He turned his loathsome glare on me again, his lip curling up in a teeth-baring sneer. The others emulated him.
“Got nothing better to do than harass me, Barnes?”
“We’ve all got better things to do,” Barnes snarled. “We’d be doing them if it weren’t for our leader…and the slags he keeps close.”
My hands were in my pockets, and I narrowed my eyes. “You can say what you want about me, behind my back or to my face. I’m giving you that. But you leave the others out of this. You got a problem with Needles? Try taking it up with him. If you can’t appreciate the services and the risks Pretty or Slim or Pale or any of the others takes, then you’re a shortsighted fool, and that’s your problem. As for me…I just don’t give a drek about you.”
I turned around and started walking. I was ready for him to take a swipe at me, but he just snarled and stalked off, his entourage trailing behind him.
I was on Lawrence, debating spending the evening in an all-night Polish gypsy coffee house playing chess, when I got a call. The vidiwindow opened to show the kindly old face of Halian Focht.
“Good evening, Mr. Crimson. Is this a good time to be calling?”
I smiled. “Absolutely, Professor.”
“Splendid. Perhaps you are about town?”
“I’m just outside a place with words I can’t read on Lawrence. A Polish coffee house.”
“Really? Have a seat, I’ll join you there in fifteen minutes.”
I ordered, watching the mounted trideo as the evening news played.
“…In other news, the Chicago Metaphysical Institute was robbed late last night by unknown individuals. Professor Dougall made a statement earlier today indicating the Bhianchi Orb, an artifact on loan for study from the Dunklezahn Institute for Magical Research, had been removed from its containment vessel. Signs of illegal entry were apparent, and the CMI is offering a reward for any information regarding its whereabouts.”
A picture of a stone orb carved with runes I didn’t recognize appeared. “While the Orb is known in certain circles to be a passive magical artifact, its abilities and function remain unknown. Lone Star has declined to make a statement regarding their investigation into the theft, saying only that they are optimistic it will be recovered soon.”
The timing was perfect. Sure enough, in the time it took for my untouched synthspresso to go lukewarm, Focht took a seat across from me, smiling.
“I’m glad you were in the neighborhood,” he said. “Conversations are always better in person.”
“Considering you have a pair of datajacks, I’d have pegged you for a net junkie.”
He absently fingered his pair of dull chrome jacks and chuckled, running a figure eight between them.
“No, those days are behind me. After a time, you come to appreciate the old-fashioned comforts of reality.”
I nodded, signaling the waiter to bring a cup for him. He smiled and shot it down, aerating to fully appreciate the flavor.
“You drink a lot of coffee in your profession, Professor?”
“I thought everyone did.”
“I meant more specifically. Maybe trid-pirates need to stay awake more than standard news hounds?”
His expression soured slightly. “‘Trid-pirate’ is such an ugly phrase. I much prefer ‘free journalist,’ or someone who works for ‘underground news.’”
“Doesn’t strike me as being much more glamorous.”
“Take a look at history, Mr. Crimson. You’ll find that news piracy and free press, while sometimes going hand in hand, are two very different entities. The common legacy of the information pirate is the modern hacker, but the trid-pirate takes it a step further. You might consider them to be personal propagandists. The crazy man on the radio, the Humanis supremacist, and the ironic, hypocritical Luddite are hijacking common airwaves to spread their messages. These have been around as long as those means of conveyance have been common. Now, a truly free press…that’s a far more noble endeavor. Remember World War Two and the underground newspapers in occupied Europe? Or Wanderly and Davitt here in Chicago?”
“I’m not so sure we live in such oppressive times.”
“Do not mistake brand for scale. Perhaps the nature of the oppression is different, but it is no less prevalent or potent.”
“I can’t decide whether you teach history, journalism, or English, Professor.”
He was stunned for an instant as I changed tack with a smile, but he laughed. “History, Mr. Crimson. An extended grasp of language is simply the byproduct of extensive education and reading. Journalism, such as it is, is a personal interest.”
“I see. But how can I be sure, then, that your journalism is handled in an unbiased manner? What separates you from extremists?”
“I’ve been asked that question many times, my friend. And the more I’ve answered it, the more I’m come to realize that there is no way to gain trust but prove worthy of it. I am not a man of lies. It is simply not in my nature. But who could just take that at my word? No, I’m afraid you’d have to know me for some time, and see the proof that my news is genuine. All I have to offer is what I learn, and the oath that it is, to the best of my knowledge, unbiased and honest. It is really up to you whether you believe me or not, after that.”
I shrugged. “Okay, fair enough. Please let me know when your next broadcast is. I’ll tune in.”
He nodded happily, signaling for another espresso.
“But you didn’t just call me up for the conversation, did you, Professor?”
His eyes turned back to me, appraising me again. “No, Mr. Crimson, though I genuinely enjoy our conversations. Polite, but straightforward enough not to waste time. No, I asked you here for your story.”
“Regarding?”
“Yourself. Given your condition, you more than most are a man of mystery. No doubt you’ve been around for a great many events, seen many great things. As a man of truth, perhaps you’d appreciate my interest in hearing firsthand accounts of history.”
I slumped. This was the last thing I wanted to talk about. “Look, ah…you seem to think I’m…older than I am.”
“How old are you? You seem physically no older than twenty, but as an elf, you might be older or younger.”
“Well, I’m…sort of ninety-two.”
“Really? What month were you born?”
“October. October twentieth, 1983.”
He laughed. “Oh dear… I thought you might be a hundred years older than that, or perhaps new to being what you are. I never suspected we were the same age!”
“You’re ninety-two?”
“Oh, better than that, my boy, I was born on the same day!”
He found it hilarious as I sat, dumbfounded. It probably should have been reversed. “My, my, now I really do feel old, seeing you. But then, elves still age slower than dwarfs. All the same, it is amusing that I’ve been debating whether you were ancient, or still younger than me. Of all the possibilities I’d considered, this was never one of them.”
I shrugged, still in awe. “No one bets on the edge in a coin toss.”
He continued chuckling as I explained my limited experience of those years, trapped without air under the waves of the Chicago River. He sobered as the story continued. I felt somewhat sorry that I didn’t have more of a tale to tell, given the time I’d had to come up with one.
“Oh, my boy, don’t you see? Yours is a tale that’s worth telling! How many others have had the circumstances you’ve experienced? I did a little info mining after our last conversation. You used to run the Seattle shadows, didn’t you?”
I nodded, trying not to think about those times, happy though they were, initially.
“You saw the inside of the Arcology doing rescue runs. You did a few stints bug hunting before that. Tell me, were you a part of the group that revealed the White Heart Coalition?”
Again, I nodded. An amateur version of the Universal Brotherhood; the insect shaman in charge of it hadn’t conjured a Queen ye
t. It wasn’t too challenging to stop him. If only Dunkelzahn’s will had been around that year, we might have collected a far larger paycheck for our time.
“You had quite a career. And then you vanished in 2063. Tell me, is Kevin Tripp your real name?”
I looked away uncomfortably. He really did know how to do his research. “Maybe you should be teaching journalism, Professor.”
He leaned back, smiling gently. “I’m sorry. I am prying. I’m afraid it is in my nature, both boon and curse at once. If you care to tell this story, I’ll appreciate it, but it would remain between us. It is purely unprofessional curiosity that motivates me.”
I nodded. “All the same, you can call me Rick.”
“And you can call me Halian.”
I smiled. “I’d like to help you, Halian, and maybe someday I will, but in the meantime…I’m still trying to reclaim my life. It’s a story without a clear end right now.”
“Rick, when the end is clear, it’s usually too late to tell.”
I walked the Corridor’s broken roads without lifting my eyes, more interested in my thoughts than the mapsoft directions. The crunch and spread of ruined pavement and endless debris faded until vanishing entirely, missing in the corporate enclaves. The fallen city core was recognizable by its darkness compared to the neon and spotlights of the subsprawl corporate zones.
The astral shifted even as the winds coalesced into physical forms. My fingers curled and the glow of a manabolt was already forming in my palm when I spun to face the new presence behind me, and the spell faded, half-finished on lips fallen silent.
Gizelle hadn’t changed one bit since I’d last seen her. She was clad in a long real leather jacket and a Vashon Island sweater and jeans, her same pensive smile hiding a deep confidence, as capable of seeming cool and confident as I ever was and then some. Yet now, it was broken. The wind spirits faded back to the astral as she walked to me and threw her arms around my neck. Only a moment’s hesitation from shock before I did likewise.
“Where have you been?” she whispered.
I laughed softly.
She had a car nearby, some newer model of Eurocar that somehow still hadn’t gone out of style, with leather interior and a fully automated pilot program. We pulled back into the subsprawl and into a five-star Elysium Hotel. She led me to a private room in the rooftop cocktail lounge with a commanding view of the ruins of the city and the rare starlight of the clear night. I smiled at the memory of the last time I’d seen her, the view we shared then half a continent away.
When she had sat down, she leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees as I did. “I thought you were dead.”
I shrugged. “I was.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Nice of you to let me know.”
I laughed. “I was dead. How could I tell you anything?”
“Were the mobs really that bad?”
I sighed and began telling the story all over again. In the time it took, the waiter brought her all the tools and ingredients for her to start shaking her own martinis. She was three in by the time I finished bringing her up to speed. She grinned as she finished it, toying with the olives in the glass.
“Well, it was nice of you to call, even if you were playing it so mysterious. Seriously, ‘a crimson name?’”
I shrugged again. “I was feeling mysterious.”
“And you were still worried I was being watched.”
I nodded. “It was stupid, I know. If there was any reason to think I was gone already, it was my businesses vanishing in the Crash.”
“That’s why I thought you were dead.”
I sighed. “I didn’t have very much say in it.”
She stood up and began pacing the room. “I thought you were going to lay low, Rick.”
“Going to Chicago is pretty much laying low. There’s no radar to stay off of in the Zone.”
“Blowing up insect spirits isn’t very low-key.”
“It’s not. But when a friend calls for help, you respond. Doing anything else is a bad way to keep friends.”
“But a bad way to stay alive.”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“You are oddly selfless for a vampire.”
“You’re oddly calm around a vampire.”
“I enjoy the novelty.” She finished her glass and sat back down, her eyes fixed on the shaker, debating another. I seemed to be having that effect on a lot of people tonight.
“What about you, Gizelle? How has a decade—”
“More than a decade.”.
“—more than a decade treated you?”
She shrugged, half-smiling as her gaze drifted out the window. “To be honest? I’m a little bored. The money is great, I’ve got more than I could ever spend. Stock options in multiples corps, savings, some stuff tucked away. I even get to take the occasional quiet potshot at Aztechnology for old time’s sake.”
“Sounds exciting enough.”
She sighed. “Is it? Was it enough for you? I seem to recall you being awfully bored with the day-to-day life of retirement after the shadows. You seemed more...alive after taking down that blood mage. You hadn’t looked that way since pulling those folks out of the Arcology.”
I folded my hands, looked out the window with her at the crumbled ruin of the city where I was born. “Maybe retirement is better when you can kick back on a beach and sip margaritas. I wouldn’t know. Night after night, blood only different by type. And they feel good, sure, but they lack in variety.”
She chuckled. “They say retirement kills. But this is the first time in history people have had the possibility of life beyond a normal human span. Elves, leonization, infection, even e-ghosts, in a way. Everyone dreams of more time, but there is no societal precedent for it.”
I nodded at the ruined city. “There’s no precedent in history for anything happening now.” I looked at her. “Maybe I should have just branched out. Learned Matrix programming or something, something challenging. A whole fresh start.”
She poured her fourth and toasted me. “It looks to me like you’ve already got that.”
I nodded, grinned. “You’ve got me there.”
“How much of your memory was affected by the suspended animation?”
“Not much in the traditional sense. Mostly my muscle memory is scrambled, so I need time to relearn the physical things, and I was asleep for so long my magical skills, I don’t know... decayed? I know exactly what I could do before, and how I did it, but the connection between knowledge and action is fogged.” I reached out a hand to levitate a martini glass to my hand. “At least I still have the basics.”
“And all the time in the world to relearn.”
“Heh. Sure.”
“What about the money and everything?”
I took a deep breath, slowly let it out.
She continued, “I could help you out. It’s not like I don’t have it to spare.”
“I might take you up on that if things get rough, but right now, maybe a fresh start is what I need. I mean, I’m right back where I learned the shadows in the first place.”
“Rick, Chicago wasn’t a bug-infested hellhole when you learned the shadows.”
“Yeah, but I was also a kid from the 20th century. I have a lot of practical experience to draw on.”
“Fair enough.” She drained the glass, exhaled, and set it down, finished. I had no idea how she kept packing them away, being so slim. Her aura said she was just a hint tipsy, but a mage as talented as she was could make her aura say whatever she wanted.
“What will you do?”
She smirked. “I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. But if I get a chance...maybe I’ll take a sabbatical into the metaplanes.”
My eyes went wide. “That’s hardly a vacation spot.”
“If anyone has the connections to make it one, it’s me. But it’s been a while since I stepped out of my shoes for a long trip, and frankly, I could use the challenge.”
“Aren’t you at all interes
ted in starting a family?”
She rolled her eyes. “Really? This old argument?”
“What?”
“It’s what every professional woman hears at least once in her life. Or one too many times, at least.”
“I’m asking for selfish reasons.”
She paused, grew quiet. “Because you can’t have kids.”
“You’re about as close as I’ll ever have to one. Or ever will, the way things look.”
“Mom used to talk about you, you know.”
“Did she?” Gizelle never talked about this. Maybe she really was drunk.
“Said you had your hunches and your occult hobbies. She thought you were crazy, that you’d gone off and joined some cult or gotten yourself killed looking for myths.”
“She was close enough.”
“I don’t know if she ever forgave you for that...until I was born.”
“What?”
She smirked, touching her long ears. “A UGE baby like me. Everyone else was looking for scientific explanations, but she knew. She knew you were right. By the time magic started happening, she wasn’t surprised at all. She knew what my imaginary friends were. You’d prepared her for that. And I think she was happy to know you were right. She wasn’t as scared when she caught VITAS. She’d already set me up with the best tutors, found a way to scam life insurance to pay for an education in magic with her own death. I think...she made sure I was taught how to use it, that she was so proud of it in a time when most people were afraid. I think that was because of you.”
She looked up at me, eyes focusing on the present again. “I think I owe all of this success to you, in a way. Or maybe just how she thought of you. And I grew up learning magic because I was carrying on your dream. And then it turned out you were alive. After a fashion.”
I chuckled. “Well, I’m proud of you.”
She smiled, blinked sleepily. “Hmmm. Okay. I really, really need to get to bed.”
I walked her to her room, only one floor down. A massive penthouse suite, warm cream and real wood I carefully avoided touching. As she plopped down in a seating pit surrounding a massive fireplace, she reached up to snatch my Meta-Link from my belt. A few twists and turns of the dials, and she tossed it back. “The rest of my contact info. Just so you don’t lose it this time. Think you’ll come back to Seattle?”
Shadowrun: Crimson Page 13
