A Game of Universe (8 page)

“A thousand pardons, benevolent sir.” He dug deeper into his pack.

I tested again. “Ninety-three percent. Good enough.” I transferred funds on his disposable from the Golden City bank to his account. In return, he dropped sixty thimble-sized capsules into my hand. “May your visit be filled with delight,” he said, and moved on.

“I can’t believe you ingest that poison,” Virginia said and crossed her arms.

“I’m not. It’s for a friend here.”

“A friend?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “He has something I need.” I didn’t explain further. I could almost see her bioware churning away, trying to guess what I was up to.

Others approached me, but I turned them down. I had enough stimulants to keep one man awake for months, and that might do Quilp for the time I needed him.

We entered the marketplace, packed with a crowd of vendors and beggars, the air rich with voices haggling, blooming with the odors of fried food, perspiration, and urine. Bald slavers paraded their living wares and gave appreciative glances to Virginia.

She held her plasma tube a bit higher, and clicked the safety off.

They gave her no trouble.

There were plenty of customers for flesh today: necromancers with tarnished silver nose rings who searched for bodies to fuel their rituals; lonely men who looked for beauty; and industrialists who preferred human hands to expensive mechanical ones. Flesh to match every desire was on the auction block today, top-of-the-line pleasure constructs that lived for three centuries, enchanted to provide their master with delight. They were ridiculously expensive, hard to make, and I found myself scrutinizing a flame-haired odalisque.

Celeste filled my head with her fantasies, the things I could do with my own personal harem, but I gritted my teeth and moved on.

Everyone was sold here—even small girls and boys with hopeless pleading stares. My childhood had been much the same, chattel to my father and brother, no friends, tortures that the psychologist would love to dissect. The other slaves, they deserved to be here, in debt, or to pay for their crimes, but the children were just unlucky—to be born into a cruel family and sold off, or unlucky to trust the wrong stranger at the wrong time. I knew about that.

There was money left in my account. I could buy their freedom. Give them a second chance.

We don’t have time to rescue slaves,
hissed Fifty-five.
And you can’t drag a hundred screaming brats along on your mission. Keep moving.

The logic of his words was undeniable. I turned my back on them, grabbed Virginia’s arm, and continued. Their desperate faces lingered in my memory, reminding me what a coward I was.

Why don’t you stand up to that bully?
the psychologist demanded.
You possess the willpower.

I had no answer.

There were more drugs to be had. And as we ventured deeper into the colony, they grew in strength and selection: pink antibiotics; powdered tiger penis aphrodisiacs; eerie glowing green mutagens to change the color of your eyes, or to alter your sex; sparkling black psychotropics to expand your consciousness, lift your soul to paradise or drag it to hell; and naturally, prescriptions to simply make you forget. There were countless shoppers, not only merchants buying in bulk, but tourists who came to get higher than they’d ever been. Many stayed, spent all they had, then were recycled as slaves or medical surplus. Nothing went to waste on Needles.

The farther away from the central market we wandered the more trash accumulated on the sides of the streets, both people and physical refuse. Long stares were cast our way, lean looks of hate.

This was where the locals hung out, where the hard core remained to keep their high as long as they could—any way they could. I set my rifle into warm mode. Its tip hummed with power and glowed with an evil red eye. That was all the warning I intended to give.

The buildings were boarded up, paint crumbling off, and covered with layers of faded graffiti. Figures moved in the shadows. Streetlights were dim, infrequent pools of illumination, islands in the murky avenues. On our left stood a five-story office, its walls blackened by fire, its smoked glass windows boarded up. This was Quilp’s home. The metal entrance was battered and the intercom smashed. I knocked hard on the door with the butt of my rifle. The booms echoed, then silence.

Across the street, four teenagers watched us with interest and whispered to one another. I didn’t like the way they looked. They were alert, eyes clear and calm, not drugged like everyone else. They started toward us.

“Trouble,” Virginia whispered and gripped her plasma tube tighter.

I took a step back, set the rifle to a narrow aperture and fired at the door. The beam cleanly sliced it in half, and it fell with a loud clatter. I turned to see if these punks wanted any. They ran away.

They’ll be back,
said Fifty-five.
They aren’t what they appear to be.

I went in feeling the danger rise about us like a tide. Virginia followed me down the hallway, to an antiquated lift. We got in, the doors slid shut, and the car jerked up.

We stopped on the top floor and stepped into a studio apartment crowded with trash, benches overflowing with scopes, computers, smoldering components, tiny robots struggling to move through the filth, and broken glass. Fast food wrappers were piled in the center (a good month’s worth), the home for a tribe of cockroaches. In back was the bedroom, a wad of torn sheets, empty Chinese food cartons, pizza boxes, and a wall of virtual projectors, their images melting into one unintelligible jumble. The sound from them blended into a symphony of voices, crashes, lovemaking grunts, and music. Pure chaos.

In the farthest corner lay a naked Quilp. He didn’t move when we plowed a path through the dump to get to him. His pale right hand clutched four remotes, and in his left was an injector, empty.

Virginia knelt by his side, scattered roaches, and touched the side of his neck. “There’s no pulse,” she told me. “He’s dead.”

6

I
handed her my blue shield and said, “Feel the back of his head.”

She set her hand there and quickly withdrew it. “It’s hot.”

“Then he’s alive.”

She attached the robot doctor to his arm and touched it with a beam of light from her double-star insignia. “I’m reading no pulse,” she told me, “and a zero heart rate.”

“There are tetraoxide crystals embedded in his skull. When his heart seizes, the crystals release oxygen for his brain. The reaction is exothermic.”

“The kit says there are massive amounts of amphetamines in him.”

“I know. He overdosed on purpose. He’ll pull through.”

She touched his hairless white chest. “He’s so cold, and his heart …”

“It will start again. He has a pacemaker to reset his cardiac rhythm. He would have replaced it with a synthetic, but he says it interferes with his rush.”

Virginia took the remotes from Quilp’s hand and turned off the wall of virtual projectors. One by one the images of violence, pornography, news, and commercials faded. “Why does he do it?”

“To stimulate his thinking,” I said. “When Quilp has a problem to solve, he overloads his mind with drugs. He’s brilliant when he’s high. Otherwise he can’t even count straight. It’s a shame really.”

A roach scurried across a nearby mountain of food cartons, navigating its way across a treacherous slope of dried teriyaki and slimy vegetables. It paused, ten legs twitched, then it tested the air with a feathery antenna. I brought my rifle butt down on top of it. It popped quite nicely.

The blue shield beeped.

“His heart is beating,” Virginia said. “Pulse rising, blood pressure still below normal. Shall I instruct it to filter the stimulants out of his system?”

“No.” Then I thought better of it, and said, “Perhaps half, so he doesn’t lapse into a coma.”

She made the adjustments; we waited for three minutes, then Quilp stirred. His hand clutched for the remotes that weren’t there, and he shook with dry heaves. He shivered. I noticed his feet were blue.

Virginia touched his shoulder.

He jerked away, suddenly more alive than either of us thought. His eyes were wide open, and stared at us with petite pupils. “Who are you?” He covered his private parts with one hand, then, “Where are my remotes?”

I cleared my throat.

He turned. “Yeah, buddy? I’m still waiting for an answer. I got a gun around here somewhere, and I know how to use it.” His face was more weathered than I remembered, dried leather creased in all the wrong places. He was three years younger than me, but had the tired look of a great-grandfather, hunched over. Only a half circle of fine white hair capped his head, and deep lines etched a permanent scowl around his mouth.

“You are pathetic, Quilp. Get dressed. We’re leaving soon.”

He stood, and stuck a trembling finger in my face. “You can’t order me around. Why don’t you go trip and crash?”

“I am Germain,” I told him. “I am disappointed you don’t recognize me.” I picked up a soiled sheet and offered it.

He withdrew the finger from my face, grabbed the sheet, and wrapped it about his naked body. He smiled, cracking his frown lines.  “Got your face changed again, huh? Looks like they did a decent job on the nose this time. I should have guessed.”

His grin evaporated. “Wait a second, I gotta finish something.” He placed one hand on his head (which was assuredly splitting apart), and staggered to a display that filled the air with equations and graphs of imaginary spaces only he could decipher. It was the problem he had overdosed to solve.

“Are you certain you want him to come with us?” Virginia asked.

“He is merely hung over,” I whispered back.

“How long will he be like this?”

“He’s always like this.”

“He seems a bit …” She couldn’t find the word.

“Unstable?” I offered. “He may be, but he’s the only one who can build—”

Let’s not go telling the hired help more than they need to know,
said Fifty-five.

Quilp shouted into his display, “No! This is all wrong.” He shook uncontrollably and pulled a handful of hair from his head.

“Can you link with the blue shield?” I asked Virginia.

It clung to his arm, blinking red warning lights. Virginia’s beam flashed across the room. “It’s in range.”

“Filter the rest of the amphetamines out. He may be more stoned than I thought.” For the moment, Quilp’s life was linked to mine. Without him, there was no thought shield, no master-psychic Necatane, and no Grail. It wouldn’t do to let him have a stroke.

Quilp attacked the equations, and tried to make sense of the army of symbols that scattered in retreat across the display. He chased after them, expanded some into long series, approximated a heap of Greek letters into transcendental functions, and dropped others completely. I had no idea what any of it meant. The symbols marched themselves into orderly rows and columns, and simplified. These surviving variables, he herded together, then collected them into a single line. The solution hovered in midair, pistachio green numbers as tall as Quilp: 0=1.

He cursed profusely for several seconds.

Quilp noticed the blue shield on his arm. “What’s this? I don’t remember—” His pale face flushed. He turned to me and hissed, “You blew my high! I had this problem licked. The answer was right in front of me. Now it’s gone! Two days wasted!”

“I need your assistance, Quilp.”

“Oh, I bet you do. You still owe me from the last job. 12K if I remember right. You think I enjoy living in this low-rent cesspool?”

I did, but I reserved my comments. “I can settle our debt now if you wish.” I reached into my shirt pocket. He tensed. Unfolding the wrinkled piece of electronics, I asked, “What account?”

Quilp relaxed when he saw it wasn’t a weapon. “3471-KAPPA, the Swiss defense fund, Earth.”

“Let’s make it a nice round 20K then, call it interest.”

He forgot the mathematical battlefield behind him, and remarked, “You’re not known for your generosity.” He mulled this over for a second, then came over and sat on a pile of pizza boxes, crushing the greasy cardboard. “You must have something big going this time. OK, I’ll bite. What is it?”

“A routine mission,” I lied.

“And my cut?” he inquired, casting a suspicious look at Virginia.

“If we are successful, I will be in a position to support you full-time, a lab, drugs, and let’s say a salary of 30K per year?”

His glassy little eyes, points for pupils, stared into mine (no doubt trying to calculate ways to soak me for more money). “30K? And if we’re not successful?”

“The majority of the danger is mine. I can give you 5K as a retainer fee. The rest you must earn. It shouldn’t be any more difficult than the last two missions.”

He snorted a laugh and stood. “What’s that mean? We all get to die if you fail? No, I think I’m gonna have to pass this time, buddy. All that violence, I’m just not cut out for it. Thanks for thinking of me though—you know the way out.”

“Make it 40K a year then,” I said, my voice a touch less friendly. “I wouldn’t want you to starve.”

He went back to his display and said, “I’ll have to think about it. Why don’t you come back tomorrow? I have a few things to wrap up here, debts to settle, and people to talk to.”

“I’m sorry, Quilp, but we depart now. I am working with a deadline. I need your answer immediately.”

“Who you going to kill this time?”

To Virginia I said, “Excuse us a moment would you?” I grabbed Quilp’s arm and escorted him to the far side of his studio. “It’s not that kind of job.”

“Something illegal then? I can’t get caught doing anything that’ll louse up my credit rating. I’ve gotta think about my future.”

“It’s nothing illegal. I have to find something.”

Quilp crossed his arms. “I know all about your routine missions, two assassinations, one coup d’état, and a little industrial espionage. You’re gonna have to fill in more of the blanks before I risk my butt.”

“Very well.”

Wait,
Fifty-five said.
You’re not going to tell this worm about our mission. He’d sell us out in the blink of an eye.

I know. And he knows that I know it, too. That’s how I shall trap him.

“How much do you know about ancient Earth?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“I have been hired to locate an antique, a relic of the old Christian mythologies.”

“—And you want me to make a duplicate so you can pawn it off as the real one?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “It cannot be duplicated. It is supposed to be magic.”

“Magic?” Quilp made a face like he swallowed a bitter pill. “There’s magic involved? You didn’t tell me that! That’s all I need, demons, genies, and spirits. Count me out. I’ll stick with what I know.”

“Most unfortunate,” I replied and unslung the accelerator rifle, letting it rest level with his groin. Quilp took a startled step back—as if he only now noticed the weapon. “There are other competitors in this search, and I cannot allow anyone to know I’ve been this way, nor the nature of my mission. My ship could be traced and my safety compromised. And I know you wouldn’t want that.”

Quilp shifted from side to side. He loathed magic, even hated me slightly for the tiny amount I practiced. It bothered him even more that I was a muse. To him that was one part knowledge, one part faith, and two parts mystery. Anything he couldn’t isolate in a stasis field or reduce mathematically he hated or feared. But he also knew I had killed before to keep things quiet. It was a good thing he didn’t know how badly I needed him.

He swallowed, and asked, “What is it you want?”

Good, he was curious. I had him halfway hooked. “Do you recall the mental shield you constructed three years ago? I need you to build me another one, a better one.”

“Gonna bump off another shrink, huh? I hate those suckers almost as much as you muses.” He spotted something under a box of empty beer bottles and pulled it out—a pair of wrinkled pants that he stepped into. “What happened to the last one?”

“Burned out,” I told him. “Fortunately, I completed my mission before it failed.”

“It won’t be easy,” he said and buttoned his pants. “Your brain pattern is … unusual.” He focused on the distant wall a moment while he thought the problem through, then he said, “I think it could be done, but I want 80K a year plus expenses, and don’t expect me to read any goat entrails, or chant mantras.”

“I can offer you 50K, no more.”

“Deal!” he said. “Let me grab a few things then we can go.” He dug around, finding two sneakers that didn’t match, and a pale green sweatshirt with the corporate logo of the Californian Empire, DNA helix coiled about a sword, stitched on front. He emptied a duffel bag of glass eyes onto the floor, let them roll away like marbles, then went from bench to bench gathering tools, meters, storage cubes, a small wandering robot, and other components I couldn’t identify. “I’ll need to visit a few of my buddies here before we leave. I’m missing a few tools.”

“Very well, if you need them.”

“You need to secure your apartment,” Virginia told him. “We cut the outer door when we came in. It was an emergency.”

“My door? Just as well. The way I see it, in a week I’ll either be stranded on an alien world, dead, or set up in a new lab. The stuff here is all junk anyway.” He stopped, then asked, “What kind of emergency?”

“Street punks,” I told him, “they wanted a piece of us. Nothing serious.”

“And you were carrying that rifle? Then they weren’t street punks. Come to think of it, I’ve seen a bunch of people hanging around since this morning. People trying awfully hard to blend in and look like locals. They weren’t high, not even trying to score, just waiting, maybe for you?”

“Maybe.” It was impossible we were followed here. The
Grail Angel
was too fast.

It wouldn’t hurt to take precautions,
Fifty-five said.

“Is there another way out of this building?”

“The elevator to the roof,” Quilp said, “then down a fire escape to the back alley.”

“Perfect. We can take a look while we’re up there.” I asked him, “Do you have everything?”

“Yeah,” he said. “—Wait, there’s one more thing.” He rummaged through a locker and pulled out a twisted alloy gear. He hefted it, then chucked it into the display he had been working on. The emitters shattered, and his problem melted into static, then vanished.

“OK, now I’m ready.”

We got into his antique elevator, and Quilp pressed both the up and down buttons together. We were jerked up to the roof. The view from five stories high showed a colony that might look like any town, buildings lined up one after another in the residential section, tall towers of glass in the business district, and panels of white and lavender, the tents of the marketplace. I guess you had to take a close look to see what this place was really made of.

I did a quick check of the alley. It was filled with overflowing trashcans, and the only occupant was a dog nosing about for dinner. The fire escape was a zigzag of folded ladders.

Check the street side,
Fifty-five suggested.
Better paranoid than sorry.

I walked to the street side edge—dropped flat when I saw what was there. Two dozen men, all with chest-mounted cannons, were on the street. And with them was E’kerta, bristly black arms and antenna, looking ugly even from up here.

How did they get here so fast?
cried Fifty-five.
Bug-man must have left right after Erybus’s meeting.

That doesn’t make sense,
I said.
Did he know we were coming here?

I crawled back to Quilp and Virginia. “We have company,” I told them. “The alley is out. We’d be stuck in a dead-end and spattered before we hit the street.” I glanced to my right. Another building was close, slightly lower than this one with a flat aluminum roof, and a crumbling brick fringe. “How far a jump to that structure?” I asked Virginia.

She flashed a beam across the distance from the double-star on her forehead and told me, “Five meters with an angle of declination of point two radians.”

“Then we jump.”

“Jump?” cried Quilp. “No sir, not me. I’d never make it with my equipment.”

“Our choices are limited at this point,” I said. “Come with us or stay and explain to my friends how you were just an innocent bystander.”