Pet Noir, Page 2
Katharine Kerr
“Yezzir.” A boy’s voice, but soldier crisp.
“Okay. One more chance. Another snafu, and you’re gone.”
The boy trots out, glances their way, then runs down the hall. Maybe twenty if that, he crouches as he runs, ducking unseen laser fire. Mulligan vaguely remembers that he’s a deserter from one space force or another—Alliance Marines, he thinks, but by then his head is swimming so badly that he doesn’t really care. Nunks picks him up and carries him the last few feet into the room, then lays him down on the gray foam-cube sofa that stands by the far wall. Lacey looks up in surprise. She is sitting in a gray vinyl armchair with her feet up on a royal blue comp-desk and watching a baseball game on the three-dee hanging on the wall. Because of his condition Mulligan indulges himself with only a brief, abstract pang of the hopeless lust that he usually feels at the sight of her. Although she’s only of average height, Lacey always seems taller because of her ramrod-straight posture. Thanks to rejuv drugs, she looks about twenty-five and rather girlish, with her big blue eyes and quick, triangular smile, but she is, in fact, a thirty-year veteran of the Republic’s deep space fleet, as one might guess from the cut of her blonde hair, an efficient military bob. Although she would have risen to a high rank in any fleet bigger than four frigates, three cruisers, and one aging battleship, she recently retired as a lieutenant commander. Those who don’t know the true story say that if only she weren’t white she would have gotten that last promotion to full command rank. Be that as it may, she lives on her pension in this warehouse, a property inherited from an uncle.
“What in God’s name’s happened to you?” Lacey flips off the sound on the game and comes over to the couch. This particular night she’s wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a loose blue shirt that says ‘official zero-gee bowling league’ across the back. “You in a fight?”
“No remember,” Mulligan mumbles. To his surprise, voice-speaking hurts his mouth. “Thought you knew.”
Puzzled, Lacey looks at Nunks, who shrugs, turning his hands palm-up. Although his naturally psychic race never developed suitable speech-organs for talking aloud, he’s learned to mimic a wide range of human and lizzie gestures. For her part, Lacey has learned to ask the correct questions.
“Let’s see,” she starts out. “You knew Mulligan was in trouble.”
Nunks nods yes and taps his skull to indicate that he picked up his friend’s pain psionically, then raises a hand to suggest that she wait.
Little brother>tell Lacey.
Try>
With a little groan Mulligan nestles into the cushions and tries to send his memory backwards. Immediately he encounters a wall of pain, sheeting through his mind. When he gasps, Nunks hurries over and lays a hand on his forehead, but not even he can block the agony. Mulligan draws back, away from the hidden memory; the pain eases.
“There’s something, like, blocking my mind,” Mulligan says, his voice little more than a whisper. “It hurts when I try to remember. But Nunks think I was doing a police job, a murder, maybe, cause he picked up a blood smell.”
“For Chief Bates?”
Police-friend now, Nunks prompts.
“Yeah, must’ve been.” BUT| not-friend mine now
[surprise] Sorry.
“Well, I can give him a call easy enough. I take it you want to know what happened.”
“I’m no sure if I do or not.”
Yes, little brother. Must know now, must know>
“I take that back, Lacey. Yeah, sure, course I got to know.”
“Okay. Want a drink? I’ve got some honest-to-god Old Earth whiskey.”
“Please, oh jeez, please.”
She goes over to the wet bar, a gleaming, spotless thing of gray and royal blue enamel. In the midst of a collection of bottles and glasses, all precisely arranged by size in neat rows, is an electric ice-maker. She rations Mulligan out two small cubes into a glass, then pours a generous amount of whiskey over them. When she hands it to Mulligan, Nunks shakes his head in sour disapproval.
[irritation] Please big brother, I now feel need to >blunt mind edge.
[resignation, mild contempt]
“You want to get real drunk?” Lacey says.
“To the max. I’ll, like, pay you for the booze when I get some bucks.”
“No problem. But after that glass, I’m going to pour you the cheap stuff. You won’t know the difference anyway.”
“Sure. Swell by me.”
Mulligan takes a long sip of the whiskey, then sighs in anticipated pleasure. In just a little while and for just a little while, he’ll be able to turn off the mental ‘gifts’ that have poisoned half his life.
“Hey, Lacey? Who’s the kid with the purple hair?”
“Name’s Maria. She got beaten by her pimp when she tried to leave his stable. He left her for dead in an alley close by here. Nunks found her and hauled her in.”
“Jeez. Poor kid.”
[Rage.] >Find, beat him> BUT [fear] /police trouble>
Yes, big brother. There> big police trouble. Pimp pay now big money/ police protection>
Nunks abruptly leaves, striding out of the room and banging the door behind him.
“What’s he mad about?” Lacey said.
“We were talking bout the girl, Maria, like how her pimp probably pays off the cops.”
“Nunks has a real low opinion of our species sometimes.”
“He’s usually right. Y’know?”
With a shrug Lacey sits back down at her desk and begins running her fingers over the touch-sensitive toggles sunk into the edge.
“You’re going to input what I told you?” Mulligan says.
“Yeah, a murder’s always important to the old biostat scheme of things. And I want to cross-file this story of something blocking your mind. I can maybe pull up some explanation for you.”
“Guess I want one. Oh, yeah, for sure. Jeez, Lacey, you sure love gossip.”
“I never. You know the old joke: you gossip, but I exchange significant data. In this city, pal, the right kind of data means bucks. My stupid pension dunt keep me in the kind of luxury I deserve.”
Mulligan has another sip of whiskey, watching as she flips up the pale green screen. A panel in the desk-top slides back and her keyboard rises—an old-fashioned museum quality piece of hardware that only she can keep in working condition. Although her comp unit of course operates by voice like everyone else’s, Lacey has installed this antique so she can enter data privately while someone else is in the room with her. After all, Mulligan reflects, any sentient who could access Lacey’s comp banks could become a very rich being indeed. Unfortunately for anyone with such a larcenous turn of mind, she’s also programmed the unit to respond in some peculiar language—Mulligan suspects that it’s her own invention.
“Say, think the news I brought you’s good for, like, some breakfast tomorrow?”
“What, you broke again?”
“I’m always broke, y’know.”
“You ought to get a regular job. Your civil service needs YOU!”
“Have mercy! I tried that for a while. You no savvy how damn boring it gets, doing past life readings for job applicants. Nobody who wants a desk job ever’s got any like interesting karma. I dunt know why they even bother to keep a psychic on the staff. Y’know?”
“If you tried it again, maybe you’d find out.”
Mulligan feels a sudden stab of guilt. Here he is, trying to sponge off Lacey after he promised himself that he’d never do it again. He decides that the least he can do is tell her the truth.
“Well, y’know, I no can go back to the civil service. They fired me.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, well, I just dint fit in. Like, I mean, that’s what th
ey said, though I had to kind of agree with them.”
“Let’s see, translated that means you were always late and always a mess, and you talked back to your supervisor.”
“Jeez, if you’d’ve known her you would’ve talked back too. She was, like, one of those psychic donnas who wear gauzy scarves and dresses with flowing sleeves and sort’ve sweep around real mysteriously while they talk about Other Realms and their Sensitivity and Talents—all with capital letters, y’know?”
“Yeah, I savvy.” Lacey favors him with a smile. “But hell, when I was in the Fleet I had lots of superior officers that I no could stand. You just follow your orders and ignore the bastards best you can.”
“You got a military mind. I dunt.”
“We will now award Señor Mulligan the prize for best understatement of the year.”
“Ah lay off! But I really did, like, try at that damned job.”
Lacey raises a skeptical eyebrow, then gets to work. Although he can’t see the keyboard, Mulligan can see her face, her mouth slack, her eyes half-shut, as if she’s day-dreaming about an absent lover, or perhaps communing with a very much present one while she works the keys. At times he hates her comp unit.
“Okay,” she says at last. “Now I’m going to call the chief himself and feed his data right into the file.”
“Always efficient, that’s you. Say, before I drink myself blind, there’s, like, something I want to ask you. I no want to forget it.”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“That deserter. It’s safe to have him here?”
“You and Nunks both vetted him, told me he was legit.”
“I no mean that, I mean if that old Alliance catches you harboring him, they’ll pull every string they can to get their hands on you. Y’know? Then it’ll be, like, the old fatal injection and the recycling lab. For sure.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. I’m arranging fake papers to get him off-world with the merchant marine.”
“Jeezchrist! That’s how many thousand bucks?”
“Oh, I’m just calling in a few favors. Listen, the pobrito panchito in his innocent way has already repaid me about six times over. Here I am, a brother officer though ex, right? So he likes to sit and talk to me, babbling everything in his little head about the Alliance fleet’s disposition and their new weaponry and all the special deep space manouevres he saw when he was in training. I can sell each byte of that about three ways.”
“Jeez! Nunks and I agreed that the kIDs, like, too dumb to lie, so it must all be straight dope.”
“You bet. Basically the Alliance is better off without a software deficient dude like him. He’ll do okay in the merchant service.”
“What made him jump ship, anyway?”
“One flogging too many. His captain sounds like a sadistic bastard, and that’s no way to run a God-damn navy anyway, flogging personnel.”
“You know, like if worse ever comes to worst, I think I’d like rather get conquered by the Cons than the Lies. Y’know?”
“Dunt say it aloud! But yeah, you got a point.”
oOo
“Yeah, glad to know he’s all right,” Bates says, but his image on the screen looks suspiciously indifferent to Mulligan’s state of health. “It scared the holy crap out of me, Lacey. Thought he was going to die on me. Did Nunks figure out what Mulligan did wrong?”
“Fraid not, but he’s working on it.”
“Let me know if he does. It’s maybe relevant.”
“Will do. Hasta la vista.”
As Lacey powers out of the tie-in, Mulligan holds out his empty glass with a small piteous moan. She gets him a refill, makes a drink for herself, then stands up to sip it and watch him as he gulps whiskey like a greedy child.
“Nunks was right. There was a murder, a carli, and you were walking by at the time. Bates asked you to help, and boom! Something blew your circuits good and proper.”
“I hate it when you talk about my mind that way, like circuits and shit. It’s flesh and blood, y’know, not wiring.”
“Ah, it’s all the same principle.”
“No! Wish it was. Then I no would be a damn psychic.”
“Say, man, a lot of people’d give their eyeteeth to have the talent you do.”
“Then they’re like loco or stupid or both. Ah jeez, Lacey, all I ever wanted was to play ball. Y’know? For chrissakes, I could’ve been in the major leagues.”
“Yeah, I savvy. It sure was a tough break, pal.”
Mulligan looks away with tears in his eyes while Lacey hopes that he isn’t going to tell her the story yet again. Sometimes when he’s in these beery moods he seems to have a real need to repeat it, like picking at a scab or biting on a sore tooth. When Mulligan was in high school he was the star of his baseball team, confidently expected to go on to the big leagues as soon as he graduated. Then, as the hormone changes of adolescence began to settle down around eighteen, all his latent psionic talents surfaced. Although he did his best to hide them, some of his classmates reported him to the proper authorities, and he was corralled, sent to the National Institute for testing, registered, and branded. That was the end of his chance at pro ball. Even though Mulligan has absolutely no psychokinetic ability, no hope in hell, in short, of influencing the movement of a baseball, he would have always been under suspicion of somehow changing the course of play. No team wanted to spend money drafting him only to have a public outcry make the league officially prohibit psionic players the way it prohibits bionic ones.
“It’s no fair,” he says, his voice thick. “I mean, jeez, even if I could have, like, read the pitcher’s mind and seen he was going to throw a curve, like, I’d still have to hit it, y’know. It’s no fair.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Like, it ruined my life.” He has a long gulp of whiskey. “Whole damn thing ruined my life. Y’know? Here I am, stuck playing semi-pro ball for a lousy five bucks a game when I could’ve been in the majors.”
“That team you were telling me about—it took you on?”
“Yeah. Dint I tell you? They no care about my God-damned mind, they need a shortstop so bad. Y’know? Lousy semi-pro ball. Mac’s Discount City Appliances Marauders, and I could’ve been in, like, the majors.”
Lacey goes tense, afraid that he’s going to cry. She never knows how to deal with someone in tears. After a minute, though, he merely sighs and mutters something under his breath.
“You’re real articulate tonight.”
“I just want to be like left alone.” His voice is a bare mumble.
Out of sympathy, not pique, Lacey does just that. First she gets the bottle of local whiskey and puts it where he can reach it, then goes back to her desk and armchair. Up on the viewer, the Polar City Bears are thrashing the New Savannah Braves eight to two in the seventh inning. Since the Bears have the best bullpen in the Interplanetary League and the Braves one of the worst, she decides there’s no use in watching further carnage and switches it off.
Soon, she knows from experience, Mulligan will drink himself into a stupor. Since in the meantime he can be safely ignored, she switches her comp unit over to voice op, but she doesn’t quite trust Mulligan enough to speak in standard Merrkan where he can overhear. Instead she uses Kangolan, a language so obscure that only about two million sentients in the Mapped Sector even know it exists and only about five hundred thousand of those actually speak it. Lacey learned it during a tour of duty spent as comp-officer on a frigate guarding against pirates at a hyperspace entry nexus that happened to be near the planet. She had plenty of time to study local customs because in the entire five years only two pirate vessels ever appeared, and one of them turned tail and ran as soon as its sensors picked up the frigate.
“I am awake and operating.” Buddy’s voice is a pleasant if somewhat brisk tenor, Lacey’s own programming, overriding the seductive female voice provided by the factory.
“I am pleased to hear it, Buddy. Did you dream of the new data I gave you while you were in silent m
ode?”
“I did. It is incomplete in its current state.”
“I know. I am hoping to access more sources as time goes along. File it and cross-reference with all murders in Polar City during the last year period. Then search and collate any instances of psychics being unable to access their memory banks because of pain. Both searches in the first extension only for now.”
The unit makes a soft sound which Lacey always describes as “humming under his breath.”
“I am finished. The cross-reference command is complete. The search and collate command is incomplete. I have no more examples of such instances in my current files. Is it possible that the Mulligan unit is providing false data?”
“It is impossible. Why do you think the data would be false?”
“The Mulligan unit is unsatisfactory.”
“In what way?”
“In every way. It is messy, ill-regulated, and prone to neural breakdowns.”
“Say ‘he,’ Buddy, not ‘it.’ Mulligan is a human being.”
“If my programmer insists, I will categorize him so.”
“I do insist. As for the neural breakdowns, the proper term for that is intoxication or getting drunk.”
“Only a previous neural breakdown would lead the unit to desire to drink himself to stupefaction.”
“Well, maybe, but still, he’s also useful, even if what you say about him is true.”
“If my programmer says so, I will define him as useful.”
“Do it, yeah.”
“Command executed. Mulligan unit is redefined as a useful human being. Next command?”
“Go into waiting mode while I think about this.”
Leaving the unit on Lacey gets up and strolls over to the wet bar to make herself another drink. Mulligan has already passed out, his empty glass half-overturned in his fingers, a thin trickle of watery whiskey staining his shirt. When she plucks the glass away, he sighs in his sleep and squirms like a restless child. Most of the turquoise hair coloring has ended up on his face in long streaks, letting the normal straw-color of his hair show through. She gets a damp towel from the sink and wipes his face, but even though the water’s cold, he stays asleep, merely squirms again and sighs.
