I stepped back and gave him the space to get off the shop front he was pinned to.
“Where I come from, you don’t go into people’s heads on the street,” I offered by way of explanation. But he’d already sensed my retreat from the confrontation and he just made a gesture with his thumb which I assumed was obscene.
“I give a fuck where you’re from? Fucking grasshopper? Get out of my face.”
I left him there, wondering idly as I crossed the street if there was any moral difference between him and the genetic designers who had built Merge Nine into Miriam Bancroft’s sleeve.
I paused on a corner and bent my head to kindle a cigarette.
Mid afternoon. My first of the day.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As I dressed in the mirror that night, I suffered the hard-edged conviction that someone else was wearing my sleeve and that I had been reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car behind the eyes.
Psychoentirety rejection, they call it. Or just fragmenting. It’s not unusual to get some tremors, even when you’re an experienced sleeve-changer, but this was the worst case I’d had for years. For long moments I was literally terrified to have a detailed thought, in case the man in the mirror noticed my presence. Frozen, I watched him adjust the Tebbit knife in its neurospring sheath, pick up the Nemex and the Philips gun one by one and check the load of each weapon. The slug guns had both come equipped with cheap Fibregrip holsters that enzyme-bonded to clothing wherever they were pressed. The man in the mirror settled the Nemex under his left arm where it would be hidden by his jacket and stowed the Philips gun in the small of his back. He practised snatching the guns from their holsters a couple of times, throwing them out at his reflection, but there was no need. The virtual practice discs had lived up to Clive’s promises. He was ready to kill someone with either weapon.
I shifted behind his eyes.
Reluctantly, he stripped off the guns and the knife and laid them once more on the bed. Then he stood for a while until the unreasonable feeling of nakedness had passed.
The weakness of weapons, Virginia Vidaura had called it, and from day one in Envoy training it was considered a cardinal sin to fall into it.
A weapon—any weapon—is a tool, she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Envoys.
In the ranks, Jimmy de Soto coughed his amusement. At the time he was speaking for most of us. Ninety per cent of Envoy intake came up through the Protectorate’s conventional forces, where weaponry generally held a status somewhere between that of toy and personal fetish. UN marines went everywhere armed, even on furlough.
Virginia Vidaura heard the cough and caught Jimmy’s eye.
“Mr. de Soto. You do not agree.”
Jimmy shifted, a little abashed at how he easily he had been picked out. “Well, ma’am. My experience has been that the more punch you carry, the better account you give of yourself.”
There was a faint of ripple of assent through the ranks. Virginia Vidaura waited until it subsided.
“Indeed,” she said, and held out the particle thrower in both hands. “This … device punches somewhat. Please come here and take it.”
Jimmy hesitated a little, but then pushed his way to the front and took the weapon. Virginia Vidaura fell back so that Jimmy was centre stage before the assembled trainees and stripped off her Corps jacket. In the sleeveless coveralls and spacedeck slippers, she looked slim and very vulnerable.
“You will see,” she said loudly, “that the charge setting is at Test. If you hit me, it will result in a small first degree burn, nothing more. I am at a distance of approximately five metres. I am unarmed. Mr. de Soto, would you care to attempt to mark me? On your call.”
Jimmy looked startled, but he duly brought the Sunjet up to check the setting, then lowered it and looked at the woman opposite him.
“On your call,” she repeated.
“Now,” he snapped.
It was almost impossible to follow. Jimmy was swinging the Sunjet as the word left his mouth, and in approved firefight fashion, he cut the charge loose before the barrel even reached the horizontal. The air filled with the particle thrower’s characteristic angry crackle. The beam licked out. Virginia Vidaura was not there. Somehow she had judged the angle of the beam to perfection, and ducked away from it. Somehow else, she had closed the five-metre gap by half and the jacket in her right hand was in motion. It wrapped around the barrel of the Sunjet and jerked the weapon aside. She was on Jimmy before he realised what had happened, batting the particle thrower away across the training room floor, tripping and tumbling him and bringing the heel of one palm gently to rest under his nose.
The moment stretched and then broke as the man next to me pursed his lips and blew out a long, low whistle. Virginia Vidaura bowed her head slightly in the direction of the sound, then bounced to her feet and helped Jimmy up.
“A weapon is a tool,” she repeated, a little breathlessly. “A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension—you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.”
Shrugging his way into the Inuit jacket, he met his own eyes in the mirror once more. The face he saw looking back was no more expressive than the mandroid at Larkin & Green. He stared impassively at it for a moment, then lifted one hand to rub at the scar under the left eye. A final glance up and down and I left the room with the sudden cold resurgence of control flooding through my nerves. Riding down in the elevator, away from the mirror, I forced a grin.
Got the frags, Virginia.
Breathe, she said. Move. Control.
And we went out into the street. The Hendrix offered me a courteous good evening as I stepped through the main doors, and across the street my tail emerged from a tea-house and drifted along parallel to me. I walked for a couple of blocks, getting the feel of the evening and wondering whether to lose him. The half-hearted sunlight had persisted for most of the day and the sky was more or less unclouded, but it still wasn’t warm. According to a map I’d called up from the Hendrix, Licktown was a good dozen and a half blocks south. I paused on a corner, signalled an autocab down from the prowl lane above and saw my tail doing the same as I climbed aboard.
He was beginning to annoy me.
The cab curved away southwards. I leaned forward and passed a hand over the visitors’ blurb panel.
“Welcome to Urbline services,” said a smooth female voice. “You are linked to the Urbline central datastack. Please state the information you require.”
“Are there any unsafe areas in Licktown?”
“The zone designated Licktown is generally considered to be unsafe in its entirety,” said the datastack blandly. “However, Urbline services guarantee carriage to any destination within the Bay City limits and—”
“Yeah. Can you give me a street reference for the highest incidence of violent criminality in the Licktown area?”
There was a brief pause while the datahead went down rarely used channels.
“Nineteenth Street, the blocks between Missouri and Wisconsin show fifty-three incidences of organic damage over the last year. One hundred seventy-seven prohibited substance arrests, one hundred twenty-two with incidence of minor organic damage, two hun—”
“That’s fine. How far is it from Jerry’s Closed Quarters, Mariposa and San Bruno?”