How Dark the World Becomes Read online

  “Yup,” I answered.

  But what?

  Ricky came from what most people would call a difficult background. Around here that was pretty common, one way or another, but in Ricky’s case it had left more of a mark. His father, Andy, was first generation—like most of ours—but Andy had come out as a kid, the son of a lab tech or something, not that it mattered. He hadn’t adapted very well to the collapse of his comfortable, well-planned life when the Varoki pharmaceutical house that relocated all the Human workers to Peezgtaan went belly-up. Andy’s family disintegrated, his father—Ricky’s grandfather—drank himself to death, and Andy grew up to be a bitter, pissed-off man. He took his bitterness out on his wife at first, and later on his two kids. One of the kids died; the other one—Ricky—survived.

  When Ricky first came to work for me, he was probably the most loyal guy I ever had on the payroll. He couldn’t do enough. He looked up to me, like a father, I guess. Problem was, his father was a grade-A son of a bitch, and Ricky had hated him, so he ended up hating me, too. It was weird. Every time I gave him more responsibility, or encouragement, or support, he soured on me a little more. Maybe he only understood a good beating, but I think he’d have hated me just as much for that.

  He had a problem with authority—obviously—but not one like I’d ever seen before. Right now, I figured Ricky wasn’t my guy anymore; he was probably Kolya’s, and he’d be loyal to Kolya right up until the time Kolya was actually his direct boss. Then, little by little, Ricky would start hating him.

  I wasn’t really sure what to do about Ricky. Since Kolya was looking after him now, my options were somewhat limited. And there was this thing with my conscience. Of course, if I were ever out of the way—a morbid thought—he’d be Kolya’s problem, and Kolya wouldn’t have any trouble figuring out what to do. He’d just kill him.

  There are advantages to being a homicidal sociopath.

  It didn’t take them long to file in. Ricky had been growing a goatee, which I thought looked stupid, and tonight he had brought an extra guy along—fellow named Saito, one of his mid-level muscle guys.

  “This is a closed meeting, Ricky. You know that,” I said.

  He smirked to his three stooges and shrugged.

  “Saito’s moving up. Thought he should see what goes on.”

  I just looked at him. Five seconds was about all it took.

  “Okay! Okay! Saito, take a walk and we’ll see you later.”

  Not that anything we were going over was top secret; it was just the principle of the thing. Ricky was always pushing like that, either trying to see if he could get away with something, or trying to provoke a reaction, I wasn’t really sure which. But it was a pain in the ass—that much I was sure of.

  Ricky nodded to the Hawker 10 in my shoulder holster.

  “You’re carrying that antique hand cannon, so you musta’ seen Arrie. He upping his order?”

  “That’s between me and Kolya,” I answered.

  “Yeah, well, Kolya ain’t gonna like it much if he don’t.”

  “Never mind what Kolya likes. You better just focus on what I like. Did you get your payment over to the clinic for this cycle?”

  He shrugged. “Not yet. Why the hell do we skim so much for the clinic, anyway?”

  “Because I say so, Goddamnit!” I exploded and hit my desk with my fist hard enough that it jumped and sloshed tea out of the glasses sitting on it.

  I took a deep breath and leaned back. Always pushing, always arguing every stinking point, always trying to provoke a reaction—and I’d let him get to me. I hate losing control like that; it’s a sign of weakness. Ricky just settled back in his chair, a scowl replacing his smirk.

  “You get your cash over to Doc Zhan tomorrow morning, and you add four percent to it this cycle, as a late charge,” I said, pointing at him for emphasis. “You understand?”

  He started to open his mouth, but then he clammed up and nodded.

  The rest of the meeting was pretty subdued. We covered all the boring business stuff you have to keep a handle on. Personnel issues. Security. Revenue. Receipts from the Lotto and the Bank were the main revenue items—numbers and loan-sharking they used to call it. We also got a cut from all of the fences, and we had interests in about a dozen legitimate local businesses as well, but most of those were pretty much break-even propositions. Lotto and the Bank—that was the real money, always had been. And now Laugh. Kolya cooked it and we sold it, mostly through Arrie, although we had a couple other Varoki contacts that did a little business. Laugh was a Varoki-specific drug, which made it perfect for us—the Varoki had all the money, and our people didn’t get hurt. But anyone who thought it could go on like this was nuts, and Kolya was at the top of that particular list.

  He’d fought the Cottohazz before, and for him, Five Races be damned—there was only one race in the Cottohazz that meant anything: leather-heads. If Laugh messed them up and eventually killed them, then that was just a bonus as far as Kolya was concerned. Me, I’m a businessman, not a revolutionary.

  It was past quarter-night—about hour 25 of the 28-hour Peezgtaan day—when we broke up and I sent them on home.

  “I got an autocab pickup wired. You need a ride?” Ricky asked. Maybe he’d decided he’d gone a little far and wanted to mend some fences. I thought about it, but I shook my head.

  “No, thanks. I’m gonna walk.”

  He looked relieved. The small talk in the cab probably would have sucked.

  THREE

  I walked along the irregular archipelago of yellow islands cast by the overhead lights that were still working. I stepped over or around the sleeping drunks and addicts, took in the smell of rotting garbage, illegal cooking-fire smoke, urine and shit and vomit and people way too long without a bath. I listened to the background noise of techscreech booming from big speakers in bars, to laughter, angry curses, and coughing—always coughing. I nodded to the whores and hustlers and club bouncers, said hi to those I knew by name, but I kept going.

  Whenever I started feeling sorry for myself—and I was armed, like I was that night—I’d take a walk down there. Even armed, I’d stick to the main thoroughfares. There were too many people with nothing to lose for anyone not in an armored vehicle to feel really safe, unless they had nothing to lose either. I walked down there to remind myself how most people lived at the bottom of the Crack, in the Human Quarter. That I sometimes needed reminding is, I think, evidence of a flawed character.

  They lived without the certainty of the next meal, or the security of a safe domicile. They lived without the means of protecting their property, and so they lived without property. They lived in constant danger of injury and disease, and without the means of coping with either. All life leads to death, one way or another, but for them, the progress was visible, palpable. Their journey was a crippling, disfiguring death march, losing bits of themselves along the way—tooth, finger, eye . . . hope, self-respect, sanity.

  And most of them lived without love, because loving someone, and being loved in return, carries with it an obligation on which they could not deliver, and the inability to provide for the people you love is the most soul-crushing burden of all. People—a lot of the good ones, anyway—willingly lived an empty, loveless existence in preference to acquiring that obligation, and failing.

  There was a lot of excitement and optimism back on Earth when we made first contact with the Five Intelligent Races of the Cottohazz: the turning point in man’s history, the dawn of a remarkable new age—you know. It all seems pretty naïve, looking back at it now, but how were they supposed to know? Races with the wisdom to travel the stars surely would have worked out all those little things like wealth and distribution of resources.

  And the guys in charge had. They surely had.

  * * *

  Depending on your point of view, my condo was either a luxury suite or a hole in the wall. Since I’m second-generation Crack Trash, I called it luxury. Once upon a time a lot of folks did. It was in
the old Traak-Amahaat Gor, a high-end residential complex built originally for the Varoki executives of a long-bankrupt pharmaceutical conglomerate. Like a lot of Varoki buildings from around first-contact time, it looked like a gigantic clay pot that somehow just hadn’t worked out right. No matter how many times somebody told me it was supposed to look that way, it never looked good, and the green-black grime that seven or eight decades of airborne mold had left on it didn’t help. Only the thought of a whole bunch of rich folks living in it could have made it attractive, and they were long gone.

  The complex was sort of a landmark, a border-crossing checkpoint. It hadn’t been part of the Human Quarter originally, but times change. Now it was fair warning that Varoki passing the foam-stone buttresses of this massive beehive-ugly insult to architecture were leaving civilization and entering the land of desperate, dangerous savages. But as long as they stood in the lee of the Traak-Amahaat Gor, they weren’t quite there yet. Young leather-heads looking for thrills would hang around the complex and gaze into the depths of the Quarter, breathe in its sour but seductive aromas, listen to the distant tinny music of anarchy, and savor the danger-juice humming in their blood. Later they would dream about what adventures they would have experienced, if only they could have found the courage to cross that invisible threshold.

  “Jo-Jo. Arriving alone,” I announced to my front door. Jo-Jo was my home security command code for the day. The laser scanner did a quick once-over, my door swung open with a soft chime, and I walked into the wonderfully rich odor of jambalaya.

  There aren’t a lot of things better than jambalaya, in my opinion, especially with a full-bodied red—it doesn’t have to be expensive, just a good working guy’s table wine. I’m not sure how good you’d consider our local hydroponic red; we don’t call it “Piss-Can Special Reserve” for nothing. But Cinti’s jambalaya was damned good—almost as good as mine—and she’d made it special for me, which was nice.

  My condo was a corner unit, with no windows—but there’s not much to see anyway. The walls were original stone on two sides and low-density feldspar aggregate foam on the other two. I’d added paneling to those two foam-stone walls—well, composite armor, actually. The condo itself was four rooms—kitchen, den, master bedroom, and a small guest bedroom that did double duty as a home office. A small bath was off the den and a bigger one off the master bedroom, but big is relative; two people had trouble moving around in there at the same time. The open area in the bedroom wasn’t much, either, because we’d put in a couple walk-in closets.

  Cinti and I had painted broad, diagonal swaths of color on the walls—warm browns and dark reds—to damp down the paleo-industrial look of the place, and tie in to the big Persian carpet in the den. Maybe it wasn’t much, but I liked it. The whole thing was maybe 100 square meters.

  We’d been together for six years. Sometimes it seemed like just a couple months; other times, it seemed as if we’d always been together. She’d been Jim Donahue’s girl when I first met her. Donahue ran most of the action in my part of the Quarter, and I sort of worked for him. It wasn’t as organized back then as it is now, but he was definitely higher up the pecking order than I was. Cinti and I hit it off right away—probably because of jazz, blues, and jonque. I loved them all, and she had this amazing vocal range and a smoky, sexy voice that melted my heart one minute and set me on fire the next. At first we were just pals, but Cinti’s a hot-blooded Brazilian, and my blood was plenty hot too. It helped that Jim was a pig.

  I’m not sure I’d have been able to work out the plan without her on the inside, but we did it, and I brought down Jim and took over most of his operation. Kolya was moving on a couple other old-timers at the same time, and so he and I ended up working together—Sasha and Kolya, the two young Ukies who shook everything apart, then put it all back together again, only better than before.

  Cinti and I were going to open an upscale jonque club. She’d sing, maybe manage it even, but there’d never been quite enough money to do it the way we wanted to. Ricky was right about one thing; the clinic was a money sink. But when Big Meg’s delivery had gone bad on her youngest daughter, it was Doc Zhan who saved both their lives. What’s that worth?

  So, yeah, the clinic cost money. It cost Cinti and me something else, too. There hadn’t been a lot of good evenings lately. This was turning into the best one we’d had in a long time. She’d been moody a lot lately, so her smiling and joking over dinner made it seem like old times. Cinti looked really good, too. She wore a pale yellow knit top that didn’t leave much to the imagination, and the color suited her, set off her olive-colored skin, dark eyes, and black curls.

  She really did look sensational.

  * * *

  I lay on my back afterwards, all but spent and enjoying the feeling. Cinti curled up in the crook of my arm, her fingers playing with the hair on my chest. After a few minutes, she shifted and then kissed me on the cheek.

  “Gotta pee,” she said and slid off the bed and padded across the carpet to the bathroom, her hips swaying from side to side to the rhythm of a samba in my head, and I smiled. She closed the door behind her, and I heard the lock click.

  Did you ever wonder why new stuff always sells better than the old, proven stuff? Why the pitch in sales and entertainment and—just about everything—is always about what’s new new new? You’d think that once we found stuff we liked, we’d stick with it. But whenever somebody says “new,” or we see something that looks different, or sounds different, or smells different, right away it’s got our undivided attention. Maybe you think that’s because we’re all idiots, with short attention spans and no common sense, but you’re wrong. It’s because of survival genetics.

  Back when our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, maybe not even smart enough to talk to each other, the environment was pretty monotonous most of the time. If something new happened—the grass moved, the smell of the air changed, birds started singing, birds stopped singing—those guys either gave that their absolute, undivided attention, and I mean right now, or they didn’t make it into our gene pool, ’cause they got eaten.

  Cinti had never locked the bathroom door before.

  The adrenaline surge made my scalp tingle as I rolled over to my left and pulled open the drawer of the night table. That’s where I always kept a loaded H&K 13mm AutoMag, but tonight it wasn’t there.

  “Shit!” I said, and I heard the door to Cinti’s walk-in closet open behind me. I looked up and saw Ricky’s reflection in the mirror as he brought his gauss pistol up. I could hardly recognize him, except by his stupid goatee. Christ! How tough did he think I was? He was wearing full body armor and a visored helmet, with V.I. goggles underneath. This was definitely overkill for one unarmed naked guy in bed—and it pissed me off.

  I rolled forward as his pistol fired—a series of four quick soft snaps—and I felt the burn as a flechette cut a furrow across my left shoulder blade. The rest of the burst blew up the lamp on the night table and plunged the room into darkness. For a half second, as I hit the floor beside the bed, I thought the darkness was an improvement, but then I remembered the V.I. goggles under the clear bulletproof visor. I grabbed a shoe, threw it at the mirror on the wall, and got lucky. It shattered, so at least he’d have to come around the bed to see me. I reached for another shoe—anything—and my fingers closed on the leather of the shoulder holster I’d dropped by the bed.

  I pulled out the Hawker 10mm—for whatever good it would do me. No telling how good Ricky’s body armor was, but some grades I don’t think even the sabot round for the Hawker would punch. As it was, all I was loaded with were plain old flat-head slugs for target practice. They’d hardly leave a bruise through armor.

  He was walking now. Any second he’d be around the bed, and that would be it.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe he’d overthought this whole thing, or maybe he’d let his hatred overpower his common sense. Vision-intensification goggles? Like he planned to put out the lights and then “stalk
” me in the dark, toy with me—first terrify me, then kill me. He should have just shot me.

  “Jo-Jo! Evac!” I shouted. Evac was notification that I needed to get out—probably because of a fire or something like that—and to turn on the emergency lighting. The evac lights were set low around the room—so they’d be below smoke level—and they shined up. They came on, and Ricky’s V.I. goggles must have immediately whited out.

  Now, if Ricky were smart, he’d have waited in his bulletproof shell for the two or three seconds it would take for the goggles to reset to the new ambient light level, but I didn’t figure it that way. I sat up, bringing the Hawker up in both hands, and sure enough, he pushed his helmet visor up to pull off the goggles. You gotta love a guy like that. I shot him once, in the eye—the Hawker sounding like a bomb going off after Ricky’s quiet gauss pistol—and he fell down. He didn’t stagger, or stand in frozen shock for a moment; he just collapsed in a heap, like a marionette that someone had cut the strings on. Once he was down, he twitched a little, but I think it was involuntary—I’d guess he was dead before he hit the floor.

  I stood up and looked at him to make sure. There was a lot of blood on his face, but he was resting on his back, and all the extra blood had run back into the helmet, so there wasn’t much of a mess on the carpet. That was pretty considerate of him.

  I sat back down on the floor by the bed, grabbed the little wastebasket with pictures of elephants on it, and threw up into it. Then I had to put the wastebasket down before I dropped it, because I was shaking uncontrollably.

  I sat there awhile until the shaking mostly stopped, and as I did, I felt blood trickle down my back. I’d forgotten that the stupid son of a bitch had shot me.

  “Jo-Jo. Secure.”

  The lights went out, except for a little ribbon of light coming from under the bathroom door. Cinti. Now what the hell was I going to do with her?

  I pulled on my slacks, turned on the overhead light, and got a towel out of a drawer in the bed pedestal. I wrapped it around my shoulder and back, mostly to keep from getting blood all over, and sat down on the bed.