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 cloisonne 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
