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Peaks. At his back the fog already covered the Sunset and the Richmond, out in
the Avenues where he'd been born, raised, and shaped. Toshi blinked, then
turned and faced across the city spread below him like a giant's candy table.
Stands of pine and palm dotted the glittering hillsides like earthbound green
clouds. Lines of light snaked between jewelbox houses, which themselves
shimmered in the long afternoon.
The city, as always, lay in a dream.
He could almost taste the salt of the ocean, borne on the creeping fog. Around
him tourists did their camera dance, uttering short plosive sounds and long
exhalations at the view. He wanted to laugh. Many of them, garbed in the
shorts and light tee shirts of their native Omaha and Indianapolis summers,
were shivering at the twenty degree drop in temperature -- a usual San
Francisco occurrence but one they simply couldn't comprehend. Some took it
personally; "Goddam it, why didn't the guide _warn_ us?" Toshi decided he
could get rich up here with a coat rental concession.
Then the visitor gabble faded away as he regarded the city. He'd killed a man
today. Which was all right.
That was his business. But --
But what?
Something stirred inside him. Feelings repressed by an endless sense of
discipline. Always he'd served, as much a mercenary as any Blade of God. That
his causes had been his own, his choices equally so, had always excused the
means employed to his various ends.
Was it enough?
Berg was missing, possibly dead. Levin had disappeared from the safe confines
of his skull. Had Arius triumphed at last? Was a similar smoking ruin rising
somewhere in Chicago, over the graves of Calley and Oswald Karman?
He didn't know. Only one thing was certain. He was still free. Still alive.
Arius hadn't gotten them all.
If he would serve Berg, then he must serve himself. Duty demanded it.
Besides, if the others were gone, he really wanted to plant his fingers in the
mad God's brain, wherever and whatever it was, and
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squeeze. He would enjoy that a lot. After all, he'd beaten the Blade of God
today. Did that not make him a kind of god himself?
Where was Levin? It was a frightening thought. He'd managed not to think about
it for almost a day as he covered his tracks from
Berg's safehouse. Now he rested in a small apartment looking out from Potrero
Hill, the dark liquid waves of the Bay an oily tapestry beneath him. Alcatraz
Island glowed like a Christmas ornament, its rocky surface covered with the
domes of the Funhouse. Farther out, the shadowy, knifelike sail of a tanker
sub cut the surface of the water.
He had the windows open. Occasionally the scream of a shuttle or a big
lasercab cut the night air, which was thick with odors of pine and nameless
flowers. The night was fogless. Stars glittered over the Golden Gate.
He missed the voice in his head. But it was more than that. Levin was
_important_. Berg had designed the computer, had done the programming, and had
supervised the surgical installation of the remotes inside his skull. Levin
was designed to be a weapon. In their war with Arius, Berg told them from the
beginning that the Demon Star had great advantages. They would have to make up
for their lack of money and numbers with speed, tactics, intelligence. Levin
provided all three, as well as access of a kind to the metamatrix. For
security reasons, Levin's location was known only to Berg. Like all the
bioelectronic brains, Levin had a presence, a reality inside the metamatrix.
He was capable of self-defense, Berg assured them. But was this true? They
depended so much on Berg.
Now he was missing. And so was Levin.
Dead? Captured? Hiding? Was this the end they had feared so long?
Toshi shook his head. He felt the wings of his dark hair brush the base of his
neck. Somewhere a single bird called, a mournful sound. I can't do this, Toshi
thought suddenly. Can't let myself get this way.
He leaned back in his chair and felt his chest rise and fall. He felt clean
dark air flow in, flow out. Fill his belly.
After a while he closed his eyes.
In the dream he felt detached. He became a discrete point floating in vast
space. Off in the distance things shimmered faintly, promising light. He felt
himself drawn toward that distance, felt speed begin to build, sensed that
great silent vistas were flowing past him in nameless waves.
The light grew. Then over the invisible horizon thundered glittering white
sands. Above the sands hung suspended incredible constructions, amorphous,
shifting shapes that bellowed silently. Lances of color darted like elongated
fish. Higher still hung clouds of luminescence in a hundred shades of green.
They were gray with spectral jewelry, hard, metallic forms embedded, dangling,
barely connected.
Burning down on all, bonfire of white and red, blazed the Demon Star.
_This must be the metamatrix_, he thought. He felt detached, warm, and safe.
Somehow he knew that none of this could hurt him. And somehow he felt the
presence of friends.
Now he began to rise like a bubble drifting to the surface of a sea. He slowed
as he approached the Star. Something deep inside his skull clicked, a
metaphysical switch, and the metamatrix came alive around him. The silence was
riven by an avalanche of sound.
Juh uh duh. Juh uh duh! Juh uh _duh!_
It was a terrible, rasping rhythm, the breathing of a wounded God, ancient and
appalling. The whole metamatrix echoed until it seemed even the endless
stretches of light moved to a ghastly dancing beat. He was very close to the
Star. He began to see things on its surface and beneath its surface. Strange,
truncated shapes, twisted in agony, pounded knobbled fists against invisible
barriers.
They rose close to the edge of fire, screamed, sank back again. Rivers of
molten red swam there, carrying freights of claws and lips and teeth.
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He wanted to scream, but had no tongue. The sound pounded at his ears, but he
had no hands to cover himself.
The Demon Sun began to change. Scarlet flowed, melded, congealed. The great
circle went white around the edge, but in the center grew a crimson pupil, a
hunger of an eye. An invisible ripple crossed it, and Toshi thought of
translucent membranes, an eyelid opening.
Slowly the eye scanned the universe. Alive with lust, it twinkled. It
beckoned. It summoned.
_It knows I'm here ... _
But the fearful gaze passed on. Where it touched pieces of the metamatrix,
darkness warped and sizzled. The metamatrix was filled with screams. And it
passed.
Toshi tried to awaken. The nightmare went on. Finally, just as the eye was
swinging its focus in his direction again, he found himself sinking. His face
burned. He knew the skin there was ruined. Yet as he sank a coolness overcame
him. Soothing, restful.
He was lowered to a diamond floor. Infinitely far above, the beat went on. JUH
uh _DUH!_
The light winked out.
His eyes slid blankly open. Fog mantled the hills outside, muffled Alcatraz,
dampened his cheeks.
"Levin?" he said.
There was no answer.
When he woke dawn was silvering patches of low fog on the Bay. The cold had
seeped into his bones like groundwater. Every muscle screeched when he moved.
At moments like these he was conscious of all the technological flotsam and
jetsam which lived in his body, aware of its alienness, the inhuman
strangeness of it. He felt full of metal, of carbon, of tiny things that moved
of their own volition.
And full of something else. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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