“Judge not lest ye be judged,” she slurred.
Another street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.
Above, the stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.
Something. Wrong here.
Alien. Not a single pattern I recognised. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms, and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside, massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians returned. I thought I could see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us …
“Whoa.” Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. “What you looking for up there, grasshopper?”
Not my sky.
It’s getting bad.
In another toilet, painfully brightly lit, I’m trying to stuff some powder Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry and it keeps falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle flushes behind me and I glance up into the big mirror.
Jimmy de Soto emerges from the cubicle, combat fatigues smudged with Innenin mud. In the hard bathroom light his face is looking particularly bad.
“All right, pal?”
“Not especially.” I scratch at the inside of my nose, which is beginning to feel inflamed. “You?”
He makes a mustn’t-grumble gesture and moves forward in the mirror to stand beside me. Water fountains from the light-sensitive tap as he leans over the basin, and he begins to rinse his hands. Mud and gore dissolve off his skin and form a rich soup, pouring away down the tiny maelstrom of the plughole. I can sense his bulk at my shoulder, but his one remaining eye has me pinned to the image in the mirror and I cannot, or don’t want to, turn.
“Is this a dream?”
He shrugs and goes on scrubbing at his hands. “It’s the edge,” he says.
“The edge of what?”
“Everything.” His expression suggests that this much is obvious.
“I thought you only turned up in my dreams,” I say, casually glancing at his hands. There is something wrong with them; however much filth Jimmy scrubs off, there is more underneath. The basin is splattered with the stuff.
“Well, that’s one way of putting it, pal. Dreams, high stress hallucinations, or just wrecking your own head like this. It’s all the edge, see. The cracks down the sides of reality. Where stupid bastards like me end up.”
“Jimmy, you’re dead. I’m getting tired of telling you that.”
“Uhuh.” He shakes his head. “But you got to get right down in those cracks to access me.”
The soup of blood and soil in the basin is thinning out and I know suddenly that when it is gone, Jimmy will be too.
“You’re saying—”
He shakes his head sadly. “Too flicking complicated to go through now. You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ‘cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”
“Jimmy,” I make a helpless gesture, “what the fuck am I going to do?”
He steps back from the basin and his ruined face grins garishly at me.
“Viral Strike,” he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream taken up along the beachhead. “Recall that mother, do you?”
And, flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror’s trick.
“Look,” said Trepp reasonably, “Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even knows if he killed you or not.”
“If he wasn’t already double-sleeved again.”
“No. Think about it. He’s cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He’s fucking out there on his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he’s a strictly limited item. Kadmin’s sell-by date is coming up, you’ll see.”
“Kawahara’s going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.”
“Yeah, well.” Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. “Maybe.”
There was another place, called Cable or something synonymous, where the walls were racked with colour-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped with thin, lethal-looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket flicked spasmodically to the off-beat music that filled the place like water. At times, the components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could he been tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.
I was sitting at the bar, something sweet smouldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I’d been smoking it. The bar was crowded but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.
On either side of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables, eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy half smiles. One of them was Trepp.
I was alone.
Things that might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I picked up the cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.
No time for—
Viral Strike!!!
— thinking.
Streets passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under Jimmy’s boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So that’s how he does it.
The crimson-lipped woman who—
Maybe you can’t—
What? What???
Jack and socket.
Trying to tell you some—
No time for—
No time—
No—
And away, like water in the maelstrom, like the soup of mud and gore pouring off Jimmy’s hands and into the hole at the bottom of the sink …
Gone again.
But thought, like the dawn, was inevitable and it found me, with the dawn, on a set of white stone steps that led down into murky water. Grandiose architecture reared vaguely behind us and on the far side of the water I could make out trees in the rapidly greying darkness. We were in a park.
Trepp leaned over my shoulder and offered me a lit cigarette. I took it reflexively, drew once and then let smoke dribble up through my slack lips. Trepp settled into a crouch next to me. An unfeasibly large fish flopped in the water at my feet. I was too eroded to react.
“Mutant,” said Trepp inconsequentially.
“Same to you.”
The little shreds of conversation drifted away over the water.
“Going to need painkillers?”
“Probably.” I felt around inside my head. “Yeah.”
She handed me a wafer of impressively-coloured capsules without comment.
“What you going to do?”
I shrugged. “Going to go back. Going to do what I’m told.”
PART 4: PERSUASION
(VIRAL CORRUPT)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I changed cabs three times on the way from the airport, paying each one in currency, and then booked into an all-night flophouse in Oakland. Anyone tailing me electronically was going to take a little while to catch up, and I was reasonably sure that I hadn’t been actually followed. It seemed a bit like paranoia—after all, I was working for the bad guys now, so they had no need to tail me. But I hadn’t liked Trepp’s ironic keep in touch as she saw me off from the Bay City terminal. Also, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do yet, and if I didn’t know, I certainly didn’t want anyone else knowing either.