Black Glass Read online

  His wife Sing, a small, tidy, wearily-smiling Chinese woman in overalls, clipping away dead leads from a shrub, waved to Candle, and went through the glass doors into the apartment, probably to make tea.

  “Your flowers are looking good,” Candle allowed. “Kind of ... lush.”

  “Oh, I rolled back the covering yesterday, we had a freshwater rain ... they liked it very much ...” Kenpo was perhaps 65 years old—but it was hard to tell with him. He was scowling over some roses, trying to prop them up with a stick. “Some birds damaged these plants. The birds are desperate for food. They get sick, feeding at the dump. You get sick of the dump too, eh? That why you’re here?”

  He looked up at Candle, flashing his yellow, widely spaced teeth. Candle was relieved to be here with him. “Maybe. Where I’m working now isn’t healthy.”

  “You’re looking for your brother? That’s what I heard.”

  “I think I know where to find him.”

  “I tried to get him to come and talk to me. You brought him twice, I thought maybe he would come on his own one time. I sent a message through that girl of his. But no. Ah, here is the tea already. Let’s sit here ...”

  Candle and Kenpo sat at a wooden picnic table, eating small, mostly-tasteless cookies, drinking jasmine-scented green tea from small cups, and spoke of various things, as Kenpo waited to learn the real purpose of Candle’s visit. To one side, between two rose bushes, sat a three-foot-high cracked bronze figure of Shiva-Buddha—four-armed, with a third eye, but without the crescent moon, and the matted, twisted hair that some Shivas had. Usually it was either Buddha or Shiva, not both. This statue of the Shiva-Buddha was smiling, his face as detached and beneficent as any conventional Buddha, because, Kenpo had told him, “He is centered in Shankara”, the benevolent aspect of Shiva. But in one of his four hands was a sword; he could become the destroyer, as needed.

  “How have you been?” Candle asked.

  Kenpo sighed. He liked to indulge in a little self-pity with longtime students. “Oh—I had a relapse into opium-smoking.”

  “Did Mai find out?”

  “Yes, yes, she got very angry. I had a little withdrawal, not too bad this time. But you know—the world cries out for help. I hear the screams. I can do nothing for most people. Billions in misery, and I can do nothing. The sea dying, I can do nothing. The forests withering, I can do nothing! Nothing!” He shook his head. “Occasionally—I have to stop up my ears somehow. For a little while. Perhaps I’ll take up drinking again instead.”

  “Oh, Master Kenpo—last time—!”

  “I know! I was horrible! It was truly fucked up. But of course we know perfectly well what I must really do.”

  Candle nodded: Kenpo meant meditation. More, deeper meditation. He taught that meditation was active and that even one man consciously meditating helped the world, if only just a little. “Are you still involved in Convergent Rivers?” Convergent Rivers was a spirituality wi-site where there was more argument than convergence, as Candle remembered it.

  “Oh ... that.” Kenpo chuckled. “A Theravada monk led the charge against me, about two years ago. ‘You cannot be a Shiva Buddhist, there is no such thing, one is Hinduism and the other Buddhism, they are separate traditions! You are a fraud!’ In so many words.”

  “You told him it was a small sect—?”

  “I didn’t bother. I told him the truth: I am a Buddhist. But we use Shiva, borrowed from the Hindus, as a symbol for our particular school. We are warriors for Buddha; we appreciate the destructive side of life as the partner of the constructive. He hated that idea—though many of them have taken up arms against the Chinese. Oh, they got so emotional, so identified! I stopped going back. Also some people, I think, were sending their semblants to the chats. I don’t want to talk to a damned semblant. They’re a social curse ....”

  “You have sitting groups, still, I assume. I thought ...”

  Kenpo poured Candle a little more tea. “You ready to come back?”

  Candle sighed. “I have to try something. When they let me go ... my old life was gone. My career. My identity. I’m afraid I’m going to lose control. I have enemies. If they decide to move against me ...”

  “If you must defend yourself, do not hesitate. Defend! I will help.”

  “It’s not defense I’m worried about.”

  “You’re worried you may lose control—and go after them? You may kill someone?”

  “If they push me much more. They already tried to kidnap me.”

  “Really! How tiresome.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here. I put you at risk.”

  “Nonsense,” Kenpo said, his face unreadable. “And as for your feeling disoriented—it’s about time! You should not be oriented to the world we have made. You should be oriented to the underlying reality. First you must see yourself and the human world as it is! You had a false orientation, before. You didn’t belong in law enforcement. I didn’t want to say. It was your life. But they are all corrupt, now, the police. Even worse than four years ago, Richard. The whole world, for decades now ... oh, it started in the late-twentieth century. People have always been sleeping, bumbling, shambling zombies, of course. But there was some kind of guidance, some times. Not so much from institutions like churches. But from families. People took care of each other more. Families stayed together. People did things together. Now—children let their parents live homeless. For two generations now, home is the mesh, virtual space ...” He shrugged. “They have all lost their center. They’re not even representing themselves to the world—they’re represented by semblants, more and more. Societies at least, for better or worse, once had a center, a moral center, a character—they’ve lost it. They were eaten up and digested and now they have become what has eaten them, and its dreams are everyone’s dreams—its bad dreams! But that is like being in a bardo state, after death. Remember yourself—remember and you will find your way to the higher place. Come, Richard—let us sit. Let us just sit. Let the world crumble around us, let them riot and wrangle and roar and we will just sit, together. Come ...”

  He led Candle to the other side of the deck, where sitting pillows were arranged in a semi-circle. A padded chair, facing the pillows, was set up for Kenpo. He sat down facing the semi-circle, grunting, muttering to himself, sniffling a bit. Then he settled into his sitting posture, scowled, closed his eyes.

  Not bothering to remove his shoes or coat, Candle sat on a pillow facing him, arranged his legs to try to prevent them from going to sleep, straightened his back, closed his eyes, and found his way into the meditative state. It took several tries—he always got sidetracked into free-association at first.

  Kenpo didn’t use the visualization that many other schools used; he regarded it as a crutch. He emphasized restful mindfulness. Candle allowed his muscles to relax, while keeping his back straight; he enclosed himself in a cone of attention. The cone was warped by passing thoughts, by restlessness ... and it disintegrated. He restored it, time and again.

  He began to sense himself and to feel himself, as he really was. He realized he was in pain. He had been in pain since the ReMinding. In pain since walking out of that prison. But he had turned away from seeing the source of the pain. But the pain was there. Driving him. Which is why he’d gotten drunk that night.

  He was in pain because his brother ... his brother had so easily, so cavalierly let him go to jail. Had seemed indifferent to what was being done for him. No, not indifferent. Just ... as if it was normal, it was his due. And Danny hadn’t been there when Candle had gotten out of jail.

  Candle looked at the pain, weighed it in his inner hand, felt its texture and energy, and color—it was indigo blue tinged with red—and detached himself from it, while remaining aware of it ...

  He felt some relief. A new inner orientation.

  Then an image sprang into his mind ...

  He saw the birdseye drone that Rina had destroyed, that day. He saw it turning to watch her, in the bar; he saw her danc
ing up to the drone and netting it. Smashing it.

  Then he seemed to see the undermarket room. To see it from above, near the ceiling. Through a crisp but slightly fish-eyed video camera ...

  His eyes popped open. Kenpo’s eyes opened at the exact same instant. “What is the matter? You have not been sitting so long ...”

  Candle stood, wanting to hurry to Shortstack and that room. But he didn’t want to offend Kenpo. He knew, though, that it was actually quite difficult to truly offend Kenpo. “I’ve just realized ... there’s something ...”

  “That’s why you sit with me—to realize something, you knot-head.”

  “No, I mean—something just came up that was in my ... it’s like I was thinking about it unconsciously and—I just realized I have to do something about it.”

  “Yes, yes, that will happen—just go!” Kenpo waved him away, yawning. “But you come back when you can. Call me if you need help. And try not to go on the offensive unless it’s the intelligent thing to do.”

  Candle bowed to Kenpo, in the traditional manner—something he rarely did—and hurried across the deck. He pushed through the gate, went pounding down the stairs. He had to call Shortstack. Or Nodder. He patted his coat pockets. He didn’t have a fone yet. Then he remembered his blueglove. He dug it out of an inside coat pocket, as he hurried down the sidewalk, looking for an auto-cab. The driving mechanisms were mostly not programmed to pick up people waving at them, they went along with dispatch.

  Heart thudding, he activated the glove, paused on the corner to stare into his palm. He tapped it, found the speed dial, called—and got the message that both Shortstack and Nodder were offline, and unavailable. He left a message—Emergency, danger, call.

  Swearing, he called for a taxi.

  “You got it blocked?” Grist asked. Or Grist’s semblant.

  Halido glanced toward the monitor with Grist’s face on it. “Yes—if they have people on the street outside watching for a raid, they won’t be able to call in. And they’re having a ‘temporary problem with their server’.”

  “Where’s Benson? Didn’t I assign him to work with you?”

  “Yeah, he went out for a smoke and never came back. I tried calling him, no reply.”

  “Why the sleazy little troll. What’s he up to? Any indication he could be working for one of our competitors?”

  There weren’t many competitors. But Halido understood him to mean other people on the Slakon board who were trying to wrest control from Grist. “He’s too clueless to do that kind of work, Mr. Grist.”

  “Then never mind. We got the flying guns in place?”

  “Yes, we do. It’s all in place. You on top of the feed for our surveillance Mr. Grist?”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  Could a semblant monitor something like that? Halido wondered. He wasn’t sure why he thought he was talking to a semblant. It was pretty much impossible to tell. “You’re waiting for Candle to show up, right, sir?”

  “Yeah, ideally. But we get them today no matter what. We don’t seem to be able to get anything more on what they’re doing, who they’re talking to. So we’re just taking them down fast and dirty.”

  “That guy Nodder isn’t there at the market.”

  “Well it’s that ‘Shortstack’ asshole who’s the big fish, how’s that for irony. We’ll go for it. Once Candle gets there. He is coming to the party, isn’t he?”

  “We don’t have him right now, Mr. Grist, so I can’t confirm. But I heard them talking. He’s expected ...”

  “Alright—I’ll call you back. I’m going to stay on top of this. We’re going to hit them soon and we’re going to hit them hard.”

  Grist clicked off and Halido took a long drink of his rum-topped coffee.

  Halido was looking forward to this. He pictured himself personally chasing that pretentious, bullying gingered up dwarf with a flying gun.

  Might do it that way. Chase him. Wound him. Chase him some more. Let him bleed awhile. Force him to crawl along in front of the gun. Then kill him.

  Could be real satisfying.

  There was no use trying to talk an auto-cab into going faster. No human driver to bribe. Just that superfluous steering wheel, moving by itself, like in an old ghost movie. A iNews display on the back of the front seat showed a couple of talking heads yammering about “the semblant controversy.”

  “Okay you can argue that it’s good for the economy, execs—or their semblants—working all night, and so on. But is it good for society?”

  He’d tried calling Rina, get her to go in person to warn them. But she wasn’t answering. He thought of calling someone else, maybe Zilia, but she’d never get there before he did. He was only a quarter mile away now. I could be wrong, he thought.

  But he didn’t think he was wrong. If the place was under surveillance did that mean they were going to raid it today? Probably not. Yet he had a strong intuition that that the surveillance was preliminary to a raid—and the raid was soon.

  One factor was what he’d learned about Grist, before the UnMinding. Grist had been all about decisive moves. If he had set up surveillance right inside the undermarket he’d be ready to file the papers, send in his privatized police, raid the thing hardcore and heavy. The underground cost Slakon pennies, nothing much—but Grist would want to send a message: This is what happens when you try to cut us out of the action.

  And now all contact was blocked. Which was suspicious in itself. So chances were—Grist was ready to move.

  They’d see him coming. They’d be hidden on the street, maybe in vans or trucks, and they’d see him coming and they might grab him right then ...

  “From what I’ve heard,” a talking head was saying, “the semblants aren’t really that efficient. What’s happening is, people put them out there to do their work for them, like they’re telecommuting, and half the time they don’t bother to get debriefed by the semblant and they get behind on the deals the semblant is doing, they don’t find out what the semblant knows.”

  “Oh come on, the semblant calls them and it informs them if anything important is happening–”

  “People are beginning to tell it to just handle whatever comes up. People going to their brother’s wedding with a semblant that’s watching from a rollmo. The whole society is in greater danger than ever of isolating–”

  Pundits dithering away. And the cab was in traffic ... but they were almost there. He could get out and run. But if he ran, Grist’s people, if they were there, would know he was trying to warn the market.

  Most likely he was being paranoid, he told himself. Not much chance they were raiding today, even if he was right about the surveillance.

  But when he saw the semitrucks, three on the same block, he knew. Same old jumpout-style cop technique, privatized or not. They were in the back of those trucks. And there on the right, self-driving car with two bored looking ladies chatting in the back. Only he had seen that technology before, he knew what to look for. If you looked close—and most people wouldn’t—you’d see the bored-looking ladies were not quite fully dimensional. They were an image in the glass of the side window; a digital film appearing in nanocells embedded in the opaqued silicon; in the black glass. Roll down that window and you’d see heavily armed privatized cops sitting inside, probably young and male.

  Candle tried calling again as he got out of the cab. Still couldn’t get through. Surely Shortstack or the ever-suspicious Brinny would take the sudden cut-off in communication as a warning sign and get out ...

  He rushed toward the building. Heard the metal doors on the back of the trucks rolling open behind him. Heard the whir of flying drones emerging.

  “What the hell are you worried about, Brinny, our communication’s gone down before,” Shortstack said, pacing, toying with his asthma inhaler.

  “Same time as our phone goes?” Brinny shook her head.

  “It’s all the same company ...” Shortstack used the inhaler.

  “’Stack I don’t like it. And where’
s that Candle of yours? How come this happens when that big useful tough cop pal of yours just disappears for no reason?”

  “She got a point,” Pell said. “Timing’s funny.”

  “Oh come on—coupla paranoids–” He put the inhaler in his mouth again.

  That’s when Candle shoved the camouflage desk aside and pushed into the room. “Evacuate, now!” he shouted as he moved about the room, staring at the walls near the ceiling. “Go!” Not there. Not there. Not there. Not there ...

  Shortstack gaped at him—the inhaler falling out onto the floor. “Why—what’s going down? We got some people watching the street–”

  Candle was searching the wall above the entrance. “Then your people didn’t feel like telling you about the unmarked police trucks. And here–” He found the small metallic insect-shaped drone, plucked it down with index finger and thumb, showed it to Shortstack: a tiny flying camera. He crushed it in his fingers. “That bigger birds-eye in the bar was a decoy so we didn’t look for this. So we’d miss the little one.”

  Shortstack turned to shout orders at Pell, Brinny and Monroe, but they were already pulling out the backups, activating the inner-melt chemicals that’d make cold lava of the inside of their machines.

  As the police drones began to bore through the walls.

  RUN, DAMN IT! HURRY—BUT WAIT! FUCK! ISN’T THIS—

  CHAPTER EIGHT?

  Flying guns and flying drills.

  They were shaped much alike: each about three feet long, and shaped like rifles with flattened undersides, splashed gray-brown for urban camouflage. Thousands of tiny holes on the guns drew in air, compressed it, released jets of air with exact control. The drills and gun drones were made of translucent nano-sheet polymers: remarkably light, and yet strong as steel; compacted pockets of helium helping the lift of the compressed air jets. The bullets were graphite mixed with polymers, and small. But very effective. Recoil was largely channeled into the compressed air channels. The guns were electrically driven, powered by resonant-wave-charged lithium-ion batteries.