Behind them lay broad steps up to higher ground. At the top, enormous flagpoles pointed into the sky, flying ragged banners he could barely make out. He started up the steps.
As he climbed, farther back to either side of the steps, two tall cloisters came into view. The greasy smells, combined with pockets of flickering light within the cloisters, suggested cooking fires shielded from the rain. More rain worshippers stood scattered along the steps as if in a shared trance. He had to navigate around them; they did not notice him. When he reached the last step, he stopped still, transfixed by the view.
Ahead of him, the quadrangle descended in five tiers to a center channel, wide open at the far end. There it dropped even farther to street level, where there was a large, disused fountain, and trees made shapeless by ravenous vines. And a second sea of box dwellings. He thought there must have been ten thousand. He had stumbled into the heart of Box City.
Like the tents of an army awaiting dawn’s early light, row upon row, their irregular lines ran all the way to Independence Hall. That edifice stood like an elaborate battlement or a simple church, its steeple ablaze in reflected sodium light.
People shoved past Angel, nudging him this way and that. They crossed the plaza and went down the steps. He drifted forward, and took the marble steps slowly. In the channel at the bottom, the crowd thickened but he was not watching them. The steeple had hold of him.
With his gaze fixed, he didn’t see a small woman in his path; she wore a miniumbrella fastened to her head and, as she tried to climbed the step beside him, the umbrella’s sharp ferrule poked his wound. He cried out and doubled up, clutching the arm. The woman tilted back her canopy headgear and said, “Sorry, Mac, didn’t see ya up there,” and started on. He reached out and stopped her.
When she turned again, he asked, “Can you help me?”
She sized him up from the shadows of her rain hat before replying cryptically, “Who’s to say.” She tilted her head back and stared some more, as if doubting he was real. She had a bristle of curly gray hair on her chin. He noticed that she was wearing red plastic gloves on both hands.
“I need a place,” he said, “to … to hide.” It slipped out as if from his grasp. “A place down there. Who do I ask about it? Do you know of any such place?”
“Somebody has to want to move or else has to have moved and nobody else is waiting ahead of you. There’s mostly a list, when you don’t know anybody. But nearly everybody can be bribed.” She reached out to rub his shirt between her fingers. “I could help you, I expect, for a finder’s fee. I know a box, got a blanket and only one owner lately. No lice. Well, not many. Plastic’s got a couple rips in the side but the water don’t get in bad. Unless it rains a lot like now, and then you take your bath with the rest of them.” She gestured back the way he had come, and chortled, revealing inflamed gums and no back teeth. “You don’t care about the view, do you? No Taj Mahal ’round here anyway. Although you can make out one of the blue towers of Franklin Bridge if you need something to stare at. Vine Street docks is noisy all the time, but you get used to that real quick. Especially as you usually can’t hear it over the assholes squawking on all sides a ya.”
“Sure,” he agreed, understanding little of her prattle.
She stepped closer, clutching his wrist. “Confidentially, I’d drop the disguise if I was you, unless you’re into frightening your neighbors to make ’em shut up. Them glowheads look like Orbiters’ ghosts. Liable to get you sliced for scaring somebody shitless. You twig me?”
“Take off the mask?”
“That.” She nodded.
One-handed, he undid the hasp and drew it off.
Her jaw hung open. “Hey,” she marveled, “you got disguises under your disguises.” She touched his jaw, turning it to display the readout panel on the side. “I know someone has one of those on his head, saying all the time he got ‘crabs.’” She guffawed. “Says it makes him walk sideways.”
“Crab, that’s right, it’s short for—”
“He got a speech problem that it mostly corrects. Does a lot better job on you. Now you come on, I’ll show you my box.” She grinned lewdly, as though she had made a rude joke.
With difficulty she walked back up the steps. Both hips seemed to bother her.
They returned to the street where he had entered, then across it to the raised park. The narrow lanes allowed little maneuvering room. Angel held his hand over his wounded shoulder to keep it from being bumped into.
Most of the boxes had curtained fronts of one kind or another, but many stood open, the people squatting in the entrance, or standing like prairie dogs in the dark doorways of their burrows. He saw no fires in them but a scattered flickering of TV screens.
Someone called out, “He here for the Bell, Lucy? He come awful late,” and his guide hollered back, “Could be.”
“You gon’ need a can opener to git anything outta him,” warned another. A lot of laughter followed that.
He watched the lights atop the Vine Street wall grow larger. The sounds from behind it ran across the ground and up his legs. Like the rumble of an earthquake. All at once the woman said, “Here ya go. As advertised.” She held back the curtain from a small box. The curtain, looped onto a dowel, had rows of leering President Odie faces on it.
Angel knelt and looked inside. He could just about sit up, and it was long enough for him to stretch out. Not wide, but the smallness, despite his earlier claustrophobia, appealed. It was an excellent place to hide. The aforementioned blanket was more like a large towel.
“’bout the size of a Jappo hotel berth,” she noted, as if this somehow increased its value.
“How much?” he asked.
“Depends. What you got worth pursuing?”
He dug into a jacket pocket, pulling out everything there. He had two program cubes from ICS-IV, and Gansevoort’s green biocard. He couldn’t recall how he had acquired it. It must have been in the jacket.
The woman swiped the card from his hand. “Oooh, you’s a regular jackpot.” She thumbed the edge, enjoying the snap. “Pristine, too. Think I’ll be sailing now. You enjoy your stay here.”
“For how long?”
“Honey, you own it, you stay as long as you like. Just don’t try lighting any fires in there or they’ll drop ya in Hell. Otherwise, you’ll be left alone, I expect. If anybody comes looking, you tell ’em Lucy moved up.” She squinted at the card. “Way up,” she added, tucked the card out of sight and limped away.
Angel watched her go. Disembodied voices out of the boxes again called to her, and she joked with them in passing.
Other observers got up and tried to hit on her as she passed, but she shook them off. Across the lane from him the curtains were drawn, either no one home or not welcoming interruption. That was all right by him.
Crouching, he tossed in the mask, then crawled painfully into the confines beside it and pulled the shower curtain closed.
The air in the box hung still and muggy upon him. The rain had imbued him with its chemical odor, vaguely sulphurous, and this mixed with the unwholesomeness of the box itself. He didn’t care: the place offered him invisibility, nonexistence.
Hunched forward, he stared at the moist floor between his legs, unable to order his thoughts, to make sense of anything. Memories spilled through the gaps in his synapses.
He grabbed the mask and clipped the collar together. It lit up, its beatific features collapsed and distorted, but at least the mesh was drying out. He stood it in the corner, where it focused on nothing, a manikin head that had just popped up out of the ground.
He shrugged out of his soggy coat and stripped off the pink shirt, placing them beside the mask. Taking the small blanket, he rolled it up into a makeshift pillow. Then he lay on his back against the cool plastic foam floor. Sweat gleamed on his torso. He sighed deeply.
The muscles of his belly were stretched tight as a drumhead. In the mask light, the skin of his upper arm looked swollen and dark. He tried to clos
e his eyes for sleep but found that all he could see was Chikako Peat: the way her lavender eyes laughed at him, the way her body leapt as each shot kicked her.
He opened his eyes and stared into the blackness of the ceiling.
“She died because of me,” he said aloud. The words were dull in the box. He turned toward the forgiving maskface.
Where were the emotions Chikako had drawn from him? It felt like days but it had been only hours earlier. He remembered pleasure breaking loose inside him. It had no form, the pleasure—he couldn’t hold onto it any more than he could find grief within himself. The invasive virtual presence had dusted him with emotion and personality, but he’d used them up in his passion play. The bypass allowed no second sampling. He had to get the damned thing off if he ever hoped to vent all that unexplored, untapped emotion. If it was even there.
For the moment all he had inside himself was ice.
***
Mingo stood between two security officers wearing name tags that identified them respectively as Gus and Eddie. They perched on swivel seats, hunkered at separate consoles, and traded unhappy glances like two schoolboys under the baleful glare of a nasty, crabby pedagogue. They knew of Mingo by reputation only, but that was sufficient to ruin the rest of their shift.
He had made simple, if drastic, demands, and the two security officers were doing all they could to accommodate him. He wasn’t being any too helpful. In the first place he insisted they set aside their regular duties and instead devote themselves to tracking a single individual for him, this at a time of night when their normal work load fell off and all they wanted to do was stretch out, remove their boots and relax, smoke a little kif. When they asked him why they were to do this, he responded, “It’s important.”
He offered a rough description of the perpetrator he was hunting and they set to work, loading the characteristics he gave them into the system and hoping it would find a match immediately. The sooner they got rid of Mr. Mingo, the better. Disks whirred.
“What about this face, is this maybe him?” Gus asked time after time, and every time to no avail.
Hung strategically between and before the two men, a large screen displayed each face the system selected.
They looked at a close-up of a brown-skinned face. It was oblong, bald on top, with gray puffs of hair over each ear. Thought Gus, it certainly matched his description.
“No,” Mingo said with undisguised impatience, “he’s not really black. You’re not listening. It’s a mask.”
“Gray, you said gray, ya see,” Gus tried to explain, “and it’s factored that in.” He wished he knew the words for what the damn thing did, how it stored and accessed imagery. He wished he could have put Eddie in the hot seat instead of him, but Big Ed had the IQ of a belt buckle. Definitely not the person to appease someone with Mingo’s clout, not if the two of them wanted to keep their jobs.
“Gray is relative, a mere impression due to the LifeMask he’s wearing.”
“Well, then, what’s he really look like?” asked Eddie. Gus fearfully shook his head and interjected, “We can’t factor gray as an impression, sir.”
“What about LifeMasks in general? Let’s narrow it to those if your machines can make that distinction.” He walked over and glanced out the one-way glass, down a two-story drop to an enclosed patio where hundreds of bodies milled about. As if everything were fine, as if nobody in the room were under the slightest pressure. That calmness scared Gus more than anything.
“Ahm, sure, we can do that, I think,” he’d answered, “but there must be, I dunno—what you think, Eddie?” praying, Please, Ed, don’t fuck up.
“Hunerts,” responded his partner.
“Yeah, must be hundreds of them.”
“How about,” Mingo said without turning from the window, “you factor in flight as well? A LifeMask fleeing. Running.”
“Well, there you go.” Gus typed.
Eddie meanwhile mumbled into a throat mike, communicating quietly with other security people who were trying to check in, telling them to call the shots on their own for the time being. Gus heard their heated responses, and cringed, assuming that Mingo heard them, too.
The screen offered face after face, spinning snapshots from the master disk, comparing each to the new parameters established, portraits whipping past in an ever-shifting mosaic. It suddenly delivered up a profile shot of a face leaning forward, the angle suggestive of a body running. It was a very dark black face, yet slightly luminous. Gus had his fingers crossed. Behind him, Mingo said triumphantly, “That’s him. Excellent work. Let’s track him.”
“Sneg it,” crowed Eddie, clapping his hands. He wore leather gloves without fingers.
Mingo said, “Does he ever speak comprehensibly?”
“Hey, that’s good—speak comprehensibly,” Gus replied with feigned appreciation. He launched the tracking program, then sat and watched the screen. His stomach felt as if it were being eaten away.
The program picked up the quarry a short distance from Grofé’s, followed him down various levels, caught him on an escalator, a ramp, and outdistancing a cyclecab. Mingo was leaning on the back of Gus’s chair. His fingers squeezed at the vinyl, producing a creaky sound that raised goose bumps on Gus.
The final image was of the individual in the mask leaving from the Penn Tower Three exit.
“He’s got out, into the Undercity. That’s that.”
“What do you mean, ‘that’s that’? Switch to external.”
“You want to follow him outside, too?”
Mingo gritted his teeth. “I want to follow him if he goes to Neptune.”
So they had switched monitoring systems. The exterior of Penn Three came up on the screen. The time codes raced to match up.
Soon enough, they were watching Angel Rueda cross an open plaza and head toward City Hall. Another lens system, on the far side, another time code matchup, and there was a shot of him passing the Market Street checkpoint with all of its food kiosks. Far along the side street they could seea brightly painted Chinese arch. They watched their prey wander toward it until the rain washed his image into the shadows.
“That’s the last of it.”
Mingo sighed. “Look, I happen to know there’s a whole system of monitors strung throughout the Undercity. Don’t try to get out of this. I can have your asses dropped off the globe if I want to. Now access that system.”
The color drained from Gus’s face as he considered how to express what he had to say next and still live. “I’ll connect up if you want, but I got to tell you, Mr. Mingo, that system’s been all but a total bust for years. We put in our microcams, they find ’em and rip them out and sell ’em or barter ’em. We got a few teahouses covered still, maybe two, three blocks of the ’Namese quarter around Box City. The rest they located and removed. They took a whole fistful of microcams from along the Delaware and ringed the underside of a toilet seat with ’em without destroying the transmitters. We still don’t know where the goddamn toilet is, but I can show you it’s still in use if you’re interested. They make a big deal of it, probably charging admission to shit on the Overcity. You get what I mean, sir? And it’s the same, lots of places outside the walls, too, especially west of town, what with everything bein’ burned out. Some places ya need an armed escort, which is the same as painting a sign on it. Not worth the trouble to replace the things.”
“I see. Seems I’ll have to squeeze a few people. I’d no idea Undercity security had gone to the dogs. Thank you for explaining, Gus.” He dropped down on the couch, all the steam taken out of him. His leg was absolutely throbbing. He needed to take another painblocker. “What do I do now?” he asked.
Gus replied, “Now you hope he needs to get laid or smoke some ‘O’ in the right teahouse.”
“Or else,” noted Mingo, “makes use of the only optically equipped toilet seat in the city.”
“You got it, sir.”
“Tremendous.”
Chapter Nineteen: Box City
Asleep in the box, he lightly kissed memory’s lips. It was his first dream.
Figures in gray hoods and business suits pursued him through a dark, airless landscape that manifested slowly, creeping into view, until it became a distorted image of Philadelphia, its towers like candle wax, burning down; beside the trash- surfaced roadway, he ran past a headless torso that had limbs formed of metal coils and which droned “Yawp, yawp, yawp,” through a plastic larynx atop its stubby neck. The sight of it dogged him until he was running blindly to escape. He dashed into a gloomy enclosure and only stopped when he banged his shins against a projecting pipe—only, it wasn’t a pipe at all, it was a large cylinder with lines and glyphs etched into it. It had a dirty glass portal in it just below him through which he saw Chikako Peat, stretched out naked inside. He wiped at the grime on the glass and, as it cleared, the face underneath became Thomasina Lyell’s. For some reason the metamorphosis didn’t surprise him. The cylinder retreated from him suddenly, and he discovered that it was attached to a mechanism in the shadows. It moved like a shell sliding into the chamber of a cannon, loading as he looked on, ejecting an instant later, pistonlike, empty. The body—whose?—had been launched through a network of colorful tubes, none of which had existed a moment before. He followed them to a crack in the wall and peered out. The tubes snaked across the ground, finally gathered together and connected to the yawping torso outside. Even when he couldn’t see it, the voice of the thing continued to bark with clockwork regularity. He knew, if he stayed there long enough, a head would sprout on the body. Already it had begun to develop breasts, take on sexual characteristics, the identity of which he knew because he could see the emerging hexagram on its thigh. As if aware of his attention, the thing rose up on one foot, balanced deftly, hands poised, an idol, an icon, a more than human terminal. Its cranium slowly bulged into place, the tubes and cables loose and writhing in a hypnotic dance, a celebration; he swung away in horror, not wanting to see but more specifically not wishing to be seen by her, and startled himself, realizing he had no idea what he looked like, what sex he was … while the arms of metal coils glided in through the cracked wall and spun around and around him, mummifying, sealing out light and air, gathering about him in a whirlpool of nullity, the same seething cyclone the virtual program had become. Its magnetism seized and dragged him into the hungry vortex.
The Pure Cold Light Page 21
