Warp (11 page)

The flow of the tide carries a flat-bottomed skiff on the current, faster and faster, out towards the bay, faster and faster and faster and faster.

Eileen smoothed his forehead with her hand.

“There, then,” she said. “There, then.”

 

CHAPTER 6

FRIDAY, 4:15 A.M.

Twenty minutes later, Hollis was downstairs in the vestibule of his apartment building. Even inside it was cold, and he could see his breath in the air. The floor was decorated with tiny colored mosaic tiles, and littered with red-and-white Chinese menus and thick bundles of newsprint coupons.

It was still dark out. He sat down on the icy marble steps and looked out through the glass door at the hotel across the street: all the lights were out, and chintzy white curtains hung in the windows. In the parking lot a pair of police cars idled, their driver's-side windows facing each other. Plumes of white exhaust from their engines floated up into the light of the streetlights.

Pulling his coat around him, Hollis stepped out onto the stoop. The early-morning air was bitterly cold. He leaned back against the door. His face felt a little raw from having been hastily washed and shaved. A pair of headlights caught his eye as they appeared at the top of the hill. He watched them as they headed towards him. At the last possible second the car slowed down and stopped, its tires whimpering on the pavement.

It was a clean, sleek, new-looking gray Lexus sedan. Hollis could barely hear the engine running. A moth fluttered crazily in front of one of the headlights, in and out of the thick white beams.

One day, my son, all this will be yours.

Hollis jogged down the steps, between the parked cars, and out into the street. He opened the door: it was warm in the car, and Peters sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead at the road, wearing a furry leather hunting cap with earflaps. There were dark circles under his eyes. Hollis climbed in and Peters eased off the brake. They rolled forward up to the stoplight at the corner.

“Pretty nice car,” said Hollis, while they waited.

Peters nodded.

“Where's your hat?” he said.

“I don't have one.”

“Take one.” Peters gestured towards the backseat. “Have a hat. Thieves always have hats.”

Hollis turned around; there was a fedora on the backseat. He made a face and turned back around again.

“My father wears those,” he said.

“How is the old man, anyway?”

The light changed, and Peters stamped on the accelerator.

“Who knows?” said Hollis.

Trees, street signs, and gray stoops flew by. They passed a block of nicer buildings with identical green canopies over the doorways; in the window of each one was an identical little brass-colored chandelier.

“Did you sleep?”

“No,” Peters said. “Blake and I played poker at his place.”

“Did you win the car?”

“We stuck to bets I could cover.”

“A deck of cards is the devil's prayerbook.”

Peters nodded, yawning.

“I'm not really feeling all that verbal right now, dude,” he said.

They beat three or four red lights in a row until they reached the main intersection, where Hollis had gotten off the bus half an hour earlier. The street corners were mostly empty now, and in the window of a Woolworth's Hollis could see rows of cages with parakeets in them, in various fluorescent colors, sleeping with their heads resting on their own shoulders. There was no other traffic, and when the light changed Peters pushed the Lexus up to fifty. The road widened out into eight lanes. Off to their left the Charles appeared and disappeared in the darkness between the buildings. They cut right through the BU campus, with high-rise classroom buildings on one side and rows of campus stores on the other.

Hollis leaned his seat back and closed his eyes.

IT WAS A RACE TO THE EDGE OF SPACE …

The ship was the size of a six-story apartment building, and not much more aerodynamic. The squared-off hull was built for interstellar flight, and in the thick lower atmosphere it was all he could do to keep its nose pointed at the sky. The gravity projectors that held it up were drawing every last watt of reserve power.

He knew he had no hope of outrunning the nimble military fighters that harried him, but there was a chance his shielding might hold out until they reached the ionosphere. Then the hyperdrive would kick in, and in an instant the bulky ship would become as quick and agile as a fish in water. It was a race to the edge of space.

If only, he thought, if only I knew for sure it was a race I wanted to win.…

After another five minutes Peters swung them up the on-ramp to the westbound Massachusetts Turnpike. When the plump middle-aged woman in the tollbooth leaned down to give Peters his ticket, her blouse fell open a little, and even from the passenger seat Hollis got a generous look at her freckled cleavage. She wore an ebony pendant shaped like a fish. Then they were through, and Peters pushed them up to eighty-five without the engine showing any sign of strain.

“What are we going to do when we get there?” Hollis said drowsily. “I mean, shouldn't we talk about it beforehand?”

“Good question,” said Peters. “I don't really know.”

Hollis grimaced and closed his eyes again.

There was a pretty girl on my vidphone screen.

I'd never seen her before. It was the last time I was to see her alive.

“EEC security is chiefly dependent on the Mendel algorithm for generating its passcodes,” she was saying. “Once you have the encryption chip, you'll be able to walk right in the front door.”

She started reciting a long list of interface parameters. The vidphone display showed a pretty oval face, with a high forehead and short brown hair wrapped up in a scarf. The room in the background was dark and indistinct.

“Your Mitsubishi-Hirsch contact will be at the gate,” she went on. “He has a tattoo, here”—she touched a place on her neck—“that will register only with your augmented vision. Don't break stride when you see him.”

“Wait,” I said. “Wait a minute. Who are you?”

She cut me off. I realized only then that she couldn't hear me. I was talking to a recording.

“If my status at EEC has not been compromised, I may still be alive when you receive this message. Do not try to contact me. For our mutual safety, we must never meet.”

The girl's eyes seemed to lock with mine, and there was a trace of pleading under the even coolness of her demeanor. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.

“Watch for the sign of the black fish.”

The vidphone screen went dark.

A two-by-four lying in the road flashed in the headlights for an instant, and Peters swerved nimbly to put it between the front wheels. Hollis watched him feel around with one hand for the cigarette lighter, then look down and punch it in.

“I guess it should be me who goes in,” Peters said finally. “If they catch me I'll be sort of fucked, because they know who I am, but on the other hand they probably won't call the police or anything. They'll just be a little weirded out—like, what am I doing robbing their house?”

“Good question,” said Hollis.

“Even if I step in, they'd probably call the police on you. That would be a disaster.”

“I can't imagine what you'd say.”

“Besides, I know the house,” Peters said. “It'll take five minutes. Max. You just stay in the car.”

Hollis nodded and looked out the window.

“We'll never make it there by dawn,” he said.

The lighter popped back out, but Peters didn't seem to notice.

The elevated highway slowly descended towards ground level as they left the city. In the darkness, beyond the pale sand of the shoulder, a bumpy line of dark trees flew by. A wide, placid reservoir appeared, and it took almost a minute for it to slide slowly past in the moonlight. There was a tiny island in the middle, with trees that leaned out from the shore to overhang the dark water.

Our island home is far beyond the waves.

“Is it still daylight savings time now?” Hollis asked.

“Not anymore, old sport. Look for a sign that says 128. 128 or 95, they're the same thing. Jesus, it's been ages since I did this.”

He reached up and angled the rearview mirror so he could look into it. Pushing back his bangs, he examined his forehead.

“I ate a whole bag of potato chips with Blake,” he said. “It was disgusting.”

“Are you looking for boils?”

“Boils? What are boils? Pimples.” He looked again. “Jesus. I think I can see my third eye.”

“At camp we used to call them fee-foos.”

Hollis glanced into the backseat again. There was a Wesleyan sticker on the back window.

“Do you think Blake really owns this thing?” he said.

“I don't know. He's no pauper, our Blake. Look at the registration, if you're insatiably curious. He ain't no pauper, and he sure ain't no prince. I of course abjure all material wealth.”

Peters straightened the mirror out again, and Hollis opened the glove compartment and started looking through the sheaf of papers inside. He stopped and held up a little spiral notebook.

“Check this out,” he said. “Someone's keeping track of every time they stop for gas. What their mileage was, how much they used. How much it cost. Some people just have too much energy. What does a registration look like, anyway?”

“Don't worry about it, we're better off not knowing.” He looked out the window at the horizon. “I wonder what time the sun comes up.”

“I dunno.” Hollis closed his eyes again. “I left my almanac in my other suit.”

Peters snorted. “Everybody's a comedian.”

He started singing:

“There is a house in something something

They call the Rising Sun.”

He cleared his throat.

“And it's been the ruin of many a man

And God, I know I'm one.”

Hollis powered down the window a crack, and as they passed another off-ramp he pointed it out.

“That's my home exit,” he said. “I grew up about a mile from here.”

Beams of white light lanced down from somewhere above us, growing a deeper and deeper red as they penetrated into the blood plasma. There was something about it that seemed achingly familiar. Even Peterson abandoned the helm for a minute, to watch through a forward viewport. For a while nobody spoke.

“What is it?” somebody asked finally.

“We've reached the ear,” Peterson said. “We're looking out through the tympanic membrane, from the inside. That light is probably sunlight.”

“Jesus God!” I said. Tears flooded my eyes. “Will we ever get out of the President's body alive? Will this fantastic voyage ever end?”

A giant flashing-arrow sign passed by on their right, mounted on a little yellow trailer in the breakdown lane. The right lane was closed off. The grass of the median strip looked pale in the darkness—sometimes there was a glimmer of water in the middle where the ground was especially low, or even a stand of cattails. Where the strip widened and the opposite lane drifted farther away, whole thickets and groves of trees sprang up. A midnight-blue state trooper parked in a turnaround watched them flash past without moving.

Hollis ran his finger along a seam in the leather upholstery.

“What do you think they'd get us on?” he said. “I mean, if we got caught.”

“Breaking and entering, I guess. I don't know. Criminal trespassing. General moral turpitude. Why?”

“I dunno.”

Hollis glanced up at the sky through the blued-glass band at the top of the windshield and frowned.

“Maybe we can get Blake arrested, too. It's his car. He aided and abetted us.”

“Sure, let's all get arrested. Hey, what happened with that girl the other night?”

“What girl?” said Hollis. “I don't know any girls.”

“From Amanda's party. She had some Russky name.”

“Oh. Tanya. I actually went out with her the other night,” he said. “Friday night. We went out for a drink, and then we ended up sitting around in her apartment. It was sort of gothic—she has some kind of obscure wasting disease that nobody knows what it is. She has to eat this special macrobiotic herb all the time, that she grows herself. Her whole apartment is full of little trays of it.”

“Sounds bucolic,” Peters said. “Pastoral.”

“It wasn't, though, it was a disaster.” He stared out the window. “She started talking about Bob Mould, and what a genius he's supposed to be, and I faded out.”

“You have to cut these girls some slack, Hollis—they feel like they have to say a certain amount of stuff, you know, first, so if you actually sleep together it won't just turn out to be an empty sex act.”

Peters looked over at him, then back at the road.

“It's supposed to be a medium for communication, right? So there has to be something that's being communicated. They know it doesn't really matter all that much what it actually is, exactly, but you can't just
do
it: you have to say something first. It's like foreplay. Do your part. Quit being so genuine all the time. You're going to have to start dissembling a little.”

He stopped and punched in the cigarette lighter again.

“If you ever want to get any.”

“Maybe I don't want any,” said Hollis.

“Sure you do. Everybody wants some. Maybe if you had a job you'd be more in circulation.”

“I don't really want a job either,” said Hollis. “To be brutally frank.” He powered the window back up.