by Pat Cadigan
“If I’d known that, I’d have gotten three more custard-filled,” I said. “And I think I’ll just go back and get them right now.”
“Can’t do that,” she said, catching my arm. “Go through again, they charge you again. You must really be scorched this time.” She pinched my sleeve between her fingers. “Musta really been worth it, too.”
“Thanks for the tip.” I pulled away from her as politely as I could and walked toward the rear of the place, where a tall skinny man in a stained duster was wiping off an empty table. I hurried over and slid into one of the two chairs, flicking on the tabletop screen.
“Chit?”
I paused with a doughnut halfway to my practically drooling mouth and frowned up at him. “What?”
He tucked the end of his washrag into a band around his arm and held out his hand. “Chit. Chit. Freelance worker here. Extra service not provided by shitty bad-food-dealing owners. Come on, gimme a chit, baby needs a new pair of nose-filters.”
“What?” I said again.
He turned and made a beckoning motion; a boy about eight years old sidled up to him and pressed close. He had his own washrag.
“Baby of the family. Nose-filters wearing out, can’t work in family trade without nose-filters. See?” The man tilted the boy’s head up to show me his nostrils. “Go crazy, eat till stomach explodes—”
I was already shoving a small but overly generous bill at him. “Here, please. Thanks for the service, buy that kid a decent meal, too, while you’re at it.”
The man took the bill and held it as if he’d never seen such an outlandish thing before. “Chrissakes, she doesn’t got a chit.” He gave the bill to the boy. “Tell Mom to stash, try to convert later. And you,” he added, leaning over me, “you go home. No place to be spending cash.”
The kid had run over to a corner booth where a woman and three other children had apparently taken up residence. I saw the boy say something to the woman, who looked over at me with a disapproving expression on her tired face. As I watched, one of the other kids slid out of the booth and hurried over to a table that had just been vacated, pulling a washrag out of his back pocket.
“So?” the man said, as if I had spoken. “Good luck. Could have been you.” He moved away, scanning the room for anyone about to leave.
“Fortune really smiling very good on you, I guess.” The local in the quilt-suit plunked herself down at my table and folded her arms expectantly.
I transferred two doughnuts from my tray to hers. “Okay? Now will you leave me alone?”
She shook her head at my largesse, laughing a little.
“Here’s what they gonna carve on your tombstone: ‘All balls, no brains.’ What I get for callin’ you in feeds me here for a year.” She picked up one of the doughnuts I’d given her and took a large bite. Custard flowed over her fingers and I winced. I hadn’t meant to part with one of the custards.
I turned to the screen and was annoyed to find that it was jammed in browse mode. That figured; once you stopped eating, they didn’t want you taking up a table because you wanted to watch some program all the way through.
“So now that you in thrill-and-chill for yourself, where you gonna run your stable from, uptown?”
I didn’t look away from the news footage. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure can’t run ’em from here, unless you plannin’ the violent overthrow of the crowned head.”
“Look,” I said wearily, “I had a bad night and a badder morning. I just want to eat my doughnuts and go home. Please leave me alone.”
“Marceline, Marceline,” she sang, wagging her finger in my face. “Don’t tell me you got no clue.”
I frowned. How could she know the character’s name? Well, how else, I thought suddenly, feeling uneasy. Obviously this was another friend Marceline had made while she’d been on the loose. When I finally did get some leak-through from the character, I was probably going to want to forget it all over again.
“Marceline, you know what your agent says about you?”
“You talked to my agent?” I said, surprised.
“So? My agent, too.”
Migod, I thought; that was a possibility I hadn’t considered—not a friend of Marceline’s, but another actor.
“Your agent says you been dead for a week.”
I couldn’t help laughing bitterly. “I’m not surprised. Half the time he can’t remember my name. Especially when he talks to casting directors. So you’re with him, too? Which theatre are you with? I don’t remember you from Sir Larry’s.”
“Theatre.” Her pasty face broke into a broad grin. “Damn. That’s good. When it’s an act, it’s theatre. Sure, I shoulda thought of that. This Larry got any slots to fill at his place? Maybe I’ll chuck our agent, too.”
“The troupe is full up right now,” I said carefully, “but without an agent, you couldn’t get an audition anyway.”
“No? All-poacher, all the time? That’s the best one I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard them all. Hope they put some bodyguards on you, because Bateau says now that you dead, you got to he down and be quiet.”
“Sorry, but you lost me completely,” I said.
“Yah, I know. Bateau’s sorry about that, too.”
“Bateau who? I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
Her face lit up even more. “Shit! You don’t! You wiped!”
“Actually, it’s just a little characterization amnesia. I didn’t really get my memory wiped. In fact, I just had a boost and as soon as the right associations connect up with each other, I’ll be back to normal.”
Her head wagged from side to side. “Doping works maybe two times if you’re desperate. After that, there’s no fooling yourself. Thought you knew that.”
“ ‘Doping’?”
“You know, pull the memories out and then have them put in again. So you can get a rise. Like blood-doping, pump the blood out, pump it back in again, makes you feel like Super-Duper-Man. Never had to do that after a hard week, I’d be surprised about it.”
I spread my hands. “Oh, you’ve got me confused with the character. That’s not actually who I really am.”
“No? Who, then?”
“My real name is Marva. And I’m not the memory junkie, she is.”
“Who?”
“Marceline,” I said patiently. “Apparently, you’ve always met Marceline, and not me. I’m Marva, and the character is Marceline. Got it? Marceline is a character in a play.”
She clapped her hands, producing a cloud of powdered sugar. “Ha! Now I got it! Some very nice people! They’re too good, make a memory junkie go all the way! Damn! But, okay.” She used her sleeve on her mouth and sat up straight, squaring her shoulders. “So, Marva, you like being Famous?”
I used a napkin to brush powdered sugar from my jacket. “Oh, I’m not Famous yet, though I have resume’d a couple of franchisers and there’s been some interest. No offers yet, and it’s something I’d have to think long and hard about …” My voice trailed away. Even as I was saying it, it didn’t sound right, for some reason. The gap in my memory yawned like a bottomless pit, but for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what was supposed to have been there. Except that I was pretty sure, now that I’d said the word, it had something to do with a franchiser …
The thought blossomed in my mind like a poisoned flower. Had I done some kind of business with a franchiser while I’d been Marceline?
Some instinct was screaming yes. But what reputable franchiser would do business with someone who was obviously not herself?
“Still thinking?” said the woman, amused. “Well, this must be a test run, eh? How you liking it? Ah, dumb question, you don’t even know you like it or not. Because you think you’re true.”
You’re true … the truest one I ever knew. Another line from the play? I remembered saying it to someone …
You want to check the line?
“I want to check my brain,” I muttered.
“Check your brain at the door when you see Bateau. Easiest way to go, save him the trouble of pulling it out your nose.” She got up. “Thanks for the doughnuts. And try to remember, if it was you, you’d have done the same as me, even for a friend.” She sailed away, swerving around tables while I blinked after her.
Theatre of the absurd, I thought, glad to be left in peace. The appetite gas wasn’t working as hard on me as it had been, so I could nurse my last two doughnuts.
On the screen, an androgyne was gesticulating earnestly and silently in front of an enormous product map of Wisconsin. I pressed for volume up; nothing happened. Figured; of all the tables in the place, I’d had to pick the one with the malfunctioning screen and now there were no other tables vacant. Oh, well. Twill always said the dataline was nine times more entertaining with the volume off anyway.
The androgyne got more and more exercised until I thought s/he was going to start trashing the set. A small legend appeared at the bottom of the screen: Cheese Advocates Join Dairy Strike. It made me wish I’d thought to get some coffee to go with the doughnuts.
I started to bite into the edible polyester when my gag reflex suddenly came to life. Damn that famine fancier. Before I could work up a good mad, the screen gave a jump as the channel browser kicked in again and suddenly I was looking at my own face.
Migod. It wasn’t any still I remembered posing for. As I stared, the pov pulled back from the head shot to a three-quarters body. The still began gyrating in melty near-animation through several different poses and costumes—all the roles I’d played at Sir Larry’s. I’d seen similar things often enough to know that it was an ad for a franchise, but I couldn’t tell which one.
Damn. I banged on the volume button and then the speaker, but to no result. My image was replaced by that of a large man in a chefs outfit doing a jerky dance while he flipped a pancake in a frying pan. Dammit, why weren’t these things closed-captioned? I tried to pull down a menu and got a message telling me I couldn’t have a menu in browse mode.
Shitty cheap public screens—I gave it a last hard slap and the image disappeared under an onslaught of static.
“Perfect,” I muttered, sitting back and looking around. The place was not full of people I’d have felt comfortable asking to share a table and screen with.
Hell with it, I thought. Time to go home and find out what I’d gotten myself into. Or what Marceline had gotten me into.
You want to check the line?
Yah, I sure did want to check the goddam line.
The skinny guy’s youngest kid started working on the table before I was all the way out of the chair.
“Sovay’s in rehearsal.”
Apparently, today was my day for bad hardware karma; Rowan’s pearlized brown biogems were the clearest things on the static-filled phone screen. From what I could make out, she was as impassive as ever, as if she had no idea who I was. So like her. She was always detached, remote. I’d thought it was because she didn’t really approve of Sovay’s career or any of the people around him, but someone—Twill? Sovay himself? I couldn’t remember that either—had told me that she was that way about everything, which made me wonder how she and Sovay had ever met, let alone married.
“Would you give me the number at Sir Larry’s?” I asked her, squinting through the static. “I don’t have it on me at the moment, and I seem to have misplaced my memory as well.”
“Um,” Rowan said. I waited, thinking she might be looking it up.
“Don’t put it on the screen,” I said. “I’ve got a blizzard on this end.”
“Oh? I can see you fine here, but I wasn’t going to. I really don’t think Sovay would want to be disturbed right now. If you want to record a message, I’ll see he gets it when he comes home later.”
I almost bit a hole in my lip. Weren’t we high-handed these days! Maybe Sovay actually had told her what had happened between us, a very stupid thing to do unless he really wanted a lot of domestic problems. Or maybe it had something to do with my selling out to a franchiser—if I had. I must have; no franchiser, no matter how sleazy, would dare advertise anyone it didn’t own the rights to. And we’d just see about that. They could plead innocent and we-had-no-idea-really all they wanted to, but if Marceline had sold me out, the contract would be invalid.
“If it’s something urgent,” Rowan added, “you could leave me your number and I could call Sovay for you and see if he could call you back right away.” She paused. “How did you know he’d be at the theatre this early?”
“Look,” I said, trying to stifle my impatience, “I know the routine at Sir Larry’s, we’re about to go from preproduction into full rehearsals. For the last few weeks, I’ve been preparing with the Method and I’ve been a little out of touch. All I need is the number of the direct line into the rehearsal hall and then I’ll leave you alone.”
She blinked. “The Method?”
“Come on, Rowan,” I said, and she jumped a little. Maybe Her Majesty wasn’t used to being addressed so casually. “I’ve been having what we call a less-than-perfect day. I’m running on no sleep at all, so give me some cush here. I wouldn’t have bothered you at home if I absolutely hadn’t had to.”
The static thickened enough to obscure her so completely that I was afraid she’d hung up on me. Then a small red light blinked in the lower left corner of my screen, indicating everything in her phone buffer had just been saved for later replay. Fine by me; maybe Sovay would find her attitude interesting. Her image faded back in again and to my surprise, she gave me the number at Sir Larry’s.
“Thanks, Rowan,” I said, and she winced at the use of her name. Migod, what was her problem anyway? We’d only met about six dozen times and I’d called her by her first name without getting that kind of reaction. Maybe that silly Sovay had told her.
“D-do you want to leave a number where you can be reached?” she asked.
Migod, what did Madam Cool-And-Remote have to be stuttering-nervous over? Maybe something that had nothing to do with me, I thought—maybe Sovay had gotten a Call, the kind of Call we all wanted to get, from Somebody Big. Loved you in your latest, darling, how would you like a slot with a national company? Yah, I’d have been breaking out in hives myself about something like that.
“Same number I’ve been using,” I said, “but I wasn’t planning to go back there yet. If I can’t get through to anyone at Sir Larry’s for some reason, tell Sovay I’ll keep checking the various message boards and services. Thanks again, Rowan.” I reached for the hang-up button.
“Wait.” She leaned toward the screen. “J don’t know what number you’ve been using. You’ll have to give it to me.”
“Sovay knows,” I said.
“In case he’s forgotten, then. Or lost it.”
She waited and I restrained myself again. Treating me like a stranger wasn’t going to change anything that had happened between me and Sovay, so what did she think she was accomplishing? Maybe just a little self-gratification; maybe that aloofness was her way of hiding a childish streak as broad as a full moon. I shrugged and gave her the number at my apartment. “See you around the Storefront,” I added. Through the static, I could see her staring at me openmouthed as I disconnected.
The first time I tried Sir Larry’s, I was bumped to call-waiting limbo. Somebody was tying up the line talking to an agent, probably. The second time, I got the recording from the box office giving an abbreviated schedule and the proper hours to call for tickets. That bitch Rowan had given me a number I could have looked up myself, not the rehearsal studio’s direct line. I was so frustrated, I hung up and fumed for five minutes before calling back and punching in my bypass code. Probably there’d be no one in the office and I’d have to record a message.
No static this time; the words came up quite readable:
INVALID SEQUENCE … REPEAT ENTRY:
I wanted to scream. Damned cheap public phone was probably garbling the numbers now instead of the visuals. I tried again anyw
ay. I got the INVALID SEQUENCE message twice more and then Sir Larry’s hung up on me.
I tried again on another phone, with the same results. I started to move to a third telephone and then hesitated. It could have been some kind of technical problem in the area node, I thought uneasily, or my bypass code might actually have been invalidated.
I decided I didn’t want to know. Calling for a ride was just a big waste of time anyway, I thought, lifting the privacy hood and stepping away from the phone. I’d just spring for my own cab, go right to Sir Larry’s, and get this whole mess straightened out.
The comm center was starting to fill up with odd types who seemed to be less interested in the phones and message boards than in who was using them. One free soul was using one of those illegal line-biters to collect any leftover time-credit previous callers might have left behind—just right out in the open, not even trying to conceal what she was doing. Yah, this was the Downs, all right, and I’d be damned glad to be back uptown where I belonged.
He must have spotted me as soon as I stepped out onto the sidewalk. I was scanning the street for a cab and there he was at my elbow, spitting little glittery stars into the air from the corner of his mouth. Street vendors did that all the time in the Downs, but for some reason, it really turned my stomach this morning.
“ ’Ey, ya noya-nuff?” he said, sending a cascade of stars over my shoulder.
“Yah, I’m annoyed enough. Now skin off,” I said.
“Unless you want to earn a fast tip by telling me where I can get a taxi.”
“Not annoyed,” he said, chuckling out more stars. “Paranoid. Are you paranoid enough?”
I looked at him, making a face at his smelly leather armor. “For one day, yah. Now, skin off.”
“Heya, day’s young. Very young. How do you know They won’t be coming to get you by lunch? Gotta think ahead. They know all about you—why shouldn’t you know all about Them
I groaned. There wasn’t a single taxi in the thickening vehicle traffic. “All I want to know about are cabs. Why can’t you get one when you want one? It isn’t even raining.