City of Golden Shadow, Page 20
Tad Williams
"Let me go! I have to find him!"
The fat man turned to look at her, his grin widening. "You are not going anywhere, my friend. I know exactly who you are. You are not going anywhere."
The room seemed to bend. His dark eyes held her, small holes that offered a glimpse into something dreadful. Her heart was thumping as it hadn't even in Leviathan's pool. She almost dropped offline before remembering !Xabbu. Perhaps he was caught somehow in the way Stephen had been caught. If she bailed out of the system, she might find him in the same deathlike trance that had claimed her brother. He was an innocent, as much so as Stephen. She couldn't abandon him.
"Let me go, you bastard!" she shouted. Strimbello's grip did not loosen. Instead he pulled her closer, dragging her into his wide lap.
"Enjoy the performance, good sir," he said. "And then you will see more—much more."
The crowd was shouting, an almost deafening roar of sound, but Renie could not think of the command to lower the volume. Something about the fat man submerged all her careful judgment in a flood of blind panic. She made a succession of gestures that accomplished nothing, then dredged up a command she hadn't used since her hacking days, splaying her fingers almost painfully wide and bowing her head.
For a moment the entirety of the Yellow Room seemed to freeze around her, a moment later, when it lurched back to life, she was several steps away from Strimbello, standing by herself on the floor before the stage. He stood, an expression of mild surprise on his broad features, and reached for her. Renie immediately moved herself out of the Yellow Room and onto the promenade.
Even the bottomless well looked normal compared to what she had left behind, but the Bushman's small sim was nowhere in sight. Strimbello would be on her in a moment.
"!Xabbu" She shouted his name on the private channel, then boosted it and shouted again. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"
There was no answer. The little man was gone.
Second:
RED KING'S DREAM
. . . Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die. Autumn frosts have slain July. Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes. . . . . . . In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die: Ever drifting down the stream— Lingering in the golden gleam— Life, what is it but a dream?
—Lewis Carroll
CHAPTER 10
Thorns
NETFEED/NEWS: Agreement Signed, But Mistrust Smolders in Utah.
(visual: men shaking hands in front of capital building, Salt Lake City)
VO: A fragile three-way peace now exists between the Utah state government, the Mormon Church, and the militant Mormon separatists known as the "Deseret Covenant," but some question whether it can last without federal involvement.
(visual: President Anford in Rose Garden)
The US government, citing the rights of states and cities to self-determination, has so far declined to become involved, leading to complaints from some Utah citizens that the Anford Administration has "reneged on the Constitution." Others, however, applaud the Administration's hands-off approach.
(visual: Edgar Riley, Deseret spokesman, at press conference)
RILEY: "No government has a right to tell us what to do in God's country. There are some warriors out here, hard men. If the state backtracks, we'll just shut everything down from the borders in."
They come for you at dawn. It's Jankel, the nice one, and another named Simmons or something—you haven't seen him much. They used to send more than two, but times have changed. You haven't slept a wink, of course, but they come in quietly anyway, as though they don't want to startle you awake.
It's time, Jankel tells you. He looks apologetic.
You shrug off his extended hand and stand up—you aren't going to let someone else help you. You'll go on your own two legs if you can, but your knees are pretty weak. You've heard their footsteps in the corridor, phantom precursors, so many times through the long night. Now you feel gritty at the edges and blurry as a badly developed photograph. You're tired.
Sleep is coming, though. You'll sleep soon.
There's no priest or pastor—you told them you didn't want one. What kind of comfort could you get from some stranger babbling to you about something you don't believe in? Only Jankel to escort you, and Simmons or whatever his name is holding the door. Only a couple of low-wage prison bulls who need the overtime on a Sunday morning. They'll also pull a little bonus for doing this, of course, since it's one of the genuinely unpleasant jobs—no coercion of anyone but prisoners in the privatized penal system. Jankel must need the money with all those high-tax kids to feed. Otherwise, who else but a psychopath would sign up for this particular task?
The last walk. A shuffle, really, with those heavy-duty nylon restraints around your ankles. None of the things you've seen in flicks happens. The other inmates don't come to their bars to call terse farewells; most of them are sleeping, or pretending to sleep. You've been through this yourself when they took Garza. What could you say? And Jankel doesn't shout: Dead man walking! or any of that other stuff—never has. The closest he ever came was a quiet chat when you first came on the floor, where in best prison drama style he told you, If you work with me, everything'll be smooth—if not, you'll be doing some real hard time. Now he looks quiet and sorry, like he's taking someone else's dog, run over in the road, to the emergency veterinarian.
The place they take you isn't really a doctor's office—it is the death chamber, after all—but it has the look and smell of any prison surgery. The doctor is a small man—if he really is a doctor: you only need to be med-tech certified to perform an execution. He's obviously been waiting around about fifteen minutes longer than he wanted to with his morning coffee turning to acid in his stomach. He nods his head when you all come in, and a weird smile that's probably just dyspepsia and nerves plays across his lips. He nods again, then points a trifle shyly at the stainless steel table, just a regular examination table, with a little shrug as if to say, We wish it could be nicer, but you know how times are. . . .
The two guards each take an arm as you slide your backside onto the paper covering—they're helping you, really, making sure your trembling legs don't prompt an embarrassing collapse. They're helping, but their grips are very, very, firm.
You lift your legs onto the table and let them ease you down onto your back. They begin to secure the straps.
Until this point, it could be any other visit to the prison doctor, except no one's talking. Not surprising, really—there's not much to say. Your condition has already been diagnosed, and it's terminal
Dangerous. Useless bastard. Trouble. Poor self-control. Inconvenient to house and expensive to feed. The combination of symptoms has added up. The cure has been decided.
It's no use telling them you're innocent. You've done that for years, done it in every way possible. It hasn't changed a thing. The appeals, the couple of magazine articles—"Burying Our Mistakes" read one headline, appropriate to both prisons and hospitals—changed nothing in the end. The little kid in you, the part which had believed that if you cried hard enough someone would put it right, is gone now, rubbed out as efficiently and completely as the rest of you soon will be.
Some corporate officer is standing in the doorway, a sharkskin-gray shadow. You turn to watch him, but Jankel's hip is in the way. A brief splash of something cold in the crook of your elbow brings your eyes back to the doctor's pinched face. Alcohol? For what? They're swabbing your arm so you don't get an infection, A little prison humor, perhaps, more subtle than you would have expected. You feel something sharp slide through the skin, nosing for your vein, but something goes wrong. The doctor curses quietly—just a hint of panic underneath—and withdraws the needle, then probes for the vein again, once, twice, three more times without success. It hurts, like someone running a sewing machine up your arm. You feel something welling up in your chest that might be either a laugh or a long, bubbling scream.
Your skin has gone clammy all over. The fluorescents shimmer and swim as the spike of steel at last slides into its proper place and the doctor tapes it down. The other guard, Simmons or whatever his name is, leans over and tightens the strap so you don't jerk the needle free. They begin on the next needle.
There is something bewildering about this. It's the end of the world, but the people around you are acting as though they were performing some workaday job. Only the tiny beads of sweat on the doctor's upper lip and frowning forehead suggest otherwise.
When you have been trussed and lanced successfully, the gray suit in the corner of your vision moves forward. You haven't seen his face before, and you briefly wonder where he fits in the corporate hierarchy—is he an over-warden or an under-warden? Then you realize what kind of nonsense you're wasting your last moments on and feel a surge of dizzy disgust.
This square-jawed white man mouths some suitably mournful platitudes, then lifts a folder and reads out the penal corporation's indemnification, followed by their legal mandate to pump you full of sodium pentothal and then potassium chloride until your heart stops beating and your brainbox goes flatline. They used to send a third fatal chemical down the pipe, too, but the accountants decided that was gilding the lily.
The doctor has started the saline drip, although you feel nothing in your arm except the discomfort of the needle and some stinging from the failed attempts.
Do you understand, son, the square-jawed white man asks you. Sure, you want to snarl. You understand better than he knows. You understand that they're just throwing out the trash and then recycling the empties. You'll be more use to Society as ram-plugged hydroponic fertilizer than you ever were as a mouth to feed in an expensive privatized cell.
You want to snarl, but you don't. For now, looking into the pale blue eyes of this man, you realize in a way you haven't yet that you're really going to die. No one is going to jump up from behind the sofa and tell you it was just a joke. It's not a netflick either—no group of hired mercenaries is going to blow down the prison doors and set you free. In a moment the doctor is going to push that button and that bottle of clear liquid—they would be clear liquids, wouldn't they, colorless, just like this square-jawed, flat-eyed white man they've sent to read your death warrant—that bottle is going to start to bleed into the main line. And then you're going to die.
You try to speak, but you can't. The cold has you shivering. Jankel pulls the thin hospital blanket up to your chest, careful not to disturb the transparent tube fanged into your arm like a long glass snake. You nod instead. By God, you're not stupid. You understand the laws and how they work. If it hadn't been one, it would have been another. They make those laws to keep people like you away from what people like them have. So you nod, trying to say what your dry tongue and constricted throat cannot: I know why you want me dead. I don't need any more explanation than that.
The man in the gray suit smiles, a tight curved line, as though he recognizes the look in your eyes. He nods to the doctor, just once, and then tucks his folder under his arm and heads for the door, disappearing out of your sight beyond the curving line of Jankel's blue trousers.
You have just met the Angel of Death. He was a stranger. He is always a stranger.
Jankel gives your arm a squeeze, which means the doctor has turned the tap on the second line, but you don't look up to meet the guard's eye. You don't want your last sight on earth to be him. He's nobody—just a man who guarded your cage. A decent guy for a keeper in a human zoo, maybe, but no more than that.
A short time passes—thick, sluggish time that nevertheless harries. Your gaze slides up toward the fluorescent lights and they shimmer even more broadly than before. There are little fractures of color around the edges. Your eyes, you realize, are filling with tears.
At the same time, the room is growing warmer. You can feel your skin growing looser, your muscles unkinking. This isn't so bad.
But you're never coming back. Your heart speeds. They're pushing you out into the darkness. One passenger too many on the big ship, and you've drawn the short straw.
Some kind of animal panic races through you, and for a moment you strain against your bonds, or try to, but the whole thing is too far gone. A muscle twitches in your chest, that's all, a slow contraction like the early stages of labor. Like birth.
Wrong way, wrong way. You're going out, not coming in. . . .
The blackness is tugging you remorselessly, pulling you down, eroding your resistance. You're hanging by your fingernails over an ocean of warm velvet, and it would be so easy so easy so easy to let go . . . but there's something underneath all that softness, something harsh and final and oh so terrifyingiy lonely.
Gone, the light almost gone, just a fast-disappearing smear. Gone, the light gone.
A soundless scream, a spark sizzling through a final instant before being swallowed by the cold darkness.
Oh, God, I don't want to.
He was still shivering half an hour later.
"You're so scanny, Gardiner. Lethal injection—Jesus! You're a scanmaster!"
Orlando looked up, trying to focus. The dark saloon was full of shadows and trailing mist, but his friend's broad silhouette was hard to mistake.
Fredericks slipped into one of the crooked high-backed chairs and perused the menu of experiences that flickered across the black tabletop, an ever-changing abstract spiderweb of frost-white letters. He made a face of exaggerated disgust The defiant lift to his shoulders made his sim appear even more chesty and musclebound than usual. "What is it with you and these fringe trips, Gardiner?"
Orlando could never figure why Fredericks liked bodybuilder sims. Maybe in RL he was a scrawny little guy. It was impossible to know, since Orlando had never seen his friend in the flesh, and at this point it would be embarrassing even to ask. Besides, Orlando himself was not innocent of image-tampering: the sim he was wearing was, as usual, a well-crafted product, although not particularly handsome or physically impressive.
"The death rides? I just like them." He was having some difficulty composing his thoughts, legacy of that last slide down into nothingness. "They . . . interest me."
"Yeah, well, I think they're morbid major." A line of tiny skeletons conga-danced across the tabletop in front of Fredericks, each one dressed in full Carmen Miranda drag; they strutted, hip-shook, then vanished in a sequence of pops as they tumbled over the edge. The place was full of the things—miniature skeletons playing fireman's pole on the swizzle sticks and skating on the ice trays, an entire skeletal army performing acrobatics on the vast chandelier. Some in tiny Stetsons and chaps even rode on the bats flittering in the shadows beneath the high ceiling. The decor of the Last Chance Saloon traded heavily on its virtual proximity to Terminal Row. Most of its habitués, however, preferred the mock-Gothic of the club to the more unpleasant and more realistic experiences on sale at the next site over.
"You did the airplane crash with me," Orlando pointed out.
Fredericks snorted. "Yeah. Once. You've been on that one so many times they probably have your seat permanently reserved." His broad sim face flattened out for a moment, as though somewhere the real Fredericks had withdrawn from the system, but it was only his software's inability to show sullenness—unfortunate, since Fredericks was prone to it. "That was the worst. I thought I was really going to die—I thought my heart was going to stop. How can you do that kind of shit, Gardiner?"
"You get used to it." But he hadn't, really. And that was part of the problem.
In the conversational lull that followed, the vast doors at one side of the saloon creaked open and a painfully cold wind swirled through the room. Orlando absently turned down his susceptibility; Fredericks, using a less expensive interface, didn't even notice. Something with glowing red eyes loomed in the open doorway, confettied with whirling snow. A few of the patrons nearest the door
laughed. One very feminine sim screamed.
"Someone told me that they record those simulations from real people dying," said Fredericks abruptly. "They take 'em right off real people's interface rigs."
"Nah." Orlando shook his head. "They're just good gear. Well-written." He watched as the red-eyed thing grabbed the screaming woman and dragged her off into the snowy night. The doors creaked shut again. "What, they just sent somebody off fitted with a gigaexpensive top-of-the-line teleneural recording rig, and it just happens to be running when a plane does a Manila? That's like a zillion to one chance, Frederico, and you wouldn't be getting it in some net arcade. Not to mention the fact that you can't record that kind of experience and play it back anyway, not like that. I've checked up on it, man. Real people recordings are just a jumble of stuff, a real monster mix. You can't interpret somebody else's experience through a different brain. It doesn't work."
"Yeah?" Fredericks did not sound entirely convinced, but he lacked Orlando's obsessive interest in VR and the net and generally didn't dispute him about such things.
"Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk to you about" Orlando leaned back. "We've got more important things to deal with, and we need to talk in private. This place is dead, anyway. Let's go to my 'cot"
"Yeah. This place is dead." Fredericks giggled as two finger-length skeletons skittered across the table, playing frisbee with a bottlecap.
Orlando frowned. "That's not what I meant."
Orlando's electronic cottage was in Pace Corner, an upscale but Bohemian section of the Inner District inhabited mostly by well-to-do university students. His homebase in the virtual world was an almost stereotypical version of a boy's bedroom—the kind of room Orlando would have liked to have at home, but couldn't. A wall-wide screen showed a constant live video feed from the MBC Project, a vast swirling desert of orange. Orlando's visitors had to squint to see the armies of little constructor robots moving through the haze of Martian dust. On the far wall a broad window looked down on a simulation of a late Cretaceous waterhole. It was pretty lively for over-the-counter wallpaper, at the moment, a young Tyrannosaurus was messily devouring a duck-billed Hadrosaurus.
