city blues 02 - angel city blues (16 page)

There was also a tattered hardcover of
The Dharma Bums
, its black and white paper dust jacket gone stiff and brittle. I lifted the book off the shelf, and carefully opened it. My fingertip slid down the face of an old yellow page, stopping at a random passage…

“Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea,” said Japhy. “Remember that book I told you about; the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”

I closed the book and returned it to the shelf. If her taste in reading material was anything to go by, I was beginning to like Ms. Leanda Forsyth.

I found a hand-sized data pad on one of the accent tables. I wondered why the cops hadn’t grabbed it, until I flicked the unit on and realized that it was just a remote for the apartment’s audio system. The discovery rang a strange chord in my head. Before it had been wiped, the AI in Leanda’s apartment had been state of the art. But—for some reason—she had chosen to run her music system by hand.

I scrolled through the play list to check out her most recent listening selections. Her tastes seemed to lean toward classical, with emphasis on the French impressionists. Lots of Debussy and Ravel. Not exactly my kind of music.

I was about to shut off the remote when I noticed a pattern in the time indexes. A lot of the entries were in the small hours. Leanda apparently liked to play music between two and four in the morning. Insomnia? Or was she one of those people who never sleep more than a few hours a night?

I scrolled back to the most recent entry: Debussy’s
The Girl with the Flaxen Hair
. The time index marked the date as September seventeenth, at six twenty-seven p.m.

That answered one question. She had been here. On the evening of her disappearance, Leanda Forsyth had actually made it to her apartment, listened to a piano composition by one of her favorite composers, and then…
what
? Vanished into thin air?

Another minute of browsing through the play list revealed something else. Leanda’s music library was enormous, but she tended to listen to the same twenty or thirty selections, often in the same order. Ms. Forsyth, it seemed, was a creature of habit.

I moved on to the kitchen. Like mine, it was highly automated, but (also like mine) it showed clear signs of manual cooking. The scratches on the cookware were irregular. A few of the pots and pans had small dents and dings. The kind of markings that came from the imprecise motions of human handling. Leanda liked to do her own cooking, at least some of the time.

I continued to putter through the apartment until I came across a SCAPE deck and a rack of chips. The room looked like a den to me, but—given the exclusivity of the building—there was probably a more impressive name for it.

I traced a fingertip down the spines of the SCAPE chips. Why hadn’t the cops seized them, along with the FANTASCAPE chip? The answer occurred to me immediately. The FANTASCAPE recording was black market; it might conceivably be important to the case. These other chips were off-the-shelf, no more significant than any commercial vid, or piece of popular music.

I looked through them anyway, to get a feel for Leanda’s taste in entertainment. Judging from the titles, two or three of them were immersive romances, and a few were dates with vid stars or other celebrities. There were also several recordings of zero-g ballet performances, presumably from the point of view of one of the dancers. The rest all had one or two word titles which made it difficult to judge their content.
High Mojave
.
Chrysalis
.
Interlude
.
Southern Cross
.
Obsidian
.
Mysterious Galaxy.
Fathom Curve
.

I drew the
Fathom Curve
chip out of the rack and looked it over. There was an image of a dolphin on the label, and a list of five recording tracks, each with a play time of twelve minutes or less. Otherwise, there was no hint at all about the nature of the recorded content.

The original packaging had no doubt included a description of the
Fathom Curve
experience, couched in smooth marketing lingo, to entice potential buyers. Leanda Forsyth had known—at least in general terms—what to expect when she had loaded this chip for the very first time. I, on the other hand, had no idea.

I held the chip in my palm. It wasn’t a very hard decision to make. As much as I disliked the whole SCAPE thing, this might be a way to gain some insight into Leanda’s personality.

I popped the chip into the loading slot on the front of the deck, and reached for the cranial set. When it was positioned on my head and I was settled into a chair, I fiddled around with the deck’s touch screen, trying to figure out how to set the timer. I gave up after a couple of minutes. The interface would probably be child’s play to someone with the technology gene. I did not happen to belong to that happy subspecies of Homo sapiens.

Finally, I decided to skip the timer, and try out the shortest recording on the chip: seven minutes and four seconds long. I figured that I could stand seven minutes of anything deemed safe enough for sale to the commercial public. Besides, it had a picture of a dolphin on the label. How bad could it possibly be?

I hit the
play
tab.

Instantaneous shift…

I’m standing in warm water up to my chest. A swell lifts me gently, my feet rising from the sandy bottom, before the following trough lowers me to my feet again.

I am female. I know this instantly, without looking down at my body. I can’t say what particular combination of sensations reveals the change in my sex, but
everything
feels different. The distribution of muscle mass and flesh across my skeletal frame. The set of my shoulders and the width of my pelvis. The twin weights of small but significant breasts against my ribcage. The lack of other (more familiar) weights below my waist.

I am naked. My wet hair brushes the tops of my bare shoulders, and coils lazily down the skin of my upper back.

The world is strange, taken in through the unaccustomed lens of another gender, but again, this body is unmistakably mine.

The water is startlingly clear, muting to a vibrant blue in the distance. The sandy bottom under my toes is almost silver-white. A thousand or so meters above my head, geodesic panes of transparent polycarbon fracture the sky into facets of blue-gray. This is one of the ocean biomes, either the corporate research site in the Maldives, or the ritzy aquatic playground off of Grand Cayman.

A pair of dolphins broach the surface about fifty meters away, nimble forms cruising effortlessly through the placid artificial waves of the biome enclosure.

I push off from the bottom and swim toward them. My body is long-limbed and lithe. I cover the distance in a surprisingly short number of strokes.

The dolphins do not retreat. When I arrive, they circle me playfully, their smooth wet skin making occasional sliding contact across my own.

I take a deep breath and plunge below the surface. It is a different world. Schools of colorful fish dart and swarm in the near distance. The gradient of the bottom is beginning to steepen, and I see the first outcroppings of coral.

I exhale slowly as I glide through this liquid realm, bubbles tickling the sides of my cheeks. Back to the surface for a quick breath, and then I’m submerged again.

The dolphins pull in close to me, swimming within easy reach of my fingers. I don’t touch them. There is no need. We are a family now, a pod. Three creatures of the water, existing and communing in flawless harmony. Touch cannot bring us any closer. Cannot make us more together.

I broach the surface for another breath, and then I am diving deeper. The pressure on my eardrums increasing, the swarms of tropical fish now close enough to become living curtains of color and life.

The world is beautiful. It is sacred. The ocean is my mother, and I am its child.

I turn back toward the surface again. The sun’s rays angle toward the depths in diagonal spears of cobalt and azure.

Shift…

I was still sitting in Leanda’s chair, but now my arms were pinned behind me. Someone was standing back there, behind the chair—fists clamped onto my wrists like bands of iron, keeping my hands forced together, and nearly pulling my shoulders out of their sockets.

A second man stood a few meters away, the cranial rig dangling from his right hand. His features were Asian. Handsome, with a very hard edge, as though the surgical robot’s face-sculpting software had been programmed for
charming contract assassin
. His left little finger was missing from the second knuckle. When he spoke, his voice carried an odd accent that was almost familiar.

“Sorry to interrupt your skinny dip,” he said. “But it’s time for us to have a little chat…”

CHAPTER 12

My brain rushed through the obvious questions… Who the hell were these guys? How many of them were there? How had they gotten in here?

Then something clicked, and I remembered where I’d heard the voice of Mr. Nine-fingers before. He was the shooter from the FANTASCAPE chip. I had watched him—no… I had
been
him—as he had gunned down five strangers in a Chicago office complex.

He was part of the Dream Snatcher crew. One of the unidentified perpetrators of their unsolved string of criminal acts. And a killer.

“What are you doing here?” Mr. Nine-fingers asked.

I thought about not answering, then decided that the truth couldn’t hurt.

“Investigating the disappearance of Leanda Forsyth.”

Nine-fingers grinned, showing very white teeth. “By swimming naked with the dolphins?”

I tried to shrug, but my shoulders were pulled too far out of shape to manage it properly. “I
like
dolphins,” I said. “Sometimes I swim with them in the bathtub. I’m usually naked for that too, if you want to buy tickets or something.”

The thug behind me torqued my left wrist, sending a lance of pain into my elbow. “You’re a funny little fucker, aren’t you?” he growled into my ear.

I didn’t recognize the second man’s voice, but he had the same strange accent as his partner. The underlying phonemes might have been Korean or Japanese, fused with some unfamiliar non-English dialect that didn’t seem to be based in any Asian language.

Nine-fingers waved a hand, and the pressure on my elbow receded. “How much are you getting paid?” he asked.

I didn’t say anything.

Nine-fingers knuckle-punched me in the solar plexus, robbing me of breath, and flooding the nerves of my upper torso with an oddly stunning pain.

“How much are you getting paid?” he asked again.

I coughed and tried to catch my breath. “Oh… You mean
me
? I thought you were asking the asshole with the hand-holding fetish.”

The thug behind me twisted the arm again, and my left elbow threatened to explode.

Again, Nine-fingers waved him off.

His white-toothed grin was back. “Here’s what we’re
not
going to do,” he said. “We’re not going to have that old cliché discussion about doing things the hard way or the easy way.”

He returned the cranial rig to my head, and reached into his pocket for a roll of surgical grade nano-pore tape.

I saw what he was about to do, and I tried to make it hard for him, shifting and turning my head, trying to buck the SCAPE rig off of my scalp. Trying to twist away from his hands.

Nine-fingers worked swiftly, despite my best efforts to interfere. He clearly had experience with doing this to unwilling participants. He got seven or eight good wraps of tape around my head, the adhesive pulling my hair and threatening to tear my skin in several places.

When he was done, he backed up to evaluate his handiwork. Satisfied that I couldn’t jar the cranial rig out of place, he ejected the
Fathom Curve
chip from the SCAPE deck, and pulled an unmarked replacement chip out of his jacket pocket.

He slipped the new chip into the loading slot of the SCAPE deck, and then turned back to me. “Let’s just skip the ‘easy way’ shit, and go right to the hard part.”