The Robot and the One You Love | Page 6

Jerome and Connie into the motel room, where they took a Demerol each and slept ten straight hours, falling out of the amphetamine haze and into a dark sleep like death. The diener stood in its own darkness, possessed by the memory of that one event, working through what in a human would have to be called the trauma of it, the pain.
The next afternoon, clouds hanging on the surrounding mountains laid down a chill drizzle as they dropped into Salt Lake City. Half an hour later Jerome had gone to manual and was driving the Pontiac along the edge of the overflowing Salt Lake, where dikes of rock and dirt had cut the road to two slow-moving lanes wet with seepage from the overflow. Robot cranes--giant mantises ringed with camera eyes worked the tops of the dikes while flagmen in yellow plastic suits urged the bottlenecked traffic onward. Farther west the road drew a straight line across the flooded salt flats, where gray sky and clouds and brown mountains were reflected in a giant watery mirror, two orders of being intersecting seamlessly, nature's excess flowing free into an unexpected beauty.
Jerome chewed a green capsule, gagged as it went down, then choked and spit into his hand. "I think I know what we're going to do," he said, then licked fragments of bitter amphetamine from his palm. "The diener here can send these assholes a phone message: Fuck with us one more time, and we leave the rotting carcass of your six on the roadside for the coyotes to eat. So pay now. Do it fast and safe--encrypt, squeeze, and squirt. I made a bad mistake the last time; I went after them like they were into some kind of ordinary security routine; but I forgot how much they might have to protect."
"And I forgot how quick they are," Connie said. "And how mean."
"Yeah. Anyway, I think we've run about far enough."
Jerome had always had apocalyptic associations with Nevada. Words like test range, underground explosion, and dead sheep came to mind. But that's where they ended up, in a small town just over the border, burning under the day's fading sun, where signs promised investors cheap entry into the "Next Las Vegas." All were faded to near illegibility.
Their room had steel furnishings, eggshell-blue walls. The lobby of the Flowing Sands had been late-twentieth-century pseudo-luxe: white ceramic and red Naugahyde, chrome, multicolored lasers running mindlessly through their programs.
Jerome lay on the bed, feeling strange.
Old blues, half remembered... songs about guns and knives and women--She's got a thirty-eight special, and hey momma, please stop breakin' down--he thought one of them might be somehow appropriate.
She stepped out of the bathroom wearing a light pink towel, crystal beads of water from the shower on her skin--
The one I love--
And she opened a black drawer and lifted a dark blue silky gown from it and put the towel aside--
put a pistol in a man's mouth--
She slid the gown over her head--
and pulled the trigger--
When her hot, damp skin pushed against him it erased an infinity of doubts--
(some special kind of blues).
The diener reached inside itself and pulled out a blue plastic lead with a silver plug on its end. Spring-loaded, the lead pulled taut as the diener stretched it and snapped it into the base of the phone. "You wish me to transmit now?" it asked.
"Sure," Jerome said.
And in the moment of the relays' closing, as circuits began to come together from Nevada to the Dominican Republic, it knew what it must say, now, and to whom.
A few seconds later, Jerome said, "That's it. It's all over. Let's get a drink." And to the diener he said, "You should recharge."
"I will do so," it said. It had further material to ponder: In light of its recent experience of irreversible change irreversible choice--it considered what likely would happen next.
Quick and mean, she had said.
Connie and Jerome were sitting over room-service breakfast the next morning when the door opened and two men in hotel uniforms--maroon jumpsuits with gold trim stepped inside. The tall one held a small black automatic pistol like the Colt in Connie's handbag. The short one went to the closet and pushed the button, and the mirrored door slid aside. He reached into the white-lit interior and pulled the cold bag from behind stacked black suitcases. He laid the cold bag on the double bed, split the opening seam, and took out the package. He unwrapped the package and with a small scalpel carved away a sliver of the lump of pink flesh inside and placed the sliver in a small black tube.
Connie looked at the diener, which was plugged into a wall socket. "I'm sorry," Jerome said, but she ignored him; she was looking wildly about as if for something that was not