Tea From an Empty Cup

by Cadigan, Pat

  Konstantin took her finger off the pause button and let the action go forward. On the screen, the Shantih Love character sat up, its elegant fingers feeling the ragged edges and flaps of skin where its throat had been cut, mild annoyance deepening the few lines in its face. As Konstantin watched it working at pinching the edges of skin together, she tried to see what was different in its expression and its posture. What was driving Shantih Love now – a robot, or a very human hijacker? If there were signs, what the hell were they?

  She could watch the video over and over for the next three hours and see if anything became any clearer to her. Instead, she decided to talk to people she was reasonably sure were human before she took in any more adventures of a dead kid’s false face pretending to be alive in a city pretending to be dead.

  EMPTY CUP [II]

  The figures on the screen were ridiculous.

  ‘Over how many years?’ Yuki asked, wondering uneasily if she were being conned.

  Joy Flower almost smiled. ‘Very funny. But what you need to know here is that I have a very poor sense of humor, and it is not a good idea to make many jokes with me. I’m just that way. Some people are.’ She swiveled the screen back around to face her where she was sitting on the other side of the desk. Yuki decided that someone had an obsession with the past; the whole office was appointed like a nostalgia exhibit. All the wood was highly polished, dark with gold overtones. The chairs were enormous ersatz-leather monsters with backs that rose up high and wide enough to conceal even the largest person. The brass-colored buttons dimpling the upholstery were supposed to suggest cushioning, but Yuki’s own chair was as hard and unyielding as a board.

  Not that there was much danger of her getting too comfortable here; this wasn’t a place where anyone went to feel comfortable. Even Joy Flower looked stiff, as if it weren’t really her office, just a place she was allowed to use from time to time.

  Yuki cleared her throat. ‘When do I start?’

  The woman glanced down at her wrist. There was nothing on it that Yuki could see. ‘Half an hour ago.’

  ‘And I guess you want me to live in?’

  ‘I knew you were clever.’ Joy Flower’s preoccupied tone seemed about to acquire an edge. On the edge of an edge, Yuki thought; a very uncomfortable place to be. ‘My stuff, back at my apartment –’

  Joy Flower gave her a sideways look. ‘Already taken care of for you.’

  Yuki shifted slightly in the chair and the ersatz leather gave an authentic creak. Her new boss rested one arm on top of the monitor. ‘You know that old saying about how you should ask questions because how else are you going to learn? I personally don’t have time to waste with anyone who hasn’t learned already. This means that I use the time I would have burned answering questions to do something more important. You know what I mean?’

  Yuki started to answer but the woman turned away from her in such a final way that a spoken dismissal would have been inane.

  Outside in the heavily carpeted, sound-deadened hallway, one of the thugs was waiting for her, a beefy man in a reddish black turtleneck sweater and black trousers. The trousers had extra pockets up and down the legs. A look that aspired to military associations. Professional bodyguard pants, designed to project the image of the matter-of-factly lethal mercenary. He looked down at her through surgically altered eyes. His face had a certain flatness that she could tell was natural, so the classically Oriental shape of the eyes didn’t look so out of place. The bright blue pupils, the straight blond hair spilling over his shoulders and down his back – those looked out of place.

  ‘How about you?’ Yuki said without preamble. The walls seemed to swallow each word; she had the sensation of being trapped in a cotton ball. ‘Do you answer questions?’

  ‘If I must.’ He looked down at her as if from a great height. ‘I’m supposed to take you to your quarters. Your things have arrived, or will arrive soon.’

  ‘Oh. Good.’ The look on that face, she realized, was not disdain but the absence of expression. He turned away abruptly and began walking up the hall. My Master says for you to walk this way. – Okay, Igor, but it’s going to take some practice. She followed at a slight distance, wondering if she had lost her mind as well as her friend.

  No, Tom was more than a friend to her. But not vice versa. Grandma Naoka would have contemplated this with some concern. Old Japan was never kind to those who loved – those usually being women. But then, the country itself was not kind to anyone. Life was not a right but a privilege. Honor meant more than love. Yuki had often wanted to ask her if honor had really just been easier to come by than love but the question felt too impertinent even for Naoka’s favorite granddaughter to get away with.

  She had expected the guy to lead her through a long and twisting maze of hallways to something like a techno-Buddhist monk’s cell. Instead, they went down one flight of stairs at the end of the hall and halfway along another quiet corridor to a door she estimated was directly under the office she had just left.

  He caught her looking up at the ceiling, and said, ‘Yes, it is.’

  She turned to him, stubbornly maintaining a casual air. ‘Right under her office, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly underneath.’

  The better to walk all over you, my dear.

  ‘Put your hand on the plate,’ he told her, gesturing at a white plastic square stuck onto the door at slightly above her eye level.

  She obeyed. There was a moment of mild heat and the sensation of the plastic crawling or writhing under her touch. She heard a soft chime and the door clicked, opening about an inch.

  ‘The lock is now keyed to you. Only you, and her.’

  Was that supposed to be reassuring, Yuki wondered. He pushed the door open and turned on the light. Instead of a cell, there was a generously large apartment that seemed to have been furnished by a random-choice generator. The couch was a puffy white thing with pillows that looked as if they would bounce wildly if she threw them on the shiny hardwood floor. The two chairs matched neither the couch nor each other – one was another ersatz-leather monstrosity like the ones in Joy Flower’s office. The other was smaller and lower, upholstered in a nubbly fabric printed with large, faded cabbage roses. They faced a very good copy of an old-style church pew that she presumed was supposed to function as a love seat. None of the stuff was hers. Yuki frowned and turned to the guy.

  ‘Are you going to show me around?’

  The guy made a short, breathy noise that might have been a laugh. ‘It’s your place, you live here. Look around all you want.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘The only thing you have to remember,’ he said, raising his voice to talk over her, ‘is not to sleep naked.’

  Yuki shut up, startled. He nodded at her once and walked out, closing the door behind him. ‘Naked,’ she said after a moment, and then turned to look at the hilariously mismatched living room furniture. Didn’t know what you liked, so we got you one of everything they had. Too funny.

  There was one doorway in front of her and one to her left. The one in front took her to the big kitchen where she found that her small, blocky wooden table and its single chair from her one-roomer had been installed. If the sight was supposed to be reassuring, it had failed. In the setting of the shiny black cabinets and the absurd mirrored floor, the table and chair looked out of place, alien and lonely. Like me.

  And a mirrored floor. A mirrored floor. How crazy could it get? She wasn’t sure she would ever be able to sit down and eat in a room where she was reflected from below. It was almost too bad that the decorator hadn’t gotten really extreme and mirrored the ceiling and walls as well. Then the room would have been not only unbearable but impossible even to look at. After all, why do things by halves?

  No windows, just simulated scenery and artificial light from one pretend window over the sink and another on the far wall. She supposed that these were the source of the recommended amount of daytime light during the appropriate hours – no darkness-induced
depressions to interfere with Joy Flower’s schedule would be tolerated here – but it was nighttime now, so the soft light spilling in over the sink was probably simulated moonlight. Or maybe just a streetlight. She’d have to check later to see if the environment were urban or rural. She hated the rural shit. Some things were too fake.

  Like your relationship with Tom? whispered an acid little voice in her mind.

  Oh, stop it, she told herself and marched through the living room to the bedroom. Just because a relationship isn’t on my terms doesn’t mean that it isn’t a relationship.

  In her heart, she knew that was bullshit of the worst sort, but she wasn’t listening to that part of her heart today. Her futon had been delivered to the bedroom and set up on a platform with cabinets at the head; a spare set of neatly folded sheets had been placed on top of a white chest of drawers. To the right of that was the bathroom, which had a separate chamber for the toilet. All very proper, civilized, livable.

  Against the wall opposite the bathroom doorway was the work-station, the oversized screen sitting like an icon of a fat spider within a nest of shelves bearing storage chips. Except spiders didn’t have nests, did they. No. They had webs. Anyone knew that. How stupid was she?

  ‘Don’t sleep naked,’ she murmured, going over to the work-station. One more thing to worry about, along with the fate of her allegedly nonexistent predecessor, and Tom’s current address. As soon as she touched one of the dark shelves, the screen lit up. Unsurprised, Yuki watched with mild interest as a fractal flower bloomed in the center and kept blooming, seeming to turn itself inside out. Yuki’s mouth twitched with bored amusement; nostalgia graphics didn’t do much for her, though she had to concede the 3-D effect was respectable.

  The cabinets at the head of her futon caught her eye again. That was probably where they had put whatever she was supposed to sleep in so she wouldn’t be naked. Maybe special uniform pajamas that could double as street clothes on short notice, in case of any midnight fire drills. Or emergency visits to clubs, to pick up a new victim. She went over to take a look.

  Kneeling in the center of the futon, she pulled the cabinet doors open. At first she thought she was looking at an elaborate S&M harness and bridle set with extra restraints and she felt her heart leap with fear as multiple thoughts cartwheeled through her mind, about Joy Flower, the bodyguards, about some of Joy’s Boyz being Girlz. Then she saw what it really was and wasn’t any happier.

  Carefully she lifted the headmounted monitor out of the cabinet and held it up. The wires from it were still connected to the lightweight, translucent hotsuit, folded into a square that made her think of wilderness weekends in nature preserves. (She had done a few of those years ago, not so much because she had been such a nature lover but because the people who ran the weekends were so … intent on them. They had exuded a sense of purpose more strongly than anyone else she had ever known, and she had liked that – people who knew what their lives were about. Most of them had been subsequently arrested in an eco-terrorist conspiracy dragnet, but strangely enough, Yuki had never been able to find out what had happened to any of them, whether they had been convicted or released or tried at all, or even if any of them had actually had any eco-terrorist connections.)

  She put the headmount aside and moved to spread the ’suit out on the futon. It was her size all right, but was this really what the thug had meant by Don’t sleep naked? Sleep in a hotsuit? What would be the point?

  So would this really be any more bizarre than sleeping under a canvas shelter – in a sack under a canvas shelter – in the middle of a government forest preserve, back in the good old days?

  But it still didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t like you could use this stuff if you were asleep.

  So maybe the point is for it to use you.

  God, she thought. That was some glorious hot-rod reasoning, more often used as a typical plot of innumerable slay-rides ground out for game modules from movies, or for movies from game modules, in a ceaseless, incestuous, and circular simulated blood orgy.

  She felt heavy with fatigue. How was any of this supposed to lead her to Tom? She should have walked away from Joy Flower and her band of thugs; this was just some blind alley and she would probably wake up tomorrow morning in a real alley, after a long, horrible night that, if she were really, really lucky, she wouldn’t be able to remember.

  Was Tom in a place like that now?

  She lay down on her stomach, rested her chin on her fists and gazed at her distorted reflection in the shiny black headmount shell. From this angle, she looked sly, knowing, even cynical. That’s me – good old cynical Yuki Harame.

  Maybe she was getting cynical. At last. Too many years of watching Tom fade in and out of her life, unabashedly leaning on her for emotional support but unable to reciprocate. Just when she was about to give in and fall in love with him, he would be gone, usually without saying good-bye in person. She would tell herself that since she hadn’t fallen in love with him, his abrupt departure hadn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly hurt her. Life would move her forward again and her attention would move along as well and pretty soon she would be contemplating the possibility of something completely different, something or even someone potentially forceful enough to displace Tom Iguchi and his gypsy feet.

  And somehow, that was always the cue for Tom to come back into her life. He seemed to have an instinct. He seemed to understand exactly how long it would take her to get him out of her system so that she might build up a resistance, possibly even an immunity to him. Before anything of the sort could happen, he would descend on her, sweep his problems around her like an enveloping blanket, and the next thing she knew, he was sleeping on her couch, eating her food, and radiating angst and charisma in whatever proportions were necessary.

  Well, at least he isn’t using you as a sex-toy, she would tell herself, and the realist in her would answer, Of course not – sex requires some giving.

  She knew why he would always come to her. They were both full Japanese, if, indeed, it was still possible to be Japanese at all when the land itself had been all but obliterated. Grandma Naoka had been among the last to visit the islands before the last earthquakes had shattered them into bits too small or too ravaged to support even one small city. Yuki couldn’t imagine the Japan Naoka had told her stories of, with a Tokyo so overcrowded that transit trains needed special employees to push and shove and pack the masses of people inside each car.

  But the most interesting stories were about what Naoka had called the water trade. It was a euphemism for something that seemed to be close to prostitution, that perhaps even was prostitution at times, but was, more often, just not quite.

  In those days, Yukiko, many people did not know how to enjoy themselves after a day of hard work. We showed them how. We helped them have a good time; they helped us make a living. We were all women, even those of us who were men. And of course, the ones who came to us, without exception, they were all men.

  Yuki remembered thinking that she wouldn’t have lasted long in that Japan. She would have much preferred being a Samurai. And then again, maybe she would not have done very well in any Japan. Perhaps it was just as well that she was what Grandma Naoka had called a sansei, a Japanese who had been born and raised outside of Japan.

  And Tom – well, who knew about Tom? Most of the time, he seemed to her to be too … disorganized for the real Japan. She could not picture him as a salaryman, not the way Naoka had described the eager young men in their business suits, clustered around their bosses in the clubs, drinking gamely and then stumbling home to apartments the size of a postage stamp. As for old Japan, she thought it was more likely that Tom would be on the receiving end of a Samurai sword than the handle. No, the only role for Tom was the one he already had – daft young man who happened to be of Japanese descent.

  And where did that leave her? Friend of daft young man who happened to be of Japanese descent. Now and always, friend of daft young etc Gullible soft-touch of a f
riend of daft young, etc And for what? The chance to approach strange and unsavory people in bars.

  Of course, there were plenty of other people out there doing likewise with much less justification. She surprised herself by getting up, stripping off her clothes, and pulling on the hotsuit. What the hell, she thought; she might learn something.

  The ’suit was one of the pricier models, soft, weightless, scented even. Was this one of the newest ’suits, with triple-density coverage, she wondered, or possibly an advance working model of the famed Climax Envelope? If the CE was real and not just another techno-myth. It was supposed to develop segments that mirrored the wearer’s own nerves, making the sensations that much more customized and subsequently that much more authentic. Whatever that meant. How authentic did it get before there was no point in putting on a ’suit at all?

  Maybe she should have asked Tom that question.

  The sensation of the ’suit adjusting to the contours of her body was both comforting and disturbing, like being caressed by a stranger who seemed to know you as well as you knew yourself. She left the genital area of the ’suit inactive. While her sex life left a lot to be desired lately, she wasn’t in the mood for a virtual encounter in a strange ’suit. Even if the ’suit did look as if no one else had ever used it.

  She hesitated with the headmount, looking into it carefully, as if she might find something that she had never seen before. But it was only a very ordinary headmount with all the usual technology – no Aladdin’s lamp, no magic carpet, no door into summer.

  Yuki ran a hand through her thick, short hair. Two days ago, she had cut it off herself, thinking it would just be easier, one less thing to fuss with. Ash had told her it made her look like a sex-change of indeterminate direction – asexual and apathetic. Yuki thought that would probably be easier, too. Ash had disagreed.

  ‘Being attractive, beautiful, sexy – all that is always useful. It helps. It makes people care more about you,’ he had argued, tapping the remote in the arm of his couch. ‘There’s no excuse not to be beautiful anymore, it’s so easy.’