Dreams of gods and men, p.11
Dreams of Gods and Men, page 11
The Wolf stepped around the corner of the building and said, “The Lay, she lookin fa you.” His fighting claws were extended.
Heavy dumps of muscle in his forearm flexed tightly. He held something small and shiny in his right paw.
Toshi turned.
As he did so the Wolf tensed his right hand, then relaxed. He lowered his head and said, “Ahhh.”
Toshi stared at the Wolf. The Wolf bowed to him. Kept on bowing. Toppled over on his face and lay still.
The black-taped hilt of a throwing knife protruded from his left eye.
Sadie walked over to the Wolf and poked at his ribs with her boot toe. She sighed. “Well, come on, help me get this sucker stashed somewhere.”
Together they dragged the, body to the back of the shed and rolled it under the rusted remains of an old tractor. Sadie found a weather-eaten tarp and covered the remains. In the dim light the Wolf was just another shapeless shadow.
“Probably that girl will find it, but we should be long gone.”
Toshi nodded. He remembered the holocube. He thought about the Wolf. About the way it had bowed to him with a knife in its eye. “Chicago,” he said. “What?”
“We’re going to Chicago.”
“It’s about time,” Sadie said.
8
Ozzie cracked an egg on edge of the huge cast-iron skillet and watched it sizzle in hot bacon grease. He wanted to look at her instead, but he’d already burned two eggs, and she said she was hungry. He didn’t want to fuck up again, and though cooking definitely wasn’t his long suit, he would have to learn. She couldn’t do it anymore.
He poked at the edge of the egg with a spatula, watching the filmy fluid turn hard and solid and begin to brown at the edge.
When both eggs were finished he scooped them from the skillet and nestled them carefully next to three strips of bacon on a plate.
Then he picked up the plate and carried it to her where she sat on the futon. Her face turned toward him, toward the sound of his footsteps.
“Smells good.”
“Here. A fork.”
“Thanks.”
He watched her eat. The fine bones of her face moved slowly as she chewed. Her eyes were open and green as emeralds, and as empty. It had been two days since her most recent return, and he didn’t know how much more he could stand.
“I must love you,” he said. “I’m such a lousy cook.”
She swallowed, put the fork on the plate and carefully set it on the floor next to the futon. “We have to talk.”
“I know. But finish your breakfast first. I cooked it for you.”
Her hand hovered for a moment in the air. “All right,” she said at last. He watched her fingers grope on the wood until they located the rim of the plate. As she lifted, the fork teetered and almost fell, but he knew better than to say anything.
It was a very dangerous time for them, for him. She hadn’t even said a word when he talked about love.
Not this way, he thought. I can’t do it this way!
When she finished he took the plate and carried it back to the kitchen and placed it on a stack in the sink.
“You should do the dishes sometime,” she said. “That sounds pretty full.”
He sighed and turned and walked back. He sat down and crossed his legs. “Talk now?”
She nodded.
“Okay. What are we gonna do?”
She shook her head. “I already told you. We’re going to the moon.”
“That’s it? That’s all?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Calley.” He touched the top of her knee. “Listen to me. You got to add things up. Berg’s gone. Levin’s gone. We don’t know where Toshi is. Something happened to you in the matrix, but you can’t remember what. Except to tell me you can’t go back. And… and—”
“I’m blind,” she finished for him. “I know.”
“Can’t you explain any of it?”
She leaned back and balanced her upper body on her elbows. She was wearing a pair of his faded gym shorts, the gold tiger emblem on one leg a corroded patch of gold. A clean tee shirt. Her hair was unbrushed and growing out. It hung in limp, dark strands around her face. It scared him that she didn’t seem to care about it anymore.
“I’ve been thinking.” She grinned crookedly. “Not that I’m good for much else.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I know. Self-pity. Not good for blind people.”
He wanted to hit her then. Smack her hard, knock the hopelessness out of her. His chest went hard and hurtful. Then he realized it was him he wanted to rid of the darkness. She was blind and he was lost.
What a pair.
“You say something?”
“No,” he said.
“This Berg thing. And Levin. I can’t explain it, Ozzie. I mean, why I can’t go into the matrix again. I’d say it was just a feeling, but it’s stronger than that. I’m as certain as I can be that for right now, at least, it’s better for me to be outside. And that certainty is all tied up with Berg.”
“He might be dead,” Ozzie said, and was astounded at the harshness in his voice.
“Ozzie,” she said gently. “If he was, wouldn’t you know about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember when you pulled us out of the metamatrix?”
“Sure, yeah, I—” He stopped. He realized that in all the years since, he’d never once thought about that time. And wondered why that was.
He closed his eyes and stared into the darkness of memory. On that day he’d operated the box he’d designed himself, the one which had taken them to the metamatrix in the first place. Besides William Norton, he and Calley had been the first to see the metamatrix, to discover that it even existed. And he’d gone there before her.
So when he’d ridden their catcher program up from the floor and plucked Berg from the chaos that was boiling into the Demon Star, he’d been a part of it, too. He just didn’t want to admit it.
“I just didn’t want to admit it,” he said aloud.
“What do you mean?”
He gulped air. He felt shaky and weak. “What did Berg call himself? You said it, too. The Key?”
“The Key That Locks and Looses.” She scratched the side of her nose. “He said it was the reason Norton had selected him for the job in the first place. Some kind of mental quirk, some talent he had.”
“And Arius used you and him to join with Norton into the Demon Star. Yeah. I was there. I remember.”
“Go on.” Her voice pushed at him.
“Uh.” He couldn’t bring out the words. “Just say you’re right. If he was dead, I’d know it.”
She was relentless. “Say his name, goddamit!”
“Berg!”
“Why would you know?”
“Because…’cause he joined me, too!” And with the words something broke inside, something old and painful, and his mouth opened and cracked, dry sounds came out.
“Go ahead,” she whispered. “Cry. You got as much right as anybody.”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
He got up, went to the kitchenette, found a piece of paper towel and blew his nose. Then he came back. “I love you, Calley. And so does he. I mean I know that, right down in my cells. ’Cause there’s a part of him in me, and a part of you in me, and I guess some of me in both of you. And—”
“Go on.” Her eyes seemed focused for an instant, and he thought he saw in their depths a flame like the corona around a sun.
“Are we a part of the Star? Is the Demon a part of us?”
She began to rock back and forth, hugging herself. “What do you think?”
He licked his lips. He opened his mouth and shut it. He blinked. “What do we do?”
She smiled. “We go to the moon. I told you already.”
He leaned back in the rickety office chair in front of his control bank and stared at morning washing blue over the top of the skylight. At times like this he was glad she’d made him wash the damned thing—somehow it lessened the cavelike atmosphere of the apartment. From the bathroom came watery noises and a husky tenor muttering against the walls of the shower.
“… might just… get what you need…”
He grinned. She was hooked on the old music, and the towering Rolling Stones anthem was a favorite of hers. “You can’t always get what you want…” He half-hummed, half-muttered the words and felt a surge of happiness. Maybe things would work out. Though he doubted it.
“You gonna stay in there all day?” he shouted.
The singing subsided, and a moment later she shut off the water. “What you howling about?”
“I said—”
“I heard you. You in a hurry or something? I thought you said I was crazy.”
“You are. But somebody’s gotta take care of you, and I guess it’s me.”
The wooden door to the bathroom, a thin wooden thing held together mostly by years and coats of paint, now currently light blue and chipped, banged open.
“On the best day of your life—”
“I know. But hurry up anyway. I need to use it, too.”
She poked her head around the door and stuck out her tongue.
“Yeah. Take a shower quick. You stink.”
“Bitch.”
“Compliments, my dear brat, will get you everywhere.” She slammed the door again. He tried a short laugh, but it turned hollow.
He glanced at the work on the screen. He was composing an extremely complicated run. Their chances of success in running whatever gauntlet the Demon Star might have erected against them depended on it. Handicapped as they were—both of us, he thought—the probabilities were dubious. But she said they were going, and so they would.
“What you need,” he mumbled, “what you need is a leader, and I’m not it.” And then felt stupid talking to an empty room.
“Okay, I’m done, bubba. Dive right in anytime.”
He didn’t move, didn’t say anything. She’d wrapped a thick bath towel around her hair, but wore nothing else. He was struck by her small beauties, by the tightness and tautness of her. No let down at all.
“Ozzie.”
He jerked. “What?”
Her voice was clear and steady, but he sensed the ragged edge of anger. “Remember what I told you?”
He did. “I’m sorry.”
She took a deep breath. “Please always cough or something, clear your throat, say a word or two, so I know where you are. And after your shower, use some of that godawful perfume I found. If I can’t hear you, at least I can smell you. Okay? Right? It’s important.”
“I know.” He felt ashamed. She was trying to adjust, and what did he do to help? Forget stuff and moon at his computers.
Her tone softened. “Ozzie, please. I’m blind.”
When she said it that way, he decided it didn’t sound like an excuse or a condemnation or even a plea. More like a description.
“I’m hungry. I’m happy. I’m blind.”
He felt like crying again and pushed the wash of emotion away. All this blubbering wasn’t going to help them get to Luna. Besides, he was all cried out.
Why me? he wondered, but he said, “Move your ass, old woman. And I think that shit smells good.”
“Old?” she said.
He ran for the door.
“All right, here’s what I got,” he said. She crouched next to his chair, balanced on the balls of her feet, one elbow on his left thigh.
Her head was tilted to the left, her face toward the soft whir of the machines in front of her. He brushed the touchpad deftly and brought a rolling scroll of glyphs up on the monitor.
“The meats don’t run everything yet, thank God. Stuff like this—air- and spaceport security, taxi data basing for bills, and so forth—it’s still hardware. Won’t last forever, but it would cost a fortune to replace all at once. So much the better for us. I cracked NORAP’s safe and hooked all their codes.”
She nodded. “No little feetprints, eh?”
“What do you take me for? An amateur?”
“Down, boy. Just asking.”
“You got to figure Arius or Double En or whoever the hell has baseline descriptions of us plastered in every security shack in North America, right? Which, of course, includes O’Hare Near Earth Port. But unless you think up some way of sprouting wings, we’ve got to go that way.”
“Are you building up to some kind of gargantuan brag about this, or have you actually figured something out?”
“I told you. I hooked all their codes. What we need is some kind of disguise. I guarantee that if they retina-code us, or try for cell or gene match, they’re going to find out we aren’t anybody named Calley or Oswald.”
“You guarantee?”
“Take it or leave it, kid.”
“Okay, so you got the machines gimmicked. Now about this disguise?”
“Well, how about this…?”
A gray wind blew low and cold around the corner of the warehouse. Ozzie carefully twisted a key in the heavy, old-fashioned brass padlock which held the door shut. “You can take all the security systems you want—and I got ’em, God knows—but it takes a frigging hammer to open one of these things. Discourages casual speculation, you might say.”
Just past a winter noon, the sun beat thin and clear on the corrugated sides of the building. Long fingers of red and brown corrosion groped down the channels in the aged siding. Calley faced away from the building, listening to the distant horns of lake freighters as they glided north toward the iron of Minnesota.
Ozzie paused and sniffed the air. “Too cold for rain,” he said. “Bright sun. Nice Chicago winter day.”
Calley squeezed her thin fingers into fists, quickly, nervously. “Can the travelogue,” she said. “I never liked this neighborhood even when I could see it.” Her breath made abrupt silver puffs in the frigid air. “You want to take my arm, sonny boy?”
He laughed. “Sure, gramma, come on. I’ll get you across this dangerous street.”
“You’d better. Or I stick those merit badges where they’ll never tarnish.” They could have flagged a taxi, but why, Ozzie thought, borrow trouble? He’d ridden the El all his life anyway. And it was cheap, not that it mattered. “You okay with the money?” he asked.
“I got cash in my bag, and those bent chips you cobbled up. What’s the credit rating, if anybody asks?”
“Gold, honey. Bright gold.”
“That’s pushy.”
“Nothing pushes like money. We may need a push, too.”
She sighed and curled her arm tighter around his. “Lay on, Macduff,” she said.
“He was a tall sucker, too, wasn’t he?”
“Walk,” she said.
At five o’clock in the afternoon the forty storied tower of Randolph Street Station was a static of hurrying commuters, departing office workers, bleary-eyed night shifters swarming in for the swing- and early graveyard shifts.
The three lowest levels of the massive building made up the station itself, a maze of high tunnels and broad platforms that daily funneled almost a third of a million commuters from the cubicles of their jobs to the fullerdomes of their suburban residences. Chicago was a big city, and those who worked in it possessed veneers tough to disturb, but even the most hardened commuter stepped away from the pair that moved steadily down the center of the corridor which led to the New O’Hare bullet-train platforms.
The woman clicked as she lurched steadily along. It was a by-product of the form-fitting black carapace which outlined every muscle of her frame. Her face was blank of any emotion; her eyes stared straight ahead, neither rejecting nor acknowledging the horrified stares directed at her.
Inside the flame of her synthetic musculature she was naked. That she chose not to cover herself proclaimed something beyond her own disabilities, as did the slender giant who glided beside her, his own brass-flecked eyes searching the crowd with feral hunger.
Without consciously seeming to do so, individuals in the pushing throng who found themselves too close to the pair stepped away, looked away, moved away. The giant and the old woman proceeded unimpeded, like a ship moving slowly through water.
Many decades ago, even before the Chicago Collapse and the Flood, the question of who ruled the underworld had been decided. After years of bloody struggle the Darkstone Ragers wrested control of the drug trade from a rival gang called the Outlaws.
With this inexhaustible source of revenue they quickly dominated the rest of the shadow economy and finally moved to gather political legitimacy in the tangled world of legitimate machine democracy. Some said that during the years of the Collapse the Ragers had literally owned Chicago.
Some said they still did.
At the first weapons check the two halted. One of the guards, an older man with a wrinkled face and weary eyes glanced up, then lowered his head again. “Jackie, you handle them, okay?”
The younger guard, a thin youth in his early twenties with a pockmarked face, muttered, “Oh, shit.” He got up from his desk slowly.
“Right on through the arch there, folks,” he said.
“She’s wearing a harness,’ ” the emaciated giant said. His voice was very deep, very fuzzy. The guard imagined something terrible happening to his vocal cords.
“I know,” the guard sighed. “I got eyes, bud. We’ll make allowances. But she’s got to go through.”
“And she’s blind. I got to go with her.”
“Blind?” The guard swallowed. “Hey, Fred. Come on over here, would you?”
The older guard’s lips moved silently over a couple of words, but he stood up and put on his hat and adjusted the heavy pistol at his side.
“Yeah?” He glanced at the pair. “What’s up, Jackie?”
“The lady’s blind. This guy says he has to go through with her.”
Fred looked at the couple. Something tickled the edge of his memory, something about tall people, but faced with this reality that barely remembered ghost made no impression.
He knew what he was dealing with here. “Oh, Jackie,” he mumbled softly. “Step over here a second.”
The giant watched impassively as they moved away. “You know what you got here?” Fred said.
