by Jim Nisbet
A moment passed. “How much is it?”
“Forty thousand.”
Tipsy emitted a low whistle. “The downstroke was another forty?”
Vassily shook his head. “Red liked sixty percent up front.”
That tallied. “Sixty thousand.”
Vassily nodded.
“For that,” she pointed at the locket, “plus the kilo of cocaine?”
Vassily tucked the locket into the pocket of his waistcoat opposite the pocket containing his watch. “I don’t know anything about a kilo of cocaine.”
“Do you have the balance with you?”
Vassily patted the breast pocket of his overcoat.
“An overcoat’s a nice idea in San Francisco,” Tipsy said.
Vassily nodded. “Russia, too.”
“When’s the last time you were in Russia?”
Vassily smiled. “About forty years ago.”
Tipsy nodded. “That’s the way I feel about San Francisco, too.”
Vassily nodded. “I like San Francisco.”
“Anyway.” After a short silence she repeated it. “Anyway?”
Vassily shrugged. “It’s academic.”
“What’s academic?”
“The forty thousand.”
“Why?”
Vassily smiled without mirth. “Now I am supposed to kill you.”
“What’s the problem? You’ve got what you came for.”
“True story,” Vassily said.
This disturbed Tipsy. “Why’d you put it like that?”
“Oh, just to make sure,” Vassily replied.
“Of what?”
“Of your … intimacy with Red Means.”
“Intimacy? You mean, now that you know I hung around Red Means long enough to become familiar with that lousy expression of his, you are entitled to make impudent assumptions?”
Vassily chuckled.
“So how did you pick it up?” she asked him.
Vassily smiled. “I’m a quick study.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” she said.
“Shoot.”
“Better than that.”
“What is it?”
“Give me the money, take the first front door you see, and keep going.”
Vassily regarded her. “Did Red Means tell you to tell me that?”
“We consulted on it.”
And it wasn’t until that moment that Vassily noticed the pineapple shirt draped over a pile of books next to the only comfortable-looking chair in the apartment, several sizes larger and a bit louder than anything Tipsy might care to wear. Altogether a tasteless shirt. Vassily permitted himself a rueful tug at his lower lip. Without Miou Miou to cover his back, he was going to have to get used to wondering if he were becoming senile.
“But first,” Tipsy said, interrupting his chain of thought, “perhaps you’d like to tell me how you got to be executor of Quentin’s estate.”
Vassily shrugged. “Right guy, right time, right place?” He tilted his head inquisitively. “How’d you get to be his heir?”
“I have no idea,” she replied frankly.
“Lotta dough,” Vassily pointed out. “This time next year, you’ll be having tax problems.”
“Pretty heads up,” Tipsy persisted.
“True story. And this?” He touched the locket through the fabric of his waistcoat pocket.
Tipsy nodded. “Right girl, right time, right place.”
Vassily smiled. “Now who’s a quick study?”
“I’m beginning to like you.”
“Don’t,” Vassily suggested. “I’m not likable.”
“Tell you something?”
“I’m supposed to be telling you something.”
She indicated the waistcoat pocket. “You turn that in, the job’s over.”
“Job’s over,” Vassily confirmed.
“Then what?”
Vassily smiled. “Maybe I’ll take a long trip to the Bahamas.”
“Oh?” Tipsy replied mildly. “Weren’t you just there?”
“That was outsourced.” Vassily shook his head. “I can’t handle the jet-lag anymore.”
“By you? Outsourced, I mean?”
Vassily’s expression gave nothing away. “I had my hands full right here in San Francisco.”
“So it’s true, then? You turn that in and you’re done?”
“Done.”
“Any prospects?”
Vassily made no reply.
“How old are you, Vassily?”
“Seventy-three.”
“Do you still enjoy this line of work?”
“No,” Vassily said, betraying no emotion. “Not any more.”
“Not like you used to.”
Vassily permitted himself a thin smile. “Not like I used to.”
“But you don’t know how to do anything else.”
Vassily shrugged.
“Chess?” she suggested.
Vassily blew air through his lips.
“It’s just that I heard somewhere that Russians are gaga for chess.”
“You checked your 401K lately?’ Vassily asked.
Tipsy laughed out loud.
“Not only that,” Vassily added gloomily, “I own a boat.”
Around midnight that same night, about a block downwind from Tipsy’s apartment, Mrs. Eloise Kleinzahler interrupted her husband’s absorption in a program on the History Channel. Its subject was World War II, the 42nd one-hour installment, and he hadn’t missed a single program. “Auggie,” she brayed, “you smell that?”
“Smell what?” the old man replied, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“It smells like burning hair.”
“Close the fucking window,” Mr. Kleinzahler suggested. A line of Tiger tanks rumbled across the fifty-two inch screen, and the snow was flying. As he lifted the fourth Old Overholdt, rocks, to his lips, he added, “It’s probably that bald transvestite up the street, there, curling his wig. What’s the name?”
“Miss Enchantment, when she’s singing. Bert Fortunato, when he’s carrying the mail.” Mr. Kleinzahler knew a great deal about booze and World War II. Mrs. Kleinzahler knew everything there was to know about the neighbors.
“That’s it.” Old man Kleinzahler rattled the ice in his glass. When the Panzers were storming frozen Europe, he was thinking, the Krauts were all shitfaced on looted cognac. “Miss Enchantment,” he said aloud, “curling her wig for karaoke.”
VII
AT THE EDGE OF THE PROJECTION
FORTY-FOUR
INVITED TO TAKE A SEAT WHILE HE WAITED, RED PACED THE FOUR WALLS of the antechamber.
The back wall featured the portal to the inner sanctum. Its analogue peephole escutcheon featured a bas-relief of the chondrophore Vellela vellela. Red had despised it from its inception. And learned to respect it. One respects the well-honed blade. Despicably ironic, ironically respectful. “One of the few examples of high seas life that a beachcomber may expect to find.” He touched the rubber tip of his walking stick to the plaque. Soon to be extinct, of course. And, though he kept the thought to himself, you’ll be better off.
Beginning to the left of the door, after an end table with a holoclock atop a copy of Chondrophore Journal—All Aboard For Luna!—a tastefully expensive L couch and chair wrapped through the corner and took up the entire south wall. Above the couch hung an oil portrait of an idealized Red Means. He had a bottle of Kalik beer in one hand, the spoke of a ship’s wheel in the other, and wind in his very long coppery hair, into a few strands of which had been braided the pin feather of an albatross. Extinct for sure. Red appeared to be squinting up at the set of his sails; but, as sails and rigging were outside the frame of the picture, he might just as well have been seeing far, far into the future. Or perhaps he was watching a well-honed blade slice his sails to ribbons.
To the right of the portal by which Red had been admitted, the east wall consisted entirely of an electrolyte brume framed on either side by two pilasters,
and top and bottom by crown and base moldings.
The brume’s pixels seethed with Info. Two crawls, two columnulars, the big picture in the background, and two inset feeds, their resolution so crisp as to make their own crawls, though much tinier, easily legible.
Red’s mouth straightened a little. His new-to-him v.6 Quietus reduced the audio to a quantum twitter, much as if it were emanating from an adjacent apartment. He was surprised and pleased that it worked here. The gadget, of the old key chain sort, had cost him 75 shells 50 on a BayFill repo auction, but the sporadic peace of mind provided by the device had been worth the price. Though his physical aging had been proceeding gracefully enough, through a perceptible decrepitude it was true, he was finding his capacity to resist the anxiety induced by Info, any Info, less and less resilient. He’d heard rumors of a Homoremote, a sort of Quietus tuned to cancel any audio emitted by humans; but these devices, if they existed—or, more like it, when they existed—would be beyond expensive.
Incongruously, by Red’s lights anyway, the east wall had been left transparent. No one could begrudge this outfit the conservation of space, of course, but while they certainly could afford it, a transparent wall virtually flaunted affluence. And it was a good idea, if only for its view of the recently completed arc of the Transbay Tower Wall, which the east window framed, erect and proud and fully two miles across, from the site of the old ballpark north to Telegraph Hill, as if the two, architecture and window, had been built for each other.
Which, come to consider the various issues involved, Red reflected wearily, might be exactly the case.
It occurred to him to look up. And there it was.
Of course. Although the myriad pixel-brumes on the market made anything possible, the adhesives hadn’t been perfected. On a floor, beneath a protective transparency, nothing could be easier. Vertical, on a flat wall, on curved or faceted or undulating walls? No problem. And voxel-based décor structures couldn’t be too far from market. But a ceiling pixel fresco evinced the acme of contemporary opulence. Given which, the image wasn’t all that surprising. In fact it was obvious. Mandated by the expense, one would think, if only to offset the impression that it was there merely to impress.
A tone sounded. The door in the west wall slid aside, and Red limped through it into a chamber of pure, tasteful affluence, the first evidence of which was no Info to be heard or seen whatsoever. Which was good; his device wouldn’t work in here.
“Red, Red, Red.”
She didn’t get up to embrace him. Things hadn’t been like that for a long time.
Red was surrounded on three sides by Bahamian vistas. Blue skies, puffy clouds, casuarinas, mangroves, palm trees, white sand littorals, a beached wooden rowboat, even a ramshackle building or two. It was useless, he knew, to attempt to identify the source of the voice. Not while Security scanned him, anyway.
Now he was queried. Do you like the fountains? Kalik of course. Or that roasted green tea? None? And the sensation of a late Chekhov story. “The Lady with a Dog” perhaps? A melancholic fatality? Very good. And how about the sensation that you are sitting down? Would you rather stand? The selection is permitted.
And so forth. Red let the probes work him over, and why not. He had no choice. But anyway they were top of the line, no more invasive to his tissue than neutrinos to a cinder block. It wasn’t like visiting a twentieth-century dentist, say, or plugging in to an older nutritional outlet. Among other ironies, the charade was intended to make him feel at home.
And here she was. Looking not a day older than the day she quit drinking, the better to attempt to guide the boy’s fate as perceived by the light of her own. In Detox We Trust. Confident. Not a trace of alcohol, cigarettes, not even the slight scar typical of tel-chip implantation. No significant other, either. Unless you count—
“How’s the boy?”
“Didn’t you watch the ceiling? He’s at the shrine.”
“Yes,” Red acknowledged with a sigh, “of course I watched the ceiling. Very impressive. How do you get it to stay up there?”
She dismissed this with the usual, “My installers get the big shells.”
“Naturally. But what’s a ceiling—yours or anybody else’s—got to do with the boy?”
“He’s going to reproduce. It requires at least the illusion of his physical presence.”
More dismissiveness. “Ah,” Red nodded. “Of course.” He laid the cane across his knees. “Reproduction. I figured that’s why you exhumed his gestation lottery.”
“It worked once,” she shrugged, “and it was expensive to produce. So …”
From a grove of bamboo beyond her, the unblinking yellow eyes of a tiger watched him.
Abruptly he looked down. Was he sitting down?
“Would you like to see him?”
“Sure,” Red lied.
A thirteen-year-old boy dressed in shorts, a sweater vest, sock garters and Buster Brown shoes materialized on one of the beaches. The nimbus surrounding the image was not a Bahamian light.
“Klegan,” Red declared tiredly. “My, but how you’ve grown.”
The hologram peered past him. Whether from the boy’s lack of recognition, or merely a bad signal, or a signal deliberately offset by Security, Red could not discern. Nor did he care. But the ambiguity reminded him of the old GPS technology. It was a degraded fix. And of course it was deliberate.
The boy would have his enemies. Among other toys.
“Klegan,” Tipsy chided the boy. “Don’t you want to say hallo to your Uncle Red?”
The boy gave up squinting and shrugged. “Hallo.”
It sounded just like hollow. “Nice accent,” Red noted wryly.
“All that English schooling,” Tipsy agreed proudly. “He’s a born diplomat. Happy new year from Beijing, Klegan.”
“Gung hay fat choy, Shushu.” As the hologram accompanied the salutation with a slight bow, Red could not fail to note the child’s hauteur, along with the note of effete disdain in his voice. Due to the transmission, no doubt, the axis of the bow appeared to be directed more at the tiger than at Tipsy. The tiger blinked at last. Blinked Red’s picture. Or maybe his retina scan.
Shushu my fucking ass, Red glowered sourly. That snot-nosed little bastard is going to be the death of us all. It was a thought he’d thought any number of times before, however, and, in the moment, he raised a pseudo-avuncular eyebrow. “How many languages does he speak?”
“Only the four. Be punctilious in your observances, Klegan my dear. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
“And in your dreams tonight,” the boy said, completing a standard salutation. He blew a kiss toward the tiger.
Tipsy returned it anyway. With a sizzle much like that of a torch applied to a nest of tent caterpillars, the image of the boy dispersed.
The noise of a fountain, visible in the garden beyond the wall to Red’s left, faded up. Tipsy’s desk materialized, a chondrophore escutcheon prominent in its modesty panel. The vertical distance from the center of the escutcheon to the lower edge of the panel, in ratio to that of the distance from the center to the upper edge, would be the Golden Mean.
“He’s okay, the boy?” Red asked idly. “What with the radiation and all?”
Tipsy dismissed this. “You can’t believe what a kid can handle these days. All that stuff in the outer vestibule you carry around that gadget to shield yourself from?”
“That which otherwise,” Red pointed out, “would make the marrow tingle?”
Tipsy dismissed this. “Doesn’t phase him at all. He can lie on the floor and work his Chinese syntax with snails cleaning his toes, let alone sixteen channels bleating in the four languages.” She beamed. “Perfect concentration. Next day his non-sycophantic tutor gives him top marks and advances the subject.” Tipsy gazed at the wall to her right. As a woman looking out her office window at a garden fountain, she was absolutely convincing. “If the rest of the kids in his generation are as oblivious to Info as Klegan is, the Department of Inf
o is in trouble.”
Red smiled. “But Klegan isn’t like the rest of the kids.”
Usually such a remark invoked further beaming. But now: “True,” Tipsy fretted. “But we—I—have tried to give him every vestige of a normal life.”
“If, by normal,” Red wrinkled his mouth, “you mean Info night and day, scripted celestial events, biodiversity asymptotic to singularity, plastics indistinguishable from flesh and vice versa, holographical filial piety out the holographic wazoo, and a prearranged marriage on his fourteenth birthday to a trollop three years—”
Tipsy raised a hand, palm out, and Red ceased the litany. Sometimes the probes were a little less subtle than neutrinos. But Red was permanently tired, his resistance was way down, and he would never be able to afford a really comprehensive immune system. Plus, it had been five or six years since he had cared.
Comprehensive was a relative term anyway, he reflected bitterly. Any commercially available comprehension being pre-installed with Ithacan beggars, G-string viruses, arachnidan access ports, and out-and-out government resets by way of entertainment, existential thrills, and total control, the shells weren’t really justifiable.
Red contemplated Tipsy. Was even Tipsy above a reset?
Only so long as that kid is on your side, babe.
Just out of curiosity … Red stood and limped a circle in front of her desk. Pretending to sort his testicles in the crotch of his trousers, he keyed the v.6 Quietus.
“Red, sit down,” he clearly heard her say.
Override. So much for 75 shells 50. Better he had purchased a serotonin smoothie.
Red sat down. At least, he thought wryly, it’s good for street-level Info. So far, anyway. Insofar, he adduced, as the Department of Info isn’t putting out unadulterated Info. Or …
Or insofar as Tipsy hadn’t become pure Info herself.
Ah, Red reflected, back to Turing. While I’m all fretful about determining whether I’m talking to a human or a machine, it seems in the meantime to have become trivial for a machine to determine whether or not it’s dealing with a human. What brume-vista was laving my stupid face while my back was turned to that more sinister development?
Who am I kidding? It’s been a long time since I even so much as heard of an un-sinister development, let alone got laved by one.