Metrophage

THIRTEEN

"Yes, the end of the world, son, can't you smell it?" asked Conover. "No finer time to be alive." He chuckled reflectively, moving Jonny along a dark and narrow service staircase, idly jabbing him in the back with the barrel of the Futukoro.

"It's the war, isn't it?" asked Jonny. "The Tokyo Alliance and New Palestine. They're finally going to do it."

Conover nodded sleepily. "What else?" he asked, shivered. He mumbled: "Need a shot," then louder: "Yes, the war. Don't look so surprised, son. Historically speaking, it's long overdue."

Jonny shook his head. "Christ, then that Arab was telling the truth."

"Arab?"

"There was this Arab at the Forest of Incandescent Bliss. Said that Tokyo and Washington were getting ready to launch a sneak attack on New Palestine," said Jonny. "When he said the Alpha Rats were involved, I thought he was just spaceman-happy, like Zamora."

Conover laughed heartily at that. "Oh, that's delightful; they must have partially decoded one of the transmissions. The poor bastards don't have a clue."

"To what?" asked Jonny.

"That we are the Alpha Rats." said the smuggler lord.

Jonny turned on Conover who casually flicked his gun up at Jonny's face. Jonny just ignored it. "I knew it," he told the lord. "It's all a ruse, isn't it? There are no Alpha Rats; there never were any extraterrestrials. It's been the government all along using the Alpha Rats as an excuse for the rationing programs and the damned war preparations."

"Bravo!" yelled Conover, clapping his left hand against the one holding the Futukoro. "Well done Jonny. What remarkable deductive powers." He smiled apologetically. "Of course, you're wrong on most of it. But it was a good try. Keep moving and I'll straighten you out."

Before they continued up, Conover lit another Sherman, the flame on his lighter briefly illuminating the wreckage of his face. He had developed a slight tic in the cracked skin under one eye. His lips were moist and slack. "Getting thin," thought Jonny as the smuggler lord nudged him up the stairs.

"Of course there are Alpha Rats," Conover told him. "Do you really think the Tokyo Alliance would put itself in such a dangerous economic position intentionally? The extraterrestrial's ship crashed on the moon fifteen years ago. Yes, crashed. They're dead, you see.

All the Alpha Rats on board. It was a plague ship, son, on auto-pilot, packed full of dead Alpha Rats.

Think about it, Jonny. The odds are staggering. The Alpha Rats drifting through empty space for god knows how long, getting caught in the moon's gravity and crashing there. I don't think that it would be far-fetched to think that in some way they were sent there for us to find. We're just lucky a Canadian team got to the site first. If the Arabs had made it, they would have discovered what we did; eventually, they would have analyzed it and figured out how it worked."

"The layered virus," Jonny said. He stumbled on loose carpet, felt Conover's gun in his back before he found his footing.

"See? Your history's not so bad," said Conover. "Of course, what killed the Alpha Rats had very little resemblance to NATO's layered virus, but it was during the early research we did on the bodies of the Alpha Rats, breaking down the genetic structure of the plague that killed them, that we finally found the key on how to make the damned virus work."

"Funny," said Jonny. "I thought for awhile that maybe you'd gotten some surplus virus juice from somebody and decided to let it loose in L.A. so you could peddle the cure through us dealers."

"You think too small, Jonny. I keep telling you: You're in business, but you're not a business man. This is government work, boy. Multinational dollars."

"But all the rationing for all these years, that was a put-on wasn't it? Keep the Pentagon fat and happy."

"Yes and no. After the Alpha ship was located, we couldn't very well have people trampling all over the moon, could we? The local military authorities took the opportunity to burn the Arab bases and mining operations. Naturally, we had to take out a few of our own to make it look good, but the circumlunar labs are still operating. You didn't know that, did you? Yes, that's where the Alpha Virus was synthesized. All we did was blow-up a few non-essential orbiters and dress the ones we needed with debris from the surface."

"So the government's got their virus and their war. What do you get out of this?"

"Freedom. From this," said Conover, touching his chest. "They're going to give me a new body, Jonny. With the government's bankroll I can leave this place and not have to worry about territory disputes or watered down drugs or the rabid dogs that run this city breathing down my neck."

"They must have given you a bundle for releasing that virus," said Jonny.

"Not at all. Raquin, as the Colonel no doubt told you, was working for the Committee. He stole the virus from me to turn over to the Colonel, but before he had the chance, Easy stole it from Raquin. No son, I'm afraid what Washington is paying me for has nothing to do with releasing the Alpha Virus. I'm being paid to deliver you." Conover sighed. "I was hoping you might figure this part out on your own. That's why I set up that little game with 'Blue Boy' and the cases of Mad Love. I thought maybe if you knew who I was, you'd see some of this coming. Maybe I'm getting eccentric in my oldage. Playing too many games. After a century or so it's easy to forget how ordinary people think. And it was probably too much to expect of you with all you've had on your mind lately." They came around a sharp turn and started up another flight of stairs. Along one wall was a stained glass fresco depicting men in armor carrying Christian banners into battle. "Why would you put that in a stairway with no lights?" Jonny wondered. "You going to tell me why the Federales want me, or should I just assume it's my magnetic personality?" he asked the smuggler lord.

"Actually, they'd prefer your grandmother, but she disappeared years ago. Then when your mother OD'd in Mexico City, it left you as heir-apparent to the throne," explained Conover. "See, your grandmother was a child of the streets, much like you and your friends. She sold blood, breathed polluted air for pay in university experiments, you know the routine. Then in nineteen ninety-five she volunteered for a series of injections at UCLA. Of course, she didn't know it was one of the Defense Department's genetic warfare projects. The school told her they were testing a new hepatitis vaccine.

Tokyo and Washington were still thinking of war strictly in terms of atomic weapons back then. Some Pentagon bright-boy had the idea that through genetic engineering he could increase the general population's tolerance to certain wavelengths of radiation.

Like the rest of the research programs, it eventually ran out of money, but not before your grandmother and a few dozen others were doped with an experimental retro-virus. The doctors had removed key sections of the virus's genetic code, so it could not hurt her, but the retro-virus was very efficient in entering her bone marrow. There, it bonded successfully with her red blood cells, producing a sort-of anti-radiation antibody.

As I said, the project ran out of money, and the subjects were dismissed, but not before they were re-examined. The little viruses really took to a few of them; your grandmother was one. But the project leaders had no hold over her or the others, no money to keep them around. Like most of the research subjects, she simply drifted away."

"So now the Federales think because my abuela had lead in her veins that something in my blood is the cure for the layered virus?"

"Apparently so."

"Then if there is no cure, why the hell did you let me go to Little Tokyo after Easy Money?" Jonny shouted. "What were you setting me up for?"

"Oh yes, Easy," said Conover. He looked tired; the junk flesh around his eyes was drawn and brittle. "Well, I couldn't take a chance on Nimble Virtue finding out what she had. It was a second batch of the virus, of course. Ricos had orders to kill her and Easy when she turned it over."

"Beautiful. Fucking beautiful, " Jonny mumbled. "Then I'm it as far as this cure goes? I mean, with all of the government's resources, they couldn't come up with one other person connected with those tests?"

"It's been a long time, Jonny. Records get lost; discs get erased. When you ran away from the state school as a boy, they we sure they'd lost contact with the program for good. Then you turned up on the Committee. You couldn't hide that blood from them for long."

Jonny laughed mirthlessly. "Serves me right."

At the top of the stairs, they came out into an immense geodesic solarium. Through the bullet-proof glass, Jonny could make-out the tattered edge of the HOLLYWOOD sign, crawling neon of the movie district below. Overhead, the moon was obscured by billowing waves of sand, like hordes of locusts moving across the sky.

"You know, Mister Conover, you really piss me off," Jonny said. "I mean, I expect this kind of chickenshit behavior from Nimble Virtue, but I thought you were my friend."

"I am your friend, Jonny. Understand, there's nothing personal in any of this."

"Right, I know. Don't tell me. It's business. Economics, it always is."

"You're looking for someone to blame again," Conover said. "I told you once: life's more complicated than cowboy and Indian movies. You think the Arabs wouldn't use the virus if they had the opportunity? Or your friends the Croakers? What if Groucho had a weapon like this?"

"You know what's funny?" Jonny asked. "What's really funny is even though you're telling me all this now, I keep thinking that maybe I'm hearing it wrong. I keep thinking, 'Maybe Mister Conover got sucked into this deal by mistake, just like everybody else.' But that's not how it is, is it?" Outside the solarium was a sculpture garden. Jonny could make out smooth Greek marbles and Indian bronzes laid out along the severe geometry of Victorian flower beds.

"When we were driving out to Santa Monica to pick up your dope from those Gobernacion boys, I asked you about the new leprosy. You just laughed and told me you hadn't had a cold in forty years. But it wasn't until a few days ago that the Croakers found out that the layered virus was attached to a cold bug. That means you knew all along exactly what this virus was, which means you've been lying to me ever since this mess got started. Or was it just another clue in your game? Am I supposed to be flattered that you decided to fuck with my head all this time?" His voice was growing shrill; he took a step toward the lord.

Conover nodded toward the statues. "Come outside. I want you to see the garden before we leave."

"Fuck you, old man."

Conover casually raised the Futukoro a few centimeters. "Jonny, consider that from my point of view, the simplest thing for me would be to shoot you and put your body on ice until my ride arrives. But I'm giving you a chance to stay alive. These people don't want to hurt you, they just need your blood."

"How are you going to get us to the desert, man? The roads between here and New Hope are gonna be full of Committee boys and gangs. You can't fly over it; a hovercar can't make it that far."

"There's no reason to go to the desert," said Conover tiredly.

"There's nothing out there. New Hope is on the moon, safe and out of harm's way. That structure in the desert is little more than a grandiose movie set. This is Hollywood, boy. A crew from CineMex put it together for us. It might have blown the Alpha Rats' image if the general public knew about all that old money sitting right next door."

Jonny took a deep breath. Between the tequila and the bombs Conover kept dropping on him, he could hardly see straight. "Ever since Zamora asked me to turn you, I've been trying to figure out who was lying to me and who was telling the truth. Now I find out that you're the only one that was lying. Everybody else, including Nimble Virtue and that sheik, was telling me whatever part of the truth they knew. That situation never even crossed my mind."

"Don't be such a pussy, Gordon," said a gravelly voice from the garden. "Come outside and have a drink."

Jonny looked at Conover "That makes the evening perfect," he said. The smuggler lord shrugged.

"I couldn't realistically keep the Colonel out of it forever," said Conover apologetically.

"Of course he couldn't," said Colonel Zamora from the doorway to the sculpture garden. "I've got contacts in government circles, too, you know. I put enough of it together to see what Conover was up to."

Jonny followed Zamora out to the garden. Conover followed. A light scrim supported by a network of poles sheathed in some light-absorbing material kept out most of the blowing sand; the scrim fluttered in the storm, beating like the wings of grounded birds.

"You're an asshole, Colonel," Jonny said.

"And you got funny eyes, kid." Zamora set down his drink.

Jonny tensed, ready to intercept the blow he knew would come- but the Colonel just smiled at him. "You should be nice to me, Gordon. We're partners now."

"Did you have your brains surgically removed or something?" Jonny asked. "Don't you know this guy's talking about war?"

"You think I don't know about war, Gordon?" The Colonel went to a portable teak bar, poured amber liquid into a glass and brought it back to Jonny (quietly laughing his breathy laugh). "After tonight, with Conover gone and the gangs squashed, I'll own this city. Take a look down there," the Colonel said, steering Jonny to the edge of the roof.

The Hollywood Hills fell sharply away from Conover's mansion, forming a featureless black lake whose shore was a million burning lights. Straight ahead was Hollywood and the translucent tent where Jonny had once lived. Off to the right was the business district, Lockheed's glowing torus and the all but invisible silicon sphere of Sony International. Jonny glanced back at Conover and caught him tying off with a length of green surgical tubing, a loaded syringe in his other shaky hand.

"Listen," said Colonel Zamora.

Jonny turned back to the lights. He could not hear it at first above the hissing of the falling sand, and when he did hear it, it was as an echo. Faint backslap of an explosion from below. His ears, having found the sound, could identify other explosions, the garbled reverberations of amplified voices barking stern warnings in several languages.

Zamora was resting his elbows on the top of the low garden wall. "You think I don't know about war?" he asked. "I've lived in this city all my life. I eat, drink, sleep, and shit war." Jonny looked at the man and would have laughed, had he not been so sure the Colonel was absolutely serious.

Jonny walked to the bar and set down his drink, untouched.

Conover was resting against the base of a bronze of Shiva (face lost in the Destroyer's shadow), green surgical tubing dangling from one hand, the Futukoro from the other, breathing deeply as the Greenies came on. Something moved by a ripped section of scrim at the far end of the roof. Jonny moved back to the garden wall, not wanting to be in the open if it was one of Conover's sentry robots.

"It's the end of your world down there, Gordon."

"That's what Conover keeps telling me," Jonny said.

"Don't get me wrong, the gangs were ballsy bastards, especially the Croakers," Zamora said. "But they're a bunch of romantic idiots. Junkies with zip guns and rocks cannot stand up to a well-organized fighting unit like the Committee."

"Really Pere Ubu, if you keep talking like that I'm going to think you're an idiot, and what fun is it beating an idiot?" There was a crackle of Futukoro fire from down below as from the top of the scrim, a crystal gecko fell and burst into a fountain of flame, spewing a stream of fish, flowers, birds and all five of the Platonic solids straight up into the air. Sections of the netting burst into guttering flame where the fountain touched it, the wind and sand blowing down on the garden through widening holes.

"What would you say if I told you your boys were going to lose tonight?" The voice came from right behind them, low on the garden wall. Crouching there all in black, Futukoro in hand, Groucho flashed Jonny a quick smile. "Told you I'd come if I could. Besides, I thought you might have run off again. Glad to see you didn't."

"Me too," said Jonny.

Zamora half-turned in Groucho's grip, gazing up at the anarchist good-humoredly. "Nice stunt kid, but you aren't going to win this thing with card tricks."

"I'm not worried about the Committee right now, Ubu," said Groucho, hopping lightly off the wall. "I'm here for you."

"I see. And this is the part where I fall apart and see the error of my evil wasted life?" Zamora laughed. "Come on kid, wise up. In the morning I'm going to be running this town. You want to make a deal?"

"You guys are just full of deals, aren't you?" Groucho said.

"Come on, Groucho, Figure it out. Everybody does exactly what they have to get the job done. Now what do you want? A piece of the city for the Croakers? A cut of the drug action? You can have it."

"It's not enough," said the anarchist. "We are the revolt of the spirit humiliated by your works. We live on our dreams. We can't settle for anything less than everything."

Zamora shrugged and leaned against the garden wall. "Then you're dead, asshole."

"Admit it, Colonel: It's over," said Groucho.

"Boy, it's never over."

Zamora's old lizard flesh was fast. He moved to the right, feinting a back knuckle to the head, and drove a knee up at the anarchist's mid-section. Groucho, however, was faster. He slipped the Colonel's kick and swept his foot, knocking Zamora onto his back.

Jonny saw Conover then, emerging from Shiva's gloom. "Down!" he yelled, but the anarchist was already falling, Conover's Futukoro still smoking as he emerged into the light.

By the time Jonny got there, Zamora was on his feet, rubbing at one uniformed shoulder. Groucho's eyes were wide, bubbles fringing an exit wound in his chest, matching his breathing. Groucho gripped Zamora's trouser leg, not recognizing the man. "I am here by the will of the people, he said, "and I will not leave until I get my raincoat back." The bubbles on his chest were smaller and fewer each time they appeared. Gradually, they disappeared altogether.

He stopped moving. Zamora bent and pried the anarchist's hand from his trouser leg. "Nickel and dime asshole," the Colonel mumbled. "Didn't have a clue."

Zamora started back to the bar. Jonny calmly took Nimble Virtue's Derringer from his pocket and blew the back of the Colonel's head off. Zamora stiffened as the hollow point hit. Then he collapsed, a solid reptilian waterfall of flesh, joints loosening from the ankles up.

Conover was on Jonny before he had a chance to move. "That's all, son. It's over," the smuggler lord said, and touched his gun to the base of Jonny's spine. "It's time to go." Conover pulled him way from the bodies, directing him to the far edge of the garden where a set of wrought-iron stairs wound down to the bare hillside. At the top of the stairs, Jonny looked back. The scrim was no longer burning, but large black-rimmed holes allowed the sand through. It was squalling in great gusts all over the garden, already beginning to cover the bodies of the dead anarchist and Colonel Zamora. Jonny walked down the metal stairs and started off across the pale scrub grass, Conover right behind him.

They walked with the storm to their backs. To their left, part of the city was on fire.

Jonny's ears became quickly accustomed to the steady rattle of far-off gunfire. The explosions seemed to take on a strange rhythm of their own, playing counter-point to his footsteps. Black smoke from the burning buildings was whipped up by the Santa Ana winds; mixing with the blowing sand, the smoke closed over the city, taking on the appearance of a solid structure, as if Jonny were seeing the lights through the walls of a dirty terrarium. Hovercars cut back and forth through the mist like glowing wasps.

They walked for some time without speaking. Then Conover said: "Down the hill here." Scrambling through the nettles and fallen branches, they eventually hit a rise and Jonny saw the rusted skeleton of the dome, the grimy white walls. He knew then that they were headed for Griffith Observatory. Years before, after a seven-point quake that dropped most of Malibu below sea level, the observatory's corroded dome had fallen in on itself like the shell of a rotten egg. Since then, various religious groups had claimed the place, performing secret rites in the husk of the old building under the full moon.

Scattered through the courtyard of the old observatory in rough concentric circles were shrines to dead technology, useless mementos of the collective unconscious of the city. The gear box from a gasoline powered vehicle; a German food processor; a Nautilus exercise machine; pelvic x-rays of forgotten movie stars; piles of pornographic video cassettes, dressing dummies and primitive Sony tube televisions.

Jonny left Conover's side and touched the yellowed keys of an ancient upright piano. It had been outside for so long that the lacquer was coming off it in great chocolate ribbons, revealing the weathered grain of some badly warped wood beneath. Jonny hit a chord and to his surprise, the thing still worked. He picked out a one-fingered melody, his off-key singing masked by the sour notes of the out-of-tune piano.

As I passed Saint James Infirmary

I saw my sweetheart there

All stretched out on a table, so pale, so cold, so fair

As I passed Saint James Infirmary "Come on," called Conover, "let's get out of this storm." He gestured at the open doors of the observatory with the Futukoro.

A few steps inside the high-vaulted chamber, Jonny was swallowed up by absolute darkness. It was like walking down the gullet of some enormous animal, he thought. He breathed the hot air (sour with the reek of oxidizing metal) deeply, relaxing in his sudden blindness. Since leaving Sumi, Jonny had refused to let his exteroceptors see for him in any but the most ordinary way. He felt comfortable in the darkness of the observatory because he had been waiting for it; it or something just like it. He had not felt the same since the gun had failed to kill him in the clinic. He understood then that he was still waiting for the bullet he had been denied. Each time he turned around, Jonny expected to see Conover raising the Futukoro to firing position. But it did not happen.

There were things hanging from the ceiling of the observatory.

They rang softly, like the tinkling of small bells or wind chimes.

Occasionally, a tiny flash would catch his eye. Something cool touched Jonny's face. He batted it with the back of his hand, and it swung away into the darkness. A few steps further, he bumped into a narrow railing that circled a sunken section of the floor, and waited there for Conover.

The smuggler lord came into the observatory, his head cocked to one side, as if listening for something. It occurred to Jonny for the first time that Conover might be insane. What proof had the lord offered him of rich people slumming on the moon or dead extraterrestrials? Just some fairy tale about his grandmother renting out her blood. Not having contracted the layered virus meant nothing. Luck or natural resistance could account for that, Jonny told himself. There were a lot of people left in the city who were not infected.

However, if Conover were insane, he might insist that they wait in the observatory for his spaceship all night. It seemed pretty likely to Jonny that a structure this size would eventually attract fire from below.

And if Conover is insane, he thought, what will he do when his spaceship does not arrive?

Outside, the sand storm was slacking off. Through gaps in the twisted metal of the dome, Jonny could see the pale curve of the moon. He thought of the celebration in the city, disrupted now by gunfire. The Day of the Dead. Illuminated in the weak moonlight, Jonny finally saw the room in which he was standing, and decided that if Conover was not crazy, whoever had re-built the observatory was.

A bank of ultra-sensitive photo-cells ringed the ceiling above a parabolic mirror cradled in a steel lattice nest; the structure supporting the mirror had been bolted beneath a section of dome open to the sky. When the pale lunar light came down through the fallen girders, the walls began to flicker; gears shifted ponderously underground and a dozen blurry moons suddenly circumscribed the room. Video images, three meters tall; old NASA footage Jonny remembered from his childhood. Car mirrors suspended from the ceiling on nylon lines picked up the pale images, flashing them back and forth like cratered stars. Narrow rows of low-voltage track lights shone through prisms and beam-splitters, bathing the highest parts of the room in tentative rainbows.

"It's wonderful, isn't it? Absolute madness," Conover said. A brightly painted Virgin Mary, part plaster of Paris and part jet engine components, revolved on a creaking turntable- a technocratic moon goddess.

"You've been here before?" asked Jonny.

"Many times. I come here to think." In the wasted gray video light, Jonny thought Conover looked like one of the masked dancers from the procession below. The smuggler lord pointed to a spot in the southern hemisphere ofone of the video moons. In case you're interested, this is where we're headed. A Japanese station a few clicks to the west of Tycho.

Jonny slumped back against the rail. "Mister Conover, there's no spaceship coming here tonight."

"Of course there is. We're going to Seven Rose Base." Bullshit.

"All that's going to happen is we're going to hang around here till somebody decides to put a mortar shell through the wall."

Conover shook his head, smiled indulgently at Jonny. "Don't go thinking I've lost my mind, dear boy," he said. "The fact is, I haven't let you in on all my reasons for wanting to get to the moon."

Jonny opened his eyes in mock surprise. "Oh gosh, then you haven't been absolutely straight with me? I'm really hurt, Mister Conover."

"What would you say if I told that you we have had contact with the Alpha Rats directly?"

"I thought you said they were dead."

"The one's on the ship were, yes. But I mean others."

"Other Alpha Rats? Where?"

"Ah, so now you're interested." The smuggler lord walked along the curving edge of the chamber, passing before each of the twelve grainy moonscapes. Earth's shadow followed him, leaving each video panel dark as he moved beyond it. "They've spoken to us, Jonny."

"From a ship, maybe an orbital broadcasting station. Three words, clear as day. Three words repeated three times. Once in English; Once in Japanese and once in Arabic."

"Wait, I think I know this joke. They said 'Send more Chuck Berry,' right?"

Conover waited before one of the screens, time-lapse dawn bursting over his shoulder. "They said: 'We are coming.' "

Jonny looked down at his hands and found dried blood on the backs of his knuckles. His stomach fluttered. He rubbed the knuckles on his jeans. "That's it?" he asked.

"Isn't that enough?"

Jonny shrugged. "Well, I mean, I don't want to rain on your parade or anything, but so what? They're coming. What does that get you?"

"A chance," Conover said. "One last chance for something new. You can't imagine what it feels like living on pure reflex, half-awake, but still functioning. And then something jars you conscious and you realize that another five years have passed but it doesn't mean anything because the next five will be exactly the same as the ones that preceded it."

Jonny nodded. "So basically you're fucking everybody over because you're bored."

The smuggler lord grinned. "Well, if you choose to look at it that way-"

"I do," Jonny said.

"I'm sorry to hear that." Conover stepped away from the videos. "Still, there's not much to be done about it."

"Sure there is," Jonny said, leaping the handrail to the sunken observatory floor. "Kill me now."

"Don't be an ass."

Jonny went to the slowly-revolving Virgin Mary, took hold of something by her feet, and came away with a meter-long piece of heavy chrome pipe. He held it before him, testing the balance in his hands, then went to Conover. "Come on, fucker. Kill me."

The smuggler lord held the Futukoro before him, but did not point it at Jonny. "You're being an idiot."

Jonny swung the pipe like a baseball bat, circling the lord on the floor of the dim chamber. "Shoot me. Shoot me or I'll cave you're goddamn head in."

"I might just have to do it, Jonny."

"Go ahead." He swung the pipe wide, letting the smuggler lord jump out of the way.

"Stop this right now," Conover said. Jonny swung again, forcing the lord back on his heels.

"I knew it!" Jonny yelled. "I'm not worth squat to you dead, am I? They don't want me if I'm dead. All that stuff about giving me a chance to stay alive was just another line. If I'm dead, you haven't got anything to trade for your new skin, have you?" He swung the pipe at the lord's head.

"You're acting like a child-"

"Then shoot me!"

"No!"

This time Jonny connected, snapping his wrists down, driving the end of the pipe into Conover's shoulder. The smuggler lord gasped and dropped to his knees. Jonny threw the pipe, rolled under the circular railing and headed for the door. Futukoro shots hissed past his ear, bringing mirrors and bits of pulverized marble down on his head. He darted to the left, more shots following him, cutting off his way to the door.

Conover was on his feet, heaving himself over the railing. The smuggler lord kept sweeping the room with the Futukoro as he pressed his back to each of the observatory's doors, grinding them closed over a thin layer of sand.

"Where are you going to go, Jonny?" Conover yelled. "You're friends are gone. It can be a bad place out there when you're all alone."

Jonny kept to the floor behind a gutted exhibit case, barely breathing. He watched the smuggler lord walk back to the sunken center of the chamber, gun in his hand. "Come on out, son. This is insane," Conover said. "We're both going to lose this way." Jonny cut his fingers picking up a wedge of glass from the wrecked case.

Moving into a crouch, he waited for the smuggler lord to get into just the right position, and threw the glass edge-first across the room, scrambling for the door at the same time.

He knew it was a lost cause within three steps. The pounding of his heavy boots gave him away. Conover turned away for a fraction of a second when the glass hit, but snapped his gun back the instant Jonny began his run. Jonny heard the smuggler lord's gun go off twice.

"Consider that… I don't have to kill you, son. A shot through each kneecap will keep you still until the ship arrives."

Jonny was lying in the shadows, in the dirt, hands crabbed at the edges of worn floor tiles. One side of his face was hot and wet where shrapnel, fragmented marble or wood from the door, had slashed his cheek. His mind was a blank, watching Conover move about the center of the chamber, keeping to the light. For a moment, when consciousness imposed itself upon him, he felt his will drain away. He did not understand why he was running so hard from death when it was what he had been looking for all along. He pressed his back against the wall.

Clinging is not acceptable, he reminded himself. Clinging to anything, including life (or death), was the sign of a weak mind. One of the floor tiles came loose in his hand.

Anger; greed; folly. Hearing the words in his mind, he almost laughed. They had been the cornerstones of his existence, as had illusion. Before he had left her, Jonny's roshi had told him to picture himself as a man crossing a river, moving from one slippery rock to the next, knowing that each step could send him plunging into the rapids.

Moving from illusion to illusion he assumed he had found himself. Now he was not so sure. Perhaps, he thought, he had just found more illusions.

Conover was moving in slow circles before the video screens.

Jonny froze where he was, watched the smuggler lord scanning the room. When Conover's gaze moved over and beyond him, Jonny sat up, throwing the floor tile high, watching it spin and shatter the parabolic mirror at the top of the chamber. The lord covered his head as the glass came down on him, firing wildly, tearing up the ceiling and the edges of the room. The muzzle flash from the Futukoro lit him like a broken strobe as the video moonscapes went dark at his back. When Conover stopped shooting, the room was quiet and very dark. Belly to the floor, Jonny could feel the underground gears winding down. He blinked once. Shapes became solid in the gloom.

Then he was up, his body moving by itself, one foot coming down on the circular rail, the other swinging over, whole body hanging for an instant in mid-air, unprotected meat, house of illusions, hate and fear. Conover was below, slow-motion turning, Jonny's new exteroceptor's showing the man as a brilliant neon scarecrow with holes in his face.

And then he hit, driving Conover hard into the floor. Jonny hauled him up, holding the wrist that held the gun, so close to the man that when his breath hesitated for a moment, Jonny felt the absence of it on his face.

Something happened then.

Sand whispered down through the roof and the moon emerged from a bank of clouds. Conover looked up. Bathed in the milky light, his face went slack, hung on his cheeks like melting putty. The bird-thin arms fell to his sides, and when the smuggler lord looked at him, for the first time, Jonny glimpsed the true face of the man.

It had cost him his eyes to see it. Groucho had an inkling of it, but had died without a look; Ice and Sumi had been spared it; no junkie or leper would have suspected it. Zamora had recognized its essence immediately, was drawn to it, but had probably never witnessed the thing itself. Only Jonny, with second-hand eyes stolen from some rich man's gaudy toy, would ever know the smuggler lord's true face.

Blank.

Without expression.

A Halloween spook; a candy skull, dead as the hills when the brush fires claimed them, dead as the sailor in the boiler room of a sunken ship, skull fused to the melted plating of her hull.

There was nothing else he could do. He moved the hand with the gun under Conover's chin. The smuggler lord never took his hand from the weapon, never tried to struggle. Sand fell on their shoulders. When Jonny looked into the other man's eyes and saw his own, he understood their common desire.

Jonny decided to make him a gift of it. And pulled the trigger.

It had not occurred to Jonny that he was not breathing. The kick of the gun triggered a spasm in his lungs and he sucked in a long breath, tasting ozone and the fear-smell of his own sweat.

Conover's body went down lightly, seemingly without weight, as if, in those last few seconds of life, the smuggler lord had used up everything he was.

Jonny was shaking all over, covered in blood and filth. He crawled under the railing and scraped open the doors. Stepping outside, he stood for some minutes in the falling sand, rubbing it into his face and arms, letting it rasp away the stink of death and illusions.

Later, as he was wandering among the circular shrines in the courtyard of the observatory, Jonny saw something skimming low and fast over the tops of the hills. At first he thought it might be a hovercar flying without its running lights, but as the craft got closer he could tell that it was much too big for that. From what Jonny could see of its outline, it appeared to have the razor-edged fuselage and stubby graphite-composite wings of a Daimyo vacuum shuttle.

Something prickled along his spine. There would be a bigger ship up there, he knew, waiting just beyond the stratosphere The shuttle came down low over the observatory, and leveled off, circling the ruin, a matte-black scavenger. From its belly extended shafts of metallic blue light, sensitive fingers probing the body of the dead building. Jonny hunkered down behind the pile of Sony televisions, listening to the ship's engine's whine in the overheated air. It was waiting for something. A signal? he wondered.

But the man who would have signaled it was dead on his back, fifty meters away.

After more than a dozen passes, the hum of the shuttle's engines took a sudden jump in frequency, the fingers of light disappearing one by one, leaving the observatory dark. Veering off down the hill, the ship banked sharply to the left and started a rapid climb back the way it had come. Jonny crawled to the edge of the pile of televisions to watch the firing of the shuttle's engines, twin stars. A couple of hovercars detached themselves from formation over Hollywood and buzzed up the hill behind the larger ship, firing their banks of heat-seeking missiles.

The shuttle disappeared on the far side of the hills. The flash of the explosion bleached the sky bone-white before the sound hit him.

It rolled like distant thunder, over the hills and on into the city. The hovercars turned off and headed back to Hollywood, merging into the mass of lights that was Los Angeles.

Below, the city was burning. The wind had changed direction; the sand was coming down harder, but behind it was a hint of rain.

Jonny wondered if the weather patterns would ever stabilize. He removed the bottom panel from the front of the old piano and crawled inside. Something exploded on Sunset Boulevard below.

Sizzling fireworks and a choir of hologram angels, enormous lavender lizards, skulls, women's shoes, dice and playing cards rose from the flames, glowed mad and beautiful, spiraled, screamed, clawed at the buildings and finally faded into the sky.

The city burned all night.