All Tomorrows Parties
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Next page When she was small, the projection seemed more concentrated; she was brighter, and it made him think of fairies in old anime, those Disney things. She could as easily have had wings, he thought, and fly around, trailing glowing dust if she wanted. But she only sat there, even more perfect at six inches tall, and talked with him. And when he'd close his eyes, not intending to sleep but only to rest them, he could hear that her voice was actually coming from the projector at the foot of his bed. She was telling him about Rez, the singer she'd wanted to marry, and why that hadn't worked, but it was difficult to follow. Rez had been very interested in Rez, Rydell gathered, and not much else, and Rei Toei had become more interested in other people (or, he guessed, if you were her, in other things). But he kept slipping out of focus, falling asleep really, and her voice was so beautiful. Before he'd stretched out here, and she'd shown him how she could get small, he'd pulled the chicken-wire gate into place and spread the curtains that were thumbtacked to it, some kind of faded nubby fabric printed with a pattern of ornate keys and strange, long-necked cats (he thought they were). He didn't know how long the sunglasses had been ringing, and it took him several rings to locate his jacket in the dark. He was fully dressed, shoes and all, otherwise, and he knew he'd been deep asleep. "Hello?" He put the glasses on with his left hand. With his right he reached up and touched the ceiling. It's paneling gave, slightly, when he did that, so he didn't do it again. "Where are you?" It was Laney. "Bed-and-breakfast," Rydell told him. With the sunglasses on, it was totally dark. He watched the low spark of his own optic nerve, colors without names. 168 "Did you get the cables?" "Yeah," Rydell said. He remembered being harsh with the sumo kid and felt stupid. He'd lost it. That claustro thing he got in crowds sometimes. Tara-MayAllenby had told him that was called agoraphobia, and it meant "fear of the mall," but it wasn't actually malls that did it to him. But he couldn't stand those little under-lip beards either. "Two of them." "Use them yet?" "Just the power," Rydell said. "The other one, I don't know what it jacks with." "Neither do I," said Laney. "Is she there?" "She was," Rydell said, looking around in the dark for his fairy star, then remembering he was wearing sunglasses. His hand found a switch that dangled from a wire near his head. He clicked it. A bare fifty-watt bulb came on. He slid the glasses down his nose and peered over them, finding the projector still there and still plugged in. "The thermos-thing's still here." "Don't let that out of your sight," Laney said. "Or the cables. I don't know what we need her to do there, but it's all around her." "What's all around her?" "The change." - "Laney, she said you told her the world was going to end." "Is going to end," Laney corrected. "Why'd you tell her that?" Laney sighed, the deep end of his sigh becoming a cough, which he seemed to choke off. "As we know it, okay?" he managed. "As we know it. And that's all I or anyone else can tell you about that. It's not what I want you thinking about. You're working for me, remember?" And you're crazy, Rydell thought, but I've got your credit chip in my pocket. "Okay," he said, "what's next?" "You have to go to the site of a double homicide, one that took place last night, on the bridge." "What do you want me to try to find out?" "Nothing," Laney said. "Just look like you're trying to find something Out. Pretend. Like you're investigating. Call me when you're ready to go, I'll give you the GPS fix for the spot." 169 "Hey," Rydell said, "what if I do find something out?" "Then call me." "Don't hang up," Rydell said. "How come you haven't been in touch with her, Laney? She said you two were separated." "The people who, well, 'own' her, that's not quite the term, really, but they'd like to talk to me, because she's missing. And the Lo/Rez people too. So I need to be incommunicado at the moment, as far as they're concerned. But she hasn't tried to reach me, Rydel!. She'll be able to, when she needs to." He hung up. Took the glasses off, left them folded on the pillow, and crawled to the end of the bed. "Hey," he said to the thermos-thing, "you there?" Nothing. He started getting himself together. He unpacked his duffel, used the switchblade to cut a couple of slits in it, took off his nylon belt and threaded it through the slits, using it as a strap, so he could sling the bag over his shoulder. "Hey," he said again to the thermos-thing, "you there? I'm gonna unplug you now." He hesitated, did. He put it in the duffel, along with the power cable, the other cable, and his Lucky Dragon fanny pack, this last because the thing had already saved his ass once, and it might be lucky. He put his nylon jacket on, put the sunglasses in his pocket, and, as an afterthought, gingerly put the switchblade in his right front trouser pocket. Then he imagined it opening there, thought about its lack of a safety catch, and, even more gingerly, fished it out and put it in the side pocket of his jacket. AND found the place without too much trouble, though Laney's mode of C PS-by-phone was pretty basic. Laney had a fix on the spot (Rydell had no idea how) but no map of the bridge, so he triangulated Rydell's sunglasses somehow and told him to walk back toward San Francisco, lower level, keep walking, keep walking, getting warmer. Okay, turn right. Which had left Rydell facing a blank plywood partition plastered with rain-stained handbills, in a European language he didn't recognize, for a concert by someone named Ottoman Badchair. He described this to Laney. 170 "That isn't it," Laney said, "hut you're really close." There was a shop next door, closed, and he couldn't figure out what it sold when it was open, and then a gap. Rolls of plastic back in there. Lumber. Someone was building another shop, he thought. If this was it, the crime scene, there ought to be a yellow plastic ribbon with SFPD stapled up, but then he remembered that the police didn't come out here all that much, and he wondered what they did when they had a body to dispose of. Flipping them over the side wouldn't make the city too happy, although of course there was no way the city could prove a particular corpse had come off the bridge. Still, it bothered Rydell that there wasn't any yellow ribbon. He guessed he thought of it as a mark of respect. He moved in, edging past the rolls of plastic, climbing over a low stack of plywood, and spotted, in the harsh light slung from the scavenged fluorescents closer to the pedestrian stroll, two frosty-looking white marks, something aerosoled over two darker stains, and he knew what that was. Kil'Z, this stuff you sprayed where bodily fluids had gotten out, in case the person who'd lost them was seropositive. He knew what Kil'Z looked like over blood, and this was that. Not much of a crime scene. He stood there staring down at it and wondering how Laney expected him to look like he was conducting an investigation. He put the duffel with Rei Toei's projector down on the rolls of plastic. Kil'Z residue was fairly waterproof, so the rain hadn't washed it away. But then he knew that the victims, whoever they had been, had died the night before. He felt like an idiot. He really had wanted to be a cop once, and he'd dreamed of crossing the yellow line and looking at the scene. And being able to do something. And now here he was. He took out the glasses and called Laney. But now Laney, in whatever fine hotel he might be in, in Tokyo, wouldn't answer. "No shit, Sherlock," Rydell said to himself, listening to a phone ring in Tokyo. A 171 •1 "You do have a sense of humor," Harwood says, behind him. "I know it." Leaning closer to the window, looking down. Foreshortened perspective up the side of this obelisk, this pyramid so-called, and midway the dark bulge of that Japanese material, placed to counter old quake damage. This is new, replacing earlier splines of polycarbon, and the subject of architectural and aesthetic scandal. Briefly fascinated, he watches as reflections of the lights of surrounding buildings shudder slightly, the thing's glossy surface tensing in response to winds he cannot feel. The truss is alive. Turning to face Harwood, who is seated behind a broad dark plain of nonreflective wood, across which an accumulation of architectural 172 41. TRANSAM 'HIS name is Rydell," Harwood says. "Image matching gave us that immediately. He was briefly associated with Cops in Trouble." "Associated with whom?" The knife, with its sheath and harness, was secured in a twilit alcove off the central elevator stack, approximately eight hundred feet below. "Cops in Trouble," Harwood says. "A cultural treasure. Don't you watch television?" "No." He is looking east, from the forty-eighth and ultimate floor of the city's tallest building, toward the shadow of the ruined Embarcadero, the gypsy glow of the bridge, the feral darkness of Treasure Island. Stepping closer to the window, he touches his belt. Stitched between two layers of black calf is concealed a ribbon of a very particular, very expensive material. Under certain circumstances, it ceases to behave as though it were some loosely woven, tissue-thin fabric, something a child might accidentally pull to pieces, and becomes instead thirty inches of something limber, double-edged, and very sharp. Its texture, in that state, its sleek translucency, has reminded him of fresh cuttlebone. models and hillocks of documents suggest the courses of imaginary rivers: a topography in which might be read change in the world beyond the window, if meanings were known, and one were sufficiently concerned with outcomes. Harwood's eyes are the most present thing about him, the rest giving an impression of existing at one remove, in some other and unspecific dimension. A tall man, he seems to occupy relatively little space, communicating from elsewhere via deliberately constricted channels. He is slender, with that agelessness of the aging rich, his long face free of tension. His eyes, enlarged by archaic lenses, are seldom still. "Why do you pretend to not be interested in this former policeman visiting the site of your recent activities?" On his wrist, gold and titanium catches the light; some multitasking bauble with intricate displays. "I don't pretend." On the large flatscreen that stands to the left of the desk, four cameras present angles on a tall, sturdy-looking man who stands, chin down, as if brooding. The cameras would be no larger than roaches, but the four images, in spite of inadequate light, offer excellent resolution. "Who placed these cameras?" "My bright young things." "Why?" - "Against exactly this eventuality: that someone might visit the site of these two utterly forgettable deaths and stand there, thinking. Look at him. He's thinking." "He looks unhappy." "He's trying to imagine you." "You imagine he is." "The fact that he's found his way to that spot at all is indicative of knowledge and motive. He knows that two men died there." Amid the various models on Harwood's desk stands one in glossy red and white, rendered with functioning miniature video screens on the trademark pylon. Tiny images move and change there, in liquid crystal. "Do you own the company that built this thing?" indicating the model with his index finger. The eyes behind Hardwood's glasses register surprise, from their 173 I peculiar distance. Then interest. "No. We advise them. We are a public relations firm. We did, I believe, advise on impact. We advised the city as well." "It's horrible." "Yes," says Harwood, "aesthetically, I agree. And that was an expressed concern of the municipal authorities. But our studies indicated that positioning it there would encourage walk-on tourism, and that is a crucial aspect of normalization." "Normalization?" "There is an ongoing initiative to bring the bridge community back into the fold, as it were. But the issue is sensitive. A matter of image really, and that of course is where we come in." Harwood smiles. "A number of major cities have these autonomous zones, and how a given city chooses to deal with the situation can impact drastically on that city's image. Copenhagen, for instance, was one of the first, and has done very well. Atlanta, I suppose, would be the classic example of what not to do." Harwood blinks. "It's what we do now instead of bohemias," he says. "Instead of what?" "Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct." "Extinct?" "We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general. Autonomous zones do offer a certain insulation from the monoculture, but they seem not to lend themselves to recommodification, not in the same way. We don't know 174 why exactly." The little images shift, flickering. "They shouldn't have put it there." Harwood's eyes come in from their private distance. "I don't believe I've ever heard ~OU express so specific an opinion." No reply. "You'll have a second chance to see it. I want you to find out what our pensive friend here is thinking about." "Is this concerned with what you implied when we spoke earlier, that something is on the verge of happening?" "Yes." "And what would that be?" Harwood considers him from the distance behind his glasses. "Do you believe in forces of history?" "I believe in what brings us to the moment." "I seem to have come to believe in the moment myself. I believe we are approaching one, drawn to it by the gravity of its strangeness. It is a moment in which everything and nothing will change. I am seeking an outcome in which I will retain viability. I am seeking an outcome in which Harwood Levine will not have become four meaningless syllables. If the world is to be reborn, I wish to be reborn in it, as something akin to what I am today." Thinking of the possible number and variety of crosshairs that must be trained on him now, hidden telepresent weapons platforms. He is fairly certain, nonetheless, that he could kill Harwood, if the moment required, though he also knows that he would almost certainly predecease him, if only by some fraction of a second. "I think you have become more complicated, since we last met." "Complex," Harwood says, and smiles. 175 I 176 42. RED GHOSTS OF EUROPEAN TIME FONTAINE makes himself a cup of instant miso on the hotplate. This is what he drinks before bed, a soothing saltiness and bits of seaweed at the bottom. Thinking of Skinner's girl and seeing her again. Usually when people leave the bridge they don't come back. Weirdness around her departure but he forgets what exactly. Not good for the old man but his time nearly done then anyway. Tick tick of the silent boy under the eyephones, hunting watches. Fontaine pours his miso into a cup missing its handle, savoring the aromatic steam. Tired now, he wonders where the boy can sleep here or if indeed he will. Maybe sit up all night hunting watches. Fontaine shakes his head. The ticking stops. Carrying his soup, he turns to see what's arrested the ceaseless hunt. There on the screen of the notebook, in the boy's lap, is a scan of a battered Rolex "Victory," an inexpensive wartime model for the Canadian market, worth a fair bit now but not in this condition. The steel case looks rough and the dial has faded unevenly. Black Arabics from one to twelve are crisp, but the inner chapter, red, European time, is almost gone. Fontaine sips his miso, looking down, wondering what it is this boy sees to hold him, in the red ghosts of European time. Then the boy's head sags under the weight of the eyephones, and Fontaine hears him start to snore. LANEY finds himself on an island in that mind-wide flow he ceaselessly cruises. It is not a construct, this place, an environment proper, so much as a knotting, a folding-in of information rooted in the substrates of the oldest codes. It is something like a makeshift raft, random pieces thrown together, but it is anchored, unmoving. He knows that it is no accident, that it has been put in his path for a reason. |
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