What does that get you?'
'A chance,' Conover said. 'One last chance for something new. You can't imagine what it feels like living on pure reflex, half-awake, but still functioning. And then something jars you conscious and you realize that another five years have passed but it doesn't mean anything because the next five will be exactly the same as the ones that preceded it.'
Jonny nodded. 'So basically you're fucking everybody over because you're bored.'
The smuggler lord grinned. 'Well, if you choose to look at it that way-'
'I do,' Jonny said.
'I'm sorry to hear that.' Conover stepped away from the videos. 'Still, there's not much to be done about it.'
'Sure there is,' Jonny said, leaping the handrail to the sunken observatory floor. 'Kill me now.'
'Don't be an ass.'
Jonny went to the slowly-revolving Virgin Mary, took hold of something by her feet, and came away with a meter-long piece of heavy chrome pipe. He held it before him, testing the balance in his hands, then went to Conover. 'Come on, fucker. Kill me.'
The smuggler lord held the Futukoro before him, but did not point it at Jonny. 'You're being an idiot.'
Jonny swung the pipe like a baseball bat, circling the lord on the floor of the dim chamber. 'Shoot me. Shoot me or I'll cave you're goddamn head in.'
'I might just have to do it, Jonny.'
'Go ahead.' He swung the pipe wide, letting the smuggler lord jump out of the way.
'Stop this right now,' Conover said. Jonny swung again, forcing the lord back on his heels.
'I knew it!' Jonny yelled. 'I'm not worth squat to you dead, am I? They don't want me if I'm dead. All that stuff about giving me a chance to stay alive was just another line. If I'm dead, you haven't got anything to trade for your new skin, have you?' He swung the pipe at the lord's head.
'You're acting like a child-'
'Then shoot me!'
'No!'
This time Jonny connected, snapping his wrists down, driving the end of the pipe into Conover's shoulder. The smuggler lord gasped and dropped to his knees. Jonny threw the pipe, rolled under the circular railing and headed for the door. Futukoro shots hissed past his ear, bringing mirrors and bits of pulverized marble down on his head. He darted to the left, more shots following him, cutting off his way to the door.
Conover was on his feet, heaving himself over the railing. The smuggler lord kept sweeping the room with the Futukoro as he pressed his back to each of the observatory's doors, grinding them closed over a thin layer of sand.
'Where are you going to go, Jonny?' Conover yelled. 'You're friends are gone. It can be a bad place out there when you're all alone.'
Jonny kept to the floor behind a gutted exhibit case, barely breathing. He watched the smuggler lord walk back to the sunken center of the chamber, gun in his hand. 'Come on out, son. This is insane,' Conover said. 'We're both going to lose this way.' Jonny cut his fingers picking up a wedge of glass from the wrecked case.
Moving into a crouch, he waited for the smuggler lord to get into just the right position, and threw the glass edge-first across the room, scrambling for the door at the same time.
He knew it was a lost cause within three steps. The pounding of his heavy boots gave him away. Conover turned away for a fraction of a second when the glass hit, but snapped his gun back the instant Jonny began his run. Jonny heard the smuggler lord's gun go off twice.
'Consider that… I don't have to kill you, son. A shot through each kneecap will keep you still until the ship arrives.'
Jonny was lying in the shadows, in the dirt, hands crabbed at the edges of worn floor tiles. One side of his face was hot and wet where shrapnel, fragmented marble or wood from the door, had slashed his cheek. His mind was a blank, watching Conover move about the center of the chamber, keeping to the light. For a moment, when consciousness imposed itself upon him, he felt his will drain away. He did not understand why he was running so hard from death when it was what he had been looking for all along. He pressed his back against the wall.
Clinging is not acceptable, he reminded himself. Clinging to anything, including life (or death), was the sign of a weak mind. One of the floor tiles came loose in his hand.
Anger; greed; folly. Hearing the words in his mind, he almost laughed. They had been the cornerstones of his existence, as had illusion. Before he had left her, Jonny's roshi had told him to picture himself as a man crossing a river, moving from one slippery rock to the next, knowing that each step could send him plunging into the rapids.
Moving from illusion to illusion he assumed he had found himself. Now he was not so sure. Perhaps, he thought, he had just found more illusions.
Conover was moving in slow circles before the video screens.
Jonny froze where he was, watched the smuggler lord scanning the room. When Conover's gaze moved over and beyond him, Jonny sat up, throwing the floor tile high, watching it spin and shatter the parabolic mirror at the top of the chamber. The lord covered his head as the glass came down on him, firing wildly, tearing up the ceiling and the edges of the room. The muzzle flash from the Futukoro lit him like a broken strobe as the video moonscapes went dark at his back. When Conover stopped shooting, the room was quiet and very dark. Belly to the floor, Jonny could feel the underground gears winding down. He blinked once. Shapes became solid in the gloom.
Then he was up, his body moving by itself, one foot coming down on the circular rail, the other swinging over, whole body hanging for an instant in mid-air, unprotected meat, house of illusions, hate and fear. Conover was below, slow-motion turning, Jonny's new exteroceptor's showing the man as a brilliant neon scarecrow with holes in his face.
And then he hit, driving Conover hard into the floor. Jonny hauled him up, holding the wrist that held the gun, so close to the man that when his breath hesitated for a moment, Jonny felt the absence of it on his face.
Something happened then.
Sand whispered down through the roof and the moon emerged from a bank of clouds. Conover looked up. Bathed in the milky light, his face went slack, hung on his cheeks like melting putty. The bird-thin arms fell to his sides, and when the smuggler lord looked at him, for the first time, Jonny glimpsed the true face of the man.
It had cost him his eyes to see it. Groucho had an inkling of it, but had died without a look; Ice and Sumi had been spared it; no junkie or leper would have suspected it. Zamora had recognized its essence immediately, was drawn to it, but had probably never witnessed the thing itself. Only Jonny, with second-hand eyes stolen from some rich man's gaudy toy, would ever know the smuggler lord's true face.
Blank.
Without expression.
A Halloween spook; a candy skull, dead as the hills when the brush fires claimed them, dead as the sailor in the boiler room of a sunken ship, skull fused to the melted plating of her hull.
There was nothing else he could do. He moved the hand with the gun under Conover's chin. The smuggler lord never took his hand from the weapon, never tried to struggle. Sand fell on their shoulders. When Jonny looked into the other man's eyes and saw his own, he understood their common desire.
Jonny decided to make him a gift of it. And pulled the trigger.
It had not occurred to Jonny that he was not breathing. The kick of the gun triggered a spasm in his lungs and he sucked in a long breath, tasting ozone and the fear-smell of his own sweat.
Conover's body went down lightly, seemingly without weight, as if, in those last few seconds of life, the smuggler lord had used up everything he was.
Jonny was shaking all over, covered in blood and filth. He crawled under the railing and scraped open the doors. Stepping outside, he stood for some minutes in the falling sand, rubbing it into his face and arms, letting it rasp away the stink of death and illusions.
Later, as he was wandering among the circular shrines in the courtyard of the observatory, Jonny saw something skimming low and fast over the tops of the hills. At first he thought it might be a hovercar flying without its running lights, but as the craft got closer he could tell that it was much too big for that. From what Jonny could
