She looked away. Scornfully: “Oh, forget it. Go on.”
He shrugged, turned, and opened the door. She thought, Maybe he manipulated me. Knew I couldn’t handle that little-kid shit. Knew that’d force me to let him go…
Scanlon was looking thoughtfully after Rimpler. Something icy-cold about the expression on Scanlon’s face frightened Claire.
Rimpler closed the door behind him—effectively closing the door on his leadership in Colony Admin.
Praeger was gazing at the screen. “This man Bonham could be very useful to us,” he said.
Messer-Krellman said, “I believe Claire made a motion a little while ago. Does anyone second it? Should we vote on it?” He liked the formalities. And he knew how the vote would turn out.
“Don’t bother,” Claire said. “I suggest we table any further action till 0900 tomorrow. We all need to think about this. Just keep in mind: the situation is explosive, with the blockade of the Colony. They know the Colony is blockaded, they know resources will run low. They’re going to be more insistent than ever—you won’t be able to manipulate them.” She got up and followed her Father out the door.
She paused for a moment before going out, and looked over her shoulder.
Van Kips and Praeger were looking at the screen. Praeger said something to Van Kips. She nodded.
Feeling helpless, Claire left the room.
• 09 •
Rickenharp put on his dark glasses, because of the way the Walk tugged at him.
The Walk wound through the interlinked Freezone outfloats for a half-mile, looping up and back, a hairpin canyon of arcades crusted with neon and glowflake, holos and screens. It was involuted, intensified by layering and a blaze of colored light.
Stoned, very stoned: Rickenharp and Carmen walked together through the sticky-warm night, almost in step. Yukio walked behind, Willow ahead, and Rickenharp felt like part of a jungle patrol formation. And he had another feeling: that they were being followed, or watched. Maybe it was suggestion, from seeing Yukio and Willow glance over their shoulders now and then…
Rickenharp felt a ripple of kinetic force under his feet, an arc of wallow moving in languid whiplash through the flexible streetstuff, telling him that the breakers were up today, the baffles around the artificial island feeling the strain.
The arcades ran three levels above the narrow street; each level had its own sidewalk balcony; people stood at the railing to look down at the segmented snake of street traffic. The stack of arcades funneled a rich wash of scents to Rickenharp: the french-fry toastiness of the fast food; the sweet harshness of smashweed smoke, gyno-smoke, tobacco smoke—the cloy of perfumes; the mixed odors of fish-ka-bob stands, urine, rancid beer, popcorn, sea air; and the faint ozone smell of the small, eerily quiet electric cars jockeying on the street. His first time here, Rickenharp had thought the place smelled wrong for a red light cluster. “It’s wimpy,” he’d said. Then he’d realized he was missing the bass-bottom of carbon monoxides. There were no combustion cars on Freezone. Some parts of America still permitted pollutive, resource-greedy gasoline cars, and Rickenharp, being a retro, had preferred those places.
The sounds splashed over Rickenharp in a warm wave of cultural fecundity; pop tunes from thudders and wrist-boxes swelled in volume as they passed, the guys exuding the music insignificant in comparison to the noise they carried, the skanky tripping of protosalsa or the calculatedly redundant pulse of minimono.
Rickenharp and Carmen walked beneath a fiberglass arch—so covered with graffiti its original commemorative meaning was lost—and ambled down the milky walkway under the second-story arcade boardwalk. The multinational crowd thickened as they approached the heart of the Walk. The soft lights glowing upward from beneath the polystyrene walkway gave the crowd a 1940s-horror-movie look; even through the dark glasses the place tugged at Rickenharp with a thousand subliminal come-hithers.
Rickenharp was still riding the blue mesc surf, but the wave was beginning to break; he could feel it crumbling under him. He looked at Carmen. She glanced back at him, and they understood one another. She looked around, then nodded toward the darkened doorway of a defunct movie theater, a trash-cluttered recess twenty feet off the street. They went into the doorway; Yukio and Willow stood with their backs to the door, blocking the view from the street, so that Rickenharp and Carmen could each do a double hit of blue mesc. There was a kind of little-kid pleasure in stepping into seclusion to do drugs, a rush of outlaw in-crowd romance to it. On the second sniff the graffiti on the pad-locked, fiberglass doors seemed to writhe with significance. “I’m running low,” Carmen said, checking her mesc bottle.
“Running low on drugs? Whoever heard of that happening?” Rickenharp said and they both burst in peals of laughter. His mind was racing now, and he felt himself click into the boss blue verbal mode. “You see that graffiti? You’re gonna die young because the ITE took the second half of your life. You know what that is? I didn’t know what ITE was till yesterday, I used to see those things and wonder and then somebody said—”
“Immortality something or other,” she said, licking blue mesc off her sniffer.
“Immortality Treatment Elite. Supposedly some people keeping an immortality treatment to themselves because the government doesn’t want the public to live too long and overpopulate the place. Another bullshit conspiracy theory.”
“You don’t believe in conspiracies?”
“I don’t know—some. Nothing that far-fetched. But—I think people are being manipulated all the time. Even here… this place tugs at you, you know. Like—”
Willow said, “Right, we’ll ’ave our sociology class later children, you gotter? Where’s this place with the bloke can get us off the fooking island?”
“Yeah, okay, come on,” Rickenharp said, leading them back into the flow of the crowd—but seamlessly picking up his blue mesc rap. “I mean, this place is a Times Square, right? You ever read the old novels about that place? That was the archetype. Or some places in Bangkok. I mean, these places are carefully arranged. Maybe subconsciously. But arranged as carefully as Japanese florals, only with the inverse esthetic. Sure, every whining, self-righteous tightassed evangelist who ever preached the diabolic seductiveness of places like this was right—in a way—was fully justified ’cause, yeah, the places titillate and they seduce and they vampirize people. Yeah, they’re Venus’s-flytraps. Architectural Svengalis. Yes to all the clichés about the bad part of town. All the reverend preachers—Reverend who, Reverend—what’s his name?—Rick Crandall…”
She looked sharply at him. He wondered why but the mesc swept him on.
“All the preachers are right, but the reason they’re right is why they’re wrong, too. Everything here is trying to sell you something. Lots of lights and whirligig suction to seduce you into throwing your energy into it—in the form of money. People mostly come here to buy or to be titillated up to the verge of buying. The tension between wanting to buy and the resistance to buying can give you a charge. That’s what I get into: I let it tickle my glands, but I hold back from paying into it. You know? Just constant titillation but no orgasm, because you waste your money or you get a social disease or mugged or sold bad drugs or something… I mean, anything sold here is pointless bullshit. But it’s harder for me to resist tonight…” Because I’m stoned. “Makes you susceptible. Receptive to subliminals worked into the design of the signs, that gaudy kinetics, those fucking on/off bulbs—makes you flash on the old computer-thinking models, binomial thinking, on-off, on-off, blink blink—all those neon tubes, pulling you like the hypnotist’s spiral pendant in the old movies… And the kinds of colors they use, the energy of the signs, the rate of pulse, the rate of on/offing in the bulbs, all of it’s engineered according to principles of psychology the people who make them don’t even know they’re using, colors that hint about, you know, glandular discharges and tingly chemical flows to the pleasure center… like obscenities you pay for in the painted mouth of a whore… like video games… I mean—”