He looks at her strangely. "Whatever. We've got to go."
"Where's Cisco?" This time she subvocalizes it. "What have you done with him?"
marching orders
"I need you to do something for me," Sky says.
Son is clearly both worried and afraid to interrupt. Dee Zu merely waves him off.
"Really? Where were you when I asked for your help?"
"I can help."
"Goddamn it. Where's Cisco?"
"First you must do something for me."
"No. First you tell me where Cisco is."
"No."
"What do you want me to do?"
"You must go to America."
"America? What are you talking about?"
"The United Securistats. The USA. Where America used to be."
"We just came from there. Only a few days ago. Cisco and me. You brought us all the way here, I had no idea why. And now you want me to go back again?"
"Not to ESUSA."
"ESUSA Mall is gone."
"Yes. You must go to what was once called Utah."
"You're kidding."
"No. There's a pod station not far south of where you are now. I am told it remains viable."
"You're told? Who told you?"
"Brian Finister."
"Brian. Eddie Eight's wet master."
"Yes."
"So never mind I should trust you, now I should trust Brian."
"Yes."
"My God."
"Brian has no choice. He must cooperate."
"Just like me?"
"Yes."
"And why should I help?"
"If you do not, Cisco will die."
"What do you mean? Die here or in Aeolia?"
"Both. Yes."
"Then he's still alive in mondoland?"
"Not if you fail to help. Enough talk. We must act."
"You are really fucked up." Then Dee Zu subvocalizes it: "You are really fucked up."
"You will let the boy lead. He has the greater experience. However, my instructions always take precedence. Understood?"
"Goddamn it." She doesn't subvocalize this.
off to disney world
Dee Zu is angry. "You are really fucked up," she says.
"What?"
"Not you," she tells Son.
The word "fuck" and its kin enjoyed most‐banned status in the Bunker on grounds they represented a shortcut to hell. "Blasphemy!" Gran‐Gran would claim, even though Auntie said it had nothing to do with taking the Lord's name in vain.
He watches Dee Zu utter it again, this time under her breath. Her lips barely move; the merest flutter in her throat. At the same time he notes the texture of her skin, which glistens with a fine sweat.
Their mantles have sloughed off again, which leaves Dee Zu a much more engaging prospect.
"Shouldn't you be more polite with her?" With Sky, he means, the semi‐divine triggerman on high.
"Just shut up, okay? Let me sort this out."
•
"God damn," she says.
"What?" Son asks.
"That's it. No choice."
"What are you talking about?"
"We have to go to America."
"What?"
"Isn't that great?" she says. "Hi‐ho, hi‐ho. It's off to Disney World we go."
"Where's Disney World?"
"Never mind. We're going to Utah."
Son lights up. "Homeland!" he says.
"You dork."
"Dork?"
"There's a pod station south of here. Sky wants us to go there."
missing in action
"Move, move, move." Son's own earworm is back.
"I'm getting the same message," he tells Dee Zu. "We've got to move out. Now."
"We can't just leave him."
"Your friend?"
"Cisco."
"We can't go after him." Poppy's hardscrabble creed flattens Son's voice as he tries to sound both grown‐up and sad. "And I'm not in the mood for another dance with godbolts, okay?"
"He might still be alive."
Missing in action. MIA, Poppy would call it. A nice way of saying somebody's dead.
"Your Sky thing says we move."
A sneaking sense of relief shames him, and he tries to feel sadder. But, hey. One kenless bit of blur fodder to look after is twice as good as two. Twice as safe, half as dangerous. That's Poppy again. What he wants to tell her, though he's smart enough he doesn't, is that it was only a matter of time before her buddy fucked up big time, and it's better that it happened now, before his bumbling hurt Dee Zu as well. Not to mention Son.
Yeah. And having this woman to himself is no part of this relief. Of course it isn't. So why does having just one kenless mallster to take care of feel ten times as good as having two of them? Be honest. Sharing Auntie had been hard, and he'd rather not go through that again. That thought floods him with shame.
"Anyway," he tells Dee Zu. "Won't Sky take care of him?"
"You bastard."
He flushes hot again, this time with resentment.
"Sky says you lead."
"Yeah." He takes a few seconds to get his bearings. "This way. Step where I step. You watch from south to west to north; I watch from south to east to north. Got that?"
She doesn't reply.
•
What they don't need are unnecessary distraction, breaches of field discipline. But Son is still pissed off. "Wow," he says, as he turns to watch his sector. "Your man had guts. Has guts."
"Yeah."
"Or is he only stupid?"
Dee Zu remains silent. Maybe she agrees he was both.
Even as he speaks, he knows he shouldn't. He says, "Maybe stupider than brave?"
"Go fuck yourself."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"I was just saying."
"And I'm just saying go fuck yourself. We don't know Cisco is dead."
"Let's say he isn't. How long do you think he'll last on his own?"
"So. It was him alone down there, or you alone up here. And you chose."
"No."
"Breaking news, Sonny. You are all alone up here. And good luck with that." She sets off back the way they've just come, much of her butt exposed by a new patch of mange.
"Stop her." The voice in his head. "Bring her back and get moving. I want you at the pod station before nightfall."
"Wait," he says.
She doesn't turn around. Son watches the flex of thigh and buttock as she strides through a fresh dust‐bunny dune. Another patch of mantle slips off one shoulder. Basically, the mallster woman is as stupid as her friend. Only a day or two ago that dune would have dissed her, stripped her down to her molecules before she'd taken a second step. Dust to dust. Son is at once indignant and scared for her. And for himself.
Whatever. This woman still knows so much more than he does. Maybe the guy did too. In other ways they're what Poppy called boobies. Easy prey. "And you know how long boobies can expect to survive in this world, boy?" he'd ask Son when he got something wrong. "About a minute, on a slow day. Ten seconds, otherwise."
She wades right on, heedless.
Son considers a degree of aloneness that doesn't bear thinking about. Without this woman, who is there? The council of elders in his head, all that remains of his family. The Boogoo his only living friend.
"Your friend," he calls after her. "Sky? She says we have to stay together."
"So?"
"It's the only way either one of us is going to stay alive."
"Who cares?"
"Wait!"
A dust tendril snakes out toward her. She doesn't even notice. It subsides back into the Boogoo.
break a leg
"Wait!" Son says.
"Bye‐bye," she tells him, and wades on.
The fluffy dune of freshly wind‐driven dust crunches and squeaks as it compacts beneath her feet. The next dune supports her weight, hard ridges sharp underfoot like tiny fractal iterations of the larger
dune structure. Meanwhile, this feral rube is calling after her as though they were players in a romantic vid, maybe a rerun from before the GR revolution, everything in gooey slow motion.
It tickles, this only semi‐committed cloak of blurs. A creepy tickle that makes her skin crawl. Partial mantles are worse than full ones. She feels a cooling breeze from behind, and reaches back to confirm a butt‐cheek freshly exposed to the air. That should give the adolescent apeman a thrill. At the same time she thinks of Cisco at the border with his own bare butt exposed to the elements, and tears start to sting her eyes. Another breeze on her shoulder suggests she's going even mangier.
"Wait!" He hollers it again.
She doesn't look back. And she doesn't respond to the storm of instructions from Sky inside her head.
"Where do you think you're going?" Son says.
"Back to the wadi."
"Don't be stupid. You can't go down that hole. Anyway, we need each other up here."
"Why?"
"To watch each other's back."
Now she stops. "The way you watched Cisco's?" She hears herself and feels childish.
"He wouldn't listen."
"Right."
"We have to watch each other's back. All we have is each other."
"And Cisco?"
Son has probably thought better of saying it again, but Dee Zu answers him anyway: "No, he isn't dead. And I plan to be here for him if he needs me."
As she starts walking away again, her anger switches to Cisco. So is this latest move of his supposed to be like a gift of Aeolian brownie points, a little something to help her flesh out a scendent backup? That twit.
Meanwhile the boy isn't about to give up. "Without me at your back," he says, "you've got a snowball's chance of being here or there or anywhere else. You don't know enough to stay alive out here."
She stops and turns around. "Okay," she says. "So teach me."
"What?"
"Teach me what I need to stay alive."
"Now?"
"I'm a quick study."
"Nobody's that quick."
"Bye‐bye, then."
"Okay. Wait."
She strides straight into a sharp jolt of pain. Her leg! She winces, awaits disassembly. One more novel experience. Her last. But the blurs aren't eating her. She has merely bashed her shin against a rock hidden beneath the dust.
She barely stifles her cry before Son is at her, tut‐tutting and poking and pissing her off. Whatever. The wound looks after itself. Within seconds the scrape is covered with a gooey mixture of blood and dust, a blur‐blood field dressing fast drying to scab.
"Prance around kicking ass in your Worlds all you like," he says. "That's one thing. But bugger a knee out here, and your life expectancy drops to zilch. Not only that, when you get killed you stay killed."
No question. Mondoland's edges and surfaces are less forgiving. And the pain has a different quality. Even with the medibots, there's an extra element of soreness, and it lingers too long, the body grieving its wounds. Gravity itself weighs heavier than it ought to.
"You're lucky," the boy says.
"You should be so lucky. Go ahead and break your own damned leg."
He smiles. Maybe believes she's only joking.
voices
Break a leg.
It's not enough the land is coming up with a surprise a minute, now voices routinely invade his head.
Expression of good will—wishing someone good luck, but saying the opposite, possibly to avert the interest of evil spirits. Originally part of the English theatrical tradition, the expression later became common usage in everyday life.
"My WalkAbout says 'break a leg' means you wish me good luck."
"Your WalkAbout is full of it."
"Yeah, well. We should be wishing each other all the luck we can get, supposing we want to survive."
"And you're going to teach me the ken?"
"I can try. But I'll have to do it on the road. We need to get going."
How's he supposed to take care of business, to watch the land while he leads the way to the pod station, when he's not only expected to conduct survival lessons for a booby, he's also got one machine spewing information even when he doesn't ask for it while another natters away threatening hellfire at every turn?
He's surprised Poppy hasn't grabbed a place at this conference table in his head. His first advice would likely be to cut Dee Zu loose. Though that would conflict with the principle that you always want to have a buddy watching your back. Then Poppy does speak up: "And you'd do well to watch your own buddy's back. Watching her ass doesn't count."
•
By now they're both pretty much bare of mantle. This circumstance, together with having to babysit a booby instead of being able to rely on a buddy, not to mention the other distractions, leaves Son feeling dead vulnerable. Doesn't matter. It's time to make their run for the pod station. They've got to move, move, move.
"Move …"
He waits for the rest of it. Then something else, not the WalkAbout, blares inside his head.
MORE!
"Jesus, Jesus Christ."
"What's wrong?" Dee Zu says, but not as though she cares. Then she also puts hands to her ears.
More than the greatest happiness for the greatest number
"Shut up." Son says it aloud.
"Forget about it," Dee Zu tells him. "This isn't Sky, or the Lode. Just ride with it."
New, improved
"It's like this shit is coming from inside my head."
MAXHAPPINESS!
All gain, no pain!
"It is coming from inside your head. It's a prop. But it'll stop in a minute. Relax."
Maximum pleasure for all
"Relax?"
"Yeah."
"What's a prop?"
"Like an official dreckad. This one sounds old."
Son's WalkAbout kicks in again.
Propagandad, commonly abbreviated to "prop." A portmanteau of "propaganda" and "advertisement." Rather than targeting specific individuals in the manner of dreckads (see "dreckad"), propagators broadcast, non‐personalized messages, using craniums as sound boxes in the same way dreckads do. Props have official educational applications, notably in maintaining a maxhappy zoomerist background ethos sufficient to optimize dreckad effect.
Whoa. Like everybody's holding a conference right here in his head.
"Are you okay?" Dee Zu says.
"Maybe. Are you getting this rigmarole?"
"What, the prop?"
"Something from the Lode."
"No."
And there's more.
Dreckad. From "direct advertisement," a marketing technique using the cranium as a receiver to deliver individually targeted, personalized commercial messages; inadvertent and perhaps unfortunate connotations of "dreck" (shoddy, crappy, schlocky).
A whole world's knowledge coming to you, steaming hot from the collective consciousness of a dead civilization. That thought is like a Poppy‐Auntie collaboration.
What an excellent thing, this babble of voices in his head. Poppy and Auntie are the least of it. A crowd of crazies are clamoring away up there, and nobody even asked him. What total insanity must be like. Though Dee Zu claims she's getting at least some of it. So it's not him, it's the world outside that's gone gaga.
It keeps coming.
Choose the good
Be good
Let no pain remain
The prop natter finally ceases. All the officiously sprightly garbage. Son feels violated. Like something shat inside his head.
"You guys put up with this stuff?" he says.
"What choice did we have?"
A chronic plague, is how Poppy described advertising. One thing nobody should mourn about the world past. But holo generators, together with their power sources, still lurked beneath the Boogoo, though how this could be remained a mystery. Not that they saw them very often. Auntie thought the generators had trouble recognizing mantled persons as targe
ts.
For whatever reasons, the land looks as jittery as Son himself feels. And the dreckmills are working overtime, maybe excited at the prospect of two bare‐naked targets out here on the loose for the first time in who knows how many years.
a history of this shit
Two gray geysers, twin arches of dust frozen in place by a force field, pop up not far from the brink of the ravine.
"Wow! I recognize those," Son says. "Auntie claimed they were an ad for a bunch of hamburger shops from before the Troubles. They're the same as that orbital logo, the one Poppy used to curse for getting in the way of the moon."
An associated dreckad sputters to life.
Big cheese…geez…
"Plus, he said, their damn burgers never tasted the same after they started making them from insect protein instead of meat."
Cheeseburger…
"We should take a break," Son says. "Maybe eat something."
"Eat?"
•
"Here." Son displays a metal container from his catchbag.
"What's that?"
"Pears," he says. "The last can."
He pulls his knife and saws the top open before passing the can back to her, along with the knife. Dee Zu wipes this off on her thigh and spears a chunk of preserved fruit. She catches Son gazing at the wet spot on her leg. This stuff has a funny texture and tastes faintly metallic. But it's not bad. It's sweet.
"Finish them."
"There's too much."
They finish the pears together, passing the knife back and forth.
"Drink the syrup," he tells her.
It's too sugary. She passes more than half back to him.
He chugs it. "That's the end of the pears," he says. "Maybe the last pears in the world."
The peaches are gone already. He tells her about Gran‐Gran and her insatiable appetite for peaches, and what the GameBoys left in the Bunker, and all that Son managed to salvage. Then he tells her about how Auntie was Poppy's woman, something of his own feelings for her, and his guilt about that.
"So Poppy and I had a problem."
"I can imagine."
"Auntie was his woman, but she didn't want to be his woman any more."
"Blame it on Auntie."
"No." He tells her about how he finally killed Poppy. His voice remains flat. He doesn't look her in the face till he's finished. His eyes are dry, his expression stony.
Dee Zu remains silent.
"It was an accident."
"I see."
"One of us had to die soon anyway. I knew that, and he knew it. Though I'd hoped not so soon."
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