Sesha heaved, felt her hands grip the arms of the chair.
With the tip of his tongue, Sick Nick plucked out the boyfriend's eyes and flicked them away. Coiling itself around the young guy's throat and picking him up from the ground like a cut flower, the tongue morphed, becoming pincer-tipped, and set about removing the guy's teeth, one by one.
Sesha closed her eyes; she couldn't watch any more.
Yet after a moment she found herself peeping again.
Sick Nick was still milking his horticulture/dentistry gag. Blood gushed from the guy's toothless mouth. A vehicle drew up at the kerbside nearby. A small van. Clearly visible on its side was BENGT & ANDERSSEN, which Sesha recognised as the name of an upmarket fadget manufacturer. From the van emerged a Bengt & Anderssen maintenance man. He had B&A emblazoned across the back of his bottle-green boilersuit, carried a toolbox, and wore a Viking helmet. Sesha had seen the guy before, in ads for the company's products. The man put down the toolbox on the cobblestones, taking care to avoid the blood. From the box he selected a small, fat-barrelled gun with a foldaway butt.
Sick Nick let the young guy drop and turned to face the maintenance man.
Sesha's heart stopped.
The maintenance man took aim and fired the gun. A net of fine mesh enveloped Sick Nick. The razor tongue hacked at it, but couldn't cut through. The net tightened. Sick Nick was now a whirling, hacking ball of gleaming blades.
But still, he remained trapped.
The maintenance man folded up and put away his special gun. Sick Nick struggled. The net tightened further. Sick Nick struggled harder, lost his balance and toppled. The net had him caught.
And then, all at once, Sick Nick was staring at her, staring straight out through the securicam at Sesha Roffey. His burning eyes bored into her, as though he knew she was there, rapt witness to his downfall. The razor tongue shot out again—
Sesha flinched, let out a horrified scream as the tongue-tip burst through the screen of her smartspecs and brushed her cheek, only to be yanked back into the image by the man from the van. Clutching the writhing, eel-like tongue in a thickly-gloved hand, the Bengt & Anderssen man produced from his toolbox a heavy-duty cutting tool. Coolly, he snipped off Sick Nick's tongue and tossed it into the gutter, where it lay jerking and twisting and squirming. Without haste, the maintenance man then removed from his toolbox a pair of vicious-looking meathooks. Stepping gingerly across the bloodstained cobblestones to where his tongueless adversary lay vainly struggling, he swung the hooks with businesslike force, digging them into Sick Nick, and then proceeded to drag the captured cyberspook across to his van. A very big, very strong, strapping specimen, quite constitutionally worthy of the horned Viking helmet he wore, the B&A man had little trouble in dragging Sick Nick to the van, pulling him through the blood of his victims, leaving a dark smeary trail. The van's tailgate had been left open. With the two hooks, the man hoisted Sick Nick up off the ground and deposited him inside, then allowed himself a slight breather before swinging down the tailgate and securing it. Throughout, he had given the impression of all-in-a-day's-work. He walked over and retrieved his toolbox, then got back into the van and drove off.
Bewildered, Sesha tried to make sense of it. Never before had she seen, or even heard of, Sick Nick being defeated by anyone. Sick Nick was invincible. This was an entirely novel development.
And the tongue—oh wow, WHAT an effect! Her cheek still tingled from its razor caress.
Of course, none of this had really taken place. The securicam image had been puppeted, first by Sick Nick himself, and then by a very sharp, clever and cool Bengt & Anderssen ad. The B&A ‘grammers had found a way of outpuppeting the world's most formidable cyberspook, pursuing him through all of his random manifestations and bringing him to poetic justice in hijacking him to their own ends, not to mention evidencing a state-of-the-art sense of humour. The ad would win awards.
Sesha took off her smartspecs. Her heart was thumping, still. So much for relaxation. By a macabre coincidence, somewhere out in the city the faint wail of sirens gradually rose to a high pitch of urgency before dying away again.
She touched her cheek.
Her fingers came away smeared with blood.
* * * *
Ruth turned a corner into a cobblestoned square. It was full of police. She had heard their sirens streets away. Police with big ugly machine guns were standing around everywhere. A covered stretcher was being put into an ambulance. Something serious must have happened.
And then, she saw the blood.
It was all over the place. It turned her stomach. Instinctively, she hugged Kali tight. What was it, a crash? Had someone been knocked down? But then why all the guns? Was it a shooting? She'd heard no gunshots. Whatever it was, for all that blood to have been spilled, that terrible amount of blood. And what was that, lying there in the gutter? A glistening, coal-black snake of a thing, throbbing faintly, obscenely.
People were standing and talking. It was hard to understand them, they were speaking so fast. In her halting Spanish, Ruth asked the woman beside her what was going on. The woman shrugged, her padded shoulders knocking into her gigantic round earrings. “Se dice que es Sick Nick."
Ruth recognized the name. Was it a character from a film? She seldom watched television, hadn't gone to the cinema in years, and never kept up with the news. But the name was definitely one she'd heard before, although this did nothing to make the situation here in the square any clearer to her.
She was hot, boiling hot, and Kali was heavy. What else was there to do but find a phone box? Not that they weren't finished, the two of them, Ruth Deitch and Paulie fucking Rayle.
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* * *
Chapter 22
He was unable to cry, laugh, scream; to do anything but feel dismally numb. His ex-wife was insane. Angel Syndrome meant that and nothing more. The things she had just now told him, here in the park after this last attack, as he had held her, as Felipe had come charging in with the Socratosine, the things she had said amounted to final, conclusive evidence of her descent into madness. The crap she'd spouted, and the beatific smile she now wore as, earnestly, she informed him, “Paulie, it's not how you think it is, all of this."
He said, “I have to go and find Ruth and Kali."
“Big Boy?"
“What?” he snapped back at the wrist mobe.
“Must I keep calling you Big Boy when I know your name is actually Paul? Does it generate adequate drollery, still? Or might a fresh pseudonym, such as, for instance, Hot Rod, serve to refurbish this running gag somewhat?"
“Look, what do you want?"
“The name you just mentioned ... Kali ... is part of the flashtransmit ident from a ResponsiCare infant transportation sling currently being employed in this city. The sling is registering a high temperature, and also some stress conducting to the child from the sling-wearer. Unfortunately, the sling's metaparental vocalizer module is for some reason inoperable, preventing the wearer from being informed, plus no local ResponsiCare infant health account has been initiated ... therefore health centres are refusing to accept alarm signals."
Could the mobe be talking about Ruth's baby sling? It wasn't like Ruth to go for that kind of hi-techery; so far as Paulie could recall she'd bought the sling second-hand, like almost all their other baby stuff. Maybe she never realized what she was buying? He himself had never paid it much attention.
“So can you locate this sling?” he asked of the mobe.
“At this moment, the sling and, presumably, its wearer are proceeding along Calle Castelar in the El Arenal quarter."
“We'll go in the car.” Frances looked to her man. “Felipe?"
As they drove, Paulie thought, I am dreaming, of course. This boxworld is mine. All of this is merely my own brain's unique, intricate, hyperconvoluted way of granting me my deepest desires.
To Frances, he said, “You do realize you're just a humiliant? A pseudoperson, a piece of furni
ture in someone else's fantasy? And that someone happens to be me.” His own cruelty shocked him. “I'm sorry.” He looked away from her.
Frances said calmly, “Ruth will be fine. Everything will be fine, as soon as I gain possession of my full range of powers."
“Now that you're finally an angel, you mean?"
“I suspect it's anamnesis, that it was there all the time, occluded, unavailable to me in my former state. The telothine released it retrotemporally."
“How, exactly?” Paulie was intrigued; he wanted to hear how his imagination had arranged things. It wasn't really so surprising that his transconscious psyche had chosen to displace agency onto Frances; he had always thought of her as some kind of Goddess. Vanity? Did he refuse to fall in love with anything less? Then what of Ruth?
Frances said, “The telothine will make me emortal, enabling me to live to see the Ontotechnological Revolution, whereupon, along with everyone else on this planet, I shall partake of the coming Paradise."
Paulie laughed out loud. “And let me guess: those others, the ones who went for telotherapy and ended up with AS ... they were just too old and weak to handle what you're going through, but retained just enough presence of mind to have themselves frozen? Not on the off-chance that they might be revived in the future, but knowing, without doubt, that they are going to be?” He laughed again, harshly, bitterly; it was all so ludicrous. “Can't you see, this is the work of a second-rate, washed-up, pathetically desperate imagination? I know what I want, more or less, but I'm just not up to conceptualizing it. Ontotechnology ... that's just my word for magic. Or, if you like, divine grace. And the funniest thing, the biggest joke of all, is that it's just myself I'm talking to. Has the timer jammed or what? I should have been fetched out long before it got to this."
He felt Frances's hand close over his. He shrugged it off.
* * * *
The second phone box was also Transac Ring Only; Ruth couldn't find one that accepted cash money. She asked the computerized operator to put through a call, collect, to Frances Rayle. No number for that person was available.
I might've known, Ruth thought, that she'd be ex-direc.
Beside the box ran a low stone wall. Ruth sat down on it. Kali was so heavy, and probably boiling up in the sling. She took the baby out and held her. The poor little love was hot, she was sweaty and red in the face, and Ruth thought, Some mother am I. Me and my fucking hormones.
For wasn't it always possible—she'd learnt this trick from Paulie, turning situations round till they looked different—that she was pushing them together, Paulie and Frances? Making her own worst fear a reality?
She didn't know what to think, couldn't work out which was the true way of seeing things, sitting there on the wall and being looked at by the tourists like another little dab of local colour. She felt that they expected her to be begging, and that she'd brought the baby out to drum up pity.
The road was noisy. Cars, vans, lorries.
SAGRADA.
Ruth started, as though slapped in the face. The word had come out of nowhere, come and then gone. A word on the side of some vehicle. Sagrada something. Something Sagrada. That same word again, the very same word the stupid voicebox from the baby sling had spoken. As if to remind her of something.
But what?
A car pulled up. A black car, just like the one in which they'd gone out to the park. The door opened and Paulie got out.
“Ruth, are you all right?"
She said to him, “What do you care?"
She didn't know how they'd managed to find her. They must have been driving around, looking. They must have driven down no end of streets in search of her.
Paulie came over to her. “I was worried."
“I want to go back,” she told him. “I want to go home."
“So do I.” He held out his hands to take Kali.
Ruth gave their baby to her father.
Paulie said, “There's nothing I can do here."
Ruth was taken back. He seemed serious, and he looked more troubled than ever, really, truly loaded down and woebegone. He hadn't looked that bad when they were in the park.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's go home."
Ruth followed him back to the car. Frances was there, sitting in the back and smiling at her. Not a smug or nasty smile, but a warm and friendly one greeted Ruth as she got into the car. Paulie squeezed in after her with Kali and shut the door. It wasn't a big luxury car, just ordinary-sized. That was one nice thing about Frances, she didn't go in for showy status symbols.
They pulled away, and Paulie said, “I think it would be best if we went home,” and immediately, despite everything she had thought while off on her own, Ruth felt guilty.
Frances said, “Everything will be fine."
There was—you couldn't fail to notice it—something odd about Frances's manner; she too had changed since the park, but in an opposite way from Paulie. While Paulie seemed to have had the stuffing knocked out of him, Frances looked and sounded on top of the world.
Ruth thought wearily, Why can't people just be normal?
They drove back to the house in a silence broken only by Kali, who suddenly went into what Ruth recognized as one of her ‘want-to-go-to-sleep-but-can't’ crying fits.
“May I hold her?” Frances asked.
Paulie looked to Ruth. She nodded. He handed Kali over. Kali stopped crying and stared up at Frances.
“Who's a little beauty?” Frances whispered.
Ruth saw that Paulie was watching them, looking at Frances and looking at Kali. She wondered what he was thinking. She wondered if it was really now finally over between them, between herself and Paulie. She wondered this despite her change of mood while sitting on the wall, and despite his having said that he wanted to go home.
They reached the house, and Frances had handed Kali back to her, and they were stepping out of the lift onto the patio when, right out of the blue, Paulie turned on Frances and asked her, in an ugly fraught voice, “So just how are you going to put everything right?"
Ruth saw that he had tears in his eyes.
Frances, far from being shocked or offended, couldn't have been more sympathetic in her response. “You're confused. I understand that. But have faith."
“Can you fetch me out?” Paulie wanted to know. “Can you do that, fetch me out?"
Ruth's stomach tightened.
“Can't you see I can't take any more?” Paulie looked like he was about to grab hold of Frances and start shaking her. “But you really can't do anything, can you? And you know why? Because my imagination's not up to it. I can't think what you would do. I don't know how the fuck ontotechnology would work, were there such a thing. I have no words to put into your mouth. I'd hook up again, try and get to another level, but what would be the use? I just don't have it in me, what it takes."
Frances said gently, “Paul, you're tired."
“Yeah, too right I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to imagine the impossible. The unimaginable. Well I've had it. I've done my best. I give up.” He broke down into sobs, then suddenly screamed out, “JUST TELL ME WHOSE FUCKING DREAM THIS IS."
Kali shrieked in terror.
Ruth walked quickly away, took Kali up the steps, up to their room, leaving him behind, back there with Frances. The two of them belonged together; they were both round the twist. She'd had enough. This was it. The finish. Goodbye.
On the landing, she caught the PsyTri woman sneaking out of her room and into theirs. The woman stopped dead with her hand on the doorhandle, a picture of embarrassment, when she saw Ruth looking at her.
“Ruth."
In the woman's hand was a little purple soft toy, one of those Bubu things, or whatever they were called. It was just like the toy Frances had sent Kali, the present that Ruth had grudgingly accepted only because she wasn't petty enough to chuck it out. The toy that had gone missing from the cottage.
“Here.” The woman held it out to her. “It's yours. I stole it. I'm sorry.
"
“Keep it,” Ruth told her, surprised to find that she didn't feel angry; or to be more exact, that she was able to choose not to be angry, not to care.
“I suppose you think I'm a klep..."
“I don't want to know,” Ruth cut in. “I'm fed up of the whole fucking lot of you. I never wanted this. I never wanted to be mixing with people like you, any of you. You're just, I don't know, you're all just completely fucked-up."
“Mmm,” the woman agreed, tears running down her cheeks. “Frucked-up."
“The word's fuck, for fucksake!"
The woman was sobbing, now, sobbing her heart out, and before she knew it, Ruth had her arm around the woman and was sort of hugging her, as best she could, what with having to carry Kali at the same time. “Oh look, it's all right, don't worry about it.” A tear fell on the back of her hand, ran tickling down her skin. “It's only a kid's toy, it's not the end of the world."
Standing there offering comfort to this woman she barely knew, Ruth thought, Who is there to mother me?
And then she thought, Sagrada.
How could I have not remembered?
How could I have forgotten my own mother's name?
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* * *
Chapter 23
Weightless, formless, yet magically able to move and feel and see and read and drink in scents and sounds and atmospheres, to study expressions on faces and listen to his songs being sung before floating off again, silent, invisible, Janko Brauch never tired of touring his world, soaking up sorrow, basking in love.
It was a gas, the ultimate gear, a hit like no other. He'd been burnt out, brought down, drained, a joke who couldn't cut it any more, these last sixteen years. A figure of pity and ridicule. A wreck on a permanent guilt trip on account of what he'd done, the two people he'd killed with that car. Now computers copied his voice, stole his style, came up with megaselling songs. They could fake his physical image and put it in movies, thus avoiding his ‘difficult’ demands. They could do very well on their own, thank you very fucking much, or frucking, as kids said nowadays. Live fast, slow down and die old and uncool, crowded out by younger flowers. Have your turn and hand over the torch, it used to be, which was kind of a cool thing. It was something to be appreciated shrewdly once you got onto the maturity and mellowness kick, found true wisdom in the fullness of time; once you saw the sin in living on as a dumb digizombie, an animated trademark, hawking yesterday's wares in eternal recycles for this year's and next year's kidsumers. Kids who hadn't known about the car crash, who would have anyhow just shrugged and said, ‘so frucking what?’ Kids who admired the way you'd bought enough lawpower to get you off and keep you out of jail. Kids of scant sensitivity, who went ahead and loved you, still. Loved you while you hated yourself.
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