She was all right when they were in view, on the street or in a store - she could act normal for short periods - but when they were inside, in this room or that room or even in a car, zigzagging their way north and west, she would spend the time at her two specialties, crying hopelessly and staring vacantly. Television was no distraction for her, nor was sex. Understandably enough she didn't want Zeb to touch her, though out of gratitude and as a form of payment she offered anything he might want in the way of his being touched himself.
"So you took her up on it?" Toby says, keeping her voice light. How can she be jealous of such a wreck, such a wraith?
"No, as a matter of fact," Zeb says. "No joy in that. Might as well hire a prostibot wank robot in a mall. It was more fun for me to tell her she didn't have to. After that she did let me hug her a little. I thought it might calm her down, but it only made her shiver."
Minta started hearing things - stealthy footsteps, heavy breathing, a metallic clanking sound - and she was frightened every time she went out of whatever squalid hotel room they were staying in. Zeb could have afforded classier lodgings, but it was better to keep to the deep pleeblands, in the shadows.
Sad to say, Minta ended by jumping off a balcony in San Diego. He wasn't in the room at the time, he'd been out getting her a coffee, but he saw the crowd gathering and heard the siren. Which meant he had to leave town in a hurry to avoid the investigation, if any; which in turn meant that his description might be top of the list as a murder suspect, supposing the authorities decided to follow up, which increasingly they didn't. Anyway, where would they start? Minta had no identity. He'd abandoned nothing of his - he made a point of taking everything with him whenever he left a room - but who knows if there were security cameras anywhere near? Not likely in the pleeb shadowlands, but you never knew.
He made it up to Seattle, where he took a quick peek into the Birth of Venus zephyr dropbox he shared with Adam. There was a message for him: "Confirm you're still in the body." Adam sometimes echoed the Rev's speech patterns in a creepy way.
"In whose body?" Zeb posted in reply.
It was an old joke of his: he always used to make fun of that pious no-longer-in-the-body funeral talk of the Rev's. He made that joke so Adam would know it was really him, not some decoy impersonator. In fact, Adam had most likely planted that in-body query on purpose because he'd know Zeb couldn't resist it; whereas a fake Zeb would just give a straight answer. Adam was usually a few twists ahead of the curve.
His next move was up to Whitehorse. He'd heard about Bearlift in a Rio bar and figured it would be a good place to hide out, since nobody would be expecting him to go there. Not Hacksaw, who had a score to settle: they'd look for him in some other hackers' hotspot, such as Goa. And not the Rev either: Zeb had never shown the least interest in wildlife.
"So that," says Zeb, "is how I wound up on the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens wearing a bear skin, and jumping onto a trail biker, and getting mistaken for Bigfoot the Sasquatch."
"Understandable," says Toby. "They might have thought that even without the bear skin."
"You being snarky?"
"It's a compliment."
"I'll mull that over. Anyway, I wasn't sad about the way it turned out."
Fast-forward to Whitehorse again: there he was, washed, dressed, and in his right mind, supposing there was such a thing. He was avoiding the Bearlift headquarters and the usual drinking holes because those people thought he was dead, and why would he want to sacrifice the advantages that non-existence can bring? So he was spending a fair amount of time in the motel room eating faux-peanut objects and sending out for pizza and watching pay-per-view, never mind what, and trying to figure out his next move. Where to go from Whitehorse? How to get out? What was his next incarnation of choice?
Also he was wondering, Who set Chuck up to stick that needle into him? Which of the several parties with an interest in his ill-being would use an inept, A-sombrero dink like Chuck as their choice of poison-dart launcher?
Cold Dish
He existed in two states: his actual camouflaged mode, an anyface with a bogus name; and, in his previous guise, fried to a crisp in a 'thopter crash. Pity about that, some might say, but very convenient for others. And convenient for himself as well.
But he didn't want Adam to think he was dead - there'd been a long communications hiatus during the Bearlift caper - so he needed to make contact before news of that kind leaked out.
He put on all his clothes, including the aviator helmet, the fake goosedown puffy jacket, and the sunglasses, and made a foray to one of the two local net cafes, a tidy operation called Cubs' Corner that served turgid organic soy beverages and undercooked giant muffins. He ordered both: eating the local foods was a principle of his. Then he paid cash for a half-hour of net time and sent a message to Adam via the zephyr dropbox. "Some shithead tried to mort me. Everyone thinks I'm f-ing dead."
He picked up the answer in ten minutes: "Renouncing profanity will improve your digestion. Stay dead. May have job opportunity. Get to New New York area ASAP, connect with me then."
"OK, get me jobcheck ID?" he sent back.
"Y. Will be waiting," Adam replied. Where was he? No clue about that. But he must have landed in a place where he felt safe, or safe enough. That was a relief to Zeb. Losing Adam would be like losing an arm and a leg. And the top part of his head.
He went back to his motel room and thought through the logistics of getting himself to New New York. As a dead person, and with the aid of the temporary patchwork ID he'd put together, he might chance the bullet train once he'd Truck-A-Pillared as far as, say, Calgary.
But the main puzzle was still bothering him. Who'd wanted to nab him via Chuck? He tried to narrow it down. First of all, who could've figured out where he was? Fingered him at Bearlift? By that time his name was Devlon, and before that it was Larry, and before that, Kyle. He didn't look much like a Kyle, but sometimes it was better to go counter-type. And he'd been through at least six earlier names.
He'd bought the better part of the identities on the greyer than grey market, and there was no upside for those guys to sell him out: they had their businesses to run, they had to maintain customer confidence, and anyway they wouldn't have been able to pinpoint a buyer for him. To them he was just one more shirker on the run from bad debts, or rapacious wives, or embezzlement from a Corp, or IP theft, or robbing a convenience store, or a string of psycho murders involving crossdressing and crowbars; they didn't care what. They'd do a preliminary ask, they pretended to have standards and ethics - no baby-fuckers - and he'd serve them up some platters of refried bullshit they both knew was crap. But it was polite to exchange this kind of pewl, just like they'd say, "Happy to help" and so forth, which meant "Let's see the cash."
So for any cybersleuth to pry him out of his layers of fake shell would've meant the expenditure of considerable resources. He'd covered his trail well enough unless they'd known exactly where to look. Whoever it was would need to be very motivated.
He more or less ruled out Ristbones because what did he have on them that could mess them up if leaked? Voting machine hacking was an open secret, but though there was grumbling in the so-called press, nobody really wanted to go back to the old paper system, and the Corp that owned the machines, picked the winners, and took the kickbacks had done a lunar PR job, so anyone who objected too much was smeared as a twisted Commie bent on spoiling everyone's fun, even the fun of those who weren't having any fun. But spoiling the fun they might have later. Their fun-in-the-sky.
So he was no threat to Ristbones because even if he did try to rouse some sort of mouldy civil-society rabble, anyone who'd listen to him would be credited with a terminal case of brain herpes. If he'd been crazy, he might've tried to double-hack the machines - code in his own virtual senator or something - just as a demo project about how easy it was.
"But you weren't crazy," says Toby.
"I might have done it for the lulz, if I'd had the time. It would have
been one of those ephemeral pranks by which sulky keyboard geniuses like me used to signal their ineffectual objections to the system."
"So, not Ristbones, then," says Toby. "Must have been Hacksaw?"
"They had a case for payback," says Zeb. "I'd fishfooded their guard, pilfered their boat, robinhooded one of their maidens in distress; but worse, I'd made them look sloppy. I could see them wanting to stage-manage a public example of me - string me up in chains from a bridge or similar, minus a leg and all my blood; turn me into a gristle display. But in order to capitalize on the publicity they'd have to reveal what I'd done to them, so they'd still lose face.
"Anyway I couldn't see them tracking me as far as Bearlift, way up there in Whitehorse. It was very far from Rio, and most likely they thought it was covered with snow and igloos, if they ever thought about it at all. But more than that, I couldn't see a tightass like Chuck working for those guys. I couldn't even picture them in the same bar together. The Hacksaw types needed to be in a bar with you before they'd take you on, and Chuck didn't compute. He had the wrong wardrobe. None of the Hacksaw guys would be caught dead hiring a guy with such dorky pants."
The more he thought about Chuck - about the yucky-clean Chuckiness of Chuck - the more he figured that was the key. The smarmy friendliness, the fake white-toothed geniality ... He had to be Church of PetrOleum. But no way the Rev and his buds, even hired professional buds, could've tracked Zeb through all his twists and turns. Just no fucking way.
Then he figured he was looking at the whole thing backwards. The Rev, and the whole Church, and their religious joined-at-the-hippers like the Known Fruits, and their political pals - they were all death on ecofreaks. Their ads featured stuff like a cute little blond girl next to some particularly repellent threatened species, such as the Surinam toad or the great white shark, with a slogan saying: This? or This? Implying that all cute little blond girls were in danger of having their throats slit so the Surinam toads might prosper.
By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God's Holy Oil, which were one and the same. And Bearlift, despite its fuzzy reasoning and its clumsy delivery system, was in a geographical area where more oil might well be discovered, or through which it might well be piped, with the usual malfunctions, spills, and coverups.
So naturally the Rev and his circle would've tried to infiltrate Bearlift. Which was none too choosy about who it let in. Chuck must've been a true PetrOleum believer, sent there to keep an eye on the furfuckers and report on the evils they were concocting. He wouldn't have been looking for Zeb in particular, though when he stumbled across him he would've recognized him. He'd been close to the Rev, then: family picture sharing. The ungrateful son. But you ... The son I wish I'd had. Sigh. Wistful smile. Hand on shoulder. Gruff, manly pat-pat. Like that.
The rest would have followed: the snitch report by Chuck, the instructions from the Rev, the obtaining of the knockout needle, the failed attempt in the 'thopter. The flaming wreckage.
Which made Zeb feel angry all over again.
He put on all his clothes once more and sallied forth to send another batch of messages. This time he used the other net cafe in town, PrestoThumbs, a seedier place in a mini-mall. It was right next to a haptic-feedback remote-sex emporium called The Real Feel: "The Real Feel, The Real Deal! Keep It Safe! Thrills, Spills, No Microbes!" But he resisted nostalgia and walked past The Real Feel and logged on at Thumbs.
First he sent a message to the ranking Elder at the Church of PetrOleum, attaching the Rev's embezzlement data and informing him that the actual cash would be found not in the Canary Islands Grand Cayman bank account, where it actually was, but in the form of stocks, in a metal box buried under Trudy's rock garden. He advised the Elder to take not only six men with shovels but also a team of security minions armed with tasers, as the Rev was armed and could be dangerous. He signed the message "Argus." The hundred-eyed giant from Greek mythology, that was him: there were pictures of the guy on the same site that hosted The Birth of Venus. Not that having a hundred eyes made you attractive from an aesthetic point of view. There was a goddess on there with a hundred tits, yet another illustration of the fact that more is not always better.
Having ruined - he hoped - the Rev's upcoming evening, he cleaned out the Rev's secret Cayman account. He'd peeked at it from time to time during his travels to make sure the Rev had followed instructions and was leaving it alone. Yup, it was all still there. He transferred the whole works to an account he'd set up for Adam under the name of Rick Bartleby, for whom he'd also created a convincing identity: Rick was an undertaker in Christchurch, New Zealand. He left Adam a message saying he'd find an account number and a password and a big surprise via the right nipple of Venus. It did him good to picture Adam clicking - finally - on a nipple.
He felt it was only right to send a message to Bearlift as well: let them know they'd been infiltrated by Chuck, say maybe they should do more of a background check on smarmy rear-lickers who turned up out of the blue, especially in new clothes with too many pockets, and maybe alert them to the fact that not everyone found them and their furfucking ways as charming as they found themselves. He signed that message "Bigfoot," which he regretted as soon as he'd hit Send: it was a little too close to a hint.
Then he went back to his crappy motel and sat in the bar where they had a flat-screen, and waited for results from the Rev-O-Rama Show. Sure enough, the discovery of the bones and shreds of Fenella made the evening TV news all over the country. There was the Rev, covering his face while being led away; there was Trudy, sweet as a milkshake, dabbing at her eyes, saying she'd had no idea, and how frightening to have been living all these years with a ruthless killer.
Smart play, points to Trudy: there was no way they could pin anything on her. By that time she must've known about the Rev's secret stash of cash - the Elders would have questioned her about the embezzled funds - and guessed he'd been planning to ditch her. To head out to an offshore safe house, where he could do some basking, and some fondling of underage children, or some flaying of them, whichever appealed to him at the moment. Because of course she'd known, she'd known about his twistiness all along. But she'd chosen not to know.
He got into his winter layers again and hiked to Cubs' Corner, where he sent another message to Adam - a short one, just the URL for where the news item on the arrest was to be found. Adam would surely be pleased: with the Rev out of commission or at least seriously curtailed, both of them could breathe a little easier.
But he needed to leave Whitehorse immediately. The criminal justice folks or equivalent could be trying to trace the message he'd sent to the PetrOleum Elder, and, if they succeeded, they'd start sifting through Whitehorse, which wasn't huge. They wouldn't be looking for Zeb as such - he was dead - but any looking would be bad looking, and it wouldn't take them long to crosshair his position. Maybe they already had: he was getting a bad feeling about that.
So he didn't go back to the motel. Instead he loped out to the nearest highway Truck-A-Pillar stop and hopped a convoy. Once in Calgary, he was able to slide himself onto the sealed bullet train, and after a couple of changes, and before you could say Maybe I Just Did a Really Stupid Thing, he was in New New York.
"A really stupid thing?" says Toby.
"Turning the Rev in and grabbing all his money maybe wasn't so bright," says Zeb. "He must've guessed then that I wasn't really dead. You know what they say about revenge - it's a dish that should be eaten cold, meaning you shouldn't do it out of anger because you'll fuck it up."
"But you didn't," says Toby. "Fuck it up."
"It was almost a fuckup. But I was lucky," says Zeb. "Look, here comes the moon. Some people would call that romantic."
Sure enough, there it is, rising above the tree
s to the east, almost full, almost red.
Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.
Blacklight Headlamp
New New York was on the Jersey shore, or what was now the shore. Not many people lived in Old New York any more, though it was officially a no-go zone and thus a no-rent zone so a few denizens were still willing to take their chances in the disintegrating, waterlogged, derelict buildings. Not Zeb, though; he didn't have webbed feet and a death wish, and New New York - though no paradise - had more people in it, and therefore more background and cover. More of a crowd to blend into.
Once arrived, he ducked into a shoddy soft-pretzel-infested net cafe and sent a checking-in message to Adam - Plan A Yay, What's Plan B? - then cooled his heels while Adam took his time, wherever the fuck he was, whatever the fuck he was up to. His latest terse communication had read merely CU soon.
Zeb had gone to ground in an erstwhile high-life pool-enabled party-roomed condo complex called Starburst - after a firework, perhaps, but at present suggestive of charred interstellar debris. Starburst had reached its half-life some time ago: the once-expensive iron scrollwork gate served mainly as a dogwiddle station, and the mouldy, leaking buildings had been turned into divided-space unit rentals. These hosted a coral-reef ecosystem of dealers and addicts and pilotfish and drunks and hookers and pyramid scheme fly-by-nighters and jackals and shell-gamers and rent-gougers, all parasitizing one another.
Meanwhile the Starburst owners dodged the needed repairs and waited for the next spin cycle. First the low-rent artists would move in, full of piss and vinegar and resentment and the delusion that they could change the world. Then the startup designers and graphics companies, hoping a sheen of grubby cool would rub off on them. After that would come the questionable gene-peddler storefronts and the fashion pimps and pseudo galleries and latest-thing restaurant openings, with molecular-mix fusion involving dry ice and labmeat and quorn, and daring little garnishes of dwindling species: starling's tongue pate had been a fad of late, in such places. The Starburst owners were most likely a bunch of guys who'd cashed in via some superCorp and wanted to fool around in real estate. Once the starling's tongue pate phase had kicked in, they'd knock down the decaying unit rentals and erect a whole batch of new limited-shelf-life upmarket condos.