WWW: Wake (18 page)

The music stopped, and she stormed across the gym, bumping into other people as she went, trying, trying, trying to find the door.

“Caitlin.” A female voice—maybe Sunshine? “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Caitlin said. “Where’s the fucking door?”

“Um, to your left, ten feet or so.” It was Sunshine; she recognized the Bostonian accent.

Caitlin knew exactly where her cane should be: propped up against the wall near the door, where others had left umbrellas. But some asshole had moved it, presumably to make room for something of his own.

Sunshine’s voice again. “It’s here,” she said, and she felt the cane being passed to her. She took it. “Are you all right?”

Caitlin did something she rarely did. She nodded, a gesture she never made spontaneously. But she didn’t trust her voice. She strode out into the corridor, which sounded like it was empty; her footfalls made loud echoing sounds on the hard floor. The din of the dance faded as she continued along, and she swept the way in front of her with her cane. She knew there was a stairwell at the far end, and—

There. She swung open the door and, using her cane to guide her, located the bottom step. She sat down and put her face in her hands.

Why were boys such jerks? Zack Starnes, who used to tease her back in Austin; the Hoser here—all of them!

She needed to relax, to calm down. She had stupidly left her iPod at home, but she did have her eyePod. She felt for the button, heard the beep that indicated the device had switched to duplex mode, and—

Ahhh!

Webspace blossomed into existence all around her, and—

And she felt herself relaxing. Yes, seeing webspace was still exhilarating, but it also was, in a weird way, calming. It was, she guessed, like smoking or drinking. She’d never tried the former; the smell bothered her. But she had drunk beer with friends—and Canadian beer now, too, which was stronger than the US stuff—but she didn’t really like the taste. Still, her mother enjoyed a glass of wine most evenings, and, well, she supposed that plugging into webspace, seeing the calming lights and colors and shapes, could become her own evening ritual, a visit to her happy place—a very special place that was hers and hers alone.

The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology was located at 142 Xi-Wai-Da-Jie in western Beijing. Wong Wai-Jeng enjoyed working there, more or less, and the irony was not lost on him that doing so made him a civil servant: the dissident Sinanthropus was an employee of the Communist Party. But the irony of the government supporting this institution devoted to preserving old fossils wasn’t lost on him, either.

Today for his morning coffee break, Wai-Jeng decided to stroll around the second-floor gallery of the museum—the four connected balconies that looked down on the exhibits below. He paused in front of the great glass tank on the granite pedestal that held the pickled coelacanth. There was irony here, too, for the giant lobe-finned fish was labeled a “living” fossil—which it had been until fishermen had netted it off the Comoros a few decades ago. It seemed in good shape still; he wondered if Chairman Mao was faring as well in his mausoleum.

Wai-Jeng turned and walked over to the railing around the opening that looked down onto the ground floor, ten meters below, with its dinosaurs mounted in dramatic poses above beds of fake grass. No school group was visiting today, but two old men were down there, sitting on a wooden bench. Wai-Jeng often saw them here. They lived in the neighborhood, came inside most afternoons to get out of the heat, and just sat, almost as motionless as the skeletons.

Directly below him, an allosaur was dispatching a stegosaur. The latter had fallen on its side, and the carnivore’s great jaws were biting into its neck. The postures were dramatic, but the thick layer of dust visible on the tops of the bones from this vantage point belied the sense of movement.

Wai-Jeng looked off to his right. The great tapered neck of Mamenchisaurus snaked up through the giant opening from the floor below and—

And there was Dr. Feng, over by the metal staircase, accompanied by two other men; they’d presumably just come down from the labs upstairs. The two men didn’t look like scientists; they were too burly, too sharp-edged, for that—although one of them did look familiar. Feng was pointing in Wai-Jeng’s direction, and he did something he never did—he shouted: “There you are, Wai-Jeng! These men would like a word with you!”

And then it clicked: the shorter of the two men was the cop from the wang ba; the old paleontologist was warning him. He turned to his left and started to run, almost knocking over a middle-aged woman who was now standing in front of the coelacanth tank.

There was only one way out; modern fire codes were new to Beijing and this museum had been built before they’d been instituted. If the two cops had split up, one going left and the other right around the large opening that looked down on the dinosaurs below, they would have caught him for sure. In fact, if one of them had just stayed put by the staircase, Wai-Jeng would have been trapped. But cops, like all party minions, were creatures of knee-jerk response: Wai-Jeng could tell by the sound of the footfalls, echoing off the glass display cases, that both were pursuing him down this side of the gallery. He’d have to make it to the far end, take the ninety-degree turn to the right, run across the shorter display area there, make another right-angle turn, go all the way up the far side, and round one more bend before he’d reach the staircase and any hope of getting downstairs and out of the building.

Below him, the duckbill Tsintaosaurus was mounted on its hind legs. Its skull poked up through the giant opening between the floors, and its great vertical crest, like a samurai’s raised sword, cast a shadow on the wall ahead.

“Stop!” yelled one of the cops. A woman—perhaps the one who’d been near the coelacanth—screamed, and Wai-Jeng wondered if the cop had taken out a gun.

He was almost to the end of this side of the gallery when he heard a change in the footfalls, and, as he rounded the corner and was able to look back, he saw that the cop from the wang ba had reversed course, and was now running the other way. He now had a much shorter distance to go back to the staircase than Wai-Jeng still needed to cover.

The one who was still running toward Wai-Jeng was indeed brandishing a pistol. Adrenaline surged through him. As he rounded the corner, he dropped his cell phone into a small garbage can, hoping that the cops were too far back to notice; the bookmarks list on its browser would be enough to send him to jail—although, as he ran on, he realized evidence or lack thereof hardly mattered; if he were caught, his fate at any trial had doubtless already been decided.

The cop from the Internet café rounded the corner back by the staircase. Old Dr. Feng was looking on, but there was nothing he, or anyone, could do. As he passed cases of pterosaur remains, Wai-Jeng felt his heart pounding.

“Stop!” the cop behind him yelled again, and “Don’t move!” the second cop demanded.

Wai-Jeng kept running; he was now coming up the opposite side of the gallery from where he’d began. On his left was a long mural showing Cretaceous Beijing in gaudy colors; on his right, the large opening looking down on the first-floor displays. He was directly above the skeletal diorama with the allosaur attacking the stegosaur. The ground was far below, but it was his only hope. The wall around the balcony opening was made of five rows of metal pipe painted white, with perhaps twenty centimeters of space between rows; the whole thing made climbing easy, and he did just that.

“Don’t!” shouted the cop from the wang ba and Dr. Feng simultaneously, the former as an order, the latter with obvious horror.

He took a deep breath, then jumped, the two old men below now looking up as he fell, fear on their lined faces, and—

Ta ma de!

—he hit the fake grass, just missing the giant spikes of the stegosaur’s tail, but the grass hardly cushioned his fall and he felt a sharp, jabbing pain in his left leg as it snapped.

Sinanthropus lay face down, blood in his mouth, next to the skeletons locked in their ancient fight, as footfalls came clanging down the metal staircase.

Dillon Fontana made it to the gazebo first; he was wearing his usual black jeans and a black T-shirt. Hobo would not let him look at anything until he’d properly hugged the ape, and that gave time for Maria Lopez and Werner Richter to arrive, as well. Given his bulk, it was no surprise that Harl Marcuse was the last of the four to make it across the wide lawn, over the drawbridge, and up to the gazebo.

“What is it?” he asked in a wheezing tone that said, Anyone who makes me run better have a damn good reason.

Shoshana indicated the painting, its colors softer now in the late-afternoon sunlight. Marcuse looked at it, but his expression didn’t change. “Yes?”

But Dillon got it at once. “My God,” he said softly. He turned to Hobo and signed, Did you paint this?

Hobo was showing his yellow teeth in a big, goofy grin. Hobo paint, he replied. Hobo paint.

Maria was tilting her head sideways. “I don’t—”

“It’s me,” said Shoshana. “In profile, see?”

Marcuse moved forward, eyes narrowed, and the others got out of his way. “Apes don’t make representational art,” he said in his commanding voice, as if his declaration could erase what was in front of them.

Dillon gestured at the canvas. “Tell that to Hobo.”

“And he did this while I was away,” Shoshana said. “From memory.” The Silverback frowned dubiously. She pointed at the hidden camera. “I’m sure it’s all been recorded.”

He glanced at the same spot and shook his head—although not, she realized after a moment, in negation, but rather in disappointment. The camera kept watch on Hobo—and that meant it showed the easel from the rear. The footage wouldn’t reveal the order in which he’d added elements to the painting. Did he paint the head first? The eye? Was the colored iris added at the same time, or was it a final, finishing touch?

“The primate Picasso,” said Dillon, hands on hips, grinning with satisfaction.

“Exactly!” said Shoshana. She turned to Marcuse. “No way the Georgia Zoo will be able to put Hobo under the knife if we go public with this. The world would never stand for it.”

* * * *

“Caitlin?”

She looked up and her perspective on webspace shifted. It took her a second to remember where she was: in a stairwell at Howard Miller Secondary School.

The voice again. “Caitlin, are you okay?” It was Sunshine.

She lifted her shoulders a bit. “I guess.”

“The dance is winding down. I’m going to walk home. Wanna come?”

Caitlin had lost track of time while she’d immersed herself in the fantastic colors and lights of the World Wide Web; she felt her watch. God knew what had happened to the Hoser. “Um, sure. Thanks.” She used her cane as a prop as she got up from the step she was sitting on. “How’d you find me?”

“I didn’t,” said Sunshine. “I was just going to my locker and I saw you here.”

“Thanks,” Caitlin said again.

Caitlin switched the eyePod back to simplex mode, shutting off the Jagster feed and her view of webspace. They went up to the second floor, where Sunshine’s locker was, then headed back down and out. The evening had gotten chilly and she could feel the odd drop of rain.

Caitlin wished she had more to say to Sunshine as they walked along, but even though they were the two American girls at school, they really didn’t have anything in common. Sunshine was struggling with all her classes, and was, according to Bashira, a knockout: tall, thin, busty, with platinum-blond hair and a small diamond stud in her nose. But if she was that pretty, Caitlin wondered why she’d come to the dance alone. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. Sure. But he works evenings.”

“What’s he do?”

“Security guard.”

Caitlin was surprised “How old is he?”

“Nineteen.”

She’d assumed Sunshine was her own age—and maybe she was. Or maybe she’d failed a time or two. “How old are you?” Caitlin asked.

“Sixteen. You?”

“Almost. My birthday is in eight days.” It was starting to rain harder. “Is he good to you?”

“Who?”

“Your boyfriend.”

“He’s okay,” Sunshine said.

Caitlin thought a boyfriend should be wonderful, should talk to you and listen to you and be kind and gentle. But she said nothing.

“Um, here’s my street,” Sunshine said. Caitlin knew precisely where they were; her own house was just two blocks farther along. “It’s starting to rain harder—do ... do you mind?”

“No,” said Caitlin. “It’s okay, go home. You don’t want to get soaked.”

“It’s getting pretty late...”

“Don’t worry,” Caitlin said. “I know the way—and I’m not afraid of the dark.”

She felt Sunshine squeeze her upper arm. “Hey, that’s funny! Anyway, look, forget about that jerk Nordmann, okay? I’ll see you on Monday.” And she heard footsteps fading quickly away.

Caitlin started walking. Forget about him, Sunshine had said. God, she wondered what that asshole had said to people after she’d left the gym. Why, if he’d—

What the—?

She paused, one foot still in the air, totally startled by—

God!

By a flash of light!

But she had the data-receive function of her eyePod turned off; the Jagster light show was too distracting when she was trying to concentrate on walking. There should have been no light of any kind, but—

And then she heard it, a great crack of thunder.

Another flash. Seconds later, more thunder.

Lightning. It had to be lightning! She’d read about it so many times: zigzagging lines coming down from above.

A third flash, like—like—like a jagged crack in ice. Incredible!

What color was lightning? She racked her brain trying to remember. Red? No, no, that was lava. Lightning was white—and she was seeing it! For the first time—for the very first time—she knew what color she was seeing! This wasn’t like her arbitrarily deciding to call something in webspace “red” or “green.”

This was the actual, real color white. Yes, white is a mixture of all other colors; she’d read that, although she had never understood what it really meant—but she now knew what white looked like!