Join (22 page)

Leap is watching Apple closely. Chance wishes Leap would sit back and acknowledge that this is a blind alley. But Leap is nowhere close to giving up.

“You've talked with Rope,” Chance One says. “He flirted with you. He told you about himself. Can you help me find him?”

“I really don't think so,” Apple says. “I told the Directorate what I know. He talked about fooling around with my One. Mentioned a hotel, but he never said which one. I don't even have that. Why do you think you could find him if the Directorate can't?”

“I keep remembering him, watching me,” Chance says. “He said something. He said he was playing a game. I was paying an ante.”

“A game?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, poker?”

“That's what I was thinking of. But I don't know. Was he a gambler? Did he talk about games, or do you have any idea what else that could mean?”

“I really don't know,” Apple says. “That guy said a lot of things.”

Leap leans forward on the bar, then has one of his seizures. He spasms backward but stays on the barstool as his arms go up and back. He doesn't hit anything, and it's over quickly.

“Ah,” he says, a hand to his mouth. “I bit my tongue.”

“Is it bleeding?” Chance asks.

“No, I don't think so. Was . . . that one of my . . . things?”

“Yeah,” says Chance.

“Shit.”

“What was that?” Apple asks, surprised.

“It's a thing I do,” Leap says. “I don't know when it's happening.”

“Well, can I get you anything? Are you okay?”

“I'm okay. Just need to sit. My tongue hurts.”

“You didn't break anything,” Apple says.

Leap, clearly not finding the assurance too comforting, says, “I'm going to the restroom.”

As he rises and gingerly makes his way through the crowd, Leap looks defeated. They just don't have much of a plan.

When Leap has gone, Apple says, “That looked like a flip.”

Interactive vids, soaps, all the morbid narratives of the day go directly to worst-case scenarios. Incurable, deadly, mysterious—even though they're rare enough to make people doubt their reality—flips still make appearances in popular media.

“I don't think he'd like me to talk about it,” Chance says.

“You sure you don't want a drink?”

“Yeah, I'm sure.”

“Look, I gotta get back to the bar.”

“Apple, there's nothing else? You can't think of anything else?”

“No.”

“You asked why I think I might find him, even though the Directorate couldn't. I guess I don't think I'll find him if he doesn't want to be found. But I think he might want to find me.”

Apple hesitates, considering something. He shakes his head violently as if trying to clear it. Chance says, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I'm fine!” Apple snaps back, then says, “Sorry.”

Apple moves closer and lowers his voice. “There is something you don't know. I told the Directorate, but they didn't listen. I don't think it will help, but . . . He did come back. In here, with a drive I didn't recognize. After the Directorate had been in and everyone had cleared off. He says, ‘Hey, Apple, it's me, Rope.' I couldn't believe it. I thought it was someone, maybe, making a joke. But a credit token popped up in his name, with a picture of the drive. I didn't know why he would come here. I was scared of him. You know—”

“What happened?”

Apple leans in even closer. “Nothing,” he says. “He ordered my twenty-one-year-old Hibiki. Absolutely topflight whiskey. Rare. I have one bottle that I bought from another customer. I'd told him about it, I guess. He had three shots, fast. That's just wrong. Shouldn't drink that whiskey fast. Then he left.”

“You told the Directorate?”

Apple nods.

“So?”

“Well, I don't know whether they cared,” says Apple.

“Then I don't see how that could help,” Chance says.

“No, but wait. The thing is, he likes his whiskey. Rope. And I don't mean that in a good way. The guy's a drunk, you know what I mean? A real one, I saw it. I mean, I'm a bartender and even I've never met a join who's a real drunk before. Even if both my drives are drinking, I don't get drunk. But there's a reason he started drinking drives to death, instead of going another way. Something about
him
, must be. What I'm saying is, he's not going to stop.”

Common wisdom considers joining a treatment for many addictions. There was a short period in the early days when people with virulent drug addictions joined with other drug addicts in a mistaken belief in a kind of dependency cancellation. But that effort is now considered a disaster and an object lesson in the theory of join variety. Stated without nuance or qualification, the theory of join variety says it's better to join people with unlike characteristics. In his years of practice, Chance never treated a join for alcoholism.

Chance notices that Leap One is standing beside him. He's not sure when Leap returned.

“I told the Directorate,” Apple is saying, “but they didn't pay any attention. How could he be an alcoholic? So here's the thing I didn't say to them. If I wanted to find him, I'd look in the bars where the real drinkers are. Solo quarter, the short spires. That's where I'd look for him.”

Chance and Leap take in what Apple is saying. They have no other leads. “Thank you,” Chance says.

“But if he does have drives left,” Apple says, “why would they be in New Denver? They might not even be on this continent.”

“Yeah,” says Chance. Nonetheless, he and Leap can check out the solo bars in New Denver. It'll keep them busy while they're waiting for Mark Pearsun to work out the licensing problems.

even though Chance Five's perceptions
are muffled by painkillers, he's available to accompany Leap Four as she explores the short spires. They've both toured the area through interactive documentaries, and each has visited a handful of times.

The two of them land their pod on the rooftop of a seven-story faux-brick building. They find the roof-access staircase, press their palms to the security plate, and, when the electronics of the steel door slide its thick bolts back with a high-pitched hiss, they step into a stairwell lit by only a faltering, pallid LED. The stairwell absorbs sound in a way that drains vitality from the space.

When joins started building spires, they often found new locations where there had been no earlier city. Because access by pod made differences in altitude less important, and the evolving megastorms were devastating large open regions, many spire communities grew in mountainous areas.

Cities began to lobby for spires to help them maintain relevance and energize renewal efforts. New architecture slowly replaced the old, and cities changed from the inside. Solos, who remained more comfortable in earlier styles of architecture or who didn't have the money to move, stayed concentrated in the older parts of cities. The term “short spires” began to be synonymous with neighborhoods inhabited mostly by solos.

New Denver's short spires cluster around the west side of Lake Everwild, a massive artificial reservoir. Even though these short spires are only a couple of decades old, they already have the hard-used look of neglected urban areas, built on a grid to accommodate the automobiles that solos are only now giving up and the big twenty-four-wheeled articulated container trucks that so many solos are employed in piloting across the continent.

The stairwell smells of urine. Its walls are stained by slashes and blossoms of graffiti. The first door they reach is sealed off, boards nailed to the walls. The decay and disarray are otherworldly. Things improve slowly as they descend the stairs. On the ground floor, they enter a small, crowded, indoor shopping area.

On each side of them, tiny, packed storefronts belly up to a long, narrow corridor. A coin shop, colorful trinkets of indeterminate purpose, handcrafted ceramics. A couple of the shops display crosses prominently, their entrances draped with brown cloth in lieu of a door.

Apple named six places they could visit and warned them about each. They pass a small, narrow, and dimly lit pub, the Single Stamen. Chance steps in, but it's deserted. Just past that is the larger bar they're looking for, One Eye. Its long window is covered over with heavy gray paper. A large eye has been clumsily painted on the paper above two small yellow
X'
s.

In his brown slacks and gray artificial silk sweater, Chance Five is dressed like a join. His dark hair is short, with a shallow strip shaved clean from one side of his forehead to the other, a style that never took hold among solos. Leap Four is in worn blue jeans and a light green T-shirt that complements her tan skin. She's dressed more like a solo but still moves and somehow looks like a join.

There are solos who are good at spotting joins. In addition to obvious differences, like a collapse of personal boundaries, there are subtler signs. In some solo parodies, joined drives never let their field of vision overlap. Joins called impersonators make a special effort to pass as solo, but neither Chance nor Leap has ever practiced the art.

One Eye is a dark place with an open floor plan, a pool table, and a few bright pinball machines in a game area that makes up roughly half of the pub's space. In the other half are two booths, a couple of tables, and a bar lined with seven barstools.

As Chance Five and Leap Four enter, they get suspicious looks from the handful of sagging patrons and an open glare from the bartender, a thin, fiftyish solo of medium height. He interrupts his conversation at the bar with a heavier man to call out to them.

“Drinks?”

“A couple of pilsners, please. Something local,” answers Chance.

“Middle Finger okay?” asks the bartender. “They make that just down the street.”

“Yeah,” says Chance. He walks toward a back booth. Leap is using a button camera to take a quick vid of each patron, to index them on Civ Net. Once she has them all, she and Chance will walk through their network profiles as they finish the beers.

Leap's notes pop up on Chance's retinal display with three profiles marked for him to focus on. The bartender brings them drinks.

“We don't get a lot of joins in here,” says the bartender in a tone that's only slightly unfriendly.

“We were just visiting an aunt,” Leap lies. “We wanted to get some work done.”

The bartender grunts. “Joins usually want to work in brighter places.”

“This is just fine,” says Leap Four, smiling.

Retinal displays can get awkward for in-depth work. Leap and Chance unroll their personal displays, which then light up with the profile information. To discourage unwelcome interest, personal displays can make fine adjustments to their viewing angles, blurring content for people other than their owners. Chance has added the bartender's profile to the five Leap collected. It only takes a few minutes for them both to review all six sheets without finding anything interesting.

They ask the bartender about Rope. Nothing. They leave, dropping by the Single Stamen briefly on their way out. When they get back to the stairs, Leap Four is tired and has a headache that painkillers won't help. She tells Chance Five that it's just the light that was getting to her. She hides a minor tremor in her right arm and hand from him as best she can. They have five more bars on their list, then they might just explore a bit.

If Rope is in New
Denver, he could be anywhere in the city. Apple said the bars he listed were guesses. Even if Rope patronized one of them, they have no idea when he'd be there, they don't know what he'd look like, and asking about him might just alert him. They visit four bars the first day and stop by the final two the next.

Then they decide to map out all of the bars in the solo areas and create a time line for regularly visiting them. While they're doing that, Chance gets a vidcall from Apple Two. Apple would like to meet at One Eye that evening. He looks nervous and unhappy.