Part 11 (1/2)

”But it was the last,” he said. He made his way into the bathroom; there he washed the blood from his arm, kept cold water flowing on the gash until coagulation began. Five minutes, fifty; he could not tell. He merely stood there, holding his elbow under the faucet. Ruth Rae had gone G.o.d knew where. Probably to nark to the pois, he said wearily to himself; he was too exhausted to care.

h.e.l.l, he thought. After what I said to her I wouldn't blame her.

10

”No,” Police General Felix Buckman said, shaking his head rigidly. ”Jason Taverner does exist. He's somehow managed to get the data out of all the matrix banks.” The police general pondered. ”You're sure you can lay your hands on him if you have to?”

”A downer about that, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said. ”He's found the microtrans and snuffed it. So we don't know if he's still in Vegas. If he has any sense he's hustled on. Which he almost certainly has.”

Buckman said, ”You had better come back here. If he can lift data, prime source material like that, out of our banks, he's involved in effective activity that's probably major. How precise is your fix on him?”

”He is--was--located in one apartment of eighty-five in one wing of a complex of six hundred units, all expensive and fas.h.i.+onable in the West Fireflash District, a place called Copperfield II.”

”Better ask Vegas to go through the eighty-five units until they find him. And when you get him, have him air-mailed directly to me. But I still want you at your desk. Take a couple of uppers, forget your hyped-out nap, and get down here.”

”Yes, Mr. Buckman,” McNulty said, with a trace of pain. He grimaced.

”You don't think we're going to find him in Vegas,” Buckman said.

”No, sir.”

”Maybe we will. By snuffing the microtrans he may rationalize that he's safe, now.”

”I beg to differ,” McNulty said. ”By finding it he'd know we had bugged him to there in West Fireflash. He'd split. Fast.”

Buckman said, ”He would if people acted rationally. But they don't. Or haven't you noticed that, McNulty? Mostly they function in a chaotic fas.h.i.+on.” Which, he mediated, probably serves them in good stead . . . it makes them less predictable.

”I've noticed that--”

”Be at your desk in half an hour,” Buckman said, and broke the connection. McNulty's pedantic foppery, and the fogged-up lethargy of a hype after dark, irritated him always.

Alys, observing everything, said, ”A man who's unexisted himself. Has that ever happened before?”

”No,” Buckman said. ”And it hasn't happened this time. Somewhere, some obscure place, he's overlooked a microdoc.u.ment of a minor nature. We'll keep searching until we find it. Sooner or later we'll match up a voiceprint or an EEG print and then we'll know who he really is.”

”Maybe he's exactly who he says he is.” Alys had been examining McNulty's grotesque notes. ”Subject belongs to musicians' union. Says he's a singer. Maybe a voiceprint would be your--”

'Get out of my office,” Buckman said to her ”I'm just speculating. Maybe he recorded that new p.o.r.nochord hit, 'Go Down, Moses' that--”

”I'll tell you what,” Buckman said. ”Go home and look in the study, in a gla.s.sine envelope in the center drawer of my maple desk. You'll find a lightly canceled perfectly centered copy of the one-dollar black U.S. Trans-Mississippi issue. I got it for my own collection but you can have it for yours; I'll get another. _Just go_. Go and get the d.a.m.n stamp and put it away in your alb.u.m in your safe forever. Don't ever even look at it again; just have it. And leave me alone at work. Is that a deal?”

”Jesus,” Alys said, her eyes alive with light. ”Where'd you get it?”

”From a political prisoner on his way to a forced-labor camp. He traded it for his freedom. I thought it was an equitable arrangement. Don't you?”

Alys said, ”The most beautifully engraved stamp ever issued. At any time. By any country.”

”Do you want it?” he said.

”Yes.” She moved from the office, out into the corridor. ”I'll see you tomorrow. But you don't have to give me something like that to make me go; I want to go home and take a shower and change my clothes and go to bed for a few hours. On the other hand, if you want to--”

”I want to,” Buckman said, and to himself he added, Because I'm so G.o.dd.a.m.n afraid of you, so basically, ontologically scared of everything about you, even your willingness to leave. I'm even afraid of that!

_Why?_ he asked himself as he watched her head for the secluded prison ascent tube at the far end of his suite of offices. I've known her as a child and I feared her then. Because, I think, in some fundamental way that I don't comprehend, she doesn't play by the rules. We all have rules; they differ, but we all play by them. For example, he conjectured, we don't murder a man who has just done us a favor. Even in this, a police state--even we observe that rule. And we don't deliberately destroy objects precious to us. But Alys is capable of going home, finding the one-dollar black, and setting fire to it with her cigarette. I know that and yet I gave it to her; I'm still praying that underneath or eventually or whatever she'll come back and shoot marbles the way the rest of us do.

But she never will.

He thought, And the reason I offered her the one-dollar black was because, simply, I hoped to beguile her, tempt her, into returning to rules that we can understand. Rules the rest of us can apply. I'm bribing her, and it's a waste of time-- if not much much more--and I know it and she knows it. Yes, he thought. She probably will set fire to the one-dollar black, the finest stamp ever issued, a philatelic item I have never seen for sale during my lifetime. Even at auctions. And when I get home tonight she'll show me the ashes. Maybe she'll leave a corner of it unburned, to prove she really did it.

And I'll believe it. And I'll be even more afraid.

Moodily, General Buckman opened the third drawer of the large desk and placed a tape-reel in the small transport he kept there. Dowland aires for four voices . . . he stood listening to one which he enjoyed very much, among all the songs in Dowland's lute books.

. . . _For now left and forlorn_ _I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die_ _In deadly pain and endless misery_.

The first man, Buckman mused, to write a piece of abstract music. He removed the tape, put in the lute one, and stood listening to the ”Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan.” From this, he said to himself, came, at last, the Beethoven final quartets. And everything else. Except for Wagner.

He detested Wagner. Wagner and those like him, such as Berlioz, had set music back three centuries. Until Karlheinz Stockhausen in his ”Gesang der Junglinge” had once more brought music up to date.

Standing by the desk, he gazed down for a moment at the recent 4-D photo of Jason Taverner--the photograph taken by Katharine Nelson. What a d.a.m.n good-looking man, he thought. Almost professionally good-looking. Well, he's a singer; it fits. He's in show business.

Touching the 4-D photo, he listened to it say, ”How now, brown cow?” And smiled. And, listening once more to the ”Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan,” thought:

_Flow, my tears_ . . .

Do I really have pol-karma? he asked himself. Loving words and music like this? Yes, he thought, I make a superb pol because I _don't think like a pol_. I don't, for example, think like McNulty, who will always be--what did they used to say?--a pig all his life. I think, not like the people we're trying to apprehend, but like the _important_ people we're trying to apprehend. Like this man, he thought, this Jason Taverner. I have a hunch, an irrational but beautifully functional intuition, that he's still in Vegas. We will trap him there, and not where McNulty thinks: rationally and logically somewhere farther on.

I am like Byron, he thought, fighting for freedom, giving up his life to fight for Greece. Except that I am not fighting for freedom; I am fighting for a coherent society.

Is that actually true? he asked himself. Is that why I do what I do? To create order, structure, harmony? Rules. Yes, he thought; rules are G.o.dd.a.m.n important to me, and that is why Alys threatens me; that's why I can cope with so much else but not with her.

Thank G.o.d they're not all like her, he said to himself. Thank G.o.d, in fact, that she's one of a kind.

Pressing a b.u.t.ton on his desk intercom he said, ”Herb, will you come in here, please?”

Herbert Maime entered the office, a stack of computer cards in his hands; he looked harried.