Metrophage

FIVE

An acid rain, the sins of the fathers, blew down hard and cold, etching obscure messages into the faces of the graceless old buildings. A few blocks to the south, beyond the fifty-story torus housing Lockheed's business offices, carbon arcs burned a pure white nimbus of light into the fat, menacing clouds. Pemex-U.S. was out there somewhere, Jonny knew. Exxon; Krupp International. And Sony- a flat black silicon sphere, almost invisible at night, like a hole punched in the sky. Wilshire Boulevard.

Hushed evening crowds hurried by. Business men, anonymous in their Gucci snake skin goggles and respirators. Groups of giggling teenage girls in matching state school ponchos. A stoned young boy, shirtless chest aglow with bio-luminescent tattoos, kicked up wings of water on a skateboard. When Ice reached Jonny's side, the boy circled once in the street, gave them the finger, and took off. Ice laughed once. "Don't say it," said Jonny. She laughed again.

"I don't have to, doll. It's plain as day. That's your lean and hungry youth just skated by."

Jonny shook his head. "I was never that skinny," he said. A great knot of tension was uncoiling in his chest. He kicked at some weeds sprouting through a crack in the pavement. Outside again, in the street, a cold wind blowing stinking sulfur rain. There was a siren fading somewhere, far off. He was home. It felt great.

"Where to?" he asked.

Ice nodded up the street, started that way and Jonny followed. He could see Groucho and Skid a few meters ahead.

They had left the old subway terminal perhaps twenty minutes before. Jonny had been surprised at how easily they reached the surface, cutting through sewers and abandoned underground shopping malls full of rotting acoustical tiles and dismembered mannequins. They had emerged in the back of a heavy equipment warehouse surrounded by the smell of rust and slow leaking canisters of toluene. Jonny had been the first one out the door. The first one into the rain. Ice had given him a belted Army raincoat before they left the clinic. Now, walking with her, he used one hand to hold the collar of the coat closed; he kept the other hand in his pocket, around the textured plastic grip of his Futukoro. Three extra clips clicked against each other in his pocket.

Across from a storage yard full of PVC piping, Groucho and Skid were in animated conversation with an albino. Jonny followed Ice through the flooded street, over to where the men were talking. The albino was seated sideways in the cab of an armored Mercedes van, a squat double-axled monstrosity with thick wire mesh bolted over the windows and grubby scales of titanium alloy welded to the body.

Jonny thought the vehicle looked something like the chimeric offspring of a half-track and a rhinoceros. He was admiring its extraordinary and single-minded ugliness when Groucho called him over.

"Jonny, I want you to meet our driver, Man Ray. He runs with the Funky Gurus," said the anarchist.

Man Ray, the albino, gave Jonny a slight nod and Jonny responded in kind. Then added a quick upward movement with two fingers of his right hand, drawing the fingers across his lips horizontally, running through a rapid series of similar gestures- a terse street distillation of Amerslan and gang recognition codes.

Obviously surprised, Man Ray gave him the answering gesture. Jonny knew the Gurus well. They were all insane, he had decided years before, but pleasantly so. They called themselves combat artists, insisted on fighting with weapons of their own devising. Their greatest pleasure came in staging absurd and bloody raids on rival gangs. There was always a theme; sometimes it was eating utensils, sometimes patterns of light and color. For the Gurus, style always counted more than the damage done, but the damage was usually considerable.

Man Ray wore what appeared to be home-made polypyrrole body armor, cut kendo-style, and red high-top sneakers. A gold obi around his waist was studded with throwing darts, shurikens and other small glittering things Jonny did not recognize. Like many of the Gurus, Man Ray was not a true albino; his features were negroid, but his face was burned the palest of pinks, shading to yellow behind his ears. Traditionally, the Gurus were recruited from workers at the Daimyo Corporation's hellish zero G foundries orbiting the moon.

Constant exposure to low-level radiation often burned out the melanin-producing cells in the worker's skin.

"Thanks for the wheels," Jonny said. "I owe you."

Man Ray smiled. He had no teeth, just stained porcelain implants running along his upper and lower jaws, like twins walls.

"You don't owe me nothin'. Blood's my muse. Flesh is my canvas," Man Ray said. "I wouldn't miss a run." He looked at Jonny, grinning slyly. "Groucho here's been telling me how you're a great appreciator of art, a true fan of beauty. Here-," he said, plucking something from his sash. "This is new."

Jonny accepted the object, turning it over in his hands. It was a perfect silver rose, about half the size of a natural one, its edges rimmed with hot gold from the sodium street lights. Man Ray pointed to the storage yard. "Over the top," he said.

Jonny looked at him once, glanced at Ice. He shrugged and threw the rose over the collapsing hurricane fence that surrounded the pipes.

There was silence, then a rush of air; the street was lit by an explosion of white flame that leapt ten meters into the air. In seconds, the blaze became a shaft of churning light, burning down to a sizzling white mass of flame and molten piping. Jonny turned to Man Ray who said, "Le fleurs du mal."

"Fuck that," said Jonny. "That was a phosphorous grenade."

"Everybody's a critic," Man Ray told Groucho. The Croaker stepped into the passenger side of the van, Skid behind him. Jonny got into the back, hunkering down next to Ice. Man Ray gunned the van's big methanol engine and turned north onto La Cienega toward Hollywood.

The Funky Guru thumbed on a short wave scanner, tuned to the Committee's frequencies, and plugged in a sound chip. The metallic voice of Committee dispatchers was overlaid with music-Taking Tiger Mountain doing an up-tempo version of Saint James Infirmary, Saint Peter taking the lead vocals.

As I passed Saint James Infirmary

I saw my sweetheart there,

All stretched out on a table,

So pale, so cold, so fair

As I passed Saint James Infirmary As the van rumbled crossed Beverly Boulevard, Jonny was suddenly aware of being very cold. He shivered against the jellied glycerin padding the walls of the van, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. His right shoulder was almost numb; before leaving the clinic, Ice had placed a xylocaine transdermal patch under the induction cast. "The Committee's last wave of raids had left endorphins in short supply," she had explained. Now she was staring out one of the van's armored windows, frowning to herself.

"Your optimism's contagious," Jonny told her.

Ice gave him a weak smile and asked, "What're you going to do when we get Sumi?"

"I thought you understood that," he said. "Gonna get the hell of here. Groucho said he'd check his contacts in the south. Maybe head down to Mexico. Why?"

Ice wiped away a small island of fog her breath had left on the window. They passed a truck unloading a cargo of black market meat. Boneless pig heads hung limply from the back, like masks from some awful theater. "What if Sumi doesn't want to leave?" she asked.

"That's her decision," Jonny said. "She can do what she wants."

His voice was harder than he had intended. The possibility that Sumi might choose to stay behind had not occurred to him. He did not want to battle with Ice for Sumi's loyalty. He had, after all, stayed with her when Ice took off. But Ice and Sumi had been lovers on and off before Jonny had known either of them. No comfort there.

"You won't stay?" Ice asked.

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because the Colonel wants to use my balls for an ashtray," Jonny replied. "Because Easy Money knows I'm looking for him and that means he's looking for me. And because I don't believe any of this anarquista wetdream bullshit. Nothing changes- it never does. One bunch loses power, another comes in. So what? There's new faces to hate, new guns to run from. But nothing real ever changes."

"Maybe we can help that," she said.

"We're talking about the Committee here," Jonny said. "They'll eat your faces off. When we get Sumi, I'm gone."

"I wish you wouldn't."

"What do you want from me?"

Ice fixed Jonny with a look that he could not quite read. Anger, frustration, fear, they were all there. "What?" he said.

"You never make it easy, do you?" she asked. "Maybe I just want us all to be together again. The three of us."

Why does she have to bring this up now, Jonny wondered. He had been thinking along similar lines all along, the three of them together again. But with Zamora and Easy Money gunning for him, it seemed impossible. Ice, he knew, would not see it that way. Her love came in broader strokes, great passions, grand gestures. That's why she's a good Croaker, he thought. That's why she ran away. "I want the same thing you do," he whispered. "But not here."

"I can't leave," said Ice.

"I can't stay." They were on Sunset now, rolling past crowds hanging around the bars and theaters. A restaurant shaped like Kukulcan's pyramid at Chichen Itza, outlined in bright neon. Jonny's face grew hot. "Don't ask me to prove myself, okay? I'm not the one who took the big walk," he said.

Almost without sound, Ice moved to the front of the van. She sat on the floor behind Groucho. Jonny tried to look out the window, but found himself watching Ice's reflection as she rocked with the gentle motion of the van. He felt alone, hardly human- he could have been an insect observing the Croakers and the lone Guru from the ceiling. Jonny was about to speak when Ice pointed at something and said, "Pull over there."

Man Ray turned up a side street near the World Link substation, shielding the van from Sunset behind a stand of towering date palms. The Guru killed the engine, reached up and flicked on an overhead light.

Groucho turned to Jonny, his face soft and ghostly in the dim light. "Let's make this fast," he said.

Jonny nodded. "We're going in the back way," he said.

Man Ray duck-walked past Jonny to the rear of the van and removed one of the side panels, jellied glycerin rolling in sluggish waves. From a storage area, he removed a Medusa, something like an electrified cat o' nine tails, and some smaller gear, pistols and bolos, which he handed to the Croakers. Over the Guru's shoulder, Jonny could see a whole rack of colorful and oddly outfitted weapons. "See anything you like?" Man Ray asked.

"I'm fine," said Jonny.

Man Ray looked disappointed. "You got this bad prosaic streak, you know?"

The rain had given way to wind-driven mist. Ice moved ahead of them in a loping trot, Skid doggedly at her side. Jonny did not try to catch up, preferring to let her cope with the ghosts in her own way.

Twisted winds whipped the mist into tiny vortices in the lee of an enormous tent-like structure. One hundred meters high and covering almost sixty square blocks, a perverse relic, it was the single still-standing structure from the Los Angeles-Tokyo Exposition, held to celebratethe one hundredth anniversary of the transistor.

It was a series of tents, really, two hundred and eighty of them, each half an acre of Teflon-coated fiberglass, all mildewed and leaking badly. Beneath the tents were three life-size thermoplast and concrete reconstructions that had comprised the Golden Age of Hollywood Pavilion: Robin Hood's castle, sporting a peeling metallic caricature that might once have resembled Errol Flynn; the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz and the Babylonian temple from D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. Jonny lived in the last of these reconstructions, as did two thousand other people.

At a service port near the bottom of a support pylon, Jonny pried a ten key pad away from its housing. Sumi had set the pad there loosely, with a gummy brown adhesive, after instructing him how to short out the locking mechanism. With a thunk, the port slid open and the five of them entered, climbing quickly up a spiral staircase to a slimy platform at the top. Jonny shorted out a second pad and a moment later, they were out onto the translucent surface of the tent itself.

Jonny motioned for them to spread out, to keep the tent fabric from sagging under their weight. Above their heads, suspended in slings and plastic bubbles were the lost tribes of Los Angeles.

Any permanent or semi-permanent structure in the city was an invitation to squatters. In the years since its construction, the Hollywood Pavilion had served as home to thousands of local down-and-outers, illegals from Mexico and Jamaica, indentured workers from Thailand and the Ukraine. A few of those one-percenters, the ones who had found the life below too confining or too desperate, had moved to the open spaces above the tents themselves, wandering like nomads across the billowing fiberglass dunes. Years later, tribes hunted, whole societies had sprung up with their own customs and languages. Jonny watched Man Ray and Skid taking it all in, eyeing the delicate habitats with a combination of fascination and nervousness. Groucho waved happily to the fleeting figures shadowing them along the cables. On the dripping wires were hung tribal banners, crude Catholic shrines, prayer flags marked with curious symbols resembling Mayan, Nepalese and parts of schematic diagrams, cabalistic cries for help directed at any god or gods who might be listening.

Jonny felt in control here. He was gripped by a strange combination of tension and elation. His mind raced. He found himself staring at the moon as it appeared from behind a cloud bank. He thought of the Alpha Rats. Again, he wondered if somewhere on that airless surface they were watching all this, noting it for some future inquiry. He had the sudden urge to meet them, to somehow explain things to them. At that same moment, he thought of Sumi down below, unaware of his and Ice's presence. His senses expanded outward until they encompassed the whole of the saddle-backed landscape. This is right, he thought; it was good to be moving again.

He felt as if he had regained some lost part of himself.

He broke ranks and scrambled to the crest of a corner dune. Its peak was a circular anchorage, open to the structure below. Quickly, he uncoiled lengths of nylon rope attached to the cement anchor and let them drop. Ice caught up with him, releasing other lines. She still would not look at him, but Jonny knew she was feeling a high similar to his. Climbing clumsily in his cast, he made it over the rim and dropped with Ice to a ledge beside a Babylonian elephant deity, its chicken wire frame visible through the cracked concrete. The others dropped down a moment later. A tangle of echoing voices from below made it impossible to hear; Jonny signed for them to follow him inside.

They moved through a series of packed gray rooms, dusty storage areas for the concession stands that had filled the pavilion during the expo. They entered a clearing; around them, half-empty crates trailed shreds of Taiwanese gun catalogs (improvised packing material) to rows of ceiling-high shelves crowded with miniature cowboy and samurai figures, still new in their plastic wrappers. Skid picked up souvenirs as he walked along: Hollywood Boulevard sealed in a water filled-lucite bubble; when he shook it, plastic snow settled over the buildings; paper jackets emblazoned with the Rising Sun; candy in the shape of silicon chips. Except for a layer of dust, most of the merchandise seemed to have changed very little over the years.

Wall-sized holograms of Uncle Sam and Disney characters, dreams figures of an extinct culture, were carefully sealed in bubble pack and duct tape, waiting for their owners to return from other errands.

They came to a flight of stairs. Jonny lead them down a couple of levels, then up one, careful to keep to the deserted areas of the structure. They saw yellow signs in a dozen languages warning them not to smoke, pointing out fire exits and giving long and detailed explanations of local hygiene laws.

From below drifted the smell of bodies pressed close together, cooking fires, mildew and something else, the almost metallic scent of nervous action. Strange insect odors of commerce, shady deals, strictly off-the-record meetings. They came upon a young girl kneeling in the corridor, bathed in the blue light of an ancient portable television, tying off with a hachimaka. When she saw them, the girl gathered up her works and took off. She left the television, which was slowly rolling a dead channel of snow. At the junction of four corridors, Ice signed for Jonny to take the rear entrance of the apartment, while she took Skid and Groucho to check out the front.

Jonny gave her the acknowledging sign and with Man Ray, started down the corridor to his right. Half-way down, they entered a room of immense asbestos-wrapped standing pipes.

"Help me get this up," whispered Jonny, indicating a textured metal plate in the floor. "We're right above the apartment."

The two of them stooped, worked their fingers under the plate and lifted it free. Jonny went feet-first into the hole, kicking out the plastic louvers of a false ventilating duct, and dropped to the floor of the apartment. A moment later, he heard Man Ray hit the floor behind him.

The room was dark, the air dead and hot; it clung to Jonny, bitter with the fumes of charred synthetics.

A mass of broken furniture lay scattered across the floor, blistered seat backs and pressboard chair legs forming the ribs of some skinned animal. Small appliances seemed to have been thrown into a pile and methodically smashed. Jonny had trouble identifying individual objects, he could make out a coffee grinder and a small microwave oven; the rest of it was unrecognizable, beaten beyond recognition. Someone had placed duct tape over the room's only window. To hide what they were doing, he thought. The tape was peeling off now, the pavilion's floods cutting the far wall into neat diagonal segments, alternating bands of light and dark. Pills and diskettes crunched beneath their feet, giving off a sour reek of spoiled hormonal extracts; an Indian throw rug was gummy with half-dissolved capsules of vasopressin and prolactin. There did not seem to be much in the room that was not burned or broken.

They followed a trail of books and Sumi's gutted electronic gear (fused circuits glowing like raw opals) down the hall to the bedroom.

In the small chamber, the arson-smell was stronger. Man Ray thumbed on a small squeeze light attached to his obi. The bed had been torched. Shredded clothes were scattered over the floor, and Freon slurred the wall from a refrigeration unit, now slag, that Jonny had hidden to store perishable drugs, and the occasional blackmarket kidney or lung for a client.

A scraping. From the living room.

Both men had their weapons up and out, Jonny leaning into the hall, anxious for something to shoot. In the far room, Ice and the others were silently surveying the wreckage on the floor.

"Back here," Jonny called.

They came back, huddling dumbly in the doorway. Ice performed a slow motion sleepwalk through the bedroom, stopping occasionally to finger a piece of clothing, a crushed circuit board, vials of pills. Man Ray's light fixed her in a wedge of sudden color.

She turned to Jonny. "Her tool belt is gone," Ice said.

"That's good," said Groucho hopefully. "Then there's a chance Sumi got away."

Jonny leaned against the wall, sliding down into a crouch. "And maybe they just took it with them for evidence. Prove she's a Watt Snatcher."

From the corner of his eye, Jonny saw Skid, shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot. "Maybe we shouldn't stay here," said the Kid quietly.

Ice stood up, holding a small prayer wheel; its half-melted copper cap squeaked as she spun it. "Either way, Sumi's long gone," she said. "Turn off that damned light."

Man Ray put the squeeze light back on his sash. Jonny remained on his haunches; Ice kicked her way through the clothes and half-melted lumps of cheap plastic furniture, and nudged him with her boot. "Looks like it's just you and me for now, cowboy," she said.

Jonny looked up at her. "I'm going to kill someone for this, you know."

Ice nodded, smiled. "Well, don't forget to leave something for me," she said.

"This is payback from Zamora," said Jonny.

Groucho cleared his throat. "I think Skid was right a moment ago," he said. "Perhaps we ought to leave. If Pere Ubu's involved, he may have left sentries behind."

Jonny pulled himself from the floor, looking the room over one more time, pressing the image in his brain for later. When he might need the anger. "Okay," he said, "we came in the back, we go out the front. Good crowds for cover."

They left the apartment. Skid abandoned his coat and walked point in his Zombie gear: an innocent hustler in search of the night's mark. They saw no Committee boys on the way out.

The main courtyard of the Babylonian temple was stifling in the overheated illumination coming from tiered ranks of klieg lamps.

Dozens of made-up, costumed extras milled around, Valley kids mostly, speaking in hushed cathedral tones. The movie set reminded Jonny of something- an immense surgery, the light giving people and objects a look of startling precision and sterility.

"Okay kids, Ms. Vega's going to make her walk in a minute," came a man's flat nasal voice from a P.A. WWhat we need here is lots of clapping and cheering. But no whistling. You want to whistle, go see kick-boxing. W

This brought shrill waves of high-pitched whistling from the temple's squatters who were massed just behind a police line around the set. The extras were costumed in cleaned-up Hollywood versions of squatter gear, much too clean and well-fed, thought Jonny.

WVery funny. Get to your positions, kids."

Jonny and the others joined the general flow of the crowd, threading their way through the back of the set, following a line of dancers in sequined parodies of Lunar Commando vacuum-suits.

Jonny was not particularly surprised by the presence of the film crew; it was not the first time he and the other squatters had been forced from their digs by a some local production company. Aoki Vega was one of the Link's most popular musical-porn stars. The irony of the situation, Jonny thought, was that the Link was going to turn around and sell the broadcast of Vega's performance to the same squatters they had displaced, presenting them with an expensive ad glittering souvenir of their powerlessness.

The dancers Jonny and the others were following seemed to be headed to a partitioned area at the far end of the pavilion near a semicircle of honeywagons and generator trucks. Skid was walking on his toes, trying to see over the line of extras waiting to cheer the star. A bank of stadium-sized video projectors displayed views of the set from several different angles.

As he pushed his way through the extras, Jonny became aware of a certain unnerving sameness about them, as if they had all been weaned from the same shallow gene pool. Caucasian faces were blandly orientalized; nisei kids snapping their fingers to unheard pop tunes, their hair bleached and skin darkened with biologics to some bizarre ideal of southern California chic. They could have been from anywhere, nowhere. A gag postcard about sex appeal and beaches.

"I know you. You're the producer, right?" said someone nearby.

Jonny turned to her. She wore a loose jacket of woven aluminum filament, plated gold. Her face held the same assembly line features as the others. Only her eyes were memorable. She wore diffraction grating contacts; her eyes were spiraling rainbows.

"We met at Marty's party in Laurel Canyon," she said brightly. "You're Mister Radoslav, right?"

It was obvious to Jonny that the woman was stoned. She might as easily have thought he was the Pope. Jonny, still moving, glanced over at the police line, then fixed her with the most radiant smile he could muster. "Please keep your voice down," he said. "No one's supposed to know I'm here." He put his arm around Skid. "This is my associate, Mister Kidd."

"My pleasure," the woman said, extending a bronzed hand. She and Skid shook, the Kid mumbled an incoherent pleasantry.

"Tell me, is there somewhere we can go and talk, Ms.-?" Jonny began.

"Viebecke," she said. "But everybody calls me Becky."

"Becky, of course. Is there anywhere we can speak privately, Becky? Perhaps discuss an audition?"

"Sure," she said. "The extra's trailer is probably empty now."

The look she gave Jonny was infused with such hunger and lust that, for a moment, he considered cutting right then and there and taking his chances with the police.

Something glided by. Jonny looked up. A long articulated arm supporting a German video-cam was hovering a few meters overhead; a half-dozen lenses rotated, pulling to focus on them. His face and Skid's were splashed across the dozen enormous video screens. "The trailer sounds fine," he said.

Ice and the others were waiting beside a two-story boom crane that reminded him of an orange praying mantis. He introduced the others to Becky who clung to his arm, looking disappointed when she saw Ice. Then she smiled, the Hollywood optimism bubbling forth.

"Oh wow, are you guys actors, too?" she crooned.

"How'd you guess?" asked Ice, flashing her teeth.

"We're casting a new feature right now," said Jonny. "Looking for fresh, interesting faces."

Becky giggled and led them to a group of trailers behind the honeywagon. The chemical smells of processed fish and beef analogs permeated the place. Becky went inside before them, holding up a hand to indicate that they should wait there. The sound of raised voices came from beyond the door. Jonny looked at Ice. She shook her head slowly.

A moment later, a young woman came storming out of the trailer. She resembled Becky so strongly, that for an instant, Jonny thought it was the actress in a new set of clothes. But the new woman just glared at them and stalked off. "You can come in now," Becky called from the doorway. They went inside.

The trailer was long and narrow, smelling faintly of perfume and sweat, with rows of lighted mirrors on one side, benches and hooks heavy with clothes on the other. Sun lamps and video monitors were crowded at opposite ends of the room. Jonny and the others went immediately to the clothes, and started pawing through them.

Becky perched on a table by the mirrors, holding her head rigid, favoring them with her best side.

"What are you guys doing?" she asked at last.

"Costumes," said Jonny. "Gotta know what young people are wearing these days."

Becky lit a joint, puffed, and rose from her perch, trying to keep up a merry front. Man Ray found a hound's tooth overcoat that fit over his body armor; Ice put on a white toreador jacket, trimmed with gold beads. When Becky lay a hand on Jonny's arm she was radiating nervousness, but her face remained a smiling mask.

Looking at her, Jonny felt an obscure sorrow. He wondered if she had any other facial expressions buried somewhere under all that bargain basement surgery.

"Is there anything you want to ask me?" she purred.

"Yeah, there much security down at this end of the set?"

Becky looked at him blankly, like a deranged puppy. She screamed: "Hey! You aren't the producer!"

"We're criminals," said Jonny. "Desperate, armed criminals."

Becky fell back drunkenly and cowered in a far corner of the trailer, whimpering and mumbling "Oh wow," like a mantra.

They had their new clothes on in a few seconds, (Groucho in a Mexican Air Force jacket studded with medals, Skid in a black leather jumpsuit and Chinese revivalist Mao cap) and started out the door. Jonny went to Becky to attempt a quick apology. She was still in the corner, struck dumb with drugs and fear, and when she thrust a chair at him, he could not tell if she wanted to give it to him or hit him with it. He just backed away slowly saying, "I'm sorry, Becky. But it's our asses."

Outside, the P.A. was blaring, "Okay kids, let's really hear it."

They moved to the very back of the set, smiling at the techs, just another group of extras waiting for their call, and started out between two grinding generator rigs. Behind them they heard the trailer door burst open and a shrill, hysterical voice. "He's not the producer! He's just a goddam thief!"

Security moved in quickly on the screaming actress. By the Babylon set, music started, drowning out Becky's voice. Someone called out for them to stop. But Jonny and the rest were running then, out of the pavilion and across the wet street.

Near the van, Jonny sneaked a look over his shoulder, and saw a couple of overweight film company rent-a-cops in pursuit. He almost laughed. Spinning on the balls of his feet, he brought his Futukoro up level with the rent-a-cops' heaving chests. The nearest one saw him, momentarily misplaced his center of gravity, and went down in a puddle like an overstuffed sack. His partner did a little tap dance, hands thrust over his head, and started back toward the bright lights of the pavilion.

Jonny ran on to the van, arriving there just in time to see Skid hit the street under the hulked black back of a uniform. Ice went down on top of them. The bright flicker of her knife blade, and she and Skid were up. Groucho caught another uniform, whipping his bolo like a garrote, pinning the uniform's upraised arm to his throat, before dispatching him with a kick to the solar plexus. Very weird for rent-a-cops, thought Jonny. A couple of Futukoro rounds slammed into the scarred armor on the side of the van. Very fucking weird.

One of the uniforms scrambled by, illuminated by the flickering green florescence of a street lamp. "Oh shit," Jonny said.

He ducked and ran, hoping the Committee boys had not spotted him. Man Ray was already behind the wheel of the van, gunning the engine. Ice and Groucho had their guns out, and were giving Jonny covering fire. The three jumped in the back. Skid, however, remained outside, in maniacal pursuit of the Committee boy who had attacked him.

Man Ray ground the van into gear, accelerating past the Kid.

Jonny held onto one of Groucho's arms as he leaned out the back. The anarchist snared the Kid and they dragged him by his sleeves for a block or so before Ice got hold of his collar and pulled him inside.

A hovercar skimmed down low over the van, burning lights, manic shadows; hot fists of turbine wash forced them back from the door. Man Ray jammed through the gears. He took two corners, nearly overturning the van on one, but the hovercar just hung there.

Then it veered suddenly off to the left.

It seemed for a moment that they had lost it, but it dropped down a few feet in front of them, barely skimming over the puddles.

Man Ray stood on the brakes, sending the van wiggling down the street like a speared fish. When he regained control, the Guru ran them through a parking lot off Vine and out onto Melrose.

Gripping the doorframe, Jonny and the others shot at the turbine vanes on the underside of the hovercar with Man Ray's custom ammo. Pink and silver spheres impacted the polycarbonate surface; blue firework dragons pawed at the landing gear, before being sucked up through the intake ports. Skid pushed past them, and threw some of Man Ray's roses, knife-fashion, at the low flying car. They exploded behind the van, blistering asphalt and palm trees.

"Let there be light!" yelled Man Ray. He cranked up the short wave scanner, making adjustments to his own broadcasting unit.

"Listen'a that dumb fuck," he said. "Thinks he's calling us in. I got that boy jammed so hard, surprised he knows which end holds the mike."

The hovercar let loose then with a burst of automatic weapons fire that hammered down on the roof of the van like a phospho-rescent avalanche, blue sparks dancing around the edges of the door.

Jonny and the others fell back. Man Ray steered them onto Wilshire Boulevard, dodging slow-moving low riders and pedicabs.

Jonny leaned up to the driver seat. "How far are we from the underground?" he yelled.

"Almost there," Man Ray said. He had slipped on a high-domed crash helmet.

"Can we take more of that fire?"

The Guru grinned through high-impact plastic. "Don't insult me."

The glass donut of Lockheed's office tower was glowing just a few blocks ahead. The Guru steered the van onto a side street, trying to lose their tail before heading for the clinic. The hovercar hung implacably above them.

"We're really eating it," Man Ray said. "There's no major turn-offs and the underground's just ahead. Any suggestions?"

"I got one," said Ice. She pulled one of the Croakers' Kalashnikov rifles, retrofit with an M-79 grenade launcher, from the weapons bin. The van was running fast down a side street between long rows of grimed and decaying old geodesic greenhouses, some forgotten experiment in urban self-sufficiency.

Wind tearing at her corn-rows, Ice sighted in on the hovercar, tracking the subtle, massive glide of the machine as it positioned itself for another attack. When she did not fire, Jonny was tempted to pull her away from the door. Then, just as he was reaching for her, she pulled the trigger, sending the burning M-79 bolt at the aft section of the car. The explosion, when the shell hit, blew out windows in one old greenhouse dome, peppering the van with dead vegetation and fragments of glass.

Black smoke and guttering light above them. The hovercar tried to rise, but its remaining engine clipped a transformer tower, flipping the car onto its back. It hung there for a moment, as if undecided what to do. Finally, in what looked like an attempt to right itself, it slammed through a greenhouse roof, emerging from the far side in flames.

"Brace yourselves!" screamed Man Ray. He wrenched the steering wheel left, sending the van broadside into the hovercar just as it skidded to the ground in front of them.

The first thing Jonny was aware of was the constant blaring of a horn; then came shadows, flickering over his eyelids in frozen micro-second silhouettes; then a thick wetness on his face, across his chest and arms. He opened his eyes. Glycerin. It was everywhere, thick puddles massing on the floor and slopping out the back, ruptured padding going limp on the walls. He crawled to the open door and dropped a couple of unexpected feet to the pavement. The vehicle was resting at a severe angle, its three left wheels spinning in the air.

He walked on some stranger's legs; they refused to work together.

Around the side of the van he found the mangled hovercar, a skeletal mass of crumpled alloys and scorched plastic, two feeble red lights rotating out of synch; the fuselage had twisted itself thoroughly into the undercarriage of the van, merging with it.

Symbiotic junk.

A sleeve grazed his face, electric jolt sending Jonny down to his knees. Man Ray danced past him, his Medusa out and swinging over his head. Charged lashes flowered sparks as they touched, gilding the air above the Guru's head with spinning galaxies, ghostly landscapes of exploding stars, playing cards, cometary butterflies. He was easily holding three Committee boys at bay. There was an enormous stained-porcelain smile plastered across his face. Even groggy, Jonny could read it: Total fulfillment. Man Ray was in his element, writing sonnets with his weapons; the image of the artist at work.

The Guru froze and held out his arms, crystal geckos skittering from his sleeves. Light-footed, quick-tongued, they leaped to the ground at the Committee boys' feet, exploding into billowing, lavender clouds of CS gas. Jonny fell back on the van, coughing, eyes filling with tears, and saw Man Ray emerge from the cloud a moment later. Somewhere along the way, the Guru had slipped a respirator on under his kendo helmet. A Committee boy grabbed him and was jolted off by the electrical charge of the polypyrrole armor.

Then someone was pulling Jonny away, around to the back of the ruined van. It was Skid, blood ruining the white perfection of his teeth, rimming his lips. The hand he used to hold Jonny was glowing, pixels throbbing nervously, but offering no image. He was shouting something.

"We're fucked! They've blown it! We're on our own, man!"

The Kid started to pull again, but Jonny shifted his weight and held him in place. "What are you talking about? Where's Ice?"

The Kid pointed with his gun. Pinned down with Groucho. "It's the Committee, man. They've blown the clinic!

Jonny pushed the Kid aside and ran between the rows of greenhouses. A block away, he could see a dozen of the Committee's meat wagons forming an armored barrier around the warehouse he and the others had left earlier that evening. Force men were leading a few cuffed Croakers to the wagons. There were bodies, Committee boys and anarchists, lying in the flood-lit parking lot. Ice and Groucho were there, pinned-down in an alley off to the right, meters apart, unable to reach the cover of the greenhouses.

"See? We're fucked!" Skid shrilled. "They found the clinic!"

Jonny watched as Ice and Groucho tried to make a run for it, shooting into the air to cover each other. The Committee boys laughed at them from the roof, cat and mousing them, letting them get a few meters out, then forcing them back against the warehouse under a curtain of bullets.

"If we lay down some fire on that roof, they could make it," Jonny told Skid. "Watch them. I need a weapon." He crawled away, then sprinted to the van.

Weapons and ammunition were scattered on the ground behind the van's open door. Some of Man Ray's clockwork constructions had been activated; they crawled absently off into the shadows where they popped and flared. The Guru was nowhere in sight. Jonny grabbed a Futukoro and, as he fished for a clip in the glycerin flooded bin, paused for a moment to take a couple of deep, even breaths. His hands were shaking. He closed his eyes, tried to will himself calm. Nothing but ruins, he thought. Seeing Ice pinned down had snapped something inside him. He thought of Sumi. He could not lose them both in one night.

A high-pitched animal scream. Jonny ran back to the warehouse in time to see Skid zig-zagging into the open, his pixels wild, a slight figure crawling with pastel geometrics and snapping death's heads. As the Kid ran, he shot wildly at the roof of the adjoining warehouse, forcing the Committee boys back. Ice, Jonny realized, had been caught between the buildings, unable to get out of the line of fire. Now, under Skid's cover, she made it to a greenhouse on the far side, Groucho right on her heels. They turned to give the Kid covering fire, but he seemed confused; unwilling to be pinned at the warehouse wall as they had been, he sprinted back toward Jonny.

He got about ten meters when a shot caught him from behind, punching a wet hole in his chest. The Kid spun around stiffly, firing the last of his clip into the pavement. "Skid!" Ice screamed. The Kid was on his back, half-conscious, crawling with snakes and phosphenes. A file dump, Jonny realized. All the images in his software were bubbling up at once, out of control. The arm Skid held up strobed madly: the arm of a woman, a reptile, an industrial robot; crimson spiders webbed him; amber alphanumerics scrolled up his twisted face; Brando, Lee, Bowie, Vega; his system was looping, the faces flickering by faster and faster, merging into one meta-fantasy face, colorless, all colors, fading at the same instant it formed. Skid sat up, looked around wildly and laughed. A single bright flash of binary, and he slumped to the ground. The Kid lay still and dark.

By the meat wagons, a loudspeaker clicked on: MY GOD, IS THAT YOU, GORDON? NICE TO SEE YOU, ASSHOLE. WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR DEAL? came Zamora's voice. "YOU

FUCKED ME, GORDON, BUT I DIDN'T THINK YOU WERE STUPID. I CUT YOU LOOSE AND YOU RUN RIGHT INTO THE ARMS OF CRIMINALS; TERRORISTS, FOR CHRISSAKE."

It was a game, Jonny knew. Could the Colonel make him mad enough to do something stupid? Jonny tried to force the sound of Colonel Zamora's voice from his brain; he conjured up visions of clawing the man's eyes out with his hands, but he stayed in the shadows, shaking, hating himself, and biting his lip until he drew blood.

I'M GOING TO ROAST YOU, KID. ONE OF YOUR BITCHES IS MINE ALREADY. THEY LOVE FRESH CUNT AT THE WEAPONS LAB, YOU KNOW. THEY'LL HAVE HER INCUBATING SPINAL WORMS. EVER SEEN THOSE THINGS? ALL THEY EAT IS NERVE TISSUE, AND THEY DON'T STOP TILL IT'S ALL GONE…

Before Jonny knew what he was doing, he was flat on his belly, screaming, firing the Futukoro, filling the air above the meat wagons with dragons, burning comets, screeching harpies. He knocked out the P.A. with the first volley, and took out some of the flood lights.

Something occurred to him then, and he was up, scrambling back to the van. Some of Man Ray's toys were been back there, he remembered. What a nice surprise they would be for the Colonel.

But he never got there.

Two dark suited men intercepted him as he was stepping into the vehicle. Instinctively, Jonny brought his boot up into one man's armpit, paralyzing the arm. But it was not enough. His whole system hummed, crying out for blood. Jonny grabbed a handful of the first man's face and pushed him into the second. They both went down, and Jonny was on them, bringing his boots down heel-first, aiming for the throat. He missed the first man, corrected his aim for the second and knocked out some of his teeth. Jonny's fun was cut short, however, when an arm clamped across his face, and something cold and stinging touched his throat. As his body went limp, some neutral part of his brain noted that he had been stuck with a neural scrambler. The effect was a strange one since Jonny's mind continued to function perfectly, but with the pyramidal tracks of his brain jammed, his body had suddenly been reduced to so much useless meat. He was aware of the two men carrying him for some distance.

He hoped they would not let him swallow his tongue.

When they removed the scrambler, Jonny found himself on the filthy floor of an underground garage. A stretched Cadillac limousine, the rear end huge under twin sweeping tail fins, was parked nearby.

His tongue seemed to be intact. The car door swung open, and a familiar florid scent of clove cigarettes billowed out. Then the ugliest man Jonny had ever seen smiled out at him.

"Please don't be angry, Jonny. Your friends are gone. Some of their compatriots picked them up a few moments ago," said Mister Conover, the smuggler lord. "Aside from that, it's been my sad experience that people who are ready to die for a cause, all too often, end up doing just that." He grinned apologetically, showing horrid yellow teeth. "There are far too many of them out there for you to do any good, you know. You'll just get yourself killed."

"Killed?" said Jonny. He laughed. Wouldn't that be a joke on everybody.