by Tad Williams
It was so hard to figure out how she felt. He was mercurial, of course, never the same from moment to moment, but wasn't that what she wanted? She had discovered a long time ago that advertising copywriters from Long Island and stockbrokers thrilled to be under warranty on their first armored Benz didn't make her heart go pitty-pat.
Face it, Anwin. You do like bad boys.
And even more, she liked knowing that she herself was at least as wicked, just more discreet. But when you moved out to the fringe neighborhoods of sex, more than the scenery changed. You got . . . well, a weirder selection.
Jesus, Dulcie, so you have a fling with him and it doesn't work out. So you go back to New York and spend a couple of days drinking and watching netsoaps and feeling sorry for yourself—worse things could happen. Do you really think he's long-term material anyway?
She had to admit that she couldn't imagine herself living in the same city with the guy for any stretch of time, let alone picking out curtains together. But was that so bad? He excited her. She thought about him all the time, alternating between fascination and, occasionally, something much stronger and more dangerous than irritation or dislike, something closer to hatred and fear.
So what? He's what you want—a bad one. He's just badder than most, and that scares you. But you can't walk the high wire and still use a net or there's no point in the high wire at all, is there? So his social skills are a little alien. The guy's an international criminal. At least he isn't boring.
Her hands had been moving reflexively, but it didn't matter: despite the differences from model to model, once you'd put together a few of these plastic stealth guns you could pretty much do it in your sleep. She got up off her knees and sat on the bed, shaking ceramic bullets out of a vitamin bottle and slotting them into the magazine. Click, click, click . . . like little babies, octuplets, being packed into a shared cradle. Babies, guns, virtual worlds, old men pretending to be Egyptian gods—her brain, she reflected, was definitely scrambled.
You need a vacation, Anwin. A long one.
She considered for a moment, then walked back to the main room of the loft. The loud argument outside was over; a peek through the window showed the alley was empty. She put the gun in the middle shelf of the coffee cabinet, under some napkins.
Or maybe I need something exciting to happen. Something big.
Christabel stood holding the glass in one hand. Her other hand was on the faucet but she didn't dare turn it on, even though she was so thirsty she was about to cry. She was angry at herself for being thirsty, angry at herself for getting out of bed to get a drink of water. Now she had to stand like a scared mouse in the dark bathroom and hear her mother and father having an argument in the next room.
". . . It's gone far enough, Mike. I can't make you come back with me, but I'm certainly not going to stay here with Christabel, put her in danger, while all this is going on. We'll be perfectly safe at my mother's."
"Jesus H. Christ, Kay!" Daddy's voice was so loud and full of hurt that Christabel almost dropped the glass to smash on the hard bathroom floor. "Haven't you been paying attention to what's going on here?"
"I certainly have. And anyone with an inch of sense would know it's no place for a little girl. Mike, you let someone point a gun at her! At our daughter!"
For a long moment no one said anything. Christabel, who had been about to set the glass down so her arm would stop aching, stayed just where she was, like she was in a terrible game of Freeze Tag.
Her daddy's voice, when it came, was quiet and scary. She had never heard him sound mad in quite that way before—it made her want to run away. "That's about the worst thing you've ever said to me, you know? Do you think I haven't had nightmares about that every night? I didn't take her in to meet Ramsey. You let her go off to find a bathroom by herself. What was I supposed to do?"
"I'm sorry. It was an unfair thing to say." Her mommy was still mad, too. "But I'm terrified, Mike. I'm . . . there isn't even a word for how I feel. I just want to take my little girl and get out of here, and I'm going to. I'm taking the boy, too. Just because he's poor doesn't mean he's any less of a child and doesn't deserve protecting."
"Kaylene, will you listen to me? If I thought there was anywhere safer for you to be, I'd be the first one to send you both there—for God's sake, you have to believe that! But I'm only here right now because Yacoubian thought he could get away with using some of the ordinary base personnel. If it hadn't been Ron who picked me up, you would never have heard of me again. There's no doubt in my mind."
"This is supposed to make me feel better?"
"No! But however much of Sellars' story is true, I can tell you this—the way they took me, that whole thing the general was up to, it stank. There was nothing regulation about that at all—it was a kidnapping. Ron and Ramsey saved my life, just by being there."
"So?"
"So what if these people come looking for me again? Without bothering with the appearances of military law, this time—at night, maybe, disguised as burglars. Don't you think my wife's mother's place is somewhere they might look? And if I'm not there, don't you think that they might figure you and Christabel would make useful hostages? These aren't Boy Scouts. What's your mom going to do, sic the cat on them? Call that goddamn mobile home park committee she's always sending after the kids on skim-boards?"
"All right, Mike. It's not very funny."
"No, it's not. You were right before, Kay—it's terrifying. At least if I have you two near me I can protect you. We can keep moving, and Sellars seems to be pretty good with managing a low profile for us. You settle in one place, even somewhere not as obvious as your mom's, we'd just be hoping they don't find you."
"You sound like you believe in this . . . conspiracy. This whole big crazy thing."
"Don't you? Explain Sellars, then. Explain Yacoubian and his little hotel room and his matching Nazi weight-lifter bodyguards."
Christabel had been stiff in one place so long that she was afraid she would scream if she couldn't put the glass down. She inched her arm to the edge of the sink, looking for a flat spot.
"I can't explain it, Mike, and I don't want to try. I just want my child safe and away from all this . . . craziness."
"That's what I want, too, as soon as possible. But the only way I can see. . . ."
The glass teetered, then tipped. Christabel grabbed at it but it jumped out of her fingers and hit the floor with a sound like something blowing up on the net. An instant later the bathroom light flashed on bright, and her father was so big and angry in the door that Christabel took a bad step back and started to fall. Her father jumped forward and caught her arm so hard she squeaked, but she didn't fall down.
"Oh, my God, what are you doing? Ah! Jesus! There's glass everywhere!"
"Mike, what's going on?"
"Christabel just broke a glass. I got a piece in my foot the size of a steak knife. Jesus!"
"Honey, what happened?" Her mom lifted her up and carried her into the room where her parents had been arguing. "Did you have a bad dream?"
"I'll just clean up the glass, then," her father said from the bathroom. "And amputate my foot to save the leg. Don't mind me." He sounded angry, but Christabel relaxed a little—it wasn't the kind if divorce-angry she had been hearing.
"I . . . I was thirsty. Then I heard you. . . ." She didn't want to say it, but she still believed a little that if she told Mommy, something would happen to make things all right again. "I heard you arguing and it scared me."
"Oh, honey, of course." Her mother pulled her close and kissed her head. "Of course. But it's okay. Your daddy and I are just trying to decide what to do. Sometimes grownups argue."
"And then they get a divorce."
"Is that what's worrying you? Oh, sweetie, don't take it so seriously. It's just an argument." But her mother's voice still sounded funny and raw, and she didn't say, "Your daddy and I will never ever get a divorce." Christabel leaned into her and held on, wishing she had never been th
irsty.
They were still talking in the other room, but much more quietly now. Christabel lay in her bed, just across a space like a little valley from the boy Cho-Cho, who was tangled up in his covers on his own bed like an Egyptian mummy. Christabel tried to breathe slowly like her mommy told her, but she kept feeling the crying about to come out and her breaths sounded all raggedy.
"Shut up, mu'chita." Cho-Cho's voice was muffled by his pillow, which lay over his face. "People tryin' to sleep."
She ignored him. What did he know? He didn't have a mommy and daddy who were arguing and were going to get a divorce. It wasn't his fault everyone was angry, like it was hers. Even though she was so sad it hurt, she also felt a little brave.
"This far crash," Cho-Cho said, rolling out of bed and taking most of his covers with him, so the sheeted mattress suddenly was bare and white, like an ice cream sandwich with the top peeled off. "Can't nobody sleep with this mierda." Skinny in his T-shirt and underwear when the blankets fell away, he walked toward the bathroom.
"Where are you going? You can't go in there."
He didn't bother to look at her and didn't even close the door. Christabel buried her head under her own blankets when he started to pee. After the noisy flush of the toilet, it was quiet for a long time. When she at last stuck her head out from under the covers he was sitting up in his bed, staring at her with his big dark eyes.
"You afraid some monsters gonna come get you, something?"
Christabel had met a real monster, a smiling man in a hotel room with eyes like little nails. She didn't need to answer to this mean boy.
"Just go to sleep," he said after a while. "Got nothing to worry about."
It was so unfair she couldn't keep quiet any more. "You don't know about anything!"
"I know nothing happens to little ricas like you." He stared at her, smiling a mean little smile, but he didn't look happy. "What you think gonna happen? I tell you what's gonna happen to me, you wanna know that? When all this over, you gonna go back to some mamapapa house somewhere, little Cho-Cho's going to work camp. See, your daddy, he one of the nice ones. Los otros, man, they maybe just take me out and shoot me."
"What kind of camp?" It didn't sound that bad—Christabel's friend Ophelia had been to Bluebird camp, and they made art projects and ate marshmallow sandwiches.
Cho-Cho waved his hand at her. "Cross City, that was one they put my tio in. Digging and like that. Bread with, like, little bichos cooked right in it."
Christabel put a hand to her mouth. "You said a bad word."
"What?" He thought for a second, then laughed, showing his missing tooth. "Bichos? That just mean bugs." He laughed again. "You thought I said 'bitches,' huh?"
She gasped. "You did say it!"
The boy let himself slide back into his bed, staring up at the ceiling. All she could see was the tip of his nose above the pillow. "Tell you what, not gonna wait around, me. Next chance I get, Cho-Cho be too much gone."
"You're . . . you're going to run away? But . . . Mister Sellars, he needs you!" She couldn't understand—it seemed like the kind of wickedness they talked about in church sometimes, not Sunday school, but the big room with the benches and the glass window of Jesus. Run away from that poor old man?
And her mother would be sad, too, Christabel realized. Mommy complained about it a lot, but she really seemed to like making Cho-Cho bathe and wear clean clothes, giving him extra food to eat.
The boy made a noise she could just barely hear—it might have been another laugh. "I thought there was some efectivo around here, some money, but it's just a bunch of crazy people trying on some spyflick mierda. Little Cho-Cho, soon he going to be too . . . much . . . gone."
He didn't say any more. Christabel could only lie in the bed next to his; straining to hear her parents' low voices, and wonder how the world could have turned so strange.
She had drawn enough hieroglyphs on the countertop with powdered creamer for an entirely lactose-free edition of the Book of the Dead. She had listened to the quiet hiss and hum of her employer's expensive coma bed adjusting itself until she wanted to scream. A thousand channels of net input and she couldn't muster interest in any of them.
Dulcie knew she ought to go lie down, but knew equally firmly that she wouldn't sleep for hours. She pulled on her lightweight raincoat and keyed the security sequence for the front door lock. When it chimed she hesitated, then went back and got her newly-assembled gun from its hiding place in the coffee cabinet.
A little before midnight and the hilly streets of Redfern were shiny with rain just fallen, although at the moment the skies were clear. A loud group of people were streaming out of a dirge club down the block, mostly young white and Asian kids dressed in funereal clothes, baggy black 'chutes and wrapped fellaheen hoods. She fell in behind the largest group, drawn down the street behind them as their voices rang off the building facades like the excited piping of a flock of bats. They seemed to be shouting things at each other in some pidgin Aboriginal dialect. Dulcie remembered a time when she could have stood on the streets of Soho or the Village next to a bunch of young people like this and done in-depth social anthropology on every word, every item of clothing and its positioning. Now she couldn't even remember if this particular sub-sub-group were Dirt Farmers or No-Siders, or anything much else about them except that they liked organic hallucinogens, loud slow music, and artificial skin bleaching.
It all seems so important when you're young, she thought. Marking yourself up so everyone knows who you are. People should just have ID readouts in real life like they do with VR sims, so instead of going to all the trouble to get your skin laced or your face branded, you could just display a little message—"I like cats and bondage, don't listen to any music older than six months ago, and am punishing my father by getting too many subdermals."
Or in my case, "I'm punishing my mother by doing things with my life that she probably wouldn't care about if she knew." Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
She was depressed, she realized. The missed moment with Dread, because of bad timing or whatever, had turned the possibility of something spontaneous and a little scary into another nightmare checklist of should-she, shouldn't-she. The fact was, although she rather enjoyed being played in that way he had—jerked back and forth emotionally, frightened and then petted—the too-long courtship, if that was what it was, had begun to lose her undivided attention. The fact that she didn't actually like him much was starting to weigh more heavily than it should.
The real truth is, he hasn't told me anything. He's dragged me into some major industrial espionage on pretty thin promises, paying me decent but unspectacular hourly rates, and for all I know he could have found a way to turn lead into gold. I have no guarantees. And what if it turns bad—I wouldn't let him take the gun for me, why should I let him keep me in the dark here in somebody else's country? I don't even know what the laws on this stuff are like in Australia.
And what else did he tell me, like it was the big payout—"Do you want to be a god, Dulcie?" Meaning what, immortality in the Grail network? Well, who knows? The fact is, he hasn't offered. He hasn't really offered me anything but himself, and although that's not bad, it isn't enough. Not for this girl.
The crowd was dispersing quickly, some to the bus stops, others flagging down taxis. Coming home from the apres-Jihad party, she thought with dry amusement as a group of black-turbaned youths jostled its way into a shared cab. Then she realized that a wide but dark street that had been crowded and noisy only moments ago was now nearly empty.
Where am I? That would be great—get lost out here in the middle of the night.
The street signs weren't particularly edifying and she had left her t-jack in the loft, so she couldn't even access a map. Angry with herself but not too worried—there were still people on the street, including some couples—she began to retrace her steps, doing her best to remember how many times she had turned while following the crowd. The old row houses with their rusting wrou
ght-iron balconies seemed to watch her like blank but disapproving faces. She patted her coat pocket, reassuring herself. At least she was armed.
Three dark-skinned men watched her as she approached the corner on which they stood, and even though none of them moved or said anything—the youngest one even smiled very sweetly at her as she passed—she found her steps quickening as she moved away from them down a dark side street.
It's like we're always in the shadow of them, somehow, she thought. Men are just there, blocking the light, and there's nothing we can do about it. Is it only because society has been shaped that way over the years, or is there something more prehistoric going on—because they were stronger back in the beginning?
Felix Jongleur, a prime example of a predatory old man, flashed through her mind. His strange Ushabti file was apparently some kind of last will and testament—an if-you're-seeing-this-I-must'be-dead bit of drama carefully prepared for an heir who seemingly never was. What would his real successors think about that when he did finally give up his lamprey-grip on life? Would they be as puzzled as she was?
Men and their secrets. It was part of their power, wasn't it? So hard to get them to talk about important things that you'd think someone was trying to steal their souls. Dread was another example—a very pertinent example, now that she thought about it. What did she know about him anyway? Sure, with the work he did, she didn't expect to find anything very useful in her few early stabs at researching his background, but she had been impressed at how much of a nonperson he was—or had made himself. There wasn't even a Dread-shaped hole to be found in any of the international files, criminal record banks, anywhere. He was Australian and, by the looks of him, of mixed racial ancestry, which could describe millions of people. Where did he come from? What was his story? It must be an interesting one. Jongleur had secrets. All powerful men had secrets. So what was it that John More Dread was hiding?
She heard the noise before she saw the clump of shadow on the sidewalk half a block ahead of her—a soft retching sound like a cat bringing up a furball. She slowed as she tried to make sense of the shape, which only resolved a few slowing paces later into a man standing over a kneeling woman. At first Dulcie thought he was holding her head while she vomited—the results of a night's excess at one of the bars or clubs—but even as she began to step out into the gutter to swing around the pair she saw that the man was actually pushing her down, forcing her toward the sidewalk.
