Jed’s memories gave me four hundred times four hundred ways of keeping out of sight. I worked out a good approach, a very direct one, low tech for today’s post-high-tech world, and crossed what was now the border of the Stake well ahead of time. I hid out in a dry wash near a hot water pipe from the power plant, in a foundation for a cooling tank that wouldn’t begin construction until the next b’aktun, which meant never.
Even when I’d been hiding out in Texas KOA kampgrounds, I learned from police broadcasts that while there was a warrant out for me, it wasn’t for murder or even assault but simply for fleeing arrest. There was nothing saying I was armed and/or dangerous. Evidently Lindsay’s people didn’t want me to get caught by the police and must have managed to cover up the killings at the hospital.
On what they called December sixteenth I moved into a pastless-I mean, transient dwelling in the suburbs. That night-the seventeenth-the events of the Greatfather Heat’s incarnations seemed promising. I started acquiring and testing the hardware I needed and studying the Hyperbowl compound from a safe distance. After a few days of frustration, I learned to draw on Jed’s knowledge of computers, and eventually I reconstructed enough skills from Jed’s memories to master the basic programming that would be necessary to work my way into the Warren systems. Many of Jed’s math skills seemed to work more or less automatically, ready for anyone to use. And while I certainly never really understood anything more complex than a simple loop, computers, surprisingly, fascinated more than repelled me. Without Jed’s uay, I could not have done it.
Were they watching me? Did I have any tracking implants? By mid-December, I’d taken too much evasive action and had been examined by enough underground-friendly doctors to be pretty sure I could answer the last two questions in the negative. Speaking of which, my fractured right hand was healing faster than I’d have thought. All good. All good.
I hired a truck driver to smuggle me to the Stake. There were patrols out and Jed-in either body-would have been spotted right away, but I used the old methods, sticking to the jungles, wearing and carrying very little, and keeping all my metal equipment in a little Otter fishing-tackle case. I made an ambush camp under a collapsed wooden water tank in sight of the border and waited.
When I felt the time was right, I crossed the trench, the electric fences, picking up a couple shocks, but ignoring them and the field of razor-wire, which I rolled over, laying down Kevlar blankets.
As I expected, the security at the Stake’s inner Olympic Complex was harder to penetrate than the border. There were trucks and passenger vans going in and out, and helicopters and, once, a new white Zeppelin, landing with VIP guests for the opening-which had not been put off by the hail-but despite the activity at the gates, I decided to sneak in the old way. Through radio intercepts and observation, I found that, evidently because of the war, there was a fleet of small remote-piloted vehicles patrolling the air above the Stake and, certainly, watching the ground. This was a setback, but finally, during a brief rain before dawn (off-season, because of the mixed-up weather) I took a chance and made my way across the perimeter. I rubbed myself with burro dung to throw off the guard dogs, crawled through ten rope-lengths of card teasel and poison ivy, and lay motionless for eight hours until I was sure I could get to what seemed to be a currently unworked construction site near the racetrack. I hid out, as I’d learned to do in my youth, silently, unmoving, in a pylon excavation, eating Snickers bars and putting my human waste into baggies of sodium polyacrylate beads. When the Pleiades rose that night, the new star, which they’d named Akhushtal, was clearly visible just below Maia. No surprise there. Lady Koh had been right again. And in that video, Lindsay’d meant “Live in Maia.” Not Maya. He never pronounced “Maya” right anyway. Maia like the star in the Pleiades. The next Kobol, I guess. He also knew.
At the death of Grandfather Heat, I waylaid a right-sized waiter near one of the pools, washed myself in the unearthly blue water, took his clothes, key cards, IDs, and a room-service cart, and walked into the hotel lobby and up to Marena’s room-which I’d located by monitoring conversations on the waiters’ earphones. Jed’s bible was the Collected Works of Ian Fleming, and I’d decided to stick to the faith. Anyway, it’s not so hard to get into a place as long as you don’t care about getting out. The very second key card made the lock light green. I walked in. She was already dressed, in a flinty pants suit, a garnet necklace, and up hair, but still without her sandals. She tried not to show that she was surprised to see me, and then not to show that she thought I was going to try and kill her. But she picked up a square chrome-framed table mirror in both hands and weighed it like she was going to swing it through my face.
It wasn’t hard to get her on board, though. Even though she’d thought I still wanted to kill her.
“I know what’s happening,” I said, “and I can stop it.”
Well, actually, I had to put in another few words.
“Look,” she said, “if you’re not going to save Max, I’m not interested.”
“We’re going to save Max. And everybody.”
“Who cares about everybody?”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“All in the light, then,” I said. “Fine.”
“Fine. Tell me.”
(109)
The center gate led right into the long covered arcade approaching the stadium lobby. There were four checkpoints of greeters and identifiers and guards, and a few thousand neo-MARCOSite protestors they were keeping at bay but Marena biometricked herself through the gauntlet, and her vouching for me worked again. We came into the Warren lobby, which was now a kind of far-up-the-scale food court, or food empyrean, as it seemed to be called, laid out as an idealized diagram of a human body. The air was breezy with what Jed’s memory said was extra oxygen pumped in.
Marena piloted me down the center aisle, around a green central square filled with ears of quadricolored sweet corn and up into the food court’s head, past counters of fish flesh and strange fruit. The thralls behind the counters were working screens of base-twenty abacus-calculators. Once in a while she squeezed my arm, cutting into it with her nails, like I was an overturned canoe. We walked into the Hyperbowl entrance. The high false arch was flanked with animated DHI video statues of the athletes performing their greatest feats and routines over and over again, monuments of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, when Warren really got going. We passed through a sound cone and heard a snatch of John Tesch’s voice: “ At this time we’d like to extend our condolences to the family of Greg ‘The Leg’ Nagel, our beloved Jaguar forward, who passed away during practice earlier today. As we all know, Greg’s outstanding stats included…”
Trapezoidal doors slid open and shut around us and the air changed to some designer mix, cool but still tropical and scented like a disinfected rain forest. It was almost quiet because of the active sound baffles, but there was the roorsh of artificial waterfalls and conversation.
“Let me carry your handbag,” I said, grabbing it on the second word.
The lobby was almost large enough to enclose the Ocelots’ mul. But it was still all in earth colors, with five kinds of grass growing out of slits in the granite floor and clusters of furniture twisted out of unfinished hardwood. There were about two thousand people milling around on the floor in black and white clusters dotted with much more colorful neo-Maya outfits, all mood-lit by pin spots slowly roving through the gloom. I noticed Shaquille O’Neal and a few other emeritus basketball players sticking up out of the crowd like spirit poles in a cornfield. There were also quite a few officers’ uniforms, Belizean, British Territorial, and U.S. In the center of the room, where the information kiosk would have been, a giant thing rose up three rope-lengths, almost too confusing-looking to name at first, a tower, a ceiba tree, a poplar tree, a wooden stele, a stone stele, a high-angled pyramid, a Christmas tree. The ornaments were all DHI spheres, most of them running different views of the Ix IIa softworld. One of them showed a slowly rotating readout of today’s soon-to-expire Maya date: