The place smelled of rotting paper and rat droppings—thankfully, nonengineered rats. Over all was the smell of scorched machinery. Nohar could hear the ticking of overheated metal.
He fumbled around for a light switch in the dark, and after a few minutes the fluorescents above came on with a buzz. The first thing Nohar noticed was the drive-chain for the door. It dangled from the ceiling, still swinging gently back and forth. The links looked fused together, and when Nohar reached to stop its swinging, it was still warm to the touch.
Nohar shook his head again and looked over the locker. It was a near-cubical room of unpainted cinder block, a bit larger than three meters square. The ceiling was corrugated steel, from which a half-dozen unshaded, fly-specked fluorescents dangled. Half of them were lit, and half of those were flickering.
Wire shelves ran from floor to ceiling on three walls. The shelves held stacks of boxes and a few suitcases. In the center of the floor, three filing cabinets and an old comm unit stood sentinel over a squat, black fire safe.
Neglect had taken its toll. A whole stack of boxes had collapsed off of one of the rear shelves, and rats had nested in the spilled clothes and papers. Leaks in that side of the roof had stained most of the boxes in that corner of the room, and the smell made Nohar write off that corner entirely.
Nohar felt unmoved looking at the damage. Clothing and records from his years as a PI. Nothing truly important. It was as if the things here weren’t really his.
He walked over to the wall opposite the one with the leak and started peeling boxes open. He needed some changes of clothes. If he was going to deal with the pink world again, he needed some protective coloration. He found an old military surplus duffel bag and began throwing things into it. Two salvageable changes of clothes and one suit went into it.
In other boxes he dug out some old equipment. He recovered an expensive set of binoculars with a built-in digital camera. They needed recharging. He also uncovered his clunky palmtop comm, which needed recharging and its account renewed.
Then he keyed in the combination of his fire safe. It opened with a sucking sound as the air pressure equalized. He pulled out a leather wallet that lay on top of everything. He checked it. It held a half-dozen ramcards, a few that would still have money on them. There was also about three hundred in cash.
Beneath the wallet, still in its holster, was Nohar’s Vindhya 12-millimeter. Nohar drew the automatic out of the holster, cleared it, and checked the action. It was metal and composite ceramics, all with a utilitarian gray finish. Deadly, efficient, and it still worked perfectly.
Nohar looked at the 70-centimeter-long barrel, and felt a premonition that something nasty was going to happen.
He made sure that the Vind was fully loaded before he put on the shoulder holster over the sweater Stephie had given him. He threw on a red wind-breaker—stiff with age but baggy enough to hide the gun from casual inspection—then he filled his pockets with every magazine that was in the safe.
He put on a pair of old stale sneakers, and left, the broken door hanging open on his past.
Chapter 4
Nohar had to call three taxi companies before he found one that would service the neighborhood he was in. After nearly half an hour, a black-and-white van rolled to a stop next to the public comm Nohar’d been using. It was a dented Chrysler Aerobus that ran on remote.
Nohar stepped inside as the door opened for him. A camera watched him from behind a metal mesh screen. The floor was littered with disposable air-hypos, beer bulbs, and used condoms. It smelled like the lid of a garbage can.
Nohar felt claustrophobic again as the door shut on the cab.
A tinny-sounding speaker in the ceiling said, “State your destination clearly,” in a half-dozen different languages.
Nohar gave it the name of an intersection in Compton. He ran one of his cards through the deposit slot before the cab could jabber any further to him. Compton was a long ride down the clogged LA freeways, but Compton was morey territory, and he knew the area. At least he had known it, seven years ago. He was confident enough that he could find a motel to hole up in while he tried to piece together what had happened.
The cab drove south down the Hollywood and Harbor Freeways, never managing more than forty klicks an hour for all the traffic. Nohar had a lot of time to sit in the wretched-smelling taxi and look out at the LA skyline. There wasn’t much for him to see; it was all a blur of glass and concrete at the extremity of his vision. All he really could focus on was the movement of maniac-driven cars cutting off the taxi, and the debris that collected in the breakdown lanes.
He smelled Compton before he reached it. It was a smoky smell of fires long since dead. It drifted through the taxi’s air filters—if it had any—as if they weren’t there, overwhelming the ozone smell of the traffic around him.
Compton was in the southern portion of a swath of destruction the National Guard had cut through the second-largest Moreytown in the United States. The riots had burned through a diagonal strip of the Greater Los Angeles area, extending from Compton through to East LA. At one point the area had been devastated worse than the Bronx.
As the cab took the off ramp, the first thing that Nohar noticed were the vacant lots. There were hundreds of them. Places where the city, or the National Guard, had bulldozed the abandoned buildings and spread dirt over the rubble. Tawny grass grew high in ragged patches throughout the lots, and the ground was uneven where erosion had uncovered the remains of the buried wreckage. Each lot was littered with trash and abandoned vehicles, as if the town had become one huge landfill.
The autocab stopped at the intersection of Rosecrans and Alameda, the door opening before Nohar realized that he had reached his destination.
He stepped out on the broken concrete. Behind him, the cab raced off as if it didn’t like the neighborhood. Nohar started walking south on Alameda, following the overgrown set of train tracks.
Other moreys walked by, usually on the other side of the street. Mostly young-looking rodents who talked to each other in a combined Spanish-English slang that Nohar couldn’t understand. Many of them gave him looks that seemed to say, “You don’t belong here.”
They were the shortest lived of all the morey breeds. In the seven years Nohar had been in his self-imposed exile, two generations of rats had been born and reached maturity. They had been designed for fast reproduction, and it was only the short life span that kept the engineered Rattis from overwhelming every other species.
When they stared at Nohar, he felt something alien. There was a gulf behind the glossy blackness of their eyes that had more than species behind it. Most moreys had been engineered around the same time, in the decades surrounding the Pan-Asian War. Nohar himself was only a single generation removed from the labs. The rats who walked around him, staring and chattering high-speed Spanish, were generations removed from the labs in Central and South America where their kind had been born. In Nohar’s lifetime, ten generations of rats had come, and mostly gone.
The rats weren’t the only moreys out on the streets, though they were the most numerous. There were other South American breeds, rabbits and other rodents that were harder to identify. There were a few canines, and one or two felines, though none as large as Nohar.
In fact, Nohar stood out in Compton as badly as he would have in Culver City. He towered over everyone else, and even if that hadn’t been the case, his dress marked him as an outsider. Everyone else on the street here seemed to have adopted the same dress, almost like a uniform. They wore blousy pants with large vertical slashes through the material, leaving them so much strips of cloth. If they wore anything on top, it was little more than an abbreviated vest. Maybe they would wear a silk scarf or bandanna around the neck.
The clothing was in every material Nohar could think of, from denim to polyester, but the style was almost universal. He saw a few other moreys wearing other things, but
they looked as out of place as he did.
One thing made him agree with the rats’ accusing stares, agree he didn’t belong here anymore—he thought the clothes looked ridiculous.
• • •
Nohar found a motel. Its sign was rusted, the neon smelled of a short circuit, and the parking lot was weed-shot and had one rusted hulk of a vehicle that seemed to have been resident ever since they stopped using petroleum.
Nohar ducked in one graffiti-swathed door and stepped up to the desk. The musk smell of a dozen species layered the lobby, making it an easy guess what the rooms here were used for. There wasn’t anyone there. Nohar dropped his bag and leaned on the desk. There was a button screwed to the desktop and Nohar pressed it. Deep in the bowels of the building, he heard a buzzer go off.
He scanned the place while he waited. The area behind the desk was a narrow mirror of the lobby. Rusty acoustical tile, scab-colored carpet, and plastic plants that smelled of dust. One thing on the desk caught Nohar’s attention and made him feel more of an outsider than ever.
A box of condoms sat on the desk with a little sticker saying “$2.80 ea.” The condoms weren’t that noticeable at first, and with his bad vision he would have missed the crucial part if he wasn’t leaning over them.
They weren’t the regular pink-designed condoms, but half a dozen varieties, each color-coded and labeled with a two-letter code. Under the box, attached to the desk beneath a sheet of plastic, a large index listed the species the codes went with. Blue went with mostly canines, red went with rodents—in particular, a “Blue AX” would fit a Qandahar Afghani, though Nohar doubted that any of that particular attack strain would have use for a condom.
Then again, he never had either. Almost all morey relationships were sterile unless you found a mate of exactly the same species. Mules, while undesirable, were too rare for most of Nohar’s contemporaries to worry about. Looking at the box, Nohar wondered about species-jumping diseases.
“Looking for a little party, are we, good sir?” The voice drifted in on the odor of curry and incense. Nohar looked up and saw a morey of a kind he’d never seen before. That was enough to give him pause.
He had a short muzzle, and wide golden eyes. His limbs were long and thin, the fingers even longer. He wore a kimono that hung loosely on his body, as if he was only a wide-eyed head propped up on a stick. His sinuous movement and long fingers made him think of an old friend named Manny—
Nohar pushed the thought away. “I want a room,” he said.
“Good, yes.” He hissed the words. “I can provide you with any manner of companionship.”
Nohar shook his head. “Just a room, and a bed for the night.”
The manager nodded, and it seemed that his head nodded around those huge golden eyes, whose gaze remained fixed on him. Nohar suspected that he was looking at someone whose ancestors were intended for night recon work. “This is fine, and any time of night you change your mind—”
“I’ll be sure to call you,” Nohar said.
“Yes.” The manager held out a hand that was longer than Nohar’s. Nohar fished the cash out of his wallet and paid for the room. The manager did not complain about the cash, and didn’t ask him for an ID.
“Room 300,” he told Nohar, sliding a cardkey across the desk. Nohar turned to go and he heard the manager say, “Rajasthan?”
Nohar stopped, frozen at the mention of his name. He looked over his shoulder, suddenly nervous. “What?”
“Yes, I see, you are Rajasthan ’20 or maybe ’23.” He held out something. Nohar took it. It was a yellow foil wrapper with the letters XT on it. “The only one of those left, you see. On the house. Don’t want you contracting the Drips, do we?”
Nohar nodded. He felt more out of place than ever. Not just the condom, or the fact that he’d never heard of “The Drips,” but the fact that he was one of a generation named for his species. He knew that his name, by itself, was enough to mark him as from another age.
He put the condom in his wallet and walked out to his room.
Behind him, the manager said, “You call me when you want some diversion, yes?”
• • •
Room 300 was a dull gray anonymous hole at the opposite end of the broken parking lot. When Nohar closed the door behind him, he collapsed on a bed that was much too small for him and felt fatigue and pain drip from every pore. It felt as if he had just run down a whole herd of deer by himself, without the bow.
His mind was awake and alert, but every muscle in his body screamed fatigue. He’d been able to hold off the crash long enough to get somewhere relatively safe, but now he paid for it. He stayed immobile, panting, staring at his collapsed body in the mirror on the ceiling. The reflection resembled a crime-scene holo, with him as the shooting victim.
Staring into his own green eyes, it came home to him how close to death he’d been this morning. He had been shot at before, and it wasn’t even the first time he had been that close to an explosion. But something about the attack gave him a sick feeling of his own mortality.
“Age . . .” he whispered to himself between burning breaths.
Who wanted him dead? The only answers that came were that they were human, and well-equipped, and they weren’t cops. Why they wanted him dead was easier—it had been triggered by the lawyer’s visit. There was absolutely nothing else in his last seven years that Nohar believed could have sparked anyone’s interest.
The attack had to be related to Charles Royd’s visit, and the job he’d pitched. But Nohar couldn’t figure out if the attack was because he’d refused the job, or because the attackers thought he’d taken it.
Nohar thought of the picture of Manuel and the ramcard that had burned in the fire. Right now he wished he knew what was on that ramcard. He was going to have to track down Royd and find out who he was working for, and why. . . .
After a half hour lying still on the bed, Nohar began to snore.
• • •
Nohar awoke with a start.
The light had gone from the windows, leaving the room in monochrome darkness. The room stank of his own leftover exertion. What parts of his body didn’t ache, itched. Nohar sat up slowly, annoyed at himself for falling asleep. Even though his body was designed to grant him short bursts of supernormal activity, the cost was a deep lethargy. Nohar knew he must have slept for hours, and he still felt tired.
Old pain from his bad knee and shoulder prodded him awake the rest of the way. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he massaged his right knee and thought of exactly what it was he was going to do.
His cabin had been burned to the ground. The cabin and the small plot of land had been part of a government homestead grant, an attempt to de-urbanize the moreau population after the riots. It had cost him nothing, and he never had any insurance on the building. He’d never be able to afford to rebuild.
Even if he found out who had tried to kill him, he had nothing left. He’d been four years on the waiting list for that cabin, and he probably didn’t have another four years.
Part of the cheap wooden bed frame gave under his hand. His fingers ached with his claws extending to bite the wood.
Anger began burning in his gut, all of it focused on Royd. It was the pink lawyer’s fault, that was a certainty. Whatever the end reason was for the attack on him, Nohar knew that it would never have happened if that human bastard had just left him alone.
After a lifetime of dreams and desires, that was the only one that remained: to be left alone. Royd had taken that away from him.
Royd was going to pay for that.
Chapter 5
Nohar plugged in the palmtop comm he’d liberated from his locker, and the binocular camera, letting them charge while he washed himself off in this place’s excuse for a bathroom. Nohar could only do a halfassed job of washing himself off, and when he was done, he could still smell Los Angeles in his fur. r />
When he came out of the bathroom, his comm was glowing at the head of the bed. The motel had a comm setup, but Nohar suspected that it charged by the minute, and probably didn’t have an outside line.
His comm supposedly had a lifetime telcomm usage attached to it that billed one of his accounts monthly for the time he spent on-line. He hoped that the telcomm account was still good.
He sat on the bed, fur still drying, and picked up the little device. He hadn’t touched it in years, and it showed. There was an ugly violet tint to the screen, and the letters on the boot screen carried ghosts of themselves on their backs.
He extended a claw and tapped the screen a few times, pulling down menus and finally grabbing a city directory. The lawyer had done a good job of keeping his home address unlisted, but it wasn’t difficult to find his office. It was in Beverly Hills.
Nohar snorted. What was this guy doing talking to him? The guy probably made more an hour than Nohar had seen in the past three years.
Charles Royd’s home address was supposed to be unlisted. All that meant was that Nohar had to spend half an hour finessing the database—and half that time was spent refamiliarizing himself with what he was doing. Royd wasn’t in the public city directory, but he was in the records of every place from the FAA, for that aircar, to the Department of Water and Power. Given his name, and the make of car, it was child’s play to lift his address from his vehicle registration.
Beverly Hills again.
Nohar shook his head. Even though Royd had been driving an expensive aircar, Nohar had him pegged as small-time. Mostly because Royd was dealing with moreaus, and only small-timers dealt with moreaus. Back in his cabin, Nohar had been as small-time as he could get.
Nohar keyed the screen until he got a too-purple GTE test pattern, and tried to place a call through to Royd’s house. Royd’s comm picked up instead, and asked for a message. Nohar disconnected before it was finished asking. He looked out the louvered windows of the motel, and saw the first rose glow of dawn filtering through the dust.