After they’d eaten, when coffee was being served, she excused herself and said goodnight. Porphyre followed her to the base of the stairs. He’d stayed near her during the meal, as though he sensed her new unease. No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was. All the things the drug had fenced away. »Missy, take care,« he said, too quietly for the others to hear. »I’m fine,« she said. »Too many people. I’m still not used to it.« He stood there looking up at her, the glow of dying coals behind his elegantly crafted, subtly inhuman skull, until she turned and climbed the stairs.
She heard the helicopter come for them an hour later. »House,« she said, »I’ll see the video from Continuity now.« As the wallscreen slid down into place, she opened the bedroom door and stood for a moment at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of the empty house. Surf, the hum of the dishwasher, wind buffeting the windows that faced the deck. She turned back to the screen and shivered at the face she saw there in a grainy freeze-frame headshot, avian eyebrows arched above dark eyes, high fragile cheekbones, and a wide, determined mouth. The image expanded steadily, into the darkness of an eye, black screen, a white point, growing, lengthening, becoming the tapered spindle of Freeside. Credits began to flash in German. »Hans Becker,« the house began, reciting the Net library’s intro-critique, »is an Austrian video artist whose hallmark is an obsessive interrogation of rigidly delimited fields of visual information. His approaches range from classical montage to techniques borrowed from industrial espionage, deep-space imaging, and kino-archaeology. Antarctica Starts Here , his examination of images of the Tessier-Ashpool family, currently stands as the high point of his career. The pathologically media-shy industrial clan, operating from the total privacy of their orbital home, posed a remarkable challenge.« The white of the spindle filled the screen as the final credit vanished. An image tracked to center screen, snapshot of a young woman in loose dark clothes, background indistinct. MARIE-FRANCE TESSIER, MOROCCO. This wasn’t the face in the opening shot, the face of invading memory, yet it seemed to promise it, as though a larval image lay beneath the surface. The soundtrack wove atonal filaments through strata of static and indistinct voices as the image of Marie-France was replaced by a formal monochrome portrait of a young man in a starched wing collar. It was a handsome face, finely proportioned, but very hard somehow, and in the eyes a look of infinite boredom. JOHN HARNESS ASHPOOL, OXFORD. Yes , she thought, and I ‘ve met you many times . I know your story ,though I ‘m not allowed to touch it . But I really don ‘t think I like you at all , do I , Mr. Ashpool?
Catwalk
The catwalk groaned and swayed. The stretcher was too wide for the walk’s handrails, so they had to keep it chest-high as they inched across, Gentry at the front with his gloved hands clamped around the rails on either side of the sleeper’s feet. Slick had the heavy end, the head, with the batteries and all that gear; he could feel Cherry creeping along behind him. He wanted to tell her to get back, that they didn’t need her weight on the walk, but somehow he couldn’t. Giving Gentry Kid Afrika’s bag of drugs had been a mistake. He didn’t know what was in the derm Gentry’d done; he didn’t know what had been in Gentry’s bloodstream to begin with. Whatever, Gentry’d gone bare-wires crazy and now they were out here on the fucking catwalk, twenty meters over Factory’s concrete floor, and Slick was ready to weep with frustration, to scream; he wanted to smash something, anything, but he couldn’t let go of the stretcher. And Gentry’s smile , lit up by the glow of the bio-readout taped to the foot of the stretcher, as Gentry took another step backward across the catwalk . . . »O man,« Cherry said, her voice like a little girl’s, »this is just seriously fucked . . . .« Gentry gave the stretcher a sudden impatient tug and Slick almost lost his grip.