Pattern Recognition

40. THE DREAM ACADEMY

The helicopter passes directly overhead, but the searchlight goes swooping far off, to the side, away from her. Close enough that she can see details of its oblong yellow undercarriage illuminated by a red running light.

Then the searchlight winks off, and she watches the red light dwindle.

The towers are gone.

She hears the helicopter, coming back.

It hovers, about fifty yards away, and the beam snaps out again, through the prop-blown dust, to find her.

She shields her eyes. Between her fingers she watches it settle to the ground, a clumsy-looking thing, its fuselage nearly rectangular. A figure jumps down from the door in its side and walks toward her, throwing a vast unsteady shadow into the light and dust.

She hears the rotors beginning to slow, thrumming down, counting their way to stasis.

He walks up to her out of the glare and stops, about six feet away, his back to the glare.

“Cayce Pollard?”

“Who are you?”

“Parkaboy.”

This doesn't seem to want to process at all. Finally she asks, “Who started the thread that gave Completism its first formal basis?”

“Maurice.”

“In response to what?”

“A post by Dave-in-Arizona, theoretical limits to live action.”

“Parkaboy? Is that you?”

He walks around to where it's his turn to face into the light, and she sees a man with reddish, receding hair, combed straight back. He wears OD surplus combat trousers, a heavy black shirt open over a white T-shirt, and a large pair of binoculars slung across his chest. These have huge, goggle-like eyepieces, but taper to a single tube the size and shape of a flashlight.

He reaches into a shirt pocket and pulls out a card. Stepping forward, he offers it to her. She takes it and squints, through the dust in her eyes and the hard white light, at

PETER GILBERT

MIDDLE-AGED WHITE GUY

“SINCE 1967”

She looks up at him.

“Music business,” he says. “In Chicago, if you're a certain type of musician, you need one.”

“One what?”

“M-A-W-G. Mawg.” He hunkers down, two yards away, careful to give her space. “Can you walk? There's a medic in the copter.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I thought you might have changed your mind.”

“About what?”

“You just broke out of the only prison in Russia that people actively try to break into.”

“They do?”

“The Dream Academy, they call it. That's where one particular batch of Volkov's people took you, after Mama fed you too much roofie.”

“What?”

“Rohypnol. Date-rape stuff. Could've killed you, but that's our Mama. You had a paradoxical reaction, though. Supposed to make you anybody's kitten, but it looked like you'd gone medieval on her.”

“Did I? Were you there?”

“No. I was just checking in when the ambulance and the police arrived. You know that scene in old movies, when the cowboy's dying of thirst in the desert, and the cavalry arrives, and they say, 'Drink this, but not too much'?”

She stares at him.

He unclips a plastic canteen from his belt and passes it to her.

She takes a mouthful, swishes it around, spits it out, then drinks.

“Mama was still trying to lobby for control of the situation, looked to me,” he says, “but with a bloody nose and one eye swollen shut, it was hard for her to be convincing.”

“You knew it was her?”

“No. Wouldn't have known it was you, either, if I hadn't heard 'Pollard', or something like it, about five times. Actually I'd seen a couple of pictures, on Google, but you weren't exactly looking your best, on that gurney there. Seemed to me that the lady with the nosebleed, though, she was pushing so hard that she was on the verge of getting arrested. I think she was arguing they should just take you up to your room and she'd stay with you. Then three guys in black leather coats showed up, and everyone but Mama went instantly deferential. You just sort of evaporated, with your little gurney, no more muss, and Mama went with the coats, looking none too happy about it. Me, I was feeling left out. I checked my e-mail. One from you, with Stella's address. I e-mailed her. Told her I was your friend, and what I'd just seen. Thirty minutes later I was in a BMW with a blue flasher and a fresh set of black coats, running reds and doing downtown Moscow in the wrong lane. Next thing I knew, I was up in one of the Seven Sisters, with Volkov —”

“Sisters?”

“Little old Commie Gothic skyscrapers with wedding-cake frills. Very high-end real estate. Your Mr. Bigend —”

“Bigend?”

“And Stella. Plus a bunch of Volkovites and this Chinese hacker from Oklahoma —”

“Boone?”

“The guy who's been hacking your hotmail for Bigend.”

She remembers the room in Hongo, Boone cabling his laptop to hers.

“Excuse me,” he said, then, “but that dust you've been rolling in has way too much titanium in it. You've probably already exceeded your MDR on that stuff. Why don't you let me get the medic over here to help get you to the helicopter?” He takes the canteen, drinks, caps it, puts it back on his belt.

“Titanium?”

“Soviet eco-disaster. Not as big as drying up the Aral Sea, but you've been hiking down the middle of a forty-mile strip of catastrophic industrial pollution, about two miles wide. I think you want to have a very in-depth shower.”

“Where are we?”

“About eight hundred miles north of Moscow.”

“What day?”

“Friday night. You went under Wednesday, and you were out until whenever you woke up today. I think they probably sedated you.”

She tries to get to her feet, but suddenly he's there, hands on her shoulders. “Don't. Stay put.” The weird one-eyed binoculars are dangling a few inches from her face. He straightens up, turning into the glare. He waves to the helicopter. “If they hadn't had these night-vision glasses,” he says, over his shoulder, “we might not have found you.”

“WHAT do you know about the Russian prison system?” he asks her. They're both wearing big greasy beige plastic headsets with microphones and green curly cords. The ear cups have enough soundproofing to muffle the roar of the engine, but he sounds like he's down a fairly deep well.

“That it's not fun?”

“HIV and tuberculosis are endemic. It gets worse from there. Where we're going is basically a privatized prison.”

“Privatized?”

“A bold New Russian entrepreneurial experiment. Their version of CCA, Cornell Corrections, Wackenhut. Regular prison system is a nightmare, real and present danger to the public health. If they wanted to set up an operation to breed new strains of drug-resistant TB, they probably couldn't do a better job than their prisons are already doing. Some people think AIDS, in this country, in a few more years, will look like the Black Death, and the prisons aren't helping that either. So when one of Volkov's corporations decides to set up a test operation, where healthy, motivated prisoners can lead healthy, motivated lives, plus receive training and career direction, who's going to stand in the way?”

“That's where the footage is rendered?”

“And what motivates these model prisoners? Self-interest. They're healthy to begin with, otherwise they wouldn't have been chosen for this. If they stay in the regular system, they aren't going to be. That's one. Two is that when they get here, they see it isn't a bad deal at all. It's coed, and the food is a lot better than what a lot of people in this country make do with. Three is that they get paid for their labor. Not a fortune, but they can bank it, or send it home to their families. There's thirty channels on satellite and a video library, and they can order books and CDs. No Net access, though. No web browsing. No phones. That's an instant ticket back to TB Land. And there's only one choice, though, in occupational training.”

“They render the footage?”

“All of it.” He offers her the canteen. “How are your feet?”

She waves it away. “Okay unless I move them.”

“We're almost there,” he says, pointing forward, through the plastic nose. “Final motivating factor that keeps the campers here: Volkov. Probably the name's never mentioned, but if you were an inmate, and Russian, which of course they all are, I think you'd get the drift.”

The helmeted pilot, whose face she hasn't seen, says something in crackly Russian, and is answered by another voice, out of the night.

She sees a ring of lights come on, ahead of them.

“I don't understand how this could all have been put together, just to facilitate Nora's art. Well, how isn't a problem, I guess, but why?”

“Massive organizational redundancy, in the service of absolute authority. We're talking post-Soviet, right? And enormous personal wealth. Nora's uncle isn't Bill Gates yet, but it wouldn't be entirely ridiculous to mention them in the same sentence. He was on top of a lot of changes, here, very early, and largely managed to keep his name out of the media. Which must have been a downright spooky accomplishment. Always has brilliant government connections, regardless of who's in power. He's ridden out a lot, that way.”

“You've met him?”

“I was in the same room with him. Bigend was doing most of the talking. Translators. He doesn't speak English. You speak French?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither. Never regretted it more than when he and Bigend were having a conversation.”

“Why?”

He turns and looks at her. “It was like watching spiders mate.”

“They got along?”

“A lot of information being exchanged, but it probably didn't have that much to do with what they were actually saying, either through the translator or in French.”

The helicopter's four wheels touch down unexpectedly on concrete. It's like being dropped ten inches while seated on a golf cart. It hurts her feet.

“They're going to check you over, patch you up, then Volkov wants to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. When you went missing, he flew us all up here in a lot faster helicopter than this.”

“'Us' who?”

But he's already removed his headset. Unlatching his harness, he can't hear her.