The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  “Did you ask nice?”

  “I imitated how my editor would ask the questions if he were there.”

  “No wonder.” The view swung away from the three men and returned to its previous perspective on the other side of the room. “That it? Doesn’t he ever face you straight on?”

  “Wait a little.”

  He scooted the disk along a little. A short, muscular woman with close-cropped ginger hair came and sat in front of the camera.

  “Now, who’s that?”

  “She’s a trainer in the weight loss place.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with that crap, does it? Your musketeers are out of SC’s lunar setup. You tumbled to something here, right? Bet I know something you don’t about these bozos,” he taunted.

  “Hang on. You can’t sit still for anything, can you?”

  The picture moved away from Nance’s freckled features, back to the bar. The three men were heading straight for the table. The black man nodded casually to her and the redhead scowled and pretended not to see her at all. The one in the middle stared right into the lens with his one good eye. Nebergall backed it up, froze it, chose a first shot that he dumped, digitized, into the still-store unit. The full-face portrait appeared on one of the wing cubes. He nudged the disk forward, selected a second, closer image of the face, keyed in another digital snapshot, and then repeated the process twice more before the men on the screen passed the table and headed down the outside corridor. The monitors offered four sharp portraits of the man in the middle suitable for framing. In the last, his full right profile had become almost entirely machine. “Beautiful,” commented Nebergall. “Gorgeous, and that’s without decompressing the RPEG—look at that.”

  The camera focused on Nance again, who had also turned to watch the threesome leave.

  “They escorting a prisoner?” he asked.

  “Not according to them, but it sure comes across that way in body language, doesn’t it? They said his name was Angel Rueda and he was ‘cycling down,’ which I take to be their euphemism for being shit-canned. They mentioned they were coming here.”

  “Headquarters. Well, they would be. I’ll look into it.” He typed Angel Rueda across the final image.

  “Yup, pardner, I know you will.” She slapped his shoulder. “You can shut it off—the rest is irrelevant.”

  “Maybe I just like to look at muscular women with freckles.”

  “I’m sure you do. Now, you want to tell me what it is you know about those three that I don’t, or do I wait for Christmas?”

  “Nothing, for certain.”

  “Then make something up.”

  “Okay. About seventy-two hours ago there was an explosion at SC’s lunar mining facility. The extent of the damage and other specifics have not been forthcoming. Don’t know how many, if any, are dead, don’t know what part of the place blew up. Last I’d heard, the official leaking story was that the infamous Xau Dâu are to blame. Another attack by little Scumber gremlins. Probably there’s more by now—I haven’t checked since I came in here to work on the Ichi-Plok piece—but your date and time code put this at just over a full day later, and that kinda fits.” He stretched his arms, flexing his shoulders.

  “I don’t know. The man looked pretty good for somebody who’d suffered extensive brain damage only twenty-four hours earlier.”

  “If that’s what it was. Maybe he is Xau Dâu, a one-man sabotage operation. Those brain-boxes can be misused, you know. Remember the Pensamuertos in Chile? Torture with a smile.”

  “Think you can find out more?” she asked.

  “Most likely, but don’t ask me how. That way you can’t be tortured into revealing any secrets. Even if they screw one of those things on your head.” He glanced wryly back at her. He had hundred-year-old eyes, she thought, in his fifty-one-year-old face. “It’ll take some discreet inquiry. Too bad you couldn’t get his prints, too. I don’t think I can un-peg them off this image. He’s either holding something or his hands are out of the frame. Try me tonight, anyway, and we’ll see. What’s on for your morning?”

  “It’s afternoon, Neeb,” she replied. “I’ve got business to take care of in the Undercity . Haven’t been seen for five days, people’ll be wondering if my box is vacant.”

  “I meant to talk to you about that, Thomasina,” he interrupted. He hung the keyboard up again and swung the chair around. “The fast-food story isn’t happening.”

  Her brow knitted. “Why not?” she asked defensively.

  “Well, Ichi-Plok informs me, off the record naturally, that they don’t want any stories on the chemicals in Happy Burgers—because they, and everybody else, have introduced psychoactives into their fast-food items, too. Isn’t that nice to hear?”

  Lyell stared at him in disbelief.

  “Yeah, I know.” He gestured toward the monitors. “Mussari at IP there played ‘throat’ and revealed that Odie and Congress have quietly passed legislation over the past two years allowing the inclusion of certain CNS drugs in all categories of fast food to, quote, ‘insure the safety and maintain the stability of our society,’ unquote. He read it off to me just like that. All sorts of bullshit tech …” He stopped. Lyell was smiling, and shaking her head. “You wanna tell me what’s so funny?”

  “Just a remark someone made, about how nobody’s covering reality anymore. It’s the truth, isn’t it.”

  “It’s tough to pick out the leading edge when most everybody experiences their world from a chair, yeah. Who said that?”

  She was too furious to let him change the subject. “I can’t get a buyer for a story on how the underclasses are being kept docile and dumb by the world’s largest manufacturer/distributor of cheap foodgoods—all of which is irrefutably verified!—and the reason is, the competition wants to dump their own tranquility shit in the soup?”

  “Exactly. Look, some battles we just don’t get to fight.” He put his hand across his heart patriotically. “It’s not economically viable.”

  “And I used to admire you.”

  Nebergall grinned. “All the same, I strongly advise against patronizing in particular the fast food kiosks with the smiley big buns on them. Look just like those wrappers on the floor over there. Maybe we oughta start a campaign—rename the stuff ‘slow food.’” He rubbed his eyes, yawned. “Hey, I’m sorry and you know it, but that’s where we hang at the moment. Unless Bickham or some smaller corporation wants to play whistleblower and ante up, we don’t have a story. Probably that ain’t gonna happen, since the law’s already two years in place and they’d be fools not to take advantage, too. All we’ll do is piss off every potential market we have. If you’re so hot to find out who Mr. Rueda is, I think you shouldn’t start by sticking it to all our benefactors.” He let that sink in for a moment, then asked, “So, what are you going to do, Tommie?”

  “I’m going to go ahead with the story, is what.” She held up her hand to stop his protest. “All right, if no one buys it now, at least the footage will be archived when finally it does go public—maybe my grandchildren can use it next century. Besides, I killed myself to establish this identity and I’m not going to toss out all that goddamned work. I didn’t like going up on the Geoplatform, either, but we’d contracted. Now that’s finished, I’m going back to what matters. Maybe I’ll find some other story we can use.”

  “You always do. Just don’t ignite when I remind you later that we can’t do this particular piece, no matter how nice the footage is. And be sure you take some shoes with you—should be a few pair left in the bag in the other room.” Somewhat cheerlessly he added, “You’re the only ’jin I got who ever uses ’em.”

  It was Nebergall who, while investigating a story about street gangs in the Undercity, had discovered the value of a good pair of shoes in the barter market. The fresh-faced idealists he usually had to work with didn’t seem to appreciate his revelation.

  “Okay,” she promised.

  She didn’t move, and he finally glanced up at her a
gain. “What?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s a crazy thing, Neeb.” She grinned. “Did you record Odie the night before last?”

  His gaze went to the ceiling as he thought back. “Probably,” then he added, “I wouldn’t have watched it, though. Why? He finally show us Schnepfe’s circumcision?”

  “Oh, there was a bit in the middle about this Orbiter who’s risen from the dead and—”

  “You’re kidding? Jesus, Odie’s approval ratings must be slipping if he’s sticking his hands in that kind of shit.”

  “Yeah. But I’d like to take a look at it sometime.”

  He glanced over at the clockface buried in the mass of digital recording equipment. “I should have lunch. Also breakfast, and dinner from last night.” He began backing out. She opened the door and stepped into the bedroom. Badebec, the gray female cat, looked up at the sound.

  “What about the ‘Happy Trayles’?” Neeb called. He backed into the doorway.

  “You know that trainer you fixated on in the video? Well, Tamiami’s been co-habiting with her for three months. According to her, she skipped home because the old man made her ‘play with his mushroom’ regularly. Don’t look at me like that, that’s what he called it—daddy’s mushroom. Tamiami ran to momma, who predictably denied anything so unthinkable could ever happen under her roof. So the kid snatched a credit card and ran away. Now she’s in what I’d call a comparatively nurturing lesbian relationship and I have no intention of reuniting the nuclear family unless that includes shoving a fuel rod up Mr. Trayle.”

  Nebergall said, “Yeah, but how do you really feel?”

  “I promise I won’t touch him. I’m just going to give him my bill. You wouldn’t believe how many hidden expenses lurk in shuttle travel. The chewing gum alone … I was amazed, myself, at the inflation.” She closed the closet door after him.

  Nebergall drove over beside the bed. Badebec climbed across the arm of the chair and into his lap. Her brother looked at him balefully and didn’t move. Lyell went over and stroked Gargantua. His tail flicked and he stretched lazily.

  Neeb said, “You know, Tommie, you’ve got the best instincts of any pijin I ever worked with. It’s like you can feel a story unfolding someplace and find it. That happened to me exactly once in all my field time. I’d hate to think that such a God-damned clever investigator had to send me her disks from behind bars on Corson’s Isle in between gang rapes. Not every father’s gonna turn out to be your father, Tommie.”

  She turned, her eyes wide in a shock of violation.

  He went on before she could say anything. “You take these jobs personally the same way you take nailing SC personally. It’s a vendetta with you, and that’s the one fundamental error in your primary motivation. If you ever do break them, it’ll be the result of your instincts, not because of the screaming avenger. I keep telling you—”

  “‘You don’t kill corporations, they kill themselves,’” she quoted. “I know. In my sleep I recite it. Don’t worry about me, Nebergall—I’m not entirely rabid yet. I won’t have myself arrested again. Promise. And you know why? Because it wouldn’t be economically viable. I’ll overlook the comment about my father, which was shitty. But all the same I’m bringing you back a bunch of nice Happy Burgers.” She bent down and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Yum,” he said.

  Chapter Five: The EAP and the INRE

  In her mind, she was seventeen again, about to go off to Princeton…

  Her father, Thomas Lyell, sat beside her on the floral-patterned porch swing and handed her a tall tumbler of iced tea. She could hear the rattle of the cubes against the glass and taste the mint leaf he’d dropped in. Wisps of gray had begun to curl through his hair. He looked sad in a way that cut into her heart, even all these years later; he thought he’d masked it.

  It was the beginning of his downfall. He had only just begun to suspect how his own staff had been suborned by ScumberCorp. The enormous infochemical giant wanted Atlanta for its own—it had used up the last of places like the Oriente in Ecuador, and was starting to collect cities. No individual mayor would dare to interfere with that process.

  Except for her father.

  Reporters had begun hounding Thomas Lyell daily. They were cutting the legs out from under him already but he didn’t see it: his every move was being videotaped, his expressions of anger and annoyance in response to goading questions had been captured on disk-images that would later “appear” in places he had never been.

  In his peculiar way of dealing with such pressures, he channeled his frustrations into a story for his daughter. He’d been a storyteller to her ever since she could remember. He never used a book; either he knew a thousand and one tales by heart or else made them up with ease.

  “Once upon a time,” said her father, “there grew a many-mouthed monster, separate from the rest of the race but living right along side us, called the Eating Press. You’ve heard of it, honey, ’cause its name is legion today.

  “This big hydra had a million heads and every one of them spoke the language of entertainment. The Eating Press—we’ll call it the EAP—thrived in hotels and casinos; it interviewed the stars of nightclubs and rock concerts and videofilms. It acquired its name because the EAP heads gathered information over free meals—huge, fabulous after-the-show feasts to rival the bacchanalia of ancient Rome. None of the other hydra-headed press monsters paid the EAP any mind. They hadn’t any reason to. After all, its words described mere entertainment—wasn’t even real entertainment itself. The EAP told what the entertainment looked like, between bites. The heads’ language ran to hyperbole. Nothing they spoke of actually referred to any tangible part of our lives. It was a big fantasy, but this country, my dear, has always preferred its fantasies and fables. Christopher Columbus is more fun as a great explorer than as a man who tortured the natives for a little gold.

  “Now, America, at the time, was pretending to be the stellar economy of all time, separate from and never co-dependent upon any supposed world economy. Everybody from the tiny grocer to the lead-assed Congress blissfully went about denying the possibility that things couldn’t continue much longer.

  “Meanwhile, way down in the shadows, like a tiny mammal hiding out from the prowling carnivorous dinosaurs, a second creature, related to the EAP, languished in near-obscurity. This one was called the Investigative Reporter, the INRE. This much smaller hydra lived and wrote and spoke its words around political centers of the country and the world. It saw corruption and felt compelled to expose it. It located subversion of power and focused public attention like a spotlight. In earlier times, people had slept well knowing that the INRE was out there, like a costumed crime-fighter, doing battle against the evils of their society. But the more the population leaned hard away from reality in order to maintain their delusions, the less and less interest they had in seeing evil exposed, and the more interest in hearing fairy stories like those the EAP told, which made everything glittery and everyone beautiful and sexy like on TV.

  “One president called the INRE puppets and laughed at them to dismiss what they said about him. A few years after him, the staff of another president began subtly to reshape the heads.

  “Now, this particular president couldn’t tell the difference between the INRE and the EAP. He’d known the latter most of his adult life, which he’d spent in the entertainment field. To him, a hydra was a hydra. He made nice and fed them all.

  “I guess the INRE didn’t really notice at first how it had been remodeled; some heads had been lopped off, but new ones always grew. Before long the important thing had ceased to be facts and information, issues and answers, and we had us a whole new mess of media heads jabbering endless speculations in the face of nothing. The new heads had turned out to be EAPs.

  “The officials of the government now controlled the INRE. They threw the parties, after all, and they told the beast what they wanted it to know. The INRE then went out and told the world what it had learned, which made the peopl
e in power very happy. In this way, properly nurtured, the creature’s career could now float along amicably for decades, and only its wardrobe suffered.

  “In the meantime, the political parties of our tired two-party system became like two big diet soft-drinks—indistinguishable from each other and without any substance. Their candidates evaded confronting all the issues anyway, replacing intelligent discourse with snappy bits of verbiage that sounded like something without being anything at all. They learned this from, of all places, the videofilm. Entertainment. The EAPs.

  “The INRE maintained a dignified air of false objectivity as it reported every pat pre-masticated phrase. It still doesn’t know what happened to it. A party is a party, after all.” He sighed.

  “I fear, my beautiful, wise daughter, that reality is lost for good this time. News shows are vaudeville. However old the act, there’s an audience for it. Stories about ugly little saucermen and children like you possessed by demons, and women who hate men who hate women who hate a basic food group, and people who tattoo their fannies and pierce their unspeakables are a thousand times more interesting than society’s actual ills.” He’d looked off in the distance and smiled then. “The trouble is, that’s the truth. You like your flying saucer stories and your music makers. I know. Even I know that, and I’m an old fart who thinks it all stopped at Miles Davis. The difference—I hope—between you and that purblind public out there is that while you’re loving such goofy things, you know your history. You know your truth. You know there are things that are important, that the EAP doesn’t touch, and they aren’t quiz shows or talk shows or spacemen or pixies. You know to question everything, even your old man. He would like to be, but he’s not perfect. Things do get past him from time to time.”

  He had touched the tip of her nose then, the way he had since she was a little girl. Things do get past him. He had no idea how prophetic a comment that would turn out to be, she thought now as she rode across the city.