Jon Grimwood - reMix

The Japanese girl was back in the bar now, her face turned ostentatiously away from Fixx. But she was watching him all the same, catching his reflection in the polished polyglass dome of the Cadillac jukebox.

“Here.” Jude slammed a first-aid box in front of him and pulled out a small stapler. Taking a half full bottle of Stoli out of an icebox, she tipped what was left of its contents down the side of his face and then wiped at the crusted blood with an old bar towel.

“Hey, you...” Jude’s fingers closed on his jerking head, holding it immobile as she cleaned up the cut. “Keep still.” It was all Fixx could do not to shout with pain, but he couldn’t, not with Jude and the Japanese girl listening.

“Okay, here goes.” Jude pinched together the gash on Fixx’s temple and stapled it fast, before he had time to protest.

It took four staples to close the gash and then Jude was done. The instant skin she stuck in strips across the gash, instead of along it as the manufacturers recommended. He didn’t ask her why, though Fixx knew without looking in a glass that he was going to need a skin graft when he got home. Always assuming the Reich left him a home to return to.

“You?” Jude asked the Japanese woman, who shook her head. “Suit yourself.” Jude turned back to Fixx, slipped her first-aid box under the bar and came up holding the tattered Kodak of LizAlec. She looked at Fixx, long and slow, and then she glanced down at the piece of card in her hand, pale blue eyes gazing at LizAlec’s intense face staring back.

“You like the girl?”

Fixx nodded.

“You fuck her?”

They looked at each other and Fixx remembered Jude kneeling over him, her hips pushing down hard as she bit her own bottom lip in concentration. He shook his head.

“You tried?”

Fixx thought about answering. But there was a lot of shit swirling around in his head that couldn’t stand too good a look. Why the fuck else did Jude think he spent as much time as he could going AWOL inside his head, skipping reality’s bail bonds?

In the end he just shrugged.

Jude nodded, half to herself. “That girl was real afraid.” She jerked her chin at the dead clone sliced open on her bar floor. “You think that shit was what scared her?”

No, Fixx didn’t. “Fresh hatched,” he said, having thought about it. “Couldn’t even talk properly yet...” But why the fuck ask him? Fixx wondered crossly. He didn’t know what the fuck had scared LizAlec, who the fuck was after her, and he certainly didn’t know where the fuck she was.

Jude looked at Fixx. “You heard of The Arc ?”

The tall musician nodded — everyone had heard of The Arc — and then he realized exactly what Jude was trying to say. LizAlec was out at the—

“Honey,” said Jude crossly, “that kid was real frightened. I had to send her somewhere she couldn’t get into trouble.”

Jude gave Fixx the tri-D, passing it across reluctantly, turning it face down before she gave it to him. Fixx didn’t bother to turn it face up again before slipping the Kodak of LizAlec into his back pocket.

“You see the kid, you give her that back, you understand?”

Fixx nodded. He was picking salted almonds out of a blue dish and swallowing them without really tasting. Eating from habit and embarrassment. They both knew it was dangerously close to goodbye.

Jude smiled wryly at Fixx and looked past his shoulder at the hole in the wall. Through the gap they could both see the metal wall and the door set into it. There was a panel of diodes, touch-sensitive switches and read-outs set in the middle of the wall, but it was so covered with dust that it just looked like a grey square. Above it was a larger grey square, which would turn into a triple-glazed glass window when anyone bothered to wipe it down. At the moment there was only a small smudge of black where one of the regulars had cleared off enough of the dust to peer through at the vast cavern behind,

“Ice,” Jude said. “Not your kind, my kind. Water.” She looked at Fixx. “You got any idea how much that amount of fresh ice is worth?”

He didn’t. He wasn’t even enough of a tourist to know about the ice reserves that had supposedly been found back at the beginning. A few of the guides said the water was brought to the Moon, the rest said it was chemically manufactured. But street rumour, deep rumour said the water had always been there as ice, right from the very start. Hidden at the bottom of the deepest craters, protected by the shadows.

“The next time you come back here, Strat’s going to be a rich town. We’ll have a market, electrics, fresh water...” Jude’s rough voice trailed away at the thought of the possibilities. “You know, I could sell that and go Earthside. Live like a queen.”

She couldn’t, of course. Her augmentations were for Luna, not Earth. And it didn’t matter that she worked out regularly in a full-gravity gym. The permanent sixfold increase in Earth gravity would burn out her metabolism within months and grind her calcium-starved bones to fragments, starting at her hips. What credit she began with would be swallowed up by medical care.

But Fixx wasn’t about to say that, and besides, he knew that Jude already knew.

“You see it all, when you come back. Sweedak?”

Fixx nodded again and Jude gave him her best twisted smile. She wasn’t stupid and nor was he: both knew he had more chance of surviving naked in a vacuum than walking back through that door. All the same...

Fixx scooped the last of the almonds out of the bowl and turned to go.

“Hey, you...” Jude’s voice was loud.

For a second, Fixx thought she was going to do something stupid like suggest he stay, but she didn’t. Instead Jude just pointed to the first clone, slumped unconscious against a cracked polycrete table.

“Take your trash with you...”

Gamblers need luck. General Que had it. Luck followed him like his own shadow: that was what his own officers had said — and they were right. But General Que worked hard for his luck, in ways so old that most Shanghai families had forgotten them...

Unlucky days were as important as lucky days, he knew that. When the gods smiled, he’d put his entire estate on one single turn of baccarat. On other days he wouldn’t have bet the loose chips in his pocket on remembering his dead wife’s name.

His house had exactly the right number of rooms, his site of fortune was placed where good feng shui demanded it should be: panelled walls had been taken down and others erected to make sure this was true. He never stayed in hotels that had a thirteenth floor and only took suites with names that were lucky. His limousine was red, with red leather seats and red carpet.

Not once in his life had he placed a bet in a room that contained an old-fashioned printed hardback. (In a different context, the word for book could also mean failure.)

Although the most important guest in Shanghai’s Imperial Casino, he never walked brazenly in through the vast revolving glass doors at the front, preferring to slip in through a discreet side door from Upgrade Alley. He knew, just as his father before him had known, that sometimes ill luck will be hiding in the foyer, waiting to mug you...

And yet, despite the large blue china lion dogs that guarded his study, the gold lucky symbol hanging from his red-painted wall and his elegant, perfectly carved chop seal made from mutton-fat jade, General Que was having a bad-luck day. A very, very bad-luck day.

In fact, the General hadn’t had such a bad-luck day since two very young, very scared military policemen had ransacked his house three weeks before, looking for something they realized soon enough wasn’t there. It wasn’t there because the General had given the shrine to his daughter as security against just such a visit. Both of the police officers had since killed themselves, thus saving him the effort of arranging their deaths himself. Though whether they had committed suicide out of fear of his retribution or terror at having failed Beijing, the General didn’t know or even care.