Pet Noir

by Katharine Kerr

  oOo

  Since everyone in the less-respectable parts of Polar City knows that Lacey is always willing to pay for interesting data, she’s not surprised when Little Joe Walker turns up at the warehouse with the remark that he’s had something real peculiar happen to him. By then, round about midnight, Mulligan has managed to roll off the couch and work his way in a fit of bad dreams into the corner; Lacey considers waking him up and making him go into another room, but since Little Joe is willing to ignore him she decides to leave him there, curled around the pillow in his arms with his head at a twist-neck angle like a sleeping cat. She can tell from the fast and choppy way he talks that Little Joe is sincerely upset, and once she’s heard the story, she agrees that peculiar is one of the better words for it.

  “But c’mon, man.” Lacey leans back in her chair and swings her feet up onto her desk. “If you thought something was going to come out of the earth after you, you must’ve had some reason. You’re no the kind of dude who just gives in to fantasies.”

  “Gracias.” He sounds sincerely grateful. “I was beginning to wonder about myself, down there.”

  “Ah man, anyone would get creeped out, stuck in a hole with the federales buzzing round and part of a corpse—well, I guess it qualifies as a corpse, if it was wearing a chrono or something like that. But come on, think. Try and see it all again.”

  Little Joe bites into an apple and settles himself on the sofa while he considers the problem. With the keyboard in her lap she punches up input and opens a new file for Little Joe’s story. Buddy flashes her an on-screen message.

  “We are remaining silent? Is there a sentient in the room?”

  “Yes. He is a friend, but not a completely trustworthy friend.”

  “Understood. Ready for input.”

  While Little Joe thinks, she types in half a page of data, a bare description of his adventure up to his panic-stricken attempts to get out of the pit.

  “Got it! You’re right, Lacey. Right by the leg, y’know? The dirt was all soft, like maybe it’d been dug up and then smoothed down again.”

  “Thought so.”

  “Look. I found this gonzo thing out there, too.”

  When he hands over the box, Lacey studies it for a long time, but the markings mean nothing to her. She slides it into the slot in her desk that connects with Buddy’s visual sensors, then hits the keyboard.

  “Define embossed characters as meaningful writing. Search, identify, and translate. Define function of artifact.”

  For a long moment Buddy hums and whistles.

  “Commands impossible. I have no data with which to obey.”

  “None, Buddy?”

  “Not one byte, programmer. I can make the following logical deductions. This artifact is alien. It comes from an advanced technology, but one that is still using silicon chips as part of its comptech. Its owner is of a race previously unknown to us. It—”

  “That’s enough. I can make such deductions on my own. Please go into waiting mode. I have to do some more dealing with the sentient in the room.”

  During all this Little Joe is watching her with an anticipatory greed.

  “Kind of interesting, huh?” he says.

  “Kind of. What do you want for it?”

  “Depends on what it is.”

  “Buddy no can tell us a damn thing.”

  “Oh.” Little Joe looks briefly worried. “Uh, you think this thing is dangerous?”

  “I no trust it, no.”

  “Neither do I. Look, Lacey, everyone knows you play straight. Can I like leave it with you on credit? I mean, you pay me for it if you want it when you figure out what it is.”

  “That way if it blows up it’ll be in my face, not yours, right?”

  “Hey, I dint mean it that way!”

  “Yeah, sure, but I’ll keep it anyway. In the meantime, Nunks just bottled some fresh cider.”

  “Yeah? Say, if I could maybe get a gallon of that for telling you the story...

  “Sounds good to me, amigo. And thanks.”

  Lacey takes him downstairs and pays him off, then comes back up to find Mulligan awake, sitting up in his corner and rubbing his face.

  “You okay?”

  “I no savvy yet. Jeez, I just had the lousiest rotten dream. Someone was beating me to death, like smashing me up with these big sticks.”

  “Oh yeah? Who?”

  “I no savvy. I no could see’em clear, but they were like weird, with these slug kind of faces, all squishy, and they were wearing gonzo clothes.”

  “Humans?”

  “Two were, but one was a lizzie and like real nasty.”

  When he looks up she sees that his eyes are red and puffy, and the rest of his face, a peculiar sallow color.

  “You want to take a shower?”

  “Jeez, can I? I’d, like, really appreciate it. The old sonocleaner just no is the same, y’know.”

  “Yeah, you look like you could use some hot water. But I warn you, I got the housekeeping comp set up to measure it out. No long rinses. Okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll be a good boy.”

  Alternately yawning and swearing Mulligan pries himself up off the floor, then merely stands there for a moment, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “I got a clean shirt of yours, that one you left here last time you drank yourself blind.”

  “Thanks. That’ll be swell.” He looks up with the ready grin that turns his asymmetrical face handsome. “I’m real grateful, y’know.”

  “Yeah? Well, I guess you’re welcome.” She stifles the answering smile she feels threatening to bloom. “You’ve been here often enough to find yourself a clean towel.”

  While Mulligan is taking his shower, she has Buddy do an optiscan on the box and print out a drawing of the mysterious characters. There are six of them in all: a thickly-drawn right angle intersecting a thin half-circle; another with the right angle perched by its point on top of the half circle; then one formed of two elaborate squiggles like three-headed snakes mating; the same two squiggles separated by a few millimeters; and a final pair, two squared-off spirals winding in opposite directions.

  “Three pair, huh? I wonder if they signify off and on, or stop and go.”

  “A reasonable guess, programmer. They are also simple symbols.”

  “Right. So easy a hatchling could use it. Maybe. At any rate, some sentient with a pair of pincers on the end of each arm could push on them easy enough. Or they just could be a name. Big Buzz’s patented chitin polisher.” She puts it away in the top drawer of the desk. “Put a lock on this drawer, Buddy.”

  “Command completed. Force-field on. Do you think this box is a valuable object?”

  “I don’t know. Better safe than sorry, that’s all.”

  oOo

  The feel of hot water and real soap is so luxurious that it wipes Mulligan’s hangover away. To Mulligan, his mind is a place, as concrete and solid as the streets of Polar City, though quite a bit larger. Using any mental ability, ordinary memory, say, as well as his psionic talents, involves walking to the right place in his mind and using the tools he finds there. To read a person’s past life, for instance, he always pictures himself walking down a long dark corridor to a door marked “Archives.” Inside the room are millions of data cubes, but he only has to think of the person whose reading he’s doing to have the correct cube appear in his hand. He can then sit down at a viewer and insert the cube, but he sees nothing so prosaic as words on the screen. At that point, the untrained part of his talent takes over, and he finds himself watching events and persons as if in a dream.

  So it is with the hangover. He experiences pain as a solid thing in his mind, a long sliver of glass, say, and when he gains control of such a pain, he feels as if he’s physically picked it up and pulled it out. (Unfortunately the trick is sometimes beyond him; the strength of his talents seems to wax and wane by some mysterious law of its own.) This morning he saw the hangover as a lot of garbage floating around his mind, and th
e shower has—to him quite literally—washed it all down the drain along with the last remnants of the turquoise hair color. In relief he’s whistling to himself as he borrows Lacey’s brush and combs out his shaggy hair, as pale as dead grass and just as wild with neither color wax nor pomade in it. Without their contact lenses his eyes are gray. Like most Blanco men, he long ago had the hair on his face permanently removed. Reluctantly he puts his dirty shorts back on, (he never has the money to buy underwear,) and wanders into Lacey’s bedroom to find his clean shirt. The room is spartan bare: a narrow bed, covered with a gray blanket so smoothly tucked in that you could bounce a coin off it, a chest of drawers, also gray, and a closet, the door always neatly shut. The only wall decoration is the saber from her dress uniform, hung casually from a nail. He finds his shirt, this one plain white with a couple of rips in the back, on a hook on the back of the closet door, puts it on, then stands there for a moment looking at her clothes. He gently strokes a couple of her shirts just because they lie next to her skin. With a sigh he turns away, leaving the closet door open behind him and his dirty shirt on the floor.

  As he goes down the hall he hears voices in Lacey’s room, hers, Buddy’s, and then another woman’s—Carol. He stops where he is and considers hiding in the bathroom until she’s gone, but since Carol is Lacey’s best friend—they served in the Fleet together—she’s likely to stay for hours, and the bathroom is very small. Bracing himself he walks on, striding into the room as if he had every right to be there. Since she is still wearing her pale blue medic’s pants-suit, Carol must have come straight from work, and she sprawls on the couch as if she’s tired. She’s a tall woman, strong enough to turn a recalcitrant patient over by force if she has to, and her black hair falls to her shoulders in a cascade of dreadlocks and beads around her dark brown face. She glances at Mulligan with profound disgust, as if he were a new species of intestinal parasite.

  “Hanging round here again, are you? It must be time for dinner.”

  Mulligan forces out a weak smile and sits down on the floor in the corner near Lacey’s desk. He suddenly realizes that he’s just acted like a pet dog, but it’s too late to move because Carol has also picked up the resemblance.

  “Jeez, Lacey, if you want a puppy I can buy you one for your birthday.”

  “Ah, lay off him, will you!” But Lacey is smiling at the joke as she turns his way. “How’s your hangover?”

  “Gone,” he snaps. He doesn’t want his drinking discussed in front of Carol’s big ears. “I no got that hung over anyway. I’ll run a couple of kilometers later and feel fine.”

  “Good. After dinner you’re coming with us to the Rat Yard.”

  “Where?! Are you like out of your mind?”

  “Nah. Oh yeah, I forgot. You dint hear Little Joe’s story yet. Listen up. This could be real important.”

  oOo

  The long night is already stretching toward dawn when Sally Pharis reaches her usual stand, a very expensive bar not too far from Civic Center. Already the work night is winding down; pols and business executives are drifting in for a quick drink and a last important conversation before heading home. Near the back, in a tasteful gray silk mini-dress and thigh-high black boots, Sally perches on a barstool, sips mineral water, and watches Ibrahim pouring drinks for a class of men and women who would be insulted to be served by a machine. Her regular customers (and those they recommend,) know that this is one of the places they can find her if they’re interested in the special kind of excitements Sally can provide. In the vast mirror behind the bar she can just see her reflection through the ranks of bottles and siphons and cranes her neck to get a good view of her new hair-do: a sleek roll just lightly frosted with royal blue highlights on top of her natural blonde. Unlike many Blancas in her line of work, she’s made no effort to darken her skin or dye her hair black; she’s found that paleness has its own exotic appeal to a certain kind of man.

  The usual crowd dresses conservatively, gray or dark blue knee-length shorts, precisely pleated or creased, crisp white or light blue shirts of the sort that button up the front rather than pull over. Here and there she even sees an older sentient stubbornly wearing a vest or a necktie in spite of the summer weather. The nicely muscled blond Blanco in the maroon jumpsuit, therefore, strikes a discordant note the minute he strolls through the revolving glass door. Sally watches with a certain anxiety as Ibrahim waves him over for a small lecture. The fellow looks like a spacer, and drunken spacers have been known to trash high-class bars in simple fits of pique at being ordered to leave them. After a few words, though, Ibrahim relaxes, even smiles, as the spacer orders a glass of water and stands back out of the way in a dark corner. Apparently he’s sober enough to play by the rules.

  Sally finds herself wondering about him, simply because he has such a good body so well displayed by his clothes. He also looks very vaguely familiar, on the order of someone met once a long time ago. He glances idly around the bar, his eyes pausing often on a young woman, then looks her way—and keeps looking with a wondering sort of tilt to his head. Ibrahim talks to him briefly, then hurries down to her.

  “Hey, got you a john.”

  “The spacer? You’re kidding.”

  “Nah. He’s just back from the Rock Belt, and he got bucks. About six months worth of pay, I bet. That’s the usual, anyway.”

  “Okay. He might be a fun change. He got quite a body.”

  When Ibrahim looks hurt, she pats his hand.

  “Nothing personal, gordito. You’ve got other kinds of things to offer.”

  She takes her handbag and, with her eyes cast down and a demure little smile, walks over to the spacer, who watches her the whole way down.

  oOo

  The police staff hypnotist, Linda Jefferson, is a middle-aged Blanca, a bit thick around the middle, who wears her adamantly dyed red hair up in a towering chignon held together with hair spray—the better to gain her subjects’ attention, maybe, Chief Bates thinks to himself. In her dimly-lit office she sits on a straight-backed chair in front of Corporal Ward, who lounges comfortably on a sofa. Soft music, a featureless whisper of synthesized strings, blocks any noise from the hall. Bates turns on a three-dee recorder and takes a chair to one side of them as she pulls a crystal droplet on a gold chain from the shirt pocket of her uniform.

  “Okay, chief, dunt you look at the focus crystal, or you’ll end up going under with him. Ward, did you sign the official release already?”

  “Sure. This is only a memory aid, anyway.” He turns to the chief. “I know I must’ve looked at that woman on the Plaza, but I sure no can remember anything about her.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” Linda’s voice is soothing, like a favorite aunt who’s offering to intercede with his parents on some sore issue. “You just relax now, corporal; sit back and look at the spinning crystal.”

  In a few minutes Ward is completely under. Except for a certain slackness to his mouth and eyes, and a certain mechanical quality to his voice, he seems completely awake as Jefferson slowly, one step at a time, takes him back to the moment when he was leaning against the library wall and hearing footsteps made by high-heeled boots slap across the Plaza.

  “It’s still nice and cool,” he says in an oddly prim voice. “Nothing’s happening yet. Oh, the lights are going on now. Yeah, there she is, and she’s sure in a hurry.”

  “What does she look like, corporal? Can you see her?”

  “Yeah, she’s tall and looks like she works out a lot. She’s wearing blue jeans and a gray blouse—no, maybe it’s lavender, I forgot about the arc lights—but it’s got folds all down the front. And high-heeled boots. Wait—I know her. It’s Sally Pharis. I arrested her once. The case never came to trial because—”

  “It no that case that matters, amigo.” Jefferson’s voice is slower, softer than before, like syrup across a cold plate. “You sure it’s Sally? The light’s no very good, y’know. You’ve got to be sure—real sure.”

  Ward’s face screws
up in exaggerated concentration.

  “Well, I’m no court-worthy sure. But it sure as hell looks like Sally.”

  “That’s enough to go on for now,” Bates breaks in. “We’ll haul her in and have a little chat with her. Bring him round, will you? He’s taking the sergeant’s exam in a couple of hours.”

  Once Ward is on his way to the cafeteria in the police station for some dinner and a little last-minute cramming, Bates takes the tape of the hypno session down to Data to check it in. The excited clerk has some news for him: the team that was scouring the area has found, about ten blocks from the murder site, a single man’s or male lizzie’s brown boot with a splash of carli blood across one toe.

  “Is the lab done analyzing it yet?”

  “Nah, chief. They just brought it in.”

  “You route the results up to my comp as soon as you get’em.”

  “Yessir. No problem.”

  Bates returns to his office, a stuffy cubicle on the third floor that sports three chairs, a comp desk, and a set of storage shelves crammed with data cubes, paper files, and holograms from old cases. A privilege of his high rank, a water cooler stands in one corner. Bates pours himself a tall glass of imported spring water and sits down, leaning back in the swivel chair and contemplating the view out the long windows. Between two tall, pale green buildings the Plaza spreads out, bright and bustling under the crackling, pulsing sky. He suspects that he’s in for a long day of it, but then, he’s used to working till noon, catching a siesta in the worst of the afternoon’s heat, and getting back on the job by an hour after sunset. Ever since his wife left him, just eight months ago now, he’s had nothing to go home to. For a few minutes he sits there, wondering whatever possessed him, to take her to a backwards planet like Hagar that lacks all the automated luxury she was used to. How in hell did he ever think it was going to work? After twenty years he should have known that if Leona was missing one thing, it was the pioneer spirit. With a shake of his head he shoves the grief away and turns to the problem of Sally Pharis.