The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.” Nohar shut off the connection.

  • • •

  Nohar spent another few hours on the comm searching through every local news provider he could access. He started with the story of Royd’s death and worked from there.

  It wasn’t encouraging. Not only did the stories have video of him, big as life, taken from the little cop drones. But they had his name, too. “Nohar Rajasthan, ex-Private Investigator” was attached to every story in connection with Royd’s death.

  Somehow, the death of Charles Royd was linked to a shadowy moreau terrorist group that someone had labeled “The Outsiders.” These “Outsiders” had apparently taken credit for Royd, and the bombing at Alcatraz. The attack on Pastoria Towers was being billed as an antiterrorist raid to uncover a cabal of these “Outsiders—” That’s how the press played it, even though no Fed agency was admitting anything to do with the raid, and a few said they were investigating it.

  Most of the news seemed to have made up its mind.

  Most.

  A small news agency out of San Francisco, the Nonhuman News Network, had a different slant on things. They took the tack that the “Outsiders” didn’t exist, and were a cover for covert actions by the Federal Government against the moreau community. The news was paranoid, involving everything from death squads to biological warfare. It seemed all too plausible from Nohar’s vantage point.

  He agreed with the NNN story: it was unlikely that any morey group would choose to target Royd.

  Nohar couldn’t find anything about Manuel in the public corners of the net. That didn’t surprise him. If his theory was right, and the Bad Guys were looking for Manuel, they would have been watching the comm for him, too. They probably were a lot more sophisticated about it, too, judging by the hardware their grunts carried. There wasn’t even so much as an acknowledgment that the cops were looking for a missing person of his description.

  He also couldn’t find any news about a shootout in Beverly Hills last night, or even something about a Mirador crashing to a halt. However, there were reports about Henderson’s disappearance. Nohar wondered who had reported it, since the story’d come out about an hour before Henderson was due back at work.

  Whatever the reason, the police wanted her for questioning in relation to Royd’s murder. Strangely, Nohar didn’t find any equivalent stories about Maria. Nohar wondered about that. The Bad Guys weren’t cops—at least they weren’t the cops—but they were certainly able to use the cops. Why not have them looking for Maria as well as Henderson and him?

  Unless they were trying to keep the whole thing with Manuel under wraps. They didn’t want the cops looking for Maria or Manuel, at least not publicly.

  The last thing he did at the comm was patch in his old digital camera so he could get hard copies of what he’d been looking at the past twenty-four hours. He slowly managed to enhance a picture of the Mirador that had ambushed Henderson, but that was little use other than to see how they’d managed to obscure the ID tags on the car. He didn’t even have a clean shot of the attackers’ faces. That was a dead end.

  There were a few other pictures. The only one that had much promise was a wide shot of the copter that had landed in the Pastoria Towers parking lot. The copter was unmarked, but he had a good shot of what the machine looked like, and it might give him a lead on who might own some. He also had a good shot of a few faces. The most promising one was the face of the first man out the door, apparently the leader of the raid.

  He was a standout. Even with the glow of the IR view, Nohar could make out his face. He was tall, with Negroid features and a long jagged scar across his cheek that showed on the display as a cold spot. There was something deep and painful in that face, even at that distance and with the distortion of the heat patterns. Nohar thought he saw the eyes of a hunter there. . . .

  Nohar spent an hour studying Scar and the rest of his boys—the ones whose features he could make out. He wanted to be sure he could pick these guys out of a crowd if he came across them. He would have felt better if he could catch their scent and the sound of their footsteps as well. Then he’d feel as if he knew these men. Just by sight, he’d only be good within a few dozen meters.

  Beverly brought him lunch as he worked on the comm. This time it was an actual piece of meat, not something that had been mechanically processed into something the consistency of gelatin packing material.

  “Are you finding everything you need?” she asked him.

  Nohar stretched. The comm was in a corner of the living room, and all he had to sit on was a small stool. He had been bent over it, and all his muscles ached. “Everything I expected to find.” Nohar stood and slipped over to the couch, taking Beverly’s offered lunch. His head knocked a dangling fern, setting it swinging.

  “Only so much I can do over the comm.”

  Beverly nodded.

  “I need to see this clinic Manuel worked at, talk to his coworkers.” Nohar looked down at himself. He suddenly found the whole idea of clothing an annoyance.

  “I took some liberties,” Beverly said and walked over to the door and picked up a package and handed it to Nohar. Nohar put down the plate he’d been eating from and opened the worn plastic. Inside was a whole new outfit.

  Nohar looked up.

  “I slipped out while you were working. There’s an ursine I buy my tea from, and he had some old clothes I borrowed.”

  “Thanks,” Nohar said as he pulled out the shirt. It was a giant tank top with an embroidered yin-yang symbol on it. With it was a pair of running shorts. He had to manhandle his tail through one of the leg holes. Not something your average ursine had to worry about.

  It was enough for him to go out in public in. He took the old plastic box and put what was left of his possessions in it. “Thanks.”

  “It was nice to have your company.”

  Nohar glanced toward the bedroom. “Tell them I’ll be back by evening.”

  Chapter 13

  The clothing had Nohar thinking about protective coloring. His problem was his inability to blend into the surroundings. The cops and the Bad Guys were both looking for a tiger, and his species just wasn’t that common. In fact, it was rare enough that the cops could claim probable cause on rousting any tiger they saw. It wasn’t like pinks could manage to tell moreys of the same species apart—

  Even moreys seeing the video the cops took would see little more than a tiger in an out-of-style suit packing a big gun. Most wouldn’t be sure about an ID without some nonvisual cues. Scent mostly.

  He needed to poke around the life Manuel left behind, but he also needed to disappear.

  He had an idea how to do it. But first he needed some untraceable cash. Most of his cash cards had his name attached to them. Using them would be a dangerous prospect if the Bad Guys had any technical aptitude. And after the room, the car, and a Mexican dinner, he had about five dollars in cash left.

  But he knew a quick and dirty way to get more cash, as long as his urban instincts held. Clothing styles had changed. He hoped certain other things hadn’t.

  He walked down the streets until he found a likely prospect. It was a hole-in-the-wall store at the base of an aging strip of concrete storefronts. The window was opaque with advertisements, and above it was a cracked yellow sign that read, “Beer, Wine, Liquor, Ganja.” Three rats stood in front of the store passing a plastic liter bottle between them chattering in high-pitched rodent-accented Spanish.

  This was what he was looking for.

  He hugged the dirty plastic package to his chest as he ducked in past the steel door.

  The cashier, a canine with the high narrow muzzle and gray coloring of central Asia, watched him enter from behind a wall of bullet-proof glass. There was suspicion in the dog’s eyes, probably because the metal detector set in the door had set off a warning behind his desk.

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sp; Nohar didn’t much care. He walked up to the counter, peered through the graffiti scratched in the manager’s shield. “I found a live cash card on the street. It has a two thousand balance. I was hoping there was a reward for returning it.” Nohar didn’t try to make the story sound legit. He was better off if the cashier believed that he rolled some drunk pink for the card.

  The dog cocked his head. “Slide it through the reader.”

  Nohar smiled to himself. He had a sale; all that was left was haggling. He pulled one of his cards out of the plastic case and slid it through the reader on his side of the bullet-proof glass. The cashier looked at the readout on his side of the glass and gave a jaded nod.

  Nohar eventually left with seven hundred and fifty in cash.

  • • •

  He visited an overpriced convenience store and a second hand clothing shop in quick succession. Both were in the same building, with the upper stories abandoned and boarded up. After he left the clothing store, with all his new purchases in a battered engineered-leather backpack, he slipped behind the building and made his way to a fire escape.

  He managed to kick his way through the plastic sheathing covering one of the busted windows, and slipped inside.

  There was almost no light inside, but Nohar’s eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. Worse was the smell of mildew, which made him want to sneeze.

  Nohar wandered through what used to be set of apartments until he came to what was left of the kitchen. Here, it smelled more of sex and beer than mildew, and the floor was littered with the trash of innumerable predecessors. The walls were wrapped in arcane graffiti. Nohar noticed a lot of used condoms, which still struck him as odd in a morey neighborhood.

  Across the wall, above the counter that used to hold a sink—before someone had scavenged it—someone had spray-painted on the wall the word, Genocide.

  A not so nice word, Nohar thought. It matched a not so nice world.

  Nohar set his backpack on the counter and walked to the other side of the room, where sheathing covered the window. Sinking his claws into the plastic, he pulled the sheet back into the room, flooding the place with sunlight. Noise from the street below filtered in, but he ignored it.

  He needed the light for what he was doing.

  Nohar went back to the sink and took out a pair of four-liter bottles of “spring water.” The labels were homemade, and he suspected that the bottles were filled from a still—if not a tap—in the back of the convenience store. Nohar didn’t care. He didn’t buy the stuff to drink.

  He stripped off the clothes that Beverly had given him and put them on the counter next to the backpack. From the backpack he retrieved two small hand mirrors and a bar of soap wrapped in heavy foil. It wasn’t ordinary soap—The foil bore warnings not to open except immediately before use, not to leave it exposed to direct sunlight, and not to use after the expiration date stamped in its side.

  It had cost Nohar twelve dollars a bar, and he had bought three. It was a cosmetic beauty soap that had a special coloring agent in it. It wasn’t a dye—which he could have gotten cheap, would have been hideously messy, and in the end would have looked like a dye job—the soap was doped with engineered enzymes that penetrated fur and chemically altered the pigmentation. It was a one-use thing that would last until the fur grew back its natural color.

  Nohar had never tried it himself. But back when he was a part of the rest of the world, he knew moreys who swore by the stuff, people who preferred black to brown, or brown to russet. Nohar picked it because he had rarely been able to tell when someone had used it.

  He didn’t have the features of a black jaguar, and he was too big, but it would be enough for him to pass as a mule.

  He uncapped one of the bottles and tore open the foil on the soap. He started with his left forearm, wetting it, lathering the fur, working the enzymed soap into it.

  When he rinsed it off the fur on his forearm and on his right hand had turned a solid glossy black. Just like Maria’s fur.

  Nohar worked his whole body over. After getting the broad areas of his arms legs and torso, he used the two hand mirrors to locate hard to reach spots on his back. In the space of an hour, his russet stripes were completely gone.

  He stood there, legs and arms spread, letting the afternoon sun shine through and dry his fur. He felt oddly different from himself, as if he’d done more than just color his fur. He felt as if someone other than Nohar stood here, a different feline, darker, colder.

  He stretched, reaching, extending the claws on his hands and feet until he felt the joints pop.

  Looking up, he saw more graffiti on the ceiling. Shiva, it said.

  “. . . destroyer of worlds,” Nohar whispered. His voice seemed to have changed as well, lowered in pitch, more dangerous. He knew it was only psychological, but he felt more threatening.

  There was one thing left before he went out in public. He rummaged in the backpack until he found a small makeup case. He opened it and began applying the contents to his nose, darkening it until the skin color matched his new fur.

  It smelled dry and made him want to sneeze, but like the soap, it sank in and disappeared into the pigment.

  Nohar had vanished.

  • • •

  When he returned to the streets, he was a different person. He could tell by the way the other people moved around him. He could smell tension precede him in a wave, and he noticed that everyone—even the hard cases—made sure they weren’t standing anywhere that could be in his way.

  His clothing still didn’t match the current fashion, but that seemed to matter less now. He wore khaki pants and a matching shirt, the only ones he’d found that had fit him—well enough that they might have been military surplus from India. Over it he wore a black long coat that was sized for an ursine or something bigger. It hid the holster and his gun well enough.

  The backpack he’d left in the kitchen, with his old clothes. The makeup he’d ditched several blocks away, in case anyone traced him to that point. He didn’t want them to discover signs of his change in appearance.

  It was a five-mile walk to the Bensheim Clinic. Nohar walked the distance without stopping. For once in a long while he wasn’t feeling his age. The few times he caught his reflection in an unbroken window, it was a different person. Not just the fur, which lacked the gray streaks, and even seemed better groomed. His movements seemed younger, more fluid.

  The Clinic stood out from the rest of the depressed architecture, a small white building squatting behind a wide well-kept lawn. The Clinic must have had the grounds regularly maintained, because none of the garbage that littered the sidewalks and the gutters made its way onto the Clinic’s small greenery.

  In front of the Clinic was a bronze statute of Doctor Otto Bensheim. They posed him with a canine, shaking hands. Around the doctor’s neck was his Nobel Prize. It was the kind of thing that the Bensheim Foundation never would have permitted while he was alive. Dr. Bensheim never even wanted his name on the Foundation, or its Clinics.

  He’d been one of the thousands of gene-techs who’d helped create the moreaus. Unlike all the other gene-techs, Bensheim had a conscience. He had created the Foundation and the Clinics to atone for his part in creating a new underclass. Reproduction, he had thought, was a fundamental right. The Clinics were there to assure that every female who wanted offspring would have the opportunity, whatever her species.

  Of the thousands of species of moreaus that were created, each small genetic variation was listed somewhere in the Bensheim Foundation’s confidential files. For a nominal fee, any female could walk in, get genetic testing, and be inseminated with the matching species of sperm. Any male could come in and receive a nominal fee for donating his own seed. The Clinics had gradually expanded their mission, to include neonatal and other aspects of reproductive health.

  Nohar had never been inside one of the Clinics. He dis
liked hospitals in general, and something about the Bensheim Clinics had always made him uneasy.

  He walked up the footpath, past the statue. It had the obligatory plaque, dedicating it on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Doctor Otto Bensheim’s death. That would make it nearly ten years old.

  Nohar stopped and studied the doctor’s face. He had seen Bensheim in news stories before the man had died. There seemed something oddly fake about the expression on the statue, as if the sculptor had never seen Bensheim smile. The look gave Bensheim the appearance of biting back some obscenity.

  Nohar pretended to read the plaque while he covertly studied his surroundings. He didn’t have to take his gaze off the plaque to realize that there were pinks around, ones more alive than the good doctor. The wind carried their scent along with the ozone exhaust of the passing traffic.

  He wondered where the best place to hide them would be. They had to be watching the Clinic, since he couldn’t think of any other good reason for humans to be in the neighborhood. Even the LAPD now hired moreys to patrol the Moreytowns, and Compton was about as nonhuman as you could get without leaving the planet.

  So the pinks he scented, at least three, were almost certainly the Bad Guys. Watching Manuel’s old workplace. Probably watching for him.

  He was going to get to see how well his new disguise worked. Either the Bad Guys were going to fall on him like a ton of bricks, or he was going to walk right in.

  An apartment across the street, Nohar finally decided. There was a restaurant across the street, and above it were a line of apartment windows. The windows were broken and dark, but they had the only view of the front of the Clinic—and the wind was from that direction.

  “We’ll see,” Nohar whispered to himself. He walked up the path to the Clinic door. The lobby was sparse and utilitarian. There weren’t even fake plants to clutter the scenery. The lights were brilliant fluorescents that set off the blazing holo posters on the walls. The mylar holos were the only decor. He read one as he passed.