The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  ScumberCorp had accrued whole cities, entire states. They owned pieces of everything in every country on the planet, and now in lunar and Martian outposts.

  Thomasina had been raised to be a part of it. Her widowed father, the mayor of Atlanta, had sent her to Princeton, where she trained to be a 3-D animator. In all likelihood, she would have been working for an SC network right now if her father had not uncovered a system of bribery running through his own staff and the city council, who were greasing the local machine for an SC takeover of the entire state. Without hesitation, he blew the whistle. He was a political realist and thought he had prepared for the tough consequences of his actions, but he had underestimated the unscrupulousness of the menace he was attacking. SC savaged him.

  They used the very 3-D systems on which his daughter was training to create images of her father receiving his own payoffs from Ichiban. SC controlled Atlanta’s media, and they impaled him with new footage of his reprehensible crimes almost daily for weeks, offering him no avenue of rebuttal or retreat. Soon most of the country had seen Mr. Thomas Lyell take money and drugs, and fuck three different whores—one in a suite in the Peachtree Center Plaza, and two in the tawdry bullet-vans out of which they operated, looping the Omni. It was as if he had brought along his own camera crew wherever he went, just to incriminate himself. Some people besides his daughter must have recognized the unlikelihood of this; but not the obtuse majority. Certainly not the eighteen members of the city council, who were well-compensated in advance for the stress of having to call for the impeachment of their once-beloved mayor. Helpless, Thomas Lyell resigned in disgrace.

  The night he quit, his daughter had spoken to him on the phone. He’d laughed away her terror—her fear that he might take his own life. He had said, “My child, don’t be so melodramatic. Don’t you see I’m free at last? Thank God Almighty, free at last.” Then he’d laughed again heartily, as at some private joke.

  She wanted to come home; he said no, she was to finish her schooling. His career was over, hers not even begun. Two months later, Thomas Lyell was dead of a fall from the landing in his apartment. Accident and suicide were both submitted publicly by way of explanation; one psychiatrist on a talk show even suggested the possibility of a “subliminal suicide” in which the victim unknowingly sought mishaps as a means of punishing himself. The word homicide, on the other hand, never once came up.

  Lyell had done a lot of stories on ScumberCorp, caught them in any number of petty lies from covering for a kleptomaniacal manager to denying outright (as they had done for two years against indisputable evidence) that there was such a thing as Orbitol decay. But nothing as insanely bold as this. Forget tranquilizers in the fast food; this looked like elective slaughter in the Undercity schools. If Neeb could get good data on this Mingo freak, they might presumably sell the pirate air to every competitor ScumberCorp had. They could damage the megacorporation and make a fortune at the same time.

  She went into the edit suite and sat down in Nebergall’s swivel chair. She drove it along its rails until she reached the disk drives. Neeb was prickly about letting anyone touch his equipment, even his favorite pijin, but she needed to review her two days’ worth of disking and there was no telling when he would show up again.

  The slots on all the machines were empty; it was a precautionary quirk of his that he never left anything in any of his decks. Where he kept the more incriminating disks, even she did not know. Thomasina inserted her own disk into the “A” drive.

  A voice behind her shouted, “It’s all or nothin’, boys!” and Nebergall burst upon her like an explosion. He smashed open the door and rode his motorized chair in like Longstreet leading the charge at Bull Run. She swiveled around as he swung his satchel at her. His flaming eyes went wide and he deflected his own swing as the corner of the satchel brushed by her cheek. He skimmed the satchel over the arm of the rail chair. It tore from his grasp and skidded beneath the right-hand bench, where it flopped over on its side.

  Nebergall said, “Damn it, I thought sure you were the enemy, Tommie. I mighta killed you if I wasn’t sober.” He paused, his glance flicking from his chair to the disk drives and the two other silver disks she had in her hand. “You moonlighting on me?” Then to prove he was joking he smiled broadly, rolled forward and gave her a huge kiss. Contrary to his claim of sobriety, he tasted of whiskey.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. “You woulda loved it.”

  She understood intuitively what he meant, what his entrance had been about. “You disseminated your Ichi-Plok piece?”

  “‘Disseminated’—now there’s a word you don’t hear enough of anymore.”

  “That’s because so many of our fine university graduates are still learning primary colors.”

  “God, I love it when you get pissy.”

  “I’m not pissy, I just speak better than you do.”

  He laughed, leaning back against the wall. “Yeah, you do, Tommie. You’re the consummate actress, pijin. Me, I put together images to melt in your mind, and the Orbitol stuff I did is fucking beautiful.”

  “I gather from what you’re not saying that ScumberCorp’s a tad upset.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said proudly. “They’re hunting all over Albuquerque for the perpetrators of this heinous attack.”

  “That’s where it went, Albuquerque?”

  “I piggybacked the whole forty minutes onto the Knewsday signal and coded its release so that it scrambled when it hit New Mexico, came loose and spread out in about three seconds to cover the whole west coast. All the way from Barrow to Manzanillo. By the time they figured out to shut down and strip their signal, the Mussari interview was screaming up their asshole from Paris, re-attached to a Jerry Lewis film festival. Seemed appropriate. It shot off the satellite and clamped right back onto Knewsday, as programmed. Whole goddamn world saw it and SC couldn’t turn it off. People sitting in their cons, drooling at their usual dose of Hollywood shit, all the sudden found themselves staring at my subjective reality. Mine’s real ugly, and it names names.

  “SC’s on the warpath. They gave up trying to handle it, just let it run, and whipped up some quick damage control about the unreliability of competitors’ speculations. They’ve spent the last two hours trying to trace the signal back to its source. I had to stay with my nervous buddy to prove they wouldn’t twig him. He’s got a weak stomach, but they won’t come anywhere near him. You can’t trace a piggyback. It’s like trying to track a DNA chain backwards to the Mesozoic. All the same, some of it musta rubbed off for me to think you were SC doing a B&E.” He laughed again, then glanced affectionately at her. “You don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, do you, Tommie?”

  “Enough of it. You get paid?”

  “Tomorrow and next week and next month, slow and steady mini-payments. Just so SC doesn’t draw a connection between my sudden increase in wealth and the dissemination”—he grinned—“of subversive information.”

  “They’re watching your credit account? Even in an IP bank?”

  “I have to pretend they are, don’t I? Hey, if Mussari’s singing for me, somebody else is singing for them somewhere, every hour of the goddam day. They’re bigger’n me. Besides, they’re suing Ichi-Plok’s ass for false accusations. Part of the damage control. Surprise, surprise.”

  “Sounds like it’s time you thought of relocating again.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been considering it. Been a purloined letter long enough—sooner or later they’re gonna notice I’m in town. I was thinking maybe Seattle, before they buy it.” He pushed his blond hair out of his red-rimmed eyes. “Anyway, what’s on your agenda? You got something to show me?”

  “I think so.” She swiveled around to start the cartridge playback. “I think maybe we have something extremely dangerous here.”

  “Will it sizzle on screen? Let me see it.”

  She let the pictures roll, turning up the volume so he could hear all that Mingo had to say in the plaza. She added no commentary
of her own; Nebergall never wanted to hear explanations. The images on the screen were all that mattered. People remembered what they saw, not what they heard. Take, for instance, Dr. Mussari’s informative lecture. By itself it was nothing. Nebergall had added powerful footage of Orbitol decay personified—people in clinics with whole pieces of themselves missing. People blinded when infection from the atomizer guns they used spread to their optic nerves; children with no arms or legs, bedridden torsos born of two worlds; Undercity halfway houses crammed full of diseased creatures who could no longer recognize their surroundings, who saw only some fabulous other world as they slipped into total madness, fell into oblivion. The images delivered the punch necessary to capture the attention of the mentally anemic audience.

  The images were what had SC in an uproar. A lot of it Lyell had brought him—he didn’t ask how she got it. He knew in a roundabout fashion that she disguised herself; she would ask for IDs, for biocards, and he always filled her orders, but he didn’t pry. All that mattered was that people talked to her, opened up and confessed. She was the best pijin he had ever known. He adored her.

  She popped in another disk. After black leader, the view came up of somewhere along the skyway over the Free Library. After a few moments of shadowy footpath footage, she climbed down into a parking lane behind a blue car and popped open the trunk. The compartment contained half a dozen red and blue tubes clearly stamped with the word “Maps”. Lyell opened one. A rolled up map slid partway out; but with it came something else, bulbous and dark. Using only her thumb and forefinger, Lyell dragged the object all the way into sight. “Ingram thirty,” Nebergall muttered, nodding to himself as she turned it over, recording every inch of it. Later, he would be able to peg in on the serial number, maybe trace it.

  She shoved the gun back into the tube suddenly, and stepped back from the car. The tag under the rear bumper was clearly delineated for a second. Then as she leaped back up on the footpath, the picture began to bounce. She was jogging. The lens gyro quickly compensated for most of the jiggle.

  She ran along past a stairwell, looked down it. Two figures were approaching the top. Behind them, larger than the lens could take in, lay the unmistakable fortress of ICS-IV. One of the figures—men in gray uniforms—called out “Hey, doll” or something like that, followed by what he supposed were rude suggestions, but by then the men were out of the picture and well behind her. The rest of it was of running, followed by more black leader, followed by a return view of the parked car, approached this time at a more leisurely, smoother clip.

  Lyell stopped the player.

  “The car?” he said.

  “Saracen. I gave you the tag, but probably there’s no point in trying to establish a link—I mean, anybody can lease a car. They just happen to own the company. But you’ve got Mingo getting into the car after identifying himself as the great benefactor of SC and making with the loaves and fishes. That should be worth a lot.”

  He nodded, but said, “Might get him buried. You know all they’ll do is sacrifice him and say they had no knowledge of his endeavors, and they’re real sorry, tightening security, it won’t happen again. Someone else immediately takes over. Mingo ends up as part of a sewer system in Bombay.”

  “So it’s nothing.”

  “I didn’t say that, Tommie.”

  “SC’s stockpiling arms in a weapons-free school zone. God knows how many lives they’ve put at risk.”

  “But, provided it’s contained, all in the Undercity, in a scummy reformatory about which nobody gives a shit. If you blew it up …” All of a sudden his brows knitted. He grabbed hold of her chair and pulled himself across her lap. “Holy Jesus,” he muttered, and grabbed his satchel out from beneath the bench, sliding back into his seat. He dug around in the various pockets of the bag. After a minute, he drew out a scratched-up clipscreen, took a stylus from his pocket and tapped it in the corner of the screen to flip through pages of notes he’d logged in.

  He paused over one, considering, his lips pursing. “This is it,” he said, in some awe of what he had found. He stood up again. “I made the inquiries on your other footage,” he told her, still looking at the screen, “got an answer earlier.”

  “That was quick.”

  “That’s what I thought. Like maybe the info was in place, in case anybody asked.”

  “I don’t like your preamble already.”

  “No kiddin’. Here’s the inside scoop. One Angel Rueda was rotated down from the main SC lunar cluster pending a hearing and possible sentencing, with regard to his responsibility in the deaths of an entire crew and skimmer pilot in a dockside accident. Some kind of chemical explosion. Rueda was the foreman on the job, the only survivor, and suffers from a kind of hysterical amnesia, like shell shock, which is thought to be due to his guilt over the incident. That’s plausible, seeing as how twelve people died.”

  “Oh, God.” She thought of the expression on his face, the way he had looked at her in the bar.

  “Wait, that’s not that part you have to hear. Since he’s out of work for an indefinite period, SC’s got him assigned a job in the Undercity. He starts tomorrow, teaching for the Inner City School System. Guess which school?”

  Lyell felt her scalp prickle. “Isis-four.”

  “Now, how’d you know that?”

  “They’re going to kill him. That’s what Mingo’s doing.”

  “That’s something of a jump, don’t you think?” Nebergall argued, yet found himself elated at the prospect. Tommie looked ready to scream.

  She said, “Offer me a better guess and I’ll listen. No, they mean to kill him. They’ve picked the perfect place, you said so yourself—‘a scummy reformatory about which nobody gives a shit.’ And nobody on the outside save you and me even knows. And the story’s already in place. The rest of it, too, I’ll wager, ready for airing the moment they take him.”

  “Amazing what comes with a decent pair of shoes these days, isn’t it?” He laid the clipscreen across her lap. He stared blankly at her legs for a minute, then sighed and said, “I’m trashed to steam. Gonna grab some sleep now. You should, too.”

  “In awhile.” She was thinking of ICS-IV and her contact inside the school. She would have been much happier if she’d known how long they had. Or if they had any time at all.

  Chapter Eleven: Adjusting to New Faces

  Shikker wandered lost for a day or more. She stopped at one point to piss, but then sat down and fell asleep. She couldn’t tell if she slept for an hour or for ten.

  When she awoke, she panicked, and ran around in the pitch blackness until she slammed into a vertical girder and fell back between the rails. Semi-conscious, she lay there for another indeterminate period, then got up and, with hardly more awareness, went stumbling off, guided by cold, unseen steel rails, into the belly of the earth. She found herself calling out to Glimet to slow down.

  By the time she regained her wits, there was no hope of finding her way out.

  Recalling the colors of the station stops she’d seen, she pressed on, every moment expecting to spy the blue or orange tiles. Without Glimet charting the way, one tunnel was the same as any other.

  She decided that she must still be on the lowest level of tracks, and imagined endless station stops slipping by on higher levels. But when she tried to climb out of the rail pit, she couldn’t manage it. One armed, she could not pull herself up onto the narrow ledge along the wall. She sobbed in frustration, seized with the awful fear that she was doomed to wander in the rail pit for the rest of her life, which wouldn’t be all that long as a result. Then she remembered how Horrible Woman had hauled her up in the darkness, and she put her hand on the ledge and followed it. Walking on the uneven slope of the rail bed, she tripped a few times, but got up and resolutely continued on. It didn’t take her long, feeling her way, to find an opening in the ledge, a flight of steps up. Then it was along the ledge she crept, pressed hard against the wall from fear that she might slip and fall into the pit again.

/>   The ledge widened but she continued to walk with tiny steps, always testing the unseen floor ahead. She brushed against a pillar. Her eyes manufactured phantom shapes out of the darkness, but she refused to give in to terror. There was nothing there.

  The echo of her footsteps changed, dulling, closing in, and she knew she’d entered a passage. It curved around and eventually she realized that she could see a little bit, enough to make out a stairwell dead ahead.

  This time she raced up the stairs. The light leaking in grew brighter as she climbed. She came out at a platform. The tiles were polished gray. There was a long tile bench jutting from the wall, and she collapsed onto it, wheezing with joy and relief. She curled her legs up, clutched herself tightly to stop from shaking, and slept again.

  A rat came scuttling up her hip. She awoke screaming, swinging upright and onto her feet. The rat squealed, jumped to the bench, and skittered away.

  Shikker’s legs flexed and she collapsed where the rat had landed. Nauseous, she pressed her cheek to the cool tile wall, waiting for the trauma to pass. Her arm and her legs ached; the joints hurt. She knew she was ill.

  Bending forward, she scooped down into the front of her oversized shirt and came up with a fistful of medicines. The bad light made her squint to read. She identified vitamins, a package of assorted healing promoters, and a time-release anti-inflammatory/antibiotic; she took all of the promos, three vitamins, and two time-release caps, swallowing them all without water. She’d have killed for some water.

  While she rested, she reflected on Glimet’s death in Horrible Woman’s camp. How had those people found their way down here? Since they all apparently suffered from the same affliction, she wondered if it could be contagious. Did she have it? Were the achy joints the first symptom? Would she end up like that—her body dissolving, putrefying? She drew her legs up and tried not to think about food. Her stomach gurgled its protest.