Read Video Star (Voice of the Whirlwind) Online
Authors: Walter Jon Williams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #Adventure, #cyberpunk, #One Hour (33-43 Pages)
6
“You a cop, buck?” The style was different from the people Ric knew in Iberia. In Granada, Ric had worn a gaucho mode straight from Argentina, tight pants with silver dollars sewn down the seams, sashes wound around nipped-in waists, embroidered vests.
He didn’t know what was worn by the people who had broken up the Cadillacs. He’d never seen any of them.
Here the new style was something called Urban Surgery. The girl bore the first example Ric had ever seen close up. The henna-red hair was in cornrows, braided with transparent plastic beads holding fast-mutating phosphorescent bacteria that constantly re-formed themselves in glowing patterns. The nose had been broadened and flattened to cover most of the cheeks, turning the nostrils into a pair of lateral slits, the base of the nose wider than the mouth. The teeth had been replaced by alloy transplants sharp as razors that clacked together in a precise, unpleasant way when she closed her mouth. The eyebrows were gone altogether and beneath them were dark plastic implants that covered the eye sockets. Ric couldn’t tell, and probably wasn’t supposed to know, whether there were eyes in there anymore, or sophisticated scanners tagged to the optic nerve.
The effect was to flatten the face, turn it into a canvas for the tattoo artist who had covered every inch of exposed flesh. Complex mathematical statements ran over the forehead. Below the black plastic eye implants were urban skyscapes, silhouettes of buildings providing a false horizon across the flattened nose. The chin appeared to be a circuit diagram.
Ric looked into the dark eye sockets and tried not to flinch. “No,” he said. “I’m just passing through.”
One of her hands was on the table in front of him. It was tattooed as completely as the face, and the fingernails had been replaced by alloy razors, covered with transparent plastic safety caps.
“I saw you in here yesterday,” she said. “And again today. I was wondering if you want something.”
He shrugged. It occurred to him that, repellent as Urban Surgery was, it was fine camouflage. Who was going to be able to tell one of these people from another?
“You’re a little old for this place, buck,” the girl said. He figured her age as about fourteen. She was small-waisted and had narrow hips and large breasts. Ric did not find her attractive.
This was his second trip to Phoenix. The bar didn’t have a name, unless it was simply BAR, that being all that was said on the sign outside. It was below street level, in the storage cellar of an old building. Concrete walls were painted black. Dark plastic tables and chairs had been added, and bare fluorescent tubes decorated the walls. Speaker amps flanked the bar, playing cold electronic music devoid of noticeable rhythm or melody.
He looked at the girl and leaned closer to her. “I need your permission to drink here, or what?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Just to deal here.”
“I’m not dealing,” he said. “I’m just observing the passing urban scene, okay?” He was wearing a lightweight summer jacket of a cream color over a black T-shirt with Cyrillic lettering, black jeans, white sneakers. Nondescript street apparel.
“You got credit?” the girl asked.
“Enough.”
“Buy me a drink then?”
He grinned. “I need your permission to deal, and you don’t have any credit? What kind of outlaw are you?”
“A thirsty outlaw.”
Ric signaled the bartender. Whatever it was that he brought her looked as if it was made principally out of cherry soda.
“Seriously,” she said. “I can pay you back later. Someone I know is supposed to meet me here. He owes me money.”
“My name’s Marat,” said Ric. “With a silent
t.”
“I’m Super Virgin. You from Canada or something? You talk a little funny.”
“I’m from Switzerland.”
Super Virgin nodded and sipped her drink. Ric glanced around the bar. Most of the patrons wore Urban Surgery or at least made an effort in the direction of its style. Super Virgin frowned at him.
“You’re supposed to ask if I’m really cherry,” she said. “If you’re wondering, the drink should give you a clue.”
“I don’t care,” Ric said.
She grinned at him with her metal teeth. “You don’t wanna ball me?”
Ric watched his dual reflection, in her black eye sockets, slowly shake its head. She laughed. “I like a guy who knows what he likes,” she said. “That’s the kind we have in Cartoon Messiah. Can I have another drink?”
There was an ecology in kid gangs, Ric knew. They had different reasons for existing and filled different functions. Some wanted turf, some trade, some the chance to prove their ideology. Some moved information, and Ric’s research indicated that this last seemed to be Cartoon Messiah’s function.
But even if Cartoon Messiah were smart, they hadn’t been around very long. A perpetual problem with groups of young kids involving themselves in gang activities was that they had very short institutional memories. There were a few things they wouldn’t recognize or know to prepare for, not unless they’d been through them at least once. They made up for it by being faster than the opposition, by being more invisible.
Ric was hoping Cartoon Messiah was full of young, fresh minds.
He signaled the bartender again. Super Virgin grinned at him.
“You sure you don’t wanna ball me?”
“Positive.”
“I’m gonna be cherry till I die. I’m just not interested. None of the guys seem like anybody I’d want to fuck.” Ric didn’t say anything. She sipped the last of her drink. “You think I’m repulsive-looking, right?”
“That seems to be your intention.”
She laughed. “You’re okay, Marat. What’s it like in Switzerland?”
“Hot.”
“So hot you had to leave, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“You looking for work?”
“Not yet. Just looking around.”
She leaned closer to him. “You find out anything interesting while you’re looking, I’ll pay you for it. Just leave a message here, at the Bar.”
“You deal in information?”
She licked her lips. “That and other things. This Bar, see, it’s in a kind of interface. North of here is Lounge Lizard turf, south and east are the Cold Wires, west is the Silicon Romantics. The Romantics are on their way out.” She gave a little sneer. “They’re brocade commandos, right?— their turf’s being cut up. But here, it’s no-gang’s-land. Where things get moved from one buyer to another.”
“Cartoon Messiah— they got turf?”
She shook her head. “Just places where we can be found. Territory is not what we’re after. Two-Fisted Jesus— he’s our sort-of chairman— he says only stupid people like brocade boys want turf, when the real money’s in data.”
Ric smiled. “That’s smart. Property values are down, anyway.”
He could see his reflection in her metal teeth, a pale smear. “You got anything you wanna deal in, I can set it up,” she said. “Software? Biologicals? Pharmaceuticals? Wetware?”
“I have nothing. Right now.”
She turned to look at a group of people coming in the door. “Cold Wires,” she said. “These are the people I’m supposed to meet.” She tipped her head back and swallowed the rest of her drink. “They’re so goddam bourgeois,” she said. “Look— their surgery’s fake, it’s just good makeup. And the tattoos— they spray ’em on through a stencil. I hate people who don’t have the courage of their convictions, don’t you?”
“They can be useful, though.” Smiling, thin-lipped.
She grinned at him. “Yeah. They can. Stop by tomorrow and I’ll pay you back, okay? See ya.” She pushed her chair back, scraping alloy on the concrete floor, a small metal scream.
Ric sipped his drink, watching the room. Letting its rhythm seep through his skin. Things were firming in his mind.
7
“Hi.”
The security guard looked up at him from under the plastic brim of his baseball cap. He frowned. “Hi. You need something? I seen you around before.”
“I’m Warren Whitmore,” Ric said. “I’m recovering from an accident, going to finish the course of treatment soon. Go out into the real world.” Whitmore was one of Ric’s former neighbors, a man who’d had his head split in half by a falling beam. He hadn’t left any instructions about radical life-preservation measures and the artificial intelligences who ran the hospital were going to keep him alive till they burned up the insurance and then the family’s money.
“Yeah?” the guard said. “Congratulations.” There was a plastic tape sewed on over the guard’s breast pocket that said LYSAGHT.
“The thing is, I don’t have a job waiting. Cigar?”
Ric had seen Lysaght smoking big stogies outside the hospital doors. They wouldn’t let him light up inside. Ric had bought him the most expensive Havanas available at the hospital gift shop.
Lysaght took the cigar, rolled it between his fingers while he looked left and right down the corridor, trying to decide whether to light it or not. Ric reached for his lighter.
“I had some military training in my former life,” Ric said. “I thought I might look into the idea of getting into the security business, once I get into the world. Could I buy you a drink, maybe, after you get off shift? Talk about what you do.”
Lysaght drew on the cigar, still looking left and right, seeing only patients. He was a big fleshy man, about forty, dressed in a black uniform with body armor sewn into pockets on his chest and back. His long dark hair was slicked back behind his ears, falling over his shoulders in greased ringlets. His sideburns came to points. A brushed-alloy gun with a hardwood custom grip and a laser sight hung conspicuously on one hip, next to the gas grenades, next to the plastic handwrap restraints, next to the combat staff, next to the portable gas mask.
“Sure,” Lysaght said. “Why not?” He blew smoke in the general direction ofó an elderly female patient walking purposefully down the corridor in flowery pajamas. The patient blinked but kept walking.
“Hey, Mrs. Calderón, how you doin’?” Lysaght said. Mrs. Calderón ignored him. “Fuckin’ head case,” said Lysaght.
“I want to work for a sharp outfit though,” Ric said. He looked at Lysaght’s belt. “With good equipment and stuff, you know?”
“That’s Folger Security,” Lysaght said. “If we weren’t good, we wouldn’t be working for a hospital this size.”
During his time in the Cadillacs and elsewhere, Ric had been continually surprised by how little it actually took to bribe someone. A few drinks, a few cigars, and Lysaght was working for him. And Lysaght didn’t even know it yet. Or, with luck, ever.
“Listen,” Lysaght was saying. “I gotta go smoke this in the toilet. But I’ll see you at the guard station around five, okay?”
“Sounds good.”
8
That night, his temples throbbing with pain, Ric entered Marlene’s condeco and walked straight to the kitchen for something to ease the long raw ache that coated the insides of his throat. He could hear the sounds of
Alien Inquisitor
on the vid. He was carrying a two-liter plastic bottle of industrial-strength soap he’d just stolen from the custodian’s storeroom here in Marlene’s condeco. He put down the bottle of soap, rubbed his sore shoulder muscle, took some whiskey from the shelf, and poured it into a tall glass. He took a slow, deliberate drink and winced as he felt the fire in his throat. He added water to the glass.
Alien Inquisitor
diminished in volume, then he heard the sound of Marlene’s flipflops slapping against her heels.
Her eyes bore the heavy eye makeup she wore to work. “Jesus,” Marlene said. She screwed up her face. “You smell like someone’s been putting out cigarettes in your pockets. Where the hell have you been?”
“Smoking cigars with a rentacop. He wears so much equipment and armor he has to wear a truss, you know that? He got drunk and told me.”
“Which rentacop?”
“One who works for the hospital.”
“The hospital? We’re going to take off the hospital?” Marlene shook her head. “That’s pretty serious, Ric.”
Ric was wondering if she’d heard
take off
used that way on the vid. “Yes.” He eased the whiskey down his throat again. Better.
“Isn’t that dangerous? Taking off the same hospital where you were a patient?”
“We’re not going to be doing it in person. We’re going to have someone else do the work.”
“Who?”
“Cartoon Messiah, I think. They’re young and promising.”
“What’s the stuff in the plastic bottle for?”
He looked at her, swirling the whiskey absently in the glass. “This cleaner’s mostly potassium hydroxide,” he said. “That’s wood lye. You can use it to make plastic explosive.”
Marlene shrugged, then reached in her pocket for a cigarette. Ric frowned. “You seem not to be reacting to that, Marlene,” he said. “Robbing a hospital is serious, plastic explosive isn’t?”
She blew smoke at him. “Let me show you something.” She went back into the living room and then returned with her pouch belt. She fished in it for a second, then threw him a small aerosol bottle.
Ric caught it and looked at the label. “Holy fuck,” he said. He blinked and looked at the bottle again. “Jesus Christ.”
“Ten-ounce aerosol bottle of mustard gas,” Marlene said. “Sixteen dollars in Starbright scrip at your local boutique. For personal protection, you know? The platinum designer bottle costs more.”
Ric was blinking furiously. “Holy fuck,” he said again.
“Some sixteen-year-old asshole tried to rape me once,” Marlene said. “I hit him with the gas and now he’s reading braille. You know?”
Ric took another sip of the whiskey and then wordlessly placed the mustard gas in Marlene’s waiting palm.
“You’re in America now, Ric,” Marlene said. “You keep forgetting that, singing your old Spanish marching songs.”
He rubbed his chin. “Right,” he said. “I’ve got to make adjustments.”
“Better do it soon,” Marlene said, “if you’re going to start busting into hospitals.”
9
The next day Ric went to the drugstore, where he purchased a large amount of petroleum jelly, some nasal mist that came in squeeze bottles, liquid bleach, a bottle of toilet cleaner, a small amount of alcohol-based lamp fuel, and a bottle of glycerin. Then he drove to a chemical supply store, where he brought some distilling equipment and some litmus paper.
On his way back he stopped by an expensive liquor store and bought some champagne. He didn’t want the plastic bottles the domestic stuff came in; instead he bought the champagne imported from France, in glass bottles with the little hollow cone in the bottom. It was the biggest expense of the day.
Back in Marlene’s apartment he opened the tops of the nasal inhalers and drained the contents into the sink. He cleaned each and set them out to dry. He set up his distilling equipment, mixing the toilet-bowl cleaner with the liquid bleach, then bubbled the resulting chlorine gas through the wood lye until the litmus paper showed it had been neutralized. He emptied the stuff into a pan and brought it to a simmer on the stove. When crystals began forming he took it off the burner and let the pan cool. He repeated the process two more times and, in the end, he had almost pure potassium chlorate. Ric then mixed the potassium chlorate with petroleum jelly to make plastic explosive. He put it in an old coffee can in the refrigerator.
Feeling pleased with his handiwork, he opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate. He drank a glass and then set up his distilling equipment again.
He put glycerine and some of the toilet bowl cleaner in a flask, mixed it, then put it over a flame. He distilled out a couple ounces of acrolein and then put the chemical in the empty nasal spray containers. He capped them. He drank another glass of champagne, put away all his materials, and turned on the vid. Something called
Video Vixens
was just starting.
Ric settled into his chair. He hadn’t seen that one.