Milos’ gaze threatened a variety of complex retributions as he sat down and lit his nic.
Nick picked up a glass and drained it as if he didn’t care what it contained. “Don’t listen to him, Milos,” he advised. “He’s so busy hating everybody, he can’t think. He hasn’t figured out yet that this situation is too complicated for hate. There’s more going on here than he realizes—and it’s more dangerous than he imagines.”
Angus was in no mood for drink; but he sampled one of the glasses and decided that a little liquor wouldn’t hurt him. For a fact, the situation was complicated. Like Milos, Succorso was a UMCPDA stooge. He’d been shaken by Angus’ attack, that was all; not really upset. Angus read his mood as if it were legible on EM wavelengths. The pressures gnawing at him came from some other source.
Because he knew of Milos’ relationship with Lebwohl, he probably guessed that Angus’ claim of power over Milos was a fabrication; guessed that Angus and Milos must be here on DA’s orders. Angus saw that clearly.
Nevertheless he didn’t care: he trusted his own judgments. Under the Bill’s bugeyes none of them could risk revealing what they knew, or thought, or needed.
“I don’t need his help,” Nick was saying to Milos. “I need yours.”
A burst of light from the stage signaled that some kind of performance was about to start. Good. Angus was ready to take advantage of anything that confused the cameras and pickups.
“I just got here,” Milos protested through a cloud of smoke. “And I’m on the run. I’m not exactly in a position to help anybody.” For Angus, he added, “Neither of us is.”
Nick grinned like a manic-depressive. “Don’t bullshit me, Milos. I know something about your resources.” The way he stressed the word made it a reference to Data Acquisition. “If you were destitute, the Bill wouldn’t let you in here. You’ve at least got enough money to make him tolerate his distrust. And you’ve probably got a few secrets you can sell, just for insurance. We’ve worked together a long time, off and on. I’ve earned some credit with you.” He didn’t appear to be as concerned about the bugeyes as Angus was, but he still chose his words carefully. “Don’t tell me you can’t help me until you hear what I want.”
“All right,” Milos sighed. He was smoking hard enough to clog the air. “Don’t keep me in suspense. I’m in a hurry to get to the part where I say no. What do you want?”
A crash which was meant to sound like cymbals came over the stage speakers. The abrupt brilliance as the lights focused into a tight spot on the stage created a temporary zone of darkness around it. Men and women at the tables and the bar looked in that direction expectantly.
As if he were dissociating himself from Nick and Milos, Angus leaned back against the wall, letting his arms dangle on either side of his chair.
“I’m in some trouble here,” Nick explained unnecessarily. “You may have figured that out. There’s a fucking Amnion ‘defensive’ in dock because of me, and another hanging out there where it can strip us all down to our subatomic particles.” He glanced at the stage as if he were waiting for the show to start before he came to the point. “I’m in deep shit, and there aren’t any easy ways out of it. I think you could say”—his scars were pale under his eyes, the color of fear—“I’ve made a couple of serious miscalculations recently. If I don’t get some help soon, I’ll have to start selling everything I own just to stay alive.”
Selling what? Angus wondered. What did Nick have to sell? DA’s secrets? His stomach knotted. Morn herself?
The thought that Captain Sheepfucker might sell her to save his ass made Angus want to snap Nick’s neck.
We’ve committed a crime—
Wasn’t that what Angus himself had done? Sell her to save his ass?
No. No. He’d made a bargain with her. And he’d kept it.
Until Lebwohl put electrodes into his head and forced the truth out. It’s got to stop.
“How much money do you have?” Nick asked Milos.
Milos snorted. “What makes you think I’m going to tell you?”
Another crash from the speakers. As if she were being disgorged by the surrounding gloom, a woman appeared in the spotlight. Like a shout, emissions hit Angus’ sight. Around her heart and deep in her belly, electromagnetic nodes revealed themselves like stars to his artificial vision. But the woman wasn’t a wire: her aura was wrong for communications. The equipment implanted in her served some other purpose.
She wore a quilted jacket and pants that looked like they might have been designed to deflect stun-prods. An immaculate wreath of hair caught the light around her head and shone. Her face, too, was lovely; delicate and vulnerable. But a grimace twisted her mouth as if she were on the verge of sobs, and a stare of old pain filled her eyes.
Nick rolled his glass between his palms. “The Bill has something that belongs to me,” he explained. “I promised it to the Amnion, but he won’t give it back. That’s why I’m in trouble. I haven’t got the money to meet his price—and if the Amnion don’t get what they want they’re going to have me for fucking lunch. I want you to help me pay off the Bill.”
Angus stifled an impulse to interrupt. He had no real desire to interfere with what Nick and Milos said: he simply wanted to prevent Nick from incriminating himself while the Bill could still record it.
The woman stood motionless in the center of the spotlight, staring into a gap of dismay. When the speakers crashed again, a stagehand pushed a box of props out of the gloom.
As soon as the box arrived beside her, the woman stooped and picked out a gleaming knife with a twenty-centimeter blade.
Some of Ease-n-Sleaze’s patrons gasped as if they were shocked; as if they hadn’t known what kind of act to expect.
Like the rest of the audience, Angus watched the stage. Without shifting a muscle, he rested the knuckles of his right fist against the wall. While the woman raised her knife into the light, and the audience gasped, he fired his laser.
From between his knuckles, a needle-thin stab of ruby pierced the wall and severed the leads to all the bugeyes in this end of the bar.
A fierce grin bared his teeth as the emissions of the bugeyes winked out.
No one in the bar noticed the difference. Nick and Milos were blind to what Angus had just done. They leaned toward each other across the table, unselfconsciously conspiratorial as Nick explained what he wanted; but now they were safe. Temporarily, anyway: as long as they were discreet. One of the requirements programmed into Angus’ datacore had been satisfied.
“You’re crazy,” Milos muttered around his nic. “That money is all I’ve got. I’ve lost everything else. Why”—he seemed to need an expletive which eluded him—“should I let you have it?
“What are you offering me in return, Nick?”
Nick’s smile was distorted and sickly. “I’ll give you what you came for. I can do that.”
Milos pulled his nic from his mouth as if he were about to vomit. After a moment he threw it vehemently to the floor and snatched out a fresh smoke. “What”—again he gaped as if language failed him—“is that woman doing?”
One at a time she lifted pieces of fabric and sheets of plastic into the spotlight. Each one she held in front of her face while she stabbed the knife through it. The apparent purpose of this ritual was to demonstrate the blade’s keenness. But Angus—and the aficionados in the bar—recognized another, more tantalizing motivation. By showing off the knife’s sharpness, she dulled it.
So that it would hurt more.
Abruptly Angus shifted his weight forward. Folding his heavy arms across his chair back, he rasped, “Cut the crap, Captain Sheepfucker. No more empty euphemisms. Let’s take it one detail at a time and call a spade a fucking shovel.”
Milos’ eyes showed a flare of alarm, which Angus ignored. He didn’t mind letting Milos think the bugeyes were still dangerous.
“Exactly what,” Angus continued, “has the Bill got that belongs to you?”
Nick stiffened; a
hint of darkness touched his scars. “I was right. You’ve got a goddamn death wish.”
Undisturbed, Angus held Nick’s stare and waited.
Suddenly Nick relaxed. Smiling with unexplained malice, he said, “All right. Have it your way.
“You remember Morn Hyland. She still probably gives you wet dreams. Well, she had a kid. That’s what we were doing on Enablement—force-growing her kid. She calls him Davies Hyland, after her pure, dead father.”
On the stage, the woman had finished cutting up cloth and plastic. Now she put the knife down by her feet and started unsealing her jacket. Under it she was naked. Her breasts looked unnaturally large and erect in the intense light. A slight suggestion of puckering in the skin around them implied that she’d performed this act at least once before. Her fear was born of experience.
“Now the Amnion want him back,” Nick went on. “It has something to do with the fact that she didn’t lose her mind when he was born. They say force-growing is supposed to make plant life out of the mother, but it didn’t happen to her. They think that’s because of the zone implant you used on her. So they aren’t particularly interested in her. But they want her brat. They want to study the consequences of having a mother who didn’t lose her mind.
“The Bill has him. If I can buy him back, I can give him to the Amnion—and then poof”—he spread his fingers—“all my problems disappear.”
For a moment the woman hesitated as if she were unsure what to do next. Finally she decided to postpone her dread by removing her pants. As she shrugged them down from her tight hips, someone in the audience whistled appreciatively.
Her belly showed the same slight puckering which marked the skin around her breasts.
“How nice for you.” Angus put as much challenge as he could into his voice: he wanted to uncover what lay behind Nick’s malice. “Everything’s fine—as long as we help you.” The information that Morn had a son meant nothing to him, aside from a minor disgust that she’d done something that stupid. “What the fuck makes you think we’ve got that much credit? What does the Bill want for this brat?”
When she was completely naked, the woman retrieved her knife. But then she hesitated again. The impacted fear in her eyes seemed to paralyze her.
With another nauseated, treacherous smile, Nick named a sum nearly as large as the one Milos had available.
Transfixed by the woman—or by what he heard—Milos wiped sweat off his forehead. The nic trembled in his mouth. “You’re crazy. I said that already. It’s true—you’re out of your entire mind. I can’t come within an order of magnitude of what you want.”
From the far end of the bar, two or three people started stamping their feet. Almost at once they took rhythm from each other, beating a demand against the floor. The demand spread and grew as more and more of the audience put their heels into it.
As far as Angus could tell, his datacore contained no provision for giving Nick Milos’ money. Simply as an experiment, he changed his tack: he wanted to see how Nick would react.
“But money isn’t the only way to get things done,” he said less aggressively. “Even here. The real question isn’t what the Bill wants. It’s what you’re going to give us. You said you can supply what we came here for. Maybe I’m being stupid again, but I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
The stamping spread until it seemed to hammer at the woman. Her face quivered at every blow.
Nick leaned forward urgently. Without transition he seemed to pass from treachery to desperation. “Listen to me, asshole,” he whispered. “I’m in too much trouble here, and I haven’t got time for games. You can play let’s pretend when you’re by yourself. You can fuck yourself senseless for all I care. Right now I won’t put up with it.
“I’m here because Hashi Lebwohl sent me. So are you. You didn’t blackmail Milos into helping you. Lebwohl gave him to you for cover so you could come here and try to earn a reprieve.”
Angus couldn’t resist: he batted his eyes. The pressure mounting on the stage didn’t touch him. “I’m astonished. How do you know all this? How am I supposed to earn this reprieve?”
“You came,” Nick articulated as if he were suddenly hungry for murder, “to rescue Morn Hyland. If you solve my problem with the Bill, I’ll hand her over. Otherwise”— his voice cracked as he crushed a shout—“I’ll sell her to the fucking Amnion to save my ass, and then they’ll have a fucking cop they can work on.”
With an abject shudder, the woman tightened her grip on the knife. Milos took the nic out of his mouth and clamped his teeth onto one of his knuckles as she put the knife against her skin and began cutting off her right breast.
Blood sprang from the incision, swarmed down her belly; more blood burst from her lip as she bit through it to keep herself from screaming. When her right breast flopped to the stage, she started on the left.
Shaking, Milos turned his chair, put his back to the stage. With both hands he lifted his glass to his mouth and emptied it. Then he replaced his nic, sucked smoke deep into his lungs.
“Go away, Nick,” he breathed as if he’d just suffered a wound—or had an orgasm. “Go away and leave us alone. You’re completely crazy. We don’t have anything to talk about anymore.”
Angus didn’t want to think about Morn: he couldn’t bear it. Nick was perfectly capable of selling her to the Amnion. Then she would be lost forever. And there was nothing he could do about it, nothing he could do about it, even Min Donner hadn’t been able to get his datacore rewritten to let him help Morn. Paresthetic fire flushed along his arms until his zone implants quenched it: rage stung his heart until they denatured it. Morn, he thought, oh, Morn! But he could do nothing; show nothing. His programming held him, as cruel as the dimensional gap.
Nearly paralyzed by rage and protest, he watched the woman on the stage out of the corner of his eye while he continued to study Nick. He’d seen self-mutilation acts before. After she finished her left breast, she opened her belly and let her guts spill down her legs. At first she bled like a pig; but now he understood what her implanted equipment was for. The nodes he saw were pressure clamps. When the initial dramatic rush of blood was over, the clamps closed on her major arteries so that she wouldn’t lose too much fluid; wouldn’t die before some one took her back to the surgeons. Once they healed her, she would be ready to perform again.
As the spotlights went out, a few people applauded. Somewhere in the bar, someone retched.
—a crime against your soul.
Without warning, a window in Angus’ head opened—the dark interface between his mind and his datacore. He seemed to fall into the gap between what he understood and what he could do as if he were going into tach; a black rush of possibilities and compulsions seemed to translate him to a whole new state of being.
It’s got to stop.
Entirely without volition, he put his palm down like a promise on the table in front of Nick and said, “It’s a deal. We’ll get Davies Hyland for you. You give us Morn.”
As if he were lost in the dimness which the spotlights left behind, Milos cried out, “Angus, you bastard!”
Nick rolled his eyes and cackled with laughter.
ANGUS
f he could have laughed or cried out himself, he might not have been able to hold back. Everything seemed to come at him at once. Behind the false stoicism of his zone implants, he was shaken to the core by inferences, dismay, and hope.
Morn!
He wanted to rescue Morn. Even to protect his heart from Nick and Milos, he couldn’t pretend that wasn’t true. Yet the decision wasn’t his: his promise to Nick had come out of his mouth without one iota of free will behind it.
But Hashi Lebwohl had made it unmistakably clear that Angus wasn’t programmed to risk his mission for Morn—
This was why Warden Dios you bastard! you fucking sonofabitch! had switched his datacore. So that Angus could try to rescue Morn, when everyone in UMCPHQ had written her off. Dios had some reason for pr
etending that he didn’t care what happened to her. He’d prepared his instructions in secret, plugged them into Angus secretly, in order to conceal his true intentions from the people around him.
He wanted her back.
It’s got to stop.
Unfortunately he hadn’t foreseen that she could be saved by mere money. The simple expedient of buying her from Nick with Milos’ credit wasn’t available.
Even Lebwohl had been kept in the dark. And Milos certainly hadn’t been let into the secret. His face was gray and lost, as if he were in the grip of an infarction, and his eyes rolled with panic, trying to look in all directions at once, measure the extent to which he’d been betrayed. No one knew the truth.
I’ll give you what you came for.
Except Nick Succorso?
How had Nick known Warden Dios’ secret?
No, stop it, Angus told himself harshly, don’t panic. All Nick knew was that Morn was UMCP—and Trumpet had come from UMCPHQ. The rest was just a lucky guess. When he laughed like that, the stark pallor of his scars under his wild eyes made him look crazy enough to have guessed anything.
Why did Warden Dios want to keep what he was doing hidden from his own people?
Who was the real target of Joshua’s mission?
Angus wanted to laugh at Milos’ consternation, and at Lebwohl’s. Those motherfuckers deserved to be corn-holed like this.
And he wanted to cry out like a stricken child because none of the decisions were his.
We’ll get Davies Hyland for you.
You give us Morn.
Those words meant the exact opposite of what Milos so obviously believed about the purpose of their mission.
But he had no choice in any of this. The link to his computer gushed like a conduit: commandments and data flooded him.
A man in the sterile suit of a medtech wrapped the performer in pressure bandages, then carried her off the unlit stage. Apparently Ease-n-Sleaze considered her good enough for a return engagement. A scrub robot followed the medtech to clean up the blood.