Chapter Twenty-Four: Discreet Protocols

“There’ve been a few changes, Bryson. Don’t be alarmed.” Bradlee rose up behind the black desk like a vapor plume at night, and pushed a paper clip around.

Bryson assessed his office. He had a wall of monitors behind him, and he faced two walls of tinted windows, with a view of the world. No that there was much worth seeing in that part of Queens. But the sun looked grand reflected in all that water. “I can see that. What happened to my lab?”

“Needed it for another project. We can’t have idle labs, can we? This is not a tax deductible, charity organization.”

“Who got it?” she demanded to know.

“Katsy Chou I think.”

“That time serving Genetel bitch? You gave it to her?”

“Monozone Research Associate now. Be collegial.”

“Did you recruit her?”

“She defected. Fripp picked up her contract and she’s working on rapid cell division. The research is very promising with tremendous applications.”

“Growth dynamics. Boo hoo.”

“Gratitude, my love, gratitude. Name the three graces.”

“How the hell should I know?”

“The seven deadly sins? Ha. I thought so. You’ve been moved to lab 5. It’s a little more discreet.”

“Antarctica. And it’s tiny. An office crammed full of equipment, and a room to sleep in.”

“A luxury cell, Bryson. And I’ve seen it. It’s maroon and black. Very sexy. The shower is a delight, and you can get chilled sunlight beamed in whenever you like. I think it’s grand.”

“And what about my team? Some of those people have worked for me for ten years.”

He clapped his hands. “Broken up, presto! Sent around the world. Had to be done. They are so effective, they need to be, er, spread around. To prevent talent from clumping up all in one place. You understand?”

Bryson shook her head. “Bullshit. You fucking liar.”

He laughed. “Please don’t be that way, Bryson. Now, suppose you tell me all about this plan of yours.” He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair, eyes half shut. “Go on, I’m listening.”

“Can I sit down?”

“By all means, do.”

“But there isn’t any chair.”

He sat up abruptly and looked around. “Heavens. I am so sorry.

Cindy, bring in a chair for Dr. Bryson.”

Cindy, a young woman with a bloom of tinselly black hair and a perky, bouncing bosom, brought in a chair. Bradlee gave a curdled smile.

“What’s it like with her?”

“Ah, young wine, Bryson. Doesn’t have the complexity or structure of a ripe old tawny port like you, but a beguiling sweetness suffuses everything she does. In bed, anyway. She’s not terribly useful around the office, I’m afraid.”

“All right Bradlee, let’s get down to business.”

He leaned back in the chair as before and said, “Fine then.”

“I need to get a bug made.”

“A bug?”

“Yeah. A biosurveillance bug.”

He pondered this and said, “Not really our kind of thing, that.”

“Well, they do it with animals.”

“Oh indeed. And police and intelligence officers and gaolers. And then all the medical applications.”

“But they don’t monitor what we have to monitor.”

He spun slowly in his chair away from her, still recumbent, and gazed at the screens. He mumbled something and then said, “Bryson, tell me what you think of this.”

All the screens filled up with the image of a fawn drinking from a stream at dawn. A vigilant buck and doe stand by. There’s a chorus of birds and crickets. Then the screen goes black and the words appear: Is this your lucky day? A deep, calm voice says, “Ask your doctor for Paregane.”

“Well? It’s going into every key market, five times an hour all through primetime.”

“Don’t involve me in this stuff.”

His voice became dour. “If you’re thinking of keeping your hands clean, forget about it. There’s work to do.” He sat up and brightened. “I’ve arranged a press conference for this afternoon, and tomorrow you’ve got two meetings in the Catskills somewhere.”

She groaned and looked at the ceiling. “God how I hate the Catskills.”

“But you grew up there.”

“What meetings?”

He stuttered and looked about. “Oh, some biosynthesis something or other, and a civic organization. Didn’t you read the itinerary I sent? Anyway, you’re to present Paregane and discuss synthetic amino acid production and tubule alteration at the conference and the civic club is one of those, er, current events type places, a puff piece. I believe your father or grandfather had a hand in its early endowment.” Bryson started to say something but he stopped her with a slight lifting of his face, so she would not ruin the drama of his pause. “I’m saving the big one for last. You’re coming with me to the Fripp dinner.”

She was simultaneously stunned and irritated, flattered and appalled. “Why am I going to the Fripp dinner?”

“As my escort of course. You don’t expect me to go alone?”

She spoke slowly, but with a strange smile impossible to interpret. “I loath,” she said, drawing out the long o, “and when I say loath, I mean, when I enter a room full of black tie brass, I can feel it in my asshole; so when I do manage to open my mouth–”

“Just open it to eat. The food is extraordinary, or so I hear. Last year they brought in Gaston Montague from Geneva.”

“Just keep smackin’ the sore spots Bradlee.”

“Surely you don’t bear a grudge against Geneva?”

“Stiff, Calvinistic Aryan bastards camped out on pylons. Nothing’s changed in seven hundred years, and the food wasn’t fit for a horse.”

“Montague may be the best chef in the world right now. There are at least a half dozen others there from all around the world preparing everything from lobster to sausage. Have you tried Peculaire’s sea foam? It looks for all the world like a chunk of that crud you find on the beach. But when you slice into it, you realize its dab and fois gras. The fois gras gives it that brownish yellow color.”

“I gag in honor of Peculaaar. Now what about my bug?”

“Excuse me.” He mumbled to his computer and stock prices began to flash across the screen. There were summaries, digests and raw data. “We just went up ten points, Bryson. No, this dinner is very important. Priss Valdez will be there and so will a lot of others who have business with each other. Leonard Two Feathers.” He nodded gravely.

She started to fidget. This was her absolute time limit for spending on something without a result. “My bug.”

“Let’s have a little talk with Jacob Boyle. Boyle?” Cindy opened the door and led in Boyle.

Like life itself Jacob Boyle was nasty, brutish and short. He was squared off at the shoulders, had a slight potbelly but otherwise was scrawny, with a black pencil mustache, and dark penetrating eyes. His cheeks were acne scarred; his nose was crooked, broken and never set right. He was dressed in a cheap, charcoal linen suit, the lapels thin and long, with one brass button below the navel, and pockets big enough for a gun. Although he was clean, the general impression he gave was of a man making every effort not to succumb.

He also looked harassed. His wife, Trinh Ma, was a devout catholic who refused to use birth control. They had nine children, aged one to seventeen. The nine children had impoverished them, and there was little they could afford to do besides fuck, which they did often enough, time permitting.

Boyle kept trying to get somewhere but he could not. He stalled out on police work, got nowhere as a crook, and landed in private security at Monozone where, for some reason, he thrived. But the only place he had ever truly been happy was the military. As a contractor in the Third Caspian War, and then in the Carpathians, Kashmir and Mexico, he learned everything he needed to know for a career back home. But the constant violence had knocked a few screws loose, and he spent most of his time trying to tighten them with alcohol and then heroin, neither of which worked. Then he met Trinh Ma and cleaned himself up. She was the most beautiful woman who ever let him fuck her. He couldn’t give that up. He wasn’t stupid.

When he took the job, she told him, Jacob, deyuh gonna make you do things you don’t wanna do. Yeah, but they were also going to pay him, and if they could make enough money, then their other kids could go to school, not just his eldest.

“Ah Mr. Boyle, come in. This is Dr. Ruth Bryson. Bryson, meet Mr. Jacob Boyle.” Boyle attempted a smile, which in his case involved lifting his thick eyebrows and turning down the corners of his mouth.

“It’s a pleasure,” he said.

“You two will be partners of a sort. Boyle, you’re to do what she says. She’ll have money. Your job is to keep her safe, handle all the details. We have to get results and we have to be discreet. I presume, Boyle, you’re familiar with the term?”

“Whatever boss. Don’t go blowing off in da bar. Keep it tight, between us three.”

“Henry the Eighth used to say, Three may keep counsel, if two be out of the room.”

Boyle scratched his face and stared at Bryson.

“I need a BioWatch bug made.”

Boyle nodded. “For surveillance? Like what they use on animals? I seen it on nature shows.”

“Precisely,” said Bryson. “Only we need to program it a little differently.”

“I know a guy who can do whatever.”

Bradlee stood. “Well, hasn’t this been nice. Now, run along to your new lab, draw some cash,” he said, escorting them to the door, where he put his hand on Bryson’s ass. She stepped on his foot, hard, and left with Boyle.

They sat down in her office. It looked exactly like the old one, maroon and black walls, composite shower/toilet unit, kitchenette, desk, cot and computer. “Shall I tell you what I want?” she asked.

“Nah, I’ll just take you down there,” he said, looking the place over. “So you’re some kind of a star around here? A real doc’s doc?”

“I’m just a piece of ass they kick around to see if any money will pop out.”

He laughed. “Oh yeah, one a dose. Look doc, I gotta take you wit me, but you gotta stick close. Dis guy I know, he can do what you want. He’s an old army spook. A guy who did a little bit of everything, interrogations, assassinations, sabotage, psyops, surveillance. But you gotta understand, the kinda neighborhood where guys like that live, dey don’t see too many high class docs walkin’ around.”

She lit a cigarette. “Do you want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

She made coffee in a glass beaker with filter paper and poured out two cups. They drank it down. “How do you know this guy?”

“Me and him, we worked together overseas. Mostly on the Caspian.”

“How many years did you do?”

“Eight all together.”

“That must have been bad.”

He shrugged. “I liked it well enough. I’ve seen some stuff. But I never got nuked, thank god. Over there, a life ain’t worth halfa one here. And here, it ain’t worth nothin’ at all.”

“Less than nothing. This bug guy, how’s his math?”

“I never saw his degree or nothin’ but I think he’s some sort of physicist. Experimental is what you call it.”

“Why does he do this then?’

“A man’s gotta make a livin’ somehow. Maybe he don’t wanna go down as some company bitch.” She flinched. “Oh, excuse my

french.”

“Forget about it. Let’s go, Boyle. You got a family?”

He smacked his head. “Do I got a family? Jesus fucking Christ. Nine kids Dr. Bryson. One still hangin’ off da tit. Two if ya count me.”

Boyle thought the hovercraft would get ripped off so they flew to a parking deck on 52nd Street and took two PCPs into midtown. They got off on a crumbling platform three stories up. The handrail was broken, the stairs down were slippery with rain and creaked and swayed. Every surface was covered in an incomprehensible scrawl of writing. It was not hot, just regular and overcast with an occasional dirty drizzle.

“It’s just a couple of blocks from here,” Boyle said. They were on a street along a small canal choked with garbage. The water pushed its way over busted bags of rotting foodstuff. Household refuse collected in high soggy piles. Men pissed into it. On either side were boarded up apartments, charred with smoke. A few were habitable, doors and windows behind steel bars, and many more occupied. Other than the men pissing there was no one out. There was no noise. A giant rat trundled across the way. Bryson’s muscles tightened. “They don’t come out in the day.”

“Tell that to da rat!” he said, laughing. He pulled out his gun and shot it. Its body spun around splattering blood. Pigeons fled up to the roofs. Bryson stared at the rat and then at Boyle.

“Why did you do that?”

He looked confused. “Didn’t you want me to do that?”

“Well I–no. It was just a rat.”

“Oh. Sorry then.”

The composite bridges over the canal were dirty with graffiti but it was more legible than at the PCP station. I got no fuckin job, street sheet. DKO was prevalent.

“What’s DKO,” she asked.

“Dr. K-O. Knock out. Doctor Knock Out. It’s a drug. Ya sleep for five days.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“You sleep for five days.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What’s to get? They say it’s like death. You get to be dead for five days, no noise, no dreams, no distractions, no stink, no fuckin’ rats. Get it now?”

She shook her head and mumbled, “Like sitting down to a snack before a great banquet.”

“I don’t come from here,” he said. “My people, they threw it all on a truck and crammed onto high ground in Jersey. All da poor together. Back in them days, everything was racial. Now, after all that, we’re fucking mutts. I heard stories growin’ up. You got no job, no money. Where you gonna go? For me, most guys, it’s war and then the police. But here, you don’t wanna fuck with them. They’re no good. This is where it all sinks doc. When you fuck up where I come from, this is where ya go. In catlic terms, where I am is purgatory and this is hell. But it’s various. Cause up there,” he waved in a northerly direction, “you got your rich, and da theaters, and them, what? Fancy, you know, da kids. And then there are the entrepreneurs. The people makin’ money, like my friend. Restaurants, nightclubs. They wanna be near the action, those kids and people. So they’re here too. Not here here,” he said, pointing to the block they were on, “but here,” waving his hands around to indicate the generality.

One of the men pissing into the canal, as he saw them approach, faced them and started jerking off.

“Will ya,” Boyle said under his breath, looking uneasily back and forth. Bryson laughed. As they passed he continued to pump away with an idiotic, toothless grin. “She’s a fuckin’ lady,” said Boyle to the man and then he casually kicked him into the canal. The man fell in backwards with a piercing shriek and struck a pile of decomposing animal remains. “I hope you fuckin’ drowned, you fucking pervert,” Boyle shouted. Then to Bryson, as the bloom of putrefaction engulfed them in its fumes, “Sorry doc, but a man’s got to show respect or take a hit. You think that guy was just doing a pecker show? He milks his fang and don’t get squashed and two blocks later, you see, someone’s got a shank at your throat. Da first rule is, no one fucks with us.”

They arrived at Ninth Avenue and turned south, into the lower thirties. In the center was an amphibatrain way and on either side were two lanes for traffic, delivery trucks, clumps of people on bikes and pedal cars. There was the odd automobile honking through the throng. Ninth Avenue was full of businesses. Residential buildings were heavily rented. Blackouts were common. The windows buzzed with fans. Storefronts lined the streets selling clothes and appliances, workers loading them in and out of sidewalk elevators. There were coffee shops with big blinking signs in the shape of a donut. On the second floors were sweatshops or bookies. They hit a block with a couple of bars. Outside of them men and women stood in groups of two or three, faces the color of fog, in heavy make up, legs bent, boots on the wall, cocky, and vigilant. An armored hovercraft passed slowly overhead.

Boyle walked fast, hands in pockets, looking at everyone, ahead, behind, to either side. A stream of patter poured out of him, informational mostly, but interrupted by editorial hiccups. At least he’s consistent, she thought.

“Ain’t I goin’ too fast for you doc?” asked Boyle, slowing down.

“No, not at all. It feels good to give it a stretch.”

He nodded. “Ever since they gave me a desk, I got this gut. Trinh Ma tried to put me on this blue paste shit. She calls it a diet to get ridda da belly. And I ain’t goin’ to no fuckin’ gym. Gyms are for assholes.”

The air warmed, her joints limbered up and she felt a sweat about to break. “What time you got?” she asked.

“Two o’clock.”

“And how far are we?”

“Just up there.” He pointed to a 19th century brick building, braced on either side by massive wooden beams bolted through the facade. An ornate concrete stoop with eroded lions and scrollwork led up to a scarred, black composite door. In the vestibule, lit by a dim orange fixture sunk into the ceiling, were unmarked doorbells to each apartment. Boyle pushed one and flexed his jaw. He pulled out a pack of filterless cigarettes and shook one loose like he’d been meaning to do it for a while. “This guy here, he’s a little weird.”

Bryson feigned alarm. “In what way weird?”

“Well, aside from how he looks? Things didn’t leave him right. His injuries upset him, made his mind a little sick, you know? He ain’t loony or nothing. But you’ll see. He’s got a lot of mechanics.”

“Mechanics, as opposed to what?”

“Not everyone got synthetics in the war, doc. Too expensive. But still, there’s somethin’ else. Anyway, he’s a real nice guy.” The door buzzed and he pushed it open, blowing smoke out which flew backwards in her face. The hall smelled like boiled cabbage and dirty feet. The floor was black with dirt and the walls were covered in what looked like grease.

“There’s no elevator or nothing, but it’s just a coupla flights up. Don’t touch the banister.”

“I’m used to it.”

He stopped. “For real?” He shook his head. The steep narrow stairway sank and creaked beneath each step. All the doors were boarded up except for one, which Boyle slapped with the flat of his hand three times. A second later it opened and they entered the room. The air was twenty degrees cooler. It had a dense, sour smell of chemicals. The windows were covered with two-inch slabs of composite and heavy flack curtains were rolled up tight against the ceiling. All the walls were knocked down and he had the entire floor. Lamps hung from the ceiling on chains at random intervals. There were workstations with roaring hood vents sucking out the fumes of assayers and fabricators. It was a bedlam of dials and boxes of equipment stacked against the walls. Computers in mismatched banks chugged along. Her eyes adjusted to the clutter and picked out familiar objects, three generations out of date: microscopes, spectrometers, atom smashers, lasers and glove boxes. Liquid nitrogen tanks stood smoking sullenly in the corner.

Seated at a desk, between two tall metal wheels as high as his ears, behind a computer and towering piles of paper, rumpled scrolls of electraweave, translucent cables like a swarm of neurons and composite boxes, was a tiny man with long black hair surrounding a bald spot. His face was lined and old. His right eye, the skull above it and the cheek below, were clearly mechanical. His left hand was articulated metal, no skin, no tactile sheath of any kind. Riveted on top of the fingers were little red diodes, shining and flashing every time he moved. On the wall behind the desk was a prosthetic limb with an arrow through it. Hanging from the arrow was a crudely lettered sign:

fUck yoU

V.A. loVe, zAck “The sign,” Zack said, “is of interest?” His voice was artificial, disembodied, trebly.

“I’m Bryson,” she said, sticking out her hand to shake the metal one. He looked at her hand with his crystal eye (a blackish ball with a dilating aperture in the middle) and sighed in a rich baritone, “Forgive my disdain for human flesh.” He smiled, revealing a row of composite studs. “The V.A.,” he continued, in the deep liquid voice, “condescended to outfit me with prosthetic limbs.” He clacked his fingers together and the red rivets glowed brightly. “Hello Boyle.”

Boyle got an uncomfortable grin and started to sweat. “Zack, Bryson’s my boss. Can ya try and stick to one voice?”

“Variety is the spice of life Boyle. But if you insist.” Then he looked at Bryson and said, “Very brave of you to come. The inventor of Euphorics. I’ve seen you on the news. Got anything to cheer a tap-dancin ambassador up? A little Paregane perhaps?”

“I neither carry nor use anything stronger than tobacco.”

“And you aren’t even an alias. Most people like you try to project into here and find themselves immediately phased out.” He slid back from the desk and they saw that instead of legs he had a movable base. “It goes up and down stairs and I can empty the potty chamber myself. The hubris, the, ah presumption of so many people is that we want to be whole again. Who by choice would keep a thing so easy to blow off as a leg. If my eye offend thee, pluck it out.” He reached up with his metal hand and pulled the upper right quadrant of his face off, holding it forward, the eye roving back and forth between Bryson and Boyle. He plugged it back in and smiled. “How may I assist the inventor of Paregane.”

“I need a BioWatch bug for humans,” she said, relieved his show was over.

“Hmmm. To track their position only?”

“No. I need to monitor their brains.”

He spun around on the base, and rode off into the hinterland of worktables on the two tall wheels. At a ten-foot high shelf he stopped and rose up on a flexible steel pole attached to his seat, which bent whichever way, he bent to reach boxes, bags and baskets crammed onto the shelves. “I’ve just the thing here,” he said, his voice going deep and coarse. “They used it to hunt spies in Champa back in ‘75, very effective. Ah–” he sank down into the base with a hiss and was back at his desk. He took out a ceramic box and showed it to Bryson. “This contains a generic nanobot. A template.”

Bryson watched him put it down on the desk. “Can it be programmed?”

“Certainly. What you need is a neuronanobot.”

“I’m searching for very specific fields,” Bryson said. “Can you program one to transmit what I need?”

“No problem. May I have a cigarette?”

Boyle, who had been standing by half asleep, grabbed suddenly for his crumpled pack.

“Not one of yours Boyle, one of hers,” he said in a long, scaly voice, smiling like a snake. The paranoia was like walking face first into a cold web. Warily she took out a pack of cigarettes from her pale green muslin smock and handed him one. “Organic, aged Turkish leaf. Fragrant, earthy, with notes of clove, cherry and oak.” He lit it and the grey exhalation drifted up into the naked bulb hanging by a wire overhead. “I am most honored to have met you Bryson. What would this world come to if people were allowed to feel their unhappiness, if they knew their true condition?” He fussed with the ceramic box and said, “In order not to interfere with the signals it’s measuring, this neuronanobot will transmit data to a booster located in the subject’s neck. That will have a limited range, depending on circumstances. Could be as low as ten k and as high as a hundred fifty. You’ll get location via GPS and whatever electromagnetic activity–“his voice dropped and became officious, “specified on this form.” He handed her a scrap of paper and a pencil stub. “Anything else?”

“Heart rate, pulsox, REM, blood chemistry–”

“Full regular BioWatch features. No problemo. So, what’s all this for?”

“Nothing,” Bryson said.

“You know how it is Zack. We were never here.”

Zack looked sad and said, in a cool, subterranean voice slightly hoarse with static, “I’ll need a week to make a prototype. Copies after that I can do quickly. Now, the manner of delivery. Can you touch the subject? Does it have to be remote?”

Bryson looked at Boyle.

Boyle said, “What’s the difference?”

“A neuronanobot is programmed to go to the brain and sit there till it decays. It’s best delivered to the spine or nervous tissue, but can make its way up through the bloodstream. It cannot go via the digestive tract. So you can’t put it in their food say. Eye drops, nasal swabs, a prick in the ganglia. There’s also the risk of malfunction or rapid decay–”

“What are the stats on that?”

He hissed unctuously. “I don’t know. Never used ‘em on anyone I cared about if they lived or died. But I guess, odds are nothing happens. A few go blind, some die. It’s like a stroke. Sometimes it happens over time, like a bunch of little tremors before an earthquake. And sometimes, boom, they go down.”

Bryson lit a cigarette and squinted into Zack’s onyx eye. “Remote delivery. Like a dart gun.”

“A dart gun it is then. Go see a man down the block. Lieutenant Drake, weapons specialist and tattoo artist.” Observing Bryson grinding her teeth he said, “Relax, it’s a referral. I’m a great admirer of his work.” He held up his silver hand and made the diodes flash.

“He did my lights. And this.” He pulled his shirt up to reveal a lightshow on his belly and chest of blue waves crashing on white sand. A blood red sun sank between his nipples, through the hair down to his belly button. “They showed us that picture and said it was the beach we were storming in Champa. Haven’t seen it yet.” He looked off around his lab, like a patriarch surveying his flocks. “But there’s always hope!” he smiled cheerfully. “Perhaps when I retire I’ll head off to a bungalow on a tropical shore and try my hand,” he clacked his finger together, “at a little surf casting.”

Bryson took a drag off her cigarette. “Yeah, maybe I’ll join you.”

“That would be an honor. There’s a lot a man can do down there for a woman at this height, you know, and it ain’t all cunnilingus either. Believe it or not, this thing swims.” He swiveled back and forth.

“I’m surprised it doesn’t fly,” she said.

“Oh, but it does! It does!”

“How much for the bug?”

“That depends on how long the prototype takes. I’ll need cash down, an advance applied to the final bill, nonrefundable. $10,000.00 oughta cover it.”

Boyle gasped. “You must be fucking nuts, Zack.”

“This is Monozone I presume, you’re not, er, an impostor?”

“At ease, Boyle. Here’s your ten grand. We’ll be back in a week. And I want you to go to that guy what’s his name.”

“Drake. Lieutenant Drake,” Boyle said.

“Yeah him. Go get us a gun, make it two of ‘em and we’ll need, eventually, a thousand bugs, maybe more.”

Zack could not suppress a genuine smile. “See you on the beach, Dr. Bryson.”

Bryson bowed slightly and then, striking like a snake, with a flash of intensity in her eye, she gripped his metal hand in hers and said, “There’s always hope, Zack,” releasing him before he could react.

Boyle had never seen anything like it. He thought about it all the way home on the amphibatrain, as it crossed New York harbor, stopped at a station on the former Staten Island, crossed the no longer narrow Verrazano Narrows and made land at Landing, New Jersey where it became a Jersey Go Transit amphibatrain and a new fare was charged for each passenger. Boyle was now half way home and nearly suffocated by the crush of bodies. Heads stood centemetres from his nose and even if his gut was big enough to act as a barrier it would have made no difference. People would have crammed it flat. There was nothing worse than a fat man on an amphibatrain.

Most people like Bryson were snobs. Condescending, always acting so nice, talking to you like you were stupid or something, or a child. Army and cop brass never talked to you like a child. Like a dog maybe, but not a child.

People like Bryson never say what’s on their mind and expect you to guess and get pissed if you can’t. It was lose, lose, lose with them. And he could never run it all down in his head, he was no good that way. The real game was never where he was, unless it was too late. But somehow he always pulled through. He was there, wasn’t he?

So what he thought. It always came down to so what. He couldn’t remember the last time something surprised him. Until Bryson. She was tough and didn’t give a fuck about rules. Sexy too for a lady in her sixties. The oldest woman he ever fucked was however old Trinh Ma was. 38. Maybe a few of the old buzzards he screwed in Azerbaijan were older, but he doubted it. They just looked old cause they were dying young. Starving people always look old, even the kids.

There was something about her face, he didn’t know what. It was a hard face, not too pretty, except when she smiled. Then you could see how blue her eyes were. It was like looking at a cat, the white hair, the eyes all lit up. She wasn’t stretched out and fake. She was rich, but she looked like a person. Maybe that was it.

And she was one ass kicker in a bar. The bar had been her idea but after the business at Zack’s he needed a drink, even though he knew it would give him a headache later. The headache he had now. It was like this big river of pain fed by little streams of perfume and clothing smell and flesh. Maybe, he thought, another drink. But the bar car was a long way off, it would wipe him out working his way through the crowd and he didn’t have the money anyway.

The only thing she shouldn’t have done was pay Zack all that money. Zack never got the ten grand down from anyone. He was ripping her off. It didn’t matter about who it was for. It was Boyle’s deal and Zack would have done it for half of that if she’d let him fuck with him. You don’t do that and then the respect’s not there. That was a difference between rich and poor. They don’t care. Chump change to them was what you could live on for a year. Well, aside from that he liked how she operated. How she treated him.

At Edgewood he struggled out of the car and took a huge gasp of foul air. The complex of methane plants that employed most of the town were pink and grey in a hazy twilight. Bamboo and modified fir stood in thick groves up and down the track and along the roads and sidewalks leading out of the station into the village of Edgewood. Edgewood was a grid of streets a half mile away from the methane plant, streets lined with little house cubes, arranged around a strip of bars, fast food joints, sex clubs and discount stores. Every block had its stand of evergreens and bamboo, municipal water and sewage, solar and hydrogen power for each house and a fire hydrant. The houses were composite sided cubes, blue, yellow or white with flat, solar paneled roofs and a little concrete play space in front. A narrow driveway entered a garage big enough for a family of four’s bikes and a box of all season sports equipment.

Boyle, in an increasingly choleric humour, rode the fifteen blocks from the station to his house with a thousand other commuters, weaving and ringing their bicycle bells and flashing their lights to turn or to stop. Even though they were more or less like him, he hated them all. Life was a pestilence. An imposition. Most days he would have been happy to just stay in bed. In fact, he felt that being born in someway was just being awakened out of oblivion for no good reason at all. They roused him up for this? But somewhere buried in the cynicism and ennui there was an ambition to get just ten centemetres ahead of the other slobs. He hated this ambition. It was like being possessed by an alien. A thing that looks like a lawn green octopus with intelligent eyes and delicate hands. But once it’s inside you it hides out, waiting to take over when your guard is down.

Sometimes he thought of it as responsibility to his family. But that explanation always seemed false. Life, the village, the job were full of losers with families to support. They gave up while he kept banging away at it to get a few more bucks, move a little ahead.

And there was the law. If he wanted to send more than one kid to school he had to pay for it. Where do you get scratch like that from? He had to become a free agent if he wanted to move up. His search for the right patron took him to Laraby. Talk about a guy who always lands on his feet. Then Laraby put him onto Bradlee. That led to Bryson.

But he didn’t work for her really, he knew that. She was butter on the toast. She was his assignment. He was, in the end, spying on the only person there he liked.

With a slight intake of breath he opened the door and prepared for the onslaught. He was clammy with drizzle and sweat and the cool air evaporated it off of his skin. The pleasant sensation consumed his entire mind for a moment. He was in the living room, with its folded up day beds and blaring t.v. Toys, clothes, bowls of luridly colored food and cups of luridly colored beverages covered the bare, composite floor. Four children sat on a daybed in a stupor interrupted only by turf battles. They were Candy, 13, Lesbian, 11, Big Guy, 9, and Little Guy, 6. Crawling through the trash on the floor was his three-year-old Maria.

Standing in the doorway to the dining room, where there was a table between two day beds with six chairs crammed in around it was his wife, Trinh Ma, a small, worn out woman of thirty eight. She had short black hair and rough, dark skin. Her eyes looked like they’d been hammered into her head. She wore a white, V-necked t shirt and a one year old, Agatha, was sort of hanging in her forearm, sucking contentedly at her left breast. Trinh Ma’s belly hung out over the tight waist of her pink jeans. Tugging at her leg was a dirty, four and a half year old boy, Nero, in underwear with a deep shit stain in the back. Trinh Ma screamed, “I told you to go potty an hour ago!”

“But Maria wouldn’t let me in.”

“Maria? What da fuck was she doing in there alone? Maria! I told you a million times–” she looked up at Boyle. “Oh, you. Let me tell you. I hate those fucking things!”

“What fucking things, what?” He hated being dropped into the middle of shit.

“I don’t know what you call it. Alias. Awright? Alias! Ali asses in the kitchen. They make my skin crawl. Go deal widit. It’s your work.”

“You gotta slow down.”

“Don’t hit me Little Guy!”

“It’s my pillow.”

“Ow. Mommy, Little Guy hit me.”

“Hit him back,” Boyle said. “Don’t let him get away with it.”

“You fucking idiot,” Trinh Ma said. “Don’t listen to him. There’ll be no hitting.”

Boyle snorted. “Reform. What a joke.”

“Will ya get in der and talk to doze damn things and get ‘em da fuck outta my house?”

“All right already.” He turned his most formidable mug on the children on the day bed and said, “You listen to your mother! No hitting. No screaming. No nothing. Watch the fucking t.v. and shut up.”

Trinh Ma swayed and looked at the ceiling. “We ain’t raising robots! Shut up and watch t.v.? And you call yerself a father?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Ow, no biting,” she said to the one year old, and jerked him away from her breast. The hem of her t-shirt sat on her swollen, wet nipple. Boyle stared at it.

“Gimme a taste of that. I promise not to bite.”

“Get out.”

“C’mon,” he implored.

“We got enough kids,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, giving him the eye.

“I never heard a one got pregnant in her tit.”

She yanked down her shirt. “Boob.”

“I could eat yer pussy and that wouldn’t knock you up either.”

She looked at the kids on the day bed and said, “You don’t think they understand? What are you, drunk?”

“I ain’t drunk.”

“Sure you are. Come home from work drunk. Ain’t we done with that?”

“Come on. Don’t be a fucking bitch. I just got home.”

“Go deal Jake. The kitchen.”

“I’m goin’, I’m goin’.” He rubbed her ass on the way out, up between her legs and she gave him a kiss on the ear. “Awright mister,” she yelled, “get in the bathroom to change those pants.”

Boyle went into the kitchen, a tiny, clean white room with a ceramic sink, oven and stovetop and a scarred composite island in the middle. The fridge was in the pedestal of this all around surface, which was currently piled up with crap. Several feet away, standing in the corner, were two high definition holographic aliases, Laraby and Bradlee. They almost looked real, but the high definition oversaturated the colors so they looked like they had been painted out of light. Laraby was a short man with a potbelly and a little purple head, his face marked by a permanent scowl. Humorless, he lived for the rat fight. Hot to Bradlee’s cool.

Bradlee scared him. His color grey wasn’t right. Like beer in a frosty mug. Guys like that, you never knew where you stood, but you had to work for them cause it’s your boss who says so.

With Laraby, if things didn’t go his way, you knew it. Then for some it’s a bullet in the head, end of story. But with Bradlee, meaning drifted in and out of the conversation.

He hated aliases as much as Trinh Ma did, maybe more, but he was used to them. Monozone had the money to use them all the time and their equipment was state-of-the-art. Boyle balked at a home receiver but Laraby wouldn’t take no. This Bryson case would involve spontaneous home visits.

“Well Mr. Boyle. A little late?” The alias of Bradlee asked, as Laraby paced the corner.

“I missed my usual train.”

“Explain that, willya? Why’d ya miss the train?” the alias of Laraby asked in a big barky voice.

Boyle faced it. The Bradlee alias said, “Do face the machine, Boyle.”

“Oh yeah.” Boyle faced the dull ceramic cube bolted to the wall.

“Why’d ya miss the train?” Repeated the Laraby alias.

“Cause Bryson and I stopped off for a drink, o.k.? We was thirsty. She said it was all right,” he added in his defense, “and you said she was the boss.”

The Bradlee alias pinched its lips into a smile and its long pale fingers brushed at its white mustache. “Relax Mr. Boyle. We’re all on the same side here. She is the boss. And an important woman.”

“You’re damn right she is,” expostulated the Laraby alias with a lucent spray of saliva. “Don’t you forget it Boyle.”

“We trust Dr. Bryson implicitly. You’re there to protect her. This,” it paused and hummed, “situation is delicate. We need to conduct our research in total secrecy. Dr. Bryson might inadvertently do something–”

The Laraby alias cut in. “If she fucks up Boyle, we need to know. Don’t ever forget who you work for.”

“Indeed. Did she talk about anything of interest at the bar? Mention anything?”

Boyle understood. “No, not really.” He looked from one to the other and then snapped back to the box. “Just about her husband and her vacation.”

The Bradlee alias raised its eyebrows. “Leonard Bryson. I see. Anything about a Dr. Velodia?”

“A doctor what?”

“vuhLODIA!” shouted the Laraby alias.

“No, not that one.”

“And what did you do about this bug.” The Bradlee alias said the word distastefully.

“Well, we ordered it from my buddy Zack. The only problem is, she paid too much. I told her not to but she did.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that Mr. Boyle. You’ve done well. I’ll see you in the morning then.”

“Yeah, have a good one Boyle. And keep your eye on the ball. She may be your boss but I, we’re who you work for.”

“Yeah yeah,” he mumbled. It was making his stomach hurt, having to talk into the cube, feeling like they’re in back of him staring.

“Cheer up old boy!”

Boyle pretended to smile. “So I can get fucked up with her if that’s what she wants?”

The Bradlee alias chuckled. “Absolutely. And it needn’t stop there. If you’ve got anything left over after coming home to this place, give it to her. Knock yourself out Boyle. Have a time of it.”

They zipped out into a hiss of static.

Bradlee and Laraby turned away from the screen and sat down on either side of Laraby’s bare distressed steel desk. From his office they could see Manhattan’s jagged towers rising from invisible battlements, the Atlantic Ocean, miles of tidal mud flats, and the grey, battered industrial expanse of buildings and waste lots below. The sky was a coarse, granular grey flecked with violet and lavender. Rain occasionally sprayed against the window.

“Well, I think he’ll do,” Bradlee said, touching his fingertips together. Laraby was an indispensable species of rat.

Laraby looked at the window irritably. “He’s a stooge. Hot for her already.”

“Every man who meets her is. Her charms are inexplicable. She’s not beautiful, she runs to fat, and for the daughter of a diplomatic

family, incredibly vulgar. And yet, well–”

“Who gives a shit about that?”

Bradlee stared at him and said nothing.

“You saw that place. Those kids have got him by the balls. Like a

brood. Boyle will do as he’s told.”

Bradlee shook his head sadly. His eyes watered. “That was an awful lot of children under foot. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Just watching it made my skin itch. All he has to really do is protect her.”

“Ah,” Laraby scoffed. “There’s not one of ‘em who’s loyal. You wait and see. Genetel or Meditron will come sniffing her butt andshe’ll go.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Whatever.” Laraby stood.

“Well then,” Bradlee said, remaining in his chair a second, “I’ll be going.” He stood slowly, as if it pained him slightly and rumpled his lips and mustache into an equivocal smile.

Bradlee started out for his own office but half way there he changed directions and took an elevator down and a lateral to Bryson’s lab where he found her seated at her desk eating a plain yogurt and drinking a cup of chamomile tea, with honey and lemon. The screen lit up her face; her hair was blue. She had changed. She was relaxed and her face was tanned. Her cheeks were lean and her eyes were bright.

“I thought maybe you’d like to get a bite,” he began.

Bryson looked up from the computer screen. He never knew exactly what she was thinking. He always assumed there were many layers to a person’s thought and one’s survival depended upon penetrating as many of these as was possible. Human intelligence, such as it was, evolved for this very purpose. The problem of course was that after a while people became so transparent he felt only boredom and contempt in their presence. Thus the only interesting

people were also dangerous. There was no way around it.

“I’m eating.”

“Perhaps something more substantial?”

“I’m not dressed.” “Sweats are all right for the Lounge.” She sighed, put down the yogurt container and looked directly at him. “O.K.”

The Lounge was empty except for a few workers in jumpsuits at the bar and a table full of technicians in white lab coats drinking pitchers of beer and eating a platter of nachos. The air smelled like burnt rubber cheese and warm dog food and above it all was the sour stink of industrial salsa. They took a table far from the windows and other customers, a dark green pocket in a puddle of amber light.

They ordered hamburgers and french fries from the bartender, Jim.

“Aren’t you glad to be back?” Bradlee asked.

Bryson lit a cigarette and narrowed her eyes. “What do you think?”

“Forgive me for asking. I thought you found the, er, country

disagreeable.”

“So what if I do?”

Bradlee craned around, desperate for a drink now. “Well then.

How did the talk to the old folks back home go?”

“You watch everything. You tell me.”

“But from your perspective.”

Jim brought a manhattan and a gin martini with three olives on a toothpick magnified by the booze. “From my perspective I saw a bunch arrogant, stupid time servers lapping up whatever shit anyone feeds them. They were that way in my father’s day and they’re like that now.”

Bradlee chuckled and sipped his drink. “You give them your usual.”

“My mood is foul. There was this, this woman there who very subtly put me down after I had inadvertently insulted her. And it’s just awful bombing around in a hovercraft.”

That afternoon Bryson had landed at the Catskills Resort Complex, wiped the film of sweat off of her forehead and walked, head down, over the burning crushed stone of the landing lot and into the circular, sandstone building. It was a back entrance so she wandered the halls past service rooms and sinks till she found a sign that said, Bryson on Paregane, 4:30.

The conference room was generic. She took a few deep breaths and put her briefcase down by the podium. The audience were milling about in mannered groups of three and four, producing a mumble that grew louder by the second and was sometimes spiked by a laugh intentionally loud. Her handler, in a humiliating panic, rushed forward to greet her. “We weren’t expecting you from that entrance,” she said, smiling and extending her hand forward.

Bryson took it and said, “Did you think I was walking?” The woman looked at her with a sort of horror. “Relax, I’m joking. I flew in on my hovercraft and walked in the nearest door.”

“I’m so sorry. We have a valet of course.”

“Of course. Again, don’t sweat it.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“A bathroom.”

The woman blushed and gripped her fist. “I’m sorry, of course. I’ll take you to your suite. Where’s your hovercraft? I’ll have someone bring in your bags.”

“There are no bags.” The woman said nothing. She examined Bryson’s clothes and twitched. “I’m wearing my work clothes if it’s all right. It seems more authentic, and anyway, I can’t think with a strap choking off my circulation and shoes that feel like a vice.” The woman touched the waist tie of her guava culottes and wiggled her feet against the FlexiSteel pumps crushing her feet into a tiny V. “No offense. Where’s the can?”

The woman smiled and paused a spell before saying, “Just this way

Dr. Bryson.”

“Did you say Bryson?” Bryson asked. “Good lord. I’m Doctor Bitztein, Valvoleen Spark Plug Professor of Sogdian Studies at the University of Leiden. This is the olfactory event sequencing conference?”

“No!”

Bryson gave her a moment of self-immolation and said, “A little humor, Ms. Nelson. I’ll take my name tag when you’re ready.”

“Then you are?”

“Dr. Bryson.”

She peed and splashed her face with cold water. Then she stepped out into a grim little courtyard of large stones and stood under the eaves smoking. When she came back the participants were seated on folding chairs arranged in rows with an aisle down the middle. About a third were holographic aliases. If she had done that they would have accused her of phoning it in. Ms. Nelson stepped up to the podium. “Welcome to the Catskills Society for the Advancement of Learning. My name is Gloria Nelson. The Society is a private civic organization first organized just over a hundred years ago by area families so that they might, in the words of the charter, remain current in our knowledge of scientific, artistic and religious advancements. Our guest tonight may not be a familiar name but within her field she is genuine star. Dr. Ruth Bryson comes to us today from Monozone, a company many here are happy to own stock in, to discuss the new drug, Paregane, developed by her team over the past ten years. While at Cornell in the thirties she did work in the mathematics of successive and emergent mental states, call and response cognition, multiple field interaction, distant wave and long pulse mental phenomena and most famously, synthetic amino acid wave stimulus matrices. These studies served as the foundation for her work in psychopharmacology at Monozone, specifically the

development of Euphorics. Paregane is the most powerful and promising of this class of drugs. Dr. Bryson divides her time between her lab at Monozone Headquarters in Queens, N.Y. and a farm upstate in a GMZ, maintained by her husband of 40 years, Dr. Leonard Bryson, an emergent ecosystems analyst and author. Please welcome Dr. Ruth Bryson.”

She stepped up to the podium, nodded with humility and cleared her throat. “Thank you Ms. Nelson. And I’d like to thank the Catskills Society for the Advancement of Learning for having me. I’m no stranger to these hills. As a girl I lived not far from here and used to attend Society lectures when it was still located in Cobleskill, at the Niemen mansion I believe. I guess that dates me!” Laughter. “Anyway, it’s a delight to be back. It was here that I was first exposed to the basic ideas of quantum psychology, evolutionary biology, the theory of states, 12 dimensional universes. My father was an early member of the Society and, as many of you probably know, a major contributor to the initial endowment. It was and is a permanent family interest.

“I promise I won’t make anyone here do any math. But you might wonder how that’s possible, given our current understanding of how the mind works. The short answer is that while mathematics can describe the operations and states we study, what really interests us, and what mathematics can’t describe, is the experience of life, of the mind, of cognition. We study the parts so that we might study the whole and the whole is no more mathematical than a sunset. A sonnet is a poem with compositional rules but the rules themselves are not terribly interesting compared to sessions of sweet silent thought.

“Now, is thought ever silent? How is it we remember, or project into the future? Why do we anticipate? What makes thought sweet? The Buddha asked, what is the cause of human suffering? and set about answering that question, systematically. That was 500 BC or so.

The work goes on.

“Now, before we get to Paregane, I should explain a little about how Euphorics work. For centuries now we have been synthesizing neurotransmitters, complex molecules that fit into receptors in the brain, like a key fits into a lock. Of course, the ancient Egyptians were doing that when they brewed beer, as were the shamans of Siberia, who ate psychoactive mushrooms and traveled to the underworld. But it’s as different from what we do as, say, domesticating the chicken or dog or the major cereals is from genetic engineering. Work of this kind basically came to a halt in the last century, for reasons we all know. I was privileged to grow up at a time when research was on the upswing. The result of that has been Euphorics, among very many other important drugs developed by my friends and colleagues at other companies and institutions.

“Those old drugs worked all right. Some, like Lithium, are still used. Lithium is a salt that some manic-depressives lack a gene to make. Give them the salt and the manic depression is reduced or eliminated. But once we got the body to manufacture it naturally, it was far more effective. Why is that? Well, suppose that when we look at the brain we are seeing the three dimensional projection of a twelve dimensional entity. Now, I know I promised you there’d be no math, and here I am talking about dimensions, twelve of them no less. But bear with me. No one can visualize twelve dimensions. Mathematics, however, has no difficulty describing twelve dimensions. Now, imagine a cube. A cube projected into two dimensions is a square, just as a sphere is a circle. Now, if you had to design a key for a twelve dimensional entity while only perceiving 3, or at most four, of those dimensions, it is not going to fit very well. Imagine having to design a key for a cube, but all you knew of it was a square. It would fit in some ways, very well even, but not in others. A Euphoric is neurotransmitter designed in twelve dimensions. And in the case of Paregane, the fit is perfect.

“That leaves what Paregane, or, as I prefer to call it, transcryptasine, does. Quite simply it makes the person who takes it feel like they’ve been in paradise, and they carry that feeling with them throughout the day, without side effects.” People in the audience smiled. She smiled back. “You see? Even thinking about it is delightful. And it works. Now, let me just remind you that the mind has many states and that we label these states in terms of their energy. These states can be successive or simultaneous. They interact and counteract. There are also the two operations, Delta, or transformation, and Chiasmus, or reversal, contradiction, dialectic. It seemed as if the names and numbers of states and operations were proliferating at an alarming rate, sort of the way elemental particles did at one time.

“The important states here are Penumbra and Umbra. These are states at rest and in the case of the latter, characterized by long, slow waves. It is the lowest state of rest a body can be in without dying. It is also remarkably similar to the background pulse of microwaves, what we call Drone, or ghost of the big bang.

“Studies show that people who are able to descend, during sleep, into Umbra, show greater contentment with their life. They don’t necessarily earn more money, for instance, but they report high satisfaction with their material life. It follows through consistently with sexuality, friendship, personal development. The contrary is also true. People of all mental types, from neurotics, to those suffering alienation and ennui, and the most desperately ill, suicidally depressed and schizophrenic people, spend less time in Umbra. Most people fall in the middle, never quite tipping over into misery or contentment. But when necessary, we have found that their brains naturally increase Umbra. Now, we have never been able to adjust this until now. Paregane allows a person to sink to Umbra for a portion of each night and the effect is immediate and remarkable.

“Are there any questions?”

A man stood up and asked, “How did you do it?”

“We studied a lot of sleeping brains. The ability to be in Umbra is universal. Only a few people consistently go there though, and this number is evenly distributed among people. Learning how and why the mutation works was difficult and just about everything connected with that is proprietary.”

“They say they dream of paradise. Is that what Umbra is?” a woman asked.

“Well, people don’t dream in Umbra. It is a state that would at one time have been characterized as sub-comatose. There is barely any brain activity; just enough to keep the body alive, and even that is an extremely low state. So the paradise effect you refer to must be a Penumbra state that is retrospectively viewed as Umbra. It’s not really possible to dream in Umbra.”

A man asked from his seat, “What are some of the other states?”

“Well, we reserve some upper ones and leave them unnamed. The highest named is sphere, a theoretical upper limit of total awareness. Below that is Dodecahedron, heightened awareness, and Tetrahedron, which is an unimpaired, waking awareness.”

“I heard somewhere there was one below Umbra.”

She laughed. “Yes, the notorious Grembo. I leave it out because it is theoretical. Anything below Umbra is death.”

“Then what is Grembo?”

“Grembo is the residue. Look, we correct to zero where life ceases. But in reality, there is a residue of energy. It’s small, anomalous, insignificant, but it screws everything up. So we correct to zero and it all works. Grembo is the Italian for ‘lap’. We like to say that when you’re in Grembo you’re in the lap of the universe. Anyway, no one has been recorded at Grembo or come back, because by definition it doesn’t exist. Existence ends before Grembo, but Grembo won’t go away. But remember? I promised no mathematics.”

Ms. Nelson stepped up to the mike and said, “Thank you Dr. Bryson, it has been most enlightening.” She gulped down her drink and looked at Bradlee. “Who can stand it. The cheery talk. The boosterism.”

“A little tense?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

This was most unusual. “Wouldn’t understand?” He lit a silky thin cigarette with a gold match and blew the smoke up into the air above them.

“That’s right.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t understand. Anyway, I’ve been reviewing the sales data and things are just fine. You should be happy. There are only two small glitches I see. One is this China business. I don’t like it at all. Unofficial sales there still amount to huge profits, but nothing compared to over-the-counter sales, nothing. That ban has to be reversed. Valdez will help with that. She’s in touch with the ATO (Asia Theater of Operations) chief, General Stein, and through Fripp we have the trade attaché in Shanghai.”

Jim made his was way over and lowered the plates to the table like a pallbearer. He gave them ketchup, mustard and relish and cloth napkins. Bradlee bit into the soft brown bun, toasted and wet with grease, and squeezed off a piece of grey, gristly meat, which he chewed until he got bored of the taste and swallowed. Bryson bit into hers and visibly relaxed. It was just what she needed, he could tell. Bradlee smiled. He enjoyed the pleasure she took in eating. He almost could feel it himself.

Bryson shoved in a wad of french fries and grunted, “Any lawsuits yet?”

“Dozens overseas. Our people in Geneva are slowing them down. Even if we have to settle a few cases, so long as we admit no wrong and gag the plaintiff, it won’t affect profits adversely–that’s been factored in. It’s the other thing that worries me more. It may be nothing. It’s quite small.”

“For god sake say what it is and then qualify it.”

He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure if it’s real, but I noticed a glitch. I have a feel for these things. It’s just a wiggle in the numbers of prescriptions. It seems that big companies are prescribing it like mad for their malcontents. And the private doctors, they’re on board. But the major nut houses, the teaching hospitals, you know, that sort of thing, are not keeping up their end, despite an especially heavy rotation of sales associates. I mean, they eat three meals a day with us. Just a glitch, you understand? But that’s how it always starts. The little thing you overlooked. The stray hair. So, how did it go with Boyle?”

“Fine.” She slurped up some gin and made a face. “I don’t want this. It tastes like fuel. I want a beer. Jim? A beer. A pint of whatever.” She tasted the beer. “This isn’t bad. I expected worse.”

“But you’ve eaten here for decades. You know exactly what that piss tastes like.”

“Nope. Everything is different Bradlee. I’m different.”

“Other than a tan and five kilos–”

“Five? Blah. I wish I weighed a thousand more. I’d like to swag through this world with a gut so big it would never fill. No, it’s that GMZ and Leonard. They’ve ruined me for work. I can’t get back into the swing of things. I’ve got no ideas, no mmmphph.”

“You make it sound like a commercial for piles medication. Every scientist goes through a slump. You’ll get it back, I know you will. It’s in your blood. You could do no different if you wanted to. Isn’t that right? Anyway, given the situation, I think a fix for Paregane would be timely.”

“Boyle’s a real pisser,” she said, watching the foam collapse in her glass.

“In what way?”

She bit off a chunk of burger and bun, swallowed some beer and munched on the yellow pickle spear. “He just has a way about him that’s endearing. I love the way he explains the world to you, things you take for granted everyone knows and that he thinks he’s discovered.”

Bradlee looked at her and her blue eyes met his and he smiled weakly, trying to conceal a surge of sadness. “Well, he is quite stupid of course. Nine children. Requires a sort of brute.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate him.”

“No, but one should never expend more energy than necessary when sizing a person up.”

“He’s no dope.”

“But the man lives in a verbal fog of solipsism and malaprop–”

“You don’t really expect me to believe that grammar is the measure of a man’s intelligence?”

“Of course not. But in the end the complexity and nuance of thought bears a direct relationship to the complexity and nuance of language.”

“Yeah right. If you want to play Scrabble with Boyle you’d probably win. But a chess game?”

“Let it not be a form of boasting when I say he would go down to defeat before the game even began.”

She laughed. “If it’s a board game you’re playing, sure. But the game I’m playing with him now–”

Bradlee swept the air between them with the flat of his hand. “He’s just the man. No doubt about it. Just the sort of Virgil you want for a midtown guide.” She polished off the french fries and wiped up the ketchup with a remnant of bun. “Don’t get too close to him Bryson.”

“Why?”

This petulance, he thought. Bryson really was argumentative. “It’s just not a good idea,” he explained. “These fellows are a sort of cut throat bunch, greedy, ambitious, violent. You know the type. Quite personable, in their own way charming. But the nature of their role in our work makes them expendable. One doesn’t dispose of a friend so easily.”

“The neuronanobots will be ready in a week or so.”

He frowned. “Wasn’t there something about those? Some lawsuits a few years back?”

“Every couple of decades someone takes a stab at neuronanobots. The problem is they malfunction and decay in the brain and destroy the adjacent cells. It’s hard to place them where they’ll do some good without risking the destruction of the very part of the brain you’re trying to save.”

“Another nifty little paradox.”

“Well Bradlee, I’m full.”

“Another drink?”

“One more.”

She got another beer. “Why do you want me to attend this party,

Bradlee?” “Who else is there? I don’t know a soul,” he said, taking a stab at flattery. The fact that she was in demand would just chase her off.

“Please. You must have a string of women.”

“But they’re all whores, even the wake up service.” He lit a cigarette and flicked the ashes into his half eaten hamburger. Bryson frowned. “She comes in first thing and awakens me with fellatio.”

“What a way to start the day. It sucks.”

“Delightful.”

“I was thinking of her.”

“But not the sort you take to the Fripp’s. I need someone there who can act the part. I don’t normally trust you to behave of course, but even you can see the importance….” She wasn’t not listening to him. “What’s gotten into you?”

She rubbed her head and stretched. “Don’t you ever just–I don’t know–mourn for things? To hear Boyle, it’s funny, relate the, you know, history of the city, his elementary school history supplemented with stories handed down in a family of ostensible losers, it made me sad.”

Bradlee sniffled a laugh. “You’ve gone soft, Bryson. I prescribe to you a strong dose of Stoicism.”

“Marcus Aurelius? Or Epictetus.”

“The emperor of course.”

“Maybe for me the slave.” She shook her head and seemed to drift off. “Leonard loves Aurelius.”

Bradlee felt a coal in his chest burn. “How is the old boy anyway?”

“Very involved of course. Did you know that the Indians run the show up there?”

She didn’t need to tell him about that. It was an obsession in the military. Valdez was trying to hold the line against the fanatics. “Indeed, Bryson, I do. Valdez is involved with water rights negotiations. Very hush hush. There are competing plans, competing means. Leonard should be careful about whom he associates with.” He contemplated his hands and the pitted tabletop. “And how about your old friend, Vadge Velodia.”

“She hates that name. And I don’t know how she is.”

“Surely there’s been no falling out?”

He scrutinized her face. Velodia was a danger and he had never liked her when she used to visit in the old days. Day long drinking parties inevitably ended with them practically coming to blows. Bryson might divulge important information to her, which she could

pass along to a competitor. But in her mood he judged that if he wanted to sleep with her he’d best not piss her off by suggesting as much.

“No,” she shook her head and smiled. “Over time, you know how it is.”

“What a shame.”

She laughed derisively. “You’re better than that Bradlee. You must be as tired as I am.”

“I mean it. Old friendships shouldn’t be allowed to expire.”

“Uh huh.” She finished her drink and called for the check. “See you in the morning, Bradlee.”

“Are you going to the lab?”

“Where else can I go?”

“You can always come home with me.” The light shined off the wet of her eye and his nerves stirred. Her lips parted slightly. He wanted them on his. Her kisses galloped after him.

“Thanks, no. Not tonight.”

“Oh don’t be like that. Why be alone? It seems to me that tonight we could both use the comfort of an old friend.”

She smiled, coldly. He’d lost the game. “Sorry Bradlee. I need my beauty sleep. Leave a message on that morning gal’s phone and wake up to a nice warm mouth agitating your glans till you cough up 10cc’s of paste.”

In her lab she couldn’t think or do anything. The soft light was somber, irritating. She didn’t feel like watching a movie or reading. The taste of alcohol wasn’t good. She wanted to recover the mood broken by Bradlee’s intrusion, the smooth concentration, the sweet taste of the Rasta’s chamomile tea and honey. Now undeniable devastation took hold from within, bedeviling loneliness. Behind the humming of the building lay silence. Beneath the radiant lights was a

vacuum. She could feel quarks blinking in and out of existence within her. She was a flickering, discontinuous thing without anchor or substance. There was no echo, no answering voice. A sense of things undone and of important names forgotten overcame her. She couldn’t stand the restlessness, the hunger. The only thing to do was to call someone, Leonard. It was late. He’d be asleep, but she could leave a message. That would be o.k.

Leonard answered her call. For a second she couldn’t speak she was so surprised. He said, Hello, again.

“Leonard–I didn’t think you’d be up.”

“Well, there’s been some,” he paused, “excitement. The state military police just left.”

“Police?”

“You wouldn’t believe–apparently some men have escaped, murderers, and the police thought they might be here. What a fright.” So they came looking for the men.

“What men?” she asked.

“Senecas I believe. Apparently, according to Dennis anyway, private contractors working for the army corps were surveying the Keuka Lake shoreline and the men told them to get off their land and when they refused the men returned with guns. The contractors panicked, shot at the men and the men killed them. Dennis has no idea where they fled to but he allowed a military gunship to land and search the area. They’ve widened the cordon to include the entire Seneca territory. They’ve been flying overhead all day.”

“Then they must have captured them. Men on foot are no match for our armed forces.”

“No no, they haven’t. The funny thing is with all this bio mass their sensor equipment is useless. Those men could be hiding near a pile of shit, or a composter, or in a herd of animals. Even in a pack of dogs. Anyway, by now they’re probably in one of the big forests.

Flying over is useless. They’ll have to track ‘em down with dogs.”

“How’s Dennis taking it?”

“Well, they’re Turtles.”

“The police are turtles?”

“No no. Dennis and the men all belong to the Turtle clan. He keeps his cool. He’s very politic about such things. But it seems state shot itself in the foot up here with this one. Dennis is worried about the violence spreading. He’s worried about his family.”

“I didn’t know he had a family.”

“Oh yeah, three children under six. One on the way.”

There was a silence. Leonard was bad on the phone, always had been. She couldn’t let it go yet, she needed more voice, anything not to return to the silence. “Tell me about her,” she said.

“Who?” He sounded suddenly nervous. Sky must be there, she thought.

“Dennis’s wife.”

“I don’t know her personally at all but she has an interesting story. She’s Amish you know.”

“I thought they couldn’t marry outsiders.”

“They can’t. She was shunned, excommunicated for some offense. They forcibly took her husband and infant child away in the middle of the night and the entire community refused to talk to her. You have to realize every congregation is different. She came from a particularly fanatical group of families up in northern Ontario. They’re Old Order Amish but they really try to go back to 16th century practice. Families like Hertzler’s won’t have anything to do with them. Anyway she took off with just the clothes on her back and a day’s worth of food and water and started to walk south. Dennis found her wandering around half out of her mind six months later. She’d been raped on the road, taken prisoner by some Mohawk bandits holed up in a cabin on Lake Erie. They made her cook for them and chop firewood till she escaped. She lived door to door then. The Amish gave her food and let her sleep in their barns but none would take her in unless she confessed and joined their affiliation. Well, she wanted none of that, as you can imagine. Dennis took her back to Salamanca with him. She settled in there and eventually they married.”

“They’re so hard core and yet Hertzler sat there at Jordan’s house talking crops and irrigation and soils.”

“The soil is their life. Lots of folks up here feel that way about the land. It’s what we have in common.”

“Yeah, but does he just ignore the half naked women and the marijuana?”

Leonard laughed. “I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what. Mordecai Hertzler’s known Jordan since they were kids. Dennis says when Hertzler was seventeen he and Jordan and a bunch of other Amish and hippy kids used to tear around on motorcycles raising hell. The Amish let their kids run wild in the years before they marry. They drank and smoked and hung around market towns playing music. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Hertzler had a few bastards out there he can’t remember fathering. Dennis says for two years running Hertzler grew the best marijuana and brewed the strongest hooch around.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, like most of ‘em he just knuckled under when the time came. I guess around the age of twenty he joined the church officially, renounced worldliness, married and started his own farm and family. But for the Amish you know it isn’t right to judge, that’s god’s job. Pride is a big sin. You won’t find Mordecai hanging out with Jordan unless there’s work to do, but when there is, the two men respect each other. I also think the Amish like to keep a few

English friends so they can let loose a little. Sometimes they tell me dirty jokes.”

“Keep talking,” she said softly, tears starting into her eyes.

“What?”

“Please keep talking? I know you’re tired.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” she sniffled.

“What did you do today? How is it getting back?”

“Nothing. I gave a press conference and went down to some absolute tenement toilet to find a man who could–” she paused,”-help out with a new experiment.” She hated the cagey use of words, wanted only to be sitting in the kitchen across the table from him.

“I see.”

“How about you?”

“Well, just the usual. After the hunt I was too tired to work so I lay around reading Wallace, The Malay Archipelago. Listen to this: The Durian is, however, sometimes dangerous. When the fruit begins to ripen it falls daily and almost hourly, and accidents not infrequently happen to persons walking or working under the trees. When a Durian strikes a man in its fall, it produces a dreadful wound, the strong spines tearing open the flesh, while the blow itself is very heavy; and then, he goes on for a while about this and then, he says, Poets and moralists, judging from our eastern trees and fruits, have thought that small fruits always grew on lofty trees, so that their fall should be harmless to man, while the large ones trailed on the ground. Two of the largest and heaviest fruits known, however, the Brazil-nut fruit (Bertholletia) and Durian, grow on lofty forest trees, from which they fall as soon as they are ripe, and often wound or kill the native inhabitants. From this we may learn two things: first, not to draw general conclusions from a very partial view of nature; and secondly, that trees and fruits, no less than the varied productions of the animal kingdom, do not appear to be organized with exclusive reference to the use and convenience of man. ” He laughed. “I mean, it’s all right there. Oh yeah, one of the pigs died.”

“Oh no.”

“I know, it was sad.”

“What of?”

“Hard to say. I won’t eat the others till I know. Mordecai’s boys are going to build a quarantine pen to isolate them from the dogs and the chickens till I find out. It looks to me like a parasite.”

“I wonder if that big cougar will ever show.”

“I’m sure. It’s a female so there must be giant cubs. My guess is they’ve been breeding fifty, sixty years up in the woods and we’re just seeing them now.”

“It’s easy for things to go unnoticed up there.”

“That’s it, isn’t it?” he said. “You think about all those extinctions and want to just cry yourself to sleep and then you come to a place like this, it’s just seething with life. You could wipe out every last person on this planet and in a couple of million years you’d never know we even existed. Less. Hell, you could wipe out the planet and it wouldn’t matter. Out there, life simply is. We’re the only ones who give a damn about it and there are precious few of us at that. If you can’t convince people to care who’re you gonna convince? The gods? I’ll tell you what, those men that shot those surveyors, they’ll get away. We all think of this climate thing as a disaster, something that’s gone on for so long no one remembers anything different. But like Dennis says, for the Senecas, for the Indian nations, except out west of course, it was a lucky break. Think about it. They lost it all because they couldn’t resist the diseases Europeans brought with them. No army could have come here and flat out conquered them. It was settlers, killing off ninety percent with measles and small pox and chiseling them out of their land. The Indians didn’t figure them out till it was too late. Now it’s the other way around. Settlers die of the diseases. And the Indians nibble away at the land. Soon it’ll all be theirs again. Only now, what can you take from them? They know how to be poor. They’re used to the heat and the bugs. And they have something to believe in. They’re organized. But most of all, they know us better than we know them. They’ve been watching us for seven hundred years. This time, things will be different.” He took a deep breath. “Damn it Ruth, you’ve talked me out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I wish you were here right now. I missed you all day.”

“Me too.”

“Good night. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Leonard stopped talking and stretched out his legs. He felt empty for a moment, and realized that that was why she had called, to share some of her emptiness. Then Sky, in a pair of white cotton pajamas, came up the stairs and stood by him.

“Can’t you sleep,” he asked.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Ruth.”

“Is everything all right?”

He paused. “No, I don’t think so. It’s hard to say. She never calls.”

“Maybe she was lonely.”

“Maybe.” He looked up at her and tried to smile.

“Do you miss her?”

He shook his head slowly. “Yes.” Emotions worked on Sky’s face like wind on water. Leonard looked into it and saw complications of fear and loss ripple out from her eyes to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“No, she’s your wife.” She moved closer to the couch and he touched her pajama top at the hem. She sat down and leaned into him. “Are they still here?”

“They’re down in the dog pen.”

“Will those men come back?”

Leonard wondered the same thing. They were a compound of absurd and terrifying. Absurd because they looked ridiculous in their silver armor and huge CellPack helmets, and because of their barky electronic voices. Absurd because with all their sensors they couldn’t find two men hiding out in a pack of dogs. But terrifying because they were so scared. One of them almost shot a chicken when it fluttered up behind him. They were out of their element and expected to be ambushed at any moment. Leonard didn’t think they were under serious suspicion though. “I doubt they’ll be back,” he said finally. He felt protective of Sky. She wasn’t used to violence, to outsiders of any kind. She had never been farther than the market town of Auburn at the north end of Cayuga lake and had spent her whole life tending to the births and deaths of subsistence farmers. They were so far off the road they never even saw travelers. There was something superficially fluttery, almost mothlike about her. It was a quality that concealed her many strengths: the rough strength a lifetime of chores had given her, the delicate command her eyes and fingers exercised over all their intricate tasks, and the solid inner power, the realism her vocation demanded.

He didn’t love her the way he loved Ruth but he loved her. Still, he had known that over the years his love of other women had become increasingly aestheticised. He liked her certainly, enjoyed her conversation and company, respected her, but their relationship was frankly and necessarily sexual, almost vampiric, as if they were absorbing each other’s energies. They were both after the same thing, perhaps for different reasons, he didn’t really know. He adored her vagina. He couldn’t help but think of the quaint restoration word quim when he thought of its slightly acidic salinity, the way she puckered up and swelled at his touch. Breasts, buttocks, cheeks and eyes were all beautiful but really they were the petals and perfume drawing him into the heart of things, where it mattered. It was an obsession, one that had taken over the second half of his life and before which he stood hopelessly enthralled, a little foolish but in the end resigned. And there had been so many. Some were pudenda, big impertinences demanding broad measures; others were vulvic, hot and erupting. But Sky’s was as delightful and free as she was. It expressed that knowing innocence, that shifting, breezy quality of her laugh. Surely it was harmless to bring pleasure to such a beautiful thing, to take in the scent of her body, the scrawl of pale hair and the pink lips.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“But you know Sky, it’s different.”

“Love is love I was always taught. Love is a dimension of the universe, perceived by the soul.”

“Different intensities of the same thing then.”

She looked at him and squeezed his hand, then lifted it and pretended to study his palm. “That’s her and that’s me,” she said, tracing the fork in his love line. “She hates me you know.”

He laughed. “It wasn’t very politic of me to have you here.”

Abruptly she dropped his hand. “What do you mean by that?”

He realized now that he had angered her. “I’ve never been good at this. We have an agreement. To be discreet.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I love you Sky, yes. I could try to tell you all the ways you delight me as a friend and lover and still I wouldn’t have told it all. And if Ruth lived here with me I’m sure we would have to end things. And, if Ruth weren’t my wife I’m equally sure you would be, if you’d have me. Of course, I’m an old man.”

She thought about it and said, “I don’t want to be a wife. A wife is a stupid thing to be. People have each other. They make love. Live together, do the chores. I think pigs and people love the same as dragonflies and lilies.”

“Ruth and I are from a different world.”

“Like those men, those cops. They looked like walking frogspawn. If the Indians go to war with them everyone’ll die up here. That’s what Jason says.”

Leonard became grave. “If it comes to that. But if they have to go to war and don’t, or we don’t support them, then all this will end. They want to drain the lakes and send the water out west. That means clearing the land, digging massive aqueducts, tunnels. It means a hoard of hungry, stupid men and women living off the land for decades. They’ll log the woods and replant them with bamboo and douglas fir clones. All the land will go to cash crops, the animals will die or flee and your children will be whores and bartenders. It won’t be worth a damn.”

“Then we’ll go north, to Ontario.”

“I won’t live to see it, thank god.” She kissed him on the lips and he said, “I could ask you the same thing, you know.”

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Do you hate Ruth?”

“Why should I?”

He laughed. “You’ll see. One day you’ll be sixty, seventy years old. If your man takes up with a beautiful young woman.”

“That’s just dumb. I love you for that tongue of yours, like a snake, not a dog. And I love your long white eyelashes and I love your dogs, especially Sasha, and your glasses of hootch at night on the porch.

And most of all I love that you talk to me, explain things.”

He burst out, “Explain things? That’s just what you’re supposed to hate!”

“If only you went to the Amish school, you’d like a good complex explanation now and again too.”

“But you know everything about this place. You speak pieces of ten languages. Do you wish you were different Sky?”

“I wish I had some money.”

“Money? But you have time.”

“I guess.”

“And you like to read.”

“Of course. I like to talk too though. You can’t just read and not discuss what you’ve read. It’s just like a recipe for something then that you’ve never tasted. At home all we talk about is the crops, or the stars. Or we gossip. Here we talk about politics, science.”

“Yes. And we gossip.”

“People came here to get lost again but if I had some money I’d leave.”

He stood up and went over to the bookcase, searching the black spines of his diary. “You can.” He took one down and withdrew a gold disc, holding it up to her. “This is money.”

“What is it, gold?”

“No, it’s a computer disc.”

“You see? I’m ignorant. I don’t have any idea about computers.”

He sat back down with the disc in his hand. “Computers are just tools. You can do anything you want with them.”

“Like what?”

“Well, whatever. Talk to people, study things, bank. This is a bank disc with millions of dollars on it. When I die, it’s yours. Then you can go somewhere. Where would you go?”

She looked confused. “I don’t know. Far away.”

“A city? Bangkok perhaps?”

“No, no. Too many people. I want to see mountains. Big towering mountains with snow.”

“North then.”

She shook her head sadly. “This is stupid. You’ll live a long time and I don’t want to take your money. And nothing will ever change.”

“Maybe your children then. Maybe they’ll be philosophers.”

“And who will give me a child? Mordecai Hertzler?”

“I will.”

He had never seen her look stunned. “I thought you never wanted children.”

“I never did. But you do.”

After a meditative pause she brightened and asked, “When do we start,” smokily.

“Well, we can start right now if you like.”

She undid his robe and saw that he was hard and pulled down her pajama bottoms, straddling him on the couch. “I’m getting wet just thinking about it,” she said.

“I can feel that,” he said, rubbing two fingers between her legs. “It might take a while. We might have to do this more often.”

“I can manage that if you can,” she said, resting her face against his. He felt a little electric jolt travel through them.

“I think I’m up to it,” he said.