Metrophage

TEN

He could not sleep. He spent the night listening to the World Link viewer in his room, restlessly changing the channel every few seconds, program to program (Damned Alpha Rat documentaries, he thought.), language to language, and pacing. The old house creaked, settling deeper into the earth on its century-old foundation. Jonny tried not to think of Sumi and Ice, tried to keep his mind numb. He felt his way into the hall once, found Blue Boy and ran his fingers over the uneven layers of paint. He knew that he was probably on somebody's security camera, but he did not care. Jonny wondered what would happen if he put his fist through the damned painting.

Later, in his room, when the little enameled clock on his desk chimed seven times, they came for him.

They injected him with something and, against his will, he felt himself relaxing. He was pushed through the halls on a padded chair that hovered a few centimeters off the parquet floor on an induction cushion, wondering if it was the same chair they had used to take Sumi away. Conover walked behind him, smelling of clove cigarettes.

"You have good timing, son," said the smuggler lord. "In another week, these techs would be gone. Off to Japan. My own staff is good, but these people are special. And expensive, too. I'm turning a nice profit on this deal. They're Russians, did I tell you? I had them brought in from a sharaska near Leningrad. You wouldn't have believed the state they were in when they got here. Pathetic. The Russians had stuck neural scramblers in all their heads. One hundred meters beyond the prison walls, their brains went into vaporlock. It's not easy, you know, taking a neural scrambler out of a brain, and having anything but Spam left over. The Japs developed the technique. My staff performed the actual surgery. We lost two of the Russians, but the rest came through with flying colors." Jonny was pushed into an elevator. He heard the doors hiss closed, experienced the slight vertigo of descent. Then the doors opened and they pushed him to a room where the smell of antiseptic hit him like a slap in the face. "Doctor Ludovico is the prize, the reason the Japanese financed the operation. The others are his staff. Ludovico is a specialist in xenograftology. He'll be doing your surgery."

The techs elevated the chair a half meter and let down the back, sliding Jonny onto a narrow table in a single, practiced motion.

Someone began covering him with small sheets of sterile cloth, moving up his body to his throat, leaving his head bare. Fingers touched his forehead, pulled the lids back from his empty eye sockets. Jonny gasped.

"Relax," said Conover. "It's Ludovico. He just wants to have a look at what he has to work with. Ludovico," Conover explained, "spoke no English." He smelled of expensive cigars and cheap cologne.

Jonny did not like the man, did not like having a stranger's fingers prying into his head, did not like the idea of a bunch of possibly brain-damaged ex-cons cutting him open, and he was about to say so when a needle hit him in the arm and an anesthetic mask slipped down over his nose.

"I'll be seeing you," said Conover. "And with any luck, you'll be seeing me."

"It hurts," Jonny said. Two days later, his hair was just beginning to come back in. The Russians had removed the staples from his face, sealing the scars with a protein glue. A lightshow played in Jonny's head. No images, just silent fireworks. He had not had any contact with Sumi since the surgery. She was in quarantine, and from the noises Conover was making, Jonny thought she might on life-support. Unconsciously, he found himself relying on the old wisdom to keep going. It was a matter of accepting each moment as a unique entity, allowing observer and the observed to merge and thus keep the panic and horror from overwhelming him. The Buddhists were right in that, at least, Jonny thought. He found that he was able to meditate for short periods of time and that seemed to help.

Now, something was tickling his eyes; ants crawled up his optic nerves, marched through his skull to his brain where they laid tiny eggs that burst into super novas, scattering colors he could not name.

He was downstairs again, in a different room, sitting up this time. Ludovico was there, mumbling to his assistants and operating a Cray mini-computer, trying to calibrate the frequency response of Jonny's new eyes. Exteroceptors, someone had called them. The front of Jonny's head felt huge, bulging with the new hardware. The techs had assured him that the feeling would wear-off in a few days, but Jonny had his doubts. He was convinced that he would look like a bug for the rest of his life.

"It's a bridge he's built," said Conover. "That's the key to this procedure. Ludovico's by-passed your optic nerves completely, and implanted silicon sensors in your sight centers. The chips receive data from a broadcast unit at the back of the exteroceptors. Your retinas are really modified Langenscheidt CCD's. Any pain or unusual light patterns you are experiencing are the effects of the electrical field around the graft stimulating what's left of your optic nerves."

Jonny laughed. "People've been telling me I ought to get a skull-plug for years. Now you've done them all one better. An entire digitized sense."

"I don't know," said Jonny, squirming in the exam chair, trying to find a comfortable spot, "I've always been a little afraid of grafts and implants, you know? Like maybe I'd forget where the machinery ended and I started."

Conover breathed heavily, making a sound that could have been a sigh. "It's all a gamble," he said. "Every moment you're alive. Would you rather be blind?"

"No way," Jonny said. He shook his head. "Some choice."

Ludovico said something and a woman with a heavy Japanese accent, translated. "The doctor is going to bring up the exteroceptors now. He wants you to describe everything you see."

Jonny settled back in the chair, consciously controlling his breathing. Burning violet rimmed his field of vision.

"Keep your eyes open," someone said.

Hot fear. Something was moving up his throat.

Give me anything, he thought. Just a little light. A little light.

Over and over until the words lost all meaning and it became a chant, a mantra Then it flowed into him, obliterating all else, a flood of sensations, solid mass of bent spectrum, vague things moving within.

He turned his head, letting the colors blur across his vision. His vision. He was seeing children's blocks, a rainbow chess board- no-a grid, like fine wire mesh. Each individual segment was throbbing neon. Then shapes. A man was seated before him. His right hand appeared to be burning.

"There's a lot of colors coming through a grid," Jonny said. "Looks like some kind of pixel display. There's someone there. His hand- it's like it's on fire." The woman translated into Russian.

The man-shape typed something into the Cray and the colors dropped suddenly in intensity, replaced with more distinct shapes.

The burning hand was no longer burning, but remained faintly aglow, splashes of pastels shading the fingers and wrist like an old map, different colors indicating geographic regions. The hand belonged to a fat man, Jonny could see, and the burning, he realized, had come from a pencil-sized flashlight the fat man had been shining into his eyes.

The pixels had the effect of distancing Jonny from what he saw.

He felt that he was watching the room from a video monitor, shooting through thousands of individual squares of beveled glass.

Something flared off to his right. Jonny turned and saw Conover. The smuggler lord was lighting a cigarette, the flame on his lighter burning red and ludicrously large.

"These eyes have thermographic grids," said Jonny. "Some kind of computer-enhanced infrared scan."

"A bonus," said Conover, a variegated skull, dead patches of skin registering as holes in his face. "There are some other sub-programs in there, too. You'll find them and learn to control the sensitivity of the pixels."

"I can make out shapes pretty well, right now," Jonny said. "Are the colors going to be like this all the time?"

"No, you're just registering infrared because the lights are out."

"Well fire them up. This heat-vision is weird," Jonny said.

"Is that all right, Doctor?" Conover asked. A woman spoke to Ludovico, whom Jonny recognized as the fat man. The Russian nodded, extra chins spilling over his collar. "Da," he said, and someone turned on the lights. Normal spectrum canceled out the infrared. Jonny looked at the room, the people, the blinking lights on the diagnostic devices. The colors were just a shade or two hotter than normal.

"Fucking beautiful," Jonny said. He was laughing. It was all he could do.

Conover put a hand on his shoulder. "It all right now, isn't it?" he asked.

"It's incredible, man," Jonny said. "When can I go see Easy?"

"Soon. Tonight, maybe, depending on how you feel. Before you go, though, there's something we have to talk about."

"Yeah, I know. You want one of your people to go with me."

"That's right. Ricos. But that's not what I want to talk about."

Conover dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out. There was something wrong with the techs' faces. They were not looking at him like someone they had just cured. More like someone they had just saved from meningitis only to find cancer. Jonny recognized a woman in the corner as Yukiko, a member of Conover's private medical staff. She had been kind to him when he was here before, he remembered, but now she would not look at him.

"What's going on?" asked Jonny.

"You know," Conover said gently, "living out here in the fringes, we sometimes find ourselves forced fall back on raw ingenuity and imagination." He picked a set of forceps off a metal tray table, turning them over in his hands. "We learn to improvise."

"What did you improvise?"

"You have your sight again."

"What's wrong with me?" He scanned the room again. "Have I got the virus? he asked.

"Nothing like that," said Conover. "I just want you to understand the context of your operation."

By then Jonny was up, pushing the Russians out of his way, looking for something. Near the scrub sink, a chrome cabinet on the counter. Leaning on the Formica (white flecked with gold) he pressed his face close to the metal. And cursed, his fist denting the side of the cabinet before he could think. "What have you done to me?" he yelled.

"We gave you back something you had lost."

Jonny looked back at the dented metal, searching for his face, but it was not there. Sockets black and threaded with the purple and red of broken blood vessels. Something alien stared back at him.

Yellow-eyed, with pupils that ran vertically from lid to lid. At certain angles, there were flashes of light, green and metallic. Tapetums, he thought.

"That tiger I blew away," Jonny whispered, feeling the strange machinery in his head. "You gave them to me."

"We had no choice," Conover said.

Jonny turned to him. "Great trade, man. One short hop. Cripple to freak."

"You're no more a freak than I," Conover said. His face tightened, smoke trailing from the scar of his nose. "Do you think I always looked like this? You learn to live with it."

Jonny kept staring. "Look at me. I ought to be in a fucking carnival."

Conover moved up beside him. "You wanted eyes, you have them."

Jonny walked numbly back to the examination chair, fell into the seat, covering his face with his hands. "Oh, man-"

"It was the best we could do," the smuggler lord told him. He smiled. "And you have to admit- in this city, they're really not such a strange sight. In a few weeks, they'll be old friends."

"Oh Christ." Jonny looked at his hands. "Don't get the idea I'm sorry about the operation," he said. The grid was still visible, subtly, clipping the tips of his fingers straight across. He looked at Conover. "I'm glad I can see again, really. It's just kind of a shock."

Conover nodded. "I understand." He looked at his watch.

"Listen, I'm going to have to leave for a business meeting. You should go to your room and try to get some rest. I'll send Ricos by later. You can tell him then if you want to go tonight or wait."

"Right," said Jonny. As Conover started to leave the room, he called out. "Mister Conover-"

The smuggler lord stopped in the door. "Yes?"

Jonny shrugged. "Thanks," he said.

"My pleasure."

"Think you could do me one more favor?"

"What is it?" Conover asked.

"Could you have somebody take the mirrors out of my room?"

Conover smiled. "Done," he said, and left.

Jonny leaned on the counter, letting his nearly bald head fall back against the laminated cupboard doors, and stared at the Russians staring at him. Yukiko brought him tea in a white styrofoam cup. With a little effort, she looked at him and smiled.

"Thank you," he said.

The trip back to his room was a nightmare. He kept his head down, but the peculiar layout of the house forced him to look up frequently and his reflection seemed to always be there, waiting for him in the glazing on a Ming vase, in the glass front of an antique china cabinet, the polished chrome of a seismic meter.

Golden-eyed monster.

He had refused the induction chair; a couple of the Russian techs followed him from the clinic, keeping a respectful distance.

When he got to his room, he closed the door in their faces.

Inside, he remained by the door and looked the room over, checking for any reflective surfaces. When he found none, he went straight to the bed and lay down.

The transparent lameness of Conover's story had been so obvious to Jonny that he knew it had to be deliberate. That meant that giving him the freakish eyes was, to one degree or other, a calculated move. The smuggler lord had obviously planned to show his displeasure with Jonny in some way, and Jonny's blindness presented him with a convenient method. The eyes were a punishment and a warning. Punishment for stealing the car and running away, and a warning that he had better not do it again. Like a Yakuza ritual, Jonny thought. Make a mistake, lose a finger joint.

Look for the guys with no fingers, they're the real fuck ups.

What does that make me? he wondered.

It surprised him, but he felt no real anger toward Conover for what he had done. He could have done a lot worse, Jonny knew. And the smuggler lord had been right all along. The moment Jonny had left the hill, he had set himself on a course that led right back into Zamora's hands. Living with funny eyes, he thought, would be a hell of a lot easier than living with whatever the Colonel had planned for him.

"Hey, maricon."

Jonny sat upright in bed. He had no memory of falling asleep and feeling himself shaken awake, the loss of control it implied, frightened him. Jonny looked at Ricos and saw that he was not the only one who was startled.

"Joder, man," Ricos whispered. He was wearing a red motorcycle jacket and stripped leather pants. "What you let them do that to you for?" Ricos was staring at Jonny as he might have stared at an open sore or a road kill, not trying to hide his disgust. For that, Jonny was grateful.

"I didn't have a lot of choice," said Jonny, swinging his legs off the bed and getting up.

"Carajo. I kill anyone do that to me."

"Your boss included?"

"Anyone."

Jonny smiled at the man. "You're really full of shit. You know that?" He went to the dresser, found a pair of black slacks his size and started to put them on. "We're going to need ID," he said. "Something corporate. Multinational."

"No problem," said Ricos.

On the top of the dresser somebody had left a dozen pairs of sunglasses, laid out neatly in horizontal three rows. Their sleek designs, so out of place against the pale wood of the French antiques, reminded Jonny of one of the Croakers' strange sculptures. Without thinking, he picked up the mirrored aviators and put them in the breast pocket of the gray tweed jacket he had taken from the closet.

"All right," Jonny said. "We'll pick up the ID, get you some better clothes and be on our way."

"What's wrong wi' my clothes?" asked Ricos, offended.

"Nothing man, if we were going to Carnaby's Pit." He headed out the door, Ricos a few steps behind him.

"So where you takin' me, maricon?"

Jonny spun and jammed a finger into the man's stomach. "Little Tokyo," he said. "Where they shoot people like you and me on sight."

The car was an old alcohol-powered Brazilian coupe, modeled on a turn-of-the-century Mercedes design. Ricos drove; he wore a powder blue Italian suit and tugged constantly at the collar of his pearl-gray shirt. Jonny and he were carrying the ID chips of dead men.

They abandoned the car near Union Station, an art deco hulk, sprouting cracked brick and I-beams like exposed ribs. A ruin of stripped cranes and power generators surrounded it, heaps of ferro-ceramic track turning black under the moon, under the Alpha Rats' gaze, waiting for the bullet train that never arrived.

A maintenance shaft beneath the battered transformers of an out-of-commission Pacific Gas and Electric sub-station ended in a short crawl-space that gave out at the false bottom in a section of vent, part of the massive air re-circulation system that served the Little Tokyo arcology. Jonny removed the loose bottom panel from the vent and he and Ricos crawled inside, careful not to get their new clothes dirty. The dimensions of the vent were such that they were able to duck-walk their way to an access hatch, a hundred meters or so upwind from where they entered. It was like strolling into a tornado the whole way.

Manipulating the lock from the inside, Jonny opened the hatch and they jumped down to the floor of the re-circulation plant. The place was fully automated, Jonny remembered, the human crew making no more than a cursory round of the place once or twice a night. Jonny could hear Ricos behind him, breathing above the din of the air-circulators. The man was tense and jittery, starting at every grunt and hiss of the equipment. Jonny led him into a corridor that rose in a slow spiral toward the surface. Cinder block walls painted the teal and orange of the Hundred Dynasty Corporation bulged with rot.

They found the ladder Jonny was looking for behind a wall of fifty-five gallon drums stacked on modular racks, pushed away a grating at the top and emerged behind a French discotheque, La Poupee.

In the pastel half-light that bled over the rooftops, the skeletal superstructures supporting neon graphics and holo-projectors, Jonny took a last quick look at the dead man's ID. Jonny was Christian van Noorden, a Dutch-born systems analyst for Pemex-U.S.; Ricos had a chip identifying him as Eduardo Florentino, a security coordinator for Krupp Bio-Elektronisches. Jonny slipped on his mirrored aviators and headed for the boulevard, Ricos on his heels, and merged unnoticed into the crowd of strolling tourists, the cream of the multinationals' crop.

Walking just ahead of Jonny and Ricos was a group of young Swedish aerospace techs. They were fair and slender, strikingly attractive, each with the same narrow jaw and delicate, long-fingered hands. Jonny wondered if they might be clones. They were all shirtless and the hard muscles of their torsos were exposed, flexing as they moved, beneath transparent polycarbonate bodysheaths.

Their muscles had been dyeddifferent colors to accentuate the movement of various groups. They were like living anatomy charts.

Across the street, high in the air, appeared the parting lips of a hologram vagina, a pink, idealized orchid, a toothless mouth that seemed to engulf the image, becoming a roller coaster flesh-tunnel, the glistening walls blurring by.

At the corner, Jonny had to stop. He pretended to watch the animated menu display outside a Burmese restaurant. The menu explained the meals in different languages depending on where you stood, but Jonny hardly noticed it. His hands were shaking.

It was an impossible psychic leap. He was a kid again, seeing Little Tokyo for the first time, nailed in his tracks by the light, the air, the impossible wealth and beauty of the place, the blatant and cherished waste of energy. Little Tokyo was a transcultural phenomenon, its name having long since been rendered meaningless, indicating a city geosector and giving hints to the place's history, but little else. It was Japanese and European chic filtered through American sleaze, through generations of exported television, video and Link images, visions of Hollywood and Las Vegas, the cheap gangster dreams of the Good Life, haven and playground for the privileged employees of the multinationals. Little Tokyo was loud and it cost the corporations dearly, but they loved it and, in the end, came to need it. What had once been their plaything, now defined them.

There were clubs offering all varieties of sexual encounters, death-fetish clubs, where controlled doses of euphoria-inducing poisons had replaced drugs as the high of choice (It was in one of these clubs when he was seventeen that Jonny had first tried Mad Love. Right now, he thought, he would kill for a hit.). There were the computer-simulation clubs, offering those with skull-plugs close encounters with violence, madness and death. A block ahead was the Onnogata where members of various cartels gambled time in the re-generation tanks for data on next year's computers, synth-fuels and pharmaceuticals.

Other clubs offered similar opportunities, and anyone could play. Hit a losing streak, and you could leave parts of your body scattered all over the boulevard. Organ removal and installation were all part of the standard hotel services. Those who lost badly enough were put on life-support systems, sometimes gambling even those away before the company jet could arrive to take them home. No one had died in Little Tokyo for over a century. Not permanently.

Ricos was staring at Jonny. "You want to eat now?" he asked.

Jonny looked at the man, then back at the menu which was describing a chicken and rice dish in over-eager French. "No," he said, "just thinking."

He took off across the clean broad street, walking, wanting to get the feel of the place before he got down to business. He had not been Little Tokyo in years. Warm breezes carried the faint smell of orange blossoms, a wholly contrived sensation. Jonny had seen drums full of the scent back in the re-circulation plant.

"Conover had been right about the eyes," Jonny noticed. Half-consciously, he had begun to manipulate them, changing their focus at first by mistake, then by repeating the mistake until he could control it. He turned to Ricos, who seemed unaffected by the place, colors slurring slightly off-register in his peripheral vision. "You see it?" asked Jonny.

"Que es, maricon?"

"No one's sick here. No one's old," he said. They were walking by a man-made lake. One and two-person robot hover-vehicles were cutting up the glassy surface of the water, shuttling between the shore and a five-story pagoda on a small island near the lake's center, wings of jewel-like foam spreading from beneath the little disc-shaped crafts, setting off the tailored evening gowns and tuxes of the riders. "Not a leper, not a liver spot, not a paper cut in sight."

"Si," Ricos replied, nodding toward a young couple displaying their customized genitalia to some friends. Chrome winked from between their thighs. "Estos carajoes, they come in kits. Comprende? Cut 'em, they don' bleed."

The entrance to the Japanese club was flanked by two man-sized temple dogs carved from some dark supple wood. Ricos walked past the place, but Jonny stopped, drawn by something, perhaps the odd angle at which one dog's head had been craved, realizing at the moment he stopped that the dogs were not statues but were, in fact, alive. The dogs, pure-bred Tosas, sat on their haunches, watching the crowd with the impassiveness of sunning lizards, the pink of a tongue appearing now and then to lick massive jaws, their necks and backs bulging with muscle, the end-product of controlled breeding and genetic manipulation. As Jonny looked at the animals, a frozen image of the bodysheathed Swedes imposed itself on his vision, the street by La Poupee clear in the background. Then it was gone. Jonny blinked, tensing the muscles around his eyes. The image of the Swedes flashed back. He held it this time, made it move slowly, forward and backward. It made perfect sense that the eyes would have a recording chip, he thought. Couple of days ago, they were part of a security system. Download pictures of intruders for the law. He blinked off the image and said, "In here," to Ricos.

The uniformed Japanese doorman bowed and held the door for them as they went in, touching a hand to his right temple as Jonny and Ricos walked past. Scanning for weapons, Jonny knew. He cursed silently, wondering if they had been made already.

Inside the club, it was very dark, the architecture traditional: tatami mats, low tables glowing with buttery yellow light of painted lanterns, white-faced geishas serving pots of hot sake to the mostly male, mostly Japanese and American middle-management crowd.

There was a lot of noise coming from a room beyond the bar. Jonny slipped his hand to the small of his back as if to hitch up his pants, and touched the grip of a small SIG Sauer handgun. The body of the weapon was of a liquid crystal polymer, impossible, he had been told, to pick up on metal detectors. The shells were a Gobernacion standard issue, commonly known as Rock Shot. Each bullet had a synthetic quartz tip. When it struck an object and compressed, the minute charge from the quartz was conducted through a medium of liquid polypyrrole where it ignited suspended particles of C-4 plastique. Ricos was carrying a similar weapon in his jacket.

Jonny ordered sake and motioned for the geisha to bring it to them in the next room. She bowed. He smiled uncomfortably at her, unsure if he was supposed to bow back or not. He bowed, and the geisha giggled at his gaijin stiffness. "Keep your eyes open for Easy Money," he told Ricos.

They split up in the next room, climbing opposite sides of a flat-topped pyramid constructed of multiple tiers of polished mahogany beams. The smell of sweat and blood was heavy in the smoky booze-air, but Jonny was still shocked by what he saw when he reached the top tier, pushed his way to the front and peered down into the wooden pen.

The winning dog was just receiving its award (outline of a golden lotus on a small banner of purple satin) from a pale doughy-faced man in shirt sleeves. One of the dog's front paws was twisted and badly mangled. Jonny watched the losing dog's body being dragged out of the enclosure, its humiliated owner and assistant careful not to get blood on their white shirts.

A moment later, the whole thing was starting again. The doughy-faced man made an announcement in rapid-fire Japanese and blessed each corner of the arena with salt. Then two more dogs, enormous Tosas again, bigger than the previous pair, easily a hundred and fifty kilos each, were lead in from opposite sides of the pen at the end of heavy carbide steel chains. The money chips were out; Jonny caught the flash of silicon embossed with gold phoenixes as the crowd surrounded the house bookmakers, touching their chips to the little multiplexer he carried, hoping to get their bets in before the dogs were released and the odds started dropping. Jonny looked around for an exit and found one, down by the far end of the enclosure. He was just starting for it when he heard the dogs hit, the dull thud of meat on meat, low-throated animal grunts, primal death-talk. He looked around for Ricos, nodded when he saw the man on the other side of the pen, eyes wide, watching the animals tear each other apart. Jonny smiled. Ditching Ricos had been easier than he had ever expected.

Heading down the tiers toward the exit, Jonny heard one of the dogs yelp frantically, the sound of it painful through the club's P.A. system. Jonny was almost to the floor when he turned and darted back into the crowd. Sometime during the few seconds it had taken him to find Ricos and walk down the steps, a Meat Boy had stationed himself at the exit. Jonny shouldered his way through the screaming mob, moving back the way he had come, eyes on the gambler's faces, trying to keep the dog fight out of his sight. Animal screams and human cheers. He spotted another Meat Boy by the entrance to the bar. The giant was talking to someone. The doorman. Jonny looked around, hoping that maybe there was an exit he had missed. But he found none, and when he turned back the way he had come in, he saw the doormanpointing right at him. Jonny ducked back into the crowd, scrambling along the top tier, the Meat Boy moving through the crowd like a pock-marked ice breaker.

Up, one leg over the rim of the dog pit. For an instant, the crowd fell silent. Then he had the gun out and the noise came back, shrill and frantic this time. He fired twice, but the stampede was already underway, and when the shells hit, blasting away one end of the dog pen, the frightened Tosas took off, all teeth and claws, headed for only way out. The Meat Boy chasing him, big as he was, was helpless, dragged back by the press of bodies. The last Jonny saw of Ricos, he, too, was being swept along by the human tide. His gun was out, his eyes wide and furious. Jonny did not stick around to see what happened.

He headed for the rear of the club, which was nearly deserted, and made it out the rear exit. Down the alley for the rest of the block.

When he came out onto the street again, he fell in with a crowd that was staring back at the club. Dark-suited men were still pouring out the front. The Tosas were headed down the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians and snarling the evening traffic.

Jonny took the long way around the block, just make sure he did not run into anybody from the dog club. Eventually, he ended up back at the man-made lake. Small hovercrafts churned-up the water.

The pagoda glittered on its small island, its finial a solid chunk of carved rose quartz, twenty meters high. Around the pagoda's base was a grove of crystal trees, a tangled thicket of prisms. The Forest of Incandescent Bliss.

No more screwing around. It was time to find Easy Money.