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"It could be," the man says, "but you are addicted to complexity"
"More literally than you kno~" says the voice, and the man imagines the few
square inches of satellite circuitry through which it comes to him. That
tiniest and mostly costly of principalities. "It's all about complexity now."
"It is about your will in the world," the man says and raises his arms,
cupping the back of his head in his hands.
There follows a silence.
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"There was a time," the voice says at last, "when I believed that you were
playing a game with me.
That all of that was something you made up for me. To annoy me. Or amuse me.
To hold my interest.
To ensure my patronage."
"I have never been in need of your patronage," the man says mildly.
"No, I suppose not," the voice continues. "There will always be
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those who need certain others not to be, and will pay to make it so. But it's
true: I took you to be another mercenary, one with an expressed philosophy
perhaps, but I took that philosophy to be nothing more than a way you had
discovered of making yourself interesting, of setting yourself apart from the
pack."
"Where I am," the man says to the gray neutral ceiling, "there is no pack."
"Oh, there's a pack all right. Bright young things guaranteeing executive
outcomes. Brochures.
They have brochures. And lines to read between. What were you doing when I
called?"
"Dreaming," the man says.
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"I wouldn't have imagined, somehow, that you dream. Was it a good dream?"
The man considers the perfect blankness of the gray ceiling. Remembered
geometry of facial bone threatens to form there. He closes his eyes. "I was
dreaming of hell," he says.
"How was it?"
"An elevator, descending."
"Christ," says the voice, "this poetry is unlike you." Another silence
follows.
The man sits up. Feels the smooth, dark polished wood, cool through his black
socks. He begins to perform a series of very specific excercises that involve
a minimum of visible movement. There is stiff-ness in his shoulders. At some
distance he hears a car go past, tires on wet pavement.
"I'm not very far from you at the moment," the man says, breaking the silence.
"I'm in San
Francisco."
Now it is the man's turn for silence. He continues his exercises, remembering
the Cuban beach, decades ago, on which he was first
- - - taught this sequence and its variations. His teacher that day the
master of a school of Argentine knife-fighting most authoritatively declared
nonexistent by responsible scholars of the martial arts.
"How long has it been," the voice asks, "since we've spoken, faceto-face?"
"Some years," says the man.
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"I think I need to see you now. Something extraordinary is on the verge of
happening."
"Really," says the man, and no one sees his brief and wolfish smile, "are you
about to become contented?"
A laugh, beamed down from the secret streets of that subminiature cityscape in
geosynchronous orbit. "Not that extraordinary, no. But some very basic state
is on the brink of change, and we are near its locus."
"We? We have no current involvement."
"Physically Geographically. It's happening here."
The man moves into the final sequence of the exercise, remembering flies on
the instructor's face during that initial demonstration.
"Why did you go to the bridge last night?"
"I needed to think," the man says and stands.
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"Nothing drew you there?"
Memory. Loss. Flesh-ghost in Market Street. The smell of cigarettes in her
hair. Her winter lips chill against his, opening into warmth. "Nothing," he
says, hands closing on nothing.
"It's time for us to meet," the voice says.
Hands opening. Releasing nothing.
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- - 32. LOWER COMPANIONS
THE back of the van collected a quarter-inch of water before the rain quit.
"Cardboard," Chevette told Tessa.
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"Cardboard?"
"We'll find some, dry. Boxes. Open 'em out, put down a couple of layers. Be
dry enough."
Tessa clicked her flashlight on and had another look. "We're going to sleep in
that puddle?"
"It's interstitial," Chevette told her.
Tessa turned the light off, swung around. "Look," she said, pointing with the
flashlight, "at least it isn't pissing down now. Let's go back to the
bridge. Find a pub, something to eat, we'll worry about this later." Chevette
said that would be fine, just as long as Tessa didn't bring
God's Little Toy, or in any other way record the rest of the evening, and
Tessa agreed to that.
They left the van parked there, and walked back along the Embarcadero, past
razor wire and barricades that sealed (ineffectually, Chevette knew) the
ruined piers. There were dealers in the shadows there, and before they'd
gotten to the bridge they were offered speed, plug, weed, opium, and dancer.
Chevette explained that these dealers weren't sufficiently competitive to take
and hold positions farther along, nearer the bridge. Those were the coveted
spots, and the dealers along the Embarcadero were either moving toward or away
from that particular arena.
"How do they compete?" Tessa asked. "Do they fight?"
"No," said Chevette, "it's the market, right? The ones with good shit, good
prices, and they turn up, well, the users want to see them. Somebody came with
bad shit, bad prices, the users drive 'em off. But you can see them change,
when you live here; see 'em every day, most of that stuff, if they're using
themselves, it'll take 'em down. Wind up back down here, then you just don't
see
'em."
"They don't sell on the bridge?"
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"Well," Chevette said, "yeah, they do, hut not so much. And when they do,
they're quieter about it. You don't get offered on the bridge, so much, not if
they don't know you."
"So how is it like that?" Tessa asked. "How do people know not to? Where does
the rule come from?"
Chevette thought about it. "It isn't a rule," she said. "It's just you aren't
supposed to do it."
Then she laughed. "I don't know: it's just like that. Like there aren't too
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