Montezuma Strip

by Alan Dean Foster

  Cardenas moved, but he was too late. The boy’s thumb convulsed on a second contact.

  As he reversed the transmitter and pointed it directly at his own skull.

  It was as if a giant fist had struck him under the chin. His small body arched up and back, and he did a broken half somersault, striking the ground hard, writhing and twitching like a worm on the end of a hook. Blood exploded from the sides of his head.

  Cardenas kicked the transmitter out of the boy’s fingers. As it went skittering across the plastic pavement, the twin LEDs on its surface winked out. The febrile, feathery wiring at one end snapped, a couple of sparks flared, and a crack appeared on the side of the case.

  Breathing hard, Cardenas looked down at the skinny kid, whose twitching was already beginning to slow. He spoke without glancing up. “Don’t move, please. You are both under arrest.”

  Paco bolted toward the bright lights of the middle pier. Cardenas pressed a switch on the police box in his pocket. The ninloco would not make it back to land.

  The girl had better sense. She stood there, angry and upset, not glancing in the direction of the younger boy at all.

  The parameds got there fast, but not fast enough.

  “He’s gone.” The middle-aged woman looked up from the pathetic corpse. It was no longer bleeding from the ears. “I mean, his body’s still alive, but that’s all.” She tapped the side of her head meaningfully. “He blew in his ears. There’s pulverized bone all mixed in with the blood. I did a quickscan. The cochlea is gone on both sides, along with the ossicles, the utricle and saccule, and some of the surrounding supporting bone. The force of it drove bone fragments into the brain and caused immediate hemorrhaging. He’s a vegetable.”

  When the lieutenant arrived, a tech was gingerly examining the transmitter, poking and prodding the damaged device. Finally he picked it up and walked over to his superiors. There was plenty of disbelief in his voice as he spoke to Cardenas.

  “That kid made this?”

  “So we believe,” said the sergeant.

  “You know how Muse glasses work? You watch the vit images in the lenses while the arms deliver the accompanying audio to the eardrum by direct transduction. The power is kept way down so that nobody can overhear and you don’t disturb others when you use the glasses in a public place.” He tapped the transmitter.

  “This son of a bitch is a tunable broadcast transducer. It works just like glasses, except no physical contact is necessary. It’s also overpowered by a factor of a hundred or so. No wonder he blew his brains. His ears must have imploded. I don’t know how the hell he worked out the necessary logs or frequencies, but me and the guys back at the lab are sure as hell gonna find out. He made it out of junk, too. Scrap I wouldn’t give twenty bucks for.” The tech looked down at the body.

  “Poor scared little niño was a freakin’ genius. Hey, I’ve rigged it with a speaker wafer. Want to hear what he killed himself with?”

  Cardenas said nothing, but the lieutenant nodded. The tech held up a DiData control nodule he’d attached to the damaged transmitter with an optical pass cord.

  A female voice emerged from the tiny wafer grid that had been hastily glued to the top of the transmitter. It was cracked and disjointed, but audible. Someone had set it to crude synthesized music.

  “I love you so much, baby… oh, do that to me, please… I can’t hold you tight enough… squeeze me harder, lover… melt into me….”

  A shriek made them turn. Two blues were loading the girl into a waiting cruiser, as she whirled to stare furiously at them.

  “The little shit! The dirty little camarón That’s me! That’s my voice. He stole my voice! Alla time he was following me, he was stealing my voice.”

  They shoved her into the cruiser, shutting off her hysterical tirade. The tech regarded both men.

  “His pockets were full of stuff. Among other things, he had a compact directional mike on him. He must’ve eavesdropped on her conversations with her boyfriend and edited him out, cut out the parts he didn’t like, added music, and made himself his own little private fantasy chip. Something he could listen to real intimatelike, via Muse transduction when nobody else was around. Like she was saying all those sweet things to him. His own little secret. Pretty sick, huh? The kid was pretty sick.”

  Cardenas looked past him to the bloodstained pavement. The parameds had already removed the crumpled rag of a body. It would not go on life support. There was no reason, no anxious relatives. No money.

  “No,” he muttered. “He wasn’t sick.”

  The tech spoke up. “How would you…?”

  “Sergeant Cardenas is an Intuit,” the lieutenant explained quietly, interrupting.

  “Ah. Right.” The tech gave Cardenas that familiar look, the one that always slipped out before people realized what they were doing, and left, carrying the broken transmitter like a cache of precious jewels.

  When he was gone, the lieutenant turned to the older officer. “You that sure he wasn’t sick, Sergeant?”

  “No, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He died before he turned his handiwork on himself.” Hard blue eyes gazed past the blood, to the dark, indifferent sea. “Over the years I’ve come to believe that emotions can be conveyed all kinds of ways. Call it verbal transduction if you want. The techs, they always have to have names for things.” He inhaled deeply of the bracing salt air.

  “The kid… his soul imploded before his ears did.”

  From the Notebooks of Angel Cardenas:

  So what, you say. There’s a surplus of kids. Even smart ones. Yeah, but smart and inventive are two different things. Society at large doesn’t seem to prize inventiveness, originality, quite the way it should. It’s only recognized when it makes money for the big companies, I guess. Sometimes I think the insignificance of originality is a canard they propagate so they can hire away all of it for themselves, and patent it, and manufacture it, and market it, and make us feel like it’s something we have to have even though we obviously don’t need it.

  That’s modern advertising. As in, “play your best canard.”

  I try to watch what I buy. I think I’m pretty good at it. Why, I estimate that of all my worldly possessions, no more than seventy percent are actually irrelevant to my continued happy existence. That’s how I know advertising’s good for me.

  Actually, it’s all a Jewish conspiracy. So many of the members of that tribe I know are born with guilt, or have it slathered on by relatives. The way I understand it, they take your foreskin and give you guilt in return. It’s a cultural tradition. The rest of us poor schlemiels have to acquire our share through advertising, so we can keep up. You know the Spanish for “guilty,” don’t you? It’s “culpable.” Pronounced, “kool-pable.” Two weird languages, I tell you. So near and yet so far.

  One thing about some of the people I have to arrest. They never feel guilty about what they do. To them it’s just business, comprende? They’d gladly pay taxes if the Namerican government would just leave them alone. Most of the time, they insist nobody gets hurt. Besides, is Namerica a free market, or what? They only supply what the people want. Isn’t that the ancient cry of businesspeople from the beginning of time?

  Why somebody buys something, and why somebody else objects to them buying it, always boils down to a fight between money and morals. Ninety percent of the time in such contests, money wins.

  Sometimes even when morality wins, it loses.

  Gagrito

  I

  As thethe sifaka sang the final chorus of “White Christmas” in its creamy, ethereal tenor it dropped to one knee and spread both thin white-furred arms wide, imploring applause. The delighted heavyset woman in the stylish beige thermosuit obliged. Acknowledging the compliment by placing its right arm across its powdery white chest and executing a deep, fluid bow, the half-meter tall lemur concluded the performance by scampering back up to its blackwire cage and shutting the door behind it.

  “It’s breathing very hard,” the woma
n observed uncertainly. Cuffs trimmed in brown diamond dust flashed as she gestured with perfectly manicured fingers. “Are you sure it’s okay?” The light from the Gee-ee tenplus carbonide on her ring finger seemed to increase the illumination in the back of the store. Her round face bore the distinctive Ponce glow of recent collagen sculpting.

  The master of the establishment appraised the sifaka professionally. Squawks and screeches issued from the multitude of cages piled three and four deep against the storeroom in which the imprisoned crawled, crept, flew, and squirmed in perpetual quest of appropriated freedoms. Some paced restlessly, their expressions motile friezes of ambulant desolation. Others snatched at fitful sleep. Despite the insistent respiratory hiss of the automatic deodorizers the atmosphere in the back room was unavoidably thick with clashing musks.

  “She’s fine.” The owner turned to his customer, smiling reassuringly. “Their bodies adapt quickly to the necessary contortions, and they are of course unaware of the existence of the installation itself.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.” The woman appeared unconvinced, but willing to be.

  The merchant reached up to tap on the blackwire. The black-and-white inhabitant of the cage was too tired to flinch. “You never see the stim wires because they’re laid right on top of the muscles. Loading access for the neuromotor and the voicebox is on the right shoulder, just to the side of the spine. There’s a small bump, but the animal’s fur hides it completely. First-class installation, brand-new animorph components. You won’t find better.”

  “It’s not the tech that concerns me.” The woman eyed the sifaka hungrily. “I thought all lemurs were on the endangered species list?”

  “Only certain species, and then only in parts of Namerica,” the store owner assured her. “Sifakas breed well in captivity. This one’s surplus stock from a Sinaloa zoo. Comes with a notarized license, all registered and legal. You can take her home without worrying.”

  The woman still hesitated. “I don’t know….”

  The advocate smiled encouragingly. “’White Christmas’ is just one of a dozen traditional favorites included in the holiday song pak, and there are twenty song paks for this model available on the open market. I just happen to have the holiday pak in her now. You saw some of the tricks she can do. There’s a gymnastics pak… sifakas are very agile… and a kidkin pak, and a household assistant pak. They have opposable thumbs, you know. Very handy if you do a lot of cooking and take the kitchenaid option. You can’t get that with a puppy.”

  “I know; but puppies are legal.”

  “I’ll show you the certificate of release from the zoo, if you want. Of course,” he added, pursing his lips and turning away with studied indifference, “if you’re not interested…”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said hastily. She approached the cage, which rested atop a much larger enclosure containing a quiescent golden tegu. The sifaka gazed mournfully down at her out of vast, vacant eyes.

  “She’s so pretty. And so much more… unique than a puppy.”

  As it was clearly no longer necessary to exert any pressure, the owner relaxed. All that remained were the formalities. “I understand you’re from New York?” The woman nodded. “Imagine the reaction of visitors to your home. None of them will have anything like this.”

  “Dr. Fonsecu’s wife has a black cockaded cockatoo that sings Italian opera while playing the piano, but I think a primate is just so much more… versatile.”

  “Very right.” He reached up to unlatch the sifaka’s cage. The lemur did not try to run. It had done that once before, and remembered.

  A small electronic pad reposed in the owner’s left hand. “Do you have a notex?” His customer nodded. “I’ll transfer the instruction book and command controls.” He indicated the cage. “You can manipulate her manually or via the preprogrammed sequences. The holiday song pak comes with the purchase.”

  Having made up her mind, the woman gave way fully to her desires. “I’ll take all the accessories you have. The kitchen pak, all the song paks; everything.”

  “That’s going to be expensive,” the store owner warned her, quietly gleeful.

  “It’s already expensive. Let me worry about that.”

  “As you like. I suppose you’ll be wanting a travel cage for her, too?”

  She nodded eagerly. “Something subdued and tasteful. My husband and I are at the Cantana in Tucson. I drove over this morning. Had a hard time locating your shop.”

  “A common complaint, but my customers always manage to find me. Being situated in an industrial district sometimes has its disadvantages.” A noise from the front of the shop made him frown. In expectation of this special referral he’d closed early, and had no further appointments scheduled for that evening. “Excuse me just a minute.”

  He was halfway to the door that separated the front of the shop from the back when it burst inward, sending him stumbling backward in surprise. The woman blinked in confusion.

  “Gluey, Twotrick, get the cages.”

  At first the startled owner thought a woman had spoken, but quickly saw that it was only a spanglo girl. Not more than sixteen, if that. She was skinny and blond, with eyes from which the pale blue had been drained as if by a siphon. Her skin was the color of fossil ivory, scorched in places by brown cancers that were the inevitable result of living too long beneath the merciless southwestern sun. Bony hips were all that punctuated the nervous angularity of her body.

  Of much more interest was the peculiar suit she wore, gray-black like sooty steel. Including gloves, boots, and hood, it covered every part of her body except her face. A multitude of silvery wires had been woven into and were integral with the dark fabric. Gleaming, diode-spotted components were strapped to her limbs, giving her the appearance of an ambulatory entertainment center. A thin black vorec curled from the edge of the hood toward her narrow lips, bobbing like a questing worm when she moved.

  Of the two boys who accompanied her one was slightly younger, the other distinctly older. Twotrick was tall, muscular, and black, with a distorted prognathous jaw that gave him the aspect of a dead pharaoh and a rumbling nose that had suffered through too many street fights. The much smaller Gluey was stringy-haired and afflicted with the cherubic visage of a feral baby. Tiny flecks of black floated in the whites of his eyes like pepper on fried eggs, sure sign of a longtime desdu user. He blinked incessantly despite the subdued lighting.

  The owner’s blood pressure soared as the boys began opening the cages. Initially hesitant, animals were soon pouring out. They frolicked about the storeroom, screeching and cawing, pounding on their former enclosures, generating a din suggestive of a chorus of the recently damned.

  “Gluey, get the back door.” The girl’s voice was unexpectedly resonant. Her stunted cohort sniffed as he ran to key the egress. As the door slid aside it revealed the interior of a large van that had been backed up to the rear of the store. Little of the access alley in which it was parked was visible. The boy’s taller companion began shooing freed animals into the waiting vehicle.

  The owner took a step toward him. His gun was latched under the counter, out front. “Hey, you can’t do that!”

  The youth whipped something short and nasty out of his back pocket, snapped his wrist. The ten-centimeter-long cylinder promptly quadrupled in length. It looked like a teacher’s pointer except for the slide trigger set in the base. “Fade, animonger.”

  The merchant swallowed, correctly assuming that the power injector was loaded with something other than copasceptic. He was reduced to looking on as dogs, cats, birds, and exotics Were alternately cajoled and guided into the truck.

  “Some of them need special diets, special care. They’ll die on you,” he muttered accusingly. “You can’t expect them to survive in the Strip.”

  “We’ll do the best we can,” the girl responded matter-of-factly. “At least they won’t have to spend the rest of their lives dancing and performing to the stim of some goddamn program for some ri
ch kid’s amusement. Some of ‘em will make it. There are people who’ll help and won’t ask questions.” Her pale eyes flashed. “You’ve been mongering dan-specs.”

  “What do you care?” Helplessly he watched his priceless inventory fly, run, crawl to freedom. “Damn loco ninosl”

  “Seguro miro.” The one called Gluey giggled as he tweaked the lock on a black macaque’s cage with a pair of snips. The primate hesitated, then swung free. Twotrick urged him toward the van. Night heat poured into the storeroom, Strip fierce and unrelenting.

  “Little bastards. You’ll pay. I have friends, too. You’ll pay.”

  The girl ignored him as she opened the sifaka’s cage and murmured encouragingly. “It’s okay. Come on out. C’mon.” She extended a hand. The lemur eyed her gravely, then climbed out onto the perch of her arm.

  “As we came in I heard something singing. This one?”

  The shop owner sniffed derisively. “It’s sold.”

  “Not anymore.” The girl turned to the terrified older woman. “You don’t want her anymore, do you?”

  “N-no. Look, I don’t know what’s going on here. I just want to leave. Please let me leave. My husband’s waiting for me back at the resort. He’ll be worried. I told him I was going shopping, but it’s getting late.” She edged toward the doorway that led to the front of the shop, away from the rear entrance that was filled with escaping animals. “Just let me go.”

  Pale blue eyes considered as the girl addressed the lemur. “What do you think, little preman? Should we let her go?”

  The sifaka had been preening its long, black-striped tail. Now it stopped to stare at the woman. “Kill the bitch,” it said distinctly in its liquid tenor.

  The matron’s eyes widened. “No, it can’t, you can’t.”

  “Tear out her womb. No, let me.” The lemur leaped, landing gracefully on the now-empty cage nearest the woman. She screamed and bolted.