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insurance guys, real-estate types, vans with munici-
pal plates....
"Miles, where'd she go?"
"Lost her, Jack."
"Look, Miles, you keep the money in the envelope, right?"
"You serious? Hey, I'm real sorry. I "
Ihung up.
"Wait'll we tell her," Bobby was saying, rubbing a towel across his bare
chest.
"You tell her yourself, co,wboy. I'm going for a walk."
So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along,
walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just
one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics. I
didn't think, just put one foot in front of another, but after a while I did
think, and it all made sense. She'd needed the money.
I thought about Chrome, too. That we'd killed her, murdered her, as surely as
if we'd slit her throat. The night that carried me along through the malls and
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plazas would be hunting her now, and she had nowhere to go.
How many enemies would she have in this crowd alone?
How many would move, now they weren't held back by fear of her money? We'd
taken her for everything she had. She was back on the street again. I doubted
she'd live till dawn.
Finally I remembered the cafe, the one where I'd met Tiger.
Her sunglasses told the whole story, huge black
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file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt shades with a telltale smudge
of fleshtone paintstick in the corner of one lens. "Hi, Rikki," I said, and I
was ready when she took them off.
Blue, Tally Isham blue. The clear trademark blue they're famous for, ZEISS
IKON ringing each iris in tiny capitals, the letters suspended there like
flecks of gold.
"They're beautiful," I said. Paintstick covered the bruising. No scars with
work that good. "You made some money."
"Yeah, I did." Then she shivered. "But I won't make any more, not that way."
``I think that place is out of business.~~
"Oh." Nothing moved in her face then. The new blue eyes were still and very
deep.
"It doesn't matter. Bobby's waiting for you. We just pulled down a big score."
"No. I've got to go. I guess he won't understand, but I've got to go."
I nodded, watching the arm swing up to take her hand; it didn't seem to be
part of me at all, but she held on to it like it was.
"I've got a one-way ticket to Hollywood. Tiger knows some people I can stay
with. Maybe I'll even get to Chiba City."
She was right about Bobby. I went back with her.
He didn't understand. But she'd already served her pur-
pose, for Bobby, and I wanted to tell her not to hurt for him, because I could
see that she did. He wouldn't even come out into the hallway after she had
packed her bags. I put the bags down and kissed her and messed up the
paintstick, and something came up inside me the way the killer program had
risen above Chrome's data.
A sudden stopping of the breath, in a place where no word is. But she had a
plane to catch.
Bobby was slumped in the swivel chair in front of his monitor, looking at his
string of zeros. He had his shades on, and I knew he'd be in the Gentleman
Loser by nightfall, checking out the weather, anxious for a sign, someone to
tell him what his new life would be like. I couldn't see it being very
different. More com-
fortable, but he'd always be waiting for that next card to fall.
I tried not to imagine her in the House of Blue
Lights, working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her
body and a bundle of condi-
tioned reflexes took care of business. The customers never got to complain
that she was faking it, because those were real orgasms. But she felt them, if
she felt them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere out on the edge of
sleep. Yeah, it's so popular, it's almost legal.
The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the
same time, which has prob-
ably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the
neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways.
I picked up the phone and punched the number for her airline. I gave them her
real name, her flight num-
ber. "She's changing that," I said, "to Chiba City.
Thatright. Japan." I thumbed' my credit card into the slot and punched my ID
code. "First class." Distant hum as they scanned my credit records. "Make that
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file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt return ticket."
But I guess she cashed the return fare, or else didn't need it, because she
hasn't come back. And sometimes late at night I'll pass a window with posters
of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes star-
ing back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical, and sometimes the
eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her
far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves
goodbye.
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