by Mark Budz
Right. "I don't have any money." She turned her attention to the flea-market stalls. Most of the tables were littered with junk. Secondhand clothhing. Shoes. Dented, half-empty canisters of glues, sealants, lubricants. Old earbuds and goggles. Spare boat parts. She looked for someone who might be willing to give her directions. The faces she met were hard, the sidelong gazes they cast suspicious but opportunistic, searching for any opening or sign of weakness. She set her mouth in a tight line, jaw muscles bunching.
"I can take you there," the fish said.
She pried her gaze from the crowd and brushed at a loose strand of hair dislodged by the backwash from its tail and wings. "I already told you. I can't afford it."
"No problem," the fish said.
She shook her head. There had to be a reason, something the fish wanted from her in return.
"This way." The fish glided ahead of her, weaving its way through the open stalls the way it might a shipwreck.
A teenage boy grinned at her over a pile of elecctronic hardware, jade teeth flashing in the settting sun. A short, grizzled woman sized her up from behind racks of glass beads and handmade jewelry.
Nadice quickened her pace. "How far is it?"
"Not far."
The planks were uneven, made even more treacherous by an occasional undulation or sideeways pitch that sent her stumbling. The aroma of pickled seaweed and cumin-spiced stir-fry drifted on competing strains of music. LED lights glowed to life in boat cabins, shacks, cafes, and nighttclubs, growing brighter as the sky darkened from pale blue to periwinkle. The fish glimmered. Its white skeleton winked in and out under scales that alternated between opaque and clear, deepending on how they caught the light.
As the heat of the day retreated, local residents emerged from the ramshackle woodwork to smoke, drink beer, play cribbage. Most wore caps, loose fitting shirts, and pants, the cotton or bamboo fabric stained yellow by perspiration. A few were philmed in off the shelf downloads. Of those she recognized, F8, Forever Jung, and XXXodus were popular. Not much animé. Some Russian graffitika in hard-boiled grays and black.
"How much farther?" she asked.
"Almost there."
The fish veered right, onto a narrow footbridge.
The bridge arched over a dank estuary. Two meters down, water stirred thick tangles of reeds, releassing the rank, turgid stench of garbage and organic decay. A sucking sound tugged at her, threatening to drag her into muddy depths. She quickened her pace and the bridge deposited her on an island crisscrossed with raised epoxy-board walkways—meandering paths that staggered from one stilt-supported hut to another.
The huts were dark, lit only by the stagnant light of the moon.
The fish took another right, onto warped planks that had been set directly on wet ground. Mud squished under her weight, releasing methane and thick, swirling clouds of mosquitoes.
Nadice stopped. Something didn't feel right.
She didn't see a sign for Delta Blu's, no indication of any activity at all. The place was completely deeserted. "Are you sure this is right?" she asked.
"It's just down here." The fish flipped in midair to face her.
Despite the muggy greenhouse heat, a sharp chill pricked Nadice's arms. "I don't think so." Throat tight, she backed away from the reed-constricted path.
A board creaked behind her. She swiveled, caught a toe on the upraised corner of one board, and stumbled.
Fingers wrapped tightly around her upper arm.
She gasped just as a hand clamped over her mouth, stifling a scream.
"Easy, gurl." The voice like honey in her ear. "Don't flip on me."
Mateus.
She steadied in his grip, calmed by the familiar voice, and felt her chest relax. "You scared me."
"No reason to get throwed."
He was in full crunk mode, wired to the philm he was 'skinning. Back in Lagos she had noticed that whenever he was tight the slang got heavier, thicker, as he slipped deeper into the pseudoself he was screening.
"I wasn't sure where to go," she explained. "1 thought I'd gotten lost."
"I feel ya."
"You could have told me about the fish," she said.
"Fish?" He shook. his head. "No fish here. Maybe farther into the delta, where it ain't so pollluted."
She looked around, but the fish was gone. "Come on." He cut a quick glance around. "Let's get inside fo things get crucial."
_______
A hand-scrawled sign on one boarded-up window advised visitors that Delta BIu's was closed. A thin man with nervous eyes and a bony Adam's apple let them into a windowless room filled with a maze of dark, soundproofed cubicles. The place reeked of mildew, sweat, and listless sex.
Something shifted in the cube closest to Nadice. She flinched as a pair of blood-red circles swiveled to look at her.
The thin man snickered. As her eyes adjusted, the rings resolved into faint coronas of light leaking from around the edges of a pair of corneal inserts.
"Snippers," Mateus explained. "Cut images from digitized celluloid and vidIO for splicing and rephilming. "
There was one snipper to a cubicle. Some lounged in chairs, others sprawled on gelfoam matttresses. Their expressions were slack, their faces spectral, as if they existed between worlds ... neiither substantial nor insubstantial, but ensnared in some hyperstantial netherworld.
Like the fish, she thought. Detached. Somehow it had gone from a flat picture to solid 3-D ..
"You're pirates," she said. "Bootleggers."
The snicker degenerated into a snort. "What we are is none of your business," the man hissed. He stared at her chest and masturbated the stubble on his chin.
"In here," Mateus said. He guided her into a room filled with d-splays. A few of the screens deepicted artistically rendered nudes and genitalia. Others were more hardcore. Across the dimly lighted hallway, through a partly open door, a naked woman lay on a futon. Japanese kanji crawled along the insides of her thighs, trickled down her abdomen like rainwater on neon-tinted glass. Instead of nipples, pink roses flowered from ceramic-smooth breasts.
Mateus appeared not to notice. She expected some lewd comment, but suddenly he was all busiiness. He closed the door, locking it.
"Sit down." He indicated a chair in the center of the room. "We need to check the status of the ware. See if it's ready." He went to a chrome equipment rack against one wall.
The chair looked clean, no obvious stains. There was even a little depression in which to rest her head. The padded armrests adjusted to her height. The chair tilted back, and she found herself staring up at a ruby-red mouth on a ceiling-mounted d-splay. She wet her lips and saw the tip of a tongue, her tongue.
"Relax," Mateus said, walking up to her. "You're tense."
He sounded different. He'd dropped the slang for some reason, the attitude. She lowered her gaze from the ceiling d-splay and saw he'd rephilmed himself. Gone were the crunk gang tattoos. The color of his 'skin had changed, too, lightened from burned coffee to pale pink.
She tightened her fingers on the armrest. "Who are you? Where's Mateus?" She hadn't heard the door open.
"Mateus is taking a short break. He'll be back as soon as we're done here."
She tried to sit up and found she couldn't. Invisible threads cobwebbed her nerves. He leaned close and his gaze pinned her, tugged on someething embedded deep inside her, as if trying to pull it out.
Nadice drew a sharp breath.
"Don't worry." The man grinned, revealing rows of triangular teeth. "This won't hurt a bit."
_______
She woke to a dull, bone-deep ache. Her mouth felt parched, her tongue swollen. It hurt to swallow, all the way to the base of her spine.
"What it do, gurl? How ya feelin'?"
Mateus bent over her. Nadice swallowed, forced a spike of air deep into her lungs. "What happened?"
"Ware ain't ready yet. Needs another day or two, I guess, before it's okay to rip it out. Too early, and it gets hulled."
/> "To you, I mean. Who was that guy?"
Mateus worked his jaw from side to side. "He works for the man."
"What man?"
"The one ballin' for this shit."
Her gaze drifted past him to the d-splays. "So what does that mean? What happens now?"
"Means we got to do this again in a couple days, gurl. Whenever we get the call. Feel me?"
"Then that's it, right? After that, we're done." She could put all this behind her.
"Not exactly."
Nadice stiffened. "You said this was it. All I'd have to do."
"I got another delivery to make." Mateus wet his lips. "In Singapore. You're the only mule I got availlable."
"We had an agreement."
"Shit happens, gurl." A resigned shrug in his voice. "You know how it is."
"No." Nadice went to push herself out of the chair. "You can find someone else."
Mateus gripped her arm. Hard. "You give me any trouble on this, gurl, and I turn you in to Atherton. That what you want?"
She bit her lower lip against the pain. His grip tightened, squeezing tears from her eyes, until she finally shook her head.
His grip eased. "Good." He patted her. "That's what I like to hear."
11
"Nice philm, " Marta said. "How long have you been waring it?"
Pelayo watched her twirl a partially empty water glass on the glossy green surrface of the table between them. "Not long."
"Who's it supposed to be? Or is that some deep, dark secret you're not allowed to talk about?"
Pelayo spread his hands, nolo contendre.
They sat at a table in the Jade Dragon, a fast-food franchise where Little Shanghai rubbed shoulders with the Zona Sagrada. As expected, there were a lot of people philmed in Hip Sing and Fuk Ching gangware, along with the standard Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Fu Manchu aficionados. Speakers from the ceiling blared music from an alt prog band called Bali Lama. The aroma of soy sauce seasoned with habanero peppers spiced the courtyard outside the main restaurant.
"New clothes, too," she observed. "They part of the 'skin? Or is that proprietary, too?"
Pelayo leaned forward and picked up the menu in front of him. The subwoof bass from the speakers kicked at his eardrums, heavy as steel-toed boots. "I saw Lagrante this morning," he said.
Ice rattled in the glass. "He rip the new ware?"
"He said you talked to him."
She shrugged, and he knew he'd touched a nerve. She watched him from behind a veil of indifference. He said nothing, content to wait her out, and ,after a moment she ran one finger along the curve of one ear, tucking back long black hair and exposing the lithe outline of her neck.
"You could have come to me," he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
She looked up from the glass. "None of your busi- ness."
Pelayo weighed her gaze, but couldn't tell if she was trying to protect him or avoid him. "I might be able to help," he said.
"What makes you think I need help? Your help?"
Good question. "What kind of trouble we talkin' about?"
She shook her head. "There's nothing you can do."
"How do you know?"
"Don't," she said.
"What?"
"Just leave me alone." The hair behind her ear slipped free, fell in a thick cascade across her face.
"If that's what you want." He set the menu down and slid the chair back, scraping loudly on the floor tile.
She jerked her head, tossing the hair back. "You don't know a goddamned thing," she said.
He eased back into the chair. "About what?"
" Anything."
Meaning her. Things had never gone the way he wanted between them. For some reason, they always ended up at odds. It had been that way for as long as he could remember, cousins that had almost, but never quite, kissed. "Lagrante didn't say shit. You wanna keep it that way, no problem."
"You're just jealous."
"Maybe," he conceded. Except that there was no maybe about it. ..
She let out a breath and, deflated, looked sudddenly drawn and pale, perhaps even a little sick.
"You seem tired," he said, his voice softening.
"I'm fine," she snapped. But some of the rancor had bled from her. "I've been busy, that's all." She rested her head in her hands.
He fought the urge to reach out and touch her on one slender wrist. He might have been able to at one time, years ago. Not anymore. They'd settled into different orbits, any attraction between them more a perturbation of memory than anything else.
"Any word on Concetta?" She was peering at him from between her long, delicate fingers.
Pelayo shook his head, glad that she'd been the one to bring it up. "Not yet. Still waiting."
Marta made a face but seemed resigned. Not only had she expected this, Pelayo realized, she'd come to accept it.
Was that why Marta hadn't come to him? Because her sister had ... and had never come back? How much did Marta know?
"I'm not the one who's in trouble," Marta said.
"I'm just trying to help somebody out, is all."
"That sounds like Concetta. Not you."
"I don't think so.".
"I do."
"It's not like that." She pulled her hair back from her face and held it tight against the top of her head with both hands. "This is different."
We're different, she seemed to be saying ... distancing herself from her sister.
"Help out how?" he asked. "New ware? Philm? DiNA?"
Marta smoothed her hands back, down to the base of her neck, and clasped them together. "Reemoval."
"Full strip?"
"Yeah. The 'skin's degrading. I don't know how long. A few days, week at the most before the neurotoxins kick in."
Pelayo shook his head. "That's not what Lagrante does."
"I know. But I thought he might be able to hook me up."
"And?"
She lowered her hands to the glass on the table.
"He said he'd get back to me."
"Sounds familiar. How much is he charging?"
"He didn't say."
"In other words, expensive. I hope your friend's rich."
Marta stiffened. "She's not my friend."
A woman, then, not a man. "If she doesn't have any money, what do you or she have that a rip artist might be interested in as payment?"
Marta blinked. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
"You don't think Lagrante's above asking for payment in trade?" It was unfair, a low blow, but he wanted to shock her, help her understand exactly what she was getting into and what kind of people she was dealing with.
Marta's cheeks flushed. "Not everyone's a—" She bit her lip.
"Go ahead" —His fingers curled inward, digging into moist palms— "say it."
He knew what she was thinking. Slut. Whore. Instead, she said, "You're pathetic," and got up, oving the chair back so hard it toppled over, clattering against the table behind her.
The thudding beat covered most of the ruckus. But a few people turned, drawn to the commotion . "At least I know who I am," she said. "What I want, who I want to be. Which is more than you can say."
Pelayo could feel eyes on them, curious to see how the telenovela would play out.
It didn't. He wouldn't let it. He remained in his seat, omerta, until she turned and stomped out.
So much for trying to scare some sense into her, prevent her from following in her sister's footsteps.
Pelayo stared down at his fists, clenched white-knuckle tight on the table, emptied of everything, including his anger.
12
From her executive office on the top floor of the Iosepa Biognost Tek building, Ilse Svatba could see beyond the seawall and the dervish lights of the Boardwalk to the far side of the Monterey Bay. A dagger of moonlight glinted on the water. It pierced the clear diamond window in front of her, slicing through the nanometer-thin film of graphene coating the surface.
<
br /> Turn her back and the sterling dagger would still be there, aimed at a point directly between her shoulder blades.
Her neck prickled at the thought. It was a good reminder of the threats that lurked, waiting to strike if she let down her guard.
A virtual d-splay appeared toward the bottom of her field of view, announcing the arrival of Giles Atherton.
She mirrored a section of the window, reflecting the office around her. Framed in Art Nouveau curlicues dolloped with pewter leaves, she considered her attire.
How to present herself for the meeting? That was the question.
She mentally opened a selection menu and canceled her current philm, a découpage of knitted bamboo fiber, copper foil, glass beads, and peacock feathers.
Should she go soft and voluptuous, lipstick smeared? Elegant waif? Or something more ostentatious?
She selected an outfit from IBT's upcoming Gil Elgren line of pinups. Black lace brassiere, fishnet stockings, garters.
She pirouetted, critical, gauging the effect.
No. Atherton was a sesquicentenarian—practically posthuman. The Betty Paige look would have little or no effect on him. Besides, she didn't want to taunt him, merely tantalize. And intimidate, it was true. Even if they were business partners, there was no sense giving him the upper hand.
She tried Alphonse Mucha next, replacing the black lace and fishnet with a diaphanous lavender gown. Ankle-length, sleeveless, her hair a thick flowering cascade of honeysuckle pink that caressed her neck and bare shoulders.
Too faery, she decided. It put her in the wrong mood.
In the end, she settled on Art Deco, circa 1928. A shift-style dress, mustard yellow, with a straight bodice and collar. Waistline near the hip. Hem pleated, falling to just below the knees. A matching bell cloche hat and lustrous pearl necklace completed the ensemble.
A perfect combination of sophisticated but sensual professionalism. She rephilmed the office next, replacing the Scandinavian wood floor with black-and-white checkerboard tiles. She papered the walls with a Poiret print of repeated parrots, rendered in flamboyant green and pink. Seashells scalloped the ceiling. For the light fixtures and door, she selected a stylized papyrus motif, articulated in classic Metyl-Wood veneer. Lastly she downloaded a new voice, something dusky, less puerile than her own nasal alto.
