Authors: Maurice G. Dantec
“Where do you want me to go?”
“Sleep here tonight, and tomorrow morning you’ll go—
we’ll
go, I mean—to get your things from the capsule. In the meantime, let’s say I’ll gather the investigative team we’ll need to find your friend.”
Decisions have to be made. They need an immediate plan of action. He will have to call on Chrysler Campbell and Yuri McCoy. They need to gain the upper hand on the night-desert and its creatures, and fast.
“And the man that came looking for me?”
Pluto Saint-Clair does not answer. This man, too—yes—this stranger from who knows where in Junkville—this man who already knows much too much—this man who is yet unaware of its importance—he will deliver him to the two young traffickers from Omega Blocks. Whatever he has come seeking from the Professor, this man will find nothing but death. The death that reigns all over this world.
Dawn, slate blue, spreads its icy glaze over all light, all matter, all darkness.
Through the plastic window of Chrysler’s tiny house, built by his parents from various bits of debris from the Airbus and a few pieces of a standard Combi-Cube, Yuri McCoy contemplates the western edge of the
territory; the hills marking the Ontario border form a purple wave, their rocky crests glowing gently pale in the eastern light, like sea foam frozen for an instant at the summit of a wave about to crash on the shore.
There are still a few vestigial stars in the sky; he even thinks he can see several groups of the particular sparks whose cold, metallic light indicates the presence of the Orbital Ring above them.
Chrysler has just woken him up, not rudely but with military strictness.
There are new cases. Again. Always.
“Tea, as usual?” Chrysler asks, going into the tiny monobloc kitchen.
Yuri notes that he prepares a full samovar; the question was purely formal, a few words of welcome on the threshold of a day that promises to be special. He moves to the center of the room, where an antique plastic camping table is surrounded by airplane seats. As he does so, he gives a mechanical rap to the punching bag suspended midway between floor and ceiling by a heavy chain, hanging above a thick blue tatami mat worn by thousands of falls. He knows this leather bag well; Chrysler brought it from the Surveyor Plateau MMA school years ago. They train with the bag regularly; it was here that Chrysler showed him how to kill a man with a single blow of his fist, here that he told him the best-kept secrets of Russian and Israeli military martial arts.
It is with this bag that Chrysler has lavishly imparted everything he knows.
It is here that Yuri joined the very elite club of those who can deal death with a smile.
“You were sleeping like a rock when she called me. There are two cases at Surveyor Plateau; they developed yesterday. She also confirmed that there have been some new ones since last month on X-15, in Ontario.”
“Your usual informant?”
“Yes.”
“I meant, which one? Old Nora Network, or that young Ethiopian gazelle you regularly screw on Surveyor?”
“Be nice, young idiot. My usual informant is Nora Network. You know I never mix business with sentiment.”
“Sentiment. What a lovely word choice you’ve made there, Chrysler.”
“Don’t act like a Jesuit with me, please.”
“The Jesuits disappeared a long time ago. They were replaced by much better missionaries when UHU came to power.”
Chrysler Campbell half smiles and sighs. “Fine. So you must know I didn’t blast you awake immediately at dawn just because I found out about a few cases in the western part of the Territory.”
“Your informant woke you, and then you woke me to tell me about it, right? By the way, how does she have access to a working transistor radio?”
“A little detail I worked out with Link de Nova quite a while ago, just like I did for Pluto. If I’m going to have an efficient network of informants, they have to be able to relay things to me as fast and as clearly as possible.”
“That seems like the bare minimum, if you ask me.”
“Listen—we’ll go to Surveyor today, and maybe to X-15. And then we’ll have to get back here as fast as possible to conduct our analyses. We have some good stores of data now, and a bit more perspective to work with.”
“Fine with me.”
“But first, let’s get to what I woke you up so early for.”
“I’m listening.”
“Pluto Saint-Clair also called me very early this morning.”
“Ah, does he have news?”
Chrysler looks at him for a moment before pouring tea out of the large samovar that sits enthroned, a large, tarnished silver shell, in the center of the camping table.
“We’re going to go see him. Right away.”
Yuri doesn’t respond; he takes a large gulp of the burning tea, the bitter, smoky taste of which fills his mouth with an invisible clatter.
He guesses that events are probably in the process of taking an unexpected turn. He guesses that the Professor has come here to stay. He guesses that Pluto Saint-Clair wants to introduce them. He guesses that, once that happens, nothing will ever be the same again.
As the rising sun bursts into an orange fireball over the landscape of Air-crash Circle, they begin their drive toward the rutted road that will take them to the old municipal road of the territory.
Chrysler takes the wheel; Yuri does not protest. He rummages in the glove compartment among the antique cassette tapes and pulls out Bob Dylan’s
Nashville Skyline. A century old
, he thinks, and slides the tape into the pickup’s player. There have been no radio broadcasts for a long time,
obviously, and any sort of compact disc–type digital system disappeared years ago; even in Vortex Townships that kind of machine is becoming rarer and rarer, but magnetic audiotapes still function and so do the devices that play them. As long as there are no microprocessors or other semiconductor-based components in play, the services of the Heavy Metal Valley healer will not be needed.
But can they do without him in their fight against the evil massing on the horizon, more threatening by far than any sandstorm? Would he even be able to do anything? Is he any sort of defense against this post-mortem second mutation, this Third Fall, this thing that attacks not the biological or the mechanical, but language itself?
Yuri doesn’t dare try to imagine the consequences of an early death of the young man with the guitar.
He concentrates his attention on the road, which unfurls in a long, dusty ribbon ahead of them, illuminated by the rising sun.
Lay, lady, lay …
Bob Dylan sings softly.
“You’ve never told me how you and Pluto Saint-Clair know each other,” he says to Chrysler.
“I haven’t? No, that’s right. We met through a guy who’s been dead since just after the First Fall; you didn’t know him. We had some things in common. We’d studied the same thing at the same university, MIT.”
“What did he study, exactly?”
“Operational genetics. He worked on experimental models of androids for some firm at the time; I don’t know which one.”
“Ah, so he was in the Ring? He worked
up there
?”
“For a few months just before the End of the Metastructure. He thought he’d be able to go back one day, from the cosmodrome, like so many others.”
Pluto Saint-Clair’s Combi-Cube rises up in front of them, its bright yellow walls shining in the fiery morning sunlight. Yuri meets Chrysler’s eyes for a fraction of a second.
He knows they are both thinking the exact same thing.
Chrysler, like him, is already imagining the approaching Armageddon.
Chrysler, like him, knows that the two of them and Link de Nova and, no doubt, the mysterious Professor from Texas, are humanity’s sole and meager remaining defense against the coming groundswell.
They both know they probably don’t have a chance in Hell.
Vegas Orlando has just opened his eyes. The injection was fairly painful, despite the powerful analgesics that were administered before it.
He focuses his gaze on the mobile home—luxurious by local standards—in the center of which is the operating table where he lies prone. Antique twentieth-century furniture mingles with the various tools and devices of a hospital room. It is a place like no other in Junkville. It is the only place where his life might still be worth something.
Everything is proceeding smoothly. Everything is normal. It’s all going almost too well.
In any case, he is no longer trembling, and his terrible stomach cramps seem to have disappeared. Just like the man promised him.
The man.
Vegas Orlando contemplates him, his vision still blurry. He is standing to one side, the hypodermic syringe still in his hand.
Jade Uber Silverskin.
A former resident of Neon Park, living here as a refugee for the past ten years. A brilliant career with the necro Triads. A surgeon without equal. Capable of finding remedies—temporary, of course, but functional—for almost any malfunctioning bio-implant, whatever its type, problem, or programmed purpose.
Jade Silverskin, like many of the residents of what used to be Neon Park, had himself autotransformed—body-tuned—several times during the last years before the Fall. He is a specialist in bionic implants and operative transgenics, one of the very rare surviving members of that community. He is the last diamond in an abandoned coal mine.
“He” is neither man nor woman, but a mixture of the two. He has
opted for functional hermaphroditism, copied from the genetic codes of animals.
Vegas Orlando knows that before his residence in Neon Park, Silverskin spent several of his adolescent years in Monolith Hills. The reputation of his androgynous beauty had spread beyond the strip very quickly.
At that time, Silverskin’s last name had been “Venus-as-a-boy,” a name he had still carried when he joined the transformist community in Neon Park. He worked for one of the kings of the strip—now dead—in a luxury brothel located across from 9900, a vast neural-game arcade that has since become one of the most crowded refugee centers in the city of Grand Junction. Orlando had known him slightly at the time; he was one of the most sought-after prostitutes in Monolith Hills.
Thanks to his coming to Neon Park, his natural feminine charms had been magnificently augmented by all the artifice then offered in the bionic capital of the Northeast. He was as beautiful as a silver Apollo in a beam of light calculated down to the millimeter so as to perfectly illuminate his skin, with its new mercurial luster resulting from his very first body-tuning operation. His transformed epidermis gracefully and wonderfully captured every passing photon; his eyes, strangely bronzed, gazed out on the world with the innate superiority of those humans who dazzle their fellows with the simple perfection of their presence.
He-she is indeed very beautiful—very handsome—whichever; it doesn’t matter much, thinks Orlando. And on top of it, he-she is the best doctor in Little Congo—and thus one of the best in the city.
And consequently one of the most expensive. One of the basic rules of the market is that a product’s rarity automatically increases its sale price; this is true with every type of business. When life itself becomes rare, the equation remains fundamentally the same—but the multiplying variable rises to another order of grandeur altogether.
A week’s reprieve now costs as much as a year’s did twelve years earlier. But Vegas Orlando can afford it.
Which is exactly why he decided to visit Jade Silverskin after the malfunction on BlackSky Ridge. The man-woman has just, with a simple series of intravenous hypodermic injections, flooded his nanogenerator with an influx of modified proteins, of which Silverskin keeps a store in his refrigerators. This transgenic implantation could give Orlando up to two weeks of relief.
It’s going to cost him half of his gasoline stores, or the equivalent—a young whore from Toy Division, for example.
But Silverskin can do even better. He can do more. It would be even more expensive, but …
“He” can, he tells Orlando, fit him up with a completely new, still-operational proteinic nanogenerator. It was scavenged by a Triad from a body in Snake Zone, a body whose other implants had failed before the nanogenerator was contaminated.
“But as soon as the new nanoprocessor is installed in your body, I can’t do anything more for you, you know. It might last a year, five years—like your old one—or two days, or three minutes. It isn’t up to me, unfortunately.”
Orlando reflects for a few minutes when the Neon Park hermaphrodite makes this offer. His old bio-implant lasted a full five years. It was a miracle, really. If the new implant only lasts half of that—a third, even—life might actually become possible again.
But fifty or sixty liters of gasoline definitely won’t be enough. Double that wouldn’t be enough, or even triple. Not even a full cistern. Or all the sexual slaves in Toy Division.
What Jade Silverskin is asking of Orlando can be summed up in one simple word.
Betrayal.
True betrayal, when it can guarantee you if not immortality then at least middle age, always comes at an astronomical price.
And in this world—this world that doesn’t even really have the face of a world anymore, but rather that of an old whore barely hanging on to life—betrayal is worth this entire world’s weight in gold.
He accepts, of course. Surprisingly, their interests have quite a bit in common on this point. Both of them know equally as much about what is truly important and, even better, they are both aware of exactly what they do not know—that is, of what is even more important.
The rumor that has been going around the Territory for the last couple of years is based on something real; it is not pure myth, but
legend
—a story composed of facts that have been greatly stretched.
And then there is the man newly arrived from Texas. Silverskin has heard about him through the same network Orlando uses, the one that leads to the old prostitute from Vortex Townships.
There is the two-year-old rumor. And there is the Professor who has just come to town.