Part 37 (1/2)

41.

I can't let you leave, Natch. Certainly you must realize that.

Faces stare from the windows of Old Chicago as Natch runs pel mel through the streets.

Past the four-wheeled fossils that were stripped to the bone hundreds of years ago. Past the untidy rubble of a tower that might have dwarfed even the Revelation Spire before it was struck down by the Autonomous Minds. To the very banks of the Great Diss Lake itself, stil silted with the metal droppings of ancient warplanes.

He has been running for at least an hour when he notices that the diss have come out of their ruined towers to look for him. It's not quite dawn. Electric lights strung along the debris are stil il uminating the streets. Yet there's a palpable presence, a stirring through the city as the echoes of shuffling feet fly through the al eyways. Whispered voices. He can't see anybody, not yet, but every few blocks he turns a corner and sees fresh footprints in the snow.

Somehow Brone has already discovered that he's left the old hotel. He's put the word out among the diss that Natch is a wanted man. Natch remembers Brone's overblown gesture of throwing his synthetic arm on the table in that underground cafe, and now he realizes that that was more than just a gesture. It was a signal. Natch has been marked.

Brone chose wel when he picked Old Chicago as the launchpad for his Revolution of Selfishness. The diss are good trackers: too fiercely independent to band together for an organized pursuit, and therefore almost impossible to predict. This is the city of barter, and with Brone the diss have struck the mother lode of bargains. Keep the Tha.s.selians safe; keep them hidden and protected; do the occasional odd job. And in return, Brone wil deliver them their Shangri-la. The ability to eliminate al social boundaries, the ability to bring themselves up to the connectibles' level-or bring the connectibles down to theirs.

I didn't want it to come to this. But you've forced my hand. I can't risk Borda finding you and taking MultiReal away.

The words float through his consciousness like a memory of something he once said, yet Natch is fairly certain that he never said them. Yet it's his own voice he's hearing, his own interior monologue. What's going on?

He makes a quick left at the next intersection and goes looking for cover, only to find himself at a dead end. An impa.s.sable cul-de-sac of rusted metal and petrified wood that might once have served as a barricade during the Autonomous Revolt. He scrambles into the corner, thinking he sees a way through the mora.s.s, but it turns out to be only a deceit of the night. Natch knows that he can't continue running like this with no direction, but he's stil too addled by rage and black code and exhaustion to keep track of where he's going.

Sprinting through the city at top speed temporarily distracted him from the pain and the quivering, but now both are returning with a vengeance. And the cold ... It's frigid as death out here. Even the winter of initiation wasn't this bad, and he didn't have the artificial insulation of bio/logics back then either.

Natch backtracks, finds a deserted storefront, and stops to catch his breath. He huddles inside the empty store next to rusted metal racks that might once have contained household products. He needs to figure out some strategy for how to proceed. Where is he going? Where can he go? Connectible territory is off-limits with the Defense and Wel ness Council on the hunt for him; and now unconnectible territory is as wel . What does that leave?

He summons a map of the city from the Data Sea and tries to get his bearings. But apparently no one has made a systematic effort to scope out Old Chicago in decades. The schematics he finds hail from a more idyl ic time when the streets weren't as cluttered with detritus and more of the old landmarks were stil standing. He looks at the most recent map and tries to figure out which building his mother lived in. Vigal once told him that Lora lived on the thirty-fourth story of a rotting skysc.r.a.per, and even an hour ago Natch had been naive enough to think he might locate the building on that description alone. But there are a dozen such structures within walking distance, and more dot the horizon to the south and east.

A pair of young men come jogging by, leading a vicious-looking mongrel on a chain.

They're peering into the shadows. Any second now they'l notice his footprints in the snow, which he's stupidly forgotten to cover up. Natch flips on MultiReal, wondering if he can use Horvil's mind control trick to divert their attention without alerting them to his presence. Thankful y, he doesn't have to worry about it, because at that moment something metal crashes to the ground a few blocks away, and the diss trackers go tearing off to investigate.

MultiReal isn't going to do you any good. You might as wel save yourself the effort.

Natch leaps out from his hiding place, taking care to step in the footprints of his pursuers as much as possible. He can't last much longer out here.

He's worn out, not just from the cold, not just from the incident at the Tul Jabbor Complex, but from weeks of ceaseless wandering, from years of pressing on through the maze of fiefcorpery.

He finds himself in an empty intersection and surveys the crossroads before him. North, south, east, west-which way should he turn?

But his feet wil not obey him. The prospect of taking a step in any direction seems like the most difficult thing in the world. He tries to peer into the future, but he can't see beyond the next five minutes. Running, and then running, and thenI'm sorry, Natch.

The sun final y climbs over the horizon and showers Natch with its cold light. Before he can react, the blackness is upon him.

Unmoving, unspeaking.

It is a completely desolate and dimensionless universe, a blackness without blackness.

There is no more Old Chicago, no more snow, and no more diss. The very Earth and sky have dissipated away. Corporeality of any kind is nothing but an abstraction, and the constant chatter of the five senses is nothing but a memory.

And yet Natch is here.

He feels that he is present, even if there's nothing to be present in. But the central core of his being, the ident.i.ty, the I that fil s the p.r.o.noun, is there.

Natch. His existence may actual y be the only thing possible in this place.

He stretches his nonexistent arms and tries to reach for somethingbut there is only Nothing within reach. His legs: he kicks out with them too, expecting to find ground, or a bed, or at the very least air. But those things, too, are gone.

In fact, he can only take it as an article of faith that he himself is stil here, since he can't see anything. Natch pats where his torso should be: nothing.

MultiReal. Even in this place, so far removed from everything, he is aware that the program is out there somewhere. He remembers the sense of limitless potential, the flush of power. But as he stretches his mind out like he has done a mil ion times since he was a child in the hive, he knows it's useless; the Data Sea, Minds.p.a.ce, even his own OCHRE systems lie in a different continuum altogether. And even if he could somehow reach and activate MultiReal, were there any possibilities for him to choose from in this nons.p.a.ce?

A voice speaks. This isn't how I wanted things to end.

The entrepreneur spins around, or at least tries to, which is impossible in a world without exterior referents. No actual sound has pierced the veil of this ultracompacted universe, but it seems like a sound. It seems like a voice. It is, in fact, the only voice that is conceivable here.

His own.

Natch has spoken those words, and yet he has not. He remembers making the vocalizations that echo in his mind; he remembers saying those things, as much as the concept makes sense. But the ideas came from elsewhere. Outside.

He can feel more words forming at his nonexistent lips, and he cannot stop them. It took me years to perfect this little piece of black code, Natch. You would be quite impressed if you had more time to explore it. The ultimate loopback!

Much more interesting than some sil y cloaking program. Al sensory input rerouted, al sensory commands blocked off. Think of it as a dam of sorts, planted in the brain stem. Except I have the ability to open and close channels at wil . Witness....

An instantaneous sword thrust of pure, unal oyed agony. The Urpain, the primordial concept itself.

Gone.

A sudden reemergence of sound. Low voices muttering, the distant bark of the mongrel.

Staccato sc.r.a.pes that might come from the confluence of boots and rubble.

Nothing.

Don't try to blame me for this state of affairs, says the voice. If you want to blame someone, you can blame yourself. You've done a much better job isolating yourself than I could have ever done. Al I've done is take advantage of it.

Yes, thanks to you, Natch, your disappearance wil arouse little suspicion. I'm sure the drudges wil speculate about you for a while. Some wil suspect foul play; some wil suspect that the Council has done away with you. But most people?

Most people wil a.s.sume you've fal en prey to your own paranoia, gotten sucked into your own self-delusions. Like Henry Osterman and Sheldon Surina.

Like Marcus Surina at the end. They'l think that one of your uncountable enemies final y caught up to you on a dark road somewhere.

I daresay even those few you label your friends wil give up on you soon enough.