The woman shrugged. 'Getting ready to die right,' she said.
'Heard about Ice. Sorry, man. I gotta tell you, though, I was kinda jealous when she moved in with you and Sumi. I really went for her.'
'You got good taste, Vyctor.'
'You know it. Groucho, I'll see you outside.' She went out then, her shadow curving over the small drifts of sand that were collecting around the fallen doors.
Jonny left the mirror shades on the bar and followed Groucho out of the club. In the game parlor, he said to the anarchist: 'So what are you, anyway? You really an anarquista or just some loco with a bodhisattva complex?'
They continued out under the awning, through the falling sand to the van parked across the street. Finally, Groucho grinned. 'Tell you the truth,' he said, 'I spend most of my time feeling like everybody's mother.' Man Ray nodded as Jonny came over. The Funky Guru's new van was as big as his old one, with the same ugly-beautiful lines. Something like a mechanical claw protruded from one side, hydraulic digits tense against the body of the vehicle. Groucho pointed to Jonny's motorcycle. 'You have fuel?' Jonny nodded, walked over to the bike and climbed aboard. 'You take care, Jonny,' called Vyctor. Jonny waved and kicked the bike awake. Then he and the van moved off in opposite directions.
From the desert, the wind was picking up, hard-blown grit biting into the backs of his hands, grinding between his teeth. The heat of the night and the tequila came down hard on him. Jonny felt himself moving through a dream-time, no longer trusting or quite believing in anything he saw. Heading north out of Hollywood, he watched bands of junkies roaming the streets eating piles of sugar candy skulls they had stolen from merchants below. Monks hiding their tumors behind things like fencing masks took the confessions of lepers squatting in Griffith Park while nearby, Neo-Mayanists cut the beating hearts out of captured Committee boys, offering them up to gods whose names they had forgotten, begging for forgiveness and an end to the plague. Writers had been busy with their canisters of compressed acid, turning the walls outside the park into a fair representation of the skull walls at Chichen Itza. They had left messages behind, too.
BOMB TOKYO NOW
BOMB NEW YORK NOW
BOMB EVERYTHING
Jonny swerved to avoid some animal in the road and almost succeeded in flipping the bike before he realized that there was nothing there. He kept flashing on recordings of Ice's face: the moment she saw his cat eyes, when she kissed him in the Forest, as she lay dying. He had not yet accepted that she could really be dead and he knew that was good. Barely functional as he was now, Jonny understood that some animal survival mechanism in his brain had cut in during the course of the last few hours, pumping him full of specific neural inhibitors, preventing him from accepting the true nature of her loss. He knew it was there, though. The loss. He imagined that he could feel it, like a sac of poison lodged at the back of his skull, ready to burst when all this was over.
He throttled up on the bike and skidded around a section of asphalt that was jutting at an angle from the narrow roadbed. The air compressors attached to the BMW's exhaust obliterated all sound but their own, while the thermographic display in Jonny's exteroceptors glazed the park into a series of slick surfaces like the ones he had seen in a Dali landscape.
Nearing the top of the hill, Jonny began to consider the notion of payback. It seemed to him that if he was to take the responsibility he had been avoiding all this time, others ought to do the same.
There was blame here to be laid at somebody's feet. But whose? Ice was dead, and Skid and Raquin before her. Soon Sumi would be gone, too. Because of his failure to salvage her cure? Because Easy Money had stolen Conover's virus? Or was it because he had left Sumi alone for so long while running from Zamora?
Yes, to all those questions. But was that enough? Jonny sensed it went deeper than any of that, but the chain of responsibility and blame, when he tried to trace it back to its source, seemed endless, extending beyond any of their lifetimes.
'How many will die tonight?' he wondered.
'How many have died already?'
Jonny tried to count up the bodies, the friends and acquaintances that had snuffed it or disappeared over the years. He could not remember them all. Again the chain- one face always leading to another. For a few, he could remember no name just the movement of a hand, the tilt of a head or a panther tattooed shoulder.
Jonny thought of Ice, in many ways just another one-percenter, living the same foolish life as any of them, dying the same senseless death, and all the while being unaware that it had all been laid for her in advance. Like a ship's course computed, entered and executed, she had lived according to the strange process that seemed to take them all in the end, Random, Skid and the rest. They were the dead wandering the streets on Dia de los Muertos. Drifting their whole lives through the city, living by rules they never really understood.
The cops had been part of it. The Committee. And yeah, Jonny thought, the dealers, too. He had been a part of it as much as anyone, supplying the medicine and the dope that kept the people docile.
Groucho's city of bones became more real, more palpable each time he considered it.
Lights on the hill above startled him. Jonny swung the BMW onto the driveway leading to Conover's mansion, wondering why the hologram dome was down. Sand whispered through the trees. He left the bike in the drive and made his way to the house through the bamboo grove, hoping that the billowing sand was dense enough to confound the smuggler lord's surveillance equipment.
The front door of the Japanese wing was open. Sprawled facedown in the walk-way was one of the smuggler lord's medical techs, a hole from what looked like a Futukoro shell burned in the man's back. Inside the house there were more bodies, techs and security staff, some lying in groups, others meters away where they had been gunned down trying to run. In the art-glutted dining room in Victorian wing, soft Elizabethan music was coming from the hidden speakers; the sound chip on the stereo read: William Williams: Sonata in Imitation of Birds. He found the African staff dead in the kitchen and the service corridors.
Working his way back through the house by feel, Jonny located the elevator he had used the day they had given him his new eyes.
Not certain of exactly where he was going, he punched in the code for the lowest level. He pulled the Derringer from his pocket, turned it over in his hand once, and put it away. It would not do him a hell of a lot of good against a Futukoro.
In the clinic area were more dead techs. The hall was littered with overturned drug carts, Pyrex culture dishes and leaking drug vials. Jonny saw Yukiko's body, recognized a couple of the Russians that had assisted on his eye surgery. A security man lay dead on his back, most of one shoulder and his lower jaw had been shot away. He was holding a small cardboard box. Scattered around the guard's head like a plastic nimbus were dozens of interferon inhalers similar to the one Easy had been using. Jonny knelt by the guard's body and stole his Futukoro. The man had not even gotten it out of the holster.
It did not take Jonny long to find Sumi's room.
At a bend in the garbage-strewn corridor was a door marked with diamond-shaped warning signs: orange biohazard marker, color-coded symbols for flammable liquids and cryoprotectants.
The door was locked and when he could not kick it open, he shot the lock off. Inside, he passed through a short retrofit airlock, ignoring neat piles of sterile paper gowns and caps, to a dust-free clean room beyond. Inside, the sterile chamber echoed with the steady whining of malfunctioning life-support units and the gurgling of protein vats. Near the circular vats, four male bodies were laid-out on what looked like stainless steel autopsy tables. From the sour smell of the place, Jonny guessed that it had been at least twenty-four hours since the life-support had shut down.
Looking into the protein vats, Jonny found what at first he took to be several dead eels, drifting limply in the swirling solution like individual strands of sea weed. The animal's had been dissected bilaterally, exposing the entire length of each spinal column. When he saw the delicate Toshiba micro-manipulators poised over each open back, Jonny realized that the animals were lampreys. He remembered Conover telling him that the nerve tissue his techs had spliced into Jonny's injured shoulder had come been grown in a specially bred variety of the animal. Seeing them now, Jonny was glad the poor fuckers were dead.
He touched one of the manipulators, running his fingers along the rows of microscopic lasers that sliced intact tissue from the lampreys' backs. A bundle of mil-thin wires ran from the base of each manipulator and was secured to node points along the exposed spines. He touched one of the bundles. A tail twitched. Jawless mouth
