Metrophage Read online

  Metrophage

  Richard Kadrey

  Richard Kadrey

  Metrophage

  Now I lay me d own to sleep

  I hear the sirens in the street

  All my dreams are made of chrome

  I have no way to get back home

  — Tom Waits

  ONE

  The Petrified City

  A crip by the name of Easy Money ran the HoloWhores down at a place called Carnaby's Pit. At least he had been running them the last time Jonny Qabbala, drug dealer, ex-Committee for Public Health bounty hunter, and self-confessed loser, had paid him a visit. Jonny was hoping that Easy was still working the Pit. He had a present for him from a dead friend.

  The ugly and untimely murder of Raquin, the chemist, had left an empty spot in the pit of Jonny's stomach. Not just because Raquin had been Jonny's connection (since it was a simple matter for Jonny to get his dope directly from Raquin's boss, the smuggler lord Conover) but over the year or so of their acquaintance Raquin had become, to Jonny, something close to a friend. And close to a friend was as much as Jonny generally allowed himself to become. It was fear of loss more than any lack of feelings on his part that kept Jonny at a distance from most of the other losers and one-percenters that crowded Los Angeles.

  Overhead, the moon was a bone-white sickle. Jonny wondered, idly, if the Alpha Rats were watching Los Angeles that night. What would the extraterrestrials think, through a quarter million miles of empty space, when they saw him put a bullet through Easy Money's head?

  Jonny caught sight of Carnaby's Pit a few blocks away, quartz prisms projecting captured atrocity videos from the Lunar Border Wars. On a flat expanse of wall above the club's entrance, a New Palestine soldier in a vacuum suit was smashing the faceplate of a Mishima Guardsman. The Guardsman's blood bubbled from his helmet, droplets boiling to hard black jewels as the soundtrack from an ancient MGM musical played in the background: I want to be loved by you, by you, and nobody else but you… The words CARNABY'S PIT periodically superimposed themselves over the scene in Kana and Roman characters.

  Jonny pushed his way through a group of Pemex-U.S. workers negotiating for rice wine at the weekend mercado that covered the street near Fountain Avenue. The air was thick with the scents of animal waste, sweat, roasting meat and hashish. Chickens beat their wings against wire cages while legless vat-grown sheep lay docilely in the butchers' stalls, waiting for their turn on their skewers. Old women in hipils motioned Jonny over, holding up bright bolts of cloth, bootleg computer chips and glittering butterfly knives. Jonny kept shaking his head. No, gracias…Ima ja naku…Nein…"

  Handsome young Germans, six of them, all in the latest eel-skin cowboy boots and silk overalls (marked with the logo of some European movie studio) lugged portable holo-recorders between the stalls, making another in their endless series of World Link documentaries about the death of street culture. Those quickly-made documentaries and panel discussions about the Alpha Rats (who they were, their intentions, their burden on the economy of the West) seemed to make up the bulk of the Link's broadcasts these days.

  Jonny swore that if he heard one more learned expert coolly discussing the logic of drug and food rationing, he was going to personally bury fifty kilos of C-4 plastique under the local Link station and make his own contribution to street culture by liberating a few acres of prime urban landscape.

  At a stall near the back of the place, an old curandera was selling her evil eye potions and a collection of malfunctioning robot sentries: cybernetic goshawks, rottweilers and cougars, simple track and kill devices controlled by a tabletop microwave link. The sentries had been very popular with the nouveau riche toward the end of the previous century, but the animals' electronics and maintenance had proved to be remarkably unreliable. Eventually they passed, like much of the mercado's merchandise, down from the hills, through the rigid social strata of L.A., until they landed in the street, last stop before the junk heap.

  There by the twitching half-growling animals, the crew set up their lights. Jonny hung around and watched them block out shots.

  The film makers infuriated him, but in their own way, Jonny knew, they were right.

  The market was dying. When he had been a boy, Jonny remembered it sprawling over a dozen square blocks. Now it barely managed to occupy two. And most of the merchandise was junk.

  Chromium paint flaked off the electronic components, revealing ancient rusted works. The hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables grew steadily smaller and more tasteless each season. All that seemed to keep the market going was the communally owned bank of leaking solar batteries. During the rolling brown-outs, they alone kept the tortilla ovens hot, the fluorescents flickering, the videos cranking.

  "Isn't it time you kids were in bed?" Jonny asked, stepping on the toes of a lanky blonde camera man. "Sprechen sie 'parasite'?"

  Huddled in the doorways of clubs and arcades, groups of fingerprint changers, nerve tissue merchants and brain cell thieves regarded the crowd with hollow eyes, as if assessing their worth in cash at every moment. The gangs, too, were out in force that hot night: the Lizard Imperials (snake-skin boots and surgically split tongues), the Zombie Analytics (subcutaneous pixels offering up flickering flesh-images of dead video and rock stars), the anarchist-physician Croakers, the Yakuza Rebels and the Gypsy Titans; even the Naginata Sisters were out, swinging blades and drinking on the corner in front of the Iron Orchid.

  As Jonny crossed Sunset, a few of the Sisters waved to him.

  When he waved back, a gust of wind pulled open his tunic, revealing his Futukoro Automatic. The Sisters whooped and laughed at the sight of the weapon, feigning terror. A tall Sister with Maori facial tattoos crooked her finger and began blasting him with an imaginary gun.

  Coming toward him from the opposite direction was a ring of massive Otoko Niku. Meat Boys- uniformly ugly acromegalic giants, each easily three meters tall. In the center of the protective ring, an old Yakuza oyabun openly stared and pointed at people. It was rare enough for people to see a pure-blood Japanese in the street that they stopped to stare back, until the Meat Boys cuffed them away.

  Jonny thought of a word then.

  Gaijin. Foreigner. Alien.

  That's me. I'm gaijin, Jonny thought. He could find little comfort in the familiarity of the streets. Jonny realized that by acknowledging his desire to kill Easy Money, he had cut himself off from everybody around him. He walked slower. Twice he almost turned back.

  A tiny nisei girl tried to sell him a peculiar local variation on sushi- refried beans and raw tuna wrapped in a corn husk- commonly known as Salmonella Roll. Jonny declined and ducked into an alley. There, he swallowed two tabs of Desoxyn, hijacked from a Committee warehouse.

  It was good stuff. Very soon, a tingling began in his fingertips and moved up his arms, filling him with a pleasantly tense, almost sexual, energy. Beads of sweat broke out on his hands and face, ran down his chest. He thought of Sumi.

  "I might not be back tonight," he had told her before he left the squat they shared. Uno tareja. "Got some deliveries to make," he lied. "Routine stuff."

  "Then why are you taking that blunderbuss?" Sumi asked, pointing to the Futukoro pistol Jonny had hidden under his tunic.

  Jonny ignored her question and tried to look very interested in the process of lacing up his steel-tipped boots. Sumi terrified him.

  Sometimes, in his more callous moments, he considered her a slip-up, his one remaining abandonment to emotional ties. Occasionally, when he felt strong, he would admit to himself that he loved her.

  "I'll be passing through the territories of a dozen gangs tonight and then if I'm lucky I'll be landing in Carnaby's Pit. That's why the blunderbuss", he said. "I should be taking a Committee battalion wi
th me."

  "I bet they'd be thrilled if you called them."

  "I bet you're right."

  Almond-eyed Sumi stroked his hair with delicate, callused hands. He had met her at the zendo of an old Buddhist nun. The Zen study had not stuck, but Sumi had. Her full name, Sumimasen, meant variously, "thank you," "I'm sorry," and "this never ends." She had been on her own almost as long as Jonny. Along the way, she picked up enough electronics to make her living as a Watt Snatcher. That is: for a fee she would tap right into the government's electric lines under the city and siphon off power for her customers.

  Jonny got up and Sumi put her arms around him, thrusting her belly at the pistol in his belt. "Is that your gun or are you just happy to see me?" Sumi asked. She did a whole little act, rolling her eyes and purring in her best vamp voice. But her nervousness was obvious.

  Jonny bent and kissed the base of her neck, held her long enough to reassure, then longer. He felt her tense up again, under his hands.

  "I'll be back," he said.

  During the last few months, Jonny had begun to worry about leaving Sumi alone. Officially, the government's power lines did not exist. All the more reason the State would like to wipe the Watt Snatchers out. All the gangs were outlaws, technically. The elements of the equation were simple: its components were the price of survival divided by the risks that survival demanded. And in an age of rationing and manufactured shortages, survival meant the black market. The gangs produced whatever the smuggler lords couldn't bring in. And the pushers sold it on the streets.

  Jonny had chosen his own brand of survival when he walked away from the Committee for Public Health and threw in with the pushers. It was a simple question of karma. Now he worked the black market, selling any drugs the smuggler lords could supply-anti-biotics, LSD analogs, beta-endorphins, MDMA, skimming the streets on a razor-sharp high compounded of adrenaline and paranoia.

  In his more philosophical moments, it seemed to Jonny that they were all engaged in nothing more than some bizarre battle of symbols. What the smuggler lords and gangs provided- food, power and drugs- had become the ultimate symbols of control in their world. The Federales could not afford to ease up their rationing of medical treatment, access to public utilities and food distribution.

  They had learned, long ago, how it easy it was to control vast numbers of people simply by worrying them into submission, keeping them busy hustling to stay alive.

  Los Angeles, as such, had ceased to exist. L.A., however- the metaphorical heart and soul of the city- was alive and kicking. An L.A. of the mind, playground of trade and commerce: the City of Night. Known in the local argot as Last Ass, Lonesome Angels, the Laughing Adder, Los Angeles existed in the rarefied state of many port cities, functioning mainly as a downloading point for a constant stream of data, foreign currency, dope and weapons that flowed onto the continent from all over the world.

  It was the worst kept secret in the street that half the State Legislature had their fingers deep in the black market pie. Like some fragile species of hothouse orchid, the city existed only as long as it had the politicos backing. Without that, the Committee would be on them like rabid dogs. For the moment, though, the balance was there.

  Merchandise flowed out and cash flowed in, blood and breath of the city.

  Jonny understood all this and accepted the tightrope existence.

  He knew too, that someday the whole thing was going to crash. It was their collective karma. Sooner or later some politico was going to get greedy, try to undercut one of the gangs or simply sell them out for a vote. And the Committee would move in. Jonny knew that this knowledge should make a difference, but it did not.

  In the alley, the speed came on like an old friend, an electric hum up and down his spine. Suddenly all things were possible. The nervous glare of neon signs and halogen street lamps domed Sunset in a pulsing nimbus of come-on colors. Stepping from the alley, Jonny barely felt his boots on the pavement. Easy Money was as good as dead.

  There were five or six lepers clustered around the entrance to Carnaby's Pit, begging alms and exhibiting their wounds to those willing to pay for a look. An upturned Stetson on the ground before them held an assortment of coins, crumpled dollar and peso notes and gaily colored pills. Ever since the lepers' numbers had grown too large to ignore, odd rumors had sprung up around them. Many people swore that the Committee was putting something in the water, while others suspected the Arabs. Some blamed the Alpha Rats, claiming they were trying to destroy the Earth with Leprosy Rays from the moon. It was Jonny's opinion that most people were idiots.

  One leper in a nylon windbreaker was reciting in a low whiskey voice:

  "The streets breathe, ebb and flow like the seas beneath a sodden twilight eye.

  The sky appears from a maw of rooftops Dusk streets, dry fountains coax the cemetery stars."

  Jonny pulled a few Dapsone and tetrahydrocanabinol capsules from his pouch and dropped them into the battered Stetson. The leper who had been reciting, his head and face heavily bandaged, opened his jacket.

  "Thank you, friend," the leper said through broken lips, pointing to his freshest scars.

  Nodding politely, Jonny left the lepers and stepped down into the Pit.

  The skyline tilted, angled steeply downward, then up, became a vertical blur of mirrored windows, skyscrapers leading to a hologram star field. Jonny was in the Pit's game parlor, separated from the bar by a dirty lotus print curtain. Around the edges of the room, antique pinball machines beeped and rang prosaically while the air in the center of the parlor burned with the phantom light of hologram games. Crossing the parlor, Jonny was caught in a spray of hot blue laser blasts from Sub-Orbital Commando, showered with fragments of pint-sized galaxies spinning from Vishnu and Shiva's hands. Rat-sized nudes swarmed above his head, frantically groping at each for Fun In Zero G.

  One angry pinball player threw a glass and it shattered against the far wall. Jonny stepped back as two members of the Pit's own Meat Boys moved smoothly from opposite ends of the room to intercept the shouting man.

  "Goddamit, this machine just ate my last dollar!" screamed the pinball player.

  He was still screaming as the two beefy monsters grabbed an arm apiece and ushered him through the front doors. They came back alone. Jonny half expected to see them return with the guy's arms.

  "Peace! Can't we have a little peace in here?" mumbled a sweating man lining up Jacqueline Kennedy in the sights of a fiberglass reproduction of a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. It was Smokefinger, the pickpocket, fat and nervous, jacked into the Date With Destiny game by a length of pencil-thin cable extending from the game console to a 24-prong mini-plug implanted at the base of his skull. Most of the players in the room were jacked into various games by similar plugs. Jonny's stomach fluttered at the sight.

  Elective surgery, he had decided years before, did not extend to having little platinum bullets permanently jammed into his skull, thank you. He could watch the World Link on a monitor and as for the games, they seemed real enough without skull-plugs.

  Smokefinger tracked the ghostly hologram of the presidential limousine as crimson numbers flickered in the metallic-blue Dallas sky, reading out his score. Jonny leaned close to pickpocket's ear and said, "How's it going, Smoke?" Smokefinger ignored him and continued to move the toy rifle with steady, insect-like concentration. "Hey Smoke," said Jonny, waving his fingers before Smokefinger's eyes just as the fat man pulled the trigger.

  "No score. Shit," mumbled the pickpocket, still ignoring Jonny.

  He had aced the chauffeur.

  This wasn't going to be any fun at all, Jonny decided. He pushed the release button on the plug at the back of Smokefinger's head. The wire dropped and a spring-loaded coil drew it back inside the game console.

  "What the hell-" yelled Smokefinger, grabbing for his neck. He looked at Jonny dumbly as his eyes slowly re-focused. In a moment, he said, "Hey Jonny, que pasa?"

  "Not much," Jonny said. I can't believe you're still pla
ying this game. Haven't you killed everybody in Dallas by now?"

  Smokefinger shrugged. "I pop 'em, but they keep coming back."

  Sweat pooled on the pickpocket's glasses where the rims touched his cheeks.

  Jonny smiled and looked around the room hoping there was anyone else from whom he might get information. However, in the pastel glare of meteor showers and laser fire, none of the faces looked familiar. "You seen Easy Money around?" he asked Smokefinger. "I've got to talk to him."

  "Right, talk. You and everybody else." Smokefinger looked back at the empty hologram chamber and cursed. "I almost broke my own record, you know," he said. He looked at Jonny accusingly. "No, I ain't seen Easy. Random's tending bar tonight. Maybe you should go talk to him. To tell you the truth, you're distracting me." Smokefinger never took his finger from the trigger of the fiberglass rifle. Jonny pulled some yen coins from his pocket and fed them into the machine.

  "Thanks for all your help, killer," he said. But Smokefinger did not hear him; he was already jacking in. Jonny left Smokefinger, wishing he could find peace as easily as that, and pushed his way into the bar.

  Jonny always found it a little disconcerting that the main room never seemed to change. He imagined it frozen in time, like a scratched record, repeating the same snatch of lyric over and over again. The usual weekend crowd of small-time smugglers, B actors and bored prostitutes stared from the blue veil of smoke around the bar. The same tired porn played on the big screen for the benefit of those unfortunates not equipped with skull-plugs. Even the band, Taking Tiger Mountain were blasting the same old riffs, stopping half-way through their own Guernica Rising" when the crowd shouted them down. They switched to a desultory Brown Sugar a song that was out-of-date long before anybody in the club had been born. Dancers undulated under the strobes and sub-sonic mood enhancers as projectors threw holograms of lunar atrocities onto their hot bodies.