Chump Change

Ray Aldridge Chump Change

The slitter whined against his throat. Bilobi felt the painless parting of his skin, then a line of flowing warmth. Heat pooled in the hollow of his throat, and the scent of his blood came to him.

«Be still, breakerboy,» the ganger whispered. «Don't want any more of your blood, but easy to make mistake, so?»

The ganger's free hand fumbled through Bilobi's pockets, flipped out the pin knife, the glass wire, the dazzlebombs — essential tools, amulets against the other harsh men who roamed the robot dump. Bilobi held himself very still, thinking: This will pass. This is nothing I've lived through worse; I’ll live through this. After a while he began to believe.

A million metal bodies lay in shining drifts, piled high. Occasionally an arm or leg rattled — the last spasm of a not-quite-dead power cell Otherwise the dump was silent. His gaze drifted up the high steel wall that encircled the dump, sealing it safely away from the rest of the world. And imprisoning the men who scratched a living from those dangerous corpses. No inspectors stood in the official observation blister today. Whatever happened next, no one would see. He stopped himself from smiling.

The ganger jerked at the buckle of Bilobi's work harness, and his tool rack crashed to the ground, The ganger pushed; Bilobi tripped over a rusty torso and fell, sprawling. He rolled over, looked up.

The ganger was thin, bald, with black-dyed skin and white eyes. A pattern of pale green whorls and triangles marked his hollow cheeks, Over the gang tattoos were shiny pink diagonal slashes, two on each cheek. The scars were artfully framed by new tattoos. A former ganger, Bilobi thought, cut loose and proud of it.

«We talk, breakerboy,» the ex-ganger said. He gestured with the slitter, and it hummed. «Lie quiet. Hands in sight! Name?»

Bilobi sighed. «Bilobi.»

«You the one I want. They all tell me, „Bilobi's good.“ Say you're the best mechjack on the dump. Don't know why you're here, could work Outside, they say.» The ganger shrugged. «Don't care, me. My name's Spill. Just talk, all I want now. You know what's this?» Spill fished a chip safe from his pink leather jacket. Through the thick plastic, Bilobi saw a ruby gleam. «Volition chip. Key chip. Eh? You begin to know now?» Spill tucked it away, darted a look to each side. «Whole dump full of dead iron, breakerboy, good for nothing, not a single keychip anywhere. But I got one, right here. Raise the dead, breakerboy, you and me!»

They don't learn, Bilobi thought. «Can't do it,» Bilobi said, shaking his head. «Too risky. You're not the first to ask. You're not the first to try.» He pointed to the wall, where iron cages hung. Desiccated corpses struck painful poses within the black bars.

Spill stepped closer. The slitter warbled. «Won't catch me. Us. You get hulks, piece together fine iron; then comes Spill, his chips. Pop 'em in, Bilobi, then we got Product.» Spill offered a wide smile, exposing rhinestone-studded teeth. «Product! Market's wide open for mean mechs. Sell'em to big flashmen; they need lots, and I know who to ask. Pigeon gutters, throwaway snuffers, viber vixens, leg breakers. Big demand, breakerboy.»

Bilobi shook his head again. «Can't be done. I do O. K., scavenging legal. I get by. I stay alive. I’ll never end up rotting on the wall, if I stay clean.» A memory washed up behind his eyes: a ragged, snarling man, running from the company mechs, back and forth across the dump, wall to wall, until they caught him. When they welded him into the cage, when the iron glowed red, Grego had been too tired to scream. That had come later, a sound impossible to forget.

Spill's smile swam on his mouth, sagged into a snarl. The slitter whipped back and forth under Bilobi's nose, singing. «You rot right here, maybe. Ahh! What you make, scrounging old servomotors, good, week? Four hundred, five maybe? Chump change, breakerboy Bilobi. Chump change! You live in a stinkhole, eat dirt food, got nothing! Give Spill one good hulk, all shiny, all smooth, and I give you fifty times more. Easy cash, clean work,» Spill's white eyes glittered. «Don't be a chump, breakerboy.» Imminent violence clotted in Spill's narrow face.

Bilobi spoke quickly, trying to ease him. «Look, you're right, Spill, I got nothing. Sure, I live like a dog; don't you know it's not what I’d do if I could do different. Don't you think I'd build iron if I thought I could get away with it? Listen, I've been here a long time; I know how it works. After the ingress crew pull out the volition chips, the hulks come over the wall on skyhook conveyors. Most times the fall smashes them so bad there's nothing left worth picking off. Just the little stuff: servos, wire harness, some sensors. But even when there is….»

Spill kicked him with a steel-toed boot, and he felt a rib crack. After the pain eased, he uncurled a little. The ex-ganger looked down at him, spoke in a calmer voice. «Don't make me be hard, breakerboy. You could chop a thousand, build a hundred sweet ones. And I can get all the key-chips we need, once we get first hulk out. Monumental money here, Bilobi; don’t shit me. We be asshole buddies now.»

Bilobi got enough breath to speak. «How do you plan to get your hulk past the egress checkpoints?»

«Easy stuff. You build. After I see it walk and talk, you break down again, mix comps in with regular shipment. No problem, so?»

Bilobi summoned a regretful smile. «You don't know about the syntha-comps. They scan every outgoing shipment, jigsaw the components a million different ways, until they're sure nothing's going to click together and walk away.» He pointed to the wall. «See Grego? The one on the right— with the skull peeking through his hair? He tried it that way.»

Spill looked uncertain, but only for a moment. «We spread bits out over several shipments, then.»

«They keep files for years; that's why it takes so long to clear a shipment out. Why do you think there's such a monster market for unregistered iron? Because it's so hard to get. Hell, if I could get one out of the dump, I'd be a fool to sell it. Think what you could do with your own iron. Sit there fat and free under the police cams while your iron was out making money for you, and no way to pin it to you. No wonder the big flashmen will pay almost anything. But getting it out… I just don't know how!»

Spill whipped the slitter back and forth, eyes narrow. «Don't jerk me, breakerboy. Got to be some way. Wait, maybe we send'em over wall on internal power. Build 'em with scaling hooks — that be scary enough for the hardest flashman!»

«I'm not jerking you! That won't work, either. They got snapfields at the top of the walls, cut your hulk in half. Then they make a DNA indent on the pieces — I got to touch them when I build them — and they come for us. That's how they caught Malone, the one just above Grego. He looks a little funny; they skinned him before they put him in the cage. Spill, they take this seriously.»

Spill's eyes rolled. «No! No! Must be a way, 'cause there got to be a way,» Spill said. «You understand, Bilobi, keychip fronted to me by hard man? I got to come up with hot hulk, or I be dead meat. He'll hurt me worse than company mechs. If you say no enough to make me believe, then I got to cut you into lots of pieces, before I pull this through my head.» The ex-ganger slashed at the air, and the slitter screamed melodiously.

Bilobi felt a twinge of regret, then a warmer, more immediate emotion. «O. K., O. K. You've convinced me. Maybe I've got an idea. You got any cash?»

«Some.»

«There're rumors. Maybe there's a guy on the egress crew can be bought, if you've got enough.» He told this untruth with an air of weary capitulation. In actuality, all the inspection crews were wireslaves who had no interest in money, or anything else that did not pump the right signal into their wires.

Spill giggled. He had the look of a lost man who has just strayed back into familiar territory. «You see! Megacred for us, breakerboy!» He helped Bilobi to his feet, slapping the dust from Bilobi's jacket, though he held the slitter ready with his other hand. «Megacred, Bilobi. You be rich, buy good clothes, buy hot joyfolk, live in Enclaves, eat like megatoff. Eh? Sound good, breakerboy?»

«Sure.» Give it one last shot, he thought, then it's on his head. «So, what's your plan now? You'll come back when I've got the first hulk running?»

Spill's white eyes narrowed. «Don't take me for fool, breakerboy; that puts me in cutting mood. I let you go now, how I know you doing right? No, I ride your back till job done. I'm company. Take me to your burrow, breakerboy, and no tricks.» The slitter made a fluttery music.

«All right, all right.» Bilobi picked up his tool rack and walked away. The warm emotion stretched his mouth into a gleeful rictus, hidden from the one who followed. Whether the world sends you good or evil make something useful of it; that had been dead Grego's favorite saying, though in the end, Grego had been too stupid to see where that thought finally led.

They reached the entrance to Bilobi's burrow, a narrow crawl under a stack of corroding janitorial robots. Spill clicked off the slitter, tucked it away. Now he held a little splinter gun. «You go first, breakerboy. No mantrap fast enough to save you from this,» he said, waving the gun.

Bilobi slid through the opening and down the smooth incline. Spill followed on his heels, bounced to his feet.

«Nice hole you got, so nice it's weird; I seen worse in the Enclaves,» Spill said, turning slowly. «You way ahead of me, you open for business. No one say you live like this.» The room had polished metal walls and deep carpet, comfortable furniture and soft light. In one corner a bot with six spidery tool arms hunched over a chessboard, immobile. Against the far wall stood a half-track bot with a laser torch mounted on its central manipulator. Beside it was a media-bot, all pickups and screens and direct-connect sensory patches. In the center of the room stood a self-contained med-unit. Through the archway a farmbot gleamed under pink wide-spectrum lights, motionless against racks of green hydroponic trays. «Tell me true, breakerboy. All they need is keychips?» Spill's sparkling smile was wide with innocent delight.

«No,» Bilobi said. «I’m afraid not.»

Spill caught a reflection of something in the darkness behind him, started to whirl.

Cindilou stepped out, a twinkling movement, inhumanly fast. She caught Spill by the throat, crushed his gun hand into red jelly. She lilted Spilt high; he kicked, struggled to scream through the elegant steel hand that clamped his windpipe.

Bilobi stepped to her side, caressed her smooth white shoulder. Spill's eves shrieked, but no sound came from his straining mouth. «Meet Cindilou.» Bilobi said. «She's a joygirl, rebuilt on an assassin chassis, upholstered in tank-grown Youngloretta skin. Beautiful, isn't she?» Of all the hulks he had resurrected, Cindilou was Bilobi's favorite. It was a shame she could not come out into the dump with him. If she could, he would never be troubled by men like Spill. But the observers on the wall must never suspect her existence; besides, men like Spill brought him the volition chips he needed to make his life perfect.

She looked at Bilobi, amber eyes glowing, a small, eager smile on her pale lips.

He nodded. «Just don't make a mess, Cindilou.» So she twisted Spill's neck enough to kill him, but not enough to rupture the arteries.

When the body stopped shuddering, Bilobi took possession of Spill's shiny new chip.

«Shall I put him through the compost shredder?» Cindilou asked. Her voice was sweet, a little breathless.

«Sure.» He hefted the chip, cast a speculative glance around the burrow. «What'll we build with this one, Cindilou?» He gestured, and the media-hot began to play a sprightly triumphant music, the farmbot went back to tending its tomato vines, and the chess player pushed a pawn forward. «I know! You're a fine cook, it's true, and so is Harald, whenever we can get him away from his chessboard, but… what about a really good chef?»

He laughed. «Chump change… he said. And licked his lips.