Slant

by Greg Bear

  “Enough to get them Ferrets,” Giffey says.

  “Is it possible that folks who can get us MGN are even more hateful and dangerous than the Aristos?”

  Giffey grins. “We are in no position to choose moral sponsors,” he says.

  “No,” Hale says. “No, we’re not. After this is over, if we’re still alive, Hally and I are going to get the hell away from all of this. Southern China, maybe. A few tens of millions will do it. Financial sigs and notes we can exercise before anybody wises up…”

  “This is my last, too,” Giffey says.

  Hale sits up in the chair. “I need you and Jenner, Jack, but I don’t trust you. I think you’re more comfortable in command, and you may even be more experienced than I am.”

  “I am not going to challenge your leadership,” Giffey says.

  “No, but you’ll have the MGN. You’ll have the balance of power.”

  They watch each other closely for four or five long seconds.

  “Don’t underestimate my contribution, Jack,” Hale says.

  Giffey shakes his head.

  “Don’t underestimate my desperation in putting Hally and myself and Pickwenn and Pent in this kind of operation. I can’t stay in this business much longer. Too many birds are coming home to roost. I assume it’s the same with you.”

  Giffey says nothing.

  “Well, I’m glad we’ve got all this straight,” Hale says with a sour face, standing. “Glad to be on firm footing and in complete sync.”

  Giffey chuckles. “It’ll be quite a romp, Mr. Hale,” he says. “A fine capstone for our checkered careers.”

  Hale lifts his arm and points his finger at Giffey. “A warning, Jack. I’m very fond of Hally, much fonder of her than I am of myself. If I feel that we’re being misused, or cheated, or put in unnecessary danger… If she gets hurt for no good reason…”

  Giffey nods solemnly. This much he can completely sympathize with.

  “I believe in treating women right, and putting them in no more danger than I’m willing to face myself,” Hale says. “And for me, there are no other women. Just Hally.”

  Hale nods emphatically and leaves, shutting the door behind him. Giffey leans against the file cabinet in thoughtful silence.

  Jenner returns to the office a moment later, carrying an almost-empty bottle of beer. He sits in the chair Hale has vacated, watching Giffey as if waiting for orders.

  “Don’t stare at me like I’m your goddamned general or your father,” Giffey snaps. “I’m not.” He jabs his finger at the door. “Hale is the boss. Not me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jenner says respectfully. “Are we all going to work together smoothly, sir?”

  “I hope so, Mr. Jenner.”

  “I hope so too, sir,” Jenner says, and finishes the last swig of his beer.

  13

  “I thought you said this wasn’t going to be a fryball,” Alice murmurs to Twist. Fryballs are vid and Yox entertainment parties, typically frenetic and overblown. Twist makes a sour face.

  “This is all I could find,” she says. She wriggles with half-restrained energy and frustration, then pleads, “You can get us in! Some tro shink people are here. We should meet them, you know, make touches, do the flow.”

  “Like who?” she asks.

  “Men and women, why can’t they get along?” a woman’s voice calls out along the pathway to the big house. Huge house, really, perched high on Capitol Hill, in the shadow of the old Corridor/Sound Relay Tower. The woman’s voice echoes across the street.

  Twist pokes the side of her nose and shakes her head, grinning. Alice is waiting for the other side of the question/ conversation, for somebody to answer.

  “Christ. Everybody’s from a different planet,” she hears a man’s voice say.

  “I wonder, could that be true?” Twist asks.

  Alice feels the deep little burn again, as if someone has pressed a just-extinguished match somewhere into the center of her head. They’ve made it up the front walkway, through the forest of twisting angels and fairies on slender black poles, through the glowing green archway to where they are checked by an arbeiter wearing a top hat and white gloves.

  “Non-invite,” Twist tells Alice at the last minute, with a little shimmy straightening her flimsy dress beneath her coat. She smiles sweetly. “You try first. You’re more famous than I am.”

  Alice grits her teeth and glares at Twist.

  The arbeiter pushes Alice’s name and palmscan through a status filter. “You’re not on my list,” the arbeiter says in a snooty voice, nasal and slyly false. “It is apparently not a true spin name. Are you currently employed in a sly project?”

  “I’ve finished working on a Francis Cord Yox,” Alice says. She may not want to go to this party, but even less does she want to be forbidden to enter.

  “I’ll push that and see if it goes through,” the arbeiter says, and quickly enough a little bowing fairy dances on its head, beckoning them to enter. “Welcome, Alice Grale; you are part of the cast of The Faerie Queene.”

  “This is my friend,” Alice says, and the arbeiter records Twist’s image. Twist smiles brightly.

  “Yow,” Twist says. Francis is sly again.” They enter through the high front door. “Heat made flesh!’

  The main hall is filled with men and women standing in threes or more—the party is young and they have not yet broken into more intimate groups—or strolling, many carrying drinks and plates of food. Arbeiters roll through with more food and more drinks; a particularly large arbeiter, at least eight and a half feet high, moves ponderously on delicate insect legs dispensing jewelry promoting a new fibe-direct action Yox, Ten High Command.

  Twist grabs a drink in a crystal bulb: and squeals with delight as she moves through the crowd and approaches the big arbiter. “I collect these things!” she calls back to Alice, plucking up a necklace. “Yow! Sapphires!”

  Alice looks over the main hall. She recognizes a few ex-spin and slow-rev faces, folks who two or three seasons past might have been sly indeed in the eyes of billions, greater than she ever was, but who are now living on residuals and scheming on how again to lay siege and take the town.

  A few figures shimmer every few minutes, projections of famous men and women from the eighties and nineties, expertly mimicked by out-of-view INDAs rented for the occasion. She recognizes Richard Thompson, looking uncomfortable in a denim jacket, hands in pockets; Thompson became hugely popular again just last year. A pair of young women are talking with him; they wear almost nothing, as subtle as steel-toed boots, and they’re just killing time, sweeping the room with opal eyes to see what the solid men are up to.

  Thompson shimmers like a mirage and then meets Alice’s gaze and smiles. He seems to be looking for somebody who wants to talk intelligently; he’s long dead and he can’t do anything with half-naked wahinis.

  Alice doesn’t feel up to talking with dead people. She moves on to the second big room, a ballroom and group Yox chamber, and more people. Bits of talk:

  —”All that backmind! Never even reached the cerebrum.”

  —”Top dyne in that deal. Signed clauses with references in three dimensions, never experienced that kind of protection…”

  —”He’s at Topps/Bally now, trying to hold together the Monte Carlo Yox deal. They got a point last year and now they’re on the board of directors.”

  —”Have you caught Melissa Missile on Twentieth? She’s been tapping into White House secrets and the FBI is going after her puppeteers.”

  —”So I asked her, ‘Senator, which would you rather see, a real Yox of people fucking, or a fake Yox of people getting killed?’ She wouldn’t answer. She could not answer. That’s one of those questions no politician will ever be able to answer. And the whole committee chamber—”

  Twist comes back to Alice, clutching a ring and two necklaces, all flashing tiny logos and designs from the as-yet-ungated Yox.

  “Who’s giving this party?” Alice asks, a little dismayed t
o realize Twist has told her nothing about the celebration, not even who owns the house.

  “Some producers,” Twist says. Twist is bright and happy, all her mental troubles forgotten. Still, in the middle of her broad grin, Twists lips jerk and she tosses her head as if avoiding a fly. “You did vids for them back when. Jake Sanchez and Tim Shandy.”

  “Oh. I did vids for Jake, not for Tim.”

  But Twist has darted off again, leaving Alice staring at empty air and unfocused figures beyond. She looks around and then up at the ceiling, uneasy. She hasn’t seen Jake Sanchez in nine years, and Tim…

  Tim never did vids with Jake. He left Jake before Jake ever signed Alice.

  Thinking of Tim, she doesn’t really want to be here. The image of her apt beckons, small and close; her mind is unsettled, and her insides twist with worries so deep she can’t remember what they are.

  But she’s here and the party is just winding up and she is determined not to be down in an up and swirling world. Steeled, she looks around not for familiar faces, but prepares to engage in the old and pleasant game of finding new attractions.

  The house seems to go on forever. One room is surrounded by terraces with springy floors, like rice-paddy beds rising to meet walls glimmering with twilight skies. No free behavior is evident yet, but Alice senses that couples will soon condense. The joins may evaporate and new duets rain out, several times before the night is over.

  She feels a renewal and some of the old party stir watching the attractive men and women talking, getting ready to seize the night. Her entrails settle, away from worry and into drives that have always been strong and facile for Alice; she has never had trouble connecting, first with words and then with hands and later with her entire body. Sex is like running free in clear cool air, or so she convinces herself yet again.

  She assumes the posture, the expression, of challenging indulgence that shows she is receptive but not easy, sights on a young cream-white man with a spectacular Apollonian body dressed in slender ribbons of orange, and starts to walk toward him.

  “Alice!”

  She turns, surprised, to see Jake. With dizzying speed, she shifts to wary professional friendliness, not provocative, but familiar. She allows him to kiss her cheek—he takes a tongue-swipe at her earlobe, to which she blandly acquiesces—and they hold hands at arms length, turning slowly in mock joy, examining each other.

  “You are still the most beautiful, you know?” Jake says. He is in his fifties, tightly handsome and brown, with a band of gold and clear ruby embroidered around his forehead. His eyes are different colors, by birth not design, and his nose is still large and bulbous, a trademark distortion men of his power can get away with. “I hear you’re working with Francis. How is the old artiste?”

  “Precise,” Alice says.

  Jake laughs in dubious recognition. “Yeah, the whisper is he’s onto something big. May even get a SexYule exposure and be expanded to the World-Wide Yox. It’s lit, what can the Grundys and Exons say?”

  Alice smiles. She’s small in whatever success Francis may have, but at least she’s on the list.

  Jake grins on. “I remember when we worked on a vid with Francis and he made you retake a simple entry fourteen times. The lights kept wandering away and he wanted your lovely navel like a swimming pool, with sweat, you know… just right.”

  Alice does not remember that. There have been so many takes on so many entries. Burn.

  “You know Tim and I are working together now. After all these years.”

  “I didn’t know,” Alice says.

  “Amazing, friends all these years. We’ve got some heavy projects, total audience grabs. Not your usual Jakey schmaltz. Tim brings real class.”

  She can’t imagine Tim working with Jake. “Things have changed,” she says.

  “He got hungry,” Jake says with shrug. “Hey, didn’t know you’d be here, but slide free. Maybe we can talk later.”

  “You own the house?” Alice asks. Jake nods proudly. “Introduce you to my wives. They’re twins, paired, with plugs, you know. Amazing team. Parallel women!”

  Jake is off, walking zag like a dog hunting up birds to flush. Alice suddenly specks clear as in an X-ray the anatomy of these folks, the half-life they live separated from work or a live audience.

  She’s no better.

  She looks again for the Apollonian male, anything to douse the burn, distract her for a few minutes but he’s not in the room now and she feels lonely, nobody else here will do. Still, she looks.

  A balding man in his forties approaches with a servile smile. “Pardon me,” he says. “Miz Grale. I’ve seen your vids.”

  “Oh?” She can do this in her sleep. Maybe he’ll sense that and go away politely.

  But no such luck. “You’re extraordinary. I think you showed me what women can be like, when I was going through a rough time, getting divorced… You kept me sane. I knew there had to be women as genuine and warm as you. I want to thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He has this look in his eyes, totally vulnerable. His little male sexual co-processor is running overtime; he’s going to hang on this ten or fifteen seconds and all she has to do is reach out and touch his shoulder (he might be sly and top, it’s been so long since she’s met the new bosses) and he’ll remember this for years to come. Making love to other women, he’ll be a kind of zombie slave to her in his backmind, he’ll think of her every time he needs to reach orgasm, and his wives or girlfriends will wonder why they never quite connect.

  Alice reaches out and grips his shoulder, leans forward, kisses him lightly on the cheek. “You’re sweet to let me know,” she says. “You make so many things worthwhile.” Her smell sets the hook deeper. “Those times when it isn’t easy. You know?”

  The man nods vigorously. “Oh, yes!”

  Alice blinks at him. “Can you tell me where the bathroom is?”

  “Oh yes, it’s an amazing bathroom, it’s over there, behind the forest wall—those trees, in the next room.”

  “Thank you,” and she gives him her most dazzling professional smile. When she turns and walks away, she does not even remember his face.

  The bathroom is bigger than her apartment. The toilet stalls are ten feet on a side and covered with pink marble and are fibed for full-sense spinal induction Yox. The wall-length mirror is virtual not reflective and the bathroom in the mirror is filled with female celebrities from times past, and she’s right in among them. Marilyn Monroe emerges from one stall, in the mirror, and adjusts her calf-length white dress. She catches Alice’s sight-line and smiles that sun-honey smile. “Your turn, sweetie,” she says.

  Marilyn’s Character Estate Manager—CEM in the trade—never rents her cheap. She’s a perennial, no matter what decade is sly.

  Jakey is doing very well indeed; either that or is blowing everything he ever made, and he’ll likely drag Tim with him when he sputters down.

  Alice hasn’t thought about Tim in years, and with good reason. She killed something wonderful that time, like stepping on a beautiful butterfly; and she did it for no good reason, except that there were other prospects and she thought she needed to get on with her life.

  And maybe she thought he could do better. He was that kind of man, that nice.

  She gets up-from the toilet as it whirls away her urine. “Excuse me,” the toilet says. “You should check with your physician—”

  Alice slams the door and stands outside the stall, her heart hammering.

  “Don’t you hate that?” asks a woman with maple and oak patterned skin, emerging from the stall next to hers. Both stalls continue their irrational warnings. “They’re doing that everywhere now!”

  Outside the bathroom, Alice wonders how much of this she can ignore without screaming. Twist orbits past on the arm of the strangest-looking man Alice has seen thus far at the party. He’s seven feet tall and built like a Popeye Goon, with heavy forearms covered with hair and incredibly broad shoulders and a banana n
ose, and his eyes are those of a proboscis monkey. Twist seems ecstatic. He’s different and Twist is not one to turn down new experiences.

  Alice wonders how well hung Goons are. She shudders.

  Finally she comes to the back of the house and the long green lawn set with winterlife palms and beds of blue irises and violets. The fence is brick and twenty feet high; set in the bricks at intervals are vid monitors reflecting the party back, with add-ons: giants, dinosaurs, disjointed animes, kid-vid characters, all accompanied by floating icons denoting their current corporate owners. (Alice remembers the (CEM) mark on Marilyn’s dress…)

  Typical for Jakey, this is all very obvious, forced, like sausage meat, which everybody likes even knowing what’s in it, and for that reason most of the guests can at least pretend they’re having a good time. The party provides everything they expect, an excellent top-do, a shink sham, or whatever else the socials will call it in the trade spams.

  The burn is really giving her grief now. She’s tough; she can handle six bad emotions and still keep a face, but she had hoped for something to take her mind away to body-buzz nirvana, to a himmelspace, and what she gets is just more EntBiz flare and glint.

  Richard Thompson has somehow migrated to the back porch, where he’s talking with Billie Holiday. Alice walks past them. Holiday nods as if they know each other. Then the two projections go on talking. Alice wonders if somebody will reconstruct her and set her up at some party a hundred years from now. But then, maybe in a hundred years they won’t have parties.

  Maybe they’ll all lie in cold coffins and suck up Yox, forever and ever.

  She’s been looking for Tim without knowing it and here he is, standing with three other men on the lawn. They’re dressed in gray EntBiz-cut longsuits with fan collars and forearm-length sleeves puff-cuff like pastries. Tim has grown a beard and she wonders whether it suits him. He half-turns, scanning for new faces, and spots her. Turns away.

  Alice suddenly feels warm and touches her face, then pulls her hand away. Jaw muscles hard as rocks, she looks for the Apollonian again, clenches her hands until the fingernails bite. There is no reason on Earth for Tim Shandy to want to pay attention to her. He’s sly top and she’s not; he’s working EntBiz now and she is not anything he needs.