LONG ENOUGH TO FEEL HIS FACE MELT

1563 4D

Three little girls grinned up at him. One was Janny. She grabbed his hand and jumped up and down. His eyes widened with joy; he laughed and squeezed her hand and tried to pick her up.

“Daddy,” she yelled over the music.

“Daddy,” the other two girls yelled back. Their little fingers wrapped themselves around Andrew‘s thumb and index finger. They jumped up and down with Janny. Andrew studied them: one Janny‘s age and build, with the same knots in her hair, a purple and orange smock, and a necklace made of tiny teeth; the other one smaller, with no hair at all and a pattern of whorls tattooed on her scalp, a pair of little coveralls spangled with manycolored stains, and an amulet of dried birds’ legs. Her fingers let go long enough to curl a pattern in Andrew‘s palm, then grip his finger again.

The other two men, sweat gleaming on their faces and dripping from their heads of curly dark-brown hair, laughed and clapped the bewildered Andrew on the shoulders, then jounced off. One called back to Andrew, “Bet-ter you than me, Brojo.”

Ecstatic, Andrew grabbed Janny up into his arms. She reached down to her companions, making a grasping gesture with her hand, and the other two girls shinnied up his legs, missed kicking his crotch somehow, scrambled over his arm, shoved off from other peoples’ bodies, and came to rest one on each of his shoulders, their legs straddling him and Janny. Little arms circled his chin. He got words out with some difficulty. “Janny, who are these girls?” She looked up at him with a smile, not answering. He tried again. “Janny, who dese?” and rocked his head side to side a little.

She reached up and grabbed a leg — Andrew wasn’t sure of its owner. “Veevee,” she said. She let go and grabbed another leg. “Billy T.” Their wiry thighs clamped Andrew‘s shoulders. “Seestees. Me seestees.” She patted their knees. Their body smells cut through the festival fragrance to assault Andrew‘s nasal linings. Andrew wanted to shrug, but his shoulders were immobilized. For now, why not? he thought, and with his new-grown tree of children, Janny beating the tympan still in his hand, he trundled sideways with the music into the narrow entrance to the stair.

His knees wobbled as he pushed his way out onto 641, fifty feet down. The crowds and noise were less — the sloping ways did not intersect here — and in the softly-lit understreet just outside the stair entrance, he found the bioshop. A few other shops, foodsellers and druggists, were open and lighted; numerous knots of tired celebrants of the Run puttered and lounged in the stores and the street, gathering energy for the next day’s climactic dances.

Setting down the girls, Andrew edged past a ceiling-high rack of tissue and organ tanks to a stand a few paces inside the store. Janny‘s cheek bumped the side of his leg.

“I’m Andrew Luce,” he said to a steeleyed man with a triangular face and metalbone thighs.

“Get those rats outa here,” the man warbled at him in a warning soprano. “Get them out!” The children stopped and eyed him.

“This is my daughter—" Andrew began.

“Feedshit! Get outa here, alla you!” Now the soprano had become a stabbing screech. The children covered their ears and backed away.

Andrew stood his ground. “Outside, then. Harren sent me to talk to you. Harren.”

The man, his red-brown skin mottled and flushed, lowered his voice and said, “Outside, yes. What you want?” They walked back to the entrance. The girls stood looking up and down the understreet, glancing occasionally at Andrew and the other man.

“I’m looking for Engel Luce. He’s my son.”

The man reached out a hand. The gray orbs darkened in his eye sockets. The hand fluttered swiftly over Andrew‘s face, lingering at the corners of his mouth, his nostrils, and his eyes, making him flinch. “He could be, yes. What you want from me?”

“I just arrived in-city. It’s been a long time, but I really need to find him right now.”

“When he wants be found, he will be. Wait a minute. Hold still. I see more with fingers.” The man brushed fingertips across the base of Andrew‘s neck, touching the uppermost of the network of scars that webbed Andrew‘s body. The man’s gray orbs flickered to white for a split second. “Arlen.”

“Yes. Like Engel. The Lady, I mean Allashani, told me that.”

Another briefer flick from the man’s eyes. “The Lady. Maybe pay me some info if I tell you where Engel be. What’s moving? People scared, even in middle of the Run. What you know, you been with the Lady?” He tilted his head slightly to the left, his centerless eyes still aligned perfectly on Andrew‘s face.

Andrew hesitated. “I don’t know you,” he said.

“No, but you holding mouth shut. Are Dorlon Bushidil trying take over again? They say she backed them.”

Andrew took a deep breath. He didn’t want to say too much. “I don’t know who they are, but I do know that you’d better shutter down and hide your doors in the next few hours. More than that I can’t say.”

Eyelids tightened in a squint over the man’s gray orbs. “Fat good that to me. As well say the Run gonna come down here and dance my ceiling. Unless you talking war. You talking war, yes?” He took a step forward, putting his patch-colored face an inch from Andrew‘s.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Andrew glanced back at the three little girls. Their eyes fixed on the man confronting Andrew, they hand-talked and made little noises between giggles and grunts. One of them pointed at a tank filled with reels of neuroleader, the leader ends wriggling like eels in the pale-blue nutrient bath.

“Then go away. Now.” The man raised an arm, its forearm aligned between Andrew‘s eyes. A barrel protruded from the man’s wrist. A toxgun. “Less you wanna share what you know.” One charge from this thing, and Andrew would live just long enough to feel his face melt.

Andrew remembered Allashani‘s invitation to return within an hour. “Never mind,” he said. He backed away, turned and beckoned to Janny. The girl with the tattooed scalp had disappeared; Janny and the other one scrutinized something over Andrew‘s shoulder. He whirled just in time to see the neuroleader tank start to topple into the aisle above the man with the toxgun.

With a noise like a brief fart, the weapon discharged into the understreet ceiling just past Andrew‘s head. “Little buggers!” the man screeched, his forearm up; the tank descended slowly at first, gathering speed; the man raised the other arm, the gun still in his hand; the gun blatted again, this time directly at the falling tank‘s wall; the tank ruptured, soaking the man with nutrient fluid now shot through with red-brown flecks and writhing neuroleader strands.

The fluid and tank shards hit the floor and washed outward. Andrew leaped away, grabbing the two children, to the safety of the stairwell entrance. The smell of rot and the sounds of near-ultrasonic screams rolled over them. All three gagged. Andrew peered out of the stairwell recess. A thin, waist-height stratum of vapor hung in the understreet outside the bioshop. An alarm wound itself up, ululated. The street lay empty. Andrew stepped gingerly out onto the wet street floor and moved cautiously through the vapor to the store entrance.

The girl with the tattooed scalp grinned down at him from the top of the tank rack. “Daddy,” she said.

Below her, the shopkeeper fought his way to his knees, bleeding profusely, gasping, choking, trying to shriek but only making whistling gargle noises. Where the toxgun charge had touched him, a few patches of his skin had begun to give off umber smoke.

Andrew watched, stepped forward, but then reeled back from the stench; the man, ignoring the toxin’s destruction, snatched at different places on his neck, splattering his own blood against the tanks nearby, fighting to get the neuroleader away from his wounds. From his hands, corkscrewing strands flew out into the street; but a single pale string wriggled into one of his cuts and disappeared. “Kill me! Kill me now!” he screamed at a whistle’s pitch. He rolled onto his back.

Andrew took a breath, held it, and strode to the man’s side. “Tell me what I want to know,” he said, “and I’ll do it.”

His voice dropping to a near-whisper, the man said, “Find Madhvi. He’s her man. He— running. Bugboys after him.” His legs twisted into a knot. “Please. Do it now.” He relaxed and smiled at Andrew, now bending closer. “Do me now.” As Andrew fumbled in his coverall for his beamer, the man shot an arm out and seized his throat in a steel grip. Powerful fingers slowly pinched Andrew‘s windpipe shut, drew him down toward a last strand of writhing neuroleader.

Andrew found the beam gun, clawed it out and around in a long, blind, whiplike arc. It missed. He flailed, not daring to fire point-blank. The world turned gray around him. The same fingers that had moved like feathers over his eyes locked themselves tighter on his throat. Andrew strained, drew his knee up, planted his wet boot on the man’s neck and trod downward, hard, underneath the chin. The fingers suddenly opened; Andrew swung free, gagging for breath, and stumbled back.

The man rolled over and collapsed face-down, motionless. As the raw neuroleader burrowed into his spinal cord, he convulsed. The strong muscles of his lower back and legs arched him so quickly that he kicked in the face of another tank at floor level. As it gushed over him, his body bowed and curled, bowed and curled, driving him around in a circle on the floor slimy with blood and biofluid and toxins. His face, in rictus, turned purple. Propelled by the extreme pressure of blood and muscle, both his steel eyes burst from their sockets and bounced away through a film of sludge, one coming to rest at the entrance near Andrew‘s feet.

Andrew stared dreamily at the eye. Massaging his bruised throat, he counted the tiny terminals on the back of the eyeball as it lay by his boot. A hexagonal array of one, six, twelve, eighteen, that made thirty-seven, and then—

“Daddy.” The little girl had taken Andrew‘s hand and stood barefoot by him, her toes flexing in the slime. “Daddy okay?”

“Daddy okay,” he said mechanically. The man’s body lay still.