And then she collapsed.
Sesha caught her, breaking her fall.
“FLIF!” she shouted desperately.
Her Personal Dangerword, selected on the basis of its unlikeliness to occur in normal conversation, aroused her mobe from its slumber in her handbag. “Seeking assistance,” came the muffled mobe voice.
Oh please God, let her be all right! Tears were flooding Sesha's eyes. Oh God, PLEASE DON'T LET HER DIE!
Already, she could hear someone approaching, running to her aid. The door flew open. The Spanish guy. He took hold of Frances, scooped her up like a child, carried her across to the bed.
“She just ... fainted.” Sesha told him.
“Is she all right?” asked Paul Rayle, from the doorway; he must have heard.
“I...” Sesha watched the young guy press a hypoderm gun into Frances's bare arm. “Frances fainted."
Paul asked the guy, “Does this happen often?"
“Increasingly, I'm afraid.” The reply came from Frances herself. Smiling wanly at the Spanish guy, she coughed, “Thank you, Xabier, I think I'll be fine now."
“You are sure?"
“Mmm-hmm. Yes. Thank you.” Frances let Xabier help her up into a sitting position. “I wish I could describe the sensation. It isn't painful ... not in the ordinary sense. But it does leave one drained.” She swung her legs down off the bed. Very good, smooth legs, Sesha noted. “I'm sorry, Processia, if I startled you. You must think me ... bothersome."
“Not at all."
Frances turned her eyes to Paul. “It's so hard to describe,” she said again.
“But it's not painful?"
He might have been mocking her; there was some slight thing in his tone, and Sesha felt angry.
“No,” Frances replied, getting up, the Xabier guy coming to her aid. “Quite the opposite."
Paul Rayle stood there and said nothing more.
“I'll let you rest, now.” Frances took a deep breath. “Please forgive the intrusion. And yes,” she gave Sesha a think-it-over look, “the offer is genuine."
Sesha nodded.
A little unsteadily, with Xavier supporting her, Frances walked toward the door. Paul Rayle made way for them. Only when they had gone did he seem to feel it safe to murmur, “Panic over."
This was meant to be amusing? Sesha felt loathing for Frances's ex-husband, with his self-absorbed self-importance masquerading as modesty.
Suddenly he asked her, “Have you ever used a Dreambox?"
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* * *
Chapter 14
In the jacuzzi aboard his yacht in the Aegean, megatycoon Bertrand Laurel took a briefing from P. Wendell Murchison, his Technical head honcho. The report came via the Mindseye of Mitzi, the off-duty captain of Laurel's all-female crew, as she rode her employer at a canter, breasts bobbing like buoys, splashed water and sweat gathering on her in beads, running in rivulets down her smooth-shaven ebony scalp. Laurel couldn't stand Murchison's nerdy pencilprick voice; and anyhow, who wouldn't prefer to hear it this way?
“As a means of predicting upcoming trends and developments, the Dreambox falls well short of infallibility,” Mitzi relayed. “The ongoing pattern of events in each individual boxworld does not accurately prefigure future happenings here in Groundworld. Indeed, the Dreambox has been cited as evidence against determinism. It seems that God does, in fact, play dice, if only at the level of human life."
What a load of ass-gas, Laurel thought.
He did a little yap-yap-yap mime that caused Mitzi to grin, squeeze on him tighter with those vicelike vag muscles and work her right index finger, packing a knuckle-length smartstim vibrothimble, further up him, locating his M-Spot with her customary expertise.
She continued—or rather, to exonerate the poor chick, Murchison continued, Mitzi being merely his mouthpiece: “Of course, it may well be that one of the boxworlds represents a perfect or near-perfect reflection of what, for convenience, we might call the real future. But the problem is, which boxworld?” Mitzi bit down on her luscious lower lip as she started squirming herself toward another climax. “And if we instruct box users to conjure up a forward-time-travel scenario, then the futures they visit can be nothing but imaginary futures, of no more practical utility than the forecasts of conventional futurologists.” Mitzi closed her eyes, committing half her mind to what her body was engaged in below water level, and the other half to passing on the shit she was receiving through her implant. “In short, I would recommend that the best use we can make of Dreambox technology would be to concentrate all our resources upon developing...” Mitzi gasped, “...a method of advantageous Groundworld pre-emption, for it would be wise to assume that our competitors are currently engaged in this very branch of...” Mitzi came, hitting soprano with the last word, “...reSEARCH...!"
She was a wild thing when she came, and Laurel always enjoyed watching her in the throes, thrashing like a hooked marlin. Of all his crew, Mitzi was the least likely to ever be faking it on him; no way could anyone simulate such a pitch of abandon. Not even Frances frucking Rayle, with her extensive English theatre training, could have put on this kind of a performance, back when she was of fruckable age, there on his screen in his bedroom when he was a kid, back before she'd made it big with that hair idea, that frucking Happy Hair Book and all its lucrative spinoffs..
Whilst being entertained by Mitzi's testament to his potency, Laurel pondered over the Dreambox report. So Murchison was, in effect, saying, ‘Let's forget the oracle idea and go for the Big One. Let's see if we can change the frucking world, replace it with a better version. Because, hey, if we don't do it, some other frucker will. Because commerce is combat.'
“As a matter of fact,” Murchison went on, through Mitzi, “Erland Zeller, discoverer of the Berkeley Effect, has recruited a team of top imagineers—people with measurably exceptional imaginatory powers—and is currently engaging in secret Dreambox Research over at Palo Alto."
“Well, find out what the fruck he's doing."
“We're trying to. One thing we can be pretty sure of: he's trying to replace this world with his own idea of an improved version. And Zeller's a Utopian. You only have to read his theoretical..."
“Yeah, yeah."
Oddly enough, now that he thought about it, Laurel realized how very much he liked the world just the way it was. He had come up from nothing, made a multibillionaire of himself. He influenced fashions, tastes, opinions worldwide. He engineered reputations, sculpted worldviews, set the agenda for the zeitgeist; for instance, he, Bertrand Laurel, had coined the verb ‘to fruck.’ Such cool and quirky Laurelisms had conquered the planet. Nietsche would have approved. He had his health, no trouble sleeping at night, and not at all did he dislike the way he looked. He was only in his thirties. How could things be any better? And besides, wouldn't life in a whole new, custom-built Groundworld just wind up robbing him of his sense of achievement? Even if he didn't know that the odds were stacked in his favour, the secret truth would remain, and Bertrand Laurel could not bear the thought such a state of affairs existing.
But commerce is combat. It had to be done. How could he afford not to take part in this struggle? The race was on to find a way of dreaming real. The winner would dominate the world. And maybe if the Zeller team won, domination wouldn't be an option, not in some fairyland of sweetness and light. A world entirely without balls.
The whole thing still struck him as crazy—beyond crazy—but Murchison took it seriously, and Laurel hadn't gotten where he was today by running scared of crazy schemes. Gotten there and stayed there. That was why he would give Murchison the go-ahead.
Mitzi started off again, but Laurel found the urge had left him, and he clenched at the approach of her fingertip, denied re-entry to the vibrothimble. Limp, now, he had already slipped out of her. He dismissed her, awarding an appreciative slap on the butt as she stepped out of the jacuzzi. Then he asked to speak to Murchison, aud only. His Rolex wrist mobe put him s
traight through. Soon, once they perfected a send-receive neurochip, he would be doing the bulk of his business the pretty way, through one or another of his girls.
“Mr Laurel?” came the beat-me-up bleat of his Tech chief.
“About that Dreambox idea ... replacing this world with a better one?” The notion sounded, spoken out loud, so completely and utterly nuts that Laurel felt anger at Murchison for having given him cause to voice it. The thing felt somehow like an affront to his authority, so lunatic was it.
“Advantageous Groundworld pre-emption?"
“Whatever.” Fruck your goddamn nerdese, Laurel thought. “So like, how do you figure this can be achieved?"
“Not very easily. We'd need to find ourselves a person with a certain special kind of imagination."
“Special? How so?"
“Someone possessing the ability to focus quantum compliance down to a single conceptual monad, that of ontosupplantation."
“So tell me, Murchison, you get your rocks off from this all this frucking jargon?” Sometimes, hearing the horsesugar he came out with, Laurel couldn't believe he was paying this dwoip. At the end of the day, though, he knew that Murchison was well worth his salary. The thing was, Bertrand Laurel didn't like to be on someone else's ground, like he definitely was here.
He said, “You mean someone who can make their dream more real than real?"
“Exactly."
“And how do we set about finding such a person?"
“I really wish I knew,” Murchison confessed. “Aside from trial and error, getting one person after another to hook up and dream, I can't at present think of any way of proceeding."
“I'm expecting you to come up with something."
“Of course, there's always the Zeller team. But I hear they're under very heavy guard. Security like nothing you've ever seen. All except for..."
“Except for what?"
“Well apparently one of Zeller's imagineers, a real star, one of the very best talents in the business, had a disagreement with the old man and quit the team; seems this person has their own idea of what constitutes Utopia. Whoever it is, they've gone underground, working alone. Now if we can track down this person..."
“I trust you're already working on it?"
“Yes, sir, Mr Laurel, have no fear."
“And can we safely assume that everyone else is stuck in the same shithole? Excuse me a moment.” Laurel was straining to get his left big toe up to his mouth so he could bite off a hangnail he had just noticed. “Way I see it, there are probably people all over the planet—not only this team of Zeller's, but other organizations, individuals—who have hit on the idea of supplanting this world with their boxworld, and who are now, even as we speak, hooked up and turning mental somersaults."
“That's very probably true."
Laurel finally got to the nail sliver, tore it off and spat it away. His bodily suppleness pleased him. “And I guess if any of them do succeed, we won't know anything about it?"
“That's almost certainly right—human memory, human consciousness in its collective entirety will have been altered to accord with the amended realitude. There's nothing to say that it couldn't already have happened."
Well, whoever may have loaded the dice, Laurel thought, I'm still in the game. I haven't started losing yet. He said to Murchison, “Find me someone who can replace this world with a new world in which the Dreambox was never invented. Even better, a world in which it could never, ever be invented."
“Mr Laurel, with all due respect, I'm not too sure that this would be a particularly shrewd..."
“Shrewd? Leave shrewd to me. You make with the science, I'll handle the strategy. A better world would be a world without all this frucking Dreambox shit. The problem solved in one fell swoop.” And, Laurel thought, with no cost to my self-esteem, my accomplishments left undiminished. “In fact why can't we get a whole bunch of people dreaming together, hooked up to one box? Maybe between them they can..."
“It's already been tried.” Murchison, for once, had the balls to cut in on him. “And, I'm sure, it's still being attempted. But it doesn't work. No one can figure out a way of stopping the psyches from attacking each other, competing for dominance, cancelling each other out, messing up the Berkeley Effect. Maybe one day we'll find a way round it, but that could be a long way off."
“Well whatever, let me know of any progress."
Laurel broke contact. He was getting hard again, his body's contribution to his self-congratulation. Another bout with Mitzi was in order. No, not Mitzi. Damaris, this time. Laurel asked his mobe to summon the bosomy bosun.
If he had been a cigar smoker, now would have been the time to light up. Laurel felt, at this moment, capable of scheming his way out of any depth of shit. It would be doing this whole world a favour, dreaming the Dreambox right out of existence. Maybe that was the source of his optimism, his sense of mastery. In a funny, superstitious kind of way, it felt like praying to God for some social, as opposed to personal, break, with God being therefore somewhat more likely to deliver the goods. And even though Laurel wasn't nearly so at home as he would like to have been with all this levels-of-realitude monkeygunge, the challenge identified by Murchison excited him. As things were, the only other piece of business to pique his interest of late had been the PsyTri thing, the prospect of eating Frances Rayle, commercially speaking, gobbling her up and thus eradicating his envy of her clever little Institute's hold on women everywhere from Reykjavik to Riyadh.
Commerce is combat.
Could even Machiavelli himself have cooked up all these little side-bets, such as the spychip in the soft toy sent in Frances Rayle's name to her ex-husband's kid? At a crucial stage of negotiations, if Frances started stalling, not meeting Laurel's terms, all he needed was to say the word, and the toy would send out an infrasound burst of precisely the right frequency to induce a seizure in the baby without affecting more mature sensory systems. Things would look bad for the kid, and Frances would get to hear about it—the Asian guy in London, Laurel's PsyTri plant, would make sure of that—and Frances Rayle would be distraught, distracted, and hopefully more agreeable and amenable; or so her psychoprofile strongly suggested. The kid would soon recover from the infrasound—the profile cited stress, not grief, as harvestable—but in the meantime the ace would have been played, the edge exploited. Okay, so it was the nuttiest ploy since the CIA's legendary last-century attempt to depilate Castro, but wasn't that, when all was said and done, the very root of its appeal? Didn't you just love being at the centre of a web, the more labyrinthine the better? To that, sex came a poor second.
Frances Rayle had no conception of what she was up against. Laurel grinned to himself. He had yet to fully factor in the Angel Syndrome, an unknown quantity but probably a bonus. Vain old bitch. Whose fault but her own?
Commerce is combat.
And combat, as Mussolini used to say, sees man at his finest. With this most profound of human insights Bertrand Laurel settled back in the jacuzzi, adjusting the water level so that his erection just crested the surface, to await the arrival of Damaris.
Less than thirty seconds later she was present and correct, crossing the room toward him, saluting playfully, and throwing off her uniform, letting loose her long straight deep-dyed hot red hair. When she got down to her skin she unzipped that, too, and Sick Nick stepped out from inside.
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* * *
Chapter 15
Sesha Roffey was regarding him with unconcealed disgust. “No I haven't used a Dreambox,” she said frostily. “I've better things to be doing with my time."
But to Paulie Rayle the theory made a good deal of sense. Sesha was Frances's nominee as her successor. A promotion beyond her wildest dreams.
“Just consider this a moment,” he asked of her. “No offense, or anything, but doesn't it seem just a little too good to be true, Frances choosing you to head the Institute? I mean you yourself sounded..."
“I b
eg your pardon?” She was furious, now. “That happened to be a private conversation."
Paulie shrugged. “I couldn't help overhearing. The walls are so thin."
In truth, the only word he had inadvertently caught was when Frances had whispered Sesha's name from outside her door. The rest had been gleaned with the assistance of his mobe, with its amplifying Eavesdrop function. It didn't make him feel very good about himself, but this was an exceptional situation.
“What exactly do you want?” She might have been the class dreamdate squashing a pass from a dweeb. “If it's more of this realworld/boxworld shit ... please, I don't want to hear. You have an addiction. You need help. And, may I just remind you, you're here for Frances's sake?"
He said to her, “If you had a boxworld, this would feature in it. Your dream job. Be honest with yourself."
“Oh look, go away and get some medication!” Sesha Roffey was, plainly, loath to swear at him, so great was her respect for Frances and, by extension, people of importance to her boss. “You don't know me. You have no conception of what I want out of life, the things I might choose to base my dreams around. I mean how dare you!” More calmly, she continued, “This is nothing but paranoia. This world we're in is the real world ... only someone very deluded would doubt that."
“Then what about the verticar?"
“What about it?” She refused to be embarrassed. “I may not be able to give an explanation, but that hardly means I have to accept yours. I can live with not knowing, without jumping to ridiculous conclusions about,” her voice thickened with scorn, “the fabric of frucking reality."
And then she stood there looking ashamed of herself for losing her cool. “I'm sorry,” she said quietly, “but this is too much."
Paulie said, “You must think I'm insane."
“Perhaps you're just tired. I certainly am.” She looked away from him as if to contain anger. “Can't you see Frances needs you?"
“I don't know how I can help her,” he said truthfully.
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