by K. W. Jeter
It didn’t look like I was going to learn anything more from Geldt, at least not for a while. I decided to leave him there and go for a little walk.
THREE
I WAS basically cruising for something to eat before I went to work.
Getting on toward midnight, the streets and sidewalks were jammed tight, the still-human bodies sliding around each other, separated by their clothes and a film of sweat. All that nervous energy prickled my skin, like taking a bath in metal filings.
I usually managed to keep track of the local faces. They came, they went. They changed and were gone. You could expect six months to a year from the time of first entry into the zone, before the n-formation started kicking in.
All of this pseudo-L.A. smelled like chili paste with garlic, and refried beans. The fallout from the Southeast Asian places and the ubiquitous—one on every corner—pupuserias. One of the layers of the Los Angeles that had come up from the archives had been tight with refugee culture. That had been one advantage of a collapsing empire. Years of war—those little wars, not the Big One—in distant world parts; that was how you wound up with great cheap ethnic restaurants.
That’s why I was out on the street. Mere animal hunger, the simple kind, oiling my gut and nothing more. I knew why I was there. But what about all these marks?—no, not marks, not suckers, because they also knew, at least a little. They weren’t operating in blissful, pocket-fleecing ignorance. They knew what was ahead of them, what the zone was doing to them. Instead of food, they all had the invisible leather strap of their destiny clenched tight in their mouths. They knew what they’d come here for.
Take this one, obviously a first-timer in the zone, pushing shoulder-first through the crowd, eyes in a narrow face scanning rapid-fire, as though he were expecting death’s flying tackle at any moment. Ready to bolt; not too late to go back home. But he won’t.
And here’s two girls, their faces sick-green under the cliché neon. (Definitely too much of that shit had been called back from the archives—all those sizzling ribbons of light indicated a paucity of imagination, and a pretty stiff dose of historical inaccuracy; too many grungy urban movie sets, and not the real city itself.) Forehead-to-forehead in deep calculation over a dwindling stash of money being counted out between them.
As if money mattered, to such as them. As if anything mattered at all. I walked past them, and out of the corner of my eye caught one girl’s quick up-glance, of fear mingled with excitement. That giddy expectation that set her teenage spine on fire, from pit of crotch to top of skull. Her small hand reached for my sleeve—did she recognize me, from Identrope’s broadcasts?—and then darted back, a small pink animal with just enough sense to be scared. It wouldn’t stay that way.
All of them—the knife-faced newcomer, the whispering girls, everyone else on the street—they all come to the Madlands looking for thrills. And that’s what they would get. If they also got Identrope and redemption as the tail end of the bargain . . . then that was a bonus. The gift-wrapped package popped out from the machinery of grace.
I found a booth in some dive where the steam rolling out of the back kitchen smelled like heavy meat action. The window next to my elbow read “Comidas Salvadorean” on the street side. Eddie the Make slid into the seat opposite me as though I had conjured him there.
“People looking for you, Trayne.” Eddie’s mandible-like fingers picked at the scraps on the table. “You’re a popular guy.”
“The whole world loves my ass.” A waiter in a grease-spotted T-shirt and a ten-year-old’s pencil moustache set an horchata in front of me. I took a sip; the rice water keeps my gut from clenching. “Anybody in particular?”
Eddie nodded, his chicken-tendoned neck jerking down to his clavicle. I kept him on a retainer, so I didn’t have to feed him cash in public. He was an old-timer in the zone, and once I thought that maybe he’d scoped out the same survival ability I had—maybe it was some genetic predisposition we shared—and that he’d just go on fidgeting and alley-sneaking in these parts forever. But in the last six months, every time I saw him, I’d seen his face going progressively softer, as though the skull beneath the raddled skin were being replaced with some substance much more flexible and regrettable. He’d gotten smaller, like one of those prematurely senile children. And the bald sector of his scalp looser, depositing flakes on his negligible shoulders, less like dandruff and more like fragments of a snake’s shed skin.
Eddie the Make was in the first stages of n-formation. The multiplying carcinoma. I’d have to start grooming some of my farm team of snitches for the big league, to replace Eddie. He’d be missed.
He didn’t bother telling me about Geldt; he’d been the one to tell me about that, months ago. “The New Moon Corporation. They’re the ones looking to get hold of you.”
It wasn’t his fault I’d already heard that one. Between carnitas bites I asked him if he knew why.
Eddie shrugged. “They’re a real start-up operation. Nobody’s got much of a handle on them. Could be anything.”
The tortilla was disintegrating and leaking orange grease down my wrists. “What’ve they been up to? In general?”
“Lotta rooting around, out in the junkyard. They’ve got some big section out there they’ve fenced off.” Eddie looked hungry at the last bits in my hands. “Got some major capitalization, whoever they are. Been really working, those big blue searchlights all night long and stuff.”
I pushed the plate over to him. He stabbed around in the debris with his finger and sucked meat off the tip.
Pinning money under one of the plastic squeeze bottles, I slipped out of the booth. “Okay, Eddie—let me know if you hear anything more.”
He looked up at me with spaniel eyes. “Trayne. I don’t feel so good.”
I wasn’t going to lie to him. “Eddie, you do look like shit.”
He sighed, growing older and smaller. You could almost see the pieces, the useless human stuff, falling off him. “Do me a favor.” He was looking at the plate and talking to me. “If you see me again, and I’m . . . you know . . . real fucked up . . .” His sad gaze swung up to me again. “You’ll do something about it, won’t you? You won’t let me just flop all over the place, will you?”
“Eddie. Trust me.” I squeezed his minimal shoulder. “I’m enough of a pal to put a bullet through your head. Or—Christ—whatever’s left of it by then.”
That comforted him. He was chewing on a tortilla scrap and looking thoughtful when I left him.
FOUR
I WENT to work. I work for Identrope.
Sooner or later, everybody in this Los Angeles comes to Identrope. We all have to deal with him, one way or another. I figured I got a better deal than most of these poor bastards. I still got to call most of my soul my own.
I had the keys to Geldt’s Hudson in my pocket, but I didn’t take it. The Hornet was such a pretty machine—all machines are pretty, but this one was especially nice—that it seemed a shame to park it anywhere near the web. There’s always a rain of ash from the dirigible burning overhead. (Some low-level hustlers scrape up the ash, put it in little vials, and sell it as either holy relics or restorative pharmaceuticals.) And some other fallout, wetter and not as pleasant. I didn’t want to find the Hudson’s paint job all munged up when I got done with my stint and climbed back down. So I walked.
The heat from the dirigible tightened my face as I approached, though I knew there wasn’t any heat, at least not any kind measured in Celsius. A cold fire, image of billowing flame. Lucky for the disciples hung in the web, or they would have been crispy-crittered a long time ago.
A superstitious dread kept clear the immediate area around the web’s anchoring point. You can walk to God, but you shouldn’t try to live in his neighborhood.
I walked by the empty buildings, a desolate wind tumbling the gutter trash. The grid of shadows cut the pavement into diamonds.
A hand grabbed my arm. And immediately let go, as soon as I looked around. A puddi
ng face, mouth shocked into an 0 by that act of temerity.
“Mr. Trayne?” The face belonged to a soft dyke, or an even softer man. Or a highly evolved rabbit. “I-I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to disturb you . . .”
“I woke up disturbed.” The person seemed barely able to speak, so I gave him/her a prompt. “Did you want something?” I’m gentle enough with the shell-shocked.
“No . . . n-nothing.” A trembling lip. “I just wanted to tell you . . . I’ve always been a big fan of yours.”
“Well, thanks. I appreciate hearing from folks like you. I really do.”
The person got up enough courage to touch my arm with pudgy fingers. “I always watch your broadcast. To see you and the dancers. I never miss a one.”
“Hey, that’s great.” I could see my charming smile reflected in the person’s irises.
“Even when they’re repeats . . . I don’t really mind . . .”
So fuck me already. Mea culpa. “I had to take a little time off. It’s kind of a high-stress job.” Actually, I had been schlumpfing around, waiting and baiting for Geldt. Identrope had been running tapes of my old shows for the last couple weeks.
“Oh, no . . . I understand.” Nod and gulp. “I just wanted you to know . . . it’ll be nice to have you back. I mean, on the air. For real.”
I felt the person’s little eyes stapled to my back as I walked on. Encounters like these make me feel like even more of a shit than I usually do. Where do they come up with such touching faith? No wonder Identrope can run such a high-voltage operation. If gullibility were spit, every one of these poor bastards could gargle an ocean.
At the anchoring point, the web’s cables bit into the asphalt and concrete like mega-snakes, head down from the sky. Some of the primary cables went up to a meter in diameter. Then the smaller laterals, down to a hand’s breadth. And the thin capillaries of the life-support systems, trembling with the nutrient broth and hematic fluids pumping through them. Finally the neural fibers, thin as the gossamer of spiders, electrons singing on spun metal.
I reached up and grabbed the nearest lateral, catching hand- and footholds. And started climbing. I’d done this so many times before—my regular commute—that I could do it on autopilot.
When I’d first started doing this gig, shilling on the airwaves for Identrope, there’d been so few disciples stuck in his web that you could pretty much go up any way you wanted. The bare bones, the big primaries and the laterals, were the only things in some kilometer-square areas. When I got bored, I used to go out to the web’s far edges, where the tension was slackest, just to ride the flapping breeze. The Santa Anas would come hot and dry over the distant grey hills, and it was like dancing in a pizza oven. A sideways yo-yo in a mild hell. You’d have to be bored out of your skull to register that as fun.
Nowadays the web was considerably more crowded. I’d been doing good work for Identrope for a long time, and the results were all around me as I climbed. (I knew I couldn’t take all the credit, or blame. Identrope had the best product to push: immortality.) I could do it without half trying, but I was still picking my way past tangles of feed tubes and brain wires. And even though I knew that none of them would feel it, I still didn’t consider it polite to step right on some openmouthed face. So I’d try to be careful.
Once in a while, going up or coming back down, I’d catch sight of one of the old ones, those original spiritual pioneers, the first to catch the hook of Identrope’s call. All skinned down to nothing, muscles withered to string, flesh translucent over softened, decalcified bones, bent by the mere tug of gravity. White hair fluttering, ragged pennants with an invisible emblem. The faces of martyrs who had finally seen the handle of their devotion bring up a solid row of cherries, the coin of the big payoff chiming inside their skulls. A spark of mingled envy and pity would fall behind my eyes.
This time, half or three-quarters up, I stopped for a while and let myself hang, hands above my head, feet braced on a lateral below. I could see all of L.A., or what passed for it. What would do well enough, for our purposes. Dreaming, and moving in dreams . . . It had never been any different, not even in the real city. But that had been long ago. Before my time even, and I felt real old once in a while.
Out at the edge of the city, the other direction from the web’s anchoring point, the junkyard rusted in its splendor. That was a lot of territory—it had been a big war that had left all that stuff behind—and I couldn’t see where this New Moon Corporation was rooting around. Whatever they were doing, they couldn’t be spied on from up here.
I could see a fleet of bogged-down, trackless personnel carriers circled around a multi-cannoned tank, a land-going battleship that had been broken in two and left charred around the edges. There were people moving around the machines, a line of wash fluttering on a rope, the coils of some home-brew water condensation rig. Probably another group that had trekked out from where normal people lived—everybody has to start from somewhere like that—and were now nibbling around the edges of the Madlands while they got up the guts to take the full-throttle plunge. They were already inside the range of the field’s effects, so they might as well. There was no point in catching n-formation without having the fun.
A TV antenna bobbed at the end of an aluminum pole. It pointed a chrome arrow right toward me and the web. These newcomers were all set to catch my next broadcast.
They hadn’t been out there the last time I’d climbed up the web. If nobody had clued them in, they might not even be aware that I’d been on repeats. Unless they had tapes or memories of whatever they watched before they’d set out for the promised land.
“Well, here’s to you, folks.” I took one hand from the cable and saluted them in the distance. “This one will be going out just for you.”
They didn’t hear me. I wasn’t on their wavelength yet. I started climbing the rest of the way up.
FIVE
UP at the top. I walked into the studios.
“Hey, Trayne—” One of the technicians, coiling a length of coax from his hand to elbow, nodded in my direction. “Where ya been?”
Everybody wanted to know. I must be important.
“I had some business to take care of.” It was getting to be automatic with me. I pointed toward the rehearsal studios. “Is Nora around?”
“Every day, pal. Waiting on you.”
“Yeah, right.” I’d figured as much. “Catch you later.” I headed down that way.
The hallway floor’s sheet metal rang like a Caribbean oil drum. The whole studio complex had been cobbled together from a fleet of mobile broadcast units—trailers, really, and a few vans, all stuffed with gear, cameras and monitors and shit—that had been left stranded out near the edge of the junkyard. Some of the equipment hadn’t even had its shrink wrap peeled off. Whatever battle some ancient network crew had been sent out to cover must have scared them pissless and gone in the first five seconds. Much later, war long over, Identrope and his minions had glommed onto the gear.
The whole shitload had been dragged up the web, these days’ version of the building of the pyramids Mucho sweat, funky winches and hoists. You would have thought all that dead metal tonnage would have dragged the burning dirigible down, even dropped it to the concrete and asphalt below, but you would have been wrong; it stayed pinned right to the sky.
About the sturdiest of the whole construction was the flooring; they’d put a little effort into that. Through the mismatched joins of the sheet-metal walls, you could see right through to open sky. Most of the roof was as poorly done. The flames of the dirigible overhead competed with the crackling fluorescents that lit the corridors.
When I’d first started the gig with Identrope, I’d kicked up a stink about sound- and light-proofing the actual broadcast studios. The initial couple of shows had been fouled with leak-through from the complex’s surrounding operations, or the cameras picking up smears and streaks from being irised down for a production number and then catching glare from some cheesy wall
panel peeling open. That had given me the cue to go into a whole prima donna, offended-creative-genius routine: “Fuck you; I won’t work under these conditions, you hear me,” blah blah blah. I still don’t know whether I was angling for the studio improvements or for getting bounced off the job entirely; I had already started getting the creeps from close proximity to Identrope. I got the walls, and was still wondering.
At any rate, the rehearsal studio didn’t look like it was in imminent risk of disintegrating like a wet shoe box. I ducked into its relative dim, and pulled the door shut tight behind me.
“Ah, it’s our long-lost Mr. Trayne.”
Shit—my eyes were taking a few seconds to adjust, but from that smooth and oily voice alone, I knew Identrope was there. Waiting for me? I didn’t know if that was a bad sign or not.
More smooth words: “I’d heard you were back from your little, ah, sabbatical. Did you have a good time? I hope you did.” True, unquestionable sincerity—that was his forte, after all—made his voice ten feet wide and tall, rolling a soft truck over me. “We really appreciate your hurrying back here like this. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
My eyes had finally reached the right aperture to see him. All real stars have big heads—I mean physically big, not a matter of ego—and Identrope’s achieved even more apparent mass with his brushed-back silver-fox mane. Big hands, too; big with soul, Lincolnesque, hands you could trust. Hanging there at the sleeve ends of his usual three-piece suit, white as though washed in the Blood of the Lamb.
He always looked immense to me, though I could look him level in the eye. And I could have pulled on his suit jacket—matter of fact, I had done that once, when I’d been cooling my heels in his living quarters and had found one of his closets unlocked—and it would fit my shoulders exactly. If he looked big to me, it was just a walking demo that perception being reality wasn’t a cliché around here, it was the law.