out like twisting blue snakes. Right now, he let it go.
“Kind of in a hurry,” said Deckard. Behind him, he could feel the crush and push of the dense paths and de facto alleyways, the tight presence of other human bodies that always tripped a memory flash of that distant city. “Maybe you could just sell me what I need-what I came here for—and we could skip the conversation.”
“You think it’s as easy as that? Shows what you know.” The man behind the counter had fierce eyes set in deep circles of black, as though his contemplation of the divine was slowly blinding him to any other world. “You come to your senses and decide to go looking for that which you should’ve sought all along—it’s not going to be a ‘kind of in a hurry’ process. Narrow is the gate, and long and hard the road beyond it. You don’t buy grace, you earn it.”
The temptation of his old police ways tingled again in Deckard’s hands. He glanced for a moment back over his shoulder; there were too many people here, too many watching eyes, for him to throttle the man into submission. He couldn’t risk alerting the colony’s authorities about what he was trying to do; the place was crawling with snitches and narks. He’d left the briefcase sitting on the kitchen-area table back at the hovel, there being no place to hide it that anyone else couldn’t have found in five minutes’ worth of tearing the flimsy structure to bits. The nagging voice, coming from the briefcase, had told him to fetch the necessary items as fast as possible; even the disembodied Batty felt the time pressure clamping down on them.
Just my luck, thought Deckard. This particular booth in the marketplace appeared to be the only one trafficking in dehydrated deities at the moment.
Every other time he’d shoved his shoulder-first way through the crowd, there had seemed to be dozens of the technically illegal but officially tolerated outlets. Another glance around, to the limit of what could be seen under the banks of dead or jittering fluorescents, showed gaps in the merchant stalls, the tiny businesses shut down, eliminated, and not yet replaced by the next wave of hustling or evangelism. The emigrant colony’s police force, or the larger and more efficient squads of the cable monopoly’s rent-a-cops, must have swept through in the last couple of days-either to restore public decency or, more likely, to keep their captive audience hooked to the video wire rather than fuguing off into religious visionary trips.
Maybe this low-level entrepreneur had upped his mordida, his payoff bribe, before the hammer had come down. Or else he’d brewed up the contents of a packet from his stock and had been lights-out under the stall’s counter, walking and talking with some Old Testament prophet or bo tree-sitting with a wide-faced Buddha, and had conveniently missed all the action.
“Look—” The cheap fiberboard flexed beneath Deckard’s hands as he leaned toward the other man’s face. “I really don’t have a lot of time. Not in this world or the next.” He kept his voice low, using a quick nod to indicate the packets fastened to the stall’s interior. They were all the same small, flat rectangular shape as the one he’d found inside the talking briefcase; they varied in color, from monochrome to shimmering, eye-aching full-spectrum assaults. “But if you’re selling, I’m buying. Got it?”
Before the merchant could reply—he’d backed up a step from Deckard on the other side of the counter, sensing at least the possibility of violence-another customer came up. A wraithlike figure, all starvation eyes and scab-picked shivering flesh, arose trembling at Deckard’s elbow. “Do you A mouth studded with a few cracked and yellow teeth, beneath unattended running nostrils, quivered open. “Do you have any more of the . . . the New Orthodox West Coast Fundamentalists?” The emaciated figure struggled to bring his scattered thoughts to words. “Specifically . . . the Reformed Huffington Rite? The Santa Barbara branch?”
“Get out of here. You mooch.” The stallkeeper glared at the creature. “This is a cash-only business. Nothing on credit. Not that I’d ever have given you any.”
“I got money! Look!” A grubby fist unfolded, revealing wadded paper with pictures of famous dead people. “Not even scrip-real money!” The supplicant voice rose in pitch, a sympathetic vibration shivering the ragged man’s body.
“I can pay!”
Grumbling subaudibly, the stallkeeper turned, pawed through the thin packets stapled behind him, pulled one off, and slapped it on the counter. Distaste curled the corners of his mouth as he sorted out the grease- impregnated bills and octagonal coins. “You’re a dollar short,” announced the stallkeeper, as though that pleased him more than a simple sale would have. He snatched the packet away as the ragged man’s shaking fingers reached for it.
“For Christ’s sake—” Deckard reached into his own pocket and dug out a bill from his dwindling stash. He flicked it into the stallkeeper’s hollow chest.
“Give the guy what he wants, and let him get out of here.” Worth it, just to get things moving.
A second later, the wraith had fled back into the churning crowd, the packet clutched to the visible bones beneath his throat. “All right,” said the stallkeeper, turning his dark-ringed eyes back toward Deckard. All pretense of religious feeling had been stripped away, leaving the pure mercantile entity beneath. “What do you want? Buy it now and get what you can out of it, before you wind up like that asshole.”
“It’s not what I want.” Deckard pulled out the rest of his money, enough to evoke a swift glance of interest from the other man. “It’s what I need.”
“Let me guess.” In another life, another world, the person inside the stall could have been a tailor; the tape measure was at the center of his empty pupils. “Pentecostal? Got a wide selection here.” He gestured at the packets surrounding him. “You’ll have to supply your own snakes, or at least have ’em inside your brain, if you want to get into that Southern Degenerate thing.” A shake of the stallkeeper’s head. “Naw—you don’t look the type to have even that much fun. Nothing Jewish line, either; you’d know how to deal with guilt, if that was the case. No d say Heavy Calvinist. You look like you’re into predestination. Badly so.” The man gave an ugly, knowing smile. “Like Weber said: ‘Forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity.’ ”
Deckard knew the rest of the quote. “ ‘No one could help him.’ ” He nodded.
“From The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”
“Good for you. I should give an educated man a discount, but . . . we’ve really got the spirit of capitalism here.” The man fingered a couple of packets at the side of the stall. “How about Dutch Reformed? That should be a severe-enough God for you. Give you a good price—I’m trying to move this stock before it goes stale.”
“No, thanks.” Deckard shook his head. “I don’t need anything like that.” Got enough of that kind of shit already, he thought to himself, without acquiring any more. “No packets. I just need the supplies. Couple quarts colloidal suspension fluid, calibrated beaker, inert glass rod. That’s all.”
The stallkeeper gave him a hard look, eyes narrowed. “You got your deity already? The one you’re going to use?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “If you’re going with some back-alley, home brew pile of dust, you’re asking for trouble, man.”
“Think so, huh?” Deckard let a partial smile show as he gazed around at the stall’s wares. “This stuff you’re peddling doesn’t exactly look like it’s FDA approved.”
“Hey. There’s standards in this business.” The stallkeeper drew back, offended. “I’m here, and my competition’s not, because I sell quality. I’ve got customers right up at the top, man, the very top. I go in the front door of the cable offices, I’ve got merchandise sticking out of my jacket pockets, and the guards don’t even blink.”
“I bet,” said Deckard. It explained a lot. “Did you have a good time getting your competition cleared out of the marketplace?”
“Loved it, pal. Made my day.” The stalikeeper’s deep-set eyes glittered. “And just to show what a nice guy I am, I only jacked up my prices ten percent. But for you, because you’re such an asshole, it’s twenty.” He reached beneath the stall’s counter and fetched out a plastic gallon jug; the contents sloshed in a slow gelatinous wave as he set it down. The beaker and glass rod were slapped down beside the container. “There you go, sport. Knock yourself out.
You want to see God on some low-rent basis, it’s your head’s funeral, not mine.”
A minute later, his roll lighter—Deckard had never bought this kind of stuff before, so he didn’t know whether he was getting absolutely screwed or not—he turned away from the stall, purchases hugged to his chest. Before he could bull his way into the crowd, the merchant called after him.
“Hey—” The man held up a creased, much-used paper bag. “Don’t be an idiot and just go walking with it where everybody can see. The next millennium hasn’t arrived yet, pal.”
The briefcase harangued Deckard as soon as he walked in the door of the hovel.
