reMix

Chapter Seventeen If it bleeds/We can kill it

“Fixx Valmont?”

“You got it...”

A nervous courier gave Fixx the 1st Virtual platinum card on his way out of VIP Customs. There had been a time he’d owned not just platinum cards but his own orbiting bank, but then, go back fifteen years and his arrival at somewhere like Planetside Arrivals would have ground the place to a halt. CySat, C3N, all freelance Ishies not nailed down or wired into a feed recharging batteries would have been crawling up the walls to get a grab of him, quite literally. Hell, there’d been five versions of the Fixx Valmont doll, bending arms, working legs, each one chipped up to say “You got it,” and a lot else beside.

Fixx took his 1stV card, sliding it effortlessly into the inside pocket of his swirling black cloak. It would be drawn against the US Navy’s own Luna account. Somehow Fixx doubted if they even realized they still had one.

He’d been waved through Immigration, excused sonic cleaning because of the electronics in his arm, and had his cloak, cotton shirt and black leather trousers taken by an embarrassed young woman in uniform, who returned with them a few minutes later, already irradiated and freeze-pressed.

“I’ve also been told to give you this.” Head down, the courier handed Fixx a small neoprene-sheathed blade, her eyes looking everywhere except at his metal arm. Or it might have been the explosion of yellow bruises that embarrassed the courier. But then, short of sitting around in a decompression chamber waiting for hyperbaric oxygenation to force extra oxygen into his bloodstream, Fixx was stuck with the bruising for as long as it took his body to repair the damaged tissue.

“Thanks.” The musician’s easy Dublin drawl was soft, miles from the rough Parisian street snarl he’d taken to using. Fuck knew what LISA had dumped into his records, but whatever it was, Fixx was enjoying the attention. It was like his early days of being on board with Sony, before being famous became hard work.

Fixx could almost believe he was up here to launch some new Sim. StarGlazz, maybe. Perhaps trying to screw over Bernie, his manager, in court hadn’t been such a good idea after all...

“Is everything okay?” the courier asked.

“Sure is.” Fixx ran his thumb along the ice-tempered molybdenum/vanadium blade, gently as he could, and blood beaded his skin, strung out in a line like little red pearls. “In fact, it couldn’t be better.” He nodded, tiny dreadlocks bobbing against the shaved sides of his head, tipped into slo/mo by the one-sixth gravity. So far, that was the only thing he was having trouble with, the slight time lapse between physical action and reaction. Didn’t look like Ghost was enjoying it much either.

The courier looked doubtfully at the kitten. “Regulations don’t...” But whatever she was about to say, she didn’t bother. It wasn’t her problem. Nodding quickly, the woman backed away.

Shit, thought Fixx, maybe LISA hadn’t told them he was filthy rich and famous after all, maybe it was just contagious. He was still watching the scuttling courier when someone else materialized at his side. Understated grey suit, lead-weighted leather shoes, white cotton shirt and red tie, a very slight bulge under one arm.

“Rez Aziz,” the man announced, sticking out his hand.

Fixx shook, feeling the firm shake of a professional. Clear brown eyes were watching him, gauging something. From the close-cropped hair and heavy moustache to the trim gut that spoke of workouts in an artificial gravity gym, everything about the man said police.

If he found Fixx’s cloak and leather trousers unusual, he didn’t let it show. Instead he flipped a pastel from a plastic dispenser and sucked heavily. A scent of violets filled the air between them.

“We weren’t expecting to see you again...”

“Surprise trip,” said Fixx.

The man looked at him, eyes narrowing as he examined the hasty repair job on Fixx’s face. He looked like the kind of man who could tell you, to the last blow, just how long it would take to inflict damage of that level.

“All the same...” His words were was emotionless, unaccented. It was the kind of voice Fixx found impossible to pin down. Middle Eastern sometime back, when the designation still meant something. And the twist of Arabic script on his gold ring suggested he kept his family’s faith. But the cologne and bland Seiko watch were as anonymous as his voice.

Five minutes after leaving him, Fixx knew he would find it impossible to remember the face, another five minutes and he’d probably have forgotten the clothes. And somehow Fixx got the feeling the man wanted it that way.

“Your luggage?” Mr Aziz looked round vaguely.

“I travel light,” said Fixx, nodding towards Ghost who was rubbing his neck against Fixx’s ankle.

“Twenty-four hours,” the man said firmly.

Fixx looked blank.

“It is twenty-four hours, isn’t it? Before you blast off for your new ring colony...”

So that was how LISA had swung it. Obscenely rich and just passing through. “Yeah,” said Fixx, “if you say so.” Hefting Ghost under one arm, Fixx turned for the door marked Exit. It opened before he was ten paces away, offering him a cheerful welcome in a language he didn’t understand. Japanese from the sound of it, which said something about who usually used the VIP lounge.

“They didn’t have time to change the program,” Rez Aziz said after him. He didn’t sound apologetic, just matter-of-fact, as if reclusive, arrogant, by-law breaking CySat stars came through all the time, expecting to be humoured. But then, hell, maybe they did.

Outside the door was a walkway, perched high above the floor of Arrivals. And looking down, Fixx could see a swirling blue mosaic and below that wall-to-wall tourists, refugees and journalists. People were beginning to look up — first one or two, then dozens — attracted by the glint of light on his arm and the cloak that billowed behind him when it remembered.

Some of them, the older ones, recognized him and Fixx bowed, unable to resist the urge; but even as he did, part of him wondered where to buy clothes that were more anonymous, for when he needed to blend in, become invisible.

It was one thing to be famous, even once-famous. Quite another to find a kidnapped girl when every step you took advertised who you were. All Fixx had in his favour was that no one yet knew he was here to find LizAlec.

“Can I get a look down there?” Fixx asked a passing cleaner. The cleaner whirred, glass eyes swivelling towards Fixx, and it nodded reluctantly. Fixx took the slight bob of its head to mean he should use the lift.

A drop lift stood waiting to take passengers down to the marble floor below and Fixx carried Ghost into the Orvis. A button released the holding magnet and his own weight-plus-gravity took them slowly down. Another button blasted the lift back to its original position. The whole contraption was based on an ancient Victorian idea of using pneumatic power to send messages down tubes from one office to another.

The American woman who’d taken out the patent on the pneumatic lift was now Croesus-rich and holed up in Baja California, her blood, kidneys and lungs wired into a Mitsubishi Extopian Special.

“Need any help?” the lift asked as its doors opened.

Fixx shook his head.

“Then enjoy your stay,” said the lift and was gone back to the VIP floor, leaving Fixx standing in the swirl of people crowding Arrivals Hall. The vast atrium stank of people, McDonald’s soyburgers and recycled air. It was a smell Fixx had forgotten and one he was going to have to get used to — fast.

Every breath, every gulp of water taken on the Moon was endlessly recycled. Tears, sweat, piss, everything was collected or leached from the air and swallowed back into the system. Breathing someone else’s stink was afact of life. As locals never stopped telling the tourists, if they didn’t like the air they could always try outside.

Plenty of people looked at Fixx. Men glancing away or defiantly meeting his silver eyes, the women smiling at Ghost and Fixx’s ludicrous cloak, or frowning at his hair. Only kids watched the weird man with undisguised interest, stopping to nudge each other at the metal arm, leather trousers and kitten clutched like a baby in his arm.

Floor level at Planetside was logo hell and fly-post heaven. HoloAds for Coke jostled flashing neon bottles of Bud. Someone had staple-gunned a flickering faux-telex It’s cheaper with Mercury over the top of Cablebox’s flashing Now phone home. There were signs pointing you to God, LunaWorld and the nearest legalized brothel. What there wasn’t was any sign of a Japanese ballerina.

LunaWorld’s Man on the Moon Spacetel was themed to mid-twentieth-century America. At least, Fixx figured it was mid-twentieth from the bright clothes in the photographs and the big pink Cadillac with fins that stood in the foyer. He knew it was a Cadillac from the reverential little notice alongside. Booking him into the MMS had to be LISA’s idea of a joke, but it wasn’t one that amused the desk staff. Oh, they had his reservation, right enough. Made months back. They just didn’t have a room to spare. Fixx shrugged and took a swig from his complimentary beer. After Paris anything was bliss.

Out of the bar window was a view of a huge white Saturn rocket taking off in a billowing cloud of smoke. It was convincing enough to fool a child, but Fixx noticed the slight jump where the tape was looped, to let the same rocket endlessly fire up its engines and vanish into an impossibly blue Cape Canaveral sky.

Ignoring the window was the sign of an old hand. Fixx realized that when he noticed that only he and a family of newly arrived South Africans were watching: everyone else was pointedly ignoring the thing. All the same, Fixx kept looking until the sequence had started over again.

Speaking personally, if he’d been fixxing the sequence he’d have done a 2001 with the colours, put an orange Saturn blasting into a purple shy, black flames belching from the afterburners. And he’d have put in some proper contemporaneous music. Maybe a little mid-period Jimi Hendrix, but hey... Fixx finished his beer and shrugged.

He didn’t see what was so wrong with watching a fake window. It couldn’t have been a real one anyway. Like all of LunaWorld except the actual dome, the MMS was dug into bedrock, sealed safely away from the sucking vacuum of the surface. It was easier, cheaper and faster to dig out the space you needed and let the overhead rock take the strain. You did away with the problems of radiation, too.

“Mr Valmont?” The thirty-something woman standing in front of him was Luna-born. Wasp-waisted from where low gravity kept her guts from pressing down into her abdomen and with pert breasts that would never know the need for a bra, but her arms were muscle-withered and her face puffy with water retention.

No amount of working out could help, unless you were rich enough to afford weekly membership of an artificial-gravity gym, and that meant going orbital. Fixx knew, he’d seen the holoAds in the Arrivals Hall.

“Yeah, that’s me.” Like it was going to be anyone else. She was desperate to tell him how difficult it had been to find him a room, Fixx could see that from her harassed face, but he didn’t need telling. Half of Europe had fled into exile and credit alone wasn’t enough to find you living space on Planetside, not these days. Whatever electronic strings LISA had tugged, it had impressed and irritated the hotel in equal amounts.

“I want to thank you,” said Fixx, looking into her grey eyes, and smiled. “I know how impossible it must have been.” The woman waved away his thanks hurriedly, butttushed all the same. She was old enough to remember him when had been famous.

Leaving the South African family still trying to check in, Fixx followed the woman into a lift, dropping five floors to level minus five. His suite was vast but filthy. Grey dust frosted like chalk across a glass table in the centre of the main room and in the bedroom it covered the grey enamel bedside locker. The bed was themed, like the rest of the furniture in the suite. And while the puffed satin headboard was undeniably hideous it wasn’t anything like as bad as the bedside lamp that had gold tassels that swung when brushed.

“It’s great,” Fixx said warmly and the woman looked reassured.

“If there’s anything you want,” she said, “anything I can provide...” She stopped, realized how he might interpret that and blushed, backing for the door before Fixx had time to reassure her that he was fine. Listening to her steps in the corridor outside, Fixx shrugged. Okay, so his reputation had been bad, but that bad...?

Hanging his cloak in a dark cupboard so that it would go to sleep, Fixx clicked on the screen and called up the LunaWorld shopping channel. The clothes on offer were dreadful but he didn’t care, not once a lisping voice had assured him that they could be delivered direct to his hotel door.

In the corner of the room was a hotel minibar, the kind that said Have a nice stay everytime you shut the door and Please shut me every time you left it open for longer than ten seconds. Inside the minibar was a Snickers, a see-through bag of Hershey’s Kisses, three packs of honey-roast protein and five different types of Coke. In the enamel locker a Gideon Bible was stacked on top of a copy of the Torah. On top of the Bible was a Koran. All were untouched.

“Protein,” Fixx suggested, offering Ghost the bag. The kitten licked one of the honey-roast lumps and sneezed, tripping off the edge of the bed. “Hey, I’m sorry.” Fixx scooped the bundle of fur lightly off the floor and propped Ghost on a lacy pink pillow. He needed to find Ghost a shit tray and something cat-like to eat. Actually, he didn’t, not when he thought about it. Fixx flicked the vidphone onto vox and called up room service.

Food for Ghost was no problem, but the hotel didn’t have a real bar, at least not one that sold anything stronger than beer, so God knew what reception would do if he rang through and asked them to arrange a few rocks or a couple of lines of wizz. So he called up the desk again and asked for someone to catsit Ghost instead.

His new clothes weren’t ready yet, so Fixx dug his cloak back out of the cupboard and checked out through LunaWorld’s perimeter gate into Aldrin Square, Planetside’s biggest space and a pedestrian-only zone. From ceiling to polished rock floor was maybe forty-feet, and from one side of Aldrin Square to the other was roughly half a mile. Alleys led off from the edge of the square in all directions and between the alley entrances were tourist shops cut into the rock. In the centre two rows of tired palms were turning yellow, despite strip lights set almost exactly overhead. Cleaning droids scuttled by and so did two English tourists, heads down as they scooted through on their way to a girlie bar. Down one of the nearby alleys was Washington Plaza, the heart of Planetside’s red-light area. Except that everything in the Plaza was as packaged up and sanitized as London’s Soho or 42nd Street and Times Square back in Manhattan.

It took no time at all to cross the square, though Fixx slid to a halt as a gang of bladers split in the middle, wheels hissing as the kids zipped around him, laughing. Things got darker in the miles that followed, once he’d turned off the square. Lights became less frequent and those that were there worked less often. People looked more and smiled less. From what Fixx remembered of the hotel map, he was nearing the Edge.

Every city has areas that don’t make it into the Lonely Planet guides, except with warnings: for Luna it was the Edge. The Edge was where you went if you liked living dangerously or were just plain stupid. And Fixx had long ago worked out that he qualified on both counts. Besides, he wanted to check if LizAlec had come this way and LISA had said that when it came to getting out of Planetside, this was jump city.

Fixx liked that. It felt like an album title, or maybe a bad show, something that might manage one day’s hang time in a minor gallery off André des Arts. Fifteen minutes after hitting hooker heaven Fixx stumbled on a crowded Swedish bar selling frozen Alborg and even colder blondes. Fixx tossed up in his head and settled for the Aquavit, his one or two stomach-settling shots ending up as five or six big ones that left his throat frozen and his lungs sodden with alcohol vapour. By the end of the evening, he was passing round his only picture of LizAlec, asking if anyone had seen his special friend.

They hadn’t and from the sideways looks Fixx got it seemed like most of the clientele didn’t think he should, either. Too bad. Grabbing back his tattered Kodak from a boy in combats, Fixx made it to the door and out into a small square, turning left, then left again and finally ending up in a narrow tunnel. It didn’t matter that an illuminated panel set into the rock announced the alley as Mir Street. As far as Fixx was concerned, if it looked like a tunnel and smelt like a tunnel then it was a tunnel.

It was also a bit late to remember that if he’d brought floating-focus Zeiss he could have imprinted LISA’s matrix over the top of his real surroundings. All the same, he remembered it anyway, and kept on remembering it until he walked slap into a wall and all his memory shut down for a while.

Halfway back to LunaWorld, Fixx threw up in a gutter, splashing soy meatballs and undigested alcohol across the grey rock floor. A Honda droid would have got around to cleaning it up just before dawn, but the droid wasn’t needed because the rats got there first. By then Fixx was flopped on his bed beside Ghost, flicking through the twenty-four-hour newsfeeds. The passing through of Fixx Valmont, once a major CySat star, made a “Hey, guess what” newsblip five minutes before the end of the hour-long show. Which was how Fixx got to be three-quarters down an obscenely expensive take-out bottle of Aquavit before Ghost got to watch a younger, thinner, less-lined version of his new owner perform on screen.

The next day Fixx spent sleeping, the one after that was spent nursing the hangover he should have had twenty-four hours earlier. Working on the half-baked basis that LizAlec was perfectly capable of abducting herself from St Lucius, Fixx took his hangover out to play at LunaWorld, just in case LizAlec had done what any intelligent kid on the lam might do, lose herself among all the others.

He left Ghost with reception and let them run a swipe off his platinum card in case the kitten needed anything serious, like medical attention. He didn’t tell reception he might not be back for a while but he reckoned the kitten knew from the way it scowled at Fixx when he left. If Ghost had known they were both two days over their leave-by date, Fixx figured he’d be scowling even more.

Leaving MMS, Ghost and his guilt behind, Fixx went kid spotting. He rode the big rides, hung out in the Simbars, took the new Astral Tour to watch pre-packaged groups hyperboost their endorphin levels with statistically safe, sphincter-tightening pre-packaged danger. He ate bad ice-cream with the Space Pirates, drank Coke he didn’t want at New York, New York. Looked over the kids and young girls until the LD security guards got nervous. But by the end of the afternoon he knew LizAlec wasn’t there.

He saw no trace of her and none of the kids he struck up chance conversations with had any memory of her either. Somehow, given the way LizAlec stalked forward on the balls of her feet, the way she held her head, Fixx had a feeling the boys at least would remember if they’d seen her. Her tits alone were worth dying for. Well, they were in his opinion.

Right at the start LISA had told him that LizAlec was not registered at any Planetside hotel. The AI had checked that out as the X3 was coming in to land. And even using military-grade visual recognition software, a rapid scan of Planetside’s m/wave cameras produced nothing. If Planetside was out then so was Chrysler: its very exclusivity made it too hermetic for strangers. Which left Islamabad, Voertrekker, half a dozen private craters and Fracture. Fixx didn’t doubt that he’d find her, however impossible that seemed, it was just the slight matter of timing. If true genius was the ability to come up with two good ideas and also see both sides of any argument, then Fixx was off the scale. His whole life had always been connections, digital, social or neural.

Fixx shivered. He was standing in the queue for SpaceWarp again, late afternoon having slid into evening. Twenty-four-hour daylight was illegal on Planetside though at LunaWorld the rides still stayed open round the clock. But the overhead sky was dimming again to signify the start of late evening. If you were using melatonin to reset Circadian rhythms, now was the time to take it.

Next door to SpaceWarp was a long glass-fronted bar called the SanRat. It looked loathsome. Slide guitar slid from the wide doorway, its oily notes as thin as any kid’s whining. Over the door was a sign in cracked enamel, riddled with fake bullet holes. The block letters announced that for the convenience of LunaWorld’s patrons, alcohol wasn’t on sale. And, in the window, adults who’d paid to sit there surrounded by tired and irritated kids looked like they hated every aspartamine-sweet minute of it.

Time to get a Bud and that meant going back to his hotel. Either that, or go find another bar. Fixx ducked under a barrier, ignoring the angry shout of a guard, and pushed his way out of the SpaceWarp queue. The kids were welcome to their ride. All he really wanted was a cold Bud, a bed that didn’t have pink frills and maybe...

That woman over there.

Fixx stopped dead and took another look, but the badly dressed blonde had stopped watching him and was examining the poster for SpaceWarp as if she’d never seen a physical-reality ride before, as if listening to the poster took up all her attention. And then Fixx realized she wasn’t listening at all, she was still busy watching his reflection...

Police?

It was possible, but then again, maybe not. Five-ten, maybe taller, mid-weight, badly-cut blonde hair: she didn’t look neat enough to be brass, and he’d never have noticed her if she was street-level. Or maybe he would have, but not that easily. Unless, of course, she wanted him to notice her.

Fixx sighed. It was one thing for Lady Clare to say go find LizAlec, Fixx thought, pushing his way towards the woman, quite another for LISA to expect him to have been able to do it in twenty-four hours. He wasn’t looking forward to the next time he had to talk to her. Three steps took Fixx to the still-burbling poster. “Look,” Fixx said, “you can’t listen to the fucking thing for a fourth time. It’s not that interesting...”

Washed-out blue eyes met his, held his gaze. Fixx was impressed. He was all in favour of first impressions and his was that this wasn’t the kind of woman who slapped, she punched. Much like LizAlec really, except LizAlec didn’t yet know it while this woman did. From the tiredness in her face, Fixx reckoned she was getting bored with living up to the mark.

Paper print dress, the kind without sleeves, unwashed hair, cheap make-up, she also didn’t belong in LunaWorld and that much was obvious from the way guards were hovering, as if desperate to shepherd Fixx and the woman away from the rest of the ice-cream-eating, Coke-slurping queue.

“Out at the Edge you?” Her accent was so thick that Fixx could, hardly grasp what she was asking, if it actually was a question.

“You? Two night back?”

Two nights... Yeah, Fixx had it, she was talking about that over-chromed brothel, the sinbin that offed him more dead presidents for a take-out bottle of Alborg than he usually had to live on for a month back in Paris. Fixx nodded. “You got it.”

“Kodak?” the woman demanded.

Fixx handed over his tri-D of LizAlec, noticing that the blonde’s nails were chipped and worn; and not even purple Candy could hide the half-circles of grime beneath.

“No water,” the woman said shortly, following his eyes. “All goes to places like this. Sweedak?” She nodded around her, not bothering to keep the contempt from her voice. “This your friend?” she asked, watching him carefully.

“Yeah, special friend.”

“An t’boy?”

“Boy?” Fixx said, surprised. For a second they glanced at each other, and then the hangover swallowed Fixx, leaving him staring blankly over her shoulder at a distant ride.

That LizAlec should have set up her own kidnap didn’t surprise him. That she set it up with someone other than him...? Fixx shrugged. He was too old and too ugly to worry about getting his feelings hurt, wasn’t he...?

Wasn’t he?

Fixx shook his head. How come Lady Clare hadn’t thought this through? She’d watched the kid grow up. Why hadn’t the snotty bitch reached the same conclusion, that it was a set-up, that LizAlec was on the lam....? Lady Clare was bright, cynical. She must have got to this conclusion before him, so what made her reject it?

“A boy?” Fixx kept his voice neutral. Only his eyes betrayed what he was really thinking.

“San’rat,” said the woman.

“From the Moon?” Fixx asked in disbelief.

Jude smiled, not kindly. “Honey, where else you get san’rats?”

“You’ve actually seen her...”

Jude began to nod and thought better of it. “You her special friend?” There was a world of ironic emphasis on that special.

“I’m a friend of her mother’s,” Fixx said, surprising himself.

Jude thought about it. “She in bad trouble, t’girl?”

“Yeah, big trouble. People want her dead.” As lies went it wasn’t inspired but the blonde woman had no way of knowing it wasn’t true.

“Jude,” said Jude, thrusting out her hand. Fixx shook. “I got a bar,” Jude said, “in Strat, t’CasaNegro. You come see me sometime, we talk, maybe...” Dodging round an approaching guard, Jude was gone before Fixx even realized she was leaving.

“My Kodak,” Fixx demanded hastily.

Jude didn’t answer him, but somehow Fixx didn’t expect her to.