BOOK TWELVE - !DEMATTING¡
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE - “PARTY!”
The death row infirmary is Regency antiseptic – white plasteen tiles composing its floor, its walls, its ceiling…
even, the condemned man imagines, the medics and the shurts
in attendance. Rateyes…
strapped to a gurney… is barely able to perceive a door opening and closing
behind a shape; a familiar voice sawing through the narcotic fantasies, visited
upon him by the Regency.
“Mac?” he gasps…
Detective Crandall leans over the prisoner. “Still time to cut a deal,
Percy. Give up that big lug we find all over your head… Broonzy, his name is…”
“You know who he is, why don't you pick him up?” Rats taunts.
“'Cause we only seen him doin' the rawth in your brain,” Crandall taps his head. “Can't convict unless you testify he did the
rawth you thought he did. Thoughtcrime
ain't illegal… yet… thanks to the gummons
at High Judiciary, Kasperson v. People of Gamma Gacula
some hundred=seventy soyyears ago… you know
that! Galaxy gone to the veebs! Otherwise we'd
have had Davey C. in the bag, too!
Course I suspect you might know more about that than we found…” and he
bent over and squeezed the prisoner’s cheek, not kindly… “some
little hairball of information still tucked away in that maggot-eaten noggin of
yours…”
“Too jammin' bad!”
Rats cuts him off.
“Don’t matter in your case, we’re gatproof
and you’re gonna slide. As for the jamming law, Regency's workin' on that. But 'til the law's
changed, it becomes my privilege to inform you that you have an opportunity to
commute tammawt down to mawt,
plain… stop all this messing around with brains and we just blow you away. Save
us money and save yoursel a lot of pain…”
“I can take anything you veebs dish
out – done it before and I’ll do it again! But, as I know your superiors want
to save money… Regency's broke, ain't it?... bring in the quack and I'll tell you how…”
The shurt’s feet in their sensible
black shoes do a little dance at Crandall’s will, despite himself. He opens his com, arranges the transaction
and goes out to the balcony for a kackle. He’s on his third cancer trick when a uniform
knocks on the window…
“He’s here…”
Dr. Hamanavisqoo, answering the
regency's summons, has manifested at the left side of Rateyes'
gurney, Crandall takes up his position on the right.
Rateyes
coughs. His eyes are crusted over with
dried blood and sand, but he forces one open and smiles. “You cheep veebs
want to track down anybody ever knew ol' Rats and
shock me out of their heads, right?
That’s your racket, isn’t it?”
“Just a crude slander on correctional paradigms of the Regency…”
the Regency psychiatrist recoils…
“But not wide of the mark…” Crandall steps in…
“Well then, throw a party…” the condemned jim suggests.
“What the jam…”
“Like a goin'-away party, faq? Invite all the danks I ever knew… the ones you pulled out of my skull,
that is, most can't resist a blowout wit from and balloons, if it’s free. Get 'em together
with drinks and snacks, set up your devices… you can blast me outta all their minds at once…”
“Bool!”
Hamanavisqoo protests…
“Figured out how much it'll cost to track every jammin' jim
down, bring 'em in for erasure as opposed to my way,
Mac? These are my friends…” Rateyes coaxes, with as much
of a nod as the restraints round his neck permits, “not as if you'd be putting
out for Hurtian champagne and funducks,
is it?”
The detective frowns. “This feasible, doctor?”
“Would be cheaper,” Hamanavisqoo
allows, his curiosity wakened. “The catchmen can
set matrices that replicate his face, his voice… the smell of 'im… burn it outta the brains of
anybody within half a klick, even if they come wearin’
protection. Which the bad jims will. We come
equipped with better protection; we dematt him and burn the people at the same time,
otherwise we might forget what we're there for and he walks away…
“What kind of better
protection?” Detective Crandall presses him.
“Tinfoil works… usually…” the shrink qualifies.
“And,” the uniform… a knafe who
answers to the name Pezzen… suggests, “we get everybody
knew this dank to come? Especially Broonzy? Can't convict
the veeb, but burning out all he ever knew about Frobisher'll make him a vegetable!”
Rats nods, enthusiastically.
“Now you’re coming! Put it on the
moodies… set ilaams up all
over the Baawl… Broonze was
just a dank I knew from the hotel, but one thing I do kip is that he can't pass
up free food and drinks. He’s a snaker!” And the
prisoner shrugs. “Oh… but I do have a
couple of conditions…”
“You?”
Crandall turns the fisheye on him – the Killshurt, in
fact, does seem to favor a halibut.
“Yeah, me. Take me out on Rassoulnacht,
stroke of
Crandall leers over his prey.
“Done!” he slavers. “We’ll get
them all… and we’ll get Broonze. Intifaq! Gonna send you to
Johanna with a bang!
“Too bad nobody will remember it,” the Detective grins.
Broonzy,
in a tattered raincoat filched out of a pile of eviction clothes left on the
sidewalk, stumbles down the Baawl, a bottle of cheap froom in his fist. He passes the ruins of the Andromeda and
Klub al-Gool, boarded-up,
flooded and burnt; closed, now, and vomits on the sidewalk before the dark
church. Chunks of flesh and blood swirl
in the red rain and ooze out towards the gutter. In the distance, a rhythmic "chee-up!" sounds… Broonzy
climbs drunkenly over the gate, and into the grotto dominated by the huge
statue of Rassoul, whose lap's just wide enough to
make a bed – sheltered from the toxic rain by the prophet’s folded arms.
He snores. Around the corner, bearing candles,
comes the procession of hooded, chanting Old Believers.
The Patriarch has died.
Rassoulnacht
arrives under intense heat and windblasts of the toxic arby
that drive what seems the whole population of the Baawl…
and then some… to seek shelter indoors. The shurts
have mobbed up a warehouse into a simulated dispersal-era nightclub with
flashing lights, music and open bar. It's jammed with mates and enemies of Rateyes from the Baawl and the dromes, and the lower-end casinos… most having a roaring
good time except for three convicted accessories manacled to the wall of the
loft above the dancefloor… the al-Gool bartender and Mushnovarian, the crooked lawyer, with Turpin suspended
between them in an obscene parody of the Passion as permeated the galaxy beforel Christ was supplanted by Rassoul.
Rateyes is strapped to the dematerializing chair… a
throne, truth be told… serviced by a pair of heathers
(coincidentally, Mandy and Candy from the Yasrick.
Detective Crandall, his shurts and Hamanavisqoo… their shaven skulls covered by tinfoil… glare
downwards, eyeballing Rateyes' guests – checking
facial profiles against Broonzy’s last known
coordinates on their devices. Another shurt mediates
a commotion at the door caused by Quaia, Marina and a
half dozen prekts (led by the survivor of the
Andromeda carnage) trying to squirm in.
“Were mates, vay presto mates of… of
that guy!” Marina points, eyes glazed, tongue thick
with the roar. “Saved my life oncet, ‘n I saved his…”
“Then you oughta be hangin’ on the wall with those other three danks who aided and abetted that dank,” the doorshurt snarls, but he has his orders and… high above the
throng… the Regency’s debraining machines are warming
up. “You can come in… you're all on the
list, but the yoots can't drink!”
“Jam you, then!”
The shurt seems to be pondering this,
so Quaia placed her hand on his bare forearm… it was
insanely hot in Tao City that evening.
“Officer, I know you have to obey the letter of the law, but the Regents
have nothing against serving me, and after that what you don't know
doesn't hurt. Everybody gets to do their own forgetting, tonight… and, after
all, these yoots don’t need froom…”
She winks – the shurt is ploofed. Besides,
it’s begun to rain… the condensation from the heat and the arby
throwing great red clouds of acidic drizzle over the domed metropolis.
“Since it's almost twenty four hundred Hurtian…
oh rawth, go in! Doesn't mean we can't gorl you after the burn… hey, no weapons, you…”
“Rawth!” the boff
prekt spits…
The sensors have detected a small arsenal of knives, lasers, spitters, hissers and other weaponry on the prekts… everything, it seems, but gats… the arsenal goes
into a quickly growing pile by the door.
“We… uh… get our stuff b-back when we g-go, faq?” one of the prekts
staggers and stammers…
“Everything that's comin' to you!” the
doorshurt promises.
Up on the mezzanine between the pulsing floor of the loft and
the cloaked debrainers mounted high above, Detective
Crandall sticks his tinfoil bedecked face down into Turpin's.
“Twenty three jammin'
fifty and no jammin' sign of your buddy!
Where the jam is he? We put out word everywhere… moodies,
ilaams, got the quaffs on all the qubes
talking up this dematting everywhere. Look at this jammin
place! Get a fire started here like they had in the Andromeda and two thirds of
the Tao City's crime disappears. All the
skimmies and sikken, lootooties and veebs… gone!” he
snaps his fingers, “Gone, down to Johanna.
You promised!”
“I didn't promise rawth!” and Turp points to Rats, enjoying the ministrations of the
heathers on his throne as his worshippers dance and drink, careen and copulate
on the floor. Pointing to Rateyes, the convict explains, “he did!”
“Where is he?” Crandall ploofs,
slapping the prisoner twice across the viz… once
left-to-right, then right-to-left.
“Where is C. Braxton jammin’ Broonzy? Where is
he?”
This time, he starts pummeling Turpin with a closed fist until
one of the Regency boffs leads him away.
go
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