arm, hissing steam as it articulated and flexed. Rolls of fat disguised the indeterminate region where her head and torso merged. Her hands were spread out as if she was drying recently painted fingernails. Each fingertip vanished into — or possibly became — a kind of thimble. Each thimble was tipped with something medical and specialised.
‘No; him first,’ she said, extending a little finger in my direction, its thimble adorned with what looked like a tiny sterile harpoon.
‘Thank you, Dominika,’ I said. ‘But you’d best attend to Quirrenbach first.’
‘You come back?’
‘Yes — once I’ve acquired some finance.’
I smiled and left the tent, hearing the sound of drills whining up to speed.
FOURTEEN
The man who looked through my belongings had a whirring and clicking eyeglass strapped to his head. His hairless scalp was quilted with fine scars, like a broken vase that had been inexpertly mended. He examined everything I showed him with tweezers, holding the items up to his eyeglass in the manner of an aged lepidopterist. Next to him, smoking a handmade cigarette, was a youth wearing the same kind of helmet I’d taken from Vadim.
‘I can use some of this shit,’ the man with the eyeglass said. ‘Probably. You say it’s all real, huh? All factual?’
‘The military episodes were trawled from soldiers’ memories after the combat situations in question, as part of the normal intelligence gathering process.’
‘Yeah? And how’d they fall into your hands?’
Without waiting for an answer, he reached under the table, pulled out a little tin sealed with an elastic band and counted out a few dozen bills of the local currency. As I had noticed before, the bills seemed to have been printed in strange denominations — thirteens, fours, twenty-sevens, threes.
‘It’s none of your damned business where I got them from,’ I said.
‘No, but that doesn’t stop me asking.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Anything else, now that you’re wasting my time?’
I allowed him to examine the experientials I’d taken from Quirrenbach, watching as his lip curled first into contempt and then disgust.
‘Well?’
‘Now you’re insulting me, and I don’t like it.’
‘If the items are worthless,’ I said, ‘just tell me and I’ll leave.’
‘The items aren’t worthless,’ he said, after examining them again. ‘Fact is, they’re exactly the kind of the thing I might have bought, a month or two ago. Grand Teton’s popular. People can’t get enough of those slime- tower formations.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘This shit has already hit the market, that’s what. These experientials are already out there, depreciating. These must be — what? Third- or fourth-generation bootlegs? Real cheap-ass crap.’
He still tore off a few more bills, but nowhere near as much as he’d paid for my own experientials.
‘Anything else up your sleeve?’
I shrugged. ‘Depends what you’re after, doesn’t it.’
‘Use your imagination.’ He passed one of the military experientials to his sidekick. The youth’s chin was fuzzed by the first tentative wisps of a beard. He ejected the experiential he was running at the time and slipped mine in instead, without once lifting the goggles from his eyes. ‘Anything black. Matte-black. You know what I mean, don’t you?’
‘I’ve a reasonably good idea.’
‘Then either cough up or get out of the premises.’ Next to him, the youth started convulsing in his seat. ‘Hey, what is that shit?’
‘Does that helmet have enough spatial resolution to stimulate the pleasure and pain centres?’ I said.
‘What if it does?’ He leaned over and slapped the convulsing youth hard on the head, knocking the playback helmet flying. Drooling, still convulsing, the youth subsided into his seat, his eyes glazed over.
‘Then he probably shouldn’t have accessed it at random,’ I said. ‘My guess is he just hit an NC interrogation session. Have you ever had your fingers removed?’
The eyeglass man chuckled. ‘Nasty. Very nasty. But there’s a market for that kind of shit — just like there is for the black stuff.’
Now was as good a time as any to see what the quality of Vadim’s merchandise was like. I handed over one of the black experientials, one of those embossed with a tiny silver maggot motif. ‘Is this what you mean?’
He looked sceptical at first, until he had examined the experiential more closely. To the trained eye, there were presumably all manner of subliminal indicators to distinguish the genuine article from sub-standard fakes.
‘It’s a good quality bootleg if it’s a bootleg, which means it’s worth something whatever’s on it. Hey, shit- for-brains. Try this.’ He knelt down, picked up the battered playback helmet and jammed it onto the youth’s head, then prepared to insert the experiential. The youth was just beginning to perk up when he saw the experiential, at which point he pawed the air, trying to stop the man pressing it into the helmet.
‘Get that maggot shit away from me…’
‘Hey,’ the man said. ‘I was just going to give you a flash, dick-face. ’ He tucked the experiential away in his coat.
‘Why don’t you try it yourself?’ I said.
‘Same damn reason he doesn’t want that shit anywhere near his skull. It’s not nice.’
‘Nor’s an NC interrogation session.’
‘That’s a trip to the cake shop by comparison. That’s just pain.’ He patted his breast pocket delicately. ‘What’s on this could be about nine million times less pleasant.’
‘You mean it’s not always the same?’
‘Of course not, or there wouldn’t be an element of risk. And the way these ones work, it’s never exactly the same trip twice. Sometimes it’s just maggots, sometimes you are the maggots… sometimes it’s much, much worse…’ Suddenly he looked cheerful. ‘But, hey, there’s a market for it, so who am I to argue?’
‘Why would people want to experience something like that?’ I asked.
He grinned at the youth. ‘Hey, what is this, fucking philosophy hour? How am I supposed to know? This is human nature we’re talking about here; it’s already deeply fucking perverted.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said.
At the centre of the concourse, rising above the bazaar like a minaret, was an ornately encrusted tower surmounted by a four-faced clock set to Chasm City time. The clock had recently struck the seventeenth hour of the twenty-six in Yellowstone’s day, animated spacesuited figurines emerging beneath the dial to enact what might have been a complex quasi-religious ritual. I checked the time on Vadim’s watch — my own watch, I forced myself to think, since I had now liberated it twice — and found that the two were in passable agreement. If Dominika’s estimate had been accurate, she would still be busy with Quirrenbach.
The hermetics had passed through now, along with most of the obviously rich, but there were still many people who wore the slightly stunned look of the recently impoverished. Perhaps they had been only moderately wealthy seven years ago; not sufficiently well-connected to barrier themselves against the plague. I doubted that there had been anyone truly poor in Chasm City back then, but there were always degrees of affluence. For all the heat, the people wore heavy, dark clothes, often ballasted with jewellery. The women were often gloved and hatted, perspiring under wide-brimmed fedoras, veils or chadors. The men wore heavy greatcoats with upturned collars, faces shadowed under Panama hats or shapeless berets. Many had little glass boxes around their necks, containing what looked like religious relics, but which were actually implants, extracted from their hosts and now carried as symbols of former wealth. Though there was a spectrum of apparent ages, I saw no one who looked
