switch the directed frictionless soles on or off.
Louise bought them on the condition Gen waited until they got back to the hotel before she tried them out. She also got a duster bracelet. When Gen clamped the trinket round her wrist and waved it round, it sprayed out a fine powder which emitted a fiery sparkle as it fell to earth. Holding her arm up and pirouetting, a spiral of twinkling starlight spun around her.
Quinn sat on one of the benches along the banks of the Seine, opening his mind to the demented screeching rever-berating through the beyond. It had taken him two and a half hours to reach the Paris arcology since being struck by that inexplicable wave of emotional torment that had swept through the beyond.
The first thing—obviously!—was to get the fuck out of New York. It wouldn’t take the cops long to review the memories of sensors covering the concourse and identify him. He’d gone straight down to a platform and taken a vac-train to Washington. A short ride, not quite fifteen minutes. He’d kept within the ghost realm for the whole trip, apprehensive that the vac-train would be halted and returned to New York. But it arrived at Washington on time, and he switched to the first inter-continental ride available: Paris.
Even then, he’d remained invisible as it streaked along the bottom of the North Atlantic. Still anxious that another of those waves would surge up and expose him. If it had done during the journey under the ocean, he knew he’d be finished. He couldn’t believe God’s Brother would allow that to happen. But the first time was causing all sorts of doubts.
It wasn’t until he was out of the Paris terminus and walking through one of the old city’s parks that he had allowed himself to fully emerge. He clothed himself in an ordinary shirt and trousers, hating the way his white skin tingled in the bright sun shining through the colossal crystal dome. But it meant he was safe, there were no processors in the middle of the park to glitch at his appearance, nobody near enough to see that he’d appeared from nowhere rather than walked round the ancient tree. He stood there for a minute, scanning the nearby minds for any sign of alarm. Only then did he relax and make his way down to the river.
Parisians strolled along behind him as they had for centuries—lovers, artists, business executives, bureaucrats; none of them paying attention to the solitary downcast youth. Nor did any of them avail themselves to the space left on his bench. Some subliminal warning steered them along past, frowning slightly at the unaccountable chill.
Slowly, Quinn started to gather the strands together, faint images and hoarse wailing voices filling in the story. He saw clouds which surprised even him, an arcology-born. Rain cascaded down on huddled bodies, so thick it was almost solid. Terrifying blasts of lightning ripping through the darkness. The encircling forces, radiating their stern nonhuman determination, closing in.
Mortonridge was not a place where a possessed should be caught outside today; and two million of them had been. Something had struck at them, tearing away their protective covering of cloud. Some technological devilry. The signal for the Liberation to commence. A one-off; a unique act in response to a unique situation. Not some miracle wrought by the Light Bringer’s great rival.
Quinn lifted his head, and smiled a contemptuous smile. Such a shock was extremely unlikely to occur again. There was no unknown threat. He was perfectly safe. Night could still dawn.
He stood up, and turned slowly, examining his surroundings properly for the first time. The celebrated Napoleonic heart of the city was encompassed by a range of splendid white, silver, and gold towers. Their burnished surfaces hurt his eyes, as their grandeur hurt his sensibility. But somewhere among all this cleanliness and vitality, the waster kids would be grubbing through dank refuse, hurting each other and unwary civilians for no reason they understood. Finding them would be as easy here as it had been in New York. Just walk in the direction everyone else was coming from. His heartland, where his words would bring its denizens purpose.
He completed his turn. Right ahead of him the Eiffel Tower stood guard at the end of a broad immaculate park, with sightseers wandering round its base. Even in Edmonton, Quinn had heard of this structure. A proud symbol of Gallic forbearance through all the centuries of Govcentral’s pallid uniformity. Its very endurance reflecting the strengths and determination of the people who regarded it as their own. Precious to the world. And now, so terribly fragile with age.
Quinn started to chuckle greedily.
Andy Behoo fell in love. It was instantaneous.
Terminal babe. Taller than him by a good ten centimetres, with the most gorgeous cloak of hair. A face with soft features so delicate as to be way beyond anything cosmetic adapter packages could achieve—a natural beauty. She wore a white sleeveless T-shirt that showed off a hot figure without revealing anything, and a scarlet skirt that didn’t reach her knees. But it was the way she carried herself that clinched it for him. Perfectly composed, yet she still looked round the shop with child-like curiosity.
The rest of the staff were all giving her clandestine glances as the doorway scanners datavised their findings. Then the smaller girl entered behind her, and the scanners gave out an almost duplicate alert. How weird. They couldn’t possibly be a cop grab operation, too obvious. Besides, the manager was pretty regular when it came to slipping the shop’s bung to the district station.
Andy told the customer he was dealing with, “Look it over, and have a think about it, you won’t find a better deal in London,” then left them to scoot over to the girl before any of his so-called colleagues could reach her. If the floor manager had seen, he’d probably lose his job.
“Hi, I’m Andy. I’m your sellrat. Anything you want, it’s my job to push the more expensive model on you.” He grinned broadly.
“You’re my what?” Louise asked. Her expression was half puzzlement, half smile.
Her accent did strange things along Andy’s spine, making him shiver. The ultimate in class, and foreign- exotic, too. He scanned his enhanced retinas across her face, desperate to capture her image. Even if she walked out of his life now, she would never be entirely lost. Andy had certain male-orientated software packages that could superimpose her into sensenviron recordings. He felt shabby even as he recorded her.
“Sellrat. That’s what the public calls Customer Interactivity Officers round these parts.”
“Oh,” the smaller girl sighed dismissively. “He’s just a shopboy, Louise.”
Andy’s neural nanonics had to reinforce his smile. Why do they always come in pairs? And why always one obnoxious one? He clicked his fingers and pointed both index fingers at the smaller girl. “That’s me. Try not to be too disappointed, I really am here to help.”
“I’d like to buy some neural nanonics,” Louise said. “Is it very difficult?”
The request startled Andy. Her clothes alone must have cost more than twice his weekly pay, why didn’t she have a set already? Beautiful and enigmatic. He smiled up at her. “Not at all. What were you looking for?”
She sucked her lower lip. “I’m really not very sure. The best I can afford, I suppose.”
“We don’t have them on Norfolk,” Genevieve said. “That’s where we’re from.”
Louise tried not to frown. “Gen, we don’t have to give our history to everyone we meet.”
Rich foreigners. Andy’s conscience struggled against temptation. Conscience won out, backed up by infatuation. I can’t sell her a pirate set. Not her. “Okay, your lucky day. We’ve got some top-of-the-range sets in stock. I can fix a reasonable deal for them, too, so there’s no need to get sweaty about the money. This way.”
He led them over to his section of the counter, managing to get her name on the way. His neural nanonics faithfully recorded the way she walked, her body movements, even her speech pattern. Like most nineteen-year- olds who’d grown up in London’s manky Islington district with its history of low-income employment, Andy Behoo fancied himself as a prospective net don. It combined the goal of fringe-legal work (also his heritage), with very little actual effort. He’d taken didactic memory courses on electronics, nanonics, and software every month since he’d passed his fourteenth birthday. His two-room flat was stocked to the ceiling with ancient processor blocks and every redundant peripheral he’d managed to scrounge or steal. Everyone in his tenement knew Andy was the guy to visit when you had a technical problem.
As to why such an embryonic datasmart prince of darkness was working as a sellrat in Jude’s Eworld, he had to get the money to finance his revolutionary schemes from somewhere—or maybe even go to college. And the shop always employed technerd teenagers as their outfront salesforce, they were the only ones who kept up to date on upgrades and new marques that would work on minimum-wage weeks.
