Richard Kadrey - Metrophage

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Richard Kadrey: Metrophage

Richard Kadrey

Metrophage

Chapter One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen

You may read these files, copy, distribute them, or print them out

and make them into little hats. You may do anything you like with

them as long as you do not change them in any way or receive

money for them.

I've put METROPHAGE and HORSE LATITUDES into free distribution

on the Net, but I retain all copyrights to the works.

If you have any problems or comments on the works or their

distribution, you can email me at: kadrey@well.com

And remember, if you charge anyone money for these files you are

the nothing but ambulatory puke, and I hope a passing jet drops a 15

pound radar magnet on your hard drive.

Richard Kadrey

May 1995

*****************************************************

METROPHAGE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ONLINE EDITION

METROPHAGE was my first novel. It came out in the U.S. in 1988, and

was gone faster than bearclaws at a cop convention. Since it was first

published, METROPHAGE has been reprinted in French, German,

Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew. Surprisingly, we're still

selling rights in various countries around the world.

The protagonist of METROPHAGE is Jonny Qabbala, a drug dealer in

his early 20s. When I wrote the book, I denied hugely that it was in

any way autobiographical. This was, of course, a stinking lie.

Aside from the fact I've never shot anyone or used cobra venom as a

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Richard Kadrey: Metrophage

recreational drug, METROPHAGE is a distillation of everything I'd

done, seen, read, heard or thought about up until the time I wrote it,

and is as purely autobiographical as anything I'm ever likely to

write. Which isn't to say you should read the book literally. Some of

what happens in METROPHAGE is straight reportage, and while some

of the events in the book happened to me, some of them happened to

friends. The things you think are the obvious truths probably aren't.

The most ridiculous and unbelievable things are quite possibly true.

Plus, the book is full of lies. It's a work of fiction. I made up a lot of

it. Yet it remains the psychological story of my life up into my mid-

twenties. This is not meant to dazzle anyone with my

accomplishments. If you read the book, you'll quickly discover an

unflattering truth: Jonny Qabbala is a jerk. He's not evil or stupid or

even a bad guy, he's just young and clueless. Jonny finds it difficult

to act decisively or take a stand, and when he does either, he's

usually wrong. Even when I was writing the book, when I was closer

to Jonny's age and temperament, I frequently wanted to crack his

skull with the collected works of Iggy Pop (which is another bit of

trivia: Iggy is in the book, but I won't tell you what character he

plays; if you've ever seen Iggy perform, you'll know).

Time passes, though, and I no longer want to slap Jonny around. I'm

not so far from Jonny that I can see him as my offspring, but I can

easily imagine him as a kid brother. As such, I can forgive him a lot

of his faults because as lame as he is, he's usually trying to do the

right thing.

The ending of METROPHAGE is deliberately open. A lot of people

have assumed that I intended to write a sequel. The truth is, I never

even considered it. However, I can't help but feel a certain

responsibility for Jonny, since I sort of left him in the middle of

downtown Nowhere. In order to settle Jonny's fate in my own mind,

I've written him into several stories and into one abandoned novel.

In the end, I took him out of all of them (and it doesn't get much

worse than ending up on the cutting room floor of a book that doesn't

even exist). Still, he tries to weasel his way into each book I write,

and I always try to find room for him. Sooner or later, he'll land in

one of them. I just hope I don't find him behind the counter of some

asteroid belt McDonald's asking, You want fries with that?"

Richard Kadrey

San Francisco, May 1995

**********************************************************************

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Richard Kadrey: Metrophage

METROPHAGE

by Richard Kadrey

Now I lay me down to sleep

I hear the sirens in the street

All my dreams are made of chrome

I have no way to get back home

--Tom Waits

ONE:

The Petrified City

A crip by the name of Easy Money ran the HoloWhores down at

a place called Carnaby's Pit. At least he had been running them the

last time Jonny Qabbala, drug dealer, ex-Committee for Public Health

bounty hunter, and self-confessed loser, had paid him a visit. Jonny

was hoping that Easy was still working the Pit. He had a present for

him from a dead friend.

The ugly and untimely murder of Raquin, the chemist, had left

an empty spot in the pit of Jonny's stomach. Not just because Raquin

had been Jonny's connection (since it was a simple matter for Jonny

to get his dope directly from Raquin's boss, the smuggler lord

Conover) but over the year or so of their acquaintance Raquin had

become, to Jonny, something close to a friend. And close to a friend"

was as much as Jonny generally allowed himself to become. It was

fear of loss more than any lack of feelings on his part that kept Jonny

at a distance from most of the other losers and one-percenters that

crowded Los Angeles.

Overhead, the moon was a bone-white sickle. Jonny wondered,

idly, if the Alpha Rats were watching Los Angeles that night. What

would the extraterrestrials think, through a quarter million miles of

empty space, when they saw him put a bullet through Easy Money's

head?

Jonny caught sight of Carnaby's Pit a few blocks away, quartz

prisms projecting captured atrocity videos from the Lunar Border

Wars. On a flat expanse of wall above the club's entrance, a New

Palestine soldier in a vacuum suit was smashing the faceplate of a

Mishima Guardsman. The Guardsman's blood bubbled from his

helmet, droplets boiling to hard black jewels as the soundtrack from

an ancient MGM musical played in the background: I want to be

loved by you, by you, and nobody else but you... The words

CARNABY'S PIT periodically superimposed themselves over the scene

in Kana and Roman characters.

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Richard Kadrey: Metrophage

Jonny pushed his way through a group of Pemex-U.S. workers

negotiating for rice wine at the weekend mercado that covered the

street near Fountain Avenue. The air was thick with the scents of

animal waste, sweat, roasting meat and hashish. Chickens beat their

wings against wire cages while legless vat-grown sheep lay docilely

in the butchers' stalls, waiting for their turn on their skewers. Old

women in hipils motioned Jonny over, holding up bright bolts of

cloth, bootleg computer chips and glittering butterfly knives. Jonny

kept shaking his head. No, gracias...Ima ja naku...Nein..."

Handsome young Germans, six of them, all in the latest eel-skin

cowboy boots and silk overalls (marked with the logo of some

European movie studio) lugged portable holo-recorders between the

stalls, making another in their endless series of World Link

documentaries about the death of street culture. Those quickly-made

documentaries and panel discussions about the Alpha Rats (who they

were, their intentions, their burden on the economy of the West)

seemed to make up the bulk of the Link's broadcasts these days.

Jonny swore that if he heard one more learned expert coolly

discussing the logic of drug and food rationing, he was going to

personally bury fifty kilos of C-4 plastique under the local Link

station and make his own contribution to street culture by liberating

a few acres of prime urban landscape.

At a stall near the back of the place, an old curandera was

selling her evil eye potions and a collection of malfunctioning robot

sentries: cybernetic goshawks, rottweilers and cougars, simple track

and kill devices controlled by a tabletop microwave link. The sentries

had been very popular with the nouveau riche toward the end of the

previous century, but the animals' electronics and maintenance

had proved to be remarkably unreliable. Eventually they passed, like

much of the mercado's merchandise, down from the hills, through the

rigid social strata of L.A., until they landed in the street, last stop

before the junk heap.

There by the twitching half-growling animals, the crew set up

their lights. Jonny hung around and watched them block out shots.

The film makers infuriated him, but in their own way, Jonny knew,

they were right.

The market was dying. When he had been a boy, Jonny

remembered it sprawling over a dozen square blocks. Now it barely

managed to occupy two. And most of the merchandise was junk.

Chromium paint flaked off the electronic components, revealing

ancient rusted works. The hydroponically grown fruits and

vegetables grew steadily smaller and more tasteless each season. All

that seemed to keep the market going was the communally owned

bank of leaking solar batteries. During the rolling brown-outs, they

alone kept the tortilla ovens hot, the fluorescents flickering, the

videos cranking.

Isn't it time you kids were in bed?" Jonny asked, stepping on

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Richard Kadrey: Metrophage

the toes of a lanky blonde camera man. Sprechen sie 'parasite'?"

Huddled in the doorways of clubs and arcades, groups of

fingerprint changers, nerve tissue merchants and brain cell thieves

regarded the crowd with hollow eyes, as if assessing their worth in

cash at every moment. The gangs, too, were out in force that hot

night: the Lizard Imperials (snake-skin boots and surgically split

tongues), the Zombie Analytics (subcutaneous pixels offering up

flickering flesh-images of dead video and rock stars), the anarchist-

physician Croakers, the Yakuza Rebels and the Gypsy Titans; even the

Naginata Sisters were out, swinging blades and drinking on the

corner in front of the Iron Orchid.

As Jonny crossed Sunset, a few of the Sisters waved to him.

When he waved back, a gust of wind pulled open his tunic, revealing

his Futukoro Automatic. The Sisters whooped and laughed at the

sight of the weapon, feigning terror. A tall Sister with Maori facial

tattoos crooked her finger and began blasting him with an imaginary

gun.

Coming toward him from the opposite direction was a ring of

massive Otoko Niku. Meat Boys-- uniformly ugly acromegalic giants,

each easily three meters tall. In the center of the protective ring, an

old Yakuza oyabun openly stared and pointed at people. It was rare

enough for people to see a pure-blood Japanese in the street that

they stopped to stare back, until the Meat Boys cuffed them away.

Jonny thought of a word then.

Gaijin. Foreigner. Alien.

That's me. I'm gaijin, Jonny thought. He could find little comfort

in the familiarity of the streets. Jonny realized that by

acknowledging his desire to kill Easy Money, he had cut himself off

from everybody around him. He walked slower. Twice he almost

turned back.

A tiny nisei girl tried to sell him a peculiar local variation on

sushi-- refried beans and raw tuna wrapped in a corn husk--

commonly known as Salmonella Roll. Jonny declined and ducked into

an alley. There, he swallowed two tabs of Desoxyn, hijacked from a

Committee warehouse.

It was good stuff. Very soon, a tingling began in his finger-

tips and moved up his arms, filling him with a pleasantly tense,

almost sexual, energy. Beads of sweat broke out on his hands and

face, ran down his chest. He thought of Sumi.

I might not be back tonight," he had told her before he left the

squat they shared. Uno tareja. Got some deliveries to make," he lied.

Routine stuff."

Then why are you taking that blunderbuss?" Sumi asked,

pointing to the Futukoro pistol Jonny had hidden under his tunic.

Jonny ignored her question and tried to look very interested in

the process of lacing up his steel-tipped boots. Sumi terrified him.

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RichardKadrey:MetrophageRichardKadreyMetrophageChapterOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenTwelveThirteenYoumayreadthesefiles,copy,distributethem,orprintthemoutandmakethemintolittlehats.Youmaydoanythingyoulikewiththemaslongasyoudonotchangetheminanywayorreceivemoneyforthem.I'veputMETROPHAGEan...

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Richard Kadrey - Metrophage

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