Jack was fairly certain that he’d missed morning. At the very least, the folks here at GFI had gone to a lot of trouble to create the illusion of a midwinter night, once upon a time. He gazed at tents and tables, fluttering pennons of gold and crimson video screens that showed GFI’s dirigibles silhouetted against a slowly turning pinwheel sky. There were people everywhere, revelers in costume and black tie, kimonoed men and women, guests in formal robes, and some who were all but naked, save for gold-mesh caches-sexe and dominoes covering their faces; and almost as many uniformed security personnel.
“Let’s find a goddamn place to sit,” complained a white-haired man, maskless, tuxedoed, his eyes invisible behind silvery plasmer.
“Let’s find a goddamn bar.”
Jack looked over to see an elegantly spare woman with sleek blond hair, bare shoulders thrusting from a column of hyaline silk. For an instant he thought she must recognize him, from some long-ago New York Public Library benefit or barbecue in the Hamptons. Then he saw the quiver of fear in her eyes, a tremor in the too-taut skin around her mouth. She turned away and took her companion’s arm, steering him toward a cluster of security guards beneath a video screen displaying an aerial view of the Pyramid.
Jack stopped, brow furrowed. The woman had been afraid of him. He was disheveled. Unshaven, too; and maskless; no expensive placebits or plasmer, no facial tattoos or identifying brands; nothing but skin.
He shivered. Snow brushed his forehead. When he wiped it away, it left a greenish sheen to his fingers. He thought of what Nellie had told him of GFI’s plans to distribute the fusarium bacteria, and a wave of nausea went through him. Cold wind played at his face, redolent of balsam; he could also smell a trace of acrid smoke, raw sewage, the standing-water scent of the city. If he stared beyond the scrim of stars and pared moon, he could see the structural grid of the dome; beyond that, something else lodged within the real sky like a bullet in a wound. A glistening golden shape, outlined with red lights that spelled out GFI then melted into the image of a gryphon holding a globe in its claws. Not far from it another, and another. He counted seven of them, an unmoving school of skyborne leviathans. A field of black spread between them like a stain—the sky platform, part of the payload to be towed into the upper atmosphere tonight.
…Because I was the one who provided them with fifty-seven sheets of collodion cotton soaked with nitroglycerin, all of which have been incorporated into the Fougas’ outer structure…
In the distance he heard an orchestra tuning up, the echoing snarl of feedback, and a voice booming from a loudspeaker. A liveried woman approached him, carrying a tray of champagne flutes. Jack took a glass from her gloved hand. As she left, two security people passed in a haze of electrified chatter, glancing at him. Jack sipped his champagne. Within minutes he felt light-headed. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He still didn’t feel hungry; the opposite, in fact, strung-out but intently focused. He wondered what would happen if he approached security and told them about the bomb.
He finished the champagne. The waitress reappeared. He set his empty glass on her tray and took another full one, watched as more and more people filled GFI’s winter palace.
Someone sure had a lot of friends. And probably they wouldn’t like it if some emaciated, scruffy-looking, no doubt virulent guy, who didn’t even have the decency to wear a mask, started raving about bombs. He thought of Jule, of Nellie Candry slumped elsewhere within the Pyramid. He would be detained again, maybe permanently, an unknown man connected with two suspicious deaths.
“Happy New Year!” A creamy-skinned young girl, no makeup, no mask, tossed a handful of glitter at him. “Happy New Year!”
She turned giggling back to her friends. He watched them go, and thought of flames raining from the sky, burning fuselage, ten thousand panicked people dying in a crush of fire and twisted girders. The world unredeemed by solex shields, all of humanity doomed because Jack Finnegan hadn’t acted on a tip about a terrorist bomb threat. Weighed that against the image of himself being questioned, insisting on the veracity of a dead woman’s ravings about terrorists and psychotropic drugs, while the party of the century went on till dawn without him, and he was finally released to stumble home to his brother’s accusing eyes. He thought of Leonard here, somewhere in his stained leather motley: the Lord of Misrule. He thought of kissing Larry Muso, of making love to him and holding him afterward, the two of them laughing—bombs! what bombs? He thought of Nellie Candry, of the web of connectedness she’d shown him; how easily it could be torn but how that was how the light got through, sometimes.
I should leave, he thought. I could escape now, I could get away from here, somehow get back to Lazyland…
But that would mean never seeing Larry Muso again. That would mean never knowing how it might have all turned out. And he wasn’t quite ready to forgo the chance to see what might have been.
And suddenly, with a clarity that took his breath away, he realized that Leonard had won, after all. They had all won, Julie and Leonard and everyone who had ever urged Jackie Finnegan to go for a dangerous drive, cross against the light, leap off the Brooklyn Bridge, fall in love with strangers.
Because Jack saw it was the jump that mattered: not the presumed safety of the cliff edge, nor the certainty of annihilation at the bottom. It was Chance that mattered, the dizzying recognition that somebody or something was, in fact, playing dice with the world, and had been all along.
Phantom sparks glimmered in the air, green and gold and violet. He glanced again at the dome, half-expecting to see the real and broken sky there, mirroring his own dislocation. He heard a soft roaring, a sound he had heard before—in the wind, in the sea, in the pulse of blood through his ears.
It was, he realized, the sound of things falling apart.
He began to laugh. For the first time in forty-two years, he realized that Free Will and Free Fall could feel very much the same.
I love the sound of breaking glass, he thought.
And hurried to find Larry Muso.
It took him forever to find Electric Avenue. Threading his way among partygoers and fire-eaters, little people, a woman whose body was a mosaic of video-circuitry reflecting the faces of those gawping at her—pausing now and then to take in one of the stage shows. Overhead, corporate logos flamed like Roman candles, their reflections trailing across faces and masks. An orchestra played “Begin the Beguine.” The Jayne County Dance Theater performed excerpts from Elektra. There was a survey of the Broadway musical from its vaudeville origins to Assassins; the Kronos Quartet, halfway through Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2. Palm readers, an onychomancer. Clocks, analog and digital, that showed the time here in New York—9:48 P.M.—as well as the hour in every time zone across the world.
And food—acres and acres of food, more food than Jack had dreamed was left in the world. He bypassed the McDonald’s World Market, stopped to eat some caviar and a gummy slice of nova that tasted of petroleum, washed down with more champagne. The alcohol seemed to intensify the effects of the fusarium, if that’s what was causing the flares that pulsed just beyond his vision, the sense of a burgeoning rapture that, like the phantom lights, was just beyond his full comprehension.
He walked unsteadily through what had become a huge crowd. People mobbed the food tents as though they held celebrities. He saw one man filling the pockets of his morning coat with triangles of toast and foie gras. Scuffles broke out, to be immediately put down by security police in flak jackets. Immense video displays showed scenes of millennial revels around the globe: blue-faced dancers in Delhi, drunken parties in Queensland, an ominously quiet Tehran street. The green silence of vanilla farms on Tafahi in the Kingdom of Tonga, the first place on earth where the new millennium would break. Now and then, glimpses of the crowd below. Screaming would erupt then, and cheers. He glanced overhead to see if the Fougas were still there, saw only the shimmer of false stars and the glow of reflected lights within the dome.