Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (11 page)

Mas has found an accountholder’s plastic smartcard among the wet spring flowers. Embossed on its plastic face is the ubiquitous thunder-eagle of Tosa Securities Inc.

“Christ’s sake, Mas, leave it.” Foolish pilgrim, who does not recognize an omen.

It is only a few hundred meters across rough, fairway, and Number Thirteen green—we can see the marker stone at the edge of the woodlands, the henro path itself wending into the trees—but among the golf karts puttering and stuttering over the grass is a blue and white buggy adorned with ToSec’s thunder-eagle. The angularities of light-power armor beneath Adidas trackwear are visible from our position on the edge of the rough. I cannot see enforcers who tear off a trespassing akira’s head taking kindly to two henro leaving tire tracks across the apron of the par three Number Thirteen.

We are effectively stymied. We cannot go forward, we will not go back, not twenty kilometers through Clint Eastwood country to the Tourist Route again. Therefore, we go around. Golf courses only seem to go on forever. A hundred or so meters back, past the dark shrine, we find a path—little more than trampled vegetation—headed in what seems like generally the right direction. After twisting and turning through riotous vegetation running wild in expectation of summer the trail plunges headlong into a vast sugarcane plantation. The rain patters on the alien cane. We have no idea where we are going; we trust that a straight path must have a destination. After ten minutes—not so much a plantation, this, as a monoculture—we hit a wide access route and come out of the claustrophobic cane on top of the cane farmer himself engaged in some cannicultural activity involving standing in the back of a Nissan pickup.

Guilty both legally and spiritually of trespass we accelerate past him before he can protest. At the sound of a shouting voice I glance over my shoulder. The farmer is waving something in his hand—I cannot be certain at this distance but it has the hard glitter of electronics. What is he shouting? Dogs? What about them?

Hydrogas shocks notwithstanding, the bike rattles as it takes the ruts, and I glance back again, just for an instant. The farmer is in his pickup now, driving after us. I shout to Mas but he has already seen and, one foot thrust out as a brake, skid-turns ninety degrees into a narrow file where no pickup can follow.

Dogs?

Somethings.
Fragments of movement Discordant patterns of light and shade within the regularity of the head-high sugarcane. Glimpses. Glances. Flickers. More than five, I reckon, less than twenty. And not human. Too low, too fast, too relentless to be human. Mas too senses them; a glance is the signal for us to flick into high gear. The hunters in the cane match us without a flicker of hesitation. I hear Mas swear. I glance back. Dogs. A hunting pack of ten, closing on us. Cancerous bulbs of bioprocessor implants blister their skulls; each wears the unmistakable ToSec logo spray-painted on its chest.

That hint of electronics I had seen in the farmer’s hand was a command unit.

That time, in Marrakech, Luka took me to a dog pit in the old city. Under the white heat of the kilowatt floods we watched the augmented dogs tear and rip and spray red arterial blood over the front rows. We watched them die on the bloody sand and still they tore at each other, enslaved even beyond death to the commands pouring from their sweating, screaming masters’ control gloves.

Except this man was not threatening us. He was warning us.

Mas’s sudden brake and swerve almost sends me into him. A hundred or so meters ahead, a second pack of augmented dogs is bounding toward us with elegant deadly fluidity.

I have seconds. Only seconds…

“Close your eyes!” I shout to Mas and they are on us. The lead dog leaps. I meet it with my naked left hand. It spins into the cane, neck broken, writhing, yelping hideously.

If the right hand is truth, what is the left?

Answer: destruction. Keter: the Void, Annihilation, the shock fracter. Animal, human, artificial intelligence: whatsoever has eyes to see, it will destroy.

Wherever I turn my left hand, dogs jerk and spasm and fall. They are savage, they are deadly, but those are not enough, not against an enemy that attacks on sight. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. In as many seconds. The cane field is littered with twisted meat, kicking in the red mud. Slipping between close-packed cane, I go from dog to dog, clamping my left hand over each face until the spasms stop. Mercy mercy. On its side in a drainage ditch, a dog beats its stump tail weakly, watches, panting, with puppy-dog eyes free from the unclean light of simulated sentience. Its breath is warm on my skin.
Hush, hush there,
I whisper in English as I press my left hand over its eyes. It jerks. Once.

A sugarcane farmer, however large his holding, could not afford twenty cybercanines. A time-share and a control unit, yes, but the true owners, the true masters, are elsewhere and cannot be oblivious of what has happened to their property. Or of us. Why would a farmer who had warned us of his dogs not stop them with his command unit? Unless, in a higher place, control was taken away from him, by someone who knew exactly what he/she/it was looking for.

Crouching, hands over eyes (See-No-Evil), Mas flinches at the touch of my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s over, Mas. Let’s go.” I want this thunder-eagle country and the evil it has forced me into far behind me. Curled around the thick, padded handlebars, my palms burn as if freshly branded. All masters of the dark arts agree: there is a terrible, seductive joy in the practice and use of their power. It felt good all those other times when I used my power, when I felt like God, that there was no authority on earth could deny me. The masters never mention that there is a price for that thrill, as there is a price for everything, and the price is pain. It can be emotional, it can be spiritual, it can be physical. But it never misses. The pain will always find you. It cannot be begged off, bargained with, wished away.

We first met in a large, high-ceilinged, windowless room, the pain and I, echoing and resonant, the kind of room where the door merges into the wall behind you and seems never to have been. Gray. All gray. The chair: gray. The Bosch industrial robot: gray. The only color: the dyes in their plastic tubes; the needles poised above them.

“Will it hurt?” the blind woman in the red glasses asked as she strapped my wrists to the arms of the gray chair, opened the fingers one two three four and thumb five, taped them down.

“It will hurt,” I said and because she was that particular kind of coward that cannot bear another’s pain, she slipped the disk into the robot and closed the door behind her.

The physical pain was the least part. The true pain was the sense of violation, that the dyes the flicking needles were stitching into the palms of my hands were spreading through my bloodstream, along my nerve fibers, branding me within as indelibly as I was marked without. In Kafka there is a long and terrible story about some engine of execution that wrote a man’s crimes into his flesh with needles. Crimes past: but what about crimes yet to be committed? Can the punishment precede the crime? If there is a point at which the long death and rebirth of Ethan Ring is focused, it is the points of those five colored needles.

Burning. My hands are burning so hot I am afraid to look at them. I want to stop. I want to cry out. I want to plunge them into deep, cold water. Guilt. Burning. Heat. Heat is an energy, energy I can use to push me on, push me away, push me through to the place beyond guilt. Push through. Push through. Or the things you have sealed up inside another life will push through into you. Into him. Into me. Me. Him.

S
UZY MAGEE ANNETT, AGE
size and three-quarters, westbound with her mother to some kind of marital reconciliation by the ocean, had stared for most of the semi-orbital flight at the new plastic socket one and one half centimeters behind the lobe of Ethan Ring’s right ear, ringed by a halo of red itching scar tissue to which the eye could not but be drawn because they had shaved half his skull to accommodate it.

“Mummy Mummy Mummy that mans got a hole in his head,” said Suzy Magee Annett, unable to contain herself any longer, and was told not to be so nosy about other people and go to sleep and when he thought they were finally asleep he took out the tap and slipped it into the socket and so learned that the European Pacific Rim network had uncovered a Pan-Islamic mole and that he was being sent to find out what he knew and take it away from him. Except that Suzy Magee Annett was a bad little girl and watched through half-closed eyes the disgusting fascinating spectacle of a man with a worm in his head.

They had the man in one of the last Barbary Coast wooden houses to escape the Race Wars. He was naked and fastened to a deeply beautiful Shaker chair with brown adhesive tape, which seemed excessive to Ethan Ring. He was a deeply beautiful man.

“Leave me,” said Ethan Ring, picking at the flaking skin around his implant. He showed the man his right hand and said, “Tell me your secrets.”

While the man taped to the Shaker chair spooled off names and addresses and informants and dead drops into a microtaper, Ethan Ring printed out the Hokhmah fracter and hid it in the palm of his gloved left hand.

“Forget it,” he said, opening his left hand. And it was gone.

“That’s it,” he told the others, handing them the microcassette.

“Good,” they said. “Now do the rest. Take it all away.”

“Everything?” he said.

“Everything. We want them to be afraid of us. Very afraid of us.”

So he went back to the naked man and took away all the numbers that might have identified him. License, passport, ID, Social Security, buckcard, credit accounts, e-mail, street name and number, locker number. Gone.

His friends. Gone.

His lovers. Gone.

His enemies. Gone.

His brothers, his sisters, his aunts and uncles and cousins and father and mother. Gone.

The next day Ethan Ring came and peeled the last ten years of his life off like the rind of an orange. College years. Dawn at Zabriskie Point. The time at the Faculty Club pool. The time on the floor in Belsize Park. The adrenaline ecstasy of making it to the top of Half Dome. Getting drunk in Paris in the rain. Dancing in the snow at Noo Year. Gone.

Teenage years, high school angst and acne, first fucks. Gone.

Vertiginous adolescence as the vast incoherencies of the adult world began to make sense. Gone.

Childhood, prechildhood, the neural rainforest of memories, impressions, sensations he had forgotten he had ever forgotten. Gone.

The third day Ethan Ring took away everything he knew. How to drive a car. How to speak Spanish. How to cook an omelet, how to ride a bicycle. The names of the twelve nearest stars. Gone. The words to old Elvis Costello songs. Gone. The interstate route map and the Northwest Pacific domestic timetable. Gone. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. The Trout Quintet. Meat Loaf. Gone. History. Geography. Physics. Chemistry. Biology. Art. Music Gone. Reading. ’Riting. ’Rithmatic Gone.

Only one thing remained.

“Tell me your name.”

“Titus Witters. My name is James Titus Witters,” said the naked man taped into the wooden Shaker chair. “Please, man, not that, leave me that…”

Gone.

“He’s yours now,” said Ethan Ring. He got into his hire car, tried to drive back to his hotel, and got caught in the twelve-block gridlock caused by Mrs. Marta Radetczy age sixty-eight’s inadvertent stepping into the path of a V.W./G.M. biopower Bagels’R’Us truck. Otherwise he would have driven past the Pendereski Gallery without noticing that it was celebrating
that very night
the gala opening of a new work, entitled
Fantasia,
by hot hot new talent Luka Casipriadin.

He thought the suit made him look like a riverboat gambler but the man in the hire shop was adamant that it was very suave, very chic, very sir, sir. From the far side of the crowded room she recognized him—his undisguisable red hair, he supposed, even more conspicuous half shaved away—and came cutting cleanly through the shoals of society/charity/arty/party/drinky/dopey and doc.

“You look like a riverboat gambler.” She ran the palm of her hand along the line of his jaw.

“You look like a dream found in a gutter one hour before dawn, down with the needles and guns and dead.” He ran his fingers through the short stubble on either side of her crest of black hair.

“I love it when you talk mucky,” she said, drawing him away through the throng of cocktail glasses, lip gloss, and Cartier pill-cases. Her fingers caressed his socket. “Your bosses must think a lot of you to fit you up with one of these. Come on. Got something to show you. Preview of coming attractions. For your eyes only.” Outside on the fire escape a light drizzle was falling. She swung over the rail and dropped into the neon-shadowed alley, landing surefooted, cat-coiled. A two-finger whistle: “Yo! Oddjob! To me!”

Stirrings in the shadows, clicking, whirrings, a gleam of light from a polished surface. A Dornier Hi-performance Industrial Robot stepped into the alley, bobbing on cantilever legs, gleaming yellow carapace spotted with rain. Luka rested a black gloved hand on its curved plastic skull.

“Here. Catch.” She skimmed a black something up at him. A snatch of immaculate kid-gloved hands: an Olivetti/IBM Mark Twenty VR-tap.

“The difference between this new bioprocessor stuff and the old clunky noninvasive gear has to be experienced to be believed,” she said. “Obviously, you were sent by God; Ethan Ring in San Francisco with a shiny new hole in his head. You get the deluxe wide-screen edition. One word of warning: be not fooled by the name. Fucking Walt Disney this isn’t.”

Fucking Walt Disney this wasn’t.

“We’ve all got them,” Luka explained as they slipped through the rain-wet streets, splashing through puddles of neon Timor and Vietnamese, the riverboat gambler and the fetish queen with their robot skipping behind. “But we’re afraid of them, we’re afraid that if people find out they’ll think we’re dark and evil and perverted or silly and stupid and fatuous, while in their own heads, those other people are exactly the same. Exactly the same.” Around them fin de siècle brownstones and leery chromium-age office blocks erupted into organic volcanoes of lilac-scented blossoms or stretched into window-studded trees whose trunks upheld the cotton-candy sky; manhole covers became smirking demon faces; every mailbox was a welcoming vagina with lolling forked tongue and grazing pedicabs, bizarre bucolic hybrids half man/half bicycle, bounded like startled gazelles from predatory taxis circling like checkerboard sharks.