“Our security systems—”
“—are worthless against my intelligence agent. Believe me, Mister Officer Langlois, you might as well quit playing games, like I have. It’s better to talk honestly, man to man.” While the machines watch, he adds to himself.
The young bloke named Florian fixes him with an icy, hate-filled stare. He notices that the blond lug is wearing a black bandanna knotted tightly at his neck; a metal charm dangles from it, its shape clearly visible in the V of the man’s partly unbuttoned shirt. It is an Iron Cross, a German military medal from the first half of the twentieth century. Definitely a cross, but Plotkin’s memories—the ones from the Russian part of his identity—show him images of ruins, floods of men and women in rags fleeing burning villages while hordes of gray-uniformed soldiers whose lapels are also adorned with this famous Iron Cross advance between cohorts of tanks.
Chin resting on his hands, the sheriff watches Plotkin watch Florian, who in turn does not drop his gaze. Finally, Wilbur Langlois lets out a long sigh. “You aren’t a bounty hunter, but you’re not a journalist, either. Much less an insurance agent. So?”
“So?” Plotkin demands, facing him, abandoning Florian Iron Cross to his little macho games.
“So, who are you?”
I don’t know, would be the correct response—but somehow he doesn’t think it is appropriate under the circumstances.
“Let me remind you that I’ve committed no crime, and that your agents arrested me without cause. You should cut this conversation short before you infringe on my rights as a UniWorld citizen.”
“First, you are in independent Mohawk territory,” Langlois interrupts him, “a little outside the jurisdiction of UniWorld. Second, as for crimes, my dear sir, I can assure you that it wouldn’t take me a minute to find fifty of them for which I could clap you in irons right now. You say you’re looking for Catholics, but you have no legal mandate. You turned up on the ridge with spy paraphernalia and you think I’m going to swallow your bullshit stories?”
“It isn’t illegal spy paraphernalia. I’m a freelance journalist and I’m investigating the underground Christian movement on behalf of a very confidential press agency. A few different things brought me to Grand Junction. That’s it.”
“What things?”
“I’m not obligated to reveal my sources. I’m keeping my mouth shut.”
Then, Plotkin lets fly with the deathblow. “Are you protecting Christian rebels, Sheriff?”
He has no time to say anything more. The butt of the .12 caliber swings around to aim at him with incredible speed, while an indistinct oath clatters in his head as if uttered in some demonic echo chamber. The next thing he knows is a white flash of pure pain. He falls from the chair, unconscious.
ON/OFF. OFF/ON.
The pain is no longer pure light, a solar fracas, a shock of stars exploding in his head.
It has weight now. It has body.
His body.
He regains consciousness.
He hears vague noises, then voices, a little hazy, saying, “How is he, Dr. Brandt? I’m going to give that asshole Schutzberg two days in the brig.” He opens his eyes. His vision is unfocused. His body is nothing but pain. His head, his cheek, and his right temple feel as if they have been branded with a white-hot iron; needles of pain are jabbing the entire top of his skull. There is a human silhouette in front of him. Something around his left arm is putting pressure on the vein, and crystallizes the cold sensation of a probe tucked into the crook of his elbow. The silhouette speaks.
“Contusions, a small concussion, scrapes and scratches, a large hematoma. Nothing really serious, fortunately.”
“Finally some good news,” murmurs Plotkin, not really expecting anyone to hear him—not even some random god that might be hiding in the corner.
The silhouette has grown clearer; it moves to the center of the room, toward the sheriff’s desk and its butane lamp. It is a woman. She perches on the back of a chair, facing the big half-blood cop. Her voice is low, calm, smoky, like burning gases—the voice of a woman who has seen much.
“This man has the right to lodge a complaint against you. Your French assistant is an asshole. The fact that Alsatian Islamists exterminated his family doesn’t give him a right to take it out on everything that moves.” The sheriff says nothing. He stares at his boots.
“I inserted a polymedic probe and covered the hematoma with transcutaneous gel. He’ll be back on his feet in a few minutes. Give him the tube of gel and the three remaining doses when he leaves. And take those handcuffs off immediately.”
“Of course, Dr. Brandt,” mutters the sheriff, humbly.
“You’re lucky there are no fractures, Sheriff. Good-bye.”
The woman turns on her heel; one of the guards hurriedly opens the emergency door at her approach.
“And don’t forget to punish that prick Schutzberg. He won’t bring you anything but trouble.”
She stands in framed daylight for a few seconds before the heavy steel door closes behind her.
Plotkin stands up slowly in the light of the butane lamp and faces the sheriff. His bare arm, sleeve pushed up, is encircled by a strip of beige latex at the elbow. A black-and-gray microcomponent is embedded in the skin there; a small, luminous diode pulses gently. He can feel the presence of the probe under his skin with every movement he makes.
The two patrol officers are gone. Only the two guards are still in their places; Wilbur Langlois must have advised the edgy Alsatian to get lost for a little while, so that the affair could be settled as quietly as possible. The woman, Dr. Brandt, had not been wrong—Heavy Metal Valley’s police station had been placed in a very delicate situation, legally speaking. Plotkin is fortunate, in a way, that the peon attacked him. He extends his arms so that the sheriff can unlock the handcuffs with a small metal key.
“Your car is in the parking lot,” says Wilbur Langlois. “You’re free to go—and to lodge a complaint against our department.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Plotkin assures him.
“Good. Best to keep it among ourselves, I suppose.”
Plotkin thinks hard. While he is still bumbling around this tiny office, rubbing his wrists, which are sore from the old-style steel handcuffs, he should continue playing the role of an investigative journalist to the hilt. His core identity, that of a killer and professional spy, allows him to adjust his various fictional identities—and any new ones he might need to invent at a given moment—as often as the situation requires it.
“I won’t bring a complaint against you,” he says, “but I think I have the right to some explanation. I told you that I’m keeping my sources confidential.”
It is when you have been brought to your knees that you can achieve the greatest victories, says an Order maxim.
Driving back along the North Junction road, Plotkin surprises himself by thinking that it was all worth it. Getting clocked in the face with a gun butt, losing consciousness, having his wrists chafed by those fucking handcuffs, being temporarily but completely helpless—all worth it. The sheriff had admitted that some Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, and even a few Israelites had fled the world after the Third Destruction of the Temple and found refuge in Heavy Metal Valley, and that they were tolerated there.
“Are you Catholic yourself, or a rebel Christian?” Plotkin had asked the sheriff. The man had only smiled neutrally. So neutrally that Plotkin had understood his message 100 percent.
“And your assistant, the one who knows how to handle a gun butt?” Plotkin had persisted. “Is he a Christian too? You know, one who strikes the left cheek after having struck the right cheek?”
“Listen, Schutzberg is a guy who generally does his job pretty well. He was only six when his entire family was massacred at Colmar, in France. He might be a little too zealous sometimes, but he protects his community.”
“And the dog?” Plotkin had asked then.
“What dog?”
“The dog,” P
lotkin had sighed. “The cyberdog. The one from the Hotel Laika. I’m sure you’ve seen him lurking in some corner—around here, probably.”
Langlois’ face had lit up with comprehension. “Oh—right, the dog.”
“Balthazar.”
“Yes, Balthazar.” The sheriff’s smile grew distant. “Yes, he comes here sometimes. He likes to hunt in the hills around here.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Plotkin had responded. “He comes here several times a week. To see someone. I’d like you to give me a little more of an answer about him. You owe me that.”
The man had rocked back and forth a little in his chair, hesitating, then stopped suddenly, obviously making a decision. “The dog usually goes to see the Sommervilles and the Sevignys. I don’t know why, but he’s close to those two families.”
“Are they Catholics?”
“Catholics and Protestants. I’ll tell you again, this is a peaceful community. We don’t tolerate armed guerrillas here.”
“But they’re still rebelling against UniWorld regulations.”
Langlois’ silence stretched for long moments as he pondered the question. Plotkin carefully recorded what he had just learned in his memory. Sommerville. Sevigny. Protestants. Catholics.
“Okay,” Plotkin said at last. “One more question. Clovis Drummond, the manager of the hotel. How is he mixed up in all this? With Humvee and the Christian rebels?”
The cop’s big face darkened. He fixed his cold eyes on Plotkin’s and said coolly, “I can assure you that I don’t know this Drummond. He has no relationship of any kind with our community, except that he is, I believe, the legal owner of the hotel cyberdog we were just discussing. Monolith Hills isn’t part of my jurisdiction.”
Plotkin had decided to let his maleficent killer’s instinct decide, later, whether the sheriff was telling the truth or not. He certainly seemed sincere. That could mean that he was lying even more than he had been before, with even more sincerity.
He knew better than to push his shaky luck. He accepted the three twice-daily doses for his medical treatment probe and the tube of transcutaneous gel, and left Heavy Metal Valley with a brief handshake for the sheriff and a “Good-bye, gentlemen” for the guards who opened the door for him silently. He had hardly seen their faces; he had not heard their voices at all.
Now, as he drives along Nexus Road, he has to admit that everything seems to be going pretty well—right in tune with the plan, in fact. The plan that the instruction program had, in spite of being overwhelmed by his emerging personality, undoubtedly implemented without his knowledge.
The android conspiracy might very well have some connection to a clan of rebel Catholics.
And the fact that an entire “marginal” city on the outskirts of Grand Junction—the margin of the margin—and its police force had been infiltrated by this “conspiracy” gives a terrible appearance of reality to this theater of shadows: nothing like good old-fashioned territorial competition, a myriad of mystic financial conflicts, and a little gangsterism to give a highly political secret the appearance of an authentic frame-up.
True conspiracies are the coming together of interests that are often surprising.
At least for others.
> HOMO TENEBROSUM
Some incidents are bottomless pits, completely without sense or any hope of one’s conscience ever enlightening what is lost in the void, like a handful of photons in a black hole. Some men are sinkholes, deep abysses like open trenches at the bottom of a deep ocean. They say that there is life there, but it is the life of sinkholes, of lightless chasms. The life of shadows.
It hadn’t taken el señor Metatron long to run up against a wall of absolute blackness around—or, even worse, inside—Mr. John Cheyenne Hawkwind, alias Harris Nakashima.
There is plenty of information to which even an intelligent software agent cannot gain access. Even an elite “angel” like el señor Metatron. These are the darkest thoughts of men, who most likely do not even know them themselves—and if they do, it is a safe bet that they have done everything they possibly can to forget them.
Only a few human beings, very rare ones, know the secret, dark, wild, and terrible dimension that stretches infinitely within them. These men know and recognize each other immediately, even blind, even in a crowd. They know one another as well as they know themselves, but this takes more than a diagram of data, or a list of police information, or a bit of intelligent software.
Or, perhaps, it takes less.
All it takes is for them to meet each other.
It is enough for them to cross paths—then each one knows, in perfect synchronicity with the other, that they are both part of the same race. The race of shadow men—Homo tenebrosum—who know that conscience illuminates only a tiny corner of a labyrinth as vast as a planet plunged into darkness.
They are a highly dangerous race of men.
Plotkin meets Nakashima/Hawkwind, finally, upon his return to the hotel, as the incident in Humvee is just beginning to take shape in his reemerging memory. This time there is hardly anyone in the lobby; two or three new arrivals, lost souls from the strip, come to sleep off their cheap-wine hangovers or meta-amphetamine trips. Plotkin, desiring to avoid them, moves quickly toward the lateral corridor leading to the central patio.
The patio is not empty. There is a junkie there, staring vacantly at his empty glass; also two seedy middle managers sitting at a table face-to-face and, from the looks of it, discussing business. There is also someone who has obviously come to Grand Junction looking for a Golden Track, wearing a Hawaiian floral shirt and memory-form Ray-Bans—the “California look” from the beginning of the century—seated in front of a plate of trans-G tofu. And there is an old crone who looks to be in her seventies, apparently unable to afford any rejuvenation cures, shuffling a pack of tarot cards. A man wearing the uniform of a Municipal Consortium electronic repair company drinks a beer in complete, tangibly anguished solitude. A trio composed of two men and a woman—a whore from the strip—look as if they are only moments away from heading up to a room together; all that is left is to negotiate the final details of the “contract.” Finally, two middle-aged women, visibly Latin American, gaze up at the wall-mounted television set to some neuroencrypted channel. The other two or three people in the room are dark, indistinguishable figures by the far wall. One of them detaches itself immediately as Plotkin enters the room. A silhouette. A face. Eyes.
A soul.
It is as powerful as a telepathic wave. It is a telepathic wave. A shock wave. It is the truth of one man exposed to the gaze of another, but also that of a man viewed through the filter of his identical other. Cheyenne Hawkwind looks at him. And at the other end of the room, Plotkin looks at Cheyenne Hawkwind. Each recognizes himself in the other. Despite the distance, the dimness, and the various distractions, the truth is there with such clarity and obviousness that both men know they are the only ones in the room who can see it.
For the first time since checking into the hotel, Plotkin feels something very like fear. Cheyenne Hawkwind is not a dealer like the others, or a trafficker taking advantage of local small-potatoes connections with the Consortium’s Mohawk cops.
They have read each other easily despite the twenty meters’ distance between them, like two decoding machines linked in a closed circuit. Hawkwind is a killer, as cold and organized as Plotkin himself. And Plotkin knows it, because he can see it in Hawkwind’s eyes. He sees himself mirrored in the dark gaze, twin to his own, and the other man’s message is crystal clear. You’re just like me, you son of a bitch.
> DARK FIRE
It is well after dark, and Plotkin sleeps dreamlessly. A few sparse shreds of vague memory try to take shape in his slumbering mind—some of his past crimes, the only parts of his memory that form any sort of coherent whole, do their best to emerge, to be perceived by him as an image of a huge global neuroconnectional tube, an infinite spiral whose circular convolutions, woven in ultraviolet DNA biophotons, wrap sim
ultaneously around his cortex and those of hundreds of millions of individuals and machines. He has the strange impression of dreaming, for a brief instant, of this same hotel room with the operations portal affixed to the wall, but it is so ephemeral that it is like something he might just barely remember, someday.
He is awakened abruptly by a voice audible only inside his head, via his auditory circuit, accompanied by a theta-stimulation neuroencoded order: EVERYBODY UP!
It is el señor Metatron, and he has information.
Information about the two residents of Capsule 081.
“What is it?” Plotkin demands.
The genetic file on Jordan and Vivian McNellis floats before his eyes, but this time the artificial combat intelligence does not say “Fuck if I know.” Instead, he glows orange with nearly palpable contentment. “I’ve got it.”
“Well?”
“The defective gene registered on their card is actually not the right one. I noticed the falsification when I saw an algorithm that seemed to correlate two sequences in their chromosome 4. They were able to do it thanks to a very simple mathematical translation; they just moved the error from the correct DNA strand to the one next to it.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that they don’t have a little degenerative retrovirus that can be controlled by transgenic transfusion; they don’t have retinitis pigmentosa—the version 2.0 machinitis I was talking about the other day—at all.”
“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? What’s the big deal?”
“Don’t be stupid. You know very well what the big deal is. The gene next to the one with the degenerative disease initiates a noncoding DNA sequence, but it’s the one that is really structurally modified; it’s the one that shows serious anomalies.”
“If it’s a noncoding structure, then so fucking what?”
“That’s exactly the problem, Plotkin. Why did they do it? I read on their registration card that they’re trying to get a flight. They’re on the official waiting list for Platform 2. A disease, even a relatively benign one like R.P. 2.0, drastically lowers their chances of passing the UHU-approved examination. Now do you understand?” The crypto-visible brazier seems impatient.
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