by Jack Yeovil
"On a lighter note, the Battle of the Bands in Fairport, Rhode Island, during which heavy metal groups Deathtongue and the Mothers of Violence played simultaneous sets in the same auditorium for thirty-eight straight hours has been resolved in single combat between the rival lead singers. Fuh-Q Charlie of Deathtongue and Sonny Pigg of the Mothers are expected to be out of the Reconstruction Wing of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in time for their big Christmas 'Freak the World' concert at the Hollywood Bowl next month.
"This has been Lola Stechkin at ZeeBeeCee, soaping my back and signing off. If it's all right with you, it's all right with us…"
Next, we go live to the Nikita Kruschev Ballrooms in Moscow for the semi-finals of The 1996 Warrior Chess Tourney, with a special guest appearance by the Samovar Seven. But first, here's a message from GenTech…
III
Jessamyn lay flat on the contoured table as the Doc sliced away the facial bandages, still relaxed from the morph-plus shots she had been taking every day. Doc Threadneedle was humming "The Girl in Gorki Park" as he wielded his scalpel. He was an artist with the knife, she had heard, and had apprenticed with the great Zarathustra at GenTech BioDiv before his "suspension." His field was bio-improvements engineering, and he had been placed in charge of some hush-hush military project that had racked him up a rep as the Frankenstein of his generation. She had never heard the whole story, but apparently some of his ideas were considered a little too daring for the traditionalists in Tokyo, and he found the rug pulled from under him. A few years ago, he had replaced her squished left eye with her first optic implant. At that time, he had offered to give her more extensive treatments—apparently, he found her a promising subject—but she hadn't had the cold kish to lay out. Now, after some shrewd scavving and a touch of inventive accountancy, she had more than the price of the pudding.
She had been undergoing treatment for over six months now. She wondered how much of what she had been bom with was left. She probably wasn't even legally the same person any more. A few weeks ago, she had spent her eighteenth birthday in a drug-induced coma, with her back opened up as durium shieldlinks were laid around her spine. She had even let Doc Threadneedle into her greymass to plug a few loops, although she didn't want too much done in there. She didn't hear voices much anymore, but Seth was still whispering dangerously, and sometimes she would dream his memories, vividly recalling some trivial incident from the remote past.
In a mud hut on an endless plain, she sorted through the bones of unrecognizable animals. Shackled to an oar, she strained in a galley as an oiled mountain of flesh beat a huge drum. In the depths of a monastery, she toiled by candlelight, laboriously copying out a crumbling manuscript, translating from one unrecognizable language to another. In a jungle whose oppressive steam-heat made sweat run inside her steel breastplate, she cut the throats of three befeathered priests. On a battlefield, she robbed a dead general of a leatherbound book grasped so tightly in his frozen fingers that two of them came away with it. In a shelter under London, while bombs exploded overhead, she coupled in a frenzy with a dead-faced young woman.
But that wasn't her. That was him. Nguyen Seth, the Summoner. Elder Seth, the Unspeakable. The more she picked up about his past, the more she realized how inadequate her vision of the world had been. She had been born to a life of violence, desperation and death, but she had never believed corpses could walk, manshaped creatures could endure for thousands of years, or that another person's mind could leak into your own.
"Don't open your eye yet," said the Doc. "I have the lights on."
The bandages were lifted from her face. Free at last, she wriggled her nose.
The Doc whistled through his teeth.
"Hmmnn, even if I do say so myself, that is quite some job. You could pass for a musickie model."
Jessamyn raised her hand, and felt her face. The dents in her forehead were gone, and her nose was reset. There was some flesh over her cheekbones again. Her chin was straight. And the improved optic was a solid lump under her left eyelid.
"It's not just a burner," Doc Threadneedle had told her as he unwrapped it from its tissue like a sugared almond. "GenTech have upgraded the product to include a kind of bat-sonar, and a heat sensor. You won't be able to see through it, but it will increase your field of perception. One model contains a micro-camera for surveillance, and the DeLuxe Tripball can filter light patterns and transmit them to the brain as psychoactive impulses. At last, a high with no side-effects. You can trip on Christmas Tree Lights."
She had picked out the combat model. Psychedelics didn't interest her these days. She had long since grown out of her disco dingbat phase.
"'Kay, I've dimmed the lights. Ready."
She opened her eye, and blinked in the gloom. She saw the Doc hovering by the table, and sat up. Her spinesheath buzzed slightly as the bioservos went along with her nerve impulses. Eventually, she wouldn't be aware of the hum, Doc told her. She would accept it just as she accepted her heartbeat and her pulses.
"Try the optic."
She closed her real eye, and opened the other. Her image of the room was clearer, now, like a line drawing. Doc Threadneedle was a man-sized conglomeration of hotspots. The blobs went from deep orange to bright yellow. The radiator elements shone like the bars of an electric fire. She could even see the faint heat pattern of the cat in the next room.
"Interesting, huh?"
"Snazz,Doc."
Doc Threadneedle laughed.
"What is it?"
"Snazz. You haven't talked like that since you got here."
"I suppose not. You have to grow up sometime."
"Not if you can afford the Zarathustra Treatment."
She eased her legs off the table. Her blastic-augmented kneejoints were smooth.
She touched the floor, and pushed herself away from the table. She was a little unsteady. A touch of dizziness. The Doc supported her with an arm around her waist.
"Wait a moment. The optic cyberfeed will kick in. Your brain's been told what to expect. It's just warming up."
He walked her to the centre of the room, and let her go. She tottered, and put her arms out. The Doc pushed the wheeled table back against the wall, giving her some space.
It was like a click inside her. The dizziness went away.
"Try it," the Doc encouraged her. "The flamingo position."
She tucked one foot into her crotch, sticking out her knee, and lifted her heel from the floor. Finally, she was balanced in perfect comfort on the ball of her big toe.
"How does it feel?"
"Wonderful. There's no strain."
"You should be able to stand like that for a week before the nerve implants get tired. Here, catch…"
He tossed a book at her. She reached out and caught it without so much as wobbling.
"You could take up ballet."
She balanced the book on her head, and laughed, turning in a slow pirouette on her toe.
Doc Threadneedle slowly turned up the lights. The line drawing faded, and she saw the colours as well as the warmths.
She looked down at herself. Below her hospital gown, her legs were still as she remembered—although her reinforced thigh and shin bones made them two and a half inches longer. She still had the faint white scar on her ankle, although the cross-hatch of scratches on her right knee was gone.
She dropped her other foot to the floor, and turned around. She felt good. The Doc's patented micro-organisms were beavering away inside, keeping her at the peak of perfection. She was hungry, not with a need for food but with a desire for tastes.
"Makes you feel kinda sexy, doesn't it?"
She smiled. "Well…yes."
"Everything will be better, Jessamyn. Food, sex, exercise. You should develop an ear for good music. Forget sovrock and get into Mozart and Bach. You've got the grey mass for it now."
"Doc, have you…?"
He grinned. She realized she didn't know, couldn't imagine, how old he really was.
"Yes, of
course. You don't think I'd do anything to a patient I wouldn't have done to myself?"
He put his hands out and fell to the floor, as if to do fingertip push-ups. Tipping himself forwards, he touched his forehead to the tile and kicked into the air. He straightened out, feet extended towards the ceiling, and rose into a handstand. Then, balanced on the fingers of his left hand, he put his right into the pocket of his labcoat and brought out a packet of sweets. He poured one into his mouth and offered the pack to her.
"Showoff," she said.
He pushed the floor, and flipped over in the air, landing on his feet. Straightening up, he was a middle-aged, rangy black guy again.
"Yes, of course. I don't get much chance to, you know, out here in the sand."
"Couldn't you…?"
"Go back?" Wrinkles appeared on his forehead. The fun sapped out of him. "No. GenTech doesn't forget. Zarathustra won't forget. One day, he'll try to take me out, you know. That's the real reason for all these 'improvements.' One slip, and you're excommunicated. He's not like he seems on the talkshows. They called me a Frankenstein, but his ambitions go further. He's a Faust, a Prometheus…and, in the end, I'm afraid he's a Pandora."
"You've lost me. Frankenstein I know from the videoshockers, but who are the others?"
"It doesn't matter, Jessamyn. I'm not like him. I've changed your body, and I tried to rewire a few of your neurons, but I've left you alone where it counts."
"And Zarathustra?"
"He doesn't want to improve the quality of an individual life. He wants to recreate the human race in the image of his ideal. Zarathustra isn't his real name, you know. It's something German, really."
"He's a…what was that old gangcult called…Nazti?"
"Nazi. Maybe. There are still a few left. The Mayor of Berlin, for instance, Rudolf Hess. Zarathustra has certainly dosed himself on some of his own miracle rejuvenators."
They left the surgery, and Doc Threadneedle locked up that part of the house. He had a large place, with as many modern conveniences as a sandhole like Dead Rat could offer, but it wasn't what someone with his skills could rate in a PZ.
He didn't seem to miss the gadgets and gizmos, though. His house was full of things she had only ever seen in old films with Rock Hudson and Doris Day: a vacuum cleaner, which did the work of a suckerdrone; a gramophone, which played unwieldy round black musidiscs with added scratch and hiss as part of the music; an electric kettle that took ages, maybe two minutes, to heat up enough water for a cup of recaff, and didn't do anything about the impurities and pollutants.
Buzzsaw, the cat, curled around Jessamyn's legs.
"I've got you some clothes," said the Doc. "Your desert gear was more holes than hide. Magda ze Schluderpacheru had something surplus down at the Silver Shuriken."
He indicated a neat pile of drab-coloured garments.
"The Silver Shuriken?"
"It's the local saloon. A yakuza operation, naturally.
They're the only people who can keep anything open out in the sand, and not be closed down by the gangcults. Magda is a honey. You should meet her."
"I'd like to. It's been so long since,.."
The Doc grinned. "…since you saw anything but my ugly mug, I understand. It's time you got out of the house. You must be stir crazy."
She wandered over to the chicken-wired window, and looked out. It was a clear night. The constellations twinkled.
"You should be with young people your own age, get yourself back into the swing of society."
"Uhh?" She had been distracted, looking out the chicken-wired windows at the half-disc of the moon. "I'm sorry. You're right. I need to…to do something."
She felt funny, as if things were happening inside her.
"I meant to tell you about that. Your body is like an engine. If you don't turn it over regularly, it will complain. With all the alterations you've had. you'll need to take vigorous exercise for several hours a day. I'd prescribe running, dancing, fighting, healthy eating and athletic sex."
"You could get to be very popular back in the city-states, Doc."
Doc Threadneedle smiled sadly. "Yes, but not with the right people."
Jessamyn picked up Buzzsaw, and felt the tingle of static from the cat's fur. It was like a mini-rush in itself. She realized she was down from the morph-plus, and that her senses were sharper than they had ever been before.
"Suck your finger and stick it in a light-socket sometime," the Doc said. "You'll be surprised."
She stroked the cat. It squealed and struggled from her grip. It disappeared upstairs.
"You don't know your own strength yet. You'll have to be careful. Here, try one of these."
He tossed her a thick yellow-covered book. She held it between her forefingers and thumbs and neatly tore it in half.
"I lose more telephone directories that way."
IV
Dead Rat, Arizona. What a place for an Englishman to end up, don't ch'know? Bloody buggering ha-ha-ha, eh what? Of course, Sarn't Major James Graham Biggleswade couldn't exactly go back to Blighty and expect them to hang out the welcome mat in Fulham, not after that tricky bit of bloody buggering business down in the Falklands—oh, excuuuuse meeee, the Mal-bloody-buggering-vinas—back in '81. Bit of a blooming sodding disgrace really, in actual fact, eh? These fakenham days, nobody hupped, frupped and trupped when the older Mastsarge yelled. Fact was, nobody knew who James Graham Buggered-to-bejaizus Biggleswade was. The sandrats just called him Jitters. His hands sometimes stopped shaking long enough for him to light a fag or give his teeth the once-over with Pepsodent, but that was every other Scumday in a month with a zed in it.
He sat in the corner of the Silver Shuriken, as far away from the bleeding video jukebox and bleeping zapper games as possible, sipping the foul antifreeze that passed for beer in the U.S. of Bloody A. He would have cut off his left doughnut and sold it to Johnny Galtieri for a pint of Six X Wadsworth, two bacon-and-cheddar sarnies and a packet of crisps with a blue twist of salt in them.
Mrs ze Schluderpacheru had taken pity on him, and gave him some sweeping-up chores in return for room and board and the occasional session with Fat Juanita. The old lady was like that, big-bloody-hearted. Jitters knew she was doing two people a favour, because Fat Juanita got depressed when the johnny-passing-throughs left her downstairs in the parlour with her knitting and gave all the custom to Gretchen, Connie Calzone, Margaret Running Deer and the Games Mistress. Fat Juanita was too bloody old, fat and stinky for the Game really. Not exactly prime camp-follower material. Bloody buggering lovely personality, though. If Jitters didn't have a wife and kids back in the old country—which, come to think of it, he probably didn't these days—he might just have dragged Fat Old Stinky Juanita up before the padre and tied the old knot. A soldier should be married, gave him a sense of what he was fighting for. Difficult to get the old fire up for the Greater Glory of flag, Empire and Prime Minister Ian Paisley, but hearth, home and humping still meant something in this godrotten hellhole khazipit of a world.
Just now, the Silver Shuriken was pretty quiet. Mrs ze Schluderpacheru was doing the accounts on her musical wrist-calculator, working how out much of her take would have to go to the yaks this quarter. Gretchen, the new girl, was putting up the Christmas decorations, replacing the black crepe around the crush velvet portrait of Wally the Whale with sparkly tinsel. The rest of the professional ladies were slumped around the telly in see-through armchairs, watching some kids' show called Cyclopaths, about a bunch of motorsickle chappies who went around slaughtering people they didn't think much of. That was one thing about America, the telly was crap.
Jitters missed the good old BBC, with the Light Programme and the Home Service. It might not be in strain-on-your-meat-pies Trideocolor or go on all night like America's bloody buggering 119 channels, but at least some nice bint like his old French teacher came on at ten-thirty and said good night as you drank your bloody buggering Ovaltine and waited for the shipping forecast. He missed the classic
serials, with Great British actors in adaptations of the works of Great British writers like G. A. Henty, Dornford Yates, Sapper, Dennis Wheatley and John Buchan. They were on the Home Service, along with all the programmes about how to make do in the kitchen what with the rationing, and the fireside chats from the Prime Minister. That had been old Ian Paisley last time he was in the old country, but he had popped his clogs of apoplexy while explaining the Fall of Port Stanley to Robin Day on Nationwide and it was that upstart Jeffrey Archer now. And on the Light Programme there was The Black and White Minstrel Show, where Benny Elton and Ricky Mayall had got their big break; The Archers, with Richard Burton and Joan Collins as Dan and Doris, saving the Ambridge enclave from gypsies and travellers; Doctor Who, with Barry Humphries visiting Great Moments of British History; The Muffin the Mule Hour… Most of all, he missed Jack Warner as the old-fashioned robocopper in Dixon of Dock Green, zapping the Frenchies with his bio-implant bazookas.
Should have had PC George Dixon at Port Stanley back in '81, Jitters thought. Johnny Argie wouldn't have seen off the task force so bloody buggering easy if the old "evenin' all" had been on the South Atlantic beat.
Gretchen was up a ladder now, sticking Bethlehem stars over the bulletholes on the ceiling. She was wearing a meshfoil microskirt, a Miss Piggy wig and strawberry pasties, her usual uniform.
The swing-doors swung open, and Curtius Kenne ambled in, chewing tobacco. He looked up at Gretchen, and spanged the spittoon with a jet of brown film.
"Nice view," he drawled. "Haw haw haw!"
Curtius was a cowboy builder. His van was painted up with pictures of Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, and he called his firm the Boot Hill and Laredo Double Glazing Company. He guaranteed his windows against everything up to a BlastMaster minimissile, but you were usually too dead to complain if he supplied you with defective merch. He loped across the bar, swinging his hips to show off his twin Colts, and got his polished pseudoleather boot up on the bar.
