reMix

Chapter Nineteen Walking Wounded

Getting into Chrysler involved submitting to a DNA test, being screened for retroVirus and undergoing a total sonic clean. And that was just the medical side of the procedure: the financial tests were much worse. Fracture, on the other hand, was simplicity itself. You just slipped the guard a hundred dead presidents and joined the queue. They didn’t even charge him entry for the cat.

Finding Strat wasn’t difficult either. There was a bus leaving from the entrance gate and Fixx took it. He didn’t even mind that it had wheels and a human driver. As the timetable told him at least three times, using a hover was antisocial in any closed ecosystem where the ground was composed mainly of dust. And anyway, hovers were useless at going up hills and if there was one thing Fracture wasn’t short of it was little feldspar-rich mountain ranges.

Zeiss wraparounds secure over his eyes, Fixx found the CasaNegro without trouble. Well, if you could call three wrong turnings and a dead end no trouble. The raytrace overlay from Routesoft that LISA fed to his wraparounds was fifty years out of date. Some of the original alleys had been blocked off, little squares had been filled in with adobe buildings and, from what Fixx could work out, one whole street had gone over the edge of a cliff ten years back in a rock slide.

And as Fixx quickly discovered there was hot and then there was trying to walk up hills in Strat where the night-time temperatures dipped to thirty degrees Centigrade if everyone got lucky. But at least no one tried to mug him and he didn’t get slapped when he walked slam into a Policia Local while rubber-necking up the Carrer Nou, checking out the Saturday afternoon market for everything from cheap bubblesuits to an obscure remix of SonicNRG/OrthoriT.

“CasaNegro?” The uniformed officer looked amused. “Left up Sant Vincent into Sant Jossep.” He paused, looking at Fixx’s new clothes: Timberland Maxx, new Levi 550s and a blue cotton shirt guaranteed to repel dirt. “Where y’hear about CasaNegro?”

Fixx shrugged and shifted Ghost up onto his shoulders. “It got mentioned.”

“It did?” The cop grinned. “Get back safe.”

Turning up Sant Vincent, Fixx stepped off the narrow pavement to let a wizened woman in widow’s weeds stalk past, her cane tapping noisily on the dusty ground. And then stood aside again as three girls in shorts and T-shirts came pounding down the hill, long legs scattering dust as they raced past him in a jumble of dark eyes, flowing hair and smiles that said We belong here, you don’t. One of them glanced at him as she passed and Fixx looked away, embarrassed. He didn’t hear what she said but it made the other girls laugh anyway.

The reason it felt like he was being watched was because he was, Fixx realised suddenly. LISA was keeping track, following his progress from a series of m/wave pods spidered onto Fracture’s glass sky. They were way too high for him to see but that meant nothing. If she wanted to, LISA could probably do everything from a quick and dirty CT-scan of his cortex to recording the fingerprints of his one good hand. The sky looked infinitely distant, blue and hot, but only the last two were real. Fixx doubted if the gap from the crater floor to the cracked sky overhead was more than a mile. Less than the height of an Earth mountain.

He was also coming round to realizing that the clumsy way Routesoft changed resolution wasn’t a bug in the code, it was LISA’s attempts to feed him information she thought he needed.

The feeling was kind of creepy. Especially as until then he wasn’t even sure LISA knew he was still on Luna. After all, his one great love had given him twenty-four hours to get out of her virtual hair and he was currently pushing the envelope at four days. Added to which, half of him reckoned her dues had been paid when she cloaked his shuttle to let it land and then blasted it off again for him, both without clearance.

It had been up to Fixx to find his own way off the Moon when the twenty-four hours were up. He hadn’t done it but then maybe she’d never expected him to. What she did do for him, though, was get rid of his original shuttle. She blew it for him, 205,000 klicks out from Darkside. A brief fireball no one noticed. Now that was murder, but Fixx figured he owed it to Earth not to take the risk that the shuttle was infected. Besides, where was the bio going to land it?

Back in Paris?

He’d ripped out all the streamers, trickwired the console. That way he figured the digital intelligence wouldn’t know it was getting dead until the last second. Maybe it never knew. Fixx shook his head, sliding in through the CasaNegro’s bead curtain. He left those kind of questions to kids like LizAlec. Late thirties was way too old to still be dealing with that why/what/who-are-we shit. And, anyway, he was too tired. It was time to get a beer quick, before he decided he needed something stronger.

The CasaNegro was larger than he’d expected, cleaner too. Eight or nine tables and a long bar at the far end racked up behind with dust-covered bottles. The ones that got drunk were smudged with heavy fingerprints, the others were shrouded white with grit. Above them all was a dumb sign of a neon broad who did nothing but take her bikini off and then put it back on again.

Overhead a ceiling fan thudded loud as a ‘copter blade but did little except shuffle the hot air around. Drink first, then think wasn’t on the level of I think therefore I am but it was still one of his Da’s maxims, along with Paid his taxes, died broke... The prison service should have etched that on his gravestone, except they cremated him out at Kilmainham Gaol in a job lot during a typhoid wave when Fixx was fourteen.

Fixx saw Jude before she saw him. She was behind the wooden bar, mopping down its battered surface with what looked like an old T-shirt. “Beer,” Fixx said, leaning on the bar, his elbow resting heavily on a corner of her cloth. The woman looked up in irritation and then recognized him.

“Round here we say please,” Jude said loudly, “Sweedak?”

Fixx glanced round at the silent regulars, smaller than him, most of them. Weaker, too, if the wasted muscles in their arms were any clue. But they looked drunker and besides, there were way more of them.

“That so?” Putting a nervous-looking Ghost on the bar, Fixx stepped back and sketched his trademark bow, the one that once had Sydney Opera House trashing chairs in delight. Then he picked up his kitten and smiled sweetly.

“A cold beer... please.”

In the corner a boy laughed and Jude slammed down a cold tube. Her eyes were flat with anger and a small tic pulled at the side of her mouth. He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like being mocked.

The beer was some Hispanic brand Fixx had never even heard of. He took it just the same, hooked his thumb under the top and pulled it up. Ice frosted the sides of the tube. “Open a tab,” Fixx said, pouring cold sweet beer down his throat.

Jude pointed to the sign below the neon girl which read “No tabs, no promises, definitely no credit.” Beneath it, someone had scrawled something obscene involving MickMouse dollars.

It was Fixx’s turn to shrug.

They compromised. That involved Fixx putting his platinum HKS card behind the bar, even though Jude pointed out it was useless to her unless he wanted her to sell it on to some guy who could strip out the account and run up a strictly illegal credit debt. He didn’t.

“Want a drink?” Fixx asked.

Jude shook her head, flashing him a cocktail smile: one part anger, two parts contempt. “I ain’t had a drink in years,” she said flatly, her accent even thicker than back at LunaWorld. Or maybe that was just memory.

“Why you bother me?”

“LizAlec,” Fixx reminded her.

“You want know ‘bout that little girl?” Only someone like Jude could describe LizAlec as little, thought Fixx, looking at the woman’s broad shoulders. Most bars he knew had a step up behind the counter, to give the bar staff delusions of grandeur and keep punters in their place. Behind Jude’s bar a good foot had been hacked out of the tiled floor and crudely ‘creted over. And still Jude towered over everyone but Fixx.

“Yeah,” said Jude, watching his eyes check behind the bar, “Don’t want to put them off spending their money. Now you tell me ‘bout that girl, ‘bout your special friend...”

Fixx thought about it.

“Her name’s Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio,” said Fixx, watching Jude’s blue eyes. Nothing, not even a flicker of recognition, but then, no surprise either. “She got kidnapped from Arrivals Hall nearly three weeks ago. It didn’t make CySat/Luna?”

Jude jerked her chin towards a group of dark-haired boys clustered round a Sonysim. Above its surface a tiny, impossibly pneumatic American schoolgirl was stripping off her cheerleader’s outfit and doing something with her baton the makers hadn’t intended. It was LaLa from PsychoPopsycles. The gameware was ten years out of date and obviously corrupted.

“Honey, it look like t’watch the newsfeed?”

Fixx had to admit it didn’t. He took the fresh tube Jude offered and flipped its top. When he put it down again a small plate of almonds had materialized at his elbow.

“Synth,” Jude said curtly. “Still, better than t’shit they feed you up at LunaWorld.”

Fixx washed away the almonds’ salt taste with another tube, then shook his head when Jude offered a fourth.

“You seen her?” Fixx asked. He tried to keep his voice casual, but he wasn’t fooling either of them. If she hadn’t seen LizAlec then Fixx wouldn’t have been there. And if Jude really had seen LizAlec then the girl was in trouble. Bad trouble. LizAlec was many things, but spoilt was the big one. When she slummed it was for a reason and CasaNegro wasn’t her style.

LizAlec liked the Crash&Burn back in Bastille for the black clothes and the anorexic amphetamined-out would-be Warhols who hung out there in silence, touting old Thai RomReaders loaded up with Rambeau. Where LizAlec was concerned, not even terminal irony could excuse CasaNegro’s white-washed adobe walls, its chrome jukebox and kitsch neon stripper. Hacienda Hispanic definitely wasn’t her thing. Nothing but dire need would have put LizAlec through that bead-curtained door.

Of course, the real irony was that, Bastille bars apart, LizAlec’s concept of living dangerously probably ended where Jude’s idea of normality began.

“And the boy...?” Fixx said.

Jude smiled, sketched a height line just about level with her shoulders. “So high, matted hair, dog jaw, smelt...” She racked her memory for other clues. “One lung,” she said, finally.

Fixx just looked.

“One lung,” Jude repeated. “And a steel bottle, ‘bout here.” She sketched in an imaginary shape at her side, a little above her hip. “Sandrat, see. One flesh lung for air, one bottle for empty tunnels...”

“Real san’rats all dead,” interrupted a boy in combats, leaning himself against Jude’s bar. Jude frowned, but said nothing. “They’re all dead,” the boy told Fixx. “That freak was just pretending. He had two good lungs.”

Imperceptibly, Jude shook her head, disagreeing.

“And the girl with him?” Fixx asked. “You saw her?”

The boy grinned. “Yeah, pretty, or would be if her face was mended.” He glanced knowingly at the bruises stained yellow down one side of Fixx’s face.

Fixx shook his head. “Police,” he said, lightly touching his cheek.

The boy nodded. That was something he understood. For a second he glanced at Jude, as if wondering how far he dared go. “I saw police this morning,” he said hesitantly. “Looking for her...”

Jude was wide awake now, her lazy boredom gone the way of the act it was. “You didn’t tell me,” she said crossly.

The boy shrugged. “You didn’t ask.” That was when Fixx finally realized that Jude was the combat kid’s mother.

“What did they look like?” demanded Fixx, getting his question in before Jude and Leon could start quarrelling for real. “Japanese?”

“Nah,” the boy helped himself to a handful of dried almonds from a saucer. “Thin guys, weird voices, both wearing...” He ran his hand across his front, indicating lapels.

“A suit,” said Fixx.

“If you say so...” Leon shrugged. “Nasty-looking people,” he added, scooping the rest of the nuts into his filthy palm. “Not good. They had...” His hands indicated a bulge under one armpit. Fixx got the message.