No Dogs in Philly (9 page)

“
What do you have against the
Net—wait, no, what’s your name?” There we go, manners.

“
My name is Ibrahim. But many of
us take old names, and there are only so many to go around, so you
may call me Hemu.”

“
Delighted, I’m Saru.” They shook
hands, sort of. He went in for some strange sort of grip greeting
but she gripped tighter and forced it into a strong American
handshake.

“
Saru is an unusual
name.”

“
They told me it comes from
another zone. My mom was a Eurocrat, Gaulian or one of those
strange places, but I never knew her.”

“
Your father?”

“
An asshole. I grew up in the HMH,
Hathaway Morning House. Won the lottery or something and got an
education—not that it stuck.”

Yeah, the lottery for sure. Backwoods farm
bitch to big-city boarding slut. Should’ve been a reporter,
should’ve written a book on that place, blown it open. She oughta
go back right now guns blazing and blow a hole in the wall, hold
off the guards while the kids ran to freedom. She wondered how many
got out, how many were right now filing their shitty plastic
cafeteria knives into shanks, planning to slice the hall guard’s
Achilles tendon and steal his keys.

“
What about you?” she asked, not
really caring. This talk was boring. The past was the past and
nothing fixed that so it didn’t make no difference. Hemu seemed
genuine in his requests so she’d given him more than a kick in the
nuts, but all this talk was stupid. Who cared about families and
parents and childhood tales? What the hell did that have to do with
anything? Hemu started talking about his life, his parents growing
up in the Fish…being cooks in the Walnut Coop, his great triumph
stripping copper from an old subway car and trading it to buy long
underwear for the whole coop. A hero. She switched on a comedy feed
and watched two fat men run around slapping people with their
cocks. She set her body to follow Hemu and her head to nod and her
mouth to make a
huh
or noise of interest now and
then.

Her instincts pulled her out of the feed—the
system worked. It wasn’t danger but curiosity. They’d come to a
building, a chapel, surrounded by a maze of massive brick
warehouses and factories. Up in the darkening sky—how long had they
been walking?—she could make out an artificial canopy of steel
girders, rope nets, and carefully placed debris. Their location was
hidden from surveillance, aerial and satellite, and nested in the
middle of an industrial jungle. The chapel was pressed, squeezed
between the walls of an alley, small, like a double-decker bus. It
seemed ancient, carved of stone, gargoyles and monsters, and…fish?
leaping out in master-crafted detail, stained-glass windows—real
glass, real art, not a screen that switched to ads every thirty
seconds—depicting…what did they depict? It seemed abstract, but the
more she stared—was that a person? An ocean? A planet? What was
this place?

She felt a hand on her shoulder, Hemu, and
somehow it was reassuring. There was that feeling here, that tingle
in her tits and hair along her spine, that something just shy of
the natural was at work. Hemu was looking at her, and his face was
serious.

“
It was a risk, bringing you
here,” he said. “You are connected to the Net, and the dark God
that hungers, but my God said to me it must be so.”

“
Oh did he?” she said, trying to
sound wry but she was rattled. It was so quiet here, so strange,
all these dead buildings with no noise. This wasn’t a city; it was
a forest. She saw the plants—so many plants, growing from the
cracks in the building, the grime between the bricks, the vines
crawling over everything and the flowers, the white flowers like
tiny bells everywhere. Where had they all come from? Were they
native? She’d never seen them anywhere else.

“
Come,” Hemu said. He led her
inside, through the carved wooden doors into the warmth and light.
There were pews, and hips, heads bowed, lips moving in quiet
prayer. The floor was marble. Yes, this had been a chapel,
McChristian maybe, but so old? Where had it come from? She tried to
scan the Net but found a signal error. She was cut off, in a dead
zone. At the far end where she guessed an altar would normally be
was a large white statue. What was that girl the McChristians
worshipped? Mara? Susan? Whatever, at some point it might have been
her, but the face had been carved out, roughly, leaving an empty
scoop in the head. Saru didn’t like the statue. She could tell that
it was the source of the bullshit, that it was the thing making her
hair go all staticky and running the thrill-sex touch up and down
her skin.

“
What am I doing here?” she asked,
loudly, causing the hips to look up. She should be at a bar,
drinking to keep her mind scrambled, chasing leads, checking on
Lou, hunting down the bastards that had hacked her—pornographers,
maybe, trying to rip out her sex life and sell it? Ha, bad luck
buddies. This was a waste of time.

“
You’re looking for a girl,” Hemu
said, bluntly, feeding her back her own get-to-it tone. “A girl
with blue eyes. We know her. We can find her.”

Well, that got her attention.

“
You know her, her, specifically?”
Wait, how? “Hey, how did you know I was looking for
her?”

He gestured to the statue. “God told
us.”

“
Oh.” Goddamnit, what a waste of
time. Hemu nodded at her, as if reading her thoughts.

“
There are no dogs in the city,”
he said.

“
So?” She was ten seconds away
from desecrating this place and laughing her ass back to
civilization. “There aren’t many cats either, or—” but that wasn’t
true, she realized. She’d seen cats, not many, but a few. So what?
They were harder to catch than dogs; they could climb trees and
scurry better. And they weren’t so dependent on
handouts.

“
So what?” she said.

“
The other, the Blue God that
follows the girl. It likes dogs. It wants to be a wolf.”

That was something. The other…he was talking
about the alien. He knew about that. But to him it was all mixed up
in religion. To the Gaespora it was a marketing gimmick. To Friar
it was science. To this poor bastard it was divine intervention.
And to her it was all just a fat pain in the ass.

“
So you know about
the…others?”

He nodded. “We have known about them longer
than anyone. We follow the First. The Slow God who knows time and
waits. She came when the skies lost their blue and told us how we
could live in a world of dark. From Her we have learned peace. We
have learned simplicity. We have learned to trust one another, and
above all to turn from the Hunger. She knows the Blue God, has seen
him in other worlds beyond ours. They are not the same but they
know how to live without destroying one another. The Hunger does
not know this. It knows only Hunger.”

“
And what about the…” Shit, what
would this nutcase call the Gaespora? The Green God? The Rich God?
The Annoying God? Ah screw it; she couldn’t play this game. “What
about the Gaespora? You know, the plant people.”

“
They are like the Hunger though
they are not. They seek to grow, to become Gods of Gods, but
through kinder means. The Slow God neither gives nor takes from the
Sad Gods. She pities them, for they have lost much, and chastens
them, for they have not learned. Of all the Gods, their end is
least certain.”

“
Oh, okay. So, where’s this girl?
The Blue God’s escort.”

She noticed that all the hips in the joint were
now watching them, staring almost reverently at her. There were at
least thirty of them, and she saw they were armed with guns, knives
and—was that a sword? She slapped herself mentally for letting down
her guard. Lame as they may be they could still dog pile her and
chop off her head. And she hadn’t quite realized how nutty these
guys were. They really believed this shit.

“
We will help you, but you must
help us.”

“
Ah, a capitalist God. I like
that.”

“
We would not ask. We would help
you freely, but we are desperate.”

Desperate. That was something she could
understand, that could make a body do some twisted shit. And if she
said no? Awfully tempting, seeing as they seemed to be relying on
voodoo just like everyone else. Would they beat her senseless and
crucify her if she flipped them the bird and bounced? Although…Hemu
had been sincere enough, and really what she needed was thousands
of slaves to keep an eye out for all the blue-eyed girls in the
Fish. That was almost exactly what Hemu could give her, if he
wasn’t bullshitting.

“
What do you want me to
do?”

“
I will show you.”

It was a tricky climb to the top of the
warehouse, but the view was breathtaking. The city was a wall of
lights and crawling ads, spilling into Jersey across the Hathaway
Bridge. She’d never seen Philly like this before, the panorama of
light, almost as far as you could see in any direction. It was like
a fantasy world, a magical kingdom—it almost looked like a place
where you would want to be. Above it all, a massive steel erection
jutting from the wall of light, the Vericast building, illuminated
by a bluish beam of what she could only suppose was moonlight, a
symbol of absolute might. She got the odd sense that they could see
her up in the Gaespora forest, that ElilE was still there on his
rock, that he hadn’t moved since their meeting, and that he was
seeing through the miles of air and dark to warn her: time was
running out.

But that wasn’t what Hemu had brought her up
here to see. He was pointing at something below, and shouting
something—they had to shout the wind was so loud. She didn’t like
the wind. The heights she could handle, sort of, but all this
blowing, whipping her hair in her eyes and chilling her through her
coat; it seemed to be pushing her towards the edge, urging her to
jump, calling her a pussy if she didn’t make a try at flying. What
was Hemu pointing at? It was a building, maybe, large, almost a
quarter of a city block, illuminated by slow-blinking lights. It
almost looked like a refinery. Oh speak up you mild-mannered twat.
She grabbed his head, and brought it closer to hers, almost so
their foreheads touched. She was pleasantly surprised that his
breath didn’t reek—was that peppermint?

“
What. Are. You.
Saying?”

“
It’s a fab dozer,” he said,
pointing at the building. “It’s coming this way.”

“
So?”

“
It will destroy the church, the
Place of Communion.”

“
So? Build another
one.”

He shook his head.

“
The Slow God cannot be in all
places. This place is close to Her. This place is dear.”

She thought back to what ElilE had said about
similarity—what had he said, similarity margins? Margarine?—well,
similarity. And this God, or alien, or inspired con artist
preferred this particular spot.

“
What will happen if it’s
destroyed?”

He shook his head again.

“
It will be bad. She brings us
peace.”

The thought hit her hard—peace. That was the
word. The quiet, the calm around the area, the green things growing
everywhere and the flowers. And she hadn’t seen an elzi in hours.
She could believe that there was something here, a God, a gas leak,
a fluke of topography that made it desirable real
estate.

She activated her binoculars and night vision.
She could see the fab dozer now, a box frame on bus-sized treads
with wrecking balls, heat rays, grinders, chemical recyclers,
auto-assemblers, and three-dimensional printers. She could see the
line of apartments it had shit out behind it—nice, two-story
buildings with brick facades, for the young techies and embyays. It
was a billion-dollar automated development device—it had to be
automated to keep Hathaway’s hands clean in case an elzi or a hip
got caught in the blender—and Hemu was asking her to destroy it,
because she would have to destroy it. It was doubtful she could get
a sharp enough program to reroute the thing, and even if she did
they would eventually catch the error and fix it. This would carry
a terrorism charge at the least and you couldn’t buy your way out
of that. The feds’d strap her to a metal cross and rip out her
fingernails, peel off her nipples, rape her with cattle prods and
snap her bones, one by one until she confessed. There was no
way.

“
I can’t do that,” she said. “I
can’t. I mean, I don’t even know how, and even if I did—they’d
catch me. That thing is a fortress. I’m sorry but no
go.”

He stared at the fab dozer, face
unchanged.

“
You don’t understand.”

“
No, I think I understand
alright.”

“
It is not you who can do this. It
is the girl. When you find her, you must bring her here. She will
destroy the machine.”

“
I can’t do that. I have to bring
her to the Gaes—the Sad Gods.”

“
Do you know why they seek this
girl?”

“
They want to protect her. There
are men trying to find her, trying to kill her.”

“
Yes. Let us go below.”