He was standing on the sidewalk, idly flexing his brand-new arm while he waited to cross with the rest of the blowfish, when he heard his mother's voice in his mind. Unbidden, unwished-for, apropos of nothing, it came to him: Carry on the way you have been, Danny-boy, you be seein' angels a lot sooner than you want to. Or maybe devils. You sure got some bad in you, boy. Watch it don't catch you out and take you down. When you go, you want to see them angels waiting to take you in.
Danny smiled to himself sourly. Yeah, sure, Momma, thanks for the pointer. He thought of it as typical of everything she'd given him, from the charity-shop clothes and cold junk food all the way down to the little stump and four tiny fingers that grew out of his right shoulder, the legacy of her five years in a fertilizer production factory, now completely covered by a brand-new arm from the Universal Prosthetics Clinic.
Maybe the sudden echo of her voice in his mind had been his simple acknowledgment that she wouldn't have approved. Getting above yourself was one of the many deadly sins on the Momma-meter, along with whining. As in, Stop whining about your goddamn stump, you're lucky that's all it was. I saw some of the things they took outta women I worked with. And if you think you oughta get one of them fancy prosthetics like some jumped-up poster child, you gettin' above yourself, boy. Way above yourself.
The sour smile deepened as the light changed. A desperate bike courier, legs pumping as if he were treading water in a panic to keep from drowning, blew through the intersection close enough to flutter Danny's shirttail. He smoothed it casually, enjoying the small fantasy that he'd worn completely normal and totally unremarkable shirts all his life, just like anyone else. Not above myself, Momma—just above you. Like the man said about everyone being in the gutter and some of us looking at the stars. It's called ambition.
He flexed the arm again. Realizing the smaller ambitions was the first step in getting the bigger ones taken care of. Not that a new arm had been all that small to him. Two years of living on the cheap, saving the money he got from playing errand boy and selling guidebooks and magazines to the tourists, no luxuries, not even a piss-quality beer on a Saturday night, just so he'd have the cash for old Sibelius at the Universal Prosthesis Clinic. UPC did a cash-only business—strictly used paper in a used brown envelope, don't want that old taxman coming around, do we? Nosir. Straight cash got you the straight goods.
You wouldn't have thought so looking at UPC's shabby storefront. You wouldn't have even thought to ask, which was just as well, since if you had to ask you'd never know. But if you were the right kind, someone more interested in possibilities than what you could have right now—i.e., the stars rather than the gutter—and you were both willing to work and open to suggestion, some of the right things could happen. Because you'd know the right way to make them happen. You'd know that putting some extra in that brown envelope and staying awake through old lady Sibelius's sales patter—Come on in, we fix you up cheap, just don't ask too many questions about where the parts are from. We do arms, we do legs, we even do whole exoskeletons. Don't matter how you come in, you gonna be walking out, walking tall and proud. Doctor Sibelius guarantees and that's for life, my man—meant you'd get something higher-grade than the stuff Sibelius and her partners jury-rigged for the run-of-the-mill blowfish. One more good reason to get above yourself.
Of course, until you actually did get above yourself, until you were actually up and out of the gutter, it was best to exercise discretion. Especially in this neighborhood, when it was starting to get dark.
· · · · ·
SKIN MUSIC screamed the old-school neon sign on the front of the tattoo parlor. Just below, one of the artists was hanging in the open doorway blowing garish-colored smoke rings. She was new; the ink in her face morphed from Valkyrie-style enhancements to Snow Queen to Snow Beast. She eyed Danny with the bold, I-can-take-you-in-a-fight-or-I-can-take-you-in-bed-your-call attitude endemic in those under the age of twenty. Or maybe that was just the tune her skin music was playing, he thought, giving her a self-possessed smile in return. She was staring at his face. Didn't even notice his arm except in passing, the way you never notice anyone's limbs if they have all of them. He made a point of pausing to read the plain old painted sign on the shop next door (TRADER VIC'S—YES WE R OPEN) by way of showing her that he was busy, thanks, some other time maybe. A prior commitment was more palatable than outright rejection; he knew that one firsthand. In
lieu of pulling a thorn out of a lion's paw, it was the sort of extended courtesy that might come in handy. But even if it didn't, it wasn't like it cost you anything.
The tattoo artist crushed her homemade on the sidewalk as he went into Trader Vic's. As usual, Vic herself was behind the high counter at the far end of the store, looking regal as she flicked a finger at the flatscreen in front of her. She was dark-skinned and heavily-built, no little slip of a thing but solid and strong in a grey Athletic Club of Overland Park sweatshirt. Trader Vic, as she styled herself, was the real deal because, unlike the restaurateur who had launched a thousand mai tais, she made trades, not drinks. Need something, but suffering from financial embarrassment? Not to worry, Trader Vic liked to say, she had a thousand thousand contacts reachable via a touch on her flatscreen, and millions more reachable by two touches. Somewhere among them was the person who had what you wanted and might be in the mood to make a deal for it, a trade between the two of you. Or it could turn into a three-way dance, or four-way, or you might end up getting plugged into a complex network of give and take, something that would be an impossible tangle for anyone but Trader Vic, who could keep it all straight in her mind no matter which angle she came at it from. You might have thought it was just good software and record-keeping so meticulous as to be anal, but that was just backup for the real trading machine, the one between Vic's ears.
"Hey yo," she said with a big smile. "Something new has been added."
He waved at her with the arm and did bodybuilder poses with it as he approached the counter. Today she had rented some of her unneeded floor space to the tattoo parlor and some to the market on the other side—boxes of animation inks faced crates of olive oil, fish paste, fortified wheat germ, and shell macaroni.
"Like they say on the late show, checkiddout, checkiddout." He stretched the arm high over his head and made a buzzing noise as he lowered his hand onto the counter next to her monitor for a five-point landing on the fingers. "The Eagle is in da house and things can only get better."
"Nostalgia sure ain't what it used to be." She tried a soul handshake on him, bumped his knuckles with her own, slapped him high and low five, and then got him in an arm wrestling grip.
"No fair, I got no leverage," he complained grinning as he pushed her arm down on the counter effortlessly, careful not to crush her fingers.
She grinned back at him and then gave him one upside the head; not too hard, though. "Don't get all misty just because you beat the champ one time." She flexed her own hand, as if she had a mild cramp. "Feels good, like the real thing. Only realer. How much were you holding back?"
"All of it. Sibelius came by some military stuff, surplus leftovers, she said."
Vic looked at her screen and tapped a finger on it. "So that's where that went. Anonymous auction, not that you heard it from me."
Danny made an elaborate dismissive gesture with his right hand. "You know Sibelius—you don't ask her questions and she doesn't have to tell you lies."
Vic leaned on the counter. "Well, if your arm really did come out of that lot, you may have gotten the deal of the century, my man. It was an experimental batch. The mad scientist behind it got himself cooked in some kind of stupid accident and the military warehoused everything. Sat for six months until the inventory database got scrambled and ceased to officially exist."
"Gee, I wonder how that happened," Danny said, admiring his fingers.
"Happens all the time," Vic said serenely. "With no official existence, there was no official sale and no official income lining any official's pocket. Not that I told you anything. What would I know anyway? I'm just a humble trader, a go-between, a matchmaker for goods and services."
Danny looked at her with exaggerated puzzlement. "Huh? Whudja say?"
"I said, I'll have to thank Sibelius for this."
He blinked, the puzzlement becoming real. "You will?"
"Oh, yeah." Vic's smile was thoughtful. "How'd you like to make that new arm pay for itself?"
"Well, that is kinda what I had in mind," Danny said. "You know, doing jobs I couldn't before."
The trader nodded. "Good. Because it so happens I've got a vacancy for tonight. Does that fit in with your busy social schedule?"
"Sure. What do I have to do? Bend some iron bars? Crush beer cans?" He snapped his fingers rhythmically. "Keep the beat?"
"Later. First get down to Jeremy's and pick up some code for me. It's special, I don't want it getting intercepted or scrambled."
He couldn't help showing his disappointment. Errand boy again.
"Hey, that's only the beginning," Vic said, reading his mind, or at least his expression. "I'm going to need a lot of help from you tonight, and I don't mean I want you to sit the store while I'm out. I can't get this done without you."
Danny laughed a little, feeling both sheepish and relieved. Anyone else might have been patronizing him or setting him up, but not Vic. "Okay. I'm on the case."
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