Fortunately the chute was so crowded that the meatie didn’t risk coming after them. They slapped down at the Markt level safe and sound . . . except for being naked and having a gouge in the back of Darla’s neck.
“Let me see it, sweets,” said Whitey. It was a round, deeply abraded spot half an inch across, still bleeding. Whitey had surprised the rat while its microprobes were still mapping out the main nerve paths of Darla’s spine. Some of her hair had matted into the wound. It was starting to scab over, but Darla was turning limp. The rat had probably shot her up with something. People were staring at them; full nudity was relatively rare in Einstein, and Darla had blood all over her shoulders.
“Get me some blocker, Whitey,” mumbled Darla, stumbling a bit. “Everything’s lookin at me funny.”
“Clear.” He steered her down the long arcade past the Markt stands and shops, heading for a health club called the Tun. Just when he thought he’d made it, a nicely dressed realwoman blocked his way. She had silver-blonde hair and big shoulderpads. Her handsome face was trembling with anger.
“What do you think you’re doing with that poor girl, ridgeback! Do you want help, dear?”
Darla—drugged, bloody, nude—peered up at the realwoman and shook her head no.
“I’m takin care of her already,” said Whitey. Three more steps and they’d be in the Tun with friends and a medix, and Darla could crash and he could lotion her wound and—
“Let her go, or I call the Gimmie.” The realwoman took Darla’s arm and began trying to muscle her away from Whitey. There was no telling what her plans for Darla really were. Whitey shrugged, released his hold on Darla, and shoved the woman as hard as he could. She tumbled to the ground and skidded down the hall. Whitey hustled Darla into the Tun.
Charles Freck was manning the door. He was an older guy, a real spacehead, and a good friend of Whitey and Darla. He wore his long gray hair in a ponytail, and his rugged face was cleanshaven. He was clothed in a loose pair of living paisley imipolex shorts, and he wore tiny green mirrorshades contact amps over his pupils. This made his eyes look as if the vitreous humor had been replaced with light-bathed seawater.
“My, how bum,” he said primly. He’d been standing out of sight and watching Whitey’s tussle over Darla. In each of his dancing eyes, the tiny, variable dot at the center was bright instead of dark. “I’ll turn on the zapper.” A glowing gold curtain filled the door. “OD?”
“Rat poison. We got down with a meatie, and the rat crawled out of his skull and bit Darla on the neck. Rat had a zombie box for her. Look where it bit.” He pushed some of Darla’s hair aside.
“Rat poison,” mused Charles Freck. “That’d probably be ketamine. A pop of beta-endorphin’ll fix that toot sweet. Let’s just go in the gym and check on the medix.”
He took Darla’s other arm, and helped Whitey march her down the hall. Darla was moving like she was half merged, and when she breathed it sounded like snoring. “Big,” muttered Darla. “Big throne. Oscar Mayer, king of the ratfood. His giant rubber crown.” She was hallucinating.
The Tun gymnasium was a huge cube of space, painted white all over. Energetic thuddy music played, and holos of handsome people gogo-exercised to the beat. There were a handful of actual people, too; two women on a weight machine, a couple of guys up on the trapezes, some people wrestling on the mats, and a woman riding a bike around and around the sharply banked velodrome that ran along the huge gym’s edges.
Charles Freck led them out from under the velodrome to the snackbar island in the gym’s center. He touched the white probe of the medix to the edge of Darla’s wound and peered attentively at the readout.
“Even so. Ketamine. Here.” He punched a code into the dispenser, and a syrette of betendorf popped out. “Whitey?”
Whitey injected the ketamine blocker into Darla’s biceps. “I’ll take some snap.”
“Even so.” Freck handed Whitey a packet of snap crystals. Whitey opened the packet and tossed the contents onto his tongue. The crystals snapped and sputtered, releasing the energizing fumes of cocaine freebase. He breathed deep and felt things around him slow down. The last hour had been one long jangle—Mooney shooting at him, Darla sharing him, the rat and the meatie, the realwoman’s Gimmie threat—but now, thanks to the snap, he could sit aside from it all and feel good about how well he’d handled things. Darla’s turgor was returning, too. He maneuvered her onto one of the barstools and bent her head forward.
“Hold still, Darla, and we’ll fix this now.”
Charles Freck cleaned the wound, moving slowly and fastidiously. He used a laser shear to snip off the rough edges. Slight smell of burnt Darla meat. Charles took a flat, whitish steak out of the fridge and carefully cut out a piece to match the hole in Darla’s neck.
“What’s that?” Whitey wanted to know.
“UDT. Undifferentiated tissue. It’s neutralized so she can gene-invade it.” He tapped and snipped, pinned and patted. Took out some gibberlin and rubbed it in. “That’ll do it, unless the rat put in something biological. I didn’t know Darla went for meaties.” He smiled merrily and poured himself a little glass of something.
Darla lifted her head and looked around. “I want a bath,” she said. “Like in pure interferon. Ugh. That’s the last time I call that creepshow Bill Ding’s Pink Party.”
“So that was it,” said Whitey. “Why didn’t you admit it?”
“I didn’t know for sure that someone was going to answer my spot,” said Darla. “I said I’d fuff for merge. And then when Ken showed up I thought you’d be . . . ” She looked down at her soiled bod. “How wrong I was. I’m taking a bath.”
“You mean if we’d left the camera on, we would have been on Bill Ding?” said Whitey, briefly enthused. “You should have told me, Darla, ‘cause we were gigahot. How many people watch Bill Ding anyway?”
The door signal chimed just then. Charles tossed off his potion with an abrupt, birdlike snap of his head. “If it’s the woman you decked, Whitey, I’ll tell her Whitey says come in to cut a gigahot four-way Bill Ding fuff vid.”
“Don’t do that,” said Whitey, his eyes rachetting. With the dirty blond matted hair running down to his bare ass, he looked subhuman. The good part of the snaprush was already over, and events were crowding in on him again. He kept rerunning the last hour’s brutal changes through his mindscreen with the setting turned to Loop (High Speed), looking for a pattern that might predict what was coming next. Mooney was, he realized just then, as he looked into his mind, in the midst of a conversation with someone with a very clear booming bass voice. A robot voice. Mooney was talking on and on with a bopper somewhere. Whitey couldn’t tell if it was vizzy or close link, he’d missed something, with all this kilp coming down so heavy so fast.
“Prerequisites,” Mooney was saying. “What’s the difference between prerequisites, perquisites, and perks, eh, Cobb? I mean that’s where the realpeople are at. Maybe you’re right, I can’t decide just like that. Berenice. And you say that’s an Ed Poe name? Wavy. I’ll come out to the trade center right now . . . “