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Authors: George Alec Effinger

Tags: #Fiction, #Cyberpunk, #Genetic Engineering, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Science Fiction

A Fire in the Sun (9 page)

BOOK: A Fire in the Sun
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I headed back down the Street, seething. I didn't know what to do next. Chiri's club—my club, now—was packed with people and I couldn't count on Indihar to keep order. I decided to go back there and try to sort things out. Before I'd walked very far, Saied came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. "You're making yourself real unpopular, Maghrebi," he said.

"It's not all my doing."

He shook his head. "You're letting it happen. You're responsible."

"Thanks," I said. I kept walking.

He took my right hand and slapped his badass moddy into it. "You take this," he said. "I think you're gonna need it."

I frowned. "The kind of problems I got call for a clear head, Saied. I got all these moral questions to think about. Not just Chiri and her club. Other things."

The  Half-Hajj  grunted.  "Never understand you, Marîd," he said. "You sound like a tired old relic. You're as bad as Jacques. If you just choose your moddies carefully, you never have to worry about moral questions. God knows I never do."

That's all I needed to hear. "See you around, Saied," I said.

"Yeah, you right." He turned and headed back to the Fee Blanche.

I went on to Chiri's where I shooed everybody out, closed up the place, and drove back to Friedlander Bey's. I climbed the stairs wearily to my apartment, glad that the long, surprise-filled day was finally over. As I was getting ready for bed, Kmuzu appeared quietly in the doorway. "You shouldn't deceive me, yaa Sidi."

"Your feelings hurt, Kmuzu?"

"I am here to help you. I'm sorry you refused my protection. A time may come when you will be glad to call on me."

"That's quite possibly true," I said, "but in the meantime, how about leaving me alone?"

He shrugged. "Someone is waiting to see you, yaa Sidi."

I blinked at him. "Who?"

"A woman."

I didn't have the energy to deal with Umm Saad now. Then again, it might be Chiri—

"Shall I show her in?" asked Kmuzu.

"Yeah, what the hell." I was still dressed, but I was getting very tired. I promised myself that this was going to be a very short conversation.

"Marîd?"

I looked around. Framed in the door, wearing a ragged brown cloth coat, holding a battered plastic suitcase, was Angel Monroe. Mom.

"Thought I'd come spend a few days with you in the city," she said. She grinned drunkenly. "Hey, ain't you glad to see me?"

 

Chapter 5

When my admirable add-on woke me on Monday morning, I lay in bed for a few moments, thinking. I was willing to admit that maybe I'd made a few mistakes the night before. I wasn't sure how I might have repaired the situation with Chiri, but I should have tried. I owed that much to her and our friendship. I wasn't happy about seeing my mother at the door later, either. I'd solved that problem by digging out fifty kiam and packing her off into the night. I sent Kmuzu with her to find a hotel room. At breakfast, Friedlander Bey offered me some constructive criticism on that decision.

He was furious. There was a husky, hoarse quality to his voice that let me know he was trying like hell not to shout at me. He put his hands on my shoulders, and I could feel him tremble with emotion. His breath was perfumed with mint as he quoted the noble Qur'an. " 'If one of your parents or both of them attain old age with thee, say not fie unto them nor repulse them, but speak unto them a gracious word. And lower unto them the wing of submission through mercy, and say: My Lord! Have mercy on them both as they did care for me when I was little.""

I felt shaken. Being inundated by Friedlander Bey's wrath was kind of like practicing for The Day of Judgment. He'd think that comparison was sacrilegious, of course, but he's never been the target of his own fury.

I couldn't keep from stammering. "You mean Angel Monroe." Jeez, that was a lame thing to say, but Papa'd surprised me with this tirade. I still wasn't thinking clearly.

"I'm talking about your mother," he said. "She came to you in need, and you turned her away from your door."

"I provided for her the best way I knew how." I  wondered how Papa had heard about the incident in the first place.

"You do not cast your mother out to abide with strangers! Now you must seek the forgiveness of Allah."

That made me feels a little better. This was one of those times when he said "Allah" but he meant "Fried-lander Bey." I had sinned against his personal code; but if I could find the right things to say and do, it would be all right again. "O Shaykh," I said slowly, choosing my words carefully, "I know how you feel about women in your house. I hesitated to invite her to stay the night under your roof, and it was too late to consult with you. I balanced my mother's need against your custom, and I did what I thought best." Well, hell, that was almost true.

He glared at me, but I could see that he'd lost the edge of his anger. "Your action was a worse affront to me than having your mother as a guest in my home," he said.

"I understand, O Shaykh, and I beg you to forgive me. I did not mean to offend you or disregard the teaching of the Prophet."

"May the blessing of Allah be upon him and peace," Papa murmured automatically. He shook his head ruefully, but with each passing second his grim expression lightened. "You are still young, my son. This is not the last error of judgment you will make. If you are to become a righteous man and a compassionate leader, you must learn from my example. When you are in doubt, never be afraid to seek my counsel, whatever the time or place."

"Yes, O Shaykh," I said quietly. The storm had passed.

"Now you must find your mother, return her here, and make her welcome in a suitable apartment. We have many unused rooms, and this house is yours as well as mine."

I could tell by his tone that this conversation was over, and I was pretty damn glad. It had been like crossing between the minarets of the Shoal Mosque on a tightrope. "You are the father of kindness, O Shaykh," I said.

"Go in safety, my nephew."

I went back up to my suite, my breakfast forgotten. Kmuzu, as usual, went with me. "Say," I said, as if the thought had just occurred to me, "you didn't happen to let Friedlander Bey know about last night, did you?"

"Yaa Sidi," he said with a blank expression, "it is the

Will of the master of the house that I tell him of these things."

I chewed my lip thoughtfully. Talking to Kmuzu was like addressing a mythical oracle: I had to be sure to phrase my questions with absolute precision, or I'd get nonsense for an answer. I began simply. "Kmuzu, you are my slave, aren't you?"

"Yes," he said.

"You obey me?»

"I obey you and the master of the house, yaa Sidi."

"Not necessarily in that order, though."

"Not necessarily," he admitted.

"Well, I'm gonna give you a plain, unambiguous command. You won't have to clear it with Papa because he suggested it to me in the first place. I want you to find a vacant apartment somewhere in the house, preferably far away from this one, and install my mother comfortably. I want you to spend the entire day seeing to her needs. When I get home from work, I'll need to talk to her about her plans for the future, so that means she gets no drugs and no alcohol."

Kmuzu nodded. "She could not get those things in this house, yaa Sidi."

I'd had no problem smuggling my Pharmaceuticals in, and I was sure Angel Monroe had her own emergency supply hidden somewhere too. "Help her unpack her things," I said, "and take the opportunity to make sure she's checked all her intoxicants at the door."

Kmuzu gave me a thoughtful look. "You hold her to a stricter standard than you observe yourself," he said quietly.

"Yeah, maybe," I said, annoyed. "Anyway, it's not your place to mention it."

"Forgive me, yaa Sidi."

"Forget it. I'll drive myself to work today."

Kmuzu didn't like that, either. "If you take the car," he said, "how can I bring your mother from the hotel?"

I smiled slowly. "Sedan chair, oxcart, hired camel caravan, I don't care. You're the slave, you figure it out. See you tonight." On my desk was yet another thick envelope stuffed with paper bills. One of Friedlander Bey's little helpers had let himself into my apartment while I'd been

downstairs. I took the envelope and my briefcase and left before Kmuzu could come up with another objection.

My briefcase still held the cell-memory file on Abu Adil. I was supposed to have read through it last night, but I never got around to it. Hajjar and Shaknahyi were probably going to be griped, but I didn't care. What could they do, fire me?

I drove first to the Budayeen, leaving my car on the boulevard and walking from there to Laila's modshop on Fourth Street. Laila's was small, but it had character, crammed between a dark, grim gambling den and a noisy bar that catered to teenage sexchanges. The moddies and daddies in Laila's bins were covered with dust and fine grit, and generations of small insects had met their Maker among her wares. It wasn't pretty, but what you got from her most of the time was good old honest value. The rest of the time you got damaged, worthless, even dangerous merchandise. You always felt a little rush of adrenalin before you chipped one of Laila's ancient and shopworn moddies directly into your brain.

She was always—always—chipped in, and she never stopped whining. She whined hello, she whined goodbye, she whined in pleasure and in pain. When she prayed, she whined to Allah. She had dry black skin as wrinkled as a raisin, and straggly white hair. Laila was not someone I liked to spend a lot of time with. She was wearing a moddy this morning, of course, but I couldn't tell yet which one. Sometimes she was a famous Eur-Am film or holo star, or a character from a forgotten novel, or Honey Pilar herself. Whoever she was, she'd yammer. That was all I could count on.

"How you doing, Laila?" I said. There was the acrid bite of ammonia in her shop that morning. She was squirting some ugly pink liquid from a plastic bottle up into the corners of the room. Don't ask me why.

She glanced at me and gave me a slow, rapturous smile. It was the look you get only from complete sexual satisfaction or from a large dose of Sonneine. "Marîd," she said serenely. She still whined, but now it was a serene whine.

"Got to go out on patrol today, and I thought you might have—"

"Marîd, a young girl came to me this morning and

said, 'Mother, the eyes of the narcissus are open, and the cheeks of the roses are red with blushing! Why don't you come outside and see how beautifully Nature has adorned the world!'"

"Laila, if you'll just give me a minute—"

"And I said to her, 'Daughter, that which delights you will fade in an hour, and what profit will you then have in it? Instead, come inside and find with me the far greater beauty of Allah, who created the spring.' " Laila finished her little homily and looked at me expectantly, as if she were waiting for me either to applaud or collapse from enlightenment.

I'd forgotten religious ecstasy. Sex, drugs, and reli-' gious ecstasy. Those were the big sellers in Laila's shop, and she tested them all out personally. You had her personal Seal of Approval on every moddy.

"Can I talk now? Laila?"

She stared at me, swaying unsteadily. Slowly she reached one scrawny arm up and popped the moddy out. She blinked a couple of times, and her gentle smile disappeared. "Get you something, Marîd?" she said in her shrill voice.

Laila had been around so long, there was a rumor that as a child she'd watched the imams lay the foundation of the Budayeen's walls. But she knew her moddies. She knew more about old, out-of-print moddies than anyone else I've ever met. I think Laila must have had one of the world's first experimental implants, because her brain had never worked quite right afterward. And the way she still abused the technology, she should have burnt out her last gray cells years ago. She'd withstood cerebral torture that would have turned anyone else into a drooling zombie. Laila probably had a tough protective callus on her brain that prevented anything from penetrating. Anything at all.

I started over from the beginning. "I'm going out on patrol today, and I was wondering if you had a basic cop moddy."

"Sure, I got everything." She hobbled to a bin near the back of the store and dug around in it for a moment. The bin was marked "Prussia/Poland/Breulandy." That didn't have anything to do with which moddies were actually in there; Laila'd bought the battered dividers and

scuffed labels from some other kind of shop that was going out of business.

She straightened up after a few seconds, holding two shrink-wrapped moddies in her hand. "This is what you  want," she said.

One was the pale blue Complete Guardian moddy I'd seen other rookie cops wearing. It was a good, basic piece of procedural programming that covered almost every conceivable situation. I figured that between the Half-Hajj's mean-mother moddy and the Guardian, I was covered. "What's this other one?" I asked.

"A gift to you at half price. Dark Lightning. Only this j version's called Wise Counselor. It's what I was wearing | when you came in."

I found that interesting. Dark Lightning was a Nipponese idea that had been very popular fifty or sixty years ago. You sat down in a comfortable padded chair, and Dark Lightning put you instantly into a receptive trance. Then it presented you with a lucid, therapeutic dream. Depending on Dark Lightning's analysis of your current     emotional state, it could be a warning, some advice, or a      mystical puzzle for your conscious mind to work on.

The high price of the contraption kept it a curiosity      among the wealthy. Its Far Eastern fictions—Dark Light-      ning usually cast you as a contemptuous Nipponese em-      peror in need of wisdom, or an aged Zen monk begging      sublimely in the snow—limited its appeal still further.      Lately, however, the Dark Lightning idea had been revived by the growth of the personality module market. And now apparently there was an Arabic version, called Wise Counselor.

I bought both moddies, thinking that I wasn't in a position to turn down any kind of help, friend or fantasy.     For someone who once hated the idea of having his skull     amped, I was sure building up a good collection of other people's psyches.

BOOK: A Fire in the Sun
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