“Sage, I’ve got an idea,” he said, turning to her. “Let’s fly on to Paris and see the sunset again.”
She smiled. “We can’t just go chasing sunsets around the globe.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . we’re adults. We’ve got responsibilities. Especially you.”
He turned back restlessly to the window. Fidgeting with the arm of his chair, he said, “That was one hell of a meme you gave me.”
“People have been passing that one around for a long time.”
“I guess so.” He paused. “That was all just playacting, right?”
She found it hard to answer. Because, unexpectedly, she wasn’t sure. At last she said, “Sure. If that’s what it was for you, that’s what it was for me.”
The liquor that had made her so giddy was now putting her to sleep. She reclined her seat as far as it would go and started dozing off to the drone of the engines. Later, she roused momentarily to find him still awake, still watching her with an expression too complex to decode.
Sage woke in her own bed the next morning, late and hung over, to find her face had launched a thousand tabloids.
The kiss was emblazoned across one Web page, along with a telephoto shot of her and D.B. on the plaza in Hong Kong. Another page was auctioning her lost shoe for several thousand dollars. “Shit,” she said, and called Patty.
“Who approved those photos?” she demanded, her temples throbbing.
“I did,” Patty said, cheerful enough to deserve summary execution. There was a new collection of objects in her hair. An Oriental drink parasol and a tiny Venus de Milo. “Don’t worry, I’m taking care of everything.”
“I didn’t want that spread all over the net,” Sage said. “It was private.”
“If you wanted privacy, Sage, you sure picked the wrong planet. Not to mention the wrong guy.”
After Sage hung up, she sat thinking: as long as she was part of the Metameme pseudo-reality, she was never going to be herself. Even sincere acts and unpremeditated words would be manipulated into lies.
She needed to get away. But to where? She had no friends, no family to run to. No money, no skills. Nothing marketable but notoriety.
Nevertheless, she needed to escape. As far as she knew, there was only one way out of D.B.’s house, the guarded underground tunnel. After dressing and eating aspirin for lunch, Sage went out to the pine-tree room. No one was around to observe her, so she took the elevator down to the bottom level.
To her surprise, the limo was waiting at the curb. Glancing around, she got in. As soon as the door closed, the vehicle started rolling silently forward. She waited, hoping the guards would think it was D.B. and let her through.
Abreast of the checkpoint, the car came to a stop. One of the phone screens buzzed. Sage hesitated, but at last touched the “answer” icon. It was D.B. He was in his office, wearing a rumpled sweatshirt.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Out,” she said, keeping her face impenetrable.
He absorbed her expression, and his face turned as uncommunicative as hers. “Would you mind taking another car? That one’s a little conspicuous.”
“I’ll take the lawnmower if I have to,” Sage said.
“Okay, get out and I’ll send something else.”
She got out and the limo rolled away backward, disappearing around a curve in the tunnel. The guard in the glass booth opposite her was trying not to watch. Soon another vehicle came self-propelled up the tunnel – a sleek, silver sports convertible. Sage didn’t recognize the make, but the design was a universal language: the car burned pure sex appeal. She wondered what D.B. thought of her, to have chosen that car.
There was a steering wheel, accelerator, and brake, but all the other controls had been replaced by a screen. When she got into the driver’s seat, the phone rang. Sighing, she answered.
“Do you know how to program it?” D.B. asked.
“Can’t I just drive it?”
“No. It’s illegal on the freeways. Traffic control laws. Just tell me where you want to go and I’ll program it from here.”
“I suppose you can trace where I go anyway.”
In a martyred tone he said, “Sage, I apologize for my world. Cars don’t come without tracer functions now.”
There was no help for it, so she told him to send her to the university. The screen flashed to a different mode as he programmed it. “When you want to come back, just hit ‘Return,’ ” he said. She refrained from commenting on whether she was going to come back.
It was a crisp and sunny day, and as the car cruised down the winding mountain road, Sage lowered the top to enjoy the wind in her hair and (with only a twinge of self-consciousness) the chic and muscular machine cornering lithely beneath her. She found a pair of sunglasses in the glove box and put them on so she would match the car.
At the freeway the car shot up the ramp toward a solid wall of traffic, and she found the brake didn’t work. Just when a collision seemed imminent, a sports-car-sized notch opened up, and her vehicle merged. Traveling at full speed only six inches from the car ahead gave her panic reflexes a workout, but the traffic flowed smoothly at a volume that would have caused apocalyptic jams in her time.
On the road into downtown, her own face loomed from a video billboard. For a distraction she tried the radio, but the first thing to issue from it was a come-on for a program called “Sage: Enchantress from the Other Side of Time.” She turned it off, gagging.
Just then she noticed the patrol car behind her. The phone rang.
“We are taking control of your vehicle,” the officer said when she answered. “Turn on your fax machine and we will send the warrant.”
“What have I done?” Sage asked as her vehicle veered onto an off-ramp.
“You have been subpoenaed to appear at the Federal Courthouse.”
“What for?”
“You’ll have to ask them that, ma’am.”
The car auto-negotiated a tangle of ramps that disgorged into downtown traffic. With the police close behind, she pulled up to the curb before a tall steel-and-glass building set back from the street behind a concrete plaza. A small crowd was waiting there, including two camera teams. As Sage got out, a woman reporter dashed over and put a microphone to her face. “Sage, do you have some ancient tribal medicine that explains your sexual magnetism?”
A tall, balding man in a brown suit met her at the curb. “Ms. Akwesasne, I represent a consortium of firms led by the Infometics Corporation that has brought suit to force a fairer distribution of information concerning you. We need your testimony to prove that there has been an illegal restraint of trade – ”
A shiny black car pulled up at the curb, and Mr. Jabhwalla jumped out, looking perfectly composed and elegant. “I would advise you not to say anything,” he told Sage.
“Oh, so now you’re threatening the witness?” the other lawyer said. “I believe we got that on tape.” Two video cameras swung to Mr. Jabhwalla’s face for a reaction.
“She’s not your witness,” he said imperturbably. “Your subpoena has no force over her. This isn’t Sage Akwesasne. She is a replica.” In an undertone to Sage he said, “I can take care of this, if you want to go on about your business. You just need to sign here – ”
An interruption saved her from having to tell him where to put his contract. The cameras turned to follow the approach of another figure across the plaza from the courthouse door. He was a burly, bearded man in a camouflage jacket and combat boots, waving a legal paper over his head. “Court order!” he was shouting. “Court order!” The two lawyers exchanged a look of mutual commiseration.
“Make way for the rights of the consumers, you corporate weevils!” the newcomer bellowed as he came up. “I’m Harry Dolnick, the consumer’s candidate for city council, and I’ve got here a court order for Sage Akwesasne to publicly reveal the message she brought back from the Holians.”
“I beg your pardon?” Sage said, per
plexed.
He turned around to speak to one of the cameras. “Who are the Holians, you ask? We don’t know what they call themselves. The fact that aliens live around the black hole has been known to the global elite for years, but you and I could only learn of their existence from the underground lists, where the information can spread unfalsified by corporate media. The Holians would never have let a human being pass through their space without sending a message back, encoded in her DNA. It only stands to reason.”
“What?” Sage said.
“The question is, what’s in the message that is so valuable that the globals are standing here fighting over legal control of her? There could only be one answer. It’s a contract offer to market Brand Earth on an interstellar scale.”
“You see the kind of irritation we can protect you from,” Mr. Jabhwalla whispered in her ear.
Something D.B. had once said about the Promethean quality of her story came back to Sage. Only now the myth seemed to have mutated into a hybrid of capitalism and conspiracy theory. “Listen,” she said. The cameras swiveled round to her face. “I can comply with your court order right now. There are no Holians, and there’s no contract offer in my DNA.”
“Do you think she would admit it?” Harry Dolnick thundered. “Here in this pool of piranhas? No,” he addressed the crowd, “this is why the consumers need to rise up and demand their rights! We should all be shareholders in Brand Earth!” The office workers on lunch break continued munching their sandwiches and waving at the cameras. One of them offered Harry Dolnick an autograph book and he paused to sign it.
The woman reporter had pushed to Sage’s elbow, and now said, “Sage, my viewers are demanding to know something. What brand of lipstick are you wearing?”
“Dear God, get me out of here,” Sage muttered.
Mr. Jabhwalla’s phone rang. He answered it, then silently handed it to Sage.
“This makes terrific theater,” D.B. said. “You ought to see how many sites we’re streaming this to.”
“Do you have me under surveillance?” Sage glanced up, half expecting to spot a Metameme spy satellite overhead.
“I’m watching on television, like the rest of the western hemisphere,” he said. She looked at one of the cameras, held by a beefy man in sandals. “Yeah, that one,” he said.
“They’re yours?”
“No, they’re freelancers. We’re just buying their feed.”
“Did you set this up?” she demanded. The lawyers, who had been arguing, paused to look at her. She turned her back and lowered her voice. “Did you start these rumors about aliens and genetic messages?”
“No, those are wild memes that mutated spontaneously into existence. You’re like hermeneutical flypaper, Sage. Theories just stick to you.”
“You need to squelch them!” she said.
“What for?” He sounded puzzled.
“Because they’re wacko claptrap!”
“So? That doesn’t mean they can’t be profitable.”
Of course, what had she been thinking? Truth was not the standard of information, only profit.
“You look a little irritated,” D.B. said. She was searching for a sufficiently blistering word when he said, “Tell you what. Turn around and look across the street.”
She did. There was nothing there but a large building of gray granite. “See the ground floor door?” he said. “Go in there.”
“But . . . it’s the public library,” she said.
“I know. I own it.”
Now that he mentioned it, she saw the stylized MM logo on the signage. “How did you – ”
“Never mind, just do it. Someone will meet you.”
She started pushing her way through the crowd. Mr. Jabhwalla said, “Wait! You can’t leave without – ”
“You said yourself, I’m not Sage Akwesasne,” she told him. “Now back off before I sue you for unlawful restraint.”
“You’re catching on,” D.B. said. Sage hung up the phone and tossed it back to the lawyer.
All the way across the street she was mobbed by teenage girls offering notebooks and body parts for her to autograph. When she reached the staff entrance, a librarian waiting inside pushed it open for her, and she slipped through, relieved by the quiet inside. “Follow me,” the woman said.
They went up a back stairway to a hallway lined with offices. The librarian stopped before what looked like a closet door and said, “Wait here while I get the key.” Sage stood staring at a motivational poster on the corridor wall that showed a soaring eagle with the caption,
Free Speech
which someone had defaced, “Only $91.95/month.”
The librarian came back and opened the door onto a spiral, cast-iron staircase. Puzzled, Sage followed her onto the gravel roof. The wind was blowing, bringing the sound of Harry Dolnick’s voice up from the street below. A low-flying aircraft passed overhead, then circled; then, with a blast of dust and gravel, it landed vertically on the other end of the roof, and she recognized its outline. As the door opened and the steps extended, Sage dashed over to it, wondering when it had started to seem normal to be plucked off a rooftop by a private jet.
Inside, D.B. was talking to half a dozen people at once on his video screens. Feeling defeated, Sage slouched into a leather seat as the plane took off. Her attempt to escape the constructed reality of Metameme had only landed her in other realities where her identity was no more her own than here. It was like being a quark, constructed entirely of spin.
The problem was larger than she had supposed. Wired together in a free-market free-for-all, the collective brains of the human race had actually invented a world where it was impossible to tell the truth.
The landscape had dwindled into a wrinkled counterpane below by the time D.B. cut off his connections and came to sit opposite her. With some surprise, she saw he was dressed in a tuxedo. It had a remarkable effect. He had an embryonic air of distinction.
“Where are we going now?” Sage asked.
“Washington, D.C. You wanted to meet the president. Well, our guy won the election, so we’re going to the victory party.”
“Your guy?” Sage looked at him balefully. “I’m going to hate his politics, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know.” D.B. shrugged, fiddling self-consciously with his cuffs. “Look, he’s only our guy because we engineered his image. You’ll have to ask him about politics. As far as I know, he’s like all the others, pro-prosperity.”
“That’s safe.”
“Uh, Sage, this is going to be kind of formal. You might want to order something to wear.”
With a feeling of impending doom, she sat down at one of his terminals to try and find out what might conceivably be fashionable. The range of choices was bewildering. Briefly, she thought of asking Patty’s advice, then remembered the tiger skin. Finally, unable to decipher any pattern, she opted for simplicity: a low-cut, shimmering crimson sheath held up with spaghetti straps. The computer suggested a matching shawl, shoes, and purse, so she went for the whole package, muttering when it didn’t tell her the price.
“Trust me, you can afford it,” D.B. said.
When the plane came down on a rooftop just at the edge of restricted air space, a delivery company was waiting with a pile of packages. Sage gathered them in, then shooed D.B. out of the plane. Alone, she stripped and stepped into the flash clean booth. When she slipped on the dress, it felt like water against her skin, sleek and caressing. The earrings dangled like stone kisses against her neck, just heavy enough to let her know they were there. She gathered up the shawl, shook back her hair, and stepped to the door.
The look of sheer exhilaration on D.B.’s face told her she had scored a bullseye. He offered his arm, and she took it, giving it a little squeeze for the moral support.
A limo was waiting for them on the floor below. As it whisked them through the streets, D.B. peered out the windows with growing unease. At last Sage said, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.
I just hate these party things,” he said.
By the time the limo pulled into a blocked-off street behind the Capitol building, he was gripping his knees in an obvious paroxysm of nerves. Sage leaned forward and put a hand on his.” Look at it this way,” she said. “You’re not yourself, you’re an actor playing the richest man in the world. The others – well, the script calls for them to envy you.”
He looked at her, a long look, then said, “Yeah. They will.”
There was a crowd of spectators and reporters lining the monumental stone steps of the building across the street. As soon as Sage and D.B. stepped out of the car, there was a trampling rush toward them, and their driver and bodyguard had to clear a path. A broad red cascade of carpet led up the stairway, with the crowds held back by ropes and stanchions on either side. As soon as they started up, Sage could feel the pressure of a hundred lenses on her. It was so distracting they were halfway up before she realized what the building was.
“The Library of Congress?” she whispered at D.B. “Do you own this one, too?”
“Don’t start, Sage,” D.B. said through his teeth. “I just help them out. They’re like the rest of the government, so underfunded they couldn’t pay the electric bill unless I bought information from them.”
They passed through towering arches into the Great Hall, a two-story Beaux Arts fantasia of gaudy marbles, bronze nymphs, gilt, and bared-tooth glamor. The party spilled down mosaic-floored halls on either side and up the stairs to the pillared balconies above. With a sinking heart, Sage saw she had guessed radically wrong on fashion – the style called for ruffles and flounces. Most women entering were peeling off from their escorts to visit the ladies’ lounge, so Sage parted from D.B. and followed the stream.
When she entered the restroom, a group of women were having an animated conversation that broke off abruptly when they saw her. They all took out their phones; with a snick like so many switchblades, the retractable screens unfolded and the women began perusing the photos of themselves that had been taken as they came up the steps. Silence fell, except for the curses and cries of disappointment as the photos inevitably failed to live up to expectation. Sage went into one of the marble stalls to hide. A video screen inside the stall door helpfully offered to order her a different dress.
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