METROPHAGE, Part 4

You may read these files, copy, distribute them, or print them out
and make them into little hats. You may do anything you like with
them as long as you do not change them in any way or receive
money for them.

I've put METROPHAGE and HORSE LATITUDES into free distribution
on the Net, but I retain all copyrights to the works.

If you have any problems or comments on the works or their
distribution, you can email me at: kadrey@well.com

And remember, if you charge anyone money for these files you are
the nothing but ambulatory puke, and I hope a passing jet drops a 15
pound radar magnet on your hard drive.

Richard Kadrey
May 1995
*********************************************************************

						TEN:
			Second Sight: An Adventure in Optics

	He could not sleep. He spent the night listening to the World
Link viewer in his room, restlessly changing the channel every few
seconds, program to program (Damned Alpha Rat documentaries, he
thought.), language to language, and pacing. The old house creaked,
settling deeper into the earth on its century-old foundation. Jonny
tried not to think of Sumi and Ice, tried to keep his mind numb. He
felt his way into the hall once, found Blue Boy and ran his fingers
over the uneven layers of paint. He knew that he was probably on
somebody's security camera, but he did not care. Jonny wondered
what would happen if he put his fist through the damned painting.
Later, in his room, when the little enameled clock on his desk chimed
seven times, they came for him.
	They injected him with something and, against his will, he felt
himself relaxing. He was pushed through the halls on a padded chair
that hovered a few centimeters off the parquet floor on an induction
cushion, wondering if it was the same chair they had used to take
Sumi away. Conover walked behind him, smelling of clove cigarettes.
	"You have good timing, son," said the smuggler lord. "In another
week, these techs would be gone. Off to Japan. My own staff is good,
but these people are special. And expensive, too. I'm turning a nice
profit on this deal. They're Russians, did I tell you? I had them
brought in from a sharaska near Leningrad. You wouldn't have
believed the state they were in when they got here. Pathetic. The
Russians had stuck neural scramblers in all their heads. One hundred
meters beyond the prison walls, their brains went into vaporlock. It's
not easy, you know, taking a neural scrambler out of a brain, and
having anything but Spam left over. The Japs developed the
technique. My staff performed the actual surgery. We lost two of the
Russians, but the rest came through with flying colors." Jonny was
pushed into an elevator. He heard the doors hiss closed, experienced
the slight vertigo of descent. Then the doors opened and they pushed
him to a room where the smell of antiseptic hit him like a slap in the
face. "Doctor Ludovico is the prize, the reason the Japanese financed
the operation. The others are his staff. Ludovico is a specialist in
xenograftology. He'll be doing your surgery."
	The techs elevated the chair a half meter and let down the
back, sliding Jonny onto a narrow table in a single, practiced motion.
Someone began covering him with small sheets of sterile cloth,
moving up his body to his throat, leaving his head bare. Fingers
touched his forehead, pulled the lids back from his empty eye
sockets. Jonny gasped.
	"Relax," said Conover. "It's Ludovico. He just wants to have a
look at what he has to work with." Ludovico, Conover explained,
spoke no English. He smelled of expensive cigars and cheap cologne.
Jonny did not like the man, did not like having a stranger's fingers
prying into his head, did not like the idea of a bunch of possibly
brain-damaged ex-cons cutting him open, and he was about to say so
when a needle hit him in the arm and an anesthetic mask slipped
down over his nose.
	"I'll be seeing you," said Conover. "And with any luck, you'll be
seeing me."

	"It hurts," Jonny said. Two days later, his hair was just
beginning to come back in. The Russians had removed the staples
from his face, sealing the scars with a protein glue. A lightshow
played in Jonny's head. No images, just silent fireworks. He had not
had any contact with Sumi since the surgery. She was in quarantine,
and from the noises Conover was making, Jonny thought she might
on life-support. Unconsciously, he found himself relying on the old
wisdom to keep going. It was a matter of accepting each moment as a
unique entity, allowing observer and the observed to merge and thus
keep the panic and horror from overwhelming him. The Buddhists
were right in that, at least, Jonny thought. He found that he was able
to meditate for short periods of time and that seemed to help.
	Now, something was tickling his eyes; ants crawled up his optic
nerves, marched through his skull to his brain where they laid tiny
eggs that burst into super novas, scattering colors he could not name.
	He was downstairs again, in a different room, sitting up this
time. Ludovico was there, mumbling to his assistants and operating a
Cray mini-computer, trying to calibrate the frequency response of
Jonny's new eyes. Exteroceptors, someone had called them. The front
of Jonny's head felt huge, bulging with the new hardware. The techs
had assured him that the feeling would wear-off in a few days, but
Jonny had his doubts. He was convinced that he would look like a
bug for the rest of his life.
	"It's a bridge he's built," said Conover. "That's the key to this
procedure. Ludovico's by-passed your optic nerves completely, and
implanted silicon sensors in your sight centers. The chips receive
data from a broadcast unit at the back of the exteroceptors.
	Your retinas are really modified Langenscheidt CCD's. Any pain
or unusual light patterns you are experiencing are the effects of the
electrical field around the graft stimulating what's left of your optic
nerves."
	Jonny laughed. "People've been telling me I ought to get a
skull-plug for years."
	"Now you've done them all one better. An entire digitized
sense."
	"I don't know," said Jonny, squirming in the exam chair, trying
to find a comfortable spot, "I've always been a little afraid of grafts
and implants, you know? Like maybe I'd forget where the machinery
ended and I started."
	Conover breathed heavily, making a sound that could have
been a sigh. "It's all a gamble," he said. "Every moment you're alive.
Would you rather be blind?"
	"No way," Jonny said. He shook his head. "Some choice."
Ludovico said something and a woman with a heavy Japanese accent,
translated. "The doctor is going to bring up the exteroceptors now. He
wants you to describe everything you see."
	Jonny settled back in the chair, consciously controlling his
breathing. Burning violet rimmed his field of vision.
"Keep your eyes open," someone said.
	Hot fear. Something was moving up his throat.
	Give me anything, he thought. Just a little light. A little light.
Over and over until the words lost all meaning and it became a chant,
a mantra--
	Then it flowed into him, obliterating all else, a flood of
sensations, solid mass of bent spectrum, vague things moving within.
He turned his head, letting the colors blur across his vision. His
vision. He was seeing children's blocks, a rainbow chess board-- no--
a grid, like fine wire mesh. Each individual segment was throbbing
neon. Then shapes. A man was seated before him. His right hand
appeared to be burning.
	"There's a lot of colors coming through a grid," Jonny said.
"Looks like some kind of pixel display. There's someone there. His
hand-- it's like it's on fire." The woman translated into Russian.
	The man-shape typed something into the Cray and the colors
dropped suddenly in intensity, replaced with more distinct shapes.
The burning hand was no longer burning, but remained faintly
aglow, splashes of pastels shading the fingers and wrist like an old
map, different colors indicating geographic regions. The hand
belonged to a fat man, Jonny could see, and the burning, he realized,
had come from a pencil-sized flashlight the fat man had been shining
into his eyes.
	The pixels had the effect of distancing Jonny from what he saw.
He felt that he was watching the room from a video monitor, shooting
through thousands of individual squares of beveled glass.
	Something flared off to his right. Jonny turned and saw
Conover. The smuggler lord was lighting a cigarette, the flame on his
lighter burning red and ludicrously large.
	"These eyes have thermographic grids," said Jonny. "Some kind
of computer-enhanced infrared scan." "A bonus," said Conover, a
variegated skull, dead patches of skin registering as holes in his face.
"There are some other sub-programs in there, too. You'll find them
and learn to control the sensitivity of the pixels."
	"I can make out shapes pretty well, right now," Jonny said. "Are
the colors going to be like this all the time?"
	"No, you're just registering infrared because the lights are out."
	"Well fire them up. This heat-vision is weird," Jonny said.
	"Is that all right, Doctor?" Conover asked. A woman spoke to
Ludovico, whom Jonny recognized as the fat man. The Russian
nodded, extra chins spilling over his collar. "Da," he said, and
someone turned on the lights. Normal spectrum canceled out the
infrared. Jonny looked at the room, the people, the blinking lights on
the diagnostic devices. The colors were just a shade or two hotter
than normal.
	"Fucking beautiful," Jonny said. He was laughing. It was all he
could do.
	Conover put a hand on his shoulder. "It all right now, isn't it?"
he asked.
	"It's incredible, man," Jonny said. "When can I go see Easy?"
	"Soon. Tonight, maybe, depending on how you feel. Before you
go, though, there's something we have to talk about."
	"Yeah, I know. You want one of your people to go with me."
	"That's right. Ricos. But that's not what I want to talk about."
Conover dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out. There
was something wrong with the techs' faces. They were not looking
like him like someone they had just cured. More like someone they
had just saved from meningitis only to find cancer. Jonny recognized
a woman in the corner as Yukiko, a member of Conover's private
medical staff. She had been kind to him when he was here before, he
remembered, but now she would not look at him. "What's going on?"
asked Jonny.
	"You know," Conover said gently, "living out here in the fringes,
we sometimes find ourselves forced fall back on raw ingenuity and
imagination." He picked a set of forceps off a metal tray table,
turning them over in his hands. "We learn to improvise."
	"What did you improvise?"
	"You have your sight again."
	"What's wrong with me?" He scanned the room again. "Have I
got the virus?" he asked.
	"Nothing like that," said Conover. "I just want you to
understand the context of your operation."
	By then Jonny was up, pushing the Russians out of his way,
looking for something. Near the scrub sink, a chrome cabinet on the
counter. Leaning on the Formica (white flecked with gold) he pressed
his face close to the metal. And cursed, his fist denting the side of the
cabinet before he could think. "What have you done to me?" he
yelled.
	"We gave you back something you had lost."
	Jonny looked back at the dented metal, searching for his face,
but it was not there. Sockets black and threaded with the purple and
red of broken blood vessels. Something alien stared back at him.
Yellow-eyed, with pupils that ran vertically from lid to lid. At certain
angles, there were flashes of light, green and metallic. Tapetums, he
thought.
	"That tiger I blew away," Jonny whispered, feeling the strange
machinery in his head. "You gave them to me."
	"We had no choice," Conover said.
	Jonny turned to him. "Great trade, man. One short hop. Cripple
to freak."
	"You're no more a freak than I," Conover said. His face
tightened, smoke trailing from the scar of his nose. "Do you think I
always looked like this? You learn to live with it."
	Jonny kept staring. "Look at me. I ought to be in a fucking
carnival."
	Conover moved up beside him. "You wanted eyes, you have
them."
	Jonny walked numbly back to the examination chair, fell into
the seat, covering his face with his hands. "Oh, man--"
	"It was the best we could do," the smuggler lord told him. He
smiled. "And you have to admit-- in this city, they're really not such
a strange sight. In a few weeks, they'll be old friends."
	"Oh Christ." Jonny looked at his hands. "Don't get the idea I'm
sorry about the operation," he said. The grid was still visible, subtly,
clipping the tips of his fingers straight across. He looked at Conover.
"I'm glad I can see again, really. It's just kind of a shock."
	Conover nodded. "I understand." He looked at his watch.
"Listen, I'm going to have to leave for a business meeting. You should
go to your room and try to get some rest. I'll send Ricos by later. You
can tell him then if you want to go tonight or wait."
	"Right," said Jonny. As Conover started to leave the room, he
called out. "Mister Conover--"
	The smuggler lord stopped in the door. "Yes?"
	Jonny shrugged. "Thanks," he said.
	"My pleasure."
	"Think you could do me one more favor?"
	"What is it?" Conover asked.
	"Could you have somebody take the mirrors out of my room?"
	Conover smiled. "Done," he said, and left.
	Jonny leaned on the counter, letting his nearly bald head fall
back against the laminated cupboard doors, and stared at the
	Russians staring at him. Yukiko brought him tea in a white
styrofoam cup. With a little effort, she looked at him and smiled.
"Thank you," he said.

	The trip back to his room was a nightmare. He kept his head
down, but the peculiar layout of the house forced him to look up
frequently and his reflection seemed to always be there, waiting for
him in the glazing on a Ming vase, in the glass front of an antique
china cabinet, the polished chrome of a seismic meter.
	Golden-eyed monster.
	He had refused the induction chair; a couple of the Russian
techs followed him from the clinic, keeping a respectful distance.
When he got to his room, he closed the door in their faces.
	Inside, he remained by the door and looked the room over,
checking for any reflective surfaces. When he found none, he went
straight to the bed and lay down.
	The transparent lameness of Conover's story had been so
obvious to Jonny that he knew it had to be deliberate. That meant
that giving him the freakish eyes was, to one degree or other, a
calculated move. The smuggler lord had obviously planned to show
his displeasure with Jonny in some way, and Jonny's blindness
presented him with a convenient method. The eyes were a
punishment and a warning. Punishment for stealing the car and
running away, and a warning that he had better not do it again. Like
a Yakuza ritual, Jonny thought. Make a mistake, lose a finger joint.
Look for the guys with no fingers, they're the real fuck ups.
	What does that make me? he wondered.
	It surprised him, but he felt no real anger toward Conover for
what he had done. He could have done a lot worse, Jonny knew. And
the smuggler lord had been right all along. The moment Jonny had
left the hill, he had set himself on a course that led right back into
Zamora's hands. Living with funny eyes, he thought, would be a hell
of a lot easier than living with whatever the Colonel had planned for
him.

	"Hey, maricon."
	Jonny sat upright in bed. He had no memory of falling asleep
and feeling himself shaken awake, the loss of control it implied,
frightened him. Jonny looked at Ricos and saw that he was not the
only one who was startled.
	"Joder, man," Ricos whispered. He was wearing a red
motorcycle jacket and stripped leather pants. "What you let them do
that to you for?" Ricos was staring at Jonny as he might have stared
at an open sore or a road kill, not trying to hide his disgust. For that,
Jonny was grateful.
	"I didn't have a lot of choice," said Jonny, swinging his legs off
the bed and getting up.
	"Carajo. I kill anyone do that to me."
	"Your boss included?"
	"Anyone."
	Jonny smiled at the man. "You're really full of shit. You know
that?" He went to the dresser, found a pair of black slacks his size
and started to put them on. "We're going to need ID," he said.
	"Something corporate. Multinational."
	"No problem," said Ricos.
	On the top of the dresser somebody had left a dozen pairs of
sunglasses, laid out neatly in horizontal three rows. Their sleek
designs, so out of place against the pale wood of the French antiques,
reminded Jonny of one of the Croakers' strange sculptures. Without
thinking, he picked up the mirrored aviators and put them in the
breast pocket of the gray tweed jacket he had taken from the closet.
	"All right," Jonny said. "We'll pick up the ID, get you some
better clothes and be on our way."
	"What's wrong wi' my clothes?" asked Ricos, offended.
	"Nothing man, if we were going to Carnaby's Pit." He headed out
the door, Ricos a few steps behind him.
	"So where you takin' me, maricon?"
	Jonny spun and jammed a finger into the man's stomach. "Little
Tokyo," he said. "Where they shoot people like you and me on
sight."

	The car was an old alcohol-powered Brazilian coupe, modeled
on a turn-of-the-century Mercedes design. Ricos drove; he wore a
powder blue Italian suit and tugged constantly at the collar of his
pearl-gray shirt. Jonny and he were carrying the ID chips of dead
men.
	They abandoned the car near Union Station, an art deco hulk,
sprouting cracked brick and I-beams like exposed ribs. A ruin of
stripped cranes and power generators surrounded it, heaps of ferro-
ceramic track turning black under the moon, under the Alpha Rats'
gaze, waiting for the bullet train that never arrived.
	A maintenance shaft beneath the battered transformers of an
out-of-commission Pacific Gas and Electric sub-station ended in a
short crawl-space that gave out at the false bottom in a section of
vent, part of the massive air re-circulation system that served the
Little Tokyo arcology. Jonny removed the loose bottom panel from
the vent and he and Ricos crawled inside, careful not to get their new
clothes dirty. The dimensions of the vent were such that they were
able to duck-walk their way to an access hatch, a hundred meters or
so upwind from where they entered. It was like strolling into a
tornado the whole way.
	Manipulating the lock from the inside, Jonny opened the hatch
and they jumped down to the floor of the re-circulation plant. The
place was fully automated, Jonny remembered, the human crew
making no more than a cursory round of the place once or twice a
night. Jonny could hear Ricos behind him, breathing above the din of
the air-circulators. The man was tense and jittery, starting at every
grunt and hiss of the equipment. Jonny led him into a corridor that
rose in a slow spiral toward the surface. Cinder block walls painted
the teal and orange of the Hundred Dynasty Corporation bulged with
rot.
	They found the ladder Jonny was looking for behind a wall of
fifty-five gallon drums stacked on modular racks, pushed away a
grating at the top and emerged behind a French discotheque, La
Poupee.
	In the pastel half-light that bled over the rooftops, the skeletal
superstructures supporting neon graphics and holo-projectors, Jonny
took a last quick look at the dead man's ID. Jonny was Christian van
Noorden, a Dutch-born systems analyst for Pemex-U.S.; Ricos had a
chip identifying him as Eduardo Florentino, a security coordinator for
Krupp Bio-Elektronisches. Jonny slipped on his mirrored aviators and
headed for the boulevard, Ricos on his heels, and merged unnoticed
into the crowd of strolling tourists, the cream of the multinationals'
crop.
	Walking just ahead of Jonny and Ricos was a group of young
Swedish aerospace techs. They were fair and slender, strikingly
attractive, each with the same narrow jaw and delicate, long-fingered
hands. Jonny wondered if they might be clones. They were all
shirtless and the hard muscles of their torsos were exposed, flexing
as they moved, beneath transparent polycarbonate bodysheaths.
Their muscles had been dyeddifferent colors to accentuate the
movement of various groups. They were like living anatomy charts.
Across the street, high in the air, appeared the parting lips of a
hologram vagina, a pink, idealized orchid, a toothless mouth that
seemed to engulf the image, becoming a roller coaster flesh-tunnel,
the glistening walls blurring by.
	At the corner, Jonny had to stop. He pretended to watch the
animated menu display outside a Burmese restaurant. The menu
explained the meals in different languages depending on where you
stood, but Jonny hardly noticed it. His hands were shaking.
	It was an impossible psychic leap. He was a kid again, seeing
Little Tokyo for the first time, nailed in his tracks by the light, the
air, the impossible wealth and beauty of the place, the blatant and
cherished waste of energy. Little Tokyo was a transcultural
phenomenon, its name having long since been rendered meaningless,
indicating a city geosector and giving hints to the place's history, but
little else. It was Japanese and European chic filtered through
American sleaze, through generations of exported television, video
and Link images, visions of Hollywood and Las Vegas, the cheap
gangster dreams of the Good Life, haven and playground for the
privileged employees of the multinationals. Little Tokyo was loud
and it cost the corporations dearly, but they loved it and, in the end,
came to need it. What had once been their plaything, now defined
them.
	There were clubs offering all varieties of sexual encounters,
death-fetish clubs, where controlled doses of euphoria-inducing
poisons had replaced drugs as the high of choice (It was in one of
these clubs when he was seventeen that Jonny had first tried Mad
Love. Right now, he thought, he would kill for a hit.). There were the
computer-simulation clubs, offering those with skull-plugs close
encounters with violence, madness and death. A block ahead was the
Onnogata where members of various cartels gambled time in the re-
generation tanks for data on next year's computers, synth-fuels and
pharmaceuticals.
	Other clubs offered similar opportunities, and anyone could
play. Hit a losing streak, and you could leave parts of your body
scattered all over the boulevard. Organ removal and installation were
all part of the standard hotel services. Those who lost badly enough
were put on life-support systems, sometimes gambling even those
away before the company jet could arrive to take them home. No one
had died in Little Tokyo for over a century. Not permanently.
	Ricos was staring at Jonny. "You want to eat now?" he asked.
	Jonny looked at the man, then back at the menu which was
describing a chicken and rice dish in over-eager French. "No," he said,
"just thinking."
	He took off across the clean broad street, walking, wanting to
get the feel of the place before he got down to business. He had not
been Little Tokyo in years. Warm breezes carried the faint smell of
orange blossoms, a wholly contrived sensation. Jonny had seen
drums full of the scent back in the re-circulation plant.
	Conover had been right about the eyes, Jonny noticed. Half-
consciously, he had begun to manipulate them, changing their focus
at first by mistake, then by repeating the mistake until he could
control it. He turned to Ricos, who seemed unaffected by the place,
colors slurring slightly off-register in his peripheral vision. "You see
it?" asked Jonny.
	"Que es, maricon?"
	"No one's sick here. No one's old," he said. They were walking
by a man-made lake. One and two-person robot hover-vehicles were
cutting up the glassy surface of the water, shuttling between the
shore and a five-story pagoda on a small island near the lake's
center, wings of jewel-like foam spreading from beneath the little
disc-shaped crafts, setting off the tailored evening gowns and tuxes
of the riders. "Not a leper, not a liver spot, not a paper cut in sight."
	"Si," Ricos replied, nodding toward a young couple displaying
their customized genitalia to some friends. Chrome winked from
between their thighs. "Estos carajoes, they come in kits. Comprende?
Cut 'em, they don' bleed."

	The entrance to the Japanese club was flanked by two man-
sized temple dogs carved from some dark supple wood. Ricos walked
past the place, but Jonny stopped, drawn by something, perhaps the
odd angle at which one dog's head had been craved, realizing at the
moment he stopped that the dogs were not statues but were, in fact,
alive. The dogs, pure-bred Tosas, sat on their haunches, watching the
crowd with the impassiveness of sunning lizards, the pink of a
tongue appearing now and then to lick massive jaws, their necks and
backs bulging with muscle, the end-product of controlled breeding
and genetic manipulation. As Jonny looked at the animals, a frozen
image of the bodysheathed Swedes imposed itself on his vision, the
street by La Poupee clear in the background. Then it was gone. Jonny
blinked, tensing the muscles around his eyes. The image of the
Swedes flashed back. He held it this time, made it move slowly,
forward and backward. It made perfect sense that the eyes would
have a recording chip, he thought. Couple of days ago, they were part
of a security system. Download pictures of intruders for the law. He
blinked off the image and said, "In here," to Ricos.
	The uniformed Japanese doorman bowed and held the door for
them as they went in, touching a hand to his right temple as Jonny
and Ricos walked past. Scanning for weapons, Jonny knew. He cursed
silently, wondering if they had been made already.
	Inside the club, it was very dark, the architecture traditional:
tatami mats, low tables glowing with buttery yellow light of painted
lanterns, white-faced geishas serving pots of hot sake to the mostly
male, mostly Japanese and American middle-management crowd.
There was a lot of noise coming from a room beyond the bar. Jonny
slipped his hand to the small of his back as if to hitch up his pants,
and touched the grip of a small SIG Sauer handgun. The body of the
weapon was of a liquid crystal polymer, impossible, he had been told,
to pick up on metal detectors. The shells were a Gobernacion
standard issue, commonly known as Rock Shot. Each bullet had a
synthetic quartz tip. When it struck an object and compressed, the
minute charge from the quartz was conducted through a medium of
liquid polypyrrole where it ignited suspended particles of C-4
plastique. Ricos was carrying a similar weapon in his jacket.
	Jonny ordered sake and motioned for the geisha to bring it to
them in the next room. She bowed. He smiled uncomfortably at her,
unsure if he was supposed to bow back or not. He bowed, and the
geisha giggled at his gaijin stiffness. "Keep your eyes open for Easy
Money," he told Ricos.
	They split up in the next room, climbing opposite sides of a
flat-topped pyramid constructed of multiple tiers of polished
mahogany beams. The smell of sweat and blood was heavy in the
smoky booze-air, but Jonny was still shocked by what he saw when
he reached the top tier, pushed his way to the front and peered
down into the wooden pen.
	The winning dog was just receiving its award (outline of a
golden lotus on a small banner of purple satin) from a pale doughy-
faced man in shirt sleeves. One of the dog's front paws was twisted
and badly mangled. Jonny watched the losing dog's body being
dragged out of the enclosure, its humiliated owner and assistant
careful not to get blood on their white shirts.
A moment later, the whole thing was starting again. The doughy-
faced man made an announcement in rapid-fire Japanese and
blessed each corner of the arena with salt. Then two more dogs,
enormous Tosas again, bigger than the previous pair, easily a
hundred and fifty kilos each, were lead in from opposite sides of the
pen at the end of heavy carbide steel chains. The money chips were
out; Jonny caught the flash of silicon embossed with gold phoenixes
as the crowd surrounded the house bookmakers, touching their chips
to the little multiplexer he carried, hoping to get their bets in before
the dogs were released and the odds started dropping. Jonny looked
around for an exit and found one, down by the far end of the
enclosure. He was just starting for it when he heard the dogs hit, the
dull thud of meat on meat, low-throated animal grunts, primal
death-talk. He looked around for Ricos, nodded when he saw the man
on the other side of the pen, eyes wide, watching the animals tear
each other apart. Jonny smiled. Ditching Ricos had been easier than
he had ever expected.
	Heading down the tiers toward the exit, Jonny heard one of the
dogs yelp frantically, the sound of it painful through the club's P.A.
system. Jonny was almost to the floor when he turned and darted
back into the crowd. Sometime during the few seconds it had taken
him to find Ricos and walk down the steps, a Meat Boy had stationed
himself at the exit. Jonny shouldered his way through the screaming
mob, moving back the way he had come, eyes on the gambler's faces,
trying to keep the dog fight out of his sight. Animal screams and
human cheers. He spotted another Meat Boy by the entrance to the
bar. The giant was talking to someone. The doorman. Jonny looked
around, hoping that maybe there was an exit he had missed. But he
found none, and when he turned back the way he had come in, he
saw the doorman-- pointing right at him. Jonny ducked back into the
crowd, scrambling along the top tier, the Meat Boy moving through
the crowd like a pock-marked ice breaker.
	Up, one leg over the rim of the dog pit. For an instant, the
crowd fell silent. Then he had the gun out and the noise came back,
shrill and frantic this time. He fired twice, but the stampede was
already underway, and when the shells hit, blasting away one end of
the dog pen, the frightened Tosas took off, all teeth and claws,
headed for only way out. The Meat Boy chasing him, big as he was,
was helpless, dragged back by the press of bodies. The last Jonny
saw of Ricos, he, too, was being swept along by the human tide. His
gun was out, his eyes wide and furious. Jonny did not stick around to
see what happened.
	He headed for the rear of the club, which was nearly deserted,
and made it out the rear exit. Down the alley for the rest of the block.
When he came out onto the street again, he fell in with a crowd that
was staring back at the club. Dark-suited men were still pouring out
the front. The Tosas were headed down the sidewalk, scattering
pedestrians and snarling the evening traffic.
	Jonny took the long way around the block, just make sure he
did not run into anybody from the dog club. Eventually, he ended up
back at the man-made lake. Small hovercrafts churned-up the water.
The pagoda glittered on its small island, its finial a solid chunk of
carved rose quartz, twenty meters high. Around the pagoda's base
was a grove of crystal trees, a tangled thicket of prisms. The Forest of
Incandescent Bliss.
	No more screwing around. It was time to find Easy Money.


						ELEVEN:
					Object to be Destroyed

	"Good evening," said the little hovercraft as Jonny stepped
aboard. "For your safety and comfort, please hold onto the handrail
provided. The trip across will take two minutes." Under normal
circumstances, Jonny would have ignored the synthesized voice, but
for some reason, tonight, the obsequious tone of the warning
annoyed him.
	"Fuck you," he told the machine.
	"Very good, sir," it said. The non-skid rubberized matting on
the passenger platform vibrated softly through the soles of his feet
as the craft's engine rose faintly in pitch, lifting him and the vehicle
out and over the water. A light mist of warm water blew up from the
sides of the craft, settling on his skin. The feel of Sumi's fevered
body, Groucho's theories on art and revolution came back to him as
he skimmed toward the bright pagoda in the distance. Flashes of carp
and fat prawns below the surface of the lake. His thoughts of Sumi
disturbed him. The images revolved around plastic tubes and pumps,
dumb machines that could never know or understand her, that
might, in their ignorance, fail, not perceiving her value, the absolute
need he had for her to be alive. Revolution, when he considered it,
was a phantom pain, nothing more. Like his eyes. He felt them itch,
but he knew that they were plastic and unreal, and therefore, they
could not itch, yet his desire to rub them was constant. Revolution
was like that. A delusion, a pipe-dream that when the lid closed over
the eye, it could be rubbed and the itch would go away, that the flesh
would be restored, the machinery vanished.
	Before he had run into the Croakers, Jonny had known a
number of revolutionaries. Bomb-throwers and pamphleteers,
graffiti artists and assassins. Some of them had meant it, others were
revolutionaries of fashion, of convenience. In the end, they had all
failed. Jonny had already spotted a dozen of the old faces in the
corporate crowds of Little Tokyo. Maybe they were the smart ones,
he thought. The ones who went over. Maybe they were the ones who
were dead before they started. He could not decide.
	The crystal trees at the base of the pagoda grew in detail and
complexity (molten glass light webbed through with burning
diamonds) as the hovercraft approached. A battery of white-gloved
attendants shaped the trees, carving the branches and leaves from a
base of modified aluminum sulfate crystals. Easy Money was
somewhere in the structure beyond, Jonny knew. He would get the
second vial from Easy, kill him if he got the chance (because he had
not forgotten Raquin's murder). That was all the revolution he could
expect. As for the other, Groucho's anarchist dreams, there wasn't a
chance in hell for those. The best that could be hoped, Jonny decided,
was for Sumi to get better and for Ice to come back, to not get hurt
for delusions, for dreams of old eyes.

	Once inside the Forest of Incandescent Bliss, he went straight to
the bar. It was a low affair, horse shoe-shaped, attempted art deco,
with gilded mirrors behind the bottles and ridged tiles that glowed
with a soft internal illumination. The two bartenders, an Asian male
and a blonde caucasian female, were each under a meter tall, but
perfectly proportioned. Everything behind the bar, bottles and corks,
sponges and mixing utensils, was scaled down to their size.
Everything except the glasses in which they served the drinks; these
were meant for someone Jonny's size and looked absurdly large in
the bartenders' child-like hands.
	Jonny ordered gin and tonic, watched as the little man
retrieved a hundred year old bottle of Bombay gin that had been
sealed, at sometime in its past, in dull blue wax. Jonny sipped his
drink and handed the man his ID chip. It failed to register the first
time the bartender tried to call up the account, and when it failed a
second time, Jonny started to get nervous. On the third try, though,
the transaction went through, the computer deducting the amount of
the drink and a large tip from the dead man's company account.
Swirling the cool antiseptic-tasting gin in his mouth, Jonny swallowed
one of Conover's endorphin tabs. His new eyes were hurting, a
constant pain cutting right through his head to the back of his skull.
	Something was moving in the gilded mirror behind the bottles.
	Jonny turned to the darkened lounge which took up most of the
pagoda's ground floor. Aged oyabuns playing endless games of Go,
moving with the ancient and deliberate grace of mantises, younger
men talking earnestly, toasting each other, skull-plugged into table-
top translators. Mostly Japanese faces, but many American and
Mexican, too. Jonny knew a few, had seen others in the newsrags.
Many of the Japanese were missing finger joints. Yakuza. Must be
their hang-out, he thought. Neutral ground. Mafia, the Panteras
Aureo, Triad families, they were all there, criminals in a league
beyond anything Jonny had ever known or experienced. They were
like him, but, he understood, their immense wealth had insulated
them, enabled them to live far enough removed from ordinary life
that they were almost mythological figures, shaping the course of
nations with their wealth.
	Kaleidoscoping in the air above the gangsters' heads was a
crystalline holographic light display, like a sculpted cloud. It seemed
to follow the shifting mood of the room, colors brightening when the
voices rose, muting when the talk was low. The man next to Jonny
addressed the bartender in Portuguese. He wore an Irezumi jacket--
tanned skin of a heavily tattooed man, cut bomber-style, with fur
around the collar, one of the most expensive garments in the world.
He was not the only person wearing such a jacket.
	In the end, Jonny thought they were not very much like him at
all. So where the fuck was Easy Money?
	He turned, seeing her at the same moment she saw him. Quick
eyes, face the color of night.
	"Hey gaijin-boy, you lookin' for a date?" she said.
	"What the fuck are you doing here?" he asked. Ice smiled,
looped an arm in his and drew him away from the bar. She wore a
tight brown pin-striped dress, cut like a man's suit at the neck,
tapering to a pleated skirt that fell just above her knees. Her legs
were bare. On her feet she wore rolled-down white socks and strap-
on Mary Janes. "Jesus Christ, you turning tricks for the revolution?"
	"Relax," Ice said, holding the smile. She took him to a corner of
the bar below a spiral staircase whose railings were mahogany
dragons, curled around each other in battle. Soft quarter-tone
melodies came from a wall-mounted Klipsch speaker above their
heads. "Now," she said, apparently satisfied that no one could hear
them. "Keep smiling, babe. I'm not turning tricks for nobody. See?"
She showed him the cork-bottomed tray she carried. "I just serve
drinks. These Yakuza boys like to be around gaijin girls. 'specially us
dark exotic types."
	"But-- " he began.
	"But that doesn't mean they can have us."
	"Fuck," he said. He could not pinpoint who or what he was
angry with, the club, Ice or himself. "So what are you doing here?"
	"I was going to ask you the same thing," she said. "Where's
Sumi?"
	He touched her shoulder, smiled for the first time. "She's fine,"
he lied. "I left her up at Conover's. I'm supposed to meet Easy Money
here."
	"Por que?"
	"Deal I made with Conover," he said. "I've got to get some of his
merchandise back for him."
	Ice looked at him and her smile wavered. "You okay?" she
asked.
	"Fine."
	"Something's wrong. Is it Sumi?"
	"She's fine." He bit off the sentence abruptly enough that he
knew Ice could tell he was lying. "You shouldn't be here," he told her.
	She shrugged. "I'm undercover," she told him. "There's other
Croakers and some Naginatas, too. We've staked this place for
months. Zamora comes here sometimes."
	"Zamora?"
	"Yeah. This is where we first got wind of the raids. Figure the
next time he comes in," she pressed two fingers into his ribs, "boom!-
- Buenos noches, Colonel." She pulled a wad of bills from her pocket.
"Besides, the tips are great."
	He shook his head in wonder. "I'm glad to see you."
	"Ditto, babe."
	"I know this is sick," he said, "but you're making me incredibly
horny."
	"It's the club," she said. "Subliminals in that holo display. They
pump some kind of sex pheromone-analog through the air
conditioning system." Her hands were up before he could stop her.
Later, when he was alone, he would replay the picture of her face,
studying the emotions there as she saw his new eyes: fear,
bewilderment, concern.
	"Oh baby," she said. Jonny felt her hand on his cheek. He turned
his head, caught a distorted image of himself in the upturned lenses
of the aviators. Yellow eyes. Vertical pupils glinted chrome green. He
had forgotten about them, unconsciously adjusting the exteroceptor's
photo-sensitivity to compensate for the mirror shades. He took the
glasses from her and started to put them on, but she reached out and
stopped him. "Oh baby," she repeated. Then abruptly: "What's wrong
with Sumi?"
	Seeing right through me, Jonny thought. He took a breath. Not
wanting to lie, he chose to remain silent. She would not let go of his
hands. "I have to see Easy Money," he said, finally.
	"Tell me about Sumi."
	"Please," he said. "She's going to be all right." Ice's face changed
with that. Rigid. He knew she understood. "Easy has the cure," he
offered.
	"There's a cure?"
	"That what Easy took when he killed Raquin. Conover didn't
know what it was. He was moving it for some third party."
	She shook her head, releasing his hands at the same time.
"Hard to concentrate sometimes," she said. "Makes you wonder what
we're doing here."
	A particular head in the crowd caught his eye. "You going to be
all right?" he asked her.
	She nodded, her jaw silently working, trying to contain the rage
and frustration. Jonny had felt it often enough to recognize it. "Yeah."
Then: "Liked your eyes, I did. Your eyes and Sumi's hands. She has
these calluses. Gives her character. I liked that."
	"Yeah, me too," Jonny said. He looked past her. The head was
moving. The one with the horns. "He's over there."
	"Get moving," she said and kissed him, deeply, biting his lower
lip as she released him. "Against club rules, you know, but what the
fuck-- It's probably my last night here anyway, right?" She smiled at
him.
	"I'll get you on the way back."
	"You better."
	He left her then, feeling lousy at abandoning her full of half-
digested, half-understood information, but he concentrated on the
head moving through the crowd before him. It was odd seeing Easy
in a suit. The tuxedo jacket fit him badly across his narrow shoulders.
Jonny caught up with the man and tapped him on the shoulder.
"We've got business," Jonny said.
	Easy turned at the sound of his voice, curling his lips in the
distant approximation of a smile. "Love the new hardware, Jonny," he
said. "I never thought you had it in you. We could get you a job
upstairs any time."
	Jonny looked at his hands and realized that he was still holding
the mirror shades. He slipped them on and followed Easy up the
spiral staircase.

	Upstairs were the prostitutes. The Water Trade, a tradition in
Japan for a thousand years, had provided for their presence. They
were part of the decor, like the dwarf trees and the straw mats; an
accepted style, part of the Floating World. And, as the "pleasure girls"
had reflected their own time in the previous centuries of the trade,
so the prostitutes in the Forest of Incandescent Bliss reflected theirs.
They lounged about the halls on benches covered in thick brocades
depicting double helices. They waited in doorways and on the
railings of the stairways. Some of them were clothed in kimonos,
most were partially nude, showing off their tattoos and grafts. A few
wore nothing at all and those were the ones that disturbed Jonny the
most. "Don't bother trying to guess their sex," Easy advised him. "Half
of 'em can't even remember which way they started out."
	At first, Jonny saw nothing special about the prostitutes, but
that, he realized was because he had not been prepared to
understand them. Mouths like vaginas, vaginas and anuses like
mouths. Hands that sprouted silicone elastomer penises instead of
fingers. Each of the prostitutes seemed to have at least one extra set
of genitalia, most (apparently) had moved or replaced their originals.
Easy giggled and stroked the odd breast, the occasional scrotal sac as
Jonny followed him. At one point, Easy snorted something from a
plastic inhaler. Jonny caught a glimpse of the label: It was a cheap
mass produced interferon nasal spray, Oki Kenko-- Big Health-- a
common cold preventative.
	Sniffing loudly, Easy said; "Now what was that deal we were
talking about?" They were on the upper floor of the pagoda.
	"The second vial you took off Raquin," Jonny said. "Conover's
authorized me to pay cash for it."
	"Oh yeah. That." Jonny wondered if Easy was stoned. The
horned man made a vague gesture with his hands, laughed drowsily.
There were two other men in foreign-cut suits at the far end of the
corridor. "Funniest damn thing, man," said Easy. "Remember back at
the meat locker when you and me, we first talked about the deal?
Well, the bitch had the place wired. Ain't that a scream? Heard every
word of it. She's smarter than I thought." By now, Jonny had stopped
in his tracks and Easy was holding a Futukoro on him. "I'll take you
apart, man." Easy reached behind Jonny, took his gun, then pushed
him down the corridor. "Nimble Virtue's got the stuff now. I had to
give it to her, you know? Get back on her good side. It's not like I can
go back to Conover." The two men ahead (actually boys, Jonny saw; in
different clothes they could have passed for Committee recruits with
no problem at all), Jonny recognized the cut of their suits now. Like
the Pakistani broadcaster on the restricted Link channel, long, almost
knee-length jackets and baggy wide-waisted pants. Neo-Zoot, a
current Arab style. "Anyway, you've got to deal with her now," Easy
said. The Arabs never took their eyes off Jonny. The younger one, a
handsome boy of about fifteen with black eyes and hair, gave him a
wide feral smile and opened the door before him. "Muchas gracias,
boys," said Easy, pushing Jonny through.
	Inside, Nimble Virtue looked up, a tiny glazed tea cup poised
before her lips. "My goodness," she said, her respirator sucking the
words back down her throat. "We have a visitor." She sat behind an
oversized desk constructed of opaque sheets of black glass supported
by a frame of etched gold cylinders. An older man with salt and
pepper hair was sitting across from her, also sipping tea and eyeing
Jonny skeptically, as if contemplating the purchase of a used car.
	"This is the man?" the gray-haired man asked Nimble Virtue.
He was quite handsome, with hard, angular features, long graceful
hands and the easy manner of someone used to being listened to. His
suit was of better material than those of the boys in the hall (he had
the same restless dark eyes as the one with the feral smile), but the
style and the cut were definitely Arab.
	"Yes," Nimble Virtue said, pouring more tea, her exoskeleton
whirring softly under her kimono as she raised and lowered her arm.
Easy set Jonny's gun on the dark glass before her and leaned on an
elaborate air purification system: ionizers, charcoal filter rigs,
dehumidifiers. The room was very cold. Jonny thought of Nimble
Virtue in the abattoir, the orbiting sandakan, unconsciously
recapitulating her childhood in her office, constructing within it a
low-key approximation of the frozen vacuum of space.
	"So whose little doggie are you?" Jonny asked the Arab.
	"Jonny!" hissed Nimble Virtue.
	The Arab smiled, turned to Nimble Virtue and laughed. "You
were right. His mouth works much faster than his mind," he said.
"Still, this is no problem. It is his presence we require, not his
intellect."
	"You don't say. Who is this guy?" Jonny asked Nimble Virtue.
	"Jonny, please," she said. "Sheik al-Qawi is a guest in my house.
More than that, he and I have entered into certain business
arrangements on behalf of the New Palestine Federation, of which he
is a field representative." The words were clear, but her inflection
was sing-song. An act for the new money, Jonny thought. Helpless
geisha-girl.
	"I thought it smelled funny when I came here. That bad meat-
political smell." He looked at Nimble Virtue. "You've finally found
your place. You, Zamora, this clown, I hope you'll be very happy
together."
	Nimble Virtue's hand came to rest on a squat lacquered box
that stood open on its end near the far corner of her desk. "Not
political
at all. Just the opposite," she said. A single jar sat in each side of the
ox. Embalmed things floating there, surrounded by dark purple
velvet. Fetuses. Her unborn sons. "Sheik al-Qawi made me a very
generous offer for the acquisition of-- what?-- an artifact. A bauble.
I am merely acting as his agent in this matter."
	"Right. And tell me those boys in the hall aren't hashishin,"
Jonny said. "These people consider going to the toilet a political act."
	"It's funny that you should raise the question of political
philosophies, Mister Qabbala," said al-Qawi, "since yours seem rather
vague."
	"That's because they don't exist," Jonny said. He checked his
watch. The passing of time had begun to weigh on him. Sumi was
back on the hill. He thought of the second virus moving through her
blood, waiting there like a time bomb. "You know, you guys slay me.
Corporate types. Politicos. If I put a bullet through your fat face right
now, they'd have you in a vat in ten minutes. And they'd keep you
there till they could clone or construct or repair a body for you.
That's the difference between your people and mine. We don't get a
second chance. We're just dead."
	The sheik brightened. "Then you are political!" he said. "Those
are not the sentiments of an amoral man. Your manner and the
company you keep bespeak a strong sense of purpose, even if you
refuse to name it."
	"Look pal, I'm just here to pick up some dope--"
	"But surely you must agree that the imperialist forces now at
work in Tokyo and Washington must be shown that plotting against
the peoples of other sovereign nations cannot be tolerated."
	"You want to deal or not?" Jonny asked Nimble Virtue. She
turned her eyes up at him, still doing her little-girl act. "Not now,"
she said.
	"Then I'm out of here." Jonny headed for the door. Easy had his
gun at the back of Jonny's head before he had taken two steps. "Hey,
just a joke. I'd love to stay."
	al-Qawi stood and slammed his fist down on Nimble Virtue's
desk. Her hand moved reflexively to the case containing her sons,
steadying it. "I cannot believe such behavior," the Sheik yelled. "That
you can make jokes in the face of the hideous conspiracy in which
your government is embroiled. That you, yourself, are a part of."
	"Jonny-san," Nimble Virtue purred, "what Sheik al-Qawi is
referring to are diabolical plans hatched by certain war-loving
officials in Tokyo and Washington to launch a sneak attack against
the united Arab nations and bring about a terrible third world war."
	Jonny looked at the two of them. He almost smiled, certain he
was being gas-lighted. Nimble Virtue was not above setting up such a
game just to confuse him and drive up the price of Conover's dope.
However, there was something in al-Qawi's manner, a weariness
around the eyes that was either very good acting or genuine anxiety.
"Do you actually have the drugs?" Jonny asked.
	"Yes," right there," said Nimble Virtue, pointing to a spot on the
floor before a screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl cranes.
	"Let me see it." "No!" shouted al-Qawi. "No more drug talk. As a
man of god, I cannot permit it." His long hands cut the air in tense,
rapid bursts. "Thanks to the good work of Madame Nimble Virtue,
my trip to this sickening city has been a short and fruitful one. As
you may have inferred, sir, you are the artifact I came here to find."
He pushed a finger in Jonny's face. "Mister Qabbala, it is my duty and
honor to arrest you in the name of the New Palestine Federation and
the people of all oppressed nations everywhere."
	"Great. Swell." To Nimble Virtue, Jonny said: "Did you sell this
idiot my dope?"
	"Do not play the fool with me, sir!" shouted al-Qawi. "Surely
even you cannot endorse so mad an adventure as your government's
alliance with the extraterrestrials!"
	Jonny looked at the Sheik, blinked once and inadvertently
scrambled the resolution of the exteroceptors' pixel display. When
the Sheik's face came back, it had been reduced to a moving matrix
of black and sand-colored squares. Easy Money sniffed loudly from
his interferon inhaler. "I'll tell you exactly what I told the last lunatic
that tried to tie me to the Alpha Rats: I don't know what the fuck
you're talking about!"
	"I do not believe you. I have studied your records, however.
You live in the drugged ignorance of a man with a heavy burden," al-
Qawi said. "It may interest you to know that the New Palestine
Federation has intercepted a series of communiqués between
broadcast stations in southern California and the moon. We now
know that using you as a go-between, your eastern masters plan to
link forces with the Alpha Rats (as you callthem) and launch a sneak
attack on Arab territories simultaneously from the Earth and the
moon."
	"Look, I've heard this moon-man song before," said Jonny
wearily. "The last time it was about dope. Now it's war. Why don't
you people get your stories straight?" He shook his head, finally
correcting the pixel display. Easy Money was behind him, sniffing
and laughing to himself. "What's your story? You suddenly develop a
political conscience?"
	Easy shrugged, the hand with the gun resting by his side. "Don't
ask me. You're the one hangs out with anarchists."
	"I am, Mister Qabbala, prepared to offer you a deal," al-Qawi
said.
	"A deal?"
	"Yes. Negotiate with the extraterrestrials on behalf of the New
Palestine Federation. Convince them to turn their weapons on your
puppet masters in the east. For this, the Federation will grant you a
full pardon for crimes against the Arab people and--" He smiled at
Jonny,"-- return to you a reasonable profit for your services."
	"You're crazier than Zamora," Jonny said. "He only accused me
of being a gofer for a smuggler lord. You think I'm hanging fast and
true with the Alpha Rats myself."
	"Aren't you?"
	"No!"
	The Sheik shook his head. "This world is an unkind place,
Mister Qabbala. I am attempting to extend to you the hand of
friendship."
	"Why? So you people can finish that stupid war?" asked Jonny.
"Don't get me wrong-- I don't think this place would be any worse
under Arab rule, but any dirty little wars you guys start, it's the
people in the street-- we're the ones that get hurt." He pointed out
the window. "Not your people, mine."
	al-Qawi nodded gravely, hands clasped behind his back. "In
that case, Mister Qabbala, you are my prisoner. You have obviously
deserted your own government to work for terrorists and anarchists,
however, you will not shirk your responsibility to the New Palestine
Federation."
	Jonny, knowing Easy was watching him, kicked his boot into
Nimble Virtue's desk, knocking off the false heel. The Futukoro went
off precisely where Jonny was not. He was rolling across his
shoulders away from Nimble Virtue's desk, scooping up his own gun
on the way. He kept it low, sending a round into the floor near Easy.
	A sheet of flame hit the ceiling as the shell exploded in the
hyper-oxygenated air. Easy landed in a heap across the room, over
by the air purification set-up. Jonny sprinted to the door and threw
the security bolts, then he turned his gun on Nimble Virtue. "Give me
that dope, goddammit!"
	"What have you done?" she screamed. Shaking, Nimble Virtue
rose from behind her desk and went to where al-Qawi lay, his legs
twisted under him, his neck bent at a peculiar angle. Her respirator
was clicking rapidly beneath her kimono; Jonny could hear the air
being forced in and out of her withered lungs. "He was taking me
with him!" she shouted. Then quietly: "He was taking me with him. It
was part of the deal."
	Jonny moved over to the floor safe. "Give me the dope," he said.
Someone was pounding frantically on the office door.
	Nimble Virtue ignored him, touching the stretched-out body of
the Arab, attending him with quick bird-like movements. "I was
going away," she said, covering her face with her hands. No act this
time, Jonny knew.
	"Listen to me," he told her. "A friend of mine is sick. She needs
this stuff badly."
	Nimble Virtue turned and looked at him. "Good!" she said. "I
hope she dies. Rots and dies like me-- like I have to stay here. In this
city." She stood and walked to the far side of the desk, rubbing at her
red-rimmed eyes. "Zamora will kill me."
	"Please, give me the dope."
	"No."
	The pounding on the door got louder. Jonny grabbed one of the
bottles from the desk and held it over his head. The little fetus,
disturbed in its fluid, bumped gently against the side. "Give it to me."
	"Go to hell."
	His arm snapped out and Nimble Virtue screamed. There was
no crash. Jonny held out his hand, showing her the palmed bottle.
	"All right," she said, and moved shakily toward him, dropping
stiffly to her knees, her exoskeleton whining with the unaccustomed
motion.
	Jonny held his gun on her as she removed a segment of
polished wood from the floor and entered a code on a ten-key pad.
The soft hiss of pneumatic bolts withdrawing. As Nimble Virtue
reached into the safe, Jonny stopped her. He pushed his hand past
her's and found the old pistol lying near the top. A tarnished
Derringer two-shot, yellowed ivory grips with over and under
barrels, each holding a single .38 hollow point shell. He pocketed the
gun and reached in again, coming up this time with a brushed
aluminum Halliburton travel case. Inside was a small black vacuum
bottle. Taking it, he backed away from the safe, keeping his back to
the wall. Nimble Virtue was standing over al-Qawi again, staring
down at the Sheik, her eyes flat and dull, like blank video monitors.
Over by the air purifier, Easy Money moaned.
	A shot, then two more from the hall splintered the wood and
metal of the office door. Jonny took a wide-legged stance and fired at
it twice. What was left of the door exploded, peppering the room
with burning wood and metal. He heard Nimble Virtue breathe in
sharply. Over by the safe, the velvet-lined case lay on the floor, the
two little bottles shattered amidst the glassy black wreckage of the
collapsed desk, old alcohol reek filling the room. Nimble Virtue's
mouth was open; a moment later, she screamed-- a single note, high
and keening. Running down the stairs, Jonny could still hear her.

	Pour gasoline on an ant hill; light it. Watch the insects pour
from the mound, crazed and sizzling: That was the main floor of the
Forest of Incandescent Bliss. At the sound of the first shot, paranoid
gangster reflexes had kicked in. Half the club was making for the
doors, sure the cops or the Committee (somebody in uniform) was
raiding the place. Old frightened men threw wads of cash and drugs
at anybody who came near them.
	The other half of the club had stubbornly stayed where they
were, convinced that they had been led into a trap. Yakuza and
Panteras Aureros lay bloody and dying across Go boards and tea pots
where they had blown holes in each other at point blank range.
Prostitutes, orifices flexing in silent convulsive screams, scrambled
down the stairs. Jonny fell into step with them, hitting the main floor
behind a curtain of manufactured flesh.
	Ice was by the bar, signaling to someone. Rapid variants of
Amerslan, fingers on lips, brushing the back of a hand. She spotted
him when he waved and ran over. They huddled by the spiral stairs.
"You got the stuff?"
	He held up the vacuum bottle. "Right here."
	"Great. Zamora never showed. We gotta rendezvous with the
others." She looked over his shoulder-- "No!"-- and pushed him to the
ground as the gun went off.
	There was a smoking hole on the center of Ice's chest, but no
blood, the Futukoro shell having cauterized the wound even at is
made it. "Give me the dope, Jonny." He swore the voice had come
from inside his head. He looked at Ice, insane for that moment, and
knew he had killed her. A black metallic wind blew through his
bones and he heard the voice again. "Hand it over like now, man."
Outside him that time. Easy Money. He was above them on the stairs,
one satyr horn broken off at the scalp, his left elbow stiff, dribbling
blood down his arm.
	"I need that dope, man." Down a step. "The bitch's gone nuts.
Gotta have Conover's juice to stake myself. Comprende?" This time
Jonny did not aim for the feet, but Easy's head. He missed anyway.
The explosion brought down a good portion of the staircase, and Easy
jumped clear on the far side.
	Jonny kicked at the wreckage of carved wood, dragons in
splinters, pig iron reinforcement rods sticking like bones from the
pile. He knelt beside Ice who was staring down at the hole in her
chest, gingerly touching the blackened skin around the edges.
	"I always wondered what this felt like," she said, drunken
wonder slurred in her voice. He cradled her head in his lap,
gangsters, gunsels and hangers-on still massingfor the door, clawing
at each other. She looked at him and a shiver passed through her
body. "You're a big boy now, Jonny, whether you like it or not. Sumi
can't cover your ass like I can." Blood, through tiny cracks (like
miniature lava flows) was beginning to seep from her wound. "You
gonna help us, Jonny? You're a Croaker. Always have been. You walk
away, though, you're one of them. And they'll do us like this forever."
She looked at her wound, touched a bloody hand to his cheek. "Sweet
Jonny. You and Sumi-- my babies--"
	He let her still head slide off his lap and stood, trembling and
crying. His new eyes did not permit tears, but kept flashing him
stored images of the last few hours. The dead fetuses. Dogs, massive
and terrified, tearing at each other. The clockwork movement of
multi-colored muscles. Feral smile of the hashishin.
	Illusion, he thought. Folly. Maya.
	For the first time in his life, shaking and blubbering in the club,
Jonny had a clear mental picture of what the Alpha Rats looked like.
They looked like al-Qawi, like Zamora and Nimble Virtue, the pimps,
the politicians, the wheeler-dealers. The Alpha Rats were the perfect
excuse, the ultimate evasion. It had been that way for a thousand
years; Jonny knew that much of history. The powers that be required
enemies as much as they needed friends, and they could not live
without scapegoats to keep their propaganda machines working. In
earlier centuries it had been the Jews, the blacks, the homosexuals,
the Hispanics. But the closed economic systems of their world had
made old fashioned bigotry impractical. Like technology, commerce
and travel: the big lie had expanded outward to embrace the rest of
the galaxy. And why not, Jonny thought. It's in our blood by now.
He looked at his hand and to his horror, realized that the vacuum
bottle was no longer there. Sometime after Ice had been shot, he had
let it go. He dropped to his hands and knees, moving frantically
between the gangsters' running feet. And spotted it across the room-
- wedged under the skirt of a Link screen showing Aoki Vega in a
Kabuki-porn version of "Casablanca."
	Between the shadows and the feet, the angry voices and
breaking glass, Jonny dove for the bottle, surprising himself when he
felt it in his grip. And then as quickly, it was gone. Shattered in his
hands, a clear sticky liquid dripping onto his lap, gray fragments of
industrial glass all around him. In the hills, machines skipped a beat.
Sumi convulsed. Jonny looked up at Easy and the smoking gun as the
one-horned man said: "Now nobody has it." And limped out the door.
	Jonny followed him, pushing his way through the thinning
crowd, the German pistol before him. Easy was just turning the
corner at the far end of the pagoda. The Forest's private security was
out. Two men moved through the crowd to intercept Jonny. He
waited until they were a few meters away and calmly blew them to
pieces. At the lake's edge, he took a hovercraft and headed back to
shore, ran until his sides ached, filthy and red-eyed, to La Poupee. In
the air re-circulation plant, he collapsed beneath two enormous filter
cylinders and retched. Outside, he found a motorcycle in the
employees' parking lot. A lithium battery powered BMW. The owner
had hooked an air compressor to the exhaust outlet; the bike roared
and sputtered like an old-style piston engine model. Jonny gunned
the bike and took off.


						TWELVE:
			Death and Revelation in a Dark Bar on
			a Bad Night at the End of the World

	Sand was blowing in from the desert, flaking paint from parked
cars, filling the bottoms of drained swimming pools. Death owned the
streets. Two AM, November second, two hours into the Day of the
Dead: Dia de los Muertos. Processions filled the thoroughfares of
Hollywood, like some graveyard Mardi Gras. Lepers danced together
in papier-mache skulls behind white-robed bishops carrying
enormous chrome crucifixes, hologram Christs floating a few
centimeters above the crossbars, writhing in agony for all their sins.
Behind the hills, orange flared and lit the sky from the burn-off
towers at the German synth-fuel plant north of the city. Jonny licked
sand from his lips. He had never seen so many people in one place.
Zombie Analytics flashed the crowd images of dead pop stars,
superimposing the outlines of their own bones on the famous faces.
Even the Piranhas were there, apparently untouched by the plague,
drawn from their internal exile by the docks to the more inviting
lights of the boulevard.
	When he first saw Death lingering at the back of the parade,
skull molded from old newsrags and clutching a crude sickle of
pounded metal, Jonny charged, gunning the big BMW up onto the
sidewalk. But he never connected. Never killed Death. It always saw
him coming or Jonny had to turn the bike at the last minute when he
heard human voices screaming from inside the paper skulls. And
each time he rode away, he grew more desperate, more furious,
knowing that Death had fooled him again.
	Somehow, he ended up at Carnaby's Pit. The parade was
moving quickly down the boulevard. Jonny was alone before the
chained entrance, reading a notice that was printed in six languages
plastered across the rusted and pock-mocked metal doors.

			WARNING
			Public buildings, except those constructed 	
			exclusively for the use of religious expression, are
			OFF LIMITS to gatherings of three persons or more.
			Emergency Ordinance #9354A-- By authority of:
			The Committee For Public Health

	The parade was blocks away now, the sound of music and
voices fading fast. Everything was dying. He looked around for the
mercado (No way those people would miss a night like this.), but all
he could find were glassy scars in the asphalt where the grills had
sat, an ancient scratch-pattern indicating the placement of tent poles.
Jonny pulled the SIG Sauer from his jacket pocket and blew the doors
to Carnaby's Pit off their hinges. The pistol's breech remained open
this time, meaning he had run out of bullets. He tossed the gun away.
Clouds of green, metallic flies buzzed loudly into the night through
the Pit's ruined doors.
	Inside, the game room stood silent, all dust shadows and hints
of greasy fingerprints where light from the street struck glass. Jonny
had never seen the club like this before. In the weak mercury vapor
light, without the sound and the colors of the games to distract him,
the place seemed small, pathetic even. Lengths of frayed copper
wires covered the walls, broke up the ceiling into a water-stained
grid behind the dead holo projectors.
	In the main room, a stack of Saint Peter's Krupp-
Verwandlungsinhalt amps had fallen over. To Jonny's exteroceptors,
the Freon leaking from around the speaker cones appeared to
shimmer in turquoise pools. The air was damp and stale, close
around him. Jonny shivered, looked back the way he had come in
and watched sand sift in through the open doors. Death was in the
club with him. Jonny could feel its presence. He pulled Nimble
Virtue's Derringer from his pocket and went into a crouch, stalking
Death through the jungle of abandoned chairs and broken glasses,
finally spotting it behind the bar. Jonny recognized Death from his
dreams. The mirror shades gave it away.
	The kick from the little Derringer, when he fired, nearly broke
his wrist, but Death was gone. The sound of the mirror shattering
behind the hollow point shell caught him off guard. By the time he
scrambled behind the bar and understood what he had done, he was
shivering again, realizing he had wanted to do it for a long time.
	If death was a illusion, as the roshis had told him, then, Jonny
reasoned, he had just proved the lie of his own existence. He kicked
at shards of the broken mirror with the toe of his boot and decided
he needed a drink to celebrate the discovery of his true nature.
	Shelves behind him held all manner of liquor: domestic,
imported and bootleg. Jonny selected an unopened bottle of Burmese
tequila and drank deeply. Gin, he reflected, would have served him
better at this point, but he could not stand the taste of the stuff neat.
He laughed at the idea of taste.
	What is taste when you don't exist?
	"There's this old man, comes to a Buddhist priest, see," Jonny
said to the empty room. "Turns out he's the ghost of another
Buddhist priest whose been reincarnated five hundred times as a
fox." He took another pull from the bottle. "In life, he'd argued that
the laws of cause and effect do not apply to enlightened beings. So
here the poor fucker is, you know, five hundred times-- pissing in
the woods, freezing in the winter and eating raw squirrel. And the
other priest says: 'Schmuck, of course cause and effect applies to
enlightened beings.' And the ghost disappears, suddenly enlightened.
He doesn't have to be a fox anymore." Jonny moved around to the
front of the bar, dropped onto a stool and propped the bottle on his
knee, the tequila already half gone.
	"I have swallowed every kind of shit," he said.
	Across the room, near the pile of fallen German amplifiers, a
swarm of flies was moving over the carcass of some dead animal.
Massed together like that in the dark bar, the insects looked to Jonny
something like waves kicked up on the shore of some crazy-quilt
ocean. He giggled and lurched to his feet, threading his way
drunkenly through the club, deliberately kicking over chairs and
tables as he went.
	Jonny approached the body slowly. From the bar it had looked
pretty big for a rat, but that it could be human had not occurred to
him until he was right up on it. Batting at flies that buzzed around
his face, Jonny edged around the corpse, noting the discolored tumors
on its arms, the leonine welling of the face, all the obvious symptoms
of the virus's mock-leprosy. The corpse's limbs were twisted, back
arched until the body was bent almost double, fingers splayed, hands
turned back on themselves at the wrists in the spastic posture of
advanced neuro-syphilis. Jonny forced himself to lean closer and look
into the half-opened mouth. Standing up, he momentarily fingered
the edge of the soiled apron, thinking that the body did not look
much like Random any more.
	Jonny did not turn when he heard the footsteps, expecting it to
be Zamora or some Committee boy come to take him away. When the
steps came to a stop a few meters off, he turned and saw Groucho
brushing sand from his English schoolboy jacket. "He swallowed his
tongue," Jonny told the anarchist.
	"I'm sorry," Groucho said. "I've seen a lot like this these last
few weeks. Gonna to be a lot more, too."
	"You come looking for me?"
	Groucho nodded. "Yeah. I figure I've got a vested interest in
you. 'Course, so do lots of people these days."
	Jonny took a drink from his bottle. "How'd you know I'd be
here?"
	"Isn't this where you always end up?"
	"Yeah. I guess." Jonny shrugged. "Kind of shabby little place to
run and hide, huh?" He took another drink and threw the empty
bottle back toward the bar, listening to it shatter. "Ice is dead," he
said quickly.
	"I heard. I'm sorry, man," said Groucho. "So what are you going
to do now?"
	"I don't know," Jonny mumbled, crouching down near Random's
body. "Lotta bottles to work through," he said, gesturing back toward
the bar.
	"Yeah, always the clear thinker. I knew we could count on you."
	"Just save that shit for your own people, okay?" said Jonny.
	Groucho leaned under a nearby table and picked up a small
silver bell from the floor; he rang it softly as he spoke. "I heard you
were at the Forest of Incandescent Bliss tonight," he said. "What for?"
	"There's a cure for the virus. I was supposed to pick it up, only
Easy Money blew away the container it was in and now it's gone,"
said Jonny. Bending, he touched one of Random's arms, disturbing the
flies which rose, droning, into the air. "Sumi's infected, you know.
Gonna die just like Random. Pretty surreal way to go, huh?" Turning,
he swung a drunken fist at Groucho, but the anarchist danced out of
the way. "What would your fucking surrealists say about that?"
Jonny shouted.
	"So you're just going to let her die like that?" Groucho asked. He
bent again and came up with a toy switchblade, about the length of
his thumb.
	"What are you talking about?" Jonny asked.
	"I'm saying that if you love her, you're going to take some
responsibility." With his long fingers, Groucho snicked the tiny knife
open closed a couple of times. "Ever since we left the fish farm, I've
been thinking how all these little bits, how all the shit that's been
floating around you is possibly related. I heard from some people
that Conover was the one that was moving that layered virus that got
loose. Then, when Zamora picked you up, he starts talking about
space men and how he wants to you turn Conover for him. All the
time, though, he's planning a raid to take out all the lords and the
gangs with them. And this is happening at the same time the city's
going balls up from this plague."
	"You think Zamora might have planned all this?"
	"I don't know yet," said the anarchist. "Doesn't really sound like
him, though. A bit subtle."
	Jonny stood, brushed away some flies that had landed on his
aviators. "There was this Arab at the Forest tonight, he was talking
about the Alpha Rats. Said something about a war."
	"Well man, we got our own war right here," Groucho told him.
When he leaned over this time, he was holding a key ring with a
plastic Ganesh on top; cheap paste rhinestones glittered in the
elephant god's eyes. He dropped the key ring and switchblade into
his jacket pocket. "I wanted to tell you-- Zamora's moving on the
lords tonight, guess he figures it's a holiday, so half the city'll be
blasted. We're moving, too. All the gangs. Viva la revolucion."
	"Jesus," Jonny said. "Are you guys ready?"
	"Vyctor Vector's waiting out in the van with Man Ray, so we've
got the Naginata Sisters and the Funky Gurus, tambien. We're
stronger than Zamora realizes," said Groucho and he smiled.
"Besides, amantadine supplies're running pretty thin around here. If
the Committee doesn't get you, seems like the virus will. Nobody's
got much to lose anymore."
	"What about going to the lords for help?"
	"The lords?" Groucho said. "Are you really that naive? The lords
protect themselves. Period. They're no better than Zamora."
	"What are you talking about?" demanded Jonny. "Not all the
lords are sell-outs like Nimble Virtue."
	"Sure they are," replied Groucho. "This is big business, Jack. The
ultimate fix. The architecture of need." The anarchist gestured as he
spoke, his hands open wide. "I mean, if you're in the desert, you sell
the natives ice water, right? Nimble Virtue, Conover and the rest
have a captive market here, and they like it that way. This
underground market drives the prices of their goods right through
the roof. The lords aren't dealers, they're vampires. They live on
pain. And you're as much a part of it as they are."
	Jonny frowned. "I sold medicine, asshole. People needed me."
	"You're just afraid to face the real issue," Groucho said. "By
selling Conover's shit you are just another part of the drug
organism. And when I say drugs, I mean anything people need, that
they'll pay money for. Food, data, booze, medical supplies. People
don't need you. They need to be free of this ridiculous cycle of drugs
and pain. Free from the Committee and the lords because they're two
sides of the same coin. One can't exist without the other. This whole
city is built on bones. You're a vampire, too, Jonny. That's what I
mean about taking responsibility."
	Jonny walked back to the bar and started sorting through the
various bottles. At the back of the bottom shelf he found a half-
empty quart of mescal and set it on the bar. The small hallucinogenic
worm inside bobbed momentarily to the top of the golden liquor.
Dead fetuses. He saw Nimble Virtue's children floating in alcohol.
Releasing the bottle, Jonny shouted to Groucho: "If I'm such puke,
what the hell are you doing here?"
	"I'm here because in the end, I don't think you are one of
them," said Groucho. He came to the bar, still ringing the silver bell in
his left hand. "You're what those old warriors used to call Dragon
head-Snake body. You're intelligent; you've got courage and integrity,
but you keep sabotaging yourself through fear and stupidity." The
anarchist picked up something the size of a playing card from the
bar. When he touched it, the card flashed a series of animated views
of Japanese casinos and resorts, spewing hard-sell patter in tinny
German. "Also, I thought you might be able help the revolution. Ice
liked you and I wanted to keep her happy. Zamora was interested in
you and so was Conover. I thought maybe we could make use of that
somewhere along the way." He looked up at Jonny. "Revolution's a
hard nut. See what happens to us? I guess I was using you, too."
	"If I go back to Conover's, will you go with me?" Jonny asked.
Groucho shook his head. "There's no time. We've got a lot to set up if
we're gonna take on the Committee tonight."
	"Sorry. A silly question."
	"I know where Conover's place is," Groucho said. "I'll meet you
there later if I can."
	Jonny nodded, took the mescal bottle and set it back on the
shelf behind the bar. Removing his mirror shades, he turned to
Groucho, making sure the man got a good look at his new eyes. The
anarchist raised his eyebrows a fraction of a centimeter, but that was
all. "These exteroceptors are funny," Jonny said. "It's like watching a
movie or something. Kind of a detached feeling. I don't know what to
do anymore."
	"Here," Groucho said, and handed him the little silver bell. "For
luck. And remember: thought is an illusion." He touched his chest,
"This is an illusion. Fear, confusion, dread-- the worst elements of
your life can lead to enlightenment as easily as the best. When the
time comes to act, you'll do all right."
	The silhouette of a tall woman was framed in the door of the
club. She wore tight leather pants and boots, a racing top crossed by
studded leather straps; in her hand was some kind of heavy wooden
staff that was almost as tall as she. Her skin shone silver in the street
light, a heavy layer of metal-based make-up covering all her exposed
skin, except for a band around her eyes. Naginata war paint.
"Groucho, we gotta hit it," said the woman. "Hi ya, Jonny."
	"How're you doing, Vyctor?" he called.
	The woman shrugged. "Getting ready to die right," she said.
"Heard about Ice. Sorry, man. I gotta tell you, though, I was kinda
jealous when she moved in with you and Sumi. I really went for her."
	"You got good taste, Vyctor."
	"You know it. Groucho, I'll see you outside." She went out then,
her shadow curving over the small drifts of sand that were collecting
around the fallen doors.
	Jonny left the mirror shades on the bar and followed Groucho
out of the club. In the game parlor, he said to the anarchist: "So what
are you, anyway? You really an anarquista or just some loco with a
bodhisattva complex?"
	They continued out under the awning, through the falling sand
to the van parked across the street. Finally, Groucho grinned. "Tell
you the truth," he said, "I spend most of my time feeling like
everybody's mother." Man Ray nodded as Jonny came over. The
Funky Guru's new van was as big as his old one, with the same ugly-
beautiful lines. Something like a mechanical claw protruded from one
side, hydraulic digits tense against the body of the vehicle. Groucho
pointed to Jonny's motorcycle. "You have fuel?" Jonny nodded,
walked over to the bike and climbed aboard. "You take care, Jonny,"
called Vyctor. Jonny waved and kicked the bike awake. Then he and
the van moved off in opposite directions.

	From the desert, the wind was picking up, hard-blown grit
biting into the backs of his hands, grinding between his teeth. The
heat of the night and the tequila came down hard on him. Jonny felt
himself moving through a dream-time, no longer trusting or quite
believing in anything he saw. Heading north out of Hollywood, he
watched bands of junkies roaming the streets eating piles of sugar
candy skulls they had stolen from merchants below. Monks hiding
their tumors behind things like fencing masks took the confessions of
lepers squatting in Griffith Park while nearby, Neo-Mayanists cut the
beating hearts out of captured Committee boys, offering them up to
gods whose names they had forgotten, begging for forgiveness and
an end to the plague. Writers had been busy with their canisters of
compressed acid, turning the walls outside the park into a fair
representation of the skull walls at Chichen Itza. They had left
messages behind, too.
			BOMB TOKYO NOW
			BOMB NEW YORK NOW
			BOMB EVERYTHING
	Jonny swerved to avoid some animal in the road and almost
succeeded in flipping the bike before he realized that there was
nothing there. He kept flashing on recordings of Ice's face: the
moment she saw his cat eyes, when she kissed him in the Forest, as
she lay dying. He had not yet accepted that she could really be dead
and he knew that was good. Barely functional as he was now, Jonny
understood that some animal survival mechanism in his brain had
cut in during the course of the last few hours, pumping him full of
specific neural inhibitors, preventing him from accepting the true
nature of her loss. He knew it was there, though. The loss. He
imagined that he could feel it, like a sac of poison lodged at the back
of his skull, ready to burst when all this was over.
	He throttled up on the bike and skidded around a section of
asphalt that was jutting at an angle from the narrow roadbed. The air
compressors attached to the BMW's exhaust obliterated all sound but
their own, while the thermographic display in Jonny's exteroceptors
glazed the park into a series of slick surfaces like the ones he had
seen in a Dali landscape.
	Nearing the top of the hill, Jonny began to consider the notion
of payback. It seemed to him that if he was to take the responsibility
he had been avoiding all this time, others ought to do the same.
There was blame here to be laid at somebody's feet. But whose? Ice
was dead, and Skid and Raquin before her. Soon Sumi would be gone,
too. Because of his failure to salvage her cure? Because Easy Money
had stolen Conover's virus? Or was it because he had left Sumi alone
for so long while running from Zamora?
	Yes, to all those questions. But was that enough? Jonny sensed
it went deeper than any of that, but the chain of responsibility and
blame, when he tried to trace it back to its source, seemed endless,
extending beyond any of their lifetimes.
	How many will die tonight? he wondered.
	How many have died already?
	Jonny tried to count up the bodies, the friends and
acquaintances
that had snuffed it or disappeared over the years. He could not
remember them all. Again the chain-- one face always leading to
another. For a few, he could remember no name just the movement
of a hand, the tilt of a head or a panther tattooed shoulder.
	Jonny thought of Ice, in many ways just another one-percenter,
living the same foolish life as any of them, dying the same senseless
death, and all the while being unaware that it had all been laid for
her in advance. Like a ship's course computed, entered and executed,
she had lived according to the strange process that seemed to take
them all in the end, Random, Skid and the rest. They were the dead
wandering the streets on Dia de los Muertos. Drifting their whole
lives through the city, living by rules they never really understood.
The cops had been part of it. The Committee. And yeah, Jonny
thought, the dealers, too. He had been a part of it as much as anyone,
supplying the medicine and the dope that kept the people docile.
Groucho's city of bones became more real, more palpable each time
he considered it.
	Lights on the hill above startled him. Jonny swung the BMW
onto the driveway leading to Conover's mansion, wondering why the
hologram dome was down. Sand whispered through the trees. He left
the bike in the drive and made his way to the house through the
bamboo grove, hoping that the billowing sand was dense enough to
confound the smuggler lord's surveillance equipment.
	The front door of the Japanese wing was open. Sprawled face-
down in the walk-way was one of the smuggler lord's medical techs,
a hole from what looked like a Futukoro shell burned in the man's
back. Inside the house there were more bodies, techs and security
staff, some lying in groups, others meters away where they had been
gunned down trying to run. In the art-glutted dining room in
Victorian wing, soft Elizabethan music was coming from the hidden
speakers; the sound chip on the stereo read: "William Williams:
Sonata in Imitation of Birds." He found the African staff dead in the
kitchen and the service corridors.
	Working his way back through the house by feel, Jonny located
the elevator he had used the day they had given him his new eyes.
	Not certain of exactly where he was going, he punched in the
code for the lowest level. He pulled the Derringer from his pocket,
turned it over in his hand once, and put it away. It would not do him
a hell of a lot of good against a Futukoro.
	In the clinic area were more dead techs. The hall was littered
with overturned drug carts, Pyrex culture dishes and leaking drug
vials. Jonny saw Yukiko's body, recognized a couple of the Russians
that had assisted on his eye surgery. A security man lay dead on his
back, most of one shoulder and his lower jaw had been shot away. He
was holding a small cardboard box. Scattered around the guard's
head like a plastic nimbus were dozens of interferon inhalers similar
to the one Easy had been using. Jonny knelt by the guard's body and
stole his Futukoro. The man had not even gotten it out of the holster.
	It did not take Jonny long to find Sumi's room.
	At a bend in the garbage-strewn corridor was a door marked
with diamond-shaped warning signs: orange biohazard marker,
color-coded symbols for flammable liquids and cryoprotectants.
	The door was locked and when he could not kick it open, he
shot the lock off. Inside, he passed through a short retrofit airlock,
ignoring neat piles of sterile paper gowns and caps, to a dust-free
clean room beyond. Inside, the sterile chamber echoed with the
steady whining of malfunctioning life-support units and the gurgling
of protein vats. Near the circular vats, four male bodies were laid-out
on what looked like stainless steel autopsy tables. From the sour
smell of the place, Jonny guessed that it had been at least twenty-
four hours since the life-support had shut down.
	Looking into the protein vats, Jonny found what at first he took
to be several dead eels, drifting limply in the swirling solution like
individual strands of sea weed. The animal's had been dissected
bilaterally, exposing the entire length of each spinal column. When
he saw the delicate Toshiba micro-manipulators poised over each
open back, Jonny realized that the animals were lampreys. He
remembered Conover telling him that the nerve tissue his techs had
spliced into Jonny's injured shoulder had come been grown in a
specially bred variety of the animal. Seeing them now, Jonny was
glad the poor fuckers were dead.
	He touched one of the manipulators, running his fingers along
the rows of microscopic lasers that sliced intact tissue from the
lampreys' backs. A bundle of mil-thin wires ran from the base of
each manipulator and was secured to node points along the exposed
spines. He touched one of the bundles. A tail twitched. Jawless mouth
gaped. "Shit," Jonny said and released the manipulator, realizing (and
the realization turned his stomach) that the animals were still alive,
swimming in their absent way, against the whirling current of the
protein solution, alien tissues taking root in their backs.
	That's when he found Conover, chest neatly lasered open, lying
on one of the autopsy tables. Jonny had turned in disgust from the
lamprey tank and froze, staring down at the body of the smuggler
lord lying under ten centimeters of clear liquid. But it was not the
Conover Jonny knew. It was the Conover he had seen in photos in the
storage room that earlier night. The Conover from Central America in
the nineteen-eighties: healthier, before the Greenies addiction had
set in. Jonny checked the other tables and found Conovers lying on
each of them, sunk in the same fluid, torsos neatly split from crotch
to chin. All the bodies were wired into a complex array of life-
support unit. They were all missing certain organs, livers, stomach,
hearts and pancreases, mostly. He knew then that what he was
looking at was essentially a farm.
	Conover had become a parasite, feeding on himself. Somewhere
in his drug-ruined body, his techs must have found some cells that
Greenies had not yet invaded. They had used these to clone copies of
the smuggler lord to use for patch jobs. The liquid in which they
floated would be some kind of perflourocarbon, Jonny guessed, to
keep the bodies oxygenated. He just stared. It was amazing; suicide
and murder all rolled into one package. The taste of tequila and bile
was strong in his throat. Jonny fled through a door beyond the tables,
away from the butchered young men.
	The room he entered was still and very cold. The
thermographic read-out in his eyes showed it to him as an almost
seamless blue surface, broken here and there by neon-red patches of
warmer electronic equipment. Some kind of gas vapor was crusting
on cryogenic pipe inlets, drifting in white clouds to the floor. A dozen
gray laminated tanks (he thought of coffins or sealed specimen cases)
stood against the walls. Jonny spotted her in the only tank that was
occupied, near the far end. When he tried to wipe a layer of frost
from the Lexan faceplate, his fingers froze to it instantly. He jerked
his hand away, stifling a small cry of pain as he left some skin
behind. Using his jacket sleeve, he rubbed at the port until he could
see her face clearly.
	Sumi appeared to be asleep in the cryogenic tank. A VDT inset
at chest-level in the gray laminate displayed her life readings as a
series of slow-moving horizontal lines, hills and valleys indicating
her body's various autonomic functions. The top of the screen was
dominated by an animated 3D display of some growing crystal. For
some reason, it reminded Jonny of a cocoon; he kept expecting to see
some new form of plant or animal life to burst suddenly from the
fragile egg shell facets that the crystal kept unfolding from within
itself. Someone had written "L VIRUS" on a strip of surgical tape and
stuck it to the VDT just below the crystal display. Jonny nodded,
recognizing the animation as a growth sequence. He had a pretty
good idea just what the programmers had been modeling when they
created the display. The lesions around Sumi's mouth confirmed this.
	Jonny backed away from the cylinder, spun and kicked
savagely at the door to the clean room, his face hot. All the half-
conscious illusions of a daring rescue he had been nursing up the hill
were dying fast. He prowled the edges of the frigid room, cursing to
himself, punched a Sony monitor off a work station and kicked it into
a wall, shattering the screen.
	A minute later, he was standing in front of the tank in which
Sumi slept. "They never told us how it worked," he explained. "So
naturally it got all fucked up." It was an apology of sorts.
	The concussion from the first Futukoro round cracked the
Lexan plate above Sumi's face. Steam from the super-cooled liquid
inside screamed through the broken plastic, condensing in the air as
a miniature whirlwind of ice. Jonny kept on firing, pumping round
after hot round through the walls of the cylinder until the room was
full of freezing white vapor and the life readings on the tank
registered as a series of flat, unwavering lines.
	When some of the vapor had cleared and he could see again,
Jonny peered through the cracked Lexan to find that Sumi's face had
remained unchanged. He was aware, on some wordless level, that
from that moment on, he would be utterly alone. But he found
himself comforted by Sumi's face, the lines of her cheeks, the set of
her lips. There was no hint at all of pain or betrayal in her smooth
features. Jonny stepped back. Calmly, gratefully, he placed the barrel
of the Futukoro between his teeth and aimed for the back of his
head. Closing his eyes, he was filled with an odd sense of euphoria,
thinking: From now on, we make our own rules.
	He pulled the trigger.
	The gun clicked once.
	Jonny shouted and threw the thing across the room. Behind
him, the door to the clean room slid open and Conover came in. Not
one of the pretty boys on the autopsy slabs, Jonny saw, but the red-
eyed death's head he knew. He was sure the smuggler lord had been
watching him. "Listen, son-- " Conover began.
	"You pig!" Jonny shouted. "How could you do that to her? Treat
her like a piece of meat!"
	"I never intended for you to see this," Conover said. He opened
his hands in a gesture of sympathy. "Really, we had not choice. She
could have infected everybody here."
	Jonny looked back at Sumi in the cryogenic tank. Most of the
fluid had evaporated, leaving a few feeble streams of vapor trailing
from holes the Futukoro shells had made. "Did you kill all those
people upstairs?" Jonny asked.
	"I'm afraid so," Conover said. He moved to sit on the edge of a
disconnected Hitachi CT scanner. Jonny noticed that the smuggler
lord was holding a Futukoro loosely at his side. "In a sense, though,
they were already dead," Conover said. "Between the virus and
Zamora, if they didn't die now, they would be gone very soon." He
shrugged. "Besides, I'm leaving. The life's gone out of it. L.A.'s no
place for me anymore."
	"What are you talking about? You're leaving Last Ass?"
	Conover lit one of his brightly-colored Sherman's and nodded.
"Yes, my ride ought to be here in a few hours. You interested in
coming?"
	"Where are you going?"
	Conover smiled. "New Hope."
	"What?"
	"I think you should come," the smuggler lord said. "In fact, I
insist on it." Conover had moved the Futukoro so that it was lying
across his legs, pointing casually in the direction of Jonny's mid-
section.
	Jonny felt his brain frosting over, as if he were asleep and
dreaming in one of the cases next to Sumi. "Mister Conover, what the
fuck is going on here?"
	"It's the end of the world, son."
	"Great. Think anyone'll notice?" Jonny asked. He looked at Sumi
and shook his head, thinking that once again, he had failed her.
	Conover got up, dropped an avuncular arm around Jonny's
shoulders and said: "Don't sweat it, son. We've got big plans for you."
He steered Jonny out the clean room, upstairs and through the
Victorian wing toward the roof. "There's so much to say over before
our ride gets here, but if we hurry, I think we might just have time
to give you the fifty-cent tour of the universe."


						THIRTEEN:
			The Fifty-Cent Tour of the Universe

	"Yes, the end of the world, son, can't you smell it?" asked
Conover. "No finer time to be alive." He chuckled reflectively, moving
Jonny along a dark and narrow service staircase, idly jabbing him in
the back with the barrel of the Futukoro.
	"It's the war, isn't it?" asked Jonny. "The Tokyo Alliance and
New Palestine. They're finally going to do it."
	Conover nodded sleepily. "What else?" he asked, shivered. He
mumbled: "Need a shot," then louder: "Yes, the war. Don't look so
surprised, son. Historically speaking, it's long overdue."
	Jonny shook his head. "Christ, then that Arab was telling the
truth."
	"Arab?"
	"There was this Arab at the Forest of Incandescent Bliss. Said
that Tokyo and Washington were getting ready to launch a sneak
attack on New Palestine," said Jonny. "When he said the Alpha Rats
were involved, I thought he was just spaceman-happy, like Zamora."
	Conover laughed heartily at that. "Oh, that's delightful; they
must have partially decoded one of the transmissions. The poor
bastards don't have a clue."
	"To what?" asked Jonny.
	"That we are the Alpha Rats." said the smuggler lord.
	Jonny turned on Conover who casually flicked his gun up at
Jonny's face. Jonny just ignored it. "I knew it," he told the lord. "It's
all a ruse, isn't it? There are no Alpha Rats; there never were any
extraterrestrials. It's been the government all along using the Alpha
Rats as an excuse for the rationing programs and the damned war
preparations."
	"Bravo!" yelled Conover, clapping his left hand against the one
holding the Futukoro. "Well done Jonny. What remarkable deductive
powers." He smiled apologetically. "Of course, you're wrong on most
of it. But it was a good try. Keep moving and I'll straighten you out."
Before they continued up, Conover lit another Sherman, the flame on
his lighter briefly illuminating the wreckage of his face. He had
developed a slight tic in the cracked skin under one eye. His lips
were moist and slack. Getting thin, thought Jonny as the smuggler
lord nudged him up the stairs.
	"Of course there are Alpha Rats," Conover told him. "Do you
really think the Tokyo Alliance would put itself in such a dangerous
economic position intentionally? The extraterrestrial's ship crashed
on the moon fifteen years ago. Yes, crashed. They're dead, you see.
All the Alpha Rats on board. It was a plague ship, son, on auto-pilot,
packed full of dead Alpha Rats.
	"Think about it, Jonny. The odds are staggering. The Alpha Rats
drifting through empty space for god knows how long, getting caught
in the moon's gravity and crashing there. I don't think that it would
be far-fetched to think that in some way they were sent there for us
to find. We're just lucky a Canadian team got to the site first. If the
Arabs had made it, they would have discovered what we did;
eventually, they would have analyzed it and figured out how it
worked."
	"The layered virus," Jonny said. He stumbled on loose carpet,
felt Conover's gun in his back before he found his footing.
	"See? Your history's not so bad," said Conover. "Of course, what
killed the Alpha Rats had very little resemblance to NATO's layered
virus, but it was during the early research we did on the bodies of
the Alpha Rats, breaking down the genetic structure of the plague
that killed them, that we finally found the key on how to make the
damned virus work."
	"Funny," said Jonny. "I thought for awhile that maybe you'd
gotten some surplus virus juice from somebody and decided to let it
loose in L.A. so you could peddle the cure through us dealers."
	"You think too small, Jonny. I keep telling you: You're in
business, but you're not a business man. This is government work,
boy. Multinational dollars."
	"But all the rationing for all these years, that was a put-on
wasn't it? Keep the Pentagon fat and happy."
	"Yes and no. After the Alpha ship was located, we couldn't very
well have people trampling all over the moon, could we? The local
military authorities took the opportunity to burn the Arab bases and
mining operations. Naturally, we had to take out a few of our own to
make it look good, but the circumlunar labs are still operating. You
didn't know that, did you? Yes, that's where the Alpha Virus was
synthesized. All we did was blow-up a few non-essential orbiters
and dress the ones we needed with debris from the surface."
	"So the government's got their virus and their war. What do
you get out of this?"
	"Freedom. From this," said Conover, touching his chest. "They're
going to give me a new body, Jonny. With the government's bankroll
I can leave this place and not have to worry about territory disputes
or watered down drugs or the rabid dogs that run this city breathing
down my neck."
	"They must have given you a bundle for releasing that virus,"
said Jonny.
	"Not at all. Raquin, as the Colonel no doubt told you, was
working for the Committee. He stole the virus from me to turn over
to the Colonel, but before he had the chance, Easy stole it from
Raquin. No son, I'm afraid what Washington is paying me for has
nothing to do with releasing the Alpha Virus. I'm being paid to
deliver you." Conover sighed. "I was hoping you might figure this
part out on your own. That's why I set up that little game with 'Blue
Boy' and the cases of Mad Love. I thought maybe if you knew who I
was, you'd see some of this coming. Maybe I'm getting eccentric in
my oldage. Playing too many games. After a century or so it's easy
to forget how ordinary people think. And it was probably too much
to expect of you with all you've had on your mind lately." They came
around a sharp turn and started up another flight of stairs. Along one
wall was a stained glass fresco depicting men in armor carrying
Christian banners into battle. Why would you put that in a stairway
with no lights? Jonny wondered. "You going to tell me why the
Federales want me, or should I just assume it's my magnetic
personality?" he asked the smuggler lord.
	"Actually, they'd prefer your grandmother, but she
disappeared years ago. Then when your mother OD'd in Mexico City,
it left you as heir-apparent to the throne," explained Conover. "See,
your grandmother was a child of the streets, much like you and your
friends. She sold blood, breathed polluted air for pay in university
experiments, you know the routine. Then in nineteen ninety-five she
volunteered for a series of injections at UCLA. Of course, she didn't
know it was one of the Defense Department's genetic warfare
projects. The school told her they were testing a new hepatitis
vaccine.
	"Tokyo and Washington were still thinking of war strictly in
terms of atomic weapons back then. Some Pentagon bright-boy had
the idea that through genetic engineering he could increase the
general population's tolerance to certain wavelengths of radiation.
Like the rest of the research programs, it eventually ran out of
money, but not before your grandmother and a few dozen others
were doped with an experimental retro-virus. The doctors had
removed key sections of the virus's genetic code, so it could not hurt
her, but the retro-virus was very efficient in entering her bone
marrow. There, it bonded successfully with her red blood cells,
producing a sort-of anti-radiation antibody."
	"As I said, the project ran out of money, and the subjects were
dismissed, but not before they were re-examined. The little viruses
really took to a few of them; your grandmother was one. But the
project leaders had no hold over her or the others, no money to keep
them around. Like most of the research subjects, she simply drifted
away."
	"So now the Federales think because my abuela had lead in her
veins that something in my blood is the cure for the layered virus?"
	"Apparently so."
	"Then if there is no cure, why the hell did you let me go to
Little Tokyo after Easy Money?" Jonny shouted. "What were you
setting me up for?"
	"Oh yes, Easy," said Conover. He looked tired; the junk flesh
around his eyes was drawn and brittle. "Well, I couldn't take a
chance on Nimble Virtue finding out what she had. It was a second
batch of the virus, of course. Ricos had orders to kill her and Easy
when she turned it over."
	"Beautiful. Fucking beautiful, "Jonny mumbled. "Then I'm it as
far as this cure goes? I mean, with all of the government's resources,
they couldn't come up with one other person connected with those
tests?"
	"It's been a long time, Jonny. Records get lost; discs get erased.
When you ran away from the state school as a boy, they we sure
they'd lost contact with the program for good. Then you turned up on
the Committee. You couldn't hide that blood from them for long."
	Jonny laughed mirthlessly. "Serves me right."
	At the top of the stairs, they came out into an immense
geodesic solarium. Through the bullet-proof glass, Jonny could make-
out the tattered edge of the HOLLYWOOD sign, crawling neon of the
movie district below. Overhead, the moon was obscured by billowing
waves of sand, like hordes of locusts moving across the sky.
	"You know, Mister Conover, you really piss me off," Jonny said.
"I mean, I expect this kind of chickenshit behavior from Nimble
Virtue, but I thought you were my friend."
	"I am your friend, Jonny. Understand, there's nothing personal
in any of this."
	"Right, I know. Don't tell me. It's business. Economics, it always
is."
	"You're looking for someone to blame again," Conover said. "I
told you once: life's more complicated than cowboy and Indian
movies. You think the Arabs wouldn't use the virus if they had the
opportunity? Or your friends the Croakers? What if Groucho had a
weapon like this?"
	"You know what's funny?" Jonny asked. "What's really funny is
even though you're telling me all this now, I keep thinking that
maybe I'm hearing it wrong. I keep thinking, 'Maybe Mister Conover
got sucked into this deal by mistake, just like everybody else.' But
that's not how it is, is it?" Outside the solarium was a sculpture
garden. Jonny could make out smooth Greek marbles and Indian
bronzes laid out along the severe geometry of Victorian flower beds.
"When we were driving out to Santa Monica to pick up your dope
from those Gobernacion boys, I asked you about the new leprosy.
You just laughed and told me you hadn't had a cold in forty years.
But it wasn't until a few days ago that the Croakers found out that
the layered virus was attached to a cold bug. That means you knew
all along exactly what this virus was, which means you've been lying
to me ever since this mess got started. Or was it just another clue in
your game? Am I supposed to be flattered that you decided to fuck
with my head all this time?" His voice was growing shrill; he took a
step toward the lord.
	Conover nodded toward the statues. "Come outside. I want you
to see the garden before we leave."
	"Fuck you, old man."
	Conover casually raised the Futukoro a few centimeters. "Jonny,
consider that from my point of view, the simplest thing for me would
be to shoot you and put your body on ice until my ride arrives. But
I'm giving you a chance to stay alive. These people don't want to hurt
you, they just need your blood."
	"How are you going to get us to the desert, man? The roads
between here and New Hope are gonna be full of Committee boys
and gangs. You can't fly over it; a hovercar can't make it that far."
	"There's no reason to go to the desert," said Conover tiredly.
"There's nothing out there. New Hope is on the moon, safe and out of
harm's way. That structure in the desert is little more than a
grandiose movie set. This is Hollywood, boy. A crew from CineMex
put it together for us. It might have blown the Alpha Rats' image if
the general public knew about all that old money sitting right next
door."
	Jonny took a deep breath. Between the tequila and the bombs
Conover kept dropping on him, he could hardly see straight. "Ever
since Zamora asked me to turn you, I've been trying to figure out
who was lying to me and who was telling the truth. Now I find out
that you're the only one that was lying. Everybody else, including
Nimble Virtue and that sheik, was telling me whatever part of the
truth they knew. That situation never even crossed my mind."
	"Don't be such a pussy, Gordon," said a gravelly voice from the
garden. "Come outside and have a drink."
	Jonny looked at Conover "That makes the evening perfect," he
said. The smuggler lord shrugged.
	"I couldn't realistically keep the Colonel out of it forever," said
Conover apologetically.
	"Of course he couldn't," said Colonel Zamora from the doorway
to the sculpture garden. "I've got contacts in government circles, too,
you know. I put enough of it together to see what Conover was up
to."
	Jonny followed Zamora out to the garden. Conover followed. A
light scrim supported by a network of poles sheathed in some light-
absorbing material kept out most of the blowing sand; the scrim
fluttered in the storm, beating like the wings of grounded birds.
"You're an asshole, Colonel," Jonny said.
	"And you got funny eyes, kid." Zamora set down his drink.
Jonny tensed, ready to intercept the blow he knew would come-- but
the Colonel just smiled at him. "You should be nice to me, Gordon.
We're partners now."
	"Did you have your brains surgically removed or something?"
Jonny asked. "Don't you know this guy's talking about war?"
	"You think I don't know about war, Gordon?" The Colonel went
to a portable teak bar, poured amber liquid into a glass and brought
it back to Jonny (quietly laughing his breathy laugh). "After tonight,
with Conover gone and the gangs squashed, I'll own this city. Take a
look down there," the Colonel said, steering Jonny to the edge of the
roof.
	The Hollywood Hills fell sharply away from Conover's mansion,
forming a featureless black lake whose shore was a million burning
lights. Straight ahead was Hollywood and the translucent tent where
Jonny had once lived. Off to the right was the business district,
Lockheed's glowing torus and the all but invisible silicon sphere of
Sony International. Jonny glanced back at Conover and caught him
tying off with a length of green surgical tubing, a loaded syringe in
his other shaky hand.
	"Listen," said Colonel Zamora.
	Jonny turned back to the lights. He could not hear it at first
above the hissing of the falling sand, and when he did hear it, it was
as an echo. Faint backslap of an explosion from below. His ears,
having found the sound, could identify other explosions, the garbled
reverberations of amplified voices barking stern warnings in several
languages.
	Zamora was resting his elbows on the top of the low garden
wall. "You think I don't know about war?" he asked. "I've lived in
this city all my life. I eat, drink, sleep, and shit war." Jonny looked at
the man and would have laughed, had he not been so sure the
Colonel was absolutely serious.
	Jonny walked to the bar and set down his drink, untouched.
Conover was resting against the base of a bronze of Shiva (face lost in
the Destroyer's shadow), green surgical tubing dangling from one
hand, the Futukoro from the other, breathing deeply as the Greenies
came on. Something moved by a ripped section of scrim at the far
end of the roof. Jonny moved back to the garden wall, not wanting to
be in the open if it was one of Conover's sentry robots.
	"It's the end of your world down there, Gordon."
	"That's what Conover keeps telling me," Jonny said.
	"Don't get me wrong, the gangs were ballsy bastards, especially
the Croakers," Zamora said. "But they're a bunch of romantic idiots.
Junkies with zip guns and rocks cannot stand up to a well-organized
fighting unit like the Committee."
	"Really Pere Ubu, if you keep talking like that I'm going to
think you're an idiot, and what fun is it beating an idiot?" There was
a crackle of Futukoro fire from down below as from the top of the
scrim, a crystal gecko fell and burst into a fountain of flame, spewing
a stream of fish, flowers, birds and all five of the Platonic solids
straight up into the air. Sections of the netting burst into guttering
flame where the fountain touched it, the wind and sand blowing
down on the garden through widening holes.
	"What would you say if I told you your boys were going to lose
tonight?" The voice came from right behind them, low on the garden
wall. Crouching there all in black, Futukoro in hand, Groucho flashed
Jonny a quick smile. "Told you I'd come if I could. Besides, I thought
you might have run off again. Glad to see you didn't."
	"Me too," said Jonny.
	Zamora half-turned in Groucho's grip, gazing up at the anarchist
good-humoredly. "Nice stunt kid, but you aren't going to win this
thing with card tricks."
	"I'm not worried about the Committee right now, Ubu," said
Groucho, hopping lightly off the wall. "I'm here for you."
	"I see. And this is the part where I fall apart and see the error
of my evil wasted life?" Zamora laughed. "Come on kid, wise up. In
the morning I'm going to be running this town. You want to make a
deal?"
	"You guys are just full of deals, aren't you?" Groucho said.
	"Come on, Groucho, Figure it out. Everybody does exactly what
they have to get the job done. Now what do you want? A piece of the
city for the Croakers? A cut of the drug action? You can have it."
"It's not enough," said the anarchist. "We are the revolt of the spirit
humiliated by your works. We live on our dreams. We can't settle for
anything less than everything."
	Zamora shrugged and leaned against the garden wall. "Then
you're dead, asshole."
	"Admit it, Colonel: It's over," said Groucho.
	"Boy, it's never over."
	Zamora's old lizard flesh was fast. He moved to the right,
feinting a back knuckle to the head, and drove a knee up at the
anarchist's mid-section. Groucho, however, was faster. He slipped the
Colonel's kick and swept his foot, knocking Zamora onto his back.
Jonny saw Conover then, emerging from Shiva's gloom. "Down!" he
yelled, but the anarchist was already falling, Conover's Futukoro still
smoking as he emerged into the light.
	By the time Jonny got there, Zamora was on his feet, rubbing at
one uniformed shoulder. Groucho's eyes were wide, bubbles fringing
an exit wound in his chest, matching his breathing. Groucho gripped
Zamora's trouser leg, not recognizing the man. "I am here by the will
of the people," he said, "and I will not leave until I get my raincoat
back." The bubbles on his chest were smaller and fewer each time
they appeared. Gradually, they disappeared altogether.
	He stopped moving. Zamora bent and pried the anarchist's hand
from his trouser leg. "Nickel and dime asshole," the Colonel mumbled.
"Didn't have a clue."
	Zamora started back to the bar. Jonny calmly took Nimble
Virtue's Derringer from his pocket and blew the back of the Colonel's
head off. Zamora stiffened as the hollow point hit. Then he collapsed,
a solid reptilian waterfall of flesh, joints loosening from the ankles
up.
	Conover was on Jonny before he had a chance to move. "That's
all, son. It's over," the smuggler lord said, and touched his gun to the
base of Jonny's spine. "It's time to go." Conover pulled him way from
the bodies, directing him to the far edge of the garden where a set of
wrought-iron stairs wound down to the bare hillside. At the top of
the stairs, Jonny looked back. The scrim was no longer burning, but
large black-rimmed holes allowed the sand through. It was squalling
in great gusts all over the garden, already beginning to cover the
bodies of the dead anarchist and Colonel Zamora. Jonny walked down
the metal stairs and started off across the pale scrub grass, Conover
right behind him.

	They walked with the storm to their backs. To their left, part of
the city was on fire.
	Jonny's ears became quickly accustomed to the steady rattle of
far-off gunfire. The explosions seemed to take on a strange rhythm
of their own, playing counter-point to his footsteps. Black smoke
from the burning buildings was whipped up by the Santa Ana winds;
mixing with the blowing sand, the smoke closed over the city, taking
on the appearance of a solid structure, as if Jonny were seeing the
lights through the walls of a dirty terrarium. Hovercars cut back and
forth through the mist like glowing wasps.
	They walked for some time without speaking. Then Conover
said: "Down the hill here." Scrambling through the nettles and fallen
branches, they eventually hit a rise and Jonny saw the rusted
skeleton of the dome, the grimy white walls. He knew then that they
were headed for Griffith Observatory. Years before, after a seven-
point quake that dropped most of Malibu below sea level, the
observatory's corroded dome had fallen in on itself like the shell of a
rotten egg. Since then, various religious groups had claimed the place,
performing secret rites in the husk of the old building under the full
moon.
	Scattered through the courtyard of the old observatory in
rough concentric circles were shrines to dead technology, useless
mementos of the collective unconscious of the city. The gear box from
a gasoline powered vehicle; a German food processor; a Nautilus
exercise machine; pelvic x-rays of forgotten movie stars; piles of
pornographic video cassettes, dressing dummies and primitive Sony
tube televisions.
	Jonny left Conover's side and touched the yellowed keys of an
ancient upright piano. It had been outside for so long that the
lacquer was coming off it in great chocolate ribbons, revealing the
weathered grain of some badly warped wood beneath. Jonny hit a
chord and to his surprise, the thing still worked. He picked out a one-
fingered melody, his off-key singing masked by the sour notes of the
out-of-tune piano.
	"As I passed Saint James Infirmary
	I saw my sweetheart there
	All stretched out on a table,
	so pale, so cold, so fair
	As I passed Saint James Infirmary--"
	"Come on," called Conover, "let's get out of this storm." He
gestured at the open doors of the observatory with the Futukoro.
	A few steps inside the high-vaulted chamber, Jonny was
swallowed up by absolute darkness. It was like walking down the
gullet of some enormous animal, he thought. He breathed the hot air
(sour with the reek of oxidizing metal) deeply, relaxing in his sudden
blindness. Since leaving Sumi, Jonny had refused to let his
exteroceptors see for him in any but the most ordinary way. He felt
comfortable in the darkness of the observatory because he had been
waiting for it; it or something just like it. He had not felt the same
since the gun had failed to kill him in the clinic. He understood then
that he was still waiting for the bullet he had been denied. Each time
he turned around, Jonny expected to see Conover raising the
Futukoro to firing position. But it did not happen.
	There were things hanging from the ceiling of the observatory.
They rang softly, like the tinkling of small bells or wind chimes.
Occasionally, a tiny flash would catch his eye. Something cool touched
Jonny's face. He batted it with the back of his hand, and it swung
away into the darkness. A few steps further, he bumped into a
narrow railing that circled a sunken section of the floor, and waited
there for Conover.
	The smuggler lord came into the observatory, his head cocked
to one side, as if listening for something. It occurred to Jonny for the
first time that Conover might be insane. What proof had the lord
offered him of rich people slumming on the moon or dead
extraterrestrials? Just some fairy tale about his grandmother renting
out her blood. Not having contracted the layered virus meant
nothing. Luck or natural resistance could account for that, Jonny told
himself. There were a lot of people left in the city who were not
infected.
	However, if Conover were insane, he might insist that they wait
in the observatory for his spaceship all night. It seemed pretty likely
to Jonny that a structure this size would eventually attract fire from
below.
	And if Conover is insane, he thought, what will he do when his
spaceship does not arrive?
	Outside, the sand storm was slacking off. Through gaps in the
twisted metal of the dome, Jonny could see the pale curve of the
moon. He thought of the celebration in the city, disrupted now by
gunfire. The Day of the Dead. Illuminated in the weak moonlight,
Jonny finally saw the room in which he was standing, and decided
that if Conover was not crazy, whoever had re-built the observatory
was.
	A bank of ultra-sensitive photo-cells ringed the ceiling above a
parabolic mirror cradled in a steel lattice nest; the structure
supporting the mirror had been bolted beneath a section of dome
open to the sky. When the pale lunar light came down through the
fallen girders, the walls began to flicker; gears shifted ponderously
underground and a dozen blurry moons suddenly circumscribed the
room. Video images, three meters tall; old NASA footage Jonny
remembered from his childhood. Car mirrors suspended from the
ceiling on nylon lines picked up the pale images, flashing them back
and forth like cratered stars. Narrow rows of low-voltage track lights
shone through prisms and beam-splitters, bathing the highest parts
of the room in tentative rainbows.
	"It's wonderful, isn't it? Absolute madness," Conover said. A
brightly painted Virgin Mary, part plaster of Paris and part jet
engine components, revolved on a creaking turntable-- a technocratic
moon goddess.
	"You've been here before?" asked Jonny.
	"Many times. I come here to think." In the wasted gray video
light, Jonny thought Conover looked like one of the masked dancers
from the procession below. The smuggler lord pointed to a spot in the
southern hemisphere ofone of the video moons. "In case you're
interested, this is where we're headed. A Japanese station a few
clicks to the west of Tycho."
	Jonny slumped back against the rail. "Mister Conover, there's
no spaceship coming here tonight."
	"Of course there is. We're going to Seven Rose Base." "Bullshit.
All that's going to happen is we're going to hang around here till
somebody decides to put a mortar shell through the wall."
	Conover shook his head, smiled indulgently at Jonny. "Don't go
thinking I've lost my mind, dear boy," he said. "The fact is, I haven't
let you in on all my reasons for wanting to get to the moon."
	Jonny opened his eyes in mock surprise. "Oh gosh, then you
haven't been absolutely straight with me? I'm really hurt, Mister
Conover."
	"What would you say if I told that you we have had contact
with the Alpha Rats directly?"
	"I thought you said they were dead."
	"The one's on the ship were, yes. But I mean others."
	"Other Alpha Rats? Where?"
	"Ah, so now you're interested." The smuggler lord walked along
the curving edge of the chamber, passing before each of the twelve
grainy moonscapes. Earth's shadow followed him, leaving each video
panel dark as he moved beyond it. "They've spoken to us, Jonny.
>From a ship, maybe an orbital broadcasting station. Three words,
clear as day. Three words repeated three times. Once in English; Once
in Japanese and once in Arabic."
	"Wait, I think I know this joke. They said 'Send more Chuck
Berry,' right?"
	Conover waited before one of the screens, time-lapse dawn
bursting over his shoulder. "They said: 'We are coming.' "
	Jonny looked down at his hands and found dried blood on the
backs of his knuckles. His stomach fluttered. He rubbed the knuckles
on his jeans. "That's it?" he asked.
	"Isn't that enough?"
	Jonny shrugged. "Well, I mean, I don't want to rain on your
parade or anything, but so what? They're coming. What does that get
you?"
	"A chance," Conover said. "One last chance for something new.
You can't imagine what it feels like living on pure reflex, half-awake,
but still functioning. And then something jars you conscious and you
realize that another five years have passed but it doesn't mean
anything because the next five will be exactly the same as the ones
that preceded it."
	Jonny nodded. "So basically you're fucking everybody over
because you're bored."
	The smuggler lord grinned. "Well, if you choose to look at it
that way--"
	"I do," Jonny said.
	"I'm sorry to hear that." Conover stepped away from the
videos.
	"Still, there's not much to be done about it."
	"Sure there is," Jonny said, leaping the handrail to the sunken
observatory floor. "Kill me now."
	"Don't be an ass."
	Jonny went to the slowly-revolving Virgin Mary, took hold of
something by her feet, and came away with a meter-long piece of
heavy chrome pipe. He held it before him, testing the balance in his
hands, then went to Conover. "Come on, fucker. Kill me."
	The smuggler lord held the Futukoro before him, but did not
point it at Jonny. "You're being an idiot."
	Jonny swung the pipe like a baseball bat, circling the lord on
the floor of the dim chamber. "Shoot me. Shoot me or I'll cave you're
goddamn head in."
	"I might just have to do it, Jonny."
	"Go ahead." He swung the pipe wide, letting the smuggler lord
jump out of the way.
	"Stop this right now," Conover said. Jonny swung again, forcing
the lord back on his heels.
	"I knew it!" Jonny yelled. "I'm not worth squat to you dead, am
I? They don't want me if I'm dead. All that stuff about giving me a
chance to stay alive was just another line. If I'm dead, you haven't
got anything to trade for your new skin, have you?" He swung the
pipe at the lord's head.
	"You're acting like a child--"
	"Then shoot me!"
	"No!"
	This time Jonny connected, snapping his wrists down, driving
the end of the pipe into Conover's shoulder. The smuggler lord
gasped and dropped to his knees. Jonny threw the pipe, rolled under
the circular railing and headed for the door. Futukoro shots hissed
past his ear, bringing mirrors and bits of pulverized marble down on
his head. He darted to the left, more shots following him, cutting off
his way to the door.
	Conover was on his feet, heaving himself over the railing. The
smuggler lord kept sweeping the room with the Futukoro as he
pressed his back to each of the observatory's doors, grinding them
closed over a thin layer of sand.
	"Where are you going to go, Jonny?" Conover yelled. "You're
friends are gone. It can be a bad place out there when you're all
alone."
	Jonny kept to the floor behind a gutted exhibit case, barely
breathing. He watched the smuggler lord walk back to the sunken
center of the chamber, gun in his hand. "Come on out, son. This is
insane," Conover said. "We're both going to lose this way." Jonny cut
his fingers picking up a wedge of glass from the wrecked case.
Moving into a crouch, he waited for the smuggler lord to get into just
the right position, and threw the glass edge-first across the room,
scrambling for the door at the same time.
	He knew it was a lost cause within three steps. The pounding of
his heavy boots gave him away. Conover turned away for a fraction
of a second when the glass hit, but snapped his gun back the instant
Jonny began his run. Jonny heard the smuggler lord's gun go off
twice.
	"Consider that I don't have to kill you, son. A shot through each
kneecap will keep you still until the ship arrives."
	Jonny was lying in the shadows, in the dirt, hands crabbed at
the edges of worn floor tiles. One side of his face was hot and wet
where shrapnel, fragmented marble or wood from the door, had
slashed his cheek. His mind was a blank, watching Conover move
about the center of the chamber, keeping to the light. For a moment,
when consciousness imposed itself upon him, he felt his will drain
away. He did not understand why he was running so hard from
death when it was what he had been looking for all along. He pressed
his back against the wall.
	Clinging is not acceptable, he reminded himself. Clinging to
anything, including life (or death), was the sign of a weak mind. One
of the floor tiles came loose in his hand.
	Anger; greed; folly. Hearing the words in his mind, he almost
laughed. They had been the cornerstones of his existence, as had
illusion. Before he had left her, Jonny's roshi had told him to picture
himself as a man crossing a river, moving from one slippery rock to
the next, knowing that each step could send him plunging into the
rapids.
	Moving from illusion to illusion he assumed he had found
himself. Now he was not so sure. Perhaps, he thought, he had just
found more illusions.
	Conover was moving in slow circles before the video screens.
Jonny froze where he was, watched the smuggler lord scanning the
room. When Conover's gaze moved over and beyond him, Jonny sat
up, throwing the floor tile high, watching it spin and shatter the
parabolic mirror at the top of the chamber. The lord covered his head
as the glass came down on him, firing wildly, tearing up the ceiling
and the edges of the room. The muzzle flash from the Futukoro lit
him like a broken strobe as the video moonscapes went dark at his
back. When Conover stopped shooting, the room was quiet and very
dark. Belly to the floor, Jonny could feel the underground gears
winding down. He blinked once. Shapes became solid in the gloom.
Then he was up, his body moving by itself, one foot coming down on
the circular rail, the other swinging over, whole body hanging for an
instant in mid-air, unprotected meat, house of illusions, hate and
fear. Conover was below, slow-motion turning, Jonny's new
exteroceptor's showing the man as a brilliant neon scarecrow with
holes in his face.
	And then he hit, driving Conover hard into the floor. Jonny
hauled him up, holding the wrist that held the gun, so close to the
man that when his breath hesitated for a moment, Jonny felt the
absence of it on his face.
	Something happened then.
	Sand whispered down through the roof and the moon emerged
from a bank of clouds. Conover looked up. Bathed in the milky light,
his face went slack, hung on his cheeks like melting putty. The bird-
thin arms fell to his sides, and when the smuggler lord looked at him,
for the first time, Jonny glimpsed the true face of the man.
	It had cost him his eyes to see it. Groucho had an inkling of it,
but had died without a look; Ice and Sumi had been spared it; no
junkie or leper would have suspected it. Zamora had recognized its
essence immediately, was drawn to it, but had probably never
witnessed the thing itself. Only Jonny, with second-hand eyes stolen
from some rich man's gaudy toy, would ever know the smuggler
lord's true face.
	Blank.
	Without expression.
	A Halloween spook; a candy skull, dead as the hills when the
brush fires claimed them, dead as the sailor in the boiler room of a
sunken ship, skull fused to the melted plating of her hull.
	There was nothing else he could do. He moved the hand with
the gun under Conover's chin. The smuggler lord never took his hand
from the weapon, never tried to struggle. Sand fell on their
shoulders. When Jonny looked into the other man's eyes and saw his
own, he understood their common desire.
	Jonny decided to make him a gift of it. And pulled the trigger.
	It had not occurred to Jonny that he was not breathing. The
kick of the gun triggered a spasm in his lungs and he sucked in a
long breath, tasting ozone and the fear-smell of his own sweat.
Conover's body went down lightly, seemingly without weight, as if, in
those last few seconds of life, the smuggler lord had used up
everything he was.
	Jonny was shaking all over, covered in blood and filth. He
crawled under the railing and scraped open the doors. Stepping
outside, he stood for some minutes in the falling sand, rubbing it into
his face and arms, letting it rasp away the stink of death and
illusions.

	Later, as he was wandering among the circular shrines in the
courtyard of the observatory, Jonny saw something skimming low
and fast over the tops of the hills. At first he thought it might be a
hovercar flying without its running lights, but as the craft got closer
he could tell that it was much too big for that. From what Jonny could
see of its outline, it appeared to have the razor-edged fuselage and
stubby graphite-composite wings of a Daimyo vacuum shuttle.
Something prickled along his spine. There would be a bigger ship up
there, he knew, waiting just beyond the stratosphere--
	The shuttle came down low over the observatory, and leveled
off, circling the ruin, a matte-black scavenger. From its belly
extended shafts of metallic blue light, sensitive fingers probing the
body of the dead building. Jonny hunkered down behind the pile of
Sony televisions, listening to the ship's engine's whine in the
overheated air. It was waiting for something. A signal? he wondered.
But the man who would have signaled it was dead on his back, fifty
meters away.
	After more than a dozen passes, the hum of the shuttle's
engines took a sudden jump in frequency, the fingers of light
disappearing one by one, leaving the observatory dark. Veering off
down the hill, the ship banked sharply to the left and started a rapid
climb back the way it had come. Jonny crawled to the edge of the
pile of televisions to watch the firing of the shuttle's engines, twin
stars. A couple of hovercars detached themselves from formation
over Hollywood and buzzed up the hill behind the larger ship, firing
their banks of heat-seeking missiles.
	The shuttle disappeared on the far side of the hills. The flash of
the explosion bleached the sky bone-white before the sound hit him.
It rolled like distant thunder, over the hills and on into the city. The
hovercars turned off and headed back to Hollywood, merging into the
mass of lights that was Los Angeles.
	Below, the city was burning. The wind had changed direction;
the sand was coming down harder, but behind it was a hint of rain.
Jonny wondered if the weather patterns would ever stabilize. He
removed the bottom panel from the front of the old piano and
crawled inside. Something exploded on Sunset Boulevard below.
Sizzling fireworks and a choir of hologram angels, enormous lavender
lizards, skulls, women's shoes, dice and playing cards rose from the
flames, glowed mad and beautiful, spiraled, screamed, clawed at the
buildings and finally faded into the sky.
	The city burned all night.



						EPILOGUE:
				The Unconsciousness of the
				Landscape becomes Complete

	The city was inside him, its windblown streets and alleys as
much a part of him as the air he breathed, the blood in his veins.
What roots he had were sunk deep in its hard soil. It formed the
walls and foundation of his soul, a thing of which he possessed little
knowledge, but which he had lately begun to consider.
He would never leave the city behind.

	Los Angeles lay white and still beneath the sun. The winds that
had carried in the sand were now blowing smoke from the
smoldering buildings out to sea, leaving the sky a nearly
unblemished dome of aquamarine. In the distance, Watts and Silver
Lake seemed to still be burning. However, since dawn a crystalline
calmness had invaded the city. It happened as the sun rose,
shimmering off the centimeters of desert sand that covered every
flat surface. The light gave Los Angeles the pure, hard look of a
newly minted coin or surgical instrument.
	Jonny spotted the first refugees just before daybreak. A small
group of them were making their way over the nearby hills, heading
for the Ventura Freeway and parts north. Later, he spotted hundreds
of people following the highways out of Hollywood. At first, he had
wondered where they were all going, but as he asked the question,
the answer seemed obvious.
	Anywhere else.
	The revolution was done. From what a young Zombie Analytic
girl told him, the Croakers had won. In a sense. "They're not in
control of the city, but neither's the Committee, so I guess they won,"
she said. "They won or they lost in such a way that the Committee
can't win; take your pick."
	By noon, the hills were full of refugees, winding in ragged lines
around the observatory and the HOLLYWOOD sign, moving Jonny as
he sat on the keyboard of the piano, and on over the hills. Many
people were still wearing their costumes from the night before. In
the bright sun, newsrag skeletons were hardly more menacing that
the flat-footed Meat Boys, hookers and merchants that followed.
	No more fighting, Jonny thought. Let them have it. Let them try
to rule an empty city.
	"What's so funny, Jonny?"
	He had not realized that he was laughing out loud. Easy Money
stood a few meters away within the ring of circular shrines, pale and
filthy, shielding his eyes from the sun. The arm he had injured at the
Forest of Incandescent Bliss was wrapped in tangled layers of dirty
gauze.
	"That's going to get infected," Jonny said.
	"I tanked up on ampecillin in Little Tokyo," Easy replied. There
was a subtle irregularity in skin color of the arm he was using to
shield his eyes, a burning or mottling. It could be anything, Jonny
thought. He looked for other signs of the virus,  but under all that
dirt, there was no way to be sure.
	"So, like I said, 'What's so funny?' "
	"Everything," Jonny said. "It's over, man. They killed us. We're
dead and they can't hurt us anymore."
	"You know the Committee's still holding parts of the city?
They've sent for the Army."
	"Let them. You can't shoot ghosts and that's all that's left down
there."
	Easy Money lowered his hand and Jonny saw heavy bruising
across the man's forehead where one of his horns had broken off.
"You going back?"
	Jonny shook his head. "Let the rats have it," he said. "You?"
	"Where would I go?"
	"There's lots of places."
	Easy looked over his shoulder at the smoke and the sand. "No."
	A dozen Mexican teenagers walked by, nylon athletic bags
emblazoned with colorful corporate decals and backpacks full of
clothes and food hanging from their shoulders. They were singing
together, an ancient melody, low and steady like a hymn, wholly
unselfconscious. They were moving against the general flow of
traffic, heading south and, Jonny knew, home. When they moved out
of ear-shot, he found himself missing their song.
	Easy was pointing at something. "You planning to use that or
what?"
	Jonny looked down at his hand and found Conover's Futukoro
there. He had a vague memory of having sneaked back into the
observatory during the night and taking the thing, though he could
not remember why. Jonny looked at Easy. "It's gone a little beyond
that, don't you think?" He shrugged. "Besides, I miss your head and
hit something important."
	Easy smiled. "You are a classic asshole, you know that? I'd have
blown you away on sight."
	"Maybe that's the difference between us. I don't have to kill
you; you're doing that just fine by yourself."
	"But I won't die an asshole."
	"I don't know if either of us has much choice in that matter."
Jonny laughed. "You know what I can't stop thinking about? Those
poor ignorant idiots on the moon. Sitting up there thinking how safe
they are from this little war they've dreamed up for us, not knowing
about the little green men that are coming to see them. I mean, it's
enough to make you think that maybe there is a god and that maybe
the fucker has a sense of humor."
	"I don't the slightest idea what you're talking about, but that's
okay," said Easy. "Seeing as how you're in such a good mood-- you
wouldn't happen to be holding, would you?"
	"Got a lot of pain?"
	"Think I cracked some ribs when I fell."
	"That's rough." Jonny pulled one of his pockets inside out. "I
seem to be all tapped out." Easy just nodded. "You might check
Conover's place. His security's down for good and there's a room
there stacked eyeball-high with Mad Love."
	Easy shaded his eyes again, frowned at Jonny from under his
arm. "Why you telling me about this?"
	"'Cause I'm a right guy," said Jonny. "'Cause I'm Dragon head-
Snake body, and I know that all thought is illusion, that any event in
our lives, the worst and the best, can lead us toward enlightenment.
Also, I don't really give a fuck."
	"You're lost in space, man." Easy shook his head. "They're gonna
come after you with nets and needles."
	"Goodbye Easy."
	"Adios, asshole."
	Easy made his way awkwardly up the hill, limping on his
clubfoot in the direction of Conover's place. Jonny watched him as the
man followed the same squatter's trail Conover had lead him down
last night. It seemed a long time ago. The sun flashed off Easy's one
remaining horn, then he was gone behind a stand of withered oaks.
	Jonny stepped off the piano, weighing the Futukoro in his hand,
marveling that at any other time in recent memory he would have
given anything to have Easy Money and a loaded gun at the same
time. The feeling was gone, all echoes now. He had moved on. To
where, he was not sure. Jonny took off his jacket and wrapped the
gun inside. Just before he dropped the bundle into the piano,
something fell from one of the pockets.
	He picked it up and rang it gently, remembering that the
Groucho had given him the small bell for luck in the deserted club.
Jonny considered the notion of enlightenment.
	Everybody he cared about was gone. Ice and Sumi, Random,
Groucho, all dead. Yet he felt their presence strong within him. It was
a corny sentiment, something you would read on a greeting card, and
he would have dismissed it entirely if the feeling had not been so
powerful, so genuine.
	Enlightenment.
	Jonny still did not know what it really meant, was certain it
was not what he was feeling now. All he knew for certain was that
although he did not feel good, in some odd way, he felt a hell of a lot
better.
	He held the bell in his left hand, letting it ring as he walked.
The way to Ensenada would be a long one, so he sang himself
through the city. "As I passed Saint James Infirmary
	I saw my sweetheart there,
	All stretched out on a table,
	so pale, so cold, so fair
	As I passed Saint James Infirmary--"





--========================_17427544==_--