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 half-annoyed, 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.