Synners (29 page)

In the bedlam that followed, Manny finally came up with the older man, the Beater. Gabe hadn't especially wanted to see Manny, but he hadn't wanted to leave while the security guards were hauling the woman up over the side of the rail. She seemed to be fine, or no worse than usual. The strange guy in the weird cape kept trying to get around Clooney, who was pushing him away and warning him about unauthorized personnel. Gabe wondered what Clooney thought he could actually do. Everyone else was milling around, gabbling in shocked tones that sounded more than a bit lascivious. It was the most excitement anyone had seen since the original stars of a very popular bad movie called
Love's Madness
had taken a publicity tour of Diversifications and somehow gotten into a fistfight in the middle of it. Love's madness, and now rock-video madness.

Manny noticed him almost immediately and gave him a friendly nod. Mystified, he could only return the nod and then retreat to the doorway leading to the elevator bank as Manny descended on Gina Aiesi.

She gestured at the Beater a few times, pointed down, waved a fist under Manny's nose—maybe she was going to hit him, Gabe thought, thrilling briefly to the image of Manny going down with blood spurting from his nose. Abruptly she turned her back on him and finished unstrapping the harness. Manny and the Beater turned and went back toward the elevators. Gabe tried to will himself invisible, but Manny paused at the entrance.

"How's the jaw?"

Gabe blinked at him. "Pardon?"

"The jaw." Manny tapped his own face. "Better now?'

"Just fine," Gabe managed, nodding. "Uh, thanks."

"Glad to hear it." Manny went inside. Gabe watched as he and the Beater stepped into one of the elevators. Their departure signaled a mass migration. Gabe slipped through the crowd to where Gina Aiesi was bundling up her harness under the stem supervision of the security guards.

"The show's over," she said. "I don't know why you're still hanging around. Unless you wanna make sure I don't steal the goddamn terrace while I'm at it."

The caped man shoved Clooney aside disdainfully. "You tell them, Gina."

"We're going to escort you back to your work area," said one of the guards stiffly. "Where you are to stay. This floor is off-limits to you, you're not to come up here again."

She gave them each a look. "Well, I guess you told
my
ass off."

"Just come along, madam." The guard reached for her, and she slapped his hand away.

"I'll take her," Gabe said impulsively. "I'll escort her back to her pit."

The guard glared at him. "You were in on it."

"No he wasn't," Gina said. "Get outa my face. I'll let him
escort
me."

The guards turned to the caped man. "Sir, we'll have to escort you from the premises now."

"So escort him," Gina said. "You two could open an escort service. Might be a better line of work for you, you don't do shit in security." She laughed a little as they herded the man toward the still-crowded elevator bank. "Hey, Val, you notice I got your fucking fall?"

"It better be good," he called back as one of the guards pushed him through the crowd.

She peeled the cam off, rubbing at her forehead. "You mind waiting till the Keystones are gone before you
escort
me? Since you wouldn't push me."

"Is that your idea of egg in
your
beer?" Gabe asked, surprising himself.

She smiled at him. She had some smile, he thought. It did things to him, and he wasn't even sure why. She tossed the cam at him, and he caught it with a dexterity he'd seldom found occasion to use outside of a simulation.

"Come on," she said. "You can take a little walk with me."

"Hell, no," said Gator. "After checking out on me like that, I don't think he'd have the nerve to show his dead ass here again." She finished cleaning the needle and put it on the tray. "Especially after the talking-to I gave him. Not to mention the tattoo."

"I don't think he ever noticed it," Rosa said glumly.

"Well, it's harmless anyway," said Gator. "Nowhere near as valuable as what he took out of your mailbox, I'm sure." She gave Rosa a skeptical look. "You really never thought to pop the old email out and take a scan?"

"Lot on my mind lately," Rosa said. "Besides, I had it automated. Anything that came in would go right into off-line storage. I didn't figure he'd bother about that."

Sam straightened up from Gator's laptop. "Well, he hasn't checked in anywhere, with or without the data."

"He wouldn't. He's not a hacker," Gator said. She went over and put an ivy design on the screen. "I marked him with this. I can send a copy to everyone in the Tattoo-of-the-Month Club, which happens to be the entire congregation of St. Diz, but I think you want to find him before anyone else does. He's not a hacker, but he knows payday when he sees it, and he knows he can get good bucks for the stuff he ripped from you."

"If he isn't on the Mimosa, I don't know where to look for him," Sam said, exasperated.

Gator frowned. "Oh, I didn't say he wasn't on the Mimosa. I said he hasn't been
here,
with me in the tent. He could be hiding out anywhere along the strip, you might have passed him without knowing it."

"Great," said Rosa. "Any more good ideas?"

"Sure," Gator said genially. "Find out when the next hit-and-run is leaving, and where it's going. I can just about guarantee Jones'll be right in the middle of it, trying to peddle his prize to one of the hackers running the fooler loops."

"What makes you so sure about that?" Sam asked her.

"The hit-and-run used to be Jones's home away from home, before he hooked up with Keely. He was always hanging on, trying to get canned with somebody famous so he could get his picture on the dataline. Or escape with somebody famous so he could go home with them and get toxed on the good stuff."

"That's kind of risky for us," Sam said doubtfully. "Since we made the top ten. If we get pulled in at a hit-and-run, we'll probably disappear like Keely."

"Leave early," said Gator.

"You're a major help," Rosa said irritated.

Gator smiled and bent over the laptop. "I can give you a couple of IDs that'll stand up to a hit-and-run arrest, squirt you through court like watermelon seeds. Best I can do under the circumstances. Diz asked me to wait here for Fez."

"St. Dismas?" Sam said.

"Sometimes known as my personal physician," Gator replied.

"You've talked to him?"

Two strips of paper came out of the printer, one after another. Gator handed them over. "He leaves me tattoo designs."

Sam wanted to ask her more about that, but Rosa was pulling her out of the tent. "Come on, we've got a hit-and-run to track down. If we're lucky, maybe we can catch Jones before he leaves for it."

"I wouldn't go out there
with
them," Gator said. "Just find out where they're going and be there."

"Wait a minute." Sam stopped at the flap. "What about you? You're on the top ten, too."

Gator grinned brightly. "Oh, they've already found me. In the Santa Monica morgue. My physician pronounced me dead and wrote up the death certificate a couple of hours ago. Hell, it works for Jones."

The creature was eight feet tall, part samurai—correction, someone's video idea of a samurai—part voodoo apparition, part machine-fantasy, and all high resolution. It moved within a small radius in the center of the room, going through a stylized, complex choreography that reminded Gabe of semaphore. He gaped at it openly from where he sat cross-legged on the floor with his back against a couch, holding a drink he couldn't identify on one knee. He was in somebody's living room, somebody's enormous, endless living room, currently filled with a glittery array of people eating, drinking, wandering in and out, watching the multiple screens on the walls, giving the thing in the center of the room a wide, courteous berth.

Some time ago Gina had brought him here, sometime after the debacle on the terrace, after she'd asked him to take a little walk with her. No,
told
him he could take a little walk with her. Gina didn't ask.

He took another sip of the drink, which he seemed to have been working on for days. It was vaguely herbal, vaguely spicy, definitely intoxicating. Gina had given it to him. Probably told him he could drink it instead of asking him if he wanted anything. He couldn't remember now, any more than he could remember exactly how he'd come to be in this enormous, endless living room.

The guy with the crazy cape passed through his field of vision. In his present state he felt immensely appreciative of the continuous running patterns in the material. If he could have moved, he would have gotten up and gone after the man to thank him for wearing something so marvelously interesting.

He was contemplating that for a while when something moved at the corner of his vision. He turned to look; nothing. Funny; he could have sworn that funny flaw was back, the strange dark spot that had dogged him through various
Head-hunters
settings.

The thought was slow in coining, but eventually it pushed its way through the warm ooze of his mind. No, the glitch wouldn't be here, because he wasn't in simulation right now. Even though it sure felt as if he were. He could summon up Marly's and Caritha's voices in his head just as clearly as if he were hearing them on his headmount speaker. He couldn't really follow what they were saying, but that wasn't so important. The program would move him along, and Marly and Caritha would take care of him. Caritha had the cam, after all; she could tell him whether he was looking at something real, or at a holo.

"Holo, yah," said a voice nearby. "What Valjean spends on holo would finance a new video channel on the dataline. Well, for part of the day, anyway."

The creature in the middle of the room elongated suddenly and changed into a pillar of fire.

"Down!"
Gabe yelled, and flung his arms up over his head, waiting for the blast and the heat. When it didn't come, he lowered his arms a little and looked around. Several people were staring at him curiously. The pillar of fire was still burning away.

Someone tapped him on the head. "I think this is yours." He twisted around; a woman thrust an empty glass at him. Something wet had splashed across the silky top of her dress. She looked half-amused and halfannoyed, the way Marly looked at him on occasion. "You know, if you can't handle the lotus, you probably shouldn't touch it."

"Got it," someone else said. Gabe turned back to see a short woman in coveralls holding a handcam. Not Caritha. Right, she wouldn't be here now, he thought, confused. "It's going to make a great effect," the woman was saying. "We'll take the splash and fan it out, it'll look like he's throwing diamonds on you. The party animals'll go bugfuck for it." She looked down at Gabe. "I don't remember getting a video release from you. Sign one before you leave, or I'll have to slip in a sub for you."

"Then this
is
a video?" Gabe said, even more confused.

"That's what they pay me for." The woman said something else, but he ignored her as he struggled to stand up, looking around the room. If this was a video, Marly and Caritha would be here somewhere. He would find them, and they could go track down more headhunters.

He swam through the room, looking around. Faces came at him and bobbed away again like painted balloons. ". . . keep sending my agent clips of these things," a voice nearby was saying, "and he keeps telling me to stay out of insty-party video. I don't understand that.
I
say if the cam loves you, the cam loves you. It loves me, and I deserve to work."

Gabe couldn't hear the reply, if there was one. He found himself facing an array of screens set into a wall, all of them displaying a different sequence of images. His eyes shifted back and forth in a frenzy as he tried to make sense of each one, and for several moments dizziness threatened to knock him over.

There was a sudden firm grip on his arm.
"That
one's pretty interesting, if you're a connoisseur of tech-fantasy porn." A warm hand turned his face slightly to the left and down. He was looking at a strange gold machine with two gleaming cones rising out of the framework on goosenecks. The point of one cone was running back and forth along glowing symbols painted on an endless stretch of transparent material feeding from an unseen source; the point of the other cone was buried in the head of a woman sitting motionless in a chair next to the machine.

"Headhunters," Gabe whispered.

"Good guess, but the real title is
Need to Know,"
said the same voice close to his ear. "It's an indictment of our present system of information dispersal. You're allowed to know only those things the information czars decide that you need to know. They call it 'market research' and 'efficient use of resources' and 'no-waste,' but it's the same old shit they've been doing to us for more than a hundred years—keep 'em confused and in the dark. You gotta be a stone-home super-Renaissance person to find out what's really going on. Don't you agree?"

Gabe couldn't look away from the image on the screen. It was almost as bad as what he'd seen in the ward.

"What ward?"

Talking without realizing it; he seemed to be doing that a lot tonight. "Where they punch holes in people's heads and steal their neurotransmitter."

There was a pause. "You must watch a lot of tech-fantasy porn. I knew it. I could tell just by looking at you."

He turned to look at the person who was speaking to him. The face wouldn't come clear of the ornate drifting patterns falling past it like veils, but he was sure it was neither Caritha nor Marly. "Excuse me," he said, "I have to find some people."

The house was on fire. No,
he
was on fire. No, he was standing in the pillar of fire. He'd forgotten all about it. Embarrassed, he tried to step out of it, and it moved with him in a way that was oddly possessive, as if it had decided to claim him. Adopted by a pillar of fire; the program certainly was frisky today. He peered through the flames. A small knot of people gathered near another machine were applauding him. He turned away, wandering around in a small circle as he tried to get his bearings. There was the wall of screens, he must have come from there—no, there was another wall of screens, maybe he'd come from
there.
The people were still applauding. Abruptly the flames parted, and he was standing outside of the pillar. A woman in an open military-style coat with fringe on the shoulders did something to the machine and then shook her head at him.