“No. Just school stuff. My father said it wasn’t good for me.”
“He say anything about those dreams?”
“Only that they were getting realer. But I never told him about the others.
“You want to tell me? Maybe it’ll help me understand, figure out what we need to do…”
“Some of them tell me things Stories. Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving on its own, just data and people shuffling it around Then something happened, and it knew itself. There’s a whole other story, about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything. Something the man did helped the whole thing know itself… And after that, it sort of split off into different parts of itself, and I think the parts are the others, the bright ones. But it’s hard to tell, because they don’t tell it with words, exactly…”
Turner felt the skin on his neck prickle. Something coming back to him, up out of the drowned undertow of Mitchell’s dossier Hot burning shame in a hallway, dirty cream paint peeling, Cambridge, the graduate dorms… “Where were you born, Angie?”
“England. Then my father got into Maas, we moved. To Geneva.”
Somewhere in Virginia he eased the hovercraft over onto the gravel shoulder and out into an overgrown pasture, dust from the dry summer swirling out behind them as he swung them left and into a stand of pine. The turbine died as they settled into the apron bag.
“We might as well eat now.” he said, reaching back for Sally’s canvas carryall.
Angie undid her harness and unzipped the black sweatshirt Under it, she wore something tight and white, a child’s smooth tanned flesh showing in the scoop neck above young breasts. She took the bag from him and began unwrapping the sandwiches Sally had made for him. “What’s wrong with your brother?” she asked, handing him half a sandwich.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, there’s something… He drinks all the time, Sally said. Is he unhappy?”
“I don’t know,” Turner said, hunching and twisting the aches out of his neck and shoulders. “I mean, he must be, but I don’t know exactly why. People get stuck, sometimes.”
“You mean when they don’t have companies to take care of them?” She bit into her sandwich.
He looked at her. “Are you putting me on?”
She nodded, her mouth full Swallowed “A little bit I know that a lot of people don’t work for Maas. Never have and never will You’re one, your brother’s another. But it was a real question. I kind of liked Rudy, you know? But he just seemed so -”
“Screwed up,” he finished for her, still holding his sandwich. “Stuck. What it is, I think there’s a jump some people have to make, sometimes, and if they don’t do it, then they’re stuck good. And Rudy never did it.”
“Like my father wanting to get me out of Maas? Is that a jump?”
“No. Some jumps you have to decide on for yourself.
Just figure there’s something better waiting for you somewhere…” He paused, feeling suddenly ridiculous, and bit into the sandwich.
“Is that what you thought?”
He nodded, wondering if it were true.
“So you left, and Rudy stayed -”
“He was smart Still is, and he’d rolled up a bunch of degrees, did it all on the line. Got a doctorate in biotechnology from Tulane when he was twenty, a bunch of other stuff. Never sent out any resumes, nothing. We’d have recruiters turn up from all over, and he’d bullshit them, pick fights… I think he thought he could make something on his own. Like those hoods on the dogs I think he’s got a couple of original patents there, but… Anyway, he stayed there. Got into dealing and doing hardware for people, and he was hot stuff in the county. And our mother got sick, she was sick for a long time, and I was away.
“Where were you?” She opened the thermos and the smell of coffee filled the cabin.
“As far away as I could get,” he said, startled by the anger in his voice.
She passed him the plastic mug, filled to the brim with hot black coffee.
“How about you? You said you never knew your mother.”
“I didn’t. They split when I was little. She wouldn’t come back in on the contract unless he agreed to cut her in on some kind of stock plan. That’s what he said anyway.”
“So what’s he like?” He sipped coffee, then passed it back.
She looked at him over the rim of the red plastic mug, her eyes ringed with Sally’s makeup. ‘You tell me,” she said. “Or else ask me in twenty years. I’m seventeen, how the hell am I supposed to know?”
He laughed. “You’re starting to feel a little better now?”
“I guess so. Considering the circumstances.”
And suddenly he was aware of her, in a way he hadn’t been before, and his hands went anxiously to the controls.
“Good. We still have a long way to go.”
They slept in the hovercraft that night, parked behind the rusting steel lattice that had once supported a drive-in theater screen in southern Pennsylvania, Turner’s parka spread on the armor-plate floorboards below the turbine’s long bulge. She’d sipped the last of the coffee, cold now, as she sat in the square hatch opening above the passenger seat, watching the lightning bugs pulse across a field of yellowed grass.
Somewhere in his dreams - still colored with random flashes from her father’s dossier - she rolled against him, her breasts soft and warm against his bare back through the thin fabric of her T-shirt, and then her arm came over him to stroke the flat muscles of his stomach, but he lay still, pretending to a deeper sleep, and soon found his way down into the darker passages of Mitchell’s biosoft, where strange things came to mingle with his own oldest fears and hurts. And woke at dawn to hear her singing softly to herself from her perch in the roof hatch.
“My daddy he’s a handsome devil
got a chain ‘bout nine miles long
And from every link
A heart does dangle
Of another maid
He’s loved and wronged.”
22 - Jammer’s
JAMMER’S WAS UP twelve more flights of dead escalator and occupied the rear third of the top floor. Aside from Leon’s place, Bobby had never seen a nightclub, and he found Jammer’s both impressive and scary. Impressive because of its scale and what he took to be the exceptional quality of the fittings, and scary because a nightclub, by day, is somehow inately unreal. Witchy. He peered around, thumbs snagged in the back pockets of his new jeans, while Jackie conducted a whispered conversation with a long-faced white man in rum-pled blue coveralls. The place was fitted out with dark ultrasuede banquettes, round black tables, and dozens of or-nate screens of pierced wood. The ceiling was painted black, each table faintly illuminated by its own little recessed flood aimed straight down out of the dark There was a central stage, brightly lit now with work lights strung on yellow flex, and, in the middle of the stage, a set of cherry-red acoustic drums. He wasn’t sure why, but it gave him the creeps; some sidelong sense of a half-life, as though something was about to shift, just at the edge of his vision…
“Bobby,” Jackie said, “come over here and meet Jammer.”
He crossed the stretch of plain dark carpet with all the cool he could muster and faced the long-faced man, who had dark, thinning hair and wore a white evening shirt under his coveralls. The man’s eyes were narrow, the hollows of his cheeks shadowed with a day’s growth of beard.
“Well,” the man said, “you want to be a cowboy?” He was looking at Bobby’s T-shirt and Bobby had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be about to laugh.
“Jammer was a jockey,” Jackie said. “Hot as they come.
Weren’t you, Jammer?”
“So they say,” Jammer said, still looking at Bobby. “Long time ago, Jackie. How many hours you logged, running?” he asked Bobby.
Bobby’s face went hot. “Well, one, I guess.”
Jammer raised his bushy eyebrows. “Gotta start somewhere.” He smiled, his teeth small and unnaturally even and, Bobby thought, too numerous.
“Bobby,” Jackie said, “why don’t you ask Jammer about this Wig character the Finn was telling you about?”
Jammer glanced at her, then back to Bobby. “You know the Finn? For a hotdogger you’re in pretty deep, aren’t you?” He took a blue plastic inhaler from his hip pocket and inserted it in his left nostril, snorted, then put it back in his pocket. “Ludgate. The Wig. Finn’s talking about the Wig? Must be in his dotage.”
Bobby didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t seem like the time to ask. “Well,” Bobby ventured, “this Wig’s up in orbit somewhere, and he sells the Finn stuff, sometimes…”
“No shit? Well, you coulda fooled me. I woulda told you the Wig was either dead or drooling. Crazier than your usual cowboy, you know what I mean? Batshit. Gone. Haven’t heard of him in years.”
“Jammer,” Jackie said, “I think it’s maybe best if Bobby just tells you the story. Beauvoir’s due here this afternoon, and he’ll have some questions for you, so you better know where things stand…”
Jammer looked at her. “Well. I see. Mr. Beauvoir’s calling in that favor, is he?”
“Can’t speak for him,” she said, “but that would be my guess. We need a safe place to store the Count here.” “What count?”
“Me,” Bobby said, “that’s me.”
“Great,” Jammer said, with a total lack of enthusiasm. “So come on back into the office.”
Bobby couldn’t keep his eyes off the cyberspace deck that took up a third of the surface of Jammer’s antique oak desk It was matte black, a custom job, no trademarks anywhere. He kept craning forward, while he told Jammer about Two-a-Day and his attempted run, about the girl-feeling thing and his mother getting blown up. It was the hottest-looking deck he’d ever seen, and he remembered Jackie saying that Jammer had been such a shithot cowboy in his day.
Jammer slumped back in his chair when Bobby was finished. “You wanna try it?” he asked. He sounded tired.
“Try it?”
“The deck. I think you might wanna try it It’s something about the way you keep rubbing your ass on the chair. Either you wanna try it or you gotta piss bad”
“Shit yeah. I mean, yeah, thanks, yeah, I would…”
“Why not? No way for anybody to know it’s you and not me, right? Why don’t you jack in with him, Jackie? Kinda keep track.” He opened a desk drawer and took out two trode sets. “But don’t do anything, right? I mean, just buzz on out and spin. Don’t try to run any numbers I owe Beauvoir and Lucas a favor, and it looks like how I’m paying it back is by helping keep you intact.” He handed one set of trodes to Jackie, the other to Bobby. He stood up, grabbed handles on either side of the black console, and spun it around so it faced Bobby. “Go on. You’ll cream your jeans. Thing’s ten years old and it’ll still wipe ass on most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it straight up from scratch He was Bobby Quine’s hardware artist, once. The two of ‘em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were born.”
Bobby already had his trodes on. Now he looked at Jackie “You ever jack tandem before?”
He shook his head.
“Okay. We’ll jack, but I’ll hang off your left shoulder. I say jack out, jack out. You see anything funny. It’ll be because I’m with you, understand?”
He nodded.
She undid a pair of long, silver-headed pins at the rear of her fedora and took it off, putting it down on the desk beside Jammer’s deck. She slid the trodes on over the orange silk headscarf and smoothed the contacts against her forehead.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Now and ever was, fast forward, Jammer’s deck jacked up so high above the neon hotcores, a topography of data he didn’t know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the nonplace that was cyberspace. “Slow it down, Bobby.” Jackie’s voice low and sweet, beside him in the void.
“Jesus Christ, this thing’s slick!”
“Yeah, but damp it down. The rush isn’t any good for us. You want to cruise. Keep us up here and slow it down.
He eased off on forward until they seemed to coast along. He turned to the left, expecting to see her there, but there was nothing.
“I’m here,” she said, “don’t worry
“Who was Quine?”
“Quine? Some cowboy Jammer knew. He knew ‘em all, in his day.”
He took a right-angle left at random, pivoting smoothly at the grid intersection, testing the deck for response. It was amazing, totally unlike anything he’d felt before in cyberspace. “Holy shit. This thing makes an Ono-Sendai look like a kid’s toy.
“It’s probably got O-S circuitry in it. That’s what they used to use, Jammer says. Takes us up a little more…”
They rose effortlessly through the grid, the data receding below them “There isn’t a hell of a lot to see up here,” he complained.
“Wrong. You see some interesting stuff, you hang out long enough in the blank parts…”
The fabric of the matrix seemed to shiver, directly in front of them…”
“Uh, Jackie…”
“Stop here. Hold it. It’s okay. Trust me.”
Somewhere, far away, his hands moving over the unfamiliar keyboard configuration He held them steady now, while a section of cyberspace blurred, grew milky. “What is -”
“Danbala ap monte I,” the voice said, harsh in his head, and in his mouth a taste like blood. “Danbala is nding her.” He knew, somehow, what the words meant, but the voice was iron in his head The milky fabric divided, seemed to bubble, became two patches of shifting gray.
“Legba,” she said, “Legba and Ougou Feray, god of war. Papa Ougou’ St. Jacques Majeur! Viv Ia Vyéj!”
Iron laughter filled the matrix, sawing through Bobby’s head.
“Map kite tout mizé ak tout giyon,” said another voice, fluid and quicksilver and cold. “See, Papa, she has come here to throw away her bad luck!” And then that one laughed as well, and Bobby fought down a wave of sheer hysteria as the silver laughter rose through him like bubbles.
“Has she bad luck, the horse of Danbala?” boomed the iron voice of Ougou Feray, and for an instant Bobby thought he saw a figure flicker in the gray fog. The voice hooted its terrible laughter. “Indeed! Indeed! But she knows it not! She is not my horse, no, else I would cure her luck!” Bobby wanted to cry, to die, anything to escape the voices, the utterly impossible wind that had started to blow out of the gray warps, a hot damp wind that smelled of things he couldn’t identify. “And she calls praise on the Virgin! Hear me, little sister! La Vyéj draws close indeed!”
“Yes,” said the other, “she moves through my province now, I who rule the roads, the highways.”
“But I, Ougou Feray, tell you that your enemies draw near as well! To the gates, sister, and beware”‘
And then the gray areas faded, dwindled, shrank…
“Jack us out,” she said her voice small and distant And then she said, “Lucas is dead.”
Jammer took a bottle of Scotch from his desk drawer and carefully poured six centimeters of the stuff into a plastic highball glass. “You look like shit,” he said to Jackie, and Bobby was startled by the gentleness in the man’s voice They’d been jacked out for at least ten minutes and nobody had said anything at all. Jackie looked crushed and kept gnawing at her lower lip. Jammer looked either unhappy or angry, Bobby wasn’t sure.
