Mountain of Black Glass (57 page)

 

The piece in the gallery window had caught her eye, and she was standing in a ray of sunshine, squinting against the glare and wondering whether she shouldn't be wearing sunblock, when her pad beeped.

The artist had taken a group of little builder toys—the kind you could buy in any souvenir store or on most street corners—and put them into an intricate grid made of glass pipes. But what gave the piece its jolt was that he had supplied them with building materials too large to be manipulated within the narrow confines, thus frustrating the monomaniacal automata completely.

Is that supposed to be some comment on modern life?
she wondered. The pad beeped again, this time with a second tone—a priority signal. She felt her heart speed a little. She felt pretty certain she knew who it was.

He was not transmitting visuals, but his voice, even with slight distortion, was unmistakable. “I have to talk to you.”

She stilled the hammer of pulse as best she could. Why did he have this effect on her? It was like something at the pheromone level, if pheromones could travel over satlinks from Colombia to New York, something subliminal that made her feel she was being stalked by an interested male despite the lack of any outward signs. Whatever the cause, it was something she could not understand and did not entirely like.

“I'm outside at the moment.” She couldn't assume he was getting visuals on his end. “I've got you on my pad.”

“I know. Go home. I need to talk to you now.”

The voice was flat, and Dulcie bristled at the tone of command—one of her early stepfathers had tried the Dad Voice on her, as she thought of it, and had received permanent contempt as his reward. But she had another response as well, a more placatory urge. He was her employer, after all. He was a man used to dealing with men—stupid men, or at least men who needed to be ordered around, from what she'd seen. And was that an undertone of real need in his words, something he did not want to let her see? Was that why he had blanked the picture?

“Well, you've probably saved me spending a lot of money,” she said, keeping her tone light. The little builders in the gallery window were trying to get a stainless steel pin around an S-bend in their pipette, something that wasn't physically possible for them, but they weren't giving up; she had a feeling if she came back the next day they'd still be shoving the same pin at the same bend, still without result. “I was about to indulge in some serious shopping . . .”

“I'll call you in thirty minutes,” he said, and was gone.

 

The palm-reader at the main street entrance was even slower than the one on her own door. The thing was ridiculously old, and miserable in chilly weather when you had to take off your glove to operate it.

As she wrestled her bags through the door, someone called a greeting to her. She looked up to see the guy with the artistic haircut who lived a few doors down from Charlie, waving as the elevator door hissed closed.

Every time she wondered about the life she had chosen for herself—hurrying home on a Friday evening, not to get dressed to go out somewhere, but to take a call from an international terrorist—she thought of how pleased her mother would have been to see her hooked up instead with somebody like Mister Elevator Wave, and it all fell back into perspective. She knew that type only too well. He would be big on personal freedom when it came to things like getting his own way—oh, the Bohemian clichés that would be flung around then!—but it would be quite a different story if someone was having a loud party upstairs when he wanted to work, or if she wanted to go somewhere he didn't.

Dulcie waited for the elevator, hating a man with whom she had never spoken.

But the thing was, she thought as she got out on her own floor, what other kind of man was she going to meet? She worked too hard, even when she was on the road, and when she came back to New York she barely ever had the energy to go out. Was that her range of options—criminals and neighbors?

Even someone like Dread, someone who was at least
interesting
—how could you have a relationship with someone like that? It was stupid. Even if there had been a spark of some kind, even if her own strange feelings were in any way reciprocated, what future could there be?

Still, even a fling had its attractions.

She stood waiting for her own door to recognize her, wondering if she'd gone too far now ever to turn back, to be a normal person. Was it just the adrenaline? Surely she could get that somewhere else—skydiving, jaywalking on freeways, something. The whole thing had seemed so exciting when she had first started, but that's what people always thought before everything went bad. Dulcie wasn't stupid: she knew that. Was it all worth it?

It was the dreams that were unsettling her, she told herself as the door grudgingly decided to let her in. The bad dreams. There was nothing very mysterious about them. Her little cocker spaniel, Nijinsky—her mother's choice of name; Dulcie had called him “Jinkie”—the one who had been hit by a car when she was ten, was suffering. She didn't know how or why exactly (in the dream there was no car, no blood on the little dog's muzzle as there had been in real life) but she knew she had to put Jinkie out of his misery. “End his suffering,” as her mother had said. But in the dreams there was no veterinarian's office either, no smell of alcohol and pet hair. In her dreams she had a gun, and as she touched the barrel to the little dog's head, he rolled his eyes toward her without seeing, responding only to the feeling of the metal bumping against his skull.

It didn't take a Park Avenue specialist to tell Dulcie what the dream was about, that it was not Jinkie she was dreaming about, but a Colombian gear monkey named Celestino. She had been pleased with herself for how easily she had done the deed—a neat, quick performance, like swatting a spider with a rolled-up newspaper—and she had been proud of how little it had affected her. But night after night she saw Jinkie's small body trembling with fear as she approached. Night after night she woke up sweating, calling for the lights in a shaky voice.

It happens, Anwin,
she told herself.
So you thought you'd get off lightly—you didn't. But the world is full of innocent little children getting killed every day, starved, raped, beaten to death, and you're not losing sleep over them. Why worry about a lowlife like Celestino? He was putting every other person in that operation at risk. You were a soldier, and he was a risk to everyone. You did your job.

Which might be true—she wasn't quite sure anymore—but there were moments, especially at two in the morning, when the idea of working for a normal company and being married to a man whose idea of wild behavior was making love on the living room couch instead of in the bedroom seemed to have its charms.

Packages shed, Jones purring in and out around her ankles, Dulcie made herself a drink. She was irritated with herself, both for her self-indulgent mood and for hurrying home just because Dread had ordered her to. She had just finished adding soda to the scotch when the calm voice of the wallscreen announced a phone call.

“I'll be brief,” he said when she opened the connection. Whatever he had been doing lately, whether online or in Cartagena, must be agreeing with him: he looked sleek and happy, like a well-fed panther. “First, expand for me a bit on your report.”

“The virtual object—the lighter?” She took a sip of her drink, trying to summon her thoughts. She should have gotten her notes up directly on coming through the door, but a schoolgirl rebelliousness had sent her to the scotch first. “Well, as I said, it's hard to tell without having the object in its matrix to experiment with. It's a very nice simulation of an old-fashioned lighter . . .”

He waved his hand dismissively, but did not lose his grin. She wondered why he seemed so speedy—from what she knew of the shared account, an account she had not used recently because he was so busy with it himself, he was in the network about sixteen hours a day or more, which must be exhausting. “I know I didn't make it easy for you,” he said. “Don't waste my time with the obvious—I've got your report. Just explain what you mean by ‘can't reverse without breaking the hard security.'”

“It means I can't reverse-engineer the thing just from the copy I made.”

“You made a copy?” The snap of sudden chill was familiar now, but it didn't get any more pleasant.

“Look, this thing of yours is hot, in more ways than one. It's a live object. I can't just bang on the buttons until something happens, especially if you don't want anyone to know you've got it.”

“Go on.”

“So I had to copy it off to my system, where I've got the tools. Not that it was easy—I had to crack about five levels of encryption just to get the low-level functions to replicate. But there are levels beyond that I couldn't copy—couldn't even access. I'm going to have to do some major work just to get to them.”

“Explain to me.”

His tone was more agreeable now. She liked that. He
did
need her. There was a reason her price was high, and she didn't want him to forget that reason. “This thing is at root an effector—it sends positional information out, and interprets what comes back from the matrix. That's just for the low-level functions, like moving the user through the network. Basic stuff. Actually, strictly speaking, I guess you should call it a ‘v-fector,' since all the information it deals with is about a virtual space. It's not describing the user's real position, just their position within the network. Right?” She hurried on as he nodded. “But with this system, nothing is simple, and certainly not access to even the most basic kinds of information. See, we found out a long time ago that most of the network is security-banded, to keep users who aren't owners from doing anything they shouldn't. So even the positional information coming to this device from the matrix is shielded—it's like with those areas around top-secret military test grounds in the real world, where you can't buy a map anywhere for miles because they don't want people trying to figure things out from what's shown and what's not shown. To be able to get that information, I'll have to pretend I'm one of the people who's supposed to receive it—and I'm guessing that's only these Grail people. They all have passwords or some other kind of access, and I have to learn how to mimic that, especially if you want me to mess with the protocols enough to show it inactive while still keeping it active.”

“So what you're saying is that it needs more work.” His expression was distracted, as though he was adding this information to a much larger whole. “You need more time.”

“Yeah.” She hoped he didn't think she was just stalling. “I did manage to find a way to corrupt the telemetry, which means that even if someone tries to turn it off before then, the system won't be able to find it. I've sent you the instructions on how to do it. But after you do it, you won't be able to use the thing until we switch it back. If the telemetry is wrong, none of the other functions will work right either. For all intents and purposes, once you change those settings, you have a dud effector.”

Dread nodded. “I see.”

“Whoever this belonged to must be an idiot,” Dulcie said, pleased to have reestablished her credentials. “Either that, or it's taking them a hell of a long time to realize it's missing. They could have found the device any time if they'd tried. I mean, it's a hot v-fector, for God's sake—it's just been sitting there waiting for the network to ask where it is.”

“Then maybe I should do what you said—change the telemetry. I'll think about that.” He cocked his head as though listening to faint music. The smile came back, but it was a bit more natural this time, less stretched and gleeful. “I've got some other important things to discuss with you, Dulcie. I'm closing down the Cartagena office. ‘Sky God' is now officially boxed, and the Old Man's got some other jobs he wants me to do.”

She was still nodding, but caught by surprise. Both relief and loss were pulling hard on her at the thought that this man would be leaving her life. She opened her mouth but for a moment could think of nothing to say. “That's . . . well, congratulations, I guess. It's been a pretty wild ride. I'll finish up my work on the v-fector and send it along. . . .”

One of his eyebrows crept up. “I didn't say
my
project was finished, did I? Just that I'm closing down the Cartagena office. Oh, no, there are a lot of loose ends I still have to deal with.” The grin, flashbulb-white this time. “I want you to come to Sydney.”

“Sydney? Australia?” She could have kicked herself for saying something so stupid, but he did not waste energy with the obvious put-down, waiting instead for an answer to his request—a request that suddenly seemed to her far more complicated than she could easily understand. “I mean . . . what do you want me to do? You . . . I haven't used the sim for a week or so.”

“I need your help,” he said, “and not just with this device. This is a very complicated project I've begun. I want you to . . . help keep an eye on things.” He laughed. “And then I can keep an eye on you, too.”

She flinched, just perceptibly, but there was none of the menace in his voice he had used when warning her to keep her mouth shut. A thought came to her, a surprising, frightening, altogether overwhelming thought.

She covered her confusion with another long, slow sip of her scotch and soda. Could that even be true? And if it was, would she be a fool to go? He fascinated her in a way no one else had—would she be a fool
not
to go?