NINE

This Is Your Wake-up Call

Tig Vesicle ran a tank farm, but he didn't do that stuff himself, anymore than he would have filled his arm with AbH. How he looked at it was this: his life was crap, but it was a life. So the kind of porn he liked to watch was ordinary, cheap, unimmersive, holographic stuff. It was often advertised as intrusion-porn. The fantasy of it was: some woman's room would get fitted with microcameras without her knowledge. You could watch her do anything, though things would usually end with some cultivar-all tusks, prick the size of a horse-finding her in the shower. Vesicle often turned that part off. The show he watched most was syndicated from out in the halo and featured a girl called Moaner, who was supposed to live in a corporate enclave somewhere on Motel Splendido. The story was, her husband was always away (though in fact he often arrived back unexpectedly with five of his business associates, who included another woman). Moaner wore short pink latex skirts with tube tops and little white socks. She had a little clean mat of pubic hair. She was bored, the narrative went; she was agile and spoilt. Vesicle preferred her to do ordinary things, like painting her toenails naked, or trying to look over her shoulder at herself in a mirror. One thing with Moaner was this: even though she was a clone, her body looked real. She wasn't any kind of rebuild. They advertised her as 'never been to the tailor' and he could believe that.

The other thing about her was that she was aware of you, even though she didn't know you were there.

Could you get behind that paradox? Vesicle believed you could. If he once understood it, it would tell him something about the universe or, equally important, about human beings. He felt as if she knew he was there. She isn't a porn star! he would tell himself.

He was dreaming this cheap, doomed, New Man dream-while Moaner herself yawned and tried on a pair of brand new yellow Mickey Mouse shorts with big buttons and matching suspenders-when the door of the tank farm banged open, letting in a gust of cold grey wind from the street, along with six or seven tiny kids. They had short black hair and tight, furious Asian faces. Snow was melting on the shoulders of their black rainslickers. The oldest was maybe eight, with lightning flashes etched into the short hair above her ears and a Nagasaki Hi-Lite Autoloader clutched in both hands. They spread out and began going through the tank cubicles as if they were looking for something, shouting and gabbling in gluey voices and pulling out the power cables so the tanks went on to emergency wake-up call.

'Hey!' said Tig Vesicle.

They stopped what they were doing and went quiet. The oldest kid shrieked and gesticulated at them. They looked warily from her to Vesicle and back again, then went on rummaging among the cubicles-where, finding a prybar, they began trying to lever the lid off Tank Seven. The girl, meanwhile, came up and stood in front of Vesicle. She was perhaps half his height. Cafй йlectrique had already rotted her little uneven teeth. She was wired until her eyes bulged. Her wrists trembled with the weight of the Nagasaki; but she managed to raise it until its aimspot wavered somewhere around his diaphragm, then said something like:

'Djoo-an dug fortie? Ugh?'

She sounded as if she was eating the words as fast as she spoke them. Vesicle stared down at her.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm not sure what you're saying.'

This seemed to anger her unreasonably. 'Fortie!' she shrieked.

Casting around for a reply, Vesicle remembered something the Chianese twink once told him. It was part of some anecdote from when the twink still had a life, blah, blah, blah, they all pretended to remember that. Vesicle, bored by the story but intrigued by the extremes of experience you could pack into a single statement, had memorised it gleefully. He spent a moment summoning the exact offhand gesture with which Chianese had accompanied the words, then looked down at the girl and said:

'I'm so scared I don't know whether to laugh or shit.'

Her eyes bulged further. He could see that she was hauling back on the trigger of the Hi-Lite. He opened his mouth, wondering what he could say to stem this new rage, but it was too late to say anything at all. There was a huge explosion which, oddly enough, seemed to come from somewhere near the street door. The girl's eyes bulged further, then jumped out of her head to the full length of her optic nerve. In the same instant, her head evaporated into a kind of greyish-red slurry. Vesicle stumbled backwards, rather covered with this stuff, and fell on his back, wondering what was happening.

It was this:

One-shot cultivars were queuing outside the tank farm in the Pierpoint night. Ten or a dozen of them stood about in the falling snow, stamping their feet and cocking their short reaction guns. They wore stained leather trousers, laced together over a three-inch gap all the way down the outside leg, and leather bolero vests. Their breath condensed like the breath of great dependable animals in the freezing air. Even their shadows had tusks. Their huge arms were blue with cold, but they were too fucking hard-on to care about that. 'Hey,' they told one another, 'I wish I'd put less clothes on. You know?' The entry pattern was this: they rushed the door of the twink parlour in twos, and the kiddies inside shot them down from behind the coffins.

It was bedlam in there in quite a short time after they killed the Hi-Lite girl, with the flat fizzing arcs of reaction bolts, the flicker of laser sights in the smoke, and a rich smell of human fluids. The front window was out. Big smoking holes were in the walls. Two of the tanks had fallen off their trestles; the rest, alive with shocking pink alarm graphics, were warming up fast. To Tig Vesicle it seemed that the whole issue revolved around Tank Seven. The kids had given up on getting it open: but they weren't going to leave it for anyone else. Seeing this early on, Vesicle had crawled as far away from it as possible, and got in a corner with his hands over his eyes, while cultivars rushed through the smoke, shouting, 'Hey, don't bother to cover me!' and were picked off. The kids had a tactical advantage there: but down on firepower, down on your luck, and they were being pushed back. They shrieked in their gluey argot. They pulled new guns from beneath their rainslickers. Looking over their shoulders for another way out, they got shot: in the legs, or the spine, and they were soon in a condition the tailor couldn't cure. Things looked bad, then two things happened:

Somebody hit Tank Seven with a short reaction shell.

And the Cray sisters appeared in the tank farm doorway, shaking their heads and reaching for the pieces in their purses.

Chinese Ed and Rita Robinson were on the run somewhere in the weeds in back of the burning carwash. Hanson was dead, Ed guessed, and the DA too, so there would be no help from that quarter. Otto Rank had the high ground. He also had the 30.06 he had taken from Hogfat Wisconsin's kitchen after he tortured and killed Hogfat's teenage daughter. It was the way he laid her out that was the missing piece of the puzzle, Ed thought. I should have seen that, but I was too busy being the smart dick. Not seeing that was going to cost two more lives, but at least one of them was only his own.

Ed's head got too far above the weeds. The flat crack-and-whip of the 30.06 cut across the drowsy afternoon air. Some birds flew up from the river bank a quarter of a mile away.

Sixteen shots, Ed thought. Maybe he's low on ammo now.

Ed's ramrod Dodge was where he had left it parked, on the service road the other side of the lot. They weren't going to make it that far. Rita was shot. Ed was shot too, but not as bad. On the up side, he had a couple of shells left in one of the Colts. He ran harder, but this seemed to open Rita's wound.