There was a vid behind the bar, up over the bottles, and then she saw Angie there, looking square into the camera and saying something, but they had the sound down too low to hear over the crowd. Then there was a shot from up in the air, looking down on a row of houses that sat right at the edge of a beach, and then Angie was back, laughing and shaking her hair and giving the camera that half-sad grin.
"Hey," she said to the bartender, "there’s Angie."
"Who?"
"Angie," Mona said, pointing up at the screen.
"Yeah," he said, "she’s on some designer shit and decides to kick, so she goes to South America or somewhere and pays ‘em a few mil to clean her act up for her."
"She can’t be on shit."
The bartender looked at her. "Whatever."
"But how come she’d even start doing anything? I mean, she’s Angie, right?"
"Goes with the territory."
"But look at her," she protested, "she looks so good . . ." But Angie was gone, replaced by a black tennis player.
"You think that’s her? That’s a talking head."
"Head?"
"Like a puppet," a voice behind her said, and she swung around far enough to see a ruff of sandy hair and a loose white grin. "Puppet," and held up his hand, wiggling thumb and fingers, "you know?"
She felt the bartender drop the exchange, moving off down the bar. The white grin widened. "So she doesn’t have to do all that stuff herself, right?"
She smiled back. Cute one, smart eyes and a secret halo flashing her just the signal she wanted to read. No suit trick. Kinda skinny, she could like that tonight, and the loose look of fun around his mouth set strange against the bright smart eyes.
"Michael."
"Huh?"
"My name. Michael."
"Oh. Mona. I’m Mona."
"Where you from, Mona?"
"Florida."
And wouldn’t Lanette just tell her go for it?
Eddy hated art-crowd people; they weren’t buying what he was selling. He’d have hated Michael more, because Michael had a job and this loft in a co-op building. Or anyway he said it was a loft, but when they got there it was smaller than Mona thought a loft was supposed to be. The building was old, a factory or something; some of the walls were sandblasted brick and the ceilings were wood and timbers. But all of it had been chopped up into places like Michael’s, a room not much bigger than the one back at the hotel, with a sleeping space off one side and a kitchen and bath off the other. It was on the top floor, though, so the ceiling was mostly skylight; maybe that made it a loft. There was a horizontal red paper shade below the skylight, hooked up to strings and pulleys, like a big kite. The place was kind of messy but the stuff that was scattered around was all new: some skinny white wire chairs strung with loops of clear plastic to sit on, a stack of entertainment modules, a work station, and a silver leather couch.
They started out on the couch but she didn’t like the way her skin stuck to it, so they moved over to the bed, back in its alcove.
That was when she saw the recording gear, stim stuff, on white shelves on the wall. But the wiz had kicked in again, and anyway, if you’ve decided to go for it, you might as well. He got her into the pickup, a black rubber collar with trode-tipped fingers pressing the base of her skull. Wireless; she knew that was expensive.
While he was getting his own set on and checking the gear on the walls, he talked about his job, how he worked for a company in Memphis that thought up new names for companies. Right now he was trying to think of one for a company called Cathode Cathay. They need it bad, he said, and laughed, but then he said it wasn’t easy. Because there were so many companies already that the good names had been used up. He had a computer that knew all the names of all the companies, and another one that made up words you could use for names, and another one that checked if the made-up words meant "dickhead" or something in Chinese or Swedish. But the company he worked for didn’t just sell names, they sold what he called image, so he had to work with a bunch of other people to make sure the name he came up with fit the rest of the package.
Then he got into bed with her and it wasn’t really great, like the fun was gone and she might as well have been with a trick, how she just lay there thinking he was recording it all so he could play it back when he wanted, and how many others did he have in there anyway?
So she lay there beside him, afterward, listening to him breathe, until the wiz started turning tight little circles down on the floor of her skull, flipping her the same sequence of unconnected images over and over: the plastic bag she’d kept her things in down in Florida, with its twist of wire to keep the bugs out — the old man sitting at the chipboard table, peeling a potato with a butcher knife worn down to a nub about as long as her thumb — a krill place in Cleveland that was shaped like a shrimp or something, the plates of its arched back bent from sheet metal and clear plastic, painted pink and orange — the preacher she’d seen when she’d gone to get her new clothes, him and his pale, fuzzy Jesus. Each time the preacher came around, he was about to say something, but he never did. She knew it wouldn’t stop unless she got up and got her mind onto something else. She crawled off the bed and stood there looking at Michael in the gray glow from the skylight. Rapture. Rapture‘s coming.
So she went out into the room and pulled her dress on because she was cold. She sat on the silver couch. The red shade turned the gray of the skylight pink, as it got lighter outside. She wondered what a place like this cost.
Now that she couldn’t see him, she had trouble remembering what he looked like. Well, she thought, he won’t have any trouble remembering me, but thinking that made her feel hit or hurt or jerked around, like she wished she’d stayed at the hotel and stimmed Angie.
The gray-pink light was filling up the room, pooling, starting to curdle at the edges. Something about it reminded her of Lanette and the stories that she’d OD’d. Sometimes people OD’d in other people’s places, and the easiest thing was just to toss them out the window, so the cops couldn’t tell where they came from.
But she wasn’t going to think about that, so she went into the kitchen and looked through the fridge and the cabinets. There was a bag of coffee beans in the freezer, but coffee gave you the shakes on wiz. There were a lot of little foil packets with Japanese labels, freeze-dried stuff. She found a package of teabags and tore the seal from one of the bottles of water in the fridge. She put some of the water in a pan and fiddled with the cooker until she got it to heat up. The elements were white circles printed on the black countertop; you put the pan in the center of a circle and touched a red dot printed beside it. When the water was hot, she tossed one of the teabags in and moved the pan off the element.
She leaned over the pan, inhaling herb-scented steam.
She never forgot how Eddy looked, when he wasn’t around. Maybe he wasn’t much, but whatever he was, he was there. You have to have one face around that doesn’t change. But thinking about Eddy now maybe wasn’t such a good idea either. Pretty soon the crash would come on, and before then she’d have to figure out a way to get back to the hotel, and suddenly it seemed like everything was too complicated, too many things to do, angles to figure, and that was the crash, when you had to start worrying about putting the day side together again.
She didn’t think Prior was going to let Eddy hit her, though, because whatever he wanted had something to do with her looks. She turned around to get a cup.
Prior was there in a black coat. She heard her throat make a weird little noise all by itself.
She’d seen things before, crashing on wiz; if you looked at them hard enough, they went away. She tried it on Prior but it didn’t work.
He just stood there, with a kind of plastic gun in his hand, not pointing it at her, just holding it. He was wearing gloves like the ones Gerald had worn for the examination. He didn’t look mad but for once he wasn’t smiling. And for a long time he didn’t say anything at all, and Mona didn’t either.
&n
bsp; "Who’s here?" Like you’d ask at a party.
"Michael."
"Where?"
She pointed toward the sleeping space.
"Get your shoes."
She walked past him, out of the kitchen, bending automatically to hook her underwear up from the carpet. Her shoes were by the couch.
He followed and watched her put on her shoes. He still had the gun in his hand. With his other hand, he took Michael’s leather jacket from the back of the couch and tossed it to her. "Put it on," he said. She did, and tucked her underwear into one of its pockets.
He picked up the torn white raincoat, wadded it into a ball, and put it into his coat pocket.
Michael was snoring. Maybe he’d wake up soon and play it all back. With the gear he had, he didn’t really need anybody there.
In the corridor, she watched Prior relock the door with a gray box. The gun was gone, but she hadn’t seen him put it away. The box had a length of red flex sticking out of it with an ordinary-looking magnetic key on the end.
Out in the street was cold. He took her down the block and opened the door of a little white three-wheeler. She got in. He got in the driver’s side and peeled off the gloves. He started the car; she watched a blowing cloud reflected in the copper-mirrored side of a business tower.
"He’ll think I stole it," she said, looking down at the jacket.
Then the wiz flashed a final card, ragged cascade of neurons across her synapses: Cleveland in the rain and a good feeling she had once, walking.
Silver.
16
Filament in Strata
I ‘m your ideal audience, Hans — as the recording began for the second time. How could you have a more attentive viewer? And you did capture her, Hans: I know, because I dream her memories. I see how close you came.
Yes, you captured them. The journey out, the building of walls, the long spiral in. They were about walls, weren’t they? The labyrinth of blood, of family. The maze hung against the void, saying, We are that within, that without is other, here forever shall we dwell. And the darkness was there from the beginning . . . You found it repeatedly in the eyes of Marie-France, pinned it in a slow zoom against the shadowed orbits of the skull. Early on she ceased to allow her image to be recorded. You worked with what you had. You justified her image, rotated her through planes of light, planes of shadow, generated models, mapped her skull in grids of neon. You used special programs to age her images according to statistical models, animation systems to bring your mature Marie-France to life. You reduced her image to a vast but finite number of points and stirred them, let new forms emerge, chose those that seemed to speak to you . . . And then you went on to the others, to Ashpool and the daughter whose face frames your work, its first and final image.
The second viewing solidified their history for her, allowed her to slot Becker’s shards along a time line that began with the marriage of Tessier and Ashpool, a union commented upon, in its day, primarily in the media of corporate finance. Each was heir to a more than modest empire, Tessier to a family fortune founded on nine basic patents in applied biochemistry and Ashpool to the great Melbourne-based engineering firm that bore his father’s name. It was marriage as merger, to the journalists, though the resulting corporate entity was viewed by most as ungainly, a chimera with two wildly dissimilar heads.
But it was possible, then, in photographs of Ashpool, to see the boredom vanish, and in its place a complete surety of purpose. The effect was unflattering — indeed, frightening: the hard, beautiful face grew harder still, merciless in its intent.
Within a year of his marriage to Marie-France Tessier, Ashpool had divested himself of 90 percent of his firm’s holdings, reinvesting in orbital properties and shuttle utilities, and the fruit of the living union, two children, brother and sister, were being brought to term by surrogates in their mother’s Biarritz villa.
Tessier-Ashpool ascended to high orbit’s archipelago to find the ecliptic sparsely marked with military stations and the first automated factories of the cartels. And here they began to build. Their combined wealth, initially, would barely have matched Ono-Sendai’s outlay for a single process-module of that multinational’s orbital semiconductor operation, but Marie-France demonstrated an unexpected entrepreneurial flare, establishing a highly profitable data haven serving the needs of less reputable sectors of the international banking community. This in turn generated links with the banks themselves, and with their clients. Ashpool borrowed heavily and the wall of lunar concrete that would be Freeside grew and curved, enclosing its creators.
When war came, Tessier-Ashpool were behind that wall. They watched Bonn flash and die, and Beograd. The construction of the spindle continued with only minor interruptions, during those three weeks; later, during the stunned and chaotic decade that followed, it would sometimes be more difficult.
The children, Jean and Jane, were with them now, the villa at Biarritz having gone to finance construction of a cryogenic storage facility for their home, the Villa Straylight. The first occupants of the vault were ten pairs of cloned embryos, 2Jean and 2Jane, 3Jean and 3Jane . . . There were numerous laws forbidding or otherwise governing the artificial replication of an individual’s genetic material, but there were also numerous questions of jurisdiction . . .
She halted the replay and asked the house to return to the previous sequence. Photographs of another cryogenic storage unit built by the Swiss manufacturers of the Tessier-Ashpool vault. Becker’s assumption of similarity had been correct, she knew: these circular doors of black glass, trimmed with chrome, were central images in the other’s memory, potent and totemic.
The images ran forward again, into zero-gravity construction of structures on the spindle’s inner surface, installation of a Lado-Acheson solar energy system, the establishment of atmosphere and rotational gravity . . . Becker had found himself with an embarrassment of riches, hours of glossy documentation. His response was a savage, stuttering montage that sheared away the superficial lyricism of the original material, isolating the tense, exhausted faces of individual workers amid a hivelike frenzy of machinery. Freeside greened and bloomed in a fast-forward flutter of recorded dawns and synthetic sunsets; a lush, sealed land, jeweled with turquoise pools. Tessier and Ashpool emerged for the opening ceremonies, out of Straylight, their hidden compound at the spindle’s tip, markedly uninterested as they surveyed the country they had built. Here Becker slowed and again began his obsessive analysis. This would be the last time Marie-France faced a camera; Becker explored the planes of her face in a tortured, extended fugue, the movement of his images in exquisite counterpoise with the sinuous line of feedback that curved and whipped through the shifting static levels of his soundtrack.
Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation, an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity. She’d felt this way seven years earlier, in New Jersey, learning that others knew the ones who came to her in dreams, called them the loa, Divine Horsemen, named them and summoned them and bargained with them for favor.
Even then, there had been confusion. Bobby had argued that Linglessou, who rode Beauvoir in the oumphor, and the Linglessou of the matrix were separate entities, if in fact the former was an entity at all. "They been doing that for ten thousand years," he’d say, "dancing and getting crazy, but there’s only been those things in cyberspace for seven, eight years." Bobby believed the old cowboys, the ones he bought drinks for in the Gentlemen Loser whenever Angie’s career took him to the Sprawl, who maintained that the loa were recent arrivals. The old cowboys looked back to a time when nerve and talent were the sole deciding factors in a console artist’s career, although Beauvoir would have argued that it required no less to deal with the loa.
"But they come to me," she’d argued. "I don’t need a deck."
"It’s what you got in your head. What your daddy did . . ."
Bobby had told her about a general consensus among the old cowboys that there had been a day whe
n things had changed, although there was disagreement as to how and when.
When It Changed, they called it, and Bobby had taken a disguised Angie to the Loser to listen to them, dogged by anxious Net security men who weren’t allowed past the door. The barring of the security men had impressed her more than the talk, at the time. The Gentleman Loser had been a cowboy bar since the war that had seen the birth of the new technology, and the Sprawl offered no more exclusive criminal environment — though by the time of Angie’s visit that exclusivity had long included a certain assumption of retirement on the part of regulars. The hot kids no longer hustled, in the Loser, but some of them came to listen.
Now, in the bedroom of the house at Malibu, Angie remembered them talking, their stories of When It Changed, aware that some part of her was attempting to collate those memories, those stories, with her own history and that of Tessier-Ashpool.
3Jane was the filament, Tessier-Ashpool the strata, her birthdate officially listed as one with her nineteen sibling clones. Becker’s "interrogation" grew more heated still, when 3Jane was brought to term in yet another surrogate womb, delivered by cesarean section in Straylight’s surgery. The critics agreed: 3Jane was Becker’s trigger. With 3Jane’s birth, the focus of the documentary shifted subtly, exhibiting a new intensity, a heightening of obsession — a sense, more than one critic had said, of sin.
3Jane became the focus, a seam of perverse gold through the granite of the family. No, Angie thought, silver, pale and moonstruck. Examining a Chinese tourist’s photograph of 3Jane and two sisters beside the pool of a Freeside hotel, Becker returns repeatedly to 3Jane’s eyes, the hollow of her collarbone, the fragility of her wrists. Physically, the sisters are identical, yet something informs 3Jane, and Becker’s quest for the nature of this information becomes the work’s central thrust.
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