A macromall on the intersection between Longwalk and Sunrise, Lovegrove squealed silently. There’s a specialist store there with liquor from every Confederation planet, probably even got Earth bourbon.
Drinks from clear across the galaxy! How about that?
So Al started walking. It was a lovely day.
The sidewalk was so wide it was more like a boulevard in itself; there were no paving slabs, instead the whole strip had been made from a seamless sheet, a material which was a cross between marble and concrete. Luxuriant trees sprouted up through craters in the surface every forty yards or so, their two-foot sprays of floppy oval flowers an impossible shade of metallic purple.
He spotted a few trashcan-sized trucks trundling sedately among the walkers enjoying the late-morning sunshine, machinery smoother than Henry Ford had ever dreamed of. Utility mechanoids, Lovegrove told him, cleaning the sidewalk, picking up litter and fallen leaves.
The base of each skyscraper was given over to classy delis and bars and restaurants and coffee shops; tables spilled out onto the sidewalk, just like a European city. Arcades pierced deep into the buildings.
From what Al could see, it was the same kind of rich man’s playground setup on the other side of the street, maybe a hundred and fifty yards away. Not that you could walk over to be sure, there was no way past the eight-foot-high glass and metal barrier which lined the road.
Al stood with his face pressed to the glass for some time, watching the silent cars zoom past. Big bullets on wheels. All of them shiny, like coloured chrome. You didn’t even have to steer them no more, Lovegrove told him, they did it themselves. Some kind of fancy electrical engine, no gas. And the speed, over two hundred kilometres an hour.
Al knew all about kilometres; they were what the French called miles.
But he wasn’t too sure about using a car that he couldn’t drive himself, not when it travelled that fast. And anyway, his presence seemed to mommick up electricity. So he stuck to walking.
The skyscrapers gave him vertigo they were so tall, and all you could see when you looked up at them was reflections of more skyscrapers. They seemed to bend over the street, imprisoning the world below. Lovegrove told him they were so high that their tops were designed to sway in the wind, rocking twenty–thirty metres backwards and forwards in slow motion.
“Shut up,” Al growled.
The leprechaun curled up tighter, like a knotted snake.
People looked at Al—his clothes. Al looked at people, fascinated and jubilant. It was a jolt seeing blacks and whites mixing free, other types too, light-skinned Mediterranean like his own, Chinese, Indian. Some seemed to have dyed their hair completely the wrong colour. Amazing.
And they all appeared so much at ease with themselves, owning a uniform inner smile. They had a nonchalance and surety which he’d never seen before. The devil which drove so many people back in the twenties was missing, as if the city elders had abolished worry altogether.
They also had astonishingly good health. After a block and a half Al still hadn’t seen anyone remotely overweight. No wonder they wore short clothes. A world where everyone was in permanent training for the big game, even the seventy-year-olds.
“You still got baseball, ain’t you?” Al muttered under his breath.
Yes, Lovegrove confirmed.
Yep, paradise all right.
After a while he took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. He’d been walking for a quarter of an hour, and it didn’t look as if he’d got anywhere. The massive avenue of skyscrapers hadn’t changed at all.
“Hey, buddy,” he called.
The black guy—who looked like a prizefighter—turned and gave an amused grin as he took in Al’s clothes. His arm was around a girl: Indian skin, baby blonde hair. Her long legs were shown off by a pair of baggy culottes.
Cutie pie, Al thought, and grinned at her. A real sweater girl. It suddenly struck him that he hadn’t hit the sack with a woman for six centuries.
She smiled back.
“How do I call a cab around here?”
“Datavise the freeway processors, my man,” the black guy said expansively. “City runs a million cabs. Don’t make a profit. But then that’s what us dumb taxpayers are for, to make up the shortfall, right?”
“I can’t do the data thing, I ain’t from around here.”
The girl giggled. “You just get off a starship?”
Al tipped the rim of his fedora with two fingers. “Kind of, lady. Kind of.”
“Neat. Where you from?”
“Chicago. On Earth.”
“Hey, wow. I never met anyone from Earth before. What’s it like?”
Al’s grin lost its lustre. Je-zus, but the women here were forward. And the black guy’s thick arm was still draped over her shoulder. He didn’t seem to mind his girl making conversation with a total stranger. “One city’s just like another,” Al said; he gestured lamely at the silver skyscrapers, as if that was explanation enough.
“City? I thought you only had arcologies on Earth?”
“Look, you going to tell me how to get a fucking cab, or what?”
He’d blown it. The moment he saw the man’s expression harden, he knew.
“You want us to call one for you, buddy?” The man was taking a longer, slower look at Al’s clothes.
“Sure,” Al bluffed.
“Okay. No problem. It’s done.” A phony smile.
Al wondered exactly what it was the man had actually done. He didn’t have no Dick Tracy wrist radio to call for a cab or anything. Just stood there, smiling, playing Al for a sucker.
Lovegrove was filling Al’s head with crap about miniature telephones in the brain. He had one fitted himself, he said, but it had packed up when Al possessed him.
“Going to tell me about Chicago now?” the girl asked.
Al could see how worried she was. Her voice, mannerisms, the way she had merged into her man’s encircling arm. They all telegraphed it, and he knew how to read the signs. Fear in other people was wholly familiar.
He thrust his face forwards toward the black guy, snarling at the wiseass bastard. Just for an instant three long scars pulsed hotly on his left cheek. “Gonna remember you, cocksucker. Gonna find you again. Gonna teach you respect, and, buddy, it’s gonna be the real hard way to learn.” The old rage was burning in his body now, limbs trembling, voice rising to a thunderous roar. “Nobody shits on Al Capone! You got that? Nobody treats me like some dog turd you stepped in. I fucking ruled Chicago. I owned that city. I am not some asswipe street punk you can take for a ride. I. Deserve. RESPECT.”
“Bastard Retro!” The man swung a punch.
Even if Lovegrove’s body hadn’t been enhanced with the energistic power which possessing souls exuded in the natural universe Al would probably have beaten him. His years in Brooklyn had pitched him into countless brawls, and people had quickly learned to steer clear of his awesome temper.
Al ducked instinctively, his right fist already coming up. The blow was focused, mentally and physically. He struck the man perfectly, catching him on the side of his jaw.
There was an ugly sound of bone shattering. Dead silence. The man flew backwards five yards through the air, hitting the sidewalk in a crumpled sprawl. He slid along the carbon concrete composite for another couple of yards before coming to rest, completely inert. Blood began to splatter from his mouth where serrated bone had punctured his cheek and lip.
Al stared, surprised. “Goddamn!” He started to laugh delightedly.
The girl screamed. She screamed and screamed.
Al glanced around, suddenly apprehensive. Everyone on the broad sidewalk was looking at him, at the injured black guy. “Shut up,” he hissed at the loopy broad. “Shut up!” But she wouldn’t. Just: scream, and scream, and scream. Like it was her profession.
Then there was another sound, cutting through her bawling, rising every time she took a breath. And Al Capone realized it wasn’t just handguns he could recognize
after six hundred years. Police sirens hadn’t changed much either.
He started to run. People scattered ahead of him the way kittens ran from a pit bull. Cries and yells broke out all around.
“Stop him!”
“Move!”
“Stinking Retro.”
“He killed that dude. One punch.”
“No! Don’t try to—”
A man was going for him. Beefy and hard-set, crouched low for a pro football tackle. Al waved a hand, almost casually, and white fire squirted into the hero’s face. Black petals of flesh peeled back from the bone, sizzling. Thick chestnut hair flamed to ash. A dull agonized grunt, cutting off as pain overloaded his consciousness, and the man collapsed.
Then all hell really did hit the fan. Anxious people became a terrified mob. Stampeding away from him. Fringe onlookers got caught and bowled over by thudding feet.
Al glanced back over his shoulder to see a section of the road barrier fold down. The squad car glided over it towards him. An evil-looking black and blue javelin-head, airplane-smooth fuselage. Dazzlingly bright lights flashed on top of it.
“Hold it, Retro,” a voice boomed from the car.
Al’s pace slackened. There was an arcade ahead of him, but its arching entrance was wide enough to take the squad car. Goddamn! Alive again for forty minutes and already running from the cops.
What else is new?
He stopped, and turned full square to face them, silver-plated Thompson gripped in his hands. And—oh, shit—another two squad cars were coming off the road, lining up directly towards him. Big slablike flaps were opening like wings at their rear, and things came running out. They weren’t human, they weren’t animal. Machine animals? Whatever, they sure didn’t look healthy. Fat dull-metal bodies with stumpy gun barrels protruding. Far too many legs, and all of those rubber, no knees or ankles.
Assault mechanoids, Lovegrove said. And there was a tinge of excitement in the mental voice. Lovegrove expected the things to beat him.
“They electric?” Al demanded.
Yes.
“Good.” He glared at the one taking point, and cast his first sorcerer’s spell.
Police patrol Sergeant Alson Loemer was already anticipating his promotion when he arrived at the scene. Loemer had been delighted as his neural nanonics received the updates from the precinct house. With his outlandish clothes, the man certainly looked like a Retro. The gang of history-costumed terrorists had been running the police department ragged for three days, sabotaging city systems with some new style of plasma weapon and electronic warfare field. Other acts too. Most officers had picked up strong rumours of snatches going down, people being lifted at random from the streets at night. And not one Retro had been brought to book. The news companies were datavising hive loads of untamed speculation across the communications net: a religious group, a band of offplanet mercenaries, even wackier notions. The mayor was going apeshit, and leaning on the police commissioner. Smooth people from an unnamed government intelligence agency had been walking around the corridors at the precinct house. But they didn’t know anything more than the patrol officers.
Now he, Sergeant Loemer, was going to nail one of those suckers.
He guided the patrol car over the folded barrier and onto the sidewalk. The crim was dead ahead, running for the base of the Uorestone Tower. Two more precinct cars were riding with Loemer, closing on the crim, hemming him in. Loemer deployed both of his patrol car’s assault mechanoids, and datavised in their isolate and securement instructions.
That was when the patrol car started to glitch, picking up speed. The sensors showed him frightened citizens in front, racing to escape; one of the assault mechanoids wobbled past, shooting wildly. He fired shutdown orders into the drive processor. Not that it made much difference.
Then the Retro started shooting at the patrol cars. Whatever the gun was, it ripped straight through the armour shielding, smashing the axles and wheel hubs. Metal bearings screeched in that unique, and instantly recognizable, tone which heralded imminent destruction. Loemer thumped the manual safety cut out, killing power instantly.
The patrol car slewed around and bounced off the road barrier to smack straight into one of the Regree trees planted along the sidewalk. The internal crash alarm went off, half deafening an already dazed Loemer, and the emergency side hatch jettisoned. Loemer’s bubble seat slid out along its telescoping rails. The translucent bubble’s thick safety-restraint segments peeled back, allowing him to drop, wailing, to his knees as the air around him spewed out a terrible volley of sense overload impulses. His neural nanonics were unable to datavise a shutdown code into the crazed assault mechanoids. The last thing he saw as he fell onto the ground was the ruined Regree tree starting to keel over directly above him.
Even Al was bruised by the wild strafing of the sense-overload ordnance. The manic glee as he watched the patrol cars skid and smash was swiftly curtailed by the onslaught of light, sound, and smell. His energistic ability could ward off the worst of it, but he turned and began a stumbling run towards the arcade’s entrance. Behind him the assault mechanoids continued to deluge the street with their errant firepower, lumbering about like drunks. Two ran into each other, and rebounded, falling over. Legs thrashed about in chaos, beetles flipped on their backs.
The sidewalk was littered with prone bodies. Not dead, Al thought, just terribly battered. Je-zus but those mechanical soldier contraptions were nasty pieces of work. And unlike real police, you wouldn’t be able to buy them.
Maybe New California wasn’t quite paradise after all.
Al staggered his way along the arcade, caught up in the flow of people desperate to escape the havoc. His suit faded away, the sharp colour and cut reverting to Lovegrove’s original drab overall.
He picked up a little girl whose eyes were streaming tears and carried her. It felt good to help. Those goddamn brainless pigs should have made sure she was out of the way before they came at him with guns blazing. It would never have happened back in Chicago.
Two hundred yards from the arcade entrance he stopped among a group of anxious, exhausted people. They’d come far enough from the sense-overload ordnance to be free of its effects. Families clung together, others were calling out for friends and loved ones.
Al put the little girl down, still crying, which he thought was due to the Kaiser gas rather than any kind of injury. Then her mother came rushing up and hugged her frantically. Al was given profuse thanks. A nice dame. Cared about her children and family. That was good, proper. He was sorry he wasn’t wearing his fedora so he could tip it to her.
Just how did people express that kind of formal courtesy on this world anyhow? Lovegrove was puzzled by the question.
He carried on down the arcade. Cops would be swarming all over the joint in a few minutes. Another hundred and fifty yards, and he was out on the street again. He started walking. Direction didn’t matter, just away. This time he kept Lovegrove’s overalls on. No one paid him any attention.
Al wasn’t entirely sure what to do next. Everything was so strange. This world, his situation. Mind, strange wasn’t the word for it, more like overwhelming. Or just plain creepy. Bad to think that the priests had been right about the afterworld, heaven and hell. He never went to church much, much to his momma’s distress.
I wonder if I’ve been redeemed, paid my celestial dues. Is that why I’m back? But if you got reincarnated didn’t you start off as a baby?
They weren’t the kind of thoughts he was used to.
A hotel, he told Lovegrove, I need to rest up and think about what to do.
Most of the skyscrapers had some sort of rentable accommodation, apparently. But it would have to be paid for.
Al’s hand automatically went to a leg pocket. He drew out a Jovian Bank credit disk, a thick, oversize coin, sparkly silver on one side, magenta on the other. Lovegrove obediently explained how it worked, and Al put his thumb on the centre. A hash of green lines wobbled over the silver side.
The green lines began to form figures, crude at first, then sharp and regular. You could store an entire planet’s treasury in one of these disks, Lovegrove told him. Al’s ears pricked up at that. Then he was aware of something being not quite right. A presence, close by.
He hadn’t really thought about the others. Those who had been there when he came into Lovegrove’s body. The same ones who had deserted him in the disused shop. But if he closed his eyes, and shut out the sounds of the city, he could hear the distant babelesque clamour. It came from the nightmare domain, the pleas and promises to be brought forth, to live and breathe again.
That same perception gave him a most peculiar vision of the city. Walls of thick black shadow amid a universal greyness. People moved through it all, distorted whispers echoing all around, audible ghosts. Some different from others. Louder, clearer. Not many of them among the multitude.
Al opened his eyes and looked down the road. A section of the barrier was folding down neatly. One of the bullet cars drew to a halt beside it. The gull-wing door slid up, and inside was a proper car, a genuine American convertible wearing the streamlined image of the New California vehicle like a piece of clothing. It was low-slung, with a broad hood and lots of chrome trim. Al didn’t recognize the model, it was more modern than anything in the twenties, and his memory of the thirties and forties wasn’t so hot.
The man in the red leather driving seat nodded amicably. “You’d better get in,” he said. “The cops are going to catch you if you stay out on the street. They’re a mite worked up about us.”
Al glanced up and down the sidewalk, then shrugged and climbed in.
Inside, the image of the bullet car tinted the air like a stained soap bubble.
“The name’s Bernhard Allsop,” the man behind the steering column said. He swung the car out into the road. Behind them the barrier rose up smoothly. “I always wanted me an Oldsmobile like this beauty, never could afford it back when I was living in Tennessee.”
“And this is real now?”
The Night's Dawn Trilogy Page 134
