Count Zero
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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 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 Next page "One of the new polycarbon variants," he said, "one of the Maas products . . The phone purred discreetly He positioned it more care- fully in front of her, stepped to the far side of the table, and said, "Your call. Remember, you are at home!" He reached forward and brushed a titanium-coated stud. Alain's face and shoulders filled the little screen. The image had the smudged, badly lit look of a public booth. "Good afternoon, my dear," he said. "Hello, Alain." "How are you, Marly? I trust you've gotten the money we discussed?" She could see that he was wearing a jacket of some kind, dark, but she could make out no details. "Your roommate could do with a lesson in housecleaning," he said, and seemed to be peering back over her shoulder. "You've never cleaned a room in your life," she said He shrugged, smiling. "We each have our talents," he said. "Do you have my money, Marly?" She glanced up at Paco, who nodded. "Yes," she said, "of course." "That's wonderful, Marly. Marvelous We have only one small difficulty." He was still smiling. "And what is that?" "My informants have doubled their price. Consequently, I must now double mine." Paco nodded. He was smiling, too. "Very well. I will have to ask, of course ..~" He sick- ened her now. She wanted to be off the phone. "And they, of course, will agree. "Where shall we meet, then?" "I will phone again, at five," he said. His image shrank to a single blip of blue-green, and then that was gone as well. "You look tired," Paco said as he collapsed the screen and replaced the phone in his bag "You look older when you've talked with him." "Do I?" For some reason, now, she saw the panel in the Roberts, all those faces Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead. All the Marlys, she thought all the girls she'd been through the long season of youth. "HEY, SHITHEAD." RHEA poked him none too lightly in the ribs "Get your ass up." He came up fighting with the crocheted comforter, with the half-formed shapes of unknown enemies. With his mother's murderers. He was in a room he didn't know, a room that might have been anywhere. Gold plastic gilt frames on a lot of mirrors. Fuzzy scarlet wallpaper. He'd seen Gothicks dec- orate rooms that way, when they could afford it, but he'd also seen their parents do whole condos in the same style Rhea flung a bundle of clothes down on the temperfoam and shoved her hands in the pockets of a black leather jacket. The pink and black squares of the comforter were bunched around his waist. He looked down and saw the segmented length of the centipede submerged in a finger-wide track of fresh pink scar tissue. Beauvoir had said that the thing acceler- ated healing. He touched the bright new tissue with a hesitant fingertip, found it tender but bearable. He looked up at Rhea. "Get your ass up on this," he said, giving her the finger. They glared at each other, for a few seconds, over Bobby's upraised middle finger. Then she laughed "Okay," she said, "you got a point. I'll get off your case But pick those clothes up and get `em on. Should be something there that fits Lucas is due by here soon to pick you up, and Lucas doesn't like to be kept waiting "Yeah? Well, he seems like a pretty relaxed guy to me He began to sort through the heap of clothing, discarding a black shirt with a paisley pattern printed on it in laundered- out gold, a red satin number with a fringe of white imitation leather down the sleeves, a black sort of leotard thing with panels of some translucent material . . . "Hey," he said, "where did you get this stuff? I can't wear shit like this "It's my little brother's," Rhea said. "From last season, and you better get your white ass dressed before Lucas gets down here. Hey," she said, "that's mine," snatching up the leotard as though he might be about to steal it. He pulled the black and gold shirt on and fumbled with domed snaps made of black imitation pearl. He found a pair of black jeans, but they proved to be baggy and elaborately pleated, and didn't seem to have any pockets "This all the pants you got?" "Jesus," she said. "I saw the clothes Pye cut off you, man. You aren't anybody's idea of a fashion plate. Just get dressed, okay? I don't want any trouble with Lucas. He may come on all mellow with you, but `that just means you got something he wants bad enough to take the trouble. Me, I sure don't, so Lucas got no compunctions, as far as I'm concerned." He stood up unsteadily beside the bedslab and tried to zip up the black jeans. "No zip," he said, looking at her. "Buttons In there somewhere. It's part of the style you know?" Bobby found the buttons. It was an elaborate arrangement and he wondered what would happen if he had to piss in a hurry He saw the black nylon thongs beside the slab and shoved his feet into them. "What about Jackie?" he asked, padding to where he could see himself in the gold-framed mirrors. `Lucas got any compunctions about her?" He watched her in the mirror, saw something cross her face "What's that mean?" "Beauvoir, he told me she was a horse" "You hush," she said, her voice gone low and urgent. "Beauvoir mention anything like that to you, that's his busi- ness. Otherwise, it's nothing you talk about, understand? There's things bad enough, you'd wish you were back out there getting your butt carved up." He watched her eyes, reflected in the mirror, dark eyes shadowed by the deep brim of the soft felt hat. Now they seemed to show a little more white than they had before "Okay," he said, after a pause, and then added, "Thanks." He fiddled with the collar of the shirt, turning it up in the back, down again, trying it different ways. "You know," Rhea said, tilting her head to one side, "you get a few clothes on you, you don't look too bad. `Cept you got eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank . . "Lucas." Bobby said, when they were in the elevator, "do you know who it was offed my old lady?" It wasn't a question he'd planned on asking, but somehow it had come rushing up like a bubble of swamp gas. Lucas regarded him benignly, his long face smooth and black. His black suit, beautifully cut, looked as though it had been freshly pressed. He carried a stout stick of oiled and polished wood, the grain all swirly black and red, topped with a large knob of polished brass. Finger-long splines of brass ran down from the knob, inlaid smoothly in the cane's shaft. "No, we do not." His wide lips formed a straight and very serious line. "That's something we'd very much like to know . Bobby shifted uncomfortably. The elevator made him self- conscious. It was the size of a small bus, and although it wasn't crowded, he was the only white Black people, he noted, as his eyes shifted restlessly down the thing's length, didn't look half dead under fluorescent light, the way white people did. Three times, in their descent, the elevator came to a halt at some floor and remained there, once for nearly fifteen min- utes. The first time this happened, Bobby had looked ques- tioningly at Lucas. "Something in the shaft," Lucas had said. "What?" "Another elevator." The elevators were lo- cated at the core of the arcology, their shafts bundled together with water mains, sewage lines, huge power cables, and insulated pipes that Bobby assumed were part of the geother- mal system that Beauvoir had described. You could see it all whenever the doors opened; everything was exposed, raw, as though the people who built the place had wanted to be able to see exactly how everything worked and what was going where And everything, every visible surface, was covered with an interlocking net of graffiti, so dense and heavily overlaid that it was almost impossible to pick out any kind of message or symbol. "You never were up here before, were you, Bobby?" Lucas asked as the doors jolted shut once again and they were on their way down. Bobby shook his head. "That's too bad," Lucas said. "Understandable, certainly, but kind of a shame Two-a-Day tells me you haven't been too keen on sitting around Barrytown. That true?" "Sure is," Bobby agreed. "I guess that's understandable, too. You seem to me to be a young man of some imagination and initiative Would you agree?" Lucas spun the cane's bright brass head against his pink palm and looked at Bobby steadily. "I guess so I can't stand the place. Lately I've kind of been noticing how, well, nothing ever happens, you know? I mean, things happen, but it's always the same stuff, over and fucking over, like it's all a rerun, every summer like the last one. . ." His voice trailed off, uncertain what Lucas would think of him. "Yes," Lucas said, "I know that feeling. It may be a little more true of Barrytown than of some other places, but you can feel the same thing as easily in New York or Tokyo." Can't be true, Bobby thought, but nodded anyway, Rhea's warning in the back of his head. Lucas was no more threaten- ing than Beauvoir, but his bulk alone was a caution. And Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didn't quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous. This ran directly opposite to the rule around Big Playground, where kids who had no real clout whatever went to great pains to advertise their chrome-studded rabidity. Which probably did them some good, at least in terms of the local action. But Lucas was very clearly nothing to do with local action. "I see you doubt it," Lucas said. "Well, you'll probably find out soon enough, but not for a while. The way your life's going now, things should remain new and exciting for quite a while." The elevator door shuddered open, and Lucas was moving, shooing Bobby in front of him like a child They stepped out into a tiled foyer that seemed to stretch forever, past kiosks and cloth-draped stalls and people squatting beside blankets with things spread out on them. "But not to linger," Lucas said, giving Bobby a very gentle shove with one large hand when Bobby paused in front of stacks of jumbled software. "You are on your way to the Sprawl, my man, and you are going in a manner that befits a count." "How's that?" |
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