Nathans reached forward to pick it up, carefully inspecting the work with a bemused expression on his face. While keeping an eye on everything else that happened at her table, the craftswoman dickered heatedly with another customer about an inexpensive clip-on nose stud. Nathans studied her carefully as he appeared to consider the pendant, still keeping his face in the shadow of his hat brim.
The jewelry vendor had long brown hair braided with a rainbow of different-colored ribbons, like the striking plumage of an extinct bird. She had strung herself with a tangled mass of jewelry, most of which seemed to be her own creations. The woman’s face was wide, not very attractive; she had a few pimples, a few freckles, a few moles. But she had a pretty smile, and she actually wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, harking back to the wave of hippie nostalgia that had swept the Metroplex a few years before.
Giving up on the other sale, she plucked the nose stud from the dissatisfied customer’s fingers and abruptly turned away from him to face Nathans. “Like that one?”
“Yes I do. It’s very interesting,” he said, sounding complimentary but uncertain. It was all a game; they both knew it.
“Are you a neo-Satanist, then?”
“Are you?” Nathans answered quickly, taking her off guard.
“No. I don’t go for that sort of stuff,” she said without vehemence, careful not to scare off a prospective customer. “But it’s okay, I mean. We’re all different, right?”
“Then why do you make a pendant like this, if you’re not part of the religion?”
She shrugged, flipping one of her braids back. “I try to do lots of different things. And I have to make what the market demands, or else why bother sitting out here quibbling prices all day long? There’s a lot of interest in this stuff. That’ll be my third one sold today—if, of course, you decide to buy it.”
Nathans appreciated her frankness. He and Stromgaard and Vincent had formed neo-Satanism with a consciously mischievous intent, as a simple joke at first and then an appallingly real joke as the stupid blues ate it up. If someone was foolish enough to be taken in by such a ridiculous and absurd religion, if someone would freely give money and fanatical energy to something that was such an apparent sham, then didn’t that person deserve to be defrauded, a disgrace to the human race?
“Of course I’ll take it,” he answered the jeweler. “But you’ll have to wrap it up for me, please.” Before she could quote him a price, Nathans removed his Net card and swept it through her reader, transferring money from one of his fictitious sources into the woman’s home account. The jeweler handed him the pendant in a white paper bag taken from a fast-food center. She nodded at the fair, but not overly generous, price he had credited her.
“Good enough. Thanks for not haggling!” she said. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”
Nathans tucked the bag inside the denim jacket. “Have a nice day.”
He walked off again past the line of vendors, paying little attention to the flower sellers, the caricature artists, the middle-aged man selling cookies. Looking, smelling, experiencing, sensing the instincts of the mass mind of the public, he could almost feel his mental batteries charging.
Nathans particularly liked the singers, especially those who had written their own songs. A new style of mournful street spontaneity had grown popular, called the “blues’ blues.” A man and his sister sat together on a blanket, loudly singing improvised words to the music from a Tchaikovsky tape. Nathans stood listening while the others paused and then moved in. He quickly slid his Net card through the singers’ reader, giving them a small donation. They didn’t break their refrain to thank him, and that pleased him even more.
He walked again, looping around slowly, not anxious to return to Resurrection, Inc. Today he didn’t really feel up to going past Soapbox Derby, though he never tired of listening to the people ranting there. Sure, most of the invective predictably attacked Resurrection, but Nathans felt gratified to see the people thinking at least, planning ways to change the world order. If they kept it up, they might actually succeed in raising their own social consciousness. Otherwise, they would be doing nothing more than assembling furniture, cleaning rooms, lifting boxes, and washing dishes, not thinking of anything beyond their own paycheck.
Out of curiosity, with a faint predatory smile on his face, Nathans slowly came up behind one of the wandering blues. The man’s sluggish movements and dead lack of expression clearly tagged him for what he was. Feeling the game build slowly, Nathans shadowed him, not trying to hide his movements but somewhat disgusted (yet not really surprised) when the blue didn’t even realize he was being followed.
As they moved on, Nathans began to grow almost nauseated by the man’s aimless course, his dejected stance. Nathans wanted to shout, to shake the man and insist that his life didn’t have to be like this—was he a machine that without a mechanical job he was lost? Didn’t humanity have the power to think, letting a man occupy himself with great things instead of trivial “busy” jobs?
Nathans narrowed his eyes, fixing his stare at the back of the man’s head. It was going to be difficult for his own subtle revolution to come about, his own important alteration of society, his vision of the bright and optimistic future. Nothing could happen until most of these pathetic people went away.
A rush of excitement filled him as he reached into his pocket, pushing aside the white sack containing the neo-Satanist pendant and fingering a small tube the size of a penlight. A hisser, an aerosol weapon, a high-pressure subdermal sprayer that could paint a broad layer of toxin onto the skin, unnoticed. The poison would take hours to permeate the stratum corneum to the basal cell layer; once into the bloodstream, the toxin would begin to neutralize the serotonin in the man’s brain, paralyzing all his muscles—including the diaphragm and the heart.
Nathans would be long gone by that time. It didn’t pay to be blatant about murder. After all, he didn’t have anything personal against this particular man, only against his medieval “life is a vale of tears” attitude.
He pulled out the hisser, carefully laying it against his wrist and hiding its tip with his curled fingertips. As Nathans came up behind the blue, he could feel his own blood pounding, his cells tingling with the anticipation. He always felt a sense of triumph when he could do something to bring about the great social change, rather than just sitting back and letting the cumbersome grinding wheels of evolution take their own course.
He saw the hairs on the man’s neck, a few glints of sweat, the naked skin waiting…. The toxin was warm and gentle; he wouldn’t even feel it sprayed on his skin. Nathans raised the hisser, exposing its tip.
But then he stopped himself, realizing that this wasn’t what he should be doing. If his theory of inexorable social change was really true—and he knew it was—then it had to run by itself. It should not require overt action from him, any direct assistance. If the world truly worked according to the “survival of the fittest” paradigm, then it would have to take care of itself. One man killed would not make a difference one way or another.
Nathans hesitated, torn, wishing he could do some thing active for once. He admitted to himself that he would have enjoyed killing the man, but in the end he backed off, bleeding the compressed air out of the hisser as he let the other man move along with the crowd, continuing his ponderous trek.
The walk left Nathans feeling oddly refreshed, exhilarated in spite of the non-confrontation with the blue. He drew in another deep breath of the sweat-mingled air. The breeze picked up, and he had to hold onto his straw hat before it sailed off above all the other heads.
He felt he could go back to his office suite now, ready to play the part of the corporate executive again. Back in front of the great building of Resurrection, Inc., he read the placard from a distance before he ducked inside the apartment complex, finding his special key to #117.
“Servants for Mankind—Freeing Us from Tedium to Pursue Our True Destiny.”
Nathans took the words to heart. The world, th
e universe was predictable. Everything would work out all right. But he was deathly afraid he wouldn’t see the results in his own lifetime. He had to use all his resources to make sure that it did happen.
10
Danal left the lights on in his room as he lay awake on the narrow bed, motionless, slowly recharging his energy reserves. The house remained silent. It was long after dark.
Danal’s austere room was sparsely furnished with a bed, a plastic chair and, looking out-of-place, an old, non-functional Net terminal on a small table in the corner. After all, Servants needed few comforts of existence.
Danal lay back, pondering, all alone in the mansion. To pass the night in peace, the Servant realized he could step down the workings of his microprocessor, so that time would seem to pass more quickly. But he was not anxious for his new life to flash by any faster. He didn’t need to sleep, and he wasn’t certain he’d be able to even if he tried. And Danal wasn’t particularly sure he wanted to find out what kind of dreams he would have.
On an impulse he shut off the light and lay alone in darkness. His Master Van Ryman had gone away at dusk, departing for one of the neo-Satanist Sabbats as the population in the streets trickled away to do their evening’s work before the Enforcers’ midnight curfew. As he departed, Van Ryman left Danal with the provocative comment that he had free run of the house to do as he wished.
For the first time, unobserved by needle-sharp eyes, Danal felt able to let his wall down, to drop the Servant facade. It felt so stifling, so unnatural, to respond with mechanical efficiency and passive complacency. At the back of his mind he began to wonder if he was wearing the clever disguise of a Servant, if the flashbacks some how signified that Danal had brought more back with him from death… or if all Servants were like this, all wearing a false disguise to fool the humans.
Danal stood up and left his room. Hesitantly he began to explore the big house, trying not to abuse the privilege. He wandered through the rooms, touching things with gentle awe, looking at hallways, at knickknacks, at a universe of tiny details.
Danal picked up a small vase that held a porcelain rose. He touched a kiln-fired ashtray, crudely made but with an air that suggested the piece was expensive. Danal looked at the elaborate furniture, one piece at a time.
He went into the different parts of the house, moving slowly in the silence. Off the master bedroom he saw a sauna room with faded old boards weathered from too much steam and hot water. He hesitated at the doorway, not venturing inside. The place seemed to exude a steam of memories as well, like psychic impressions swirling out of the cracked floor.
Just to the right of the front door was the cramped control room for the Intruder Defense Systems. The crowded and intricate panels blinked like city lights, but the ominous machinery frightened him, and Danal stood outside looking in, afraid to enter in case he might touch something.
In the open sitting room at the end of the main hall, the Servant found a low door half-hidden under the stair case that led up to the loft and the other two rooms. He felt drawn to the door, but when he reached the handle, he found it locked. Danal tried to pull at the knob, but it remained fastened. A sudden fear ran up his spine, and he turned to leave the door alone, trying not to think about it.
Danal walked slowly into the study, the room where Van Ryman had first interrogated him. In the following days, the Servant had been cleaning the house, or taking care of the plants and flowers in the terrarium room. He had also been attempting to cook, using fresh ingredients and unpackaged vegetables and meats, but even though he carefully and methodically followed the proper steps, he didn’t seem to have any real finesse for cooking.
In the study he looked at the rugs on the floor, at the lacquered black Grande piano. Experimentally he ran his fingers over the synthesizer keypad, but the unit had been powered down, and no music emerged. He walked along the row of books, studying the neo-Satanist texts. Gingerly he opened one that sounded particularly sinister, the Malleus Maleficarum, and scanned across a few pages, but it all seemed like a gibberish of plastic Latin—words that were supposed to sound mysterious and arcane but had no actual meaning. Brownish-red ink sketched various shapes and symbols and things that looked like spells.
With growing enthusiasm Danal put the book back and stepped over to the white-light hologram on the mantel. The fireplace sat dead and cold, with a grayish crystal inside it. He worked the hologram’s position coordinates again, maneuvering the beach scene until he found the image of Van Ryman and Julia on the beach. He stared at the picture, haunted, drinking in the details for a long moment. His heart felt heavy inside him, but he didn’t know why.
Danal stood motionless and uneasy. Thinking, pondering, waiting. He heard his Master’s words echo over and over in his head, You may inspect anything you wish.
He listened to the silence, knowing Van Ryman wasn’t there, and stepped in front of the Net terminal. He looked at the vacant screen of glass, behind which words could come, evoking mysteries from The Net itself. He stared at it, nearly hypnotized.
Danal reached forward, almost touched the keyboard, drew back, stopped, thought for a brief moment, realized how ridiculous he was being, then reached forward again. He touched his fingers to the panel, and hit the Return key. Real, mechanical keys moved up and down as he touched his fingers to them, making knife-switch contacts. The screen came alive, responding:
“WELCOME TO THE BAY AREA METROPLEX NETWORK.
“USERNAME:”
Danal sat in the chair next to the terminal, resting his elbows on his knees, then typed some letters. With few other names in his nearly vacant memory, the Servant tapped out “VINCENT VAN RYMAN.” The Net returned and prompted him for his access code. Danal felt dizzy for an instant, and hammered a complex, seemingly random pattern of thirteen characters.
The green pixels on the screen vanished briefly, and Danal channeled his thoughts through his own microprocessor, scaling his time sense up to the same speed as The Net itself. For almost a year, it seemed, random pixels ignited and flashed on the screen before the characters returned.
“WELCOME TO THE NETWORK, VINCENT VAN RYMAN. HOW MAY WE HELP YOU TODAY?
“?”
Danal suddenly realized what he had done, that he had somehow keyed in Van Ryman’s supposedly unbreakable personal Net password, a tenth-level access code. He stared down at the tips of his fingers in awe.
Danal logged off immediately and took two steps away from the terminal as if it would bite him, attack him, swallow him up. He turned and hurried back to his room, leaving all the lights on.
11
Rodney didn’t like the faces all around him on the streets. He was supposed to feel safer among numbers, but some how the people made him even more uneasy as he darted through the crowd—bumping elbows, almost tripping himself—to the meeting place.
The air, the surroundings felt extremely oppressive around all the uncaring pedestrians. He sensed too many things here, too many chances for a mass-trans vehicle to suddenly come careening at him, too many chances for Supervisor to cause a power surge and make a Net booth explode as he passed it, or send an underground repair rat running amok to burst the seams of a power conduit just as Rodney Quick walked above.
Supervisor would take special care to leave Rodney’s body intact—so he could return as a Servant.
He hadn’t made his bargain with the Cremators yet.
But would Supervisor kill him here? Out in the streets? Or would she do it where she could watch in person?
Supervisor had not shown up at Resurrection, Inc. all day, and her unexplained absence seemed more sinister than her presence. What was she doing?
This morning his coffee from the vending panel on Lower Level Six had tasted odd, so odd that he quickly discarded it after touching no more than a drop on the tip of his tongue. And in his own shower Rodney had been suddenly blasted by a scalding spray, with all the cold water mysteriously gone—and nothing wrong with the controls. What if… ? He hur
ried along.
At the Cremators’ specified meeting place, he paced nervously around the base of an auto-statue of some long-forgotten military hero. The auto-statue shifted its position several times a day to reenact different grandiose poses. Looking incongruously colorful, carefully trimmed geraniums rose around the feet of the great general like the gloriously spilled blood of many enemies.
Rodney chewed his lip and tapped his two silicon fingernails on the rim of the statue. He didn’t have the slightest idea who the Cremators were or how to recognize them. He didn’t know what to do. Two Enforcers stood nearby, motionless. They seemed to be looking at him.
He glanced at the chronometer on his wrist, saw that he had arrived two minutes early. No one else seemed distinct from the rest of the crowd, no one else seemed to be waiting for anyone.
Claiming he had an appointment with a dentist, Rodney had left Resurrection, Inc. for a few hours. Suddenly fearing that Supervisor might check, he made a last minute appointment with a real, but inexpensive, dentist, an appointment he had no intention of keeping. But then as time slowly dragged by, closer and closer to 11:33 A.M., he began to fear that Supervisor might check further, to see if he had actually shown up for his appointment. Just before departing, Rodney sent electronic mail to the dentist’s appointment address, telling him he would be a little late…. Rodney hoped he could afford to pay for both the Cremators and the dentist.
Suddenly Rodney realized that a short, thin woman had come up to him on one side, and before he could turn, a man approached on the other side. The tech almost jumped, flinching and ready to run, but the strange man spoke to him in a calm and soothing voice.
“We’re glad you could get here, Mr. Quick. We are the representatives you wanted to meet.”
Rodney felt a terrified relief, but then he cringed. “How do I know you’re—”
Resurrection, Inc. Page 8
