Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World
- Автор: Мосли Уолтер
- Год: 2001
- Язык: английский
- Год: Aspect / Warner Books
- ISBN: 978-0-446-52954-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World». Краткое содержание книги:
“What?” Charles Spellman half rose from his chair.
“... down into Common Ground, that’s right.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Listen, kid. You’re in the middle of a full-fledged murder spree here. The cops are obviously coverin’ it up because they never caught those muggers — and the cops catch everybody they want to catch. It takes a lotta money to rig an accident like that cave-in on Upper Broadway and more than that to make it look like an architectural flaw. The only reason you’re not dead is ’cause they haven’t gotten to your name yet. If they did you all at once somebody like the Daily Dump might pick up on it. I know a guy can make you a fake ID that’ll put you under and safe until I can get a handle on who’s doin’ what and why.”
“There’s no fake ID in the world that can beat the Molecular Tester Device,” Spellman said. Johnson noticed that he was looking even paler than when he’d walked in.
“You think they suspect people of sneakin’ into Common Ground? They don’t care. They don’t check. Anybody off of the cycle is welcome into hell.”
“I can’t just vacate my place. I have responsibilities.”
“You call in sick. I’ll stay in your hole. Maybe someone’ll try and check you out. That’s my best bet for a clue.”
“When?”
“Right now. We go to the bank and then to my friend. After that you take the Develator to Common Ground and stay there until you hear from me.”
The fear in the kid’s eyes delighted Johnson. He stood to his full six foot seven height, towering over the frightened fascist. He was happy to cause the young man pain, but he was happier to have a bed to sleep in and five thousand creds on his wild card.
2
“You wanna take some more vig and do me again, baby?” Tana Lynn whispered in Folio Johnson’s ear.
“Again?” he moaned. “Honey, thatta be seven times. I’ma start comin’ red if I do that shit again.”
“It’d only be six,” the ecstasy girl said, pouting. “And I love it when you make that little noise like you were crying.”
“Next time I’ll put on the rec-chip and you can listen to that while I heal.”
“Can we get somethin’ to eat, then?” Tana asked.
“Order whatever you want,” Folio said, crawling out of the great round bed. “But charge it to the apartment. I don’t want to spend my cash.”
She had fine features and dark skin, blond hair, and green eyes. When Folio had met her at the West Side DanceDome a few days earlier, he thought she was an Egyptian heretic. But when he took her out that night she’d told him that she was Ethiopian.
“They kept us in a field outside Addis Ababa,” she’d told him, “but then a Peace Corps guy named Lampton put me in a bag and brought me here. By the time I turned eleven he wasn’t attracted to me anymore and gave me to this guy named Jim. Jim put me to work cleaning his sister’s house and his. It wasn’t so bad, really. They let me study and I learned commodities trading. It was kinda weird, ’cause the day I moved out to my new place Jim told me that Lampton had paid him to kill me.”
After Tana ate she went to sleep. Johnson sat out on the deck of Charles Spellman’s two hundred first floor apartment. He stared at the red-tinged night sky and studied the information provided by his excellent eye.
He had downloaded the information of all ten Seekers while talking to Spellman, but absorbing that information into his brain took time. It was especially hard because the men had lived such boring lives. Everyone but Mingus, the black Backgrounder, was completely unremarkable.
After an hour he went back into the apartment. The entertainment room’s lasers were on. A 3D image of a shifting moonscape was being projected. The usual noise dampeners that this image used to simulate the silence of space weren’t engaged, or Folio wouldn’t have heard her from the bedroom. At first he thought that she’d gotten tired of waiting and was masturbating to take the edge off the vig she’d taken.
He peeked around the corner of the door to see if she wanted him to join in.
The man in the skin-tight glossy emerald one-piece had his hands around her throat. Tana was struggling but weakly. The detective had his knife out in a heartbeat. The targeting system of the eye was instantaneous, and so the hurtling blade severed the assassin’s spine in less than a second after Folio had seen him.
The Ethiopian’s eyes were bloodred but she was breathing and semiconscious. The dead man was white, with long, micro-braided eyebrows. Folio quickly stripped off the assassin’s suit, leaving the corpse nude. The man was bald, with no tattoos, ID jewelry, marks, scars, or defects. Other than his exceptionally well-conditioned physique there was nothing to distinguish him except for his hands — they had six fingers each.
“Assassin synthy,” Tana wheezed over Folio’s shoulder.
“German issue,” he agreed.
“I thought they weren’t allowed in the U.S.”
“I guess they are — sometimes.”
New York’s last private detective turned his attention to the blond Ethiopian’s neck.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, yeah. I had rougher make-out sessions when I was fifteen.”
“You don’t look much older’n that now.”
“I’m twenty-four and I been on my own since I was sixteen,” the woman said. “And this ain’t the first dead man I’ve seen.”
“You weren’t his first either,” Johnson said.
“There’s nobody who hates me that bad,” Tana said. “And even if there was he wouldn’t have the millions it’d take to buy a test-tube assassin.”
“No. They were after the dude lives here.”
“I thought this was your place.”
“It’s time for you to go home, girl,” he said.
“The fuck I am,” she replied. “I have to know why that man tried to kill me before I can sleep.”
“Okay. We’ll talk for a minute, but not here.”
Folio went to the bathroom and got a fiber swab. He dipped the swab in the assassin’s wound and then wrapped it up in tissues.
Then he looked up at the ecstasy girl and said, “Let’s go.”
Tana Lynn lived in a commune deep in Harlem. It was called the Mau-Mau and proclaimed the ethics of the Third and Fourth Black Radical Congresses. On the way there, Folio stopped at a communications booth and notified the police that there was a dead man in Charles Spellman’s apartment.
“Why you wanna do that?” Tana asked.
“Just chummin’ the water a little. Later on I might wanna catch me a fish.”
Tana’s apartment was on the fifth floor of the huge building, midway between Lower and Middle Adam Clayton Powell Drive. The view out of her picture window was eternally night and limited to the featureless walls of the Harlem jail just across the street. Her apartment was a single large room with a thirteen-foot ceiling. She had a bed in one corner and a tiled shower with no curtain or door in the other.
“Pretty spare,” Folio said.
“Good for the soul,” she said.
She kissed him hard then and he leaned away from her, a little perplexed.
“What’s that?”
“You killed that man the second you saw him,” she said with a smile. Her eyes got large, as if she was looking at something transform before her. “You didn’t hesitate, or I’d be dead now.”
“Li’l somethin’ I picked up in the Ukraine. You got a desk?”
Tana Lynn went to a door at the midpoint of one wall and opened it. An oak board a meter square fell out, landing against a prop that held it parallel to the floor. From under her bed she drew a metal folding chair.