Free Light by M. John Harrison

Vesicle’s tank farm. He erupted out of the wreckage of Tank Seven, half drowned, throwing up with disorientation and horror. He stared round at the drifting smoke, the dead kids and stunned-looking cultivars. Proteome poured sluggishly off him like the albumen of a bad egg. Poor, dead Rita was gone for good and he wasn’t even Chinese Ed the detective anymore. He was Ed Chianese, twink.
    “This is my home, you guys,” he said. “You know? You could have knocked.”
    There was a laugh from the doorway.
    “You owe us money, Ed Chianese,” said Bella Cray.
    She looked meditatively across the room at the two remaining gun-kiddies. “These punks aren’t from me,” she said to Tig Vesicle, who had got himself up off the floor and sidled back behind his cheap plywood counter.
    Evie Cray laughed.
    “They aren’t mine, either,” she said.
    She shot them in the face, one after the other, with her Chambers pistol, then showed her teeth. “That’s what’ll happen to you if you don’t pay us, Ed,” she explained.
    “Hey,” said Bella. “I wanted to do that.”
    “Those punks were some of Fedora Gash’s punks,” Evie told Tig Vesicle. “So why’d you let them in?”
    Vesicle shrugged. He had no choice, the shrug indicated.
    The cultivars were leaving the farm now, one-handedly dragging their dead and wounded behind them. The wounded looked down at themselves, dabbling their hands and saying things like, “I could get shot like this all day. You know?” Ed Chianese watched them file past and shivered. He stepped out of the ruined tank, plucked the rubber cables out of his spine and tried to wipe the proteome off himself with his hands. He could already feel the black voice of withdrawal, like someone talking persuasively a long way back in his head.
    “I don’t know you,” he said. “I don’t owe you anything.”
    Evie gave him her big lipstick smile.
    “We bought your paper off Fedy Gash,” she explained. She studied the wreckage of the tank farm. “Looks as if she didn’t really want to sell.” She allowed herself another smile. “Still. A twink like you owes everyone else in the universe, Ed. That’s what a twink is, a speck of protoplasm in the ocean.” She shrugged. “What can we do, Ed? We’re all fish.”
    Ed knew she was right. He wiped helplessly at himself again, then, seeing Vesicle behind his counter, approached him and said:
    “You got any tissues back there, or like that?”
    “Hey, Ed,” Vesicle said. “I got this.”
    He pulled out the Hi-Lite Autoloader he had taken from the dead girl and fired it into the ceiling. “I’m so scared I could shit!” he yelled at the Cray sisters. They looked startled. “So, you know: fuck you !” He darted jerkily out from behind the counter, every nerve in his body firing off at random. He could barely control his limbs. “Hey, fuck, Ed. How’m I doing?” he screamed. Ed, who was as surprised as the Cray sisters, stared at him. Any minute now, Bella and Evie would wake up from their trance of surprise. They would brush the plaster dust off their shoulders and something serious would start to happen.
    “Jesus, Tig,” Ed said.
    Naked, stinking of embalming fluid and punctured for the tank at “neurotypical energy sites,” a wasted Earthman with a partly grown-out Mohican and a couple of snake tattoos, he ran out into the street. Pierpoint was deserted. After a moment explosions and flashes of light lit up the windows of the tank farm. Then Tig Vesicle staggered out backwards, the arms of his coat on fire with blowback from the reaction pistol, shouting, “Hey, the fuck, ” and, “I’m so shit!” They stared at one another with expressions of terror and relief. Chianese beat out the fire with his hands. Arms around each other’s shoulders they blundered off into the night, drunk for the moment with body-chemicals and camaraderie.
     
10
Agents of Fortune
    Three in the morning. Valentine Sprake was long gone. Michael Kearney