Metrophage | Page 2

him
from a dead friend.

The ugly and untimely murder of Raquin, the chemist, had left an
empty spot in the pit of Jonny's stomach. Not just because Raquin had
been Jonny's connection (since it was a simple matter for Jonny to get
his dope directly from Raquin's boss, the smuggler lord Conover) but
over the year or so of their acquaintance Raquin had become, to Jonny,
something close to a friend. And "close to a friend" was as much as
Jonny generally allowed himself to become. It was fear of loss more
than any lack of feelings on his part that kept Jonny at a distance from
most of the other losers and one-percenters that crowded Los Angeles.
Overhead, the moon was a bone-white sickle. Jonny wondered, idly, if
the Alpha Rats were watching Los Angeles that night. What would the
extraterrestrials think, through a quarter million miles of empty space,
when they saw him put a bullet through Easy Money's head?
Jonny caught sight of Carnaby's Pit a few blocks away, quartz prisms
projecting captured atrocity videos from the Lunar Border Wars. On a
flat expanse of wall above the club's entrance, a New Palestine soldier
in a vacuum suit was smashing the faceplate of a Mishima Guardsman.
The Guardsman's blood bubbled from his helmet, droplets boiling to
hard black jewels as the soundtrack from an ancient MGM musical
played in the background: I want to be loved by you, by you, and
nobody else but you... The words CARNABY'S PIT periodically
superimposed themselves over the scene in Kana and Roman
characters.
Jonny pushed his way through a group of Pemex-U.S. workers
negotiating for rice wine at the weekend mercado that covered the
street near Fountain Avenue. The air was thick with the scents of
animal waste, sweat, roasting meat and hashish. Chickens beat their
wings against wire cages while legless vat-grown sheep lay docilely in
the butchers' stalls, waiting for their turn on their skewers. Old women
in hipils motioned Jonny over, holding up bright bolts of cloth, bootleg
computer chips and glittering butterfly knives. Jonny kept shaking his
head. No, gracias...Ima ja naku...Nein..."
Handsome young Germans, six of them, all in the latest eel-skin
cowboy boots and silk overalls (marked with the logo of some

European movie studio) lugged portable holo-recorders between the
stalls, making another in their endless series of World Link
documentaries about the death of street culture. Those quickly-made
documentaries and panel discussions about the Alpha Rats (who they
were, their intentions, their burden on the economy of the West)
seemed to make up the bulk of the Link's broadcasts these days. Jonny
swore that if he heard one more learned expert coolly discussing the
logic of drug and food rationing, he was going to personally bury fifty
kilos of C-4 plastique under the local Link station and make his own
contribution to street culture by liberating a few acres of prime urban
landscape.
At a stall near the back of the place, an old curandera was selling her
evil eye potions and a collection of malfunctioning robot sentries:
cybernetic goshawks, rottweilers and cougars, simple track and kill
devices controlled by a tabletop microwave link. The sentries had been
very popular with the nouveau riche toward the end of the previous
century, but the animals' electronics and maintenance had proved to be
remarkably unreliable. Eventually they passed, like much of the
mercado's merchandise, down from the hills, through the rigid social
strata of L.A., until they landed in the street, last stop before the junk
heap.
There by the twitching half-growling animals, the crew set up their
lights. Jonny hung around and watched them block out shots. The film
makers infuriated him, but in their own way, Jonny knew, they were
right.
The market was dying. When he had been a boy, Jonny remembered it
sprawling over a dozen square blocks. Now it barely managed to
occupy two. And most of the merchandise was junk. Chromium paint
flaked off the electronic components, revealing ancient rusted works.
The hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables grew steadily smaller
and more tasteless each season. All that seemed to keep the market
going was the communally owned bank of leaking solar batteries.
During the rolling brown-outs, they alone kept the tortilla ovens hot,
the fluorescents flickering, the videos cranking.

"Isn't it time you kids were in bed?" Jonny asked, stepping on the toes
of a lanky blonde camera man. "Sprechen sie 'parasite'?"
Huddled in the doorways of clubs and arcades, groups of fingerprint
changers, nerve tissue merchants and brain cell thieves regarded the
crowd with hollow eyes, as if assessing their worth in cash at every
moment. The gangs, too, were out in force that hot night: the Lizard
Imperials (snake-skin boots and surgically split tongues), the Zombie
Analytics (subcutaneous pixels