Corrupting Dr. Nice (6 page)

"Can you stand a day or two more, Wilma?" he asked.

The Apatosaurus thumped the side of her box. Owen hoisted it and headed for the door.

#

Owen lugged Wilma in the titanium carrier down to the service elevator. A floor down the car stopped and another hotel guest got on. He was a slender man with round face, fair hair, and a calm, open demeanor, pushing a cart with a couple of boxes on it. The boxes were labeled "Transtemporal Music Imports."

=I know this guy!= Bill said. =He ran guns out of Malasia during the Micronesian revolt! Women think obsessive wicked men are therefore dysfunctional!=

"Give it a rest, Bill," Owen subvocalized.

=I'm not making this up. He's a ruthless character. His name is Serge Halam.=

Genevieve was a gold-digger, this man was a spook. There was only one way Owen was going to get Bill to shut up. "Are you a trader in musical instruments?" he asked the man.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Owen Vannice," Owen said.

The man looked Owen over, then extended his hand. "Serge Halam."

Owen tried not to drop his teeth. Bill didn't say anything. If an AI could be smugly silent, Bill was being smugly silent.

"Are--uh--the historicals interested in modern instruments?" Owen asked.

"You'd be surprised what they're interested in."

"What are these?"

Halam acted completely calm. "These are harmonicas."

"Harmonicas?"

"Harmonicas have certain advantages to the trader with historicals. It's a low tech instrument. It's easy to learn. It's portable."

"Gosh," Owen said. "That's a clever product to try out in the first century."

"Thanks.   These are very hot items," Halam said quietly.

When the elevator stopped in the lobby, the acceleration shifted Wilma and she began thumping the carrier. A couple of guests looked in. "Going up?" they asked.

"Down," said Owen.

The doors slid closed.  Halam looked over. "What do you have in that carrier?"

=I hope I don't have to remind you--= Bill started.

"An iguana," said Owen.

"That's a new one. Why bring an iguana to ancient Jerusalem?"

Another opportunity to pretend. Owen launched into it without hesitating. "I'm headed for Central America. I'm going to breed this one with historical iguanas. I'm an iguana breeder."

"I didn't know iguanas had breeds."

"Oh, yes. There are all sorts. There's the highland iguana, the mutant blue iguana, and of course the Malibu Max. This one here's a Nice."

"A Nice?"

"Well, it's not really very nice. Your true Nice is prone to losing his tail in moments of anxiety. That's not a show quality iguana."

=For a guy who wouldn't lie to that dame, you're developing a disturbing flair for this.=

"You can imagine how bad it looks when your iguana loses its tail in the middle of a judging," Owen continued. "Because an iguana show is really quite anxiety provoking, for the iguana as much as for the owner."

"I don't doubt it," Halam said.

"That's why we're hoping to breed with the historical Central American iguana, to see if we can eliminate this undesirable trait."

The doors slid open.

=Please get us out of here," Bill said. =But don't run.=

"Good luck," Halam said.

"Yes. Well--good luck on your harmonica imports."

"I hardly need it," Halam said. "Business is booming,"

SIX: A
DAY AT THE PET STORE

A lot of tourists made no concessions to local customs, but in order to fit in with first century Jerusalem, Genevieve had downloaded Aramaic. It made her brain itch as if an ant colony had taken up residence in her head. Although she did not plait or oil her auburn hair in the fashion of the wealthy women of the times, she wore the traditional shawl to conceal it. Her white linen shift fell to her heels, and over it she draped a rich purple robe. Her sandals were simple soles strapped to her feet. On first glance, someone spotting her in the street might take her for a young Judean wife.

Her father hummed a tune as he oiled the beard he had grown overnight. Over his own shift he wore an embroidered white robe, with a curiously chased silver belt. Add gloves to keep him from touching anything unholy and he would look every bit the wealthy patriarch.

"You will dazzle him senseless at the dance tonight," August said. "And tomorrow--tomorrow I will dazzle him dinosaurless."

Smuggling a dinosaur uptime would be tricky, but aside from the fact that it was alive, it was something they had done many times before. There were the gold artifacts they'd lifted from the Inca Sun temple in Cuzco from under the eye of the Conquistadors, Charlemagne’s sword they’d sold to that meat packer in Des Moines, the Hemingway manuscripts they'd stolen from the Gare de Lyon in Paris.

"Where are we going to sell it? " Genevieve asked him. "A thing like this has got to be next to impossible to fence."

"This is the beauty of it, my beauty. We're not going to fence it. Do you remember Lance Thrillkiller?"

"I thought he went down with the Titanic."

"Yes. Well, he's up again. He has a new scam going back home, a phony committee to protect the past. When we return to the 21st century, we will donate Wilma to Lance's committee, for her own protection. Think of the contributions a dinosaur will raise for the cause."

"But she'll be stolen property. Won't that draw a lot of heat?"

"She's already stolen property. Our friend Dr. Nice had no leave to draw such a specimen from an unsettled moment universe. The audacity of his snatching the first dinosaur out of the Cretaceous will draw the ire of every protect-the-past radical in the Northern Hemisphere. Out of that will arise enough of a legal smokescreen to keep Vannice from reclaiming her. Plus contributions in the millions to Lance's cause--of which we will take our percentage."

"Seems risky to me."

"Life is risky. Nothing ventured--"

"--nothing lost."

He looked at her, as if trying to make up his mind about something. "Come now, it's time to go," he said abruptly. "We need to buy a dog. A valuable Egyptian saluki. Did you know I was a member of the Westminster Kennel Club?"

August adjusted his shawl so that the ends dangled down his back and they headed down to the hotel kennel. The kennel was in the basement, next to a large warehouse of stalls and cages that held livestock waiting to be shipped uptime. A window wall in the office opened onto a view of a Galilean valley. A young woman, whose name tag read "Maureen," greeted them at the desk.

"Good morning," August said. "Can we purchase a dog here?"

"I'm afraid we aren't in the business of sales. But I can give you the addresses of several reputable dealers in the city."

"How about an animal carrier?"

"You can purchase that there as well. Here at the kennel we only take care of animals prior to shipment."

"Very good," August said. Under the pretext of getting a look at the kennel where they intended to keep this valuable dog they were planning to buy, August made the woman show them down the aisles of cages in back. Gen examined the security setup. The usual camera midges, hooked into the hotel's AI, hovered in the corners of the rooms. There were ways of disabling them. But they needed some information on the hotel personnel routines.

"Father, do you think we could get someone to come with us to purchase this dog?" Gen asked.

"If you're worried about security in the city, it's really not that dangerous," the woman said.

"Don't a lot of the historicals resent us?"

"Only a radical minority. Most of them are happy we're here. Here's Simon, for instance. Excuse me, Simon?" the woman called to a small, dark man wheeling a cart of food down one of the aisles.

"Yes?"

"Simon, I want you to help these guests go out and purchase a dog."

The man's brow furrowed. "Mr. Callahan told me to clean out the large cages."

“I’ll speak to Mr. Callahan,” Maureen said. "Go now."

"We will pay you handsomely for your help," August said.

"There's no need for that," Maureen said. "We pay you quite enough already, don't we, Simon."

Simon was silent. He looked at Gen for the first time, then did a barely noticeable double take. "I will take you," he said.

Despite Maureen's assurances, Gen had no doubt that Simon had seen enough of tourists to get tired of them. Working in the hotel, he would have become familiar with their condescension. The very fact that he had to take orders from a woman must at the very least gall any man of this time period, and at worst humiliate him.

"Shalom, Simon," Gen said, bowing her head.

The historical looked at her for a moment with open astonishment, then ducked his head and began to set out a bowl of food for the mewling cat inside the next cage. "Go to the hotel lobby. I will meet you there in five minutes."

A moment after they got to the hotel entrance, Simon approached from a service door, still in his hotel coverall but wearing a shawl and headband. The day was bright and hot, the cloudless sky above the busy plaza a depthless blue. The upper market filled the area just outside the palace walls below Mariamme's tower. Since the upper city had largely been taken over by the time travelers, most of the shops were electrified and bore signs in English as well as Hebrew. It was the hottest spot in Judaea for legal trade. Shadier dealings tended to go on in the lower city: the plaza near the Hippodrome was a notorious black market for currency, condoms and antibiotics.

A fishmonger hawked his wares from a polyfoam cooler. Outside a wine merchant's shop hung skins of wine like the bellies of pregnant women. An old man with a barrow scraped up the leavings of donkeys and horses to keep the pavements clean for the tourists. Simon led August and Genevieve across the plaza and down a narrow side street. The street climbed up a hill between two-story stone buildings. They turned a couple of times and ended up in a still narrower street of shops close to what had once been Herod the Great's magnificent stables. From down the way Gen smelled fresh bread from a bakery, heard the barking of dogs from an animal wholesaler's.

Genevieve had owned a pet only once in her life. She and her mother were living in a run-down house west of Dufferin Grove, in what had been an Indian section of Toronto. Her mother worked a doubles scam above a microrganic cleaners on Bloor Street, selling bereaved people the chance to retrieve their loved ones by stealing their doubles from recent moment universes. Most of their marks were retirees or parents who had lost children. To kidnap a real duplicate required access to a time machine; about the only ones who could do that were the mob. The outfit Ivy Faison worked for had no time machine, so they just sold the promise.

Ivy didn't seem too worried about crossing the mob, or the cops. At nights she would come home with one or another of her men friends, or lie on the sofa in her VR suit embracing phantom lovers, picking up objects that weren't there. Gen was alone a lot. She got the idea that if they had a dog, it would give her somebody to talk to, and keep her safe. One of her friends at school got her a full-grown German shepherd named Max. Max's right ear had a notch in it from some old fight, and he had fleas and smelled bad. A bath got rid of the fleas, but Max never was much of a watchdog because he never, under any circumstances, would bark. Gen loved him immediately.

Eventually her mother started coming home later and later. She would wobble into the room after twelve, push some Snooze into her arm to get herself to sleep and some Focus in the morning to get her up. Sometimes she wouldn't come home at all for a day or more. Finally she didn't come back at all. Gen didn't know what to do. She couldn’t call the police. Even if they found Ivy Faison, she would end up in jail, and Gen in some foster home. So Gen kept going to school, hoping each day that her mother would be there when she came back. Instead she had Max. For a month she lived alone in the apartment with her German shepherd, rent unpaid, the bills collecting and the food dwindling.

One day at recess she saw a man watching her from outside the chain link fence of the school yard. At first she thought it might be a cop or one of her mother's boyfriends, and she tried to ignore him. But there was something familiar about he way he stood, and when he finally called out to her, "Genevieve!" she knew it was her father.

She had never seen her mother again. Two years and a dozen scams later, Max died.

Simon had said little to them since they'd left the palace, but Gen caught him giving her an occasional wary look. The awed expression on his face was out of keeping with his brusque manner. Was he attracted to her? But at times he seemed almost afraid. He took them down the street to a shop under a big painted sign:

Fiery Furnace Sale!

HONEST ABEDNEGO'S DISCOUNT ANIMALS

Why waste Time? Why pay more?

The building was one of the new sandfoam prefabs with a stucco front and a high tin roof that must drum like a demon when it rained. Simon nodded at the entrance but did not follow them inside.

Both sides of the front room were lined with cages of animals: birds, snakes, lizards, cats, dogs. The place smelled of wood shavings, a trace of urine. Incense burned in an iron lamp stand. The HVAC system hummed above them. An open doorway in back led to a sunlit courtyard and a glimpse of paddocks containing horses, camels, oxen. The rear wall held racks of animal carriers. Most had wire mesh windows, but on display was a pearl gray metal quarantine carrier identical to the one Vannice had brought from the Cretaceous, hermetically sealed with an environmental readout on top.

On the corner of the service counter rested a green lava lamp and a flatscreen playing the 2062 Sporting News. Though it was turned upside down to her, Gen recognized a clip of Babe Ruth swatting his latest homer for the Vancouver Sea Lions. A clean shaven man in a stained brown tunic came up to speak to them. "Yes, sir?"

"I would like to purchase a dog," August said.

August went off with the owner to examine a selection of Egyptian dogs, and Gen went back to where Simon stood under the shadow of the entrance.

Outside a man had stopped in front of the baker's shop to pray. Several passersby stopped to join him. The baker came to his door to scowl at this impediment to his business, but did nothing to chase the man away. Simon watched, a sober expression on his face. The praying man wore a blue and tan shawl, a brown robe. On his left arm he wore a leather strap wound seven times around his biceps, from which dangled a leather cube. Another cube hung from a band around his forehead.

"Coming with us must have disrupted your schedule," Gen said. "Will you have extra work to do when you return?"

Simon turned his attention from the praying man. "There are more people who need work than jobs to do."

"When does your shift normally end?"

He only stared at her. He was shorter than she, and his dark brown eyes worked with powerful emotion. Despite herself, Gen stopped thinking of him as a source of information and saw him as a man. "You don't like to deal with us," she said.

"I am a poor man. I do what I must."

"What did you do before the people came from the future?"

"Like my father, I was a weaver."

"That is a difficult work, as I understand it."

He looked at her as if trying to detect some insult. "Men call it women's work. Yet they would be without a cloak in the cold of winter were it not for weavers."

"An injustice. Doesn't the change that we have brought offer you some hope?"

He looked away.

A band of teenaged boys came dashing up the street, shouting and hurling sticks. While one of them decoyed the owner's attention by throwing a fistful of pebbles onto the awning over the shop front, another of them snatched a loaf of bread from the baker's table. Simon stepped forward. "Samuel!" he shouted.

One of the boys turned to them, while his companion ran off with the loaf. He saw Simon and Gen, hesitated, then dashed off down an alley. Simon took another step toward him. The baker glared. When Simon retreated, the baker turned on the Pharisee, and yelled at the man to move along. An argument started.

"Who was that boy?" Gen asked.

"That was my son. Running with thieves."

"Why did he look at us like that?"

Simon paused. "You carry yourself like his mother."

Gen tried to think of something to say. "You must wish that she could keep him out of trouble."

"His mother is dead. So while I spend my day working for foreigners, he slips away from me."

Gen stood there in the shadow of Honest Abednego's sign, at a loss for words. Simon still would not look at her. In order to live Gen and August often had to impersonate historicals. But it was a small step from impersonating to sympathizing. Over the years Gen had perfected a double-think that made it possible for her to use historicals without compunction. But in the scant hour she'd known him Simon had slipped from a being prop in their con game to a man with a dead wife and a troubled son.

"Genevieve?" It was August.

"Come, help us," she said to Simon, and re-entered the shop.

August held a slender silky-haired dog by a leash while the shopkeeper prepared the carrier. Gen knelt down next to the dog and scratched behind its long and delicately formed ears; it whipped its tail and sniffed her hand. "This is Pharaoh," August said.

The Saluki slipped readily into the carrier and they sealed the door. While August paid the proprietor, Gen made Simon haul the carrier to the front. She could not estimate the degree of his resentment, and she tried not to think of it. The baker had given up trying to get the praying Pharisee to move, but now the life of the street went on around him, oblivious.