Kitabı oxu: «Only Forward»
Only Forward
Michael Marshall Smith
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk
First published in Great Britain as a Paperback Original by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1994
Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1994
Excerpt from ‘Silent all these years’ written by Tori Amos, copyright © Sword and Stone Music 1991.Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Michael Marshall Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008117443
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007325368
Version: 2019-02-27
Dedication
For my family: David, Margaret and Tracey, and in memory of Mr Cat.
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by Neil Gaiman
PART ONE: The Paper Over the Cracks
The beginning
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
PART TWO: Some Lies
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
PART THREE: Requiem
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
The End
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books By
About the Publisher
Introduction
There is an audacity we possess when we are young, a cockiness and a knowledge that stems from, I suspect, two very different things: firstly, we don’t care what the rules are (we don’t even know what the rules are that we are breaking, as we break them. We want it all). Secondly, we may not have much time, we don’t know: if we are going to scrawl our names on the walls of the world we must do it in letters of fire a thousand feet high, and we must do it now.
So when you are a young writer, you put in everything you’ve got.
In the case of Michael Marshall Smith, also now sometimes known as Michael Marshall, you write something that manages to be, at the same time (or at least, in the same book), a work of futuristic parodic science fiction, a jaded and bitter private eye novel, a work of magical realism, a realistic psychological novel, and which contains in itself one of the most excellent pieces of dream fiction ever constructed.
Only Forward starts with a bang. It moves off with a series of even louder bangs. We meet Stark, and watch as he takes a job (it’s a dame, of course. It always takes a dame to start a story like this). Stark’s world-weary voice is irresistible (and to whom is he telling this tale? to us? to himself?) and it allows Smith to give us all the information he needs to (and to palm all the cards, coins, doves and cats he needs to). The story takes us to The City and to such neighbourhoods as Colour, Red, Stable and, my favourite of them all, Cat. Comic book, pulp places, each of them recognizable, each with its own dangers and joys.
Stark grows up as the novel goes on, because most first novels are, somewhere deep inside, coming-of-age novels. He moves from adolescence to responsibility in two very different ways.
Despite the gallimaufry of genres and of kinds of content in here, Smith, holding onto his novel, is always in control of his material, even if, sometimes, he seems to be wrestling it into submission, like a man clutching a fire hose as it bucks and sprays. But, once the possibility that this is all a dream, or a form of wish-fulfilment, is allowed out, it never goes away. It becomes harder to read the second half of the book literally, and easier to see it as a solo fugue, in which nothing is occurring outside Stark’s head.
Publishing Only Forward was a glorious flare that went up to let the world know about the arrival of a writer of talent and facility and a little genius. It won the British Fantasy Award and, six years later, when it was published in the US, the Philip K. Dick Award, doubly appropriate because it is a work of profoundly Dickian fiction: snarky gadgets, argumentative places, frangible realities and all.
Twenty years on, Michael Marshall and Michael Marshall Smith are twin stars who are continuing to burn brightly and with power. He’s more selective now about what he puts into his books, although the emotional power and the ability to plot have never let up or slackened. But this book was where it started. It’s impossible to forget the ending, and it has a very odd beginning, too. Did I mention all the stuff that happens in between?
Neil Gaiman
PART ONE The Paper Over the Cracks
But what if I’m a mermaid
In these jeans of his with
Her name still on them
Hey but I don’t care ’cos sometimes
I said sometimes
I hear my voice and it’s been
Here, silent all these years.
Silent all these years Tori Amos
The beginning
Once there was a boy in a house. He was alone because his father was out at work, and his mother had run round the corner to the store. Although the boy was only four, he was a reliable child who knew the difference between toys and accidents waiting to happen, and his mother trusted him to be alone for five minutes.
The boy was sitting playing in the living room when suddenly he had an odd feeling. He looked around the room, thinking maybe that the cat had walked behind him, gently moving the air. But he wasn’t there, and nothing else was out of the ordinary, so the boy went back to what he was doing. He was colouring a picture of a jungle in his colouring book, and he wanted to have it finished before his father got home from work.
Then there was a knock at the door.
The boy stared at the door for a moment. That’s what the feeling had been about. He had known there would be a knock at the door, just as he sometimes knew that the phone was going to ring. He knew that it couldn’t be his mother, because he’d seen her take the keys. He also knew that he shouldn’t open the door to strangers when he was in the house alone. But something made him feel that this didn’t count, that this time was different. After all, he’d known about it beforehand. So he got up, and walked slowly over to the door. After a pause, he opened it.
At the time his family were living high up in a block of flats. Outside their door was a balconied walkway which went right round the floor and led to lifts round to the right. It was midmorning, and bright spring sun streamed into the room, the sky a shining splash of white and blue.
On the balcony stood a man. He was a big man, wearing tired jeans and nothing on his feet. His torso was naked except for tiny whorls of hair, and he didn’t have a head.
The man stood there on the balcony outside the boy’s flat, leaning against the wall. His head and neck had been pulled from his body like a tooth from the gum, and his shoulders had healed over smoothly, with a pronounced dip in the middle where the roots had been.
The boy did not feel afraid, but instead a kind of terrible compassion and loss. He didn’t know what the feelings were in words of course. He just felt bad for the man.
‘Hello?’ he said, timidly.
In his head the boy heard a voice.
‘Help me,’ it said.
‘How?’
‘Help me,’ said the voice again, ‘I can’t find my way home.’
The boy heard a noise from along the balcony and knew it was the lift doors opening. His mother was coming back. The man spoke once more, spoke to the boy as if he was the only one who could help him, as if somehow it was his responsibility.
‘I want to go back home. Help me.’
‘Where’s your home?’
The voice inside his head said something, and the boy tried to repeat it, but he was young, a child, and couldn’t get the word right. He heard footsteps coming towards the nearest corner, and knew they were his mother’s.
‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I can’t help you,’ and he gently closed the door, shutting out the light. He walked stiffly back towards his book and all at once his legs gave way and left him on the floor.
When his mother came in moments later she found the boy asleep on the carpet, with tears on his face. He woke up when she hugged him, and said that nothing was wrong. He didn’t tell her about the dream, and soon forgot all about it.
But later he remembered, and realised it had not been a dream.
One
I was tired.
I got up, crawled out of the maelstrom of sheets, at 9.30 this morning. I took a shower, I drank some coffee. I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and felt my muscles creak as they carried a burning cigarette from the ashtray to my mouth, from my mouth to the ashtray. And when I first thought seriously about taking a nap, I looked at the clock. It was 10.45.
a.m.
I was still sitting there, waiting to die, waiting to fossilise, waiting for the coffee in the kitchen to evolve enough to make a cup of itself and bring it through to me, when the phone rang.
It was touch and go whether I answered it. It was right on the other side of the room, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t geared up for answering the phone, not this morning. If I had’ve been, I’d have been dying quietly on the other side of the room, near where the phone is.
It rang for quite a while, and then stopped, which was nice. Then it started again, and went on for what felt like days. Whoever was on the other end clearly didn’t know how I felt, wasn’t empathising very well. At all, in fact. I decided it would be worth getting to the other side of the room just to tell whoever it was to go away.
So I let myself sag gently to the floor and climbed up it like it was a mountain. I established a base camp about a third of the way across, and had a bit of a rest there. By now the phone had been ringing for so long I’d almost forgotten about it, and the sound wasn’t bothering me so much. But once I’ve made up my mind about something I stick to it, so off I went again.
It was a long and arduous journey, full of trials, setbacks and heroic derring-do on my part. I was almost there, for example, when I ran out of cigarettes, and had to go back to fetch another packet.
The phone was still ringing when I reached the other side, which was useful, because now I was there I had to find the damn thing. Half a year ago some client gave me a Gravbenda™ in part-payment for a job I’d done them. Maybe you’ve got one: what they do is let you alter the gravity in selected rooms in your apartment, change the direction, how heavy things are, that sort of stuff. So for a while I had the gravity in the living room going left to right instead of downwards. Kind of fun. Then the batteries ran out and everything just dropped in a pile down the far end of the room. And frankly, I couldn’t be fucked to do anything about it.
It took me a while to find the phone. The screen was cracked and the ringing sound was more of a warble than it used to be, though maybe it was just tired: it’d been ringing for over two hours by then. I pressed to receive and the screen flashed ‘Incoming Call’, blinked, and then showed a woman’s face. She looked pretty irritable, and also familiar.
‘Wow, Stark: have a tough time finding the phone, did you?’
I peered at the screen, trying to remember who it was. She was about my age, and very attractive.
‘Yes, as it happens. Who are you?’
The woman sighed heavily.
‘It’s Zenda, Stark. Get a grip.’
When I say I’m tired, you see, I don’t just mean that I’m tired. I have this disease. It’s nothing new: people have had it for centuries. You know when you’ve got nothing in particular to do, nothing to stay awake for? When your life is just routine and it doesn’t feel like it belongs to you, how you feel tired and listless and everything seems like too much effort?
Well it’s like that, but it’s much worse, because everything is much worse these days. Everything that’s bad is worse, believe me. Everything is accelerating, compacting and solidifying. There are whole Neighbourhoods out there where no one has had anything to do all their lives. They’re born, and from the moment they hit the table, there’s nothing to do. They clamber to their feet occasionally, realise there’s nothing to do, and sit down again. They grow up, and there’s nothing, they grow old and there’s still nothing. They spend their whole lives indoors, in armchairs, in bed, wondering who they are.
I grew up in a Neighbourhood like that, but I got out. I got a life. But when that life slows down, the disease creeps up real fast. You’ve got to keep on top of it.
‘Zenda, shit. I mean Hi. How are you?’
‘I’m fine. How are you?’
‘Pretty tired.’
‘I can tell. Look, I could have something for you here. How long would it take you to get dressed?’
‘I am dressed.’
‘Properly, Stark. For a meeting. How soon could you be down here?’
‘I don’t know. Two, three months?’
‘You‘ve got an hour.’
The screen went blank. She’s a characterful person, Zenda, and doesn’t take any shit. She’s my contact at Action Centre, the area where all the people who are into doing things hang out. It’s a whole Neighbourhood, with offices and buildings and shops and sub-sections, all totally dedicated and geared up for people who always have to be doing something. Competition to get in is pretty tough, obviously, because everyone is prepared to do what it takes, to get things done, to work, all the fucking time. A hundred per cent can-do mentality. Once you’re in you’ve got to work even harder, because there’s always somebody on the outside striving twenty-five hours a day to take your place.
They’re a pretty heavy bunch, the Actioneers: even when they’re asleep they’re on the phone and working out with weights, and most of them have had the need to sleep surgically removed anyway. For me, they’re difficult to take for more than a few seconds at a stretch. But Zenda’s okay. She’s only been there five years, and she’s lasted pretty well. I just wish she’d take some shit occasionally.
I found some proper clothes quite easily. They were in another room, one where I haven’t fucked about with the gravity. They were pretty screwed up, but I have a CloazValet™ that takes care of that, another part-payment. It somehow also changed the colour of the trousers from black to emerald with little turquoise diamonds, but I thought what the hell, start a trend.
The walls in the bedroom were bright orange, which meant it was about seven o’clock at night. It also meant I’d spent a whole day sitting with my back to the wall. I don’t think I’ll ever make it into the Centre, somehow.
Getting to Zenda’s building in Action Centre would take at least half an hour, probably more, even assuming I could find it. They keep moving the buildings around just for something to do in lunchbreaks, and if you don’t keep up with the pace you can walk into the Centre and not know where anything is. The Actioneers are always up with the pace, of course. I’m not.
I told the apartment to behave and got out onto the streets.
The fact that Zenda had asked me to change meant that I was almost certainly going to be meeting someone. I meet a lot of people. Some of them need what I can do for them, and don’t care what I look like: by the time I’m the only person who can help them, they’re prepared to put up with sartorial vagueness.
But most of them just want something minor fixed, and only like giving money to people who’ll dress up neatly for them. They insist on value. I hadn’t been able to tell from Zenda’s tone whether this was to be a special thing, or just a run-of-the-mill one, but the request for tidiness implied the latter.
All that stuff about the disease, by the way, it wasn’t true. Well it was, but it was an exaggeration. There are Neighbourhoods like I described, but I’m not from there. I’m not from anywhere, and that’s why I’m so good at what I do. I’m not stuck, I’m not fixed, and I don’t faze easily. To faze me you’d have to prove to me that I was someone else, and then I’d probably just ask to be properly introduced.
I was just tired. I’d had three hours’ sleep the night before, which I think you’ll agree isn’t much. I’m not asking for sympathy though: three hours is pretty good for me. In my terms, three hours makes me Rip van Winkle. I was tired because I’d only been back two days after my last job. I’ll tell you about it sometime, if it’s relevant.
The streets were pretty quiet, which was nice. They’re always quiet here at that time: you have to be wearing a black jacket to be out on the streets between seven and nine in the evening, and not many people in the area have black jackets. It’s just one of those things. I currently live in Colour Neighbourhood, which is for people who are heavily into colour. All the streets and buildings are set for instant colourmatch: as you walk down the road they change hue to offset whatever you’re wearing. When the streets are busy it’s kind of intense, and anyone prone to epileptic seizures isn’t allowed to live in the Neighbourhood, however much they’re into colour.
I’m not into colour that deeply myself, I just live here because it’s one of the milder weirdnesses in The City, one of the more relaxed Neighbourhoods. Also you can tell the time by the colour of the internal walls of the residential apartments, which is kind of useful as I hate watches.
The streets thought about it for a while, then decided that matt black was the ideal compliment for my outfit. Some of the streetlights were picked out in the same turquoise as the diamonds in my trousers too, which I thought was kind of a nice touch. I made a mental note to tell the next Street Engineer I met that they were doing a damn fine job. Sort of an embarrassing thing to think, but I knew I was safe: I always lose my mental notes.
Last time I’d ventured out of the apartment the monorail wasn’t working, but they’d obviously been busily busying away at it, because the New and Improved Service was in full swing. An attendant in a black jacket sold me a ticket, and I had a whole carriage to myself. I took a leaflet from the pouch on the wall and read that the monorail had been shut temporarily so they could install mood sensors in the walls of the carriages. I thought that was pretty cool, and the walls picked that up and shone a smug blue.
Little Big Station, Pacific Hue, Zebra One, Rainbow North: the stations zipped by soundlessly, and I geared myself up for whatever it was I had to gear myself up for. I didn’t have much to go on, so I just geared up generally.
I judged I was probably geared up enough when the walls were a piercing magenta. ‘Steady,’ read a little sign that popped up from nowhere on the opposite wall. ‘That’s pretty geared up, fella.’ I took the hint and looked out the window instead. Soon I could see the huge sweeping white wall that demarcated the Colour Neighbourhood from Action Centre. The Actioneers aren’t the only people to have built a wall round them to keep everyone else out, but theirs is a hell of a lot bigger, whiter and more bloody-minded than most.
The mono stopped at Action Portal 1, and I got off and walked across to the gate. The man in the booth was reading an advanced management theory text, but he snapped his attention to me instantly. They’re like that, the Actioneers. Ready for anything.
‘Authorisation?’
I fumbled in my wallet and produced my card. Zenda got it for me a few years ago, and without one they just don’t let you in.
‘Destination?’
‘Department of Doing Things Especially Quickly.’
‘Contact?’
‘Zenda Renn, Under-Supervisor of Really Hustling Things Along.’
He tapped on his console for a while, taking the chance to snap up a few more lines of Total Quality Management at the same time. The computer flashed a curt authorisation, not wasting any of its time either, doubtless keen to get back to redesigning the Centre’s plumbing system or something.
‘Wrist.’
I put my hand through the gap in the window and he snapped a Visitor Bracelet round my wrist.
‘You are authorised one half hour this visit. Take the A line mono to your destination. Your journey will be free, with no cash or credit transaction involved.’ They like to make a big thing about the fact that they don’t use money in the Centre, like it means they’re some big egalitarian happy family, yet there are 43 grades of monorail attendant alone. ‘May I suggest that you make productive use of your travel time by reading or engaging in some other constructive pass-time?’
I guessed my attendant was at least a 10: he was pretty sharp.
I got on the mono, and again had a carriage to myself. Seven till eight is compulsory relaxation time in Action Centre, and all the zappy Actioneers were off busily relaxing in the most complex, stressful and career-orientated ways they could find. I was glad the carriage was empty. It meant that no one was using any of the phones built into each seat, there was no meeting going on round any of the meeting tables, and no one was heading for a stroke on the exercise machines.
I sat in my seat, steadfastly ignoring the bookcases and the tutorial vidiscreens. Triggered by my Visitor Bracelet, the carriage’s synthetic voice assured me that my journey time would be at the most four minutes and thirty-two seconds, and went on to suggest several constructive tasks I could accomplish in that time.
The deal with the bracelets is this. When you visit the Centre, they want to make damn sure you leave again. They can’t have just anyone slouching around the place, diluting the activity pool. So they give you a bracelet, which has a read-out of how long you’ve got. If the read-out gets down to zero and you’re still in the Centre, it blows up. Simple, really. You’ve got business, you’ve got half an hour to do it in, and if you don’t get it done you get blown up. I guess it’s what Actioneers feel like all the time.
People from Natsci Neighbourhood, which is to the south of the Centre, can get two-day passes. The Natscis specialise in technology. It’s their life. They’re sweet really, little men and women in white coats dashing about the place, twiddling dials and programming things. They have better computers and gadgets than everybody else, and the Centre has to buy their mainframes from the Natscis, which pisses them off no end.
As it happened, I did do something constructive during my four minutes and thirty-two seconds, which doubtless made the carriage very happy. I got my seat computer to print out a map of the current layout of the area round the Department. This week, I saw, they’d arranged the buildings to make up the ancient symbol for Diligence when seen from a particular point in space.
When the doors opened at my stop I stood politely to one side to let an Actioneer get on first.
‘Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep,’ he was saying into his portable phone, ‘yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.’
He struck me as a can-do kind of guy.
‘Stark. You’re early. Congratulations.’
Zenda was sitting behind her ridiculously large desk when I finally made it to her office. This time they’d rearranged the inside of the building too, and used an industrial strength Gravbenda™ so they could have the floors at a 45° angle to the ground. They probably had a reason, but it made finding your way around sort of mentally strenuous. The elevator I took was clearly very annoyed about the whole thing and spent the entire journey muttering to itself instead of telling me the history of the Department in the way it was supposed to.
Zenda’s desk is about forty feet square, literally. As well as her computer, pens, paperclips and stuff like that, it also has an aquarium on it, and a meeting table with six chairs. I made my way round to her end of it and kissed her hand. They don’t do that in the Centre, but they do in the Neighbourhood where she grew up, and I know she kind of likes it.
‘Good to see you, Zenda. You’re looking very diligent today.’
‘Why thank you, Stark. Cool trousers.’
‘Yeah, the streets loved them. Am I tidy enough?’
‘You’re fine.’
She turned and bawled a drinks instruction at the unit in the wall.
‘Okay, okay already,’ the machine said huffily, ‘I’m not deaf.’
I grinned. Zenda is very relaxed for an Actioneer. Being in the Centre has changed her much less than it does most of them: I think the only reason they keep her there is that she’s so damned good at Doing Things. The machine burped the drinks onto the desk and slid shut, without even telling us to enjoy them. Zenda smiled, and handed me one of them.
‘When did you get back?’
‘A few days ago. Went into extra time. Sorry about this afternoon.’
‘That’s okay: I assumed you were tired.’
‘I was.’
‘Did it work out okay?’
‘It worked out fine. You going to tell me what this is about?’
‘I can’t. I don’t know myself. I got a call this afternoon from a couple of rungs up the ladder, saying there was an ultra-important Thing That Needs Doing, requiring a particular blend of skills and discretion. It sounded like your sort of thing, so I got you here.’
‘Is it a normal thing or a Something?’
‘A normal thing.’
Very few people would have known what the hell I was talking about. Zenda is one of the very few who know me well, and knows what I really do, but we don’t discuss it. There are things I have to sort out, and they often come to me through her. I rely upon her, in fact, her and a couple of other people, and yet I’m the only person who can sort these things out, and they know that. It’s an odd kind of relationship, but then what isn’t?
‘Good. So. When can I buy you dinner?’
‘Next year, possibly. It’s a busy time: I’m on intravenous feeding for the next three months.’
‘Okay, so I’ll bring a burger and we can watch the drips together,’ I drawled with a grin.
‘I’ll call you,’ she said, lying sweetly. Actioneers don’t date outside the Centre. It’s frowned on, it’s not a good career move, and having your date blow up mid-evening would be a bit of a downer too, I guess. I know that, but it’s kind of fun pretending to try. It’s an in-joke between us, like the private detective impersonation. Contrary to appearances, I don’t have a frosted glass door with my name on it, and I didn’t use to be a cop. I used to be a musician. Sort of.
At one minute to eight exactly the desk intercom rasped, ‘Ms Renn, your meeting participants are on their way up. Meeting time minus one minute and counting.’
People in the Centre are never, never early for meetings. Being early would suggest that you weren’t busy enough, that you hadn’t just immediately flown in from something else just as important. These people had timed it very well. I tried hard to admire that.
‘Okay, Stark: shall we sit?’
We climbed onto the desk. Zenda arranged herself beautifully in the chair at the head of the table, and I sat opposite, so that I could monitor her facial reactions during the meeting. Also, so that I could just look at her face, which has high cheekbones, green eyes and a wide mouth. Yes, okay, so I like Zenda a lot. Well spotted.
‘Meeting time minus thirty seconds and counting.’
The doors at the end bounced open and two men and a woman entered in formation, walking fast. The woman I recognised as Royn, one of Zenda’s assistants, and the man in front wore the distinctive violet cufflinks of the Centre’s Intelligence Agency, ACIA. He was thickset and looked pretty serious. Not much of a dancer, I guessed.
‘Hi, Royn,’ I said.
‘Hi, Stark. Hey, cool trousers.’
I made a mental note to use the CloazValet™ incorrectly again sometime. As they arranged themselves around the table I stole a look at the second man. He was in his fifties, tall and thin, with a pale and bony face. That meant that he was senior enough to disregard the compulsory tanning regulations in the Centre, which made him pretty damn senior. I wondered who he was.
‘And…Meeting time!’ sang the intercom’s synthetic voice. ‘On behalf of the building I would like to wish you a productive and diligent meeting. Here’s hoping it will be deemed a success by all participants and by those they work for, with and above in their respective Departments. Go for it!’
While Zenda introduced us all to each other, I lit a cigarette. Normally that’s strictly forbidden in the Centre, as all the Actioneers want to carry on busily doing things for as long as they can, but I figured I ought to state a presence somehow. The man from ACIA, whose name was Darv, gave me a long stare but I gave it right back to him. I’ve met his type before. They hate me. Actually, they hate what they see, which isn’t the same thing. I’ve been playing this game for ten years now, and I know how to fit in. Curiously, what they see and hate is what they want to see.
The thin man was referred to only as C, which meant he was the third most senior executive in the whole Department. That made him an alarmingly heavy hitter, and though he said nothing for the first ten minutes of the meeting, I could tell he was someone to take seriously. I saw now why Zenda had suggested I make an effort.
Darv kicked off the meeting by grassing on the elevator, which had moved on to insinuating damaging things about the sexual proclivities of the building’s interior designers. Royn made a call and somewhere in the basement a SWAT team of elevator engineers and hydraulic psychotherapists went into action.
‘Now, Mr Stark,’ he continued, swivelling his head on his thick neck to face me, ‘I’m sure you realise that someone like you wouldn’t be my first choice for a Thing That Needs Doing like this. I want it put on record that I think this could be a mistake.’
I looked at him for a while, and the others waited for me to say something. I blew out some smoke, and thought of something.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘until you give me some idea of what the job is, it’s very difficult for me to tell whether you have a point or if you’re just being a dickhead.’
Both Zenda and Royn rolled their eyes at this, and Darv clearly thought very seriously about punching me in the face. I detected the faintest whisper of a smile on C’s face, however, and that was far more important. Though Darv was apparently the designated talker, the power in the room lay with C. I raised my eyebrows at Darv and after a heavy pause, he continued.
‘The situation is fundamentally quite simple, and very serious. A senior Actioneer, Fell Alkland by name, has disappeared. Alkland was a much-valued member of the Central Planning Department, involved in groundbreaking work in the furtherment of Really Getting to the Heart of Things.’
Darv stood up and started to pace round the perimeter of the desk, with his hands behind his back. I couldn’t be bothered to keep swivelling round to keep him in vision, so I just listened to the drone of his voice and kept a check on Zenda’s facial reactions.
‘Alkland left his Department at 6.59 three days ago, and entered the nearby Strive! mono station at 7.01 p.m. We know this because a mono attendant remembers him clearly. Alkland gave him a useful tip on how to keep used ticket stubs really tidy. He then boarded the mono. As you may know, Mr Stark, seven until eight is leisure time here in the Centre, and Alkland’s chosen regular form of relaxation was to make his way to the swimming baths in the Results Are What Counts sub-section of the Neighbourhood. There he would work extremely hard whilst wearing a bathing costume. On that day, however, he never made it to the baths.’
He paused dramatically before concluding, ‘No one has seen him since he boarded that mono.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said, reeling under the impact of so much bad film dialogue, ‘so put a trace on him.’
Darv sighed theatrically, as I knew he would. Every Actioneer has a tracer compound inserted into their left arm, so that they can be located within the Centre at all times and have their phone calls redirected. If ACIA were talking to me, it meant they’d already tried that and come up a blank. I knew that. But sometimes it doesn’t pay to let everyone know everything you know. See? I have hidden depths.
‘Obviously we’ve tried that, Stark, obviously.’
‘Oh,’ I said, grinning. Zenda smirked covertly at me. ‘So?’
‘Attention! Attention!’ Darv nearly fell off the desk as he jumped at the sound of the intercom’s voice. ‘Ms Renn, your Visitor is due to explode in two minutes.’
‘Jesus wept,’ muttered Darv, as he made his way under the table. Clearly a cautious man. I held my wrist out to Zenda and she waved her Extender over it, giving me another half hour. C remained calm at all times.
‘Darv?’ I said gently, as he re-emerged, ‘Are you saying that you suspect Alkland has been taken to another Neighbourhood?’
‘No, I don’t suspect that,’ he replied coldly, taking his seat again and leaning across to be cutting directly to my face, ‘I know it. Alkland is not in the Centre, we’re sure of that. He was involved in very important and highly classified work. He has clearly been kidnapped, and we want him back.’
‘Surely even a class 43 mono attendant at the Portals would have noticed something? How could anyone have got him out without his consent?’
‘That,’ said C, slowly turning his impassive face towards me, ‘is what we want you to discover.’
I left the Department ten minutes later, in plenty of time to get out of the Centre in one piece. Rather than go directly to the mono I headed across The Buck Stops Everywhere Park and Recreation Area, a little patch of green in amongst the towers of excellence. The park was pretty packed, unfortunately, full of people holding impromptu al fresco meetings and starting affairs with people who might be useful to them, so I cut out again and headed for the B line mono on the other side. Remind me to take you to a Centre bar sometime. It’ll be the least fun you’ve ever had.
There hadn’t been much more to the meeting. C had outlined the brief, and it was pretty straightforward. Find out who’d snatched Alkland, find out where they’d taken him, and bring him back alive. There was also an unspoken sub-brief: don’t let anyone know what you’re up to. The Actioneers don’t like it to be known that they’re not on top of absolutely everything, and ACIA has no jurisdiction outside the Centre itself. Their thinking was that whoever the guys in the black hats were, chances were they’d be holed up in Red Neighbourhood, which borders on the Centre’s eastern side. I wasn’t so sure, but I had to go there anyway, so it would do as a place to start.
I had a CV cube on Alkland, with his likeness and various other pieces of information about him, and I had twenty-four hours before I made an initial report back to Zenda. A standard, run-of-the-mill, normal thing. Something to do.
I took the mono to Action Portal 3, and as I had five minutes to spare I found Hely, the attendant who’d last seen Alkland. He’d been reassigned from the inner mono, and Royn told me where to find him. He was eager to help, but couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already.
Before I boarded the mono Hely showed me his used tickets. I could see why they were so keen to get Alkland back. The pile really was very, very tidy.
Two
I boarded Red Line One at 8.30 p.m., and as always immediately wished that I hadn’t.
Red Neighbourhood isn’t like the Centre. It isn’t like Colour, either. It isn’t like anywhere. The chief reason the Centre has a fucking great wall around it is to keep Red Neighbourhood out.
Let me explain a bit about the Neighbourhoods. A long, long time ago, the old deal about cities being divided by race and creed simply went down the pan. I think basically everybody got bored with the idea and lost interest: spending all day hating your neighbours was just too damn tiring. At the same time, the whole concept of cities started to change. When a nation’s main city begins to cover over seventy per cent of the whole country, clearly things need to be organised a little differently.
What happened is that neighbourhoods became Neighbourhoods, self-governing and regulating states, each free to do what the hell they liked. The people that live in a given Neighbourhood are the people who like what the Neighbourhood likes. If you don’t like the Neighbourhood, you get the hell out and find one that’s more your sort of thing. Unless you come from a bad Neighbourhood, in which case you’re pretty much stuck where you are. Some things change, some things stay the same. So far, so what.
With time things began to get a little weird, and that’s kind of how they’ve stayed. Everything is compacting, accelerating, solidifying, but not all of it in the same direction. There’s a loose collection of Neighbourhoods that are pretty much on the same planet, and if any country-wide decisions need to be made, they get together and have a crack at it. Everybody else? Well, who knows, basically. I’ve seen a lot of The City, I’ve been around. But there’s a lot of places I haven’t been, places where no one’s been in a hundred years, no one except the people who live there. Some places you don’t go because it’s too dangerous, and some places don’t let outsiders in. Believe me: there are some Neighbourhoods out there where there is some very weird shit going on.
Red Neighbourhood doesn’t fall into that category. It’s not that bad. It’s just kind of intense. I was in Red because I needed to buy a gun, and you can’t buy guns in the Centre or Colour. In Red you can buy what the hell you like. At a discount.
There’s no good or bad time to get on a Red mono. They don’t have hours where you do certain things, or days even. You just pay your money and take your chances. Actually, by Red standards the carriage I boarded was fairly civilised. True, there was both vomit and a human turd on the seat next to mine, but I’ve seen worse. The prostitutes were mainly too stoned to be doing serious business, the fight down the end was over very quickly, and there were never more than two dead bodies in the carriage at any one time.
Zenda thinks I’m very brave for going into Red by myself. Partly, she’s right. But partly you just have to know how to fit in, how not to be fazed. If Darv or any of those ACIA suits poked their head in here they’d get the crap beaten out of them before they sat down, because they’d look like they didn’t belong.
Look at me. Okay, so I’m wearing good clothes, but that’s not the point. Clothes are not an issue. Clothes cost nothing. It’s in the face. I don’t look like I’m dying for this mono journey to end, like I’m about to wet myself in fear. I don’t look like I’m disgusted with what I see. I look like the kind of guy who’d have a knife in your throat before you got halfway through giving him a hard time. I look like the kind of guy whose mother died in the street choking up Dopaz vomit. I look like the kind of guy who pimps his sister not just for the money, but because he hates her.
I can look like a guy who belongs.
I got off at Fuck Station Zero and weaved down a few backstreets. In Red they can’t be bothered to move the garbage around, never mind the buildings. In the real depths of Red, places like Hu district, there is garbage that has literally fossilised. Finding your way around is not a problem, assuming you know your way to start off with: there aren’t any maps. If you don’t know where you’re going you want to get the hell out of Red immediately, before something demoralising and possibly fatal happens to you.
It had been a couple of months since I was last in Red, and I was relieved to see that BarJi was still functioning. The turnover of recreational establishments in Red is kind of high, what with gang war, arson and random napalming. BarJi has been running for almost six years now, which I suspect may be some kind of record. The reason is very simple. The reason is Ji.
It’s always kind of a tense moment, sticking your head into a bar in Red Neighbourhood. You can take it as a given that there’ll be a fight in progress, but it’s less easy to predict what kind. Will it be fists, guns or chemical weapons that are involved? Is it a personal battle or a complete free-for-all? The fight in Ji’s was a very minor one of the knife variety, which made it feel like a church in spite of the grotesquely loud trash rock exploding out of the speakers.
The reason? Ji.
Ji is an old, well, friend, I guess. We met a long time ago when we were both involved in something. I may tell you about it sometime, if it’s relevant. He wasn’t living in Red then: he was living in Turn Again Neighbourhood, which is the second weirdest Neighbourhood I have ever set foot in. I have been in Turn twice, and there is no fucking way I am ever going there again.
I’m not even going to talk about the weirdest Neighbourhood I’ve seen.
Ji was a hard bastard even by Turn standards: in Red he is a king. Doped-up gangs in surrounding areas while away the hours tearing up and down streets in armoured cars, blasting the shit out of each other with anti-tank weapons and flamethrowing the pedestrians. When they get to Ji’s domain, they put the guns down and observe the speed limit until they’re safely out the other side. Through a series of carefully planned and hideously successful atrocities Ji has firmly established himself as someone you under no circumstances even think about fucking with. This makes him kind of a good contact to have in Red, especially as he owes me a few favours. I owe him a few too, but the kind of favours we owe each other aren’t complementary, and so they don’t cancel each other out. At least we don’t think they do: we’ve never really got to the bottom of the whole thing.
I sat down at a table near the side and ordered some alcohol. This didn’t go down well with the barman, but I coped with his disapproval. I knew that Ji’s assistants monitored everyone who came into the bar through closed circuit vidiscreens, and that Ji would send word down as soon as he could be bothered. I took a sip of my drink, set my face for ‘Reasonably Dangerous’, and soaked up the local colour.
The local colour was predominantly orange. The decor was orange, the drinks were orange, the lights were orange, and the bodies of the women performing languorous gynaecological examinations of each other on the orange-lit stage were painted orange too. Ji’s Bar is a Dopaz bar, and as any Dopaz-drone will tell you, orange is like, the colour, of, like, orange is, you know, orange, orange is, like, orange.
Dopaz is two things in Red Neighbourhood. It is the primary recreational drug. It is also the most common cause of death. Is Dopaz strong? Let me put it this way. Drugs are often diluted or ‘cut’ with other substances, either to swindle buyers or just to lower the dosage. A lot of drugs are cut with baking powder. When they cut Dopaz, they cut it with Crack.
Most of the drones in BarJi were out there in the main bar, watching the biology lesson and drinking very low dosage Dopaz drinks, about four of which will leave you unconscious for forty-eight hours. The heavy hitters would have made their way to the rooms at the back, and tomorrow would find half of them in the piles of garbage in the street, their corpses waiting to fossilise like everything else. There’s no safety net in Red Neighbourhood: if you fall, you fall. You can’t leave Red for a better Neighbourhood: they’ve all got standards, criteria, exams or fees. If you were born Red, or end up in Red, you’re not going to make it out into the light. The only way out of Red is down.
While I waited for Ji I worked my way through Alkland’s cube. The Actioneer was sixty-two years old, born and bred in the Centre. His father had been B at the Department of Hauling Ass for seven years, and then A for a record further thirteen. His mother had revolutionised the theory and practice of internal memoranda. Alkland’s career leapt off the CV like an arrow or some other very straight thing: he wasn’t just a man who was very good at doing things, but the perfect product of the Centre, a hundred per cent can-do person. His work during the last five years was classified, and I didn’t have a high enough rating to break the code, but I knew that it must be very diligent stuff. The Department of Really Getting to the Heart of Things is the core department in the Centre. Everybody reports to them in the end, and the A there is effectively Chief Actioneer.
The cube told you everything you needed to know about Alkland unless you weren’t an Actioneer. To them, what you did in office time was what you were. But I needed to know why whoever had kidnapped him had chosen him, and not someone else. I didn’t want to know what Alkland was: I needed to know who he was. I had to understand the man.
Eventually, frustrated, I switched the setting to Portrait and a 10 x 8 x 8 hologram of Alkland popped onto the table. It showed a bony face, with grey thinning hair and a thinner nose. The eyes behind his glasses were intelligent but gentle, and the lines round the mouth told a history of wry smiles. He looked rather gentle for an Actioneer. That was all. There was nothing else to learn from the cube, and I had no more to go on.
‘Stark, you fuck, how the fuck are you, fucker?’
‘Fuck you,’ I said, turning with a smile. I know my language is far from ideal, but Ji makes me sound like a rather fey poet. I stood and stuck my hand out at him and he shook it violently and painfully, as is his wont. The two seven-foot men on either side of him regarded me dubiously.
‘Who’s that fucker?’ he asked, nodding at the holo.
‘That’s one of the things I want to talk with you about,’ I said, sitting down again.
The main bar in Ji’s is actually the most private place to talk, as all the patrons are so wasted you could set fire to their noses without them noticing. Overhearing other people’s conversations is not what they’re there for.
‘Well, he’s got to be in deep shit of some kind, for you to be looking for him,’ said Ji as he settled violently into one of the other chairs round the table. Ji looks like he was hewn out of a very large rock by someone who was talented but on drugs all the time. There’s a kind of rough rightness about him though, apart from round his eyes. He has some big scars there.
His bodyguards lurked round the next table, watching my every move. Given that Ji could kill either of them without breaking sweat I’ve always thought them kind of superfluous, but I guess there’s a protocol to being a psychotic ganglord.
Ji waved in the direction of the bar and a pitcher of alcohol was on the table before his hand stopped moving. He nodded at the stage. ‘What do you think of the show?’
‘Obscene,’ I said, nodding in appreciation, ‘genuinely obscene.’
‘Yeah,’ he grunted, pleased. ‘Bred for it, you know.’ He wasn’t joking: they really are. Red tends not to be the Neighbourhood of choice for women. I noticed that as usual all the girls had thick black hair. Ji has a thing for that.
We chewed the rag for a while. I recapped the last few months, mentioned a couple of mutual acquaintances I’d run into. Ji told me his land had expanded another half mile to the north, which explained his bar’s continued existence, recounted a couple of especially horrific successes, and used the word ‘fuck’ just over four hundred times.
‘So,’ he said in the end, waving and receiving another pitcher, ‘what the fuck do you want? I mean, obviously the joy of seeing my face, but what else? Nice trousers, by the way.’
‘Thanks. Two things,’ I said, leaning over the table and dropping my voice, just in case. ‘I have to find this guy. His name’s Alkland. People who are looking for him think he might be in Red somewhere.’
‘Actioneer?’
‘Yeah, and not just any old can-do smartarse. This is a golden boy.’
‘What the fuck’s he doing in here then?’
‘That I don’t know. I’m not even sure he is here. All I know is that he isn’t in the Centre. ACIA think he’s been stolen and stashed in Red somewhere: I guess it’s the logical first choice.’
I sat back and took a drink of alcohol. Ji knew what I was asking: I didn’t have to spell it out for him. On the stage the sweating and toiling performers were joined by a new pair of girls, who immediately proceeded to go to the toilet over them. That’s entertainment in Red for you.
‘No.’
I nodded and lit another cigarette. I think I forgot to mention that I’d just had one. Well I had. I finished it, put it out, and then I lit another one. Use your imagination.
‘I guessed not.’
‘I’ll listen for him. You still in Colour?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’ll pass word if I hear anything. Don’t think I will, though.’
‘No, me neither. I don’t think there’s a gang in Red with enough power to kidnap an Actioneer right out of the Centre. It has to be someone else, maybe a team out of Turn or somewhere. But they could be holding him here.’
‘What’s the other thing?’
‘I need a gun. I lost mine.’
Ji grunted and waved at one of his bodyguards. Ji has a good line in waves: the guard didn’t even need to come over to know what he was asking for. He just disappeared straight out the back.
‘Thanks.’
‘No problem. You going to leave me the cube?’
‘Can’t. Zenda would kill me.’
‘You still working for her?’
I pressed the cube, printed out a colour image of Alkland and gave it to Ji.
‘You know me. I’ll work for anyone.’
‘Especially her.’
‘Especially her.’
By the time I got back to my apartment it was late. You’re not allowed to enter the Centre more than once in one day, so I had to go the long way round, via two other Neighbourhoods. Luckily Ji, cunning old fox of a psychotic that he is, had got hold of some WeaponNegatorz™, so I got the gun back undetected.
Guns, actually. Ji gave me a Gun, which is my weapon of choice, and also a Furt as an added bonus. The Furt is quite a flash laser device, which doubles as a cutting instrument and is therefore kind of useful. The Gun just fires energy bullets. Crude, but effective, and as it generates the bullets itself you never have to reload, which has saved my life eleven times. It was the same make as my last gun, which I lost on the recent job I still haven’t told you about, and it felt very comfortable in my hand. Over a couple more pitchers Ji and I had tried to work out where this left us in the favour stakes. We were both pretty bollocksed by then, but the end result seems to be that he now owes me one more favour than he did before.
As I sat with a jug of Jahavan coffee, each molecule of which is programmed to pelt round the body kicking the shit out of any alcohol molecules it finds, I considered where to go from here. So far, I didn’t have very much to go on. I had established that Ji hadn’t been involved in Alkland’s abduction, but I’d known that anyway. Ji simply wanted to take over as much of Red as he could and stay alive as long as he could whilst killing as many other people as possible. He was a simple man, with simple needs.
Whoever had Alkland was into something much more complex. They couldn’t be after money, because the Centre didn’t have any, but it was unlikely they’d done it for the sheer fun of it. They had to want something that only the Centre could give them. Working out what that might be was going to be important, and I put a memo in my mental file to have a crack at it when I could be bothered. My mental memos are different to my mental notes: I always do something about them eventually, and they’re typed so I can read what they say. For example:
Internal Memo: Who’s got Alkland?
1) Someone with enough togetherness to get people into the Centre to snatch him.
2) Someone with enough togetherness to know about him in the first place.
(The togetherness factor of these guys had to be pretty high. The Centre doesn’t widely distribute lists of ‘People Doing Really Important Things Whom You Might Like To Consider Kidnapping’. I’d never even heard of Alkland before tonight, and I know the Centre pretty well for an outsider.)
3) Someone who wants something of a kind that only the Centre can give them.
(When I knew what that might be, I’d know what kind of people I was dealing with, which would make it easier to predict the way in which they’d operate.) And
4) Get some batteries for the Gravbenda™.
See? Very diligent. Zenda would be impressed. Well, not impressed, probably, because I’m sure her mental memos run to 120 pages with graphs, indexes and supporting audio visual material, but pleasantly surprised, maybe. Surprised, anyway.
I also made another note, which I’m not going to tell you about. It was kind of a surprising idea, and very unlikely: but I stored it away anyway. I’ll let you know if it turns out to be relevant.
By the time I finished the jug I was completely sober. More sober than I wanted to be, in fact: I’d drunk too much coffee and was now too far in the black, sobriety-wise. It made me notice things like that whenever I come back to my apartment, it’s empty. It’s a nice apartment, fully colour co-ordinated and with happening furniture, but I use it just as somewhere to store my stuff, and to crash when I’m in the Neighbourhood. When I come back to it, it’s always empty. No people. Or no person, to be more precise.
I have an apartment, I have more money than I need, I have a job, of sorts. But have I got a life?
See what I mean? Foolish, unhelpful thoughts. I took a look at the packet of Jahavan and saw I’d picked up Extra Strength by mistake. ‘Warning,’ it said in the blurb. ‘Anyone except alcoholics may find themselves experiencing foolish and unhelpful thoughts.’
I wasn’t feeling tired, but decided to try to get some sleep anyway. When I get immersed in a job I tend to have to go days without any, which is one of the reasons I end up so tired. There was nothing more I could do tonight, so making a deposit in the sleep bank was the clever thing to do.
Before I turned in I checked my message tray, on the off-chance that Ji might have transfaxed something through. It was empty apart from a note from the council. The Street Colour Coordinator Computer had sent me a message saying how much it had enjoyed working with my trousers.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
