Mountain of Black Glass (68 page)

“You brought your kids?” Del Ray's voice soared high with irritation. “Gilbert, what are you doing?”

“Look, man, their mama's gone out.” The brother, who Joseph was seeing properly for the first time, had the worn look of a man who had been babysitting all morning. “I don't have a choice.”

“I'm not getting back there with no children,” Joseph declared. Grumbling, Del Ray got out and slid in with his niece and nephews. By the time Joseph got his long legs properly folded under the dash—Del Ray's brother was short, and had the seat close to the wheel—they had driven past the spot where the black van had been parked, so Joseph didn't get a closer look at it.

“Look, I can't drive you and this old man around all day,” Gilbert said. “I already spent enough time sitting around outside that hospital. Where are you going?”

“Yes, and nice to meet you, too,” Joseph snarled. “Last time we spending any time together, you were perpetrating a crime on me. You lucky I don't call the police on you. Old man, is it?”

“Oh, please shut up,” groaned Del Ray.

“Wasn't my idea,” his brother said quietly. “I have a
job.
”

“Don't start with me, Gilbert,” Del Ray snapped. “Who got you that job, anyway? We're going to see Elephant. He lives over in Mayville.” He gave directions, then slumped back, pausing to pull the two boys apart, but not before they had inflicted screamprovoking injuries on each other.

“Elephant!” Joseph shook his head. “What kind of name is that? I'm not going to no game park.”

Del Ray sighed. “Very humorous.”

“I did an elephant in school, Uncle Del,” the girl beside him announced. “I colored him all green and my teacher said that wasn't right.”

“Your teacher is foolish, girl,” Long Joseph called over his shoulder. “Schools are full of people who can't get no regular job, think they know everything. You can have any color elephant you want. You tell your teacher that.”

“Look,” snarled Gilbert, the car rocking on its aged springs as he negotiated a narrow turn, “don't start in telling my child to disrespect her teacher. You and my brother want to run around playing Johnny Icepick, that's your affair, but don't start with my children.”

“I'm just telling her to stand up for herself.” Joseph was deeply wounded. “Don't blame me 'cause you not doing your duty.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” said Del Ray. “Everyone please just
shut up.
”

 

Gilbert dropped them in front of Elephant's building, a warehouse tower built in the early part of the century, a right-angled pile of alternating brown-and-gray concrete slabs. Under the dark skies and cold rain, Joseph thought it was almost as depressing as the hospital. Del Ray thumbed the intercom and the downstairs door unlocked with a loud click.

There was no elevator, and Joseph was complaining vigorously by the time they reached the third floor. Some of the widely-separated doors had little nameplates next to them, but many more were blank. Every door, though, had some kind of additional security locks, and some were so festooned with chains and pressure bolts that it looked like terrible monsters must be imprisoned behind them.

“What good that going to do you when you inside?” Joseph asked. “How you going to lock all that nonsense?”

“This isn't a flatblock, it's storage.” Del Ray was breathing only a little less heavily after the climb than Joseph. “People don't live in these, they just want to keep other people out.” He corrected himself as they stopped in front of one of the featureless, nameless doors. “People don't live in
most
of these.”

The door popped open almost immediately at his knock. It was nearly dark inside, so Joseph hung back to let Del Ray step through first while his own eyes adjusted.

“What is this?” he asked. “Looks all old-fashioned.”

Del Ray shot him an irritated glance. “He likes it this way. Just don't start in with your usual charm, will you? He's doing us a favor—I hope.”

The huge, windowless room was indeed like something out of one of the net dramas of Joseph's youth, one of those sciencefiction things that had always filled him with scorn. It looked like an aging space station or a mad scientist's laboratory. Machinery covered every surface, and had colonized the room's other spaces as well, hanging in nets from the ceiling or piled on the floor in haphazard stacks. Everything seemed to be connected, thousands of individual conduits flowing together to share one electrical circuit; huge bundles of cables ran almost everywhere so that it was hard to find somewhere to put your foot down. There were so many little scarlet readout lights blinking and so many palely glowing dials and meters that even though only one ordinary source of illumination burned at the center of the room, a tall floor lamp with a crooked shade, the cavernous space was as full of twinkling light as a Christmas display in some Golden Mile shop window.

An ancient, peeling recliner stood in the middle of the lamp's glow. Its occupant, a large black man in a striped wirewool jumper, whose head was shaved except for a topknot like a bird's crest, sat hunched over a low table. He turned to peer at them for a moment before returning to whatever was in front of him. “Del Ray, utterly weird that you called,” he said in a childish, high-pitched voice. “I was just thinking about you.”

“You were?” Del Ray picked his way through the seemingly random piles of equipment; Joseph, following close behind, couldn't figure out what any of the machines were supposed to be or do. “Why?”

“Cleaning out some memory and found this thing I put together for a presentation a while back—remember that thing I did for your Rural Communications Project, the bit with the little dancing bullyboxes?”

“Oh, yes. That was a while ago.” Del Ray pulled up beside the recliner. “This is Joseph Sulaweyo. I used to go out with his daughter Renie, remember?”

“Doubt not. She was fine.” The chunky young black man nodded in appreciation. He glanced at Joseph but did not get up or offer his hand.

“How come you got a name like Elephant?” Joseph asked.

Elephant turned to Del Ray. “Why'd you tell him that? I don't like that name.”

“You don't? But it's a term of respect,” Del Ray said quickly. “You know, because an elephant doesn't forget anything. Because they're wise, and they get their noses into everything.”

“Yeah?” Elephant wrinkled his forehead like a little boy who still wants to believe in Father Christmas.

Long Joseph thought he knew where the name came from, and it wasn't anything to do with respect. Not only was the young man's belly wider than his shoulders, he had the sagging skin and gray pallor of someone who didn't get outside in the sun very much. A mulch of food wrappers, squeeze bottles, and wave boxes surrounding the table testified to the truth of it.

“And I need a favor,” Del Ray hurried on, “like I told you. And you're the only one I can trust to do it right.”

Elephant nodded sagely. “Couldn't talk over the phone, you said. I hear that—man, your old bosses at UNComm, they're all over everything now. Can't fart without someone showing up at your door, talking about EBE.”

“Electronic Breaking and Entering,” Del Ray explained to Joseph, who could not have cared less. “Hacking, in an old-fashioned word. My man here is one of the world's true experts on data acquisition—legitimate, very legitimate, that's why he did so much work for us at UNComm!—but there's so much red tape, tollgates, you name it. . . .” He turned back to the large young man. “And now I need you to find something for me.”

The respect due to his eminence now duly rendered, Elephant inclined his head. “Tell me.”

As Del Ray passed along Long Joseph's fragmented recollections of the military base in the mountains, Joseph wondered idly if this fat young man might have any beer. He considered asking, but after weighing it against another annoying lecture from Del Ray, figured he would do better looking around on his own. The cavernous warehouse space seemed big enough to hide anything, including a refrigerator full of something pleasant, and anyway it was something to do. As he wandered off, Elephant was already making pictures appear in midair above the desk, a succession of bright shapes that threw long shadows from the equipment towers.

“Op that, man,” Elephant said proudly. “Hologram display like this, you won't find another one in private hands south of Nairobi.”

The huge horizontal refrigerator, which at first had filled Long Joseph with such glee, seemed to contain only soft drinks—row after row of squeeze bottles like Chinese soldiers awaiting inspection. Joseph finally found a single bottle of something called “Janajan” behind the plastic bags of components inexplicably stored alongside Elephant's cola reserves and pop-up wave packs. It had an irritatingly fruity taste, but it was still beer—it even had a tiny bit of a kick to it. Joseph nursed it slowly as he strolled through the artificial fairyland, not sure when he might get his next one.

He had no urge to hurry back to where Del Ray and his large friend sat huddled before the shining, cartoonish display. All this blinking-lights nonsense was what had taken his son from him. What use was it? Didn't even kill someone, like fire had killed his wife, so you could bury the dead and get on. Instead, it just turned them into a machine—a machine that didn't work, but you couldn't unplug it. The fat man was excited about his toys, but the whole thing left a sour taste in Joseph's mouth that no fruity beer could take away. Renie had tried to explain this kind of foolishness to him when she was studying, had dragged him to the school lab, full of excitement, to show him how people made the things he watched on the net, but even then he had found the whole thing strange and confusing, and he hadn't liked his young daughter showing him so many things he was ignorant about. Now that it had taken Stephen—and Renie, too, for that matter—he had even less interest. It all just made him thirsty.

“Joseph!” Del Ray's voice pulled him out of his thoughts. “Can you come over here?”

Long Joseph realized he had been standing in the middle of the room for long minutes, looking at nothing, slack as a rag doll.
What's becoming of me?
he thought suddenly.
Might as well be dead. Just thinking about the next drink.

Even that realization just made him want the drink more.

“Hey,” Del Ray said as he approached, lean face carnival-painted by the lights from Elephant's display, “I thought you said this place was a big secret, this military base.”

Joseph shrugged. “That's what Renie told me.”

Elephant looked up from a luminous snake's-nest of data. “It's called ‘Wasp's Nest,' not ‘Beehive.'”

“Yeah, that is right.” Joseph nodded. “I remember now.”

“Well, it
is
a secret, but someone's been checking into it.” With a gesture of Elephant's meaty hand, another squirming tangle of shapes, numbers, and words appeared in the air before him. “See? Careful, very quiet, but they've been nibbling at the edges, looking it over.”

Joseph squinted at the display, as meaningless to him as the most aggressive sorts of modern art. “That must have been that French woman, what her name, Mar-teen. She was all around, helping get it ready for Renie. And some other old man they were talking to, him, too.”

“Within the last couple of days?”

“Don't know.” He shrugged again, but he had an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach, as though the fruit-flavored beer had been a little off. “But it seem like they were all done with that a while ago. That Mar-teen, she was with Renie and the little Bushman fellow, whatever they were doing, wherever they went.”

“Well, someone has been sniffing around.” Elephant sat back and folded his arms across his breasts. “Checking the communication lines, testing the links.” He frowned. “Does that place have phones?”

“I think so. Yeah, that old kind you hold up to your mouth.”

“I think someone's been trying to call.” Elephant smirked as he turned to Del Ray. “I've got your maps for you, man, but I am utterly glad
I'm
not going anywhere near the place.” He waved his arm and the bright visuals vanished so swiftly that it left a dark hole in the air where they had been. “Take it from me, there's nothing worse than pranking around with secrets that aren't quite secrets anymore.”

 

H
E felt weak and ashamed, but that had not prevented him from coming. Even he sometimes needed relief.

He closed his eyes and felt the air wash over him, relaxing already under the ministrations of the silent slaves and their palmfrond fans. The bower of Isis was always cool, a refuge from the desert, from the noise of the palace, from the stresses of mastery. He felt a part of himself, a steely, cold part, resisting the urge to let go. It was hard to turn that part off—the habit of self-reliant command, of sharing his thoughts with nobody, was very strong, and more important than ever now in these last days—but even he could not go without forever. Still, he had waited long before returning this time.