Metrophage

SEVEN

They drove in silence. Jonny dozed in the back, waking every few minutes when the Cadillac would hit a patch of broken concrete, causing the car to shake violently. Then he would look out the window and see hillsides covered with brightly-colored fabric or a group of chrome palm trees constructed from stolen jet engines and lengths of industrial piping. A gift from the Croakers, he thought, giving the finger to the world. Closer to the city were squatter camps, long walls of corrugated tin and dismantled billboards. Jonny could make out a word here, a face there. A woman's eye. FLY. EAT. The curve of a hip. LOVE.

Just outside Hollywood, they turned off the ruined freeway and drove through an old suburban sector before starting a steep climb into the hills.

The driver switched off the carbon arcs on the roof and skull-plugged into an infrared array set into the car's headlight housings.

The only light visible to Jonny was the pale green mercury vapor glow of the suburbs and the jittery firefly of Conover's cigarette.

They passed through tunnels of rotted concrete where fungus padded the walls. Even with the air conditioner on full blast, there was a strong smell of decomposing vegetation. Outlines of burned-out cars down the embankment, overgrown with weeds. As they gained altitude, the road grew narrower and more hazardous. They passed the ruins of the ancient Hollywoodland development, the New Hope of its day. The well-heeled residents had tried to seal themselves off, Jonny remembered, but it didn't work. They had brought all their madness with them, into the hills. And when it all came crashing down around their ears, no one had been surprised. The rot had set in before the first foundation had been laid.

The car slowed, finally, and came to a stop. Looking out the window, Jonny could see nothing but rocky hills and the ribbon of leaf-cluttered road curving off into the distance. The driver punched a code into a key pad on the dashboard (Paranoid reflexes had Jonny leaning on the seatback, memorizing the digits as he read them out of the corner of his eye.). Then portions of the hillside, perfect squares of stone and grass, began to wink out. Jonny realized that he was looking at a hologram.

After about a dozen of these segments had disappeared, Jonny could see a paved driveway leading off the main road. The driver turned them onto this new road, and the hologram hillside reappeared behind them. A large cat, a cougar or jaguar (Sentry robot, Conover said.) paced the car as they passed a thick stand of madrone and scrubby manzanita. There were men up there, too.

Jonny caught a glint of rifles slung over camouflaged shoulders.

"Our security is quite tight up here," said Conover. "The whole hill is wired. We have motion detectors, infra-red and image intensifiers in the trees. Neurotoxin microcapsule mines buried on the blind side of the hill. Those men you saw? They're carrying rail guns. Models that small are very new. Very expensive. They can push a one hundred gram polycarbonate projectile at a thousand kilometers an hour. It's like having a small mountain dropped on you." He lit another cigarette and from his inside jacket pocket, took a black silicon card. There were gold filaments on the card's face, forming a bar code on its face. "You need this, too. We run a magnetic scan on every vehicle that comes through here. If the system doesn't read the right code, it sets off every alarm in the place."

"You expecting the Army?" asked Jonny.

"I expect nothing," replied Conover. "But I anticipate everything."

Around an out-of-place bamboo grove, they came up on Conover's mansion, stars hazy through the hologram dome. Jonny's first thought was that the main building of the estate was surrounded by smaller bungalows. When they get closer, however, he realized that what he was looking at was a single massive, confusion of a building, erupting over the top of the hill like a geometric melanoma. What appeared to be the oldest wing of the mansion was built in a straight Victorian style, while others were pseudo-Hacienda; the most recent additions appeared to have been built along traditional Japanese lines. Gracefully curled pagoda roofs abutted at odd angles with Spanish arches, high-windowed garrets overlooking gilt temple dogs.

"I've heard of this place. It's the old Stone mansion, isn't it?" Jonny asked.

Conover nodded. The Cadillac stopped by a pond full of fat, spotted carp, and he stepped out. Jonny followed him; a grinding pain was building up in his shoulder beneath the anesthetics. "Yes, this is the Stone place. I'm surprised anyone still remembers it. Old Mister Stone made a fortune selling tainted baby formula in Africa and the Asian sub-continent (encouraging the mothers to stop breast-feeding and use his poison). After he died, Mrs. Stone got it into her head that the ghosts of all those little dead children were coming to get her. She kept building onto the place, sleeping in a different room every night for thirty years. The architects were given a free hand to build in whatever style was popular at the moment. This, he gestured toward the mansion, is the result. What do you think? Is this a vision of insanity, made whole and visible, or just the maunderings of a bored old bitty with too much money? Doesn't really matter. The place is very comfortable. The old lunatic only used the best materials."

"It's a great set-up," said Jonny. "You must suck an awful lot of power up here. Aren't you afraid someone's going to trace it back to you?"

"We're set up for solar and there are darius windmills on the surrounding hills," said Conover. He gave Jonny a small smile. "The rest of what we need I've had Watt Snatchers route through the Police power grid."

Jonny laughed, slapped the hood of the car. "I love it!" He felt weak and hot. He wanted to sit down.

From the madrones came a series of long hysterical cries, rising in pitch until they peaked, fell and started again. Answering calls came from deeper in the trees.

"What the hell was that?" asked Jonny.

Conover gestured toward the hills. "Samangs," he explained. "Apes. We're right below Griffith Park. When the zoo was destroyed during the Protein Rebellion, some of the animals escaped and bred. It's not advisable to walk through these hills alone at night. The apes won't bother you, but there are tigers."

Jonny nodded, watching the madrone branches move in the light breeze. "Kind of chilly out here, isn't it?"

"Perhaps you'd like to see the inside of the house? I've picked up one or two baubles from some local museums that you might find interesting."

"Art is my life," said Jonny, following the smuggler lord inside.

The Japanese wing of the mansion was almost empty; Jonny was not sure if this was through style or neglect, but it smelled pleasantly of varnished wood, incense and tatami mats. Many of the rooms they passed were closed off by rice paper doors painted with pale watercolors of cranes and royal pagodas. Conover took him deep into the cluttered Victorian wing where artificial daylight shone through stained-glass windows full of saints and inscriptions in Latin.

Carpeted staircases appeared suddenly around corners, behind urns of blond irises and fat pussy willows, leading to corridors that seemed to turn in on themselves in impossible ways. Jonny's room was papered in a floral design, thousands of tiny purple nosegays, and furnished with delicate French antiques: a walnut boudoir, small idealized portraits painted on glass, white hand-carved chairs with tapestry cushions and a canopied bed, all lace and gold leaf. He smiled at Conover, but was inwardly revolted by the place. It was like living in the underwear drawer of a very expensive prostitute.

When Conover left him, Jonny sat on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. He felt drained, both mentally and physically, but could not relax. The long walk to his room, Conover's fairy tale about his security and the wild animals in the hills had been obvious warnings. Jonny was not to leave the grounds. That thought made him uneasy. He was afraid to touch the antique furniture and had not seen any signs of video or hologram viewers. Just these damned paintings everywhere, he thought. They lined virtually all the walls of the Victorian wing, set in carved wooden frames and lit by small halide spotlights recessed into the ceiling. He's an art freak, too, thought Jonny. Like Groucho. But the anarchist's art had effected him differently. It had shown the process of the artist's mind and made full use of his or her obsessions, revealing a wealth of personal symbols that were the landscapes of dreams. Conover's paintings reminded Jonny of grim family snapshots. Groucho's art (the art he and the other Croakers had not created themselves) had also been copies, cheap reproductions clipped from books.

Jonny looked above the desk at the portrait of a sorrowful-eyed man whose body was riddled with arrows. A small plaque below the painting read: El Greco. It meant nothing to him. He went out into the hall, touching each painting he came to, running his hands across the still eyes, the centuries old canvas. They were all alike. One-percenters commissioned by noble men to paint their faces, he thought. Old masters, he had heard them called. Most of Conover's paintings appeared to be portraits, although there were a few landscapes, also meaningless to him. Pictures of men on horseback wearing red jackets and chasing what reminded Jonny of big rats. Names: Goya. Rembrandt. The faces in all the portraits had the same leathery texture of old oil paint.

"I'll take Aoki Vega or Mikey Gagarin videos any day," he said to a Renaissance Madonna with child.

On the wall above a heavy dark wood Gothic table, was a painting Jonny recognized. "Blue Boy" by Thomas Gainsborough. He remembered seeing a post card of the painting as a teenager, glued by sweat to the bare buttocks of the young woman he was with in the ruins of the Huntington Art Gallery. Jonny ran his fingers along the boy's plumed hat.

Finely ridged plastic.

Jonny touched the painting again. When he leaned close to Blue Boy's face he saw that the texture of the paint was an illusion. A hologram, he said, very surprised.

So Conover does go for fakes, he thought. For some reason, that made him feel better. Jonny touched the plastic face one more time to reassure himself, then went back to his room. Inside, he undressed and ran water for a shower. Before he got in, he took two Dilaudid analogs that Conover had given him for the pain in his shoulder. He stepped into the stall and stood for a long time under a spigot that was a golden wrought-metal fish, turning the water on hard so that it hit his back in a stream of warm stinging needles.

Back in his room, he found a maroon silk robe had been laid out for him, and a silver tray with ice, gin and a bottle of tonic. The analog was just coming on. Standing by the desk, surrounded by antiques and the smell of clean sheets, he had a sudden vision of the world as an orderly place. His teeth melted gently into his skull. He poured himself a shot of gin and drank it down straight.

His shoulder hurt as he lay down on the bed, but the pain came from somewhere deep underground, lost among dark roots and grubs. He fell asleep and dreamed of Ice and Sumi. He found them at the top of an ornate spiral staircase, but when he touched them, they were plastic holograms.

Jonny woke in a sweat, hours later. Someone had turned off the lights. He stumbled around the dark room until he found the gin. He brought the bottle with him, setting it on the floor next to the bed.

He lost track of the days.

He slept a great deal. Conover had a private medical staff, mostly Japanese and painfully polite. With many apologizes, a young nurse called Yukiko stuck him with needles, antibiotics for the wound in his shoulder, protein supplements and mega-vitamins for his mild malnutrition. In a small, tidy lab in the Japanese wing, they grafted new nerve tissue into the damaged area of his shoulder. They hooked him to a muscle stimulator that used mild electric shocks to tense and release his muscles, building back the strength in his shoulders and arms. Yukiko spoke no English, but smiled a great deal.

Jonny smiled back.

In the mornings, he tried to do t'ai chi, but the movements felt odd and unfamiliar, as if he had learned them in some other body. He took the lace trimmed pillows from the bed and sat cross-legged on them in one corner of the room, staring into the interface of two flowered walls, trying to meditate. Despite the fact his sitting had become haphazard over the years, he still held a certain belief in meditation's power. He had once had a master, an ancient Zen nun with creased olive skin like old newsrags and cheap second-hand piezoelectric eyes that could only register in black and white. The colors are here, she would say, and point to her skull. "All this is illusion". She would point to the room. "But also important: so is this." She would point to her head again and laugh delightedly.

But the emptiness always eluded Jonny, the void that was filled when the self was lost. He remembered all the Zen words, all the theories. He sat on the old French pillows, pain shooting like hot wires down his knees, and chanted the Sutras, trying to imagine himself as a bird. In the past, this had sometimes helped. Leave yourself, become the bird. Leave the bird, become nothing. But his concentration was gone, replaced with a wavering self-doubt compounded of fear, drugs and guilt. He thought often of Ice and Sumi.

Days came and went without any information about the Croakers. They seemed to have disappeared en masse. What Conover found out was that shortly after he had picked Jonny up, a second group of Croakers had attacked the Committee boys at the warehouse. There had been heavy losses on both sides. But he had no information about the Croaker leader or Ice.

Jonny discovered that if he turned a stylized cloisonne elephant on his desk counterclockwise, the wall would slide away and reveal a large liquid crystal video screen. He decided then that bed was his karma, the theme of this incarnation in the world of flesh, pain and illusion. He did Dilaudid analogs and drank gin and watched Link broadcasts. Learned experts still clogged the wires with panel discussions on the Alpha Rats; Jonny flipped past these quickly, finding himself drawn day after day to the Pakistani newscasts on a restricted Link channel that Conover's satellite rig was somehow able to un-jam.

Jonny was delighted to find that the thin Muslim spoke in the same rapid and mock-smooth tones employed by western newscasters. Although Jonny did not understand a word of Pakistani, the look of the commercials was familiar and the music had a universal sing-along jingle quality to it. The advertisements seemed to be mostly about new fusion power projects and injured war veterans.

Jonny's favorite part of each broadcast came at the end. That's when the ritual flag burning always occurred. Sometimes the flags they torched were American, sometimes Japanese. Jonny took to toasting the young uniformed hashishin (each with a gray metal key around their neck that was the key to heaven) until he remembered that Muslims did not drink. Then he would simply cheer and pound the bed, drunkenly singing with the battle songs.

The news show often featured pictures of the moon, fuzzy satellite shots that showed ruined geodesic domes and the crystal mounds of the Alpha Rats' ships on the barren lunar surface. On one broadcast, Jonny saw a street that looked familiar. It was a jumpy rolling shot, as if being shot from the window of a moving car or truck. Polychrome marquees above crawling neon. Hollywood Boulevard, Jonny thought. The newscaster's face grew serious as he spoke over the grim footage. Pictures of lepers in the streets; they seemed to be everywhere: shots of gangs (he recognized the Lizard Imperials right away), hookers and nine-to-fivers from the Valley. Burning funeral ghats along the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. A quick-cut to people being loaded into the back of a Committee meat wagon.

The show ended when the newscaster lowered his head and pronounced, "Al salaam." As he faded away, a caricature of Uncle Sam and a samurai appeared on the screen. Both figures were yelling "Bonsai!" the samurai swinging a long sword, cutting a deep trench into a map of the Middle East. Jonny's hands were shaking when he turned off the screen.

Jonny sometimes ate dinner with Conover in a cavernous room at the far end of the Hacienda wing. A cantilevered stucco ceiling with bare wooden beams so old that they were probably real wood, criss-crossed two stories above the dining area, a lighted island of silver and crystal in a sea of plundered art. Sitting at the dining table, the walls of the room were lost to Jonny. Old masters, bathing scenes and hunts, orgies and crucifixions, some several meters long, were stacked three deep along the base boards or perched on aluminum easels between sixteenth century Roman warrior-angels and Henry Moore bronzes. Buddha and Ganesh shared space with porcelain clocks on the mantel above a bricked-in fireplace.

Jonny came to dinner dressed in one of Conover's black silk shirts and a pair of light cotton trousers, He was drunk, but he had given up on the Dilaudid. Although the analog was technically non-addicting, it gave him the sweats and cramps when he did not take it regularly. To counteract the symptoms, he had prescribed for himself daily doses of Dexedrine. Despite all the drugs, he was aware that Conover's medical staff had done a considerable repair job on him. He felt healthier and stronger than he had since he quit the Committee.

Except for those times when Jonny joined him, Conover always seemed to eat alone.

They were served their meals by an efficient and mostly silent staff of ritually scarred Africans. The was French and Japanese, snow peas or glazed carrots arranged with surgical precision around thin and, to Jonny, mostly tasteless cuts of beef. When he commented on this to Conover, the smuggler explained to him that the meat came from Canadian herds that still consumed grain and grazed in open fields, not the genetically altered beasts that hung from straps, limbless and eyeless, in the Tijuana protein factories.

"What you miss, son, is the taste of all those chemicals. Plankton feed solutions and growth hormones."

"Jonny shrugged. I'm just a cheap date," he said.

Conover laughed, sitting across the table in a chair of padded aluminum piping. Wires trailed from his chest, ears and scalp (pale tufts of sparse white hair) to a vital signs-monitor on his left. One of his sleeves was rolled up and a tube ran from a rotating plasma pump mounted on the side of the chair and under a strip of surgical tape on his left arm. "Twice a week I have to endure this," he explained. "Blood change and cyclosporin treatments. My body is rejecting itself. Most of my organs are saturated with Greenies by now. Those that aren't, my body no longer recognizes and tries to destroy. The cyclosporin slows the rejection process. He took a sip of wine from a fluted crystal glass. I clone my own organs. Have transplants once or twice a year. Heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, the works. Downstairs, I have everything I need to stay alive. That nerve tissue in your shoulder? We grow that here, in the spinal columns of lampreys." He took a mouthful of beef and wild rice, chewed thoughtfully. "I've endured all types of nonsense to prolong my stay on this silly planet. I flew to Osaka once, let a quack remove my pituitary gland and install a thyroxine pump in my abdomen. I was told to gobble antioxidants, butylated hydroxytoluene and mercaptoethylamine. I took catatoxic compounds to boost the function of my immune system and now I take cyclosporin to inhibit it. I still have daily injections of dopamine because the production of certain neurotransmitters decreases with age." He shook his head.

"My staff could cure me of Greenies addiction completely, of course. A little tinkering with my DNA and it's done. The problem is that afterwards, they'd practically have to boil me down and build a whole new body for me. In the meantime, I'd be in some protein vat while the other lords and the Committee carved up my territory. It's strange, don't you think," he asked, "that we expend so much energy trying to stick around a place we don't particularly like?"

Jonny picked at a piece of asparagus. "I think I could help your people track down the Croakers," he said. "I've got some experience, you know."

Conover continued chewing. "You're drunk," he said.

"That doesn't have anything to do with anything."

"And what are you going to tell the Colonel when he picks you up?" Conover asked.

"You think he can get to me again?"

"There's no question of it. You are a commodity of some value to him. Plus, your face is well known. He or one his informants will find you."

Jonny grunted. With his fork, he moved the tasteless meat around his plate until he could not stand to look at it anymore. "So I wait here forever, is that the plan? Well, forget that. I can take care of myself," he said. "Besides, what if I was picked up. What makes you think I'd tell Zamora anything?"

Conover set down his fork and glanced at the monitor. "Jonny, I understand your worry, believe me. You miss your friends and you've been drinking. What I should have said was that it would be very foolish for you to leave here. The Colonel wants you because he wants me, and he is not careful with his prisoners. When he pumps you full of Ecstasy and starts burning off your fingers, you'll tell him everything he wants to know."

Jonny picked up a crystal carafe and slopped some wine into a glass for himself. Conover pushed his glass forward, but Jonny ignored it and the smuggler lord had to pour for himself.

"In any case, you're better off staying away from the Croakers," Conover said.

"What does that mean?"

"Just what I said," Conover replied.

"The Croakers are all right. They're just trying to help people."

Conover rang a silver bell by his plate. Young African men in white jackets began clearing away the plates from the table. "Why is it Americans always insist on making everything into a cowboys and Indians movie? Just because you label one group the Bad Guys, you immediately assume that the group they are in conflict with are the Good Guys. The world isn't that simple, son."

"You think the Croakers are the Bad Guys?" Jonny asked.

"I didn't say that. But they are destabilizing southern California far more effectively than the Alpha Rats or the Arabs could ever hope to."

Jonny leaned his elbows on the table. His dinner churned with the liquor in his stomach. "The Croakers are the only effective force we have against the Committee."

Conover gestured to one of the waiters and dessert was served: a raspberry torte like a lacquered sculpture. "The Committee is a fact of life. What we do, you and I, all the dealers and smugglers, is poetry. Haiku. A form defined by its restrictions. The sooner you learn to work within those restrictions, the happier you'll be."

Jonny tossed his fork onto the plate and stood up. Wisps of vertigo floated around the inside of his skull. "Thanks for dinner. I'm going to get some sleep."

As Jonny started out of the dining room, Conover called to him.

"You know I'm doing all I can, don't you?"

"I know," said Jonny, without turning around.

"And you believe me when I tell you I'm trying to locate your friends.

"Yes, I do."

"And you have to know I'm right about the Colonel."

"I know about all that," Jonny replied quietly. "I just don't know if I care anymore."

He drank from the bottle of gin he had taken from his room. He stood in a darkened storage room, the third one he had explored that night, a refuge from his latest failed attempt at meditation.

The room was silent; the air musty. Light danced on a circular dais at the far end. A Camera Obscura, he saw. There was a worn metal wheel mounted on the wall. When he spun it, the brilliant panorama of Los Angeles swept across the dais like a video on fast forward. He focused the image on Hollywood, moving the wheel until the luminescent tent of his home slid into view, glowing beyond palm trees and neon. For a while, he found it comforting, but soon he felt pangs of self-consciousness, imaging himself a peeping-tom getting his kicks.

Is this how we look to the Alpha Rats? Jonny wondered.

Padded Zero-G crates with five year old shipping codes from some lunar engineering plant were stacked against the far wall.

Jonny took another pull from the gin, slid one of the crates to the floor and opened the top. Inside were a dozen smaller boxes, each packed with capsules in blister pack, two capsules to each blister.

The manufacturer's code indicated that the red capsules were an inhalant form of atropine. The purple capsules were unmarked, but Jonny had seen them before. His stomach tightened. It was a popular combination in some circles: atropine and cobrotoxin nitrite.

Holy shit, he thought. What's an engineering company doing with Mad Love?

He tore open one of the packs, slopping gin on floor, and popped a purple capsule under his nose. The cobrotoxin came on like a slow-burning volcano, boiling along the surface of his brain, not enough to kill him or cause permanent damage, just enough to cop the killing euphoria from the cobra venom. His body was molten glass and treacle. No flesh, no bones, just a sizzling mass of plasma, fried eyes and melting genitals. His brain bubbled like magma. Thirty seconds later, he popped the atropine and the inside of his skull iced over. The room exploded into negative as white glacier light blazed behind his eyes and shot down his spinal column. His nerves (he could feel each individual fiber, vibrating in harmony like some kind of cellular choir) were cut crystal and gold. "A las maravillas," he said. This was it. Zen. Oneness. How could he have forgotten? Anger, greed and folly were gone, replaced with a heightened awareness that was what he had always imagined enlightenment to be like.

Then the feeling was gone.

When he could move, he tore two more capsules from the pack and repeated the process. A few years before, Mad Love had been a big problem for Jonny. He had avoided the stuff for years, neither dealing nor using it. In some ways it had been easy; Mad Love was almost impossible to find in the street, at any price, since the Alpha Rat takeover of the moon. Yet, here he was with hundreds of hits.

He felt expansive, filled with love for his fellow man, wanting nothing more than to share his good fortune with the world. Jonny laughed. It was the drugs talking to him, he knew. He did not want to share this with anybody. Stumbling to his feet (the atropine causing his muscles to fire erratically) he pulled down more crates, taking a quick inventory of his stash.

The first three containers were empty, but the fourth held another bonanza: twelve more boxes of Mad Love. He grabbed for more crates, caught the glint of something shining dully on the wall.

Gilt wood. He pulled the boxes away, could see the carved frame.

Then- Blue Boy. The original.

He ran his fingers over the old lizard skin paint, from the plumed hat to the goldleaf frame. There was a catch at the edge. He pushed it and the painting swung away from the wall with a faint click. Behind it were shelves piled high with books and a bulging manila folder. Jonny picked up the foxed folder, took it back to the Camera Obscura and dumped the contents on the dais. It was several seconds before Jonny understood exactly what he was looking at. He fingered a yellowed Social Security card, shiny with wear. Then in the pale Los Angeles nightscape, he turned the pages, rapt, reading a collage version of the life of Soren Conover.

A driver's license from Texas, two thousand and ten. Discharge papers from the United States Army, nineteen fifty-seven. Passports: British, Belgian, Egyptian, all under different names. Ancient news clippings concerning drug wars in Central America and the collapse of the government's genetic warfare programs. Photos on some of the older documents showed a handsome oval-faced man in his thirties, with intelligent eyes and a nose that had been broken more than once. Jonny double-checked any dated documents he came across, trying to find the oldest. From what he had seen so far, he was calculating Conover's age at around one hundred and fifty, possibly one hundred and sixty years.

There were photostats of OSS documents, brittle with age.

Conover had apparently been involved with an operation to assassinate the Russian head-of-state in the early nineteen-fifties.

The American president had canceled the operation and pensioned Conover off. There was nothing from the nineteen-sixties or seventies, but from the eighties, there were several letters on CIA stationery bearing Conover's signature, along with a report marked "Confidential." The report carried no date, but detailed the workings of a Honduran-based CIA drug operation helping to finance right-wing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces in Central America. There was a black and white photo of men in jungle fatigues standing before mortar tubes and M-60 machine guns. One tall man held a cigarette in a short black holder. The hand-lettered date on the back of the photo read: 1988. It occurred to Jonny that if these documents were genuine, then Conover had been in the drug business for close to one hundred years.

That's a long time to do one thing, Jonny thought. He continued through the papers as the silent city light played over them, and wondered at the process of the smuggler's life. How he had parlayed those CIA drug contacts into his own private business. Jonny found the gin bottle by the boxes of Mad Love, took a drink and laughed.

He and Conover had something in common, he now knew. Conover was a smuggler lord now, but once he had been like Jonny, an agent gone native.

"Rogue elephant" they called it, right?

L.A. glimmered on the dais, just out of reach.

The atropine was still buzzing inside Jonny's skull. He picked up handfuls of Mad Love packets and stuffed them into his pockets, then returned to the dais, gathered up the contents of the folder and put them back behind the painting. He restacked the Zero-G crates and, just before leaving the room, he spun the wheel that adjusted the Camera Obscura's lenses. The city blurred by on the dais, streaks of light like a tracer rounds. The picture came to rest on the Japanese wing of the mansion. A snow leopard was strolling gracefully down the driveway.

Conover will understand, Jonny thought, popping another atropine cap.

He went out through the kitchen. The African staff had a music chip going full blast, some Brazilian capoeira band. A coltish young woman who had been dancing as she stacked Wedgewood in a cabinet, stopped to stare at him. Jonny crossed quickly to the door, avoiding the Africans' eyes. Copper pots flashed bronze suns onto the wall above his head.

"Dad'll kill me if I don't get the trash out," he said to their unmoving faces.

He found Ricos alone in the garage, the workings of a robot rottweiler strewn across a wooden workbench. Rather than injure the man, Jonny wrapped an arm around Ricos' neck and jammed a knuckle into his carotid artery, cutting off the flow of blood to his brain. When he was out, Jonny went through his pockets and found the silicon identification card. He got into Conover's car, gunned the engine and backed out.

He took the Cadillac at a leisurely pace down the drive, eyes ahead, ignoring the men among the madrones. At the foot of the drive, Jonny nervously punched the ten-digit code he had memorized weeks before into the dashboard key pad. He was surprised and relieved when he saw sections of the hologram disappear. When the road was clear, he turned off the roof lights and drove slowly down the hill.

The night was clear and hot.

He steered the Cadillac down the winding road, following a series of rolling brown-outs through the suburbs, cracked solar panels, Astroturf on the lawns, a deserted shopping mall that once had served as a holding area during the Muslim Relocation programs at the beginning of the century. The razorwire was still in place atop double layers of hurricane fencing, a grim reminder of the war that had never quite gotten off the ground.

Jonny popped another atropine cap and rode the high all the way into Hollywood, confident that if called upon, he could count each strand of muscle tissue in his body. He left the car behind a Baby Face plastic surgery boutique on Sunset and made his way in and out of the stalled traffic to Carnaby's Pit, taking a detour through the weekend mercado. The smell of cook smoke and sweat greeted him, scratchy Salsa disc recordings, all the familiar sensations. The crowd was thick with Committee boys. Jonny kept his head down while old women tugged at his sleeves and children ran after him with broken electronic gear, an artificial heart of chipped milky white plastic, ancient floppy disk drives. Jonny saw no Link documentary makers and he took this to be a good omen, but he kept mistaking women in the crowd for Ice and Sumi. There were a lot of lepers in the mercado. He spotted them easily- they were the ones wearing gloves or scarves or long sleeved shirts of radio-sensitive material, drawing eyes from their lesions to the random Link videos bleeding across their clothing.

There were more lepers in the Pit's game parlor, frying in their disguises. The air conditioning was down, leaving the air sauna-hot and moist. Jonny felt as if he had stepped into an oven. The scarves and gloves the lepers wore could almost be taken for some new fashion, Jonny thought. Under other circumstances, they might have been. A blonde woman plugged into Fun In Zero G wore a facial veil and a long chador-like garment patterned with dozens of colorful corporate logos, but the billowing material could not hide the mottling along her hands.

All that atropine had left Jonny with a crushing thirst. He pushed his way to the bar and ordered a Corona. Porn jumped and jittered on the video screen, colors slightly out of register (What does that look like through skull-plugs? he wondered). Taking Tiger Mountain was not playing. The music was a computer generated recording in the style of numerous Japanese bubble gum bands. The club was only half-filled and the crowd seemed edgy, voices louder than usual. Random came back with his perpetual half-smile and set down Jonny's Corona. "Haven't seen you for a while," the bartender said. "You're looking exceptionally handsome and vital these days."

"Thanks," replied Jonny. "Took me a little out of town vacation. Dude ranch in the hills. Had an oil change, lube-job, the works."

The bartender nodded. "Vacation, huh? And you came back? You must be a glutton for punishment. " Random, too, was wearing a scarf, folded cravat-fashion in the folds of his sweat-stained white shirt, hiding something. He polished a glass absently on the front of his spotted apron.

"Crowd's looking a little abbreviated tonight," said Jonny.

Random nodded. "Fucking A, man. You can thank the Committee for that. They just passed an ordinance cutting the number of people we can have in here in half. Supposed to get a handle on the leprosy."

"While keeping things convenient for themselves," said Jonny. "If it's illegal to get together, then the Committee can raid any gang councils they get wind of."

"Exactamente," the bartender said. He set down the glass he had been rubbing. Through some method Jonny could never quite understand, the bartender could polish glasses all night, and they never seemed to get any cleaner. "You hear that bit of nastiness just came over the Link? Seems that some person or persons unknown set off a small nuke a few kilometers above Damascus."

"Jesus," said Jonny, "was it us?"

"Nah. Very high burst. Didn't cause any property damage, but the EMP fucked up communications, computers, etcetera for a few hours. Seems from the device's trajectory that it came from beyond Earth orbit."

"What, they think the Alpha Rats are dropping bombs on people?" Jonny asked. He took a long drink of the Corona.

Random shrugged, leaned his elbows on the bar. "Buddha said 'Life is suffering.'"

"Then this must be life," said Jonny. He held up the empty Corona bottle and Random bought him another. When the bartender set it down, Jonny said: "What do you hear about the Croakers?"

The bartender shook his head. Jonny could almost hear the gears shifting. Business mode. "Don't know if I've had the pleasure," said Random.

Jonny palmed a packet containing a half-dozen hits of Mad Love and passed it to the bartender. When Random realized what he was holding, he glanced at Jonny, registering genuine surprise. Jonny was delighted; he had imagined the bartender incapable of any emotions beyond a certain rueful irony.

"If you had nicer legs, I'd marry you right now," Random said, tucking the packet away under the bar. "You're aware that I could open my own place if I had a mind to sell what you've just given me."

"If you had a mind to sell it."

"If I had a mind." Random leaned closer, running a soiled gray towel across the old dashboards that formed the bartop. His breath smelled of old tobacco. "Word is, Zamora's cut their balls off. They're gone, man. Closed up shop. Adios. All kinds of crazy talk about them. Like they're trying to get arms from those New Palestine guys or trying to steal a shuttle to go to the moon. Maybe they're the ones that nuked Damascus." Random laughed, all air. "Like I said, crazy talk."

"That's it?" asked Jonny.

"Hell no. That's the crazy talk. People with a few synapses left say they're hold up somewhere up the coast, past Topanga Beach."

"The Committee's coming down hard on all the gangs."

"So I've heard," Jonny said, draining half of his beer. He glanced at the tense faces around the bar. Anger, greed and folly. "Perhaps you've hit on it. Perhaps the Committee's nothing more than an instrument of karma."

"More like a stairway to the stars. If you're an ambitious prick."

"Que es?" said the bartender, "You think the Colonel wants to addressed as 'Mister President'?"

Jonny shrugged. "He wouldn't be the first one."

"What's the old joke? 'Don't vote. It only encourages them.' "

Random shrugged. "Maybe it's not that funny. Anyway," he continued, "if I were you, I'd consider taking my act on the road. Between the heat and the lepers, Last Ass ain't no place to be right now." The bartender moved down the bar to serve a group of well-dressed movie producers and their dates. They were drunk and tan and radiated the slightly forced humor of store-bought youth, hard, sleek bodies surgically sculpted into something as functional and anonymous as next year's jets.

"Jesus Christ," Jonny said. "It makes you crazy."

Later, when he was working on his third Corona, Random stopped in front of him. "You think about what I said?"

"About leaving?" Jonny asked. "No way. I'm a business man. Got deals to make. Grande deals. Enorme deals."

"In that case," said the bartender, "I think somebody over there wants to talk to you."

Jonny turned in his seat and saw Nimble Virtue, the slunk merchant, waving to him from a corner table. "Thanks," he said to the bartender.

"It's your movie, man," said Random. "Be careful."

Jonny picked his way through the crowd to the corner table where Nimble Virtue sat by herself. She was dressed in a loose-fitting kimono patterned with water lilies and delicate vines done in gold and turquoise. Dropping into a seat across from the smuggler lord, Jonny had a perfect view of a couple of her men, two tables away, drinking iced vodka with some of the local Yakuza. Jonny smiled and waved to them. One of the Yakuza men laughed and made a made a circular motion with his finger to indicate madness.

"Dear Jonny-san," began Nimble Virtue, "First, allow me to apologize for the uncomfortable circumstances under which we last met. If I had any inkling as to Colonel Zamora's true intentions, I can assure you that he would never have gained a single syllable of information from myself or any of my people."

Nimble Virtue was small, a skeletal, middle-aged woman with a flat nose and pale skin through which you could see the blue veins around her skull. The way Jonny heard it, she had been born into prostitution on one of the circumlunar sandakans that had serviced the mining trade from the moon; it was not until the Alpha Rat's invasion had destroyed the lunar mining business that she ever set foot on Earth. Once there, she became the mistress of a powerful Yakuza oyabun and thereby escaped the sandakan.

Having spent much of her life in zero-G or reduced-G environments, on Earth Nimble Virtue was forced at all times to wear a titanium alloy exoskeleton. This helped her move about, and a ribbed girdle-like mechanism worked her diaphragm, her chest cavity having grown too small for her lungs to breathe the thick air of Earth's surface. It was also rumored that she never went anywhere without a velvet lined case bearing the fetuses of her two still-born sons.

"You're a liar," Jonny said. "You'd sell your grandmother for sausage if you thought you could hide the wrinkles. The only thing I don't understand is why nobody's ever put a bullet through your brainpan."

Nimble Virtue covered her mouth with pale metal-wrapped fingers, and giggled. "Some have tried, Jonny-san, but, as you can see, none have succeeded. Many people find it more pleasurable to work with me rather than against me. Could you not?" Nimble Virtue lifted an empty wine glass and waved it at the table where her men sat.

One of them got up and went to the bar. "Have a drink. They keep Tej here for me. Have you ever tried it? It's an Ethiopian honey wine. Wonderful."

"I don't drink with people who sell my ass out from under me," said Jonny. "But since you got me over here, you can at least tell me why you turned me to Zamora."

Nimble Virtue ran her index finger around the rim of her glass and licked off the remains of the wine. In the second of silence between the pre-recorded songs, Jonny could hear the insect humming of her exoskeleton. "I gave you to him as a gesture of goodwill. I thought the Colonel and I had a deal, but things have not worked out for us." She gazed after her man at the bar. "A bit of free advice, Jonny. Never develop a sweet tooth. It is much too expensive a vice in a city like this.

"What's this goodwill business you're talking about?" asked Jonny.

"I thought you would be the expert in that."

"Don't be cute," said Jonny. "I could snap that skinny neck of yours before any of your boys even draws his gun."

Nimble Virtue smiled at him. "And then we would both be gone, and wouldn't that be a waste? No, much better that you should hear me out," she said. "I have a business proposition for you. It's very simple: I want you to forget the Colonel. Come and work for me."

Jonny leaned back on his chair. "What could I give you that you can't buy already?"

"I know that Zamora had you picked up because he wanted information about Conover. I also know that the Colonel is planning a massive raid against all the smuggler lords. It only stands to reason that you two have made a deal. That's why he let you go. Correct, Jonny-san?" She paused and took several deep, ragged breaths.

Talking, it appeared, put her out of synch with her breathing apparatus.

"You are a dealer and can move freely among the lords. You are gathering information about us for the Colonel: our strength and our movements. I, too, wish to bid for your services. Work for me. All I need is the date and time of the raids. For that information, I will provide you with ample protection, as well as a permanent place in my organization when we cut the Colonel down."

"I don't know anything more about the raids than you do," said Jonny. "And I'm not working for Zamora, and if I was, I sure wouldn't give you any information."

One of Nimble Virtue's men arrived, carrying a heavy green bottle from which he poured a clear gold liquid. The man set down a second glass and poured Tej for Jonny before heading back to the other table.

"Thank you, my dear," Nimble Virtue called after the man.

She took a sip of the syrupy liquid and looked at Jonny. "Really, Jonny-san, these threats and the names you call me mean nothing, but do not insult my intelligence. I know that you have spent these last weeks at Conover's mansion in the hills. Gathering evidence, yes? I know all about Conover's hologram dome, and I know in my bones that you are working for Colonel Zamora." She paused again to catch her breath. "In truth, I admire the subtle way you set up the Croakers for the Colonel. Groucho is not a stupid man. You are to be congratulated for taking him so thoroughly."

"Keep talking. You're digging your own grave, asshole," said Jonny.

Nimble Virtue crossed her hands on her lap and gave him an indulgent, matronly look. "Do you know the expression 'Little Tiger', Jonny-san?"

"I've heard it."

"You are the Little Tiger," she said. "You make loud roars, but you have little strength and no cunning. I like you because you make me laugh. But circumstances force me to limit the amount of time I can expend on any one enterprise."

"Don't let me keep you," said Jonny.

She waited a moment. "Then you are committed to the Colonel?"

"I'll deal with Zamora in my own way," he said. "I don't work for him and I won't work for you." Jonny started to get up, but Nimble Virtue laid a hand lightly on his arm.

"I would think twice about leaving here if I were you," said the smuggler lord. "After betraying the Croakers, you have very few friends left in L.A. I could make it ever so much hotter for you-"

Jonny swept his arm across the table, knocking glasses, bottles and wine to the floor. "You sell me like your goddam slunk and then you want to make a deal with me? Fuck you, old lady." Nimble Virtue made a fluttering gesture with her hand. Jonny turned and found three of her men pointing Russian CO2 pistols at him, assassin models, chambered for explosive shells. The men were young and handsome, wearing tight black jeans and sleeveless t-shirts with coiled dragons on the front. They were cool and expressionless, mechanical in their movements and stance. But they were not ninja.

"If they were, Jonny knew," he would be dead by now.

Nimble Virtue got to her feet and waved for her men to put their guns away. As they did so, she turned and gave Jonny a small bow. Her face was flushed and she was breathing heavily. "I will be going now. I wish you luck, and time to grow wise, Jonny-san. It would be best if you stayed out of my way," she said.

He watched them as they left. Taking Tiger Mountain appeared on the stage to indifferent applause. As Saint Peter kicked them into their first number, Jonny pushed his way out the heavy fire door at the rear of the Pit.

If he pressed his back against the wall of the alley, Jonny could get a pretty good look at Sunset Boulevard and the entrance to Carnaby's Pit. The repair job on the front of the bar had been a sloppy one. Smears of resin and cheap construction foam covered the bullet holes in the Pit's facade. The charm was definitely wearing off the place, he decided. Hot wind brought the smell of frijoles and burning carnitas down the alley from the mercado.

A scrape. A corpse's whisper: Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.

Jonny started to move. Metal, cold and sharp, bit into his neck.

"Now, now," said Easy Money. "Long time no see, Jonny, old pal, old buddy." Easy and spun Jonny around. Satyr horns, tattooed knuckles around the grip of a knife. "You know what I hear? I hear you want to do me."

Other feet shuffled up behind them; other hands gripped Jonny's arms. Easy released him and lowered the knife. "Bring the car around," he said. Footsteps moved off. Then to the others: "This guy wants to fuck me. But he's so simple you gotta love him, you know?"

Jonny leaned back, supported by the grasping hands, and snapped the steel toe of his boot up into Easy's groin.

Later, after they beat him and he was laid-out on the floor of the car, their feet on his back and a canvas hood over his head, he comforted himself with the image of Easy Money rolling up into a fetal position on the pavement in the filthy alley.