oo
Yes, but what’s it doing? We thought it was Just being invited to join the Group out of politeness, didn’t we? Suddenly it’s acting like a fucking missile. What is it up to?
oo
This may seem rather obvious, but we could always just ask it.
oo
Tried that. Still waiting.
Well you could have said…
oo
I beg your pardon. So now what?
oo
Now I get a load of bullshit from the Steely Glint. Excuse me.
oo
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 868.8243]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oGCV Steely Glint
Our mutual friend with the velocity obsession. This wouldn’t be what we really expected, would it? Some private deal, by any chance?
oo
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28. 868. 8499]
xGCV Steely Glint
oLSV Serious Callers Only
No it isn’t! I’m getting fed up repeating this; I should have posted a general notice. No; we wanted the damn thing’s views, some sort of entirely outside viewpoint, not it tearing off to anywhere near the Excession itself.
It was part of the Gang before, you know. We owed it that, no matter that it is now Eccentric. Would that we had known how much…
Now we’ve got another horrendous variable screwing up our plans.
If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
oo
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.868.8978]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
(signal file attached) What did I tell you? I don’t know about this. Looks suspicious to me.
oo
Hmm. And I don’t know, either. I hate to say it, but it sounds genuine. Of course, if I prove to be wrong you will never confront me with this, ever, all right?
oo
If, after all this is over, we are both still in a position for me to confer and you to benefit from such leniency, I shall be infinitely glad to extend such forbearance.
oo
Well, it could have been expressed more graciously, but I accept this moral blank cheque with all the deference it merits.
oo
I’m going to call the Sleeper Service. It won’t take any notice of me but I’m going to call the mealworm anyway.
IV
Genar-Hofoen didn’t take his pen terminal with him when he went out that evening, and the first place he visited in Night City was a Tier-Sintricate/Ishlorsinami Tech. store.
The woman was small for an Ishy, thought Genar-Hofoen. Still, she towered over him. She wore the usual long black robes and she smelled… musty. They sat on plain, narrow seats in a bubble of blackness. The woman was bent over a tiny fold-away screen balanced on her knees. She nodded and craned her body over towards him. Her hand extended, close to his left ear. A sequence of shining, telescoping rods extended from her fingers. She closed her eyes. In the dimness, Genar-Hofoen could see tiny lights flickering on the inside of her eyelids.
Her hand touched his ear, tickling slightly. He felt his face twitch. ‘Don’t move,’ she said.
He tried to stay still. The woman withdrew her hand. She opened her eyes and peered at the point where the tips of three of the delicate rods met. She nodded and said, ‘Hmm.’
Genar-Hofoen bent forward and looked too. He couldn’t see anything. The woman closed her eyes again; her lid screens glowed again.
‘Very sophisticated,’ she said. ‘Could have missed it.’
Genar-Hofoen looked at his right palm. ‘Sure there’s nothing on this hand?’ he asked, recalling Verlioef Schung’s firm handshake.
‘As sure as I can be,’ the woman said, withdrawing a small transparent container from her robe and dropping whatever she had taken out of his ear into it. He still couldn’t see anything there.
‘And the suit?’ he asked, fingering one lapel of his jacket.
‘Clean,’ the woman said.
‘So that’s it?’ he asked.
‘That is all,’ she told him. The black bubble disappeared and they were sitting in a small room whose walls were lined with shelves overflowing with impenetrably technical-looking gear.
‘Well, thanks.’
‘That will be eight hundred Tier-sintricate-hour equivalents.’
‘Oh, call it a round thousand.’
He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them was that it would always be night when you got there, and you’d have no excuse for not having fun.
Night City Tier was situated on the middle level of the world, on a small island in a shallow sea. The island was entirely covered by a shallow dome ten kilometres across and two in height. Internally, the City tended to take its cue from each year’s Festival. The last time Genar-Hofoen had been here the place had taken on the appearance of a magnified oceanscape, all its buildings turned into waves between one and two hundred metres tall. The theme that year had been the Sea; Street Six had existed in the long trough between two exponentially swept surges. Ripples on the towering curves of the waves’ surfaces had been balconies, burning with lights. Luminous foam at each wave’s looming, overhanging crest had cast a pallid, sepulchral light over the winding street beneath. At either end of the Street the broadway had risen to meet crisscrossing wave fronts and connect – through oceanically inauthentic tunnels – with other highways.
The theme this year was the Primitive and the City had chosen to interpret this as a gigantic early electronic circuit board; the network of silvery streets formed an almost perfectly flat cityscape studded with enormous resistors, dense-looking, centipedally legged flat-topped chips, spindly diodes and huge semi-transparent valves with complicated internal structures, each standing on groups of shining metal legs embedded in the network of the printed circuit. Those were the bits that Genar-Hofoen sort of half recognised from his History of Technical Stuff course or whatever it had been called when he’d been a student; there were lots of other jagged, knobbly, smooth, brightly coloured, matt black, shiny, vaned, crinkled bits he didn’t know the purpose or the name of.
Street Six this year was a fifteen-metre wide stream of quickly flowing mercury covered with etched diamond sheeting; every now and again large coherent blobs of sparkling blue-gold went speeding along the mercury stream underfoot. Apparently these were symbolised electrons or something. The original idea had been to incorporate the mercury channels into the City transport system, but this had proved impractical and so they were there just for effect; the City tube system ran deep underground as usual. Genar-Hofoen had jumped on and off a few of the underground cars on his way to the City and on and off a couple more once he’d arrived, hoping to give the slip to anybody following. Having done this and had the tracer in his ear removed, he was happy he’d done the best he could to ensure that his evening’s fun would take place unobserved by SC, though he wasn’t particularly bothered if they were still watching him; it was more the principle of the thing. No point getting obsessive about it.
Street Six itself was packed with people, walking, talking, staggering, strolling, rolling along within bubblespheres, riding on exotically accoutred animals, riding in small carriages drawn by ysner-mistretl pairs and floating along under small vacuum balloons or in force field harnesses. Above, in the eternal night sky beneath the City’s vast dome, this part of the evening’s entertainment was being provided by a city-wide hologram of an ancient bomber raid.
The sky was filled with hundreds and hundreds of winged aircraft with four or six piston engines each, many of them picked out by searchlights. Spasms of light leaving black-on-black clouds and blossoming spheres of dimming red sparks were supposed to be anti-aircraft fire, while in amongst the bombers smaller single and twin-engined aircraft whizzed; the two sorts of aircraft were shooting at each other, the large planes from turrets and the smaller ones from their wings and noses. Gently curving lines of white, yellow and red tracer moved slowly across the sky and every now and again an aircraft seemed to catch fire and start to fall out of the sky; occasionally one would explode in mid air. All the time, the dark shapes of bombs could be glimpsed, falling to explode with bright flashes and vivid gouts of flame on parts of the City seemingly always just a little way off. Genar-Hofoen thought it all looked a little contrived, and he doubted there’d ever been such a concentrated air battle, or one in which the ground fire kept up while interceptor planes did their intercepting, but as a show it was undeniably impressive.