Avalon

by Rusty Coats

  I walked up and put my arm around her. She turned and cried into my robe. "What are we going to do, Jack? I can't keep walking around the city like this."

  St. Luke's doors opened and two Neuromantic women came out, blond hair curling out from under black pillbox hats, carrying boxes of clothes and bric-abrac. They walked to a barrel and upended their boxes, spilling blouses and posters into the fire.

  Rita went rigid in my arms and tried to peel away, but I held her. She writhed as the flames devoured the new kindling, but I held tight until the Neuromantic janitors had gone back inside. Then she broke away.

  She shoved her hands into the burning barrel and came up with handfuls of treasure. Her treasures. The Neuromantics were cleaning out her apartment, dumping her antique WPA souvenirs into the fire barrels, scorching away Rita's past. Now she rescued her history by singing the sleeves of her robe.

  I helped as long as the flames let us. We rescued a recruiting poster from her kitchen, a few blouses, a cocktail dress and an antique poster map of WPA uplink depots. It wasn't much, but it was more history than I'd been able to save.

  When I looked up, missionaries had moved further down the street. We'd have to run to blend in again. But after two days of wandering and waiting for a sign, I'd lost my faith. We could hoof it with the soul-savers for a year and never find our answers, because the answers weren't on the surface. They were buried, guarded by dragons.

  I took Rita's arm and pulled her toward the church steps. It was time to lose our religion and go underground.

  St. Luke's Cathedral was empty, the pews stacked and the confessionals busted into kindling. The Neuromantics had evicted God.

  We walked into the incense darkness and scanned the Cathedral for jumpsuits. Rita squeezed my hand as we walked toward the hole where the confession booths had been. The Automatic Tithing Machine wires snaked out of the broken plaster, groping for praise, but the trap-door was splintered, exposing the hall that led to Tommy's Place.

  I pushed the hood off my head and led Rita down the steps. We ducked into the arched doorway to her small studio. The door was off its hinges and the linoleum scuffed from boot heels. I poked my head around the corner and found it empty.

  Rita bit her lip, staring into her home. The guards had taken everything, from her posters and clothes to her hydrogen 'fridge. Even the futon where she'd nursed me back to health. The place had been gutted, leaving nothing but nail holes.

  "God." It was all she could say. "God."

  I tugged her into the hall. Her body tensed, fighting for a last look, but it was no good. The spirit was gone from here, as barren as a physicist's washed chalkboard.

  The hall was full of crates stamped with Neuromantic symbols. The Crusaders were cataloguing immersion equipment. Gloves, visors, Mensa relays and optic drives, stripping the useful parts and burning the chaff. They were parting out Prohibition.

  They'd removed the doors that once shielded fiber-optic warriors from the lobby at Tommy's Place. Inside, a dozen Neuromantics were detaching the beakers and stacking Recaros in the corner; the lobby had already been stripped. The goggle girl's counter was a wad of metal and the closet of scuba suits was an empty tomb. The holographic posters of high-res kung fu were gone; now the bloodsport heroes of Sparta were trapped in a world where they were losers, twenty-four hours a day.

  The only thing left was Tommy. His body was a black dune that rose above the slick floor, dead eyes staring at the acoustic tiles. He'd been a small-timer all his life, drawn by Prohibition’s promises of power and prestige. But the promises were attached to an hourglass, and when Prohibition's sand ran out, so did Tommy's life.

  With the steel doors removed, we couldn't cross the lobby without being seen by the Neuromantics. Across the lobby was the elevator, which led to the substation. No way to tell how many guards were down there.

  We took a breath, listening to the Neuromantics inside Tommy's Place, taking a breath. Then I hiked a thumb at the hallway and mouthed: Very quiet.

  The robes silenced our footsteps. But when we reached the south wall, I poked my head around the corner and found Merlin’s gates guarded by six Neuromantics in full assault gear. I jerked my head back, but not before a lanky Crusader spotted me.

  He impressed us with his intelligence. He said: "Hey."

  I pushed Rita against the wainscoting and said: "Access denied." We glanced up the hall at the splintered confession booth, our penance too many steps away. Then we heard the Neuromantic tell his buddies to sit tight while he investigated the situation.

  "You do that, Marky," one of the others sneered. "You investigate the situation."

  His boots clicked toward us and he charged up his rifle with a spin of the dial, making it hum. I rolled my eyes, sick of seeing half-baked Crusaders with that much firepower, then let my eyes wander over to the workers inside Tommy's Place. They hadn't heard. Then my pupils snagged on a small crack in the wainscoting.

  I dug into Rita's satchel and wrapped my hand around the metal scales of her cocktail dress and whispered, "Do you remember the way to Administration?"

  Rita followed my stare to the crack in the wall and nodded.

  "Go there. Now."

  Rita ran silently on the balls of her feet, slipped her fingers into the crack and slid the trap door open, exposing the tunnel Ferret had showed us. I watched her disappear in the blackness, then turned to stare into a dimpled chin.

  "This area is restricted," he bellowed. "Your religious rights do not extend here."

  "Sorry." I wadded Rita’s dress into a ball behind my back. "I'll leave."

  The Crusader shook his head. "You'll show me your pass." He lifted my robe with the barrel of his rifle, exposing my calves. "And then we'll search you. Thoroughly."

  The Neuromantics by the elevator were out of sight, sharing a laugh. I glanced over my shoulder to count the steps to the tunnel.

  He licked his lips. "Now," he said. "Let's see you undress."

  "Whatever you say, spaceman," I said, and shoved the dress at him.

  The Neuromantic tried to jerk the rifle away and panicked on the trigger. The dress had snagged on the prongs and when the Crusader fired, electricity coursed into the metal fabric of the dress, which acted as a cheap conductor and sent the jolt right back into the rifle. And into Marky, who began to shake, unable to let go of the rifle as he pumped electricity into his own body.

  The other guards stopped laughing and started running, charging their stuns. I took a running leap and slid, baseball style, into the crack. I was inside the tunnel before they turned the corner and quickly kicked the trap door shut, leaving the Neuromantics to watch their buddy dance alone with an electric cocktail dress.

  I caught up with Rita at the first fork and gave her a kiss for luck. The Neuromantics hadn't followed, which was their good luck; Ferret's tunnels were as confusing as a topiary labyrinth and twice as dark. Without Ferret to guide us, it took us longer to find the Administration building, but after forty minutes of stumbling, Rita walked face-first into a rope ladder.

  I climbed up first and found the tunnel covered with rocks. I pushed the stones aside, telling Rita to shield her eyes. When the dust cleared, I glimpsed inside.

  The shelves were empty. Monk's collections of antique scuba suits, data gloves and helmets -- kept for spare parts and nostalgia -- were gone. As Rita climbed through, I saw the doors had been dynamited, turned to ribbons of steel. Loose rubble littered the floor: ROM shards, a gutted optic drive. Monk's warehouse had been picked clean.

  I risked a glance outside the vault in case Monk's lair was crawling with Crusaders, but shouldn't have worried. The Neuromantics had been here, all right. But they'd run out of things to smash.

  The Mensas had been pounded into nuggets of smoked Lucite and the beakers had been ground into piles of glass. The holographic portrait of Avalon had been torn off the wall and lay face-up, staring at the ruined spotlights. All the scuba suits were gone.

  Rita walked up the
ramp to her perch behind the ruined Mensas. She lifted a chair out of the rubble and sat down. “Think he got out of here?"

  The dumbwaiter where Monk had sent me to safety had been sealed with triple-gauge steel, welded to the girders, sealed like a tomb.

  "He sent me that message a week after the brain boys took over." I picked up the bent handle of a laser-suture and sniffed the tailor tool. "He made it that long."

  Rita dug her hands into a dead Mensa. "Maybe it’s a trap."

  I tossed the tool aside and walked across the press room Monk had converted to a home. The low-slung burgundy chairs had been gutted and the liquor cabinet had been blasted with stun rifles. The only thing that looked salvageable was Monk's luggage trunk. Its metal skin had been dented, but its oak ribs hadn't splintered. The stickers were faded -- adhesive postcards from New York and Amsterdam, souvenirs from his amusement-park days. My thumbs flipped the latches, opening the lid.

  "If they had him, they would have used him by now," I said, staring into the trunk. It had three compartments and a shelf for toiletries. "But so far, I --"

  My voice trailed off. I'd removed the shelf to reveal stacks of clothing, revealing something short of treasure but just as unexpected.

  "What is it?" Rita called.

  "Proof," I said. I pulled out the crisp pinstripes of a new Tremayne coat, black lapels pointed like arrows. I didn't bother to check the size. "Proof Monk made it out."

  I draped the coat on the upended chair and found the matching pants, then a pair of wingtips. The suspenders were tucked in the pocket of a white collarless shirt.

  Rita's eyes were full of spice. "He leave a note?"

  He'd left a Tremayne, the kind of suit prisons give you when you're paroled. The kind of suit not even a scavenger would steal. "He didn't have to."

  I went to the sink and peeled off the filthy missionary robe. I scrubbed away the last scraps of dead skin and said silent thanks to Levi’s healing herbs. Then I put on the suit. Each metal button made me feel better. I belonged in the city, no matter who called the shots, Digerati or Neuromantic. But most of all, I belonged in cheap suits.

  Rita washed up and changed into clothes she'd salvaged -- a black skirt full of pleats and an indigo blouse. While she changed, I transferred the ROMs from the belt pouch to the jacket, dropped my palmtop into the liner pocket and strung the fob chain. Then I scooped up the robes and walked toward the incinerator.

  But on the way I tripped over a splintered coffee table and spilled the robes. Rita snickered and I gave the coffee table a few kicks. Then I bent down for the robes, grabbed one and stopped. Beneath the wood and shattered glass was an inky shadow.

  I dusted glass off the material, remembering the day Monk showed me his prototype. Everything's imbedded, he'd said proudly. The fabric breathes with Avalon.

  Rita buttoned her blouse and turned around to show off. "What do you think?"

  I held up the prototype datasuit. "I think the Neuromantics missed one."

  After dropping the robes down the incinerator tube, we foraged through the cabinets and found some rations. The jerky was tough and the beans were chewy, but it was the first meal we'd had since morning and we choked it down.

  I kept the prototype suit in my lap, feeling the stretch of the material, marveling at the old tailor. Right up to the end, Monk was a master. With this suit, beakers, datapacks, helmets and dioxide-bubble suits would have become obsolete. People could wear immersion suits under their clothes, using only a small cable to adjust the gravity and slotting their online cosmetics directly into a Mensa or even a palmtop. The only thing you lacked was a visor. Incredible craftsmanship.

  I tore open a foil pouch, popped a chunk of dry chocolate in my mouth and walked to the back of the stage to stare at the holographic portrait of Avalon. Its image was frozen in time, as it had been for eight years, with half the skyscrapers completed and the virtual offices floating in the turquoise sky. Here was the unfinished blueprint, with chalk lines snapped, but the willpower long gone. And there, in the center of the half wagon-wheel, stood the Library, a sphere filled with the digitized treasures of three millennia, shining almost as bright as the silver cigarette case beside it.

  Wait.

  I dry-swallowed the chunk of chocolate and stared at the silver case. Then I bent down and moved the case aside. It covered the teleportation portals at Central Station, where WPA hardhats once punched the digital clock. The Plymouth Rock of Avalon.

  I clicked open the case and found a catalyst and more than thirty Cyns, their cinnamon odor tart and strong. I popped one in my mouth, touched the catalyst and inhaled a sweet nootropic burst.

  "Rita," I said, exhaling the mist through my nose. "Come here."

  She walked over, squinting. "Where'd you find the smokes?"

  I pointed at the miniature coils of Central Station rising from the hologram. "Here," I said. "And I’ll bet you ten to one that’s where we’ll find Monk."

  She glanced at the trunk where we'd found the clothes, then at the splintered coffee table where I'd found the scuba suit, then back at the hologram portrait. She pulled the Cyn out of my mouth and took a drag and said, "X marks the spot."

  "He's telling us he found a way in."

  Rita tugged another hit from the Cyn. "The Neuromantics control the substations, which means they control Merlin, so they can padlock the doors to the city, or get Merlin to reject every virtual body that doesn't carry a certain uplink code."

  "Maybe."

  "They've burned all the speakeasies and they’re beating the street dealers to death." She was talking faster now, maybe thanks to the Cyn, maybe because things were starting to click. "Anything linked to the Digerati has been ripped out."

  "Right. But they've forgotten something."

  Her pewter eyes reflected the skyscrapers in the hologram. Slowly, she said, "The Neuromantics ended Prohibition. So they killed off everything contraband."

  "But Avalon wasn't always contraband."

  Her pupils caught fire. "And neither were the uplink stations."

  "Which still exist."

  She ran across the stage and tore into her satchel. She found the map of depots scattered across the continent, carried it back and spread it over the hologram. The WPA booth boys built hundreds of uplink stations, installing them in Tube depots, city halls and shopping malls. United Nations workers installed seventy in Europe and about three hundred in Asia, the slick beakers dotting the landscape.

  Most depots were dismantled when Prohibition passed; in Jasper we watched a newsreel of datacops disconnecting the last booth in Berlin. But along the Pacific Rim, dozens of the abandoned doorways to Avalon had survived.

  And the doorways led to Central Station.

  "Here," Rita said, pointing to a cluster of dots around the northern edge of the city. "Most of these have probably been stripped down, but maybe we can hotwire one."

  My eyes blurred on the dots scattered across the country, across the globe, buried like landmines beneath the feet of the Tomorrow Crusade.

  "Maybe we can hotwire them all."

  AVALON XXIX: Going Home

  We followed a Campus maintenance pipe into a collapsed intracity tunnel and broke into the library through a heater duct to find the first uplink station. But the WPA depot was wrecked; junkies had smashed the beakers and used the Mensas for spare parts. So Rita picked another site from the map and we dropped into the tunnels again.

  We emerged on the wharf, in a teleportation station built for the tourists who once flocked here to eat chowder and stare at the cold Pacific. And while the Mensas booted, the salt-water mist had corroded the beaker ports. No good.

  Neither was the third station. Or the fourth. Or fifth. But we kept on, spelunking the city, making lists of the usable parts we'd found, leaving a trail of empty Cyns and stolen kisses. I stopped paying attention to time, driven by adrenaline and, oddly, hope.

  It was almost dawn when I pried open the fallout shelter door beneath the po
st office. I brushed away the sticky threads of a black widow's web and stared at a WPA-sponsored hologram of a solar system that spanned the room like a mobile. Beneath Saturn was a Mensa with dust as thick as topsoil. Beneath Mars was a teleportation booth mummified by a burlap blanket. Inside its sun was a holo-model of Avalon

  "Let's hit the spark," I said, "and see if she kicks."

  She didn't. While the hardware was solid, the software was wormy with bugs. Rita stretched her wire-rimmed cheaters over her ears and booted the Mensa, then instinctively found the data gloves and went to work. She demolished the dry-rotted source code, ground the commands into a digital mortar and began rebuilding.

  I busied myself with the mechanics of connecting the beaker cables to Monk's prototype suit, running back to depots we'd found, mining them for a cable, an analog control, a set of ninth-generation goggles. I found rations in the shelter, scored a bottle of Cogni-Juice and forced Rita to eat. I polished the grime off my mother's ROM and my copy of Mohican, wondering what the Neuromantics were doing to my city.

  But mostly I stood under the ghostly hologram of Jupiter, watching Rita reprogram that Mensa, the hands of a sculptor finally reunited with clay.

  She was brilliant.

  Almost twenty-four hours after I'd found the Cyn case on the hologram of Central Station, Rita pulled off her cheaters and said, "Suit up."

  While I stripped out of the Tremayne and shoved my foot into Monk's prototype suit, Rita briefed me. "I pinged Merlin," she said. "He's still functioning, so Monk wasn't lying. Avalon's alive, but they've made a few changes."