Sometimes he just needed to stand there and look up at the Judge, or squat on the concrete beside the Witch. It held back the memory-stutter, to do that. Not the fugues, the real flashbacks, but this jerky unfocused feeling he got, like the memory tape kept slipping in his head, losing minute increments of experience . . . So he was doing that now, and it was working, and finally he noticed Cherry was there beside him.
Gentry was up in the loft with the shape hed captured, what he called a macroform node, and hed hardly listened to what Slick had tried to tell him about the house and that whole place and Bobby the Count.
So Slick had come down here to crouch next to an Investigator in the cold and dark, retracing all the things hed done with so many different tools, and where hed scrounged each part, and then Cherry reached out and touched his cheek with her cold hand.
"You okay?" she asked. "I thought maybe it was happening to you again . . ."
"No. Its just I gotta come down here, sometimes."
"He plugged you into the Counts box, didnt he?"
"Bobby," Slick said, "thats his name. I saw him."
"Where?"
"In there. Its a whole world. Theres this house, like a castle or something, and hes there."
"By himself?"
"He said Angie Mitchells in there too . . ."
"Maybe hes crazy. Is she?"
"I didnt see her. Saw a car he said was hers."
"Shes in some celebrity detox place in Jamaica, last I heard."
He shrugged. "I dunno."
"Whats he like?"
"He looked younger. Anybodyd look bad with all those tubes nshit in em. He figured Kid Afrika dumped him here because he got scared. He said if anybody comes looking for him, we jack him into the matrix."
"Why?"
"Dunno."
"You shoulda asked him."
He shrugged again. "Seen Bird anywhere?"
"No."
"Shoulda been back already . . ." He stood up.
Little Bird came back at dusk, on Gentrys bike, the dark wings of his hair damp with snow and flapping behind him as he roared in across the Solitude. Slick winced; Little Bird was in the wrong gear. Little Bird jolted up an incline of compacted oildrums and hit the brakes when he shouldve gunned it. Cherry gasped as Bird and the bike separated in midair; the bike seemed to hang there for a second before it somersaulted into the rusted sheet-metal tangle that had been one of Factorys outbuildings, and Little Bird was rolling over and over on the ground.
Somehow Slick never heard the crash. He was standing beside Cherry in the shelter of a doorless loading bay then he was sprinting across snow-flecked rust to the fallen rider, no transition. Little Bird lay on his back with blood on his lips, his mouth partially hidden by the jumble of thongs and amulets he wore around his neck.
"Dont touch him," Cherry said. "Ribs may be broken, or hes mashed up inside . . ."
Little Birds eyes opened at the sound of her voice. He pursed his lips and spat blood and part of a tooth.
"Dont move," Cherry said, kneeling beside him and switching to the crisp diction shed learned in med-tech school. "You may have been injured . . ."
"F-fuck it, lady," he managed, and struggled stiffly up, with Slicks help.
"All right, asshole," she said, "hemorrhage. See if I give a shit."
"Didnt get it," Little Bird said, smearing blood across his face with the back of his hand, "the truck."
"I can see that," Slick said.
"Marvie n them, they got company. Like flies on shit. Couple of hovers n a copter nshit. All these guys."
"What kind of guys?"
"Like soldiers, but theyre not. Soldierll goof around, bullshit, crack jokes when nobody importants looking. But not them."
"Cops?" Marvie and his two brothers grew mutant ruderalis in a dozen half-buried railway tankcars; sometimes they tried to cook primitive amine compounds, but their lab kept blowing up. They were the nearest thing Factory had to permanent neighbors. Six kilometers.
"Cops?" Little Bird spat another tooth chip and gingerly probed his mouth with a bloody finger. "They arent doin anything against the law. Anyway, cops cant afford shit like that, new hovers, new Honda . . ." He grinned through a film of blood and spittle. "I hung off in the Solitude nscoped em good. Nobody Id wanna talk to, or you either. Guess I really fucked Gentrys bike, huh?"
"Dont worry about it," Slick said. "I think his minds on something else."
"Thas good . . ." He staggered in the direction of Factory, nearly fell, caught himself, continued.
"Hes highern a kite," Cherry said.
"Hey, Bird," Slick called, "what happened to that bag of shit I gave you to give Marvie?"
Bird swayed, turned. "Lost it . . ." Then he was gone, around a corner of corrugated steel.
"Maybe hes making that up," Cherry said. "About those guys. Or seeing things."
"I doubt it," Slick said, pulling her into deeper shadow as an unlit black Honda swung down toward Factory out of winter twilight.
He heard the Honda making its fifth pass over Factory as he pounded up the quaking stairs, the iron roof rattling with the copters passage. Well, he thought, that should anyway bring it to Gentrys attention that they had visitors. He took the fragile catwalk in ten long, slow steps; he was beginning to wonder if theyd ever be able to get the Count and his stretcher back out without having to weld extra I-bar across the span.
He went into the bright loft without knocking. Gentry was sitting at a workbench, his head cocked to one side, staring up at the plastic skylights. The bench was littered with bits of hardware and small tools.
"Helicopter," Slick said, panting from the climb.
"Helicopter," Gentry agreed, nodding thoughtfully, his disheveled roostertail bobbing. "They seem to be looking for something."
"I think they just found it."
"Could be the Fission Authority."
"Bird saw people at Marvies. Saw that copter there too. You werent paying much attention when I tried to tell you what he said."
"Bird?" Gentry looked down at the small bright things on the workbench. Picked up two fittings and twisted them together.
"The Count! He told me "
"Bobby Newmark," Gentry said, "yes. I know a lot more about Bobby Newmark, now."
Cherry came in behind Slick. "You gotta do something about that bridge," she said, going immediately to the stretcher, "it shakes too much." She bent to check the Counts readouts.
"Come here, Slick," Gentry said, standing. He walked to the holo table. Slick followed, looked at the image that glowed there. It reminded him of the rugs hed seen in the gray house, patterns like that, only these were woven of hairfine neon, and twisted into some kind of infinite knot; the knots core hurt his head to look at it. He looked away.
"Thats it?" he asked Gentry. "What youve always been looking for?"
"No. I told you. This is just a node, a macroform. A model . . ."
"Hes got this house in there, like a castle, and grass and trees and sky . . ."
"Hes got a lot more than that. Hes got a universe more than that. That was just a construct worked up from a commercial stim. What hes got is an abstract of the sum total of data constituting cyberspace. Still, its closer than Ive gotten before . . . He didnt tell you why he was in there?"
"Didnt ask him."
"Then youll have to go back."
"Hey. Gentry. Listen up. That copter, itll be back. Itll be back with two hovers fulla guys Bird said looked like soldiers. They arent after us, man. Theyre after him."
"Maybe theyre his. Maybe they are after us."
"No. He told me, man. He said, anybody comes looking for him, were in deep shit and we gotta jack him into the matrix."
Gentry looked down at the little coupling he still held. "Well talk with him, Slick. Youll go back; this time Ill go with you."