George Effinger: When Gravity Fails

“Maybe,” said the trick. He was playing it cagey.

“Lookin’ for anybody special?”

The man licked his hps nervously. “I was hoping to find Ashla.”

“Uh uh, baby, sorry. Lips, hips, or fingertips, I don’t do no Ashla.” She looked away for a second and spat. “You go by that girl, I think she got Ashla.” She pointed to a deb I knew. The trick nodded his thanks and crossed the street. I accidentally caught the first whore’s eyes. “Fuck, man,” she said, laughing a little. Then she was watching the Street again, looking for lunch money. A couple of minutes later another man came up to her and had the same conversation. “Lookin’ for anybody special?”

This guy, a little taller than the first and a lot heavier, said “Brigitte?” He sounded apologetic.

She dug in her black vinyl purse and brought out a plastic rack of moddies. A moddy is a lot bigger than a daddy, which usually just chips right into a socket on the side of the moddy you’re using, or onto the cory plug in your skull if you’re not wired for moddies or if you just feel like being yourself. The girl held a pink plastic moddy in one hand and put the rack back in her purse. “Here she go, your main woman. Brigitte, she be real popular, she get a lot of airplay. She cost you more.”

“I know,” said the trick. “How much?”

“You tell me,” she said, thinking he might be a cop setting her up. That kind of thing still happened whenever the religious authorities ran out of infidels to persecute. “How much you got to spend?”

“Fifty?”

“For Brigitte , man?”

“A hundred?”

“An’ fifteen for the room. You come with me, sugar.” They walked off along Fourth Street. Ain’t love grand.

I knew who Ashla was and who Brigitte was, but I wondered who all the other moddies in that rack might be. It wasn’t worth a hundred kiam a throw to find out, though. Plus fifteen for the room. So this Titian-haired hustler goes off with her sweetheart and chips Brigitte in, and she becomes Brigitte, and she’s everything he remembers her being; and it would always be the same, whoever used a Brigitte moddy, woman, deb, or sex-change.

I went through the eastern gate and I was halfway to the bank when I stopped suddenly in front of a jewelry store. Something was gnawing at the edge of my mind. There was some idea trying to burst its way into my consciousness. It was an uncomfortable, ticklish feeling; there didn’t seem to be any way to help it, either. Maybe it was only the tri-phets I’d taken; I can get pretty carried away with meaningless thoughts when I’m humming like that. But no, it was more than just drug inspiration. There was something about Bogatyrev’s murder or the conversation I’d had on the phone with Okking. There was something wrong.

I thought over as much of that business as I could remember. Nothing stood out in my memory as unusual; Okking’s bit had been a brush-off, I realized, but it was just the standard cop brush-off: “Look, this is a matter for the police, we don’t need you sticking your nose into it, you had a job last night but it blew up in your face, so thank you very much.” I’ve heard the same line from Okking before, a hundred times. So why did it feel so wonky today?

I shook my head. If there was something to it, I’d figure it out. I filed it away in my backbrain; it would stew there and either boil away into nothing or simmer down into a cold, hard fact that I could use. Until then, I didn’t want to bother about it. I wanted to enjoy the warmth and strength and confidence I was getting from the drugs. I’d pay for that when I crashed, so I wanted to get my money’s worth.

Maybe ten minutes later, just as I was getting to the bank’s sidewalk teller terminals, my phone rang again. I plucked it off my belt. “Yeah?” I said.

“Marîd? This is Nikki.” Nikki was a crazy change, worked as a whore for one of Friedlander Bey’s jackals. About a year ago I had been pretty friendly with her, but she was just too much trouble. When you were with her, you had to keep track of the pills and the drinks she was taking; one too many and Nikki got belligerent and completely incoherent. Every time we went out, it ended up in a brawl. Before her modifications, Nikki had been a tall, muscular male, I guess — stronger than I am. Even after the sex change, she was still impossible to handle in a fight. Trying to drag her off the people she imagined had insulted her was an ordeal. Getting her calmed down and safely home was exhausting. Finally I decided that I liked her when she was straight, but the rest of it just wasn’t worth it. I saw her now and then, said hello and gossiped, but I didn’t want to wade into any more of her drunken, screaming, senseless conflicts.

“Say, Nikki, where you at?”

“Marîd, baby, can I see you today? I really need you to do me a favor.”

Here we go, I thought. “Sure, I guess. What’s up?”

There was a short pause while she thought about how she was going to phrase this. “I don’t want to work for Abdoulaye anymore.” That was the name of Friedlander Bey’s bottleholder. Abdoulaye had about a dozen girls and boys on wires all around the Budayeen.

“Easy enough,” I said. I’ve done this kind of work a lot, picking up a few extra kiam now and then. I’ve got a good relationship with Friedlander Bey — within the walls we all called him Papa; he practically owned the Budayeen, and had the rest of the city in his pocket, as well. I always kept my word, which was a valuable recommendation to someone like Bey. Papa was an old-timer. The rumor was that he might be as much as two hundred years old, and now and then I could believe it. He had an archaic sense of what was honor and what was business and what was loyalty. He dispensed favors and punishments like an ancient idea of God. He owned many of the clubs, whorehouses, and cookshops in the Budayeen, but he didn’t discourage competition. It was all right with him if some independent wanted to work the same side of the street. Papa operated on the understanding that he wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t bother him; however, Papa offered all kinds of attractive inducements. An awful lot of free agents ended up working for him after all, because they couldn’t get those particular benefits for themselves. He didn’t just have connections; Papa was connections.

The motto of the Budayeen was “Business is business.” Anything that hurt the free agents eventually hurt Friedlander Bey. There was enough to go around for everybody; it might have been different if Papa had been the greedy type. He once told me that he used to be that way, but after a hundred and fifty or sixty years, you stop wanting. That was about the saddest thing anyone ever said to me.

I heard Nikki take a deep breath. “Thanks, Marîd. You know where I’m staying?”

1 didn’t pay that much attention to her comings and goings anymore. “No, where?”

“I’m staying by Tamiko for a little while.”

Great, I thought, just great. Tamiko was one of the Black Widow Sisters. “On Thirteenth Street?”

“Yeah.”

“I know. How about if I come by, say, two o’clock?”

Nikki hesitated. “Can you make it one? I’ve got something else I need to do.”

It was an imposition, but I was feeling generous; it must have been the blue triangles. For old times’ sake I said, “All right, I’ll be there about one, inshallah .”

“You’re sweet, Marîd. I’ll see you then. Salaam.” She cut the connection.

I hung the phone on my belt. It didn’t feel, at that moment, like I was getting into something over my head. It never does, before you take the leap.

It was twelve forty-five when I found the apartment building on Thirteenth Street. It was an old two-story house, broken up into separate flats. I glanced up at Tamiko’s balcony overlooking the street. There was a waist-high iron railing on three sides, and in the corners were lacy iron columns twined with ivy, reaching up toward the overhanging roof. From an open window I could hear her damn koto music. Electronic koto music, from a synthesizer. The shrieking, high-pitched singing that accompanied it gave me chills. It might have been a synthetic voice, it might have been Tami. Did I tell you that Nikki was a little crazy? Well, next to Tami, Nikki was just a cuddly little white bunny. Tamiko’d had one of her salivary glands replaced with a plastic sac full of some high-velocity toxin. A plastic duct led the poison down through an artificial tooth. The toxin was harmless if swallowed, but loose in the bloodstream, it was horribly, painfully lethal. Tamiko could uncap that tooth anytime she needed to — or wanted to. That’s why they called her and her friends the Black Widow Sisters.