“You should know, I think, that my search for our boxmaker involves more than art, Marly.” He removed his glasses and polished them in a fold of his white shirt; she found something obscene in the calculated urbanity of the gesture. “I have reason to believe that the maker of these artifacts is in some position to offer me freedom. Marly. I am not a well man.” He replaced the glasses, settling the fine gold ear-pieces carefully. “When I last requested a remote visual of the vat I inhabit in Stockholm, I was shown a thing like three truck trailers, lashed in a dripping net of support lines… If I were able to leave that, Marly, or rather, to leave the riot of cells it contains… Well’ - he smiled his famous smile again - ‘what wouldn’t I pay?”
And Tally-Marly’s eyes swung to take in the expanse of dark lichen and the distant towers of the misplaced cathedral…”
“You lost consciousness,” the steward was saying, his fingers moving across her neck. “It isn’t uncommon, and our onboard medical computers tell us you’re in excellent health. However, we’ve applied a dermadisk to counteract the adaptation syndrome you might experience prior to docking.” His hand left her neck.
“Europe After the Rains.” she said. “Max Ernst. The lichen…”
The man stared down at her, his face alert now and express-ing professional concern. “Excuse me? Could you repeat that?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “A dream… Are we there yet, at the terminal?”
“Another hour,” he said.
Japan Air’s orbital terminus was a white toroid studded with domes and ringed with the dark-rimmed oval openings of docking bays. The terminal above Marly’s g-web - though above had temporarily lost its usual meaning - displayed an exquisitely drafted animation of the torus in rotation, while a series of voices - in seven languages - announced that the passengers on board JAL’s Shuttle 580, Orly Terminus I, would be taxied to the terminal at the earliest opportunity.
JAL offered apologies for the delay, which was due to routine repairs underway in seven of the twelve bays.
Marly cringed in her g-web, seeing the invisible hand of Virek in everything now. No. She thought, there must be a way. I want out of it, she told herself, I want a few hours as a free agent, and then I’ll be done with him… Good-bye, Herr Virek, I return to the land of the living, as poor Alain never will, Alain who died because I took your job. She blinked her eyes when the first tear came, then stared wide-eyed as a child at the minute floating spherelet the tear had become.
And Maas, she wondered, who were they? Virek claimed that they had murdered Alain, that Alain had been working for them. She had vague recollections of stories in the media, something to do with the newest generation of computers, some ominous-sounding process in which immortal hybrid cancers spewed out tailored molecules that became units of circuitry. She remembered, now, that Paco had said that the screen of his modular telephone was a Maas product.
The interior of the JAL toroid was so bland, so unremarkable, so utterly like any crowded airport, that she felt like laughing. There was the same scent of perfume, human tension, and heavily conditioned air, and the same background hum of conversation. The point-eight gravity would have made it easier to carry a suitcase, but she only had her black purse Now she took her tickets from one of its zippered inner pockets and checked the number of her connecting shuttle against the columns of numbers arrayed on the nearest wall screen.
Two hours to departure. Whatever Virek might say, she was sure that his machine was already busy, infiltrating the shuttle’s crew or roster of passengers, the substitutions lubricated by a film of money… There would be last-minute illnesses, changes in plans, accidents.
Slinging the purse over her shoulder, she marched off across the concave floor of white ceramic as though she actually knew where she was going, or had some sort of plan, but knowing, with each step she took, that she didn’t.
Those soft blue eyes haunted her “Damn you.” she said, and a jowly Russian businessman in a dark Ginza suit sniffed and raised his newsfax, blocking her out of his world.
“So I told the bitch, see, you gotta get those optoisolators and the breakout boxes out to Sweet Jane or I’ll glue your ass to the bulkhead with gasket paste…” Raucous female laughter and Marly glanced up from her sushi tray. The three women sat two empty tables away, their own table thick with beer cans and stacks of styrofoam trays smeared with brown soy sauce. One of them belched loudly and took a long pull at her beer. “So how’d she take it, Rez?” This was somehow the cue for another, longer burst of laughter, and the woman who’d first attracted Marly’s attention put her head down in her arms and laughed until her shoulders shook. Marly stared dully at the trio, wondering what they were. Now the laughter had subsided and the first woman sat up, wiping tears from her eyes. They were all quite drunk, Marly decided, young and loud and rough-looking. The first woman was slight and sharp-faced, with wide gray eyes above a thin straight nose. Her hair was some impossible shade of silver, clipped short like a schoolboy’s, and she wore an oversized canvas vest or sleeveless jacket covered entirely in bulging pockets, studs, and rectangular strips of Velcro. The garment hung open, revealing, from Marly’s angle, a small round breast sheathed in what seemed to be a bra of fine pink and black mesh. The other two were older and heavier, the muscles of their bare arms defined sharply in the seemingly sourceless light of the terminal cafeteria.
The first woman shrugged, her shoulders moving inside the big vest. “Not that she’ll do it.” she said.
The second woman laughed again, but not as heartily, and consulted a chronometer riveted on a wide leather wristband. “Me for off.” she said. “Gotta Zion run, then eight pods of algae for the Swedes.” Then shoved her chair back from the table, stood up, and Marly read the embroidered patch centered across the shoulders of her black leather vest.
O’GRADY - WMIMA
THE EDITH S.
INTERORBITAL HAULING
Now the woman beside her stood, hitching up the waist-band of her baggy jeans. “I tell you, Rez, you let that cunt short you on those breakouts, it’ll be bad for your name.”
“Excuse me,” Marly said, fighting the quaver in her voice.
The woman in the black vest turned and stared at her.
“Yeah?” The woman looked her up and down, unsmiling.
“I saw your vest, the name Edith S., that’s a ship, a spaceship?”
“A spaceship?” The woman beside her raised thick eye-brows. “Oh, yeah, honey, a whole mighty spaceship!”
“She’s a tug,” the woman in the black vest said, and turned to go.
“I want to hire you,” Marly said.
“Hire me?” Now they were all staring at her, faces blank and unsmiling. “What’s that mean?”
Marly fumbled deep in the black Brussels purse and came up with the half sheaf of New Yen that Paleologos the travel agent had returned, after taking his fee. “I’ll give you this…”
The girl with the short silver hair whistled softly. The women glanced at one another. The one in the black vest shrugged. “Jesus,” she said. “Where you wanna go? Mars?”
Marly dug into her purse again and produced the folded blue paper from a pack of Gauloise. She handed it to the woman in the black vest, who unfolded it and read the orbital coordinates that Alain had written there in green feltpen.
“Well,” the woman said, “it’s a quick enough hop. For that kind of money, but O’Grady and I, we’re due in Zion 2300GMT. Contract job. What about you, Rez?”
She handed the paper to the seated girl, who read it, looked up at Marly, and asked, “When?”
“Now,” Marly said, “right now.”
The girl pushed up from the table, the legs of her chair clattering on the ceramic, her vest swinging open to reveal that what Marly had taken for the net of a pink and black bra was a single tattooed rose that entirely covered her left breast.
“You’re on, sister, cash up.”
“Means give her the money now,” O’Grady said. “I don’t want anyone to know where we’re going,” Marly said.
The three women laughed.
“You come to the right girl,” O’Grady said, and Rez grinned.
24 - Run Straight Down
THE RAIN CAME on when he turned east again, making for the Sprawl’s fringe ‘burbs and the blasted belt country of the industrial zones. It came down in a solid wall, blinding him until he found the switch for the wipers. Rudy hadn’t kept the blades in shape, so he slowed, the turbine’s whine lowering to a roar, and edged over the shoulder, the apron bag nosing past shredded husks of truck tires.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t see. The wiper blades are rotten.” He tapped the button for the lights, and four tight beams stabbed out from either side of the hover’s wedge of hood and lost themselves in the gray wall of the downpour. He shook his head.
“Why don’t we stop?”
“We’re too close to the Sprawl. They patrol all this. Copters. They’d scan the ID panel on the roof and see we’ve got Ohio plates and a weird chassis configuration. They might want to check us out. We don’t want that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Keep to the shoulder until I can turn off, then get us under some cover, if I can…”
He held the hover steady and swung it around in place, the headlights flashing off the dayglow orange diagonals on an upright pole marking a service road. He made for the pole, the bulging lip of the apron bag bobbling over a thick rectangular crash guard of concrete. “This might do it,” he said as they slid past the pole. The service road was barely wide enough for them; branches and undergrowth scratched against the narrow side windows, scraping along the hover’s steel-plate flanks.
“Lights down there,” Angie said, straining forward in her harness to peer through the rain.
Turner made out a watery yellow glow and twin dark uprights. He laughed. “Gas station,” he said. “Left over from the old system, before they put the big road through.
Somebody must live there. Too bad we don’t run on gasoline
He eased the hover down the gravel slope; as he drew nearer, he saw that the yellow glow came from a pair of rectangular windows. He thought he saw a figure move in one of them. “Country,” he said. “These boys may not be too happy to see us.” He reached into the parka and slid the Smith & Wesson from its nylon holster, put it on the seat between his thighs. When they were five meters from the rusting gas pumps, he sat the hover down in a broad puddle and killed the turbines. The rain was still pissing down in windblown sheets, and he saw a figure in a flapping khaki poncho duck out of the front door of the station. He slid the side window open ten centimeters and raised his voice above the rain: “Sorry t’ bother you. We had to get off the road. Our wipers are trashed. Didn’t know you were down here The man’s hands, in the glow from the windows, were hidden beneath the plastic poncho, but it was obvious that he held something.
“Private property,” the man said, his lean face streaked with rain.
“Couldn’t stay on the road,” Turner called. “Sorry to bother you…
The man opened his mouth, began to gesture with the thing he held beneath the poncho, and his head exploded. It almost seemed to Turner that it happened before the red line of light scythed down and touched him, pencil-thick beam swinging casually, as though someone were playing with a flashlight. A blossom of red, beaten down by the rain, as the figure went to its knees and tumbled forward, a wire-stocked Savage 410 sliding from beneath the poncho.
Turner hadn’t been aware of moving, but he found that he’d stoked the turbines, swung the controls over to Angie, and clawed his way out of his harness. “I say go, run it through the station…” Then he was up, yanking at the lever that opened the roof hatch, the heavy revolver in his hand. The roar of the black Honda reached him as soon as the hatch slid back, a lowering shadow overhead, just visible through the driving rain. “Now!” He pulled the trigger be-fore she could kick them forward and through the wall of the old station, the recoil jarring his elbow numb against the roof of the hover. The bullet exploded somewhere overhead with a gratifying crack; Angie floored the hover and they plunged through the woodframe structure, with barely enough time for Turner to get his head and shoulders back down through the hatch. Something in the house exploded, probably a propane canister, and the hover skewed to the left.
Angie swung them back around as they crashed out through the far wall. “Where?” she yelled, above the turbine.
As if in answer, the black Honda came corkscrewing down, twenty meters in front of them, and threw up a silver sheet of rain. Turner grabbed the controls and they slid forward, the hover blasting up ten-meter fantails of ground water; they took the little combat copter square in its polycarbon canopy, its alloy fuselage crumpling like paper under the impact. Turner backed off and went in again, faster. This time the broken copter slammed into the trunks of two wet gray pines, lay there like some kind of long-winged fly.
“What happened?” Angie said, her hands to her face.
“What happened?”
Turner tore registration papers and dusty sunglasses from a compartment in the door beside him, found a flashlight, checked its batteries.
“What happened?” Angie said again, like a recording, “What happened?”
He scrambled back up through the hatch, the gun in one hand, the light in the other The rain had slackened. He jumped down onto the hover’s hood, and then over the bumpers and into ankle-deep puddles, splashing toward the bent black rotors of the Honda.
There was a reek of escaping jet fuel. The polycarbon canopy had cracked like an egg. He aimed the Smith & Wesson and thumbed the xenon flash twice, two silent pops of merciless light showing him blood and twisted limbs through the shattered plastic. He waited, then used the flashlight. Two of them. He came closer, holding the flashlight well away from his body, an old habit. Nothing moved. The smell of escaping fuel grew even stronger. Then he was tugging at the bent hatch. It opened. They both wore image-amp goggles. The round blank eye of the laser stared straight up into the night, and he reached down to touch the matted sheepskin collar of the dead man’s bomber jacket The blood that covered the man’s beard looked very dark, almost black in the flashlight’s beam. It was Oakey. He swung the beam left and saw that the other man, the pilot, was Japanese. He swung the beam back and found a flat black flask beside Oakey’s foot. He picked it up, stuffed it into one of the parka’s pockets, and dashed back to the hover In spite of the rain, orange flames were starting to lick up through the wreckage of the gas station. He scrambled up the hover’s bumper, across the hood, up again, and down through the hatch.
“What happened?” Angie said, as though he hadn’t left “What happened?”
He fell into his seat, not bothering with the harness, and revved the turbine. “That’s a Hosaka helicopter,” he said, swinging them around. “They must have been following us They had a laser. They waited until we were off the highway. Didn’t want to leave us out there for the cops to find When we pulled in here, they decided to go for us, but they must have figured that that poor fucker was with us. Or maybe they were just taking out a witness…”
