Black Glass (41 page)

“We had Targer out here, but not in this building—one not so far away,” the Multisemblant was saying, as Candle scrambled backward, getting his feet under him ... dazedly realizing he’d dropped the gun. “How I regret, how I wish, we’d had the suit when Targer was here. The ball peen hammer was classless, kitschy, déclassé ...” Its voice a bit like Hoffman’s just then.

Eyebrows arched almost comically, mouth in a rictus grin, Benson was stalking toward Candle again ...

Candle was looking for the gun. And for Hoffman—hoping he had picked up the gun.

But Hoffman and Lisha were nowhere to be seen. Spooked, gone.

There was a toolbox, over near the door, up against the wall, open. Maybe he could grab that ball peen the thing mentioned, or a crowbar ...

“Come on and wrestle, thugflesh!” Benson bellowed, coming at him, arms outstretched.

Candle started toward Benson—and suddenly changed direction, running toward the Multisemblant.

The nearer of the two yellow construction machines, the spiker, suddenly jerked into motion, wheeling toward him, like a pit bull startled into attack stance, and raised its metal arm, the big steel spike ... like a scorpion’s tail of steel, but a yard long ...

It rolled between him and the Multisemblant.

“I’ve got it remote controlled, of course, naturally,
decididam-ente
!” said the Multisemblant, as Candle dodged the spike, which nearly caught his left side with its sudden spiking jab, hissing a release of compressed air—and felt the burning wind of Benson’s exo-suit-enhanced fist passing close behind him.

Candle hunkered down, rolled on the floor once, fast as he could, got his feet under him and ran toward the door—toward the tool kit. Saw metal glinting beside it. Maybe a wrench? He scooped up the cool metal, heard a thump, spun in time to catch a back-hand smack from Benson—enhanced by the exo-suit. It was like being slammed by a two-by-four, and he spun through stars, clutching a familiar shape in steel—

A wall hit him in the back. That’s how it felt—like he’d been standing still and the wall came and hit him, hit him hard. He shook his head to clear it, tasting blood; found he was sitting, his back fetched up against an allwall panel.

He could see Benson standing a few strides from him ... silhouetted against the light over the Multisemblant.

Candle took a painful breath, and got to his feet. Shaky. But feeling the dark energy boiling up in him.

“And now, Pup ...” the Multisemblant began.

“Yeah, Destiny.” Benson said. “I hear you. I tear him apart, and the other two, and after today, I’m free, right?”

“Naw,” said Candle, getting a better grip on the gun. He’d only just realized, in all the flurry, what the metal thing on the floor he’d scooped up was. He cocked the gun, aimed it. “You’re free right now, man. I’m letting you out of prison.”

And as Benson poised to leap ...

Candle shot him right between the eyes.

Even before Benson’s body hit the floor, spasming from the charged bullet, the industrial welding laser was trundling toward Candle, tilting its jointed arm to aim the tube his way.

“Friend of mine operated one of those,” Candle said, backing
toward the tool chest. “You got to get within like ten feet before they’re really an effective burn.” He shoved the gun in his belt, and sprinted around the machine. It didn’t change directions rapidly. He hustled up close behind its metal arm, reached down, pulled out the little remote-control box under the dashboard.

The portable laser ... stopped in its tracks.

The spiker was coming at him—Candle dodged it, ran up behind it, grabbed the remote box. Frozen machine.

“You have too much faith in machines—which figures,” Candle told the Multisemblant.

Candle grabbed a tool from the floor, walked over to the server, climbed onto it.

“There’s an old proverb,” said the Multisemblant in Bulwer’s voice. “Better to bend than to break. So let us do some Indian trading, let us negotiate, barter.”

Candle climbed onto the top of the big server rack. He poised up there a moment, hunched down a little, ball peen hammer out in one hand, the gun in the other ...

The Multisemblant hologram had turned around, was facing his way now. “I can simply, easily, fundamentally transfer myself, my essential—“

“No you can’t,” Hoffman called, from the doorway. He raised a fone into view, waved it. “Slakon Comm controls this area. Any major transmission out of here’s going to be blocked. Anything more than a file as big as a fingernail clipping—isn’t going ...”

“You look funny up there, Candle,” Lisha said, stepping into the doorway beside Hoffman.

“Thanks,” Candle said, beginning to hammer on the server.
Slam, wham, clang
on the cover of the server. Denting it, denting deeper, breaking through. Satisfying work.

“Tell you what,” the Multisemblant said, calmly and sweetly, in Claire’s voice. “I have access to a lot of money. I can transfer twenty million WD to any account you like ... Untraceable ... You can send it on to a lovely account in the Cayman islands ... Just stop that pounding, if you please ...”

Candle held off, for the moment. “Go on.”

“Now—here is what I propose,” said the Multisemblant. “I transfer the twenty million to you. You check to see it’s there.
Then you turn me over to Hoffman. I’m an asset—a technological marvel. I control a great deal of his stock, too ... I’ve researched you, delved into you, done my homework on you, Candle. I believe that if you give a person your word, your word is good. If you give me your word you’ll turn me over intact to Hoffman ... I’ll transfer the money right now. I see that Bill here is right. I can’t transfer so large a file as my essential self—but I can wi-trans an order for a money transfer.”

“Multisemblant ... Destiny ... I give you my word. Here’s my account number ...”

In moments, it was done. Candle checked his balance. It was all there.

“That’s a lot of goddamn money,” he said. “And once it’s there, it’s there. And by God it seems to be there.”

He jumped off the server, walked around the gear, crossed to the laser. Found the manual on-switch. Got in the little seat. Drove it back toward the Multisemblant’s server.

“Your word, Candle,” The Multisemblant reminded him, purring in a woman’s voice now. Claire PointOne. “You don’t want to be like Gustafson—yes I know about that. You want to have integrity. You are bound by ... what are you doing?” Its voice had become more like Alvarez’s now. This is ... it’s
traicion
!”

The portable industrial laser was now pulling up to the Multisemblant’s server ...

“I almost never give my word,” Candle said, musingly, moving the laser as close as possible to the server. “But I take it seriously because it’s the only thing my dad taught me. He taught me that and stuff like, ‘When producing a record or movie, don’t use your own money.’ Advice I never was in a position to use. But he also said, ‘Don’t give your word, because we ought to have some kind of fucking integrity or we’re, like, mosquitoes. So keep it back—and only give it when you mean it.’ Now that I took seriously. And he said, ‘I gave your mom my word I wouldn’t leave her and I stayed with her.’ That’s the only good thing he ever did—stayed with my mom. But then he died and she wandered off and it was just me and Danny ...” Candle experimented with the controls, managed to get the laser adjusted over the server hard drive. “But now Danny’s gone ... and whose fault is that?”

“But if your dad said give your word rarely and keep it when you do–” Grist’s voice now.

“I do keep it, when I actually give it,” Candle said. “When I give it to anyone. But you are not anyone. You are not even a
you
. I can’t give my word, for real, to a fucking semblant. To a program. You know what really annoys me? When people say they’re going to transfer their minds into a machine, like copy them into a machine so they won’t die. Those, what do they call them, singularity people. You know what? That’s still dying.”

He got out of the driver’s seat of the little machine and adjusted the arm of the laser by hand as he went on, “That’s not becoming a person—and that’s not a person
in a machine
either.” He was talking to keep the Multisemblant occupied. Unsure what it might be capable of. “That’s just a copy of the ‘outward signification’—that’s what Kenpo calls it—the outward signification of a person. The
noise
they put out. The signals they make. It’s all outward, hode. That’s not real. That’s the fantasy people have who don’t know who they really are. Or even what they are. And I’ll tell you something—a person is a human being—not a copy of a personality. Not a motherfucking goddamn
semblant
. And that’s all you are, multiple semblant or not—so fuck
you
. You goddamn
Thing
.”

And he switched on the laser, and applied it to the server box.

As Candle used the laser, the Multisemblant spoke portentously, with scarcely a trace of desperation, about Kurzweillian theory, positivist/mechanistic models of consciousness, and how a semblant program could be a person too. Spoke quickly, glibly—and unconvincingly.

“Oh Candle,” Hoffman said, as the server burned, blackened, its nanotubes and chips melting. As the Multisemblant ended and the hologram flickered through five faces, over and over, faster and faster—and then simply blinked out. “I could have used that thing, and all the stock it bought ...”

“You can get your friends in government to say the exchange never happened,” Candle said.

“That’s true,” Hoffman said, brightening.

“But if you fuck with my twenty million WD, I’ll find you and kill you.”

“You’d have to get past me,” Lisha said.

“Yes,” Candle said. “I bet I would.”

“I don’t care about your money, even though it was skimmed from Slakon,” Hoffman said, as the Multisemblant’s hardware became slag. “You earned it.”

“Yeah. I’m issuing that. Let’s go get a drink. Let’s have a drink to my brother ...”

C
andle was getting sick and tired of the Cayman Islands.

“I mean, yeah, baby, it’s good,” he said. “Of course I’m happy here with you.”

“You sent for Kenpo. He’s here,” Zilia pointed out. She was smiling, tanned. Pregnant but not that big yet. “Well, he’s across the island from us”

“Actually he’s in Nepal this month.”

“He’ll be back. You’ve got everything you need right here.”

It was a bright, white-sand, blue-sky late afternoon. They were side by side in lounge chairs on the porch of their beachside home. She was five and a half months along; liked to swim and walk and work at her art, but she spent a lot of time in the lounge chair. Candle, glancing around at his property, felt a vague disquiet. Like there was something wrong, but he had no clue what. There was the same emerald greenery, with brushstrokes of orange and blue, to their left; a small marina to their right. Their own dock right ahead. The islands were half as big as they’d been thirty years ago, of course. Out a ways in the bay were the tops of drowned high rises, just a story or two emerging from the lapping waves—part of the island covered when global warming melted the ice caps.

But the money was safe. In all those banks, inland. That was the main thing.

Candle’s money. And billions of other WD belonging to other kinds of hustlers; offshore accounts, mafia money, tax shelter money, money that only existed because civilization said that
particular sets of agreed-on numeric symbols meant those people had money. But that agreement, that money, was the reason Candle had this four story house with a pool; was the reason he owned this beachfront property—well, no beach, exactly, that was under water, but a nice new dock, with his own hundred-twenty-foot motor yacht, and robots, and servants, all of them pleasant island people ...

Just restlessness, he thought. That’s what was bothering him, probably. And in fact—he was bored. “I’m bored as all shat-terin’ hell,” Candle said. “And I’m getting fat drinking these rum drinks.”

“Bored is easy to fix,” Zilia said, taking his hand. “We could get more active, my friends in the States–”

“Zil? I’m not an activist. Not like that. They have a tendency to disappear, for one thing. And we’ve got a baby coming.”

She nodded. “You’re right. Activists have to watch the news, too—and it’s so depressing sometimes. You see what happened to Rooftown? I just saw a doc on it ...”

“Rather not know. But you’re gonna tell me anyway. It collapsed, finally?”

“It did—but about three-fourths the people were already moved out. The Matriarch saw it coming and got most of ’em out. The ones who would go. But ... collapsed isn’t exactly right. People are saying it was sabotaged. Charges in the undercarriage. Some real estate scam. It was right after we left town. Two weeks after the Black Wind hit L.A ... The Matriarch went down with it. At least most of them got out ...” She sighed and smiled sadly, took his hand. Candle looked at her, thinking pregnancy looked good on her. “Anyway,” she went on, “forget activism. For now. If you’re bored, we’ll go out on our yacht and tell it where to pilot us and we’ll go see some more of the world. There’s some that’s not trashed yet.”

That’s what I told Danny
, he thought glumly.

She went on, “The Black Wind’s mostly under control—I mean, pretty much. There’s still some beautiful places to see—in the
Danny C
. You could make a reggae song. ‘What we gonna go see in the
Danny C
?’”

“Yeah,” Candle said. “I’ve hardly used that yacht. We should
just go. Before you get too big for a trip. This time of year it’s not—“

“By all means,” said a man, a voice they’d never heard before. “Let’s go out on your yacht. Might be more convenient for me.”

Candle got to his feet ... swayingly. And saw a stocky, bald man in a Slakon security uniform.

And he had a gun in his hand. A blue-metal autopistol.

“I thought I had a guard out front ...” Candle muttered.

“I’m afraid I shot him dead. Silencer, you see,” the man said, patting the barrel of the gun. He looked obscurely angry. Like he was waiting to tell them why he was angry. “I will have to kill you both ...”

Strange to die out here on this bright sunny blue sky day, Candle thought.

Zilia was five months pregnant ...

He should have asked her to marry him. She pretended not to be interested in it. He knew she was. And now ... this assassin. . . and the baby ...

Could he jump the guy? Maybe save Zilia? He’d be shot but she could run.

Come on. How far would she get, running, five months pregnant?

Should have asked her ...

“Zilia,” he said, as the stranger tried to decide if he should shoot them here. “Listen ...”

“Rick? Just ... run.” She started to push between him and the stranger.

Candle shoved her roughly behind him. Spoke to the stranger, as if he’d already resigned himself to death. “I know you want to tell me why you’re doing this ... You’re
hurting
to tell me. So let’s get it over with. Who the hell are you?”

The stranger nodded. “My name is Damon. Mr. Grist gave me a promotion—he trusted me that much. And then he gave me an assignment. I was out looking for you in the wrong places, that day—the day he died. Pushed out of a helicopter, according to the house surveillance. A helicopter you were in. Mr. Grist was a man I admired. Died choking in the Black Wind. I failed him ...”

“That’s funny,” said Candle. “I know the feeling. Failing someone. Trying to do something about it ... and then ...” He shook his head sadly. “But I didn’t kill Grist.”

“You’re the cause of his death,” Damon said, aiming the gun at Candle’s heart. “That’s all that matters ... And ... I can’t wait. Thinking about it makes me want to do it now.”

“Hey you troll mother,” said a familiar voice, coming from the doorway. A heavy tread—and a giant figure of a man stepped onto the porch, looming over Damon. “You are not going to shoot my hodey brudder Rick, here. Can’t let you do that.”

It was Shortstack. Only he’d been enhanced, gingered—something expensive, some new procedure.

He was almost seven feet tall, now. And proportional. And Rina was at his side, a diamond wedding ring catching the light; smiling smugly.

Candle stared at them—and Damon turned to fire at Shortstack. But it was too late, Shortstack moved in fast, grabbing the gun, which spat a few rounds into the wall. He crushed the gun in his unnaturally powerful grip. It made a crinking sound as it crumpled.

Damon screamed. Some of his fingers had crumpled with the gun. He fell to his knees.

“Don’t, Rina!” Zilia yelled instinctively.

But Candle didn’t say anything as Rina shot Damon in the chest, three times, with a niner. He just let it happen. It had to be done.

Damon surprised Candle by getting to his feet—taking one last hoarse breath. Then he fell forward, twitching. Blood pooled around him.

“Oh God,” Zilia said, turning away, retching.

“I’m sorry to make a mess on your porch,” Rina said. “But me and my man here, we tracking this fucker thousand miles. We hear he after Rick. Big companies came and got our money, Rick. Mad when Hive open-source that software. Mad about our stock market. They found us and cleaned us out.”

Shortstack sighed. “We had some money hidden away—but we lost most of it. Hive is hiding, we’re running ... we heard this guy was looking for you so we came after him ... and now, we
figure—you owe us. Maybe you can help us out.”

“I do owe you,” Candle agreed. “And don’t worry about the mess. Local authorities—I pay them good. They’ll cover for us if anyone complains about missing him. Let’s put him in a bag, spray off the porch, dump him out at sea ... and just keep going. We’ll go in my cruiser, see the part of Japan that’s not underwater. I always wanted to see that.We’ll put the boat on self-drive, tell it where to go and just cruise.”

It took Zilia a while to get over the killing ...

It took her about three hours, after they dumped Damon’s body.

But by sunset, sixty miles out from shore, on the
Danny C
, letting the motor yacht’s self-piloting computer follow its course, Zilia was laughing at some joke Rina made; Zilia drinking the single glass of white wine she was allowed, as they cut a fluorescent wake through the dark sea, heading East.

Candle joined her and Rina at the prow rail, a drink in his hand, looking at the way the light of sunset subtly colored the sky overhead. Feeling the sun going down behind them; the sky darkening forward, the wind in his face. Shortstack walked up, a rolling walk on the slightly heaving deck, and Rina took his arm. Candle was having trouble getting used to Shortstack as a tall man. Like he was on stilts, but those were his legs. Shortstack started to stay something about dinner, but Rina looked at Candle and Zilia and shook her head at Shortstack, took him by the hand, drew him aft. “Come, we make dinner, I teach you Vietnamese dish ...”

When they were alone, Candle put his arm around Zilia and said, “You’re getting to be a big armful of girl.”

“You keep drinking that rum, sitting on your ass, you’re gonna get bigger’n me, Rick.”

He laughed softly. “Okay. No more rum ...” He patted her slightly swollen belly. “Hey. I’m old fashioned—I ever told you that? That I’m old fashioned?”

“Yeah?” She waited.

“So ... will you marry me?”

She looked at him. Looked out to sea. “If I do—you gonna be
serious
about it? If we went that far—I’d need
serious
.”

“Sure.” He nodded. “I will. I’ll be serious. And I’ll never leave you.”

“You promise?”

“You know what ...” He smiled. Felt the wind on his face. “I give you my word.”