Only Forward. Michael Marshall Smith

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       Three

      At 4.45 a.m. I woke up, instantly alive and alert. I turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but it wasn’t going to happen. I still had Jahavan running wild round my bloodstream, shouting, carrying on, waking up all the cells. I got up, had a shower, went into the kitchen and threw the coffee away. I don’t need that kind of shit from a beverage.

      I made a cup of Debe, which is similar to coffee except it has no natural products in it and doesn’t taste much like it either, and sat by the wall in the living room, waiting for dawn to break. An amazingly, ridiculously large spider ran across the floor in front of me. I stared at it for a while, wondering how the hell it had got in. My apartment is on the fourth floor: I couldn’t believe the thing had scaled a hundred feet of wall just to hang out with me. It had to have a lair in the apartment somewhere, though I couldn’t imagine where. I found it hard to believe that there could be a crevice in there big enough to hold an animal that size. More likely it just sat around in the open all day, cunningly disguised as a piece of furniture, waiting for night to fall so it could go zipping round the floor in that way they enjoy so much. I might have sat on it without knowing, or rested a drink on it. Hell, I could have stretched out and gone to sleep on it.

      Halfway across the floor the spider stopped, skittered round, and sat and looked at me. I looked back at the spider. It was a tense moment.

      I take shit as and when necessary, but not from things as far down the evolutionary ladder as spiders. I think it sensed this. After a long moment it pointed itself in a different direction and slowly and many-leggedly ambled towards the door. Then, probably realising this was the last chance it was going to get tonight to do any zipping about, it suddenly accelerated to warp speed and zoomed out into the hall, taking the corner on two legs.

      Unlike a lot of Neighbourhoods, Colour is open to the sky, and by 5.30 the black outside my window was tinged with a hint of pinky blue. It didn’t help much but it looked nice. They always have nice skies in Colour: I think they fiddle about with them in some way.

      It was still too early to do anything useful, so I went shopping instead.

      Early afternoon found me back in the apartment, sitting crosslegged on the ceiling of the living room, finishing a massive lunch.

      For long stretches I can’t be bothered with shopping, especially for food. I try, but by the time I get to the stores either I’m bored with the whole idea or I get choice anxiety and it all gets too much for me. Today, though, I’d gone through with it. I’d really shopped. Food, batteries for the Gravbenda™, food, Normal Strength coffee, food and food. I’d made the fridge really happy. Finally it had something to get its teeth into again, lots of stuff it could keep nicely cold and fresh. Not all of the food was for me: one of the things I had on my list of things to do was to get in touch with my cat, Spangle, and see if he wanted to come and stay for a while.

      First, though, I had some calls to make. I made them. I called all of the reliable contacts I have in Neighbourhoods around the Centre, and some of the unreliable ones too.

      Nothing. Whoever had snatched Alkland had done a truly tremendous job, secrecy-wise. It was looking more and more as if it had to be a gang from Turn Neighbourhood, which was very bad news. I do this kind of thing, the normal things, largely for something to do. I have to fill my time somehow, now that it’s all I have: but I’d rather it didn’t get too serious. I’ve calmed a bit in the last few years. Taking on a bunch of well-organised psychopaths doesn’t appeal as much as it would have done once.

      I ate some more food. Things were not going particularly well yet, but that’s the way it always works. The City is a hell of a big place, split into hundreds of places that have no idea what’s going on in all the other places. There’s no point just skipping blithely round, hoping you’ll run into what you’re looking for on a street corner. You don’t get handed a job complete with a little box full of clues and helpful pointers. I don’t, anyway. There’s a lot of waiting involved in the initial stages. I’d put out feelers, registered an interest, and that was all I could do.

      Suddenly there was a loud pharping noise from the message tray. Unfortunately the tray is fixed to the wall near the floor, and I couldn’t reach it from where I was sitting, i.e. on the ceiling. I flicked the switch on the Gravbenda™ to return things to normal.

      It’s not just the batteries on that thing, you know, I think the unit’s completely dysfunctional. Instead of gradually reorientating the room it just switched over instantaneously, dumping me and the remains of my lunch in a large and messy pile in the middle of the floor. I made a mental note to go stand outside my ex-client’s apartment sometime and shout, ‘Be wary if this gentleman asks to pay you in kind, lest the consumer goods he offers are faulty in significant ways,’ or something equally cutting, and then crawled painfully through the debris towards the message tray. I hadn’t actually cleared up the mess from the last Gravbenda™ disaster before turning it on again, and you haven’t seen untidiness until you’ve seen a room where the gravity has failed twice in different directions.

      The message was from Ji. He was going to kick the shit out of an enclave in the Hu sub-section of Red, and would I like to come along? I knew Ji well enough to realise that this was not purely a social invitation. He was on to something.

      I quickly changed into attire suitable for gang warfare likely to stop only just short of the deployment of nuclear weapons. Long black coat, black jacket, black trousers, black shirt. On impulse I ran the CloazValet™ over the shirt first: it stayed black, but gained a very intricate, almost fractal pattern in very dark blues, purples and greens. I found my gun and shoulder-holstered it.

      It’s always difficult to predict how long these things will go on, so I put a call through to Zenda to warn her I might be a little late calling in. This is me in full action mode, you see: dynamic, vibrant but considerate too. Royn answered the vidiphone.

      ‘Hi, Stark. Like the shirt.’

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