And somehow, those same McLure men recognized the man in the faded velvet, not as an individual, they didn’t know him, no, but they knew what he was.
And so did the TFDs.
His name, at least the name he used, was Caligula.
Plath knew he would have been the one to kill Ophelia. He would also be the one to kill her, if she ever threatened BZRK. She had seen him in action and could entertain no fantasies about surviving if he came for her.
Invisible lines connected McLure men and Caligula. Invisible, intangible calculations were made. Some scent in the air, maybe, some inaudible whisper in the ears.
The TFDs walked on by.
And Plath—Sadie McLure—walked with Keats past the McLure men, all of them smiling, a tense, alert welcome, and accepted the door held open for her.
“You okay?” Plath asked Keats.
“Just relieved not to have wet myself,” he said. “That won’t be the end of it. They’ll be waiting when we come back out.”
But Plath doubted that.
Keats’s hand closed around hers. She could picture what was happening at the nano level: skin like fallen leaves, fingerprints like the plowed furrows of some arid farm, sweat beads popped by the contact, mingling.
It was an absurd romantic illusion to imagine that they could avoid death so long as they held on to each other. But Plath, carrying the name of a poet, had a right to a small measure of illusion.
Dr Anya Violet, who had been dragged unwilling into violence, into lunacy and horror, sat forgotten in her room, in her narrow, filthy room, and against all odds and logic thought of Vincent.
Oh, she knew it was all part of the same insanity. She knew that Vincent had been inside her head, that he had wired her. She was a scientist, a trained observer. She knew.
Once she had found Vincent desirable. That had been honest. That had been real. She remembered meeting him for …at least she believed she remembered. She searched for the memory, ran the pictures back in her head, testing them for tampering. It was hard to tell. Hard to be sure; in fact, impossible to be sure. But she believed that first meeting at least, and that first visceral impression, had been real.
She had found him interesting. And sad. Sadness was not a terrible thing to her. She was Russian by birth, from Samara, located in the middle of nowhere. She was not an American raised on the idea that happiness was the natural human condition. She tired quickly of smiling people. Have a nice day. Hey, honey, smile.
She had seen wariness in Vincent, lessons learned, pain endured, limitations accepted. He was perhaps ten years younger than she, but that was only chronology.
Where it didn’t matter, Vincent was young. The other places, where it mattered, he was old, old, old and sad.
He had touched her that first time. Yes, of course he had targeted her. She was a scientist at McLure, a biot researcher and designer, and Vincent had even then been laying out a back door to McLure, anticipating the day.
So he had touched her that first time, and yes his invisibly small biots had raced up her shivering shoulder and across the neck and into her through nose or ear or eye.
Into her brain, there to probe and discover and spy and wire her. To prepare her for a continuing relationship that he needed and she wanted.
Yes, she had wanted. Yes, that surely was an honest memory. Yes, that first liquid feeling had been real, that first parting of her lips, that first animal response to him, that at least had been completely real.
And now she loved him.
Real love? Or wired love? In the end did it matter?
They had made love. Not once, more than once. Had it been enhanced by busy biots laying wire and transponders in her brain? He had claimed not. He claimed he wired her only minimally, only to obtain her …professional …services. He wired the scientist in her, not the woman.
So he had said.
Did it matter? Did it change the fact that her heart had been a desperate animal in her chest? Did it change the way he’d made her breath catch in her throat? Did it change the fact that she had gasped and made strangling, inarticulate cries into a pillow, and he had taken the pillow away because he wanted to hear her, needed to hear her pleasure, needed to experience secondhand at least what pleasure could be?
Maybe some of it, most of it, all of it, was false.
He had told her that it was not. Vincent had sworn that he only made her more suggestible to co-operating on the building of new biots, that he would never …That that sort of thing was not BZRK, not what they fought for.
Did it matter?
Anya sat in her one chair remembering, and while remembering thus was unable to work on the formula she’d begun to complete on the sketch pad, covered like a college chalkboard with obscure symbols.
There was a knock at the door.
Her eyes flew open. She waited a few seconds for the unsteadiness in her voice to calm. “Yes?”
There was the sound of a lock. The door swung inward, practically halving the room. Nijinsky stepped in.
Anya didn’t like him. He was beautiful and perfect and not interesting to her. And she knew that his relationship with Vincent was deeper than her own. She was jealous of him. It annoyed her somehow that he had chosen a Russian nom de guerre. The Chinese American model didn’t have a Russian soul, he was not a Nijinsky.
“Dr Violet,” he said politely. He glanced at the sketch pad, quickly at her, then resumed his usual mask of indifference. “I wanted to talk to you about …well, whether you’ve had any strange feelings lately.” Nijinsky raised his eyebrows and made a slight, wry smile.
“Why don’t you tell me what you mean,” Anya said curtly.