Table of Contents

Epigraph

ONE: Proud Flesh

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TWO: Laudable Pus

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Afterword (by Philip K. Dick)

I would like to add my vote in favour of showing female amputees in your magazine. One-armed and, especially, one-legged females offer a unique excitement and a pictorial featuring attractive girl amputees would certainly be welcomed by a large number of readers....

—Letter, Penthouse magazine,

November 1972

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I only remember one thing very well from when I was a kid, and that's probably because of the fuss made at the time. I was outside the front door of a day-care center, cutting earthworms open with a pair of scissors so large I had to use both hands to hold them. The sunshine was kind of dry and hazy; I can recall it exactly. Just like it nearly always is.

The attendant must have been looking for me for quite a while, because I could tell she was pretty fuckin’ exasperated. She snatched me out of the planter and took away the scissors. She carried me into a room with a little sign on the door that said YOUNG 4S. She sat me down in front of a large television screen, with a bunch of other little kids absorbed in it with their mouths open. She didn’t see me watching her leave the room, bearing off the scissors like captured enemy weapons.

In the supplies room, she pulled open the drawer where the scissors were kept I remember her as being vaguely young and constipated. She was probably thinking, How did he get in here in the first place? and then, That’s odd, there’s supposed to be another pair of scissors in here. But by then, I had managed to catch up behind her, and plunged the article in question into her lower leg, through her mesh panty hose, soft flesh, and stiff muscle, glancing off bone, as I watched the blood flow over the protruding half of the scissors and then down my two little hands. I can still see it. When she flopped down onto her knees in front of me, her mouth and eyes were widened into silent O’s of pain and shock.

Twenty-five years later, I was lying in that shit-strewn alley, near dead. A neat quarter-century. It must have looked like the blood had never stopped flowing, until I was drenched with it, sticky and warm. Solid red, a little pool collecting beneath me, with specks of bone chips and fragmented tissues clinging to my clothes and body. And one forearm buzzing and clicking, plotting lethal trajectories for enemies to which I was almost inviolate, beyond reach.

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“I’m leaving,” said the young man. He was known throughout the Phoenix Egg Ranch as E. Allen Limmit; he ran the company-owned brothel.

“No shit,” said Bonna Cummins, the ranch’s personnel manager. Beneath her seemingly thumb-wide eyebrows, she glared across her desk at him. Behind the eyes could be read the thought, The little twerp.

Limmit nodded, trying not to be intimidated, oppressed spiritually by the woman’s overwhelming bulk. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve arranged passage on tonight’s egg run to L.A. Paid for and everything.”

“What’s the matter?” scoffed Cummins. “How come the little GPC faggot wouldn’t give you a ride back in his personal jet? Afraid you’d get chicken feathers on the upholstery?” She leaned back in her chair, trying to extract something from between her incisors with one spatulate fingernail.

For a moment, he looked abstractedly around the cramped office. On one wall hung dusty and yellowing photographs of the ranch’s champion layers, with sometimes a smaller snapshot of one of their eggs included, with a man standing beside it to indicate the dimensions. Their eyes, thought Limmit, gazing at the dumb feathered faces; they’ve always reminded me of horses.

Through the window beside the door, he could see out over the entire floor of the ranch’s main barn, and observe the white-overalled eggers and techs attending each stall’s occupant. Penetrating the window glass came a shrill, wailing sound. Limmit winced, remembering what it was. A short distance beyond the barn’s walls, past the other barns and dormitories, lay the outskirts of the city of Phoenix, the Arizona sand sifting through the abandoned streets and freeways. All this, he said to himself, I’ll be leaving.

“It’s part of the plan,” he said finally, conscious again of Bonna’s heavy-lidded gaze. “It’s necessary for me to arrive in L.A. that way.”

“Do I want to hear it?” asked Cummins, scowling. “Fuck your stupid plot, whatever it is. What I want to know is, who’m I going to get to run the damn brothel?”

Shrugging, Limmit said, “That’s your problem.”

“I oughta step on your skinny face for that. You know who’s going to have to run that place? Me, that’s who!” She calmed down, with visible effort. “But I’m going to be nice to you. After you get your ass eaten off in L.A., you can come crawling back here and I’ll give you your old job back. I’ll even have the rooms beside it kept ready for you; don’t even bother moving your stuff out.”

“Thanks.” He turned for the door. “But I won’t be coming back,” he said grimly.

“Sure. We’ll see.”

Before he could close the office door behind him, her raucous voice called out after him. “Until you leave tonight, you’re still in charge of those beds, you hear? So put my favorite out, you know, Larry 4B. I need to relax after a shitty day like this.” Crossing the floor of the main barn, dodging the forklifts, each carrying another egg out to the loading dock or the ranch’s own freezers, Limmit paused outside one stall with the name LEONA scrawled in chalk below the stenciled code designation. Inside the stall, the hen lay on its side, as if stricken. Several eggers and techs stood around idly, waiting; one tech dispassionately inspected the enormous, distended cloacal opening. The straw beneath the tech’s feet was soaked with Leona’s blood: evidently, at some point it had been decided that replacing it was a waste of time. “Watch out, Cal,” he heard one of the eggers call, laughing, to the tech. “Don’t forget the time you poked your head too far and got sucked up in one of those. Like to smothered before we got you out.”

Limmit knelt down beside the hen’s head. The red, equine eyes flickered in recognition, then clouded. “Nernts,” it gasped, the honking voice strangling somewhere in the animal’s beak. “Nernts neel bagh.”

“I know it hurts,” soothed Limmit, stroking the down alongside its beak. “Don’t fret—it’ll be all right.” He looked up and saw one of the techs gazing amusedly down at the scene they made. Leona’s eyes had closed as if she had been comforted, childlike, to sleep.

Limmit straightened up, meeting the gaze of the tech leaning casually against the animal’s flank. “How is she?” he asked evenly.

“She?” echoed the tech, puzzled. “You mean the hen? Dying. The egg went blastomic—she’ll never get it out alive. Even if we went in and took the egg out in pieces, she’s too ripped up inside to survive. Besides,” she said coolly, “it’s too old to go to that much trouble to save. Only a few egglaying months left.” The tech shrugged her wide shoulders and turned away.

He glared silently at her retreating back. Stupid bitch, he mouthed. Looking up, he saw one of the eggers watching him. He recognized her and quickly left the stall, his face burning angrily. “Limmit, wait!” the egger called after him. He only quickened his paces; behind him, in the stall, Leona moaned, then screamed shrilly at another contraction convulsing her massive form.

The egger caught up with him in his living quarters beside the brothel. “Hello, Joan,” Limmit said, without looking around to see her.

“I heard you were leaving,” she said, watching him open a small suitcase on his bed.

“That’s right,” said Limmit. He studied the empty interior of the suitcase. There was nothing he could think of that he wanted to take from here. He glanced up at the shelves above his bed, lined with the yellowing paperbacks he had dug out of the dunes piling up in an old bookstore in the city. The largest science fiction collection in the Southwest (anymore), thought Limmit, gazing up at their once bright covers; maybe the world now. Who needs it?

“How come?”

He snapped the suitcase shut and turned around to look at the egger. Her wide, coarse face looked the same as when they had graduated together from the company’s high school six years ago. “Let’s just say I’m tired of the place.”

She looked hurt. “You shouldn’t let them get to you,” she said. “They’re not mean—they just don’t have time to get attached to them like you do.”

He snorted derisively. “I’m the last person you can tell that to. I run this little place, remember? I know exactly who gets attached to what around here. Which reminds me, I’ve got to go stiffen up Larry 4B for Bonna Cummins.”

Joan stood silent for a moment, her close-cropped head bent as if studying her workboots. “Is that the only reason you’re leaving?” she asked softly. “I mean... it’s not because everyone here knows who your father was, is it?”

Limmit stared at her without saying anything.

“Because, if that’s it,” she gulped, and stammered on confusedly, “that’s nothing to be ashamed of, is it? I mean, without him, there wouldn’t even have been a Phoenix Egg Ranch, would there?” She looked at him in mute appeal.

“What makes you think I’m ashamed of my father?”

“Well, you know, taking your mother’s name and all.” “That’s just the way she brought me up; neither he nor I had anything to do with it. It’d be stupid for me to change it now.” She stood for a moment longer, gazing mournful and inarticulate at him, then she turned and fled out the door. Sighing, Limmit unlocked the brothel’s drug and alcohol cabinet and, without bothering to sign them out, swallowed dry two of the precious amphetamine analogs. Plenty of them out where I’m going, he reflected moodily. I’ll mail Bonna a couple to make up for these.

He sat down on the bed and looked off into space. Without him, he thought, there wouldn’t even have been a Phoenix Egg Ranch. What a thing to be proud of. Just one of the many wonderful things Lester Gass left for us. In his mind, he surveyed the ranch’s barns like hangars, every stall containing its massive roclike hen, delivering its weekly egg to be cut up and processed into thousands of ersatz edible items. The increase in body size had had a parallel effect on brain capacity. The hens, too large to move about, watched and listened with interest to everything that happened around them.

And the brothel too, thought Limmit. My old man thought of everything.

Feeling the first wave of energy released by the capsules, he stood up and left the room. Better take care of business, he thought, crossing the walkway into the women’s section.

He injected double the standard dose into Larry 4B, the small red eyes watching him with a curious emptiness behind them. He had never felt as close to anything in the brothel as to the egglayers below—the animals here having brains still too small for speech or thought, even if their beaks hadn’t been removed surgically, the only nongenetic alteration that took place on the ranch. Limmit watched the swelling response to the drug begin. By the time Bonna knocked off work and arrived here, it would reach its maximum.

He didn’t inject any more of the cocks, or douche any of the hens. Let everybody do it themselves, he thought, returning to his rooms. Or with each other, though that was hardly likely: Lester Gass’ original schedule of fines for intercourse between ranch employees had long been forgotten, never having been used more than once or twice.

Waiting for him in his rooms was Joe Goonsqua, the GPC official. “Ready to leave?” he asked, smiles and dimples breaking out all over his cherubic face.

“Sure,” said Limmit. The amphetamine analogs were making him tense.

“Well,” said Goonsqua, beaming, “the Greater Production Corporation just wants you to know that it appreciates your help in this little matter. And that, of course, we will appreciate your further discretion.” He extended a large black briefcase toward Limmit. “This is it.”

Limmit took the case, the weight of it nearly pulling him over. “Christ, it weights a ton.”

“Well, heh, you know what’s in it.” Goonsqua stepped back and clasped his hands together, looking around the room. “Sure you’re all set now? Everything taken care of?”

He nodded. “There wasn’t much.”

Goonsqua cleared his throat. “I understand,” he said, “that you have, ah ... something set aside for your personal use in the, uh, you know?” He waved a hand vaguely toward the door and the brothel beyond.

“That’s right,” said Limmit. “Glad you reminded me. I’ll have to give the key to the compartment to Bonna Cummins on my way out.” He drew the key out of his pocket and glanced at it. He remembered the warm feathers of its breast, the tangling of the down with his own hair. Perhaps, he thought, I should’ve said goodbye to her—if she would’ve understood.

“No, that’s all right,” said Goonsqua. “I’ll take care of it.”

“It’s on my way,” he said, repocketing it.

“Give me the key,” said Goonsqua, his face suddenly florid and unsmiling.

Limmit stared at him, until something clicked together inside himself. “Sure,” he said understandingly, drawing out the key and dropping it in Goonsqua’s palm. “Try everything once, I guess.”

Who would’ve thought it, Limmit said to himself as he crossed the main barn floor, heading for the loading area where the plane was waiting. That an important bastard like that would even be interested. The dying hen screamed miserably again, thrashing in the blood-soaked straw.

All over L.A., television sets were being turned on; in Orange County they were on already.

The first wave of the assassination party emerged onto the roof of the building. The setting sun, visible when they had started hiking up the dark stairwells, was gone now, headed for China. Eddie Azusa, working by starlight, began clamping the weapon and the separate, multilensed gunsight to the guardrail. Milch, the triggerman and hence the unofficial host for the party, pulled at a plastic jug of homemade alcohol, a cloudy brown fluid, then passed it down to little Morris, sprawled exhausted against an airshaft. Being a newcorner, Morris had been conned into hauling up everything.

“Ready to go,” announced Azusa, and peered through the gunsight’s main eyepiece. It had two: one through which the gunner could zero in on almost infinitesimal targets, and another that allowed a second person to observe as well. The apparatus had been designed for CIA hit teams used to doing everything as a committee. “Pretty crowded tonight, though. Gonna be hard getting a clear shot.”

Milch replaced Azusa at the eyepiece and grunted. “Maybe,” he said thickly, “this time I won’t wait for no gray coats, just take out who I feel like.” He was half drunk already, which in itself was only a buffering for the otherwise lethal or at least incapacitating compounds he would, as the moment approached, slowly and luxuriously inject to steady his hand.

Observing Milch’s erratic motions, Azusa felt that there were few things in Rattown more disgusting than an alcoholic. He himself preferred kainine, in moderate amounts; as with the other compounds produced in the good Dr. Betreech’s labs somewhere in the Hollywood hills, there were no physical side effects to obscure the pure psychical, almost spiritual, changes produced. None of that tonight, however, Azusa told himself, checking the near-unconscious motion of his hand toward his inside jacket pocket; fine for the star and fine for the audience. But not for the “agent” who, he thought grimly, is going to have to keep his shit together to get through this party night.

From the other end of the roof came sounds of violent retching. Sixty-plus flights of stairs, laden like a packhorse, topped off with the unfamiliar alcohol, had been too much for little Morris.

“Obviously not cut out for this heavy revolutionary work,” said Azusa, to which Milch sniggered and said, “Send him over to Mother Endure.”

Patti F. swam out of the darkness, bearing another plastic jug, full, out of the number that Morris had carried up. Milch’s current piece, and thus unofficial hostess: she set the jug down by the guardrail and stood by him placidly, her face as blank and vacant, Azusa saw, as any budding cowhead’s.

“Wanna look?” Milch said, offering her the other eyepiece. Together they focused on the brightly lit street far below and away. Without removing his eye from the gunsight he groped for the plastic jug, guzzled from it, set it down, and fumblingly began caressing her flanks. A type of foreplay, Azusa knew. Later tonight, when he had made himself ready, Milch’s fingers would be curled around more triggers than one.

“See any you like?” asked Milch, twirling the gunsight’s knobs.

“Ooh, there’s a nice one; I’d like to snuff that one, or that one, or ...”

Azusa looked over their heads, down to the distant Interface. From here it looked like a worm or a snake, filled with a slowly churning light, suspended close to the edge of the empty, disintegrating buildings and streets that constituted L.A., save for the merely disintegrating part that was the slum. A snake, he reflected, curiously moved in spite of his functional cynicism concerning the party’s quasi-mystical rationale. He became aware of a gentle guttural sound somewhere in the dark. It was little Morris snoring. He headed in the sound’s general direction. “Just a happy band of assassins,” he said to the night as he unpacked the tiny portable television from Morris’ prone form, plugged it into one of the ubiquitous outlets to the cable network that permeated all of L.A. like a living nervous system in a corpse. Bless John Mox, he thought, and his Orange County-size ego—keeping the cables into the slums live even though the chances of gaining any converts from this audience were just about zilch. He switched the set on, bathing a section of the roof in its soft, gray, trapezoidal light.

“A pimp,” said Leslie. He could smell it, like blood; operating on the principle that it takes one to know one. He watched the figure, large black briefcase in tow, walking slowly on the other side of the congested Interface. The figure disappeared into the crowd. “From out of town—New York, maybe.”

“Huh?” inquired the little whore clutching his arm. She was eighteen, having come to L.A. a week ago, the day after her birthday.

“That dude there,” said Leslie, pointing him out, as the thin figure reappeared for a moment at the opposite curb.

“He’s a pimp?”

“Yeah, but not a local.”

She pondered this a moment. “What’s he doing here?” she asked. “Nobody but big GPC officials and army brass fly that far. You sure he’s from New York?”

Smiling, he studied the serried rows of stroke books arranged in the racks outside of a little porn shop. Behind him and the girl, the Interface milled and jostled slowly. The bright covers, pink like some soft, edible candy, pleased him. Stuff, he thought, two-dimensional stuff. The phrase had popped whole into his mind, filling him with a sense of satisfaction. “Where else?” he mocked gently. “Phoenix, I suppose?”

“Okay, so he’s from New York, but what’s he doing here?” At least, she thought, looking up into his face, he’s in a good mood. This is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with him.

He shrugged. “Who knows. I’ve been watching him cruise up and down the Interface a dozen times already. Like he’s waiting for someone or something. Whatever it is, it must be important. When pimps start winging transcontinental, something’s up for sure.” A sudden, unarticulated thought came upon him, a sense of previously unintimated levels of pimpdom beyond this first barrier he, with all the force of his own eighteen years, was trying to penetrate. He wondered if the girl suspected that she was his first number.

She pressed her face into his leather sleeve. “Does this change our plans?”

The fleshy magazine covers flared for a split-second in his eyes, the harsh chemical lights lining the Interface perhaps receiving a momentary surge of current. “Shit. It would take more than that spooky asshole for me to pass up an opportunity like this. When those gates open up and Dr. Adder pulls out his machine, you’re going to be standing right there. If we pull this off, we’ll get you a free job that’ll make every other hooker on this street look sick.” His voice dropped a few cycles in pitch. “And isn’t that what you want? Hmm? For your own true friend?”

A tear formed a round dot, like ink, upon the leather. She lowered her face so he wouldn’t see. “I’m still... a little scared,” she said, her voice muffled, staring fixedly at her own slim, pale legs.

“Don’t worry,” he said, turning away from the porn shop’s racks, and drawing her by her bare arm into the street’s flow. He felt a pleasing, expectant tension within himself. As if, he thought, I know I’ll make it tonight, at last. My big break. An L.A. pimp can change two-dimensional fantasies to this; feeling the pressure of the girl’s arm upon his.

Behind them, the short, balding man inside the porn shop switched on the small television that hung over the cash register. Glancing back, the girl could see the luminous gray screen clearly through the shop’s door, her vision interrupted only by the figures passing by on the sidewalk.

From the air, Orange County and L.A. had appeared to Limmit to be slowly combusting, tinged like glowing coals with the last red rays from the sun. Sitting up front with the pilot, a madly grinning girl with ALICE stenciled on her breast pocket, he watched the land approach while half listening to her descriptions of it.

Orange County seemed to consist of randomly grouped pyramids of varying sizes, but all looming massive even from this altitude. The residential complexes, explained the pilot. Surrounding them were the remains of whatever suburbs or towns had not yet been reclaimed by decay and the hills’ patient, rugged foliage. To the north of them were the rectangular units of the industrial zones. They seemed absurdly small in comparison to the pyramids: she told him that the main parts were underground. She pointed out the small landing strip for which they were headed.

L.A. appeared to flow, like an avalanche of rubble, right up to the edge of Orange County. Cancerous, thought Limmit, slightly stunned by its horizontal immensity. Like the remains of some malignant growth, it spread haphazardly over the ground below. As the last light turned violet and faded, the intricate, convoluted details of L.A.’s tightly packed buildings and streets faded also, replaced, as darkness advanced, by the image of some thick, coagulated fluid staining the earth. Small, almost undetectable points of light appeared in the dead city’s northern section. At the southern edge, just barely within the dark mass, a narrow line of artificial light glowed.

“The Interface,” said the pilot, pointing to the line and grinning at him. “Hope you find what you want.”

Limmit said nothing, trying to gauge the distance from the landing strip in the Orange County industrial zone to the other, almost parallel strip of light.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the pilot, reading his thoughts. The plane started to descend with them and its cargo of eggs aboard. “There’s no hassle getting from Orange County to the Interface.”

She had been right. A sullen youth, one of a number loitering around the buildings near the airstrip, had, upon receiving a bill peeled off Limmit’s savings rolled up in his pocket, driven him and the black briefcase to the nearest end of the Interface and deposited him there without a word. The kid had then noisily motored off, back to the not-distant fringe of Orange County for more passengers.

That had been more than an hour ago; closer to two hours, Limmit realized, looking at his watch. In the interval he had paced slowly, propelled in part by the jostling crowd on the sidewalk, up and down the length of the Interface. At first, he had been approached by dozens of other youths, not sullen like the first, who offered him in succession an array of tablets, capsules, and vials of liquids unfamiliar to him. He declined, keeping one hand in his pocket on his roll of bills and the other clutching the briefcase, until they all had at last given up on him and left him alone.

The hookers were another thing. Their blank faces and the sharp, unnatural eyes of their pimps seemed to penetrate through him, waiting for him to approach like the other customers, or to pass on down the sidewalk. Limmit passed on, a sense of unease growing within him. Amputees, he thought, glancing covertly at another one; it must be that nearly half of them are missing something. A leg or an arm, or both, or more. He watched in fascinated revulsion as a legless hooker emerged from the doorway of one of the shabby buildings lining the street, and, under the watchful gaze of one of the older, more expensively dressed pimps on the street, began pulling her way through the crowd.

Christ, thought Limmit, what’s going on? Are they battle casualties or something? So many of them. And there was something strange about the intact ones as well: some undetectable sign of kinship with their mutilated sisters. What’s stranger, thought Limmit, is that the amputees seem to be doing the better business.

The rest of the Interface, Limmit saw, sorting out its gestalt in his mind, consisted of the innumerable porn shops and skin flick theaters that, apart from the dealers and hustlers in the street, seemed to comprise the street’s entire business; the scattered, unlit building fronts into which the hookers disappeared with their clients; a single obscenely greasy hamburger and taco stand surmounted by a neon sign that flashed the words HARRY’S HOT shit over and over (a joke, surmised Limmit, through unwilling to experiment to see just how perverted L.A. actually was); and the straights from Orange County, male, constituting the majority of the street crowd, in the classic ratio of herbivores to meat eaters. The crowd was dotted by a few random uniformed police who, as far as Limmit could see, seemed to do nothing but stand around and watch. No vehicles other than the bedraggled cars ejecting more straights at either end of the street; the crowd was too thick, clear across the width of the street, for any progress to be made except on foot.

Only one other thing, thought Limmit, watching for a moment his boots moving through the slowly accumulating layer of trash on the street, to constitute the entirety of the Interface. He felt suddenly cold, thinking of it. It was the black wrought-iron gates set directly in the middle of the street’s north side. An old man had pointed them out to him when Limmit, upon arriving, had inquired where he could find Dr. Adder.

Before the old man could do anything but point across the street at the gates, a young, bulky man in a gray coat had approached them and thrust a leaflet at them from a pile held under one arm. “Here,” said the young man in a sour, rehearsed monotone. “Save yourself.”

“Fuck off,” snapped the old man, retracting his outstretched arm.

“To hell with it,” muttered the leafleteer, as if coming to a decision deep inside himself. He had then flung the stack of leaflets at the old man, knocking him down in a flurried explosion of paper, then stalked off into the crowd.

“Who was that?” had asked Limmit, raising the old man from the sidewalk.

The old man snorted. “Street evangelist. One of John Mox’s damn MFers.”

The description had puzzled Limmit. “Are they always like that?”

‘Forget it.” The old man had clutched his arm tightly. “Why are you asking about Dr. Adder anyway?”

Limmit had instinctively tightened his grip on the briefcase’s handle. Before he could say anything, the old man spoke again.

“That’s a lot of crap about him and what he does. Believe me, I used to run this street, before Adder ever came along; wasn’t even called the Interface back then. You can trust me. I had those iron gates put up myself, special. So save your money.”

Uncomprehending, Limmit had managed to pull his arm free.

“Wait,” cried the old man as Limmit back-pedaled away. “I can find what you want—you don’t need that crap from Adder.” He had tried to pursue Limmit, but was swallowed up in the milling, unnoticing crowd.

Since then, Limmit had crossed the street and passed back and forth a dozen times or more in front of the black iron gates the old man had indicated. Inside them, across a small courtyard containing a few desiccated wall-clinging plants and what Limmit recognized as a motorcycle, propped up rigid and vaguely phantasmical upon its center stand, he could see the front door of Dr. Adder’s combined residence and place of business. He had come, complete with black briefcase, all the way from Phoenix to enter it.

But how, thought Limmit, gazing at and through the wrought iron. That idiot Goonsqua and his stupid plans. The gate had a lock on it the size of a small potato, and Limmit could see no button or other means of getting inside. How do I call for an appointment? he said to himself acidly. But the sarcastic note fell hollow inside him. Christ, he thought, I don’t even know what Dr. Adder does. An enigma, a complete, dark vacuum beyond the name. The black iron gates had, upon every subsequent passage, loomed larger and more ominous in his mind. Together with the amputee hookers, the old man’s strange babble, and the entire Interface itself, they were almost enough to make him wish he had never left Phoenix.

But not quite, he thought grimly. That would be death by suffocation; even this strange exile could be buffered by enough money. He glanced down at the briefcase, its solid weight in his hand raising his spirits. I might even get to enjoy it after a while. He looked up and saw, a little ways down the sidewalk, a whore and her pimp gazing idly in his direction.

Unlike most on the Phoenix Egg Ranch, Limmit had knowledge of coitus beyond that provided by the company brothel: one fumbling, guilt-inspiring session with Joan, bulky even back in grade school, and more memorable sessions during his brief career in the Army of the Southwest.

What the hell, speculated Limmit, running a thumb over the edge of the roll of bills in his pocket; when in L. A. This one seemed to have all her limbs intact, even if she did share the strangely bovine, blank expression somehow endemic to all the hookers on the street. He started to push his way through the crowd toward her. Perhaps, he thought, it’ll revitalize me. In L.A., maybe you have to lose your cherry all over again. A business expense. After her, he thought, I’ll know, just like a native, how to get in to see Dr. Adder.

Up in the shabby room she led him to (after he had deposited several bills in the palm of her “friend”), she switched on a small television sitting on a bureau. It was the only piece of furniture besides a large bed that seemed to have been frozen halfway through a process of disintegration. A totally tensionless bed, thought Limmit, sitting on its edge; soft, like adipose tissue. In the gray light from the television, the girl’s skin emerged section by section, her constant, vacant half-smile reflecting the TV’s somehow fungal luminescence. The incomplete spectrum made her nipples appear dark, coinlike. Like a dream, thought Limmit, watching her body by the television’s illumination. She seemed to be moving in slow motion, half real-time. The room’s dim spaces brought the strangely satisfying thought of grottoes to him.

Becoming bored, Dr. Adder watched his assistant, Pazzo, cleaning his fingernails with a surgical scalpel. He suddenly saw which particular scalpel Pazzo was using and reached across the desk to snatch it out of the smaller, older man’s hands. “Do that again,” said Adder, placing the instrument on the desktop, “and I’ll cut your fuckin’ colon out.” He laid his hands beside the scalpel, vaguely pleased with the effect. Like tools, he thought; cutting edges. They were both narrow, angular, like his own face and body.

“What is it with that knife anyway,” asked Pazzo irritably. They were both sitting in Adder’s front office.

“It’s not a knife, ass. Besides which I have a sentimental attachment for it.”

Pazzo snorted. “Don’t take out your ill temper on me. If you weren’t so damn tight, we wouldn’t have to wait an hour for that machine back there to warm up.”

Grinning ferally, Adder said, “They don’t make them anymore. It’s unique.” That pleased him.

“I give up,” said Pazzo. The conversation didn’t seem to be making any sense, as if his own fatigue had caught up with him in this slack moment, waiting for things to be ready again in the operating room. How does Adder do it? he wondered, thinking of all the small blue capsules, amphetamine analogs, that he, Pazzo, had had to take to keep up with Adder for the last two days. He felt tired, or even more. Drained, he thought. Or even ... sucked dry. He rose and walked over to the office window. “Hey,” he said, looking out into the black iron gates and the night-covered Interface. “Guess who’s coming.”

“Shitfire,” said Adder disgustedly from behind his boots, which had taken the place of the scalpel on the desk. It could be only one person. “That pain in the ass.” He weighed the scalpel in his hand, then extended his arm and sank its point into the edge of the desk. “I’ve got a good mind to dump on him and his money. Do I need the aggravation?” He drew a meditative forefinger through the right angle formed by the blade and the desktop, and watched as Pazzo, Chaplinesque, pantomimed turning empty pockets inside out. Adder sighed. “Go down and let him in.”

All my old clown tricks, thought Pazzo, wearily descending the stairs. All of Adder’s screwed games. I can’t take it anymore.

Adder removed his feet from the desk and brushed a few stray crumbs from his clothes. He balled up a few greasy food wrappings, marked HARRY’S, and tossed them across the room. Personally fastidious, he affected a degree of slovenliness about the nonsurgical part of his working quarters that appalled everyone except Pazzo, who was used to it. A layer, ankle-deep at points, of trash and other lesser and larger debris was randomly interrupted by stacks of yellowing stroke books, empty bottles, and unidentified objects. Black-and-white photographs of his work, like a catalog, were haphazardly tacked to the walls. It was, in actuality, a studied effect: Adder’s attempt to simulate some sort of archetypal and ultimate abortionist’s den-tattoo-parlor-sink of iniquity. He enjoyed degrading his clientele in these small ways.

Pazzo reentered, followed by a large, tailored military uniform. Its occupant had a slightly disintegrating look, as if facial sinews were being cut beneath the skin. The effects of imminent kainine collapse, Adder knew. “Good evening, General,” he said.

The general flopped down bonelessly in the chair across the desk from Adder. “I’ve got,” he said, “half of what you asked for. That’s all V m going to pay.”

Adder shrugged. “Pay as you please. You don’t even have to pay at all. Since you won’t be getting anything until I get my price.”

The general started to sweat. The chair he sat in was permeated with the nervous perspiration of Adder’s clientele. “Look,” he blustered, “nobody futzes around with Romanza. I know what I want and you’re going to regret it if I don’t get it.” His lower lip swelled out like a blister, catching the salt sweat from his gray cheeks.

Adder had a patrician distaste for melodrama in real life. He winked at Pazzo leaning in the door frame, and pointed a thumb at the general. “A big man,” he said. Pazzo, with a curiously blank expression, formed a small circle with his left thumb and forefinger and in an automatic rhythm thrust his right forefinger through it.

The general’s eyes, porcine, swiveled back and forth between the two faces he felt mocking him. “You punks—”

“Nyeh, cram it,” said Adder, warming to his role. He leaned across the desk, hands flat against it, bringing his face a few inches away from the general’s.

“Jam it on!” shouted Pazzo unexpectedly from the doorway. Adder looked up for a second, surprised and momentarily baffled, then returned his concentration to the general.

“I’ve got enough customers,” said Adder, snarling theatrically, “to crack your ass for a favor anytime I want. As a matter of fact”—he jerked out the scalpel—“I might slice you up right now and just let them get me off the hook. Which can be done.” “You tell him,” interjected Pazzo again. “Show ’im that two can play these hyperthyroid games—you’ve seen enough of Betreech’s old movies.”

“Will you shut up,” said Adder, enraged, turning his knifelike face upon Pazzo. What’s with him? he thought seethingly. He turned back to the general, feeling both his mood and effect shattered. “You want her?” he said. “You know how much it costs.” The words sounded lame in his mouth. Pazzo was right, thought Adder. A bad old movie.

Somehow, Romanza seemed not to have noticed Pazzo’s interruptions. The general’s face had frozen upon it the look of someone abruptly sprung upon by something large and carnivorous. Shakily, he fetched a small silver box from his coat pocket, extracted a minute red capsule, and swallowed. Adder could follow its slow, struggling descent through the fat-swaddled throat. “Please, Adder,” the general whispered. He ran pale, blunt fingers through his sparse hair. “I can’t raise that much money. But I’ve got to have—you know, I—” He broke off, his chins trembling, infantile.

It always, reflected Adder, comes down to this. You contemptible turd. He had watched more than enough such men, with their gonads where their brains should be, to have formulated certain behavior patterns for them. Could, in fact, predict their precise moment of collapse: that point at which the mark was left groveling sans wit, sans honor, sans dignity, and soon sans money, ready to exchange any and everything for the object of his fixated lusts. General Romanza, being of weaker stuff than most, and having accelerated the process with overindulgence in a variety of drugs, was nearing that point rapidly.

Adder knew just what to do, which was to screw out of the general everything as quickly as possible. A certain momentum would thereby be achieved, the velocity of which would almost be capable of sucking out his gold fillings.

“Don’t worry, General R., old fella,” Adder said, rising from his chair. He felt good again; even if, he thought, I’m going to have to ream Pazzo’s ass out for fooling around like that. He walked over to a large, dust-laden television in one corner and switched it on; its gray rectangle of light fell into the room. Might as well catch old Mox’s broadcast, he thought, until the operating room’s ready. He stopped to pat the general on his trembling shoulder as he headed back to his chair behind the desk. “I’m sure,” he continued affectionately, “we’ll be able to find a solution to your financial difficulties—one that everybody will be happy with, you’ll see.”

Through the walls, Limmit could hear all around him the sounds of happy or—mostly—obsessed copulation. He stood by the grime-encrusted window of the hooker’s room and stared out at the scurrying Interface below. No escape from it, he thought despairingly. At least not tonight.

“I’m sorry,” the whore called out again. Miserable, conscious of some failure. He turned away from the window and walked back to the side of the bed. “It’s all right,” he said, gently touching her shoulder. She was somehow prettier now that her cowlike passivity had been penetrated. “Not your fault.” His eyes passed over her small, handful breasts, the flat boyish plain of her stomach, and then, unstoppable, to between her thighs, her legs sprawled artlessly apart on the bed. There, the sight that had frozen him, then swelled and pushed him across the room to the window from where he had looked out sightlessly into the night, sweating, his mind convulsed with sudden fear and surmise.

She had finished stripping, he remembered, practiced, seconds after she had switched on the small television that provided the room’s only illumination, the screen’s tiny, muted laughter sounding distant; Limmit had stepped forward to the side of the bed, hands at his belt buckle; leaned over her patient, horizontal form; and found, trembling beneath him, pudenda that had been altered and reconstructed so as to be nearly unrecognizable. Engorged with real or simulated passion, they had reddened and flexed slightly under his gaze. Baroque, pathic convolutions of the vulva, other parts shining wet like fleshy sea plants emerging from the cave formed by her womb. The effect was indescribable: Limmit had felt himself growing dizzy, falling toward them before he had sucked in his breath raggedly and fled to the window.

Now the girl lay on her side, looking at him with sad eyes, unable to comprehend what had happened. Limmit, his innards quivering but under control, studied the sight again. What lusts they served to satisfy, what perversions they could adeptly draw forth, he was not even able to guess. He realized that there were things he might not even care to find out about L.A.

He saw, surmounting it all, at the point where perhaps not too long ago her pubic hair might have begun, a small circular tattoo on her abdomen. He had noticed the same mark prominent on the stumps of the amputee hookers in the street, but had not gotten close enough to make out its details. It was an amateurish, almost childishly executed cartoon of a grinning snake’s head. The conviction grew cold and large within him. He touched the tattoo lightly. “His trademark?” he asked.

The hooker knew who he meant. She shook her head. “The girls do it themselves,” she said, “after the operations. With a ball-point pen and a needle.”

Limmit nodded slowly. It figured: the altered genitalia had a weirdly professional finish to them, too smooth to match evenly the crude cartoon snake. Professional, he thought numbly. So this is what Dr. Adder does. I can’t even handle this, and I’m supposed to deal with him? Impossible.

And what’s worse, Limmit realized, is that I know there’s even more to it than this. But what? He searched his memory, looking for some clue he had seen in the street, or the old man’s babble, or something, that indicated anything beyond what this girl had shown him between her legs.

Perhaps I just sense it, said Limmit to himself. Something I still don’t know about Dr. Adder. Or else there is nothing more to be revealed—this was enough for L.A. to shake me with.

He glanced again at her, then away. Why did she do it, why did they all do it? wondered Limmit. It might be as well to ask it of lemmings or the tides. Sea waves, animal waves, human waves; he was beginning to feel that whores’ motives were like the oceans—basically unfathomable. He asked anyway, and was proven correct. She responded to his question by smiling sadly and slowly shaking her head.

There was no point in staying, trying to delay the inevitable. He peeled another bill off his rapidly diminishing roll, tucked it into her clothes piled carelessly at the foot of the bed, and picked up the black briefcase. He was wrapped in the hallway’s darkness, after the door shut behind him had cut off his last sight of her, vulnerable in the television’s flat glare.

Emerging onto the star- and lamp-lit roof from the total darkness of the stairwell, Azusa finished zipping up his fly. I hope nothing’s gone wrong, he thought, trying to locate Milch through the crowd of partygoers. I shouldn’t have left him—not at a time like this. Berating himself under his breath, he began pushing his way through the massed, sweating bodies and flushed faces.

His worst fears were realized when he reached the guardrail. Milch stood by one side of the gun and sight clamped to the rail, while Patti F. lay sprawled a few yards away, where (Azusa surmised) Milch had flung her, eyes wide in uncomprehending fear like an animal’s. The partygoers had formed a little crescent around the tableau, their hilarity dampened by whatever had happened.

“Where the hell have you been?” rasped Milch upon catching sight of Azusa. His drunkenness was gone. His face was livid with anger and a complex mix of other emotions.

“Screwing,” said Azusa without thinking. It was the truth: one of the advantages to being Milch’s agent was the spinoff charisma Azusa derived from his intimate, indispensable association with him. The real object of adoration among the active residents of Rattown, both male and female, was Dr. Adder, Azusa had realized upon his own arrival in the slums two years ago. But Milch and the two or three other triggermen were celebrities enough in their own right.

“You buddyfucker,” said Milch venomously. “You’re the one that hooked me up with that bitch.” He waved a shaking hand in Patti F.’s direction.

He hadn’t, but Azusa let it slide, argument being pointless. “So what’s wrong with her?”

“Don’t you see, you dumb cocksucker. Look—right—there.” Azusa followed the direction of Milch’s quivering forefinger. Patti F. looked back at them both in mute resentment.

“So what’s the matter?” asked Azusa, exasperated.

“Her ring. Right there. On her goddamn hand. ”

“A ring, and that’s all? Jesus Christ, the last chick you had up here had rings through her nose, her snatch, even her nipples. What’s so special about this one’s?”

Milch breathed heavily. Almost bashfully, he whispered, “Well, shit, it’s my old high school’s ring.” The words tumbled out in a rush. “Buena Maricone High School, back in Orange County.”

Azusa stared into Milch’s eyes and thought amazedly: I’ll never figure this dude out. Never. What’s running through his mind? How ashamed his old civics teacher would be to see him here, gun in hand? Do his sphincters tremble at John Mox’s TV

image? What the hell—maybe the night could yet be salvaged. He motioned over two of Milch’s hard-core fans and pointed out Patti F. to them. Get rid of her,” he said, not even bothering to watch as they hustled her off.

He surveyed the party. Milch needed another female to help him pull the trigger, preferably fresh stuff to get his mind off that stupid Patti F. (but then again, he thought charitably, how was she to have known). He spotted the teenager he had just had in the stairwell, plunged into the crowd, and dragged her by one wrist over to the guardrail.

It must be nice, thought Azusa, dispassionately watching Milch grappling the anonymous new girl, to be so talented and simple—to forget and heal so easily. Not to know the agonies of responsibility. Ah well. He glanced at the small TV, still muttering and giggling to itself nearby. Not long, he thought, till Mox comes on. The best time for the shot. He drew from his jacket a cardboard box, surprisingly heavy for its small size, and, sensing the crowd of partygoers press forward excitedly, lifted the lid to reveal a massive, intricately detailed large-caliber bullet.

If only life was like a science fiction novel, thought Limmit, pushing slowly through the crowds on the street again. He remembered his own collection sitting in the shelves over his bed in Phoenix, now lost to him forever. If only people actually did just sit around and talk, unloading on each other the secret or even well-known underpinnings of their society ... info-dump, the practice had been called in a book review from one of the tattered old magazines Limmit had among his collection.

The incompetent writer’s way of revealing the details of his story’s setting, or whatever axe that particular writer had to grind. In reality, it never took place: the fundamentals of a society remained unarticulated, something to be lived upon, not talked about. There are no revealing conversations, thought Limmit, for me to eavesdrop on and discover what’s underneath L.A. Something about Dr. Adder; that’s messed me up so bad.

He stopped still on the sidewalk. The traffic was thinner here, at one far end of the Interface. L.A.’s dark buildings sagged together out of the reach of the street’s neon lights. The black briefcase hung oppressively heavy, crushing in his hand. There was no hope of pressing on to see Dr. Adder, not at this moment, even if he could get in. The fear, thought Limmit. I need a drink. Is there alcohol in L.A.?

Miraculously, he noticed a flickering neon sign, BAR, above the door of the last building before the light ended. As he entered and walked hurriedly to the bar, he had only the general impression that the semidark interior was filled with people seated at small, circular tables.

After he knocked back half of the brown acrid fluid the bartender produced in exchange for another bill from his roll, Limmit glanced over his shoulder to get a better look at the bar’s other occupants. Jesus, he thought, turning back to gaze into the remainder of his drink. There had been only one bar, company-owned, on the Phoenix Egg Ranch, so it was impossible to go into the wrong one. Even if this is the only bar in L.A., he said to himself, it’s still the wrong choice.

He glanced quickly around again, hoping that his eyes, adjusted to the darkness, would reveal that the former sight had been an illusion. It hadn’t been: The bar’s tables were still crammed with scores, or even hundreds, of replicas of the gray-coated leafleteer who had knocked down the old man earlier. They were all obviously surly with alcohol, and bending upon him unwavering, hate-filled stares.

Limmit looked up into the bartender’s blank, unsympathetic face, then around to the door by which he had entered. It seemed a long distance away, through a narrow corridor of the packed tables. Which is more likely, he thought, to get the shit beat out of me: making a break for it or staying put? Shit—this is what happens when you go into strange bars.

“Another one for my friend,” said an unfamiliar voice as Limmit was gazing morosely into his now empty glass. An arm slapped him across the shoulders. “And one for me.”

Limmit looked in astonishment at the short, grinning figure perched on the bar stool next to him. “Uh, no thanks,” he mumbled. The figure wasn’t wearing a gray coat—was he just crazy or what? “I was just thinking of leaving.”

“Nonsense,” said the figure as the bartender produced two more full glasses. “These guys’ll crack your ass cold if you try to leave here without me.”

“I should feel safe in here?”

The other shrugged. “Like I said, as long as you’re with me. It’s a popular assumption among these MoFos that I’m some sort of fingerman for the snipers up in Rattown. They think if they piss me off, they’ll be the next to get lined up in some gunsight. It’s not true, of course, but as long as they believe it, it’s all right with me. My name’s Droit, by the way.”

“Rattown?” muttered Limmit to himself, puzzled. “Snipers?” This sounded ominous. He quickly gulped half of the second glass before him. To hell with waiting for the info-dump to come. “You may think this is funny,” he said, “but would you mind explaining those to me? I’m a stranger here.”

Droit grinned wider. “Yes, I know,” he said. He waved a vague hand to the north. “Rattown. All those deserted slums and office buildings and shit in back of the Interface. The rest of L.A. Most of the dealers and hustlers you see here live right in the buildings lining the street. Certain others who are, shall we say, a little farther gone, live way back there. Two types, actives and downers. The downers are the real basket cases— too fucked up to do more than squat in their rooms and tremble. L.A.’s quite a psychosis factory. A woman they call Mother Endure—beats me where she came from—looks after them. Scrounges up food and sometimes medicine, lets them suck off her life force. The actives, most of them like to go on top of the abandoned office buildings with old CIA weapons they’ve dug up, and snuff one of these MoFos every now and then.” He sipped his own drink.

“MoFos,” said Limmit. “Motherfuckers?”

Droit shook his head. “Moral Forces. The Video Church of, to be exact. They’re John Mox’s little evangelists—he sermonizes on TV every night, a big power on the GPC exec board back in Orange County. Most everybody in L.A. hates Mox, though they watch him just for kicks, and some of the more hyperactive ones like to plug his fans in the gray coats.”

“Tell me,” said Limmit. His tongue felt numb and clumsy from the alcohol. “Do they ever miss?”

“Not so far.”

“Then I’d feel safer out there than in here.”

“That’s academic, since I don’t feel like leaving just yet. Why not stick around and answer a few questions for me?”

“Why should I?”

Droit smiled unpleasantly. “You might just want to oblige me, considering I know what’s in that briefcase.”

Limmit considered this for a moment. Fuckin’ Goonsqua, he thought. Sending me out here not knowing anything more about L.A. than anybody else stuck on the Phoenix Egg Ranch would, not even how to get in to see Dr. Adder. Probably thought I wouldn’t come if I did know. And now this guy. “How do you know?” he said finally. “And so what if you do.” Droit’s smile grew wider. “Oh, I know all sorts of interesting things, Mr. E. Allen Limmit-who-just-got-in-from-Phoenix. And there’s sufficient markets for my information, thank you. Granted there aren’t many police around, but I could find one who’d be interested in your briefcase’s contents. But more likely, I’d sell the info to my old and reliable customer, Dr. Adder. Surprise is half the game in these sorts of transactions, hmm? Which is what you’d lose thereby. Whereas, just give me a few answers, and see how much you’d gain, relatively.”

“All right,” said Limmit, after a second’s thought. “What do you want to know?”

Droit pulled out a little pen and notebook. “Are you,” he asked clinically, “heterosexual?”

“Yeah, sure.” I guess the bedhen counts that way, he thought. “Have you seen any hookers here in L.A. that look like your mother?”

“How could I? My mother’s dead.”

“Looks like, not is. ”

“You ask some pretty weird questions, you know that?” exploded Limmit. He flushed with anger, feeling mocked by the absurdity of it.

Droit patiently laid the notebook on the bar. “Look,” he said. “I’m in the information business. I’m the last of the pure, dispassionate social researchers. Selling my findings to whoever’ll pay the most. I do all right. Certain people, like Dr. Adder, are very interested in some of the things I find out.”

“Dr. Adder wants to know if I’m queer?”

“No,” said Droit flatly, watching his own hand pick up the notebook again. “This is for another customer.”

“All right then,” said Limmit. “What else?”

Drawing a thin pack of cards from his coat pocket, Droit said, “These are pictures of some typical L.A. women.” He handed the pack to Limmit. “Sort through them and pick out the ones whose laps you’d most like to, and least like to, sit on during a long train journey.”

“There are,” said Limmit, “no trains anymore.”

“That’s all right. Some of these don’t have laps.”

Limmit turned over the top card, glanced at it, then turned it back over and handed the pack to Droit.

“Don’t worry,” said Droit, scribbling in his notebook. “Your silence says as much to me as anything else you could have done.”

“That’s really sick,” said Limmit. He felt depressed now, the picture having reminded him of Dr. Adder and his handiwork. “Is that all the questions? I’ve got business to take care of.” “That’ll do for now.”

Limmit swiveled around and saw that the bar was vacant except for themselves. Empty chairs and tables bare except for clusters of bottles and glasses. “Where did they go?” he asked.

Droit waved his pen at the door and the street beyond it. “They left some time ago,” he said. “They carry TVs along the sidewalk when Mox’s nightly spiel comes on. You missed it—if you want to see the old fucker, you’ll have to wait for his ser-monette in a couple hours. Most of the MoFos would prefer to stay in here and get loaded, rather than go out and risk getting shot. But if you’re going to stay in Mox’s little fan club, you have to take some chances.”

Outside the bar, Droit turned to Limmit. “Don’t worry about your little business deal,” he said. “I don’t really know what’s in your briefcase, though I don’t doubt I will before long. I just knew that somebody like you would be coming, and then when you arrived I got your name from Alice, the pilot.”

“Who else knew I was coming?”

“No one. At least, no one you'll be coming into contact with. Even though I could have used the money, there are certain, shall we say, sequences of events that generate more useful information if allowed to run their full course.”

“I’m glad,” said Limmit, “you’ve got my best interests at heart.”

“Dispassionate science, my friend. I’ll see you around.” He walked off down the street.

Limmit felt cold sober. The alcohol’s effect had drained off, leaving him here on the street again, no further than before. The rest of the Interface and the black iron gates were still in front of him. Let’s get on with it, he thought. The fear remained, but something else had died. He sensed other things growing, the running out of time.

“Is your little friend Lyle going to be waiting for you when we leave tonight?” Dr. Adder smiled innocently across the surgical table.

“Yeah, I suppose so,” said Pazzo, sullenly concentrating on the equipment’s gauges. This is the part I hate, he thought. The finishing touches on a job—when I’m shot and he’s really starting to come on. His own rabid joy. Especially after kicking Romanza’s ass out of here, and then hearing himself talked about even more than usual by Mox. Dualities, said Pazzo to himself.

“Don’t know what you see in that little honey,” murmured Adder absently, deftly smoothing with a whirring chrome instrument the stitches in the spread-eagled female crotch on the table. Transforming the elaborate surgical alterations performed on the unconscious girl’s flesh into a weird semblance of virginity. “No accounting for tastes, I guess.”

Pazzo noticed Adder’s hands laying down the tool. He looked up into Adder’s amused, baiting face.

“Right?” said Adder archly. “No accounting for tastes, is there?”

Feeling his face grow heated, Pazzo said nothing, continuing to meet Adder’s level gaze.

“What accounts for little Lyle’s taste, I wonder?” continued Adder. “KY, most probably. Smegma, perhaps, if his parents were antiquarian enough. Have you tried putting honey on your honey’s honey?”

“Knock it off,” said Pazzo. “Dr. Adder—the world’s last queerbaiter. There’s something to be proud of, all right.” “And you’re the last one in the world to be ashamed of it. Not many of you little honeys left, are there? Glad I’m not a faggot.” “Get screwed.”

With a speed and agility that astonished Pazzo, Adder vaulted over the girl-laden surgical table, knocked Pazzo down, and knelt on his chest. “You fuckin’ queer,” he said, grinning fiendishly, and menaced one side of Pazzo’s face with the surgical instrument.

“Christ,” said Pazzo, straining his face away from the chrome. “You’ve flipped out—you’re really on something tonight.”

Adder tossed the tool away and stood up. “Bullshit,” he said, almost childishly hurt by the accusation. “Nothing but adrenaline high—you know that.”

Pulling himself up, gasping for breath, Pazzo nodded. “Yeah, I know,” he wheezed. I only said it to hurt him, he thought. Get him off me.

“Look,” said Pazzo, his voice measured. “Maybe you’re still up for fun and games, but I’m exhausted. I just want to go home and go to sleep.”

Adder picked up the surgical instrument and walked around to the other side of the table. “You know, Pazzo,” he said, his narrow hands resuming work almost independently of the rest of him, “I’m actually very fond of you ... but I’m beginning to think you’re not cut out for L.A.” He smiled thinly.

My bones agree, thought Pazzo, feeling them being pulled, dead weight, to the earth’s mass below. He watched the gauges, the edges of his vision starting to haze from fatigue.

The proprietor of the hamburger stand called Harry’s Hot Shit leaned his bare, meaty arms on his grease-stained counter and observed the traffic on the Interface. In my own way, he thought, I’m just as important to this street as Dr. Adder. He does his work, I do mine: cut and stitch, thaw and cook. He fingered one of the paper napkins that read HARRY’S HOT SHIT —WE FEED THE INTERFECA, misprinted by some spaced-out Rattowner on an old offset he had unearthed. From below L.A., the proprietor thought, whence all blessings flow, including my frozen meat.

“So how come the name?” inquired the kid sitting on the other side of the counter. A few crumbs and spots of grease lay before him, remnants.

The proprietor ignored him, content and impassive. Young stuff, he thought, cataloguing the street’s female inhabitants. Old stuff. One-legged, two-legged, other. All stuff. He liked the word—it implied to him, if not inanimation, at least submissiveness. He rolled it silently through his head, the s sliding and hissing up to the t behind his incisors, the ff passing without a sound through his lips like an invisible pearl. Live meat, frozen meat. Adder fixes them, I fix them; he sends out to me for hamburgers, I send them up to him, they come to my counter and eat. So how come Mox never talks about me on the TV?

“I said, how come the name?”

He looked at the kid as if from a lofty height. He hadn’t seen him around before, and had his suspicions. “What name?” he asked.

The kid pointed up to the flashing neon sign.

“What’s your name?” asked the proprietor, as though this would somehow answer it.

“Edgar.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen, of course. Why’d you ask?” the kid snapped. He was obviously both on something, probably kainine, and a believer in a good offense.

“Oh, nothing,” the proprietor said coolly. “I just hadn’t seen you around here is all.”

“I just haven’t eaten here before,” said the kid, glaring upward through his lowered eyebrows.

The proprietor’s attention wandered away while the kid calculated the best means of sneaking away. Before he could slide from the torn plastic stool a policeman had responded to the proprietor’s unobtrusive signal and nabbed the kid by his collar.

“Buddyfucker!” yelled the kid as the silent policeman gently dragged him off to the car that would return him to Orange County.

“Now you know,” said the proprietor, folding the crisp bill the policeman had given him. “Come back next year, when you’re of age.” He tucked the money away in his spattered apron, and felt momentarily sad. I’m not it, he thought. Not the big time—like Adder and Mox. The double star we orbit around.

His foot slipped in something wet on the sidewalk, and Limmit lurched heavily into another person. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, too sunk in his own thoughts to look up to see which of the anonymous figures on the street, hustler or straight, he had collided with. Before he could continue on his way, he noticed a woman’s hand clutching his free arm. He looked up into her face, familiar enough after the years since he had seen her last to stagger him under the weight of memories.

“Jesus,” he said, after a moment’s dumbfounded funk. “Mary. Mary Gorgon.”

“Old E. Allen,” she said tenderly. She drew him, unresisting, into the shadow of the building they were beside, out of the harsh blue-white light and the pull of the crowd. “I never thought I’d see you in L.A.,” she said, smiling, her face level with his.

Limmit laughed nervously, his emotions confused. “I never thought I’d be here either.” He paused. She looked almost exactly the same to him as before, complete to tight faded denims. He wondered for a moment, as he had done before, where she and her comrades obtained their distinctive thick-soled boots. Perhaps the Front had its own factory or something. “What about you?” he asked. “The revolution over or something?”

Stiffening slightly, she shook her head. “Organizing. We don’t win battles on guts alone.” She grinned slightly at her own melodramatic tone.

“Organizing? Here? An Amputee Hooker Battalion—that’s a hot idea.”

Another shake of the head. “Not here. The slums.” Her smile had faded but not, he saw with a pang, from annoyance with him—but concern. “What about you?” she said quietly. “What are you doing here?”

He hesitated, then decided to trust her as he had before. “Business,” he said, lifting the black briefcase up to her attention.

Her eyes widened, as if the briefcase had sparked some sort of ominous recognition. “What’s in it?”

Limmit looked around warily, then snapped open the briefcase a few inches and held it up to her face. He could tell from her expression as she looked inside that she knew it for what it was.

“Shee-it,” whispered Mary. Limmit, snapping the case shut again, felt a momentary pleasure at the sudden respect for him that seemed mixed into her expression. It faded, replaced entirely by the almost motherly concern he remembered from before. “It’s for Dr. Adder,” she said evenly. “That’s where you’re headed now, isn’t it? The only place where you could unload something like that.”

He nodded, silent.

“Where’d you get it?” she asked.

“Long and involved,” he said. “I’ll tell you some other time. Don’t worry, I’ll find you afterward.” Without saying more, he turned to leave.

She clutched his arm tighter. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t go there now. Wait until later.”

He whirled angrily on her. “Why,” he said. His voice seemed choked by some colossal lump of phlegm that had gradually been accumulating in his throat. “So that I’ll never get there?” he gasped, the words barely able to squeeze past the frustrating, evil taste seeping into his mouth. “Would that please you?” Whipping her head from side to side, she said, “No. You’ve been stuck on that damn egg farm all these years, right? You don’t know how it is with people like Adder. Everybody in L.A. except you knows that he’s been cranked up for the last two days working on one of his jobs. It’d be suicide to try to deal with him now—he’d bite your head off for fun.” She pulled him closer toward herself, almost an embrace. “Come on,” she pleaded, reasonable, “give yourself the advantage at least.” He shrugged, looking away from her face down the length of the still-crowded street. What time was it? he wondered dully. Time seemed to be telescoping—it must be hours since he had left the bar. All ability to move or resist seemed to have been finally sapped off, replaced by an overwhelming fatigue. Accepting, he thought; like death. He nodded slowly, eyes closed, to Mary. Yeah, okay, he said to himself. First the street, then the hooker, the bar, and now this. The first good thing to happen to him in L.A., a miracle almost. Is there a conspiracy, he wondered, to keep me from seeing Dr. Adder tonight? If so, by now he welcomed it.

“You were right,” said Dr. Adder, looking over his shoulder toward the iron gate. “There he is.” He finished locking the building s front door and turned around, ostentatiously sucking in the cool night air through flared nostrils.

Pazzo shrugged and said nothing. Across the motorcycle- and dead-vegetation-inhabited courtyard he could see Lyle on the other side of the gate, dancing on his toes and waving at him.

“That one,” said Adder, “is lasting a long time, eh, Pazzo? You’re getting to be just like an old married couple.”

Up yours, thought Pazzo. In fact, he was getting tired of Lyle s gamut of little-girl imitations. Maybe I’ll kick his ass out of bed tonight, he thought. Better yet, kick the rest of him out and keep the best part there in bed. What would Adder think of a commission like that?

While Adder lifted the motorcycle off its center stand and wheeled it to the gate, Pazzo studied the tableau on the other side. Besides Lyle there were three others waiting motionless for them: the ubiquitous Droit and a young hooker and her pimp whom he didn’t recognize. The crowd milling past them on the sidewalk slowed down a little to gawk but none stopped, except for a sodden-looking, gray-coated MFer shuffling a few yards away.

A sudden coughing roar announced that Adder had managed to kick the cycle into starting. Straddling it, he reached up to unlock the gate, then swung one half of it open. Pazzo closed it behind them and snapped the lock together. Lyle circled his arms about Pazzo’s waist while Adder watched contemptuously, rolling the cycle’s throttle back and forth, varying the dynamics of its ragged noises.

Suddenly, as if by afterthought, Adder turned to the others standing a few respectful feet away. “You,” he said over the machine’s racket, pointing to the girl. “What’s your name?” She smiled. “Just anything you want it to be.”

He waved her off with a disgusted hand. “Don’t bother. I’ve heard that line before.” He turned to the pimp. “You I’ve seen around before. Don’t tell me why you’re hanging around here: let me guess.” He peered down at them, as if the motorcycle were some sort of throne. His eyes seemed to iris down, focusing into concentration. “You want me to take this fresh merchandise home for the night, as a free sample from your newly founded firm, Lust and Greed—‘We Pander to the Famous.’

Eh? Is that it? And in return for the night of ecstasy thus produced, I will gratefully bestow an expensive ADR run and subsequent surgical modifications on said whore. All free of charge, no doubt.”

The young pimp shuffled his feet in the street’s debris, oddly shy under the circumstances.

Adder sighed elaborately. “Such, such is the price of fame. Everyone starts to dope out your every little weakness and takes advantage of it. Still, I am a hard sucker for virginity. The sexual fascination of the tabula rasa.” He extended his arm and pulled the girl up onto the seat behind him. “Relative, of course,” he said, warming to his own hugely enjoyable seriocomic theatrics. “No scalpel has pierced your epidermis, your largest sexual organ in fact, so the matter of the hymen you split like an onion skin in your seventh-grade gym class is superfluous.” He turned from the girl’s ashen face to the pimp. “Not for free, though. Just because you caught me in such a good mood, you only have to give me fifty percent of her future earnings, rather than the sixty percent I usually get from those without the up-front money. Don’t bother thanking me now.”

Pazzo turned away, slightly nauseated by the spectacle of Adder’s gleeful role playing. Lyle whispered something unintelligible into his ear, punctuated by the wet end of his tongue.

The girl leaned her head against Adder’s back, her thin arms around his waist. “Hey,” Droit called out suddenly to him. “Did you catch Mox on the TV tonight?”

Adder began to slowly twist the motorcycle’s throttle around, converting its noise into a gradually crescendo-ing whine. “Yeah, I saw him. That old fart and his show.”

“What was your reaction to it?” asked Droit, readying his pen over his notebook. It was one of his standard research questions.

“Are you sure about this?” asked Azusa, lifting his eye from the gunsight.

Milch nodded. “No sweat,” he said. His eyes were slightly lidded, reptilian looking, from the injection a few minutes ago of the herpezine combination.

“You can’t find another MFer?”

Milch shook his head. “Lucky to get this one. Usually they all disappear after Mox’s first broadcast.”

“Maybe we should call it off for tonight,” said Azusa, glancing out at the distant strip of light surrounded by darkness.

“No way,” said Milch emphatically. “And disappoint all my fans?”

He’s right there, thought Azusa. At this late stage of excitation, if we don’t take a shot we might not even get off this roof alive. “Go ahead then,” he said. “I guess you know what you can do.” He turned and pushed his way alongside the guardrail, through the edge of the encircling crowd, silent but reeking of sweat and chemical exudations. The word had flashed that Milch had finally lined up his shot. There was some squabbling over binoculars and telescopes.

Leaning out over the guardrail, Azusa could see, beyond the serried backs of the Rattowners, Milch kneeling down into his contorted assassin’s position: left hand and arm in control of the gunstock and trigger, the other arm wrapped through the new girl’s thighs, the right hand plunged into the terminus of her crotch. The gunsight had been locked over into following position, so that the picture it presented to Milch’s and the girl’s eyes, their faces pressed up to the mechanism alongside each other, changed slightly with each minute adjustment of the gun itself. The girl moaned, transfixed at eye and groin, and began to whisper, out of some subconscious connection, a feverish chant or song. Milch’s breathing, conversely, had seemed to cease entirely, as though he no longer needed it.

Something’s wrong, thought Azusa, looking away, staring sightlessly at the far-off Interface. Total despair gripped him: the burst of satisfaction he derived from deftly handling the Patti F. crisis had disappeared, replaced by this ominous, fatalistic presentiment. When Milch had shown him just now his target in the gunsight, the solitary MFer standing dangerously close to Dr. Adder himself, on his motorcycle, right out on the sidewalk in front of his black iron gates, the certainty of disaster had tightened around himself. Even though Azusa knew that with Milch all shots, regardless of their perimeters, were the same, this seemed too close. Of course, he thought, that’s what appeals to Milch about this shot. Snuffing this MFer will be like laying a gift at his own hero’s feet.

He turned back to watch Milch move the gun slightly, perfecting the alignment of the gunsight’s cross hairs. The crowd was silent as stone: what they could not see, craning their heads toward the Interface’s distant image, they could imagine. The only sound dropping into the vacuum was the new girl’s fragmented chant, which grew slightly louder, as if Milch had discovered a volume control deep within her, and then crystallized into sudden intelligibility.

Azusa watched in horror as Milch lifted his face from the gunsight and stared, blanching, at the girl’s mouth. Unheeding, lost in who knew what high school cheerleader exstasis of memory, she softly crooned, “Fight on, for Buena Maricone.... Ever faithful we will be—”

“Alumna,” croaked Milch, his face bloodless, the injection’s psychic insulation shattered. The girl’s groin started to buck and rear beneath his hand in sudden spasms of pleasure. Azusa tore desperately at the backs of the Rattowners in front of him, struggling to reach Milch and the gun.

At the end of the street, Limmit turned around and looked back. Something seemed to tug him toward its depths. Mary pulled him gently back around by one arm and asked, “What’s wrong?”

He drank in her sober, concerned face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

He sighed and reached behind him for the wall of the building to lean against, but it was yards away. “You’re right. Maybe it’s L.A., the Interface itself. I feel like I’ve been drained. Like my blood all went down the sewers or something.” He shook his head slowly. “Maybe I’m not cut out for this at all.”

She smiled. “Who is.”

The MFer lurched forward, shoving Droit aside. “Fuck you!” he screamed at Adder, then staggered toward the motorcycle, both arms upraised, revealing large ovals of sweat in the gray coat’s folds.

On the steel-capped toe of his boot, Adder caught the MFer in the stomach and shoved him back, stumbling. What a night, thought Adder, grinning. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lyle opening his mouth to receive Pazzo’s kiss. “Save it till you get home!” he yelled at them. “You disgusting fairies!”

Wrenching aside the last Rattowner, Azusa flung himself at Milch. The air seemed to thicken into a heavy, viscous liquid, through which he crawled agonizingly slowly. He could see the gunsight’s small circle of light from which Milch had torn himself away, and the cross hairs, controlled by the spastic hand frozen upon the gun, dancing from one body to another in the tight knot of people clustered around the motorcycle on the Interface. Everything on the roof seemed to be moving at a fraction of real-life time except for that small circle of light, jerking from one possible victim to the next. Even the girl’s song and Milch’s scream oozed, rumbling, into Azusa’s ears.

Still miles away, Azusa saw Milch’s hand clench slowly around the gun’s trigger. He heard a low, throbbing roar begin, which quickly modulated up into the gun’s deafening report. The slow air thinned out suddenly, and he plowed shoulder-first into Milch, tearing him free of the weapon and the girl. They skidded across the rooftop into the massed legs of the gaping Rat-towners around them. Twisting his neck around, Azusa could see the bullet’s white tracer trail arcing down toward the Interface.

“Look back there,” said Mary, pointing down the Interface. “Just so you can’t say your entire night’s been wasted—now you’ll recognize him when you see him. That’s Adder there, on his famous machine.”

Limmit followed the direction of her outstretched finger to the small clot of people a long distance down on the street. It was hard to see much from this far away. He had a brief impression of a grinning, knifelike face, when the sound of a small explosion, muffled by distance, hit his ear. It seemed to come from somewhere high in the darkness; he looked up and saw nothing but the lightless shapes of L.A.’s buildings. He turned back in time to see a red spot, like a rose or a small vein bursting in his own eye, appear down the street where Dr. Adder was.

Nothing could be heard over the roar of Adder’s motorcycle. Pazzo’s head shattered without warning between Lyle’s hands. A faint tingle like electricity burned his lips as bone splinters and fragments of pulpy tissue flew in a nimbus of vaporized fluids. Blood welled from the neck of the body collapsing and twitching like a puppet, washing over the larger pieces of facial structure that had already fallen to the sidewalk. Lyle’s hands closed together on something warm and damp, and he went into great, back-arching, vomiting convulsions, Pazzo’s tongue being expelled from his mouth like some blood-swollen leech.

“Shitfire,” said Adder. Stunned. The cycle’s engine died, snorting and coughing as if drowning. “Somebody just got Pazzo.”

“Really?” said Droit, looking rapidly from Adder to the corpse and back again. He took out his notebook. “Could you describe your reaction to that?”

❖

“Es wird mirganz angst urn die Welt, wenn ich an die Ewigkeit denk,” sang the small, yellow plastic radio. It was just before noon; some earth tremor had toppled the radio from the window sill onto the floor, switching it on. Limmit woke at the sound, tangled up in sweat-soaked sheets. Panic-stricken, he jerked his bare feet to the cold wooden floor and looked around for some place to hide the still-smoking pistol in his hands. He looked down at them and saw that they were empty, the palms pink but bloodless. A dream, he thought stupidly, as the last fragments evaporated. Something to do with last night. The music flowed on, all atonal strings and horns whining. Slumping, spine curved, against the wall at the head of the bed, he ran his tongue over corduroy-textured teeth; he had never awakened in Phoenix with a mouth like this.

On the other side of the bed, Mary slept on, exposed, the bed coverings in a puddle at Limmit’s feet. He watched her even, childlike breathing raise and lower gently her dark-coffee breasts and their nearly black aureoles. Her eyelids with their dark lashes lay unmoving, untroubled by REMs or other night phenomena. If she was dreaming at all, it was of immobile, sunlit landscapes free of last night’s sudden, conclusive splash of violence. From which Mary had pulled him to this room, after he had run halfway up the Interface, a fear clenching his heart, to see Dr. Adder vanish completely behind his iron gates, leaving behind the mangled corpse for the suddenly numerous police and silent crowd.

He pulled himself across the bed, closer to her. The wet stain in the middle of the bed had evaporated, absorbed into the night air’s humidity. He leaned down and kissed her forehead, causing her eyelids to flutter and then open, regarding him calmly. “What’s that music?” she asked softly.

“Wozzeck, ” he said, leaning back against the wall. “By Alban Berg.” He knew it from the small collection of tapes, all German vocal works, left behind in Phoenix with his paperbacks. They had belonged to his father: the only material remainders of that shadowy yet distinct figure that had ever come into his possession, other than the black briefcase now stored beneath the bed.

Ein guter Mensch, Limmit echoed the opera’s captain inside his own head, der sein gutes Gewissen hat, tut alles langsam .... Wrapping her arms around his bony waist, Mary, ignoring the incongruous radio, said, “It’s nice to have you back.” She smiled, turning her face away from him shyly, as if she felt it foolish, a small betrayal. Just like, thought Limmit painfully, the first time years ago. His heart constricted with the memory’s pang. Wasn’t there one single gesture of hers, one word or smile or anything that couldn’t slip like this through all his defenses?

At the Phoenix Egg Ranch, Limmit’s mother had died when he was ten. He hadn’t cared much for her, finding her only interesting as a link through the past to the vividly remembered image of his father. Given to alcohol and depression, she hadn’t given the young Limmit many details about Lester Gass, other than the often repeated fact of his having stranded his wife and five-year-old child at the ranch, one of the many enterprises he controlled or had a hand in. Still clear in Limmit’s mind was the image of his father’s face, staring at him from the door of the helicopter that was bearing Gass aloft, until both helicopter and father disappeared into the Arizona sun.

Not much provision had been made for young Limmit upon his mother’s death. He moved in with R. C. Cuthbertson, the harmless old fart who was running the brothel back then. The old man had been his mother’s only friend on the ranch, feeding her alcohol and sympathy in exchange for brief hand jobs. When Limmit grew older and ran into disciplinary problems at the company-run high school, Cuthbertson, in the manner of a wise old uncle, introduced him to the contents of the brothel’s drug cabinet.

This is a ssssnap, said young Limmit to himself, oozing through his scholastic career. The world and its contents shrank into a level, featureless plain. The high school was actually little more than a holding pen, detaining its occupants until they were old enough to go to work among the chickens. The teachers appreciated Limmit’s new cooperative attitude, even though he did seem to slouch a lot and only mumbled in response to questions. For his own part, Limmit felt warm and comfortable, insulated from the other adolescents, whom he had never (except for the overfriendly Joan) really seemed to fit in with. He had always felt a barrier, compounded partly of his own mixed feelings about his father, between them and himself. Fuck ’em all, he would fuzzily repeat to himself.

At age eighteen, upon graduation, Limmit discovered that he had somehow, while wrapped in his cozy private miasma, neglected to fill out the form, a routine matter for all students, requesting exemption from Selective Service processing. Notified of his subsequent induction, he craftily filled his suitcase with what he calculated to be a sufficient supply of his favorite downers from the drug cabinet, enough to last his three-year hitch. They were all confiscated from him upon stepping off the bus that had brought him and the three or four volunteers from the ranch’s graduating class to the army training center near Salt Lake City.

After boot camp, young Limmit found himself in the Army of the Northern Midwest, under the leadership of General Abraham Romanza, spending most of his time toting one end of a huge metal tube studded with various lensed devices over the gentle agrarian hills of Ohio and surrounding states. No one ever saw General Romanza. At one point in his military career, young Limmit read on the wall of a field latrine that the general spent all his time back at GHQ, chasing army nurse tail and personally farting on any and all requests for transfer of duty— and Limmit believed it. The Midwestern Liberation Front, led by the feared Anna Manfred, was reaching some kind of zenith and blowing up autonomic farm machinery by the long ton, leaving square miles of accelerated two-month wheat rotting in the fields. This waste was overseen only by the smoldering hulks of the giant combines that had had the entire agricultural responsibility, from seeding to reaping, to themselves. The Army of the Northern Midwest, Limmit included, trudged through the fields, chasing in slow, methodical soldier fashion the revolutionary bands.

As it turned out, too methodical: one of Anna Manfred’s lieutenants deduced that the army’s search pattern, supposedly random, was in fact a simple mathematical progression, a semispiral based on the set of primes. Once the pattern, which had indeed been set up by General Romanza’s big military model computer, was figured out, all of the army’s future moves were easily calculable. Which fact greatly helped the MLF in setting up an ambush (ill-famed since in military circles) some eighty miles out of Cleveland.

Most of the troops died immediately in the crossfire. Young Limmit and the other half of his tube-toting team, a Spec. 4 named Jetsam, were pinned down in the combined wreckage and impact crater of their division’s hot-lunch copter. For the rest of the afternoon, they disposed of slowly cooling coffee and sandwiches, only slightly singed, and listened to mingled weapon and death noises. To pass the time, Limmit sorted through the company’s mail sacks, which had burst open in the copter’s crash. Dead letters: there were not going to be any recipients for them, let alone an actual mail call. Not surprisingly, none were addressed to him. He opened them, extracting letters from home, seminude Polaroid snaps from girlfriends, dear johns from others, small packages of crushed cookies, socks, et cetera. The contents of one small package were more interesting than the others.

Evening came, and they were surrounded at an indefinite distance by an unknown number of revolutionaries. Limmit had little conception of them other than what had seeped through from an army indoctrination film six months earlier at boot camp, which he had mostly slept through. A woman’s voice crackled metallic over a bullhorn: “Imperialist lackeys ...” (“Shee-it,” he could hear her comrades laughing among themselves, good-natured from excitement and success, at the melodrama.) “How’s this,” continued the bullhorn to both groups. “Hand the tube over to us undamaged and we’ll give you your lives and safe escort out of here. That’s a promise.”

To young Limmit’s surprise, Spec. 4 Jetsam yelled back “Nuts!” to the unseen enemy, sincerely dredging up a fragment of some old movie seen at boot camp. Limmit had thought these conditions excellent. Jetsam disagreed, fervently proposing instead that they wipe out about forty-five degrees of the encircling revolutionaries with the one projectile they had for the tube. Young Limmit didn’t bother pointing out the remaining degrees of pissed-off neo-Bolsheviks that would descend upon them after they had shot their wad, only slipped between the Spec. 4’s ribs a six-inch, superbly balanced and honed blade he had removed from an undeliverable package earlier in the day. He wiped the blade on his pants leg, inserted it into the boot sheath the doting parents of their undoubtedly dead son had thoughtfully enclosed, tossed the tube over the rim of the crater, and made a separate peace.

The surrounding revolutionaries turned out to be only seven in strength, three men and four women, a fact that didn’t shake Limmit’s belief in the correctness of his surrender. Somewhat autonomous within the MLF, they stayed behind, mopping up, while the rest of Anna Manfred’s troops regrouped to the east. The leader of the little band was Mary Gorgon.

True to their word, within reason, and impressed with his quick-thinking execution of the reactionary Spec. 4, the revolutionaries fed young Limmit a mixed diet of Marx, Lenin, Malcolm X, Peter Camejo, and others, none of which impressed him very much, en route to a drop-off point from which Phoenix would be accessible.

“Why Phoenix?” asked Mary. It had been his request.

He didn’t answer. The chemical burden of his high school fog had dissipated enough to let a certain native cunning and ambition, his father’s heritage, emerge. Or else his rare, if not singular, spurt of positive action in instinctively snuffing Jetsam had catalyzed him into no longer being content to be an object moved by other people’s forces. At any rate, at that point he was already formulating plans for his return to Phoenix.

(The plans were never put into effect. Even though he still carried the handy blade inside his boot, it had not been necessary to actually use it on old Cuthbertson, in order to clear his way for the assumption of the position of brothel-keeper. The mere showing of the knife to him in private was enough to send the old man into a fatal syncope. After that, Limmit seemed to run out of steam, the ability and willpower of his father no longer being secreted from Limmit’s glands. He was will-less, content to let things ride until a year and a half later when Joe Goonsqua had shown up.)

“Have it your way,” said Mary. The life of a revolutionary for her, he knew: good times with high moral purpose, touch of fatalist quixotic. Sometimes, watching them sing ancient Cuban guerrilla songs around the campfire, he suspected her and them to be in it solely for the fun of it. That they wished it would never end, by defeat or victory, because they would never find anything else that was such a kick. Came daylight, however, and he knew that wasn’t the case. He realized that she was ready to die for some vision of a far-off humanity, even taking on faith the validity of her own actions. Did it really do any good? It probably wasn’t even appreciated by its supposed beneficiaries, snug in their gigantic residential complexes on both coasts, or accorded anything beyond nuisance value by its enemies. Sometimes, on a lunar basis tied in with her menstrual cycle, she doubted. Even so, there was always a mischievous pleasure she found in this stuff.

Two nights before they reached the drop-off point, she took him aside to make her most forthright recruiting pitch. “Come on and join us, old E. Allen,” she said. “Lotta laughs waging people’s war.”

“Nah,” he said. “I really think I’d like to see a little more of the world before I get my ass shot off.”

An army plane, using infrared scopes, spotted the band on the ground below. As if young Limmit’s words were a cue, it released a small covey of thermotropic personal missiles at them. Only two missed, distracted by the campfire, the others bursting like jam-filled plastic bags the internal organs and shattering the major thoracic bone structure of everyone but Mary Gorgon and Limmit. Through the rest of the night, he watched her cradle in her arms the one who took longest to die, the rest having expired almost immediately upon impact. Her tears mixed with the blood that seeped into her rough shirt as she gently rocked back and forth, crooning to the stiffening body. He had thought she was so hard.

When the last body had also drained into the red ground around them, she crawled in with him into a roll of blankets and continued to weep as he, as well as he could, comforted her.

Later, he would wonder if she had been merely grateful for that comfort. Or if he, Limmit, had somehow become identified in her mind with her dead and beloved comrades. When they reached the drop-off point, she told him she loved him.

“You love everyone, minus capitalists,” he said. He felt oddly surly. Perhaps whatever controlled his emotions had reasoned that if he hurt her enough, she wouldn’t mind his leaving.

“What’s there for you in Phoenix,” she said. “A lot of mutant chickens and redneck sodomites.”

“Maybe that’s where I belong.”

“Why. Feeling guilty? Join the MLF to forget that Spec. 4, some other sin, your own child-of-exploiters inheritance.” “Shove that.” He started walking west, toward Phoenix. He looked back and thought he saw that her strange, sadness-tinged smile meant from this distance that she cared for him too much to stop him, that she had already seen so many loved ones depart from her, the way they could depart only from someone who cared. He turned and started running, until he tripped and fell, breathless, scraping his hands raw against the road. Pressing his palms to his mouth, he sucked the dirt from the oozing cuts, then got up and walked on.

Now that smile pressed itself against his ribs, in this room in L.A. Is it victorious now? wondered Limmit. Pushing her away, he got up and walked to the window. He picked up the yellow radio from the floor below the sill and studied it. “I didn’t think,” he said finally, “that there even were any radio stations still operating.”

She watched him, eyes wide. “It’s just a small one,” she said. “Operated by an old guy living in Rattown, using a miniaturized transmitter—you can only pick up his broadcasts in L.A. Just during daylight. Plays mostly old recordings of German opera.”

“What’s his name?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. They call both him and the station KCID, whatever that stands for, if anything. Nobody ever sees him, but he’s supposed to know everything that happens in L.A.—he does a little patter between recordings. He’s got a thing about Adder, too, just like everyone over in the slums.”

Limmit wished he could hear that, but decided he couldn’t take any more Wozzeck right then. It should be L.A.’s theme song, he thought, switching it off and turning to look out the window. The top pane was shattered, leaving pale jags of glass like teeth in a mouth, and the lower was mottled with dirt. In L.A.’s hazy sunshine, hunched-over figures crawled and sifted through the debris that lined the length of the Interface. “Who are those people?” he asked without turning around.

She studied his thin, pale legs and narrow buttocks, his back with an angry splash of acne across the shoulders on top of layers of adolescent scar tissue. He doesn’t take care of himself the way he should, she thought. “They’re scavengers,” she said, not needing to look. “Old broken-down freaks and cripples that crawl out from Rattown, looking through all the garbage on the street... For lost coins or pills and shit they can gobble up right on the spot. Anything they can sell for small profit they carry back into the slums.”

He came away from the window and sat down beside her on the bed. Idly, he stroked her brown thigh. “You know what comes next,” he said quietly.

She looked up into the eyes set deep into his narrow face. “Your ‘business,’ I suppose.”

“That’s right,” he said, nodding.

She took his hand and laced her fingers between his. “In a minute. Please.”

He shut tight his eyes, and squeezed his captured hand together, her knuckles between his, as much to hurt himself as her. “No more minutes,” he said.

The noon sun appeared over the edge of the skylight and dropped directly onto Dr. Adder’s face below. Auggh, shouted characters in his dreams, interrupted: I’ve been shot. We die. Which was true, for dreams and all their inhabitants dissolved as Adder cocked one eye open at the glare, screwed it shut again with its partner, and shifted his head upon the rolled-up surgical sheets and bandages that served as a pillow, out of the sun’s remorseless trajectory. Goddamn sun, he muttered to himself. Or some damn god? Whatever.

He propped himself up on one elbow and studied the nude figure sleeping next to him. After the sudden disintegration of Pazzo’s head last night, the remaining levels of adrenaline and other secretions in Adder’s bloodstream had taken his shock and, as was his personal tendency, flipped it over into flat-out paranoia. Adder had pulled the young whore and the motorcycle back behind the black iron gate, locked it, pulled the whore inside the building’s front door, locked it, and from there retreated into this room where all his surgical supplies were kept, locking doors all the way behind them. Here he had pushed two gurnies together against a wall, some vague image (perhaps gleaned from one of Betreech’s vintage cinema westerns) in his mind of using her body as a shield as he blasted with a .44 Magnum at the assailants besieging the door of this sanctum. (None of these fancies had had any effect, though, in diminishing his constant and irrelevant erection.)

That was last night, however. Now, all stimulants and their engendered fears had drained out of his system, leaving behind only furry teeth and a general feeling of shitfulness. He pulled the sheets from their bodies and prodded the girl’s ass. “Hey,” he said. “Come on, wake up. Big day ahead of us.” Especially for you, he added maliciously to himself.

The hooker rolled over and looked into his face. Her clear, unblinking eyes indicated that she had been awake for some time now, lying motionless beside him. “Some big deal,” she said bitterly, as if she had been rehearsing it in her mind all this time. “I didn’t figure a night spent with the great Dr. Adder amounted to nothing but a meager screw on a couple of slab-hard body carts in a crummy storeroom.”

Adder scratched and yawned. “What were you expecting. No, don’t tell me: you cheap cunts are all alike. You expected in exchange for the services of your almost virginal body, in addition to the special analytical and surgical services of mine that you and your pimp are counting on, one, a heady, erotic dash up the Interface on Dr. Adder’s famous machine, and two, some kind of wonderfuck in Adder’s richly appointed pleasure palace in the hills. And what were you expecting as regards this?” He waved with one hand his half-erect organ. “Did you think my cock had little beady eyes and a forked tongue that flicked in and out? Shitfire,” he said, laughing and rolling on his back. “You are too much. Just what do you think I owe you?” The girl said nothing. Adder peered at her through the corner of one eye. She seemed to be looking through him at the wall beyond, a curiously satisfied, postorgasmic look on her face. “Even though,” she said dreamily, “it’s only been a week or so, it seems like such a long ways from when I was my high school valedictorian to here.”

Adder sneered at this. “All alike,” he said, shaking his head. “A// alike. You just don’t know how all alike you are, do you?” The phrase, with these few repetitions, seemed to float loose from its meaning and assume some new, sinister potency. “Every one of you hookers I ever came across out on the Interface claims to have been her high school valedictorian—Christ, some of you probably believe it. And you know why all of you build up this fantasy of being super-achiever, pom-pom-honors-society-academic-socialite chicks?”

Her eyes diffused over his face in anxiety, dreading revelation.

“You really want to know why?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said, trying to suppress the quaver in her voice. “Lay it on me.”

“Because,” he ground on, “it’s not enough to have been a typical dumb Orange County high school slut and then become a typical L.A. loser trick. Your fall, your degradation, wouldn’t be far enough. For you, it’s got to be unique, it’s got to be from the very top to the very deepest pit you ever saw on Mox’s stupid TV show that excites all you dumb, self-destructive chicks so much. Well, listen”—his voice dropped ominously in pitch—“you’re all alike; you’re not unique; you won’t hit bottom, it’s beneath anything you'll ever reach; and you won’t know finally anything more than you did as a sweet, dumb Daddy’s little snatch-on-legs back in Orange County.”

A tear spread around inside the rim of her eye. “Thanks,” she said tightly. “You really give someone a lot. For this I got laid?” One corner of Adder’s mouth lifted in a small smile. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll still get a good bargain. This afternoon I’ll run an ADR on you, and tomorrow morning I’ll start to work on whatever I get from it. I’ll even give you your choice of general or local anesthesia, in case you want to watch. You’ll get what you came here for. It’s just that it’ll cost you more; you’ll be leaving behind more than you counted on.”

“You must really hate women,” the young whore said evenly, “to do all that you do to them, and tell them this too.”

“Ha,” said Adder. “I love women—I give them what they want.”

“All of them?”

“No, of course not. Just those lucky enough to want what I have to give them.”

“Some love,” she said, dry-eyed again. “You give us what we want even when it destroys us.”

“More than that,” said Adder, his smile tightening into something else. “Even when it destroys me.”

“That’s happened?”

“Once.”

“I see,” the whore said bitterly into her pillow, “that you recovered all right.”

Shitfire, thought Adder with a tinge of exasperation. This is all good fun, but I’ve got work to do. Plus Pazzo is no longer here to help. He gave the other gurney a violent shove with one foot, sending it rolling into the opposite wall. The girl almost fell off, ass first, onto the floor, but managed to remain clinging to it as it clattered across the room. From there she glared at him with as much dignity as she could muster, as he swung his legs over the side of his gurney and started to pull on the clothes he had worn the day before.

Limmit heard his name called out behind him and turned around, wincing under the intense L.A. sun. Droit came trotting up the sidewalk, grinning.

“Well, here we are again,” said Droit, walking alongside and clapping him on the arm. “What’s your reaction to L.A. by daylight?”

The scavengers turned blank, weakly omnivorous faces upon them, then looked back to their own busy paws, turning over leaf after leaf of trash, like the pages of some intensely interesting book or catalog. “Nice place to visit,” said Limmit.

“It has its points,” said Droit absently as he jotted the reply in his notebook, then stowed it away again in his coat.

“If you don’t mind being shot at.”

“Oh, yeah. That.” Droit nodded. “Poor Pazzo. Really a nice guy when you got to know him. I just got back from seeing some of my contacts over in Rattown about the shooting. A profitable trip—a certain someone will be, ah, generously eager to hear what I found out.” He grinned and winked at Limmit. “You’re going up to see Dr. Adder now?”

“Yeah, so are you, I imagine. Good thing for you I came along, as I doubt if Adder would have seen you at this time. He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s putting the final touches on one of his big jobs.” They reached the black iron gates and stopped in front of them. “You can come in with me. In return, I’m sure you won’t mind my hanging around when you open this for Adder.” He tapped with one finger the briefcase hanging from Limmit’s hand.

“I don’t give a shit,” said Limmit, watching Droit press a large button in plain sight beside the gates. “At this point.”

Adder heard the buzzer, swore, laid down his tools, wiped his hands off, and exited from his surgical room. Striding across the front office, he picked up a half-brick from a small pile. At the window, he looked down and saw Droit with someone else he didn’t recognize. Droit at least was the very person he wanted to see. He tossed the brick back into the center of the office’s clutter, and went down to open the door.

After leading them silently up to the office, Adder turned to Limmit and said, “Pull a chair up to the desk. Just toss whatever’s on that one to the floor.”

Limmit’s stomach flinched at the words, and then, as Adder walked on behind the desk, his trembling hands lifted the stack of mildewed magazines from the indicated chair. Clits & Shits, the top of the stack proclaimed. The Magazine Lesbian Coprophages Can Trust. Jesus, thought Limmit, carrying the chair across the room and setting it beside Droit’s chair. I’m about ready to shit. Adder’s thin, knife-faced figure, clad in a white laboratory coat, exuded force and presence. The cluttered room seemed dominated by him, as if it were a projection from somewhere inside himself.

Leaning back in his own chair, Adder incised a casual scalpel cut across the much-scarred desktop. “So,” he said to Droit without looking at him, as if the ceiling were more interesting, “what’s new?”

“Actually,” said Droit, “trends look pretty stable at the moment. I can predict quite confidently that sexual interest in amputation will maintain at its present level, with perhaps small upswings through the summer months in genital alteration, junkie balling, and—”

Something beneath Adder’s controlled surface broke through violently. “You stupid shit!” he yelled, flinging the scalpel in Droit’s direction. It struck the wall opposite and imbedded itself there, quivering in minute counterpoint to Adder’s words. “You think I’m interested in that right now, for Christ’s sake? My goddamn right-hand man gets his fuckin’ head blown off last night two feet away from myself, and all you can tell me is what a bunch of Orange County suckers are going to want to get their feeble rocks off on this summer?”

“Well,” said Droit, unruffled, “I do have other interesting things you might care to know, but I also have, so to speak, expenses—”

With a grimace, Adder pulled bills from a roll he took out of the lab coat’s pocket and tossed them across the desk. “Is that enough?”

“If you can spare a few of those green and white spansules, the combination kainine/barbiturate analog ... yes, those,” said Droit, nodding as Adder extracted a clear plastic vial from one of the desk’s drawers. “Betreech is droughting up the market on these right now,” he explained, pocketing the cheerful-colored cylinders, “to drive up the price. Good rate of exchange on these over in Rattown.”

“The fluctuations of the Greater L.A. Dope Exchange I’m not interested in,” said Adder impatiently. “Get on with it.” “Relax,” said Droit. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. They were just having one of their usual assassination parties up in Rattown. The triggerman wasn’t aiming for you or Pazzo. He was zeroing in on that MoFo that was hanging around there last night and he muffed his shot, is all.”

“ ‘He muffed his shot, is all,’ ” mocked Adder. Despite his sarcastic tone, it was evident that a great deal of his tension had dissipated, or else had been drained back into some internal storage. “That’s real fucking reassuring, is what that is. I ask you,” he said, appealing rhetorically to Limmit’s blank visage, “just trying to run a little business here, do I need this? Just a goddamn good capitalist, for Christ’s sake, and I’ve got to have a bunch of loser gun freaks trying to do me a big favor, which I also don’t need, by potshooting MFers all over the street. If they start driving customers away, I’m really going to be pissed, believe me. Besides”—he turned back to Droit as if Limmit were a microphone gone dead—“what kind of bullet was that anyway, to make Pazzo’s head crumble like that?”

Shit, said Limmit to himself, does he even stop to breathe? Droit shrugged. “You know those fans of yours. They’re always rooting around in the cellars of the old CIA building back there, coming up with new goodies.”

“Great,” said Adder disgustedly. “Just great. Next thing you know they’ll be coming up with goddamn nuclear weapons. Maybe one of those briefcase jobs ...” His brows lowered ominously as his eyes flicked from the briefcase in Limmit’s lap to Limmit’s face and back to Droit. “Hey,” he said with a halflaugh and one thumb pointed at Limmit, “just who is your friend here?”

Limmit took a deep breath and leaped recklessly into the opening. “Dr. Adder,” he said, “my name is Limmit, E. Allen Limmit, and I just flew in from Phoenix yesterday, in order to offer you this unique item, the value of which I’m sure you’ll appreciate.” He snapped open the briefcase and shoved it across the desk at Adder. That’s enough, he said to himself, his larynx failing. He’ll know what it is.

Adder studied the contents of the wide-open briefcase for a long moment.

“A deactivated flashglove,” he said finally, looking over the edge of the lid at Limmit, his face immobile. “You came all the way from Phoenix to show me this? Big deal. I’ve got three already in my collection.”

“I suspected something of this nature,” said Droit, almost sadly, leaning back in his chair. He displayed no desire to even glance at the briefcase’s contents.

Limmit leaned across the desk and thumbed a small switch inside the briefcase. Small red points and shapes of light throbbed on like flames or open wounds. “It’s not deactivated,” he said quietly, savoring the triumph and the small measure of control, or at least equality, it gave him. “It’s live.”

Adder’s eyes widened as he gazed upon the transformation of the briefcase. What had been before cold and inert now glowed and pulsed with a crystalline, gemlike vitality. Shitfire, thought Adder.

He gently stroked the shining metal surface. It seemed fantastic, an object heavy with the weight of the past. Nothing else, he knew, that Lester Gass had devised for the infamous CIA Special Operations Teams had had such an effect in ending the five-year history of the Popular Anarchy movement that had come so close to seizing national power. At one point, the anarchists had controlled all of Washington and Oregon and the northern counties of California. As a point of fact, though, the CIA’s Program Drench B had been so successful, in its own way, that the CIA itself was disbanded afterward.

All that remained of the movement was Anna Manfred and her small bands, growing smaller and more ineffectual every day as they continued to dynamite easily replaced farming units. All that remained of Program Drench B were relics such as the flashglove Adder gazed at, and a small group of abandoned buildings surrounded by decaying walls and barbed wire out in the Mojave Desert.

The power of it, thought Adder. Several hundred thousand anarchists and sympathizers died in that little fenced-off rectangle in the desert. Executed continuously, three shifts a day, by machines like this. Lying in the briefcase, the flashglove looked like a severed forearm and hand of gleaming chrome, rigid, blunt-fingered, and studded with various small apertures. Gass had surpassed himself in designing it, taking a minor archetypal image of the twentieth century for inspiration. The metal hand, the incorporation of some lethal inanimate object into one’s own being, appearing as it still does in the nightmares of all age groups and used too in lots of cheap popular media. In some old TV programs and pulp stories it is merely weighted into being a crushing hammer; in others it can talk. It could be argued that western man’s obsession with the idealized karate blow is a form of the metal hand archetype, the rigid, steel-calloused striking hand representing the same fascination with the artifacts of destruction, the desire to make them part of oneself, the fear of those who have succeeded in that.

At any rate, said Adder to himself, Gass succeeded. The flashglove materialized some dark part of everyone’s subconscious.

Many of its victims had frozen, like hypnotized rabbits, when the executioners, each with a forearm amputated and glove installed into its place upon the stump, approached through the crowded enclosure, swinging ceaselessly and randomly. The device operated off the energy of the bearer’s central nervous system; it was equipped with optical, auditory, and thermal sensors and detection devices giving the bearer a fantastically heightened awareness of everything around him; and programmed with enough logic/memory circuits to respond, under the bearer’s control, faster than either he or the victim could even see. A special alloy sheathed the glove, capable of emitting lethal harmonic vibrations that exploded flesh and bone upon contact. The image of the executioners, with the multisource blood flowing off their leather aprons, their eyes glistening with growing lunacy, one bloody hand upraised, had been psychologically conceived by Gass to transfix and terrorize everyone who saw or even heard of it.

After Program Drench B’s success, and a certain revulsion that set in the ordinarily unsoftened hearts of the government, there was nothing to do but shoot the now hopelessly psychotic executioners. Gass eluded the hit team sent after him, and died somewhere in the desert west of the camp, ending his faceless and mysterious career. The flashgloves were all destroyed or defused into inert lumps of metal. Except for this one, thought Adder. This one escaped somehow.

Along one side of the briefcase’s interior, little rectangles glowed, surrounding minute black words with red. SERVO MECH I: OPERABLE, read Adder to himself, SERVO MECHII, OPT. INPUT, ONF-R. Oh fuckin’ marvelous! thought Adder. The best of all, the largest little red sign that blinked on and off with a quiet, demanding authority: READY FOR GRAFTING ... READY FOR GRAFTING ...

Adder’s throat felt strangely parched. “Tell me,” he said. “How did you get ahold of this?”

“Lester Gass was my father,” said Limmit. “When the flashgloves were originally produced for the CIA, he had one more made than the contract called for. The hiding place out on the Phoenix Egg Ranch was the only thing of value he left me.” He felt his voice tremble—would Adder be able to tell that everything after the first sentence was what Goonsqua had coached him to say?

“I suppose,” explored Adder, “you have an idea of how much something like this is worth to me.”

“I think we could arrive at a price that would be ... mutually satisfactory.”

Sharp little bastard, thought Adder, grinning. He’d better be careful. Hate to have to snuff him.

Droit leaned across the desk. “May I see?” Adder, with elaborate graciousness, turned the briefcase around to him.

“Very nice,” said Droit after a few seconds of silence on everyone’s part. “Most rewarding from many viewpoints. Though I wonder what it being bugged signifies?” He pulled his lip abstractedly, lost in thought.

“Bugged?” said Adder, stiffening. “Where?”

“Right there,” replied Droit, pointing to a near-microscopic dot near the edge of the briefcase’s lining. “Pinhead scanner.”

Adder, mouth set and eyes narrowed in fury, tore the black velvetlike cloth away from the lid. He extracted a small, flat metal pack connected to the scanner node by a silver filament.

Jesus shit, thought Limmit, feeling the blood drain away from his extremities. That lying bastard back in Phoenix shopped me good, all right.

“All right, Mr. Limmit, if that’s really your name,” said Adder grimly, holding the scanner and transmitter toward Limmit on one flat palm. “Just what the fuck do you think you’re trying to pull?”

Limmit shook his head desperately. “I didn’t know that was in there. It’s someone else’s scam, not mine.”

“Sure,” said Adder. “Hope it doesn’t offend you if I check that out a little. Even if this isn’t your own cute little idea, I’ve got a good notion who’s behind it.” He flipped the metal pack over. Inscribed on the reverse side were the words PROPERTY OF GREATER PRODUCTION CORPORATION, BROADCAST MEDIA DIVISION. Adder picked up the scanner node between one thumb and forefinger and waggled the extended middle finger of his other hand at it. “I hope you’re watching, Mox,” he snarled. “Up your ass with your pathetic schemes.” He turned back to Droit. “Did you know anything about this whole shtick?”

“Sorry,” said Droit brightly. “It’s completely new data to me.”

“Well, since you’re so fucking useless,” Adder said, pulling from the lab coat a .44 Magnum, the same one he had slept with the night before, and handing it to Droit, “I’m sure you won’t mind keeping an eye on our little friend from Phoenix here. Just make sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”

Limmit turned slowly to face Droit as Adder got up from the desk, tore off the lab coat, and threw it over the empty chair. Droit was casually cradling the pistol in one hand, the barrel unwavering at the very center of Limmit’s chest.

“I thought you were a dispassionate social researcher,” said Limmit.

The gun in Droit’s hand didn’t waver. “I am,” he said. “Then how come you’re holding that on me? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to bias your findings a little?”

Droit shrugged. “Maybe, but then again I’ll be able to keep on collecting data if I stay on good terms with Adder. If I piss him off, I won’t be collecting anything much longer.”

“Shit.” Limmit collapsed back into his chair. The short dialogue had exhausted all the bravery he could summon up. Into the pit, he thought wretchedly. Even as a kid he had periodically sensed an abyss beneath himself, one into which at any moment he could fall, the inevitable result of the simplest or even cleverest of his actions. He felt it always there, waiting for him to slip up, the subreality beneath the whole world, an alternate universe from his science fiction paperbacks constructed of shit: Fecal planets moving around long, brown stars. Busted hopes. This must be what hell feels like, he said to himself, filled with self-disgust at his own stupidity, even more than fear of its consequences. This is what I get for listening to that fucker Goonsqua.

Droit coughed apologetically. “You really don’t have that much to worry about,” he said. “Adder isn’t vengeful or anything, if you’re really on the level with him.”

“Wonderful,” said Limmit. “The only trouble is I’m not.” He watched despairingly as Droit shifted the gun from his right to his left hand, then wiped the sweaty palm on his pants.

“Does anybody have any cigarettes?” Limmit and Droit both turned their heads in the direction of the girl’s voice. In one of the two doorways on the far side of the office a young girl stood, pallid blonde and naked. She looked back at them, unblushing. “I’ve looked all over this goddamn place, but I swear that guy’s some kind of ascetic or something.”

She crossed the room, small breasts shimmering, and perched on the front edge of the desk between Droit and Limmit. She leaned across its surface, one leg placed farther out for balance, converting her body into a single pleasing line from bare foot to shoulder. Limmit thought he could detect a gray pallor, an analog of L.A.’s atmosphere, growing beneath her still-pink skin. She searched through the desk’s surface rubble, pushing the closed briefcase to one side. “I give up,” she said disgustedly, turning around and, hunched over casually, placing her palms on the desk’s edge next to her thighs. Her movement dissipated the pure line, the body lapsing back into gravity-bound postadolescent flesh. “Sure you don’t have any cigarettes?” she asked.

“Sorry, don’t smoke,” said Limmit, detumescent from misery.

“Neither does Adder,” said Droit, “so there really isn’t much point in looking around here.” With his unoccupied right hand, he fished his notebook from his coat and propped it on his knee. “By the way,” he said from behind gun and pen, “how did things go with Adder last night, after Pazzo got shot? Your little deal still on?”

The girl peered at him. “Oh yeah,” she said after a moment. “You’re that nut Leslie told me about, always going around asking weird questions. You were there last night, weren’t you?” She considered for a few seconds. “Yeah, I guess everything went all right last night. I mean, he wasn’t so shook up or anything that he couldn’t function, if you know what I mean. He said he was going to run an ADR on me later today, when he got done with some other business. Is this”—she nodded at the gun in Droit’s hand—“part of what he was talking about?”

“No,” said Droit, smiling and jotting something down. “This is something else that came up. Did he say whether he was going to start work immediately after the ADR? Was it going to be a straight ADR run, or with any variations? Just asking for research, you know.”

“What the fuck’s an ADR?” asked Limmit before the girl could reply. “I keep hearing those letters.”

Droit looked at him in mild surprise. “You know,” he said, “I’m really beginning to wonder about you. Are you sure you’re in the right line of work? I mean, you don’t know shit about L.A.”

Limmit glanced briefly up into the naked girl’s amused eyes. “Come on,” he said to Droit, “just tell me what it is. Maybe I’d like to know before I die, okay?”

Scratching his chin thoughtfully, Droit said, “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you; it’s just that, after all, information is my business, you know ...” He trailed off, looking expectantly at Limmit.

“You must be kidding.” Shaking his head in disbelief, Limmit extracted his roll of bills and peeled several off into Droit’s empty hand. This is ridiculous, he thought. I’ll probably be dead in a few hours. He marveled at the fatalistic calm that had suddenly descended upon himself. What a way to spend the time.

“That’s fine,” said Droit, pocketing the money. He coughed, clearing his throat. “ADR is an acronym of undetermined meaning, referring to a process invented, in fact, by your father, Lester Gass. That is, if you really are his son.”

“I am.” Worse luck for me, thought Limmit.

“Well, we’ll see. At any rate, the ADR was devised by Gass for interrogation purposes, but not for extracting information based in reality. Gass was interested in something else, something below that.”

“The pit,” mumbled Limmit to himself. It figures. “Materially, the ADR consists of two unique drugs, synthesized exclusively now for Adder by the same person who manufactures nearly all the drugs in L.A. Both drugs are injected intravenously into the subject and the interrogator. The first shot acts to eliminate the barriers between the different evolutionary stratifications in each person’s cerebral cortex. All the submerged, bestial layers are united with the topmost, conscious layer into a single entity. An alligator that can talk.”

“What’s the use of that?” asked Limmit.

Droit ignored him. “You’ll see. The second shot establishes a telepathic rapport between the subject and the interrogator. It’s a cumulative effect—it wouldn’t work without the expanded psychical energies created by the other drug. Both individuals, or rather their egos complete with the formerly buried parts, meet on a common symbolic ground outside their bodies.”

“That part’s kinda hard to believe.”

“Believe what you want—you paid to know. The whole effect of the second drug is a refinement of some of the original mind-uniting drugs of the late seventies. Those were eventually given up by most people because they were only able to give the sensation of a rapport between minds, without any actual details—so faint a sensation that it would be impossible to tell whether it was an illusion or not. The other drug Gass devised for the ADR resolved that question.”

“So what’s the point?”

Droit showed a small irritation at the interruption. “The point is,” he said, “that the interrogator, if he was strong enough, could examine the totality of the subject’s mind, conscious and subconscious, while they were in this common psychical meeting ground. It’s like a separate world or universe: the details of it are created by the interaction between the two minds. Most people, after having the first drug injected, have the topmost, normally the only conscious, layer of the mind overwhelmed by the release of the submerged parts. The individual’s psychic energy goes into constructing elaborate fantasies, satisfying the buried, primeval lusts and hungers of the former subconscious, using the symbols and thought patterns of the mind’s top layer. If the interrogator can control those portions of himself, and resist the attacks of the subject’s expanded and united mind, then it’s all spread out before him—the entire contents, not just the conscious part, of the subject’s mentality.

“The only problem with it,” continued Droit, “was that, at the time, Gass himself was the only person able to control it to that purpose. CIA men who tried it either came back with nothing, having succumbed while under the ADR to the power of their own subconscious, or else, if they persisted, becoming subject to a particularly nasty and irreversible decay of the higher conscious functions. A unique cancer, sort of, since it consisted of those sections of the brain that contained the primitive, unconscious areas of the mind absorbing the other sections. As if the beast within had been finally aroused by the ADR and was attacking and eating its long-time captor. Eventually, after some really interesting personality changes, the autonomic functions would also be consumed and the would-be interrogator would die.

“The only effect on Gass, and since then, of course, on Adder, was a residue of the telepathic effect created by the ADR’s second drug. Close physical proximity to someone who’s been a subject under the ADR before, and the injection of the two drugs into either individual’s bloodstream, is enough to stimulate the ADR’s complete effects in both.”

“I still don’t see,” said Limmit, “what good that is to anybody, let alone Gass or Adder.”

Droit sighed and spread one hand alongside the gun. “Gass used it for his own purposes—he got the inspiration for the flashglove from interrogating captured anarchists with the ADR. Adder, however he got ahold of it, is able to control it too, but for a little different end. Evidently it takes a certain type of mind, where the conscious layer isn’t as far removed from the submerged sections to begin with as in other people, to get control of it.

“The heart of Adder’s position in L.A.’s little social scheme is that he does two things with the ADR. For one price, sometimes taken as a percentage of future earnings, he’ll run a young girl, fresh on the Interface, under the ADR, and then surgically bring about the particular masochistic fantasy he saw there. It’s kind of moral, actually. An aptitude test for determining what degradation would be most satisfying; what they were looking for in L.A. to begin with, or else they wouldn’t be here, only it was too far buried for them to be sure of discovering themselves.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” said the girl, emotionless.

“For a higher price,” said Droit, “Adder runs the ADR on those who can afford to pay for it, mostly big shticks in the GPC and high army brass. That’s to find out what private, basic lusts are in them, aching to be released and satisfied. Whereas most poor schmucks from Orange County you see on the Interface have to find their own private kinkhood through experimentation. In both classes, nearly all the fantasies deal with the amputation or mutilating or altering of the sexual object. Hence, all of the chopped hookers out on the street. The rich customers get one cut to the exact specifications of their ADR-revealed hunger—there’s never any problem finding the girls for it—and store them in little rooms in the buildings along the street. They swap door keys every now and then for variety, but for the most part they’re fantastically attached to their little pets. After all, deep below, that’s what they’ve been lusting after for millions of years.”

“Some humanitarian, all right,” said Limmit. He accepted Droit’s explanation—it revealed too much about L.A. not to be true to some degree.

“In his own way, he is,” replied Droit. “Though I doubt if he gives a shit about much of any of it except the money.”

“You guys are fulla shit,” the girl said disgustedly. “Lotta metaphysical garbage, if you ask me.” She looked Limmit full in the face. “You’d understand better the way things are in L.A. if you spent more time out on the street instead of listening to weird bullshit artists like him.” She jerked a thumb at Droit. “Do you want to know how it is with this ADR thing?” Limmit nodded dumbly, vaguely wondering why the girl was affecting such a phony “from the gutter” speaking manner.

“No hooker,” she said, “is going to make any money in L.A. unless she has a specialty. And without money, she isn’t going to have a friend or anything else that’s nice to have. So, one way or another, she gets ahold of Dr. Adder. He dopes her out and peeks in her skull with this ADR stuff, and finds out what she’d be good at, or what parts she wouldn’t mind losing. Then he does it, back there in his operating room. Oh yeah, and sometimes he runs it on some fat rich guy and finds out what he’d really like to do, but is too afraid to admit to himself. That’s all.”

Droit rolled his eyes up to the ceiling.

“You know,” said Limmit to both of them, “he could be a fake. There might be no ADR at all. He just saws away however he pleases, and the suckers bang away at the results, believing because of his reputation that he must be right.”

“There’s a possibility of that,” admitted Droit. “I’ve never been under the ADR, so I can’t say for sure. But Adder doesn’t like to trick people. He likes being strong enough to tell them flat out what he’s going to do to them, and then doing it. And everybody digs it, of course.”

“This whole thing is hopeless,” said Limmit. A sudden wave of despair surged over him again. He had fallen into the hands of some mad doctor who extracted great bloody lizards from people’s brains and then chopped away until the people resembled them. A surgeon who cut out carcinomas and threw away the rest of the living body as not wanted. Adder was probably capable of turning Limmit into a toad for minor annoyance, like some childhood nightmare. And here he sat, talking it over with L.A.’s last and cheapest independent social researcher and some stark-naked chick with amputee ambitions. “Hopeless,” he muttered again.

“It passes the time,” said Droit. With a grin, somewhat malicious, he picked up from beside the girl’s left thigh on the desk a small ticking clock inscribed “To Dr. Adder, Best Regards, Admiral Sennet,” and displayed its face to Limmit. The hands had been replaced with miniature scalpels.

The flanks of the motorcycle lay dappled in the leaf-filtered sunlight. Adder trod over the moist layers of decaying leaves and other soft vegetation to the door of Betreech’s residence and factory. The door was only visible as a slightly less overgrown patch in what seemed to be a general facade of dark vines and leaves. Adder brushed aside several of the vines, found a small metal button, and depressed it, hearing the loud, raucous buzz inside the house. No answer came. “Motherfuck,” said Adder, and bent down to dig through a layer of decomposing greenery nearly a half-foot thick at the base of the door. He uncovered a rotting doormat (WELCOME), spotted with bright dots, colonies of mold. Beneath the mat was a brass key.

Inside the house, after the door swinging open had deposited a residue of dust, cobweb fragments, and dried birdshit on his head and shoulders, Adder shouted Betreech’s name. Again there was no answer. The sound of his voice seemed to travel only a few feet before it was sopped up by damp carpets and drapes, lush with mildew and rot. Adder’s shouts seemed to have as much weight as the cheap veneer peeling off the suburban petit bourgeois furniture that had been in the house when Betreech had acquired it, and never bothered to dispose of. One of the house’s encircling vines had managed to penetrate the wall, but had not got very far, becoming despondent and sickly in the light-scarce gloom inside the house. This had left the field open for the vine’s microscopic, airborne cousins. The fabric of the couch and chairs was gradually being replaced by a richer, self-renewing velvet; the chintzy end- and coffee-tables became lacquered with dull and intricate finishes, evolved and bent by moisture into shapes undreamed of in the bright eyes of long-dead faggot interior decorators.

“What a mess,” said Adder softly, being an admirer himself of the baroque that springs up from the intricacies of filth. He walked into the kitchen where the stairs into the cellar had been plunged, wondering if anything would sprout from the garbage in his lab back on the Interface, if he kept it as moist as up here in the thickening jungles of the Hollywood hills. He tended to doubt it. A vividly garish mold, sprung from one last peach-half left forgotten in its can sitting on the edge of the sink (one of many in various stages of rebirth), dripped down the wood cabinet, pointing to the trap door set into the buckling linoleum floor. A series of ketchup dots disappeared, the last neatly bisected, at the edge of the trap door. They were still fresh, as Adder could tell by smudging one with the toe of his boot. At least he’s still alive, thought Adder as he pulled open the trap by its metal ring and descended.

At the bottom of the stairs, three bare concrete corridors split off at forty-five-degree angles. From the first two on the right, Adder could hear the varied noises of Betreech’s autonomic pharmacological factory, muffled only slightly by the several weighty intervening doors. I might have known, thought Adder disgustedly, seeing the pale sheet of light emerging from beneath the door at the end of the short corridor to the left. As he stepped toward it, he could hear a familiar, rapidly slapping sound.

Inside, Betreech lay sprawled diagonally in the centermost of a group of a dozen upholstered theater chairs. The only illumination in the room was the large white rectangle cast against one wall by an antiquated motion picture projector. The projector’s take-up reel spun relentlessly, slapping the tail end of some film against the lens housing. Adder strode to the projector, switched it off, and turned on the lights. The unconscious old man was dressed in a woman’s Civil War-period crinoline ball gown, the long white skirt of which was rucked up past his thin, blue-veined legs to his narrow waist. His naked hipbones stuck out like butterflies swathed in dough. One hand still cradled his now detumescent flesh; a small liquid stain trailed down one thigh, matching the trail of saliva from his mouth, subject to the same gravitational pull. Adder caught the scent of the breath that whistled out of the old man’s mouth, observed the dead pipe, stuffed with ashes, balanced carefully on the arm of the chair. “Ah, Betreech,” he muttered. “Beating your meat at age eighty-plus, just like some brain-fogged old geriatric in an Orange County rest home.”

Adder retreated out the door and returned in a few minutes with a glass of water from the upstairs kitchen, in the cleanest glass discoverable in a short search. “Come on, old scout,” he said, bringing the glass and the old man’s lips together. “You’re going to dehydrate your tongue some day, going to sleep with your mouth open like that.”

The old man’s mouth sipped automatically at the water, then consciousness spread outward from the vegetative functions of the brain. Two unfogged, slightly reddened eyes fluttered open. Seeing Adder, the withered head smiled, which, in combination with the antebellum outfit, gave the impression of a gay mummy laid to rest in drag and come alive again. “Ah, Adder,” the old man said, apologetically dabbing at the drying semen with one edge of the crinoline skirt. “Come upon me in the midst of my little vice, eh?”

Dr. Betreech’s little vice consisted of dressing up like characters in his collection of old Hollywood films and stroking himself to a climax at the thought of the sexual activity imagined to be occurring in the ellipsis between one cut and another. “Jerk off, smirk off,” said Adder. “As long as you’re happy.” He remembered the time he discovered Betreech here dressed in a baggy fur ape suit scrounged up for him from an abandoned costume shop in the slums, and excitedly claiming to have discerned four explicitly sexual ellipses in the last surviving print of the 1933 King Kong—as simian pure a film, thought Adder, as Betreech had ever shown him from his collection. It was alarming how much Betreech had aged since then, only a few years ago: Now, the small violence of each film-inspired orgasm left him unconscious. It all reminded Adder idiotically of a description he had heard as a kid of some apocryphal male (black, naturally) who had an organ so big that when fully erect, the loss of blood from other parts of the body caused him to black out. Maybe Betreech’s brain, exercising overtime to supply the (to him) missing party of all these old flicks, had grown the same way.

“So,” said Betreech, sipping at his glass of water, the crinoline skirt down primly to his ankles, “what brings you up here? Just visiting a lonely old man? Unusually thoughtful of you.” Perched on the back of the theater seat in front of the old man, Adder shifted uneasily. “Come off it,” he said. They had gone through all this before, as if life had become looped somehow and threaded into Betreech’s projector. “Why try to make me feel guilty, for Christ’s sake? Do you expect me to come up to stay and cook for you, clean up that terminal mess upstairs? Nursemaid you while you rot into senility with one hand wrapped around your decayed old prick?”

“I still don’t think you understand much of anything,” murmured the old man. “Go live your own life out, see if I care. I worry about you—is that all right? I’m old enough to be your father, I set you up in business; allow me that much at least.” “Great,” muttered Adder. “I’ve got the world’s largest dope pusher for a Jewish mother. So what do you want already?” he yelled suddenly. “A signed and notarized confessional of all I owe you? Bill my office for it, you old pervert.”

“You’re too defensive,” sighed Betreech, shaking his head, giving up. “All right, what did you come up for?”

Adder sulkily told him about the flashglove. Perhaps Betreech’s more extensive contacts within the Rattown underworld and with the mysterious suppliers of his raw materials had leaked some knowledge concerning it and the plot behind.

“Haven’t heard a thing,” said Betreech. “Maybe this character who showed up with it acquired it honestly, or at least the way he says he did, and Mox bugged it without his knowledge. What did the fellow say his name was?”

“Allen Limmit. He says Lester Gass was his father, and he inherited it from him.”

“Might be,” said Betreech. “Gass did have a son who would be about that age now. When I was still an honest anesthesiologist I assisted at Mrs. Gass’ delivery, in a CIA hospital. Seems a lot longer ago than twenty-odd years.”

“Mmm,” said Adder, stroking his chin meditatively. “What do you suppose I should do about the thing?”

“Are you asking me for advice? Don’t buy it. There’s quite a few stiff laws left over from when the CIA was disbanded against unauthorized persons possessing a live flashglove. Obviously Mox is trying to set you up for some kind of a bust, thinking that the heaviness of the crime would be enough to circumvent his partners’ and your friends’ conniving to protect you. I’d say drop it—maybe turn in this Limmit character, like a good citizen.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” said Adder. “I want it.”

“Why? To complete your image? One useless machine like your motorcycle isn’t enough, you need another power symbol? You wouldn’t be able to graft it on without giving up your fine lucrative practice, which you need two skilled surgeon’s hands for. Give that up, and your former friends couldn’t care less while Mox had it and you deactivated.”

“Look, I just want it, okay?” said Adder. “Just to have, not to use.”

“What a dumb schmuck,” said Betreech. “He wants to have it just as proof that he can have it. Big bad Adder—ain’t nothing he can’t do.”

“Fuck off.”

“It means so much to you, find your own damn way to get it.” The brown-spotted hands angrily pressed the crinoline’s wrinkles out against his lap. “Remember you have ‘friends’ willing enough to do you favors. Why ask my advice?”

“Thanks a lot,” said Adder, springing from his perch. “You’re a real fuckin’ help.”

Betreech followed him up the stairs, through the moldering house’s kitchen and front room, out the door, and watched as Adder mounted his motorcycle. “Don’t worry,” the old man called out, conciliatory, from the front doorway. “You’ll work it out all right.”

Adder grunted, then spoke. “Take it easy on those movies. No double bills from now on, all right?” Without looking around for Betreech’s nod, he kicked over the engine and slid off down the hill trail packed with dead leaves. He looked around once and saw the old man still watching his progress, the expression on his face made indiscernible by distance, but the fragile antique crinoline gown glowing in the fragmented afternoon sunlight.

*   *   *

“All right,” said Adder, seating himself down behind his desk. He balled up the white lab coat, money included, and wiped the street’s dust from his face. In front of him, Droit looked composed and inquisitive, the young hooker seated on the desk vapid, and the still mysterious Limmit nervous and extremely uncomfortable. He’s probably been frozen like a rabbit since hearing my cycle snarl into the courtyard a minute ago, thought Adder. “Enough of this futzing around. You, Droit, give me back the gun and bug off. Yeah, don’t worry, I’ll let you know of any developments. You”—he prodded the girl in one buttock —“get back in the other room. I’ve got enough trouble keeping this place neat and tidy without every broad-assed hooker in L.A. sweating all over my business papers.”

As the two departed silently, Adder swiveled his chair in Limmit’s direction. “You,” he said, wagging the gun at Limmit for emphasis, “stay right where you are. I’ve got a little phone call to make.” He got up, keeping part of his vision and the gun pointed toward Limmit, and searched through several molder-ing piles of debris. A stack of vintage skin magazines tottered, then avalanched in a flow of pink and brown photos, revealing a telephone behind them.

Limmit heard him punch out a number. Adder seemed to be in a good humor: what did that mean? “Give me General Romanza,” he thought he heard Adder say behind his back. “I don’t care,” continued Adder in a louder voice, “you stupid capon. Just put him on.” Pause. “Well, when he gets back tell him to call Dr. Adder. Don’t forget, or it’ll be your ass.” Adder sat down behind the desk again. He stroked the gun’s barrel with one forefinger, and smiled crookedly at Limmit. “Why don’t you,” he said, “tell me all about it. Who you are and where you got the flashglove.”

“My name really is Limmit. I am Lester Gass’ son. I got the flashglove back in Phoenix. A GPC exec named Joe Goonsqua flew out to the egg ranch and gave it to me. He arranged for me to come out here and try to sell it to you; I don’t know why. I was to keep whatever I got from you for the glove as my profit in the deal.”

“Jesus,” said Adder. “And you fell for that? A setup like that smells wrong about twenty different ways. A frame for me, and a nice way to get burned or killed for you.” He tossed the gun on the desk beside the black briefcase and tilted back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. “You know,” he said, “I really believe you. I can’t help feeling for you. Just another punk kid out looking for an honest con. Just like me a while back, before I hooked up with old Dr. Betreech. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably be a specialist in some Orange County medical center right now, with a heavy trank habit, ulcers, and children. Puts me in a nostalgic mood, yes indeed.” He fell silent for a moment, deep in reverie. Suddenly the chair descended back onto all four legs and Adder leaned across the desk toward Limmit. “How would you like to work for me? I need a new assistant; my old one got snuffed last night.”

“I was on the street,” said Limmit. “I saw—”

“Yeah? Don’t worry about it, it’s not an occupational hazard or anything. Purely accidental, risks of city living, you know. How about it?”

This took some consideration. Limmit felt partly numb with shock. If his fortunes took any more sudden falls and rises he was afraid his lunch would follow them next. “I don’t know,” he said, and laughed nervously. “What would I have to do?” “Just general hassling. And give me a hand at the operating table. Know anything about surgery?”

Limmit told him of his work with a scalpel at the egg ranch’s brothel.

“That’s more than that dud Pazzo knew,” said Adder. “In your case, you’d already be halfway to picking up a good trade. Earn while you learn.”

“Why me?”

Adder shrugged and spread his hands. “Who can I find in L.A. that would work out? Everybody here is on some image kick, even me to some extent, though I’ve got mine under control. I need someone who can cut through all this obsessive crap, deal with just profit and cash.”

“Maybe,” said Limmit. He gazed around the dingy office. “But if I’m going to stay here in L.A. I want to know a few more things. You don’t have to be one in order to want to know a little about lunatics, especially if you’re locked in the homicidal ward. Droit told me about that ADR of yours, and why all the top GPC guys are so stuck on you they even let you operate down here at all. All except this John Mox, that is. If your fans are running around taking potshots over our heads at his fans, I want to know what the story is.”

It’s not much. A sort of joke. Some people actually don’t find it funny, though. I suppose it wouldn’t be fair for you to sign on without having heard it.

About the time I was graduating from high school, which is a ways back, the exec board at the Greater Production Corporation decided to initiate a new program for some of their factory workers. Volunteers were to get cash bonuses, and toasters, TV sets, et cetera, for undergoing surgery designed to improve their job performance. GPC bigfarts figured they’d save a bundle by retooling their workers’ arms and hands to flex in different ways, assume different stress and load capacities, and so on, rather than retooling or redesigning a lot of expensive machinery. After all, if you’ve got some apparatus that performs about two hundred separate functions on a plastic flange extrusion, it’s cheaper to alter your assembly line workers to handle the item in the factory’s most efficient way, rather than trying to build the machine to fit all its actions to be within natural human capabilities, right?

So anyway, a small problem—no medical personnel geared up and specially educated to do the necessary surgery. Big Orange County-wide aptitude test, I get in it by accident, and they pick me, both for my high natural ability and the GPC’s desire to kill two birds with one stone. I had some so-called “personal adjustment problems” when I was a kid. This way, they could show what a productive citizen I had been therapied into. Me, I just wanted some soft job with lots of spare time for my hobby, personal vegetation. They ship me off to the Auckland Medical Center in New Zealand. Not many people around here are even aware there is such a place. There I meet up with Dr. Betreech, the screwed-up med student’s unofficial friend and adviser. He was working up to being deported for peddling illicit substances. Things happen.

Five years later, we both come back to L.A. and hole up right on the fringe of the empty slums closest to the Orange County industrial district. There’s already a little sporting life going on here. Those GPC pricks got no hold on me, didn’t even bother to sign me to any contract in exchange for my high-priced education: they thought the prospect of a big salary was enough for their little pet cut-up to come home to Orange County. It wasn’t. Pretty soon, Betreech and I are a big success, making big money doing interesting work; becoming cultural heroes and objects of frenzied worship in our spare time. The Famous Amputationists’ School is looking for people who like to slice.

Whatever. Within months every GPC official is a customer of mine, including John Mox, even though he was head of the Video Church of Moral Forces back then as well. Just another satisfied customer, happy for me to arrange the customized tickling of his personal perversions. Little did he know what plots were circling around him, like pet vultures of mine. I had a grudge on him; I was just waiting for the perfect moment.

One day he comes up to my office, this office, with the hots. Wants me to do a big genital alteration (his thrill) on some girl he said he had found himself. Get this: I discovered later it was his wife. Some guys have no pride, even though she was, hmm, somewhat of a slut anyway. Her name was Jing, like the sound a cash register makes. The chance I had been waiting for. I assure him I’ll give his woman a box like none he’s ever been into before, and set to work. It takes me a while, but I do it just the way I want.

Now, I knew for a fact that Mox was as square in his screwing as everything else he did. Missionary position, with the lights off, always. So when that chick’s cunt closed around his organ in an unescapable rictus, all he could see when he looked down in horror at their interlocked loins was the faint phosphorescence I had given my little surprises, as they slid out of their cleverly concealed sheaths, but that was enough. In my ADR probe of Mox I had seen particularly strong a certain nightmare figure found in nearly every man’s subconscious, and now here was Mox, stuck hilt-deep in that dreaded nemesis, the Vagina Dentata. The grip around the base of his shaft was so tight that no fear was frenzied enough to drain even a drop of blood sustaining his erection, as he beat on the poor girl’s chest, she bewildered by all the uncontrollable functions I had built into her body to be triggered by simple coitus, mouse in baffled trap. He had time for probably one long scream as the long shark fangs I had filched from the ruins of the UCLA oceanology labs slid inexorably slow out of her groin and closed in on his prick like a dumb fish in a hard ivory sea anemone. If Goonsqua, his faithful little second-in-command, hadn’t been right outside the door, rushed in, and rushed him off to the hospital, while the girl went into her own hysterics at the sight of the bloody and mangled penis being spat out of her like a particularly ugly abortion, Mox would have been dead now for a long time.

Can’t win ’em all, I decided, sitting behind the little peephole through which I had observed (infrared scanner) the whole thing. In a way, Mox castrated was even more satisfying than Mox dead. I returned to my practice a pleased man, and things have continued as they are to this day.

❖

“Shoo-ee,” said Limmit, pale. “Some story.”

“Nothing much, really,” Adder said, shamming modesty. “Just another urban folktale of sordid bloodlust.”

“Mox became so down on you after that?”

“Well, sure. Before, he tut-tutted on his MoFo broadcasts in a general way about me and the whole Interface, but it was sheer hypocrisy—-just another thing too good to share with the masses. With his cock, however, went his duplicity. He’s become more powerful now, image-wise—attracts all those messed-up leafleteers you see out on the street, just itching for a chance to break loose and kill every dealer and whore in L.A. Mox keeps ’em repressed, however, to maintain his influence inside the GPC. He’s not quite as dumb as he is fanatical.” Limmit sat silent, thinking. “How come,” he said finally, “you wanted to get him?”

The amusement disappeared from Adder’s manner in a way that subtly frightened Limmit. The skin of Adder’s face tightened around his sharp bones, like a sheath about to be split open by the knife within. “Because,” he said, “everything I remember about growing up over there in Orange County came walking into this room wrapped up in that one person. Not because of some archetypal conflict of polarities, anarchy versus order, son versus father, or any of that other crap, but simply because I hated his bowels the same way I hated them when I was a goddamn child, for Christ’s sake, and my teachers would load me up on downers and tranks and set me in front of his sententious moral face on the tube. He was younger then, but it was the same face that came walking in here that had told me practically every day of my life till I was eighteen to sit still, work hard, be good, and don’t say anything. So I chopped off his balls, a childhood dream come true. I used to fantasize as a kid, with whatever part of my head was still mine underneath the layers of numb cotton wool they shoved in, that all my teachers, from nursery school on, were Mox’s paid agents. The truth was worse—they did it almost for free. And they did a good job, too.

“Look out there.” He cast a hand at the window that looked out over the street. “Everyone thinks it’s called the Interface because L.A. and Orange County share the same pathological boundary there. Well, that might be—it’s as good an explanation as any. But it’s my Interface, too. Every part of me that came out crippled or dead from Orange County is out hooking on that street, trolling down my spine for all corners. And there isn’t any part of me that got so crippled up that it isn’t staggering or crawling down that pavement in the same direction, regardless of incline, down or up. I mean, they did a job on me. When I stumbled into taking that surgical aptitude test long ago, all I could even think of wanting to be (at that point, it’s hard to want anything) was a fuckin’ librarian—the closest modern equivalent in my mind of a monk in a medieval retreat. And that’s where I’d be, thanks to Mox and all the little Moxes, if certain things hadn’t happened. Maybe Betreech, in his little den in Auckland, let me try out the ADR once too often; maybe the reptiles, the alligators, climbed up out of the sewer, up the toilet bowl, and ate, ass first, the good little boy squatting there taking his respectable, constipated shits. Whatever. It’s really no wonder to me at times that all those psychopaths in the slums are obsessed with me. The Interface isn’t anything I created with Betreech’s help. It is me, spread out with a giant hard-on thrust deep into the subterranean recesses of L.A. Godhood? I fuckin’ love it.”

“Jesus,” said Limmit, aghast at the vehemence that had swelled into Adder’s voice. “You’re really crazy.” He regretted it instantly, remembering the scalpel, gun, and flashglove laid out on the desk, a lunatic arsenal.

Adder laughed, becoming calmer. “I’m not that much of a megalomaniac. I’m just a hardworking hustler with a good con and an unhappy childhood like all the rest. Everybody’s got a horror story to tell. And a proposition for you. Go on, take it, it’s what you want, you little hungry pimp. You won’t wake up some night to find me standing over you, drooling onto a machete clutched in both hands.”

“So, all right,” said Limmit. He could feel his heart accelerating, dizzying him. “When do I start?”

“I’ll get hold of you tomorrow. The only job I’ve got going at the moment I’ll be able to wrap up by myself tonight. Oh yeah, one little thing right now.” He opened up the flashglove’s case and extracted the pinhead scanner. He placed it on the desk, its tiny eye gazing at them both. Taking the roll of money from the lab coat, he handed the bills over to Limmit. “Thank you,” said Adder, looking directly into the scanner, “for bringing me this fully active flashglove, which I’ve always wanted for my personal use and possession.” He picked up the scanner and held it to his grinning face. “Thought you’d have to wait longer for your evidence, didn’t you, Mox? Do your worst, schmuck.” He tossed it into a desk drawer and slammed it shut. The telephone rang across the room.

As Adder rose and went to the telephone, Limmit sat lost in thought. “Romanza,” he heard Adder say; the rest he couldn’t make out. I’m into it now, thought Limmit. One way or another.

A few minutes later, the phone conversation ended. “Hey,” said Limmit, turning around in his chair, as Adder replaced the receiver. “What happened to the girl? Mox’s wife?”

For a second, it looked as if Adder hadn’t heard. He looked blankly through Limmit, as though no one existed in the chair. Then his eyes refocused on Limmit’s face. “Her?” he said. “She died, I guess.”

Through the window, Dr. Adder could see the sun going down in flames from the sky over L.A. He sat at his desk in the darkening office, the shadows from the debris on the floor lengthening toward him, and kneaded his forehead with one hand. A few seconds ago, he had flung across the room the small red capsule that would have dissolved the headache, an aftereffect of the ADR. The capsule had bounced off the window glass with a tiny click, joining all the other items underfoot. Fuckin’ thing anyway, Adder thought moodily.

To take his attention from the pain behind his eyes, he glanced again through the contents of the manila envelope Romanza had sent over. The army messenger had been waiting down at the gates when Adder had come out of the ADR.

The first sheet, postdated a week ago, detailed the legal incorporation of something called Adder Research Laboratories; the other sheet awarded that organization the army’s contract for research into “the military potential of certain obsolete and discontinued devices of CIA design and origin.” Good old Romanza, thought Adder, his spirits rising a little. He’s earned his little treat.

There probably won’t even be any word from the law, reflected Adder. Mox had by now undoubtedly heard of his coup, his authorization for possessing the flashglove. He patted the briefcase sitting on the desk, then opened it and placed the papers inside. It’s mine now, he thought, even legally. It’s a new trip, being an incorporated research laboratory.

From behind him, he heard a groan and the sounds of stumbling flesh. She must be coming out of it, he thought, turning around. The young hooker appeared in the door from the stockroom, red-eyed and groggy looking. “Shit,” she said in a shaky voice, “that’s what I feel like.” She crossed the room and sat down heavily in one of the chairs in front of the desk. “That’s some rough stuff, Doctor.”

“Think so?” said Adder. “Don’t worry. You won’t have to go through it again.” Her skin, paler now, seemed subtly looser as well, the small breasts slack as though slightly deflated with age. It was as if something inside had contracted in fatigue. “Remember anything?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Blank.”

“No one ever remembers except me.”

“What did it say?” she asked flatly, looking full into his face. “What’d you find out?”

“Ever hear of junkie balling?”

Nodding slowly, the blood draining from her face, she whispered, “The Long One.”

“That’s right,” said Adder. He pulled open one of the desk drawers and extracted a syringe and a small vial filled with a colorless fluid. He laid them on the desktop. “I can do it later, if you want.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Go ahead and do it now. It takes a while to set in, doesn’t it?”

She watched as Adder silently pushed the needle through the vial’s seal. “I suppose I should have known it would be this,” she said. “I remember when I was in junior high school, they actually brought my class on a field trip down here. To scare us onto the paths of righteousness, I guess—they don’t do it anymore. Because it was daytime, only the scavengers were out on the street. Then a young woman, a whore, staggered out of an alley toward us. All the kids recoiled except me. She fell to her knees right in front of me. There was something strange about her eyes. She tried to speak, maybe something about the crumpled-up paper in her hands. I remember thinking it looked like a dirty rose. A real rat-faced man came running up and pulled her away.” She looked away as Adder pricked her arm with the needle. “They gave me a sedative on the bus back to Orange County, even though I didn’t need one.”

Adder sat down again behind the desk and tossed the empty vial to the floor. “Maybe that’s when you did pick up on this,” he agreed.

“I’m not afraid,” she said. In fact, she did appear to Adder to be stronger, her skin filled out to normality.

“It won’t always be this clear,” he said gently. “This stuff works in progressive cycles, you know. When you hit the periodic low points for the first year or so, you’ll remember all that you’re losing, and about to lose. It’s only fair you should know.” “I won’t regret it,” she murmured dreamily. “You’re being so nice to me. No one ever told me you could be like that.” “Don’t think I am. You’re just easy money to me.”

“Maybe everyone will be nice to me now,” she continued, even softer. “I wonder what they’ll all seem like to me. Junkie bailers...”

Adder carried the sleeping girl, the exhaustion from the ADR having caught up with her, into the stockroom and laid her on a gurney. No more would be necessary, other than calling the pimp in the morning to come get her.

When she wakes up, thought Adder, pulling a sheet over her bare form, she won’t be really human anymore. And every day that passes, she’ll be less so. The drug, the only actual hallucinogen Betreech produced, had been the culmination of the visionary epoch of drug use that had died out in the seventies. It had a cumulative, altering elfect on the individual’s genetic structure. Gradually, day by day, the perception of reality changed as the biochemical makeup of the brain and nervous system was replaced by the new patterns. The pimp fortunate enough to have such a commodity on his hands fed and protected it from the sharp edges of reality, and located the customers interested in intercourse with a body no longer inhabited by a mind that could perceive them. Adder analyzed it to himself as a form of necrophilia.

Back at his desk, he felt a vague dissatisfaction. Maybe I just like working with my hands, he thought. It’s too easy, just doing it with a needle like this. He opened the briefcase again and gazed at the flashglove, not wanting to probe any deeper into the causes of what he felt.

“Get out of here,” said Mary. Her eyes were narrowed with bitterness and hurt.

Limmit wheeled away from the dark window and faced her as she sat on the bed, face averted from him. “What’s wrong?” he shouted, though the hollow feeling in his gut already seemed to tell him. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

She laughed, short and painful. “Happy? That you’re going to be Adder’s assistant box chopper? You must be joking.” “What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, wounded by her derision. “What’s wrong with working for Dr. Adder? Running that feathered whorehouse in Phoenix was better, I suppose.” “Oh, Christ, E. Allen.” She turned her face violently up to his, the single wet streak down one cheek running into her angry, pressured lips. “Can’t you see what Adder is? How long do you have to be in L.A. before you know?”

“Okay, bitch, so what is it then?” asked Limmit, maddened beyond restraint. He still felt ill from the speed at which he had, without warning, dropped into the pit.

Mary attempted to erase the tremors from her voice, speaking slow and flat. “He’s responsible for it. Everything in L.A., everything out on that street”—she flung one hand at the window—“he created. It’s his.”

“That’s a-fuckin’ right,” said Limmit. “And I’d have to be crazy to walk away from a piece of it.”

Shaking her head, she said softly, “You’ll wind up like him. If he doesn’t eat you first, like everyone else has been. You don’t understand anything.”

“I understand enough. You’re pissed because now you won’t be able to drag me into that drizzled-out revolution of yours.” “Get out of here.”

“The Red Madonna,” he sneered. “Mother to the troops. Too much for you to castrate a man yourself; you just look around for a natural failure. But it’s not going to be me.”

A fine dust settled through the room, dislodged by the door slammed behind him. That stupid prick, Mary thought, remaining seated on the bed and watching the blurred images of the Interface’s light come through the window. Asshole.

The last stitch disappeared, merging into flesh beneath the humming chrome. Adder switched off the instrument and laid it down beside the unconscious girl on the surgical table. Perfect at last, he thought perfunctorily, admiring his own handiwork, the smooth, pink submaxillary skin. It was the only detail that had been left undone from the night before—in a few hours, Pazzo would be dead for an even twenty-four, one rotation of the earth.

The building seemed strangely quiet, bloated with silence, even though Adder could hear the noises of the crowd on the street. He drifted uneasily into the unlit office, as though looking for something. He sat down at the desk and switched on the lamp in the center of its cluttered surface. At the edge of its pool of light, a single ancient skin magazine lay crumpled. He picked it up and leafed through it, stopping at a tattered page he thought he had almost forgotten from when he had first seen it, rescued from Rattown’s underground debris. The young girl’s face in the picture looked calmly into the camera, somehow angelic among the hands that pulled and contorted her body, inserting themselves.

Adder hurled the magazine convulsively into the dark center of the room. He rubbed his eyes, gauging from their slight pain how long he had gazed unblinking at the gray representation of flesh long ago gone soft, wrinkled, then buried. A good lay, he decided. That’s what I need. When melancholia strikes, and all else fails, think of cunt.

Springing from the chair, he strode toward the storage room in which the young hooker lay sleeping, then changed direction midcourse for the surgery. Romanza won’t be able to tell, he thought, if I take first crack at his new toy.

Inside the surgery, he stroked the soft flesh of the body on the table. Asleep as a stone, still anesthetized. Fortunately, according to Romanza’s specifications, all sexual functions had been placed at the subconscious level, ready to go into action regardless of the girl’s degree of awareness. Adder turned his back on her for a moment, reaching for his belt buckle beneath the white lab coat. “Ad,” he heard the sleeping girl whisper.

He spun around, fear rising like a ball of vomit in his throat. The girl was still asleep, as he swallowed and swallowed, trying to get rid of the nauseating taste in his mouth. She was, as he well knew, with her modifications incapable of speech. Christ, thought Adder, sinking slowly upon the table beside her, I’m cracking up. What happened to the girl? a voice repeated inside his head. For a second he thought it was his own, rather than Limmit’s. What happened to her?

“Why?” he moaned, pathetic, looking down at the unconscious face. He felt himself struggling, losing hold of some line of demarcation within himself as the face turned to the black-and-white one in the skin magazine, then to another. “Why’d he ask that?”

Control! he screamed inside, fleeing into the office. Maintain. He frantically tore open one of the desk drawers, extracted a cylinder of red capsules, and shook several into his hand, then mouth. He gagged and vomited them whole onto the desktop. He stood looking at their wet surfaces, a tremor discernible to no observers in the vacant room. Toward the circumference of the light, he collapsed slowly into the chair, drawing his fingers through the clutter and across the compulsive scalpel incisions, like hieroglyphics, in the wood.

At the edge of the desk, his fingers trapped one of the capsules. He picked it up and bit into it, chewing automatically. The seeping red line along one finger, from passing over the scalpel’s upturned blade, went unnoticed. “That cocksucker,” he murmured, his voice drained and exhausted. “Stupid, cock-sucking asshole.”

Screw her, thought Limmit. She can go shit on someone else’s rainbow from now on. He walked through the milling crowds of the Interface, no longer alien. I belong here, he repeated fiercely to himself. On the inside of it all, at last. The hollow feeling in his gut persisted; he felt as if somehow he had been cheated during his sleep.

Absorbed in his own mood, he didn’t notice the arm approach from one side and circle his shoulders, halting him abruptly on the sidewalk. A voice pronounced his name with drunken hilarity. Limmit turned and saw Joe Goonsqua’s florid face next to his. “Hey, how you been doing?” he said, squeezing Limmit tighter.

“All right,” said Limmit, stiffening warily. “I sold it to Adder.”

“I don’t even wanna hear about it,” Goonsqua replied, his face beaming and shiny from some chemical exudation. “I knew you’d work out all right. I mean, what are you doing right now?”

Limmit eyed the sloppy, disorganized figure. “Just hanging around.”

“Yeah? Come to my...” He faded off, befuddled. “Party. That’s it. Was a surprise, all my pals celebrating my return to Orange County. Floated from there to here. Come on in; they said it’s nearly time for the big climax.” He tugged Limmit toward an open doorway.

He hesitated, then allowed himself to be pulled by Goonsqua into the building. Only when he was inside did Limmit recognize it as the MFers’ hangout bar where he had run into Droit. All the tables had been pushed and stacked against one wall, leaving a large open space in which several of the street’s hookers stood around listlessly. Goonsqua, chortling liquidly, let go of Limmit and pulled two of the hookers unresisting to the bar at the side of the room.

Limmit turned to leave. Something about the room full of idle whores both puzzled and depressed him. He felt it obvious now that Goonsqua at least knew nothing about the briefcase being bugged. He’s too messed up, thought Limmit, to pull anything off right. He didn’t even tell me how to get in to see Adder.

“Some party,” a bored voice said behind him. He turned and saw a one-legged hooker leaning on her crutch and surveying the room coldly.

“Aren’t you getting paid for it?” asked Limmit.

“Sure,” she replied. “But I don’t know for what. All the other GPC execs disappeared ten minutes ago, right out that door. They just left that pig behind,” she added, pointing to Goonsqua. She looked up at Limmit and smiled.

Reaching into his coat, he extracted a bill from the wad Adder had given him and handed it to the hooker. “Not tonight,” he said, turning back to the door. “Out of the mood.”

Even before he crossed the room and reached the door, he could sense something wrong beyond it. Complete silence had replaced the Interface’s usual nighttime noise.

Standing in the bar’s doorway, he looked out onto the crowded, motionless street. All of L.A.’s dealers and hookers were standing bunched together in the middle, staring frozenly at the far ends of the street. Limmit peered over their massed heads and saw one last Orange County straight, tiny at this distance, disappear, arguing drunkenly while being pulled behind a solid mass of MFers standing shoulder to shoulder across the width of the Interface. The other end of the street, only a few yards from where Limmit stood, was blocked the same way. The MFers’ hands, below their flushed faces, were full of long hard objects.

A telephone was ringing somewhere. Adder sat at his desk and listened to it. Had it been ringing long? he wondered. It was hard to tell; perhaps it had taken hours to pierce the red capsules’ fog and reach him beneath. The phone continued to ring, and Adder grew slightly annoyed. It won’t stop until I answer it, a portion of his narcotized mind realized. He got up, swaying slightly. One hand brushed across the desktop, rearranging the pattern of objects on its surface.

The telephone lay nestled between stacks of old skin magazines, as he remembered dimly it had earlier in the day. Their soiled white edges glowed faintly, like flesh. Adder picked up the receiver, silencing the ringing.

“Adder!” cried Droit’s voice from the phone, abnormally excited. “Where have you been? Something’s happening—” “Where,” interrupted Adder in a thick voice, “are you calling from?” It seemed important for some reason.

“What the fuck does that matter? What’s wrong with you?” yelled the voice of Droit. “You’re gonna have to get your ass out of there, and fast.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Adder. Whatever it was, he felt disinterested, as though it could not possibly affect him.

“Take a look out your window, for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you seen? Mox has gone—”

Droit’s voice was replaced by a dead vacuum. Adder, without thought, put the telephone back on the floor and sat down beside it. Inside him, adrenaline started to flow, slowly cutting and dissipating the fog. In a few minutes, he rose shakily, walked to the window, and looked out.

Screams, shouts of varying pitches and intensities, struck his ears. It must be a hallucination, he said to himself. But then why had Droit phoned him? He went rigid, startled by the sudden, glaring realization that the carnage in the street below was real. MFers armed with short pipes chased the Interface’s whores, pimps, and dealers, bludgeoning them senseless or dead upon capture. Already dozens of skull-smashed bodies lay twisted and heaped on the sidewalks. Spots and trickles of blood merged into a general flow, filling the gutters like a small river. As Adder watched, some of the MFers, exhausted and grinning, exchanged places with the others guarding the street’s exists. One pimp dived between their legs, struggled past their grasping hands, and sprinted down an alleyway. An MFer with a red armband, who seemed to have been giving orders, came running up and extended a large, blued-steel pistol at the fleeing figure. A small hole appeared in the pimp’s back, then he was lifted from his feet and propelled a yard farther down the alley, landing in the pool of blood and tissue that had burst from his chest. The gun’s noise echoed over the chaos in the street.

That’s what Droit was trying to tell me, thought Adder. Mox must’ve gone crazy. He wouldn’t dare—why hasn’t the GPC exec board stopped it already— His thoughts snapped off. Immediately below, he could see the heavy padlock dangling broken and useless from the iron gates. He spun away from the window and froze, facing the darkened room. All of the toxins seemed to dissipate instantaneously from his bloodstream. Faintly, on the floor below him, he could hear the sounds of a group of men trying to enter the building as quietly as possible, but betrayed by their own excitement.

What the fuck is going on here? thought Limmit, dazed in the middle of the street. He looked around wildly for some exit from the buffeting chaos. The motion of maddened, fear- and blood-crazed runners on all sides doubled him over convulsively for the second time since the massed MFers at either end of the street had surged forward on signal from their red-armbanded leaders. He heaved dry: nothing was left from the first vomitus when he had narrowly eluded the MFers swarming over their old hangout bar at the far end of the street.

A pair of crutches clattered on the ground before his eyes. Limmit looked up and saw an amputee hooker, her eyes glazed with animal panic, fall to the asphalt beneath an MFer’s short metal pipe. The weapon imbedded itself so deeply into the base of the girl’s skull that her fall twisted it out of his hands. Before Limmit could move, the MFer, his face maniacal, leaped massive and toadlike at him, knocking them both sprawling onto the sidewalk. The MFer scrambled to force his weight on top, as Limmit, with the strength of unthinking reflex, jerked one fist up into his groin. The heavy body rolled off, writhing, lost under other running feet. Limmit, breathless, knelt on hands and knees and panted. Delirious, he thought he could feel the confusion and death flow wavelike over his back.

A hand grasped his shoulder, then jerked him over onto his back. Another MFer grinned and straddled his chest, pressing his metal pipe down on Limmit’s throat. The carnage’s noise grew louder and merged into a single roaring sound in his ears. A silver line of saliva trailed from the MFer’s rictuslike grin and Limmit felt its liquid warmth across his brow and cheeks. The pressure on his throat became an iron band of smaller and smaller dimensions as the MFer pressed his thumbs, wide as houses, into his larynx.

Suddenly, as the black, vacuumlike dots before his eyes started to grow and merge with each other, the metal pipe’s pressure ended and the MFer rolled off Limmit’s chest, and lay on his side, staring astonished into Limmit’s face. He grunted and spurted blood around the handle of the knife sunk deep into his back.

“Come on,” said Mary urgently and jerked Limmit to his feet. She started to pull him down the street but he pulled his hand free. “Wait a minute,” he said calmly. He walked back to the dead MFer and pulled the knife free. He was right—it was his own. She must have taken it from my boot just now, he thought dazedly. Maybe she lost her own already, just getting to me. He wiped it carefully on the gray coat before reinserting it into its sheath in his boot.

“Are you crazy?” yelled Mary, grabbing his arm again. “Come on!” She dragged him after her for a few yards until, as if suddenly waking, he ran alongside her, following her lead.

“This way,” she said, pointing to a small alleyway between buildings. “Quick. They’ve spotted us.” He looked behind and saw a dozen MFers, one with a red armband at their head, racing over the corpse-littered street toward them. The unceasing noise from the Interface was eclipsed briefly by the sound of the leader’s pistol, and the bullet thudding into the bricks on one side of the alley.

Before Limmit could follow Mary into the alley’s dark mouth he tripped over an outstretched hand on the sidewalk. Landing painfully on one knee, he saw in a flash of recognition that the obstacle was Joe Goonsqua’s arm, beyond the shoulder of which lay his face, the eyes puzzled looking and the forehead caved in around a small, neat hole in its center. A small line of drying blood ran from the hole to the larger pool beneath. Limmit shook off the strangely riveting effect of the vision, rose, and caught up with Mary in the alley.

“I saw this,” Mary panted between strides down the alley’s dark length, “when I came out after you. They’ve only got one young kid guarding this way out. The others must have got excited and went to join in the action.”

The alley bent sharply, revealing the young MFer. His face drained white as he swiveled a rifle up at them. His fingers went paralyzed with fear around the gun’s trigger. Mary snatched it away from him, uppercutting his chin with its blunt end. The MFer fell to his knees, his face bloodied, and Mary brought the butt down on his neck. “No time for that,” she said as Limmit drove his boot into the side of the unconscious head. She pointed along the rest of the alley. “North. Go to Rattown. We’ll lose them there.”

She threw away the rifle and they ran on, leaving the body spread-eagled in the alleyway for their pursuers.

The door to the office flew open, and a second passed before three shots flared from the stairway’s darkness at the figure silhouetted against the window. The figure dissolved into a man-high stack of skin magazines, bursting out through the window in an exploding storm of shattering glass and paper, driven by the bullets’ impact.

Adder, standing silent and invisible behind the desk, sighted two feet behind the spot where the long gouts of flame had appeared in the doorway and squeezed off with both hands three shots of his own from the .44 Magnum, keeping his arms level despite the pistol’s jolting kickback. There was the sound of two large objects, rigid but filled with liquid, hitting the far wall of the stairway, and a scramble of live bodies back down the stairs.

The young hooker slowly opened the door from the storeroom. In the dim light from the window, Adder could see that her eyes had the confused look of someone who has awakened suddenly, but for whom the nightmares hadn’t ended. Fearfully, she stepped into the office and looked around in the darkness. “Dr. Adder?” she whispered.

Adder stepped from behind the desk and grabbed her by one wrist. “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered tensely. “Don’t worry. I’ll get us out of here.” For a moment, she could see the planes of his face illuminated by the light from the smashed window as he pulled her across the room and flattened them both against the wall beside the door to the stairway.

They waited until she felt Adder, with a barely audible hiss of intaken breath, stiffen suddenly beside her. The sounds of rapid, shallow breathing were in the doorway, detectable at about knee height. Adder, his eyes fully accustomed to the darkness now, watched as the faces of two MFers appeared at that level, eyes intent upon the desk at the other side of the room. Swiftly, Adder whipped the girl by one arm into the center of the room. Stumbling into the faint shaft of light from the window, she had time to blink once in her confusion before the first MFer, with trained rapidity, raised an old CIA issue shotgun and had at her. The deafening blast lifted her naked body, flying, disintegrating into bloody fragments, into the far corner of the room; Adder took careful aim and shot the MFer behind one ear, snapping his head down onto the floor in a spatter of fluid.

The second MFer took one look up at Adder beside the door behind him, fired one shot wide of the mark, then collapsed alongside his comrade, his face shattered by Adder’s subsequent bullet. Stepping quickly to the desk, Adder snatched up the flashglove’s black briefcase. He turned and vaulted over the bodies blocking the top of the stairway. Hope that’s all of them, he thought, racing down the steps. Hope they haven’t touched the motorcycle.

He shot one more standing guard in the courtyard, dropped the empty gun into the cavity where the MFer’s chest had been, and mounted the cycle. It started up with a single kick, roaring and spitting. It hadn’t been tampered with—overconfident, they hadn’t expected him to get this far.

He pulled the machine past the iron gate with its smashed lock dangling, out onto the Interface’s surging chaos. A few feet away from him in all directions, the Moral Forces members, spotted with red and insane grins, chased, beat, and killed, frenzied with delayed vengeance. The hands of L.A.’s whores and pimps clutched and implored at the sudden vision of Adder in their midst, impeding him as they caught hold of the motorcycle, until he picked up enough speed where no worshipper or enemy could gain a purchase on him. The forks bucked under his hands upon running over whatever limbs he wasn’t able to avoid in his path, the wheels slipping in puddles of various fluids.

He gunned it harder, the motor’s unmuffled roar blending into the screams of the dying Interface, then saw the mass of MFers blocking the end of the street, waiting for him. He pulled the cycle around short, balancing on one foot through a stopping turn of 180 degrees. The other end of the street was blocked as well. MFers from either blockade started to run toward him, joined along the way by the ones already in the street alerted to his presence, all converging on him, pipes and guns raised. Shitfire, thought Adder, desperately looking around him. His thoughts burned for a fraction of a second, then he turned the motorcycle in the direction he had started. He picked up speed again, weaving around the mounded bodies in his path.

Ahead of him, the blockade of MFers grew closer; a few, then most of them scattered at his manic approach, till only a coolly professional trinity remained standing in the middle of the road, large guns clutched in both hands and calmly focused on him. They were waiting for point-blank firing distance. Their unblinking eyes bored straight into his with a cold passion of hatred. Adder felt he could discern and memorize every separate line in their faces, swelling up like earth fissures as he aimed the geometrical center of the motorcycle’s handlebars square into their collective midst. He saw the small contraction of their fingers around the triggers of their guns.

Even before the explosions following the bullets roared over his head, he clenched the cycle’s front brakes on hard for a second and pulled the bars around, sending the machine falling on its side into a whirling skid as he tried to throw himself clear. He clutched at a whore’s corpse on the road behind him, pressing the stale air from its lungs with his impact, his momentum pulling them both for a distance behind the sliding motorcycle, his face thrust into the smashed facial bones of the dead hooker. One blue eye had been smashed by an MFer’s pipe into jelly. He had jerked one leg free as the motorcycle fell, but felt it grind across the left for an agonizing second of shredding cloth and skin.

Motion stopped. He unwrapped himself from the stiffening arms of the corpse, a smell of friction-burned dead flesh rising from beneath her, and limped toward where his motorcycle now lay. Behind him, at a distance, he could hear shouts and running feet.

Two of the MFers were dead or unconscious as he passed them; the third gasped in pain and shock from the asphalt at Adder towering over him, then attempted to point a wavering gun at him. Adder kicked it aside and thrust the boot into the stark-white face. He righted the motorcycle. Miraculously, the engine roared into life. He straddled it, his left leg throbbing, and was swallowed up in the darkness beyond the Interface before his pursuers could reach him.

As they got farther away from the Interface, the less light seeped into the alley. In the darkness, Limmit ran into something waist-high, metallic, and empty. An abandoned trashcan.

It sent him flying and then sprawling into a wall. For a moment he lay there stunned, thinking he could feel the MFer’s pipe on his throat again. That passed, and he looked around the alley’s black shapes. No one else was there. He must have gotten separated from her among the alley’s twisting branches and turns. He thought he heard several sets of feet nearby running away from him in another segment of the alley, then approach, then fade away again.

He shook his head viciously, trying to clear away the ringing confusion. Which way was north? he wondered. Looking up, he saw only a patch of flat darkness, defined at its irregular edges by the darker black of the roofs of L.A.’s abandoned buildings. He smelled something strangely acrid, like sweat, made faint by distance; some subconscious, crisis-risen sense registered the presence of death in one direction. Placing one hand against the wall of the alley, he rose and loped on, away from the scent.

“I know everything,” said Dr. Betreech. He continued swabbing the blood and oil from Adder’s leg. “Droit phoned me— he managed to escape over the line into Orange County.” “What do you think happened?” asked Adder. He felt his strength slowly ebbing back, after the exhausting ride up into these hills. Luckily, Betreech had been waiting for him.

“God knows.” Betreech reached up and took a can of aerosol bandage from the shelves lining the cramped cellar medical room. Spraying it on the raw flesh of Adder’s left leg and watching it congeal into a porous membrane, he shook his head. “If the rest of the GPC is letting him get away with it, then some unknown factor has come up. Some drastic change with Mox or you that we can’t see.”

Submerged in thought, Adder swung his bandaged leg over the edge of the table and rolled his pants leg down over it. He looked up suddenly at the old man, now in his white lab coat. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I’m tired,” said Betreech calmly. “I’m too old to fight or run. There’s a toxic capsule implanted in one of my molars—when they come storming in here, I can break it with my tongue and be dead in fifteen seconds. For some reason, I’m still afraid of a violent death.”

“How long do you think it’ll be before they get here?”

“An hour or more. It’ll take them at least that long to round up a vehicle and then find this place.”

“Good,” said Adder. “Then there’s time for this.” He reached down and lifted the black briefcase. It had remained strapped to the motorcycle throughout—he hadn’t let Betreech pull him inside without it.

“Do you think that’s going to help you?” said Betreech. “Or are you just trying to go down in flames in a big way?”

“It’s the only weapon I’ve got,” replied Adder grimly. “And I don’t think there’s going to be much work in my old line for a while.”

“Are you that confident I can graft it on all right?” He studied Adder, his own age-lined, gray face inscrutable.

“I know how Lester Gass designed this thing, so that it could be attached out in the desert by nonmedicals. The glove has a grafting sequence programmed in, plus autonomic neural linkups. All you have to do is attach it to the stump—a boy scout with a dull axe could do it.”

“It would be better if you ran and hid out, rather than try to fight them.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I just want this in case they catch up with me.”

Betreech sighed wearily. “I don’t believe that. But go ahead and take off your shirt—it’s probably the last thing I’ll ever be able to do for you.”

The sensation was like blood circulation being restored to a limb—an intense, near-painful tingling beneath the point where the metal receptor of the flashglove lapped over Adder’s stump. The feeling went on for a minute, then faded as he felt the weapon’s expanded sensory range begin to switch on, like the opening of eyes from his wrist to elbow.

Betreech studied the dead-white face, the angles sharper and more knifelike than ever, as if more had been removed in the amputation than his arm. “I warned you,” said Betreech. “I could have given you a local anesthetic. Even a high-velocity bonesaw is no picnic.”

“No,” mumbled Adder, rolling his head on the sweat-soaked towel below. “Didn’t want... anything to interfere. With getting control of it immediately.”

“Do you think you’re in control of it now?”

Adder closed his eyes and nodded. “I can feel it. All of its programs ... I can see your body heat—like a photo. And the machines in the other room, running hot.” The eyes flew open. “What’s that?”

“There’s nothing.”

“In the corridor outside. They’re here.” Adder slid off the table and faced the closed door, then turned around, his mouth open in surprise and his metal arm flashing upward, as he felt a small, sharp pain in the small of his back. Betreech stood behind him with a hypodermic, wetly tipped with red. “You,” emitted Adder as a warm, numbing wave swept through him. His heart beat again and the paralyzing warmth surged over his head. He collapsed beside the surgical table, dimly hearing the door opening and footsteps inside the room.

From the floor, unable to turn his head, Adder could see, through miles of black-bordered, wavering liquid space, Betreech and an MFer with a red armband looking down at him. “You took your time getting here,” he could hear Betreech say to the other as the black border swept toward the center of his vision and he lost consciousness. “There’s my part of the deal.”

“What did you hit him with?” asked the MFer with the red armband.

Dr. Betreech looked down the silent length of the Interface. The mounded bodies on its surface were lit pale blue by the lights overhead. He felt freezing cold in the night air, and wished he could stand by the bonfire the last dozen MFers had built in the center of the street. But that’s where Adder is, he thought, right where they dumped him out of the car. And I don’t want to see that.

“I said, what did you hit him with?”

“What?” Betreech’s thoughts broke off and he turned to face the MFer. “Oh, I didn’t hit him with anything—the injection was a normal saline solution, just to make him think he was threatened. A black placebo.” He hugged his coat tighter around his frail body. “I knew more about the flashglove than he did. At the CIA camps in the desert, they found it was necessary to keep the glove bearer unconscious for six hours after the grafting. It takes that long for the neural connections to fully complete themselves. If the bearer’s slightest impulse initiates any of the glove’s attack programs before that period is over, the feedback knocks him out, paralyzes his higher conscious centers. Takes weeks to recover.”

“That’s more time,” said the MFer, “than Adder’s got.” “Look,” said Betreech, suddenly shaking with impatience. “Can’t we get on with it? Why don’t you just shoot him and take me on in to see Mox?”

“Those weren’t my orders,” said the MFer, smirking. “My orders were to bring him here, have my squad stomp him to death here, and leave him here. Right in the middle of the road.”

“For God’s sake,” said Betreech bitterly. He turned away from the MFer’s cruel and smug face. “It’s like kicking a corpse.”

“It’s more fun than that. They say he’s started to twitch and mumble a little. Last gasp, no doubt.”

Betreech slowly swiveled to face the MFer. “He does what?” “Twitches and mumbles. Why? What’s wrong?”

“Christ,” whispered Betreech hoarsely. The few spots of color in his gray face disappeared, as if sucked back inside. He ran toward the bonfire, followed by the baffled MFer.

At the edge of the bonfire’s heat and light, Betreech broke through the ring of laughing MFers, squeezing his frail body frantically between them. They stopped kicking and drew back a little as he looked down at Adder’s body. The knifelike angles of his face were obscured by puffy bruises and a stiff crust of dried blood. A thin stream of blood and saliva flowed from the battered mouth below his unconscious, lidded eyes, along with low, incomprehensible syllables. His legs and the one flesh arm, battered and filthy, jerked about erratically.

“Do you have a gun?” demanded Betreech of the armbanded MFer.

He dumbly extracted a large pistol from his gray coat and displayed it.

“Then shoot him,” snapped Betreech, near hysterical, his voice rising in pitch. The tendons and veins in his neck stood out like thick cords. “Immediately.”

“Why?” asked the MFer. “He’s out, isn’t he?”

“Don’t you see?” Betreech shrieked to the circle of faces, flapping his arm at the twitching body on the ground. “The feedback from the flashglove only knocked out the highest layers of his mind, the conscious. The buried parts, the unconscious, are emerging, taking control! I should have known—I should have seen that the ADR would make him this way.” He choked, then laughed hysterically as he beat on the MF leader’s chest with his small, wrinkled hands. “Don’t you see? The Subconscious Man! Kill him!” He snatched the pistol from the MFer, turned, and pointed it with both quivering hands at Adder. The eyes of the figure on the ground sprang open, boring directly into the old man’s gray face.

Betreech’s hands and forearms exploded in a burst of gore as the flashglove, with a shrill whine, flew and struck like a missile, pulling Adder to his feet. The second blow shattered Betreech’s head in a whirl of lethal harmonic vibrations. The decapitated body sank to its knees, then fell forward at Adder’s feet.

Three of the surrounding MFers broke and ran; the others stood in horrified immobility at the sight of the near-crippled body, filling out from some inner, hidden source of strength, spotted with his own and Betreech’s blood, the alien look of the mind behind the eyes. The prehuman portions in control.

When the remains of the last MFer in the circle had fallen, bloody and fragmented, to the street, only a few seconds had passed, a few seconds of flashing motion as the flashglove leaped through a fraction of its attack programs. The prehuman portions of Adder’s brain, looking about with reptilian violence and suspicion, sent his broken body staggering away from the fire and the sizzling pool of blood lapping up to its edge.

The flashglove’s thermal sensors enabled him to locate the three remaining MFers, cowering in doorways. Their blood spattered and washed over his body, joining the other fluids. With his flesh eyes, the newly emerged mind sections saw the image before him of a stooped, painfully moving figure, drenched red from head to foot, a single gleaming forearm piercing the stiffening color. The flashglove flew up and shattered the reflecting storefront window. A universe of corpses exploded into splinters. The flying shards of glass opened new flows of his own blood.

The sensors told him there was nothing still alive in the street. He could detect a small spark of body heat up an alleyway. He staggered toward it, leaving a coagulating trail behind, the flashglove whining restlessly.

Stumbling around a sharp bend in the alley, he came upon a spread-eagled, breathing form, a gun with a bloodied grip beside it. He dropped to his knees beside the figure and sent the flashglove shattering into the skull. The body flopped spastically, and the metal forearm flew into its chest in an explosion of organ fragments and bone, the thick heart’s-blood spouting up at its attacker.

The flashglove ceased its metallic whining. The blood-drenched figure swayed on its knees, then collapsed alongside the fragments of the other body, rolling slowly onto one side of the again knifelike face. His eyes faded, the mute look of a dying animal in them. The exhaustion of death, from the weapon’s cumulative feedback, set in. The flesh arm and legs curled toward his body’s center, toward the fetal position, but strength ebbed before the contraction was completed. After the blood of others stopped flowing from his body, his heart slowly and more slowly pumped his own blood out into the alley; his lungs grew cold. There was nothing behind the eyes now.

“What an angel,” said the distant nurses, as the long-retired day-care attendant, now an ancient and sweetfaced woman, hobbled out of the TV parlor, dragging one scarred leg behind her. “She’s so well behaved.” The TV went on chattering the news of the riot in L.A. to the Orange County nursing home’s other residents, slumped in wheelchairs or crouched in sofas behind their chrome walkers. The old woman went upstairs to her own tiny room and lifted her skirt. The TV’s images jumbled and blurred with her memories of a child’s punishment, completed at last, as she pressed, whimpering with senile delight, the dried flesh of her loins beneath her bloodless hands.

❖

She was probably psychotic. Just meat, in her own mind and Limmit’s. You schmuck, he told himself savagely, even as he ground on between the so-far nameless girl’s spread legs. An easy pickup won’t help. No forgetting that the one who loves and saved your ass is waiting, worrying, somewhere else.

“I’m going,” the girl beneath him moaned. It had taken less than a quarter-hour, from the point where she, with flared nostrils and wide mad eyes, had sneaked up on him in one of Rattown’s mazy alleys and had thrust her hand into the crotch of his pants, to reach this stage. “Going, I’m going.”

L.A. women have no class, thought Limmit disgustedly, raising himself on his palms and looking at her. “The word,” he said with icy disdain, ceasing all vertical motion, “is coming. ”

The girl’s skewered pelvic rotations ended. “Yeah?” she said coolly. “Better look to be sure.” His erection flagged at the tone of her voice, and she slid out from beneath him.

Limmit rolled over on his hip and looked in astonishment at the clear yellow fluid dripping from his lower body onto the drenched bedsheets, becoming tangible as it cooled from the 98.6° F. it had been held at in the girl’s bladder. “Christ,” he yelled. “Why’d you do that all over me?”

She had pulled on her pants and a shirt and, sitting on a small dry patch at the edge of the bed, leaned over and kissed him. “Welcome, honey,” she said sweetly, “to the land of piss-offs.” After she left, Limmit pulled himself from the sopping bed and looked around the dingy room for something with which to wipe himself off. The room, like every other space he had encountered so far in Rattown, seemed to contain nothing but stifling semidarkness and indistinguishable heaps of trash and dust moldering lumpish underfoot and in all corners. The only recognizable objects in the room were a small television, its plug snaking into the cable outlet in the wall, and another small, yellow plastic radio sitting on top of that. Weird, Limmit had thought when the girl had brought him to the room. Maybe there was a God, running a galactic dreck hustle, with L.A. as warehouse. The Solar Connection for top-grade, super-refined shit. Or else it just grew openly here, no longer having to hide under beds. Inside and out of the people who lived in the slums. There’s a coil of gray fuzz, big as a boa constrictor, for every broken heart in L.A.

In the adjoining bathroom, crusted with antique feculence, he found a gray towel that shredded only slightly with age as he ran it over his body.

Outside, he picked his way through the narrow alleys, heading again for his original destination. This was only the second morning since the Raid, and his sense of direction still seemed scrambled—it was best not to wander away from the sections Mary had guided him through.

That bitch back there had quarts of it, he mused, fingering in his jacket pocket the radio he had lifted on his way out of the aromatic room. Perhaps Dr. Adder had given her a specially enlarged bladder, holding copious amounts of fluid for the delight of those who cared for wet action. Perhaps somewhere in L.A. roamed or lay decomposing a girl with monster-diametered intestines coiled within her, capable of depositing, upon depraved and eager upturned faces....

And that would be all that was left of him, thought Limmit dismally. Nothing remained of Adder except the corpses of his work on the Interface, and the few living who had come to Rattown before or escaped the MFers the night of the Raid. Limmit walked on automatically, feeling a great, numbly bleeding cavity opening inside himself.

On the wall of the alley a series of identical posters were slathered, red ink on ragged-edged brown paper. Despite the crude artwork and reproduction, the more than life-sized visage on them was recognizable as Adder’s. Limmit stopped to study one of the posters. His death seemed to be turning Adder into something new. Like maggots, thought Limmit bitterly, animating a corpse. He turned away from the poster and moved on toward the headquarters of the Adder Siege Front, which had been the poster’s subject.

The meeting room of the Front’s Lead Committee must have been originally, long ago, the executive offices of some financial corporation. On the walls, under a layer of dust, Limmit could see elaborately framed graphs and charts, filled with jagged lines. The lines were colored blue and red, like diagrams of the blood’s circulation. The committee’s five members looked up from whatever they had been discussing when he entered.

“Well,” said Mary, leaning across the imitation-mahogany table. Her eyes seemed more intent than he could ever remember seeing them. “What did you decide?”

Limmit glared back at her, his body rigid with repressed anger. “I decided,” he said, “that you’re a bunch of fucking ghouls.”

“Aw, Christ, Gorgon,” the figure sitting next to her said disgustedly. Limmit remembered, from the night before, his name as being Eddie Azusa. “Why do you even fool around with this schmuck? Who needs him?”

Mary ignored him. To Limmit she said quietly, “Things have changed. Two days ago this Front didn’t even exist. You’ve got military experience; we can use you. Need you.”

Limmit sneered, his lower lip trembling with emotion. “You mean I can have a good place in line for sucking off Dr. Adder’s dead body.”

“Fuck it,” said Azusa. “Look, asshole, if you want to join in, fine. We’ve got barely enough people as it is to man the defense stations around the slum’s perimeter. But if you don’t care for it, don’t hand us any of that ghoul shit. You’re just like that idiot Milch I had to dump. A good triggerman, but he couldn’t face up to the fact that this is A.D. now: Adder’s Dead. Who cares what he would think if he was alive? If we can distort his image enough to draw people into a revolutionary movement, that’s all that counts.”

“Revolution, shit,” Limmit spat out. “There might be one person here who’s some kind of a revolutionary, but she’s barking up her ass if she thinks she can get me in with the rest of you mindfuckers.” He turned and strode to the door before Azusa or any of the others could do anything but jeer an obscenity after him.

They’re right, thought Limmit. Adder’s dead. Facing the committee, he had felt himself fill with rage; now he felt emptier than before. Rising momentarily from the pit, he looked around. The alley he was in was unfamiliar, the light from the sun sucked away into the layers of dirt and trash—he had wandered into some unknown area of the slums. Shit, he thought wretchedly. The abyss. Bottom at last. Curl up and die.

“Hello, Limmit,” said a voice behind him. He whirled around, startled, to see Droit with a small grin.

“You made it,” said Limmit. It sounded to himself like an idiotic thing to say but he could think of no other. “I thought you must have gotten snuffed during the Raid.”

Droit shook his head. “It just took me a while to get here. I ran the other way that night, into Orange County. Even found a pay phone over there, but it didn’t help.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got through to Adder—warned him about what was happening. He even managed to escape, I found out, but Betreech screwed him, handed him back over to the MFers. After everybody else on the street was dead, they dragged him back there and stomped him.”

“How the hell do you know that?” asked Limmit. “You mean you just watched while it happened?”

“Fuck, no. I wasn’t anywhere near there—you think I’m crazy? My former client, KCID, told me about it.”

“How?” muttered Limmit. He felt ill as the last hope buried inside—that Adder might have somehow still survived—started to shrivel. “How could he know?”

“Beats me,” said Droit, spreading his hands in mystification. “Besides Adder, KCID was my only other big client for info. But how he ever found out the things I didn’t tell him, I never figured out. He had some sort of process worked out, an oracle or something. It had to do with randomly generated numbers —he had a little box, a minicomputer that lit up with seven- or eight-digit figures, I think. He told me that when he had enough data worked into the system he could predict any series of events connected to Adder, a few minutes before each event actually occurred. When I went to see him last night and told him I called Adder the night of the Raid, that must’ve been the final datum—he said he had no need for my services anymore, after he let me know what happened to Adder.”

“But he can’t prove it,” Limmit said desperately. “You don’t know for sure that’s what happened.”

“Oh, he proved it,” said Droit. “Told me where to go look.” He nodded. “KCID’s got some kind of inside track on Adder, all right. Seems like a pointless achievement now, though. I mean, what’s left to predict?”

“You saw it? Adder’s ... corpse?”

“Well, almost.” Droit’s expression grew sickly. “Just about the closest thing to it.”

Christ, thought Limmit, looking into Adder’s face from only inches away. This isn’t the closest thing to being a corpse. This is worse than dead. As if the stone had been rolled away, and Jesus had shambled out, giggling idiotically, his brains lapping like watered oatmeal behind his eyes, his shroudcloth all mired with his no longer controllable excretions. No wonder nobody knew. Better he shouldn’t come back at all than to come back like this.

“How long has he been like this?” Limmit asked without turning around as he knelt by the couch Adder lay on. Droit had left without saying anything more, as soon as he had brought Limmit to this room.

“Days,” said the old woman behind him, her voice oddly inflected. “Since she brought him here. You know, her, Mother Endure. She found him in that alley, you know. I told her then that he was dying. Not dead yet, of course, but close to—just sits there or lies there, depending on which way I’ve put him, swallows a little of what I put in his mouth, lets me wipe and clean him. No trouble. No trouble at all. Just like my little girl Melia.” Limmit turned, still on his knees, and watched the woman indicate with a nod a young girl squatting in a corner of the filthy room, huddled next to a softly muttering television. Laughing faces passed back and forth on the screen. The girl’s eyes, below her matted hair, were blank, staring sightlessly into the center of the room. Limmit could sense that she was deaf as well as blind.

He looked up at the old woman. “No trouble at all,” she mumbled, smiling. She’s insane, Limmit thought with a sick horror. One of L.A.’s walking wounded. He slowly turned back to the figure on the couch.

Adder’s blank face swelled and mocked him as Limmit felt the room’s walls sway and bend closer toward him, breathing stale dust over his shoulder like this psychotic old woman. Did you expect to find me here? asked the unseeing eyes. All your life you were waiting for me, and now I’ve moved on, behind locked doors of gray tissue you’ll never have the key to. Poor Limmit missed the connection. Too bad for Limmit. Still ...

He sprang back from Adder’s face, and started to back out of the room. There seemed barely enough room for him to squeeze through, the walls heaving in a gross peristalsis in time with the old woman’s thundering breath, which seemed somehow to absorb the room’s few scraps of light with each contraction. The only illumination came from the three pairs of dead or near-dead eyes that swiveled toward him, following his panicky retreat. Jesus, thought Limmit fearfully, I’m losing my mind. It’s too much for me. I’ll never get out of here; I won’t make it before it goes completely ... I’ll stay here forever, just like Adder. She’ll take care of me, spoonfeed me and wipe my ass; my teeth will fall out, and my hair, and my arms will wither and fall off, and my legs from disuse, and I’ll grow into a giant baby intestine, like a pink slug, with an open mouth at one end that she spoons oatmeal into, and an open anus at the other that she empties the bucket underneath every hour, blind, helpless, mewling, puking—

His fumbling hands found the doorknob between them. The door oozed open reluctantly, and he almost fell through to the corridor beyond. He pushed the door shut and leaned against its surface for a moment to catch his breath, until he felt, through the back of his coat, the door going soft and yielding, about to squirm open and suck him back into the dark room like a gut, a womb. He sprinted down flights of dark, moist stairs that vibrated like flesh beneath his boots, soft, breastlike layers of tissue.

It was only when he emerged into the smoky sunlight that filtered down and washed over the planes and surfaces of Rat-town’s buildings and alleys that he felt safe. Whatever giant placenta lurked up there, waiting for him to weaken and surrender to her tender care, swallow him up and soften his bones to baby softness, it had remained behind. In order not to risk losing that which it already had. Adder.

Droit was waiting for him outside the building. “You rotten fucker,” gasped Limmit, doubled over, trying to fill his aching lungs.

“He’s alive, isn’t he?” said Droit defensively. “I didn’t say in what condition.”

“Go to hell. Christ, I should have known. Don’t you want my reactions? Take my pulse, shove a thermometer up my ass? You and your asshole data, you make me sick.”

Droit said nothing, only looked back at him in smoldering anger.

“Go on, get out of here,” said Limmit, straightening up. “Leave me alone. No wonder KCID got rid of you. Who the fuck needs you? Or KCID, for that matter. Just like everything else in this shithole—two phonies sucking each other off.” Droit’s face filled with blood beneath the surface. “Okay, fuckhead,” he said, his voice tight. “Here’s the last piece of info I’ll give you for free. Did you see his arm? Did you?”

Limmit nodded, his own face beginning to burn.

“It’s not there, is it?” snapped Droit. “He had the glove grafted on before they caught up with him. And that’s what burned out his brain—what you brought him. Stick that up your ass and suck on it!” He pivoted on his heel and strode away, his figure compressed into an angry wedge through the alley.

Limmit felt the hollowness swell within, a bursting vacuum. Numbly, he thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and automatically drew out the yellow plastic radio. I don’t even understand, he thought abjectly, gazing at the silent object. But I know it’s true—I helped. He switched the radio on with one finger.

“Hohl! Alles hohl/” the radio sang out. “Ein Schlund! Es schwankt! Hörst du, es wandert was mit uns da unten! Fort, fort!”

Wozzeck again, thought Limmit as the music continued thornily. My song now. “All hollow” is right.

In a few moments the opera’s scene ended and the split-second of silence following was broken by a strangely cheerful, yet thoughtful voice. “KCID here at the mike,” it emerged humanely from the radio’s tiny speaker, “somewhere in the heart of L.A. You know, friends, I think more and more we’re all becoming like poor Wozzeck. I know my faithful listeners have their little problems, right, gang? But it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, if the earth really weren’t hollow. Hohl, alles hohl That’s the way it is, all right. Isn’t that what you were just thinking? Ein Schlund, a gulf, an abyss, yawns beneath us and what can we do, friends? Some of us wait all our lives for something, somebody to come and make us whole, make us what we dreamed we were meant to be. And then, friends, he’s snatched right away from us. The ol’ abyss yawns and the awaited one falls right out of our sight. It seems like that pit is always there beneath us, waiting for us to forget about it, then it opens up again, swallowing up some part of us. Right, friends? Doesn’t it seem like that? Poor Wozzeck, poor radio audience. You bunch of losers. But there’s still hope. Yes, I sincerely mean that, and I’m talking right now to a certain specific individual out there, he knows who he is, and the rest of you just butt out, okay? Now listen, fella: there’s things down there in that pit, too. Es wandert was mit uns da unten, right? Something’s moving down there. Go talk to it, if you think something was coming for you. How long will you go on thinking that, hmm? There’s levels beneath this one, you know. In that abyss is a world. Fort, fort! Get off your ass and down beneath Rattown, where the action is! Maybe you should look behind you, too. In the meantime, how about some Schubert lieder?” Different music flowed on, replacing the voice.

Limmit started, amazed, at the radio in his hands, sweetly singing now. The congenial voice had poured itself into him, warm as alcohol. He switched the radio off in mid-lied. Where’s Droit? he thought excitedly, looking down the alley. He’ll know what it means.

Surprisingly, he could see Droit about a hundred yards away, running back toward him. He was waving his arms and shouting something. Limmit strained to make it out. Suddenly, he comprehended—“Behind you!” in a frantic voice.

Limmit whirled around and saw nothing but the wall of the building several yards away that terminated the alley. His eyes traveled up its grime-encrusted surface to its roof, where he could see a figure standing at the edge, silhouetted black against the sun. The figure leaned its head against the side of some long object braced against its shoulder and pointed in Limmit’s direction.

The sight froze him for a second, then he jerked back, his feet slipping from beneath him in the alley’s garbage. As he fell backward he could feel his bowels knotting in fear, and a bright flare of light appear in front of the figure on the roof. The ground exploded a few feet behind where Limmit had been standing, showering him with gravel.

When he wiped his eyes clear again, the distant figure had been replaced by Droit standing over him. “On the radio,” Limmit panted, reaching for the outstretched hand. “KCID— he talked to me.”

“Shit,” Droit half grunted. “As if you don’t have enough problems already.”

The woman called Mother Endure stepped silently into the room, from the smaller room behind it. She had observed Adder’s visitor from there.

“Oh, strange indeed,” the old woman cooed to her. “I imagine our little guest here,” she said, stroking Adder’s dark hair, “had lots of interesting friends. But that’s all past now, isn’t it?” Her blind daughter pressed herself closer to the side of the television, seeing nothing.

Mother Endure knelt in front of Adder’s body to look into his blank face. Her own was hidden in the cowl of her dark monkish robe. She took his one flesh hand and cradled it in hers. “All past now,” she said softly. “All of it.”

“This is what he meant,” said Droit, pausing to stamp, Wozzeck-like, upon the paved surface of the alley through which they were walking. The late afternoon sun slanted over their heads. “As far as L.A. is concerned, the earth is hollow. Before the Greater Production Corporation consolidated everything over in Orange County, things got pretty wild here. Expansion in every direction, just like a cancer. Catacombs, warrens, caverns, great big fuckin’ maze of old sewers, fallout shelters, subterranean apartment complexes, abandoned rapid-transit systems, warehouses, layer upon layer of interconnected tubes and tunnels, vaults, cathedrals, and abysses. All underground. If you know the way, you can go anywhere you want on the Sump Line, as they call it. People down there, too: loners and sump tribes. Not all the crazies in L.A. are on the surface, believe me.”

“Why would KCID tell me to go down there?” asked Limmit. The excitement he had felt when listening to the voice over the radio had cooled slightly.

“// he did—”

“Is there any way I can go see him?” interrupted Limmit. “Can you take me to him?”

“No way. He told me he was going into hiding. All his broadcast equipment and tapes fit into a suitcase—he could be anywhere in the slums with it now.”

“Why’d he do that?”

“Beats me. But you’ve got reasons to head below anyway, whether he was talking to you or not. That guy on the roof wasn’t just some crank berserker—that was a professional.”

“How could you tell? Why would anybody come here just to snuff me?”

“The gunner’s equipment, for your first answer. That wasn’t any resurrected CIA weapon; that was shiny new army issue. Why he’s been sent after you I couldn’t say.”

“Who then?” asked Limmit. “Who could have it in for me now?”

“Well,” Droit said, smiling thinly, “as far as killing goes, there’s only been one person recently with much of a large-scale interest in it.”

“Mox.” He paled; the vision of Joe Goonsqua’s neatly penetrated forehead flashed in his mind. “That must be it—for some reason he’s getting rid of everybody who had anything to do with that flashglove business.”

Droit shrugged. “Maybe. Whatever’s happening, though, your chances above ground right now aren’t much.”

“There’s more to it than that,” insisted Limmit. “There’s something ... down there. ” He lowered his eyes to the layer of trash his feet were stepping over. Nothing was visible below that.

“The only thing I can think of like that is the Visitor.” “Visitor? What the fuck’s that?”

Their eyes met. “I don’t know,” said Droit flatly. “I’ve never gone to look for it. It’s supposed to be up north, beyond the outskirts of L.A. even. All I know about it is what the Sump Liners I’ve talked to have told me. They say that something large fell and crashed into an abandoned town up there twenty or so years ago. Practically nobody down here noticed or cared much about it one way or the other. A group of scientists and technicians living in the slums, unemployed since the universities shut down, went up one of the underground aqueducts to look at whatever it was. They didn’t come back, but made arrangements with one of the sewer tribes to salvage all the old computer equipment from the linguistic labs at the former campuses. The story got started that the scientists had found something enormous still living at the crash site, buried about a mile into the ground. Messenger from the stars, eh? And that the scientists were devoting the rest of their lives to transcribing and translating what it’s saying. It’s supposed to be taking that long because the Visitor’s time sense is so much slower than ours.”

“Is all that true?”

“Shit, who knows by now. Maybe it is. There’s only one way to find out.”

And there’s nothing, Limmit said to himself, up here for me now. Except death. “Can you show me how to get down there?” he asked. “Into the Sump Line?”

“Sure,” said Droit. “It’s not hard. But are you asking me for that info?”

Limmit studied the other’s face for a second. “I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “I lost my head when I saw what became of Adder.” “Don’t worry about it,” Droit said abstractedly. “It’ll probably be all over for him in a couple of weeks.”

“I can’t pay you anything, if that’s what you want. I must have lost the money I had during the Raid.”

“That’s all right.” He sighed. “Nobody else is paying anything now, so I might as well give it to you for free. When you’re ready, I’ll take you down, find you a guide. Right now, if you want.” Limmit shook his head. “First I’ve got to tell somebody I’m going.” He looked around. They had walked back to one of the sections of alley familiar to him. The building in which he had woken up that morning was only a few blocks away.

“I’ll wait for you here,” said Droit.

“It might be a while. She may not be there yet.” Maybe she won’t come back there at all, he thought.

“I’ve got nothing else to do at the moment.” Droit gazed back at the dark length of alleyway. “You know,” he said suddenly, “KCID never paid me for any of the data I gave him. I kept working for him because he seemed somehow to understand what was going on in L.A. I never did. I’d hoped he would tell me eventually. When the Interface got shut down, I thought that was some kind of end to something. That’s why I hurried back to see him. But he didn’t say a thing I wanted to hear.” He looked back into Limmit’s face. “I hope your message turns out better.”

Mary sat on the bed and looked at him standing in the middle of the room. Somehow, while in the thick of forming the Siege Front, she had found this room and cleared it of its accumulated layers of trash. When she had first found him again, wandering in the Rattown alleys, she had brought him here and pressed herself to him through the nights. This morning, she had left before he woke up, heading for the Front’s headquarters. “What are you going to take?” she asked.

Limmit walked to one of the room’s corners and bent over the warped cardboard box that held the few items and changes of clothing she had found for him. She had made this room into some kind of bastion against the piles of rubbish and dust that slumped everywhere else like decaying bodies. But already there was a thin layer of airborne dirt coating the box’s contents. He lifted out a shirt, still in the original plastic wrapping in which it had been unearthed. Dots of mold bloomed on the graying cloth beneath the clear plastic. He dropped it back in the box. What the hell do you pack anyway, he thought, when you’re off to see a two-ton messenger from the stars buried at the end of the world’s largest sewer?

He straightened up and turned around to look at her. “Nothing, I guess.”

She said nothing. He stood silently before her, then turned away. “All I ever seem to do anymore,” he said from the doorway, “is say goodbye to you.”

The room was on the building’s second story. From its window she watched him emerge from the building and disappear, hands empty, down an alleyway. It always seemed so dark here. There would be even less light where he was going.

To hell with him, she thought. Let him fall ass first into the abyss if that’s what he wants. There are others enough who need, deserve.... I’ll become another Mother Endure, but for the comrades of the revolution. Open my heart and thighs to my compatriots. I understand her now, she said to herself. She could feel the kinship linking her with that strange image of the slums. Has Mother Endure discovered yet, could she tell me, how many others it takes to equal the one who’s gone away?

She stood up from the bed. In the corner of the room, the box of his clothes waited to be thrown away. She looked down at them, minutes passing, then left the room without touching them.

L.A. was dark when Limmit reappeared. He came down the alley looking the same as before, the only difference a slightly preoccupied expression. Droit lounged against the side of the alley, waiting for him. “Let’s go,” Droit called out. He finished shoving aside with his foot the last pieces of trash from a circular area of pavement. “Wait’ll you see the guide I lined up for you.” “Guide?” said Limmit. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, something’s on my mind, I guess. How do we get down there?”

Droit reached down, lifted a large metal plate by the hole near its edge, and pulled it aside. There was a metal ladder bolted to the side of the cylindrical hole he revealed.

A dim light filtered up from the unseen depths below the alley. “This way,” said Droit, pointing with a spectral finger. Limmit stooped to the hole’s edge and began to clamber down, followed by Droit’s boots above his head, all that he could make out of him. He heard Droit pulling the metal plate back over the tube’s mouth.

In a shorter time than Limmit had expected, he emerged into a small, low-ceilinged room, to one wall of which the metal ladder was fastened. In the dim yellow glare of some sort of gas lamp he could see masses of rusting and unworkable controls, dials, levers, wheels. He could make out the form of a girl as well, sitting cross-legged beside the lamp on the floor. Droit descended to his side and panted, out of breath. “Is this it?” asked Limmit.

“Not really,” said Droit. “More like an anteroom, actually. The Sump Line’s a lot farther down.” He waved a hand at the girl, who had been watching them all this time with silent, devouring eyes. “Meet Bandita, Princess of the West Side Sewer Gypsies. She’s going to take you to the Visitor.”

Limmit took a closer look at the girl as she rose from the floor and crossed the small space between them. “Hello,” she said, low and playfully ominous. Limmit told himself that she looked like the kind of girl who could screw you or eat you (literally), either one, and enjoy them both about the same. Childlike, with vacuum-black hair and eyes, and white skin made so pallid by, he supposed, underground life that it glowed faintly phosphorescent; no gray tones at all. Teeth like little sugar daggers. Clad in the ubiquitous denim and leather boots of L.A., made subtly antique and shiny by constant exposure to the sewers. “Hello,” said Limmit, at a loss for anything else.

“Here’s where I leave you,” said Droit. “I’ll try to be waiting up here when you get back.”

“Come on,” said the girl Bandita, taking Limmit’s arm in her hands. She came up to his shoulder. “Let’s get moving. I really wanna get back down in the Sump, with you.”

“How?” said Limmit. “I mean, how do we get down?” He could not see any exit from the room other than the circular hole in the ceiling.

Bandita pulled him over to one wall, stenciled L.A.W.D. ACCESS PERMIT REQ’D. She kicked at the wall and a section swung away, showering flakes of rust and revealing a pitch-dark doorway. “Go on,” she said, letting go of his arm. “After you.” Limmit put one foot over the door’s edge and felt around cautiously. “Hey,” he said. “There’s no bottom here.”

“Just hold your nose,” she laughed, “and jump.”

“Are you shittin’ me—” Limmit turned around and caught in his stomach the push meant for his back. He stumbled and fell backward through the black doorway. Framed in the yellow light from the room he had just been knocked from, he saw the sewer girl jump spread-eagled after him, a grin of fierce delight on her face, like a voluptuous bird of prey. Behind her, he saw Droit peering down at them from the door, holding the gas lamp and calling something he couldn’t understand. Dizzy from the rushing of his blood and having his breath knocked out, Limmit saw the square of yellow light swoop upward in giddy circles, shrinking from door size to card size to pin size, then nothing. Air welled up warm and pungent from below, but seemed to rush by too fast for him to suck any into his lungs. Panicking in the total absence of light he could not see, only feel the girl’s body reaching for him from above as he fell.

Several bounding heartbeats later, he plummeted into something soft and damp. The momentum of his fall carried him deep into the center of whatever it was; then, energy absorbed, it slowly swelled back up, carrying him to the surface of its spongy mass. He felt the tremors from the girl’s impact into the substance. A light appeared and Limmit found himself and the girl in the small circle of illumination created by an electric lamp in her hand. She grinned maniacally. “Some fun, huh?” asked Bandita.

“Loads,” he quavered, looking around. They seemed to be standing knee-deep in a small sea of some dirty-white, porous substance. “What is this stuff?”

“It’s called sewer fluff,” she said. “It’s all over down here in the Sump Line. We used to have a guy in the Sewer Gypsies named Jezzy, real smart, knew a lot of science and stuff. That was because his father had been one of those scientists up north, who quit that to join us. Jezzy used to tell me it was some sort of combination organism, like a jellyfish, though I could tell you for shit what a jellyfish is. He said they spawn up north in some place called Alaska, and clogged up the water pipes coming from there, which is why the people in Orange County stopped using them. The fluff kinda creeps around, in and out of the water, and just grows, or else it dies sometimes. Sometimes it’s not there when you count on it, like to break your fall when you jump from one level to another. That’s how Jezzy got killed; really smashed him up. Though some say he did it on purpose, the rotten bastard.” Her face clouded with memory for a moment, then cleared. “Hey,” she said brightly, “wanna screw? This fluff is the best place for it. It reacts to your body heat, what Jezzy called thermotropic. Really snuggles you while you fug-gle. How about it, huh?” She leaped forward, clasping her arms behind his back and knocking him over onto the fluff s surface. She lay there, looking at him from atop his chest. Her arms seemed awfully strong to Limmit.

“Do I have a choice?” he asked.

Her laugh pealed off into the unknown reaches of the Sump Line. I have no principles, thought Limmit. At this rate I’ll never even get to the Visitor. Bandita’s hands flew from behind him to his belt buckle and, practiced, began their work.

“God,” she panted, “I just want to eat you up all over. How I love topside guys.”

Something in the dark air made Limmit feel giddy. “Is that a sexual position or a point of origin?”

“Shut up. I’ve got better things for you to do with your mouth.” Portions of body surged all around him, weirdly illuminated by the small lamp left behind her on a mound of fluff. How can she be so fast? Limmit wondered. The heat-loving fluff squirmed beneath them; from the corner of his eye he saw their clothes as dark patches on a sea of white, undulating away as more tiny waves came rippling at them in the opposite direction. “Mff,” he said, his mouth full of downy flesh.

“Like that, topsider,” breathed the girl into his ear, and sank her tiny sharp teeth into it.

There seemed to be a small explosion somewhere in the distance. Limmit almost began to wonder what it was, then decided to attend to matters at hand, when the lamp exploded. Limmit jumped to his feet, bouncing and dragging the clinging Bandita to her knees. “Somebody’s shooting at us!” he yelled. Christ, he thought, has that gunman followed me down here already?

He felt Bandita pull her head away from his body and look around in the total darkness. “Shit,” she said sourly. “That asshole Victor.”

Limmit dived across the fluff in the direction he had last seen their clothes. He heard another shot, and a splat of fluff where he had just been standing. “Victor!” screamed the girl angrily. “Cut it out, you schmuck!”

His eyes had become accustomed enough to the dark to detect the clothes against the faint luminescence of the fluff. “Come on!” he shouted to Bandita. “Let’s get out of here.” He attempted to stand on one leg to pull on his pants, but fell over sideways in the yielding mass. Another shot rang out, and the bullet penetrated the empty leg of his pants flapping above him.

“Okay for you, Victor!” called the girl to the invisible gunman again. “See if I ever give you head again!” She huffed over to Limmit, on his ass struggling frantically to get his boots on, and gathered up her clothes. “Let’s go,” she snapped. “We don’t have to put up with this shit.”

Limmit, bouncing and falling over the marshmallow-like surface, followed the twin pale moons of her buttocks to the edge of the fluff. She slid down its rounded slope, her bare feet slapping against a concrete floor some six feet from the fluff’s top. He jumped down beside her. “Hold out your arms,” she said, and he felt her load her wadded clothes into them. He heard the creaking of more rusted metal, and a shaft of light shot up from the floor. From it he could see her, compact breasts glinting with sweat, kneeling beside a trap door. “Down here,” she said. He looked, saw a floor several feet below, tossed her clothes down, and swung himself to it, holding on to the edge of the floor above. She jumped down lightly beside him, and the trap door whammed shut. Particles of rust showered down on them.

“He won’t follow us down here,” she said. “He knows I’d cut off his balls in close quarters.”

“You know him?”

“I’d recognize the sound of his rat killer anywhere.”

They were in a long corridor without visible end in either direction, lined with pipes of varying dimensions. Fluorescent panels glowed down the length of the corridor with a few random blanks. This was the first good light in which he had been able to see the girl. His general impression was unchanged, even though he now saw she had a tattoo on one thigh, in the form of a cartoon’s speech balloon with its tail disappearing into her tangled pubic hair. The balloon contained the words FEED ME. He felt somehow relieved that it hadn’t been the snake cartoon of the Interface whores. “We’d better get going,” he said.

“That’s what I say.” She slipped a hand into the front of his pants. “Let’s go—right where we left off.” She held on with the one hand, and spread with her foot the pile of her clothes into a rough bed shape on the floor.

“This is insane,” said Limmit. “Fun’s fun, but you reach a point. I mean, I hate to disappoint you or anything, but all this sudden violence has left me, I think, temporarily impotent.” She grinned maliciously. “You must be in a bad way when that happens,” she said, “if even your fingers go soft.”

He sensed the mass of earth between him and everything on the surface. No principles at all, he thought as she pulled him down to the floor and guided his hands.

Limmit awoke sometime later, his head between the girl’s thighs. He sat up without waking her and looked around. They were still the corridor’s only inhabitants. A brief panic welled up in him. Jesus, he wondered, how long have I been down here? There was no way of telling. It had seemed to take a very long time to satisfy Bandita and then fall asleep. Days, maybe. He brushed away the empty cans she had fed them from and pulled his scattered clothes to himself.

As he dressed, he suddenly sensed her watching him. Her crazy smile disconcerted him when he looked back. Christ, he realized, I’m depending on her. Not just to get me to the Visitor, but back out of here again. What if she’s really swacked on me, and doesn’t want to ever let me go. Maybe life underground has affected all the men down here, given ’em cocks like button mushrooms. In the country of the three-inchers, the six-inch man is king. He shook her hand loose from his ankle and picked up his boots. “Let’s start traveling,” he said.

Her eyes seeped enigmatically through her lashes at him. “Whatever you say,” she said demurely, and pulled her own clothes together.

When she had dressed, she pointed down one direction of the corridor. “That way.”

Wordlessly, he followed her beneath the fluorescent panels. One flickered and went out as they passed under it. “Soon they’ll all go,” she said over her shoulder. “Someday we’ll all have to grope like moles everywhere we go down here. How do moles grope, I wonder?”

He ignored the last. “Speaking of‘we,’ where’s the rest of the West Side Sewer Gypsies? Out digging up canned goods somewhere?”

Her smile faded for a moment. “There aren’t any others,” she said. “I’m the last one. After Jezzy died, they all got wiped out by the Screamin’ Sludge Queens from the East Side. Except for me.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I guess. Then who’s this Victor who was shooting at us?” He had convinced himself that it hadn’t been Mox’s gunner; the ragged cough of this weapon had been too unlike the crisp puncturing of space he remembered from the surface.

“Not at us, at you. He’s a loner, like I am now. His bunch, the Upper Aqueduct Rattenfängerei, got caught in a sudden back-flush of sludge from one of the lower levels. Stunk like shit. He’s gone a little crazy from it, I think. Has a thing about sludge and fucking—maybe that’s what he was doing when he got washed away by the backflow. I hung around with him for a while, but he was just getting weirder by the day. I mean, I like a little variety, but sticking my head under the sewer, mounting me from behind, and beating me with a rubber boot while screaming ‘It smells like shit!’ was all he ever wanted to do. I finally ditched him, to go guide someone else Droit brought down to me. A real fruity character named Lyle something. Victor shot at him, too. Would’ve killed him, actually—snuck up on us, knocked me dizzy, and was sitting on this fag’s chest with his shotgun about to blow his shrieking head off. Then a bunch of really weird guys, about five or six straight-looking middle-aged dudes, only wearing like rubber skin-diver suits with great big orange letters on them, busted in. Knocked Victor off, grabbed up the little fruit, and ran back up the tunnel the way they came, before I could even get up off my ass.”

Limmit had listened to her in growing amazement. “Who were they?”

“Beats the shit out of me. The letters on their suits were PSS, I think. I’ve seen ’em around from a distance, and heard things from other loners. Whoever they are, they only nab topsiders who have come down into the Sump Line. Kinda scary. One guy said he had heard they were a bunch of weirdo gourmets from somewhere in Orange County, looking for new taste thrills. They don’t want us sewer dwellers, ’cause we’d taste too shitty.”

What the fuck am I doing here? thought Limmit. This is what comes from reading all that damn science fiction—you get to the point where you can accept just about fuckin’ anything. “Seen ’em lately?” he asked, almost gaily.

She halted abruptly. “Shh,” she ordered. “Listen.”

Limmit strained, hearing nothing at first. Then, faintly, almost as if he were imagining it, he heard a soft, gentle sound somewhere far off above or behind them, as of rubber-shod feet moving, pausing, then moving again. “That’s them,” she whispered.

“Sure it’s not Victor?” One pursuer would have been enough. She nodded. “He’s following us, too. But him you won’t hear.” He fell silent for a second, absorbing this. “What are my chances?”

She looked at him calmly. “Pretty good.”

“That’s a comfort. If you really think so.”

Her eyes grew wider, then she broke into laughter. “That’s really funny,” she gasped between outbursts. “You were talking about your chances of making it. I thought you meant of getting killed. That's what’s pretty good.” She laughed harder, doubling over, her face growing red.

He stared at her until she sobered and looked into his face again. Her grin faded at the sight of his taut expression. “A real riot,” he said grimly, bunched the neck of her frayed denim shirt in one hand, and ripped it downward. Her small breasts bounced forth, nipples erect. “Hey,” she said delightedly. “I thought you were so hot to get moving.”

“Now there seems to be,” he said, smileless, pushing the torn shirt down from her pale shoulders and moving on to her pants, “a different light on things.”

“There it is,” said Bandita, pointing. “The last stretch.” Her voice echoed hollow in the enormous space.

Limmit studied the glassily flowing river, black as ink. He could see along its length, until it disappeared from sight in either direction, the narrow cement path bordering it. At even intervals, openings into other corridors appeared like mouths, similar to the one from which they had just emerged. Overflow drains, he thought. “If we had something that would float,” he said, judging the water’s sluggish speed, “we could ride the rest of the way.”

She laughed. “Not hardly. It’s going the wrong way, dummy —toward Orange County.” She swung off down the silent water’s border.

Well anyway, said Limmit to himself, thank God it’s the last ways to go. Several times he had woken up in the empty corridors, dark tunnels, luminous grottoes, once in a dead subway car filled with bone shards, that she had led him through, only to realize that he couldn’t even remember the purpose of the journey. Slowly, with an effort, it would come back to him, dragging fragments of what seemed to have been a completely separate existence before the Sump Line: Adder, Mary, the Interface, KCID.... Once, he had almost started sobbing when he realized he would probably never see Bonna Cummins again.

Memory or not, he had followed Bandita, copulated with her, ate what she fed him—cans at first, but more recently, rats on a spit turned over a little fire. She caught them somehow when he wasn’t looking. They slept curled up like children or small animals. Sometimes, he had lain awake with her in his arms, listening to the faint gurgles and murmurs of the surrounding subterranean world, and for the sound of approaching feet, rubber-shod or not. How far down am I? he wondered; how long has it been?

Lost in nonverbal, vegetative reverie, he collided with Ban-dita, who had suddenly frozen in front of him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Be very still,” she said softly. Ominously, her usual manic grin was absent.

He listened, but heard nothing. Then he felt it. As if the darkness somewhere nearby were thickening, coalescing into a form very close to them. “What is it?” he whispered.

“Victor.” Her voice was small, strangely constricted. “He’s right by us now. We’re in trouble—this section of the Line he knows a lot better than I do. Part of his old Rattenfängerei stomping grounds. He could jump out at us anytime. I was hoping we had enough of a lead to get through here before he caught up to us.” She cautiously stepped forward again.

Limmit nervously looked around in the damp gloom. That’s what happens, he thought, if you fuck around too much on the road. He followed behind her as they proceeded alongside the flowing water, their heads swiveling warily, peering into the darkness.

Before Limmit could react, a dark figure leaped between them and sent Bandita sprawling into the tunnel wall with a furious swing of a metal pipe section. “She’s mine!” the figure, an emaciated and wild-haired wraith, shouted at Limmit, and jabbed the metal pipe straight at his stomach. He jerked away from it, but caught the end of its thrust, which sent him sprawling onto the damp concrete. The figure leaped astride Limmit’s chest, pressing down against his throat with the pipe. “She’s mine!” he shouted again. “You can’t have her!”

The pipe felt the same as the one the MFer on the Interface had strangled Limmit with; pressing his life out the top of his head in a bloody mass. He stopped tearing at Victor’s back, and began beating against the side of his head. Blood sprang from one ear onto his fist. The contorted face continued to leer and grunt through the growing gray haze. Then, miraculously, the pressure stopped as it had once before, on the surface.

“Mary?” croaked Limmit, dazed and weak. He rolled on his side and retched blood and phlegm. His vision cleared, and he saw Victor and Bandita, one side of her face red with blood, struggling a few yards away, the metal pipe swaying between them in their hands, gradually forcing her to her knees. Limmit reached into his boot and extracted the blade that had remained there so long. Dizzy, but with a burning calm, he lunged forward and grabbed one of Victor’s wrists, the hand still clamped to the pipe. The emaciated form’s eyes widened in shock as Limmit methodically sliced across and down through the blood vessels and tendons of his arm. Victor gasped and let go of the pipe, the blood flowing satisfyingly warm across Limmit’s blade and hands, before he collapsed into unconsciousness at Limmit’s feet. Limmit smiled wanly at Bandita, sank to one knee and puked again, then fell the rest of the way on top of the other figure.

He woke up, unknown hours later, to find both Bandita’s and Victor’s eyes observing him. She had bandaged Victor’s forearm with strips torn from her shirt, and then bound him immobile as well with the same. His eyes flicked between her and Limmit, glaring. “Well, what now?” said Limmit groggily. He rubbed his throat tentatively. “Why didn’t you kill him right on the spot, while he was out?”

She shrugged. “Something could still happen to you on the way,” she said. “If it did, I wouldn’t want to be left all alone down here. I mean, he does care for me in his way.”

This is too much, thought Limmit. “You know,” he mused aloud, “back on the surface, when Dr. Adder asked me to work for him, he said he figured that my being from someplace else and comparatively unhooked on images would give me an advantage out here. I’m really beginning to think he was dead wrong. I don’t think I can understand any of this shit, let alone deal with it.” He leaned back against the tunnel wall.

Bandita cocked her head strangely at him. “Did you say,” she asked eagerly, “that you worked for Dr. Adder?”

“Yeah, I suppose you could say that.”

“Wow,” she breathed ecstatically. “What’s he like? I mean, up close. I’ve only heard of him down here, never really seen him or anything. But you—you’ve actually touched him and talked to him and everything. His right-hand man, practically, I bet!” Her eyes glowed with admiration, and she stroked and plucked at his sleeve in a fit of conflicting desire and sudden shyness.

So even down here, thought Limmit bitterly. Right-hand man—what she didn’t know made that a cruel joke. A strange mixture of emotions pressed against his heart, suffocating him. “For your information,” he said, “the last time I saw him, Adder was a helpless, brain-damaged near-corpse. No hope of recovery. Almost certainly dead by now, I hope.”

Her eyes narrowed at him. “You lying turd,” she spat. “That’s impossible. I don’t think you ever worked for him at all.” Her expression betrayed her shock and fear.

“Look,” said Limmit. A great weariness seemed to flow over him like sludge. “I’m not going to argue about it. Since I came down here, I’ve been pushed off cliffs, shot at, near fucked to death by you, and been had at with a goddamn lead pipe. Can we just get moving now? I really think I’ve had enough.” He rose to his feet, massaging his aching throat. Strangely, his thoughts seemed more lucid now than they had for a long time, as if the fight had knocked loose a cumulative miasma from him. He turned and looked away from her, down the opposite direction of the tunnel. Shee-it, he thought. After all this, that damn Visitor better have something good going.

“So don’t argue with me,” he heard her say behind him. “Argue with this, fuckhead!” He spun around and saw Victor’s metal pipe in her hands, flying at the side of his head.

He woke up again, this time his head throbbing painfully. He reached up to the side of his face and his hand encountered a sticky fluid. He opened his eyes, wincing at the dim light, and looked around him. He was lying in the same spot where Victor had jumped them, but Victor and Bandita were gone. Instead, he was surrounded by six men in rubber skin-diver outfits. One, with gray hair and a thin mustache over a chrome and brown plastic pipe, cleared his throat. He looked like the insurance-selling father in old TV family comedies.

“We saw your friends,” said the man, in a voice resonant with trying to be both authoritative and friendly, “hightailing it down the tunnel. Too bad we didn’t get here a little sooner. Could have saved you from a nasty crack on the head.” He took his pipe from his mouth and tamped it down with a blunt forefinger. “Lover’s quarrel?”

Limmit laid his throbbing head back on the cold tunnel floor. “You might say that.” He closed his eyes. “Go ahead and eat me, I don’t care.”

“Tut, tut, my boy. Do you believe all those horror stories that girl pumped into you? She’s a sly one, all right. We’ve had a hell of a time, tracking you all this way.”

Limmit cocked one eye open and squinted dubiously at the gray-haired man. “If you’re not going to eat me,” he said, “then who are you?”

The man smiled beatifically. “My boy,” he said expansively, “I am your father.”

Limmit shut his eye wearily. Goddamn L.A. is all the same, from top to bottom. “Like fuck you are,” he said.

“Only metaphorically,” said the gray-haired skin diver. “Am I your father, that is.” He closed the lid of the first aid kit and tossed it into the center of the inflated rubber raft, smoothly gliding with the dark river’s current. One of the five other rubber-suited men pushed aside with a paddle the random small heaps of sewer fluff in their path. “You see,” he continued, pointing to the orange letters SPS on his suit, “we represent the Orange County Society for the Prodigal Son. My name’s Endpoint, Albert Endpoint. I’m the Chief Exalted Patriarch this month.”

“That’s nice,” said Limmit, drowsily trailing one hand in the raft’s wake. With his other hand he fingered the bandage on the side of his face, and wondered vaguely if they might have injected a tranquilizer into him when they had found him unconscious. “What’s your society do?”

“Don’t put your hand in the water like that, son,” said Endpoint. “You don’t know what’s down there. Yes, well, what does the SPS do? I presume, of course, that you’re familiar with the biblical story, the parable, of the prodigal son? You are? Well, the SPS consists of fathers who have lost their children to the temptations of the paths of wickedness above us in L.A. Nothing would make our hearts more joyous than to see our sons and daughters return to us, contrite, to be welcomed with love and charity.” His voice had to Limmit’s ear a canned quality, like a memorized recruiting speech. “Unfortunately, however, there seems to be a low rate of return from L.A., even now that the infamous Interface has been shut down. Too many of them are caught in the magnetic influence of Dr. Adder.”

“I could tell you a little about him,” said Limmit, smiling ruefully at the water.

“Doubtless you could, my boy. But as it is, the SPS sends a team of members out each month to accelerate, shall we say, the process of remorse and eventual return we feel is sure to occur to all of our errant children, given enough time.” Endpoint’s voice had lapsed into a canned recitation. “Due to certain, uh, legalities, we’re forced to operate underground, as it were, picking up the ones who venture down here into the sewers. Naturally, given the still-small, membership of the SPS, the chances of us hitting upon one of our very own children is quite small. But the principle is what counts, right? And when the returning prodigal son sees the warm and generous welcome provided for him by that month’s Patriarch, never does he return to his former evil ways.” At times, Limmit thought, listening to this Endpoint is like hearing a pamphlet read itself. “Believe me, in Orange County we really know how to slay the ol’ fatted calf.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Limmit softly. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. It’s your intention to adopt me? Like I was your lost son?” “For the time being, yes. As this month’s Chief Exalted Patriarch, I’m going to make a home for you with my family back in Orange County.”

“And that way the return of the prodigal son is accomplished?”

Endpoint nodded.

“Then I’m sorry,” said Limmit, smiling in dreamy triumph, “to inform you that it won’t work out that way. I wasn’t born or raised in Orange County; I’m from Phoenix. An orphan, too.” Minutes passed while the six SPS members, in their skin-diving suits, huddled at one end of the inflated raft and conferred in whispered tones. Limmit sat at the rear of the raft, looking back at the river. Every second drew him inexorably away from his goal, the Visitor. For some reason, he found himself feeling that he could give a shit. Events below the surface seemed to follow their own weird logic; maybe this was just some roundabout way of getting to his destination. I’ll ride along with it for now, he thought. Besides, they’ll have to let me go in a minute or two.

“Ahem,” came Endpoint’s voice. Limmit slowly swung his head around. “We’ve come to a decision,” said the mouth around the pipe. “Concerning your case. Inasmuch as we’re dealing with spiritual father-son relationships, it would be foolish of us to insist upon an actual physical return to Orange County on the prodigal son’s part. All that is necessary for Orange County to be the son’s home in spirit, if he was not born there, is for him to achieve knowledge of it. Then it becomes his spiritual home, and thus his home in fact.” Endpoint leaned back with a satisfied expression.

“What does that mean?” asked Limmit.

“We’re going to show you around,” blurted one of the other men, “before we officially welcome you home.”

“Great,” murmured Limmit, and slumped over the raft’s tubular edge, staring at the dark water rushing beneath. Kidnapped by lunatic Orange County fathers, he thought. At least KCID had been right about one thing—beneath L.A. is where the action is. “Tell me,” asked Limmit, looking around at Endpoint in mild curiosity. “How come you guys wear those rubber skin-diver suits?”

Endpoint looked uncomfortable. “Well,” he said stiffly. “Most of it down here is a sewer, isn’t it?”

The inflatable raft remained below, tied to an outcropping of rusted valve handle. The first of several metal hatchways and doors slammed shut below the last SPS member on the ladder, shutting off Limmit’s view of the raft twisting on the end of its tether in the dark, silent stream.

With Limmit sandwiched in the middle, the group threaded its way up from the sewers to the closed doors of a large freight elevator. As Endpoint thumbed the elevator’s call button, he grinned at Limmit. “How’s it going to feel to be back on top again, eh?” he asked. The other SPS members pulled small bags filled with clothes and shoes from behind a metal panel, and started peeling off their rubber suits.

Limmit, exhausted from what had seemed miles of clanging stairs and ladders, grunted and nodded. Back on top, he thought wearily. Hot shit.

All the way up in the elevator, a journey so long that Limmit worried once that the machine had gotten stuck between levels, the SPS team laughed and congratulated each other like triumphant hunters. The elevator doors slid open first onto an enormous, humanless sea of silent automobiles underneath a gray cement sky. Two of the men, with much handshaking and back-thumping from the others, departed down the even lanes of cars. “They live in one of the other complexes,” explained Endpoint to Limmit. “This is the largest, Casa del Solituda.” The doors slid shut again.

They opened again at random intervals, disgorging the rest of the SPS team, with the same ritual, into carpeted hallways lined into seeming infinity with numbered doors. Finally, only Endpoint and Limmit were left in the rising elevator. “Good thing it’s after midnight,” said Endpoint, checking his wrist-watch. “No one will see us.”

The doors revealed another hallway, identical to the others, and Endpoint hustled Limmit by his elbow from the elevator.

It wasn’t until he was standing inside the Endpoint conapt, in the little kitchenette to one side of the entranceway, that Limmit realized how much filth and exhaustion he had accumulated on the Sump Line. His nose recoiled as, isolated now, the combined odors of sewage and sweat hit his nostrils. I feel like the plague, he thought, trying not to stain the gleaming chrome and warm vinyl surfaces.

Endpoint tossed the canvas bag holding his skin-diver suit into a closet. “This way,” he said, opening a door onto a small bathroom. He turned on the taps over the tub, pulled out towels and a robe from a cupboard. “Try to be quiet, won’t you?” he said. “Everybody’s asleep, you know.”

Limmit waited a few minutes after Endpoint had left, steam rising from the water gurgling into the tub. He cautiously opened the bathroom door and looked around. No one. He stepped forward quietly through the kitchenette and into the little entranceway. He turned the front door’s handle experimentally—locked. Someone cleared his throat behind Limmit, and he spun around to see Endpoint standing in the doorway of the kitchenette, leveling a minuscule pistol at him.

“The shot must’ve worn oflF,” said Endpoint. He had changed into striped pajamas. “I hoped you were going to be reasonable about this whole thing.”

“I wanted to be on my way again,” said Limmit sullenly. “Before I lost too much time.”

“Come on, son. What’s a couple of days? Is that too much to ask, to make a bunch of old men happy? Besides, that’s lot less time than you’ll lose if I have to shoot you in the leg, or if we have to track you down again.” He laid the gun down on a counter and wrapped a paternal arm around Limmit. “You might as well face it, my boy,” he said genially, “you’re stuck with being our prodigal son for a little while. Realizing your responsibilities is part of growing up. Afterward, you can go back to what you were doing down in the sewers.”

“All right,” said Limmit. The compulsion to flee, to descend back into the warm, dark world of the sewers, ebbed from him as quickly as it had struck. I guess I can use the rest, he thought. “Bring on the fatted calf.”

After the bath, Endpoint escorted him to another door. He pushed it open, revealing a small room with two beds. In the dark, a figure lay on one beneath a blanket, sleeping. “My son Edgar,” said Endpoint, pointing to the occupied bed. “Our older boy ... left, you know. You can use his bed while you’re with us.” Limmit felt a momentary twinge of pity for the older man. “And in the morning,” Endpoint continued, “don’t tell him anything about why you’re really here. My wife and son don’t know about the SPS—I told them before I left I’d be bringing back the son of a friend of mine for a visit.” He hesitated for a moment, as if he were going to say something more, but instead stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him.

In the room’s still darkness, Limmit shed the bathrobe and slipped beneath the empty bed’s covers, luxuriating for a moment in their softness. I haven’t slept in a clean bed since I left Phoenix, he reflected. There’s something to say for the bourgeoisie.

He heard the figure in the other bed roll over and switch on the lamp standing on the table between the two beds. The light revealed a small-boned, narrow-faced teenager sitting up and smirking at him. “How does it feel,” the youth asked, “to be the prodigal son?”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to know about that,” said Limmit. What next? he said to himself. Everybody out here seems to have hidden sides except me. The Secretless Man.

“My mother might be fooled with that ‘vacation’ crap my father hands us,” said the teenager Edgar. “But that’s only because she’s swacked out on tranks and TV all the time. What the hell kind of a vacation trip can you disappear for a month on, in Orange County? Camp out in some other complex’s recreation center? Fuck that—all my friends know about their fathers and their little SPS.”

“Yeah?” said Limmit. His eyes closed involuntarily, then flicked open again. “Is what your dad says about it on the level?” “Ohh,” said Edgar craftily, “maybe it is. Maybe I know something, though, about it that most people don’t.”

Disturbing. “Like what?” asked Limmit. He snapped his nodding head erect.

Edgar shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, whatever your name is. Maybe I’ll tell you later.” He reached up and switched off the light. “School day tomorrow,” came his voice in the darkness. “Lots of business to take care of.”

Limmit didn’t hear, having already fallen asleep.

He watched himself in the bathroom mirror, peeling the bandage from the side of his face. There was no blood underneath, only a few fading pink lines. My face, thought Limmit. He grasped the corners of the sink and leaned closer to the mirror to inspect it. A mirror’s another thing I haven’t seen since Phoenix. He had caught glimpses of himself, distorted and somehow alien, in the storefront windows of the Interface and the grime-coated windowpanes of Rattown. But now he saw that not even the trek along the Sump Line had done anything to him. Had not made his face as narrow and sharp as it had appeared in L.A.’s reflecting surfaces. Splashing cold water against the skin, he felt, in an indefinable way, disappointed.

In the kitchenette, the Endpoint family was grouped around three sides of the room’s central table. Between Edgar and his father, a middle-aged woman in a bright floral robe sat smiling vacantly. As Limmit sat down in the empty chair on the table’s fourth side, the elder Endpoint said, “Good morning,” and Edgar mumbled something around a mouthful of food; the woman said nothing. Something about her face disturbed him —he tried to study it unobtrusively as Endpoint placed items on the plate in front of him.

A connection within his memory completed itself. Suddenly he knew of what the woman’s face reminded him. When his mother had died, the egg ranch’s resident mortician had filled out the corpse’s sagging, dissipated facial flesh with injected plastics. Limmit, ten years old, from simple curiosity had prodded with one finger the sleeping face in the coffin—she had looked younger than he could remember having seen her. Her pink cheeks had been as stiff and rigid to the touch as the hardened plastics beneath the skin. Now, he felt that if he were to lean across the breakfast table and feel Mrs. Endpoint’s face, it would be the same.

“You’ll have to excuse my wife,” said Endpoint stiffly, noticing Limmit’s fascinated stare. “She’s not very talkative in the morning.” He jogged her elbow and she dreamily raised a forkful to her mouth, all the while looking through space at nothing.

Limmit broke away his gaze and looked down at his plate. A waffle and several sausagelike cylinders lay on it. After a bite of each, he recognized them as processed egg from the Phoenix ranch.

“After I get off work today,” continued Endpoint, “I’ll start showing you around. Maybe you can watch TV with Muffy, Mrs. Endpoint that is, until I get home.”

“Hey,” said Edgar, grinning up from his plate. “Why not let him come with me to old Buena Maricone High this morning? You know, sort of take him around, make him feel at home in Orange County.” He winked at Limmit, who had told him further details a few minutes earlier about the SPS’s adoption decision.

“That’s not a bad suggestion,” said Endpoint thoughtfully. He turned to Limmit. “I’ll give you a note for the principal. He’s a ... friend of mine.” Edgar snickered but was ignored. “He’ll give you permission to sit in on Edgar’s classes. How about it?”

Limmit shrugged. “All right with me,” he mumbled around a mouthful of ersatz waffle. He took another quick look at Mrs. Endpoint, still smiling at the wall behind him.

After Edgar had loaned him some of his clothes, Limmit descended with him to the complex’s parking area. From the multicolored rows of vehicles, Edgar selected what appeared to be a streamlined armored tank with windows. It was painted fluorescent blood-red. Limmit was driven back into its plush black imitation leather by the accelerating G-forces as Edgar careened down the parking area’s ramps and sprang without looking into the thick of the morning traffic emerging from the residential complexes.

Edgar patted the vehicle’s dash as he maneuvered it through the traffic. “What a machine,” he said with fierce pride. “Paid for it all myself, too. Expensive as shit.”

“Where’d you get the money?” asked Limmit, unnerved by the near-collisions as they sped along.

“Where else?” laughed Edgar. “Peddling goodies.” He did not elaborate.

Once beneath Buena Maricone High School’s single, all-encompassing roof, after Edgar had found a spot in the school’s enormous parking lot and a bored entrance guard had directed Limmit to the administrative office concerned with the note Endpoint had given him, Edgar led him to the school’s main hallway. For a moment Limmit felt, as he looked around the windowless expanse, that he was back in one of the Sump Line’s tunnels, only lined with vending machines and milling teenagers. “Some cavern, huh?” said Edgar, pushing his way through the crowd. He finally took a position by one wall, between a vending machine that spelled out EGGOBARS on its front and another that said ERGOTONE. “Just wait,” said Edgar, propping one foot against the wall.

Gradually, one after another, Edgar’s classmates approached him, staring suspiciously for a few seconds at Limmit by his side. Edgar and his customer would exchange a few whispers, then a wad of money would be passed to Edgar in exchange for a thickly padded manila envelope Edgar pulled out of his pocket from a seemingly infinite supply. Limmit watched silently as the clot of bills in Edgar’s hip pocket grew steadily larger.

“Who’s your friend?” asked one girl as she handed Edgar her money. She eyed him speculatively, the same bruise-purplish makeup surrounding her eyes and the nipple of one exposed, barely pubescent breast. Limmit smiled wanly back at her; he had noticed that half the girls in the crowd were like this one, and the others like Mrs. Endpoint, dazed and rigid. The latter had only drifted by in front of them, not stopped.

“Don’t you know?” said Edgar. “He’s the prodigal son, he is.” “Really?” said the girl. She ran a forefinger lightly up the fly of Limmit’s pants. “Welcome home.” She merged back into the crowd and disappeared.

“Just what is it you’re selling?” asked Limmit finally, after seeing several more rapid transactions.

Edgar looked out over the throng of students. “I used to sell dope,” he said. “But there’s no money in that. Any kid can get all the downers he wants from his parents’ medicine chest. And stuff like bovaine and kainine only make it in L.A., you know? The right atmosphere. Who ever heard of an Orange County cowhead? So now I sell ’em this.” He pulled out an envelope like the others and handed it to Limmit.

Limmit tore it open and unfolded the contents, a sheaf of odd, slick-feeling paper. The top sheet was a photo of Dr. Adder mounting his motorcycle, obviously taken without his knowledge by a telephoto lens. Limmit leafed through the other sheets. Most of them were photos, either of Adder taken unaware, or posed shots of the various Interface hookers who had undergone his services. The results of the operations and the amateurish snake’s-head tattoos the hookers had added themselves were prominently featured. The few remaining sheets were interviews of the whores or other Interface denizens, describing their impressions or relating anecdotes of Adder. Limmit folded the sheets and placed them back in the envelope. “You mean to tell me,” he said, “that there’s a market for this stuff?”

Edgar nodded. “It’s printed on a special paper. Goes blank in a week. Also you can’t photostat or Xerox it—the reflective surface just flares out. I’m the only source.”

“Where do you get them? I mean, you can’t just go up to L.A. yourself and take them.”

A shake of the head. “A fellow up there prepares ’em, and then meets me at a prearranged point in the Sump Line below. I pick up the envelopes, and then later give him his percentage of the haul.”

“What’s this guy’s name?”

“He said Droit.”

Limmit nodded to himself. Another of the ubiquitous social researcher’s sidelines; putting his “research” to good use. “And people are that interested here in Adder?”

“The kids are,” said Edgar. “Every week, I sell as many as I’ve got. It’s like, you know, an act of devotion. You can’t split for L.A. until you’re eighteen, otherwise the police usually intercept you at the county limits and haul you back. So these little bulletins kind of keep the flames alive.”

“You’re not a pusher,” said Limmit, laughing harshly. “You’re a fuckin’ evangelist.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Listen,” said Limmit. “Don’t you get any news here? Didn’t you hear of a little raid on the Interface by Mox’s MFers?” “Sure,” said Edgar. “But Adder escaped. Naturally. The official word may be that he’s dead, but he’s alive, running the Siege Front. Otherwise, would I still be getting these from Droit?” He waved the manila envelope.

It dawned on Limmit. That fuckin’ Droit is sending out old pictures of Adder, and the kids in Orange County aren’t able to tell the difference. The myth lived on. Limmit snorted in derision. “I could tell you something about your beloved invincible Dr. Adder.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

Limmit smiled at him. “Oh, nothing. Don’t worry about it.” He paused for a moment to watch Edgar’s face as he comprehended the situation. “Sure you don’t want to tell me more about the SPS?”

The youth turned away, irritated. “Forget it,” he said. “What could you know about Adder?” The crowd had thinned out in response to the officious clanging of bells several minutes ago and no more customers had approached while they had been talking. “Come on,” said Edgar, pushing himself away from the wall. “I usually don’t bother with my English class, but you might get a laugh out of it.”

The class had already begun when they entered the room.

Thirty or so students of Edgar’s age sat around, idly talking with each other, inspecting the contents of the envelopes Edgar had just sold them, and a few were watching in a bored manner the large television screen suspended in one corner of the room. Several of the numb-faced girls sat near the walls, as if stored there.

Edgar led him to a pair of vacant desks by one group of conversationalists. Limmit grew bored with their talk, mostly low exclamations of delight over the photos of Adder and the whores, and turned his attention to the television. On the screen, two men were sitting behind a desk, the front of which was lettered SCIENCE FICTION IN THE CLASSROOM—AN AUDIOVISUAL APPROACH.

Speaking to the television camera was a young man, well groomed and game-show oily. The other man was short and appeared somehow incredibly ancient despite his smooth skin. He looked as if his body had been drained of its contents, refilled with paraffin, and restored to life. Like Mrs. Endpoint and the high school’s vacant-faced girls, but with a difference —there still seemed to be a spark of something unextinguished behind the figure’s eyes. A shock of white hair hung over what must have once been a living face a long time ago. Now the man sat listlessly, his face slack, the eyes staring unfocused out of camera range.

“... all of which,” the young man on the screen was saying, a dynamic salesman of education, “insured Lars Kyrie’s position in American letters, and qualified him for special preservative treatment from the Board of Education’s Bio-Archive Section.”

Limmit started, and leaned forward to peer closer at the screen. So that’s Lars Kyrie! He had assumed from the tattered and yellowing condition of the ancient paperback books bearing his name as author that Kyrie was long since dead.

“You will find,” the young man continued, “one of Lars Kyrie’s disturbing science fiction stories on page fifty-eight of your text.” Limmit looked around and saw a thick volume lying on the floor by his seat. He picked it up and looked at the title. Augurs of Utopia: A Basic Reading Text for Science Fiction in the Classroom. Still listening to the young man’s voice, he quickly leafed through the book, noting familiar titles and names from his own abandoned collection back in Phoenix.

Each story in the book was surrounded by a lengthy introduction and questions for the student. Limmit closed the book and nudged Edgar in the ribs. The boy broke off his conversation and turned to face him. “What is this, anyway?” asked Limmit, nodding sideways to indicate the television.

Edgar shrugged, disinterested. “The educational channel. For lit classes they haul out these old hacks they’ve got on ice and have ’em talk about their books. This semester we’ve been doing whatchacallit, um ... science fiction.” He turned back to his friends.

Limmit poked him again. “Aren’t you interested?” he asked. “That’s Lars Kyrie up there.”

“So?” said Edgar, sneering. “If he’s such dangerous shit, how come they want me to study him?” He turned away again.

On the screen, the young man’s handsome face was in profile as he spoke to the older and shorter man. “Good morning, Mr. Kyrie,” he said. “We’re honored to have you with us today.” The author’s face did not change, but continued to stare vacantly off to one side. “Mr. Kyrie?” he repeated. There was no response. Without looking, the young man depressed some buttons on the desk before him, hidden by the camera’s angle.

Instantly, the figure of Lars Kyrie jerked spasmodically, the eyes flaring wide, as if a surge of electricity had been sent through his body. The old writer looked around in dazed panic. The young man patted Kyrie’s hand soothingly. “There, there. Don’t be alarmed, sir. We’re here to talk about your writing, remember?”

The aged head nodded slowly, the eyes like those of a cornered animal.

“Now then,” the young man said briskly. “As one of society’s most eloquent warning voices of a few decades ago, when you were still writing, how do you feel about the present-day society that you have lived to see?”

The old man licked his dry, flaking lips and fidgeted, as if trying to remember something. His interviewer’s hand hovered warningly over the hidden buttons. “It’s wonderful,” Kyrie hazarded quickly. “Uhh ... I’m sincerely grateful that America has truly taken the wuh-warnings of my juh-generation of science fiction writers to heart in buh-building—” He broke off, blinking at the camera.

“Yes?” prompted the young man. “In building what, sir?” He flicked lightly one of the buttons, resulting in a shivering flinch on Kyrie’s part.

“In building,” the old man quickly jabbered, “a society free from personal alienation and racial strife and war and, and, and ... all those other bad things I used to write about.” He looked up at the young interviewer cringingly. Someone in the classroom snickered.

“How interesting,” said the young man. Limmit thought he could detect in his voice a slight tone of exasperation, as though the interview was not going as well as planned. “Mr. Kyrie, what do you think is the relevance of your writing to today’s high school student?”

The old man hung his head without answering, as if ashamed. “Mr. Kyrie?” the young man asked gently.

The old man did not look up.

“Mr. Kyrie?” The young hand fell over the hidden buttons. The ancient head flung itself up. A secret switch within him seemed to have been thrown. He took a deep, rattling breath, almost a sob. “Fucked!” he screamed. “It’s fucked!” The young man looked too startled to comprehend.

“My stuff is alive!” the old man continued to scream, in a frantic, reedy voice. “But they’re burying it all under a mountain of shit! I never thought what they did to Shakespeare”—the young man came alive suddenly, and slapped his hand full upon the concealed buttons—“they could do to me!” The old man’s eyes rolled up in his head and he started to sway back and forth. “When they first started teaching my stories in schoolrooms,” he gasped painfully, “I thought it was wonderful. I thought ... academic recognition—I longed for it!” The young man pressed furiously with both hands on the buttons before him. The old man’s face began to twitch erratically, as if it were about to fly apart. “I didn’t know it would come to this. I didn’t think ... I thought I was too vivid . .. alive ... for them to make me into a bore ... like all the others they did it to ... make you think I was one of them ... those gray teachers... on their reading lists...” This is ghastly, thought Limmit in horrified silence. “Cut! Cut!” he could hear the young man fiercely whispering to someone outside of camera range. “Get us off the air!”

Kyrie was writhing in his chair now, in response to the young man’s pressure on the buttons. His head rolled on his shoulders and his arms began to flap spastically, like a crippled bird. His words continued to spill out in hoarse, explosive gasps. “I didn’t know ... first the colleges ... those professors were all right maybe ... they loved me ... but they’re dead ...” “Whaddaya mean, there’s no one in the control booth?”

“... then in the high schools ... studying me and my friends ... until ... you were sick of us ...”

“Goddamn this old fucker!”

“... until ... you thought we were just old farts ... like all the other old farts ... your teachers ... and everyone else who had ever written ... that they got their dry hands on ... like leeches—”

“Don’t give me that ‘automatic’ crap! Get us off the air!”

.. leeches ... bloodsuckers ... dust-clogged filthy cocksuck-ing vampires . .

The young man’s nerve finally broke. “Shut up!” he yelled, letting go of the buttons and springing at the old writer’s throat. As the two fell behind the desk, one maniacally throttling and the other, with his old yellowed eyes rolling and bulging from his head, weakly resisting, the screen finally went blank. A chorus of cheers and whistles resounded from the classroom audience, who had left off their conversations to watch the unplanned spectacular. The voice of a different announcer, equally unctuous, came on. “Be sure to attend tomorrow’s class, when our special guest will be the noted S-F author Alex Turbiner. This has been Augurs of Utopia, Audio-Visual Supplement. ”

Limmit staggered to his feet and rushed blindly to the door of the classroom. Outside the door he vomited on the hallway carpeting. He sucked in a few ragged breaths and straightened up. He stared for a few seconds at the surrounding corridors and doors of the school, then, without waiting for Edgar, he trotted shakily in the direction of the main gate. There, one of the school’s uniformed guards glanced idly at him as he stumbled out into the day’s dim sun.

Before he knew it, Buena Maricone High was out of view. He found himself walking down a strangely empty street, lined with enigmatic masses of buildings and full parking lots, when a blood-red car pulled alongside the curb, the door popping open. “Get in,” called Edgar.

They jerked away from the curb as soon as Limmit had barely closed the door. Barreling down the road, empty of any other traffic, Edgar turned around behind the wheel, grinned, and said, “School’s out.”

Limmit stared, uncomprehending.

“I sold out,” said Edgar. “No more Adder-paks left. No point in staying, so I bribed the gate guard to let me out.”

Numbly, Limmit nodded. “Where are we?” he asked, looking out at the buildings flashing by. “What’s this place?”

“Industrial district,” said Edgar. “My father’s in there somewhere, turning out defense items for the Mid-ocean Autonomic Defense Fleet. Though who the fuck’s ever going to do anything about the USA except forget it even more than they already have, let alone invade it, is beyond me. Main industry here, though; every building’s part of it, working on some contract. Except, of course, that one.” He pointed to an imposing rectangular structure some blocks away but clearly visible over the other buildings.

“What’s that?” asked Limmit.

Edgar laughed. “A lot of things, but they’re all John Mox’s. His headquarters really—Orange County Broadcast Central. The Video Church of Moral Forces, and nearly everything else that shows up on the TV screen, comes from in there. All cables lead to Mox, you might say.”

So that’s it, thought Limmit, studying the building from the changing angle caused by the car’s movement. That’s where all this originated from, a source of evil like a poisoned heart. That’s reached out to Phoenix and brought me here, to kill me amidst filth and disease. But never anything personal, of course. Limmit felt a cold flush drain through his vitals. There’s more, he knew, involved here than my life. A thought struck him. “Lars,” he said in a voice of quiet urgency. “Lars Kyrie’s in there.”

“Yeah,” said Edgar. “Probably catching shit right now, too.” He felt something snap together beside his heart. “We should get him out of there,” he whispered. He turned to Edgar with wide, unblinking eyes. “Is there any way we can get some guns? And some more people?”

Edgar stared at him for a second, then laughed. “You must be crazy. That place is stiff with MFers. And even if you could get in it wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t get Lars Kyrie out.” “Why not?”

“He’s not there—not really. He’s on tape in the archives. He was one of the first, before I was born even, to have his personality and memory programmed into the big computer banks they’ve got in there; that’s why his output is that dummy you saw on the screen this morning, a replica of his original body.” “That was a fake?”

Edgar nodded. “Wires and gears. But with pain circuits built in so they can keep him in line. Now they’ve developed outputs where they use straight computer graphics. It’s still realistic, looks like the guy did when he was alive, but it’s really just a sophisticated animated cartoon.”

Limmit slumped back into the car seat. It was hopeless. There was no way to attack Mox, guarded deep within his iron fortress, no way to take from him anything like what Limmit felt had been taken from himself. There’s nothing to do, he thought bleakly, but to sit here and wait for his gunman to catch up with me. Wait for the bullet through the base of my skull.

They rode on in silence. Edgar seemed to be cruising purposelessly. The teenager’s hands clenched again and again on the steering wheel, as if something were on his mind. Finally he spoke. “Listen,” he said. “There is something you should know about the Society for the Prodigal Son. I’ll tell you if you let me have what you know about Dr. Adder.”

A bitter edge pierced Limmit. “Don’t even bother,” he told the youth. “I doubt if you could make any money peddling this.” And besides, he said to himself, what do I care what the truth is about the SPS? Let them be or do what they want. He felt himself turning into an object. Without volition, subject to the will of ... others. This must be what a stone feels like, he thought. Beyond pain.

“Come on,” Edgar pleaded. “It’s important. Not for money —I mean for me.”

“He’s dead.” The flat words seemed to burn up from his lungs. “Deader than Lars Kyrie even. Something happened to him during the Raid on the Interface.” He felt his voice tremble with the suppressed harmonics of grief and shame. “It burned out his brain. He’s an idiot, if he still hasn’t died all the way yet —a drooling, blank-faced idiot. He sits in the corner of a dark room in Rattown and is spoonfed and wiped clean by one of Mother Endure’s walking wounded.” Jesus Christ, cried Limmit to himself, I hope he is dead, clean-dead.

“B-bullshit,” said Edgar, his face flushed. “He’s alive—I get new pics of him every week.”

“Droit’s stringing you on,” said Limmit, and sighed. “He’s dead—go wait for the Resurrection.”

Edgar slammed on the car’s brakes viciously, jerking Limmit forward against the dash. “Fuck you,” he snarled, his young face contorted with hate and fear. “Shit if you’re getting any info on the SPS for that bunch of lies.” He reached across Limmit and pushed open the car door. “Get out.”

As the car roared away from the curb, Limmit turned around on the sidewalk to see where he had been dumped. He was standing in the gigantic triangular shadow of the Casa del Solitude residential complex. The Endpoint apartment was somewhere in its pyramidal mass. He trudged head down through the glass doors of the main lobby and headed for the elevator. This is my home now, he thought. He no longer felt horrified or bitter. I’m resigned to it, he thought, probing his feelings like a tooth that had stopped aching. I’ve earned it. I deserve to live here now.

“You don’t have to show me around,” he told the elder Endpoint when he arrived home to find Limmit waiting for him outside the conapt door. “I think I’ve seen enough. I’m ready to come home.”

“Nonsense, my boy,” Endpoint said heartily. He repocketed his door key and took Limmit by the elbow, steering him back toward the elevators. “I was going to wait until Edgar brought you home from his school, but since you’re here already, let’s go right now—you won’t believe it when you see it.”

As Endpoint drove them through the late afternoon traffic, he elaborated. “Actually, you’re going to be a step ahead of most everyone else in Orange County. I got special permission to show you this because Arthur Fuller, the man in charge, is a brother member of the SPS. One of your uncles, so to speak.”

The car pulled through the entrance of another of Orange County’s mammoth parking lots, crowded with vehicles. Limmit could see, over the tops of strangely green trees and an elevated railway, the peak of a miniaturized mountain, complete with ersatz snow gleaming in the dull sunlight. “This used to be one of the world’s most famous amusement parks,” said Endpoint proudly, pulling into a vacant parking space. “Now it’s pretty much just Orange County’s local fun spot. Christ, my glove compartment’s crammed with old unused ‘A’ tickets— from when I used to bring Edgar here.” His face clouded momentarily. “When he was younger and still liked to go. But it’s going to be different soon—you’ll see.”

He led Limmit to a small, unmarked gate away from the garishly decorated ticket booths and main entrances, and showed a slip of paper to a bored security guard who waved them wordlessly inside. Endpoint pulled him into a large, pre-fabricated-looking building and down a corridor lined with doors bearing crudely stenciled numbers and designations. An almost tangible aura of activity exuded from behind the doors, like the hum emitted by giant machinery. Directly at the end of the hallway was a door marked FULLER—PRIVATE, upon which Endpoint rapped, then opened without waiting for a response. “Art?” he called into the room, then pushed Limmit inside with him. “Here he is. Ready for his little tour.”

A balding man, shaped like an angular pear, rose from behind a desk cluttered with blueprints and schematics. He grasped Limmit’s hand in his own damp palms. “Welcome home,” he said sincerely, “to Orange County.”

Limmit opened his mouth to speak, but Endpoint interrupted. “Not yet, Art,” he said. “You remember.”

“That’s right, ” said Fuller, looking fondly at Limmit. “I hope our little exhibit will impress you favorably. We want you to feel that this is truly your home.”

I feel it all right, Limmit thought to himself.

“Shall we?” said Fuller, opening another door on the other side of the room. He ushered Endpoint and Limmit through it.

Beyond the door, Limmit felt his internal organs shift sickeningly at the sight of the high-ceilinged room’s contents. Its entire length, stretching as far as he could see, was filled with duplicates of the Interface’s slaughtered whores, in various stages of completion. All the workers had apparently ended their shift and gone home. The enormous room was evidently an assembly line: far down its length, the figures were only skeletal metal frameworks slung from chains attached to a conveyor track in the ceiling. Then, at stations progressively closer, cylinders, tubes, other mechanisms, were hooked up in increasingly complicated arrangements; padding, heating elements, and artificial skin were fitted over the framework; finally, only a few yards from them, the completing articles of body hair, eyes, and miscellaneous details were being applied or inserted. A dozen or more of the finished products stood in frozen nudity before them. Holy shit, thought Limmit, nauseated. The old science fiction pulp wet-dream: the mechanical cunt.

Fuller lifted the eyelid of a brunette and peered into the eye in a professional manner, checking out some detail. “There’s quite an involved rationale behind this whole project,” he said, an overfriendly lecturer. He dropped the plastic eyelid and turned to face Limmit. “Briefly, with the shutting down of the Interface, some replacement had to be created for the, ah, diversion it afforded the residents of Orange County. It was, shall we say, a vital release of tension. True, many are now finding their way to the appropriate people in Rattown, the pimps and whores who escaped the Moral Forces action. That’s easy enough, inasmuch as there actually is no siege surrounding that area—”

“No siege?” echoed Limmit.

“That’s right. Oh, I know that some people still think there is—mainly because of that silly Adder Siege Front the Rattown-ers organized. But honestly, how long do you think a motley collection of psychotics like that could last if the Moral Forces really wanted to go in and clear them out? Actually,” he added, his voice dropping to a dramatic whisper, “I hear that several of the Front’s leaders are in on the, um, traffic, if you know what I mean.”

Limmit could feel his mind fragmenting into layers. One small section flashed a brief image of Eddie Azusa and the words It figures. But why? another part began to nag unceasingly. Why did Mox stop there? Had the Raid just been to kill Adder? The questions burned and sizzled in a tiny corner of his skull like drops of molten steel. Why did Mox send me with the flashglove to Adder?

The rest of him watched in frozen repulsion as Fuller continued speaking. “So you can imagine how glad we all were here when the GPC exec board gave us the green light for our little pet project—the most innovative idea yet conceived for one of this amusement park’s ‘theme areas,’ as we call them.”

“Fuckland,” said Endpoint, his insurance salesman’s face leering idiotically, and a strange visionary light in his eyes.

“Mmm, yes,” smiled Fuller patiently, “that name has been considered. But we’re much more likely to opt for something with a little wider appeal, with less offensive connotations. After all, it is going to be a family amusement area. Something, of course, that the old Interface never was.” He took the dazed Limmit by one arm and led him up to one of the artificial whores. “Don’t be shy. Say hello to the little lady.”

I’m going to be sick, thought Limmit. Right here. Fuller reached behind the thing’s back and flipped a switch. The hooker came alive and smiled coyly at Limmit. Christ, he thought, how repulsive. Its plastic face looked eerily like the young girl to whom he had talked in Adder’s office so long ago. He felt a gentle stroking pressure on the inside of his thigh. Looking down, he saw what he hadn’t noticed before: the hooker was a simulated amputee. She had one hand resting on the shoulder of another automaton to balance herself, and was rubbing the stump of her right leg (only, thought Limmit, there never was a right leg) against him. He perceived another evidence of painstaking attention to detail. Right at the edge of the stump, where the synthetic whore’s real-life counterpart would have had her grinning snake’s-head tattoo, there was the amusement park’s own version of the mark. A little cartoon mouse’s head, two perfect black circles for ears, grinning insanely friendly with button nose and wide-sprung eyes.

This is it, thought Limmit. Nausea and despair sucked at his interior. I’m never going to leave Orange County. I’ll die right here, only I’ll keep on walking. I’ll be dead, and I’ll settle down here in Orange County, marry a girl vague from TV and downers, and we’ll raise anonymous children together, removed from her body like loaves of bread while she’s knocked out, a widespread brainless oven of a girl. On weekends we’ll bring them here to Fuckland just like any other Orange County family. And nobody will know I’m dead until my rotting body starts to fall apart. Right here with this foam-rubber ersatz whore. My decaying prick will break off right in her polyethylene cunt. What a thing for the next customer to find.

Limmit leaned his forehead against the hooker’s soft, gently heated breast. A tear dropped from his eye and beaded on the waterproof synthetic skin. I’m not dead, he thought in sick desperation. Don’t let me be dead. For the first time in a long while he found himself thinking of Mary. “I want to leave,” he said in a constricted, childlike voice. “I want out of here.” Behind him, Endpoint and Fuller exchanged quick, worried looks. Endpoint brought his face close to Limmit’s. “Do you mean,” he whispered, “Orange County? Or just this room?” “Here—” Limmit gulped, his cheeks burning and wet. “Orange County.”

Endpoint straightened back up and faced Fuller. “We’ll have to convene the welcoming committee tonight. We can’t wait any longer.”

“Why not?” asked Fuller. “If he runs away we can always track him down again.”

“I’m not worried about that,” snapped Endpoint. “I think he’s going suicidal.”

“But if that’s the case—”

“The ceremony will change all that,” Endpoint interrupted brusquely. “I’m the Patriarch this month. It’s my responsibility, and my decision.”

“All right,” said Fuller, shrugging. “I’ll get on the phone to the others.” He started to turn away to his office, then stepped back to reach behind the artificial whore and switch it off. Limmit felt the padded breast begin to grow cold beneath his face.

“How long is this going to last?” asked Limmit. He was seated in the back of Endpoint’s car, between two SPS members. Endpoint himself was driving, with two others up front.

“The ceremony?” said Endpoint, glancing at Limmit in the rearview mirror. “Not very long. A couple of hours; we should be through shortly after midnight.”

Limmit stared out the car window at Orange County’s brightly lit streets. The questions that had sprung into his mind when confronted by the artificial whore, that had indeed been boiling at the closest edges of his subconscious since the night of the Raid, continued to repeat themselves endlessly, like some mnemonic jingle. As soon as it’s over, he decided, I’ll say goodbye and light out. Back to the sewers. Or any way out of Orange County.

“Why do you ask?” inquired Endpoint.

“Oh,” said Limmit, “you know, I don’t want to eat too much at this feast of yours. Slows you down when you’re traveling.”

“He doesn’t want to eat too much?” asked the SPSer on Limmit’s right, sounding puzzled.

Fuller, sitting up front, turned around. “He doesn’t know yet,” he said explanatorily.

“Ah.”

“Know what?” asked Limmit quickly. Something seemed foreboding.

No one answered him. The vehicle pressed on through the late night traffic. Limmit watched the men’s silent faces, all looking straight ahead into the night without meeting his eyes. The rumor, Limmit thought suddenly, that Bandita told me—

He lunged across the lap of the SPSer to his left, scrabbling for the car’s door handle. The door popped open for a brief second, giving him a dizzying glimpse of the concrete road surface flashing by beneath the car. Then the two SPS members hauled him back into his place between them, and clamped themselves firmly onto his arms, rendering him immobile. He could see Endpoint’s livid eyes observing him from the rearview mirror.

“That’s right, son, ” Endpoint grated. “I’m afraid we observe a reading of the parable of the prodigal son that may differ a little from your conception of the story, son. ” The way he rasped out the word bristled Limmit’s neck hair. “But then,” Endpoint continued, “you don’t really know what it’s like to be a father, eh? And to raise a son like you? Maybe, if you think about it in the time left to you, you’ll begin to see why we hold that the prodigal son is the fatted calf. It makes more sense that way, of course. After all, how would you really welcome home such a son? The flesh of his father’s loins, yet who has feasted on his broken heart. Now it’ll be tit for tat, so to speak.” Christ, thought Limmit crazily, they’re not even gourmets— they’re probably going to eat me bloody raw! He struggled to keep control of his senses. Looking out the window, he saw that the road had entered vacant land, scrubby gray and brown hills. That probably meant they were only minutes away from whatever isolated spot the SPS held their ceremonies at. A pair of headlights was visible heading for them; soon they would flash by on the other side of them and disappear.

“But,” said Limmit desperately, “I’m not even your real son.” In the rearview mirror, Endpoint’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Like I told you,” he said quietly, “you’ll do.” Then the eyes darted away from the mirror; Limmit saw them grow wide in startled astonishment. He looked ahead through the windshield and saw that the pair of headlights on the road before them was heading straight for them, and accelerating. “What’s he doing?” screamed Fuller in a terrified falsetto.

Endpoint panicked, slamming on the vehicle’s brakes and cranking the steering wheel to the right. The car skidded through a ninety-degree arc, nearly heeling over as it continued sideways in the same direction. Limmit felt himself bounce off the shoulder of the SPSer next to him, then slam his forehead against the back of the seat ahead. Dazed, he watched through the side window as the other car’s lights sped closer; at the last possible moment the lights veered to one side. Something struck the car’s tail a glancing blow, spinning it back the other way around on the road and smashing Limmit and the SPS members against the right side of the car’s interior before it came to a lurching stop.

There was a taste of blood in Limmit’s mouth. His head aching, he looked around at the car’s other occupants. All except one were still conscious; a spatter of blood traced itself across the windshield to where Fuller’s head lay on the dash. Endpoint clutched the steering wheel tightly, his face drained white. Before he or anyone else could say anything, a hand snaked through the side window and placed a small revolver against Endpoint’s temple.

“Freeze, Dad,” said Edgar Endpoint.

*   *   *

“My own son,” said the elder Endpoint bitterly, staring out the window at Edgar. “And my gun, too. Who said you could go into my bureau?”

“Two bad ones in a row,” muttered one of the SPS members beside Limmit.

“Let him out,” said Edgar, holding the pistol steady at his father’s head.

“Who?” asked Endpoint blankly. He seemed genuinely confused, still not recovered from the collision.

“The prodigal son—he’s going with me.”

Limmit scrambled out of the car, the two SPSers in the back seat not trying to stop him. Outside, on the dark, empty road, he could see Edgar’s blood-red vehicle a few yards off, one entire side crumpled like metal foil. In the hand without the gun, the youth dangled a battered crash helmet by its chin strap.

“Don’t try to follow us, Dad,” said Edgar, pulling out the gun. Limmit sensed the air of nervous tension around him. “Come on,” Edgar said, waving him over to his car. “Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute,” said Limmit. He reached inside his boot. The blade was still there; amazing, considering all he had been through lately. He walked around Endpoint’s car, quickly and systematically slitting the tires.

“Ta-ta,” he yelled as he climbed into Edgar’s car. He was filled with giddy excitement from the violent escape. “See you later, child eaters.”

“Pretty hairy driving,” said Limmit as Edgar accelerated down the road. He sank back into the car’s upholstery, accepting it like a dream. “I’m surprised this thing can still run.” Edgar grinned across at him. “It’s built for little street games like this. The favorite sport of Orange County’s affluent young. Steel beams all the way around—I could’ve slammed into a bank and not hurt this car. The side panels are just snap-on decorative modules—I’ve changed them about twenty times already.” He fell silent; his gleeful smile drained away completely as he hunched over the wheel.

Limmit studied his silhouetted profile. “So why?” he asked finally. “Why’d you do it?”

“It’s true,” said Edgar, staring straight ahead. “About Dr. Adder. What you told me.”

“What confirmed it for you?”

“Droit. I went down below, to the sewers, to give him his money. I told him what you had told me, and he admitted it was true. He said that he had seen him, Dr. Adder, himself.”

It’s true, all right, reflected Limmit, plunged again in private melancholia. Now you know, too.

“Droit told me to give you this,” said Edgar. He handed Limmit a sheet of paper. “He said he couldn’t arrange another guide for you.”

Holding it up against the car’s dashboard lights, Limmit could make out the paper’s details. It was a map of sections of the Sump Line. Directions were indicated on it, leading from a spot marked VISITOR back to some point in the L.A. slums. It looked impossibly complicated; maybe, he thought, I’ll be able to figure it out when I get down there again. He folded the sheet carefully and placed it in his inside coat pocket. Might as well see it through, he decided. “I take it,” he said, “you’re going to lead me back down to the sewers.”

Edgar nodded, continuing to stare at the road ahead. “What are you going to do then?” asked Limmit.

“I don’t know,” said Edgar, shaking his head. “I can hide out all right, I guess, either down in the sewers or up here at my friends’ for a while.” He fell silent for a moment. “I always used to think,” he said softly, “that someday I could always go to the Interface, or Rattown even. Get away from here. But now what can you do?” He turned his face to Limmit; the car’s dim green dash lights shining wetly upon his cheeks. “What can anybody do now?”

I should’ve asked the kid for a watch or something, thought Limmit. My sense of time is really fucked up now. His legs ached as if he had been walking beside the dark underground river for days; but since leaving Orange County he had slept only once, curled up dreamless in one of the side tunnels, woken, and plodded on upstream.

Or better yet, he thought, some food. His stomach had long ago ceased rumbling—only a periodic tremor of faintness welled upward with each step. So far he had not even seen, let alone been able to catch, any of the small rodents Bandita had found for them before. They’re probably too smart for me, he thought.

The next section of tunnel he entered was only faintly lit from a few remaining fluorescent panels above. What looked to be a large clump of rags lay in his path, and another similar object lay farther on. Weakly, Limmit prodded the closest bundle, and Bandita’s dead face lolled over, staring up at him.

He bent down beside the body. Against the Sump Line’s background melange of odors was the scent of several days’ putrefaction. A pool of blood had dried and caked around the body, pouring from the ragged exit wound in her chest and the smaller hole in her back where the bullet had entered.

The other object was Victor’s corpse. Stooping down, he saw that the throat had been expertly slit. One stiff hand still clenched the rifle he had had time to fire before he bled to death.

Limmit walked back to Bandita’s body and noticed her small outstretched hand cradling the strap of a large canvas bag. He pulled the bag free and looked inside. It was filled with old, but still edible, canned foods. He extracted and weighed in his hands a can of peaches. She must have found a cache, thought Limmit.

He walked back and forth between the two dead objects, studying their outlines and contortions. I don’t understand it, he thought. She killed him, and left him. Heading for ... where? For me? He shook his head, the canned peaches a weight in his hand.

Her body was astonishingly light when he lifted it in his arms. As he lowered it into the black, silent water, it sank below the surface, but bobbed back up as it slowly wheeled around, following the river’s current. When it was out of view he sat down and pulled off the peaches’ lift-tab. He fished out with his fingers the slippery golden sections, like tangible sunlight in the dark, from the warm fluid and placed them in his mouth.

The end of the tunnel, where the dark water emerged from behind a steel and concrete wall, was littered with the rotting fragments of old packing crates. Beyond them to one side was a small doorlike opening. Limmit, entering and following its downward slope, soon found himself in a long room crowded with banks of electronic apparatus, connected to each other by thick bundles of black cords lying on the floor. The passageway was so narrow that he slid the strap of the can-filled canvas bag from his shoulder and dropped it to the ground. On the machines’ faces a few colored lights shone or blinked erratically; a low, wavering hum filled the room.

Beyond the computers, Limmit entered another room, lined with shelves. Most were filled with large black volumes—half of one side contained cardboard boxes crammed haphazardly with computer printout paper. With a finger he wiped the dust from the spine of one of the volumes—the typed label read VISITOR—TRANS. SERIES R. A pair of cables from the previous room snaked across the floor and vanished through another door.

The Visitor was on the other side. The space itself that contained it was enormous, a cathedral-like immensity. Standing on its floor, Limmit could see no ceiling; only the wall behind him indicated any of the area’s dimensions. And a few yards away from him lay the gargantuan bulk of the Visitor. Somehow Limmit sensed that he and it were the only living things there.

It reminded Limmit of pictures he had seen as a child of certain ants whose queens grow gross and immobile until the chitinous body becomes nothing but an appendage of a great shapeless, pulsating mass. Only this was not insect-sized: it swelled and towered over him like a cloudbank.

Limmit walked closer to its bulging flank and touched it. A faint luminescence added to the dim electric lights set up around it. A section some fifty feet square slowly bellowed in and out. As far as he could see, the soft bulk pulsated all over in like manner, with no apparent coordination. It’s dying, Limmit realized suddenly. It’s been dying for years.

Where it rested on the floor, great discolored bruises had developed, as if the pulpy body’s fluids were collecting and growing stagnant with lividity. Several patches touching the floor had rotted open, and had emitted a puslike fluid that dried into a yellow crust around the body’s edges.

He slowly circled the body for several yards. As in the dimly remembered pictures of the insect queens, a comparatively small half-figure, like a human imbedded waist-deep, hung attached to the great mass. A hard-shelled trunk the size of a man’s, with thin, sticklike limbs hanging limply or occasionally twitching, and a smooth oval head that hung just at the height of Limmit’s own. He walked up and stared into the suspended alien face. The large, flylike, complex eyes seemed to contain only the barest spark of consciousness. A tiny microphone was attached to one side of the face’s arrangement of mandibles. Leaning close to it, Limmit could hear a faint stream of sounds, a liquid whining. His message, thought Limmit. From so far away. That he has come to die in order to give us.

He followed the microphone’s dangling cord across the floor to a small machine, clattering softly to itself and unreeling from a wide slot a closely filled length of printout paper. The sheets had piled up into a disorderly mountain at the machine’s foot, sliding like a glacier over the thick black cables from the other rooms. He lifted a handful of the paper and read it. After a few minutes, he dropped it and snatched up more, scanning it quickly; then he tore the sheet straight from the machine’s mouth and studied it frantically.

In the other room he tore the black volumes from the shelves at random, dropping them as soon as he had seen a few pages of each. He uprooted the cardboard boxes’ contents, until he was standing, panting from exhaustion, knee-deep in a welter of paper.

Sickness, he thought, filled with disgust and bitterness; filth and disease. All this way ... for this. He looked around at the scattered sheets of translation. Years, he thought, decades of babbling, incoherent self-pity. Idiocy. It must’ve been diseased, deranged when it got here, was sent here. And wallowing in its own decay since, begging moronically for our help. As if we could do anything at all.

Limmit walked back into the chamber and stared at the Visitor’s bulk. It was no mystery to him now why the old scientists had all gone someplace else and died, away from it. To work and hope, he thought, and then find out that no one was coming with the answers after all.

The thing’s faint whine and necrotic mass stirred Limmit’s memory. Full circle, he said to himself; from the egg ranch to the L.A. sewers, two giant corpses at either end. This would be as good a place as any, he thought, to finish. To lie down beside it and die. To stop.

The stench of rot flowed through him, warm and rancid. Why the fuck keep on moving? he thought wearily. Life’s nothing but the beating you take before you die. And I’ve died so many times already. Killed and lost so much. The remains.

Minutes or hours later, he turned away from the pale mass and slowly followed the black cables out. Stupid; you keep taking it, he thought, extracting and unfolding Droit’s map. Until the last time.

The sewer fluffs luminescence had increased somehow, or Limmit’s eyes had become completely adapted to the dark. Bandita’s bullet-shattered lamp still lay on top of the fluff onto which he had fallen from the surface of Rattown. A rope ladder dangled above him—Droit’s, he thought. He reached up and mounted it, swaying slightly in space, and climbed until the fluff below him was lost to sight. Looking down into the darkness, he could see hundreds of yellow points of light, arranged in pairs, appear on all sides below him. The rats, he thought. They’ve been watching all along.

For a brief flash of delirium, the yellow lights looked like stars in a black sky, and he hung suspended, unable to tell up or down —it seemed as if he were descending headfirst into the depths, rather than up from them. The feeling passed, and he climbed on, until the lights disappeared.

On the surface it was night. Nothing’s changed, he thought as he walked through the empty dark alleys. The walls were covered with the Siege Front’s red and black posters, only slightly faded and tattered. Advertisements, he thought, for the land of shades.

And Mox’s gunman is waiting for me. He knew I’d come back here to die. As good as dead—only a thin crust of animation left to shatter. He felt as if some slow corrosive had eaten out the rest, leaving only stilled vacuum.

He came to the ancient, decaying building where Mary had brought him. She’s forgotten, he thought, mounting the stairs. Left the dead behind. He stood before the room’s closed door and touched the cold metal of the doorknob. The only one who might have saved me ... died. Limmit pushed open the door and gazed into the dark, silent room. He saw that the box of clothes Mary had gotten for him still sat in the same corner, a thick coat of dust covering it, shroudlike. She’s gone, he thought; like everything else.

Faint light streamed from the window on the other side of the room. As Limmit stepped into the room he saw a man’s figure silhouetted black against the window. Limmit turned slowly toward the figure, palms outward, to accept the bullet.

There was no shot.

“Hello, Limmit,” said Dr. Adder.

I sat there for a long time. Or laid there. Depending on which way the old woman put me. She fed me, wiped my mouth and ass. I didn’t move; I had become an object. After my vision cleared, I watched TV—more than I had since I was a kid in Orange County. The old woman nearly always tugged and pulled my lolling body into a position where I could see the TV; I guess she thought that as long as my eyes were open I deserved it in some way. I would lie in the same spot for days, my face turned to the screen, while the old woman crept through the room’s piles of debris, muttering to herself. Sometimes the young girl would drift into my field of vision. She seemed to be attracted to the TV, although I could tell she was blind, as well as deaf and speechless and with impaired tactile sense, I discovered later. Lying there on the room’s moldering couch, I would see the girl kneel on the floor and press her face and the palms of her hands against the side of the TV, her blank gaze turned direct into my empty one. I figured then that she liked the faint heat the set gave off.

I didn’t sleep, or think, or remember anything. I lay there, or was propped against one arm of the couch, filled with a strange contentment. Not filled, actually: it was as if something enormous had been drained out of me, and I could now touch and feel the vacuum left behind. Peace defined as the absence of .. . something. I had never realized before how much of everything I did had been a consequence of some nameless fury within me, as if all my visible manifestations were simply results of an inner storm. Now I was content to be a tube, without tension or restriction at either end, and the TV programs passed through me just like the old woman’s prepared mash.

I watched the TV families omnivorously. It got to where I couldn’t distinguish one bunch from another—they merged in my perception into one giant collective entity, like a jellyfish compounded of thousands of smaller organisms. The father-extensions would smile at the mother-extensions, and these would in turn smile at the children-extensions; and they would all flex and grope through their daily adventures. Which must have been hilarious, judging from the hysterical laughter that accompanied their every move, but it all seemed to me like foreign movie actors going through an unknown language’s tragic opera. Over and over: rituals.

Then other times Mox would come on the TV, and I would watch him just like everything else. All my former contempt and hate for him was gone—in fact, I was unaware that I had ever had any. He would drone on and on, his voice sliding through me like it was oiled. Sometimes, he would mention a figure called Dr. Adder. I knew there was a connection between that dimly mysterious person and myself, that he had once even occupied this body lying on a dirty couch in Rattown; but he was gone. Purged.

I started to fall. Memory began to come back, but it changed nothing. Behind my empty face I watched again all of that one night’s bodies blur and leap at me, shattering into corpses. Blood oozing slowly, half-life speed, onto the Interface. Dr. Adder had done it all, with this metal forearm that dangled from my side as limp, volitionless, as my other of flesh. It had taken quite a lot out of Adder, I realized—in fact, had taken quite a lot of him out of me. Who was I? I wondered, falling farther. On the couch, observed by the muttering old woman, the blind girl, and the happy faces on the screen.

I watched old Betreech’s look of fearful knowledge dissolve into splinters of bone, clots of blood and tissue, flying teeth like decayed pearls around Dr. Adder’s metal hand. I watched you sell the weapon to Adder, to him, to me. He and I were still one, but as I fell farther I could feel him splitting away from me. Pazzo’s head dissolved on point of impact. A long parade of women went naked beneath Dr. Adder’s knife, customers under him and the ADR. All those revelatory visions merged, like the TV shows, into a single feverish dream of overpowered flesh.

Then I fell, motionless on the couch in Rattown, down farther. When there was no Interface yet for him to come to or create. When he lay encysted in Orange County like a tumor. There was more of me, whoever I was, than of him back then. Years of medical school flowed by—I walked through them now in slow, dreamy reverse. Then Buena Maricone High School: I was part of a river then, indistinguishable from the mass, the spot of blood that was the embryonic Dr. Adder within me concealed beneath the skin. I fell through grade school, more of the same, and into a preschool class. The memories stopped at one particular day. The attendant was not aware of me having crept up behind her with the other pair of scissors that had been dropped on the floor. The spot of blood that was Dr. Adder lay right on the surface, formed only minutes ahead and not yet covered up with my bland layers. He didn’t hesitate, but plunged the scissors into her calf, the blood creeping in memory’s slow motion over the child’s hand. I hesitated, did not plunge the blades in; she turned around and saw me, snatched the scissors away, scolded me, and I resolved in my sincere childish heart to be a good boy forever. A simple choice between what one should do and what they want you to do; that’s how it starts for everybody. The attendant walked away on unscarred, unpenetrated legs, and the bloodspot burned fiercely and disappeared into me, drilling a corrosive hole that healed over it without a trace.

And then I didn’t fall any farther. There was no need to. At that point he and I were more than distinct, separate: only one of us existed, and I was at rest upon that couch in that innocent child’s time. The rivers of blood would never flow over this body’s hands; no one would open their septic minds to its interior eyes. There was no Dr. Adder—I had erased him. I will lie here, I told myself, and be good.

I don’t know how long it took for me to reach that point, but once I had, time almost completely ceased to flow around me. It took what seemed to be days for the old woman to cross the dingy room toward me, her mutters now edging into subsonic rumbles. The food she placed in my mouth crawled softer than but as slow as glaciers toward my anus. I could trace its progress through my guts for weeks, it seemed. The voices on the TV oozed toward me like paste, the vibrations in the air fluttering and sucking at my ears like warm contra-bass kisses. The girl, crouched beside the TV, seemed like an unmoving rock formation, blank and perpetual.

I think now that I was dying. There was only a finite amount of time left before my heart, sensing that some finality had been reached, ceased to beat. My lungs would no longer inflate the sluglike body I was evolving to. My mind was thus stretching out for as long as it could this sweet, empty bliss. It was a race, with me as the dispassionate observer, to see which stopped first —my heart or my gradually slowing perception of time.

Years, it seemed, after I had reached the end of my fall, something happened. If anything deviating even slightly from the room’s frozen routine ever occurred (the dropping of a dish the old woman was carrying to me or the blind girl, strange flurries of noise out in the street), time speeded up slightly to encompass the event, then slowed down again to its lengthening pace. My face was turned toward the TV, as was more or less usual; the people inside it were swimming slowly through their static ballet, their laughter emerging as great woofing roars. The girl crouched, dumb and sightless beside it, pressing against. She had taken to this practice increasingly during the last few centuries I had been observing the room’s contents— perhaps because of the decreased, due to me, amount of attention she received from the old woman.

Suddenly, the image on the screen flared out in a brilliant burst of white light and static. The TV family’s figures resolved back on, but distorted, wavering. They slowly twisted and flowed, their bodies lengthening and contracting into erotic contortions, while the TV’s speaker howled and gibbered. The old woman, who had been sitting in the filthy upholstered chair beside the couch, shrieked, her voice traveling from the bass end of the audible spectrum to an ear-piercing siren as time raced up to its normal speed. “Get away from there!” she screamed, leaping up and pulling away from the side of the TV the blind girl, who lolled limp, clutched in the bony, clawlike hands. She shook the girl’s body back and forth, screaming a storm of warnings, threats, and curses at the head which snapped back and forth with its blank, unhearing expression. The old woman finally gave up in disgust, her outburst exhausted against the girl’s stonelike face. She flung her across the room, against the couch where I was lying, and raged out of the room.

The girl slid, dazed by the shaking, to the floor beside me. I watched her blind head swivel from side to side, unaware of my being there, moving gradually slower and slower as time started to congeal around me again. In slow motion I saw her rise to her feet; she stumbled against the side of the couch and flung one arm out, so slowly it seemed, to catch something to break her fall. I watched her outstretched hand move through the thickening air above me, and then light on the flashglove, this metal arm, the skin of her fingers kissing the cold surface, then her weight coming full upon it, the fingers curving across it, grasping.

Nothing happened for a long moment. An expression I had never seen on her immobile visage appearing was the last thing I saw then. Something flared around me in a brilliant white flash, just as the TV screen had done, then faded away. There seemed to be a waiting silence. A girl’s voice came to me, moving in real-time. “Hello,” I heard it say, but somehow not with my ears. “You’re ... Dr. Adder, aren’t you?” There was a faint sizzle of static behind the words; the voice was shy, a child’s, almost.

Adder broke off for a few seconds, staring at some point beyond the window. Watching him, Limmit sensed the silent alteration behind the now razorlike face. Something seemed to have disappeared irrevocably from around its cutting edge.

Her name was Melia—she remembered somebody calling her that, before she became deaf. That was a long time ago, she told me. There had been a man, her father, she thought. She was never able to understand any of what he did, but gathered from what she told me that he had had both a taste for kainine-herpezine combinations and a fertile imagination. And two victims for it: the woman, too fucked up on bovaine to run away, and the child, too young. When he finally ODed, the woman’s placid shell was cracked open by madness, and Melia, the little girl, was senseless. She had walled off the little one-room hell behind closed eyes and ears; the nerve endings in her skin had finally shut down almost completely against the pain. She was isolated—the mother took care of her in her lunatic fashion, living like vermin in Rattown on Mother Endure’s handouts.

It went on that way, she told me, dark, silent; until she wandered into the TV set the old woman kept playing constantly there in the room. When I was in med school in Auckland, the university was studying a group of blind Maori children who could erratically manipulate small electronic calculators without touching the controls: the IBM Syndrome, it was called. Perhaps if those children had been as completely shut off from sensory input for so long a time as Melia, their mutated nervous systems would have developed into an ability like hers.

She became able to leap the gap from beneath her skin to under the TV’s metal cabinet, and plug directly into its electronic circuitry. At first the sensations were meaningless to her —random flashes inside her skull of the colors she remembered as a baby, noises and voices crackling and fading in and out unintelligibly. She squatted closer to the set for months on end, until, like learning to see, she mastered this new sense. It didn’t take long, actually—there was nothing to distract her.

At last she had it: she received the TV’s signals directly, without it being necessary for them to be translated into light and sound waves, which were lost to her anyway. She watched the families, and Mox. This was her existence, clamping herself tight to the side of the TV, sucking these electronic portions of life from it. She told me she remembered being a little girl like the ones in the TV families, but she believed she had died, and now she just floated in some uncomfortable limbo, looking back at the world in this way.

Gradually, as she absorbed more and more from the TV, she reasoned out the truth. The TV families were less alive than she;

the memory of the sight of the TV from the days past when she could still see was recalled; finally, she relived, silently screaming, the forgotten pains that she had sealed herself from. She knew, to some degree, where she was and what was going on, and that she was alone and unique—no one in the TV families used a set like this. She watched on, and discovered there was more to her talent than that.

She learned to trace the TV signal. All the way from the set through the underground cable back to Orange County. Right to the computer banks in Mox’s Broadcast Central where the video tapes are created, played, and stored. The entire electronic apparatus had become part of her nervous system. She could penetrate at will any section of the entire interconnected communications network that had Mox’s headquarters as its focus. The electronic extension of her ego raced through the computer’s memory banks, digesting nearly everything. In the medical data units she ran into the information concerning the other known IBM Syndromes. She realized her powers were already greater than anything she found recorded there. Bored as a child, she determined to see how far her abilities did reach.

Weeks later, she discovered that not only could she penetrate the network, she could to some degree control it. Starting with the TV she clung to in Rattown, she altered, distorted the signal appearing on that one screen. The phosphor-dot images would turn into the weird memories of her father that I saw later. She extended her power; for a brief period, a wave of distorted images hit all the sets in Orange County and L.A. as she reached right back into Broadcast Central and changed the signal from there. She gave up this little game, though; whenever she attempted it, something would pull her away from the TV—her mother, the old woman, instinctively sensing that her daughter was somehow responsible for the disturbing patterns on the screen. Also, she became aware that the network’s technicians were sending tracers throughout the system to catch their new glitch. Fearful of being discovered, she modified her actions. Only on rare occasions, when she could no longer resist, did she try it again, to the TV in the room or the entire system, and then only for a few seconds. That explains, I suppose, a few phenomena from back on the Interface. She confined herself mainly to exploring the system without creating any disturbances. She found out quite a lot that way.

When I was brought to the room, she was only faintly aware of my existence. On occasion she had brushed or fallen against the old woman, then me, and deduced from her limited tactile sense that there was another body in the room. Not that she cared—her life was in the TV. So it was until the incident I already told you of, when her mother threw her against the couch I lay on.

The electronic network connecting the flashglove’s sensors with my own nervous system is really only a simplified version of the network she had been playing with all that time. When she came into close enough proximity, her hand actually grasping the surface of the glove, the bridge was gapped, just as between her and the TV set. The glove was, in effect, an electronic interface between our two nervous systems. The signals from the glove’s sensors were designed so that my brain would perceive them as analogs of my original senses, particularly sight and hearing. The first thing she mastered was an “audible” signal—that was the voice I heard. A few minutes later she was giving me “visuals” through the glove.

I was the first live person her mind had been in contact with since her father, the people represented on the TV signal being separated from her by the computer banks and video equipment. She knew who I was, having gone through the memory bank data on me. She was more curious than afraid; in fact, after a while I thought I could detect some of the inevitable worship, though whether she was impressed by what she had learned of me from the banks, or was imitating what she had learned of my fans, I couldn’t tell.

She gave up the TV, and “talked” incessantly with me. “Visually,” she appeared as a young girl, not the filthy and skinny creature sitting beside me, clutching the flashglove, but the one she might have become ... otherwise. She drew the image, I suppose, from what she had seen on TV. I didn’t even notice, for a long while, that time had begun flowing normally around me. I told her whatever she wanted to know about me and the rest of the world that she hadn’t been able to discover herself. She was able to hold on to my metal hand and reach across the room to touch the side of the TV—it must’ve been a sight, a blind girl stretching her arms between a catatonic on a couch and a TV set, like a bizarre seance. She led me through the TV, the cables, and back to the computer banks and Broadcast Central in Orange County: what she had told me of her discoveries I was able to see for myself. And there was something there, concealed deep within the network, that was very interesting indeed; but it took a lot of thinking, as I lay immobile on the couch back here in Rattown, being fed and wiped by the old woman, and “talking” silently with Melia, before I realized what it meant to me.

I stood up from the couch, finally. My muscles ached and screamed at the sudden exertion; the old woman saw me and fell into a fit on the floor, raving and scrabbling. I stumbled over to where Melia was kneeling beside the TV and placed her hand on the flashglove. I kissed her goodbye on the forehead, both there in the dark room and with our “visual” images in the glove, and told her I’d be back soon. When I walked out of the room I could hear, somewhere very faintly, the cry of a very small child falling submerged into a spot of blood as big as L. A.

“So how did you find me?” Limmit stared out the room’s grime-encrusted window, his back turned to Adder sitting on the edge of the bed.

“When I left the old woman’s,” said Adder, “the first person I ran into out on the street, the only one, was Droit. It was either just luck or he was telling me the truth when he said that a KCID broadcast had told him to wait for me there. He told me where you were traveling, and where you probably would come back to. I’ve been waiting here for you since over a day ago.”

“Why?” Limmit faced him. He looks harder, he thought again, more knife’s-edge sharp than back on the Interface— honed for some deadly purpose. The flashglove lay across his lap, purring muted electronic sounds. “What do you need me for?”

Adder’s gaze burned expressionless at him. “Because,” he said quietly, “I owe Mox a great deal. I want your help in paying it back.”

“Shit,” said Limmit disgustedly. Adder’s eyes widened slightly, sensing some unexpected phenomenon. “I suppose I’m to lead a suicide squad of the remaining amputee hookers armed with your old scalpels against Mox’s headquarters in Orange County. You’ll make me president of your fan club if I come back.”

The flashglove’s metal fingers curled slightly, Adder saying nothing.

“I don’t know,” said Limmit, kneading his forehead with one hand. “I’m tired, I guess. I wouldn’t be of much use to you, whatever your plan is. I left a lot behind, between the Visitor and here. Not much is left—it was a long trip.”

“So?” Adder shrugged. “I’m not interested in any of that. Everybody’s got a horror story to tell.”

“Then just fuck you, Adder.” Limmit felt his face burn with some emotion close to rage. “I was wrong—it was better with you dead.” It’s true, he thought, trembling as the sudden realization pierced him. “You’re better as a remembered fantasy than a live reality. Why should I let myself be sucked into your stupid vendetta? Why should anyone?”

“I would imagine,” said Adder, “that anyone who does get involved with me has his own reasons.”

Limmit looked straight into the narrow face for a long, silent time. Their eyes locked without moving away. Limmit nodded slowly, then broke away his gaze.

“All right,” he said, sinking onto the bed beside Adder. “I’ll help you.” He stared down at the section of floor framed by his own boots. “Did you ever read any old books, any science fiction?” He shook his head thoughtfully, feeling a determined calm slowly filling his interior. “No, don’t bother. Don’t answer.”

“We’d better get going. There’s not much time.”

“Wait,” said Limmit, looking up. “One condition. When it’s all over, then that’s it. Even if you get your whole little circus on the Interface back, I don’t want the job you offered me, no part of it. I don’t want anything from you—I’ll find my own way out of L.A.”

Adder nodded impatiently. “Fine. Whatever you want. Let’s go, then.”

“Just a minute,” said Limmit, rising and heading for the door opening onto the bathroom. “Funny—all that time in the sewers, and I could hardly take a crap to save my life the whole time.” He pushed the door open.

Great splotches of drying blood splashed in static patterns across the floor and walls; small spots like red stars spattered across the ceiling. A corpse, twisted and unrecognizable, stiffening in the contortions of violent death, lay half out of the bathtub and across the tiny room, one hand cradled in the curved trap of the sink’s drainpipe, his head, or what remained of it, partially submerged in the toilet bowl. The still water had turned into translucent rose.

“What the fuck’s this?” shouted Limmit, standing transfixed in the doorway.

“Beats me,” came Adder’s voice from behind him. “He was hiding here when I came to wait for you. Jumped me, so he got it.” He paused, then laughed, short and cold. “It was a sight— I must admit that this flashglove is everything I heard it was.” “My assassin,” said Limmit, staring at the fragmented body. “That’s who it is.”

“What? Oh, yeah, Droit told me about it. Well, if everything works out, there won’t be another one.”

Limmit reached in and pulled the shattered head out of the bowl, dripping. Little clumps of brain tissue, like soft pink cauliflower, and one perfect staring eye floated in the red water. Ah, fuck it, he thought, and squatted on the toilet seat after dropping his pants down to his knees. Living in L.A. sure makes you callous.

Feeling his colon functioning unabashed, Limmit called out to Adder in the other room, “So what’s first on the agenda? What’s this big revenge plan of yours consist of, anyway?” Adder appeared in the bathroom doorway. “You can’t say you don’t owe me something, eh,” he said, kicking one of the dead gunman’s outstretched legs. “The plan? All in good time. There’s some other business to take care of first.”

“Like what?”

“We’ve got to pay a little visit to the Adder Siege Front headquarters.”

Limmit felt his sphincter involuntarily narrow a fraction in diameter. Mary’11 be there, he thought. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to see her again. “What for?” he asked, standing up and flushing the toilet.

“Droit was a little short of cash when I talked to him. One of his sources of income in Orange County just dried up, he said. I didn’t have any money to give him, so I’m afraid the news of my being alive and walking again went for sale to other interested parties.”

“Why should that matter?”

The thin cut of Adder’s smile flickered into existence briefly. “The notion that I was preferable dead,” he said, “may be more popular than you think.”

She looks older, thought Limmit. More ... pared down, he realized, his viscera clenching. Time is stripping us, like Adder, to our essentials. No message passed from Mary’s brooding eyes to his, except a first spark of surprise and recognition.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Eddie Azusa, breaking the pall-like silence that had fallen when Adder and Limmit had entered the room. “But we didn’t really know whether to expect you here or not.”

Adder drew an empty chair away from the other side of the table and sat down facing the committee. “I thought,” he said calmly, “you might enjoy a surprise visit more than I would.” Azusa’s face trembled and broke into a nervous grin. “So? You expected us to have some special reaction to the news of your being ... back, so to speak?”

“Can the shit,” said Adder irritably, waving him off. “Save it for the Rattowners you’ve sucked into this phony siege of yours.”

Limmit pulled out the chair at Adder’s left and sat down opposite Mary. Her eyes did not meet his.

“Watch it, Adder,” said one of the other figures. “We’re in a tight situation here, and there’s no room for bad elements, if you get my meaning.”

“Tight situation, my ass,” said Adder. “You know this siege is a load of crap. There’s no threat from Mox, his MFers, or anyone else to this pile of shit. All that your spaced-out little troops sitting on the building tops have to shoot at is each other.”

“You must like to think,” said Azusa, not smiling, “that you’re pretty well informed.”

Adder grinned. “I get my info from the same place you do.” “But you’re missing the point,” said Mary fervently, leaning across the table. “Sure, so the siege is a shuck—so what? The thing is, we’ve extended something resembling revolutionary thought to hundreds of people who up to this point had nothing on their minds but kainine, fucking, and—you, Adder. It’s not so much in itself, but big enough when you consider how close we are to the single largest source of revolutionary potential left in America, Orange County.”

“Orange County?” snorted Limmit. Every face turned toward him in surprise—none had expected him to speak. “Jesus Christ, go raise your armies out of fuckin’ graveyards,” he continued. “You’ve a better chance, if you can tell the difference to begin with.”

“That’s not the point, either,” said Adder. “Look, I know more about what’s going on than you think. I know that you and your friends here are more interested in keeping this bullshit siege just the way it is, rather than getting to the improbable point where you’d actually have to shit or get off the pot. It’s a lot more fun just to play revolutionary generalissimo, and rake off a little on the side, too. And maybe you’ll be able to keep the Rattowners’ interest up for the rest of your life and more, given my attraction as your dead martyr. Oh yes, I know about that. No matter: it’s your problem, I’m not interested in it. You see, the point really is that I’ve got my own plans, and it’s your ass to ride out your personal shit-storms the best way you can.” “You came here to tell us that?” asked Azusa, his face grown rigid and mottled with sullen anger. “Kinda foolish of you to let us know.”

“Just a little affectation of mine.” Another menacing grin. “I’ve always liked telling people just what I was about to do. I don’t want you to even interfere for a second, trying to stop me.” He laid the flashglove on the table like an ominously humming torpedo clenched into a fist. “Believe me, nothing can. ” Before any of the committee members could speak, a woman’s voice came from the doorway behind Limmit and Adder. “Nothing?” the voice called softly. A black-robed figure entered the circle of light enclosing the table.

That must be her, thought Limmit, the one they call Mother Endure. What an effect with the robes, he attempted to think cynically. Dredged up from some abandoned costume shop, no doubt. So calculated, yet ... somehow, it’s for real. He saw Adder’s eyes flare wide at the sight of the cowled face, then tighten down into slits again.

The woman stood beside Adder and looked down into his face. “What about those in Rattown,” she said, almost serenely, “who aren’t in the siege? What about the less fortunate, the downers?”

“All right,” rasped Adder harshly. “What about them?” “They’re safe here. They will be—until your presence here is known to Mox. He crushed the Interface and everyone on it just to get you; we all know that. He’ll do the same to these slums, once he knows you’re here. A lot of innocent people, even more harmless than the others, will die merely because you wouldn’t abandon your lust for revenge against Mox.” The reedlike voice lapsed into composed silence.

“How do you know that’s what my plans are?”

Her placid manner faltered for a second. “What else would they be?”

“Hey,” broke in Azusa agitatedly. “That’s a whole different angle on this that we hadn’t thought of. We don’t want any shit like that coming down on us. Uh, that is, it would, I mean, wipe out the little progress we’ve made here in L.A. It’s premature —we’re not ready for it.” He glanced around nervously at the other members for confirmation.

Mother Endure ignored him. “Don’t you owe anything,” she said quietly to Adder, “to anyone else? Or even just to me?” Limmit watched as Adder’s face hardened into a rigid, cutting mask. “Yeah,” he said slowly, his voice dropping lower and more ominous than Limmit had ever heard it, frightening in its intensity. “I owe you a whole lot, too.”

“Aw, forget it, Mother,” said Azusa disgustedly. “I mean, in the revolutionary cadres we’ve always appreciated the way you take care of the community’s, uh, less capable members, but there’s nothing you can do with this schmuck. We’ll have to take care of him in our own way.”

“Just try it, motherfucker,” said Adder, whirling around in his chair to face the shorter man. The flashglove flexed and whined.

“You d-don’t dare kill me,” babbled Azusa near-hysterically. “I’ve got enough followers of my own now to shoot you from out of your reach.” He regained his composure to the point of a feeble sneer. “And even if you hide where a sniper can’t get to you, we’ve got sneak-killers, too. You’ve got to sleep sometime, even with that thing on your stump.”

“That’s all right,” said Adder. “I wasn’t planning on doing any sleeping for a while. I’ve had a long rest.”

“Let’s split,” said Azusa, pushing his chair away from the table. “We’ve got work to do. Have fun, Adder. While you can.” The committee’s four men and Mary rose and started for the door.

Adder grabbed hold of Mother Endure’s thin wrist as she turned away. “Wait outside,” he said briskly to Limmit without looking at him, staring up instead at the face half-hidden in the cowl of the black robes.

When the others had all left the room, Adder said quietly to the woman, “It’s been a long time, Jing.”

“A long time,” she agreed, sitting down in the chair beside him. “It’s no use calling me by that name—everything has changed.”

“Has it.”

She turned her face away. “Don’t. Don’t try to. Not after everything that’s happened. Everything ... I became. You don’t know who I am now.”

“I thought I knew once,” said Adder, bitterness tinging his voice. “But that was before Mox wheeled you into my office, doped out., and told me you were his wife.”

She said nothing, her cowled head inclining over the table. “Mox’s wife,” mused Adder. “Quite a surprise. I’ve never yet figured out—and I used to spend a lot of time thinking about it —why you loved both him and me, or why we both loved you.” “I know why,” her whisper quavered. “I knew from the beginning. Because I was the perfect receptacle for each of you to fill up with your own lives. So empty. For me it was simply because no one else could even start to fill the vacuum inside me.”

“I hope you didn’t wonder, then,” said Adder, “why I did it.”

“How could you have?” she cried, turning a tear-streaked face on him. “Can you imagine what it was like to come up out of that haze, Mox straddling, bending over me, and then that monster you turned my cunt into emerging like a shark from between my legs. Christ, I can still see the blood, those dead-white teeth. That was the first and last time I ever saw them emerging from their sheaths, but I still feel them there inside my groin.”

“I can change that now,” said Adder softly. “I didn’t do it to you—it was Mox I was after.”

“No,” she said, biting her lower lip and shaking her head. “Nothing, not you or your scalpel, is ever going to touch me there again.”

“You’ll just go on, I suppose, here in Rattown, playing the Madonna of the Cripples.”

Her eyes flashed sudden anger. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been taking care of Mox’s and your victims for a long time now. Can’t you understand why I said what I did before? Can’t you accept any responsibility for anything that’s happened because of you? Mox told me himself that he slaughtered everyone on the Interface just to get you.”

“You’ve seen him?” Adder stiffened.

“No. I haven’t seen him for years. But we keep in touch. He still loves me, you know. Just as you do. He supplies me with food and medicine, and some clothing, for the ones I take care of. More than that: he’s wanted to wipe out Rattown for a long time now, just out of thoroughness. His mind works like that. But he hasn’t—I asked him not to, for love of me.”

“So that’s why you want me to give up my plans. You know that when I destroy him the handouts stop. How are you going to play the saintly benefactress then? They might, when they get hungry enough, even eat you. ”

“Oh, Ad, you stupid prick,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “Don’t you understand anything? You’re going to fail. Whatever the plan is, it’ll end in your death. I know both you and Mox. He’s already tricked you twice, beaten you. You won’t get him this time—you’ll die.”

“Twice? What do you mean?”

“He tricked you with the flashglove. His plan wasn’t to get you to commit a crime in buying it—he knew you could protect yourself against that easy enough. He’d been building up his MFers for years, waiting for the chance to go in and raid the Interface. But the others on the GPC exec board outvoted him, wouldn’t let him. After all, it was their playground, too, wasn’t it? And it was safe for them to let the Interface go on running; their computer analyses showed that your image wasn’t powerful enough to present a serious threat to the psychic stability of Orange County, even though they’ve been on a teetering balance over there for decades now—why do you think we get so many mental refugees over here? But you were tolerable; in fact, a good safety valve. Until, that is, Mox tricked you into buying the flashglove. That one factor, added to your psychopublic image, was enough for the computers to reevaluate you as a terminal threat to them. And then Mox had the proof that you bought it; that’s what the bug was planted for. The other board members abandoned their warped libidos in favor of their wallets, and gave the okay for the raid. And that’s what brought the shit down on the Interface.”

Adder stared at his metal forearm, shining like an accusation. “What was the other time that he tricked me?”

She hesitated, then spoke, her voice trembling. “He tricked you ... about me. Tricked you into doing what you did to me. He was able to control what you saw when you had him under the ADR; he was familiar with the stuff, somehow. Maybe he learned from Gass himself. Who knows? But he was able to make you think that castration was what he feared most, castration by the fanged snatch of the one he loved. It wasn’t his nightmare—it was his dream. He’s insane, a fanatic; that’s where his power comes from. You released him, in a way that satisfied his madness for a while, from all the ties of flesh he despised. He knew all along what was between my legs that night. Why else did he have his right-hand man waiting outside the door, like he had never done before? His cock was the last thing blocking the reconciliation of his mind with his subconscious drives. Without it, he was whole. On the side of death. And he tricked you into doing it for him.”

Adder sat motionless in the chair. A strange mixture of emotions had rapidly surged through his facial muscles while he had listened to Jing, but had now melted away, leaving only a blank mask. “Control,” he whispered.

“Control,” Jing echoed. “That’s right. He’s been in control all along. That’s why I asked you to give up. Out of fear for you, not Mox. Do you think I rescued you, bleeding in that alley, just so you could kill yourself on him?” Another tear plummeted down one cheek. “It could never be like it was before,” she said slowly. “But stay here with me. You could be a real doctor even. This could be your life—as it is mine. There are so many people you could be needed, wanted by.”

His eyes grew wider with her last words, then he burst into raging vehemence. “All my life,” he shouted, a drop of saliva flying, omenlike, onto her cowl, his rigid neck muscles causing his head to quiver, “I’ve wanted everyone in the whole world to want me, to need me, to come begging up to me, loving me, worshipping me! And I almost. Had it.” His voice grew lower and hollower, as if some final message were being dragged out. “And I wanted it, just so—just so that if I had it, somehow I could tell everyone at the same time, L.A., Orange County, the whole world, to go fuck themselves.”

He lapsed into silence, as if spent, then smiled grimly, his eyes lost in some interior vision. He shook his head. “No thanks,” he said finally. “I’m going to ram it through.” He got to his feet, looking down at her cowled head. “I’m better armed now—no illusions.”

Long after the door clicked shut behind him, she sat at the table, inert.

Mary was waiting for Limmit outside the meeting room. All right, he thought wearily. Lay it on me. Just till Adder’s done talking with that spook.

“You’re back,” she said calmly. Her eyes looked into him with their steady gaze.

“Since a couple of hours ago.”

“You look tired.”

Limmit kneaded the back of his neck. True enough, he thought. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll endure.”

“Without me. Without anybody. Except Dr. Adder.”

“Shit,” said Limmit. “Is that all you’ve got to tell me? I suppose you were expecting me to come back from the sewers clean and pure and dedicated to the revolution? I’m real fuckin’ sorry, then.”

She sighed and shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what I expected. Except for you to probably die down there, never make it back. I hoped though that you’d realize finally Adder was dead.”

“Except he wasn’t.” There was no satisfaction in the words. “He’s alive.”

“And you’re working for him again. The lucky fan who gets to be right up close to him. Do things for him. His little functionary.” Her face darkened with scorn. “How nice that he gave you your old job back. Just like on the Interface.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not that way now. I’m helping Adder with his plan against Mox—for my own reasons.” Echoing Adder’s words. “After that, it’s over between him and me.”

“Oh, E. Allen,” she said mournfully. “God, I wish I could believe that. But he’s sucked so many others dry, consumed them. It’ll be the same way with you. I can’t protect you forever.”

“Don’t, then,” he snapped, his own anger flaring. “Did I ever ask you to? Do you have to wait until I just tell you to fuck off, before I get any slack from you?” The emotion subsided, leaving him feeling more drained than before. “I’m sorry. It’s just that whatever this plan of Adder’s is, it’s important to me. I can’t even think about us until it’s over, one way or another.”

“Did you really think,” she said softly, “that I was only concerned about us?”

“Don’t tell me,” said Limmit exhaustedly. “The revolution.” “Yes, damn it. Sure, Azusa and the others who were in there are a bunch of phony chickenshits—so what? Can’t you see we’ve got a chance at last to really accomplish something? To do more than just wipe out one man like Mox? Isn’t there anything more important to you than your own fucked-up innards, something you’d sacrifice yourself for?”

“So that’s what’s important to you,” he said. “Fine. Go give your life to the ghost of Lenin; it’s okay with me. Christ, you talk about being sucked dry. At least my vampires are on this side of the grave.”

“Fuck you,” she said with a contemptuous gesture, “if you can’t tell any difference.” She turned and strode away, her boots striking hollow on the concrete floor.

I can’t tell, said Limmit to himself. Maybe you’re right—there is something wrong with me. I wish, he thought suddenly and fervently, that there was some way I could have told her to wait for me until this was all over. But this part seems finished anyway. He propped one foot up beside the door to the meeting room, waiting for Adder to emerge.

“I think before we go any further,” said Limmit, “you’d better let me in on your plan.”

Adder paused on the stairway’s second-floor landing. The two of them had been heading back to where the blind girl Melia was waiting. “You’ve got a point,” he said. “There’s not much longer to go, anyway. In an hour or so, the plan will be on its inexorable progress. So you’d better know now.”

Limmit watched in silence as Adder reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small black leatherette case, like a wallet. Adder zipped it open and spread it between his hands, displaying it to Limmit. In the landing’s thin light it was hard to make out the contents, but Limmit could see several small vials and a syringe. “What is it?” he asked.

“I didn’t go straight from here to where I waited for you,” said Adder. “I sneaked over onto the Interface—it’s not hard, no one’s guarding it or anything. I fetched this out of my old office. It’s the ADR.”

“What the hell good is that?” asked Limmit incredulously. Jesus, he thought, maybe Adder didn’t come out of all this in one piece.

“With this,” said Adder, stroking the vials with one finger, “I can get right into Mox’s own mind. As I did before. Only not to observe and find out, oh no. I can use it as a weapon, the way Lester Gass did sometimes—to crush an enemy. To reach right inside his innermost being and grapple with him on that great psychic/symbolic meeting ground.” A strange, fervent tone had crept into his voice.

“Nice trick,” said Limmit drily, “but you’re here in Rattown and Mox is there in Orange County. Forget that? Or were you planning a commando raid on his headquarters? Strap him down and shoot him and yourself full of this stuff, I suppose.” Composedly, Adder closed the case and replaced it in his pocket. “That’s hardly necessary,” he said, the fervidness temporarily dissipated. “You see, I’ve got a direct line from here straight into Mox’s skull. That’s what Melia discovered in the computer banks, what she showed me. Mox isn't alive; he’s on tape there in the computers. After the Interface raid, he had his entire mentality recorded that way. There was no risk—nothing new; they’ve been doing that kind of thing for years.”

“I know,” said Limmit dazedly. Like Lars Kyrie, he thought. “Only Mox had special autonomous personality circuits built in. The others on tape are without control—they’re just turned on or off whenever they’re wanted. Mox, however, still functions just as when he was alive; only a few members of the GPC exec board know that he’s really only several hundred miles of magnetic oxide inside their computers. The broadcast image everyone sees on their TVs is only computer graphics, a completely convincing animated cartoon.”

“Yes,” said Limmit faintly. “I’ve heard of that.”

Adder observed critically the other’s paling face for a moment, then continued. “Dosed with the ADR, Melia and I can go back up the TV cable and plug into Mox’s mind. Both of us together will be enough to pull Mox into the visions. Since he’s been under it before, the mental state the drug produces is still there, programmed into his unconscious. Melia will serve as the pipeline and key into him for me; once there, I’ll take on Mox while she stands aside.”

“But then what do you need me for?”

“While Melia and I are under the ADR, we’ll both be helpless, unconscious here in Rattown. You’re to help us find a safe hiding place and be ready to protect us from the Siege Front’s triggermen. For several hours.”

“And that’s all?”

“Don’t worry,” said Adder with a tight smile. He started up the stairs again. “It’ll be enough. Perhaps more than you’d care for.”

The room’s oppressive miasma of filth seemed to have dissipated slightly since the last time Limmit had been in it. The old woman as well was nowhere to be seen. Limmit had half expected to find her corpse on the floor, growing furry with dust.

“The old woman must’ve split after I left,” said Adder, as if hearing Limmit’s thoughts. “That must be how she, Mother Endure, knew I was walking again. The old bag ran and told her.”

The only occupant of the room was the young girl, sitting patiently on the couch, her hands folded demurely in her lap. She was unaware of the two men’s entrance. To Limmit she looked to be about fifteen or sixteen; he noticed that she had been washed, degrimed from when he had seen her before, and her thin brown hair combed. Her skin had the slightly pink look of one who has recently had old layers of dirt removed at last. Adder must have done that, thought Limmit. Washed her— she’s almost pretty now. And not said anything about doing it.

Adder walked over to the couch, picked up her right hand, and laid it on the flashglove. Her face still looked straight into the vacant middle of the room, but lifted into a smile. Her closed eyelids made her appear as if she were dreaming; the expression hit Limmit like a blow. She loves him, he thought with sudden certainty. And why not? First man she’s talked to in a dozen years.

He glanced up at Adder’s face. There was no corresponding trace of emotion. He doesn’t even know, thought Limmit. He felt a wave of pity for the young girl. The cold son-of-a-bitch— he washed her like he was sterilizing a scalpel.

“She’s seeing you through my eyes,” said Adder. “She already knows who you are. I’ve told her all about the plan. Say hello to her—she’ll hear you, through me.”

Limmit looked straight into Adder’s warmthless eyes. “Hello, Melia.”

After a second, Adder spoke. “She says hello. I’m afraid she’s not very interested in you, for some reason. Perhaps being isolated all this time damaged her sociability.”

You schmuck, thought Limmit. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Right,” said Adder, not noticing Limmit’s tone. “We don’t have much time. Especially not here—we’ve got to find a hiding place fast.”

“I know one that might do,” said Limmit. “I hid out there for a day after the Raid, until Mary Gorgon found me and took me to that other room. Just inside the slums. A big empty warehouse or something, but with a lot of smaller offices and rooms above.”

“Sounds all right. There’s several rifles, with stocks of ammunition, in the other room here. They must have belonged to Melia’s father—they’re oiled and sealed in hermetic cases like only a psychotic would do. Take what you can; use the best.” Adder pulled the girl up from the couch.

Through the door Adder had indicated Limmit found the weapons, standing upright in dusty, glass-doored containers like coffins. He pulled one open, hearing the short rush of air into the vacuum, and extracted a rifle identical to the one he had used as a kid back in the army. Just like old times, he thought, weighing its remembered heft in his hands. I’m still traveling in circles. He stored several boxes of rounds in his jacket and headed out the door.

“Perfect,” pronounced Dr. Adder, surveying the empty warehouse. A group of office-cubicles looked out over the warehouse’s floor from a height of twelve feet or more, connected by a common walkway with guardrail. Anyone entering the building from the ground would have to cross the entire floor over to the stairs on one side; the only entrance from the office elevation or above opened onto the far end of the connecting corridor. Both aspects in full view of someone standing guard outside the cubicle into which he and Limmit had dragged the two cots. A clear shot, said Adder to himself. I almost wish I’d be here to take advantage of it.

A muted babble of unfamiliar voices jerked him around from his position at the guardrail. Inside the cubicle, Limmit had finished connecting to the cable outlet one of the small portable televisions they had found, and switched it on. One of the TV families was giggling through its miniaturized life-cycle on the screen. Adder relaxed, seeing the tiny phosphor-dot figures. Shitfire, he thought. Take hold. Nothing to lose sphincter control over yet—not even what Jing/Mother Endure told you.

He walked into the cubicle and picked up one of Melia’s hands, placing it on the flashglove. Her face broke into its dreaming smile again as the thin fingers curved around the metal surface. Through the weapon’s electronic network he “saw” the feminine image she projected. Ready? he asked the image.

Yes, she replied, the image blushing like a young bride. If you are.

“Here,” said Adder, tossing a roll of white surgical tape to Limmit. He gently pushed Melia down supine on the cot.

Limmit wordlessly brought the small television over and placed it on the floor beside her. With the surgical tape he bound her hand and forearm to the set, looping the tape completely around the set and across the figures on the screen. Adder lay down on the other cot, placed alongside Melia; Limmit quickly and efficiently took her free hand and placed it on the flashglove’s cool surface, then bound it similarly with the tape. “There,” he said, straightening up from the task. “Off into the wild gray yonder.”

“Not yet,” said Adder from his horizontal position. He pulled out the black case and extended it to Limmit. “Know how to use a hypodermic?”

“Sure,” said Limmit, zipping it open. “Extensive practice on chickens, as a matter of fact.” He extracted the syringe and plunged it through the sealing membrane of one of the vials. He pulled up the plunger until the colorless liquid reached the indicated point. More than enough here, he thought. All the vials are full—could send a whole fuckin’ army into Mox’s electronic head. But not me, he decided. Not on your life.

“Her first,” said Adder. “Then me.”

Limmit located the vein in the crook of the girl’s arm strapped to the flashglove. He observed silently the young girl’s rapt, eyes-closed expression, watching for a reaction as he depressed the plunger. There was none. He refilled the syringe and repeated the sequence into Adder’s flesh arm.

“Should only be a few minutes,” said Adder. Already it seemed as if whatever animated him from inside was speaking from a slowly increasing distance, the voice fading hollow. The eyes glanced over at the television; through the strips of tape he could see that whatever program had been on had just ended, the credits crawling by on the screen. “Hey,” said Adder, grinning faintly miles away. “Just thought of something. It’s time for Mox’s nightly broadcast. Melia showed me that there’s no outside control over him on that, or the graphics. If he doesn’t switch his broadcast off himself, this whole thing might show up on all the TVs tied into the cable, everywhere ...” The voice faded away, then surged back with a visible effort from him. “What a comeback. You won’t want to miss it—” The eyes closed.

Right, Limmit said sourly to himself. Your TV debut, back from the grave. He picked up the other portable television and carried it out, trailing the cord plugged into the cable outlet, to the chair he had positioned by the guardrail. He suddenly noticed how full his bladder was—the canned juices and fruit they had found here and made a meal of had worked their way through his kidneys already. Just nervous, he decided. I’d better take a piss before I get any more so.

He stood up and looked around. I’ve never yet, he thought, found a urinal in L.A. that really works. Probably why the streets smell like that. Screw it, he decided, stepping over to the guardrail and unzipping his fly.

What a hero, he thought contemptuously as the first drops emerged. Good for nothing except standing guard over L.A.’s leading mutilation artist, zonked unconscious on his eponymous drug in his climactic bid for glory. Watching for enemies who aren’t even going to come looking, most likely. I should have attacked Mox’s headquarters myself when I was in Orange County, with my own piddly knife—better for my self-esteem than this, at least. Ah, Limmit, you cowardly prick, he mused bitterly, staring into the distance as the golden stream arced downward into the semidarkness.

“Hey, you fuckhead!” screamed an outraged voice from the floor. “What’s the big idea, pissing all over me?”

His flow shut off in alarm; Limmit grabbed the rail and peered down. Below, one of Rattown’s crazies looked up from beneath his dripping hair, his mouth dropping open as if recognizing Limmit from a description. He stood transfixed for a moment, then scrabbled for a small, antennaed box clipped to his belt.

Walkie-talkies, thought Limmit, then absurdly: Christ, they’re well organized. Move! something screamed inside him, and he snatched up the rifle propped against the chair. It was still unloaded yet; he pulled out a clip from his jacket and fumbled it sideways, upside down, and backward before at last jamming it into the rifle’s feed connection.

The crazy below had the walkie-talkie already raised to his face before Limmit’s first shot tore it and most of the fingers of one hand away. The Rattowner collapsed to his knees, moaning in pain and shock.

Limmit slung the rifle over his shoulder by its strap, climbed over the guardrail, and hung from the edge of the walkway before dropping down to the floor. He landed painfully on his feet, then his ass. He unslung the rifle and scrambled over to the wounded man. He placed the rifle’s muzzle beneath his chin. “All right,” Limmit said crisply, jabbing him in the throat, “who knows you’re here? Tell me and I won’t blow your head off.” “Nobody,” gasped the Rattowner. His eyes rolled, dazed. “We already searched this area. I just snuck away to do myself up, honest.” His undamaged hand opened, displaying several small capsules. Their red coloring had smeared off in the sweat of his hands.

“Fine,” said Limmit, withdrawing the gun and swinging it to one side. “Then nobody’s going to come looking for you here.” He reached into his boot and, before the other could move, brought his blade up, into, and across his throat, the terrified gasp of breath bubbling through a flow of blood. No need risking another shot anyway, thought Limmit. They’ll probably think the first one was just some of their own partying on a rooftop. I hope.

Mounting the stairs back up to the walkway, the rifle cradled in one hand, Limmit listened to the body’s last thrashes and gurgles, feeling the adrenaline high drain from his body. You’re so fuckin’ ruthless, he said to himself, satisfied. Sticking that poor dumb asshole like that. Reminds me of Spec. 4 Jetsam.

Inside the cubicle, Adder opened his eyes slowly and looked up at him. “What was . . he whispered, the voice light-years away, “... the noise ...” The eyes closed again.

Doesn’t miss a thing, thought Limmit, impressed. “Pleasant dreams, Doctor,” he said, and exited from the room and its two consciousless bodies.

He sat himself down in the chair on the walkway and propped the rifle against the guardrail. Now I can watch the show with my mind at ease, he thought, wiping a spot of blood from his hand. That pays him back for getting the assassin. He angled the television between his feet up at himself, switched it on, and leaned back in the chair. All this futzing around, he thought, in L.A. and Orange County even and I’ve never yet been able to catch one of Mox’s broadcasts. At last I’m going to see what His Gray Eminence looks like. His farewell performance, too: last chance. You can do it, Adder—go, team, go. I must be going delirious, he thought as the television image swam into focus.

The broadcast had already begun. For some reason the set had no sound. Even without it, Limmit stared, suddenly transfixed, at the ancient yet immensely powerful-looking white-haired visage, precisely mouthing his words. Limmit rose trembling to his feet, his heart slamming frantically within him. He staggered against the guardrail, gripping it in both white-knuckled hands. Convulsed with fear, he vomited with great shuddering heaves, spattering the corpse below, the salt taste of the sweat drenching his face seeping into the corners of his mouth and mixing with the vomitus’ acridity.

He turned around weakly and faced the television again. It was the first time in his life he had ever been this afraid—afraid of more than death. “It’s him,” he whispered, his voice a panicky vibrato. A rapid interior flash of a face in a helicopter looking down at him, a child. He whirled around and yelled at the entrance of the cubicle where Adder and the girl lay. “It’s him—it’s Gass! My father!”

He raced into the cubicle and knelt beside Adder’s cot. “You don’t have a chance,” he babbled into the unconscious face. “He invented this stuff—Gass did, my father! Can’t you see—” He pulled himself away with a jerk. Oh Jesus shit, he thought, shaking. Maintain.

He stared at the television beside Melia, the strips of tape running across Mox/Gass’ face. My father, he thought, the high peaks of panic subsiding, leaving the sharp undercurrent of fear. That only I could have recognized. No wonder he wanted to kill me. Limmit hoped it was not too late to stop Adder.

He pulled his blade out of his boot and bent down to the surgical tape binding Melia’s hand to the flashglove. As soon as the point was inserted beneath the edge of the tape, the flashglove emitted a high-pitched whine, the metal fingers curling into a fist. Limmit saw the small red dots of the sensors, like points of blood, glowing. He withdrew the knife and placed it against the tape holding Melia’s other hand against the television by her side. The glove whined again, lifting slightly off the cot. There was the same response when Limmit stepped across to the other side of the cubicle, to the cable outlet. Some part of Adder’s subconscious, it dawned on Limmit, must have felt I’d chicken out. An electronic watchdog—it’ll kill me if I try to stop him. On the television screen a ripple of distortion passed over his father’s face like a wave of heat. Adder and Melia had already penetrated that far.

He stared at the blood-red dots of the sensors, trying to order his chaotic thoughts. Maybe, he thought in near-hysterical despair, I could find a phone and call the station. Long distance to Orange County—would you mind telling the two poltergeists in your circuits that the beloved John Mox is really the infamous Lester Gass?

He shook off the lunatic thoughts: realizing there was only one way. He bent down and picked up the leatherette case containing the ADR from where he had dropped it before.

After he had bound one arm to the limp flesh arm of Adder, he took the filled hypodermic and injected its contents into the crook of his elbow. He lay down on the floor beside the cot, the image of the three connected bodies reminding him absurdly of a chorus line. Feeling the cubicle slowly begin to fade away from him, he thought, Either the flashglove will set itself off anyway and kill me, or Azusa’s Rattowners will come back and find us here unconscious and shoot us all. Or the likeliest: my father will crush us all like gnats inside his skull, leaving these three empty husks to rot in an abandoned warehouse in the slums. My warning will be too late, he realized dismally. For Adder. Or any of us.

“How come you never got your side panel replaced?”

Edgar Endpoint one-handed the car into another lane, cruising slowly through the early evening traffic. He shrugged without looking at his companion seated beside him. “Aw, too much hassle,” Edgar said. “All the parts houses know me—they might have turned me in to my father.” He accelerated in a sudden spurt, then slowed, moving to the rhythm of the other cars. “Besides,” he said softly, “who cares?”

His friend nodded slowly, absorbing this information. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s about how I feel nowadays.” He reached into his jacket and drew out a sheaf of dirty, creased papers. “I tried to keep these out of the light, hoping they’d last longer. But they faded anyway.” He threw them down on the console between the bucket seats, where they fluttered limply, the breeze not enough to lift them.

Edgar took his eyes from the traffic ahead and looked at the sheets. He recognized them as one of his Adder-paks, now wilted and completely blank. The sight depressed him beyond endurance.

After he had left his friend off at his residential complex, Edgar sat brooding in the motionless vehicle. Maybe I shouldn’t have told them all, he thought. But they would have found out anyway. And it was a weight—like carrying his corpse around on my back. The last thing keeping us alive in this mortuary world. Mox’s video-men can come film my life now—I Was a Teenage Corpse. He sighed and started the car up.

He left it in his old parking space beneath Casa del Solituda, and took the elevator up to his family’s conapt. His key still worked. The old fart, he thought, didn’t even change the lock. He probably knew I’d be back—after he found out what everyone else’s kids were talking about. About Adder.... Yes, Dad, I’m ready to go get my lobotomy now. I’ll be right out of the bathroom—soon as I’m done with this razor blade.

Searching the rooms, he found the conapt empty except for his mother in her usual coma in the bedroom. He yelled at her horizontal figure, getting no response. He contemplated bouncing the alarm clock ofiF her forehead, but decided finally that he preferred her this way. Peeking in his own bedroom, he saw that nothing had been changed.

Wonder where my father is, he thought as he sat down in the living area before the television. Probably out kidnapping more runaways for the SPS. He switched the set on, settling back in the upholstered chair as the familiar gray face of John Mox faded in. All I need, he thought grimly. Maybe I’ll appreciate it now. With a little help. From a cut-glass candy dish on the coffee table he picked out several of his mother’s pink barbiturate-analog capsules and downed them.

On the screen, Mox blathered on. A ripple like heat waves or some viscous liquid over the screen appeared. Never saw that before, thought Edgar, as the fog started to roll in. Technical difficulties, blah blah. Maybe it’s the ghost of Dr. Adder come back to haunt you, John Mox, he announced melodramatically inside himself. We should be so lucky. It’ll go away in a second.

It didn’t.

“Sieges come and go, but whores remain. Right, Leslie?”

“That’s why I didn’t go into the siege business, Mr. Endpoint.” You fat, intoxicated asshole from Orange County.

The three men stopped in the dimly lit hallway, outside a door familiar to two of them.

“The usual, Leslie?” asked Endpoint, his voice as sloppy as his rumpled hair and clothes.

“That’s right,” said the young pimp coolly, extending a limpid palm. Endpoint fumbled bills onto it from his wallet. The pimp pushed the shabby door open for the two straights, then disappeared graciously down the hallway.

“Wait’ll you see her,” chortled Endpoint, dragging his staggering companion into the room. It was dark except for a soft blue-gray glow from a rectangular area in the ceiling over the bed. “These long trippers are somethin’ else,” continued Endpoint, not noticing his friend sinking, slack-faced, into one corner. “I use ta think double amputees were my thing—loved the way you could roll their little legless asses any way ya wanted. But now it really gets my rocks off to see these chicks so absorbed in their vizh-ee-unz while I’m reamin’ the shit out of ’em. It’s like they’re—not even there! Dead or somethin’. This one’s the best.” He waved an erratic hand at the motionless, naked figure on the bed. “Nuts about TV—sees things, I guess. Haw! Leslie even had a TV placed in the ceiling”—he gestured up at it—“so’s she could watch and fuck at the same time. Wow.” Swaying slightly and sweating, he contemplated the angle-distorted face of Mox in the overhead television. The screen was reflected as two gray dots in the unmoving eyes of the girl on the bed. He reeled around, nearly falling over in the process. “Wan’ first crack at her, Art?” he asked, then saw his companion crouched unconscious in the corner.

“Mmm,” mused Endpoint. “It appears you’re a smedge too coshed for this right now. ‘S all right—got all night.” He loosened his pants, dropping them into a puddle at his feet.

The girl’s eyes flicked into his face briefly as he pressed his weight onto her. “Daddy!” she whispered, her voice trailing off as her eyes wandered back to the screen, visible over Endpoint’s sweaty shoulder.

“Dream on, kid,” he grunted. “You’re no kid of mine, dead bitch.”

Above his back, a liquid shimmering passed over Mox’s face on the screen.

He was walking down the Interface, passing through the swirling crowds of pimps and whores, straights and hustlers, like a silent knife through flesh. I belong here, thought Limmit with satisfaction, moving with the flow. Suddenly, he stopped in his place on the sidewalk; the strangely yielding crowd parted and flowed past, unnoticing, on all sides. Wait, he thought, remembered: the Interface is over—this is the ADR. Someplace out of Mox and Adder’s minds. Got to find Dr. Adder. But how? He grabbed someone, a pimp passing by one side, halting him. Christ, thought Limmit in dismay, peering into the blank, zombielike face. This guy’s dead. He released the figure and whirled around, facing the others walking toward him on the sidewalk. They’re all dead, he thought. He noticed suddenly how silent it was: the constant shrieking babble he remembered from his first nights in L.A. was absent. Alarmed, he pushed his way through the walking figures to the curb. He stopped short at its edge, sick again with fear.

The street was filled with the corpses from the Raid. But not dead. Their blood-soaked and shattered bodies writhed in a shallow river, filled with a repellent white substance. Pus, thought Limmit in nauseated horror. Their faces, or the remains of them, held the same blank expressions as the figures on the sidewalk. The corpses nearest the curb would reach up and attempt to snare the ankles of the walkers; if successful, more dead hands would reach out for the tripped figure and pull it into the street, where the thick white fluid seemingly transformed the figure into one of its numbers, reaching out in turn for others on the sidewalk. After a moment, Limmit saw also that some of the slowly churning corpses would pull themselves out of the street, lifting themselves out onto the curb. There the pus and blood melted off, the body became whole, and the figure rose and walked on, as if nothing had preceded or interrupted his zombielike progression. The numbers of those leaving and entering the street’s mire of dead bodies seemed equal; a constant cycle in and out of the corpse world’s tributary.

Limmit looked down suddenly at his feet. A pair of red-spotted hands had encircled one ankle. A girl’s face, missing the lower jaw so that the throat cavity gaped open at him like an enormous, misshapen mouth, stared up at him, dead eyes registering nothing. More hands reached up from the white fluid for him. In revulsed panic, his heart thudding wildly, he kicked free and staggered back into the center of the sidewalk. The corpse hands snared another figure, toppling it, then pulling it headfirst into the street.

There was nothing left inside Limmit to vomit, so he doubled over in dry spastic heaves. He stood up again, dizzied. I’ve got to find Adder, his mind repeated obsessively. He’s somewhere, behind all this. But how can I find him?

From nowhere a thought struck him. Jostled on all sides by the figures on the sidewalk, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out the small yellow plastic radio Droit had given him. His hands trembling, he switched it on and spun the dial. An impassioned tenor voice burst out into the pseudo-interface’s oppressive silence. Not that, thought Limmit, shaking the radio in frustration. He felt like he was going to burst into tears. Abruptly, the music ended.

“Friends,” said the smooth, humane voice of KCID, “I know a lot of my listeners will get a chuckle out of this one. How many of you out there know a certain E. Allen Limmit? How many of you are him? Well,” he went on, clucking like a mother hen, “I want to tell you that it takes a certain kind of dumb to stand on the sidewalk of L.A.’s main drag and not be able to find Dr. Adder. Am I right, folks? And after he already found him once before, not too long ago. Ah well, I suppose it takes all kinds. Now, how about Wunderlich doing the first movement of Das Lied von der Erde? Ein Aff ist’s, heh heh.” The music swelled back on.

Limmit switched the radio off, the silence rushing back up to him like a thick wave of air. His office, he thought, replacing the radio in his jacket. The black iron gates. Where else?

He pushed his way through the somnambulent crowd and, after a moment’s hesitation, up to the curb. He looked around till he located the well-remembered gates. They were on the other side of the corpse-filled street.

Kicking away one dead hand reaching for him, he sighted either way to see which end of the street lay closest. There were no visible ends to it. The pseudo-interface appeared to stretch toward infinity in both directions, a limitless river of writhing corpses bounded on either side by endlessly walking resurrections of pimps and whores.

As he tried to shout across the street to the building behind the black gates, he could feel his voice dissipate only inches from his lips, the sound not even penetrating the sludgelike atmosphere. It’s no good, he thought despairingly, exhausted by his strangulated yelling. I can’t get across—the corpses will start to pull down more than can leave, until the sidewalks are empty and the river of pus spreads and swallows everything, me and the buildings; then that’ll be the end.

Nothing to lose then, he decided, and stepped off the curb into the street.

The white fluid sloshed gluily to the top of his boots. The effort required to pull them free and take another step was immense. The arms of the corpses mired around him reached up to his thighs, grasping and pulling him down. God, he screamed in sudden panic to himself, anything’s better than this! He swung frantically at the corpses, knocking off their clinging hands. The curb he had left seemed miles away when he looked back; no hope of scrambling back to it. The bodies behind pressed him forward inexorably into the center of the street. He was no longer able to see either side from here. Sobbing, he batted away the hands reaching from below, his own hands and arms spotted with their blood.

I’m dying, he realized fearfully. There was no sensation in his feet; they’re dead, he thought, submerged among the corpses. He tottered and fell upon his knees, amidst the tangled, writhing bodies. The hands pawed at his chest and shoulders as he whimpered and inched forward through the thickening fluid.

When the feeling was gone from his legs, he fell forward on his hands. How long, he wondered in horror, has it been? Dead feet, dead legs, dead cock: how long until I’m all dead. He pulled himself forward, through and over the corpses, feeling the rigidity of their skeletons and the yielding softness of their spilled innards. His hands died. As he pitched forward on his chest, he saw dimly the curb of the sidewalk before him, the feet and legs walking upon it. I can’t reach it, he thought, gripped in paralyzing fear and nausea as the blood-drenched hands pawed and clutched at his head straining to keep above the white fluid. He felt the hands leaving smears of the street’s slime upon his face, the surface skin starting to die and then decay.

Dead, he thought dully; this is how it feels to be a corpse. He saw the arms of the corpses around him reaching up to the feet on the sidewalk—saw hands that he recognized as his own catching hold of a pair of ankles. My hands, he thought. Part of the corpse world now, moving to its laws.

The figure on the sidewalk resisted being pulled into the street by Limmit’s corpse. The dead hands held as if rigor mortis had set in, as the blank-faced figure stumbled back, pulling Limmit partially up onto the sidewalk.

He felt his hands and forearms coming alive, as if blood were being pumped into their tissues. He held on to the figure’s ankles, trying to gain a purchase on the sidewalk with his elbows. Suddenly the figure tripped and fell; Limmit felt himself being pulled back into the street. I’m still partially alive, he realized, so they want me back. Other corpse hands had grabbed hold of the figure he had tripped and were pulling it in by its arms. Limmit let go of its ankles and scrabbled to one side. He clawed at the sidewalk desperately, the pus-filled street sucking at him from behind. “Please,” he whispered hoarsely, twisting his head up agonizingly at the unnoticing figures, “somebody help me.”

He slid slowly backward, the tips of his fingers burning across the rough sidewalk. His fingernails caught in a hairline crack, stopping him momentarily, until the street’s suction built up again as more dead hands clutched at him. Across the width of the sidewalk he could see the bars of Dr. Adder’s black iron gates, impossible to reach, and beyond them his silent motorcycle and the building’s front door. “Please,” he whispered deliriously at the sight, the exhaustion of his strength dimming his eyes with slowly expanding dark circles.

The iron gates parted and began, half real-time, to swing toward him. They stopped only a couple of feet from him. The pull behind him increased hungrily—he could feel the edges of the crack in the sidewalk begin to crumble beneath his clawlike fingers. If I reach for the gate, he thought, and miss, I’ll fall back into the street and die forever.

With his last strength he lunged for the black iron bars. His panic almost overwhelmed him into unconsciousness as he felt himself being dragged back as his hands flew for the gate. One hand caught, the other missing, then catching hold. He tried to pull himself up, but only enough strength remained to cling, gasping, to the bars.

The gates slowly started to swing shut, the half he was clinging to drawing him with it across the sidewalk. Dazed, he could see his lifeless lower body emerging from the grip of the street’s corpses. When his feet were free and out of reach from the street, he dropped from the gate and lay panting on the sidewalk. The denizens of the pseudo-interface stepped over him, zombielike. They had stopped, somehow automatically, for the gates’ motion, and now resumed their dreamlike parade.

Gradually, he felt the life flowing back into his body, his mind too exhausted to think anything. When the sensation had returned to his legs and only his feet remained covered with blood, the puslike substance having melted without a trace from the rest of his body, he sat up on the sidewalk. His shoulders jostled by the passing walkers, he drew out on impulse the plastic radio and switched it on. A last fragment of music faded away.

“And that,” said the voice of KCID cheerfully, “was the first movement of Mahler’s Lied. Playing time of eight minutes, three seconds, in case any of my listeners out there are keeping a clock on their daily activities. Better hurry, too, folks; I’m sure we’ve all got a busy day ahead of us—I know I do!” More music began as Limmit switched off the radio.

He wriggled his now-living toes inside his boots, then stood up shakily. He pushed his way through the crowd and slipped inside the black iron gates.

Upstairs, Adder sat behind his desk in the dimly lit office. As Limmit opened the door and peered in, he could see Adder and a young girl sitting in the chair beside the desk. There was something familiar about the girl; her eyes followed him as he stepped inside the room. It’s Melia, he realized, the image she made for herself.

“I’m sorry about what happened in the street,” said Adder as Limmit approached the desk. “If I had been aware of your presence I could have helped you sooner.”

Limmit pulled another chair in front of the desk and collapsed into it, Adder watching him expressionlessly. He’s not here, thought Limmit, gazing into the cold, distance-filled eyes. Not all of him.

“That’s right,” said Adder, passing a hand slowly across his brow. “What’s behind the desk is only a fraction of me. The ADR activates nearly the entire cerebral capacity, or at least it’s doing so with Mox and myself. Because of relative ego strength you and Melia are only observers in this world created by us.” He paused and turned his head slightly as if listening to some inaudible signal. Then the penetrating gaze settled back onto Limmit.

“Mox,” blurted Limmit. “I recognized him on the TV back in Rattown. He’s Lester Gass. My father.”

Adder received the information impassively. “I was beginning to suspect as much,” he said calmly. “Though it’s best that I know for sure.” He gazed over Limmit’s head toward the window opposite. “So many things have become clear.”

Limmit sensed something happening behind him. He turned in his chair and saw the window expanding and growing nearer, condensing like a telephoto lens the debris-littered space between it and the desk. The window rushed up until Limmit felt himself at the edge of a precipice; Melia, a few feet away, gazed unafraid at the view of the Interface.

“Interface,” said Adder, “between Mox and myself. It’s a parallel of the world we created between us in reality. His force and mine wrestle down there, stasis and action. Only, he can’t make the corpses in the street completely dead, and I can’t make the walkers on either side alive. But the struggle is real —you know that, Limmit, from being down there among them.

“All this,” he continued, pointing his hand at the gaping window, “is either him or me. Only this is already starting to pass away—the ADR is penetrating the layers of our conscious minds, carrying us closer to the animal layers beneath. Look,” he commanded.

Trembling, Limmit peered out the window. Below, the buildings lining the Interface had become indistinct, blurring, changing into mountains of earth and rock-cliff faces. Between two banks on which subhuman figures crawled mechanically, reptilian forms thrashed in a stagnating river of the white fluid.

“Soon that whole metaphor, the one of a physical Interface between us, will go,” said Adder faintly. “The ADR’s depth increases geometrically. Soon we’ll be down right into the cellular level, the struggle between energy and nonenergy. Look at the sky,” he commanded again.

Limmit looked up and saw there was none. Only a vast field of flames overhead, curling and writhing through a dead-black, tangible vacuum. The abstract, moiling battle spread until nothing but the churning flames and extinguishing vacuum could be seen from the window.

“It’s draining me of too much effort,” said Adder, his voice growing distant, “to maintain this image here.” Limmit looked around him and saw the walls and furniture becoming murky, like a pencil drawing fading with erasure. The details of Adder’s face were becoming indistinct, a line drawing showing only the sharp edge of his profile. “I need everything for out there,” the figure continued. “Mox and I are more evenly matched than either of us would have thought.”

“But what about us?” cried Limmit. He could feel alternating blasts of searing heat and cold from behind him—the glass had already disappeared. “What are Melia and I to do?” He glanced at the girl. She sat calmly upon her shadowy chair, the same expression of trust and love that he had seen on her blind face in Rattown.

“I can’t help you,” said the almost completely faded image of Adder. “You do have some control, some power here, though not much. Maybe together you can make some kind of shell, a protection to ride out the storm in. Of course, if Mox wins, it won’t do you much good. You’ll die just seconds after I do.” The last outlines of the image wavered, then winked out. “... luck ...” whispered the air filling the space where he had been.

Around Limmit and the girl the remains of the office started to shrink and run as if melting. The faces in the skin magazines withered and disappeared.

The phone rang. Edgar picked up the extension in the living room, still keeping his eyes on the television screen. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I’ve been watching it all along. He’s alive. I don’t know—somehow.” Pause. “Yeah, that’s what I was going to do, too. Before it’s all over.” He replaced the receiver and glanced at the churning screen. The sharp, violent images of Dr. Adder had gradually abstracted themselves into this visual inferno. Edgar nodded knowingly at the screen, as if it were reminding him of something, then picked through the cut-glass candy dish for the last remaining amphetamine-analogs. His muscles quivered for a second as the outnumbering blue capsules overpowered the barbiturate, seemingly filling him with energy to the bursting point.

Methodically, he took the ornate cigarette lighter from the coffee table and carried it farther back into the conapt. With it he set fire to the large bed his mother lay unconscious upon. He closed the bedroom door behind him. After starting other fires in all the rooms, he ended by setting the lighter to the drapes and furniture surrounding the television set. He watched the flames for a moment, then dropped the lighter to the floor and ran out.

He pressed his palms fiat against the outside of the front door, feeling the heat building up inside. Far down the hallway he could see other doors blackening and bursting into flames. He tore himself away convulsively and ran for the elevator, trembling with an excitement greater than that the blue capsules had given him. On the television screen inside, the flames were seemingly being mirrored. The whore on the bed in Rattown watched them intently, over the shoulder of Mr. Endpoint of Orange County, who, his passion spent, had fallen asleep upon her breast. She was hardly aware of his flabby weight—she was listening to the phosphor-dot flames. It was as if they were burning through layer after layer of dreams and visions that had encrusted around her like a pearl, until they reached the small, hard core in the center.

Endpoint didn’t wake up until he felt the fingers at his throat, the nails grown long and sharp with inactivity. If he had been able to hear as the surprisingly strong hands tore open his throat like pulpy fruit, he might have recognized the voice that told him any father would suffice, if not the particular father who had driven his oldest son to the Interface to have his sex changed (as with so many other of the whores on that street), the beginning of a voluntary victim’s long descent. Above the two blood-washed figures on the bed, the flames on the television screen writhed. Milch held his hands a few inches away from the small television set, thinking he could perhaps feel the heat from them. He straightened up from the set sitting on the walkway of the empty warehouse, his rifle slung across his back.

He peeked into the cubicle, nodding in satisfaction at the three unconscious figures bound together at the arms. He didn’t understand, but was willing to go on faith. Outside the cubicle, he stepped over the figures of Azusa and two others, crumpled and bloody in death, their rifles pinned beneath them. I knew, he thought, that I should never have listened to that fucker Azusa. He felt a little ashamed now for the doubts he once had. It was a good thing he and the others who had kept on believing had caught the images on the TV, and been able to track Azusa and his men to this place, after Azusa’s scout hadn’t reported in. Kicking at the short figure’s blood-crusted head, he watched the flames’ small image on the television by the guardrail. Let the others, he thought, celebrate. I’ll wait here until he awakens, comes back to his body. I should have had faith, he brooded fiercely. All things will change again—that’s what the flames mean. He glanced back through the door of the cubicle, in an almost childlike agony of fear and hope.

The female geriatric whimpered and backed away from the fire-wreathed door, one scarred leg dragging behind her, until she reached the window and screamed down at the milling youths, their faces stark-lit by torches and small televisions. Somewhere else, beneath an artificial mountain, the figures of dead whores coupled amidst the fires, their plastic skin melting into unknown genitals. As, to the north, a storage annex burned and collapsed, blocks away from Orange County Broadcast Central, the lips of a short, white-haired mannequin vaporized and revealed a momentary grinning rictus.

Limmit and Melia crouched together in the small shell they had formed around themselves. Like an egg, thought Limmit, in a furnace. “How much longer?” he wondered aloud, feeling on his back the alternating penetrations of heat and cold.

“Things must come to a conclusion,” said the girl evenly. “He explained it to me. The ADR requires a cathartic expenditure of psychic energy before it dissipates out of our bloodstreams.” She looked abstractedly at the shell’s thin skin.

Christ, thought Limmit miserably. We’re going to die right here, fry or be frozen before the battle’s even over. If he wins, only Adder will wake up. And if he doesn’t win.... Limmit shuddered convulsively. “How the fuck can you be so calm,” he shouted at the girl, “when—”

“Quiet,” she ordered, her face taut. “Listen.”

Outside the shell the furious roars and silence of the struggle between Adder and Mox had ceased: there was only a barely audible, tension-filled thrumming, extending from the subsonic through all the pitches between to the hypersonic. “Is it over?” whispered Limmit.

“No,” said the girl, intently listening to something more than the thrumming sound. “He and Mox are deadlocked, their forces equal. I can tell; I’m closer to him than you are.” A section of the shell grew transparent, reminding Limmit of the window in Adder’s vanished office.

The flames and contorted vacuum were frozen, moving imperceptibly if at all. “You mean this is it?” said Limmit, a slow horror growing within him. “We’re never coming out of this? It’ll be like this forever?”

“No,” snapped the girl, turning a suddenly fierce and impassioned face on him. “Don’t you see? A deadlock means Mox will win in just a few moments. Mox’s strength is limitless, he’s part of the computer banks, but Adder’s strength will start to weaken and die eventually, along with his body back in L.A.” She turned back to the shell’s transparent section.

“Don’t open that,” shouted Limmit as he saw what she was doing. “You’ll weaken it!” He dragged her as far away as he could from the section.

“I’m going to him!” she screamed as she pounded on his chest with her small fists. “He needs me, like he did before!” “Don’t be an idiot,” said Limmit, struggling to control her flailing limbs. “You’ll just die out there—what kind of strength like that could you have?”

“More than you, chickenshit!” The shell was instantly covered with a net of hairline fractures, then started splitting apart into fragments.

Limmit released her in sudden panic, feeling himself suspended, helpless, over the abyss. He had one glimpse of her image shooting away in a long, arcing fall, before the fear closed his eyes and squeezed him into a fetal ball. There was no protection for him now, the last lucid portion of his mind realized, even if Melia could help Adder.

The vibration grew louder and more intense, and he felt the first layers of his skin start to peel away.

His blood seeped away into the flames. Not fire, but warmth enveloped him. Blind, he felt himself still alive, immersed in a greater blood that pulsed with electricity.

It's his blood. The thought broke through Limmit’s fear as he hung suspended, motionless. My father's. The same as mine.

Without sight, he felt his father’s blood penetrating to his center, seeking the spark of energy there. A blood tie, thought Limmit. He wants me to join him, be him. Live forever when we win this fight. The comforting warmth narrowed closer to his spine.

This is what you really wanted. A whispering thought that he could barely tell from his own. To become your father.

“No.” Limmit spoke and the blood lapped against his teeth. The hate swelled out of the pit of his stomach, as the warmth around him hissed like steam and drew away. “We’re not the same blood!” He spat out the choking mouthful. “You die—not me.”

He uncoiled himself, his hands ripping through the darkness. The whisper that he’d heard, his father’s voice, screamed with its own hatred and pain at the wound his son tore open.

Then Limmit felt himself outside his father again, no longer held suspended in blood, but falling into flames.

❖

“I came to, eventually, in the warehouse.”

“How did you feel?” asked Mary. She watched Limmit’s profile, turned away from her. Perhaps the conversation could be prolonged. They were sitting in the little room in Rattown they had shared for a little while, she on the bed and he on the chair beside it. He had come to look for something (he had said) and had found her there.

“Like shit,” he said. “Trembling all over. I could barely walk. Adder, though, had come out of the ADR a few minutes before, and was sitting there, calm and steady as possible. Relaxed, even. The girl was dead, her hand still strapped to the TV.” He paused and studied his own hands, wondering for a second if the tremor would ever go away completely. “There’s a certain unconscious spark, a force of will, that keeps your heart beating and stuff, keeps you alive. It’s what pulled me through after all the rest had been burned away. That’s what she gave him, at the end. It was enough, I guess. Mox was dead even before Broadcast Central went up.” He fell silent, then turned and saw her regarding him with her large, now unsmiling eyes. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

She looked away, to the room’s grimy window. Through it floated spasmodic and distant sounds. “I might go back,” she said, “rejoin Anna Manfred. If there’s any of the Midwestern Liberation Front left. There’s nothing possible for me to do in L.A. now—I saw some of the things that were on the TV last night, and how the Rattowners reacted to it.”

Another silence stiffened around them for several seconds. “Coming here,” said Limmit, “I ran into Droit. He told me that Mother Endure has started to lead most of her downers into the sewers below. Those that would still go with her. He said he was getting ready to go down into the Sump Line himself. Heading up north—beyond the Visitor. Not that he had ever heard of there being anything up there.” He paused, seemingly unable to extract any more words to drop into the vacuum. He inclined his head at the yellow plastic radio softly humming on the window sill. “Is that the right frequency?”

She nodded. “We’ll hear him as soon as he comes on.” Staring out the window. “I keep hoping that he’ll be ... different now.” She turned her face to look at him. “What are your plans?” she asked quietly.

“I should go back to Phoenix,” he said, meeting and holding her level gaze. “There’s not much left for me here. If anything.” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. Everything’s possible now.”

Outside, beyond the alleys, the noises grew louder.

Dr. Adder sat behind a dust-covered desk in one of the empty warehouse’s cubicles, next to the one that still held Melia’s body. A pair of cans that had once held peaches, grown long ago somewhere else, and now containing only clear syrup, sat on the desktop.

I wonder whatever became of my motorcycle, thought Adder, leaning back in the chair and planting his feet between the empty cans. Probably still up there where I dropped it outside Betreech’s place. Covered with mold by now, lichens on the tank and fungus sprouting from the leather.

A person he had never seen before appeared in the doorway of the cubicle. He looked as if he had been once, long ago, a stocky, even portly figure, but had condensed with accumulating age, the network of fine lines on his face absorbing the excess. He lugged a large black suitcase with him.

“How,” said Adder, looking at the apparition in mild curiosity, “did you get past that Milch character out there?”

“He’s one of my most faithful listeners,” said the ancient figure, smiling at him.

“KCID,” said Adder, recognizing the voice. “So you’re it.”

“That’s right,” the old man said. He lifted the case onto a corner of the desk and opened it. “Portable, self-contained transmitter,” he said, noticing Adder’s small interest. “One of Lester Gass’ lesser known devices. I found it here in L.A.; been using it for my own purposes for years.” He winked at Adder. “Right, radioland?”

“So what the fuck do I want with it?”

The old man pulled out a microphone from inside the case and held it before himself. “They’re all waiting, Dr. Adder,” he announced dramatically into the device. A red rectangle marked ON THE AIR glowed inside the case. “All your old fans, and everyone else, who never worshipped you until now. All through the streets of L.A., and even in the smoking ruins of Orange County, people are clustered around radios, waiting to hear you, back from the dead. I broadcast the announcement earlier that you’d be with me today. The word has reached everyone, I assure you.” He paused. “What do you have to tell them, Dr. Adder?”

Adder gazed into the withered face for a silent moment. There was no mockery there; he saw that the old man was just doing his self-appointed job in the best way he could. And that he knew already.

“Yeah,” said Adder finally, grinning and swinging his feet off the desktop. He reached for the microphone. Everyone; L.A., Orange County, the whole world. “Yeah, I’ve got something to say to them.”

AFTERWORD

—PHILIP K. DICK

“Sir, you have written a dirty book, sir!”

Which writer does Mrs. Grundy have in mind now? James Joyce for his masterpiece ULYSSES? Or Henry Miller for his two TROPICS novels? The shriek of dismay from the prudes of the world is eternal. And this shriek has prevented the publishing of K. W. Jeter’s extraordinary novel DR ADDER for literally years—until a courageous publisher finally stepped forth and said,

“We’ll publish it.”

I did not know K. W. Jeter when I first read DR ADDER in 1972. The well-known figure in science fiction academic circles Dr. Willis McNelly brought me the manuscript and said, “One of the students wrote this. I think it’s good. I’d like to know what you think.” And left it with me to read.

If there’s one thing I hate it’s having novels brought to me to read... because, frankly, there are so few novels these days that are worth reading. I must admit I considered reading this manuscript an imposition—until I read the first third of it, and having read that first third of DR ADDER my life was permanently changed. Here was not just a good novel; here was a great novel. It picked up where the dazzling power of the DANGEROUS VISIONS stories (in Harlan Ellison’s anthologies) had left off. Very simply, it is a stunning novel and it destroys once and for all your conception of the limitations of science fiction. This is, of course, why so many years had to pass before it saw print. It’s not dirty. Mrs. Grundy is wrong. Yes, it deals not only with sexual perversions but with fantastic sexual perversions: dreams of sexual perversions which are dreams you and I never supposed existed. But—is a murder mystery usually accused of advocating death? Is a science fiction novel about the end of the world construed by its readers as expressing a desire on the part of the author to see the world end?

Did the movie Jaws advocate biting children in half?

I don’t wish to fall back on the easy statement that DR ADDER was ahead of its time. It wasn’t. It was right on the nose. What was wrong was this: the field of science fiction was behind the times. I have no doubt that if DR ADDER had been published in 1972 it would have been a blockbuster of a commercial success, and what is more, its impact on the field would have been enormous. The field has been growing weak. It has for years become ossified. A stale timidity has crept over it. Endless novels about sword fights and figures in cloaks who perform magic—in other words clones of the Hobbit books— have been cranked out, published, sold, and the field of science fiction has been transmuted into a joke field—certain exceptions to the contrary such as Tom Disch’s CAMP CONCENTRATION and Norman Spinrad’s THE IRON DREAM admitted.

Now, I ask you, aren’t you tired of reading about magic and wizards and little people with turned-up fuzzy feet? Consider this, then: you have been deprived for many years of the opportunity to read powerful, original, daring novels such as DR ADDER. A few months ago I heard a major figure in the science fiction field argue at a lecture that “no good s-f novel ever went unpublished.” How tragically untrue! You, as the reader, must take my word for it: good s-f novels do go unpublished because there are relatively few brave publishers these days. But now DR ADDER is in print and you are holding it in your hands. This fits my personal view of the workings of the universe: the mill of the gods grinds slow, but it will eventually grind out justice. What you now hold in your hands proves it.

I could make a case for the unfair misery that K. W. Jeter has been forced to undergo from 1972 until this publication now, at long last, of DR ADDER, but I think the case that you as the reader have been mistreated is a more important case. However, I think you should know that it is a dreadful experience psychologically to have written a masterpiece, a truly wonderful novel, and then find that no publisher in the United States or England or France (Mr. Jeter even tried France, where almost everything gets published!) will stand up, be counted, face the judgment of history and publish the goddam thing.

Earlier this year I talked to an Editorial Assistant at a certain publisher. “Are you going to publish DR ADDER?” I asked, knowing that they had the manuscript at that moment. He said, “What if we lose our shirt?” To this I said, “History is going to judge you.”

History does judge you, publisher, author and reader alike. Consider this. I myself—I am, in my opinion, defamed in DR ADDER (there is a character, KCID, who is based on me). But as far as I am concerned, this is not important. I have to admit that the portrait of me made me acutely uncomfortable. But which is more important, that I keep my self-serving image going, or that a great novel be published? I tell you this so you will understand how little I have personally to gain by advocating the publishing of DR ADDER. In fact in a sense I have something to lose; I show up in it as a worn-out old fart with scrambled wits. So don’t show up at my door and tell me I’m recommending DR ADDER because I’m a friend of the author. Well, I am a friend of the author; after I read DR ADDER I got to know K. W. and we see a lot of each other. But I am writing this Afterword for you the reader, not for K. W. Jeter. I am writing this to tell you, Forget your timid preconceptions of what a science fiction novel should be like. Forget the little people with fuzzy turned-up feet and sword fights on imaginary planets. This novel is about our world and so it is a dangerous novel in the sense that Harlan’s DANGEROUS VISIONS stories were, by and large, dangerous. Which is terrific. This is precisely what we need.

Well, I have rattled on enough; time for you to return to the novel itself. I’d like to add a few words about K. W., however, since I know him so well. He’s a tall, gloomy person with the most brilliant wit of anyone I know (gloomy people usually have the flair for wit). His ex-wife once said that she thought he looked like John Barrymore. I think he looks like Richard the Third, plotting to overthrow everyone ahead of him in line to the royal throne. And in a literary sense K. W. has done precisely this. He has worked and waited years—not to get to the throne of power but to the throne of getting an important and exciting and dramatic and, above all, interesting novel published, against overwhelming odds. He never gave up, although many times his morale dropped to a low ebb. We, his friends, cheered him up as best we could, but, really, only one thing could cheer him. And that one thing is what you hold in your hands now: a published copy of his masterpiece DR ADDER.

Consider yourself warned. This novel is gut-destroying. It is not a creampuff novel; it is not empty sweetness. I enjoyed it. I loved it. Mrs. Grundy is going to run off shrieking when she reads it, but let her run off. James Joyce and Henry Miller survived her, and so will K. W. Jeter. And so will a courageous publisher, whose imprint appears on this book. I wish to thank that publisher. And, above all, I wish to thank K. W. for his valor. And his genius.

—Santa Ana, California

August 1, 1979