Budayeen Nights: Stories

I didn’t need this now. “Yasmin would scratch your eyes out, Lily. I’ve only been protecting you.”

“Huh, Yasmin don’t remember how to spell your name, Marid.” She slammed the phone down, too. I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to set foot in my own business today. I’d probably be slashed to ribbons.

I found Sheba’s apartment building and went up to the second floor. It was an old place with a thin, worn carpet runner on the stairs. The paint on the walls hung down in grimy, blowzy strips. Sheba’s front door was painted a dark reddish brown, the color of a bloodstain on clothing. I knocked. There was no response. Well, Sheba was a Budayeen hustler, she was probably asleep. I knocked louder and called her name. Finally I unclipped my phone again and murmured her commcode into it; I could hear the ringing from within the apartment.

It took me perhaps a minute and a half to get past her lock. The first thing I learned was that Sheba wasn’t home. The second was that it appeared she hadn’t been around for a while — several envelopes had been pushed beneath her door. One had been closed only with a rubber band. I opened it; it contained a hundred kiam in ten- kiam bills, and a note from some admirer. Clothes, jewelry, stuffed animals, all sorts of things were strewn across the floor of the apartment’s large room.

There was a mattress with a single sheet lying tipped up against a wall. The room’s only window was standing open, water-stained yellow curtains blowing in on a warm breeze. Below the window was another heap of clothing and personal articles. I brushed the curtains aside and looked out. Below me was a narrow alley leading crookedly in the direction of Ninth Street.

A light was on in the bathroom; when I looked in there, it was as much a mess as the other room. It seemed to me that Sheba had been in a hell of a hurry, had grabbed up a few things, and had gotten out of the apartment as fast as she could. I couldn’t guess why.

I looked more closely at what she’d left behind. Near the bathroom was a pile of cellophane and cardboard scraps that Sheba had kicked together. I sorted through the stuff and saw quickly that it was mostly packaging material ripped from several personality modules. I was familiar enough with the blazebrain field to know that some of the moddies Sheba had collected were not your regular commercial releases.

Sheba fancied black-market titles, and very dangerous ones, too. She liked illegal underground moddies that fed her feelings of superiority and power; while she was wearing them she’d become these programmed people, and her behavior could range from the merely vicious to the downright sinister and deadly. She could almost certainly become capable of murder.

I recalled that months ago, when she worked for me at Chiri’s, she was almost always chipped in to some moddy or other. That wasn’t unusual among the dancers though. I was sure that Sheba wasn’t using these hardcore moddies back then, at least not at work. Something had happened in the meantime, something that had drastically changed her, and not for the better.

I put some of the wrappers in my pocket and went back to the window. A niggling thought had been bothering me, and I looked outside again. My attention was drawn to the four trash cans below. They weren’t just any trash cans. Safiyya the Lamb Lady had brought me here. She had found all her silver jewelry in Sheba’s alley.

I took another look around Sheba’s shabby apartment. There were dead flowers shoved into one corner, several books thrown together on the floor, and shattered glass everywhere. I found another double handful of abandoned jewelry, a heap of pendants and necklaces, cheap stuff. Most were decorated with familiar symbols, all jumbled together — there were a couple of Christian crosses; Islamic crescents and items with Qur’anic inscriptions; a Star of David; an ankh; Buddhist, Hindu, and other Asiatic religious tokens; occult designs; Native American figures; and others I wasn’t able to identify. These were the only things I saw that might have had some connection to the vampire mythology, but I still discounted them — the things might just have been left behind like the rest of the jewelry. I couldn’t be sure there was any particular significance to them.

Nothing else set off a bell in my highly perceptive crime-solving mind. The moddies were the best clue, and so my next stop was Laila’s modshop on Fourth Street. I was surprised that Laila herself wasn’t in when I got there, but I was relieved, too. Laila is almost impossible to deal with. Instead, there was a young woman standing behind the counter.

She smiled at me. She didn’t seem crazy at all. She was either wearing a moddy that force-fed her a pleasant personality, or something was definitely not right here. This was not a shop where you met people under the control of their own unaugmented selves.

“Can I help you?” she asked me in English. I don’t speak much English, but I have an electronic add-on that takes care of that for me. I kept the language daddy chipped in almost all the time, because there are a lot of important English-speaking people in the city.

I took the wrappers from my pocket. “Sell any of these lately?”

She shuffled the cellophane around on the counter for a few seconds. “Nope,” she said brightly. I was positive now that I wasn’t dealing with her real personality. She was just too goddamn perky.

“How do you know?” I asked.

She shrugged. “This shop and its owner are much too concerned about upholding local ordinances to sell illegal bootleg moddies.”

I almost choked. “Yeah, you right,” was all I said.

“Anything else I can help you with?” She was deeply concerned, I could tell. That was some moddy Laila had found for her.

“I’ll just browse a bit.” I went toward the bins of moddies based on characters from old books and holoshows. For some dumb reason, I couldn’t come up with the name of the villain I was looking for. “You know what a vampire is?”

“Sure,” she said. “We had to watch that movie in a class in high school.” She made a scornful expression. “Twentieth Century Literature.”

“What was the vampire’s name again?”

“Lestat. They made us watch that movie and another classic. Airport, it was. None of us could figure out what they had to do with the real world. I like modern literature better.”

I’ll bet she did. Lestat wasn’t who I was searching for. I browsed through the bins for half an hour before I came across a set of vampire-character moddies. The package had been torn open. I took it to the counter and showed it to the young woman. “Know anything about this?” I asked.

She was upset. “We don’t break sets open,” she said. “We wouldn’t have done that.” The Dracula moddy was missing, leaving the Jonathan Harker, Lucy Westenra, Dr. Van Helsing, and Renfield moddies. I gave a little involuntary shudder. I didn’t want to meet the person who’d be eager to chip in Renfield.

“Do you suppose someone could have shoplifted the missing moddy?” I asked.

I almost wished I hadn’t said it. The young woman paled. I could see how abhorrent the entire idea was to her. “Perhaps,” she murmured. The word she used was “perhaps,” not “maybe.” That had to be the software talking.

“Forget it,” I said, coming to a decision. “I’ll buy the rest of the package.”

“Even though part of it’s been stolen? You know I’m not authorized to offer you a discount.”

It took me a little while longer to persuade her to sell me the things, and I was already chipping in Dr. Van Helsing, that fearless old vampire hunter, as I left the shop and headed back toward the eastern gate.

The first thing Audran noticed was that he was somewhat taller and a good deal older. There was a painful twinge in his left shoulder, but he decided it wouldn’t hinder him too much. He also felt very Dutch; he — Van Helsing — was from Amsterdam, after all.

Audran’s own consciousness lurked in a tiny, hidden-away area submerged beneath the overlay of Van Helsing. There he wondered what “feeling Dutch” meant. It was probably just some programmer’s laziness. That person had known that Van Helsing was Dutch, but had not bothered to include specific dutchnesses. It was a weakness that Audran despised in poorly written commercial moddies.

It did not take long for Audran’s muscles and nerves to compensate for the differences between his own physical body and the one the moddy’s manufacturer imagined. As long as the moddy was chipped in, Audran would move, feel, and respond as Van Helsing. There was also an annoying nervous flutter in his right eyelid, and Audran sincerely hoped it would go away as soon as he popped the moddy out.

Van Helsing was still heading east, on the sidewalk; Audran preferred walking in the middle of the street. As he approached the arched gate of the Budayeen, Van Helsing considered the things they had found in Sheba’s apartment. Now, with his special knowledge, the evidence took on new significance.