When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger Page A

a moment. “You know,” she said softly, “I did see Nikki today. She came by my place about ten this morning. She said to tell you ‘thank you.’ She didn’t say why, but I suppose you know. Then she went off looking for Yasmin.”
    I felt my anger starting to bubble up again. “Did she say where she was going?”
    “No.”
    I relaxed again. If anyone in the Budayeen knew where Nikki was, it would be Tamiko. I didn’t like the thought of facing that crazy bitch again, but I was sure as hell going to. “You know where I can seize some stuff?”
    “What you need, baby?”
    “Oh, say, half a dozen sunnies, half a dozen tri-phets, half a dozen beauties.”
    “And you say you’re broke, too?” She reached down under the bar again and found her bag. She rummaged through it and came up with a black plastic cylinder. “Take this into the men’s room and pocket what you need. You can owe me. We’ll work something out—maybe I’ll take you home with me tonight.”
    That was an exciting though daunting thought. I haven’t been intimidated by many women, changes, debs, or boys in my time; I mean, I’m no superhuman sex machine, but I get along. Chiri, though, was a scary proposition. Those evil, patterned scars and filed teeth. . . . “I’ll be right back,” I said, palming the black cylinder.
    “I just got Honey Pílar’s new module,” Chiri called after me. “I’m dying to try it out. You ever want to jam Honey Pílar?”
    It was a very tempting suggestion, but I had other business for the next hour or so. After that . . . with Honey Pílar’s personality module plugged in, Chiri would become Honey Pílar. She’d jam the way Honey had jammed when the module was recorded. You close your eyes and you’re in bed with the most desirable woman in the world, and the only man she wants is you, begging for you . . .
    I took some tabs and caps from Chiri’s caddy and came back out into the club. Chiri looked down along the bar casually as I put the black cylinder in her hand. “Nobody’s making no money tonight,” she said dully. “Another drink?”
    “Got to run. Action is action,” I said.
    “Business is business,” said Chiri. “Such as it is. It would be if these cheap motherfuckers would spend a little money. Remember what I said about my new moddy, Marîd.”
    “Listen, Chiri, if I get finished and you’re still here, we’ll break it in together. Inshallah .”
    She gave me that grin of hers that I liked so much. “Kwa heri, Marîd,” she said.
    “As-salaam alaykum,” I said. Then I hurried out into the warm, drizzling night, taking a deep breath of the sweet scent of some flowering tree.
    The tende had lifted my spirits, and I had swallowed a tri-phet and a sunny. I’d be doing all right when I booted my way into Tamiko’s phony geisha rat’s nest. I practically ran the whole way up the Street to Thirteenth, except I discovered I couldn’t. I used to be able to run a lot farther than that. I decided it wasn’t age that had slowed me down, it was the abuse my body had taken that morning. Yeah, that was it. Sure.
    Two-thirty, three in the morning, and koto music is coming out of Tami’s window. I pounded on her door until my hand started to hurt.
    She couldn’t hear me; it was either the loud music or her drugged state. I tried to force the door and found that it was unlocked. I went slowly and quietly up the stairs. Almost everyone around me in the Budayeen is modified somehow, with personality modules and add-ons wired down deep into their brains, giving them skills and talents and inputs of information; or even, as with the Honey Pílar moddy, entirely new personalities. I alone walked among them unaltered, relying on nerve and stealth and savvy. I out-hustled the hustlers, pitting my native wits against their computer-boosted awareness.
    Right now, my native wits were yelling at me that something was wrong. Tami wouldn’t have left her door open. Unless she did it for Nikki,