Engineman - Eric Brown [188]
//The Pineal-Zen Equation
I'm dropping acid shorts in the Supernova slouchbar when the call comes through. Gassner stares from the back of my hand, veins corrugating his mugshot. Gassner's white - fat and etiolated like a monster maggot - but my Bangladeshi metacarpus tans him mulatto. He's a xenophobic bastard and the fact that he comes over half-caste on the handset never fails to make me smile.
I like irony almost as much as I dislike Gassner.
He's muttering now, some stuff about young junkies.
"You wrecked?" he queries, peering.
"I'm fine," I lie.
He wants me in ten. He has customers coming. Distraught parents who have evidence their daughter was butchered. "This is big-time, girl. Some high-up in the Wringsby-Saunders outfit. Don't screw it." I feel like telling him to auto-fellate on a cannibal personatape, but I resist the urge. Maybe later, when I have the funds to fly. He still owns me, still has his fat face stamped on the back of my hand, good as any brand.
But it's only a matter of time now.
I've been out for hours. What I did earlier needed a good hit to help me forget. My head's dead and so are my legs. I stagger through a battlescene of prostrate bodies and make it to the chute.
Outside it's night, and the crowds are beginning to hit the streets. I brazen my way across a packed sidewalk, earning taunts on three counts. I'm a telepath and a junkie - the two go together - and I have no crowd-sense. I admit everything with an insolent yeah-yeah to whoever's complaining and climb aboard the moving boulevard. A breeze, fresh onetime but polluted now with city stench, does its best to revive me. I ride the slide a block and alight at 3rd. Feeling better already, I dodge touts and beggars and home in on the Union towerpile.
"Bangladesh!" The legless oldster grins in my direction, dumped like garbage by the entrance. How does he do it? He gouged his eyes out yearsback and still he knows when I'm coming. Could be he's on to the scent of my hair oil, or even my crotch. His tag's Old Pete, and he's my regular. I slip him creds and he makes sure I'm stocked with 'gum when I see Gassner. "Any nearer?" he asks now.
I try a probe. All I get is jumblefuzz. He's shielded. We have a game, me and him. He reckons he was someone famous, onetime, and I have to guess who. His face is certainly familiar, disregarding the absent nose and evacuated eye-sockets. He went Buddhist, yearsback. Quit the race and mutilated himself to indicate his repudiation of this illusion. I often wonder what it was that drove him to such extreme action. Maybe he was seeking enlightenment, or perhaps he'd found it. Once again I concede ignorance, pass him ten and chew 'gum in the upchute.
I'm feeling great when I hit the 33rd. Gassner has his office shelved this level, though 'office' is a grand title for his place of work. It's little more than a cubby filled with Batan II terminals and link-ups and however much of his blubber isn't spilling through the hatch. I enter bright, my metabolism pumping ersatz adrenalin. It doesn't do to let him see me any other way. He'd gloat if he knew how low I was at being his slave.
A metal desk-top, the bonnet of a pre-fusion automobile, pins his fat up against the floor-to-ceiling window. He's scanning case notes and his grunt acknowledges the fact that I got in with about three seconds to spare. The only light in the place is the silver glow from the computer screen. I clamber over this and sit cross-legged in the hammock where Gassner slings his meat between shifts. Every ten seconds the chiaroscuro gloom is relieved from outside by the electric blue sweep of a misaligned photon display, strobing sub-lim flashes of 'Patel's Masala Dosa' into our forebrains.
I slip my ferronniere from its case and loop it around my head. And instantly all the minds