Richard Kadrey: Metrophage

Zamora started back to the bar. Jonny calmly took Nimble Virtue's Derringer from his pocket and blew the back of the Colonel's head off. Zamora stiffened as the hollow point hit. Then he collapsed, a solid reptilian waterfall of flesh, joints loosening from the ankles up.

Conover was on Jonny before he had a chance to move. "That's all, son. It's over," the smuggler lord said, and touched his gun to the base of Jonny's spine. "It's time to go." Conover pulled him way from the bodies, directing him to the far edge of the garden where a set of wrought-iron stairs wound down to the bare hillside. At the top of the stairs, Jonny looked back. The scrim was no longer burning, but large black-rimmed holes allowed the sand through. It was squalling in great gusts all over the garden, already beginning to cover the bodies of the dead anarchist and Colonel Zamora. Jonny walked down the metal stairs and started off across the pale scrub grass, Conover right behind him.

They walked with the storm to their backs. To their left, part of the city was on fire.

Jonny's ears became quickly accustomed to the steady rattle of far-off gunfire. The explosions seemed to take on a strange rhythm of their own, playing counter-point to his footsteps. Black smoke from the burning buildings was whipped up by the Santa Ana winds; mixing with the blowing sand, the smoke closed over the city, taking on the appearance of a solid structure, as if Jonny were seeing the lights through the walls of a dirty terrarium. Hovercars cut back and forth through the mist like glowing wasps.

They walked for some time without speaking. Then Conover said: "Down the hill here." Scrambling through the nettles and fallen branches, they eventually hit a rise and Jonny saw the rusted skeleton of the dome, the grimy white walls. He knew then that they were headed for Griffith Observatory. Years before, after a seven-point quake that dropped most of Malibu below sea level, the observatory's corroded dome had fallen in on itself like the shell of a rotten egg. Since then, various religious groups had claimed the place, performing secret rites in the husk of the old building under the full moon.

Scattered through the courtyard of the old observatory in rough concentric circles were shrines to dead technology, useless mementos of the collective unconscious of the city. The gear box from a gasoline powered vehicle; a German food processor; a Nautilus exercise machine; pelvic x-rays of forgotten movie stars; piles of pornographic video cassettes, dressing dummies and primitive Sony tube televisions.

Jonny left Conover's side and touched the yellowed keys of an ancient upright piano. It had been outside for so long that the lacquer was coming off it in great chocolate ribbons, revealing the weathered grain of some badly warped wood beneath. Jonny hit a chord and to his surprise, the thing still worked. He picked out a one-fingered melody, his off-key singing masked by the sour notes of the out-of-tune piano.

As I passed Saint James Infirmary

I saw my sweetheart there

All stretched out on a table, so pale, so cold, so fair

As I passed Saint James Infirmary "Come on," called Conover, "let's get out of this storm." He gestured at the open doors of the observatory with the Futukoro.

A few steps inside the high-vaulted chamber, Jonny was swallowed up by absolute darkness. It was like walking down the gullet of some enormous animal, he thought. He breathed the hot air (sour with the reek of oxidizing metal) deeply, relaxing in his sudden blindness. Since leaving Sumi, Jonny had refused to let his exteroceptors see for him in any but the most ordinary way. He felt comfortable in the darkness of the observatory because he had been waiting for it; it or something just like it. He had not felt the same since the gun had failed to kill him in the clinic. He understood then that he was still waiting for the bullet he had been denied. Each time he turned around, Jonny expected to see Conover raising the Futukoro to firing position. But it did not happen.

There were things hanging from the ceiling of the observatory.

They rang softly, like the tinkling of small bells or wind chimes.

Occasionally, a tiny flash would catch his eye. Something cool touched Jonny's face. He batted it with the back of his hand, and it swung away into the darkness. A few steps further, he bumped into a narrow railing that circled a sunken section of the floor, and waited there for Conover.

The smuggler lord came into the observatory, his head cocked to one side, as if listening for something. It occurred to Jonny for the first time that Conover might be insane. What proof had the lord offered him of rich people slumming on the moon or dead extraterrestrials? Just some fairy tale about his grandmother renting out her blood. Not having contracted the layered virus meant nothing. Luck or natural resistance could account for that, Jonny told himself. There were a lot of people left in the city who were not infected.

However, if Conover were insane, he might insist that they wait in the observatory for his spaceship all night. It seemed pretty likely to Jonny that a structure this size would eventually attract fire from below.

And if Conover is insane, he thought, what will he do when his spaceship does not arrive?

Outside, the sand storm was slacking off. Through gaps in the twisted metal of the dome, Jonny could see the pale curve of the moon. He thought of the celebration in the city, disrupted now by gunfire. The Day of the Dead. Illuminated in the weak moonlight, Jonny finally saw the room in which he was standing, and decided that if Conover was not crazy, whoever had re-built the observatory was.

A bank of ultra-sensitive photo-cells ringed the ceiling above a parabolic mirror cradled in a steel lattice nest; the structure supporting the mirror had been bolted beneath a section of dome open to the sky. When the pale lunar light came down through the fallen girders, the walls began to flicker; gears shifted ponderously underground and a dozen blurry moons suddenly circumscribed the room. Video images, three meters tall; old NASA footage Jonny remembered from his childhood. Car mirrors suspended from the ceiling on nylon lines picked up the pale images, flashing them back and forth like cratered stars. Narrow rows of low-voltage track lights shone through prisms and beam-splitters, bathing the highest parts of the room in tentative rainbows.

"It's wonderful, isn't it? Absolute madness," Conover said. A brightly painted Virgin Mary, part plaster of Paris and part jet engine components, revolved on a creaking turntable- a technocratic moon goddess.

"You've been here before?" asked Jonny.

"Many times. I come here to think." In the wasted gray video light, Jonny thought Conover looked like one of the masked dancers from the procession below. The smuggler lord pointed to a spot in the southern hemisphere ofone of the video moons. In case you're interested, this is where we're headed. A Japanese station a few clicks to the west of Tycho.

Jonny slumped back against the rail. "Mister Conover, there's no spaceship coming here tonight."

"Of course there is. We're going to Seven Rose Base." Bullshit.

"All that's going to happen is we're going to hang around here till somebody decides to put a mortar shell through the wall."

Conover shook his head, smiled indulgently at Jonny. "Don't go thinking I've lost my mind, dear boy," he said. "The fact is, I haven't let you in on all my reasons for wanting to get to the moon."

Jonny opened his eyes in mock surprise. "Oh gosh, then you haven't been absolutely straight with me? I'm really hurt, Mister Conover."

"What would you say if I told that you we have had contact with the Alpha Rats directly?"

"I thought you said they were dead."

"The one's on the ship were, yes. But I mean others."