desynching series was complete and the egg began to split.
Inside the egg Gonzales lay pale, nude, near-comatose,
machine-connected: a new millennium Snow White. A flesh-colored
catheter led from his water-shrunken genitals, transparent iv
feeds from both forearms. White sealant and anti-irritant paste
had clotted around the tubes from throat and mouth. The sharp
ozone smell of the paste was all over him.
An autogurney had rolled next to the egg, and its hands,
shining chrome claws, began disconnecting tubes and leads. Then
it worked with hands and black flexible arms the thickness of a
stout rope to lift Gonzales from the egg and onto its own surface.
Gonzales woke up in his own bedroom and began to whimper.
"It's okay," the memex whispered through the room's speaker.
"It's okay."
Some time later Gonzales awoke again, lay in gloom and
considered his condition. Some nausea, legs weak, but no apparent
loss of gross motor control, no immediate parapsychological
effects (disorientations, amnesias, synesthesias)
Gonzales got up and went to the bathroom, stood amid white
tile, polished aluminum and mirrors and said, "Warm shower."
Water hissed, and the shower stall door swung open. The water ran
down his skin and the sweat and paste rolled off his body.
3. Dancing in the Dark
The next morning, Gonzales stood looking out his front
window, down Capital Hill to the city and the bay. After a full
night's sleep, he felt recovered from the egg. "Halfway down the
hill stood a row of Contempo high-riseshalf a dozen shapes in
the mist, their sides laced with optic fiber in patterns of red,
blue, white, and yellow.
>From the wallscreen behind him, a voice said, "The Fine Arts
Network, showing today only: the legendary 'Rothschild Ads
Originals and Copies,' a Euro/Com Production from the Cannes
Festival; also showing, NipponAuto's 'Ecstasy for Many
Kilometers.'"
"Cycle," Gonzales said. He turned to watch as the screen
split into windows, showing eight at a time in a random access
search. In the screen's upper-right corner, the Headline Service
cycled what it considered important: worsening social collapse in
England; another series of politico-economic triumphs for The Two
Koreas. And the Ecostate Summaries: ozone hole #2 over the
Antarctic conforming to predicted self-repair curve, hole #3
obstinately holding steady; CO2 portions unstable, ozone reaching
for an ugly part of the graph; temperature fluctuations continuing
to evade best predictions
Why call it news? wondered Gonzales. Call it olds. Christ,
this stuff had been going on forever it seemed
He said, "Memex, what do you think about the attack?"
"A bad business," said the memex. "We are lucky to have
survived." It seemed a bit subdued in the aftermath of the trip in
the egg, as though it, too, had come close to dying. Gonzales
didn't know how it experienced such things, given its limited
sensory modalities and, he presumed, lack of a fear of death.
"What's happening in the real world?" Gonzales asked.
"Your mother left a message for you. Do you want to look at
it now?"
"Might as well."
On the screen she lay back in a lawn chair, her face hidden
behind a sun mask, her mono-bikinied body a rich brown. She sat
up and said, "Still in Myanmar, huh, sweetie? When are you coming
back? I'd love to talk, but I just won't pay those rates."
She removed her sun mask. She had dark skin and good bones;
her face was nearly unlined, though her skin had the faint
parchment quality of age. Her small breasts sagged very little.
Body and face, she appeared an athletic fifty year old who had
perhaps seen too much sun. She would turn eighty-seven next
month.
Since Gonzales's father had died in a flash flu epidemic
while the two were visiting Naples, his mother had turned her
energies and interests to maintaining her health and appearance.
Half the year she spent in Cozumel's Regeneration Villas, where
tissue transplants and genetic retailoring kept her young. The
rest of the time she occupied an entire floor of a low-res condo
Top dollar, but she could afford it.
She and his father had been charter members of the
gerontocracy, that ever-expanding league of the rich and old who
vied with the young for their society's resources. The young had
the strength and energy of youth; the old had wealth, power and
cunning. No contest: kids under thirty often stated their main
life's goal as "living until I am old enough to enjoy it."
Gonzales's mother draped a blue-and-white print cotton-robe
over her shoulders and said, "Call me. I'll be home in a week or
so. Be well."
Their talks, her taped messagesboth usually made him feel
baffled and angrybut today her self-absorption pricked sharper
than usual. I almost died, he wanted to tell her, they almost
killed me, mother.
But he was far away from her, as far as Seattle was from
Miami. And whose fault is that? a small voice asked. He had
chosen to come here, as distant Southern Florida as he could get
and remain in the continental United States. Sometimes he felt
he'd come a bit too far. In Florida, people cooled down with
alcohol in iced drinks; here, they warmed their chilly selves with
strong coffee. Gonzales often felt lost among the glum and
health-conscious Northerners and craved the Hispanic sensuality
and demonstrativeness of Southern Florida.
Still, how he hated the world he'd grown up in. He had seen
the movers, dealers, and players since he was a child, and in all
of them he had felt the same obsessive grasping at money and land
and power and had heard the same childish voices, wanting more
more more. At his parents' parties, he remembered dark Southern
Florida facessun-burned whites, blacks, Hispanics; men with
heavy gold jewelry, trailing clouds of expensive cologne, and
women with stiff hair and pushed-up breasts whose laughter made
brittle footnotes to the men's loud voices. He'd fled all that as
instinctively as a child yanks its hand from a fire.
Both there and here he stood in an alien land, no more at
home at one end of the country than the other.
"No reply," Gonzales said.
#
The next day Gonzales sat in the solarium, where he lounged
among black lacquer and etched glass while thoughts of death
gnawed at the edges of his torpor. He filled a bronze pipe with
small green sensemilla leaves and holed up in a haze of smoke and
drank tea.
The late afternoon light through the windows went to pure
Seattle Gray, the color of ennui and unemphatic despair, and his
solitude became oppressive. He needed company, he thought, and
wondered what it would be like to have a cat. Then he thought
about the truth of it, how often he would be gone and the cat left
&
nbsp; to itself and the house's machines. "Here kitty kitty," the
cleaning robot would say, and the memex would want veterinary
programs and a diagnostic link fuck it, they all could live
without a cat.
Then a hunger kick came on him, and he decided to make
taboulleh. "You are not taking care of business," the memex said
to Gonzales as he stood chopping mint leaves, green onions and
tomato, squeezing lemon and stirring in bulgur wheat with the
patience of the deeply-stoned.
"True," Gonzales said. "I'm in no hurry."
"Why not? Since your return from Asia, you have not been
productive."
"I'm going to die, my friend." The smells of lemon and mint
drifted up to him, and he inhaled them deeply. He said, "Today,
maana, some day for sure and I'm still trying to understand
what that means to me now. To be productive, that is fine, but to
come to terms with my own mortality I think that is better."
The taboulleh was finished. It was beautiful; he wanted to rub
his face in it.
#
Not long after he finished eating, a package arrived from
Thailand. Inside layers of foam and strapping were the memory
modules the Thais had taken. When he plugged the modules into the
memex, they showed empty: zeroed, ready to be used again.
Gonzales stood looking at the racked modules in the memex
closet. I can't fucking believe it, he thought. In effect, the
audit had been cancelled out. Whatever data he or anyone else
collected at this point from SenTrax Myanmar would be essentially
useless, Grossback having been given time to cook the data if he
needed to do so. A fatal indeterminacy had settled on the whole
affair.
Grossback, you bastard, thought Gonzales. If you arranged
for the Thais to grab these boxes, maybe you are smarter and
meaner than I thought.
"Shit," Gonzales said.
"Is there anything I can do?" the memex asked.
"Nothing I can think of."
#
>From the background of jungle plants and pastel walls and the
signature pieces of curved silver, HeyMex recognized the latest
incarnation of the Beverly Rodeo Hotel's public lounge. Mister
Jones preferred ostentation, even in simulacra.
HeyMex settled into a sling chair made of bright chrome and
stuffed chocolate-brown leather. HeyMex wore the usual baggy
pants and jacket of black cotton, a crumpled white linen shirt;
was smooth-faced and had close-cropped hair.
A figure shimmered into being in the chair opposite: silver
suit and red metal-laced shirt brilliant under lights; black-
framed glasses with dark lenses; greased hair combed straight
back, a little black goatee and moustache.
"Mister Jones," HeyMex said.
The other figure took a long, slow drag off a brown
cigarette. "HeyMex," it said. "What can I do for you?"
"It's Gonzales. Since we got back from Myanmar, he's been
passive, hasn't been taking care of business."
"Post-trauma responsegive him some time, he'll be okay."
"No, he doesn't need time. He needs work. Have you got
something?"
"Maybe. I haven't run a personnel searchhe might not fit
the exact profile."
"Never mind that. Give it to Gonzales. He needs it."
"If you say so. You'll hear something official later today."
The world went translucent, then turned to smoke, and Mister
Jones disappeared back into his identity as Traynor's Advisor,
HeyMex into his as Gonzales's memex.
(Ask yourself why the two machines chose this elaborate
masquerade, or why no one knew these sorts of things were
happening. However, as to the who? and the why? there can be no
question. These are the new players, and these are their games.
So welcome to the new millennium.)
4. Privileged Not to Exist
When Gonzales returned home, he found a message from Traynor:
"Will arrange for transportation tomorrow morning, five a.m., from
Northern Seattle Airtrack to my estate. Be prepared for immediate
work. Pack the memex and twenty-two kilos personal luggage."
"Shit," Gonzales said. "We just got home. Twenty-two kilos,
huh? That means we'll be going where do you think?"
The memex said, "Somewhere in orbit."
#
The airport limo held its spot in a locked sequence of a
dozen vehicles moving away from the city at two hundred kilometers
an hour. Seattle's northern suburbs showed as patches of light
behind shifting mist and steady-falling rain. Overhead, cargo
blimps flying toward Vancouver moved through the clouds like great
cold water fish.
Gonzales got a quick view of a square where white and yellow
searchlights played across a concrete landscape, and a gangling
assemblage of pipe and wire stepped crab-wise as it sprayed a
brick wall: a graffiti robot, a machine built and set loose to
scrawl messages to the world at large. Gonzales could only read
GENT OF CHAN
With a sigh from its turbines, the limo slowed to exit into
North Seattle Airtrack, then turned into the private field access
road. A wire gate opened in front of them as it received the
codes the limo sent. Near the SenTrax hangar waited a swing-wing
exactly like the one that had taken Gonzales from Pagan to
Bangkok. Gonzales climbed into the plane, placed his bag and the
memex's shock-cases into the plane's baggage locker, seated
himself, and pulled his shoulder harness tight.
The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog. After a while, the
blank whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-
wing's engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted
until the ascending scream of engine noise told him they were
landing.
As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of Lake
Tahoe stretching away to the south, then a patch of green lawn on
the water's edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final
pproach to Traynor's estate.
>From his six years' work with Internal Affairs, the past two
as independent auditor, Gonzales knew quite a bit about Frederick
Lewis Traynor, his boss. Traynor had wealth sufficient for even
the most extravagant tastesit was his family's, and he had known
nothing elsebut power whose smallest touch could shape lives,
imprint stone, that he longed for. From his position as head of
Internal Affairs, one of SenTrax's most powerful divisions, he
plotted ascent to the SenTrax Board; he wanted to be one of the
twenty people who had moved beyond negotiation and compromise,
whose desires were reality, whims action.
In fact, Traynor had already achieved a level of eminence
that is privileged, when it wishes, not to exist. His house and
land occupied a chunk of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe where there
had once been two casino-hotels and a section of state highway.
The hotels had been demolished, the highway diverted. The grounds
were now surrounded by a four-meter high fence of slatted black
steelalarmed, hot-wired, and robot-patrolled. The
estate showed
on no map or record of purchase, ownership or taxation; neither
did the man himself.
When Gonzales stepped out of the plane onto a great expanse
of green lawn, Traynor waited to meet him. He was short and
pudgy, and his skin was pale. His sparse hair lay limp in dark
curls on his skull. On his feet were soft black slippers, and he
wore an embroidered silk robegreen and blue and white and red,
with rearing dragons across back and front. He thought of himself
as Byroniceccentric and interesting, afflicted by geniusbut to
Gonzales and many others he appeared simply petulant and self-
indulgent.
Traynor stretched his arms wide and said, "Mikhail," giving
the name three syllables, saying it right, then took Gonzales in a
brief hug. Traynor then stood back and looked at him and said,
"You don't look too bad."
"Is that why you brought me here, to look at me?"
Traynor shrugged. "For that, maybe, and to talk to you about
your next job. Besides, I like you."
Gonzales supposed that Traynor did like him, in his peculiar
boss's and rich man's way. Particularly, he seemed to like the
fact that Gonzales wasn't awed by the outward and visible
manifestations of his money and power.
"Good breeding," Traynor had said to him once. "That's your
secret: patrician and plebian blood mixed." Mikhail
Mikhailovitch Gonzales was of mixed blood indeed; among others,
Russian Jews and Hispanics from Los Angeles on his mother's side,
Blacks from Chicago and Cubans from Miami on his father's. Among
his family background were slaves and field workers and bourgeois
counter-revolutionaries, along with the odd artist and smuggler
and con man.
However, whatever his breeding or experience, he had to put
up with lots of cheerful, condescending bullshit from Traynor, as
he had to put up with Traynor in general, because the man was rich
and powerful and the boss, and neither of them ever forgot it.
The two walked toward the house that stood facing the lake at
the lawn's far border, a Stately Home an idealized eighteenth-
century English architect might have built for an equally
idealized and indulgent patron. Off a golden domed center stood
three wings of creamy stone, the whole in restrained neo-Palladian
with no modern excesses of material, no foamed colored concrete
and composites, just the tan and creamy sandstone and rose marble