As she dressed, Michele saw that Luc had suited up in a pair of jeans and cowboy boots, as he announced that were going to visit several local wineries and enjoy the beautiful day. When she was finished dressing, and preparing herself for a relaxing day of wine tasting, Michele went downstairs to the kitchen to pour herself some more coffee, whereupon she found Luc reading the newspaper, as he commented on how sexy she looked in her simple outfit, and how that, tonight, she would get her chance to say goodbye to Anjun and Atikur, at the party that the Countess was throwing at the zoo. Luc then asked Michele to have a seat, on his lap, so that he could finish telling her the tale that, nearly an hour before, had been interrupted by the news that her training was only days away from starting..
"Well, as I was saying earlier, Kincaid was lost in writing the set of commands we were going to plug into the dead center of Chrome's computer. That was going to be my job, because Kincaid was going to have his hands full trying to keep the Russian program from going straight for the kill. It was too complex for us to rewrite, and so he was going to try to hold it back for the two seconds I needed."
"I made a deal with a street fighter named Miles. He was going to follow Rikki the night of the burn, keep her in sight, and phone me at a certain time. If I wasn't there, or didn't answer in just a certain way, I'd told him to grab her and put her on the first tube out. I gave him an envelope to give her, money and a note."
"Kincaid really hadn't thought about that, much, how things would go for her if we blew it. He just kept telling me he loved her, where they were going to go together, how they'd spend the money."
"Buy her a pair of Ikons first, man. That's what she wants. She's serious about that simstim scene."
"Hey," he said, looking up from the keyboard, "she won't need to work. We're going to make it, Jack. She's my luck. She won't ever have to work again."
"Your luck," I said. I wasn't happy. I couldn't remember when I had been happy. "You seen your luck around lately?"
"He hadn't, but neither had I. We'd both been too busy."
"I missed her. Missing her reminded me of my one night in the House of Blue Lights, because I'd gone there out of missing someone else. I 'd gotten drunk to begin with, then I'd started hitting Vasopressin inhalers. If your main squeeze has just decided to walk out on, you, booze and Vasopressin are the ultimate in masochistic pharmacology; the juice makes you maudlin and the Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things. So I 'd bought myself an ultraintense replay of a bad affair; trouble is, you get the bad with the good. Go gunning for transports of animal ecstasy and you get what you said, too, and what she said to that, how she walked away and never looked back."
"I don't remember deciding to go to the Blue Lights, or how I got there, hushed corridors and this really tacky decorative waterfall trickling somewhere, or maybe just a hologram of one. I had a lot of money that night; somebody had given Kincaid a big roll for opening a three-second window in someone else's ice."
"I don't think the crew on the door liked my looks, but I guess my money was okay."
"I had more to drink there when I'd done what I went there for. Then I made some crack to the barman about closet necrophiliacs, and that didn't go down too well. Then this very large character insisted on calling me War Hero, which I didn't like. I think I showed him some tricks with my gun, before the lights went out, and I woke up two days later in a basic sleeping module somewhere else. A cheap place, not even room to hang l yourself. And I sat there on that narrow foam slab and cried."
"Some things are worse than being alone. But the thing they sell in the House of Blue Lights is so popular that it's almost legal."
"At the heart of darkness, the still center, the glitch systems shred the dark with whirlwinds of light, translucident razors spinning away from us; we hang in the center of a silent slow-motion explosion, ice fragments falling away forever, and, despite that, I could hear Kincaid's voice coming in across light-years of electronic void illusion-- "
"Burn the bitch down. I can't hold the thing back--"
"The Russian program, rising through towers of data, were now blotting out the playroom colors, as I rose up and plugged Kincaid's homemade command package into the center of Chrome's cold heart. The squirt transmission cut in, a pulse of condensed information that shot straight up, past the thickening tower of darkness, the Russian program, while Kincaid struggled to control that crucial second. An unformed arm of shadow twitches from the towering dark, too late."
"We've done it." He said, as the matrix folded itself around me like an origami trick, leaving the loft smells of sweat and burning circuitry. It was then that I thought I heard Chrome scream, a raw metal sound, but I couldn't have."
"Kincaid was laughing, tears in his eyes. The elapsed-time figure in the corner of the monitor read 07:24:05. The burn had taken a little under eight minutes."
"And I saw that the Russian program had melted in its slot."
"We'd given the bulk of Chrome's Zurich account to a dozen world charities. There was too much there to move, and we knew we had to break her, burn her straight down, or she might come after us. We took less than ten percent for ourselves and shot it through the Long Hum setup in Macao. They took sixty percent of that for themselves and kicked what was left back to us through the most convoluted sector of the Hong Kong exchange. It took an hour before our money started to reach the two accounts we'd opened in Zurich."
"I watched zeros pile up behind a meaningless figure on the monitor. I was rich."
"Then the phone rang. It was Miles. I almost blew the code phrase."
"Hey, man, I dunno--what's it all about, with this girl of yours? Kinda funny thing here... "
"What? Tell me."
"I been on her, like you said, tight but out of sight. She goes to the Loser, hangs out, then she gets a tube. Goes to the House of Blue Lights--"
"She what?"
"Side door. Employees only. No way I could get past their security."
"Is she there now?"
"No, I just lost her. It's insane down here, like the Blue Lights just shut down, looks like for good, seven kinds of alarms going off, everybody running, the heat out in riot gear.... Now there's all this stuff going on, insurance guys, real-estate types, vans with municipal plates...."
"Miles, where'd she go?"
"Lost her, Jack."
"Look, Miles, you keep the money in the envelope, right?"
"You serious? Hey, I'm real sorry. I--"
"I hung up."
"Wait'll we tell her," Kincaid was saying, rubbing a towel across his bare chest."
"You tell her yourself, cowboy. I'm going for a walk."
"So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics. I didn't think, just put one foot in front of another, but after a while I did think, and it all made sense. She'd needed the money."
"I thought about Chrome, too. That we'd killed her, murdered her, as surely as if we'd slit her throat. The night that carried me along through the malls and plazas would be hunting her now, and she had nowhere to go. How many enemies would she have in this crowd alone? How many would move, now they weren't held back by fear of her money? We'd taken her for everything she had. She was back on the street again. I doubted she'd live till dawn."
"Finally I remembered the cafe, the one where I'd met Tiger."
"Her sunglasses told the whole story, huge black shades with a telltale smudge of fleshtone paintstick in the corner of one lens. "Hi, Rikki," I said, and I was ready when she took them off."
"Blue, Tally Isham blue. The clear trademark blue they re famous for, ZEISS IKON ringing each iris in tiny capitals, the letters suspended there like flecks of gold."
"They're beautiful," I said. Paintstick covered the bruising. No scars with work that good. "You made some money."
"Yeah, I did." Then she shivered. "But I won't make any more, not that way. "
"I think that place is out of business."
"Oh. " Nothing moved in her face then. The new blue eyes were still and very deep. "
"It doesn't matter. Kincaid's waiting for you. We just pulled down a big score."
"No. I've got to go. I guess he won't understand, but I've got to go."
"I nodded, watching the arm swing up to take her hand; it didn't seem to be part of me at all, but she held on to it like it was."
"I've got a one-way ticket to Hollywood. Tiger knows some people I can stay with. Maybe I'll even get to Chiba City." She said."
"She was right about Kincaid. I went back with her. He didn't understand. But she'd already served her purpose, for Kincaid, and I wanted to tell her not to hunt for him, because I could see that she did. He wouldn't even come out into the hallway after she had packed her bags, I put the bags down and kissed her and messed up the paintstick, and something came up inside me the way the killer program had risen above Chrome's data. A sudden stopping of the breath, in a place where no word is. But she had a plane to catch."
"Kincaid was slumped in the swivel chair in front of his monitor, looking at his string of zeros. He had his shades on, and I knew he'd be in the Gentleman Loser by nightfall, checking out the weather, anxious for a sign, someone to tell him what his new life would be like. I couldn't see it being very different. More comfortable, but he'd always be waiting for that next card to fall."
"I tried not to imagine her in the House of Blue Lights, working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of conditioned reflexes took care of business. The customers never got to complain that she was faking it, because those were real orgasms. But she felt them, if she felt them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere out on the edge of sleep. yeah, it was so popular there that it's almost legal. Just like back then, the customers today are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has probably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways."
"I picked up the phone and punched the number for her airline. I gave them her real name, her flight number. "She's changing that," I said, "to Chiba City. That's right. Japan. I thumbed my credit card into the slot and punched my ID code. "First class." Distant credit records. "Make that a return ticket."
"But I guess she cashed the return fare, or else didn't need it, because she never came back. And sometimes late at night I'll pass a window with posters of simstim Japanese stars, all those beautiful, identical Asian eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and then I'll close my eyes and see her far out on the edge of all the sprawl of night and cities as she waves goodbye."
"The point of my story Michele, is that Kincaid and I back then were a team, but that we nearly split up because of a woman. However, unlike Rikki and Ukiko, you came into Kincaid's life searching for something that was missing from your life, namely love, adventure, and sexual fulfillment, and thus, as a result we, meaning Kincaid and myself, know in our hearts that we can trust you with both our lives and hearts."
By this time Michele, who was listening intently to Luc's tale, was incredibly horny, as she looked into Luc's sad beautiful eyes and said to him, "My darling, I promise to never break your or Kincaid's trust, you two are the most wonderful men I have ever known, and I promise that I will make both of you proud as your personal operative, just like Mata Hari." The promise of which Michele then sealed with a kiss, after which, after making love one more time, they both got into Luc's old Ford pickup and drove to several of the local wineries, enjoying each others company, as they laughed and smiled the whole time until, finally, they headed back into Paris for the Countess' party at the zoo, where she would get a chance to say goodbye to Atikur and Anjun, who were both leaving the next day for Japan to study under Michele's future mentor and Sempai, Akira Sensei...
No comments:
Post a Comment