Spares (45 page)

As she walked toward the door I stood up, too, suddenly afraid.

“Don’t go like this,” I said, reaching out to grab her shoulder. She slipped out from under my hand and kept going. “Can’t we be friends?”

Her face was hard, and she looked like someone I’d never seen.

“Friends
is no use to me, Jack. I’ve got friends. I don’t need any more. What I need is someone who’ll light up the woods so I can find a place to stay.”

I blinked. “What made you put it like that?”

She shrugged. “Who gives a shit? It’s just a phrase, like ‘Hey, we can still be friends.’” Her eyes ran over me, as if capturing something. When she spoke again, her voice was calm and dull. “No, I don’t want to be your friend, Jack. You’d be a lousy friend. For a start, you’re going to be dead, and dead people never return your cal Is.”

She grabbed my face in her hands, and kissed me hard on the lips. It wasn’t tender, or forgiving. It was fierce and uncompromising, the flip side of a punch in the mouth.

“Good bye and fuck off,” she said, and walked out of my life.

I sat in Howie’s office until six, then went into the bathroom. I stood in front of a mirror and shaved, and when I was finished with each itemi I threw it into the trash. Shaving cream, razor, comb, toothbrush. Then I examined my reflection for a while. I looked like an alien.

The bar droid told me Howie had gone to bed. I got it to serve me a coffee and drank it sitting at the bar.

The room was almost empty, just a lone couple sat at a table in the corner, come in for an early coffee on the way to work. They were holding hands, and something told me they’d just spent the night together for the first time. The girl’s hair was still wet from its morning wash, her normal routine disrupted; his cheeks were pink from using a razor found lying around in her bathroom, feeling oddly unsettled, wearing yesterday’s shirt and smelling of someone else’s deodorant. Neither of them seemed quite sure what to say, how to be, as they struggled to deal with suddenly widened perceptions of someone they saw every day at work. Confused memories of the night before; of the shock of so much skin.

The cat I’d pulled from the abandoned Farm was also there, curled up asleep in one of the corners. I was glad it had found a home. It would never want for
peperoncinos
, at least.

A little while later the young couple stood up, hesitated, and then held hands as they walked out the door.

I thought about leaving a note for Howie, but I couldn’t find any paper and I didn’t know what I would say. Seven o’clock, I left the bar and walked to an xPress elevator. There was very little life on the streets. The only place doing business was a Chinese restaurant with a variety of tired-looking dishes sitting in hot plates in front of the window. The restaurant was called the Happy Garden, but it didn’t look like a Happy Garden. It looked like a Pretty Miserable Garden. It looked like the kind of place Schopenhauer would have enjoyed during the period when he had a bad urinary infection.

At 100 I showed my fake pass to the guys standing there. Their eyesight wasn’t as good as the one who’d stopped me with Vinaldi, or maybe they just cared less; either way, I got through and made it up to 104.

Golson was still half asleep when he opened the door, but woke up rapidly on seeing me.

“Whoa, big dude,” he said. “You’re turning into a regular feature.”

“You got someone with you?”

“Yeah,” he said, smirking. “Sandy came back for some more.”

“Get rid of her,” I said, shouldering past him into the apartment. It was beginning to feel like a second home. Golson scuttled after me as always, making small and unimportant bleats of disagreement.

“Hey, man—I can’t do that. I promised to take her to the Memorial as my guest. That’s why she came with me last night. She kept her side of the bargain—she ain’t going to leave now for no man.”

Sandy was sitting up in bed as I entered, looking fetchingly disheveled. I twitched the sheet off, then pulled out my gun and racked it

“Sandy, go home,” I said. “There’s a danger this man may only be after your body.”

I walked into Golson’s kitchen and started nuking some coffee. It was cinnamon apple, but I reckoned if I smoked heavily enough I could mask the taste. Gotson stayed in the bedroom and watched with bewilderment as Sandy gathered up her clothes and left in a way which underlined her chagrin, slamming the door hard enough to shake the city to its foundations. I smiled. Everybody I knew seemed cursed to do the same thing again and again: The if-then loops go on and on until you find some way of breaking out.

I was sipping my first cup when Golson stomped in. “Hey listen, dude,” he began petulantly. “That was beyond. I mean it. Okay, so I got laid already, but the service starts at nine and how am I going to mobilize someone foxy enough to be my guest by then?”

“You already got a replacement guest,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” he said, hopefully. “Who?”

“Me,” I said. “Get dressed.”

The great and the good, the talented and the important, the cream of New Richmond’s gene pool.

No, actually. Just the richest. I guess some people of merit probably made it in through the side doors, invited to make the memorial service even more appealing to the media circus. But the autocameras and talking heads were kept firmly away from the event itself, and buzzed excitably around the lobby on the 200th floor. I’d like to think they were kept out through respect for the dead, but I suspect it was just to pique their curiosity. The cameras, droid-operated fliers, seemed to be remaining calm, but their human front people were almost exploding with excitement.

Everybody else was led up an enormous spiral staircase all the way to 203, where we stood buzzing in a room the size of a small European country. This, we were given to understand, was the chapel’s anteroom. It was two stories high, and the ceiling had been entirely painted in the style of the Sistine Chapel. Storyboarded by the West Coast’s finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits
of that most durable of action heroes—God. Religion never really went out of fashion for the rich, maybe because it’s the easiest pretense at humility they could find. All the people around me, themselves the most well-heeled in New Richmond, stood trying not to be obvious about the fact they were wondering how much it cost to have a mile-square Renaissance cartoon daubed over a ceiling—proving that pretense was all that it ever was. The room could dwarf five thousand guests, and so the four or five hundred who stood huddled in its middle were left in absolutely no doubt as to their relative status to the person who owned it.

I stood with Golson to one side of the group. It wasn’t that I particularly valued his company; there just wasn’t anywhere else for me to go. I didn’t have a plan of any kind. I was waiting to see what I would do.

The area around us was alive with a low murmur of anticipation. Golson was utterly entranced. His eyes flitted over the assembled company with a fervor that seemed almost religious itself. These, I could tell, were his gods; the wrinkled old and glowing young, all slick with money and four-dimensional with status. CostSlots were sewn into almost every sleeve, trumpeting the garment’s worth to anyone who gave a shit. Most people, it appeared, gave a shit. A very few of them had cannily eschewed these public announcements of value, and I could see the other guests trying to work out whether this was because their garments were a little cheaper than theirs, or even more expensive. From the furrowing on some of the brows around me, I could tell this wasn’t an easy judgment to make. I don’t mind the rich, really I don’t. It’s just that they’re so
boring
.

Getting through security had been easy; there’d been an anxious few moments while I wondered whether my picture might have been circulated around the security staff, but no one gave me a second glance. I was accompanying someone who had a bona fide invitation, as his guest, and I was also dead so I was unlikely to be a threat to anybody. Golson was still rather
unhappy about the turn of events, but I’d reassured him that far from damaging his reputation, it would probably double his chance of scoring at the reception after the service. He seemed fairly cheered by this until he figured out what I meant.

I didn’t see anyone in the crowd who looked like trouble for me, nor did I expect to. I’d made Vinaldi promise to keep his head down until the afternoon. Maxen wouldn’t be showing himself before the service proper, where he was apparently slated to deliver a eulogy to the dead girl; and Yhandim and his colleagues were far too ragged-looking to be allowed near center stage of such an event. I had little doubt they were lurking somewhere on the sidelines, but so long as I stayed in the crowd I wasn’t too worried about them. Yet.

After half an hour I noticed something going on at the far edge of the group, and saw that Yolande Maxen was leading the woman whose image I’d seen talking on Golson’s invitation. This was Forma Richardson, I gathered, mother of the deceased, and she was being given a tour of the guests. I lit a cigarette, to the general irritation of everyone around me, and watched as the small entourage made its way through the crowd. Golson had disappeared by then, presumably working the room.

Something about Yolande Maxen’s face struck me as off; instead of the triumph I would have expected, or the public display of sympathy, her features seemed dead and hollow. Mrs. Richardson, for her part, seemed completely unaware of the identities of many of the people around her. Grief, possibly, or maybe the Maxens had primarily invited people they wanted to cow, rather than anyone who had any genuine relation to the dead Louella Richardson. When I saw one middle-aged couple turn away in distaste after shaking Forma’s limp hand, obviously trying not to let her misery intrude on the exciting time they were having, I looked away and gazed up at the ceiling instead.

Directly above me was a representation of some biblical event or other. It meant nothing to me, nor probably
to anyone else in the room. It was yesterday’s box score. We used to have religion but now we had code, both signifiers of events that happen in worlds which are just out of sight. We used to believe in an invisible God: Now we put our faith in streams of electrons fizzing through spaces too small to see. Once again our understanding is handed over to the unperceivable, as if there is some fundamental need in humanity which requires the inexplicable to be at the heart of our lives, which requires that our destiny be shaped by intangible forces. Maybe we need places with no paths to them.

God, code, our own minds. Maybe we just never read the manuals properly.

As I stared up at the ceiling it shaded away, and instead I saw a series of images that came unbidden into my head. Henna’s face, and Angela’s; and then Shelley Latoya. Shelley took the longest to fade, a memory of the way her eyes had slipped across to me when I’d given her a cheap way out of the guilt she felt at taking her dead sister’s money. It was replaced by a girl I’d never seen in real life: Louella Richardson. Strangely, the image I had of her face was different from that in Golson’s photograph, as if taken in altered light.

Finally I saw Suej, not sad but laughing.

A low grating sound heralded the opening of two enormous doors at the far end of the room. Naturally the entrance to the chapel was as far as possible from where we were standing, to make once again the point of how large the room was. It was surprising, in fact, that we hadn’t all been shown some other humbling treats yet, like sofas fashioned from silicon or a scale model of the Milky Way in diamonds. Maybe that would come later, after the service. If so, I would never get to see it.

Because as I fell in step with the other mourners and started the long trek across the room, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to pull the veils from Maxen in front of his congregation, to show that even men made of points of light are capable of sin.