Despite everything, Cisco finds himself enjoying the show. Finally, half rolling, half dragging him, with Sweetie tottering along in attendance, Rabbit manages to get Brian installed.
Smeared with batshit, he hangs there otherwise naked, suspended in his makeshift cradle.
•
The tank flickers on. A vague form wavers into view and resolves itself. “Yo, yo, yo,” it says. “Howdy!”
At first he thinks it's the mushrooms. Cisco blinks the functioning eyelid. But no mistake. Right there in Brian's holotank, attired in nothing but a jockstrap, stands a familiar figure.
“Eddie Eight!”
Sweetie shrieks. “It's Eddie Eight.”
And so it is. Very much alive and still in possession of his head after all. Eddie Eight does a deep knee bend and waves in Cisco's direction. “Long time no see, man. Actually, it's only been a day or two—I guess we can measure time in days out here—but it seems longer, doesn't it? Maybe it's because ESUSA's already nothing but history.
“Whatever. Here we have Cisco the Kid, nearly the last mallster standing. Wow! Good to see you!” Eddie Eight pauses his knee bends to take a bow. “Also presenting Eddie Eight, the last telep, in person and still going strong.” He grabs his crotch, which, as usual, bulges unnaturally.
Brian, meanwhile, hangs there in his cradle gurgling, a sly baby gazing at a giant ice‐cream sundae. “Surprised, my boy? You shouldn't be. I told you old Brian gets around.”
It's weird, watching them both at the same time: the legless apparition in the cradle and, swollen with oily muscles, the cognate telep in the tank.
Cisco's friend Eddie Eight isn't dead after all. He's never been anything but a telep. A Brian telep, of all things.
•
“Ready?” Rabbit asks.
“Just do it,” Brian advises him.
Eddie Eight, one hand inside his jockstrap, watches avidly as another form boils up beside him.
A naked woman substantiates in the tank. An absurdly voluptuous naked woman.
“What the…?” Eddie Eight, for one, is nonplused.
His ebee visitor holds two large dildos, slick with lubricant, one in each hand.
Grinning impishly, she squats and proceeds to insert them.
“Fuck me, Sweetie!” The querulous voice issues from the cradle. “Did you do this?”
Sweetie goes, “No, no. Wah ha‐ha‐ha! Not me.”
“Fuck, you're past it. Rabbit! Did you do it?”
Rabbit looks serious, as he must, and says, “No, not me. No time.”
Up in the tank, Eddie Eight radiates indignation at the same time he tries not to laugh. “Well, Jesus Christ. Change it, man.”
Brian seconds the motion: “Change it, change it, change it.”
The bimbo evaporates. In her place, two ebees, one of them especially ill‐defined and wavery, materialize together in the tank. Rabbit mutters and clanks at the console. The figures coalesce.
•
“Hi!”
She stands there. A woman of medium height. Chestnut haired. Lithe. Sharp‐edged and steady as a rock, aside from last‐moment dither while her costume firms up. A simple VitaSkin tunic in beige and tan with orange trim. Graceful, she steps forward. It's hard to believe she's fifty‐four years old. She looks thirty, maybe thirty‐five.
This is the lady of the locket. A super‐high rez version, but that's who it is. It's also the woman from Cisco's lost‐childhood dream fragments.
Brian and his Eddie Eight telep are crowing in near concert: “Ah‐hah. Welcome. Yes! Welcome, welcome, welcome.”
This is surely his mother. And Cisco can't even say hi. He wills his body to action, and to hell with the curare. One eyelid flutters and he senses a twitch in the opposing forefinger. He subvocalizes: Is this my mother?
The response is quick: Not yet.
“Behold my Ellie! I give you new life.” Eddie Eight flexes and preens and grabs at his bulge some more. Then he reaches for Ellie.
Brian mimes Eddie's rutting, hanging there alone in mid‐air, stubby dick jutting from legless crotch, a string of drool coming off his chin. God is naked. “Isn't this just grand?” he's saying. He bobbles and rocks, miming his wheelchair dance, humping away all by himself, thrusting erratically, and Cisco watches Sweetie turn away from the sight of Brian's hairy ass stuck with bits of bedding lint and batshit. Brian's eyes stare past his audience and the cavern walls, intent on another dimension of experience.
It's a one‐man gangbang. In the tank, Eddie Eight has sunk to his knees and is noisily lapping at Ellie's ebee. In the cradle, Brian spreads his arms wide, purses his lips and suckles at thin air. Cisco's eyes have adjusted well to the dim light; he wonders if the mushrooms aren't upping the rez as well. He can see the wisps of white hair on Brian's head, on his ass. The pallid, fungal body is spotty and rough with plantations of skin polyps. Now Brian is engaging in a grotesque parody of what his telep is doing with Ellie's ebee in the tank. Eddie Eight thrusts into Ellie with abandon, looking down to admire the flex of his oily thighs as he ruts. Brian thrusts in unison, gazing down at where he has no legs. Cisco would look away if he could.
Sweetie is looking away. Then she goes over to Pussy. Reaches between its hind legs and pinches. Smiles at the godawful caterwauling. Still smiling, she holds the cat steady with one hand and, with the other, she pushes a long piece of metal up into its rectum. She wiggles it around, gently at first, then she does it much harder, describing half‐meter circles with the hand holding the wire. Soon the cat makes no more noises.
Sweetie returns to her station beside Cisco.
The remainder of the show hurts Cisco as much as anything that Sweetie is doing to him. And she has gone back to her games with special ferocity, though she doesn't appear to be enjoying them as much, paying more attention to the tank than she is to Cisco. The wrinkles in her face run with tears.
Eventually it's finished. Eddie Eight slaps Ellie's ebee on the butt and says, “That was great. Thank you, ma'am.” Then he turns and bows to his audience.
Little clouds of semen float in the field around Brian. His voice emerges again for the first time in minutes: “Wow! Here I am, a legless old piece of homo sap shit, hanging here in this cradle at the same time I'm projecting qubital and mechanical teleps all over the place, one of them off and away and leading your fuckwitted father over hill and dale through the dusty wilderness. I've got no legs, and I've got legs like fucking oak trees. Fuck me, I could have wheels if I wanted them. What am I saying? I do have wheels. Can you beat that? Hah! No, you can't. Can anybody? And get this. They're all me. We're all me. Even Rabbit. And Muggs. And soon that's all there's going to be in this whole world. Me, in all my many‐splendored variety, and Ellie. Whoa. That's right; and Sweetie, of course. Just the three of us.”
Ellie is standing in the tank looking vague, smiling as Eddie Eight runs a hand up between her legs from behind.
“Of course this Ellie is little more than a pale facsimile of the real McCoy.” Brian gurgles happily. “But we'll soon have the rest of the goods. As soon as Leary arrives. Then we'll see. Oh, yes. We will see. Rabbit! Get me back to the monitor.”
“Tsk.” Rabbit goes over to release Brian from the field and maneuver him into his chair. Then he wheels him back to center stage.
“Well, my boy. That was your dear, departed Mommy, only half defragged but fully shagged. And it was fine. Not as good as it'll be when I have all of her. But pretty fine.” He licks his lips and makes smacking noises. Then he sees the cat lying in its pool of blood. “Hey! What's happened to Pussy? Shit.” Rabbit wheels Brian over so he can give Pussy a whack, maybe to see if he's only playing possum. “Shit, Sweetie. What good is it, beating a dead cat? Haven't you got any sense at all?”
•
Sweetie is tired. Too much fun for one day. So she takes a break from her experimentation with Cisco and lapses back into mummy mode, leaning right up there against her Snookums‐Wookums. Motionless, eyes closed
this way, she might have been dead for years. The tank is empty again. Brian, snoring contentedly, has nodded off in his wheelchair, wasted by mushrooms and all the excitement of Ellie's quasi‐defragging. Even Rabbit has gone dormant. The main sign of life is a flow of roaches that have ventured out of the shadows to engulf Pussy and his pool of blood.
Cisco himself tries hard to recover enough control to do something. But he's tired, tired. The drip of water and Brian's rhythmic snores are having a hypnotic effect. Despite himself Cisco eventually falls asleep, one eye still open and staring.
Dream
In his dream, he explores a wooden house of many rooms, a house like none he has ever seen. Yet the house feels familiar, packed with emotional baggage. It's rich with times long past and forgotten, laden with experiences that are his and at the same time are not.
Now he's in a hallway, dark with shadow and dust. A door is ajar, and he can hear people. Quiet chatter, tinkle of ice in glasses. Then he's at the door, pushing it open. The happy chatter has ceased. There is no party. Two women, naked, are making love to one another on an old‐fashioned bed. The nearer person, towards the foot of the bed, looks up. It's Sky. The other peers around behind Sky's haunch and smiles at him. It's Sissie.
“Why don't you get the others?” Sky says. “Bring them in.”
He's on a narrow wooden stairway that wends this way and that to other floors. He's in another hallway with more doors. One of them opens to reveal a boy of nine or ten who looks oddly familiar. He sees Cisco and bolts. He runs down the hall and darts into another room, slamming the door behind him.
Now Cisco stands outside the room, and a nasty unease swells within him. The dread becomes terror of what lies inside. Then he's on the stairs again. No, these are different stairs. Lost in the bowels of a great rambling house, he knows he's supposed to be somewhere else. He's late, and it's important he meet some people soon. And he must bring others. He can't remember who. But it's urgent that he bring them together.
In one shadowy room he finds bookshelves from floor to ten‐meter ceiling. Broken pieces of mirror litter the floor, and he's fraught with an unutterable sense of loss. A man with a prominent forehead and a gray beard appears and explains. The books, the ones that are left, are like these silvered shards: they hold frozen moments of a time past, but no matter how you turn them this way and that, squinting at various angles into their depths, the rest of that mirror's world remains obscure. All that remain are scattered pieces, and few of them fit together.
The old man becomes Leary, and in the dream Cisco is not surprised that Leary speaks with Sky's voice: “The world had a written history, a dramatic narrative, but all that remain are the shards of a broken mirror. Frozen pieces of a world long departed, mere glimpses of what we once had and what was once possible.”
•
He awakens to Brian shouting at Rabbit. Brian is telling him to man the monitors, check the emergency systems, secure the backups, fuck the fucking fuck… Brian has lost his cool.
Briansday
WHOOMP!
The whole place judders. Rabbit loses his balance and collapses in a heap as thousands of bats spill out of the dark once more to hurtle around twittering and alarming Cisco, who wants to shut his eye against the storm. His new WalkAbout informs him that a bat's sonar allows it to navigate with uncanny accuracy, even in the dark.
“Holy shit!” Brian says. “Holy shit! Has MOM got a bead on me? Or what? What's going on here, eh? How many vectors can she have?”
An old‐fashioned alarm, one of Brian's antibugging devices, is whoop‐whooping. “Rabbit! You check our boy again. There's something in here.”
Rabbit, back on his feet, sweeps Cisco over again and again, but he finds nothing.
“So shut the goddamned thing off. Now! Doesn't anything around here ever work the way it's supposed to? Jesus Christ, I ask you.” He looks all around before he remembers. “Sweetie, you fuckwit. You killed Pussy.”
Sweetie has put her hands over her face against the bunkerbusters and, perhaps, against Brian's pique.
“What is this? Rabbit! Put all monitors on high alert. Have the plaguebot stand by.
Search for any sign of intruders. Jesus Christ. Maybe you'd like to go out there and have a look around yourself? Eh?”
•
The satrays are also back.
“Piss me off,” Brian says, pointing at the monitor. “The first really nice day in I don't know how long, and now look.” Clouds of smoke and dust rise from trails of fire that pass this way and that, describing what look like random tracks in the desert a few kilometers on the other side of the perimeter and obscuring an otherwise clear blue sky.
He jabs his stick in Cisco's general direction. “She knows she's got to get me before I get her. This world isn't big enough for the two of us. That's right. I'm only here because she can't see me, otherwise I'd be long dead and gone. And you're here because she needs to find me. ”
Brian raves and rocks and waves his stick around. “So which MOM is it? Who's shooting at us? If Mildread thinks she has found me, and it sure as shit looks like she's getting warm, she doesn't need you anymore. You'll be nothing but collateral damage. Although she might want to save the nursery. Who knows? Sky's probably a different story. She may be sorry to lose a favorite toyboy window on mondoland. Cisco the Kid Smith: Sky's very own home entertainment center. Stay tuned for next week's installment, eh? If it's Maria, on the other had, it's simple. We're cooked. She wants all of us dead. We freak her out. Basically she wants to slam every window on existence shut. All of them. Forever. This would be opping out big time, what you might call a radical suicide.”
Another bunkerbuster jolts the place, but not as hard as before. Brian shimmies and squeaks in his ruts and then things go quiet again, aside from a slight snore from Sweetie and Rabbit's fretting. Cisco hears a slump of books, catches a moldy gust of decayed history. Up on the monitor, the day is dying as satrays continue to frolic in the distant wastes.
“Maybe it was only a false alarm. MOM fluking out.” Brian doesn't sound convinced. “But the closer Leary gets the more MOM is finding her range. We have to assume he's carrying something, I don't know what. I could have Muggs try to take that locket off him and leave him out in the cold. On the other hand, Muggs might fuck it up, and I'd lose the locket. Besides, as I've said, it would spoil the fun if your dear old daddy couldn't join us for the finale.
“Anyway, the big question right now is this: what else has MOM got trained on me?”
Outside
Trapped out here, Dee Zu can do little more than wait. What she needs is a diversion. Something to occupy the plaguebots while she scoots across the boundary. Or she can stay where she is and die soon of one cause or another.
“We wait,” is all Toot has to say. “Wait till morning.”
•
Night falls, and the sky fills with stars and logos. Dee Zu is fascinated. This is like nothing she's ever seen from her window in ESUSA. At the same time, she's hungry, she's thirsty, and she's tired. She reflects. What has she got going for her? Number one, nobody knows she's here. Okay, that could be a real advantage. She thinks some more, but number two doesn't come. So there's little she can do now but wait for daylight.
Dee Zu isn't sure whether the flickering holo relics, most likely a mix of ads and decoy targets left over from the Wars, are in fact out there or whether she's dreaming them. She stretches out on the ground swaddled in blur dust and eventually goes to sleep.
Outside
The satellites have ceased operations for the time being.
Leary notices the bot billboard in the last light of day. It rises due east, reddened by the setting sun. It's bigger than the ones he's seen from his window in ESSEA. Like the others, it's blank. Another billboard rises due west of him, standing square‐on opposite the first, a hundred meters from where Leary sits. It firms up dark and inscrutable against the sunset.
The dull red orb of the sun sinks behind
a bank of gray stratocumulus. It reappears between cloud and horizon, swells to a fiery, misshapen glob, and then melts into the earth. Night has fallen.
•
Leary watches the bloated orange moon lift off the horizon. Is Moon Station still manned? Hard to say, but he thinks not. He hasn't seen a Loonie telep in the tank or a World for donkey's years. Ever since that last shuttle contaminated the Moon with blurs.
As big as the moon might be this night, it's being gradually obscured by an enormous, multi‐colored WU. Leary is witnessing a rare semi‐occlusion of the moon by the orbital Worlds UnLtd logo. Like the face of a long‐lost friend, the night sky is at once familiar and strange. He makes out the Big Dipper, but the Dog Star is obscured by light from neighboring logos. He sees many of the familiar old celestial bodies. The Golden Arches floats next to the BioLogic molecule, half blocking out the Big Dipper, and below the giant Silver Swoosh.
Leary sleeps. When he opens his eyes again the Arches have hardly moved. Muggs is sitting right up tight against him, staring westwards into the black. Even as Leary sits up to help him stare, the stars in that direction fade. Then they smear away altogether. Leary's first thought is that the fleye is back; he swats with both hands in front of his face.
Then he hears the dry rustle and rush of things rocketing past just above head level. He ducks. Hunkers down closer to the ground. Muggs doesn't budge. There they are again. And again. A few go the other way, east to west. This time Leary sees something. Greenish lights whizzing past. Hummingbird size, maybe. Over to the east, ghostly green forms waver and then brighten. They flicker and dance like an old‐style billboard trying to spell something out with thousands of little electric lights, except the circuits are scrambled, and the message seems randomized.
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