his voice.
A soprano turbojet seemed to bear down on them, fading in and out as it tacked through the flora. The creepy apparatus Dopplered down a couple of notes as it came to a stop directly above them. They couldn't see more than the odd glint of colored light, picked up by whatever-itwas from the distant mediatrons. A voice, flawlessly reproduced and just a hair too loud, came out of it:
'Visitors are welcome to stroll through this park at any time. We hope you have enjoyed your stay. Please inquire if you need directions, and this unit will assist you.'
'It's nice,' Nell said.
'Not for long,' Harv said. 'Let's get out of here before it gets pissed.'
'I like it here.'
Bluish light exploded out of the aerostat. They both hollered as their irises convulsed. It was hollering right back at them: 'Allow me to light your way to the nearest exit!'
'We're running away from home,' Nell explained. But Harv was scrambling up out of the hole, yanking Nell behind him with his good hand.
The thing's turbines screeched briefly as it made a bluff charge. In this fashion it herded them briskly toward the nearest street.
When they had finally climbed over a barrier and gotten their feet back on concreta firma, it snapped off its light and zoomed off without so much as a fare-thee-well.
'It's okay, Nell, they always do that.'
'Why?'
'So this place don't fill up with transients.'
'What's that?'
'That's what we are, now,' Harv explained.
'Let's go stay with your buds!' Nell said. Harv had never introduced Nell to any of his buds before, she knew them only as children of earlier epochs knew Gilgamesh, Roland, or Superman.
She was under the impression that the streets of the Leased Territories were rife with Harv's buds and that they were more or less all-powerful.
Harv's face squirmed for a while, and then he said, 'We gotta talk about your magic book.'
'The
'Yeah, whatever it's called.'
'Why must we talk about it?'
'Huh?' Harv said in the dopey voice he affected whenever Nell talked fancy.
'Why do we gotta talk about it?' Nell said patiently.
'There's something I never told you about that book, but I gotta tell you now,' Harv said. 'Come on, let's keep moving, or some creep's gonna come hassle us.' They headed toward the main street of Lazy Bay Towne, which was the Leased Territory into which the pod had ejected them. The main street curved along the waterfront, separating a beach from a very large number of drinking establishments fronted with lurid, bawdy mediatrons.
'I don't want to go that way,' Nell said, remembering that last gauntlet of electromagnetic pimps. But Harv grabbed her wrist and hobbled downhill, pulling her behind.
'It's safer than being in the back streets. Now let me tell you about that book. My buds and I pinched it and some other stuff from a Vicky we rolled. Doc told us to roll him.'
'Doc?'
'This Chinese guy who runs the Flea Circus. He said we should roll him, and make sure we made it good so it'd get picked up on the monitors.'
'What does that mean?'
'Never mind. He also said he wanted us to lift something from this Vicky— a certain package about yay big.' Harv formed right angles with his thumbs and index fingers and defined the vertices of a rectangle, book-size. 'Gave us to understand it was valuable. Well, we didn't find any such package. We did find a shitty old book on him, though. I mean, it looked old and fine, but no one reckoned it could be the thing Doc was looking for, since he's got lots of books. So I took it for you.
'Well, a week or two later, Doc wants to know where is the package, and we told him this story. When he heard about that book, he flipped and told us that the book and the package were one and the same.. By that time, you were already playing with that book all night and all day, Nell, and I couldn't bear to take it away from you, so I lied. I told him I threw the book down on the sidewalk when I saw it was junk, and if it wasn't still there, then someone else must have come along and picked it up. Doc was pissed, but he fell for it.
'That's why I never brought my buds to the flat. If anyone finds out you still have that book, Doc'll kill me.'
'What should we do?'
Harv got a look on his face like he'd rather not talk about it. 'For starters, let's get some free stuff.'
They took a sneaky and indirect route to the waterfront, staying as far as possible from the clusters of drunks winding through the constellation of incandescent bordellos like cold dark clumps of rock wending their way through a bright nebula of young stars.
They made their way to a public M.C. on a streetcorner and picked out items from the free menu: boxes of water and nutri-broth, envelopes of sushi made from nanosurimi and rice, candy bars, and packages about the size of Harv's hand, festooned with implausible block letter promises ('REFLECTS 99% OF INFRARED!') that folded out into huge crinkly metallized blankets. Nell had been noticing a lot of rough shapes strewn around on the beach like giant chrome-plated larva. Must be fellow transients wrapped up in these selfsame. As soon as they had scored the goodies, they ran down to the beach and picked out their own spot. Nell wanted one closer to the surf, but Harv made some very well-considered observations about the inadvisability of sleeping below high tide. They trudged along the seawall for a good mile or so before finding a relatively abandoned bit of beach and wrapped themselves up in their blankets there. Harv insisted that one of them had to stay awake at all times to act as a sentry. Nell had learned all about this kind of thing from her virtual adventures in the Primer, and so she volunteered to stay up first.
Harv went to sleep pretty soon, and Nell opened up her book. At times like this, the paper glowed softly and the letters stood out crisp and black, like tree branches silhouetted against a full moon.
Miranda's reactions to the evening's events;
solace from an unexpected quarter;
from the Primer, the demise of a hero, flight to the Land Beyond, and the lands of King Magpie.
The Theatre Parnasse had a rather nice bar, nothing spectacular, just a sort of living room off the main floor, with the bar itself recessed into one wall. The old furniture and pictures had been looted by the Red Guards and later replaced with post-Mao stuff that was not as fine. The management kept the booze locked up when the ractors were working, not sharing any romantic notions about substance-abusing creative geniuses. Miranda stumbled down from her box, fixed herself a club soda, and settled into a plastic chair. She put her shaking hands together like the covers of a book and then buried her face in them. After a few deep breaths she got tears to come, though they came silently, a temporary letting-off-steam cry, not the catharsis she was hoping for. She hadn't earned the catharsis yet, she knew, because what had happened was just the first act. Just the initial incident, or whatever they called it in the books.
'Rough session?' said a voice. Miranda recognized it, but just barely: It was Carl Hollywood, the dramaturge, in effect her boss. But he didn't sound like a gruff son of a bitch tonight, which was a switch.
Carl was in his forties, six and a half feet tall, massively built and given to wearing long black coats that almost swept the floor. He had long wavy blond hair drawn back from his forehead and affected a sort of King Tut beard. Either he was celibate, or else he believed that the particulars of his sexual orientation and needs were infinitely too complex to be shared with those he worked with. Everyone was scared shitless of him, and he liked it that way; he couldn't do his job if he was buddies with all of the ractors.
She heard his cowboy boots approaching across the bare, stained Chinese rug. He confiscated her club
