Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

They were outside now, treading carefully down the steps until they stood in a puddle of snowmelt and squashed grass. Larry stared into Jack’s face with disarming happiness, after a moment touched his hand.

  “I am glad to see you. Are you hungry? Busy? I mean, do you have—plans?”

  Jack laughed. “You mean, what am I doing New Year’s Eve? Nothing but this—”

  He grabbed Larry’s shoulder, looked down to see Larry staring at him. For a moment they stood in silence. Jack’s heart thrummed inside him, there was a soft roaring in his ears, ghostly sparks behind his eyes. When he let his hand fall away from Larry’s arm, he heard the other man release his breath in a long sigh.

  “So.” Larry Muso cleared his throat. “Would you like to have dinner?”

  “Dinner? Sure.”

  “Wait—there’s a catch. Because I have to be at GFI’s private tent in”—Larry withdrew a pocket watch from his coat—“thirteen minutes. This is the formal dinner for Mr. Tatsumi and our Board of Directors, also some very hush-hush guests, and maybe some surprises. I am required to be there, but I could arrange for you to be there as well.”

  “But—Jesus, I’m not dressed for it, Larry.” Jack shook his head, “This has been a pretty horrible few days. A friend of mine died, and—”

  “Hush.” Larry rested a finger against his lips. “I can find you a jacket and tie, my friend. They may even fit,” he added, eyeing Jack’s lanky frame. “You look very tired.”

  “I know. I’m in pretty bad shape. Probably I shouldn’t even have come.”

  “No.” Larry took his arm. “I’m so glad you did. Come with me now—”

  And Jack went.

  GFI’s private pavilion was walled with light, pulsing columns twenty feet high arranged in a great circle.

  “A new kind of full-spectrum fluorescent,” Larry Muso explained as they stopped at a checkpoint. “Very low wattage, very efficient. They promote serotonin production.”

  “That’s great.” said Jack. Larry’s relentless enthusiasm was pure balm, Larry himself was balm, his ridiculous clothes and laughter, those lovely dark eyes.

  “Yes, it is.” Larry stepped aside so that the security guards could search Jack, photograph and fingerprint him. A jacket had been found, black silk Armani, far too big. Jack did the best he could, rolling up the sleeves, took the paisley foulard Larry gave him and tied it loosely about his throat.

  “Do I look like an idiot?”

  “You look very, very good.”

  Jack lifted his hand to touch Larry’s cheek. He leaned forward until that absurd pelagic curl of hair brushed his face, and felt something fall away inside him, an iceberg calving; a grief so old he hadn’t even known he was frozen.

  I could love him, he thought. If it’s not too late.

  “Late?”

  Jack saw Larry’s head cocked questioningly. Had he spoken aloud?

  “It is almost ten-thirty,” Larry said. “But the party goes on through tomorrow.”

  They passed beneath a glowing arch where a holographic gryphon reared and clasped the sun to its breast, into an open space where tables were laid out with bloodred cloths, spare arrangements of black twigs, and golden ornaments shaped like sun and moon and stars, crystal glasses, gleaming flatware, bone white chopsticks. Overhead the space yawned into the glittering uppermost reaches of the dome, false stars twinkling, moon now at full. Fifty or so people were scattered around the area. Men in black tie and robes and kente cloth, women in elegant evening wear, masks held in bejeweled hands. Jack recognized a few of them—a well-known stage actress of middle years, a television anchorman who had covered the war in South Korea; a mori artist who’d been a protégé of Leonard’s. Clink of glasses, soft tread of waiters. Tuxedoed men bore champagne, Scotch, trays of sushi and tiny fresh strawberries.

  “Here.” Larry Muso scooped several pieces of uni and tow onto a chilled plate and handed it to Jack. “I won’t be able to sit with you, but I’ve put you at a table with—”

  He broke off as an austerely dressed blond woman approached them. She nodded politely, spoke in a low voice to Larry. He glanced sideways at Jack. “Mr. Tatsumi needs to speak with me about a few things. I believe you’re at Table Seven. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

  He bowed and walked with the woman across the room. Jack watched them go. With Larry gone, he felt Nellie’s warning lodged like a poison dart within his breast. He felt the way he had the last few times he’d flown, in the wake of the Jihad 9 bombings: anxious but not frightened enough to forgo the trip. He took another glass of champagne and walked around.

  At one end of the room a dance floor had been set up. A technician sat behind an array of computers and other equipment. Six black-clad women crossed the dance floor, carrying musical instruments, sat beside him, and began tuning up. Two violins, two kotos, viola, and cello. They started to play, a heartbreakingly plangent melody. Jack stood, listening, turned away as they launched into a more familiar piece.

  People were getting seated now. Waiters moved gracefully, pouring wine, setting out decanters of sake and cast-iron teapots. The wall of lights dimmed to a bluish glow as Jack found Table Seven.

  The other guests’ names had been painted in gold leaf on porcelain tablets. Jack saw none that he recognized. His own was written in a swooping calligraphic hand—Mr. John Finnegan—on a square of thick handmade paper. He took his seat, leaned over to read the china place card at the setting to his right.

  MR. PETER STILLMAN LOOMIS

  He was wondering who Peter Stillman Loomis was, when a hand tattooed with death’s-heads and flaming trees plucked the bit of porcelain from its holder and replaced it with another.

  MR. LEONARD THROPE

  He whirled and saw Leonard step over to the neighboring table. There Leonard shuffled several more place cards, grabbed a bottle of champagne from a silver bucket, and ambled back.

  “Hello, Jackie-boy.” He yanked out the chair beside Jack and slid into it, leathers creaking, chains and amulets tinkling. “May I join you?”

  “I guess so. I guess you’re invited?”

  “Long before you were.” Leonard raised a gold-bedecked eyebrow at Jack’s place card. “Paper and ink. How quaint.” He laughed, baring white sharp teeth like a fox’s, and clapped a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “So! You actually got here. Congratulations. I’m amazed. I didn’t think you’d really come.”

  Jack shook his head. “Leonard, listen to me. Julie’s dead. He—he—”

  Leonard’s grin tightened into a grimace. “I know.” He stared at his fingers, the network of scars and interlacing coils, reached out and covered Jack’s hand with his own. “Emma called me. To help her with some of the police stuff. They had him pegged as some kind of fucking terrorist or something. Julie. Can you imagine? I called a couple of people, to help her out. To figure out what the hell to do with the body, how to get him back to Westchester. She was going to go to your house, Jackie—we could only get an ambulance to take him that far.”

  “To Lazyland?”

  “Yeah. I have no idea what’ll happen from there. What a mess. What a goddamn mess.” Leonard sighed. “Christ, Jackie. Just thee and me, now, and I’m not so sure about thee.”

  Jack sat in silence. In the background the sextet played, strings chased by the kotos’ plangent notes. The thought of Emma at Lazyland soothed him, despite his grief. Doctor Duck calming Keeley and Mrs. Iverson, tending to Marz even as she laid out her own dead husband…

  “Oh God.” He covered his eyes.

  “Poor Jackie.” Leonard put an arm around him. “It’s okay, Jackie, it’s okay—”

  “Of course it’s not okay.” Jack looked at Leonard. “Nothing’s fucking okay. You know that.”

  “Of course I know that. I’ve always known that.” Leonard’s eyes grew hard. He reached for Jack’s champagne and downed it at a gulp. “It’s poor idiots like you, just now catching on—you’re the ones having a bad time.” His placebit glittered as he poured anot
her glassful. “End of the fucking end, Jackie-boy. Might as well whoop it up.”

  At the table more people were seating themselves, glancing companionably at each other and making introductions. Leonard ignored them, and for once Jack sided with him. “So. Are you alone?”

  Leonard made a rude sound. “Am I ever alone? No. But tonight—you’ll like this, Jackie—tonight I found this poor lost soul, this Xian kid who thinks he’s got a lawsuit or something against Agrippa Music for stealing his intellectual property. Broke my heart, let me tell you. I was going to bring him in, but then I decided, probably not such a great idea. So he’s waiting out in the limo. Otnay ootay ightbray, if you take my meaning.” He tilted back in his chair. “But he’s cute.”

  Jack gave him a disgusted look. “Glad I asked.” He lowered his voice. “Something else happened. I met someone, a woman named Nellie Candry—”

  “I know Nellie Candry.”

  “She’s dead.”

  Leonard’s green-flecked eyes closed, after a beat opened again. They would not meet Jack’s gaze. “She’s dead,” Leonard said at last.

  Jack nodded. “Blue Antelope,” said Leonard.

  “No. She killed herself. Before they could get to her, I guess. Some kind of—I don’t know, a poison capsule.”

  Behind them the music soared, Shostakovich’s Fifteenth with kotos. A plate was set before Jack, curls of green and pearl pink, an octopus no bigger than his thumbnail.

  “Yummy,” said Leonard. He picked up his chopsticks and pushed desultorily at his plate. “She knew they were going to kill her. They found out she defected.”

  “Couldn’t you have helped her?” Jack pushed his plate away. The young Asian woman to his left glanced at him, her skin creamy orange from lichen supplements, teeth capped to look like blue-veined marble. “I mean, you could have—”

  “Couldn’t do a fucking thing, Jackie-boy.” Leonard grinned cheerlessly. “God’s Mafia. And the young ones are the worst. All that energy they should put into drugs and fucking? Goes right into this other shit. Blowing up hospitals. Save the whales.”

  To his side, a well-dressed man with a graying ponytail frowned. Leonard lifted his champagne glass to him and pronounced, “‘Curse God and die.’ I say, fuck Him.” The man turned away as Leonard continued. “Admit it, Jackie. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be bored out of your mind. You’d be—”

  “Shut up, Leonard,” Jack said wearily. “Just shut up.”

  Leonard focused his attention back on his food. Jack swiveled to look across the room. At the head table, a middle-aged Japanese man sat between two men in tuxedos and their wives. Several scary-looking bodyguards stood behind him, all flak jackets and plasmer eyes.

  That would be Mr. Tatsumi, thought Jack. He wondered about Mrs. Tatsumi, recalling the news report he’d heard some time ago—that her death had been a suicide. He gazed across the head table until he spotted Larry Muso, seated between two young men conventionally dressed in tuxedos and luminous cummerbunds. The three of them smiled and nodded to one another, oblivious to his stare.

  The sextet took a break. A bland old Europop hit oozed from the speakers. Jack toyed with his chopsticks. When a waiter started to remove his plate Leonard snagged the octopus and popped it into his mouth. The waiter slid a new plate in front of Jack, this one with salad greens.

  “Eat,” ordered Leonard. He poked Jack with his fork. “Not even the Pope gets food like this. Eat your goddamn salad.”

  Jack ate. When it was gone he took a gulp of champagne, hesitated, then said, “She told me Blue Antelope was going to blow this place up. Nellie Candry. She said there was going to be some kind of terrorist attack.”

  Leonard shook his head. “Not this place per se. Just the Fougas. They want to sabotage any attempt to interfere with the Big Guy’s plan for us. Which seems to be not unlike His plan for T. Rex.”

  Jack stared at Leonard, incredulous. “It’s true?”

  “True? Yeah, probably.”

  “They’re going to blow it up?” Jack pointed at the dome high above them. “She was telling me the goddamn truth? The drugs, and now this? Why the fuck didn’t you—”

  He started from his chair, but Leonard yanked him back down. “Shut up, Jackie,” he said evenly. “You want to get arrested?”

  “I don’t give a—”

  “That’s right! That’s the attitude to take. Don’t—give—a fuck,” Leonard said very carefully. “Who knows what the hell’s going to happen? Who cares?”

  “I do. I mean, I care if I die—”

  “Get over it.” Leonard leaned forward. “What are you going to do, go and tell security? What do think will happen then? I’ll tell you: you’ll get a long vacation in a holding cell, with interrogators and other friendly visitors. That’s if you make it out of here. I bet half the staff in this room are Blue Antelope operatives.

  “Drink your champagne, Jackie-boy. ’Cause this is it, apocalypse ciao. Those Fougas?”

  Leonard cocked his thumb at the dome. The stars had abruptly dimmed, and the moon. Jack saw the grid of glass and metal, and beyond it a churning whirlpool of purple and green and blue, speared by crimson lightning. Within it the seven dirigibles floated serenely, a pod of whales in a Satanic storm.

  “They’re not going to do shit,” Leonard hissed. “What, you think this is Star Wars? You think you can save the fucking world by having it put on sunglasses? This is terminal, Jack. Goddamn cancer ward. The best we can hope for now is a good show. And good drugs.”

  Jack stared at him, aghast. “Then why did you come here?”

  “‘The sky is full of good and bad, but mortals never know.’”

  “What’s that? Fucking Euripides?”

  “Robert Plant. It’s a party, Jackie. ‘Here we are now, entertain us!’ Why the hell not? What else were you going to do? Sit up there in the family mausoleum and watch the river rise while you wait to die? I couldn’t let you do that. At least this way you got a night out. I mean, isn’t it better this way? Aren’t you happy, Jackie-boy?” He took Jack’s hand. “Aren’t you glad to be with me, Jackie? Here at the end of all things?”

  “Fuck you.” Jack shoved his chair back. “Julie’s right, you’re a fucking psychotic.”

  “Maybe. But Julie’s dead, and I’m not. I’m here, now. I’m alive, even if it’s just for another”—Leonard thrust his wrist out and perused the moon-phase Rolodex there. “Oh, another twenty-three minutes.”

  “What happens in twenty-three minutes?”

  “Last call, last dance. Closing time. Or nothing, maybe. The Fougas are scheduled to launch at 11:55. The fireworks start at midnight, all that ‘Auld Lang Syne’ shit. We’ll see what happens after that. My advice to you?” He attacked the lacquered box of Kobe beef that had appeared before him. “Finish your dinner. No one ever saved the world on an empty stomach.”

  Jack speared a shred of beef speckled with dulse flakes. It tasted like the salmon had earlier, of petroleum and raw spirits. He set his chopsticks in the box and pushed it away, glanced at the entrance where he’d been admitted with Larry Muso. The security giant stood there with a dozen armed, uniformed men who might all have been cloned from the same linebacker. Jack grit his teeth, then poured more champagne.

  All around him people ate and laughed. Leonard was listening to the man beside him, some kind of European investor.

  “Security encryption devices for virtual private networks and intranets,” he explained as Leonard feigned interest.

  Waiters brought green tea sorbet, pickled beets, scallops the size of pencil erasers. Roast pork with green apples, quail stuffed with unborn eggs, smoked domestic elk. Another sorbet, anise-flavored. Finally a flurry of desserts—profiteroles, something puffy and livid pink, like a jellyfish—and coffee, real coffee, greeted with hushed excitement; not even the very rich could find coffee anymore. Jack took a sip of his, trying not to show revulsion. It all tasted bad to him, almost poisonous.

  “Well,” announced Leona
rd. “That wasn’t exactly Trimalchio’s feast, but—”

  A soft voice cut him off, amplified from directly overhead.

  “My friends—”

  Jack turned with everyone else, to see the spare figure at the center of the head table standing, hands clasped against his stomach. His body mic gave the words an eerily hollow timbre. Behind him, bodyguards turned their heads back and forth, tracking something unseen.

  “This is a moment I have awaited for a very long time.” Mr. Tatsumi paused, his expression somber. He blinked several times before continuing. “To be here in company with all of you, in such fine surroundings, on such an important day. On what may be the most important day in human history…”

  Leonard made a face.

  “… In the last eighteen months we have achieved quantum leaps in the areas of resource management and environmental reclamation, as well as breakthroughs in medical research that will affect every single person in this room. That may someday affect everyone on this planet.”

  Enthusiastic applause.

  “Hear that, Jackie?” said Leonard. “We’ll all be tan and rested in no time.” Leonard’s eyes narrowed as the chairman went on.

  “We have made advances in entertainment technology that will change the way we see that world. Most importantly, in a few minutes you will all witness the moment when we move from making world history, to remaking the world itself, when we launch the SUNRA platform.”

  Tumultuous clapping and cheers.

  “Thank you. Thank you all very much.” Mr. Tatsumi bowed, first to his tablemates, then to the gathered diners. He raised a hand, looked to where the lone technician sat behind his banks of equipment. Jack heard a scatter of Japanese from the CEO’s body mic. In the seats beside him, men and women stared expectantly at the dance floor.

  The applause died away. Across the table from Jack, people nodded happily at each other, flushed and well fed. Women reached for handbags, men stretched. Dinner was finished, coffee drunk. Everyone was anxious to leave. Everyone was ready to find the real party. For the first time since he’d entered the room, Jack heard a cresting wave of sound from outside the GFI area, cheers and shrieks and a voice bellowing from a loudspeaker.