Dreams of flesh and sand, p.1
Dreams of Flesh and Sand, page 1
Dreams of Flesh and Sand
W. T. Quick
This book is dedicated to my mother,
Della May Quick,
and my father,
Clifford W. Quick
and to
Theodore R. Cogswell.
Skoal, Brigadier!
1
Reports said they got Collinsworth just after he stepped off the lunar shuttle. He picked up his suitcase from the luggage carousel and carried it out to the taxi stand, a matter of two or three minutes—long enough for the quarter-kilo of tailored petroleum derivative in the handle of the case to reach body temperature and go unstable. Somebody knew that machines do all the baggage handling. Half of him landed in the picturesque flower cart across the street, and the other half permanently ruined a nearly new San Francisco cab.
Aldocci was in a phone booth in Muncie, Indiana, when something crawled out of the face plate and bit him on the chin. It was a double bug, and the insect-vectored recombinant virus, an industrial job designed to do interesting things to calcium deposits in nuclear reactors, left a nasty puddle on the floor for the next customer of Midwest AmeriTech to find.
Tough little Marie, she of the legendary monomole switchblade, picked about the same time to go skydiving from the 237th floor of the State of Illinois building, carving a scalpel-thin wound in its skin on her way down.
None of this would have bothered Berg, but all three people had things in common. They were skilled in the arcane arts of camouflage and spookery. They were very hard to kill. They were pros.
And they were all coming to meet him.
In some Chicago places, mostly the Old Labyrinth under what was once Michigan Avenue, you can still see high water marks from the time before they brought in Dutch engineers to dam up the rising lake. Ancient slime hangs petrified in black, ropy lines ten meters or so above the rotting basement bones of wrecked hotels. Down in the Lab, where abandoned roadways lie choked with rusted car hulks and loading docks gape like rotten mouths opened in the dark, new things lurk. Things that like the atmosphere of ruin and decay.
Berg caught a broken glimpse of his face in a shattered windshield. Pale, thin: he looked as if he belonged. His footsteps echoed sharply, like somebody pounding steel spikes with a hammer. The locals had strung surplus glowbulbs along the underside of the roadway in this section, marking off a meeting ground. They seemed to cast more shadow than light.
Everything smelled of damp, rust, decay. And a diseased sweetness, as if unseen, night-blooming plants waited somewhere, wafting a funereal perfume.
It was very cold.
Suddenly they were in front of him. He stopped.
They approached him with the wariness of animals, sniffing. He looked okay, but you never could tell.
She stayed pretty well back, and let her two wolves check him out. Couple of boys with tooth-bud transplants, sharp canines protruding from lumpy jaws, and big clots of muscle implant in places the human body was not designed to have muscle.
“Wha y’here, guy?” the one on the right said. He wore trashed jeans and a T-shirt advertising The Pet Killers.
“Came to see the lady,” Berg told him. “We’re old friends, right?”
She moved forward then, tall and willowy, wearing what might have been a discarded wedding gown. The tattered lace moved like a windblown curtain as her face turned toward him in sunflower tropism.
Two huge eyes like saucers of blood. Infrared optical inserts. She operated as much on sound as on her shadowy kind of vision, and recognized his voice before she made out his dim outline.
She was a great lady in her world, and the two wolves would tear him into bloody shreds if she raised her finger.
“Hello, Lady,” he said.
Her blind gaze sought his face. “Berg,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly deep and strong. “You need something done?”
He nodded, then remembered she had trouble making out small movements. “Yeah. That’s right.”
She smiled, and for an instant her face looked wistful and sad. “Yes,” she replied. “You usually do.”
Then she turned businesslike. “So, what’d you bring with you?”
He grinned. “What I usually do,” he told her. “I brought money.”
When he got back to his condo, he accessed the Denver Deep and hung a message on one of the hacker bulletin boards there. The message was meaningless, but which board it was hung on conveyed information to those who knew. In this case, Toshi would get in touch with him as soon as possible.
Although the data-processing underground—the Deep—was a pretty tangled place, changing all the time, some of the corporate types knew their way around there, too, and he thought about finding a new way to keep in touch.
Then he poured some scotch into a glass, stuck a couple of adrenaline-seritonin analogs behind his right ear, and settled back to wait for a few answers. It had been a long day, and it looked as if the night would be longer.
I’m all right, Jack, he told himself, feeling the smooth high begin to hammer its velvet way into his skull. He sipped his drink and watched New Chicago flicker and burn below him in all the colors of a neon rainbow, and wondered how much somebody was paying to tuck him up…
He propped one gummy eyelid open and wondered what had awakened him. The cheerful little Braun clock-holo at the foot of his bed snorted colored smoke rings that said it was ten o’clock in the morning. He heard the soft clink of glass on glass coming from the living room.
That somebody could enter his condo without his knowledge was nearly impossible. That somebody had, and that he was still alive, meant only one thing.
He pried open the other eyelid and yelled, “Hey, Toshi. I like my eggs poached.”
The mellow, somber reply came instantly. “Yeah, massa, and cream in your coffee. I do walls and windows, too.”
More clinking sounds. Berg chuckled, and began the laborious process of putting himself together.
Toshi most resembled a cartoon Japanese butterball. Since he could afford to look like anything from Superman to President Steenburg, Berg figured it was because Toshi liked the way he looked. One time Toshi told him the inch-thick layer of fat helped conceal all the Silicon Valley microcircuitry implanted throughout his body.
The morning sun stabbed bright, dusty lances into Berg’s living room. Toshi was sprawled on a Weber sofa, his feet up on the one-of-a-kind coffee table Ralph Lauren had built for his own country place.
“I see you still know how to respect the finer things in life,” Berg told him sourly.
Toshi grinned, his black eyes like two marbles in a glass of chilled liebfraumilch. “I see you still collect junk by anybody, as long as they have a social reputation,” he replied. He glanced at Berg and added, “You know, Berg, you gain twenty pounds, get out in the sun every once in a while, and quit adding scotch to bizarre hormone compounds, you might not look like you spend all your time under a rock. You ever think about that?”
Berg padded across to the Tiffany coffee service and poured. Blue Mountain. Good. He sipped and sighed. “Tosh, I think I’m gonna live, but not if you keep trying to reform me. Besides, what’s a guy that looks like Mr. Moto in a trash compactor giving me health tips for?”
Toshi shrugged. “I hear word your health—your future health, that is—might not be so good. Any truth in that, my man?”
It was Berg’s turn to shrug. “Could be. You got my message?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? Oh, and by the way, you need to rethink some of your defenses. It took me less than ten minutes to get in.”
Berg drank some more coffee and thought about it.
“How long for anybody else?”
“Couple of hours, probably.”
Berg sighed. “Have to do,” he said. “I don’t have enough time to fix it right. Got another job on the table.”
Toshi took his feet off the coffee table. He was wearing one of those appalling hawaiian shirts, the kind that look like pictures of lung cancer, white duck pants with about fifty pockets, and cheap plastic thongs. “You want to tell me about it? What other job?”
Berg lit the first of the day’s sixty or so of Bolivia’s finest, rode out the coughing spell, and poured more coffee.
Then he told him.
Toshi said, “Berg, you get mixed up with those people, it can get very tough. I think you may get yourself killed.”
Berg grinned at him. “Yes, but is it worth it?”
Toshi rubbed his right ear. “Beats the hell out of me. All I am is lowly muscle, boss.”
Berg poured more coffee. “Right. And at your lowly prices, we better get muscling…”
They were coming back into the lobby of Berg’s building when Toshi touched his arm gently. Berg froze.
“Guests, Berg,” Toshi said softly.
The wolf materialized from behind the shrubbery next to the elevators. He was wearing a furry, gray, floor-length coat that was hard to look at. The wolf nodded at Berg, but kept his eyes on Toshi.
“Theh ah p’pul in yah apt’mnt,” the wolf growled softly.
Berg looked at Toshi.
“This a friend of yours?” Toshi asked.
“Yeah,” Berg said. “I paid a lady to have my place watched. Among other things.”
The wolf stared at them. “P’pul,” he repeated.
“How many?” Berg asked.
The wolf held up three fingers. The fingers were ugly, clawlike things.
“Okay, thanks,” Berg said. The wolf no
“How does he do that?” Berg wondered.
“Mimetic carbon fibers in the fur,” Toshi grunted. “He’s over there behind us, doing an imitation of that marble wall. Listen, Berg, who is in your apartment?”
“I doubt if it’s friends,” he told him. “Shall we find out?”
“Sure thing,” Toshi said. “Let’s not take the elevator, though.”
Toshi sighed as he stared at the black scorch marks on the fire door that opened onto Berg’s kitchen. “Idiots,” he said. “No finesse. They’ve burned out your entire system.”
Berg glanced at him.
“It makes it easier for us, though,” he said thoughtfully. “Listen, Berg, I think you better wait out here.” He got a faraway look on his face and hunched over the lock. Berg heard a soft, metallic click, though Toshi didn’t seem to have anything in his hands. The door swung softly open.
Toshi turned and winked at him. “Just take a second,” he mouthed silently.
Toshi moved quietly into the apartment. Berg’s hearing was very good, but there wasn’t any sound. After a couple of minutes somebody tried to scream. Berg recognized the sudden sharp intake of breath, followed by—nothing. Except more silence.
Toshi’s moonlike face appeared around the door. Berg jumped.
“Nerves, Berg?” Toshi said. “Come on in. It’s all over.”
Berg followed him through the kitchen and out into the main room. Just beyond the kitchen door they had to step over the body of a large, dark-haired woman. One of her arms was twisted at an impossible angle.
A small, rat-like man was crumpled against the window wall, his hands outstretched as if he had been trying to climb the glass. A trickle of bright red blood ran from one of his ears.
Both of these intruders were shabbily dressed, unlike the third man on the sofa, who appeared to be taking a short nap. He was tall and slender, dressed in an impeccable brown business suit. Wings of carefully trimmed white hair floated above his ears. He wore a gold signet ring on the little finger of his right hand.
Berg shook his head slowly. “Three bodies to get rid of, Toshi? What do you think I am, the garbage man?”
Toshi grinned. “Nobody’s dead, Berg. It wasn’t necessary. Besides, I thought you might want to talk to them.”
“Oh, you inscrutable Oriental,” Berg said. “You’re smarter than you look.”
“I’m smarter than you look, too,” Toshi told him. “The one on the sofa is sleeping the lightest. Want me to wake him up?”
Berg appraised his visitor. “No. I’ve got some stuff that works better if I start while he’s out. Come on, give me a hand.”
When the guy woke up, Berg smiled at him. His chiseled, aristocratic face was puzzled. He blinked quickly, twice, and then relaxed. He smiled.
“Mr. Berg?” he said. His voice was a clear, even tenor.
Berg glanced at Toshi. The visitor had recovered too quickly. He looked like any high-level corporate exec. But he wasn’t.
Berg smiled again. “My name was on the door when you broke in,” he told him.
“I apologize for that,” the man said quickly. “I didn’t think you would see me if you had a choice in the matter.” He tried to shift his weight on the sofa, then stared at his legs in surprise.
“I gave you a spinal,” Berg told him. “You’re paralyzed from the waist down. You want to try anything else, I think my friend here can handle it okay.”
Toshi grinned at him toothily.
A faint glimmer of disgust colored the man’s expression. “You’ve had some work done,” he said.
Toshi smiled. “Takes one to know one, dude,” he replied.
“Listen,” Berg said. “Right now you don’t have any legs. Your two pals aren’t going to wake up any time soon, either. Now, I’ve got some real interesting derms here, and when I slap them on your neck you’re gonna tell me everything about this little episode. So can we cut the polite conversation and get to it?”
The man’s gray eyes chilled suddenly. “Only if you want to talk to a corpse,” he said.
“Oh,” Berg said. “You’re one of those.” He sighed. “Okay, we do it the hard way, then.”
“Is he wired?” Toshi asked.
“Nope. Bugged. Tailored bacteria that go toxic in the presence of certain drugs. Truth drugs, mostly. It’s a new wrinkle.”
“How about if I just cause him a whole lot of pain, while you use the retinal analyzer?”
Berg stared at his guest. “Might work,” he said. “What do you think, buddy?”
The man began to look worried. “I think we might have some grounds for negotiation. This is business, right?”
Toshi reached out and gently touched the man’s shoulder. Cords exploded suddenly in his neck as his face turned into a pain-filled skull.
“It’s really bad when it hurts that much and the nerve block won’t let you scream, isn’t it?” Toshi asked politely.
“Let go, Toshi,” Berg said.
The man collapsed backward, breathing hard. Toshi winked at him.
“You here just looking, or you plan to kill me?” Berg asked.
“Actually, I had rather hoped to buy you. Or convince you,” the man said.
“That what the two goons were for? What’s your name, anyway?”
“Smith will do,” he said calmly. “The two incompetent goons are bodyguards.”
“Don’t be too hard on them, Smith. You need more than competence to handle Toshi.” Berg shrugged. “Not that it’s relevant. How much are you going to offer?”
Smith turned his cool gaze on Berg’s face. “Two million new. In the bank of your choice.”
“A nice sum,” Berg told him. “What are you offering it for?”
“I thought you’d know,” Smith replied.
“Sorry. That much money makes me stupid. What’s it for?”
“To drop your contract with Nakamura-Norton, Get sick. Take a vacation. Whatever.”
Berg glanced at Toshi. Toshi winked again.
“Well, it’s a nice offer. Who’s making it?”
“Of course I can’t tell you that.”
“I think you can.” Berg smiled carefully.
Toshi slowly reached for Smith’s shoulder.
“No!” he said hastily. “What I mean is I don’t know. Do you think whoever is paying this out would send me to a man like you if I had any actionable knowledge?”
Berg stared at his hands. Then he lit a Bolivian cigarette and blew smoke in Smith’s face. Smith stared at him.
“Nakamura?”
No reply.
“Norton?”
Smith raised his beautifully tailored shoulders and let them fall.
Berg grinned. Then he walked over to the desk and replayed some readouts.
“You’re telling the truth. You don’t know. But your body thinks you’re a Norton guy. And that makes absolutely no sense at all…”
The hotwatch alarm on one of Berg’s machines chimed softly. He looked at Smith, then brushed his fingers across the touch pad on his desktop. A screen lit up.
“ICEBERG,” the letters danced. “COLLINSWORTH, ALDOCCI, MARIE—THIMK—LOVE, ICEBREAKER—ENDS.”
Berg stared at Toshi, who cocked one bushy eyebrow. “Anything?” he asked.
Berg shrugged. “Love letter,” he said. “From an old friend.”
2
Cold.
A green, chilling taste, and the feel of vast space whirling. That was the first ride.
Later, it became easier…
The office fit her like a black leather glove. She’d told the decorator, a thin young man who resembled a poolside matador, to make it look like a bruise.
The young man stared at her. “A what?”
“You know. Dark, soft. A little bit overripe, almost rotten. I don’t want anybody to feel comfortable here. Except me, of course.”
The desk was a ring of polished stainless steel, supported in thin air by a hidden array of magnets. When clients met her face to face, they saw her poised within the ring like a dart plunged into a target.
There were no windows.
“Ms. Calley,” the visitor said.
She quickly ran thin fingers through her tangled, chopped mass of black hair and flashed a smile that left the man feeling as if he’d just been flipped a quick piece of identification. “Calley’s okay,” she said. “I don’t need that Miz bullshit.”
