William Gibson - Count Zero

“Yes.”

“He was dead?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you say it, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who did you feel was doing something to you?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps Alan.”

“Doing what?”

“Being dead? Complicating matters? You tell me.”

“You are a difficult woman.”

“Let me out.”

“I will take you to your friend’s apartment…”

“Stop the car.”

“I will take you to — ”

“I’ll walk.”

The low silver car slid up to the curb.

“I will call you, in the — ”

“Good night.”

“You’re certain you wouldn’t prefer one of the spas?” asked Mr. Paleologos, thin and elegant as a mantis in his white hopsack jacket. His hair was white as well, brushed back from his forehead with extreme care. “It would be less expensive, and a great deal more fun. You’re a very pretty girl.

“Pardon?” Jerking her attention back from the street beyond the rain-streaked window. “A what?” His French was clumsy, enthusiastic, strangely inflected.

“A very pretty girl.” He smiled primly. “You wouldn’t prefer a holiday in a Med cluster? People your own age? Are you Jewish?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Jewish. Are you?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” he said. “You have the cheekbones of a certain sort of elegant young Jewess… I’ve a lovely discount on fifteen days to Jerusalem Prime, a marvelous environment for the price. Includes suit rental, three meals per diem, and direct shuttle from the JAL torus.”

“Suit rental?”

“They haven’t entirely established atmosphere, in Jerusalem Prime,” Mr. Paleologos said, shuffling a stack of pink flimsies from one side of his desk to the other. His office was a tiny cubicle walled with hologram views of Poros and Macau. She’d chosen his agency for its evident obscurity, and because it had been possible to slip in without leaving the little commercial complex in the metro station nearest Andrea’s.

“No” she said, “I’m not interested in spas I want to go here.” She tapped the writing on the wrinkled blue wrapper from a pack of Gauloise.

“Well,” he said, “it’s possible, of course, but I have no listing of accommodations. Will you be visiting friends?”

“A business trip,” she said impatiently. “I must leave immediately.”

“Very well, very well,” Mr. Paleologos said, taking a cheap-looking lap terminal from a shelf behind his desk. “Can you give me your credit code, please?”

She reached into her black leather bag and took out the thick bundle of New Yen she’d removed from Paco’s bag while he’d been busy examining the apartment where Alain had died. The money was fastened with a red band of translucent elastic “I wish to pay cash.”

“Oh, dear,” Mr. Paleologos said, extending a pink finger-tip to touch the top bill, as though he expected the lot of it to vanish. “I see. Well, you understand, I wouldn’t ordinarily do business this way… But, I suppose, something can be arranged…

“Quickly,” she said, “very quickly…”

He looked at her. “I understand. Can you tell me, please,” — his fingers began to move over the keys of the lap terminal — “the name under which you wish to travel?”

TURNER WOKE TO the silent house, the sound of birds in the apple trees in the overgrown orchard. He’d slept on the broken couch Rudy kept in the kitchen. He drew water for coffee, the plastic pipes from the roof tank chugging as he filled the pot, put the pot on the propane burner, and walked out to the porch.

Rudy’s eight vehicles were filmed with dew, arranged in a neat row on the gravel One of the augmented hounds trotted through the open gate as Turner came down the steps, its black hood clicking softly in the morning quiet. It paused, drooling, swayed its distorted head from side to side, then scrambled across the gravel and out of sight, around the corner of the porch.

Turner paused by the hood of a dull brown Suzuki Jeep, a hydrogen-cell conversion Rudy would have done the work himself, Four-wheel drive, big tires with off-road lugs crusted in pale dry river mud. Small, slow, reliable, not much use on the road.

He passed two rust-flecked Honda sedans, identical, same year and model. Rudy would be ripping one for parts from the other; neither would be running. He grinned absently at the immaculate brown and tan paintwork on the 1949 Chevrolet van, remembering the rusted shell Rudy had hauled home from Arkansas on a rented flatbed. The thing still ran on gasoline, the inner surfaces of its engine likely as spotless as the hand-rubbed chocolate lacquer of its fenders.

There was half of a Dornier ground-effect plane, under gray plastic tarps, and then a wasplike black Suzuki racing bike on a homemade trailer. He wondered how long it had been since Rudy had done any serious racing. There was a snowmobile under another tarp, an old one, next to the bike trailer. And then the stained gray hovercraft, surplus from the war, a squat wedge of armored steel that smelled of the kerosene its turbine burned, its mesh-reinforced apron bag slack on the gravel. Its windows were narrow slits of thick, high-impact plastic. There were Ohio plates bolted to the thing’s ram-like bumpers. They were current. “I can see what you’re thinking,” Sally said, and he turned to see her at the porch rail with the pot of steaming coffee in her hand. “Rudy says, if it can’t get over something, it can anyway get through it.”

‘Is it fast?” Touching the hover’s armored flank.

“Sure, but you’ll need a new spine after about an hour.”

“How about the law?”

“Can’t much say they like the way it looks, but it’s certified street-legal. No law against armor that I know of.”

“Angie’s feeling better,” Sally said as he followed her in through the kitchen door, “aren’t you, honey?”

Mitchell’s daughter looked up from the kitchen table. Her bruising, like Turner’s, had faded to a pair of fat commas, like painted blue-black tears.

“My friend here’s a doctor,” Turner said. “He checked you out when you were under. He says you’re doing okay.”

“Your brother He’s not a doctor”

“Sorry, Turner,” Sally said, at the stove. “I’m pretty much straightforward.”

“Well, he’s not a doctor,” he said, “but he’s smart. We were worried that Maas might have done something to you, fixed it so you’d get sick if you left Arizona…

“Like a cortex bomb?” She spooned cold cereal from a cracked bowl with apple blossoms around the rim, part of a set that Turner remembered.

“Lord,” Sally said, “what have you gotten yourself into, Turner?”

“Good question.” He took a seat at the table. Angie chewed her cereal, staring at him.

“Angie,” he said, “when Rudy scanned you, he found something in your head.”

She stopped chewing.

“He didn’t know what it was. Something someone put there, maybe when you were a lot younger. Do you know what I mean?”

She nodded.

“Do you know what it is?”

She swallowed. “No.”

“But you know who put it there?”

“Yes.”

“Your father?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“Because I was sick.”

“How were you sick?”

“I wasn’t smart enough.”

He was ready by noon, the hovercraft fueled and waiting by the chainlink gates. Rudy had given him a rectangular black ziploc stuffed with New Yen, some of the bills worn almost translucent with use.

“I tried that tape through a French lexicon,” Rudy said, while one of the hounds rubbed its dusty ribs against his legs. “Doesn’t work. I think it’s some kind of Creole. Maybe African. You want a copy?”