by John Shirley
In the antechamber, the guard looked up to see Zizz and Cisco come in, and almost pissed his pants.
Network and Grid were in place. Quinn and the Middle Man, each dancing in his own skull, in shamanistic ecstasy, invoked Pharmus-Hormona, and MaxBux.
The guard at the TV monitors was named Krutzmeyer. He was stubby and he had a donkeyish face and bristly black hair on his knuckles. He was reaching for the alarm button when the spiky girl touched him with a little doll made out of wires.
Suddenly she wasn't there anymore. In her place was a sex-swollen thing from his fantasies, impossibly voluptuous. The sight of her was an electric shock. It was instant hard-on.
The feeling that rose up in Krutzmeyer was not sexual attraction. It was sexual consummation, ongoing. It was like being hit by a freight train made of soft, warm, sticky ladyflesh, and the train had hit him from the inside, had come charging out of the base of his skull down into his spine, down to the groin chakra and IMPACT. There was no resisting it.
(To Cisco it seemed that the guard looked at ordinary Zizz and—bafflingly—gave out a wail of ecstasy and monstrous fulfilment and fell onto the floor, convulsing.)
Krutzmeyer was watched by other guards on a second bank of monitors. One of these wanted to raise the alarm but Floures, of the Electrons, poured through him, holding him rigid, till Cisco figured out how to open the door into the second checkpoint. This guard's name was Wolfeton, he was sixty-two, emphysemic, and sick of his job, easy as it was. And when Floures could no longer hold him, when he saw the two weirdos walk in, and he reached for the alarm button . . .
Cisco touched him with a fetish.
For Wolfeton, Cisco was someone else. Cisco was Darrel "Ducky" Parks, grandson of Bert Parks and host of Bux, Boy, Bux!!, TV's most popular game show, routinely giving away $100,000NB a show. Transmuted from lead into gold by MaxBux, Cisco was the apotheosis of Easy Money and Instant Luxury, he was a ticket dispenser for a non-stop to that island in the Florida Keys Wolfeton had dreamed about, and with the money Darrel was transferring to his account Wolfeton could buy a place on the island—Hell, he could buy the island! And he and Gertie could . . . the hell with Gertie, he could afford a pricey divorce, he could dump Gertie and buy the best mistress bux could buy—hell, make it three mistresses, and while you're at it . . .
What happened to Wolfeton went beyond pushing his greed buttons. His rational mind would never have believed Ducky Parks had come here. MaxBux reached into the part of Wolfeton that yearned for infantile gratification. Something buried beneath the foundations of the person-ality; wired into the nervous system itself. Gratify that place, where a personality interfaces with a nervous system, and the rest of the mind will follow. MaxBux was quickfix; the Big Release; Mama and Papa in one. And Wolfeton had been waiting years for him.
To Zizz it looked like the guard was staring at Cisco and grinning a sort of rictus grin and hyperventilating, turning bright red . . . But nodding frantically, muttering "You goddit, Darrel, anything you say, Darrel—" as he punched the code to open the door to the control room.
She shrugged and went into the computer-control room.
Brandis Danville was anorexic, anal, and—in the words of his coworkers—"a suck-up." He thought of himself as "ambitious and diplomatic." He looked up and saw the strangest woman he'd ever seen walk unaccompanied into the control room. She wasn't even wearing an anti-dust suit to protect the computers. He reached for his console and she touched him with a faceless doll made of wires.
The girl wasn't there anymore; instead, a man in the uniform of the Federal Control High Command stood there, his eyes in mirror shades, his uniform crawling with braid and brass; he was big, and Brandis could no more defy him than a straw could stand up to a hurricane. He had five-hundred-mile-per-hour authority. For Zizz had been visually transfigured by Bust, the Destroyer. Bust, for whom even a fractional defiance means death.
Bust, The Compleat Officer, said, "Deirdre Beladonna Arliss, FP87041, in unit 4577BB, is to be released and remanded to me."
"Absolutely, right away." Not a thought of all the orders, the papers, the various failsafe checks and countersignings and video authorizations. Except one. "If you'll give me the key, sir. Keys are kept in FedControl Central and transmitted in emergency or—"
Zizz handed him the cassette.
"How did you get the image code?" the Middle Man asked a part of Quinn's mind.
"When she was locked in, her lawyer was there, he recorded it off a screen with a lapel cam. Fuzzy image, couldn't use it for the key, but I figured it out, video animated a dupe. Took me four months."
"You got an eye. You were born to it. Cause it's working."
Deirdre was entering the third part of the cycle. In that part, the voices ceased for a while, and the small electric shocks ceased, and the rehab computer held back on the nausea drug. Give her system a rest before the conditioning started again. She felt her arms and legs twitch in their restraints as the impulsers exercised her inside the capsule. Calendar pictures of idyllic countryside were flashed in front of her eyes for "psyche refreshment." She had the option of talking to the Friend, if she wanted. But the computer that was the Friend always gently steered her back to the subject of rehabilitation, and it could not be induced to break down or to do anything extraordinary, so she didn't talk to it anymore. She couldn't think about the Struggle, of course, not overtly, because the biomonitors knew what her body and bloodstream did when she thought about the work she'd undertaken before the incarceration. The little glandular hints, the involuntary reactions . . . and when it sensed those things, it punished her.
But she tried to think of something that would—
A ripping sound. A deep, sickening disorientation. A burst of light. Oh no, she thought, it's happened: I've gone crazy. The one thing she was afraid of.
She was hallucinating that the cyberguards were taking her out of the mesh, wrapping her in a rubber sheet, carrying her between them for a long whirring time. Her mind had snapped into a fantasy of escape, she decided, like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. She'd gone pathetically insane.
And when she heard Cisco's voice she was sure of it.
"It's going to be a long time before she's . . . before she's all right," Bowler said, his voice cracking. "I don't know if she'll ever be. But at least they haven't got her anymore."
It was dawn, and the smog-singed light washed everything dirty blue. They were in an alley between a warehouse and a subcontractor's su-perconductor plant, near the Brooklyn Bridge, waiting for the van that would take them out of Manhattan. Bowler was going to take Deirdre to a place in Maine, a house in the mountains where there were people learning how to use automatic weapons for something Bowler wouldn't talk about. "They're good people. We'll take care of her," is all he'd say.
They were all supposed to go with him. Quinn felt hollow, detached, like everything was happening to someone else. Disorientation? Despair? He wasn't sure. But he knew he was wrenched.
He had come to himself walking down the street, with the Mufti and another Funs guerrilla he hadn't seen before; they were on either side of him, supporting him as if he were a drunk. And they'd laughed at him the way they'd laugh at a drunk. He'd looked around, and found the world dull, grey, bloodless. An enormous rock pit where humanity quar-ried mediocrity like gravel. He had lost the Spirits.
"We take you to your friends," the Mufti had said. "And so you should not be weeping."
But he had wept.
Now, Deirdre was sitting on someone's grimy back steps, dosed on tranquilizers, holding her knees, swaying, now and then her head making a chicken-pecking motion, her tongue protruding, some kind of hideous motor twitch . . . Quinn looked away. He couldn't stand seeing her like that. The conditioning had broken something in her. Maybe not forever. But she was forever altered in Quinn's mind.
Everything was altered. Deirdre was no longer frozen in the Fridge, but she could not stay in New York. She had to run; her fight here was ove
r. She could only run, and hide, and try to heal.
And Quinn could no longer believe in Bowler's revolution. Because in his trance he'd had a vision, he'd seen FedControl: the vast stainless steel matrix of it, binding them with economics into a societal "Fridge Unit," the macroscopic mother of the one that had held Deirdre. It was too big, now, too technologically coordinated, to fight with guns, with bombs.
The Middle Man had shown them how to fight it. It had to be fought on a plane that transcended technological superiority.
Cisco was chattering, "I mean, it was so fantastic, the guards just sort of turned into babbling idiots and I could, like, feel the spirit workin' through me—"
No, Quinn thought, it worked around you. At most used you to prop up the scarecrows.
There were other things he wanted to say to Cisco, and couldn't. Wanted to tell him that the only reason the manifestations took the form of spirits was because guys like Cisco could comprehend them no other way. That it was because there were a thousand million people using all of civilization's technology without understanding it; the children of the new illiteracy. Using electronics the way a Cro Magnon had used fire: assuming it was magic. Using computers as if they were mediums to the spirits. And so the IAMton field had given us back our own interpretation of the new wilderness, the technological wilderness . . .
Quinn wanted to tell him that he really didn't understand at all. That Spirit was real but it wasn't what he thought it was. But Quinn shrugged, and looked at Zizz.
She was different, too, he saw. She wasn't chattering, he hadn't seen her reach for her drugs. She wasn't looking at him through the subpersonalities she'd used for years. She was looking at him from the core of her . . .
"I was there, too," she said, suddenly.
"Where?"
"In the dancing place. Just watching. I felt . . . I was halfway in . . ."
Quinn nodded. She could make the connection, too.
"I don't think we should talk about it," Bowler said. "Generates misunderstandings. Struggle to align with the Necessity of focusing on issues the Masses can relate to. Mysticism is decadent, elitist."
"You're too predictable, Bowler," Quinn said. "And I got news for you. I'm not a fucking Communist."
The van was coming down the alley, jouncing with pot-holes and trash.
"I don't wanna go," Zizz said, looking at the van.
"You have to," Bowler said.
I'm supposed to go with them, Quinn thought.
"You aren't going," said a wet voice.
It was behind him. Quinn turned, took a shaky step back. A mercurial thing, a balloon-face in silver. It was just inside a grime-caked, broken window, extending from something he couldn't see. From an empty light socket, probably. It spoke again, and its two-dimensional lips moved.
"You were made for us," it said. Its voice sounded synthetic, but not electronic. It was a mathematical model of a voice, made audible. "We let you come back to these others, so you could choose fairly. To let you choose without fear. Choose: Come home and learn."
Bowler was tugging on Quinn's wrist. "Come on," he said. "The van." He was careful to pretend he didn't see the thing.
"Bowler, look at this thing, this means something, man. Look and then tell me it's not—"
"I don't see your hallucinations. And I don't want to see any more holoprojections. Hypnosis, whatever they used, it worked—but it was tricks, man. Gimmicks. Mirrors and hidden compartments."
A shadow fell over them, then. They looked up, and saw something blotting out the sky over the alley, lowering itself massively between the buildings, only just fitting (or did Quinn see it compress itself to fit?), and Bowler ran to Deirdre, pulling her toward the van, shouting, "Feds! Come on, it's a bust, let's go!"
But Quinn shook his head. "It's not a bust. It's from the Middle Man." He knew it, looking at the thing. A kind of mechanistic semiotics informed him. The vehicle's identity spelled out in dancing chrome and glass; its heraldic styling.
None of them made the thing out clearly. It had a style, but its specific lineaments seemed to shift. Was it a sphere? A saucer, a teardrop, a swept-wing jet? It was constantly redefining itself like an animation drawn with a shaky hand. Quinn had an impression of the design essence of the sleekest helicopters; the design symmetry of a Japanese Magnetic Induction train; the design elegance of the new, slim orbital shuttles; the design compactness and attitude of an Italian sports-car. All these affects shifting, warring to assert themselves. Here was no vehicle: here was a Spirit, personifying vehicles. It settled onto the pavement between Quinn and Bowler. A section of the shimmering, nervous hull shimmered faster yet, and dissolved. A door yawned. An invitation.
Zizz said, "Quinn . . ." She took his arm. Quinn was amazed: her touch felt so good. It felt like a completion.
Shivering with relief, Quinn followed his instincts. He stepped into the vehicle, and went somewhere else.
And Zizz went with him.