Magnus Tate watches Auri rise on long legs.
With a look that leaves no doubt in his mind how long she will treasure the memory of their first encounter, she wipes away the residue of lovemaking, "Well, what now?"
Tired, as close to throwing in the towel as he's ever been, he hauls himself erect with a groan. It's been nearly twenty years since he's been this foolish, letting a client sucker him into compromising himself. His age, slipping into her dress she looks half his sixty years. Still, there is something about her that turns men to fools.
"Now? I'm going to send somebody else, that's what I'm going to do."
Hands on hips, she looks at him, appalled, "God, but you're hopeless! I thought you were competent! Don't you get it? They're not cutting it! We're no closer now than we were a month ago."
He gets it.
Stepping into trousers, he pours himself a dose of scotch, offers her one. She waves it away. Oh, yes, he gets it. If he doesn't do something right now, he might as well buy some razors and draw himself a good, hot bath. Maybe he should anyway. He's never liked sending men and women to die. "They tried, and they paid for their failure."
"You said they were good."
The pleasant burn of Chivas dulls the edge of panic. He thinks of the dead. For the hundredth time he sees their faces. He won't have her dirtying them. The look he gives her is easy to understand. "They were good."
"Then what good will another one do?" She grabs her bag, heading for the door and out of his life. "I'm out of time."
Desperate, Tate watches her go, and with her his career, his agency. Fear burrows in his stomach. In this instant he understands how a man will betray a friend. "There is someone...."
"Oh, don't bother." Hand on the door she hesitates, "You've had your chance, I'll try somewhere else."
Another second and she'll be gone. He can't let her go. God help him, he can't. Of course she knew he would react this way. If she knows anything, she knows men. Half a century she's spent them like tokens.
"If anyone can do it, Karl can."
Bored, she sighs, "All right, who is he, and why haven't you mentioned him before?"
"He's been...out of circulation."
She sighs, annoyed. "Retirees, now?"
"He's forty, best man ever worked for me. Unconventional...."
She cocks an eyebrow, "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Independent as hell. Born five centuries too late, is what I think. Sees himself as some kind of knight in black ostrich hide. Used to be a cop, but doesn't care about the law. Only cares what's right. You convince him what you want done is to help the underdog, and he'll never quitnot while he's breathing, anyway."
"And you think we can sell him?"
Magnus knows he can. Karl would be a sucker for it, he can feel it. "I can sell him."
She opens the door. "Why should I believe you this time?"
"He's smart, he's tough, survival instincts of a mink, thinks on his feet."
"If he's so damned good, why doesn't he work for you anymore?"
He'd hoped she wouldn't ask. "Something happened, he walked away."
"Somethingwhat?"
Tate doesn't answer.
"Little boys and their secrets. Okay, let's try this: He walked away to do what?"
"Lives alone up in the hills by the sea in Anglo-Cali, raises cattle, sheep, grows his own vegetables, you know, that kind of thing."
"Oh...." With an exasperated laugh, she appraises him with a slow shake of her head, eyes industrial diamond. "A back-to-the-land has-been? You can do better than that."
Heart stone, he drains his glass, pours another. Is there anything he won't do to hold on to the agency, anyone he won't betray? Disgusted with himself, with what he's about to do, he looks out over the waters of 2030 L.A.. "He's the one we want, Auri. Don't ask me why, just trust me when I say he's the one.
"You know I trust no one."
He knows she won't buy it, tries anyway. "I gave my word."
Her eyes, implacable, stay on him. "Give me a reason to stay or I'm gone."
He has to stop her. She goes, it's all done, all over. He can tell her or he can draw his pension, join the netpunks in their Ultimate Reality stupor.
Did Judas feel this way?
"He reads minds." He looks up to see her jaw drop. "That reason enough?"
She shuts the door, comes back to her perch on the couch. Slender legs splayed, elbows on knees, she leans forward, eager, "So, tell me."
And he does.
God help him, he does.
The smell of straw, of alfalfa, of molasses cob, of lanolin, of wool and dung hang heavy on the air of the shed.
Karl pushes the piston on the tube clamped between the ewe's jaws, forcing the bolus down past where she can spit it up. Its fear comes through his hands. The ewe is afraid, but in a dull, uninterested way. Released, she runs bawling from the shed out onto wet grass as if it's all a game. Worming time. How he hates it. Just one of life's little pains in the ass. Nothing any stupider than a lamb. Birth them, vet them, feed them, and will they take a pill without fighting for their life? They won't. Got to be done, though. He's heard lambs cough, seen them eat and eat, gaining nothing, livers swimming with ray-like flukes. Bad here by the coast. Snails are the vector. Long wet winters and misty summers make it a constant fight.
Bink, a beagle no bigger than his shoe, rolls happily in dung at his feet. His only company, Bink may be a freakthey have that much in commonbut he knows how to have a good time. Found him barely weaned, running down the centerline as if he knew where he was going and was in one damned big hurry to get there. Sweeping alongside in his '53 Ford pickup, Karl scooped him up. On his lap, fleas porpoising through short fur, what he read in Bink was longing for someone to love, a need so strong he suspected that somehow he was reading himself reflected back.
Now, when he can help it, animals are all he touches. Bink is simple. A hunger for cats and jackrabbits to chase. A consuming love for him and for hocks of the lambs Karl slaughters. No undercurrents of dark guile, no greed, no envy, no resentment, no regretsjust love. He'll never find that in a woman, never. He knowshe's tried.
Suddenly Bink springs to short legs, black eyes alert. A low rumble rising from his throat, he tears out of the shed, kicking up straw as he goes. Karl steps up on a bale to look out under the roof, shapeless felt hat pressed up against dusty tin. Churning its way up gravel to the house below is an aquamarine Ranchero. Karl breathes, relaxingonly Mel.
Relieved, he groans, slapping his drooping hat against a thigh to dust it of cobwebs. No hurry. Digging a pencil stub from the pocket of a worn Pendleton, he makes a note on a post which lambs he's yet to dose. He wipes his hands on clean straw as Mel winds up the drive, Karl scans the sea a mile away down slope.
Though he grew up here, for him Cape Mendocino never palls. Sea, sky, land and trees clap violently together here as they do nowhere else on earth. Here they gnaw at each other, breaking off pieces and carrying them away for their own. Here he feels more alive than he does anywhere else. Here he's home.
Now what can Mel want? Something, that's sure; he wouldn't bother driving up unless he did. With a tired sigh, Karl heads down to meet him.
Mel parks, gets out, polishes the hood with a sleeve. Stands back, judges, nods approval. Under his breath he says it, the incantation, the benediction. Though Karl is still too far away to hear, he knows what he says: "Bitchin'."
It's about the only word his nephew uses now. Cynthia, the cute seventeen year old down the road is bitchin'. So's the aboriginal music he listens to. Chimichangas are. The Net is. So's the fit of a tight pair of jeans on the tourist chicks who stop at the cafe for a soda and directions every summer.
Some things aren't, though. Helping Mary with the dishes isn't. Neither is studying, nor the price of gas, nor his Uncle Karl, come to that. No, Karl muses as he heads down, Mel's much too old to think an uncle is bitchin'. And if that uncle just happens to have spent the last fifteen years wrestling with you and untangling your fishing line and teaching you to shoot when you didn't have a father around, well, that doesn't count for much eithernot to a sixteen year old.
Karl stumbles, catching the toe of his boot on a root, reaches down to rub a smarting knee. Mel spots him, waits. Karl smiles as he comes, Bink running ahead. No, Mel won't run to meet himhasn't for a long time. He just stands, looking bored, piece of paper in one hand.
"Got a letter for you, Unk, came FedEx from L.A.." He holds it up to the sky, straining to make it out.
A chill washes over Karl as he jerks it out of his hand, "Thanks there, Neph."
Mel doesn't flinch. Used to it. They've had this war going so long neither thinks it even sounds funny, now.
He shrugs,"Thought you might want it before next Saturday when you come down, so I brought it up." Mel watches him expectantly, fingers on one hand grooming a pimply forehead, tee shirt with a picture of a python gripping a baby in its mouth, half swallowed, legs splayed. A meaning there somewhere, a band maybe. Karl's given up guessing and doesn't care enough to ask.
How can a kid change so much in only a few years?
"Going to open it, Unc?"
Karl glances at the envelope and despite the sun, slivers of ice slide down his backbone. So he guessed rightit is from Magnus. He slips it into a pocket. "Not now, worming."
"Aw, come on." Mel trims a nail with his teeth, spits the sliver, "Let's see what it says."
"Later."
"Oh, you mean when I'm gone, huh?"
Karl smiles, sure of the risk he's taking, "You're that anxious, you can stay and help me dose the lambs. Shouldn't take more than another hour. Then we'll open it together. You can read it to me."
Mel gathers a ponytail in his fist. "Okay, be that way."
Karl notices the tell-tale shaved patch and scab at the nape of his neck, and a knife spikes his heart. Reaching out to clasp Mel's hair in a fist, he yanks his head around to see. It's there, all right: the bluish puncture left by the implant gunthe stomata of the hive. A spider of revulsion feels its way up Karl's neck.
Mel squirms in his grasp. "Hey, come on, let me go!"
Disgusted, Karl turns him loose. If the letter's bad, this is worse. Mel may be a smart ass, but he's blood, his sister's son, the only kid he's ever cared about. Now he belongs to them. Karl wants to hit something, somebody. If he thought it would help, he'd hit Mel. But it won't. Nothing will.
Karl whips off his hat, slaps his thigh with it, "What the hell you need with an implant, Mel, will you tell me that?"
Mel smiles, looking down at dirty sneakers, spattered with mud, grease, something green, maybe cow shit. Mary keeps a steer out back of the store, and Mel takes it rolled corn, and a flake of alfalfa when she can browbeat him into it.
Mel stands his ground,"Can't get into college without one, can't get a job either, don't you know that? Don't you know anything, Unc?"
Karl feels sick. He didn't.
It's worse than he thought. Five years and it's much worse. There's nowhere to hide, nowhere the sickness doesn't reach. Runit follows. Hideit finds you. What right does he have to judge? Mel's got to live out there, got to function. Not like him. Mel needs the world. Wants it. Hungers for it. The way he did once.
Mel waits, head bobbing to a beat Karl doesn't hear, eyes staring out to sea, blind, seeing, listening to something beamed down from a satellite somewhere above an overcast sky. Still he makes no move to go.
Karl hates to admit curiosity, but itches to know. "What you watching?"
"UR feed," Melvin says too loud for the quiet hill, only the breeze soughing through spruce, through bunch grass. "Blue Green Algae concert live from Prince Albert in London. I can see them right in front of me, hear them too. I can even smell the place."
The old terror grips Karl hard. The fear of slipping off the inverted bowl of reality and into the abyss, into Auden's borough of the nightmare, has always scoured his soul raw with dread. For that reason alone he's never seriously considered taking the dip into Ultimate Reality.
It revolts him, too, the thought of being somewhere yet not being there, of leaving your body behind, a husk. Unnatural as corn smut, it defies the will of God. Ridiculously rudimentary, it seems to himmen were not meant to do this. Puritanical though this thought seems, there is no doubt in his mind it is so.Though he's left a fundamentalist upbringing thirty years in the past, something of it sticks yet.
There's something else Karl's always wanted to know."How do you drive?"
Melvin laughs to hear such ignorance, shakes his head, grinning. "No, Unk, no, you can turn it down anytime you want, you don't have to take full feed." He frowns, searching for a way to describe the miracles of modern technology to a three-toed sloth.
"It's like a memory, a daydream, sort of. You can control it, but anytime you want it, it's there. Get it? Just hit the juice and look out, here it comes, bam, and you're there." He lifts an arm, no longer the arm of a boy, beefy, muscular, and points into space. "There, some guys are toking." He breathes, long, deep, "I can smell it, and there's ale spilled all over, and there must be a toilet stopped up, too, I'll bet." He laughs.
"And do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Turn it off."
"Sure."
"Oh, yeah?" Karl doesn't believe him. "When?"
"All the time."
He won't let it lie. "When last?"
Mel frowns, "Don't know...forget...sometime."
Karl nods, repulsed by this kid he's watched grow up, mind linked to some global widow's web. He sees him trailing invisible fibers linking him to low earth orbiting satelites, and thinks of a moth bound and suspended, awaiting a spider.
Why doesn't he leave, what's he waiting for?
"Thanks for bringing this up, Mel," he says, leaning close to his ear, speaking loud enough so he'll be sure and hear over whatever's happening inside his skull. "See you, thanks for the lesson."
"Don't have to yell," Mel says to his back, "Sure is a long way up here, and man is gas getting high."
Understanding, Karl says he'll transfer fifty next time he goes down to the store.
Mel smiles, "See ya," he says, running for his Ford, rolling slowly down the hill, cautious about chipping the paint with flying gravel.
Karl watches him gofirst visitor in a year, then lets his eyes rove the hills, spruce falling away to pasture. Wind fresh from the sea rocks him, thermal bringing warmth in the dead of February. From where? Tahiti, maybe.
Petrolia, westernmost town in the continental US. Misnamed for oil that never was. Home to a handful of ranchers, most of whom have lived there for generations. Not an easy club to break into. One family, moved to the cape before Karl was born, is still the new folks in the Walker place.
Though he'd spent fifteen years away, Karl, born into one of the original homestead families, was just "The Kleiner boy." At forty, still a boy, coming home from the big city. They knew him, went to school with him. Used to his ways, they let him be. And that's what it's all about, or so he thinks nowbeing left alone.
Bink at his heels, Karl slogs slowly back up the hill to the waiting lambs. Absently, he feels in his jeans pocket, counting five of the big pills. Enough to finish. Past bawling lambs, he walks, on up into the sprucethe best place for him to think, the only place. He finds a thirty-year-old Sitka stump, sits, takes out the envelope.
He doesn't have to open it, knows what's in it, knows he doesn't want to read it. He thinks about tearing it up, forgetting it ever came, denying it if it comes to that. Five years is a long time to live alone, cut offfrom the world, from friends, from everything. Five long, wet winters Magnus has left him alone. Now what?
Tearing it open, he blows inside to separate thin reactive paper, gets a chemical whiff. Electronically generated, never signed, never touched. He opens it, reads, finds no surprise.
One line is all. Just one:
K.
AUNT CELIA ILL. TICKET WAITING. WILL MEET.
M.
One line, but enough. Karl curses into the wind. Bink sits up, whining, nose working, eyes alert, making sure he doesn't miss anything. The wind flutters the paper in his hand and he sees the cape through the eyes of a man who may never see it again. Unbearably beautiful it seems now. No way around it. He'll have to go. After everything, Tate's just about the only friend he has. If he needs him bad enough to send this, after five years leaving him alone, he's got to go.
Stomach prickling, he thinks about the city. Okay, he misses itpart of him does anyway. But there is at least as much dread in the constriction in his throat as anticipation. He can feel it from here: the festering heat, the malignancy of L.A.
Rain spatters his hat, his jeans. A drop strikes the FAX in his hands, eats through as if it were sulfuric. Karl smiles. Magnus and his caution. Of course he would use water reactive paper. Rising, he leaves it on the stump and heads down to the shed.
He'll leave at dusk.
Karl lies back, enjoying first class.
First flight in five years and he's got room to stretch. Tate does have his good points. In the carrier on the seat beside him, Bink sighs, nose pressed through mesh. Checking for stewards, Karl unhooks the door and he pushes out, worming his way under his jacket. Karl latches the door and settles back, slipping on the headset he bought on the way to the airport.
Slimmer, less bulky than his old one, it's not much more than a spaghetti thin hoop connecting earpieces with the laser projectors at his temples. Outdated as it is he was lucky to find one at all and is relieved to see that despite the thick layer of dust on the package, it powers up.
Karl's rusty. Hasn't had one on since he left. This one's better, faster, can do morehow much he's not sure. He calls up news archives. So far so good. Each movement of his eyes takes him to another rush of news casts. The arrow floats, a neon defect on a cornea. A flick, a blink, and it plays real time. Another blink zips it forward one day per second. Not too bad. And that's good. Five years is a lot to review.
"The President," says a fawning blonde head with the voice of a blue vid queen, "is intent upon working with the Chinese to foster human rights by a policy of engagement while at the same time insuring continued trade by reaffirming MFN trading status...."
"Uh, huh."
Zip.
"...bisexual goddess, lead singer of Priapic Pump, whose mega hits include, I Want To Be With You When You UR, says she's working on curbing her addictions to group sex, drugs and UR." In full war paint, she speaks: "I'm all turned around, like, it's been over a week now, since I..."
"All for you, babe."
Zip.
"Democrats in Congress are not willing to accept a Republican budget slashed to less than a twenty percent increase as it stands, says House Majority Leader Mann. 'We can not, we will not, stand by and let these mean-hearted...'"
"God, no, man, don't stand for it."
Zip.
"...Rodney and Heather, seventeen and twenty at the time of their alleged torture-mutilation of a five-year-old neighbor, are to undergo rigorous psychiatric counseling as a condition of amnesty..."
"Christ, yes, counsel the hell out of them."
Zip.
"...Education Secretary Linnet says that despite a decline in test scores, the self-esteem of our students is steadily on the rise."
"Thank God for that."
Zip.
"...at the moving dedication today of a monument to gay sacrifice and suffering in the continuing war against the AIDS epidemic was attended by a host of luminaries including..."
"What, and the flu gets nothing?"
Zip.
"...study by UCLA geologists predicts a decline in the rate of descent of the San Andreas subversion fault from more than 10 meters per year to less than two..."
"Oh, yeah, with their track record for accuracy I'll rush right out and pick myself up a seaside lot."
Zip.
"...roundup of all weapons in private hands in Mexicali from Mexico to the Anglo-Cali border is nearing completion. Experts predict a fall in crime when..."
Snarling in disgust, Karl rips the headset over his head into his lap, pressing temples between his hands. Headsets always did give him a headache; after so long, it's worse. In five years nothing's changed anyway. Still, if he's going to be working, he needs to know what he's facing. Resigned, he pushes on.
No sooner does he seat the headset behind his ears, than a Netad assails him, loud and insistent.
"The most beautiful women in the world."
Sisters talk, laugh, pose. The voiceover hovers barely above a whisper, as if not to betray our presence among them.
"They live for one purposeto entertain you, to fascinate you, to make your evening unforgettable. Is there a more luxurious gift than an evening with a goddess? Is there any better way to show the world that you deserve the best, than to be seen with the embodiment of perfection?"
Karl watches Sisters work out in leotardssvelte, vibrant, demure. It's been twenty years since he's thought about them. Pleasing as the view may be, he hasn't the time to waste on it. His eye moves to cancel the ad, to call up more news. For no reason he can say, he lets it run.
"Each one genetically predisposed to fall in love with one man, just
one, one in a billion. Will you be the one for her?"
A nightclub like any other nightclub. A man, nondescriptmight be anybody sits beside Terese, a short-haired blond, half intellectual, half harlot. They gaze into each other's eyes, fascination evidently requited.
"It happened to this man. It's happened to others. He has found an adorable, physically pure, absolutely devoted life mate in a Sister from Genesistems. Will you?"
Up close, Terese looks directly into Karl's eyes, searching his face, and he feels his vitals slowly drawn from him. It is that kind of look. "I'm waiting to meet you."
When the next ad blares he jumps, blinks, tries the index, scrolling through, flashing works hypnotic. The heading Digitally Mastered Immortals catches his eye and he scrolls back. He calls it up, lets it play. A woman, very old, speaks facing the camera dead on, no actress, the real McCoy.
"I want what everyone wants," she says, voice like a length of chain on a tin roof, "a shot at something that endures, a chance to live, that's all."
The announcer boasting a cleft chin, ice blue pompadour the size of a souffle, and a voice that wouldn't run off steaming waffles, strains to look contemplative. "This woman has just purchased immortality."
What the hell?
"A trillion and she'll live forever. Genesistems, the leading innovator in digital technology, offers an analysis of every aspect of her personality, myriad tests, behavioral, physiological and psychological, the results of which are used to create a net program that will, with a certainty of 99.762 percent, recreate the woman's own reactions to any given situation. This they guarantee."
Karl smiles. Or what, your money back?
"...will be stored in vaults in three distant countries to insure continuation in the event of terrorism, war or natural disaster."
"So," Karl says, "even if everybody really alive dies, you can still go right on almost living. Where do I sign?"
"Some say it's selfish," Blue Hair says, "that you should spend this much to insure you will survive when there is so much else worthwhile that might be done with such a big chunk of change."
The old woman grins, "Oh, yes," she says, voice quivering with excitement, or senility, it's hard to tell, "Some people think so. My husband wanted to leave it to the kids and grandkids, but he's gone now. It's mine, I can do what I want with it."
"And what is it that you hope to do by outliving your body?"
She looks at the camera, eyes bleary, face grotesquely swollen, skin hanging loose and watery. A reaction to prednasone, Karl guessesruined lungs from a life spent sucking smoke.
She smiles, not a nice smile. "Whatever I want, what I've always wanted, I guess. There sure as hell won't be any way to stop me, will there? I don't expect God could even touch me then, could he?"
Suggestive smile a slash on his face, Blue Hair leans close, "And what might that be?"
Coquettishly, she smiles, and the effect is hideous. She says nothing, just smiles, and there above the cloud layer in the spring sunshine, Karl's skin crawls. Head throbbing, he pulls off the headset for the second time, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger to ease the throbbing in his head. He feels dirty, wants a shower. That was no sweet grandma. Maybe it's just sexual antics she plans, but he doesn't think sonot just. Old lady or no, that is one scary bitch.
Thinking, Karl reaches inside his jacket, strokes Bink under his chin, soft whiskers, teeth. Bink moans in sleep. So that's iteverlasting life, of a kind anyway. They've done it, beaten time, whipped the reaper. Though she'll die, she'll leave behind a simulation. To do what?
He sees it. God, but he's stupidof coursethe net. Without a body where else would they go? A mausoleum for ambulatory dead. Why not?
If he could only go home. This world is so nuts, so far over the edge, so far beyond redemption.... He's a foreigner here. He wants no part of this sickness, this insanity. He wonders if anyone else feels the same. Is he the only one who sees it for what it is? He takes a look in to find Bink already alseep in the warmth under his arm.
A good definition of insanity, thinking you're the only one who sees truth.Then he's nuts. The article is five years old. That means she's dead, got to be, and out there somewhere.
Net access? That's it? A trillion dollars and you can spend eternity in UR? An eternity in Disneyland? It's a small world after all, huh? It's never occurred to him hell would charge admission.
He reaches for the set, slips it back on.
He's got a lot to catch up on, after all, it seems.
Welcome back to the real world.
The bird sets Karl on the roof fifty stories up, thirty over the water. Same old place. Feet hitting cement, he smiles. Just like the old man to stay put through it all. L.A. a reef, half the state gone back to Mexico, why should Tate let any of it bother him? Stubborn SOB, always has been. It's one of the things Karl likes about him.
The bird lifts off, whipping hair in his eyes. He squints, watching it rise into clear sky. Roof door's locked. He tries a pass of his palm over the lock and it hums, opening. So he's still in the system. Unsure whether or not this pleases him, he starts down.
Inside, Rick looks up from his desk, sees him for the first time in half a decade. His face sours, "Oh God...."
Tall, good looking, to Karl he's just another faggot. "How are tricks, Rick?"
With a sigh, Rick rises, "Wouldn't you like to know." He minces to open the door. "Karl's here, Mr. Tate."
Karl smiles, passing inside, "Missed you too, Ricky."
With a venomous look, Rick closes the door silently behind him.
Tate waits behind his desk. "You two still oil and water, I see."
Karl shrugs, "Rick's still Rick. Why have you put up with him all these years?"
Tate shrugs, "If you weren't such a Neanderthal you'd see whyhe's good." He motions to a chair.
Tate's office is big, dark, coolsame as he remembers it. Same as he dreams about it. Stupid, dreaming about the office rather than the carport where it happened, but he does. He dreams he's called in to be sent out again. That's the nightmare makes him sweat. Now here he is.
"Cold in here," he says, stalling. Kept the same temperature winter and summer, cool and moistTate's skin demands it. That or it dries out, splits, bleeds. Picked it up in a covert op gone sour in some jungle somewhere around the turn of the century. Fungus. Hundreds of speciesall badalways there waiting. Nothing they can do.
Karl doesn't want to sit. He goes to the windows that wrap around the office, stands looking out, wishing he'd never come. Akibia, each leaf a hand, fingers hanging slack, trails down over the glass from planters above, giving the whole scene an underwater feel, as if tendrils are rills of water cascading over them. Then there's the view.
"Jesus...." Taking it all in, he doesn't want to move, to breathe, just wants to look, and keep on looking. He's always loved the view from here, but he'd forgotten the impact of it, the way it always hit him. Half Venice, half Shanghai, the platform towers hovering over a drowned city, water as far as he can see, it pulses with life, with movement. A city of water and hills since the Big Slip back in 2020, L.A. water surface sells one to one for what the land under it had. L.A. let a little thing a hundred feet of sea water dampen the party? Not likely.
Tate watches from his desk, amused. "Forget what it looks like?"
Thirty stories below, a stalled taxi holds up the file of boats crawling between junks, houseboats, floating restaurants. Raucous air horns drift up on the breeze. Hills gone, the traffic's no better, still just as slow, the air bad as ever.
It's beautiful, sure, staggeringly, even, but only from up here. At sea level it's the same citythe same elaborately decorated cesspool. "I haven't forgetten."
Senses alert, Karl waits as if a tiger squats across the room. He waits for it: the pitch, the hook.
"How was your trip?" Tate says, offhandedly, which is bull. Nothing he does is offhanded, not ever. Ten years working for Tate taught him that.
Karl shrugs, amazed just as he is every time he sees him. To anybody else, Tate would look like just another old man, harmless, bumbling even, everybody's grandpa. Looks lie. "Some turbulence over the bay." Stalling, that's all he's doing, circling, feeling for an opening, a weakness, for something to grab hold of. Then comes the take down.
Old eyes calculating, Tate peers at him over woven hands. "How about the traffic at LAX?"
Tate's aged. Karl wonders if he looks as bad. Stomach tight with anxiety, Karl wishes he would get on with it. "I'm here, what is it you want?"
Tate frowns in that way of his that could wring guilt from a saint. It's the way he works: seeding guilt, then reaping whatever it is he wants. Right now, what he wants is Karl. Under his hawkish gaze, Karl takes his usual place on the couch.
"Hate to bother you, Karl, you know that."
Karl doesn't, but nods anyway, runs a hand over the bronze reclining nude on the glass table next to the couch. Calf, thigh, belly, breast. His hand moves over glacial bronze, not thinkinghis habit during these interviews. "I'm not coming back, Magnus."
Tate perches on the front of his desk, pulls trousers up frail legs so as not to break the crease. "I didn't ask you to, did I?"
Motioning him back onto the couch with a hand from across the room, Tate starts his song and dance. Karl knows it, saw it for ten years. The same subtle, polite beginning that slides into something ugly. This feeble looking old man is anything but. Karl has seen him kill effortlessly.
Karl knows he should get up, get up now and go out the door. But here he sits, waiting for the hard push he knows is coming.
What can Tate want of him? Out of circulation five years, rusty, soft, stalehe's a lousy candidate for anything tougher than babysitting. He must have a new stable to draw from. Why him? It can only be one thing, but he wants to hear it. "Then why am I here?"
"Why?" Tate says, offended. "Isn't it just scarcely possible I might like to chat with an old friend, share a drink?"
Here comes the guilt. Even though Karl knows what he's doing, it still works. It's like watching a magician whose tricks you know inside and out and still being flummoxed by his sleight of hand. He's misjudged him, and he feels lousy about it, which, he knows, is just what Tate wants. "I guess it's possible." Is it, he wonders? "It's also possible the San Andreas will send a tsunami to wipe out the plats." Karl considers: Magnus with no ulterior motive versus the city of angels scoured clean in five circuits of a secondhand. He'll put his money on the wave.
"I was hoping we could sit, talk, you know, things old friends do."
Karl barely resists smiling.Tate wanting to chat, now that's rich. He must have something, something cinched tight as a rope around his neck. He can't feel it yet, but he will, oh, yes, he will. If he'd sent for him, it was there all right. What worries him is he has no idea what it is.
"You look as if you don't believe me, Karl."
How much of this can he stand? "I've got Bink waiting in a carrier on the roof and he doesn't like it. Let's just skip the part where we make nice and get to what it is you want."
Tate hoists himself up, sagging arms levering him away from the desk. "I was hoping you'd have a drink with me. I had some nouveau Beaujolais flown in from down under, I know how you appreciate it." He shrugs, lifts a bottle from the rack under the bar. "If you're in a rush, I understand. I can always send it home with Rick."
Karl hasn't tasted it in five years. The memory is stronger than the first dead ripe apricot on a warm June day.
Tate wrings out the cork, takes down two glasses. They ring in his hands.
He takes the glass, "I'm not in that big of a hurry."
Tate smiles, "Thought not." He takes one for himself, fills both as Karl watches, anticipation watering his mouth.
"I brought you in because I heard something and was worried about you, that's all."
Hair prickles on the back of Karl's neck. He should have known. No one leaves the agency, not as long as he has anything left to give. Wrung dry, they're put out to grass. With a niggling GS-7 pension and commissary privileges they mark their days. No one draws it long.
First choice is biting down on a shotgun barrel. A pile of neatly folded clothing on the high tide line of a winter rip tide beach runs a fashionable second.
It's a hard businessone not many can live without. Few have families. The traveling, the secrecy, the temptation all see to that. Turned out to grass, it becomes all too clear the job was all they had.
Karl's out and he'll stay that way, thank you. No one bedroom patio apartment in the valley for him. No damn way. Nothing Tate can say will change his mind.
"I've left you alone for five years, Karl. Don't think I haven't needed you."
Tate is scaring him. For him to be laying it on this thick whatever he wants must be plenty. "The people I get now have no tact, no subtlety. Bulls in a china closet, all, women the worst, and of course," he smiles as if enjoying an inside joke, "none of them have your talent."
He loads the word and Karl squirms uncomfortably on the couch, hand stroking cool bronze. He's never liked discussing it, doesn't want to, now.
If it weren't for his talent he would never have heard of Tate, the Agency, any of it. If it weren't for the talent he might have some sliver of a chance at what most poor slobs call happiness. As it is, no. Never has.
Not liking where this is taking him, he fights the urge to get up, get out. Nerves prickling, he watcheds Tate ease himself forward in his chair with a long groan. "I heard from a contact at EPA that your little Timbuktu falls inside the border of the new UN wilderness area."
Karl stops breathing, stops thinking. There it is, the sledge between the eyes.
"Oh, oh, I know, you're thinking I finagled this to bring you back in. I didn't."
Like hell he didn't. "So you say, but we both know you're a liar, don't we?"
Tate folds heavily veined hands carefully on spotless walnut that reflects the sheen of freshly manicured nails. He might have been praying. A mirthless up-tick at the corners of his mouth betrays rising ire. Karl sees it and is satisfied he's gotten to him. One for him. He'll take his soon enough. When hurt, Tate always gets his back, gets it in spades.
"They're shooting the line straight up the coastRussian River Gulch to Cape Mendocino to Crescent City. Foolishly I thought you might want to know. Obviously, I was wrong."
Karl's not listening.
This changes everything. It means moving off, giving up land his family homesteaded more than two hundred years before. Four square kilometers of spruce, alder slope, perennial pasture, reprod timber, not that he'd touch it. Tired, the land is. Over grazed, over cut, overused. It needs rest, and it'll get it. The old cabin is there still. A Duroc sow and eight wieners shelter in it now.
Land held for eight generations. Ponds filled from hillside seeps. Water cold enough to cramp your feet in August. Largemouth bass long as his arm. Coastal deer small enough to slip under the bottom wire of a cattle fence. Rolling hills long overgrazed where Sitka he planted twenty years before are just coming into their ownthe ones young deer haven't girdled polishing velvet. Apple orchard planted by his great grandfather, trees that give bushels of tart, crisp, russeted apples. Grimes Golden, Spitzenburg, Cox Orange Pippin, Ashmead's Kernel, they are all there. And others, apples with no name, cultivars forgotten. Apples that hang on until Christmas. Picked of a frosty morning, translucent at the core with sugar. Real apples. Trees that feed deer and porcupine with windfalls. Five acres of trees gnarled and bent with age and sea wind that whips up and over the cliffs with force enough to make flutes of hundred foot spruce.
When they are done, all sign of his family's two century tenure will be erased. With earth movers, with C-4, with a creed that equates man with smut. He's seen their work in Sonoma county. Little wart on the ass of the world: Valley Ford. Whole town, roads, houses, everything wiped away, turned back to nature. As if She wanted it.
Even the ponds will go, drained along with a spring he keeps open for deer during September dry spells. They will thirst or go elsewhere. It's the way of nature.
Last male scion of a family who herded turkeys over the hills to Scottsburg to meet the rail line. Hens and toms roosting nights in trees, gorging on fallen acorns, they made their way to market in San Francisco. The drives went with open range. He won't join them. He won't let them wipe away all he has, all he's done, all he is.
Across the room he watches Tate. He's got him. Tate's always known precisely where to find the artery, the pressure point. He's found his.
"Nice of you to tell me. Why not just put it in the cable, why make me come all the way down here to hear it?"
Tate pauses to take a long, slow sip of wine, swishes, swallows.
Tate's needling him. Karl refuses to take the bait. He must stay cool. Especially here. Especially now.
"I never could see broadcasting what I know from the rooftops. You know that. Besides, I may have a solution for you."
Sickeningly, Karl's heart leaps.
"A client came to see me. Daughter's in some trouble. She wants her kept safe, brought home."
Karl swirls tart new wine on his tongue, not believing. "That's it? Some spoiled brat with a tit in the wringer? I don't care whose poor little rich girl it is, I don't chase runaways, Magnus, you know that. You've sunk pretty low. I mean, come on, hire a dick for Christ's sake."
Tate nods, as if he'd expected this, slips some holograms out of his desk, spreads them over the desktop with wrinkled hands. He motions Karl over, "Come look at these." The reverence with which Tate handles them intrigues him. When he sees, Karl understands.
For Karl, time stalls. Up at him gaze angels. Not publicity shots, these are candid, not posedangels at rest. Perfection. Women of dreams, of fantasy, they draw him down until fighting, he tears himself away. A fist clenches his guts. "Sisters. When you said a daughter, I thought"
"I know what you thought." Tate's pleased with himself. "I thought a look would be enough." Old dog's face smiling, creased heavily enough to hurt. "I'll let our client tell you the rest."
Unable to resist, Karl reaches down, but before he can touch them, Tate slides them into a drawer. "I need you frosty on this one, Karl."
"You mean this client is their mother?" He's never thought of Sisters as having mothers, though he can't say why not.
Tate goes to the window. "This one's bad, Karl, bad as they come, maybe impossible. I don't know if I should have called you in. I'm desperate, that's all."
Karl watches his back, trying to decide if he's really struggling with something, or if it's just a performance.
"They're being murdered, Karl, and we can't stop it."
"Why isn't the FBI down there?"
"The plats are privately owned, out of territorial waters, sovereign, you know thatwe go by invitation only. On 66 they handle their own security, besides, they're only near-humanthat makes what's happening theft, not murder."
All this he knows. What disturbs Karl is that the faces in those holos aren't the faces of things. What they are he doesn't want to think about.
Tate goes back to his desk, falls into the oversize chair, leather moaning."I didn't want to call you away from your mountain, but I had no choice."
That's a new oneKarl doesn't buy it for a second.
"This client, she has juice, and she's using it all. She's in tight with some senators. Some dirt she has on them from way back, something sexual, I'm sure. With those old goats it usually is."
Tate rubs his temples between thumb and finger, looking tired. "Funding for the agency will be coming up in committee next month, and I've been getting the message that if she's not happy, we won't be either." Tate looks troubled. "I've got to tell you, though, Karl, if you were smart, you'd go out that door right now and never look back."
Tate's scared, and he doesn't scare. Uneasy, Karl glances at the door, refills his glass from the open bottle on the bar, thinking it over. Okay, so maybe he's a little bit pleased Tate called him in. That is pathetichim needing the old man's approval. Loathing himself for it, Karl sets down his glass, starts for the door. Let them come.
Boy president makes the fringe of the Greens into a law unto themselves, arms them, and sics them on cattle ranchers, loggers, on anybody living on the land, out of the cities. Hard to control, and not on the contributor lists, they're the new kulaks.
Arrogant cultural revolutionaries with ponytails and flachette carbines, semi-official, but not so close their abuses can't be disavowed, Greens are the perfect enforcement arm of an environmental policy reducing men to the status of noxious pests in nature's eden.
Their first attempts meet with fierce resistance as ranchers and farmers fight for their way of life with the single-shot rifles and shotguns the law allows them. The commander-in-chief, a man Voltaire might have called a hero, calls in napalm and whole towns evaporate in jellied flame. Mass graves are left marked by nothing more than earth mover tracks cracking in the heat of the sun.
Losing is a given, but Karl isn't afraid to die for what's his. But there's Mary, Melvin, and everybody else on the cape. Like him, they'll be pushed out. What right does he have to decide for them?
Hand on knob, Karl hesitates. He can go. But then he'll never know why he called him back. Now he can feel itthe rope around his neck. He leans, back to the door, "What do you want from me?"
"I'm going to let her tell you that. I've got Rick making an appointment right now." Tate stalls, examining his hands, which is odd because Tate never stalls. "You know Alandro?"
"Never met him."
"Came after you left, I guess. You would have liked him. Good, very good. Called in from the plat two weeks ago, watch this, now."
A face materializes in the air between them. "So far, I'm not doing much better than the others." Intelligent eyes Alandro has. He seems sincere, worried. Very worried.
"Can't get the subject to talk to me. As for the other thing, I don't like what I'm finding. In the week I've been here I've seen three of them strangled and three perps caught." He shrugs. "Sounds good, I know. It's not. Nothing changes. It just goes on and on." He searches for words, "It's as if they're actors in some vid that just step into the role and take over for the one we bust. And there are the other ones, the netpunks, come out of their trance to do lookout for an hour, then drop back out of sight. It's like some impossible conspiracy. I don't like it. Nothing about it feels right. This whole place gives me the meemies. For some reason I can tell I'm fooling nobody with this cover." He seems to shake off a shudder, "Tomorrow, same time." And he's gone.
Karl waits for Tate to say something else. He doesn't. "Where is he now?"
Tate shakes his head, "Gone."
Karl swallows, draining his glass, savoring its piquancy, bouquet so fresh he imagines he can sense the feet used to crush it, the oak vat, the odd leaf in the mash. He had no idea how much he missed this. It's not like Tate to be so tightlipped. "Come on, this is like pulling teeth, gone where, Tahiti, to pasture, insane, what?"
Tate goes back to examining his nails, "His liver we traced as far as Paris, a kidney to Perth, skin matching his DNA profile surfaced in a burn clinic in Quebec. His chip we found on the continental shelf with whatever else they couldn't use." Tate leans back in his chair, linking hands behind his head. "So, what do you say?"
Karl swallows, sets down his glass. His instincts tell him to run. Far and fast. "You know anybody that's still breathing?"
"I would have thought this was right up your alley, I mean it's got everything: murder, damsels in distress, your fixation with the underdog"
"Look, Magnus, just because I know this stuff exists doesn't mean I want to roll around in it like a dog in dung."
"I know how you were raised, but I thought knowing Sara you'd gotten over that."
He doesn't like it that he brings her up. "That's not it."
"Well, what is it, then?"
Feeling caged, Karl paces the office. He hates sitting, being still, hates it worse than most everything else about being here. "It's the whole thing, making these things, these dolls, these women, if that's what they are. Raising them to be the ultimate escorts. It's sick, it's lousy, the whole thing is. I want no part of it."
Again Tate lays the images out across his desk one by one, looks them over. He taps his lower lip with a finger, humming tonelessly, not a song. He never hums an actual tune, just kind of a loop, same melody round and round. Tate lifts one for Karl to see. "This onename's Deenawas found in her apartment. Right in the tower."
To Karl's puzzled look he says, "Oh, that's right, you've never been. Sisters Tower, it's out on 66. They live on the upper floors, security's very tight. She played harpsichord," he says, reading off the back of the holo, "harp, paintedoils, spoke, let's see, six, no, seven languages, worked in the home for kids of UR addicts in L.A.." He sets the picture face down on the desktop, squares it with a fingertip."Strangled, slowly, must have taken more than an hour is what Alandro said. You know what it must be like to die like that, Karl?"
Karl knows. He knows exactly, but he isn't talking about itnot to Tate, not to anybody.
Tate blinks and she appears in the air between them solid as flesh.
Karl looks closely at him, for the first time getting it. "You did it, you let them do you."
Tate's lost for a second, "Oh, you mean the implant, yeah, sure. Can't live without it, now." He smiles, "You're still out in the cold, huh?" He laughs, rasp on dry oak. "Luddite to the end. Look at her, Karl."
Karl looks, feels the pull of her, a force that in the flesh must have been ten times what he feels now.
"Look at that face. So she was made, was it her fault? Was it, Karl, I'm asking you?"
Karl can't look at those accusing eyes. He goes to the window, opens it, breathes in the stench of saltwater, kelp, sewage. It helps anyway.
Tate blinks and she fades, "Out of the original thousand there aren't sixty left alive. They select them now for compliance. Second and third generations aren't the same, spark's gone out, they say." Tate comes to stand beside him. "There's a fox in the hen house, Karl, and the farmer, he puts out milk."
This gets his attention. "Genesistems?"
Tate nods, "Every one gone weakens Auri's case."
Outraged despite his resolve not to be drawn in, Karl says, "You think they're in on it?"
"In on it, ordering it, looking the other way, what's the difference? They're dying and nothing's being done. Isn't that enough?"
Karl's lost and he knows it. Five years and he's just as much putty in Tate's hands as ever.
At his side, Tate watches him, "In ten years I never knew you to walk away from somebody that needed your help. You can't deny they need you."
Tate reaches to twist off one of the paper-like akibia blossoms, spins it between thumb and forefinger, looks up, face that of an old man. "Oh, I know what you're thinking." He sighs, "I don't know what human is, Karl. I'll leave the philosophy to you. All I know is if they're not, they're a damn good imitation. They're being raped and murdered like clockwork, one, sometimes two a day."
Tate slides wide the 50th story window, "Okay, so they're not first in the pew Sunday morning. They lead the lives they have to. They didn't choose to be born any more than you did. You want to let prejudice get in the way of doing anything about it, that's fine." Tate throws the flower out the window with a vicious flick of the wrist. Karl watches as it sails down and out of view against a sea flat as a table, green as the eyes of the dead Sister.
"I was wrong to drag you down here." Tate turns back to his desk, "A bird will be on the roof powered up by the time you get there. My best to your hogs."
The door beckons. Fifty paces to the stairs, up one flight to the deck and home. Simple as that. Easy. But to what? Tate knows damn well he isn't going anywhere.
Karl fills his lungs with L.A. smog laced with the tang of seaweed, shuts the window on the noise below, sits, "Tell me more."
Karl rents a car, one of the little golf ball three-wheeler jobs with the door in front made in one of the former Soviet states. Bink riding shotgun, they head south. Every time he takes off from a light, the little two-banger puts off a cloud of blue smoke that earns him dirty looks from drivers roaring around him as the little jitney rockets up to its maximum 58 clicks per hour.
Queuing up his headset, words glow neon in the air twenty feet in front of the little car's windscreen as Karl hums down the freeway on ramp dodging his way into the slow lane.
Search Completed: Genesistems: Occurrences: 52.
Jesus, so many?
This Digitally Mastered Immortals thing tugs at his mind. There's something about it, something he doesn't like.
He calls up one at random, gets a vid magazine: Nature: November 2023.
Surprised by the citation, he barks a profanity. Nature's still the big gun in science vids, still respected. Not expecting to understand it, he blinks, lets it run.
"For twenty years we've known of the potential for creating binary switches from complex inorganic molecules as well as various algae and bacteria."
He pauses the readback, consults a map on his thigh, "Speak for yourself."
"Biocom, Genesistem's much heralded next step in personal satcom technology, is the result of exhaustive fetal testing."
There's that name again.
"Effected through manipulation of germ cells, and thus affecting not only the offspring, but all future progeny, this patented gene sequence directs the body to form a microcomputer from its own nutrients in a microfilament structure acting both as satcom link and transceiver."
Karl listens, skin crawling.
"By reducing rejection to nil, Genesistem's Biocom is almost certainly the death knell of implant technology as we know it. Any future modification to the Biocom can be accomplished by genetic therapy, but will not affect offspring unless affected at the germ cell level. Spokespeople for the genetic multinational project distribution by late spring."
Numb, he drives, not seeing the lane in front of him, subconscious steering for him. How have things come so far so fast?
A passing transport honks and he jumps, knocking his head on the roof of the cramped little car. Forcing himself to go on, he cues up the news and one of the perfect hair guys, Karl can't tell any of them apart, pops up sitting in the slow lane, as if perched on the tailgate of the transport ahead.
"The dead are indeed with us, Jane. It seems more and more digitally-mastered personalities are showing up on the net. Recent advances in storage technology have brought a shot at immortality within reach of many of us. Some analysts believe as many as one percent of the avatars one is likely to meet in cyberspace are Digitally Mastered Immortals or DMI as they are called by the pioneers of this technology."
Exasperated, Karl sighs. No help at all. He gets the feeling he's wasting his time. Switching lanes to get a semi off his tail, he lets it run.
"In an unrelated story, today in Los Angeles the tenth victim in as many days was discovered in a state of extreme catatonia. Pathological analysis of brain tissue and tests for implant function have turned up no clues as to the cause for the malady, which has become commonplace in most of the world's major metropolitan centers.
Although the victims seem aware, they have lost the ability to move, speak or even eat, baffling doctors and implant technicians alike. While some believe it is just a temporary withdrawal from reality after too long in UR, others suggest it stems from a chemical imbalance in the brain, and liken it to the so called sleeping sickness prevalent over a century ago."
Karl cuts it off, tosses the headset onto the floor as the little car bounds like a jackrabbit over tracks and he struggles to keep it on the road. Winding up the drive to Auri's, it grinds its heart out at a breathtaking 37 kph. Looking out the window down at the macadam crawling by, he's sure he could use it for a scooter and do better.
Auri's house hovers at the edge of a rock-faced cliff near Laguna Nigel overlooking what is now oceanfront. Moneylots of it.
Rounding a curve, he's surprised to see a security station half hidden in the shade of a grove of Buddha Belly bamboo at the base of the hill. Standing on the brakes, he stops, jagged teeth of the tire rippers prodding the single front tire. God, he hates Russian cars. If there had been a nuclear OK Corral over the Cuba thing in the sixties, he's sure they would have missed.
Squinting as sun glints off sea at the base of the cliffs, Karl shades his eyes as a rent-a-jerk in dark blue comes to his window. "Nice car."
Smart ass. Karl shrugs, looking past him, taking in the view up the hill, "Gets me there." Oh, yes, money, an ocean of it. For landscaping, for this dick here, for all of it. Karl looks on up the hill, impressed. Nothing in plain sight. No heat, just polite orangutans in crisp blue, hands out of sight. Very high class.
"Name please?" He says it like he's bored, saving the charm for the next Mercedes.
"Latte."
He punches it into his tablet, "To see?"
"Auri Zerai."
Blue Shirt backs off a little like he thinks Karl might take out a pea shooter and start spraying. Sure. The guy still in the office smiles, hands out of sight. Karl smiles back, nods. He'd have maybe a couple seconds to live before smiley came out and settled his bill with whatever he's got under the counter. Something heavy, he guesses. Something that'd chew its way through the little dung beetle car and him and out the back without deforming.
The guy at his window talks into the air, holds out the tablet. Karl passes his hand over it wondering if the chip he hasn't used in five years will come up clean.
The tablet chirps contentedly. "Thank you, Mr. Latte. Number 20 on up ahead on the left."
Smiley sheaths the spikes and Karl chugs on in, leaving them choking behind him in his very own James Bond smoke screenfrom Russia with love. Take that, rent-a-cops.
He flogged the jitney up the long hill, past lawns smooth enough to prop a wine glass and not spill a sip, along a street perfect as money can make it. Not a place he'd want to live, but nice, he's got to admit that. Real nice.
For the second time he parks, then struggles out the door, which falls back on his shin. Kicking it open, he nearly trips scrambling out. He cracks the windows for Bink and slams the door, draws back a boot to kick in the door panel, but thinks better of it. No way's he paying a grand to punch out one of these lemons. Russia's revenge. What they couldn't do with ICBM's, they do with rolling cockroaches.
Up the walk to number 20. Along the way he ducks under eucalyptus hanging pendulous with crimson flowers big as dinner plates. Weird, the stuff they come up with. Say what you will about the geeks in rDNA, they've got imagination.
The front door, plate glass, opens before he gets there, and a guy with shoulders that must give him trouble with standard door frames blocks his way, right hand out of sight.
"Mr. Latte," he says, voice casehardened steelthat shiny, that hard. A second guy, this one a thin, cold fish type with black shades, leans behind a high teak counter, covering him with something. A twelve, he guesses. Perennial favorite, twelves, never go out of stylethe most spatter for your buck at room range. Karl stops, feeling the tension, making sure they can see his hands.
"Hey," he says, smiling his best I'm-just-a-regular-Joe-like-you smile, doing his best to put them at their ease. "Relax, will you?"
He fails. If anything, this seems to wind them up more. What's got them so keyed?
"I need you to verify your ID for us, please," the big one says. Karl waves his left hand at the screen and it comes up with his ID. One of his old ones, comfortable as a worn tennis shoe, as harmless, as mundane. He steps forward and they both tense up, the big one brings up an MP-5K, thick finger heavy on the trigger.
A boundary crossed: weapons out. Not good.
Karl raises his hands, gives the smile a few more watts, "What's the problem? You brought me up, your chums down the road liked me fine. I have an appointment, you know that."
The one behind the desk subvocalizes, talking to someone upstairs, Karl guesses. For ten seconds nobody moves.
"Will one of you guys talk to me, or are we posing for a still life here?"
Nothing. So much for humor. They're waiting. He's being chipped, recorded from all sides. He's got the uncomfortable feeling he's very close to dying. "So very sorry, but while we were checking him out he went for his gun." Work just fine with him room temperature. Need some vid to back them up, that's no problem eithersimple as the push of a key. The blessings of digital technology.
"Karl Latte to see Zerai," Shades says, not looking at the screen, not needing to, taking it off the implant in his head.
Karl raises two fingers, "Two o'clock, that's PM." Impatient, now, the novelty wearing off, he thinks maybe getting shot would be worth it to be out of here. How he hates L.A.
The lineman's eyes snap back, body tense, "You're heavy."
Karl shrugs, "It's licensed."
Was five years ago. It's not now. Karl's sure they won't check that deep.
"You can't go up hot," Shades says, then mumbles under his breath. The big one steps forward, short snout of the 10mm visible under his jacket, pit bull nosing out from under a silk sheet. "Hands out still," he says, reaching.
Biting his cheek, Karl does as he's told. The big guy takes his gun, leaving the speed strips hanging impotent as extra teats under his right arm.
The big man sets the cut down .44 on the counter like it's a dead mouse, butt dangling between sausage fingers, unimpressed. "That it?"
"That's it."
He grunts, cocks an ear. Karl's scanned again, comes up clean. Now they both relax. The snout of the MP-5 disappears. He even tries on a smile. "Sorry for the inconvenience Mr. Lotto," he says as the elevator vomits heavy artillery. Two file out trying to look as if they haven't been waiting. Taking no chances, it seems. Somebody's nervous. He still doesn't know why.
On the way up with the big man, Karl decides to see what he can find out. "What are you guys expecting here?"
He looks down at Karl, considering.
Karl has always been able to talk to people, put them at their ease. It's his ordinary face, his way of talking to people in their own language. He's been alone so long, he wonders if he's lost it. He hopes not.
The big man's face relaxes. "Hey, man, sorry about that down there, but we've been shot at a couple times on the way to her health club. Van tears out, lights off, pulls alongside. I stand on the brakes, do a bootlegger turn. We're having a good laugh about it when I look up and, hell if there isn't another one." He shakes a bulldog head, "We counted 528 pocks in the limo. Somebody's pretty damn serious about ventilating the old frail."
With protection like this, Karl's sure she'll live to get frailer still.
"You're another PI she's hiring to step-n-fetch it on that big court case of hers, am I right?"
Karl shrugs, "You got it. Bill's got to be paid. Guy can't be too choosy."
He snorts triumphantly with an uncanny similarity to one of Karl's hogs, "Knew it."
The door slides open, and looking forward to meeting the woman somebody's so eager to kill, Karl steps out.
A small, dark woman waits, hands clasped over flat chest. Greeting him with worried eyes and a nervous smile, she leads him through a maze of elegant rooms. Following her, Karl thinks of a mouse scurrying in its burrow.
On a balcony overlooking the sea, Auri waits, arm slung over the back of her chair. Shoulders bare by a clinging shimmer of a dress, her gaze reaches out over the sea. Eyes vacant, she caresses the underside of a hanging branch of Myrciaria with a long index finger. Hair the color of the heavy platinum bracelet on her wrist, she waits. Does he see silver in that perfection of disarray? He can't be sure. It might be reassuring to find flaw amid such icy perfection.
Without turning, she says, "Sit." Her voice is dark, husky, at shocking odds with the delicate beauty of the woman before him. It carries with it the musk of sex, the sound of age.
At the door, the wren-like woman waits, eyes on her master, hands wrung before her.
"Bring us something cold, Carmen," Auri says, and for an instant the dark woman meets his gaze. Her lips part, lines forming at the corners of wary eyes. For an instant he thinks he sees something therehate? concern? He gets the feeling she wants to say something to him, but then diffidently, her eyes drop and she goes inside, taking her sense of unease with her.
If he could have thought of an excuse he might have touched her. Dismissing the puzzle of her gaze from his mind, he examines Auri, figuring her age. Thirty, thirty-five, no more. Beauty fading, but still very much there, potent, high amperage. A hyacinth past its prime, perfume still exquisite.
Neither of them speak as they wait for the small woman to return. Is this silence an attempt to make him uncomfortable? If so, it fails. She may have more juice than an overripe valencia and the climactic oral ejaculations of every senator on the hill on chipwhat of it?
If she has anything to say, she'll say it.
Fascinated, he watches her stare out to sea three quarters turned away. He's seen her before. What he doesn't know is where.
A dark zephyr, the woman slips in, sets tall glasses before them, avoiding his eye. Gliding out, she shuts the glass door tight behind her, and for a fragment of a second glances up. The look in her eye leaves Karl disturbed.
Auri turns, lifts a glass with an elegant arm. A doe is what she reminds him of. A doe with the eyes of a panther.
She sips. "Try it, I think you'll enjoy it."
He drinks, and a succession of flavors hits him one upon the next. Lemon, papaya, mango, kiwi, jelly melon, finally apricot. Unable to keep up, he can't be sure. It leaves him craving more. "What is it?"
She smiles, a tired smile. He notices her eyes. Sad, jaded, with gravities of their own, they tug at him. She watches to see their effect. Immune, he stares back. Nice eyes, if he cared about women's eyeshe doesn't.
When she sees he's out of her reach, a frown crosses her face, bringing a gaggle of lines out of hiding. With an incline of her head, she smiles, "How old would you say I am?"
Okay, here we gothe question. Why lie, who is she to him, anyway? Just the only chance he's got, that's all. He doesn't like tests. He knows how hard women like Auri work to look the way they do. Money no object, time no object, suffering, denial, painthey'll endure it all. Any sins they could ever possibly commit are more than atoned for by the years of hell they endure watching themselves fade. He pities them. Because he resents being tested he adds ten years. "Forty."
Head back, she laughs in triumph. "Sixty," she says, savoring the look on his face. "I'm going to be the sexiest damn corpse this city's ever seen."
He watches her, feeling an overwhelming sadnessfor her, for any woman who fears aging as much as she must to endure what she has. Revulsion, too, for the vanity, the self-absorption. There's something ludicrous about a woman, even this one, trying to look half her age.
"You don't know who I am, do you?"
He gets the idea she expects him to. "Should I?"
She shrugs. "Forget it."
Karl sets his glass down. He's had enough. Of her and the overly sweet drink. "You going to tell me why I'm here?"
"Tate told me we might be able to help each other."
How much more did he tell? "And?"
"We discussed your problem, I've spoken with some people." She sips her drink, swallows, slender throat moving. "Consider it solved."
Too easy. When things are too easy he gets nervous. "That's it?"
She shrugs supple arms, "Sure. I see a barely noticeable little island in the midst of the wilderness, for safety's sake. Somewhere to see the land as it once was, still in the hands of the original homestead family, bla, bla, you can fill in the rest."
"The hell, you say."
"I can sell it."
"Look, I'm not some freak to be gawked at by a bunch of New Agers. I'd rather blow the place myself than live in a fish bowl."
She continues, unperturbed, "I think perhaps bed and breakfast in an original log cabin would be worth a thousand a night. Of course, they would have to hike in from Scottsburg, what, a good two days, three, maybe, or south from Ferndale about the same distance. No, I don't suspect they'd be lined up around the block, do you?"
Karl smiles, picturing the ten by twelve cabin turned from sty into historical hotel of one cramped room, outhouse in back. The money wouldn't hurt, assuming there were anyone foolish enough to pay it. It would more than make up for the inconvenience.
"You don't know yet if I can help you."
She smiles again, and he can see the years in the hollows of her cheeks. Lifts, tucks, acid washes can only do so much. The temples, the backs of their hands gave them away. A fragile look to them, the look of an apple kept too long.
She reaches for a joint in natural wrapper. One of the expensive ones grown without pesticides in one rain forest or other. She lights it, slides the pack along with the lighter across the glass table top for him, inhales deep, holding it. "Oh," she speaks soto voce, "he told me about your talent, and if anyone can, it's you." Long and slow, she exhales, eyes closed, waiting for the surge of THC. She notices the pack, untouched on the glass, "Too early for you?"
Brooding about Tate, he waves them away. That's the first time Tate has told anyone as far as he knows. The first time he's betrayed Karl's trust. He wants to know why.
She leans forward, eyes intent, "Is it true you read minds?"
First time in twenty years he's had to answer that, and he's not happy about it. The freak show he's spent his whole life running from. She has no idea how it feels. He knows that, but it doesn't help. He's close to walking outskin close. "It's true."
She holds out her hand, palm up, "Do me, please, I want you to."
Rage surging, he stands, hands fists to stop them trembling, "Want your palm read, go to a carnival."
Slowly, she draws back her hand, "Sensitive, are we?" Hard eyes appraising, she leans back, takes a long hit. "Sit down." Not a request.
He looks at the door, finds it closed, curtains drawn. He can go, get away from her right now and lose everything he's got, or he can sit and listen. What he can't do, won't do, is put up with any more sideshow crap. He wants to leave, wants it so bad the soles of his feet itch.
He sits. "I don't do that, I never do that. Not for you, not for anybody."
She waves away smoke, "No need to be touchy, I meant no insult."
Nerves ratcheting down a notch, he breathes. She can't know how it makes him feel. "So," he says, "you know all about me, what I need, what I do. What is it you think I can do for you? It isn't like you don't have enough hired help."
She laughs, a handful of pebbles tossed into a pool. The water's cool, he can tell. She coughs long and desperate, coughs as if she'll never stop. He sits up, wondering what he can do to help, but she motions him back, gasping. "I'll be fine." She chokes it out, flicks her joint away over the balcony down to the seaa butt a netpunk downtown would take a chance getting run over for. "All the beef," she goes on, voice raw as if she'd gulped sulfuric, "Tate's idea. Last week on the way back from the gym some kid took a shot at us. Just boredom, I'm sure, just L.A.. I'm nobody any more."
She moves to stand at the rail, back to him. She's tall, taller than he is by a hand. In spite of himself, he's impressed.
"That's right, you don't know, I have to keep reminding myself. You don't know anything about me." She says it like it's a miracle.
The sun sags dangerously close to the sea. Through the thin dress he sees her silhouette. She must be lying about her age. Must beno woman looks like that at sixty. "Okay, so I'm ignorant, so tell me something."
She takes a long breath, lets it go. "Forty years ago I was the highest paid model in the worldfor a while."
Now he remembers her.
She shrugs, "Life was fast. New love every other week, more money than I could spendnot that I didn't try. We had to be thin, thin, thin. Look at the magazines sometime from right around the turn. W, Vogue, Glamour, Bazaarthey made us up like we were beat up. We all had huge bags under our eyes from the drugs, the dieting, the way we livedlike alley cats."
She laughs. "Why? I don't think I knew, except that it was expected. And we were all so desperate never to disappoint anyone. Oh, I know, it doesn't make any sense to you. You can't see how it was."
She turns, eyes intense, "Imagine yourself, twenty, knowing nothing, practically illiterate I was, making more in a month than most people make in their lives. I'm suddenly rich. Rich, and I don't deserve any of it. I see the other girls. They're better looking, their boobs are bigger, their legs better, hair better, none of these damned freckles. And here I am making as much as all the rest of them put together. The agency's making its payroll off meI'm keeping them afloat. It's all on my shoulders.
"Every girl I meet would cut my throat with a smile if she thought it would get her a job, just one job. Every man wants to do me, and when I let them, they can't wait to talk about it. Even the ones I don't say I did. And every time I find one I can talk to, one who's not always trying to handle me, he's gay! Never fails, every damned time!"
She laughs, taking the rail in her hands and falling forward, hair skimming tile.
"We were young, we could survive anything. We became as bad as they were, used them so they wouldn't use us first. It was a race to see who could be the biggest bastard." She laughs, a despairing sound, "I usually won. But the eyes.... I look at us now, and even with the makeup we looked so sad, so tired."
Across from him she sits, leans forward at the waist, arms reaching across the table. "Do you have any idea what it was like to be so popular, so sought after, and the whole time knowing you're a fake? Knowing that everything about you, everything they adore, desire, isn't really you? Do you know what that does to you? Do you?"
He can guess.
"Nothing anyone can say helps. The most sincere compliments are insults. You can trust no one. Agencies, boyfriends, agents, brokersall pigs. They all stole from me. All of them."
He wonders where this is taking them.
"I'm coming to it, getting that?"
Confused, he looks around the veranda, "What?"
She stares, then smiles, shaking her head at the absurdity. "Tate wasn't lying, you really aren't wired."
"Just a minute, I've got it off." Embarrassed, he reaches back to switch on his set, fumbling clumsily as she watches, wearing a condescending smile. "Okay, I'm ready."
The glasses come alive, the sea, sun, sky, fading. Several blonds and a brunette lounge on a bed in garters, stockings, heels, teddies. They move as they're directed from someone off scene. Silk rustles. "Tabby," a man says, voice unctuous, "lie back, there. Now Neena, up, up, no, back. There, now, pout, more pout, baby. You're unhappy, but seductive. I want more, Auri, give me more, uh huh, oh, good, good."
The girls look weary, youth squandered, like women twice their age. Cheeks hollow, they seem used up. So lovely, yet what he sees in their eyes is what he's seen in stills of Dachau. Impossibly slender hips and legs, breasts swollen out of all proportion, they pose, looking more like painted children than women, exuding the razor-sharp tang of sex.
Auri cuts the sound, stills the women, snaps long fingers in the air for attention. "There I am, the one on her knees. Can you tell?" Her eyes search his face, gauging his response to an image of her from the year he was born.
He can.
"The one in black stockings," she says.
He sees a painfully slender girl with long straight hair, a girl with excruciating eyes.
"The othersall dead," she says, "Neena, the one in the heels, starved herself. The blond on the edge of the bed, TabbyGibley's and Seconal. The auburn haired girl, Tatia, on her yacht after a party, took a swim alone at dawn. So they said. They never found her. The last, the prettiest of all of us, Morgan, did a swan dive off a rooftop helipad eight, no," she looks up, figuring, "nine years ago, now." She blanks the image.
Stomach still burning from the ghosts on the bed, he's once more on the terrace, Auri across the table, breeze carrying the scent of the sea.
Unsmiling, she looks hard into his face.
"I'm the last."