As night rode roughshod over fading evening the day shift made way for their replacements, workers moving both ways jamming the warren of access alleys around the plants until the last of the daytime personnel had escaped to the worker’s warrens south of the Strip and their nocturnal counterparts were online. There were still people in the alleys and streets, but not nearly so many now, nor all so gainfully occupied. In addition to the massive factories there were cafes and tiny service markets, outlet stores and discount marts that identified themselves by means of drifting holagel adverts and ambient neonics. They clung to the flanks of the plants like whale lice to favored cetaceans.
Cardenas’s clothes worked overtime to cool him down, but along the Colorado with its combination of desert inferno and river humidity there was no choice but to sweat.
The combination of directions and numbers led him to a workers’ hostel. Only the poorest of the poor, the true bottom-end laborers lived here, in the bowels of the city, because they couldn’t afford to get out, couldn’t afford the price even of a shuttle commute. There was no live desk clerk; only an automonitor that demanded his room card and had to be satisfied instead with his police identification.
Following directions he rode the elevator to the top floor and exited into a hall that reeked of neglect and stale urine. Someone had managed to etch obscenities into one supposedly graffiti-resistant wall with a cutting laser or similar tool. There was barely enough light to illuminate the hall and its featureless flush-set doors, the chemoluminescent strip tacked to the ceiling weak and long overdue for replacement.
The old aural stripping around the doors leaked and he could hear sounds from within each apartment as he passed it: children crying, men and women arguing vociferously, TVs blaring. He went to the end of the hall. There was a window, a single fixed pane of transparent plastic. The building’s air-conditioning huffed reluctantly. On this top floor it was stifling hot. The lower levels, he knew, wouldn’t be much better.
He drew his gun, made sure the tracer sewn into his suit was activated, and thumbed the callthrough. A tinny male voice barked back at him.
“Yeah?”
“Police, open up. I just want to ask you a few questions.”
There was a pause. Cardenas’s fingers tightened on his weapon. He didn’t like this place, didn’t like the delay. Much as he preferred to work alone, maybe he ought to have requisitioned backup for this one. But his tracer was on, and the room’s occupants had no way of knowing he was by himself.
“Sure, homber. Come on in.” Cardenas heard the door seal unsnick.
He found himself in a single room, somewhat larger than what he’d expected. There were two beds, rumpled and used, the cooling thermosheets stained beyond hope of color recovery. An ancient chair squatted beneath a window that was a match to the one in the hall. It offered the same dismal view of alley and buildings. Cotton stuffing bulged from various holes in the upholstery like bloodless entrails.
The walls of the room were an incongruous, immutable pale pink splattered with faded images of butterflies. The choice of scheme was ironic. The dirty, polluted chunk of industrial Namerica that smothered the lowermost Colorado hadn’t played host to a real butterfly in a hundred years.
Both boys looked to be in their late teens. One was tall, healthy-looking, dark-skinned. The other had ear-length stringy blond hair and a stunned expression, as though he wandered through life under perpetual sedation. From the look of his bones and eyes his condition wasn’t entirely due to drugs though. Cardenas saw that he suffered from congenital mental numbness.
The tall black kid nodded toward the pistol. “You just want to habla, frion, why the punch?”
“Regulations.” Neither boy was armed nor was there anything lethal visible in the room. Cardenas dropped his arm, letting the gun hang at his side, where they could see that it was still activated. He took in his surroundings. Maybe drugs for sale if not for use, but that wasn’t what he was here for.
“You guys know anything about some illegal magimals been involved in a couple of incidents recently?”
The tall boy laughed, his companion chiming in with a rasping giggle. “Seguro, frion. Sure. We monitor the news every day.”
“We don’t know nada, man,” added his equally hostile companion. “Anything else you wanna know?”
The combination of ignorance and pugnacious disdain might’ve been enough to put off a regular federale, but not Cardenas. There were too many pregnant syllables in the boys’ phrasing, too many subtle, disquieting, revelatory shifts in their posture. He intuited that they were hiding something, that they knew more than the nothing they were saying. Staying alert, he strolled over to the far bed, eyed the door beyond.
“What’s in there?”
“Bathroom, frion,” said the tall boy. “You got to take a leak, be our guests. But watch your booties. The pot leaks, too.” He laughed again, studiously indifferent but unable to hide the suggestive twinge of sudden anxiety the sergeant detected in his voice.
“Thanks.” Cardenas hefted his pistol and pushed through the door.
He was ready for another boy; for a gun, for a stick. He was not ready for the two hundred kilos of distilled lightning and muscle that exploded in his face. The jaguar slammed him to the ground, knocking the wind out of him. Gold dust danced in his flickering vision as he struggled to aim his weapon. The big cat swatted it across the room where the shorter boy rushed to recover it.
Cardenas found himself flat on his back, staring up into the jaguar’s face. It snarled, canines that were proportionately the largest of all the big cats a scant half meter from his face. If he moved, if he twitched, it could rip out his esophagus like so much garden hose.
“I ought to kill you right now,” the jaguar growled. “A little bit at a time. Bite off your ears first. Or maybe your works. Chew ‘em up slow.” Nearby, the smaller boy laughed uproariously.
“How’d you find us?” the jaguar asked. When Cardenas didn’t reply a huge paw descended to completely cover the lower half of his face. Claws contracted, digging into the sides of his cheeks. Excruciating pain shot through the sergeant as his jawbones were ground together.
“He’s scared shitless.” The taller boy leaned casually against the wall. “He ain’t gonna tell us nothing like that.”
“You’re right,” said a new voice. The jaguar eased off Cardenas. He sat up slowly, his whole body aching from the collision. The big cat squatted on its hindquarters nearby, tail switching nervously back and worth. Its eyes were now closed.
From the bedroom behind the now open door a woman emerged. A girl, really, Cardenas thought. She was slim, even skinny, with a faded, pinched kind of prettiness too much time spent on the streets imparts to certain children. She wore a peculiar silvery suit with the hood pushed back and integral gloves and boots. Hair the color of dirty oak was cut short and bound up on the crown of her head in a samurai knot that more than anything else resembled an antique shaving brush.
She nodded toward the big cat. “I’ve put him in sleep mode, but I can wake him up fast if you make me. Jaguars are light sleepers.”
Cardenas staggered to his feet. The younger boy had the pistol trained on him. “Then I’ll be careful to move slowly. You’re not very hospitable to visitors.”
“You’re no visitor,” she snapped. “You’re a frion, a cop, the chill. How’d you find us so fast?”
Cardenas responded with an accusation. “You were the ones at the pet shop and the cockfight. You caused the trouble.”
She shook her head, pushed out her lower lip. “They caused the trouble, exploiting animals like that. Not me. Goddamn Neurologic components.”
“Magifying animals is legal in the Southwest, except for the Californias. You may not like it, but that’s the way it is. Magifying exotics is illegal, though. But you don’t kill the violators. Turn them in and let the law take care of them.”
“I’d rather take care of them myself.” She indicated the jaguar.
“When we found Chimu in San Juana he was being used in a sex show. I won’t tell you how. The people who’d had him magified were making him do things no cat was designed to do, making him move in ways no cat was designed to move. Twisting his bones and muscles out of position, hurting him.” She grinned wolfishly. “We freed him to react naturally.”
“It hasn’t come to my attention that anyone in San Juana has been killed by a jaguar.”
Her smile lingered. “After I let Chimu null the two pendejos who’d been mistreating him he was hungry. They never fed him properly, either. So I let him eat them. Jaguars are very thorough diners. When he’d finished there was nothing much left for anyone to get excited about. Poetic justice.”
“You strike me as a very bright young lady. Too bright to be messing around with something like this. How do you program the animals to react and talk like that?”
“I don’t. I won’t program anything. But I’ll borrow. See.” She touched one switch among the many on her right sleeve. Almost instantly the jaguar was on its feet, alert and awake.
The girl raised her left arm. The jaguar mimicked the gesture perfectly with its left foreleg. She made a circle with her hand in the air. So did the big cat. When she tilted her head to one side, the animal did likewise. When she took a swipe in Cardenas’s direction, he felt the simultaneous whoosh of air as the cat’s claws missed him by centimeters.
“I don’t work through chips,” she told him proudly. “I’ve got a steady-state broadcast unit in the suit that records the actions of my muscles. The animal’s controller receives the information and transposes my movements accordingly. My suit reads my movements and gestures and conveys them to the broadcast unit, which passes the action digitally to the Neurologic controller in the animal, which matches my movements gesture for gesture. Unlike in the old paraplegic outfits, the stim filaments in my suit are coded for pickup, not distribution.”
“Pretty clever,” Cardenas admitted. “So the animals are only imitating your movements, your gestures, and not reacting to some embedded program.”
“That’s it, frion.”
“So they haven’t killed anyone. You have.”
Her smiled vanished. “You’re awfully stupid for such an old cop, but then you were awfully stupid for coming here in the first place. You still haven’t answered my question.” She straightened and grabbed for him. The jaguar rose on its hind legs and wrapped a paw around Cardenas’s right hand. “Tell me, or I’ll have Chimu pull off your fingers one at a time.”
He could feel the pressure, as if his hand had been encased in a heated vise. “Take it easy. What difference does it make?”
She approached and pushed her face close to his own. The jaguar was right next to her, its fangs wet and sharp. “That’s my business.” She touched a control and when her hands started going through his pockets, the jaguar did not mimic the gestures.
She found his wallet, which she tossed to the tall boy, and his police vorec, which she gave to the shorter one. Eventually she found the slip of paper containing the directions.
“Mira this, Twotrick.” The tall boy took the paper.
“Mierdel Okolona letterhead.” He wadded the paper into a ball and threw it aside.
“I guess I’m not surprised. It’s my fault. I should’ve expected it.” Her hands balled into tiny fists.
Cardenas felt the bones in his fingers grinding together as the jaguar’s paw contracted. He wanted to scream but clenched his teeth and sucked it in.
“No more of this,” she muttered. She looked and sounded suddenly tired. “No more.”
“Hey, Gagrito!” The shorter boy looked up from where he’d been playing with Cardenas’s vorec. “You ain’t giving up, are you? The game’s just getting good and started.”
“Ball it, Gluey,” she shot back. “It’s no fun if they know. But we can still endgame, verdad?” The shorter boy jammed the vorec in his pocket as he hopped off the bed, nodding eagerly.
When she looked back at Cardenas there was a horrific blankness in her eyes, as if he were no longer there. He knew that look but had never encountered it before on the face of one quite so young.
“We’re leaving.” Her voice had grown distant, surreal. “You can stay and keep Chimu company.”
“Now wait….”
She held up her balled fist and he winced at the increased pressure on his hand. “My range is about twenty meters. As soon as we’re on our way down in the elevator the connection will be broken. Then Chimu will be on his own. So will you.”
They left hurriedly, Gluey favoring Cardenas with a last nervous giggle as he shut the door behind him. The sergeant stood there gazing at the jaguar, his right hand throbbing with pain in the animal’s grip. It could be counted on to react suddenly and instinctively when the girl’s control was released. Striking at its eyes might buy him a second or two, Cardenas thought tensely. Probably the three ninlocos were already stepping into the battered, rickety elevator. He had only seconds left in which to do something, anything.
The jaguar’s posture, standing erect on its hind legs, was completely foreign to the animal. For the moment it was being ordered to hold on to him, and that was all.
So he kicked it as hard as he could between its hind legs.
The gesture was remarkably productive. The paw clutching his right hand let go and the animal dropped and rolled onto its back. Cardenas sprang for the door and wrenched at the handle as the big cat yowled thunderously behind him. The handle wouldn’t budge.
They’d locked it from the outside.
Already the jaguar was scrambling back onto its feet. Having previously been introduced to the taste of human flesh Cardenas doubted it would stop with just killing him. Not that the final disposition of his corpus would matter to him once he’d been eviscerated. He looked around wildly, then sprinted to his right even as the cat was digging into the floor with its claws, gathering itself to leap.
The cheap plastic window shattered as Cardenas flew through it, arms crossed protectively in front of his face, the frame snapping like cardboard, the fragments of inexpensive transparency cutting his hands and arms. The big cat, never hesitating, followed.
The cable he’d noticed from inside the room felt like it was going to slice through his armpits as he slammed against it and convulsively curled his arms, his body and legs swinging wildly five floors above the alley. He felt a claw rip his pants leg. Screeching, yowling, twisting, the jaguar plummeted earthward. The last sound it made was an audible thud as it struck the unyielding pavement far below.
Cardenas dangled suspended in the sweltering night air, his muscles aching. He could feel warm wetness beginning to trickle from beneath both arms. Across the alley a window opened and a face appeared. He yelled in its direction. Dimly aware that while his lips were parted and moving, no sound was emerging, he tried again.
The window slammed shut, the face disappeared. Cursing, he began to pull himself hand over hand along the cable, heading for the building to which it was attached. There was a roof there, lower than the room from which he’d so precipitously exited. His progress was agonizingly slow, but steady.
VII
They wanted him admitted to the hospital but had to settle for patching him up. Via vorec he supplied the night shift with a thorough description of the three ninlocos as well as their modus. Then he called Sisu Okolona to warn her that the trio now had her address. Having spoken of “ending the game” the girl called Gagrito might decide that the best way to punish Neurologic was to try to take some sort of revenge on its corporate head. Okolona assured him she would take the necessary precautions and not to concern himself because her home was quite inviolable. An army of ninlocos couldn’t force their way in.
Thus reassured somewhat, he allowed the biosurges to go back to work on him. They repaired the bones of his right hand, though it would be in a cast for some weeks, and sealed the wounds beneath his arms where the cable had cut. By midafternoon of the following day he’d p
ulled rank to get himself discharged.
The first thing he wanted to do was talk to Okolona in person again. He should have called for assistance when he first saw the gate in the cactus fence slightly ajar, but decided not to. Probably it simply hadn’t shut all the way after its last use and Okolona had assured him with confidence the previous night of her home’s impregnability. Such technocratic xanadus generally were.
No servant appeared to greet him, but when he identified himself the door clicked open to grant admittance. Only when he stepped inside did he feel the gun in his back.
A familiar giggle sounded behind him. “You oughta be dead, frion. Why ain’t you dead?”
“I’m quicker than you think, niño.”
“Not quicker than your own gun, I bet. Waft.” Cardenas started forward.
They were all in the big room that overlooked the river. Sisu Okolona sat on the big couch, with her edgy paramour close by. Twotrick leaned against an exquisite Victorian sidebar, picking at his nails with a titanium stiletto. Her silver suit dirty and greasy, the girl Gagrito stood confronting the couple on the couch.
The manservant who had greeted Cardenas on his last visit lay sprawled in a hallway nearby, his blood filling the grout lines between the black pyrite tiles.
The girl glared at him. If she wasn’t insane she was borderline, Cardenas saw instantly. There would be no reasoning with her.
“You officious prick. What’ve you done with Chimu?”
“He’s not hungry anymore,” Cardenas told her quietly, looking for an opening.
“Mierde.” She turned back to the couch. The mistress of the grand house looked utterly self-possessed, as always. “That’s the last animal whose death you’re going to be responsible for.”
“I am not responsible for the death of any animal,” replied Okolona tightly. “Neurologic only builds the components, the majority of which are given over to perfectly legitimate uses.”
“Legitimate, yeah. Like making hamsters jump through flaming hoops and parakeets recite Shakespeare. Forcing animals into unnatural activities that age them prematurely. You cold, heartless bitch; you wouldn’t know a ‘legitimate’ animal if it jumped up and bit you on the ass.” The fury of her response startled Cardenas.