Cyberpunk

and menacing smell of heavy oil filled the air. Johnny’s car stood openmouthed on black greasy concrete, surrounded by a slew of tools and power leads. It looked as if the poor beast had been through a rough grilling. Johnny hoped it had managed to hold out.
    The mechanic inspected them. Johnny had rarely met a black man outside the city. Tribal divisions were so stern it would have been pointless to send a white boy off the white squares, under no matter what inalienable flag of truce. But this man’s color was only the least of the signals he sent out. Johnny gathered that he was looking at the local God, the big chief.
    God was very dark, perhaps fortyish (but Johnny was always making mistakes about age out here), with sleepy narrow eyes and a whisper of moustache above his humorous mouth. Johnny liked him on sight; and was no less very scared indeed. He slid Bel to the ground but kept a tight grip. The wrist, not the hand. One learns these tricks of technique.
    The mechanic wiped his hands on a dirty rag.
    “You ain’t armed, boy.”
    A man without a gun on his hip was so peculiar he was downright threatening. Johnny didn’t mean to threaten anybody.
    “I’m a journalist.”
    “Ah-ha. Thought you said you were an engineer.”
    God speaks grammatical English, when he chooses.
    “Engineer—journalist. I’m an eejay.”
    God’s courtiers displayed a hearteningly normal reaction. Samuel giggled, nudged Ernesto in the ribs; Gustave hooted.
    “Hey, eejay. You wanna mend my TV?” Archibald grinned.
    Florimond in the suit jacket cuffed him and shrugged at the visitor, assuming an air of grave man-to-man sophistication.
    “Okay. So what story are you hunting, newshound?” Unlike the others, God was not impressed by the eejay tag.
    But Johnny was still recovering from Bella’s masterstroke: from finding himself sitting in a gangster’s waiting room with a two-year-old who was calmly taking the opportunity to get in touch with her emotions . . . Smothered hilarity maybe gave him an aura so inappropriate as to shift the balance. As the man spoke, the casual promise of death that hung around him became less palpable. Johnny’s territorial blunder might be excused.
    The courtiers grew quiet. Bella squirmed and tugged, displaying her usual pathological failure to read adult atmosphere—which at this moment made Johnny long to break her arm.
    “It’s kind of private.”
    “Let the kid go, boy. She won’t hurt anything.”
    Bella bounced free. “I won’t hurt anything,” she parroted smugly.
    She was gone, beyond arm’s reach. Gustave was lifting her up to peer inside the poor tortured car. Johnny felt sweat breaking out delicately all over his body.
    “Look. This is not necessarily the truth, but . . . I’m after the source of a kind of legend. You had a nuclear accident hereabouts, two years ago?”
    The reading in God’s eyes flickered upward again. Johnny had better not dwell on this subject—nuclear poison, two-headed babies, that kind of insulting stuff.
    “We had an incident.”
    “Okay, I’m looking for . . . this will sound crazy, unless you know something already, but I’m looking for a diamond mine.”
    “Diamonds.”
    “It’s like this. When you get a melt—er, an incident of that kind, a massive amount of heat and pressure is generated. The safer the plant, the less of it gets dissipated outward. It has to go somewhere, it goes down. You’ve got coal-bearing strata around here, not all of it even mapped. Under pressure, that old fossil fuel can be transformed into another kind of pure carbon. What I’m looking for is a deposit of blue clay, a blue clay that’s new to this area. From the blue clay, you get the diamonds.”
    Johnny needed all his professional skill to measure God’s reaction. He couldn’t use it. His attention was painfully focused on Bel: her position in the stinking cavern, who was touching her, was she being led near a door. It didn’t matter. God was stonefaced, neither twitchy nor incredulous.
    “I don’t know if this is exactly a newslead,” Johnny went on, straightfaced. “It’s my own long shot. I haven’t decided yet if my employer would have an interest.”
    God laughed softly, and shook his head in reproof (we superbeings must stick together).
    “If you dig up a diamond mine on your boss’s time, I guess those are her diamonds, boy. Take a closer look at that employment contract of yours, you’ll find I’m right. Which leaves you with