Cowboy kneels by Raul. His eyelids are flickering, his head lolls from left to right.
Regaining consciousness. He looks up into the terrified eyes of Lupe, still standing at her place by Roon’s couch. Gorman is calling for a medic on his radio. Tears are spilling silently down Lupe’s cheeks. Cowboy stands up and puts his arm around her shoulders. He can feel her trembling, but she’s too scared of Roon to do anything but remain at attention.
Raul begins to open his eyes. Cowboy looks at Roon. Feels his heart thundering, in his throat. “What will you do with him?”
Roon looks down at the boy. His expression is mild. “Nothing,” he says. “Put him outside the gates. Let him live outside of the communion with the sky.” He looks at Cowboy, and there is a sweet smile of genuine sadness on his face. “It’s the worst thing that can happen to him, really. To be barred forever from the future that could have been his.” One of the mercenaries reaches down, drags Raul to his feet by his collar.
“Poor fool,” Roon says. “I love him still.” He looks down at Lupe and puts a hand on her trembling forehead. Drops of blood patter down the starched white dress. “The sister will stay, of course. I will not shun her for her brother’s sin.” He seems to become aware of the scarlet stream running down his wrist.
“Where is the medic?” He frowns, and walks away, toward his rooms, leaving a speckled, darkening trail.
Cowboy watches him go. Raul hangs by his collar from the guard’s fist, passive now, ready to accept the consequences of his revolt. His cheek is glowing red where Roon’s hand struck. Gorman looks at the guard, shrugs. “You heard the boss. Put the boy outside.”
The two guards march away. Cowboy strokes Lupe’s head, trying to give comfort. Hoping she doesn’t think it a pirate caress. Gorman shrugs, his hands on his hips, then looks at Cowboy–– and for a moment there’s a reflection of Cowboy’s own hatred there, before the mercenary can choke it back down.
Then Cowboy’s fishing in his pocket for a credit spike and holds it out. “Can you see he gets this?”
“Raul?”
Cowboy nods. “Tell him who it’s from.”
Gorman takes the needle with its little jewel of crystal at its tip, then puts it in his pocket. He looks into Cowboy’s eyes for a half second, and Cowboy can’t tell what he’s reading there. Gorman nods slowly. “Yeah. Okay,” he says. He calls into his radio for the guards to wait, then walks briskly away.
Cowboy feels Sarah’s gaze on him. “How much was in that?” she asks.
“A few thousand. Something like that.”
“In dollars?”
Cowboy says nothing. A grin twitches at Sarah’s lips. She turns to look at Gorman’s receding back.
“Dollars aren’t much back home; but they’re worth a lot more here. The little bastard’ll be rich...if they don’t think he stole it. ” She reaches to the table for a napkin, crouches in front of Lupe, blots her tears. Now that Roon and the guards are gone Lupe breaks her stance, throws her arms around Sarah. Sobs.
Cowboy keeps stroking her hair, not knowing what else to do. Adrenaline pulses in spurts through his ragged nerves. He looks at the door where Raul had gone and tastes envy on his tongue. Knows he should have done it himself, should have broken the glass and gone for Roon’s throat with a piece of the crystal in his hand. Let the act become one of the metaphors Roon’s so fond of. He will never do it. He’s too caught up in the matrix of darkness, here, the compromises he’s made have wedged too far into him for him ever to see clearly again.
*
As Sarah and Cowboy come nearer, parts of Roon’s building seem to curl out of sight, as if moving like Thibodaux’s model into the fourth dimension. A warm canyon wind brings dust hissing inelegant scouring tracework over the building’s black skin. There is no door, no interface between the geometrical Orbital fantasy and the courtyard; they simply walk under the bright pretzel girders and into an area of cool, still air, hushed like the place is holding its breath, the sun’s light, refracted by the curved crystal above, shining down in falling sheets of green, violet, blue, touching sculpted metal furniture with delicate pastel-colored nails…
“Must be a metaphor, huh?” Cowboy says. Sarah’s laugh echoes harshly from the silent metal.
They follow the two children down a metal runway that turns into a curving hallway. Cowboy’s bootheels sink deep into the carpet. This leads to a pair of linked rooms, all shadows and curves, just like the Ritz Flop, but with a hologram image of some space habitat rotating slowly near one ceiling corner. Cowboy feels an urge to use the softglow inhaler in his pocket, feeling that a sense of unreality might help in coping with this place. Sarah walks through the irising connecting doorway.
“We’re deep in Fantasyland here,” she says. “You know about Fantasyland, Cowboy? Where they built the spaceport at Orlando?”
“Never heard of it.”
“A place for children. Where they could learn how nice the future was supposed to be.” She laughs. “They sure got that part wrong, didn’t they?”
*
The sitting room has a holo of a refugee kid in the corner, all ribs and eyes. Cowboy doesn’t like to look at it.
Roon enters the room quietly from behind, and Cowboy can feel his hackles trying to rise at the man’s scent, the sweet pomade he uses on his forelock, the scent of corpses on his breath. Roon, moving in silence behind Cowboy’s chair, lowers his pale hands to the iron muscles in Cowboy’s shoulders. Cowboy looks at the opaque expression on Sarah’s face as she curls in a half-lotus on a settee.
“I have considered your plan,” he says. “My crystal tells me it is sound. I will accept.” He pauses. “I will make the arrangements for secure communication lines.”
The tension doesn’t leave Cowboy’s neck. “Thank you, Mr. Roon,” he says.
Roon’s thumbs drill into Cowboy’s neck with considered pressure, as if trying to loosen the hard muscles there. Cowboy remains as still as one of Roon’s children at the table. “You are blessed,” Roon says. Corrupt breath floats in the room. “You will help me to regain heaven. From there I shall impose my crystal dreams upon the Earth.”
“We’re only messengers,” Cowboy says. He can feel prickles of sweat on his scalp.
Roon doesn’t seem to be listening. “I shall send Couceiro to Earth,” he says, his voice drifting on, locked in its own madness. “To the surface of the planet he hates. Perhaps it will redeem him, perhaps the people of Earth will teach him to love. Who can say?”
He takes his hands away, and Cowboy can feel relief filling his muscles. Roon walks toward Sarah. Cowboy can see the white bandage on his arm as he takes her head in his hands and bends to gravely kiss her lips. “I thank you,” he says. “I thank you both.” He turns and fixes Cowboy with his blissful smile. Liquid nitrogen fills Cowboy’s heart. “You have made possible all my dreams.”
*
After waiting for an hour, Cowboy and Sarah decide to go exploring. They poke into things at random, finding the same kind of soft, shadowy rooms lit by tinted sunlight. Beds, chairs, tables, computer access seem to be strewn more or less randomly; few of the rooms appear to have any definite purpose in mind. Hologrammatic images of star fields, ships, industrial colonies move silently on the walls, the ceilings. There are also pictures of children, wide-eyed barefoot refugee kids, standing like appeals to charity in the midst of the plush, silent rooms.
In the end they find Roon by accident, wandering into the room where he sits on a tall white chair, faced into a portable computer deck held in the still arms of a small, absolutely motionless girl-child standing next to him in a white dress. By now Cowboy’s beginning to doubt anything he sees and it takes him a moment to realize the picture isn’t another hologram, that the man with the long laser-optic cable reaching up to the socket on his temple is breathing slightly, that his closed eyelids are trembling with reflex eyeball movement as his optical centers scan the data.
The black-rimmed eyes open, move dreami
ly across the room. Find Cowboy and Sarah, focus on them. His look sharpens. “I love you,” he says. “As if you were my very own children.”
The black and silver singularity twists into cold n-dimensional space. And the collective nightmare, Roon’s and Cowboy’s, begins again.
Chapter Fifteen
The flat green border of the Florida peninsula, scalloped where the sea is coming in, lies canted up on edge before them. Clouds seem pasted to it like construction-paper cutouts. The returning gravity presses on Sarah’s chest. She swallows hard and feels Weasel lying like a rock in her throat.
In Roon’s house she hadn’t dared relax–– she was either watching Roon the whole time or riding Cowboy to make sure he didn’t flip. The time in Roon’s house had felt like a century, and she’s surprised it was only five days. Before the shuttle left she mixed rightsnap and alcohol in the port bar, the first relief she’d allowed herself, and walked onto the shuttle in a blaze of warm internal light. Now the drugs move sluggishly through her veins, softening the razor edge of reality.
She looks at Cowboy and frowns. He’s been faced into his computer for most of the trip, and even when he’s had his head out of the crystal his eyes have still had that far-off look, as if he was trying to make sense out of something...like maybe the latticework of his three-dimensional holo construct of the Tempel bloc, the way Roon was worked into it, the girders and networks of its architecture studding into his sockets, the way Cowboy and Sarah are now extensions of those networks, a tunnel through which Roon communicates with all the lattices and powers outside of the Tempel organization. Cowboy’s trying to make sense, Sarah thinks, of the way Cowboy and Roon are linked, and what that means to the world that Cowboy’s lived in for so many years, that implausible vision of himself that she’s been able to glimpse from time to time, all jet-powered hardware and burning crystal escaping into black night corridors, the outside sensors filled with flaming rockets, alcohol fire, screaming pumps-and all this mechanical violence in the unlikely servile of some kind of transcendental, personal sense of justice, life lived in service to unspoken codes of honor and existence... Sarah figures Cowboy’s been living alongside evil people all his life, but just never let one touch him before.
Lucky man, she thinks, and sips her rum and lime. Gravity squats on her chest, and she sees the bubbles that rise in her glass slow down, then hang in the cool solution, waiting for the well to free them. Her head presses back against the padded rest.
“You think he’ll be okay?” Sarah can’t decide whether Cowboy’s muttering to himself or to her.
“Raul.”
She closes her eyes, seeing growing patches the color of blood on the back of her lids.
“Yeah,” she says. “He’ll do good.” Maybe it’s even the truth, though Sarah suspects that Raul’s throat will most likely get cut the first time he tries to use the American dollars Cowboy gave him. She wishes he’d given the money to her–– she’d have found a good use for it, better anyway than scattering it among the knifeboys of some Cordillera shantytown.
“Maybe I can find him again. Bring him to the States, let him stay with my uncle. He can always use a willing hand.”
Sarah can feel the atmosphere whispering against the outside of the shuttle. She opens her eyes. The clouds over Florida have risen at an angle oblique to the land, like a layered transparency lifted over a map. Shadows pox the land below. The pressure in her throat lessens.
“If you want to get into that kind of business,” Sarah says, “there are homeless kids a lot closer than Venezuela.”
He doesn’t answer that, just stares forward and fades into the matrix again. Sarah sips her drink and closes her eyes. The shuttle begins to buffet and the Free Zone rises to claim them.
*
“Michael will meet you tonight.” That’s the word from the Flash Force man who waits at the security gate. “In the meantime, we’ll drive you where you need to go.”
The sun hammers at them as they step onto the concrete. “The Ritz Flop,” Sarah says, but out of the corner of her eye she sees Cowboy shake his head.
“No,” he says. “Someplace else.” She looks at him in silent surprise. Sweat dots his forehead like a constellation of extra sockets.
“Where?” she asks.
Cowboy shrugs. He looks at the long car with its opaqued windows, then at Sarah. “Your place, maybe. Above the bar?”
She’s about to refuse but something stops her. His look, a sixth sense, something. A knowledge that to say no would be wrong–– not unwise, just a piece of unnecessary cruelty.
“Okay,” she says slowly. “But you’ll be by yourself. If we don’t meet the Hetman till night, I’m going to spend the afternoon with Daud.”
Cowboy shrugs again. “Blue Silk, then,” Sarah tells the driver, then ducks into the car’s back seat.
Cowboy’s quiet on the ride back to Tampa, drawn into himself. Sarah stops in the Blue Silk long enough to tell Maurice that it’s okay if Cowboy stays for the afternoon, then lets the Flash Force take her to Daud.
She’s moved him out of the hospital and into a recovery house in a Tampa suburb, a place out behind the howling limited expressway that connects Tampa with Orlando. He’s got a room that’s more like a dormitory residence than a hospital room, and Sarah doesn’t think any of the attendants have the look of a Joseph, with a syringe hidden in the towels.
Daud is sitting up in a chair when she enters his room. He looks better simply by virtue of the fact he’s out of hospital clothes, and he’s lifting a dumbbell with his weak arm. It’s the first time she’s seen him exercise voluntarily, and she smiles as she walks toward him.
“Hi, Sarah.”
She bends to kiss him. His blue eyes smile up at her from beneath an unscarred brow. Sarah straightens in surprise. “Daud...” She blinks at him. A cold needle begins to stitch her nerves. His smile broadens as he works the weight. “How...?”
“The body designer took off the face scars two days ago. With her laser.” He’s beginning to breathe hard from the exertion. His tone shows the strain.
She leans back against the wall, crosses her arms. “Who paid for it?” she asks.
“This...guy I met. His sister is in here with...terminal Huntington’s. He’s rich.” Daud’s smile turns shaky. The cords on his neck stand out. He lifts the weight twice more, then lets it down. He leans his head back and takes a breath.
“What does he do?”
“Something in shipping. He’s from southern Africa someplace. He’s just in Florida because his sister is a patient here.” He raises his head and looks at Sarah. His smile is hesitant. “He thinks he might want me to go home with him.”
“Well.” Sarah can feel a harshness in her tone that she doesn’t want. She swallows and tries to control it. “This is fast. A romantic African from across the seas. All in five days.”
A wary look clouds Daud’s eyes. “I think you’ll like him,” he says.
“Is he here now?”
Daud mutely shakes his head. “He left about an hour ago.”
Sarah wants to grab him, hold his arm out, tear up his sleeve to see if there are puncture marks. Shake him till his teeth rattle. Instead she makes herself smile. Knowing how badly he needs this new bit of hope, and that she doesn’t dare destroy it unless she knows for certain it’s a phantom.
“Can I meet his sister?”
“Sure. But she’s paralyzed with viral Huntington’s. Can’t talk.”
Sarah feels apprehension waning in her system with the rightsnap. She moves to sit on Daud’s bed. Tries to smile again. “Daud, I hope you’re being careful. Because this man may be aimed at me.”
She sees the jaw muscles clench, the anger flaring behind the coldness in Daud’s eyes. He turns to her. “You can’t believe in things that aren’t connected to you, can you? Everything has to revolve around you, even me and the people I know.” He throws up his hands. “Can’t you stay out of my life?”
“I’m j
ust trying to keep you from getting hurt, Daud. If this man turns out to be one of the people that are after me.”
“He’s not. He cares for me. He really does.”
“I’m glad. If...” She lets the sentence fade away.
“If he turns out to be real.” Daud’s voice blazes defiance. “That’s what you were going to say, right?” He shakes his head. “You didn’t even ask his name, did you? It’s Nick Mslope. ”
“I don’t want to fight, Daud.”
“Nick Mslope. Say it.”
“Yeah. Fine. Nick Mslope. Who may or may not be real.” She looks at him. “Can you say that?”
He turns away, fumbles in his pocket for a cigarette.
“Can you, Daud?” Her voice is as gentle as she can make it.
“I don’t have to take this,” Daud mumbles. “I don’t have to say anything I don’t want.” He lights the tobacco. “I don’t have to depend on your money anymore. Nick will take care of me.”
“I hope he will,” Sarah says. “But tell him something first. Tell him you saw me, that we had a fight and you’ll never see me again. And then if he’ll still take care of you, fine.” Smoke rises over Daud’s averted head. Sarah leans forward. “Will you tell him that, Daud? Will you take that chance?”
Daud’s jaw is trembling. “I don’t have to,” he says.
“I’m only interested in making things clear. For everybody. If Nick wants to help you through this, fine. I’d enjoy not having to pay for it. But don’t question him too close till you get all your parts back.”
He looks at her out of the corner of his eyes. “Damn you,” he says. “You can’t leave me with anything.”
“I don’t enjoy this.”
“So you say.” He tries to make his voice cut, but he can’t do more than choke on the words. She reaches out to touch him, feels him try to flinch away, then accept her. Feeding people realities. That seems to be all she’s done lately, and she feels a sickness at it, like bile stirring in her stomach.
She comes closer to Daud, putting her arms around him, kissing his cold, compliant cheek.
Hardwired Page 25
