No Dogs in Philly (17 page)

“
What do I have to do?” he
asked.

She looked away and touched her
neck.

“
There is a price,” she said. “But
one you have nearly paid.”

“
I don’t want to be an elzi,” he
said suddenly, unexpectedly, desperately. He couldn’t resist, he
knew; whatever this was had owned him, knew him and controlled him.
He would give in now, later, one day or another. It had come and he
would follow and he was just a small mind, a weak soul—had always
been weak, everyone had known that about him, he had always known.
He would surrender, but he had to fight, just a little, struggle at
least a bit. He would not become an elzi, he wouldn’t, wouldn’t let
the real Saru find him like some beast, naked and broken and
mindless, rolling in the garbage. The other Saru laughed, a
tinkling kindness that warmed him, set his mind at ease, like she
knew his thoughts and was gently guiding him back to safety, back
on a course that led to her, his only course, the
inevitable.

“
Don’t be silly,” she said,
leaning forward with her hands back so her breasts rose up. “The
elzi pay a different price. They aren’t like you. You’re
intelligent, Brian. You have a good mind, a
strong
mind. No
one would ask you to give that up. No Brian, keep your mind, but
give me your body. What do you need it for anyway?”

She leaned forward and touched his knee. Heat
spread out from her touch, traveling up his leg into his groin, his
heart, his brain. What did he need his body for anyway? Everything
good was in the Net, that was the real world, that was where he
could do anything he wanted. All his body did was slow him down—it
was a big sack of chores with all the eating and sleeping and
shitting. He wouldn’t need to do any of that. She would give him a
place where he was free.

“
If I say no, will you leave me
alone?” he asked.

She smiled. “Oh Brian, you can’t say no. You
could never say no to me.”

Of course she was right. He didn’t remember
saying yes, but he remembered her standing and coming over to him,
crossing her legs as she walked, bending over and kissing him on
the forehead and then her kisses traveling down his neck and
finding his mouth. He remembered her hand tugging at his hair, her
body wrapping around his, and the two of them coming together at
last. He felt her nails digging into his back, felt the heat of her
breath, the soft, delicious moans, and the sound of his name
whispered in his ear. It seemed at some point in all of that he
died, leaving his body and going into hers, that inside her was a
whole new world, vaster and more beautiful than he had ever
imagined, and that his old, lumpy bone and skin had been a burden
all along.

Chapter 14

She was free! Free to waltz out, to kick the
guard in the shins and laugh, to click her heels and give little
love smacks to every pig she met. Fear. And anger. But mostly fear
in their faces as she skipped by, the bitch that had smashed up
half of Broad Street, untouchable, unstoppable. She had friends,
the barefoot man in the suit who didn’t seem quite right, who told
their bosses behind the big oak desks what was what, who went to
jail, which bothers disappeared, and which lucky cunts ran free.
They handed her back her gun, loaded, right there in the office,
and the prod, and the dart launcher, and the micro grenades, and
her clothes, of course, that someone had even washed. She was
pleased that half her tricks had remained a mystery, delighted
they’d never found the hair-thin shiv lying just under the skin of
her outer thigh.

It was a challenge not to press her luck, not
to hop into one of the squad cars in the parking lot and race off
into the sunset. How far did ElilE’s protection go? How much would
he stick his dick out for her? What were the stakes? A girl? A dog?
The city? The world? Or ten million American dollars? Pick up the
phone, Jojran! Her implants were back online, brain awash in smut
and news and wacky videos—it was a lonely cage without them. And
even though she laughed into the cold night air, it was hard to
forget why she’d been tossed in a cell. Her great pile of fuckups
that kept killing people she knew—and who would have thought that
she actually cared? That woman was nothing but an annoyance, but
for some reason she wouldn’t get out of Saru’s head, that image of
her, that last glimpse, looking so scared, and McCully had seen it
and gone back…

Pick up the phone! She needed information,
leads or the appearance of leads. It was clear that even if she
found the women on this list she couldn’t babysit them, and the
Gaespora were too afraid to do anything. Ha! Free. She truly was
free, freer than any of them, freer than the mopey Gods, because
she could do whatever she wanted and no one could mistake it for
anything but retarded blundering. Yes, she was perfect for the job.
She would find these bastards and make them pay as soon as Jojran
answered the goddamn phone. What was he playing at? He never
ignored her calls. She’d have to go put a boot up his ass, but hell
he’d probably enjoy that.

Security let her in without hesitation. It was
the same men; she recognized the hard-ass that had hassled her
before. He was polite now, “Ma’am,” and he smiled at her. It was a
knowing smile, a smile that made her feel naked to the bone. She
didn’t want to turn her back on him, and she watched him through
her earlobe cam the whole way to the elevator; he smiled the whole
time, watching her back. She jammed the button, fifty-seven, and
then pressed it a few thousand more times, sensing suddenly the
urgency. The music in the elevator was a sterile tune that seemed
to her full of menace. She wanted it to stop, searched for some way
to end it, but it cackled on.

The doors slid open. The hallway was quiet,
perfectly quiet. She walked to the door and rang the doorbell.
Almost immediately the door swung open and Jojran stood there. He
was dressed nicely, in clothes that fit for a change, and it made
him look almost like a man. He seemed relaxed, truly at ease, not
the nervous faux confidence, no twitching, no grinding his teeth,
no unconscious vocalizations. He wore the same knowing smile as the
guard.

“
Saru,” he said. “What a pleasant
surprise.”

“
Shouldn’t be,” she said, pushing
past him. Their skin touched as she went by and the area of contact
exploded in a crawling sensation, like fleas swarming on her skin.
She shivered. “I’ve been calling for hours.”

“
Sorry,” he said. He closed the
door behind him. Every motion was so smooth now. The apartment
smelled funny, like sex, almost, and something else, something
sweet like garbage. “I was occupied. I was trying to reach you too,
where were you?”

“
Got picked up,” she said. “Broke
a few road rules, but they let me out for good behavior. Listen, I
need you to find me a vulture, someone with good vibes. I need
someone to analyze this.” She withdrew the vial of blood McCully
had collected. “This came off of one of our perps, killed a woman
this morning.” He didn’t need any more detail.

He took the vial and held it up to the light,
swirling it. He smiled even more broadly. She noticed that his
teeth were whiter, like he’d gone out and finally seen a dentist,
fixed those odd yellow spots. His teeth were almost perfect
now.

“
I think I can help you with
this,” he said. He winked. “I’ve been doing some research, you
know, on our friends, the UausuaU.”

She shuddered. The name was nonsensical, some
alien transliteration, something with no semantic power, just a
sound. She’d stumbled through it, heard other people stumble
through it, even ElilE and Friar with their good technical
pronunciation—it didn’t sound like this. When Jojran said it it was
perfect, a perfect, slithering re-creation of the song, the hidden
song she’d heard in the jukebox, in the elevator, in the
hallucinations with Friar, the street player with his saxophone,
and the screech of brakes as she’d slammed into that car and
crawled over her crumpled hood.

“
What kind of research have you
been doing?” she asked, taking a step backwards, nonchalant. He
noticed of course, and his smile grew, even broader now, straining
at the edges of his mouth.

“
Wonderful research,” he said. “In
fact, I’ve found a lead. Fanny Duvak. Do you know who she
is?”

Saru sensed they were moving in tandem, that he
acted only in response to her but so quickly it was like they were
mirroring each other. Her Betty jolted to her hand and she fired
three rubbers into his chest. He brought up his arm and flicked his
wrist, casually, like he was trying to dry his hands. A pain like a
knife cut across her chest. She looked down and saw indeed she had
been cut, a straight red line from her right hip up through her
left breast to her left shoulder. The cut had gone right through
her steel-armor shirt. For a second the pain was too much,
overloading her senses, and then her combat implants kicked in and
shot her full of painkillers and adrenaline. She dove behind the
kitchen counter and then peeked over the top.

Jojran stood there, exactly where he’d been,
not moved an inch by three rubber bullets from two feet away. They
had put holes in his shirt, holes in his skin; she could see blood
trickling out. His head swiveled a hundred degrees to look at her,
swiveled without the rest of the body moving an inch, bones
cricking at the motion.

“
Why Saru,” he said, sounding
hurt. “Why would you do that to me?”

She stood and leveled the gun at him. Her scans
swept up and down telling her over and over again that this was
Jojran, their somatic profiles matched—slower heartbeat, slower
blinks, regularly timed, like with ElilE, a stopwatch arrangement
to every breath and motion, like a machine pretending to be a
man.

“
What have you done with Jojran?”
she asked.

“
But I am Jojran,” he said. “You
know that.”

“
You’re good, but I’ve seen
dopples before. You aren’t fooling anyone so cut the bullshit.
Where’s the real Jojran, and I swear to God if you’ve hurt him I
will show you pain.”

He laughed, neck springing back into forward
position, and then he leaned-sat on the back of the sofa causing
the nose of her gun to twitch down and stay level with his heart.
She didn’t know if a regular bullet would slow him down but the
ball buster in the barrel could shred a tank; it would turn a
person—even a drugged-up, body-modded psychopath—into
goulash.

“
You think I’m a clone? No, sorry.
This is the real deal.” He held up a forearm and she flinched—what
had he used on her before? Some sort of sonic sword or a ring
laser? Whatever it was it hurt like a motherfucker and it had gone
right through her. Her whole chest felt tight as her platelet
injectors flooded the area and accelerated the scarring process.
That was one unfortunate side effect of the technology—big ugly
scars for everything. She hoped she hadn’t lost a nipple; it was
hard to tell. He wagged his forearm at her so the skin jiggled and
then he grabbed a pinch and ripped it out, holding it up and
shaking it.

“
Yep, this is the real Jojran—his
body at least. He gave it to me.”

“
You sick fuck.”

“
No. I helped him. He was sad and
afraid and alone and his life was pain. I gave him
peace.”

“
You murdered him like you
murdered those women.”

“
Hardly. Murder implies malice and
I act only out of love. This world is in disarray, the planets and
stars scattered about at random, the organisms fighting each other
willy-nilly—what an odd word, willy-nilly. Willy-nilly,
willy-nilly, willy-nilly…you see what I mean? It could just as
easily be nilly-willy. There’s no order here, no structure. No
unity
.”

She resisted the urge to just shoot him. This
mad rambling was garbage, but he might let something slip, a clue
about his hideout or his methods. The danger was if he started
making sense, started getting inside her head.

“
And you do that by
killing?”

“
Killing is a meaningless concept.
The information is the same no matter how it is expressed, but more
useful in the aggregate. An individual can be just as easily
unkilled as killed, but then you would lessen the whole. It is
better to be whole.”

“
I don’t understand.”

“
Of course not. You’re just one
mind, one body, ninety years at most of life to learn and save a
copy of any wisdom that manages to penetrate your selfishness. I
didn’t kill those women. I freed them, and they begged,
begged
me to do it. They died in pain only because they made
it so, according to the rules of your species—nothing is free,
there is no love, everything has a price. They forced their payment
upon me—for some reason your species has a fascination with pain,
and pleasure too, and all the sordid acts of the body. They asked
for pain in measure of the gift, and I gave. But we would give
freely, without pain, to all if you would only allow us, for mine
are the Giving Gods, the Gods of Eternal Life, the Loving
Gods.”

“
And Jojran? What have you done
with him?”

“
He is with us now,
happy.”

“
You mean he’s dead.”

“
You aren’t
listening
.
There is no such thing as death. Do you wish him to be back here?
As an individual again, a lonely mind trapped in a bag of fluid? Or
what about your friend McCully or the woman Terry? Do you wish to
see them again? To return them to the pain of this
world?”