Wetware (22 page)

Of course, later, when he did not have the time for her that he once had, when he tried to make excuses, she became frantic. This, she said with a smile, as though she had found a solution to her difficulties, was the moment she “bitched him up in earnest.” She had found the place of entry, the secrets he had kept to himself, but which she discovered and used to great effect. After that, she said, “nothing could stop us . . . ” What wouldn’t they sacrifice for a few hours together, when the innocent and sweet pleasure was invoked through such acts as are described in appendices 3–110a. . . . Of course, it is hard to believe in the stamina, in the sheer vitality needed to pursue such activities, day after day, until each of them was certain they were right at the edge of dissolution of self, which, if properly exploited, as they discovered, could be used to such sensual advantage. . . .

Briggs closed the book, feeling a little whoosh of air that came out of the heavy pages. Then he looked out the window at the brick wall on the other side. Silence behind him. Well, he thought, he didn’t want to get to the end of this one, and he guessed it was best not to look too carefully at the appendices. He was curious about what the man’s secrets had been, but he guessed, in a way, that he already knew.

What man doesn’t know just what it is that he would give anything for? Or what the moment would be like if a woman knew what this was, even better than he did, and that one day she sprung this knowledge on him, with a gasp of joy? And a shiver of excitement? He had always known that Kay had enormous power over him, but until this moment such considerations had been abstract. He looked up and saw the pigeons, their wings sawtoothed at the window ledge as they used them to brake just on the other side of the glass.

He looked down the dark aisle. Then outside again. He thought about Berlin. At some point this man must have realized that he was in the midst of an attraction that had its own imperative, and that the confusing thing about it was that as it advanced, as it consumed everything in his life, it became that much more pleasurable.

Kay had been interested in some other books too, and now he went looking for them. She wanted essays by Nobel Prize–winning economists. She was particularly interested in economic metrics. Indices. Movement of capital. Above everything else, she was interested in those theories having to do with establishing market trends. Briggs flipped through these things. It wasn’t his realm of expertise, and he guessed that she was smart enough to want to be clever about the money she must have gotten her hands on. Surely she was living on something. She would open an account someplace and use the money in some clever way. He nodded to himself as he held the book in his hand. She was practical. She would manage the money in a way that made sense.

The last book she had wanted was an account of a slave revolt in Rome. This was in another section, and he went toward it, through the maze of shelves, going along the titles, finger up, like a man testing the wind. The books were pleasant to touch, the cloth of the bindings soft to his finger. He stopped. Here it was.

The book was a collection of speeches, records, invoices from an itinerant executioner, all of it assembled with the order of sediment in a cross-section of geological strata, laid one on top of another in the order that they had been produced. Briggs stood in the brown dimness, holding the book. He realized that he would discover which of these accounts she responded to by his own feelings. She had looked as he did, if not here in this place, then in another library, and surely she had read what he did.

Of course, he was interested in revolt too. What wouldn’t he like to say about the people who controlled his life, who decided which project he would be allowed to do, when he would be paid, the people who often decided, for the most tedious reasons, that he would be shipped out to some strip, downgraded to the second rate? How often had he fought back from this stigma, picked up the pieces, and continued? He was still doing it now. Or what he would like to say about the way he lived, or the way everyone lived, when the future arrived as a bullying rumor, a part of which would come true?

He stopped at a speech by Tacitala, the leader of a revolt in Sicily in the second century. The words had been recorded by one of the men who had survived and who, as a secretary to a landowner, had been taught to write. And to remember, too, by the Roman method: the first thing to do was memorize the architecture of a building and then, when committing something to memory (a speech, for instance), to assign various parts of it to the rooms of the house. When the speech was recalled, one imagined going through the architecture: What was in the first room downstairs, what was in the second?

Tacitala spoke from a few rocks on a hillside in the afternoon, and around him stood olive trees, the silver-white of their undersides flickering in the breeze. He spoke to five thousand slaves who knew that the Roman legions were about to arrive. The air was thick with smoke from the campfires, where the men had prepared a last meal, which they had eaten, slowly, with deliberation, and then they had stood before the hillside where Tacitala spoke.

“My friends,” he said, “the Romans are just over the hill. You can see the dust from their approach. And with the dust there are vultures, who are clever enough to know what that dust means. There is not much time, but I wanted to speak to you from the heart. If I do not speak in this manner now, why, when should I do so? From the grave or from the cross where some of us are going to be hung in a few hours? No. I think the time to speak is now, with the dust in the air, when you can almost hear the sounds of the Romans as they march. Some of you worked on ranches, on the
latifundia
in chains, and some of you, as I did, in the mines. We know things that no other men know, and this knowledge binds us together. Let us be thankful for that closeness, for the fact of our unity. It is the one thing we have. We can depend upon it in the most trying circumstances. Surely this is one of them. I would not dare to tell you otherwise.

“I want to speak honestly as well, because if this is not the time for honesty, then what is? In a few hours from now? No. The time for honesty is this instant. With vultures approaching in the train of the Romans. The first thing is to address the facts. It appears as though the gods love us less than others. This is what eats at my heart even more than the things we have all endured: Why should we be so shunned? I would cry if it wasn’t a futile waste. And, under these circumstances, what do I have to offer? Let us make a pact. Let us agree that when the Romans come, as they will soon, they will know that they fought human beings. Not some reduced creatures, not some fearful children, but us, informed of the circumstances as they are, as the universe really is, and that we have chosen to be remembered by this moment. You could call it defiance if you have to have a word, but we know what it is. By any word you want to use.

“The Romans will stand on the ridge of the hill and make a war cry. But we are more practically minded. After all, we have had to work in places most people only see in nightmares. As a practical man I am going to do a practical thing. I am going to reach down and pick up a stone. Like this one. And I am going to use it to sharpen my sword. You hear? That scraping sound as the edge comes true? When the Romans come up the hill, when we see their dust as it streams up, every one of us will use a stone to work on his sword. Let us try it now. Yes. And again. Yes. Again. That is the sound they will hear from us when they first approach. Then we will be in a position to leave our mark and to show these men, brave men I am sure, that we were men, too.”

The book made a little sliding sound as he pushed it back onto the shelf, and then he turned off the light and stood in the darkness.

CHAPTER 13

April 15, 2029

IN THE evening, Kay sat up on the side of the bed and looked out the window at sky. Jack slept on the bed, and his pale legs, the marblelike definition of the muscles in his chest, the corded veins in his arms, the angle of his hips made him look like Renaissance sculpture. She touched his chest, the hair under one arm, ran a finger around one of his nipples. The pistol was on the nightstand and she picked it up, reassured by the heft of it. In the mirror she appeared in white and shadow with the pistol on the bed next to her.

Kay got up and walked around, the pistol hanging by her thigh, which seemed to make her feel more naked. In the bathroom, the radiators clinked and the pistol made a clanking sound, a counterpoint to the radiators, as she put it down on the porcelain tank of the toilet. She turned on the shower and stepped into it like someone walking into a tropical rainstorm. She thought,
It’s just nerves.
Finally she took the small, cheap towel that the hotel left in the bathroom and began to dry off.

She had gotten lucky when she had gone to Briggs’s apartment without being caught. But what good was luck once you had used it? She didn’t think it was a good idea to go back, and yet she didn’t know what else to do. Then she thought of Jackson. Jackson might help.

Certainly, Jackson had helped them before. He had found them in the hall of Galapagos when they were trying to get away. He could have sounded an alarm, but he hadn’t. In fact, he’d looked as if he had been waiting for them. But no matter what he’d been thinking, he had said, “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you. Come on. Don’t worry. Jack. Don’t worry.” He had given them the jumpsuits and some money. On the night they had escaped, he’d taken them to his apartment for a couple of hours.

Jackson had been nice to her. And something else too. He had been polite. She hadn’t had any experience, but she had liked his politeness. He’d asked her what she wanted to eat or drink and he hadn’t made her feel embarrassed because she didn’t understand something. Jackson knew that she might be awkward, but he seemed to be certain that this wouldn’t last long. At the heart of his treatment had been respect, and she realized now how lovely it had been. He had given her a cup of tea and watched her drink it. Given her a cookie. Told her to be careful about ever coming back to this apartment. He had liked her, and she had experienced this as warmth that she could almost feel. He had spoken to her like an adult, right from the beginning. Anyway, he had told her not to come back to his apartment, ever.

She tried to comfort herself. Maybe in the blinding will of revolt, she would really be alive and capable of love. Not just the obsessive love she felt now, but a conscious, gladly given passion. Both eyes open. She sat there in the bathroom, feeling the pistol warm on her thighs.

Oh, let it rest,
she thought.
Can’t I just have a little pleasure? Isn’t a girl
even allowed that?
Who was to say it was obsessive? Fuck them. The people who used this word had never had a moment like this, when they were crazy to have just the touch, the whiff, the hint of someone . . . And yet, with each passing hour, she became panicky with the desire to break away, to be defiant. What if Briggs wasn’t what she wanted after all? What would she do about that? She sat there, trembling.

She went to the dressing table and looked through the junk there, cosmetics she had bought, and in the clutter of powder and brushes she picked up the promotional key chain for a game called Pacifica XII. It was the one she had put in her pocket when she had been in the gaming parlor. The gimmick wasn’t much, really, about the size of a matchbook, but if you opened it up, a single eye inside winked at you, lascivious, beckoning. If you took the thing to a gaming parlor, it let you have a look around in a new game. If you held the gimmick in your hand, it took a quick registration of your pheromones and then adjusted the game so as to reflect just what your ideas of romance really were.

Jack was still sleeping. The light from the setting sun outside lay over him like an aureate dust, the shadows of the muscles of his chest looking dark, almost the color of coal against the gold film. His chest rose and fell. She held the gimmick up and let it swing back and forth, and then she ran it across her lips. Well, she guessed it had possibilities.

The cheap computer with the cigarette-burned lid made a little squeak as she turned it on. The trouble was that the machine only had one adapter, and it didn’t fit the promotional gimmick. She went into the bathroom, looked through the medicine chest, in the closet, but there was nothing there, just some crumpled-up tissue. She found the nail file in the drawer next to the bed, and she used it on the adapter: she did the job carefully, counting the strokes, rotating the plug even more precisely than it could have been done on a lathe. One stroke, turn. Keep the pressure the same. Then she clipped the key chain onto it, the connection to the computer making a diminutive and reassuring snap. The power came on. She looked at the guts of the key chain, scrolling through the code.
Hmmm,
she said,
hmmm. Look. That’s where I could do a little work. Right
there. If you did it right, you could turn it into a place to leave a message.

She added new lines, inserted new uses, and then she took a piece of paper and wrote in her neat, Palmer method script, “You might use this sometime.” She put the promotional gimmick and the note into an envelope she found in the drawer of the nightstand. No name on it, but not clean, either, with a round circle where someone had put a wet glass.

After a while she put her hand to her neck and rubbed it, and then she got up and put on her new coat, with nothing underneath. She buttoned it up and put the pistol into the pocket before she went out into the last of the sunset, which lay on the walls like a pink dust. She didn’t want to sleep, since she had become frightened of dreaming: her dreams were filled with such longing. Jack slept while the door clicked shut.

She walked through the city, and as she went, she looked at each shadow, listened to each small sound, the almost inaudible pad of a cat’s foot on the pavement of an alley, the plink of a drop of water from a flower box, all of it being examined, thought about, put into context. She didn’t think anyone would try to stop her. It was late when she stood in front of the post office, her hand in the pocket of her coat.
I’ll be waiting
for you,
she thought. Then she dropped the envelope in the mail.