The Exile Kiss

by George Alec Effinger

  "You've been lax in your religious duties lately, yaa Sidi."

  I turned and looked into his handsome, black face. "What the hell do you care? We're not even of the same faith, as you keep reminding me."

  "Any religion is better than none."

  I laughed. "I'm not so sure. I could name a few—"

  "You understand what I mean. Has your self-esteem fallen so low again that you don't feel worthy to pray? That is a fallacy, you know, yaa Sidi."

  I got up and muttered, "None of your business." I went back into the bedroom, looking for my rack of moddies and daddies. I hadn't touched a bite of the breakfast.

  The neuralware wasn't in the bedroom, so I went into the parlor. It wasn't there, either. I finally discovered it hiding under a towel on the desk in my study. I sorted through the small plastic squares. Somewhere along the line, I'd really put together an enviable collection. The ones I wanted, however, were the special ones, ones that I'd had ever since I'd originally had my skull amped. They were the daddies that fit onto my special second implant, the daddies that suppressed unpleasant bodily signals. It was the software that had saved my life in the Rub al-Khali.

  I chipped them in and rejoiced at the difference. I was no longer sleepy, no longer hungry. One daddy took care of my growing anxiety, too. "All right, Kmuzu," I said in a cheerful voice. "Let's get on the road. I've got a lot to do today."

  "Fine, yaa Sidi, but what about all this food?"

  I shrugged. "There are people starving in Eritrea. Send it to them."

  Kmuzu customarily failed to appreciate that sort of humor, so I just made sure I had my keys and went out into the corridor. I didn't wait for him to follow; I knew he'd be along immediately. I went downstairs and waited for him to start the car and bring it around to the front door. During the ride to the Budayeen we said nothing more to each other.

  He let me out by the eastern gate. Once more I had a lot of plans that didn't involve Kmuzu, so I sent him home. I told him I'd call when I needed a ride. Sometimes it's great to have a slave.

  When I got to the morgue, I had an unpleasant surprise. Dr. Besharati hadn't even started on the corpse of Khalid Maxwell. He looked up at me as I entered. "Mr. Audran," he said. "Forgive me, I'm running a little late this morning. We had quite a bit of business last night and early today. Unusual for this time of year. Usually get more murders during the hot months."

  "Uh huh," I said. I hadn't been in the place two minutes, and already the formaldehyde was irritating my eyes and nose. The suppressor daddies didn't help me at all with something like that.

  I watched as the M.E.'s two assistants went to one of the twelve vaults, opened it, and lifted out Maxwell's body. They wrestled it awkwardly to one of the two work tables. The other one was already occupied by a cadaver in an early stage of disassembly.

  Dr. Besharati pulled off one pair of rubber gloves and put on another. "Ever watched an autopsy before?" he asked. He seemed to be in great spirits.

  "No, sir," I said. I shuddered.

  "You can step outside if you get squeamish." He picked up a long black hose and turned on a tap. "This is going to be a special case," he said, as he began playing the water all over Maxwell. "He's been in the ground for several weeks, so we won't be able to get quite as much information as we would with a fresh body."

  The stench from the corpse was tremendous, and the water from the hose wasn't making any headway against it. I gagged. One of the assistants looked at me and laughed. "You think it's bad now," he said. "Wait until we open it up."

  Dr. Besharati ignored him. "The official police report said that death came about as the result of being shot at close range by a medium-sized static pistol. If the range had been greater, the proper functioning of his nerves and muscles would've been interrupted for a brief time, and he'd have been rendered helpless. Apparently, though, he was shot close up, in the chest. That almost always leads to immediate cardiac arrest." While he was talking, he selected a large scalpel. "Bismillah," he murmured, and made a Y-shaped incision from the shoulder joints to the sternum, and then down to the top of the groin.

  I found myself looking away when the assistants lifted the skin and muscle tissue and sliced it free of the skeleton. Then I heard them snapping the rib cage open with some large implement. After they lifted the rib cage out, though, the chest cavity looked like an illustration in an elementary biology book. It wasn't so bad. They were right, though: the stink increased almost unbearably. And it wasn't going to get better any time soon.

  Dr. Besharati used the hose to wash down the corpse some more. He looked across at me. "The police report also said that it was your finger on the trigger of that static pistol."

  I shook my head fiercely. "I wasn't even—"

  He raised a hand. "I have nothing to do with enforcement or punishment here," he said. "Your guilt or innocence hasn't been proved in a court of law. I have no opinion one way or the other. But it seems to me that if you were guilty, you wouldn't be so anxious about the outcome of this autopsy."

  I thought about that for a moment. "Are we likely to get much useful information?" I asked.

  "Well, as I said, not as much as if he hadn't spent all that time in a box in the ground. For one thing, his blood has putrefied. It's gummy and black now, and almost useless as far as forensic medicine is concerned. But in a way you're lucky he was a poor man. His family didn't have him embalmed. Maybe we'll be able to tell a thing or two about what happened."

  He turned his attention back to the table. One assistant was beginning to lift the internal organs, one by one, out of the body cavity. Khalid Maxwell's shriveled eyes stared at me; his hair was stringy and straw-like, without luster or resiliency. His skin, too, had dried in the coffin. I think he'd been in his early thirties when he'd been murdered; now he wore the face of an eighty-year-old man. I experienced a peculiar floating sensation, as if I were only dreaming this.

  The other assistant yawned and glanced at me. "Want to listen to some music?" he said. He reached behind himself and flicked on a cheap holosystem. It began to play the same goddamn Sikh propaganda song that Kandy danced to every time she took her turn on stage.

  "No, please, thank you," I said. The assistant shrugged and turned the music off.

  The other assistant snipped each internal organ loose, measured it, weighed it, and waited for Dr. Besharati to slice off a small piece, which was put in a vial and sealed. The rest of the viscera was just dumped in a growing pile on the table beside the body.

  The medical examiner paid very special attention to the heart, however. "I subscribe to a theory," he said in a conversational tone, "that a charge from a static pistol creates a certain, unique pattern of disruption in the heart. Someday when this theory is generally accepted, we'll be able to identify the perpetrator's static pistol, just as a ballistics lab can identify bullets fired by the same projectile pistol." Now he was cutting the heart into narrow slices, to be examined more thoroughly later.

  I raised my eyebrows. "What would you see in this heart tissue?"

  Dr. Besharati didn't look up. "A particular pattern of exploded and unexploded cells. I'm sure in my own mind that each static pistol leaves its own, unique signature pattern."

  "But this isn't accepted as evidence yet?"

  "Not yet, but someday soon, I hope. It will make my job— and the police's job, and the legal counselors'—a lot easier."

  Dr. Besharati straightened up and moved his shoulders. "My back hurts already," he said, frowning. "All right, I'm ready to do the skull."

  An assistant made an incision from ear to ear along the back of the neck, just below the hairline. Then the other assistant pulled Maxwell's scalp grotesquely forward, until it fell down over the corpse's face. The medical examiner selected a small electric saw; when he turned it on, it filled the echoing chamber with a loud burring sound that set my teeth on edge. It got even worse when he began cutting in a circle around the top of the skull.

  Dr. Besharati switched
off the saw and lifted off the cap of bone, which he examined closely for cracks or other signs of foul play. He examined the brain, first in place, then he carefully lifted it out onto the table. He cut the brain in slices, just as he'd done the heart, and put one piece in another vial.

  A few moments later, I realized that the autopsy was finished. I glanced at my watch; ninety minutes had sped by while I was wrapped in a kind of gruesome fascination. Dr. Besharati took his samples and left the Chamber of Horrors through an arched doorway.

  I watched the assistants clean up. They took a plastic bag and scooped all the dissected organs into it, including the brain. They closed the bag with a twist-tie, pushed the whole thing into Maxwell's chest cavity, replaced the pieces of rib cage, and began sewing him back up with large, untidy stitches. They set the top of the skull in place, pulled Maxwell's scalp back over it, and stitched it back down at the base of the neck.

  It seemed like such a mechanical, unfeeling way for a good man to end his existence. Of course it was mechanical and unfeeling; the three employees of the medical examiner's office would have twenty or more autopsies to perform before suppertime.

  "You all right?" asked one of the assistants with a sly grin on his face. "Don't want to throw up or nothing?"

  "I'm fine. What happens to him?" I pointed to Maxwell's corpse.

  "Back in the box, back in the ground before noon prayers. Don't worry about him. He never felt a thing."

  "May the blessings of Allah be on him and peace," I said, and shivered again.

  "Yeah," said the assistant, "what you say."

  "Mr. Audran?" called Dr. Besharati. I turned around and saw him standing in the doorway. "Come back here and I'll show you what I was talking about."

  I followed him into a high-ceilinged workroom. The lighting was a little better, but the air was, if anything, even worse. The walls of the room were entirely taken up with shelves, from floor to ceiling. On each twelve-inch shelf were a couple of thousand white plastic tubs, stacked four high and four deep, filling every available inch of volume. Dr. Besharati saw what I was looking at. "I wish we could get rid of them," he said sadly.

  "What are they?" I asked.

  "Specimens. By law, we're required to keep all the specimens we take for ten years. Like the heart and brain samples I removed from Maxwell. But because the formaldehyde is a danger, the city won't let us burn them when the time is up. And the city won't permit us to bury them or flush them down the drain because of contamination. We're about out of room here."

  I looked around at the roomful of shelves. "What are you going to do?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe we'll have to start renting a refrigerated warehouse. It's up to the city, and the city's always telling me it doesn't have the money to fix up my office. I think they'd just rather forget that we're even down here."

  "I'll mention it to the amir the next time I see him."

  "Would you?" he said hopefully. "Anyway, take a look through this." He showed me an old microscope that was probably new when Dr. Besharati was first dreaming of going to medical school.

  I peered through the binocular eyepieces. I saw some stained cells. That was all I could see. "What am I looking at?" I asked.

  "A bit of Khalid Maxwell's muscle tissue. Do you see the pattern of disruption I mentioned?"

  Well, I had no idea what the cells were supposed to look like, so I couldn't judge how they'd been changed by the jolt from the static pistol. "I'm afraid not," I said. "I'll have to take your word for it. But you see it, right? If you found another sample that had the same pattern, would you be willing to testify that the same gun had been used?"

  "I'd be willing to testify," he said slowly, "but, as I said, it would carry no weight in court."

  I looked at him again. "We've got something here," I said thoughtfully. "There's got to be a way to use it."

  "Well," said Dr. Besharati, ushering me out through the Chamber of Horrors, to the outer waiting room, "I hope you find a way. I hope you clear your name. I'll give this job special attention, and I ought to have results for you later this evening. If there's anything else I can do, don't hesitate to get in touch with me. I'm here twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week."

  I glanced back over my shoulder. "Seems like an awful lot of time to spend in these surroundings," I said.

  He just shrugged. "Right now, I've got seven murder victims waiting to be examined, in addition to Khalid Maxwell. Even after all these years, I can't help wondering who these poor souls were, what kind of lives they had, what kind of terrible stories led to their ending up on my tables. They're all people to me, Mr. Audran. People. Not stiffs. And they deserve the best that I can do for them. For some of them, I'm the only hope that justice will be done. I'm their last chance."

  "Maybe," I said, "here at the very end, their lives can acquire some meaning. Maybe if you help identify the killers, the city can protect other people from them."

  "Maybe," he said. He shook his head sadly. "Sometimes justice is the most important thing in the world."

  I thanked Dr. Besharati for all his help and left the building. I got the impression that he basically loved his work, and at the same time hated the conditions he had to work in. As I headed out of the Budayeen, it occurred to me that I might end up just like Khalid Maxwell someday, with my guts scattered about on a stainless steel table, with my heart and brain sliced up and stored away in some little white plastic tubs. I was glad I was on my way anywhere, even Hajjar's station house.

  It wasn't far: through the eastern gate, across the Boulevard il-Jameel, south a few blocks to the corner of Walid al-Akbar Street. I was forced to take an unplanned detour, though. Papa's long black car was parked against the curb. Tariq was standing on the sidewalk, as if at attention, waiting for me. He wasn't wearing a cheerful expression.

  "Friedlander Bey would like to speak with you, Shaykh Marîd," he said. He held the rear door open, and I slid in. I expected Papa to be in the car, too, but I was all alone.

  "Why didn't he send Kmuzu for me, Tariq?" I asked.

  There was no answer as he slammed the door shut and walked around the car. He got behind the wheel, and we started moving through traffic. Instead of driving toward the house, though, Tariq was taking me through the east side of the city, through unfamiliar neighborhoods.

  "Where are we going?" I asked.

  No answer. Uh oh.

  I sat back in the seat, wondering what was going on. Then I had a horrible, icy suspicion. I'd come this way once before, a long time ago. My suspicions mounted as we turned and twisted through the poverty-ridden eastern outskirts. The suppressor daddy was doing its best to damp out my fear, but my hands began to sweat anyway.

  At last Tariq pulled into an asphalt driveway behind a pale green cinderblock motel. I recognized it at once. I recognized the small, hand-lettered MOTEL NO VACANCY sign. Tariq parked the car and opened the door for me. "Room 19," he said.

  "I know," I said. "I remember the way."

  One of the Stones That Speak was standing in the doorway to Room 19. He looked down at me; there was no expression on his face. I couldn't move the giant man, so I just waited until he decided what he was going to do with me. Finally he grunted and stepped aside, just far enough for me to squeeze by him.

  Inside, the room looked the same. It hadn't been decorated since my last visit, when I first came to Friedlander Bey's attention, when I was first made a part of the old man's tangled schemes. The furnishings were worn and shabby, a European-style bed and bureau, a couple of chairs with rips in their upholstering. Papa sat at a folding card table set up in the middle of the room. Beside him stood the other Stone.

  "My nephew," said Papa. His expression was grim. There was no love in his eyes.

  "Hamdillah as-salaama, yaa Shaykh," I said. "Praise God for your safety." I squinted a little, desperately trying to find an escape route from the room. There was none, of course.

  "Allah yisallimak," he replied bluntly. H
e wished the blessings of Allah on me in a voice as empty of affection as a spent bullet.

  As I knew they would, the Stones That Speak moved slowly, one to each side of me. I glanced at them, and then back at Papa. "What have I done, O Shaykh?" I whispered.

  I felt the Stones' hands on my shoulders, squeezing, tightening, crushing. Only the pain-blocking daddy kept me from crying out.

  Papa stood up behind the table. "I have prayed to Allah that you would change your ways, my nephew," he said. "You have made me unutterably sad." The light glinted off his eyes, and they were like chips of dirty ice. They didn't look sad at all.

  "What do you mean?" I asked. I knew what he meant, all right.

  The Stones kneaded my shoulders harder. The one on my left—Habib or Labib, I can never tell which—held my arm out from my side. He put one hand on my shoulder and began to turn the arm in its socket.

  "He should be suffering more," said Friedlander Bey thoughtfully. "Remove the chips from his implants." The other Stone did as he was told, and yes, I began suffering more. I thought my arm was going to be wrenched loose. I let out one drawn-out groan.

  "Do you know why you're here, my nephew?" said Papa, coming closer and standing over me. He put one hand on my cheek, which was now wet with tears. The Stone continued to twist my arm.

  "No, O Shaykh," I said. My voice was hoarse. I could only gasp the word out.

  "Drugs," said Papa simply. "You've been seen in public too often under the influence of drugs. You know how I feel about that. You've scorned the holy word of Prophet Muhammad, may the blessings of Allah be on him and peace. He prohibits intoxication. I prohibit intoxication."

  "Yes," I said. It was clear to me that he was angrier at the affront to him than the affront to our blessed religion.

  "You had warnings in the past. This is the last. The last of all time. If you do not mend your behavior, my nephew, you will take another ride with Tariq. He won't bring you here, though. He'll drive away from the city. He'll drive far into the desert wastes. He'll return home alone. And this time there will be no hope of your walking back alive. Tariq won't be as careless as Shaykh Reda. All this despite the fact that you're my great-grandson. I have other great-grandsons."