Metrophage

Jonny how, in the midst of what seemed to him to be absolute bug-fuck madness, Conover could calmly carry on with business as usual. Earlier that evening he had mentioned this to Conover and the smuggler lord had explained that it had mostly to do with his age. 'Nothing much surprises me anymore. Or frightens me, for that matter,' he had said. 'It's all re-runs now. Has been for years.'

'Now,' Conover said, 'Nineteen ninety six was the year of reckoning. How good is your history, Jonny?'

''Bout as good as my math,' he said between sips of hot soybean soup.

'How about you, my dear?' Conover said to Sumi.

'Ninety six? That's the year of the Saudi revolution. When the oil ran out, right?'

Conover, laughed and slapped the tabletop. 'An educated young woman, how delightful,' said the smuggler lord. 'Yes, indeed, in ninety six the oil ran out. For us. The west. Of course, it was still there- in the ground, but there was so little left that the New Palestine Federation wanted to freeze all exports. That's what brought down the House of Saudi. They opposed the embargo and down they came, like a house of cards.'

'That's it?' asked Jonny. Someone took away his empty soup bowl and set a plate before him. He sniffed. Pickled cabbage. 'That's what that whole stupid non-war was about? They wouldn't sell us their oil?'

'No, no, no,' Conover said. 'That was part of it, to be sure. But it goes much deeper than that, back years and years. If you read histories of that period, they'll tell you the shooting started when somebody blew-up the Malaga fusion reactor in southern Spain. The CIA claimed the Arabs took it out with a surface to surface missile from Tangier. For their part, the Arabs claimed that radical members of the Green Party or some other environmental group did it without knowing the damned thing was on-line.'

'Did they really blow up the reactor?' Sumi asked.

'Yes indeed. Wiped out a hundred square kilometers of prime Spanish real estate, too. But as to starting the war… It's like saying the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand started World War One. The event is true, the ultimate outcome is accurate, but the event becomes meaningless when you remove it from its context.'

'Who's Archbishop Ferdinand?' asked Jonny.

I' t was Islam itself we had to kill,' said Conover. Jonny heard the smuggler lord sipping tea. He picked at his pickled cabbage, waiting for Conover to continue. Even drunk, the man was interesting.

'This goes back to the nineteen seventies and the early oil embargoes. When the Arabs first let the world know they were aware of their own power. You have to understand, that world communication was still at a very primitive stage. There was no World Link, no skull-plugs. Your average westerner knew nothing of the middle east. Muslims scared the hell out of middle America. All most people knew of Islam came from the twentieth-century equivalents of the World Link. Videos of hostage taking, flag burnings, young men driving trucks full of explosives into the sides of buildings. Utterly alien images. How were we frighten these people? Intimidate them? We couldn't. There we were, the most powerful country on earth and we were powerless to stop a handful of radicals. 'Fanatics' we called them. 'Muslim extremists'.'

'Terrorists,' said Jonny.

'Oh yes. A very flexible word,' Conover replied. 'Generally used to describe anybody we don't like. But the Arabs- after all the years we had been shitting on these people, they were starting to shit back, and that was unacceptable. It was bad for morale and, more importantly, it was bad for business. We had to squash them. It was going to be Central America all over again. Boom!' Conover yelled. 'Flat as a pancake.'

Jonny set down his chop sticks and, not finding a napkin, licked his fingertips. He had picked-up the habit of keeping one or two fingers on his plate at all times. It was the only way he could find his food.

'You really think that old mess is heating up again?' he asked.

'I was speaking metaphorically,' Conover explained. 'I simply meant to draw an analogy between that old war and our current situation in L.A.'

'Who's the Arabs and who's the U.S.?' asked Jonny. 'I suppose we'll figure that out when he see who wins.'

'The war in ninety-six died down in a few days, right?' asked Sumi.

'Nobody really wanted to start World War Three. The war plans died, yes, but it was more like a few years,' said Conover. 'Don't forget that's where our economy went, right down the black holes of all those oil fields we didn't own. The moment they signed the Reykjavik treaty, we were dead. All those booming war-time industries collapsed overnight. Then, when the Depression was at its worst, the Alpha Rats landed on the moon, cut off the mines and our lunar research labs and finished us off. We're probably the first country on record to ever go into receivership. The Japanese picked us up for a song. The smuggler lord was silent, as if remembering. Some people think it comes down to accumulated bad karma. My dear'- Conover said suddenly- 'are you all right?'

Jonny reached out and found Sumi's hand. It was hot and moist with sweat. 'I'm fine,' she said irritably, pulling from his grip. 'The food up here's too rich for me. I can't keep it down.'

'She's been running a fever on and off for a couple of days,' said Jonny. He touched her face. She was burning up.

'Don't do that,' she said.

Jonny heard Conover get up and move around to their side of the table. 'Please,' the smuggler lord said quietly. He was quiet for a moment. Jonny knew the lord was checking Sumi's eyes. Hepatitis was still common in the city, and the D strain was a killer.

'Why, didn't you tell me about the fever sooner?' Conover asked.

Jonny shrugged. 'We were out at that fish farm. It was wet. I thought maybe she got a cold. It just didn't seem important,' he said, and saying it, he knew he was lying. He and Sumi had both been afraid of the same thing when she became ill, and at moments of stress it was easy to fall back on old habits. A year before they had avoided talking openly about Ice's leaving and the daily knowledge of it had eaten them up. Now they could not discuss Sumi's illness, could not take the simplest measures to treat it because to treat it would be to acknowledge its presence, and that was impossible. Sumi could not be ill, not with what they both knew was loose in the city.

'I'm going to have my techs check you out, Sumi,' Conover said.

His heavy footsteps moved across the straw mat. A light door slid back.

'Please don't… Mister Conover?… Please… Jonny, make him stop. I don't… want to know…'

Jonny pulled her to him and she put her arms around his neck. She shook with fever and wept quietly. Jonny found himself supporting more and more of her weight. 'Hurry!' he yelled.

It was like waking up blind all over again. His mind was working, racing, in fact, like an overheated engine, but nothing was getting through. The information, the possibility that Sumi might be fatally ill was utterly unacceptable. Bad dreams, bad data.

'It's all right, babe,' he whispered. 'Everything's gonna be all right.'

Medical techs were coming down the hall, preceded by the smell of antiseptic. Something followed them. Jonny heard it brushing against the rice paper walls, something that floated forward steadily on an induction cushion. The techs pushed it up to sliding doors and left it there, humming quietly. He felt Sumi being gently lifted from him. Opening his arms, she slipped away, into a space occupied by smooth, reassuring voices, the smell of scrubbed skin and Betadine.

'Jonny?' He heard her as they set her on whatever they had brought with them. 'Don't let them take me, please. Jonny? They're wearing masks. I can't see their faces.' He sat there at the table as they took her away. 'Jonny? I'm scared. Jonny?' Footsteps. The buzzing of induction coils.

He cradled his head in his hands. 'Jesus-fucking-Christ.' He took deep breaths, pressed his fists to his temples. And hit himself.

And again. And again.

'Stop it.' Conover held Jonny's fists. 'You're not helping her with that. We have to wait for the lab results.'

'You know what it's going to say,' Jonny said.

'No, I don't,' said Conover. 'And neither do you, unless you've developed some special sense you haven't told me about.'

'It's the virus,' Jonny said. 'She's got the fucking leprosy.'

'This is a good med team. Russians,' said the smuggler lord. 'I'm moving them for a private clinic in Kyoto. Now they can earn their keep.'

'She's been all over the city,' Jonny said. 'It was her job. Watt Snatcher goes anywhere people need power.