Spares (23 page)

I felt otherwise, and lunged toward the table, carelessly knocking it over and sending my gun skittering toward the wall. Johnny had regained his composure and was reaching for his own weapon, but it was all far too slow.

The door was kicked open and five of Vinaldi’s men swarmed in—the guys who’d come for me at Howie’s place. The man with the blue lights leapt out of their way like a gymnast, and again I heard a rustling sound at the back of my mind like spiders walking on leaves. But mainly I heard the sound of gunfire as everyone fired at one another at once. I swiped my gun up from the floor, keeping my head below the level of the sofa.

I don’t like enclosed spaces too much. I turned and fired straight at the glass wall.

The result was nothing like the shattering in Howie’s place. That was just straight glass. This window had electronics built into it, and fractured with a grinding folding
scream. A jagged sheet broke out of it, tumbling down into the room and revealing the sweating dancers beyond.

I grabbed the overturned table and yanked it onto its side, crawling quickly toward the hole in the glass, flinching against the impacts I expected to come. Everyone seemed to be too busy trying to kill someone else. Vinaldi was crouched by the wall, behind the body of a fallen bodyguard, firing into the melee by the door.

“I’m still going to kill you,” I told him, then jumped through the wall and tumbled into the crowd beyond. None of the dancers seemed to be aware of what was happening, the gunfire inaudible beneath the pounding noise and flickering lyrics. I pushed my way out through the crowd, and when I emerged panting into the street I turned for the elevators and ran.

“Hey—what the hell happened to you?”

I shouldered my way past Nearly and into her apartment. It was dark—lit only by warm strip lighting down at floor level—and neat, cozy, personal. Presumably she didn’t do business here, though a few items dotted around the apartment—the TV, some of the furniture, a rearWindow on the back wall—hinted that she did good business somewhere. Suej was sitting in the middle of the floor, a mug of coffee in front of her. She jumped on seeing me, face aghast.

“What?” I said, and then looked down and realized someone’s blood was spread liberally all over my clothes. “It’s not mine,” I said, putting my arms around Suej, and holding her tight.

When we disengaged I turned to see Nearly holding a mug out to me. “We don’t have time,” I said.

“Sure you do,” she replied, thrusting it into my hands and letting go. I kept hold of it—barely. “You’re not going anywhere now. Just sit down and be quiet.”

Without really knowing how, I found myself in a chair. My entire body ached in a nonspecific way. Rapt
crash. My head hurt in several very specific places. But we needed to be moving on. To where, I didn’t know.

Nearly seemed to read my mind. “Where you going to go, big guy? Howie’s okay—we gave him a call. But his place is going to be too hot for a while.”

“We’re putting you at risk by being here,” I said. “I’m not prepared to do that. I don’t even know you.”

“That’s sweet of you and don’t think I don’t appreciate it but I think you’re kind of tired right now and working out what to do next is going to be a high mountain to climb.”

I stared at her, something that she’d said striking a chord.

“While I remember,” Nearly continued apologetically, “Howie asked what he should do with the box. Did you want it kept or anything? Because otherwise it’s kind of gross.”

“What was in the box?” Suej asked. I took one look at her and knew I couldn’t lie.

“Part of Nanune,” I said. “I’m sorry, Suej.”

Her eyes glazed, and then she nodded. “A big part?”

“Big enough,” I said, and then—horrifically—had to stifle a yawn. Suej didn’t seem to notice. My head was feeling strange. Sour adrenaline, I guessed.

“Do you know where David is?” Suej asked, looking at the carpet.

“No,” I said. “But I know who’s got him, and the others.”

“Is he from Safety Net?”

“I don’t know where he’s from,” I said heavily, though I felt I should. Something was still tugging at my mind. It pisses me off, when it does that. I wish it would just come out and speak its piece rather than pussyfooting around in the shadows. Probably the result of too much drugs, too often, for far too long. Kids, don’t live like this at home. I yawned again and realized—something was wrong, I looked down into my mug: My sight was blurring, but I could see that I’d finished the coffee.

“What have you done tome?” I asked querulously.

“Nothing bad, and it wasn’t just my idea,” Nearly said. “Just a sedative.”

“You’re with them,” I said thickly, voice slurring. The walls seemed to be sliding down into the floor.

“I’m not with anyone,” she said, standing and carrying a blanket over to me. “What you see is what you get. Now get some sleep. Your mommies will look after you.”

The last things I saw were Suej sitting on the floor next to me, whispering tunnel talk; and Nearly’s face a little farther away, clear skin and big eyes framed by dark chestnut hair.

“She’s beautiful,” I thought foggily. “Pity she’s killed me.” The thought seemed somehow consistent with life in general.

I woke up shaking violently, but it didn’t last too long. Ten minutes and a cup of coffee scavenged from Nearly’s immaculate kitchen saw me through to the end of it. In a way it was kind of a nostalgic experience, though I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone.

The apartment was empty, but a note in the bathroom told me where they’d gone:

Taken the day off
, it said, in a firm hand.
Cone shopping on Indigo Drive
. Underneath, in Suej’s much less confident scrawl, was added:
Come meet us? ps I tole Nearly about things

I showered rapidly, swearing quietly under my breath. Though I was grateful to Nearly for looking after Suej the night before, they shouldn’t have gone out alone. I was also somewhat annoyed about having been knocked out, though even I could tell I was better for it. The face I saw in the mirror didn’t look exactly human, but at least I resembled some allied species. Back in the living room I discovered a pile of men’s clothes neatly laid out, presumably for me. They were my size at least, a black suit and midnight blue shirt. Rather smarter than my usual attire, and I didn’t know where they’d come from, but I put them on under my coat and left the apartment
still clutching a second mug of coffee. So what if I was wearing some John’s cast-offs; it didn’t matter to me. And I could hardly cruise Indigo Drive covered in brown splatters of someone else’s blood.

A local elevator took me up to 98, and a short walk got me to the start of the shopping strip. It was eleven o’clock by then, and from the way the crowds were beginning to swell I realized belatedly that it was Saturday. Indigo Drive is kind of a point of honor in the world below the 100 line. In the original MegaMall the two-story 9495 floor had been the most prestigious of the shopping arcades, plumb in the middle of the aircraft. Pretty lanes of bijou shoplets ranged round sweeping highways of outlet stores, dinky little cafés, and restaurants, with not a bar in sight. All the most chichi stores had since migrated up into the shopping floors in the 130s and above, but Indigo Drive was still hanging on in there. It was the best shopping there was without getting a pass to go higher; and things were a hell of a lot cheaper. The stores had resisted the high life fashion of costs lots-LCD panels in clothes which showed in dollars just how expensive they’d been—which meant that they were no use to anyone from above 130. But for people in the 70s-120s, Indigo Drive was the place to go.

I wandered the main streets for an hour, partly looking for the girls, mainly enjoying the brief sensation of not being shot at. I recognized some of the stores; others seemed to have changed, the partial familiarity making me feel as if I’d never been there before. Then a way ahead of me I saw a face in the crowd which looked like Suej’s, and quickened my pace. She disappeared at Nearly’s side into a clothes store, but not so quickly that I couldn’t see her expression: big smile, bright eyes. I stopped hurrying, to give them a little more time, and hung around outside to finish a cigarette.

When I entered the store, I reached without thinking for some MaxWork. Only when I had a small, half-finished device in my hands did I realize what I’d done, and I ground to a halt in the doorway, staring down at a
partially constructed nest of chips and components. People tutted as they walked round me, but I barely heard them. I could remember perfectly what I was supposed to do with the stuff in my hands, but I put it back, turned round, and left the store.

When I reached the outside again I stood for a while, staring ahead but not seeing anything as it was. Everything seemed to have changed, as if in some small way the past had suddenly become married to the present. As I stood there, I thought I felt a child run a hand against mine, but when I looked there was no one there. Maybe it was just a coincidence, or perhaps I was finally realizing that was always the way it was going to be. I walked unsteadily to a bench and sat down, trying to avoid looking at the MaxWork bench just inside the store. I was thinking of Henna, and the past, in a way I hadn’t ever really done since things had changed.

Remembering how, like every man alive, I’d trailed round after my woman in clothes stores, gazing dazed with boredom into the middle distance and periodically nodding at stuff that was being shown to me. A handbag; a dress; some shoes. How I’d never been able to tell the difference between them, and how, like all those other men, I’d done MaxWork to ease the tedium.

Fifty or so years ago Arlond Maxen’s father had been following his wife round a store just like this when a very lucrative bulb went off in his head. Maxen had been thinking that he’d do anything at all to make the time pass quicker, and then suddenly realized that he probably wasn’t alone. All these guys, he mused, looking round him at the walking dead, following their women and bored out of their minds: all those wasted man-hours.

He could give them something to do.

So MaxWork was born. A small bench inside every women’s store, with components and half-finished products laid out. You followed your wife or girlfriend into the store, and just picked one of the devices up. In the early days Maxen made sure the kiosks were staffed by
eye-candy; after a while it became such a habit that the babes weren’t even necessary. While you trailed around the racks of cloth and leather you did some work on the device; simple, absorbing tasks which anyone could do, picking up from where the last guy had left off. When you left the store you put it back on the bench on the way out, to be picked up by the next boyfriend or husband along. When the devices were finished they were taken away, but there were always new ones to complete.

It was the kind of scheme Howie had been trying to emulate all his life. Perfect, in every way. Relief from tedium for the men, fewer bored sighs for the women to endure—and free labor for the Maxen Corporation, cheaper even than droids. Everybody won, but Cedrif Maxen won most of all. Thirty years later he was the richest man in New Richmond—and now his youngest son had it all.

That’s the history, for those of you who’re interested, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. Walking into the store had carelessly wiped a cloth across a window blackened and opaque with time. The path of that cloth was still filthy, but just transparent enough to reveal glints on the edges of memories lost in the darkness beyond. I’d tried so hard not to think of any of it. Not even of the horror at the end, just of the times before that Bad things done, and said; things which could never be undone. Not just the bad, either; good and bad memories hurt in different ways, but they hurt just about the same.

At that moment, I would have given anything to walk round a shoe store following Henna’s glee, watching the way her eyes calculated cost, the way her hands reached out to caress and assay, it could never happen, and for a moment I was seized with a distraught desire to go down to 72 and the clothes left in our old apartment; to look at them, touch them, see if I could remember the day when they were bought. To try to take myself back to that day and this time not grunt and yawn, or bury myself in MaxWork, but be there with her
and live every minute as it passed. So many minutes, and hours; so many days ignored away. And then suddenly it’s over, and she can never come back, and all that time returns to stay.