Black Glass (17 page)

The machine didn’t respond.

He called out to Rack through the curtain. “Hey! Is it snakin’ or not? I gotta put ’em on manually?”

“Naw!” Rack called back. “Just reach back and push the re-set!”

His hands snaking like the snakers, knowing the way, he reached back and pushed re-set and almost immediately he felt the snakers slithering onto his head, from the machine, crawling wires suctioning their electrodes to his temples, and almost immediately the transmission started. Direct stimulation of the requisite cerebral centers via attenuated resonator. He knew the damage it did but he was a million miles from thinking about that as the wave of pleasure washed over him and the pictures started, and then the physical sensations that went with them, a moment later.

He was in orbit around the Earth. He was naked, and he could breathe, quite impossibly, here in outer space, and that felt perfectly natural. He was drifting almost weightless in orbit—he could
feel the weight of his body though, as one level of the pleasure. It felt good just to
have
a body, out there. To float along in weightless orbit, perfectly at ease, listening to the newest worldsound, the music swelling. But there was an ache in Danny’s heart, too, a piquant ache, that called out to Cloe, who was floating toward him: a nude woman silhouetted against the backdrop of a space station. The space station wasn’t a high-rez image, some part of Danny’s mind noted, the connoisseur inwardly frowning, but he ignored it and focused on Cloe, on her perfected face and body—a new Cloe without grime or scars or stretch marks or blemishes of any kind, without yellow buck teeth; with a supermodel’s sharply defined, elegantly designed face, perfect breasts, perfect legs, lush golden-red hair. She turned in space with the grace of a ballet dancer and swam toward him.

He circled around, keeping his distance, for now, to appreciate the image of her, now clear of the space station, her hair and breasts moving in complementary slow motion against the backdrop of the shining blue-white curve of the Earth. She was silhouetted now against both the North and South Atlantic Ocean, her silhouette a bit southerly, turned in profile so that she faced the Americas, her rump tucked into the Gulf of Guinea, near Ghana, her back arching past Liberia, her breasts pointing toward Venezuela ...

And the resonator-beam induced pulses of pleasure in his brain that accompanied a rhythm in the imagery, the speed of her turning in space, her head turning toward him ... her lips parting ...

Then she opened her arms and he kicked toward her, they drifted together, they spun in one another’s arms.

In the paint-flaky old loft with the sagging floors and the empty glass cases, the two V-rats writhed in the webbing. Their bodies didn’t duplicate the shared illusion of VR; just little suggestive twitches. That twitch of Danny’s hips was ...

. . . his penetration of her, in VR, as they coupled in orbit, twined, passing now over South America, now over the Pacific ocean, feeling sunlight reflected off the ocean on their naked skin as he plunged himself into her, and she bucked her hips up to welcome him.

The sex was almost irrelevant; it was as much the resonator transmission that the addict wanted, as anything, and he’d have taken that alone, in the dark with his eyes closed, if that’s all he could get. But the VR made it all more real and fulfilling, made it possible to forget with every last corner of his mind, all the shadows driven away by the sunlight reflected from the brightly snowy tips of the Himalayas ...

Danny was happy to be alive, seeing only what was good, feeling only good feelings.

Until tomorrow,
the song goes.
But that’s just some other time. I’m waiting for my man ...

Raining again in the warehouse district. Candle was half way to sober, thinking maybe Zilia would let him in because of the rain. Not that he didn’t have alternatives. He had Nodder’s phone number, he could get Nodder or Shortstack to put him up. He wanted time away from those two, though; time to think.

He was too tired, too emotionally drained, too headachey, to look for Danny any more today. He had an advance; he could go to a motel. But then he’d be on the motel’s computer and that’d put him on the grid, and that might trigger some search spider, cue Grist where he was. He needed to buy a good, solid, fake identity. He knew people he could see about that.

Tomorrow or the next day.

So Candle rang Zilia’s doorbuzzer.

“Oh no,” she said, surprising him by coming almost immediately to the window. “Great. You again. The guy with no money and no clue.”

But she buzzed him in. He dripped a trail of rainwater up the stairs to her loft apartment. The upstairs door was slightly ajar. He went in, closing the door behind him, found Zilia standing at her workstation, barefoot in a clinging shift. The workstation was set high enough off the floor that she could work standing up. Some kind of painter’s tradition? Her fingers were tracing a touch-active screen. An overlay of green followed her index finger around the face of a furiously sobbing little girl ...

She tapped a keyboard and the picture began to move, the
little girl blurring as she turned, the child’s image on the screen seeming to look past Zilia right at Candle as he stood dripping by the workstation.

“Dumbass, you’re getting water on the floor,” Zilia said, without looking up from her work.

“Wondering if I could borrow your sofa. Just tonight. I’m kind of avoiding being on the grid right now and I’m tired and a little drunk and–”

“Just stop dripping. Go to that armoire in the back, there’s a bathrobe you can put on. Strip off the outer clothes. And get no ideas.”

“Ideas? No ma’am, not me,” Candle said. He crossed to the armoire stripped off his shirt and pants. “Any news on Danny?” he called.

“I was gonna ask you that,” she said. “But there might be something soon ...”

He changed to the terrycloth bathrobe, over his underwear, borrowed some too-small flip-flops, tied up the bathrobe and returned to sit, half stretched out on the sagging dull-green sofa. She’d cleaned up the Chinese food cartons and had set up a small twenty-year-old plasma TV on a coffee table—the table was actually an old wooden door, the doorknob still attached, now pointing at the ceiling; the door lying flat on cinder blocks. He looked around more closely at the wall art. Her own work and prints by a collection of artists selected with some tantalizingly obscure unifying principle. Candle recognized some of the artists from the online art history class his lama had talked him into: late nineteenth-century absinthe-addled etchings, Italian futurists, some surrealists—Max Ernst, Duchamp—and modernists. David Hockney ... and the uncategorizable: Robert Williams and Paul Mavrides. He considered trying to impress her by discussing the artists, and decided it wouldn’t work.

“You can put the TV on,” she said, her fingers tapping. Images flowed from the tapping, as if they were projected right from the tips of her fingers. “I’ve been listening to news while I’m doing this piece, getting ideas from it. I’ve got a grant and a deadline. Have to get this done.”

“TV!” he said, leaning toward it. And waited for it to turn itself on.

It didn’t respond. She laughed. “You have to turn that one on with a remote.”

He found the remote, switched on the news, which was the very last thing he wanted to watch. His head was throbbing. He rubbed his temples with his fingers. The news channel was showing pictures of the latest hurricane devastation. Describing another attempt at “hurricane diffusal” with microwave beams from space, a process which sometimes seemed to make them worse, not weaker; the report segued to “other orbital observations from Olly” which referred to an investigation into the deaths of sixty-two space tourists killed when a satellite struck the Virgin Airways Public Space Station.

“They’re still investigating that?” Candle asked. “They were investigating that four years ago.”

“Yeah,” she laughed. “They’re finally somehow coming to the conclusion that it’s not the fault of any major corporation and everyone is, like, so fucking surprised.” Virgin had been absorbed, years before, into one of the Fortune 33.

In other orbital news, the ChiDePlex Microwave Energy Beam ...
The beam’s energy was gathered by enormous solar panels floating in an outer orbit, to be sent to a mountaintop receiving station and turned into electrical power. It seemed that the power had again fried a slightly-lost airliner, cooking a number of the passengers in their seats. An engineer speculated that “frequency disturbances” from the power-beam, which was responsible for most of the energy used in the Chicago-Detroit Complex, were interfering with the guidance systems of the robot airliner pilots, so they tended to wander into the beam, which then ...

Candle grimaced, imagining the scene on the plane.

“So besides finding Danny—what are you going to do now?” she asked.

“I’ve got a job in ... security.” That was another thing he didn’t want to think about right now. Did not want to think about what a mistake he was probably making, working with Nodder and Shortstack.

Now the news had shifted to a health pundit warning about “ad-stress malaise”, the purported sickness caused by being bombarded
by too much advertising, especially amongst people who couldn’t afford skull-phones without eye-projection advertising. You had to pay extra for commercial-free implanted phones. Between ads generated on nearly every public surface and those generated by your own phone, the pundit said, you felt over-amped, confused, numb. The Advertising Council insisted that the malaise was not genuine ... “I get sick to my stomach every time I go in a fucking mall for more than twenty minutes,” Zilia said. “And I haven’t even got a skull fone. Every wall, the floors in a lot of places, the ceiling, even the fucking el-banisters crawling with ads. I think I’ll put my girl here into a mall, holding her stomach like she’s feeling sick ...”

Back after this word from Slakon
. An ad for Slakon pharmaceuticals came on: A pretty middle-aged woman walking her Turtle Dog. It panted and snarfed; its shell was decorated in tasteful pastels. She chuckled at the dog and looked up at the sky, stretching happily. Then smiled at the camera.
“My dog’s customized–”
She laughed softly.
“—and so are my prescriptions. Slakon Customized Medication works for me, it’ll work for you. Painless implants, always customized to your blood chemistry, your age, your needs. Always—
your
needs.
” The middle-aged actress shook her head, grateful and amazed
. “Just think—every single prescription unique ...”

A chime sounded and a window formed on Zilia’s work screen. “Found some botsearch!” said a small, sexless voice from the computer.

“That’s my botsearch on Danny,” she said. She touched the little window and it unscrolled its findings. “Says there’s chatter about him doing a show at the Black Glass club. This weekend ... I’ll print it out ...”

“I know the place,” Candle said. “The Black Glass. He must know I’ll find him there. He probably figures he can ditch me after the show—or maybe he’s got a phishline ready.”

“Oh he’s got a lie ready, alright. That’s as reliable as death and taxes.”

She’d gone back to video painting, finding the image of the woman with the turtle dog on a Slakon Pharms website, copying it, introducing it into her image, morphing the little girl’s image
so she changed, became the older woman walking her turtle dog, changing it so the woman’s mouth endlessly vomited prescription pills; the woman’s eyes shedding pill tears. “He’s gonna pay me the money he owes me, the little troll. What you going to do when you find him?”

“I don’t know,” Candle said sleepily. “It’s not like he’ll agree to go into rehab. But I’ve got to try.”

“I hope you can go to sleep with me working because that’s gonna go on for awhile.”

“Sure, I’m fine. Half an hour or so, I’ll zone out no matter what.”

Images flooded across her screen sucked from a thousand sources in the Mesh. “You know ...” She murmured. “All our media’s supposed to be, like, a window for us. Windows, they called it, the system that broke it out for everyone. But there’s so much—and it has so little content that matters ... and we get so drawn into it ... it’s like the window’s gone dark. Transmarginal Inhibition, Pavlov called it. Like if you put too many colors together it makes black ...”

Black glass
, he thought, watching her silhouette against the light from her several screens. Admiring the muscular shape of her thighs. Something subtle in her body language told him she knew he was looking at her, and admiring her. She didn’t seem to mind. Back when she was with Danny she’d known that Rick Candle was attracted to her. They both knew, and never spoke of it. Candle was drawn to her intelligence, her mordant honesty; her capacity for wrapping idealism in wry cynicism. Her face mesmerized him—and her physical energy. He thought she was drawn to him, too. But neither one of them had been likely to do anything about it; he’d never make a move on Danny’s girlfriend, though her relationship with Danny had been shaky. Not that Danny Candle wasn’t catnip to women, when he had it together.