The troll wasn’t saying anything. Serrin began to ask timidly about an appointment, but the troll put a hand up for silence and the elf obeyed. Time ticked by and Serrin began to squirm in his chair as an eyeball-shaped sensor swiveled smoothly out from the wall beside him on a long, flexible metal arm. It scanned his face and thorax and, despite his best leg-crossing efforts, showed a definite interest in the more private areas of his anatomy. It scanned down, then up at his face, before finally returning to its wall socket.
When nearly half an hour had elapsed. Serrin began to get up, very slowly, and addressed the troll, who had remained motionless the whole time.
“Um, it’s getting very late and I really would be very grateful if-”
What happened next was utterly bizarre and confusing. The troll broke into an operatic aria, then got up, twirled a pirouette, and spread his hands wide, grinning with steel teeth. He flicked out a disturbingly large tongue and pointed to the other door in the room, which opened slowly. Serrin had no idea what the troll had been singing, but he thought it might have been Italian. Flipping his tongue back like a frog, the troll clicked his teeth when Serrin entered the darkened corridor beyond. This is good luck, he thought. They say she rarely agrees to see anyone, let alone lets them walk right in out of the blue like this.
Coming to four doors, he decided to knock at the one with a red light glowing above it. At his touch it swung motionlessly open, inviting him into Her Ladyship’s sanctum. With a mixture of hope and trepidation. Serrin walked through.
He gawked at the sight that greeted him on the other side of that door. Wall to wall, endless viewscreens, trideo, telecom, and satellite links, all downloading everything imaginable. He saw commodity price lists, air travel schedules and passenger IDs, corporate accountancy reports, a chat show with a nude female psychiatrist as host, a wildlife documentary, a cartoon squirrel smashing a cartoon dog on the head with a baseball bat, a film on Inuit society, slo-mo replays of football touchdowns, gruesome surgical operations in living color, shots from space satellites, everything in humanity’s full range of information flow. He had to shield his eyes from the constant flicker and glare.
The other elf was alone in the room, a ghastly figure in the center of a great netted web of fiber cabling, pumps, pipes, feeders, and inputs of every imaginable type. A multi-stranded feeder cable pumped an endless supply of data into the middle of her forebrain. Meanwhile, fluids pulsed and pumped into myriad tubes, pipes, and filters of an I/O port complex into her hindbrain. The elf herself had only the vestiges of a body, shrunken and virtually embalmed alive. Her muscles were wasted, fingers hopelessly knotted and shriveled, but the eyes were alive, and they were real eyes. It was perhaps the only part of Her Ladyship that betrayed any functioning vestiges of her original body.
Very slowly she lowered her eyelids, with their inch-long, heavily-mascaraed eyelashes, and the flow of information through the forebrain diminished just slightly. The screens in the room dimmed.
“Ah, one of my people. An elf come to see me.” The voice was utterly flat and devoid of expression, so Serrin couldn’t tell if it was mockery or an honest expression of welcome. The face gave nothing away because it did not move; the vocal synthesizer was in sensurround, so it couldn’t be localized either. Between Her Ladyship’s lifeless arms appeared a little green and blue hologram of Serrin, dancing a jerky, mannequin-like round. Spiraling about the figure was a four-colored double helix, his DNA code, and to one side of that a continuously scrolling update on his vital signs and physical parameters. To the other side the output of a quarkspin tomographic brain scan throbbed in vivid color. He felt very frightened now, completely in the power of this obscene creature. The DNA helix was seriously spooky; someone could use that for ritual sorcery against him. He wondered where she’d gotten the code.
“Serrin Shamandar. This will substantially add to my file on you, little elf mage.” The hint of a smile seemed to play around those white lips. The eyes were unblinking, taking in his discomfort and enjoying it.
“You have a file on me?’
“I have a file, a pretty little file, on everything and everyone. We are all information. Look at you sparkle and shine.”
The DNA helix sparked into a fireworks display of crackling energy. It had a peculiar beauty, with the blue and silver and radiant purple of the bondings. “Oh, you are a pretty one. Look at your Power,” the voice said, as a stretch of the scrolling helix began to glow golden before his face. The figure before him began a slow, smooth. almost peristaltic rocking movement, to and fro. The eyes never left him.
“It is an honor, your Ladyship,” Serrin said, beginning to feel that this creature was quite insane. He needed to tread very carefully.
“So you come to learn something, my pretty little mage. Why come to me? Not many do. Or many do and few are allowed within. Your scans amused me. You are damaged. pretty one. I like that.”
“I was given your name by a friend. He told me you might know something about a corporation I am trying to investigate.”
The screens blazed into life again. “You come for something as boring as that? A runner come for information on a corporation? You waste my time. I only dispense information, just a tiny little tidbit perhaps. if I am asked something interesting. Look!”
The sensory overload was impossible. The screens ran riot with fast strobing, and the sensurround amplification assaulted his mind. He was forced to his knees with the pain of it, desperately trying to shut it out. The avalanche subsided.
“It is interesting. Lady. Please hear me,” he managed to force out between clamped teeth. He began to explain, telling her of the murders and the coincidences between lives drawn apart for many years, She liked that, and the voxsynth purred at him.
“Oh yes, oh yes, pretty one. Your friend was right. Years ago, little one, BTL chips. Jack the Ripper, oh yes. I so enjoyed that.”
Better-than-life chips; someone had chipped up a version of the killer. Of course.
But they didn’t get it right, no, no.” She created a dancing hologram of her images, putting his imagery behind her where it continued to dance in silence. “Pretty Little whores, slash! slash! slash! Hee hee hee hee…”
The voice trailed into psychotic laughter, and then, most horribly, into a song, a child’s lullaby.
Serrin didn’t think even the word madness was adequate here. Not even schizophrenic could have fulfilled the task of describing this one. He didn’t even want to Look at the hologram, with its mutilated bodies in lace and chiffon.
“So he’s back, he’s back! Jack's back! Hee hee hee!” Again the high-pitched laughter reverberated around him. “Well, little one, is it pretty now? Have they done it well this time?”
Serrin nodded grimly. He wanted desperately to find out who had made a Ripper BTL chip, and he decided to risk her ire by asking outright.
“Oh, well,” she sounded fussy and mildly irritated. “Little people with big money in the shadows. Global Technologies made the chips. Little people used them. Hollywood people. Never know what they’re doing. Hollywood people, always so self-absorbed, never attend to details. We’re not stylish and we’re not pretty,” she half-sang in mockery.
For a split-second the withered form seemed to rock just a little further forward toward him. She gazed right though him with eyes the frequency of lasers. “Hollywood Simsense, little mage.’ she said simply. ‘Corporate warfare. But who was behind the Hollywood people? Who’s bigger than all of the Global world?”
“Go now.” The voice changed very abruptly. “I am bored now. I think I shall have a soiree.” Abruptly the screens as one flipped channels to show an endless array of celebrities. Politicians, artists, simsense stars, religious leaders, writers, sportsmen and women; Serrin recognized almost all of them. Almost all were silent, but to Serrin’s amazement the Russian president began reciting an old and especially obscene joke about a New York mayor and an actress. He looked quizzically at the expressionless elf.”
“They shall say what it pleases me to have them say. You will go now. But, oh, before you go, pretty one, you shall dance for us all. We shall applaud most politely. Dance for us.”
It felt as if he were being pushed and pulled throughout his body, and he lost all voluntary control. His mind went spinning across the possibilities; low-wave EM. quarkspin modulators, subliminals, photic driving… they couldn’t do this to him. But he had no choice as he skipped and swayed across the nightmarish room.
Afterward, though, Serrin did not remember anything of that nightmare dance. When the troll dumped him outside the door, he had a mechanism and some names. Better-than-life chips. Global Technologies continued for him, and Hollywood Simsense. It was far more than he’d hoped for. Walking dazedly along the sidewalk, he realized that he hadn’t had to part with a single nuyen, and he smiled. He even skipped a few steps, until his leg hurt him and he settled for an ordinary walking pace.
Thank you, Lady.
It was after midnight when he got back to the Hyatt. He just couldn’t resist the home-grown taste of some snacks from the Stuffer Shack on the way back. Real synthetics. He had eaten too much good food back at Geraint’s in London and it had begun to upset his system.
There was only one message on the telecom. It was one of his New York contacts getting back to him for a meet at eight the following evening. Of all the people he knew in this town, this was the one he’d hoped would come through. If anyone could tell him who might be the brains behind the BTL scene at Global Technologies and Hollywood Simsense, it was Shrapenter.
Serrin made his return flight arrangements. What he’d gotten was more than enough to take back with him.
26
Heading northeast, the Saab purred along the expressway. It had been a good morning. While waiting for Francesca to finish her software shopping and bag-packing, Geraint happened on a glitch in currency transactions across the major banking centers of three continents that netted him four thousand nuyen for about fifty seconds’ work. He’d learned that he could usually put one over on the Swiss satellite banking system by keeping his eyes on the South American and smaller Far Eastern markets. Even a gain no bigger than small change gave him that glorious feeling of bucking the system.
He’d decided not to bring his Tarot deck with him. No matter that he was a magical adept, the Oxford location was daunting. Being a center of English druidic magic, certain spots might be heavy with magical interference. Background count, the scholars termed it-places where powerful residues of emotion or repeated magical operations made most magical, or adept, work difficult. Ii was said that the druids knew how to harness the background count for their own purposes. Geraint deliberately avoided contact with most English druids, and wasn’t about to do anything that might alert them to his presence and activities now. Most of all, though, he never knew what the Tarot might reveal, so how could he guess what someone magically snooping might detect?
Still waiting for Francesca, he’d meditated awhile at his desk then shuffled the cards and spread them out for a reading. So engrossed and absorbed was he in his thoughts that he didn’t hear her open the front door with the magkey, only becoming aware of her presence when she crept upon him.
“Do I cross your palm with silver?” she said with a grin. She got a frosty glare in return.
“Don’t trivialize this, Fran. You know me well enough that I wouldn’t use it if it didn’t work.”
That chastened her. Eager to placate him, she asked Geraint to tell her what the spread meant, pointing to the first card with its explosion of yellow-red plumes surrounding a crackling pillar of energy.
“Ace of Wands. I wanted to know where we stood at this point. It doesn’t tell me very much. An ace is a starting point, wands are intuition, energies in a general sense. So the card says energies are unleashed, we are all expending energy in different directions. It’s vague, but it fits; we’re all in different places, and we’re all chasing leads, not sure where we may end up.”
“Who’s the old geezer?” she asked, moving onto the next card. Geraint turned to her with the hint of reproach in his expression.
“The Hermit. Me, actually. I asked where I was in all this. He’s rather solitary, introspective, detached from the world. I think he’s telling me to back my own judgment and not depend too much on others. If we get into an argument, my dear, I’m afraid you’re going to lose.”
She laughed and tossed back her hair. “You’re just saying that to intimidate me so I’ll give you your own way. I know you.”
“No, really. See,” he said. “This is you.” The card showed a green-cloaked figure seated atop a stone pedestal, waving a sword in the air in a defensive posture. Princess of Swords. The card shows you’re going to be very practical and down-to-earth, but you just might be missing something. Smart but not creative, the Princess. No offense meant, Fran. Bear with me.” He moved to the fourth card lying on the desk.
I asked how our part of things would go. I asked for two cards: one to show the most important problem we might face, a second to show the final outcome. In this context the Five of Coins says that something is unsettling and worrying. The foundations of what we’re doing aren’t quite right somehow. But the Six of Swords, that looks good. It says that our little trip will be successful, but we may encounter some unforeseen difficulty. It’s all right, though,” he continued, catching her look of uncertainty.