Futuretrack 5 (17 page)

Everyone I met, I asked where Blocky lived. Said I had an offer that would interest him. I hadn’t. But what else could I say? Instead, it was me who had the offers. A little girl of eight offered me a drink of meths; another offered me real plum brandy. Luckily, I caught the whiff of bitter almonds just in time. I had several offers from women, one with a well-grown moustache. I had to break somebody’s arm and nearly got drowned in a sewer.

About five in the morning, a girl with black leathers and black crewcut hair simply walked up to me and said, “Blocky will see you now.” An Est voice.

“He’s taken his bloody time.”

“I’ve been following you all night. He said if you survived till dawn, you might be amusing.”

She led me to the blank wall of an old bonded warehouse which carried, in huge letters of white glazed brick, the legend: EWART AND SON WHISKY DISTILLERS FOUNDED 1865.

She knocked on a massive, rusted iron hatch, which I could’ve sworn hadn’t moved for a hundred years. It opened on silent, oiled hinges. There were two more girls inside and two lads, all slim, black-leathered, crew-cut, talking in Est voices. Not carrying bayonets or cutlasses; it made them feel quite dangerous. We went up echoing flights of uncarpeted stairs and burst into a long, gilded hall that might have belonged to a stately home. Except when I tapped on the marble Doric columns I found them plastic. But the oil paintings of Scottish lairds and stags at bay were genuine enough; the ancient, tarnished Adam mirrors, huge Wedgwood vases.

“Don’t keep him waiting,” said the girl.

“He kept me waiting.”

She raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, shook her head. It was more scary than any number of cutlasses. She knocked on a highly polished Georgian door. The cheap brass door knocker, in the form of an imp, looked somehow out of place in a nasty sort of way.

Blocky was sitting in a Chippendale chair that might have come out of Buckingham Palace. (Later, I was fairly sure it had.) He was fondling the ears of a depressed-looking corgi that looked like it would rather be asleep, but knew it had better stay awake and have its ears fondled by Blocky.

Blocky was little: about five foot three. His tiny feet, in pointed, highly polished, black businessman’s shoes, didn’t quite touch the floor. I remember a spotless white shirt, Brigade of Guards tie, blue pinstripe trousers. But the rest of him was wrapped in a quilted maroon dressing gown, with Chinese dragons writhing all over it.

I nearly killed myself laughing.

I mean, if I’d laughed, he’d have had me killed. It was there in his eyes. China-blue, they sparkled like a young girl’s when she’s in love. Sparkled with interest and joy. Not joy in life: joy in evil. He grinned at me like a child grins at its presents on Christmas morning. He was going to open me up, sort through me, break some bits, take others apart to find out how they worked. He was
overjoyed
with me. His hair was fine and blond, freshly washed. His skin was clear and pale, but his cheeks shone rosy with health.

“Cigarette?” He held out a full, expensive packet toward me, one fag already pulled forward like the barrel of a gun. Lit it for me with a silver butane lighter. The flame shot up about six inches; I heard the front of my hair singe and crackle. I was careful not to flinch. He laughed and put the lighter away.

“Kitson, Henry. Ex-Est, ex-Tech. Welcome to the club. And how do you think you could interest me?”

“Keri Roberts.”

“Your problem. She’s Unnem. I only collect Ests.”

“She’s National Champ.”

“That won’t save her.”

An idea grew in my mind; it seemed to grow out of the air inside that room. One second it wasn’t there; the next it was full-blown.

“If your boy won six races off her,
he’d
be National Champ.”

“He couldn’t beat her in a million years—unless she gave him the races on a plate. And she wouldn’t do that. She’s too…
honest.”
He said it with a giggle.

“She’s a bit tired of racing. She’s got a new interest— camping.”

He raised pale eyebrows. Looked down at the corgi, as if sharing some sly joke with it. The corgi gave him one uneasy glance, then stared fixedly across the room again, letting its jaws hang in a tongue-lolling pant.

“She
must
like living dangerously. Getting scraped off the front of a robo-truck
is jun,
but the lobo-farm. …”

“Why do they send campers to the farm? How can camping be a crime against the state?”

“Oh, but it
is.
Isn’t it Charlie?” he asked the corgi. Which went on uneasily panting.

“But why?”

“Try it. Find out for yourself. It cost me a lot of good guys, finding out. Why should I give it to you, for free?”

“I intend to find out. But we need a tent. …”

“And pans and grub and your bike resprayed, and new registration plates and new ID, and a job for you as a government countryside-snooper… You’ve been appearing in too many Paramil security printouts recently, Kitson, old mate, old buddy.” He smiled, switching it on like a torch. “You
do
need a lot of things, in return for one little potty National Championship.”

“But…”

“Oh, you can
have
them. No bother to me.” He waved a small, soft white hand. “Screwing up Paramils is my favourite hobby. It just worries me it might turn into a

…
virtue.
But my boss here reckons that the end justifies the means. …”

“Boss?”

He flicked one hand toward the wall behind my head; the wall the corgi kept staring at.

I turned, looked where the corgi was looking. Hung on the wall, in an antique gold frame, was a painting unlike any I’d ever seen before. From a greasy, splattered background, a face looked out, large-nosed, small-eyed, long, grey, gloomy. With a hint of antlers where the ears should be. Not a human face. A face that drained the room of hope, drained the world of hope. You couldn’t look away. To look away was to admit that you were afraid, inferior. But if you went on looking, it seemed to work its way deeper and deeper into your mind. You couldn’t win.

“Who painted
that?”

“I did. I was down to my last credit. I was going to jump out of the window, twenty stories up. I was just combing my hair before I jumped, in the wardrobe mirror, when I saw this face looking out at me, from the grain of the wood. I had this urge to paint the face bigger, clearer. Spent my last credit on a bit of plastic board. Borrowed some oil paints off the kid downstairs. He didn’t want to lend them—we had a fight. I knocked him down. Afterward, when I took the paints back, he was still lying there, bleeding, dead. Must’ve knocked his head on the fender. Something made me scoop up a bit of his blood with my finger… and mix it with the paint of the mouth, here. Dunno why.

“Anyway, when I was lying in bed that night, the wardrobe began banging and jumping about. I was shit-scared… but everything seemed to go all right for me after that. …” He waved a hand at the marble Adam fireplace, the corgi, the whole of Glasgow…

I looked again at the painting, at the battered wardrobe standing in the corner. At Blocky’s rosy cheeks and shining eyes. Then I wanted to run out of that room as fast as my legs would carry me.

“Be reasonable, Kitson,” he said gently. “You’re a Tech. You’ve been trained to be open-minded. What did they use to say at Cambridge? If a technique works, it’s a good technique. That’s all this is, Kitson. Think of this as a technique for staying alive. I made a bargain— He’s kept His side of it. I’d have been a heap of ashes in a little plastic urn, if He hadn’t. Can’t be bad.”

“I’m not making any bargain with
that
thing.”

“Who’d you think you are—Jesus Christ? After what you did to Vic Huggett?”

“How’d you know that?”

“Oh, we know most things here. Only we don’t have to prove they’re crimes… unlike the Paramils. I still don’t see how you got away with it.” There was a tinge of admiration in his voice, like a soft hand reaching out for me. “What do you want most in the world?”

“I want to know what some bastard called Scott-Astbury’s up to.” It was foolish to say it, but I wanted to wipe his Cheshire-cat grin.

The shine went off his face. “You want a lot.”

“You don’t know?”

“Oh, but I do. It was when I found out what Scott-Astbury was up to that I made my final bargain with
Him.”
Just for a second, as Blocky looked inward at something, he looked human, tired, old. “I’m not giving Scott-Astbury to you for free, either.”

“I’m still not making a bargain with that thing.” The painted face kept drawing my eyes, try as I might.

“All right,” he said soothingly. “This bargain is with
me.
Your part is just losing one National Championship—or persuading her to. And, when you’ve found out all about camping, and Scott-Astbury, you can come back and make a bargain with Him. If you don’t wake up saying goo-goo in the lobo-farm first.”

His bright, sunny smile came back: his world was wonderful again.

I fled. He was talking to somebody as I left. I hoped it was the corgi.

“All set?” asked Blocky, brimming with glee. Wearing his Est country-gent gear, white riding mac, cravat, and corduroy cap. With his tininess, he could take the mickey out of it and still look elegant.

He’d kept his word. Mitzi, resprayed matte green, her chrome blacked, had new registration plates. Which must tally, in Laura’s memory banks, with my new ID, John MacDonald, a lowly Tech servicing agri-robots in the Scottish lowlands. Keri was now Mrs. MacDonald, fetching, domestic, and wifely in a humble green anorak.

The MacDonalds must once have been real people… I didn’t ask.

Grubs, pans, tent—were all stowed. Blocky had even offered me a Paramil blaster, in case we got caught camping red-handed. I refused: if I took it, I’d only end up using it, and Blocky was pushing me down the broad road to hell fast enough already.

We’d kept our word, too. It took three days to persuade Keri, but in the end she’d lost her championship most artistically, riding wilder than ever, in apparent desperation. Giving her fans a last show. I’d spent two days with my heart in my mouth, but she was safe now, all mine again. Another girl, wearing Keri’s old helmet and leathers, would go on riding, further and further back down the field, till the media lost interest and went back to London. In a few weeks, all these riders would be dead, and Keri and I lost forever.

“All set?” asked Blocky again. Grinning from ear to ear like a kid launching an expensive model yacht, bought by some silly uncle, into a North Sea gale. I couldn’t be sure he hadn’t packed a time bomb in our camping gear. I wasn’t sure the warehouse door we were about to ride out of wasn’t several stories up. But I guessed he liked his jokes longer than that. He’d be amused if we came back disillusioned and made a bargain with his dreadful boss; he’d be amused if we got caught and sent to the lobo-farm. He’d reached some diabolical nirvana where
everything
was funny.

This warehouse was part of the Glasgow perimeter. Blocky nodded to one slim, black girl to put out the light. Another slid aside a well-oiled door, letting in a gale of wind, a sky of fast-moving cloud and broken moonlight.

“They’ll never spot you from the air tonight. Keep calm, and the psycho-radar won’t spot you, either. The psychopters only patrol ten miles out—first ten miles are the worst. And …” He held up a finger like a conductor’s baton, consulting his expensive watch. Then, as he dropped his arm, all hell broke out back in Glasgow. Screaming, homemade pistols, the whoof of petrol bombs.

A red light grew on the wall of the next ruined warehouse, outside the Wire.

“What the? …” I said weakly, pretending to be surprised.

“Someone’s dying for you, Kitson. Don’t waste it.”

Keri did a wheelie up the steep ramp, then we snaked across the usual pattern of crumbling tarmac. In a minute, we were on the Cumbernauld road. We kept the speed right down. Mitzi didn’t even whisper. Her engine made no heat to show up on a psychopter’s heat scanners. Inside our green anoraks, cooled by the rush of air, our bodies sent out no more heat than a running dog. We hummed our favourite songs, to keep happy; the frame of mind of a canine on the razzle. So to a psychopter overhead we’d present the speed, heat, and pleasure pattern of a dirty-minded Fido. We kept our headlights off, because Fidos don’t have headlights. That was illegal; but we could outrun any patrol car we met on the ground.

We met nothing. No car or person, house or farm. Only the wind, making us sway and wobble on corners. And the ancient smell of greenery, even if it was only the lousy hardy-vines and hardy-hops, mutated by our wonderful Techs to grow here in the cold north.

The loudest sound, apart from the wind, was the endless whirr and clatter of the agri-robots in the fields, watering, trimming, weeding, even in darkness.

“Psychopter!” It swung high overhead, an evil dragon, blinded by its own lights flashing red, green, white. Its pinging filled our brains, but Keri was gently happy with the bike between her knees, and I was happy holding her waist between my hands. Besides, their radar would be clogged with all the hell breaking loose in Glasgow.

Was it a harmless riot that would fade quickly? Or a suicidal attack on the Paramils’ HQ? With Blocky, you never knew.
Were
they dying for us? Why hadn’t I asked him seriously, made him answer? But Blocky had that effect on you; it got worse the longer you knew him. The dying ghosts of Glasgow flickered uneasily in my mind. Ugly, hating, destructive, pointless, but still human; not paper money in Blocky’s endless game of Monopoly.

The psychopter faded. Empty dark-green silence, with the ticking and chirring and endless stealthy movements of the mickey mouses. Keri shivered.

“I feel lonely.”

I squeezed her waist. “You’ve got me.”

For once she didn’t grumble. “First town’s Cumbernauld. Five miles.”

“Skirt round the side roads, once you spot the perimeter.

But we didn’t spot any perimeter. The white-lined road wound on and on, under the cloud-dodging moon. Once a fox stared out, with moon-green eyes; and there were rabbits. But as for the smell of man, not a whiff.