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?'
