Madlands

by K. W. Jeter

  I’d hit it, right off the bat. “That’s right. What’s that guy’s name?”

  “I think it’s Identrope. At least, that’s what they say on the radio.”

  I nodded. “You know, I heard about him before. Before I ever got to L.A., I mean. He’s a real famous guy. Even bigger than Billy Sunday.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She looked at me wide-eyed. “I’d never heard of him before I got here.”

  “Matter of fact, that was one of the big reasons I wanted to come to the city. So I could go to one of this Identrope’s revival meetings. You know, where they do the radio broadcasts from? I heard he had a great big church. Only now I can’t find where the place is at.”

  “It’s not here any longer. One of the other girls told me all about it. They closed up shop and moved out of the city. ’Cause of it being a sink of depravity, and all.”

  My heart ticked over slowly. “Did he go far away? This guy Identrope, I mean.”

  “No, just a little south of here, is all. To some big piece of land the church could have all to itself. They’ve got—at least, what I’ve been told—their own regular amusement park and all down there. I guess that’s for the kids, or something. So the kids would have stuff to do while their folks are busy getting their souls saved. Seems a little strange to me, though.”

  That was all I needed to know, in what direction lay Identrope’s place. I figured that once I got close to it, I’d see the dirigible burning up in the sky.

  I could have buttonholed anybody out on the street and found out the same information. It struck me now that all I’d really wanted to do was talk to Nora, even if she didn’t remember who I really was.

  “Gotta get going.” I stood up from the chair. “I just came by to say hello, is all.”

  “Are you going to go down there? To that Identrope’s place, I mean.”

  “I thought I would.”

  She reached out and touched my hand. “Why don’t you stay here a little while longer? With me.”

  A note of concern had sounded in her voice. “Why? Is there something wrong?”

  A shake of the head, but she wouldn’t look me straight in the face. “No—it’s just . . . I don’t know. It makes me feel funny, when I think about it. Like you shouldn’t go there. But I don’t know why.”

  I gave her hand a squeeze. “Don’t worry about it. Tell you what. I’ll come by here again and see you, soon as I’m back in town.”

  She smiled, but didn’t look happy.

  I went back down the stairs and hit the street.

  There was nobody waiting for me on the sidewalk. D was gone.

  THIRTY-ONE

  A RUMMY sprawled on the sidewalk, his back against the brick building, a dead Tokay bottle between his legs.

  “Hey, buddy—” I had to give him a slight kick to get his attention. “There was a guy out here a little while ago. You see which way he went?”

  The drunk gave me a leer and a wink. “They went along there.” He pointed a wobbling finger toward the other end of the street.

  I saw what he meant when I hit the corner. D was a couple of blocks away, arm in arm with a young woman. She was dressed in Joad period costume, the black lines of seamed silk stockings vertical on her calves. The little purse gave it away, though; that’s always been such a traditional hooker’s emblem that I could tell her profession, and her interest in D, right off. She smiled right up into his face, and he gave her the john’s usual shit-eating grin.

  They didn’t see me. I followed them to the expected cheap hotel. I waited down on the sidewalk, watching until a light appeared in a window up on the third floor. Their silhouettes moved against the cheap curtain, then disappeared.

  I hung out in the shadows down below for close to half an hour. Then the woman appeared at the window by herself, smoking a cigarette, a thin flowered wrap pulled around her. She looked sufficiently postcoital for me to head on up.

  She opened the door when I knocked. And smiled at me.

  “Hello, Eastern,” I said. “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine, thanks.” She tilted her head. “Come on in.”

  I had known it was her, sensing her presence through the hotel room door, and had suspected as much from down in the street. Her taking on an appearance suitable to this period—I couldn’t tell if she’d shuffled herself into a new body here, or had just been pulled into this reality’s way of doing things—wasn’t enough of a disguise.

  She offered me a glass of something brown and evil. “Want some?”

  “I’ll pass. Where’s D?”

  “Is that what you call him? Over there.”

  D lay in a broken-back bed, sleeping the sleep of the wildly oversated, in more ways than one; the alcohol she’d fed him flushed his cheeks with simmering blood. This farm boy walking around in my original body never knew what hit him. She’d always been good that way.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. D’s clothes were piled untidily on the floor. “Any special reason you put the moves on him?” I sniffed at an empty glass on the bedside table.

  She shrugged. “Old times’ sake, maybe. I’ve got some fond memories of you back then. The body’s in pretty good shape, considering how long ago that was.”

  “I’ve kept it on ice.”

  “Besides—it might’ve actually been you in there. I knew you were somewhere around in this territory. So I thought I’d better make sure.” She looked wistful. “It would’ve been nice if it had been.”

  “Yeah, it would’ve been.” Eastern always got sweet and slightly declawed afterward. She came over and sat down next to me. “There some reason you’re in these parts?”

  “There’s no other parts to be in right now. Hadn’t you noticed? This is the Madlands for the time being. There’s some strange stuff happening these days.”

  “I thought it was just me.”

  She gave me a half-sad, half-exasperated look. “Trayne—I don’t know what the hell you’re up to. But you’d better get with the program.”

  I held out the empty glass. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

  She poured me a finger. “About what?”

  “All the stuff you’ve been finding out lately.”

  A finger for herself. She sipped at it. “Why should I tell you?”

  “Like you said. For old times’ sake.” I pointed to D still snoozing away. “He got one part. I’ll take the rest.”

  Eastern drained her glass. “Like the girl in that old joke says: ‘Not ’til now, you sweet-talking sonuvabitch.’” She shook her head, smiling. “All right. Just to keep our track record complete.”

  What Eastern told me—

  While D and I had been hoofing it across the Madlands, Eastern had been pursuing her own investigations out at the New Moon Corporation’s work site in the junkyard. Since she had been put in charge of security, hired for that purpose by Harrison and the rest of the New Moon brass, she had complete access to all areas. Behind the barbed wire they’d hastily thrown up, and the armed rent-a-cops doing their perimeter patrols, she got busy snooping. That was also something she was good at.

  Much as I’d figured, the bodies of the murdered New Moon technicians were still out at the work site. A medical crew had been brought in to run some preliminary autopsy work on the cadavers, so Eastern didn’t have to mess around with little knives and drill bits herself; all she had to do was call up the rough-draft reports on the in-house computer system.

  Some interesting things right there, stuff that she had a better handle on than the autopsy team. The CAT scan readouts showed a particular cancer-like patterning in the brain cells of the murdered techs; Eastern was able to recognize it as a precursor state of the n-formation disease. That was very intriguing to her. These New Moon employees had started to suffer the usual symptoms of exposure to the Madlands’ reality field without being in the field itself. Somehow, the Madlands had reached out and touched them, long-distance calling. Eastern had never seen that happen before.

/>   “Strange stuff,” Eastern said, as we sat on the bed and rolled our glasses in our hands. I had to agree.

  Some more snooping; Eastern had decided to check out all the electronic gear in the New Moon work site. It had taken her a while, but she’d found another interesting thing, well hidden but there nonetheless: a closed-circuit link between the site in the junkyard and some other unidentified point. A little network tracing established the link’s other terminus, a dedicated hook in the Madlands zone, somewhere around the tethering point of the web going up to the burning dirigible and Identrope’s headquarters. Pretty obvious that Identrope hadn’t been using the line for calling and checking on the weather in the outside world.

  The closed-circuit line was still connected and active.

  Bingo City, as far as Eastern had been concerned. This was what she did best, getting in through these back doors that people had left unlocked. Basically, the cat burglary equivalent of stealing clothes off a line. A tap on this line would give her access to whatever data bank files Identrope was maintaining up there on the web. All his little secrets would be hers.

  “Except it didn’t work that way.” Eastern poured herself another finger. “It just didn’t work at all.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. That was the strange part. Exactly nothing. There weren’t any access codes to hassle with, no encryption, no nothing. It should’ve been just like walking into somebody’s kitchen and raiding their refrigerator. But it didn’t happen. The closed-circuit link just . . . resisted. It was just . . . balky. Slow, and stubborn. And finally it just stopped. But all the circuitry showed that the line was still active. It just wasn’t cooperating.” She took a sip from her glass. “The weirdest thing was that I started to feel like I was dealing with a living thing. Not on the other end of the line. But like the line itself was alive.”

  I held my glass out for a refill. “Did you test this out any?”

  Eastern nodded as she screwed the cap off the bottle. “I put a readout device on the line about twenty or so meters from its terminus in the New Moon work site. Then I sent an innocuous signal along the line; it came out fine, completely unaltered, at the readout point. But when I sent any kind of signal that could’ve accessed or manipulated other areas hooked up to the line, like Identrope’s data banks, the signal didn’t pass through the wire even to the readout point, or else it got there scrambled, neutered sort of. Whatever was affecting operations on the line was in the line itself.”

  We drank to the mutually agreed weirdness of this. I had already drunk enough to start feeling toasted. The alcohol translated from my empty stomach into my bloodstream with enough raw heat to flame my ears. Behind us, D went on sleeping, emitting a gentle snore as he slept off his load.

  Eastern’s voice circled around me as she told me what had happened next.

  She got hold of Identrope himself. Live, and on the line.

  She hadn’t been trying to. She had still been trying to shove her signals down the rock-stubborn wire, when that recognizable voice had come over the audio band of her equipment.

  “What’d he say? I mean, after hello.”

  Eastern hesitated a moment. She gazed at the room’s wall. Then: “He said he loved me.”

  I shrugged, unimpressed. “He loves everybody. He says so on his show all the time. It’s all part of his Christ-like demeanor.”

  She glanced at me. “Yeah? He said he wanted to marry me.”

  “That is new.” I rubbed my sweating brow. I almost expected to see blood on my hand, my brain having given such a lurch against the inside curve of bone. “Elaborate.”

  She did.

  Apparently, Identrope had been impressed with her efforts at getting through on the closed-circuit link Nobody else had ever gotten that close to him; that had been the way to whatever heart he had all along.

  More than that. This was not some simple, flesh-and-blood marriage proposal. Identrope had something else in mind

  It must’ve been love, or something close to it. Identrope, like a teenager crooning over the telephone, revealed to Eastern everything he’d accomplished. And his ultimate plans. He laid out the whole bit for her. He was going to sweep her off her feet, one way or the other.

  “The web,” Eastern told me. “It’s all in the web. He’s not in there, somewhere. He’s there, period.”

  Identrope’s web was, in more senses than one, a brain in the process of constructing itself. (This information was his heart bared to her, the ultimate engagement ring.) The web, when completed, would be different from the human brain that it was modeled upon. Identrope’s web would have a consciousness capable of perceiving and comprehending totally unfiltered “white reality.” It would be the brain of God, perhaps—Identrope told Eastern this, laying it on thick—omniscient and omnipotent in a reality that included all other possible realities, including those beyond mere human comprehension.

  “What a deal.” I drank and listened.

  There was more.

  If the web was becoming a brain, then Identrope himself would be its central cortex, the thinking ego part. He’d gained a unique control over the actual physical material of the web, the wires linking all of his subsumed disciples together. All metal is crystalline in structure, the crystals more or less rigidly bonded to each other depending upon the exact alloy content. Simple metallurgy, so far. But with Identrope, the crystalline nature of the wires had become the equivalent of synapses in an organic nervous system. That is, each metal crystal in the wire passed on or modified an electronic signal just as the synapses in a human brain pass on or modify a bioelectric signal to the next cell in the neural pathway. (I thought that was what Eastern told me; a lot of these explanations were getting fuzzy around the edges, alcohol-eroded.) That was how Identrope had been able to build a defense against any penetration into the web, such as Eastern had attempted from the closed-circuit terminus out at the New Moon work site. The metal “synapses” had identified and rejected her signals. Identrope had, in effect, caused mere metal to take on human characteristics at the atomic level. His power went down that far.

  I lay back across the bed, feeling D’s shins under my shoulder blades. “Go on,” I murmured. Through half-closed eyes I watched the water-stained ceiling slowly rotate.

  “You know about all that ‘white reality’ stuff, don’t you, Trayne?” Eastern leaned on one elbow. “I know you do.”

  “Sure . . .” If I closed my eyes, I could see the stars beyond the ceiling, the gearing of any handy universe.

  “Everything . . .” Eastern’s voice sounded a little sleepy and blurred, a page where the ink had dissolved and run. “Every tail in every mouth of every snake . . .”

  Where Identrope had been. She had told me that, what Identrope had told her. Now where he was going.

  That wished-for white reality was growing closer with every formerly individual human consciousness that Identrope added to his web. He wanted Eastern to join him—to “marry” him—on this ultimate project. Not as another sucker to be merely absorbed into the system, but as an essential buffer between himself in this new grand state he’d have achieved and the commonly perceived reality of the world outside the web.

  “Sheesh.” I shook my head; the booze had put me in the mood for making my own pronouncements. “You know, this isn’t anything new. This is an old story, just written on a slightly more . . . egomaniacal scale.” The big words came flooding out of me, as I waved one hand about. “It’s the same old thing where you have your great men, all lost in their profound and abstract thoughts, depending upon the faithful little woman, the usual practical-minded wife, to maintain the petty details of their . . . um . . . physical existence.” The spiel left me slightly breathless. “The same old kitchen melodrama of the intellectual classes. Karl Marx ran his household that way, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Maybe so.” Eastern’s gaze drifted away from me. “But I don’t think Mrs. Marx ever got what Identrope promised me.”
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br />   “Yeah? What’s that?”

  The ultimate argument. Identrope had given her a taste. Of the almost unfiltered reality he had already achieved inside the web he controlled. Right through the closed-circuit link to her head; Identrope manipulated the living wire into an exact sympathetic parallel to Eastern’s nervous system, so she could get the full bang.

  She wasn’t able to describe it to me. More than words failed her. Thought and concept failed.

  Something like a kaleidoscope of overlapping realities, all the possible ways that possibility itself could be. The sensation had been so intense and multiplex that Identrope had had to yank the plug before Eastern’s unprepared nervous system had burned out.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, Trayne.” She looked at me with a frightening clear gaze. “If you knew . . . you’d understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Why I agreed. To the marriage proposal. It’s worth it. Whatever it takes . . . it’s worth it.”

  “Aw, shit.” I had raised myself up a bit to listen to her, but now let myself fall, heavy and sodden, back against the bed and D’s legs under the blanket. “Just tell me where to send the flowers. I don’t think I’ll make the wedding.”

  “You see? You don’t understand. That’s the whole point.” The bed creaked as Eastern stood up from it. She started to pull on her clothes, slipping the period dress over her head and letting it slide down. “But you will.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” I checked the bottle on the table. It was finally empty. “So is that why you’re here? In the Madlands, I mean.”

  She nodded. “I’m on my way to meet him. To hook up with him “

  “How romantic. I take it the territory’s a little different from what you’d expected?”

  She looked puzzled. “Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on here. What happened.” She looked down at the Joadoid dress. “I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

  “Strange stuff.” I wasn’t going to bother trying to explain all about the sleeping D to her. “Maybe we’ll all understand someday.”