A Fire in the Sun

by George Alec Effinger

  He waved a hand, just that easily making nothing of the pain and horror I'd suffered. "You were defending yourself from danger then," he said. He turned and put one old, clawlike hand on my knee. "I need you now to defend me from danger. I wish you to learn everything you can about this woman, and then I want you to destroy her. And her child also. I must know if I have your absolute loyalty."

  His eyes were burning. I had seen this side of him before. I sat beside a man who was gripped more and more by madness. I took my coffee cup with a trembling hand and drank deeply. Until I finished swallowing, I wouldn't have to give him an answer.

  3

  BEFORE I had my skull amped, I used to have an alarm clock. In the morning when it went off, I liked to stay in bed a little while longer, bleary and yawning. Maybe I'd get up and maybe I wouldn't. Now, though, I don't have a choice. I chip in an add-on the night before, and when that daddy decides it's time, my eyes snap open and I'm awake. It's an abrupt transition and it always leaves me startled. And there's no way in hell that chip will let me fall back asleep. I hate it a lot.

  On Sunday morning I woke up promptly at eight o'clock. There was a black man I'd never seen before standing beside my bed. I thought about that for a moment. He was big, much taller than me and well built without going overboard about it. A lot of the blacks you see in the city are like Janelle, refugees from some famine-stricken, arid African wasteland. This guy, though, looked like he'd never missed a sensible, well-balanced meal in his life. His face was long and serious, and his expression seemed to be set in a permanent glower. His stern brown eyes and shaven head added to his grim demeanor. "Who are you?" I asked. I didn't get out from under the covers yet.

  "Good morning, yaa Sidi," he said. He had a soft, low-pitched voice with a touch of huskiness. "My name is Kmuzu."

  "That's a start," I said. "Now what in the name of Allah are you doing here?"

  "I am your slave."

  "The hell you are." I like to think of myself as the defender of the downtrodden and all that. I get prickly at the idea of slavery, an attitude that runs counter to the popular opinion among my friends and neighbors.

  "The master of the house ordered me to see to your needs. He thought I'd be the perfect servant for you, yaa Sidi, because my name means 'medicine' in Ngoni."

  In Arabic, my own name means "sickness." Friedlander Bey knew, of course, that my mother had named me Marîd in the superstitious hope that my life would be free of illness. "I don't mind having a valet," I said, "but I'm not gonna keep a slave." Kmuzu shrugged. Whether or not I wanted to use the word, he knew he was still somebody's slave, mine or Papa's.

  "The master of the house briefed me in great detail about your needs," he said. His eyes narrowed. "He promised me emancipation if I will embrace Islam, but I cannot abandon the faith of my father. I think you should know that I'm a devout Christian." I took that to mean that my new servant wholeheartedly disapproved of almost everything I might say or do.

  "We'll try to be friends anyway," I said. I sat up and swung my legs out of the bed. I popped out the sleep control and put it in the rack of daddies I keep on the nightstand. In the old days, I spent a lot of time in the morning scratching and yawning and rubbing my scalp; but now when I wake up, I'm denied even those small pleasures.

  "Do you truly need that device?" asked Kmuzu.

  "My body has sort of gotten out of the habit of sleeping and waking up on its own."

  He shook his head. "It is a simple enough problem to solve, yaa Sidi. If you just stay awake long enough, you will fall asleep."

  I saw that if I expected to have any peace, I was going to have to murder this man, and soon. "You don't understand. The problem is that after three days and nights without sleep, when I do doze off at last I have bizarre dreams, really gruesome ones. Why should I put myself through all that, when I can just reach for pills or software instead?"

  "The master of the house instructed me to limit your drug use."

  I was starting to get aggravated. "Fine," I said, "you can just fucking try." The drug situation was probably behind Friedlander Bey's "gift" of this slave. I'd made a bad mistake on my very first morning chez Papa: I showed up late for breakfast with a butaqualide hangover. I was moderately dysfunctional for a couple of hours, and that earned me his disapproval. So that first afternoon I passed by Laila's modshop on Fourth Street in the Budayeen and invested in the sleep control.

  My preference is still a half-dozen beauties, but these days I'm always looking over my shoulder for Papa's spies. He's got a million of 'em. Let me make it clear: You don't want his disapproval. He never forgets these things. If he needs to, he hires other people to carry his grudges for him.

  The advantages of the situation, however, are many. Take the bed, for instance. I've never had a bed before, just a mattress thrown on the floor in the corner of a room. Now I can kick dirty socks and underwear under something, and if something falls on the floor and gets lost I know just where it'll be, although I won't be able to reach it. I still fall out of the damn bed a couple of times a week, but because of the sleep control, I don't wake up. I just lie there in a heap on the floor until morning.

  So I got out of bed on this Sunday morning, took a hot shower, washed my hair, trimmed my beard, and brushed my teeth. I'm supposed to be at my desk in the police station by nine o'clock, but one of the ways I assert my independence is by ignoring the time. I didn't hurry getting dressed. I chose a pair of khaki trousers, a pale blue shirt, a dark blue tie, and a white linen jacket. All the civilian employees in the copshop dress like that, and I'm glad. Arab dress reminds me too much of the life I left behind when I came to the city.

  "So you've been planted here to snoop on me," I said while I tried to get the ends of my necktie to come out even.

  "I am here to be your friend, yaa Sidi," said Kmuzu.

  I smiled at that. Before I came to live in Friedlander Bey's palace, I was lonely a lot. I lived in a bare one-room flat with nothing but my pillcase for company. I had some friends, of course, but not the kind who dropped over all the time because they missed me so much. There was Yasmin, whom I suppose I loved a little. She spent the night with me occasionally, but now she looked the other way when we bumped into each other. I think she held it against me that I've killed a few people.

  "What if I beat you?" I asked Kmuzu. "Would you still be my friend?"

  I was trying to be sarcastic, but it was definitely the wrong thing to say. "I would make you stop," said Kmuzu, and his voice was as cold as any I've ever heard.

  I think my jaw dropped. "I didn't mean that, you know," I said. Kmuzu gave a slight nod of his head, and the tension passed. "Help me with this, will you? I think the necktie is winning."

  Kmuzu's expression softened a little, and he seemed glad to perform this little service for me. "It is fine now," he said when he finished. "I will get your breakfast."

  "I don't eat breakfast."

  "Yaa Sidi, the master of the house directed me to make sure that you eat breakfast from now on. He believes that breakfast is the most important meal of the day."

  Allah save me from nutrition fascists! "If I eat in the morning, I feel like a lump of lead for hours."

  It didn't make any difference to Kmuzu what I thought. "I will get your breakfast," he said.

  "Don't you have to go to church or something?"

  He looked at me calmly. "I have already been to worship," he said. "Now I will get your breakfast." I'm sure he'd note every calorie I took in and file a report with Friedlander Bey. It was just another example of how much influence Papa exerted.

  I may have felt a little like a prisoner, but I'd certainly been given compensations. I had a spacious suite in the west wing of Friedlander Bey's great house, on the second floor near Papa's own private quarters. My closet was filled with many suits of clothes in different styles and fashions—Western, Arab, casual, formal. Papa gave me a lot of sophisticated high-tech hardware, from a new Chhindwara constrained-AI data deck
to an Esmeraldas holo system with Libertad screens and a Ruy Challenger argon solipsizer. I never worried about money. Once a week, one of the Stones That Speak left a fat envelope stuffed with cash on my desk.

  All in all, my life had changed so much that my days of poverty and insecurity seemed like a thirty-year nightmare. Today I'm well fed, well dressed, and well liked by the right people, and all it's cost me is what you'd expect: my self-respect and the approval of most of my friends.

  Kmuzu let me know that breakfast was ready. "Bismillah," I murmured as I sat down: in the name of God. I ate some eggs and bread fried in butter, and swallowed a cup of strong coffee.

  "Would you like anything more, yaa Sidi?" asked Kmuzu.

  "No, thank you." I was staring at the far wall, thinking about freedom. I wondered if there was some way I could buy my way out of the police-liaison job. Not with money, anyway, I was sure of that. I don't think it's possible to bribe Papa with money. Still, if I paid very close attention, I just might find some other means of leverage. Inshallah.

  "Then shall I go downstairs and bring the car around?" Kmuzu asked. I blinked and realized that I had to get going. I didn't have Friedlander Bey's long black limousine at my disposal, but he'd given me a comfortable new electric automobile to use. After all, I was his official representative among the guardians of justice.

  Kmuzu, of course, would be my driver now. It occurred to me that I'd have to be very clever to go anywhere without him. "Yes, I'll be down in a minute," I said.

  I ran a hand through my hair, which was getting long again. Before I left the house, I put a rack of moddies and daddies in my briefcase. It was impossible to predict what sort of personality I'd need to have when I got to work, or which particular talents and abilities. It was best just to take everything I had and be prepared.

  I stood on the marble stairs and waited for Kmuzu. It was the month of Rabi al-Awwal, and a warm drizzle was falling from a gray sky. Although Papa's estate was carved out of a crowded neighborhood in the heart of the city, I could almost pretend that I was in some quiet garden oasis, far from urban grime and noise. I was surrounded by a green lushness that had been coaxed into existence solely to soothe the spirit of one weary old man. I heard the quiet, peaceful trickling of cool fountains, and some energetic birds warbled nearby from the carefully tended fruit trees. On the still air drifted a heavy, sweet perfume of exotic flowers. I pretended that none of this could seduce me.

  Then I got into the cream-colored Westphalian sedan and rode out through the guarded gate. Beyond the wall I was thrown suddenly into the bustle and clamor of the city, and with a shock I realized how sorry I was to leave the serenity of Papa's house. It occurred to me that in time I could come to be like him.

  Kmuzu let me out of the car on Walid al-Akbar Street, at the station house that oversaw the affairs of the Budayeen. He told me that he'd be back to drive me home promptly at four-thirty. I had a feeling that he was one of those people who was never late. I stood on the sidewalk and watched as he drove away.

  There was always a crowd of young children outside the station house. I don't know if they were hoping to see some shackled criminal dragged in, or waiting for their own parents to be released from custody, or just loitering in the hopes of begging loose change. I'd been one of them myself not so very long ago in Algiers, and it didn't hurt me any to throw a few kiam into the air and watch them scramble for it. I reached into my pocket and grabbed a clutch of coins. The older, bigger kids caught the easy money, and the smaller ones clung to my legs and wailed "Baksheesh!" Every day it was a challenge to shake my young passengers loose before I got to the revolving door.

  I had a desk in a small cubicle on the third floor of the station house. My cubicle was separated from its neighbors by pale green plasterboard walls only a little taller than I was. There was always a sour smell in the air, a mixture of stale sweat, tobacco smoke, and disinfectant. Above my desk was a shelf that held plastic boxes filled with dated files on cobalt-alloy cell-memories. On the floor was a big cardboard box crammed with bound printouts. I had a grimy Annamese data deck on my desk that gave me trouble-free operation on two out of every three jobs. Of course, my work wasn't very important, not according to Lieutenant Hajjar. We both knew I was there just to keep an eye on things for Friedlander Bey. It amounted to Papa having his own private police precinct devoted to protecting his interests in the Budayeen.

  Hajjar came into my cubicle and dropped another heavy box on my desk. He was a Jordanian who'd had a lengthy arrest record of his own before he came to the city. I suppose he'd been an athlete ten years ago, but he hadn't stayed in shape. He had thinning brown hair and lately he'd tried to grow a beard. It looked terrible, like the skin of a kiwi fruit. He looked like a mother's bad dream of a drug dealer, which is what he was when he wasn't administering the affairs of the nearby walled quarter.

  "How you doin', Audran?" he said.

  "Okay," I said. "What's all this?"

  "Found something useful for you to do." Hajjar was about two years younger than me, and it gave him a kick to boss me around.

  I looked in the box. There were a couple of hundred blue cobalt-alloy plates. It looked like another really tedious job. "You want me to sort these?"

  "I want you to log 'em all into the daily record."

  I swore under my breath. Every cop carries an electronic log book to make notes on the day's tour: where he went, what he saw, what he said, what he did. At the end of the day, he turns in the book's cell-memory plate to his sergeant. Now Hajjar wanted me to collate all the plates from the station's roster. "This isn't the kind of work Papa had in mind for me," I said.

  "What the hell. You got any complaints, take 'em to Friedlander Bey. In the meantime, do what I tell you."

  "Yeah, you right," I said. I glared at Hajjar's back as he walked out.

  "By the way," he said, turning toward me again, "I got someone for you to meet later. It may be a nice surprise."

  I doubted that. "Uh huh," I said.

  "Yeah, well, get movin' on those plates. I want 'em finished by lunchtime."

  I turned back to my desk, shaking my head. Hajjar annoyed the hell out of me. What was worse, he knew it. I didn't like giving him the satisfaction of seeing me irked.

  The funny thing was that Hajjar was in Friedlander Bey's pocket too, but he liked to pretend he was still his own man. Since he'd been promoted and given command, though, Hajjar had gone through some startling changes. He'd begun to take his work seriously, and he'd cut back on his intrigues and profiteering schemes. It wasn't that he'd suddenly discovered a sense of honor; he just realized he'd have to work his tail off to keep from getting fired as a crook and an incompetent.

  I selected a productivity moddy from my rack and chipped it onto my posterior plug. The rear implant functions the same as everybody else's. It lets me chip in a moddy and six daddies. The anterior plug, however, is my own little claim to fame. This is the one that taps into my hypothalamus and lets me chip in my special daddies. As far as I know, no one else has ever been given a second implant. I'm glad I hadn't known that Friedlander Bey told my doctors to try something experimental and insanely dangerous. I guess he didn't want me to worry. Now that the frightening part is over, though, I'm glad I went through it. It's made me a more productive member of society and all that.

  When I had boring police work to do, which was almost every day, I chipped in an orange moddy that Hajjar had given me. It had a label that said it was manufactured in Helvetia. The Swiss, I suppose, have a high regard for efficiency. Their moddy could take the most energetic, inspired person in the world and transform him instantly into a drudge. Not into a stupid drudge, like what the Half-Hajj's dumbing-down hardware did to me, but into a mindless worker who isn't aware enough to be distracted before the whole assignment is in the Out box. It's the greatest gift to the office menial since conjugal coffee breaks.

  I sighed and took the moddy, then reached up and chipped it in.

  T
he immediate sensation was as if the whole world had lurched and then caught its balance. There was an odd, metallic taste in Audran's mouth and a high-pitched ringing in his ears. He felt a touch of nausea, but he tried to ignore it because it wouldn’t go away until he popped the moddy out. The moddy had trimmed down his personality like the wick of a lamp, until there was only a vague and ineffectual vestige of his true self left.

  Audran wasn’t conscious enough even to be resentful. He remembered only that he had work to do, and he pulled a double handful of cobalt-alloy plates out of the box. He slotted six of them into the adit ports beneath the battered data deck's comp screen. Audran touched the control pad and said, "Copy ports one, two, three, four, Jive, six." Then he stared blankly while the deck recorded the contents of the plates. When the run was finished, he removed the plates, stacked them on one side of the desk, and loaded in six more. He barely noticed the morning pass as he logged in the records. "Audran." Someone was saying his name.

  He stopped what he was doing and glanced over his shoulder. Lieutenant Hajjar and a uniformed patrolman were standing in the entrance to his cubicle. Audran turned slowly back to the data deck. He reached into the box, but it was empty.

  "Unplug that goddamn thing."

  Audran faced Hajjar again and nodded. It was time to pop the moddy.

  There was a dizzy swirl of disorientation, and then I was sitting at my desk, staring stupidly at the Helvetian moddy in my hand. "Jeez," I murmured. It was a relief to be fully conscious again.

  "Tell you a secret about Audran," Hajjar said to the cop. "We didn't hire him because of his wonderful qualities. He really don't have any. But he makes a great spindle for hardware. Audran's just a moddy's way of gettin' its daily workout." The cop smiled.

  "Hey, you gave me this goddamn moddy in the first place," I said.

  Hajjar shrugged. "Audran, this is Officer Shaknahyi."

  "Where you at?" I said.