Higher off the grasping earth than he has ever been before, his right hand atop June’s left knee, feeling wild and rich and free, Stone ruminates over his life of Alice Citrine, and the sense he is beginning to make of it.
Alice Citrine is 159 years old. When she was born, America was still com prised of states, rather than FEZ and ARCadias. Man had barely begun to fly. When she was in her sixties, she headed a firm called Citrine Biotics. This was the time of the Trade Wars, wars as deadly and decisive as military ones, yet fought with tarriffs and five-year plans, automated assembly lines and fifth-generation decisionmaking constructs. This was also the time of the Second Constitutional Convention, that revamping of America for the state of war.
During the years when the country was being divided into Free Enterprise Zones—urban, hi-tek, autonomous regions, where the only laws were those imposed by corporations and the only goal was profits and dominance—and Areas of Restrictive Control—rural, mainly agricultural enclaves, where older values were strictly enforced—Citrine Biotics refined and perfected the work of their reseachers and others in the field of carbon chips: microbiological assemblies, blood-borne programmed repair units. The final product, marketed by Citrine to those who could afford it, was near-total rejuvenation, the cell-slough—or, simply, the sluff.
Citrine Biotics headed the Fortune 500 within six years.
By then it was Citrine Technologies.
And Alice Citrince sat atop it all.
But not forever.
Entropy will not be cheated. The information-degradation that DNA undergoes with age is not totally reversible. Errors accumulate despite the hardworking carbon chips. The body dutiful gives out the end.
Alice Citrine is nearing the theoretical close of her extended life. Despite her youthful looks, one day a vital organ will fail, the result of a million bad transcriptions.
She needs Stone, of all people, to justify her existence.
Stone squeezes June’s knee and relishes the sense of importance. For the first time in his sad and dingy life, he can make a difference. His words, his perceptions matter. He is determined to do a good job, to tell the truth as he perceives it.
“June,” Stone says emphatically, “I have to see everything.”
She smiles. “You will, Stone. You will indeed.”
And the phaeton comes down—in Mexico City, which crashed last year at population 35 million. Citrine Technologies is funding a relief effort there, operating out of their Houston and Dallas locations. Stone is suspicious of the motives behind the campaign. Why didn’t they step in before the point of collapse? Can it be that they are worried now only about refugees flooding across the border? Whatever the reasons, though, Stone cannot deny that the CT workers are a force for good, ministering to the sick and hungry, reestablishing electrical power and communications, propping up (acting as?) the city government. He boards the phaeton with his head spinning, and soon fmds himself—in the Antarctic, where he and June are choppered out from the CT domes to a krill-processing ship, source of so much of the world’s protein. June finds the frack stench offensive, but Stone breathes deeply, exhilarated at being afloat in these strange and icy latitudes, watching the capable men and woman work. June is happy to be soon aloft, and then—in Peking, where CT heuristic specialists are working on the first Artificial Organic Intelligence. Stone listens with amusement to a debate over whether the AOI should be named K’ung Fu-tzu or Mao.
The week is a kaleidoscopic whirl of impressions. Stone feels like a sponge, soaking up the sights and sounds so long denied him. At one point he finds himself leaving a restaurant with June, in a city whose name he has forgotten. In his hand is his ID card, with which he had just paid for their meal. A holoportrait stares up from his palm. The face is cadaverous, filthy, with two empty, crusted sockets for eyes. Stone remembers the warm laser fingers taking his holo in the Immigration Office. Was that really he? The day seems like an event from someone else’s life. He pockets his card, unsure whether to have the holo updated or to keep it as a token of where he has come from.
And where he might end up?
(What will she do with him after he reports?)
When Stone asks one day to see orbital installations, June calls a halt. “I think we’ve done enough for one trip, Stone. Let’s get back, so you can start to put it all together.”
With her words, a deep boneweariness suddenly overtakes Stone, and his manic high evaporates. He silently assents.
Stone’s bedroom is dark, except for the diffuse lights of the city seeping in through a window. Stone has multiplied his vision, the better to admire the naked glowing form of June beside him. He has found that colors grow muddy in the absence of enough photons, but that a very vivid black-and white image can be had. He feels like a dweller in the past century, watching a primitive film. Except that June is very much alive beneath his hands.
June’s body is a tracery of lambent lines, like some arcane capillary circuitry in the core of Mao/K’ung Futzu. Following the current craze, she has had a subdermal pattern of microchannels implanted. The channels are filled with synthetic luciferase, the biochemical responsible for the glow of fireflies, which she can now trigger at will. In the afterglow of their lovemaking, she has set herself alight. Her breasts are whorls of cold fire, her shaven pubic mound a spiral galaxy dragging Stone’s gaze into illimitable depths.
June is speaking in a abstracted way of her life before Stone, pondering the ceiling while he idly strokes her.
“My mother was the only surviving child of two refugees. Vietnamese. Came to America shortly after the Asian War. Did the only thing they knew how to do, which was fish. They lived in Texas, on the Gulf. My mother went to college on a scholarship. There she met my father, who was another refugee of sorts. He left Germany with his parents after its Reunification. They said the compromise government was neither one thing nor the other, and they couldn’t deal with it. I guess my background is some sort of microcosm of a lot of the upheavals of our times.”
She catches Stone’s hand between her knees and holds it tightly. “But I feel a calmness with you right now, Stone.”
As she continues to speak of things she has seen, people she has known, her career as Citrine’s personal assistant, the oddest feeling creeps over Stone. As her words integrate themselves into his growing picture of the world, he feels the same abyssmal tidal suck that he first felt upon learning of history.
Before he can decide consciously if he even wants to know or not, he finds himself saying, “June. How old are you?”
She falls silent. Stone watches her staring blindly at him, unequipped with his damned perceptive eyes.
“Over sixty,” she finally says. “Does it matter?”
Stone finds he cannot answer, does not know if her age does matter or not.
Slowly June wills her glowing body dark.
Stone bitterly amuses himself with what he likes to think of as his art.
Perusing the literature on the silicon chip that dwells in his skull, he found that it has one property not mentioned by the doctor. The contents of its RAM can be squirted in a signal to a stand-alone computer. There the images he has collected may be displayed for all to see. What is more, the digitized images may be manipulated, recombined with themselves or with stock graphics, to form entirely lifelike pictures of things that never existed. These, of course, may be printed off.
In effect, Stone is a living camera and his computer a complete studio.
Stone has been working on a series of images of June. The color printouts litter his quarters, hung on wall and underfoot.
June’s head on the Sphinx’s body. June as La Belle Dame Sans Merci. June’s face imposed upon the full moon, Stone asleep in a field as Endymion.
The portraits are more disturbing than soothing, and, Stone senses, quite unfair. But Stone feels that he is gaining some therapeutic effect from them, that each day he is inching closer to his true feelings
for June.
He still has not spoken to Alice Citrine. That nags him greatly. When will he deliver his report? What will he say?
The problem of when is solved for him that afternoon. Returning from one of the tower’s private gyms, he finds his terminal flashing a message.
Citrine will see him in the morning.
Alone this second time, Stone stands on the plate before Alice Citrine’s room, allowing his identity to be verified. He hopes the results will be shared with him when the machine finishes, for he has no idea of who he is.
The door slides into the wall, a beckoning cavern mouth.
Avernus, Stone thinks, and enters.
Alice Citrine remains where she sat so many event-congested weeks ago, unchanged, seemingly sempiternal. The screens flicker in epileptic patterns on three sides of her instrumented chair. Now, however, she ignores them, her eyes on Stone, who advances with trepidation.
Stone stops before her, the console an uncrossable moat between them. He notes her features this second time with a mix of disbelief and alarm. They seem to resemble his newly fleshed-out face to an uncanny degree. Has he come to look like this woman simply by working for her? Or does life outside the Bungle stamp the same harsh lines on everyone?
Citrine brushes her hand above her lap, and Stone notices her pet curled in the valley of her brown robe, its preternaturally large eyes catching the colors on the monitors.
“Time for a preliminary report, Mr. Stone,” she says. “But your pulse rate is much too high. Relax a bit—everything does not hinge on this one session.”
Stone wishes he could. But there is no offer of a seat, and he knows that what he says will be judged.
“So—what do you feel about this world of ours, which bears the impress of myself and others like me?”
The smug superiority in Citrine’s voice drives all caution from Stone’s thoughts, and he nearly shouts, “It’s unfair.” He pauses a moment, and then honesty forces him to admit, “Beautiful, gaudy, exciting at times—but basically unfair.”
Citrine seems pleased at his outburst. “Very good, Mr. Stone. You have discovered the basic contradiction of life. There are jewels in the dung heap, tears amid the laughter, and how it is all parceled out, no one knows. I’m afraid I cannot shoulder the blame for the world’s unfairness, though. It was unfair when I was a child, and remained unfair despite all my actions. In fact, I may have increased the disparity a little. The rich are richer, the poor seemingly poorer by comparison. But still, even the titans are brought down by death in the end.”
“But why don’t you try harder to change things?” Stone demands. “It has to be within your power “
For the first time, Citrine laughs, and Stone hears an echo of his own sometimes bitter caw “Mr. Stone, “ she says, “I have all I can do to stay alive. And I do not mean taking care of my body—that is attended to automatically. No, I mean avoiding assassination. Haven’t you gleaned the true nature of business in this world of ours?”
Stone fails to see her meaning, and says so.
“Allow me to brief you, then. It might alter a few of your perceptions. You are aware of the intended purpose of the Second Constitutional Convention, are you not? It was couched in high-flown phrases like ‘unleash the strength of the American system,’ and ‘meet foreign competition head-to-head, ensuring a victory for American business that will pave the way for democracy throughout the world.’ All very noble-sounding. But the actual outcome was quite different. Business has no stake in any political system per se. Business cooperates to the extent that cooperation furthers its own interests. And the primary interest of business is growth and dominance. Once the establishment of the Free Enterprise Zones freed corporations from all constraints, they reverted to a primal struggle, which continues to this day.”
Stone attempts to digest all this. He has seen no overt struggles on his journey. Yet he has vaguely sensed undercurrents of tension everywhere. But surely she is overstating the case. Why, she makes the civilized world sound no more than a large-scale version of the anarchy of the Bungle.
As if reading his mind, Citrine says, “Did you ever wonder why the Bungle remains blighted and exploited in the midst of the city, Mr. Stone, its people in misery?”
Suddenly all of Citrine’s screens flash with scenes of Bungle life, obedient to her unvoiced command. Stone is taken aback. Here are the sordid details of his youth: urinereeking alleys with rag-covered forms lying halfway between sleep and death, the chaos around the Immigration Office, the razor-topped fence by the river.
“The Bungle,” Citrine continues, “is contested ground. It has been so for over eighty years. The corporations cannot agree over who is to develop it. Any improvement made by one is immediately destroyed by the tactical team of another. This is the kind stalemate prevalent in much of the world.
“Everyone wanted to be pulled into an earthly paradise by his purse strings, like a Krishna devotee by his pigtail. But this patchwork of fiefdoms is what we got instead.”
Stone’s conceptions are reeling. He came expecting to be quizzed and to disgorge all he thought he knew. Instead, he has been lectured and provoked, almost as if Citrine is testing whether he is a partner fit to debate. Has he passed or failed?
Citrine settles the question with her next words. “That’s enough for today, Mr. Stone. Go back and think some more. We’ll talk again.”
For three weeks Stone meets nearly every day with Citrine. Together they explore a bewildering array of her concerns. Stone gradually becomes more confident of himself, expressing his opinions and observations in a firmer tone. They do not always mesh with Citrine’s, yet on the whole he feels a surprising kinship and affinity with the ancient woman.
Sometimes it almost seems as if she is grooming him, master and apprentice, and is proud of his progress. At other times she holds herself distant and aloof.
The weeks have brought other changes. Although Stone has not slept with June since that fateful night, he no longer sees her as the siren figure of his portraits, and has stopped depicting her in that fashion. They are friends, and Stone visits with her often, enjoys her company, is forever grateful to her for her part in rescuing him from the Bungle.
During his interviews with Citrine, her pet is a constant spectator. Its enigmatic presence disturbs Stone. He has found no trace of sentimental affection in Citrine, and cannot fathom her attention to the creature.
One day Stone finally asks Citrine outright why she keeps it.
Her lips twitch in what passes for her smile. “Aegypt is my touchstone on the true perspective of things, Mr. Stone. Perhaps you do not recognize her breed.”
Stone admits ignorance.
“This is Aegyptopithecus zeuxis, Mr. Stone. Her kind last flourished several million years ago. Currently she is the only specimen extant, a clone—or rather, a recreation based on dead fossil cells.
“She is your ancestor and mine, Mr. Stone. Before the hominids, she was the representative of mankind on earth. When I pet her, I contemplate how little we have advanced.”
Stone turns and stalks off, unaccountably repelled by the antiquity of the beast and the insight into her mistress.
This is the last time he will see Alice Citrine.
Night time.
Stone lies alone in bed, replaying snapshots of his terminal screen, of pre-FEZ history that has eluded him.
History that has eluded him.
Suddenly there is a loud crack like the simultaneous discharge of a thousand gigantic arcs of static electricity. At that exact second, two things happen:
Stone feels an instant of vertigo.
His eyes go dead.
Atop these shocks, an enormous explosion above his head rocks the entire shaft of the Citrine Tower.
Stone shoots to his feet, clad only in briefs, barefoot as in the Bungle. He can’t believe he’s blind. But he is. Back in the dark world of smell and sound and touch alone.
> Alarms are going off everywhere. Stone rushes out into his front room with its useless view of the city. He approaches the front door, but it fails to open. He reaches for the manual control, but hesitates.
What can he do while blind? He’d just stumble around, get in the way. Better to stay here and wait out whatever is happening.
Stone thinks of.June then, can almost smell her perfume. Surely she will be down momentarily to tell him what’s going on. That’s it. He’ll wait for June.
Stone paces nervously for three minutes. He can’t believe his loss of vision. Yet somehow he’s always known it would happen.
The alarms have stopped, allowing Stone to hear near-subliminal footsteps in the hall, advancing on his door. June at last? No, everything’s wrong. Stone’s sense-of-life denies that the visitor is anyone he knows.
Stone’s Bungle instincts take over. He ceases to speculate about what is happening, is all speed and fear.
The curtains in the room are tied back with thin but strong velvet cords. Stone rips one hastily down, takes up a position to the side of the outer door.
The shock wave when the door is hit nearly knocks Stone down. But he regains his balance, tasting blood, just as the man barrels in and past him.
Stone is on the man’s burly back in a flash, legs wrapped around his waist, cord around his throat.
The man drops his gun, hurls himself back against the wall. Stone feels ribs give, but he tightens the rope, muscles straining.
The two stagger around the room, smashing furniture and vases, locked in something like an obscene mating posture.
Eventually, after forever, the man keels over, landing heavily atop Stone.
Stone never relents, until he is sure the man has stopped breathing.
His attacker is dead.
Stone lives.
He wriggles painfully out from under the slack mass, shaken and hurt.
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology Page 28