city blues 01 - dome city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  She paused and then closed her eyes for a couple of breaths. “I used to laugh behind his back, call him a bible-thumper, and a fanatic. But he was right. About a lot of things. I had to die to understand what he’d been trying to tell me my whole life.”

  When Maggie’s eyes opened, they seemed to lose their focus. “Within each of us lives a trinity,” she said. “Like the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But for us, it’s the Mind, and the Flesh, and the Spirit.”

  She looked at me and squinted her eyes, as though trying to peek at something that was silhouetted by a bright light. “It’s the heart that brings the three together, your Mind, Flesh, and Spirit. Did you know that?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Maggie,” John said. “Let’s not go through this again. What happened to you didn’t have anything to do with God.”

  Maggie raised her voice. “John doesn’t believe me,” she said. “He drew me forth from my frozen tomb just as surely as Jesus did to Lazarus, and he still can’t believe that there is more to life than electro-chemistry.”

  Her voice softened. “He doesn’t believe in souls. But I know that they’re real, David, beyond any inkling of doubt. Because I know what it feels like to live without one.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “John’s chip could only reunite two sides of the trinity,” she said. “My mind and my body. He couldn’t restore my soul, David, because my heart was gone.”

  “Stop it, Maggie,” John said. “You know where this always leads.”

  “John is too sweet to say so,” Maggie said. “But he thinks I’m suffering from delusions. I can’t blame him for that; he doesn’t know what I know. Have you ever heard the old saying that fish aren’t aware of water? That’s what people are like; they’re born, they live, they build or destroy, they make love, and they die, all without ever quite being aware of their own souls: the little piece of God that they carry around inside their chests. But if you took a man’s soul away then he would notice it, just as surely as a fish becomes aware of water when the last of it has drained away. I know what that’s like. I know how it feels to wake up with an emptiness inside you that is so wide, and so deep, that you can scream inside your own head as loud as you want, and you’ll never even hear the faintest stirrings of an echo. But it doesn’t do any good, David. It doesn’t matter how long you scream, or how loud.”

  Maggie leaned close to me and whispered, “when you don’t have a soul, no one can hear you. Not even God.”

  “Move Sarge away from the robot,” John said. “I’m just about ready to run the UV cycle.”

  Maggie ignored him. “Your soul lives inside your heart,” she said again. “The Bible talks about it in a thousand different places. Jeremiah 24, verse 7: ‘And I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord and they shall be my people, and I will be their God; for they shall return unto me with their whole heart.’ You see, David? You can’t know God without your heart. And you can’t return unto Him unless your heart is whole!”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “That’s why I was so empty inside. By the time John managed to recover my body, the organ clinic had already cut out my heart and sold it. They’d also sold one of my kidneys, and my hand.”

  The fingers of her left hand flexed unconsciously. “But the hand didn’t matter, any more than the kidney did. John bought replacements and they work just fine. But you can’t let them take your heart, David. I never listened to my father, but I should have. He knew what he was talking about. He knew that you can’t go before God without your soul.”

  Maggie looked puzzled for a second, her gaze distant and unfocused. “They gave my heart to a pretty little girl, fourteen years old. Her name was... Elaine Carerra.”

  The sound of Elaine Carerra’s name brought reality down on my head with the force of a hammer blow. I had been just sort of floating along, pretending that none of this was real. But it was real.

  The sim recording of the girl’s homicide scene came back to me in sickening detail. Her young body sprawled half on and half off the bed, face tilted upward, dead eyes staring at the ceiling. A drop of blood trailing down her left cheek like a tear. The blood-streaked bed sheets swaddling her body. And behind the image of Elaine Carerra came the memories of all the other girls: Kathy Armstrong... Miko Otosaki... Felicia Stevens... Christine Clark... All close to the same age. All lying dead with gaping holes hacked into their chests.

  “It was you,” I whispered. “It wasn’t John at all. It was you.”

  Maggie kept talking as if she hadn’t heard me. “I watched her for weeks,” she said. “It practically killed me every time I saw her. Knowing that my heart was beating inside her chest. Knowing that my soul was burning inside her, making her alive, making her a person. While I was just this empty husk, this hollow shell of a thing that used to be human. And I knew that I would never be human again, not until she gave me back what she had taken from me.”

  John’s data-gloved hands went through the motions of opening a box, and suddenly the robot’s arms came to life. They began to move in sequence, four or five at a time, cycling each joint through its full range of motion as John took control of them and ran start-up diagnostics.

  “Maggie,” John said. “It’s time. Both of you need to move away from the robot.”

  “She was sleeping when I came into her room,” Maggie said softly. “So young. So pretty. I must have stood there for an hour, watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest. If I listened closely, I could actually hear my heart beating just under her skin. Fluttering under her ribs like a bird batting itself against the bars of a cage. I could feel it, the energy of my soul radiating through the pores of her skin, warming my face from across the room like the heat of a furnace.”

  “Maggie,” John said. “I’m ready to run the UV cycle and turn control of the robot over to the computer.”

  Maggie’s eyes drifted down to rest on Sonja’s bound body. “Her parents were out of the house,” Maggie said. “I sat on the edge of her bed and shook her gently to wake her. She tried to scream. I held my hand over her mouth and told her the truth, that it would be okay. I wasn’t there to hurt her. I just wanted something back that had been taken from me. Something important. She fought me for a while, until I showed it to her, held it up in front of her face so that she could see that it was mine. I told her that I needed my soul, that God wanted me to have it, so that the trinity could be complete. So that I could really be alive again.

  “I thought it was over then,” Maggie said. “But Elaine won’t let it be over. I passed her on the street about a month later. At first, I almost didn’t recognize her. She was younger, and shorter, and her hair was different. But I knew that it was her.”

  The muscles in Maggie’s neck tensed, and her right hand unconsciously drew the laser up to her chest. “I ran and I hid,” she said. “I locked myself into a dingy little hotel room and didn’t so much as open the door. I pulled the curtains and huddled in the dark, hungry and afraid. I could feel her out there, moving through the streets. Searching for me. Stalking me. I couldn’t even order food, because she might hear the sound of my voice and find me. I tried to slow the beating of my heart so that she couldn’t feel it.”

  A tear ran down Maggie’s cheek. “But you can’t hide forever, David. You can’t be afraid every second of every day. Eventually, the fear begins to turn to something else. And after a while, I stopped waiting for her to come to me. I went to her instead.”

  Maggie looked up at me, the tears glistening in her eyes. “I can’t make her stop, David. I keep trying, but she won’t stop coming back. She’s too clever for me. She makes it hard for me to recognize her. She changes her name. Her eyes. Her face. But it’s always her, David. It’s always... her.”

  Maggie’s gaze caught mine and transfixed me like an insect pinned to a board. Behind the tears, her beautiful amber-brown eyes blazed with an agony that I could scarcely
imagine.

  Some part of me wanted to fold her into my arms. To forget the past, no matter how horrible it was...

  But I couldn’t. This thing wasn’t Maggie. It had Maggie’s memories, and it looked out at the world through Maggie’s eyes, but it was not Maggie. John’s creation was not the resurrection of Maggie Stalin, but a chimera, a thing that spoke with Maggie’s voice. An insane thing. A monster.

  The natural corollary to that thought came unbidden to my mind. It was up to me to stop this. No one outside of this room knew the truth. If this didn’t stop here, tonight, Maggie would go back to hunting Elaine Carerra. More little girls would die to satisfy her psychotic fantasies.

  No. Maggie had to be stopped, and for that, I needed a weapon. Over the years, Maggie had given me enough lumps on the sparring-mat to prove that she was at least my equal in unarmed-combat. With my right arm fried, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

  I scanned the floor for the Blackhart, trying to keep my eye movements casually disinterested. No luck. I’d probably have to crawl around on hands and knees to find it, giving Maggie all the time she needed to put several nicely cauterized holes through my head.

  What did that leave for weapons? Maybe something lying around, a scalpel, or an injector-syrette, or something. I gave the room the once-over again, looking for anything that might conceivably be used as a weapon. No luck. There might be something inside one of the drawers or cabinets, but Maggie would hardly stand by and wait for me to conduct an organized search.

  Maggie must have caught my eye movements. “You’re getting ready to try something, aren’t you David?”

  The tone of her voice changed totally, as though she had shifted moods in an instant. She glanced down at Sonja. “Time to rescue your damsel in distress?”

  Maggie frowned, an exaggerated theatrical expression. “She’s not really a very good damsel, is she? In fact, she’s basically just your common variety street-whore. But I guess that doesn’t really matter, because you’re not much of a detective either. You’re not really much of anything, are you David?”

  John pushed the data-shades back up onto his forehead and stood up.

  “Such a pitiful little man,” Maggie said. “Holed up in your cave like a hermit. Sad little man, drowning in scotch, wallowing in self-pity. Welding together pieces of people’s trash, pretending that it’s art.”

  Maggie laughed, a single short syllable dripping with sarcasm. “Do you know who bought all those so-called sculptures of yours? I did, David. Every one that you ever sold. I’m the mystery buyer that Susan Blayne told you about. As far as I know, I’m your only buyer. Can you guess what I did with all your little masterpieces? I had them hauled to a foundry, and I watched them go into the arc-furnace. You should have seen it, David, your precious little bits of twisted metal melting like icicles in the sun.”

  It was obviously meant to be a devastating blow—brutally shredding the last inklings of my artistic fantasies. Squashing me to the floor in a puddle of self-pity. In another place, under different circumstances, it might have crushed me as thoroughly as Maggie intended. But coming in the wake of so many other terrible revelations, this latest insult didn’t seem to matter very much.

  My eyes settled on John as he walked toward us. His steps were exaggerated, heels clicking loudly on the floor. He was agitated. Maybe it was his frustration at Maggie’s refusal to cooperate, or maybe he really didn’t want to send Sonja under the knife.

  He claimed that he’d been trying to protect me. What if it were true? We’d been friends most of our lives. Could I use that friendship somehow? Was there a way to leverage his guilt and self-doubt into some kind of tactical advantage?

  I suddenly realized that I’d found the weapon I’d been searching for. It wasn’t a gun, or a lead pipe. It was John.

  I cleared my throat and nodded toward Sonja. “So she gets the chip now?”

  John nodded. “I’m sorry, Sarge. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said. “What has this woman done to you? How did she become a candidate for your puppet-chip?”

  “She hasn’t done anything to me,” John said. “Believe me, Sarge, it’s not personal.”

  “And that makes it better?” I asked. “It’s okay to murder innocent people if you do it to protect Maggie?”

  “Don’t act so self-righteous,” John said. “You’ve killed people for a whole lot less. What about Argentina? How many people did you kill down there? Ten? Fifteen? People with lives, families. And you murdered them, because our government was pissed off at their government. That’s justification for murder? Sure, I’ve killed to protect the things I love. I’m not proud of it, but I’ll do it again if I have to.”

  “And again?” I asked. “And again after that? This is it, John? This is your immortality?”

  John’s eyes jerked up to meet mine.

  “I hope you can get your money back,” I said, “because you’re sure as hell not getting what you paid for.”

  I poked my left hand toward Maggie. “You think that thing is Maggie Stalin?”

  “She is Maggie,” John said.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Bull-shit.”

  I poked my finger in her direction again. “I don’t know what that is: an animated corpse, maybe. A scientific curiosity, without a doubt. But it’s not a human being. And it most certainly is not Maggie.”

  “She isn’t...”

  “Not she, John. It!”

  Maggie yanked the laser around to point at me. “Shut up, David.”

  I looked at her. This was a dicey game, at best. The trick was to push far enough to snap John around, without going so far that Maggie would burn me down.

  “Or what?” I snapped. “You’ll shoot me?”

  My eyes went back to John. “Does this sound like Maggie to you? The real Maggie? The gentle, sweet Maggie that I fell in love with? That you fell in love with? Did you ever see the real Maggie raise a hand to anyone, except on the practice-floor, or in self-defense? I mean sure, she knew her way around guns, but did you ever hear of the real Maggie actually shooting anything besides a target?”

  “I am Maggie!” she said. “Don’t listen to him, Baby; he just wants to confuse you. He’s trying to divide us.”

  “How many people has this thing killed now? Twenty-five? Thirty? Jesus, John, how many has it killed that you don’t even know about? That’s why you’ve got to implant Sonja with the puppet chip, isn’t it? You need another scapegoat because that thing has been killing little girls again.”

  “Don’t do this, David,” John said. “For your own good, stop it now.”

  “What are you saying? If I behave myself, she’s going to let me walk out of here? Look at yourself, John. You’re a button-push away from doing the same thing to Sonja that you did to Russell Carlisle and Michael Winter. That thing, that maniac, has turned you into a killer right along side her. She butchers the little girls, and you create the puppets to take the blame.”

  I waved my left hand at the surgical robot. “You’re so excited about this technological miracle of yours. When do you start using it to change the world, like you talked about, instead of covering up for that thing’s murders?”

  Maggie pulled the trigger. The laser drilled through my left leg, a molten tunnel of pain through the meat of my thigh. I screamed as my leg folded. I collapsed to the floor.

  It took me a couple of seconds of breathing through clenched teeth to get enough of a handle on the pain to speak.

  “When...” my voice came out in a hiss. “When it brings... you a heart... that it’s ripped... out of the chest of some little... girl... What do you do... with it? Or does she... eat it?”

  Maggie aimed the laser at my head and pulled the trigger. John moved at the same instant, grabbing the barrel of the weapon and pushing it to the side. The deadly beam flashed by my head, close enough that I felt the heat of its passing.

  “Stop it, Maggie!” John shouted. “Stop
it, now!”

  Maggie screamed, an inarticulate shriek with no words behind it. John and Maggie grappled over the weapon. John hung on to the barrel, jerking and twisting it, trying to wrench it out of Maggie’s hands.

  My Blackhart lay on the floor where it had fallen. I started crawling toward it, scrabbling as quickly as my injured limbs would pull me.

  I was just about a meter short when I heard John shout “David! Look out!”

  I rolled to my left and the laser fried the patch of floor where I’d just been laying. I snapped my head around just in time to see Maggie’s left hand whip out and smash into John’s windpipe. He fell to the floor, gasping and clawing at his throat.

  She aimed the laser at my forehead and made a kissing gesture with her lips. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Drop it!” The voice came from behind me, sharp and mechanical.

  Maggie’s eyes darted to the door.

  I turned my head too.

  Surf stood in the doorway, a strange and vaguely rifle-shaped weapon pointed at Maggie. The barrel portion of the weapon seemed to consist of five or six brick-sized superconductor modules wrapped in electrical tape and conduit foil.

  Five more of Iron Betty’s fledglings surged through the door and fanned out like a SWAT Team. One woman and four men, all of them about as heavily augmented with cybernetic hardware as Surf. Their guns looked like Surf’s, and they all pointed at Maggie. I could see more of them moving out there in the hall.

  “Drop it!” Surf yelled again. “Right fucking now!”

  Maggie’s laser flared again, and the man to Surf’s left shrieked and fell to the floor with a smoking hole in his chest.

  Surf’s strange weapon squealed like a bank of charging capacitors when he fired it. At least two of his henchmen fired a millisecond behind him. The lights flickered.

  Maggie spun to her right, dancing away from the unseen energy beams. The barrel of her laser swept around toward Surf, and she pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; her battery pack was dry.