Complete Short Fiction, page 50
If I came home to find Cynthia fixing the toaster, I knew she was giving it the IQ of a professor of alien linguistics and the instincts of the Marquis de Sade—it would toast bread with such art! Such delicate exquisite pain! Which is not to say that I didn’t appreciate her efforts—it’s just that sometimes I wanted to make myself a sandwich without feeling that I needed an advanced degree in Comparative Technologies and a black belt in multispecies kung fu to do it.
Cynthia was setting gear up around Fungo and Louise’s grill, her face flushed and excited. The air around her was filled with yellow glittering pinpoints marking streamlines and vortex centers. It was heartbreaking to watch her, because nothing else excited her quite so much, not even me.
“Matthew!” someone called from above. I peered up into the sunlight. It was Mercado, wrestling furiously with a clutch of friendly hn’ga eggs. “Dammit, what is this stuff?”
“Someone else’s breakfast,” I said. “Want some coffee? You’re late.” I grabbed a sheaf of annotated Landing City maps off the table. “I have a line on something interesting. There’s a Ssama temple acolyte—you know, one of those birth-traumatized, semi-psychotic, post-reproductive females they use for religious technology development—”
“No time for that,” he cried, as he grabbed a cup, dumped coffee and sugar into it, and chugged it down. He didn’t notice a thing. “It’s TzinTzinatty.” Unexpectedly, he chortled. “I guess that’s what happens to hypochondriacs.”
“What, Merc? What’s happened to TzinTzin?” I asked urgently. TzinTzinatty was the best findit in the business. His nose for profitable alien artifacts was almost supernatural. I could work our way through the maze of Landing City environmental structures and Mercado could cut deals with various alien security services, but it took TzinTzin to pluck out the essential piece of gadgetry that made the difference between profit and disaster.
“Come on.” Mercado started climbing back up the sunsail filament. “I have to show you. Just telling you won’t make any sense.”
“Cynthia?” I yelled as I followed.
“What is it, honey?” Her voice came faintly up from the maze of equipment she’d set up around Fungo’s grill. I recognized some Pelbargian fractional-dimension manipulators and a fluid vortex focus. Those damn eggs were going to stay on that grill, or my beloved wife was going to die trying.
“I have to go. Business.”
“When will you be back?”
I looked at Mercado, who shrugged. “Don’t expect me. This could take a while.”
We climbed onto the outer surface of the booster. Mercado’s Antarean vehicle, originally intended for military operations on some alien moon, rested on the top, having climbed adhesively up the side. Landing City loomed beyond, its mysterious towers glowing in the sunlight. Mercado jumped into the driver’s seat.
“Try to make it for dinner.” Cynthia sounded concerned. She thought tech-smuggling was a dangerous line of work.
“I will. I love—holy shit!”
The Mercadomobile was already rolling, ripping down the booster’s side. I had been holding on to the door frame and had to sling myself in before he yanked me over the curve and tumbled me to the distant ground, something I was sure he would have watched with goggle-eyed interest. I strapped myself in, hanging from the increasingly angled seat, almost strangling myself on the belts intended to restrain anatomical parts I did not possess. “Dammit, Merc—”
“We gotta go, Matt. This is serious.”
We slid down the gray fabric-like road that led to Slitherville, the Mercadomobile making a noise like a thumbnail along an elastic underwear waistband. The Simlese had laid the road, spitting it out of some gadget that resembled a flying nose-hair remover, as part of their incomprehensible place in the agreements that governed alien relations in Landing City and the surrounding human tech-looting communities known collectively as Jackpot.
I sat back and worried about TzinTzin. He was a great findit, the best. He stole things even our alien buddies didn’t know were important. They usually didn’t even miss them when they disappeared.
For example, a creche monitor used to quiet first-in-star Tan grubs turned out to be dynamite for coordinating construction robots in orbital spaceship yards. Of course, the robots’ internal self-ID schemata tended to get scrambled, causing them to perceive the vessel they were constructing as their mother, link up to its power lines, and nurse contentedly until its central power core was drained.
A random-bouncing toy that entertained Canopan brats, keeping them from going gloaming-feral and eating their parents’ gene-modified cyborg servants, served as the basis of a near-silent concrete shatterer, great for getting rid of the abandoned, crumbling urb-complexes that you find everywhere.
Sphinx’s Wheels, hydroclimatrons, epidermal tingle-scrubbers—all had come from TzinTzin’s clever thefts of alien plumbing fixtures, plant misters, and office cleaning equipment.
We slid into Slitherville, a dismal collection of shacks and sagging tensile domes housing a collection of reptiles and human beings who had found that their bodily parasites and domestic pests were cross-edible and had great, bellowing rat-and-weenie roasts that were the main social events of Jackpot. Weenies were a weird soft-fleshed creature that lived under the scales of giant saurians. Great with mustard, once you’ve cut the suckers off.
We slowed down. Run over a non-sentient nymph oligosaur—about the size of a chipmunk, though the adults are bigger than booster fuel tanks—and momma would put her tusks through our heads and hang us up as auxiliary egg-storage carcasses.
“Well, all right,” Mercado said. “Here we are.”
The Mercadomobile drifted to a halt at the main sewer outflow of Slitherville, a dramatic double-arched structure that spit greasy greenish-brown goo. By contract, all the waste from all over Jackpot was mixed and squirted out here. The smell was indescribably bad, the feces of a dozen species.
Looming above was a tangle of rickety gantries supporting flexible parabolic mirrors. The mirrors shifted in the sun, reflecting light down at the sewage, which boiled and steamed in response. Giant saurians relaxed, their bellies in the rotting goo, as intense foci of sunlight scorched across their back plates, exploding desperately fleeing parasites like popcorn. Fangs bared, the saurians thrummed in contentment.
Mercado looked out over the resting thunder lizards, formerly inhabitants of Rigel VII and Spica II, as if mesmerized by their vast mass, the colored spikes on their spines, the wailing, organ-like sounds of their great laboring lungs.
“Where is he, Merc?”
“Eh?” He was suddenly tentative. “Here. He’s here. Come on. Wait, wait.” He reached behind the seat and pulled out two reflective parasols. “Watch the mirrors. Let’s go.”
We crossed the sizzling muck, keeping our eyes on the parabolic foci, dextrously flipping our parasols to spill off deadly sunlight. Our shadows fell across the head of a massive cancrosaur, who blinked tiny red eyes in annoyance and rolled a long, needle-covered tongue after us. We skittered away like water bugs, splashing ankle-deep through sewage that I could now see was full of writhing translucent worms. Their crystal-toothed mouthparts rasped on my boots.
We paused at a curving ridge that artistically mixed a stream of gooey yellow-green sewage with a stream that was looser and redder, making a nice swirly effect. Just beyond this excremental pinwheel lay an odd creature indeed. A network of red, coral-like tendrils rose up from the ground two or three feet, supporting what looked like a mass of impossible, multi-colored organs, full of complex ducted vessels, oily secreting tissues, and frantically beating cilia. Rising over it all were dark-purple multilobed air sacs, abandoned barrage balloons inflating and deflating forlornly with the sound of a harmonica filled with a mixture of corn syrup and sewing machine oil. Lidless eyes dangled from long, myelin-sheathed optic nerves like the decoration of an anatomically enthusiastic peacock.
Mercado stopped and stared at the thing, his face gloomy.
“What is it, Merc? What’s the problem?”
“That’s the problem.” He pointed at the interspecies pathology lab display. “That’s TzinTzinatty.”
“Jesus. What the hell happened to him?” I walked up to the weird agglomeration of incomprehensible body parts, feeling sick, really sick, no longer just nauseated by the sewage smell. I’d worked with TzinTzin for years. I reached out a hand—and pulled it back. God only knew what touching him would do. “TzinTzin? Are you there? Can you hear me?” Mercado and I held our breaths. A saurian shifted with a groan, sending waves of sewage over our ankles, but TzinTzinatty did not respond.
“He went to the doctor with a complaint, some little shit thing, I don’t even remember what.” Mercado was annoyed. TzinTzin was famous for his minor health complaints. “And something went wrong.”
“Looks that way.”
“Hey, don’t get on my ass,” Mercado said aggrievedly. “We have to help him.” He averted his eyes from TzinTzin. “He had a bunch of data for Cynthia, some damn thing.”
“He loves giving her oddball data,” I said. “It’s his way of flirting.”
“Well, however you want to run your marriage. . . . We were talking on the phone about getting over to your place when it happened. He was real excited about this new smuggling idea of his—whatever the hell it is. Then he said he felt funny, like his adrenal medullas were full of centipedes, and I lost contact.”
“Poor bastard.” I remembered the bony TzinTzin sitting gloomily on our pad, talking to Cynthia. She could actually make him smile, something I’d never succeeded in doing. “All right—first step. What doctor did he go to? Did he say?”
“Yeah. Even wanted to recommend him. I suggest you give him a pass, but that’s just my opinion. Health’s a pretty individual thing. Lessee . . . a [Hic]Kang name of [load-of-gravel-down-corrugated-aluminum/small-animals-thrown-through-turbine-blades],” Mercado managed to choke out. “Near as I can get it. Left my vocoder at home. Don’t ask me to say it again.”
“That’s good enough. Where’s he hang out his shingle?”
“Out in Bugtown, green zone. A chlorogasper. Never trust those halogen inhalers. Rowdy bunch and you can’t even see through the damn air.”
“Okay. Let’s get him into the car.”
“What?” Mercado contemplated the oozing mass of complex tissue in front of us with dismay.
“We can’t just leave him here. He’s our friend.”
“Well . . . yeah. Hell of a scene.”
“Let’s go.” So we hoisted the unfortunate TzinTzinatty into the capacious rear of the Mercadomobile. As we tugged at him, organs of no known use came loose and slithered over each other: a nest of tetrahedral green crystals in a mass of pink fat globules, a multilobed liver-like thing that generated barely visible gas-filled spheres, tensile-structure bladders filled with fluorescent liquids.
“Bugtown,” I said.
“You got it.”
We entered Bugtown, bumping over raised culverts and open grates spilling toxic gases. I had a nose-breather on in a minute, Mercado the same. Lots of reducing-atmosphere-inhaling types in Bugtown. Methane, halogens, nitric acid, a big mess, and they never maintained their pipes, squirting the deadly stuff left and right. Leave a bicycle locked to a meter in Bugtown and in a day it would be gone—not stolen, but dissolved, only the butt-conforming gel saddle left lying on the ground like a cryptic fossil.
I had glanced back at TzinTzin a couple of times to see if he was OK, but had stopped that in a hurry. Some swollen, fuzz-covered version of his spine had emerged from the tangle of organs and now arched over everything, each vertebra rotating independently on its axis with a painful squeaking sound. I could have squirted some of Cynthia’s microsphere lubricant into the joints, but feared making him explode or fall into tiny slithery pieces or something. I’m not very good at first aid.
The [Hic]Kang physician’s office was on a street of crystal buildings proof against the artificially generated corrosive atmosphere. Puzzling out the holographic advertising glyphs, we finally found the right place.
“Yes, yes, yes?” The [Hic]Kang was a huge, hunched-over creature resembling an insectoidal tyrannosaur with arthritis serious enough that it had pulled its skeleton outside its skin and left it there to facilitate repairs. Each “yes?” involved a puff of chlorine that swirled up to add to the green haze overhead. “What you want? Organ recalibration? Limb stretching? We complete service facility. And price reasonable.” He gestured, and obscure surgical machinery moved in the background.
“Are you [clatter/shriek]?” I asked, acknowledging to myself that my command of [Hic]Kang was not the equal of Mercado’s.
“Yes, yes, yes! Full license [loud-clatter/yelp-twitter]. Certificated interspecies maintenance.”
“[Clatter/yelp-twitter] means ‘physician’ in [Hic]Kang,” Mercado advised me, sotto voce. “Each physician’s specific name is a variation on the main theme, kind of a verbal taxonomic parallelism, you know?” He raised his voice. “Are you denominated [load-of-gravel-down-corrugated-aluminum/small-animals-thrown-through-turbine-blades]?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Chlorine puffed up. “Acquire practice, cheap. Many solar rotations, same location. Welcome!”
“Who the hell are you, then?” Mercado was irritated. “ ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ my ass. What happened to the other guy? We need him.”
“Yes, yes, yes. I am [cement-mixer-filled-with-inferior-grade-of-concrete/ferrets-and-weasels-with-their-heads-squeezed-in-vises]. This my business now, inheritance and purchase. Neovascularization, sensory implants, limb multiplication? Yes? Yes, yes?” A hydra-headed multiblade spun up, glittering in the light through the glass roof.
“No, thanks,” I said, backing away. “We need some information—”
“Yes, yes, yes, I have none, none at all. Sold, purchased, transacted, gone. You first in file? First for you!” A Vfg readscreen slid up, a black void waiting for input. Mist came off its over-enthusiastically cooled superconducting surface. “See? Yes, yes, yes? Empty, cold, en-vacuumed, in through out.”
It took a while. Extracting information from the [Hic]Kang doctor, if that’s what he really was, was like sucking cheese through a straw. As it turned out, he had acquired the business from the doctor who had performed the treatment on TzinTzinatty, a doctor with a subtly different name, but then had sold all of the medical records to some third-party data jobber—or at least that was the understanding we managed to get.
“Yes, yes, oh oh oh yes. Physio-industrial mass data distribution. High valuta return. Re-jig and re-skill device complex! Deal good.” He thumped his exoskeleton in delight at his own business acumen. “Yes, yes, yes! Cranial enlargement, provisions for advanced infoprocessing?” A chromed half-sphere like a commercial hair dryer lowered itself to a foot over my head. I looked up. It was lined with rasping suckers, countless tiny mouths hungry for my skull. They gaped wide as they came closer.
I dropped to the floor and rolled across the debris-littered floor, coming up in a defensive posture—with my hands firmly over my head.
“Cut it out!” Mercado said sharply. “We’re trying to get information. That’s rude.”
“Sorry.” The cranial enlarger slid back up into the green haze overhead. “But how the hell are we going to get any information?”
“Descend! Yes, yes, oh yes. Descend in inversion. Device extraordinary. Inversion in spiritual data.”
“You suggest—”
“Yes, yes—”
A brutally loud wailing cut him off. Searing laser flickers glared through the glass building structure. “Don’t move a goddam limb or organ!” a stentorian voice bellowed, loud enough that hairline cracks appeared in a skylight. “Slack your fluids, flaccidify your ligaments. Thank you in advance for your cooperation, scum boluses.”
“Great,” Mercado said bitterly. “Just great.”
The subtle and mannered style of Captain Gorf, Head Enforcer of Techimport in these parts, was instantly recognizable.
“Think about it this way,” I said consolingly. “When was the last time we ran into Gorf when we were doing absolutely nothing whatsoever illegal?”
Mercado brightened. “We’re as slick as a couple of steam-cleaned Tan grubs. This is going to twist his ass, big time.”
“Let’s not get too foreskin-in-your-face about this,” I cautioned. “We have things to—”
Fuchsia-uniformed Techimport squadguys sprinted in, weapons at ready. Their corneas had been buffed and front-silvered, turning their eyeballs into featureless gleaming spheres. Impressive in an interrogation, they gave terrible vision in the darkened medico-office. The squadguys tripped and slid like puppies on the garbage-covered floor. One of them wanged his forehead into an overhanging piece of equipment and slammed to the ground, unconscious. The others immediately dropped to the floor and prepared to open fire.
“Calm down, boys. Calm down.” Captain Gorf stomped in after his squadguys, immense belly jiggling. It wasn’t a real belly, of course, just as Gorf wasn’t a real human being, as his bulging, multifaceted eyes indicated. The big stomach still gave him the appearance of a corrupt southern sheriff, one whose mother had consorted with palmetto bugs. He glared at the [Hic]Kang, then spoke with an accent even worse than mine. “Dr. [fart/wheeze], you’re in a heap of trouble—” For the first time he saw Mercado and me. He grinned. “Hey, hey. What have we here? This is going to be more fun than I thought. Right, boys?” The squadguys laughed dutifully, except for the unconscious one.
“Hiya, Cap’n, what’s up?” Mercado managed to sound annoying and look guilty at the same time. He has a history of bad relations with authority figures. Quite unlike me, of course.
“Well, now, that depends on you, don’t it? Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here?”
“Getting medical help,” I said. “What else would we be doing here?” And if he hadn’t come here after us, what had he come for?
