The horse kept walking, and San Francisco Bay fell ever further below us. Finally, stupidly, I said: "Okay, we've covered all the other bases on mutual recrimination. Aren't you going to accuse me of killing the only man you ever loved?"

She jerked as though I'd shot her, and turned round to regard me with blazing eyes.

"You didn't kill him," she said, in a very quiet voice. "You just let him die."

She turned away, and of course then I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her I was sorry. If I did that, though, I'd probably spend the next few months in a regeneration tank, growing back my arms.

So I just looked up at the neighborhood we had entered without noticing, and that was when I really felt my blood run cold.

"Uh-we're in Sydney-Town," I said.

Mendoza looked up. "Oh-oh."

There weren't any flags or bunting here. There weren't any torches. And you would never, ever see a place like this in any Hollywood western. Neither John Wayne nor Gabby Hayes even went anywhere near the likes of Sydney-Town.

It perched on its ledge at the top of Pacific Street and rotted. On the left side was one long row of leaning shacks; on the right side was another. I could glimpse dim lights through windows and doorways, and heard fiddle music scraping away, a half-dozen folk tunes from the British Isles, played in an eerie discord. The smell of the place was unbelievable, breathing out foul through dark doorways where darker figures leaned. Above the various dives, names were chalked that would have been quaint and reassuring anywhere else: The Noggin of Ale. The Tam O'Shanter. The Jolly Waterman. The Bird in Hand.

Some of the dark figures leaned out and bid us "G'deevnin'," and without raising their voices too much let us know about the house specialties. At the Boar's Head, a woman was making love to a pig in the back room; did we want to see? At the Goat and Compass, there was a man who'd eat or drink anything, absolutely anything, mate, for a few cents, and he hadn't had a bath in ten years. Did we want to give him a go? At the Magpie, a girl was lying on a mattress in the back, so drunk she'd never wake before morning, no matter what anyone did to her. Were we interested? And other dark figures were moving along in the shadows, watching us.

Portsmouth Square satisfied simple appetites like hunger and thirst, greed, the need to get laid or to shoot at total strangers. Sydney-Town, on the other hand, catered to specialized tastes.

It was nothing I hadn't seen before, but I'd worked in Old Rome at her worst, and Byzantium too.

Mendoza, though, shrank back against me as we rode.

She had a white, stunned look I'd seen only twice before. The first was when she was four years old, and the Inquisitors had held her up to the barred window to see what could happen if she didn't confess she was a Jew. More than fear or horror, it was astonishment that life was like this.

The other time she'd looked like that was when I let her mortal lover die.

I leaned forward and spoke close to her ear. "Baby, I'm going to get down and follow the trail on foot. You ride on, okay? I'll meet you at the hotel."

I slid down from the saddle fast, smacked the horse hard on its rump, and watched as the luminous mutant whatever-it-was bobbed away through the dark, shining feebly. Then I marched forward, looking as dangerous as I could in the damn friar's habit, following Isaiah Stuckey's scent line.

He was sweating heavily, now, easy to track even here. Sooner or later, the mortal was going to have to stop, to set down that sack of gold dust and wipe his face and breathe. He surely wasn't dumb enough to venture into one of these places...

His trail took an abrupt turn, straight across the threshold of the very next dive. I sighed, looking upat the sign. This establishment was The Fierce Grizzly. Behind me, the five guys who were lurking paused too. I shrugged and went in.

Inside the place was small, dark, and smelled like a zoo. I scanned the room. Bingo! There was Isaiah Stuckey, a gin punch in his hand and a smile on his flushed face, just settling down to a friendly crap game with a couple of serial rapists and an axe murderer. I could reach him in five steps. I had taken two when a hand descended on my shoulder.

"Naow, mate, you ain't saving no souls in 'ere," said a big thug. "You clear off, or sit down and watch the exhibition, eh?"

I wondered how hard I'd have to swing to knock him cold, but then a couple of torches flared alight at one end of the room. The stage curtain, nothing more than a dirty blanket swaying and jerking in the torchlight, was flung aside.

I saw a grizzly bear, muzzled and chained. Behind her, a guy I assumed to be her trainer, grinned at the audience. The act started.

In twenty thousand years I thought I'd seen everything, but I guess I hadn't.

My jaw dropped, as did the jaws of most of the other patrons who weren't regulars there. They couldn't take their eyes off what was happening on the stage, which made things pretty easy for the pickpockets working the room.

But only for a moment.

Maybe that night the bear decided she'd finally had enough, and summoned some self-esteem.

Maybe the chains had reached the last stages of metal fatigue. Anyway, there was a sudden ping, like a bell cracking, and the bear got her front paws free.

About twenty guys, including me, tried to get out through the front door at the same moment. When I picked myself out of the gutter, I looked up to see Isaiah Stuckey running like mad again, further up Pacific Street.

"Hey! Wait!" I shouted; but no Californian slows down when a grizzly is loose. Cursing, I rose and scrambled after him, yanking up my robe to clear my legs. I could hear him gasping like a steam engine as I began to close the gap between us. Suddenly, he went down.

I skidded to a halt beside him and fell to my knees. Stuckey was flat on his face, not moving. I turned him over and he flopped like a side of meat, staring sightless up at the clear cold stars.

Massive aortic aneurysm. Dead as a doornail.

"NO!" I howled, ripping his shirt open and pounding on his chest, though I knew nothing was going to bring him back "Don't you go and die on me, you mortal son of a bitch! Stupid jackass-"

Black shadows had begun to slip from the nearest doorways, eager to begin corpse robbing; but they halted, taken aback I guess by the sight of a priest screaming abuse at the deceased. I glared at them, remembered who I was supposed to be, and made a grudging sign of the cross over the late Isaiah Stuckey.

There was a clatter of hoofbeats. Mendoza's horse came galloping back downhill.

"Are you okay?" Mendoza leaned from the saddle. "Oh, hell, is that him?"

"The late Isaiah Stuckey," I said bitterly. "He had a heart attack."

"I'm not surprised, with all that running uphill," said Mendoza. "This place really needs those cable cars, doesn't it?"

"You said it, kiddo." I got to my feet. "Let's get out of here."

Mendoza frowned, gazing at the dead man. "Wait a minute. That's Catskill Ike!"

"Cute name," I said, clambering up into the saddle behind her. "You knew the guy?"

"No, I just monitored him in case he started any fires. He's been prospecting on Villa Creek for the last six months."

"Well, so what?"

"So I know where he found your quartz deposit," said Mendoza. "It wasn't mined up the Sacramento at all, Joseph."

"It's in Big Sur?" I demanded. She just nodded.

At that moment, the grizzly shoved her way out into the street, and it seemed like a good idea toleave fast.

"Don't take it too badly," said Mendoza a little while later, when we were riding back toward our hotel. "You got what the Company sent you after, didn't you? I'll bet there'll be Security Techs blasting away at Villa Creek before I get home."

"I guess so," I said glumly. She snickered.

"And look at the wonderful quality time we got to spend together! And the Pope will get his fancy crucifix. Or was that part just a scam?"

"No, the Company really is bribing the Pope to do something," I said. "But you don't-"

"Need to know, of course. That's okay. I got a great meal out of this trip, at least."

"Hey, are you hungry? We can still take in some of the restaurants, kid," I said.

Mendoza thought about that. The night wind came gusting up from the city below us, where somebody at the Poulet d'Or was mincing onions for a sauce piperade, and somebody else was grilling steaks. We heard the pop of a wine cork all the way up where we were on Powell Street...

"Sounds like a great idea," she said. She briefly accessed her chronometer. "As long as you can swear we'll be out of here by 1906," she added.

"Trust me," I said happily. "No problem!"

"Trust you?" she exclaimed, and spat. I could tell she didn't mean it, though.

We rode on down the hill.

Annuity Clinic

NIGEL BROWN.

Nigel Brown lives in Hove, England, and is an optometrist. He has been an occasional book reviewer for Interzone since 1996, and published only three stories before 2003 but several this year. He is associated with the William Hope Hodgson memorial website, The Night Land, where some of his fiction appeared. He has enjoyed the work of William Hope Hodgson for many years, and considers "The Nightland" to be one of the most imaginative and exciting adventure stories he has ever read.

"Annuity Clinic" appeared in Interzone. It is about an old woman who used to be an engineer in a dystopian future UK, in which the elderly are forced to sell artificial body parts back to the government to get enough money to live on. Bureaucracies are run by robots of various kinds which the old woman used to work on. Technology is recycled rather than discarded. Brown combines here a problem-solving protagonist, an old woman living in a nursing home, with some interesting future speculation and dreamlike images.

Blue dawn light seeped around the frayed curtains, throwing shadows across the small bedroom, and the hump of her gently snoring roommate Betty.

Eloise was already awake. A vision of the Eastern Mediterranean glowed in her left eye, offering a tantalizing glimpse of life two thousand miles beyond the cold plaster walls. She drank in the scene until the sun, outside her window, rose higher; a sunbeam found a chink in the curtains. The sudden glare blinded her; the cataract in her natural right eye dispersed the light into a white fog. It bleached out her cyberspace vision-her private escape.

Eloise reluctantly shut her left eye down. The Aegean, shimmering in the Mediterranean light, vanished. Now she stared, unfocused, at the ceiling. Bright after-images danced over its dark surface.

Suddenly aware of the room around her, she took shallow breaths through her mouth to endure the stink. It lay like a thick blanket in the heady air: Betty was never one for getting to her chamber pot at night.

It's ridiculous, she thought. We've got automation so good: robots...even robots that are self-aware,and this dump still uses chamber pots.

The answer lurked at the back of her mind-"Because you're at the bottom of the heap, dear...you let yourself drift down there. Artificial minds, robots, cost a lot more money now than you have left..."

That's why...

Something flicked through her mind-a fleeting thought she tried to catch, nearly held-then the screaming across the corridor began. The thought left her, driven out by old Arnold's cries.

Eloise lay patiently in bed, listening out for the pattering footsteps of the Duty Carer, the creak of Arnold's door, then silence as his medication was administered.

The thought crept back into her head and settled there, triggering a spark of excitement...today was a trip out of the home-the visit to the Annuity Clinic.

Breakfast was the usual chaos, with Betty extracting her mouthplate and tossing it onto the table, narrowly missing her bowl of cornflakes. Eloise had learned to shield her food with her hand, and place a shaky palm over the heaped cereal to avoid the spray of spittle that came from the babbling Katie sitting on her other side.

"Ready for the bus today, Eloise?"

She looked up to see the Matron, Mrs. Whitten, standing over her.

"I'm always grateful for a trip outside," she said carefully.

Mrs. Whitten frowned. "You have plenty of trips, Eloise. We're contracted to supply one trip a month-that's what you get."

"Thank you," Eloise answered.

Katie mumbled something incoherent to the Matron. A look of disgust crossed Mrs. Whitten's face, and she turned to go.

"Will my room's internet link be repaired soon?"

"It's on my list," Mrs. Whitten said. Then her eyes widened with understanding. She peered at Eloise's sapphire eye, and gave a sharp nod. "Oh I see!You'll lose access when that eye goes, won't you?" She sniffed. "I could never afford an interface eye like that...you'll get by-like the rest of us."

"I'm sure I will," Eloise answered, "but with my eye gone, I'll be cut offin my room..."

"Maybe for a while," Mrs. Whitten replied, "but you'll have the money-with that eye sold-to continue living here." She gave a wide smile. "That's a consolation, don't you think?"

Her words haunted Eloise the whole of the coach trip to the Clinic. Lost in her thoughts-dreaming of her sister's house and family on the warm Aegean-she ignored the bleak scenery through the window: the scrubby Sussex tundra running up to the dark fir-line that rimmed the South Downs.

They hurried off the coach, shivering in the raw northerly wind that blew off the Midlands glacier. The Clinic was a low, small windowed building that ran along one side of the town's bus terminal.

Eloise glanced wistfully at the other buses, but she had no money, no permit...no where else to go.

"This global warming's boiling my blood!" Betty managed to joke.

Eloise smiled at the irony. They were all old enough to remember the predictions of vineyards in Southern England. No one listened to warnings that the Gulf Stream might shut down.

We push bad news to the back of our minds , she mused, knowing that we lose it there.

So how could she blame the country for her own predicament, when pension poverty had been predicted for so long?

The Annuity Clinic's waiting room was full up by the time she managed to shuffle inside. She didn't regret not getting a seat as her hip made it difficult to stand up again.

"How long'll we be 'ere?"

She turned at the sound.

"I don't know, Arnold," she replied. "They said it was for pre-assessments. I guess they need to know how much work to prepare for when we come back to have bits chopped out of us."

He looked startled at her tone.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean it to come out like that."

His face was a pasty yellow-Eloise couldn't decide whether it was anemia or the effect of his dailysedative-but, far from his usual drowsiness, he seemed lucid enough now.