It was only as Walken stared in the mirror and watched the bruises ebb with every passing day that he had been truly impressed at Lo's craftsmanship. His frowning, craggy face had been remade into a kind of blandly handsome mask, pale but sculpted, a computer-designed conglomeration of popular faces synthesized from years of net and hologram media. The eyes, though, remained the same. Walken looked eight years younger, pleasant yet forgettable, but his brown eyes kept their grim edge. He was glad. He needed that.
These strange days were getting to him. In the week it took for his face to heal he spent the hours staring into the dim reaches of Bobbi's warehouse ceiling, wondering about what had occurred that night at First Ebenezer. Had Exley been in the employ of Genefex, or some other Wonderland outfit and had arranged for Walken to get the rope for getting rid of evidence? Perhaps his executing Brighton was the final nail on this coffin made of secrets that he had found himself sealed in. Walken often fantasized about their duel, how he could have done things differently. How the hell did Exley spot him like that? Exley didn't have a sniffer and there were no implants that he'd ever heard of that could range through solid objects.
Also on Walken's mind was the division of self he had experienced when he had accidentally dropped his consciousness into Stadil's coded archive. The weight of the mysteries and the guilt he felt for having dragged Bobbi into things hung heavy on his shoulders and there was little he could do but stare into the eyes that remained, the last scraps of that which he had been and ponder his own fate.
Too soon had Walken healed, though and now he and Bobbi were collating information, preparing to begin their investigation anew. Unlike before, where anonymity was problematic, Walken could move about again. Only two people knew that Walken had changed himself and it was doubtful that either Lo or Lionel would bite the hands that fed them. The risk to their professional reputations was too great, never mind the danger to their lives should some of their clients feel that they too would be at risk of betrayal. Playing like that, Walken knew, got you crushed by the dominoes you set off. Things seemed as if they would be reasonably peaceful as they prepared to make their next move.
The next part of their investigation would involve what Walken hadn't told Hunt before she had been killed. Although the primary research complex for the biocomputer storage systems involved in Genefex's immortality experiments lay in Wonderland, there were several small secret laboratories in the city. They had decided to explore these locations, to try and gather further information concerning the mystery cycle that had begun to spin back up again.
They had to know, now. The weeks had seen Bobbi change somewhat. She wasn't asking him to stay with her anymore. What they had learned from Stadil's file packet and the duel with Exley seemed to catalyze a change in her mental chemistry. She still wanted him close, still made love to him, still adored him in that odd, protective way, but there was something else there that he couldn't identify, something driving her. They never talked of money anymore. He had begun to think it had never existed. Perhaps she had, too.
Since his brush with the brainrider terminal, a phenomenon they had yet to find an answer for, he had found himself changing too. He dreamed of the flood nightly now, each dream getting stranger than the next; the sea had long since gone silver and the sky was always dark, though he could perceive cycles of night and day. The towers now ringed the bay, tangled up with industrial machinery that he could not identify. They all looked like the nanosculpted oddities downtown, forming a congruent whole, dreamlike and strange. They vanished when he woke, but the afterimages had begun to grow more insistent of late.
Walken kept thinking about Exley. What he faced off against in the ruined church hadn't been the man he knew. Exley preferred clean kills when he had to make them and he didn't talk like a fucking robot. He wondered if the specter of implant-rejection syndrome, so rare in these modern days, had manifested from Exley's bizarre implants — or was there something else going on? Was Exley attached to the conspiracy that was Genefex? Had he killed Hunt for this reason? And why had he let Walken go when he could have killed him so easily? Questions were all Walken had now, staring up at the distant ceiling and cursing whatever fates had brought him to this pass. Walken wondered why, against all sense, when he had changed his face and was able to continue with his life in some new form, he conspired with his lover to dredge up more of this poisoned truth.
It had always been about the truth, he tried to tell himself. As the nights progressed and the whispering of his instinct grew more insistent every day, however, he found himself doubting that ever more. What was it now? Had it become something more, a need to dig it up, to confront it, to end it? Was there really any way to slay the beast? By the end of his recovery, when the last of the bruises were fading on his re-engineered flesh, he wondered if he were merely trying to con the thing into killing him when he wasn't paying attention.
On that morning Walken rose a new person. Bobbi had gotten him new papers, a new ID presence on the Federal system, everything he needed to live at least halfway peacefully off the grid. He'd be like she was, a man of the street, a joe just like everyone else and she seemed to like that just fine.
For Walken, whose reality had been in the detached strata of the Bureau, it was the Fall. He felt the weight on him, the sheer gravity of realities changing and he wasn't certain how he was going to deal. It was merely that he was, that he had to and that it was going to have to be made the best of. He had always wanted to live apart from the world into which he had been born, but until now he was able to try and do better in the open. Sitting on the bed, assembling the C-J for what seemed the sixtieth repetition, he tried not to think about where the course of his life was leading.
For the first time, he didn't believe it was going anywhere. A vacuum percolated somewhere inside him where the faith that things would improve had been. Small, perhaps, but it was a gap that gnawed dully in the distant reaches of his being.
"Hey, gangster," Bobbi chimed from the doorway. She had brightened enormously since his decision to go underground. The grudging nature of his choice didn't seem to affect her. "You look grouchy."
"Yeah." He didn't look up, intent on his assembly. Something about her had begun to irritate him lately; she seemed so goddamned happy when he was so miserable, almost as if she'd pulled him down to her level. It wasn't a kind thought, but it was persistent. Something about her flesh, the smell of her, made him uncomfortable in the past few days, especially when they slept together.
"More dreams?" She sighed. "Well, you look nice. It's nice to see you without all those damned bandages."
He shrugged. "It isn't me," he said, his fingers working the puzzle that was the C-J. "It isn't anybody, in point of fact. I'm a generic."
Bobbi made the softest 'tch'ing sound. "This again." She stepped into the room, hands tucking into her back pockets and looked at him with her head canted. He didn't see her face but he knew the look, that of the stern, maternal tropical bird. "You're what you need to be at the moment," she said. "We become what we wish to be, I told you that. The flesh doesn't have to be original. You think my hair's naturally this color? Hell, you think my tits are real?" She seized them gently in her hands through the thin fabric of her t-shirt, weighing them.
He looked up. "You never told me that," Walken said, a bit surprised.
She let go of herself with a snort. "Wasn't exactly on the menu of important things to discuss, honey." Bobbi put her hands on her hips. Those eyes, so bright and sharp, seemed to peer through him. "You're so damned melancholy lately. What's with you?"
Walken looked at her, said nothing and went back to assembling the gun.
Bobbi frowned. "I'm getting real bored with this 'poor me' thing you've got going on," she said sharply, floes of frustration in her tone. "It's gonna fuck you up for what we're gonna be doing. Keep your head straight, boy, before you end up getting it taken off and ruin the whole damned thing." She turned and left and he could hear the padding of h
er feet on the concrete floor receding into silence.
This is what it was to be him, now. Moody. Grim. Indeterminately angry. Was this what Lucifer felt when he landed in the shadow of God, realizing the enormity of getting what he'd wanted all along? It wasn't really any different and he still felt better than the rest of the world. Arrogance swelled in Walken's head like a tumor and he hated himself for it.
He wished he could just snap out of it. Bobbi was happy he was around; why couldn't he feel the same way? With a sigh of reservation, Walken rose, dressed, put the newly-assembled pistol in the band of his jeans and pulled on the new leather jacket Bobbi bought him. He shuffled into the center clearing where she sat in front of the terminal, surrounded by screens, though they were all currently blank planes of navy blue light.
"I'm going out," he said to her back.
"Already?" She glanced at him from the corner of her eye, but he couldn't see her face. Her voice was carefully calm.
"Yeah." He took a deep breath. "I need to walk, you know? Get my head together. Maybe I'll feel better with some fresh air."
She snorted at that. "I suppose." She turned in her seat to look at him, green eyes narrowed faintly. "Do you still want to be here, Tom?"
"I don't know." The words came out before he could think and he winced at their flatness.
Bobbi didn't blink. "So go and find out," she said. "I got no problem living like this for the rest of my life. I don't need to take a bullet over money, or a man that doesn't want me." Her voice was stern, leaden. She sounded like he used to.
Something squirmed inside Walken before the sharpness of her gaze. He looked down at his sneakers and nodded. "Yeah," he said softly, "Yeah, I understand. I guess I wouldn't want that for you either."
"Come back when you've got an answer, then." She canted her head. "But if you get yourself into trouble, call me. Oh and take this. I bought it for you yesterday." She turned a bit and pulled a thin, palm-sized oblong of black plastic from behind the terminal, tossing it to him; he caught it, looked down. It was a hand computer, a Sony Victra, very slim and powerful. Very expensive.
Bobbi just shrugged at his look of surprise. "I guess I'm in the habit of spending money on you," she said. "It's got all my information in it. Just call me if you get in trouble, all right? It's not like I'm kicking you out."
He nodded. "I'll call," he told her, put the Sony in his pocket and turned to go.
"One thing," she said to his back.
Walken paused. "Yeah?"
"No other girls." Her voice seemed to strain. "Not unless you say goodbye to me first."
"No other girls," His voice was hollow when he said it, for he knew it wouldn't be a woman that would separate the two of them. Then he was gone.
Walken rode the train all day. For the price of a single farecard, he didn't have to look at the mockery of an afternoon sky, didn't have to witness the passage of time at all. Just him and the people, packing the seats and hanging from the rails, a thousand different species of human animal. He felt like he was on safari, observing from his seat in the back of one car the many who shuttled in its silent length to their business all across the city. He watched the salarymen and the corporate drones stack themselves in the morning next to menial workers and students, cycling in and out, then the shoppers and tourists emerged from under their respective rocks. Sometimes he busied himself by watching the newscrawl, saw his real face glowering down at him from the occasional police bulletins when he wasn't learning about the takeover of the collapsing German government by a corporate alliance or the completed construction of yet another LaGrange station.
Often he had wondered what it would be like in space, though he'd never had either the money or the occasion to experience it. At one point an advertisement for a new orbital spa splashed itself across a screen next to him. He looked at it, saw the endless expanse of black behind the image-panes of smiling tourists and beautiful people and wished for a moment that he could dive in, be sucked in forever to voyage to that beautiful void where there was nothing else to distract him.
Walken let the wave of thought crash over him and ebb away. He tried to distract himself from the strange pang of loss that rang in his heart by watching a cluster of nearby punks try and chat up some nervous-looking girls.
Walken bathed himself in the people of the trains; their smells, their colors, the rhythm of their business. He had still found nothing to connect himself to them. They were all the same machine, he knew, all human flesh. They just weren't the same model. Walken allowed himself for a moment the conceit to think that perhaps his was just a very rare type - but then the voice inside him, the one he had so recently begun to hate, suggested that perhaps he was simply a better design.
His own personal directive seemed to be to exist outside the rest of the world and what purpose had that served? Even the gangs of disaffected youth had kindred souls. All he had was Bobbi and, though she was far sweeter than he had ever deserved, he now felt little of the spark that had once flared between them. It was as if with the removal of his face, his identity, something new and strange had been revealed that was previously unknown even to him.
Walken left the train and its troubling thoughts and ascended the escalators into the light-drenched bustle of the night complex, the city as he most often knew it. He had emerged in the middle of the Waters, nearly drowned in its swelling glow. A group of girls had gathered by the top of the escalator, thin, made-up prostitutes in last year's surplus fashions.
"Hey, baby," one of them called.
"None for me, bitches," Walken growled, pushing past them to get to the sidewalk. One of them spat on the ground after him; he thought of Exley's shotgun spewing death around his ankles. It made a knot of nameless anger tighten deep in his gut, made him turn toward the group with hooks of rage pulling back at the corners of his mouth.
They sneered at him, that collection of greyhound whores, the foremost with her dark hair hanging in heavy, wild curls shot through with ribbons of vivid blue. "Hey, motherfucker," she hissed at him, her mad eyes shining and her pupils wide and black as pits, "Don't you fucking turn around. Don't you turn around! I know you, motherfucker. You hear? I will fucking hunt you down, man!"
The whore's words were bravado, something hissed in the heat of refusal. He had seen it all too often in his time on the street, the hollowing out of the mind and soul by the ravages of the street and illicit pharmaceuticals, but there was something in her eyes that stayed with him as he turned and walked away, something that seemed to flicker in the back of his head as he walked on. Hers was the madness that the Doll had carried in the squalor beneath the overpass, the incendiary roar that drove the tiny child-body toward him like a fury. He remembered how he recoiled, how he pulled the trigger and made her evaporate in a cloud of white. Had he chosen the explosives, banishing her away, without even realizing it? Had the crime truly been his all along?
Walken hurried down the sidewalk, trying to escape from memory. It would not leave him entirely, though. The veil of it, heavy and unyielding, seemed to try and pull him down. Images flooded into his mind as he threaded the mottled concrete. The Dolls as he had first found them, painted up like whores in their coffins. The first dead Doll, hand pressed against white-spattered glass. Dead Koreans sprawled like discarded toys across a trash-strewn floor. The other Dolls, the white pool spreading from the sundered ruin of the young fury, the quiet, pitiful body of the martyred little one. Brighton, blasted down like an overfed game animal at his feet.
Scenes of death haunted him even as he tried to shake them away and he found his feet directing him on automatic beneath the extruded flying corridors of the mall complexes, the delirious glow of the advertisements latched remoralike to their bellies. When Walken finally did throw them off he found himself in a hotel bar, staring at a pair of exhausted, haunted eyes in the bottom of a glass of scotch. Familiar eyes, brown even through the amber liquor. His own. He blinked hard and tried to remember where he was, how he'
d gotten here and then he heard a light voice sound in his ear.
"Hello." He looked up, saw another pair of eyes, startlingly violet. The irises each had a tiny golden Nikon logo laid into their rims. They were synthetic but gorgeous, glittering like plates of polished amethyst. Their inhumanity had startled him.
"Hey," he said, blinking. Confusion filled up his mind like silt kicked up in a fish tank.
The eyes belonged to a woman. Coffee-colored skin, long dark hair, strips of rainbow chrome woven into flowing, ironed locks, a sea-green dress licking down over her athletic frame. He stared at her; she smiled. "You look like you've had a hard day," she said. "Everything all right?"
Walken blinked again, trying to place the face, the voice; they, too, were familiar to him. Suddenly the switches clicked in his head. The woman, the bar, everything. The eyes were new — implants — but the lovely face was Karen Hammond's. This wasn't just some random place, he realized as the bar's dark woods and warm lighting snapped into place around him; it was Ellison's, in the heart of the New City and he was maybe a block from the C.E.P. Tower and certain doom. Busy shouldering the weight of memory, he had walked himself straight into the Bureau's favorite watering hole.
"Oh," Walken said softly as the blood froze in his veins. "No... no, I'm fine."
The look on his face must have been terrible because she drew back a little, blinking. "All right," Hammond said, her voice somewhat wary. "Sorry." She turned to get the bartender's attention, but he saw her keeping his face in her periphery — a cop reflex, just as his was to go into friendly territory under stress. Only this wasn't friendly territory anymore and he felt very stupid as he got up and began to walk casually toward the door.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 23