There were murals of the Christian hell, flames leaping like clawed fingers over a procession of screaming, naked sinners. At one end of the room, where the figures on the walls seemed to blend with the denizens of the bar in smoke and noise, a girl danced on a rotating platform. A cupped petal of black glass scythed around with the platform and each time it passed between audience and dancer, the girl was gone and a skeleton danced grinning in her place.
“This place is called All Flesh Will Perish,” yelled Trepp above the noise as we forced our way in through the crowd. She pointed to the girl and then to the black glass rings on her fingers. “Where I got the idea for these. Great effect, isn’t it?”
I got drinks, quickly.
The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell — and heaven — on earth.
“Sounds a bit epic, Angin Chandra’s outward-bound valediction to the people sort of thing,” shouted Trepp. “But I take your point.”
Evidently the words that had been running through my mind were also running out of my mouth. If it was a quote, I didn’t know where it was from. Certainly not a Quellism; she would have slapped anyone making that kind of speech.
“Thing is,” Trepp was still yelling, “you’ve got ten days.”
Reality tilts, flows sideways in gobs of flame-coloured light. Music. Motion and laughter. The rim of a glass under my teeth. A warm thigh pressed against my own which I think is Trepp’s, but when I turn another woman with long straight black hair and crimson lips is grinning at me. Her look of open invitation reminds me vaguely of something I’ve seen recently—
Street scene:
Tiered balconies on either side, tongues of light and sound splashed out onto pavements from the myriad tiny bars, the street itself knotted with people. I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats.
There was something I had forgotten. Something clouded.
Something impor—
“You can’t fucking believe something like that,” Trepp burst out. Or in, into my skull at the moment I had almost crystallised what I—
Was she doing it deliberately? I couldn’t even remember what it was I’d believed so strongly about cats a moment ago.
Dancing, somewhere.
More meth, eye-shot on a street corner, leaning against a wall. Someone walked past, called something out to us. I blinked and tried to look.
“Fuck, hold still will you!”
“What’d she say?”
Trepp peeled back my eyelids again, frowning with concentration.
“Called us both beautiful. Fucking junkie, probably after a handout.”
In a wood-panelled toilet somewhere, I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me. Or as if I was waiting for someone else to emerge from behind the seamed features. My hands were braced on the filthy metal basin below, and the epoxy strips bonding the thing to the wall emitted minute tearing sounds under my weight.
I had no idea how long I’d been there.
I had no idea where there was. Or how many theres we had already been through tonight.
None of this seemed to matter because …
The mirror didn’t fit its frame — there were pointed jags dug into the plastic edges holding the star-shaped centre precariously in place.
Too many edges, I muttered to myself. None of this fucking fits together.
The words seemed significant, like an accidental rhythm and rhyme in ordinary speech. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to repair this mirror. I was going to cut my fingers to shreds, just trying. Fuck that.
I left Ryker’s face in the mirror, and staggered back out to a table piled high with candles where Trepp was sipping at a long ivory pipe.
“Micky Nozawa? Are you serious?”
“Fuck, yes.” Trepp nodded vigorously. “The Fist of the Fleet, right? Seen it four times at least. New York experia chains get a lot of imported colonial stuff. It’s getting to be quite chic. That bit where he takes the harpoonist out with the flying kick. You feel it right down to the bone, the way he delivers that fucking kick. Beautiful. Poetry in motion. Hey, you know he did some holoporn stuff when he was younger.”
“Bullshit. Micky Nozawa never did porn. He didn’t need to.”
“Who said anything about need. The couple of bimbettes he was playing around with, I would have played around with them for free.”
“Bull. Shit.”
“I swear to God. That sleeve with the sort of Caucasian nose and eyes, the one he wrote off in that cruiser wreck. Real early stuff.”
There was a bar, where the walls and ceiling were hung with absurd hybrid musical instruments and the shelves behind the bar were stacked solid with antique bottles, intricately worked statuettes and other nameless junk. The noise level was comparatively low and I was drinking something that didn’t taste as if it was doing my system too much immediate harm. There was a faint musk in the air and small trays of sweetmeats on the tables.
“Why the fuck do you do it?”
“What?” Trepp shook her head muzzily. “Keep cats? I like ca—”
“Work for fucking Kawahara. She’s a fucking abortion of a human being, a fucked up Meth cunt not worth the slag of a stack, why do you—”
Trepp grabbed the arm I was gesturing with, and for a moment I thought there was going to be violence. The neurachem surged soggily.
Instead, she took the arm and draped it affectionately over her own shoulders, pulling my face closer to her own. She blinked owlishly at me.
“Listen.”
There was a longish pause. I listened, while Trepp frowned with concentration, took a long slug from her glass and set it down with exaggerated care. She wagged a finger at me.
“Judge not lest ye be judged,” she slurred.
Another street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.
Above, the stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.
Something. Wrong here.
Alien. Not a single pattern I recognised. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms, and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside, massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians returned. I thought I could see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us …
“Whoa.” Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. “What you looking for up there, grasshopper?”
Not my sky.
It’s getting bad.
In another toilet, painfully brightly lit, I’m trying to stuff some powder Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry and it keeps falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle flushes behind me and I glance up into the big mirror.