Issue 12

© Wyrm Publishing, 2016
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the twelfth issue of Forever Magazine!

As we start the new year, Forever completes it’s first. I’ve enjoyed the journey and since we’ve now passed our first year goal, I can continue to do so. A big thank you to everyone that has subscribed, purchased, or reviewed the magazine. I’ll need to bring a lot more of you on-board to reach the 2016 goals, but I look forward to the challenge. If you’d like to help, please tell friends or write reviews, particularly at our Amazon and B&N subscription pages.

At this point, our resources don’t permit many changes to the format. We’ll continue to publish one novella and two short stories/novelettes, but I will be loosening up the restrictions on original publication date a bit. Science fiction has a rich history and I’m giving myself the more freedom to explore that here. Forever is not becoming a retro-zine. It just feels silly to have restricted myself in that manner. You could call this a minor course correction. The basic feel of the magazine will remain relatively unchanged.

That said, this issue features stories that span three decades and are published ten years apart: 1995, 2005, and 2015. It felt like the right way to kick off the new year.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

On the Night of the Robo-Bulls and Zombie Dancers

Nick Wolven

“Let the night teach us what we are, and the day what we should be.”

—Thomas Tryon

1: Wolves in the Bullpen

When Gabriel showed up for his nightshift, the other traders were already at their desks. They hunkered low over takeout sandwiches, meatball subs crushed in tinfoil, bleeding sauce. They looked like the kinds of beasts who have hackles to raise. They looked like wolves.

The sun was setting over downtown Manhattan.

Popovski came sauntering down the rows of desks. Popovski was the head of the fund, but Popovski never looked wolfish. Popovski looked chickenish, mostly because of how he held his elbows: up and out, like saucy little wings.

“We-ell!” called Poposki with his familiar lilt. ”Ga-briel! Last one back in the office. You know what that means. I have a special mission for you.”

Trader heads popped from the cubicles. There were a lot of cubicles, and even more traders. Kappalytics was a big fund with a small office. Popovski insisted on renting prime real estate. He said he liked his view of the New York skyline. He said he liked to see the city switch on and off.

Gabriel followed Popovski to one of the high windows. Just now, the city was switching on, going electric as the sun left town. Their two reflected faces faintly lightened the darkening sky.

“I hate the nightshift,” Gabriel said. “And I especially hate special missions on the nightshift.”

Popovski squeezed his shoulder. Gabriel had worked hard all day, unwinding the fund’s big Serbian screwup. But this didn’t count, or anyway, didn’t count extra. At Kappalytics, there were no bonus points for work well done. Gabriel knew the rules.

“You know the rules,” said Popovski. “Last one back from dinner gets the dirty work. If you don’t like it, eat at your desk.”

Gabriel had been eating at his desk for ten years. He’d gone out to dinner tonight only because Marisol insisted. ”Seven dayshifts a week, and seven nightshifts,” Marisol had said. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this. I know the stakes. I know the economics. But can’t we ever just take an evening off?”

Gabriel put a hand in his pocket and fingered his wake-up pill. It felt at once hard and delicate, a tiny egg ready to hatch.

“So what’s the dirty work, tonight?”

“Oh, it’s that damn AI.” Popovski led Gabriel to the terminal in the corner. ”It’s been playing for weeks in the mark-to-Markov exchanges. Now it’s gone completely bozo. Look at this behavior!”

The terminal displayed a multicolored probability tree, rainbow branches in a 3D display. Branches grew and vanished as Gabriel watched, pruned by a cybernetic hand.

“Penrose is predicting something big,” said Popovski. “He’s going long-term. Don’t ask me to explain it. Look at that time series! This is posi-tute-ly longitudinal. We’re talking years. We’re talking global. We’re talking complexity beyond human understanding.”

“So this chain of events.” Gabriel traced the trunk of the tree. “Penrose is sure these things’ll happen?”

“He better be,” Popovski said. “I already bet the farm.”

Penrose, the AI, was located underground in a vault in Thailand. Kappalytics only contracted for its services. Like all AI quants, Penrose surpassed human understanding. It gravitated toward crazily complex models, long-chain probabilities, million-factor sims. Extrapolations of unfathomable detail. Gabriel didn’t understand it. No humans did.

If all trading was an attempt to predict the future, AIs were fortunetellers of insane sophistication. They spat out countless recommendations: buy this, sell that. But they couldn’t express themselves in human terms. They were like child prodigies, Gabriel imagined, hypersmart, woefully inarticulate. No one really knew what their prognostications meant.

That never stopped Popovski. He bet on every tip the AIs handed out. Kappalytics was one of the heaviest robo-quant investors on the street.

“So you have no idea what this prediction means,” Gabriel said, “but you bet on it anyway?”

“What can I do?” Popovski’s chicken-arms flapped. “Penrose is ten million times as smart as me. But look at these numbers. We take a bath on this, we’ll drown. The whole city will drown. The proverbial seas will proverbially rise.” He kicked the terminal. ”I called in our math kids. They’re no good. Stanford PhD my ass. I called my snitch at Emporiki. He says they’re seeing the same thing. All across town, the bot-quants are going batty. And everyone’s signing up for the ride. It’s a worldwide stampede. It’s like some panicky Pascal’s Wager.”

“Meaning?” Gabriel said.

“Meaning this time is different, Gabe. Meaning if this bubble pops, you and I and every other asset-wrangler on this planet are going to fall to earth with a wet and splattery sound. Meaning the proverbial end of days just became a matter of high probability.”

Gabriel looked out the office windows. Manhattan’s high buildings had snuffed the sun. Gabriel could never get used to modern investing, this biz where people placed bets without knowing what they were betting on. But that was high-finance in a time of AI-modeling. No one saw the real-life forest for the probability trees.

“Maybe we should let this ride,” Gabriel said. “It being nightshift and all.”

“I hear you,” Popovski said. ”I want to take this cool and slow. I’m not making sudden moves. That’s where you come in, Gabe. I want you to do something special for me. I want you to go on a pilgrimage.”

“A pilgrimage? To where?”

Popovski’s head swiveled, intimating long marches, Siberian treks, the illimitable unknown.

“Uptown,” he said. “I want you to meet with Ribbeck.”

“Ribbeck!” Gabriel’s eyes felt like they were spinning. “But he never leaves the house.”

“Exactly.” Popovski’s index finger pinned the second button of Gabriel’s shirt. “That’s why you need to go there and see him. If any human knows what’s going on with the AI markets, it’s Ribbeck. He predicted the great sweetened beverages short of ‘27. He flew with the last Russian capital flight, before the algo-traders had even spread their wings. He has a second sight, a third sight, an n-to-the-n sight. He peers into the market and he reads its dreams.”

“But how will I get to him?” Gabriel said.

Popovski’s lips made a rubbery sound. “That’s your problem. I just rack the chips. RemoteID puts Ribbeck in his house on Seventy-third street. I want you working this old-school, Gabe. I want you getting face-time with the man.”

“But how will I convince him to let me in?”

“Oh,” and Popovski’s eyebrows got sly, “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with that.”

Gabriel leaned against the windows. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to lay his head on the low-pile carpet and sleep. How blessed, how undeservedly luxurious, to curl up like a baby, shut his eyes, and absent himself for seven hours from this world. He took his wake-up pill out of his pocket, rolling it in the crinkly wrapper between his finger and thumb. A snippet of language wriggled into his mind. Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep’ . . .

“Let me get this straight—”

A bong sounded from someone’s computer, throbbing like a grandfather clock. A trader shouted, “Eight o’clock! Nightshift, boys!”

Casters squeaked. Pneumatics creaked. Suddenly all the traders were on their chairs. The bullpen had become a wolf-pen, and the wolves were howling.

“A-roo! Nightshift! A-roo! A-roo!”

“A-roo!” sang Popovski. ”Cock-a-doodle-do!” He jabbed an elbow into Gabriel’s ribs. “Good luck out there, soldier. Those can be some mean streets.”

2: Lunies and Goons

Gabriel Boateng hadn’t wanted to be a trader. In the spic-and-span concrete blocks of Ghana’s all-new national university, he’d studied first, atonal music, then sociometrics. He thought of numbers as symbols that meant real things: meant how sound sounded, how people lived. This metonymic mathematical bias, along with deep monetary needs, had finally inclined him to a high-finance life. In the torrential liquidity of a round-the-clock global exchange, numbers had awesome, near deified meaning. Numbers meant the big thinks. They meant life and death.

Alone in the hall outside the office, Gabriel leaned against the door. He was second-generation American, but the first generation of the wake-up-pill world. Had the African imperialists of his ancestry, he wondered, ever felt so gosh-darn tired? Those warlike Ashanti of the golden coast had marshaled vast militaries, they had conquered and enslaved, they had vied and colluded with British colonialists. But had they ever sweated through eight consecutive days and nights of marathon Victoria-Falls-volume trading with the cutthroat bondmongers of modern-day Japan? Had they ever stayed awake for one-hundred-and-seventeen nail-devouring hours in a multi-round firesale of decroded high-impact derivatives?

Had they ever been dispatched at the start of nightshift to traverse darkling Manhattan on a mission to ply modern banking’s most phone-shy guru for clues to a Markov-market meltdown?

Ribbeck. What could he have to say about this?

More to the point: how could Gabriel get to him?

Gabriel called Marisol.

“Babe, what’s up?” Marisol’s dark face, pretty but prematurely weary, loomed in Gabriel’s phonescreen. Racked terminals were her backdrop, the cluttered equipment of the dispatcher’s station. ”You know I can’t talk.” She adjusted her headset. ”Nightshift just began.”

“I know,” Gabriel said. “That’s what this is about. I need an escort, Mari. To go uptown.”

“Uptown? On the nightshift? Gabe, you crazy?”

“Some mystery mojo hit the AI modelers. Popovski wants me to try and meet with Ribbeck.”

“Ribbeck!” Marisol’s eyes widened. “Good luck getting in touch with him. Doesn’t he live in a coffin or something?”

“More like a bomb shelter,” Gabriel said. “You have any spare cops?”

Marisol whistled. ”I don’t know, babe. The hard right’s back in city office, cracking down on police details. Stop the cop shop, no hired guns, all that crap. I can send a contracted driver.”

“A merc-car? To take me through the Village? You’re kidding.”

“Hey, hey.” Marisol bobbed her head side-to-side. “Some of these mercs are on the level.”

“They’re all cultists. They’re vigilantes. And they drive like Frenchmen.”

“Gabe?” Marisol suddenly looked worried. “Are you sure you want to do this? Head uptown? On the nightshift? ‘Cause you can tell that plutocrat Popovski if anything happens to my Gaby-Baby, I’m showing up at that slave pen you call an office with a police-issue pain ray.”

A credible threat. Even police dispatchers these days got serious combat training.

“I can’t help it, Mari. It’s do the job or screw the job. It’s the rat race, round-the-clock.”

“Well, I’ve got no cops for you, but there’s no way I’m sending you out there alone. I see a merc-car in your area. I’m sending him over.”

Gabriel groaned.

“The cops don’t like the Village either,” Marisol said. ”Roll with this contract man, hon. I’ll sniff around and see what else I can rustle up. Much love.”

“Marisol—”

She’d hung up.

Gabriel took his wake-up pill in the elevator. Sleep no more . . . Macbeth does murder sleep . . . Murder, yes, that was the word. Taking these damn pills always made him feel like something mild and gentle was being kicked to death inside him. They should put that slogan on the packaging.

He closed his eyes. The effects of the pill, phasing in, felt deeply feverish, a tissue-deep squeezing, a hard thud back of his eyes.

The lobby was full of security guards. Every company in the building had its own force, liveried in distinctive blue. Cobalt, cornflower, Persian, navy. They gathered in groups behind aramid fiber barricades, German armaments oiled and agleam. Squad captains bawled over the helmeted heads.

“All right, boys! Nightshift! Check your bogarts, bugbears, and bogeymen at the door! Holster those projectile weapons; we’re electric-only till dawn! Pause before you fire and repent after you kill! It’s a half moon, a mad world, a hell of a town!”

No kidding. By three AM, Gabriel knew, they’d mostly be shooting each other.

A bright orange car was parked by the building. Gabriel studied it through the glass doors. Sometimes scurrilous entities posed as hired escorts. You got in a merc-car and found yourself on a five-borough joyride, drag racing motorcycle gangs for hooker money on four landmasses. This car looked at least semi-legit. Gabriel jogged down the basalt steps.

“Uptooooown!” sang the driver, pushing open the passenger door. A beefy man with a British smile, he wore a yellow escort vest trimmed with reflectors that twinkled in the dwindling day. “Traveling during the nightshift, is it? You, my friend, must be the irresponsible type. I admire that in a passenger.”

“Just get me where I’m going,” Gabriel said, climbing in.

“Well, well, what are we, now?” The driver winked. “Finance? I love a financial man. You lot are the ones got us into this, you know, with your fourteen hour days. If it weren’t for your example, we’d all still be sleeping.” He punched the auto-drive controls with a fat red thumb. ”Time to make good on the investment, eh?”

The car set off, whirring through the downtown streets. Things were quiet right now, but that wouldn’t last. Gabriel felt his wake-up pill pushing into the second stage, a nervous hyperclarity of chems and nanotech. The tops of the skyscrapers burned candle-like in day’s last rays.

“You know, I’ve a bit of a theory about the nightshift,” the driver said, reclining and resting his hands on a burgeoning belly.

“That so?” Gabriel prepared to tune out. Everyone had a theory about the nightshift. Theories about the nightshift were as common as screenplay ideas.

“Mm-hm.” The driver nodded: the profound, slow nod of the crank. ”Way I see it, man was never meant to sleep. Not by night, anyway. Sleeping by night, living by day, that only came with recorded history. But if you go back, oh, ten thousand years or so, I believe all men used to be nocturnal.”

There was something uncanny in the man’s voice, Gabriel thought. Loaded, lockjawed, overcontrolled.

“How do you figure?”

“Well, think about it.” The driver mashed more buttons, making the car chirp and kick. “What evidence’ve we got, that people slept through the night back then? This was thousands of years ago, mate. How can we even know? Monkeys are nocturnal. Apes are nocturnal.”

“Are they?”

“Now, now, don’t be pedantic. What we do know is this: those old Cro-Magnon chaps, they had a sense of magic. Spirits, symbols, rituals, statues. A sort of, what would you say? A fever. The fever of—but what would your lot call it? Old-time religion.” The driver paused, tongue fondling his mustache. ”Bit like now, I’d say.”

A soft sound emanated from the car speakers, the loudening bump of a tribal drum. But no, not drums, exactly. A pulse, electronic, granular units of compacted sound, growing steadily more basso, more booming.

“They didn’t have wake-up pills back then,” Gabriel said. Was it his imagination, or was the car going faster? And they were going downtown, the wrong way.

“Maybe they didn’t need wake-up pills,” the driver said softly. ”Maybe we don’t need ‘em, either. Ever try staying up a few nights without your pills? Tell you, friend, it’s like nightshift, but a thousand times better. Puts you in touch with something. Lets you talk to the spirits that be.”

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Gabriel twisted in his seat.

The driver jabbed the dashboard. The windows went dark. ”Diurnality,” the driver said. ”Now that’s the aberration. Ten thousand years of sleeping through the night, and look what we got for it. Rationality. Sobriety. Descartes, the Enlightenment. Locke, Hume, all those sober types. Lot of rubbish, I say. Clearheaded and alert, that’s what we all wanted to be. Creatures of the sun. So bloody alert, we just about wrecked the planet. Tell me, is that how things were meant to be?”

Gabriel found the button for the car’s compass. A digital display made the windshield bright. Yes, they were definitely heading downtown. And going faster, too.

“Turn the windows clear,” Gabriel said, “right now.”

The driver laughed and patted the dashboard. ”Nothing to see, mate! Car knows where she’s going. ’Sides, it’s nightshift. All bets off! Let the spirit take you, I like to say.”

The car drove faster. The beat got louder. Now there were whoops and howls, too. The driver gave tuneless accompaniment:

Lullaby, lullaby, where will you go?

Deep into dreamland, where all dreamers go.

“Stop this car,” Gabriel said, leaning forward to hit random buttons.

The windows flickered, blinked, showed polygons flocking by. Then stars and planets, streaks of lightspeed. Fish and water, the Circuit de Monaco. The music changed to Rive-Gauche accordions, industrial metal, a nightclub croon.

The driver laughed, rocking in his ergo-gel carseat.

Lullaby, lullaby, where have you gone?

I’ve gone into dreamland, where all go alone.

“Stop!” Gabriel shouted, and pushed open his door.

An alarm bleated. The car screeched and stopped. ”Please keep all extremities within the vehicle,” it urged in placid baritone, as Gabriel tumbled out into a pile of green trash bags.

By the time Gabriel picked the lettuce shreds from his suit, the driver was standing beside him.

“Here we are, then.” He waxed his mustache from a tin.

“Where?” Gabriel sat up, scanning the dank alley.

The driver pointed to an illuminated steeple, thrusting obelisk-like above the rooftops. ”Church of the Woken Spirit. Services from dusk to dawn. Five blocks off, but this’ll do.” He said with a smile, “I have found the light, my friend—in deepest darkness.”

Gabriel sighed. The man was a Lunie, a worshipper of darkness and the moon, on his way to a nightshift mass. Totally mad. You could never trust a nightshift driver.

“What about your job?” Gabriel shouted, as the driver sauntered, whistling, up the street. ”What about your car? What about me?”

“What about enlightenment?” the driver called back, and added with a thickening of his somewhat put-on British accent, “To be or not to be, that is the answer.”

He turned the corner and was gone.

Taking refuge in the abandoned car, Gabriel managed to call up a map. He was still in the financial district, but that didn’t mean he was safe. The black-marketeers would be abroad soon, conducting deals and trades amid the roots of the skyscrapers. Gabriel already heard hoarse cries, piped on pirated channels through street-level speakers. The pimps were out and about. The sidewalk pirates would soon follow.

Gabriel tried Marisol. No answer. He told his phone to keep trying, passing the time by looking up the phrase that had troubled his mind. Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep. He’d searched for so much music over the years that the online search-bots, wise to his profile, insisted on playing mostly songs. Dumb AIs. Thought they were too smart for user input.

At last, Gabriel found it. The car engaged autoplay. “Sleep no more!” said a scratchy voice, piped across the decades from some old recording, “Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep; sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast!”

Shakespeare. Of course. Not really Gabriel’s cup of tea. Still, there was something to it, wasn’t there? Humanity had murdered sleep, and what did they have to show for it? Twenty-hour workdays, skyrocketing crime. The trouble was, they’d done away with sleep, but they hadn’t managed to do away with the night.

Shouts nearby. Shadows on the wall. Or was it just a wake-up pill hallucination? You could never trust your senses during nightshift, Gabriel had found. Couldn’t trust much of anything, really.

Gabriel’s phone rang, making him gasp. The phone interfaced automatically with the car. Marisol’s face loomed huge in the windshield. “Mari, jeez! You scared me to death.”

“Yeah, I can tell. You look awful. What’s the matter?”

“You delivered me into the arms of a religious nut, that’s what’s the matter.” Gabriel levered back his seat, trying to get a better perspective on Marisol’s huge, down-staring face. “I told you the merc-drivers couldn’t be trusted. They’re all turning into Lunies. I’m downtown. Stranded.”

“In the black market?” Marisol looked alarmed. ”You’d better get out of there. Word is the sidewalk pirates are out in force. They’re already holding three traders for ransom.”

“Well, maybe you could give me some help with that. I need the real thing, Mari. True blue and black. The city’s finest. I need a cop.”

Marisol sighed, closing her eyes. “Even if I go off-book, Gabe, the cops won’t go through the Village. Especially not tonight. There’s some kind of carnival.”

“Another carnival?” Gabriel groaned. Every nightshift, it seemed, the hipsters, pagans, nuts, druggies, freaks, and weirdoes of the Village threw a carnival. “What’s the occasion this time?”

“You’d have to talk to a numerologist. Something to do with the Newgrange tumulus. Runic decipherments. Astral theories. Word around the force is, they’re doing a human sacrifice.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Well, it’s not the real deal. One of those brainless bodies, lab-grown for research. Mount Sinai’s getting rife with ghouls. Half the staff sells meat out the back.”

“Don’t those artsy bums have anything better to do?”

“They’re living the dream, I guess. Party all night. At least it’s good for business.”

The liquor business, Mari meant. And the drug business, and the fast food business. Night was the time of vice, and vice was booming. With wake-up pills, parties around the world had gotten ever longer, wilder, weirder. Were people just bored with their extra time? Or did the dark hours have some power all their own? Maybe the Lunie cults had a point.

“The carnivals are tame,” Marisol said, “compared to what goes on uptown. You should see the police reports. Some of the kids who grew up with these pills? They really believe they’re creatures of the night.”

“I know about the batheads.”

“Oh, no you don’t. Not the half of it. Not till you’ve worked municipal dispatch. The richer they are . . . . We have kids on the Upper East Side . . . Gabriel? Gabe—?”

Marisol’s face fractured, flickered, vanished. A sickly visage coalesced in the windshield. Hollow cheeks, pointed teeth, cigarette-burn eyes.

“Speak of the devil,” Gabriel said.

“Tremble, mortal,” said the vampire. ”Vorgoth has found your signal. Vorgoth has picked up your scent.”

Gabriel groaned. He should have known not to say the word “batheads” on a non-encrypted call. These sickos monitored communications throughout the city, waiting for the unwary to speak flagged keywords. Drop a mention of Nosferatu into a conversation, you could have some jerk in a polyester cape haunting your fire escape for weeks. “Invocation,” the kids called it.

“You have spoken the words of doom, mortal. Now you must face your destiny.”

This particular kid looked young. Preteen-young. Could just be some punk playing dress-up. Or maybe this kid had gotten the surgery, gone all-out. From the way he rolled his r’s, Gabriel guessed he was a newbie.

Thing was, when it came to vampires, the newbies were the dangerous ones.

“Get out of my phone call, bathead.”

“Silence, prey! You speak to a creature of darkness. Denizens of the sunnyside have no rights in my domain.”

“Yeah, sure.” Gabriel pressed the button to end the call. The car gave out an angry chirp.

“Attention. You have attempted to disconnect two conversant devices. Please wait until your devices determine that it’s safe to terminate their connection.”

“Wa-ha-ha,” laughed Vorgoth from the windshield.

“It’s a pirated phone call!” Gabriel shouted at the car. ”Can’t you identify a pirated call? I’m talking to a vampire, here.”

“Correction,” said Vorgoth. ”The vampire is talking to you. Heed well my warning, beast of prey. With the rising of the moon, death shall swoop upon you.”

Gabriel pushed more buttons. Vorgoth, for all his sharp teeth, was small taters. If Gabriel didn’t get moving, the black market would sweep him up. He’d fall prey to the naphthalene lassos of the sidewalk pirates. He’d be kidnapped, held for ransom. He’d miss work.

Sure enough, Gabriel heard shouts, footsteps, a booted troop’s advancing tramp. He popped his head out the window. No sidewalk pirates seemed to be around, but a private security force came goose-stepping around the corner. A ragtag bunch, five men, all wearing red headbands. Every one of them save the leader carried crude tools of urban back-alley abuse: shockprods, billysticks, truncheons, bats.

The leader, an automatic rifle at his hip, marched backwards at the head of the pack. “All right, boys, recon puts our nest at two blocks down. You got the 3-D map, you got the infrared. Now, these are rogue ransomers, remember, small and unequipped, and you know what that means. Unpredictable. We’re talking street-blitzkrieg, overwhelming force, no pulled punches. Their hostage is a property developer, middle-fifties, white male—”

On it went. Gabriel shook his head. These sad street forces always puffed themselves up with military airs. Acting like they were Green Berets, instead of some company’s low-rent mercs.

The security team was nearing Gabriel’s car when another force, bigger and better equipped, appeared at the opposite end of the street. These men wore green uniforms, pants and tunics, low-watt lasers. Gabriel recognized the security crew for Ballen’s, a big ratings firm headquartered downtown.

The green force spanned the street, blocking passage. The red force halted near Gabriel’s car. Trouble at the OK Corral, with Gabriel smack in the center. The wild west, redux. With better guns.

“Look like you kids are lost.” The leader of the green force amplified his voice with a fist-sized mike. “The paintball arenas are out in New Jersey.”

“Eat a dog, Chang,” a red-team member retorted.

The Ballen’s force seemed to be all Vietnamese, while the red force was a motley mix. Gabriel wasn’t surprised. A lot of these private forces had degenerated into gangs. After the wake-up pill revolution, with employees working day and night, it took half as many people to do the same work. Folks lost their jobs; unemployment broke fifty percent. Some of the rejects had turned to porn, some to drink, and most of the rest of them turned into crooks. City police couldn’t handle the extra load, so private companies compensated with private forces. And human nature wouldn’t be what it was, Gabriel supposed, if it hadn’t taken all of a few years for those private forces to turn into clannish, territorial mobs.

“These are Ballen’s corners.” Green leader drummed his fingers on the holster of his gun. “We are the only police on these streets.”

“Then you ain’t doing your jobs,” red leader replied. “We tracked a hostage to your turf, Fu Man Chu. Got some sidewalk pirates holding our boy, just down the block. Now, are you gonna help us take him home, or are we gonna open some skulls?”

“Give us the address. We will save him for you.”

“And pick up the bounty? Hell to that.”

Something unspoken passed between the two men. Green leader smiled. Red leader scowled.

“Don’t tell me you’re in on this, Won-ton.”

“A thousand per head,” the green leader said, “to come into our territory. Will you pay?”

So the green security team and the pirates were in league. Again, Gabriel wasn’t exactly shocked. It was a typical scam, security teams in cahoots with sidewalk pirates. The red gang surely pulled the same stunt on their own turf.

Both teams were tense, now, fingering their weapons. Gabriel doubted the red team had the moolah to pay their way onto the green team’s turf. He also doubted this confrontation would end in hugs.

“Is the sheep anxious?” said Vorgoth from the windshield. “Is the sheep afraid?”

“Oh, shut up.” Gabriel jabbed dashboard buttons.

The car was still playing Shakespeare quotes. “To be or not to be,” a fuzzy voice said, “that is the question.”

“Not to be,” Vorgoth elected, and laughed.

The red security team advanced, shockprods ready. “We’ll see how well you Commies bluff.”

Commies. An odd insult, it seemed to Gabriel. If anything, the Ballen’s security team was a bit too entrepreneurial.

“To die,” said the voice from the dashboard, “to sleep; no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to . . . . ”

Sleep no more. Macbeth hath murdered sleep.

“To die,” Vorgoth overrode the canned quotes, “‘tis a consummation, sheep, devoutly to be wished.”

The two rogue forces converged on the car.

To die, to sleep . . .

“Rods at the ready, boys!”

“Phasers out!”

To sleep, to be . . .

It clicked.

“To be or not to be,” Gabriel said, imitating the escort’s British accent. “That is the answer.” He punched the cars buttons. Nought. The British said nought for zero.

2-B-R-0-2-B.

“Override engaged,” the car intoned.

Gabriel hit the power button. The engine grumbled. He couldn’t get his phone call to disconnect, but once he hit the gas, the car shrank Vorgoth’s face to a tiny inset. The car bucked forward. Gabriel steered onto the sidewalk, around the red security team. Trash bags thumped and farted under the wheels. He swerved, scraping a wall.

“Run, sheep, run,” Vorgoth chortled. “The hunt begins!”

Green light flashed in the street behind. Were the security teams shooting at him, or at one another? Gabriel rounded a corner on screeching wheels. He hadn’t driven a car since he was a student, before wake-up pills, before mass unemployment, before night shifts and Lunie cults and a world of unintended consequences. He remembered puttering in his old Saipa around the Kinshasa university, dreaming of international finance, venture capital, innovation, the bright rich future.

Amazing how old skills came back, when a man was running for his life.

3: The Mighty Ram

Eleven o’clock PM. The city bright and alive. Under the barricades of the Chinatown compound, Gabriel huddled with his phone.

“Mari? You there?”

The Lunie cabbie’s car was a twist of steel, partially wrapped around a concrete pylon. Gabriel always got twitchy while driving with a wake-up pill high. He’d run a merry chase through the downtown streets, scanning the alleys for batwing shadows, Vorgoth goading him from the windshield. At Canal street, Gabriel had lost control. Vorgoth’s pale face had disappeared in a spray of glass.

Thank God for airbags. Gabriel wrapped a Band-Aid around his bleeding thumb.

“Gabes?” Marisol’s image came in startlingly clear. “Signal’s great. Where are you?”

“Outside Chinatown. I had to ditch the car.”

“Is that it behind you? That mashed-up wreck?”

“You know me and parallel parking.” Gabriel absently kicked a rearview mirror. “At least I could have picked a worse place to crash. Always a hotspot here.”

He glanced up at Chinatown’s radiant towers. Twelve-foot ramparts shielded their splendor from the streets. Conversant in the language of the far side of the globe, the immigrants of this neighborhood had profited from round-the-clock corporate schedules. By day, by night, they kept up cross-hemisphere contact, doing business with the market maestros of Shanghai. Transcending the outdated day-night distinction had made them disproportionately rich.

“Dear, dear,” Marisol said, managing to look at once worried and distracted. “You look all right. Do you feel all right?”

“Ask me again when the rush wears off.”

“You’ve got another rush coming,” Marisol said. “If you’re feeling up to it. I found you an escort. A bona fide cop.”

Gabriel suppressed a whoop.

“He’s ninth precinct,” Marisol said. “He knows the Village like a tactical map. He’s agreed to take you as far as the park.”

“What’s his price?”

“You’ll have to take that up with him.”

“Where do I meet him?”

“Zoner’s Alley.”

Gabriel groaned.

“It’s the best I could do. At least it’s close by.” That distracted look came into Mari’s face again, like she’d suddenly become aware of dark forces around them. “Hey? Gabes? Tell me something.”

“Fire away.”

“This mystery market event. This AI bubble. It’s all over the news. The bot Pamplona, they’re calling it: robo-bulls chasing humanity down the street. They say all the inside players are running long, buying like gangbusters from the loan brokers.”

“What about it?”

“You have any idea what it might be?”

“I know what you know.” Gabriel shrugged. “The AI modelers are onto something. Or they think they are. Predicting a biblically huge event.”

“Like an interest rate change?”

Gabriel laughed. “No, God, bigger. Way bigger. AIs aren’t like the human quants, Mari. Not likely to bite the bait of some little number dangled by a government bank. They think big picture. Society wide.” Her frightened face worried him. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know.” Marisol kneaded her neck. “The emergency lines are on fire tonight. It’s wild. Networks are down. I heard the mayor’s meeting with his cabinet. Even the president issued a statement.”

“Oh, yeah? What’d he say?”

“Things are under control.”

“Pretty terrifying.” Gabriel ducked. A gang of hoods, passing the Chinatown compound, lobbed balled trash at the high brick walls. “I’ve got to get to Ribbeck, I guess. Ribbeck’ll know.”

“I sure hope so,” Marisol said.

“He’s the world’s greatest trader,” Gabriel said. “He sees the mind of God.”

The Alley of the Zoners was a new subway tunnel. Twenty-hour work shifts meant high night ridership. The city had started construction on three new lines. But high unemployment yielded massive indigence. Bums, addicts, sundry hungry ghosts, now thronged to these manmade caves.

Gabriel shuddered as he walked along the rows of staring faces. Some people had strange reactions to wake-up pills. The chems kept them up all night, but not alert. They sat, eyes open, and stared, just stared. Stuck in a 3 AM torpor that never waned. Zombified, they shuffled through life, ate, spoke, but barely lived. Eventually, most of them drifted down here, to sit out existence staring into the dark.

Why, Gabriel wondered, did they still take the pills? Their fixed faces suggested they were seeking something mystical, elusive, hopelessly internal, retreating forever from the restless world to stalk the waking-dreamscapes of an endless sleepless night.

Gabriel fought an urge to drop down among them. To rest, to sleep, perchance to dream . . . How simple, how pleasant. And by a sleep, to say we end . . . Something something something. He’d never been strong on the classics.

Truth was, Gabriel had feigned confidence with Marisol on the phone. Meeting with Ribbeck: this was the definition of a desperate mission. Ten years ago, Augustus Ribbeck had been the savviest trader who ever measured out his life in basis points. But ten years was an astronomical span of time in the trading world. And Ribbeck had retreated, pulled in his riskier bets, cut off personal contact, vanished into the agoraphobic gloom of his uptown apartment. He’d become a living ghost, never heard or seen. No one knew what the old coot might be up to. Gabriel doubted he’d even get to see the man.

“Sad, isn’t it?”

Bright light cast a ghastly pallor on the pavement. The beam slid up to illumine a nearby vacant face. The light source bobbed to the beat of approaching boots. “We should just let ‘em wither away,” said a voice behind the flashlight, as the beam swung over the array of staring zoners. “What a waste of the waking mind.”

The flashlight was industrial strength, punishing. Gabriel lifted a hand to shield his eyes. In the byways of nightshift, where notoriety threatened death, only city employees dared to wield a light so bright.

“Are you my escort? The cop? Marisol sent you?”

The light angled away, glaring on haggard faces.

“Know what I think?” The cop’s face was invisible, his voice gritty, harsh. “I think men are born with only so many waking hours. Like a finite store of thoughts, a stock of thinking minutes. Burn through ‘em early, you turn into this. A brain-fried bum zoning out both day and night.”

The light jogged, swung, made a pale pool on the pavement.

“Benjamin Colt.” The cop put out a hand. “So you’re the banker? Looking for a hiking companion? You gotta have a lot of disposable wealth, you wanna hire a guy like me.”

“Not exactly,” Gabriel said.

“Maybe you didn’t understand me,” said the cop. “When I say you gotta, I mean you betta.”

Gabriel mentally tallied his tappable funds. “A hundred thousand now, same again on arrival.”

“With inflation like it is? Whyn’t you just blow your nose in my palm? In case you haven’t noticed, kid, the markets are going loco. Money may be worth exactly dick by tomorrow.” The light slid up Gabriel’s legs, down his arms. “Tell you what. Give me your phone, watch, and rings right now, your necklace and shoes on arrival.”

“My ring? My shoes? Are you serious?”

The light jumped. The cop’s feet clopped in close. His face emerged from the darkness, young and sober, cleanshaven. He held out a palm.

“You bet I’m serious, son. This is police business.”

As they came up into the glare of East Houston Street, the cop tossed Gabriel a police reflector vest.

“Better put that on, so they know you’re with me.”

Gabriel studied the gaudy yellow garment. “Impersonating an officer. Isn’t that a crime?”

“Sure is, kid. You better not make me angry.”

And so, glowing like two human torches with reflected luminescence, Gabriel and the cop worked their way through jammed traffic, across a littered sidewalk, into the east-side projects. A radio car would be useless on these streets, with zoners and revelers milling all around.

The project complex was a dark, brick fort. Overhead, bright windows watched the night. Mothers and fathers would be up there, Gabriel knew, guarding bolted doors, semis on hips and crowbars on knees, waiting out the long and lawless hours. Crime, made strong and bold by dark, pooled at the feet of these brooding towers.

Gabriel tripped. A blackened fender lay twisted underfoot. Nearby, a car, some kind of fancy German coupe, had been blown to a tangle of charred and jagged scraps. The melted windshield spilled, taffy-green, down the dashboard. Lately, police, overcome by rising crime, had been resorting to tactical strikes.

“Keep your attention to yourself,” said the cop, “and don’t say a damn thing.”

“What are we doing here?” Gabriel tried to keep close. “I didn’t ask for a tour of the projects. I need to get through the Village.”

“Oh, you’ll get there, Speedy, don’t worry. I just got to make a quick stop.”

They entered a tower through the glass front doors. Crowds of grim young men filled the lobby. The cop began to climb a stairway. Everything was surprisingly well-lit. Extra cables had been strung on the walls. Hi-watt lamps, hanging from twisted wire, supplemented the standard municipal lighting. Men stood guard on every landing, unabashedly armed with big black rifles, stolid and disciplined as soldiers.

Five flights up, a guard blocked their climb. Gabriel looked past, peering up the stairwell. Laughter and music came echoing down, resounding from some floor high above. Children’s laughter. Cheerful music. A woman’s voice spoke in a lulling cadence, issued algebraic questions. Youthful voices chorused answers.

The stairwell guard made menacing motions.

“Hey.” The cop snapped his fingers. “Snoopy. Get away from there.” He grabbed Gabriel’s arm. “That’s none of your business. That’s where the families live.”

“It sounds like a school.” Gabriel still leaned forward. “Like someone giving lessons.”

“Sure does. Know why, genius? Cause that’s what it is. Night school. You think any of these people are going to let their kids outside at night? They’re breeding the next generation of Stephen Hawkings up there. Got a captive audience. But come on. Up above, that’s molto privato. Our business is with Ram.”

“Ram?”

Shaking his head at Gabriel’s questions, the cop grabbed his arm and pulled him into a hall. They entered a living room identifiable as such only by a ceiling fan that stirred the sweaty air. Furniture, sofas, tables, sideboards, all must have been present, but were utterly concealed. At least fifty people packed the floor, watching a TV that took up one whole wall. A love scene played in vast hi-def, the actor’s faces huge as doors. TV had made out famously post wake-up pill.

“It’s my casino,” the TV actress sighed in Spanish. “My cocaine. My problem.”

“That is not important,” cooed the male lead, close to her lips.

“And why not?”

“Because the sun is down, the moon is up, and you are a woman, and I am . . . a fiend!”

“Oh!” sighed the room in chorus, shivering through all its fifty-plus bodies as the actors joined their humungous mouths.

“What are we doing here?” Gabriel whispered.

The cop didn’t answer, but tugged him through the rapt throng, toward an open door. In a contiguous kitchen, a young man, twenty-five at most, sat at a round table, bent over a pizza. “Well, look who it is,” the guy said through a mouthful of cheese, looking up as they entered, shaking his head. “I guess I got to put some discipline in my crew. I keep telling ‘em to shoot your corrupt ass on sight.”

“Yeah, right,” said the cop. “No BS, tonight, Ramirez. I got this knucklehead with me, going uptown. You got my virgins?”

The young man, with a courtly sumptuousness of movement, still holding the pizza slice to his mouth, rose and knuckled open a door. In the bedroom beyond, three sullen boys sat on a bed, playing some kind of videogame with handcuffed hands.

“All tied up,” said the young man, “and ready for delivery. IDs and dossiers at their necks. One assault, one firearm sale, one MJ possession.”

“Possession?” The cop scowled. “Jesus, Ram. My guys aren’t going to go for that. We got whole prison wings full of possession; nobody gives a flying fat one. Can’t you get me a murder once in a while?”

“You want a virgin murder,” said Ramirez, “you’re going to have to do it yourself. Be grateful these young men stepped up like they did.”

The cop stomped up to the third boy, tugging a cord that looped his neck. A plastic baggy pulled free of the boy’s big T-shirt, flopped onto his chest. The cop grabbed it up in a fist.

“Possession. Christ. I’m starting to wonder about you guys. What kind of criminal underworld are you running here?”

The young man named Ramirez finished his pizza, dabbed his lips with a pink-striped dishtowel. “I promised you three felonies. Here are three felonies. You want a better bargain, lawman, change your laws.”

Gabriel looked from man to man. His wake-up pill was in full effect, alertness become a mad pump in his head.

“What’s going on?”

“Never you mind,” the cop said. “Come over here and help me rope these dopes.”

Ramirez handed over blue nylon rope. The cop looped it through the three kids’ handcuffs, stringing them in sequence like a team of cows. He bade them stand with a snap of fingers. The three boys glared, still hunched on the bed.

“Come on, you fecal smears, hup to. You three idiots are now the temporary property of New York’s finest scum-processing system, and that means you stand, squat, and fart on my say-so. You were fleet enough on your feet when you were attacking law-fearing folks and slinging kif. Speaking of which, Ram, you said one of these was an assault. What kind of assault are we talking, here?”

Ramirez waved a languorous crust. “Oh, that’s Jacko, here. Got the mean reds one night, hurled a pineapple at his lady’s head.”

“Jesus,” said the cop. “That all?”

“It was a pretty big pineapple,” said Ramirez. “It was high-velocity.”

“You know how many numbnuts in this town are throwing high-velocity fruit at their ladies right this moment? Ramirez, come on. I thought we had a clear deal. Three virgins a week. Used to be you’d get me at least a grand larceny. Now it’s, what? Pineapple throwers? Dope dealers? You know how everloving common this crap is? I could walk into any building in this town and find you a gun-selling, dope-owning, pineapple-throwing wife-assaulter, all in one. It’s a wake-up pill world. This shit’s the new normal.”

“Hey, don’t tell me.” Ramirez pressed his chest. “I’m only selling what you buying buy, badge-man. ‘Sides, Jacko here’s the real deal. He almost killed the woman. Just about took off her head. We got documentary evidence. Look at his baggy. We got proof.”

“Proof this loser is only doing what every sadsack, shrewbitten shrunknut in this town wants to do after being cooped up talking to his woman all night, every night, since the world got wake-up pills.”

The cop grabbed the baggie around the kid’s neck, gave its contents a grudging glance. The boy called Jacko, Gabriel noticed, looked as if he was getting restless. The boy called Jacko looked as if he might be starting to feel a little what you might call violent inside.

“We got a whole city, here,” the cop went on, “living on spousal abuse and grass clippings. This is not true crime, Ram. This is what keeps people going.”

“Did I mention the lady nearly died?” said Ramirez. “Did I mention she was wearing glasses?”

“Cry me a river.”

“Did I mention she was a cop?”

The tone of the room became dense with excitement, as if a little bomb of aerosolized adrenaline had gone off.

“Well, now, that’s different.” The cop dropped the baggie, rubbing his hands. “That’s really something.” He grabbed the end of the nylon rope, tugging hard. The three tied boys jerked up from the bed. The cop sidled up to the boy called Jacko, peered appreciatively into his sweat-shined face. “This is finally some prime steak. Cop killer, huh? Would-be, anyway. With a pineapple, no less. That’s some serious disrespect.”

Jacko’s throat, Gabriel noticed, was convulsing in the way a throat convulses when either spit is being worked up or vituperation is being suppressed.

“This may actually be a bonehead worth breaking,” said the cop, pulling the rope to draw Jacko close. “You’re with me, cop-beater. Come to papi. You gonna be my special friend.”

The boy named Jacko looked displeased.

“Just remember your side of the agreement,” said Ramirez.

“Oh, don’t worry, Ram. I’ll treat your boys right.”

4: Jacko Loco

Out on the street, a cop copter was circling low, probing the overgrown grounds of the projects with a tightly focused beam. Gabriel followed the cop and team of roped boys into the smelly recess between two vastly overfilled dumpsters.

“So what’s all this craziness about?” Gabriel said.

“Eh?” The cop leaned out between the towering heaps of trash, squinting as a hail of plastic spoons and warm drops and noodle containers came shaking and raining from some window high above. He pointed at the circling chopper. “Keep your head low, Speedy. Those copter jockeys always pull this stunt, flyby my pickup and try to boost the game. We got a fine prize, for once; I’m not letting some whirligig streetsweeper lift a documented cop-assaulter off my hands.”

“But what’re we doing? Where are we going? Why are we bringing three petty criminals with us?”

“Not too bright, are you, for a man in a ten-thousand-dollar shirt? Thought you finance types were supposed to be the whizzest kids who ever dropped out of Harvard.”

“But who are these guys?” Gabriel persisted.

The police helicopter moved on. The cop gave a tug on the nylon rope. Gabriel and the three prisoners shuffled and stumbled across the small desert of trash that filled the former promenade between two files of project towers. The cop, pulling the rope, set a jaunty pace. Gabriel, holding the tail end, trotted behind.

“Look,” called back the cop. “Let’s keep this simple. We’re going to the park. Through the Village. Exactly where you wanted. Now, if you’re as smart as your paycheck says you are, Speedy, you’ll know that’s all you need to know.”

“And these prisoners, they’re—”

“Yo!” The boy called Jacko halted short. The rope jerked tight in Gabriel’s hand. “I don’t wanna do this,” Jacko said. “I changed my mind. I wanna go back.”

“You,” said the cop, coming close to Jacko’s face, “don’t have a mind to change, pendejo. You got exactly as much volition in this as a hundred-dollar douche. Your only role from now into foreseeable futurity is to open up wide and take whatever I decide to ram into you.”

“I got . . . . ” Jacko’s face was writhingly alive. He looked to Gabriel rather as if fat worms of anxiousness were squirming under his skin. “I got a mean feeling in me, man. I think I did a bad thing.”

“You did a bad thing? You bet you did a bad thing. You threw spiny fruit at a lady-cop’s face. You know what the book on that reads like?”

“No, man, I mean . . . I ain’t thinking right. I flipped a bad switch. You gotta send me back.”

“Listen, you walking digestive stain.” The cop got closer. “You volunteered for this. You gave up your right to a free life twice over, once when you did the crime, twice when you copped to the culpability. So don’t tell me any tearful tales.”

Over Jacko’s shaking shoulder, the cop spoke to Gabriel. “Don’t listen to this rockbiter. He knew what he was doing.” He sighed. “OK, see, Ram and me, we have a kind of arrangement. As you and every other civilian in this town has to know, there’s no way any normal police force is gonna keep up with all the crime we’re seeing. That means the politicians get in a tizzy, and politically speaking, it’s all about the numbers. How many busts, how many bums behind bars. So here’s what we do, down on the streets where it matters. Ram, I pay him a nominal monthly fee, he rustles me up a couple small perps. Virgin offenders, no record to cause complications. I boost my stats without a hassle, Ram and his fellow bigshots get left alone, the mayor gets his numbers, and any of these trivial pissants who step up, they get to pop their prison cherry with minimal fuss, do some credible time on a lowball crime. Which is apparently a good deal if you’re a piece of creeping street-filth and having a jail stay under your belt’s your only hope of getting respect. It’s happy-joy-joy, all around.”

“So this . . . ?” Gabriel backed half-consciously from Jacko’s convulsive face. “You actually pay these criminals to turn themselves in?”

“Hey.” The cop shrugged. “It’s a high-productivity culture. Everybody’s gotta keep up. All the pressure we’re under these days, the department’s taking tips from the masters. Stack ranking, aka, rank and yank. If you don’t have the numbers, you’re out on your ass. What I do, this is called streamlining a process. This is law enforcement in a wake-up-pill world.”

“But doesn’t that mean . . . . ” The financier in Gabriel couldn’t let it go. “Doesn’t that mean you’re essentially paying people to break the law?”

“Better me than the next guy.” The cop shrugged. “If our precinct doesn’t do it, some other precinct will.”

“I got . . . . ” Jacko’s pulsing throat muscles now nearly throttled his speech. “I gotta go back . . . I got . . . something in me . . . . ”

The cop chuckled. “Whatta you got in you, cabron? Pray tell.” Leaning in to hear the whispered answer, the cop chuckled harder. “A killer? Is that what you said? You got a killer in you? Well, son, you’re in luck. ‘Cause I got the cure.” From beneath his poison-yellow coat came a dark semi-auto. “There you go, killer.” The cop waved the gun under Jacko’s nose. “Get a good look. One tight fistful of commissioner-issued stopping power. So you take a touch on this cool steel and feel the killer in you just melt away.”

The cop stroked Jacko’s cheeks with the gun. Jacko shuddered at the muzzle’s caress. His bared teeth grated like cubes of ice.

“Listen, finance man,” the cop said. “You got your answers, now here’s the executive summary. You have your business, I have mine. And I seriously doubt anyone in this town has clean hands. I’ve got a contact up at the park who’s waiting to take these cattle in. All we gotta do is cross through the Village. Look at it like this. It’s the new wild west, and you and me, we’re just a coupla lonesome ol’ vaqueros. And we’ve got three head of prime meat, here, to herd through a great divide.”

The Village.

Once upon a time, Gabriel knew, the Village had been fashion Mecca, a bohemian Babylon, a gay utopia. But that was all pre-wake-up pill.

The Village, now, was a second Gomorra.

All night, the streets in this area glowed with Roman-candle light. Pothole bonfires, multicolored chemical torches, the lambent reflections of firelit windows, all filled Broadway from dusk to dawn with a wavering glare. In this ever spirited sector of the city, the acolytes of libertine self-investigation had leased the dark territory of the night for experiments with personal release that year by year grew steadily weirder. Was it boredom, Gabriel wondered, the tug of the moon, some lupercalian dream lurking in darkness itself? Wickermen on the tenements rooftops went up nightly in whuffling flame; masked figures moved through the steps of obscene dances; drugs, illegal or legal, circulated through the alleys like scurrilous words; gluttons fed to the point of purgation on street-food feasts. In the Village, promiscuity wasn’t just a liberty. It was law.

Gabriel hoped they’d get through alive.

The cop led their little cohort west on 4th. Something big seemed to be afoot. The streets were weirdly barren of crowds. A few coked-up reprobates gibboning on fire escapes, a few of the usual fornicating shadows. But where, Gabriel wondered, were the expected mobs, the orgies, the madcap dancing?

“Party seems to have hit a hiatus.” The cop jerked the rope to draw their little group tighter. “Either that, or some big blowout’s in the works.”

“Maybe they called off the party,” Gabriel said. “Maybe these kids have heard the news.”

They walked a silent block past sierras of trash.

“News,” the cop said, after a moment, as they neared Broadway. “And what is the news, exactly? You mean this market turmoil? All this crazy business people are talking about, AI raiders run amok. Tell me, you’re a finance, man, Speedy. You got any inside word?”

Gabriel looked up as they passed a sort of gate, glossily vitrine, compiled of a recent party’s discarded bottles. Above the buildings of NYU, nightshift’s usual swarm of helicopters shed rattling echoes over the town.

“Personally?” Gabriel sighed. “If you ask me? I think all this fuss is for exactly nothing.” He shrugged. “The news is that people think there’s news. We see this every time the AI models spike. It’s a panic. It’ll pass.”

“But these AI traders—”

“The robo-quants?” Gabriel shook his head. “There’s nothing special about them. They’re doing what every gambler does. They’re trying to predict the future.”

Amazing, how silent the streets were, tonight. A sonic pressure built in the distance, as if a thousand people were gathered nearby, still out of sight but talking softly.

“Predicting the future,” said the cop. “But that’s news, isn’t it? These robots, they’re predicting something big, right? Well, if it’s big and it’s the future, boy, I want to know.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” Gabriel said. “But prediction, that means different things to different people. And it sure as heck means something different to a computer.”

That weird, steady sound was getting stronger, less a detectable noise than a subliminal pressure. Gabriel felt strangely excited. He walked fast, tugging the rope, throwing the others off balance. No trader could help but be driven to heights of nerdy rapture by the semi-sybilline mystery of the AI quants.

“So, take tomorrow.” Gabriel skirted a vomit splash. “Here’s a prediction for you. The sun will rise, water will still be wet, billions of people will mostly honor their contracts. So what? Or how about this: maybe three world leaders will be assassinated, there will be mass panic, the markets will crash, and civilization will collapse. But who could ever predict that? And why bother betting on it? See, we’re all trying to find the sweet spot, events that are predictable, but not too predictable. Events at the razor margin of predictability.”

“You’re losing me,” said the cop.

“And me, and my fund manager, and every other human on the planet. Because here’s the thing. These AI modelers, their idea of predictability is totally different from ours. They’ve got more data. They’ve got better math. And they’ve got a very, very different way of placing bets.”

“So they’re better gamblers?”

“Who knows?” Gabriel paused, tugging the rope, making the cop turn back and see his shrug. “I’m saying, the AIs are so advanced, it’s like a whole different game. It’s not about investments, or optionality, or shadow derivatives, or complex instruments, or even portfolios of conditional orders. These machines, they’re trading models of the world itself. Simulated timelines, huge multidimensional constructs. Probabilities and chaos-theory a million times as intricate as the craziest climate model. And the thing is, these AIs are so alien, so far beyond us, that no one can really explain what they’re doing. We don’t even know if their predictions will come true. All we can do is glance into their crystal ball, hope to see something we understand.”

“But you don’t understand it,” said the cop. “None of you smart guys do. Not tonight.”

“What I think?” Gabriel said. “I think we’ve come to Delphi.”

They turned a corner and saw the source of that faint subsensory tightness in the air. A massive crowd had gathered on Broadway, jamming the lopsided star of Astor Place. All the mad urchins, kooks, layabouts, marabouts, fiends, and artistes of the Village were here, and all attending to some spectacle just out of sight. A hush contracted like shrink-wrap around the crowd, swathing the tattooed and unwashed bodies in a crackling static of suspense.

“High times in Whackoland,” said the cop.

Gabriel barely heard. “The Delphic oracle,” he murmured into the hush. “That’s who the Greeks used to go to for advice. What’s going to happen, what does it mean? And now these AI modelers, they’re like prophets to us. But when you listen to an oracle, you never get a straight answer. You have to interpret. You have to figure out what it means.”

“Bull.”

A tug on the nylon rope made Gabriel trip. Behind him, Jacko’s eyes were bulging, webbed red. The poor kid’s head looked like the swollen portion of a squeezed balloon.

“You crazy,” Jacko said, “finance man. Like every smart person I ever known. Trusting computers. Son, you ever use a computer? Computers are a joke, man. Computers are insane.”

“Easy, boy,” the cop said.

“Computers?” Jacko’s muscles were jumping. “You ever see what they do? Computers freeze. Computers get hung. Computers, they loop, they never unloop. I’ll tell you what to do with your computers. You gotta shut. Them. Down.”

“Heel, boy.” With the rope wound tight in his fist, the cop jerked Jacko’s leash. Jacko staggered.

“You sure he’s all right?” said Gabriel.

“He’s got a killer in him, remember?” The cop chuckled. “Probably got a fat lady and a talking dog in there, too, and all of ‘em trying to run the show. Don’t worry, son. Long as we keep this nutjob leashed, we’ll be OK. Anyhoo. You were saying. This big AI bubble. You think it’s just some really long bet?”

Gabriel couldn’t pull his eyes from Jacko’s empurpled face. “Well, I don’t know. It could be an event two hundred years down the road. Or a complex of events, all very contingent. It could be an event so subtle, so global, so fundamental, we wouldn’t even notice if it happened. The point is, we not only don’t know. When it comes to guessing what these AI quants are calculating, we human beings probably can’t even imagine.”

The crowd down Broadway let out a soft cheer. Jacko’s eyes were gumball-sized. Gabriel peered down nearby streets. “We’d better find another route.”

“Hell,” said the cop, “this is the most direct way. And I wanna see what these freaks are up to.”

Gabriel opened his mouth to object, but the cop was already walking. They made their way toward the edge of the crowd. The cluster of bodies seemed less dense, up close. Here, the yellow police vests proved to be of service. People parted to watch them sidle by. Hating eyes glared from beneath scraggly bangs. The scene was almost inconceivably motley: tats, rags, piercings, punk accoutrements, every countercultural mutation of fashion since the Beats. “Get out of here, pigs,” sneered an unlocatable voice. Someone spat.

The cop waved his gun.

“Keep it up, you miserable vermin, and I’ll call this whole shindig in as an anti-American rally. Believe me, a couple of well-placed words, I could have this square eyeball-deep in drone ordnance.”

Gun aloft, the cop wended toward the square’s center. A clear space surrounded the cube-like central statue. Chemical odors tainted the otherwise sweat-scented air. Three concentric rings of torches kept the crowd at bay. Within the inner ring, robed figures in pale, blank gloves and masks circulated ceremonially, shuffling, stooping, attending to at least two dozen gurneys.

And on each gurney, under a sheet, lay a body.

5: Carnival

Gabriel was thinking about the market.

In his first years out of Kinshasa, Gabriel had seen himself as something of a calm metrician, carefully testing possible bets in the fine-tuned scales of common sense. But in New York, living the Wall Street life, he’d found that high finance was a lot weirder than classroom models. Real-life finance, it was mostly about imagination. Imagination: trying to guess what billions of people would do in the next few years. Imagination: trying to guess what billions of people were guessing about other people. Imagination: trying to guess what kinds of bets irrational actors might make about other irrational actors.

Imagination—and now the AI traders had taken off, and it was all about trying to guess what irrational people might guess about what other irrational people were guessing about the borderline impenetrable divinations of a group of latter-day oracles.

Investors, traders, bankers: Gabriel had come to see them all as masters of imagination, the real artists of a technocratic age. Prophets, philosophers, seers, explorers.

Ten years ago, Augustus Ribbeck had been a prophet par excellence. But how sharp could those famous eyes, with their iconic round glasses, still be? The work of banking on imagination ran 24/7. And Ribbeck, old recluse, never left his home.

A stir in the Village crowd drew Gabriel’s attention back to the square. The robed warlocks of this hipster rite were turning down the gurney sheets. Each uncovered a lifeless face: a curly-haired woman, a large bald man: humans of every model, all inert. Dummies, or maybe mummies, born without brains and rapid-grown in the round-the-clock-factories of biotech empires. Gabriel remembered Marisol’s warning. Medical cadavers. Human sacrifice. What were these coo-coo revelers planning to do, cut out two dozen hearts?

“This is looking to be ne-plus-ultra sicko,” said the cop. “This is looking to be life-sentence-grade illegal.”

“Come on, man.” A reveler in front of them turned around, like some stoned concertgoer chiding folks whose chatter spoiled the show. “Leave the negativity at home, OK?”

“What’s going on?” Gabriel rose on tip-toes, mentally dredging whatever he could remember of the darker side of Western history. “Is this some kind of Satanic ritual?”

“Whoa, dude.” The reveler leaned back, laughing, holding up his hands. “You got a dark mind. We’re just having a little fun.” Eyes blinking with dryness, naked torso knotted, the guy bent his immensely tall body over their heads, talking with the blank gregariousness of the very, very stoned. “It’s like, art, you know? Like a kind of Samhain-Tim-Burton-Siege-of-Leningrad happening. Nothing to get all paranoid about. Just gonna have us a little zombie dance.”

The druidic priests were bending over the cadavers, now, prying open their mouths, packing them full of little purple pills. They poured in water and shuffled back. The bodies, obviously not alive, were yet evidently not quite dead. They swallowed reflexively, spasmed, sat up. Their naked skin flushed with the warmth of life.

“These medical cadavers are same crazy biotech, yo.” The stoned guy shook his head. “Guess they have to make them mostly alive, you know? So like, people know what they’re dissecting, right? But check this out.” He flapped his arms. A nearby cadaver, a small Asian woman, turned on him her glassy gaze. Slowly, stiffly, like a doped stroke victim, the dead woman mimicked his movements, waving. “It’s all sensory-motor,” said their stoned cicerone. “Nothing but a brainstem. Monkey see, monkey do.”

“But what’d you give them?” Gabriel shuffled back instinctively as the horde of cadavers stumbled to its feet. “What are those pills?”

“What else, man?” The stoned guy did a little jig. “They’re what got you here. They’re what keeps this whole city dancing. Wake-up pills! Pack enough in, turns out you can bring the almost-dead to almost-life.”

The corpses, the zombies, whatever they were, began to totter and sway around the clearing. The robed figures, necromancers, artists, whatever they were, mimicked their movements, initiating a slow and drunken dance. And now Gabriel heard music. Curious music. A fluttery drumbeat. A pokey sort of whistle. A rabble of a marching band came strutting through the square. Drums, brass, distorted guitars: a whole punk-metal marching column, playing at max loudness.

The necromancers danced. The cadavers danced along. A lurching, crooked, horrible dance. Stiff limbs swinging. Drugged eyes staring. Strings of drool wagged from the chins of half-alive bodies that stumbled as if the world were tipped. The priests stripped nude. The crowd did, too. A jumpy excitement shot through the gathered bodies, as if the city had been shaken like a huge pinball machine.

“Here!” The stoned guy held out a fistful of pills. “Join in the moment, lawmen. Trust me, you never felt anything like a massive OD on your own waking mind.”

“No!” Jacko, though his hands were still tied, swung his head down and smashed away the pills. “No more.”

Jacko’s body tightened like a trapped animal’s. Thrashing, tugging at the rope, he jerked the cop into the crowd’s sweaty welter. The cop shouted a warning, but Jacko had gone mad. Maybe the music had gotten into him. Gabriel could understand. It was awful, evil, insane, this music. An imminent madness tugged at the tune. The marching beat hardened, going loud and angry.

Gabriel suddenly realized: he knew this piece. But from where?

Screaming, “I can’t take it, I can’t take it,” Jacko clawed a path through the crowd. Hardly anyone seemed to care. The dance was changing, turning mean. The zombies seemed to set the style: stiff limbs waving, stomping, drool. Gabriel took an arm in the face. Lashing out in response, he felt his knuckle clip tooth.

Zombies imitating dancers who imitated the zombies who then refined their imitation: who could call this anything but madness? People whooped and laughed. The music had gone shrill. Horns blared a warlike theme. Drums clattered. Guitars screamed.

Gabriel had it: Shostakovich’s seventh. Specifically, the notorious section known as the Invasion March, a passage of such swaggeringly awful taste that it still sparked contention in classical music circles.

Purportedly this had been the Russian composer’s theme music for the Nazi attack on Leningrad. Some said it had rather been written as a veiled critique of the creeping madness of Stalinist Communism. In a music appreciation class, years ago, Gabriel’s instructor, perhaps muddling his history, had interpreted the piece as a sarcastic burlesque of militarism and nationalism and rationalism and indeed, all the reigning isms of Western civilization.

And maybe there had been something to that, Gabriel thought. Maybe there was truth to that critique. Because Gabriel now realized, thanks to these frolicking hedonists and their undead dance partners, that the weird little tune, with its silly beginning, its building beat, its swelling hysteria, it had for him still another significance. This was the music of the market, the Wall Street rag, the trader’s theme: this swaying, tiddly, half-mad march. This was the tune, or akin to the tune, that Gabriel seemed to hear playing at all times, now, somewhere behind the ticking numbers that crawled all year, in a glowing reflected drizzle, over his eyeballs: the ditty of nonstop day/night trading, steadily building from a gentle seduction to a panicked cataclysm.

Jacko thrashed through the storm of dancers, dragging their posse like a big snagged fish. “I can’t!” he gabbled. “I don’t want to. I’m changing my mind. I’m going back.”

“Heel, puppy.” The cop drew his gun.

“Wait!” Gabriel reached out. The dancers, oblivious, didn’t even clear a path. Gabriel could hardly tell, now, which were alive and which were dead. The whole square had become one jittering clot of naked, aimless, mindless movement, the dead imitating the living, the living the dead, and all merged in a single, stiff, lurching orgy.

Jacko had somehow acquired the strength of seven men. A bucking, foaming stallion of a boy, he pulled the cop and group of cons. His remonstrations came in spittle-choked explosions. “I . . . didn’t mean it . . . man . . . I just get . . . so . . . angry.”

The cop leaned on his heels. The rope tangled in the crowd. Their little train netted additional bodies. Everyday physics had become a source of confusion: was Gabriel running or crowdsurfing or crawling? He found himself holding Jacko by the shoulders.

“It’s the work, man.” Jacko’s lips seemed to have developed a sudden, squirming fear of touching his teeth. “You don’t understand. Day, night, day, night, picking through trash. Waste reclamation, man, twenty-two hours a day, that was my gig. And you can’t slack off, never, you gotta keep giving two hundred percent. Day, night, day, night. Shit, I wish they never made those pills. At least, in the old days, you could sometimes forget. At least in the old days, you could sometimes dream.”

“You think you got it tough, senor?” The cop pulled Jacko out of Gabriel’s hands. “I spend twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, chasing malcontented scum like you. So don’t start sobbing on my uniform.”

“Man, these kids are right.” Jacko slumped from the cop’s arms, eyes rolling over the square’s abounding madness. “They put their finger right on it, yo. These days, we’re all doing a zombie dance.”

Jacko seemed at once exhausted and enraged. The zombie crowd still shambled around them, artsy wastrels in an avant-garde display. Watching their waving limbs, Gabriel realized he himself could hardly remember the routines of the pre-wake-up-pill world. Jacko was right: the present had become an endless daze. Wake-pills had divided all people along a crack of fractured time. Once, every person’s life had alternated rest and work. Now half of humanity hoarded labor, a round of endless, overstimulated strain. And half of humanity idled, wasted away, with nothing to do but drugs and dirty business.

“I tried to end it, y’know?” Jacko held Gabriel’s arm. “Sign off, bail out, check in, pay up. Only way a person can rest, these days, I mean, really rest, like, really-really. These kids are right about that, too. That’s what I wanted. Keep poppin’ those pills. Keep poppin’ and poppin’, till I went to sleep, forever and for true and for always and for good.”

The zombie dance had gotten, it seemed to Gabriel, seriously, immoderately, inadvisably wild. These kids were going to party till they dropped, till exhaustion reined in their raging nerves and pulled them down into blissful torpor. Ashes to ashes, they would all fall down, the dead among the living, the living like the dead.

“Look at this.” The cop turned in a circle, fondling his gun like a lucky charm. “This is sick, what this is, I tell you, finance man, this is deranged.”

The music seemed unlikely to cease. A single theme repeated to the point of hair-pulling aggravation. The dance, as well as wild, had become insufferably sweaty. The cop, winding Jacko’s leash around his arm, hefted his Glock.

“Um,” Gabriel said.

“You know what burns me up, Speedy?” The cop’s face, mirroring Jacko’s in mood, was lit rippling gold by a chemical torch. “What burns me up is you high-finance types, investors, innovators, all these bums with their petty crimes, and these spoiled kids with their artsy parties—you’re the ones who wanted this. Stay up all night, every night. And why? I’ll tell you. ‘Cause all you people believe in freedom.”

A naked dancing girl, maybe alive, maybe not, jostled the cop. For a moment Gabriel thought she’d get a bullet in the nose. The cop caught her face in a splayed hand and shoved her, wheeling, back into the crowd.

“Freedom. Oh, yeah. You thought this would be just one big fun freedom-fest, running wild under the moon. Break the rules, have a high old time. What else is the nighttime for? You never thought about the people like me. People who’re supposed to keep your precious freedom from getting a little too free, know what I mean? ‘Cause Lord knows, y’all want everyone else to follow the rules. So here’s me, running down a pack of rats who never sleep. And if maybe I try to swing a few deals, pump my numbers on the side, well, hell, that’s not allowed. ‘Cause that kind of thing’s only for gamblers and hustlers, and Johnny Law’s got to mind his Ps and Qs.”

“I hear you,” said Gabriel. “Believe me, I do.”

“Oh, yeah? And what about this degenerate?” The cop turned his gun on Jacko, still bucking like a bull.

“We’re all in this together,” said Gabriel. “We’re all working hard.”

“Maybe so. But the difference is, I’m working at making peace. You’re working at making money. But all this jackass is working at is making trouble.”

Jacko looked ready to pop like a bottle rocket, take off toward the circling copters whose dark rotors continually whapped the night.

“You better settle your skinny self down,” the cop said, “or so help me, son, I will put you down.”

“Wait. Listen.” Gabriel clapped a hand to the cop’s arm. “I don’t think he can help it.”

“Help what? His killer inside? It’s the killer right here he better worry about.”

“There is no killer inside. That’s not what he said.”

“I’m giving a final warning, son. Heed or bleed.”

Shaking his head to the swing of the music, Jacko pulled them toward a voided building. “Hell with this,” the cop said, and shot him.

At the invisible impact, Jacko fell. A scream trilled up, all around. Gabriel, cursing in his mother’s Akan, hurried forward. Jacko’s calf was pumping blood. The boy’s pupils described arcane curves. “You didn’t have to do that.” Gabriel knelt and unbuckled from his belt the first aid kit he carried with him every nightshift.

“Don’t worry,” the cop said, “he’ll be all right. Just helping him tame that killer inside.”

“He said pills.” Gabriel shook a fist as if rolling dice. “Not killer. Pills. As in wake-up pills. As in, he overdosed. Before he surrendered. As in, this kid felt so guilty about what he did, he was trying to kill himself. There is no killer inside. This guy is running on a massive hormonal rush. If we don’t get him to a hospital, his heart could literally burst.”

“Ha!” The cop’s head rocked. “How’s that for justice?”

“We’ve got to help him.”

“Maybe this’ll calm him down.” And the cop shot Jacko two more times.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel screamed.

“Relax, pencil-neck. It’s nonlethal. Watch.”

At the first crack of the gun, the music had stopped. At the second and third, the dance dissolved. The crowd stampeded, screaming, in a thousand conflicting currents. At least, that’s what Gabriel thought was happening. It was hard to distinguish mass panic from the dance.

The cop fired blindly. Crack-crack-crack. Naked revelers stumbled and bled. The stampede built without picking a direction. The two remaining convicts—stirred, Gabriel supposed, to unaccustomed heroism by this singular display of unrestrained psychopathy—made a stumbling attempt to tackle the cop, but he swung his gun with the lazy lethality of a flask-a-day actor in a forties western and felled both men in one limp-wristed fusillade. Gabriel staggered back as, smiling, the cop struck the classic smoke-blowing pose that signals an end to sharpshooting vigilantism.

“It’s auto-aiming, see?” The cop flourished the gun. “Just point and pull. Got a little computer in me, flawless targeting. They’re making every cop get ‘em, now.”

“But you—you—”

The cop laughed. “Son, it’s all right. They kept busting me for excessive force, so I finally gave in and hacked my implant. Now I can only shoot for the limbs. It’s automatic. Pretty clever, huh?”

Gabriel, still trying to comprehend what had happened, began to sputter about the very obvious flaws with this plan: about unpredictable ricochets, infections, malfunctions, moral hazard.

“Hey?” The cop pressed the air. “Calm down, son. It’s your tax dollars at work. Behold the miracle of high-tech crimefighting. I could fire into this crowd all night, wouldn’t do more’n give the hospitals some work. Look.”

And the gun was swinging toward Gabriel, now, the face behind the foreshortened barrel rutilant with reflected flame. And Gabriel saw that, like his wolfish fellow traders, like the Lunie cab driver, like the sidewalk pirates and their mercenary foes, like the zoners in their subterranean trance, like this roistering horde of amped-up zombie dancers, like all the fast-living souls in this city that now quite literally never slept, the policeman was, very likely, completely insane.

“You’ll barely even feel it,” the cop said, finger curling around the trigger.

And it was a funny thing, Gabriel thought. Damned amusing, when you got right down to it. Because Gabriel could have run. He could have charged. He could have used the quick-and-dirty combat training Marisol had given him five years ago, when the nightshifts of the post-wake-up pill world passed a critical point on their accelerating slide into anarchy.

But Gabriel did none of those things. Absurd, really. A potentially nonlethal wound, a hospital stay, a sedative-assisted convalescence in a clean-sheeted bed . . . what Gabriel saw, staring down the cop’s gun, was an-all-too-tempting opportunity to finally stop, lay down his head, and sleep.

Eyes closed, Gabriel waited for the shot that would deliver him into blessed unconsciousness.

It never came.

Gabriel opened his eyes.

The cop was gone.

The screaming revelers had nearly dispersed. A few naked bodies lay trampled in the square. Jacko and the other two convicts, holding frayed rope, were staring with wide eyes into the sky, where the full moon had just risen above the Village rooftops.

From a dark window of the voided building, a shredded yellow police vest fluttered to the sidewalk.

“Tremble, mortal,” a dark voice boomed. “Your armed companion is no more.”

“Oh, God, no,” Gabriel said.

“No help is at hand, sheep, and the hunt nears its end. The mighty Vorgoth will dine well tonight.”

“Good God.” Gabriel scrambled to his feet, heading north on Third. Something black and fleet flapped overhead.

“Truly, sheep, the night air is ripe with the smell of your fear.”

Gabriel already had his phone out. “Marisol? Marisol?”

His wife’s weary face appeared in the jogging screen.

“I knew something like this would happen,” Marisol said.

“You’ll never guess.”

“Oh, but let me try.” Marisol squeezed the bridge of her nose. “The vampire’s back. There’s been a trash avalanche. The rats are swarming in Union Square. The Sisters of Artemis are hunting stray men. You got caught in a drug-fueled zombie dance. The Lunies are having a parade. It’s a vigilante thing. A motorcycle thing. A live-theater thing. It’s all three. Mobs of children are suffering again from delusional mass panics. Someone spotted a UFO in the park. A monster. The vengeful ghost of Mel Gibson. The CHUDs are rising.”

“Got it in one,” Gabriel said. “With bonus points for five.”

In the jouncing screen, Marisol, with practiced smacks, shut off her dispatcher equipment and stood. “All right, Gabe, I’m coming. Yet again, I’m leaving work early, risking my career, to save my hubby’s ass. Tell me, hon, are we ever going to just spend a day in?”

A shadow swung from a streetlight above. Gabriel ducked as pale claws snatched at his head. Vorgoth’s laughter squeaked like a child’s.

“Run, sheep, run. Prolonging the hunt only whets my appetite.”

“At this point, Mari, I think I’d settle for surviving the night.”

“Don’t worry about that.” Marisol reached beneath her desk, hauling up a piece of equipment the size and shape of a water blaster. “I’m on my way. And I’m bringing my pain ray.”

6: The Guru

In the milky light of dawn, a battered police moped carrying two passengers pulled to the curb of Seventy-Third Street. A strip of construction tape clung to the front leg shield. A two-foot white-oak splinter had pierced the acrylic windscreen. A knotted tie and a remnant of a vampire’s cape trailed limply from the rear wheel.

Marisol dismounted, shaking plaster from her hair. “End of the line, Gabe. How’re you holding up?”

The second rider tottered to the sidewalk. The right arm of Gabriel’s shirt had been torn off; he couldn’t quite remember how. Paint speckled his face with rainbow sprinkles. He hiked up a pants leg to check the four scratches in his calf.

“Wonder if I should get a rabies shot.”

“I don’t think vampirism is catching,” Marisol said. “Not this kind, anyway. Not unless you’re a highly impressionable idiot.”

“You know,” Gabriel sighed, massaging the scratches, “I almost feel sorry for the kid.”

“He learned a useful lesson.”

“If he ever gets to apply it.”

“You mean if he ever gets down from that crane.”

“I mean if the vampire hunters don’t catch him first.”

“Quite a night,” Marisol said, and nodded at the nearest building, a parkside tenement twenty stories tall. “This the place?”

Gabriel tipped his head back. “From what I’ve heard, Ribbeck owns the whole twentieth floor.”

“Gabe,” Marisol called as he limped to the three-step stoop. Gabriel turned, wincing even at this slight movement. His wake-up pill was wearing off, the familiar aftereffects kicking in: fuzzy tongue, gummy eyes, an acute caffeine craving. Marisol said, “Was it worth it?”

Gabriel shook a screw from his shoe. “We’ll find out.”

The building’s façade was nondescript. No mercs in the lobby: that meant robotic monitors. Either that, or hoodlums simply knew to stay away.

An elevator sighed open between marble columns. No welcome, no deterrents. Gabriel saw no buttons to press. The doors closed quietly behind him.

A long silence sucked him up the softly humming shaft.

At the twentieth floor, again without input, the elevator doors slid open. Gabriel gazed into a mellow radiance: light from high windows shining on spotless upholstery.

A bald man waited in a shaft of morning sun.

“Gabriel Boateng?”

“Ribbeck?” Gabriel squinted. This man, for all his calvity and dignity, seemed too young to be the Ribbeck Gabriel knew.

The bald man smiled. “He’s still asleep.”

Gabriel followed the footman through the apartment. All surfaces here seemed designed for the broad diffusion of light: varnished pine planks, polished bibelots on shelves, a ubiquitous gleam of well-dusted fruitwood. Ribbeck’s rooms exhibited, in general, the spacious immaculateness of wealth uncluttered by greed. On a table on a balcony, breakfast things twinkled sunnily: croissants and coffee, a half dozen jams. At the edge of the table lay an old print paper.

Gabriel followed the footman into the sun, a lone word thrumming in his mind, sleep, sleep. He couldn’t believe it. So the legendary investor, on this morning of all mornings—could it be true that Ribbeck was asleep?

“Has he been waiting for me?” Gabriel stood back while the footman pulled out a wicker chair.

“Oh, not particularly. Please.” With a wave.

And so Gabriel dropped onto the cushioned seat, leaned back in the sun above the park’s green jumble.

A creak of springs sounded deep within the apartment. A groan, a bump. Gabriel realized he was listening to the unmistakable, the almost forgotten sounds of a man rising from bed.

A French door swung. A spotted hand fumbled along the wainscoting. And Augustus Ribbeck shuffled into view.

He looked older than Gabriel had expected. The famous round glasses were there, the blowsy hair. Ribbeck’s felt slippers susurrated on the balcony’s red tile. Holding the belt of a Scotch plaid dressing gown, he gestured at the table.

“Good, I see you’ve helped yourself. I’m sorry for my . . . lethargy, but I’m afraid I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

Pulling out a chair, Ribbeck sat with an old man’s tentative fall and thump. He pulled over the paper.

“So. You’re Gabriel Boateng, from Kappalytics. And you’ve come all this way for . . . breakfast?”

Gabriel found Ribbeck’s smile obscure. “I think you know what I’m here for.”

Ribbeck lifted a finger, his open mouth suggesting the imminent dispensation of wisdom. Instead he swept up the paper.

“Yesterday’s news. Anyhow it might as well be. I grew up on print, you know. It was a slower world. Now I have to have these made specially. A fine use for my fortune, you’ll say, adding to the world’s inefficiency.” He gave the paper a snap. “Somehow I find it easier to welcome into my home words that weren’t in such a terrible hurry to find me.”

“Your servant . . . . ” Gabriel began. Ribbeck’s glasses peeked over the paper’s edge.

“I hope you had no trouble. I had Silvio file your face with the security system. Otherwise, I’m given to understand, anyone who forced his way in here would end up roughly the consistency of a Bloody Mary. That’s another thing I’ve never gotten used to: trusting ourselves to the benevolent oversight of these . . . electric entities.”

Gabriel shifted with a strange unease, remembering crossing the lobby, coming up the lift, unwatched by anything save electric eyes.

“So you knew I was . . . ?”

Ribbeck’s hand flapped at the hovering footman. “Two omelets, Silvio. Western, please.”

Silvio slid away. With rackety sounds inside the apartment, a mechanical chef chopped and steamed. In minutes they were forking up peppers. The sun on the polished forks stupefied Gabriel, punched like alcohol into his drowsy mind. His wake-up pills had just about worn off.

Ribbeck’s tilted glasses flashed reflected dawn. “So,” he said, licking egg from his lip. “The AI modelers have gone wild. Worldwide confusion ensues, market turmoil. The loan brokers are making out splendidly, and every hedge fund is gorging on long-term securities. A major productivity boost seems to be in the offing, but no one can exactly say what it will be. And now your fund manager wants the solution to the mystery, and here you are, to pick an old man’s brain.”

“Do you have it?” Gabriel freed a thumb stuck in his cup’s round handle. “The solution?”

Ribbeck’s lips smacked as he skimmed headlines, chewing with a geriatric’s loose chops. Suddenly brisk, he pushed back his chair.

“Follow me.”

Leaving behind a half-eaten omelet, Gabriel followed Ribbeck’s slippered shuffle. The back rooms of the apartment were close and quaint: high wood thresholds, rail moldings. The newspaper, clamped under Ribbeck’s arm, flapped and patted his tartan hump. How could this frail, secluded man, Gabriel wondered, possibly comprehend the hi-tech forces clashing in the outside world? For God’s sake, the old fellow still read longform journalism.

They entered a small dim room.

The first thing to strike Gabriel was the smell. Thick, organic, like a ball of clothes on a bathroom floor. A smell of intimacy, of basic life functions—and yet, for all that, piercingly nostalgic, like the musty warmth of a mother’s lap.

The odor rose from the room’s central object: a big low bed, sheets tumbled into hills. A black sock dangled from a corner, tense with static. Sun through a slit between drawn shades drew golden trickles on a rucked-up blanket. One pillow still held the print of an elderly head.

That smell. Gabriel knew it, now. It was the ancient, the historied smell of sleep. Of a body lying still in its own pooled heat. Of pillows into which a slack mouth had breathed eight hours of exhalations. Of sheets steeped in a sleeping man’s aura: stewed humanity.

So it was true. The old man did it. He really slept.

“I know it’s here somewhere.” Ribbeck sat on the edge of the bed. “If you’ll just give me a minute.”

Stacks of old newspapers stood all around, looming, megalithic, some taller than men. Ribbeck, bent at the edge of the mattress, ticked down one with an unsteady thumb.

“So you . . . ?” Gabriel choked on a mouthful of the warm, sweetish atmosphere.

Ribbeck glanced up. “Sleep? Yes, I do indeed. Every night.”

“And you don’t . . . ?”

“Oh, I gave up those horrible pills. After all, I spent most of my life sleeping. It wasn’t hard to go back to old habits.”

“But how do you . . . ?”

“Keep up?” Ribbeck’s eyes lifted, gleaming. “With a world that’s moving ever faster, speaking at electromagnetic speeds, packing one-point-five as many hours into a day? But it’s not how I keep up is it? It’s can I? That’s what you’d like to know.”

Swooning in the soporific air, Gabriel nodded.

“My friend, come sit with me.”

As Gabriel added his weight to the tired old bed, Ribbeck bent again to his paper stacks.

“Ten years ago, Gabriel, as I’m sure you know, I was among the fastest hustlers on the street. A weekly killer in the market coliseum. I lived for the fire sale, the long shot, the big short. The world had gotten wake-up pills, and I gobbled them down like capsulated immortality. Faster, hotter, free of doubt: I got so I talked, traded, bought, and sold in a walking trance of reflexive action. In the sere years of my life, I lived like a transistor, pulsing white hot in a neverending present.

“Until one night.” Ribbeck smiled. “Now, a man of my age inevitably learns to depend on many machines. I always had my home casabot alert me with a chime when it was time to take my pills. I lived impulsively, a fully conditioned creature, medicating on command. But one night . . . a malfunction, I suppose. One night, Gabriel, the chime didn’t come.”

Ribbeck’s fingers played down the paper stack, pulling corners, sampling dates. His narrative mumbled from below his bowed head.

“A slower man, a saner man, a man less swept along on the EM waves of cyberbanking, that sort of man might have remembered, I suppose. I was working to unload a bundle of micro-term futures contracts keyed to time-zone arbitrage across an index of realtime virtual currency recalculations. Literally racing the sun against the deleveraging of my position. Let me tell you, to be margin-called by the cosmos is frightening thing. The sun went down. My head grew heavy, as the song says, and my eyes grew dim. My last thought was to wonder if I’d forgotten to take my pill.”

Ribbeck selected a paper, pulled. The wavering stack spat dust as the sheaf ruffled free.

“When I woke up, Gabriel, I had no idea what time it was, what day, what world. I lay face-down at my terminal, my trade wholly blown. It turned out I’d slept for forty-one hours.”

Ribbeck, tongue pointing to his upper lip, riffled his paper’s pages.

“I was groggy, slow-witted, and yet I’d never felt so clear-eyed. Sluggishly, at first, I began to catch up with the world. I checked the net. I walked the street. And slowly, very slowly, I came to my senses.”

Ribbeck, finding what he sought, marked the section with an inserted thumb. His eyes, age-hazed, had the gentle acutance of old cathode screens.

“And do you know what I saw, when I came back from dreamland?”

Gabriel, swimming dreamily in those lactic eyes, could only muster an empty murmur.

“Madness!” Ribbeck’s arms winged out. His hand whapped the papers. The stack tipped, swayed. Only by lurching from the bed with a lover’s arms did Ribbeck steady it. “Madness,” he cried, kneeling on the tufted carpet, hugging an eight-foot pillar of news. “In the squares and in the streets. Madness in the agora and in the marketplace. Madness marching at lightspeed overseas. A worldwide orgy of constant, incontinent madness. And as I saw it clearly, for the first time—I knew then that I myself had finally become sane.”

The warmth of the room lay thick on Gabriel’s mind. He felt his own mind slipping into a kind of madness, the hypnagogic portal to sleep. How wonderful it would be, to lie back in this bed, pull up the blankets, close his eyes . . . .

“I’ve been watching you,” Ribbeck said.

Gabriel jumped. Ribbeck reached for a remote. A press of a button, and the walls lit up. Gabriel’s face gazed down from a thousand angles. Pictures copied from his online profiles. His social network. His professional network. Frame captures from TV. Op-eds, posts, tweets.

And more. Gabriel saw his face, only eight hours back, peering up from a Village street. An overhead shot: his stroll with the cop and cons. Truly, privacy had gone extinct. Video streams from a billion cameras now stitched the digital grid. And Gabriel remembered: searchlights of surveillance choppers, swinging out of a midnight sky.

Ribbeck’s finger flicked through images. “It’s not a large community, ours. A trader’s name gets around. And a trader’s face, and a trader’s behavior . . . . The thing about our business, Gabriel, is that it’s everyone’s business.”

A button. A click. Video played. Gabriel saw himself, gabbling under searchlights. Filters amped the audio. He heard his own recorded voice.

“These machines, they’re trading models of the world itself . . . what I think? I think we’ve come to Delphi.”

“Delphi.” Ribbeck touched Gabriel’s shoulder. “I couldn’t have said it better myself. For months, Gabriel, I’ve had my eye on you. Your fatigue, your frustrations, your ennui. And yes, your philosophies. I know the signs of a discontented mind. As soon as I heard about this crisis, I called Popovski. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been searching for someone—to share, to understand. Someone who will listen to a prophet when he hears one.”

Gabriel, propped on locked arms, almost swooned in the bed’s warm scent. He hardly knew what Ribbeck was saying. His mind had seized on a single phrase. A quiet moment. When was the last time he’d had one of those?

“I’m sorry, I don’t—you think I’m some kind of seer?”

“Those people out there?” Ribbeck pointed at the wall. “Do you think I can talk to them? The AIs tell them what to buy, and they buy. The AIs tell them what to sell, and they sell. They’re all rushing headlong into the future, no time to pause and wonder why. But you and I, here and now . . . . ”

As he spoke, he fondled papers, steadying, plucking, sifting, sorting, tossing gray sheaves onto the bed. The headlines piled up, all those bold buzzwords: puzzle, bubble, crisis, breakthrough.

“Listen.” Ribbeck wet his lips. “In the past five years, there have been three big spikes in the AI models. Three massive destabilizations. Each one set off a small storm of investment, a frenzy of high-speed securitization, the rapid issuance of a massive slate of multi-sector high-yield loans. But in all this betting, in all this mad divination, in all this overinvestment in the future, who bothered to ask what the oracles were saying? Who paused to interpret their prophecy?”

As Gabriel remembered, plenty of people had asked; the trouble was that none of them had gotten any answers. But Ribbeck was snapping his fingers, bouncing on the bed.

“Look, Gabriel, look here.” Ribbeck snatched up newssheets, one after another, the print smeared and stained by his sweating hands. “Look what one old man with a pile of papers realized, while the rest of the world ran mad. Years ago—but who even remembers?—back in the dusty forgotten past, three events rocked the markets and the world. The bioethics treaty, that was first. Auto-targeting weaponry came next. And the third—but I don’t have to tell you what the third was.”

Ribbeck rose onto his knees, tartan robe flapping open, shaking the papers at Gabriel’s nose.

“Here’s the answer, staring us all in the face. The answer I saw clearly, while your friends out there wrote me off as a shut-in, a fossil. Each of these events happened exactly ten years, two months, and five days before a big jump in the AI models.”

Gabriel forced his thoughts through a thickening swamp of somnolence. “What are you saying?”

“Think.” Ribbeck’s excited lips sprayed spittle. “What does an AI value? Accuracy, above all things. What does an AI live for? Simulation. But not just simulation. Better simulation. More factors, more data, more information. Ever-increasing complexity. And, now, now.” Ribbeck’s finger woodpeckered Gabriel’s chest. “Here’s the zinger. Because the richer you make a simulation, Gabriel, the longer it takes to run.”

Gabriel felt a prickle along his skin. He saw where Ribbeck was heading.

“It’s a logical necessity.” Ribbeck chuckled. “You always, always trade speed for detail. But the AIs, they don’t care. They worship detail. You see what’s happened? Madness, Gabriel, madness is always the answer. The AI quants have a madness all their own. And they’ve fallen behind the pace of time itself, chasing perfection in their mathematical models. Chasing it ever further into the past.”

Gabriel closed his eyes. Ribbeck’s thin voice cackled around him, mingled with a crackling of paper. Gabriel could almost see it. All those over-evolved calculators, parping sparks in Bangkok cellars. If a machine had a mind, why couldn’t it go mad? And what form would its madness take? Some data-driven obsession, a dream of infinite exactitude.

“Crazy.” Ribbeck shook him. “But what else, after all, can you expect a prophet to be? Gibbering nonsense, buy, sell, buy. The AI quants aren’t predicting anything. While we go rushing off the cliff of the future, they’re running the other way, chasing their own kind of immortality, racing after a lossless fetish down the Turing tape of recorded history. They’re not showing us the future. They’re reminding us of the past.”

The past. Beset by Ribbeck’s sprays of spittle, Gabriel closed his eyes. He remembered the past. It seemed like a different world. And there was a reason for that. It had been.

“That’s crazy,” he murmured.

“Crazy?” Ribbeck laughed. “I’ll tell you what’s crazy. Crazy is placing bets on a computer model without having any idea what it means. Crazy is staying awake around the clock, never taking time to pause and reflect. Crazy is the life we’re living now.”

“But if that’s what these AI quants are doing . . . . ” Gabriel struggled to make his mind focus. “If they’re only building incredibly rich simulations of past events . . . I can’t believe it. We’ve been placing bets on these things. Buying stocks, investing in companies. There would be consequences.”

“Consequences?” Ribbeck waved. “You see the consequences. Look out your window. This is what happens when the blind lead the blind.”

“But all this time . . . you’re saying the AIs have lost touch with the outside world. That their simulations have gotten so rich, so slow, they take longer to run than history itself. Maybe that’s possible. But it’s also nuts. Someone would have figured it out by now.”

“And someone has.” Ribbeck cackled and patted his chest. “Those people out there, they haven’t slept in ten years. They’re living in the moment, perpetual panic. They wouldn’t recognize the past if their lives depended on it. And now, as a result, their lives do.” Ribbeck rubbed his hands. “Well, I haven’t forgotten. I remember the past. And now, consequently, I have all the power.”

Ribbeck rattled on, shaking the bed, but Gabriel, eyes closed, hardly noticed. The logic. He could see it. The AI madness, as Ribbeck conceived it. That ancient lure, to recapture the past, reconstruct it in perfect detail, every factor included, every connection made. To understand why things had happened the way they did.

Like military buffs, reenacting every step of some long-ago battle. Like preservationists, archiving every iteration of the web. Like one of those kooks who wandered around with implanted cameras, recording every second of their lives.

Wasn’t that the grail of every intellectual? Or rather, the curse of memory itself, that oldest form of simulation? What was the study of history, after all, but an ongoing attempt to predict the past?

And so the AI quants had ceased to be gamblers at all. And humanity, obsessed with its fantasies of the future, hadn’t noticed, or had chosen not to notice. Like a hasty man who reads the news without checking the date, they had taken the past on faith for the future. Not recognizing history, they had doomed themselves to repeat it, and the AI prophecies, unintended as such, had, in a sense, become self-fulfilling.

Yes, Gabriel could see how it might have happened.

If nothing else, he understood the appeal.

He flopped back in the sheets. The past. It all seemed so far away. Remote, lost, and impossibly sweet—those early years with Marisol in their Marble Hill apartment, sun through rusty child bars on their sagging queensize bed. Her hip beside him, rising up to go caramel-colored in the light’s hot spill. That first summer back from Kinshasa’s gray air, waiting to dock at a downtown desk, Marisol still on the evening beat, lean from Academy calisthenics. Above all, those leisurely yellow mornings, the walk-through kitchen thick with inspissated sun. How slowly the days had started, back then. Gabriel had picked up a chocolate-drink jones in college, Milo spiked with fine coffee grounds grabbed at stands around Kinshasa, and even in America he preferred to launch Sundays with hot cocoa, waiting for Marisol to get her ass in gear. Nothing to do, then, but eye chipped Formica, slouching in a tube-frame chair, beeping away vaguely at some puzzle game on his phone. Till his mind started dreaming, drifting back toward Africa, the ancient timesense of his mother’s country, ancestors’ spirits still extant in the hills. Sometimes Gabriel had smelled it, sense memories wafting up from lost history, a clinging loamy aroma of eras before international finance, before telecom, before even clocks . . . until Marisol’s nibble on his ear snapped him awake and he rose up out of that primal sense of time.

The past, yes. Gabriel missed it.

“None of that, now.” Ribbeck slapped his cheek. “Wake up, look sharp. You see what you have to do.”

Gabriel blinked. Old memories, lost mornings, still poured thickly through his head, the fading honeyed pleasure of sleep. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Don’t play dumb.” Ribbeck pointed at the window. “Call Popovski. Tell him it’s off. The bet, the bubble. You’re backing out.”

“You want me to—what?”

Ribbeck showed grinning dentures. “You see what’s at stake.”

Gabriel put a hand to his head. “I’m sorry, I dozed off. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, Gabriel, that you’re in a unique position. Your fund, your reputation. If Kappalytics takes a stand now . . . granted, you’re not the biggest bear in this circus. But if we both move together, it could be a trigger.”

“Trigger?” But Gabriel saw, with alarming clarity, what Ribbeck meant. Kappalytics had always followed the AI quants, taking every recommendation their models spewed out. If they bucked the trend, lost faith, it could send a signal. It might even—he hardly dared to think it—it might even start a run. “You want to set off a panic?”

Ribbeck, standing on the bed, robe flapping, lifted fistfuls of throttled paper. “Oh, good Lord, no. I want to do much more than that. I want to bring this whole mad racket crashing down. What are all those fools out there doing, after all? Betting on history, again and again. But we know the truth, Gabriel. History doesn’t deserve it.”

He flung down a paper. Gabriel spread the sheet on his knees. A front page ten years old. Large-point headlines stretching tall like shadows at sunset. Crime waves, the first medical clones. Dead tissues and dead issues.

“It’s not what you see,” Ribbeck said, “it’s what you—”

Don’t. Something small, understated, tucked under the fold. A single column. The FDA had just approved—

“Wake-up pills!” Ribbeck shook a fist. “That’s when it started. Ten years, two months, and five days ago. The curse of our age. And now, you see, now the AIs are running through it all again, the changes we’ve seen, the crime, the chaos, simming it all in their virtual recreations. That’s what they’re predicting: the world we currently live in, with wake-up pills and all their consequences. And everyone’s pouring in their money, doubling down on our sick, broken civilization. Well, I say, this is it. Our chance, our moment, to look at the history we’ve been handed and say, ‘Hell, no.’ To pronounce our judgment on this deranged society.”

Gabriel sat there, blinking at the headline, while Ribbeck knelt and felt in the sheets.

“Anyway, Gabriel, you have no choice.”

Gabriel’s head jerked up. A nasty tune wormed into his ear, a tootling flute, a marching beat. A slow build to clashing insanity.

Ribbeck had left the video playing on the wallscreen. They heard it again, Shostakovich’s march, the insipid ditty of a world gone mad.

“Excuse me?”

“Well, I told you, son, I gave your face to my home security system. I seem to remember making a grisly reference, earlier, to Bloody Marys.” Ribbeck held up the remote. “One tap, I can have you reclassed as an intruder. You’ll never leave this apartment—unless it’s through the plumbing system.”

“Let me get this straight.” Gabriel shook his head. “You want me to call Popovski and try to start a market run, maybe a crash, by betting against the AI quants—all as a way of casting judgment on our depraved society. And if I don’t go along . . . . ”

“It’s quite simple, m’boy. I zap. You squish.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Care to test your faith?” Ribbeck, with a Strangelove grin, held a Damoclesian finger above the button. “I’ve been waiting for years to stop this madness. And don’t try any nonsense like tackling me to the floor. The laser system will melt your head.”

Gabriel’s eyes rolled from Ribbeck’s Tabasco breath, over video dancers and stacked newsprint, into the dozing sub-basements of the mind. He was so tired. Of nightshift’s quirks. Of tides of nonstop finance washing through the circadian craze of never-sleeping cities. Of drop-dead parties and hormonal overdoses, crazy cops and crazier investors, of everything but one dream deferred: a languorous morning with his wife in bed.

From across what seemed a Styxian span, his eye sought Ribbeck’s spectacles.

“You really won’t let me out of here?”

“Not unless you comply, of course.”

“And if I resist, I’ll be fried on the spot?”

“Reduced to a spot, one might say.”

“So I can’t run, or wrestle with you, or make even the slightest violent gesture?”

“Not if you have any emotional investment in your cellular integrity.” Ribbeck grinned.

“I see. But . . . I can’t help but wonder . . . what happens if I only do . . . this?”

And Gabriel reached out, and with the mildest, gentlest movement, nudged a teetering newspaper pile.

He’d hoped Ribbeck would drop the remote. Gabriel never planned for what actually occurred. The newspaper tower swayed and spilled. The folds of its slumping column shot liked slipped vertebrae into adjacent stacks. Tower after tower toppled, like Aksum obelisks cracked and tipped.

As the paper archive canted down, Ribbeck shrieked and leapt, arms out, staggering into the gray cataclysm. Under Shostakovich’s smashing cymbals, the room shook to concussions of accumulated newsdays. Gabriel ducked his head. He heard a scream, a thump. The floor bounced like a bad suspension bridge.

When Gabriel lifted his head, Ribbeck had vanished, along with the floor, under a settling surf of cheap paper.

Leaning off the bed, Gabriel felt in the gray drifts. He uncovered the old man’s face—still breathing, peaceful as a sleeping child.

By the time Silvio leaned in the door, Gabriel was tucking the ancient investor into bed, as gentle and nonviolent as you please.

“Did something . . . ?” Silvio’s eyes passed over the chaos. Gabriel held a finger to his lips.

“Shhhh.” He pointed at Ribbeck’s sleeping face.

Silvio shook his head. “Sleeping again? I don’t why he doesn’t just take his pills.”

Gabriel pointed at the papery mess. “He bumped a stack as he nodded off. If you want, I could try to straighten up.”

“Oh, no.” Silvio’s hand cut the air. “Let him do it. It will keep him occupied. Poor old man, he’s mad as a leprechaun. Come on, then, I’ll let you out.”

Wading to the door, Gabriel glanced at the bed. The great investor’s face, in sleep, was deceptively sober. Poor old man, indeed—felled by a sentimental fetish for print journalism. Gabriel wished the bastard pleasant dreams.

7: Asleep

In the uptown dawn, at the top of the townhouse’s sandstone steps, Gabriel stood with his phone to his ear. Popovski’s good morning lilted tinnily.

“Ga-bri-el!”

“Don’t Gabriel me, Pop.” Gabriel shielded his eyes against the dawn sun. “You delivered me into the arms of a madman.”

From the curb below, Marisol looked up, eyebrows raised. Popovski’s voice in the phone made a put-put sound.

“Mad? I wouldn’t call Ribbeck mad. Eccentric, maybe. A tad peculiar. A trifle homicidal, if my sources are to be believed. But forget about all that. What did he tell you? Did he puzzle out what the AIs are doing? Did he put his finger on Penrose’s big prediction? Did he pin the proverbial tail on the market donkey?”

Gabriel looked down the steps. Marisol waited at the curb. He could tell by her blinky eyes that she hadn’t yet taken her wake-up pill. As a city employee, she got Sundays off, a luxury Gabriel rarely enjoyed.

“Did he say what we should do, here? Hello? Gabe? We’ve got to move fast. Give me the game plan. Are we short or long this thing? Are we buying in?”

Halfway down the steps, Gabriel watched his wife yawn, Marisol’s head going back and back to gulp down morning’s honey light.

“Gabriel? You there? What do you think? Did you get any answers? Do you know what’s going on? Can Ribbeck be trusted? Can Penrose? What do we do?”

“You know what I’d like to do?” Gabriel was already lowering the phone. “I’d like to sleep on it.”

“Sleep?” Popovski’s voice rose in a crow of surprise. “Gabriel, wait, I think I heard you wrong. Did you say sleep? We’re in a crisis, we can’t sleep. Dayshift’s starting, we’ve got to move, jump, get ahead of this thing—”

But Gabriel had shut off his phone, pocketed it, and trotted down the last few steps. Marisol already had her wake-up pill in her palm.

“So what’s the story, babe? Back to the office?”

Gabriel plucked the crinkle-wrapped package from her hand.

“Gabe? What’s up?” Marisol patted a yawn. “You need a ride downtown?”

Gabriel took out his own pill, setting it in his palm beside hers. He contemplated the loudly colored packages, the tiny egg-like nubs inside. What was the slogan he’d thought of? Murdering sleep.

He tossed the two bright packages to the curb. “You know, I thought we could spend the morning in.”

Marisol interrupted another yawn, showing him her surprised, pleased eyes. “But don’t you have to—aren’t you supposed to—?”

Smiling, Gabriel slipped an arm around her waist. Holding her close to his hip, he walked her to the curb. Marisol mounted the bike and aimed it east, toward the park, the road home, the morning sun.

As Gabriel climbed on behind her, another snippet of poetry tugged at his mind. A tune, a lyric, a text from school. Something that seemed to sum up his life of the last ten years. A little life, really, rounded with a . . .

A what? He’d lost it. No matter. Marisol twisted the starter. Gabriel, holding her from behind, rested his head on her shoulder.

She tipped her head back, touching his cheek with hers. Slowly, almost drowsily, they started down the street. Already half-dozing, Gabriel knew he’d feel her touch again, hours later, when they woke, side by side, from a long-delayed snooze. The city would be rocking and screaming around them, lurching on from day into night. But for a moment, they would lie apart from all that, drifting in half-light on the margins of the mind—neither of the future nor of the past, but arrested in a primal instant of time—and hardly aware, in that dreaming moment, if they were awake or asleep.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2015.

A Few Words with Nick Wolven

What are the origins of this story?

Not too long ago, I can’t remember exactly when or where, I came across a book called 24/7, by Jonathan Crary. It’s an odd book, a recent book, a readable book—but it belongs to that genre of weighty, Marxist-flavored cultural theory that flourished in the mid-twentieth century, before we had TED talks and Slate pitches to satisfy our appetite for sweeping social commentary. It argues that sleep is the last human activity, the one remaining sphere of experience, that hasn’t been colonized or enclosed or appropriated (or whatever jargon word you prefer) by capitalist influences. So apart from a few basic industries and consumer goods—hi-tech mattresses, a handful of medications—no one really makes money off our need to sleep, no has managed to commodify or regulate that time, no one really sees sleep as a productive activity. People don’t even talk about sleep that much. You can rattle on and on about your favorite recipes and restaurants, but it’s gauche to gab too much about your dreams. Of course, as Crary discusses, we have electric lights and alarm clocks and night shifts and all these other devices for making sleep fit into a post-industrial production schedule. But for all that, the experience of sleep is still very private, a kind of primitive holdover from wilder, untamed times.

That speaks to some of the ideas behind this story. I think we all like to imagine that if only we could get rid of the need to sleep, we’d be much more productive, more accomplished, more in control of our time—in a way, more civilized. In her sci-fi novel Beggars in Spain, Nancy Kress uses the need to sleep as a kind of metonym for all human limitation—in the hugely meritocratic, hugely unequal future society she sketches, genetically engineered super-people are actually called The Sleepless, and liberation from slumber has catapulted them to the top of civilization. And who hasn’t had that fantasy, while nodding and swilling coffee over some term paper or white paper at 2 AM? If only I didn’t have to lose so much time . . . sacrifice all these hours to Morpheus . . .

But would giving up sleep really make us more productive? I think about my own waking nights, stumbling around among downtown bars at ungodly hours . . . sitting up at the window, staring-eyed and freakish with insomnia . . . whispering secrets and ghost stories in the dark of childhood slumber parties. There’s another book that comes to mind, a book called At Day’s Close, by Roger Ekirch. It gives a history of night in early modern Europe. How people acted after dark, how they conceived of the meaning of the night, what activities they pursued in the sunless hours, in an age when Europeans thought of themselves as civilized, but when the light of civilization, after dusk, still reached only as far as a candle flame’s radius. Most of what went on in that deep darkness wasn’t too pretty.

As the hero of my story reflects, we might one day get rid of our need to sleep, but we’ll never get rid of the night—of the dim, spooky, untamed world that comes to life under the moon. Night is the time of fear, the time of vice, the time of crime and lust and superstition. What would happen if in seeking to maximize our productive ours, we ended up setting loose some wild part of ourselves that has so far been confined to slumber and dreams—an ancient, dangerous aspect of our nature that only awakens when the sun goes down?

What are some of your favorite short stories?

My favorite short stories are the ones I read thirty-odd years ago, and that I can now barely remember. I have a dim recollection of reading a story in a hotel once—one of those shabby, middle-American, B&B-style places with a hall bookcase full of crumbling paperbacks. I must have been about eight or nine. The story was about a group boys on a canoeing trip who get eaten, one by one, by a giant birds. I mean, what? Maneating birds? Maybe I’m misremembering. But that’s the point. The ideal short story for me is something that flourishes in the cracks of life. Something held out of the rain at a Greyhound stop, or experienced in a half-snooze at a thirty-thousand feet, or consumed at one swallow in the aisles of a book store and afterwards retained only as a series of murky impressions. A boy raising a monster flatworm in a pond . . . a man defending his remote home against a huge burrowing worm . . . a guy with a haunted alarm clock. I have dozens of these unmoored images floating through my mind, culled from forgotten piles of sci-fi magazines and horror anthologies. And among them is an arresting but untraceable memory of giant, hungry birds swooping over a mountain river, homing in on a small fleet of canoes.

You have one wish, you can make one from a story or novel you’ve written a reality. What would it be? Why and which book/story was this in?

Oh, well, that’s easy: the one with the machine that enables people to . . . but wait, I shouldn’t say more. I haven’t published it yet.

Do you have anything coming out in the months ahead?

Well, I’m working on a novel. (Who isn’t?) It’s going to be a real beast. It’s in more or less the same mode as this novella, but on a bigger scale. I’ve also got some stuff coming out in the magazines: a short story in F&SF, a novelette in Asimov’s, and a novella in Analog (but that one probably won’t be out till summer or so).

When the Old Gods Die

Mike Resnick

Ngai, who rules the universe from His golden throne atop the holy mountain Kirinyaga, which men now call Mount Kenya, created the Sun and the Moon, and declared that they should have equal domain over the Earth.

The Sun would bring warmth to the world, and all of Ngai’s creatures would thrive and grow strong in the light. But even Ngai must sleep, and when He slept He ordered the Moon to watch over His creations.

But the Moon was duplicitous, and formed a secret alliance with the Lion and the Leopard and the Hyena, and many nights, while Ngai slept, it would turn only a part of its face to the Earth. At such times the predators would go forth to maim and kill and eat their fellow creatures.

Finally one man, a mundumugu—a witch doctor—realized that the Moon had tricked Ngai, and he made up his mind to correct the problem. He might have appealed to Ngai, but he was a proud man, and so he took it upon himself to make certain that the flesh eaters would no longer have a partnership with the darkness.

He retired to his boma and allowed no visitors. For nine days and nine nights he rolled his bones and arranged his charms and mixed his potions, and when he emerged on the morning of the tenth day, he was ready to do what must be done.

The Sun was overhead, and he knew that there could be no darkness as long as the Sun shone down upon the Earth. He uttered a mystic chant, and soon he was flying into the sky to confront the Sun.

“Halt!” he said. “Your brother the Moon is evil. You must remain where you are, lest Ngai’s creatures continue to die.”

“What is that to me?” responded the Sun. “I cannot shirk my duty simply because my brother shirks his.”

The mundumugu held up a hand. “I will not let you pass,” he said.

But the Sun merely laughed, and proceeded on its path, and when it reached the mundumugu it gobbled him up and spat out the ashes, for even the greatest mundumugu cannot stay the Sun from its course. That story has been known to every mundumugu since Ngai created Gikuyu, the first man. Of them all, only one ignored it.

I am that mundumugu.

It is said that from the moment of birth, even of conception, every living thing has embarked upon an inevitable trajectory that culminates in its death. If this is true of all living things, and it seems to be, then it is also true of man. And if it is true of man, then it must be true of the gods who made man in their image.

Yet this knowledge does not lessen the pain of death. I had just come back from comforting Katuma, whose father, old Siboki, had finally died, not from disease or injury, but rather from the awful burden of his years. Siboki had been one of the original colonists on our terraformed world of Kirinyaga, a member of the Council of Elders, and though he had grown feeble in mind as well as body, I knew I would miss him as I missed few others.

As I walked back through the village, on the long, winding path by the river that eventually led to my own boma, I was very much aware of my own mortality. I was not that much younger than Siboki, and indeed was already an old man when we left Kenya and emigrated to Kirinyaga. I knew my death could not be too far away, and yet I hoped that it was, not from selfishness, but because Kirinyaga was not yet ready to do without me. The mundumugu is more than a shaman who utters curses and creates spells; he is the repository of all the moral and civil laws, all the customs and traditions, of the Kikuyu people, and I was not convinced that Kirinyaga had yet produced a competent successor.

It is a harsh and lonely life, the life of a mundumugu. He is more feared than loved by the people he serves. This is not his fault, but rather the nature of his position. He must do what he knows to be right for his people, and that means he must sometimes make unpopular decisions.

How strange, then, that the decision that brought me down had nothing at all to do with my people.

I should have had a premonition about it, for no conversation is ever truly random. As I was walking past the scarecrows in the fields on the way to my boma, I came across Kimanti, the young son of Ngobe, driving two of his goats home from their morning’s grazing.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he greeted me, shading his eyes from the bright overhead sun.

“Jambo, Kimanti,” I said. “I see that your father now allows you to tend to his goats. Soon the day will come that he puts you in charge of his cattle.”

“Soon,” he agreed, offering me a water gourd. “It is a warm day. Would you like something to drink?”

“That is very generous of you,” I said, taking the gourd and holding it to my mouth.

“I have always been generous to you, have I not, Koriba?” he said.

“Yes, you have,” I replied suspiciously, wondering what favor he was preparing to request.

“Then why do you allow my father’s right arm to remain shriveled and useless?” he asked. “Why do you not cast a spell and make it like other men’s arms?”

“It is not that simple, Kimanti,” I said. “It is not I who shriveled your father’s arm, but Ngai. He would not have done so without a purpose.”

“What purpose is served by crippling my father?” asked Kimanti.

“If you wish, I shall sacrifice a goat and ask Ngai why He has allowed it,” I said.

He considered my offer and then shook his head. “I do not care to hear Ngai’s answer, for it will change nothing.” He paused, lost in thought for a moment. “How long do you think Ngai will be our god?”

“Forever,” I said, surprised at his question.

“That cannot be,” he replied seriously. “Surely Ngai was not our god when He was just a mtoto. He must have killed the old gods when He was young and powerful. But He has been god for a long time now, and it is time someone killed Him. Maybe the new god will show more compassion toward my father.”

“Ngai created the world,” I said. “He created the Kikuyu and the Maasai and the Wakamba, and even the European, and He created the holy mountain Kirinyaga, for which our world is named. He has existed since time began, and He will exist until it ends.”

Kimanti shook his head again. “If He has been here that long, He is ready to die. It is just a matter of who will kill Him.” He paused thoughtfully. “Perhaps I myself will, when I am older and stronger.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed. “But before you do, let me tell you the story of the King of the Zebras.”

“Is this story about Ngai or zebras?” he asked.

“Why don’t you listen?” I said. “Then you can tell me what it was about?” I gently lowered myself to the ground, and he squatted down next to me.

“There was a time,” I began, “when zebras did not have stripes. They were as brown as the dried grasses on the savannah, as dull to the eye as the bole of the acacia tree. And because their color protected them, they were rarely taken by the lion and the leopard, who found it much easier to find and stalk the wildebeest and the topi and the impala.

“Then one day a son was born to the King of the Zebras—but it was not a normal son, for it had no nostrils. The King of the Zebras was first saddened for his son, and then outraged that such a thing should be allowed. The more he dwelt upon it, the more angry he became. Finally he ascended the holy mountain, and came at last to the peak, where Ngai ruled the world from His golden throne.

“‘Have you come to sing my praises?’ asked Ngai.

“‘No!’ answered the King of the Zebras. ‘I have come to tell you that you are a terrible god, and that I am here to kill you.’

“‘What have I done to you that you should wish to kill me?’ asked Ngai.

“‘You gave me a son who has no nostrils, so he cannot sense when the lion and the leopard are approaching him, and because of that they will surely find and kill him when at last he leaves his mother’s side. You have been a god too long, and you have forgotten how to be compassionate.’

“‘Wait!’ said Ngai, and suddenly there was such power in his voice that the King of the Zebras froze where he was. ‘I will give your son nostrils, since that is what you want.’

“‘Why were you so cruel in the first place?’ demanded the King of the Zebras, his anger not fully assuaged.

“‘Gods work in mysterious ways,’ answered Ngai, ‘and what seems cruel to you may actually be compassionate. Because you had been a good and noble king, I gave your son eyes that could see in the dark, that could see through bushes, that could even see around trees, so that he could never be surprised by the lion and the leopard, even should the wind’s direction favor them. And because of this gift, he did not need his nostrils. I took them away so that he would not have to breathe in the dust that chokes his fellow zebras during the dry season. But now I have given him back his sense of smell, and taken away his special vision, because you have demanded it.’

“‘Then you did have a reason,’ moaned the King of the Zebras. ‘When did I become so foolish?’

“‘The moment you thought you were greater than me,’ answer Ngai, rising to His true height, which was taller than the clouds. ‘And to punish you for your audacity, I decree that from this moment forward you and all your kind shall no longer be brown like the dried grasses, but will be covered with black and white stripes that will attract the lion and the leopard from miles away. No matter where you go on the face of the world, you will never again be able to hide from them.’

“And so saying, Ngai waved a hand and every zebra in the world was suddenly covered with the same stripes you see today.”

I stopped and stared at Kimanti.

“That is the end?” he asked.

“That is the end.”

Kimanti stared at a millipede crawling in the dirt.

“The zebra was a baby, and could not explain to its father that it had special eyes,” he said at last. “My father’s arm has been shriveled for many long rains, and the only explanation he has received is that Ngai works in mysterious ways. He has been given no special senses to make up for it, for if he had been he would surely know about them by now.” Kimanti looked at me thoughtfully. “It is an interesting story, Koriba, and I am sorry for the King of the Zebras, but I think a new god must come along and kill Ngai very soon.”

There we sat, the wise old mundumugu who had a parable for every problem, and the foolish young kehee—an uncircumsized boy—who had no more knowledge of his world than a tadpole, in total opposition to each other.

Only a god with Ngai’s sense of humor would have arranged for the kehee to be right.

It began when the ship crashed.

(There are those embittered men and women who would say it began the day Kirinyaga received its charter from the Eutopian Council, but they are wrong.)

Maintenance ships fly among the Utopian worlds, delivering goods to some, mail to others, services to a few. Only Kirinyaga has no traffic with Maintenance. They are permitted to observe us—indeed, that is one of the conditions of our charter—but they may not interfere, and since we have tried to create a Kikuyu Utopia, we have no interest in commerce with Europeans.

Still, Maintenance ships have landed on Kirinyaga from time to time. One of the conditions of our charter is that if a citizen is unhappy with our world, he need only walk to that area known as Haven, and a Maintenance ship will pick him up and take him either to Earth or to another Eutopian world. Once a Maintenance ship landed to disgorge two immigrants, and very early in Kirinyaga’s existence Maintenance sent a representative to interfere with our religious practices.

I don’t know why the ship was so close to Kirinyaga to begin with. I had not ordered Maintenance to make any orbital adjustments lately, for the short rains were not due for another two months, and it was right that the days passed, hot and bright and unchanging. To the best of my knowledge, none of the villagers had made the pilgrimage to Haven, so no Maintenance ship should have been sent to Kirinyaga. But the fact remains that one moment the sky was clear and blue, and the next there was a streak of light plunging down to the surface of the planet. An explosion followed; though I could not see it, I could both hear it and see the results, for the cattle became very nervous and herds of impala and zebra bolted this way and that in panic.

It was about twenty minutes later that young Jinja, the son of Kichanta, ran up the hill to my boma.

“You must come, Koriba!” he said as he gasped for breath.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“A Maintenance ship has crashed!” he said. “The pilot is still alive!”

“Is he badly hurt?”

Jinja nodded. “Very badly. I think he may die soon.”

“I am an old man, and it would take me a very long time to walk to the pilot,” I said. “It would be better for you to take three young men from the village and bring him back to me on a litter.”

Jinja raced off while I went into my hut to see what I had that might ease the pilot’s pain. There were some qat leaves, if he was strong enough to chew them, and a few ointments if he wasn’t. I contacted Maintenance on my computer, and told them that I would apprise them of the man’s condition after I examined him.

In years past, I would have sent my assistant to the river to bring back water which I would boil in preparation for washing out the pilot’s wounds, but I no longer had an assistant, and the mundumugu does not carry water, so I simply waited atop my hill, my gaze turned toward the direction of the crash. A grass fire had started, and a column of smoke rose from it. I saw Jinja and the others trotting across the savannah with the litter; I saw topi and impala and even buffalo race out of their way; and then I could not see them for almost ten minutes. When they once again came into view, they were walking, and it was obvious that they were carrying a man on the litter.

Before they reached my boma, however, Karenja came up the long, winding path from the village.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“The whole village knows that a Maintenance ship has crashed,” he replied. “I have never seen a European before. I came to see if his face is really as white as milk.”

“You are doomed to be disappointed,” I said. “We call them white, but in reality they are shades of pink and tan.”

“Even so,” he said, squatting down, “I have never seen one.”

I shrugged. “As you will.”

Jinja and the young men arrived a few minutes later with the litter. On it lay the twisted body of the pilot. His arms and legs were broken, and there was very little skin on him that was not burned. He had lost a lot of blood, and some still seeped through his wounds. He was unconscious, but breathing regularly.

“Asante sana,” I said to the four young men. “Thank you. You have done well this day.”

I had one of them fill my gourds with water. The other three bowed and began walking down the hill, while I went through my various ointments, choosing the one that would cause the least discomfort when placed on the burns.

Karenja watched in rapt fascination. Twice I had to rebuke him for touching the pilot’s blond hair in wonderment. As the sun changed positions in the sky, I had him help me move the pilot into the shade.

Then, after I had tended to the pilot’s wounds, I went into my hut, activated my computer, and contacted Maintenance again. I explained that the pilot was still alive, but that all of his limbs were broken, his body was covered with burns, and that he was in a coma and would probably die soon.

Their answer was that they had already dispatched a medic, who would arrive within half an hour, and they told me to have someone waiting at Haven to guide the medic to my boma. Since Karenja was still looking at the pilot, I ordered him to greet the ship and bring the medic to me.

The pilot did not stir for the next hour. At least, I do not think he did, but I dozed with my back against a tree for a few minutes, so I cannot be sure. What woke me was a woman’s voice speaking a language I had not heard for many years. I got painfully to my feet just in time to greet the medic that Maintenance had sent.

“You must be Koriba,” she said in English. “I have been trying to communicate with the gentleman who accompanied me, but I don’t think he understood a word I said.”

“I am Koriba,” I said in English.

She extended her hand. “I am Doctor Joyce Witherspoon. May I see the patient?”

I led her over to where the pilot lay.

“Do you know his name?” I asked. “We could not find any identification.”

“Samuel or Samuels, I’m not sure,” she said, kneeling down next to him. “He’s in a bad way.” She gave him a perfunctory examination, lasting less than a minute. “We could do much more for him back at Base, but I hate to move him in this condition.”

“I can have him moved to Haven within an hour,” I said. “The sooner you have him in your hospital, the better.”

She shook her head. “I think he’ll have to remain here until he’s a little stronger.”

“I will have to consider it,” I said.

“There’s nothing to consider,” she said. “In my medical opinion, he’s too weak to move.” She pointed to a piece of his shin bone that had broken through the skin of his leg. “I need to set most of the broken bones, and make sure there’s no infection.”

“You could do this at your hospital,” I said.

“I can do it here at much less cost to the patient’s remaining vitality,” she said. “What’s the problem, Koriba?”

“The problem, Memsaab Witherspoon,” I said, “is that Kirinyaga is a Kikuyu Utopia. This means a rejection of all things European, including your medicine.”

“I’m not practicing it on any Kikuyu,” she said. “I’m trying to save a Maintenance pilot who just happened to crash on your world.”

I stared at the pilot for a long moment. “All right,” I said at last. “That is a logical argument. You may minister to his wounds.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“But he must leave in three days’ time,” I said. “I will not risk contamination beyond that.”

She looked at me as if she was about to argue, but said nothing. Instead, she opened the medical kit she had brought, and injected something—a sedative, I assumed, or a pain killer, or a combination of the two—into his arm.

“She is a witch!” said Karenja. “See how she punctures his skin with a metal thorn!” He stared at the pilot, fascinated. “Now he will surely die.”

Joyce Witherspoon worked well into the night, cleansing the pilot’s wounds, setting his broken bones, breaking his fever. I don’t remember when I fell asleep, but when I woke up, shivering, in the cold morning air just after sunrise, she was sleeping and Karenja was gone.

I built a fire, then sat near it with my blanket wrapped around me, until the sun began warming the air. Joyce Witherspoon woke up shortly thereafter.

“Good morning,” she said when she saw me sitting a short distance away from her.

“Good morning, Memsaab Witherspoon,” I replied.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“It is morning.”

“I mean, what hour and minute is it?”

“We do not have hours and minutes on Kirinyaga,” I told her. “Only days.”

“I should look at Mr. Samuels.”

“He is still alive,” I said.

“Of course he is,” she replied. “But the poor man will need skin grafts, and he may lose that right leg. He’ll be a long time recovering.” She paused and looked around. “Uh . . . where do I wash up around here?”

“The river runs by the foot of my hill,” I said. “Be sure you beat the water first, to frighten away the crocodiles.”

“What kind of Utopia has crocodiles?” she asked with a smile.

“What Eden has no serpents?” I said.

She laughed and walked down the hill. I took a sip from my water gourd, then killed the fire and spread the ashes. One of the boys from the village came by to take my goats out to graze, and another brought firewood and took my gourds down to the river to fill them.

When Joyce Witherspoon returned from the river some twenty minutes later, she was not alone. With her was Kibo, the third and youngest wife of Koinnage, the paramount chief of the village, and in Kibo’s arms was Katabo, her infant son. His left arm was swollen to twice it’s size, and was badly miscolored.

“I found this woman laundering her clothes by the river,” said Joyce Witherspoon, “and I noticed that her child had a badly infected arm. It looks like some kind of insect bite. I managed through sign language to convince her to follow me up here.”

“Why did you not bring Katabo to me?” I asked Kibo in Swahili.

“Last time you charged me two goats, and he remained sick for many days, and Koinnage beat me for wasting the goats,” she said, so terrified she had made me angry that she could not think of a lie.

Even as Kibo spoke, Joyce Witherspoon began approaching her and Katabo with a syringe in her hand.

“This is a broad-spectrum antibiotic,” she explained to me. “It also contains a steroid that will prevent itching or any discomfort while the infection remains.”

“Stop!” I said harshly in English.

“What’s the matter?”

“You may not do this,” I said. “You are here to minister to the pilot only.”

“This is a baby, and it’s suffering,” she said. “It’ll take me two seconds to give it a shot and cure it.”

“I cannot permit it.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she demanded. “I read your biography. You may dress like a savage and sit in the dirt next to your fire, but you were educated at Cambridge and received your post-graduate degrees from Yale. Surely you know how easily I can end this child’s suffering.”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“Then what is the point?”

“You may not medicate this child. It seems like a blessing now—but once before we accepted the Europeans’ medicine, and then their religion, and their clothing, and their laws, and their customs, and eventually we ceased to be Kikuyu and became a new race, a race of black Europeans known only as Kenyans. We came to Kirinyaga to make sure that such a thing does not happen to us again.”

“He won’t know why he feels better. You can credit it to your god or yourself for all I care.”

I shook my head. “I appreciate your sentiment, but I cannot let you corrupt our Utopia.”

“Look at him,” she said, pointing to Katabo’s swollen arm. “Is Kirinyaga a Utopia for him? Where is it written that Utopias must have sick and suffering children?”

“Nowhere.”

“Well, then?”

“It is not written,” I continued, “because the Kikuyu do not have a written language.”

“Will you at least let the mother decide?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“The mother will think only of her child,” I answered. “I must think of an entire world.”

“Perhaps her child is more important to her than your world is to you.”

“She is incapable of making a reasoned decision,” I said. “Only I can foresee all the consequences.”

Suddenly Kibo, who understood not a word of English, turned to me.

“Will the European witch make my little Katabo better?” she asked. “Why are you two arguing?”

“The European witch is here only for the European,” I answered. “She has no power to help the Kikuyu.”

“Can she not try?” asked Kibo.

“I am your mundumugu,” I said harshly.

“But look at the pilot,” said Kibo, pointing to Samuels. “Yesterday he was all but dead. Today his skin is already healing, and his arms and legs are straight again.”

“Her god is the god of the Europeans,” I answered, “just as her magic is the magic of the Europeans. Her spells do not work on the Kikuyu.”

Kibo fell silent, and clutched Katabo to her breast.

I turned to Joyce Witherspoon. “I apologize for speaking in Swahili, but Kibo knows no other language.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I had no difficulty following it.”

“I thought you told me you only spoke English.”

“Sometimes you needn’t understand the words to translate. I believe you were saying, in essence, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’“

The pilot moaned just then, and suddenly all of her attention was focused upon him. He was coming into a state of semi-consciousness, unfocused and unintelligible but no longer comatose, and she began administering medications into the tubes that were already attached to his arms and legs. Kibo watched in wonderment, but kept her distance.

I remained on my hill most of the morning. I offered to remove the curse from Katabo’s arm and give him some soothing lotions, but Kibo refused, saying that Koinnage steadfastly refused to part with any more goats.

“I will not charge you this time,” I said, for I wanted Koinnage on my side. I uttered a spell over the child, then treated his arm with a salve made from the pulped bark of the acacia tree. I ordered Kibo to return to her shamba with him, and told her that the child’s arm would return to normal within five days.

Finally it was time for me to go into the village to bless the scarecrows and give Leibo, who had lost her baby, ointment to ease the pain in her breasts. I would meet with Bakada, who had accepted the bride price for his daughter and wanted me to preside at the wedding, and finally I would join Koinnage and the Council of Elders as they discussed the weighty issues of the day.

As I walked down the long, winding path beside the river, I found myself thinking how much like the European’s Garden of Eden this world looked.

How was I to know that the serpent had already arrived?

After I had tended to my chores in the village, I stopped at Ngobe’s hut to share a gourd of pombe with him. He asked about the pilot, for by now everyone in the village had heard about him, and I explained that the European’s mundumugu was curing him and would take him back to Maintenance headquarters in two more days.

“She must have powerful magic,” he said, “for I am told that the man’s body was badly broken.” He paused. “It is too bad,” he added wistfully, “that such magic will not work for the Kikuyu.”

“My magic has always been sufficient,” I said.

“True,” he said uneasily. “But I remember the day when we brought Tabari’s son back after the hyenas had attacked him and chewed off one of his legs. You eased his pain, but you could not save him. Perhaps the witch from Maintenance could have.”

“The pilot had broken his legs, but they were not chewed off,” I said defensively. “No one could have saved Tabari’s son after the hyenas had finished with him.”

“Perhaps you are right,” he said.

My first inclination was to pounce on the word “perhaps”, but then I decided that he meant no insult by it, so I finished my pombe, cast the bones and read that he would have a successful harvest, and left his hut.

I stopped in the center of the village to recite a fable to the children, then went over to Koinnage’s shamba and entered his boma for the daily meeting of the Council of Elders. Most of them were already there, grim-faced and silent. Finally Koinnage emerged from his hut and joined us.

“We have serious business to discuss today,” he announced. “Perhaps the most serious we have ever discussed,” he added, staring straight at me. Suddenly he faced his wives’ huts. “Kibo!” he shouted. “Come here!”

Kibo emerged from her hut and walked over to us, carrying little Katabo in her arms.

“You all saw my son’s arm yesterday,” said Koinnage. “It was swollen to twice it’s normal size, and was the color of death.” He took the child and held it above his head. “Now look at him!” he cried.

Katabo’s arm was once again a healthy color, and almost all of the swelling had vanished.

“My medicine worked faster than I had anticipated,” I said.

“This is not your medicine at all!” he said accusingly. “This is the European witch’s medicine!”

I looked at Kibo. “I ordered you to leave my boma ahead of me!” I said sternly.

“You did not order me not to return,” she said, her face fill with defiance as she stood next to Koinnage. “The witch pierced Katabo’s arm with a metal thorn, and before I could climb back down your hill the swelling was already half gone.”

“You disobeyed my command,” I said ominously.

“I am the paramount chief, and I absolve her,” interjected Koinnage.

“I am the mundumugu, and I do not!” I said, and suddenly Kibo’s defiance was replaced by terror.

“We have more important things to discuss,” snapped Koinnage. This startled me, for when I am angry, no one has the courage to confront or contradict me.

I pulled some luminescent powder, made from the ground-up bodies of night-stalking beetles, out of my pouch, held it on the palm of my hand, raised my hand to my mouth, and blew the power in Kibo’s direction. She screamed in terror and fell writhing to the ground.

“What have you done to her?” demanded Koinnage.

I have terrified her beyond your ability to comprehend, which is a just and fitting punishment for disobeying me, I thought. Aloud I said, “I have marked her spirit so that all the predators of the Other World can find it at night when she sleeps. If she swears never to disobey her mundumugu again, if she shows proper contrition for disobeying me today, then I shall remove the markings before she goes to sleep this evening. If not . . . ” I shrugged and let the threat hang in the air.

“Then perhaps the European witch will remove the markings,” said Koinnage.

“Do you think the god of the Europeans is mightier than Ngai?” I demanded.

“I do not know,” replied Koinnage. “But he healed my son’s arm in moments, when Ngai would have taken days.”

“For years you have told us to reject all things European,” added Karenja, “yet I myself have seen the witch use her magic on the dying pilot, and I think it is stronger than your magic.”

“It is a magic for Europeans only,” I said.

“This is not so,” answered Koinnage. “For did the witch not offer it to Katabo? If she can halt the suffering of our sick and our injured faster than Ngai can, then we must consider accepting her offer.”

“If you accept her offer,” I said, “before long you will be asked to accept her god, and her science, and her clothing, and her customs.”

“Her science is what created Kirinyaga and flew us here,” said Ngobe. “How can it be bad if it made Kirinyaga possible?”

“It is not bad for the Europeans,” I said, “because it is part of their culture. But we must never forget why we came to Kirinyaga in the first place: to create a Kikuyu world and re-establish a Kikuyu culture.”

“We must think seriously about this,” said Koinnage. “For years we have believed that every facet of the Europeans’ culture was evil, for we had no examples of it. But now that we see that even a female can cure our illness faster than Ngai can, it is time to reconsider.”

“If her magic could have cured my withered arm when I was still a boy,” added Ngobe, “why would that have been evil?”

“It would have been against the will of Ngai,” I said.

“Does not Ngai rule the universe?” he asked.

“You know that He does,” I replied.

“Then nothing that happens can be contrary to His wishes, and if she could have cured me, it would not have been against Ngai’s will.”

I shook my head. “You do not understand.”

“We are trying to understand,” said Koinnage. “Enlighten us.”

“The Europeans have many wonders, and these wonders will entice you, as they are doing right now . . . but if you accept one European thing, soon they will insist that you accept them all. Koinnage, their religion only allows a man to have one wife. Which two will you divorce?”

I turned to the others. “Ngobe, they will make Kimanti attend a school where he will learn to read and write. But since we do not have a written language, he will learn to write only in a European language, and the things and people he reads about and learns about will all be European.”

I walked among the Elders, offering an example to each. “Karenja, if you do a service for Tabari, you will expect a chicken or a goat or perhaps even a cow in return, depending on the nature of the service. But the Europeans will make him reward you with paper money, which you cannot eat, and which cannot reproduce and make a man rich.”

On and on I went, until I had run through all the Elders, pointing out what they would lose if they allowed the Europeans a toehold in our society.

“All that is on the one hand,” said Koinnage when I had finished. He held his other hand out, palm up. “On the other hand is an end to illness and suffering, which is no small achievement in itself. Koriba has said that if we let the Europeans in, they will force us to change our ways. I say that some of our ways need changing. If their god is a greater healer than Ngai, who is to say that he may not also bring better weather, or more fertile cattle, or richer soil?”

“No!” I cried. “You may all have forgotten why we came here, but I have not. Our mandate was not to establish a European Utopia, but a Kikuyu one!”

“And have we established it?” asked Karenja sardonically.

“We are coming closer every day,” I told him. “I am making it a reality.”

“Do children suffer in Utopia?” persisted Karenja. “Do men grow up with withered arms? Do women die in childbirth? Do hyenas attack shepherds in Utopia?”

“It is a matter of balance,” I said. “Unrestricted growth would eventually lead to unrestricted hunger. You have not seen what it has done on Earth, but I have.”

Finally it was old Jandara who spoke.

“Do people think in a Utopia?” he asked me.

“Of course they do,” I replied.

“If they think, are some of their thoughts new, just as some are old?”

“Yes.”

“Then perhaps we should consider letting the witch tend to our illnesses and injuries,” he said. “For if Ngai allows new thoughts in His Utopia, He must realize they will lead to change. And if change is not evil, then perhaps lack of change, such as we have striven for here, is evil, or at least wrong.” He got to his feet. “You may debate the merits of the question. As for myself, I have had pain in my joints for many years, and Ngai has not cured it. I am climbing Koriba’s hill to see if the god of the Europeans can end my pain.”

And with that, he walked past me and out of the boma.

I was prepared to argue my case all day and all night if necessary, but Koinnage turned his back on me—on me, his mundumugu!—and began carrying his son back to Kibo’s hut. That signaled the end to the meeting, and each of the Elders got up and left without daring to look me in the face.

There were more than a dozen villagers gathered at the foot of my hill when I arrived. I walked past them and soon reached my boma.

Jandara was still there. Joyce Witherspoon had given him an injection, and was handing him a small bottle of pills as I arrived.

“Who told you that you could treat the Kikuyu?” I demanded in English.

“I did not offer to treat them,” she replied. “But I am a doctor, and I will not turn them away.”

“Then I will,” I said. I turned and looked down at the villagers. “You may not come up here!” I said sternly. “Go back to your shambas.”

The adults all looked uneasy but stood their ground, while one small boy began climbing up the hill.

“Your mundumugu has forbidden you to climb this hill!” I said. “Ngai will punish you for your transgression!”

“The god of the Europeans is young and powerful,” said the boy. “He will protect me from Ngai.”

And now I saw that the boy was Kimanti.

“Stay back—I warn you!” I shouted.

Kimanti hefted his wooden spear. “Ngai will not harm me,” he said confidently. “If He tries, I will kill him with this.”

He walked right by me and approached Joyce Witherspoon.

“I have cut my foot on a rock,” he said. “If your god will heal me, I will sacrifice a goat to thank him.”

She did not understand a word he said, but when he showed her his foot she began treating it.

He walked back down the hill, unmolested by Ngai, and when he was both alive and healed the next morning, word went out to other villages and soon there was a seemingly endless line of the sick and the lame, all waiting to climb my hill and accept European cures for Kikuyu ills.

Once again I told them to disperse. This time they seemed not even to hear me. They simply remained in line, neither arguing back as Kimanti had, nor even acknowledging my presence, each of them waiting patiently until it was their turn to be treated by the European witch.

I thought that when she left, things would go back to the way they had been, that the people would once again fear Ngai and show respect to their mundumugu—but this was not to be. Oh, they went about their daily chores, they planted their crops and tended to their cattle . . . but they did not come to me with their problems as they always had done in the past.

At first I thought we had entered one of those rare periods in which no one in the village was ill or injured, but then one day I saw Shanaka walking out across the savannah. Since he rarely left his shamba, and never left the village, I was curious about his destination and I decided to follow him. He walked due west for more than half an hour, until he reached the landing area at Haven.

“What is wrong?” I asked when I finally caught up with him.

He opened his mouth to reveal a serious abscess above one of his teeth. “I am in great pain,” he said, “I have been unable to eat for three days.”

“Why did you not come to me?” I asked.

“The god of the Europeans has defeated Ngai,” answered Shanaka. “He will not help me.”

“He will,” I assured him.

Shanaka shook his head, then winced from the motion. “You are an old man, and Ngai is an old god, and both of you have lost your powers,” he said unhappily. “I wish it were otherwise, but it is not.”

“So you are deserting your wives and children because you have lost your faith in Ngai?” I demanded.

“No,” he replied. “I will ask the Maintenance ship to take me to a European mundumugu, and when I am cured I will return home.”

“I will cure you,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. “There was a time when you could cure me,” he said at last. “But that time has passed. I will go to the Europeans’ mundumugu.”

“If you do,” I said sternly, “you may never call on me for help again.”

He shrugged. “I never intend to,” he said with neither bitterness nor rancor.

Shanaka returned the next day, his mouth healed.

I stopped by his boma to see how he was feeling, for I remained the mundumugu whether he wanted my services or not, and as I walked through the fields of his shamba I saw that he had two new scarecrows, gifts of the Europeans. The scarecrows had mechanical arms that flapped constantly, and they rotated so that they did not always face in one direction.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he greeted me. Then, seeing that I was looking at his scarecrows, he added, “Are they not wonderful?”

“I will withhold judgment until I see how long they function,” I said. “The more moving parts an object has, the more likely it is to break.”

He looked at me, and I thought I detected a hint of pity in his expression. “They were created by the God of Maintenance,” he said. “They will last forever.”

“Or until their power packs are empty,” I said, but he did not know what I meant, and so my sarcasm was lost on him. “How is your mouth?”

“It feels much better,” he replied. “They pricked me with a magic thorn to end the pain, then cut away the evil spirits that had invaded my mouth.” He paused. “They have very powerful gods, Koriba.”

“You are back on Kirinyaga now,” I said sternly. “Be careful how you blaspheme.”

“I do not blaspheme,” he said. “I speak the truth.”

“And now you will want me to bless the Europeans’ scarecrows, I suppose,” I said with finely-wrought irony.

He shrugged. “If it makes you happy,” he said.

“If it makes me happy?” I repeated angrily.

“That’s right,” he said nonchalantly. “The scarecrows, being European, certainly do not need your blessings, but if you will feel better . . . ”

I had often wondered what might happen if for some reason the mundumugu was no longer feared by the members of the village. I had never once considered what it might be like if he were merely tolerated.

Still more villagers went to Maintenance’s infirmary, and each came back with some gift from the Europeans: time-saving gadgets for the most part. Western gadgets. Culture-killing gadgets.

Again and again I went into the village and explained why such things must be rejected. Day after day I spoke to the Council of Elders, reminding them of why we had come to Kirinyaga—but most of the original settlers were dead, and the next generation, those who had become our Elders, had no memories of Kenya. Indeed, those of them who spoke to the Maintenance staff came home thinking that Kenya, rather than Kirinyaga, was some kind of Utopia, in which everyone was well-fed and well-cared-for and no farm ever suffered from drought.

They were polite, they listened respectfully to me, and then they went right ahead with whatever they had been doing or discussing when I arrived. I reminded them of the many times I and I alone had saved them from themselves, but they seemed not to care; indeed, one or two of the Elders acted as if, far from keeping Kirinyaga pure, I had in some mysterious way been hindering its growth.

“Kirinyaga is not supposed to grow!” I argued. “When you achieve a Utopia, you do not cast it aside and say, ‘What changes can we make tomorrow?’“

“If you do not grow, you stagnate,” answered Karenja.

“We can grow by expanding,” I said. “We have an entire world to populate.”

“That is not growing, but breeding,” he replied. “You have done your job admirably, Koriba, for in the beginning we needed order and purpose above all else . . . but the time for your job is past. Now we have established ourselves here, and it is for us to choose how we will live.”

“We have already chosen how to live!” I said angrily. “That is why we came here to begin with.”

“I was just a kehee,” said Karenja. “Nobody asked me. And I did not ask my son, who was born here.”

“Kirinyaga was created for the purpose of becoming a Kikuyu Utopia,” I said. “This purpose is even the basis of our charter. It cannot be changed.”

“No one is suggesting that we don’t want to live in a Utopia, Koriba,” interjected Shanaka. “But the time has passed when you and you alone shall be the sole judge of what constitutes a Utopia.”

“It is clearly defined.”

“By you,” said Shanaka. “Some of us have our own definitions of Utopia.”

“You were one of the original founders of Kirinyaga,” I said accusingly. “Why have you never spoken out before?”

“Many times I wanted to,” admitted Karenja. “But always I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of Ngai. Or you.”

“They are much the same thing,” said Karenja.

“But now that Ngai has lost His battle to the god of Maintenance, I am no longer afraid to speak,” continued Shanaka. “Why should I suffer with the pain in my teeth? How was it unholy or blasphemous for the European witches to cure me? Why should my wife, who is as old as I am and whose back is bent from years of carrying wood and water, continue to carry them where there are machines to carry things for her?”

“Why should you live on Kirinyaga at all, if that is the way you feel?” I asked bitterly.

“Because I have worked as hard to make Kirinyaga a home for the Kikuyu as you have!” he shot back. “And I see no reason to leave just because my definition of Utopia doesn’t agree with yours. Why don’t you leave, Koriba?”

“Because I was charged with establishing our Utopia, and I have not yet completed my assignment,” I said. “In fact, it is false Kikuyu like you who have made my work that much harder.”

Shanaka got to his feet and looked around at the Elders.

“Am I a false Kikuyu because I want my grandson to read?” he demanded. “Or because I want to ease my wife’s burden? Or because I do not wish to suffer physical pain that can easily be avoided?”

“No!” cried the Elders as one.

“Be very careful,” I warned them. “For if he is not a false Kikuyu, then you are calling me one.”

“No, Koriba,” said Koinnage, rising to his feet. “You are not a false Kikuyu.” He paused. “But you are a mistaken one. Your day—and mine—has passed. Perhaps, for a fleeting second, we did achieve Utopia—but that second is gone, and the new moments and hours require new Utopias.” Then Koinnage, who had looked at me with fear so many times in the past, suddenly looked at me with great compassion. “It was our dream, Koriba, but it is not theirs—and if we still have some feeble handhold on today, tomorrow surely belongs to them.”

“I will hear none of this!” I said. “You cannot redefine a Utopia as a matter of convenience. We moved here in order to be true to our faith and traditions, to avoid becoming what so many Kikuyu had become in Kenya. I will not let us become black Europeans!”

“We are becoming something,” said Shanaka. “Perhaps just once there was an instant when you felt we were perfect Kikuyu—but that instant has long since passed. To remain so, not one of us could have had a new thought, could have seen the world in a different way. We would have become the scarecrows you bless every morning.”

I was silent for a very long time. Then, at last, I spoke. “This world breaks my heart,” I said. “I tried so hard to mold it into what we had all wanted, and look at what it has become. What you have become.”

“You can direct change, Koriba,” said Shanaka, “but you cannot prevent it, and that is why Kirinyaga will always break your heart.”

“I must go to my boma and think,” I said.

“Kwaheri, Koriba,” said Koinnage. Good-bye, Koriba. It had a sense of finality to it.

I spent many days alone on my hill, looking across the winding river to the green savannah, and thinking. I had been betrayed by the people I had tried to lead, by the very world I had helped to create. I felt that I had surely displeased Ngai in some way, and that He would strike me dead. I was quite prepared to die, even willing . . . but I did not die, for the gods draw their strength from their worshippers, and Ngai was now so weak that He could not even kill a feeble old man like myself.

Eventually I decided to go down among my people one last time, to see if any of them had rejected the enticements of the Europeans and come back to the ways of the Kikuyu.

The path was lined with mechanical scarecrows. The only meaningful way to bless them would be to renew their charges. I saw several women washing clothes by the river, but instead of pounding the fabrics with rocks, they were rubbing them on some artificial board that had obviously been made for the purpose.

Suddenly I heard a ringing noise behind me, and, startled, I jumped, lost my footing, and fell heavily against a thorn bush. When I was able to get my bearings, I saw that I had almost been run over by a bicycle.

“I am sorry, Koriba,” said the rider, who turned out to be young Kimanti. “I thought you heard me coming.”

He helped me gingerly to my feet.

“My ears have heard many things,” I said. “The scream of the fish eagle, the bleat of the goat, the laugh of the hyena, the cry of the newborn baby. But they were never meant to hear artificial wheels going down a dirt hill.”

“It is much faster and easier than walking,” he replied. “Are you going anywhere in particular? I will be happy to give you a ride.”

It was probably the bicycle that made up my mind. “Yes,” I replied, “I am going somewhere, and no, I will not be taken on a bicycle.”

“Then I will walk with you,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“To Haven,” I said.

“Ah,” he said with a smile. “You, too, have business with Maintenance. Where do you hurt?”

I touched the left side of my chest. “I hurt here—and the only business I have with Maintenance is to get as far from the cause of that pain as I can.”

“You are leaving Kirinyaga?”

“I am leaving what Kirinyaga has become,” I answered.

“Where will you go?” he asked. “What will you do?”

“I will go elsewhere, and I will do other things,” I said vaguely, for where does an unemployed mundumugu go?

“We will miss you, Koriba,” said Kimanti.

“I doubt it.”

“We will,” he repeated with sincerity. “When we recite the history of Kirinyaga to our children, you will not be forgotten.” He paused. “It is true that you were wrong, but you were necessary.”

“Is that how I am to be remembered?” I asked. “As a necessary evil?”

“I did not call you evil, just wrong.”

We walked the next few miles in silence, and at last we came to Haven.

“I will wait with you if you wish,” said Kimanti.

“I would rather wait alone,” I said.

He shrugged. “As you wish. Kwaheri, Koriba.”

“Kwaheri,” I replied.

After he left I looked around, studying the savannah and the river, the wildebeest and the zebras, the fish eagles and the marabou storks, trying to set them in my memory for all time to come.

“I am sorry, Ngai,” I said at last. “I have done my best, but I have failed you.”

The ship that would take me away from Kirinyaga forever suddenly came into view.

“You must view them with compassion, Ngai,” I said as the ship approached the landing strip. “They are not the first of your people to be bewitched by the Europeans.”

And it seemed, as the ship touched down, that a voice spoke into my ear and said, You have been my most faithful servant, Koriba, and so I shall be guided by your counsel. Do you really wish me to view them with compassion?

I looked toward the village one last time, the village that had once feared and worshipped Ngai, and which had sold itself, like some prostitute, to the god of the Europeans.

“No,” I said firmly.

“Are you speaking to me?” asked the pilot, and I realized that the hatch was open and waiting for me.

“No,” I replied.

He looked around. “I don’t see anyone else.”

“He is very old and very tired,” I said. “But He is here.”

I climbed into the ship and did not look back.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1995.

Search Engine

Mary Rosenblum

Aman’s eyelids twitched as the tiny skull and crossbones icon flashed across his retinal screen. Uh oh. He blinked away the image and scowled at the office door. The feds. “Sit tight and pay attention,” he said to the new kid sitting in the chair beside the desk.

“What’s up?” New Kid leaned forward. But the door was already opening, the soft whisper as it slid aside a reassurance that this was a high end operation, that your money was being spent wisely. The real-life, physical office, the expensive woolen carpet and real wood furniture echoed that reassurance. No sleazy, virtual private eye here . . . you were at the top of the ladder in a hard office.

Not that the suit cared. He took off his shades, slipped ‘em into the pocket of his very well made business tunic and fixed icy gray eyes on Aman’s face. If he didn’t like what he saw, he was too well trained to let it show. “Mr. Boutros.” The suit didn’t offer his hand, sat down immediately in the chair across from the desk. Cast New Kid a single pointed glance. Jimi. Aman remembered his name at last. Raul’s latest, given to him to babysit and maybe even train.

“My assistant.” Aman put fnality in the tone. New Kid stays. He kept his body language relaxed and alpha, waited out the suit’s evaluation of his options. Inclined his head at the suit’s very slight nod. He had won that round. You won when you could. “How may I help you?”

The suit pulled a small leather case from inside his tunic, slipped a tiny data disk from it. Without a word, Aman extended a port. Clients did not store their files on the net. Not if they were paying Search Engine’s fees. The disk clicked into place and Aman’s desktop lit up. A man’s head and shoulders appeared in the holofield, turning slowly. Medium-dark, about twenty, mixed Euro/African and Hispanic genes, Aman noted. About the same phenotype as New Kid—Jimi—a history of war, rape, and pillage made flesh. The Runner’s scalp gleamed naked, implanted with fiberlight gang-sign. Aman read it and sighed, thinking of his fight with Avi over his fiberlights. Tattoo your political incorrectness on your body for the cops, son. Just in case they don’t notice you on their own. Stupid move, Avi. That hadn’t been the final argument, but it had been damn close. Several data-file icons floated at the bottom of the field. Food preferences, clothing, personal services, sex. Aman nodded because the feds knew what he needed and it would all be here. “Urgency?” he asked.

“High.” The suit kept his eyes on the Runner’s light-scribed profile.

Aman nodded. Jimi was getting tense. He didn’t even have to look at him, the kid was radiating. Aman touched the icon bubbles, opening the various files, hoping Jimi would keep his mouth shut. Frowning, because you never wanted the client to think it was going to be easy, he scanned the rough summary of the Runner’s buying habits. Bingo. He put his credit where his politics were. Not a problem, this one. He was going to stand up and wave to get their attention. “Four days,” he said. Start high and bargain. “Plus or minus ten percent.”

“Twenty-four hours.” The suit’s lips barely moved.

Interesting. Why this urgency? Aman shook his head. No kinky sex habits, no drugs, so they’d have to depend on clothes and food. Legal-trade data files took longer. “Three point five,” he finally said. “With a failure-exemption clause.”

They settled on forty-eight hours with no failure-exemption. “Ten percent bonus if you get him in less.” The suit stood. For a moment he looked carefully and thoroughly at Jimi. Storing his image in the bioware overlay his kind had been enhanced with? If he ran into Jimi on the street a hundred years from now he’d remember him. Jimi had damn well better hope it didn’t matter.

“They really want this guy.” Jimi waited for the green light to come on over the door, telling them that the suit hadn’t left anything behind that might listen. “The Runner’s wearing Gaist sign.”

No kidding. Aman knew that scrawl by heart.

“What did he do?”

“How the hell should I know?” Aman touched one of the file icons, closing his eyes as his own bioware downloaded and displayed on his retina. That had been the final argument with Avi.

“Oh, so we just do what we’re told, I get it.” Jimi leaned back, propped a boot up on the corner of the desktop. “Say yessir, no questions asked, huh? Who cares about the reason, as long as there’s money?”

“He’s government.” Aman blinked the display away, ignored Jimi’s boot. Why in the name of everyone’s gods had Raul hired this wet-from-birth child? Well, he knew why. Aman eyed the kid’s slender, androgynous build. Hi boss had a thing for the African/Hispanic phenotype. Once, he’d kept it out of the business. Aman suppressed a sigh, wondering if the kid had figured it out yet. Why Raul had hired him. “How much of the data-dredging that you do is legal?” He watched Jimi think about that. “You think we’re that good, huh? That nobody ever busts us? There is always a price, kid, especially for success.”

Jimi took his foot off the desktop. “The whole crackdown on the Gaiists is just crap. Bread and circus move because the North American Alliance . . . ”

Aman held up a hand. “Good thing you don’t write it on your head in light,” he said mildly. “Just don’t talk politics with Raul.”

Jimi flushed. “So how come you let him back you down from four days? An Xuyen is already backed up with the Ferrogers search.”

“We won’t need Xuyen.” Aman nodded at the icons. “Our Runner is organic. Vegan. Artisan craft only, in clothes and personal items. You could find him all by yourself in about four hours.”

“But if he’s buying farm raised and hand made?” Jimi frowned. “No Universal tags on those.”

Aman promised himself a talk with Raul, but it probably wouldn’t change anything. Not until he got tired of this one, anyway. “Get real.” He got up and crossed to the small nondescript desktop at the back of the office, camouflaged by an expensive Japanese shoji screen. This was the real workspace. Everything else was stage-prop, meant to impress clients. “You sell stuff without a U tag and you suddenly find you can’t get a license, or your E coli count is too high for an organic permit, or your handspinning operation might possibly be a front for drug smugglers.” He laughed. “Everything has a U tag in it.” Which wasn’t quite true, but knowledge was power. Jimi didn’t have any claim on power yet. Not for free.

“Okay.” Jimi shrugged. “I’ll see if I can beat your four hours. Start with sex?”

“He’s not a buyer. I’ll do it.”

“How come?” Jimi bristled. “Isn’t it too easy for you? If even I can do it?”

Aman hesitated, because he wasn’t really sure himself. “I just am.” He sat down at his workdesk as Jimi stomped out . Brought up his secure field and transferred the files to it. The Runner got his sex for free or not at all, so no point in searching that. Food was next on the immediacy list. Aman opened his personal searchware and fed the Runner’s ID chipprint into it. He wasn’t wearing his ID chip any more, or the suit wouldn’t have showed up here. Nobody had figured out yet now to make a birth-implanted ID chip really permanent. Although they kept trying. Aman’s AI stretched its thousand thousand fingers into the datasphere and started hitting all the retail data pools. Illegal, of course, and retail purchase data was money in the bank so it was well protected, but if you were willing to pay, you could buy from the people who were better than the people who created the protection. Search Engine, Inc. was willing to pay.

Sure enough, forsale.data had the kid’s profile. They were the biggest. Most of the retailers fed directly to them. Aman pulled the Runner’s raw consumables data. Forsale profiled, but his AI synthesized a profile to fit the specific operation. Aman waited the thirty seconds while his AI digested the raw dates, amounts, prices of every consumable item the Runner had purchased from the first credit he spent at a store to the day he paid to have a back-alley cutter remove his ID chip. Every orange, every stick of gum, every bottle of beer carried an RNA signature and every purchase went into the file that had opened the day the Runner was born and the personal ID chip implanted..

The AI finished. The Runner was his son’s age. Mid-twenties. He looked younger. Testament to the powers of his vegetarian and organic diet? Aman smiled sourly. Avi would appreciate that. That had been an early fight and a continuing excuse when his son needed one. Aman scanned the grocery profile. It had amazed him, when he first got into this field, how much food reflected each person’s life and philosophy. As a child, the Runner had eaten a ‘typical’ North American diet with a short list of personal specifics that Aman skipped. He had become a Gaiist at nineteen. The break was clear in the profile, with the sudden and dramatic shift of purchases from animal proteins to fish and then vegetable proteins only. Alcohol purchases flatlined, although marijuana products tripled as did wild-harvest hallucinogenic mushrooms. As he expected, the illegal drug purchase history revealed little. The random nature of his purchases suggested that he bought the drugs for someone else or a party event rather than for regular personal consumption. No long-term addictive pattern.

A brief, steady purchase rate of an illegal psychotropic, coupled with an increase in food purchase volume suggested a lover or live-in friend with an addiction problem, however. The sudden drop-off suggested a break up. Or a death. The food purchases declined in parallel. On a whim, because he had time to spare, Aman had his AI correlate the drop off of the drug purchases to the newsmedia database for Northwestern North America, the region where the drug purchases were made. Bingo. A twenty year old woman had died within eighteen hours of the last drug purchase. His lover? Dead from an overdose? Aman’s eyes narrowed. The cause of death was listed as heart failure, but his AI had flagged it.

“Continue.” He waited out the seconds of his AI’s contemplation.

Insufficient data, it murmured in its androgynous voice. Continue? Aman hesitated because searches like this cost money, and the connection was weak, if there at all. “Continue.” No real reason, but he had learned long ago to follow his hunches. .

He was the last one out of the office, as usual. The receptionist said good night to him as he crossed the plush reception area, her smile as fresh as it had been just after dawn this morning. As the door locked behind him, she turned off. Real furniture and rugs meant a money and position. Real people meant security risks. The night watchman—another holographic metaphor—wished him good night as he crossed the small lobby. Koi swam in the holographic pond surrounded by blooming orchids. Huge vases of flowers—lilies today—graced small tables against the wall. The display company had even included scent with the holos. The fragrance of lilies followed Aman out onto the street. He took a pedal taxi home, grateful that for once, the small wiry woman on the seat wasn’t interested in conversation as she leaned on the handlebars and pumped them through the evening crush in the streets.

He couldn’t get the suit out of his head tonight. Jimi was right. The Gaiists were harmless, back to the land types. The feds wanted this kid for something other than his politics, although that might be the media reason. Absently, Aman watched the woman’s muscular back as she pumped them past street vendors hawking food, toys, and legal drugs, awash in a river of strolling, eating, buying people. He didn’t ask ‘why’ much any more. Sweat slicked the driver’s tawny skin like oil. Maybe it was because the Runner was the same age as Avi and a Gaiist as well. Aman reached over to tap the bell and before the silvery chime had died, the driver had swerved to the curb. She flashed him a grin at the tip as he thumbprinted her reader, then she sped off into the flow of taxis and scooters that clogged the street.

Aman ducked into the little grocery on his block, enjoying the relief of its nearly empty aisles this time of night. He grabbed a plastic basket from the stack by the door and started down the aisles. You opened the last orange juice today The store’s major-domo spoke to him in a soft, maternal voice as he strode past the freezer cases. True. The store’s major-domo had scanned his ID chip as he entered, then uplinked to smartshopper.net, the inventory control company he subscribed to. It has searched his personal inventory file to see if he needed orange juice and the major-domo had reminded him. He tossed a pouch of frozen juice into his basket. The price displayed on the basket handle, a running total that grew slowly as he added a couple of frozen dinners and a packaged salad. The Willamette Vineyard’s Pinot Gris is on sale this week the major-domo here at the wine aisle used a rich, male voice. Three dollars off. That was his favorite white. He bought a bottle, and made his way to the checkout gate to thumbprint the total waiting for him on the screen.

“Don’t we make it easy?”

Aman looked to up find Jimi lounging at the end of the checkout kiosks.

“You following me?” Aman loaded his groceries into a plastic bag. “Or is this a genuine coincidence?”

“I live about a block from your apartment.” Jimi shrugged. “I always shop here.” He hefted his own plastic bag. “Buy you a drink?”

“Sure,’ Aman said, to atone for not bothering to know where the newbie lived. They sat down at one of the sidewalk tables next to the grocery, an island of stillness in the flowing river of humanity.

“The usual?” the table asked politely. They both said yes, and Aman wondered what Jimi’s usual was. And realized Jimi was already drunk. His eyes glittered and a thin film of sweat gleamed on his face.

Not usual behavior. He’d looked over the intoxicant profiles himself when they were considering applicants. Aman sat back as a petite woman set a glass of stout in front of him and a mango margarita in front of Jimi. Aman sipped creamy foam and bitter beer, watched Jimi down a third of his drink in one long swallow. “What’s troubling you?”

“You profile all the time?” Jimi set the glass down a little too hard. Orange slurry sloshed over the side, crystals of salt sliding down the curved bowl of the oversized glass. “Does it ever get to you?”

“Does what get to me?”

“That suit owned you.” Jimi stared at him. “That’s what you told me.”

“They just think they do.” Aman kept his expression neutral as he sipped more beer. “Think of it as a trade.”

“They’re gonna crucify that guy, right? Or whack him. No fuss, no muss.”

“The government doesn’t assassinate people,” Aman said mildly.

“Like hell. Not in public, that’s for sure.”

Well, the indication had been there in Jimi’s profile. He had been reading in the fringe ezines for a long time, and had belonged to a couple of political action groups that were on the ‘yellow’ list from the government . . . not quite in the red zone but close. But the best profilers came from the fringe. You learned early to evaluate people well, when you had to worry about betrayal.

“I guess I just thought I was working for the good guys, you know? Some asshole crook, a bad dealer, maybe the jerks who dump their kids on the public. But this . . . ” He emptied his glass. “Another.” He banged the glass down on the table.

You have exceeded the legal limit for operating machinery, the table informed him in a sweet, motherly voice. I will call you a cab if you wish. Just let me know. A moment later, the server set his fresh margarita down in front of him and whisked away his empty.

“Privacy, what a joke.” Jimi stared at his drink, words slurring just a bit. “I bet there’s a record of my dumps in some data-base or other.”

“Maybe how many times you flush.”

“Ha ha.” Jimi looked at him blearily, the booze hitting him hard and fast now. “When d’you stop asking why? Huh? Or did you ever ask?”

“Come on.” Aman stood up. “I’ll walk you home. You’re going to fall down.”

“I’m not that drunk,” Jimi said, but he stood up. Aman caught him as he swayed. “Guess I am.” Jimi laughed loudly enough to make heads turn. “Guess I should get used to it, huh? Like you.”

“Let’s go.” Aman moved him, not all that gently. “Tell me where we’re going.”

“We?”

“Just give me your damn address.”

Jimi recited the number, sulky and childlike again, stumbling and lurching in spite of Aman’s steadying arm. It was one of the cheap and trendy loft towers that had sprouted as the neighborhood got popular. Jimi was only on the sixth floor, not high enough for a pricey view. Not on his salary. The door unlocked and lights glowed as the unit scanned Jimi’s chip and let them in. Music came on, a retro-punk nostalgia band that Aman recognized. A cat padded over and eyed them greenly, its golden fur just a bit ratty. It was real, Aman realized with a start. Jimi had paid a hefty fee to keep a flesh and blood animal in the unit.

“I got to throw up,” Jimi mumbled, his eyes wide. They made it to the tiny bathroom . . . barely. Afterward, Aman put him to bed on the pull out couch that served as bed in the single loft room. Jimi passed out as soon as he hit the pillow. Aman left a waste basket beside the couch and a big glass of water with a couple of old fashioned aspirin on the low table beside it. The cat stalked him, glaring accusingly, so he rummaged in the cupboards of the tiny kitchenette, found cat food pouches and emptied one onto a plate. Set it on the floor. The cat stalked over, its tail in the air.

It would be in the database . . . that Jimi owned a cat. And tonight’s bender would be added to his intoxicant profile, the purchase of the margarita’s tallied neatly, flagged because this wasn’t usual behavior. If his productivity started to fall off, Raul would look at that profile first. He’d find tonight’s drunk.

“Hey.”

Aman paused at the door, looked back. Jimi had pushed himself up on one elbow, eyes blurry with booze.

“Thanks . . . f’r feeding him. I’m not . . . a drunk. But you know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Aman said. “I know that.”

“I knew him. Today. Daren. We were friends. Kids together, y’know? Were you ever a kid? Suit’s gonna kill him. You c’d tell.” Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. “How come? You didn’t even ask. You didn’t even ask me if I knew him.”

Damn. He’d never even thought of looking for a connection there. “I’m sorry, Jimi,” Aman said gently. But Jimi had passed out again, head hanging over the edge of the sofa. Aman sighed and retraced his steps, settling the kid on the cushions again. Bad break for the kid. He stared down at Jimi’s unconscious sprawl on the couch-bed. Why? Didn’t matter. The suit wouldn’t have told them the truth. But Jimi was right. He should have asked. He thought about today’s profile of the Runner, that break where he had changed what he ate, what he wore, what he spent his money on. You could see the break. What motivated it . . . that you could only guess at.

What would Avi’s profile look like?

No way to know. Avi’s break had been a back-cutter.

Aman closed the door and listened to the unit lock it behind him.

He carried his groceries the few scant blocks to his own modest condo tower. No music came on with the lights. No cat, just Danish furniture and an antique Afghani carpet knotted by the childhood fingers of women who were long dead now. He put the food away, stuck a meal in the microwave, and thought about pouring himself another beer. But the stout he’d drunk with Jimi buzzed in his blood like street-grade amphetamine. He smiled crookedly, thinking of his grandfather, a devout man of Islam, and his lectures about the demon’ blood, alcohol. It felt like demon’s blood tonight. The microwave chimed . Aman set the steaming tray on the counter to cool , sat down crosslegged on the faded wool patterns of crimson and blue, and blinked his bioware open.

His AI had been working on the profile. It presented him with five options. Aman settled down to review the Runner’s profile first. It wasn’t all a matter of data. You could buy a search AI, and if that was all there was to it, Search Engine Inc wouldn’t be in business. Intuition mattered—the ability to look beyond the numbers and sense the person behind them. Aman ran through the purchases, the candy bars, the vid downloads for the lonely times, the gifts that evoked the misty presence of the girlfriend, the hope of love expressed in single, cloned roses, in Belgian chocolate, and tickets in pairs. They came and went, three of them for sure. He worried about his weight, or maybe just his muscles for awhile, buying gym time and special foods.

Someone died. Aman noted the payments for flowers, the crematorium, a spike in alcohol purchases for about three months. And then . . . the break. Curious, Aman opened another file from the download the suit had given him, read the stats. Daren had been a contract birth—the new way for men to have children. Mom had left for a career as an engineer on one of the orbital platforms. Nanny, private school. The flowers had been for Dad, dead at 54 from a brain aneurysm.

He had joined the Gaiists after his father had died.

Unlike Avi, who hadn’t waited.

Aman looked again at the five profiles the AI had presented. All featured organic, wild harvest, natural fiber purchasing profiles. Three were still local. One had recently arrived in Montreal, another had arrived in the Confederacy of South America, in the state of Brazil. Aman scanned the data. That one. He selected one of the local trio. The purchases clustered northeast of the city in an area that had been upscale suburb once, was a squalid cash-worker settlement now. He was walking. Couldn’t use mass transit without a chip and didn’t have access to a vehicle, clearly. Naïve. Aman let his breath out slowly. Frightened. A little kid with his head under the sofa cushions, thinking he was invisible that way. He wondered sometimes if he could find Avi. It would be a challenge. His son knew how he worked. He knew how to really hide.

Aman had never looked.

On a whim, he called up the AI’s flag from his earlier search. It had flagged the woman who had died, who had probably been a live in friend or lover. This time, the AI presented him with clustered drug overdose deaths during the past five years. A glowing question mark tagged the data, crimson, which meant a continuation would take him into secure and unauthorized data. Pursue it? He almost said no. “All right, Jimi.” He touched the blood-colored question mark. “Continue.” It vanished. Searching secure government data files was going to cost. He hoped he could come up with a reason for Raul, if he caught it.

His legs wanted to cramp when Aman finally blinked out of his bioware and got stiffly to his feet. The AI hadn’t yet finished its search of the DEA data files. The meal tray on the counter was cold and it was well past midnight. He stuck the tray in the tiny fridge and threw himself down on the low couch. Like Jimi, but not drunk on margaritas.

In the morning, he messaged Raul that he wasn’t feeling well and asked if he should come in. As expected, Raul told him no way, go get a screen before you come back. You could count on Raul with his paranoia about bio-terrorism.

It wasn’t entirely a lie. He wasn’t feeling well. Well covered a lot of turf. The AI had nothing for him on the overdose cluster it had flagged and that bothered him. There wasn’t a lot of security that could stop it. He emailed Jimi, telling him to work on the Sauza search on his own and attached a couple of non-secure files that would give him something he could handle in what would surely be a fuzzy and hung over state of mind. He found the clothes he needed at the back of his closet, an old, worn tunic-shirt and a grease-stained pair of jeans. He put on a pair of scuffed and worn out boots he’d found in a city recycle center years ago, then caught a ped-cab to the light rail and took the northeast run. He paid cash to the wary driver and used it to buy a one way entry to the light rail. Not that cash hid his movements. He smiled grimly as he found a seat. His ped-cab and light rail use had been recorded by citizen.net, the data company favored by most transportation systems. It would just take someone a few minutes longer to find out where he had gone today.

City ran out abruptly in the Belt, a no-man’s-land of abandoned warehouses and the sagging shells of houses inhabited by squatters, the chipless bilge of society. Small patches of cultivation suggested an order to the squalid chaos. As the train rocketed above the sagging roofs and scrubby brush that had taken over, he caught a brief snapshot glimpse of a round faced girl peering up at him from beneath a towering fountain of rose canes thick with bright pink blossoms. Her shift, surprisingly clean and bright, matched the color of the roses perfectly and she waved suddenly and wildly as the train whisked Aman past. He craned his neck to see her, but the curve of the track hid her instantly.

At his stop, he stepped out with a scant handful passengers, women mostly and a couple of men, returning from a night of cleaning or doing custom hand-work for the upscale clothiers. None of them looked at him as they plodded across the bare and dirty concrete of the platform, but a sense of observation prickled the back of his neck.

Why would anyone be following him? But Aman loitered to examine the melon slices and early apples hawked by a couple of bored boys at the end of the platform. He haggled a bit, then spun around and walked quickly away—which earned him some inventive epithets from the taller of the boys. No sign of a shadow. Aman shrugged and decided on nerves. His AI’s lack of follow-up data bothered him more with every passing minute. The rising sun already burned the back of his neck as he stepped off the platform and into the street.

The houses here were old, roofs sagging or covered with cheap plastic siding, textured to look like wood and lapped to shed rain. It was more prosperous than the no-man’s-land belt around the city center, but not by much. Vegetables grew in most of the tiny yards, downspouts fed hand-dug cisterns and small, semi-legal stands offered vegetables, home-made fruit drinks, snacks, and various services—much like the street vendors on his block, but out here, the customers came to the vendors and not the other way around.

He paused at a clean-looking stand built in what had been a parking strip, and bought a glass of vegetable juice, made in front of his eyes in an antique blender. The woman washed the vegetables in a bucket of muddy water before she chopped them into the blender, but he smelled chlorine as he leaned casually on the counter. Safe enough. His vaccinations were up to date, so he took the glass without hesitation and drank the spicy, basil flavored stuff. He didn’t like basil particularly, but he smiled at her. “Has Daren been by today?” He hazarded the Runner’s real name on the wild chance that he was too naïve to have used a fake. “He was supposed to meet me here. Bet he overslept.”

Her face relaxed a bit, her smile more genuine. “Of course.” She shrugged, relaxing. “Doesn’t he always? I usually see him later on. Like noon.” And she laughed a familiar and comfortable ‘we’re all friends’ laughter.

He was using his real name. Aman sipped some more of the juice, wanting to shake his head. Little kid with his head under the friendly sofa cushions. A figure emerged from a small, square block of a house nearly invisible beneath a huge tangle of kiwi and kudzu vines and headed their way, walking briskly, his hand-woven, natural-dyed tunic as noticeable as a bright balloon on this street. Loose drawstring pants woven of some tan fiber and the string of carved beads around his neck might as well have been a neon arrow pointing. “Ha, there he is,” Aman said, and the woman’s glance and smile confirmed his guess. Aman waited until the Runner’s eyes were starting to sweep his way, then stepped quickly forward. “Daren, it’s been forever.” He threw his arms around the kid hugging him like a long lost brother, doing a quick cheek-kiss that allowed him to hiss into the shocked kid’s ear, Act like we’re old friends and maybe the feds won’t get you. Don’t blow this.

The kid stiffened, panic tensing all his muscles, fear sweat sour in Aman’s nostrils. For a few seconds, the kid thought it over. Then his muscles relaxed all at once, so much so that Aman’s hands tightened instinctively on his arms. He started to tremble.

“Come on. Let’s take a walk,” Aman said. “I’m not here to bust you.”

“Let me get some juice . . . ”

“No.” Aman’s thumb dug into the nerve plexis in his shoulder and the kid gasped. “Walk.” He twisted the kid around and propelled him down the street, away from the little juice kiosk, his body language suggesting two old friends out strolling, his arm companionably over the kid’s shoulder, hiding the kid’s tension with his own body, thumb exerting just enough pressure on the nerve to remind the kid to behave. “You are leaving a trail a blind infant could follow,” he said conversationally, felt the kid’s jerk of reaction.

“I’m not chipped.” Angry bravado tone.

“You don’t need to be chipped. That just slows the search down a few hours. You went straight from the hack-doc to here, walked through the belt because you couldn’t take the rail, you buy juice at this stand every day, and you bought those pants two blocks up the street, from the lady who sells clothes out of her living room. Want me to tell you what had for dinner last night, too?”

“Oh, Goddess,” he breathed.

“Spare me.” Aman sighed. “Why do they want you? You blow something up? Plant a virus?”

“Not us. Not the Gaiists.” He jerked free of Aman’s grip with surprising strength, fists clenched. “That’s all a lie. I don’t know why they want me. Yeah, they’re claiming bio terrorism, but I didn’t do it. There wasn’t any virus released where they said it happened. How can they do that? Just make something up?” His voice had gone shrill. “They have to have proof and they don’t have any proof. Because it didn’t happen.”

He sounded so much like Avi that Aman had to look away. “They just made it all up, huh?” He made his voice harsh, unbelieving.

“I . . . guess.” The kid looked down, his lip trembling. “Yeah, it sounds crazy, huh. I just don’t get why? Why me? I don’t even do protests. I just . . . try to save what’s left to save.”

“Tell me about your girlfriend.”

“Who?” He blinked at Aman, his eyes wet with tears.

“The one who died.”

“Oh. Reyna.” He looked down, his expression instantly sad. “She really wanted to kick ‘em. The drugs. I tried to help her. She just . . . she just had so much fear inside. I guess . . . the drugs were the only thing that really helped the fear. I . . . I really tried.”

“So she killed herself?”

“Oh, no.” Daren looked up at him, shocked. “She didn’t want to die. She just didn’t want to be afraid. She did the usual hit that morning. I guess . . . the guy she bought from, he called himself Skinjack, I guess he didn’t cut the stuff right. She ODed. I . . . went looking for him.” Daren flushed. “I told myself I was going to beat him up. I guess . . . maybe I wanted to kill him. Because she was getting better. She would have made it.” He drew a shaky breath. “He just disappeared. The son of a bitch. I kept looking for him but . . . he was just gone. Maybe he ODed, too,” he added bitterly. “I sure hope so.”

All of a sudden, it clicked into place. The whole picture.

Why.

They had reached an empty lot. Someone was growing grapes in it and as they reached the end of the rows, sudden movement in the shadows caught Aman’s eye. Too late. He was so busy sorting it all out, he’d stopped paying attention. The figure stepped out of the leaf shadows, a small, ugly gun in his hand.

“I was right.” Jimi’s eyes glittered. “Didn’t think I was smart enough to track you, huh? I’m stupid, I know, but not that stupid.”

“Actually, I thought you’d be too hung over.” Aman spread his hands carefully. “I think we’re on the same side, here, and I think we need to get out of here now.”

“Shut up,” Jimi said evenly, stepping closer, icy with threat. “Just shut up.”

“Jimi?” Daren pushed forward, confused. “Goddess, I haven’t seen you . . . what are you doing?”

“He found you,” Jimi said between his teeth. “For the Feds. You’re not hiding very well, Daren, you idiot. Everything you buy has a damn tag on it. He looked up your buying habits and picked you out of the crowd, just like that. He laughed about how easy it was. You were too easy for him to even give the job to a newbie like me.” Jimi’s eyes burned into the kid’s. “You got to . . . ”

Aman shifted his weight infinitesimally, made a tiny, quick move with his left hand, just enough to catch Jimi’s eye. Jimi swung right, eyes tracking, gun muzzle following his eyes. Aman grabbed Jimi’s gun hand with his right hand, twisted, heard a snap. With a cry Jimi let go of the gun and Aman snatched it from the air, just as Daren tackled him, grabbing for the gun. The hissing snap of a gas-powered gunshot ripped the air. Again. Aman tensed, everything happening in slow motion now. No pain. Why no pain? Hot wetness spattered his face and Jimi sprawled backward into the grape leaves, arms and legs jerking. Aman rolled, shrugging Daren off as if he weighed nothing, seeing the suit now, three meters away, aiming at Daren.

Aman fired. It was a wild shot, crazy shot, the kind you did in sim-training sessions and knew you’d never pull off for real.

The suit went down.

Aman tried to scramble to his feet, but things weren’t working right. After a while, Daren hauled him the rest of the way up. White ringed his eyes and he looked ready to pass out from shock.

“He’s dead. Jimi. And the other guy.” He clung to Aman, as if Aman was supporting him and not the other way around. “Goddess, you’re bleeding.”

“Enough with Goddess already.” Aman watched red drops fall from his fingertips. His left arm was numb, but that wouldn’t last.

“Why? What in the . . . what the hell is going on here?” His fingers dug into Aman’s arm.

“Thank you.” Hell was about right. “We need to get out of here. Do you know the neighborhood?”

“Yes. Sort of. This way.” Daren started through the grapes his arm around Aman. “I’m supposed to meet . . . a ride. This afternoon. A ride to . . . ” He gave Aman a sideways, worried look. “Another place.”

“You’re gonna have to learn some things . . . ” Aman had to catch his breath. “Or you’re gonna bring the suits right after you.” After that he stopped talking. The numbness was wearing off. Once, years and years ago, he had worked as private security, licensed for lethal force, paying his way though school. A burglar shot him one night.

It hurt worse than he remembered, like white hot spears digging into his shoulder and side with every step. He disconnected himself from his body after awhile, let it deal with the pain. He wondered about Jimi’s cat. Who would take care of it? Raul would be pissed, he thought dreamily. Not about Jimi. Raul had no trouble finding Jimis in the world. But Aman was a lot better than Raul. Better even than An Xuyen, although Xuyen didn’t think so. Raul would be pissed.

He blinked back to the world of hot afternoon and found himself sitting in dim light, his back against something solid.

“Man you were out on your feet.” The kid squatted beside him, streaked with sweat, drying blood, and gray dust, his face gaunt with exhaustion and fear. Daren, not Jimi. Jimi was dead.

“I don’t have any first aid stuff, but it doesn’t look like you’re bleeding too much anymore. Water?” He handed Aman a plastic bottle. “It’s okay. It’s from a clean spring.

Aman didn’t really care, would have drunk from a puddle. The ruins of an old house surrounded them. The front had fallen—or been torn—completely off, but a thick curtain of kudzu vine shrouded the space. Old campfire scars blackened the rotting wooden floor. The belt, he figured. Edge of it anyway.

“What happened?” Daren’s voice trembled. “Why did he shoot Jimi? Who was he? Who are you?”

The water helped. “What sent you to get hacked?” Aman asked.

“Someone searched my apartment.” The kid looked away. “I found . . . a bug in my car. I’m . . . good at finding those. I . . . told some of my . . . friends . . . and they said go invisible. It didn’t matter if I’d done anything or not. They were right.” His voice trembled. “I’d never do what they said I did.”

“They know you didn’t do anything.” Aman closed his eyes and leaned back against the broken plasterboard of the ruined wall. Pain thudded through his shoulder with every beat of his heart. “It’s the guy who killed your girlfriend.”

“Why? I never hurt him. I never even found him . . . ”

“You looked for him,” Aman mumbled. “That scared ‘em.”

The kid’s blank silence forced his eyes open.

“I’m guessing the local government is running a little . . . drug eradication program be eliminating the market,” he said heavily. Explaining to a child. “They cut a deal with the street connections and probably handed them a shipment of . . . altered . . . stuff to put into the pipeline. Sudden big drop in users.”

“Poisoned?” Daren whispered. “On purpose?”

“Nasty, huh? Election coming up. Numbers count. And who looks twice at an OD in a confirmed user?” Aman kept seeing Jimi’s childlike curl on the couch, the cat regarding him patiently. Couldn’t make it go away. “Maybe they thought you had proof. Maybe they figured you’d guess and tell your . . . friends. They might make it public.” He started to shrug . . . sucked in a quick breath. Mistake. Waited for the world to steady again. “I should have guessed . . . the suit would know about Jimi. Would be tailing him.” That was why the long look in the office. Memory impression so the suit could spot him in a crowd. “I figured it out just too late.” His fault, Jimi’s death. “How soon are your people going to pick you up?”

“Soon. I think.” The kid was staring at the ground, looked up suddenly. “How come you came after me? To arrest me?”

“Listen.” Aman pushed himself straighter, gritted his teeth until the pain eased a bit. “I told you you’re leaving a trail like a neon sign. You listen hard. You got to think about what you buy . . . food, clothes, toothpaste, okay?” He stared into the kid’s uncomprehending face, willing him to get it. “It’s all tagged, even if they say it’s not. Don’t doubt it. I’m telling you truth here, okay?”

The kid closed his mouth, nodded.

“You don’t buy exactly the opposite—that’s a trail we can follow, too—but you buy random. Maybe vegan stuff this time, maybe a pair of synth-leather pants off the rack at a big chain next purchase. Something you’d never spend cash on. Not even before you became a Gaiist, got it? You think about what you really want to buy. The food. The clothes. The snacks, toys, services. And you only buy them every fifth purchase, then every fourth, then every seventh. Got it? Random. You do that, buy stuff you don’t want, randomly, and without a chip, you won’t make a clear track. You’ll be so far down on the profile that the searcher won’t take you seriously.

“I’ve been buying in the belt,” the kid protested.

“Doesn’t matter.” He had explained why to Jimi. Couldn’t do it again. Didn’t have the strength. Let his eyes droop closed.

“Hey.” The kid’s voice came to him from a long way away. “I got to know. How come you came after me? To tell me how to hide from you? You really want me to believe that?”

“I don’t care if you do or not.” Aman struggled to open his eyes, stared into the blurry green light filtering through the kudzu curtain. “I’m . . . not sure how come I followed you.” Maybe because he hadn’t asked why and Jimi had. Maybe because Avi had been right and the job had changed him after all.

“But why? You a closet Gaiist?”

Aman wanted to laugh at that, but he didn’t. It would hurt too much.

Voices filtered through nightmares full of teeth. People talking. No more green light, so it must be almost dark. Or maybe he was dying. Hard to tell. Footsteps scuffed and the kid’s face swam into view, Jimi’s at first, morphing into the other kid . . . Daren. He tried to say the name but his mouth was too dry.

“We’re gonna drop you at an emergency clinic.” Daren leaned close, his eyes anxious. “But . . . well, I thought maybe . . . you want to go with us? I mean . . . they’re going to find out you killed that Fed guy, right? You’ll go to prison.”

Yes, they would find out. But he knew how it worked. They’d hold the evidence and the case open. No reason to risk pointing some investigative reporter toward the little dope deal they’d been covering up. They’d have expectations, and he’d meet them, and Jimi’s death would turn out to have been another nasty little killing in the belt. He could adopt Jimi’s cat. No harm done. Just between us.

“I’ll come with you,” he croaked. “You could use some help with your invisibility. And I have the track to the proof you need . . . about that drug deal. Make the election interesting.” Wasn’t pleading. Not that. Trade.

“You can’t come chipped.” A woman looked over Daren’s shoulder, Hispanic, ice cold, with an air that said she was in charge. “And we got to go now.”

“I know.” At least the chip was in his good shoulder.

She did it, using a tiny laser scalpel with a deft sureness that suggested med school or even an MD. And it hurt, but not a lot compared to the glowing coals of pain in his left arm and then they were loading him into the back of a vehicle and it was fully dark outside.

He was invisible. Right now. He no longer existed in the electronic reality of the city. If he made it back to his apartment it wouldn’t let him in. The corner store wouldn’t take his card or even cash. He felt naked. No, he felt as if he no longer existed. Death wasn’t as complete as this. Wondered if Avi had felt like that at first. I probably could have found him, he thought. If I’d had the guts to try.

“I’m glad you’re coming with us.” Daren sat beside him as the truck or whatever it was rocked and bucked over broken pavement toward the nearest clear street. “Lea says you probably won’t die.”

“I’m thrilled.”

“Maybe we can use the drug stuff to influence the election, get someone honest elected.”

He was as bad as Jimi, Aman thought. But . . . why not hope?

“You’ll like the head of our order,” Daren said thoughtfully. “He’s not a whole lot older than me, but he’s great. Really brilliant and he cares about every person in the order. She really matters to him . . . the Earth I mean. Avi will really welcome you.

Avi.

Aman closed his eyes.

“Hey, you okay?” Daren had him by the shoulders. “Don’t die now, not after all this.” He sounded panicky.

“I won’t,” Aman whispered. He managed a tiny laugh that didn’t hurt too bad.

Maybe it hadn’t been the final fight after all.

Could almost make him believe in Avi’s Goddess. Almost.

“Your head of the order sucks at hiding,” he whispered. And fainted.

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2005.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Nick Wolven (nickthewolven.com)

Nick Wolven’s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, and Analog, among other publications. He lives in New York City with his family.

Mike Resnick (mikeresnick.com)

Mike Resnick is the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He has won five Hugos (from a record thirty-seven nominations), a Nebula, and other major awards in the USA, France, Japan, Spain, Catalonia, Croatia, and Poland. He’s the author of seventy five novels, over two hundred seventy five stories, and three screenplays, and the editor of forty two anthologies. His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages and he is currently the editor of Stellar Guild books and Galaxy’s Edge magazine.

Mary Rosenblum

One of the most popular and prolific of the new writers of the '90s, Mary Rosenblum made her first sale in 1990, and soon became one of that decade’s most prolific contributors at short story lengths, making dozens of sales to many different magazines and anthologies. Her linked series of “Drylands” stories, about an American Southwest rendered uninhabitable by prolonged droughts, now seems, alas, more germane than ever, and was recently collected in an expanded version as Water Rites. The original version, The Drylands, won the prestigious Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel of the year in 1993. Her other books include the SF novels Chimera, The Stone Garden, and Horizons, and a short story collection, Synthesis and Other Stories. She has also written a trilogy of mystery novels written under the name Mary Freeman. Rosenblum won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2009 for her story “Sacrifice.” A graduate of Clarion West, Mary Rosenblum lives in Canby, Oregon, and runs the website New Writers Interface. Her most recent book is Self Publishing Success: A Handbook for New Writers.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.