The attorney general cocked its head, as though listening to distant voices.
The mentar took a moment before replying
All at once, Meewee remembered his recent flight over the Pacific.
But Meewee’s mentar failed again to respond, and Cabinet said
The cart rolled up to Meewee. He jumped in and clung to the handle-bars as the cart took him at an incautious speed back to the reception building.
Going to See Someone
The addy for the relationship counselor led him to the lower lobby of the Nestle Tower off Daley Plaza, but when Fred arrived, Mary was nowhere to be seen.
Fred went to the window wall overlooking the plaza. Daley Plaza, at Munilevel 000, was a concrete park sixteen square blocks in area that served as the floor to Daley Well, the deepest traffic well in the Midwest. It boasted unobstructed airspace 507 munilevels to the top of Nestle Tower and the blue skies beyond. It contained four pairs of spiral interchanges that served all major traffic arteries on all major munilevels. Thousands of vehicles climbed up and down the magic bean stalks every minute, like tornadoes of taillights, like twirling ropes of shiny beads, like a living sculpture three kilometers high.
By comparison, the twencen Picasso baboon sat like a rusted doorstop in the center of the plaza, like some kid’s discarded metal shop project, like the afterbirth of the Industrial Age. Fred couldn’t conjure up a baboon in its simple shapes. If anything, he saw the head of a dairy cow. Other people saw other things; that was probably why it was called art.
Fred picked out a figure on the main pedway connecting the Picasso to the Nestle. An evangeline — was it Mary? Fred confirmed her transponders in his visor, and while he was watching, the pedway came to an unexpected halt. Pedestrians were thrown off balance and were falling over each other. Another hairball?
Then everyone on the plaza stopped what they were doing and looked up into the chimney of the well. Fred pressed his cheek against the glass but couldn’t get the angle. He found Mary again, some meters away from the stalled pedway, limping to a park bench. “I see you. Hang on. I’m coming.”
But he was already through the pressure curtain and sprinting toward the baboon. The moment Fred left the building, he tasted panic in the air. It was intensified by an illegal subaural alarm that jarred his bones — a two- note dirge, like a silent foghorn that was felt as much as heard. A bee flew at his face, almost tripping him up, and screeched, “Flee! Flee! The Wreckers are here! Flee! Flee!” before racing away.
There was a terrific thud overhead, like a giant boxing glove hitting a brick wall, and Fred glanced up to see a cargo van careening out of a downward spiral. Fortunately, it was scooped up in a safety lane and chuted to a soft touchdown on the nearest munilevel. But its short fall was enough to spook the thousands of plaza pedestrians who began a stampede to the emergency portals. They filled the paths and forced Fred to cut across a stone fountain.
As he ran, he tagged the spirals overhead in his visor, which blossomed with travel advisories ten layers deep. “Mary, are you hurt?”
There were sounds of more collisions overhead, and cars were falling into safety lanes by the dozen.
“I saw you on a bench. Is it made from conplast?”
There were so many collisions, the safety lanes were overwhelmed, and cars, vans, and buses started to spill out and fall into the well.
“Crawl under it right now, Mary! Don’t hesitate! Do it now!”
By the time he reached her bench, vehicles were hitting the plaza with impact-absorbing thuds, like rotten fruit. Fred paused to catch his breath and did a snap assessment. The bench was, indeed, molded conplast, and nearly indestructible; Mary fit snugly under it. Options: carry her through the impact area or shelter here.
The question was answered a moment later by a big black limousine right on top of him. Fred dove behind the bench and the limo struck meters away and cartwheeled over them, slamming the bench with debris.
“Are you hit?” he asked. She wasn’t. Fred didn’t quite fit in the space under the park bench, so he crouched next to it and watched for falling cars. The city traffic midem had apparently regained control of the grid, and the sounds of collisions were tapering off.
Mary said, “It’s over.”
“Only the bombardment part. Next comes the pillaging. Look!” An army of freakish mechs began to invade the plaza. They surged out of storm drains and service vents, from side streets and arcades.
“They won’t bother us,” Fred said without knowing if that was true. “We need to shelter here.” He took off his Campaigner hat and pulled its floppy brim, stretching it to its limit. He covered both Mary under the bench and himself with the hat like a rain poncho.
“How’s the knee?”
“Bad.”
“I don’t have anything on me for the pain, sorry.”
“I’ll survive. By the way, love the hat.”
“It sorta grows on you.”
Mary and Fred watched the full-throttle wrecker attack from their court-side bench. Scavenging mechs came in a stunning variety. They were bizarre assemblages of cannibalized parts from other machines. There was the lawn scupper chassis with acetylene torch arms; the utility cart with grappling hooks and improvised armor; a gaggle of rat-sized, leaping metal snips.
The scavenger mechs swarmed over the fallen limo. Doors and side panels vanished. Three hapless limo passengers hung in their crash pods like bugs in blue amber as the car around them was cut, gouged, and ripped to pieces, and then carted away by tiny tractors.
“By the way,” Fred said, “in my own defense, I would like to point out that even though the sky is raining cars and buses, and I see slipper puppies going by with frickin’ flamethrowers attached to their heads, I’m not blaming this on the nits.”
“That’s encouraging to hear, Fred.”
A subtle change came over the chaos outside their shelter. A sturdy mech with flailing teflon spikes impaled a tractor and hauled it off, along with its spoils. Fred had already checked his pockets, and now he checked them again. He sorely missed the pocket billy. What a foolish gesture it had been to leave it behind.
