A Fire in the Sun (5 page)

Before we got to the waiting room, a tall, well-dressed woman crossed the hall and went up a flight of stairs. She gave me a brief, modest smile and then turned her head away. She had hair as black and glossy as obsidian, gathered tightly into a chignon. Her hands were very pale, her fingers long and tapered and graceful. I got just a quick impression, yet I knew this woman had style and intelligence; but I felt also that she could be menacing and hard, if she needed.

"Who was that, Youssef?" I asked.

He turned to me and frowned. "That is Umm Saad." I knew immediately that he disapproved of her. I trusted Youssefs judgment, so my first intuition about her was most likely correct.

I took a seat in the outer office and killed time by finding faces in the pattern of cracks in the ceiling. After a while, one of Papa's two huge bodyguards opened the communicating door. I call the big men the Stones That Speak. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. "Come in," said the Stone. Those guys don't waste breath.

I went into Friedlander Bey's office. The man was about two hundred years old, but he'd had a lot of body modifications and transplants. He was reclining on cushions and drinking strong coffee from a golden cup. He smiled when I came in. "My eyes live again, seeing you O my nephew," he said. I could tell that he was genuinely pleased.

"My days apart from you have been filled with regret, O Shaykh," I said. He motioned, and I seated myself beside him. He reached forward to tip coffee from the golden pot into my cup. I took a sip and said, "May your table always be prosperous."

"May Allah grant you health," he said.

"I pray that you are feeling well, O Shaykh."

He reached out and grasped my hand. "I am as fit and strong as a sixty-year-old, but there is a weariness that I cannot overcome, my nephew."

"Then perhaps your physician—"

"It is a weariness of the soul," he said. "It is my appetite and ambition that are dying. I keep going now only because the idea of suicide is abhorrent."

"Perhaps in the future, science will restore you."

"How, my son? By grafting a new zest for living onto my exhausted spirit?"

"The technique already exists," I told him. "You could have a moddy and daddy implant like mine."

He shook his head ruefully. "Allah would send me to Hell if I did that." He didn't seem to mind if / went to Hell. He waved aside further speculation. "Tell me of your journey."

Here it was, but I wasn't ready. I still didn't know how to ask him if he figured in my family tree, so I stalled. "First I must hear all that happened while I was gone, O Shaykh. I saw a woman in the corridor. I've never seen a woman in your house before. May I ask you who she is?"

Papa's face darkened. He paused a moment, framing his reply. "She is a fraud and an impostor, and she is beginning to cause me great distress."

"Then you must send her away," I said.

"Yes," he said. His expression turned stonelike. I saw now not a ruler of a great business empire, not the controller of all vice and illicit activity in the city, but something more terrible. Friedlander Bey might truly have been the son of many kings, because he wore the cloak of power and command as if he'd been born to it. "I must ask you this question, O my nephew: Do you honor me enough to fill your lungs again with fire?"

I blinked. I thought I knew what he was talking about. "Did I not prove myself just a few months ago, O Shaykh?"

He waved a hand, just that easily making nothing of the pain and horror I'd suffered. "You were defending yourself from danger then," he said. He turned and put

 one old, clawlike hand on my knee. "I need you now to defend me from danger. I wish you to learn everything you can about this woman, and then I want you to destroy her. And her child also. I must know if I have your absolute loyalty."

His eyes were burning. I had seen this side of him before. I sat beside a man who was gripped more and more by madness. I took my coffee cup with a trembling hand and drank deeply. Until I finished swallowing, I wouldn't have to give him an answer.

Chapter 3

Before I had my skull amped, I used to have an alarm  clock. In the morning when it went off, I liked to stay in bed a little while longer, bleary and yawning. Maybe I'd get up and maybe I wouldn't. Now, though, I don't have a choice. I chip in an add-on the night before, and when that daddy decides it's time, my eyes snap open and I'm awake. It's an abrupt transition and it always leaves me startled. And there's no way in hell that chip will let me fall back asleep. I hate it a lot.

On Sunday morning I woke up promptly at eight o'clock. There was a black man I'd never seen before standing beside my bed. I thought about that for a moment. He was big, much taller than me and well built without going overboard about it. A lot of the blacks you see in the city are like Janelle, refugees from some famine-stricken, arid African wasteland. This guy, though, looked like he'd never missed a sensible, well-balanced meal in his life. His face was long and serious, and his expression seemed to be set in a permanent glower. His stern brown eyes and shaven head added to his grim demeanor. "Who are you?" I asked. I didn't get out from under the covers yet.

"Good morning, yaa Sidi, "he said. He had a soft, low-pitched voice with a touch of huskiness. "My name is Kmuzu."

"That's a start," I said. "Now what in the name of Allah are you doing here?"

"I am your slave."

"The hell you are." I like to think of myself as the defender of the downtrodden and all that. I get prickly at the idea of slavery, an attitude that runs counter to the popular opinion among my friends and neighbors.

 "The master of the house ordered me to see to your needs. He thought I'd be the perfect servant for you, yaa Sidi, because my name means 'medicine' in Ngoni."

In Arabic, my own name means "sickness." Fried-lander Bey knew, of course, that my mother had named me Marîd in the superstitious hope that my life would be free of illness. "I don't mind having a valet," I said, "but I'm not gonna keep a slave." Kmuzu shrugged. Whether or not I wanted to use the word, he knew he was still somebody's slave, mine or Papa's.

"The master of the house briefed me in great detail about your needs," he said. His eyes narrowed. "He promised me emancipation if I will embrace Islam, but I cannot abandon the faith of my father. I think you should know that I'm a devout Christian." I took that to mean that my new servant wholeheartedly disapproved of almost everything I might say or do.

"We'll try to be friends anyway," I said. I sat up and swung my legs out of the bed. I popped out the sleep control and put it in the rack of daddies I keep on the nightstand. In the old days, I spent a lot of time in the morning scratching and yawning and rubbing my scalp; but now when I wake up, I'm denied even those small pleasures.

"Do you truly need that device?" asked Kmuzu.

"My body has sort of gotten out of the habit of sleeping and waking up on its own."

He shook his head. "It is a simple enough problem to solve, yaa Sidi. If you just stay awake long enough, you will fall asleep."

I saw that if I expected to have any peace, I was going to have to murder this man, and soon. "You don't understand. The problem is that after three days and nights without sleep, when I do doze off at last I have bizarre dreams, really gruesome ones. Why should I put myself through all that, when I can just reach for pills or software instead?"

"The master of the house instructed me to limit your drug use."

I was starting to get aggravated. "Fine," I said, "you can just fucking try." The drug situation was probably behind Friedlander Bey's "gift" of this slave. I'd made a bad mistake on my very first morning chez Papa: I showed

up late for breakfast with a butaqualide hangover. I was moderately dysfunctional for a couple of hours, and that earned me his disapproval. So that first afternoon I passed by Laila's modshop on Fourth Street in the Budayeen and invested in the sleep control.

My preference is still a half-dozen beauties, but these days I'm always looking over my shoulder for Papa's spies. He's got a million of 'em. Let me make it clear: You don't want his disapproval. He never forgets these things. If he needs to, he hires other people to carry his grudges for him.

The advantages of the situation, however, are many. Take the bed, for instance. I've never had a bed before, ' ist a mattress thrown on the floor in the corner of a room. Now I can kick dirty socks and underwear under something, and if something falls on the floor and gets lost I know just where it'll be, although I won't be able to reach it. I still fall out of the damn bed a couple of times a week, but because of the sleep control, I don't wake up. I just lie there in a heap on the floor until morning.

So I got out of bed on this Sunday morning, took a hot shower, washed my hair, trimmed my beard, and brushed my teeth. I'm supposed to be at my desk in the police station by nine o'clock, but one of the ways I assert my independence is by ignoring the time. I didn't hurry getting dressed. I chose a pair of khaki trousers, a pale blue shirt, a dark blue tie, and a white linen jacket. All the civilian employees in the copshop dress like that, and I'm glad. Arab dress reminds me too much of the life I left behind when I came to the city.

"So you've been planted here to snoop on me," I said while I tried to get the ends of my necktie to come out even.

"I am here to be your friend, yaa Sidi," said Kmuzu.

I smiled at that. Before I came to live in Friedlander Bey's palace, I was lonely a lot. I lived in a bare one-room flat with nothing but my pillcase for company. I had some friends, of course, but not the kind who dropped over all the time because they missed me so much. There was Yasmin, whom I suppose I loved a little. She spent the night with me occasionally, but now she looked the other way when we bumped into each other. I think she held it against me that I've killed a few people. "What if I beat you?" I asked Kmuzu. "Would you still be my friend?"

I was trying to be sarcastic, but it was definitely the wrong thing to say. "I would make you stop," said Kmuzu, and his voice was as cold as any I've ever heard.

I think my jaw dropped. "I didn't mean that, you know," I said. Kmuzu gave a slight nod of his head, and the tension passed. "Help me with this, will you? I think the necktie is winning."

Kmuzu's expression softened a little, and he seemed glad to perform this little service for me. "It is fine now," he said when he finished. "I will get your breakfast."

"I don't eat breakfast."

"Yaa Sidi, the master of the house directed me to make sure that you eat breakfast from now on. He believes that breakfast is the most important meal of the day."

Allah save me from nutrition fascists! "If I eat in the morning, I feel like a lump of lead for hours."

It didn't make any difference to Kmuzu what I thought. "I will get your breakfast," he said.

"Don't you have to go to church or something?"

He looked at me calmly. "I have already been to worship," he said. "Now I will get your breakfast." I'm sure he'd note every calorie I took in and file a report with Friedlander Bey. It was just another example of how much influence Papa exerted.

I may have felt a little like a prisoner, but I'd certainly been given compensations. I had a spacious suite in the west wing of Friedlander Bey's great house, on the second floor near Papa's own private quarters. My closet was filled with many suits of clothes in different styles and fashions—Western, Arab, casual, formal. Papa gave me a lot of sophisticated high-tech hardware, from a new Chhindwara constrained-AI data deck to an Esmeraldas holo system with Libertad screens and a Ruy Challenger argon solipsizer. I never worried about money. Once a week, one of the Stones That Speak left a fat envelope stuffed with cash on my desk.

All in all, my life had changed so much that my days of poverty and insecurity seemed like a thirty-year nightmare. Today I'm well fed, well dressed, and well liked by the right people, and all it's cost me is what you'd expect my self-respect and the approval of most of my friends. Kmuzu let me know that breakfast was ready. "Bis-millah, "I murmured as I sat down: in the name of God. I ate some eggs and bread fried in butter, and swallowed a cup of strong coffee.

"Would you like anything more, yaa Sidi?" asked Kmuzu.

"No, thank you." I was staring at the far wall, thinking about freedom. I wondered if there was some way I could buy my way out of the police-liaison job. Not with money, anyway, I was sure of that. I don't think it's possible to bribe Papa with money: Still, if I paid very close attention, I just might find some other means of leverage. Inshallah.

"Then shall I go downstairs and bring the car around?" Kmuzu asked. I blinked and realized that I had to get going. I didn't have Friedlander Bey's long black limousine at my disposal, but he'd given me a comfortable new electric automobile to use. After all, I was his official representative among the guardians of justice.

Kmuzu, of course, would be my driver now. It occurred to me that I'd have to be very clever to go anywhere without him. "Yes, I'll be down in a minute," I said.

I ran a hand through my hair, which was getting long again. Before I left the house, I put a rack of moddies and daddies in my briefcase. It was impossible to predict what sort of personality I'd need to have when I got to work, or which particular talents and abilities. It was best just to take everything I had and be prepared.

I stood on the marble stairs and waited for Kmuzu. It was the month of Rabi al-Awwal, and a warm drizzle was falling from a gray sky. Although Papa's estate was carved out of a crowded neighborhood in the heart of the city, I could almost pretend that I was in some quiet garden oasis, far from urban grime and noise. I was surrounded by a green lushness that had been coaxed into existence solely to soothe the spirit of one weary old man. I heard the quiet, peaceful trickling of cool fountains, and some energetic birds warbled nearby from the carefully tended fruit trees. On the still air drifted a heavy, sweet perfume of exotic flowers. I pretended that none of this could seduce me.