George Alec Effinger - Marid 2 - A Fire In The Sun

GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER

BANTAM BOOKS NEW YORK • TORONTO • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND

A FIRE IN TOE SUN

A Bantam Spectra Book I April 1990

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My grandfather, George Conrad Effinger, whom I never knew, was a police officer in the city

of Cleveland during the Depression. He was killed in the line of duty. This book is dedicated

to his memory, growing fainter now each year in the minds of those people who did know

him, except for his policeman's shield, Badge #374, hung with pride in a station house in

Cleveland.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they

forgive them.

—oscar wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen

property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the

author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

ISBN 0-553-27407-4 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell

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countries. Marco Registrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

7e'd ridden for many days out the coast highway toward Mauretania, the part of Algeria

where I'd been born. In that time, even at its lethargic pace, the broken-down old bus had

carried us from the city to some town forsaken by Allah before it even learned what its name

was. Centuries come, centuries go: In the Arab world they arrive and depart loaded on the

roofs of shud-dering, rattling buses that are more trouble to keep in service than the long

parades of camels used to be. I re-membered what those bus rides were like from when I

was a kid, sitting or standing in the aisle with fifty other boys and men and maybe another

two dozen clinging up on the roof. The buses passed by my home then. I saw turbaned

heads, heads wearing fezes or knit caps, heads in white or checked keffiyas. All men. That

was something I planned to ask my father about, if I ever met him. "O my father," I would say,

"tell me why everyone on the bus is a man. Where are their women?"

And I always imagined that my father—I pictured him tall and lean with a fierce dark beard, a

hawk or an eagle of a man; he was, in my vision, Arab, although I had my mother's word that

he had been a Frenchman—I saw my father gazing thoughtfully into the bright sunlight,

framing a careful reply to his young son. "O Marid, my sweet one," he would say—and his

voice would be deep and husky, issuing from the back of his throat as if he never used his

lips to speak, although my mother said he wasn't like that at all—"Marid, the women will

come later. The men will send for them later."

"Ah," I would say. My father could pierce all riddles. I could not pose a question that he did

not have a proper answer for. He was wiser than our village shaykh more knowledgeable

than the man whose face filled the posters pasted on the wall we were pissing on. "Father," I

would ask him, "why are we pissing on this man's face?"

"Because it is idolatrous to put his face on such a poster, and it is fit only for a filthy alley like

this, and therefore the Prophet, may the blessing of Allah be on him and peace, tells us that

what we are doing to these images is just and right."

"And Father?" I would always have one more ques-tion, and he'd always be blissfully patient.

He would smile down at me, put one hand fondly behind my head. "Fa-ther? I have always

wanted to ask you, what do you do when you are pissing and your bladder is so full it feels

like it will explode before you can relieve it and while you are pissing, just then, the

muezzin—"

Saied hit me hard in the left temple with the palm of his hand. "You sleeping out here?"

I looked up at him. There was glare everywhere. I couldn't remember where the hell we were.

"Where the hell are we?" I asked him.

He snorted. "You're the one from the Maghreb, the great, wild west. You tell me."

"Have we got to Algeria yet?" I didn't think so.

"No, stupid. I've been sitting in that goddamn little coffeehouse for three hours charming the

warts off this fat fool. His name is Hisham."

"Where are we?"

"Just crossed through Carthage. We're on the out-skirts of Old Tunis now. So listen to me.

What's the old guy's name?"

"Huh? I don't remember."

He hit me hard in the right temple with the palm of his other hand. I hadn't slept in two nights.

I was a little confused. Anyway, he got the easy part of the job: Sitting around the bus stops,

drinking mint tea with the local ringleaders and gossiping about the marauding Christians

and the marauding Jews and the marauding heathen nig-gers and just in general being

goddamn smooth; and I got the piss-soaked alleys and the flies. I couldn't remember why we

divided this business up like that. After all, I was supposed to be in charge—it was my idea

to find this woman, it was my trip, we were using my money. But

Saied took the mint tea and the gossip, and I got—well, I don't have to go into that again.

We waited the appropriate amount of time. The sun was disappearing behind a western

wall; it was almost time for the sunset call to prayer. I stared at Saied, who was now dozing.

Good, I thought, now I get to hit him in the head. I had just gotten up and taken one little step,

when he looked up at me. "It's time, I guess," he said, -yawning. I nodded, didn't have

anything to add. So I sat back down, and Saied the Half-Hajj went into his act.

Saied is a natural-born liar, and it's a pleasure to watch him hustle. He had the personality

module he liked best plugged into his brain—his heavy-duty, steel-belted, mean mother of a

tough-guy moddy. Nobody messed with the Half-Hajj when he was chipping that one in.

Back home in the city, Saied thought it was beneath him to earn money. He liked to sit in the

cafes with me and Mahmoud and Jacques, all day and all evening. His little chicken, the

American boy everybody called Abdul-Hassan, went out with older men and brought home

the rent money. Saied liked to sneer a lot and wear his gal-lebeya cinched with a wide

black leather belt, which was decorated with shiny chrome-steel strips and studs. The

Half-Hajj was always careful of his appearance.

What he was doing in this vermin-infested roadside slum was what he called fun. I waited a

few minutes and followed him around the corner and into the coffeehouse. I shuffled in,

unkempt, filthy, and took a chair in a shad-owy corner. The proprietor glanced at me,

frowned, and turned back to Saied. Nobody ever paid any attention to me. Saied was

finishing the tail end of a joke I'd heard him tell a do/en times since we'd left the city. When

he came to the payoff, the shopkeeper and the four other men at the long counter burst into

laughter. They liked Saied. He could make people like him whenever he wanted. That tilent

was programmed into an add-on chip snapped into - badass moddy. With the right moddy

and the right iddy chips, it didn't matter where you'd been born or how you'd been raised.

You could fit in with any sort of people, you could speak any language, you could handle

mrself in any situation. The information was fed directly to your short-term memory. You

could literally become

another person, Ramses II or Buck Rogers in the 25th century, until you popped the moddy

and daddies out.

Saied was being rough and dangerous, but he was also being charming, if you can imagine

that combination. I watched the shop owner reach and grab the teapot. He poured some into

the Half-Hajj's glass, slopping some more on the wooden counter. Nobody moved to mop it

up. Saied raised the glass to drink, then slammed it down again. "Yaa salaam!" he roared.

He leaped up.

"What is it, O my friend?" asked Hisham, the propri-etor.

"My ring!" Saied shouted. He was wearing a large gold ring, and he'd been waving it under

the old man's nose for two solid hours. It had had a big, round diamond in its center.

"What's the matter with your ring?"

"Look for yourself! The stone—my diamond—it's gone!"

Hisham caught Saied's flapping arm and saw that, indeed, the diamond was now missing.

"Must have fallen out," the old man said, with the sort of folk wisdom you find only in these

petrified provincial villages.

"Yes, fallen out," said Saied, not calmed in the least. "But where?"

"Do you see it?"

Saied made a great show of searching the floor around his stool. "No, I'm sure it's not here,"

he said at last.

"Then it must be out in the alley. You must've lost it the last time you went out to piss."

Saied slammed the bar with his heavy fist. "And now it's getting dark, and I must catch the

bus."

"You still have time to search," said Hisham. He didn't sound very confident.

The Half-Hajj laughed without humor. "A stone like that, worth four thousand Tunisian dinars,

looks like a tiny pebble among a million others. In the twilight I'd never find it. What am I to

do?"

The old man chewed his lip and thought for a mo-ment. "You're determined to leave on the

bus, when it passes through?" he asked.

"I must, O my brother. I have urgent business."

"I'll help you if I can. Perhaps I can find the stone for

you. You must leave your name and address with me; then if I find the diamond, I'll send it to

you."

"May the blessings of Allah be on you and on your family!" said Saied. "I have little hope that

you'll succeed, but it comforts me to know you will do your best for me. I'm in your debt. We

must determine a suitable reward for you."

Hisham looked at Saied with narrowed eyes. "I ask no reward," he said slowly.

"No, of course not, but I insist on offering you one."

"No reward is necessary. I consider it my duty to help you, as a Muslim brother."

"Still," Saied went on, "should you find the wretched stone, I'll give you a thousand Tunisian

dinars for the sustenance of your children and the ease of your aged parents."

"Let it be as you wish," said Hisham with a small bow.

"Here," said my friend, "let me write my address for you." While Saied was scribbling his

name on a scrap of paper, I heard the rumbling of the bus as it lurched to a stop outside the

building.

"May Allah grant you a good journey," said the old man.

"And may He grant you prosperity and peace," said Saied, as he hurried out to the bus.

I waited about three minutes. Now it was my turn. I stood up and staggered a couple of

steps. I had a lot of trouble walking in a straight line. I could see the shop-keeper glaring at

me in disgust. "The hell do you want, you filthy beggar?" he said.

"Some water," I said.

"Water! Buy something or get out!"

"Once a man asked the Messenger of God, may Al-lah's blessings be on him, what was the

noblest thing a man may do. The reply was 'To give water to he who thirsts.' I ask this of

you."

"Ask the Prophet. I'm busy."

I nodded. I didn't expect to get anything free to drink out of this crud. I leaned against his

counter and stared at a wall. I couldn't seem to make the place stand still.

"Now what do you want? I told you to go away."

"Trying to remember," I said peevishly. "I had some-thing to tell you. Ah, yes, I know." I

reached into a pocketof my jeans and brought out a glittering round stone. "Is this what that

man was looking for? I found this out there. Is this—?"

The old man tried to snatch it out of my hand. "Where'd you get that? The alley, right? My

alley. Then it's mine."

"No, I found it. It's—"

"He said he wanted me to look for it." The shop-keeper was already gazing into the

distance, spending the reward money.

"He said he'd pay you money for it."

"That's right. Listen, I've got his address. Stone's no good to you without the address."

I thought about that for a second or two. "Yes, O Shaykh."

"And the address is no good to me without the stone. So here's my offer: I'll give you two

hundred dinars for it."

"Two hundred? But he said—"

"He said he'd give me a thousand. Me, you drunken fool. It's worthless to you. Take the two

hundred. When was the last time you had two hundred dinars to spend?"

"A long time."

"I'll bet. So?"

"Let me have the money first."

"Let me have the stone."

"The money."

The old man growled something and turned away. He brought a rusty coffee can up from

under the counter. There was a thick wad of money in it, and he fished out two hundred

dinars in old, worn bills. "Here you are, and damn your mother for a whore."

I took the money and stuffed it into my pocket. Then I gave the stone to Hisham. "If you

hurry," I said, slurring my words despite the fact that I hadn't had a drink or any drugs all day,

"you'll catch up with him. The bus hasn't left yet."

The man grinned at me. "Let me give you a lesson in shrewd business. The esteemed

gentleman offered me a thousand dinars for a four thousand dinar stone. Should I take the

reward, or sell the stone for its full value?"

"Selling the stone will bring trouble," I said.

"Let me worry about that. Now you go to hell. I don't ever want to see you around here

again."

He needn't worry about that. As I left the decrepit coffeehouse, I popped out the moddy I was

wearing. I don't know where the Half-Hajj had gotten it; it had a Malaccan label on it, but I

didn't think it was an over-the-counter piece of hardware. It was a dumbing-down

moddy; when I chipped it in, it ate about half of my intel-lect and left me shambling, stupid,

and just barely able to carry out my half of the plan. With it out, the world sud-denly poured

back into my consciousness, and it was like waking from a bleary, drugged sleep. I was

always angry for half an hour after I popped that moddy. I hated myself for agreeing to wear

it, I hated Saied for conning me into doing it. He wouldn't wear it, not the Half-Hajj and his

precious self-image. So I wore it, even though I'm gifted with twice the intracranial

modifications of anybody else around, enough daddy capacity to make me the most

talented son of a bitch in creation. And still Saied per-suaded me to damp myself out to the

point of near vegeta-bility.

On the bus, I sat next to him, but I didn't want to talk to him or listen to him gloat.

"What'd we get for that chunk of glass?" he wanted to know. He'd already replaced the real

diamond in his ring.

I just handed the money to him. It was his game, it was his score. I couldn't have cared less. I

don't even know why I went along with him, except that he'd said he wouldn't come to Algeria

with me unless I did.

He counted the bills. "Two hundred? That's all? We got more the last two times. Oh well,

what the hell—that's two hundred dinars more we can blow in Algiers. 'Come with me to the

Kasbah.' Little do those gazelle-eyed boys know what's stealing toward them even now,

through the lemon-scented night."

"This stinking bus, that's what, Saied."

He looked at me with wide eyes, then laughed. "You got no romance in you, Marid," he said.

"Ever since you had your brain wired, you been no fun at all."

"How about that." I didn't want to talk anymore. I pretended that I was going to sleep. I just

closed my eyes and listened to the bus thumping and thudding over the broken pavement,

with the unending arguments and laughter of the other passengers all around me. It was

crowded and hot on that reeking bus, but it was carrying

me hour by hour nearer to the solution of my own mys-tery. I had come to a point in my life

where I needed to find out who I really was.

The bus stopped in the Barbary town of Annaba, and an old man with a grizzled gray beard

came aboard selling apricot nectar. I got some for myself and some for the Half-Hajj.

Apricots are the pride of Mauretania, and the juice was the first real sign that I was getting

close to home. I closed my eyes and inhaled that delicate apricot aroma, then swallowed a

mouthful of juice and savored the thick sweetness. Saied just gulped his down with a grunt

and gave me a blunt "Thanks." The guy's got all the refinement of a dead bat.

The road angled south, away from the dark, invisible coast toward the city of Constantine.

Although it was get-ting late, almost midnight, I told Saied that I wanted to get off the bus and

grab some supper. I hadn't eaten anything since noon. Constantine is built on a high

limestone bluff, the only ancient town in eastern Algeria to survive through centuries of

foreign invasions. The only thing I cared about, though, was food. There is a local dish in

Constantine called chorba beida bel kefta, a meatball soup made with onions, pepper,

chickpeas, almonds, and cinnamon. I hadn't tasted it in at least fifteen years, and I didn't

care if it meant missing the bus and having to wait until tomorrow for another, I was going to

have some. Saied thought I was crazy.

I had my soup, and it was wonderful. Saied just watched me wordlessly and sipped a glass

of tea. We got back on the bus in time. I felt good now, comfortably full and warmed by a

nostalgic glow. I took the window seat, hoping that I'd be able to see some familiar

landscape as we passed through Jijel and Mansouria. Of course, it was as black as the

inside of my pocket beyond the glass, and I saw nothing but the moon and the fiercely

twinkling stars. Still, I pretended to myself that I could make out land-marks that meant I was

drawing closer to Algiers, the city where I had spent a lot of my childhood.

When at last we pulled into Algiers sometime after sunrise, the Half-Hajj shook me awake. I

didn't remember falling asleep. I felt terrible. My head felt like it had been crammed full of

sharp-edged broken glass, and I had a pinched nerve in my neck, too. I took out my pillcase

and

stared into it for a while. Did I prefer to make my en-trance into Algiers hallucinating,

narcotized, or somnambulant? It was a difficult decision. I went for pain-free but conscious,

so I fished out eight tabs of Sonneine. The sunnies obliterated my headache—and every

other mildly unpleasant sensation—and I more or less floated from the bus station in

Mustapha to a cab.

"You're stoned," said Saied when we got to the back of the taxi. I told the driver to take us to

a public data library.

"Me? Stoned? When have you ever known me to be stoned so early in the morning?"

"Yesterday. The day before yesterday. The day be-fore that."

"I mean except for then. I function better with a ton of opiates in me than most people do

straight."

"Sure you do."

I stared out the taxi's window. "Anyway," I said, "I've got a rack of daddies that can

compensate." There isn't another blazebrain in the Arab world with the custom-made

equipment I've got. My special daddies control my hypothalamic functions, so I can tune out

fatigue and fear, hunger and thirst and pain. They can boost my sensory input too.

"Marid Audran, Silicon Superman."

"Look," I said, annoyed by Saied's attitude, "for a long time I was terrified of getting wired,

but now I don't know how I ever got along without it."

"Then why the hell are you still decimating your brain cells with drugs?" asked the Half-Hajj.

"Call me old-fashioned. Besides, when I pop the dad-dies out, I feel terrible. All that

suppressed fatigue and pain hit me at once."

"And you don't get paybacks with your sunnies and beauties, right? That what you're

saying?"

"Shut up, Saied. Why the hell are you so concerned all of a sudden?"

He looked at me sideways and smiled. "The religion has this ban on liquor and hard drugs,

you know." And this coming from the Half-Hajj who, if he'd ever been inside a mosque in his

life, was there only to check out the boys' school.

So in ten or fifteen minutes the cab driver let us out at

the library. I felt a peculiar nervous excitement, although I didn't understand why. All I was

doing was climbing the granite steps of a public building; why should I be so wound up? I

tried to occupy my mind with more pleasant thoughts.

Inside, there were a number of terminals vacant. I sat down at the gray screen of a battered

Bab el-Marifi. It asked me what sort of search I wanted to conduct. The machine's voice

synthesizer had been designed in one of the North American republics, and it was having a

lot of trouble pronouncing Arabic. I said, "Name," then "Enter." When the cursor

appeared again, I said, "Monroe comma Angel." The data deck thought about that for a

while, then white letters began flicking across its bright face:

Angel Monroe

16, Rue du Sahara '

(Upper) Kasbah

Algiers

Mauretania

04-B-28

I had the machine print out the address. The Half-Hajj raised his eyebrows at me and I

nodded. "Looks like I'm gonna get some answers."

"Inshallah," murmured Saied. If God wills.

We went back out into the hot, steamy morning to find another taxi. It didn't take long

to get from the library to the Kasbah. There wasn't as much traffic as I remem-bered from my

childhood—not vehicular traffic, anyway; but there was still the slow, unavoidable battalions

of I heavily laden donkeys being cajoled through the narrow I streets.

The Rue du Sahara is a mistake. I remember someone telling me long ago that the true

name of the street was actually the Rue N'sara, or Street of the Christians. I don't know how

it got corrupted. Very little of Algiers has any real connection to the Sahara. After all, it's a

hell of a long hike from the Mediterranean port to the desert. It doesn't make any difference

these days, though; the new name is the only one anyone ever uses. It's even found its way

onto all the official maps, so that closes the matter.

Number 16 was an exhausted, crumbling brick pile

with two bulging upper stories that hung out over the cobbled street. The apartment house

across the way did the same, and the two buildings almost kissed above my head, like two

dowdy old matrons leaning across a back fence. There was a jumble of mail slots, and I

found Angel Monroe's name scrawled on a card in fading ink. I jammed my thumb on her

buzzer. There was no lock on the front door, so I went in and climbed the first flight of stairs.

Saied was right behind me.

Her apartment turned out to be on the third floor, in the rear. The hallway was carpeted, if

that's the right word, with a dull, gritty fabric that had at one time been maroon. The traffic of

uncountable feet had completely worn through the material in many places, so that the dry

gray wood of the floor was visible through the holes. The walls were covered with a filthy tan

wallpaper, hanging down here and there in forlorn strips. The air had an odd, sour tang to it,

as if the building were occupied by people who had come there to die, or who were certainly

sick enough to die but instead hung on in lonely misery. From behind one door I could hear a

family battle, complete with bellowed threats and crashing crockery, while from another

apartment came insane, high-pitched laughter and the sound of flesh loudly smacking flesh. I

didn't want to know about it.

I stood outside the shabby door to Angel Monroe's flat and took a deep breath. I glanced at

the Half-Hajj, but he just gave me a shrug and pointedly looked away. Some friend. I was on

my own. I told myself that nothing weird was going to happen—a lie just to get myself to take

George Alec Effinger - Marid 2 - A Fire In The Sun

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