Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (16 page)

"Detective Thorpe," Folio said with studied nonchalance.

"Name?"

"Folio Johnson and Tana Lynn."

"Reason for visit."

"Folio's follies."

"Come again?"

"I'd rather not."

Tana snickered.

"This is no joke, citizen."

"Listen, lady," he said. "You got a job and so do I. You ask the questions and I give the best answers I can. Type in the words I gave you and that door there will pop open in thirty seconds. So let's get on with it, all right?"

__________

Tana and Folio walked down a long hall that was over a hundred feet in width. The walls were lined with official booths where citizens could file claims, make reports, or show up for warrants. The detective stopped at a door guarded by an armed and armored sentry.

"Folio's follies," the detective said.

The guard waited a moment, listening to an electronic feed in his helmet, then moved to the side. The pair entered a small elevator that began to descend.

"You're quivering," he said.

"I like to have an exit."

"You the one asked to come along."

"I know."

The doors to the elevator slid open. A man stood before them dressed all in red except for a black collar ring that, Folio knew, was made from shatterproof glass. The policeman was white and not quite six feet. But what he lacked in height he more than made up for in width. Detective Aldo Thorpe was heavy with the natural muscle mass of a mesomorph.

"Got your black ring, eh?" Folio asked.

"What do you want?"

"Prussian six-finger, clutch forty-two," Folio said.

"Come on in," Thorpe said.

__________

"How do you know about the sixer?" Thorpe asked.

"I killed him," Folio replied.

They were in a room called Interrogations 419-ag. The room, and the furniture therein, was composed solely of bright and shiny Glassone, the shatterproof plaster of the twenty-first century. Everything was Glassone and everything was white--the walls, the long conference table, the chairs. There were no windows a thousand feet belowground.

"Murder?" Thorpe suggested.

"You can't murder a synthy. You know that. Anyway, he was trying to kill Tana. I severed his spine."

"You're lucky he didn't see you."

Folio shrugged.

"Why didn't you wait for the police unit?"

"I'm scared'a teenagers."

Thorpe smiled, then he laughed. "Good to see you again, Tana," he said.

"Inspector."

"You two know each other?"

"Tana an' me go way back. Every time I picked up Jim Rachman on a murder rap his little girl here would be his alibi."

Folio glanced at Tana. He hadn't checked her files because he felt it was gauche to research a woman he wanted to have sex with.

"That doesn't have anything to do with us," she said. Her light brown eyes seemed to care what he thought.

Folio allowed himself to fall into Rapture--a setting for his electric eye that removed him completely from the world, a place where there was nothing but his mind floating in an endless universe of mathematical possibilities. In Rapture his thoughts and impressions became idealized notions of energies that intersected and interacted as galaxies dancing freely. He saw her energy as a whirling haze of cosmic dust, not yet formed into stars. She hovered and approached then hesitated, drawn off toward the gravity of some unseen celestial body. They separated without incident or damage. Folio smiled. He opened his eyes. It felt as if he had been far away for a long time but he knew that the timer on Rapture was less than a second in real time. Three seconds in that zone would drive any human insane.

"I'm on a job, Aldo," the private detective said. "There's a kid named Charles Spellman, an Itsie. He's got a group of friends gettin' knocked off. He's worried that his turn was comin' up and so he asked me to intercede."

"You workin' for the International Socialists now?"

"I'm not political, you know that."

"Tell that to them when they get in power. As a black man you should know what they'll do."

"I know four black men went down in the Central Develator and they never came back. They were going in for some questions and stayed."

Aldo Thorpe's mouth tightened and his bushy eyebrows furrowed slightly--then he forced a smile. "Let's hear it," he said.

Johnson related everything he knew to the police detective--the dead men, their club's activities, the assassin. The only thing he lied about was the whereabouts of his client.

"He's off-continent," he said. "I don't know where."

"What's wrong with you, Folio?" the policeman asked.

"All systems functioning normally, sir."

"This is no joke. If what you say here is true, I can't do anything. The files'd be closed. These killings aren't random, they're sanctioned assassinations. Anybody close to it will be in just as much trouble as these Seeker people. Why don't you forget this shit and come to work for us? We have lotsa independents on the payroll."

"That means I'd be on a cycle right?"

"Yeah, but--"

"But nuthin'. I'm not a termite, Aldo."

"You could be dead."

"Will be," Folio agreed. "One day. But at least I'll be the one to call that last charge."

"Idiot."

3

"So," Folio said over a steaming plate of bok choy and tofu, "you're keeping secrets and we haven't even known each other two days."

"Most secrets are kept at the beginning," Tana replied, "and I wasn't hiding anything anyway. I told you that Jim was supposed to kill me. What did you think he did for a living?"

"I don't know. It's just strange to find the adopted daughter of an assassin fighting it out with a sixer in the house of a marked man."

"You brought me there, remember?"

Folio used his plastic chop sticks to spear a limp leaf of bok choy. He held the dripping petal in front of his mouth a moment before biting it.

"Come on, Johnson," the young woman moaned. "You met me three days ago. You said that this guy, this Spellman, only came at you yesterday morning."

"Yeah. Yeah. I guess so."

"I tried to get you to take me that first night."

Folio let his mechanical eye roam back over its memory database (which had complete recall back over five years and partial memory back even further). She had been standing at the outer rim of the open-air DanceDome at the Sixtieth Street pier. She was wearing an orange-tinted transparent cellophane dress, with nothing underneath, and drinking a Blue Moon from an oversize crescent-shaped glass. Four men and two women were asking her to plug in with them and dance to music that only they would be able to hear. She chose a tall black woman who was bald and powerful. Before they twirled out on the floor she pulled away from the amazon and handed Folio a scrap of paper with her number on it.

"Maybe," he said. He was trying to think of a way that she could have known that he would meet Charles Spellman. "Maybe."

The China Diner was closed. D'or Hallwell was in her bed three floors below street level. She had served Folio and the girl and left them to lock up.

"I wouldn't hurt you, Fol," she said.

"Maybe. But anyway that doesn't matter. We are where we are. You're going home and I'm going to finish my business with whoever it was sent that sixer."

"I don't wanna be alone."

"I'll call you."

"I might not be there."

"Then, where will you be?"

"Either dancing or dead."

__________

"Mingus Black?"

The broad-shouldered young man turned to face the tall and slender black man who had called his name.

"Yeah?"

They were standing at the railing of the Crystal Plaza Bar that hovered on invisible gasses above the East River at South Street Seaport.

"My name is Johnson, Folio Johnson." Folio extended his hand.

"Do I know you?" Black was instantly on guard.

"No, no you don't. I'm a security expert for Macso but I want to get into real estate. I've been studying the brothers in that field and you, Mingus Black, are at the top of my list." The black Seeker ran his tongue under his lower lip and wondered.

"Can I get you a drink, M?" a young, naked white girl asked Folio from the outward side of the railing. Folio looked at the girl through the clear Glassone bar. She was shaven from head to toe and perfectly proportioned. He wondered what his hero, Humphrey Bogart, would have said in that situation.

"Real rum," he said. "And, honey, do me a favor."

"What?"

"Put in an ice cube and stir it with your finger."

"You're somethin' else, mister."

The young woman, who was unashamed to walk around naked in the bright sun of downtown New York, blushed under the detective's intense blue eye. She moved away to get his drink.

"Macso, huh?" the real estate genius asked. "What division?" Folio was still watching the barmaid, enchanted by the words that had passed between them.

"Home," he said.

"You shittin'," Mingus said with a Backgrounder twang.

"No. I worked as Kismet's main bodyguard. Nine years I was with him."

"Was?"

"Seven years ago Home was hit by a Peruvian kick squad. They wanted to wipe out Kismet before MacroCode could annex their country. They got pretty close." Folio ran a finger above his blue eye.

"You get that then?"

"A cinder broke loose from a wild shot. It ruined my eye and part of my brain."

"Damn. That's why I never work for nobody full out," Mingus said. "They pay you to die for 'em, that's all, they pay you to die."

"You right about that, brother," Folio said. "You right about that, but still that cinder was the best thing ever happened to me."

"How you figure?"

"I saved Kismet's life by puttin' mine on the block. Motherfucker's crazy to the bone but he's loyal. Had his surgeons save me and then give me this synthetic eye to make up for what I lost. Between the fight and this new eye I see the world in a whole new light."

"And in that light you see real estate?" Mingus Black asked.

"Sure do. I wanna move a half a million Kenyans to downtown Tokyo and spend my life lookin' at cute girls at Crystal's."

"You're here right now." The black Seeker was getting comfortable.

"I'm working, though."

"Here's your drink, mister," the bald girl said.

When Folio reached for the glass she dipped her finger into the amber liquid and stirred it around. Folio took her hand and put the finger into his mouth, sucking hard enough to get all the rum off. The girl's eyes widened and she forgot to withdraw her hand when he let it go.

"Working on what," Mingus asked, "a hard-on?"

Folio laughed, looking deeply into the starstruck girl's eyes. "I sure am workin' on that one." Then he turned back to his target. "But today I'm here representin' a new world Nazi boy named Charles Spellman."

Mingus leaned back on his translucent barstool. For a moment Folio was afraid that he might bolt.

"What's up with Chas?" Mingus asked.

"He's drinkin' synth and worryin' about death."

"He is?" Mingus looked down at his wristcom.

"If you wanna know the time, I can tell ya--it's almost up," Folio said.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Mylo, Laddie, Bill Heinz, Derry James. They're all dead before their time. All the little Itsies." Mingus looked around to see if there was someone with Johnson, then he looked the detective in the eye.

"What's Charles to you?"

"A piece'a shit," Folio said. "But a piece'a shit who laid out hard creds for me to save his ass."

"You think that's it?" Mingus asked. "That it's because they're in the IS?"

"We should be so lucky to live in a world where they kill the fascists and spare the lambs."

"Maybe it's coincidence?"

"Is that the kinda thinkin' bought you downtown Tokyo?"

"So what
do
you think?"

"Nothin' yet. I'd like to know who's killing you boys. And in order to know that I have to know why."

"I have no idea."

"What were you guys discussing at your last meeting? Other than the ten-million-mile pool cue."

"Education and labor and their relation to citizenship. Azuma was thinking that Elite Education Group had the right idea, that everyone should be tested as to their abilities and that their scores should be the basis of the degree of their citizenship."

"Anything else?"

"No. Nothing. They thought they were getting somewhere, though. Fonti and Derry set it up so that we could have daily meetings. They were all excited by the possibility of presenting the IS with a model for political organization that would lead ultimately to social change."

"How could you hang with Itsies, man?" Folio asked. He took his glass and drained it, thinking of the barmaid's fingers as he did so.

"They ain't worried about us, man. There's a place for all the races up in there. All except Jews and Gypsies."

"You believe that?"

"Sure."

"Then why don't you belong?"

"How do you know I don't?"

"I know."

"Another drink?" the barmaid asked. She had a glass with a doubleshot of rum in it. Her finger already submerged.

Folio took the glass and the hand. This time he kissed the fingers and then licked his lips.

"My name is Paradise," she said.

"What else could it be?"

"I get off at midnight."

"I have to work the next three nights," Folio said seriously. "But I will be at the front door on the fourth night at midnight. And I won't do anything until we're together. You know what I mean?"

"Uh-huh."

"Eightday night, then?"

"Uh-huh."

Folio smiled and handed her his wild card. "My friend and I have to go, but I'll see you then." Paradise swiped the card through a payment slot on her left wrist. When she handed the card back Folio tapped in her tip on the screen over her artery.

"See ya," she said meekly.

"You bet."

__________

"How do I know that you're working for Chas?" Mingus asked Folio on the way down the Crystal Stair escalator.