Only Forward Read online

  Zenda thinks I’m very brave for going into Red by myself. Partly, she’s right. But partly you just have to know how to fit in, how not to be fazed. If Darv or any of those ACIA suits poked their head in here they’d get the crap beaten out of them before they sat down, because they’d look like they didn’t belong.

  Look at me. Okay, so I’m wearing good clothes, but that’s not the point. Clothes are not an issue, Clothes cost nothing. It’s in the face. I don’t look like I’m dying for this mono journey to end, like I’m about to wet myself in fear. I don’t look like I’m disgusted with what I see. I look like the kind of guy who’d have a knife in your throat before you got halfway through giving him a hard time. I look like the kind of guy whose mother died in the street choking up Dopaz vomit. I look like the kind of guy who pimps his sister not just for the money, but because he hates her.

  I can look like a guy who belongs.

  I got off at Fuck Station Zero and weaved down a few backstreets. In Red they can’t be bothered to move the garbage around, never mind the buildings. In the real depths of Red, places like Hu district, there is garbage that has literally fossilised. Finding your way around is not a problem, assuming you know your way to start off with: there aren’t any maps. If you don’t know where you’re going you want to get the hell out of Red immediately, before something demoralising and possibly fatal happens to you.

  It had been a couple of months since I was last in Red, and I was relieved to see that BarJi was still functioning. The turnover of recreational establishments in Red is kind of high, what with gang war, arson and random napalming. BarJi has been running for almost six years now, which I suspect may be some kind of record. The reason is very simple. The reason is Ji.

  It’s always kind of a tense moment, sticking your head into a bar in Red Neighbourhood. You can take it as a given that there’ll be a fight in progress, but it’s less easy to predict what kind. Will it be fists, guns or chemical weapons that are involved? Is it a personal battle or a complete free-for-all? The fight in Ji’s was a very minor one of the knife variety, which made it feel like a church in spite of the grotesquely loud trash rock exploding out of the speakers.

  The reason? Ji.

  Ji is an old, well, friend, I guess. We met a long time ago when we were both involved in something. I may tell you about it sometime, if it’s relevant. He wasn’t living in Red then: he was living in Turn Again Neighbourhood, which is the second weirdest Neighbourhood I have ever set foot in. I have been in Turn twice, and there is no fucking way I am ever going there again.

  I’m not even going to talk about the weirdest Neighbourhood I’ve seen.

  Ji was a hard bastard even by Turn standards: in Red he is a king. Doped-up gangs in surrounding areas while away the hours tearing up and down streets in armoured cars, blasting the shit out of each other with anti-tank weapons and flamethrowing the pedestrians. When they get to Ji’s domain, they put the guns down and observe the speed limit until they’re safely out the other side. Through a series of carefully planned and hideously successful atrocities Ji has firmly established himself as someone you under no circumstances even think about fucking with. This makes him kind of a good contact to have in Red, especially as he owes me a few favours. I owe him a few too, but the kind of favours we owe each other aren’t complementary, and so they don’t cancel each other out. At least we don’t think they do: we’ve never really got to the bottom of the whole thing.

  I sat down at a table near the side and ordered some alcohol. This didn’t go down well with the barman, but I coped with his disapproval. I knew that Ji’s assistants monitored everyone who came into the bar through closed circuit vidiscreens, and that Ji would send word down as soon as he could be bothered. I took a sip of my drink, set my face for ‘Reasonably Dangerous’, and soaked up the local colour.

  The local colour was predominantly orange. The decor was orange, the drinks were orange, the lights were orange, and the bodies of the women performing languorous gynaecological examinations of each other on the orange-lit stage were painted orange too. Ji’s Bar is a Dopaz bar, and as any Dopaz-drone will tell you, orange is like, the colour, of, like, orange is, you know, orange, orange is, like, orange.

  Dopaz is two things in Red Neighbourhood. It is the primary recreational drug. It is also the most common cause of death. Is Dopaz strong? Let me put it this way. Drugs are often diluted or ‘cut’ with other substances, either to swindle buyers or just to lower the dosage. A lot of drugs are cut with baking powder. When they cut Dopaz, they cut it with Crack.

  Most of the drones in BarJi were out there in the main bar, watching the biology lesson and drinking very low dosage Dopaz drinks, about four of which will leave you unconscious for forty-eight hours. The heavy hitters would have made their way to the rooms at the back, and tomorrow would find half of them in the piles of garbage in the street, their corpses waiting to fossilise like everything else. There’s no safety net in Red Neighbourhood: if you fall, you fall. You can’t leave Red for a better Neighbourhood: they’ve all got standards, criteria, exams or fees. If you were born Red, or end up in Red, you’re not going to make it out into the light. The only way out of Red is down.

  While I waited for Ji I worked my way through Alkland’s cube. The Actioneer was sixty-two years old, born and bred in the Centre. His father had been B at the Department of Hauling Ass for seven years, and then A for a record further thirteen. His mother had revolutionised the theory and practice of internal memoranda. Alkland’s career leapt off the CV like an arrow or some other very straight thing: he wasn’t just a man who was very good at doing things, but the perfect product of the Centre, a hundred per cent can-do person. His work during the last five years was classified, and I didn’t have a high enough rating to break the code, but I knew that it must be very diligent stuff. The Department of Really Getting to the Heart of Things is the core department in the Centre. Everybody reports to them in the end, and the A there is effectively Chief Actioneer.

  The cube told you everything you needed to know about Alkland unless you weren’t an Actioneer. To them, what you did in office time was what you were. But I needed to know why whoever had kidnapped him had chosen him, and not someone else. I didn’t want to know what Alkland was: I needed to know who he was. I had to understand the man.

  Eventually, frustrated, I switched the setting to Portrait and a 10 × 8 × 8 hologram of Alkland popped onto the table. It showed a bony face, with grey thinning hair and a thinner nose. The eyes behind his glasses were intelligent but gentle, and the lines round the mouth told a history of wry smiles. He looked rather gentle for an Actioneer. That was all. There was nothing else to learn from the cube, and I had no more to go on.

  ‘Stark, you fuck, how the fuck are you, fucker?’

  Fuck you,’ I said, turning with a smile. I know my language is far from ideal, but Ji makes me sound like a rather fey poet. I stood and stuck my hand out at him and he shook it violently and painfully, as is his wont. The two seven-foot men on either side of him regarded me dubiously.

  ‘Who’s that fucker?’ he asked, nodding at the holo.

  ‘That’s one of the things I want to talk with you about,’ I said, sitting down again.

  The main bar in Ji’s is actually the most private place to talk, as all the patrons are so wasted you could set fire to their noses without them noticing. Overhearing other people’s conversations is not what they’re there for.

  ‘Well, he’s got to be in deep shit of some kind, for you to be looking for him,’ said Ji as he settled violently into one of the other chairs round the table. Ji looks like he was hewn out of a very large rock by someone who was talented but on drugs all the time. There’s a kind of rough rightness about him though, apart from round his eyes. He has some big scars there.

  His bodyguards lurked round the next table, watching my every move. Given that Ji could kill either of them without breaking sweat I’ve always thought them kind of superfluous, but I guess ther
e’s a protocol to being a psychotic ganglord.

  Ji waved in the direction of the bar and a pitcher of alcohol was on the table before his hand stopped moving. He nodded at the stage. ‘What do you think of the show?’

  ‘Obscene,’ I said, nodding in appreciation, ‘genuinely obscene.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he grunted, pleased. ‘Bred for it, you know.’ He wasn’t joking: they really are. Red tends not to be the Neighbourhood of choice for women. I noticed that as usual all the girls had thick black hair. Ji has a thing for that.

  We chewed the rag for a while. I recapped the last few months, mentioned a couple of mutual acquaintances I’d run into. Ji told me his land had expanded another half mile to the north, which explained his bar’s continued existence, recounted a couple of especially horrific successes, and used the word ‘fuck’ just over four hundred times.

  ‘So,’ he said in the end, waving and receiving another pitcher, ‘what the fuck do you want? I mean, obviously the joy of seeing my face, but what else? Nice trousers, by the way.’

  ‘Thanks. Two things,’ I said, leaning over the table and dropping my voice, just in case. ‘I have to find this guy. His name’s Alkland. People who are looking for him think he might be in the Red somewhere.’

  ‘Actioneer?’

  ‘Yeah, and not just any old can-do smartarse. This is a golden boy.’

  ‘What the fuck’s he doing in here then?’

  That I don’t know. I’m not even sure he is here. All I know is that he isn’t in the Centre. ACIA think he’s been stolen and stashed in Red somewhere: I guess it’s the logical first choice.’

  I sat back and took a drink of alcohol. Ji knew what I was asking: I didn’t have to spell it out for him. On the stage the sweating and toiling performers were joined by a new pair of girls, who immediately proceeded to go to the toilet over them. That’s entertainment in Red for you.

  ‘No.’

  I nodded and lit another cigarette. I think I forgot to mention that I’d just had one. Well I had. I finished it, put it out, and then I lit another one. Use your imagination.

  ‘I guessed not.’

  ‘I’ll listen for him. You still in Colour?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll pass word if I hear anything. Don’t think I will, though.’

  ‘No, me neither. I don’t think there’s a gang in Red with enough power to kidnap an Actioneer right out of the Centre. It has to be someone else, maybe a team out of Turn or somewhere. But they could be holding him here.’

  ‘What’s the other thing?’

  ‘I need a gun. I lost mine.’

  Ji grunted and waved at one of his bodyguards. Ji has a good line in waves: the guard didn’t even need to come over to know what he was asking for. He just disappeared straight out the back.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No problem. You going to leave me the cube?’

  ‘Can’t. Zenda would kill me.’

  ‘You still working for her?’

  I pressed the cube, printed out a colour image of Alkland and gave it to Ji.

  ‘You know me. I’ll work for anyone.’

  ‘Especially her.’

  ‘Especially her.’

  By the time I got back to my apartment it was late. You’re not allowed to enter the Centre more than once in one day, so I had to go the long way round, via two other Neighbourhoods. Luckily Ji, cunning old fox of a psychotic that he is, had got hold of some WeaponNegatorz™, so I got the gun back undetected.

  Guns, actually. Ji gave me a Gun, which is my weapon of choice, and also a Furt as an added bonus. The Furt is quite a flash laser device, which doubles as a cutting instrument and is therefore kind of useful. The Gun just fires energy bullets. Crude, but effective, and as it generates the bullets itself you never have to reload, which has saved my life eleven times. It was the same make as my last gun, which I lost on the recent job I still haven’t told you about, and it felt very comfortable in my hand. Over a couple more pitchers Ji and I had tried to work out where this left us in the favour stakes. We were both pretty bollocksed by then, but the end result seems to be that he now owes me one more favour than he did before.

  As I sat with a jug of Jahavan coffee, each molecule of which is programmed to pelt round the body kicking the shit out of any alcohol molecules it finds, I considered where to go from here. So far, I didn’t have very much to go on. I had established that Ji hadn’t been involved in Alkland’s abduction, but I’d known that anyway. Ji simply wanted to take over as much of Red as he could and stay alive as long as he could whilst killing as many other people as possible. He was a simple man, with simple needs.

  Whoever had Alkland was into something much more complex. They couldn’t be after money, because the Centre didn’t have any, but it was unlikely they’d done it for the sheer fun of it. They had to want something that only the Centre could give them. Working out what that might be was going to be important, and I put a memo in my mental file to have a crack at it when I could be bothered. My mental memos are different to my mental notes: I always do something about them eventually, and they’re typed so I can read what they say. For example:

  Internal Memo: Who’s got Alkland?

  1)

  Someone with enough togetherness to get people into the Centre to snatch him.

  2)

  Someone with enough togetherness to know about him in the first place.

  (The togetherness factor of these guys had to be pretty high. The Centre doesn’t widely distribute lists of ‘People Doing Really Important Things Who You Might Like To Consider Kidnapping’. I’d never even heard of Alkland before tonight, and I know the Centre pretty well for an outsider.)

  3)

  Someone who wants something of a kind that only the Centre can give them.

  (When I knew what that might be, I’d know what kind of people I was dealing with, which would make it easier to predict the way in which they’d operate.) And

  4)

  Get some batteries for the Gravbenda™.

  See? Very diligent. Zenda would be impressed. Well, not impressed, probably, because I’m sure her mental memos run to 120 pages with graphs, indexes and supporting audio visual material, but pleasantly surprised, maybe. Surprised, anyway.

  I also made another note, which I’m not going to tell you about. It was kind of a surprising idea, and very unlikely: but I stored it away anyway. I’ll let you know if it turns out to be relevant.

  By the time I finished the jug I was completely sober. More sober than I wanted to be, in fact: I’d drunk too much coffee and was now too far in the black, sobriety-wise. It made me notice things like that whenever I come back to my apartment, it’s empty. It’s a nice apartment, fully colour coordinated and with happening furniture, but I use it just as somewhere to store my stuff, and to crash when I’m in the Neighbourhood. When I come back to it, it’s always empty. No people. Or no person, to be more precise.

  I have an apartment, I have more money than I need, I have a job, of sorts. But have I got a life?

  See what I mean? Foolish, unhelpful thoughts. I took a look at the packet of Jahavan and saw I’d picked up Extra Strength by mistake. ‘Warning,’ it said in the blurb. ‘Anyone except alcoholics may find themselves experiencing foolish and unhelpful thoughts.’

  I wasn’t feeling tired, but decided to try to get some sleep anyway. When I get immersed in a job I tend to have to go days without any, which is one of the reasons I end up so tired. There was nothing more I could do tonight, so making a deposit in the sleep bank was the clever thing to do.

  Before I turned in I checked my message tray, on the off-chance that Ji might have transfaxed something through. It was empty apart from a note from the council. The Street Colour Co-ordinator Computer had sent me a message saying how much it had enjoyed working with my trousers.

  3

  At 4.45 a.m. I woke up, instantly alive and alert. I turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but it wasn’t going to happen. I s
till had Jahavan running wild round my bloodstream, shouting, carrying on, waking up all the cells. I got up, had a shower, went into the kitchen and threw the coffee away. I don’t need that kind of shit from a beverage.

  I made a cup of Debe, which is similar to coffee except it has no natural products in it and doesn’t taste much like it either, and sat by the wall in the living room, waiting for dawn to break. An amazingly, ridiculously large spider ran across the floor in front of me. I stared at it for a while, wondering how the hell it had got in. My apartment is on the fourth floor: I couldn’t believe the thing had scaled a hundred feet of wall just to hang out with me. It had to have a lair in the apartment somewhere, though I couldn’t imagine where. I found it hard to believe that there could be a crevice in there big enough to hold an animal that size. More likely it just sat around in the open all day, cunningly disguised as a piece of furniture, waiting for night to fall so it could go zipping round the floor in that way they enjoy so much. I might have sat on it without knowing, or rested a drink on it. Hell, I could have stretched out and gone to sleep on it.

  Halfway across the floor the spider stopped, skittered round, and sat and looked at me. I looked back at the spider. It was a tense moment.

  I take shit as and when necessary, but not from things as far down the evolutionary ladder as spiders. I think it sensed this. After a long moment it pointed itself in a different direction and slowly and many-leggedly ambled towards the door. Then, probably realising this was the last chance it was going to get tonight to do any zipping about, it suddenly accelerated to warp speed and zoomed out into the hall, taking the corner on two legs.

  Unlike a lot of Neighbourhoods, Colour is open to the sky, and by 5.30 the black outside my window was tinged with a hint of pinky blue. It didn’t help much, because it was still too early to do anything, but it looked nice. They always have nice skies in Colour: I think they fiddle about with them in some way.