I hear shouting. I hear the shot, too, but I don't look at the gun or the bullet or the man being killed. I look at the Coors poster over the killer's shoulder. I keep looking at it. I don't dare look anywhere else, and I don't have any way back to my own room where the TV is just an object that my cat likes to sit on for the warmth.
Eventually a Gillette commercial came on.
When I had recovered enough to reach for more pizza, I found that it tasted of roses. I spit it out.
In the weeks that followed, there were more hauntings, seemingly at random, when I watched TV. All of them involved the man with the gun. Sometimes I'd see him in his car – a beige Chevy Nova with a cranked-up rear end and gray body-shop paint on one side panel. Sometimes I'd see him eating lunch at a deli in Jersey City. Sometimes I'd see him sleeping in his house in Hasbrook Heights. I saw the address.
Then I saw him outside my apartment. I don't mean I saw him there in reality. I saw it in a haunting. I'd been watching Bowling For Dollars and then I saw the street outside my own building, and there was the guy looking at my mailbox and writing something down on the back of an envelope.
I had no way of knowing if this was happening in real time or not, but there was absolutely nothing I could do. During a haunting, I am paralyzed. I have no motor control over my own body that I'm aware of, and all my senses are engaged in the haunting. He could open my door, walk up the steps, and reach my apartment and there was nothing I could do. He could break into my apartment and attack me, and I'd still be sitting in front of the TV, watching it happen.
That was what scared me most.
It still scared me, even though all this happened years ago and the guy had never had any cause to take revenge because he'd never gone to prison because the police didn't believe me.
For all that I could see, my visions were useless. It turned out that there was nothing I could do to make the outcome any better.
I guess that's why Dataplex had come to mean so much to me. My work there gave me a chance to make things better. To be more than just a helpless observer; to be an agent of change.
But here I was again: my mother gone without warning. Nothing I could do or say to change it. I'd been reduced once again to helpless observer.
I guess that's why, though I was still in shock probably, I experienced such a strong urge to fly while my mother was not yet even buried.
max fact
It feels like you've been gone a thousand years, but you only lost about thirty seconds of flight time. You are right back where you were, leaving Serge and the others behind at their new camp and striking off towards N-Ridge and the climax of the conflict at the mines.
It's not long before you come across the infamous gap. You are supposed to head straight for N-Ridge with best speed, but the temptation to look more closely into the ruined Grid is too great. You fly in over the original break, changing eye settings so as to look down into what remains of the well fluid as deeply as you can.
Something is in there, all right. In the green and violet murk Gossamer's eyes descry at first a vague bulk; then you start to concentrate. You add layers of interpretation and probability arrays,and the shape refines itself to become an oblong.The first thing that comes to mind is a shipwreck; then you think torpedo. After that the form resolves itself nicely into a shape that is shadowy but unmistakable. It's a MaxFact missile, still live: undetonated.
There are filaments extending from the downed missile into the well fluid. Soft lights glow from within the thing's main body; which doesn't make sense because you know MaxFact missiles to be densely constructed of metal. Yet this one looks translucent - almost gelatinous. It has begun to swell in the middle, pregnant with some unknown quality.The shell of its guidance fins has the soft look of warm glass, and you can see circuit boards and other components silhouetted within.
How did it get diverted so far from N-Ridge? And why didn't it explode on contact with the Grid? And if it hasn't exploded, what's the reason for the dead Grid . . .?
Gossamer is picking up airbornes. The fragrances match your catalog of malevolent agents. Once again, Goss is being chased away from this scene. The Grid doesn't like you spying on it – and come to think of it, Commander Galante won't appreciate your being late, either. You take a last look at the basking missile and bring Gossamer back to her original course before she can break away from you.
Gossamer tears towards N-Ridge on a stiff breeze. At a distance, the Grid soon becomes less threatening. Seen from a height the Grid reminds you of oil making art on water. It's like soap bubbles and candlelight; it's like the swerve of wind-sculpted stone that's taken ages to assume this form but looks as if it could deliquesce at any moment. The Grid is feminine like that; like the sea, like anything subject to change, like any body that yields and sacrifices its nature and transforms itself. Like any thing that pretends to lose and, in so doing, sometimes does lose. And sometimes, against all odds, that wins.
But these are armchair evocations; you can lie on the wind and dream all you like. You are not down there inside it. You are up high, reading the pollen, untangling the grammar of the winds, and in the end, you are speculating.
Nothing's at stake for you, in truth.
Probably you like it that way.
You follow the dead Grid to the mines. It has extended itself since the last time you were here. It ends at a point closer to the mines, and the Grid nearby is taking on the same signs of human-like structure as it was in the place where Serge made camp.
Such darkness as the Grid knows has settled over N-Ridge, and as Gossamer comes wheeling over the mine encampment and looks down, you think of cotton candy and Las Vegas; but only for a moment. The blossoming luminescence over and in the mines is a result of a major MF assault. The perimeter has been entirely surrounded by heavy machinery, and although golems swarm from branches of the Grid to counterattack from the rear, Major Galante's machines are smooth-surfaced and virtually impenetrable. These must be the vanguard of the Third Wave you have been hearing about: fully automated strike forces, unencumbered by humans with their emotional weaknesses.
Major Galante's forces have blown the perimeter fence in three places and as you watch they occupy the compound. The air above the Grid shakes and sings, and you spot two other fliers being blown X-ward across their flight planes, rippling like wayward kites.
You wonder briefly whose eyes lie behind the eyes of the other Gossamers recording the operation. Wendy of the candy machine? It's hard to imagine that. And you wonder if you are the only flier who is ambivalent about whether this assault is a good idea.
After that, there's no time to think anything. You are wholly occupied in watching, registering every detail. You see golems scatter and suicide; some hide within the mine compound. These you locate for MF, which targets some with micromissiles; others are hunted down on foot by Major Galante and her elite eliminatio force. Golems go up like torches as Galante takes back the mines.
The burn scars of the mines' former personnel are still visible. Youi can see where golems have hacked off sections of heavy equipment, as well as the places where they have dragged lighter pieces of machinery out of the buildings and left them, partially dismantled. The mines themselves remain sealed, but they won't be for long. Galante and her strike force leap back into their carrier and get set to blow the mine entrance.
‘I'm waiting for the all-clear from my fliers,’ she tells MF, who are anxious to get inside. ’We don't want any stray golems on the ground when we go in there.’
You and the other two anonymous fliers make your final passes, checking for golems. Another flier spots a band of a heavily armed golems hiding behind a water tower. While they are being targeted and disposed of, you see two of the Grid's children sitting on the perimeter fence, swinging their legs. Watching. You look away quickly and instinctively. There are limits to what you will see, and by seeing it, what you will be a party to.
Gunther's words come back to you. Something he said
to you a long time ago, when you first complained about the ugliness.
It's what the Grid wants. The Grid will use your disgust against you. It will use your fear against you. Your morality. You play right into it when you let it manipulate you.
The child golems are dangerous. You have to report them. It's your duty.
GOLEMS ON WALL AT B-17, you compose. You try to send the message but the nex jams. Gossamer is resisting you. She actually turns around in the air and flies over a different part of the mine. You tug at her, wrench her mentally, but she will not obey.
What is happening here?
The third flier spots the girls, anyway. You turn in the air just in time to see a series of micromissiles strafe the perimeter wall where they were sitting. They jump down and land inside the mines.
Stupid fools. Gossamer lurches, goes flying in. You get the weird feeling that the flier is trying to protect these creatures – as if she could.
The girls are running for the breach in the wall. Their hair flies behind them in wet banners; their bare feet dance over rubble and through dust. Missiles stud the ground around them. The first one dives through the hole in the perimeter and seizes hold of a Grid branch likeTarzan grabbing a vine. An explosion throws the second one through the same breach. She lands in a ball, rolls, comes up disoriented. Foot soldiers are pelting after her. She crabwalks backward, one foot black and bleeding.
Major Galante herself is at the head of the team. She halts, steadies her arm to fire her weapon. You try to set yourself for what you know will happen.
Only it doesn't. In an eye-blink, the well opens beneath the child and swallows her. Major Galante's ray gun fires into the fluid, which bubbles with radiance and then subsides.
Suddenly Gossamer is pliant again. You bring her around and continue to sweep the area, alarmed that this could have happened. No one seems to have noticed that you spotted the girls first and failed to alert MF. There are no accusations or questions coming your way.
Gossamer is an indigene. Does she have some loyalty that she's never expressed before?
But how could she, without a cortex?
Eventually, the all-clear comes through and MF sends you back to Serge. You don't get a chance to see Major Galante personally, which is disappointing. It would have been nice to reconnect with someone you respected, to remind yourself that you're one of the good guys. But it doesn't happen.
And when you fly back over the Grid, you'd swear you could hear music. It's elusive, like the blurred bass of a car stereo as the car speeds by, or the inchoate warble between radio stations. But it's enough to drive you off the nex, seeking refuge.
the pimpernel gets nobly drunk
In those first days after my mother's death, I felt a terrible need to be doing something. I had to clear out her apartment. At first I toyed with the idea of moving in there, keeping it – well, keeping it ready for her. Which just made me cry more and get all hysterical. So I decided to bring her stuff to my place. I worked at it obsessively. It was my mission.
I routinely tortured myself by recalling the last time I'd seen her/spoken to her/touched her there in the hospital. I dragged out photographs. I made funeral arrangements. All of that was a strange pleasure, or at least a form of relief from pain. It was as if I could retroactively help her. Which was dumb, but I couldn't help it.
Darren's plane wasn't coming in until the day of the funeral, and he was going to stay with friends in the city – which was just as well because my apartment was chock full of my mother's stuff as well as my own, and the cats were always fighting. It was Friday night, D&D night at Miles's house, and I decided to go because our party was in the middle of a sticky situation in some ice caves where we'd been ambushed by these troglodytes after our weapons were attacked by some kind of animate ice and frozen solid within it. Last time, my paladin had been using his 18+54/100 strength to try to wrench his sword out, King Arthur-style, but with no success, and our magic-user was bleeding to death because the cleric was lost in an ice-maze and we'd run out of Cure Serious Wounds potions. I thought I oughtn't to let the group down.
That's me, 'the ever-reliable Cookie,' as Mom would say. Sniff.
Who would know the Cookie-stories to tell at holidays? Who would be able to say: ‘. . . and just as I'm about to roll up my sleeves and show the plumber what I mean by a fair bill, all of a sudden my little one pipes up and says, 'Did you know your cat has a lung tumor?' ' This one always brought a lot of laughter, both for its portrayal of my mother as a would-be bare-knuckle boxer, and of me. 'You dark horse, Cookie,' people would say to me, and pat me on the head. Or my mother would talk about the time we almost got evicted for having a cat against the lease and how I had suddenly come up with the piece of information that our downstairs neighbor had a boa constrictor in his bathtub. 'She was never in that apartment!' my mother would insist. 'How could she know about that?'
I have only a vague memory of the events: I was about five when the boa thing happened, but my mother was still retelling the legend years later. I remembered innocently saying something that seemed perfectly obvious to me, the equivalent of 'Your shoes are in the hallway,' and everybody over reacting. My mother was really proud of what she called my 'spontaneous visitations' which she claimed were 'stress induced.' She tried to get me to use Vedic meditation practices to control them. She said we could win the lottery or at least make money on the horses. But I never could make the flashes happen. Instead, I learned to keep my mouth shut whenever there was a confrontation.
'Make nice, Cookie,' she'd tell me, the hypocrite! But I did make nice. I didn't want to be like her, always in trouble.
Now I'm not so sure. Maybe if I opened my mouth during a disagreement I wouldn't find myself stuffing so many Ring Dings in it afterward.
'So they aren't coming? Just like that?'
So much for my psychic powers. I wouldn't have driven all the way to Miles's house if I'd suspected the rest of the players weren't going to be there.
'Bastards,' said Miles. 'Recalcitrant tree frogs. Hopeless thugs.'
'Maybe it's just as well. I don't feel like I'm on form.'
'Car trouble on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, or so they tell me. They probably just decided to stay at Villanova for a keg party. Never mind. I bought extra Cheez Doodles. And those new things, Cheez Combos? They're like little pretzels filled with soft cheese – they're fantastic.'
He actually had lined a bunch of said Cheez Combos up in front of the lead figures we use to represent our characters and monsters. A troglodyte wielding a double-bladed axe was just about to take a swing at the Cheez Combo, which looked like a miniature Lincoln Log. I sidled closer, trying to sneak a peek at Miles's DM notes or his graph-paper map, which he kept hidden behind a cardboard shield with all the charts that told you what happened in combat. I picked up a four-sided die and spun it like a top. It knocked over a destrier bearing a wizardess.
'Try one!' urged Miles, picking up a handful of the snacks and shoving them in his mouth. For all that he lives on junk food and sits on his butt all day, he never gains weight. It isn't fair.
'No, that's OK, I'm not really hungry,' I said.
Miles shrugged. It would never occur to him to ask if I was OK, if I needed to talk. That kind of thing just isn't in his repertoire.
'You want to go down to the basement and play air hockey?'
I shook my head. 'I'm feeling kind of weird tonight,' I said.
‘Weird how? You mean about your mom?’
I sighed. 'I wish I could explain it, but I can't. See, it's easy for you. You're the Pimpernel. The Pimpernel can deal with any situation.’
Miles rubbed his hand through his wild hair. ‘Well, I wouldn't go that far,’ he said, smiling in embarrassment.
‘Really? Well, what does the Pimpernel do when he feels like he's losing his grip?’
Miles grinned and patted me on the head.
‘The Pimpernel gets nobly drunk, of course.’
Miles went dow
n to the garage and got a couple six-packs of Amstel Lite. We put them in the freezer and started drinking the four he had already in his fridge door. To my amazement, the beer didn't nauseate me. He offered me some leftover Kentucky Fried but that did nauseate me, even if only in principle. Once the beers in the freezer were chilled, we took a couple outside and hung out in the driveway. It was dark by now except for the streetlights, and the kids next door had gone in. You could hear them watching Hill Street Blues on TV. Miles tried to shoot baskets and I leaned on his car, drinking as fast as I dared and swatting at mosquitoes.
‘I don't really believe in it,’ I told Miles, tracing circles in (he condensation on the roof of his Oldsmobile with my beer bottle. I waved the Amstel at the world at large. ‘None of this actually signifies.’
Why did I use that word? The Significator is the most important card in the tarot. Am I starting to sound like my mother?
I heard myself say: ‘It's an elaborate illusion and I think deep down everybody knows it. Look at all this concrete and asphalt. When me and my mom . . .’ I heard my voice crack. ‘When my mom and I came back from the Bahamas last year we were circling over the metropolitan area for like a half-hour. All you could see was rows and rows of houses, and buildings, and roads.’
‘Yeah?’ said Miles, ‘It's all very well to have bucolic fantasies about trees and mountains, but you can't have that and still have photocopiers and take-out pizza and multiplex movie theaters.’
‘Maybe we only need those things because we got rid of the stuff that was really important. Or hid it where it can't be perceived.’
‘Maybe we got rid of scarlet fever and polio, too. Or hid them with Aunt Edna's vacation slides of Tampa Beach.’
‘Oh, Miles, you're so hard-headed sometimes. If you could see the things that I see you might not be so sure.’ I was slurring, which made me snort with a private laughter. Then I slapped a mosquito against my forearm and thought mournfully of Gossamer.
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