The elevator bank was set by the druid tree’s trunk, its vacuum sleeve tunneling right through the root network.
The cars were dirty and harshly lit and a whiff of urine and stale body sweat emanated from them. As the crowd swept forward, Rebel stared up wistfully, flashing on a quick fantasy: She would fight her way free of the crush and scramble up the tree trunk, nimble as a squirrel, moving faster and faster as she swarmed higher and the gravity grew less, surging from limb to limb. Until, at the very top, she would pull knees to chest, brace toes against bark, and leap… soaring high into the air, body taut and outstretched, her flight slowing gradually, until at the last possible instant she’d touch axis and be snagged by the magnetic line, to be hauled far and away from here in the time it took to draw a breath.
(But she didn’t have the armbands or leg rings for the magnetic field to grab. She would plummet like a stone, with excruciating slowness at first, then faster, a wingless Icarus, curving down to smash bloody dead against the city walks. It was a stupid fantasy.)
“Deutsche Nakasone is going to come looking for you.
You know that?” They stepped into a car along with a hundred others. The doors sighed shut and the floor dropped. “They want a clean recording of that personality of yours. And then they want to revert you to Eucrasia Walsh. Out of the goodness of their corporate heart, you ask? Shit. They’re just worried about retaining copyright.”
Heisen’s face was so close to hers that their hoods kissed.
His breath was sour as he murmured in her ear. “They don’t care that to you—the present you, the one you think you are—it’ll be just the same as dying.”
Some of the elevator stayed behind to let off passengers; the rest continued downward. A black-and-white painted rude boy with a metal star hung about his neck cruised Rebel, hooking a fist on his hip and throwing back his cloak to reveal a body-length strip of flesh. She looked away, wrapping her cloak tightly about her, and helaughed. “But why? Why are they doing this to me?”
Heisen sighed. “It’s a simple enough story,” he said, “if an ugly one. Do you remember being Eucrasia? Working as a persona bum?”
The memory was there, but it was painful and Rebel flinched away from it. It keyed into the suicidal madness she had fallen into earlier, and she wanted to keep her distance from that. Though like a tongue returning again and again to worry at an aching tooth, her thoughts had a will of their own. “My memories are all in a jumble.”
Another slice of elevator stayed behind and another.
They stepped back. Heisen glanced around at the blank faces. “Well, tell you what, let’s not go into that here.
Somebody might hear. I’ll give you the story at Snow’s.”
The elevator opened. Hot, steamy air breathed into Rebel’s face. This low, the gravity was over Greenwich normal, and she felt clumsy and heavy-footed. They were jostled forward into a vasty cavern of interlocking kelp bars and surgical parlors, gambling lofts and blade bazaars. A shifting holo banner struck her eye, and she winced. Three strains of music clashed; the subimbeds made her feel anxious and restless. Sweat sheened up on her body. I’ve been here before, she thought. No, I haven’t.
“Down Bakuninstrasse,” Heisen said. Away from the uptown elevators the shops thinned and were broken by ebony stretches of building foundation and habitat supports. Light flared as they passed a wetware mall, and Heisen stopped and pointed within. Rebel stared: Customers edged down narrow aisles, passing slow hands over the endless racks. Now and then somebody would lift a wafer and slide into one of the programming booths that lined the rear wall. Advertising holos flashed overhead: suzy vacuum, said one. She looked to be some kind of Amazon. The most beautiful boy Rebel had ever seen floated over the single word angelus. And then she spottedthe Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark banner. Against a starry backdrop was a woman who was not her, doing something she would never do. Rebel stared at it, horrified.
“Notice the little comets in the background? You treehangers are very fashionable this season.”
Rebel turned her stunned face toward Heisen. He shrugged.
“Prepublicity. They’ve got a lot of money tied up in you. I wanted you to see what an expensive little piece of developmental wetware you are. Come on.”
Down a slideway and into an access corridor with long stretches of black stressed slag. On the lower reaches slogans were crudely permasprayed in nightglo colors, one over the other, in a tangled and almost incoherent snarl, stay yourself god hates was overrun by FREEMINDSFREEMINDSFREEMINDS which raged over BURN BRIGHT BRAIN before smashing up against SHAPESHIFTERSFACE DANCERS
WEREWOLFVAMPIRES GOTO HELL. Someone had made a serious effort to erase a wheel logo with the words EARTH FRIEND about it. Beneath the graffiti a workman sat on a crate facing the wall. He had removed an access hatch and was cyborged into a tangle of color-coded wires.
Around a corner they passed a sling city. The burn cases stumbled down, looking for handouts. They babbled in endless monotones, their minds rotted out with God, sex, information, their reflexes shattered, their faces vacant-eyed and twitching. Heisen hissed and stepped up his pace. “Scum!” he gasped once they were safely past.
“They ought to be…” They turned down a yet smaller run where garbage was mulched thin against the street and starting to ferment. The stench of rotting squid and old grease hung in the air, and the soles of Rebel’s feet were going black.
Rebel glanced at Heisen and was shocked to see the man was trembling. Sweat poured down a face gone fishbellywhite. “God damn, sport,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s just the wetware.” Heisen waved a hand at his face.
“I keep the imaginative processes cranked way up, so I’ll be fast to pick up on the main chance, right? Makes me a touch… paranoid, though.” They stepped down a slanting gallery where most of the overheads had been smashed or stolen. Exhaust fans grumbled in shadow. Tangles of black cable drooped from the ceiling; they had to duck under the lower loops. “God damn her,” Heisen fretted. “She doesn’t have to have her office down here, she just wants all that space. I wish…” They rounded a final corner and he pointed to a door grey with urban grime. “Here.”
Over the doorway hung a flickering neon switchblade, a piece of antique technology that must have cost a fortune to recreate. It buzzed and crackled, tinging the shadows red. The knife’s blade blinked off and on, as if snapping in and out of the handle. On the center of the door was taped a small white rectangle, a business card: snow the cutting edge ostend kropotkinkorridor bei berkmangallerie neues-hoch-kamden, E.K.
“Snow?” Heisen said uncertainly.
The door opened, and they stepped within.
Whatever Rebel might have been expecting, it was not this: a room so large and empty she could not guess its size. Eggshell-textured walls, white and featureless. No furniture. The only item in all that space was a small prayer rug in its center. A solitary figure knelt there, hood down, shaven head bowed. The room was chilled to an ambient that was, after a moment’s relief, as oppressive as the heat outside.
They walked forward. This was the ultimate form ofostentation among technology freaks—to have a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines, no wires, no controls. The room would be laced with an invisible tracery of trigger-beams, directional mikes and subvocal pickups. There was power here, for one who knew its geography.
The woman raised her head, fixed Rebel with cold snakelike eyes. Her skull was white as marble, and her face was painted in a hexangular pattern suggestive of starbursts and ice crystals. “What have you stolen for me this time, Jerzy?”