How Dark the World Becomes (2 page)

Through the window, I watched Planck Plaza below. It was never very bright, even during the brief daylight out in the canyon. They had rigged up a lot of polished metal mirrors and cut some shafts through the rock to let natural light into the Quarter during the day, but there were five major levels up above us that each took some of the light, so there wasn’t much left for us. There was artificial lighting, too; power was cheap—it was the fixtures and cables and stuff that ran to money, and were always burning out, and never got fixed in less than a couple months. But even with just the feeble glow from the light tunnels, Planck Plaza was kind of nice around midday. Half a dozen food vendors usually showed up, and lots of working folks met here, to eat lunch or just stroll around and talk. Nice.

At night it was dark, though—dark and dirty and empty. 

Henry showed up first, along with his two top people. They crossed the plaza and entered the front of the building. After a couple minutes, they showed up in the office.

“Boss,” Henry said in greeting, and he and his two lieutenants nodded. 

“Tea’s fresh,” I said, and waved to the outer office. 

“I’ll get it,” Phil Gillman—inevitably known as Phil the Gil—the youngest of the three, volunteered. Henry settled his short, thick body into a chair across the desk. Henry was built like a linebacker, but I’d seen him move when he had to, and he was fast—really fast. Big Meg Stanker, his other lieutenant, crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. Meg was taller than any of us, and looked like she lifted weights as a hobby—which she used to. Phil the Gil was tall as well, but skinny, frail-looking next to the other two.

“How’d things go with Arrie?” Henry asked. 

“Pretty good.”

“He gonna up his order?”

I shook my head. Henry frowned a little at that, and then settled back in his chair when Phil gave him a glass of tea. 

Henry was smart, and he was loyal, and he was level-headed. He wasn’t any crazier about peddling Laugh than I was, but what Kolya wanted, Kolya usually got, or there was trouble. Henry knew it, and so did I. 

“You make any progress on that special deal we were talking about?” I asked.

“Yeah, actually.” 

“Really?”
I asked, and he nodded.

“Looks like it might work out. I think I got a guy. I’ll know more in a couple days.” He smiled.

Now, that was good news. Henry and I were working on an e-snap data-mining project, without Kolya knowing about it. Two of the big Varoki merchant houses—AZ Simki-Traak and AZ Kagataan—had hub offices on Peezgtaan, and with round trip transmission times of weeks between different worlds, they kept most of the proprietary stuff their techies had to reference in the float memory of their central e-synaptic core. Henry had figured out a way—in theory—we could tap into it and sell it to their competition. Lining up the inside guy was actually the hard part. 

Of course, if either the Varoki conglomerate we were planning to mine or Kolya found out what we were up to, we’d be dead a lot quicker than with the Laugh business. But potentially it was a whole lot of money . . . and clean money.

Well, cleaner than Laugh.

“How big a fortune we gotta pay this guy?” I asked. 

His smile got broader and he shook his head.

“Less than we figured—a lot less. The guy’s in the wrong social club or something—I didn’t follow all of that—but he got passed over for promotion one too many times. He’s in this as much for the pain as the payoff.”

That I wasn’t so crazy about; people out for revenge get stupid. Greed—in moderation—is a more reliable motivation. Still, it wasn’t like we had a lot of candidates to pick from. 

We made small talk for a while, waiting for Ricky Lee, my number-three guy, to show up. Big Meg showed us new pictures of her youngest daughter. Cute kid, maybe turn into a real beauty some day. 

“Good thing she takes after her old man,” Phil joked, and for a second Big Meg looked like she wanted to hit him, but then she grinned, which was good. I wouldn’t want Big Meg to hit me. 

“They’re coming,” Henry said, looking over my shoulder. He stood up and leaned over the desk to watch. I turned the swivel chair and saw Ricky and three other guys walking across the plaza. They were horsing around and laughing.
There,
I thought to myself,
is a guy who thinks he has the world by its ass.

“You’re gonna have to do something about him,” Henry said softly, just for me to hear.

“Yup,” I answered. 

But what?

Ricky came from what most people would call a difficult background. Around here that was pretty common, one way or another, but in Ricky’s case it had left more of a mark. His father, Andy, was first generation—like most of ours—but Andy had come out as a kid, the son of a lab tech or something, not that it mattered. He hadn’t adapted very well to the collapse of his comfortable, well-planned life when the Varoki pharmaceutical house that relocated all the Human workers to Peezgtaan went belly-up. Andy’s family disintegrated, his father—Ricky’s grandfather—drank himself to death, and Andy grew up to be a bitter, pissed-off man. He took his bitterness out on his wife at first, and later on his two kids. One of the kids died; the other one—Ricky—survived.

When Ricky first came to work for me, he was probably the most loyal guy I ever had on the payroll. He couldn’t do enough. He looked up to me, like a father, I guess. Problem was, his father was a grade-A son of a bitch, and Ricky had hated him, so he ended up hating me, too. It was weird. Every time I gave him more responsibility, or encouragement, or support, he soured on me a little more. Maybe he only understood a good beating, but I think he’d have hated me just as much for that. 

He had a problem with authority—obviously—but not one like I’d ever seen before. Right now, I figured Ricky wasn’t my guy anymore; he was probably Kolya’s, and he’d be loyal to Kolya right up until the time Kolya was actually his direct boss. Then, little by little, Ricky would start hating him. 

I wasn’t really sure what to do about Ricky. Since Kolya was looking after him now, my options were somewhat limited. And there was this thing with my conscience. Of course, if
I
were ever out of the way—a morbid thought—he’d be Kolya’s problem, and Kolya wouldn’t have any trouble figuring out what to do. He’d just kill him. 

There are advantages to being a homicidal sociopath.

It didn’t take them long to file in. Ricky had been growing a goatee, which I thought looked stupid, and tonight he had brought an extra guy along—fellow named Saito, one of his mid-level muscle guys.

“This is a closed meeting, Ricky. You know that,” I said. 

He smirked to his three stooges and shrugged.

“Saito’s moving up. Thought he should see what goes on.”

I just looked at him. Five seconds was about all it took.

“Okay! Okay! Saito, take a walk and we’ll see you later.” 

Not that anything we were going over was top secret; it was just the principle of the thing. Ricky was always pushing like that, either trying to see if he could get away with something, or trying to provoke a reaction, I wasn’t really sure which. But it was a pain in the ass—that much I was sure of.

Ricky nodded to the Hawker 10 in my shoulder holster.

“You’re carrying that antique hand cannon, so you musta’ seen Arrie. He upping his order?”

“That’s between me and Kolya,” I answered.

“Yeah, well, Kolya ain’t gonna like it much if he don’t.”

“Never mind what Kolya likes. You better just focus on what
I
like. Did you get your payment over to the clinic for this cycle?”

He shrugged. “Not yet. Why the hell do we skim so much for the clinic, anyway?”

“Because I
say
so, Goddamnit!” I exploded and hit my desk with my fist hard enough that it jumped and sloshed tea out of the glasses sitting on it. 

I took a deep breath and leaned back. Always pushing, always arguing every stinking point, always trying to provoke a reaction—and I’d let him get to me. I hate losing control like that; it’s a sign of weakness. Ricky just settled back in his chair, a scowl replacing his smirk.

“You get your cash over to Doc Zhan tomorrow morning, and you add four percent to it this cycle, as a late charge,” I said, pointing at him for emphasis. “You understand?” 

He started to open his mouth, but then he clammed up and nodded.

The rest of the meeting was pretty subdued. We covered all the boring business stuff you have to keep a handle on. Personnel issues. Security. Revenue. Receipts from the Lotto and the Bank were the main revenue items—numbers and loan-sharking they used to call it. We also got a cut from all of the fences, and we had interests in about a dozen legitimate local businesses as well, but most of those were pretty much break-even propositions. Lotto and the Bank—that was the real money, always had been. And now Laugh. Kolya cooked it and we sold it, mostly through Arrie, although we had a couple other Varoki contacts that did a little business. Laugh was a Varoki-specific drug, which made it perfect for us—the Varoki had all the money, and our people didn’t get hurt. But anyone who thought it could go on like this was nuts, and Kolya was at the top of that particular list. 

He’d fought the
Cottohazz
before, and for him, Five Races be damned—there was only one race in the
Cottohazz
that meant anything: leather-heads. If Laugh messed them up and eventually killed them, then that was just a bonus as far as Kolya was concerned. Me, I’m a businessman, not a revolutionary. 

It was past quarter-night—about hour 25 of the 28-hour Peezgtaan day—when we broke up and I sent them on home. 

“I got an autocab pickup wired. You need a ride?” Ricky asked. Maybe he’d decided he’d gone a little far and wanted to mend some fences. I thought about it, but I shook my head.

“No, thanks. I’m gonna walk.” 

He looked relieved. The small talk in the cab probably would have sucked.

THREE

I walked along the irregular archipelago of yellow islands cast by the overhead lights that were still working. I stepped over or around the sleeping drunks and addicts, took in the smell of rotting garbage, illegal cooking-fire smoke, urine and shit and vomit and people way too long without a bath. I listened to the background noise of techscreech booming from big speakers in bars, to laughter, angry curses, and coughing—always coughing. I nodded to the whores and hustlers and club bouncers, said hi to those I knew by name, but I kept going. 

Whenever I started feeling sorry for myself—and I was armed, like I was that night—I’d take a walk down there. Even armed, I’d stick to the main thoroughfares. There were too many people with nothing to lose for anyone not in an armored vehicle to feel really safe, unless they had nothing to lose either. I walked down there to remind myself how most people lived at the bottom of the Crack, in the Human Quarter. That I sometimes needed reminding is, I think, evidence of a flawed character. 

They lived without the certainty of the next meal, or the security of a safe domicile. They lived without the means of protecting their property, and so they lived without property. They lived in constant danger of injury and disease, and without the means of coping with either. All life leads to death, one way or another, but for them, the progress was visible, palpable. Their journey was a crippling, disfiguring death march, losing bits of themselves along the way—tooth, finger, eye . . . hope, self-respect, sanity.

And most of them lived without love, because loving someone, and being loved in return, carries with it an obligation on which they could not deliver, and the inability to provide for the people you love is the most soul-crushing burden of all. People—a lot of the good ones, anyway—willingly lived an empty, loveless existence in preference to acquiring that obligation, and failing. 

There was a lot of excitement and optimism back on Earth when we made first contact with the Five Intelligent Races of the
Cottohazz
: the turning point in man’s history, the dawn of a remarkable new age—you know. It all seems pretty naïve, looking back at it now, but how were they supposed to know? Races with the wisdom to travel the stars surely would have worked out all those little things like wealth and distribution of resources. 

And the guys in charge had. They surely had.

*   *   *

Depending on your point of view, my condo was either a luxury suite or a hole in the wall. Since I’m second-generation Crack Trash, I called it luxury. Once upon a time a lot of folks did. It was in the old
Traak-Amahaat Gor
, a high-end residential complex built originally for the Varoki executives of a long-bankrupt pharmaceutical conglomerate. Like a lot of Varoki buildings from around first-contact time, it looked like a gigantic clay pot that somehow just hadn’t worked out right. No matter how many times somebody told me it was supposed to look that way, it never looked good, and the green-black grime that seven or eight decades of airborne mold had left on it didn’t help. Only the thought of a whole bunch of rich folks living in it could have made it attractive, and they were long gone.

The complex was sort of a landmark, a border-crossing checkpoint. It hadn’t been part of the Human Quarter originally, but times change. Now it was fair warning that Varoki passing the foam-stone buttresses of this massive beehive-ugly insult to architecture were leaving civilization and entering the land of desperate, dangerous savages. But as long as they stood in the lee of the
Traak-Amahaat Gor,
they weren’t quite there yet. Young leather-heads looking for thrills would hang around the complex and gaze into the depths of the Quarter, breathe in its sour but seductive aromas, listen to the distant tinny music of anarchy, and savor the danger-juice humming in their blood. Later they would dream about what adventures they would have experienced, if only they could have found the courage to cross that invisible threshold. 

“Jo-Jo. Arriving alone,” I announced to my front door. Jo-Jo was my home security command code for the day. The laser scanner did a quick once-over, my door swung open with a soft chime, and I walked into the wonderfully rich odor of jambalaya.