COUNT ZERO

He watched her eyes, reflected in the mirror, dark eyes shadowed by the deep brim of the soft felt hat. Now they seemed to show a little more white than they had before.

“Okay,” he said, after a pause, and then added, “Thanks.” He fiddled with the collar of the shirt, turning it up in the back, down again, trying it different ways.

“You know,” Rhea said, tilting her head to one side, “you get a few clothes on you, you don’t look too bad. ‘Cept you got eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank...

“Lucas.” Bobby said, when they were in the elevator, “do you know who it was offed my old lady?” It wasn’t a question he’d pla

Lucas regarded him benignly, his long face smooth and black. His black suit, beautifully cut, looked as though it had been freshly pressed. He carried a stout stick of oiled and polished wood, the grain all swirly black and red, topped with a large knob of polished brass. Finger-long splines of brass ran down from the knob, inlaid smoothly in the cane’s shaft. “No, we do not.” His wide lips formed a straight and very serious line. “That’s something we’d very much like to know...”

Bobby shifted uncomfortably. The elevator made him self-conscious. It was the size of a small bus, and although it wasn’t crowded, he was the only white Black people, he noted, as his eyes shifted restlessly down the thing’s length, didn’t look half dead under fluorescent light, the way white people did.

Three times, in their descent, the elevator came to a halt at some floor and remained there, once for nearly fifteen minutes. The first time this happened, Bobby had looked questioningly at Lucas. “Something in the shaft,” Lucas had said. “What?” “Another elevator.” The elevators were located at the core of the arcology, their shafts bundled together with water mains, sewage lines, huge power cables, and insulated pipes that Bobby assumed were part of the geothermal system that Beauvoir had described. You could see it all whenever the doors opened; everything was exposed, raw, as though the people who built the place had wanted to be able to see exactly how everything worked and what was going where. And everything, every visible surface, was covered with an interlocking net of graffiti, so dense and heavily overlaid that it was almost impossible to pick out any kind of message or symbol.

“You never were up here before, were you, Bobby?” Lucas asked as the doors jolted shut once again and they were on their way down. Bobby shook his head. “That’s too bad,” Lucas said. “Understandable, certainly, but kind of a shame Two-a-Day tells me you haven’t been too keen on sitting around Barrytown. That true?”

“Sure is,” Bobby agreed.

“I guess that’s understandable, too. You seem to me to be a young man of some imagination and initiative Would you agree?” Lucas spun the cane’s bright brass head against his pink palm and looked at Bobby steadily.

“I guess so I can’t stand the place. Lately I’ve kind of been noticing how, well, nothing ever happens, you know? I mean, things happen, but it’s always the same stuff, over and fucking over, like it’s all a rerun, every summer like the last one...” His voice trailed off, uncertain what Lucas would think of him.

“Yes,” Lucas said, “I know that feeling. It may be a little more true of Barrytown than of some other places, but you can feel the same thing as easily in New York or Tokyo.”

Can’t be true, Bobby thought, but nodded anyway, Rhea’s warning in the back of his head. Lucas was no more threatening than Beauvoir, but his bulk alone was a caution. And Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didn’t quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous. This ran directly opposite to the rule around Big Playground, where kids who had no real clout whatever went to great pains to advertise their chrome-studded rabidity. Which probably did them some good, at least in terms of the local action. But Lucas was very clearly nothing to do with local action.

“I see you doubt it,” Lucas said. “Well, you’ll probably find out soon enough, but not for a while. The way your life’s going now, things should remain new and exciting for quite a while.”

The elevator door shuddered open, and Lucas was moving, shooing Bobby in front of him like a child They stepped out into a tiled foyer that seemed to stretch forever, past kiosks and cloth-draped stalls and people squatting beside blankets with things spread out on them. “But not to linger,” Lucas said, giving Bobby a very gentle shove with one large hand when Bobby paused in front of stacks of jumbled software. “You are on your way to the Sprawl, my man, and you are going in a ma

“How’s that?”

“In a limo.”

Lucas’s car was an amazing stretch of gold-flecked black bodywork and mirror-finished brass, studded with a collection of baroque gadgets whose purpose Bobby only had time to guess at. One of the things was a dish ante

“Sit down somewhere. You drive it like this: Ahmed, get our asses to New York, lower east.”

The car slid smoothly away from the curb as Bobby dropped to his knees on a soft pile of rugs.

“Lunch will be served in thirty minutes, sir, unless you’d care for something sooner,” a voice said. It was soft, melodious, and seemed to come from nowhere in particular.

Lucas laughed. “They really knew how to build ‘em in Damascus,” he said.

“Where?”

“Damascus,” Lucas said as he unbuttoned his suit coat and settled back into a wedge of pale cushions. “This is a Rolls. Old one. Those Arabs built a good car, while they had the money.”

“Lucas,” Bobby said, his mouth half full of cold fried chicken, “how come it’s taking us an hour and a half to get to New York? We aren’t exactly crawling...”

“Because,” Lucas said, pausing for another sip of cold white wine, “that’s how long it’s taking us. Ahmed has all the factory options, including a first-rate counter-surveillance system. On the road, rolling, Ahmed provides a remarkable degree of privacy, more than I’m ordinarily willing to pay for in New York. Ahmed, you get the feeling anybody’s trying to get to us, listen in or anything?”

“No, sir,” the voice said. “Eight minutes ago our identification panel was infra-sca

“Okay, okay,” Lucas said. “Fine. Never mind You see? Ahmed got more on those Tacs than they got on us.” He wiped his hands on a thick white linen napkin and took a gold toothpick from his jacket pocket.

“Lucas,” Bobby said, while Lucas probed delicately at the gaps between his big square teeth, “what would happen if, say, I asked you to take me to Times Square and let me out?”

“Ah,” Lucas said, lowering the toothpick, “the city’s most resonant acre What’s the matter, Bobby, a drug problem?”

“Well, no, but I was wondering.”

“Wondering what? You want to go to Times Square?”