Kalifornia (12 page)

It was pure gossip, stray rumors and innuendo that, combined,
seemed integral parts of a secret that was hers alone to reveal.

She shuttled in darkness, hands on the enormous invisible loom.
Intuition inspired her. She hardly saw what was in her hands; she gathered the
strands and wove them. This was something no one else could do. There was pure
pleasure in seeing what emerged from the chaos:

A narrow band of stars obscured by tumbling blackness.

Dogmen slipping down metal stairs.

A girl’s smile blazing like a weapon.

Almost ready.

A complete thought, an idea cribbed from the wire-borne cosmos,
floated before her, still furled, like a crumpled tapestry. She grasped it by
metaphorical corners and shook it out to see the whole picture.

And dropped the cloth, screaming.

She fled back to consciousness, groped her way blindly into flesh
again, pulled her body on like a clammy wetsuit. Heart pounding, tongue thick
in her throat, she spit out the rubber pacifier and opened her eyes.

Terrified.

The audience waited for her words. Waited for the oracle to speak,
to illuminate them, to bring some bright speculation to their dreary lives. To
give purpose to their passage through the fire.

She didn’t know what to say.

There was no way to tell them what she’d seen. Not that it was
unclear. She could describe it, yes—she simply didn’t dare.

If what she knew were true, and if, being truth, she revealed it,
she would die. And while much of what she wove was pure deception, enough to
make her doubt what she’d just seen, some part of it always came true, and that
was enough to keep her silent.

For the first time in her life, the Seer feared the wires. Feared
what they had told her. Feared that they might speak again. Feared what they
could do.

Her audience waited.

She had to tell them something. Anything. She must distract them.

She rose and faced them. Raised her arms.

An expectant hush. Walls shining with lights.

Tell them anything.

She threw back her head, closed her eyes, groped. . . .

Screamed, sybillic:

“Elvis lives!”

***

After each broadcast, the Seer gave private consultations. She
kept a regular schedule for paying clients, but in order to accrue good karma
she always took three needy visitors at no charge. Today, on her way out of the
studio, she told the scheduling computer to cancel all her appointments.

When she peered into the waiting room to dismiss her charity
cases, she found three people already selected. One was an overly familiar
face, a woman who came every time her son ran off to join a cult. She was a
pain in the neck; the Seer felt no qualms about dismissing her. The next was
slightly more desperate, a man whose skin had a soft, rotten look, as if it
were a mushroom ready to burst and scatter spores.

“You need a doctor, not advice,” she said. “I could get in trouble
telling you anything else.”

“No meditations? Nothing to help me relax?” he pleaded.

She raised a warning finger. “I give you one little white-light
mantric affirmation and the AMA’s all over me like a jar of leeches. Forget
it.”

He slunk out of the room, leaving a damp patch of mold on his seat.

The last visitor, sitting quietly behind the door, made her
hesitate.

Clothed entirely in black, even the eyes invisible, this one sat
stiffly upright in the chair, bearing a black-swathed bundle.

“Excuse me,” the Seer said. “You’re a Daughter of Kali, aren’t
you?”

The figure inclined her head. “Greetings, Seer, most divine.”

An older woman, the Seer realized. The Kali sect fascinated her.
Even after the events of the afternoon broadcast, she was reluctant to let go
of this one. The Daughters were a recent order, a curious new sprout from the
occult mulch, and notoriously secretive.

“This is quite a rare occasion,” she said. “I’ve never seen a
Daughter of Kali in public. You weren’t in the audience, were you?”

The Daughter shook her head. “My vows do not permit it.”

“You must have urgent business to have come out of the Holy City at all.” She decided that she couldn’t resist this opportunity. “Why don’t you
come into my office?”

Her office was another studio, a small one that hadn’t been used
in thirty years. It was jammed with equipment, mostly inoperable except for
blinking lights and tremulous needles; it was all for show. She remembered too
late that it would probably offend the Daughter. Many occupants of the Holy City had forsworn all contact with modern technology—in particular the wires, which
were anathema to the more fanatical sects.

But if wires made the Daughter of Kali uncomfortable, she didn’t
show it. She rocked the black bundle gently while it made a cooing noise. The
Seer suddenly realized that the Daughter held a child. A Daughter’s daughter.
Odd . . . she’d thought they were celibate. They were
definitely opposed to sex with men: Y-chromosome contamination. This must be a
parthenogenetic child. Or perhaps the Daughter had gotten herself into some
more old-fashioned kind of trouble. The Seer repressed a smile. No wonder she
needed advice!

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“I came to show you this,” said the Daughter, holding out the
child. The veil fell away from the infant’s face.

The Seer gasped, gazing at a remarkable visage. The baby’s eyes
shone like gold coins, new-minted, bright. The hair was short and straight, as
orange as the skin. A girl child.

“That’s a Figueroa,” she whispered.

The Daughter snatched her back. “What?”

“This must . . . this
is
the
Figueroa child. The one missing since the bicentennial. How did she come to
you?”

Wait until I tell Alfredo she fell in my lap! Alfredo, my sweet
secret lover . . . you’ll thank me for this in kisses and
credit.

“We found her on our doorstep,” the Daughter said slyly, as if
suspicious of Figueroas and bicentennials alike. “An offering to Kali, made in
the night.”

“This is incredible. Don’t you realize—? But no, you wouldn’t. I’ll
tell you, this child has been sought far and wide. Only someone in your
isolation could have missed the news. Her poor mother will be delighted, to say
the least.”

The Daughter made a sound like a growl. “The only mother she’ll
ever know is our dark goddess, Kali.”

“She has a mother of flesh and blood, and a family. I happen to
know them rather well.”

The Daughter of Kali drew back indignantly. “If that’s the case,
then I’ve wasted my time. Take her then, return her to the parents. I’ll have
nothing more to do with such a polluted child.”

She offered the infant again, not like a gift but like a thing to
be disposed of. The Seer sensed a great coldness in the woman; one little
reason and she was ready to surrender the child. In that case, it was just as
well to save the infant from her “tender” care.

The black-wrapped bundle was lighter than the Seer had expected.
She kept her fingers at the base of the head, to support the strangely heavy
skull, but it didn’t seem necessary. The infant was remarkably strong. She
lifted her head and stared up at the Seer.

“There, little darling,” she started to say.

But the Seer choked on her words.

Her tongue began to swell in her throat; her pulse hammered on
the anvils of her ears. The child’s golden eyes held hers riveted, hanging
before her like twin suns while the rest of the world went up in flames. She
felt her body ravaged from within, the polynerves writhing like a nest of
earwigs suddenly exposed, stinging and thrashing inside her.

A sharp, searing field of energy thrust repeatedly into her ribs
and skull, stabbing her with electric knives.

Golden eyes . . .

A monster!

The little freak who couldn’t form a syllable was playing the Seer’s
wires like a practiced tech, drawing power from the rest of the studio,
flipping on circuits that should have stayed off.

Sender, receiver, the Seer lost track of what she was. She felt a
sly, invasive presence, totally foreign to her experience, like a hand that
snatched up the tangle of her body’s nerves and squeezed them together, crying,
“This is what wires are for!” As if she had wasted them all her life . . .

“What—what—”

She gasped, unable to speak, hardly able to breathe.

A surge began to oscillate from one end of her body to the other,
slow at first but building, peaking very near her heart. She tried to drop the
child but her fingers would not obey; her palms were scorching.

“Take
—
her
—
back!”

The Daughter of Kali did not move. “I thought you wanted her.”

The Seer went deaf and blind. She felt more isolated than she ever
had in the astral of the wires. There seemed no escape from this place, and no
sense in returning to her body, not as it was now.

Visions fluttered in. For a moment she saw the cloth she’d woven
and then dropped. A final strand of knowledge joined the tapestry, forming a
black border around it, a frame to set it apart from everything else. A slim
bit of knowledge, but crucial:

Her fearful vision was true.

But she had failed to foresee this part of it. There must be other
aspects she had overlooked—and that gave her a last glint of hope. There might
be ways out of this . . . not for her but for everyone
else. Or maybe not.

The weight of the child was lifted from her hands, but it came too
late to benefit her. The nervous rhythm of her heart was out of control. That
vital organ ceased to beat with any regularity and now shivered all over like a
bag of worms.

Fibrillation is a far from painless death, but the Seer didn’t
really mind. It was good that her last sensations should be so . . . 
intense.
Pain
helped demarcate the boundary between realms. She wondered which death prayers
best suited her mood. Tibetan, Egyptian, or something more modern?
Om
mani padme Anubis Jesus Hermes almotherofgodhuuuuu
—

S01E06.
 
Poppies
 
Will
 
Make
 
Them
 
Sleep

The great California deserts had drowned beneath a waterless sea
of homes. The Mojave was no more, although the sun still remembered it, and
glared nostalgically down on shopping-mall cactus roof-gardens and
air-conditioning maintenance crews with the same lack of mercy it had shown
the prior hard-baked earth and yucca plants, junipers, and jackrabbits. Yucca
and juniper still grew there, though mainly now in bonsai pots, keeping the
roof-bound cacti company. Jackrabbits, horned toads, and defanged rattlesnakes
retained nearly invulnerable niches as household pets. And there were new
things under the sun as well. The coyoodle, a clever hybrid of toy poodle and
native coyote, was popular among the spry septuagenarians who comprised so much
of the erstwhile desert’s populace.

But one thing the old desert had had in plenty, and which now was
nowhere to be seen, was land itself. Houses sat on concrete shelves that once
had been hills of sere, majestic tone: mineral black, rust orange, coppery
green. All such subtle colors were now generalized, homogenized, democratized
into brash pastels. Instead of gravelly soil, one walked on soiled gravel. The
land was veined with driveways and highways; it suffocated under a heavy coat
of parking lots crowded with vehicular homes. In fact, the pavement drank up so
much desert sun that excess heat had to be siphoned off and sold to chillier
climes. Winter snow—in fact any precipitation at all—was almost unheard of.

The desert was hardly hospitable to humanity, but that had never
stopped developers before. Death Valley Estates, the favorite mockery of a
generation of famous-name architects during its planning and construction, now
featured many of the same names on its ten-year waiting list for homes. A
similar list held applicants for membership in the Devil’s Golf Course Country
Club, although the wait was not nearly so long: players dropped dead at the
rate of two or three a week in the summer heat. (The rate was much higher for
caddies.)

For all that, it was a mercifully cool day when Poppy Figueroa,
Clarence Starko, and a one-man sensory crew named Chick Woola ended their drive
through the cluttered Mojave at the gates of a tiny resort.

The spot was as isolated as any vacationer could wish, being
situated at the far brink of a played-out gravel quarry half full of green
brine and spanned by a dangerous narrow bridge. Woola, doubling as driver of
the studio van, hesitated before crossing. Clarry looked across the gulf and
saw clusters of drab hemispherical and cubical lock-to-fit quondos scattered
among rusted scraps of abandoned machines and factory buildings. The little
hutches were windowless, devoid of ornament or appeal. Gravel dust swirled in
the lanes. The only sign of life was a row of hunchbacked palm trees, their
fronds a startling shade of crimson.

A sign on the bridge gave the name of the settlement:

BLEEDING PALMS

—A Martyr’s Place—

It didn’t appear on many maps.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” Woola the senseman said.

“You kidding?” Clarry said. “This is beautiful stuff. Beautiful.”
But he was slurping up baccorish like it was spaghetti.

He tried to sound positive, but inwardly he was probably more
anxious than Poppy. And for good reason. Foul luck had brought them here; bad
rumors that could bring him real trouble.

Two days ago, Poppy’s message service had fielded an anonymous
five-word blip: “I know where she is.” The tag bore this address in the middle
of nowhere—or the next thing to it.

Clarry had been monitoring her mail, but not carefully enough. He
would have destroyed it before it ruined him, but it slipped past. No one was
supposed to know the baby’s whereabouts. Not even
he
knew
that, and he was closer to the deal than anybody except the old witch-bitch who’d
set it up. If he could have gotten in touch with her, he’d have asked her
advice, though he hated her more than ever now that the danger to himself had
deepened. Unfortunately, Clarry had no idea how to reach her; he didn’t know
who she was or where she lived. Once the job was done, the goods delivered,
there’d been no more messages or visitations. Until this one. Someone else was talking
now. Maybe one of her own people, turned traitor.

He rode alone with his fears, hardly sensing Poppy beside him—as
if his anguish were any match for hers. No one could help him, no one could
hear his warnings. There was no help either of them could offer the other.

Poppy was dragging him deeper in the shit all the time. Because
she trusted him, not knowing that he’d put her there in the first place. Poor
Poppy. Poor Clarry.

So there was no turning back, not for any of them. Especially not
for Clarry. No, sir. He had to find out who was talking and exactly what they
knew, if anything. See if he was implicated.

The bridge trembled under the weight of the van. Clarry stared
down at the murky water. Grotesquely smooth, slick salt pillars poked up like stiff
drowned fingers from gelatinous puffs of silky, fluorescent, lime green moss.

“What a scene,” Poppy whispered, leaning out the half-open window
to look. A shudder passed through her, registered as a dance of lights and
needles on the wireboard. It
was
beautiful
stuff, Clarry admitted inwardly. Truly morbid. Under other circumstances he
would have appreciated its dramatic possibilities. Anyone who lived out here
must be twisted, sick. He only prayed it was all a deception, a false lead,
some nutty hermit thinking he’d divined an answer to the mystery show. That was
exactly what they needed for “Poppy on the Run”: more bizarre distractions on
the ever more twisted trail of the Figueroa baby, more weird illusions
disguising the truth, clues leading nowhere. False tracks could save Clarry’s
skin and the show’s ratings at the same time—as if there were any difference
between the two.

Woola parked the van near the trunk of one scabrous palm tree and
shut off the engine. The scarlet fronds scraped and clacked overhead like
hermit-crab claws in a dry breeze. The sound summed up the desolation of the
place. Clarry gulped another time-release antidepressant, swallowing it dry
except for the tobacco juice already in his mouth.

Poppy got out and Woola took her seat. Clarry craned over the
meters to check signal quality.

“You be careful,” he called after her.

She glanced back and gave him a brave little smile. She looked
terrible.

Clarry wished he could go along with her—go
instead
of
her—but he didn’t figure in the show. He was strictly a wire-puller, behind the
scenes. Anyway, through the wires, riding in her skin, he knew everything the
moment she knew it. Everything but her thoughts.

Right now she was bearing him along toward a little quondo with a
sign above the door reading OFFICE.

“Intense,” said Woola.

“Sh.”

***

A bell jingled absurdly as Poppy closed the office door behind
her. The place was empty, walls bare except for an old lunar calendar years out
of date. The only light came from a dingy lens mounted in the middle of the
domed ceiling. At least she thought it was a lens: it could have been a dirty
skylight. After a few moments, her eyes adjusted to the dimness and she went to
the plastic counter looking for a bell she could ring for service.

Instead she discovered a man curled up on the floor behind the
counter. A ragged terry-cloth bathrobe covered most of his head but left his
ancient gray legs exposed. Dead, she thought. Then he muttered, “No vacancy.”

Nothing moved but his lips, between the folds of terry cloth.

“I . . . I’m looking for someone.”

“Oh, wow. Do I look like someone? Wow, with my luck I probably
do.”

“I got an invitation to Number Six.”

“We don’t allow visitors. Punishment only. And one meal a day.
Like, whoa. You’re not here to punish anyone, are you?”

“No. I mean—”

“Wow, like, that’s too bad. You . . . you
wouldn’t have any idea how to go about it, I guess? I mean, to, to really hurt
someone . . . not just physically, but their feelings too,
like, you wouldn’t know how to do that, would you? 1 mean, like, wow, that
would be just. . .” The man seemed to be working himself into action.

“I can find it myself,” she said, eager to put him at ease; and he
subsided.

“Sure. Leave me here. I mean, obviously I can take care of myself.
No problem here, no sir. I’ve got nice clothes, a comfy place to sleep. Like,
sure, you just run along. I don’t need any attention.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Like, wow.”

Outside, she shaded her eyes with a hand, avoiding sight of the
van. With somewhat more ominous feelings, she headed into the shadows of ruined
machinery. In the distance, heat shimmered over a craggy range of hills
covered with what looked like factory-made spit bubbles: the newest form of
quondominium. Polyhedral, they locked together into cozy, instant neighborhoods,
infectious to the earth and spreading. She wondered how much longer Bleeding
Palms could maintain its dreary isolation.

The heat was dizzying. Putting out her hand, she leaned against
the side of a tall, silo-like building. The corrugated sheet metal was
incongruously cold, and flaking away into rust. A beetle touched briefly on her
knuckle and buzzed off. She closed her eyes, felt the wires deep within,
imagined them humming away with a life of their own, parallel to her life but
separate, inhuman. It was reassuring to know that every bit of this was being
recorded, right down to this very moment . . . and this one . . . and
this . . . not in broken pieces as she experienced them,
but continuously, creating an illusion of a fluid, unified reality. This moment
would never be lost, no matter what happened to her later. Clarry was getting
it all on ice.

She felt, lately, that something terrible was coming. Nothing as
bad as what had happened already, of course; only a neat way of tying things
up. “Things” being her life, which had ended, really, on the night she lost the
baby. That had been the climax of Poppy’s story. After that, she might as well
skip to the end.

That’s what she was doing now. Skipping. From moment to moment to
moment, the good parts all behind her, a few loose ends to tie up before
slipping out of the wires. Time to start another story.

This desert trek was a false lead, and she knew it.

She didn’t want to be pessimistic, but she knew there would be no
easy solution to the mystery. No hard solution, either. Her audience would
gradually come to realize that Calafia wasn’t going to reappear. The “gimmick”
would soon lose its appeal. People hated unsolved mysteries in a wire show.
There’s no suspense in knowing that you’ll never know a thing.

Like her, they would soon give up wondering. Give up hope. Perhaps
that was why she felt so calm now, so detached. She was readying her
audience—though they couldn’t know it-—for a huge disappointment.

Her thoughts meshed with the feel of rust beneath her abraded
fingertips. I’m flaking away, too, she thought.

She swallowed a dry mouthful, gravel dust gritting between her
teeth. Clarry must be wondering what she was up to. Oh, well, he could cut this
part later.

Lifting her eyes, she saw Number Six. It was a cracked dome like
the crown of a long-buried skull, baked and blistered by the sun. The door,
ajar, looked as if it would never shut again. Cold in winter, an oven in
summer. Some poor soul’s home, that broken head. The brain all withered inside
it . . .

She went forward, laid a hand on the warped wood, and gave the
door a gentle push. A lizard scurried out between her feet. She put her head
through the opening. Was that singing she heard?

“. . . Tum-tum-tumbleweeds . . .”

“Hello?”

She stepped inside, and felt a cold pulse pass through her, an
electric tingle that caught her up short for a moment then vanished. A fleeting
sensation, but one she had felt before, going into office buildings during
business hours.