Spares (29 page)

Vinaldi got it as we were stalking down the corridor. “They have to keep going back?”

“I think so. And Ghuaji’s currently going nowhere at all.”

“So maybe you’re not as stupid as you look. That’s encouraging.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I told him. “I have hidden superficialities.”

There were three people in Howie’s storeroom.
Dath, who was watching over the body with sterling vigilance, balancing a chain saw in his hands; Howie, who looked like he was taking the whole thing rather personally and trying to make up for that morning; and Ghuaji himself. I walked straight over to the latter and bent down, keeping well out of the way, just in case.

The hole in his temple looked looser than before, and there was a small pool of blood under the back of his head. His skin seemed the same. Maybe the strange texture was just a result of having been there so long, and not something which got any worse.

“You know what’s happening, don’t you?” I said. There was no reply. “You’ve got that place in your blood. You need to go back there to recharge, and you’re not getting it lying here. Meanwhile, Yhandim’s running around New Richmond with the other guys. He may have a major plan, Ghuaji, but the way things are going it ain’t going to involve you.”

“Fuck you,” he said, predictably. They all say that, don’t they—and probably not even one of them realizes that when it comes to their turn it’s worn pretty thin and isn’t terribly frightening anymore. Especially when they’re taped into immobility and smelling of wet blood from the holes in their head. “Your mother sucks goats in Hell,” he added, hoarsely.

“A telling riposte, I grant you,” I said, “but you know what I’m saying is true. Now listen up. We know that Arlond Maxen got you guys out somehow, so that’s something you can’t tell me.” I ignored the explosion of surprise from Howie and Dath. “So let’s concentrate on where Yhandim is holding the spares.”

“Man, you know I ain’t telling you nothing,” Ghuaji said, coughing up another mouthful of blood.

I pulled away the collar of his coat and saw that the neck wound was also opening up. A flower of blood above the collarbone showed trouble was coming there too. I shrugged.

“Have it your own way. But time’s running out.”

I’d barely lit a cigarette in the corridor outside when
I heard a scream from within the storeroom. I opened the door a crack and saw Vinaldi standing over Ghuaji I didn’t know what he could have done to make the soldier make that sound, and I didn’t want to find out. I shut the door on another shriek and finished my cigarette alone.

Suej was my problem, Nearly too, not to mention the rest of the spares; yet it was Vinaldi who was in there doing the wet work. It couldn’t have been any other way. I have no stomach for that kind of thing. It was the same in The Gap. I just did my time and tried to stay alive. I guess I managed it, but sometimes my life feels like a piece of demo shareware, all the key or interesting features disabled, running on a fourteen-day trial period that just repeats over and over again without ever becoming mine.

So I waited there, breathing smoke in and out, hearing the cries and melding them with many others from long ago. Something, either exhaustion or despair, was stripping years off me. I kept expecting to see flashes of orange, to hear beating wings and voices from long ago. I was remembering people I’d killed, and trying to recall why, and failing to see that it added up to anything at all. Maybe it’s impossible to see out when you’re stuck there in the if-loop. Maybe you’ve got to be dead for any of it to make sense. Life and chance write the code which drags you along, and all you can do is watch—alternately saddened, bored and horrified—as they execute their instructions. Emotions run the action, as they always have, and the brain is powerless to intercede.

I was on a bit of a downer, in other words.

Vinaldi joined me after ten minutes. He wasn’t even breathing heavily, although the front of his suit was splattered with blood.

“Yhandim’s in The Gap,” he said, with a small, brutal smile.

It was obvious, and maybe I had already known. Where better to hide than somewhere no one else can enter? Perhaps that’s why I’d spent the last twenty-four
hours in decreasing circles of futility, running away from the problem.

“Then we wait till he comes out,” I said.

“Come on, Randall. You know we can’t do that. He’s got your girl in there, and the other woman. That’s no place for them. It’s no place for anyone.”

“Johnny, The Gap’s been closed since the last sidelift. That’s twenty fucking years. How the hell are we supposed to get back in there? It’s impossible.”

“Clearly it isn’t, or our lunatic friends wouldn’t be able to come and go as they please. And Maxen must have found a way, didn’t he? Howie in there came up with a plan. For once it’s a good one—so much so that he may have earned himself a higher place in my organization at some later date. We let that guy inside free, let him think we’re finished with him, and then we see where he goes. He’s fucked up pretty badly now. If you’re right, then he’s going to need to get back there real soon.”

“It won’t work.”

“It might.”

“No, it won’t.”

“What the fuck is
wrong
with you?” Vinaldi shouted, his face suddenly inches from mine. “You got any better ideas?”

“I can’t go back in there,” I said. “I’m not going back in The Gap.”

“You’re scared, I’m scared,” he spat. “Anybody’d be fucking scared. But it’s the only answer, Randall. Either we go in there and fuck these guys up or they’re going to fuck up those two women and all the others you keep talking about. More important than that, far as I’m concerned, and I’m a selfish man and happy that way, when they’re finished with them they’re
going to come after me
. I worked twenty years to get where I am today, and I’m not losing it because some guys who should have been dead decades ago blame me for the fact they couldn’t keep track of where the fuck they were and follow
the rest of us out of a firestorm which I didn’t lead them into in the first place.”

I turned away from him, but he carried on ranting.

“
I
could just wait until they come out, but
you
can’t. You got to go in there and find them. I’m offering to help you, Randall, but the offer ain’t going to last forever. Understand?”

“I can’t go back,” I said, and walked away.

People are always finding me when I don’t want to be found. When Vinaldi appeared in the doorway I was sitting on Mal’s floor, surrounded by used foil, unused packets and a needle. Half of the last of my money was already in my bloodstream, the rest was ready and waiting. In my own mind I was sitting in Mal’s because Yhandim knew where it was and might come looking for me there; in reality, I was there because I had nowhere else to go.

I’d gone straight up to my contact on 24. He didn’t seem surprised to see me again, or that this time I wanted Rapt that had been less cut. I gave him everything I had, and he passed it over. I shot up in the back of his store.

By the time I got back down to 8 it had kicked in. Climbing into the chute at the back of the women’s rest room was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. But the last, dying tendrils of my working mind told me that if Maxen was tied so heavily into the NRPD, I couldn’t afford to leave by a normal route, so I soldiered on with it anyway.

More by luck than judgment I found my way to the main shaft, and laboriously clambered down. I don’t know if you’ve ever descended eight floors, hand over hand on a ladder, while full of designer hallucinogenic amphetamorphines, but it takes a certain degree of doggedness. It was very dark, for a start, the shadows brown and continually slithering over my hands and face. They were like snakes in that they were drier than
they appeared, but unlike snakes in that they whispered bad things to me, which reptiles rarely do. I slipped once on the way down, and because of my condition believed that I was falling upward. This, I thought, was fine, and I was mildly interested to see where I might end up. Perhaps I’d fall as high as the 200’s, in which case I’d give old Arlond Maxen a piece of my mind.

Him and his brother both, I muttered, the fucken dead fucken fuck.

Luckily—I guess—my back brain realized I was unlikely to have conquered gravity anywhere except inside my head, and my hands grabbed a lower stair entirely independently of my will. I failed to dislocate my wrist by the barest of margins, and made it down most of the remaining steps, only falling about the last six feet. I landed heavily on my back, and checked out for a while.

When I came to everything was worse. But I stood up laboriously, deciding I ought to go somewhere.

Then I got lost.

I’ve done the back route in and out of New Richmond more times than I can recall. A lot of it takes place in the dark, so you have to be pretty good at remembering the way. On this particular occasion, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even especially good at remembering how to use my legs. I tried shutting my eyes, but this merely put me into a spotless operating room, where a cake fashioned out of eye-splittingly bright yellow and white icing was waiting for an operation. This scene remained for a number of minutes after I opened my eyes, before finally fading into the darkness. I resolved to keep my eyes open for the time being. I seemed to have been walking for an awfully long time without reaching the landmarks I was expecting, but on the other hand each time a droplet of sweat squeezed out of the pores on my forehead it seemed to take about an hour and I was worried about being drowned, so it’s possible my judgment may have been impaired.

Then I was very, very frightened of something. I
wasn’t sure what, and the fear only lasted a few minutes. Or half an hour.

When that passed, I entered a brief spell of relative lucidity, which is generally the prelude to the second—and more momentous—Rapt rush. I took the opportunity to accept that I was completely and utterly lost, and in a part of the MegaMall’s lowest level I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have gone down right to the bottom of the main chute, but got off one level above as I always had before. I was somewhere near the heart of the engine block, and had no clear way of finding my way out. The corridor was circular, and reinforced with very thick ceramic panels. It could only be the main exhaust duct.

Something which I took at first to be a series of pink flowers exploding at a distance then revealed itself, in time, and with a few cautious steps forward, this turned out to be not a visual phenomenon at all, but a sound. A quiet, pistony sound. I crept toward it, giggling, reasoning that whatever it was it couldn’t be more frightening than what was going on in my head.

“What the hell are you doing here?” said a voice.

I’d been wrong, of course; there
was
something more frightening, and being addressed out of darkness in a place no living human even
knew
about certainly fitted the bill. I shrieked in a very uncool manner and tried to run away, but my legs had apparently turned into columns of rice, loosely packed together. They gave out dryly and deposited me on the floor, and I just waited for whatever was going to happen, while fighting off flying nuns which even I could tell weren’t really there.

The first thing that happened was more of the pink sounds. Then they stopped, and I turned to see something sitting in front of me. It was about three feet tall, and made of metal. A large number of complex arms jutted out of various parts of its main body, all of which ended in manipulating extensions. The body itself was battered and heavily patched, as if it had been repaired time and time again. At the top of the whole affair was a headlike structure which was glaring at me.

“Er, hi,” I said.

“I’m working as fast as I can!” the thing shouted. The voice, as well as looking very deep blue, sounded a little strange. Mechanical, not very human at all, though it was certainly a beautiful color. “I don’t have the firmware!”

“Bummer,” I said, trying to be helpful without getting involved in a long conversation. I could feel the beginnings of the second Rapt rush lumbering toward me, and wanted to be a long way from here when it hit.

“Actually, I don’t even think it’s “ware at all,” the machine said, confidentially. “Just processing power. I’m by myself, you know, completely and utterly by myself.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.

“No, you don’t!” the machine shouted, seeing through me instantly. “You don’t see at all. You’ve just been sent to spy on me!”

“I haven’t,” I said plaintively. The big rush was now definitely on the way. “Honestly. I’m just lost.”

“Lost my ass, you bastard.”

“Please, I’ll leave you to get on with whatever the hell it is you’re doing if you’ll just tell me how to get up a level.”

“Turn around, go 46.23 meters, turn left, 21.11 meters, right 7.89 meters, climb up the panel with the ladder on it,” said the machine, almost too fast for me to make out. “Now piss off and let me get on with my work.”

And then the second rush came, like a sudden fall of night. Moving with all the verve of a potato I followed the machine’s instructions as closely as I could, though possibly not to the second decimal place. By then I’d realized that the machine hadn’t existed anywhere outside my head, but I reasoned that it was possibly a mechanism for my subconscious to tell me how the hell to get out. I was impressed with my subconscious for even attempting such a thing, and decided I should follow its instructions. I felt I owed it to myself, and that if I turned
out to be right I probably deserved a prize. Like a little more Rapt.