A rare sight in winter, Mount Rainier’s impeccable snowcap glinted above the city, an apparition bright enough to make Pilar squint. Clouds rolled in from the sound, predictably. The mountain would vanish in moments. Pilar was oblivious of its beauty, for somewhere in a repeating loop in the back of her mind tires howled on asphalt and metal screamed. She heard the tinkling of broken glass and the call of an owl in the sudden silence. The sound track from the night her parents died was always the same, each noise in its place, a memory track laid down in nightmare, and it ran again now, over the memory of Jared sinking into bitter cold.
Rainier vanished in fog. On a flatscreen display, Whiteline’s translations of a night’s work on a fishing ship scrolled past, the routine comments of workers at their jobs. There was no mention of Jared. Pilar watched the words go by and altered them with idle brush strokes, making them look like pagodas and flying birds. Jimmy sat quiet beside her, a stodgy lump of discomfort who obviously didn’t know what to do with this situation.
“This is a bad time for you,” Jimmy McKenna said. “I should go.”
Janine’s absence was a palpable thing in the Seattle house, a lack that made the air colder, more humid. Pilar could see, still, Janine’s firm little rump marching off into the dawn, a warrior on her way to bait an Asian fox called Tanaka in his lair.
“No,” Pilar said. “I don’t think so.”
“Jared is—special to you?”
“You mean is he my lover?”
“Yeah.”
Was he? Pilar never had really thought about it that much. Jared did good stuff with his cameras, moved well. In bed, he knew the timing and the touches; he knew a woman’s capacities, and his own. He was handy to have around for sex, or talk, or no sex if that’s how things went. But Jared didn’t wrap strings around a bed, or a friendship, or a job—
“Yes, he is. More a friend, though.”
Jimmy nodded as if he understood what she meant. Maybe he did.
Paul and Signy wanted Jimmy picked over, turned inside out, wanted Pilar to find out why Jimmy McKenna existed in their space. The boy—now, why did she think of him as boy? In virtual, where he had insisted on staying for most of the night, Jimmy presented a deft, far-ranging mind that leaped and danced through the worlds he chose to show her; Jimmy was proving himself to be a brilliant observer of visual forms and a musical epicure of fey and eclectic tastes.
Afraid of flesh, though. Pilar hadn’t pushed him. She sought Jimmy’s trust; she intended to ensorcel Jimmy, more or less, for Edges’ purposes. She liked him well enough to want to force him to bloom a little, too, and Pilar considered for a moment that she might be able to do it without harming him.
This could be an intriguing little game, the capture of a Jimmy. They had fallen asleep together, as chaste as children. Jimmy had offered lovemaking in virtual, with himself in the muscular persona of a prince of dreams. Pilar’s refusal did not seem to surprise him.
Pilar smiled, remembering falling asleep to the sound of his soft breathing, and then a kinesic memory came to her with nauseating force, Jared struggling to reach the surface, hampered by the thick bulk of his parka. Somewhere far away, broken glass fell on frozen asphalt with a sound like crystal bells.
Pilar did not want to be alone.
“We—they, I mean Paul and Signy, want me to find out why you’re here. Paul thinks you queered our transmissions with that music of yours.” Pilar could see protest on Jimmy’s face. “Yeah, I told him you didn’t, and he knows it keyed a scrambler sequence that came from the Siranui, but he still thinks you knew it would fuck us over.”
“No. God damn, no. I told you it came from something I got off the net. An idea for a melody—I scored it for you, Pilar, but there wasn’t anything in it that could have done what you guys say it did.”
“You wrote it?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Good stuff, McKenna. You’re a composer?”
“I mess around, yeah.” Jimmy looked at his hands, palms up in his lap, as if they were alien creatures. They were soft hands, short and square, but the fingers tapered pleasantly. Jimmy’s fingerpads were not the spatulate, flat sort that Pilar, for no reason she could define, disliked. Pilar reached for Jimmy’s hands and drew them up to her face so he would look at her.
“Jimmy, it is beautiful work. Now. Tell me. Why did you send it to me?”
“I thought you would like it.”
“Wrong answer. Why did you send it to me?” Pilar held Jimmy’s palms together so that he looked as if he were praying. She stroked the backs of his hands.
“Because. Because of the ‘Shelter’ song.”
Oh, lord, she should have known. Tongue firmly in cheek, Pilar had set the simplest of melodies against a rhythm section of Brazilian drums, and filmed herself in the most hackneyed of brass-bra fantasy costumes, a judicious scattering of amethysts, their facets reflecting chrome and washes of synchronous blue light. The song’s words were easy nursery words, crooned soft and speaking of shelter, refuge, safety.
Paul always called the work “Mama Neon.”
Pilar looked at Jimmy’s wary eyes, so ready to be hurt, and saw in them—worship.
“I wanted to meet you. So I got your address from Whiteline. He talked about this company you had going. When he said that someone was after an avant group to do some publicity, I sent them Edges’ name. Because I’d heard…”
“That I lost my shirt on the tour.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said.
“Did you come and see me?”
“I came to the San Francisco show.”
“Did you like it? The show?”
“No.” Jimmy’s eyes searched Pilar’s face for reaction. She tried not to give one. “I didn’t think it was really you,” he said.
Not Mama Neon. Just a woman onstage. What had led him, then, to seek the flesh-and-blood Pilar who lived in this house? Brave man, Jimmy, to dare the imperfections of a woman live and blemished, who, at the moment, smelled of a night’s hard work.
“Jimmy? Who else heard your music? Did you play it for anyone?”
“Uh, yeah. Just for one person, and she’s just in the net anyway. It’s not someone who would, like, know you.”
“Who?” Pilar asked.
“She was in Sri Lanka, so I didn’t think it would matter.” Jimmy swallowed on what looked like a dry throat. Pilar thought of coffee that she hadn’t yet had, that Janine usually made.
“Who?”
“Evergreen. That’s the only name I know for her. She found me when I was on that job in Houston. You know, where I met Signy for the first time. Whiteline got me the job; he said Gulf Coast wanted someone who was good with tolerance-specific graphics.” He paused, apparently seeing from her expression that she didn’t know what he was talking about. “I can turn numbers into beautiful things, Pilar. Things to pick up and hold, and push around. Dr. James McKenna, Ph.D. in physics, but what I do is structural analysis, in virtual.”
“Evergreen,” Pilar said. “Where is she now, Jimmy?”
“I don’t know. She’s gone,” Jimmy said.
“Gone? Gone where?”
“Whiteline said somewhere in Japan. He thinks.”
“You miserable little shit,” Pilar said. Edges had been sold. To Tanaka? To a Tanaka rival? To a competing company, one of the conglomerates who arbitrarily sent hackers searching the net to tangle new companies just for practice? Jimmy hadn’t even been paid for messing them around, and that was the saddest thing of all. Pilar got up from her chair and walked away from him. She wanted coffee.
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “I’ll go now.”
“The hell you will,” Pilar called over her shoulder. “You’ll come in here, right this minute, and wash up some coffee mugs.”
“Paul?” Pilar yelled at the kitchen mike.
“I’m looking for her,” Paul’s voice said.