“How come you said Lucas was dead?” Bobby ventured, because it seemed to him that the silence was silting up in Jammer’s cramped office like something that could choke you.
Jackie looked at him but didn’t seem to focus. “They wouldn’t come to me like that if Lucas were alive,” she said. “There are pacts, agreements. Legba is always invoked first, but he should have come with Danbala. His personality depends on the ba he manifests with. Lucas must be dead.”
Jammer pushed the glass of whiskey across the desk, but Jackie shook her head, the trode set still riding her forehead, chrome and black nylon. He made a disgusted face, pulled the glass back, and downed it himself. “What a load of shit Things made a lot more sense before you people started screwing around with them.”
“We didn’t bring them here, Jammer,” she said. “They were just there, and they found us because we understood them!”
“Same load of shit,” Jammer said, wearily. “Whatever they are, wherever they came from, they just shaped them-selves to what a bunch of crazed spades wanted to see. You follow me? There’s no way in hell there’d be anything out there that you had to talk to in fucking bush Haitian! You and your voodoo cult, they just saw that and they saw a setup, and Beauvoir and Lucas and the rest, they’re businessmen first. And those Goddamn things know how to make deals!
It’s a natural!” He tightened the cap on his bottle and put it back in the drawer. “You know, hon. it could just be that somebody very big, with a lot of muscle on the grid, they’re just taking you for a ride. Projecting those things, all that shit… And you know it’s possible, don’t you? Don’t you, Jackie?”
“No way,” Jackie said, her voice cold and even. “But how I know that’s not anything I can explain…”
Jammer took a black slab of plastic from his pocket and began to shave. “Sure,” he said. The razor hummed as he worked on the line of his jaw. “I lived in cyberspace for eight years, right? Well, I know there wasn’t anything out there, not then… Anyway, you want me to phone Lucas, set your mind at ease one way or the other? You got the phone number for that Rolls of his?”
“No,” Jackie said, “don’t bother Best we lay low till Beauvoir turns up.” She stood, pulling off the trodes and picking up her hat. “I’m going to lie down, try to sleep. You keep an eye on Bobby.” She turned and walked to the office door. She looked as though she were sleepwalking, all the energy gone out of her.
“Wonderful.” Jammer said, running the shaver along his upper lip. “You want a drink?” he asked Bobby.
“Well,” Bobby said, “it’s kind of early…”
“For you. maybe.” He put the razor back in his pocket.
The door closed behind Jackie. Jammer leaned forward slightly.
“What did they look like, kid? You get a make?”
“Just kind of grayish. Fuzzy…”
Jammer looked disappointed. He slouched back in his chair again. “I don’t think you can get a good look at ‘em unless you’re part of it.” He drummed his fingers on the chair arm. “You think they’re for real?”
“Well, I wouldn’t wanna try messing one around…”
Jammer looked at him. “No? Well, maybe you’re smarter than you look, there. I wouldn’t wanna try messing one around myself. I got out of the game before they started turning up.
“So what do you think they are?”
“Ah, still getting smarter… Well, I don’t know Like I said, I don’t think I can swallow them being a bunch of Haitian voodoo gods, but who knows?” He narrowed his eyes. “Could be, they’re virus programs that have gotten loose in the matrix and replicated, and gotten really smart That’s scary enough; maybe the Turing people want it kept quiet. Or maybe the Al’s have found a way to split parts of themselves off into the matrix, which would drive the Turings crazy. I knew this Tibetan guy did hardware mod for jockeys, he said they were tulpas…”
Bobby blinked.
‘A tulpa’s a thought form, kind of. Superstition. Really heavy people can split off a kind of ghost, made of negative energy.” He shrugged “More horseshit Like Jackie’s voodoo guys.”
“Well, it looks to me like Lucas and Beauvoir and the others, they sure as hell play it like it was all real, and not just like it was an act.”
Jammer nodded. “You got it And they been doing damn well for themselves by it, too, so there’s something there He shrugged and yawned “I gotta sleep, too. You can do whatever you want, as long as you keep your hands off my deck. And don’t try to go outside, or ten kinds of alarms will start screaming. There’s juice and cheese and shit in the fridge behind the bar.
Bobby decided that the place was still scary, now that he had it to himself, but that it was interesting enough to make the scariness worthwhile. He wandered up and down behind the bar, touching the handles of the beer taps and the chrome drink nozzles. There was a machine that made ice, and another one that dispensed boiling water. He made himself a cup of Japanese instant coffee and sorted through Jammer’s file of audio cassettes. He’d never heard of any of the bands or artists. He wondered whether that meant that Jammer, who was old, liked old stuff, or if this was all really new stuff that wouldn’t filter out to Barrytown, probably by way of Leon’s, for another two weeks… He found a gun under the black and silver universal credit console at the end of the bar, a kind of fat little machine gun with a magazine that stuck straight down out of the handle. It was stuck under the bar with a strip of lime-green Velcro, and he didn’t think it was a good idea to touch it. After a while, he didn’t feel frightened anymore, just kind of bored and edgy. He took his cooling coffee and walked out into the middle of the seating area. He sat at one of the tables and pretended he was Count Zero, top console artist in the Sprawl, waiting for some dudes to show and talk about a deal, some run they needed done and nobody but the Count was even remotely up for it. “Sure,” he said, to the empty nightclub, his eyes hooded, “I’ll cut it for you… If you got the money…” They paled when he named his price.
The place was soundproofed; you couldn’t hear the bustle of the fourteenth floor’s stalls at all, only the hum of some kind of air conditioner and the occasional gurgles of the hot-water machine. Tired of the Count’s power plays, Bobby left the coffee cup on the table and crossed to the entrance-way, running his hand along an old stuffed velvet rope that was slung between polished brass poles. Careful not to touch the glass doors themselves, he settled himself on a cheap steel stool with a tape-patched leatherette top, beside the coat-check window A dim bulb burned in the coatroom; you could see a couple of dozen old wooden hangers dangling from steel rods, each one hung with a round yellow hand-numbered tag. He guessed Jammer sat here sometimes to check out the clientele. He didn’t really see why anybody who’d been a shithot cowboy for eight years would want to run a nightclub, but maybe it was sort of a hobby. He guessed you could get a lot of girls, running a nightclub, but he’d assumed you could get a lot anyway if you were rich. And if Jammer had been a top jock for eight years, Bobby figured he had to be rich…
He thought about the scene in the matrix, the gray patches and the voices. He shivered. He still didn’t see why it meant Lucas was dead. How could Lucas be dead? Then he remembered that his mother was dead, and somehow that didn’t seem too real either. Jesus. It all got on his nerves. He wished he were outside, on the other side of the doors, checking out the stalls and the shoppers and the people who worked there. He reached out and drew the velour curtain aside, just wide enough to peer out through the thick old glass, taking in the rainbow jumble of stalls and the characteristic grazing gait of the shoppers. And framed for him, square in the middle of it all, beside a table jammed with surplus analog VOM’s, logic probes, and power conditioners, was the raceless, bone-heavy face of Leon, and the deepset, hideous eyes seemed to look into Bobby’s with an audible click of recognition. And then Leon did something Bobby couldn’t remember ever having seen him do. He smiled.
23 - Closer
THE JAL STEWARD offered her a choice of SimStim cassettes: a tour of the Foxton retrospective at the Tate the previous August, a period adventure taped in Ghana (Ashanu!), high-lights from Bizet’s Carmen as viewed from a private box at the Tokyo Opera, or thirty minutes of Tally Isham’s syndicated talk show Top People.
“Your first shuttle flight, Ms. Ovski?”
Marly nodded. She’d given Paleologos her mother’s maiden name, which had probably been stupid.
The steward smiled understandingly “A cassette can definitely ease the lift-off. The Carmen’s very popular this week. Gorgeous costumes, I understand.”
She shook her head, in no mood for opera She loathed Foxton, and would have preferred to feel the full force of acceleration rather than live through Ashanti! She took the Isham tape by default, as the least of four evils. The steward checked her seat harness, handed her the cassette and a little throwaway tiara in gray plastic, then moved on. She put the plastic trode set on, jacked it into the seat arm, sighed, and slotted the cassette in the opening beside the jack. The interior of the JAL shuttle vanished in a burst of Aegean blue, and she watched the words TALLY ISHAM’S TOP PEOPLE expand across the cloudless sky in elegant sans-serif capitals.
Tally Isham had been a constant in the stim industry for as long as Marly remembered, an ageless Golden Girl who’d come in on the first wave of the new medium. Now Marly found herself locked into Tally’s tanned, lithe, tremendously comfortable sensorium. Tally Isham glowed, breathed deeply and easily, her elegant bones riding in the embrace of a musculature that seemed never to have known tension. Accessing her stim recordings was like falling into a bath of perfect health, feeling the spring in the star’s high arches and the jut of her breasts against the silky white Egyptian cotton of her simple blouse. She was leaning against a pocked white balustrade above the tiny harbor of a Greek island town, a cascade of flowering trees falling away below her down a hillside built from whitewashed stone and narrow, twisting stairs A boat sounded in the harbor.
“The tourists are hurrying back to their cruise ship now,” Tally said, and smiled; when she smiled, Marly could feel the smoothness of the star’s white teeth, taste the freshness of her mouth, and the stone of the balustrade was pleasantly rough against her bare forearms. “But one visitor to our island will be staying with us this afternoon, someone I’ve longed to meet, and I’m sure that you’ll be delighted and surprised. As he’s someone who ordinarily shuns major media coverage.”
She straightened, turned, and smiled into the tanned, smiling face of Josef Virek
Marly tore the set from her forehead, and the white plastic of the JAL shuttle seemed to slam into place all around her Warning signs were blinking on the console overhead, and she could feel a vibration that seemed to gradually rise in pitch.
Virek? She looked at the trode set. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you are a top person.”
“I beg your pardon?” The Japanese student beside her bobbed in his harness in a strange little approximation of a bow. “You are in some difficulty with your stim?”
“No, no,” she said. “Excuse me.” She slid the set on again and the interior of the shuttle dissolved in a buzz of sensory static, a jarring mélange of sensations that abruptly gave way to the calm grace of Tally Isham, who had taken Virek’s cool, firm hand and was smiling into his soft blue eyes. Virek smiled back, his teeth very white “Delighted to be here, Tally.” he said, and Marly let herself sink into the reality of the tape, accepting Tally’s recorded sensory input as her own. Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, something in her personality conflicting with the required degree of passivity.
Virek wore a soft white shirt, cotton duck trousers rolled to just below the knee, and very plain brown leather sandals.
His hand still in hers, Tally returned to the balustrade “I’m sure, ‘ she said, “that there are many things our audience”
The sea was gone. An irregular plain covered in a green-black growth like lichen spread out to the horizon, broken by the silhouettes of the neo-Gothic spires of Gaudi’s church of the Sagrada Familia. The edge of the world was lost in a low bright mist, and a sound like drowned bells tolled in across the plain.
“You have an audience of one, today,” Virek said, and looked at Tally Isham through his round, rimless glasses. “Hello, Marly.”
Marly struggled to reach the trodes, but her arms were made of stone. G-force, the shuttle lifting off from its concrete pad… He’d trapped her here.
“I understand,” said Tally, smiling, leaning back against the balustrade, her elbows on warm rough stone. “What a lovely idea. Your Marly, Herr Virek, must be a lucky girl indeed…” And it came to her, to Marly, that this wasn’t Sense/Net’s Tally Isham, but a part of Virek’s construct, a programmed point of view worked up from years of Top People, and that now there was no choice, no way out, except to accept it, to listen, to give Virek her attention. The fact of his having caught her here, pinned her here this way, told her that her intuition had been correct: The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek’s money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will…
“I’m sorry,” he said, “to learn that you are upset Paco tells me that you are fleeing from us, but I prefer to see it as the drive of an artist toward her goal. You have sensed, I think, something of the nature of my gestalt, and it has frightened you As well it should. This cassette was prepared an hour before your shuttle was scheduled to lift off from Orly. We know your destination, of course, but I have no intention of following you. You are doing your job. Marly. I only regret that we were unable to prevent the death of your friend Alain, but we now know the identity of his killers and their employers…
Tally Isham’s eyes were Marly’s eyes now, and they were locked with Virek’s, a blue energy burning there.
“Alain was murdered by the hired agents of Maas Biolabs,” he continued, “and it was Maas who provided him with the coordinates of your current destination, Maas who gave him the hologram you saw. My relationship with Maas Biolabs has been ambivalent, to say the least. Two years ago a subsidiary of mine attempted to buy them out. The sum involved would have affected the entire global economy.
They refused. Paco has determined that Alain died because they discovered that he was attempting to market the information they had provided, market it to third parties. “He frowned. “Exceedingly foolish, because he was utterly ignorant of the nature of the product he was offering.”
How like Alain, she thought, and felt a wave of pity. Seeing him curled there on the hideous carpet, his spine outlined beneath the green fabric of his jacket.
