Miles shrugged. He sat down on the hood next to me, blotting his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt and revealing a hairy, pot-bellied tummy that sat beneath his scrawny ribs like a kangaroo's pouch.
He said: ‘I'm not a man of action. I'm a man of ideas. I need to be indoors. I need to be fed regularly. I need a dishwasher. I don't want to have to worry about going out and shooting my dinner out of a tree. It's all a bucolic fantasy.’
‘A what? An alcoholic what?’
‘Bucolic, not alcoholic!’
‘Bubonic alcohol?’
I was really plastered. We both started giggling. ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I'm thinking about retiring my paladin.’
Miles leaped to his feet, twisted his ankle in a pothole, and staggered sideways.
‘What? You can't retire Monty. I just designed a whole burial complex for him, presided over by a lich.’
‘If you ripped it off from Tomb of Horrors, you shouldn't have bothered. I already know about the room that automatically drops you down a hundred-foot shaft and kills you instantly, OK?’
Miles swelled with indignation. ‘I can do better than ripping off a module. Gary Gygax, he annoys me so much, why is the guy so egotistical? He really thinks that just because he wrote the rules he's, like, God. The real God would be more modest.’
I smirked into my Amstel Lite bottle. Miles obviously hasn't listened to himself when he's just finished a cunning piece of programming. Hasn't heard himself talk up his work on the phone to gaming distributors. I didn't say anything, though. Spazmonia had hit a snag and its creator was behaving like Sherlock Holmes in between cases. Except, instead of cocaine, Miles was into Dr. Pepper and Cheez Doodles. Lately I'd noticed that a fine dust of orange crumbs coated the surfaces of his computer and his living room –where he actually worked – had the dull odor of deeply ingrained stale cheese farts.
‘I'm going to create a new character and she's going to be Neutral.’
‘Lawful neutral? Chaotic neutral?’
‘Just neutral.’
‘How boring,’ moaned Miles. ‘Please, think it over. If you knew how much fun my lich was going to be . . .’
‘Miles,’ I said. ‘Something scary is happening to me. I'm dividing into parts, but they're all still me – no, it's like, I feel like I'm stretching in all directions. Like I'm on a rack. My head is going this way, and my arms are each going that way, and my legs are getting stretched out. . .’ I balanced on the hood of the Olds, trying to illustrate. ‘I feel all distorted, dragged out of my own shape. I'm living in too many worlds at once. In my mind I look like a starfish. I'm being pulled into these different dimensions and pretty soon there will be nothing left in the middle.’
Miles made a big obvious effort to act sober. ‘Could this be a medical phenomenon?’ he said. ‘I mean, there isn't as much in the middle. Of you. As before.’
I stared at him. ‘Do you have to be so literal-minded?’
Miles said, ‘OK, so this is for real. I can just see the newspaper headline: Cookie Starfishes. AFair Lawn, NJ woman has mysteriously disappeared, to be replaced by an abnormally large starfish in her bathtub. The starfish was discovered reading Ringworld Engineers and eating a Hershey bar. No, don't go! Come on, Cookie, we're having such a good time, the Pimpernel commands you to stay!’ He was running after me. ‘Please? I have Yodels.’
‘Yodels can't tempt me anymore, Miles,’ I said in a superior tone as I crossed his tiny patch of lawn. I got in my car and tried vainly to insert the key into the ignition. The key kept stabbing the steering column and sliding off. The car seemed to be breathing, expanding and contracting around me. I felt sick.
‘Well, you can't drive. Come out of there. You'll kill someone.’
‘I don't care.’
‘Yes, you do. Come on, come on, I've got Raiders of the Lost Ark on Betamax. Oh, I forgot, you can't watch it. OK, I'll tell you what, I'll read to you. All right? I'll read you The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – would that make you feel better?’
I sniffed. Miles had never read to me before. It was a sweet offer.
‘Make it Watershiv Down,’ I said. ‘But first I have to be sick.’
grateful dead to the humpbacks
‘—Total waste of me being here if all I get to do is follow her around and be her punchbag.’
It's Klaski, and it doesn't seem like much has changed with Serge's team since your last visit.
Lewis is laughing.’I used to work in a hair salon,’ she said. ‘They made me sweep the floors and make coffee for six months before I got to even mix up the hair color. Apparently I was regarded as a risk to the clientele. You're a risk to yourself, Joanne. And us.You just don't know the ropes yet, and that takes time.’
She's running through your channels and checking your files from the day before to make sure nothing's been corrupted by the recharge in the Grid.
‘I'm not trying to insult you,’she adds.’But you're really green.’
‘I know already, OK?’Klaski snaps.’But I don't want to learn to be a soldier. Learning to follow orders isn't any good to someone like me.’
Lewis's lip curls but Klaski doesn't see it. She's deep in her mug of Cup O'Soup (Chicken Noodle).
'If you didn't want lo be a soldier, what are you doing here?’
'I want to study the Grid. I told my adviser that when they recruited me. I was told there were a lot of research opportunities open at X.’
Lewis smiles. She tosses you into the air; by now the group has begun to move off, Klaski sucking up the last of her noodles as she walks. ’I'd forget what they told me in the recruiting office if I were you. Just concentrate on surviving in the Grid. If you don't, you're dead.’
Klaski wipes her mouth and sticks the plastic cup in a thigh pocket of her utility suit. 'Thanks a lot.’
Lewis nods at Serge to indicate that your retrieved files have been moved to her Swatch. Serge motions to the others to precede her and then scans the material quickly, nodding. When she sees the footage of the girl-golems running for their lives and making it, she whistles softly.
‘I guess it's all going to end up academic,’ she mutters. ‘Galante's made a good job of it. She makes it look easy. Soon we'll all be home.’
She sounds like she's anticipating a prison sentence.
You rise over them. Their conversation as they move through the Grid sounds like fuzzy radio to you. You test your eyes, changing focal lengths and banking from side to side. The relative structure of this region of the Grid makes it considerably easier to track the humans moving within it.
‘The grid is like a whale,’ Lewis is telling Klaski. ’You see it as big and scary until a whaling boat sticks harpoons in it and chops it up into big chunks, and then it's pathetic. But if you get too close it's scary again, even when it's dead. It might be a whole world you could lose yourself in. It might make everything irrelevant, from 7-11 to taxes and death. Or it might just land you on your back in a military hospital reading Ladies Home Journal and eating Jell-O. Either way, you're an idiot if you don't pay attention to what it's doing, every single minute you're here.’
Klaski says, ’See, but that's my whole point! At MIT I took a course on the Grid and the professor said if the Grid is intelligent we should be able to communicate with it, but the government never tried to do that. When they found out about the logic bullets they just went in like it was the California Gold Rush.'
Lewis flaps her hands at Klaski. 'Shh! Don't talk to Serge about—'
'Too late,’ drawls Serge. 'Serge heard y'all. 'S OK. Y'all can talk to me about anything. Don't think you'd like to hear what I got to say on that topic, though, Klaski.'
Klaski clears her throat and keeps her eyes focused on where she's placing her hands and feet.
'I'd be very interested in your point of view, ma'am.'
Serge grunts. 'Yeah? Well, speaking of whales, did you ever hear about those guys who hang out piping improvisational music down to the ocean to talk to the wh
ales? Playing the Grateful Dead to the humpbacks, asking 'em to jam. So far the whales couldn't give a shit. Now, these guys are talented and they believe in what they're doing, but they can't even communicate with a whale, which – am I right, you tell me, you're the college kid, Klaski – a whale's pretty close to a human, ain't it? At least we come from the same planet, and they do have big motherf%#king brains! If you can't get a whale to say good morning Miss Jones, how the ju-ju are you gonna talk to the Grid? How, Cousin Nellie? Tell me how.'
'Uh, there could be some flawed logic in—' Klaski slips and falls, the wide branch she was walking on catching her in the crotch. She gasps a bit. 'Um, whales might have big brains but maybe the Grid is a brain.'
'Then where's its body, chitlin?' Serge laughs. 'I sure wouldn't want to know.'
She stops and looks back at Klaski struggling to her feet. 'I'm just an old soldier, kid. And by the way, I ain't Japanese. Just in case you was thinking I knew your boyfriend.' She winked, then turned and scrambled up a net of sparking filaments to get to the next wide branch.
Hendricks had dropped back to give Klaski a hand. 'l told you she was smart. She sees right through you, Jojo.'
Serge gets the call then from Dante, asking if Major Galante can borrow you a second time. Paranoia grips you. Has Galante figured out that you nearly sold out your own side yesterday? Does she know you overlooked the children? Do they all know you are losing your nerve?
You wonder if you have to go. Maybe Serge will refuse to release you. She needs you to find Gonzalez, after all.
But Serge nods soberly and gestures to you to take off, then continues to climb.
Maybe she knows, too. Maybe everybody is in on it.
As you take Gossamer up and away, you follow Klaski's stare fixing on Serge's strange body from behind. Serge looks like a chunky spider missing four legs as she swarms up the side of the Grid.
'She has a dominance complex,' pronounces Klaski, sniffing.
When you reach the logic mines, a short, slim woman with a Major's rank-insignia on her shoulder comes to greet you. She has dark hair, blunt features and sapphire-blue eyes. Her hands as they reach to catch Gossamer from the air are stitched with silver scar tissue like a patchwork quilt. Your first thought is that Major Galante doesn't seem angry with you. So she doesn't know about Gossamer's behavior yesterday.
'Hello, my friend. I'm just in the middle of an argument with Machine Front – what else is new? Hang on. I may need you to back me up.'
Persia Galante knows perfectly well that you can't reply, but she always behaves as if you and Goss are a person. She flashes you a smile and turns back to the holographic cigar-smoking zebra projected above her Swatch – her personalized exit portal for the collective wisdom of Machine Front. You've often wondered what it says about her that she has a zebra where Serge has Dante. It's almost as if Serge wants to date Machine Front, and Major Galante wants to make sure she never takes it too seriously.
It's pretty obvious from her first words what the argument's about.
'There are no logic bullets in the mine perimeter. It's that simple. You want to come up here with a metal detector and check it out? Oh, I forgot, you're just a bunch of statistics – you can't actually walk. Well, I can tell you because I was there. The logic bullets are gone. They're not in the mines, they're not in the processing units, they're not in the storage facilities and they're not in the transports. They're not in the cafeteria or the barracks, either. We checked everywhere. We checked the damn latrines. There isn't one single logic bullet in the entire area.'
'You haven't looked hard enough,' barked the zebra. 'Nothing passed the perimeter between the time that the MaxFact missile was launched and the arrival of your convoy that sealed off the mines. The Gossamer has ample records to indicate that no golems escaped during that interval.'
On cue you call up Gossamer's visual memories associated with the golem raid from two weeks ago and confirm that this is true. There was a brief period of chaos at the beginning of the golems' assault, but once the MaxFact failed to strike its target all personnel in the mines were obliged to automatically self-immolate to prevent themselves becoming golems. The marauding golems then set about dismantling superficial equipment and dragging it into the Grid, but within a very short time Galante's convoy had surrounded the camp perimeter and prevented most of them escaping. The golems subsequently besieged in the camp might very well have entered the mines after that, but there was no way out of the camp without crossing the perimeter fence, and Galante's blockade ensured that didn't happen.
'Then they must have been removed beforehand,’ Galante says.
'There is no evidence to indicate that they were. You need to make a more complete search. Take the Gossamer and crosscheck all the reference files with what you can see now. We need to find out what's changed since the raid began.'
Galante blows out through her lips like a horse.
'My people have just successfully raided a golem camp that was said to be impenetrable. We have not lost a single soldier. We haven't even lost a major piece of equipment. And now you want me to go on a research hunt?'
'We need the logic bullets. You know very well that the effectiveness of the Third Wave depends on close pursuit. Close pursuit is impossible without the logic that predicts how the Grid will behave. Until the logic has been recovered, your mission remains open.'
Galante slams her Swatch shut and punches the air. She opens the Swatch again and shouts into it.
'Gossamer saw the raid. We have footage. No golems escaped my equipment. How could they have removed the logic, then? I'll tell you what happened. We've been stuck up here waiting for the right moment to go in and get the logic bullets, and all the time they were never here. They were removed weeks ago. And I bet I know who removed them.'
Machine Front is implacable. 'You will double-check every inch of the perimeter. You will check all flier records and you will do a detailed forensic analysis on the mine shafts themselves. The possibility that the logic was removed earlier will be explored by us. But don't rely on it being true.'
And so you end up spending six hours combing the air, and your own records, for some indication of where and when the logic bullets went missing. A distinct mood of disappointment, followed by anger, settles over Galante's guys.
'There's no end to what they want,' one of the elite soldiers grumbles as she fits a miner's lamp on to her helmet. 'Next thing they're going to say there's a fuel shortage and ask us to fly home powered by our own farts.'
'We'll get home, Hotchkiss,' Galante reassures her. 'lt won't be long now. Did you see the videos of the Third Wave tanks? Poetry in motion. We'll get the logic and we'll all be having a barbecue in no time.'
You wish you could always work with Galante. You can't imagine Serge at a barbecue, that's for sure.
_______
Arla Gonzalez is hanging out with golems these days. It's not clear to you what their relationship is. You don't witness them talking. But they seem to follow her, and her wishes and their actions seem somehow causally connected; but it's hard to be sure exactly what's going on.
You have seen golems disembowel soldiers with their own weapons, or with Grid-generated versions thereof. You have seen them butcher a man and toss his body parts in the Grid, like Horus into the Nile. An you have seen the hands and arms rise from the well in multiples of nine, groping blindly: the Grid always makes nine copies of everything. You have seen heads rise, eighteen eyes look around, only to sink again. But mostly the golems leave bodies intact – that's the only way to get more fully functioning golems. The best soldiers make the most dangerous golems.
Why have they not simply killed Arla Gonzalez?
Serge has got to be wondering the same thing. Again she has located Gonzalez, but the presence of so many golems lurking around her like spidery bodyguards prohibits Serge from making a capture. Gonzalez is pleasant and soft-spoken as always. She looks emaciated.
'There's something you
should see before you bring me in,' Gonzalez says. And she leads Serge to the gap where you first spotted Gonzalez, the gap that holds the MaxFact missile (and suddenly you remember that you never reported that to anyone, and you wonder if you forgot by accident or if, as Mom would have said, you forgot by accident-on-purpose).
Serge beckons you down, into the dead Grid. It's not at all nice.
Now that you see the blackened, rigid forms of what once had been branches and boles and roots, the live Grid compares as a kind of Disneyland, a moving panoply of pastel happiness and life-affirming energy. The dead Grid makes a sound like thunder, and the patterns of shadow in its wasted skeleton write on your animal cortex in a terrible, primeval script. It has no smell. And you can't help but suspect that it has no weight, either – no integrity. Judging by Serge's behavior, she has the same intuition. She creeps near to the edge of the living, throbbing Grid, but stops a few paces clear of the gray region. She can't seem to bring herself to go any closer to the gap, and her voice trembles when she sends instructions to MF.
'No one else is to come over here,' she tells Dante. 'Under any circumstances. Gossamer: you come down here with me. I don't want you going directly over it, just in case something happens to you.'
No problem there. Gossamer has no intention of going near the wound in the Grid; in fact, she seems to be physically repelled by it, like a magnet of the same charge. You come in among the upper branches, sinking faster as Goss picks up more mass in the form of Grid pollen, until you hit a branch near Serge and stick there.
'Record this,' Serge says, ’But don't try to send it yet. We'll have to test the air waves first.'
She takes a few steps across the gray foundation like a nervous ice-skater. She lightens her goggles by one setting, and you take the corresponding restraints away from Goss's machine eyes. The Grid starts to boogie and shake, but you edit that out and focus on the dead zone. The branches are flashing alternately black and white; then they change to ultraviolet; then everything goes dark.The strobe pattern makes Serge grab her head, and she takes the opacity on her goggles back up a notch.
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