FERDINAND THINKS

1529 4D

Back at Bujilla‘s. Kuklagrad smells lonely now, with no Jeddin to wait for, no Jeddin to love, no Jeddin to draw me back from doom’s spiral into the sewers here. I play with the taste of the Beefheart tea on my tongue, savoring its many aromas of leaf and flower and husk. Can anything deaden my need for Jeddin?

I need coin for my next load of KPX and the trip to Talu‘s arms and shapeshifting body. Time to play the sensi, look for gigs. Flick a hand, and the wall beside me comes to life with a cluster of talking human heads blooming out of a cornucopia of varicolored flesh. Ah – it’s ROFI, the Regional Office of Factual Information, or as we know it, the Big Liars.

One voice thunders, “We’re in the midst of the coll debates on the way to the zone elections in the City, and I’m Enzan Tarazan your immoderator, trying to keep the pot stirred.” His voice recedes into an angry gabble of four other voices all arguing wildly about levies, relocations, and andro deaths, the spit spewing from their mouths as they bawl and wave arms and stamp feet in a pit of chairs.

It’s all theater. Nothing changes: andros die by the thousands every day, relocated City people die by thousands every week in some frozen waste, and the levies keep the poor poor. The theater of debate is pure distraction, designed to send the viewers, humans and andros alike, off to our next doses of drugs and sex and sleep to still the keening of waste and destruction in the backs of our brains.

I alter sense clockings and filter the main signal out, and I see in the wall what andros see here: a series of scenes showing places offering work to andros, news of interest to andros, and occasionally some satirical commentary from the mocking, clandestine Jestice feed. Jestice always finds its way onto the major sensi feeds, no matter how they try to block it.

Most of the andro jobs are sex work. Sex runs in the air supply, we say in the City, and in the water, and in the rhythms, and in the stone itself. Andros make good coin at sex – we’re built for it, just as we’re built for lots of other things – and I see thirty or forty jobs in that vein right now.

My gut ties itself in an angry knot. There’s only one partner I want, and she’s deep in innerspace in the Archives, and I want her now. I’m sick. Sick with desire, sick of myself, sick of the City, and I would rather be dead than here.

“Ferdinand.” It’s Bujilla. “What’s wrong?”

“Jeddin‘s dead,” I mutter.

Her words come slowly, softly. “How?”

“I killed him.”

Her arm covers my shoulders as if I am a child, she sits close beside me, and I start to sob.

“Ferdinand, you didn’t kill him. You loved him. What happened?”

“Aliens destroyed him. Not the Hounds, the way he thought. I was supposed to warn–“

“Ferdinand. Don’t–“

I stand up quickly. I must do this now, before I decide not to. “Goodbye, Bujilla. You’ve been very good to me. Now be nice to Pazzan, he’s a good person, at least when he’s got his head on right side up.”

Her eyes widen as she stands, her hand on my arm. “Ferdinand, what are you doing? Don’t do something stupid.”

“That’s exactly the problem, my dear lady. I’ve been doing stupid things all along. I’m going to change that.” I place a small stack of coin on the table, all twenties. “Here. Give three to Pazzan, would you?”

As I leave, her uncertain spoken “Ferdinand" trails off into the noise of the street. Goodbye, Bujilla.

Three men and seven women later, my stack of coin is big enough, and I have the drugs I need. I find the little long-term sleep cubby I like to use, pay for a four-month stay, and burrow in with my load. When they find my body, I’ll be long gone into the place I’ve always wanted to be forever. I won’t be back. Maybe the aliens will find me and take the parts of me the way they did to Jeddin. Then I could maybe turn this pain aside.

I start loading. I got a pyro tap in my thigh from a streetmeddie after the last woman who did me, and I hump the KPX and met straight in. Not fast enough for my taste – the pyro tap meters the fluids carefully – but I start the happy dive the usual way and then things begin to accelerate. The dive finds a hole in the abyss, and in I go.