“It isn’t poison,” Hu said. “Besides, very often we don’t sell it. We give it away. How can anyone possibly object to that?”
“Pushers have been saying ‘The first one’s free’ as long as there’ve been drugs.” Contempt dripped from the DEA chief’s voice. “‘Wanna ... get Real?’“ He contrived to make the question sound obscene.
Patiently, Hu Zhiaoxing said, “You seem to be laboring under a mistaken impression. Getting Real has nothing to do with drugs. It’s a matter of metastimulation of specific brain regions.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me,” the Secretary of Defense whispered to the Secretary of State. Hu knew he wasn’t supposed to hear that, but he did. China had technical leads in more areas than the Americans realized, and those leads were wider than the Americans thought.
“How do you produce this, uh, metastimulation?” Jackson asked.
“We have ways,” Hu answered. “I could not tell you myself. I am not an artisan shaping that particular form of knowledge.”
“It’s got to stop,” Kojima said. “Do you have any idea how much productivity we’re losing because people would rather get Real than work or do anything else?”
“Don’t you think that should be a warning to you, Mr. Secretary?” Hu said.
“Huh? What do you mean?” Kojima didn’t impress the Chinese as being either very polite or very bright.
“If your citizens had lives that were more worth living, getting Real would not seem so enjoyable to them,” Hu Zhiaoxing replied.
All three American Cabinet officials glared at him. “It’s your fault that we don’t,” Secretary of State Jackson said bitterly.
“My fault?” Minister Hu pointed at his own chest, then shook his head. “I am sorry, sir, but I must reject the imputation.”
“Not your fault personally. I didn’t mean that,” Jackson said. “Your country’s fault.”
“What did China do?” Hu answered his own question before any of the Americans could: “China collected the debts the United States owed her. No one forced the United States to contract those debts—and many others. You did it of your own free will.”
“And then you broke us. And you left us broke,” Jackson said.
Hu couldn’t help shrugging. “I would say you did it to yourselves. I would also say you resent us for going on to discover new fields of knowledge after you could no longer stay in that game yourselves.”
“Damn right we do,” Berkowitz muttered. Again, Hu wasn’t supposed to hear. Again, he did. This time, though, the Secretary of Defense went on to speak directly to the Chinese minister: “We’re sick and tired of you pushing us around, and we aren’t going to take it any more. You say you won’t stop ramming getting Real down our throat?”
“Our position is that we are merely supplying a demand,” Hu replied. “Only your unfortunate inability to offer your consumers anything nearly so interesting and exciting causes your resentment of it. Jealousy, I must say, is not an appropriate motive for foreign policy.”
Berkowitz breathed hard through his nose. And a long, ugly nose it was, too, at least to someone with Hu’s standards. “This is not a matter of jealousy. This is a matter of national security. Security, nothing—this is a matter of national survival. If you think you can make people in this country not give a damn about anything except getting Real—”
You’re right, Hu Zhiaoxing thought irreverently.
But that wasn’t where the American Secretary of Defense was going. “If that’s what you think, you’ve got another think coming.”
An old song had lyrics something like that, a song from the days when the United States really was the world power it still imagined itself to be. “What precisely are you driving at, sir?” Hu asked.
The Secretary of State responded before the Secretary of Defense could: “If you don’t quit pushing Real in the USA, that can only mean war between your country and mine.”
All three Americans looked stern and determined, as if they were playing parts in a thriller from a director who didn’t know what the devil he was doing. Wang Zemin ... giggled. The Americans gaped at him. Minister Hu sent him a reproachful glance—that wasn’t how you were supposed to play the game. Which didn’t mean the Third Minister didn’t feel like giggling himself.
“I must tell you, Mr. Jackson, that that would be ... inadvisable,” he said.
“You think you can do whatever you please here, and it doesn’t come with a price,” Jackson said. “But that’s not the way things work. We can protect our borders.”
“You can try ... sir,” Minister Hu said coolly.
“We can—and we will,” Secretary of State Jackson said.
“You have been warned,” Secretary of Defense Berkowitz added.
“If you think you can go on corrupting us and humiliating us, we just have to show you how totally wrong you are,” Secretary of the DEA Kojima declared. “And I mean totally.”
After that, nobody on either side seemed to see much point to saying anything else. The Chinese diplomat and his aide went back to the Saturn. It carried them to the harbor without falling apart. They boarded their little boat. Wang Zemin steered it back to Avalon. He laughed most of the way there.
Pablo opened his eyes. He closed them again as fast as he could. But when he opened them a second time, nothing had changed. This wasn’t Real. This, goddammit to hell, was real. And it was that particularly depressing part of reality called jail.
He looked around the holding tank. A couple of Hispanic guys like him. Three or four brown Indian guys. A couple of black guys. A couple of skinny but dangerous-looking Asian guys—if they didn’t have shanks stashed somewhere, he would have been amazed. And a couple of white guys: one who seemed scared shitless, the other looking as if he’d been carved from granite—a fuck of a lot of granite. Regardless of how buff he was, he wouldn’t last long if he acted stupid. If enough guys jumped on you, you could really be made of granite and you’d break anyway.
One of the Indians lit a cigarette. Most of the time, Pablo thought tobacco smoke was gross. Piled on top of all the other stinks here, it didn’t seem so bad.
The massive white guy scowled at Pablo from two of the coldest, nastiest gray eyes ever. The LEDs in the ceiling lights gleamed off the dude’s shaved head. “So—you’re awake, huh?” he rumbled in a voice like boulders crashing together.
If this was real, Pablo wanted Real. Oh, man, he really wanted Real. He wished that sweet-talking avatar would show up so he could forget all about this. Hey, it could happen, even in jail. The cops wished they could stop avatars. Wishing didn’t do them any good, either.
And Pablo still had to answer the mountain of toned meat. “No, man,” he said, “but I figure I’ll wake up pretty soon, you know?”
“Huh?” The white guy blinked. Pablo hadn’t been a hundred percent sure he could—snakes never did. Then he decided it was funny. His laugh sounded like kettledrums. “Comedian, are you?”
Right. And then you wake up, Pablo thought. But that was the trouble. Pablo had woken up. What a bringdown. He reminded himself he needed to answer again. “Sure, man. Me and the dragon.”
He threw it out at random. Besides, the dragon was dead, and this dude hadn’t got Real with him anyway. With that carcass, the white guy looked more likely to be into something like HGH 3.0 than avatars and everything that went with them. The more fool him. That redhead ... Remembering her made you want to forget all the genuine local girls.
You couldn’t always tell by looks. The hard-muscled white guy proved that. When the fingers on his right hand twisted a particular way, Pablo damn near fell over. “Dude!” he said. “You got some? You got some here? How’d you do that?”