Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 8

"You must never tell anyone about this, and never practice reading or writing unless you are behind a locked door, and I will give you all of the locked doors in the world to protect you." He glanced at her. "If the priests find out about this, I will not be able to protect either of us, do you understand?"

She nodded and her father's eyes looked into the flames for a haunted moment. "Someday you may have doubts that I know what I'm doing. Many would think me madman, heretic, or fool. You may yourself, when you think that I am a man and men would keep learning from you." He turned his head slowly and looked down into her eyes. "Never doubt for a moment that I know exactly what I'm doing. Never doubt that I know what you will do with your birthday present." His gaze held hers for an instant, and in the reflection from the fireplace Lilith saw Magda once more plunge the world in flames. Her father looked down at the paper and began going down the man-writing alphabet, making the letter sounds as he went.

Gavin J. Grant

EDITING FOR CONTENT.

Plus seven or minus seventeen, ahead or behind the West Coast. Add an extra three to either for the East Coast. Yet another five for Greenwich Mean Time. Set your chronometer carefully; you have just crossed the dateline. You are now a day ahead, or a day behind.

Gentle music and masked high-voiced women met me when I touched down at Kansai International Airport, just a twelve-hour superzep express from Los Angeles. I was directed from one line to another: Customs, Credit-Check, Inoculation, Trans.m.u.tation-always the last, always the worst. They pa.s.sed in a blur of polite name tags, synthesized voices, and cold rubber gloves. I left the airport by the North Exit. No alarms went off and there was no one to meet me. Good.

I went straight to the Tokyo-Mitsubishi Bank opposite the exit, took my turn through the usual security blankets, spat into the spittoon to confirm my ID, and dropped my credit bracelet into the Automatic Trinket Machine. Next to my regular accounts a burning salamander danced on-screen: a new short-term account. I was pleased. I hadn't been entirely convinced of my client's mental balance and had half-expected the prearranged expense account not to appear. But they were my clients, whatever that implied about their mental states.

I followed the pictograms to the train connection. The man behind the screen took my photograph, finger- and eyeprints, quizzed me on my mother's maiden name and the whereabouts of my husband, and only consented to sell me a ticket when his screen showed a train coming in. It was a direct line to Namba, in the center of Osaka, and from Namba a short walk to my Compact Hotel, where I left my tourist bag. I had a few things to do before I slept.

In the growing darkness of early evening the neon was beginning to come into its own. Underneath each display a stand of stationary cyclists with mutilated-reality headsets worked hard to keep the lights bright. I mingled with the under- and overdressed and saw my new shape in a shop window reflection. I was dissatisfied with the Trans.m.u.tation: at only 155 centimeters and on the skinny side I was no threat to anyone. I'd hoped to retain more of my bulk. I hated these foreign jobs. No matter how many times my body was transformed I'd never get used to it. But the money was always so good.

I souped standing at a ramen stall, slurping like a king, then went next door to a Norwegian bakery, picked up a coffee, one chocolate and one plum croissant, and took a seat in the back. I sipped the coffee and watched the foot traffic for a while. The uniformity was fake. Visitors had to take the body alterations they gave you at the airport or it was an immediate return flight. I wondered how many in the crowd had part of them waiting back at the airport. Immigrants needn't even bother applying anymore.

I dug out the little wooden memory box that had arrived at my office back in the Quake State and opened it. As promised, it contained all the details of a relatively simple editing job. My target should be heading into the city from his cottage in the wilds. I flipped open a small sub-compartment. It was velvet lined and as I opened it a small needle flicked up, p.r.i.c.king my finger. I didn't feel anything yet but knew I'd been primed to find my target. With any luck it would be a quickie and I'd be skipping back to warmer parts pretty soon. Cold weather always gets me down. I was so small I'd call myself pet.i.te and cute to match but I could still be rude.

I hawked vigorously and spat. Time to begin.

"Ach, you are moaning again. Beasts. Ach, yes, Yumiko, if only you were moaning, eh? Come then Taki, come Hiro, come now." The two llamas complied slowly, following him out the stable into the chilly morning with many a snort and threat. They preferred their more usual afternoon journeys. It had been three years, eight months, and a week or so since his wife, Yumiko, had died. Each time he left for the market he could still hear her.

He harnessed the llamas to the old sled loaded with furs and checked his knots once more. He returned to his little house to see if Yumiko had not somehow appeared, or maybe to check if everything was all right.

All stood as it ever did. Not so much as a plate ever moved unless he moved it. He pulled the door shut.

"d.a.m.n door, have to fix the hinges when I get back," he muttered and his breath billowed out behind him in the cold air. He stepped onto the sled's front runner, took the reins and began the journey into Osaka for themarket. He couldn't get World Service on his earring yet, so he settled for a Franco-African jazz station. As the llamas found their pace he settled himself and the kilometers began to slip away.

The memory box degraded fast. I left it in the next empty doorway. Tomorrow it would be a tidy pile of wood and other const.i.tuent parts ready to be reused or sold by some lucky finder. Today my body, somehow not quite my own, was feeling different again. It knew I was looking for someone. Like a word on the tip of my tongue. Not a person so much as an idea, a set of circ.u.mstances, a place. I knew he wasn't going to arrive until tomorrow, so I had plenty of time to prepare, but the urge was hard to ignore. It was always like this at the start.

I did a little shopping in antic.i.p.ation of the job ahead. The international language of trading was alive and well. Even in my new-style body I couldn't quite get my tongue around speaking j.a.panese. I got what I wanted in the end but there were many bows and smiles behind hands.

At a local hospital on Naniwa Higashi it took a little time and 300,000 yen to reach an agreement with a helpful individual for the use of a room and a ring to direct me to it. For a further small consideration a few odd pieces of equipment would be misplaced there for the duration. I left my bundle of purchases in the room and exited as un.o.btrusively as I'd entered.

I went to the market. The site was a ghost town, benches and stalls vacant, windblown trash from the last market a month ago still shuffled around. There were a couple of merchant caravans drawn into tight, watchful circles.

From the nearest one the voice of a Bedouin guard rose up, beginning the opening phrases of an ancient love poem. But in the chilly quiet dark even he couldn't keep his heart in it, and he let it fade after merely the first couple hundred syllables. I looked back and gave him the smallest hint of a smile. He shrugged; tomorrow, his closed face promised, tomorrow it would be different.

He was a young man out in the mountains north of Shinjo hunting the great white stag.

Ahead in the trees he saw a flash of white and his heart leapt. Something lithe and confident moved in front of him. He tried not to hurry, not to make a sound. He kept quiet and watched the indistinct form slip among the dark trunks. When the crashing moved on he changed his path to converge on it. Night would drop in two hours.

His snowshoes crunched with the rhythm of his prey and he settled in behind it. For a time they went steadily on. In the failing light of the early evening the trees suddenly opened up into a clearing. He stopped, aware of a deep silence all around him. On the opposite side of the clearing stood a woman dressed in white from hat to boots. Thoughts of the stag fled from his mind. He looked long at those clothes and thought of the hunts that someone had made for that bear, that ocelot, all those skins. Then, as he began to walk forward with his hand raised in greeting and his face uncovered, he realized who she must be: Yuki-Onna, the snow woman. He could not stop walking but his smile stopped moving from his eyes to his mouth and left him with what must have been a terrible face. She was she that had led him here and now her touch would turn his body to ice. Staring at her he stumbled over the flat snow. When he met her regal eyes again her hand rose to her mouth and she began to laugh. He watched her in wonder. In his heart they were married right there.

I lay in my hotel capsule watching the ceiling screen. It didn't understand my j.a.panese and was refusing to acknowledge any other language. I was too tired to signal or crawl out and argue with the manager. I'd wanted to research the market. Even though the older hangers-on, bohemiads and a.s.sorted trash say it's only a shadow of its former self, it still outshines Camden, Istanbul, St. Petersburg and even the Antarctican free-for-all as the place to find that certain something for just the right price. Or to die bargaining. But less of that went on these days, I'd heard.

I selected a video of the market opening. Between the first hint of sun and dawn the market was abruptly in full swing. Shouting, trading, buying, selling, sweating, shivering, credit given, unfortunate mistakes, inordinate demands made, met, exceeded, created, killed, settled a thousand times over.

White-faced capuchin monkeys ran between customers' legs, delivering lunches, stealing them back, boxing ears, liberating owners from the chains of their wealth and tripping anyone they could. The screen claimed that outside zoos these were the last capuchins alive.

I was bored by the pop-ups and factoids so I looked through the bibliography of market scholarship. Many dissertations were started here and very occasionally one was completed. There were reports of gnomic societies of former grad students surfacing on these two or three days a month. They banded together, living somewhere on the edges of the market; they observed, attempted to regulate and calcify, to discover norms, reasons, means, and rhythms, only to disappear with the vendors, disappointing many a loved one come searching. I'd watch out for them. But nothing I saw worried me. Security was loose, loyalties thin. I turned off the screen manually and slept.The journey was long. He pa.s.sed through an hour or two of rain and quite enjoyed it, but then the sun slipped away with the clouds and night came down. He clicked his tongue at the llamas and they slowed from a trot and stopped. He took his small knife from his belt and cut an apple in half, fed one part to each animal. They snorted and hummed at him. He rubbed them down and unrolled a rain sheath onto each before connecting the kinesthetic lamps. Unzipping his own coat and digging beneath, he found his pocket watch. It showed a little after seven and he thought they had made decent time thus far. He checked all the knots again, made sure all his goods were covered. It would not do to let the smell of damp deter the buyers.

A warning snort from the front told him they had better be off. The cool metal of the watch felt good in his tired hands. It had been his father's, and his father's father's. His father had given it to him before dying, just ten, no, fifteen years ago now. He had been a good man. Still holding the watch he stepped back onto the runner. The llamas were already pulling at the reins. Memory took him away as the animals confidently followed the familiar track. He would not be replaced: children hadn't come, no apprentice had appeared and now it was much too late. He held the reins with a light, trusting pressure; in the other hand he still cradled the watch. It shone softly in the light from the first stars.

I arrived just as the homing geckos were freed for their hourly scamper through the market to clear the latest wave of c.o.c.kroaches. A gecko flashed over my foot and on into the crowd which was already so deep that I lost sight of it immediately. I took a breakfast plate from a purveyance and ate standing, gazing at the pa.s.sers-by. I let my gaze slip by others, refusing to catch or be caught, leaving it to my other senses to safeguard me. People began pointing upwards. I raised one of my necklaces and looked through a spying-eye.

High above the thermal island of the city a school of balloons floated in the calm air: large, small, manned and unmanned, gaudy and plain. Something flickered for a second at the edge of my sight and I saw the unmistakable figure of a pirate's automatic dragon flying in low from over the sea. It easily evaded the market defenses and went for one of the brightest balloons. The balloon jerked visibly and began to move upward as ballast sacks were thrown overboard. It was far too late. The dragon flamed and the balloon crumpled. The cradle fell as the dragon rose higher and disappeared. When the cradle crashed to earth bargaining for the contents and the s.p.a.ce vacated below had been completed. Percentages were already being paid for expected goods: sight unseen, condition not guaranteed. An undertaker chatted with the merchants, waiting for the call.

The day was unseasonably warm. I'd have to shuck layers of clothing soon. I pa.s.sed some enviro-clothists showing off their new layered coats and cloaks. They were peeling thin edible layers off and giving them to the kids or dropping them to the ground for a bottom feeder to find. It made me hungry, but not for lemon-flavored cotton. The sun said it was coming on noon and any moment now the first parades, dances, and fireworks would begin. If my target had had a good day he might be packing up already. I had to speed up. I plugged in my earphones and activated the antenna that began in another necklace and ran into my tiara. I picked a retrodance station, the pumped-up lines making me edgy. I started to make my own paths, drawing others in my wake. I kept it up for half an hour and it got me nowhere. I wasn't catching any scents or recognizing any faces; my target wasn't moving around.

I opened a sensor of my own device set on a ladybug brooch but there were too many competing compelling stimuli. I was annoyed at myself and snapped it closed. The initial surge of adrenaline had pa.s.sed. I dropped my pace back to the crowd's slow roil, let myself be pushed and pulled along, a pac.h.i.n.ko ball without life or momentum of my own.

I waited impatiently for the rule of coincidence to reestablish itself. If this guy was such a regular he'd have a regular stall. Why hadn't my oh-so-clever client just given me the number? I could try the Admin offices but I'd already wasted enough time.

I pushed off the main track up a side alley that promised food, and when I saw a place with some seats emptying I headed in. Going through the trailing vines I was approached by a young woman wearing more makeup than I'd ever owned. "Know what you want?" she muttered, eyes slipping past me to the writhing ma.s.ses outside.

"A hunter," I said, eyes closed, pushing at my temples with my fingers.

The woman began to recite a list in a sing-song voice, "Octopus b.a.l.l.s, sheep-brain salad, little finger fries, cricket juice, fish'n'chips, vistula vindaloo, falafel..." I didn't spend too long wondering what the fries were, just ordered the fish'n'chips. At these prices they might even be half decent.

I sat back and enjoyed the break. The food appeared and she pulled me a liter of Golden Harvest Ale. I sighed with pleasure and as I ate I was overwhelmed with a feeling of well-being. I realized I was in trouble and tried to keep eating but I was being irresistibly drawn to someone pa.s.sing on the main drag. I was pretty annoyed: I hadn't known how heavily primed I'd been. I dropped my bracelet into the woman's jewelry box and added a healthy tip, hoping it would cover the cost of the ohashi, plate, and gla.s.s.

It was tricky work balancing everything but now I had no choice. If I didn't go right this instant my nervoussystem threatened to get out and go on ahead of me. I cursed the lack of vinegar and dropped the chopsticks, finishing what was left with my fingers; drained the beer and burped and groaned, satisfied. A monkey mocked me and I sent it racing off with the crockery, figuring the woman with the faraway eyes had as much chance of receiving them as anyone else. I still hadn't seen my target, yet I was so tuned in to him that if he veered left, so did I. If he stopped to look at something I'd know what it was when I pa.s.sed. I was becoming more annoyed at the liberties my client had taken with me and I gave a jolt to my mental abacus, moving my fee up another order of magnitude. I was like a dog in heat. My fingers itched, my eyes were scratchy.

On the far fringes of the market surrounded by merchants who might charitably be described as peddlers, his tawdry stall stood alone. It looked like business couldn't be great. I tugged at my demure dress until it lay in a way it definitely hadn't been designed for and slinked over to him.

He straightened a few pieces of this and that and then evidently decided I was actually approaching him.

He met me with a smile and went into a well-practiced speech, "Welcome. Please be so kind as to inspect my humble wares, thank you. All were handmade by myself and my late wife. Long are the winter evenings and hard is the work, so, yes, at first glance the prices may seem a little high; but, see, feel for yourself what is for sale. These are real furs. I hunted each and every one. Touch, please touch, have you ever felt softer?

No? A black bear, what a hunt, an epic I could tell you. That? That is ermine, a vicious creature, but beautiful, no?"

"It's very beautiful," I said, caught by his old, strange voice.

"Yes, a worthless animal but what beauty they lend us after their deaths. It would look well on you, or perhaps you are looking for a gift? You have a partner who might appreciate something from the outer reaches? Look at this squirrel-lined dressing gown, the pattern handed down for hundreds of years. My grandfather made these for Russian n.o.bles long before the first Revolution."

I fingered the dressing gown. It looked like nothing I'd ever seen before.

He sighed. "Yes, many people look. My wife has gone and we never had children. So I must go on. Boots, madam?" He came out of his reverie and awkwardly lifted a booted foot to me. "I make them to order, so there would need to be a fitting, but if there was something else that you would prefer, these hands are old yet still contain some memory of what they knew." He started chanting a list, parts of which would get me arrested in many places in the world. He turned away from me then to sort through some sc.r.a.ps and samples and I bent toward him as if in interest. I fingered a locket hanging on a soft silver chain around my neck. I flipped it open, the small block within turned to gas on contact with the air. For a second the drug quieted me until the antidote floating in my bloodstream kicked in. When he turned back to me he was surprised to find me so close and gasped. It was enough. He straightened and stood still.

"Pack it up quick. We're leaving and not taking any of this with us," I told him.

Immediately he started unpegging skins, furs, tails and other sc.r.a.ps I couldn't identify into an old sled behind the stall. From business to empty sh.e.l.l was quicker than I'd expected. He seemed unsure of what to do next, forty years of habit were warring with the drug, telling him he should still be selling, or if he was leaving he should go and get his animals from the stables. Instead I attached a thin scarlet cord hung with tiny bells to his wrist and led him from the market.

From a kilometer away the market sounded like a small war but I doubted anything serious would break out until nearer sundown.

The receptionists at the hospital paid us no mind. I followed the glowing arrow on the orderly's ring. It led us to the room I'd been in yesterday and opened the door.

"Strip," I said to him when we were inside. "Onto the table. Go to sleep." He did everything I asked and I made a mental note to buy into my supplier's company. This drug was something I had to keep an eye on. I flipped the brights over the bed on and strapped him in place. The bed rose at a command to a forty-five degree angle. Beside it was a trolley with the few tools I'd requested.

I washed, snapped on a pair of gloves, attached an IV drip to his arm and loaded it with a light gluco-saline solution. I selected a dull armlet from above my elbow and looked at the patterns for a moment. It was beautiful. I touched my thumb to my lips and carefully polished a touch of verdigris on the armlet. The saliva did the trick and it began to slowly unbind. I kept my hands still as it separated. Unbound it looked like nothing as much as a handful of morning mist on a mountain.

I sent the mapping thread up his ocular ca.n.a.l. It wove through his forebrain, spread around his synapses and dug further and further in until his brain was diagrammed, shadowed, replicated. I connected the reader from the tray and flipped it on. Even as I stepped away from him the first sheets of the reader's report dropped into the hopper. I shucked the gloves and read.

I skimmed the three-page synopsis and went on to the body of his life. It was rather simple. Even on the first read I was able to get the red pencil out and start marking it up; what might be used, what had to be dropped. Junctures, motifs, repet.i.tions. I couldn't avoid killing his father. Everything with him seemed to involve hunting. So it would be a hunting accident. The boy would grow up a farmer. I couldn't tell whether the area surrounding his home was fertile enough, but he was smart. He'd survive. Besides, he'd go home with a huge headache from his 'celebratory'

drinking binge after his huge sale. He'd be well into the swing of things before he noticed anything odd. That wasn't my problem. Either my employers would fix things out there or they wouldn't. The nearest Lawson's Station convenience store was sixty kilometers away. He must already grow some food, otherwise how could he survive?

After my initial scan I started working more seriously on his life. I threw away whole sheets until they covered the floor like years shed from the cold body on the slab. I edited pretty hard. I kept his wife. Except for their first meeting she'd never gone into the forest with him. It was amusing to see how deeply their lives had intertwined. He'd never strayed, a first in my career.

He had very few other contacts and they were easy enough to alter. Now that I'd divested him of his livelihood and history I had to rest. I'd finish rebuilding him in the morning.

When I woke it was still dark. I was filled with a sense of urgency. I washed swiftly, flinching at the feel of harsh hospital soap on my unfamiliar body. I rubbed a piece of scent-impregnated amber over my arms and body and quickly dressed.

I'd taken too long to find him at the market. I was running out of time on the room. Still, I started at the beginning again. I looked for discrepancies, faults, deja-vu possibilities. Tried to gauge whether it all hung together. There were the usual senseless breaks, direction changes, and multiple paths of a normal life. It would do.

Jubilant but barely awake, I pushed the heater tab on a can of tofu and noodles from my stash and listened to the fizz as it heated, the drip of the chili sauce. It popped open and the smell rose up. My knees went weak. I wanted to drop to the floor and eat. There was a knock on the door.

"Hi," said my contact charging in. I dropped my hand from my belt buckle with the hidden dart within, but he probably didn't notice.

"What do you want?"

"Time's up ten minutes ago. The room's needed."

His credit jewel hung from his belt right there in the open. I put my ring against it, sent him another 300,000 yen. His frown was replaced with yesterday's cheery grin.

"It's been difficult looking out for you."

"Of course I'm grateful."

"What time will you be done?" For the first time he took his eyes off my skinny body and let his glance slide over to the old man.

"By two. You can bet your job on it."

His face went hard again. "Okay. Money runs out at two." He turned and stalked out, the door closed slowly behind him. My noodles were still warm. I tucked in.

The old man's breathing was a little ragged from his not having moved for fifteen hours or so. A simple slip in the frontal lobe and he could be just another lobotomy job. Any number of choices were available to turn him into just another pile of meat in the morgue. An embolism would be easiest. The hospital would probably take him as one of their own mistakes. They'd be glad he had no family to sue them. Or I could add his name to the market's casualty lists. But most of my clients knew death wasn't my business. If I was asked to kill I pa.s.sed the request along to the appropriate service provider, taking my ten percent referral fee to ensure professionalism on all sides. Death at this point might be some relief to the old man. When he got home there would be a h.e.l.l of a lot of work to do.

I shook my head. I had a simple job I'd been paid to do. A life to edit. The opinions expressed within weren't my remit. They were fifty percent paid for already, the rest upon completion. If some radicals wanted to target this old man and his way of life and had the credit to back it up, it was no concern of mine. If they paid on time I'd never even need to know their names.

I did an hour or so of stretches that flowed into a little tai chi, then a couple of fist sets to sharpen up.

Reenergized, I approached the table for the final session.

I rewrote the gross history with an altered synopsis that began everything shifting. Then I got down to the nitty-gritty. I was setting his life along wholly new paths, burning out old connections and building fresh, casting his neural net anew. His body quivered and shook. Muscle groups shifted. He sighed deeply, groaned as his body slackened. With the noise went hundreds of years of skills pa.s.sed from father to son to son. The blood of a thousand animals, long nights, learning, chases, a certain kind of patience, an awareness, all of these now were as if they had never been. I winced with him as his hands contracted into stiff claws. No matter how carefully I wrote there were always some unavoidable side effects. Without the fine finger work of his past trade he would lose the continued use of some of his fingers, more as the years went by. It was too late now to introduce something that would replicate the actions of his old jobs-and I didn't want any ghost memories of his old skills. His body, so fragile now under the tearing and washing away, sagged. He waslosing something that had stood out even at the market, something of the wild that had rubbed off onto him over the years.

I rested and did a last review of what I'd given him. It wasn't the strongest job I'd ever done, but overall it looked durable and it should see me paid and him still alive. I started the thread rewinding out of his head into a dish. All his synapses should be as I had set them with none left to trigger his true past. I withdrew the IV that had been keeping him alive. He'd eat like a teenager for a couple of days.

I pulled out the clothes I'd bought for him, listening for the tiny chime as the final piece of thread hit the dish. I took the dish to the window and set fire to the contents. It crackled as it disappeared. With it went his memories of his former life, and most of the proof of my night's work. I looked at him in the late morning light.

His body was gray. I'd almost pushed him too far.

"Wake up and get dressed," I said. He sat stiffly, nearly tipping over to one side, looked around without recognition. When he saw the two piles of clothes he went without hesitation to the hemp farm shirt and trousers, not even glancing at his lifelong wardrobe. I'd put a new Kevlar-fleece jacket under his old fur coat.

He pushed the fur aside and shrugged on the recycled plastic fleece. Once dressed, he leaned back against the bed waiting for more instructions. From his cloth cap to his rubber boots he was every inch a farmer come to the city for the market.

I bagged everything from my noodle cup to the few small tools I'd brought, took that and his old clothes to an incinerator chute in the hallway, and dumped the lot. It was just after one, twenty-four hours after we'd first met, and it was done.

Back at the market the energy was lower. Trading was, for the most part, completed; fortunes hadn't been made, but the occasional one had been squandered. There were more dead s.p.a.ces, the edges reached towards the center. Today the wind, formerly masked, could distinctly be heard. Where my old man's stall had been was now the middle of a clearing. The other vendors had moved away from it, sensing trouble.

When I glared at them, none would meet my eye. From opulent coats and stoles to the barest sc.r.a.ps he'd carried for years, all the furs were gone. Only his sled was left. I stared at a sake and shoku dealer who'd been closer yesterday but he looked back with wide eyes, a subtle pantomime of innocence. What a favor they'd done me.

We went to the barns to get the animals. The various beasts of burden called and nickered at us as we walked past. At the scent of their owner the two llamas raised their heads but they looked past him at first.

His body language, habits, stance, even his voice had changed and they looked at him, disbelieving. The llamas ruminated upon whether they would accept him and while they considered it I led them back through the market. His lack of attention was annoying them.

"Hook up the animals," I told him. He bustled around, putting on harnesses, tying knots, tickling them behind the ear and such so that, by the time he was done, they'd accepted him. With reservations, but until proven otherwise, he was their man. I asked him to stand beside the sled, and I used the small ring on my little finger to take a picture of him. I wished I'd done it before. I wanted a cameo of him for myself.

I opened the backside of the drug locket and leaned into him, put my arms around him and hugged him hard.

"Thanks again," I said. "You can't imagine the s.h.i.t I'd have been in if you hadn't supplied me with everything I needed. Listen, I've got to go, so give me the total and we can finish up. It rounded to an even two million yen, didn't it?"

His eyes had slowly cleared and he blinked hard a few times as the antidote kicked in. When he looked at me he began to smile, taken in by the size of my own smile.

"Pardon me, madam..." he said.

I started prattling on again, waiting for his brain to give him a reason as to why we were standing in front of an empty stall, animals ready to go, discussing large amounts of money.

"...a real savior having all those specialties in one place. I guess if I'd run into you later you might have been sold out and then where would I have been? I don't want to imagine. Oh! The sheik isn't what you'd call a patient man. That would've been my job, kaput, right there." I grinned at him, leaned in again and spoke quietly. "Listen, my budget's real tight but let me pa.s.s on some goodwill, right? I'm sure you discounted some of those rare things since I was buying it all, and that's not fair. You probably would have sold it all anyway, right?"

He shook his head, but I forestalled the protest. "Listen, business is sure to pick up for us after the feast, it always does. The sheik might not understand waiting but he knows people. When the new money starts flowing I'll be first in line to get my cut. Share and share alike, right gramps?"

"You bought all I brought?" he managed.

"Sure. Don't you remember yesterday morning and the panic I was in? What did you do, party the night away?"

"I don't think so, but, ah, I'm not sure. Perhaps I slept a little late this morning."

"You're a wild guy, gramps." I lowered my head and looked up at him, ready to add the last ingredient."And thanks for waiting for payment. I just couldn't swing it yesterday."