“Can’t you get it fixed?”
“Well, yes, normally I’d ring for the butler—”
“Don’t start,” she snapped.
“Why are you so touchy about being rich?”
“Because I want to be loved for myself.” She said it lightly, a tossoff, as a joke.
“I didn’t think you wanted to be loved at all,” he said.
“Ah. Well, there’s a difference between wanting to be in love and wanting to be loved.” She shivered. “I’m freezing.”
“Shall we go down?”
She shot him a look from beneath lowered eyelids. “How do you not recognize a cue to offer me some warmth?”
He put his arm around her.
“Still cold,” she said.
He took her in his arms. She put her arms around his waist and pressed against him, the side of her face flattened against his chest. She breathed deeply. She felt her breasts flattening against his abdomen.
He was breathing in her hair.
“So it’s cold in your room,” she prompted.
“Sorry?”
“You were telling me about normal.”
“Was I? Sorry, I was busy thinking about football. Desperately thinking about football. Remembering all the details of a particular match . . .”
“Mmm,” she said. “You like sports?”
“Yes. I find sport to be an excellent distraction.”
“From?”
But she had lost interest in banter, really, and he didn’t bother to answer. Instead he ran his fingers through her hair and pulled her close for a kiss.
Her heart wasn’t in it. She was distracted.
“What?” he asked.
“Keats …Noah …Those beaches we were talking about. What if it was possible? I mean, what if I had a way to—”
A scream.
Keats and Plath froze. “That’s not Vincent,” she said.
“Billy!”
They bolted for the stairs.
Billy saw the palm of his own hand as an unworldly terrain, gently rolling hills crossed by an irrational crosshatch of ditches, some shallow enough that his nanobots could step over them easily, others deep enough to hide a nanobot from view.
He experimented by closing his hand slowly. The land curved up around his nanobots. It lifted him at the same time as it began to shut out the strong light. Fingers …They looked so huge! Like someone had made sausages the size of Metro trains. They were even segmented like a train, each section of finger like a car. They came together as they closed, blocking light, creating deep canyons in the sky. The surface was again covered in slashes, left right, diagonal, in every direction. It looked like some arcane script, like writing in a language he could never hope to understand.
He opened his hand slowly. The massive scarred fingers swept back and away, like watching one of those time-lapse things of a flower opening its petals, bud becoming blossom.
Light flooded over his troops, his nanobots.
His tiny army.
But enough of palms and fingers, he wanted to see more. He
wanted to see what the older BZRKers had always talked of in awed tones. He wanted to go down in the meat. He wanted to confront the beasties. He wanted battle.
He wanted game.
He glanced at Burnofsky. The man looked at him with an expression that reminded Billy of rats he had seen in the alleys behind his foster home. Knowing. Wary but not fearful. Contemptuous.
Billy sent his nanobots speeding across his palm—leaping, cavorting, even lowering the center wheel for a bit, though this proved to be not a practical idea on this terrain. He cartwheeled a couple of the nanobots in the process of learning this fact.
The nanobots raced madly, legs motoring along like blue-tinged cavalry. He picked the middle finger to climb. And it was a climb now: when they slipped the nanobots fell backward, like Jack and Jill falling back down the hill. But gravity hadn’t too much meaning for nanobots. A slip, a fall, meant little, which gave him a reckless courage. He laughed.
“Fun, eh?” Burnofsky said. “Hurry and get off your hand. Get somewhere more interesting.”
Billy shot him a suspicious look. Burnofsky prodded him. “Don’t be scared, little boy,” he crooned. “You’ll be part of history. A first. And I’ve got a ringside seat.”
“What are you talking about?”
Burnofsky made a lopsided grin. “It doesn’t matter. Game on, Billy the Kid.”
The nanobots reached the end of Billy’s finger.
He raised that finger toward his face.
In the up-is-down and none-of-it-matters world of the nano, the fingertip seemed to plunge down toward the face. Like a massive rocket aiming for impact, and Billy was riding that rocket.
Yee-hah.
Billy went around the circumference of his finger. He crossed from plowed farmland to an eerie moonscape, like the dried-out salt flats of Death Valley, hard-baked shale plates, not nearly as smooth down at the nano level as fingernails were up in the macro. Down here what was up there was like roof shingles.
But ahead, oh, there was the stuff, there was the world-wide wall of meat, the cheek, and above it a globe like the moon sunk into a pulpy earth. The eyeball. His eyeball.
The nanobots leapt from the crusty ground of the fingernail onto an endless curved plain of fallen leaves, and then slowed.
“Three minutes,” Burnofsky said. “It will begin now.”
The nanobots deployed curved hooklike blades from the ends of their rear legs. The front legs continued to power forward and the rear legs sank into the dried outer layer of epidermis, those fallen leaves of dead flesh, and began to plow them up.