Futureland. Part 15

"I read the paper every day." While he spoke his eye searched for the ident.i.ties of the unemployed muggers but there was no record of an arrest.

"Bill Heinz was killed eight days later," Spellman said. "They dropped a chunk of Upper Broadway on his head."

"I remember that one too. Four people got killed. They were working on the new DanceDome."

"Derrick James was killed by a freaked-out prost.i.tute that he had been seeing for the last nine years. The guy picked up Derry and threw him out of the three hundred twenty-seventh floor of the IBC building."

"Was the tramp usin' drugs?"

"He was a divinity student," Spellman said. "He only had three clients and wouldn't even drink synth."

Johnson was reading about James and Heinz in the back of his eye. The images of the dead, published by INA, superimposed themselves on his pale would-be client.

"My cousin Mylo died from an infection he picked up at the hospital they put him in after getting an AIDS booster. He got the virus from his mother, at birth you know, but everything was fine, he just needed to keep up the treatments. But something about the serum reacted with the hive and he got weak. They kept him overnight and suddenly he came down with a blood infection. That was okay too, they said, only the doctor prescribed the wrong ABs and before they knew what was going on his fever shot up to one oh nine and he died."

"You said there's ten of you?"

Spellman nodded.

Johnson asked his blue eye what were the chances of four out of ten members of one club dying separately, and unexpectedly, in such a short span of time. The odds would have bought him a condo on Dr. Kismet's island Home.

"Okay," he said. "You got a story there. Four more or less healthy young men out of fifty-seven million in Greater New York, who know each other, die in a few days. That's not natural, that there's man-made, I agree. So what do you want from me?"

"I want to know why and who, hopefully before they kill me, too." Spellman's words were tough but, Folio thought, bolstered by the synth.

"It's a tight fit, Charles. A conspiracy of some sort. What were you guys inventing that would scare somebody into this?"

"We aren't inventors. I mean, we don't work with electrics or chemicals or anything like that. We thought that that kind of work would slow down the process of pure thought. It's all just ideas, notions. Like at our last meeting, Brenton asked if we made a pole maybe ten million miles long and then push it from one end so that ten million miles away a gla.s.s was knocked over, would that act exceed the speed of light? You see, if the pole moved as one unit, the gla.s.s would be knocked over almost simultaneously, in less than a second." The young blond man lifted his head with pride.

"That's the kinda stuff you expect to get you rich?" Johnson asked.

"Well, maybe it's not so smart, but that's the process of invention. You use your mind."

Johnson's blue eye was covering all available data through a wireless transmitting station embedded in the prosthetic baby finger of his left hand.

"Is this club of yours registered under the name Seekers?"

"No. We're not registered."

"Why not? It is the law that all intellectual property be catalogued with the feds."

"We were worried that the government would sequester our ideas."

"They only do that if the ideas are dangerous. Were any of your ideas threats?"

"No. No. Just things like that pole and some political questions. But most of them were pretty conservative. I mean, nine of us are International Socialists."

Johnson put his fingers together, making a tent under his blue and brown eyes. D'or came in with two steaming plates of bok choy and tofu under gleaming sheaths of oyster sauce. Spellman put up a hand to wave away the food but D'or ignored him. Folio accepted his serving and bided his time using his blue eye to map molecular patterns in the steam. He considered the young man in front of him.

"What brought you guys together?" he asked at last.

"What do you mean?"

"How did you meet? How did you get together?"

"About half of us knew each other from school. Trent State. Lenny Li and Brenton both went there, and me and Mylo. Laddie did too. Mylo knew Billy from boarding school and Laddie was my friend from the gym. He was a lawyer for IBC. I think Derrick was a friend of Mingus."

"Who is Mingus?"

"Mingus Black, he worked with Derry for a while. A real success story. You know, black, Backgrounder parents--but he worked his way topside and made it as a lawyer. Now he's into buying up leases for Red Raven Enterprises mainly, he really works it. He was one of the four guys who bought up the Tokyo leases and moved those half million Kenyans to j.a.pan."

"Who else?"

"Fonti Timmerman and Azuma Sherman."

"They from Trent?"

"Azuma went there one year and then transferred to Harvard. He did a leverage with Laddie at Macso. It was a real beauty too--"

"What about Fonti?"

"Him and Brenton were friends. He's just a programmer but he's real smart and he knows how to read crystal code. He went to City College."

As the pale antique dealer gave names, Folio recorded them off the Ether with his blue eye and baby finger. He didn't read the whole files into his mind because he was concentrating on what the kid had to say.

"No Jews," Johnson said.

"What?"

"No Jews among your group."

"Is that a problem?"

"Just an observation."

"There are no Jews in International Socialism. Zionism is incompatible with social evolution."

"You got a black kid in there," the detective suggested. "We're not racist, we're modernists in the modern world."

"Then why not go all the way and accept Jews who agree with your beliefs?"

"A Jew can never fully accept International Socialism," certainty worked its way into the wan kid's words, "because of the deep symbolic knowledge his people have h.o.a.rded over the last six thousand years. They can never give up their primitive notions of how the world should be organized."

"No place for them?" Johnson asked.

"Not in our group."

For a moment the detective considered refusing to help the kid. Why bother saving this fool? he thought. But then he remembered that he'd been sleeping behind D'or's counter for the past eight days and that his store of general credits was almost depleted.

"Five thousand credits and you'll have to move out of your apartment."

"What?" Charles Spellman half rose from his chair.

". . . down into Common Ground, that's right."

"Are you crazy?"

"Listen, kid. You're in the middle of a full-fledged murder spree here. The cops are obviously coverin' it up because they never caught those muggers--and the cops catch everybody they want to catch. It takes a lotta money to rig an accident like that cave-in on Upper Broadway and more than that to make it look like an architectural flaw. The only reason you're not dead is 'cause they haven't gotten to your name yet. If they did you all at once somebody like the Daily Dump might pick up on it. I know a guy can make you a fake ID that'll put you under and safe until I can get a handle on who's doin' what and why."

"There's no fake ID in the world that can beat the Molecular Tester Device," Spellman said. Johnson noticed that he was looking even paler than when he'd walked in.

"You think they suspect people of sneakin' into Common Ground? They don't care. They don't check. Anybody off of the cycle is welcome into h.e.l.l."

"I can't just vacate my place. I have responsibilities."

"You call in sick. I'll stay in your hole. Maybe someone'll try and check you out. That's my best bet for a clue."

"When?"

"Right now. We go to the bank and then to my friend. After that you take the Develator to Common Ground and stay there until you hear from me."

The fear in the kid's eyes delighted Johnson. He stood to his full six foot seven height, towering over the frightened fascist. He was happy to cause the young man pain, but he was happier to have a bed to sleep in and five thousand creds on his wild card.

2.

"You wanna take some more vig and do me again, baby?" Tana Lynn whispered in Folio Johnson's ear.

"Again?" he moaned. "Honey, thatta be seven times. I'ma start comin' red if I do that s.h.i.t again."

"It'd only be six," the ecstasy girl said, pouting. "And I love it when you make that little noise like you were crying."

"Next time I'll put on the rec-chip and you can listen to that while I heal."

"Can we get somethin' to eat, then?" Tana asked.

"Order whatever you want," Folio said, crawling out of the great round bed. "But charge it to the apartment. I don't want to spend my cash."

She had fine features and dark skin, blond hair, and green eyes. When Folio had met her at the West Side DanceDome a few days earlier, he thought she was an Egyptian heretic. But when he took her out that night she'd told him that she was Ethiopian.

"They kept us in a field outside Addis Ababa," she'd told him, "but then a Peace Corps guy named Lampton put me in a bag and brought me here. By the time I turned eleven he wasn't attracted to me anymore and gave me to this guy named Jim. Jim put me to work cleaning his sister's house and his. It wasn't so bad, really. They let me study and I learned commodities trading. It was kinda weird, 'cause the day I moved out to my new place Jim told me that Lampton had paid him to kill me."

After Tana ate she went to sleep. Johnson sat out on the deck of Charles Spellman's two hundred first floor apartment. He stared at the red-tinged night sky and studied the information provided by his excellent eye.

He had downloaded the information of all ten Seekers while talking to Spellman, but absorbing that information into his brain took time. It was especially hard because the men had lived such boring lives. Everyone but Mingus, the black Backgrounder, was completely unremarkable.

After an hour he went back into the apartment. The entertainment room's lasers were on. A 3D image of a shifting moonscape was being projected. The usual noise dampeners that this image used to simulate the silence of s.p.a.ce weren't engaged, or Folio wouldn't have heard her from the bedroom. At first he thought that she'd gotten tired of waiting and was masturbating to take the edge off the vig she'd taken.

He peeked around the corner of the door to see if she wanted him to join in.

The man in the skin-tight glossy emerald one-piece had his hands around her throat. Tana was struggling but weakly. The detective had his knife out in a heartbeat. The targeting system of the eye was instantaneous, and so the hurtling blade severed the a.s.sa.s.sin's spine in less than a second after Folio had seen him.

The Ethiopian's eyes were bloodred but she was breathing and semiconscious. The dead man was white, with long, micro-braided eyebrows. Folio quickly stripped off the a.s.sa.s.sin's suit, leaving the corpse nude. The man was bald, with no tattoos, ID jewelry, marks, scars, or defects. Other than his exceptionally well-conditioned physique there was nothing to distinguish him except for his hands--they had six fingers each.

"a.s.sa.s.sin synthy," Tana wheezed over Folio's shoulder. "German issue," he agreed.

"I thought they weren't allowed in the U.S."

"I guess they are--sometimes."

New York's last private detective turned his attention to the blond Ethiopian's neck.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Yeah, yeah. I had rougher make-out sessions when I was fifteen."

"You don't look much older'n that now."

"I'm twenty-four and I been on my own since I was sixteen," the woman said. "And this ain't the first dead man I've seen."

"You weren't his first either," Johnson said.

"There's n.o.body who hates me that bad," Tana said. "And even if there was he wouldn't have the millions it'd take to buy a test-tube a.s.sa.s.sin."

"No. They were after the dude lives here."

"I thought this was your place."

"It's time for you to go home, girl," he said.

"The f.u.c.k I am," she replied. "I have to know why that man tried to kill me before I can sleep."

"Okay. We'll talk for a minute, but not here."

Folio went to the bathroom and got a fiber swab. He dipped the swab in the a.s.sa.s.sin's wound and then wrapped it up in tissues.

Then he looked up at the ecstasy girl and said, "Let's go."

Tana Lynn lived in a commune deep in Harlem. It was called the Mau-Mau and proclaimed the ethics of the Third and Fourth Black Radical Congresses. On the way there, Folio stopped at a communications booth and notified the police that there was a dead man in Charles Spellman's apartment.