Slaughtermatic (11 page)

‘
What I gotta do to get some service round here, admit a mistake? I’ll know from the
bottom o’ my heart
when I had enough - now gimme another.’

‘
Okay, Mister Blince, but from here on into eternity I ain’t acceptin’ the consequences.’

‘
I ain’t offerin’ the consequences, fryboy, just a few smackers squeezed outta the rock o’ this state’s economy right here.’ He smacked the cash on to the counter. ‘Y’accept cash from a cop, I right, fryboy?’

Blince returned to the
Bugle
and Logan’s thoughts on the Deal installation. ‘One is left with the impression of a stage, dressed and lit, while the action is proceeding behind the backdrop.’ Blince snorted - the
Bugle
was scrawled by a bunch of banjo-playing timewasters who didn’t know which bucket the head was under. ‘Bunny-huggin’ liberals,’ he rumbled, then rolled the paper and rammed it down the throat of a crumb-awaiting dog.

The classified timebreach file was more compelling. Seemed Specter and maybe even the dancing chimp he fired knew more than they’d let on. The brotherhood had escalated internal cover-ups after the crime-strike embarrassment four years ago - the only people conspicuously unaware of the strike were the cops, who had gone on killing and looting as usual. Timebreaches were worse because they affected property on a grand scale. There was a quote from a Professor Guppy:

It said here Cincinatti was the result of some guy experimenting in a garage - time got folded over and there were two versions of the same guy. One fainted and the other tried giving him the kiss of life, destroying the city in seconds. It was the sort of scenario Cincinatti folk had always dreaded.

Deal was shaping up to be worthy of Blince’s attention. And he started to wonder, did eels contain caffeine? Maybe just the head, which was the only possible reason for chefs to remove it. ‘Hey Dobey, what happened to them hotdogs? They ain’t out here in one minute I’ll rip off your ears and use them as suckers to climb that wall over there -
right
there.’

Blince’s radio went off - they had a lead on Parker.

When Dobey emerged with a fresh stack, the eatery was empty. He began sobbing like a child.

Restraint and the Kid picked over the trash in Jones’s digital foundry. They’d passed the stripped skeleton of Rosa’s jetfoil in a side alley - the only major component remaining was the rotar hub, because the brotherhood had clamped it. ‘This is hardsoft heaven, Trope,’ said Restraint now, punching out a safe door’s lock spindle with an airhammer. Download’s mainframe was linked to the offweb by a one-way airlock cable and for some reason was electron-shielded. Once inside there was an old-fashioned screen and keyboard.

This first generation download took a swatch at the schematic of the Deal Highrise now on the dredge and compared it with a version of the city plans stored in its memory. ‘Quite different,’ it stated. ‘And I haven’t been revised since my inception seven years back. The original schematic relates apparently to a multi-level stealth fortress. The official city plans have been hacked and amended.’

‘
That’s that,’ whispered the Kid. ‘Download thought he was on to the right stuff but someone had messed with it. And that’s what newted the heist.’ The Kid began idly sifting through a heap of prankware. He turned up a few clowny masks and, under a polkadot flak jacket, a scooby rifle. In front of a boarded-up elevator stood a medicine locker.

Restraint asked the download about Jones’s re-set virus. ‘No information. But I doubt the Master would seed a virus which would decimate his own download constructs.’

‘
But you ain’t affected by the dredge, I right?’

The medicine locker was stacked with drug clips. The Kid selected a cocktail cartridge and started breaking open the others, filling the cocktail clip with grail wizz and IQ boosters.

‘
I’m not affected by anything - nor do I affect anything.’

‘
So what’s the point?’

‘
Running a system is the quickest, shortest and only sure method of discerning emergent structures in it.’

At the shot Restraint fumbled the keyboard and turned to see the Kid with a jolt gun aimed at his heart. Metabolics were unaffected by his aversion programme and as he sat waiting for the cocktail patch to dissolve and the intelligence to come on, his pupils were the size of wrecking balls.

Restraint couldn’t believe the brotherhood had left so much jolt gear on the premises and gave silent thanks to a gummy god of his own invention. ‘All dependence and renunciation go unrewarded,’ he said, inspecting the patch clips, ‘in the universal jaws of experience.’ He found more works under a floor panel near the gyrospheres. ‘Ramone,’ he gasped, addressing the bird behind his shades, ‘we’ve hit the paymother.’ One eye wept and the other sang.

The Kid had seated himself at the keyboard and begun a lightning inquiry. ‘What am I worth?’

‘
Value is based on rarity, demand and ease of replacement.’

‘
It depends who you ask?’

‘
Precisely. A friend would say one thing - a cop, army or business another.’

‘
So what’s the point?’

‘
Running a system is the quickest, shortest and only sure method of discerning emergent structures in it.’

The Kid booted out and closed the cover on the machine.

‘
God’s speed, Kid,’ called Restraint. ‘But more care.’ When the Kid left, Restraint was priming a syringe the size of a clarinet.

Parker’s bigotry-propelled car was a short way from the subway entrance where he’d abandoned it. Numerous strip-heads and speed urchins had tried to boost it and only got a few halting yards before the motor cut out. Soon after, a few cops had given it a try, but none had got the balance right. Blince squeezed inside and the car glided smoothly off, disappearing into the haze of morning bonfires.

Dante Two couldn’t keep his mind on the chase no matter how much he told himself it was important. The details of the day struck him harder than any bullet. Sunlight glinted off a Subaru sign, rust brittled an oil can, kids kicked through the smoke-plume ashes of the dead, Olympus threw a shadow over hordes of muggers addicted to Mace. This was surely the most lurid of worlds and he had never felt so much a part of it. The Dump’s wire fence hove into view and Dante Two recalled a nursery rhyme from his Chicago youth:

"April in the breaker’s yard

Yes, my arms are very hard

Rub them every day with lard

April in the breaker’s yard."

He was bent over laughing when above his head a window splintered outward and the sound of mirth and light machine-gun fire escaped from a second storey. Costello - he’d recognize the Mexican’s calibration anywhere.

Dante Two entered the building and, racing up the stairwell, plunged into a snipers’ party. Everywhere he looked there were frenzied tableaux of impromptu torture and freestyle garroting. The mildest of discourse was punctuated with the chirping flight of daggers. Old and trusty friends improved the shining hour by punching each other into the middle of next week. The bewildering tangle of alliances was decipherable only by the frequency and angle at which wounds were inflicted. The entire crew had staggered from the Tree Museum to Deserters to the Delayed Reaction and were weeping old tears. At one end of the room was a giant cake housing a naked and drugged senator.

On a couch sat Costello, discussing dialist subcontinuism and drinking a Reaction takeout entitled Counterfeit Reality Strain. He called Dante Two over for support. Costello had been given six months for crucifying a Valley girl and everyone was boasting that if they’d been allotted that much time they could have crucified fifty. Now he belied his exopose by discussing the annihilative dangers of attempting to purify a thing which consisted entirely of impurities. ‘I’ve given this town the blood-heavy shirt off my back,’ he said in disgust. ‘And that’s the long con of existence here - police and thieves, eh? If they don’t got the spirit they oughta get outta the quivering meat wheel, Danny. Outta the goddamn loop. The city’s the bad guy. Help yourself to cloakers, my friend.’

On a coffee table was a large bowl of anodyne pills, used to damp down original thought and reduce conspicuity in public. The practical hazards of re-examining one’s mental premises on the wing were well known to the denizens of Beerlight - a guy skyjacking a plane one time had pushed a gun to the pilot’s face and instead of demanding a flight to Cuba, snarled, ‘The cultural space vacated by logic and morality has been filled at once with an automated and meaningless simulacrum which is nevertheless of precisely the same dimensions.’ A kidnapper started assembling a ransom note from scissored headline letters and finished a year and forty thousand words later with the words ‘and won’t accept the jig’s up even when faced with a show of apathy equal to their own’. The kid he kidnapped had long since escaped. Another sparkhead entered a bank right after a romantic break-up and delivered a bitter monologue on how ‘women send signals but men speak English’ while performing the most mawkish heist in Beerlight history. He later wrote and signed a confession which, published under the title
The Seahorse’s Gaze
, replied to theories of gender manipulation with those of hermaphroditic self-fertility and indifference.

Some denizens would mix anodynes with smarts and watch everything gain and lose meaning, need it and not give a damn. The very walls pulsed in a fast alternation which made cloaker-smart cocktails a fashionable substitute for rave strobes. Those who could afford strobes and pills practised the art of intersecting the two elements by synchronizing and desynchronizing the strobe frequencies to provoke a series of profundity pile-ups or empty vistas depending on whether you were tuned in.

Dante Two wondered if he should have downed a few cloakers before the Deal heist. He’d agreed with himself that if he entered the bank to find he was the second Dante on the scene he’d allow the time-tripper to ventilate him. A necessary sacrifice. But he hadn’t gotten rebellious - he’d followed through and didn’t feel in any way guilty for surviving the shot. In any case he’d felt weird about dumbing out, even as a disguise.

‘
We are acting much too well, and procrastinating,’ Costello told Dante Two, staring him in the eye with his fist. ‘Digitizing guns as if we cannot trust our own senses. Look at this.’ He picked up an AMA Long Range Rifle. ‘Thirty-four pounds of dismissal, my friend. Fired by you or me, it has a meaning. Computer-assisted, it’s merely a movie. Carry on that way, we end up on the stinking dump out there. Take it from me - Costello Ignore Anaya.’

The party started breaking up to attend the convention, which was kicking off around now. Dante Two said thanks but no thanks, thinking about Rosa. He loved her from the black ice of her boots to the pink icing of her brain. If she were blown to pieces he’d love the pieces. He headed out.

6

RESTRAINT

Restraint had stupidly volunteered to provide an amusement at the snipers’ rip - he’d got a degree of notoriety for his performances at the Delayed Reaction. ‘I spy,’ he’d announce, ‘with my little eye, something beginning with T.’ Then he’d release Ramone the wren, who would pluck the wallet of a bleary onlooker and return it to Restraint amid applause. ‘Theft,’ Restraint would explain, tossing the wallet back, empty. But he found the audience would bellow guesses regardless - ‘tree’ - ‘trampoline’ - ‘turtle’ - and be genuinely baffled at his consequent rage.

Today he had something different planned. When he was a kid his mother had always tried to stop him picking his nose by saying ‘God can see you when you pick your nose.’ This guarantee had led him to create a snot graffiti which said YOU FUCKED UP BIG TIME. But in adulthood it occurred to him that maybe God couldn’t read. The thing needed to be simpler.

So now he stood on stage before an assembly of rivet-eyed mercenaries and picked his nose, backed by a fast-cutting projection of starvation, death and disease. The worse for Jones’s joltware, he began laughing and performing a strange, jerking dance. He had forgotten the purpose of the exercise, and the MC’s introduction of the piece as ‘Mister Restraint and his Amazing Eye’ put the cherry on the audience’s indignation. Small-arms fire began cracking out from various points in the auditorium - it was impossible to tell from where. Restraint was clutching his arm, then his leg, and then dragged himself from the stage, the back-projection continuing.