The Night Mayor (3 page)

Meanwhile, she resented being yanked back five years to hackery. But needs must…

She quickskimmed to the finish, and sunk into:

Nurse Ted Crozier, attending Vanessa in her terminal tank. Starched linen, hospital smells, the buzzes and bleeps of life support. Nikolai, Ray and Lord Roger, enemies united in grief, crowding around the bed of the dauntless heroine. The dracula from the transplant league outside in the corridor, waiting for the usable organs to be liberated, pacing up and down to frighten the non-terminals in the nearby suites.

The nurse was a clever authorial touch. He provided a necessary break from the Vanessa Vail POV. Thanks to brave little smiles, hair rainbowed on the pillow, choked-back tears and an emotional confrontation with the fey little girl due to receive Vanessa’s surplus heart, it was possible to make dying of cancer look all right. But by no stretch of subjectivism could it be made to feel pretty. There was a market for pain, but the D-9000 did not cater to it. Ted Crozier could naturally have medical externals vital to the concept flit across his mind during the dreamer’s tenure. Also, Susan knew her lady dreamers liked a good handsome nurse.

The subliminal infilling of background external from a minor character’s memory was a typical Susan Bishopric touch, she knew. When she was free of the D-9000 she wanted to experiment with more complex uses of the device: conflicting recollections, false impressions, mental delusions. Dreams were at about the same stage as the flatties in 1912 or ice sculpture ten years ago. The medium was waiting for its Griffith, its Eisenstein, its Chillmeister Freaze…

Susan in:

Ted Crozier watches with heartfelt admiration as the still-beautiful Vanessa Vail lifts herself up to bid her lovers goodbye. His manly tears give the scene a misty, soft-focus effect.

Quickskim:

Nikolai weeping, Ray getting drunk, Lord Roger planning suicide.

‘Darling. Darlings. Before I zed out for the last time, I… There’s one thing I want you all to know. Something important…’

Susan pulled out. The D-9000 had dialogued
Vanessa Vail.
She had not been qualified to handle that. She rewound.

She tapnoted the obvious external changes. In the next edition Vanessa would wear her hair orientally, a black fringe and pigtails instead of the outmoded red beehive. Fashions in clothing, food and sex updated easily.

The politicals were only a shade more difficult. Since the War Between the States, the CIA was the OSS again, but Ray Chance could still booze and womanise for them. The fall of Premier Romanova meant a few alterations to the Moscow sequence. The D-9000 liked to include real-life characters, and had had Nikolai briefed for his mission to Lapland by Romanova herself. The scene would have to be re-Dreamed for Sobienkin.

Susan thought that, in the light of his treatment of his immediate predecessor, the ascetic new premier would be unamused to learn that his complete change of the Kremlin did not warrant any radical re-Dreaming. In
Vanessa Vail
the premier was just a face and a voice, plus a few cartoon mannerisms. Romanova’s dialogue would do just as well for Sobienkin. The decor in the office would have to change: Susan would have to make it more like a provincial skimmer waiting room, less like an eighteenth-century bordello. And, of course, the sex was out, unless… No, another brush with the International Libel people was not what she wanted. The Dreamer would stay inside Nikolai anyway. IL excluded Susan from the minds of real people.

A shame: she could think of a few intriguing uses of that trick. One of the pirates had recently offered a bootleg of the King having sex with a goat. The Dreamer had been into the heads of the King
and
the goat. The pirate had been remaindered, and his tape run wiped clean. A shame, the goat had been an interesting characterisation. She hated to see raw talent go to waste.

The
Vanessa Vail
headache was cancer. It had been preventable five years ago; now things were worse, it was reversible, even in the formerly terminal phase. Vanessa Vail, condemned to a beautiful death by the unconscious wish of the dreamership, needed a new disease. Or something.

The D-9000 would do the bulk of the research, but selecting the appropriate lingering malady would still be a drearo business. Susan mourned the great romantic disorders: leukaemia, consumption, sickle-cell anaemia, aids, chemical warfare. Cancer had been the last hope of the morbid love story. Now the ogre of generations past was extinct. And whatever substitute she found – mutant measles, perhaps, or foot-and-mouth disease – was bound to be pestered out of existence by the next edition.

She toyed with the idea of making something up. A real-sounding, exotic wasting disease. No one could find a cure for that. Perhaps, during her stopover in the jungles of Ecuador, Vanessa Vail could be dosed with a rare native poison. It was the sort of thing that was always happening to her.

Tony would fight it: ‘There are doctors dreaming out there, Sue-love, and they’ll know. With something as loony as
Vanessa Vail
it’s bloody vital to get the externals right.’

Susan dropped the dreamflower into its glass of purple. She saved her tapnotes into the slab.

She considered a few internal changes, unnecessary but interesting.
Vanessa Vail
could do with a complete re-dialogue. Susan cringed at practically every line the D-9000 had stuck her with. But Tony would only allow her to tamper with any obsolete slang; substituting ‘squitch’ for ‘kink’, ‘bove’ for ‘zooper’, stupid stuff like that.
Vanessa Vail
sold by the million, and was practically sacred in publishing terms.

Rats! Susan spitefully thought of giving Vanessa Vail a sobering dose of realism. ‘Sorry, gang, I can’t fight any cybernetic squid today. I’m menstruating.’ Serve her right, the unreal bitch.

No. She would just polish up the externals and field the whole thing back to Tony. This little Dream wouldn’t hurt. She would save the good stuff for the next Susan Dream, the Great English Dream the crix were expecting from her.

Susan exed the White Room. In contrast to the sourceless glare of the Dreaming chamber, her office was soft-lit turquoise. The shelves were cluttered with extraneous objects: a ceramic bridge, favourite Dreams, her huge and uncatalogued music collection, tridsnaps, and a few flatty tapes. At Eton her House Sponsor had stressed the importance of the cinematic tradition. She was a particular admirer of early Frank Tashlin, mid-period Antonioni and late Richard Attenborough.

Her Rodney nomination plaques and her sole award – Best Nasal Effects for
The Sewer Thing
– had a mantel to themselves. These things didn’t matter, of course. The Rodneys were always being awarded to utter sick. Last year, John Yeovil’s drearo historical
The Private Life of Margaret Thatcher
had scooped Best Dream, Yggdrasil rot it! But this year, it was between her and Orin Tredway, and she needed to see Orin frozen out. His
Passions Perfected
was unspeakably, cloyingly awful, and yet the crix were tipping it as the favourite. Still, she was confident. She had even drafted a beautiful, moving, inspirational acceptance speech.

Her outdoor helmet and flakjak were bundled on a chair. She shifted them and sat at the D-9000 terminal. She backgrounded a music:
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.

She tapped into the British Museum Library, and pressed the vocator to her throat.

‘Hello, BritLib. What’ve you got on primitive toxicology? I’m particularly interested in South America, but if anything fun turns up anywhere else, throw it at me. I want to be able to make up something superficially convincing.’

The museum coughed and started to sort through itself. It would deposit the findings in Susan’s D-9000 file space. She would tell Tony that whatever she came up with was soundly researched fact. She was good enough to get past him. Even if he did check, he would do it by tapping into the D-9000, whereupon the machine would deluge him with the museum’s native-poison bumph. No way would he go through that.

She planned on selling Tony her little-known but deadly drug on the dramatics. Vanessa Vail getting the bad news from the unbearable, kindly old Dr Murchison (‘I brought you into the world, Miss Vail, and I think you’ve a right to know…’ ‘Oh, Dr M, is it…?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How long?’ ‘We don’t know, ’Nessa. Maybe a year. Maybe not that long. You could go’ – snaps fingers – ‘like that!’) could be replaced with some steaming jungle action.

Vanessa Vail slogs through the tropical undergrowth in search of the Great MacGuffin. A fabulous horde of jewels, a crashed spaceship, the lost secret of the original Coca-Cola formula, something like that. She stumbles across an ancient temple, forbidden to unbelievers. A monstrous idol grins at her. Little brown figures lurk in the foliage. Vanessa senses danger. A dart strikes her arm. She brushes it away, and then learns of her impending death from a painted witch doctor. He describes her fate in horrible detail during his ritual curse.

An entirely new concept hook, and a great clip for the trails. Did they have pygmies in Ecuador?

‘Hi, Sue-love.’ Tony cut through the British Museum tap. An iris opened in the lower right corner as he holoed into the tridvid. Susan was reminded of shrunken heads, and wondered if she could work one into her Ecuador sequence.

‘’Lo, Tony. I was busy-busy.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m tapping in swiftkick. You’re off
Vanessa
.’

Susan assessed her reaction. Relief: escaping a chore. Indignation: would Tony let someone else tamper with her Dream? Fear: was she being disemployed?

‘Sorry, Sue-love. It just came through the slab here. You’ve been conscripted to the Public Service.’

‘Expletive deleted!’ Conscripted to the Public Service? It happened, of course. In theory it could happen to anyone. But what arm of the Gunmint could want a Dreamer?

‘Christ knows why. You’re not the first. The Gunmint skulks whisked Tom Tunney off the West Country a week ago. The same crowd. Whatever it is, sweets, don’t scraggle up or we’ll all be freezing our arses off gutting fish clusters on Rockall.’

Susan over-and-outed on Tony. Conscription to the Public Service was one of the Yggdrasil nets. The concept was to match individual talents to specific problems. Strictly functional. But as an artist – all right, entertainer (Susan Bishopric: four-dimensional tap-dancer) – Susan supposed she was useless. That was certainly the way her parents had looked at it when she tested Talent-positive.

She knew Tom Tunney slightly. He Dreamed historical detective stories.
Get Richie Quick
,
Richie Quick
–
Private Dick
,
The Quick and the Dead
. Very derivative of twentieth-century flatties. She had enjoyed the first in a minor key and not bothered with the sequels. His sales were up and his crix were down. Wherever he was, she was going. Offhand, Susan couldn’t think of anything important in the West Country aside from sheep processing and Cellophane City.

An idea struck. She tapped into her NatBank account. The figures whirred like an odometer on FASTER-THAN-UGHT. A large sum was being credited to her. Payment in advance. Conclusion: she was not being seconded to the Volunteer Police or the Rural Reclamation Corps. Further, although more debatable, conclusion: whatever it was she was being asked (ordered) to do was unusual. Final deep-down gut feeling: it was likely to be at best nasty and at worst suicidal. She knew enough about the Gunmint to figure that.

Uh-huh. If you want a kidnapped royal rescued from a renegade superscientist’s island enclave, get Vanessa Vail. Ink Susan Bishopric out. Was it worth dodging? She could be Transconcorde-exing the country within the hour. Before they came for her. And come they would – armoured andrews, polite voices behind opaque visors, spidercopters. She had Dreamed enough
policiers
to know the system.

No, exing was out. There was extradition from everywhere, anyway. She told herself she was overreacting. Whatever it was couldn’t be that terrible, and would just have to be put up with.

She changed her clothe, flakjakked, and waited for them.

I
was in Daine’s penthouse, trying to figure a way of taking the hand. I was clutching a pair of dubious deuces, and he had the whole deck fanned in his manicured fingers.

How had I got into this? That was a dumb thing to think, since I flashbacked:

Spinning newspaper headlines: FIRST NATIONAL BANK KNOCKED OVER!; SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH, FIFTH AND SIXTH NATIONAL BANKS KNOCKED OVER!; THE KHALIFIA KIDNAPPED – DAINE WANTS 70 MILL!; REIGN OF TERROR CONTINUES!; SHIP SINKS – ONLY ONE SURVIVOR!; INTERNATIONAL COURT WITNESSES SUCCUMB TO BUBONIC PLAGUE!; ‘NO PRISON WILL HOLD ME!’ VOWS SUPERCROOK!; GUILTY! GUILTY!! GUILTY!!!; THE INQUIRER SAYS ‘FRY THE RAT!’; TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS IN SING SING!

News on the March
clips: stock footage explosions, skimmer chases, baffled cops reading official statements, Daine blankfaced in mindcuffs, the scales of justice, Princetown.

Then I came into it: Tom Tunney, Dreamer. One broken marriage and two inferior sequels away from the peak of my career. There I was, quietly stealing the plot for my next Dream from a 1947 flatty
(Ride the Pink Horse
, since you asked) and hoping the crix would miss it. Then 1 got conscripted to the Public Service, and dumped on the Midnight Special for the City…

Someone kindly kicked me in the head. That brought me back to the present. Whenever that was. Hell, I had to kill Daine before this started making sense.

Hey, Lissa, look at me. Your ex-husband, the private eye. About to be beaten to a pulp in someone else’s nightmare. Proud of me yet?

‘Here’s your shamus. Mr Daine,’ said Duryea. ‘He got sick.’

‘Well done, Daniel.’ Truro Daine had a cultivated accent. The kind you cultivated on agar jelly in a petri dish.

I tried to do something difficult, like stand up. I half made it. Mazurki made sure I went the distance by grabbing me under the armpits and lifting me as easily as I might lift a coat.