Buying Time

  The casinos would not do, and although two of the restaurants offered “private” booths, they would surely be no more private than the sleeping cubicles. The observation deck was too open, and of course we couldn’t go to a show and talk.

  I finally came upon a nearly ideal place, the swimming pool. It was satisfyingly loud, with background noise from the engines and air conditioning, as well as the water sloshing around and people splashing and shouting. The echoing din would normally have driven me away, but now it was perfect. And I had never before, as an adult, been undressed in front of strangers, but I realized that nakedness was a rather good disguise for Dallas; we don’t visualize famous people without their clothes on, at least not with any accuracy.

  At a buffet line I assembled us each a plate of salad, bread, meats, and cheese. Famished, I wolfed down a piece of ham while waiting behind a dawdling woman—and then the image of Eric blowing apart, meat, came back suddenly, and I almost vomited. I swallowed hard a few times, and it finally stayed put; but my appetite was gone.

  A waiter stopped me at the door and said he would be glad to carry the plates to my “suite.” I said he needn’t bother, and he insisted, still politely but with enough of an edge that I finally understood. He didn’t want us to walk off the ship with their valuable pseudoceram plates and stainless flatware. Walking back to the cubicle behind him, I was first amused, then angry in a petty way, and then provisionally sympathetic. Possibly he didn’t enjoy this part of the job. If he did, I should find room in my heart to pity him.

  The emotional distraction took away the nausea, anyhow, and I was able to nibble a little food with Dallas. We made small talk and watched the ocean roll by a kilometer below, while he polished off his plate and then half of mine.

  “Didn’t feel like eating?” he said, hand poised over the last chicken piece.

  “Not really.” He swooped and snatched it. “Actually … I feel like swimming.”

  He gave me a significant look. “Long dive.”

  “No, silly, they have a pool. Australian style; you’ll like it.”

  “Pretty raucous?” I nodded. “Let’s go get wet.”

  There were forty or fifty people in the pool area, many of whom would have benefited from a few acres of clothing. They added little to the scenery but did help the noise level. Dallas and I put our clothes in a locker and slipped into the deep end. We held on to the pool’s edge and inched into a corner. Nothing suspicious about a “young” couple huddling there and whispering.

  “So this island we’re going to,” I said, “it’s not really part of the United States?”

  “Depends on who you ask. About fifty years ago the Conchs formally seceded from the country and changed the name to the Conch Republic. Neither the U.S. government nor the state of Florida admitted the validity of the act. Florida cut off their freshwater pipeline; the Conchs retaliated by kicking out all the tourists and blowing up the bridge that connected them to the mainland.”

  “Sounds American,” I said. “I do remember something about it.”

  “It wasn’t all that impulsive, either. A lot of people in the power structure were happy to have an officially outlaw state nearby. For hiding ill-gotten gains, currency manipulation, and so forth. So the federal government keeps protesting, dunning the Conchs for unpaid taxes and demanding extradition this and reciprocity that. But it never does anything that might actually change the status quo.”

  We both winced as a huge man dove over our heads. When the tidal wave subsided, Dallas continued.

  “It’s a good situation for us because we can do everything by cash and not raise any eyebrows. Sooner or later we can be smuggled into the States, with new identities already in place.”

  “All right … and then what?” I shouldn’t have said it.

  He stared out over the pool’s deck, looking at nothing. “Yeah. Then what.”

  “You have ten or twelve years before your next Stileman. You show up at the clinic for the treatment—assuming you can put together a million pounds without being Dallas Barr—and they’ll immediately identify you. No disguise is going to hide your chromosome pattern.”

  “So I have ten or twelve years to beat them,” he said quietly. “Or to wait for them to beat themselves, more likely—but I’m thinking more in terms of two or three years. Your time, not mine.”

  He waited for me to say something. I just looked at him. A part of me wanted to be honest, end the charade right here. Tell him one year would be too long. But I just looked at him.

  “We have two basic courses of action,” he said. “One of action, really; one of inaction.”

  “Hide or attack,” I said.

  “That’s right. Though we can ambush them from hiding without too much risk. Send messages to as many Stileman officials as we can locate, describing what happened. Telling everything I learned or could infer from Briskin. Or I could try to go public, use my famous mug—”

  “No. Even if it worked, they’d get to you.”

  “Maybe not, if I set it up right.”

  “No! You can’t act as if they used any common sense, any caution. The way Sir Charles set up our assassination, he obviously didn’t waste any time weighing the possible consequences.”

  “Went ahead and did it.” Dallas looked thoughtful. “Yeah. For safety’s sake, we have to assume they’ll do anything to get us. Even though Briskin may be the only really crazy one.”

  A giggling couple rushed by over us, bound for an obvious destination. I watched the man’s erect penis bouncing and felt a sudden internal squeeze. Dry mouth.

  Dallas followed my stare and laughed. “They don’t have things like that in the convent?”

  I tried to think of a funny reply, but nothing came. I rubbed his smooth bicep. “Let’s go back.”

  Watson Hygiene Account

  Tentative script for Dallas Barr 40-second endorsement

  LOW SCALE—

  A man and a woman, both a little overweight but still attractive, sit on a couch watching the cube. Clothes, furniture, surroundings all low-middle.

  We see that they’re watching a sex show (maybe a Holes ‘n’ Poles excerpt if we can work up account reciprocity). He slides his hand into her blouse

  Man

  Come on, Margie …

  Woman

  I dunno … maybe I

  shouldn’t.…

  Man

  Come on … I’m dyin’—

  Woman

  If you think it’d be all

  right …

  A flurry of activity as they undress each other in haste.

  Dallas Barr’s speech starts as a VOICE-OVER; after a second, the POV drops to the cube and shows his face.

  Barr

  Lucky cob, eh? Talked

  the slit into it.

  REVERSE ANGLE; she’s wriggling out of underclothes.

  Barr, cont.

  Said he was dyin’ for it …

  CLOSE shot of penetration

  Barr, cont.

  He will, all right. Die for it.

  Her ass has the X; Brand X.

  BIG CLOSE-UP from the side, plunging penis

  Barr, cont.

  He’s not wearing anything.

  Two months, his blade’ll

  rot and fall off. Another

  month and he’s dead.

  POV back to Barr. He holds up a three-pack of Airskins in one hand and a single one in the other, draped over his palm. A pencil spot (polarized to give rainbow reflection) picks it up in front of the dark b.g.

  Barr, cont.

  Airskins. Twenty bucks a pop.

  Can’t feel ’em; can’t see ’em except

  for the blue ring.

  Guaranteed to save your life …

  unless her husband shows up.

  Then you’re on your own.

  They tethered the gasbag hovering over a marina, and a floater took people down in groups of thirty to Mallory Square, on the west end of the island. In the customs she
d there, those who were headed on to the United States got into a TRANSIT PASSENGER line, for the usual red tape and waiting. There was no line for CONCH REPUBLIC, just an exit door and a table with a rubber stamp, in case you wanted to decorate your own passport.

  Although the island was a congenial place for criminals—affluent ones, at any rate—it was not at all lawless. It had police and courts and its own truncated version of Florida law. For six weeks following Secession, a local bar named Sloppy Joe’s had used as its sole source of entertainment a group of lawyers giving a marathon reading of the Florida statutes. They would read a law and call for a voice vote from the patrons of the bar. If the people in their wisdom rejected the law, it was torn out of the book. Of course, you also lost whatever was on the other side of the last page.

  The result was a strange hybrid of Novysibirsk-style anarchy and conventional American law. You could walk naked down the street carrying a gun, but you couldn’t spit on the sidewalk. You could be a fugitive from justice in sixteen countries and go anywhere on the island unmolested—but so could all the bounty hunters and undercover cops who followed you.

  For the average tourist it was no more dangerous than New Orleans or Alaska; it was as pretty as the former and as loose as the latter. Reconstructed or scrupulously preserved nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century buildings sat well back from wide streets lined with tropical flowering trees and palms. Silvery awnings shading the streets from the tropical sun seemed to be a modern concession to comfort, but they were actually there for security, so people could come and go without being monitored from orbit. The government of the United States was not the only party interested in those comings and goings; the Mafia had a satellite, and so did several conglomerates.

  But the salt air was like spice and the light was liquid gold. The food and drink were Caribbean, and so was the pace of life. Mañana, if we get around to it. Sometimes there were gunfights, true; but they were usually professionals, and hitting bystanders was a serious misdemeanor.

  Dallas

  As soon as we checked into the hotel, I took the crowdpleaser down to a gun shop and found a holster to fit the awkward thing. I also bought a three-shot “homer” hidden inside a pen barrel. That’s a small heatseeker that’s good out to about a hundred meters if your target’s unambiguous. Maria didn’t want any weapons, but I forced a nonlethal stinger on her, a pocket model that she could put in her purse and forget about.

  Maria went down to the library to get the Stileman committee addresses we needed (the Conch phone system is deliberately primitive, not hooked up to any datanets) while I went off to find some money and a good laundry.

  Getting the money was straightforward. There’s a store-front message service on Duval Street where I traded my thumbprint for a fifty-year-old key. The key fit a deposit box in a bank on the other side of town. The box was halfway through its ninety-nine-year lease; I’d filled it up the year after Secession. It held six kilogram ingots of gold, a ten-carat diamond of the first water, and three packages of one hundred uncirculated thousand-dollar bills. I took the bills, the diamond, and two ingots.

  The gun felt awkward. Too big; too conspicuous. I bought an oversized Hawaiian shirt to wear over it but that made it even worse, like a growth on my hip I was trying to conceal. I went into Friendly Mike’s Death Shoppe to make a trade.

  In the other gun shop the salespeople had been heavily armed; Friendly Mike didn’t have any obvious weapon. He didn’t need one. Only three people were allowed in the shop at a time, and each of us was tracked by one of three automated lasers, their mountings making ominous greased-metal whirrings as we moved.

  He was a huge, rounded cone of fat, like a slightly mobile Buddha, perched heavily on a four-wheeled stool between the register and a glass counter full of small weapons. Small black eyes sunk deep in fat, missing nothing.

  “Dallas Barr,” he said in a stagy deep voice.

  “Nice to be recognized.”

  “Maybe sometimes.”

  I stopped a safe distance away. If he fell on you, that would be the end. “I want to trade in a gun. Do I just pull it out, or will that get me fried?”

  “Go ahead. I’m in control.”

  I handed him the crowdpleaser, butt first. His pudgy hands were surprisingly agile, spinning it around, inspecting it from every angle. He opened the receiver a centimeter. “Shouldn’t carry a round in the chamber. Blow your leg off.” He sniffed the muzzle delicately.

  “Hm.” He set it down on the glass and stared at it. “Normally, I could give you five or six hundred, trade-in.”

  “Normally?”

  “Yeah. Don’t like to carry stuff I know was used in a crime. Cops come by, I sort of have to give it to them.”

  “Crime?” I could feel my knees turning to water.

  “Double murder in Yugoslavia. You forget already?” I shook my head. “We hear as fast as anybody. Interpol, in your case.”

  “I killed one man in self-defense.”

  “Hey. I’m not here to judge. Just explaining store policy.” He handed it back. “You want some advice?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll sell you anything you want. But the first thing you want is to go to a laundry. Get rid of that face.” He extracted a card from his vest. “Betsy Wolf. She’s real good and I get a ten percent kickback.”

  The address seemed to float shimmering over the card, an expensive refinement. A warning to prospective customers, not to expect bargains. “Thanks. I’ll check her out.”

  “There’s no reward on you, yet. Interpol doesn’t always carry that, though.”

  “That was crossing my mind, yeah. Thanks.” The Conch Republic had rather more bounty hunters than preachers. I walked fast through the chalky heat to the address, an oceanfront highrise. “Elizabeth Wolf, Beauty Consultants” took up the whole top floor.

  The elevator told me how many weapons I was carrying and opened a box in its wall for me to deposit them. It locked the box and coded it to my thumbprint, supposedly. There were nine boxes. “What if more than nine armed people come through here at the same time?”

  “I do not know how to answer that question,” it said. I was obscurely glad. The door opened into an elegant reception area, glass walls on the right overlooking the ocean, and on the left, a holo reproduction of nineteenth-century Key West. An aerial view from before the time of airplanes.

  The receptionist looked up, and for a fraction of an instant there was the familiar I-know-you-You-must-be-someone-famous expression, which faded immediately and was replaced by something professional. “May I help you?”

  We established that my name was Morris Niemand and that I wanted to see Dr. Wolf and I didn’t have an appointment. While we were discussing the impossibility of my seeing her right away, Dr. Wolf buzzed the desk and said send him in.

  The inner office, actually several rooms, was all white and chrome and smelled faintly of isopropyl alcohol and old-fashioned starched sheets. Uniform white light radiated from the ceiling and the upper half of the walls.

  Dr. Wolf came in, and it was my turn to be surprised. I recognized her from the Sydney party. I felt very unarmed.

  She tried to suppress a smile and failed. “Small world, isn’t it? Mr. Niemand.”

  “I guess I’d better go somewhere else.”

  “You could. But anybody you find on the island who’s any good is going to be immortal. It’s a profitable enterprise.” She took me by the elbow and walked me across the room. “Any good or not, they’re going to recognize you.”

  She sat me down on a stool and put a finger under my chin. “Look straight ahead. Chin up.”

  “Wait. I’m not sure—”

  “I keep no records, cash on the barrelhead, very bad long-term memory. I’m already forgetting what you used to look like. Smile—no, naturally.”

  “What kind of cash?” I said, smiling. A holo camera came down from the ceiling and circled me silently.

  “Permanent change?”
br />   “No.”

  “How much cash you have? Now don’t smile.”

  “Forty or fifty thousand.” The camera went around again.

  “Last of the big-time spenders, eh? Follow me.” We went into a low room that had a row of chairs facing a large holo cube. She took the first chair and unfolded a keyboard on her lap. An image of my head appeared from floor to ceiling.

  “Where’ll you be going?”

  “Uh … I don’t know.”

  “Don’t be coy. For fifty thousand I can make you black or oriental. That’s the easiest kind of misdirection. But there are places where either might be a disadvantage.” She herself was black. “I assume you’ve learned to handle places where being white is a disadvantage.”

  “I’m not being coy. I haven’t had time to plan.” I could afford to tell her something. “There are people after me with guns. They don’t want to talk about it. Rightly or wrongly, they’re not afraid of the law.”

  “Stilemans?”

  “At least one of them.”

  “And you can’t go to the law yourself.” She was staring thoughtfully at the image.

  “No. Not just like that. Eventually.”

  She nodded and tapped a few keys on the console. “Here.” My face rippled hugely around chin, cheeks, brow. Then it was somebody else’s face.

  “That would do fine.”

  “Four nonmetallic pressor and tractor inserts. Good for about two years; then your face starts to sag back to normal. I can take them out or recharge them, no fee. Course, when you go into rejuvenation, they’ll be found. Likewise any kind of facial surgery.”

  “That’s it for fifty grand?”

  “No. I’ll throw in new identity papers, change your skin color and hair. Height and posture. You want a new dick?”

  “What?”

  “Blade, dork, penis. One-eyed trouser mouse. It’s as individual as the face. You can imagine circumstances where a man might want it disguised.” Deadpan. “Give me a first. Say you want it shortened.”

  “Yeah, well … not this time. What about the voice?”

  “I wouldn’t advise it, unless the ones after you have known you a long time. Most people, it really wears you down, trying to keep a new voice in mind twenty-four hours a day. It’s conspicuous when you slip.”