“I believe you call it flak armor now, M Choy. Protection from this level so you can concentrate on your work. The armor is thin this case. You are not completely on your own and you are working a spike fence. We likely cannot catch you if you fall. Not in time. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The word here is, west coast federals hate the Yardley connection as much as I do. It’s old, it’s Raphkind, it smells. East coast federal is still ambiguous and likely will be for years while the grand juries and courts grind slow. But maybe not. Yardley keeps pushing his imports…We keep blocking them. Spike fence.
“I give you permission to sniff all local trails and if they’re still cold after two days, you have clearance for an official visit to Hispaniola. Assistants if you need them, as many as five.”
“I’ll need two Hispaniolan experts,” Mary said.
“My office will find them and pass their names and currvitas on to Supervising Inspector D Reeve, unless you have people in mind already…”
She did not. “Do I have your permission to query Citizen Oversight?”
Ellenshaw averted for a moment, frowning. “We can only make so many Oversight queries. But if any case merits, this one does. You have permission to go to Oversight.”
“Thank you.” She inclined.
“Details are on your orders. We’ll work with federal to get Hispaniola to cooperate with you. Call me anytime. Don’t be isolated. You might be our flak armor on this one.” He smiled cleanly.
“Yes, sir.”
She left Ellenshaw’s office knowing this was the case of her career and pd was giving her extraordinary support; also knowing federal had deemed her expendable, but not in a minor cause. She would be stupid not to be afraid. To those concerned with basic human dignity Colonel Sir John Yardley was the western world’s prosperous heart of darkness. Mary Choy allowed herself the requisite fear, but no more.
The comb towers went dark against the last blue wink of dusk. She drove a slaveway to the pd shade central on Sepulveda and filled out a request for overnight research space, slept an hour in a cop cot, drank a nutrient cocktail and went to work.
LA City of Angels like a horse sleeps on its legs. I’ve walked the shade (since before it was shadowed) late night and seen the nocturnal half conduct itself busily not just machines but people…Don’t think the shade is reckless eccentricity. It has its own life, not clean like the therapied hives perhaps, but rich and full as any past city, as organized; shade has its mayors and councils, bosses and workers, mommies and daddies, neighborhoods and businesses, hospitals and pd stations, churches and libraries, and they are vital. Bootstrappers, perfecters of humanity, don t forget the ground you lift yourself from, unless you want a hard fall!
10
Sure as is, they had him Fausted; Albigoni and Lascal had tempted and Martin Burke was about to succumb. It was all over but the night of pangs. Still the forms must be observed; the night of pangs must pass.
Adult enough to realize that the prize might be hollow, Martin Burke tried to deny the temptation but could not. The pair had found his most vulnerable patch in his most pale and yielding underbelly. His life was science and he had been removed from that life through no fault of his own, merely as an accident of bad politics and history. To have it back would mean he could live again. He longed to walk the Country of the Mind. That was a stimulus like no other; knowledge from the frontier that defined all frontiers.
Martin grinned in the half dark watching a playback of the AXIS reports. He selfsaw that grin and sobered. He did have one train of questions to answer but Carol Neuman was not taking her calls and she did not have a home manager.
Martin closed his eyes and tried to stop shaking. Ethical questions all too obvious and tenacious. Goldsmith’s right to deny intrusion. Still, a poet, a murderer whose country of the mind would reflect the artist’s adaptation of subaware forces…Never such an opportunity. Never.
“I am not a bad man,” he said out loud. “I didn’t deserve what happened to me and I do not deserve this now.” This what. Qualms. Opportunity/temptation.
Albigoni had nothing to lose. If Martin would not give him what he wanted nobody could except perhaps the ghosts/doppelgangers of Martin Burke that might exist elsewhere, sucking his discoveries raking his ground with more brutal clawed fingers, the far less scrupulous who might exist in Hispaniola exploiting not developing the Country of the Mind and racing ahead of him even now, alligator versus hare, alligator eats the hare.
Martin was not a bad man. Albigoni had not immediately flown Goldsmith to Hispaniola and paid Colonel Sir John Yardley what he might require, so Albigoni was not a bad man, either. Of course Yardley’s prisons and labs were rumor; still Albigoni had the connections to have such rumors confirmed or denied. Albigoni did not intend to harm Goldsmith and of course Goldsmith was a bad man; no harm to him but the probe of science a redemption opportunity payment; a recovery of his value to humanity.
Martin lay back on the couch, still shaking, fingers laced. Not a bad man. Perhaps not even a bad deed.
He got up from the couch and placed another call to Carol.
“Hello.”
He started in surprise and pushed his hand back through his hair. “Hello, Carol. This is Martin.”
“I thought you’d call. I’ve been working.”
Martin’s tension erupted before he could wrap it tight. “You’ve put me into a horrible quandary. God damn it, Carol. God damn it.”
“Whoa. I’m sorry.”
“I wonder whether you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you. Listen. I just got in. You want to talk with me, but not tonight. It’s too late. I’ve contracted with Mind Design Inc in Sorrento Valley. Through StarTemp agency you know. If you can come out to—”
“Yes. I know where it is. Which lab?”
“Thirty one. Midmorning?”
“Ten.”
“I don’t hate you, Martin. Whether I should I don’t know but I don’t. We’ll talk.”
They said brief farewells.
AXIS replays had lost their charms and he shut down the screen with a curt “Off.” With some guilt he understood that his shaking was not from moral dilemma; there really had been none from the moment of the offer. He shook because of eagerness and excitement.
In white society every black is a trained bear. That’s how I feel at times even with my white woman who shows not the slightest sign of thinking such. Does she love me for being the one black male writer given a chance to shine in USA this generation? One per, an old law. The greatest taint of all is the taint left by history on my own soul. I cannot love her; I see her with scarred eyes.
11
Richard Fettle returned to his shade apartment by seven o’clock, hoofing slowly up crumbling concrete and steel stairs. He brushed aside an abundance of brown and yellow banana leaves intruding into the second floor landing, slipped his smoothworn brass key into tricky lock and greeted the cheap ten year old home manager on smoke stained fireplace mantel with “It’s me. Only me.”
“Welcome home, Mr. Fettle,” the manager croaked. + Once did not recognize me. Raised a miserable stink. Pd didn’t come. Neighbors checked in though. Take care of our own.
He made himself a cup of coffee and sat in a chair he had made twenty years before to give to his
A comfortable chair the last he had of his handicrafts. Gave it to his
He glanced briefly at a slate, noted some articles in today’s Shadow Rhubarb he wanted to read, finished his coffee and wondered what he would do for dinner. He wasn’t hungry but the body must. Truth to tell he was depressed now, decompressed, all the stories told to all who mattered and nothing but his own thoughts not good company at all. + Roughed and not deserving cut that refrain and bear down on your past you bastard