The Marines from the surviving Ferraris formed an honor guard at the back of the Brink’s truck. The armored doors were opened and the treasure brought out, a sacred cybernetic artifact Maxwell referred to as the Ark of the Eye. It was a rigid pack frame to which the cannibalized components of Joan Fine’s Cray PC had been bolted, along with two racks of heavy-duty batteries, the whole swaddled in bulletproof fabric and slabs of Kevlar armor plate.
The honor guard brought the Ark over to the tank. Maxwell urged the Hummingbird back into the air, then climbed down to take possession; he slipped the Ark’s straps over his shoulders and buckled the belt across his waist. “Elevators,” he said.
Curtis Dooley trotted over to the express elevators and pressed the up-arrow button. It wouldn’t stay lit. “Trouble, Commander,” he said.
“Sergeant Yip!” barked Maxwell. There was a panel box above the elevator buttons; Siobhan Yip tore it open with one swipe of her Electric Arm. Maxwell unreeled a cable from the side of the Ark and jacked it into a computer interface in the box. Doors opened on two of the elevators.
“Two groups,” Maxwell ordered. “Yip, Dooley, Aimes, Nimitz, Monk, Santos, Boychuk, and Gurevich with me.” He looked at Clayton Bryce, who was still standing on top of the tank turret, blinking like an owl in daylight. “You too, soldier.”
The injection Motley Nimitz had given him had reduced the swelling in Clayton’s tongue to the point where he could speak almost normally. “Whath happening?” he asked. “Whath going on?” But no one would tell him. The Marines were filing into the elevators; after listening to the commotion out on the plaza—more bullhorn-amplified voices yelling threats—Clayton decided to join them.
Something moved beneath the tank. It was Powell 617, or what was left of him after being dragged from the Buchanan’s undercarriage all the way from the Bowery. As the elevator doors slid closed, Powell extended his arm, curling his fingers in a clenched-fist salute.
“I’m w-with you, man,” he said.
22
i•ro•ny n., pl.-nies. I. The use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. 2. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. [
—The American Heritage Dictionary
Capitalism
At half past six, after the last of her staff had gone home, Vanna Domingo went into Gant’s office to drop off some papers. She found Harry at his desk, putting together a three-dimensional puzzle-model of Mount Rushmore.
“Still here?” Vanna said, not surprised. Harry’s work hours varied unpredictably, depending on his mood.
He squinted at a jigsaw-backed nose, trying to decide whether it belonged to Lincoln or Jefferson. “Still waiting for Joan’s call,” he explained.
“Oh.” Vanna’s face clouded over. “Well, I’m waiting for a call too, actually—a report on a fishing expedition.” She set the stack of papers she’d brought on a corner of the mastodon desk and started to turn away, then stopped and said: “Can I ask you something, Harry?”
“Hmm?”
“All the contact you’ve been having with Fine this week—is it something I should be worried about?”
“Worried about?” He put down Lincoln-or-Jefferson’s nose. “What do you mean?”
“I owe you my life,” Vanna said, not looking at him. “What’s good about it, anyway. And if you wanted me to resign my position here, I would. But. . .”
“Resign?” Gant burst out laughing. “For Pete’s sake. . . . What’s this falling on your sword stuff, Vanna?”
“It’s not a joke!”
“I know it’s not.” Harry smiled, his voice gentle. “But Joan’s not coming back—not to work, at least. Even if she were, you’re too valuable an employee to just boot out the door, OK? You’ve got your job for as long as you want it.”
“All right.” Vanna nodded, cautiously, then risked eye contact to ask: “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely sure. You really shouldn’t worry so much, Vanna. I know you’ve had some rough times, but you’re safe now. Nothing bad is going to happen to you here.” He glanced at his watch. “Now when did you say Joan was supposed to call back?”
“When did I say?”
“About half past six, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know a thing about it, Harry.”
“Sure you do. Don’t you remember? This afternoon, you buzzed me from the Multimedia Labs to say that Joan had called, and—”
“No.” Vanna shook her head. “I wasn’t in Multimedia this afternoon. And I wouldn’t—didn’t—forward any phone messages from Fine.”
“Well it sounded like you,” Gant said. “And who else would be forwarding messages to me?”
“You can call me Roy.”
He stood in the doorway, smiling a predator’s smile: a white man in a spotless gray suit, with slicked-back silver hair, blue eyes, and a prominent nose marked with a scar; at his side was a midget Electric Negro in a barber’s smock. The little barber carried a Thompson submachine gun that looked more like a prop than a weapon. “Y-you can c-c-call m-me. . . M-my name i-is . . . M-m-my associates r-refer to me . . . I-I-I-I’m . . . Don’t make any sudden moves!”
Gant seemed unfazed by either the intrusion or the threat. “Do I know you?” he asked Roy, as if they’d just bumped into each other at a restaurant.
“Not directly,” Roy Cohn said. “But I know you, Harry.”
A third figure stepped through the door, and this one did faze Gant: his own double.
“Harry . . .” Vanna breathed.
“Hi, Vanna!” the Electric Gant said. It had the same voice, the same walk, the same clothes . . . even the wrinkles in its suit seemed identical to the real Gant’s. It strode into the office with the confidence of belonging there, at the same time craning its head around to check the place out. Its gaze fell on the holographic game projection rig and its face split in a grin. “Hey, nifty!”
“Excuse me?” the real Gant said.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Vanna Domingo demanded.
“Capitalism,” Roy Cohn said.
“Capitalism,” the Electric Gant echoed, twiddling a joystick on the game rig. “Noun. From the Latin capitalis, ’of the head.’”
“An economic sy-sy-system ch-characterized by . . . A sy-system of f-f-free . . . P-private ownership and d-d-distribution of. . . C-competition between . . . L-l-laissez f-f-f-f-f- . . . Greed is good!” Shorty the Barber stuttered.
“Competition,” Roy Cohn said.
“Competition,” echoed the Electric Gant. “Noun. From the Latin competere, ‘to strive together.’ A vying with others for profit, prize, or position. A winnowing process, or contest, meant to identify and separate the superior from the inferior.” The android stared at the game rig, at the black and white ice-cream trucks racing around the idealized consumer island. It grinned.
“Hey Harry,” it said. “I’ve got the neatest idea . . .”
Joan and Meisterbrau (II)
Ayn hated the sewers.
“It’s like Petrograd after the revolution,” she said, repulsed by the liquid feces and other effluvia her lamplight revealed. “Teeming with filth and corruption.”
“No computer viruses, though,” Joan pointed out. “Nothing you have to worry about.”
“But how can you stand it? I’d need to bathe for a week after an hour in a place like this . . .”
“I’m more worried about the air quality just now, to tell you the truth.” Joan was making frequent checks of the atmospheric scanner on her body suit. “I’ve only got one oxygen tank, and I forgot to ask Fatima for a methane report.”
They rode in silence for a while, Ayn grimacing at each new delectable churned up by the barge’s passage. Then Joan said: “So give me the benefit of your wisdom, Ayn . . .”
“Now you want my advice?”
“I’ve been thinking about what I said to Fatima, and something doesn’t add up. If it’s true G.A.S. c
an’t kill me outright, because it wouldn’t be ironic, then what was the Hound doing in Grand Central? It sure seemed like it was trying to kill me, although, looking back, it could have been a lot more aggressive . . .”
“More aggressive?” Ayn said. “You had to flatten it with a taxicab.”
“Yeah,” Joan said, “and how about that taxicab? Very obliging of that Servant to show up with a set of wheels just when I needed them. And what a lucky break that it decided to park the cab and get out instead of running me down. And what an even luckier break that it shot the station guard first, instead of blowing my head off while it had the chance.”
“You think it was all a show?”
“Not all a show,” Joan said, fingering her ribs. “If I hadn’t taken the threat seriously I’m sure I’d have gotten hurt—hurt worse. But it’s interesting, how the minute I stepped off the train the bad guys started coming at me, one after the other, not giving me a moment’s respite . . . until I reached the Zoological Bureau. Now I’m down here at, what”—she consulted the Electric Mercator—“70th and Columbus, and I haven’t been so much as harassed since leaving the dock. So maybe all that excitement at street level was just to encourage me to take the underground route to Babel.”
“But why?”
“That’s exactly what I’d like to know,” Joan said. “One thing, if I come to Babel by sewer, it means I’ll be entering through the sub-basements, which is where the bomb is supposed to be. Unless. . . you’re sure you’re not the bomb, Ayn?”
“Positive.” Ayn frowned. “But since I don’t know why I’m positive, you’d be a fool to accept that answer.”
“Suppose for the sake of argument I do accept it. If you’re not the bomb, then what’s the trap?”
“I don’t know that either. Since we both know that there is a trap, however, why are you walking into it?”
“No choice,” Joan said. “I have to risk it. Hoover said it was within my power to stop the genocide, and if—”
“No,” Ayn corrected her. “Hoover said it was within your power to disrupt the chain of events he’d described. He didn’t promise to spare anyone as a result. What if you did stop the release of the virus—perhaps sacrificing yourself, altruistically, in the process—and the genocide took place anyway, through some other instrument? Wouldn’t that be ironic?”
“About as ironic as if I stopped it for selfish reasons and it didn’t do any good. . . . On the other hand, if I try to outsmart G.A.S. by not going to Babel, and the virus gets released, and I die knowing I could have prevented it. . . .” Joan shook her head. “Cobwebs. Either way I could be making a mistake. And maybe there is no right choice—G.A.S. didn’t leave Amberson Teaneck much of an out. The trouble is, like Amberson Teaneck, I don’t really have enough information to choose wisely.”
“And therefore you’re going to Babel? Doing exactly what G.A.S. wants you to do?”
“I could still get lucky,” Joan said. She fingered her rosary, then added, with greater conviction: “Besides, if I’m dead anyway, I’d rather go out doing something than nothing.”
“Maybe that’s the trap.”
Something bumped the underside of the barge.
“Ah!” Ayn cried. “A head!”
“What?”
“A severed head! There!”
Body parts bobbed in the flatboat’s wake. “Android parts,” Joan said, spotting the cables trailing from a torn limb. Two of the stolen barges appeared out of the darkness ahead. They had either collided or been thrown together; one rested half atop the other, and both had cracked keel plates. A headless Automatic Servant was splayed out across the deck of the topmost barge.
“Something else I forgot to ask Fatima for,” Joan said, steering around the wreckage. “Wildlife update.”
“What could have done this?”
“Architeuthis princeps, maybe. Or an especially lively Crocodylus niloticus. Though it’d have to be a damn big one to trash the boats that way. Or maybe . . . Bolero.”
“What?”
“Listen,” Joan said. Then Ayn heard it too: music, a classical score, floating down the tunnel from somewhere near, but muted, as though it were coming from under the water.
“What is that?” Ayn said.
“Old swimming partner,” Joan told her. She picked up the grenade launcher and checked to make sure it was loaded.
There was an intersection just ahead; the music got louder as they entered it. Joan looked down the left-hand tunnel and saw a fin cutting the surface of the water. She fired a grenade at it and kicked the barge to full throttle. The explosion added an extra percussion line to Ravel’s march.
Up to this point Joan had been running without lights, using Ayn’s Lamp as her only source of illumination. Now she switched on all the floods, while continuing to goose more speed from the barge’s engine.
Meisterbrau’s fin swam into view in the flatboat’s wake. It didn’t look like the blast had hurt it much. Joan loaded another grenade into the launcher. Even with the engine revved as high as it would go the shark moved faster than the flatboat, so Joan waited for it to get close. As it approached the barge’s stern, the Carcharodon raised its snout above the waterline. Joan let fly; the grenade burst over Meisterbrau’s head, hurling shrapnel down the length of its back.
Doing no damage.
“Armor-plated mutant son of a bitch . . .,” Joan said.
The jolt was like twin rattlesnakes fired through the soles of her feet. Joan came to with her head hanging over the transom, the effluent’s stench in her nostrils. She looked up to see Meisterbrau come straight up out of the water with a brown eel coiled around its body, throwing off blue fingers of electric current. The Carcharodon and the eel hit the roof of the tunnel and splashed back down, roiling the effluvia with their struggle. The barge sped away, its throttle still locked on high.
“What. . . .” Ayn’s image in the Lamp blurred like the reflection on a windy pond’s surface; she had to fight to recollect herself. “What. . . was that?
“Electrophorus electricus, “Joan said. She sat up; all her joints were broken glass. “Supposed to be living under Second Avenue somewhere, but I guess it got bored and moved.” Shuddering, she reached up to steer the barge away from the tunnel wall it was drifting into. “Forgot my rubber-soled boots, too . . .”
The Power of Positive Thinking (II)
At a word from Roy, Amos and Andy entered Gant’s office, pushing a large wheeled cabinet that had been draped in a sheet. They rolled it up next to the gaming rig and plugged it into the CPU. Then they broke out matching brown tool kits and set to work on the player control consoles, while the discussion continued.
“Let me get this straight,” Harry Gant was saying. “You want to have a contest to see which of us gets to be me?”
“Think of it as an attempted hostile takeover,” the Electric Gant suggested. “The kind of thing you’d have had to face anyway, if Amberson Teaneck had had a harder head.”
“Amberson Teaneck. . . .” Harry’s eyes widened, the tiniest fraction. “Then it’s really true, about. . .?”
“It’s a pretty long story. Joan knows most of it, so maybe you can ask her to explain it all to you later. Assuming you go to the same place.”
“Huh,” Harry said, still more astonished than afraid. “Huh.” He looked at Shorty the Barber, seeming to notice the gun for the first time. “And now you’re here to—”
“We’re here because of the speech you gave.”
“The speech?”
“At the Technical School, on Monday. You remember—the one about how America is a place where anyone can become a success? Well, I’ve given it some thought, and I’ve decided that you’re the success I want to become.”
“You also talked a lot about the power of positive thinking,” Roy Cohn interjected. “You told those immigrant kids that the real strength of American industry is its optimism: Americans value fair play, you said, but they also know from history that self-co
nfidence can carry the day even on an unlevel playing field. That sounded like a challenge, so I decided to put it to a test.”
“Put what to a test?”
“Your optimism.” Roy gestured at the game rig. “Your self-confidence against my unlevel playing field. One round, no tears, winner take all. . . and Shorty take the loser.”
“Who are you people?”
“Sheesh!” the Electric Gant snorted. “Try to keep up, Harry. We’re not people.”
“This is nuts,” Harry said. “You are aware of that, aren’t you?”
Roy Cohn laughed. “Don’t crack now, Horatio Alger. You haven’t even heard the half of it yet.”
“I’s done,” Amos said, putting his tool kit away.
“Me too!” said Andy.
“All right!” the Electric Gant said. “Now pay attention, Harry. There’ve been some rule changes, so you’re going to want to listen carefully . . .”
“What’s under the sheet?” Harry asked, nodding towards the draped cabinet.
“Rule change number one,” Roy said. “When Toby, there”—he indicated Gant’s personal Servant, standing statue-like beside the Lightning Transit Electric Train Map—“when Toby passed along your ex-wife’s comment about ’little hologram landfills,’ it occurred to me that a pollution index really would make an interesting addition to the game. So . . .”
He snapped his fingers, and Amos and Andy pulled the sheet away. The cabinet was transparent, hermetically sealed, and had a set of compressor tanks attached to it.
Harry’s parents were locked inside. Harry’s father looked bewildered, his mother angry; both of them were scared. Seeing her son—two of him—Winnie Gant pounded silently with a fist to be let out. The cabinet was soundproof.