All Tomorrow's Parties Page 25

  She felt like she'd split in half, the part of her that was ragging Rydell for getting her into this kind of crazy shit again, and the part of her that just kept looking around and wanting to say: look at this, and how come I'm alive?

  But something started beeping, in Rydell's pocket, and he took out a pair of sunglasses, black frames with cheap chrome trim, and put them on. “Hello?” he said. “Laney?”

  She looked over as the one who'd talked Fontaine out of his gun opened the door, glass grating beneath it, and stepped in, looking exactly the same as when he'd left, except he had a long fresh scratch down the side of his face, where blood was beading. He took the skinny little revolver out of his pocket and handed it to Fontaine, holding it sideways with his hand around the thing you put the bullets in. “Thank you,” he said.

  Fontaine brought the gun up beneath his nose, sniffed at it, and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “I've adjusted the windage,” the man said, whatever that meant. “No need now to compensate for the pull.”

  Fontaine clicked the bullet-thing out and ejected five empty brass cartridges into his palm. He looked at these, looked up at the man. “How'd you do?”

  “Three,” the man said.

  “I think they've got one,” Rydell was saying. “There's this kid here on it. You want me to try the cable? You talk to her, Laney? She told me you used to talk with her a lot…” Rydell looked idiotic, standing there talking to the air in front of him, one hand up to hold the ear bead in, the other letting that crazy-ass gun hang down. She wished he'd put it somewhere, back in the wall, anywhere.

  “Come on, Rydell,” she said, but then she saw that God's Little Toy was up against the ceiling in the front of the shop, watching her. “Tessa? Tessa, you hear me?”

  There was a burst of squawky static, like a parrot trying to talk.

  “Tessa?”

  “I'm sorry,” the man in the long coat said. “The men who attacked you communicate on a number of specific channels. I am employing a jammer at those frequencies.” He looked at God's Little Toy. “This device's control frequencies are unaffected, but voice communication is currently impossible.”

  “Tessa!” Chevette waved frantically at the balloon, but it only continued to stare at her with its primary lens.

  “What do you mean, burn it?” she, heard Rydell say. “Now? Right now?” Rydell pulled the sunglasses off. “They're setting fire to the bridge.”

  “Fire?” She remembered Skinner's caution around that, how careful people were with cooking gas, matches; how a lit butt thrown down could earn you a broken nose.

  But Rydell had the sunglasses on again. “I thought you said to get out? What do you mean, leave her? Damn, Laney, why don't you make some sense for once? Why—Laney? Hey?” She saw Rydell's tension as he took off the glasses. “Listen up. Everybody. We're leaving now. Laney says they're setting fire to the bridge.” Rydell bent, wincing, and opened his bag, hauling this silver thing out. She saw it glint in the light from outside. Like a big steel thermos. He pulled out some coiled cables and tossed her a length. “Find a socket.” He had another cable in his hand now and was standing over the boy with the old military eye-phone rig. “Hey. Kid? We have to borrow the notebook. Hear me?” The helmet came up and seemed to regard him blindly but sentiently, like the head of a giant termite. Rydell reached down and took the notebook, unhooking the lead to the helmet. Chevette saw the boy's mouth close. The notebook's screen showed the black dial of a clock. No, Chevette saw, it was an old-fashioned watch, enlarged to the size of a baby's face.

  Rydell studied the two ends of the cable he held, then tried a socket on the back of the notebook. Another. It fit. Chevette had found an outlet, set crookedly into one of Fontaine's walls. She plugged the cable in and passed Rydell the other end. He was plugging the cable from the notebook into the silver canister. He plugged the power cable in beside it. She thought she heard it start to hum.

  And a girl was there, pale and slim, glowing with her own light, naked for an instant between them. And then she wore Skinner's jacket, faded horsehide. Black jeans, a black sweatshirt, lug-soled runners. Everything cleaner and somehow sharper than what Chevette wore, but otherwise identical.

  “I am Rei Toei,” the girl said. “Berry Rydell, you must leave the bridge now. It is burning.”

  “You said that you knew my name,” the man in the overcoat said, the long thin scratch on his face black in the light she gave off. “In the tavern.”

  “Konrad,” the glowing girl said, “with a ‘K.’”

  The man's eyebrows rose, above his round gold glasses. “And how do you know that?”

  “I know many things, Konrad,” the girl said, and as she said it, became, for a few seconds, another girl, blonde, the irises of her blue eyes ringed with black.

  The man seemed carved from some incredibly dense wood, heavy and inert, and Chevette thought for some reason of dust motes floating in sunlight in an old museum, something she'd seen once but could not remember where or when. “Lise,” he said, a name as if dredged from some deep place of pain. “Yesterday. I dreamed I saw her, in Market Street.”

  “Many things are possible, Konrad.”

  Rydell had taken a pink fanny pack from his duffel and was strapping it around his waist. It had a grinning cartoon dragon screened on the front. As Chevette watched, he zipped it open and unfolded a pink bib, which he fastened around his neck. The bib said LUCKY DRAGON SECURITY in square black letters. “What's that?” Chevette asked him.

  “Bulletproof,” Rydell said. He turned to the glowing girl. “Laney says I should leave the projector here. But that means we leave you—”

  “That is what I want,” she said. “We are about to find our way to the heart of Harwood's plan. And change it. And change everything.” She smiled at Rydell then, and Chevette felt a twist of jealousy.

  Chevette became aware of noise approaching, the revving and whining of overtaxed electric engines. There was a crashing of metal on wood, and Fontaine sprang away from the door. A three-wheeled ATV slammed to a halt outside, Tessa straddling its seat behind a moon-faced boy who wore a black meshbacked cap, backward, and a black T-shirt. Tessa was wearing her input glasses and had a control glove on either hand. She pulled off the glasses and pushed hair back from her eyes. “Come on, Chevette.”

  “Get off the damn trike, honey,” the round-faced boy said. “Don't have a lot of turning radius in here.”

  Tessa hopped off the bike and stepped into the shop, looking up at God's Little Toy. “I'm not getting any audio,” she said.

  The boy punched the engines mounted in the ATV's rear hubs, reversing one. The trike lurched around and back, then forward, turning so that he faced back toward San Francisco. “Come on, honey,” he said.

  “I'm picking up flames on two cameras,” Tessa said. “This sucker's on fire.”

  “Time to go,” Rydell said, putting his hand on Chevette's shoulder. “Mr. Fontaine, you get you a ride here with Chevette.”

  “I'm not going anywhere, son,” Fontaine said.

  “It's on fire, Mr. Fontaine.”

  “It's where I live.”

  “Come on, Rydell,” Chevette said, grabbing him by his waistband.

  Tessa had climbed back on, behind her meshbacked driver, and was putting her input glasses on. “Jesus,” Tessa said, “I don't believe the angles I'm getting…”

  Chevette tugged Rydell through the door and climbed on the back of the ATV, sort of sidesaddle, leaving room for Rydell. “Wait,” Rydell said, “we can't just leave them here…”

  “We'? Hey, boy, I'm not carrying you—” But the moon-faced boy saw the chain gun then and stopped.

  “Go on,” said Fontaine, who stood now with his arm around the shoulder of the boy who'd worn the helmet, whose eyes regarded Rydell with a sort of animal calm. “Go on. We'll be okay here.”

  “I'm sorry,” Rydell said. “I'm sorry about your shop…”

  “Your ass be sorry, you don't g
et out of here.”

  Chevette heard a woman start screaming, toward San Francisco. She yanked his waistband, hard. The fly button popped off his khakis. He climbed on the back of the ATV opposite her, hanging on with one hand, the chain gun in the other.

  The last she saw of the glowing girl, she was saying something to the man she'd called Konrad. Then Tessa's meshback popped it and they took off toward the city. “Good-bye, Fontaine,” Chevette shouted, but she doubted he ever heard her.

  Remembering the night of a hill fire above the sharehouse, the birds in the brush all around the house waking in the dark, sensing it. All their voices.

  And now through the plywood patchwork overhead she hears it too: the drumming of conflagration.

  60. RATS KNOW

  FONTAINE knows the bridge is burning when he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then another, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly by the bridge's host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and surgical tubing. These bridge slingshots are lethal not only to rats, their users favoring balls of dense damp clay, a trick held over from the Middle Ages and not to be underestimated.

  Fontaine watches the rats flash past and sighs. He has a fire ax here, somewhere, salvage from a tug sank in China Basin in 2003, and an extinguisher too, but he can't imagine these will be of much use, although chopping a hole in the back wall and falling into the bay is a possibility. He wonders if there actually are sharks there, as the bridge children like to believe. He knows for a fact there are mutant fish, warped, it is said, by oxides leaching off the piers of the cable towers.

  But Fontaine has survived many disasters, both municipal and marital, and there is in him that which believes, against all odds or hope, that all will simply, somehow, be well. Or that in any case there is usually not much to be done about certain things, or in any case not by him.

  So, now, rather than digging through the closet, where he remembers, possibly, putting that fire ax, he picks up his push broom and begins tidying the front of the shop, sweeping as much of the glass as possible into a single drift beside the door. Glass, he reflects, sweeping, is one of those substances that takes up relatively little space until you break it. But it is also, he recalls being told, if considered over truly cosmic stretches of time, a liquid. All the glass in every pane in every window, everywhere, is in the infinitely slow process of melting, sagging, sliding down, except it would be unlikely that any one pane survive the millennia required to be reduced to a solid puddle.

  While outside the rats are being joined by fleeing humans, as diverse a company of them as only the bridge can offer. He hopes that Clarisse and the children are safe; he's tried to phone, but no answer, and there seemed little point in leaving a message, under the circumstances.

  He looks back and sees Rydell's hologram girlfriend kneeling beside the bunk, talking to the boy. Beside the boy sits the professor who had borrowed the Kit Gun, and they strike Fontaine just then as a family group, unlikely perhaps but not without warmth. Fontaine has lived long enough with technological change that he really doesn't question the why or what of the girl: she is like a game program that comes out and sits in your room, he thinks, and some people would like that just fine.

  Now he comes to an obstacle in his sweeping: the butchered Another One dolls in their puddle of consensual silicone. At least none of them are talking now. It looks terrible, cruel, when he pushes the broom up against them, amid shards of glass, so he leans the broom against the counter, fishes one from the glass by its limp arms. He carries the faux Japanese baby outside and stretches it on its back in front of the shop. The others follow, and he is laying out the last when a fat woman, fleeing heavily toward Treasure Island, clutching what appears to be a bedsheet-load of wet laundry, notices what he is doing and starts to scream. And screams all the way out of sight, and can still be heard as he turns back into the shop, thinking of Tourmaline, his first wife.

  There is smoke in the air now, and maybe it is time to find that ax.

  61. FUTUREMATIC

  THAT shape that Laney sees when he looks at Harwood, at the idoru, at Rydell, and these others, has never before been a place for him, an inhabitable space. Now, driven by a new urgency (and augmented by virtually the entire population of the Walled City, working in a mode of simultaneity that very nearly approximates unison) he succeeds in actually being there, within a space defined by the emerging factors of the nodal point. It is a place where metaphor collapses, a descriptive black hole. He is no more able to describe it to himself, experiencing it, than he would be able to describe it to another.

  Yet what it most nearly resembles, that place where history turns, is the Hole he has posited at the core of his being: an emptiness, as devoid of darkness as it is of light.

  And Harwood, he knows immediately, though without knowing how he knows, is there.

  —Harwood?

  —Colin Laney. An evening for miracles. The unexpected.

  —You told them to burn the bridge.

  —Is there no privacy?

  —You're trying to stop her, aren't you?

  —I suppose I am, yes, although without knowing exactly what it is I'm attempting to stop her from doing. She's an emergent system. She doesn't know herself.

  —Do you? Do you know what you want?

  —I want the advent of a degree of functional nanotechnology in a world that will remain recognizably descended from the one I woke in this morning. I want my world transfigured, yet I want my place in that world to be equivalent to the one I now occupy. I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want a free lunch. And I've found the way to have it, it seems. Though you have too. And what, we have to ask ourselves, went wrong there?

  —You chose it. You chose to take 5-SB. In the orphanage, we volunteered to be test subjects, but we had no idea what we were taking.

  —And I chose to take 5-SB based on results collected from you, Laney. You and a girl named Jennifer Mo, who subsequently became the homicidally obsessed stalker of an astonishingly boring actor named Kevin Burke. She committed suicide while holding him hostage at a meditation retreat in Idaho.

  Laney knows the story of Jennifer Mo; it has haunted him since he first read it, several years ago, as a classified government document.

  —Why hasn't it gotten you, Harwood? Why hasn't it kicked in?

  —Perhaps because I'm too perfectly self-obsessed to become interested in anyone else. It's been all gravy for me. The next best thing to knowing the future. Better, actually: just that little degree of free will and we're so much more happy, aren't we? And looking backward is very nearly as much fun as looking forward, though our digital soup does thin out rather rapidly, that way down the time-line. Amazing, though: that business around Curie's husband… Changed everything, and who knows? I ask you, Laney, who knows?

  —We do.

  —Yes, we do.

  —It's changing again. Tonight.

  —This morning, rather. Pacific Standard. Very early. But, yes, it is. And I'm here to see that it changes in the directions I prefer it to, and not in others.

  —We're going to try to stop you.

  —Of course. That's the shape of things tonight, isn't it? I couldn't expect otherwise.

  Now Laney feels two things simultaneously: a coldness, physical and inescapable, rising beneath his heart, and the secret, ranked presence of the individual inhabitants of the Walled City, arrayed behind him like clay soldiers set to march forever across the floor of an emperor's tomb. Yet these will move, should Laney require them, and he senses as well the presence of Rei Toei, and he knows that the configuration is not yet complete.

  —She's here, Laney. She's in the flow. You've done that, you and your friends. But it won't help now, because I'm going where you won't find me. For the duration. Till the deal is done. Your friends aren't the only ones who learned how to sec
ede.

  And with the cold rising around his heart, Laney knows that this is true, that Harwood is going now, inverting himself into an informational wormhole of the sort the Walled City exists within—

  And reaches down (it seems like down, though in this place there is neither direction nor ordination), a legion reaching with him, to find—

  62. LOS PROJECTOS

  SILENCIO is remembering the rusting cans of fire, in the yards of los projectos, how the men stand and spit and warm their hands. Playboy and Raton he had met around such a fire, and now there is the smell of the cans in this room, and he is frightened, and even this kind one, who makes her own light and speaks to him in the language of his mother (but kind) will not keep the fear away, and he wishes only to return to the watches, to their faces and conditions and values, this universe that has discovered him, this mode of being, without which there is only the fear.

  Crouching here on the black man's bed, the kind one glowing beside him, he feels the fear come very big, and the black man in the closet, throwing things out, and Silencio wants only the watches.

  At the edge of his mind wait men with dog's teeth and wings, their faces blacker than the face of the black man with the watches. Their faces are the black of the drug men rub into their gums.

  “Bring the projector closer,” she tells the man, this one who stilled Playboy and Raton, and Silencio sees that for the time she speaks she is another, her hair smooth gold, the bones of her face another's bones. “Bring the notebook. Be very careful of the cable.” And the man shifts the silver thing Silencio fears (now Silencio fears everything) closer, and brings the watch finder to the bed, still on its wire.

  “Connect the eyephones. Quickly!” The man puts the wire from the hat into the watch finder and hands Silencio the hat. Inside, Silencio sees, are the pictures that fit against the eyes, and they are pictures of the watch on the screen of the finder, and Silencio feels relief, the fear moving away, back to the edge of things where the dog-toothed men are. He puts the hat over his eyes.