Ed, he thought. They said that Ed planted the microtrans on me. So it did locate me. But—Still, maybe it only told them the general area. And they assumed, correctly, that it would be Kathy’s pad.
To Ruth Rae he said, his voice breaking, “God damn it, I hope I haven’t got the pols oinking their asses after you; that would be too much, too goddamn much.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Do you have any coffee that’s super-hot?”
“I’ll go punch the stove-console.” Ruth Rae skittered barefoot, wearing only a box bangle, from the bathroom into the kitchen. A moment later she returned with a big plastic mug of coffee, marked KEEP ON TRUCKIN’. He accepted it, drank down the steaming coffee.
“I can’t stay,” he said, “any longer. And anyhow, you’re too old.”
She stared at him, ludicrously, like a warped, stomped doll. And then she ran off into the kitchen. Why did I say that? he asked himself. The pressure; my fears. He started after her.
In the kitchen doorway Ruth appeared, holding up a stoneware platter marked SOUVENIR OF KNOITS BERRY FARM. She ran blindly at him and brought it down on his head, her mouth twisting like newborn things just now alive. At that last instant he managed to lift his left elbow and take the blow there; the stoneware platter broke into three jagged pieces, and, down his elbow, blood spurted. He gazed at the blood, the shattered pieces of platter on the carpet, then at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, whispering it faintly. Barely forming the words. The newborn snakes twisted continually, in apology.
Jason said, “I’m sorry.”
“I’ll put a Band-Aid on it.” She started for the bathroom. “No,” he said, “I’m leaving. It’s a clean cut; it won’t get infected.”
“Why did you say that to me?” Ruth said hoarsely.
“Because,” he said, “of my own fears of age. Because they’re wearing me down, what’s left of me. I virtually have no energy left. Even for an orgasm.”
“You did really well.”
“But it was the last,” he said. He made his way into the bathroom; there he washed the blood from his arm, kept cold water flowing on the gash until coagulation began. Five minutes, fifty; he could not tell. He merely stood there, holding his elbow under the faucet. Ruth Rae had gone God knew where. Probably to nark to the pols, he said wearily to himself; he was too exhausted to care.
Hell, he thought. After what I said to her I wouldn’t blame her.
10
“No,” Police General Felix Buckman said, shaking his head rigidly. “Jason Taverner does exist. He’s somehow managed to get the data out of all the matrix banks.” The police general pondered. “You’re sure you can lay your hands on him if you have to?”
“A downer about that, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said. “He’s found the microtrans and snuffed it. So we don’t know if he’s still in Vegas. If he has any sense he’s hustled on. Which he almost certainly has.”
Buckman said, “You had better come back here. If he can lift data, prime source material like that, out of our banks, he’s involved in effective activity that’s probably major. How precise is your fix on him?”
“He is—was—located in one apartment of eighty-five in one wing of a complex of six hundred units, all expensive and fashionable in the West Fireflash District, a place called Copperfield II.”
“Better ask Vegas to go through the eighty-five units until they find him. And when you get him, have him air-mailed directly to me. But I still want you at your desk. Take a couple of uppers, forget your hyped-out nap, and get down here.”
“Yes, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said, with a trace of pain. He grimaced.
“You don’t think we’re going to find him in Vegas,” Buckman said.
“No, sir.”
“Maybe we will. By snuffing the microtrans he may rationalize that he’s safe, now.”
“I beg to differ,” McNulty said. “By finding it he’d know we had bugged him to there in West Fireflash. He’d split. Fast.”
Buckman said, “He would if people acted rationally. But they don’t. Or haven’t you noticed that, McNulty? Mostly they function in a chaotic fashion.” Which, he mediated, probably serves them in good stead … it makes them less predictable.
“I’ve noticed that—”
“Be at your desk in half an hour,” Buckman said, and broke the connection. McNulty’s pedantic foppery, and the fogged-up lethargy of a hype after dark, irritated him always.
Alys, observing everything, said, “A man who’s unexisted himself. Has that ever happened before?”
“No,” Buckman said. “And it hasn’t happened this time. Somewhere, some obscure place, he’s overlooked a microdocument of a minor nature. We’ll keep searching until we find it. Sooner or later we’ll match up a voiceprint or an EEG print and then we’ll know who he really is.”
“Maybe he’s exactly who he says he is.” Alys had been examining McNulty’s grotesque notes. “Subject belongs to musicians’ union. Says he’s a singer. Maybe a voiceprint would be your—”
“Get out of my office,” Buckman said to her
“I’m just speculating. Maybe he recorded that new pornochord hit, ‘Go Down, Moses’ that—”
“I’ll tell you what,” Buckman said. “Go home and look in the study, in a glassine envelope in the center drawer of my maple desk. You’ll find a lightly canceled perfectly centered copy of the one-dollar black U.S. Trans-Mississippi issue. I got it for my own collection but you can have it for yours; I’ll get another. Just go. Go and get the damn stamp and put it away in your album in your safe forever. Don’t ever even look at it again; just have it. And leave me alone at work. Is that a deal?”
“Jesus,” Alys said, her eyes alive with light. “Where’d you get it?”
“From a political prisoner on his way to a forced-labor camp. He traded it for his freedom. I thought it was an equitable arrangement. Don’t you?”
Alys said, “The most beautifully engraved stamp ever issued. At any time. By any country.”
“Do you want it?” he said.
“Yes.” She moved from the office, out into the corridor. “I’ll see you tomorrow. But you don’t have to give me something like that to make me go; I want to go home and take a shower and change my clothes and go to bed for a few hours. On the other hand, if you want to—”
“I want to,” Buckman said, and to himself he added, Because I’m so goddamn afraid of you, so basically, ontologically scared of everything about you, even your willingness to leave. I’m even afraid of that!
Why? he asked himself as he watched her head for the secluded prison ascent tube at the far end of his suite of offices. I’ve known her as a child and I feared her then. Because, I think, in some fundamental way that I don’t comprehend, she doesn’t play by the rules. We all have rules; they differ, but we all play by them. For example, he conjectured, we don’t murder a man who has just done us a favor. Even in this, a police state—even we observe that rule. And we don’t deliberately destroy objects precious to us. But Alys is capable of going home, finding the one-dollar black, and setting fire to it with her cigarette. I know that and yet I gave it to her; I’m still praying that underneath or eventually or whatever she’ll come back and shoot marbles the way the rest of us do.
But she never will.
He thought, And the reason I offered her the one-dollar black was because, simply, I hoped to beguile her, tempt her, into returning to rules that we can understand. Rules the rest of us can apply. I’m bribing her, and it’s a waste of time—if not much much more—and I know it and she knows it. Yes, he thought. She probably will set fire to the one-dollar black, the finest stamp ever issued, a philatelic item I have never seen for sale during my lifetime. Even at auctions. And when I get home tonight she’ll show me the ashes. Maybe she’ll leave a corner of it unburned, to prove she really did it.