George Effinger: When Gravity Fails

I couldn’t remember what Chiri had said this girl’s name was. She’d obviously had a lot of work done: her cheekbones had been emphasized with silicone, her nose straightened and made smaller, her square jaw shaved down to a cute rounded point, oversized breast implants, silicone to round out her ass … they all left telltale signs. None of the customers would notice, but I’d seen a lot of women on a lot of stages in the last ten years. They all look the same.

Chiri came back from serving customers farther down the bar. We looked at each other. “She spill any money for brainwork?” I asked.

“She’s just amped for daddies, I think,” said Chiri. “That’s all.”

“She’s spent so much on that body, you’d think she’d go the whole way.”

“She’s younger than she looks, honey. You come back in six months, she’ll have her moddy plug, too. Give her time, and she’ll show you the personality you like best, hardcore slut or tragic soiled dove, or anything in-between.”

Chiri was right. It was just a novelty to see someone working in that nightclub using her own brain. I wondered if this new girl would have the stamina to keep working, or if the job would send her back where she came from, content with her perfectly modified body and her partially modified mind. A moddy and daddy bar was a tough place to make money. You could have the most dazzling body in the world, but if the customers were wired too, and paying more attention to their own intra-cranial entertainment, you might as well be home yourself, chipping in.

A cool, imperturbably voice spoke in my ear. “You are Marîd Audran?”

I turned slowly and looked at the man. I supposed this was Bogatyrev. He was a small man, balding, wearing a hearing aid — this man had no modifications at all. No visible ones, anyway. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t loaded with a module and add-ons I couldn’t see. I’ve run into a few people like that over the years. They’re the dangerous ones. “Yes,” I said. “Mr. Bogatyrev?”

“I am glad to make your acquaintance.”

“Likewise,” I said. “You’re going to have to buy a drink or this barmaid will start heating up her big iron cooking pot.” Chiri gave us that cannibal leer.

“I’m sorry,” said Bogatyrev, “but I do not consume alcohol.”

“It’s all right,” I said, turning to Chiri. “Give him one of these.” I held up my drink.

“But—” objected Bogatyrev.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s on me, I’ll pay for it. It’s only fair — I’m going to drink it, too.”

Bogatyrev nodded: no expression. Inscrutable, you know? The Orientals are supposed to have a monopoly on that, but these guys from Reconstructed Russia aren’t bad, either. They practice at it. Chiri made the drink and I paid.

Chiri liked to keep her club dark. The girls tended to look better in the dark. Less voracious, less predatory. The soft shadows tended to clothe them with mystery. Anyway, that’s what a tourist might think. Chiri was just keeping the lights off whatever private transactions might be occurring in the booths and at the tables. The bright lights on the stage barely penetrated the gloom. You could see the faces of the customers at the bar, staring, dreaming, or hallucinating. Everything else in the club was in darkness and indistinct. I liked it that way.

her. (I don't know what this supposed to be, so let it be) Then I steered the little man to a table in the back. Bogatyrev never glanced left or right, never gave the almost-naked women a moment of his attention. I’ve known men like that, too.

I finished my first drink and slid the glass to the side. I wrapped my hand around the second one. “What can I do for you, Mr. Bogatyrev?”

“Why did you ask me to meet you here?”

I shrugged. “I don’t have an office this month,” I said. “These people are my friends. I look out for them, they look out for me. It’s a community effort.”

“You feel you need their protection?” He was sizing me up, and I could tell that I hadn’t won him over yet. Not all the way. He was intensely polite about it the whole time. They practice that, too.

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Do you not have a weapon?”

I smiled. “I don’t carry a weapon, Mr. Bogatyrev. Not usually. I’ve never been in a situation where I needed one. Either the other guy has one, and I do what he says, or he doesn’t, and I make him do what I say.”

“But surely if you had a weapon and showed it first, it would avoid unnecessary risk.”

“And save valuable time. But I have plenty of time, Mr. Bogatyrev, and it’s my hide I’m risking. We all have to get our adrenaline flowing somehow. Besides, here in the Budayeen we work on kind of an honor system. They know I don’t have a weapon, I know they don’t. Anybody who breaks the rules gets broken right back. We’re like one big, happy family.” I didn’t know how much of this Bogatyrev was buying, and it wasn’t really important. I was just pushing a little, trying to get a sense of the man’s temper.

His expression turned just a tiny bit sour. I could tell that he was thinking about forgetting the whole thing. There are lots of private strongarms usted in the commcodes. Big, strong types with lots of weapons to reassure people like Bogatyrev. Agents with shiny bright seizure guns under their jackets, with lush, comfortable suites in more attractive neighborhoods, with secretaries and computer terminals hooked into every data base in the known world and framed pictures of themselves shaking hands with people you feel you ought to recognize. That wasn’t me. Sorry.

I saved Bogatyrev the trouble of asking. “You’re wondering why Lieutenant Okking recommended me, instead of one of the corporations in the city.”

Not a flicker out of Bogatyrev. “Yes,” he said.

“Lieutenant Okking’s part of the family,” I said. “He tosses business my way, I toss business his way. Look, if you went to one of those chrome-plated agents, he’d do what you need done; but it would cost you five times more than my fee; it would take longer, I can guarantee you that; and the high-velocity guys have a tendency to thunder around with their expensive equipment and those attention-getting weapons. I do the job with less noise. Less likely that your interests, whatever they are, will end up decorated with laser burns themselves.”

“I see. Now that you have brought up the subject of payment, may I ask your fee?”

“That depends on what you want done. There are certain kinds of work I don’t do. Call it a quirk. If I don’t want to take the job, though, I can refer you to someone good who will. Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

“I want you to find my son.”

I waited, but Bogatyrev didn’t seem to have anything further to say. “Okay,” I said.

“You will want a picture of him.” A statement.

“Of course. And all the information you can give me: how long he’s been missing, when you last saw him, what is said, whether you think he ran away or was coerced. This is a big city, Mr. Bogatyrev, and it’s very easy to dig in and hide if you want to. I have to know where to start looking.”

“Your fee?”

“You want to haggle?” I was beginning to get annoyed. I’ve always had trouble with these New Russians. I was born in the year 1550 — that would be 2172 in the calendar of the infidel. About thirty or forty years before my birth, Communism and Democracy died in their sleep from exhausted resources and rampant famine and poverty. The Soviet Union and the United States of America fractured into dozens of small monarchies and police states. All the other nations of the world soon followed suit. Moravia was an independent country now, and Tuscany, and the Commonwealth of the Western Reserve: all separate and terrified. I didn’t know which Reconstructed Russian state Bogatyrev came from. It probably didn’t make much difference.