Only Forward. Michael Marshall Smith
I told C what I’d found out, and he agreed with my conclusions. The fact that I was still in one piece after two visits to Red and being in the front line of a gang war between two Turn psychopaths was not lost on Darv, and though he was no more polite, he seemed to accept that I was indeed the man for the job.
The job being, of course, risking almost certain execution and/ or instant death, melodramatic though that sounds. There was no question but that the job was going to go ahead, and that made me think a little. Forbidden Neighbourhoods, particularly Stable, are very, very protective of their privacy, and the Centre is supposed to respect that. If I was going to get top level go-ahead for an incursion, something pretty major was at stake. I was beginning to wonder if I knew everything I ought to, if this was just going to be a normal job after all.
‘Well,’ said C, leaning back in his chair. ‘There does appear to be only one option. Ms Renn suggested you for this job, Mr Stark. She said that not only were you the best at what you did, but also that you had never turned your back on anything once you’d started. Does this set a precedent?’
‘No,’ I said, gazing levelly at him and saying what he expected to hear, ‘and I take it this conversation never took place.’
He smiled gently, and nodded.
‘Ms Renn is a good judge of character.’
He stood and left the room without another word. Darv, grunt that he was, took the time to spell out exactly how disinterested the Centre was going to be in any trouble I got myself into, and then he left also. As I watched him go I felt unreal for a moment, was aware of the world around me. It passed. It always does.
Zenda saw me to the door.
‘Be careful, Stark,’ she said.
‘I will,’ I said, kissing her hand, feeling for once a fragile pool of intimacy in the administrative desert. ‘And if there’s anything I can do, should whatever it is that isn’t wrong get any worse, call me.’
She nodded quickly twice, and I left.
On the way back to my apartment I did what I could to come up with a plan of attack. For reasons of my own I was actually pretty excited at the idea of seeing the inside of Stable, but like everybody else, I knew next to nothing about it. What little I did, including the only possible method of entry, I knew from Snedd. I had the notes I’d got him to make after being released from there with numbers on his forehead, but they were very patchy. He didn’t understand why I was so interested in the inside of a Neighbourhood I could never go into, and he wasn’t in the best of moods at the time.
There was no point going back into Red to talk to him now: after eight years, many of them spent out of his head, there was little chance he was going to remember anything new. All I could do was memorise what I had, and try to replicate his entry.
I remembered him being very insistent on one thing: if you’re going to try to break in, do it during the day. Most of the Neighbourhoods are geared for twenty-four-hour living, though activity does thin out a lot at night. It’s only places like Red that go full on all the time. But Stable, Snedd had said, shuts tight at 11.00 p.m. That had been his mistake. He’d broken in at night, because that’s what you generally do, to find himself the only moving person.
Apart from the Stable police, that is. That’s why he’d been caught, and that’s why he was a living time-bomb. He’d been lucky, too. By chance he’d been caught in a built-up area: had it been possible, the police would simply have shot him on sight.
By the time I was near my mono stop the walls of the carriage looked like an explosion in a paint factory as they strove to meet the challenge of evoking my mood. In most Neighbourhoods I have a contact, I have an angle, I have some way of protecting myself, of keeping this just a dangerous game. In the Centre I have Zenda. In Red I have Ji. In Natsci I have a guy called Brian Diode IV, who can break the security code of just about any computer in The City, given the time and enough pizza. In Brandfield I know a girl called Shelby who has a two-person heliporter, which has saved my life more than once.
And so on, and so on. In Stable I had nothing. Blending in was not going to be easy, always assuming I could gain entry in the first place, and if I didn’t, I was going to die.
Also, what the hell was going on in the Centre? I’ve known Zenda a long time, and I’d never seen her looking the way she had tonight. A little paranoia was natural in a Neighbourhood where absolutely everybody was trying to clamber over the top of everybody else, but she hadn’t been looking paranoid. She’d looked like something was worrying her, but she wasn’t sure what it was. I found that very worrying.
Also, who the hell were we dealing with? Any gang who could not only steal an important Actioneer but then sneak him into a forbidden Neighbourhood and keep him there undetected was a group of serious over-achievers. If they found out I was looking for them then the Stable police were going to be the least of my problems, and I wouldn’t have Ji or even Snedd around to help.
How do I get myself into these positions? Why do I do this job? Why do I still need this safety net, this thing to be? Isn’t it time to say goodbye now?
There was a quiet pinging sound, and I looked up to see that the walls were fading to a uniform black. I’d broken the carriage’s mood detector.
Bugger this, I thought. I had to wait till tomorrow anyway. I was going to take a break. I was going to find my cat.
I stayed on the mono to the far side of Colour, and then got off at the transfer portal. I had to go through another Neighbourhood to get where I was going, which meant buying another ticket. An attendant inspected me at the gate, checked that I was wearing quiet shoes, and nodded. I went over to the ticket office and pointed on the map at where I wanted to go. The man behind the counter nodded, and held up three fingers. I handed him three credits as quietly as I could, and he passed me a ticket. Then I tiptoed over to the platform and waited.
The next Neighbourhood along from Colour is Sound, so named because they don’t allow any. When the mono arrived it pulled up with barely a whisper, and the doors opened silently. I stepped into the carriage and sat carefully down on the padded seat. My journey wasn’t going to take that long: Sound isn’t very big, thank Christ. It gives me the creeps.
The carriage was empty. The Sounders have one hour every evening where they’re allowed to go into a small room and shout their heads off, and I was bang in the middle of that hour. I still couldn’t make any noise though, as the carriages have microphones all over the place. If you make any noise a silent alarm goes off somewhere and they come and throw you silently off the mono, and you have to walk silently down the silent streets instead, which is even worse.
So I sat and thought, trying to calm my mood and also to remember as much as possible of what Snedd had told me about Stable.
There wasn’t much. The Neighbourhood had been forbidden right from the start. When The City reorganisation had started to take place, Stable had simply built a wall all around itself, shut out the sky, severed all connections with the outside world and pretended it didn’t exist. The first generation knew it did, of course, but they were forbidden to tell their children. They were happy not to: the first generation stayed in Stable because they liked it that way.
They were all long dead now, and the sixth and seventh generations had no idea the outside world existed. As far as they knew, the whole planet apart from the area they lived in had been destroyed in a nuclear war. They could walk up to the walls and see through windows and sure enough, outside was just a barren red plain blown with radioactive sand. The windows were in fact vidiscreens maintained by the authorities whose job it was to keep things going on the way they were.
The very last thing those authorities want is for anyone to make it in from the outside: it would blow the whole thing and trash hundreds of years of desired deception. Desired, because I’m not talking about repression here. The Stablents aren’t kept in ignorance