Chapter TWENTY-SIX
That night was a blur. Later, when I tried to get it back, even Envoy recall would only give me fragments.
Trepp wanted a night on the town. The best nightlife in Europe, she maintained, was only minutes away, and she had all the right addresses.
I wanted my thought processes stopped dead in their tracks.
We started in a hotel room on a street I could not pronounce. Some tetrameth analogue fired through the whites of our eyes by needlespray. I sat passively in a chair by the window and let Trepp shoot me up, trying to not think about Sarah and the room in Millsport. Trying not to think at all. Two-tone holographies outside the window cast Trepp’s concentrated features in shades of red and bronze, a demon in the act of sealing the pact. I felt the insidious tilt at the corners of perception as the tetrameth went barrelling along my synapses, and when it was my turn to do Trepp I almost got lost in the geometries of her face. This was very good stuff …
There were murals of the Christian hell, flames leaping like clawed fingers over a procession of screaming, naked sinners. At one end of the room, where the figures on the walls seemed to blend with the denizens of the bar in smoke and noise, a girl danced on a rotating platform. A cupped petal of black glass scythed around with the platform and each time it passed between audience and dancer, the girl was gone and a skeleton danced grinning in her place.
“This place is called All Flesh Will Perish,” yelled Trepp above the noise as we forced our way in through the crowd. She pointed to the girl and then to the black glass rings on her fingers. “Where I got the idea for these. Great effect, isn’t it?”
I got drinks, quickly.
The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell—and heaven—on earth.
“Sounds a bit epic, Angin Chandra’s outward-bound valediction to the people sort of thing,” shouted Trepp. “But I take your point.”
Evidently the words that had been running through my mind were also running out of my mouth. If it was a quote, I didn’t know where it was from. Certainly not a Quellism; she would have slapped anyone making that kind of speech.
“Thing is,” Trepp was still yelling, “you’ve got ten days.”
Reality tilts, flows sideways in gobs of flame-coloured light. Music. Motion and laughter. The rim of a glass under’ my teeth. A warm thigh pressed against my own which I think is Trepp’s, but when I turn another woman with long straight black hair and crimson lips is grinning at me. Her look of open invitation reminds me vaguely of something I’ve seen recently—
Street scene:
Tiered balconies on either side, tongues of light and sound splashed out onto pavements from the myriad tiny bars, the street itself knotted with people. I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats.
There was something I had forgotten. Something clouded.
Something impor—
“You can’t nicking believe something like that,” Trepp burst out. Or in, into my skull at the moment I had almost crystallised what I—
Was she doing it deliberately? I couldn’t even remember what it was I’d believed so strongly about cats a moment ago.
Dancing, somewhere.
More meth, eye-shot on a street corner, leaning against a wall. Someone walked past, called something out to us. I blinked and tried to look.
“F*ck, hold still will you!”
“What’d she say?”
Trepp peeled back my eyelids again, frowning with concentration.
“Called us both beautiful. F*cking junkie, probably after a handout.”
In a wood-panelled toilet somewhere, I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me. Or as if I was waiting for someone else to emerge from behind the seamed features. My hands were braced on the filthy metal basin below, and the epoxy strips bonding the thing to the wall emitted minute tearing sounds under my weight.
I had no idea how long I’d been there.
I had no idea where there was. Or how many theres we had already been through tonight.
None of this seemed to matter because …
The mirror didn’t fit its frame—there were pointed jags dug into the plastic edges holding the star-shaped centre precariously in place.
Too many edges, I muttered to myself. None of this f*cking fits together.
The words seemed significant, like an accidental rhythm and rhyme in ordinary speech. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to repair this mirror. I was going to cut my fingers to shreds, just trying. F*ck that.
I left Ryker’s face in the mirror, and staggered back out to a table piled high with candles where Trepp was sipping at a long ivory pipe.
“Micky Nozawa? Are you serious?”
“F*ck, yes.” Trepp nodded vigorously. “The Fist of the Fleet, right? Seen it four times at least. New York experia chains get a lot of imported colonial stuff. It’s getting to be quite chic. That bit where he takes the harpoonist out with the flying kick. You feel it right down to the bone, the way he delivers that f*cking kick. Beautiful. Poetry in motion. Hey, you know he did some holoporn stuff when he was younger.”
“Bullshit. Micky Nozawa never did porn. He didn’t need to.”
“Who said anything about need. The couple of bimb-ettes he was playing around with, I would have played around with them for free.”
“Bull. Shit.”
“I swear to God. That sleeve with the sort of Caucasian nose and eyes, the one he wrote off in that cruiser wreck. Real early stuff.”
There was a bar, where the walls and ceiling were hung with absurd hybrid musical instruments and the shelves behind the bar were stacked solid with antique bottles, intricately worked statuettes and other nameless junk. The noise level was comparatively low and I was drinking something that didn’t taste as if it was doing my system too much immediate harm. There was a faint musk in the air and small trays of sweetmeats on the tables.
“Why the f*ck do you do it?”
“What?” Trepp shook her head muzzily. “Keep cats? I like ca—”
“Work for f*cking Kawahara. She’s a f*cking abortion of a human being, a f*cked up Meth cunt not worth the slag of a stack, why do you—”
Trepp grabbed the arm I was gesturing with, and for a moment I thought there was going to be violence. The neurachem surged soggily.
Instead, she took the arm and draped it affectionately over her own shoulders, pulling my face closer to her own. She blinked owlishly at me.
“Listen.”
There was a longish pause. I listened, while Trepp frowned with concentration, took a long slug from her glass and set it down with exaggerated care. She wagged a finger at me.
“Judge not lest ye be judged,” she slurred.
Another street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.
Above, the stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.
Something. Wrong here.
Alien. Not a single pattern I recognised. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms, and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside, massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians returned. I thought I could see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us …
“Whoa.” Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. “What you looking for up there, grasshopper?”
Not my sky.
It’s getting bad.
In another toilet, painfully brightly lit, I’m trying to stuff some powder Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry and it keeps falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle flushes behind me and I glance up into the big mirror.
Jimmy de Soto emerges from the cubicle, combat fatigues smudged with Innenin mud. In the hard bathroom light his face is looking particularly bad.
“All right, pal?”
“Not especially.” I scratch at the inside of my nose, which is beginning to feel inflamed. “You?”
He makes a mustn’t-grumble gesture and moves forward in the mirror to stand beside me. Water fountains from the light-sensitive tap as he leans over the basin, and he begins to rinse his hands. Mud and gore dissolve off his skin and form a rich soup, pouring away down the tiny maelstrom of the plughole. I can sense his bulk at my shoulder, but his one remaining eye has me pinned to the image in the mirror and I cannot, or don’t want to, turn.
“Is this a dream?”
He shrugs and goes on scrubbing at his hands. “It’s the edge,” he says.
“The edge of what?”
“Everything.” His expression suggests that this much is obvious.
“I thought you only turned up in my dreams,” I say, casually glancing at his hands. There is something wrong with them; however much filth Jimmy scrubs off, there is more underneath. The basin is splattered with the stuff.
“Well, that’s one way of putting it, pal. Dreams, high stress hallucinations, or just wrecking your own head like this. It’s all the edge, see. The cracks down the sides of reality. Where stupid bastards like me end up.”
“Jimmy, you’re dead. I’m getting tired of telling you that.”
“Uhuh.” He shakes his head. “But you got to get right down in those cracks to access me.”
The soup of blood and soil in the basin is thinning out and I know suddenly that when it is gone, Jimmy will be too.
“You’re saying—”
He shakes his head sadly. “Too flicking complicated to go through now. You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ‘cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”
“Jimmy,” I make a helpless gesture, “what the f*ck am I going to do?”
He steps back from the basin and his ruined face grins garishly at me.
“Viral Strike,” he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream taken up along the beachhead. “Recall that mother, do you?”
And, flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror’s trick.
“Look,” said Trepp reasonably, “Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even knows if he killed you or not.”
“If he wasn’t already double-sleeved again.”
“No. Think about it. He’s cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He’s f*cking out there on his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he’s a strictly limited item. Kadmin’s sell-by date is coming up, you’ll see.”
“Kawahara’s going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.”
“Yeah, well.” Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. “Maybe.”
There was another place, called Cable or something synonymous, where the walls were racked with colour-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped with thin, lethal-looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket flicked spasmodically to the off-beat music that filled the place like water. At times, the components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could he been tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.
I was sitting at the bar, something sweet smouldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I’d been smoking it. The bar was crowded but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.
On either side of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables, eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy half smiles. One of them was Trepp.
I was alone.
Things that might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I picked up the cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.
No time for—
Viral Strike!!!
—thinking.
Streets passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under Jimmy’s boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So that’s how he does it.
The crimson-lipped woman who—
Maybe you can’t—
What? What???
Jack and socket.
Trying to tell you some—
No time for—
No time—
No—
And away, like water in the maelstrom, like the soup of mud and gore pouring off Jimmy’s hands and into the hole at the bottom of the sink …
Gone again.
But thought, like the dawn, was inevitable and it found me, with the dawn, on a set of white stone steps that led down into murky water. Grandiose architecture reared vaguely behind us and on the far side of the water I could make out trees in the rapidly greying darkness. We were in a park.
Trepp leaned over my shoulder and offered me a lit cigarette. I took it reflexively, drew once and then let smoke dribble up through my slack lips. Trepp settled into a crouch next to me. An unfeasibly large fish flopped in the water at my feet. I was too eroded to react.
“Mutant,” said Trepp inconsequentially.
“Same to you.”
The little shreds of conversation drifted away over the water.
“Going to need painkillers?”
“Probably.” I felt around inside my head. “Yeah.”
She handed me a wafer of impressively-coloured capsules without comment.
“What you going to do?”
I shrugged. “Going to go back. Going to do what I’m told.”