A chaotichick came in, and he watched her, feeling less alone. Chaotics were much closer to real rockers. She was a skinhead, with the sides of her head painted. The Gridfriend insignia was tattooed on her right shoulder. She wore a skirt made of at least two hundred rags of synthetic material sewn to her leather belt—a sort of grass skirt of bright rags. The nipples of her bare breasts were pierced with thin screws. The minimonos looked at her in disgust; they were prudish, and calling attention to one’s breasts was decidedly gauche with the M’n’Ms. She smiled sunnily back at them. Her handsome Semitic features were slashed randomly with paint. Her makeup looked like a spinpainting. Her teeth were filed.
Rickenharp swallowed hard, looking at her. Damn. She was his type.
Only… she wore a blue-mesc sniffer. The sniffer’s inverted question mark ran from its hook at her right ear to just under her right nostril. Now and then she tilted her head to it, and sniffed a little blue powder.
Rickenharp had to look away. Silently cursing.
He’d just written a song called “Stay Clean.”
Blue mesc. Or syncoke. Or heroin. Or amphetamorphine. Or XTZ. But mostly he went for blue mesc. And blue mesc was addictive.
Blue mesc, also called boss blue. It offered some of the effects of mescaline and cocaine together, framed in the gelatinous sweetness of methaqualone. Only… stop taking it after a period of steady use and the world drained of meaning for you. There was no actual withdrawal sickness. There was only a deeply resonant depression, a sense of worthlessness that seemed to settle like dust and maggot dung into each individual cell of the user’s body.
Some people called blue mesc “the suicide ticket.” It could make you feel like a coal miner when the mineshaft caved in, only you were buried in yourself.
Rickenharp had squandered the money from his only major microdisc hit on boss blue and synthmorph. He’d just barely made it clean. And lately, at least before the band squabbles, he’d begun feeling like life was worth living again.
Watching the girl with the sniffer walk past, watching her use, Rickenharp felt stricken, lost, as if he’d seen something to remind him of a lost lover. An ex-user’s syndrome. Pain from guilt of having jilted your drug.
And he could imagine the sweet burn of the stuff in his nostrils, the backward-sweet pharmaceutical taste of it in the back of his palate; the rush; the autoerotic feedback loop of blue mesc. Imagining it, he had a shadow of the sensation, a tantalizing ghost of the rush. In memory he could taste it, smell it, feel it… Seeing her use brought back a hundred iridescent memories and with them came an almost irrepressible longing. (While some small voice in the back of his head tried to get his attention, tried to warn him, Hey, remember the shit makes you want to kill yourself when you run out; remember it makes you stupidly overconfident and boorish; remember it eats your internal organs… a small, dwindling voice… )
The girl was looking at him. There was a flicker of invitation in her eyes.
He wavered.
The small voice got louder.
Rickenharp, if you go to her, go with her, you’ll end up using.
He turned away with an anguished internal wrenching. Stumbled through the wash of sounds and lights and monochrome people to the dressing room; to guitar and earphones and the safer sonic world.
“You gave him to me,” Steinfeld said, leaning close to Purchase so he could be heard over the noise of the bar. “And I give him back. And I think we’ll both keep him.”
Purchase smiled and nodded. “Stisky’s a find. A piece of luck.”
Purchase was a big, sloppy-bodied man, his hair thin and his face wide. You could hear him breathe, even when he was at rest. But he laughed easily, and he didn’t miss much. The two men liked one another, though they were NR for different reasons. Steinfeld had shaped the NR in the image of his own idealism. It was an extension of his convictions—some would say, his almost perverse obsession. Purchase worked for Witcher, Steinfeld’s chief source of funding. But no, Steinfeld reflected, as they slid into a booth in the Freezone cocktail bar, Purchase worked for himself. That should have made him suspect. Only, it didn’t. Steinfeld trusted him more than he trusted some of the NR’s political zealots.
“Any problem with the blockades?” Purchase asked, toying with his gold choker.
Steinfeld’s brow furrowed. “Yes and no. I got through—but it was close this time. No one actually fired on us. But they would have if they’d picked up on us sooner. Sometimes I feel like asking Witcher’s pilots not to tell me if we’re tracked. I’d rather not know if I’m about to be shot out of the air…”
“You bring anyone else through?”
“A few people. We can’t get more than a handful out at any one time… and it’s a risk with just the handful. I won’t be taking many more of these trips…” He grimaced and changed the subject. “That’s a silk suit, isn’t it? It’s a little hard to tell in these lights, but I think it’s blue?”
“It is. Dark blue silk.” Purchase signaled for a drink. When the puffy-eyed waitress arrived, yawning, rubbing her temples, he said, “I want something big and glittery in an enormous glass. You choose. Something sweet. Sweet as whoever it was kept you up so late last night.”
She almost smiled. “Something with a plastic mermaid? A little paper umbrella?”
“Both the umbrella and the mermaid are absolute necessities.”
“I’ll have a scotch, please,” Steinfeld said. “On the rocks.” They watched her walk away. She was wearing a gown that picked up wifi signals at random as the signals passed through the room and reproduced Web imagery down the svelte length of her. Collaged faces, mostly fashion models and breakfast-cereal-kids, rippled across her ass and the back of her thighs.
The bar was at the edge of a disco. Minimono droned and thudded on the dance floor. Lights whirled like UFOs landing in an old movie Steinfeld had seen as a boy.
They had to lean over the transparent plastic table to talk, but they’d picked the booth to discourage bugging.
The lights tinted Purchase’s face, changing his color as if some expressionist painter were experimenting with his portrait. He was pinkish red dappled with blue when he asked, “How’d Stisky take to training?”
“A fish to water. The more rigorous the better. Well, he was a priest, once, after all… Does he have a name yet?”
“John Swenson. The cover had a good foundation: there was a John Swenson born the same year as Stisky. Died five years later. Looked a lot like Stisky did as a kid. His death went unregistered in his hometown—died in a boating accident with his parents on vacation, they all drowned. Death registered in Florida but never entered in computer records. We’ve put all the rest together. Worked up a set of false memories for mem-plantation… I think we’ve got some likelies, to take the implants…”
The expression on Steinfeld’s face made Purchase say, “You’ve got qualms about mem-plants?”
“This business of toying with people’s memories—I don’t care which side it is doing it—no, I don’t like it. It’s—” He shook his head.
“Too close to interfering with the soul?”
Steinfeld said, “I am not sure I believe in the soul. But yes, it’s too close—to interfering with the soul.”
“We’re up against it. Outnumbered. We’ve got to use all the tools at hand. If it’s any comfort, we don’t implant our own people. We should, but we don’t. Just the enemy.”
Steinfeld shrugged. “So be it. How high can you place him?”