Chapter 4: The Taproot
Alba, Mars
Walking was far more painful than Gideon had bargained for. Bad enough in of itself, but Jet seemed to have landed on the opposite side of Alba than the dealer he apparently had in mind - Gideon wondered if it was intentional, to make him regret tagging along. He was determined not to be a liability, even if he had a negative track record already.
He'd been a boy the last time he'd been in Alba; he wasn't sure whether he'd simply forgotten what it had looked like, or if it'd simply grown in the last decade. He was used to things not changing.
The air smelt of diesel and Martian nutmeg. The streets were less crowded than Gideon thought he remembered, but then, he supposed everything seemed much more when you were a child. Much of the inner city that they were heading through now had been pedestrianized and as a result, the diesel smell from the outer industrial limits was soon replaced by that of an open-air market that had taken over one of the central parks. The shouts of the vendors was muffled by the wall of carefully-maintained trees that were, no doubt, more valuable than the skyscrapers dwarfing them by virtue of their propagation cost.
"You realize how large Alba is, right?" Faye was saying with a groan. Seemed Gideon wasn't the only one unhappy about all the walking. "This will take us forever."
"It's less conspicuous if we get where we're going coming from this side," Jet said.
Gideon thought about asking for clarification, but didn't want to draw too much of the older man's ire. He assumed it'd become obvious soon enough.
They crossed one of the few roads still marked for vehicles, blocked at either end by bollards that lowered to allow an off-duty ambulance to pass on its way into the hospital garage to their right. Less than a block over, and Jet suddenly veered down the delivery ramp of a supermarket. Gideon had a little more trouble with limiting his pain on the slope but tried to grin and bear it. He was surprised when, after a quick glance to determine there wasn't anyone else around, Jet opened a metal door in the side of the ramp. Gideon and Faye went first into the dark, narrow corridor.
When Jet closed the door behind them, plunging them into total darkness, Gideon felt a mild panic begin to make his skin crawl. He swallowed. Not here. Not now. Just, take it slow. Don't think about it. He tried to ignore the feeling of the walls closing in on him, and said, "There was a camera trained on the ramp."
"Defunct," Jet replied. "For show only." Gideon felt him pass to take the lead again.
Gideon fished out his keys and turned the ring around the lens of the tiny flashlight on the keyring and pointed it ahead. It barely illuminated a foot in front of him. Faye laughed.
Thankfully the corridor was shorter than Gideon expected, but he was less thankful for the suspicious hole that it ended in. Jet turned and began to climb down into it.
"Farther underground?" Faye groaned again and followed. "I feel like a sewer rat."
"You're not much better than one so you'd best stop complaining."
"Charming as always."
Their voices sank away from him. Gideon steeled himself, remembering his purpose, and put his flashlight between his teeth and followed them down the ladder. Rust came away on his fingers and his surroundings - he tried not to think about how close the walls were - were decidedly damp. He was distracted by the repetitive contraction and relaxation of his shoulder muscles pulling on the wound in his back and with a particularly bad pull, the keys fell out of his mouth and his firefly of blue-white light span downward, hitting Faye and Jet on the way down.
"Sorry," he hissed.
There were grumbles in reply, but Gideon could at least see the bottom of the tunnel now. Where it ended was a space not quite big enough for the three of them; he barely had room to bend to pick up his keys. Luckily Jet opened another door before Gideon's heart began to truly hammer against his ribs - fresh-ish air engulfed them and they stepped out into the glorious space beyond.
The ceiling was low, but the antechamber was wide. They stepped out onto buffed concrete under dazzling striplights stretching like a layline to their left and right. After his eyes adjusted Gideon determined it was an underground strip mall of sorts, with small specialist boutique shops running along the far wall immediately opposite. Their side of the hall was vacant. Every so often a store had been veiled with a roll-down steel shutter adorned with graffiti, or the lights were off and windows barred, but a few businesses seemed open and active. There were only a few other people coming and going - criminal types, Gideon hesitated to label, much like themselves. He was surprised by how clean the space was. He turned off his flashlight and pocketed his keys.
"What is this place?" Faye asked.
"The southern branch of Alba's black market. Commonly called the Taproot," Jet said and took them right.
"The Taproot?"
"Generates the most revenue, so it's a lifeblood of sorts. The Black Guild that oversees all black market operations also has its office here - divvies out taxation, handles shopfront rentals, policing, etc."
"Wouldn't think a criminal underworld would have taxes or any kind of local government," Gideon mused as he examined the shopfronts they passed.
"A criminal underworld isn't necessarily one of anarchy," Jet said. "It just has a structure that goes against the upper-world status quo. Humans - even criminals like us - like structure, after all."
Gideon remembered his grandfather saying something similar about humans liking structure, and how it was that structure was the key to success - be it in capitalizing on one's own use of it, or exploiting others' need of it. Harper Chung frequently cited structure and discipline as the root of his success, and lamented Gideon's lack of it in his own life.
"'You are a windblown leaf'," he muttered his grandfather's chiding words to himself, "'and humankind has had its fill of drifters - it now needs those who will plant roots and provide forests.'"
Faye looked over her shoulder. "Hmm?"
Gideon remembered himself. "Nothing."
Jet entered an emerald-painted shopfront - he remembered the color of the trees in his grandfather's precious arboretum, where he used to spend the summer, and this memory was chased by another of one of the dresses the Model 6 wore in her depiction of a Lempicka. Gideon paused to read 'The Emporium' painted in gold letters above the door. The windows were covered in intricate black ironwork and the light was low inside. He hurried to follow Faye.
The exterior had been misleading; although Gideon found himself on a worn, fringed oriental rug, most of the shelves lining the small boutique were temporary wire-and-bracket ones and bare besides except for a clear plastic tub here and there. There was a stack of rubber tires in one corner, on which a cat lounged and opened one eye at their entry. Immediately opposite the door was the sales desk where an old woman with frizzy hair and a pink crocheted poncho also slept, a flatscreen TV hung above him quietly humming a soap opera.
"Generates the most revenue, huh?" Faye commented.
The old woman was startled by the cat jumping off the tires onto the counter, and she blinked at the three of them as it headbutted her chin. "May I help you?" she asked.
Faye laid a hand on Jet's arm and asked, "I don't suppose you've had any memorydrives come in recently? We're in the market for one."
The woman raised her eyebrows at them; the droopiness of her brow pulled back somewhat, Gideon could see that her eyes were milky with cataracts - he wondered if she could see at all.
When she didn't respond, Gideon stepped forward and clarified, "Any residential units? A Deco-Install, maybe?" He was surprised by the note of desperation in his voice and wished he'd done a better job of acting cool.
She suddenly looked tired and waved a hand at the wall, there three tubs stood overflowing with what looked like junk. Gideon smiled at her nonetheless and thanked her, heading over to them. After a few minutes of rifling, however, among the various pieces of what was indeed junk he had found not one, but five memorydrives. As he'd suspected they might, the thieves had stripped the drives of their casing - which would have helped him narrow down their age and manufacturer - to the point where they were octopi of chips and wires.
"Find it?" Jet grunted over his shoulder.
Gideon passed his eyes over the bundles in his hands. "I...I have no way of really telling in this condition. I mean, we don't even know that this is the spot she would have been sold to."
"The Emporium has the monopoly on memory devices," Jet said. "The Guild enforces that other brokers refuse to buy them. It's the same with other merchandise for other stores - it's a way of evening-out the playing field for the market down here. If it isn't one of these, your Model 6 or whatever hasn't entered the market at all yet."
Gideon held the mess closer to his face, as if it would help. As a programmer he never saw the hardware, though he knew vaguely what he was looking at from reading he'd done here and there out of curiosity. It was frustrating not to be sure which was the business end, but one thing was sure.
"I'm not going to take the chance of picking the wrong one," he said. Gideon turned and brought all five to the counter, where the old woman was blinking at him sleepily. "I'll take all five." He laid them before her like an offering to an ancient deity, glancing over them, lifting a wire here and there, "I'd say...considering their condition...three hundred."
The old woman rolled her eyes and pulled a manual receipt book and a pen out of a drawer. While she wrote up the transaction Gideon scanned the deskspace; it didn't take his eyes long to be drawn to the small, ornately-framed postcard print of the Angel Gabriel from Da Vinci's The Virgin of the Rocks next to the cash register, partially hidden by an empty mug and the new resting spot of the black and white cat.
He smiled again, pointed to the print. "That's actually one of my favorites."
The old woman paused and looked him in the eye. She seemed the most lucid she'd been since they came in, though Gideon found it hard to read her expression.
"Yeah," he wiped his nose. "My mother hung it in my nursery when I was little. The detail in the curls and the robe is fantastic obviously but the best part is how Da Vinci captured that expression - you can't quite tell whether it's knowing, or sad, or happy, or beatific, you know? Humanizes this untouchable unearthly being."
She stared at him, her small lips retreating inside her mouth and her eyes watering under a pinched brow. Then she opened her mouth as if to speak.
Gideon heard the door behind them open, followed shortly by a pair of footsteps and a nasally voice exclaiming, "Mama Manda, y'got the goods?"
The old woman seemed to shut down again, looking down at her hands.
"We're here for Uncle Gregoire's Deco-Install for the casino, remember?" The taller of the two unsavory characters came into Gideon's right-hand periphery. He was wearing a hideously bright neon green shirt that Gideon couldn't look at for too long; he was discomfited more, however, by the term 'Deco-Install'.
The old woman glanced at Gideon and got up from her stool. She unlatched a portion of the counter and swung it up, waving the two new arrivals through to the back room behind a faded blue curtain.
"Thanks, Mama Manda!" said the second and placed a stuffed large envelope in front of her.
Once they'd disappeared, however, she carefully and quietly pulled out a padded envelope from under the counter and shoved it into Gideon's hands, waving insistently at them to go. She raised a finger to her lips when Gideon started to object, and instead grabbed one of the memorydrives he held, putting it under the counter.
"Thanks for your business," Faye said loudly for effect and dragged Gideon away by the elbow. Jet was already halfway out the door.
Over his shoulder Gideon could just about see Mama Manda waving at them through the wrought-iron-covered windows as they retreated. With their back now to The Emporium, Gideon fished in the envelope he'd been given to peek at its contents - another memorydrive, to be sure, and also without its casing. With a sigh he shoved the other four memorydrives he held into the envelope too, feeling guilty about not having paid a cent but also anxious to know if one of these was the Model 6.
It didn't help that, as he led them back to the little door in the wall that'd take them back to the surface, Jet said, "Hope one of those is what you're looking for."
Back on board the Bebop, as they came into the livingroom Gideon finally worked up the courage to say, "I doubt I have the equipment needed to verify these drives."
There was silence. Gideon cringed.
Having just sat down on the sofa, Faye's head rolled on the back of it to squint at him behind her. "What's all that junk you took from your apartment, then?"
"Me being optimistic I guess," he said with an askew smile to cover his embarrassment.
"Good thing I figured you wouldn't be as prepared as you'd like to be," Jet called.
Gideon frowned and craned his neck to try and see Jet in the gloom of the bridge. Judging by the various beeps and chirps and the warming of the thrusters, it seemed a course was being plotted.
"Where are we going now?" he asked, though the more pressing question on his mind was, Why aren't you just washing your hands of me already?
"To see an old friend," Jet said.
