Tamlin stood up, already issuing stem instructions as to where the combatants shouldn’t stab one another. He didn’t want the recording apparatus damaged. “The only way you can make real money for this kind of work,” he told the kid, “is to get used to the kit and to make damn sure it doesn’t get damaged. Given that your chances of long-term survival are directly proportional to your upgrade prospects, you’d better get this right, because it’s the only break you’re likely to get. Savvy?”
Garon nodded dumbly. Tamlin was a major player in the Underworld games these days, and the boy respected his opinion. “I can do it,” he said, uneasily. “I got all the feints and jumps. It’ll be OK.”
“We don’t want feints and jumps,” Tamlin countered, with a contemptuous sneer intended to wind the boy up. “We want purpose and skill and desperation. Just because we re making a VR tape... explain it to him, Damon.”
“We aren’t making a simple recording that will give a floater the illusion that he’s going through your moves, Lenny,” Damon said, off-handedly. “We’re making a template. It’s raw material, which has to be carefully refined, but it has to have a sense of urgency about it—an edge. Playacting doesn’t do it. It reeks of fake. I know it’s difficult, but if you want to be good at this, you have to go all the way... and as Madoc says, you have to look after the wiring. No record at all is even worse than a bad one.”
The kid nodded respectfully. Damon still had a reputation on the streets; his tapes made sure of that.
“Just remember,” Tamlin said, as he pushed the boy forward, “it’s a small price to pay for taking one more step towards immortality.” Street talk always spoke of immortality rather than emortality—which, strictly speaking, was all that even the very best internal technology could hope to provide.
Damon watched the two fighters square up. Their kit was more than a little cumbersome, but very few artificial organics were as delicate as the real thing and you couldn’t get template-precision with thinner webs. Then he looked away, at the ruined buildings to either side of the street. This whole district was ex-urban wilderness, emptied by the Crash and never recolonized or reclaimed. Nobody lived here; it was just a vast playground for the gangs. Damon wondered what it must have been like in the bad old days of the Crisis, crowded out with the unemployable and the insupportable: one of countless concentration-city powder kegs waiting for an inflammatory spark that had never come. He couldn’t imagine it. Even the very old, who had lived through the Crisis and the Crash, had mostly lost their memories of it.
The fight itself was boring, although the other watchers—whose sole raison d’etre was to whip the combatants into a frenzy—weighed in with the customary verve and fury. Amazingly, the kid managed to stick Brady in the gut while the experienced fighter was playing cat and mouse with him, which made Brady understandably furious. It was immediately clear that he wasn’t going to settle for some token belly-wound as a reprisal; he wanted copious bloodshed. That would be more than OK by Tamlin, so long as the cuts didn’t do too much damage to the recorders. Young Lenny would be all the more enthusiastic to volunteer for something really heavy in order to pay for the nanotech that would make him as good as new and keep him that way.
Tamlin noticed Damon’s reluctance to join in the loud exhortations of the crowd. “Don’t get all stiff on me, Damon,” he said. “You may be in the Big World now, but you’re too young to get rigor mortis. You pissed about splitting with Diana?” Tamlin hadn’t said so, but Damon presumed that Diana had gone straight to him after the split. Tamlin surely wouldn’t take her back on a full-time basis, but he’d be ready to lend her a shoulder to cry on, for a week or two.
“Interpol came to call,” Damon told him, abstractedly. “They were asking about Eliminators.”
“Eliminators! You don’t have any truck with them, do you?”
“Of course not. It’s just a connection from the distant past—something I thought I’d won free of.”
Madoc Tamlin was the only person Damon knew who would be able to take the correct inference from those words; even Diana Caisson didn’t know that Damon Hart had once been Damon Helier. Damon saw the flicker of interest ignite in his friend’s eye, but Tamlin knew better than to say too much out loud. All he said was: “Oh?”
“You know some light-footed Web-walkers, don’t you?” Damon said. “Do you know anyone who could do Interpol-type work better than Interpol can?”
“They all say they can,” Tamlin replied, cautiously. “It’s a key item of the creed that all the best cracksmen are outlaws. The really good ones get all their commissions from the corps, though—they’re just undercover suits with expensive tastes. I don’t know anyone who could outsmart Interpol on the cheap. Nobody does.”
“If this thing turns out to be serious,” Damon said, stressing the if, “I’d be willing to lay out serious credit to pursue it.”
“Do you have that kind of money?” Tamlin asked, warily. “You haven’t been making it on what I pay you.”
“I’ve got some put away,” Damon said, feeling no compulsion to specify where it had come from. He fetched a smartcard out of his pocket and held it out. “It’s already authorised for cash withdrawals,” he said. “It’s all above board. You can draw ten thou with no questions asked. If you need more, call me—but it had better be worth paying for.”
“What am I looking for?” Tamlin asked, mildly.
“Some local pervert calling himself Operator 101 has posted a notice about Conrad Helier, claiming that he’s still alive and that he’s guilty of some as-yet-unspecified crime. One of my foster-parents, Silas Arnett, has gone missing from home near San Francisco.”
“I thought you didn’t like your foster-parents,” Tamlin said, keeping one eye on the fight. Lenny Garon was in real trouble now. The crowd were baying for blood, and getting it. Damon kept his own eyes firmly on Tamlin’s face.
“We had a disagreement,” Damon said, dismissively. “They only did what they thought was right, and Silas tried a lot harder than Karol or Eveline to figure out what that might involve. After I left, he dropped out too. I owe him.”
“It’s Helier you’re really interested in, isn’t it?” Tamlin asked, running his fingers speculatively back and forth along the edge of the smartcard. “This Arnett guy is a side-issue. You want to know if your natural father really is alive.”
“If he were,” Damon admitted, “I’d like to know. But what I really want to know is whether he really was an enemy of mankind.” He said it lightly, to imply that he was joking, but he knew that Tamlin would wonder whether this was one of the many true words that were rumoured to be spoken in jest. He wasn’t entirely sure himself.
“How are things otherwise?” Tamlin asked, finally putting the smartcard away. “Honest toil living up to your expectations?”
“I’m taking a break,” Damon told him. “A brief excursion to Hawaii.”
“Vacation?”
“Independent line of enquiry. Karol Kachelleck is there, working out of Molokai. He probably won’t tell me anything, even if he has some idea what’s going on, but if I go in person I might at least unsettle him a bit.”