Cyberpunk

charge of a minor. All he knew about the “blue clay” could be beaten out of him on the side. He could see how tempting it looked. They’d have Bella and the diamonds. Johnny would be dumped naked out on the road—dead or alive. Dead, for preference, rather than explain himself to Izzy. He should not even dream of taking the risk.
    On the other hand, all his instincts promised that the clerk was not laying that kind of trap.
    “I don’t know if you have the right idea about me. I take risks, that’s my job. But not for trivial reasons.”
    “I felt that. I can read people . . . pretty well.” She smiled, ruefully. “This may sound crazy, but I’ve always thought I could have been an eejay. If someone like me could have the chance.”
    “I wish that everyone could have the chance,” said Johnny.
    She nodded, head bent.
    “Mr. Micane’s got you all wrong, in my opinion. This blue clay that you’re looking for, it doesn’t represent any kind of material gain. The diamonds don’t mean anything . . . to you. What you really want is, like, a sense of living meaning in your life. Something rare and magic that could unite everyone.”
    “It’s true, living with meaning is a dream of mine,” he agreed—with the accent on the two special words.
    “I’ve had that dream too.”
    She gave him a long and tender look. It thrilled Johnny to the core. This was a real contact. He wondered how much she could be persuaded to tell.
    Cambridge tossed back her hair. “Okay, mister eejay. After the highfaluting come-on, do we have a deal?”
    He glanced around the room, swiftly up and away at the “defective” camera. “Um—can we go somewhere?”
    “You want me to take you home?” She walked to the door. Leaned there, in a pose from some ancient movie. “I come off shift in an hour. There’s a dark blue Nissan in the parking lot. I’ll meet you beside it.” She grinned up at the eye in the ceiling. “I’ll take you where there’s no protection. Can you do it without an audience, eejay? Ever tried?”
    Johnny put his gear together. He was rapturously busy for a few minutes, during which Bella vanished as she had by the roadside. Then he remembered her. He stared at the sleeping baby, chewing his lower lip.
    Next to the Japanese antique there was an ancient pickup, the color of its paint indeterminate in the yellow light of the oil lamps that guarded the hotel’s rear. Cambridge looked out of the dark cab. She was silently amazed.
    “I couldn’t leave her. She’d wake and be scared.”
    She looked him over. “Is that a gun in your pocket?”
    “No, it’s a spare diaper.”
    The clerk shook her head, pushed open the other door for him. He clambered, arranging Bel’s warm bulk in the baby carrier on his knees. They were jolting away, lightless, through the dark town, before she managed to come up with a comment.
    “In my world, men don’t bring up kids. They just own them.” She chuckled. “Hey, what happens when we get to our love nest? Does she like to watch, or have you trained her to take part?”
    Mental tape: a long drive. The darkness was haunted by the ghosts of well-kept lawns and scampering retriever dogs, boys on bicycles, flung newspapers and mailboxes on sticks. It was a world that Johnny had never known—inaccessible now except on records as hard to decipher as incunabula to an eye reared on print. How did people make out that stuff? Depthless, even colorless. Johnny imagined skills lost to him forever, the genes for watching b&w TV switched off in his decadent blood. He hugged Bella in her frame sling. The feel of her was so immensely reassuring, he thought all secret agents should have a baby to carry. When you can’t trust anyone, and it’s against the rules for you to be sure what’s going on—you hug your baby, and she keeps you sane.
    They parked among trees.
    “What the fuck was all that nonsense about jewelry, anyway?”
    Johnny shrugged. “Best I could do. I didn’t expect to be picked up like that. Had to send out some kind of signal. I could see I wasn’t going to get much chance to nosey around asking questions.”
    “You’re right. And you’re lucky. Micane’s not stupid, you know. He’s just short of information. Like all of us out here. Okay, come on. You take some tape of the crown jewels, and hurry the record back to your magic dome.”
    “Please. I don’t live in a ‘dome.’ I live in an overgrown shopping mall. With dirt in the corners, and