I-I-V

“Pop her into first, Bansi old chap.” I lean on the door of the old hearse-looking ambulance as Bansi Butcher fumbles with the gearshift. “Got to let out the clutch though, what? Here, let me have a go.”

“Cheers, Spex.” Bansi undoes his seatbelt and opens the door. He’s a transatlantic import like myself -- his father’s a diplomat, London by way of Mumbai. “Three, and two, and one.”

He slides out of the driver’s seat like a three-hundred-pound Indian eel. I leap in as the ambulance starts to roll. I clutch, shift, and set the handbrake. “There we are. Sweet as a nut.”

“Hey, Spex!” Blind Allie’s waving in my general direction from the steps of the Mortal Coil. “Your brother’s on the phone! He says he’s got reservations at Picardie for eight o’clock tonight. Wanna talk to him?”

“Not on your bally life!” I shout back. “Not now, and not tonight at eight o’clock. Tell dear brother Adrian to go fuck himself, only not in a nice way.”

Allie shrugs and goes back inside. I toss Bansi his keys. “Why are you driving, anyhow? Where’s your cousin?”

He pockets the keys with a sheepish grin. “Rajiv had to work. Mum got it started, but parking’s tricky. I keep meaning to learn, I do.”

“Don’t you dare,” I say. I slap his mountainous shoulder. “We can’t go wasting your brain cells on trifles, what?”

“That’s what Mum says.” He blushes. Thirty years old, Bansi’s already lost most of his hair. Shy bloke, but when he laughs he has to bend at the waist and gasp until his cheeks stop bouncing. “She says I’m not allowed to do the washing-up either. Useless task memorization she calls it, might stop me learning something else.”

“Listen to your mum.”

Bansi and I look down at the corpse lying between two parked cars in front of the Coil. A few minutes earlier it had looked like a half-naked prostitute with torn restraint bracelets on her wrists, but death has a way of stripping off illusions. The thing that lies on the noon-hot asphalt is a five-foot cylinder of glassy green-blue rubber covered with whiskery tendrils. A dark and throbbing ooze drifts in its core, some persisting biological function that doesn’t realize that the guest is gone and the party’s over. Bansi nods. “Yeah, I’ll ‘ave it. Let me grab me tools.”

“This is why we love you, Bansi,” I say. “Your mum must be pink with pride.”

Bansi pulls a crusty black case out of the back of the ambulance. “She says I’m cleverer than her because I eat more fish. At least, she says that when it’s fish fingers for tea.”

“She ought to know, what?” I adore Bansi’s mum. She was head of psychopathology at the Upshur Institute for Clinical Psychology in Illinois before Georgetown University Hospital threw the bank at her to lecture in DC.

“I guess.” Bansi sets the case down next to the corpse. He pops the catches and pulls out a thing like a bent machete. “I reckon she’s having me on about the fish-thing, though. I’ve never really studied human neurochemistry, but just ‘coz docosahexaenoic acid’s a necessary precursor for eicosanoid synthesis don’t mean me brain will fall out if I don’t eat up.”

An old friend once explained to me that chess isn’t really a game. It’s a math problem, and it has a solution: go black, and don’t go back. Whoever plays the black pieces always takes the second turn, which means they can win every game automatically. There’s a formula for it: no matter what the white pieces get up to, black can always force a win. The problem is, our squishy little brains (and even the terabyte processors that help Wal-Mart sell dog food) are too titchy to contain that formula. The last grandmaster the world will ever need will be the mental equivalent of the chap who gets his picture put up behind the bar for eating the hundred-ounce Impossiburger at one sitting.

I’ve gone a bit off the topic, but what I’m getting at is this: Bansi trying to work a gearshift is the opposite of somebody trying to learn the formula for chess. It’s too small a problem to be managed by a bloke whose mechanical aptitude doesn’t have an upper limit. I’ve watched him stare at a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter for twenty minutes because he wouldn’t let me help him make a sandwich, but pop him in the space shuttle and he’ll parallel-park the thing between Saturn’s rings without a glance at the owner’s manual.

“Bloody brilliant,” Bansi murmurs as he sets to work with his oddly-shaped blade. He peels off one of the cartilaginous rings that encircle the body and slides it into a plastic bag. “I’ll give you two hundred for it.”

“Two hundred thou?” My my, this is old Spex’s lucky day, what? Doing odd jobs for odd people isn’t quite the career Pater had in mind, but it’s certainly paying the bills. “I suppose I can keep body and soul together on that, for the nonce.”

“Nuh-uh.” Bansi runs his thumb over glistening membranes and pulls out a shorter blade with a serrated edge. “Two hundred. It’s what’s in me wallet.”

This tough stuff isn’t like Bansi. “Oh, come now,” I say. “It’s a bally transplanar receptacle, and fresh as a daisy. And dash it all … well, you’re the expert of course, but I’ve never seen one like this in all my puff. I suppose you’ll tell me you’ve got a warehouse full of the things?”

“Nah, s’not that.” Bansi digs the blade into the fibrous trunk, sawing through the outer tissues to expose the pulsating purplish-black liquid at the core. “This thing’s a semirigid vermiform, and I’ll be buggered if that’s not bioperfect amphichirality around the longitudinal axis. You understand? Bioperfect amphichirality.”

I nod. “You don’t get that sort of amphichirality anymore. Not these days. I blame the schools.”

“No, Spex, mate. Listen.” Bansi scratches his nose on his shoulder and dips a finger into the dark ooze. He makes little stirring-movements. A tiny whirlpool forms -- and remains, vortexing away, after he pulls back his hand. “The projection medium looks about like what you’d expect, but you’ve got loads more of it than what you get in one of your garden-variety maniped or cognoc receptacles. High-traffic carrier, mate, serious egoavailability. But all that’s beside the point -- on superstructure alone, this thing’s ataxonomic.”

Dear brother Adrian and I both had third-period Latin at Eton. I learned quite a bit before I gave up trying to out-study him and just started spiking his Orangina. “Ataxonomic, eh? Bit of a rarity, then. Collector’s item.”

“Not rare, boyo. Unique, far as I know.” Bansi’s got a syringe out, and he’s filling plastic ampoules with the wiggling goop. “This xenostructure hasn’t been articulated, at least not clinically. You see it in books, but only in the last couple centuries, and there’s no artifactual reference.”

This seems a bit of an odd haggling strategy on Bansi’s part. “Well, then. Why the piffling price tag? You got me twelve thou for that bit of macrosquid the Smithsonian bought, but you don’t know one mad old boffin in a castle somewhere who’ll shell out a few beans for this unique xeno-whatsit?”

Bansi wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of one hairy wrist. “Not happening, mate.” He looks up, his big brown cow-eyes goofy with excitement. “This is coming home with me.”

I sigh. “Dash it,” I retort weakly. The blighter goes back to work -- I’d like to punch him on the back of his shiny head for putting his scientific curiosity over my pay packet, but he’s the only fence for biologicals I’ve ever trusted. Since I only trust him because he doesn’t give a fuck about the money, I suppose I must make allowances. “Perhaps a barter, then, what? Your mum’s got run of the morgue, and I know a chap who’ll take all the pineal glands I can get him. Surely a N-bally-G receptacle’s worth more than--”

“Wozzat?” Bansi drops an ampoule of inky glup. It bounces on the pavement and rolls under a car. “What makes you think it’s a Newgie?”

“She spoke the lingo,” I reply. “Still not sure why she was wandering about, but … what, you off?”

Bansi is throwing his knives and things back into the case. He surges to his feet. “Come on, get the door.” He’s sweating more than usual as he wraps his arms around the corpse. I open the back of the ambulance, and he heaves the thing in. “Spex, mate -- couldn’t do me a favor?” He takes out his wallet and presses a crumply wad of bills into my hand. “Don’t go talking about this, eh? I need at least a week with it, and if the Novi find out before I’m done--”

I’m about to laugh right in Bansi’s earnest, dripping face. The chap’s a wizard with machines, especially living ones, but he’s gullible as a babe in arms. Nobody knows much about the so-called New God planars, at least nobody who mixes with the general community of those-in-the-know, and I’ll admit that I’m a trifle worried about having found one in my favorite bar. Still, use a bit of common sense, what? Sometimes extrauniversal tourists develop followings among my fellow naked apes, but the rumors about Novi Dei cultists are the stuff that bad movies are made of. Bansi’s afraid that masked men are going to come along in a black van and make him disappear for intruding on their sacred silliness.

As I say, I am just about to laugh at Bansi when a black van screeches to a stop behind me. Two chaps in masks jump out. They grab my arms, throw me into the back, and speed away.