HE STAYED OUT FOR something like eight hours, by the clock on his mothers Hitachi. Came to staring at Its dusty face, some hard thing wedged under his thigh. The Ono-Sendai. He rolled over. Stale puke smell.
Then he was in the shower, not sure quite how hed gotten there, spinning the taps with his clothes still on. He clawed and dug and pulled at his face. It felt like a rubber mask.
"Something happened." Something bad, big, he wasnt sure what.
His wet clothes gradually mounded up on the tile floor of the shower. Finally he stepped out, went to the sink and flicked wet hair back from his eyes, peered at the face in the mirror. Bobby Newmark, no problem.
"No, Bobby, problem. Gotta problem . . .
Towel around his shoulders, dripping water, he followed the narrow hallway to his bedroom, a tiny, wedge-shaped space at the very back of the condo. His holoporn unit lit as he stepped in, half a dozen girls grinning, eyeing him with evident delight. They seemed to be standing beyond the walls of the room, in hazy vistas of powder-blue space, their white smiles and taut young bodies bright as neon. Two of them edged forward and began to touch themselves.
"Stop it," he said.
The projection unit shut itself down at his command; the dreamgirls vanished. The thing had originally belonged to Ling Warrens older brother; the girls hair and clothes were dated and vaguely ridiculous. You could talk with them and get them to do things with themselves and each other. Bobby remembered being thirteen and in love with Brandi, the one with the blue rubber pants. Now he valued the projections mainly for the illusion of space they could provide in the makeshift bedroom.
"Something fucking happened," he said, pulling on black jeans and an almost-clean shirt. He shook his head. "What? Fucking what?" Some kind of power surge on the line? Some flukey action down at the Fission Authority? Maybe the base hed tried to invade had suffered some strange breakdown, or been attacked from another quarter . . . But he was left with the sense of having met someone, someone who . . . Hed unconsciously extended his right hand, fingers spread, beseechingly. "Fuck," he said. The fingers balled into a fist. Then it came back: first, the sense of the big thing, the really big thing, reaching for him across cyberspace, and then the girl-impression. Someone brown, slender, crouching somewhere in a strange bright dark full of stars and wind. But it slid away as his mind went for it.
Hungry, he got into sandals and headed back toward the kitchen, rubbing at his hair with a damp towel. On his way through the living room, he noticed the ON telltale of the Ono-Sendai glaring at him from the carpet. "0 shit." He stood there and sucked at his teeth. It was still jacked in. Was it possible that it was still linked with the base hed tried to run? Could they tell he wasnt dead? He had no idea. One thing he did know, though, was that theyd have his number and good. He hadnt bothered with the cutouts and frills that wouldve kept them from running a backtrack.
They had his address.
Hunger forgotten, he spun into the bathroom and rooted through the soggy clothing until he found his credit chip.
He had two hundred and ten New Yen stashed in the hollow plastic handle of a multibit screwdriver. Screwdriver and credit chip secure in his jeans, he pulled on his oldest, heaviest pair of boots, then clawed unwashed clothing from beneath the bed. He came up with a black canvas jacket with at least a dozen pockets, one of them a single huge pouch across the small of the back, a kind of integral rucksack. There was a Japanese gravity knife with orange handles beneath his pillow; that went into a narrow pocket on the jackets left sleeve, near the cuff.
The dreamgirls clicked in as he was leaving: "Bobby, Bobb-y, come back and play . . ."
In his living room, he yanked the Ono-Sendais jack from the face of the Hitachi, coiling the fiber-optic lead and tucking it into a pocket. He did the same with the trode set, then slid the Ono-Sendai into the jackets pack-pocket.
The curtains were still drawn. He felt a surge of some new exhilaration. He was leaving. He had to leave. Already hed forgotten the pathetic fondness that his brush with death had generated. He parted the curtains carefully, a thumb-wide gap, and peered out.
It was late afternoon. In a few hours, the first lights would start blinking on in the dark bulks of the Projects. Big Playground swept away like a concrete sea; the Projects rose beyond the opposite shore, vast rectilinear structures softened by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies, catfish tanks, solar heating systems, and the ubiquitous chicken-wire dishes.
Two-a-Day would be up there now, sleeping, in a world Bobby had never seen, the world of a mincome arcology. Two-a-Day came down to do business, mostly with the hotdoggers in Barrytown, and then he climbed back up. It had always looked good to Bobby, up there, so much happening on the balconies at night, amid red smudges of charcoal, little kids in their underwear swarming like monkeys, so small you could barely see them. Sometimes the wind would shift, and the smell of cooking would settle over Big Playground, and sometimes youd see an ultralight glide out from some secret country of rooftop so high up there. And always the mingled beat from a million speakers, waves of music that pulsed and faded in and out of the wind.
Two-a-Day never talked about his life, where he lived. Two-a-Day talked biz, or, to be more social, women. What Two-a-Day said about women made Bobby want to get out of Barrytown worse than ever, and Bobby knew that biz would be his only ticket out. But now he needed the dealer in a different way, because now he was entirely out of his depth.
Maybe Two-a-Day could tell him what was happening. There wasnt supposed to be any lethal stuff around that base Two-a-Day had picked it out for him, then rented him the software hed need to get in. And Two-a-Day was ready to fence anything he couldve gotten out with. So Two-a-Day had to know. Know something, anyway.
"I dont even have your number, man," he said to the Projects, letting the curtains fall shut. Should he leave some-thing for his mother? A note? "My ass," he said to the room behind him, "out of here," and then he was out the door and down the hall, headed for the stairs. "Forever," he added, kicking open an exit door.
Big Playground looked safe enough, except for a lone shirtless duster deep in some furious conversation with God. Bobby cut the duster a wide circle; he was shouting and jumping and karate-chopping the air. The duster had dried blood on his bare feet and the remnants of what had probably been a Lobe haircut.
Big Playground was neutral territory, at least in theory, and the Lobes were loosely confederated with the Gothicks; Bobby had fairly solid affiliations with the Gothicks, but retained his indie status. Barrytown was a dicey place to be an indie. At least, he thought, as the dusters angry gibberish faded behind him, the gangs gave you some structure. If you were Gothick and the Kasuals chopped you out, it made sense. Maybe the ultimate reasons behind it were crazy, but there were rules But indies got chopped out by dusters running on brainstem, by roaming predatory loonies from as far away as New Yorklike that Penis Collector character last summer, kept the goods in his pocket in a plastic bag . . .
Bobby had been trying to chart a way out of this landscape since the day he was born, or anyway it felt that way. Now, as he walked, the cyberspace deck in the pack-pocket banged against his spine. Like it. too, was urging him to get out. "Come on, Two-a-Day," he said to the looming Projects, "get your ass down outa there and be in Leons when I get there, okay?"
Two-a-Day wasnt in Leons.
Nobody was, unless you wanted to count Leon, who was probing the inner mysteries of a wall-screen converter with a bent paper clip.
"Why dont you just get a hammer and pound the fucker till it works?" Bobby asked. "Do you about as much good."
Leon looked up from the converter. He was probably in his forties, but it was hard to say. He seemed to be of no particular race, or, in certain lights, to belong to some race that nobody else belonged to. Lots of hypertrophied facial bone and a mane of curly, nonreflective black hair. His basement pirate club had been a fixture in Bobbys life for the past two years.
Leon stared dully at Bobby with his unnerving eyes, pupils of nacreous gray overlaid with a hint of translucent olive. Leons eyes made Bobby think of oysters and nail polish, two things he didnt particularly like to think about in connection with eyes. The color was like something theyd use to upholster barstools.
"I just mean you cant fix shit like that by poking at it," Bobby added uncomfortably. Leon shook his head slowly and went back to his exploration. People paid to get into the place because Leon pirated kino and simstim off cable and ran a lot of stuff that Barrytowners couldnt otherwise afford to access. There was dealing in the back and you could make "donations" for drinks, mostly clean Ohio hooch cut with some synthetic orange drink Leon scored in industrial quantities.
"Say, uh, Leon," Bobby began again, "you seen Two-a-Day in here lately?"
The horrible eyes came up again and regarded Bobby for entirely too long. "No."
"Maybe last night?"
"No."
"Night before?"
"No."
"Oh. Okay. Thanks." There was no point in giving Leon a hard time. Lots of reasons not to, actually. Bobby looked around at the wide dim room, at the simstim units and the unlit kino screens. The club was a series of nearly identical rooms in the basement of a semi-residential rack zoned for singles and a sprinkling of light industry. Good soundproofing: You hardly ever heard the music, not from outside. Plenty of nights hed popped out of Leons with a head full of noise and pills, into what seemed a magic vacuum of silence, his ears ringing all the way home across Big Playground.
Now he had an hour, probably, before the first Gothicks started to arrive. The dealers, mostly black guys from the Projects or whites from the city or some other burb, wouldnt turn up until there was a patch of Gothicks for them to work on. Nothing made a dealer look worse than just sitting there, waiting, because that would mean you werent getting any action, and there was no way a genuinely hot dealer would be hanging out in Leons just for the pleasure of it. It was all hotdog shit, in Leons, weekenders with cheap decks who watched Japanese icebreaker kinos.
But Two-a-Day wasnt like that, he told himself, on his way up the concrete stairs. Two-a-Day was on his way. Out of the Projects, out of Barrytown, out of Leons. On his way to the City. To Paris, maybe, or Chiba The Ono-Sendai bumped against his spine. He remembered that Two-a-Days icebreaker cassette was still in it. He didnt want to have to explain that to anyone. He passed a news kiosk. A yello fax of the New York edition of the Asahi Shimbun was reeling past a plastic window in the mirrored siding, some government going down in Africa, Russian stuff from Mars . . .
It was that time of day when you could see things very clear, see every little thing so far down the streets, fresh green just starting from the black branches of the trees in their holes in the concrete, and the flash of steel on a girls boot a block away, like looking through a special kind of water that made seeing easier, even though it was nearly dark. He turned and stared up at the Projects. Whole floors there were forever unlit, either derelict or the windows blacked out. What did they do in there? Maybe hed ask Two-a-Day sometime.
He checked the time on the kiosks Coke clock. His mother would be back from Boston by now, had to be, or else shed miss one of her favorite soaps. New hole in her head. She was crazy anyway, nothing wrong with the socket shed had since before he was born, but shed been whining for years about static and resolution and sensory bleedover, so shed finally swung the credit to go to Boston for some cheapass replacement. Kind of place where you dont even get an appointment for an operation. Walk in and they just slap it in your head . . . He knew her, yeah, how shed come through the door with a wrapped bottle under her arm, not even take her coat off, just go straight over and jack into the Hitachi, soap her brains out good for six solid hours. Her eyes would unfocus, and sometimes, if it was a really good episode, shed drool a little. About every twenty minutes shed man-age to remember to take a ladylike nip out of the bottle.
Shed always been that way, as long as he could remember her, gradually sliding deeper into her half-dozen synthetic jives, sequential simstim fantasies Bobby had had to hear about all his life. He still harbored creepy feelings that some of the characters she talked about were relatives of his, rich and beautiful aunts and uncles who might turn up one day if only he werent such a little shit. Maybe, he thought now, it had been true, in a way; shed jacked that shit straight through the pregnancy, because shed told him she had, so he, fetus Newmark, curled up in there, had reverberated to about a thousand hours of People of Importance and Atlanta. But he didnt like to think about being curled up in Marsha Newmarks belly. It made him feel sweaty and kind of sick
Marsha-momma. Only in the past year or so had Bobby come to understand the world well enough as he now saw it to wonder exactly how she still managed to make her way in it, marginal as that way had become, with her bottle and the socket ghosts to keep her company. Sometimes, when she was in a certain mood and had had the right number of nips, she still tried to tell him stories about his father. Hed known since age four that these were bullshit, because the details changed from time to time, but for years hed allowed himself a certain pleasure in them anyway.
He found a loading bay a few blocks west of Leons, screened from the street by a freshly painted blue dumpster, the new paint gleaming over pocked, dented steel. There was a single halogen tube slung above the bay. He found a comfortable ledge of concrete and sat down there, careful not to jar the Ono-Sendai. Sometimes you just had to wait. That was one of the things Two-a-Day had taught him.
The dumpster was overflowing with a varied hash of industrial scrap. Barrytown had its share of gray-legal manufacturers, part of the shadow economy" the news faces liked to talk about, but Bobby never paid much attention to news faces. Biz. It was all just biz.
Moths strobed crooked orbits around the halogen tube. Bobby watched blankly as three kids, maybe ten at the oldest, scaled the blue wall of the dumpster with a length of dirty white nylon line and a makeshift grapple that might once have been part of a coatrack. When the last one made it over the top, into the mess of plastic scrap, the line was drawn swiftly up. The scrap began to creak and rustle.
Just like me, Bobby thought, I used to do that shit, fill my room up with weird garbage Id find. One time Ling Warrens sister found most of somebodys arm, all wrapped in green plastic and done up with rubber bands.
Marsha-mommad get these two-hour fits of religion some-times, come into Bobbys room and sweep all his best garbage out and gum some God-awful self-adhesive hologram up over his bed. Maybe Jesus, maybe Hubbard, maybe Virgin Mary, it didnt much matter to her when the mood was on her. It used to piss Bobby off real good, until one day he was big enough to walk into the front room with a ballpeen hammer and cock it over the Hitachi; you touch my stuff again and Ill kill your friends, Mom, all of em. She never tried it again. But the stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt hed considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasnt one of them, so he didnt.
Now one of the dumpster kids popped up and conducted a slit-eyed survey of the immediate area, then ducked out of sight again. There was a clunking, scraping sound. Small white hands tipped a dented alloy canister up and over the edge, lowering it on the nylon line. Good score, Bobby thought; you could take the thing to a metal dealer and get a little for it. They lowered the thing to the pavement, about a meter from the soles of Bobbys boots; as it touched down, it happened to twist around, showing him the six horned symbol that stood for biohazard. "Hey, fuck," he said, drawing his feet up reflexively.
One of them slid down the rope and steadied the canister. The other two followed. He saw that they were younger than hed thought.
"Hey," Bobby said, "you know that could be some real bad shit? Give you cancer and stuff
"Go lick a dogs ass till it bleeds," the first kid down the rope advised him, as they flicked their grapple loose, coiled their line, and dragged the canister around the corner of the dumpster and out of sight.
He gave it an hour and a half. Time enough Leons was starting to cook
At least twenty Gothicks postured in the main room, like a herd of baby dinosaurs, their crests of lacquered hair bobbing and twitching. The majority approached the Gothick ideal: tall, lean, muscular, but touched by a certain gaunt restlessness, young athletes in the early stages of consumption. The graveyard pallor was mandatory, and Gothick hair was by definition black. Bobby knew that the few who couldnt warp their bodies to fit the subcultural template were best avoided; a short Gothick was trouble, a fat Gothick homicidal.
Now he watched them flexing and glittering in Leons like a composite creature, slime mold with a jigsaw surface of dark leather and stainless spikes. Most of them had nearly identical faces, features reworked to match ancient archetypes culled from kino banks. He chose a particularly artful Dean whose hair swayed like the mating display of a nocturnal lizard. "Bro," Bobby began, uncertain if hed met this one before.
"My man," the Dean responded languidly, his left cheek distended by a cud of resin. "The Count, baby" as an aside to his girl "Count Zero Interrupt." Long pale hand with a fresh scab across the back grabbing ass through the girls leather skirt. "Count, this is my squeeze." The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product shed heard of but had no intention of buying.
Bobby scanned the crowd. A few blank faces, but none he knew. No Two-a-Day. "Say, hey," he confided, "how you know how it is n all, Im lookin for this close personal friend, business friend" and at this the Gothick sagely bobbed his crest "goes by Two-a-Day . . ." He paused. The Gothick looked blank, snapping his resin. The girl looked bored, restless. " Wareman," Bobby added, raising his eyebrows, "black wareman."
"Two-a-Day," the Gothick said. "Sure. Two-a-Day. Right, babe?" His girl tossed her head and looked away.
"You know im?"
"Sure."
"He here tonight?"
"No," the Gothick said, and smiled meaninglessly.
Bobby opened his mouth, closed it, forced himself to nod. "Thanks, bro."
"Anything for my man," the Gothick said.
Another hour, more of the same. Too much white, chalk-pale Gothick white. Flat bright eyes of their girls, their bootheels like ebony needles. He tried to stay out of the simstim room, where Leon was running some kind of weird jungle fuck tape phased you in and out of these different kinda animals, lotta crazed arboreal action up in the trees, which Bobby found a little disorienting. He was hungry enough now to feel a little spaced, or maybe it was afterburn from whatever it was had happened to him before, but he was starting to have a hard time concentrating, and his thoughts drifted in odd directions. Like who, for instance, had climbed up into those trees full of snakes and wired a pair of those rat things for simstim?
The Gothicks were into it, whoever. They were thrashing and stomping and generally into major tree-rat identification. Leons new hit tape, Bobby decided.
Just to his left, but well out of range of the stim, two Project girls stood, their baroque finery in sharp contrast with Gothick monochrome Long black frock coats opened over tight red vests in silk brocade, the tails of enormous white shirts hanging well beneath their knees. Their dark features were concealed beneath the brims of fedoras pinned and hung with fragments of antique gold: stickpins, charms, teeth, mechanical watches Bobby watched them covertly; the clothes said they had money, but that someone would make it worth your ass if you tried to go for it. One time Two-a-Day had come down from the Projects in this ice-blue shaved-velour number with diamond buckles at the knees, like maybe he hadnt had time to change, but Bobby had acted like the wareman was dressed in his usual leathers, because he figured a cosmopolitan attitude was crucial in biz.
He tried to imagine going up to them so smooth. just putting it to them: Hey, you ladies surely must know my good friend Mr. Two-a-Day? But they were older than he was, taller, and moved with a dignity he found intimidating. Probably theyd just laugh, but somehow he didnt want that at all.
What he did want now, and very badly, was food. He touched his credit chip through the denim of his jeans. Hed go across the street and get a sandwich . . . Then he remembered why he was here, and suddenly it didnt seem very smart to use his chip. If hed been sussed, after his attempted run, theyd have his chip number by now; using it would spotlight him for anyone tracking him in cyberspace, pick him out in the Barrytown grid like a highway flare in a dark football stadium. He had his cash money, but you couldnt pay for food with that It wasnt actually illegal to have the stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it. Hed have to find a Gothick with a chip, buy a New Yens worth of credit, probably at a vicious discount, then have the Gothick pay for the food. And what the hell was he supposed to take his change in?
Maybe youre just spooked, he told himself. He didnt know for sure that he was being backtracked, and the base hed tried to crack was legit, or was supposed to be legit. That was why Two-a-Day had told him he didnt have to worry about black ice Whod put lethal feedback programs around a place that leased soft kino porn? The idea had been that hed bleep out a few hours of digitalized kino, new stuff that hadnt made it to the bootleg market. It wasnt the kind of score anybody was liable to kill you for . . ."
But somebody had tried. And something else had happened. Something entirely else. He trudged back up the stairs again, out of Leons He knew there was a lot he didnt know about the matrix, but hed never heard of anything that weird . . . You got ghost stories, sure, and hotdoggers who swore theyd seen things in cyberspace, but he had them figured for wilsons who jacked in dusted; you could hallucinate in the matrix as easily as anywhere else . . .
Maybe thats what happened, he thought. The voice was just part of dying, being flat-lined, some crazy bullshit your brain threw up to make you feel better, and something had happened back at the source, maybe a brownout in their part of the grid, so the ice had lost its hold on his nervous system.
Maybe. But he didnt know. Didnt know the turf. His ignorance had started to dig into him recently, because it kept him from making the moves he needed to make. He hadnt ever much thought about it before, but he didnt really know that much about anything in particular. In fact, up until hed started hotdogging, hed felt like he knew about as much as he needed to. And that was what the Gothicks were like, and that was why the Gothicks would stay here and burn themselves down on dust, or get chopped out by Kasuals, and the process of attrition would produce the percentage of them whod somehow become the next wave of childbearing, condo-buying Barrytowners, and the whole thing could go round again.
He was like a kid whod grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes, or the ins and outs of weather. Hed used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasnt space, mankinds unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline.
But since hed started hotdogging, he had some idea of how precious little he knew about how anything worked, and not just in the matrix. It spilled over, somehow, and hed started to wonder, wonder and think. How Barrytown worked, what kept his mother going, why Gothicks and Kasuals in-vested all that energy in trying to kill each other off Or why Two-a-Day was black and lived up in the Projects, and what made that different.
As he walked, he kept up his search for the dealer. White faces, more white faces. His stomach had started to make a certain amount of noise; he thought about the fresh package of wheat cutlets in the fridge at home, fry em up with some soy and crack a pack of krill wafers . . .
Passing the kiosk again, he checked the Coke clock. Marsha was home for sure, deep in the labyrinthine complexities of People of Importance, whose female protagonists life shed shared through a socket for almost twenty years The Asahi Shimbun fax was still rolling down behind its little window, and he stepped closer in time to see the first report of the bombing of A Block, Level 3, Covina Concourse Courts, Barrytown, New Jersey..
Then it was gone, past, and there was a story about the formal funeral of the Cleveland Yakusa boss Strictly trad. They all carried black umbrellas.
Hed lived all his life in 503, A Block.
That enormous thing, leaning in, to stomp Marsha Newmark and her Hitachi flat. And of course it had been meant for him.
Theres somebody doesnt mess around," he heard himself say.
"Hey! My man! Count! You dusted, bro? Hey! Where you headin!"
The eyes of two Deans twisting to follow him in the course of his headlong panic.