MOM

by Collin Piprell

  “No look,” Bia says, indicating he should turn away.

  The scuff and snap of G‐string removal is prelude to a chorus of whinging bedsprings. And a voice. “Okay. Can look.”

  He turns to see Sky lying there. She smiles up at him. “So you were going to fuck a bargirl.”

  All that remains of Bia is a G‐string draped across the high‐heeled pumps lying beside the bed. A twinge of regret passes at the loss of the honey. But porcelain skin is also good.

  “Aren't you getting undressed?”

  “Sure.” Cisco shakes himself. “Hey, I knew it was you, okay? Downstairs. I already knew.”

  “Yes. But you were going to fuck my Bia telep. Is that not still cheating?“

  What a charmingly archaic attitude, Cisco thinks as he shucks his complicated twentieth‐century costume. Everybody is playing Bangkok World to the retro max.

  Sky and the bed sag away from him in the middle. So at first Cisco finds himself spread‐eagled over the steel bedframe and razzed by bedsprings as he thrusts all around into thin air. Was this also just the way things used to be? Nostalgia must have its limits. Cisco calls a recess and piles pillows and sheets in the middle of the bed. Sky then instructs him to lie down.

  “Let us do it this way,” she says, and now they elicit real music from the bed. She is a portal to hitherto unsuspected Worlds; Cisco has no idea how she does it. They ascend together on a screech of protesting metal, the screech transformed to a million sharp yet subtle pressures on his body. Their movement into each other, meanwhile, becomes a transport of deep cello‐like reverberations, sounding a slow interior rhythm amid a swirl of red cinnamon and creamy brown musk. Her moans are warm caresses that clutch more and more tightly, and Cisco comes in a sonatina of groaning oboe and cello, the cinnamon‐musk storm of color‐scent shot through with bright coiling loops of yellow and orange.

  Then they are back on the bed in the room above Shaky Jake's Go‐Go Bar.

  “Jesus Christ,” Cisco says.

  “Okay?” she asks.

  Cisco thinks it over and decides he's in love. “I like you,” he says. “I like you a lot.”

  “I like you, too.”

  “Tell me where you live. Who are you?”

  “It is not time yet. Be patient.”

  “I am being patient.”

  “Maybe you will be disappointed. You think you know me, but you do not. Let us just enjoy each other for now, no questions asked.”

  The bed protests as Cisco gets up and walks over to the wall gallery of Thai movie and rock stars. None of them looks as good as Sky.

  He hears her get off the bed. “Cisco.” Her voice is soft, unBia‐like. “I am sorry, ” she says. “What's about to happen? You are going to suffer. Yes. And I am partly responsible; for that I am especially sorry.”

  He can't tell whether she's being funny or serious. “I am suffering. I think I love you.” He blurts the last as he turns back to her.

  She shows no sign she has heard. “Everything that is going to happen, it is necessary. Remember, even when it is darkest, I will be with you. And, if we get things right, you and I will finally be together. Really together. Yes. Now go back downstairs. You have to do this.”

  “Really together?” “Trust me.”

  •

  A girl is ascending the dark stairway. She clunks up sideways aboard platform shoes. Cisco stops to press flat against the wall, making room.

  “Geez. Not even a hello.”

  “Dee Zu?”

  And so it is. She wears what Cisco believes is her true avatar together with a rhinestone G‐string and nothing else but the shoes.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “It wasn't easy. My God, Cisco. I could hear you all the way downstairs. It sounded like you were torturing a bagpipe. Two of them. I'll bet they could hear you on the go‐go stage.”

  “It's good to see you.” And it is, though it's also embarrassing. “What's a bagpipe?” he asks. Immediately his HIID starts scrolling.

  She pushes past, proceeding to the top of the stairs and heading straight towards the door of the room he has just left.

  “Dee Zu,” he says. “Please don't.”

  She ignores him, pushes the door open and goes in. Cisco follows. Sky is nowhere to be seen. A barred window facing the wall of the adjoining building, no other exit. She's gone except for the faintest hint of her scent. No cello or swirl of color. No coiling moans.

  Then Dee Zu sits on the bed. The bagpipes. “You bastard,” she says.

  “What?”

  “That was Sky.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who was with you on this bed. The woman you fucked a couple of minutes ago.”

  Oh, yeah. Her. But what Cisco says is, “There was something she had to tell me.”

  “Is it true you've been with her on Mondays?”

  “I met her inline.”

  “For God's sake. What do you know about this woman? Where is she from? Do you know? Who is she, really?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “Why is she so special?” “Dee Zu…”

  “Is it the noise? I can make noise.”

  “No.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Okay.”

  “Never mind. I'm here to tell you: be careful. That woman is using you. Things are happening we know nothing about.”

  “She's trying to help me.”

  “She's using you. And so is Eddie Eight. They're using us.”

  “I thought Eddie Eight was supposed to be the paranoiac.”

  “Seriously, Cisco. Listen to me. I've got to go, but if anybody tries to show you something, if anyone says something like, 'Look at this,' don't look. Okay? Do not look.”

  They start to come back—all the times somebody has told him to look. Eddie Eight. And, at least a couple of times, Smoke.

  “I'm serious. Condition yourself. It's got to be automatic. If you hear 'Look at this,' looking away has to be reflexive. Or closing your eyes. Anything. But don't look.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I don't know what's going on. Not yet. But I can tell you this: somebody's using us. As weapons. They're knocking us out and using us to do things. Bad things.”

  “Like what? Come on, Dee Zu.”

  “For instance? They're using us to kill each other. Think about it. What about Lars? And the others, before him? Who's next? There are only two of us left. 'Two little test pilots.' Which of us gets to be the weapon this time, Cisco? Who gets to be the target? We have to stop them.”

  “Stop who?” Cisco is worried. Dee Zu sounds more like Sissie than she does herself. Everyone's going nuts.

  Fraggings

  The Malls Go Down. From the folks that brought you Shaky's Last Stand.

  —Graffito

  There's more to the Buffalo Shuffle, now, than lackadaisical dancing.

  Some larger skewedness is lending a hallucinatory edge to things. Cisco believes it's inside his head, at first—attributes it to the incessant flicker and flash and the crash of classic rock 'n' roll. The dancers are stepping back and forth, back and forth, over and over, faster and faster, caught in a local loop. Leary and Brian are still there at the wraparound bar.

  “Where's Bia?” Cisco yells at them as he approaches.

  “You young fellers,” says Leary. “You mean to say you've gone and misplaced her?”

  “Was she good?” Brian leers. The music has suddenly stopped, so this query comes across loud and clear. Then the lights come up and everything holds still, a fluorescent morgue.

  “A go‐go bar with bright lights and no music,” says Leary. “What a cockroach feels like caught out in the open.”

  Things are going awry. Cisco's senses of place and balance tell him he's moving, though in fact he's standing at the bar. He glimpses an evil grin just before Brian wheels his chair around and heads off towards the back of the bar. Leary is looking uncharacteristically apprehensive. Things are fast going t
o hell. Cisco hasn't seen this type of disintegration in a long time, even in drills. Today's Worlds are supposed to have intregral fail‐safes. Nevertheless, Cisco expects the nausea and handles it. Leary doesn't look well, but he seems to be under control. “This isn't good,” he manages to say before a blast of music drowns him out.

  It's interesting, from a technical point of view. Spotlit in the gloom at the far end of the stage a good ten meters away, Cisco can see, in exquisite detail, a constellation of pink and blue and gold glitter stuck to a dancer's bare backside. But the floor at his feet has gone indistinct, a featureless mystery. Then, when he looks up again, he can't even see the girl, or the end of the stage. The flashing red light that marks the toilet is only a pulsing smudge.

  Cisco checks back to the near distance, and now the detail is surreal. Cisco fights down another twinge of nausea. The spatio‐temporal axes are badly askew. He looks away from it all to collect himself; he focuses on the floor in time to see the roach hit‐and‐run victim reconstitute itself, its mess all coming together from the smear. Sporting a single bit of red glitter on its carapace, it scuttles backwards to disappear amid the debris. Cisco is gripped by the strongest sense of déjà vu he's ever experienced. He sees Leary deck the burly tourist, the same guy as before, the same wham‐wham‐wham combination except this time from a different perspective. The ebee jerk drops his beer bottle, and Cisco hears the smash from behind the bar—the visual and spacialized auditory cues are out of whack. Two or more different pieces of music are blaring. The beats accelerate, subtly at first, then faster, and Cisco resists the natural inclination of the heart to race in sympathy. An instant later the beer reappears on the bar. The guy drops it again, and it smashes. This time the sound comes from where it should. Cisco watches as the shards reassemble themselves and the beer is sucked back into the bottle. He ducks at the smash coming from just above and behind his head. The bottle smashes and reassembles, smashes and reassembles. The sound is coming from random points, no longer in phase with the visual representation of the bottle's impact.

  “Let's go!” Leary is shouting at him. “Let's get out of here.” His lips aren't in sync with the words. “Sorry, Kid. I'm bailing.” Then he's gone.

  The World is falling to pieces. Rapid foreground‐background reversals are being complicated by phase dissonances and fractal oscillations. This is chaos. Cisco can't tell whether the motion‐and‐perspective trackers are functioning; even if they are, they wouldn't be able to make sense of this. Bangkok World is fast disintegrating, reality engines on a runaway track to total dementia. Part of it briefly resolves itself as a bargirl wobbling past on platform boots—maybe a real telep, given that she appears to be panicking—though the sound of her passing doesn't even register, much less include reverb. A scream issues from Cisco's shirt pocket, some woman expressing acute distress, although Cisco knows she isn't really in his pocket.

  He can bail anytime he wants to, but he doesn't want to yet. He falls against a barstool and clips his forehead on the bar top. There's pain, lots of it. More psychic than physical, but liberal doses of both. He shuts his eyes, pulls closer to his center. This is only a perceptual thing, this assault on his integrity. He can handle it. He knows he's actually safe and sound back in his own cradle in ESUSA. He knows this, but it doesn't reassure him as much as it ought to.

  He looks for his console, just so he knows it's there. It isn't.

  Worldsday

  Dee Zu stands way outside the magic circle. She holds to herself, a kernel of sanity in a universe gone berserk.

  This isn't supposed to happen. Modern world processors are programmed to keep visitors within the circle. Always. Only as much of a universe as is needed at any given time is realized from any given point of view. A critical part of Dee Zu's job, in fact, is ensuring that worlders never stray outside that sphere of intelligibility, a familiar universe continuous with the circle of light and companionable narrative thrown by the primordial campfire. Even with all her training, however, it's hard to hold to herself.

  She has seen Tor. He was sitting on the other side of the bar in Shaky's, almost obscured in the shadows. She's only ever seen him in the Worlds, but never before on a Worldsday; it has always been a Monday. But she knows it was him. Watching her. Maybe jealous of Cisco, or just worried about her. She needs to talk to Tor, but, when she looked again, he was gone.

  Cisco is here. “Cisco!” she screams. “Cisco.” He's standing there in front of a door, seemingly paralyzed by indecision. A nearly naked bargirl, the one Cisco took upstairs for the bedspring duet, is trying to communicate something urgent to him. Sudden nausea threatens to have Dee Zu puking up her soul, now. She's going to have to bail. But she tries again: “Cisco! Look over here. This way.” Cisco pays her no mind, and Dee Zu hits the big red bail button on her console.

  Worldsday

  “This way!” It's Sky. Her Bia avatar. “Hurry.” She's standing by a door.

  Then he sees Dee Zu, also still mostly naked, stationed beside a different door. “Cisco! This way,” she says. Then both Dee Zu and Sky disappear. But his console is back. There, just on the periphery. It looks different, somehow, but it displays the familiar buttons, and he subvocalizes Tools and then Back. What he gets are several consoles, all of them identical. His hand passes through the ones he tries.

  Others wink in and out like macroscopic quantum phenomena. Then there's no console. His HIID is scrolling gibberish. These tools are supposed to be secure, inviolable. There's a pattern to all this. It's more than mere bugs. The Lode itself must be under attack.

  He sees Sky again. She's doing something with a console.

  •

  He steps out into Soi Awol. Except there is no Soi Awol. At least not much of it, even less than there was before. No nightmarket, no skyscrapers, 2D or otherwise. No midget doorman. The door to Shaky's has disappeared, and Shaky's itself is nowhere to be seen. Dee Zu isn't there. Nor is Sky. Cisco finds himself in a dimensionless void relieved only by the faintest of neon smears running in parallel lines off to infinity together with ghostly silhouettes of people and cars. This affords a sense of up and down. And direction. He strides along Soi Awol, noting how the sketchy bars and people and vehicles to either side keep pace, unchanging, as though he were merely stepping in place. Boon Doc's should be up ahead, but he can't approach it. Can't even see the sign. Then it emerges, a higher‐rez island in the drear mist ahead. Or is that behind? It's time to bail. Except his console has disappeared once again. This is serious; this kind of stuff can't happen. He looks in all directions from where it's supposed to be, and it still isn't there. This feeling in his gut is worse than nausea. He looks up and down the vestigial street, but Boon Doc's sign is also gone again.

  Then he hears a booming voice, familiar, muffled as by a door, and Cisco turns to find Boon Doc's directly behind him. He opens the door and steps in.

  •

  Cisco walks in on a crowd of Learys. Everybody is Leary, even the barmaids.

  “Leary?”

  “Hey, Kid.”

  “Have a drink, Kid.”

  He's hailed by a babble of Learys. Abruptly, then, things get worse. Now everybody is Lars King, who is dead.

  “I thought you were my friend.” A plaintive chorus.

  Things all fall apart at this point—or more apart at least. Now there are no Learys, no Lars Kings. No bar.

  No Cisco either, not that he can actually see. This is way outside the magic circle. Existence has been pixelated, shaken and stirred.

  “Cisco! Oh, my God. Cisco. Help me.”

  Dee Zu. Her voice. But he can't even tell which direction it's coming from. “Dee Zu!” he calls. There's no response.

  Then he hears Sissie's voice. “This is bad shit, bro.” What the hell is Sissie doing here?

  “Hey, Kid. Have a drink.” … “Darn it, Kid. Have a beer.” Variations on a theme from half a dozen invisible Learys.

  “Cisco.” Dee Zu is back. “Look this way. No, no.
This way!”

  This, from the woman who told him never to look if anybody tells him to look. But he looks anyway. And he sees a console. Maybe his console, even. He grabs for it. There's the bail button, big and red and inviting. But he doesn't hit it. “Dee Zu,” he yells. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “Now I can't find my console. This is crazy. What's happening?”

  That's what Cisco thinks he hears, but Dee Zu is cut off in mid‐phrase. He goes out the door.

  •

  This isn't Soi Awol.

  Tires scream on asphalt. Cisco jumps back, and the taxi just misses running him down. His telep is operating with all options fully enabled, and getting hit by a one‐and‐a‐half‐ton car traveling fifty kilometers an hour would be painful. He recognizes the hotel across the street. This has served as their portal. Sky's and his. An old six‐story brownstone from the mid‐twentieth century. Blue‐bordered brown letters spell its name: The Landmark. Mondomondo to the max. But it's not Bangkok; it could be New York. And it's expertly finished. State of the art. Somewhere a dog barks, and a cat scrabbles hysterically across the sidewalk in front of the building to disappear into a barred window‐well.

  Then Cisco sees her. Sky's skirt comes to just below the knee, her simple white blouse is open at the throat. She's dressed in period costume, sheer stockings with a thick line running up the back of the legs and under the black skirt. She strides along on stiletto heels, purposeful yet fabulously sexy, up the steps and through the front doors. He's never before seen the wet Sky on a Worldsday, and he can't even be sure this is her. Cisco waits for a bus to pass—an anachronism gaily painted up as a giant Worlds UnLtd cradle—then runs across to follow Sky in.

  Sky is nowhere to be seen. Cisco's footfalls resonate nicely. Only going by the sound, Cisco knows the ceiling lies ten meters above him and the walls are of wood. Then he feels a flash of anger. And a sense of despair. And a young boy's delight at a sunny morning. A yearning for Sky. He feels all of these things as he is assailed by the simultaneous reverb of his footfalls from a dozen standpoints at once. Half blind in the abrupt transition from full sun to cool gloom, Cisco looks towards the reception desk.