LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

again.” Benjamin had spotted it. He gave the voice command to expand the screen. Burnofsky’s image pushed all the others aside.

      In the image—high-def, no grainy monochrome—Burnofsky had lit a cigarette. He took a few puffs. Sat, staring at nothing. Took another drag on the cigarette.

      “Here it comes,” Benjamin said.

      Burnofsky slid a desk drawer open. He drew out a framed photograph of a young girl.

      “The daughter,” Charles said. “He’s never gotten over it.”

      Burnofsky looked at the picture and puffed his cigarette so that now the smoke partially obscured the image, swirling up around the hidden camera. They could only see the side of the man’s face, but the smile was huge, ear to ear. The smile and a silent laugh.

      “Volume up,” Charles ordered.

      Burnofsky was making a chortling sound, a private, gleeful, somehow greedy sound. Like a miser counting his money.

      “Bugs in your brain, baby,” he said, laughing happily. “Bugs in your brain.”

      “System: zoom in on Burnofsky’s face,” Benjamin ordered. The camera zoomed. “He’s crying as he laughs. Crying and laughing. Here it comes.”

      Burnofsky lifted his shirt up off his corpse-white concave belly. They had a poor angle on this, just barely able to see.

      Burnofsky sucked hard on the cigarette, and holding the smoke in his lungs, stabbed the lit end of it against his belly.

      They heard the sizzle.

      He held it there; held it, held it, held it . . . and then, with a cry of pain that caused smoke to explode from his mouth, Burnofsky at last pulled the cigarette away.

      “Karl, Karl, Karl,” Charles said.

      “Exercising, eating well, no more drugs, far less alcohol.” Benjamin recited the relevant facts. “Seemingly less depressed. And this self-mutilation is the price, somehow. You know it’s BZRK, brother. You must know that. He’s wired. They’ve taken our genius from us.”

      Charles sipped his wine. He had to take it slow if Benjamin was going to be swigging brandy. “I don’t know it. But, do I suspect it?”

      He let the question hang.

      “We must return home. Home to the Tulip.”

      “Back to the Tulip?” Charles’s voice was troubled. “Even now that will be dangerous.”

      “I’ve spent—we’ve spent—our lives skulking and hiding, brother. Is there not, finally, a time to stand up and be seen and counted?”

      Charles didn’t argue. He knew it would be pointless. Benjamin would have his own Götterdämmerung . Charles felt sick inside. He did not want this to end in apocalypse. He had never wanted anything, really, but for all the world to be happy. And to accept him for what he was. And if only he could be allowed to wire the entire human race with his nanobot forces that beautiful vision would be realized. A world of peace. A world free from want and hate and fear and pain because every human being would be brother, sister, father, mother to every other human being. One vast interconnectedness.

      “We hit back,” Benjamin was saying. Over and over. “We hit back!”

      Charles closed his eye and heard the voice of his brother, so many years ago, so long ago, before they understood. Before they came to accept their isolation and loneliness. The voice of the child Benjamin was the voice of the grown man now.

       Hit back, hit back, hit back.

      On the screen Burnofsky was giggling and crying.

FOUR

      Sadie and Noah were bundled into a Land Rover and driven straight, without packing, without ceremony, without time to breathe, to a privately owned airstrip and practically shoved aboard a Gulfstream.

      The pilot filed a flight plan for the relatively short hop to Sambava airport on the main island of Madagascar. But that would be the expected route and if the enemy had gone to the trouble of blowing up a boat, would they hesitate at an airport assassination?

      So the Gulfstream flew on, took on fuel in Kenya, and made the long haul to Madeira to prepare for the final leg to New York’s Teterboro.

      At Madeira the security men let them off the plane. Plath and Keats took a taxi into the whitewashed city of Funchal and ate voraciously at a café that smelled of garlic, red wine and cedar, and served cod and prawns and good, doughy bread in a sky-blue stucco dining room. The Gulfstream had left in too great a hurry to take on food and despite their picnic lunch hours earlier, they were starving.

      “So what do we do now?” Keats asked. He had the sense that this might be the last time they could speak freely. There was a single weary McLure security guy outside on the street, gun out of view but not out of reach, but no one was watching or listening in the restaurant and the clatter of cutlery on pottery and china would have obscured their words in any case.

      “Back to New York,” she said with a shrug.

      “And then?”

      “Then we do whatever Lear tells us to do.” It sounded bitter. It was.

      Keats tore at a piece of bread then used it to sop up some gravy. “That’s not proper, is it? Proper table manners, I mean.”

      “Yeah, that’s what I care about,” Plath said. “Table manners.” She offered him a smile and put her hand on his.

      “It doesn’t make sense, that’s the thing,” Keats said.

      “Manners?”

      “Blowing up the boat.”

      One of Plath’s continuing joys in her relationship with Keats came from the fact that in just about every case where she wondered if he was understanding things, he was. He might look a bit like the naive dreamboat guy, but those too-blue eyes and sensuous mouth were deceptive. There was a sharp, observant brain there as well.

      When am I going to stop underestimating you, Noah? She asked herself this silently, and in her mind he was firmly Noah still, not Keats. Keats was work. Noah was . . . Well, what? Love?

      He loved her. Did she love him ?

      Was it a class thing? The fact that she came from money and his family had never risen to middle class? Was she really that shallow? She wouldn’t have thought so, would have angrily denied it. But at the same time, coming into her inheritance had without doubt added just a bit of swagger to her worldview.

      She was rich. Very rich. He was very much not. Was that why she still held something back from him? That would be shameful. Or was it simply that she had seen him in ways no young woman is meant to see a young man? She knew too much and had memories that were far too vivid and intrusive. She knew what his lips looked like in the micro-subjective.

      She knew that down there, where distances were measured in microns, those full lips were crusted parchment. She knew that his fingertips looked like arid, plowed fields. She knew that his tongue was serried ranks of pink hoods, and that trapped between the rows were bright false-color bacteria.

      She knew that living things crawled in his eyelashes, tiny things unless you were down in the meat and saw them m-sub. Then they didn’t look so small. M-sub fleas looked like spiky, punk versions of the armored oliphaunts from the Lord of the Rings movies, except that they could jump a thousand times their own height.

      She knew, above all, that all the intelligence and charm and wit, all of his readiness to commit, all the love he was so ready to express, was nothing but minute electrical charges firing along neurons in the wet folds of his brain.

      She had not just seen these things on an image captured from a scanning

Скачать книгу