The Pure Cold Light (34 page)

“That’s taking dedication too far, don’t you think? If you know all this, why don’t you escape? He’s not sitting out in the hall, you know.”

“Where to? Iowa? One of those little subsistence farms, those places where they think they’re taking back the land from the agribusiness concerns?”

“It’s not the worst life I can imagine.”

“Well, it’ll
do
.” He slumped down in the same chair she’d tied him to. He had a Kleenex in the pocket of his pajamas, as if in an attempt to make them more formal. “My whole life, I’ve expected everything I did to catch up with me. That’s the way I see Mingo—final retribution, punishment meted out.”

“I don’t understand. Has everything you’ve done been all that bad?”

“Been a lie. A sham. I’ve never gotten anything right. Only, sometimes people miss it, and I slip by.”

She clicked her tongue. “No escape, then, I take it.”

“None.”

“You’re probably right. He’ll come for you the same as he did Chikako Peat.”

He glanced up. “I thought the news said … but, then, it would say that, wouldn’t it? He’d make it say that. Terrorists. When he had me act as liaison to get Angel Rueda that scummy ICS teaching post, I knew nothing was the way it appeared. I mean, who would do that to a valued employee, and an accident victim, too? I expect this has been about Rueda from the start.”

“Partly. It’s about you and the people you work for, too.” Lyell leaned forward and placed her hand on top of his. He shivered at the contact. “All the lies you blame yourself for are a speck of sand compared to the mountain of deceit you work for, that disgusts you. There’s at least one option to sharecropping among the Mennonites, you know.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and he didn’t.

“You could try to blow the top off that mountain.”

“What, Mingo? Must be mad. That’d be like fighting a shark with a chicken leg.”

“I didn’t mean Mingo. Higher than that.” She glanced at his work area. “Your set there is linked to SC, isn’t it? You work from home occasionally?”

“I’m linked. I have to be, in my position. Secure line.”

“Mmm-hmm. Tell me, then, do you have access to schedules—who’s assigned what duties, what shift? That sort of thing. It’s not protected data.”

“Certainly.” He gestured at the air. “I don’t bother with it much. That’s not a concern unless someone isn’t showing up as they’re supposed to or their account isn’t being credited the proper hours or—”

“Cleaning staff?”

“Yes, even them. I can tell you who’s got lavatory duty this evening if you want to know. We could run down the procedures list if you’ve got a few hours to learn the proper way to scrub a urinal.”

“There’s a proper way, how about that? Listen, Gansevoort, I need your help. Rueda needs your help. Lots of people need your help. I think I can offer you an alternative, a real alternative—what I mean is, a way to salvage that pathetic image you maintain of yourself, God knows why. You might even turn your life around. Or do you prefer to sit and wait?”

“Actually, I do, I think,” he answered.
 

“For Mingo.”

“That’s right.”

“You elect to die.”

He almost said “yes” but stopped on the brink of it. That would be admitting too much.

“I don’t believe you,” she replied. “And in any case, Mingo won’t be coming.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that.”

“He’s dead?”

She stared at her fingers. “More like untroubled by thoughts.”

The immensity of it took a while to filter through his self-recrimination. “It’s all gone to hell, hasn’t it? The company, even the world really, gone to hell.”

“Pretty much. I’m doing what I can. The pay’s none too good but it feels better than waiting for the next Mingo to show up.”

“And what do I have to do to contribute?”

“Two small things. First I need to browse some company procedures regarding display cases—when they’re cleaned, how they’re accessed, how to switch off any alarm codes.”

“Simple enough,” he replied. “That kind of alarm you can shut off from here … Well,
I
can.”

“Good.”

“Number two?”

“I need you to repeat what you did for me and Chikako Peat.”

That brought his head up smartly. He thought it over for a moment and then asked, “Will that include tying me up again?”

“No, nobody will tie you up,” she said, adding, “unless you want to be.”

The latter of her “two small” requests made him tremble. If he did what she wanted, and failed, there would be no escaping the severest of penalties. But he had been awaiting just such a fate already, and now, according to Lyell, it would not be coming. In one sense, then, no matter how events fell out hereafter, he would advance toward a recognizable goal of some kind. “Why should the Devil have all the good tunes?” he muttered. It was a phrase his grandmother had often used, one he had never been too sure about, but now he understood how it applied. “Let’s get started, then,” he said, and directed her to the screen of his set.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Transported by Ecstasy

The doors to the lift opened. Gansevoort peeked warily around the edge at the empty rice paper-walled room and, as he did, the long-haired figure of Huston Sherk stepped around him and out onto the bare wood floor. Sherk’s chubby visage would have been at complete odds with Thomasina Lyell’s Stardance-conditioned body, so she had draped an oversized vinyl jacket of Neeb’s over her clothes to bulk up.

Gansevoort watched her with panic in his eyes. He didn’t know what sort of nefarious devices protected this chamber—information about the officers’ private suite was not accessible to him.

The art deco doors started to close and the three other occupants of the car forced Gansevoort out as they quickly disembarked.

Like Sherk’s, their faces glowed ever so slightly—a LifeMask characteristic that might not have eluded Mrs. Fulrod’s blue-tinted scrutiny if she had been on duty; as it was, the night guard had been stupefied, struck dumb, and more to the point totally persuaded that he was in the presence of his masters.

“You’re supposed to take off your shoes,” Gansevoort whispered. Lyell gave him a deadly look that the mask mimicked with toadlike sourness. But the damage was already done.

 
From behind the wall of
fusuma
screens, a dull voice called out, “Who’s out there? Fulrod, is that you? It’s way too early for tea.”

Lyell scanned the black rails along the tops of the screens. There had to be micro-lenses mounted up there, probably all along the convenient frames, the kind of system that produced a composite “spider-eyes” image; SC could certainly afford such an array—after all, they manufactured them. In that case, however, why the questions? There would be a defense system, too, which no doubt imperiled them. Yet she hesitated, wanting to hear what more the voices had to say. There was something peculiar about this arrangement.

The voice continued petulantly, “Damn it, I said, who’s out there. Dorjan, you’re supposed to be monitoring the room! Wake up!”

“What?”

“The
room
!”

“What about it?” Dorjan Kosinus complained from farther away.

“There’s somebody out there.”

“There is? At this time of night? Don’t be silly.” A pause, while something crackled. “I don’t hear anybody. Turn on the set and let’s see.”

“Gotoh’s supposed to be in charge of that.”

“Gotoh’s barely conscious of anything anymore, or hadn’t you noticed. We’ve been losing him for days.”

A woman interjected testily. “Your blathering’s ruined my nap. It’s the first decent damn sleep I’ve had all week, so would you both please shut up.”

“Huston says the elevator opened.”

“He’s hallucinating. Here, look at the… Oh. Oh, my God, we’ve been
invaded
.”

Lyell grabbed the nearest sliding panel and flung it aside, opening a door to the inner sanctum. Gansevoort and the others barged in right behind her. None of them was quite prepared for it.

An immense glass conference table on gold tubular underpinnings stretched across the middle of the room; but it and the high-backed chairs around it rose, like fabled Atlantis, out of a geological stratum of garbage. Trash lay everywhere. The room must have been lovely once. There were paintings and sculptures lining the walls—Inuit masks and Oriental jades, works by Horunobu and Degas, and even one huge Kokoschka canvas. The debris dwarfed it all, blighting all the potential beauty.

To Lyell it was a colossal version of Nebergall’s walk-in closet. Faxes and documents, empty drink bulbs of assorted colors, food trays that, judging from what was growing on them, had been stacked there for months, clothing that included underwear of various persuasions dangling from the “clipboard” terminals and statuary, and still more clothes stuffed into shelves. On the wall dead ahead hung a screen displaying the composite picture of the room she’d just vacated. Beneath it stood an enormous black, all-purpose set manufactured by one of SC’s subsidiaries. The set appeared to offer every possible convenience—the satellite networks, world radio bands, disk formats, private phone fax lines, lighting controls, a thermostat and humidistat, and a versatile security system that probably would have been her undoing if she had waited any longer to enter. They were armed to the teeth but so retarded in their coverture, their utter contempt for all enemies, that probably none of them had ever contemplated bringing those weapons to bear.

The far end of the room was of glass—a breathtaking view over the city. The sparkling spires of three dozen towers stabbed at the sky. Their arrangement formed the walls of a deep artificial canyon which seemed to run all the way to the Art Museum. Between a crisscross of skyways and walkways, as beetling Troy might once have appeared upon Hisarlik, the Art Museum glowed in a shield of light, as though time and space had fractured. It was ancient history and it was the pristine city of the future, the way architects’ renderings always looked, with everything idealized, without the litter and the vagrants and the helplessly insane, without the souls numbed to life’s possibilities. Not a box dwelling or a weedy, crumbling speck of the true Tartarus in sight at this height. It was the kind of illusional view that windowalls delivered, and the foursome had hoarded it as well.

Gansevoort edged to the front to lead the four impostors over the trash heap toward the seemingly unoccupied table.

Among all the debris, the four CEO’s nearly escaped detection. It was Shikker, under Rajcevich’s mask, who stabbed the air with a finger and crowed, “They’re just like Glimet!”

Lyell had already seen. “‘Corporate heads’
is
the term, isn’t it?” she asked rhetorically. She peeled off the mask of Sherk, then took a careful step back from the rest of the group to capture everything in one slow, steady pan.

“A witty bitch,” the real Jean Rajcevich responded. Her corpulent, disembodied head bobbed at the top of her gray chair like a balloon that had lost its string. Her face was saggy, as if the skin had come loose. Her hair, a thinning, unkempt tangle, added to the overall effect of dissipation. “Get out of here, every one of you!” she ordered them.

Her tone of command actually impelled Gansevoort back a few steps: he caught himself, and glanced self-consciously left and right. No one had noticed, but he glared back at her. “You’re nothing,” he accused daringly, “nothing but a fat head.”

He compared her to her mask on Shikker—a slimmer version more than two decades old. And idealized—the modeler had disguised the contour of scorn on her lips, or perhaps the years had exposed it. He compared all of them to their artificial counterparts. The effect was the same—they were all ravaged, every one.

They had aged prematurely. Dorjan Kosinus had gone paper-thin and blotchy. His shaggy hair had turned white. Huston Sherk’s jowls had filled out, becoming trembling, wrinkled dewlaps, while his cheeks had caved in. His long hair now stuck out like dry grass off the back of his head. But Masayuki Gotoh could hardly be seen. He had vanished as far as his upper palate, and his shiny black mane blended into the chair behind him.

On each of them were displayed the telltale scars of long-term Orbiters.

What had at first looked like drink containers scattered about might as easily have been discarded Orbitol atomizer bulbs. The truth of it struck Gansevoort all at once: the Gang of Four, the gods of ScumberCorp, were
junkies
.

Realization triggered his anger as if it were a hydrogen bomb. “You two-faced jackals!” he screamed shrilly. “You lying, fucking bastards!”

He charged at the table but the figure—the false image—of Gotoh turned and stopped him. “Calm, Ton Gansevoort,” said Glimet, unclipping the mask and drawing it off. “Put your outrage to use.” He turned back to the table.

Jean Rajcevich threatened, “I’m calling security.”

Glimet replied, “I doubt that very much, mademoiselle. The last thing you want is for senior management, the public, and especially your competitors, to learn of your condition. And without your Mr. Mingo around there’s no one to set about eliminating everyone who sees you.”

“Gansevoort,” she cried, “let’s see your team spirit. You swore we could rely on you for anything—we’re asking you now,
kill
these people.”

Kosinus commanded, “Jean, for once in your life, shut up!
I’m
the Chairman here; you’re only COO. Try to remember that and let me handle this.” His chair swiveled sluggishly. His disembodied head looked weary of existence. “You say Mingo is gone?”

“Yes.”

“Of course, he’d exceeded his authority. We all knew it and turned a blind eye.”

“You allowed him to continue,” said Angel under his mask.

“True,” Kosinus replied lightly. “Some of the blame has to fall on us. We’ll make restitution to each of you, naturally.”

Lyell asked “What about the people of Box City—the ones who burned up this morning? What was it—at least a hundred dead and ten times that hurt? All the squalid little shacks north of the quadrangle destroyed. Poof, just like that—not very fireproof after all, those crates.”