Ralfi kept walking, but I don’t think he was trying to escape. I think he’d already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against.
I looked back down in time to see him explode.
Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping toward as the little tech sidles out of nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls off. It’s a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended. Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop thumbtip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lightning yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pear-shaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.
Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched sections rolling forward on to the tiled pavement. In total silence.
I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke my wrist.
It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She’d just edged one mirrored eye around the corner to report a single Volks module in front of the Drome, red lights flashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions.
I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. ‘I don’t see how the hell I missed him.’
‘Cause he’s fast, so fast.’ She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her bootheels. ‘His nervous system’s jacked up. He’s factory custom.’ She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. ‘I’m gonna get that boy. Tonight. He’s the best, number one, top dollar, state of the art.’
‘What you’re going to get, for this boy’s two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He’s a Yakuza assassin.’
‘Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly’s been Chiba, too.’ And she showed me her hands, fingers slightly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double-edged scalpel in pale blue steel.
I’d never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget. Generations of sharpshooters had chipped away at the neon until the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black against faintest pearl.
Where do you go when the world’s wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.
Molly had an answer: You hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace. You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit’s inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips.
She had another answer, too.
‘So you’re locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password?’ She led me into the shadows that waited beyond the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.
‘The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.’ I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. ‘Client’s code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don’t like to talk about, there’s no way to recover your phrase. Can’t drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don’t know it, never did.’
‘Squids? Crawly things with arms?’ We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit.
‘Superconducting quantum interference detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.’
‘Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid’ll read that chip of yours?’ She’d stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors.
‘Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it’s like pulling a whisper out of a cheering stadium.’
‘Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.’
‘But your data’s still secure.’ Pride in profession. ‘No government’ll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they’re too likely to watergate you.’
‘Navy stuff,’ she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. ‘Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.’
‘A junkie?’
‘A dolphin.’
He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.
Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank.
‘What is this place?’ I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.
‘Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. “Talk with the War Whale.” All that. Some whale Jones is…’
Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.
‘How’s he talk?’ Suddenly I was anxious to go.
That’s the catch. Say “hi,” Jones.’
And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and blue.
‘Good with symbols, see, but the code’s restricted. In the navy they had him wired into an audiovisual display.’ She drew the narrow package from a jacket pocket. ‘Pure shit, Jones. Want it?’ He froze in the water and started to sink. I felt a strange panic, remembering that he wasn’t a fish, that he could drown. ‘We want the key to Johnny’s bank, Jones. We want it fast.’
The lights flickered, died.
‘Go for it, Jones!’
Blue bulbs, cruciform.
Darkness.
‘Pure! It’s clean. Come on, Jones.’
White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones.
The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses. ‘Give it to him,’ I said. ‘We’ve got it.’
Ralfi Face. No imagination.
Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, spasming across the frame and then fading to black.
We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he’d swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he’d used to pick Ralfi’s pathetic password from the chip buried in my h
ead.
‘I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?’
‘The war,’ she said. ‘They all were. Navy did it. How else you get ’em working for you?’
‘I’m not sure this profiles as good business,’ the pirate said, angling for better money. ‘Target specs on a comsat that isn’t in the book –’
‘Waste my time and you won’t profile at all,’ said Molly, leaning across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger.
‘So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?’ he was a tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably.
Her hand blurred down the front of his jacket, completely severing a lapel without even rumpling the fabric.
‘So we got a deal or not?’
‘Deal,’ he said, staring at his ruined lapel with what he must have hoped was only polite interest. ‘Deal.’
While I checked the two recorders we’d bought, she extracted the slip of paper I’d given her from the zippered wrist pocket of her jacket. She unfolded it and read silently, moving her lips. She shrugged. ‘This is it?’
‘Shoot,’ I said, punching the RECORD studs of the two decks simultaneously.
‘Christian White,’ she recited, ‘and his Aryan Reggae Band.’
Faithful Ralfi, a fan to his dying day.
Transition to idiot-savant mode is always less abrupt than I expect it to be. The pirate broadcaster’s front was a failing travel agency in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously from a Styrofoam cup of water on a ledge beside Molly’s shoulder. As I phased into mode, they accelerated gradually until their Day-Glo-feathered crowns became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the plastic wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly and the Mao-faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in an artificial language.
I sat and sang dead Ralfi’s stolen program for three hours.
The mall runs forty kilometers from end to end, a ragged overlap of Fuller domes roofing what was once a suburban artery. If they turn off the arcs on a clear day, a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of arcylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometers roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires. In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters?
We’d been climbing for two hours, up concrete stairs and steel ladders with perforated rungs, past abandoned gantries and dust-covered tools. We’d started in what looked like a disused maintenance yard, stacked with triangular roofing segments. Everything there had been covered with that same uniform layer of spraybomb graffiti: gang names, initials, dates back to the turn of the century. The graffiti followed us up, gradually thinning until a single name was repeated at intervals, LO TEK. In dripping black capitals.
‘Who’s Lo Tek?’
‘Not us, boss.’ She climbed a shivering aluminium ladder and vanished through a hole in a sheet of corrugated plastic. ‘“Low technique, low technology.”’ The plastic muffled her voice. I followed her up, nursing an aching wrist. ‘Lo Teks, they’d think that shotgun trick of yours was effete.’
An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one sawed crookedly in a sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo Tek.
‘’S okay,’ Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder, ‘It’s just Dog. Hey, Dog.’
In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regarded us with his one eye and slowly extruded a thick length of grayish tongue, licking huge canines. I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don’t exactly grow on trees.
‘Moll.’ Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva dangled from his twisted lower lip. ‘Heard ya comin’. Long time.’ He might have been fifteen, but the fangs and a bright mosaic of scars combined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total bestiality. It had taken time and a certain kind of creativity to assemble that face, and his posture told me he enjoyed living behind it. He wore a pair of decaying jeans, black with grime and shiny along the creases. His chest and feet were bare. He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin. ‘Bein’ followed, you.’
Far off, down in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.
‘Strings jumping, Dog?’ She swung her flash to the side, and I saw thin cords tied to eyebolts, cords that ran to the edge and vanished.
‘Kill the fuckin’ light!’
She snapped it off.
‘How come the one who’s followin’ you’s got no light?’
‘Doesn’t need it. That one’s bad news, Dog. Your sentries give him a tumble, they’ll come home in easy-to-carry sections.’
‘This a friend friend, Moll?’ He sounded uneasy. I heard his feet shift on the worn plywood.
‘No. But he’s mine. And this one,’ slapping my shoulders, ‘he’s a friend. Got that?’
‘Sure,’ he said, without much enthusiasm, padding to the platform’s edge, where the eyebolts were. He began to pluck out some kind of message on the taut cords.
Nighttown spread beneath us like a toy village for rats; tiny windows showed candlelight, with only a few harsh, bright squares lit by battery lanterns and carbide lamps. I imagined the old men at their endless games of dominoes, under warm, fat drops of water that fell from wet wash hung out on poles between the plywood shanties. Then I tried to imagine him climbing patiently up through the darkness in his zoris and ugly tourist shirt, bland and unhurried. How was he tracking us?
‘Good,’ said Molly. ‘He smells us.’
‘Smoke?’ Dog dragged a crumpled pack from his pocket and prized out a flattened cigarette. I squinted at the trademark while he lit it for me with a kitchen match. Yiheyuan filters. Beijing Cigarette Factory. I decided that the Lo Teks were black marketeers. Dog and Molly went back to their argument, which seemed to revolve around Molly’s desire to use some particular piece of Lo Tek real estate.
‘I’ve done you a lot of favors, man. I want that floor. And I want the music.’
‘You’re not Lo Tek…’
This must have been going on for the better part of a twisted kilometer, Dog leading us along swaying catwalks and up rope ladders. The Lo Teks leech their webs and huddling places to the city’s fabric with thick gobs of epoxy and sleep above the abyss in mesh hammocks. Their country is so attenuated that in places it consists of little more than holds for hands and feet, sawed into geodesic struts.
The Killing Floor, she called it. Scrambling after her, my new Eddie Bax shoes slipping on worn metal and damp plywood, I wondered how it could be any more lethal than the rest of the territory. At the same time I sensed that Dog’s protests were ritual and that she already expected to get whatever it was she wanted.
Somewhere beneath us, Jones would be circling his tank, feeling the first twinges of junk sickness. The police would be boring the Drome regulars with questions about Ralfi. What did he do? Who was he with before he stepped outside? And the Yakuza would be settling its ghostly bulk over the city’s data banks, probing for faint images of me reflected in numbered accounts, securities transactions, bills for utilities. We’re an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified…
But by now the pirate would have shuttled our message into line for blackbox transmissions to the Yakuza comsat. A simple message: Call off the dogs or we wi
deband your program.
The program. I had no idea what it contained. I still don’t. I only sing the song, with zero comprehension. It was probably research data, the Yakuza being given to advanced forms of industrial espionage. A genteel business, stealing from Ono-Sendai as a matter of course and politely holding their data for ransom, threatening to blunt the conglomorate’s research edge by making the product public.
But why couldn’t any number play? Wouldn’t they be happier with something to sell back to Ono-Sendai, happier than they’d be with one dead Johnny from Memory Lane?
Their program was on its way to an address in Sydney, to a place that held letters for clients and didn’t ask questions once you’d paid a small retainer. Fourth-class surface mail. I’d erased most of the other copy and recorded our message in the resulting gap, leaving just enough of the program to identify it as the real thing.
My wrist hurt. I wanted to stop, to lie down, to sleep. I knew that I’d lose my grip and fall soon, knew that the sharp black shoes I’d bought for my evening as Eddie Bax would lose their purchase and carry me down to Nighttown. But he rose in my mind like a cheap religious hologram, glowing, the enlarged chip in his Hawaiian shirt looming like a reconnaissance shot of some doomed urban nucleus.
So I followed Dog and Molly through Lo Tek heaven, jury-rigged and jerry-built from scraps that even Nighttown didn’t want.
The Killing Floor was eight meters on a side. A giant had threaded steel cable back and forth through a junkyard and drawn it all taut. It creaked when it moved, and it moved constantly, swaying and bucking as the gathering Lo Teks arranged themselves on the shelf of plywood surrounding it. The wood was silver with age, polished with long use and deeply etched with initials, threats, declarations of passion. This was suspended from a separate set of cables, which lost themselves in darkness beyond the raw white glare of the two ancient floods suspended above the Floor.