Dirty Heart

by Peter Gifford

Sometimes one has no choice but to give up. We stay in that place most of us have been at one time or another, or at least loiter around the entrance attempting to catch the attention of those within. You enter, or it enters you, without fanfare or warning as you keep your chin up in the face of challenges no one but you would understand. What was once you becomes a memory, an irretrievable past, an ideal long abandoned.

It’s about living past the day you realised you lost hope.

My name is Mission—well, that’s what they call me now. Out here we lose our names as soon as we step off the boat. They are luggage we leave behind when we embark. I am somewhere in my thirties. I walk with a purpose and I push past those who get in my way. I don’t think I have any friends any more. If you looked at me you would see a dark, lined face, deep wells of eyes, black hair dirty and unkempt. You would see a nondescript costume of thick black and brown cloth that could belong to a trader, a slaver or a warrior, or none of these. And then I would be gone, and you would quickly forget.

But there are times when I see myself getting off the ship here at Abbsalon, looking around me with an idiot grin, a grimy pack slung over one shoulder. I see them get off the inbounds every day, and wonder that I ever was so foolish and innocent. I try and cast my mind back to clutch at the fluttering threads of the hope I once felt.

“Boy, yeah you, boy! Get down here and move this for me willya!”

“Why should I mister, I got things to do.”

“I’ll tell you why smart mouth, ‘cause if you don’t start making friends here in sunny Abbsalon damn fast, you’ll end up feeding the crows—or what they call crows—out there on the Sun’s Anvil with most of your bits fetching bottom dollar on the red market before a daycycle is out.”

“Alright old man.” I figured I’d get something out of him for my trouble anyway. Shoved on all sides by the disembarking passengers of the God’s Breath, I strode down the gangplank and onto the dusty iron plates of the port tarmac. I’d hardly had time to blink in the harsh sunlight, to learn to breathe the thick new air, and here I was moving boxes onto a gravtrak; it was just like being home. The old man had stepped back and was watching me sweat, his chapped lips clamped down on the wet plug of an old cigar.

“Another one fresh off the dumpsters” he muttered to himself. “Well, watcha plan boy? You got creds, relatives, a place to stay? You gonna make it big in the movies?” He laughed heartily at his own joke as I did his work for him. “Hot, ain’t it? It’s gonna be a scorcher this ‘cycle, fifty-seven hours of baking heat, lung-busting pollution and swarms of goddamned-to-buggery little biting bastards the like of which you ain’t never experienced. Welcome to Abbsalon boy.”

I slammed the last box on the trak as hard as I could hoping its contents were fragile. “I may not have a place in the Midtown Oasis, you old bastard, but I wasn’t born yesterday neither. Are you gonna tell me a cheap place to stay or do you want me to suck your cock as well?”

The old man nearly chocked on his cigar. “Why I oughta—”

But I’d read him right. Next thing he was chuckling to himself like Santa Claus. “Maybe you ain’t as fresh as you look boy. You’ve got some guts at least. You should be making for the Waiting Room, in the Trader’s District. You’ll find all the work, and trouble, you’re looking for there.” He swung into the seat of the gravtrack and gunned it off over the tarmac. I took a long look at the heat shimmering off the endless flat of the Sun’s Anvil from down here at eye level instead off the top down view I’d had coming in, and strode in the opposite direction.

I watched the boy head off to the terminal and plunged back into the crowd, feeling the familiar press of bodies like an anonymous embrace. I had a job to do, and no time to reminisce about days long gone. The keening of a recorded muezzin making the call to prayer made me aware that I was already late. There were three blocks of streets crowded with market stalls, bumper-to-bumper grav traks and hundreds of pilgrims of all the seventeen major medical religions to force my way through before I reached the drop off point.

Three hours later I was leaving the harsh sunlight and smells of the street behind and entering the shade of a hotel. It was a colonial-era pile in the style of the first settlers some three hundred years back, all pre-fab latticework and fake wood grain. The haze inside was cigarette smoke and dust thick enough to make you want to wave your arms in front of you like a swimmer. It was cool though. I heard the concierge before I saw him. The familiar rhythmic thumping of an ancient dialysis machine, the wheezing breath and coughing – all sure signs of someone who’d been on the government transplant queue for far too long. In this part of town he probably had a long time to wait. Unlike my contact.

“Obviously … you’re not here … for a room …” he wheezed. I turned my head and sized him up with a glance. He was a fat Mafusian, his face a thick lattice of ropy tendrils from which the dialysis cords snaked.

“What I’m doing here doesn’t concern you” I said a threw a couple of creds onto his desk. “Room 237.”

“Second floor … turn right,” he replied, brushing the creds off the desk. “Have … a nice day.”

I never did reach the Waiting Room. I was bailed up by three scumbags before I’d got two streets into the city. At first I thought they were going to farm me, but it turned out they were just after loose creds, and since they’d picked on me it was obvious they were almost as inexperienced as I was. That’s when I first met her. All I remember was the surprise I felt lying on the concrete seeing stars revolve around the head of this slim little babe who’d just cracked me across the back of the head with a dented bedpan. I was in love. It must have been mutual because she didn’t hit me a second time. Instead, when they’d discovered I didn’t have more than a couple of creds on me, she ordered the other two goons to pick me up and carry me to where they’d set up headquarters on the second floor of an underground warehouse in the abandoned industrial district. It was a long time before I could get around to thanking her, cause I had to ride out a couple of weeks of planetfall fever first. I spent days staring up at the dust motes swirling through the girders of sunlight holding up the roof. She nursed me through it all, even scoring a course of antisick pills from some street medic she’d done a favour or two for.

Of course, I fell in love with her. She was tougher than me, probably smarter too, and I was a young kid who thought he knew how to survive on a new planet. Maybe everyone looks cuter when you’re swimming in a haze of fever and they’re walking around free and healthy. But after a couple of years had passed, the gang had grown to five and we were king and queen of our own tiny little empire, I got sick of the petty thieving and street muggery. It was time to move on up. It was my idea to find some new contacts in the Med district. I’d worked out how the city functioned by then, and the big money had always been in organ deals. It was just a matter of finding the right people to give you the commissions.

So I kept my ears open, and pretty soon I heard about Rilker.

Second floor, turn right. I didn’t meet anyone else on the stairs or in the corridor. The hubbub outside was a muffled slab under the stillness. I walked up to Room 237, stopped and listened. Nothing. I looked up and down the corridor, touched the comforting bulge of the needler under my left arm, and knocked on the door. After a barely perceptible pause a female voice said “enter, slowly.”

I didn’t recognise her at first, sitting there outlined against the bright white rectangle of the window. I felt a tug of familiarity, then discarded it. But as I moved into the room and she turned to face me, the full force of recognition hit me like a wave and lifted me, shocked and disoriented, andd making me stagger against the doorframe.

“Do you have the merchandise?” she said in a cool, even voice.

It took me a while to reply, my professionalism lost under the sudden, unexpected reality of her presence. She had been dead eight years after all.

Outside, life went on. Street vendors sold greasy chapatis cooked in week old ghee, organ sellers fooled newcomers with whispered promises of new kidneys and grade seven heart trades, desert dwellers strode through the city looking to the nearest sand shop where they could sell their mass-produced authentic handicrafts ‘from the deep desert’, prophets raved on street corners railing against the sins of the borrowed flesh, or extolling the virtues of body swapping for the development of the soul.

“So, Mission they call you huh? I like it. It’s like I don’t have to remember your name, just what you do.”

“Yeah Mr Rilker. Any kind of mission is safe with Mission. Especially the high-paying ones.”

“They’re all high-paying jobs lad.” Rilker slid from behind his desk suddenly, causing one of his two burley robed minders to jump inelegantly back. His long fingers flickered over the embroidery on his rich coat. “And without our work the economy on Abbsalon would rapidly collapse.”

[ To be continued ... ]