All Tomorrow's Parties bt-3 Page 22

  He knew this through the pain in his side, which felt like a white-hot ax blade between his ribs; he knew it through his shock (he was literally in shock in a number of ways) at discovering Chevette (this version of Chevette, with really different hair, more the way he'd always wished she'd wear it). He knew it in the dark that followed the report, the dark that followed the death (he was pretty sure) of whoever the man was who'd gone after Chevette, the man he'd decked, the man who'd gotten up and, it felt like, driven Rydell's broken rib halfway through his diaphragm. He knew it, and he held on to it, for the very specific reason that it meant the scarf was a trained professional, and not just some espontaneo in a bar.

  Rydell knew, in those first instants of darkness, that he had a chance: as long as the scarf was a pro, he had a chance. A drunk, a crazy, any ordinary perp, in a pitch-dark bar, that was a crapshoot. A pro would move to minimize the random factor.

  Which was considerable, by the sound of it, the remaining crowd, and maybe Chevette as well, screaming and heaving and struggling to get out the door. That was bad, Rydell knew, and easily fatal; he'd been a squarebadge at concerts, and had seen bodies peeled off crowd barriers.

  He stood his ground, nursing the pain in his side as best he could, and waited for the scarf to make a move.

  Where was Rei Toei? She should've shown up in the dark like a movie marquee, but no.

  And zooming past Rydell's shoulder, toward where he'd last seen the scarf, there she was, more comet than pixie, and casting serious light.

  She circled the scarf's head twice, fast, and Rydell saw him bat at her with the gun. Just a ball of silver light, moving fast enough to leave trails on Rydell's retina. The scarf ducked, as she shot straight in at his eyes; he spun and ran to the left. Rydell watched as the light expanded slightly, to whiz like cold, pale ball lightning around the perimeter of the dark bar, people moaning and gasping, screaming as she shot past. Past the struggling knot at the door, where several lay unconscious on the floor, and still no sign of Chevette.

  But then the Rei-sphere swung in and down, and Rydell spotted Chevette on her hands and knees, crawling in the direction of the door. He ran over to her as best he could, his side feeling like it was about to split; bent, grabbed her, pulled her up. She started to struggle.

  'It's me, he said, feeling the complete unreality of seeing her again, here, this way, 'Rydell.

  'What the fuck are you doing here, Rydell?

  'Getting out.

  The blue flash and the nail-gun f-wut were simultaneous, but it seemed to Rydell that the flick of the slug, past his head, preceded it. In immediate reply, one tight white ball of light after another was hurled past him from behind. From the projector, he realized, and likely straight into the scarf's eyes.

  He grabbed Chevette under the arm and hustled her across the floor, adrenaline flooding the pain in his side. The stream of projected light, behind him, was just enough to show him the wall to the right of the door. He hoped it was plywood, and none too thick, as he pulled the switchblade from his pocket, popped it, and drove the blade in overhand, just at eye level. It punched through, up to the handle, and he yanked it sideways and down, hearing an odd little sizzle of parting wood fiber. He made it down to waist height, twisted it, back to the left, and three-quarters of the way up the other side before he heard the glasslike tink of the ceramic snapping.

  'Kick. Here, he said, striking the center of his cutout with the stub of the blade. 'Brace up against me. Kick!

  And she did. She could kick like a mule, Chevette. The section gave way with her second try, and he was boosting her up and through, trying not to scream at the pain. He was never sure how he made it through himself, but he did, expecting any second one of those subsonics would find him.

  There were people unconscious, outside the door, and other people kneeling, trying to help them.

  'This way, he said, starting to limp in the direction of the ramp and the Lucky Dragon. But she wasn't with him. He swung around, saw her headed in the opposite direction. 'Chevette!

  He went after her but she didn't slow down. 'Chevette!

  She turned. Her right eye swelling, bruised, swimming with tears; the left wide and gray and crazy now. As if she saw him but didn't register who it was she saw. 'Rydell?

  And all this time he'd thought about her, remembered her, having her there in front of him was something completely different: her long straight nose, the line of her jaw, the way he knew her lips looked in profile.

  'It's okay, he said, which was absolutely all he could think of to say.

  'It's not a dream?

  'No, he said.

  'They shot Carson. Somebody shot him. I saw somebody shoot him.

  'Who was he? Why'd he hit you?

  'He was- She broke off, her front teeth pressing into her lower lip. 'Somebody I lived with. In LA.

  'Huh, Rydell said, all he could manage around the idea that the scarf had just shot Chevette's new boyfriend.

  'I mean I wasn't with him. Not now. He was following me, but, Jesus, Rydell, why'd that guy… Just walked up and shot him!

  Because he was going after me, Rydell thought. Because he wanted to wail on me and I'm supposed to be theirs. But Rydell didn't say that. 'The guy with the gun, he said, instead, 'he'll be looking for me. He's not alone. That means you don't want to be with me when he finds me.

  'Why's he looking for you?

  'Because I've got something- But he didn't; he'd left the projector in the bar.

  'You were looking for me, back there?

  I've been looking for you since you walked out. I've been working up and down the face of the waking world, every last day, with a tiny little comb, looking for you. And each day shook out empty, never, never you. And he heard in memory the sound those rocks made, punching into the polymer behind the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. Pointless, pointless. 'No. I'm working. Private investigation for a man named Laney.

  She didn't believe him. 'Carson followed me up here. I didn't want to be with him. Now you. What is this?

  Laney says it's the end of the world. 'I'm just here, Chevette. You're just here. I gotta go now-

  'Where?

  'Back in the bar. I left something. It's important.

  'Don't go back there!

  'I have to.

  'Rydell, she began, starting to shake, 'you're… you're- And looked down at her open hands, the palms dark with something. And he saw that it was blood, and knew that it would be the boyfriend's, that she'd crawled through that. She started to sob, and wiped her palms down her black jeans, trying to get it off.

  'Mr. Rydell?

  The man with the tanto, carrying Rydell's duffel in the crook of his arm as though it were a baby.

  'Mr. Rydell, I don't think it would be advisable for you to attempt to leave the bridge. A watch has almost certainly been posted, and they will shoot you rather than permit the possibility of your escape. The pallid glare of the fluorescents chained overhead winked in the round lenses; this lean and concise man with perfectly blank, perfectly circular absences where eyes should be. 'Are you with this young woman?

  'Yes, Rydell said.

  'We must start toward Oakland, the man said, handing Rydell the duffel, the solid weight of the projector. Rydell hoped he'd gotten the power cable as well. 'Otherwise, they will slip past and cut us off.

  Rydell turned to Chevette. 'Maybe they didn't see us together. You should just go.

  'I wouldn't advise that, the man said. 'I saw you together. They likely did as well.

  Chevette looked up at Rydell. 'Every time you come into my life, Rydell, I wind up in … She made a face.

  'Shit, Rydell finished for her.

  54. SOME THINGS NEVER HAPPEN

  THE Gunsmith Cats alarm watch taped to the wall of Laney's box brings him home from the Walled City. It buzzes to announce the Suit's impending arrival. The Suit has no watch of his own but is relentlessly punctual, his rounds timed to the clocks of the subway, which are set in turn by rad
io, from an atomic clock in Nagoya.

  Laney tastes blood. It is a long time since he has brushed his teeth, and they feel artificial and ill-fitting, as though in his absence they have been replaced with a stranger's. He spits into a bottle kept for this purpose and considers attempting the journey to the restroom. Importance of grooming. He feels the stubble on his cheeks, calculating the effort required to remove it. He could request that the Suit obtain an electric disposable, but really he prefers a blade. He is one of those men who has never grown a beard, not even briefly. (And now, some small voice, one always best ignored, suggests: he never will.)

  He hears the old man, in the next box, say something in Japanese, and knows that the Suit has arrived. He wonders what model the old man is building now, and sees, in his mind's eye, with hallucinatory clarity, the finishing touches being put on a model of Cohn Laney.

  It is a 'garage' kit, this Laney kit, a limited run produced for only the most serious of enthusiasts, the otaku of plastic model kits, and as such it is molded from styrene of a quite nauseous mauve. The plastic used in garage kits tends to uniformly ghastly shades, as the enthusiast-manufacturers know that no kit, assembled, will ever remain unpainted.

  The Laney the old man is detailing is an earlier Laney, the Laney of his days in LA, when he worked as a quantitative analyst for Slitscan, a tabloid television show of quite monumental viciousness: this Laney wears Padanian designer clothing and sports a very expensive pair of sunglasses, the frames of which are even now being picked out in silver by the old man's narrowest sable, scarcely more than a single hair.

  But this waking dream is broken now by the advent of the Suit's head, his hair like the molded pompadour of some archaic mannequin. Laney feels, rather than sees, the precision with which the Suit's black eyeglass frames have been most recently mended, and as the Suit crawls in, beneath the flap of melon blanket, Laney smells the rancid staleness the Suit's clothing exudes. It is strange that any odor produced by a warm body should suggest intense cold, but the Suit's somehow does.

  The Suit is bringing Laney more of the blue syrup, more Regain, several large chocolate bars laden with sucrose and caffeine, and two liters of generic cola. The Suit's painted shirtfront seems faintly self-luminous, like the numerals of a diver's watch glimpsed far down in the depth of a lightless well, a sacrificial cenote perhaps, and Laney finds himself adrift for just an instant in fragments of some half-remembered Yucatan vacation.

  Something is wrong, Laney thinks; something is wrong with his eyes, because now the Suit's luminous shirt glows with the light of a thousand suns, and all the rest is black, the black of old negatives. And still somehow he manages to give the Suit two more of the untraceable debit chips, and even to nod at the Suit's tense little salaryman bow, executed kneeling, amid sleeping bags and candy wrappers, and then the Suit is gone, and the glare of his shirt, surely that was just some artifact of whatever process this is that Laney is here to pursue.

  * * *

  LANEY drinks half of one of the bottles of cough syrup, chews and swallows a third of one of the candy bars, and washes this down with a swallow of the lukewarm cola.

  When he closes his eyes, even before he puts the eyephones on, he seems to plunge into the flow of data.

  Immediately he is aware of Libia and Paco, directing him. They do not bother to speak or to present, but he knows them now by a certain signature, a style of navigation. He lets them take him where they will, and of course he is not disappointed.

  A lozenge opens before him.

  He is looking down into what he takes to be Harwood's office, in San Francisco, at Harwood seated behind a vast dark desk littered with architectural models and stacks of printout. Harwood holding a telephone handset.

  'It's an absurd launch, Hardwood says, 'but then it's an insane service. It works because it's redundant, understand? It's too dumb not to work.

  Laney does not hear the reply, and takes this to mean that Libia and Paco have hacked a security camera in the ceiling of Harwood's office. The audio is ambient sound, not a phone tap.

  Now Harwood rolls his eyes.

  'People are fascinated by the pointlessness of it. That's what they like about it. Yes, it's crazy, but it's fun. You want to send your nephew in Houston a toy, and you're in Paris, you buy it, take it to a Lucky Dragon, and have it re-created, from the molecules up, in a Lucky Dragon in Houston… What? What happens to the toy you bought in Paris? You keep it. Give it away. Eviscerate it with your teeth, you tedious, literal-minded bitch. What? No, I didn't. No, I'm sorry Noriko, that must be an artifact of your translation program. How could you imagine I'd say that? Harwood stares straight ahead, stunned with boredom. 'Of course I want to give the interview. This is an exclusive, after all. And you were my first choice. Harwood smiles as he calms the journalist, but the smile vanishes the instant she begins to ask her next question.

  'People are frightened of nanotechnology, Noriko. We know that. Even in Tokyo, seventeen-point-eight of your markedly technofetishistic populace refuses to this day to set foot in a nanotech structure. Here on the coast, I'd point to the example of Malibu, where there's been a very serious biotech accident, but one which is entirely unrelated to nanotech. It's actually being cleaned up with a combination of three smart algae, but everyone's convinced that the beaches are alive with invisible nanobots waiting to crawl up your disagreeable pussy. What? 'Unfriendly cat'? No. There's something wrong with your software, Noriko. And I do hope you're only writing this down, because we negotiated the interview on a nonrecorded basis. If any of this ever turns up in any recorded form at all, you'll not be getting another. What? Good. I'm glad you do. Harwood yawned, silently. 'One last question, then.

  Harwood listens, pursing his lips.

  'Because Lucky Dragon is about convenience. Lucky Dragon is about being able to purchase those things you need, really need, when you need them, twenty-four seven. But Lucky Dragon is also about fun. And people are going to have fun with these units. We've done enough research that we know that we don't really know what, exactly, Lucky Dragon customers will find to do with this technology, but that's all part of the fun. Harwood explored the recesses of his left nostril with the nail of his little finger but seemed to find nothing of interest. 'Blow me, he said. 'Inflate'? I don't think so, Noriko, but I'd have that software checked, if I were you. 'Bye. Harwood puts the phone down, stares straight ahead. It rings. He picks it up, listens. Frowns.

  'Why doesn't that surprise me? Why doesn't that surprise me in the least? He looks, to Laney, as if he's on the verge of laughing. 'Well. You can try. You can certainly try. Please do. But if you can't, then he'll kill you. All of you. Every last one. But I shouldn't worry about that, should I? Because I've got your brochure here, and it's really a wonderful brochure, printed in Geneva, spare no expense in presentation; full-color, heavy stock, and it assures me that I've hired the best, the very best. And I really do believe that you are the best. We did shop comparatively. But I also know that he is what he is. And God help you.

  Harwood hangs up.

  Laney feels Libia and Paco tugging at him, urging him elsewhere.

  He wishes that he could stay here, with Harwood. He wishes that he and Harwood could sit opposite one another across that desk, and share their experience of the nodal apprehension. He would love, for instance, to hear Harwood's interpretation of the node of 1911. He would like to be able to discuss the Lucky Dragon nanofacsimile launch with Harwood. He imagines himself sending a replica of the garage kit Laney-though 'sending' isn't the word, here-but where, and to whom?

  Libia and Paco tug him to the place where that thing is growing, and he sees that it has changed. He wonders if Harwood has looked at it recently: the shape of a new world, if any world can be said to be new. And he wonders if he will ever have the chance to speak with Harwood.

  He doubts it.

  Some things never happen, he reminds himself.

  But this one always does, says the still small voice of mortalit
y.

  Blow me, Laney tells it.

  55. BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

  LATER Fontaine would remember that when he woke, hearing the sound at his door, he thought not of his Smith&Wesson but of the Russian chain gun, plastered away beneath gypsum filler and gauze some four months earlier, out of sight and out of mind.

  And he would wonder about why that was, that he'd thought of that particular ugly thing as he became conscious of something clicking urgently against the glass of the shop door.

  'Fontaine! A sort of stage whisper.

  'Spare me, Fontaine said, sitting up. He rubbed his eyes and squinted at the luminous hands of a soulless black Japanese quartz alarm, a gift of sorts from Clarisse, who liked to point out that Fontaine was frequently late, particularly with the child support, in spite of owning such a great many old watches.

  He'd gotten about an hour's sleep.

  'Fontaine! Female, yes, but not Clarisse.

  Fontaine put his trousers on, slid his feet into his cold clammy shoes, and picked up the Kit Gun. 'I'll say it was self-defense, he said, glancing back to see his mystery boy sprawled whale-like on the camping pad, snoring again but softly.

  And out through the shop, where he made out the face of Skinner's girl, though somewhat the worse for wear, really major serious shiner going there, and looking anxious indeed.

  'It's me! Chevette! Rapping on his glass with something metal.

  'Don't break my damn window, girl. Fontaine had the gun out of sight, by his side, as was his habit when answering the door, and he saw now that she was not alone; two white men behind her, the one a big, brown-haired, cop-looking person, and the other reminding him of a professor of music known decades before, in Cleveland. This latter causing Fontaine a prickling of neck hair, though he couldn't have said exactly why. A very still man, this one.

  'Chevette, he said, 'I'm sleeping.

  'We need help.

  ' 'We' who, exactly?

  'It's Rydell, she said. 'You remember?