her with an expression that was more curious than angry. "You embarrassed me."

  "Why? Because I had to go to the lady's room?" Her voice sounded weak, and she immediately wished that she could choke the words back and start over again.

  "You don't think anyone believed that, do you? We all knew why you left—you were upset at what we were saying."

  Back in the garage, the guards escorted them into the car. Tomaso was quiet, but the air between them had gone cold. She felt a need to reach out to him, say something, reestablish contact of some kind... any kind...

  "I can't help it. I can't help being—"

  He turned on her fiercely, eyes burning in his puffy face. "Dammit. You were my brother's woman for almost two years. What is this? You shared his life with him; what's wrong now? I mean, I'm not good enough, or what? Just what the hell is it?"

  "Please, Tomaso—" She held up a hand, trying to collect her wits. "You have to understand."

  "I don't have to understand a goddamn thing." The car rose up out of the tunnel and headed for the CompWay again. Tomaso watched the buildings whiz by, watched the people walking and tubing to and from jobs. His voice, when he spoke again, was a whisper. "I don't have to do a thing. They—" He swept his hand out in a broad arc "—all the little people out there had better watch out. Had better understand." He pressed his face close to the bulletproof glass, fogging it with his breath. "From today on, I own them. All of them." He laughed, a nasty, predatory sound.

  "What I've got, everyone will want. There has never, ever been anything like this before."

  She could feel the tautness in his body, knew that he was aroused, that he would demand her, or someone, when they got home, and that if she played her cards right, she could undo the damage done by her carelessness.
/>   She leaned against him, melting her body into his, kissing his neck. "Tomaso, you have to understand. Luis never trusted me to know about the Family business. I.. .just never saw that side of it." He looked at her quizzically, and she pulled his head down to her, until he was looking directly into her incredibly black eyes. "Can you forgive me?" She kissed him hard then, tasting and feeling in the kiss that the power was not yet entirely in his hands.

  And perhaps, just perhaps, something could be done to improve the situation even further...

  After all, if he was so obsessed with his love drug, it was only fair that he be one of the first to try it.

  12. Out of Mind

  All kinds of tunnels. Sewers, storm drains, service and pedestrian tunnels, electrical conduits, even a subway."

  Aubry's ears perked up. "Subway? Who are you kidding?"

  One hand on the steering wheel of his cart, Warrick turned around. "No joke." His face darkened, and he seemed to be trying to remember something, finally shaking his head. Next to him on the front seat, Mira patted his arm and yelled back to them. "In the twentieth century there were two efforts to build subways in Los Angeles—both of them went broke. Neither of them were ever used for anything except filming movies."

  "And now?"

  "It's ours."

  Warrick barely seemed to pay attention to his driving, although he guided the cart with uncanny precision. Every time that it looked as if he'd surely crash into one of the walls, he swerved smoothly around the corner, without so much as a ruffled eyelash. Mira didn't seem to be worried or impressed at all, taking her brother's odd driving style totally in stride.

  "And they can keep it, too," Promise said. She scratched at the edge of her coveralls, wincing at the way they chafed.

  "What's wrong?" Aubry asked. "Not used to working for a living?"

  Her gaze was murderous. "Laugh on, Knight—"

  "Shields," Aubry said softly.

  "Listen, Shields, I know that hard labor is old hat to you." She sniffed, and sank her chin down onto her chest. "Some of us are used to earning our way a little more gently."

  "A little exercise never hurt anyone."

  She said nothing, just watched the walls of the tunnel curving endlessly ahead of them, and kept her thoughts to herself.

  The air had a sour, dead smell to it, as though its only movement or circulation was caused by the passage of the electric carts. She had been assured by Warrick and the others that in time she would get used to it. Well, time was something that she had plenty of.

  Warrick's cart hesitated as he chose the smaller of two branching tunnels and followed it down. Aubry wrenched at the wheel: the turn was sharper than most of the others, sharp enough to cause the supply wagon they towed to swing from side to side in protest. For an uneasy moment he thought that the cart was going to tip over: he felt his way into the balance of the machine and compensated for the tilt, taking the turn safely.

  He was profoundly grateful that Warrick had decided to take one of the storm drains, and not one of the sewage maintenance tunnels. Although the sewer had ruptured and dried long before, the walls and ceilings of those tunnels were caked with filth, and reeked hideously. Whenever it rained, more garbage washed down into the Scavenger area, and the smell never completely died.

  Warrick pulled his cart over to a side and stopped it, the engine dying with a shudder.

  He hopped out of the cart and trotted back to them. "All right, unload and come with me."

  "This is it," Aubry said unnecessarily, and got out, pausing just an instant to listen to his own voice echoing up and down the tunnel. The light was dim, reflected back from the gently curved walls of the tunnel ahead.

  Just before the tunnel curved, there was a breach in the tiled cement wall, opening up into darkness.

  Warrick's step grew livelier as they went, until he was almost doing a jig.

  "What's wrong with him?" Promise said sullenly, watching the way the thin, wild figure pranced at the entrance of the tunnel.

  "Fleas?" Aubry shrugged. "Let's get the food unpacked, and go see for ourselves."

  She didn't say anything else, waiting until Aubry had loaded his arms with the food and jugs of water intended for the workers on the other side of the hole. She hefted two small packages, sighed with disgust, and shifted the lot in her arms, finding room for another shoulderful.

  She looked amazingly like an upright packhorse. "That's the girl." Aubry chuckled. "See there? Give yourself half a chance, and you'll fit in."

  "I'd like about half a chance to break your neck," she gasp staggering.

  Mira had unpacked her own gear, and was first into the hole.

  "That's a pretty big load, Promise," Aubry said. "You sure that you don't want to leave some of that for the next time."

  "Listen, 'Shields'—you carry your load, and I'll carry mine."

  "I can understand why you're having trouble."

  She looked at him suspiciously. "And why is that?"

  "You're used to carrying most of your loads on your stomach, aren't you?"

  Warrick's laugh drowned out her retort. "Do you see why I keep you together? Surely you don't expect me to let the two of you pollute the rest of my workers."

  "Most of your workers are at least marginally intelligent," Promise said doggedly, shifting her pack. There was a tiny stream of water trickling from somewhere, and her feet made sucking sounds as she slogged through the dark.

  "I know my people," Warrick said. "Some of them are even as spoiled as you, Promise."

  She gritted her teeth, but said nothing. "And some of them are as full of rage as Shields." He laughed. "Interesting thing, Aubry. I've dreamed of you. And when I did, I didn't see you as the shield, but as the man behind it. Does that make any sense to you?"

  They walked on quietly for a few more feet. Mira took a turn, and the tunnel narrowed so that they had to walk single-file.

  "Why don't you spit it out, Warrick? You don't think that's my name, do you?"

  "I'm not interested in who you were. Just in what you do."

  "You know, Warrick, I know what brought me down here, and I know what's keeping me down here. But what in the world keeps you here, Warrick? And the others?"

  Warrick chuckled grimly. "Anything would be better than this, right, 'Shields'?"

  "Yeah, something like that."

  "Really? Because it's dark down here, and it smells bad, and you can hear things creeping out there in the dark, always just out of your torch's reach?"

  "That's... what I was thinking, yeah."

  "Then that's what it is for you, Aubry. For me, it's just— where I am. A place to fit in. Have you ever really wanted more than that?"

  Promise laughed. "Yeah, that's right, Aubry. You crawled out of a hole just like this one, so why fight it?" She looked back over her shoulder for Warrick, and couldn't see him. "You can't say that about me, Warrick. I wasn't born in this cesspool. I don't belong here, and as soon as I can figure a way out, I'm going."

  Again, the grim chuckle. "Aubry Shields was born into his prison. You weren't born into one, were you?"

  "Of course not."

  "So you wrapped yourself in a billboard. One that lights up on command and screams to the world that you're a somebody, trapped inside a nobody."

  Promise cursed. "Why don't you stop—"

  "—pretending I know so much about you?"

  "And stop finishing my sentences. What is it with you?"

  There was no reply. Promise waited until the silence grew unendurable, then turned, waiting for Warrick. His pale figure loomed up out of the darkness suddenly, stopping the instant before they would have collided.

  She reached out and touched his arm. "Hey? Did you hear me?"

  Warrick's skin was so cold he seemed dead. He stopped, and shook his head as though momentarily unaware of his surroundings. "I'm sorry—did you say something?"

  Promise shook her head. "No. Nothing at all." She turned and continued into the dark, m
ore confused than ever.

  They passed another branching tunnel, and suddenly the ground felt smooth and well-worn. After the next turn there was a long straight way and another turn, with a jagged hole smashed in the wall at the corner. Light streamed through it. Mira whistled sharply.

  There was an answering whistle, and a clattering sound as tools were put aside. A scruffy face poked out of the hole and whooped, "Supplies!" The face disappeared for a moment, then a leg poked through the barely man-sized entrance hole, moving with the delicate nimbleness of a long-legged spider.

  Mira stopped the convoy, and the supplies were quickly scooped by a horde of Scavengers.

  About half of them headed back down the tunnel toward the carts: Aubry wondered how in the world they would find their way through the maze of branching paths, then just shook his head and forgot it. Aubry followed Warrick into the hole, leaving Mira to dicker with one of the Scavengers over rations.

  The room was piled high, stacked to the ceiling with dusty boxes and stacks of books. One stack was low enough for Aubry to take one off the top, and he did, mystified at Warrick's excitement.

  He scratched his head. "Dreaming and Memory." He pronounced the syllables distinctly.

  Behind him, Promise clapped sarcastically. "Bravo. Better than I expected."

  He shut the book with a loud snap and shrugged his massive shoulders. "So what, Warrick? Who are you going to trade this stuff to? Who wants it?"

  Warrick turned to them, his eyes burning. "/ want them," he said. "This is our wealth."

  "Well, yippee shit. So what? Can't you get ahold of some cubes, some disks? Can't you set yourself up a compschool, or what?" He threw the book back on the stack. "So, who needs to read?"

  Warrick looked at him with pity. "There's something of a fox-and-grapes attitude in that comment."

  Aubry's eyes narrowed. "What in the hell are you talking about?"

  "Exactly."

  "Hey, man. Do you think I'm stupid, or what?"

  Warrick pulled a book from one of the shorter stacks, leafing through its delicate pages with care. "You know, it isn't that you can't get information in electronic form, or microfilm, or disk, or cube, or any of the other forms—tape, holographic computer feed." He paused. "Tell me, Aubry, what's the similarity between all the modes of information storage I've just named?"