Black Glass (23 page)

They drank. Licorice flavor on top; underneath were herbs he wasn’t sure of. Was that what wormwood tasted like? Interesting aftertaste ... and a glow, in his belly. Two more shots, and the glow spread, the image of Monroe’s death receded. He seemed to feel all the train’s parts, working together; had a mental image of small green creatures turning cranks inside the train, making the wheels turn, laughing in rhythm with the train’s wheels ...

He laughed, too, and was aware of Zilia grinning at him, her head slightly wobbling with the motion of the train. “Look at that. Rick Candle laughing. Don’t see that often.”

“I was imagining ... never mind.” The glow inside him seemed to expand, to fill the small industrial space around them. It occurred to him that the train was like the engine of civilization and they were man and woman hurtling along inside it, to an unknown destination. Who had laid down the tracks for the
engine of civilization? He snorted. “Absinthe gives me oddball thoughts.”

“Good, then it’s working. Have another.” She handed him the flask, and pulled off her hoody. Underneath, just a torn T-shirt, faded.
Resurrection Poets, Life in Death
, was printed on the T-shirt, and an image of a laughing skull with a full head of lush black hair and eyeballs and lipstick painted on its teeth. Something was moving across Zilia’s skin, down across the back of her shoulders—a squid, tattooed in blue and green and pink, its tentacles pumping, swimming in that backwards way they had, across a place on her upper back laid bare by a rip in the T-shirt. It moved from one shoulder blade to the other, and back. “Do you have a moving tattoo or am I hallucinating?”

“You’re not hallucinating, there isn’t that much thujone in this absinthe.”

“I’ve seen posters with motion on them but ... not this. Nice looking squid.”

“That’s Gams the squid. She’s an image in nanosize light-nodes. You can’t see it most of the time but my face is in there where her beak is supposed to be. I can run a shifter over it and change it to two other pictures. There’s a transsexual mermaid and a goldfish smoking a pipe. I was in an aquatic phase.”

“It almost looks three dimensional ...” He found himself reaching to touch the squid.

“See if you can feel the squid’s body,” she said, with a straight face.

He touched her skin, warm and elastic, where the squid was—and the tattoo darted away, wagged a tattoo’d tentacle at him reproachfully, glaring. He laughed. “Appears that Gams doesn’t approve of me.”

“The hell with her. Touch the tattoos on my breasts ...” She pulled off her I-shirt.

“I ... don’t see any tattoos.” Her breasts were neither large nor small. There was a small mole on the right one.

“Those are tattoos of nipples. If you touch them they’ll run away too.”

He touched one of them lightly with the edge of his thumb. The nipple stiffened. “Not going anywhere.”

“My breast tattoos must’ve moved to another part of my body. Tell you what ...” She took a quick swig of her drink. “See if you can find them ...”

In a moment they were kissing. They undressed, barely interrupting a long, long kiss to do it. He saw that her hips were a bit improportionately wide; he liked that.

It was difficult, peeling their clothing off in that small space, with the train vibrating around them, but they managed, and somehow—she was nimble, adroit—she was facing him, nude, clambering aboard him, into his lap, her legs clasping his bony hips, her knees raised, and then he was inside her, and they were coupling, the motion of the train merging perfectly with theirs. The train picked up speed ... hurtling down the tracks ... its parts all working together ... and they were a soft machine inside, with their own piston, their own smoothly interacting moving parts ...

The train stopped accelerating, and, on a long straight stretch of track, kept going, going and going, chugging at the same speed, wheels turning ... moaning with the contact of metal rims on rails, roaring through the world ... on a track laid down by no one knew who ...

When Candle came, the orgasm was actually more painful than pleasurable. But it was a relief.

Four years,
he thought.

“Sykes?”

Grist waited, hoping for a response. Not wanting to press it because a Filipina nurse with brittle black eyes was watching him narrowly from the doorway.

Sykes didn’t respond. He lay there, looking hopelessly beached, his breathing barely visible, in a king-sized bed in the Slakon Private Care Hospital. An oxygen mask hid much of Sykes’ face; his eyes were mostly closed, just slitted, seeing nothing. Sensors taped to his arms transmitted to monitors that beeped with dull regularity to one side. A mini-MRI scanning arm leaned vulture-like over the bed.

No one had sent any flowers, Grist noticed. He’d have some
sent. Sykes could come out of this and it’d be good to soften him up so he cooperated. Especially considering the way he’d threatened the engineer.

Maybe I do resort to threats too often, Grist thought.

“Has he said anything?” Grist asked. When there was no answer he glanced at the door, saw the nurse had gone. He went around closer to Sykes. Leaned close, smelling antiseptics, blood, sweat. “Sykes? We know it was Benson who shot you, we got him on cameras all over the facility. He say
why?
Come on, he must have said something. Like who sent him to take the Multisemblant. He tell you that, Sykes? He say where it went and what they wanted with the fucking thing? I don’t mean to overwhelm you with questions, there, Sykes, and I know you’re all doped up, but you’re going to have to–”

“Leave that man alone!” came the woman’s barking voice from the door.

Grist straightened so suddenly his back hurt. “Listen there’s an investigation–”

“You’re not a police officer,” the nurse interrupted, matter-of-factly, bustling into the room.

“I’m the guy who owns this hospital and I–”

“The hospital is owned by stockholders,” she said sharply, tinkering with the tubes going into Sykes’ nose. “You’re a big shot, fine, then get me fired. But while I’m here you’re not going to harass a man who’s ... as sick as this one.”

She had stopped short of saying,
A man who’s on the point of death
. In case Sykes was listening more than he seemed to be.

Grist toyed with the idea of getting her fired, as a matter of principle. He knew that she knew who he was; that there was a seething background resentment in the middle class against the Fortune 33; against Slakon and the New Monopolies. People rarely dared to speak up directly, anymore, about corporate power. But the resentment thrived like rats in a sewer. Maybe it was time for a new PR campaign.
We’re all family—and we know we need you, the way parents need their children ...
No, too patronizing.

What about the Multisemblant? Who had it and why? They hadn’t been able to trace Benson’s most recent calls. They’d been hacked, blanked out.

Street cameras had lost Benson a quarter mile from the lab. Americans had held out against the kind of uniform street surveillance cameras that had become normal in the UK and Canada; in Japan and China and Russia. America’s streets, at least some of them, though haunted by drone cameras and ATVs, were the last bastion of privacy. He was going to have to militate harder with his people in Congress, to get that overturned. They needed those cameras in place.

He watched the nurse injecting some clear fluid into Sykes’ IV and wondered: Who had stolen the Multisemblant? Hoffman? Someone from Microsoft, maybe? They’d been sniffing around. The countries that Microsoft had bought in Central America, to create their nationalized corporate headquarters, were said to have spies all over North America.

Grist growled to himself and turned away, strode down the hallway, wondering if he should have his bodyguards stick closer to him.

“This all my stuff you got?” Danny asked, poring through the plastifiber box in Spanx’s musty closet, a flashlight in his left hand, his right hand rummaging. “You didn’t fucking
sell
any of it did you?”

“Sell what? Like you had anything worth selling, nothing gelling, oh well oh welling, Mr. Wanxenheimer,” Spanx said, from somewhere behind him.

“Oh so if there was anything worth selling you’da sold it?”

“No, I told you–” This was followed by a litany of complaints and resentments which Danny tuned out. Under a copy of
Essential Works of Baudelaire
Zilia had given him, and snuggled up with a pair of multiply-holed
Intestine Town
socks, was the memstick he was looking for. He’d forgotten about it—pushed it out of his head with all thoughts of the court case, Rick’s going to jail—until Rick getting out had prompted thoughts of Maeterling and the software deal they’d been working on when the skim-scam bit them in the ass.

Danny picked up the memstick, toyed with it, admiring its translucent blue-green color, like beetle’s wings. Seemed intact.

He considered the rest of the contents. An old drive that had some even older songs on it; a holo-cube award certifying a million tune downloads, a couple of antique .45 bullets missing their gun; a sheaf of lyrics; a bent headset microphone that probably didn’t work; a flattened Jerome-X cap; an empty
Absolut Absinthe
bottle, full when he’d swiped it from Zilia’s place; those socks ...

He smiled, remembering his three months doing music for the
Intestine Town
Mesh cartoon. Scoring the animated adventures of strangely witty germs in crap and mucous; germs earnestly building houses out of undigested bits of corn. “Now, that’s comedy,” he said. Too bad he’d gotten fired, it’d been a lucrative gig.

“
What’s
comedy, hode, your story about why you don’t owe me money, is that comedy? Because I’m gonna tell you it’s all shitter-shatter and I’m not laughitating or chuckifying and I’ll tell you something else–”

“You know what, Spanx? Don’t! Just don’t! Now listen: we going to have rehearsal or not? Is the beat-jock coming or what? Or not and or what?” The beat jock played out the beats and rhythm guitar tracks with sample loops, triggered sounds.

“I told him come but maybe he’s not over his operation yet. Maybe he won’t show. I got the last set we used all on a stick, we don’t need him for rehearsal. We could use the stick for the show too. We got to pay him, rather slay him. So if he doesn’t show up who cares, Care Bear.”

“I care. I want him here and I want him at the show. Presentation matters. You got to have some fucking pride about performance, hode. We don’t have him there for the show, we’ll come across like
duh
-taunts.”

Spanx paced up and down the creaking floor, kicking empty food cartons aside. “He’ll be there! He’s all ‘Mr. Jeep’, you know how he is, he’ll be here, hode, he gets all Sisters of Mercy on it—You should be thankin’ me for getting this gig together, man. You should be, all: Spanx is the wanx who deserves your thanx–”

“You didn’t think I had anything to sell in that box,” Danny said, going to the grimy window of the tenement flat. “Pretty ironic, hode. You had something worth maybe millions in that box all this time.”

Outside, a rusting fire escape, not safe to climb on; a trashed-up airshaft, illuminated with a glaucous security light. Far overhead, a five-decker flying bus plowed through the rasping haze, angling north for the airport, fully visible in the night because the city lights reflected from the smog, making the sky a backdrop of luminous violent. Ah, downtown L.A.

“What you mean, worth millions, you phishline V-rat–?”

“You call me a V-rat again and I’m not going to tell you and I’m not going to play the gig, I don’t need the money that bad.” Which was a bluff, and they both knew it.

“Okay so what’s the mystery, money man?”

“Texer is: Maeterling was a thief–”

“Like we don’t know that, hode!”

“Shut up and listen. I got a reason for telling you this. Maeterling was a thief, did his skim-scam, yeah, but he was also looking for proprietary ware to steal. He was really interested in the semblant ware. Thought it was going to be a big thing. Only, it was so, like, obsessed on by the company he didn’t think he could get away with stealing that. But there was a program they had for in-house work ... like, when you got a V-game and you’ve got cheats to use in-house to check things out, like God Mode used to be. So this was a program they had for detecting semblants. But they wanted their semblants to be seamless so they didn’t want the program getting out. But he got numbdumb with a guy in Slakon semblant programming and the guy blogmouthed and Maeterling found out about this and went into the guy’s machine and copied it. And he gave it to me to sell but then the whole thing fell apart so I hid it. And Maeterling turned up dead. So I was worried about using anything, after that, from them, I didn’t wanta turn up with a hole in my head and people saying, ‘another burnt out rock star casualty killed himself’. And with Rick in prison, I just didn’t want to ...” He shrugged. “... anyway, I figure it’s now or never.”