Bobby blinked, glanced frantically around, found Jammer’s eyes, glazed with drugs and pain. “Tell him,” Jammer said. “I couldn’t get to the Yak. Somebody grabbed me, I don’t know how. “Who?” The tall man had his arm around the girl now. “She said her name was Slide From Los Angeles.” “Jaylene,” the man said The phone on Jammer’s desk began to chime. “Answer it,” the man said. Bobby turned as Jackie reached over and tapped the call- bar below the square screen. The screen lit, flickered, and showed them a man’s face, broad and very pale, the eyes hooded and sleepy-looking. His hair was bleached nearly white, and brushed straight back. He had the meanest mouth Bobby had ever seen “Turner.” the man said, “we’d better talk now.~ You haven’t got a lot of time left. I think you should get those people out of the room, for starts .
THE KNOTTED LINE stretched on and on. At times they came to angles, forks of the tunnel. Here the line would be wrapped around a strut or secured with a fat transparent gob of epoxy. The air was as stale, but colder. When they stopped to rest in a cylindrical chamber, where the shaft widened before a triple branching, Marly asked Jones for the flat little work light he wore across his forehead on a gray elastic strap. Holding it in one of the red suit’s gauntlets, she played it over the cham- ber’s wail. The surface was etched with patterns, microscopi- cally fine lines “Put your helmet on,” Jones advised, “you’ve got a better light than mine . Marly shuddered. “No.” She passed him the light. “Can you help me out of this, please?” She tapped a gauntlet against the suit’s hard chest. The mirror-domed helmet was fastened to the suit’s waist with a chrome snap-hook. “You’d best keep it,” Jones said. “It’s the only one in the Place. I’ve got one, where I sleep, but no air for it. Wig’s bottles won’t fit my transpirator, and his suit’s all holes . He shrugged. “No, please,” she said, struggling with the catch at the suit’s waist, where she’d seen Rez twist something. “I can’t stand it . . Jones pulled himself half over the line and did something she oouldn’t see. There was a click. “Stretch your arms, over your head,” he said. It was awkward, but finally she floated free, still in the black jeans and white silk blouse she’d worn to that final encounter with Alain. Jones fastened the empty red suit to the line with another of the snap-rings mounted around its waist, and then undid her bulging purse. “You want this? To take with you, I mean? We could leave it here, get it on our way back.” “No,’~ she said, “I’ll take it. Give it to me.” She hooked an elbow around the line and fumbled the purse open. Her jacket came out, but so did one of her boots. She managed to get the boot back into the purse, then twisted herself into the jacket “That’s a nice piece of hide,” Jones said. “Please,” she said, “let’s hurry . . “Not far now.” he sald, his work light swinging to show her where the line vanished through one of three openings arranged in an equilateral triangle.
“End of the line,” he said. “Literal, that is.” He tapped the chromed eyebolt where the line was tied in a sailor’s knot. His voice caught and echoed, somewhere ahead of them, until she imagined she heard other voices whispering behind the round of echo. “We’ll want a bit of light for this,” he said, kicking himself across the shaft and catching a gray metal coffin thing that protruded there. He opened it. She watched his hands move in the bright circle of the work light; his fingers were thin and delicate, but the nails were small and blunt, outlined with black, impacted grime. The letters “CJ” were tattooed in crude blue across the back of his right hand. The sort of tattoo one did oneself, in jail. . . . Now he’d fished out a length of heavy, insulated wire. He squinted into the box, then wedged the wire behind a copper D-connector. The dark ahead vanished in a white flood of light. “Got more power than we need, really,” he said, with something akin to a homeowner’s pride. “The solar banks are all still workin’, and they were meant to power the main- frames . . . Come on, then, lady, we’ll meet the artist you come so far to see He kicked off and out, gliding smoothly through the opening, like a swimmer, into the light. Into the thousand drifting things. She saw that the red plastic soles of his frayed shoes had been patched with smears of white silicon caulking. And then she’d followed, forgetting her fears, forgetting the nausea and constant vertigo, and she was there. And she understood. “My God,” she said. “Not likely,” Jones called. “Maybe old Wig’s, though. Too bad it’s not doing it now, though That’s even more of a sight.” Something slid past, ten centimeters from her face. An ornate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half, from end to end.