Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“It’s a tight fit, Charles. A conspiracy of some sort. What were you guys inventing that would scare somebody into this?”

“We aren’t inventors. I mean, we don’t work with electrics or chemicals or anything like that. We thought that that kind of work would slow down the process of pure thought. It’s all just ideas, notions. Like at our last meeting, Brenton asked if we made a pole maybe ten million miles long and then push it from one end so that ten million miles away a glass was knocked over, would that act exceed the speed of light? You see, if the pole moved as one unit, the glass would be knocked over almost simultaneously, in less than a second.” The young blond man lifted his head with pride.

“That’s the kinda stuff you expect to get you rich?” Johnson asked.

“Well, maybe it’s not so smart, but that’s the process of invention. You use your mind.”

Johnson’s blue eye was covering all available data through a wireless transmitting station embedded in the prosthetic baby finger of his left hand.

“Is this club of yours registered under the name Seekers?”

“No. We’re not registered.”

“Why not? It is the law that all intellectual property be catalogued with the feds.”

“We were worried that the government would sequester our ideas.”

“They only do that if the ideas are dangerous. Were any of your ideas threats?”

“No. No. Just things like that pole and some political questions. But most of them were pretty conservative. I mean, nine of us are International Socialists.”

Johnson put his fingers together, making a tent under his blue and brown eyes. D’or came in with two steaming plates of bok choy and tofu under gleaming sheaths of oyster sauce. Spellman put up a hand to wave away the food but D’or ignored him. Folio accepted his serving and bided his time using his blue eye to map molecular patterns in the steam. He considered the young man in front of him.

“What brought you guys together?” he asked at last.

“What do you mean?”

“How did you meet? How did you get together?”

“About half of us knew each other from school. Trent State. Lenny Li and Brenton both went there, and me and Mylo. Laddie did too. Mylo knew Billy from boarding school and Laddie was my friend from the gym. He was a lawyer for IBC. I think Derrick was a friend of Mingus.”

“Who is Mingus?”

“Mingus Black, he worked with Derry for a while. A real success story. You know, black, Backgrounder parents — but he worked his way topside and made it as a lawyer. Now he’s into buying up leases for Red Raven Enterprises mainly, he really works it. He was one of the four guys who bought up the Tokyo leases and moved those half million Kenyans to Japan.”

“Who else?”

“Fonti Timmerman and Azuma Sherman.”

“They from Trent?”

“Azuma went there one year and then transferred to Harvard. He did a leverage with Laddie at Macso. It was a real beauty too—”

“What about Fonti?”

“Him and Brenton were friends. He’s just a programmer but he’s real smart and he knows how to read crystal code. He went to City College.”

As the pale antique dealer gave names, Folio recorded them off the Ether with his blue eye and baby finger. He didn’t read the whole files into his mind because he was concentrating on what the kid had to say.

“No Jews,” Johnson said.

“What?”

“No Jews among your group.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Just an observation.”

“There are no Jews in International Socialism. Zionism is incompatible with social evolution.”

“You got a black kid in there,” the detective suggested.

“We’re not racist, we’re modernists in the modern world.”

“Then why not go all the way and accept Jews who agree with your beliefs?”

“A Jew can never fully accept International Socialism,” certainty worked its way into the wan kid’s words, “because of the deep symbolic knowledge his people have hoarded over the last six thousand years. They can never give up their primitive notions of how the world should be organized.”

“No place for them?” Johnson asked.

“Not in our group.”

For a moment the detective considered refusing to help the kid. Why bother saving this fool? he thought. But then he remembered that he’d been sleeping behind D’or’s counter for the past eight days and that his store of general credits was almost depleted.

“Five thousand credits and you’ll have to move out of your apartment.”

“What?” Charles Spellman half rose from his chair.

“... down into Common Ground, that’s right.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Listen, kid. You’re in the middle of a full-fledged murder spree here. The cops are obviously coverin’ it up because they never caught those muggers — and the cops catch everybody they want to catch. It takes a lotta money to rig an accident like that cave-in on Upper Broadway and more than that to make it look like an architectural flaw. The only reason you’re not dead is ’cause they haven’t gotten to your name yet. If they did you all at once somebody like the Daily Dump might pick up on it. I know a guy can make you a fake ID that’ll put you under and safe until I can get a handle on who’s doin’ what and why.”

“There’s no fake ID in the world that can beat the Molecular Tester Device,” Spellman said. Johnson noticed that he was looking even paler than when he’d walked in.

“You think they suspect people of sneakin’ into Common Ground? They don’t care. They don’t check. Anybody off of the cycle is welcome into hell.”

“I can’t just vacate my place. I have responsibilities.”

“You call in sick. I’ll stay in your hole. Maybe someone’ll try and check you out. That’s my best bet for a clue.”

“When?”

“Right now. We go to the bank and then to my friend. After that you take the Develator to Common Ground and stay there until you hear from me.”

The fear in the kid’s eyes delighted Johnson. He stood to his full six foot seven height, towering over the frightened fascist. He was happy to cause the young man pain, but he was happier to have a bed to sleep in and five thousand creds on his wild card.

“You wanna take some more vig and do me again, baby?” Tana Lynn whispered in Folio Johnson’s ear.

“Again?” he moaned. “Honey, thatta be seven times. I’ma start comin’ red if I do that shit again.”

“It’d only be six,” the ecstasy girl said, pouting. “And I love it when you make that little noise like you were crying.”

“Next time I’ll put on the rec-chip and you can listen to that while I heal.”

“Can we get somethin’ to eat, then?” Tana asked.

“Order whatever you want,” Folio said, crawling out of the great round bed. “But charge it to the apartment. I don’t want to spend my cash.”

She had fine features and dark skin, blond hair, and green eyes. When Folio had met her at the West Side DanceDome a few days earlier, he thought she was an Egyptian heretic. But when he took her out that night she’d told him that she was Ethiopian.

“They kept us in a field outside Addis Ababa,” she’d told him, “but then a Peace Corps guy named Lampton put me in a bag and brought me here. By the time I turned eleven he wasn’t attracted to me anymore and gave me to this guy named Jim. Jim put me to work cleaning his sister’s house and his. It wasn’t so bad, really. They let me study and I learned commodities trading. It was kinda weird, ’cause the day I moved out to my new place Jim told me that Lampton had paid him to kill me.”

After Tana ate she went to sleep. Johnson sat out on the deck of Charles Spellman’s two hundred first floor apartment. He stared at the red-tinged night sky and studied the information provided by his excellent eye.