The Robot and the One You Love | Page 6

as
the miles rolled under the Pontiac, and the chemicals they were eating
fired a million tiny darts up and down their spines and dumped huge
glass vats of acid into their stomachs. Jerome figured they had to stop
sometime. So in Wyoming, in a shitty little town that was half neon
fast-food strip and half lunar landscape, they pulled in under a clear sky
that was rapidly fading into twilight and stopped at the 80 Autotel.
The diener followed 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,