Gold's Price Page 7

  She was thinking of intelligence operatives. Spies. How they worked, how they thought, what they were good at. Good at finding assets. How to find assets? Willing assets? People you can use for information. You can find motivated people somehow. Money, Lust, Compulsion, Ideology. You can coerce them if you're ruthless enough. You can threaten them or threaten their families.

  Silver remembered. She had been with the KGB for twenty years. She moved in their circles, among them. It was useful. She, too, needed information. She, too, needed assets to please her gods. To stop the dreams. She'd seen their tactics, the photos of the daughter, away at school. Or the mother, headscarf, pushing a shopping stroller to the market. Leaning on it, the way an old woman will. Silver had been there, seen it done. Done it. She knew how.

  But there were other ways. Subtler ways. Find a target, someone you think might be useful to you somehow. Find them, give them what you want them to know, and have them do it, whatever it was, for you. Hypnosis could work. It was real enough, she'd seen that done. But it could lead back to you.

  No, if you wanted to be sneaky, really sneaky, and find an Oswald, maybe the thing to do is to find a bunch of Oswalds. Social media would let you hyper-target, would it not? If you were clever enough, and didn't want notice, didn't want your fingerprints on it, didn't want to be anywhere near it, so to speak, then of course, it could work. Plant a thousand seeds; maybe one will take root. More if you are lucky.

  So Carter, she mused, could be telling the truth. He was just fed up. She could relate. American politics was ridiculous, but Americans loved their ridiculous politics in ways a lot of other places sneered at. Certain sectors, military families, were more patriotic than most. More susceptible. Also, this was probably targetable on the Internet. On the Facebooks, YouTubes, and whatever.

  Buy ads. Plant the seeds. Promote certain videos. Game the algorithm that recommended certain types of content. If you were smart enough and had enough resources, you could even create content targeted to your ideal consumer. The disaffected patriot with access to weapons and to the target.

  Who could do this? Seemed scatter-shot if you were to try it, Silver thought, ineffective to the point of useless. But if you were really smart, like, if you were a really smart state agency with effectively unlimited resources, could you do it? She was trying to convince herself that it was still impossible, but could only get as far as improbable when she heard Carter returning.

  “Carter,” she said, smiling up at him. “How much do you know about artificial intelligence?”

  “About as much as them,” he said, holding up two dead rabbits by their legs. He tossed them to her. “I caught them, you clean them.” His eyes were challenging her.

  She sighed. How many rabbits had she cleaned in her life? She looked at them. “I’ve done this before, you know.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ve never liked it.” He sat down on his blanket, still spread out by their fire pit. “I do it, but I never get used to it. Grew up eating out of supermarkets, I guess.”

  “I grew up closer to the land, I guess.” She hefted the rabbits, massaged a stiff rabbit leg. “Good rabbits. Healthy. Good eating around here for them, and a good mix of predators. Cats and coyotes, I’ll bet.”

  He looked at her. “What do you mean?

  “Predators,” she said, fishing in her vest for her knife. She took it out, a six-inch jackknife she had liberated a thousand years ago off a dead man who had stared at her with reproof, blood leaking out of the hole in his forehead. “If there weren’t any, or too few, the rabbits would be scrawny, since they’d be competing for food. These guys are healthy.”

  He shook his head. “They were fast, first couple got away.” He put his one arm behind his head, one over his eyes. “But the net always works in the end.”

  She got to work. Rabbits weren’t hard to clean, and her hands did most of the work without her even needing to guide them. First, hang them with a length of braided nylon from a tree limb. Then, cutting. Snip here, a snip there. Bleed them out, which took a while. She chided herself for not walking deeper into the bush before she bled them. Blood draws scavengers. And predators.

  But she doubted there were any large animals in the California central valley, even a thousand years in her future. She’d seen nothing but small packs of coyotes, or wild dogs. She’d seen a mini-leopard on the scope from the Dutchman once, but not much beyond that. It had looked more like an overgrown house cat to her. No mountain lion, no bears.

  She had the skin off when she saw Carter watching her. “Whenever I see that, I think of a show I watched once, on Netflix. It was about the civil war in Liberia. Did you ever see any of that?”

  Liberia. She froze at the sound of that name. Africa. The smell of garbage in the street, the crash of the surf down by the harbor, a hotel, all in white stucco. Her arm through the elbow of—who was he? A civil servant? He wore a suit in her memory, light flannel, just this side of gauzy.

  She remembered him later that evening. They had made love? Fucked, she felt sure, like animals, the way he liked it. Hard and fast and her nails running up his spine, biting at his ears. She strained to remember more, but he receded into the distance, fading like a movie reel ending.

  “I remember Liberia,” she said, realizing she had been silent a heartbeat or two too long. “I was there, once, a long time ago.”

  “Before the war?” He asked. “I keep forgetting. Your story, what you said. You’re old.”

  Which war? She smiled, making another cut with the knife. “Yes, before the war, before World War II.” Then, she tugged, and the rabbit's skin began to peel off, like a little coat he was wearing. Peel it right off, Mr. Rabbit. Sorry.

  “I forget things too,” she told him, looking back over her shoulder. “I’m old. It comes and goes. Takes years and years for me to forget, which is something. But it goes. Until someone reminds you, then it’s there, some of it.” She shrugged. “But, there are some things I remember, which I wanted to talk with you about.”

  “Like what?” he asked, leaning back, his eyes shadowed by the crook of his elbow.

  “Like,” she said, “the woman in the bar. Who was she?”

  “Fuck if I know,” he said. “I talked to her for maybe ten minutes.”

  She frowned. “Ten minutes, and she gave you a dose of one of the most powerful drugs ever created?” She laughed. “Immortality in a pill, stuff the rest of the world was fighting over, and she just gave it to you?”

  “Like I said, she said it was cheap. Easy to make.” He stretched his neck. “It was a joke to her.”

  “What is this Bloom? Do you know?” She knew he didn’t.

  “Just what was on the news,” he said.

  “Which was?” she said, cutting the guts out of the rabbit. Slimy and bloody as always, no way around it.

  He looked up, and she saw him look away. Ah, pretense, this feigned tiredness. “It was nanotech, little robots that reprogrammed your cells. Down to your DNA. Like, changed you so your cells didn’t get old and die. Rolled you back to optimum health. Made you young. Kept you young.”

  Sounds familiar, she thought. “You were talking about Liberia. Why?” She laid the rabbit nearby on a scrap of tarp, picked up the other one.

  “That show, it just had some crazy child soldiers. You know, really horrible stuff. Those kids had turned into monsters; it was really disturbing. They were maybe twelve or thirteen, by the looks of it.” He licked his lips. “They had killed someone and cut out his heart. Those kids…they held it up to the cameraman, and it had tendons and gristle hanging off it. Some of them were eating it, passing it around. Eating his heart, raw.” He looked at her. “What the fuck was that?”

  She nodded. She said nothing for a bit. What to say? She could tell him about the kids who had followed the legions and how they behaved. It wasn’t quite as savage as what this civil war in Liberia, which she remembered, sounded like. But why? This video, this knowledge of what happened when law broke
down, when wild kids raised other kids. It was the start of the dreamtime. And not all dreams were pleasant.

  “I think we should go north,” she said, to change the subject.

  “In the blimp,” he said, after a pause.

  “I’m not walking,” she said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “Where did it come from?” He asked. “I don’t remember tiny maneuverable blimps. Not from before I was in jail. Or while I was in jail. We had TV and stuff. Some.”

  “After, I think. Chinese all over it, but English too. I told you, it was in Vegas. Just north of the city.” She finished the second rabbit in a few short, quick strokes.

  “What does Vegas look like these days?” He asked, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “I fucking hated that place.”

  She pursed her lips. “The streets are still there. I mean, you can tell where they were. Some concrete is still showing. You can kind of tell from the streets where the buildings were, but they are all jumbled up in little mounds. The buildings are all overgrown now. All those big buildings. Heaps of junk with dirt over it. It’s how most cities end up.”

  He looked at her, propping himself up. “How old are you?” He asked. “I mean, for real. I know it’s not supposed to be something you ask a woman, but I gotta ask.” It came out in a rush.

  So. Honesty. “Near as I can tell, about twenty, maybe thirty thousand years. Long time.” She snatched up her water bottle, splashed some on her hands, set it down and rubbed them together. She had a towel, well worn, legacy of the same bunker she’d found the Dutchman in. The towel must have been centuries old, but it was still whole, more or less. Like her, she thought. Like him.

  “I’m having a hard time with that,” he said, looking at her. “You look, maybe thirty.”

  “Look at yourself,” she said, shrugging. “You were on that mountain for almost two centuries.”

  “I had some kind of treatment. It altered me.” He emphasized the word.

  “So, I guess, was I. We went over this.” She looked at him. “Doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch.”

  “But that long? How do you, I mean, keep it together?” He looked down at his hands. “I am having a really hard time with this.”

  It gets easier, she could say. Hang in there. Immortality is a blessing? She could lie. She wouldn’t, though. Not even to a stranger she didn’t know. Not about that.

  Instead, she softened her tone. “I’d say it got easier, but I’d be lying. You get used to it after a while. A long while. I know it messed me up pretty good, at least once.”

  He looked up at her. His eyes were, she thought, haunted. There was sorrow there, a deep well of pain she could feel. “I lost a lot back then, and I’m just now, meeting you and talking to someone who was there, it brings it back. It brings it all back.” He shut his eyes tight. Shook his head, a quick jerk back and forth. “Nothing can bring it back, though. Nothing can bring it back.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Li studied the woman carefully. She tried to be sly but never seemed to be able to catch Gold unawares. Gold would turn her head at just the right time to catch her looking. She seemed to always know where Li was. She would glance up if Li looked at her too long, her dark eyes flicking at her. Once she gave Li a hint of a smile.

  This angered Li. She was angry at the woman, at her ability to do this. To read her. Well, of course I am. She is dangerous and a stranger. I want to know what she is about. Her plans. I want to understand her, she told herself while Gold slept, curled into a ball, back to her in the cage as they rolled along.

  She was guiding them, and neither Uncle nor she knew where or why. North, she had said, and then, after talking at length with Uncle, this changed to south. Uncle told her Gold and he had spoken of a place far to the south and west, where ships once flew into the heavens. Where her ancestors went, he said. Her people.

  She chided Uncle then, but not too harshly. Chided him for deciding things for them all without including her. Was she not a princess? She wasn’t, but Uncle didn’t know this. She’d lied when she found Uncle as a young girl and told him she was. She suspected he might not believe it, but he did not quibble with her. Hadn’t she brought him to Truck, the only other thing like him, to meet each other? Hadn’t she saved Uncle from life up on a dusty shelf, where she found him in a vault beneath that old house?

  It was once a large house, built into a hillside near the wide plain to the east. A ruin now, but it had been grand once. A Party leader’s house, Uncle told her later, belonging to a powerful family named Ba once. A powerful and smart Party leader had built it. Li knew about the Party. It was the big gang that ran things in ancient China. Like a clan, but bigger. Her name was Ba, she said, naming her clan, pleased she shared a pedigree with the powerful owners of that house. But Uncle would have sat on that shelf until the vault collapsed on him or his battery wore out. So he owed her.

  But also, she studied Gold because Gold fascinated her. She was older than Li, and looked not by much, but Uncle said she was ancient, by what she carried and how she talked. She is an old one, much older than Li, centuries at least. This sent a shiver down her spine, as she’d heard many stories of the old ones. They were vengeful, unquiet spirits. Those stories were always frightening. But she didn’t stop looking.

  Li looked out over the countryside as it flowed under Truck’s rolling rumble through the hills and valleys. Truck was not fast, although he claimed to be quick once, when she’d talked with him. He talked little, being simpleminded and focused on his tasks. Doing whatever task Truck was for. He told her that the ancients built him to move things and build things. He was strong, but old now. As young Truck, he had a top speed of eighty kilometers per hour, whatever that meant. He stopped talking for a while after that. And now, since she’d brought Uncle to meet him, he only ever spoke with Uncle’s voice.

  This also gave her pause. She’d brought Uncle, in his little black box, inlaid with old wood and golden wire, to meet beat-up old Truck. Before she’d even taken Uncle out of her bag, he’d begun a hissing screech. It was loud and rose and fell and then climbed to a shrieking whine so high she’d set Uncle down and covered her ears. Then it stopped, and they were quiet.

  “Leave me here, with Truck,” he’d said. “I will be safe if you put me on Truck’s fender, there.” Truck pointed, an odd thing, with his mangled finger, at his own fender, a broad flat plane of steel about the length of her body over his front wheel. So she did, but stayed nearby, and listened to Uncle and Truck singing, humming together, a beep and chirp here and there from Truck, with Uncle mostly singing.

  And after that, the next day when she returned, Truck spoke with Uncle’s voice and did what Uncle wanted to do. It was as if Uncle was Truck. She’d asked him, later, to explain it. She’d been young. Ten or eleven years old. Half her life ago. She’d spent more than half her life with Uncle, and a little more than that with Truck.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “machines like Truck can go bad.” Explaining that Truck was like this. In the past, he’d gone wrong somehow and Uncle couldn’t fix him. Not really. It was sad, Uncle said, but that was how it was. If he hadn’t overridden him, and controlled Truck’s mind, Truck might be dangerous. Truck was dangerous, he said. Truck had done things, bad things. “It’s better this way,” he said. “Better for everybody.”

  Truck was different now. The clan found him dormant in a building that looked designed to hold things like Truck. It was big, still with a large roof in places. There was a lot of old junk, too big to move or break down, or it would have been long ago dismantled by a clan such as theirs. They knew rumors of Truck, of course. Everyone said he was fearsome. Like a demon. He lurked in his building, sat and sometimes chuffed into life, his bright eyes lighting up the cavernous room with its crumbling roof.

  He would roar at people who disturbed him. Inchoate, scrambled words, whooping sirens like a bird but louder than ten thousand birds. Li saw him, with the other children, daring each other.
Children who threw stones at him to rouse him into life. But he didn’t wake, only rarely, when they got too close. His great arms would swing around, grabbing and snapping for them. But Truck, big as he was, was slow and clumsy back then. He never caught them, as none dared to linger in reach of those massive hands, each finger tipped with its own clawlike hand, larger than her head.

  Ha-pong, an older man, warned them away, but of course they hadn’t listened. Ha-pong walked with a limp, which he said he got from Truck when he’d been a child and the clan wintered there. “Stay away from that demon,” he said. “He is dangerous.” But they hadn’t listened. Why should they? Truck was old and slow. He was loud, but fun and scary to torment. He was sad, Li thought, even then. Like a sad, old, wounded animal, backed into his corner of the massive building, fending off years and years of clan children and their sticks and rocks.

  One day, when she was about twelve or thirteen, she went with the children to look at Truck. She went along to keep the youngers out of Truck’s way and keep them from being troubled by the older boys. It would be good to see Truck, and bring Uncle to him. It was a good walk from their winter camp to his lair. They jeered at him, some older, bolder boys darting in to smack at him with sticks. Truck seemed slower than she remembered from when she was little. Truck roared at them, in his hooting voice, full of static and crackling and strange words they didn’t know. The boys had run.

  To show them for fools, she ran in and climbed on Truck. On his back, and, as he rumbled to life, skipped away from his creaking arms, which tried to swat her away. Truck defended himself when troubled. He whined like a million, million bees, which Uncle later said was his fans, trying to cool the fires inside him with just air instead of water. It was Uncle who knew to fill up Truck’s tank so he stayed cool better. Stayed cool and could travel, like they were traveling now.

  She was sad to leave the clan, but it was time. Her father’s family had given up trying to find a match for her. She was too strange. A witch, some said, and Uncle played to that. He explained to the clan that she was a witch, and that she was under his protection. He would punish anyone who troubled her. To show this, he rolled Truck into their camp, booming this in his scary loud voice while she sat atop her newly installed cage like a queen.