Silhouette (10 page)

*   *   *

The choir at the Requiem bellowed something in Latin that I didn't understand, but I acted like I did. As my eyes scanned their faces, I saw that one of them was Lynn and the next was Lynette. Her mother seemed to be spitting out the lyrics, but my little girl was angelic as ever, wearing the ponytails I loved so much.

Then Harris was reading the Latin words from an old vinyl record on one of his infomercials, in his “talking head” voice. He muttered something that I couldn't make out, but I knew it was something that he had said to me at some point. And I knew it was important. But the scene shifted before I could ask him.

Then, sometime later, floating in the middle of a dark sea, bobbing back and forth like a small boat, was D's driveway. I stepped inside it as the gate opened, holding something metal between the fingers and palm of my right hand, and approached the car. D recognized me, and started opening the window, and the little girl in the backseat was up at her window, saying something to me through the glass. But I didn't really know them. I squeezed the trigger on the disk in my hand, bowled it under the car, and jumped back, seeing a burst of white light through my eyelids. I felt hot all over, and opened my eyes to see that I was scorched from the blast.

From the flames of the wreckage stepped Saul Rabin, leaning on his cane and laughing maniacally. With the fire behind him, he appeared as a silhouette, all dark except for his eyes, which glowed bright red like the flames. The light from his eyes reached out toward me, pressing like fingers into my head, until the razor-sharp piece of metal inside my brain started moving around, churning and slashing through my gray matter like a farmer's sickle.

*   *   *

The pain became so intense that it woke me up. I was still upright on the couch, but I was now sweating and my head was throbbing with the echoes of the nightmare wound. I glanced at the clock on the wall, noting that the two hours I had just slept were two more than the night before. That explained the intensity of my dreams—but what about their content? Driven by a morbid fascination, and something nagging at the back of my mind, I reviewed them as best I could.

The one I remembered most was the last, of course. Were the images of the murder from my
memory
, as they seemed to be, or a reconstruction from the facts I knew? Certainly the old man hadn't stepped out of the fire, but the rest of it was real enough that I never wanted to endure it again. And what about Harris? Hadn't he said something significant to me? In vain I tried to recall it from my two discussions with him, but then I remembered the glasses, and put them on.

I called up the audio recording of my first talk with him, and listened from the beginning. Halfway into it, I suddenly remembered the prerecorded message that had gotten through to me earlier, and found that. In a few moments, I had what I was looking for.

“Prayer is what you'll need, Mick, when he stops liking you Just the Way You Are [singing again] and morphs your ass into goo. Or maybe he'll do a mind lift, a head hijack, a brain boost, a personality pinch … jerk with your neuros and make you into someone he likes.”

I rewound a little, and heard again,
“jerk with your neuros.”
And he had even used the phrase
mind lift.
Did Harris know about this? If so, it was a pretty high-level leak. Or had he been involved with it before he left BASS? While the glasses were on, I made a note to check into this, and came across the reminder to talk to Korcz about his paranoia regarding our upper-level leadership. This cued me to search the Web for some more information, and I thought of using the room system like I usually did, but then realized that my glasses were more likely to be private. Most homes with net rooms had only one or two at the most, because that was all normal people could afford, but in ours almost every room was equipped with the technology, and it occurred to me that Saul might have been using that equipment to keep an eye on me. I imagined there was some risk in going on the net in any way for what I wanted, but I decided to limit it to a few minutes and hope it didn't come back to bite me.

So, staying in the glasses, I entered a search for “neural manipulation.” It took a while to get it started because I had to key the words in letter by letter, using the glasses' mouse, because I didn't want to say them out loud. Numerous links came up, and the large majority of them confirmed what Paul had claimed—that there was a broad consensus among experts in related fields that it could be done. There seemed to be no documented cases of its actually happening, but that might have been because the Geneva Accords put a serious cramp in research by forbidding any legal development. The political and corporate leaders who met there certainly were worried about the possibility, and there were many other Web sites filled with paranoia about it.

I modified the search to “Saul Rabin neural manipulation,” and nothing came up that was directly related. There were many entries about Saul Rabin and manipulation, but they were all critiques of his governing decisions and leadership style. Many of these sites referenced his famous last press conference many years ago, after which he had decided to stay away from the media and let Paul and D act as the public spokesmen for BASS. I had seen the video of it many times before but wanted to watch it again with “new eyes,” so I brought up one of the clips listed.

“Please comment on the repression of minorities in San Francisco,” a female reporter says.

“Who's being repressed?” Saul answers.

“LGBT and PPB groups, for one.”

“Nonsense,” Saul says in an angry tone. “There are no new laws under BASS that didn't exist before it. We haven't even made any public statements about any of those lifestyle preferences … no new laws or even statements concerning gays, not for lesbians, not for bisexuals, not for transgenders, not for pedophiles, not for polyamorists, and not for bestialists, or for any other types of people for that matter. And don't forget that BASS has given staggering amounts of money to AIDS and AIMS research and treatment.”

“Then why have so many people left the city since you've come to power?”

“A lot of criminals have left the city,” the Mayor says, turning to his son next to him and flashing that twisted smile obstructed by his scar.

“But what about many activists who have no criminal records?”

“I don't know, ask them,” he says, getting irritated again. “Nobody makes anybody stay or go.”

“We
have
asked them, and they say that you want to control people too much.”

“No, they want too much control!” Pointing at the reporter. “I am the duly elected leader of this city. We can't have too many hands on the wheel; we won't get anywhere.”

“You were elected
after
you were in power and many people had left, fearing what you would do.…”

“I can't help how people read me, or if they read me wrong. And at the beginning, we
really
couldn't have too many hands on the wheel … when you're crashing, that's the last thing you need.”

“You are a tyrant, like every other one in history,” she says with a loud voice, more to the crowd than to Saul. “Who can only rule by control and manipulation!”

“Listen, you little bitch,” the old man is shouting now, “I'd control things
more
if I could, and if I knew it was best for the people of this city … and I'd manipulate your punk ass right out of it!”

At this point Paul stepped in, calmed down his father, and concluded the press conference in a softer and gentler way; and, along with D, had conducted all of them ever since. I remembered hearing that afterward, Saul was regretful about this ugly scene, which was broadcast all over the world, of course. I also realized that it was probably a key event (or setback) in his wife's efforts to reform his speech patterns, and I wondered if she had chastened him for his comments about control as well. But since Mrs. Rabin had died seven years ago, I could see how he might now have reverted to the control problem, even though he continued to honor her memory in the language department.

Not wanting to risk any more exposure on the Web, I took off the glasses. I was locked in a living hell without a key, but at least things were becoming more clear in my mind. I used to view Saul Rabin's last press conference as impressive evidence of his chutzpah, that he was not willing to back down to special-interest groups pushing their agendas. But now I was starting to see it as oppressive, rather than impressive.

I heard movement from the stairs, and a guilty feeling shot through me. I sat up straight and wiped the sweat on my face with my sleeve, looking over just in time to see Lynn appear from the stairs. She looked briefly at me, went across the kitchen to get her Black Death book, and walked back to the stairs. As she started up them, she said, “I love you,” without looking at me, then disappeared.

I shook my head, thinking that loving her was a lot easier than understanding her.

I forced myself to my feet, still groggy, thankful that some of my anger had been swallowed by the sleep, or maybe released by the dreams. I traversed the kitchen and climbed the stairs. Lynn was in our room, on the bed, reading the book with her knees drawn up in front of her. I assumed the same position next to her, reading along with her for a little while, hoping to find comfort in the book myself.

She was at a part where the author was describing flagellism, a religious practice that arose during the plague. It was an attempt on the part of some fanatics to appease the wrath of God and end the suffering by inflicting pain upon themselves. They thought this self-abuse could somehow atone for the sins that had caused the pestilence. The author quoted from a fourteenth-century eyewitness named Jean Froissart.

The penitents went about, coming first out of Germany. They were men who did public penance and scourged themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes. Some made themselves bleed very badly between the shoulder blades and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying it was miraculous blood. While they were doing penance, they sang very mournful songs about nativity and the passion of Our Lord. The object of this penance was to put a stop to the mortality, for in that time … at least a third of all the people in the world died …

I continued reading for a while, but didn't find that it made me feel any better. The poor wretches who went through the plague had it bad, for sure—but at least none of them had murdered their own daughter and friend. And it was beginning to bother me more and more that the subject of this cruel deity seemed to be popping up at every turn during my ordeal … I had enough to worry about with the enemies I could see. On the other hand, the book's references to death and atonement did lead me to some ideas about my situation that were strangely cathartic. Paul was right, of course, that acting on my own, I could never take out the old man without dying in the process. But perhaps that was exactly what I needed to do—take revenge on my enemy and make restitution for my own crimes in a glorious orgy of mortal violence. And I began to feel that the resulting oblivion would be far preferable to living with all this.

But the metaphysical shadow that had been following me prevented me from committing to that course. As I thought about how I would carry out this murder/suicide and pictured myself doing it, the theme of Hamlet's most famous speech nagged me. I had seen the play dozens of times, and years ago I had even memorized the “to be or not to be” soliloquy. I couldn't remember it word-for-word now, but I knew the point. What if there was a life after this one? And what if we have to answer for what we do here? That fear of the unknown is enough to keep even the bravest man from taking his own life, according to the Bard. I took comfort from this amid my own cowardice, because I had to admit that even if my death would make everything right, I still didn't want to die.…

At some time during my ruminations, an exhausted Lynn gave up on the book and rested her head on my shoulder. As I watched her fall asleep, I again felt a tiny surge of hope that we could somehow come out on the other end of this. So I decided to go with Paul's more cautious plan, hoping that I could manage to suppress my craving to blow the old man into a thousand bits, or dismember him slowly.

“Act like everything is normal,” Paul had said. I would try my best for now, but if my friend's approach took too long, I would take it as a sign that Saul Rabin and I should pay for our sins together, in one bloody act of expiation.

*   *   *

At dawn I left Lynn sleeping in the bed, showered, dressed, took off in the aero, and checked the glasses, just as I had the morning before. Once again there were two messages from Paul, and a clip of Harris, which Paul had attached.

“You need to see this,” he said. “Harris fell into it somehow, and got it rated by Reality G. They say it's legit.”

Reality Guaranteed was the premier “genuineness evaluation” service in the world, formed under federal American law years ago, during the initial rise of computer crime. In addition to identity theft and credit fraud, audiovisual technology had progressed so far by then that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could produce albums, movies, and various forms of pornography featuring popular media figures, without the stars themselves ever being involved. These were marketed so widely on the wild wild web that certification with services like Reality G became necessary for consumers to know whether their purchases were authentic. The news could be faked, too, so a video clip couldn't survive with any credibility unless it received their stamp of approval.

The end of Paul's message said that this particular clip had already been distributed and broadcast on numerous news services, but because it had started with Harris, he sent me the freak's “world premiere” showing.