by John Shirley
"You're reading my mind?"
"No, you're exhibiting some of it to me. We're not really here, you understand. You're lying on a table under the old bank."
"Shit!"
"If you say so.You're hooked in, socketed with the DataBase that the Middle Man uses to talk to the Spirits."
"Bowler doesn't buy the Spirit part. He says you've just got good hackers."
"He's a left-brained Stalinist ignoramus."
"Look—"
"You want to know what we want from you in return for opening the Fridge. If it was anybody but Deirdre, or if you didn't have the key—which you can bet your ass isn't enough by itself—we'd tell you to cruise on. There's a thousand people who want to get somebody out of the Fridge. That's hard. But it's Deirdre, and that's part of the reason. The other reason is our usual fee, which is worship. I mean real worship, I don't mean ego pumping."
"You want us to worship the, uh, Spirits?"
Another flicker, and then the street sleeper wasn't exactly there anymore. The guy had gone two-dimensional, was a geometrically emblematic figure on a screen, like a product insignia. Quinn was sunken into a sweet numbness, from within which he could hear the emblem talk, could see the hieroglyphic's mouth move, knowing he was seeing this on the back of his closed eyelids . . . while the Middle Man, the transformed tramp, said:
"It's a sweet thing, Quinn, our worship. It's not submission, not really: it's vanity. They're us. It's a rush, Quinn. To sing of them, and bleed a little for them, and give them offerings, and ergs.
"I'm talking Floures, who exhales electrons.
"I'm talking Network and Grid, the messengers of the gods, one for back and the other for forth, sexing with their mistress Wavelength.
"I'm talking TeeVee the Belly-stroker, who eats everything and consumes nothing, the Buddha who lies.
"I'm talking One-Oh-One—of whom you, Quinn, are a halfling—the Spirit whose sword is Input and whose shield is Output, whose recollections are the ice-melt flowing between the arid banks of every computer online.
"I'm talking Pixel, the video queen—your mother, Quinn—who awaits you in the on-screen demimonde.
"I'm talking Fractal, the living gateway to the Fifth Dimension, whom you met in a lamp post and a drainpipe, who unites the dimension of the human senses with the dimension perceived by the electronic.
"I'm talking Pharmus-Hormona, whose translucent flesh swells voluptuously or shrinks to sinewy sweetness; who has made Fertility and Fashion indistinguishable.
"I'm talking MaxBux, the energy that is money, the money that is energy, the living flow chart of ease and power.
"I'm talking Score, Lord of the Stash, Mister Gooddrugs, whose teeth are needles; plead, beg to be sacrificed to him, beg him to take your throat in his jaws.
"I'm talking Androgyna the Disco Queen, who is the shortcut to the Spirits, who is the hip-hop voodoo and the Womb of the Urban Primitive.
"I'm talking Vehicle, on whose crown is the Mack Bulldog and in whose heart is the GM slogan.
"I'm talking Court, the Liar, the speaker with two tongues, both of them brown.
"I'm talking Bust, the Cop, the Destroyer, whose face is chrome stamped with all numbers, and whose arms end in a gun and a stun-stick; Bust, to whom sacrifices must be made, and if you're wise you'll pray humbly to the Spirits that he is satiated with your enemies . . .
"I'm talking relatives, Quinn. Because sometimes Zeus becomes az swan . . ."
"I'm scared."
"You're okay. When One-Oh-One took control of you to talk to the Mufti in Arabic—"
"Yeah—what was that?"
"That was One-Oh-One, using your tongue to talk to Jabbar, in Arabic taken from its linguistics database, tapping heavily on its rhetoric database and my own contribution . . . what matters is, afterwards you were a little shaken up. But you were okay, you were remarkably all right, considering. That means you're suited for this. So have confidence, Quinn. You've found your wavelength."
"But I don't know how to use it if I've got it—"
"I do. I'll guide you. Now: Let's see if the Fridge is crackable. It has a kind of unseeable Spirit of its own protecting it, Quinn, and it is Terrible."
"I'm—" A circuit closed.
Quinn watched with the Middle Man's eyes. They were eyes that seemed to float over a scene, unwatched themselves. They might have been electronic, they might have been human, they might have been both. They were . . . apart from Quinn. Who was still locked away under the bank, on a table, heavily into R.E.M.s.
Still, Quinn watched as the tramp appeared in the ruins to Cisco and Zizz and Bowler, manifesting in the air above them, a holy wino, a levitated tramp with an aureole the color of a monitor screen's glow in a dark room. Bowler shrank away, and turned his back on the apparition, shaking his head. The vision spoke to Cisco and Zizz. It fluttered its silver metal-flake wings, and drew on an ethereal cigarette; it blew a smoke ring that shaped itself into a swastika. It blew a stream that shattered the swastika and, with suave detachment, said: "There is an old pornography theatre in the next block south. The place is derelict now, and looks blocked off, but climb over the rubble and you'll see the way in. The Fetish Broker is there. She will equip you." The voice had just the faintest telltale of electronic filtering.
The apparition faded, the details first and then the outline, the way projected holos do. But Cisco and Zizz never doubted it. "Meet you back heee-errre, Bowler," Zizz said, "since you're gonna be a butt-hole about it." And went to meet the Fetish Broker. Bowler waited behind, alone in the ruins, unarmed, sulking in a fog of ideology. Running a risk: alone out here he was a victim waiting for the victimizer, unless he got lucky.
On the next block, Cisco and Zizz clambered over fallen masonry and into the shattered Adult Sensurround Theatre across the nibbled street, and there met the Broker.
The Broker was lying in a bed of smut.
The photographic imagery on the twentieth century porn magazines had been transferred onto pseudoskin—High Silk, the expensive brand—so that she lounged on a wallowy pillow configured with hundreds of small, interlocked nudes, a cloth-print pattern of languid faces, of canted buttocks and flowing breasts and the intersection of genitalia. She was wearing an alumitech spine: a long grey metal millipede down her naked back, a millipede equipped with implant wires instead of legs. It was a signal transformer for the nerve-ends, hyping impulses from the erogenous receptors, from every sort of pleasure-sensitive nerve. It was state-of-the art, but it was a new art, and her movements were sometimes erratic, when incoming somatic pleasure signals interfered with motor-coordination transmissions. A porcelain mechanism beside the bed blew warm, therapeutic mists onto her, jets that strategically probed her enhanced erogenous receptors; the pillow undulated slowly beneath her, its hidden servos massaging, falling slack, massaging again . . .
The Fetish Broker was sunken-eyed, dagger-haired, and almost skeletal-skinny. A tattoo of prettied-up nervous system lines, embroidered with curlicues and fleur de lis and blossoming vines, was etched across her torso and legs in sullen colors. Watching from another place, Quinn saw the flesh-colored plastic box of the drug-doler implanted into her calf.
Zizz noticed it too. "Ooooh, a doler, those are 'spensive, what you got innit, what'sa dosage?" Zizz and Cisco stood before the Broker's bed like courtiers at a royal audience.
"That's a rude question," the Broker said. Voice like an annoyed Siamese cat. "People don't ask people that."
Quinn assumed she was getting low doses of amphetamines trickled out to her, cut with maybe demerol, the occasional wash of Beta-Endorphins.
The room was a concrete cave, with its edges lost in red shadow, and the Broker's electronic fetishes its stalactites.
Cisco was staring up in fascination at them. They hung from the ceiling, hundreds of them, each about six inches long. Made with tiny pliers and tweezers and probably with the Broker's teeth, sculpted intricately from color-coded wires, bandsaw-cut pieces of c
ircuit board, microprocessors, semiconductors, condensors, and . . . bone. Hanks of hair. Strips of blue velvet, green satin. All of it twined into little almost-people, and shapes suggesting animals no one had ever seen. None of the figures were definite, but all were clearly defined.
The Fetish Broker grinned, lips skinning from teeth that showed the tops of their roots around receding blue gums.
On a solder-spattered wooden worktable next to the bed, four fetishes were strung together on a black wire. They were figures of brightly colored rubber and copper and alloy. She moved a hand toward the table and it looked like she was moving it through strobeflashes. Jerk-jerk-jerk. Annoyed, she reached behind her with her other hand and made an adjustment on her spine. The hand moved more fluidly and picked up the ring of fetishes. "For you, Middle Man says, for Deirdre."
Cisco reached for the hoop, and tugged on it—but the Broker wouldn't let go of it. Her lips skinned back from her death's head teeth again.
"A price." She moved jerkily into a robotic parody of a seductive pose. "He says I can't charge bux this time. But I can ask for something else." She looked at Cisco's crotch. "You, for a while. The other can watch."
Cisco swallowed, visibly. Muttered, "Bowler's getting off easy."
The Broker put a new tube in her doler, and lay back on the bed. She spread her legs, and said, "Don't waste time."
They had to wait for the Broker to finish with Cisco.
"She's a pain in the ass," the Middle Man said. "She's going to throw off my timing if she takes too long."
Quinn couldn't see himself, or the Middle Man. He saw Cisco and the Fetish Broker on the bed, from some objective non-place. But he and the Middle Man could hear each other.
"Hey," Quinn said. "How do the fetishes work? I mean, are they just a psychological trick or—"
"They're attuned to an IAMton transmission, and channel it. What matters is why they work, Quinn. The human world has reached a psychological critical mass. In the last part of the twentieth century people were panicking for a sense of community, belonging. They felt inconsequential in the bigger community—and for most people the smaller ones around them were filled with strangers. Their families were falling apart, and their tribes were bogus. They needed real tribes, Quinn. We all need them, particularly under stress. Which is why things factioned so brutally in Beirut. And in New York. And it's why the fetishes work: because we're pulling back into tribes; tribes with powerful consensual beliefs. And our tribe is strong in this town, Quinn . . ."
The Fridge looked like an office building.
"Why should prisons be ugly if the new technology can make them internally secure?" the designers had asked, thinking themselves stunningly innovative. Why not make them so that the locals would be less likely to object to having them nearby?
Out-of-towners seeing the Federal Control Penitentiary, rising austere but unthreatening from the artificial island that forked the Hudson, took it for the headquarters of a security conscious multinational corporation.
But when you saw it from Shacktown, it looked different. Shacktown was the towering personification of the housing crisis: The roof-slums, the intricate maze of fiberboard shacks precariously piled on tenement roofs, warehouse roofs, any open space they could stake out, up above. From up there, they could see the Fridge's octagonal polarized-glass skyscraper, and know it for a prison. A seventy-story prison without roving spotlights, without outer containment walls or electric antipersonnel wire. It had a stylish notch up one side and sprawling green lawns and a topiary garden and floodlit fountain. The Shacktowners knew what it was, though. It made them shiver because it was so confident.
But it was guarded, all right.
As Cisco and Zizz climbed out of the boat, up the concrete embankment, and onto the lawn—they stopped, hearing the hover-cams approaching through the darkness.
Quinn, watching and listening through the Middle Man's own remote, heard it too. The Middle Man switched to infra-red scan, and Quinn saw them, two abstracted birdshapes glowing red with their motor heat as they hovered on either side of Cisco and Zizz, thirty feet up, evaluating them. Alerting the cyberguards in their niches around the base of the building.
"That's it," Quinn told the Middle Man. He couldn't see the Middle Man, but he was There. He was the unseen background. "The last time someone tried to break somebody out of there, the cyberguards came down on 'em, was twenty of those little fuckers rolling up all at once, blazing away. There was choppers, everything—all in about one minute. They're screwed."
"Not if we intervene."
"We don't have time."
"We do. You and I are talking in dreamtime now. Braintime, which is anything you want it to be. You ever have a dream where everything that happens takes days and days—only when you wake the whole dream took place in three minutes? It's like that. We're ten times faster. Twenty. Thirty. Okay?"
BAM BAM BAM Buh-BAM
"I hear music," Quinn said. "A hip-hop beat."
BAM BAM BAM Buh-BAM.
"I can't crack the Fridge alone, Quinn. That's why you're here. You have the talent to be empty. To be a channel. To be a zero in the right place. You and me channel the Spirits to intervene. To do that, you got to empty your mind. You got to . . . come on and DANCE."
"What?"
"DANCE!" A woman's voice now.
BAM BAM BAM buh-BAM
"DANCE!" A twenty-first century Motown singer. "Come on and DANCE!" Chanted in the rhythmic pocket.
"Are you serious?"
The beat, a ubiquitous Linn-drum detonation, went on into infinity as she (for the moment, a she) sang
Come on and DANCE
Barn Bam Buh-BAM
your way to another place
Come on and DANCE
Bam Barn Buh-BAM
internalize space
Come on and—
The beat radiated out from the marrow of his bones. Its Linn drum was programmed in the genetic core of his cells.
Suddenly Quinn was in another place. Androgyna's womb, a mirror-walled Disco suffused in crystal blue; he was dancing with himself, one of the Broker's fetishes hanging around his neck on a cord, whipping with his movements, each movement sloughing off doubts, shedding: Why? What if? But they—?
There were neon strokes of light in the ceiling and he knew from their patterning that they were impulses firing through his neurons. That he was dancing in his own skull.
And his spinal cord radiated somatic impulses in the center of the ceiling: a split-laser, spitting streaks of laser light to the beat, and that was the campfire he danced around, in the dance of the urban primitive . . .
In the Amazon, in an oca, in a village of the Topajo, the Feiticeiro danced around a fire; the men of his tribe squatted around him, gifting him with rhythms. They twanged the birinbal and thumped hollow trunks. He was naked but for the sacred marks in green pigment, and the shining sheath of his sweat. The hut baked with the heat of the campfire, of bodies; the shaman was trembling like a leaf in a wind in the hot roar of a drug American medical shamans called Ibogaine, the powdering of a holy plant. The shaman danced in the groove, to the beat that radiated out from his marrow, programmed in the genetic core of him: that's what his body did. His mind had another body that eased through the World, the jungle, searching for the black jaguar, the bamboo blowgun in his right hand; humming deep in his throat to the distant plangency of the Birinbal as he called to the Spirits . . .
Quinn felt himself there physically, sweating, aching, short on breath, heart banging, but getting his groove, going into the trance that made it seem possible to dance forever, realizing that the gateway to the other continuum had a corridor and this corridor was the infinite dance; letting your own bodyheat melt you down and sweep you along, moving your hips into the pocket of the beat, completely lost in it. So the pain of exertion seemed far away, a distant smear of color. . . . And it seemed to him, as he danced (BAM BAM BAM buh-BAM) in place, in the suit of lights that was his perspirati
on, that he was on his way somewhere . . .
He touched the fetish at his neck. A circuit closed.
Something clicked.
There was an amoebic grid, a rubbery lattice of light, that rippled in three dimensions with sine waves. If you kind of squinted, it was man-shaped, too. It was forming around the fetish that Zizz had thrown on the ground, as the Fetish Broker had told her to.
Quinn felt the rippling lattice thing quiver in his hands. It was two things, two Spirits, and he felt them in his hands like there was a mild electric charge going through them. . . . That buzzing feeling . . .
Like the buzzing, the vibration he'd felt just after he'd inserted the card.
Now he had them in his hands like small animals that would respond to his will, trained pets, hungry and curious . . .
Go to the cameras.
The rippling grid stretched itself out, with hunger and interest, to the two hovering metal birdshapes—each with its camera-lens head—and seemed to split into an amoeba and drain into the lenses . . .
"Network and Grid, inseparable," the Middle Man said. "One thing going to two places at once."
(In some far place, Quinn was still dancing.)
Quinn saw a man looking at a bank of monitors. On one of them was a view of the lawn by the riverbank, where Zizz and Cisco had stood. But (PUSH IN on the monitor) they aren't Zizz and Cisco; through the intercession of the spirits Network and Grid, Zizz and Cisco are now two guards out for the evening patrol of the island. Normally no one would have to go patrol the island in person but what with the blackout riots in the city and all . . .
The two guards were at the front door and the man at the monitor, recognizing them (thought they were on break, must've decided to stay out longer than usual . . . what with the riots . . .), hit the keyboard sequence that opened the gate and let them in.