“How you doing, Laila?” I said. There was the acrid bite of ammonia in her shop that morning. She was squirting some ugly pink liquid from a plastic bottle up into the corners of the room. Don’t ask me why.
She glanced at me and gave me a slow, rapturous smile. It was the look you get only from complete sexual satisfaction or from a large dose of Sonneine. “Marid,” she said serenely. She still whined, but now it was a serene whine.
“Got to go out on patrol today, and I thought you might have — “
“Marid, a young girl came to me this morning and said, ‘Mother, the eyes of the narcissus are open, and the cheeks of the roses are red with blushing! Why don’t you come outside and see how beautifully Nature has adorned the world!’ “
“Laila, if you’ll just give me a minute — “
“And I said to her, ‘Daughter, that which delights you will fade in an hour, and what profit will you then have in it? Instead, come inside and find with me the far greater beauty of Allah, who created the spring.’” Laila finished her little homily and looked at me expectantly, as if she were waiting for me either to applaud or collapse from enlightenment.
I’d forgotten religious ecstasy. Sex, drugs, and religious ecstasy. Those were the big sellers in Laila’s shop, and she tested them all out personally. You had her personal Seal of Approval on every moddy.
“Can I talk now, Laila?”
She stared at me, swaying unsteadily. Slowly she reached one scrawny arm up and popped the moddy out. She blinked a couple of times, and her gentle smile disappeared. “Get you something, Marid?” she said in her shrill voice.
Laila had been around so long, there was a rumor that as a child she’d watched the imams lay the foundation of the Budayeen’s walls. But she knew her moddies. She knew more about old, out-of-print moddies than anyone else I’ve ever met. I think Laila must have had one of the world’s first experimental implants, because her brain had never worked quite right afterward. And the way she still abused the technology, she should have burnt out her last gray cells years ago. She’d withstood cerebral torture that would have turned anyone else into a drooling zombie. Laila probably had a tough protective callus on her brain that prevented anything from penetrating. Anything at all.
I started over from the beginning. “I’m going out on patrol today, and I was wondering if you had a basic cop moddy.”
“Sure, I got everything.” She hobbled to a bin near the back of the store and dug around in it for a moment. The bin was marked “Prussia/Poland/Breulandy.” That didn’t have anything to do with which moddies were actually in there; Laila’d bought the battered dividers and scuffed labels from some other kind of shop that was going out of business.
She straightened up after a few seconds, holding a shrink-wrapped moddy in her hand. “This is what you want,” she said.
It was the pale blue Complete Guardian moddy I’d seen other rookie cops wearing. It was a good, basic piece of procedure programming that covered almost every conceivable situation. I figured that between the Half- Hajj’s mean-mother moddy and the Guardian, I was covered. I wasn’t in a position to turn down any kind of help, friend or fantasy. For someone who once hated the idea of having his skull amped, I was sure building up a good collection of other people’s psyches. I paid Laila for Complete Guardian and put it in my pocket.
She gave me that tranquil smile. It was toothless, of course, and it made me shiver. “Go in safety,” she said in her nasal wail.
“Peace be upon you.” I hurried out of her shop, walked back down the Street, and passed through the gate to where the car was parked. It wasn’t far from there to the station house. I worked at my desk for a little while until Officer Shaknahyi ducked his head into my cubicle. “Time to roll,” he said.
It didn’t bother me in the least to tell my data deck to quit. I followed Shaknahyi downstairs to the garage. “That’s mine,” he said, pointing to a patrol car coming in from the previous shift. He greeted the two tired-looking cops who got out, then slid behind the steering wheel. “Well?” he said, looking up at me.
I wasn’t in a hurry to start this. In the first place, I’d be stuck in the narrow confines of the cop car with Shaknahyi for the duration of the shift, and that prospect didn’t excite me at all. Second, I’d really rather sit upstairs and read boring files in perfect safety than follow this battle-hardened veteran out into the mean streets. Finally, though, I climbed into the front seat. Sometimes there’s only so much stalling you can do. He looked straight out the windshield while he drove.
We cruised around the streets of the city for about an hour. Then, suddenly, a shrill alarm went off, and the synthesized voice of the patrol car’s comp deck crackled. “Badge Number 374, respond immediately to bomb threat and hostage situation, Cafe de la Fee Blanche, Ninth Street North.”
“Gargotier’s place,” said Shaknahyi. “We’ll take care of it.” The comp deck fell silent.
And Haj jar had promised me I wouldn’t have to worry about anything like this. “Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem,” I murmured. In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
5
A crowd had gathered outside the low railing of the Cafe de la Fee Blanche’s patio. “Get these people out of here,” Shaknahyi growled at me. “I don’t know what’s happening in there, but we got to treat it like the guy has a real bomb. And when you got everybody moved back, go sit in the car.”
“But-“
“I don’t want to have to worry about you, too.” He ran around the corner of the cafe to the north, heading for the building’s rear entrance.
I hesitated. I knew backup units would be getting here soon, and I decided to let them handle the crowd control. At the moment, there were more important things to worry about. I still had Complete Guardian, and I tore open the shrink-wrap with my teeth. Then I chipped the moddy in.
