METROPHAGE, Part 2

You may read these files, copy, distribute them, or print them out
and make them into little hats. You may do anything you like with
them as long as you do not change them in any way or receive
money for them.

I've put METROPHAGE and HORSE LATITUDES into free distribution
on the Net, but I retain all copyrights to the works.

If you have any problems or comments on the works or their
distribution, you can email me at: kadrey@well.com

And remember, if you charge anyone money for these files you are
the nothing but ambulatory puke, and I hope a passing jet drops a 15
pound radar magnet on your hard drive.

Richard Kadrey
May 1995
***********************************************************************

						FIVE:
				The Rescue of Sumimasen

	An acid rain, the sins of the fathers, blew down hard and cold,
etching obscure messages into the faces of the graceless old
buildings. A few blocks to the south, beyond the fifty-story torus
housing Lockheed's business offices, carbon arcs burned a pure white
nimbus of light into the fat, menacing clouds. Pemex-U.S. was out
there somewhere, Jonny knew. Exxon; Krupp International. And
Sony-- a flat black silicon sphere, almost invisible at night, like a hole
punched in the sky. Wilshire Boulevard.
	Hushed evening crowds hurried by. Business men, anonymous
in their Gucci snake skin goggles and respirators. Groups of giggling
teenage girls in matching state school ponchos. A stoned young boy,
shirtless chest aglow with bio-luminescent tattoos, kicked up wings
of water on a skateboard. When Ice reached Jonny's side, the boy
circled once in the street, gave them the finger, and took off. Ice
laughed once. "Don't say it," said Jonny. She laughed again.
	"I don't have to, doll. It's plain as day. That's your lean and
hungry youth just skated by."
	Jonny shook his head. "I was never that skinny," he said. A
great knot of tension was uncoiling in his chest. He kicked at some
weeds sprouting through a crack in the pavement. Outside again, in
the street, a cold wind blowing stinking sulfur rain. There was a siren
fading somewhere, far off. He was home. It felt great.
	"Where to?" he asked.
Ice nodded up the street, started that way and Jonny followed. He
could see Groucho and Skid a few meters ahead.
	They had left the old subway terminal perhaps twenty minutes
before. Jonny had been surprised at how easily they reached the
surface, cutting through sewers and abandoned underground
shopping malls full of rotting acoustical tiles and dismembered
mannequins. They had emerged in the back of a heavy equipment
warehouse surrounded by the smell of rust and slow leaking
canisters of toluene. Jonny had been the first one out the door. The
first one into the rain. Ice had given him a belted Army raincoat
before they left the clinic. Now, walking with her, he used one hand
to hold the collar of the coat closed; he kept the other hand in his
pocket, around the textured plastic grip of his Futukoro. Three extra
clips clicked against each other in his pocket.
	Across from a storage yard full of PVC piping, Groucho and Skid
were in animated conversation with an albino. Jonny followed Ice
through the flooded street, over to where the men were talking. The
albino was seated sideways in the cab of an armored Mercedes van, a
squat double-axled monstrosity with thick wire mesh bolted over the
windows and grubby scales of titanium alloy welded to the body.
Jonny thought the vehicle looked something like the chimeric
offspring of a half-track and a rhinoceros. He was admiring its
extraordinary and single-minded ugliness when Groucho called him
over.
	"Jonny, I want you to meet our driver, Man Ray. He runs with
the Funky Gurus," said the anarchist.
	Man Ray, the albino, gave Jonny a slight nod and Jonny
responded in kind. Then added a quick upward movement with two
fingers of his right hand, drawing the fingers across his lips
horizontally, running through a rapid series of similar gestures-- a
terse street distillation of Amerslan and gang recognition codes.
Obviously surprised, Man Ray gave him the answering gesture. Jonny
knew the Gurus well. They were all insane, he had decided years
before, but pleasantly so. They called themselves combat artists,
insisted on fighting with weapons of their own devising. Their
greatest pleasure came in staging absurd and bloody raids on rival
gangs. There was always a theme; sometimes it was eating utensils,
sometimes patterns of light and color. For the Gurus, style always
counted more than the damage done, but the damage was usually
considerable.
	Man Ray wore what appeared to be home-made polypyrrole
body armor, cut kendo-style, and red high-top sneakers. A gold obi
around his waist was studded with throwing darts, shurikens and
other small glittering things Jonny did not recognize. Like many of
the Gurus, Man Ray was not a true albino; his features were negroid,
but his face was burned the palest of pinks, shading to yellow behind
his ears. Traditionally, the Gurus were recruited from workers at the
Daimyo Corporation's hellish zero G foundries orbiting the moon.
Constant exposure to low-level radiation often burned out the
melanin-producing cells in the worker's skin.
	"Thanks for the wheels," Jonny said. "I owe you."
	Man Ray smiled. He had no teeth, just stained porcelain
implants running along his upper and lower jaws, like twins walls.
"You don't owe me nothin'. Blood's my muse. Flesh is my canvas,"
Man Ray said. "I wouldn't miss a run." He looked at Jonny, grinning
slyly. "Groucho here's been telling me how you're a great appreciator
of art, a true fan of beauty. Here--," he said, plucking something from
his sash. "This is new."
	Jonny accepted the object, turning it over in his hands. It was a
perfect silver rose, about half the size of a natural one, its edges
rimmed with hot gold from the sodium street lights. Man Ray pointed
to the storage yard. "Over the top," he said.
	Jonny looked at him once, glanced at Ice. He shrugged and
threw the rose over the collapsing hurricane fence that surrounded
the pipes.
	There was silence, then a rush of air; the street was lit by an
explosion of white flame that leapt ten meters into the air. In
seconds, the blaze became a shaft of churning light, burning down to
a sizzling white mass of flame and molten piping. Jonny turned to
Man Ray who said, "Le fleurs du mal."
	"Fuck that," said Jonny. "That was a phosphorous grenade."
	"Everybody's a critic," Man Ray told Groucho. The Croaker
stepped into the passenger side of the van, Skid behind him. Jonny
got into the back, hunkering down next to Ice. Man Ray gunned the
van's big methanol engine and turned north onto La Cienega toward
Hollywood.

	The Funky Guru thumbed on a short wave scanner, tuned to
the Committee's frequencies, and plugged in a sound chip. The
metallic voice of Committee dispatchers was overlaid with music--
Taking Tiger Mountain doing an up-tempo version of "Saint James
Infirmary," Saint Peter taking the lead vocals.

	"As I passed Saint James Infirmary
	I saw my sweetheart there,
	All stretched out on a table,
	So pale, so cold, so fair
	As I passed Saint James Infirmary--"
	As the van rumbled crossed Beverly Boulevard, Jonny was
suddenly aware of being very cold. He shivered against the jellied
glycerin padding the walls of the van, clenching his teeth to keep
them from chattering. His right shoulder was almost numb; before
leaving the clinic, Ice had placed a xylocaine transdermal patch
under the induction cast. The Committee's last wave of raids had left
endorphins in short supply, she had explained. Now she was staring
out one of the van's armored windows, frowning to herself.
	"Your optimism's contagious," Jonny told her.
	Ice gave him a weak smile and asked, "What're you going to do
when we get Sumi?"
	"I thought you understood that," he said. "Gonna get the hell of
here. Groucho said he'd check his contacts in the south. Maybe head
down to Mexico. Why?"
	Ice wiped away a small island of fog her breath had left on the
window. They passed a truck unloading a cargo of black market
meat. Boneless pig heads hung limply from the back, like masks from
some awful theater. "What if Sumi doesn't want to leave?" she asked.
	"That's her decision," Jonny said. "She can do what she wants."
His voice was harder than he had intended. The possibility that Sumi
might choose to stay behind had not occurred to him. He did not
want to battle with Ice for Sumi's loyalty. He had, after all, stayed
with her when Ice took off. But Ice and Sumi had been lovers on and
off before Jonny had known either of them. No comfort there.
	"You won't stay?" Ice asked.
	"I can't."
	"Why not?"
	"Because the Colonel wants to use my balls for an ashtray,"
Jonny replied. "Because Easy Money knows I'm looking for him and
that means he's looking for me. And because I don't believe any of
this anarquista wetdream bullshit. Nothing changes-- it never does.
One bunch loses power, another comes in. So what? There's new faces
to hate, new guns to run from. But nothing real ever changes."
	"Maybe we can help that," she said.
	"We're talking about the Committee here," Jonny said. "They'll
eat your faces off. When we get Sumi, I'm gone."
	"I wish you wouldn't."
	"What do you want from me?"
	Ice fixed Jonny with a look that he could not quite read. Anger,
frustration, fear, they were all there. "What?" he said.
	"You never make it easy, do you?" she asked. "Maybe I just
want us all to be together again. The three of us."
	Why does she have to bring this up now, Jonny wondered. He
had been thinking along similar lines all along, the three of them
together again. But with Zamora and Easy Money gunning for him, it
seemed impossible. Ice, he knew, would not see it that way. Her love
came in broader strokes, great passions, grand gestures. That's why
she's a good Croaker, he thought. That's why she ran away. "I want
the same thing you do," he whispered. "But not here."
	"I can't leave," said Ice.
	"I can't stay." They were on Sunset now, rolling past crowds
hanging around the bars and theaters. A restaurant shaped like
Kukulcan's pyramid at Chichen Itza, outlined in bright neon. Jonny's
face grew hot. "Don't ask me to prove myself, okay? I'm not the one
who took the big walk," he said.
	Almost without sound, Ice moved to the front of the van. She
sat on the floor behind Groucho. Jonny tried to look out the window,
but found himself watching Ice's reflection as she rocked with the
gentle motion of the van. He felt alone, hardly human-- he could
have been an insect observing the Croakers and the lone Guru from
the ceiling. Jonny was about to speak when Ice pointed at something
and said, "Pull over there."
	Man Ray turned up a side street near the World Link
substation, shielding the van from Sunset behind a stand of towering
date palms. The Guru killed the engine, reached up and flicked on an
overhead light.
	Groucho turned to Jonny, his face soft and ghostly in the dim
light. "Let's make this fast," he said.
	Jonny nodded. "We're going in the back way," he said.
	Man Ray duck-walked past Jonny to the rear of the van and
removed one of the side panels, jellied glycerin rolling in sluggish
waves. From a storage area, he removed a Medusa, something like an
electrified cat o' nine tails, and some smaller gear, pistols and bolos,
which he handed to the Croakers. Over the Guru's shoulder, Jonny
could see a whole rack of colorful and oddly outfitted weapons. "See
anything you like?" Man Ray asked.
	"I'm fine," said Jonny.
	Man Ray looked disappointed "You got this bad prosaic streak,
you know?"
	The rain had given way to wind-driven mist. Ice moved ahead
of them in a loping trot, Skid doggedly at her side. Jonny did not try
to catch up, preferring to let her cope with the ghosts in her own
way.
	Twisted winds whipped the mist into tiny vortices in the lee of
an enormous tent-like structure. One hundred meters high and
covering almost sixty square blocks, a perverse relic, it was the
single still-standing structure from the Los Angeles-Tokyo
Exposition, held to celebratethe one hundredth anniversary of the
transistor.
	It was a series of tents, really, two hundred and eighty of them,
each half an acre of Teflon-coated fiberglass, all mildewed and
leaking badly. Beneath the tents were three life-size thermoplast and
concrete reconstructions that had comprised the Golden Age of
Hollywood Pavilion: Robin Hood's castle, sporting a peeling metallic
caricature that might once have resembled Errol Flynn; the Emerald
City from "The Wizard of Oz," and the Babylonian temple from D.W.
Griffith's "Intolerance." Jonny lived in the last of these
reconstructions, as did two thousand other people.
	At a service port near the bottom of a support pylon, Jonny
pried a ten key pad away from its housing. Sumi had set the pad
there loosely, with a gummy brown adhesive, after instructing him
how to short out the locking mechanism. With a thunk, the port slid
open and the five of them entered, climbing quickly up a spiral
staircase to a slimy platform at the top. Jonny shorted out a second
pad and a moment later, they were out onto the translucent surface
of the tent itself.
	Jonny motioned for them to spread out, to keep the tent fabric
from sagging under their weight. Above their heads, suspended in
slings and plastic bubbles were the lost tribes of Los Angeles.
	Any permanent or semi-permanent structure in the city was
an invitation to squatters. In the years since its construction, the
Hollywood Pavilion had served as home to thousands of local down-
and-outers, illegals from Mexico and Jamaica, indentured workers
from Thailand and the Ukraine. A few of those one-percenters, the
ones who had found the life below too confining or too desperate,
had moved to the open spaces above the tents themselves,
wandering like nomads across the billowing fiberglass dunes. Years
later, tribes hunted, whole societies had sprung up with their own
customs and languages. Jonny watched Man Ray and Skid taking it all
in, eyeing the delicate habitats with a combination of fascination and
nervousness. Groucho waved happily to the fleeting figures
shadowing them along the cables. On the dripping wires were hung
tribal banners, crude Catholic shrines, prayer flags marked with
curious symbols resembling Mayan, Nepalese and parts of schematic
diagrams, cabalistic cries for help directed at any god or gods who
might be listening.
	Jonny felt in control here. He was gripped by a strange
combination of tension and elation. His mind raced. He found himself
staring at the moon as it appeared from behind a cloud bank. He
thought of the Alpha Rats. Again, he wondered if somewhere on that
airless surface they were watching all this, noting it for some future
inquiry. He had the sudden urge to meet them, to somehow explain
things to them. At that same moment, he thought of Sumi down
below, unaware of his and Ice's presence. His senses expanded
outward until they encompassed the whole of the saddle-backed
landscape. This is right, he thought; it was good to be moving again.
He felt as if he had regained some lost part of himself.
	He broke ranks and scrambled to the crest of a corner dune. Its
peak was a circular anchorage, open to the structure below. Quickly,
he uncoiled lengths of nylon rope attached to the cement anchor and
let them drop. Ice caught up with him, releasing other lines. She still
would not look at him, but Jonny knew she was feeling a high similar
to his. Climbing clumsily in his cast, he made it over the rim and
dropped with Ice to a ledge beside a Babylonian elephant deity, its
chicken wire frame visible through the cracked concrete. The others
dropped down a moment later. A tangle of echoing voices from below
made it impossible to hear; Jonny signed for them to follow him
inside.
	They moved through a series of packed gray rooms, dusty
storage areas for the concession stands that had filled the pavilion
during the expo. They entered a clearing; around them, half-empty
crates trailed shreds of Taiwanese gun catalogs (improvised packing
material) to rows of ceiling-high shelves crowded with miniature
cowboy and samurai figures, still new in their plastic wrappers. Skid
picked up souvenirs as he walked along: Hollywood Boulevard sealed
in a water filled-lucite bubble; when he shook it, plastic snow settled
over the buildings; paper jackets emblazoned with the Rising Sun;
candy in the shape of silicon chips. Except for a layer of dust, most of
the merchandise seemed to have changed very little over the years.
Wall-sized holograms of Uncle Sam and Disney characters, dreams
figures of an extinct culture, were carefully sealed in bubble pack
and duct tape, waiting for their owners to return from other errands.
	They came to a flight of stairs. Jonny lead them down a couple
of levels, then up one, careful to keep to the deserted areas of the
structure. They saw yellow signs in a dozen languages warning them
not to smoke, pointing out fire exits and giving long and detailed
explanations of local hygiene laws.
	From below drifted the smell of bodies pressed close together,
cooking fires, mildew and something else, the almost metallic scent of
nervous action. Strange insect odors of commerce, shady deals,
strictly off-the-record meetings. They came upon a young girl
kneeling in the corridor, bathed in the blue light of an ancient
portable television, tying off with a hachimaka. When she saw them,
the girl gathered up her works and took off. She left the television,
which was slowly rolling a dead channel of snow. At the junction of
four corridors, Ice signed for Jonny to take the rear entrance of the
apartment, while she took Skid and Groucho to check out the front.
Jonny gave her the acknowledging sign and with Man Ray, started
down the corridor to his right. Half-way down, they entered a room
of immense asbestos-wrapped standing pipes.
	"Help me get this up," whispered Jonny, indicating a textured
metal plate in the floor. "We're right above the apartment."
	The two of them stooped, worked their fingers under the plate
and lifted it free. Jonny went feet-first into the hole, kicking out the
plastic louvers of a false ventilating duct, and  dropped to the floor of
the apartment. A moment later, he heard Man Ray hit the floor
behind him.
	The room was dark, the air dead and hot; it clung to Jonny,
bitter with the fumes of charred synthetics.
	A mass of broken furniture lay scattered across the floor,
blistered seat backs and pressboard chair legs forming the ribs of
some skinned animal. Small appliances seemed to have been thrown
into a pile and methodically smashed. Jonny had trouble identifying
individual objects, he could make out a coffee grinder and a small
microwave oven; the rest of it was unrecognizable, beaten beyond
recognition. Someone had placed duct tape over the room's only
window. To hide what they were doing, he thought. The tape was
peeling off now, the pavilion's floods cutting the far wall into neat
diagonal segments, alternating bands of light and dark. Pills and
diskettes crunched beneath their feet, giving off a sour reek of
spoiled hormonal extracts; an Indian throw rug was gummy with
half-dissolved capsules of vasopressin and prolactin. There did not
seem to be much in the room that was not burned or broken.
	They followed a trail of books and Sumi's gutted electronic gear
(fused circuits glowing like raw opals) down the hall to the bedroom.
In the small chamber, the arson-smell was stronger. Man Ray
thumbed on a small squeeze light attached to his obi. The bed had
been torched. Shredded clothes were scattered over the floor, and
Freon slurred the wall from a refrigeration unit, now slag, that Jonny
had hidden to store perishable drugs, and the occasional blackmarket
kidney or lung for a client.
	A scraping. From the living room.
	Both men had their weapons up and out, Jonny leaning into the
hall, anxious for something to shoot. In the far room, Ice and the
others were silently surveying the wreckage on the floor.
	"Back here," Jonny called.
	They came back, huddling dumbly in the doorway. Ice
performed a slow motion sleepwalk through the bedroom, stopping
occasionally to finger a piece of clothing, a crushed circuit board,
vials of pills. Man Ray's light fixed her in a wedge of sudden color.
She turned to Jonny. "Her tool belt is gone," Ice said.
	"That's good," said Groucho hopefully. "Then there's a chance
Sumi got away."
	Jonny leaned against the wall, sliding down into a crouch. "And
maybe they just took it with them for evidence. Prove she's a Watt
Snatcher."
	From the corner of his eye, Jonny saw Skid, shifting his weight
nervously from foot to foot. "Maybe we shouldn't stay here," said the
Kid quietly.
	Ice stood up, holding a small prayer wheel; its half-melted
copper cap squeaked as she spun it. "Either way, Sumi's long gone,"
she said. "Turn off that damned light."
	Man Ray put the squeeze light back on his sash. Jonny
remained on his haunches; Ice kicked her way through the clothes
and half-melted lumps of cheap plastic furniture, and nudged him
with her boot. "Looks like it's just you and me for now, cowboy," she
said.
	Jonny looked up at her. "I'm going to kill someone for this, you
know."
	Ice nodded, smiled. "Well, don't forget to leave something for
me," she said.
	"This is payback from Zamora," said Jonny.
	Groucho cleared his throat. "I think Skid was right a moment
ago," he said. "Perhaps we ought to leave. If Pere Ubu's involved, he
may have left sentries behind."
	Jonny pulled himself from the floor, looking the room over one
more time, pressing the image in his brain for later. When he might
need the anger. "Okay," he said, "we came in the back, we go out the
front. Good crowds for cover."
	They left the apartment. Skid abandoned his coat and walked
point in his Zombie gear: an innocent hustler in search of the night's
mark. They saw no Committee boys on the way out.

	The main courtyard of the Babylonian temple was stifling in
the overheated illumination coming from tiered ranks of klieg lamps.
Dozens of made-up, costumed extras milled around, Valley kids
mostly, speaking in hushed cathedral tones. The movie set reminded
Jonny of something-- an immense surgery, the light giving people
and objects a look of startling precision and sterility.
	"Okay kids, Ms. Vega's going to make her walk in a minute,"
came a man's flat nasal voice from a P.A. "What we need here is lots
of clapping and cheering. But no whistling. You want to whistle, go
see kick-boxing."
	This brought shrill waves of high-pitched whistling from the
temple's squatters who were massed just behind a police line around
the set. The extras were costumed in cleaned-up Hollywood versions
of squatter gear, much too clean and well-fed, thought Jonny.
	"Very funny. Get to your positions, kids."
	Jonny and the others joined the general flow of the crowd,
threading their way through the back of the set, following a line of
dancers in sequined parodies of Lunar Commando vacuum-suits.
Jonny was not particularly surprised by the presence of the film
crew; it was not the first time he and the other squatters had been
forced from their digs by a some local production company. Aoki
Vega was one of the Link's most popular musical-porn stars. The
irony of the situation, Jonny thought, was that the Link was going to
turn around and sell the broadcast of Vega's performance to the
same squatters they had displaced, presenting them with an
expensive ad glittering souvenir of their powerlessness.
	The dancers Jonny and the others were following seemed to be
headed to a partitioned area at the far end of the pavilion near a
semicircle of honeywagons and generator trucks. Skid was walking
on his toes, trying to see over the line of extras waiting to cheer the
star. A bank of stadium-sized video projectors displayed views of the
set from several different angles.
	As he pushed his way through the extras, Jonny became aware
of a certain unnerving sameness about them, as if they had all been
weaned from the same shallow gene pool. Caucasian faces were
blandly orientalized; nisei kids snapping their fingers to unheard pop
tunes, their hair bleached and skin darkened with biologics to some
bizarre ideal of southern California chic. They could have been from
anywhere, nowhere. A gag postcard about sex appeal and beaches.
	"I know you. You're the producer, right?" said someone nearby.
	Jonny turned to her. She wore a loose jacket of woven
aluminum filament, plated gold. Her face held the same assembly
line features as the others. Only her eyes were memorable. She wore
diffraction grating contacts; her eyes were spiraling rainbows.
	"We met at Marty's party in Laurel Canyon," she said brightly.
"You're Mister Radoslav, right?"
	It was obvious to Jonny that the woman was stoned. She might
as easily have thought he was the Pope. Jonny, still moving, glanced
over at the police line, then fixed her with the most radiant smile he
could muster. "Please keep your voice down," he said. "No one's
supposed to know I'm here." He put his arm around Skid. "This is my
associate, Mister Kidd."
	"My pleasure," the woman said, extending a bronzed hand. She
and Skid shook, the Kid mumbled an incoherent pleasantry.
	"Tell me, is there somewhere we can go and talk, Ms.--?" Jonny
began.
	"Viebecke," she said. "But everybody calls me Becky."
	"Becky, of course. Is there anywhere we can speak privately,
Becky? Perhaps discuss an audition?"
	"Sure," she said. "The extra's trailer is probably empty now."
The look she gave Jonny was infused with such hunger and lust that,
for a moment, he considered cutting right then and there and taking
his chances with the police.
	Something glided by. Jonny looked up. A long articulated arm
supporting a German video-cam was hovering a few meters
overhead; a half-dozen lenses rotated, pulling to focus on them. His
face and Skid's were splashed across the dozen enormous video
screens. "The trailer sounds fine," he said.
	Ice and the others were waiting beside a two-story boom crane
that reminded him of an orange praying mantis. He introduced the
others to Becky who clung to his arm, looking disappointed when she
saw Ice. Then she smiled, the Hollywood optimism bubbling forth.
"Oh wow, are you guys actors, too?" she crooned.
	"How'd you guess?" asked Ice, flashing her teeth.
	"We're casting a new feature right now," said Jonny. "Looking
for fresh, interesting faces."
	Becky giggled and led them to a group of trailers behind the
honeywagon. The chemical smells of processed fish and beef analogs
permeated the place. Becky went inside before them, holding up a
hand to indicate that they should wait there. The sound of raised
voices came from beyond the door. Jonny looked at Ice. She shook
her head slowly.
	A moment later, a young woman came storming out of the
trailer. She resembled Becky so strongly, that for an instant, Jonny
thought it was the actress in a new set of clothes. But the new
woman just glared at them and stalked off. "You can come in now,"
Becky called from the doorway. They went inside.
	The trailer was long and narrow, smelling faintly of perfume
and sweat, with rows of lighted mirrors on one side, benches and
hooks heavy with clothes on the other. Sun lamps and video monitors
were crowded at opposite ends of the room. Jonny and the others
went immediately to the clothes, and started pawing through them.
Becky perched on a table by the mirrors, holding her head rigid,
favoring them with her best side.
	"What are you guys doing?" she asked at last.
	"Costumes," said Jonny. "Gotta know what young people are
wearing these days."
	Becky lit a joint, puffed, and rose from her perch, trying to
keep up a merry front. Man Ray found a hound's tooth overcoat that
fit over his body armor; Ice put on a white toreador jacket, trimmed
with gold beads. When Becky lay a hand on Jonny's arm she was
radiating nervousness, but her face remained a smiling mask.
Looking at her, Jonny felt an obscure sorrow. He wondered if she had
any other facial expressions buried somewhere under all that
bargain basement surgery.
	"Is there anything youwant to ask me?" she purred. "Yeah,
there much security down at this end of the set?"
	Becky looked at him blankly, like a deranged puppy. She
screamed: "Hey! You aren't the producer!"
	"We're criminals," said Jonny. "Desperate, armed criminals."
Becky fell back drunkenly and cowered in a far corner of the trailer,
whimpering and mumbling "Oh wow," like a mantra.
	They had their new clothes on in a few seconds, (Groucho in a
Mexican Air Force jacket studded with medals, Skid in a black
leather jumpsuit and Chinese revivalist Mao cap) and started out the
door. Jonny went to Becky to attempt a quick apology. She was still
in the corner, struck dumb with drugs and fear, and when she thrust
a chair at him, he could not tell if she wanted to give it to him or hit
him with it. He just backed away slowly saying, "I'm sorry, Becky.
But it's our asses."
	Outside, the P.A. was blaring, "Okay kids, let's really hear it."
	They moved to the very back of the set, smiling at the techs,
just another group of extras waiting for their call, and started out
between two grinding generator rigs. Behind them they heard the
trailer door burst open and a shrill, hysterical voice. "He's not the
producer! He's just a goddam thief!"
	Security moved in quickly on the screaming actress. By the
Babylon set, music started, drowning out Becky's voice. Someone
called out for them to stop. But Jonny and the rest were running
then, out of the pavilion and across the wet street.
	Near the van, Jonny sneaked a look over his shoulder, and saw
a couple of overweight film company rent-a-cops in pursuit. He
almost laughed. Spinning on the balls of his feet, he brought his
Futukoro up level with the rent-a-cops' heaving chests. The nearest
one saw him, momentarily misplaced his center of gravity, and went
down in a puddle like an overstuffed sack. His partner did a little tap
dance, hands thrust over his head, and started back toward the
bright lights of the pavilion.
	Jonny ran on to the van, arriving there just in time to see Skid
hit the street under the hulked black back of a uniform. Ice went
down on top of them. The bright flicker of her knife blade, and she
and Skid were up. Groucho caught another uniform, whipping his
bolo like a garrote, pinning the uniform's upraised arm to his throat,
before dispatching him with a kick to the solar plexus. Very weird
for rent-a-cops, thought Jonny. A couple of Futukoro rounds
slammed into the scarred armor on the side of the van. Very fucking
weird.
	One of the uniforms scrambled by, illuminated by the flickering
green florescence of a street lamp. "Oh shit," Jonny said.
	He ducked and ran, hoping the Committee boys had not spotted
him. Man Ray was already behind the wheel of the van, gunning the
engine. Ice and Groucho had their guns out, and were giving Jonny
covering fire. The three jumped in the back. Skid, however, remained
outside, in maniacal pursuit of the Committee boy who had attacked
him.
	Man Ray ground the van into gear, accelerating past the Kid.
Jonny held onto one of Groucho's arms as he leaned out the back. The
anarchist snared the Kid and they dragged him by his sleeves for a
block or so before Ice got hold of his collar and pulled him inside.
	A hovercar skimmed down low over the van, burning lights,
manic shadows; hot fists of turbine wash forced them back from the
door. Man Ray jammed through the gears. He took two corners,
nearly overturning the van on one, but the hovercar just hung there.
Then it veered suddenly off to the left.
	It seemed for a moment that they had lost it, but it dropped
down a few feet in front of them, barely skimming over the puddles.
	Man Ray stood on the brakes, sending the van wiggling down
the street like a speared fish. When he regained control, the Guru ran
them through a parking lot off Vine and out onto Melrose.
	Gripping the doorframe, Jonny and the others shot at the
turbine vanes on the underside of the hovercar with Man Ray's
custom ammo. Pink and silver spheres impacted the polycarbonate
surface; blue firework dragons pawed at the landing gear, before
being sucked up through the intake ports. Skid pushed past them,
and threw some of Man Ray's roses, knife-fashion, at the low flying
car. They exploded behind the van, blistering asphalt and palm trees.
	"Let there be light!" yelled Man Ray. He cranked up the short
wave scanner, making adjustments to his own broadcasting unit.
	"Listen'a that dumb fuck," he said. "Thinks he's calling us in. I
got that boy jammed so hard, surprised he knows which end holds
the mike."
	The hovercar let loose then with a burst of automatic weapons
fire that hammered down on the roof of the van like a phospho-
rescent avalanche, blue sparks dancing around the edges of the door.
Jonny and the others fell back. Man Ray steered them onto Wilshire
Boulevard, dodging slow-moving low riders and pedicabs.
	Jonny leaned up to the driver seat. "How far are we from the
underground?" he yelled.
	"Almost there," Man Ray said. He had slipped on a high-domed
crash helmet.
	"Can we take more of that fire?"
	The Guru grinned through high-impact plastic. "Don't insult
me."
	The glass donut of Lockheed's office tower was glowing just a
few blocks ahead. The Guru steered the van onto a side street, trying
to lose their tail before heading for the clinic. The hovercar hung
implacably above them.
	"We're really eating it," Man Ray said. "There's no major turn-
offs and the underground's just ahead. Any suggestions?"
	"I got one," said Ice. She pulled one of the Croakers'
Kalashnikov rifles, retrofit with an M-79 grenade launcher, from the
weapons bin. The van was running fast down a side street between
long rows of grimed and decaying old geodesic greenhouses, some
forgotten experiment in urban self-sufficiency.
	Wind tearing at her corn-rows, Ice sighted in on the hovercar,
tracking the subtle, massive glide of the machine as it positioned
itself for another attack. When she did not fire, Jonny was tempted to
pull her away from the door. Then, just as he was reaching for her,
she pulled the trigger, sending the burning M-79 bolt at the aft
section of the car. The explosion, when the shell hit, blew out
windows in one old greenhouse dome, peppering the van with dead
vegetation and fragments of glass.
	Black smoke and guttering light above them. The hovercar
tried to rise, but its remaining engine clipped a transformer tower,
flipping the car onto its back. It hung there for a moment, as if
undecided what to do. Finally, in what looked like an attempt to right
itself, it slammed through a greenhouse roof, emerging from the far
side in flames.
	"Brace yourselves!" screamed Man Ray. He wrenched the
steering wheel left, sending the van broadside into the hovercar just
as it skidded to the ground in front of them.

	The first thing Jonny was aware of was the constant blaring of
a horn; then came shadows, flickering over his eyelids in frozen
micro-second silhouettes; then a thick wetness on his face, across his
chest and arms. He opened his eyes. Glycerin. It was everywhere,
thick puddles massing on the floor and slopping out the back,
ruptured padding going limp on the walls. He crawled to the open
door and dropped a couple of unexpected feet to the pavement. The
vehicle was resting at a severe angle, its three left wheels spinning in
the air.
	He walked on some stranger's legs; they refused to work
together.
	Around the side of the van he found the mangled hovercar, a
skeletal mass of crumpled alloys and scorched plastic, two feeble red
lights rotating out of synch; the fuselage had twisted itself
thoroughly into the undercarriage of the van, merging with it.
Symbiotic junk.
	A sleeve grazed his face, electric jolt sending Jonny down to his
knees. Man Ray danced past him, his Medusa out and swinging over
his head. Charged lashes flowered sparks as they touched, gilding the
air above the Guru's head with spinning galaxies, ghostly landscapes
of exploding stars, playing cards, cometary butterflies. He was easily
holding three Committee boys at bay. There was an enormous
stained-porcelain smile plastered across his face. Even groggy, Jonny
could read it: Total fulfillment. Man Ray was in his element, writing
sonnets with his weapons; the image of the artist at work.
	The Guru froze and held out his arms, crystal geckos skittering
from his sleeves. Light-footed, quick-tongued, they leaped to the
ground at the Committee boys' feet, exploding into billowing,
lavender clouds of CS gas. Jonny fell back on the van, coughing, eyes
filling with tears, and saw Man Ray emerge from the cloud a moment
later. Somewhere along the way, the Guru had slipped a respirator on
under his kendo helmet. A Committee boy grabbed him and was
jolted off by the electrical charge of the polypyrrole armor.
	Then someone was pulling Jonny away, around to the back of
the ruined van. It was Skid, blood ruining the white perfection of his
teeth, rimming his lips. The hand he used to hold Jonny was glowing,
pixels throbbing nervously, but offering no image. He was shouting
something.
	"We're fucked! They've blown it! We're on our own, man!"
	The Kid started to pull again, but Jonny shifted his weight and
held him in place. "What are you talking about? Where's Ice?"
	The Kid pointed with his gun. "Pinned down with Groucho. It's
the Committee, man. They've blown the clinic!"
	Jonny pushed the Kid aside and ran between the rows of
greenhouses. A block away, he could see a dozen of the Committee's
meat wagons forming an armored barrier around the warehouse he
and the others had left earlier that evening. Force men were leading
a few cuffed Croakers to the wagons. There were bodies, Committee
boys and anarchists, lying in the flood-lit parking lot. Ice and
Groucho were there, pinned-down in an alley off to the right, meters
apart, unable to reach the cover of the greenhouses.
	"See? We're fucked!" Skid shrilled. "They found the clinic!"
	Jonny watched as Ice and Groucho tried to make a run for it,
shooting into the air to cover each other. The Committee boys
laughed at them from the roof, cat and mousing them, letting them
get a few meters out, then forcing them back against the warehouse
under a curtain of bullets.
	"If we lay down some fire on that roof, they could make it,"
Jonny told Skid. "Watch them. I need a weapon." He crawled away,
then sprinted to the van.
	Weapons and ammunition were scattered on the ground behind
the van's open door. Some of Man Ray's clockwork constructions had
been activated; they crawled absently off into the shadows where
they popped and flared. The Guru was nowhere in sight. Jonny
grabbed a Futukoro and, as he fished for a clip in the glycerin
flooded bin, paused for a moment to take a couple of deep, even
breaths. His hands were shaking. He closed his eyes, tried to will
himself calm. Nothing but ruins, he thought. Seeing Ice pinned down
had snapped something inside him. He thought of Sumi. He could not
lose them both in one night.
	A high-pitched animal scream. Jonny ran back to the
warehouse in time to see Skid zig-zagging into the open, his pixels
wild, a slight figure crawling with pastel geometrics and snapping
death's heads. As the Kid ran, he shot wildly at the roof of the
adjoining warehouse, forcing the Committee boys back. Ice, Jonny
realized, had been caught between the buildings, unable to get out of
the line of fire. Now, under Skid's cover, she made it to a greenhouse
on the far side, Groucho right on her heels. They turned to give the
Kid covering fire, but he seemed confused; unwilling to be pinned at
the warehouse wall as they had been, he sprinted back toward
Jonny.
	He got about ten meters when a shot caught him from behind,
punching a wet hole in his chest. The Kid spun around stiffly, firing
the last of his clip into the pavement. "Skid!" Ice screamed. The Kid
was on his back, half-conscious, crawling with snakes and
phosphenes. A file dump, Jonny realized. All the images in his
software were bubbling up at once, out of control. The arm Skid held
up strobed madly: the arm of a woman, a reptile, an industrial robot;
crimson spiders webbed him; amber alphanumerics scrolled up his
twisted face; Brando, Lee, Bowie, Vega; his system was looping, the
faces flickering by faster and faster, merging into one meta-fantasy
face, colorless, all colors, fading at the same instant it formed. Skid
sat up, looked around wildly and laughed. A single bright flash of
binary, and he slumped to the ground. The Kid lay still and dark.
	By the meat wagons, a loudspeaker clicked on: "MY GOD, IS
THAT YOU, GORDON? NICE TO SEE YOU, ASSHOLE. WHAT HAPPENED
TO OUR DEAL?" came Zamora's voice. "YOU FUCKED ME, GORDON, BUT I
DIDN'T THINK YOU WERE STUPID. I CUT YOU LOOSE AND YOU RUN
RIGHT INTO THE ARMS OF CRIMINALS; TERRORISTS, FOR CHRISSAKE."
	It was a game, Jonny knew. Could the Colonel make him mad
enough to do something stupid? Jonny tried to force the sound of
Colonel Zamora's voice from his brain; he conjured up visions of
clawing the man's eyes out with his hands, but he stayed in the
shadows, shaking, hating himself, and biting his lip until he drew
blood.
	"I'M GOING TO ROAST YOU, KID. ONE OF YOUR BITCHES IS MINE
ALREADY. THEY LOVE FRESH CUNT AT THE WEAPONS LAB, YOU
KNOW. THEY'LL HAVE HER INCUBATING SPINAL WORMS. EVER SEEN
THOSE THINGS? ALL THEY EAT IS NERVE TISSUE, AND THEY DON'T
STOP TILL IT'S ALL GONE..."
	Before Jonny knew what he was doing, he was flat on his belly,
screaming, firing the Futukoro, filling the air above the meat wagons
with dragons, burning comets, screeching harpies. He knocked out
the P.A. with the first volley, and took out some of the flood lights.
Something occurred to him then, and he was up, scrambling back to
the van. Some of Man Ray's toys were been back there, he
remembered. What a nice surprise they would be for the Colonel.
	But he never got there.
	Two dark suited men intercepted him as he was stepping into
the vehicle. Instinctively, Jonny brought his boot up into one man's
armpit, paralyzing the arm. But it was not enough. His whole system
hummed, crying out for blood. Jonny grabbed a handful of the first
man's face and pushed him into the second. They both went down,
and Jonny was on them, bringing his boots down heel-first, aiming
for the throat. He missed the first man, corrected his aim for the
second and knocked out some of his teeth. Jonny's fun was cut short,
however, when an arm clamped across his face, and something cold
and stinging touched his throat. As his body went limp, some neutral
part of his brain noted that he had been stuck with a neural
scrambler. The effect was a strange one since Jonny's mind continued
to function perfectly, but with the pyramidal tracks of his brain
jammed, his body had suddenly been reduced to so much useless
meat. He was aware of the two men carrying him for some distance.
He hoped they would not let him swallow his tongue.
	When they removed the scrambler, Jonny found himself on the
filthy floor of an underground garage. A stretched Cadillac limousine,
the rear end huge under twin sweeping tail fins, was parked nearby.
His tongue seemed to be intact. The car door swung open, and a
familiar florid scent of clove cigarettes billowed out. Then the ugliest
man Jonny had ever seen smiled out at him.
	"Please don't be angry, Jonny. Your friends are gone. Some of
their compatriots picked them up a few moments ago," said Mister
Conover, the smuggler lord. "Aside from that, it's been my sad
experience that people who are ready to die for a cause, all too often,
end up doing just that." He grinned apologetically, showing horrid
yellow teeth. "There are far too many of them out there for you to do
any good, you know. You'll just get yourself killed."
	"Killed?" said Jonny. He laughed. "Wouldn't that be a joke on
everybody."


						SIX:
					The Exquisite Corpse

	Mister Conover, relaxed and smiling, was sporting that season's
newest suit style from Milan (high-waisted pants, shoulder pads in
the jacket, all woven from Russian silk. There was a Cyrillic character
on each of the gold buttons. In all, the suit violated a dozen U.S. trade
embargoes against pro-Arab countries.). He was the most powerful
smuggler lord in Los Angeles, singlehandedly controlling most of the
drug traffic in and out of southern California.
	Many of the other lords were working small, furtive drug deals
of their own, deals designed to boost their cash flow and their self-
esteem, and while they were, technically, cutting into Conover's
action, he did not mind. Allowing the other lords to have their little
deals helped to keep them happy and in line. And that, Conover
knew, was a form of power he could not buy or do without.
	Rumor had it that Mr. Conover's influence reached far beyond
the limits of Los Angeles, into the governor's mansion, and the offices
of the multi-nationals in Osaka and Mexico City. Part of this was due
to an elaborate kick-back scheme he had reputedly concocted with
several pharmaceutical firms decades before, a scheme having to do
with the scuttling of artificial intelligence controlled-cargo blimps
and tankers, allowing the companies to collect on the insurance, then
returning the vessels with new names and computer logs, while he
kept the cargo. However, a portion of his influence had simply to do
with his age. He had been born in the previous century, making him
older than most of the corporations and politicos he was dealing with.
Through the years, he had become a link to a golden age when the
foundations for the power structure of their world was being laid, a
sort of icon to commerce and stability.
	Mr. Conover was also a Greenies addict. Originally marketed in
the late nineteen nineties as a longevity drug, Greenies were later
found to be responsible for a whole range of bizarre side effects.
However, these effects manifested themselves only after decades of
use, and by then it was usually too late; the drug had already bonded
with and re-inscribed large segments of the addict's DNA. To stop
taking the drug would have killed Conover. The drug's street name
derived from its peculiar tendency to slow the oxidation of blood in
the user's system, giving the addict's skin a brittle, greenish-blue
quality.
	The final irony was that Greenies turned out to be an
exceptionally effective life extender. Thus, the user could look
forward to decades (centuries?) of addiction and slow physical
disintegration. No one really knew how old Mr. Conover was, but
what he had become was obvious to all.
	Conover's small grayish-green skull of a head bobbed between
narrow shoulders set above a thick torso. His nose was little more
than a mass of jagged scar tissue surrounded by livid clusters of red
tumors. He puffed constantly at gold-tipped Sherman clove cigarettes
which he held in a long mother-of-pearl holder, an affectation which,
like his clothes, was another symptom of his compulsion to
accentuate his own ugliness. When he smiled, which was often, his
thin lips stretched back from a stained jumble of teeth. His
appearance always gave Jonny the feeling that he was in
conversation with a well-dressed corpse.

	The Cadillac moved swiftly along an all but abandoned stretch
of freeway. Sand was blowing in off the desert, carried to the city on
the backs of freak Santa Ana winds. Carbon arcs mounted on the roof
threw the cracked roadbed into stark relief, made the sand look like
static on a video screen. Jonny looked out the double-glazed
windows, but there was not much to see. They were driving through
hills northwest of the city, on the edge of the German industrial
sector, a bleak dead zone of strip mining equipment and half-
finished bunkers housing the Krupp Corporation's experimental
tokamak. The leached hills depressed Jonny, reminded him of a
painting by Max Ernst that Groucho had shown him: Europe After the
Rain. The landscape brought back uneasy memories of evenings on
the Committee shooting speed with Krupp's young shock truppen.
The German's did not have Meat Boys, instead, it was common for
young recruits to display their machismo by replacing their limbs
with unfeeling myoelectric prosthesis. Jonny had the patchy,
drunken memory of a laughing boy holding a cigarette lighter to his
fingertips until they melted and dripped away, revealing the silicon
sensors and black alloy mesh beneath.
	Jonny relaxed on the soft leather seat in the rear of the
limousine. Seated next to him, Conover pulled out an ornate silver
cigarette case and offered him a smoke. Jonny accepted the cigarette
and a light, pulling the harsh, sweet clove smoke deep into his lungs
and letting it trickle out through his nose.
	It had been months since he last smoked a cigarette (Sumi had
guilted him into stopping when a Croaker working out of the back of
a taqueria told him he had a shadow on one lung), but his past
seemed to be catching up with him at such a rate that Jonny figured
he might as well get into the spirit of it. He coughed wearily as the
smoke caught in his throat. Resting his head on the seatback, he
watched the road slide by. Conover's chauffeur, a heavy-set ex-
Guardia Nacional man, was skull-plugged into a radar/navigational
unit in the dashboard, following a trail of military sensors under the
road bed. Conover was one of the few men in the city Jonny trusted,
certainly the only lord. For the moment, he felt safe. Conover leaned
over and spoke to him quietly.
	"You seem to have brought down the wrath of god, old son. Or
at least you pissed off Zamora, which amounts to the same thing.
What in the world can you have done?"
	Jonny ran a hand through his hair. "I wish I knew," he said.
"Maybe I'd feel like I deserve all this special attention."
	"Much as he'd like to, the Colonel does not stage raids just for
fun. He must have had some reason for singling you out." Conover
put a hand on Jonny's arm. "No offense, you're a charming boy, but--"
	"The man's insane. He thinks you and I are playing footsie with
the Alpha Rats," Jonny said. "I suppose that's assuming they have
feet. I don't know. This whole thing's crazier by the minute."
	"The Alpha Rats," Conover said, half as a question, half a reply.
He smoked his pastel Sherman, laughed mildly. "The Colonel never
ceases to amaze me. Did he happen to mention what, specifically, you
and I were doing with the Alpha Rats?"
	"No. He just said we'd had contact and that we're into some
kind of deal," Jonny explained. He gave up and ground out the
cigarette in an ashtray gouged from a crystal lump of Amazon quartz.
His throat burned.
	"And that's all he said?" Conover asked.
	"Yeah." Jonny hesitated before saying anything about Zamora's
demand that he turn Conover. Just saying the words, Jonny felt,
implied a kind of betrayal. But how will it look, he wondered, if I
don't say anything and he finds out? "Zamora's really got the hots for
you," he said. "He cut me loose and told me I had to deliver you in
forty eight hours or--"
	"--Or we get the little scene back at the warehouses. Tell me,
did Easy Money ever come up in your talk?"
	"I don't think so."
	"Take a moment. I want you to be sure. Did Colonel Zamora
mention Easy Money?"
	"No, never."
	"You didn't seem so sure a moment ago."
	"Well, I wasn't then; I'm sure now," said Jonny. He looked at the
smuggler lord.
	"Good," said Conover, nodding in satisfaction. "Forgive me for
being insistent, but it's important that I get to Easy before the
Committee. He's made off with something of mine and I do not want
Zamora involved, on any level, with its recovery."
	"For what it's worth, Groucho, the Croaker, said Easy's gone to
work for Nimble Virtue."
	Conover reached forward and picked up a bottle of tequila
from a well-stocked traveling bar set into the seatback before them.
Next to the bar was an array of sleek matte-black Japanese electronic
gear; Jonny recognized a Sony compound analyzer, a cellular
videophone and a voice-activated PC. Conover poured a shot of
tequila into a glass and handed it to Jonny.
	"I'd heard about Nimble Virtue," said Conover. "In fact, I've
been trying to set up a meet with her, but the witch is on the run.
Paranoid,that woman is. My sources say she might have a pied a
terre in Little Tokyo, but only time will tell." Jonny finished his
tequila and Conover refilled his glass. "Right now, though, why don't
you relax and tell me, from the beginning, everything that went on
with you and Zamora. Take your time, we have a bit of a drive ahead
of us."
	Jonny took a gulp of the liquor, bracing himself with its cool
heat. He was not wild about the idea of reliving that night, but he
knew had known it was coming, ever since the smuggler lord had
picked him up. Conover, meanwhile, was using a tiny spoon to scoop
a fine white powder from a glass vial he pulled from the back of the
bar. That done, he cut the pile the into several neat lines with a gold
single-edged razor blade.
	As the lord snorted up a couple of the lines, Jonny began to
talk, telling Conover everything he could remember, from the
moment Zamora had picked him up, until he had found himself alone
behind the prison, confused and outraged. It was painful; all that had
happened since came crashing down on him. Ice was gone. Sumi was
gone. Skid was dead. He even found Groucho's absence disturbing.
	When he finished, Conover had him run through the whole
thing again, focusing on Zamora's theories about their connection to
the Alpha Rats. After going through it a second time, Jonny was
drained.
	Conover patted his arm, and nodded. "A very good job, Jonny.
Thank you," he said. "You look like you could use a break."
	"I could use a new life. But what about Zamora and the Alpha
Rats?"
	Conover handed the tube he had used to snort the coke to
Jonny. "It all sounds fascinating. I never would have suspected the
Colonel of having an imagination. It almost makes me wish it were
true. Without you to pull out of the fire, Jonny, my life would be
unbearable. Don't let anybody try and sell you on immortality. There
simply isn't enough of interest to make it worthwhile. Do your time
and get it over with; that's the best way. It's not polite to be the last
one to leave a party."
	Jonny snorted up the white lines and asked: "Then there's
nothing to all this spaceman stuff?"
	Conover shook his head, his eyes fixed miles and centuries
away. "No, nothing," he replied. Then he said something else; Jonny
thought it might be: "Empty."
	Jonny found himself beginning to feel a certain odd sympathy
for the smuggler lord. For all his power, Conover had trapped himself
in the decomposing body of a junky fop through a single
miscalculation-- his urgent will to live. On the other hand, Mr.
Conover was no fool. Had it really been a mistake? Jonny wondered.
Or was it a stage in some other, infinitely more complex and subtle
plan that Jonny and the rest, condemned to a pitiful handful of years,
could not see? If the smuggler lord was working on something else,
Jonny hoped it was very big. The price of it seemed high.
	Conover lit another in his constant stream of cigarettes. Tossing
the match out the window, he let in a sudden blast of hot air and
dust. His mood seemed to have grown lighter.
	"I hope you don't mind, but I've a little side trip to make
before we can go home. Just some business, you understand. I have a
boat coming in from the south with some goodies on board: pituitary
extracts, frozen retinas, a few kilos of cocaine. We wouldn't want to
be late and give our neighbors the impression that we keep a sloppy
shop, eh?" He laughed, amused by his own rambling. "Besides, I
believe these boys are going to try and burn me. And I wouldn't miss
that for the world."
	"Yeah? What would you do for the world?" Jonny asked, feeling
pleasantly numb and reckless, buzzing on the coke. Objects in the car
had taken on a warm internal glow.
	Conover looked at him, not without affection. "Only a lunatic
would want to run this dump," he said. "I'm content to farm my small
bit and be done with it. L.A. has been a very good investment for me,
in money and time."
	"I always wondered why you didn't move into someplace like
New Hope. I mean, those people have got to have some expensive
habits."
	Conover raised his ruined eyebrows. "More than you could
know," he said. "But New Hope is a ghost town. The corruption there
is a closed system. The same families have been running drugs and
data through there for generations. Old families, very powerful.
We're talking here about the Yakuza and the Panteras Aureo. The
families connected to the multinationals have their own internal
organizations to keep their people happy and restful. There's no
freedom in that sort of set-up. Little potential for growth." He
carefully ground out his cigarette and placed another in his mother
of pearl holder. "Besides, like Lucifer in the poem, I much prefer to
rule in Hell than serve in Heaven."
	Jonny grinned up at him. "I thought you said you didn't want to
run this dump."
	"It's all semantics. You can't buy Heaven, either."
	Outside, the sand had let up. Heat lightning crackled silently
across the horizon. Inside the Cadillac, they had passed into what
Jonny had come to think of as a pocket of silence, one of those odd
conjunctions of time and place where conversation vanished of its
own accord; at those moments, Jonny believed, all words became
dangerous and banal. He had come to attach a certain sacredness to
the silence. All things were at rest. It was a ritual from boyhood, no
different from stepping around cracks so that he would not break his
mother's back. Meaningless, he knew, but when the feeling passed,
he missed it and in trying to force it back, came up, instead, with the
twin images of Ice and Sumi.
	"Hey Mister Conover, anything in this stuff we're picking up
have to do with the new strain of leprosy?"
	"No," said the smuggler lord. "Why do you ask?"
	"I just figured you might be looking around for something. It's
getting pretty bad in some neighborhoods."
	"Have you seen the epidemic yourself?" asked Conover. "You
know how these things can get blown out of proportion. With AIDS in
the last century and the new hepatitis strains at the beginning of this
one, people are very susceptible to rumors of a new plague. Then the
Link gets hold of the talk, and broadcasts it right into people's skulls,
reinforcing their belief in their own delusions. Couldn't this plague
just be some mass psychogenic reaction?"
	"Yeah, I've seen it. People aren't really talking plague-- not yet.
The Croakers have a roomful of lepers quarantined. Say this new
strain is viral and that it kills, maybe through some kind of
secondary infection," said Jonny. "We're not talking about a few
hysterical whackos here. The whole city's in trouble."
	"Calm down, son," said Mister Conover, laying a hand on Jonny's
arm. "Remind me not to give you stimulants in the future." He smiled.
"Actually, I do know this new strain is real. Looks like a bacteria, acts
like a virus and all that, right? I was just trying to get an untainted
perspective. As I said, all I hear are rumors. Like in east L.A. they've
taken to burning their dead. That neighborhoods are beginning to
seal themselves off. The social effects of the disease are certainly real
enough. Tell me, have the Croakers had any success in isolating
reverse transcriptase from the virus samples?"
	"You think it's a retro-virus?"
	"AIDS was. And that little fellow practically had the medical
community reading Ouija boards before they got anywhere."
	"What about going after it with a general virus-killer like
ribovirin or amantadine?" asked Jonny.
	The smuggler lord shook his head. "That's been tried," he said.
"Amantadine seems to have some preventative applications, but if
you're already infected, it's useless."
	"You know about this new strain, don't you, Mister Conover?"
	"It's my job."
	"You don't seem too concerned."
	"Personally? No. The Greenies took care of that long ago. I
doubt my blood would be very appetizing to these little bastards." He
rocked with some internal laughter. "I haven't had a cold in over
forty years."
	"Then you don't know any treatments we could get hold of for
the new strain?"
	"No one is even sure how it's transmitted," Conover said. "And
without the disease vector, curing a few individuals isn't going to
stop an epidemic."
	Seated beside the driver in the front of the car, a hawk-nosed
man with an oily pompadour turned to face the back. One of his eyes
was blackened, and his upper lip was swollen badly, drawing it
downward, giving him a childish, sullen look. Jonny recognized the
man as the one whose teeth he had loosened with his boots earlier
that evening. The man appeared to be slightly embarrassed. He
would not look at Jonny.
	"'Scuse me, Mr. Conover, but I read un transmissor en la auto,"
he said.
	"Jonny, my boy, you wouldn't be wired for sound, would you?"
asked the smuggler lord.
	Jonny looked at him. "Hey, you know me, Mister Conover."
	Conover nodded and turned to the front. "What do you say,
Ricos? You sure your little gadget's reading correctly?"
	"Si, no cuestion. The maricon es only new baggage 'round here.
I'm not reading nothin' till he get in."
	"Friend, if you can read at all I'd be surprised," said Jonny.
Ricos made a quick grab for Jonny, but Conover shoved the man back
in his seat. "That's enough, children. Jonny, could somebody have
planted something on you?"
	"No," Jonny said. "Those Committee boys never got near me and
these clothes are Croaker cast-offs. They'd have no reason to tail me
to their own hideout." He looked at Ricos, pointed to his skull "Tu
tener un tornillo flojo."
	Conover puffed thoughtfully at his cigarette, leaned forward
and touched the driver's shoulder. "Pull over up ahead," he said.
"Ricos, bring your remote. Come on, Jonny."
	The car stopped near an old dumpsite for a mining operation
that had flattened the surrounding hills. Conover slipped on a white
Panama hat as he led Jonny out and around to the back of the
Cadillac. Cottony tracers of gas clung to gummy, bitter smelling waste
pits. The smuggler lord pointed to Jonny with his cigarette holder.
"Find it," he said to Ricos.
	Ricos moved very close to Jonny and began moving a small
electromagnetic device over Jonny's clothing, tracing the outline of
his body. Jonny glanced over at Conover and wondered what was
going through the smuggler lord's mind, but it was impossible to read
that face. He concentrated, instead, in affecting a look of extreme
uninterest as Ricos studiously moved the device around his crotch.
	"Ai!" Ricos yelled. He held the box to Jonny's bandaged
shoulder. "Got you, maricon."
	Jonny looked at the man and then at the box in his hand.
"Jesus," said Jonny miserably. "Oh fucking hell--"
	"Jonny?" said Conover.
	He slumped against the back of car, Ricos standing over him
delightedly. It took several seconds for the image to assemble itself;
it appeared to him much the way he imagined visuals formed
through skull-plugs: an out of focus mass of phosphenes settling
slowly, like a reverse tornado, around a central spiral. In truth, he
did not want to understand it, but in admitting that, he gave the
thought form and terrible substance.
	"Zamora did this," Jonny said. The image was clear. The prison
infirmary had fixed him up nicely and, all their doctors were
Committee recruits: bloodless and faceless; company men all the way.
It was obvious. He had lead the Committee to the Croakers. Right to
Ice's room. Now he was leading them to Conover. "Oh fucking hell--"
	"What is it, Jonny?" ask Conover.
	Jonny's hand moved involuntarily to his cast. "I got shot
earlier," he said. "I got shot and Zamora had them wire me. It's in my
goddam shoulder."
	Conover approached him, shaking his head sympathetically.
"I'm truly sorry, son. It's an awful thing to have done," he murmured.
"We'll have to cut it out, of course. You can't go around beeping the
rest of your life."
	Jonny laughed, when he thought about it. Zamora could not let
him off that easily. The insult had been there all along; all that had
been required was for him to recognize it. There was, Jonny had to
admit, even a kind of twisted beauty to it.
	Conover called the driver out, and spoke to him for some time
in quiet Spanish. When they parted, the driver opened the trunk and
unrolled a cloth-bound set of surgical instruments. He helped Jonny
off with his coat and pulled back the top of the Pemex jumpsuit.
When he removed Jonny's cast and xylocaine patch, he did it with
such sureness that Jonny was sure the man had been a medic at
some time.
	Jonny felt a cool punch of compressed air on his arm as the
driver injected him with something from a pressurized syringe.
Seconds later, Jonny was flying. The driver set him on the rear
fender and hooked a small work light to the inside of the trunk lid.
Before Conover retreated inside the car, Jonny heard him say: "When
you find it, bring it to me."
	The driver held out a small device that looked like an old
fashioned tattoo needle, but which Jonny recognized as an Akasaka
laser scalpel. In Spanish, the driver told Jonny to concentrate on the
hanging light.
	He did not feel a thing.

	Later, when the car was moving and Jonny was sacked out on
the back seat, still high on whatever they shot him with, he heard
voices in the midst of conversation. His shoulder ached with each
heartbeat. But he seemed to recall that his shoulder always hurt,
didn't it? Eventually he recognized Conover's voice.
	"We each do our bit as best we can, of course. Zamora is a
vicious, greedy prick, but a sterling leader of men. I've seen him pull
many strange stunts in my time. However, I have never before
known him to betray a sense of humor." He glanced at Jonny. "Have
you?"
	Jonny just rolled away and fell asleep. "I'd like to go home
now," he said, but nobody heard him.

	A dark, sour smelling harbor glittering oily rainbows amidst
sluggish waves. Men talking in a circle some distance off, a litter of
shapes around their feet; another painting came to him, Tanguy, this
time. Sharks-- the bleached carcasses of dead sharks, stripped of
their flesh by birds and their jaws by souvenir hunters, strewn
across the sand like some hallucinatory crop ready for harvest. Down
the beach, a roofless merry-go-round, half-collapsed, dangling a
string of bloated wooden horses into the dirty water. The flares of
gas jets miles away.

	Jonny rubbed grit from his eyes and tried to focus on the circle
of men outside on the beach. He had no idea how long he or they had
been here. He was very thirsty.
	From what Jonny could see, only two men were doing all the
talking. One was Conover, who was easy to spot, towering above the
rest, the glowing dot of his cigarette tracing erratic patterns in the
air. Behind Conover stood Ricos, scowling into the ocean wind, his
pompadour flailing around his ears like a dying animal.
	The man Conover was talking to was considerably shorter, but
very board, wearing the white dress uniform of a Mexican Naval
officer. A jet foil with the name Sangre Christi painted on the bow
floated a few meters out in the harbor, rolling gently with the surf.
Two small Zodiac crafts were beached nearby, one overloaded with
sealed metal containers. The identification numbers on the Sangre
Christi indicated that the ship was from the Gobernacion fleet
stationed in San Diego, but she was running no lights, and the flag on
her mast was Venezuelan, not Mexican. When the moon broke
through the heavy cloud layer, Jonny got a good look at her crew,
spread out in a semi-circle around the Zodiacs. About half wore naval
uniforms; the others were dressed variously in jeans and leathers,
pale gringos and dread-locked blacks numerous among the crew.
	That's it then, Jonny thought. They're pirates.
	Picking up the tequila from Conover's traveling bar, Jonny took
a drink. The pirate captain pointed back to his ship and shouted
something. Warmed by the tequila, Jonny's thoughts drifted back to
his own time as a dealer.
	Jonny always picked up a buzz when he was pushing or setting
up a meet that was wholly divorced from the rest of his life. Part of
it was the thrill an ex-Committee boy felt at having gone over to the
"other side." Another part of it had something to dowith vague
notions of changing the world, but he attributed this to youthful
folly, regarding it as a consequence of spending too much time sober.
Groucho's casual remark equating Jonny's dealing with revolutionary
politics had disturbed him. It saddled him responsibilities he had no
intention of trying to fulfill. The world (at least Los Angeles, which
was all he knew of the world), as Jonny perceived it, was little more
than the natural battle of competing organisms, like the virus he had
seen on the micrograph at the Croakers' clinic. Each viral unit was
incomplete until it had taken over a living cell and used that
organism to replicate itself, and the one-percenters and gangs of the
city followed the virus's pattern. Inertia swept them along in a
perpetual hustle, moving in time to the endless rhythm of commerce;
most knew nothing else. And, as was the way of nature, the strongest
viruses ate the weaker. The strongest viruses were the Committee,
the lords and the multinationals, Jonny thought, forces that were
overwhelming and, in the end, incomprehensible to him.
	Did the Croakers really believe they could change a world run
by Zamora or Nimble Virtue? Even Conover was just a business man
who had his own reasons for being there. And Groucho was too
damned small to play Atlas, Jonny thought.
	He wondered where Ice was at that moment. He felt certain
that she was all right; she seemed to have a talent for staying alive.
In his mind, however, Sumi had become one with the ruined
apartment. If Zamora really had her, she was lost. Jonny loved both
women (something which he was quick to point out as the single
distinguished feature of his character) but he felt he owed them
something more that.
	The door opposite Jonny opened and Conover leaned in. Salt
mist sparkled on the smuggler lord's shoulders and the wide brim of
his hat. He smiled at Jonny. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "We'll
be through here in just a few minutes. These boys are playing it to
the last row. Hand me that box by your feet, will you?"
	Jonny looked at the floor of the Cadillac and found a small
black lacquered box with brass fittings in the shape of lotus petals.
His head spun as he picked the box up. Conover smiled as he took it.
"Thanks, son. Sit tight. Have a drink," he said.
	Watching the smuggler lord cross the colorless sand, Jonny was
overcome by a sudden and overwhelming sense of loss. As if he were
adrift in some vast and infinite ocean with no land in sight. He had
the strong urge to bail out right there, to run from the car and to
keep running. But for some reason he stayed. If he drifted long
enough, he thought, a landfall was bound to appear. Besides, he was
drugged silly. Where would I go if I ran, he wondered. On the beach,
the pirates were smoking and passing a bottle. Jonny raised his
tequila to them and decided to remain in the car. Drifting, he knew,
was what he was best at.
	Outside, the pirate captain was nodding as Conover
ceremoniously handed him the small box. The pirate opened it for a
moment, waved briskly to a couple of men by the Zodiacs. They
made their way through the sand slowly with several containers,
setting them a few meters from Conover and Ricos. That done, they
retreated quickly from the smuggler lord's presence. Jonny caught a
quick movement of one pirate's hand. He had crossed himself,
Catholic-fashion.
	Ricos flicked open a butterfly knife and slit the metal strips
that bound the top of one container. Reaching inside, he pulled out a
white brick wrapped in heavy plastic and handed it to Conover.
Jonny looked around the car, wondering where Conover's chauffeur
had gone. When he looked back at the beach, the pirates were
moving out, pushing their Zodiac's into the surf. The moon lit, briefly,
the rubber floats that flanked each craft, like twin torpedoes
wrapped in skin. Ricos carried the metal containers back to the
Cadillac, stacking them by the rear bumper as Conover got in.
	Jonny nodded at the brick. "Real cocaine?" he asked.
	"Theoretically."
	"That's an awful lot."
	"You would think so, wouldn't you?" The smuggler lord pushed
some bottles out of the way, and set the brick on the traveling bar.
With his thumb nail, he gouged a hole in the plastic. He touched the
finger to his tongue ad grunted, motioning for Jonny to have a taste.
Wetting the end of his middle finger, Jonny touched it to the pile.
"What's wrong?" he asked, putting the finger gingerly to his tongue.
	"You tell me," said Conover as he spooned a small portion of the
powder into a test tube half-filled with a clear fluid. Swirling the
mixture together, the smuggler lord fastened the test tube into the
twin metal receptacles on the front of the compound analyzer. He
punched a switch and a beam of pale laser light lit up the sample
from the inside.
	Jonny found the taste of the powder to be odd. Alkaloid
bitterness, with a sweet after-taste. There was a thickness and a
graininess that was wrong.
	"Feel anything?" asked Conover.
	"Nothing," said Jonny. "They've cut the hell out of it."
Conover said "Show," to the PC and the terminal's screen lit up with
the rainbow-bar that was a spectrographic read-out of the contents
of the test tube. A list of chemicals and percentages to five decimals
places was displayed on one side of the screen. The smuggler lord
snorted and snatched up the brick, spilling white grains onto the
seat.
	"Good  god," Conover said. "Milk powder, sugar and probably
baking soda. Christ, you could bake a cake with this stuff. It's been
cut, recut, and cut again. These lads have probably selling my drugs
to freelancers all the way up the coast and filling in the weight with
whatever was at hand." He shook his head sadly. "These people think
because they have that gun boat they're immune." He tossed the
brick onto the bar.
	Something occurred to Jonny then. "You gave it to them, didn't
you?" he said.
	"Gave them what, dear boy?"
	"The transmitter. You put it in the box with the money, didn't
you?"
Conover smiled, removed a cigarette from his case, and lit it. After
bringing the last two boxes to the car, Ricos got in the front seat.
	"I consider it a fair exchange. Loaded money for loaded coke,"
he said, chuckling. "The hormones and the retinas?" he asked. Ricos
shook his head.
	"Paralizados. Look like they break the seal and go poking
inside. Es all spoiled."
	The smuggler lord nodded. "Let this be a lesson to you, Jonny:
there are always going to be assholes. Wherever you go, whatever
you do, you have to be on guard. If you're not, the fools and the tiny
minds of this world will drag you right down into the gutter with
them."
	Jonny leaned back in the seat and felt a slight tingling begin on
the end of his tongue. It was not much, though. "You think Zamora
will go after them?" he asked.
	"Why not? That was a nice piece of hardware we dug out of
your shoulder. Hitachi, military issue. VHF for short-range
monitoring and neutrino broadcasting for long-range. The Colonel has
no way of knowing you're not international. He thinks you're buying
dope from moon men, remember?"
	Jonny made a face at that. "This whole set-up was very--
professional of you."
	Conover looked at him curiously, one hand toying with the rip
in the white brick. "You find my methods uncouth? Maybe you'd be
happier if the Colonel followed us back to my place. That would end
the party pretty quickly, wouldn't it?"
	"Let's say I'm a little disillusioned, how's that? I mean, I was
kind of under the impression that the people running dope were on
our side, you know?" Jonny bit the end of his tongue to see if it was
numb yet. It was not. "Pretty stupid, right? You don't have to explain
it to me. I know how the song goes: it's all economics. It always is."
	The smuggler lord picked up the brick and held it before Jonny.
" 'Get place and wealth, if possible with grace; if not, by any means
get wealth and place.' Alexander Pope. It's the algebra of need, son.
As long as the need exists, somebody is going to service it and take
advantage of it, like those gentlemen from the Sangre Christi. They
understood, or did until they got greedy.
	It's mother's milk-- consumerism-- the Big Teat. The trouble
with you, Jonny, is that you're in business, but you're not a business
man."
	Conover opened his door and turned the white brick upside
down, dumping its contents into the sand. "In business, sometimes
you've got to take a loss in order to make a gain."
	"I'll try to remember that," said Jonny.
	"It would do you well."
	Ricos shivered in the front seat. Conover found a bottle of
aguardiente, and poured him a glass. Soon, the driver returned,
wearing a dun-colored windbreaker and heavy pair of night vision
goggles. He was carrying a shoulder-held Arab mini-gun, its twelve
massive barrels running with condensed mist. Conover explained
that the man had been hiding in the dunes some distance away
waiting for the jetfoil to pull out. After the driver stowed the gun in
the trunk (scattering the ruined hormones and retinas on the beach
for the gulls) Conover gave him a drink and told him to take them
home.


						SEVEN:
				The Machine-gun in a State of Grace

	They drove in silence. Jonny dozed in the back, waking every
few minutes when the Cadillac would hit a patch of broken concrete,
causing the car to shake violently. Then he would look out the
window and see hillsides covered with brightly-colored fabric or a
group of chrome palm trees constructed from stolen jet engines and
lengths of industrial piping. A gift from the Croakers, he thought,
giving the finger to the world. Closer to the city were squatter camps,
long walls of corrugated tin and dismantled billboards. Jonny could
make out a word here, a face there. A woman's eye. FLY. EAT. The
curve of a hip. LOVE.
	Just outside Hollywood, they turned off the ruined freeway and
drove through an old suburban sector before starting a steep climb
into the hills.
	The driver switched off the carbon arcs on the roof and skull-
plugged into an infrared array set into the car's headlight housings.
	The only light visible to Jonny was the pale green mercury
vapor glow of the suburbs and the jittery firefly of Conover's
cigarette.
	They passed through tunnels of rotted concrete where fungus
padded the walls. Even with the air conditioner on full blast, there
was a strong smell of decomposing vegetation. Outlines of burned-out
cars down the embankment, overgrown with weeds. As they gained
altitude, the road grew narrower and more hazardous. They passed
the ruins of the ancient Hollywoodland development, the New Hope
of its day. The well-heeled residents had tried to seal themselves off,
Jonny remembered, but it didn't work. They had brought all their
madness with them, into the hills. And when it all came crashing
down around their ears, no one had been surprised. The rot had set
in before the first foundation had been laid.
	The car slowed, finally, and came to a stop. Looking out the
window, Jonny could see nothing but rocky hills and the ribbon of
leaf-cluttered road curving off into the distance. The driver punched
a code into a key pad on the dashboard (Paranoid reflexes had Jonny
leaning on the seatback, memorizing the digits as he read them out of
the corner of his eye.). Then portions of the hillside, perfect squares
of stone and grass, began to wink out. Jonny realized that he was
looking at a hologram.
	After about a dozen of these segments had disappeared, Jonny
could see a paved driveway leading off the main road. The driver
turned them onto this new road, and the hologram hillside
reappeared behind them. A large cat, a cougar or jaguar ("Sentry
robot," Conover said.) paced the car as they passed a thick stand of
madrone and scrubby manzanita. There were men up there, too.
Jonny caught a glint of rifles slung over camouflaged shoulders.
	"Our security is quite tight up here," said Conover. "The whole
hill is wired. We have motion detectors, infra-red and image
intensifiers in the trees. Neurotoxin microcapsule mines buried on
the blind side of the hill. Those men you saw? They're carrying rail
guns. Models that small are very new. Very expensive. They can
push a one hundred gram polycarbonate projectile at a thousand
kilometers an hour. It's like having a small mountain dropped on
you." He lit another cigarette and from his inside jacket pocket, took
a black silicon card. There were gold filaments on the card's face,
forming a bar code on its face. "You need this, too. We run a magnetic
scan on every vehicle that comes through here. If the system doesn't
read the right code, it sets off every alarm in the place."
	"You expecting the Army?" asked Jonny.
	"I expect nothing," replied Conover. "But I anticipate
everything."
Around an out-of-place bamboo grove, they came up on Conover's
mansion, stars hazy through the hologram dome. Jonny's first
thought was that the main building of the estate was surrounded by
smaller bungalows. When they get closer, however, he realized that
what he was looking at was a single massive, confusion of a building,
erupting over the top of the hill like a geometric melanoma. What
appeared to be the oldest wing of the mansion was built in a straight
Victorian style, while others were pseudo-Hacienda; the most recent
additions appeared to have been built along traditional Japanese
lines. Gracefully curled pagoda roofs abutted at odd angles with
Spanish arches, high-windowed garrets overlooking gilt temple dogs.
	"I've heard of this place. It's the old Stone mansion, isn't it?"
Jonny asked.
	Conover nodded. The Cadillac stopped by a pond full of fat,
spotted carp, and he stepped out. Jonny followed him; a grinding pain
was building up in his shoulder beneath the anesthetics. "Yes, this is
the Stone place. I'm surprised anyone still remembers it. Old Mister
Stone made a fortune selling tainted baby formula in Africa and the
Asian sub-continent (encouraging the mothers to stop breast-feeding
and use his poison). After he died, Mrs. Stone got it into her head
that the ghosts of all those little dead children were coming to get
her. She kept building onto the place, sleeping in a different room
every night for thirty years. The architects were given a free hand to
build in whatever style was popular at the moment. This," he
gestured toward the mansion, "is the result. What do you think? Is
this a vision of insanity, made whole and visible, or just the
maunderings of a bored old bitty with too much money? Doesn't
really matter. The place is very comfortable. The old lunatic only
used the best materials."
	"It's a great set-up," said Jonny. "You must suck an awful lot of
power up here. Aren't you afraid someone's going to trace it back to
you?"
	"We're set up for solar and there are darius windmills on the
surrounding hills," said Conover. He gave Jonny a small smile. "The
rest of what we need I've had Watt Snatchers route through the
Police power grid."
	Jonny laughed, slapped the hood of the car. "I love it!" He felt
weak and hot. He wanted to sit down.
	From the madrones came a series of long hysterical cries, rising
in pitch until they peaked, fell and started again. Answering calls
came from deeper in the trees.
	"What the hell was that?" asked Jonny.
	Conover gestured toward the hills. "Samangs," he explained.
"Apes. We're right below Griffith Park. When the zoo was destroyed
during the Protein Rebellion, some of the animals escaped and bred.
It's not advisable to walk through these hills alone at night. The apes
won't bother you, but there are tigers."
	Jonny nodded, watching the madrone branches move in the
light breeze. "Kind of chilly out here, isn't it?"
	"Perhaps you'd like to see the inside of the house? I've picked
up one or two baubles from some local museums that you might find
interesting."
	"Art is my life," said Jonny, following the smuggler lord inside.

	The Japanese wing of the mansion was almost empty; Jonny
was not sure if this was through style or neglect, but it smelled
pleasantly of varnished wood, incense and tatami mats. Many of the
rooms they passed were closed off by rice paper doors painted with
pale watercolors of cranes and royal pagodas. Conover took him deep
into the cluttered Victorian wing where artificial daylight shone
through stained-glass windows full of saints and inscriptions in Latin.
Carpeted staircases appeared suddenly around corners, behind urns
of blond irises and fat pussy willows, leading to corridors that
seemed to turn in on themselves in impossible ways. Jonny's room
was papered in a floral design, thousands of tiny purple nosegays,
and furnished with delicate French antiques: a walnut boudoir, small
idealized portraits painted on glass, white hand-carved chairs with
tapestry cushions and a canopied bed, all lace and gold leaf. He
smiled at Conover, but was inwardly revolted by the place. It was
like living in the underwear drawer of a very expensive prostitute.
	When Conover left him, Jonny sat on the edge of the bed and
closed his eyes. He felt drained, both mentally and physically, but
could not relax. The long walk to his room, Conover's fairy tale about
his security and the wild animals in the hills had been obvious
warnings. Jonny was not to leave the grounds. That thought made
him uneasy. He was afraid to touch the antique furniture and had not
seen any signs of video or hologram viewers. Just these damned
paintings everywhere, he thought. They lined virtually all the walls
of the Victorian wing, set in carved wooden frames and lit by small
halide spotlights recessed into the ceiling. He's an art freak, too,
thought Jonny. Like Groucho. But the anarchist's art had effected him
differently. It had shown the process of the artist's mind and made
full use of his or her obsessions, revealing a wealth of personal
symbols that were the landscapes of dreams. Conover's paintings
reminded Jonny of grim family snapshots. Groucho's art (the art he
and the other Croakers had not created themselves) had also been
copies, cheap reproductions clipped from books.
	Jonny looked above the desk at the portrait of a sorrowful-
eyed man whose body was riddled with arrows. A small plaque
below the painting read: El Greco. It meant nothing to him. He went
out into the hall, touching each painting he came to, running his
hands across the still eyes, the centuries old canvas. They were all
alike. One-percenters commissioned by noble men to paint their
faces, he thought. Old masters, he had heard them called. Most of
Conover's paintings appeared to be portraits, although there were a
few landscapes, also meaningless to him. Pictures of men on
horseback wearing red jackets and chasing what reminded Jonny of
big rats. Names: Goya. Rembrandt. The faces in all the portraits had
the same leathery texture of old oil paint.
	"I'll take Aoki Vega or Mikey Gagarin videos any day," he said
to a Renaissance Madonna with child.
	On the wall above a heavy dark wood Gothic table, was a
painting Jonny recognized. "Blue Boy" by Thomas Gainsborough. He
remembered seeing a post card of the painting as a teenager, glued
by sweat to the bare buttocks of the young woman he was with in
the ruins of the Huntington Art Gallery. Jonny ran his fingers along
the boy's plumed hat.
	Finely ridged plastic.
	Jonny touched the painting again. When he leaned close to Blue
Boy's face he saw that the texture of the paint was an illusion. "A
hologram," he said, very surprised.
	So Conover does go for fakes, he thought. For some reason, that
made him feel better. Jonny touched the plastic face one more time
to reassure himself, then went back to his room. Inside, he undressed
and ran water for a shower. Before he got in, he took two Dilaudid
analogs that Conover had given him for the pain in his shoulder. He
stepped into the stall and stood for a long time under a spigot that
was a golden wrought-metal fish, turning the water on hard so that it
hit his back in a stream of warm stinging needles.
	Back in his room, he found a maroon silk robe had been laid
out for him, and a silver tray with ice, gin and a bottle of tonic. The
analog was just coming on. Standing by the desk, surrounded by
antiques and the smell of clean sheets, he had a sudden vision of the
world as an orderly place. His teeth melted gently into his skull. He
poured himself a shot of gin and drank it down straight.
	His shoulder hurt as he lay down on the bed, but the pain came
from somewhere deep underground, lost among dark roots and
grubs. He fell asleep and dreamed of Ice and Sumi. He found them at
the top of an ornate spiral staircase, but when he touched them, they
were plastic holograms.
	Jonny woke in a sweat, hours later. Someone had turned off the
lights. He stumbled around the dark room until he found the gin. He
brought the bottle with him, setting it on the floor next to the bed.
He lost track of the days.
	He slept a great deal. Conover had a private medical staff,
mostly Japanese and painfully polite. With many apologizes, a young
nurse called Yukiko stuck him with needles, antibiotics for the
wound in his shoulder, protein supplements and mega-vitamins for
his mild malnutrition. In a small, tidy lab in the Japanese wing, they
grafted new nerve tissue into the damaged area of his shoulder. They
hooked him to a muscle stimulator that used mild electric shocks to
tense and release his muscles, building back the strength in his
shoulders and arms. Yukiko spoke no English, but smiled a great deal.
Jonny smiled back.
	In the mornings, he tried to do t'ai chi, but the movements felt
odd and unfamiliar, as if he had learned them in some other body. He
took the lace trimmed pillows from the bed and sat cross-legged on
them in one corner of the room, staring into the interface of two
flowered walls, trying to meditate. Despite the fact his sitting had
become haphazard over the years, he still held a certain belief in
meditation's power. He had once had a master, an ancient Zen nun
with creased olive skin like old newsrags and cheap second-hand
piezoelectric eyes that could only register in black and white. "The
colors are here," she would say, and point to her skull. "All this is
illusion." She would point to the room. "But also important: so is this."
She would point to her head again and laugh delightedly.
	But the emptiness always eluded Jonny, the void that was filled
when the self was lost. He remembered all the Zen words, all the
theories. He sat on the old French pillows, pain shooting like hot
wires down his knees, and chanted the Sutras, trying to imagine
himself as a bird. In the past, this had sometimes helped. Leave
yourself, become the bird. Leave the bird, become nothing. But his
concentration was gone, replaced with a wavering self-doubt
compounded of fear, drugs and guilt. He thought often of Ice and
Sumi.
	Days came and went without any information about the
Croakers. They seemed to have disappeared en masse. What Conover
found out was that shortly after he had picked Jonny up, a second
group of Croakers had attacked the Committee boys at the
warehouse. There had been heavy losses on both sides. But he had no
information about the Croaker leader or Ice.
	Jonny discovered that if he turned a stylized cloisonné elephant
on his desk counterclockwise, the wall would slide away and reveal a
large liquid crystal video screen. He decided then that bed was his
karma, the theme of this incarnation in the world of flesh, pain and
illusion. He did Dilaudid analogs and drank gin and watched Link
broadcasts. Learned experts still clogged the wires with panel
discussions on the Alpha Rats; Jonny flipped past these quickly,
finding himself drawn day after day to the Pakistani newscasts on a
restricted Link channel that Conover's satellite rig was somehow able
to un-jam.
	Jonny was delighted to find that the thin Muslim spoke in the
same rapid and mock-smooth tones employed by western
newscasters. Although Jonny did not understand a word of Pakistani,
the look of the commercials was familiar and the music had a
universal sing-along jingle quality to it. The advertisements seemed
to be mostly about new fusion power projects and injured war
veterans.
	Jonny's favorite part of each broadcast came at the end. That's
when the ritual flag burning always occurred. Sometimes the flags
they torched were American, sometimes Japanese. Jonny took to
toasting the young uniformed hashishin (each with a gray metal key
around their neck that was the key to heaven) until he remembered
that Muslims did not drink. Then he would simply cheer and pound
the bed, drunkenly singing with the battle songs.
	The news show often featured pictures of the moon, fuzzy
satellite shots that showed ruined geodesic domes and the crystal
mounds of the Alpha Rats' ships on the barren lunar surface. On one
broadcast, Jonny saw a street that looked familiar. It was a jumpy
rolling shot, as if being shot from the window of a moving car or
truck. Polychrome marquees above crawling neon. Hollywood
Boulevard,
	Jonny thought. The newscaster's face grew serious as he spoke
over the grim footage. Pictures of lepers in the streets; they seemed
to be everywhere: shots of gangs (he recognized the Lizard Imperials
right away), hookers and nine-to-fivers from the Valley. Burning
funeral ghats along the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. A
quick-cut to people being loaded into the back of a Committee meat
wagon.
	The show ended when the newscaster lowered his head and
pronounced, "Al salaam." As he faded away, a caricature of Uncle
Sam and a samurai appeared on the screen. Both figures were yelling
"Bonsai!," the samurai swinging a long sword, cutting a deep trench
into a map of the Middle East. Jonny's hands were shaking when he
turned off the screen.

	Jonny sometimes ate dinner with Conover in a cavernous room
at the far end of the Hacienda wing. A cantilevered stucco ceiling
with bare wooden beams so old that they were probably real wood,
criss-crossed two stories above the dining area, a lighted island of
silver and crystal in a sea of plundered art. Sitting at the dining
table, the walls of the room were lost to Jonny. Old masters, bathing
scenes and hunts, orgies and crucifixions, some several meters long,
were stacked three deep along the base boards or perched on
aluminum easels between sixteenth century Roman warrior-angels
and Henry Moore bronzes. Buddha and Ganesh shared space with
porcelain clocks on the mantel above a bricked-in fireplace.
	Jonny came to dinner dressed in one of Conover's black silk
shirts and a pair of light cotton trousers, He was drunk, but he had
given up on the Dilaudid. Although the analog was technically non-
addicting, it gave him the sweats and cramps when he did not take it
regularly. To counteract the symptoms, he had prescribed for himself
daily doses of Dexedrine. Despite all the drugs, he was aware that
Conover's medical staff had done a considerable repair job on him. He
felt healthier and stronger than he had since he quit the Committee.
	Except for those times when Jonny joined him, Conover always
seemed to eat alone.
	They were served their meals by an efficient and mostly silent
staff of ritually scarred Africans. The was French and Japanese, snow
peas or glazed carrots arranged with surgical precision around thin
and, to Jonny, mostly tasteless cuts of beef. When he commented on
this to Conover, the smuggler explained to him that the meat came
from Canadian herds that still consumed grain and grazed in open
fields, not the genetically altered beasts that hung from straps,
limbless and eyeless, in the Tijuana protein factories.
	"What you miss, son, is the taste of all those chemicals.
Plankton feed solutions and growth hormones."
	Jonny shrugged. "I'm just a cheap date," he said.
Conover laughed, sitting across the table in a chair of padded
aluminum piping. Wires trailed from his chest, ears and scalp (pale
tufts of sparse white hair) to a vital signs-monitor on his left. One of
his sleeves was rolled up and a tube ran from a rotating plasma
pump mounted on the side of the chair and under a strip of surgical
tape on his left arm. "Twice a week I have to endure this," he
explained. "Blood change and cyclosporin treatments. My body is
rejecting itself. Most of my organs are saturated with Greenies by
now. Those that aren't, my body no longer recognizes and tries to
destroy. The cyclosporin slows the rejection process." He took a sip of
wine from a fluted crystal glass. "I clone my own organs. Have
transplants once or twice a year. Heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, the
works. Downstairs, I have everything I need to stay alive. That nerve
tissue in your shoulder? We grow that here, in the spinal columns of
lampreys." He took a mouthful of beef and wild rice, chewed
thoughtfully. "I've endured all types of nonsense to prolong my stay
on this silly planet. I flew to Osaka once, let a quack remove my
pituitary gland and install a thyroxine pump in my abdomen. I was
told to gobble antioxidants, butylated hydroxytoluene and
mercaptoethylamine. I took catatoxic compounds to boost the
function of my immune system and now I take cyclosporin to inhibit
it. I still have daily injections of dopamine because the production of
certain neurotransmitters decreases with age." He shook his head.
"My staff could cure me of Greenies addiction completely, of course.
A little tinkering with my DNA and it's done. The problem is that
afterwards, they'd practically have to boil me down and build a
whole new body for me. In the meantime, I'd be in some protein vat
while the other lords and the Committee carved up my territory. It's
strange, don't you think," he asked, "that we expend so much energy
trying to stick around a place we don't particularly like?"
	Jonny picked at a piece of asparagus. "I think I could help your
people track down the Croakers," he said. "I've got some experience,
you know."
	Conover continued chewing. "You're drunk," he said.
	"That doesn't have anything to do with anything."
	"And what are you going to tell the Colonel when he picks you
up?" Conover asked.
	"You think he can get to me again?"
	"There's no question of it. You are a commodity of some value
to him. Plus, your face is well known. He or one his informants will
find you."
Jonny grunted. With his fork, he moved the tasteless meat around his
plate until he could not stand to look at it anymore. "So I wait here
forever, is that the plan? Well, forget that. I can take care of myself,"
he said. "Besides, what if I was picked up. What makes you think I'd
tell Zamora anything?"
	Conover set down his fork and glanced at the monitor. "Jonny, I
understand your worry, believe me. You miss your friends and
you've been drinking. What I should have said was that it would be
very foolish for you to leave here. The Colonel wants you because he
wants me, and he is not careful with his prisoners. When he pumps
you full of Ecstasy and starts burning off your fingers, you'll tell him
everything he wants to know."
	Jonny picked up a crystal carafe and slopped some wine into a
glass for himself. Conover pushed his glass forward, but Jonny
ignored it and the smuggler lord had to pour for himself.
	"In any case, you're better off staying away from the Croakers,"
Conover said.
	"What does that mean?"
	"Just what I said," Conover replied.
	"The Croakers are all right. They're just trying to help people."
Conover rang a silver bell by his plate. Young African men in white
jackets began clearing away the plates from the table. "Why is it
Americans always insist on making everything into a cowboys and
Indians movie? Just because you label one group the Bad Guys, you
immediately assume that the group they are in conflict with are the
Good Guys. The world isn't that simple, son."
	"You think the Croakers are the Bad Guys?" Jonny asked.
	"I didn't say that. But they are destabilizing southern California
far more effectively than the Alpha Rats or the Arabs could ever
hope to."
	Jonny leaned his elbows on the table. His dinner churned with
the liquor in his stomach. "The Croakers are the only effective force
we have against the Committee."
	Conover gestured to one of the waiters and dessert was served:
a raspberry torte like a lacquered sculpture. "The Committee is a fact
of life. What we do, you and I, all the dealers and smugglers, is
poetry. Haiku. A form defined by its restrictions. The sooner you
learn to work within those restrictions, the happier you'll be."
	Jonny tossed his fork onto the plate and stood up. Wisps of
vertigo floated around the inside of his skull. "Thanks for dinner. I'm
going to get some sleep."
	As Jonny started out of the dining room, Conover called to him.
"You know I'm doing all I can, don't you?"
	"I know," said Jonny, without turning around.
	"And you believe me when I tell you I'm trying to locate your
friends."
	"Yes, I do."
	"And you have to know I'm right about the Colonel."
	"I know about all that," Jonny replied quietly. "I just don't
know if I care anymore."

	He drank from the bottle of gin he had taken from his room. He
stood in a darkened storage room, the third one he had explored that
night, a refuge from his latest failed attempt at meditation.
	The room was silent; the air musty. Light danced on a circular
dais at the far end. A Camera Obscura, he saw. There was a worn
metal wheel mounted on the wall. When he spun it, the brilliant
panorama of Los Angeles swept across the dais like a video on fast
forward. He focused the image on Hollywood, moving the wheel until
the luminescent tent of his home slid into view, glowing beyond palm
trees and neon. For a while, he found it comforting, but soon he felt
pangs of self-consciousness, imaging himself a peeping-tom getting
his kicks.
	Is this how we look to the Alpha Rats? Jonny wondered.
	Padded Zero-G crates with five year old shipping codes from
some lunar engineering plant were stacked against the far wall.
Jonny took another pull from the gin, slid one of the crates to the
floor and opened the top. Inside were a dozen smaller boxes, each
packed with capsules in blister pack, two capsules to each blister.
The manufacturer's code indicated that the red capsules were an
inhalant form of atropine. The purple capsules were unmarked, but
Jonny had seen them before. His stomach tightened. It was a popular
combination in some circles: atropine and cobrotoxin nitrite.
	Holy shit, he thought. What's an engineering company doing
with Mad Love?
	He tore open one of the packs, slopping gin on floor, and
popped a purple capsule under his nose. The cobrotoxin came on like
a slow-burning volcano, boiling along the surface of his brain, not
enough to kill him or cause permanent damage, just enough to cop
the killing euphoria from the cobra venom. His body was molten
glass and treacle. No flesh, no bones, just a sizzling mass of plasma,
fried eyes and melting genitals. His brain bubbled like magma. Thirty
seconds later, he popped the atropine and the inside of his skull iced
over. The room exploded into negative as white glacier light blazed
behind his eyes and shot down his spinal column. His nerves (he
could feel each individual fiber, vibrating in harmony like some kind
of cellular choir) were cut crystal and gold. "A las maravillas," he
said. This was it. Zen. Oneness. How could he have forgotten? Anger,
greed and folly were gone, replaced with a heightened awareness
that was what he had always imagined enlightenment to be like.
	Then the feeling was gone.
	When he could move, he tore two more capsules from the pack
and repeated the process. A few years before, Mad Love had been a
big problem for Jonny. He had avoided the stuff for years, neither
dealing nor using it. In some ways it had been easy; Mad Love was
almost impossible to find in the street, at any price, since the Alpha
Rat takeover of the moon. Yet, here he was with hundreds of hits.
	He felt expansive, filled with love for his fellow man, wanting
nothing more than to share his good fortune with the world. Jonny
laughed. It was the drugs talking to him, he knew. He did not want to
share this with anybody. Stumbling to his feet (the atropine causing
his muscles to fire erratically) he pulled down more crates, taking a
quick inventory of his stash.
	Thefirst three containers were empty, but the fourth held
another bonanza: twelve more boxes of Mad Love. He grabbed for
more crates, caught the glint of something shining dully on the wall.
Gilt wood. He pulled the boxes away, could see the carved frame.
Then-- Blue Boy. The original.
	He ran his fingers over the old lizard skin paint, from the
plumed hat to the goldleaf frame. There was a catch at the edge. He
pushed it and the painting swung away from the wall with a faint
click. Behind it were shelves piled high with books and a bulging
manila folder. Jonny picked up the foxed folder, took it back to the
Camera Obscura and dumped the contents on the dais. It was several
seconds before Jonny understood exactly what he was looking at. He
fingered a yellowed Social Security card, shiny with wear. Then in
the pale Los Angeles nightscape, he turned the pages, rapt, reading a
collage version of the life of Soren Conover.
	A driver's license from Texas, two thousand and ten. Discharge
papers from the United States Army, nineteen fifty-seven. Passports:
British, Belgian, Egyptian, all under different names. Ancient news
clippings concerning drug wars in Central America and the collapse
of the government's genetic warfare programs. Photos on some of the
older documents showed a handsome oval-faced man in his thirties,
with intelligent eyes and a nose that had been broken more than
once. Jonny double-checked any dated documents he came across,
trying to find the oldest. From what he had seen so far, he was
calculating Conover's age at around one hundred and fifty, possibly
one hundred and sixty years.
	There were photostats of OSS documents, brittle with age.
Conover had apparently been involved with an operation to
assassinate the Russian head-of-state in the early nineteen-fifties.
The American president had canceled the operation and pensioned
Conover off. There was nothing from the nineteen-sixties or
seventies, but from the eighties, there were several letters on CIA
stationery bearing Conover's signature, along with a report marked
"Confidential." The report carried no date, but detailed the workings
of a Honduran-based CIA drug operation helping to finance right-
wing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces in Central
America. There was a black and white photo of men in jungle
fatigues standing before mortar tubes and M-60 machine guns. One
tall man held a cigarette in a short black holder. The hand-lettered
date on the back of the photo read: 1988. It occurred to Jonny that if
these documents were genuine, then Conover had been in the drug
business for close to one hundred years.
	That's a long time to do one thing, Jonny thought. He continued
through the papers as the silent city light played over them, and
wondered at the process of the smuggler's life. How he had parlayed
those CIA drug contacts into his own private business. Jonny found
the gin bottle by the boxes of Mad Love, took a drink and laughed.
He and Conover had something in common, he now knew. Conover
was a smuggler lord now, but once he had been like Jonny, an agent
gone native.
	"Rogue elephant" they called it, right?
	L.A. glimmered on the dais, just out of reach.
	The atropine was still buzzing inside Jonny's skull. He picked
up handfuls of Mad Love packets and stuffed them into his pockets,
then returned to the dais, gathered up the contents of the folder and
put them back behind the painting. He restacked the Zero-G crates
and, just before leaving the room, he spun the wheel that adjusted
the Camera Obscura's lenses. The city blurred by on the dais, streaks
of light like a tracer rounds. The picture came to rest on the Japanese
wing of the mansion. A snow leopard was strolling gracefully down
the driveway.
	Conover will understand, Jonny thought, popping another
atropine cap.
	He went out through the kitchen. The African staff had a music
chip going full blast, some Brazilian capoeira band. A coltish young
woman who had been dancing as she stacked Wedgewood in a
cabinet, stopped to stare at him. Jonny crossed quickly to the door,
avoiding the Africans' eyes. Copper pots flashed bronze suns onto the
wall above his head.
	"Dad'll kill me if I don't get the trash out," he said to their
unmoving faces.
	He found Ricos alone in the garage, the workings of a robot
rottweiler strewn across a wooden workbench. Rather than injure the
man, Jonny wrapped an arm around Ricos' neck and jammed a
knuckle into his carotid artery, cutting off the flow of blood to his
brain. When he was out, Jonny went through his pockets and found
the silicon identification card. He got into Conover's car, gunned the
engine and backed out.
	He took the Cadillac at a leisurely pace down the drive, eyes
ahead, ignoring the men among the madrones. At the foot of the
drive, Jonny nervously punched the ten-digit code he had memorized
weeks before into the dashboard key pad. He was surprised and
relieved when he saw sections of the hologram disappear. When the
road was clear, he turned off the roof lights and drove slowly down
the hill.

	The night was clear and hot.
	He steered the Cadillac down the winding road, following a
series of rolling brown-outs through the suburbs, cracked solar
panels, Astroturf on the lawns, a deserted shopping mall that once
had served as a holding area during the Muslim Relocation programs
at the beginning of the century. The razorwire was still in place atop
double layers of hurricane fencing, a grim reminder of the war that
had never quite gotten off the ground.
	Jonny popped another atropine cap and rode the high all the
way into Hollywood, confident that if called upon, he could count
each strand of muscle tissue in his body. He left the car behind a
Baby Face plastic surgery boutique on Sunset and made his way in
and out of the stalled traffic to Carnaby's Pit, taking a detour through
the weekend mercado. The smell of cook smoke and sweat greeted
him, scratchy Salsa disc recordings, all the familiar sensations. The
crowd was thick with Committee boys. Jonny kept his head down
while old women tugged at his sleeves and children ran after him
with broken electronic gear, an artificial heart of chipped milky
white plastic, ancient floppy disk drives. Jonny saw no Link
documentary makers and he took this to be a good omen, but he kept
mistaking women in the crowd for Ice and Sumi. There were a lot of
lepers in the mercado. He spotted them easily-- they were the ones
wearing gloves or scarves or long sleeved shirts of radio-sensitive
material, drawing eyes from their lesions to the random Link videos
bleeding across their clothing.
	There were more lepers in the Pit's game parlor, frying in their
disguises. The air conditioning was down, leaving the air sauna-hot
and moist. Jonny felt as if he had stepped into an oven. The scarves
and gloves the lepers wore could almost be taken for some new
fashion, Jonny thought. Under other circumstances, they might have
been. A blonde woman plugged into Fun In Zero G wore a facial veil
and a long chador-like garment patterned with dozens of colorful
corporate logos, but the billowing material could not hide the
mottling along her hands.
	All that atropine had left Jonny with a crushing thirst. He
pushed his way to the bar and ordered a Corona. Porn jumped and
jittered on the video screen, colors slightly out of register ("What
does that look like through skull-plugs?" he wondered). Taking Tiger
Mountain was not playing. The music was a computer generated
recording in the style of numerous Japanese bubble gum bands. The
club was only half-filled and the crowd seemed edgy, voices louder
than usual. Random came back with his perpetual half-smile and set
down Jonny's Corona. "Haven't seen you for a while," the bartender
said. "You're looking exceptionally handsome and vital these days."
	"Thanks," replied Jonny. "Took me a little out of town vacation.
Dude ranch in the hills. Had an oil change, lube-job, the works."
	The bartender nodded. "Vacation, huh? And you came back?
You must be a glutton for punishment." Random, too, was wearing a
scarf, folded cravat-fashion in the folds of his sweat-stained white
shirt, hiding something. He polished a glass absently on the front of
his spotted apron.
	"Crowd's looking a little abbreviated tonight," said Jonny.
	Random nodded. "Fucking A, man. You can thank the
Committee for that. They just passed an ordinance cutting the
number of people we can have in here in half. Supposed to get a
handle on the leprosy."
	"While keeping things convenient for themselves," said Jonny.
"If it's illegal to get together, then the Committee can raid any gang
councils they get wind of."
	"Exactamente," the bartender said. He set down the glass he
had been rubbing. Through some method Jonny could never quite
understand, the bartender could polish glasses all night, and they
never seemed to get any cleaner. "You hear that bit of nastiness just
came over the Link? Seems that some person or persons unknown
set off a small nuke a few kilometers above Damascus."
	"Jesus," said Jonny, "was it us?"
	"Nah. Very high burst. Didn't cause any property damage, but
the EMP fucked up communications, computers, etcetera for a few
hours. Seems from the device's trajectory that it came from beyond
Earth orbit."
	"What, they think the Alpha Rats are dropping bombs on
people?" Jonny asked. He took a long drink of the Corona.
	Random shrugged, leaned his elbows on the bar. "Buddha said
'Life is suffering.' "
	"Then this must be life," said Jonny. He held up the empty
Corona bottle and Random bought him another. When the bartender
set it down, Jonny said: "What do you hear about the Croakers?"
	The bartender shook his head. Jonny could almost hear the
gears shifting. Business mode. "Don't know if I've had the pleasure,"
said Random.
	Jonny palmed a packet containing a half-dozen hits of Mad
Love and passed it to the bartender. When Random realized what he
was holding, he glanced at Jonny, registering genuine surprise. Jonny
was delighted; he had imagined the bartender incapable of any
emotions beyond a certain rueful irony.
	"If you had nicer legs, I'd marry you right now," Random said,
tucking the packet away under the bar. "You're aware that I could
open my own place if I had a mind to sell what you've just given
me."
	"If you had a mind to sell it."
	"If I had a mind." Random leaned closer, running a soiled gray
towel across the old dashboards that formed the bartop. His breath
smelled of old tobacco. "Word is, Zamora's cut their balls off. They're
gone, man. Closed up shop. Adios. All kinds of crazy talk about them.
Like they're trying to get arms from those New Palestine guys or
trying to steal a shuttle to go to the moon. Maybe they're the ones
that nuked Damascus." Random laughed, all air. "Like I said, crazy
talk."
	"That's it?" asked Jonny.
	"Hell no. That's the crazy talk. People with a few synapses left
say they're hold up somewhere up the coast, past Topanga Beach.
The Committee's coming down hard on all the gangs."
	"So I've heard," Jonny said, draining half of his beer. He glanced
at the tense faces around the bar. "Anger, greed and folly."
"Perhaps you've hit on it. Perhaps the Committee's nothing more than
an instrument of karma."
	"More like a stairway to the stars. If you're an ambitious prick."
	"Que es?" said the bartender, "You think the Colonel wants to
addressed as 'Mister President'?"
	Jonny shrugged. "He wouldn't be the first one."
	"What's the old joke? 'Don't vote. It only encourages them.' "
Random shrugged. "Maybe it's not that funny. Anyway," he
continued, "if I were you, I'd consider taking my act on the road.
Between the heat and the lepers, Last Ass ain't no place to be right
now." The bartender moved down the bar to serve a group of well-
dressed movie producers and their dates. They were drunk and tan
and radiated the slightly forced humor of store-bought youth, hard,
sleek bodies surgically sculpted into something as functional and
anonymous as next year's jets.
	"Jesus Christ," Jonny said. "It makes you crazy."
	Later, when he was working on his third Corona, Random
stopped in front of him. "You think about what I said?"
	"About leaving?" Jonny asked. "No way. I'm a business man. Got
deals to make. Grande deals. Enorme deals."
	"In that case," said the bartender, "I think somebody over there
wants to talk to you."
	Jonny turned in his seat and saw Nimble Virtue, the slunk
merchant, waving to him from a corner table. "Thanks," he said to the
bartender.
	"It's your movie, man," said Random. "Be careful."
	Jonny picked his way through the crowd to the corner table
where Nimble Virtue sat by herself. She was dressed in a loose-
fitting kimono patterned with water lilies and delicate vines done in
gold and turquoise. Dropping into a seat across from the smuggler
lord, Jonny had a perfect view of a couple of her men, two tables
away, drinking iced vodka with some of the local Yakuza. Jonny
smiled and waved to them. One of the Yakuza men laughed and made
a made a circular motion with his finger to indicate madness.
	"Dear Jonny-san," began Nimble Virtue, "First, allow me to
apologize for the uncomfortable circumstances under which we last
met. If I had any inkling as to Colonel Zamora's true intentions, I can
assure you that he would never have gained a single syllable of
information from myself or any of my people."
	Nimble Virtue was small, a skeletal, middle-aged woman with a
flat nose and pale skin through which you could see the blue veins
around her skull. The way Jonny heard it, she had been born into
prostitution on one of the circumlunar sandakans that had serviced
the mining trade from the moon; it was not until the Alpha Rat's
invasion had destroyed the lunar mining business that she ever set
foot on Earth. Once there, she became the mistress of a powerful
Yakuza oyabun and thereby escaped the sandakan.
	Having spent much of her life in zero-G or reduced-G
environments, on Earth Nimble Virtue was forced at all times to wear
a titanium alloy exoskeleton. This helped her move about, and a
ribbed girdle-like mechanism worked her diaphragm, her chest
cavity having grown too small for her lungs to breathe the thick air
of Earth's surface. It was also rumored that she never went
anywhere without a velvet lined case bearing the fetuses of her two
still-born sons.
	"You're a liar," Jonny said. "You'd sell your grandmother for
sausage if you thought you could hide the wrinkles. The only thing I
don't understand is why nobody's ever put a bullet through your
brainpan."
	Nimble Virtue covered her mouth with pale metal-wrapped
fingers, and giggled. "Some have tried, Jonny-san, but, as you can see,
none have succeeded. Many people find it more pleasurable to work
with me rather than against me. Could you not?" Nimble Virtue lifted
an empty wine glass and waved it at the table where her men sat.
One of them got up and went to the bar. "Have a drink. They keep Tej
here for me. Have you ever tried it? It's an Ethiopian honey wine.
Wonderful."
	"I don't drink with people who sell my ass out from under me,"
said Jonny. "But since you got me over here, you can at least tell me
why you turned me to Zamora."
	Nimble Virtue ran her index finger around the rim of her glass
and licked off the remains of the wine. In the second of silence
between the pre-recorded songs, Jonny could hear the insect
humming of her exoskeleton. "I gave you to him as a gesture of
goodwill. I thought the Colonel and I had a deal, but things have not
worked out for us." She gazed after her man at the bar. "A bit of free
advice, Jonny. Never develop a sweet tooth. It is much too expensive
a vice in a city like this."
	"What's this goodwill business you're talking about?" asked
Jonny.
	"I thought you would be the expert in that."
	"Don't be cute," said Jonny. "I could snap that skinny neck of
yours before any of your boys even draws his gun."
	Nimble Virtue smiled at him. "And then we would both be
gone, and wouldn't that be a waste? No, much better that you should
hear me out," she said. "I have a business proposition for you. It's
very simple: I want you to forget the Colonel. Come and work for
me."
	Jonny leaned back on his chair. "What could I give you that you
can't buy already?"
	"I know that Zamora had you picked up because he wanted
information about Conover. I also know that the Colonel is planning a
massive raid against all the smuggler lords. It only stands to reason
that you two have made a deal. That's why he let you go. Correct,
Jonny-san?" She paused and took several deep, ragged breaths.
Talking, it appeared, put her out of synch with her breathing
apparatus. "You are a dealer and can move freely among the lords.
You are gathering information about us for the Colonel: our strength
and our movements. I, too, wish to bid for your services. Work for
me. All I need is the date and time of the raids. For that information,
I will provide you with ample protection, as well as a permanent
place in my organization when we cut the Colonel down."
	"I don't know anything more about the raids than you do," said
Jonny. "And I'm not working for Zamora, and if I was, I sure wouldn't
give you any information."
	One of Nimble Virtue's men arrived, carrying a heavy green
bottle from which he poured a clear gold liquid. The man set down a
second glass and poured Tej for Jonny before heading back to the
other table.
	"Thank you, my dear," Nimble Virtue called after the man.
	She took a sip of the syrupy liquid and looked at Jonny. "Really,
Jonny-san, these threats and the names you call me mean nothing,
but do not insult my intelligence. I know that you have spent these
last weeks at Conover's mansion in the hills. Gathering evidence, yes?
I know all about Conover's hologram dome, and I know in my bones
that you are working for Colonel Zamora." She paused again to catch
her breath. "In truth, I admire the subtle way you set up the
Croakers for the Colonel. Groucho is not a stupid man. You are to be
congratulated for taking him so thoroughly."
	"Keep talking. You're digging your own grave, asshole," said
Jonny.
	Nimble Virtue crossed her hands on her lap and gave him an
indulgent, matronly look. "Do you know the expression 'Little Tiger',
Jonny-san?"
	"I've heard it."
	"You are the Little Tiger," she said. "You make loud roars, but
you have little strength and no cunning. I like you because you make
me laugh. But circumstances force me to limit the amount of time I
can expend on any one enterprise."
	"Don't let me keep you," said Jonny.
	She waited a moment. "Then you are committed to the
Colonel?"
	"I'll deal with Zamora in my own way," he said. "I don't work
for him and I won't work for you." Jonny started to get up, but
Nimble Virtue laid a hand lightly on his arm.
	"I would think twice about leaving here if I were you," said the
smuggler lord. "After betraying the Croakers, you have very few
friends left in L.A. I could make it ever so much hotter for you--"
	Jonny swept his arm across the table, knocking glasses, bottles
and wine to the floor. "You sell me like your goddam slunk and then
you want to make a deal with me? Fuck you, old lady." Nimble Virtue
made a fluttering gesture with her hand. Jonny turned and found
three of her men pointing Russian CO2 pistols at him, assassin
models, chambered for explosive shells. The men were young and
handsome, wearing tight black jeans and sleeveless t-shirts with
coiled dragons on the front. They were cool and expressionless,
mechanical in their movements and stance. But they were not ninja.
If they were, Jonny knew, he would be dead by now.
	Nimble Virtue got to her feet and waved for her men to put
their guns away. As they did so, she turned and gave Jonny a small
bow. Her face was flushed and she was breathing heavily. "I will be
going now. I wish you luck, and time to grow wise, Jonny-san. It
would be best if you stayed out of my way," she said.
	He watched them as they left. Taking Tiger Mountain appeared
on the stage to indifferent applause. As Saint Peter kicked them into
their first number, Jonny pushed his way out the heavy fire door at
the rear of the Pit.

	If he pressed his back against the wall of the alley, Jonny could
get a pretty good look at Sunset Boulevard and the entrance to
Carnaby's Pit. The repair job on the front of the bar had been a
sloppy one. Smears of resin and cheap construction foam covered the
bullet holes in the Pit's facade. The charm was definitely wearing off
the place, he decided. Hot wind brought the smell of frijoles and
burning carnitas down the alley from the mercado.
	A scrape. A corpse's whisper: "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst
make me clean."
	Jonny started to move. Metal, cold and sharp, bit into his neck.
"Now, now," said Easy Money. "Long time no see, Jonny, old pal, old
buddy." Easy and spun Jonny around. Satyr horns, tattooed knuckles
around the grip of a knife. "You know what I hear? I hear you want
to do me."
	Other feet shuffled up behind them; other hands gripped
Jonny's arms. Easy released him and lowered the knife. "Bring the car
around," he said. Footsteps moved off. Then to the others: "This guy
wants to fuck me. But he's so simple you gotta love him, you know?"
Jonny leaned back, supported by the grasping hands, and snapped
the steel toe of his boot up into Easy's groin.
	Later, after they beat him and he was laid-out on the floor of
the car, their feet on his back and a canvas hood over his head, he
comforted himself with the image of Easy Money rolling up into a
fetal position on the pavement in the filthy alley.




--========================_17427544==_--