TO BE CONTINUED.
From: sahtori@aol.com (Sahtori)
Subject: Story/Shadowrun Millieu/Action-Adventure/The Red-Haired German Pt 3
Date: 21 May 1995 02:10:00 -0400

It was a good week to be in the city, a tourist's summer-hot but not
lethal; almost a good week to be in Brooklyn. They went from place to
place, Redding and Muller and Stevens; three pseudonyms stepping out on a
clockwork schedule from the Condemnables in Cobble Hill where they had set
up house on bedrolls. It was a week of evenings: Stevens had a crippling
allergic reaction to the substances his skin produced in sunlight and
nothing that medicine had ever thought of would allow him to spend more
than three hours under daylight without complex and meticulous
preparation. They went out  in the last hour before nightfall and walked
to the promenade in Brooklyn Heights. Stevens  and Muller held hands like
lovers and watched the sun sink into  the thick, red air that people
breathed in New Jersey.

The deckers they had hired used messengers to take jobs and deliver
answers and the promenade was the contact point. The preparations were in
place: a janitor from Fukien province had been approached by a member of a
Chinatown gang and given money to tape a package under their seats the
night before the concert. Redding had gotten a tourist's guide to New York
in high-definition VR and drilled them in the location of every exit. They
arranged meeting places for contingencies that separated them; made plans
for the worst things. They arranged meeting places around the Garden,
niches and doorways that they visited each night; walking from the doors
of the Garden to each of them and back again. Stevens contributed;
sketching out sociology from the downside-telling her which emergency room
to ask for when you had a little money and you were hurt and bleeding: he
told her the local lore of what to tell the police if she were arrested.
He wasn't surprised by how much she already knew.

"Pretend you're stupid. No matter what happens, you are the victim,
apologize a lot, and look like you're listening to them-even when they
know you're lying through your  ass, they'll cut you a little something if
they think you respect them." Remember, he told her, "You might have
rights, but you can dissappear into the system for days before a judge
dismisses the silly shit they charge you withxin there with a lot of
people who don't like you and who want anything you have to offer them.
Short of dying, they'll be the worst days of your life."

They spent a week punishing their expense account with restaurants and
clothing. It was corporate money, the stuff of dreams: it came from the
same places where people spent lifetime incomes on projects that began and
ended without anyone ever hearing about them. The last day came and it was
four hours before the event, they were standing on the Promenade, an hour
earlier than usual-Stevens  dangerously exposed on the gray hexagonal
flagstones; his skin the unnatural flesh color of clonal melanin and
intricately formulated Zinc oxides. The city was spread out in front of
them from all the left to all the right like the landscapes on the painted
on fans they sold in Chinatown-the shuttles from New Jersey wallowing
through the air like fat, black bumblebees. Someone would be coming to
meet them soon; either someone would come to meet them or they would never
see the inside of the Garden. If the contact had the wrong thing to say,
if he failed to show up, they would pack her bags and business class her
back to Europe, back to the Maastrecht Treaty wonderland, where they still
had money, history and safety. Stevens wouldn't work himself into a fury
of nervousness; pacing until every muscle in his body was as tight as a
violin string-vomiting when he reached the apex of his tension. Redding
wouldn't sit in a chair for an hour before hand, breathing slowly, his
back straight; quietly staring at his hands.

Redding stood apart, leaning on the iron rail in front of him, talking
into a cardphone; agreeing with one thing-disagreeing with
another-adjusting some element at the last minute when a normal in
dirt-stiff jeans and rubber sandals came out of the crowd carrying a
motorboard. His hair was blond and matted. He  walked up to Redding,
grabbed his jacket and raved at him in loud, hoarse French; his eyes
wild-like the eyes of someone who was using Iscariot. The normal went on
to a knot of Malaysian tourists who pointed their cameras at him; smiling
uncomfortably as he stuck his tongue out at them until it touched his chin
and screamed like a woman. The Malays took a few pictures and started to
back away with their hands rising; their shoulders raised.

Redding walked past Stevens without looking at him, like a stranger on  a
random vector; brushing the wrinkles out of his windbreaker. His face was
expressionless. He said, "We're on" and kept walking. There were no more
questions. There was nothing more to do.

The drums were up and running and there was something in them, a
sensation, a feeling, voices that spoke in no known language. Rabenda sang
low in synthesized Arabic. A computer turned his voice into voices; each
one one-hundredth of a second out of phase until the words melted into
feeling. The music was seeping in through the cracks  and the crowd knew
that they were in the center of something new and special. Stevens sat
counting the bells in the percussion as the guitar threaded its way
through it. He knew just enough about music to know that it wouldn't hold
together. It was as if six musicians were playing different musics in
different rooms, the music they made holding together by an ephemeral
coincidence. The precision of arithmetic told Stevens that it couldn't
hold together for more than a few moments-he knew that it couldn't fuse
together the way it did-couldn't be what it was-but he was wrong. it
could, it did, it was. The percussionist played a sequence of bells faster
than before and the band followed producing seamless trance music, without
beginning or ending-It was like nothing that he had ever heard or imagined
and It became more intense by the second.

The girl in front of Stevens sat bobbing her head to it, the boy sitting
next to her moved his shoulders to the exact same rhythm like two gears in
the same machine-a machine with gears as warm and soft as liquid paraffin.
He looked around him and his mouth fell open. In the light, in the spill
from the spotlights and the lasers that filtered through the smoke, he
could see the heads of a thousand people, normals, elves, dwarves,
orcs-trolls sitting in their own special sections-all the subsets that
made up Homo Sapiens, Sapiens; Keeping the same time with their bodies;
moving to the same rhythm. He could feel it reaching for him; reaching
deep like fingers on the ghosts of hands; tugging at the marrow of his
bones. Pulling.

Redding recognized it immediately. It was one of those things that
transcended technique and redefined its boundaries. Redding knew that it
was glorious and unique: it was the idea, the notion of love with sound as
its body. It was wanting cast in the space between the drums and the
guitar: it transcended the fine distinctions of shape and gender-it was
the instant of knowing that all things were possible.  Reading sat in his
seat swaying to it ever so slightly; feeling its energy and adding it to
the task of watching. He thought, "of course, how simple, this is it-this
is it exactly."

Stevens sat with his hands balled into fists, watching the holographic
dragon over the stage; trying to count the scales on its back; looking for
relief from the music. At first, he had thought that it was a spell, but
he had found that there was no magic in it. There was something else in
it. It was something that was hardwired into the organism; something that
the organism had always been capable of, a moment in history waiting for
the technology to bring it out, a buried treasure, looking for the mind
that would find it and bring it into the light for the first time. He
looked down at one point and saw a brown-haired orc in the distance: she
was hugging herself for some reason and bright tears rolled down her
cheeks and caught the light like silver. The music reached deeper and
spoke love to him in sound that fell like rain.

He wanted to understand the anger at the center of his magic. He wanted
every person he had ever met to live forever; to never know what it was to
age; to never feel the pain of loss and rejection; the pain of childbirth
or the agony of slow withdrawal. He wanted to give his life to the sick
and bring comfort to the lonely. Comfort. And he knew that all the things
that he wanted were the death of the self and rebirth into knowledge that
all things  were one large thing-the sum of all the living things in the
only place where any life was known to be. His breathing was ragged. He
right hand was shaking, he was going to take Ulrike Muller's hand in his
and the music would win over him, win over him and her at the same
instant. She was the only person who would understand it in the way he
did. The only one to understand his point of view;  the only person within
arm's reach who would never stop wanting the kiss of a whistle against her
skin. He would touch her hand and there would be something: the birth of
something that he had feared even without knowing what it was. As if in
answer to his thoughts, her left hand rotated so that her palm was facing
the ceiling and then opened like a flower in the rain. There was something
beyond description in her empty hand: his raised his hand to take it.

Sweat rolled down Rabenda's face as he stood on the stage. His hair was
matted to his forehead, a dark brown helmet, as he chanted and the
computers multiplied his chant; breaking it, molding it, multiplying it.
His eyes were wide like the eyes of someone who saw visions; who someone
who had taken the last step, had said the final prayer and fasted the last
day: he was elsewhere in the center of the music. His face was the face of
a man who had climbed the last vertical inch and stood in the live
sunlight that is only found at the tops of mountains. He knew.

He spread his arms wide, his thief's face suffused with generosity and
triumph,  and turned them inwards an embrace for all the audience. The
message was plain: "look, look! All this is my gift to you." And in that
instant, someone tried to kill him.  Six rounds of explosive ammunition
flashed bright blue at center of his face.

Redding found himself at the center of a sudden vacuum, a dry rustle of
silence. Rabenda had stopped singing and the rest of the band turned to
look at him; retreating from a stream of bullets; confused as the impacts
registered, flashing subminiature novas, in front of his face-his chest
and belly. A darkened shape ran up to the edge of the stage from out of
the audience. Something it carried in its hand flashed. There was the
sound of an explosion and then another shadow raised something to its
shoulder and leaned forwards. More blue flashes appeared in front of
Rabenda, Ondaate, and Haas. Guards in full riot seemed to materialize on
stage between the band members-Redding realized with an instant of
admiration that they had been there throughout the performance, invisible.
A color more than red leapt from the hand of one of the guards. The air in
front of the gunman nearest the stage boiled and shimmered for a moment.

A sensation like a frozen wire moved up Steven's spine as an alarm spell
warned him of INTENT behind him. One of the amulets on his left arm warmed
as it drew energy and used it. He turned in his seat in time to see a
bullet freeze in the air and then melt into a globe of molten lead and
copper behind the base of the girl's neck as it's  momentum was translated
into heat. The wire appeared again and drew a line that crossed his ribs
on the right side. He followed its direction with his eyes; saw a shape
standing between several people who were slumped in various positions in
their seats-utterly still. People were running in a river towards the
aisles away from it; scrambling, the motion spreading outwards like a
funnel. They were climbing over one another. Falling. Something in the
figure's hand flashed. Lead and copper materialized in front of Stevens.
He thought, "Oh, really?"

He visualized a bottle on its side turned inside out, a twisted window.
One word with nine syllables.

Redding reached under the seat, found the small, angular pistol held there
with gaffer's tape, and pulled it free in time to see Stevens turn around
with a look of panic on his face and then gather himself for a spell.
Redding rested the pistol against the back of his seat (the faces of the
people in the seats behind him slowly changing when they saw the gun in
his hand) and looked in the direction that Stevens was looking; saw people
running from a point in a "v" shape-whoever was shooting  would be at it's
apex. He saw the man. Something in his hand flashed. Redding squeezed off
six shots in groups of two at the center of his body in the same instant
as a rotating column of  fire rose from the floor and engulfed him: it was
green like a copper thread held in white-hot flame. He died without the
smallest fraction of a scream.

Stevens saw and heard a lightning bolt from somewhere strike the figure as
it fell. The alarm spell was quiet. He turned around and saw that Rabenda
and the rest of the band were being hustled off the stage covered by
guards while the ones who had first appeared were laying prone; shooting
carefully. One of the gunmen turned towards the body of the crowd up front
and held down the trigger.

Redding slapped the woman on the shoulder and shouted, "Get up, sis,-we're
for out of here."

Stevens watched people fall in the second, third and fourth rows. One of
the two sides in the gunfight found a grenade and used it-sound and light
in the distance and then the sound's echo through the speakers. More
people falling. A sound of screaming that was louder than any of the music
had been. The remnant of the fourth aisle was scrambling over into the
fifth who who ran to avoid being trampled pressing them into the sixth.
The gunmen fired again and started running behind them melting into the
mass as it ran.

The crowd in front of them became a wave of bodies moving toward them;
driven and driving as it surged forward, bounding over the seats-a tidal
wave in boots and denim; a demonstration of chain reaction performed in
flesh and bone. Stevens saw several individuals fall at the front of the
wave: none of them got up again. He watched some people sit frozen in
their seats, unbelieving, even as  the motion reached them.

Muller sat fixed, staring straight ahead in her seat, her mouth open. She
looked up at Redding with blank incomprehension on her face. Redding saw
the wave coming uphill toward them. They were coming too quickly. He said,
"Get up" to the girl and grabbed her arm. He turned to Stevens and
shouted.

"This isn't good!"

Stevens raised one hand suddenly, like a child catching a firefly. He
brought it across his body and pulled down. Twelve feet in front of them,
the wave broke and became faces and bodies pressed against something
smooth and shapeless. Redding saw fear and rage in their faces as the air
in front of them stiffened, became immune to the intrusion of their flesh
before they were swept aside or ground under. The people in the nearest
seats stared out in disbelief as if they had suddenly found themselves  in
a movie: one person reached out to try and touch the skin of the magic in
front of him as the crowd broke around it accommodating it like a river
flowing around a rock. The girl with the light patch turned around and
started to say something before she saw Steven's face.

His face was gray. He stood hunched, hugging himself, his hands were claws
at his side and shoulder. Redding shouted, paraphrasing himself:

"This really isn't good!"

Magic is the application of human will at a distance powered by an endless
but invisible energy-source that only people capable of working magic saw
or understood. Every spell had a price that varied with the energy that
went into it. Magic was the wax in the candle and the magician was the
wick. They had needed an oasis large enough for three and Stevens had
created an Island large enough for the twenty-six people in the area with
him. It was much more than he should have done, the strain of it had
nearly dropped him where he stood. He was swaying on his feet. His eyes
were wild.

"I can't hold this."

People were pounding on the shield in front of them, clawing at it, hating
it.

Redding said, "She can't be here for the police, I want you to leave."

"I can't take both of you." Stevens said, and then he said, "No" His voice
broke in the vowel; becoming a cry of pain.

"Take her and go!"

Stevens made a cutting gesture with one hand and tried for "no" again. The
word "no" was an achievement; something that he tried to attain and failed
to. The pain was everywhere-a strong man beating him over every inch of
his body all at once. Soon it would drive him to his knees. When it made
him drop the spell, the wave would reach them. He was going to lose
consciousness.

Redding put the gun in his back pocket and raised his hands level with his
chest. His voice had a disturbingly level tone to it -- loud but calm. He
said, "Get the fuck out of here."

Stevens said, "come to me and serve me" as he turned to the girl. She had
been oblivious to what had gone on between them; fascinated by the sights.
Stevens grabbed her.

She knew that he wanted the recorder from her belt and that they would
leave her there; leave her to the mad faces of the crowd; that was rushing
toward her. She fell backwards when he touched her and curled into a fetal
ball with the unit on her belt at its center. She kicked at him as his
hands circled her body. She went at him with an elbow and connected with
his chin. The barrier collapsed. Someone near them screamed. Her entire
body was shaking, she wailed something sibilant and mournful in German.

Stevens imaged the linking spell to the air elemental as it settled around
them. Someone's foot found the calf of his left leg; something else struck
him across the kidneys and the pain drove the breath from his body;
something struck him in the middle of his spine so that the lights danced
before his eyes. He felt the linking spell congeal in the air around him.
He heard someone say, "up" from a very long distance and he wondered if it
was him.

There was a lurching, dramatic change in perspective as the floor of the
garden dwindled. Far below, the nucleus of quiet was disintegrating  and
fragmenting. He saw a shape in light colored clothes approach the space
where Redding must have been and undergo an instantaneous change of
vector. The girl was in his arms rigid and screeching: Something warm and
wet flowed down his legs where their hips met. Across the open space, he
saw a red sign marked "exit" on one of the upper tiers and pointed himself
in that direction.

Stevens wore a matrix when they found Redding, a brightly-lit, curtain of
warning colors; alternating bands of orange and black that hid his face,
size and shape-a message from magician to mundane that was clearly
understood in the wide swatch between the South Bronx and Buenos Aires: it
said, "You can do what you like now, but there there won't be any
witnesses later."

They found Redding sitting in a niche, in a doorway not far from the
garden, across the street from a closed bar with a beer display; a wan
light that gave burglars and graffiti artists something to work by. He
could hear the sirens where the police were holding court behind the
barricades-busily scanning the barcode on ID cards. He was holding his
shirt balled up under his body armor with one hand, using it as a bandage.
It was nine-parts red. He used the other hand to put the small, flat
automatic back into the shadow of his thigh as he recognized them. Muller
stopped; keeping the sight of blood at a respectful distance. Stevens
reached for the edge of the shirt and looked under it.

"Before you ask, " Redding said, "it was someone with a knife and I was
turning."

Stevens said, "It's long but not really dangerous, so long as you just sit
here. It looks like about five minute's worth of work."

Redding's eyes flicked to Muller's face for a moment.

He said, "When is delivery?"

"An hour from now-forty-five minutes to the first drop point, I can do it
for you if you want."

"They contracted for both of us."

"Screw them." Stevens said; both words spoken with a cold, disturbing
precision.

"Yeah?" Redding asked, "what makes them so lucky?"

"It turns out that the pins in her upper arm form an antenna, she has a
GPS that started transmitting sometime after we got to the concert. It's
still going."

"Anyone listening?" Redding asked.

"I don't think so, not through her at least. As a bug, the bandwidth is
too narrow for anything but basic audio, if that much. Burst-transmission
Morse is more likely what it's up for-I can't tell without time and
equipment-but any way you slice it, she's got an added little feature that
Mr. Client didn't tell us about."

"Yeah, a left arm that you can find anywhere in the world."

"Um-hm. Certainly enough to make you out in a crowded space with the right
hardware."

"What do we do about it?"

Stevens said, "what do you want to do about it?" and then he exchanged a
look with Redding.: it was a look with a quality to it; a brightly
imprinting instant; like staring down into a box with a medal in it. It
only lasted a second, but he knew that it was a significant moment-seconds
heavy with the promise of long reverberations.

Redding tilted his head slightly to one side and shrugged. He closed his
eyes and opened them.

He said, "I want to stop bleeding."

"Then grab a wad of your jacket and hold on to it" Stevens said. "I'm
going to have to do this in stages and it's going to hurt like hell."


Article: 4594 of alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo
From: sahtori@aol.com (Sahtori)
Subject: Story/Shadowrun Milleu/Action-adventure/The Red-Haired German Pt 1
Date: 21 May 1995 02:09:58 -0400
Lines: 363
Reply-To: sahtori@aol.com (Sahtori)

This is the first of the Redding and Stevens stories that I completed.
And, so far, It has been relatively well-received.

I would like to hear what you have to say about it. Any grammatical,
spelling, or stylistic errors are mine and I claim responsibility for them
-- should you notice them, please keep in mind that I did not sit down and
re-write and re-rewrite it until I thought it was ready for publication:
basically, no one need offer me reminders of the story's purely technical
shortcomings. I am sure that they are there and if I ever think that
anyone will display a commercial interest in them, I will go over it with
a fine-toothed comb.

I hope that you like it. Please tell me what you think.

The story is written to follow the Shadowrun Game and it uses concepts
which are under the copyright of the FASA corporation. No challenge to
that copyright is intended or implied by this story.

All three sections of this story are copyright c, 1995, Mark Kalvin.

The Red-Haired German

Later, Stevens would ask a waitress, "Exactly how much time is involved in
never."

it was hot the night Intika played the Garden-hot in a way that made you
grateful for the air-conditioning. For Redding, the concert was a series
of impressions mixed with the need to watch the space around him: Smoke
and lasers, applause, the holographic sculpture hovering over the stage
and all through it, the rhythm of the drums, rising and falling, like the
sound that a dragonfly made when it was after something.

Things happened, to the time of the music, punctuating the it with events:
the person who sat next to him elbowing him to its rhythm and the clown in
the distance-five rows back and six seats west, a traveler from the Confed
lands, who had just given out his fifth rebel yell  of the evening. A
contingent of street life from the Warrens sat bobbing to it; sitting in a
block; the stink of twenty unwashed bodies lined all in a row-giving off
more any air conditioning known to man could handle.

The girl in the seat in front of Stevens was seventeen and twisted.
Offering him a swig from a bag of Coca-Cola that her breath said was
mostly Stolitchnaya and whatever she was flying on. He lowered his head
and shook white dreadlocks at her, making refusal into a dance. For the
fifth time that night, Stevens wanted to turn around to give the screamer
something to scream about.

The drums were Intika's little thing and the drums were on that night, a
syncopation of rhythms within The Rhythm, that were deep and quiet like a
heartbeat.

The woman they were minding sat between them hunched forward on her seat,
tense and intense. Her fists were bunched in her lap, her eyes wide open,
staring at the stage, locked on it, as if she were sending thought waves
to the drummers; or trying to move the stage and everything on it by an
act of will.

The singer stepped up and adjusted the microphone on his headpiece,
unaware of her presence as her eyes clicked short fractions of a
millimeter to follow him. There was something in the air that night that;
something that the band knew and the audience didn't. Expectation. A buzz
in the air and a tension that you could smell in the breath of the person
sitting next to you. Redding felt it, Stevens felt it. The viola found
something and kept it.  The guitar played a smooth thread of synthesized
voice: it was the eighth number of the evening and everyone knew that this
was where things were going to happen. Pal Rabenda cupped the microphone
in his palm of his right hand. He said, "This is called 'Tomorrow' and
then he began to sing.

Redding and Stevens: a very large, very healthy, normal, a baseline human,
with calm watcher's eyes and an albino elf-a Negro elf, thank you-with a
bag on his left arm who looked sickly, who looked as if it took all the
magic in the world just to keep him from falling over. They were a matched
pair of operators, symbiotics; a physical adept and a projective magician
who were never seen separated by more than a few meters when they were
working. They were upscale bodyguards and setup-men for the strange and
expensive rituals of inter-corporate burglary who always worked a
double-blind; middle-men linking them to clients who knew nothing more
about them than what the net had to say. They were edge-workers; what you
found in the last corner of the service sector; when the categories of
porfessions thinned until all you found were con-artists, prostitutes, and
hitmen. The one entry on the net that mentioned them said: "they will do
anything short of deliberate murder and what they can't  find or find out
is not worth finding or knowing."

The client was a leaf-green silhouette cut in the air of a library, a
blackbody demonstration filled with the color of the forest at night. It
moved when it spoke, showing them the spines of the books bound in and
brown and black leather on the shelves behind him. They knew that the
books were part of the image and that there was no point in stopping it to
record the background. The client was one of those people who had trouble
getting to the point-someone who only landed on the point by accident-but
it had been a bad month for paying bills and staying solvent and they
decided that whoever it was must have had something to say.

 "They", the voice explained, wanted someone to escort a bootlegger, a
stim artist, to a concert-a concert that would happen soon-and that was
all it had to say, everything that it could say to anyone who didn't take
the job. Redding looked at Stevens; watched him shrug ever so slightly and
then he said, "yes" to someone whose image had been meticulously erased.
The voice said the name, "Rabenda" and everything was as clear as thin
rods of leaded crystal.

Redding remembered a face like a pickpocket's-a normal with thin, sallow
skin, a large head with close-set eyes.

Stevens remembered that Rabenda was a legend, an icon, a shining, stellar
talent that burned like an arclight at the center of pop music-a true
giant in an age where people who couldn't quite play their instruments
seemed to appear by spontaneous generation. The son of an Indian banker
and his secretary, Rabenda had learned to play the piano at the age of six
and the guitar at seven. He had been compared to Glen Gould and Timon
Mercado. He had a perfect sense of pitch and it was said that he
remembered everything he ever played, note for note, perfectly-right down
to the mistakes that he never made again.

He was made a member of the Royal Academy at the age of fourteen. Everyone
with eyes and ears had seen Rabenda.  The odd face of a person who wasn't
truly beautiful or handsome but who demonstrated an odd chemistry, a
charisma, with any camera that was pointed at him. Rabenda was a creature
of sound and images: a feverish-looking child sitting at a piano that
looked as if it were about to swallow him; a tuxedoed adolescent with his
eyes closed conducting an orchestra-his lips moving to something that only
he and the deaf could hear, and the Jonathan Titus interview where he
explained why the Great Hope of Classical Music had left the Academy. The
intensity in his eyes, a fire that couldn't have been rehearsed as he
said, "It simply wasn't enough"

At nineteen, Rabenda left England, saying that he was "looking for the
music" Three years later, he came back to England and formed Intika, a
band that lived together in a dead commercial space in soho. One day,
someone put ninety seconds of the performance, "Ashes and Ghosts" on a
commercial path on the Internet and Twenty-seven minutes later, everyone
in Intika were multimillionaires. Rabenda had gone looking for the music
and it was obvious that he had found it; that he had found much more of it
than anyone else had seen in a very long time.

He was the perfect rock star: quiet, almost humble, with eyes that said
that if you asked, he would tell you what he knew with a vividness that
would live with you in your dreams. He picked the groupies that he bedded
with discrimination and treated them with a tenderness that left them more
sad than angry in the inevitable interviews. The only thing that made
Rabenda anything other than a publicist's dream was his religion. Once, a
suited delegation from Sony-Columbia had gone  to Rabenda to beg him for
his stim rights; and it was said that he had thrown back his head and
laughed at them. He belonged to a modernized Moslem sect that he had found
in his travels that regarded simstim as unforgivable obscenity-one that
allowed for almost anything but an image filtered through a human mind. He
let them leave with the promise that it wouldn't happen, ever-that he
would sign with another label if it ever did happen. And the corporates
believed him: at any concert that Pal Rabenda gave, the guards searched
everyone with grinding, intimate thoroughness. There was word on the net
about seeing Intika from Paris: it said you could strap alcohol and
substances to your chest and no one would notice; but if they caught you
with anything like a stim rig, security would come and put the proper
boots to you.

The green man finished by underscoring the obvious.

 "Copyright law along the Pacific Rim is like a sieve with a hole in it"
he said, "and anyone with a high-quality recording would stand to make a
very large pile of money."

She came into the country through an airport in the southwest and tubed
the rest of the way into the city. According to the arrangement, there
were four places and four times where they could have met her. They found
her at the third one, at Grand Central, sitting on a bench in the company
of an ork who wouldn't stop talking to her and an enormous backpack made
of nylon in electric blue. The orc looked up at Redding and walked
away-just slowly enough for it to appear voluntary. She stood up and
offered Redding a hand to shake and then did the same for Stevens. When
she looked at them, her eyes locked onto points on their faces for an
instant; tracking and stabilizing mechanisms pausing them in space;
stopping them at exact, fixed intervals. The effect was distinct and
disconcerting. Redding hoped against hope that she could turn it off.

She said, "My name is Ulrike Muller" with the precise intonation of
someone who had practiced the same phrase over and over again. Stevens
shook his head and smiled with one side of his mouth.

"No." He said," No it's not. But that's alright. His isn't Boris Reading:
mine certainly isn't Paolo Stevens."

She spoke with a definite Maastrecht accent-an aggregation from half a
dozen European languages with one or two central foci-the sound that
happened when your parents spent your childhood trawling Europe for
day-jobs. In her case, the hub was German. Her face contrasted with the
language, it was an English or an Irish face, pale and angular-a long,
straight nose with a gold stud in the left nostril; Red hair cut nearly to
stubble, gray eyes, and no tattoos showing-something that meant nothing: a
laser could undo a month of maori thorns in seven minutes. Stevens took a
long look at her when she turned to speak with Redding. She was blandly
but expensively dressed in a summer suit from Bergdorf Goodman Europe; he
looked her up and down from the toes of her shoes to the crown of her
head-It took only half a second: he looked at her just once and he knew
everything he needed to.

They found an Indian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, where the cabbies got
their dinners-steam trays under chipped glass and scratched stainless; the
day's specials written in curlicues of Sanskrit and Bangla. Some places
were information dead spots where what you got by listening wasn't worth
what it cost you to sift it and the restaurant was one of them. Short,
thick men were sitting at the tables talking with one another; eating off
of their right hands under live posters of Indian celebrities. Bright,
factory-blue eyes staring out of dark brown faces.

Stevens was toying with a piece of green pepper smiling to himself:
Redding was all business.

He said, "You need  a reason to be here-we're going to give you one. Are
you weird about elves?"

"No."

"Good." Redding said, "I have to ask you a few questions-they're important
and I'd like you to tell me the truth."

The middle finger of Steven's left hand made counter-clockwise circles on
the surface of the table. His eyes were slitted. His lips began moving
like someone whispering in a  dream.

"Mensch-" she began and then "What is this? How serious is this? It is
only a concert-"

Steven's finger stopped its circling, he tapped the tabletop once as if he
were scolding it, a definite motion-"once and once only". He opened his
eyes and looked at the back of her hand; tracking the pattern of her
veins.

Redding's voice remained even and steady. He shrugged. "Off-the-rack," He
said, "a broadcast-quality rig, the implant version, costs more than ten
people make in ten years-it's unreal hardwarexcomplex and dangerous to
install. Before now, I never met anybody who had one. "

"So what?"

"So why do you have one for this concert?"

"I went to art school. I frame shots without thinking. Why do you ask me
these questions?"

"Because I really, really hate surprises-surprises are something you want
everyone else to have. I couldn't ask the client but you-you I can ask. So
I'm asking: why you, here and now, with all that great silicon?"

"I don't know."

"Who paid for it?"

"I don't know?"

Stevens nodded like someone listening to music, nodding.

"Do you have regular contact with anyone? How do they pay you? "

"I have contact with one person-in Europe. I have an account-money goes
into it, enough, more if I need it. It stays full while I do as I am told.
If it goes well, they say we make a business and I get more concerts."

"That's something."

There was a moment, a pause when they sat watching one another. She said,
"What now?"

"Now? You need cover, so you get cover-you get a great place to live out
in Brooklyn-they even have police there. My friend here is your boyfriend.
You're an upscale type come in for a safe little taste of the gutter. I'll
look like a big hired guy."

"Why all this caution?"

"Because our contract says that we have to protect you until you get
through the concert. We've got a context filter searching the boards for
any mention of you or anyone like you for the time we expect to move if it
finds anything, we scrub and  you can take all the Bang & Olafsson back to
Germany"

"Why?"

"Because we are supposed to protect you and because I got a nervous wish
to live forever. What do you care? We're on expenses and we know lots of
restaurants-you'll eat even better than you did where they worked on you."

Stevens looked at her face and saw that all the muscles around her eyes
had contracted but her pupils remained exactly the same size, fixed and
dead. "cheap eyes," he thought. "no pupillary  function."

"Yes?" she said, "What do you know about it?"

Redding looked at her with calm, hazel eyes. His voice was distant,
distracted, like a doctor diagnosing a frequently-seen ailment.

"It's the belt-dead giveaway-the only thing that isn't fresh off a shelf
and it's notched way downxsays you used to be thin, thin like sick. Guess
they fed you up real good didn't they? First Ringer's drip, then protein
shakes, and then everything they could put in your mouth. You're
fashionable now but the belt says you're a junkie someone found
somewhere."

Her mouth opened and closed again. She seemed to think of one thing to say
and then found something else.

"You were a bastard, yes? Your mother hated you."

Redding ignored her. "We are watching you. Nothing can happen to you while
you are with us. You are about to prank someone who doesn't want it and
can do something about. If it was anything else, they could have called
the Girlscouts for escort. Oh, and while we're here, do you have any
special nutritional requirements  we should know about-anything that
wouldn't make it through customs?"

For an instant, something like hope appeared on her face. The ghost of a
smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, before she could fight it down.
But then the hope disappeared and her eyes narrowed. Her voice again took
on the tone of repeated phrases, coaching-her English becoming oddly fluid
and natural; "a receptor check for morphine derivatives, another for
methedrinexsome antidepressants that I will give you the names for later.
They are your responsibility and the cost for them is in your budget."

Stevens saw that she had folded her hands on the tabletop in front of her.
The muscles were tight; the tendons standing out like surgically implanted
rods. He had to look  away from her: he had a very clear recollection of
the seventeenth time he himself had turned down someone with an injection
whistlexhow much he had wanted to scream.

"Fine," Redding said. He turned to Stevens, "Can we do that?"

"That?" Stevens said. "That's an easy. He laughed, "shit...that's almost
legal." He looked at her face in one of the mirrors: there was a fine
network of lines around and under her eyes as they had belonged to an
older woman.

"How's she doing on truth so far?"

He turned back to face Redding. "Full truth for the last six answers; a
little less sure on the others-nothing important." His eyes brightened.
"She really does think your mother hated you."

"Quick. Ask me if I care."

"I tell you the truth now." She volunteered.

"Now?" Redding ventured.

Stevens tilted his head back and rolled it onto his shoulder in her
direction, smiling. "Oh, we know that, dear-we are very sure about that.
Oh yes, I forgot, we want to have a look at your equipment."

"My contact knew you would want to see it. He gave me the specifications,
a readout of it on chip."

Redding said, "Any bells and whistles for ultrasound? MRHD-that kind of
thing?"

"No." she said, quickly as if convincing them were important, "They knew
you would ask-they told me no protection."

Stevens laughed. "Good," he said brightly, hIs face full of sudden energy.
 "That means it won't melt when we scan it."

Article: 4595 of alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo
From: sahtori@aol.com (Sahtori)
Subject: Story/Shadowrun Millieu/Action-Adventure/The Red-Haired German Pt 2
Date: 21 May 1995 02:09:59 -0400
Lines: 291
Reply-To: sahtori@aol.com (Sahtori)

They walked to the meeting place. It was as old parking lot in the Village
on Astor place, where they knew the attendant would close his eyes for a
few credits so long as you left the cars alone. The  had gone South,
downtown, and then East; he and Stevens with the girl between them. Step,
stepping; walking the way you learned to when you grew up in a place where
everyone had something to do or something to say-what you learned to do
when you could never quite scare up what it took to take the bus. Stevens
had worked on Redding's shirt: it looked new but wrinkled. Stevens was
pacing back and forth; looking like a lookout: keeping his hands in his
pockets, occasionally spitting tobacco-juice; his eyes constantly
moving.Cars came and went along the avenue: Redding had things to say.

"I don't know a lot about a lot of things but I know my business. You're
involved in my business now. You did what we do for money so you're a
professional."

"So?"

"So, one professional to another, the key to the business is to make sure
you get paid for what you do and then keep quiet about it...keep quiet
from as far away as you can"

"What is your point? What are you saying?"

"Me? I'm not saying anything-I haven't said anything in twenty years.
Point is, that they don't want you: they want  that slug of quartz you're
carrying. The slug is worth a storm of money-you are only the thing that
brings it to them. I think you should leave it for them and go do
something else with your silicon. If I were saying anything, I'd say that
they've got a lot of money and they won't miss what's in your head so long
as they think you'll keep quiet."

"What do I do with myself? How do I live?"

"There's a big market in witnesses with stim. Someone's always scamming
somewhere: you go to where the accidents are, make a recording, and then
talk about it in court. The insurance companies are always looking for
stringers. We can set you up for a new recorder. If the job is hairy, we
could go with you for a piece of it."

"You are a hero now? You want to protect me."

Stevens stopped pacing. He turned his head to one side and spat something
brown before speaking.

"We're not heroes." He said, nearly shouting.

Muller stood staring at him. Her mouth open. He had spoken in flawless,
accentless German. He went on. "We work hard and we keep our eyes open for
the next chance and that's all we do-heroes are all about sacrifice: we
would love to be heroes-just once. We can't afford it. To hell with it.
Look, If you get into the car that's coming-"

Redding raised a finger and waved it. "We're not sure about it and we have
a contract."

"This is an act" she said, "You are trying to scare me."

Redding said, "No. You don't understand: it isn't scary. It's just the way
things are."

A low and smooth Mercedes, a variation in the key of limousine, pulled
into the parking lot and stopped in the lane between the cars. One the
doors it the rear it opened. It was dark inside the passenger section;
dark enough for a quiet debriefing with champagne and fingerfood: It was
dark enough for one more bad thing to happen in a place where no one saw
it.

Stevens looked at her face and there were no more arguments. He said
nothing, he could see that she was already in the limousine; telling her
story; drinking the champagne; sipping a nice warm cup of white Miso and
and laughing. He saw in her face that she was already preparing with her
soul to be loyal to the company; waiting to hear what a good girl she was;
eager to go to her next concert and the next one, and the one after
that-someone about to take the first steps in a brilliant career.

Stevens positioned himself in the open lane that lead to were the
limousine was waiting; placed himself to be easily seen and targeted.
Stevens had worked for safety; worked for years to make it hard for a
bullet or a spell of any kind to touch him. Redding had the automatic down
behind one leg. Cars were a problem in tactics that they had solved years
ago: Redding used whatever he had to make everyone close the doors and
stay inside while Stevens called a fire elemental that manifested in its
fuel tank, providing the sudden, unanswerable presence of a
thousand-degree flame.

Muller started walking forward towards the door that had opened for her.
If anything happened, it was going to happen in the next few seconds.
Redding was edging to the left with an air of nonchalance in motion that
was natural-barely noticeable-as if creeping around cars for a better shot
was something that he had done ten times a day for years. She was walking
to where the door was open and waiting for her. She was thirty feet away;
then twenty; and then ten feet. All it would take was a spell or a bullet:
if a single loud word from the back of the car happened, people would die.

Stevens' body was like a statue erected as a celebration of
tension-seventy kilos of rigid flesh swaddled in cotton and advanced
aramid polymers. Redding stood behind the hood of a car as if he had grown
there; watching and waiting. But nothing happened. She got into the
limousine and It was almost a relief when she got in; when the door closed
behind her; peacefully and without comment. Redding thought that it would
almost have been easier if the people who had carefully assembled the
evening had found the decency to try and save themselves a little money.
The limousine turned in an arc onto the avenue and went south.

Redding took a last look around him and put the automatic away. Stevens
relaxed and started breathing again. They  were done. They had protected
her and delivered what she was carrying. They were on the cusp of the
excersize. They were going to get paid.

They took a fast mover out to Queens where they still had diners. They
went to an empty one and sat down at a booth. The harsh light from socket
flourescents gave the place an atmosphere of almost  surreal
cleanness-sterility like an undertakers' workshop.  Redding looked at
Stevens  and saw the harsh shadows that his hair cast on his face. He had
changed his contact lenses and his eyes were a borrowed shade of gray. It
was at times like this that Redding wondered at the kind of joke biology
had played on him. He had seen a picture of Stevens' parents: both of them
had faces that were as brown as fresh-turned earth while under the light
in the diner, Redding could clearly make out the small red veins under
Stevens' skin.  And then there was the whole drug situation- three years
after the fact, and he still looked like he was fixing up eight times a
day.

The waitress came and asked them what they wanted.

Redding said, "Coffee. Make it real, make it quick, and keep it
coming-we've got a haul for Toronto tomorrow and we gotta be awake when we
get there."

The waitress turned and went to the kitchen showing them her back. There
were flat screen televisions in the corners of the diner; playing to no
one: the one nearest them showed a scene of the garden from the air; then
stock footage of of Pal Rabenda on stage; a scene from the inside during
the happening; and then a jump cut to a reporter standing in front of the
barricades-blue uniforms everywhere.

Redding said, "Do me a thing."

"What thing?"

"Pretend for a sec that we're a little different and do a thought
exercise. Money and resources no problem: I want you to do Pal Rabenda for
me."

Stevens said "You mean..." He covered the side of his face with his hand
and silently mouthed the end of the sentence, "kill him?"

"Yes." Redding said, "That...do that for me."

"Exercise only?"

"Yeah."

"Okay." He said, "Steal or buy a welding laser. Modify the optics,
collimating for a six inch blade at a one half mile;  survey a target
reference to somewhere where his head shows up at intervals. Wait for him
to go there. When he shows up, you put one-hundred thousand Joules through
his brain-next case: If resources are really no object, you can have a
computer do it for you."

"Physical security?"

"Sure. Stay inside forever; never walk through the same door twice-learn
to duck fast at random intervals."

"How 'bout magic?"

"You'd have to know the make and frequency of the laser in advance-which
frequency you wanted blocked-there are lots and lots of them. Blocking the
whole spectrum in pieces would ignore the Theory of Characteristics so it
isn't happening. Block everything and you end up walking around in a black
bubble with no light going in or out. Find a way to do it and still see
your dinner and the world would be grateful. We could retire on
neighboring Islands from the proceeds."

"What team of hitters don't know this?"

"Bad ones. None who could actually do the job. But you know all this
already. We were trained by the same people."

The waitress brought coffee in two steaming white mugs. She held them with
exaggerated care, up level with her shoulders, before laying them down in
front of them. She asked, "You need milk?"

"Did it come out a cow?" Redding asked.

"Nope. We got some frozen baby formula if you want...take just a sec to
zap it."

Redding smiled. "Thanks, don't need it."

"A lot of sugar for me." Stevens said.

Redding sipped. It was good. The best of the bad coffee, hot and
black-bottled water over beans that should have been buried a long time
ago. He looked over the edge of his mug at Stevens: his hands were hidden
under the edge of the table with one of them was making a circling motion.
He was looking off to the left with slitted eyes; an almost routine look
of inhuman determination crossing his face for an instant. Having done
whatever he had done, He poured a waterfall of sugar into his coffee and
turned to Redding while he stirred it.

"Who do you think commissioned it?"

"Pick a telecom company and point a finger. Maybe Rabenda's Parent company
wanting to teach him to loosen up about the stim thing-you know; 'look how
dangerous it is.' The same people who hired the clown behind us, the
screamer. Maybe they figured the chip was easier to get out than the girl
was and wanted to give us a little hand."

Stevens pulled his computer out of the sheath on his thigh. The screen
showed green alphanumerics flashing in and out of existence-money
laundering-thousands of transactions below the threshold where banks kept
records seconds. Stevens had liked muller, liked her a lot. They had tried
it once while Redding was off arranging things. It had happened in the
center of the floor in a sleeping bag. Neither of them closing their eyes
for an instant: in the middle of it all, Stevens started laughing and
couldn't have stopped for love or money. Staring into her glass eyes with
his, he thought of the phrase, "The bizarre image of cameras mating." If
he had touched her hand at the concert she would have been sitting there
with them. Magic was good for that.

He looked at the computer and said, "we're getting paid."

Redding said, "That's something." and then he saw Stevens look to his left
for a moment and nod. He took a sip of his coffee and then put his mug
down on the formica in front of him. His face was yellow like old, dead
paper.

 "Here's something else," he said, "her name was Nuala Theresa O'Connor:
she was just disassembled in Brooklyn."

"Where in Brooklyn?"

Stevens smiled, his eyes went wide. "At a place I am going to burn to the
ground."

"Not smart."

He shook his head. Precise, crisp pronunciation:

"I don't care."

"Why?"

His smile broadened. "Because I want to and because I can."

Redding shrugged, drank from his mug and nodded. He emptied his cup and
motioned for the waitress to come over to them.

He said, "How do you take your coffee? My friend here wants to buy you a
cup."

She said, "I wouldn't know."

"Come and have a cup with us-we'll pay extra."

She looked up at a spot near one of the screens, where the camera would
be.

Coffee was expensive and hard to come by. She looked down into Steven's
cup. "My boss wouldn't like it."

"Tell you what, go tell him about it. Then, either come back with a mug or
tell him he can come over and explain his policies to my friend here."

She turned to Stevens and looked him up and down. Her eyes lingered on the
tips of his ears.

 "You a magician?"

Stevens looked up at her and smiled, giving her his best wildman stare.
"Like they say in the flats... 'right off the scale.' and then he was
serious again, "Don't worry, nothing will happen to you while you're with
us."

A few minutes later, she came back with the coffee pot on a warming plate;
carrying a third mug in the pocket of her apron. Her name was Linda. She
had brown hair and brown eyes with not that much behind them. She asked
them if they worked for the mafia. She told them the story of her life in
detail and they listened with real interest: She was in her thirties and
had a little girl. Stevens called a spirit  for her and let her use it to
take a message to a man whose name she could barely remember and she got
an answer. Redding told her about a vampire they knew. They drank coffee
for a very long time. They sat and talked and drank coffee until the sun
rose and chased them away.