Pet Noir

by Katharine Kerr

  For a moment Mulligan is delighted that she would defend him; then it occurs to him that he probably should be defending himself. Feeling more like a pet dog than ever he follows them as they set off down the cracked runway, pointing like an arrow into the heart of the Rat Yard.

  “Someone will see we’ve arrived,” Carol remarks. “The Ratters always keep up a good guard, and some of’em have learned to watch for me. There’s one donna here named Del, and she got a niño name of J.J. She usually shows up every time I come. Nothing like mother love to overcome paranoia, I guess.”

  “A baby?” Lacey sounds genuinely shocked. “Will it be okay?”

  “Who knows, man? It’s healthy enough now. I think if she thought it—he—was going to die or even get real sick, she’d give him to me to take back to the city.”

  “I dunt mean his health. I mean, what he’s going to be like mentally after growing up out here?”

  Carol merely shrugs with a rustle of reflec to admit her lack of a prognosis.

  “Who’s the father?” Mulligan says.

  “This big Blanco they call John Hancock. His name’s some kind of joke, I think, but I wouldn’t laugh at him. He looks like he could twist someone’s head off with one hand.”

  “Oh jeez,” Lacey says. “What do these people live on, anyway?”

  “I’m no totally sure. They hunt rats. Sometimes they trade stuff to the rehydro gang. They find artifacts in the rubble from the old colony days, and those are pretty valuable. Some of’em grow things in the ravines where there’s a little water. But even all that no is enough. Like I say, they no tell me their secrets. I did get the City Council to pop for vitamin-mineral supplements, though.”

  “Job and a half,” Lacey mutters.

  “You bet. Pols—a bunch of selfish bastards all of’em. Oh well, I got to have someone to bully. That’s why I took this project on. Without any med techs to push around, my retirement was getting super boring.”

  Hearing Carol talk so matter-of-factly about her self-imposed mission of keeping these crazies alive and as healthy as she can plunges Mulligan into an orgy of guilt. What’s he ever done for anybody, besides his high school baseball coach? The question makes him want a drink, especially since he’s sweating inside his sun cloak and his hangover is threatening to return. He finds himself walking slower and slower until he’s trailing about five meters behind as they pick their way through broken appliances, junked skimmers, indistinguishable packing material, and the occasional heap of fresh garbage.

  All at once he realizes that he can no longer see or hear the two women, that not only is he alone but he’s also no longer in the Rat Yard. He’s up high in mountains of a type he’s never known, the slopes covered with tall green plants that he recognizes as trees from the holos he’s seen of Old Earth. Down below him in a gorge a wide river runs silver over rocks, and when he looks up he can see higher peaks capped with a white substance that he assumes is snow. The sunlight is all wrong, too, a pale yellow-white. When he steps back from the edge of the precipice, he hears someone cough politely behind him and turns to find an old man leaning on a tall, crooked stick.

  “Buenos dias,” Mulligan says, because he can’t think of anything else. “Nice view, huh?”

  The old man smiles, then vanishes, turning transparent first, then melting away. All at once Mulligan realizes that he’s having a vision.

  “Damn it, Lacey might need me. I no can stay here.”

  Since the vision refuses to break, Lacey or no Lacey, he decides to walk on, heading downhill away from the precipice. The farther he goes the faster the sun begins to set, until at last he comes to a flat plain or meadow—it’s hard to see how big it is in the purple twilight—with a stream running through it, clear water, trickling over rock with a pleasant little sound. In something like awe he kneels down, scoops up a handful, and drinks. Although it tastes clear and cold, he knows the moment he swallows it that he shouldn’t have tasted it, that he’s now condemned to wander here forever, under the watchful eye of the old woman who suddenly appears, kneeling beside him, patting him on the face, then trickling still more rancid-tasting liquid into his mouth from an old cracked cup.

  “He’s coming round now, Doctor Carol. See? He’s coming round. Old Meg knows what to do.”

  The woman certainly looks old, with her face lined like a crumpled grocery sack, the pouches under her eyes as big as thorn tree nuts and her skin just as dark. Her gray hair winds round her head in a thin, greasy braid. Just beyond her shoulder he can see Carol, hovering anxiously with a syringe in her hand.

  “Lacey?” he whispers.

  “I’m right here.”

  Then he realizes that she is sitting next to him on a lumpy, stinking pile of cushions and holding his hand. That she would hold his hand, that she would look at him in such sincere concern makes this whole miserable trip to the Rat Yard worthwhile.

  “Mulligan, you feel okay?” Carol says. “I can give you a shot if you need it.”

  “He no needs your shot, Doctor Carol,” Meg says, sucking stumps of teeth. “I brought him round.”

  “Well, yeah.” Mulligan tries sitting up and finds it easy. “Sure did.”

  “Least I could do, boy. Caught you in the cards, I did. Sorry bout that. Dint mean to catch anyone in my cards. I was just looking, that’s all.”

  Lacey and Carol both arrange fixed smiles.

  “What cards?” Mulligan says. “Can I see?”

  “Can you see?” Meg laughs, a pathetic attempt at an arch giggle. “I can bring’em out, sure enough, but I dunt know if you can see or not.”

  When she gets up and shuffles away, Mulligan realizes that they are in a hut, dug out some three feet below the ground and roofed with a patchwork conglomeration of junk and chunks of plastocrete slabs. The cushions he is sitting on were obviously scavenged at one time from scrapped skimmers; there is a cooking stove of sorts made out of a big metal drum.

  Meg herself is dressed in several loose layers of rags, all filthy. She opens a battered hard foam carton while Lacey and Carol watch in utter bewilderment.

  “When we get back to town,” Carol whispers. “I’m going to get a good look at you, boy.”

  “Lay off.” Mulligan is surprised at how good talking back feels. “Just lay off.”

  Before Carol can snap at him, Meg comes back. Although the bundle she’s carrying is wrapped in a dirty, decaying undershirt, Mulligan sees—in a visionary sense, that is—power streaming from it like waves of light. When he reaches for it Meg snatches it away.

  “You no touch’em, white boy. I said you could look. Dint say you could touch.”

  “Sorry. I’m real sorry. Course I won’t.”

  With a grunt of satisfaction she kneels down again and unwraps the bundle to reveal what looks like a pack of playing cards, all greasy and well-thumbed.

  “Tear oh,” Meg says. “These are super old, boy, and they’re called tear oh cards. They come from Old Earth.”

  With a riffle like an expert gambler she shuffles the cards and reforms the deck, then sets it firmly down on the bit of old canvas that stands her for a rug.

  “Well, maybe you can cut’em if you want,” she says with an almost flirtatious wink at Mulligan. “Just about in half.”

  Reluctantly he lets go of Lacey’s hand. When he reaches for the deck he realizes that his hand is shaking, as if he’s afraid that the cards will burn him. With a little toss of his head he cuts the deck exactly in half, and Meg giggles again, a screechy parody of a young girl. She turns the cut upward and shows him his vision with him in it: a white-haired young man stands at the edge of a precipice in the high mountains.

  “But there no was no dog with me,” Mulligan says, pointing to what seems to be a spaniel under a smudge of dirt.

  “No? You sure, boy?”

  All at once Mulligan remembers that he himself is the dog, or so he’d been thinking just before the vision began.

  “You’re right. It was there.”
>
  “Thought so.”

  Lacey and Carol exchange such a startled glance that Mulligan realizes they’re frightened. Since he isn’t, he feels briefly smug. Meg restores the cut and begins dealing the full deck into four packs face down, the cards whispering as they slide, greased, over one another. Once she’s done she turns over the top card on each pack, starting from her right and going to the left. On top of the second pack is the pale young man again, but this time he’s riding a horse by a vast body of water—an ocean, Mulligan supposes.

  “That’s you.” Meg lays a bony finger on the rider. “Your trouble is Love, ain’t it?” Next she points to the card to its right, ten long sticks crossed in the middle. “Never did amount to much, did you, boy? Always losing before you could even start playing.” To the left of the blond rider is a peculiar figure indeed: a goat-headed man squatting on some kind of stone with a pair of naked humans in front of him. Meg hesitates, then skips on to the last pack, topped by five old-fashioned coins. “You’re never going to have money of your own, neither, unless you marry it.”

  When she starts to sweep up the cards, Mulligan grabs her wrist and hangs on even when she yelps and tries to twist away.

  “Who’s the dude on the stone, Meg? You’ve got to tell me.”

  “Dunt want to. You let me go, white boy! Doctor Carol, make him let me go!”

  When Carol starts forward Lacey gets up, moving fast, and blocks the way with a warning toss of her head. Mulligan gives Meg another shake.

  “You got to tell me!”

  “He’s the Devil. There—now I said it, and we’re all in real trouble now.” Her voice drops to a whisper, and she leans forward, suddenly friendly and conspiratorial. “They killed him, you see. About two days ago now, I guess. John Hancock and the Wild Man and Blue-Beak Bizzer. They seen him crawling along, and they killed him. Smashed his head in, and it stank to high heaven, Wild Man tells me. They buried him, too. Buried the Devil!” She begins to laugh. “Ain’t that a good joke, white boy? Burying the Devil?”

  With a grunt Mulligan lets her go and sits back, letting her sweep up the cards and begin a slow ritual of wrapping them just so. Although he can hear Lacey and Carol whispering together in what sounds like excitement, he can’t take his eyes off the greasy pack.

  “Find your own,” Meg snaps. “You no can have mine.”

  “I’d never steal’em, but I no mind admitting I sure do, like, want a pack.”

  “Good luck. Like I say, they come from Old Earth. No can be a lot of them left, but you got to find your own. Hear me? No can have mine!”

  Since he can see that she’s growing agitated, Mulligan forces himself to stop staring and gets up, suddenly aware of his head aching with a dull throb at the base of his skull. Lacey and Carol are both watching at him with mingled admiration and concern.

  “Vamos,” he says to them. “Meg, thanks.”

  “Welcome. Maybe it was a good thing, me catching you in my cards. I sure do feel sorry for the Devil’s wife, losing her old man that way.”

  Grabbing his sun cloak from the floor, Mulligan climbs out of the hut, not so much because he wants to go as because he knows that Meg will start getting paranoid about her cards if he stays. It’s obvious to him that she’s a very strong psychic who merely happens to be stark raving mad; she knows perfectly well that he covets that deck of cards in a way he’s never wanted anything before, not even the four hundred year old baseball signed by Willy Mays that he once saw in an exhibit in the Polar City art museum. Utterly distracted, he walks away in a hurry, navigating almost blindly through the rubble until Lacey yells at him. Obediently he stops to let the women catch up to him, but he is thinking of antique shops that might have a pack of those tear oh cards and wondering how he can possibly get the bucks to pay for them since he’s already had to sell everything of value that he ever owned.

  oOo

  Although she hates to admit it to herself, Lacey is genuinely worried about Mulligan. She’s seen him go into trances before, but never while walking. She glanced back once, saw him coming along after them, then looked back not two minutes later to see him lying on the ground and Old Meg crawling out of her underground hut to snatch him like a prize. From what she could follow of the conversation after Mulligan came round, she assumes that somehow or other Meg made him faint, but by mistake. She decides to wait until they get back to Polar City to question him, and after he’s had a chance to rest, too.

  “Carol, think we should take Mulligan straight home?”

  “Ah, he’s tougher than he looks. Besides, it’s pretty damn obvious to me that this devil character has something to do with the leg Little Joe found.”

  “Yeah, I kind of drew the same conclusion.” Lacey’s brought a crude sketch map of part of the Rat Yard along with her. She gets the map out of her shirt pocket, then brings it out through the arm-slit in the cloak so that Mulligan and Carol can see it. “Little Joe’s no artist, but it’s pretty clear that he walked in on the southern road right here. Since he was running hell-bent for leather from the police speeders, he’s no sure exactly how far he went, but after Sally and Ibrahim got him out, he took a good look round and saw this broken tower about twenty meters away. We ought to find this pit of his pretty easy.”

  “Easy?” Carol snarls. “I no believe that any of this is going to be easy. You’re the one who keeps telling me how dangerous everything is.”

  “Well, yeah, you’re right.” Lacey pats her cloak, approximately over her heart. “I got my officer’s service laser with me, and it’s fully charged.”

  “Oh jeez!” Carol rolls her eyes heavenwards. “Just don’t go drumming up any business for me, will you? Between here and Porttown, I got enough hardship cases already.”

  In this part of the Yard, big slabs of pale gray plastocrete rise out of the ground at odd angles, and tumbled faux-brick walls lie in long moraines. Since there’s always the possibility of a cave-in from a hidden cellar, they go slowly, Carol in the lead, Lacey bringing up the rear with one hand inside her cloak near her laser pistol. She keeps her eyes moving, turns constantly, looking for other Ratters who might be less hospitable than Old Meg. If this unlovely trio, John Hancock, the Wild Man, and Blue-Beak Bizzer, happens along, she doesn’t want her party mistaken for the Devil’s minions.

  After about a kilometer they top a small rise and see below them the broken tower, a jagged rise of white plastocrete that once was probably a signal tower for shuttle landings. Even after over a hundred years of bleaching sun and scouring winds Lacey can still pick out a cryptic inscription painted in letters two meters high: part of an N, an A, an S, and part of another A. Those particular letters appear all through the Republic on ruins and antiques; probably some scholar somewhere knows what they mean.

  “Okay.” Lacey pulls out the map again. “There’s the tower, so the pit ought to be to the south over there—yeah, hey, look—you can see it.”

  Right next to a two-meter pile of old plastofoam packing material gapes the dark hole, some three meters across. They approach cautiously, testing the ground with each step forward, but the surface holds. At the edge of the pit Lacey flops onto her stomach and peers in.

  “I bet someone else’s been here since Little Joe. I can see gonzo tracks, and the rubble’s been piled even higher. I’m going to go down, guys. You stay here to pull me out.”

  Before either of them can object she sits up and slides down, landing on the convenient rubble-heap with a bounce and spray of minor garbage. She takes out her laser pistol in the spirit of better safe than sorry, then jumps down and begins prowling around. The smell guides her, a vinegar-sharp rot hanging in the air about where Little Joe found the leg, if leg it was. Now that corner is empty, the ground obviously swept clean and packed down, ringed by long but narrow oval prints—a hand, patting down the dirt? a foot, walking round a grave? Embedded into the dirt near the wall of the pit is a plastocrete slab with symbols burned into it by some kind of beamer.

  �
�Omigawd,” Lacey says. “They’ve murdered a sentient.”

  “Think we ought to dig the poor bastard up again?” Carol is on her hands and knees at the edge of the pit.

  “Nah. We’ve got to let the federales know and let them do it legal.”

  “Lacey, get out of there!” Mulligan’s voice is almost a shout, sharp and urgent. “Get out now! The eaters are there! They’re going to get you. Oh please, get out of there!”

  “What? You picking something up?”

  “Hell yeah! Lacey...”

  “Okay, man, okay! Be cool, will you? Help me up.”

  Between the rubble and Carol’s strong hands it’s easy for Lacey to flip herself back up to solid ground even in the enveloping folds of the sun cloak. She brushes off the worst of the dirt while she considers Mulligan, who is dead-white and shaking.

  “Now, what’s all this noise about eaters?”

  “Dunt know. There’s a mind down there, man, a real weird one, like, some kind of animal, not a sentient.” He pauses to run trembling hands through his hair. “I’ve blocked it now, but man! it creeped me out. Y’know? Eating, eating, eating—all it thinks about, if you can even call it thinking.”

  With one last shudder he turns away and walks a few paces back toward the skimmer. Lacey thinks hard, chewing on her lower lip. By rights she should call the police the minute she gets home, but they may well ask awkward questions, for instance, how she knew there was a corpse there in the first place. All at once she hears Mulligan sob aloud.

  “Oh for chrissake,” Carol snarls. “What’s bugging you now?”

  Mulligan flips the helmet away from his face and settles to the ground under the folds of the cloak like a parachute hitting the earth. Even though she can’t see him, Lacey can hear him crying and steps back in a sudden fit of cold helplessness. With a visible effort Carol controls her dislike and kneels down next to him.

  “Hey, man, come on, tell me. I’m sorry I snapped at you. What’s wrong? You tired? You’ve been through a hell of a lot today.”

  “No my pain.” His muffled voice is thick with tears. “Whoever buried that dude loved him a whole damn lot.”