by Pat Cadigan
Which was a very stupid thing to do, seeing as how I work for Bateau, and that’s about the worst news I’ve gotten in recent memory—ha, and ha—unless it’s the fact that I have also just surfaced from a week as a missing person. I don’t know what was in my mind when I did that, but I hope to hell whatever I was holding is recoverable, buried safe and intact. Because even the kindest-hearted pimp—that’s agent to you—will rip your brains out through your nose for freelancing on the sly.
And while we’re on the subject of bad news, I’m wondering if I should tell Anwar we should watch out for incoming from low-flying onionheads. Nah, I’ll just ruin his night even more. As it is, he’ll probably never forgive me for forgetting his pump. I’d rather think that memory got swept out along with all the stuff about Bateau, because I wouldn’t want to be the kind of person that would deliberately forget that about somebody. Just because I’m a hypehead doesn’t mean I got no heart at all. Though the fact that he’s wearing a pump and I’m not isn’t lost on either one of us, even if we’re not saying anything about that.
The pump has to be Bateau’s idea, but we’re not saying anything about that, either. We don’t have to. It tells me a lot about what kind of life I live now. Maybe when I get my memory back, I’ll be able to figure out why I ever wanted to live this way.
But then I don’t have to worry about it because we’re at the memory lane, and Anwar’s shoving me through the front door.
You Must Remember This is one of those places privs like to claim they’ve gone into on a sleaze-along. I saw some actually come into the waiting room once, about half a dozen of them moving like they were roped together in some kind of onionhead-style marriage. For all I know, they were. They looked around and then one of them said loudly, “Dear me, I thought there was a bar at this address,” before they all shuffled out again. And it’s not even that bad, by Downs standards.
There’s nobody in the waiting room and the wall screens are all blank except for one running General News off the dataline. The guy working the front is busy watching something in his desktop. I almost know him; it’s so close, I actually start to say his name, but it vanishes off the tip of my tongue.
When he sees Anwar, he leaps out of his chair with an eggsucker’s grin. Business must really be in the toilet.
“You got anyone for a general all-around boost?” Anwar asks him, jerking his thumb at me.
“This is a memory lane—what do you think?” the guy says, still smiling. “Sally’s taking them walk-in.”
Like You Must Remember This has a full appointment book? Who are they putting on for? I glance down at myself. Maybe for these fancy clothes I’m wearing.
Anwar grabs my arm. “Go on. I’m buying. Last time ever—come out with the goods, or don’t come out.”
He shoves me toward the door the guy is already holding open. I step into a long narrow hall and a woman sticks her head out of the nearest doorway.
“Booster?” she says.
“How’d you guess?”
I don’t recognize her. She’s got glossy black hair, golden skin, onyx eyes. The effect is heiress-with-a-bad-attitude. But then someone else comes up the hall to me and forget the heiress—this woman is starving to death. She’s not just scrawny, she’s bones wrapped in skin. A strip on the left side of her chest says SALLY LAZER in raised black letters. One skeletal hand closes around my arm and I have this wonky flash that she’s an Escort and all this is just an hallucination. That hand feels real enough, but all us hypeheads know that it doesn’t have to be real to feel real.
She steers me firmly into her room and the way she’s got my arm, it’s like she thinks I might bolt on a whim, which makes me wonder if maybe I’ve got cause to. Then I see the sandwiches.
Actually, I smell them first. She’s got this big bad old platter of sandwiches on a desk, not edible polyester but real food. You can always tell the real stuff by the smell, and if I closed my eyes, I’d think I was in a deli. She acts like they aren’t there, not letting go of me till I’m sitting on the chaise across the room, next to her system.
“Can you take your own eyes out, or shall I do it for you? No extra charge for the service.”
I put my legs up on the chunky cushion before she can do that for me. The chaise shifts under me and for a moment I’m afraid I sat down on one of those live things that’ll mold itself to any position, but it’s only a plain old adjustable. I’m still wondering why Sally Lazer would be working in a Downs joint if she’s scale enough to afford stuff like this when she comes at me with a long-handled scoop.
“Don’t point that thing at me,” I tell her and pop out my left eye. She’s got the holding tank ready for me and I hurry up and do the other eye before she thinks I’ve decided to leave the job to her after all But Jesus, what’s her hurry? Does she actually have a full appointment book, or do skinny people just have to move fast before they lose so much weight they disappear altogether?
Her system connections are brand-new, I can tell by the way they latch on to my optic nerves, no pull, no jerk, just smooth. Am I the first person she’s used them on? I’d ask, but the sensory cutoffs kicked in, and that’s a relief, because the smell of those sandwiches was starting to get sickening.
The relaxation exercise is some kind of sequential color-building thing, simpler than what I’m used to, but I’m not too picky. The last few hours have me docile enough to be a herd animal. Any minute I’m going to be chewing my cud.
I get the space of maybe half a thought-beat to wonder if I’m going to regret this more than not. Then I’m down in it, alone in the system with fast Sally Lazer.
It’s Davy Jones’ Locker all over again, except all the people and fish are gone. There’s just me and the mirror in the moody underwater half-light. Just me and the mirror, literally—I don’t even have a reflection yet. That makes me think this was an even worse idea than I thought when I first saw old Sally Lazer.
And speaking of old Sally, where the hell is she? I wave a hand in front of the mirror to see if I can stir up an image for myself. Nothing happens in the mirror but I get a faint sensation of a distant, answering movement that might be Sally signaling her presence. Maybe her mind’s as skinny as her body. That could be me carrying over impressions from outside, or she might really be starving to death.
Meeting someone mind-to-mind in a system, even the stripped-down kind dedicated to one function, you still get a fair amount of personal stuff in the drift, snatches of the other person’s inner life. But I’m getting damned fucking little from bad old Sally Lazer. She’s like the first draft of a facade personality for a system, operational enough for a test run but barely there otherwise.
Some kind of time passes, hard to tell what. Time in the system is a stretchy old blob, thick and slow in some places, brittle and fast in others. That’s all subjective, and only low-ballers who fell off the turnip truck yesterday believe that old story about the hypehead who died of old age in three clock-hours.
Sally Lazer—right, the name wants me to believe she’s built to travel at the speed of light, but she’d have to be a machine to work at the same speed every time, even down to the way her own inner time passes.
Maybe she can’t get herself in synch with me and that’s why she’s holding back. I wait for her to figure it out so we can live at the same pace in here. Anwar’s paying for this but if I’d known she was this stumble-headed, I’d have made her pay me.
Anytime you’re ready, Sally.
No answer.
… Sally?
It doesn’t pay to get puffed up when you’re on the business end of someone else’s system, but it’s a triple-A, all-wool bore to hang fire with minimal visuals and nothing to do.
About the time I’m thinking I’m going to envision the exit and get the hell out of here, a feeling comes over me, like dust settling. At first, I think it’s carry-over from what I was thinking before about being a herd animal; the weirdest shit will boomerang on you. But this isn’t me.
It’s Sally. Sally is … chewing?
Chewing. Sally’s not eating, just chewing.
Come on, get it right—herd animals don’t come in extra-emaciated economy size. Then the deli smell-taste rolls in at gale force, damn the torpedoes and no prisoners. Sally’s chewing away, chewing and chewing and I can tell by the feel that this is what Sally Does. We all got one Thing we Do, each one of us, and this is Sally’s: she chews.
I can’t shake the bad old feeling that she’s overridden her own cutoffs and she’s really chewing. You’re supposed to disable outside-world movement when you’re hooked into the system so you won’t sleepwalk, but Sally Does this so through-and-through, I swear if I put my eyes back in this second, I’d find her sitting at that desk blindly chewing sandwiches with the wires trailing out from under her sunken eyelids.
My stomach declares mutiny. The taste is bad enough, too strong to be good, but she’s killing me with this not swallowing. Chew-and-swallow is how it’s supposed to go, but Sally only chews. Only.
Talk about fed up, ha, and ha. I wish that were funny. I try to concentrate on swallowing, thinking that’ll teach her to hook in with me and force her bad Old Thing on me. Sally doesn’t even notice. Nothing gets her when she’s in peak-experience nirvana.
I stare at the mirror, concentrating. Something’s got to come up in it pretty damned soon. Okay, Sally, let’s see what you’re up to.
The mirror fogs over and the image comes in slowly. Some kind of office … but did anybody ever have an office like this? It’s full of fat furniture, pudgy overstuffed chairs that look like they’re fighting with each other for space, a desk with weird old bulgy sides—even the lights are globes with the texture of excess flesh.
Guess I found the secret Sally-land she lives in. She won’t last long in this business, putting her Thing in the clientele’s face, even in the Downs. Maybe she’s an ex-fetishizer who can’t kick the old subroutines. Fetishizers are just cut-rate neurosis peddlers with no brakes on their missionary mode. If I’d known she was one of those, she couldn’t have paid me enough to come in here. And Anwar’s buying.
And then I see her, crouching in the middle of all those obese chairs, too busy even to know I found her. What a bitch.
I start to move toward her and run a little moment of truth when suddenly there’s a new image in the mirror between us, blocking Sally from me.
Her. The Famous person, the one with her face on the fish. What the hell?
No, I’m wrong, it’s not her after all, it’s someone else altogether.
No, wrong again. No, not wrong, exactly, just not quite right. Now, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? How do I do this shit to myself?
Wait a minute, says the other woman in the mirror. This is what you’re looking for. She holds one hand out, waving me closer to the mirror. There’s something shiny in her palm.
I’ve killed before. That’s okay. That’s right. The guy was asking for it.
That’s how it goes when you bet your life on a roulette wheel and lose. I remember:
An antique roulette wheel in a sky-island. A sky-island—if the Royale is uptown, a sky-island is like … heaven. They were all overdressed there, period costumes from some time in the past where everybody overdressed, and it was like they were all moving in slow motion. Who could move any other way under all those layers of brocades and silks and lace?
The guy was wearing stiff-looking black clothing, funny stand-up shirt collar, funny tie, and a coat that split into two panels—tails, he called them. Skin the shade of rich hardwood, but only here in the sky-island. Anywhere else, he was little more than a pile of dark ashes, tubes growing out of every hole he had and a few holes he never used to have.
The siege of adult-onset progeria, he told me. Happens when the body has taken too many rejuvenation treatments—the cells suddenly react to the restoration drugs fry accelerating the aging process. Like Nature gives you only so many reversals before she slams her hand down on the fast forward button.
But in the sky-island’s main gaming salon, he was in full healthy bloom in the golden light slanting through the windows running all around the place. On one side, you could look out and see the sun hanging above the cloud line, waiting; on the opposite side, the sky had deepened, evening just beginning to show itself. Also waiting.
And the roulette wheel went around with a rapid ticking sound, a ball skipping over the little holes, color changing from red to white to black on each bounce. The wheel was antique but the ball was strictly today—the old-fashioned kind didn’t used to change color. He had these tokens—no, he called them chips—instead of money, and he put some on only one number for each spin. Sometimes the pile of chips shrank after the wheel spun, sometimes it grew. He was the only one playing because he was the only one who had any of those chips. Everyone else including me was watching, and waiting, just as the sun waited on one side and the night on the other.
I remember:
He was real happy. More than that; there was a place called happy and he was in it. My life has been filled with many sophisticated ways to be happy and unhappy, to win and lose, he said, but in the end, it really comes down to some relatively simple thing like this: a roulette wheel. I didn’t know much about it and he didn’t tell me anything except that sooner or later the wheel must turn against you.
I knew the moment it began stealing from him. There was nothing different about that spin, but the pile of chips never grew larger afterward. It just kept shrinking little by little, until he had just one chip left. So many numbers, and just that one chip. He picked it up, holding it between two fingers at eye level between us. I was supposed to choose the number this time.
Had to be that way; that was how he needed it to be. I took the chip from him and put it on a number right in front of me. And all of a sudden, that was the most beautiful thing in the world, that chip sitting there on that losing number.
In all the complexity born of sheer duration, he said, that’s what ultimately belongs tome, to anyone: beauty, and loss.
And the wheel spun, the ball bounced, changing colors over and over again, and came to rest in a number I hadn’t noticed before: 00.
House number. Everybody loses.
Everybody except me. None of the chips on the table were mine.
The windows on the sun side of the island blew open then; the wind rushed through, fluttering everybody’s silk and lace and scattering all the chips, before it died. The guy got up from the table and offered me his arm.
You can … Escort me now, he said.
We walked over to the open window together, and there was absolute silence as he climbed up onto the sill. He looked out over the plain of clouds for a few moments before he turned and held out his hand to help me up. That was okay, I could go that far. The dress he’d put on me was heavy and itchy but I managed to get up there with him.
The sun was still waiting.
I’ve enjoyed every moment, he told me, stepping away from the frame behind him and holding on to me as he balanced on the thin sill. I got a good grip on the part of the window behind me. He took one foot off the sill, and he looked as if he were about to step out onto the clouds and stroll away.
Every moment, he said, and I knew I was going to have to be the one to let go. He wanted to, but he just couldn’t make that last move. Lots of them couldn’t. That was mostly what Escorts got hired for.
Only this far, I reminded him.
House number, he said. Everybody loses.
Everybody with chips on the table. That was okay, too, nine times out of ten, it came down to this. They got used to the company and forgot that the end had to be first’ person singular. I didn’t mind holding him there. The link between us was telling me everything I wanted to know.
Including the exact moment to let go of his hand.
There was no pause, no in-between; he just went, fell backward, straight down into the clouds and disappeared.
Like that, I was back inside the i
sland. The rest of them were lined up at the window now, single file and in an orderly fashion. One by one, they went, too, still gliding in slow motion.
That was what they all believed, too, that it all went when they did. Even the ones that were sure they knew better. Hell, that was what it felt like, the absolute end of
… the line?
Good-looking guy, too much makeup and overdressed, holding some kind of skinny book out to me. He’s overdone the makeup and the clothes so much that it takes a while to see he’s the guy from Davy Jones, the first person I saw when I came to. You want to check the line? You want to check—
The line? No, I know how it goes. Except I don’t. But somebody does. Memory junkie, tourist in other people’s lives; no memory ever gets wiped clean away, it always leaves traces, associations. Associations can reconnect.
… feed the beast …
And there’s Sally, chewing and chewing. Threw me a little bone I could gnaw on myself, but it’s never my own memories that junk me up. That didn’t even make a mouthful for me.
What else you got, Sally?
The other woman can’t run interference for her. Sally’s head snaps around as fast as a snake striking and I know down to the root that it was a bad old mistake to mix it up with this one. Her goddam cheeks are crammed, for chrissakes, and she’s chewing, chewing, chewing like she’s really just all mouth, all the inside of a mouth and nothing else is real to her, in here or out there.
She senses me thinking all this and the taste in her mouth goes bad. Sickening enough before, but that’s too much. I move closer, trying to see what she’s doing. Jee-zuz, she’s got my memory loss there and I didn’t even feel her working on it. I can’t feel it now. She might as well be working on someone else for all it means to me.
No, now that I’m aware, things start occurring to me, some of it making sense, some not. The images come in flashes—