by Cadigan, Pat
‘Yeah. Sure.’ Konstantin sat down again. ‘But that’s no distinction around here. Everybody’s tough in AR. Gotta be tough to hold your own in those post-Apocalyptic Gang Wars, right, Guilfoyle? Tough is a must. Tough and fast is better, though, isn’t it? And the faster you go, the tougher you get and the tougher it gets, right? And then things get a little crazy – no, a lot crazier than usual, and then a whole lot crazier than they ought to be.’
Rosario leaned over to try to look into her eyes. ‘Do you have a point, Lieutenant Konstan –’
‘The paranoia, the delusions and the hallucinations,’ Konstantin said, staring hard at Pleshette. ‘Get someone cranked up high enough, they probably won’t know whether they’re wearing a hot suit or not. You don’t even have to put a headmount on them, they wouldn’t notice one way or the other anyway, would they?’
‘Your point, lieutenant –’
Konstantin waved a dismissive hand in his face. ‘What really happened to that kid before we got here? Was he screaming so loud that he was scaring the rest of the paying customers? What was it, snakes coming out of the walls? Bugs crawling all over him? Bugs crawling under his skin, maybe, because he put his hotsuit on over nerve endings that were already going like Holy Rollers? Did somebody go in there to try to calm him down and end up killing him by mistake?’
Rosario turned to Pleshette and started to tell her not to answer but she waved her hand in his face in a near-perfect mirroring of Konstantin’s gesture. ‘Nobody killed that kid. Mezzer’s too bored to swat a fly. I’m too small. Mank’s too useless. You want to know the truth, I think he killed himself.’
‘How?’ Konstantin frowned. ‘We didn’t find a knife. The coroner said he couldn’t possibly have sawn through his own windpipe –’
‘Well, maybe the coroner’s wrong,’ Pleshette said sulkily. ‘You said yourself, you go fast, things get a lot crazier than usual. Everybody’s tough in AR. You still ache all over, don’t you?’
‘What other footage do you have?’ Konstantin asked suddenly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not the shit you showed me, high-speed connection footage.’
Pleshette shook her head. ‘There isn’t any. No parlor could afford to take that much footage, or keep it.’
‘That’s convenient. Where’s the connection to tap into that level?’
‘Don’t answer that,’ said Rosario.
Pleshette ignored him. ‘There isn’t any. You either ’suit up and go, or nothing.’
Konstantin nodded. ‘Then I’ll ’suit up and go.’
Rosario and Pleshette gaped at her with identical dumbfounded expressions. ‘What?’ they said together.
‘What?’ said Taliaferro, trailing after her down the hallway toward the room where the kid had died.
‘I have to know,’ Konstantin said. ‘We have to know.’
‘We do? You mean, you and me, or –’
She stopped at the doorway to the cubicle. ‘I hit my bullshit quota for this lifetime. “D.C., life is so cheap there, it’s a whole different world.” “Broke the same exact ribs.” “Post-Apocalyptic Tokyo, that only the Japanese can find.” And let’s not forget Body Sativa, knows all, sees all, says nothing. She’ll get back to me by email. Yeah. I’ll find myself on so many junk-email lists it’ll take me the rest of my life to get off them.’
Taliaferro watched her straightening out the hotsuit that had been slung over one arm. ‘Yeah, but Jesus. You can’t do anything in there. And anything you pull out is inadmissible.’
‘Maybe not, if I can persuade someone otherwise.’
‘But who?’
Konstantin blew out a hard breath. ‘I don’t know. If I can get someone to care, someone to help. If I find someone who knows or someone who saw something and I tell them they have to come forward or else, and they do – that’s their lookout. Says so in the on-line agreement. You oughta read it, it’s like what real life wishes it were.’
‘You haven’t gone that way on me, have you?’ Taliaferro groaned. ‘Friend of mine from the academy turned into a law’n’order goon last year. The only things she didn’t have were a costume with a mask and her own comic book.’
‘Nah,’ Konstantin said, shaking out the hotsuit. Then she paused. ‘Or, I don’t know. Maybe I am.’ Taliaferro started to say something else and she cut him off. ‘I’m just tired of standing around saying, “Jeez, I wonder what happened in there.” I’m going to find out, and if the only way I can find out is to get shot up with this –’ she held up a sealed vial of clear liquid ‘ – then that’s the way we live now, isn’t it.’
Taliaferro’s brow puckered worriedly. ‘Pleshette’s little tiny lawyer’ll get the whole thing thrown out.’
‘Only if it proves she’s guilty. Maybe I’ll prove she’s innocent. Then it’ll be in his best interests to help me keep the case from getting thrown out.’
To her surprise, Taliaferro only looked more worried. ‘You can’t always be sure of something like that. Listen, here’s my best and last pitch. You want to hear it?’
She didn’t, but she nodded anyway. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Walk away from it. Stuff like this has a way of turning on you and biting you in ways you didn’t expect it would. You might end up setting some kind of precedent you never wanted to.’ There was a pause. ‘Okay. That was my last pitch.’
‘Okay. I heard you,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to wait around here while I do this.’
‘No, but I will,’ he said resignedly. ‘So you can call if you need anything. Not that I could come in and give it to you.’
‘It’s bigger in there than it looks from out here,’ she said, smiling at him.
Taliaferro sniffed. ‘That’s what they’d like you to think.’
Pleshette had given her a different hotsuit this time, after her lawyer Rosario had made Konstantin sign a pre-notarized statement to the effect that Konstantin would not use the availability of the hotsuit or of the drug against her in the immediate case under investigation. No one was actually sure if that would hold or not and Konstantin didn’t much care. This ’suit had a compartment for the vial, located in the hollow between her breasts. A tube ran from there around the collar to the back of the neck, where the drug would be injected.
‘How pleasant,’ she muttered to herself, getting undressed so she could slip into the ’suit. It occurred to her then that the drug might not work for her – or rather, it might not work right for her, it might work too well because she didn’t have tolerance of a regular user. She might spend several hours lying flat on her back in an empty room, hallucinating on the dark screen of an un-activated headmount and thinking she’d done something.
And wouldn’t it be funny if that was what everybody actually did? And it was just the power of suggestion that made them think that they were somehow all together, seeing the same things. Or at least it made them give things the same names.
She closed the suit up high on her neck, touching the spot briefly where she knew it was going to inject her. The image of the so-called child in the basement apartment sprang into her mind. You don’t have a dirty mind, do you?
Do I? She stood gazing down at the headmount in her hands without seeing it, seeing only the girl’s face, first as she was while sitting on the bed, and then smiling up at her as Konstantin had held her with one hand and threatened to punch her with the other.
Real easy to go native in a Gang Wars module.
Go native? Taliaferro had mouthed at her.
Right, except a better way to put it might be just ‘go wild,’ she thought.
Do anything, do everything, because you’re not really doing it, are you? It doesn’t count, doesn’t go on your permanent record, won’t be on the final, can’t be used against you in a court of law. Playground of lost souls – no, playground for lost souls. That would be all of us, without exception. We’re all lost souls some way, sometime, and some more than others. And if you’ve already lost your soul when yo
u go in there, you can pick up another one in general stores.
She made a face at her thoughts, started to put the head-mount on and hesitated.
But I didn’t hit her. Whoever, whatever she really was, I didn’t hit her, in the end. She took a deep calming breath.
So, will you be able to stop yourself when you’re doped up and going who-knows-how-much faster?
She had to take another breath and sit down on the edge of the chaise, holding the headmount on her thighs.
For all you know, the kid’s murder had nothing to do with AR. And the other seven deaths are just stupid coincidences. Has anyone coordinated the statistics on deaths occurring during an AR session?
Probably not. They were probably all too busy looking for the Out Door.
The kid had found an Out Door, besides the one his wife had told her about.
The kid’s murder was all about AR, she thought suddenly. Because he was calling himself Tomoyuki Iguchi out here as well as behind the Shantih Love name in there.
Then she hurried to put on the headmount before she could start arguing with herself again.
The vertigo was so strong that the injection barely registered on her, was over almost before she was aware of it. When her head cleared, she found a catalog in her Shantih Love hands, not the one she had lost but a different one, new to her but well-traveled, much used, and, by the feel of it, stuffed full.
She looked up from the plain, dark cover of the catalog and found herself standing on the edge of the area where she had first seen Shantih Love begin her/his last walk in the sand, before the killer had struck. Konstantin drew back into some deeper shadows, watching as a multitude of characters faded in along the beach and on the pavement.
And then in a lazy dissolve, the characters faded as others appeared, each group oblivious to the other, and oblivious to the third that covered them both and erased them. It was like watching a time lapse that might have been part of a history of how different groups had come to the area and then been displaced by later arrivals. Except it wasn’t a matter of time in sequence but velocity; she knew she was seeing it this way because the drug was bringing her literally up to speed. The slowest became undetectable to the most accelerated, and vice versa.
She frowned. So if the kid had gone into the scenario accelerated, why was there visible footage of him?
‘I want to access a low-speed recorded sequence,’ she told the catalog in a low voice.
It became a simple white surface in her hands, blank for a few moments until a hi-res holo of a human mouth, many times larger than life, appeared on it. ‘Keywords?’ the mouth asked her in an equally low tone.
Keywords. ‘Tomoyuki Iguchi. Shantih Love,’ she said, hoping she had guessed at least one of them.
‘Which one?’ the mouth asked.
‘Which one,’ she repeated, baffled at how to express that both were one.
‘Which footage?’
Konstantin laughed slightly in relief. Of course. There would be a lot of footage. ‘Oh. The murder.’
‘Which one?’
Konstantin froze. ‘Which one? Which one what?’
‘Which murder?’ the mouth asked her patiently, and waited while she thought it over.
EMPTY CUP [VI]
Yuki had wanted to ask the woman a whole series of questions: How fast was she going relative to the speed at which she was falling, did she have to do anything special to maintain her current velocity, was there an upper limit to how fast you could go, and maybe most important, was she a comet on a long loop around the sun, or a meteor burning up in the atmosphere? But the woman who looked so much like her grandmother and went by the gaijin name didn’t seem disposed to provide answers. Or at least not those answers.
‘Bunraku means that you don’t have to do it alone,’ she told Yuki, gesturing at the puppet, positioned in dignified repose amid the three handlers.
‘I don’t think I like the idea of being a puppet,’ Yuki said, frowning unhappily.
‘Not a puppet,’ Body Sativa sounded disgusted with her. ‘“Puppet” is a poor word for it. The whoremaster Joy Flower, she would make a puppet out of you, for any reason, for no reason, just for her own amusement. Just to see the look on your face when you felt one of her clients crawling around inside you, wearing you like a hotsuit.’
‘I don’t see the point of it, though,’ Yuki said. ‘Why –’
‘You don’t have to see the point of it. You don’t have to see the point of rubber dolls with openings of a certain type, you don’t have to see the point of being beaten with a whip. Nobody’s asking you to see the point of it. Nobody’s asking your permission. Nobody’s asking.’
Yuki shrugged. ‘What do I have to do?’
‘Open yourself to Old Japan.’ Body Sativa gestured toward the center of the table. The puppet had vanished, leaving the three handlers, robed and hooded in black, standing together, waiting.
She could not imagine now how fast she was going, how fast her mind was working; how it felt was pleasantly slow and dreamy. Cooperative but not subservient, she let Body Sativa help her climb onto the chair and step from there to the table, where she faced the puppeteers. One of them was wearing a pair of absurdly tall clogs. She walked toward them, a small part of her mind wondering what she was walking on, what they were all standing on, as the table seemed to have disappeared as well and turned simply into darkness.
She stopped in front of them. They stood motionless and she knew that they weren’t going to reach for her or position her. In this bunraku, she would have to make the first move. Moving carefully, she turned around, raised her arms to shoulder height, and leaned back. She felt them catch her, hold her, and then felt herself encompass them, include them, contain Old Japan.
Find him or find his catalog; the choice was really no choice at all. She hadn’t ever seen his catalog, but she had seen him. If she had seen him once, she could see him again. All she needed was high-res vision and the resonance of the heart of Old Japan, the commonality that Tom himself had always chosen to observe: the fact that they were both full Japanese.
She was kneeling on a black wooden floor polished to such a high gloss that it might as well have been black glass. She leaned over and Tom’s face stared up at her, impassive. Old Japan raised her arms, lifted her gracefully into a dance that her blood knew even though the last time it had been performed had been sometime long before most recorded history. There was no record of this anywhere; there didn’t have to be.
DEATH IN THE PROMISED LAND [VI]
The plain white surface in Konstantin’s hands started to grow. She put it down and stepped back from it as it propped itself up in the sand and swelled to the size of a doorway. A blank, white doorway – the mouth had vanished. Konstantin edged forward and put her hand out to touch it. As she had thought, it was insubstantial. She would have to go through it to see anything. Right this way, ladies and gentlemen. This way to the egress –
She felt her heart give an alarmed thump, even though it was nonsense. She knew it was nonsense. Except it seemed so much easier to believe it was nonsense out there than it was to believe it in here. When you were in here, standing in mushy, thick sand up to your ankles and so doped up that you could feel it far more vividly than you had ever felt the real thing, all the out there stuff took on the paleness of the theoretical, of ideas she’d had once, pictures she’d seen somewhere, sometime. In here, it really was bigger than it looked from out there, and it wasn’t just what they – whoever ‘they’ were supposed to be – wanted you to believe, it was truer than most people imagined. Because most people seemed to imagine only amusement parks like post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty and if that was all they wanted, you couldn’t make them want more.
To someone like that, Konstantin thought, this could well look like an out door.
Holding her breath, she took a giant step into it.
She found herself standing at the railing in the park bordering the large body of water where she ha
d seen the flying saucer – and where she had met the possibly fake child, she remembered uneasily, and turned around. She could hear a faint metallic creaking in the darkness, but that was all.
Gradually it became lighter; the sky was grey, overcast. In the dark water below, just a bit too far away for her to see clearly, creatures were playing in the water. Some of them seemed to be human. Others were human-like but almost certainly not. Konstantin waited, gripping the railing.
She saw it approach from the north, then, small in the distance although the way it flapped its wings hinted at its immensity. A dragon. Excuse me, an evolved dragon. How could you tell? Konstantin wondered. Larger-than-average brain case? Opposable thumbs? Advanced postgraduate degree?
As it came closer, she was glad that the day was overcast – full sunlight on the thing’s steel-colored metallic scales would have been too blinding to look at. It was easily the size of a small house, about the size you’d generally imagine for a dragon. The basic body structure was more reminiscent of a mammal than a reptile, however; it reminded her of a lion. The wings were a cross between a sail-plane and a bat. Konstantin had expected them to look leathery but now she could see that they were actually much lighter, actually translucent, showing an occasional rainbow pattern along the span, even under the diffused daylight.
She watched it circle overhead and then bring itself lower and lower so that she could see it more clearly. It was the face that gave away the fact that it was evolved, she decided. The eyes, though slit-pupiled and unmistakably reptilian, were positioned more like human eyes, at the front of the head and instead of the long crocodile-type jaws more usually associated with dragons, the nose and mouth were, again, more like a lion’s muzzle.
Then it was as if lightning had somehow flashed both in her brain and inside the evolved dragon face, illuminating the face beneath it: Sally Lefkow, the first suspicious death.
The dragon proceeded to lower itself down near the water, the great translucent wings beating the air to execute what should have been an impossible hover. It looked into her eyes, or rather she looked into its eyes – this was footage, she realized, and the dragon wasn’t really seeing her.