Pat Cadigan & Chris Fowler - Freeing the Angels

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2024-12-22 0 0 131.4KB 29 页 5.9玖币
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Freeing the Angels
by Pat Cadigan and Chris Fowler
He was standing on the sidewalk, idly flexing his brand-new arm while he waited to
cross with the rest of the blowfish, when he heard his mother's voice in his mind.
Unbidden, unwished-for, apropos of nothing, it came to him: Carry on the way you
have been, Danny-boy, you be seein' angels a lot sooner than you want to. Or
maybe devils. You sure got some bad in you, boy. Watch it don't catch you out and
take you down. When you go, you want to see them angels waiting to take you in.
Danny smiled to himself sourly. Yeah, sure, Momma, thanks for the pointer. He
thought of it as typical of everything she'd given him, from the charity-shop clothes
and cold junk food all the way down to the little stump and four tiny fingers that
grew out of his right shoulder, the legacy of her five years in a fertilizer production
factory, now completely covered by a brand-new arm from the Universal Prosthetics
Clinic.
Maybe the sudden echo of her voice in his mind had been his simple
acknowledgment that she wouldn't have approved. Getting above yourself was one
of the many deadly sins on the Momma-meter, along with whining. As in, Stop
whining about your goddamn stump, you're lucky that's all it was. I saw some of
the things they took outta women I worked with. And if you think you oughta get
one of them fancy prosthetics like some jumped-up poster child, you gettin' above
yourself, boy. Way above yourself.
The sour smile deepened as the light changed. A desperate bike courier, legs
pumping as if he were treading water in a panic to keep from drowning, blew
through the intersection close enough to flutter Danny's shirttail. He smoothed it
casually, enjoying the small fantasy that he'd worn completely normal and totally
unremarkable shirts all his life, just like anyone else. Not above myself, Momma—
just above you. Like the man said about everyone being in the gutter and some of
us looking at the stars. It's called ambition.
He flexed the arm again. Realizing the smaller ambitions was the first step in
getting the bigger ones taken care of. Not that a new arm had been all that small to
him. Two years of living on the cheap, saving the money he got from playing errand
boy and selling guidebooks and magazines to the tourists, no luxuries, not even a
piss-quality beer on a Saturday night, just so he'd have the cash for old Sibelius at
the Universal Prosthesis Clinic. UPC did a cash-only business—strictly used paper in
a used brown envelope, don't want that old taxman coming around, do we? Nosir.
Straight cash got you the straight goods.
You wouldn't have thought so looking at UPC's shabby storefront. You wouldn't have
even thought to ask, which was just as well, since if you had to ask you'd never
know. But if you were the right kind, someone more interested in possibilities than
what you could have right now—i.e., the stars rather than the gutter—and you were
both willing to work and open to suggestion, some of the right things could happen.
Because you'd know the right way to make them happen. You'd know that putting
some extra in that brown envelope and staying awake through old lady Sibelius's
sales patter—Come on in, we fix you up cheap, just don't ask too many questions
about where the parts are from. We do arms, we do legs, we even do whole
exoskeletons. Don't matter how you come in, you gonna be walking out, walking tall
and proud. Doctor Sibelius guarantees and that's for life, my man—meant you'd get
something higher-grade than the stuff Sibelius and her partners jury-rigged for the
run-of-the-mill blowfish. One more good reason to get above yourself.
Of course, until you actually did get above yourself, until you were actually up and
out of the gutter, it was best to exercise discretion. Especially in this neighborhood,
when it was starting to get dark.
· · · · ·
SKIN MUSIC screamed the old-school neon sign on the front of the tattoo parlor. Just
below, one of the artists was hanging in the open doorway blowing garish-colored
smoke rings. She was new; the ink in her face morphed from Valkyrie-style
enhancements to Snow Queen to Snow Beast. She eyed Danny with the bold, I-can-
take-you-in-a-fight-or-I-can-take-you-in-bed-your-call attitude endemic in those
under the age of twenty. Or maybe that was just the tune her skin music was
playing, he thought, giving her a self-possessed smile in return. She was staring at
his face. Didn't even notice his arm except in passing, the way you never notice
anyone's limbs if they have all of them. He made a point of pausing to read the
plain old painted sign on the shop next door (TRADER VIC'S—YES WE R OPEN) by way
of showing her that he was busy, thanks, some other time maybe. A prior
commitment was more palatable than outright rejection; he knew that one
firsthand. In lieu of pulling a thorn out of a lion's paw, it was the sort of extended
courtesy that might come in handy. But even if it didn't, it wasn't like it cost you
anything.
The tattoo artist crushed her homemade on the sidewalk as he went into Trader
Vic's. As usual, Vic herself was behind the high counter at the far end of the store,
looking regal as she flicked a finger at the flatscreen in front of her. She was dark-
skinned and heavily-built, no little slip of a thing but solid and strong in a grey
Athletic Club of Overland Park sweatshirt. Trader Vic, as she styled herself, was the
real deal because, unlike the restaurateur who had launched a thousand mai tais,
she made trades, not drinks. Need something, but suffering from financial
embarrassment? Not to worry, Trader Vic liked to say, she had a thousand thousand
contacts reachable via a touch on her flatscreen, and millions more reachable by
two touches. Somewhere among them was the person who had what you wanted
and might be in the mood to make a deal for it, a trade between the two of you. Or
it could turn into a three-way dance, or four-way, or you might end up getting
plugged into a complex network of give and take, something that would be an
impossible tangle for anyone but Trader Vic, who could keep it all straight in her
mind no matter which angle she came at it from. You might have thought it was
just good software and record-keeping so meticulous as to be anal, but that was
just backup for the real trading machine, the one between Vic's ears.
"Hey yo," she said with a big smile. "Something new has been added."
He waved at her with the arm and did bodybuilder poses with it as he approached
the counter. Today she had rented some of her unneeded floor space to the tattoo
parlor and some to the market on the other side—boxes of animation inks faced
crates of olive oil, fish paste, fortified wheat germ, and shell macaroni.
"Like they say on the late show, checkiddout, checkiddout." He stretched the arm
high over his head and made a buzzing noise as he lowered his hand onto the
counter next to her monitor for a five-point landing on the fingers. "The Eagle is in
da house and things can only get better."
"Nostalgia sure ain't what it used to be." She tried a soul handshake on him,
bumped his knuckles with her own, slapped him high and low five, and then got him
in an arm wrestling grip.
"No fair, I got no leverage," he complained grinning as he pushed her arm down on
the counter effortlessly, careful not to crush her fingers.
She grinned back at him and then gave him one upside the head; not too hard,
though. "Don't get all misty just because you beat the champ one time." She flexed
her own hand, as if she had a mild cramp. "Feels good, like the real thing. Only
realer. How much were you holding back?"
"All of it. Sibelius came by some military stuff, surplus leftovers, she said."
Vic looked at her screen and tapped a finger on it. "So that's where that went.
Anonymous auction, not that you heard it from me."
Danny made an elaborate dismissive gesture with his right hand. "You know
Sibelius—you don't ask her questions and she doesn't have to tell you lies."
Vic leaned on the counter. "Well, if your arm really did come out of that lot, you
may have gotten the deal of the century, my man. It was an experimental batch.
The mad scientist behind it got himself cooked in some kind of stupid accident and
the military warehoused everything. Sat for six months until the inventory database
got scrambled and ceased to officially exist."
"Gee, I wonder how that happened," Danny said, admiring his fingers.
"Happens all the time," Vic said serenely. "With no official existence, there was no
official sale and no official income lining any official's pocket. Not that I told you
anything. What would I know anyway? I'm just a humble trader, a go-between, a
matchmaker for goods and services."
Danny looked at her with exaggerated puzzlement. "Huh? Whudja say?"
"I said, I'll have to thank Sibelius for this."
He blinked, the puzzlement becoming real. "You will?"
"Oh, yeah." Vic's smile was thoughtful. "How'd you like to make that new arm pay
for itself?"
"Well, that is kinda what I had in mind," Danny said. "You know, doing jobs I
couldn't before."
The trader nodded. "Good. Because it so happens I've got a vacancy for tonight.
Does that fit in with your busy social schedule?"
"Sure. What do I have to do? Bend some iron bars? Crush beer cans?" He snapped
his fingers rhythmically. "Keep the beat?"
"Later. First get down to Jeremy's and pick up some code for me. It's special, I don't
want it getting intercepted or scrambled."
He couldn't help showing his disappointment. Errand boy again.
"Hey, that's only the beginning," Vic said, reading his mind, or at least his
expression. "I'm going to need a lot of help from you tonight, and I don't mean I
want you to sit the store while I'm out. I can't get this done without you."
Danny laughed a little, feeling both sheepish and relieved. Anyone else might have
been patronizing him or setting him up, but not Vic. "Okay. I'm on the case."
The blowfish, mainly of the tourist persuasion, were lined up for Eye in the Sky,
which was just starting to jump. The sumo wrestler on the door was making the
usual big show of passing them through after a thorough visual inspection of their
clothes, their faces, their jewelry, and, presumably, their coolness quotients. The
sumo wrestler's name was Rakishi, and legend had it he really had been a sumo
before bad knees had relegated him to ruling the ingress with guest list and stun-
stick.
Danny didn't look at any of the overdressed would-be clubbers, fearful he'd see
some of the people he'd cajoled into buying guidebooks or letting him run errands
for them. All he'd need would be for one of them to call out Errand boy! in front of
that lard-ass on the door. Rakishi would never let him forget it.
Relax, he told himself as he trotted up the crystal steps to the entrance. The errand
boy they knew was a gimp with one arm. They weren't expecting to see him with
two good arms. Nonetheless, he decided, tomorrow he'd get a new haircut, and
maybe a dye job just to make sure.
"Say hey." Rakishi tapped him on the chest with the stun-stick and then left it
there. He made a business out of counting Danny's arms and legs and pretending to
think it over. "Sorry, I don't see your spare parts on the guest list, and even if they
were, you couldn't come in here dressed like that."
"Save it for the blowfish, Rakishi, you know I'm not here for the dancing. Jeremy's
expecting me. Otherwise I wouldn't get within a mile of this place."
Rakishi laughed. "You're telling me."
He winced at having inadvertently handed the man a straight line at his own
expense and started to push past. Rakishi blocked his way with the stun-stick,
resting the point against his new arm, against the shoulder, where the stump and
the tiny fingers were now hidden away. The big man started to say something.
Danny reached up, closed his new fingers around the chubby wrist, and began
slowly applying pressure, letting Rakishi feel it.
The look on the fat man's face went from surprise to unease and then to outright
fear. Danny backed him up several steps toward the entry foyer, still squeezing. He
removed the stun-stick from the man's numbed fingers, and then, just as slowly,
released him.
"Don't worry, nobody saw," he said in a low voice, giving the stick back to him. "It'll
be our little secret, that a gimp with a spare part took your toy away from you. I
mean, we wouldn't want the blowfish rushing the door and getting you fired, would
we?"
Rakishi stared at him, saying nothing. The expression on his face was supposed to
be murderous, but Danny could see a hint of the fear underneath.
"But no more, Rakishi, okay? No more gimp, no more spare parts, no more big-
man-on-the-door crap. Not to me. Got that?"
Still silent, Rakishi stepped back to let him pass.
"Thanks." Danny started to go in, then stuck his hand out. "Shake on it?"
Rakishi drew back and jerked his head at the entry foyer.
"Oh, yeah," Danny said, "we already did that, didn't we?"
The big man turned away from him and Danny suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He
hurried through the dimly-lit foyer, pushing through the double doors marked STAFF
ONLY to the left of the ticket-booth and going up the stairs two at a time. Good
show, Danny-boy, he thought, you just proved you can be as big a bully as anybody
else.
He went halfway down the narrow corridor at the top of the stairs and stopped at a
grimy-looking door, plain except for a small card at eye level that said SERVICE
MANAGER. Danny knocked and heard the answering come-in grunt.
Jeremy was dressed in his usual multi-pocketed work pants, white T-shirt, and blue
fisherman's jacket with even more pockets. He was as thin as Rakishi was fat, which
was some trick considering that Danny had never seen him when he wasn't eating.
Tonight he was having Chinese food, busy chopsticks clicking among an array of
classic white takeout cartons on his desk. They competed for space with the old,
oversized but very sharp surveillance monitor. On the screen, Rakishi was doing his
sorry-not-cool-enough routine with three tourists who were trying to argue with
him.
"Saw you throwing the fear of God into my big guy," Jeremy said, gesturing at the
screen with a noodle caught in the chopsticks. "New arm, eh?"
"Works pretty good," Danny said.
Jeremy made a prawn disappear. "I could see that."
摘要：

FreeingtheAngelsbyPatCadiganandChrisFowlerHewasstandingonthesidewalk,idlyflexinghisbrand-newarmwhilehewaitedtocrosswiththerestoftheblowfish,whenheheardhismother'svoiceinhismind.Unbidden,unwished-for,aproposofnothing,itcametohim:Carryonthewayyouhavebeen,Danny-boy,youbeseein'angelsalotsoonerthanyouwan...

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