Future Crimes Part 69

"Feeling better?" Better. Yes. Amazing what nannites can do, isn't it? Heal as well as hurt. Reclaim that which seemed .. , forever lost.. ..

My legs begin to move of their own accord. I can't stop them. Can't do anything.

I was right, and I was wrong. Wrong in thinking that he'll be caught; that his pattern of murder--the bodies and depredations and choice of victims--creating a profile that will eventually, inevitably, lead the authorities to him. That won't happen. He's found a way around it, a way to kill and kill and never, ever get caught, never betray himself.

I'm your last victim, I told him. That much was right. Last .. . and only. Now and forever.

I try to scream, but, in a touch of characteristic irony, he's rewired my neurals so that any expression of fear or panic turns into a smile, or a laugh.

"Yes," he says, smiling, patting me on the back, "good to see you, too." He ushers me into the parking structure. I laugh again. And again. And again. My laughter fills the parking garage, and my companion, ever amiable, laughs with me.

SETTING FREE THE.

DAUGHTERS OF EARTH.

by Peter Crowther

Peter Crowther is the editor or co editor of nine anthologies and the coauthor (with James Lovegrove) of the novel Escardy Gap. Since the early 1990s, he has sold some seventy short stories and poems to a wide variety of magazines and chapbooks on both sides of the Atlantic. He has also recently added two chapbooks. Forest Plains and Fugue on a G-String, to his credits. His review columns and critical essays on the fields of fantasy, horror, and science fiction appear regularly in Interzone and the h.e.l.lnotes internet magazine.

He was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Horror Writers'

a.s.sociation. He lives in Harrogate, England, with his wife and two sons.

"Oaths are but words, and words but wind," --Samuel Butler

THE addict hunkered down beneath the bridge, leaned into the support, and blew warm air into his cupped hands. His breath came out like steam, pooled around his hands, and then drifted slowly up against the blackened stonework of the bridge, weaving its way through the filigreed metalwork of the railings

to mingle with the exhaust fumes of the occasional overhead traffic.

Somewhere off in the distance, beyond the towering Residential Blocks that littered the Edge, sirens sounded--maybe a traffic accident, another Midtown thruway littered with fallen debris. The addict knew it had to be Midtown because the Prowlcars didn't come out here often--hadn't come out here regularly for a long time, long before the addict had become hooked.

He looked over his shoulder, surveying the litter strewn dry ca.n.a.l bottom whose bank he now crouched upon, and stared out into the night, watching the pirouetting light beams scratch the sky around the Business Blocks, where the surrounding blackness was already lightened by the glow of life, a glow that never went out. Not like the old days, the days he had heard folks talk about around the occasional fires here on the Edge, days when work stopped on an evening, slowed down on a weekend, that mythical pause in commercial motion when all but the most essential services ceased for a day.

Sunday, it had been called.

The seventh day. A day of rest.

But Sunday had long gone.

Now time was marked strictly by the Julian calendar, a five-digit identification that did not recognize individual days or their characteristics.

His mother, before she died, had told him all about Sunday, and about the other days, information pa.s.sed down to her by her mother who had had it pa.s.sed down to her by her mother!

About how his mother's great-grandfather, in that long-ago mythical time before the addict was born, would go out for A Drink on Friday, the sixth day, with his friends.

And about how, on a Thursday--which had been the day before Friday--the two of them, his mother's great-grandparents, would sometimes go out to see a moving picture show ... in the days before TAP came in. And about how some folks had gone to Church on Sunday, That was long gone, too.

And she had told him about how the different months used to have different characteristics.

Months? he had asked.

His mother had smiled and ruffled his hair. Months had been groups of four weeks, sometimes four and a half, which occurred at different times of the year.

The seasons, his mother had called them, speaking their names reverently .. . though she had never known them herself.

The addict could remember their names--summer, winter, autumn, spring--but not their order. It didn't matter.

The seasons, his mother had explained, had been differentiated by the weather. Sometimes it was hot.

Sometimes it was cold. And sometimes it was getting close to being one or the other, but not quite there yet.

One season, his mother had been told, the sun shone and people got out of doors, walking around or lying on the gra.s.s, drinking in the suns.h.i.+ne, feeling it recharge their bodies.

Then, in another season, folks started to wrap up more, had started to wear more clothes, and the trees had started losing their leaves.

And still another one, the one after that one, snow would fall out of the sky. Snow .. . even the word had a magical resonance to it. In reality it was rain, frozen into tiny white cereal flakes of coldness, that fluttered down and lay on the ground, blown by the wind into banks and drifts of white against buildings and fences. The addict did not know snow. But he hoped that, one day, he would see it ... watch it falling from the sky.

And then, last of all, she had told him about how, after all the coldness and the snow, the temperature would ease off and plants would start to sprout new shoots, the trees would grow new leaves, and people would rummage through closets and wardrobes and old chests in the hallway, sifting through piles of clothing until they found the light stuff, the stuff with hardly any sleeves or hardly any pants legs .. .

getting ready for the heat.

But that had gone, too. All gone.

Everything was gone.

The snow, the wind, the heat.

No days. No seasons. No weather. No beliefs.

People worked. And people TAPped.

And that was it.

For those who did not work, those lost souls who had drifted out into the dead areas of the Edge, on the periphery of the dome-covered Cities that now covered the inhospitable world, a brief nomadic existence was on offer .. . brief because they invariably drifted out of the domes, pulled by the lure of the open land glimpsed through the murky Plexiglas. Then there was only lingering death. But there was a sense of the way things used to be ... if you were interested and if you could be bothered to look for it.

On this night, as it was with every night, the addict looked.

Still crouched down, the addict carefully stepped out from beneath the bridge and breathed in, fighting off the urge to cough.

Once free of the overhang, he looked up and saw a sky bus negotiating the tight corner of Vicar Lane and The Headrow, a handful of empty emotionless faces staring out of the fluorescent-lit interior and down into the gloom of the streets and the darkened buildings. The bus stopped against a loading platform and a stooped figure carefully stepped down. The addict imagined he could hear the sibilant rush of the pneumatic doors--ssssshhhht--opening and closing, and then the bus moved off into the stream of intermittent traffic, steam jets pumping from its rear and its underside.

The stooped figure watched the bus for a minute and then turned away, lugging what looked like two huge mall bags limping onto the railed walkway that traversed the residential block.

The addict watched the figure go and then allowed his eyes to drift down the building, floor by floor, until he was staring straight at a man sitting on the stone ann guard of the bridge. The addict was about to duck out of sight, but it was clear that the man was not interested in him. The man wasn't interested in anything at all, save the current running from the box in his lap--the addict a.s.sumed that was where the box was although he couldn't actually see it--and up the wires to the terminal bolts grafted into his temples.

The man was a TAPper or a Frankie, oblivious of everyone and everything while his bolts were being fed, thrusting whatever particular images and sensations made up his own particular pleasure.

A cab pa.s.sed overhead, its underside light sweeping the bridge and then the ground before returning to the bridge and fixing momentarily on the man. An airhorn sounded--horrrk!--as the cab wheeled left and pa.s.sed over the addict, moving toward the dense forest of residential blocks closer to the dome edge.

The addict turned to watch it go, watched its tail lights blinking, and, just for a second, before the cab turned again to move along Boar Lane, he saw the distant reflection of its headlights in the Plexiglas between two blocks on the corner of Boar Lane and Commercial Street.

Then the gla.s.s was dull again, unseen, just a wall of darkness at the end of Commercial Street.

He looked back at the bridge and saw the man shaking, watched him near the end of his. .h.i.t. The man would be in heaven for a few hours now, swirling down the blissful aftermath of the hit until reality crowded in again and he would have to seek out another supply.

The addict shrugged his coat up on his shoulders and scrambled up the side of the embankment onto the walkway. Everyone had his or her way of dealing with life in the domes, particularly those who lived on the Edge . , . his or her way of escaping the way things really were.

But some methods of cerebral escape were considered to be even more heinous than the artificial stimuli that could be scored for a few credits from any street corner or in the shadowed recesses of the second-cellar bars in Downtown. Of these--of all the recreational drugs openly tolerated (and even encouraged) by an increasingly dependent society--one and only one was completely forbidden. And this was the substance favored by the addict.

The penalty for being caught with his particular tipple was termination.

No questions, no excuses, no trial. Just lights out, and goodbye.

He shrugged his shoulders and stared along the walkway.

The sound of the city was stronger up here, so strong that the addict could barely hear the man on the bridge coming to the end of his. .h.i.t.

But he could still hear it just a little, and he hurried his step to get out of range.

The air smelted of smoke, cold, and fuel.

The puddles on the walkway and the rain-slicked ledges of the buildings were all rainbow-hued, the constant drizzle of fuel particles having eaten into the surface to come out with the water and swirl in eddies of various shapes and colors. The addict looked up into the darkness.

He couldn't see the dome's ceiling, let alone the sky beyond, but he could feel the gentle drizzle from the sprinkler system, drifting down over the town.

Now and again, when the system broke down, the authorities would send rain s.h.i.+ps circling the building tops. He had seen one once, coming down onto the dock at the filling station across town, its bulbous tanks gleaming in the fluorescent lights, its contents spread across the streets.

With crops grown outside the dome in separate covered areas and all water for domestic use fed into the city, rain was something the population didn't actually need any longer. The official line was that the daily spraying was a token gesture to simpler times: the consensus, however, was that the nightly downpours were used to quell disenchantment and insurrection.

Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly low and particularly bold, the addict thought about leaving the city.

Sometimes, at night, lying in his cot, wrapped up in his coats, he dreamed of the deadly open s.p.a.ces beyond the Plexiglas.

He dreamed of dusty roads winding between gra.s.sy hills, and of clouds silently drifting across an endless blue sky.

He dreamed of wooden shacks and picket-fenced garden areas, of clear lakes and a vast ocean lapping a sandy sh.o.r.eline. He even dreamed of gleaming, brightly-colored automobiles humming along rolling highways, attached to the roads themselves instead of flying around the building-sides, and he dreamed of panting trains hammering along a ribbon of track that snaked between frozen-rain-topped mountains .. .

and gra.s.s .. , and forests.

He dreamed these dreams because of his addiction.