All Tomorrow's Parties Page 20

“Honey!” she cried, grabbing Chevette by the shoulders. “Where have you been? We got all kinds of free drinks for our industry guests!”

  Maryalice clearly didn't remember Chevette having told her that she and Tessa weren't A&R people, but Chevette guessed that there was quite a lot, usually, that Maryalice didn't remember.

  “That's great,” Chevette said. “Have you seen Tessa? My friend I was here with? She's Australian—”

  “Up in the light booth with Saint Vitus, honey. She's getting Buell's whole performance on those little balloon things!” Maryalice beamed. Gave Chevette a big, lipstick-greasy kiss on the cheek and instantly forgot her, face going blank as she turned in what Chevette supposed would be the direction of the bar.

  But the light booth, now, she could see that: a sort of oversized matte-black crate tacked up against the angle of the wall, opposite the stage, with a warped plastic window running its length, through which she could see, quite plainly, the faces of Tessa and some bald-headed boy with mean-looking slitty black glasses. Just their two heads in there, like puppet heads. Reached, she saw, by an aluminum stepladder fastened to the wall with lengths of rusting pipe strap.

  Tessa had her own special glasses on, and Chevette knew she'd be seeing the output from God's Little Toy, adjusting angle and focus with her black glove. Creedmore had launched into another song, its tempo faster, and people were tapping their feet and bobbing up and down in time.

  Couple of men in those meshback caps, drinking beer out of cans, by that ladder, but she ducked under their arms and climbed up, ignoring the one who laughed and swatted her butt with the flat of his hand.

  Up through the square hole, her nose level with dusty, beer-soaked brown carpet. “Tessa. Hey.”

  “Chevette?” Tessa didn't turn, lost in the view in her glasses. “Where'd you go?”

  “I saw Carson,” Chevette said, climbing up through the hole. “I took off.”

  “This is amazing footage,” Tessa said. “The faces on these people. Like Robert Frank. I'm going to treat it as mono and grain it down—”

  “Tessa,” Chevette said, “I think we should get out of here.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” said the baldie, turning. He was wearing a sleeveless tube shirt and his upper arms were no thicker than Chevette's wrists, his bare shoulders looking fragile as the bones of a bird.

  “This is Saint Vitus,” Tessa said, as if absently bidding to forestall hostilities, attention elsewhere. “He does the lights in here, but he's the sound man at two other clubs on the bridge, Cognitive Dissidents and something else…” Tessa's hand dancing with itself in the black control glove.

  Chevette knew Cog Diss from before. “That's a dancer bar, Tessa,” she said.

  “We're going over there after this,” Tessa said. “He says it'll just be getting going, and it'll be a lot more interesting than this.”

  “Anything would,” Saint Vitus said with infinite weariness.

  “Blue Ahmed cut a single there,” Tessa said, “called ‘My War Is My War.’”

  “It sucked,” Chevette said.

  “You're thinking of the Chrome Koran cover,” said Saint Vitus, his voice dripping with contempt. “You've never heard Ahmed's version.”

  “How the fuck would you know?” Chevette demanded.

  “Because it was never released,” Saint Vitus declared smugly.

  “Well, maybe it fucking escaped,” Chevette said, feeling like she wanted to deck this diz-monkey, and thinking it might not be that hard to do, although you never knew what would happen if somebody tightened on dancer got really upset. All those stories about twelve-year-olds getting so dizzed they'd grab the bumper of a cop car and flip the whole thing, though these usually involved the kids' muscles popping out through their skins, which she sincerely hoped was impossible. Had to be: what Carson called urban legends.

  Creedmore's song ended with a steely clash of guitar that drew Chevette's attention to the stage. Creedmore looked completely tightened now, staring triumphantly out as though across a sea of faces in some vast stadium.

  The big guitarist unslung his red guitar and handed it to a boy with sideburns and a black leather vest, who passed him a black guitar with a skinnier body.

  “This here's called ‘Pine Box,’” Creedmore said, as the big guitarist began to play. Chevette couldn't catch the words as Creedmore began to sing, except that it sounded old and doleful and was about winding up in a pine box, by which she took him to mean a coffin, like what they used to bury people in, but she guessed it could just as easily apply to this sound booth she was stuck in here, with Tessa and this asshole. She looked around and saw an old chrome stool with its pad of upholstery split and taped over, so she planted herself on that and decided she was just going to keep quiet until Tessa had taped as much as she wanted of Creedmore's act. Then she'd see about getting them out of here.

  47. SAI SHING ROAD

  LIBIA and Paco have shown Laney to a barbershop in Sai Shing Road. He has arrived here, of course, with no knowledge of the route involved; Sai Shing is in the Walled City, and he is a visitor, not a resident. The Walled City's whereabouts, the conceptual mechanisms by which its citizens have opted to secede from the human datascape at large are the place's central and most closely held secret. The Walled City is a universe unto itself, a subversive rumor, the stuff of legend.

  Laney has been here before, although not to this specific construct, this barbershop, and he dislikes the place. Something in the underlying code of the Walled City's creation induces a metaphysical vertigo, and the visual representation is tediously aggressive, as though one were caught in some art school video production with infinitely high production values. Nothing is ever straightforward, in the Walled City; nothing is ever presented as written, but filtered instead through half a dozen species of carefully cultivated bit rot, as though the inhabitants were determined to express their massive attitude right down into the least fractal texture of the place. Where a clever website might hint at dirt, at wear, the Walled City luxuriates in apparent frank decay, in texture maps that constantly unravel, revealing of other textures, equally moth-eaten.

  This barbershop, for instance, is shingled from overlapping tiles of texture, so that they don't quite match up at their edges, deliberately spoiling any illusion of surface or place. And everything here is done in a palette of rain-wet Chinatown neon: pink, blue, yellow, pale green, and the authoritatively faded red.

  Libia and Paco depart immediately, leaving Laney to wonder how he, were he to bother, might choose to present himself in this environment: perhaps as a large cardboard carton?

  Klaus and the Rooster put an end to this surmise, however, abruptly appearing in two of the shop's four barber chairs. They look as he remembers them, except that Klaus now wears a black leather version of his snap-brim fedora, its brim turned up all around, and the Rooster somehow looks even more like one of Francis Bacon's screaming popes.

  “Whole new game here,” Laney opens.

  “How so?” Klaus appears to suck his teeth.

  “Harwood's had 5-SB. And you know it too, because those chilango kids of yours just told me. How long have you known?”

  “We operate on a need-to-know basis,” the Rooster begins, in full geek-pontificator mode, but Klaus cuts him off: “About ten minutes longer than you have. We're anxious to know what you make of it.”

  “It changes everything,” Laney says. “The way he's been successful all these years: the public relations empire, advertising, the rumors that he was pivotal in getting President Millbank elected, that he was behind the partition of Italy…”

  “I thought that was his girlfriend,” the Rooster says sullenly, “that Padanian princess—”

  “You mean he's only picking winners?” Klaus demands. “You're suggesting that he's in nodal mode and simply gets behind emerging change? If that's all it is, my friend, why aren't you one of the richest men in the world?”

  “It doesn't work that way,” Laney protests. �
�5-SB allows the apprehension of nodal points, discontinuities in the texture of information. They indicate emerging change, but not what that change will be.”

  “True,” agrees Klaus and purses his lips.

  “What I want to know,” Laney says, “what I need to know, and right now, is what Harwood is up to. He's sitting at the cusp of some unprecedented potential for change. He appears to be instrumental in it. Rei Toei is in it too, and this freelance people-eraser of Harwood's, and an out-of-work rent-a-cop… These people are about to change human history in some entirely new way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911—”

  “What happened in 1911?” the Rooster demands.

  Laney sighs. “I'm still not sure. It's complicated and I haven't had the time to really look at it. Madame Curie's husband was run over by a horse-drawn wagon, in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start there. But if Harwood is the strange attractor here, the crucial piece of weirdness things need to accrete around, and he's self-aware in that role, what is it he's trying to do that has the potential to literally change everything?”

  “We aren't positive,” the Rooster begins, “but—”

  “Nanotechnology,” Klaus says. “Harwood was a major player in Sunflower Corporation. A scheme to rebuild San Francisco. Very radical restructuring, employing nanotechnology along much the lines it was employed, post-quake, in Tokyo. That didn't fly, and, very oddly indeed, it looks to us as though your man Rydell was somehow instrumental in helping it not to fly, but that can wait. My point is that Harwood has demonstrated an ongoing interest in nanotechnology, and this has manifested most recently in a collaboration between Nanofax AG of Geneva—”

  “Harwood front,” the Rooster says, “run through a shell corporation in Antigua—”

  “Shut up,” and the Rooster does. “Between Nanofax AG of Geneva and the Lucky Dragon Corporation of Singapore. Lucky Dragon is a Harwood Levine client of course.”

  “Nanofax?”

  “Everything the name implies,” says Klaus, “and considerably less.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “Nanofax AG offers a technology that digitally reproduces objects, physically, at a distance. Within certain rather large limitations, of course. A child's doll, placed in a Lucky Dragon Nanofax unit in London, will be reproduced in the Lucky Dragon Nanofax unit in New York—”

  “How?”

  “With assemblers, out of whatever's available. But the system's been placed under severe legal constraints. It can't, for instance, reproduce functional hardware. And of course it can't, most particularly can't, reproduce functional nanoassemblers.”

  “I thought that they'd proven that didn't work anyway,” Laney says.

  “Oh no,” says the Rooster, “they just don't want it to.”

  “They who?”

  “Nation-states,” says the Rooster. “Remember them?”

  48. IN THE MOMENT

  RYDELL watched this man move ahead, in front of him, and felt something complicated, something he couldn't get a handle on, but something that came through anyway, through the ache in his side, the pain that grated there if he stepped wrong. He'd always dreamed of a special kind of grace, Rydell: of just moving, moving right, without thinking of it. Alert, relaxed, there. And somehow he knew that that was what he was seeing now, what he was following: this guy who was maybe fifty, and who moved, though without seeming to think about it, in a way that kept him in every bit of available shadow. Upright in his long wool coat, hands in pockets, he just moved, and Rydell followed, in his pain and the clumsiness that induced, but also in the pain somehow of his adolescent heart, the boy in him having wanted all these years to be something like this man, whoever and whatever he was.

  A killer, Rydell reminded himself, thinking of the weight lifter they'd left behind; Rydell knew that killing was not the explosive handshake exchange of movies, but a terrible dark marriage unto and perhaps (though he hoped not) even beyond the grave, as still his own dreams were sometimes visited by the shade of Kenneth Turvey, the only man he'd ever had to kill. Though he'd never doubted the need of killing Turvey, because Turvey had been demonstrating his seriousness with random shots through the door of a closet in which he'd locked his girlfriend's children. Killing anyone was a terrible and permanent thing to enter into, Rydell believed, and he also knew that violent criminals, in real life, were about as romantic as a lapful of guts. Yet here he was, doing the best he could to keep up with this gray-haired man, who'd just killed someone in a manner Rydell would've been unable to specify, but silently and without raising a sweat; who'd just killed someone the way another man might change his shirt or open a bottle of beer. And something in Rydell yearned so to be that, that, feeling it now, he blushed.

  The man stopped, in shadow, looking back. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” Rydell said, which was almost always what he said if anyone asked him that.

  “You are not ‘fine.’ You are injured. You may be bleeding internally.”

  Rydell halted in front of him, hand pressed to his burning side. “What did you do to that guy?”

  You couldn't have said that the man smiled, but the creases in his cheeks seemed to deepen slightly. “I completed the movement he began when he struck you.”

  “You stabbed him with something,” Rydell said.

  “Yes. That was the most elegant conclusion, under the circumstances. His unusual center of gravity made it possible to sever the spinal cord without contacting the vertebrae themselves.” This in a tone that someone might use to describe the discovery of a new but convenient bus route.

  “Show me.”

  The man's head moved, just a fraction. Some birdlike acuity. Light winked, reflected, in the round, gold-framed glasses. He reached into the open front of his long coat and produced, with a very peculiar and offhand grace, a blade curved, upswept, chisel-tipped. What they called a tanto, Rydell knew: the short version of one of those Japanese swords. The same light that had caught in the round lenses now snagged for an instant in a hair-fine line of rainbow along the curved edge and the angled tip, and then the man reversed the movement that had produced the knife. It vanished within the coat as though a segment of tape had been run backward.

  Rydell remembered being taught how you had to use something, anything, if someone was coming after you with a knife, and you were unarmed. If nothing else you were supposed to take off your jacket and roll it around your hands and wrists, to protect them. Now he imagined using the projector, in its bag, as a sort of shield, to ward off the knife he'd just seen, and the hopelessness of the idea actually struck him as funny.

  “Why did you smile?” the man asked.

  Rydell stopped smiling. “I don't think I could explain,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “I can't tell you that,” the man said.

  “I'm Berry Rydell,” Rydell said. “You saved my ass back there.”

  “But not your torso, I think.”

  “He might've killed me.”

  “No,” the man said, “he wouldn't have killed you. He would have rendered you helpless, taken you to a private location, and tortured you to extract information. Then he would have killed you.”

  “Well,” Rydell said, uneasy with the matter-of-factness here, “thanks.”

  “You are welcome,” said the man, with great gravity and not the least hint of irony.

  “Well,” Rydell said, “why did you do that, take him out?”

  “Because it was necessary, to complete the movement.”

  “I don't get it,” said Rydell.

  “It was necessary,” the man said. “There are a number of these men seeking you tonight. I'm uncertain of how many. They are mercenaries.”

  “Did you kill someone else, back there, last night? Where those patches of dried blood and Kil'Z are?”

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “And I'm safer with you than I am with these guys you say are mercs?”

  “I think so, yes,” the man
said, frowning, as though he took the question very seriously.

  “You kill anybody else in the past forty-eight hours?”

  “No,” said the man, “I did not.”

  “Well,” Rydell said, “I guess I'm with you. I'm sure not going to try to fight you.”

  “That is wise,” the man said.

  “And I don't think I could run fast enough, or very far, with this rib.”

  “That is true.”

  “So what do we do?” Rydell shrugged, instantly regretting it, his face contorting in a grimace of pain.

  “We will leave the bridge,” the man said, “and seek medical aid for your injury. I myself have a thorough working knowledge of anatomy, should it prove necessary.”

  “Unh, thanks,” Rydell managed. “If I could just buy some four-inch tape and some analgesic plasters at that Lucky Dragon, I could probably make do.” He looked around, wondering when he'd next see or be seen by the one with the scarf. He had a feeling the scarf was the one he'd really have to watch out for; he couldn't say why. “What if those mercs scope us leaving?”

  “Don't anticipate outcome,” the man said. “Await the unfolding of events. Remain in the moment.”

  In the moment, Rydell decided he knew for a fact his ass was lost. Just plain lost.

  49. RADON SHADOW

  FONTAINE finds the boy an old camping pad, left here by his children perhaps, and lays him back on this, still snoring. Removing the heavy eyephones he sees how the boy sleeps with his eyes half-open, showing the white; imagines watches ticking past, there, one after another. He covers him with an old sleeping bag whose faded flannel liner depicts mountains and bears, then takes his miso back to the counter to think.

  There is a faint vibration now, though whether of the shop's flimsy fabric, the bones of the bridge, or the underlying plates of the earth he cannot tell: but small sounds come from the shelves and cabinets as tiny survivors of the past register this new motion. A lead soldier, on one shelf, topples forward with a definitive clack, and Fontaine makes a mental note to buy more museum wax, a sticky substance meant to prevent this.