Kalifornia (2 page)

She stared at the moon, the tortious moon, the moon where
everything had gone to hell.

Then came an explosion—

Fireworks!

Calafia’s mouth and eyes dropped open. Staring up at a face of
showering fiery gold pyrotechnics, the child began to scream. The baby’s eyes
and the face of fire were the same color.

More explosives shook the fire escape. Poppy offered a perfect
target, acting like stupefied prey. After several moments, her mind sifted out
a few separate components of the bicentennial chaos and realized that someone
was breaking down the door of the room behind her.

She hurried to the first double-back and pounded down to the level
below. All but one of the windows along the fire escape were lit. She hurried
to the dark one and found it ajar; sounds of moaning issued from within. No
help there. Her elbow brushed a liquor bottle standing on the sill; as it
tipped over, it gurgled as softly as Calafia, who remained mysteriously calm.

Halfway down to the eighth floor, Poppy glanced up and saw a
shadow untangling itself from the torn curtains of her window. It poured over
the sill like spilled ink and quickened after her.

Poppy’s steps caused tremors in the ironwork. The corroded
structure, which had clung to the crumbling brick wall for a hundred years
while the building codes governing it fell into disuse, began to quake as if an
army were descending.

She stumbled to the seventh floor. This was the maximum height
from which she could hope to leap and stand any real chance of survival.

Sixth. The odds were only slightly better. Broken legs and spine
for her . . . and for the child, who knew?

From above came a screech and a thud. More shadows roosted on the
fire escape. Some dropped directly from level to level, ignoring the stairs,
slipping over the rails and leaping.

Fifth floor. The street below looked like a doll street, a model
awaiting her hand. Pedal cars, bikes, and wagons swerved around pedestrians who
clogged the walks and teetered on cement columns that otherwise supported only
flowerpots. Llamas and cows cried counterpoint to their owners’ frustrated
shouts. More pervasive were the cries of glee, of celebration. Every bar was
full, the drug counters crowded with jostling bodies. Houses doubled as
saloons. Celebrants packed onto the balconies of other buildings, jumbling
from the habimalls. She wished for revelers on this fire escape, to offer
camouflage.

From above, as she reached the fourth floor, she heard crumbling
metal. A shape tumbled past her, followed by a rain of rust and particulate
iron. It landed on the sidewalk in a heap of garbage, one of the night’s many
casualties.

Poppy hesitated. The third-floor landing was ragged and full of
dangerous gaps like broken teeth.

As for the second floor ramp, it hadn’t existed for years.

Whispering, screak of rubber, a breathy, bubbling voice called
out: “Poppy!”

She must descend, futile as it seemed. Bricks and boards blinded
all the windows of the third floor. The ruinous landing sagged beneath her
weight, inching closer to the street. Old brackets tore from the walls, brick
dust and iron flakes sifting down like poor man’s confetti onto the revelers
below. No one noticed. They brushed the grit from their shoulders and hurried
on.

She stepped gingerly over the largest of the gaps, clutching the
rail with one hand. The whole landing moaned. She was level with the
streetlamps now, still dizzyingly high. As she shifted her weight to the far
side of the hole, suspicious of the metal, two of her pursuers dropped into her
path.

She threw herself backward, over the gap.

The fire escape screamed and broke in two.

Poppy landed on the edge of rotten metal, her legs dangling. The
two pursuers watched from the far side, holding perfectly still. She stared
into their dark, liquid eyes, saw their pink tongues lolling.

“You can’t escape,” one growled, extending a shaggy hand. “The
child is ours.”

It was the hoarse voice from the hallway.

“Tell the president to go to hell!” she cried.

They stared at one another, then sniffed the night. Both were
transgenic—or teegee—dogs, leftover “Lassies” from the first days of
animal-human hybridization. The SPCA had fought against creation of such
unhappy teegee breeds, with limited success. Animal rightists argued that it
was purest cruelty to subject innocent canines to the traits of humanity; cruel
to instill the happy creatures with guilt, remorse, ambition, indecision.
Other creatures arguably benefited from the humanimalism, but the change
destroyed dogs, turning the mildest breeds into killers.

Loyal killers, true. Auggie-doggies made superb assassins, risking
anything to please a full-human master. In this case, President McBeth.

Very carefully, the Lassies began to clamber upward. They would,
she realized, run along the fourth-floor ramp and come down again beside her.
They might knock the whole ramp loose. She would fall . . . she
would probably die, or be too stunned or crippled to run.

She looked down at the street, the crowd. “Look at me,” she
murmured. “Why won’t anyone see me?”

In the constant flood of traffic, in the unprecedented midnight
clangor, the groan and collapse of the fire escape was little noted.

Rubber-soled feet tiptoed overhead.

She moved a fraction of an inch. The fire escape shuddered.
Another fraction and the baby moaned, opening golden eyes. It was worth any
risk to spare her from the president.

“You don’t deserve this, baby. You weren’t the one who cheated on
your taxes.”

Clarry Starko loved stories portraying President McBeth as a
villainous tightwad.

“She owes a birthdebt!” called a dog from above. She looked up,
about to argue with him, then realized that he was only trying to distract her.
“Hand her over!”

The fire escape protested the addition of another dog’s weight.

She leaned forward, over the dark-bright street, over the agitated
stew of people and creatures and cars and contraptions. She clung one-handed
to the cold iron rail, holding the child out before her in midair.

Not yet . . . not yet.

The landing swayed with too much weight. She would lighten it in a
moment. The dog at her level moved cautiously, though not fearfully.

Not yet . . .

An old gas-powered station wagon appeared directly beneath her.
The top was sawed away, leaving an open bed. The horn blared as the driver
pulled up on the sidewalk to negotiate a stalled clump of singers and beasts.
Bundles and baskets jostled in the bed of the wagon, fat soft sacks and heaps
of black cloth. The wagoneer cursed and slammed on the brakes. The vehicle
stalled for the moment, awaiting an opening.

Now.

Poppy let go and watched Calafia fall. Her daughter made an
acceptably soft landing on a bale of cloth, then slipped down among baskets and
bundles as the wagon started up again, moving off through a clearing in the
shifting crowd.

The shock of what she’d done almost broke her from trope-trance.
She had dropped her baby daughter. As if this were a real threat, and not a
mere wire show.

The landing had looked safe enough. The Shock-Pruf in the
swaddling would protect her. But still . . .

Behind her, curses.

Poppy looked back. Time to face the Lassies.

Her free hand stole into her garment and pulled out a gun. The dog
on the landing growled when he saw it, lips peeling back from inhumanly sharp
teeth. She knew he wouldn’t ask for mercy. Not now. Nothing could keep her from
firing.

Nothing but the weight that hit her from above.

The second dog caught her by surprise, crushing her in furry arms.
She relinquished the rail and both of them fell. People screamed, catching the
show at its climax. An instant later, they struck cement.

Poppy lay stunned, pinned beneath the dog, wondering where she
would find the strength to push him off and flee. The Lassie moaned and
tightened his grip on her throat. The world went black. She couldn’t breathe,
couldn’t move. He was choking her, really doing it now, caught up in the
tropes, believing the role, a canine actor overcome by his innate ferocity and
hatred of humanity.

They should have used a man in a dog suit, she thought. He’s
really choking me!

The weaker half of the fire escape, rigged to fall, tore away from
the wall. Clarry had meant it to create a convincing end for her attacker. But
as she toppled into blackness, she knew that it would come too late.

“Kai,” she tried to say. “Kai, it’s me. It’s Poppy!”

He didn’t seem to recognize her, and she could hardly speak. He
was strictly the president’s dog now. And she was a fugitive. His legal prey.

Blackness. Light nowhere.

“Kai!”

Calafia . . .

“God!” exclaimed a gawker. “This is
so
realistic!”

***

“Cut! That’s enough, Kai. Let go of her, you fucking mutt!”

Poppy felt as though she’d been washed up on a reef, drained and
exhausted. Clarry Starko and a few hands dragged the Lassie away. Kai looked
cowed, timid now, his vestigial tail tucked up between his legs beneath baggy
trousers. They led him off. Clarry crouched and helped Poppy to her feet.

“Feel okay?”

“Dizzy.” She clung to him for a moment, looking around at the
crowd. People only now were beginning to realize that they had seen a livewire
session.

Several men pulled the fire escape aside. It was hollow, almost
weightless, and couldn’t have crushed a puppy. The sidewalk was padded to
cushion her fall, though at the moment she’d hit, caught up in the tropes of
the chase, it had felt cruel and hard as real cement. So much unreality made
the hotel look fake; its bricks seemed to turn soft and waver in the damp night
wind. This whole back alley, with its lights and revelers, could have been just
another set.

“You look way tawdry,” Clarry said. “Way pale. Here, have a twist
and tan out. ‘Grats, by the way. You did a great job as a mommy.”

He handed her a cool silver vial. She started to push it away, but
he folded her fingers around it. His large, black, long-fingered hand dwarfed
her small, pink one. “Go on, you deserve a break. I’ll take care of the
cleanup.”

“I don’t want a twist tonight, Clarry. I want my baby.”

“That’s tan. I’ll go get her. You stay right here.”

He walked off past the studio van. The street was busier than it
had been during the recording, but down here in the midst of the crowd it all
seemed two-dimensional, as if pieces of cardboard were cut into people shapes,
all sliding past each other in shifting planes. She felt a bit flat herself
tonight. Painted eyes followed her. Recognition. Everybody knew Poppy. Her spin-off
was scaling the ratings, though it might never be as popular as the “Figueroa
Show,” in which her whole family had been wired and continually live. She
should bask in the recognition, not cringe from it. But tonight fame didn’t
satisfy her. Was this any kind of life for a child? Poppy had been brought up
for the wires, but not born in them. Her youth had been inviolate; she’d been
neither sender nor receiver. The media surgery, the teasing growth of
polynerves, had been (more or less) elective on her seventh birthday, which was
older than most kids were when they got their wires. But then, most kids were
RO—receive only—and she had been a sender all the way.

But Calafia never had a choice.

She sank back in an alley between a drug shop and a sushi-taco
stand, twisting the halves of the silver vial. Clarry was right. A twist would
help clear her thoughts. She glanced up at the hotel across the street, seeking
out the broken window of the room where Calafia had been born. Maybe she would
get a room and sleep up there with the baby tonight. She didn’t want to stay
with the cast and crew again. The baby deserved better.

Clarry found her again just as she was setting the twin halves of
the twist against her temples. He slapped one arm down before the current could
hit her wires.

“Hey,” she said, mildly irked. Then she saw his face. “What is it,
Clarry?”