The Pure Cold Light (13 page)

Mingo’s destination wasn’t too far away: the ICS-IV youth-education fortress, referred to colloquially as “Isis-four.”

The indigo sky looked clear overhead. A scattering of stars was still visible, the sun somewhere below the skyline of the Vine Street wall. Mingo found himself pretending he could smell fresh, clean air instead of the recycled, ion-charged atmosphere that surrounded him. Things were working, falling into place; it was going to be a good meeting; it was going to be a
good
day. Not for a moment did he conceive that anyone, anyone at all, might have cause to follow him.

Skyways, laid out as they were in mostly straight stretches, offered few opportunities for eluding pursuit, and none at all if the car you were driving had been left unattended for a few minutes while the valet called to let you know it was ready.

***

ICS-IV had its own entrance off the skyway, a brightly lighted, high-security entrance in keeping with the nature of the student body who dwelt as virtual prisoners behind the school’s formidable stone walls. There was a parking lane at the entrance, into which Mingo scooted the blue car. Once out, he stepped up onto the pedestrian walk, from where he could look over the west fortress wall at the starred array of buildings below.

Seven long arms radiated from the central, lighthouse-like tower, seven narrow buildings like spokes on a wheel. It was an ancient design, one that had caught on in penal systems the world over, but this one, formerly called Eastern State Penitentiary, had been the first, the template all others copied. The high-security blocks on Corson’s Island still used the plan, with ten spokes in the wheel, easy to segregate, one from another. This place, this prison, had been unique in 1829. ESP was the single most-emulated piece of architecture in Philadelphia. For one hundred fifty years, it had operated successfully as a grim hive, row upon row, of solitary cells. Although made over as a medium-security institution of learning, to Mingo’s way of thinking, ESP or, rather, ICS-IV still resembled a medieval stronghold around which a modern city had arisen, and it still provided the same service as before—it exiled a dangerous few for the good of the many.

The pedestrian walk led to a steep flight of stairs. A blue wire cage barred descent halfway down. Mingo headed toward it, his hand already sliding into his inner jacket pocket for his biocard. The card had been coded to identify him as an ICSS inspector, a position allowing him free access to any part of any school—including the students’ quarters.

Two guards lounged inside the cage, waiting for him. They wore striped, gray and violet uniforms, and each looked as if one, if not both, of his progenitors had been a tractor.

The students called them
bullgods
, making a joke both of their gargantuan proportions and their nearly unchecked dominance. Almost all of the bullgods were veterans of prison isle incarceration. Most had chosen guard duty as an extended vacation away from such hellholes as Corson’s Isle. Survival odds weren’t vastly improved here, but the accommodations and the food—most of the latter donated by Happy Burger and its competitors—were heads above the shingled shit the overpopulated prison isles had to offer.

All Mingo cared was that the megatherian guards did exactly as he instructed them. He had been here before. By reputation they would know him.

Reaching the blue cage, he smiled coolly, first at one and then the other juggernaut. With his thumb in place on it, he inserted his biocard into its slot. The door thunked open. The bullgods twitched and, with downcast eyes, edged aside to let him in.

***

A few minutes later, the two guards went lumbering up the stairs to Mingo’s car. As they neared the top of the steep incline, a jogger passed them—not an uncommon sight to the general Overcity populace, but bullgods tended not to get into the Overcity. They drew up as one and admired the jogger’s long legs and wide shoulders. She was a big woman, but that intimidated neither of them, one of whom had carnal acquaintance with bovine life forms twice his own weight. He watched the jogger’s sizable breasts jouncing under her loose clothes and felt a confused sexual heat in his lower abdomen. “Hey, dollin’,” he said, “I got a exercise you can do.” His buddy chortled and added, “Yeah, me too, sugar.”
 

The jogger glanced slowly their way. She was dark, smoky, exotic. A little jewel in her nose, catching a first ray of sunlight, seemed to wink invitingly at the guards.

They watched her go by.

“Geez, now I got a hard-on,” said the uppermost bull.

“Geez,” agreed the other.

They shuffled up the steps to keep the woman in sight as she bounced into the distance. Had they been on their own, allowed to act on their urges, they might have pursued her and exacted their satisfaction. But Mr. Mingo was waiting below, and he would not have been understanding.

He had told them how to operate the Saracen’s trunk, but it was already open. That had no effect upon the two guards, who wouldn’t have known a discrepancy if it had bored straight through their forebrains. All six red and blue tubes lay where they were supposed to be; one had popped open at the end. The black butt of a little assault pistol was sticking out, and the nearest bullgod unhesitatingly reached down and pulled it the rest of the way out.
 

“Yo, loog a’ dis,” he said. “Dis no map.”

It was a hot little item to be sure, an Ingram Model 30. They, armed with meter-long, metal-headed
lathis
, would have loved an Ingram. The telescoping sticks were nice, and could easily bash in somebody’s skull, but an Ingram just poking out of a bull’s belt would have kept most of the little toads in line. The two guards slid their hands over the black metal like blind men seeking Braille.

“Why ya suppose he’s bringing these in, Tackler?” asked the second guard. He picked up another “Map” and shook it to hear the gun rattling inside.

“Maybe it’s like a secret cache, ya know, case of a riot. Ooh, boy, makes you hope they fuck up soon, don’t it?” He held the gun a moment longer. “Think he’d miss one?”

“What, like keep it?”

“Yeah,” Tackler grinned.

“They’s only six.”

“So?”

For a minute they just stood there, unable to choose, with no real sense of what they had blundered into or what consequences could be served up. Then the bull with the gun leaned into the trunk and recapped the tube. “If he don’t say nothing, then I won’t neither.”

“An’ if he does?”

“Then I say ‘oh, so sorry, we found dis lying in the trunk, you know, and, bein’ duty officer, I dint wanta leave it there in the open.’”

“
You’ll
say it.”

“I will. I got the gun, so I will.”
 

His partner nodded, having now safely distanced himself from any retribution that might occur if the gun’s absence were discovered. Mr. Mingo, although he was physically unimposing, was a spectacularly venomous quantity. It was the glasses, the scarves, the swept-back mane of hair, and the way he’d dispatched an overweening bull on his first visit, using nothing but a ballpoint pen.

They scooped up the tubes, closed the trunk, and descended the steep stairway toward the open, empty cage. They had forgotten entirely about the runner.

In the bowels of the school, Mingo had presented a list of names to the guard in charge, and was waiting for his sleepy-eyed guests to be rousted and brought into his commandeered classroom. His program disk was loaded in the podium; displayed on the wall behind him was the LifeMask face he wanted them to recognize. The arsenal was on its way down from the car. He began to hum “The Pirate King’s Song” from
The Pirates of Penzance
, thinking that it was his song today. Everything was absolutely splendid, everything was really
good
.

Chapter Ten: Pirate Air

“Neeb, are you around?” called Thomasina Lyell.

The edit suite was deserted, the cubes all dark. She thought of how it would be if he were killed: it would be like this. She retreated to the outer room. His four-room apartment was hardly vast, but there was enough space for Nebergall to get lost among the clutter. So fastidious as an editor, he was anything but tidy personally. The outer room—the one ostensibly for guests—looked as if it had been detonated. Cast-off clothing covered the furniture in layers. Empty soda flasks fought with biodegrading wrappers from fast foods (that Neeb still ate, even knowing what he knew about them), DVDs, loose A/V high-density disks, ancient video tape cartridges, and cables, connectors, and converters of every sort for possession of the floor. On one wall shelf were two plastic commemorative “ANN: 5 Years Watching the Skies” drink cups that had not moved in at least three years. A few footpaths had been cleared through the debris. She checked the bedroom—deep in shadow but otherwise in much the same overwhelmed condition—before being satisfied that he wasn’t home.

On more than one occasion she had found him passed out after two or three days straight of editing, when a smoke alarm pressed to his ear wouldn’t have roused him. She knew network corsairs—she had lived with one briefly in the beginning. They all behaved much the same as Nebergall. They did not seem likely candidates for long life, nor were they the sorts of people given to trying to accommodate others. They were iconoclasts, dedicated to the precept that the apple cart needed regular upsetting if one was to keep an eye on all the apples. To Nebergall’s way of thinking—and to hers, she admitted—society, thoroughly unaware, needed them. It needed their perspective to maintain its equilibrium. “Harmony,” he had proclaimed more than once, “derives out of conflict.”

She wondered what he would think of the conflict she was encountering. ScumberCorp was arming ICS guards (she could not conceive of the more dreadful notion that it might be supplying students), while its representative bribed the Box City squatters to hunt down real live aliens, who had supposedly taken refuge in the city. She questioned whether the man, Mingo, actually represented the company’s interests. But of course he did—they were, all of them, mad as hatters.

ScumberCorp was the largest corporate entity in the world. It’s nearest competitor, Ichiban-Plokazhopski, was barely half its size; next came Bickham Interplanetary, a fresh contender as likely to be absorbed into one of the other two as to survive. There were others, thousands of them—a tower here, an industrial complex there; little companies that had entrenched in a technological niche and managed to ward off the competition for a time. This became more difficult each year. SC’s lobby groups had for decades been guiding Congress through seemingly innocuous legislation that was in fact deleterious to the smaller elements in the business world—specific fetters embedded deep inside impenetrable bills, the means to cut off a targeted company’s legs (or worse) legislated so that there could be no question of legality. There were millions of pages of nearly nonsensical bureaucrababble to wade through each year, and even if you ran across the particular paragraph tailored against you, you probably wouldn’t recognize it unless you could afford to hire someone (at enormous cost) specializing in congressional encryption. Unprotected both financially and legally, companies in one arena after another succumbed to the grinning behemoth.

ScumberCorp had accrued whole cities, entire states. They owned pieces of everything in every country on the planet, and now in lunar and Martian outposts.

Thomasina had been raised to be a part of it. Her widowed father, the mayor of Atlanta, had sent her to Princeton, where she trained to be a 3-D animator. In all likelihood, she would have been working for an SC network right now if her father had not uncovered a system of bribery running through his own staff and the city council, who were greasing the local machine for an SC takeover of the entire state. Without hesitation, he blew the whistle. He was a political realist and thought he had prepared for the tough consequences of his actions, but he had underestimated the unscrupulousness of the menace he was attacking. SC savaged him.

They used the very 3-D systems on which his daughter was training to create images of her father receiving his own payoffs from Ichiban. SC controlled Atlanta’s media, and they impaled him with new footage of his reprehensible crimes almost daily for weeks, offering him no avenue of rebuttal or retreat. Soon most of the country had seen Mr. Thomas Lyell take money and drugs, and fuck three different whores—one in a suite in the Peachtree Center Plaza, and two in the tawdry bullet-vans out of which they operated, looping the Omni. It was as if he had brought along his own camera crew wherever he went, just to incriminate himself. Some people besides his daughter must have recognized the unlikelihood of this; but not the obtuse majority. Certainly not the eighteen members of the city council, who were well-compensated in advance for the stress of having to call for the impeachment of their once-beloved mayor. Helpless, Thomas Lyell resigned in disgrace.

The night he quit, his daughter had spoken to him on the phone. He’d laughed away her terror—her fear that he might take his own life. He had said, “My child, don’t be so melodramatic. Don’t you see I’m free at last? Thank God Almighty, free at last.” Then he’d laughed again heartily, as at some private joke.

She wanted to come home; he said no, she was to finish her schooling. His career was over, hers not even begun. Two months later, Thomas Lyell was dead of a fall from the landing in his apartment. Accident and suicide were both submitted publicly by way of explanation; one psychiatrist on a talk show even suggested the possibility of a “subliminal suicide” in which the victim unknowingly sought mishaps as a means of punishing himself. The word
homicide
, on the other hand, never once came up.

Lyell had done a lot of stories on ScumberCorp, caught them in any number of petty lies from covering for a kleptomaniacal manager to denying outright (as they had done for two years against indisputable evidence) that there was such a thing as Orbitol decay. But nothing as insanely bold as this. Forget tranquilizers in the fast food; this looked like elective slaughter in the Undercity schools. If Neeb could get good data on this Mingo freak, they might presumably sell the pirate air to every competitor ScumberCorp had. They could damage the megacorporation and make a fortune at the same time.