"What are you talking about?"
"I was attacked by someone during the fire. He almost beat me. I've never seen anything that fights like that. I have to know. I have to find him."
"Why . . . ?"
"Because ..." The pain in his eyes was mixed with something else. Hope. "What happened here was bad— worse than anything I ever did. And it's linked into something bigger. Something more evil than anything I ever was. It's my way out, Promise. I'm going after it."
Promise began to shake uncontrollably. "Aubry, our child—"
"Is dead, Promise."
"You're willing to just leave it at that?"
"I have to go on living. Without you, if I have to."
"I see." She stepped back away from him. "I love you, Aubry . . . but I have to find my child."
Aubry squeezed his eyes shut. "I don't know if I love you. I don't know if I ever did. That damned drug has twisted everything inside out."
"You won't help me?"
"Not until I know the truth. You won't come with me?"
"Not until I know the truth."
Aubry nodded. "All right then." He took her face in both hands, and tried to kiss her, but she pulled away.
"Just go," she said. "Just go, damn you."
He nodded, and a mantle of ice seemed to fall over him. "You can have the car. I'll take some Scavenger wheels."
He turned and walked away.
"Aubry!" she called. "Where are you going?"
"San Diego," he said. "The NewMan encampment. I want to find Bloodeagle. He owes me. He'll know, if anyone does. Promise—"
"Yes?"
"If it means anything to you—there's never been anyone but you. Not in my whole life. And maybe that's the problem."
Then he pushed through the door. The hinges squeaked a few times, then came to rest.
All at once, the weight of the last seventy-two hours fell on her like an avalanche. She collapsed against the wall, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Her mother. Her child. The only man she'd ever loved. Goddess. How much? How much do I have to lose?
Chapter Nineteen
Moonman
Friday, June 9
Marina Batiste drove her groundcar through the outskirts of the modular park.
The chunks of houses were arranged almost haphazardly: these were pieces that had been auctioned at tossdown prices, and never reassembled into completely designed homes. Instead, they were hauled to one of the modular trailer parks across the country, and set up in some sort of a living arrangement.
From any distance the park looked like a wrecking yard.
One had to look much more closely to see that there was a sense of order in the arrangement of the dwellings. From inside them the eyes of children studied her. She waved back, and the small, dirty faces grinned at her, giggling.
The park, ten miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota, was special to her. She had been here twice before, and knew its most celebrated resident, a man whom few of the inhabitants had ever met. Some of them might have heard of him, or read of him in the papers.
She pulled her car up to one of the jumbled heaps of steel and plastic boxes. Try as she might, Marina couldn't escape the feeling that she was in a gigantic playpen, with construction blocks tumbled this way and that by the hand of a godlike infant.
She wiped her forehead as she pulled into the shadow of a box. The heat was almost unbearable.
A tarnished steel grille was set askew in the gap between two immense blocks of molded plastic. She pushed a button at the front gate, waiting for almost a full minute before the buzzer rang in answer.
"I am sorry," an androgynously synthesized voice said solicitously. "No one is home at the moment. If you would care—?"
"Jeffry?"
"—to leave a message, wait—"
"It's Marina."
"Oh." This voice was human, and high, and suspicious. There was a pause, and the sound of rustling. "All right. Come on in."
The lock buzzed and clicked, and Marina entered. The entire yard was filled with old packing crates and cartons, and pieces of electronic apparatus. She picked her way through a forest of obsolete gear, and stood at last in front of the door. With the delicate hum of a servo, it opened.
A slender, spidery metal figure met her there. It was attached to a rail that ran along the wall and back up into the living quarters. The robot had vast faceted eyes, and golden skin that looked spray-painted on. "And you are alone?"
"Always, Jeffry. I wouldn't try to hurt you."
"You'd better not," the robot warned. "I'll tie your IRS records together with the national debt. Don't screw with me, lady."
"I just want to talk with you. You owe me one, Jeffry, and you know that's the truth."
"You got your story."
"You wouldn't believe how much heat I took for not giving you up."
Disorientingly, the robot snickered and rolled its eyes at her.
"Come on," she coaxed. "Let's talk."
The robot revolved on its axis and glided back up to the main floor, with Marina just behind it.
The place was just as she had remembered it from eighteen months before: an absolute shambles, every inch crammed with boxes and books and files. Laser chips, bubble packs, and even a few ancient read/write CDs were scattered around the room.
The robot torso rode a rail around the wall, came to a branching post and hooked itself into a guide iron in the ceiling. "Follow me, please."
She did, walking past a stack of boxes and only then hearing the snick of an automatic being primed.
She turned and smiled, as calmly as she could.
Jeffry Barathy weighed perhaps ninety pounds, but would have weighed more if he'd had legs. She guessed that he was somewhere in his forties, but his total lack of facial hair or even the most minute crow's feet made it difficult to determine his exact age.
There was something almost comical about the crop of raggedly chopped mohawk hair, as if he were a throwback to another era completely.
But there was nothing at all comical about the little floatcar he'd rigged his torso into, or the elaborate track system that guided it around the apartment. And even less about the gun pointed directly between her eyes. "You come in here, no call, no parlay . . . who do you think you're screwing with?"
"You know I'm not wired, Jeffry."
"Damn straight you ain't wired. Scanned you three times already. Didn't know that, did you? Taught me that in Chad. Cost me my legs. The more expensive a lesson is, the better you remember it."
"I could have guessed. I know you're not a fool. You also know you can trust me. May I sit down?"
The little man scratched at his nonexistent beard. "Sure. Sure. You go ahead."
He put the gun down, but he pivoted the rim of his floatcar to watch her even more carefully now. "So it's payday, is it? I knew that you weren't going to let me alone. What do you want?"
"What do you think?"
His eyes narrowed craftily. "Want me to have you declared dead? Screws up the IRS to no end. I could transfer money to your account... no, that's not what you want. I don't know. I don't ..."
She scanned the room. Everything had more dust on it than she remembered. "Haven't heard much from you for a while, Jeffry. What's the problem?"
His narrow face tightened. "You know what it is. It's that shitferbrains DeLacourte. One time. One time I bust in on his broadcast. Twelve seconds of heavy breathin'."
The laughter bubbled up from deep inside her. "It was his monthly lecture on venal sin, as I recall."
"I thought I raised the entertainment value."
"About eighty million people around the world saw that one, Jeffry. It cost you, didn't it?"
"Yeah. Damn good thing I had relays and redundant remotes and cutoffs all down the line. They came after me. God did they come after me." He looked up at her, and managed a smile. "But then, you know about that, don't you."
Marina closed her eyes for a moment, rememberin
g the long trail she had walked to find the elusive "Moonman." She had used up more favors than she liked to remember, but at the tail end, she had her award-winning exclusive. Not to mention taps and traces on her credit, telephone, infax, and car guidance systems. "So he shut you down. How would you like a chance to get even?"
His eyes narrowed. "I'll get freakin' even. Count on it. I've still got my remotes. I can break into every network transmission in the continental United States."
"For about twelve seconds. They'll catch you this time."
"So I'll flame out. One more headline, and then down the hole. They owe me something. They owe me. I didn't volunteer for the PanAfrican thing—"
"I know," she said quietly.
"—they drafted me. I did my freakin' duty, tried to chop Swarna back. They screwed up. Like Harris screwed up two years ago when they tried to off that black son of a bitch." He grinned crookedly. "Hell. Most of my buddies are dead, or on the dole. But me, communications is communications. I merely shifted my venue."
"Do you want to get back some, without any risk? Do you want another shot at the Prophet?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I don't want you to interfere with transmissions. I just want information, if you can get it. And correlations, if you can generate them."
Jeffry didn't move a twitch, but a computer screen behind him popped into life. "What kind of information?"
"DeLacourte is suppressing data on Gorgon—"
"The fairies who blew the Swarna hit?"
Marina glared at him. "Think what you want, Jeffry, but don't talk like that around me." He hunched his shoulders apologetically, and she continued. "I want to know what else he's doing. His support base has been growing too damned quickly. I want to know what's going on."
"Can do."
"Good. I want you to generate a report for me, showing me who's tied in with him, and how fast it's grown. Start running correlations. Find me the unusual. Find me something I can stick my nose into. Find me what Sterling DeLacourte doesn't want found."
North Dakota is whiplashed daily by an extraordinary cross section of telecasts. Radio and commercial Omnivision, government scans, confidential economic bulletins to the trade centers, the entire spectrum of satellite broadcasts. Better than ninety percent of it is scrambled or encrypted.
Jeffry Barathy went to work sorting, deciphering, organizing. Slowly, the information began to come through.
Using cut-outs furnished by friends in academia, he routed information on DeLacourte in, running it past screens, through filters, looking for the extraordinary. Statistics on advertising expenditures supposedly intended for a Pol Ec class at the University of Hawaii were rerouted to North Dakota. Corporate structural data requested by the business law computer owned by NYU went to North Dakota.
Marina watched, and watched. Endless parades of statistics, many of them available to anyone with a library card or a long-standing newsfax subscription.
She moved into the trailer with Jeffry, sleeping and eating, and cleaning out a tiny corner of the house. It seemed that he had glued the rec room of a modular house onto a fancy bathroom and a library. The stairway led up and then twisted sideways like something out of an Escher painting, rails for his robot and floatcar twisting along the floors like mating snakes.
The days passed. Between other, legitimate, research projects, Jeffry sandwiched in a series of rather odd requests. Most of them probably slipped right past the awareness of the operators on the other end.
How many? How long? How much?
Paper and plastic strips reeled from the printers. The screens were crowded with data, and Jeffry worked on and on, without sleep, until sixty hours later, Marina found him leaning over, head down on one of the computer panels, sound asleep as the printer next to his ear churned silently.
She guided his floatcar to his bedroom and sighed. What a mess. She peeled a dozen layers of junk away, and when there was an area flat enough to lie on, she lifted him from the car and nested him down.
For a minute she just looked at him. He looked so young, so untroubled.
She lay down next to him and cradled one arm around him protectively, and quickly fell asleep.
"Clean. The man is clean." She sighed at last, feeling beaten. "Look. Some of his people do stupid things, violent things—but he's not responsible for them. There are always radicals on the fringe of any movement."
Jeffry, eyes dark-circled even after twelve hours of sleep, sipped at a cup of Marina's coffee. He scanned the list of supporters. "Look at this. Over the last eighteen months, he's gotten additional political support from all over the country. There are no irregularities in property holdings, bank records, anything that I can find. There doesn't seem to be any bribery. He could be providing kinky sex, but today, all you have to do for that is pick up the comm line. It would have to be something else."
Images flashed on the screen. Smiling, gray-haired Senator Grossman.
Steel industrialist W. P. Wekes, shown shaking hands with the president of International 105 labor union as they agreed to throw their combined weight behind DeLacourte.
"And they've got considerable weight, too. Both of them look as if they've enjoyed the good life for a long time."
A second picture of them a year later at another rally . . .
Marina squinted. "Would you go back to the last picture? Put them out side by side."
She looked at both of them. In the first picture, they looked like two powerful, dangerous old bulls calling a truce. But there was something about the second picture. What was it? The weight was almost the same. The color of the hair was the same. But . . .
"They don't look quite as old to me. They look like they're in better physical condition or something."
"Joined a gym."
"Must be a good one. Neither of 'em are spring chickens."
Jeffry sat back in his car. "Just a second." He thought about it for a moment, then his eyes traced designs on the screen. Sensors picked up the eye movements and the blinks, coordinated them quickly, and spat out columns of data.
"Twenty-eight radical switches in the past eighteen months, all of them moving more and more behind DeLacourte. Look at this. They're all over sixty years old."
"So he appeals to the older, conservative type. I can buy that."
"No . . . these are radical switches. Let's take a look at DuPrene. He was scheduled for some kind of surgery— canceled. Let's see his hospital records." The screen blanked for a minute, and a "classified" sign popped up.
"Well, yippie shit. Let's try it another route. I have a commission to study routing for medical emergencies in Kentucky. All right . . . Let's ask the University of Oklahoma Medical School to help us by feeding stats on the number of surgeries performed for men of DuPrene's physical profile. We'll get an abstract on him, without the program knowing it's violating its security codes." He looked up at her and grinned impishly. "Damn, these things are dumb sometimes."
There was a whirr of images on the screen, and then it cleared. "Hmm . . . look at the test results. Man is exhibiting signs of . . . well, shit. What can you call it except rejuvenation?''
"What?"
"Rejuvenation. All functions are closer to normal after the surgery canceled. I don't know what to make of it."
"Anything unusual? Traces of any unusual chemicals?"
"Not really. Ah ... we have a blood test here. Total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, uric acid, triglycerides. A physician's note that all values are closer to those you'd expect from a teenager than a sixty-year-old man. Cholesterol below one-twenty, uric acid three point six. Healthy dude."
"Anything else?"
"Well, another note—there are high levels of something called 2,3 DEA."
"What's that?"
"Damned if I know. Whatever that is. Can research it for you. Hold on." Jeffry's fingers and eyes moved. The screen clouded and cleared again. "Here it is. 2,3 diethylandroeternalone. It's an androgenic steroid, pres
ent in human blood. Levels of DEA are high in fetuses, decline to almost nothing after birth, pop up again in puberty. Decline drastically in old age. There is speculation that it could be a longevity treatment, but it's like insanely expensive to synthesize. Lots of footnotes. Want me to follow up?"
"Not now. What else do you have?"
Jeffry played with the console. In quick succession, three video images of DeLacourte appeared.
"I've got something else here. How long has it been since DeLacourte has appeared in public?"
"Almost two years. Why?"
"Take a close look at these pictures. This one"—he pointed at the image on the extreme left—"was the last one taken by an independent photographer, a little more than twenty-six months ago. Notice anything about these more recent freezes?"
Marina studied them. "I . . . well, he looks younger too."
"I'm not sure why that bothers me. How long have you worked for this geek?"
"Three years. First met with him two years ago. Does that mean something?"
"I don't know, lady. I really don't."
Marina sat back and closed her eyes. "Neither do I, Jeffry. But I'm going to find out."
Chapter Twenty
Wu
Sunday, June 11
Outside, the cyclic rhythm of the city's sound and light was a constant, seething thing. But here, eighty floors up in the penthouse suite of the Ortega Towers, Promise might have been in another world.
The visual screens worked better than the sonic baffles. Standing almost to the edge of the terrace, and looking out, she could see nothing but a gentle, snow-covered landscape. It was dappled with trees and, in the distance, restful, broken arcs of mountain.
She could stay here. She could just remain here, and live out the rest of her life. For a moment she was lost in the holofantasy. Then it was gone, gone with the touch of feet on the carpeting behind her, gone as she turned to face the man whose feet made the impressions.
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