[Shadowrun 05] - Changeling Read online

  Peter felt cold and wanted to leave.

  “Mirium’s got it bad.”

  “What bad?”

  “Whatever. No names. Names. Just listen to her. There it is.”

  “Did she really put… a baby…?”

  “What can I say? She says she did. Whether she did or not, it’s sure there, in her head.”

  “How?”

  “How does it happen? Why’s she talking to herself? Don’t know. Chips. Slotted wrong from birth. Loneliness…”

  “Loneliness?”

  “Sure. You ever been really alone?”

  “Yeah,” said Peter. He spoke the single word slowly. He had the strong feeling Eddy wanted to draw him into something.

  “And did you ever start talking to yourself? To yourself? Not like Mirium, like, but just speaking out loud. To hear a voice. To test your ideas. To talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Speed. Now imagine that no one ever comes back to talk with you. At least you’ve got yourself. You get kind of used to talking without people around. You get better at it. Until finally, finally, you don’t even think it’s strange. It’s the way you talk. During that time you’re driving people away from you. You’re talking to yourself, they don’t want to talk to you, you’re strange. Your habit is a liability. Liability. Liability. People, all people start to ignore you. They don’t want to hear your ranting. They don’t want to see see see you. They don’t want to notice you’re there. They don’t know how to deal with you so they don’t. Then what have you got left?”

  Peter didn’t want to think about this line of thought anymore. “Do you know a place where I can stay?”

  “Well, I’ve got a doss, a little nook in an alley….”

  “No. A hotel.”

  “You got cash?”

  “Some,” Peter lied.

  “No hotel here’s going to take you. Everyone’s afraid.”

  “I know.” He glanced over at the woman. Would he end up like her? Isn’t that why he’d left home? To avoid being alone?

  Should he go back to his father?

  No. Not like this. Not after that bold proclamation he’d left on the telecom screen. He couldn’t run back, tail between his legs, the very same night.

  Dr. Landsgate?

  No. Peter had to do it himself. He didn’t want to be weak. Or, at least, he didn’t want his father or Dr. Landsgate to see him as weak.

  “Listen, kid,” said Fast Eddy. “You’re new to the scene? Right? Right? You don’t know the score. Score. I do. I do. I know it. I can help you, but I need your help, see?” Eddy’s body rattled wildly for a moment, then settled down. “You’re big, you got the bod. I need someone around to handle the muscle—”

  “I don’t think—”

  “You may have noticed noticed my condition. Bad wiring. Reflexes. Wired reflexes. I got one of the first sets. A black-market prototype. Back in thirty. I was twenty years old and I was red-hot. For eight years I was amazing. No one ever knew I was around. I was fast. Quiet. Someone coming? Phht! I was gone. Gone, gone, gone. A ghost. But last year the wiring started going bad. Neural connections wearing away or something. Hey, I’m not a lit, you know. I don’t know this stuff. I just want to use it. Use it. Actually, it was going before that. And, people would say, Eddy, what’s with the twitch? Just every once in a while, I didn’t even notice it. I’d say, Nothing, nothing. What’re you talking about, and I’d ignore it. But last last last year, sonny, I got slammed, slammed hard by some guards at Ares security. I just lost it, right there on the job. My body started to flop like a fish all over the floor. These guards find me like a water spirit trapped in a concrete block, you know, slamming my head against the floor trying to get out. I didn’t know what the frag was going on.

  “I’m telling you all this up front so you know what you’re getting into. But but but I also got to tell you I think we’d make a great team.

  “I don’t go bad often, and if I had someone like you around, I bet it wouldn’t happen so much. It’s my nerves, see? It’s my nerves, see? I get nervous if something’s going to go wrong, and the nerves cycle through my cyberware, and it makes me react fast, gets my adrenaline whizzing, even though there’s nothing to panic about. And since I know there’s nothing to panic about, I panic that I’m out of control. It feeds my cyberware another cycle of trouble, and there’s this adrenaline feedback that keeps looping back on itself. This ain’t a fact, by the way. It’s my own own own theory.” Fast Eddy smiled proudly.

  “I don’t think so,” said Peter. “I’m not… looking to steal. I have some work to do.”

  “Work? After the IBM Tower went down? Where?”

  “It’s my own work. Research.”

  Eddy eyed him curiously. “Research?”

  “Yes.”

  Eddy lifted his hands as if surrendering. “Whatever. Whatever. Whatever.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing. I just just didn’t know they were taking trolls on at corps now. For scientists. I mean, that’s what I, what I, what I thought you meant.” His eyes widened and his head jerked once left and then right. “Oh! You mean they’re experimenting on you. Good biz. As long as the tech doesn’t go too deep.”

  Peter placed his hands carefully on the table. “No. I’m doing my own research. Now, please, go away. I want to eat my dinner.”

  Eddy looked Peter up and down. “You got it, Profezzur. I’ll get out of here. But I’m all over the place. If you think you want a partner, just look me up.”

  Fast Eddy rose from the table and headed toward the door. As he opened it, he turned to give Peter one last look, then shuddered wildly. The next moment, he was gone, vanished into the warm autumn night.

  Peter didn’t sleep for fear of having his bag stolen or being killed while unconscious. He stayed in the C&E all night, and when dawn broke he was back on the street. A flock of birds flew dark against a pale purple sky. They cried out, guiding each other and giving purpose to their flight.

  He walked to the lake front, having nowhere else to go until the employment agencies opened. There he stood, watching as the top of the bloated sun was just coming over the flat horizon of Lake Michigan. The impossibly orange sun was blinding as it cut the low clouds hanging over the lake into patterns of gold and deep shadow.

  Peter stayed in Uptown, walking the streets all day as he looked for work. On several street corners be noticed groups of men and women gathered for day labor, waiting to be picked up by trucks. But large signs stated that no metahumans would be hired. Although some of the workers eyed Peter with suspicion as he passed by, many more were frightened. Anyone who got too near a troll these days risked getting a bomb thrown at him.

  He passed some stores whose windows displayed yellowed help-wanted signs. Metahumans weren’t being excluded from the work force when the signs had gone up, but when Peter walked through the door of such establishments, the strained expressions of the store owners clearly indicated that times had changed.

  He walked and walked, and found nothing.

  After two days he was exhausted enough, even though fearful, to fall asleep in any doorway. After five days the fear dissipated and sleeping on the street felt normal.

  After his long days of looking for work, Peter would go to the lake front, find a tree to sit under, and start up his portable. He started with the basics of reading. The lessons went slowly, for it seemed that as soon as he turned to a new section of a chip, he’d forget what he’d just learned. The vocabulary just didn’t stick.

  One night he had chosen a young elm for his sitting place while he doggedly reviewed the primer. The sun had traveled far to the west. Behind him the lights of the city were coming on, their glow like an oppressive, unnatural sunset.

  The light of the portable’s screen was pale blue, but blurred to black because of Peter’s thermographic vision. The portable quickly radiated red over the screen, as if it were an arcane device of magic.

  He knew there was magic i
n the world. Magic such as Thomas healing him with shamanistic methods and magicians casting balls of fire. As he sounded the letters formed of pixels on the screen, he felt that he, too, had entered into a kind of magical communion. The pixels formed letters, the letters words, the words sentences, the sentences paragraphs, the paragraphs pages. Twenty-six letters, doubled for capital and small letters, mixed with eight punctuation symbols, letting him tap into an entire universe of ideas. Sixty symbols total, and he could learn about almost anything and someday use the same symbols to write his own research, his own cure to become human, pure human, again.

  Peter felt oddly content. If nothing else, he could learn. He still had enough money to survive a while longer. He had his chips. He had the night. For hours he read happily sounding out the words carefully.

  Then a beam of light fell upon him. He turned around to seek the source, the light blinding him.

  As Peter shielded his eyes, he made out the dark outlines of two cops in metro uniforms standing a few meters away. Each man held a small box, and one was shining the power flashlight on Peter.

  “And what have we here?” one of them said in a deep, amused voice. “A lit-dip troll? What are you doing there, troggie? Playing with someone else’s toys?”

  6

  “Reading anything interesting?” one cop said sarcastically. Peter sensed something bad was about to happen, but he didn’t know what. It was as if he’d wandered into the scene of a trideo show, for which no one had given him the script. When he didn’t answer, the two guards lost their sense of humor at the same instant, as if disappointed that Peter didn’t know how to play along. “Enough yakkety,” said the first. “Put the portable down and get your hands up.”

  “Why?” Peter said, knowing he was making things worse, but so dazed by events that he couldn’t stop himself.

  The first cop raised the hand holding the small box and an arc of sea blue lightning slammed into Peter.

  For one horrible moment he was blinded.

  When the moment ended, he was sprawled on the ground, the muscles of his neck seeming to squeeze up against one another. His right arm was shivering, as if very cold, and his face rested against the ground. He saw the comfortable glow of the screen a short distance away.

  “No more trouble, right?” the second cop said.

  The pain receded and Peter raised his head. “Why are you doing this?”

  The cops were laughing again, and one of them picked up his bag and began to rifle through the optical chips inside. “Must’ve rolled a student,” the cop said matter-of-factly.

  “Hey, keep down,” said the second cop to Peter. Silhouetted against the dark sky in their stiff, armored uniforms, the cops looked almost mythically large from Peter’s prone angle of vision. Instead of two bullies, they might have been living embodiments of the protectors of the innocent that Peter had always imagined policemen to be.

  “I didn’t steal the…. It’s mine. The portable and the chips are mine.”

  The cops laughed again. “You know, any trog just a bit brighter than you would at least have been smart enough to say that someone paid you to pick them up from a store.”

  “Hey, here’s an ID,” the other one said, “Peter Clarris. Poor son of a bitch.”

  “That’s me. I’m Peter Clarris.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “lam.”

  No sooner did he speak than brilliant blue static filled his vision. A warm buzz shot through his muscles, and suddenly be was flat on his back. Peter gulped in air, unable to stop.

  “Shut up. Just shut up,” one of the cops said.

  The fit of hyperventilation passed, and it occurred to Peter that the weapons these cops were using on him could surely kill a pure human. Did the weapons have different settings, or was he just lucky? Or did they have special ones just for trolls?

  As his breathing calmed, he made out the two men muttering to one another.

  “Should we take him in?”

  “Ah, frag it. How about he tries to escape?”

  “Sounds like a hum to me.”

  Peter realized the cops intended to kill him. He could make a run for it, but he didn’t trust his still-stiff muscles to move fast enough to escape. “My DNA scan will show you…” he began, careful not to move a muscle, not to be a threat.

  “Looks like he’s making a break for it.”

  Peter didn’t know what to do. All the rules had fallen away and he was standing only on thin air. “I’m not really a troll…” he said weakly.

  The next moment Peter’s muscles felt ripped by countless sharp pins. He rolled wildly to escape the pain, but it followed him everywhere. It started and stopped over and over again. Soon he lost all sense of time, and it seemed that he had lived his whole life under this blade of agony.

  Then just as suddenly the pain vanished.

  He couldn’t move, but he knew he was lying on his back, his fingers curled tightly. A loud hum filled his ears so that he could hear nothing else. He waited, paralyzed, for the next attack to come. But it did not.

  Daring only to move his eyes, he let them search around for the cops.

  First his eyes found the tree he had been leaning against, still lit softly by the portable’s screen. He also saw dark holes in the bark that hadn’t been there before. It looked as if the bark had been chewed off.

  Then he saw the cops. Their hands were in the air, both of them turning their heads slightly, but seeming fearful of turning fully around to look behind them.

  From somewhere Peter heard shouts. At first he couldn’t make out the words. But as the buzz in his ears finally cleared, he heard a voice say, “…so just take the bag and let’s call it square.” He recognized the voice, but could not place it.

  “Sure, sure,” said one cop.

  “Now move it. Take the bag and the portable and get. Quick!” This was followed by a loud burst of gunshots and a spray of bullets that slammed into the tree.

  “We’re gone!” shouted the other cop, stooping over to grab the portable and Peter’s bag. Then the two were off and running.

  For the third time that night Peter’s breathing returned to a normal pace.

  A warm shadow ran to him, then a face hovered over him. It twitched wildly, then settled down into a grin.

  Fast Eddy.

  “Hey, Prof, howzitgoin’?”

  Peter had expected somebody… better. Angry frustration bit into him. “You gave away everything I own.” He struggled to get up, but found his muscles still beyond his control.

  Eddy pulled back, hurt. “I just saved your life. What’s with you, chummer.”

  “Why didn’t you just shoot them?” Peter settled onto his back, unhappily resigned to his helplessness.

  “You don’t shoot cops, you don’t shoot cops. It’s part of the deal.”

  “Deal?”

  “Yeah,” Eddy snapped, obviously annoyed, “the deal. And if you knew about the deals, or had just just just the tiniest bit of thinking, you’d know that if you’re a troll you don’t wander around with a portable computer and expect the cops to leave you alone.”

  “But it’s mine.”

  Eddy dropped to his knees and brought his face to within centimeters of Peter’s.

  “You are a blood clot! You know that? You are blood clot. A little thing that gets caught up in the system and brings the whole thing to a crashing halt. Let me tell you what happens to a blood clot. All the blood gets stuck and jams up behind it, until there’s enough pressure to just shove the clot out of the vein. And then it’s dead!”

  Peter knew Eddy was wrong, but couldn’t remember the specifics so he just kept his mouth shut.

  “Now I put my my my neck out on the line for you. I’m not expecting lifelong gratitude, but I’m not expecting face!”

  “Sorry,” Peter said softly.

  “If you’re so hot, why didn’t you just take them on? Spirits, you’re a troll! Why didn’t you just nail them?”

  Embarrassm
ent made him speak awkwardly. “I don’t know how to fight.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t…”

  “I heard, I heard, I heard you. A baby! You’re just a little baby dropped out of the sky into the sprawl.”

  Peter resented the image, but he knew it was absolutely accurate.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter shouted.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I saw what was going on. I remembered you. I’m hoping it will endear endear endear me to you. I do want to work with you. Let’s go, they might come back. And bring friends.”

  Finding he could move a bit, Peter rolled over onto to his hands and knees. Then a dizziness gripped him, and he had to pause to get his balance.

  “You all right?”

  “No.”

  “Dumb question. Question. Sorry.”

  Peter stood up, slowly. It seemed an hour passed as he did so, and then, suddenly, he was on his feet.

  Eddy shoved a small gun, a small machine gun, its barrel still hot, into his leather jacket. “Let’s go.”

  The whole scene was no more than a shadowy blur as Peter let Eddy lead him along the asphalt path away from the lake front and back onto the streets of Chicago.

  7

  Peter picked through a garbage can behind the night club. Here on the far Westside people could afford not to finish their meals. Pushing aside a few empty vodka containers, he discovered a small plastic bag full of something soft and squishy. When he looked inside, he saw it was full of meat scraps. A feast.

  Looking down the alley to make sure no one had seen him, Peter smiled in delight at his find.

  He stuffed the plastic bag into a large canvas sack bed stolen from another gutter rat a few months back. For just a moment he tried to place the bum’s face, but couldn’t. As far as he knew the man was dead.