by Rusty Coats
"You never remember your bad ones."
"Who should?" He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his tattered pea coat and stared out at the rain. "She was a beautiful woman, Jack."
I had a hard time breathing and told myself that my bruised ribs were to blame. Finally, I had enough air to say: "She was the smartest human being I've ever met."
"I'll drink to that."
He stepped across the rubble, his gait more pronounced by the cold rain, and I handed him the flask. He swished it around his cheeks, swallowed and winced. "Christ, Jack. Where'd you find this old paint?"
I took a hit. "On my floor. With a dead house detective and everything I own."
"Where were you?"
"At the Rhapsody, where Van Meter's telling everyone I killed that kid."
"So it’s true. He really is dead." He glanced at my nose. "And you?"
"I’ll make it.” I handed him the flask. “No thanks to Jenny. He’s pinning this on me. He paraded me around the Rhapsody like I was his loveable attack dog, then showed me off to his guest. His guest was Frank Wren."
“Christ,” Monk moaned. "I was hopin' that bastard had died of the plague."
I told him about tenderizing Frank's face and that cheered him up. But then he frowned. "After showboatin' you around, Van Meter sent someone to kill your house dick and shake you down? I don't get it."
"I don't think it was Jenny's boys."
"Why not?"
"Because Jenny seemed surprised I wasn't already dead. Contract job, he said."
"Hired out by who?"
"I tried breaking his arm to find out, but his Southpaw interrupted me.” I brushed rusty rainwater off my suit. “Jenny also wanted to know if the kid gave me anything."
"That would explain the mess in your apartment. They take anything?"
"They dismantled my Mensa and took the drives -- including all my Smithsonian work. Come Monday, I've got nothing to show Stan."
"Meaning you'll be in violation of parole."
"If the datacops find the Smithsonian archives in Haggletown, they’ll figure I fenced it. And if Jenny’s telling everyone I'm a killer, it's sure to get back to Stan. Either way, I'm short-time." I glanced away. "They took my ROM album, Monk."
"Your what?"
I tossed him the ROM shard. He held it closer to the halogen and a smile pulled up the sashes of his cheeks. He wiped the rain off my hand-lettered title and thumbed the jagged edge, his smile dying by degrees. He gave it back.
"They took all of them?" When I nodded, he said, "I'm sorry, Jack. I know what these ... what you ... Jesus. What I mean is, hell."
The rats squealed, choosing sides in a fight between the walls. Monk held up the stun rifle to his shoulder, then relaxed. He grabbed the flask and shook it.
"No more liquor," he said. "Bad luck all around."
I walked to the pile of ash where my mother once danced, climbed it and looked across the empty Campus. The rain had let up, but the drain spouts hadn't finished, and the gutters moaned from Compression to Administration. I wondered if it was raining the night my mother danced on the table. I wondered what had made her so happy.
"She never forgave me for Icarus."
"Who?" he asked, then: "Oh. Ramona? Of course she forgave you. She --"
"Come on." The girders bled rust on my hat. "You were there when the datacops broke down the door. Frank Wren tried to have them blackballed."
He wiped the lines on his dark forehead. "You almost unraveled a lifetime of work for them, Jack. The U.N. thought you were tryin' to overthrow the government, and after they busted you, they went after your folks. Called us all anarchists."
He kicked a burnt bar stool out of the way and sat on the floor. "What they never got -- not Frank or the U.N. or the Sons of David -- was how much we loved that place. Avalon had become so important that their laws stopped matterin' -- like when England tried governin' the colonies. Even without a Revolution, England wouldn'ta kept us much longer, because we'd changed. We weren't European anymore. We'd become something else. Same was happenin' here on this Campus.”
He smiled at the sooty Campus. “This was a new country, and it was growin' up right inside their borders. But growth hurts. When South China realized it had outgrown that old Maoist dinosaur and tried to secede, North China nuked it away, just cauterized itself. The U.N. tried to nuke us, too. It's like Cassady's story about flyin' dogs."
I nodded, remembering. "Freud said that if a litter pup is born with wings and the pack realizes the pup will someday fly above them, it will kill the pup. Basic survival."
"We were the new dogs, Jack. Avalon changed us. The U.N. didn't see how far we'd gone until you wrote Icarus. It was our Declaration of Independence."
Another rat squealed. Monk leveled the rifle and let fly a bolt of lightning.
"Icarus was a wake-up call. It told us we controlled our own fate. If that damned disease hadn't come along, there's no tellin' what we'da done. Secession was just the beginning. But I know one thing: You wouldn'ta done no seven years in Jasper, and your parents wouldn't be dead, and we wouldn't be drinking paint in this old graveyard."
He pulled himself up with the rifle and dusted his pants. "Now you ask me if your mother ever forgave you for writing Icarus." His copper eyes flashed. "Ramona Denys thought you were a hero, Jack. Everyone did. Everyone but you."
I stared up at the glass-block wall of Continuity, six stories high, and from the roof you could see the training ground behind Tactile, where we first felt Avalon's touch. And beyond that, Acquisitions and Entry, old Dewey Decimal, its steel face now as empty as the ROM album of memories I'd kept under the bed. My family, my past. All of it gone.
Monk was scanning the walls for more rats when I turned around. My Tremayne was ruined, its skin as spotted as a leopard. I laughed and Monk looked up.
"Looks like I need a new suit."
He barely glanced at the rust spots. "Yep."
I pulled the shard from my pocket, pressed the jagged edge with the pad of my thumb until a bead of blood swelled through. And then I hurled the ROM at the old booth, at Lucky No. 7, chopping the air.
I met Monk's eyes across the halogen glow. "As a matter of fact," I said, "I think you might have one in my size. If you still know how to sew, that is."
His mouth curled into a grin. "A suit, huh?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'm coming back to town."
AVALON XI: Suiting Up
Monk told me to strip while he found me a suit. The Recaro was where I'd left it, still freckled with my blood. Its control panel had been removed. The connectors were cauterized and its fuses scattered on the floor, gold arcs broken by the power surge. I tossed my fedora on the arm of the chair, hiding the stains.
"What are you doing to the Recaro?"
Inside the storage vault, a Mensa's optic drive fell off the shelf and shattered. Monk cursed, then said, "Same thing you're doin'. Tryin' to figure out how that dragon bloodied your nose and killed that kid."
I shrugged off my suspenders. "It wasn't the chair. It's what came through my fedora that punched my clock."
Through the mouth of the closet I saw his hair winking behind a shelf of old VR helmets, their collarplates tarnished and the wiring sheaths turned brittle.
"The Recaro's the entry point for the data pumping through your hat, dimwit. Your fedora won't do diddly unless it's in two meters of the chair. So the chair --"
"May hold a data record."
"Praise the Lord,” he said. “The savage understands."
I folded my pants and saw where orange rust spots had soaked through the pleats, giving the pinstripes a spray of polka dots. "Find anything?"
"Plenty," he said. "Plenty of garbage. Whatever gave you the nosebleed is in the Recaro's memory, but it reads like a recipe for topsoil. I can't decipher it."
"Maybe I'll let Rita have a look at it."
Monk's noisy rummaging stopped. "Who's Rita?"
I smiled. Monk still played Proxy Paren
t. That's what Gretchen called him. "She works in the Mission. Helped me lay the trap. A real crackerjack on code."
"Digerati girl, then."
"In name only. It's Merlin she loves. Grew up in Shiloh Community and caught the last train to Campus. Now she'd sign with the devil if it meant working on Merlin."
"She already has, if you ask me." I could hear the lecture building, but something interrupted. "Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! You stop that! Get on outta here! Shoo!"
Metal clashed as the bins toppled, chucking Mensa parts onto the floor. I ran to help, my bare feet stamping dust on the teleportation stage. Monk hurled a dataglove battery pack against the closet wall, breathing hard, and said, "Damn rats."
I stared at the gash in the wall. The steel had been bent backwards and the concrete crushed by a sledge. I kicked a chunk of gravel into the hole and listened to it fall down an endless shaft. "Awful big rats, " I said. "And they're pretty good with tools."
He squinted at me in the darkness. "This town's got all kinds of rats, Jack. You kill one batch and another batch crops up. A wise man learns to bargain."
Before I could answer, he grabbed a slate-colored piece of cloth and yanked. A scuba suit fell between us, crushing a virtual memory pack.
"Put it on, son," he said. "Let's see if you still know how to fly."
I dragged the heavy scuba suit out of the closet and Monk fetched his sewing kit. He came back just as I'd dropped the suit at the foot of the stage.
"Hook it up there." He pointed at the second beaker. "Ya still know how, right?"
"Yeah," I said. Then I nodded at the sleek prototype suit he'd shown me. "Why don't we use that one? It's gotta be lighter than this. And you said it --"
"'Cause I didn't say we could use it. I ain't finished testin' that suit. Besides, you're outta practice. You even tried to flame-out in that Recaro. Why, you mighta --"
"All right, all right," I said. "Old nag."
He pulled a laser from the satchel. "In a few minutes, I'll be stitching your inseam with this." He clicked the toggle and the beam flared. "Let's try to remember that."
It was a Ninth-Generation unit, the most advanced suit used in the last days of Construction, and it weighed about as much as Tommy Jacarta after Fat Tuesday. Dust covered the polymer fabric, but it didn't tear as I lifted it into the Lucite beaker and attached the shoulder hooks. Monk built his suits to last.
The beaker had a yellow-brown film and the cables connecting it to the panel had rusted orange. And the suit -- with its slate-gray skin and its black calibration controls on the chest -- looked as high-tech as a headless scarecrow with its stuffing removed. The spun fur of a cocoon filled one of the memory jacks and when I dug it out with the tip of my Cyn, it crumbled. And that made my eyes burn, because here was the most advanced stab we’d made at virtual colonization, and it was old.
Monk shoved me toward the beaker. "Hook up the cables and see if she shorts."
My hands moved fluidly, remembering. In Jasper, a lifetime ago, I dreamed of hot-rodding tactile systems or tweaking gravity, and my fingers twitched in my sleep.
Fifteen minutes later I socketed the last chip and said, "Give her a boost."
“Power up,” Monk said, the panel glowing in his eyes. Two stories above us, a thunderstorm pounded the city, almost in synch with the panel, waking up.
The suit began to inflate, filling with life. Inside the suit, the dioxide bubbles bulged against each other in an intricate grid. The dust, trapped in the wrinkles, shook free and the suit's musculature emerged.
Monk read the wavelengths on the panel. "Good. How's your end?"
I stared at the diagnostic screen on the backpack. The input and output waves appeared fluid. The signal returned as strong as when it entered. Ready to fly.
"Good," I said. "Wave pattern is --"
That's when the left hand spasmed and tossed sparks across the stage. The whole left arm flailed like a drunken street fighter, slamming me into the beaker wall.
Monk spanked the panel, then brought the lever down. The suit began deflating but the arm continued to jitter. I shoved my way out of the beaker, rubbing my jaw. Monk shuffled up with a fire extinguisher and doused the hand with halon. I gave him a long stare, barely aware that I was flexing my left hand.
Monk shrugged, watching the foam drip. "Moths," he said.
He grabbed the laser and fixed the glove in less than ten minutes. When he juiced up the suit this time, nothing went wrong. The suit inflated, the fingers curled and the boots stood flat, hanging twenty centimeters above the beaker floor. We let the juice run for twenty minutes, just to be sure. I smoked. The suit didn't.
Monk cut the power and gave me a nod. I snubbed the Cyn, climbed inside and unzipped it down to the crotch. The dioxide bubbles looked like millions of lavender fish eggs. I touched the bubbles along the main corridor, where they were the most intricate, because the spine absorbed most motions of gravity. And at the base of the spine, I found another antique and smiled.
"Hey, Monk," I called, and ripped the digital-delivery dildo away from its plug. Light prismed off its skin. "What kind of company are you keeping these days?"
He squinted at it. "Looks like a Johnny model. Hums like a blender. Crude."
"Maybe." I tossed the sausage off stage. "But that prick helped destroy Avalon."
"That prick did no such thing. The battle for hearts and minds don't start in the crotch. Now, zip up."
I grabbed the anti-sway bar and chinned it, pivoting mid-air, tucking my legs as I hand-walked on the bar. Then, as Monk shuffled into the closet, I lowered myself inside.
The bubble skin adhered to my body like refrigerator wrap closing over a fresh onion. When I felt my feet touch the boots, I released the bar, crashing into the padded crotch. An avalanche of dust fell on the stage and I fought a sneeze and tried not to think of what happened the last time someone in my family put on one of these suits.
The mask was Ninth Generation neoprene, black with a silver-leaf insignia, and it latched to the suit at the collarbones. It weighed forty pounds and smelled like low tide. As Monk tugged the hood over my forehead, the salty grit scraped my skin.
There was a silver mesh for my mouth, thin enough so Monk could read my lips. Online, my lips would be frozen in whatever pose I picked from Cosmetics. Lips were high-priced extras in Avalon, because labial motion required so much split-second guesswork by Merlin. I was going in without lips. I was going in without a lot of things.
Monk felt around my ears, balancing the audio coils, then attached the hood. He gave the mask a tug and an air bubble burped against my lashes. "Claustrophobic?"
“No.” I felt like I was covered with leeches. "Not at all."
He stepped off the stool and shuffled off for a pair of eyephones. While he was gone, I closed my eyes and practiced leaping, feeling old muscles groan. Once upon a time, I could fly with the best of them. Now I wondered if I could even crawl.
Monk stepped up with anodized red metal frames, curved like a banana boat, its WPA logo blurred from age. The frame wrapped from temple to temple, eliminating the lights of reality. One of Monk's protégés designed the infrared controls, keyed by the motion of your eyes. Maya. She was on Doc Cassady’s bracelet rehab plan.
"I've polished these up," Monk said, giving the slick goggle screen a final swipe with his shirt. "But like everything here, they probably got a few bugs."
He sealed the eyephones to the hood with a click of the jacks. Once attached, the visor strip became translucent, like staring through a welder's lens. My line of sight was just that: A line showing a dusky world where a black man waved three fingers.
"Three," I said, and he patted my shoulder.
He stepped off the stool and moved behind me in the beaker and opened the suit's datapack, humming a pre-Prohibition tune, reminding me that Monk was tone-deaf. Then a flash of carnival lights burst into my retinas.
"Christ, Monk."
"Sorry," he moped. "It's comin' a
round."
A cityscape supernovaed as the sensors tried to find the center of my stare, guided by the infrared tracking system. The image flipped as the video-hold let go. Monk cursed, clacking toggles. Finally, the city came into focus.
Hong Kong. Before two bombs launched from Chinese submarines converted hydrogen to helium, a cocktail that turned the city into hot ash.
"Got it." I blinked at history. "Perfect pitch."
Monk clapped my back. "Good. Now all we need is an account to plug you in."
I frowned. I lived in a neighborhood where even the rats had keys to the city, but not me. The datacops confiscated my passports when they sent me to Jasper. I never thought I'd miss them. Never intended to go back.
"I don't have an account. The old ones, well, the U.N. wiped those long ago."
His lower lip curled. "Most of 'em, at least, and it was the Sons of David, not the feds. The crazies finally got their hands on a virus that didn't flop around like a bass. It went straight for the WPA roster. By the time we found it, it had chewed through half of the staff's online bodies. They called it Leper."
"And the other half?"
"Digerati," he said. "They rubbed out all the old personality files. First item of business. Everybody pays."
During Construction, the mannequin crew in Cosmetics programmed billions of pixelated bodies for future citizens. The plan was that people could enter Avalon from WPA depots scattered across the world, and Merlin would have their bodies waiting for them when they emerged from the Leap. But Prohibition had turned Avalon into a virtual gulag; millions of virtual people simply disappeared.
"Don't fret," Monk said. He held up a ROM disc. "I've got a spare."
"Who is it?"
He shrugged. "Some fella."
I frowned inside the mask. "Where'd you find it?"
"Here and there, Jack. You want a pedigree?"
He slotted the ROM and a dashboard screen opened at the bottom of the visor -- a transparent viewer that flashed binary as the ROM loaded. Once in Avalon, the visor would provide other functions I could access by voice or eye.
"Preview Cosmetics," I told the datapack, and the screen filled a quarter of the visor. It scanned the green topographic grid of a man’s head, torso and legs. Next came flesh, then hair, eye color, facial features and, lastly, clothing.
