Louie headed back to the emti, gloating ‘I’m going to bill you three for ten minutes of my wasted time. That’s thirty minutes OK?’
Kiki was the only one to wave goodbye. Louie vanished.
‘Maybe they just didn’t like our song,’ said Fencer.
‘No one at all?’ said Dielle.
‘There was a lot of competition around at the time, millions of bands and solo performers were trying to get noticed, all using the same distribution lines.’
‘Yeah, but not one buyer? Surely someone would have been curious enough to buy it?’
‘They just weren’t ready for us,’ said Fingerz, emerging from his shield. ‘Everything has a time and place and that one wasn’t ours, man. S’cool by me. Selling music never felt right anyway.’
‘Look,’ said Kiki. She pointed at the screen. ‘It’s still working. Can you try again?’
‘What’s the point if they don’t like us?’ said Dielle. ‘Maybe we got the wrong device. Why did they need something this size just to play music anyway?’
‘They didn’t just listen to music on these things,’ said Fencer. ‘They used them to play games, watch sumes, communicate, create stuff and a whole load of things we just do by eye. They even used them to read books.’
‘Dicing primitives. I can’t believe you grew up getting your feeds that way, darling,’ said Kiki.
‘Books? That’s a great idea!’ said Dielle. ‘Why don’t we send back a book and see if they’ll buy that?’
Fencer checked his status displays. ‘I think we only have a minute or so left. Not easy to write a book in a minute.’
‘You don’t have to,’ said Kiki. ‘Tell Sis to dump a load of the latest onSlab events into a simple text format, add in a couple of proposed sume threads my team have in the development file and entangle that. The sumers of the day will think it’s science fiction.’
Fencer paused briefly. ‘Done,’ he said. ‘We need a title.’
‘For Dicesake!’ said Dielle. ‘It took us days to come up with a name for the band and even then we had to ask Louie and believe me I am never going to ask that gap for anything ever again.’
‘Come on,’ said Fencer, watching his internal status indicators decline. ‘Quickly, just think of anything. Fingerz?’
‘Yeah man,’ said Fingerz. ‘A book.’
‘Three seconds,’ said Fencer. ‘Dielle, think of a title now!’
Dielle was not at his best under pressure. ‘I… I don’t know, dammit!’
The tablet computer’s screen cracked and acrid, blue smoke seeped from the sound vent.
Fencer grimaced. ‘I guess we’ll never know if that worked either. I didn’t have time to track it with a different account code.’
‘That was fun,’ said Kiki. ‘Now that’s over we can release the sume of the theft performance. Problem is, if we include this debacle it’s not exactly going to paint the Farts in a good light. Not unless you want to go down the comedy route.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Dielle.
‘She means we’ll be a laughing stock if we show what we went through all this for and then not a single person bought our music back in the twenty-first century,’ said Fencer.
‘Blows man,’ said Fingerz.
‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Kiki. ‘I’ve put a couple of my writers on it. See if they can come up with a more upbeat pay-off, but if they can’t I’d recommend we keep schtum and see if we can whip up a couple of false linktrigues about who wanted this thing and what for. Le Pendue only knows that I was brokering the deal, not what it was going to be used for, so he can’t leak it.’
‘How did he do it anyway?’ asked Dielle.
‘We don’t have a final edit yet obviously, but I can let you sume a feed of the theft,’ she turned to Fencer. ‘Do you have a sumeplace in here?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I don’t use it much though. I’ll make some space.’ He pulled some crates from the centre of the floor and arranged them in a semi circle. They sat on them and Kiki instructed her editor to send over the pertinent parts of the sume.’
‘It’s still rough,’ said Kiki as a closeup of Pierre Le Moment.Pendue’s neatly trimmed goatee and knife-edged sideburns filled the holo projection area between them. He went through an elaborate sequence of arm movements and body stretches to show off his agility and balletic prowess.’
‘Thinks a lot of himself, doesn’t he?’ said Dielle.
‘You should have heard the histrionics he pulled on me when I asked him to guarantee he could pull it off,’ said Kiki. ‘Dicing prima-donna.’
The scene cut to Pendue performing a series of contortions around the curved wall of Charlie Pleewo’s darkened reception rotunda. Why, was anyone’s guess, because if they could see it then so could Sis.
{[How is he hiding this from Pleewo? Wouldn’t you have automatically alerted him by this point?]}
[[Ex judicio. Pleewo uses his own offGrid security system. If he didn’t know about it at the time it could only have been because M. Le Moment.Pendue had infiltrated his system and compromised it in someway. Most professional onSlab thieves are usually not much more than skilled hackers who love to play to an audience]]
The view closed in on a domed alcove set into in the wooden library shelves. Among the brass compasses, charts and ancient Earth-globes was a transparent case containing a selection of dark-screened metal oblongs arranged in an evolutionary progression from a thick, hand-sized block with a white wheel set into its face up to the tablet computer they needed and then down through various colourful devices of decreasing size until the last item was a pin with a large magnifying glass in front of it. Pendue waved his hands theatrically over the case and then, seemingly without moving, he was holding the tablet up to his personal followcam, making the shiny face reflect the light.
‘What?’ said Dielle. ‘How’d he do that?’
‘You have to pay for the reveal,’ said Kiki. ‘Scam-sumes are free but if you want to get the pay-off then you have to pay up. There’s a full edit already available if you want to buy in.’
Fencer and Fingerz were already longazing as they watched an encoded overlay on the sumecast polarised only to their sitting position.
‘Of course,’ said Fencer. ‘That’s neat.’
‘Lookadat man!’ said Fingerz.
They came out of longaze.
‘Well?’ said Dielle.
‘Well what?’ said Fencer.
‘How did he do it?’
‘No idea,’ said Fencer. ‘Does it matter?’
Fingerz shrugged and pulled out a shiff.
‘But you two just sumed it!’ said Dielle.
‘Did we?’ said Fencer. He checked his personal logs. ‘Yes, looks like we did. It’s an encrypted feed. You watch it but the experience is firewalled from your biological memory so you can’t tell anyone else. It’s an intellectual property protection mechanism. You want me to explain the principle?’
‘No thanks,’ said Dielle sullenly. He never understood anything Fencer explained to him anyway.
{[Can you let me see the reveal please]}
[[Debit 125 credits; acknowledge approval]]
{[125 bucks? That’s a bit steep isn’t it?]}
[[••]]
{[OK, I approve]}
Dielle watched the reveal. It was indeed a highly imaginative and totally unexpected method that required a phenomenal level of skill and planning. If it had simply been described to him he wouldn’t have understood it. It had to be seen to be believed. Astounding. Pendue was a true artist.
He came out of longaze. Kiki smiled at him. ‘What do you think?’
‘About what?’
‘Anything you’re keen to know?’
‘Yeah,’ said Dielle. ‘Can you get us another gig?’
eleven
Dielle had stayed behind to commiserate with Fingerz and Fencer while Kiki tubed back to Seacombe for more meetings. They commiserated quite heavily until Sis reminded Dielle that he
had a dinner appointment. He sobered up on the tube ride back to Seacombe and was delivered, fresh-faced and hungry, to Aux Renoir 21 at the uppermost level of upTown DownSide. He was received with an overwhelming level of obsequiousness laced with extra grovelling.
{[What’s going on?]}
[[Pundechan Media Conglomerate has renegotiated your endorsement deal with Aux Renoir Inc. As a result you are now tied into being seen eating at one of their restaurants for a minimum of twenty days out of each cycle]]
Dielle didn’t mind that at all. Yet.
The fawning maître d’ led him to a table that had one of the most spectacular views in Seacombe - if you had a good head for heights, which Dielle didn’t. The restaurant overlooked the canyons of glass and metal that formed the heart of the main financial district onSlab. It was almost seven kilometres above the Natalite floor and only a few hundred meters below the zero-g interface that separated DownSideUp from UpSideDown. The slabscape extended off into a vanishing point that was hundreds of kilometres away. Curved, open-roofed tube-ways, unsupported for tens of kilometres, linked the buildings, walkways and parkforms, criss-crossing and branching in every direction. They were filled with the evening’s commuter traffic. Hundreds of levels below, the privacy fields displaying softads to the freetubers looked like multi-coloured dots. The business architecture in this part of slab was a bravado of spiky reflections and sheer, multi-faced slender towers. Everyone wanted a view and everyone got one. In normal circumstance all the buildings and forms were mobile. The towers floated through the ubiquitous daylight, changing their aspects and forming proximity allegiances that reflected their trading activities and latest acquisitions, but the imminent course change meant that everything had been buttressed together and physically locked into a rigid network. The locals were enjoying the novelty. New bridges spanned the gaps to neighbouring buildings like tendrils of cheese between pizza slices and a series of sponsored multi-level marathons had already been initiated.
Far above, the razor thin structures of UpSideDown hung from an invisible ceiling like stalactites in a gigantic gothic cathedral.
The view was stunning but it was completely wasted on the man talking to Kiki. He was blind.
‘Ah, Dielle,’ he said turning his darknight glasses in the direction of the waiter. ‘I’ve been dying to see you.’
Dielle couldn’t be sure how to take this. He’d researched their dinner guest via the linktrigue Kiki had sent him after breakfast but couldn’t find anything that explained why he was blind. What it did say was that he was one of the most respected storytellers onSlab and that he’d authored more than a thousand books. That had come as a surprise to Dielle. He already knew that almost nobody onSlab read text so he couldn’t imagine what shape a book might take. Sis had given him an example. She’d suggested he close his eyes and then she fed him a sequential, time-released narrative. The information poured into his mind, at his chosen rate, like a river of thoughts flowing into his consciousness. Then they evaporated like dreams, leaving behind the memory of the story and the pleasure of an experience that was enchanting and highly addictive. He had read two of this guy’s books during his post-breakfast stroll and experienced a completely new set of emotions. His imagination had been fired with longing for a fragile beauty and filled with images and memories of lost loves and exquisite desire. Dielle could tell why he was so popular.
‘Mr Parque,’ said Dielle. He stuck out his hand and then lowered it again quickly. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’
‘Please, dear boy, call me Sefton,’ he said, offering his own hand for Dielle to shake. ‘A firm hand! That’s a very good sign. Sit! Sit! We shall feast in the delights of Mochi and suck nectar from the teat of Ishtar!’
Kiki made a mock-scary face at Dielle then kissed him hello.
Sefton reached over to Kiki and stroked her hand. ‘Kiki darling, you will let me re-write this claptrap before you feed the sumes, won’t you?’
‘Of course, darling. Your agent insists on 100% edit rights before she lets you out these days.’
‘Ah! Such are the vagaries and vulgarities of time, Dielle. Let me tell you now, while it has its compensations, I cannot, on the whole, recommend allowing one’s mind to experience too much time. No matter how you discipline it, the mind seems to develop a will of its own. It plays truant on you and goes hiding behind the bike-sheds, sneaking a crafty fag.’
He didn’t look old, of course. Almost no one onSlab looked old unless they deliberately chose to. But according to Slabscapedia he was over 800 cycles old and had personally witnessed, as a young child, the great handbrake turn when the original ship was turned perpendicular to the direction of travel and converted into what was now known as The Strip. He’d witnessed it with functioning eyes too. {[Crafty fag?]}
[[Obsolete, mass-manufactured shiff-style tranquilliser. Highly carcinogenic and habit forming. Used as an intelligence test on Earth]]
{[Does he always talk like this?]}
[[••]]
Sefton was merely warming up. ‘I can tell you are bursting with curiosity, aren’t you, dear boy?’
Three separate waiters plied Dielle with iced Scintilleau®, warm rolls and red wine.
‘Well, I, erm. No, not really.’
‘You want to know why. Of course you do. It’s perfectly natural. The only bushes here are those one should never beat about.’ He patted Kiki’s hand again. ‘The truth is I am blind because I choose to be. It helps my work.’
‘But how do you write such emotive imagery when you can’t see?’ asked Dielle. ‘I read two of your books earlier. The descriptions were so vivid it was like I was there.’
‘Thank you for such a gracious compliment, dear boy, but those two you sumed earlier were nothing but tawdry attempts at schlock and bluster. You should try my earlier work. I peaked sometime in the sixth century. When I look back to then I honestly don’t know how I did it myself. Nowadays I have to beat my silly sentimentality senseless with a cognac cudgel. But there were such great minds around back then and we spurred each other on so. All long gone, all gone ahead.’ His mouth started to quiver. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I may have upset myself.’ He removed his dark glasses and dabbed at his sightless eyes with a table napkin. They shone with a dazzling energy. ‘Silly old me. Please, let’s order some lunch. The foie gras is most acceptable here. In fact, allow me to order for you. I insist! On me! What fun!’
Dielle caught Kiki’s eye. They shrugged.
‘The truth is, dear boy,’ said Sefton after he’d spent a few moments placing their orders by eye, ‘that I can conjure up any beauty I desire in a trice. I can see more beauty in my imagination than I ever could through my real eyes, but when you lose a sense, especially one as overwhelming as sight, all of your other senses become enhanced. I experience smells and sounds and tastes and the exquisiteness of touch in far greater depth and complexity than you do simply because my brain isn’t spending all that time processing and discarding all the visual noise that deluges every moment of your waking life. I shall enjoy the starter we are about to be served far more than you will, despite the fact that I have had this exact dish,’ he paused for a fraction of a second, ‘two thousand four hundred and twenty-eight times during my extensive culinary peregrinations.’
‘But isn’t everything more difficult for you?’ said Dielle. ‘And what about not being able to read people’s expressions?’
‘Our dear sister looks after me perfectly well,’ he said, reaching directly for his wine. ‘In any case, you can only look at people’s faces for so many cykes before you realise you have seen everyone before. When you have lived for as long as I have, every person you see reminds you, maddeningly, of at least fifty others. You stare and try to remember where you have seen them before. Yet all you can grasp are fragments. A look, a way the head turns. Who was that? When was that? A decade? A century? A lifetime? All long gone.’
He dabbed his cheeks again as the waiter brought a fresh n
apkin. ‘And there’s a bonus,’ he continued. ‘I don’t see all that crass, base ugliness anymore. I hear plenty of it of course, but words are their own antidote. You can erase harmful, vile and fearful words with good and honest ones. There is no antidote to the searing memory of the visually abhorrent. You cannot neutralise ugliness with beauty, the most you can do is force them to co-exist but then each magnifies the other through their polarity.’
‘But you once wrote,’ said Kiki, ‘that you could never have too much beauty.’ She accessed Sis. ‘The day will never come when I say, No more for me, I am satiated with surfeit sublime!’
‘Did I say that? What absolute rot. Ah! The starters at last.’ He tucked his napkin into his collar and picked up his cutlery like an eager schoolboy. Thirty seconds later, the waiters brought their food.
The appetiser was out of this world. The wine was one of the top vintages onSlab and the foie gras was, as expected, superb. Dielle had queried Sis about the precise nature of the dish and had been appalled to learn that before the introduction of animal-independent bioment-based organ farming, the process of procuring foie gras involved animal torture. He was relieved to know that this liver had never been anywhere near the inside of a living animal, until now.
‘Your agent hinted that you wanted to talk to Dielle about a new book,’ said Kiki when they were between courses, eager to move the conversation on to something more profitable.
‘Yes, she did, didn’t she?’ he said. ‘A minor conceit. You’ll have to forgive me.’
‘No book?’ said Kiki.
‘Please don’t be irritated with me, darling,’ said Sefton, stroking her hand again. ‘You can be of great service to me and I to you.’
Kiki waited out his dramatic pause while Dielle wiped his plate with his finger.
‘You see, my dears, and I know I can trust you to keep the details of our little tête-à-tête completely private.’ He knew this because the only way Kiki had been able to secure the meeting was by lodging her acceptance with Sis to one of the most comprehensive non-disclosure agreements onSlab. ‘Brace yourselves, mes braves! The truth is I am about to choose between two rather terminal options. I am either going to go ahead or I will reset.’
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