THE INVISIBLE COUNTRY
Paul J. McAuley
Cameron was discharged from the black clinic with nothing more than his incubation fee and a tab of painkiller so cut with chalk it might as well have been aspirin. Emptied of the totipotent marrow that had been growing there, the long bones of his thighs ached with fierce fire, and he blew twenty pounds on a pedicab that took him to the former department store on Oxford Street where he rented a cubicle.
The building’s pusher, a slender Bengali called Lost In Space, was lounging in his deckchair near the broken glass doors, and Cameron bought a hit of something called Epheridrin from him.
“Enkephalin-specific,” Lost In Space said, as Cameron dry-swallowed the red gelatin capsule. “Hits the part of the brain that makes you think you hurt. Good stuff, Doc. So new the bathtub merchants haven’t cracked it yet.” He folded up his fax of yesterday’s Financial Times—like most pushers, he liked to consider himself a player in the Exchange’s information flux—and smiled, tilting his head to look up at Cameron. There was a diamond set into one of his front teeth. “There is a messenger waiting for you all morning.”
“Komarnicki has a job for me? It’s been a long time.”
. . .
