William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

Volkova. Stella Volkova. Stalling, Cayce takes a sip of Perrier. It seems flat.

“He is their uncle,” Dorotea says, impatiently. “I know where you have been today. I know that you have met with them. Soon Volkov will know as well.”

“I've never heard of him.” Throat dry, she takes another sip.

“The invisible oligarch. The ghost. Very probably the richest of them all. He rode out the Bankers' War in 'ninety-three, untouched, then emerged to take even more. His roots are in organized crime, of course; it is natural here. Like many, he has suffered personal losses. His brother. That had more to do with what you think of as politics, than crime, but to make that distinction here has always been naive.” Dorotea takes a sip of wine.

“Dorotea, what are you doing here?” Cayce wonders what she would be feeling, now, if she were having this encounter on any other day. Against her recent experience of the actual creation of the footage, it's difficult to feel frightened, or angry, though she remembers having felt both those emotions toward Dorotea. The knot in her upper back, relaxing.

“You are in danger now. From Volkov's apparat. You threaten them because you have met his nieces. That is not supposed to happen.”

“But they can't be that tightly guarded. I sent an e-mail. Stella answered.”

“How did you get the address?”

Baranov's glasses flash in the caravan, in a beam of British sunlight through some tiny hole. The depths of cold and utter distrust in his eyes. “From Boone,” Cayce lies.

“It's not important,” Dorotea says, and Cayce is glad it isn't, though she wants to tell Dorotea that Boone is in Ohio, at Sigil.

“Tell me about your father,” Dorotea says. “That is more important. What was his name?”

“Win,” Cayce says. “Wingrove Pollard.”

“And he vanished, the day of the towers, in New York?”

“He checked into a hotel, the night before, and in the morning he took a cab. But we've never found the driver, and we can't find him.”

“Perhaps I can help you find him,” Dorotea says. “Finish your water.”

Cayce drinks the rest of the Perrier, the ice hurting her front teeth when it clicks against them, hard. “I hurt my teeth,” she says, putting down the glass.

“You should be more careful,” Dorotea says.

Cayce looks across the bar and sees the snakeskin panels on the girl's dress crawling, wet and glistening. The flame-shaped cutouts in the taut fabric revealing the living greenish-black serpent skin beneath. She wants to tell Dorotea but somehow it might be embarrassing. She feels awkward, and very shy.

Dorotea pours the rest of the Perrier into Cayce's glass. “Did you ever guess,” Dorotea says, “that I might also be Mama Anarchia?”

“You couldn't be,” Cayce says, “you never say anything's hegemonic.”

“What do you mean?”

Cayce feels herself blushing. “You're fluent, but I don't think you could make all that up. The stuff that Parkaboy hates.” But maybe she shouldn't be saying this? “Could you?”

“No. Drink your water.” Cayce does, being careful of the ice. “But I have a little puppenkopf, to help me. I say what I need to say, and he translates it into the language of Anarchia, to so annoy your most annoying friend.” Dorotea smiles.

“Puppen —?”

“Puppet-head. A graduate student, in America. That is how I am able to be the Mama. And now I think you are my little puppenkopf as well.” She reaches across the table to stroke Cayce's cheek. “And I think we will have no more trouble from you, none at all. You are my very good girl, now, and you will tell me where you got the e-mail address, won't you?”

But there are skulls atop the sideboard, and as she's opening her mouth to tell Dorotea about them, she sees Bibendum himself behind the bar, the rolls of his pallid, rubbery flesh like the folds of a partially deflated blimp, greasy and vile. Cayce's mouth freezes open, no sound at all emerging, as the terrible eyes of the Michelin Man fix her with a truly dire regard — and she experiences, perhaps, her sole and only brush with EVP — as from some deep and hidden eddy in the river of Sinatra's voice emerges a strange bright cartoon-like whirling snarl of sound, which executes the sonic equivalent of a back flip and becomes, as though compressed for transmission over unimaginable distances, her father's voice.

“She's drugged the water. Scream.”

Which she does.

So that, when things go black, she's just curling her fingers around something smooth and cold, at the very bottom of the Stasi envelope.

There must be, though she's never noticed it before, a band of steel, cunningly fashioned, that ordinarily follows the exact irregularities of the inner circumference of her skull.

It seems, now that she's aware of it, to be made from rod no thicker than the wire of a coat hanger, but much stronger, and of enormous rigidity. She knows that because she can feel it, now that someone has been turning a central key, also of metal, which is T-shaped, and engraved, very finely, on one side only, with the map of a city whose name she once knew, though it escapes her now in her wretchedness at the band's expansion. With each turn of the key, it widens, causing her excruciating pain.

Opening her eyes, she finds that they don't work, not as she expects them to.

I'll have to have glasses, she thinks, closing them again. Or contact lenses. Or that operation they do with lasers. That had come from Soviet medicine, she knew, and by accident, the first patient having suffered cuts to the retina in a car crash, in Russia —

Opening them again.

She's in Russia.

She tries to raise her hands to her aching head, but finds she can't.

Spatial inventory. She's on her back, probably on a bed, and can't move her arms. She carefully raises her head, as she'd do in Pilates in preparation for the Hundred, and sees that her arms at least are there, or seem to be, beneath a thin gray blanket and a folded edge of white sheet, but that there are two restraining bands of gray webbing, one just below her shoulders and the other just below her elbows.

This seems not a good thing.

She lowers her head and groans, because this has caused the key to be turned at least twice, and quickly.

The ceiling, which she finds she can focus on now, is blank and white. Rolling her head gingerly to the right, she sees an equally blank wall, also white. To the left, the ceiling's light fixture, which is rectangular and featureless, and then a row of beds, three at least, which are empty, and made of white-painted metal.

All of that seems a lot to do, because it makes her very tired.

A gray-haired woman, wearing a gray cardigan over a shapeless gray dress, is there with a tray.

The bed has been cranked up to partial sitting position and the restraints are gone. So, she finds, is the expanding interior skull ring. “Where am I?”

The woman says something, no more than four syllables, and places the tray, on wire supports, across Cayce's stomach. There is a plastic bowl of something that looks like thick clam chowder, perhaps minus the clams, and a plastic tumbler of grayish-white fluid.

The woman hands Cayce a strangely blunt-looking spoon that proves to be made of some rubbery, flexible plastic, rigid enough to eat soup with but soft enough to bend until its two ends meet. Cayce uses it to eat the soup, which is warm, and thick, and very good, and more heavily spiced than anything she's eaten in a hospital before.

Cayce eyes the gray beverage suspiciously. The woman points to it and utters a single syllable.

It tastes, Cayce finds, not entirely unlike Bikkle. An organic Bikkle. When she's finished, and has returned the tumbler to the tray, she's rewarded with another monosyllable, neutral in tone. The woman takes the tray, crosses the floor, opens the room's single door, which is cream-colored, and goes out, closing the door behind her.