Bleeding Edge - Pynchon Thomas - Страница 80
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“You’re part of this project?”
“Only here to have a look. Find out how long I can stay just at the edge of the beginning before the Word, see how long I can gaze in till I get vertigo—lovesick, nauseous, whatever—and fall in.”
“You have an e-mail address?” Maxine wants to know.
“Kind of you, but maybe I won’t come back. Maybe one day you’d look in your in-box and I won’t be there. Come on. Walk with me.”
They reach a sort of observation platform, dangerously cantilevered out from the ship into high hard radiation, vacuum, lifelessness. “Look.”
Whoever she is, she’s not carrying a bow and arrows, her hair isn’t long enough, but Maxine can see she’s gazing downward at the same steep angle, the same space-rapt focus at infinity, as the figure on the DeepArcher splash page, gazing into a void incalculably fertile with invisible links. “There’s a faint glow, after a while you notice it—some say it’s the trace, like radiation from the big bang, of the memory, in nothingness, of having once been something . . .”
“You’re—”
“The Archer? No. That one is silent.”
• • •
BACK IN MEATSPACE, needing somehow to talk to somebody about the new, and soon she guesses unrecognizable, DeepArcher, Maxine calls Vyrva’s mobile number. “I’m just headed down into the subway, I’ll get back to you when I have reception again.” Maxine is not an old hand at cell-phone shenanigans but knows nervous when she hears it. A half hour later Vyrva, allegedly just back from the East Side, shows up at the office in person dragging a heavy-gauge trash bag stuffed full of Beanie Babies. “Seasonal!” she cries, pulling out one by one little Hallowe’en bats, grinning jack-o’-lanterns in witch hats, ghost bears, bears in capes done up as Dracula, “Ghoulianne the Girl Ghost, see, with the little pumpkin, isn’t she cute!”
Hmmm yes something slightly manic about Vyrva this morning, the East Side to be sure can have this Munchkinetic effect on people, but—retro-CFE circuits now fully kicked in—it occurs to Maxine that the Beanie Babies could have been a cover all the time, couldn’t they, for activities less in the public interest . . .
Phatic how’s Justin, how’s Fiona, all fine thanks—a shifty flicker of the eyeballs here?— “The guys . . . I mean, we’re all stressed lately, but . . .” Vyrva putting on a pair of lavender-lens wire-rims, five dollars on the street, any number of reasons why right now, “We came to New York, we all did, so innocent . . . Back in California it was fun, just write the code, go for the cool solution, the elegance, party when you can, but here, more and more it’s like—”
“Growing up?” maybe a little too reflexive.
“OK, men are children, we all know that, but this is like watching them give in to some secret vice they don’t know how to stop. They want to hang on to those old innocent kids, you can see it, it’s this terrible disconnect, the childlike hope and the depravity of New York meatspace, it’s becoming unbearable.”
Dear Abby, I have this friend with a big problem . . .
“You mean, unbearable for you . . . somehow . . . emotionally.”
“No,” Vyrva with a rapid flash of eye contact, “for everybody, as in a-little-goes-a-long-way, pain-in-the-ass unbearable.” Chirpy yet snarling delivery, all too familiar in Maxine’s line of work. Maybe also an appeal for understanding, hopefully on the cheap. This is how they get when the audit hooks start pulling up evidence they thought they’d deep-sixed forever, when the tax man sits there across the desk with his office thermostats cranked all the way up, stone-faced, puffing on an IRS-issue stogie, waiting.
Careful to keep it subtext-free for the moment, “Maybe it’s business that’s getting to them?”
“No. Can’t be pressure about the source code, not anymore, they’re out from under all that now. You can’t tell anybody, but they’re going open source.”
Pretending not to have heard the news already, “Giving it away? Have they looked at the tax situation?”
According to Vyrva, Justin and Lucas were out one evening at the brightly lit bar of some tourist motel way over in the West Fifties. Huge-screen TVs tuned to sports channels, fake trees, some of them twenty feet tall, long-haired blond waitresses, an old-school mahogany bar. A lot of convention traffic. The partners are drinking King Kongs, which are Crown Royal plus banana liqueur, and reviewing the room for familiar faces when they hear a voice to which time has been at best disrespectful going, “A Fernet-Branca, please, better make that a double, with a ginger-ale chaser?” and Lucas does a spit take with his drink. “It’s him! That crazy motherfucker from Voorhees, Krueger! He’s after us, he wants his money back!”
“You’re being paranoid?” Justin hopes. They hide behind a plastic bromeliad and observe squintingly. The packaging is a little different these days, but it seems to be Ian Longspoon all right, last seen years ago just having spun out in the Sand Hill soapbox derby. Being approached now by a compact individual in Oakley M Frames and a neon avocado lounge suit. Justin and Lucas instantly recognize Gabriel Ice in some notion of deep disguise.
“What would Ice be meeting our old VC, on the sly, to talk about?” Lucas wonders.
“What would they have in common?”
“Us!” Both at once.
“We need to look at those cocktail napkins, and quick!” They happen to know the motel security guy here and are presently back in his office scrutinizing a bank of CCTV displays. Zooming down on the Ice/Longspoon table, they can make out strange soggy diagrams full of arrows, boxes, exclamation points plus what sort of look like giant letter J’s, not to mention L’s . . .
“You think?”
“It could stand for anything, couldn’t it?”
“Wait, I’m trying to think . . .” Each picking it up in turn, tossing it back and forth to be reamplified, till before long it’s totally paranoid panic and their security friend, grown grumpy, is showing them the back way out.
“What the boys concluded,” Vyrva summarizes, “is that Ice was trying to get Voorhees, Krueger to invoke protective covenants, take the business away, and then sell off the assets—the DeepArcher source code, basically—to Ice.”
“Fuck it,” Justin later in the night, with unexpected bitterness, “he wants it, let him have it.”
“Ain’t like you, bro, what’ll happen next time we need to get lost?”
“I won’t.” Justin sounding a little melancholy about it.
“Maybe I will,” Lucas declares.
“We can invent someplace else.”
“Justin, what is this town doing to our heads, man, we never used to be like this.”
“I don’t think it’s any better back in California anymore. Just as corrupt, we’ve been up and down the same streets together, you know where it all leads to, there or here.”
Vyrva, though technically a shiksa, let them go on, drifting in and out in a motherly way, offering snacks and keeping her annoyance to herself. Now, to Maxine, “Talk about lost. Sometimes . . .”
Here it comes, the fraudster’s lament. Maxine could run workshops in Conquering Eyeroll. “And . . .”
“And if they’re lost, then I think,” barely audible, “it could be my fault.”
In comes Daytona with a sack full of Danishes and a plastic coffee carafe. “Yo Vyrva, surf’s up, baby!”
Vyrva is enough of a sport to stand and bump butts with Daytona and contribute eight bars of backup on the seldom-heard oldie “Soul Gidget” before Daytona, giving her a look, remarks, “Should be singin ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ you lookin a little anorexic, girl, need some them po’k chops! Collard greens!”
“Fried peach pies,” Vyrva wan but game.
“What I’m talk’n about,” waving herself back out the door. “Hold that mayo!”
“Vyrva—”
“No. It’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, oh, Maxi . . . I’ve been going through such guilt?”
“If you’re not Jewish, you have to have a license, cause we hold the patent, see.”
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