"A funeral home."
"Better. You know, man, if I've learned one thing about the world it's this: intelligence is a finite pool of energy, unevenly distributed among individuals of every sapient species on the planet. Every population expansion stretches it a little thinner. I think we first began to exhaust the pool in 1914. It's dangerously close to a backlash now, I think. I mean, when you look at the signs, I mean, acephalic babies being born in Texas, you know what that means? No fucking brains at all, Zane, they stop at the eyebrows."
"I'm not in the mood, right now, Buggs."
"And you'd think the government would be doing something about it, right? Well, sure they are. They've got a crash program to eugenically engineer supergeniuses, so they can stockpile intelligence, even as they're accelerating the meltdown. Wait and see if I'm wrong, in about five years, we're all going to go feral and live in the trees."
"Are you done?"
"See if I'm wrong, that's all."
They rolled through the hills, past clusters of housing developments that seemed to have been assembled by robots or lowered out of the sky or assembled by giant hornets; past vague hints of towns hiding behind mountains or stands of evergreens, hermit towns where time flowed at an agreed-upon rate, if at all, like Thermopylae for ultimate insiders. The builders of these interim towns must have felt real fear of the land they'd been forced to occupy, to have built so timidly. With the high western hills eating up the sun and the dusk drawing over the highway with an air of final abandonment, Storch, who was hitching a ride into a necropolis with a sociopath, began to see fear. He did not feel it eating him, but he sensed it skulking inside his mind, yet outside his heart.
Storch was roused out of his half-sleep by a flash-glimpse of a figure in the road directly before them: an adult doe, stiff and still as a plaster yard decoration, impaled on the van's hi-beams. What did his father call it, his father who served three tours in Vietnam but, in his saner days, had prayed only while deer hunting? Jacklighting, a mortal sin, a betrayal of the rapport between hunter and hunted.
Buggs jogged right and grazed the deer's flank against the driver's side. Storch saw the top of its head whip around confusedly as the giant steel box hurtled past, the vacuum of its passage sucking it off its feet. It did what instinct told it must be done. It leapt into the air, straight up, its legs cocked at an angle as if to fend off the Buick Le Sabre following too closely behind them. The driver of the next car lacked Ely's reflexes and sailed into the deer at seventy-eight miles per hour. The deer plunged through the windshield as if diving into a pool covered in a sheet of frost. The Le Sabre nosed into the guardrail and whipped perpendicular to the fast lane and the Weber's bread truck behind it. Buggs's van turned a snaky S-bend in the road, and the hills enveloped the scene just as a second sun seemed to rise above it.
"When are those dumb animals going to learn?" Buggs asked.
The sign at the Colma city limit claimed the population was seven hundred fourteen, but Storch never saw one above ground. Rolling green hills girded the freeway on both sides, studded with row upon row of headstones, plaques, monuments and mausoleums. The graves to the east commanded a majestic view of the gray San Francisco Bay. Storch was hard pressed to decide what was weirder, the city itself, or the creeping feeling of relief and the sense that he could learn to live here.
Buggs turned off the 280 at Route 82. They rolled past a deserted mall: florists, chapels, stonemasons, banquet halls and liquor stores. They turned south on El Camino Real, the main drag in California's grand necropolis. They passed more cemeteries than Storch had seen in his entire life. As expected, Buggs took upon himself the role of tour guide.
"Like no other city in America," Buggs said. "Over half a million residents, the real silent majority. Look at all this fucking real estate. In the future, archaeologists digging this up will conclude one of two ways: either we worshipped our dead or we were heavily into worm farming.
"About a hundred years ago, San Francisco took a good look at its zoning laws and realized all its cemeteries were illegal. Besides which, they needed the space. So they dug up every last one of them and carted them down here—except for the Presidio and the Old Mission. See that? That's Cypress Lawn, where the rich ones go. William Randolph Hearst, Spreckels, Coit, Gertrude Atherton…"
Storch closed his eyes and pulled his ears into his skull, let himself squeeze in one last five-minute catnap. He felt himself slipping away just as the van came to a stop and the engine died. Buggs opened his door and hopped out, feet crunching on gravel as he came around and opened Storch's door. He fought not to stumble as he climbed out and surveyed Buggs's new job.
"It sure as hell looks like a funeral home."
"Used to be. The people I work for meditate a lot. They say they can't have the psychic vibrations of the living around, or something."
The building was a two-story gambrel-roofed farmhouse in the New England style, impeccably maintained, with fresh pearl-gray paint and black trim. A gravel driveway wound up to a six-car garage. Towering weeping willows framed the converted funeral home on three sides, and iron fences separated it from the crowded, neglected Greek Orthodox cemetery that encircled the property.
"Come on. Check it out."
They crossed the lawn and ascended the portico steps. A porch glider swung silently in the evening breeze, and scores of wind chimes hung from the eaves. Storch could feel an electric tingling in the lobes of his ears, but couldn't quite hear them.
Buggs slipped off his shoes and motioned for Storch to do the same.
"You've got to be really, really quiet until we get back into my workroom, man." Storch nodded and stooped to unlace his boots. Buggs unlocked the door and peeked inside, scanning the place for something. Deciding the coast was clear, he slipped inside and waved Storch in.
Candles and incense burned in sconces around the foyer, marking the walls rather than illuminating anything. The walls themselves were cushioned with the deep packing foam used in recording studios. The faint shuffling of their stockinged feet on the lush carpet sounded as if it was coming from down a tunnel. The pungent opiate smoke from the incense, the stifling stillness, made Storch feel sleepy.
"Where's your room?" he asked, rubbing his eyes.
Buggs shushed him, led him deeper into the house. They passed through what probably used to be the chapel. Storch could dimly make out posts hung with headphones and goggles and racks of electrical components set evenly around the room, and surrounded by piles of pillows. They turned down a narrow corridor lined with narrow doors. Some stood open, and Storch saw someone sleeping inside, goggled and headphoned. Hints of pulsating black static leaked out of them. Faint as it was, it resonated in all the cavities of Storch's skull and made the darkness come alive with impossible, predatory colors. A hand reached out of the wall and took him by the arm, pulled him into one of the rooms. The door closed behind him, and the hungry colors dissolved into black again. Silent lightning flashed, once twice, and became the cold glow of a fluorescent light. Buggs was staring into his eyes, pinning his arms at his sides.
"Are you alright, man? You're not gonna freak out and have a Desert Storm flashback, or something, are you?"
"I'm fucking fine," Storch growled, breaking loose and stepping back. "Don't touch my fucking body."
Buggs shrugged and went to a bank of light switches. The room had once been used for embalming, and still had a checkerboard-pattern tile floor and a row of steel beds with gutters in them. Computer shit was stacked to the ceiling on all five of these, and spilled over onto the floor, crowded the counter that ran along the wall, and even hung suspended from the ceiling. The floor was a carpet of cables and trash: potato chip bags, Twinkie wrappers, empty Jolt Cola cans, Ephidrene packets, cigarette butts.
"Alright, alright. Pretty weird, huh?"
"What the hell are these people on, Buggs?"
"A mystical mission," Buggs answered in a fruity, New Age voice. "They alone understand the true nature of the universe, and are destined to preserve it from destruction."
"What are you talking about?"
"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream of a god they call—" Buggs looked around melodramatically, then cupped his hand and whispered, "Mana Yood Sushai." He looked around again, then smiled and nodded knowingly at Storch, having confided the cult's innermost secret.
"What do they do?"
"Mostly, they just sleep, I guess, building up the energy to meditate, which is pretty much what they do the rest of the time. They use all that VR shit in the chapel to entrain their brainwaves to the same frequency, and they dream together. They think that as long as they keep dreaming and meditating and shit, Mana Yood Sushai will keep dreaming the universe. But if they stop—" again looking around for cult assassins, "He'll wake up."
Buggs went over to a tower of CPUs and started flicking switches, Things started humming and clattering and Storch could feel ions proliferating in the air around him. He wanted to go back out, find an empty cell and go to sleep in the hungry dark. To keep himself awake, he kept talking.
"How can they afford all this?"
"They're all really brilliant programmers, actually. Every so often, one of them comes out and bats out some code or does some contract database design work, makes them a few hundred grand, and goes back to sleep. They've got some people who come in to clean up and do the landscaping, but they know better than to come in here."
"What do they need you for?"
"I do a lot of different things. Network administration—they've got a couple of nodes just for decryption, websites with all kinds of ciphers and encrypted messages floating around—"
"Anything about cancer?"
"No. Why'd you ask?"
"No reason."
"But it's funny you should mention it, because what I think they really wanted me for was to screen their TV."
"What?"
"I tape all their favorite TV shows. Trekkie crap, mostly, and lots of airy-fairy New Age lectures on Public Access channels, but some CNN and Discovery Channel stuff, too, anything on genetics or paleontology— and anyway, what I do is, I edit out the commercials. It's kind of like being a poison-taster for a paranoid royal family."
When he got tired of babbling, Buggs hacked Water & Power records for
Sperling, Donald
. "Nobody else keeps better track of where you've lived," Buggs boasted as he pried their firewall open and typed in bogus passwords. The screen blew up a catalogue of numbers and addresses, going back to Sperling's college days at UC Davis.
"Look at this. Donald and Marie Sperling's power bill accounts, from the day they set up housekeeping in Davis in 1976 until the present. Notice anything weird?"
"This isn't complete," Storch muttered. "There's two and a half years missing." Then he remembered how long the commune had lasted. "Shit. He was one of them. Him and his wife were members." After July of 1979, there was no service record. Then, in December of 1981, with service charges, switch-on fee and a fifty dollar deposit for the house in Sunnyvale.
"There's where he was. Now let's find out where he is," Buggs said.
Buggs fiddled for five minutes, opening windows within windows of security, slipping through each layer with a different skeleton key. Storch tuned out his rambling explanations of the significance of each. Computers bothered him. More than anything else since he'd gone into the desert eight years before, computers had changed the world, and not for the better. It was as if a crazy new religion had burned new tongues, new prayers, new commandments, into the rest of the world. It baffled him, the way they talked about Y2K, and poured money into businesses that existed nowhere and made nothing. Everyone worshipped false gods of pure data, and trembled before an Apocalypse when the world might threaten to become real again.
"Here you go. Credit card purchases for Donald NMI Sperling for July, 1999. Hmmm, eats out a lot—alone. Not much else…Monthly Metrotram pass…oh, look at this. You came at a bad time, boss." Buggs tapped the entry at the bottom of the screen: $695 / AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 997 / SAN JOSE TO MEXICO CITY VIA LAX / ONE-WAY / 7-8-99. "He's gone on vacation."
He was gone.
How many people have to disappear before you get wise and vanish yourself?
If there really was a secret war, let it be fought by people with their heads screwed on right. Mexico—and not to find Donald Sperling, either.
"I can get into airline booking, see if his seat was filled."
"No, Buggs. Let it go."
"Well, shit, I'm real sorry I couldn't be of more help. You want me to call some of your righteous militia friends to come pick you up?"
"I don't have any righteous friends. Take me back."
Buggs dropped Storch off at a Target around the block from his motel just before ten. As he climbed out, Buggs said, "Hey, boss. Take this."
Storch turned around and saw a roll of bills held under his nose, the two on the outside were twenties. "I can't take your money, Buggs. Thanks, anyway."
"Dude, you need money to get out of here, and you need a new look. Right now you look like a freaked-out commando in a bad disguise. You won't even stay out long enough to make it on America's Most Wanted." Buggs grinned sheepishly. "Besides, you paid me way too much. I would've done it for free. Go on, man. Take it and get the hell out of here."
Feeling like a proud farmer accepting his first welfare check, Storch took the money. "Thanks. I'll send you a postcard."
"Adios, dude," Buggs said and pulled out of the parking lot. Storch watched his last friend go until his van disappeared onto the freeway onramp. Suddenly feeling naked, he turned and walked into the Target.