"Slick Henry," the Kid said, his breath puffing white as it hit the air of the Solitude, "hello."
Slick looked down at the long brown face. Kid Afrika had big hazel eyes, slitted like a cat’s, a pencil-thin mustache, and skin with the sheen of buffed leather.
"Hey, Kid." Slick smelled some kind of incense from inside the hover. "How’y‘ doin’?"
"Well," the Kid said, narrowing his eyes, "recall you sayin’ once, if I ever needed a favor . . ."
"Right," Slick said, feeling a first twinge of apprehension. Kid Afrika had saved his ass once, in Atlantic City; talked some irate brothers out of dropping him off this balcony on the forty-third floor of a burned-out highstack. "Somebody wanna throw you off a tall building?"
"Slick," the Kid said, "I wanna introduce you to somebody."
"Then we’ll be even?"
"Slick Henry, this fine-looking girl here, this is Miss Cherry Chesterfield of Cleveland, Ohio." Slick bent down and looked at the driver. Blond shockhead, paintstick around her eyes. "Cherry, this is my close personal friend Mr. Slick Henry. When he was young and bad he rode with the Deacon Blues. Now he’s old and bad, he holes up out here and pursues his art, understand. A talented man, understand."
"He’s the one builds the robots," the girl said, around a wad of gum, "you said."
"The very one," the Kid said, opening his door. "You wait for us here, Cherry honey." The Kid, draped in a mink coat that brushed the immaculate tips of his yellow ostrich boots, stepped out onto the Solitude, and Slick caught a glimpse of something in the back of the hover, eyeblink ambulance flash of bandages and surgical tubing . . .
"Hey, Kid," he said, "what you got back there?" The Kid’s jeweled hand came up, gesturing Slick back as the hover’s door clanked shut and Cherry Chesterfield hit the window buttons.
"We have to talk about that, Slick."
"I don’t think it’s much to ask," Kid Afrika said, leaning back against a bare metal workbench, wrapped in his mink. "Cherry has a med-tech’s ticket and she knows she’ll get paid. Nice girl, Slick." He winked.
"Kid . . ."
Kid Afrika had this guy in the back of the hover who was like dead, coma or something, had him hooked up to pumps and bags and tubes and some kind of simstim rig, all of it bolted to an old alloy ambulance stretcher, batteries and everything.
"What’s this?" Cherry, who’d followed them in after the Kid had taken Slick back out to show him the guy in the back of the hover, was peering dubiously up at the towering Judge, most of him anyway; the arm with the buzzsaw was where they’d left it, on the floor on the greasy tarp. If she has a med-tech‘s ticket, Slick thought, the med-tech probably hasn‘t noticed it‘s missing yet. She was wearing at least four leather jackets, all of them several sizes too big.
"Slick’s art, like I told you."
"That guy’s dying. He smells like piss."
"Catheter came loose," Cherry said. "What’s this thing supposed to do, anyway?"
"We can’t keep him here, Kid, he’ll stiff. You wanna kill him, go stuff him down a hole on the Solitude."
"The man’s not dying," Kid Afrika said. "He’s not hurt, he’s not sick . . ."
"Then what the fuck’s wrong with him?"
"He’s under, baby. He’s on a long trip. He needs peace and quiet."
Slick looked from the Kid to the Judge, then back to the Kid. He wanted to be working on that arm. Kid said he wanted Slick to keep the guy for two weeks, maybe three; he’d leave Cherry there to take care of him.
"I can’t figure it. This guy, he’s a friend of yours?"
Kid Afrika shrugged inside his mink.
"So why don’t you keep him at your place?"
"Not so quiet. Not peaceful enough."
"Kid," Slick said, "I owe you one, but nothing this weird. Anyway, I gotta work, and anyway, it’s too weird. And there’s Gentry, too. He’s gone to Boston now; be back tomorrow night and he wouldn’t like it. You know how he’s funny about people . . . It’s mostly his place, too, how it is . . ."
"They had you over the railing, man," Kid Afrika said sadly. "You remember?"
"Hey, I remember, I . . ."
"You don’t remember too good," the Kid said. "Okay, Cherry. Let’s go. Don’t wanna cross Dog Solitude at night." He pushed off from the steel bench.
"Kid, look . . ."
"Forget it. I didn’t know your fucking name, that time in Atlantic City, just figured I didn’t wanna see the white boy all over the street, y’know? So I didn’t know your name then, I guess I don’t know it now."
"Kid . . ."
"Yeah?"
"Okay. He stays. Two weeks max. You gimme your word, you’ll come back and get him? And you gotta help me square it with Gentry."
"What’s he need?"
"Drugs."
Little Bird reappeared as the Kid’s Dodge wallowed away across the Solitude. He came edging out from behind an outcropping of compacted cars, rusty pallets of crumpled steel that still showed patches of bright enamel.
Slick watched him from a window high up in Factory. The squares of the steel frame had been fitted with sections of scavenged plastic, each one a different shade and thickness, so that when Slick tilted his head to one side, he saw Little Bird through a pane of hot-pink Lucite.
"Who lives here?" Cherry asked, from the room behind him.
"Me," Slick said, "Little Bird, Gentry . . ."
"In this room, I mean."
He turned and saw her there beside the stretcher and its attendant machines. "You do," he said.
"It’s your place?" She was staring at the drawings taped to the walls, his original conceptions of the Judge and his Investigators, the Corpsegrinder and the Witch.
"Don’t worry about it."
"Better you don’t get any ideas," she said.
He looked at her. She had a large red sore at the corner of her mouth. Her bleached hair stood out like a static display. "Like I said, don’t worry about it."
"Kid said you got electricity."
"Yeah."
"Better get him hooked up," she said, turning to the stretcher. "He doesn’t draw much, but the batteries’ll be getting low."
He crossed the room to look down at the wasted face. "You better tell me something," he said. He didn’t like the tubes. One of them went into a nostril and the idea made him want to gag. "Who is this guy and what exactly the fuck is Kid Afrika doing to him?"
"He’s not," she said, tapping a readout into view on a biomonitor panel lashed to the foot of the stretcher with silver tape. "REM’s still up, like he dreams all the time . . ." The man on the stretcher was strapped down in a brand-new blue sleeping bag. "What it is, he — whoever — he’s paying Kid for this."
There was a trode-net plastered across the guy’s forehead; a single black cable was lashed along the edge of the stretcher. Slick followed it up to the fat gray package that seemed to dominate the gear mounted on the superstructure. Simstim? Didn’t look like it. Some kind of cyberspace rig? Gentry knew a lot about cyberspace, or anyway he talked about it, but Slick couldn’t remember anything about getting unconscious and just staying jacked in . . . People jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.
"He paying the Kid?"
"Yeah," she said.
"What for?"
"Keep him that way. Hide him out, too."
"Who from?"
"Don’t know. Didn’t say."
In the silence that followed, he could hear the steady rasp of the man’s breath.
3
Malibu
There was a smell in the house; it had always been there.
It belonged to time and the salt air and the entropic nature of expensive houses built too close to the
sea. Perhaps it was also peculiar to places briefly but frequently uninhabited, houses opened and closed as their restless residents arrived and departed. She imagined the rooms empty, flecks of corrosion blossoming silently on chrome, pale molds taking hold in obscure corners. The architects, as if in recognition of eternal processes, had encouraged a degree of rust; massive steel railings along the deck had been eaten wrist-thin by years of spray.
The house crouched, like its neighbors, on fragments of ruined foundations, and her walks along the beach sometimes involved attempts at archaeological fantasy. She tried to imagine a past for the place, other houses, other voices. She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop nest when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about the way it followed her, as though it were an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift.
She knew that Hilton Swift was watching through the Dornier’s cameras. Little that occurred in the beach house escaped Sense/Net; her solitude, the week alone she’d demanded, was under constant surveillance.
Her years in the profession had conveyed a singular immunity to observation.
At night she sometimes lit the floods mounted beneath the deck, illuminating the hieroglyphic antics of huge gray sandfleas. The deck itself she left in darkness, and the sunken living room behind her. She sat on a chair of plain white plastic, watching the Brownian dance of the fleas. In the glare of the floods, they cast minute, barely visible shadows, fleeting cusps against the sand.
The sound of the sea wrapped her in its movement. Late at night, as she slept in the smaller of the two guest bedrooms, it worked its way into her dreams. But never into the stranger’s invading memories.
The choice of bedrooms was instinctive. The master bedroom was mined with the triggers of old pain.
The doctors at the clinic had used chemical pliers to pry the addiction away from receptor sites in her brain.
She cooked for herself in the white kitchen, thawing bread in the microwave, dumping packets of dehydrated Swiss soup into spotless steel pans, edging dully into the nameless but increasingly familiar space from which she’d been so subtly insulated by the designer’s dust.
"It’s called life," she said to the white counter. And what would Sense/Net’s in-house psychs make of that, she wondered, if some hidden microphone caught it and carried it to them? She stirred the soup with a slender stainless whisk, watching steam rise. It helped to do things, she thought, just to do things yourself; at the clinic, they’d insisted she make her own bed. Now she spooned out her own bowl of soup, frowning, remembering the clinic.
She’d checked herself out a week into the treatment. The medics protested. The detoxification had gone beautifully, they said, but the therapy hadn’t begun. They pointed out the rate of relapse among clients who failed to complete the program. They explained that her insurance was invalid if she terminated her treatment. Sense/Net would pay, she told them, unless they preferred she pay them herself. She produced her platinum MitsuBank chip.
Her Lear arrived an hour later; she told it to take her to LAX, ordered a car to meet her there, and canceled all incoming calls.
"I’m sorry, Angela," the jet said, banking over Montego Bay seconds after they’d taken off, "but I have Hilton Swift on executive override."
"Angie," Swift said, "you know I’m behind you all the way. You know that, Angie."
She turned to stare at the black oval of the speaker. It was centered in smooth gray plastic, and she imagined him crouching back there, his long runner’s legs folded painfully, grotesquely, behind the Lear’s bulkhead.
"I know that, Hilton," she said. "It’s nice of you to phone."
"You’re going to L.A., Angie."
"Yes. That’s what I told the plane."
"To Malibu."
"That’s right."
"Piper Hill is on her way to the airport."
"Thank you, Hilton, but I don’t want Piper there. I don’t want anybody. I want a car."
"There’s no one at the house, Angie."
"Good. That’s what I want, Hilton. No one at the house. The house, empty."
"Are you certain that’s a good idea?"
"It’s the best idea I’ve had in a long time, Hilton."
There was a pause. "They said it went really well, Angie, the treatment. But they wanted you to stay."
"I need a week," she said. "One week. Seven days. Alone."
After her third night in the house, she woke at dawn, made coffee, dressed. Condensation stippled the broad window facing the deck. Sleep had been simply that; if dreams had come, she couldn’t recall them. But there was something — a quickening, almost a giddiness. She stood in the kitchen, feeling the cold of the ceramic floor through thick white sweatsocks, both hands around the warm cup.
Something there. She extended her arms, raising the coffee like a chalice, the gesture at once instinctive and ironic.
It had been three years since the loa had ridden her, three years since they had touched her at all. But now?
Legba? One of the others?
The sense of a presence receded abruptly. She put the cup down on the counter too quickly, coffee slopping over her hand, and ran to find shoes and a coat. Green rubber boots from the beach closet, and a heavy blue mountain jacket she didn’t remember, too large to have been Bobby’s. She hurried out of the house, down the stairs, ignoring the hum of the toy Dornier’s prop as it lifted off behind her like a patient dragonfly. She glanced north, along the jumble of beach houses, the confusion of rooflines reminding her of a Rio barrio, then turned south, toward the Colony.
The one who came was named Mamman Brigitte, or Grande Brigitte, and while some think her the wife of Baron Samedi, others name her "most ancient of the dead."
The dream architecture of the Colony rose to Angie’s left, a riot of form and ego. Frail-looking neon-embedded replicas of the Watts Towers lifted beside neo-Brutalist bunkers faced with bronze bas-reliefs.
Walls of mirror, as she passed, reflected morning banks of Pacific cloud.
There had been times, during the past three years, when she had felt as though she were about to cross, or recross, a line, a subtle border of faith, to find that her time with the loa had been a dream, or, at most, that they were contagious knots of cultural resonance remaining from the weeks she’d spent in Beauvoir’s New Jersey oumphor. To see with other eyes: no gods, no Horsemen.
She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.
Her father was dead, seven years dead, and the record he’d kept of his life had told her little enough. That he’d served someone or something, that his reward had been knowledge, and that she had been his sacrifice.
Sometimes she felt as though she’d had three lives, each walled away from the others by something she couldn’t name, and no hope of wholeness, ever.
There were the child’s memories of the Maas arcology, carved into the summit of an Arizona mesa, where she’d hugged a sandstone balustrade, face into the wind, and felt as though the whole hollowed tableland was her ship, that she could steer out into those sunset colors beyond the mountains. Later, she’d flown away from there, her fear a hard thing in her throat. She could no longer recall her last glimpse of her father’s face. Though it must have been on the microlight deck, the other planes tethered against the wind, a row of rainbow moths. The first life ended, that night; her father’s life had ended too.
Her second life had been a short one, fast and very strange. A man called Turner had taken her away, out of Arizona, and had left her with Bobby and Beauvoir and the others. She remembered little about Turner, only that he was tall, with hard muscles and a hunted look. He’d taken her to New York. Then Beauvoir had taken her, along with Bobby, to New Jersey. There, on the fifty-third level of a mincome structure, Beauvoir had taught her about her dreams.
The dreams are real, he’d said, his brown face shining with sweat. He taught her the names of the ones she’d seen in dreams. He taught her that all dreams reach down to a common sea, and he showed her the way in which hers were different and the same. You alone sail the old sea and the new, he said.
She was ridden by gods, in New Jersey.
She learned to abandon herself to the Horsemen. She saw the loa Linglessou enter Beauvoir in the oumphor, saw his feet scatter the diagrams outlined in white flour. She knew the gods, in New Jersey, and love.
The loa had guided her, when she’d set out with Bobby to build her third, her current life. They were well matched, Angie and Bobby, born out of vacuums, Angie from the clean blank kingdom of Maas Biolabs and Bobby from the boredom of Barrytown . . .
Grande Brigitte touched her, without warning; she stumbled, almost fell to her knees in the surf, as the sound of the sea was sucked away into the twilit landscape that opened in front of her. The whitewashed cemetery walls, the gravestones, the willows. The candles.
Beneath the oldest willow, a multitude of candles, the twisted roots pale with wax.
Child, know me.
And Angie felt her there, all at once, and knew her for what she was, Mamman Brigitte, Mademoiselle Brigitte, eldest of the dead.
I have no cult, child, no special altar.
She found herself walking forward, into candleglow, a buzzing in her ears, as though the willow hid a vast hive of bees.
My blood is vengeance.
Angie remembered Bermuda, night, a hurricane; she and Bobby had ventured out into the eye. Grande Brigitte was like that. The silence, the sense of pressure, of unthinkable forces held momentarily in check. There was nothing to be seen, beneath the willow. Only the candles.
"The loa . . . I can’t call them. I felt something . . . I came looking . . ."
You are summoned to my reposoir. Hear me. Your father drew vévés in your head: he drew them in a flesh that was not flesh. You were consecrated to Ezili Freda. Legba led you into the world to serve his own ends. But you were sent poison, child, a coup-poudre . . .