“Shouman, not Showman. For pity’s sake, don’t call him Showman. He’d love that.”
“Why does he want to block your view, George?”
“Out of spite, what else? Vicious, unappeasable spite. It’s a spite wall.”
Tenderly, Lena Faye traced the shell of my ear with a fingertip. “What occasioned his spite?”
“It’s a Semito-Phoenician thing. Drop a toad on one of these guys, he comes after you harder than a hockey goalie.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Bashir Shouman hosts a products-demonstration thing called Getting the Goods on ShariVid opposite my own Forum/Againstum on Levant.”
“Title’s familiar, but I’ve never scanned it.”
“My first week here, the head of the European Mercantile Authority, Tito Malcangio, was a guest. In passing, I told Malcangio that Shouman played with high-tech toys for a living. I swore Forum/Againstum would knock him off his mechanical camel—an expensive Iraqi amusement product I once saw him demonstrate—in less than six months. Malcangio hoo-hawed. Said Shouman besmirched the reps of all true sales and marketing pros.”
“You insulted him.”
“I made an observation. And a prediction. Malcangio insulted him.”
“Then Malcangio should get the spite wall.”
“He lives in Milan. Shouman’s a Beiruti. Unfortunately, these days, I also qualify.”
“My poor Cherokee.”
On my nomaditronic bed in my library-cum-relaxall, Lena Faye and I stared at my cactus gardens and the boat lights bobbing on the horizon. Shouman’s spite wall already partially blocked our view of the favela sprawling downslope. That wasn’t so bad, but in another few days his coolies would have raised the wall high enough to revoke my vantage on the eastern Med.
Then I’d have no view, only a window on the stuccoed and whitewashed backside of a barrier whose sole purpose was to humiliate and vex me. It had no other use. Maybe I could post adverts on it or beam one of those premixed copulatory laser shows against it. No, nix that. The imamon Damur Ridge, if I showed such smut, would have his followers convert me into a choirless castrato. Nix everything but my mounting frustration and rage.
“Don’t you have any recourse?” Lena Faye said. “I mean, of the legal sort.”
“Over here, no. This isn’t the fragmenting U.S. Over here, folks can do with their land just what they like—dogs, fellaheen, and furriners be damned.”
“I can’t believe that. Surely there’s a law.”
“I’ve asked the president of Levant Limitless—”
“LLBEAN?”
“Listen. I’ve asked her to pull strings. To offer baksheesh. To threaten. But Shouman’s pit-bull intractable.”
“And his wall keeps going up.”
“If I lose my view, Lena, I’ll—” I stuck, sighed, resumed: “With all I’ve got to do, with six hours of holotaping hanging over me, this view’s indispensable to my mental health.”
“Come back to Tulsa. You’re indispensable to me, George. As I’ve found to my pain in your absence.” When Lena Faye kissed me, I gunned the bed a dizzy one-eighty away from the window.
Facing away from the sea, gazing upon the loveliest Leatherboat ever to emerge from Enid, I felt a rush of calming metabolic chemicals.
“Maleesh. ‘Never mind.’ Nothing’s indispensable. The world keeps turning.”
Lena Faye had her head thrown back, her long neck agleam. She started. Something in the window had her attention. She fought to sit up. “Turn the bed back around! Now!”
I pivoted the bed, elevated its headrest, revved it toward the window. Shouman’s unfinished spite wall had no power to deny us a view of the plasmic light show writhing like a lost aurora borealis in the midnight skies over Lebanon. This kinetic event—whatever it was—flowed lavender, lime, orange, indigo, even an eerie red. It rained light. This rain flashed from the tin-roofed huts, flare-illuminated the beach, painted and repainted the bobbing docks. It turned the sea into a crumpled foil mirror that caught, and muted, and softly echoed back, the multicolored cries of this inexplicable happening.
Lena Faye clutched me. Unashamedly, I clutched her too. The terrible light show continued to blaze and flicker. Then, without any incremental slackening, it ceased. The night sky over Lebanon was nothing but night sky again, an inverted bowl of moonlight and palsied stars.
“Lord, Mr. Gist, what a hello! Do you stage the same airborne gala for all your old flames?”
I hugged Lena Faye tighter.
Serious now, she said, “What was it, really? A new Israeli weapon? An electrical storm?”
“Lena Faye, I have no idea. I doubt it’s the former. That would jeopardize the peace. An electrical storm? Who knows? Not me. I’m no meteorologist.”
Before I could react, Lena Faye had pivoted the bed and dialed up Levant’s round-the-clock news coverage on my vidverge wall. We watched three or four replays of the event, as taped from the roof of our studio in the Sabra Intercontinental Hotel.
Rafika Ali Sadr, the midnight anchor, noted in five or six different ways that so far no one had a convincing theory for the untoward light show, which, just moments ago, thousands of people in Beirut and environs had witnessed “live and in shivering color.” Then she began airing all the conflicting “expert” feedback, and I retrieved my multiflicker in order to mute the idiotic row among the talking heads.
“Hey, Mr. Gist! I was watching that! Don’t you want to find out why the sky started sizzling?”
“We’ll know by morning. Why tune in the guesses of a thousand and one egotistical crackpots, whether Arab, American, or Trobriand Islander.”
“But—”
“‘Spontaneous ozone-layer decay.’ ‘Chain-reaction molecular combustion.’ ‘Projected hologrammatic illusion.’ Do you really think any of those blind stabs on target?”
She didn’t, or said she didn’t to placate me. Whereupon we consummated our reunion. Thirty minutes later, Lena Faye was fast asleep, seemingly blissfully so.
Careful not to wake her, I eased out of bed and strolled to my picture window. Bashir Shouman’s spite wall loomed in the darkness downslope, an architectural obscenity, the three-dimensional Muslim equivalent of a Bronx cheer. It loomed far more forcefully in my awareness than did the weird event that had interrupted Lena Faye’s and my conversation. Damn Shouman. Damn him to the gaudiest hell ever imagined by a vindictive iman.
Without my view, I’d …
Unbidden, my vidverge wall snapped on. Faintly, it lit 1) my library, 2) Lena Faye’s lovely slumbering form, and 3) my stunned nakedness before the picture window.
In virtually thoughtless self-defense, I tinted the window with a thumb touch and telegoosed the bed into another room. That left me buff upright in front of my screen as it cycled through hundreds of fi-opt channels. I tried to kill it with my multiflicker, but it refused to slide back into blank and docile wallness. In fact, I felt that it needed an observer; that it wanted that observer to be me.
I, I mean: Cherokee George Gist of the popular gabfeed, Forum/Againstum.
The channels on my vidverge wall stopped flipping—as abruptly, by the way, as had the spooky-ass light show. A figure emerged from the digital fi-opt signals coursing through my scrambler, a ghost of many thin and motile colors. Green predominated, the green of a diluted kiwi-fruit drink.
The head of this wraith—humanoid after the fashion of a splayed bullfrog—reminded me, with its capelike fins and the fins’ hypnotic hula-ing, of a manta ray. From the hidden neck down, though, the wraith’s watery greenness hinted at a narrow “chest,” pipe-cleaner “arms,” and static-riven “legs” that may, or may not, have ended in a pair of nebulous “feet.”
The image was a cartoon, a whimsical computer-generated assemblage of migrating pixels. Whimsical and scary at once, for the creature’s “eyes”—I grokked, taking hasty inventory—looked just like those of Pope Jomo I, who, along with three other religious bigwigs and a virroga
te for a lottery-chosen viewer, would appear on this coming week’s cablecasts of Forum/Againstum.
Like Pope Jomo’s, the thing’s eyes gleamed big, brown, and wise. They didn’t belong in a manta-ray-shaped head, granted, but today’s vidverging hackers can do almost anything with sendable images. Given my screen’s refusal to obey my off button and the weirdness of the figure astutter on the wall, those pious eyes held and calmed me.
“George Gist?” My unit speakers lapped me with a “voice” like seven cellos twanging in concert.
“Guilty.” I walked to my rotary chiffonier and dialed out a robe, which I cinched about myself. The robe fell only to mid thigh, but better a quarter clad than jaybird nude before the pontiff’s unmistakable gaze—the peepers, so to speak, of the Holy See. I faced my image-bearing wall.
“We are the su’lakle,” the creature shimmering there said in its echoey cello tones.
“‘We’? You look like an ‘it.’ But who knows how many of you pesky cablejackers have conjured this lie?”
“‘Lie’? We don’t lie. But, we confess, su’lakle is a syllabic rendering of the [garbled] physical sequence by which we denominate ourselves.”
“What?”
“Sorry to confuse. We are a kind of plasma-energy entity of no small venerableness.”
“‘We’? You keep saying ‘we.’ Please name the buttinsky electronic felons in cahoots with you.”
“‘I’—the ‘I’ you now see—am a concentrated distillate of the cosmic intelligence that has just come to Earth. If you prefer the singular, I will gladly use it.”
“Good. On Forum/Againstum I talk to jackasses in herds. Here at home, it’d be a huge relief to entertain crackpots like you—if I really must—one at a time.”
“‘Crackpots’?” the thing on my wall said in its multiple-cello voice, sounding offended. “A disparaging term, correct?”
“It’s late, Mr. Ukulele. What the hell do you want?”
“To appear on Forum/Againstum.”
“You and ten million other humans starved for a nanosecond of celebrity.”
“I am neither a … a ukulele nor a human being. I am the deliberately sublimated essence—the spokesentity—of an antique sentient species here self-styled the su’lakle. Don’t be obtuse, Mr. Gist.”
“I’d be obtuse if I bought this. A dupe conspiring in my own unprincipled scamming.”
“Hardly. You see, Mr. Gist, you’re—”
“Look, you’ve hacked your way into my relaxall in the dumb-ass guise of Manta Man, or the Stingray Kid, and I’m supposed to reward you with a stool next to the simseats of my guests this week?”
“Roger—yes. Pope Jomo, Iman Bahadori, the Dalai Lama, and evangelist Jennie Pilgrim. I’d like to palaver—rap—with them. In order to reach as many of your kind as possible.”
“Roger—yes,” I mocked. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to arrange this historic tetracast?”
“Mr. Gist, you—”
“Listen, vidiot, why not hack your way onto Forum/Againstum the same way you’ve raped the privacy of my home?”
“I am no hacker, Mr. Gist. Nor a pixel-built virrogate. I observe, therefore I am.”
“In Marx’s immortal words, horsefeathers!”
“And therefore you are too—along with your planet, solar system, galaxy, and surrounding galactic clusters.”
“The coaxial cops will have you traced and busted by morning! And our scientists—real ones, not cranks—will know by then what caused tonight’s honky-tonk glowstorm!”
“I doubt both such outcomes.”
“I have a warm female companion in the next room. I’m going in to her now, Mr. Ukulele. Shut my wall unit off when you’re through playing around with it.”
I moved to rejoin Lena Faye. The ray-headed thing on my screen began to quake more violently than ever. Its erratic motion halted me. As I watched, it stepped from the flat cage of the vidverge wall into my house. There, facing me like a burglar, the su’lakle floated in three dimensions, like a person-shaped pocket of neon mist. Less than an arm’s length away, it radiated neither heat nor coolth, but a dry, spreading tingle. The hairs on my knuckles stood up. My nape hairs swayed. A fine electrostatic disturbance helixed through my bowels.
“What crackerjack systems crasher could do this—drift in air before you as an independent being?”
“You’re a hologram.”
“I am? Projected from where, by whom, and through what mechanism?”
Like the su’lakle, I was trembling—but for different reasons. “Who knows? By Bashir Shouman. By means of a secretly deployed nanoholocaster.”
“A hologram is often a kind of telepresence, Mr. Gist. I, though, inhabit this space with you, even as the filtered-to-essentials spokesentity of my larger Self.”
Truth? Gobbledegook? I had no idea.
“Touch me, Mr. Gist.”
I hesitated, then reached out and pinched the su’lakle’s eelish arm just below its, uh, “elbow.” The plasmic “skin” between my thumb and forefinger had a filmy elastic moistness; it followed my tug, more like a biddable mist than a pinch of rubber, and then seeped rather than snapped back into place. I couldn’t imagine a virrogate able to interface to that peculiar degree with consensus reality. Maybe the creature wasn’t lying.
“Give me a spot on Forum/Againstum with Pope Jomo and the other sacred worthies.”
“But … but what’ll I call you?”
Su’lakle, I argued, wouldn’t do—not at least until Levant’s subscribers understood the being’s origins and nature. Even then, they’d probably regard it as just another electronic wave-function virrogate.
After all, in the recent past, randomly selected subscribers had come on F/A as my “Faces from the Rubble” interviewees in the identity-concealing teleguises of Socrates, Cleopatra, Torquemada, Queen Elizabeth I, Pocahontas, Sir Isaac Newton, Soujourner Truth, Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Mahatma Gandhi, Brigitte Bardot, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Buddy Holly, the Pink Panther, Steven Hawking, Stephen King, Jessica Rabbit, Tina Turner, and Salman Rushdie (a virrogate sent packing in midbroadcast to avert a global epidemic of Islamic riots). The su’lakle’s current look, to put it frankly, had less authenticity than had J. Rabbit’s.
“Call me Joe,” it said.
“Joe?”
“Yes. Joe Way. A participant without a sacerdotal honorific perhaps requires two names.”
Bewildered, I agreed. The su’lakle stepped back into the two-dimensional realm of my vidverge unit, then disappeared by obligingly shutting the unit off.
I summoned my nomaditronic bed back from exile and lay down beside Lena Faye. No one, I mused, should have to deal at the same time with a spite wall, an ex-fiancée, and the unannounced arrival of a star-struck plasma being.
I got up to find Lena Faye sitting in front of my vidverge at a table set with bagels, strawberry jelly, cream cheese, and a pot of Earl Grey. I joined her.
“Hey, slug-a-bed,” she said. “Despite your certainty to the contrary, the world still lacks a decent explanation for last night’s pyrotechnics.”
“Nobody’s suggested fireworks?”
“Of course. Along with dozens of other screwy guesses. But those weren’t fireworks. The only fireworks I have any empirical knowledge of, George, took place—” nodding “—in that bumper-car bed of yours.”
I spread some jam on a bagel and took a bite. I poured myself a cup of tea, which Lena Faye had brewed to a satisfying strength and temperature.
“If you won’t come back to Okla*Globe,” she said, “I could come here. I’d bet LLBEAN, ShariVid, or AvivTel could use another savvy PR flack, wouldn’t you?”
“Say LLBEAN instead of Levant to management, they’ll boot you out faster’n a CableCom inspector.”
“Have talent, will travel.”
“Lena Faye, I just can’t think about that now. I tape the biggest shows of my career this afternoon.”
“Congrats.” She deformed a bagel
with her canines, the jam on her mouth as red as something more dire.
“Besides, you’re supposed to get me back with obscene amounts of cash, corporate flattery, and—”
“Good lovin’.”
“Which you’ve just offered to bring here. Meanwhile, Okla*Globe can go jump. If this is savvy recruitment work, Lena Faye, nobody here in Beirut will recognize it.”
We ate for a time in silence. Nadia Suleiman, Levant’s morning anchor, efficiently ticked off all the theories so far proposed for the peculiar aerial phenomenon that’d signaled “Joe Way”’s arrival on the stage of Earthbound history. None of the theories mentioned the su’lakle, of course, or came anywhere near the bizarre truth of the matter.
It did amuse me, though, to hear Nadia report that a spokesperson for the New Millenarian Ecumenical Council convening this week in Beirut claimed that the light show marked God’s joyous personal blessing on the momentous proceedings of the NMEC.
“Ha ha,” I said mirthlessly.
“At least that has a certain befitting poetry to it. You just grump and cynicize.”
“Because I know what really happened.”
“Do tell.”
To Lena Faye’s incredulity, consternation, and mounting alarm, I did just that. She believed me. I warmed to the telling because she so obviously did believe, and tried to comfort me, and in fact eased me through the rest of the day to the taping that would secure Forum/Againstum’s status as the premier gabfeed on any of the global vidgrids.
Pope Jomo, Iman Bahadori, the Dalai Lama, and Jennie Pilgrim, spiritual leader of the World Evangelical Union (WEU), had all come to Beirut for the New Millenarian Ecumenical Council (NMEC). Other attendees included an assortment of hatted rabbis, skinny Hindu mucky-mucks, the prophet of the Baha’is, voodoo houngans, the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Wiccan hierarchs, saronged Theravada and Mahayana priests and bodhisattvas, African tribal shamans, and maybe a dozen sachems from mainline, borderline, and off-the-wall Protestant-Christian denominations.
I’d tried to round up a representative sampling of spiritual leaders for this week’s episodes of Forum/Againstum, but the Pope and Iman Bahadori had threatened to withdraw if I made them share Levant’s studio—even as holojections—with more than two other council attendees. In return for this concession, they’d offered me six hours of their precious time, all of which I hoped to tape on a single afternoon for a full week’s worth of programs. No one else in the infogabshow biz had ever managed such a coup.
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