19
Under the Knife
Hotel again, sinking into the deathmarch of wiz-crash, Prior leading her into the lobby, Japanese tourists already up and clustering around bored-looking guides. And one foot, one foot, one foot after the other, her head so heavy now, like somebody punched a hole in the top, poured in a quarter-kilo of dull lead, and her teeth felt like they belonged to somebody else, too big; she slumped against the side of the elevator when its extra gravity pressed down.
"Where’s Eddy?"
"Eddy’s gone, Mona."
Got her eyes open wide and she looked at him, seeing the smile was back, bastard. "What?"
"Eddy’s been bought out. Compensated. He’s on his way to Macau with a line of credit. Nice little gambling junket."
"Compensated?"
"For his investment. In you. For his time."
"His time?" The doors slid open on blue-carpeted corridor.
And something falling through her, cold: Eddy hated gambling.
"You’re working for us now, Mona. We wouldn’t want you off on your own again."
But you did, she thought, you let me go. And you knew where to find me.
Eddy ‘s gone . . .
She didn’t remember falling asleep. She was still wearing the dress, Michael’s jacket tucked up around her shoulders like a blanket. She could see the corner of the mountainside building without moving her head, but the bighorn wasn’t there.
The Angie stims were still sealed in plastic. She took one at random, slit the wrapper with her thumbnail, slotted it, and put the trodes on. She wasn’t thinking; her hands seemed to know what to do, friendly animals that wouldn’t hurt her. One of them touched PLAY and she slid into the Angie-world, pure as any drug, slow saxophone and limo glide through some European city, how the streets revolved around her, around the driverless car, broad avenues, dawn-clean and almost empty, with the touch of fur against her shoulders, and rolling on, down a straight road through flat fields, edged with perfect, identical trees.
And turning, tires over raked gravel, up a winding drive through parkland where the dew was silver, here an iron deer, there a wet white marble torso . . . The house was vast, old, unlike any house she’d seen before, but the car swung past it, then passed several smaller buildings, coming at last to the edge of a smooth broad field.
There were gliders tethered there, translucent membrane drawn taut over fragile-looking frames of polycarbon. They quivered slightly in the morning breeze. Robin Lanier was waiting beside them, handsome, easy Robin in a rough black sweater, who played opposite Angie in almost all of her stims.
And she was leaving the car now, taking to the field, laughing when her heels sank into the grass. And the rest of the way to Robin with her shoes in her hand, grinning, into his arms and his smell, his eyes.
A whirl, a dance of editing, condensing the business of boarding the glider on the silver induction rail, and they were flung smoothly down the length of the field, lifting now, banking to catch the wind, and up, up, until the great house was an angular pebble in a swathe of green, green cut by a dull gleam of curving river —
—and Prior’s hand on STOP, smell of food from the cart beside the bed knotting her stomach, the dull sick ache of wiz-crash in every joint. "Eat," he said. "We’re leaving soon." He took the metal cover from one of the plates. "Club sandwich," he said, "coffee, pastries. Doctor’s orders. Once you’re at the clinic, you won’t be eating for a while . . ."
"Clinic?"
"Gerald’s place. Baltimore."
"Why?"
"Gerald’s a cosmetic surgeon. You’re having some work done. All of it reversible later, if you want, but we think you’ll be pleased with the results. Very pleased." The smile. "Anyone ever tell you how much you look like Angie, Mona?"
She looked up at him, said nothing. Managed to sit up, to drink half a cup of watery black coffee. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the sandwich, but she ate one of the pastries. It tasted like cardboard.
Baltimore. She wasn’t too sure where that was.
And somewhere a glider hung forever above a tame green country, fur against her shoulder, and Angie must still be there, still laughing . . .
An hour later, in the lobby, while Prior signed the bill, she saw Eddy’s black gator-clone suitcases go by on a robot baggage cart, and that was when she knew for sure that he was dead.
Gerald’s office had a sign with big old-fashioned letters, fourth floor of a condo rack in what Prior said was Baltimore. The kind of building where they throw up a framework and commercial tenants bring their own modules, plug-ins. Like a highrise trailer camp, everything snaked with bundled cables, optics, lines for sewage and water. "What’s it say?" she asked Prior.
"Gerald Chin, Dentist."
"You said he was a plastic surgeon."
"He is."
"Why can’t we just go to a boutique like everybody else?"
He didn’t answer.
She couldn’t really feel much now, and part of her knew that she wasn’t as scared as she should be. Maybe that was okay, though, because if she got scared enough she wouldn’t be able to do anything, and definitely she wanted to get out of the whole deal, whatever it was. On the drive over, she’d discovered this lump in the pocket of Michael’s jacket. It had taken her ten minutes to figure out it was a shockrod, like nervous suits carried. It felt like a screwdriver handle with a pair of blunt metal horns where the shaft should be. It probably charged off wall current; she just hoped Michael had kept up the charge. She figured Prior didn’t know it was there. They were legal, most places, because they weren’t supposed to do much permanent damage, but Lanette had known a girl who’d gotten worked over real bad with one and never got much better.
If Prior didn’t know it was in her pocket, it meant he didn’t know everything, and he had a stake in having her think he did. But then he hadn’t known how much Eddy hated gambling.
She couldn’t feel much about Eddy, either, except she still figured he was dead. No matter how much they’d given him, he still wouldn’t walk out without those cases. Even if he was going for a whole new wardrobe he’d need to get all dressed up to go shopping for it. Eddy cared about clothes more than almost anything. And those gator cases were special; he’d got ‘em off a hotel thief in Orlando, and they were the closest thing he had to a home. And anyway, now that she thought about it, she couldn’t see him going for a buy-out bid, because what he wanted most in the whole world was to be part of some big deal. Once he was, he figured, people would start to take him seriously.
So somebody finally took him seriously, she thought, as Prior carried her bag into Gerald’s clinic. But not the way Eddy wanted.
She looked around at the twenty-year-old plastic furniture, the stacks of stim-star magazines with Jap writing. It looked like a Cleveland haircut place. There was nobody there, nobody behind the reception desk.
Then Gerald came through a white door, wearing the kind of crinkled foil suit that paramedics wore for traffic accidents. "Lock the door," he said to Prior, through a blue paper mask that hid his nose, mouth, and chin. "Hello, Mona. If you’ll step this way . . ." He gestured toward the white door.
She had her hand around the shockrod now, but she didn’t know how to turn it on.
She followed Gerald, Prior taking up the rear.
"Have a seat," Gerald said. She sat on a white enamel chair. He came close, looked at her eyes. "You need to rest, Mona. You’re exhausted."
There was a serrated stud on the shockrod’s handle. Press it? Forward? Back?
Gerald went to a white box with drawers, got something out.
"Here," he said, extending a little tube thing with writing on the side, "this will help you . . ." She barely felt the tiny, measured spray; there was a black blot on the aerosol tube, just where her eyes tried to focus, growing . . .
She remembered the old man showing her how you kill a catfish. Catfish has a hole in its skull, covered with skin; you take something
stiff and skinny, a wire, even a broomstraw did it, and you just slip it in . . .
She remembered Cleveland, ordinary kind of day before it was time to get working, sitting up in Lanette’s, looking at a magazine. Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you could feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.
It’s called money, Lanette said.
It’s called money. You just slip it in.
20
Hilton Swift
He arrived unannounced, as he always did, and alone, the Net helicopter settling like a solitary wasp, stirring strands of seaweed across the damp sand.
She watched from the rust-eaten railing as he jumped down, something boyish, almost bumbling, in his apparent eagerness. He wore a long topcoat of brown tweed; unbuttoned, it showed the immaculate front of one of his candystriped shirts, the propwash stirring his brown-blond hair and fluttering his Sense/Net tie. Robin was right, she decided: he did look as though his mother dressed him.
Perhaps it was deliberate, she thought, as he came striding up the beach, a feigned na•vetŽ. She remembered Porphyre once maintaining that major corporations were entirely independent of the human beings who composed the body corporate. This had seemed patently obvious to Angie, but the hairdresser had insisted that she’d failed to grasp his basic premise. Swift was Sense/Net’s most important human decision-maker.
The thought of Porphyre made her smile; Swift, taking it as a greeting, beamed back at her.
He offered her lunch in San Francisco; the helicopter was extremely fast. She countered by insisting on preparing him a bowl of dehydrated Swiss soup and microwaving a frozen brick of sourdough rye.
She wondered, watching him eat, about his sexuality. In his late thirties, he somehow conveyed the sense of an extraordinarily bright teenager in whom the onset of puberty had been subtly delayed. Rumor, at one time or another, had supplied him with every known sexual preference, and with several that she assumed were entirely imaginary. None of them seemed at all likely to Angie. She’d known him since she’d come to Sense/Net; he’d been well established in the upper echelons of production when she’d arrived, one of the top people in Tally Isham’s team, and he’d taken an immediate professional interest in her. Looking back, she assumed that Legba had steered her into his path: he’d been so obviously on his way up, though she might not have seen it herself, then, dazzled by the glitter and constant movement of the scene.
Bobby had taken an instant dislike to him, bristling with a Barrytowner’s inbred hostility to authority, but had generally managed to conceal it for the sake of her career. The dislike had been mutual, Swift greeting their split and Bobby’s departure with obvious relief.
"Hilton," she said, as she poured him a cup of the herbal tea he preferred to coffee, "what is it that’s keeping Robin in London?"
He looked up from the steaming cup. "Something personal, I think. Perhaps he’s found a new friend." Bobby had always been Angie’s friend, to Hilton. Robin’s friends tended to be young, male, and athletic; the muted erotic sequences in her stims with Robin were assembled from stock footage provided by Continuity and heavily treated by Raebel and his effects team. She remembered the one night they’d spent together, in a windblown house in southern Madagascar, his passivity and his patience. They’d never tried again, and she’d suspected that he feared that intimacy would undermine the illusion their stims projected so perfectly.
"What did he think of me going into the clinic, Hilton? Did he tell you?"
"I think he admired you for it."
"Someone told me recently that he’s been telling people I’m crazy."
He’d rolled up his striped shirtsleeves and loosened his tie. "I can’t imagine Robin thinking that, let alone saying it. I know what he thinks of you. You know what gossip is, in the Net . . ."
"Hilton, where’s Bobby?"
His brown eyes, very still. "Isn’t that over, Angie?"
"Hilton, you know. You must know. You know where he is. Tell me."
"We lost him."
"Lost him?"
"Security lost him. You’re right, of course; we kept the closest possible track of him after he left you. He reverted to type." There was an edge of satisfaction in his voice.
"And what type was that?"
"I’ve never asked what brought you together," he said. "Security investigated both of you, of course. He was a petty criminal."
She laughed. "He wasn’t even that . . ."
"You were unusually well represented, Angie, for an unknown. You know that your agents made it a key condition of your contract that we take Bobby Newmark on as well."
"Contracts have had stranger conditions, Hilton."
"And he went on salary as your . . . companion."
"My ‘friend.’ "
Was Swift actually blushing? He broke eye contact, looked down at his hands. "When he left you, he went to Mexico, Mexico City. Security was tracing him, of course; we don’t like to lose track of anyone who knows that much about the personal life of one of our stars. Mexico City is a very . . . complicated place . . . We do know that he seemed to be trying to continue his previous . . . career."
"He was hustling cyberspace?"
He met her eyes again. "He was seeing people in the business, known criminals."
"And? Go on."
"He . . . faded out. Vanished. Do you have any idea what Mexico City is like, if you slip below the poverty line?"
"And he was poor?"
"He’d become an addict. According to our best sources."
"An addict? Addicted to what?"
"I don’t know."
"Continuity!"
He almost spilled his tea.
"Hello, Angie."
"Bobby, Continuity. Bobby Newmark, my friend," glaring at Swift. "He went to Mexico City. Hilton says he became addicted to something. A drug, Continuity?"
"I’m sorry, Angie. That’s classified data."
"Hilton . . ."
"Continuity," he began, and coughed.
"Hello, Hilton."
"Executive override, Continuity. Do we have that information?"
"Security’s sources described Newmark’s addiction as neuro-electronic."
"I don’t understand."
"Some sort of, um, ‘wirehead’ business," Swift offered.
She felt an impulse to tell him how she’d found the drug, the charger.
Hush, child. Her head was full of the sound of bees, a building pressure.
"Angie? What is it?" He was half up from his chair, reaching for her.
"Nothing. I’m . . . upset. I’m sorry. Nerves. It isn’t your fault. I was going to tell you about finding Bobby’s cyberspace deck. But you already know about that, don’t you?"
"Can I get you anything? Water?"
"No, thanks, but I’ll lie down for a while, if you don’t mind. But stay, please. I have some ideas for orbital sequences that I’d like your advice on . . ."
"Of course. Have a nap, I’ll have a walk on the beach, and then we’ll talk."
She watched him from the bedroom window, watched his brown figure recede in the direction of the Colony, followed by the patient little Dornier.
He looked like a child on the empty beach; he looked as lost as she felt.
21
The Aleph
As the sun rose, still no power for the 100-watt bulbs, Gentry’s loft filled with a new light. Winter sunlight softened the outlines of the consoles and the holo table, brought out the texture of the ancient books that lined sagging chipboard shelves along the west wall. As Gentry paced and talked, his blond roostertail bobbing each time he spun on a black bootheel, his excitement seemed to counter the lingering effects of Cherry’s sleep-derms. Cherry sat on the edge of the bed, watching Gentry but glancing occasionally at the battery telltale on the stretcher’s
superstructure. Slick sat in a broken-down chair scrounged from the Solitude and recushioned with transparent plastic over wadded pads of discarded clothing.
To Slick’s relief, Gentry had skipped the whole business of the Shape and launched straight into his theory about the aleph thing. As always, once Gentry got going, he used words and constructions that Slick had trouble understanding, but Slick knew from experience that it was easier not to interrupt him; the trick was in pulling some kind of meaning out of the overall flow, skipping over the parts you didn’t understand.
Gentry said that the Count was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft; he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that was true, the thing’s storage capacity was virtually infinite; it would’ve been unthinkably expensive to manufacture. It was, Gentry said, a fairly strange thing for anyone to have built at all, although such things were rumored to exist and to have their uses, most particularly in the storage of vast amounts of confidential data. With no link to the global matrix, the data was immune to every kind of attack via cyberspace. The catch, of course, was that you couldn’t access it via the matrix; it was dead storage.
"He could have anything in there," Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. "A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs . . ."
"Like he’s living a stim?" Cherry asked. "That why he’s always in REM?"
"No," Gentry said, "it’s not simstim. It’s completely interactive. And it’s a matter of scale. If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could have anything at all in there. In a sense, he could have an approximation of everything . . ."
"I gotta feeling off Kid Afrika," Cherry said, "that this guy was paying to stay this way. Kinda wirehead action but different. And anyway, wirehead’s don’t REM like that . . ."
"But when you tried to put it out through your stuff," Slick ventured, "you got that . . . thing." He saw Gentry’s shoulders tense beneath black-beaded leather.
"Yes," Gentry said, "and now I have to reconstruct our account with the Fission Authority." He pointed at the permanent storage batteries stacked beneath the steel table. "Get those out for me."