by Cadigan, Pat
A moment later, she was seeing things from the dragon’s point of view, riding along in the footage. The experience was dizzying, almost incoherent – something about the dragon’s eyesight made it feel as if even the eyes of her mind were crossing. It was enhanced in some way but also strained, as if the dragon were under the influence of some drug –
She recognized the sensation of the accelerant, but there was something else as well, something that didn’t mix either with Sally Lefkow or the accelerant or both. The dragon soared crazily like a maddened bird of prey and Konstantin got the impression of itching all over, but from the inside.
Briefly the vitals readings became visible on the screen; the numbers meant nothing to Konstantin but she didn’t need them to feel the physical sensation of Sally Lefkow’s panic at sensing something alien moving inside her skin, handling her person, manipulating her body. The dragon thrashed in the air and then, in a desperate move to dislodge whatever it was – or just a desperate move, period – it plummeted straight into the ocean.
In the darkness, Konstantin felt Sally Lefkow fighting for air not because she was drowning in the water but because her throat had swollen closed. The flesh continued to swell, beyond the point usual for anaphylactic shock; the flesh swelled and as it swelled it hardened, dislocating her jaw, tearing ligament and cartilage, crushing her voice box.
Konstantin found herself lying on the pavement by the iron-pipe fence, coughing and gasping for breath. Her eyes were watering furiously and she could hear herself sobbing. She pulled herself to a sitting position, still coughing, looking out over the water. It was still day and still overcast, but the dragon was gone.
With an effort, she got to her feet and then was bent double by another fit of coughing that hurt her chest and her throat. The saliva in her mouth was thick and sour; she wondered what would happen if she tried to spit. Wet the inside of the headmount she was wearing, most likely.
She straightened up and saw a new figure waiting by the railing. Konstantin had not actually seen a picture of this particular character, but the features were distinct, impossible to confuse with anyone else. Marilyn Presley didn’t see her, wouldn’t have seen her anyway. Her face was lifted to something directly over her head. It wasn’t visible to Konstantin but she felt a pulling from the woman and knew that, very shortly, she would be seeing the flying saucer that had abducted Marilyn Presley just before Emilio Torres had overdosed on something.
So much physical sensation associated with states of mind, Konstantin thought marveling, as she ascended with Marilyn Presley toward the saucer. Most of the time you didn’t notice that you breathed a certain way in the grip of one emotion, differently in another, or that you assumed some postures so specifically to express certain emotions that later on, you would assume the posture not only when you felt that emotion, but when you wanted to feel it, or when you wanted someone else to feel that way.
And then there was the terrible, new feeling, the sensation of having been invaded, penetrated, and permeated by some force that intended to use you, from the inside out. Emilio Torres’s heart went wild as his bowels let go. Abruptly she was completely sightless but sensation remained and she knew that Torres had torn off his headmount and gone searching for something. For what?
For an antidote, she guessed. He must have thought he’d been poisoned and he’d tried to counter whatever it was with a remedy. Either that or he had just wanted to calm down so he could think what to do next. But whatever he had taken had hit him like a sledgehammer. It had stopped every organ, every cell, every tiny bit of him, stopped him and dropped him.
Konstantin’s knees buckled and she crumpled to the pavement. ‘Okay,’ she panted. ‘Okay, I get the idea, we can stop n –’
But the next victim, the panther man, was already bounding toward her over the grassy humps in the park, and it was getting dark again.
EMPTY CUP [VII]
She moved in the darkness; was moved, and could feel that she wasn’t alone, even beyond the three ningyo-zukai flowing with her. There were many nisei out there in the darkness. Her sense of their presence waxed and waned with her movements. Sometimes she could feel how she and the three puppeteers got out of synch with each other and instead of moving together, moved at odds. At other times, the four of them might have melded into one entity, a creature that could only be the product of a certain kind of joining.
Was that Old Japan? Or just a method to bring Old Japan awake and alive again? She didn’t know. So many nisei of her age had been raised either by non-Japanese or thoroughly Western-assimilated Japanese. She knew the culture and history, though she had not been steeped in it the way her grandmother had, and the Japanese of her grandmother’s generation had taken that sort of thing very hard. We are losing our young, they would say, and Yuki, like many others her age, would think, How can you lose us? We’re right here.
She remembered when she had heard that her grandmother had consented to donate her brain after death to a neural-network organization. At the time, it had been a controversial thing, the use of the brains of the dead for the organization and pathways, neurons, synapses – all sorts of things she didn’t understand. She would not have thought that her grandmother would have been either interested or approving of such a thing.
I want to see if there is such a thing as the ghost in the machine.
So perhaps there was. Perhaps?
She felt the ningyo-zukai stumble with her. This Body Sativa person hadn’t come right out and said she was her grandmother. What she knew about Yuki meant nothing – it was easy enough to find out everything you needed to know about someone on-line.
Yuki felt a sudden strong longing for her grandmother, a powerful wish that at least a simulacrum of the old woman existed somewhere in some form, something like a cross between a recording and a shrine. Perhaps if Old Japan could really be awakened, who knew what else could come to be?
Her movements became more rhythmic. She was performing a dance now, she and the puppeteers, except she couldn’t even really feel them anymore. She started to reach out her awareness for them and then thought better of it – in this bunraku, the puppet was not supposed to remain conscious of the puppeteers, but enter a state in which its life was the combination of the puppeteers’ movements and the audience willing to let it be alive in their eyes.
They were all around her now, clapping to the rhythm of the dance, beating it out on the ground with their feet. The ground; they were in a clearing in a forest, one of the places that had disappeared well before the legendary Ginza district had first come ablaze. This was a different legend entirely. Yuki remembered it now as she turned slowly, looking at all the Japanese faces, some pure nisei, some part, but all come together to wake Old Japan. Who had told her this story? Her grandmother? Or had it been Tom, of all people?
The story of how day had been returned to the world after a period of unbroken night – Amaterasu, sulking in a cave, angry over something her brother had done. She had refused to be moved, Yuki remembered, turning toward the dark mouth of the cave, even when all the other gods and goddesses came to plead with her. And so the Dread Female of Heaven had stepped up onto an overturned tub and begun to dance. Not the beautiful, stylized dance in silken kimonos to the thin, sharp notes of the shamisen but something primal. A type of dance that even a sansei who couldn’t even speak the language could perform.
But once again, the legend differed, for it was Tom in hiding, not Amaterasu, and he cared a lot less about things like unbroken night and waking Old Japan. Nor did he care a great deal about her.
Well, then, she would have to do all the caring, and she would have to get everyone gathered there with her to care also. Without realizing it, she had begun to chant his name; the crowd took it up, softly at first, letting it build.
DEATH IN THE PROMISED LAND [VII]
The thing about pain in AR, Konstantin noticed, was that it took somewhat longer for the nerves to deaden, possibly because there was no ph
ysical impact to do any actual damage. You could go on tweaking a nerve via hotsuit stimulation for much longer than you could, say, beat it with a club or whip it with a seasoned strip of leather.
So what was it – had all the victims been kinky for pain to begin with? Or just obsessed with authenticity?
Or had the accelerant simply canceled out anything remotely like common sense?
Whatever it was, Konstantin felt sorry for the people who had suffered through it before dying. Although not quite as sorry as she was feeling for herself, just at this moment.
The panther man’s death had been all the more brutal for the way the survival instinct had been over-ridden or overwhelmed. No, no one in the parlor had heard or seen anything because they had all been buried alive in their own particular worlds, leaving March Kuykendall to bash his head repeatedly against the floor of his soundproofed cubicle in complete privacy. It took a while for Konstantin to realize she was still alive.
When she did, there was no time to try to escape, or even brace herself. In Denver, the wannabe gymnast Lydia Stang had ridden along helplessly in her body as it tried to execute some sort of midair tumbling twist on the run, and failed. Konstantin rode with her, and wasn’t sure which was worse – knowing what was going to happen, or having to hear, deep inside the illusory body, the grisly silent sound of her neck breaking.
Suffocating in a headmount wasn’t impossible – block the ventilation, seal the neck area, pass out. Flo the musician had slept through her death. Konstantin hadn’t.
Victims six and seven – oh, a special treat, dueling deaths, experienced together. Double slay-ride; somewhere, some pervert was in a seamless ecstasy bubble, re-living this one. Could you really stab yourself and make it look like someone else had done it? Or could you stab yourself so badly, slash and hack away at yourself in such a manner that no one would believe you’d done it? Which of course you hadn’t, because someone was wearing you like a glove, like a puppet –
Maybe it was just called shoddy police work from lazy investigators, she thought as the last moments of Tomoyuki Iguchi congealed around her.
Lying on the ground, under the everlasting night sky, the creature preparing her for slaughter. Against her will, her neck stretched and she felt something pressing against her windpipe, something with an edge.
Under the night sky, the knife came down. In the stale, smelly cubicle, the kid voided himself in terror as his hands went up, pressed against the outside of the monitor and shoved it impossibly hard, the bottom edge sharp against the sensitive flesh of his neck. Konstantin’s skin was stinging, burning, ripping, tearing. The edge of the monitor, sharp but not nearly so sharp as a knife, sawing away at the kid’s windpipe, while the kid held on and pushed and pulled and pushed and pulled until his windpipe had been completely severed.
She was going to have words with the coroner.
Konstantin wanted to pass out but the drugs refused her even that minor bit of solace. Both drugs, this one and the other, that all eight victims had taken along with the accelerant, thinking that they were being given some kind of biochemical key to a super-exclusive club. What it actually had been, as far as Konstantin could tell, was a bizarre formula of hallucinogen and hyper-alertness; somewhere else on-line, clients of a certain very bent madam waited until the drug took effect and activated a special sort of hotsuit, one that enabled them to wear, in effect, other people. The attraction of such a thing escaped Konstantin. Perhaps it was the hyper-alertness of having what amounted to one body moving inside another – perhaps the stimulation was the height of pleasure.
Unless, of course, you were the one being slipped onto someone else like a glove. There you were, thinking you were going to get into AR’s most exclusive club and instead, something got into you. Maybe your body rebelled before anything important could happen, maybe you discovered the hard way that you were allergic to certain substances and being on accelerant besides didn’t help matters. Or maybe the sensation of something under your skin was too much to bear and you’d do anything to make it stop, even stab yourself to let whatever it was out.
Sometimes, however, the pervert wearing your body decided to take it over altogether after enjoying the sensation of you sawing through your own throat. Konstantin could see where that sort of person would think it was an extra special thrill, to walk off with the virtual body afterward.
Shantih Love’s book had recorded it all, not because Shantih Love had wanted a handy record but because he’d been sure it would never be found and he had to keep track of how much of this drug there was and who it had gone to. The catalog itself had recorded the fate of each of his customers – exactly why, Konstantin wasn’t sure, and she doubted that Shantih Love even knew it had done so. Possibly because it wasn’t actually Shantih Love’s catalog in the same way the catalog she had had on-line was her catalog. This seemed to have a great deal more in it, pages and pages of undecipherable symbols, many of them Japanese ideograms. Others seemed to be far more ancient, though she couldn’t have said how she knew. An old memory of hieroglyphics, maybe, or cuneiform, or something else entirely.
Whatever else it might be, it was big and dense and too much for one person. And now that it had told her what she had wanted to know, it refused to be investigated any further. She could hold on to it, but it refused to open for her, refused to respond, refused to do anything except sit in her hands like a book-shaped rock.
She would wait it out, she decided. Sooner or later, someone was going to want it, would look for it, ask for it.
After a while, she got the distinct impression of movement, her and the book together moving toward some definite destination. Was that because the accelerant was wearing off and she was going more slowly now, or because everyone else was going that much faster?
The darkness began to lift; the surrounding shadows became less formless, more patterned. She thought she could hear some kind of regular noise, a thumping combined with human voices chanting. The sounds became louder, or came closer, she wasn’t sure which, and now she could feel an answering pulse from the book, as if it were alive and its heart had been jarred into life again.
The light came up some more and she could just make out what seemed to be a gathering of people around some kind of big rock formation. Konstantin pressed the book between her hands, letting the pulse inside run up both her arms. Eventually she could feel it in her torso as well, and the light grew brighter and brighter until finally she saw them, an enormous group of Japanese gathered around a puppet being manipulated by three robed and hooded puppeteers.
Konstantin drew closer. The beat seemed to penetrate more deeply into her body, stirring feelings that would have embarrassed her had she not been holding on to the book.
The puppet, she realized, was leading them. Even though the puppeteers were in plain sight, it was easy to forget they were there, at least in their capacity as puppeteers. It was as though they were assisting the puppet rather than manipulating it.
Something was going to happen. Konstantin could feel it building around her in the very substance of AR as well as deep inside of herself. She looked over the heads of the gathering, past the puppet to the black mouth of the cave behind. An Out Door? Or was it the Door In for something else entirely?
Suddenly she was terrified that that was exactly what it was, that they were going to let something come in from somewhere else, something strange and new and, before now, completely unknown, and then everything would change, be changed, whether you wanted it or not. She stepped forward, holding the catalog in one hand and raising the other. ‘Don’t –’ she started to say, but it was too late.
Even as the feeling took hold of her and shook her like a rag doll, she understood what it was and let go with a shout of laughter, both kinds of relief. And then she couldn’t stop laughing, she was literally rolling on the ground, clutching the book to her front and laughing, laughing, laughing. Laughing for the joy of being alive. Laughing in the face of darkness and death
. Laughing for pleasure, laughing against pain, laughing because it made her shake all over and that made her want to laugh some more. And she laughed, too, because apparently she wasn’t the only one who felt that way, that the entire gathering of people there were laughing just as loudly as she was, no doubt for many of the same reasons. They laughed and howled and laughed some more and it began to sound almost like a chorus of singing, everyone laughing together.
Breathless, still laughing a little, Konstantin sat up and looked over at the puppet to see how the puppeteers were taking it. The puppet was facing the cave where a bewildered-looking Japanese guy had appeared, blinking in the light. His gaze moved from the puppet to the people gathered around the cave and then finally came to rest on her.
His face twisted in shock and anger and she remembered belatedly that she was wearing the Shantih Love character. Or maybe it was the book he was upset about. He gave a shout and lunged toward her. The people around him caught him and held him tight.
The puppet had become a human woman. She stood alone now, staring at Konstantin, her face wary, and then reached out one hand.
‘Shantih Love,’ she said.
The book lifted easily out of Konstantin’s hands and went directly to her. Konstantin started to shrug, suppressed the movement, and looked over at the Japanese guy, still in the firm hold of several of the crowd. She felt as if they were waiting for her to say something, so she said the only thing she could think of.
‘Tom Iguchi, you’re under arrest as an accessory before and after the fact in the murders of Sally Lefkow, Emilio Torres, March Kuykendall, Lydia Stang …’