“I should have known the Special Services uses Singers too,” I said. “Everyone else does. The Word changes today, doesn’t it? Lewis and Ann didn’t pass on what the new one is?”
“I saw them yesterday, and the Word doesn’t change for another eight hours. Besides, they wouldn’t tell me, anyway.” She glanced at me and frowned. “They really wouldn’t.”
“Let’s go have some sodas,” I said. “We’ll make small talk, and listen carefully to each other, while we affect an air of nonchalance; you will try to pick up things that will make it easier to catch me; I will listen for things you let slip that might make it easier for me to avoid you.”
“Um-hm.” She nodded.
“Why did you contact me in that bar, anyway?”
Eyes of ice: “I told you, we simply travel in the same circles. We’re quite likely to be in the same bar on the same night.”
“I guess that’s just one of the things I’m not supposed to understand, huh?”
Her smile was appropriately ambiguous. I didn’t push it.
It was a very dull afternoon. I couldn’t repeat one exchange from the nonsense we babbled over the cherry peaked mountains of whipped cream. We both exerted so much energy to keep up the appearance of being amused, I doubt either one of us could see our way to picking up anything meaningful; if anything meaningful was said.
She left. I brooded some more on the charred phoenix.
The Steward of The Glacier called me into the kitchen to ask about a shipment of contraband milk (The Glacier makes all its own ice cream) that I had been able to wangle on my last trip to Earth (it’s amazing how little progress there has been in dairy farming over the last ten years; it was depressingly easy to hornswoggle that bumbling Vermonter) and under the white lights and great plastic churning vats, while I tried to get things straightened out, he made some comment about the Heist Cream Emperor; that didn’t do any good.
By the time the evening crowd got there, and the moog was making music and the crystal walls were blazing; and the floor show—a new addition that week—had been cajoled into going on anyway (a trunk of costumes had gotten lost in shipment [or swiped, but I wasn’t about to tell them that]), and wandering through the tables I, personally, had caught a very grimy little girl, obviously out of her head on morph, trying to pick up a customer’s pocketbook from the back of a chair—I just caught her by the wrist, made her let go, and led her to the door, daintily, while she blinked at me with dilated eyes and the customer never even knew—and the floor show, having decided what the hell, were doing their act au naturel, and everyone was having just a high old time, I was feeling really bad.
I went outside, sat on the wide steps, and growled when I had to move aside to let people in or out. About the seventy-fifth growl, the person I growled at stopped and boomed down at me, “I thought I’d find you if I looked hard enough! I mean if I really looked.”
I looked at the hand that was flapping at my shoulder, followed the arm up to a black turtleneck. where there was a beefy, bald, grinning head. “Arty,” I said, “what are… ?” But he was still flapping and laughing with impervious Gemiitlichkeit.
“You wouldn’t believe the time I had getting a picture of you, boy. Had to bribe one out of the Triton Special Services Department. That quick change bit. Great gimmick. Just great!” The Hawk sat down next to me and dropped his hand on my knee. “Wonderful place you got here. I like it, like it a lot.” Small bones in veined dough. “But not enough to make you an offer on it yet. You’re learning fast there, though. I can tell you’re learning fast. I’m going to be proud to be able to say I was the one who gave you your first big break.” His hand came away and he began to knead it onto the other. “If you’re going to move into the big time, you have to have at least one foot planted firmly on the right side of the law. The whole idea is to make yourself indispensable to the good people; once that’s done, a good crook has the keys to all the treasure houses in the system. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“Arty,” I said, “do you think the two of us should be seen together here… ?”
The Hawk held his hand above his lap and joggled it with a deprecating motion. “Nobody can get a picture of us. I got my men all around. I never go anywhere in public without my security. Heard you’ve been looking into the security business yourself,” which was true. “Good idea. Very good. I like the way you’re handling yourself.”
“Thanks. Arty, I’m not feeling too hot this evening. I came out here to get some air…”
Arty’s hand fluttered again. “Don’t worry, I won’t hang around. You’re right. We shouldn’t be seen. Just passing by and wanted to say hello. Just hello.” He got up. “That’s all.” He started down the steps.
“Arty?”
He looked back.
“Sometime soon you will come back; and that time you will want to buy out my share of The Glacier, because I’ll have gotten too big; and I won’t want to sell because I’ll think I’m big enough to fight you. So we’ll be enemies for a while. You’ll try to kill me. I’ll try to kill you.”
On his face, first the frown of confusion; then, the indulgent smile. “I see you’ve caught on to the idea of hologramic information. Very good. Good. It’s the only way to outwit Maud. Make sure all your information relates to the whole scope of the situation. It’s the only way to outwit me too.” He smiled, started to turn, but thought of something else. “If you can fight me off long enough, and keep growing, keep your security in tiptop shape, eventually we’ll get to the point where it’ll be worth both our whiles to work together again. If you can just hold out, we’ll be friends again. Someday. You just watch. Just wait.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
The Hawk looked at his watch. “Well. Goodbye.” I thought he was going to leave finally. But he glanced up again. “Have you got the new Word?”
“That’s right,” I said. “It went out tonight. What is it?”
The Hawk waited till the people coming down the steps were gone. He looked hastily about, then leaned towards me with hands cupped at his mouth, rasped, “Pyrite,” and winked hugely. “I just got it from a gal who got it direct from Colette” (one of the three Singers of Triton). Then he turned, jounced down the steps, and shouldered his way into the crowds passing on the strip.
I sat there mulling through the year till I had to get up and walk. All walking does to my depressive moods is add the reinforcing rhythm of paranoia. By the time I was coming back, I had worked out a dilly of a delusional system: The Hawk had already begun to weave some security ridden plot about me which ended when we were all trapped in some dead end alley, and trying to get aid I called out, “Pyrite!” which would turn out not to be the Word at all but served to identify me for the man in the dark gloves with the gun/grenades/gas.
There was a cafeteria on the corner. In the light from the window, clustered over the wreck by the curb was a bunch of nasty-grimies (a la Triton: chains around the wrists, bumble-bee tattoo on cheek, high heel boots on those who could afford them). Straddling the smashed headlight was the little morph-head I had ejected earlier from The Glacier.
On a whim I went up to her. “Hey?”
She looked at me from under hair like trampled hay, eyes all pupil.
“You get the new Word yet?”
She rubbed her nose, already scratch red. “Pyrite,” she said. “It just came down about an hour ago.”
“Who told you?”
She considered my question. “I got it from a guy who says he got it from a guy who came in this evening from New York who picked it up there from a Singer named Hawk.”