“Charming.”
“Told you it was nasty, didn’t I.” There was pride in her voice.
“I’ll take it.”
Back out on the street, weighed down with my purchases, it occurred to me I’d need a jacket after all, if only to conceal the newly acquired arsenal. I cast a glance upward in search of an autocab and decided instead that there was enough sun in the sky to justify walking. I thought, at last, that my hangover was beginning to recede.
I was three blocks down the hill before I realised I was being tailed.
It was the Envoy conditioning, stirring sluggishly to life in the wake of the Merge Nine, that told me. Enhanced proximity sense, the faintest shiver and a figure in the corner of my eye once too often. This one was good. In a more crowded part of town I might have missed it, but here the pedestrians were too thin on the ground to provide much camouflage.
The Tebbit knife was strapped to my left forearm in a soft leather sheath with neural spring-load, but neither of the guns was accessible without making it obvious that I’d spotted my shadow. I debated trying to lose the tail, but abandoned the idea almost as soon as it occurred to me. It wasn’t my town, I felt sludgy with chemicals and anyway I was carrying too much. Let whoever it was come shopping with me. I picked up my pace a little and worked my way gradually down into the commercial centre, where I found an expensive thigh-length red and blue wool coat with Inuit-inspired totem pole figures chasing each other in lines across it. It wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind, but it was warm and had numerous capacious pockets. Paying for it at the shop’s glass front, I managed to catch a glimpse of my tail’s face. Young, Caucasian, dark hair. I didn’t know him.
The two of us crossed Union Square, pausing to take in another Resolution 653 demonstration that had stalled in a corner and was gradually wearing thin. The chants wavered, people drifted away and the metallic bark of the p.a. system was beginning to sound plaintive. There was a good chance I could have slipped away in the crowd, but by now I couldn’t be bothered. If the tail had been going to do anything other than watch, he’d had his chance back in the leafy seclusion of the hills. There was too much going on here for a hit. I steered my way through the remnants of the demonstration, brushing aside the odd leaflet, and then headed south towards Mission Street and the Hendrix.
On my way down Mission, I stepped inadvertently into the cast radius of a street seller. Instantly, my head flooded with images. I was moving along an alley full of women whose clothing was designed to display more than they would have shown of themselves naked. Boots that turned legs into slices of consumer flesh above the knee, thighs with arrow-shaped bands pointing the way, structural support lifting and pressing breasts out for view; heavy, rounded pendants nestling glans-like in sweat-beaded cleavages. Tongues flickered out, licked across lips painted cherry red or tomb black, teeth were bared in challenge.
A tide of cool swept in across me, erasing the sweaty need and turning the posturing bodies into an abstract expression of womanhood. I found myself tracking angles and the circumferences of bulges like a machine, mapping the geometry of flesh and bone as if the women were a species of plant.
Betathanatine. The Reaper.
Final offspring of an extended chemical family engineered for near death research projects early in the millennium, betathanatine brought the human body as close to flatline status as was feasible without gross cellular damage. At the same time, control stimulants in the Reaper molecule induced a clinical functioning of intellect which had enabled researchers to go through artificially induced death experiences without the overwhelming sense of emotion and wonder that might mar their data perception. Used in smaller doses, Reaper produced a depth of cool indifference to such things as pain, arousal, joy and grief. All the detachment that men had pretended for centuries before the naked female form was there for the taking, in capsule. It was almost custom built for the male adolescent market.
It was also an ideal military drug. Riding the Reaper, a Godwin’s Dream renouncer monk could torch a village full of women and children and feel nothing but fascination for the way the flames melted flesh from bone.
The last time I’d used betathanatine had been in street battles on Sharya. A full dose, designed to bring body temperature down to room normal and slow my heart to a fractional rate. Tricks to beat the antipersonnel detectors on Sharyan spider tanks. With no register on infrared, you could get up close, scale a leg and crack the hatches with termite grenades. Concussed by the shockwave, the crew usually slaughtered as easily as newborn kittens.
“Got Stiff, man,” said a hoarse voice redundantly. I blinked away the broadcast and found myself looking at a pale Caucasian face beneath a grey cowl. The broadcast unit sat on his shoulder, tiny red active lights winking at me like bat eyes. On the World there are very tight laws regulating the use of direct-to-head dissemination, and even accidental broadcasts can generate the same kind of violence as spilling someone’s drink in a wharf-front bar. I shot out one arm and shoved the dealer hard in the chest. He staggered against a shop front.
“Hey…”
“Don’t piss in my head, friend. I don’t like it.”
I saw his hand snake down to a unit at his waist and guessed what was coming. Retargetting, I got the soft of his eyes under my stiffened fingers …
And was face to face with a hissing mound of wet membranous flesh nearly two metres tall. Tentacles writhed at me and my hand was reaching into a phlegm-streaked hollow framed with thick black cilia. My gorge rose and my throat closed up. Riding out a shudder of revulsion, I pushed into the seething cilia and felt the slimy flesh give.
“You want to go on seeing, you’ll unplug that shit,” I said tightly.
The mound of flesh vanished and I was back with the dealer, fingers still pressed hard onto the upper curves of his eyeballs.
“All right, man, all right.” He held up his hands, palms out. “You don’t want the stuff, don’t buy it. I’m just trying to make a living here.”
I stepped back and gave him the space to get off the shop front he was pinned to.
“Where I come from, you don’t go into people’s heads on the street,” I offered by way of explanation. But he’d already sensed my retreat from the confrontation and he just made a gesture with his thumb which I assumed was obscene.
“I give a fuck where you’re from? Fucking grasshopper? Get out of my face.”
I left him there, wondering idly as I crossed the street if there was any moral difference between him and the genetic designers who had built Merge Nine into Miriam Bancroft’s sleeve.
I paused on a corner and bent my head to kindle a cigarette.
Mid afternoon. My first of the day.
Chapter Twelve
As I dressed in the mirror that night, I suffered the hard-edged conviction that someone else was wearing my sleeve and that I had been reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car behind the eyes.
Psychoentirety rejection, they call it. Or just fragmenting. It’s not unusual to get some tremors, even when you’re an experienced sleeve-changer, but this was the worst case I’d had for years. For long moments I was literally terrified to have a detailed thought, in case the man in the mirror noticed my presence. Frozen, I watched him adjust the Tebbit knife in its neurospring sheath, pick up the Nemex and the Philips gun one by one and check the load of each weapon. The slug guns had both come equipped with cheap Fibregrip holsters that enzyme-bonded to clothing wherever they were pressed. The man in the mirror settled the Nemex under his left arm where it would be hidden by his jacket and stowed the Philips gun in the small of his back. He practised snatching the guns from their holsters a couple of times, throwing them out at his reflection, but there was no need. The virtual practice discs had lived up to Clive’s promises. He was ready to kill someone with either weapon.