Futureland. Part 16

"Why you wanna do that?" Tana asked.

"Just chummin' the water a little. Later on I might wanna catch me a fish."

Tana's apartment was on the fifth floor of the huge building, midway between Lower and Middle Adam Clayton Powell Drive. The view out of her picture window was eternally night and limited to the featureless walls of the Harlem jail just across the street. Her apartment was a single large room with a thirteen-foot ceiling. She had a bed in one corner and a tiled shower with no curtain or door in the other.

"Pretty spare," Folio said.

"Good for the soul," she said.

She kissed him hard then and he leaned away from her, a little perplexed.

"What's that?"

"You killed that man the second you saw him," she said with a smile. Her eyes got large, as if she was looking at something transform before her. "You didn't hesitate, or I'd be dead now."

"Li'l somethin' I picked up in the Ukraine. You got a desk?"

Tana Lynn went to a door at the midpoint of one wall and opened it. An oak board a meter square fell out, landing against a prop that held it parallel to the floor. From under her bed she drew a metal folding chair.

"This is my chair," she said proudly. "My own property. Not leased or rented or anything. Axel Alpha made it for me in his shop downstairs."

Folio seated himself at the desk and took out the swab of blood. He held the sample five centimeters from his electric eye. It took a full three minutes to map the DNA patterns and another six to find and access the database that held the pod number to which the chromes were related.

"What is that?" Tana asked when he looked up. "What?"

"That eye."

"It was a gift from a grateful client."

"What's it do?"

"Watches out for trouble and then dives right in."

Folio could see the thrill that went through the young ex--s.e.x slave. Her pulse quickened, and his did too.

"No, baby," he said.

"No, what?"

"I got to get to work on this job I got."

"What job?"

"I'm looking for a reason and maybe looking for a man that has that reason."

"Can I come?"

Folio's eye counted nine hundred forty-two stairs from the eternal night of the lower avenues to the sunlit streets of the upper levels. The buildings that loomed over the busy business streets were clean and gleaming, while the lower and middle avenue walls were filled with graffiti and garish electric signs. Manhattan had been trisected into separate strata thirty years earlier with the architectural masterpiece of the middle, upper, and lower streets. The reason for this separation was to achieve an aboveground approximation of Common Ground. There were many New Yorkers riding the labor cycles who could not afford the high prices of Manhattan's rents and leases but who were still necessary for commerce. It was the brainchild of Brandon Brown, a City College graduate, to extend the city even further into the sky, leaving the lower levels for those who could not afford the sunlight but who still worked for a living.

"I love it up here," Tana said to her new friend. "When I was a kid I used to come up and run around until the Social Police would grab me and try to say I was White Noise. But Jim'd always come to the station and get me. He never got mad or nuthin'. Just tell me to come on and we'd go out for Macsands and maybe a vid."

"Sounds like a good guy, this Jim."

"Unless you was under his sights," Tana said. "Where we goin'?"

"Grand Central Develator."

"Cops?" For the first time Tana looked worried.

Folio nodded and smiled. "You scared?"

"I've been to Police Central before. They thought I was moving Pulse illegally. I seen what they did to the real dealer." The look in her eyes made the detective want to laugh, but he held it in.

"I won't let 'em hurt you, little girl."

The last stop of Grand Central's Develator, like all Develators around the world, was Common Ground. But this particular ma.s.s conveyance device made an intermediate stop one thousand feet belowground at Police Central, the hub of all law enforcement for the Twelve Fiefs of New York. This one ma.s.sive center was connected, through underground trams, to all police stations in the city. This allowed for speedy deployment of officers on a military scale.

Folio and Tana rode the great flatbed with hundreds of others. At Police Central they debarked into a long hallway filled with people seeking entre to the Law.

Tana stayed close to Folio's side, holding on to his sinewy forearm. The mob moved slowly, funneling down from a mob to a single-file line.

"Yeah?" a woman said from behind a three-inch-thick, bulletproof pane.

"Detective Thorpe," Folio said with studied nonchalance.

"Name?"

"Folio Johnson and Tana Lynn."

"Reason for visit."

"Folio's follies."

"Come again?"

"I'd rather not."

Tana snickered.

"This is no joke, citizen."

"Listen, lady," he said. "You got a job and so do I. You ask the questions and I give the best answers I can. Type in the words I gave you and that door there will pop open in thirty seconds. So let's get on with it, all right?"

Tana and Folio walked down a long hall that was over a hundred feet in width. The walls were lined with official booths where citizens could file claims, make reports, or show up for warrants. The detective stopped at a door guarded by an armed and armored sentry.

"Folio's follies," the detective said.

The guard waited a moment, listening to an electronic feed in his helmet, then moved to the side. The pair entered a small elevator that began to descend.

"You're quivering," he said.

"I like to have an exit."

"You the one asked to come along."

"I know."

The doors to the elevator slid open. A man stood before them dressed all in red except for a black collar ring that, Folio knew, was made from shatterproof gla.s.s. The policeman was white and not quite six feet. But what he lacked in height he more than made up for in width. Detective Aldo Thorpe was heavy with the natural muscle ma.s.s of a mesomorph.

"Got your black ring, eh?" Folio asked.

"What do you want?"

"Prussian six-finger, clutch forty-two," Folio said.

"Come on in," Thorpe said.

"How do you know about the sixer?" Thorpe asked.

"I killed him," Folio replied.

They were in a room called Interrogations 419-ag. The room, and the furniture therein, was composed solely of bright and s.h.i.+ny Gla.s.sone, the shatterproof plaster of the twenty-first century. Everything was Gla.s.sone and everything was white--the walls, the long conference table, the chairs. There were no windows a thousand feet belowground.

"Murder?" Thorpe suggested.

"You can't murder a synthy. You know that. Anyway, he was trying to kill Tana. I severed his spine."

"You're lucky he didn't see you."

Folio shrugged.

"Why didn't you wait for the police unit?"

"I'm scared'a teenagers."

Thorpe smiled, then he laughed. "Good to see you again, Tana," he said.

"Inspector."

"You two know each other?"

"Tana an' me go way back. Every time I picked up Jim Rachman on a murder rap his little girl here would be his alibi."

Folio glanced at Tana. He hadn't checked her files because he felt it was gauche to research a woman he wanted to have s.e.x with.

"That doesn't have anything to do with us," she said. Her light brown eyes seemed to care what he thought.

Folio allowed himself to fall into Rapture--a setting for his electric eye that removed him completely from the world, a place where there was nothing but his mind floating in an endless universe of mathematical possibilities. In Rapture his thoughts and impressions became idealized notions of energies that intersected and interacted as galaxies dancing freely. He saw her energy as a whirling haze of cosmic dust, not yet formed into stars. She hovered and approached then hesitated, drawn off toward the gravity of some unseen celestial body. They separated without incident or damage.

Folio smiled. He opened his eyes. It felt as if he had been far away for a long time but he knew that the timer on Rapture was less than a second in real time. Three seconds in that zone would drive any human insane.

"I'm on a job, Aldo," the private detective said. "There's a kid named Charles Spellman, an Itsie. He's got a group of friends gettin' knocked off. He's worried that his turn was comin' up and so he asked me to intercede."

"You workin' for the International Socialists now?"

"I'm not political, you know that."

"Tell that to them when they get in power. As a black man you should know what they'll do."

"I know four black men went down in the Central Develator and they never came back. They were going in for some questions and stayed."

Aldo Thorpe's mouth tightened and his bushy eyebrows furrowed slightly--then he forced a smile. "Let's hear it," he said.

Johnson related everything he knew to the police detective--the dead men, their club's activities, the a.s.sa.s.sin. The only thing he lied about was the whereabouts of his client.

"He's off-continent," he said. "I don't know where."

"What's wrong with you, Folio?" the policeman asked.

"All systems functioning normally, sir."

"This is no joke. If what you say here is true, I can't do anything. The files'd be closed. These killings aren't random, they're sanctioned a.s.sa.s.sinations. Anybody close to it will be in just as much trouble as these Seeker people. Why don't you forget this s.h.i.+t and come to work for us? We have lotsa independents on the payroll."

"That means I'd be on a cycle right?"

"Yeah, but--"

"But nuthin'. I'm not a termite, Aldo."

"You could be dead."

"Will be," Folio agreed. "One day. But at least I'll be the one to call that last charge."

"Idiot."

3.