by Carl Sargent
Then it happened. As two men came striding down Chepstow, one slightly ahead of the other, the rear man suddenly fell soundlessly, only a muted airy hiss from somewhere above and behind him giving away the location of the assassin. The other two men, the one’s she’d been watching, moved in perfect synchrony, one slamming a fist hard into the leading man’s guts as the second brought a balled fist up under his jaw. Doubled up and then sent flying backward, the man didn’t stand a chance. With precision timing a limo purred up Ocean View, the door opening as the two men dumped the body into the back and then piled in after it. They knew what they were doing; the limo fired up again immediately, then moved smoothly up the street and turned onto High, headed no doubt for the Strand.
It was perfect, like a scene from one of her favorite vids. Feeling like a player in a drama, Kristen walked across the almost deserted road and looked down at the body they’d left behind. She had his wallet in seconds, then saw the small metal box lying on the sidewalk glistening with rain. A couple of other pedestrians had just appeared, but with no gangers in sight, Kristen had all the time she needed. With the night’s spoils safely in her bag, she continued on toward Merriman.
6
Serrin had had to cool his heels for hours after his arrival in Redmond. Word was that Tom was down in the Jungles, but somehow the elf didn’t want to meet him there. It seemed almost like an invasion of privacy. The elf passed the time browsing through the bazaars of the Bargain Basement, avoiding the more obvious manifestations of Mafia and yakuza business enterprises, buying a pair of clamshell brooches as much out of boredom as anything else. Come five in the afternoon, he made his way to the old haunt.
“Well, well, whatddya know?” Janus said when Serrin came through the door of Crusher 495. “You some kinda bad penny, turning up again?”
The elf smiled ruefully, “Been a long time, chummer.”
“Sure has. But we been hearin’ all about you on the trid,” the barman said, his smile making his face curl up like a cat’s after cream.
Serrin shrugged, looking around at the old familiar places. He recognized some of the faces and the place still smelled the same too, a pungent, not unpleasant scent of beer and sweat.
“Hear you’re some kinda hero these days,” came an ork voice from the shadows. It was only partly a challenge.
“I’ll make you guys a deal,” Serrin said. “I get the beer, you forget the drek, okay?” The hubbub of enthusiasm aroused by his offer told Serrin he was even more at home than he’d expected.
He was halfway through his beer when the sudden hush told him that Tom had arrived instants before he felt the ham-sized hand on his shoulder.
“Hear you been looking for me,” the troll said in the same tone he might have used with a friend he’d last seen yesterday instead of five years ago. Serrin swiveled round on She creaky bar stool and looked up at his old friend. It was a moment of great wonderment as the elf sensed almost viscerally that Tom was changed, utterly and irrevocably. A kind of transformation Serrin had never experienced and reckoned he never would, though he had the power to recognize it. He picked up his glass and ordered a beer for the troll.
“Nah. The usual, Janus,” Tom said cheerily. Wrapping his huge fist around the glass of mineral water the barman served up, he guided Serrin to the seclusion of a quiet corner.
“I guess we got a lot to catch up on,” he said for starters.
* * *
The ID in the wallet said the slag was from the Loop district. Nothing special, not the real money of Castle or Buitenkant, just a company man. The plastic told her he worked for Kruger, drove an Elektro, was smart enough not to carry an organ donor card, and had managed to talk his way into more parking permits than seemed reasonable. Normally, Kristen would have taken the credit card and sold it to some tsotsi at the docks, but not this time. The police would be investigating this murder and she didn't want to find herself sitting in a jail cell waiting for the special treatment they reserved especially for a mixed-race suspect.
After removing the rands from the wallet, she wiped the synthetic leather and the plastic cards clean of any fingerprints, then tore some pages from the tabloid and wrapped them around the wallet. She dumped the soggy pages in a trash bin at the junction of Merriman and Ocean View, making sure no one was watching, and then headed west. But Kristen didn’t feel much like dancing anymore, and she cut back through to High, toward Western Boulevard, where she could find a coffin hotel for the night. Even with her newly acquired wealth, she begrudged the handful of rand she had to dish out, but that was just her old survival instincts.
Sitting down on the creaky bed, she realized how terribly tired she was. She pulled up the coverlet to inspect what was underneath, finding clean sheets and no more than the usual quota of stains on the mattress. Best of all, there didn’t seem to be any bugs, though that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be visited by the usual roach or two. Somehow, it wouldn’t have felt right without them, though Kristen hoped they’d be the smaller variety. Pulling off her leggings and blouse, she was about to try to get some sleep despite the flickering of neon through the thin curtains when she caught the glint of light on the metal box lying among her things on the floor. She picked it up and examined it.
It looked like a pocket computer, a miniaturized laptop, though it wasn’t any bigger than her own hand. There weren’t any numbers or obvious symbols on the tiny keys, but she had no idea how to use such a thing anyway. Idly, she pressed a few keys out of sheer curiosity, hissing as she caught two with one fingertip touch.
The small screen on top of the box suddenly lit up and a message appeared on it. She couldn’t read the words telling her that a deletion process was in operation, but she guessed that something bad was happening from the tiny skull-and-crossbones icon at the left of the screen. Then she pressed the entire keypad, desperately hoping that she wasn’t ruining the thing. A string of identical symbol-pairs ran across the screen left to right and the light behind the screen winked out.
Frag it, I’ve broken it, she thought miserably. It might have been worth hundreds. But, what the hell. I can’t complain. This hasn't been such a bad day.
She threw the inert box into her bag and took out some long cigarette papers and the last wrap of dagga, then smoked herself some immunity against the wake-up effects of the glaring neon blinking on and off outside her window.
* * *
“I did come back a couple of times,” Serrin said defensively. “You know . .. afterward.” He didn’t know what to expect from Tom, but the quietness of the huge figure seated opposite was as startling as the mineral water he was sipping. Back in the old days, the troll would have been finishing a second pitcher of beer by now.
“I know. You came down in June and September of ’fifty, but I hadn’t changed,” the troli said gently. “Guess you thought it would be a mistake to try to pick up the pieces. Shock treatment doesn’t work if you’re not prepared to go through with it.”
“Something like that,” the elf said. Somehow, he didn’t want to let himself off the hook. He could remember the scene as if it were yesterday, the troll lying almost senseless with drink in a vomit-splattered room, Serrin standing over him, screaming impotently at his friend. Then the elf had walked out and slammed the door, never getting close in person again except to pass through now and then to inquire after Tom. At first it was because he couldn’t take the pain of seeing his friend destroy himself, but later it had been the shame of having abandoned him.
“Don’t worry, chummer. It’s not that heavy. You couldn’t save me. Nobody could have. But I think you kept me alive long enough for it to happen.” The troll grinned suddenly. “Frag it all, nobody else would have carried me off and locked me up in some hellhole to dry out for a month. Craziest dumb thing I’ve ever known anyone to do.”
“It was the best I could think of at the time, apart from buying you a new liver—but you were too full of implants and metal anyway,” Serrin said, then realized the
clumsiness of his words. If Tom was now a Bear shaman, every piece of cyberware in his body would be hateful to him, an alien presence reminding him of a past he’d rather forget. Wouldn't it? The troll seemed to read his mind.
“It’s all still there,” he rumbled. “The smartgun link, the reflex job, the muscle implants. Never had the money to remove ’em, and it’s dangerous anyway. I just gotta live with it. I’ll never be able to run with Bear; more like limp along. But it don’t worry me too much.”
Serrin saw a ghost of pain in the troll’s eyes and knew damn well that Tom lived with it every minute just like the well-oiled old blues beginning to crank out from the battered speakers around the bar.
“But how did it happen? Do you want to talk about it?” Serrin had half-forgotten he was here to hire someone who’d saved his neck in the Barrens years ago. It was a different person before him now. He wanted to know who Tom had become.
“It’s hard to describe . . . Don’t have those fancy words,” the troll said slowly. “You remember Anna?” The elf nodded. Tom had been head over heels for the crazy, wild troll woman who fought for the folks in the Jungle day and night and then one day been caught in the crossfire of some senseless gang fight. That was when the troll’s drinking, always heavy, had exploded into binges of days at a time when he’d go through enough beer and whiskey to kill half a dozen men. Most people had figured he’d stop sooner or later. After all, it wasn’t like they’d been a hot item or anything. Anna had never been anything more than friendly to Tom, who was quite a bit younger. But the drinking didn’t stop. Instead it got worse and worse.
“Once I thought I saw her again. Early in ’fifty-one. I went ape, chasing after her, thinking she’d come back from the dead. I had a belly full of booze and a heart full of desperation and when I sobered up, I saw things awful clear. Anna never loved me, and I’d been drowning myself in drink over a dream.”
“Anna cared for you,” Serrin muttered.
“That ain’t the same thing. I realized I’d been a fool, and there wasn’t anything left. Worse than that, I’d killed a lot of people for the money.”
“Not when I knew you, you didn’t. I never heard of you icing anyone who hadn’t taken a shot at you first,” Serrin said, surprised.
“Some things I don’t get public about. Anyways, you know how bad it got. After you left, I stayed barely alive for a few months, and then it got real bad. You don’t want to know the details.” The troll hunched forward over the table and looked Serrin in the eyes. It was desperately uncomfortable for the elf, but he was spellbound by the troll’s whispered words.
“Found myself face down in a gutter in the Jungles without a cent in my pockets. I got up and killed someone for the small change in his pockets—the price of a bagful from a liquor store. Chummer, I drank so much I didn’t have DTs; they had me. Back in the gutter somewhere, I don’t remember. I do know, damn well, that I was going to die. I was failing down a black tunnel and didn’t see no light at the end of it. It was hell, chummer. Now, you know and I know we got some fancy words for what’s out there in the astral, and there ain’t no demons or devils. But there’s something we might as well call hell, ’cause you know that’s what it is if you ever go there. That what’s left of your soul will burn there forever.”
At that moment Serrin felt that Tom was a shaman, that he had at least something of the Power. It was there in the look on his face, in the unmistakable aura around him. The troll had changed indeed.
“That’s when Bear appeared. Between me and hell. Took me into her arms before I died. Like I say, I don’t really know how to talk about it. I pick up fancy words from smart folk now and then, but I can’t stitch them together into something that does justice to it somehow.
“Let me try to put it so you can feel a piece of it,” the troll went on slowly. “In a way that would make sense to you. Imagine you get wrapped up in someone huge, and warm, and simple and kind. Imagine she says to you, you have pain in you because your parents were blown to bloody pieces out of the blue when you were eleven years old. You got to ID them in the morgue because state law says ID gotta be done by a blood relative if possible, and you were the only one to hand. You got pain every day because your leg’s mangled up. And you don’t forget about that blind girl in Lafayette when you went back there hoping it could be home again, and you got pain from that too.”
“How the hell do you know all that?” the elf said almost angrily. He was sure he’d never told Tom the whole story about his parents or anything about the one love of his aduit life.
“Don’t matter. Important thing is, you’re feeling the hurt right now, so you can understand me. Now, these pains you’re always going to carry around. You don’t have any choice. But imagine this presence says to you, you know you can’t change these things. You might try to forget, but if you do, you’re just impoverishing yourself. And lying to yourself. And it don’t work anyway. But then she says to you—and you know it because it pours into you like a flood—that you don’t have to hurt so bad. You know you can trust yourself a bit more than you do. And you don’t have to hate yourself so much anymore.
“But it’s scarier than anything you can think of. Because you have to open up to her, chummer, and there’s every little lie and deception coming back to you, everything you ever did to someone because you were cowardly or afraid; that, mostly, rather than when you really used someone deliberately, because Bear doesn’t often take someone really into that. Every humiliation you ever suffered, every time you were vulnerable and got fragged over, every time you tried to use your sensitivity and love and it went to waste, just like it does so often, and you ended up with nothing but yourself and it seemed like another piece was chipped away and lost forever. You fall into Bear’s arms on an ocean of hurt, Serrin. It’s too much for anyone to handle, I promise you.
“Then she holds you tight and it heals you, brother. I don’t really have any fancy words for that at all.”
The troll’s huge hands wrapped themselves around those of the elf. “And, you know, I see you need something of that. You wouldn’t shake like you do if you didn’t. But I ain't no preacher and I ain’t gonna push you,” Tom said with an edge of sadness to his voice.
Serrin couldn’t speak. It was all he could do just trying to keep his emotions under control. He wasn’t used to having everything brought to the surface so quickly.
Tom leaned back and finished the last of his mineral water. “But it ain’t that you turn into a perfect specimen or nothin’. I still got some of my illusions. These days, I do a lot of work for the folk down in the Jungles and beyond. Just like Anna used to. So I suppose there’s still some drek in my head, chummer. The thing is, if you’re not so damned hard on yourself all the time it’s a lot easier to be worth something to someone else.”
“Yeah,” the elf replied, slowly, still shaken. “There might be something in that.”
“Well, that’s my life in five minutes.” The troll suddenly broke into a grin. “Now it’s your turn. What are you doin’ looking me up after all this time? Mind, I can wait if you don’t feel like saying right out. We can just chew the fat awhile if you’d rather.”
Serrin found that prospect too intimidating, “It’s pretty simple, Tom,” he said. “Someone’s got a hit out on me. I’m almost certain it’s a magician. Among other things, I need a bodyguard, and someone suggested looking you up. But I guess that’s not your kind of work these days.” The troll rubbed his chin and stood up. “Hmmm. Maybe, maybe not. The money could be useful to a lot of folks down here; I live cheap. Pass on anything extra. I owe you one, I reckon. Let me buy you a beer and you can tell me more. I ain’t going to say no to an old friend before he’s said his piece. Anyway, I want to hear about you these past five years. We been hearin’ some weird drek, Serrin. All about you bein’ a hero and last year hangin’ with them kings and queens in England . .
Tom ordered two more of the same and was halfway back to their table when the doors op
ened and someone who obviously had never been in Redmond before walked through them. Every head turned to look at the man.
He was just over six feet, very lean, with tanned skin and the kind of mop of bleached blond hair that had gone out of fashion in the days when people realized that sunlight gave you cancer, it was the clothes that had everyone really staring, though. Legs the length a fashion model would have killed for were encased in perfectly creased gray flannel pants, ending at real leather shoes that must have cost more than anyone in the bar earned in a month. The silk shirt was perfect, and the tweed jacket combined eccentricity with elegance. The silk cravat, with its gold pin, topped the whole thing off. Everyone gawked and wondered where this creature could possibly have come from.
“Good evening,” the man said in an impossibly perfect English accent. “Such a charming place. Barman, I'd be most grateful for a cold beer, and can you tell me where I might find Mr. Shamandar?”
No one spoke for a few seconds. Then Tom looked at Serrin and laughed.
“Hell, I’d better go and get him before someone else does,” the troll chuckled. “It’s a miracle he made it this far alive. We’d better make sure he gets out that way too.” He went over to the newcomer and put an arm around his shoulder, pointing to Serrin’s table.
“Over there, chummer,” he said. “Man, you are one crazy fragger coming in here like that. They must be lining up to mug you on the way out.”
“Really?” the man said, seeming wholly unconcerned. “It wouldn’t have been very wise of them, old boy. I possess a truly awesome reaction speed with a Predator.”
“Are you for real?” came an ork’s snarl from somewhere behind them.
“No, dear fellow, of course I’m not for real. I’m an Englishman from Manhattan. What could be more preposterous than that?”
Ignoring the continuing stares, he shook the hand of Serrin as the elf stood up. Then he sat down while smoothing his pants to preserve the creases. That done, he placed his hands palms-down on the table with the air of someone for whom everything in life is a business meeting.
