Ribofunk by Paul di Filippo Read Free Book Online

that jumps my gaps. Listen.” I put an arm real uncle-like around her shoulder. “You’re a helluva gipsy. I never seen anyone better at dredgin’ a bay or sprayin’ a forest full of pear-thrips than you. I am proud to be your partner on any job Stack gives us. But that’s where it ends, you latch? Strictly a professional relationship.”
    Geraldine had turned the taps off by the time I finished my speechifyin’. She knuckled her eyes, then extended one hand. We shook.
    “Okay,” she said, sadder’n a preacher who’s seen the collection come up empty, “if that’s the way you want it. It’s better than nothing, I guess.”
    We loosed our shake. “See you on the plane, Lew.”
    I went back to my packin’. What a mixed-up gal. I wondered why people had to lose it when it came to their emotions. Thank the Lord we at least had tropes and strobers nowadays to help. It was hard to imagine how it had been just a few decades ago, before the bioboys understood all there was to know about the brain. Not that you should come to rely too much on such aids, I believed. There was something to be said for a natural life. Why, look at me, for instance. Once I had taken all the mnemotropins prescribed in school and learned what I had to, did I keep on takin’ ’em? Nope, not me. As my daddy always said, “Son, if we was meant to get our experience outa a pill, the Good Lord woulda made ’em easier to swallow.”
    Before that day was over, we were boardin’ a DDI suborb, all laughin’ and jokin’ at the thought of hittin’ the streets of Dallas once again. We had barely settled into the flight, however, when we were told to buckle up once more for the landin’ and take our circadian-adjusters. That’s the problem with these hour-long jumps: they don’t give you no time to feel like you really been travelin’. One minute your ass is in Mongolia, the next minute you’re home. It does require some mental gymnastics.
    We got hung up in Customs for a couple of hours—longer’n the flight itself. Turned out a couple of our gips had tried to make a little extracurricular eft for themselves by attemptin’ to smuggle back Mongolian bugs in their blood. Probably some kind of ethnic-specific high that they figured would sell well among the Dallas community of ex-pat Hong Kongers. The Customs probes had unzipped the nongenotype codes faster’n spit dryin’ on a griddle, and Stack had some fancy dancin’ to do to get off with just a bloodwash, by claimin’ our innocent liddle boys was infected without their knowledge.
    In the terminal we were crossin’ the atrium when a squad of IMF crick-cops bulled through, carryin’ their chromo-cookers and packin’ splat-pistols, lookin’ mean as eighty-year-old virgins with libido-locks, headin’ doubtlessly for some Fourth-World infection or infestation of some sort. We gave ’em a wide berth outa respect, as they are about the only ones with a dirtier job than us gips. We got it relatively easy, dealin’ with old well-known hazards, while they get all the new and superdangerous shit.
    Outside DDI had a couple of Energenetix cowbellies with drivers waitin’ for us. Most of the folks clambered right into the minivans (I made a point of gettin’ in a different one from Geraldine), but Tino and Drifter—the boys who had gotten pinched by Customs—had to take a piss real bad. Side effect of the bloodwash. They’d be leakier’n a sharecropper’s cabin in a hurricane for the next day.
    Stack called out, “Don’t waste the biomass, boys.”
    Tino and Drifter grumbled, but they each opened up a fuel intake cap, unvelcroed their flies, butted their groins up to the vans, and did their best to top off the tanks.
    Refastenin’ their coveralls, the two climbed in rather sheepishly. Tamarind, a bantam-weight black gal sittin’ next to me, who always managed to get off a great zinger with perfect timin’, said, “A lot different than the last sockets I seen you boys