The Pure Cold Light (24 page)

“I wish it was me,” he said, and the conversation slammed into the turn.

Sober, he never would have lost control. They glanced at but avoided one another’s eyes. Lyell picked up the shoulder harness and disk recorder off the bed. She pretended to concern herself with running a diagnostic on it. She pressed her palm against various pads in the harness that absorbed body heat: the recorder ran off body heat. It was guaranteed to record for at least half an hour after she died—a guarantee that did little to excite her.

Nebergall tried to gain ground by making light of his naked comment. “Well, you deserve your reward,” he said, “and it’s information I’m bestowing. Quiz show time.”

Without looking at him, she asked, “Did the blood I gave you match anything?”

“Blood and prints both.”

She set down the harness, and sat up. “And the winner?”

“Señor Angel Rueda,” he said.

She cocked an eyebrow. “It’s his real name?”

“Yeah, for all that’s worth.” Clearly he had much more to tell.

“Wait a minute,” she said, “what’s that supposed to mean—for all it’s worth?” She made a grab for him, but he joysticked the chair to pivot on one wheel and she clutched air. “Give, Nebergall, you rat bastard.”

He stopped, facing her directly, then puttered back to her side. “C’mon, put your feet up and I’ll rub ’em for you.”

With a sigh, she flopped back on the bed, dragging the harness with her.

He backed up so that he could slide her feet onto his lap, then began working his thumbs into her soles. He had powerful hands, and Lyell shortly succumbed to the sheer excruciating ecstasy of his deep massage. “That is wonderful,” she told him.

“I know. I’m good.”

After a minute, he added casually, “ScumberCorp’s already tagged his ID with their story.”

“So, there’s nothing left. I’m not surprised.”

“They wish. See, Clarence—that’s my buddy with the lab, Clarence Marquardt, who has big dandruff and serious BO by the way, just to make you happy—he gets the backup cartridge from his friends in I-P security once they change ’em over. New one’s issued every three months. The old ones are supposed to be erased and recycled but these security guys humor Clarence, ’cause he used to be one of them and there’s a sort of bond there. Like with you and me, except you want me to take more baths. What Clarence does is he exchanges the cartridge twice removed for his pals to turn in for erasure, and they give him the one that’s just been pulled. The city’s down one cartridge forever, but nobody’s going to miss the fucker. His data base’s always a little out-of-date, but for most of his customers that he
has
a goddam cartridge makes him solid gold. So, who cares? He’s retired, this is all money on the sly, anyhow. I figure most of the corsairs on the East Coast check in with Clarence. He’s a great old guy, with lots of stories. You get him talking over a few drinks—”

“Yes, okay, thank you, Cowboy Bob, for that wonderful bedtime story. I get the point. Clarence has data on Angel Rueda from prior to ScumberCorp’s rewrite.”

He stared at her with moist eyes. “God, I adore you, Tommie. You’re so goddam noumenal.” He went to work on her left foot.

“Am I supposed to guess what you found? Okay, the old data cartridge shows he has no connection whatsoever to
Xau Dâu
.”

“Oh, better than that,” he replied. “No connection to ScumberCorp, period.”

She leaned up on her elbows. “None?”

He shook his head, his smile as wide as a scythe. “Never on the Moon, never worked a day as a docker. None of it.”

“But they were bringing him
down
. I saw them. You saw them. That’s how this all began.” He continued to smile broadly and noncommittally. She cast over the the sea of possibilities without sighting a clear explanation. “According to Peat’s records, they were passing him off to Isis as an ex-Orbiter.”

“Bingo.”

Her expression clouded. “What—that’s true?” She withdrew her feet from his lap and sat up, clutching the towel to her. “Him, an Orbiter?”

“Oh, yeah, a serious junkie. But not like you think.”

“Like
what
, then, Nebergall?”

“Like ‘ex’ as in Orbitol decay,” he said.

“
No
.”

“Yup. Absolutely and without a doubt. Four months ago, your very own Angel Rueda—blood, DNA, fingerprints and spit—was stone-cold dead and gone.”

Chapter Seventeen: Going Down, No Mercy

“Let me see now. Angel Rueda was CFO for a company named Nubarrón, which is a Bickham Interplanetary subsidiary,” read Nebergall. “He worked and lived in Madrid, Spain, until three years ago when he got hooked on Orbitol. Doesn’t say how in the report. His work went to Hell—big surprise, huh?—and so did he. Dropped out of sight, you might say.”

“You got this from Bickham?”

“From Nubarrón, yeah. This is their bio on him. Even includes a presumed date of death.” He dangled it in front of her.

He said, “Your old boy took himself right out of the picture and then came back again. A neat trick, that. No wonder ScumberCorp’s shittin’ itself over him. They want to wipe out the homeless population, and here’s some unprecedented Spaniard in the works, to borrow a great man’s pun—an inflato-collar, pegged pants, suit-jacketed worker bee from the upper crust of a competitor, and he comes
back
! Christ, what if everybody who ever decayed is gonna do it? That’s like millions of the great unwashed dropping in on SC from nowhere. And not here: On the Moon! I like that as a concept, especially if they’re pissed off. Tommie, we gotta do this show, even if there’s not a word of truth to it and it ends up on ANN, we
got
to—just to sweat the robber barons.” His bloodshot eyes glittered madly.
 

“Neeb, President Odie.”

“What about him?”

“Remember, I asked you if you’d copied Odie’s show while I was on the Geosat?”

His brows knitted. “Vaguely,” he replied.

“It would have been, what, the night of the thirteenth.”

He scratched his chin. “I was pulling the Mussari edit, I remember now.”

Lyell stood, tucking the towel tightly above her breasts. “We have to find the disk.”

“Why?” He wheeled around after her. “What was on that asshole’s show?”

“Evidence,” she opened the door to the edit suite and encountered a wall of chilled air. “It’s
freezing
in here.”

“Not if you’re wearing clothes, it ain’t.” He lingered in the doorway, unable in his inebriation to ignore her. “Tommie, you’re gonna have to put something on before that towel opens up again and I go bugfuck. I am not driving in here to be scrunched up against your luscious bare ass, without it having a profound and disastrous effect. I’m sure I do not wish to spoil this relationship we’ve so far managed to avoid.” He rolled back to let her out. Unrecognizable objects crunched beneath his wheels. The cat stared solemnly at him from the bed, and he stuck his tongue out at it.

By the time Lyell was dressed, Nebergall had come up with the specific disk and cued it up on the screens. His reaction upon being introduced to Mrs. Akiko Alcevar and the photos of her late husband was much like Lyell’s had been initially—utter disbelief.

“I can do better effects work right here in ten minutes with my toes,” he argued, while tapping an electronic stylus against his small graphics tablet. “At least make him look identifiably like himself. They must be hellishly over budget if that’s the best work they can produce.”

“Exactly,” replied Lyell. “A three-year-old with a crayon could do better. So why run such a bad portrait unless it’s the real thing?”

“Kinda flaky argument, isn’t that? What’s to keep you from cleaning it up even if it
is
real? There’s an audience out there that’s seen the best work available and swallowed it like the good little fish fillets they are. The average Undercity dweller sees one hundred fifty thousand hours of programming in their lives. Most of it is either sitcoms or crap about alien invaders, past lives, and troglodytes. They can’t discriminate between tits and toilet bowls anyway, none of ’em. So why bother bein’ honest if it doesn’t get you anything?”

She ignored his pessimism. “What I want to know is where that second image of Alcevar comes from.”

“
If
it’s the real thing, you mean. If he’s another piece of toast popped up same as Señor Rueda. Doesn’t look like he hit the Moon, does it?”

“Where could the widow Alcevar have seen her husband, do you think? It’s not likely he was shopping up in Penn Tower Six.”

“I don’t get the impression
she’s
ever been in Penn Six.”

“Then, what have we got?”

“
Nada
is what we got. All you know for certain is, he didn’t turn up on a sitcom.”

“‘My Favorite Gulag,’” she said reflexively.

“Awful show. You have to vomit before you can sit down in front of it—ha-ha, we’re being beaten to death with shovels, what a fucking laugh-riot. Who the hell cares where she saw it? Maybe the guy was from Madrid, too. Could be location is a factor. I could go check with Clarence. Then there’s the question of how ScumberCorp ended up with Rueda at all.”

“Explain that.”

“Well,” he said, “say the guy fades out in Madrid like Nubarrón suggests. Okay? So, what happens? He all of a sudden wakes up on the Moon inside one of SC’s facilities? That is what’s implied.”

She thought about it for a moment, finally shook her head. “No. That doesn’t scan.”

“Exactly. We got to get more of the story. Before they bury it.”

“Meaning
I’ve
got to get more of the story.” She glanced at the real-time clock. “Jesus, is that the time?” He looked, nodded. “I should have known when you told me how many bottles of urine you dumped. Damn you, Nebergall.”

“Y’all needed the rest. Who knows when you’ll get to sleep again?”

She shook her head. “Exploiter.”

“I’ll make you a household word,” he promised. “But let’s not make it posthumously, okay?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I guess I’ll check out the footage so far and try to put something together we can sell. Don’t forget to take a fresh disk!” The outer door slammed. He wheeled back, and shut himself in with the equipment.

***

Angel Rueda ignored the lumps under his back as he reclined on the futon, his feet hanging off the end and his good arm under his head. He’d placed Chikako Peat’s gold cigarette case on his chest. He passed the time by watching Chikako sleep beside him.

The
ibogaine
had exhausted her after five hours, with a little help from him. He ought to have been worn out, too, but all he felt was an inner calm, a stillness unlike the void of the bypass. Lyell’s absence had begun to concern him.
 

She exhibited extraordinary self-reliance, was quick and dogged in her pursuit of a story—after all, she had come looking for him as a result of only a few moments on the Geoplatform. He had sensed something about her then, hard to say exactly what even now. He tried to recall the way she’d watched him led out, but the image had evaporated. Odd that he could remember the event but no sensory impressions to support the memory.

Now he was beginning to think he had dragged her into something so huge that it had consumed her, as, sooner or later, it must devour him and Chikako. He had no real comprehension of the vastness of ScumberCorp. The way everyone talked, it was an empire with its grip upon the globe and its fingers stretching into space, ready to seize world after world. Comparatively, he was a grain of sand trying to withstand the whole force of an ocean.

Without thinking, he opened Chikako’s gold case and took out the last cigarette. It was neon blue. He stuck it in his mouth, then hesitated, took it out again, rolled it in his fingers, sniffed the tip. Some kind of pungent herb; he had smelled it in her sweat, where it had acted as an aphrodisiac.

He put it between his lips again, then pressed the case closed and held it up. A distorted face glared back at him, its seeming anger the result of the lens over his right eye. Now he was fairly sure that there was nothing wrong with his sight and the lens was phony.

He maneuvered the cigarette around from one side of his mouth to the other, a notion which had a certain familiarity to it. The case had a lighter built into the side. When he touched the recessed button, it clicked twice, then lit. He inhaled, tentatively, one puff, and began to choke. Swinging upright, he kept coughing. He reached over and stubbed the cigarette out against a dirty plate on the discarded tray.

By the time he regained control of his breathing, he thought his lungs were coming up. Tears had pooled inside the lens and he had to shake his head to clear it. He sniffled, wiped his palm across his cheek. Glancing up, he found Chikako watching him.

“I just had a dream,” she said softly. “You were in it, but you were changed. That contraption had been taken off your head. I was standing on a bridge and you came by, and I saw that you had a new face but it was still you.”

“What happened?”

“When you came up beside me, you said, ‘Forgive me,’ and then you pushed me off the bridge. I landed on the bed and woke up.” She slid out, golden, from under the single blue sheet. “I should get dressed. Or—” Slyly, she tilted her head.

“Please, no more. I’d like to depart here under my own power and with the few working parts remaining to me.”

She smiled. “How late is it?”

“After eleven.”

Worry crossed her face. “Thomasina never came back?”

“Not yet. I was just wondering what we do if she hasn’t shown up by one.”

“We fly, Fleance, fly. No matter what, when Mallee says it’s time, then it’s time.”

“Could be this Mingo character has found her.”

“Probably. It’s not a very free society we live in these days. You don’t know that, do you?” She picked up and put on a black chemise she’d discarded earlier, then began looking for her other clothes. She had left them hanging in a changing area behind a bamboo screen. “People without your excuse don’t know it, either. The difference is, you need to find out more and they don’t want to. Where the devil’s my dress?”

“Mallee brought it back while you were asleep. And a jacket for me. They’re both behind the other screen,” he said.