scary than the men. If one of them was to take Bel and go, out into the
drenching purple night, what could he do?
Meanwhile, the desk clerk who was also the waitress kept passing to and
fro. She was breaking the rules, but she seemed to have some kind of special
license. Every time she passed she would find a way to flirt: leaning over a
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nearby table to show her neat butt, reaching up to a shelf to give him the taut curve of her breast and waist. Every small town has to have its bad girl. The
younger men hooted and flicked her behind. The other women, young and
old, pretended not to notice.
The party broke up at last. Johnny lay staring at the gray ceiling of room 5,
and at the inevitable cam—eye circled with its thoughtful message for your
protection. The rain had stopped. The main street outside was noisy with the home-going populace. Must’ve been about every able-bodied soul in town.
He’d brought Bella out before, but never so far and nothing had ever gone
wrong. He considered how important it was for him to believe that it was
safe. No danger, no harm, there are decent people everywhere. The upholding
of some kind of liberal ideal was apparently worth more to him than his
child’s life and safety.
They could take Bella away from me.
Walking into that bar with her had been like shooting his cuff to display an
antique gold Rolex. Madness! He could try to tell them Bel was a perfectly
ordinary little girl, produced by traditional methods and complete with
organically grown blemishes (she had a crowded mouth, and a tendency to
stand over on her inherited weak ankles). You wouldn’t get people out here
to believe it, when they saw her next to their own scrawny, undersized,
scabby-faced kids. To believe Bella was ordinary they’d have to accept that
Johnny wasn’t weirdly privileged, Johnny was normal . . . They’d have to see how far they’d fallen.
You wouldn’t want to wish that on them.
Two hundred miles from NYC. There was no protection, no law, no appeal.
From the moment that tow truck appeared he had been in trouble. He would
be criminally crazy not to cut his losses and get out—even if he were alone. But he hated to give up. He was on the track of a story, and he knew he was in the right place. If God didn’t know why the fuck he was here; if God was convinced
by the spurious dazzle of irradiated gemstones— somebody must know better.
That somebody would come to Johnny. He didn’t have to do anything but wait.
He linked his hands behind his head, and thought about sex. He recalled
Bella’s experiment in the school hall. She was her father’s child all right.
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She’d made that vital connection so naturally—doubt and danger and a
mellow hint of violence . . . whoo, up we go. It wasn’t likely that Johnny was
heading for a real amorous adventure. Things weren’t so different in that
area, inside the city or out. But the sex stuff could come in useful, just because it was in short supply. It was a greed that could cover for anything.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
The desk clerk shut the door and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Hi, Johnny.”
She seemed older than he was, but she was probably a teenager. She had
stringy dark blonde hair cut in a bob. Blue eyes, a wiry unkempt body in a faded overall, an out-of-doors suntan that was ruining her skin. She smiled with her
eyes and touched his pant leg, as if she were testing if it was still damp.
She glanced upward. “It’s okay, Donny’s minding the store. He never
checks the screens, and this one don’t work anyhow. I put you in here on
purpose.”
A heavy, warning wink told him he wasn’t meant to be reassured. Donny,
aka Gustave, was undoubtedly glued to the most promising peephole in town.
“Well, stranger, can we do business?” She took her hand from his leg and
touched herself, both palms smoothing the slick worn fabric over her breasts.
“I don’t want money. I want a ride. I don’t belong to anyone, you’ve no need
to worry.”
She was in a big hurry, but that was reasonable enough. Johnny would be
gone tomorrow.
“What’s your name?”
“Cambridge.”
“That’s the name of a city.”
“I know. My momma liked the sound. You ever been there? The English
one? I like to think it’s the original I’m called for.”
“No, I can’t say I have.” Johnny watched her, not moving a muscle. “I can’t
get you into the city, you know that. I suspect you’re an agent provocateur,
ma’am.”
“Hey, no way. I’m not going to get you into trouble. I just want a ride down
the road, a change of scene. And I can get you out of the trouble you happen
to be in.”
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She winked her steamroller wink again. “Get rid of those ants in your pants,
city boy?” She squeezed his thigh, and giggled. Her eyes, which the camera
couldn’t see, were deadly serious.
“If a girl wants to get on, she has to be ready to act fast. That’s the shape of things to come, don’t you think? You can’t act like the old technology, sit there waiting for the current. You gotta be able to change yourself, to fit what’s coming at you.”
Johnny was wrestling with his conscience. This could so easily be a trap.
He would accept the clerk’s offer (what city slicker would refuse a loose
woman?). The vigilantes would burst in. There would be some kind of
ersatz legal procedure, God probably presiding. The boondocks were hot on
sexual restraint. Notwithstanding her behavior downstairs it would be
Johnny’s fault. The stranger caught in the act of fornication—maybe
statutory rape—would be declared unfit to be in charge of a minor. All he
knew about the “blue clay” could be beaten out of him on the side. He
could see how tempting it looked. They’d have Bella and the diamonds.
Johnny would be dumped naked out on the road—dead or alive. Dead, for
preference, rather than explain himself to Izzy. He should not even dream
of taking the risk.
On the other hand, all his instincts promised that the clerk was not laying
that kind of trap.
“I don’t know if you have the right idea about me. I take risks, that’s my job.
But not for trivial reasons.”
“I felt that. I can read people . . . pretty well.” She smiled, ruefully. “This may sound crazy, but I’ve always thought I could have been an eejay. If
someone like me could have the chance.”
“I wish that everyone could have the chance,” said Johnny.
She nodded, head bent.
“Mr. Micane’s got you all wrong, in my opinion. This blue clay that you’re
looking for, it doesn’t represent any kind of material gain. The diamonds
don’t mean anything . . . to you. What you really want is, like, a sense of living meaning in your life. Something rare and magic that could unite everyone.”
“It’s true, living with meaning is a dream of mine,” he agreed—with the accent on the two special words.
“I’ve had that dream too.”
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She gave him a long and tender look. It
thrilled Johnny to the core. This
was a real contact. He wondered how much she could be persuaded to tell.
Cambridge tossed back her hair. “Okay, mister eejay. After the highfaluting
come-on, do we have a deal?”
He glanced around the room, swiftly up and away at the “defective” camera.
“Um—can we go somewhere?”
“You want me to take you home?” She walked to the door. Leaned there, in
a pose from some ancient movie. “I come off shift in an hour. There’s a dark
blue Nissan in the parking lot. I’ll meet you beside it.” She grinned up at the eye in the ceiling. “I’ll take you where there’s no protection. Can you do it
without an audience, eejay? Ever tried?”
Johnny put his gear together. He was rapturously busy for a few minutes,
during which Bella vanished as she had by the roadside. Then he remembered
her. He stared at the sleeping baby, chewing his lower lip.
Next to the Japanese antique there was an ancient pickup, the color of its
paint indeterminate in the yellow light of the oil lamps that guarded the
hotel’s rear. Cambridge looked out of the dark cab. She was silently amazed.
“I couldn’t leave her. She’d wake and be scared.”
She looked him over. “Is that a gun in your pocket?”
“No, it’s a spare diaper.”
The clerk shook her head, pushed open the other door for him. He
clambered, arranging Bel’s warm bulk in the baby carrier on his knees. They
were jolting away, lightless, through the dark town, before she managed to
come up with a comment.
“In my world, men don’t bring up kids. They just own them.” She chuckled.
“Hey, what happens when we get to our love nest? Does she like to watch, or
have you trained her to take part?”
Mental tape: a long drive. The darkness was haunted by the ghosts of well-
kept lawns and scampering retriever dogs, boys on bicycles, flung newspapers
and mailboxes on sticks. It was a world that Johnny had never known—
inaccessible now except on records as hard to decipher as incunabula to an eye
reared on print. How did people make out that stuff? Depthless, even colorless.
Johnny imagined skills lost to him forever, the genes for watching b&w TV
switched off in his decadent blood. He hugged Bella in her frame sling. The feel of her was so immensely reassuring, he thought all secret agents should have a
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baby to carry. When you can’t trust anyone, and it’s against the rules for you to be sure what’s going on—you hug your baby, and she keeps you sane.
They parked among trees.
“What the fuck was all that nonsense about jewelry, anyway?”
Johnny shrugged. “Best I could do. I didn’t expect to be picked up like that.
Had to send out some kind of signal. I could see I wasn’t going to get much
chance to nosey around asking questions.”
“You’re right. And you’re lucky. Micane’s not stupid, you know. He’s just
short of information. Like all of us out here. Okay, come on. You take some
tape of the crown jewels, and hurry the record back to your magic dome.”
“Please. I don’t live in a ‘dome.’ I live in an overgrown shopping mall. With
dirt in the corners, and plenty of problems.”
Cambridge smiled, humoring him. “Sure you do.”
She opened a door, steps led down. When he realized they were going
underground, he understood the dazzling truth. She wasn’t leading him to a
bargaining rendezvous with the cadre. She had brought him straight to the
goods. The room was shadowy, echoing, with a low and bowing ceiling and a
strange incline. The walls, replying to Cambridge’s pencil light, gleamed
phosphorescent pale.
“What is this place?”
“It was a swimming pool,” she said. “Olympic pool. It’s been drained and
boarded over for years. No water. Rest of the building’s derelict.”
She’d changed into pants, jacket, and a sweater. The rain had made the
night cool. Her clothes were as squalid, strange-colored, and ill-fitting as the things the men wore, but not filthy. She pulled a clunky black plastic remote
out of her waistband and keyed lights. Must be a generator on site.
Johnny stared. The glass and ceramic labyrinth: the vats. It was the real
thing, a coralin plant in full production. He’d spent time in legal protein-chip production, in his apprenticeship—if only in virtuality. It wouldn’t have
helped. The processing here was too makeshift to be precisely recognizable.
But he’d also been tutored, unofficially, by people who knew the wild side.
He took the time to settle Bella on his shoulders. She had woken up in the
pickup, but only to ask a few drowsy questions. What’s her name . . . What’s
this car’s name. She was asleep again (and the pickup was called Laetitia).
He was proud of her. She was really the perfect child.
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“I can make tape?”
Cambridge nodded. “That’s the deal, eejay. We’ll get you away from
Micane. You tell the folks back home what we have here.”
He mugged amazement, let her know how thrilled he was to find this spore
of civilization outside the citadel: wondering all the while where the rest of
the group was, where they’d gotten the starter, all sorts of questions to which he ought to get answers. But he already knew that Cambridge was going to
tell him everything. He was stunned by her group’s trust, embarrassed by the
power of his job’s reputation.
It had been obvious before the end of the twentieth century that the future
of data-processing and telecoms was in photochemistry. Chlorophyll in green
plants converts light—energy into excited molecules without thinking twice
about it. The “living chip” was inevitable: compact and fast. They called the
magic stuff of the semi-living processors “blue clay” because the original
protein goop was blue-green in color. Embedded in a liquid crystalline
membrane, blue clay became a single surface of endlessly complex
interconnections. Under massive magnification it looked like a coral: hence
the other name, coralin. Clay? Because you can make it do anything.
So much for the technology. But then the networks, silicon and gallium-
arsenide based, had crashed in the explosion of virus infection that ended the
century. Coralin wasn’t greatly superior at that point, but it was immune to
the plagues. In a deteriorating political situation—a foundering economy,
wave upon wave of environmental disasters—the blue clay had become
political dynamite. It meant power.
Diamonds? It was a stupid cover, but good enough for the spur of the
moment. Out here, a coralin plant was worth more than a truckload of gems.
If the masses who lived outside the citadels could build themselves some
modern data processing they could hook up into the city networks. They’d be
up and running again, and the elite who lived indoors would be running
scared. The amazing thing was that more of the masses didn’t try. They
accepted, with chilling calm, that a certain way of life was over. They had
their own world with its own rules, and the cities were on another planet.
Johnny made tape, describing how it really was a coralin plant, a
nd the journey he’d made to find it. He walked the aisles, the 360 cam on his headset taking in every angle. Cambridge stayed off camera. She didn’t want to wave to the public.
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He finished. They faced each other: two nodes of a diffuse molecular
machine, linked by the lock and key action of certain key phrases hoicked
out of the romance of molecular technology. The living meaning, not like the old technology, change yourself to fit what’s coming at you. Johnny was uneasy. He had not deceived her, not actively. But she was deceived, and it was making
him uncomfortable.
“You’re a union activist, aren’t you,” she said.
“Yeah,” he laughed nervously. “A cellar unionist.”
She had been tough and worldly wise to his soft city-boy, a rough diamond.
Down at the deep end, in the pallid glow of the drained pool, the balance
between them was reversed.
“You came out here to find us. What can I say? I feel . . . found. Like a toy
left out in the rain, that thought the kids would never come back to look for
her. I feel rescued.”
Johnny chewed his lip. Bella wriggled and muttered. One of her knees
started butting him in the ribs. She couldn’t get comfortable and she was
going to wake. She weighed a ton.
“D’you ever hear about the phylloxera beetle?” he said. “It’s a similar story.
It’s a kind of bug, it spreads like a virus. Once upon a time, all the good wine came from France. They had the vines. The quality, wonderful ancient-lineaged plants. Then someone accidentally shipped in some phylloxera
beetles, and the whole of French viticulture was devastated. They had to rip
the lot out and start again . . . with vines from North America, where the bug
was endemic and the native vines had natural resistance. In a generation
nobody could tell the difference. The wine-drinking public forgot it had ever
happened.”
“Phylloxera-proof telephones,” said Cambridge. “Knowing what’s
happening in the next state. Bank credit. No more of that fucking censored
cable TV. God. I can’t believe it.”
Johnny registered something moving behind him. The lights were off at the
shallow end, but the 360 showed Gustave coming down the steps. Johnny
controlled himself with an enormous effort. Among these people you must
not show fear.
“Micane’s guys are here,” he told her softly. Cambridge didn’t make a fuss.
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