“Open me a line to Uncle Zip,” said Seria Mau.
Uncle Zip the tailor ran his operation from a parlour on Henry Street down by the Harbour Mole. He had been famous in his day, his cuts franchised in every major port. A fat, driven man with protuberant china-blue eyes, inflated white cheeks, rosebud lips, and a belly as hard as a wax pear, he claimed to have discovered the origins of life, coded in fossil proteins on a system in Radio Bay less than twenty lights from the edge of the Tract itself. Whether you believed that depended on how well you knew him. He had shipped out talented and come back focused, that was certain. Whatever codes he found, they made him only as rich as any other good tailor: Uncle Zip wanted nothing more, or so he said. He and his family lived above the business, in some ceremony. His wife wore bright red flamenco skirts. All his children were girls.
When Seria Mau fetched up in the middle of the parlour floor, Uncle Zip was entertaining.
“This is just a few friends,” he said, when he saw her at his feet. “You can stay and learn a thing or two. Or you can come back later.”
He had got himself up in a white dress shirt and black trousers the waist of which came up to his armpits, and he was playing the piano accordion. A round, rosy patch of blusher on each chalk-white cheek made him look like a huge porcelain doll, glazed with sweat. His instrument, an elaborate antique with ivory keys and glittering chromium buttons, flashed and flickered in the Carmody neon. As he played, he stamped from side to side to keep the beat. When he sang, it was in a pure, explosive countertenor. If you couldn’t see him you didn’t know immediately whether you were listening to a woman or a boy. Only later did the barely controlled aggression of it convince you this voice belonged to a human male. His audience, three or four thin, dark-skinned men in tight pants, lurex shirts and jet-black pompadour haircuts, drank and talked without seeming to pay him much attention, although they gave thin smiles of approval when he hit his high, raging vibrato. Occasionally two or three children came to the open parlour door and egged him on, clapping and calling him Papa. Uncle Zip stamped and played and shook the sweat off his china brow.
In his own good time he dismissed his audience—who vanished with a polite sly hipster grace into the Moneytown night as if they had never been there at all—and sat down on a stool, breathing heavily. Then he shook one of his fat fingers at Seria Mau Genlicher.
“Hey,” he said. “You come in down here in a fetch?”
“Spare me,” said Seria Mau. “I get enough of that at home.”
Seria Mau’s fetch looked like a cat. It was a low-end model which came in colours you could change according to your mood. Otherwise it resembled one of the domestic cats of Ancient Earth—small, nervous, pointy-faced, and with a tendency to rub the side of its head on things.
“It’s an insult to the cutter, a fetch. Come to Uncle Zip in person or not at all.” He mopped his forehead with a huge white handkerchief, laughed his high, pleasant laugh. “You want to be a cat,” he advised, “I make you into one no trouble.” He leaned over and put his hand several times through the hologram. “What’s this? A ghost, young lady. Without a body you’re a photino, you’re a weak reactor to this world. I can’t even offer you a drink.”
“I already have a body, Uncle,” Seria Mau reminded him quietly.
“So why did you come back here?”
“The package doesn’t work. It won’t talk to me. It won’t even admit what it’s for.”
“I told you this is complex stuff. I said there might be problems.”
“You didn’t say it wasn’t yours.”
Faint disagreeable lines appeared on Uncle Zip’s white forehead.
“I said I owned it,” he was ready to acknowledge. “But I didn’t say I built it. In fact, it was passed to me by Billy Anker. The guy said he thought it was modern. He thought it was K-tech. He thought it was military.” He shrugged. “Some of those people, they don’t care what they say—” he shook his head and pursed his little lips judicially “—though this guy Billy is usually very acute, very dependable.” The thought leading him nowhere, he shrugged. “He got it in Radio Bay, but he couldn’t work out what it did.”
“Could you?”
“I didn’t recognise the cutter’s hand.” Uncle Zip spread his own hands and examined them. “But I saw through the cut in a day.” He was proud of his plump fingers and their clean, spatulate nails, as proud of his touch as if he cut the genes directly, like a cobbler at a last. “Right through and out the other side. It’s what you need all right: no trouble.”
“Then why won’t it work?”
“You should bring it back. Maybe I take another look.”
“It keeps asking me for Dr. Haends.”
6
In Dreams
At first you thought the Cray sisters were running themselves on some kind of one-shot cultivar. You soon saw they took too much care of themselves to be doing that. Nevertheless, they were big, with that sensual, more-alive-than-alive look a cultivar has because its user just doesn’t care what happens. They had big, powerful behinds, over which they wore short black nylon skirts. They had big, short legs, with calves tightened and moulded by a lifetime of four-inch heels. The big shoulders of their short-sleeved white “secretary” blouses were padded and flounced. Tattooed snakes curled and uncurled lazily around their bare, fleshy biceps.
One day they came in the shop and Evie asked Tig Vesicle did he have a twink called Ed Chianese in one of the tanks. This twink would be about yay tall (she indicated two inches taller than herself), with a partly grown out peroxide Mohican and a couple of cheap tattoos. He would have been quite a muscular guy, she said, at least before tank-life got to him.
“I never saw anyone like that,” Vesicle lied.
He was immediately full of terror. If you could help it, you did not lie to the Cray sisters. They did their faces every morning with white pan-stick, and drew in wide red liplines, voluptuous, angry and clown-like all at once. With these mouths they held the whole of Pierpoint Street to ransom. They had innumerable soldiers, shadow boys in cultivars, cheap teenage punks with guns. Also, in their antique briefcases, or big, soft leather purses, they each carried a Chambers reaction pistol. At first they seemed like a mass of contradictions, but you soon understood they weren’t.
The truth was, this Chianese twink was Tig Vesicle’s only regular. Who went to a tank farm in the upper 700s, Pierpoint? No one. The trade was all down at the other end, where you got any number of investment bankers, also women whose favourite dog died ten years before, they never got over it. The lunch trade was all down there, in the middle and low numbers. Without Chianese, who was twinking three weeks at a time when he could afford it, Vesicle’s business would be fucked. He would be out on the street all day trying to move AbH and Earth speed to kids who were only interested in do-it-yourself gene patches which they got from some guy across the halo called Uncle Zip.
The Crays gave Tig Vesicle a look designed to say, “You lie on this occasion, you get broken down for your rarer proteins.”
“Really,” he said.
Eventually Evie Cray shrugged.
“You see a guy like that, we’re the first to know,” she said. “The first.”
She stared round the tank farm, with its bare grey floor and shoot-up posters peeling off the walls, and gave Vesicle a contemptuous look. “Jesus, Tig,” she said. “Could you just make this place a little more unwelcoming? Do you think you could do that?”