Video Star (Voice of the Whirlwind) by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online

off,” he said. He turned to her. “There’s room on the bike for two.”
    “To where?” She was looking at him sidelong.
    “To Mexico, for starters,” he said. A lie. Ric planned on heading northeast and losing himself for a while in Navajoland.
    “To some safe little country. A safe little apartment.”
    “That’s the idea.”
    Marlene took a hefty swig of cognac. “Not me,” she said. “I’m planning on staying in this life.”
    Ric felt a coldness brush his spine. He reached out to take her hand. “Marlene,” he said carefully. “You’ve got to leave this town. Now.”
    She pulled her hand away. “Not a chance, Ricardo. I plan on telling my boss just what I think of him. Tomorrow morning. I can’t wait.”
    There was a pain in Ric’s throat. “Okay,” he said. He stood up. “See you in Mexico, maybe.” He began to move for the door. Marlene put her arms around him from behind. Her chin dug into his collarbone.
    “Stick around,” she said. “For the party.”
    He shook his head, uncoiled her arms, slid out of them.
    “You treat me like I don’t know what I’m doing,” Marlene said.
    He turned and looked at her. Bright eyes looked at him from a mask of bright paint. “You don’t,” he said.
    “I’ve got lots of ideas. You showed me how to put things together.”
    “Now I’m showing you how to run and save your life.”
    “Hah. I’m not going to run. I’m going to stroll out with a briefcase full of happiness and a hundred K in my pocket.”
    He looked at her and felt a pressure hard in his chest. He knew that none of this was real to her, that he’d never been able to penetrate that strange screen in her mind that stood between Marlene and the rest of the world. Ric had never pierced it, but soon the world would. He felt a coldness filling him, a coldness that had nothing to do with sorrow.
    It was hard not to run when he turned and left the apartment.
    His breathing came more freely with each step he took.

26
    When Ric came off the Navajo Reservation he saw scan-sheet headlines about how the California gang wars had spilled over into Phoenix, how there were dead people turning up in alleys, others were missing, a club had been bombed. All those people working for him, covering his retreat.
    In New Zealand he bought into a condecology in Christchurch, a big place with armored shutters and armored guards, a first-rate new artificial intelligence to handle investments, and a mostly foreign clientele who profited by the fact that a list of the condeco’s inhabitants was never made public... this was before he found out that he could buy private property here, a big house on the South Island with a view of his own personal glacier, without a chance of anybody’s war accidentally rolling over him.
    It was an interesting feeling, sitting alone in his own house, knowing there wasn’t anyone within five thousand miles who wanted to kill him.
    Ric made friends. He played the market and the horses. And he learned to ski.
    At a ski party in late September, held in the house of one of his friends, he drifted from room to room amid a murmur of conversation punctuated with brittle laughter. He had his arm around someone named Reiko, the sheltered daughter of a policorporate bigwig. The girl, nineteen and a student, had long black hair that fell like a tsunami down her shoulders, and she was fascinated with his talk of life in the real world. He walked into a back room that was bright with the white glare of video, wondering if the jai alai scores had been posted yet, and he stared into his own face as screams rose around him and his nerves turned to hot magnesium flares.
    “Ugh. Mexican scum show,” said Reiko, and then she saw the actor’s face and her eyes widened.
    Ric felt his knees trembling and he sank into an armchair in the back of the room. Ice tittering in his drink. The man on the vid was flaying alive a woman who hung by her wrists from a beam. Blood ran down his forearms. The