Avalon

by Rusty Coats

  "This is old-hat," I said. "He was a beginner when he made this. He wasn't a beginner when I met him."

  "This is all I could find -- and I found this in a malfunctioning spike buffer that should have been erased while you were in Jasper." She shrugged. "We don't run as tight a ship as they did during Construction. The Sysops are lazy. There are pieces of Merlin's memory hidden all over the place."

  I thought of Monk, combing the beaches for discarded memories so he could rebuild Avalon if Repeal ever came. "There should have been a lot more than this."

  "Yeah, but listen to this." Her voice was picking up speed now. "After I found this, somebody dumped the kid's file. Back-ups, batch files, everything. As far as Merlin is concerned, Adam McFee's feet never touched the streets of Avalon. Spooky, huh?"

  Cleaning out the kid's account would have taken a high-level tapeworm -- serious firepower, even in an age when everyone carried a plague or two for protection. Making someone disappear online was harder than whacking someone off-line. Off-line, you just had to dispose of the body. But online, you left pieces of personal code all over town, like oil left on doorknobs. Erasing McFee would mean sterilizing billions of files.

  "What about the datacops?"

  "They're hogtied. Van Meter won’t give them the visual record, and no Sysop is gonna give the datacops access to Merlin, no matter how much they hate Van Meter."

  I raked my hair out of my eyes again. "Why not just question the kid?"

  Her lips drew together. "Oh, Jack."

  She walked toward me, stepping lightly, as if she was afraid to wake the neighbors. She reached out to touch my arm, but I jerked away.

  "I mean it," I snapped. "All this dancing. Van Meter, the Neuromantics, the datacops. All over some squeaky kid. And you, coming out of the hole and walking here from the substation? It’s queer. My theory is this: You're an errand girl."

  "No, Jack. I --"

  "You’re playing both sides. You work for the Digerati in the hole, but you track junkies for Cassady, which is so reckless it’s suicidal. So which side sent you here?"

  "Nobody, Jack. I came alone. I," she stammered, "I'm not working for anybody."

  "Stop it. Levy has you on a short leash because he knows how much you'd hate going back to Shiloh. And Cassady --"

  "Has my mother."

  I took a step back. She smeared eyeliner on her cheek with the back of her hand and said, "She's a junkie, Jack. I found her six months after I went in the hole. She was working a club called Shangri-La as a taxi-dancer for Roddy Benedikt. Later she did some hooking in the sex rooms, but then she crashed. New Hope diagnosed her with SDS, slapped a bracelet on her and gave her three years. But she won't stay clean. All she cares about is her fix, down at Shangri-La. Down where she's still beautiful."

  She looked away. "She doesn't recognize me anymore. She doesn't recognize anyone. She babbles most of the time and flies into a rage if you take her cheaters. But she's my mother, and I don't want her sent to an asylum."

  Cryptographers are good liars, maybe the best. But they can also smell the truth. "Cassady made you a deal."

  "As long as I supply New Hope with flight records on his junkies, Cassady keeps my mother out of the asylum." She glanced at the floor, kicked a bloody rag with her heel. "If I break the agreement, Cassady will slip her into a straightjacket. He's made it very plain that my mother wouldn't survive a week in the asylum."

  She stared through the grimy glass at the Campus below. "Look at us, Jack. I left my mother at a Tube station twelve years ago to follow my father to Shiloh and now, when she doesn't know me from a blur of ROM, I risk a Digerati funeral to keep her out of the vegetable farm. And you? You live next to this Campus so you can wake up next to dead dreams."

  I waited until the sniffling stopped, owing her that, then touched her shoulder with the tips of my fingers. But her body went rigid and she jerked away.

  "Please," she said. "Don't touch me. It reminds me of Shiloh. Of everything."

  I backed away. Rita was a long way from the agrarian love camp. "You never answered my question about McFee. Why aren't the cops questioning him?"

  She glanced up. "You really don't know, do you?"

  "Know what?"

  "He's dead."

  Something tugged on my ribs. "What?"

  "Dead. Adam McFee died when that dragon attacked."

  My mouth hung open as the scene played again. The dragon swooping down, the burst of fire from its maw, the ghost turning to charcoal. Serious pyrotechnics, enough heat to leech power from Merlin's higher functions. Enough to crack my trap and peel McFee's cloak away. But not deadly. The only thing deadly in Avalon, the Neuromantics liked to say, was your own weakness, and it's a slow death.

  I felt moisture on my lip and reached for my handkerchief. "How?"

  "Nobody knows. Maybe that dragon triggered a surge in his scuba suit. Others say -- and this is spooky -- that something told his brain to die, so he did."

  "What do the cops say?"

  "That he's dead, and not much else." She shrugged. "It's the Neuromantics who are talking. They've turned this kid into a martyr. Something like 'Shouldn't we stop Avalon before Avalon stops us?'"

  The kid was dead, not sitting in some condo dabbing his nose. He was dead.

  "Maybe it's just a story Van Meter drummed up,” I said. “His goons could have killed the kid, then stuffed him back in the suit for show. He's done it before."

  "Not this time. I tracked Adam back to his entry point in New Berkeley and got the diagnostics. He was flatlined, Jack. He was DOA when his brain got back to his suit."

  For safety, Monk and the other tailors wired suits for minor diagnostics: pulse, brainwave, perspiration, bladder. No one took it seriously until SDS and CNI. That's when the suits performed a more ghoulish task: It wrote the coroner's reports.

  "That fast?"

  "That fast." She took the handkerchief from me and dabbed the side of my cheek. "This McFee was a good kid. Smart, healthy, no prior arrests, had a decent job in virtual engineering at AquaNet’s undersea farming team. Bright future, good family --"

  "Blah, blah, blah."

  She nodded. "Sure, except this kid was healthy when he plugged in and dead when he plugged out."

  She shivered and rubbed her arms. "It's like a flash of light wiped him out. If the Neuromantics can convince people a one-time flight can kill you, the United Nations finally may grant them jurisdiction so they can really pull the plug."

  The fog had come in. Somewhere out there was a dead kid named Adam, who'd begged me to let him go when I had the chance. And somewhere out there was a man named Van Meter who owed me more than three days' pay. If someone had wiped the slates on McFee, chances were that someone was looking to do the same to me.

  Unless I moved first.

  I touched Rita's arm and felt her recoil. I left my palm on her shoulder until it began to warm, and when she looked up, I said, "Thank you."

  "For what?"

  "For reminding me that I'm not dead yet."

  She shrugged and looked away. "How can you be sure?"

  AVALON IX: Rhapsody

  After walking Rita back to the Mission, I caught a Tube uptown and hoofed it to the Rhapsody, where Van Meter’s guests strolled under the neon parapet. I slipped in the back with the hired help, dodging cases of bootleg booze as the dishwashers babbled Spanglish, slopping suds on crystal, jaws tight from chewing Snap.

  I followed a backstage hallway past the dressing rooms for the can-can girls. Buddy Green's Wireless Orchestra was blowing tonight, Depression therapy for people who needed it the least, but the real show was a chorus line of synchronized nudity. From the hall I heard them laughing; they were hard women with soft lines and they knew the irony of the market. You could get any pleasure online, but it wasn't as real as a live woman in your lap, shimmying to Buddy's trumpet. Reality had its moments.

  A set of swinging doors opened to the bar, where men in swashbuckler shirts poured nootropi
c booze, accelerating the speed of thought. The nearest one had bristly hair and a pale scar that ran from scalp to chin, and when he saw me on the service side, he stopped pouring the biloba cocktail and pulled a heater from under the bar.

  "You lost, buddy?" He waved the stun at my neck. "Or just looking for a job?"

  “Got a job,” I said, tapping a Cyn on the silver case. "But I could use a drink."

  The club bubbled with pre-show small talk. Stage lights burned against the curtain while piped music chased chrome gazelles across the walls. Cigarette girls swished between tables, hawking smokes and towelettes for the folks fresh from the uplink room. Corporate veeps and Digerati molls on their way to Avalon, a fiber-optic one-night stand. Van Meter ran the classiest show in town.

  "Listen, bud, this is the wrong side of the bar to order a drink. You lost, or --"

  "Ephedria," I said. "Show it some ice, but be a gentleman."

  The stun whined, charging. "Buddy, you're gonna make me do something I honestly dislike."

  "Not as much as your boss would dislike it." I notched the Cyn in an ashtray. "Buzz Jenny and tell him Denys has come to collect."

  "Mr. Van Meter is expecting --"

  "He's expecting me to have a drink in my hand. So let's not disappoint him, eh?"

  The bartender said he'd hate that, too, but like a good soldier, he buzzed security for a second opinion. Ten seconds later the stun was gone and we were old friends.

  The Ephedria was dry and hard.

  Thurgood escorted me, easily cutting a path through the club. His Stygian suit covered his genetically enhanced muscles with a black sheen, his Southpaw tattoo winking above his collar. I tried to keep pace, spilling my drink in the shadow of death.

  "How long have you worked for Jenny?" I asked, stopping to catch my breath. At the table beside us, Ambassador John Cassandra was playing sugar daddy, tipping the cigarette girl in places where she needed no padding.

  Thurgood's eyes were like tumbled ice. "Is this leading somewhere?"

  I jiggled the glass. "I'm pecking for your graduation date. I'm guessing you're second generation. Yukon, maybe."

  "And I asked if this is led somewhere."

  Cassandra pawed the girl's corsage, slurring, "Come 'ere, baby, come 'ere." The girl struggled, then covertly tapped the security beacon on her cigarette box. Bouncers emerged from the lobby, their eyes half-shaded by surveillance cheaters.

  "Three days ago I met someone. Classmate, maybe. A turncoat. Works torch for the Neuromantics."

  Thurgood's pale eyes narrowed. "That would be Janak."

  The bouncers grabbed Cassandra and lifted him from the table. When he told them they couldn't do this to a UN Ambassador, the short guard punched him behind the left ear and he slumped in their arms. The cigarette girl moved on to the next table.

  "That’s the name. Only his Southpaw insignia was gone."

  "We cut it off. My classmates and I. A warning."

  "Yeah?"

  Thurgood watched a busboy wipe off Cassandra's table. "Mr. Janak betrayed several tenets of the order. Most notably, he killed the man he was assigned to protect."

  "Who?"

  "A doctor named William DeMaster," he said.

  Everyone on Campus knew the name. "The Surgeon General."

  "The police found no evidence, of course, but a Southpaw knows. If word had leaked, the organization would have suffered. We couldn't stand for that."

  "So you called your own jury."

  "He wounded two Southpaws before we brought him down." Thurgood studied a small scar dissecting his palm. "He is very adept. He graduated second in our class."

  "Who graduated first?"

  Thurgood gave a small smile. "We removed his tattoo with a cheese grater and I delivered an electrical burst to his frontal lobe." He touched his temple and I recalled Janak’s scar. "The damage was minor, but complete. Janak no longer possesses the sense of smell, making him ineligible for Southpaw work. He is an outcast."

  I stared at Thurgood, with his cool delivery and calculated blinks. Bred from raw DNA and raised in isolated training camps, Southpaws were an elite corps who took their cues from Shoguns and Sicilians, offering complete loyalty. That Janak murdered his employer was as damaging to the Southpaws as a pedophile priest was to the Vatican. The only difference was that the Southpaws did something about it.

  "He's still got a few of his senses," I said. "He and two pugs tried to fry me in an alley near Haggletown."

  "Yet you're standing here. If Janak were a true Southpaw, you would not be." Thurgood gestured toward the elevator. "Mr. Van Meter is waiting."

  "Jack!" Van Meter hollered, all too jovial. He had a napkin tucked into his collar, covered in barbecue stains. I smelled the beef -- real beef -- and my mouth watered. It made me think of Texas, which no one had thought of in a long, long time.

  I handed Thurgood my fedora. Van Meter wasn't alone. He had two molls and a coifed Swede whose face set my teeth on edge. Jenny asked, "What are you drinking?"

  "Usual," I said, studying the room. Van Meter's third-tier balcony overlooked the whole club, the best seat in the house. The knee-high balcony sported a toggle panel that would raise a smoked Lucite shell, completely sealing the room for privacy.

  "Let me introduce you, Jack," he said. "These lovely ladies are the most beautiful creatures in any reality. This is Cecily" -- the redhead offered a limp hand across the table -- "and Emily" -- the brunette grasped my hand firmly. "And this is Frank Wren."

  The Swede offered a greasy, manicured hand and of course I recognized him, even beneath the white hair and fresh wrinkles. Frank Wren, titular head of the Avalon Project, a bottom-line administrator born to tapeworm his way into any regime. A man of no talent, fate had somehow given Frank the reins to the most important project in the early half of the century -- a post he accepted and later rejected with equal buffoonery.

  "Hello, Commissioner." We shook cordially and I wiped my fingers with my handkerchief. "You've got blood on your hands."

  Frank smiled and wiped sauce on his bib. "So I do, so I do."

  Van Meter beamed. "And this is Jack Denys, once a celebrity in his own right." He gave the molls a leer. "Jack wrote Icarus, an encryption program that sent the United Nations into a panic because they couldn't crack it. It panicked them so much that they sent Jack to the Jasper Penal Colony for, oh, how long, Jack?"

  I wished Thurgood would hurry up with the liquor. "Seven years."

  The women gasped, on cue. Emily gave my thigh a caress that made me feel like a pet goat. Frank's eyes narrowed. Through his food, he said, "The traitor."

  I never liked Frank. During Construction, Frank was as useful as spilled milk -- something you stepped around. And when the first studies linked the programmer's disease with immersion technology, Frank didn't go to bat for his Project. Instead, he became a one-man bazaar, selling out his staff. To cap it off, he helped write the legislation dooming the Project and spent his staff's severance pay on razorwire.

  Now he was calling me a traitor. Life without irony is worthless.

  Thurgood arrived and poured me a stiff one. His eyes flicked to Frank, then came back to me and did a small roll. It was as close to emotion as a Southpaw got.

  "Well," Van Meter said, "that's one interpretation. Others would say Jack was a champion of society’s expectations of freedom." Frank spluttered but Van Meter raised his hand -- a small motion that carried a huge threat. "But let's not argue politics. Jack's here to celebrate a job well done." He raised his glass. "Here, here."

  Emily and Cecily had a sip. Frank slurped his cocktail. I shot the juice and Thurgood poured another hit.

  The crowd was louder now, impatient for the show. In the wings, dancers checked each other's suits for unfastened zippers. They wore Aztec headdresses and carried neon spears. It was culture night at the Rhapsody.

  "And what is it that Mr. Denys has done for you?"

  Van Meter offered Frank a Cheshire smile. "Jack is perhaps th
e last private eye in the world, but don't tell his parole officer. Right, Jack?"

  I shrugged and watched chorus girls adjust their bras.

  "I had a problem with an uninvited guest who didn't want to pay," he said. "In fact, he so loathed paying that he designed a way to come and go without being seen."

  "He was all invisible and stuff?" Cecily asked.

  "Yes." Van Meter gave her a patronizing nod. "All invisible and stuff. And I knew that if I wanted this interloper caught, I would have to hire Jack."

  Frank sucked marrow from a broken rib. "To catch a thief, hire a thief."

  My hand tightened around the tumbler. Frank was still as lovable as the day he sent e-mail to his staff, saying they'd never work in this hemisphere again.

  "In a manner of speaking," Van Meter said. "I knew Jack was right for the job, even though he'd been in prison for seven years and, since his release, had done nothing but data-work for the Smithsonian." He let it soak in until I was sufficiently bitter, then said: "Even more amusing is this: Jack refuses to work Avalon."

  Emily adjusted her spaghetti straps. "You don’t? Why not?"

  I dabbed sauce off her chin. "Just call me old-fashioned."

  "He’s superstitious," Van Meter said. "Jack lost his parents to Avalon. He was in Jasper at the time, cut off from digital interface. And now I suspect he's taken a vow that he won't follow in their footsteps." He turned to me. "Am I close, Jack?"

  "Whatever you say, Jenny. It's your club."

  This amused Frank. "So," he clucked, "your parents were junkies?"

  I stared across the picked bones. "They were idealists."

  The house lights dimmed, signaling that the show would begin in two minutes. The crowd's din died away as they found their seats.

  "In any event," Van Meter said, "I'd been extorted and, naturally, refused to pay. Jack said he could deliver, even without physically traveling to Avalon."

  Emily cradled her chin in her hands. "Did he?"