“All right,” I said, “where the hell’s my moistware?”
“I am afraid that those items have now become evidence in the trial of the renegade officers,” the captain said with rehearsed sincerity.
“Look, I’ve got an interview to do in less than three hours. I need my equipment.”
“I’m sorry. The trial should take place in a few days. When it is over you can return here to pick up your belongings.”
This was his petty revenge, I realized. My only chance was to scare it out of him. I straightened my spine a little to get the full advantage of my height, looked down into his left pupil, and said: “Would you care to give the Russian populace an explanation for this bureaucratic obstructionism? Or would you rather just get me my property?”
“I regret that—”
“Captain, you have a transmission coming in,” said the Post-cop at the front desk. “It’s marked triple-urgent.”
“Triple…? If you will wait one moment.”
“Of course,” I said. He walked around behind the desk and took the plug the receptionist proffered. As he turned away and inserted it, the assignments on the monitor above the desk dissolved into a single word, flashing: NOW, NOW, NOW.
I’d had the same idea myself. I ducked out the front door and took the stairs down to the street three at a time. Then I stopped cold. In front of me was a wall of wasps, all electronically parked, so that there was barely a centimeter between them. I could go down the sidewalk, but I’d be a sitting duck. I turned around and saw the captain clattering down the stairs, with a whole parade of Postcops behind him. Trapped, I backed up till I tripped on the curb and stumbled against a wasp. In my panic, I barely noticed that the car was not cold, like metal, but taut and warm and muscled, like the shoulder of a horse.
“Put your hands in the air,” the captain called out. I noticed he didn’t say please. I tried to comply, but my arms were stuck. As the Postcops raised their guns, I realized that I had sunk into the wasp up to my elbows, as if it were quicksand.
“Put your hands up! This is your last warning!”
“I’m trying!” I called out, but the car had already enveloped me. Something cold touched the back of my head. A thick black liquid wrapped itself around my eyes, and forced its way into my mouth and nostrils. I wanted to gag, but my throat would not obey the impulse. Then my mind folded in on itself, like a burning spider, and for a long time I felt nothing more.
Fifteen
PHAETON
Stop trying to breathe,” said a voice in my ear. “You’re only making yourself panic.”
“Keishi—”
“Don’t try to use your mouth, just think it. If you just forget about your body, you’ll be all right.”
“Where are we? Why can’t I see anything?”
“We’re a couple hundred kilometers out of Arkhangelsk. You can’t use your eyes to see; just look.”
I did. I was in the front seat of a car, with Keishi sitting next to me. The road was rushing past at an improbable rate. I reached up and felt the driver’s helmet wrapped around my head, with braided cables trailing from it.
“Did we escape? Am I alive?”
“Nothing gets by you, does it?”
I tried to laugh, but the helmet choked me.
“Laugh on the inside,” she advised.
“Keishi, I could kiss you,” I said.
“No, you couldn’t,” she said matter-of-factly, “because for one thing, I’m still in Arkhangelsk, and for another thing, you’ve got a car in your mouth.”
“Oh. I… I thought maybe it was really you this time.”
“Soon,” she said.
“Sooner than my death?”
“Don’t talk that way. Do you see anyone following us?”
“No,” I said. We were far from the city by now, and the lights on the dashboard informed me we were at 300 kph and climbing. “What kind of car is this?”
“Postcop pursuit vehicle.”
“Oh, gods,” I said, and tried to bury my face in my hands—only to remember that I couldn’t move my head. “You just had to dig us even deeper.”
“Maya,” she said in exasperation, “it doesn’t get any deeper than you were. How much we piss off the Postcops is no longer an issue. They’re as pissed as their moistware will let them get.”
“I guess that’s true. Won’t they be able to trace this car, though?”
“Not a chance. The license plate’s a hologram, which I’m changing at random intervals. The color cycles through the full spectrum, too gradually to notice. And on top of that, I used the onboard computer to give every car in Leningrad the same registration number. Everything but the kitchen sink in these babies.”
“How’d you steal it? Don’t they have alarms?”
“I signed it out to Officer Pudding. One of our pal Voskresenye’s back doors.”
“How many back doors are there in the Postcop computers?”
“Uh, before or after today? I think I’ve used up about half of them.”
“Terrific,” I said. The adrenaline high of finding myself free was beginning to wear off. I tried to look out the side window, only to find that there wasn’t one. “Where are we going?”
“Arkhangelsk, of course. You’ve got an interview to do.”
“But I don’t even have a camera chip!”
“Check the glove box,” she said smugly.
“I don’t think I can….”
“Oh, right.” A segment of the dashboard slid aside, revealing the rosebox I had left under the bathroom sink.
“How did you get this here if you’re still in Arkhangelsk?”
“I, um…” She looked at me, then turned away and said meekly, “I sort of hired someone to break into your house.”
I looked at her in anger, but immediately relented. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Look,” I said, “moistware or no moistware, I’m never going to get on the air. The first thing the Postcops’ll do when they figure out what happened is to call Netcast and have my time slot revoked.”
“Yeah, they already did that.”
I sighed in frustration. “Then why are we going to Arkhangelsk?”
“Wanna hear my impression of a Net executive?”
I stared at the side of the road, having figured out how to pan the vehicle’s cameras. “I’m not going to get out of this, am I? Sooner or later we’ll run out of back doors and luck. At the outside, maybe I’ll manage to do the Netcast and die famous. But probably not even that. Chances are I’ll never even get to meet you.”
“But the Netcast changes everything,” she said earnestly. “The world will be following your every move. You’re going to have a lot of people watching over you.”
“You mean I’ll be surfed.”
She nodded sadly. “I’m afraid so.”
I shook my head a little, which made the helmet tug uncomfortably against my sockets. “I’m not sure which is worse—dying, or having every prepubescent in Russia trying to get behind my eyes.”
“But it’s only for a little while. Before all this happened I was going to build you a shield, but instead I’m going to take out the defenses you already have. The Postcops won’t come for you when you’ve got a thousand people in your head. It’s not in their programming.”
“They’ll find a way,” I said.
“Eventually. But by that time, I’ll have you in Africa.”
I laughed without humor. “You better get that screening chip checked out. You’re not getting good color fidelity.”
“It doesn’t matter how white you are, you can still get political asylum. You know how His-Majesty-In-Chains feels about suppressor chips. Your encyclopedia is as good as a passport.”