Part 32 (1/2)

Decisions, decisions.

'I'm keeping count, you know,' said Chris.

The Doctor picked up a dark-brown fedora. 'Hmm?'

'And this is the twenty-seventh shop we've been in.'

The Doctor popped the hat on his head. 'What do you think?'

'It doesn't go with what you're wearing,' Roz pointed out. She was sitting on a padded seat nearby, wearing a red and purple dress and a pair of sandals.

She was also wearing an enormous, wide-rimmed straw hat, festooned with bird-of-paradise feathers. The price tag hung down in front of her face. She flicked it away. 'And since you never wear anything else, you'd better buy something that matches.'

The Doctor stood in front of a full-length mirror, fingering the crumpled material of his clothes. 'I don't always wear the same thing,' he protested.

'What, you've had that jacket cloned?' said Roz.

'It's not the number of shops I mind,' said Chris. 'So much as the fact that neither of you ever buy anything.'

Roz waved a red and grey sleeve at him. 'What about this jacket?'

'I like like this jacket,' protested the Doctor. this jacket,' protested the Doctor.

Roz put a finger to her lips. Chris looked around. A shop robot was meandering up to them, rolling on a single ball under its conical base. 'You want jackets?' it murmured.

'Hats,' said the Doctor.

'We got hats. What do you want?'

Chris sat down, sighing, as the Doctor and the robot got into a complex argument about synthetic rabbit felt. At least he hadn't been stuck with carrying the shopping bags, since there weren't any.

He looked at the printed map of the galleria, feeling his heart sink. It took up more than a block of the overcity. There were 229 five hundred shops. More than a hundred of them were listed under clothing, footwear and millinery clothing, footwear and millinery. 'I'm doomed,' he said.

'No,' Roz was explaining to another of the robots. 'What I want is genuine leather. Yes, these shoes are lovely, but I want actual tanned dead animal skin. Upstairs? Chris, can I borrow that map?'

He pa.s.sed it over. 'I'm definitely doomed,' he said.

The Doctor wandered over as Roz was putting the outrageous feathered hat back. 'And a good thing too,' he said. 'That's far more Benny's style than yours. Would you believe that robot had never even heard of Jimmy Stewart?'

'Do you think we're attracting enough attention?'

'Why don't you buy that hat?' said the Doctor.

'Where now?'

'Imports, apparently,' said Roz. 'The only way to get genuine leather shoes is to have them sent over from the Crow Nation.'

'Bison leather?' said the Doctor.

'Apparently.'

'Here we go again,' said Chris, trailing after them.

Groenewegen's department store filled twenty floors of the galleria, crammed with merchandise, music, mirrors. On floor seventeen there was a beautiful vase, not an antique, but a new work of art.

They took the escalators up from the headwear department on floor six, pa.s.sing through scents and bathroom accessories. Roz identified the smells almost subconsciously as they rode those moving stairs. Sandalwood, rose, lavender, smoke, peppermint, frangipani.

It was like being inside a HeadStop sim. So much sensory input you won't be able to think, they promised. Guaranteed to shock that monkeymind. Your head will stop or your money back.

She could picture the vase, made from electrically fired silicon, some new technique from the colonies. Swirls of hot blue colour trapped in gla.s.s so clear it was almost invisible.

Up through music, sabasaba clas.h.i.+ng with the Hithles. Roz had tried a few of those HeadStops after Martle had died. After she'd killed Martle. She'd tried a lot of things in those heavy days 230 before she'd found Doc Dantalion and his memory-cutting knife.

Anything to replace the worn, jumping and stuttering sim of the moment she'd thrown that vibroknife, puncturing his eye, his skull, his miserable crooked life.

The vase, in a hundred pieces, like an eggsh.e.l.l. She could see it so clearly, now, riding up and up towards the roof, where the light would break in, letting the light in, cutting through her skin to let the light in, like having her excised memory forced back in by Dantalion, smiling an insect smile.

She couldn't move. She couldn't breathe. She could breathe, but only through one nostril. She needed to open her mouth. She wanted to use her hands to pry her mouth open so she could get a decent breath, but she couldn't move.

She could move, rolling over, blood pouring down her face.

Her head was surrounded by pieces of gla.s.s, blue and clear.

'Here,' said the Doctor. He handed her a clean hanky.

's.h.i.+t!' she said, catapulting off the floor and feeling her neck, her head still full of the image of cutting, slicing through the tough walls of the vein and artery in her throat.

'It's all right,' said the Doctor. He was quivering with energy, pale as a ghost. 'Chris! Look for someone with a matching nosebleed.'

'I'm on it,' said the boy. 'I see her!' He pushed through the crowd.

Roz looked at the vase. 'Don't worry about it,' the Doctor said.

'It'll go on my credit card. Chris will be pleased.'

'What?'

'We bought something.'

Chris pushed through the crowd, using size and determination to get people out of his way. He broke free of the circle of onlookers.

There! The girl he'd spotted, fighting her way through the crowd with panicked movements knocking people and shopping bags flying. Chris thundered after her, shouting 'Stop thief! Stop thief!'

The girl glanced back she was so young, no more than sixteen! and hurled herself down a narrow pa.s.sageway. Chris 231 pa.s.sed a VIEWING AREA sign as he followed her, stumbling over a cleaning robot.

The girl ran smack into a crowd of tourists, standing about in a cool blue lounge, staring out at the overcity. She looked back once more. Chris saw a flash of dark eyes, desperately afraid.

'No!' he shouted.

The girl hurled herself at one of the great rectangular windows.