The Pure Cold Light (25 page)

She crossed the room out of sight. “In the last twenty years,” she said as she dressed, “SC has become part of everything. The vegetables in that stir-fry we ate probably came off SC-owned land, or from their seed or was fed their fertilizers. Same with the melons. The rail cars that brought them to Vine Street. The shots you got today—they
definitely
owned that formula. The president—hell, the president’s nothing but a corporate foreskin. He’s been signing laws year after year, slicing away individual rights that most people didn’t even know they had. The kind of rights that won’t kick in till SC decides it likes the property somebody owns  or the product they’re selling … like with Mars.”

“Mars?”

“‘If not today, then tomorrow, a new world awaits you.’ Ever hear that?”

“I think I saw it on a poster, on the Geoplatform.”

She nodded. “The promise of Mars. We can’t even live on it for another generation at least, but guess who’s got the rights to all the shopping malls?”

He pursed his lips. “I was wondering how big they were.”

“You have no idea. Neither have I.” She stepped into her red-violet shoes and adjusted the straps, then looked in one of the overhead mirrors. “Ah, the hair’s a hornet’s nest, but I’ll still turn a few heads, eh? Come on with me.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve been held hostage long enough. Besides, you just wasted my only remaining cigarette, oaf. Those things are obscenely expensive, but at least Grofé’s is attached to a shop.”

“Chikako, you can’t go out. They’re sure to be looking for us. If they got to Lyell—”

“Well, fuck them, Angel!” She walked over to him, then bent down and kissed his cheek, looked him in his one dark eye. “Eventually, if they don’t kill you first, you’re going to reach a point where even you say, ‘fuck them.’ It’s as American as subverting justice.” She grinned.

Troubled by her tone, he asked, “Are you all right?”

“Actually, yes, I am.” She straightened up. “I’ve gotten extremely laid and bathed, and I’ve eaten and slept. All of a sudden as I speak to you, I realize I’ve been ScumberCorp’s hostage for years. I said ‘Thank you’ when they gave me the Isis post instead of shipping me to a mining station, which is the equivalent of fucking in Hell till you die. You know, I’ve been cringing on the inside—for years! You think I’m brave, but that’s because you haven’t discovered yet how people disguise fear. They make it come out looking like fury. Angry people are mostly scared people. Stupid, isn’t it?”

“Chikako—”

“You put on that shirt and jacket, señor, and come meet me for a drink. Let’s take a little risk.” She opened the door and stepped into the hall before he could think of a way to stop her.

In a mad rush he put on the pink shirt Mallee had brought for him, then the charcoal gray jacket of Gansevoort’s. He had to drape it over his bad arm, which had developed an acute ache in the shoulder joint. He supposed the injections had worn off. The shirt had one of those collars like Gansevoort’s that expanded into a sort of ruff, but he didn’t know how to manipulate it. He rolled it loosely down.

As he was about to leave, he saw her gold cigarette case on the divan, and snatched it as he went by. He tucked it into his inside pocket.

Before the door, he stared at himself in the mirror and remembered the LifeMask. Dutifully, he went back for it.
 
He pulled it on clumsily, one-handed, as he strode down the hall.

In the shadow of the curtain he lingered, surveying the tearoom. A dozen or so people, mostly men, sat or lay on their sides in the room, each booth with its own efficient attendant. He couldn’t see everybody but recognized no one.

A television screen had been lowered in the corner on his left. Some kind of CD-I program was displayed, a lined game board with black and white circles on it in clusters. He couldn’t tell who had the remote responder.

Two women pushed through the curtains, and he stepped aside to let them pass. He saw Chikako then, just past the opposite doorway, standing at the bar. After making sure his mask was on straight, he stepped out, and, head low, started across the tearoom.

He kept his eyes on her. She must have sensed him. She turned toward him, stuck her hands out and parted the drapes wide, rustling the palm tree, smiling broadly. She had a fresh red cigarette in her fingers.

Her expression stiffened, eyes shifted, going wide.

“No, Angel!” she cried and sprang at him. He stumbled back against a table in alarm. Instinct made him reach for the gun he no longer had. The doctors had removed it. His knuckles rapped against the gold case.

Hand outstretched, Chikako Peat slammed past him. Her shoulder hit him hard enough to turn him. He saw, past her hand, the muzzle of the gun—black like the ones in the school—coming to bear on him. He stared into the eyes of the familiar, placid, blond face, and realization dropped through him like a cannonball.
 

His own face,
his
assigned mask from the school, had come to kill him.

The killer fired, and blood ripped out of Chikako’s hand. Two fingers and the cigarette were gone. She gasped. Someone else screamed. He tasted her blood on his lips.

The maskface fired again, this time into her body. Her right arm swung back, slapping Angel’s head. He stumbled into the table again.

The crowd dived for the floor, crouching in their booths. Tabletops flipped up to shield them. Silverware danced through the air. The third shot flung Chikako back into him. He wrapped his arms around her, trying to prop her up.
 

Past her neck, he saw the gun swinging, the hole like an iris open wide, looking for the spot in him to bore into.

Suddenly, she pushed off him, wrenching free of his grasp. She pounced on the killer. The gun fired. The bullet buzzed past his ear. Chikako and her adversary crashed against a booth, then into the nearest table, flipping it off its pedestal. Drinks and food flew like shrapnel, skittered, and shattered. She slapped at the charming electronic face, glimpsed Angel still there behind her, and screamed, “Get away, goddamit!” An awful, bloody gouge had torn her cheek.

She stabbed with her lacquered nails into the LifeMask’s eyes. The false face flickered like a tired fluorescent bulb. The gun fired again. Her body bucked, her back tore open. Screaming in rage and pain, she hammered her fist into the gray mask.

Someone took hold of Angel and yanked him away. He swung around, but did not recognize Mallee for a second. Her horror amplified his own numbness. She had the presence of mind to act. She shoved him through the curtains, dragged him out past the diners, crouching like mice under their tables. Out the front entrance. “Run and don’t stop,” she ordered.

“Chikako—”

“No chance. She’s dead. It was for
you
, you bastard, now
go
!” Another shot went off. “
Get the fuck out of here
!”

A small crowd was gathering outside the door. They stared at him as at a cornered beast. He bolted, and they jumped aside, shrieking.

Mallee slammed and bolted the door.

***

Furiously, Mingo shoved the dead woman off him.

She had been nearly impossible to kill, as if she had been wired up on drugs. He ought to have opened up on full automatic and leveled the place; but he’d thought it was going to go smoothly.

He crawled to his feet and looked around. No one was about to come near him, but no doubt security was headed here right this minute. The mask, he could tell, had shorted out, useless, incommodious; but the cringing customers all would have seen—they would all recognize the face well enough to identify it. He could take that little satisfaction away with him.

Painfully, he stepped over the corpse, then fled, limping, through the rear curtains, into the deeper reaches of Grofé’s. A few doors hung open, people looking out, some so disoriented that they still wore their
virtual
goggles. Many yanked their heads back in as he ran past. Some of them were naked, but their perversions did not interest Mingo at the moment. He’d memorized the club’s layout, where other exits lay.

His left thigh burned each time he put the weight of his body on it. In the center of each flash of pain, he pictured Angel Rueda, dead and dismembered.

That dimwit bullgod had actually changed sides, thrown in with the enemy! No corpse of Rueda’s and the damnable guard on duty
shoots
him. Well, it was all too much.

He ought to have been in a hospital with a wound that severe—everybody told him that and he even agreed with the diagnosis; but he was going to finish this thing first, tonight. No more unexplained phenomena on the Moon, and no more mingling with the stinking, shit-covered proles. After this,
Xau Dâu
was going into retirement.

Once he’d gone far enough, Mingo unlocked the mask and peeled it off. He tossed it aside as he ran. It still carried a code assigning it to Angel Rueda. That should finish him if nothing else did. Even Overcity security would know to hunt him down, provided Mingo didn’t get him first. God, but the man was slippery. Mingo was beginning to think he was hunting some kind of trickster.

Mingo touched his face where it stung and found congealing blood on his fingertips. The Peat woman had shredded his cheek right below the eye. The tiniest bit higher and she would have torn out his eyeball. He smiled grimly, reliving the triumph of having silenced her. That leak had been patched permanently. There remained only Gansevoort to eliminate, which could wait until all the other loose ends had been fixed. Gansevoort—he had to laugh—they’d left the naive boob tied to a chair for six hours. Heaven keep him from honest men!

Mingo slammed out the exit door, ignoring the alarm he set off. He glanced around immediately for any sign of Angel in the deserted corridor. Stranger things had happened, but not this time. He hurried along the alleyway.

He asked himself where a man with no memory would run to. As an intellectual exercise, it intrigued him. Peat had obviously selected Grofé’s—that had been a simple enough puzzle to solve. This, now, would require more existential contemplation.

Mingo straightened his jacket, tucked away the gun, and put on his dark glasses, then walked quickly but not obtrusively around the corner and into the main flow of late evening traffic. He dabbed gingerly with his scarf at the gouge in his cheek. From behind the tinted lenses, he stared intensely into people’s eyes, believing himself gifted with the power to read in their look any confusion or dismay that a running man would have left, as though he could peer into each retina and locate an image burned there.

A team of security uniforms charged past, and most heads turned to watch them. Mingo pretended to rub at his eyelid.
 

He could not refrain from a self-satisfied smirk. That whore had been nothing other than a cool gadfly, yet she had succeeded in squeezing the company for years with her threat of “private files.” No doubt there would be some fallout as a result of her demise. Naughty picture disks or some such. A few heads would roll. People in power could not afford to exercise their perversions—when would they ever learn? It made the work of people like himself so much more difficult. This way, at least, the equation balanced out. SC might lose some executive material, but they would gain in the end.

“If you’d only listened to me …” he muttered.

After a few minutes’ search, he concluded that Angel had fled the twenty-third floor. There weren’t enough people about to conceal him.

Mingo took an escalator to the nearest skyway level—the eighteenth—and hailed a pedicab. “Locust Walk Tower,” he said. The cyclist eyed him suspiciously but as quickly started pedaling.

Overcity security resided in Locust Walk. He would use their facilities to track his prey while their people sorted out the mess he had just left in Grofé's. If they were pleasant, he might even help them to connect the one with the other.

A large group exited from a theater court. Through the crowd he glimpsed a LifeMask and went for his pistol only to discover, as the cab rolled past, that it was someone apparently crippled, probably disfigured, walking via a CNS-stimulating prosthesis.

He clucked his tongue, tucked the gun away, and contemplated how accidents happened every day. Angel Rueda’s being alive was thus far a series of enormous accidents—who could have predicted it?

Security would turn up Rueda, however. There was no place in the Overcity he could go that their lenses weren’t scanning right now. If only the bastard had kept his original mask, Mingo could have tracked him anywhere on the planet. If only he hadn’t had to go deal with that errant skimmer pilot on the Moon while Rueda was fitted with a cortical calotte, he would have had the stupid surgeon place a tracking device inside it. He hadn’t really expected that he would ever need it, and had let the matter drop. Accidents again. Nothing but accidents. Too many accidents and none in his favor.

He took solace in the hope that Rueda would lead him now to the third party, the uninvited guest—the woman who had aided in the escape from ICS-IV, who had seemingly evaporated afterward. She wasn’t one of the twitchers nor one of the staff. No one who’d survived had any idea who she was. There would have been a record of her visit if the rioting children hadn’t destroyed every active disk in the place. There ought to have been security images of her, only that fool Gansevoort had come along and used his clout to escort her around the checkpoint.
Accidents
.

She was a ghost, this woman, a phantom. Mingo yearned to meet her. Just once.

Chapter Eighteen: Underworld Blues

It was raining when he reached the plaza—a steady downpour washing the more recent human egesta into dark crevices and drains. Where hamburgers and
cha gio
had recently been consumed under Mingo’s governance, Angel lingered on a chipped stone bench and gathered his frayed wits.

Most certainly, Chikako Peat was dead. A few hours ago they had been of one body; and the memory brought to him her perfume, the scent of those herbal smokes, the voice that mocked him while extending comfort, that hexagram tattoo from her former employ: “
Hsien
,” she’d identified it. “Wooing.” Her voice, full of irony, rang out so sharp and clear in his mind that he could not help gazing up to see her, a
fata morgana
riding the hiss of the rain in the dark, lost to him.