THE LONG ORBIT

Mick Farren

Copyright © 1988 by Mick Farren

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-91960

ISBN 0-345-35318-8

Cover art by David Schleinkofer

e-book ver. 1.0

ONE

marlowe lit a cigarette. it was a zimbabwe Pall Mall, smuggled in through Canada. That was the way all cigarettes came in since prohibition. Of course, everyone knew that prohibition was a shuck. Cigarettes had only been outlawed after every tobacco plant in North America had been killed off by the DX virus. The Ja­mison Act was hardly enforced, and anyone could buy a carton on just about every street corner in the Zone. Mar­lowe coughed and reached for the autolin inhaler. What the hell? He knew that smoking was a disgusting, dan­gerous habit, but it was such a crucial part of his persona that there was nothing else he could do. Sam Spade, Mike Hammer—they all smoked. He told himself that smoking couldn't be any worse than breathing the air. The view through the double glazing tended to confirm that idea. The air was swamp-green and sluggish with dirty mois­ture. The temperature outside had to be in the low nine­ties, and his elderly air conditioner made moist, grinding noises as it labored to keep the apartment tolerable. The bad greenhouse summer lay on the city like a heavy blan­ket. On a clear day he could see across the block. Mar­lowe noticed that there was algae growing between the panes of the double glazing. That shouldn't be happening on the forty-fifth floor, but it was only what could be expected in a building as old and poorly maintained as this one.

The big wall screen was playing "Gilligan's Island." Marlowe didn't know what it was that made him order up antique sitcoms. They weren't even his period. It had to be some bizarre form of self-punishment. He hated "Gilligan's Island." He hated all of them: Gilligan, the Skipper, Thurston and Lovey, Ginger—well, maybe not Ginger. It was hard to hate anyone who looked like Tina Louise. He particularly loathed the Professor. He fanta­sized about a hurricane washing them all away and put­ting an end to their stupid antics. On the other hand, he couldn't quite bring himself either to turn it off or to call up something else. The show put a kind of Zen edge on his boredom. He was quite prepared, however, to make minor changes.

"Solarize out, please."

"This is a black and white video. I will have to impose simulated color."

There was something strange about the computer's voice. He would have to call the service, and that would put him further in hock. The machine was an AZU 2000 and well past its prime.

"Please do that."

The big wall screen became a glare of vibrating, strob­ing color. Gilligan, the Skipper, and a waddling duck were wading through a sea of violent, psychedelic orange and magenta.

"Off audio, please."

The sound of "Gilligan's Island" faded to nothing. Marlowe thought about the flat half liter of John Powers Irish in the bottom drawer of his desk. It was too early to start drinking. He also thought about the three Syrettes of Blind Tiger in the same drawer. It was certainly too early for that. Even half a deck of Blind Tiger and he'd be on his way down to the street, building up to act crazy. He coughed again.

"Goddamn it."

He stubbed out the cigarette. They packed so many chemicals into the damn things that they burned down like fast fuses. He took his time grinding the butt into the glass ashtray. The chipped red lettering around the outside read "George Washington Hotel." It was over a hundred years old, a genuine antique. Time was the con­stant malaise of the leisured out. You took your persona, your fantasy, your obsession, and your costume. You took the Guaranteed Income Maintenance and agreed to sterilization. You selected your new name and you moved into the Zone, Surf City, or one of the dozen or so other centers, and that was that. Permanent vacation. From, then on, minute by minute, hour by hour—for the rest of your life—you had to wrestle with the problem of how you filled that time. Not that he would ever want to be a normal. The periods of boredom, the times when futility impacted, and the bouts of manic self-destruction were infinitely preferable to running like a standardized ham­ster on some corporate treadmill. Conformity was the cross that the normals had to bear: same clothes, same hair, same mannerisms, and same mindset. Normals smiled and strove. They toed the line and played on the team, and if they had any truck with fantasy, it was a guilty secret between them and either their assigned an­alysts or their therapy cells, depending on their corporate status. In the Zone all was fantasy.

The gold lettering on the opaque, plastiformed outer door said it all. marlowe—private investigator & li­censed poet. Of course, it was all Zone-style nonsense. He had never investigated anything, and there was no such thing as a licensed poet. It was a piece of original, self-conscious whimsy. In the early days there had, in­deed, been a little poetry, but it had quickly faded away. In the Zone, creative endeavor always proved to be an act of vanity, an ultimate deadend. The only arts that flourished were those of performance and life-style. What really defined Marlowe was the trenchcoat, the dark, double-breasted, pinstripe suit, the two-tone shoes, and the battered fedora. He'd get in the electric reproduction Buick and drive to fortyist joints like the Brown Derby, the Radium, and the Club Noir, where he'd try to pick up women with padded shoulders and tiny hats with veils. For the rest of the time, he'd get drunk on straight John Powers; he'd deck Blind Tiger or squirt amdex; he'd squeal his car around the streets—as far as anyone could squeal a car that had a top speed of 40 kph—and scare hell out of the tourists. Now and again, he'd get involved in fistfights with others of his own kind or shootouts with nonlethal gas guns, but such behavior was exactly what was expected from anyone running a Humphrey Bogart life-style. It may have been a vapid and fundamentally worthless way of life, but some of the alternatives were quite unthinkable. He was profoundly grateful to who­ever or whatever controlled his destiny that he had passed the twelve-plus test and had been allowed to leisure out. From his first days in school he had known that he was unemployable. His discipline quotient was all but non­existent. If he'd failed the test, he would have wound up in one of the underclass ghettoes living on soyjacks and gin, or worse still, in one of the new control enclosures, wearing black and white pajamas and a prefrontal sup­pressor in the middle of his forehead.

The AZU 2000 was making a high-pitched chattering noise like an electronic chipmunk. Marlowe had never heard that sound before. He really did need to call the service.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked.

"I'm badly maintained and frivolously operated, and besides, this particular facility is rarely used."

When the service came, he'd have to have something done about the user petulance. It wasn't funny anymore.

"What facility?"

"Building security. You have an uninvited visitor."

"I never have uninvited visitors."

"She's at twenty-one and rising."

"She?"

"She."

"Is she good-looking?"

"How would I know?"

"Image her on the small screen."

There was something wrong with the camera in the elevator. It made the woman look as if she were under­water. Despite the effect, though, it was quite clear that she was extremely handsome. She was dressed forty—a scarlet suit with pencil skirt and a short tight jacket with padded shoulders. A matching pillbox hat was tilted for­ward on her head. Its veil stopped just below her eyes. As he shut off the large screen, blacking out the psychedelic images from "Gilligan's Island," Marlowe won­dered about the woman's lingerie. Without thinking about it, he lit another cigarette.

"Close on her feet, please."

The shoes matched the suit. They had ankle straps and very high heels. She might have designed herself to his specifications.

"Now the face."

If one were talking perfection, her nose was a little too long, her eyes were too large, and her lips were too full. If one were talking attraction, she was perfection. Her makeup was exquisite.

Marlowe's voice had dropped to an awed whisper. "What the hell is this all about?"

The elevator came to a stop, and the woman stepped out of camera range. Marlowe wanted to take a belt from the bottle in the drawer, but there wasn't time.

"The visitor is at the door."

She actually knocked. That was cute. Slowly and de­liberately, he leaned back in his chair. He swung his feet up onto the desk and crossed his legs at the ankles.

"Open, please."

The woman was in the small anteroom. "Marlowe?"

"In here."

In person, she was even more stunning than she'd been on the small screen. Marlowe was sorely tempted to compromise his image by jumping to his feet like a damned fool. In the Zone, a compromised image was worse than a deathwish. A deathwish could be quite ac­ceptable in the right circumstances, while a compromised image could make a man a pariah. Musky perfume filled the room. Marlowe couldn't identify the brand. Ever since his nose had been broken, he wasn't good with perfumes. It didn't stop him from reacting to them, though. Something was stirring inside him that made it hard to maintain his pose of bored, cynical disinterest. He wondered if there were more in the room than just perfume. Was she raiding him with pheromones? It hardly seemed likely. A woman who looked the way she did had no need of endocrinal dirty tricks. She was standing on the other side of his desk. She looked slowly around the room at the shelves of personality-reinforcing junk that he had accumulated over the years, all the Chandler-era bric-a-brac that shored up his fantasy, like the worn and lumpy leather furniture, the scarred desk with its missing drawer handles and cigarette burns, and the mess of patchwork hardware. Marlowe was aware of how dusty everything was. The hosenose hardly worked anymore. Lately it had started crawling like a wounded spider. An­other job for the service.

"You're Marlowe?" She'd finished her inspection and was looking at him. She had the expression of the un­impressed.

Marlowe nodded to the beat-up chair that was reserved for visitors. "Seat?"

As she sat, she crossed her legs in a way that Marlowe thought was hardly fair. If this was the start of a fantasy interface, she was coming on like gangbusters.

"What can I do for you, lady?"

"How much do you charge?"

It wasn't a question that women who played this kind of game usually asked. He picked the first number that jumped into his head. "Ten thousand a day in black scrip."

"That's ridiculous."

Marlowe smiled lazily. "You have to pay for the best."

"I'll pay you two thousand a day, regular."

"I don't dicker on the rate."

The game might be unorthodox, but it was coming along fine. Then she stopped it in its tracks.

"You can cut the crap, Marlowe. This isn't some fan­tasy interaction. This is the real thing."

Marlowe had been in the act of lighting a cigarette. He had struck a bookmatch one-handed, a trick that had taken weeks to perfect. The flame halted halfway to the tip of the cigarette. It burned down and scorched his thumb. He clumsily dropped it. In the Zone, nothing was the real thing, except maybe pain. It was also a waste of a match. The damn things were hard to find.

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm taking you at face value, Marlowe. My name is Veronica Stavers, and my sister Christine is missing. I want you to find her for me and I'm prepared to pay you two thousand a day for as long as it takes. Believe me, it's more than you're worth. Are you willing to take the job?"

Marlowe had recovered a little of his composure. The best thing would be to go along with the gag. "You'll have to pay me in black. I'm a leisure-out. I can't handle regular."

Black scrip was the Zone's guerilla currency. Leisure-outs weren't permitted to hold credit in excess of what was paid into their GIM accounts on the Ziapsu plan, the donated minimum wage of their proxy robots. It was never enough to maintain the fantasy, so there had to be an underground, off-data economy to make up the differ­ence. It was particularly useful for illegal transactions where a record couldn't show. There was nothing tangi­ble to back up black scrip. It only worked because of the mutual need and mutual interest of those who used it.

Veronica Stavers didn't seem fazed. "I can work that out."

"So what can you tell me about this sister of yours?"

Veronica Stavers opened a red patent shoulder bag that matched the rest of her ensemble. She produced a flat black disc and placed it on the desk. A holo, some fifteen centimeters tall, blossomed from the disc, showing a young woman in her early twenties, apparently at a party or maybe in a nightclub. She was wearing a short and very revealing cocktail dress; glass in hand, she was talk­ing animatedly to someone outside the range of the holo. There was no doubt that she was Veronica Stavers's younger sister. The features came from the same mold, but where Veronica was controlled and businesslike, Christine sparkled and bubbled. Her figure was fuller and her hair was freaked out into an electric halo. Where Veronica might prove to be a challenge, Christine looked like more unashamed fun. There was, however, a pouty quality to her lower lip that might indicate a tendency to willful temper.

"Are there any more at home like you two?"

Veronica shook her head. "A brother but no more sis­ters. One sister is quite enough."

"How long ago was this taken?"

"Quite recently."

"So she'll still look like this?"

"It's hard to know with Christine. She tends to be capricious about her image."

"That isn't too much help."

"She shouldn't have changed all that radically."

Marlowe reached for the holo. "Can I keep this?"

"That's what I brought it for."

As his hand touched the disc, the image faded. Mar­lowe dropped the disc in his pocket. "Where was she last seen?"

Once again, Veronica Stavers reached into her bag. This time she produced a small gold data cone. She held it out to Marlowe. "Can your equipment handle this?"

Marlowe took the cone. "Sure. I've got a universal reader. It's old, but it'll take this."

He turned the cone over in his fingers before he dropped it into the reader. "High-class packaging."

A street map that showed something like a four-mile-square section of the Zone appeared on the big screen. There were red symbols on a dozen or so locations, marking stores, tourist markets, and the more accessible night spots. Each was the kind of place that a normal, slumming in the Zone, might be expected to visit and drop some change. Beside each symbol there was a dia­logue box with the details of an Amex transaction.

Marlowe raised an eyebrow. "You got hold of a de­tailed analysis of her Amex record? That stuff's supposed to be privacy guarded."

"I'm her sister, aren't I?"

"They don't normally give that information out, even to sisters. The only people who can get it are the cops and the government."

Veronica Stavers took a deep breath. For the first time she looked uncomfortable. "The family was sufficiently concerned that we hired a skater to go in and get it. I understand that Amex records aren't that hard to pene­trate if you know what you're doing."

The Amex transactions spanned a period of about nine days, and the final one had been made exactly two weeks earlier. All but the one before the last were small to me­dium sums, just what a tourist would spend on souvenir purchases, bar bills, and the like. It was only the one before the last that fitted no recognizable pattern. It was a hundred and fifty thousand regular paid for what was minimally described as "raw data medium." This time Marlowe raised both eyebrows.

"Your sister spent one and a half biggies on blank ice?"

"The family didn't believe it either."

"You know the most obvious explanation for this?"

"You tell me."

"She changed the bundle from regular to black scrip."

"Why should she do that?"

"She was either paying for a couple of murders, a bunch of drugs, or she planned to go to ground in the Zone and wanted a little mad money."

"The family tends toward the last one. That's why we hired you."

Marlowe treated Veronica to a long, hard look. "Why did you hire me?"

"You're a native, you know the Zone."

Marlowe shook his head. "I can't buy that. You know what I am and that I only play at this. You'd be better off with a regular skip tracer."

"You're from here. You have natural cover. The family wants to keep this quiet."

"Natural cover? Is that why you came in here done up like a roaring forty? Are you sure this isn't some mightily overworked fantasy? What are you? A variation on Lau­ren Bacall in The Big Sleep?"

"Are you scared to do it for real once in your life?"

"Not me, lady. I just want to know what I'm dealing with." He gestured toward the screen. "See that last transaction? It was for the bill at a joint called Graceland. It's the one place on the list where tourists don't go. It's a greez joint, but it's on the edge of vampire turf. It strikes me that if she got to there, she was pretty en­tranced with the Zonelife. The most likely reason you haven't heard from her is that she's shacked up with some Zonee, and sooner or later she'll show up with a few bruises and mental scars and the whole clan can gather and kill the fatted calf. It happens all the time, but most families don't rush out and hire a leisured-out Bogart."

It was at that point that Marlowe's sixteen-pound Per­sian cat, Greenstreet, chose to make his entrance. He was fat, black, and amber-eyed, and was about the only living thing to which Marlowe was really attached. In an environment that was primarily fantasy, it was hard to form lasting relationships. There were times when Mar­lowe thought that the cat kept him sane. Greenstreet had been sleeping on top of the air conditioner. He woke, stretched, yawned, and jumped to the floor. He landed with a thud, then strolled over to Veronica Stavers and rubbed up against her stockings. He inadvertently gave her a few moments' breathing space.

"Nice cat."

"He's an amoral hustler, and you still haven't an­swered my questions."

"I told you. We hired you because you're from the Zone; you're on the inside, so to speak. If we hired a normal investigator, there'd be too much chance of the whole thing getting out. You don't know anyone in the normal world. With you, we're safe."

"You must be very fond of your sister to go to all this trouble."

"Mild dislike is about as good as it gets."

"So why bother to find her at all?"

Veronica seemed to be choosing her words carefully. "It's a matter of business."

"Business?"

"My grandfather built a very successful corporation. When he died two years ago, he left the bulk of the busi­ness to my brother Lawrence, but because he didn't al­together trust Lawrence, he also left blocks of voting stock and certain patents to both me and my sister. Right now the corporation is engaged in fighting off a hostile merger. Without her votes, we won't be able to do it. That's why she has to be found, and found quickly."

"Didn't your father or mother figure anywhere in the will?"

"My father and grandfather hated each other. He cut him out completely."

"Charming family."

Veronica Stavers's expression hardened. "I don't think you're in any position to pass judgment."

Marlowe shrugged. "I'll keep my mouth shut in the future."

"It might help."

"Is there anything else that I ought to know? Anything else in your box of goodies?"

Again Veronica hesitated. "There is one thing."

"Oh yeah?"

She took another cone out of her bag. This was a cheap black one. Marlowe held it up questioningly.

"So what's this?"

...