Kalifornia (13 page)

Her signal was being jammed or scrambled. As long as she stood
inside this room, she could neither send nor receive. Suddenly, her isolation
magnified, she felt afraid.

***

As Poppy stepped into the hut, Clarry stayed with her. He wished
he could work her manually, like a remote human camera—turn this way, now that,
zoom in, fall back. He wasn’t content seeing only what she saw, doing only what
she did. But that was wires for you.

The tiny dome was full of branches, pale and scraggly lumps of
dead vegetation. A thin little voice wailing an off-key tune told him what he
was seeing: “Tumbling . . . with the tumbling tumbleweeds .
. .”

Tumbleweeds, yes. Their branches scraped at Poppy’s hands, snagged
her clothes. Across the room, at the far curve of the dome, he saw the face of
the terrible singer drowning in the dry weedy clumps. Her skin was white as
sun-bleached bone; her gray hair drifted like a winter cloud, tangled in the
tumbleweeds. When she saw Poppy, she started to rise, and half a dozen weeds
leaped toward her, dragged up like marionettes by the strands of her hair.

Clarry felt physically relieved. There would be no clues here,
only madness and senility. Nothing to give him away.

“Tumbling, tumbling, tumbleweeds,” the old woman piped.

“Hello,” Poppy said. “Are you the one I’m suppose to meet?”

“Meet? Oh, yes. There’s not much time. I need help with the
garden. Everything’s forgotten how to bloom.”

Poppy made an attempt to get closer, but the weeds were much too
dense.

“I’m Poppy,” she said. “Poppy Figueroa?”

“Poppies? Poppies will make them sleep!” The frail voice grew
almost musical, though out of tune. “You can remind them how. Once they were
everywhere, just like the tum-tum-tumbling tumbleweeds. I loved to look at
them. They covered the hills and the green valleys, a mist of lovely colors.
Poppies were the state flower, you know. Now there’s nothing but the tumbling
tumbleweed.”

The hag turned toward Poppy, involuntarily drawing the weeds into
bunches around her midriff. She scooped them closer still, as if gathering a
flock of desiccated children to her breast. “Tumbling, tumbling . . .”

“Did you send me a message?” Poppy asked. “About my daughter? Was
that you?”

“Poppy!” the old woman barked, her eyes turning bright and alive.
But the spell passed like a cloud’s shadow.

The woman sank down in her crackling throne; the tumbleweeds
buoyed her up. Her dry weeping wended through the thin branches. Abruptly she
lurched forward, causing the tumbleweeds in her hair to leap forcefully free of
the other weeds that snared them. They sprang almost to the ceiling as she
flailed her hands. Her fingers were covered with lacerations, scabbed with old
blood; her gingham dress was in rags.

“I was there when you lost her,” the woman intoned. “I was there.
And I know where she is, yes, I know.”

Clarry’s fingers twitched on the wireboard. Crazy old bat, why
didn’t she come right out and say it? Why torment him like this?

“And where is that?” Poppy asked.

“McBeth took her! His gods! Bad dogs—bad dogs! Shouldn’t talk like
that to their masters. But you should have paid your taxes.”

Clarry sighed, slumping over the board with relief.

“Oh dear God,” Poppy murmured. “That’s the show, old woman. That
was only a show—it wasn’t life.”

“So? Not life? You think I don’t know what’s real?”

“I’m sure you—”

“I know what I know, you know!”

Clarry withdrew almost completely from Poppy, monitoring the
session with a fraction of his attention, ignoring the crone’s babble and Poppy’s
polite responses. After coming all this way, she might as well talk to the hag.
It would provide some light amusement once he pared it down to a few good
lines.

Relieved, he began to laugh at all his fears. Woola was laughing
too, but for different reasons: because the old gal was whacked. She didn’t
know the truth. Maybe only one person knew the whole truth.

And it sure wasn’t Clarry.

***

Poppy hesitated at the threshold as the cold pulse of the
signal-jammer faded. Should she go back out, back into Clarry’s reach?

What would he think, cut off abruptly? If there was any chance of
danger to her, he’d come running within seconds.

It occurred to her that whoever had brought her here had not,
perhaps, wanted their encounter recorded. Clarry wouldn’t like that, though.

Relaxing, she peered about at the dimness of the dome. It was
empty, swept clean, unfurnished except for a small table in the center. On the
table was a generic prismascreen holovision set, the cheapest kind imaginable.
As she approached, it came to life, as though it had been waiting for her.

She found herself looking at Clarry Starko inside the prism. He
sat in what she recognized as the cluttered editing room in his Hollywood quondo, seated at his old Sens8 deck. He stared right at her, out of the screen.
He looked different, his hair shorter than he kept it now, and he was wearing a
moustache. This was Clarry as he’d looked when she first met him, when he’d
approached her about doing the spin-off.

That thought was painful. She’d been planning the pregnancy then,
full of anticipation, seeing every offer that came her way as an omen of good
fortune, bringing security for herself and the child.

Well, she was no Seer, that much was proven.

The POV camera moved toward Clarry, startling him. The end of a
baccorish rope fell out of his mouth. “Who are you?” he said to the domed room,
to her. “How’d you get in here?”

The voice that answered, out of sight on the screen, was cool and
refined, electronically smoothed until it retained no human edges, nothing to
distinguish it: “That doesn’t matter, Mr. Starko. I’ve come to make you an offer.”

Clarry gave his visitor—and incidentally the camera, the hut,
Poppy—a long look before answering.

“What kind of offer?” he said at last.

“I want to stage a scene, with you producing. It will make your
name and seal your fame.”

“Yeah? One scene? How can you be so sure of that?”

“The great directors take great risks—especially today, when every
stunt has already been accomplished. The audience is bored. To partake of
history, you must take part in history. I am offering you a chance to record a
historic moment as it is happening. To participate in its creation, according
to your abilities. You may not interfere with it as it takes shape, but you are
free to do what you wish with the crystals you procure. I will manage
everything except the production; that remains properly your jurisdiction.”

Poppy bent closer to the screen. The hologram had perfect focus,
infinite depth of field. The camera must have been worn as a pendant, small and
inconspicuous. Such instruments were commonly used for filming the simultaneous
flatscreen and holo versions of wire-show programs, so that the wired
actors—and the audience living through them—did not have to avoid looking at
cameras that might otherwise have shattered the reality of their programs. She
examined the black glass windows behind Clarry, and in them she barely made out
the invisible speaker’s reflections: a shape cloaked in blackness, faceless,
tall. No wonder Clarry looked so baffled—his visitor was hardly even human.

“You’re an actress, aren’t you?” Clarry said, turning on his
enthusiasm now, but sarcastically. “Some old-timer. You want me to stage your
comeback, like Gloria Swanson in that old strip-flicker, 77
Sunset
Boulevard.
You want to break into wires cause nobody watches flatscreen
flicks these days. But why come to me?”

“I have no desire to recapture my past, Mr. Starko. I wish only to
change the future.”

“Like how?”

“First, let me show you how I intend to win your loyalty.”

As the camera wearer approached Clarry’s editing board, the room
swam and curved around the lens’s eye, dissolving at the edges. Poppy saw a
black-gloved hand press the eject button on the Sens8 editor, and a cube of
recording crystal slid out of the slot. The hand dropped a black ice cube into
the player, then pressed the start button.

Clarry’s room, and the desert hut, abruptly filled with screaming.
Poppy clutched the fabric of her blouse, feeling feverish. In the prism, Clarry
backed away from the deck, then lurched forward to shut it off; but the
black-gloved hand stopped him. The signal was obviously feeding through his
wires. Poppy couldn’t feel it at this remove—thank God for that—but his whole
body shook with it.

“What—where’d you get it?” Clarry gasped.

The black hand relented and switched off the deck. “You recognize
it?”

“It’s a snuff cube. You—you could be executed just for carrying
it!”

“Yes, because it’s authentic. But how did you know? It’s quality
snuff—you can feel yourself being sliced limb from limb, while at the same time
you’re the one doing the slicing. It can be synthesized, fabricated legally,
but not on a black-market snuff-cube’s zero budget. This is the real thing, the
work of a talented but penniless wirist . . . as I’m sure
you recall.”

He was pale, his forehead beaded with sweat. “You had no right
switching me in there without warning.”

“It can’t be too surprising, Mr. Starko. You recognized it, didn’t
you?”

He didn’t answer. He stared at her—stared straight at Poppy, it
seemed—without speaking.

“Why is it, Mr. Starko, that male artists feel obliged to spray
blood everywhere, to bathe an audience in grue? Is it because you fear blood?
Because you envy women the power of menstruation? Blood is the carrier of life
and death, isn’t that it? Aren’t those the powers you wish you could master?
The things that truly terrify you and make you feel helpless and weak?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about darkness and mystery . . . about
death and blood and the grave, Mr. Starko. You have some familiarity with it,
don’t you, acquired in the underworld of this little hell we call Hollywood? I know that’s where you came from, the source from which your roots perhaps
still drink. You never studied in the studio schools; you weren’t born to rich
snobs or wire stars. You had a
practical
schooling in the wires. Snuff shows. The blackest of black-market media. You’ve
come a long way since then, Mr. Starko, but that
is
what got you where you are.”

“What do you want?” His voice was hard now. He didn’t look
frightened anymore; this was business. “If you’re thinking of blackmailing me
with that crystal, you don’t know me like you think you do. I may work in Hollywood, but I’m not what you’d call rich. Go after the ones who make those snuffs if you
want money—the ones who bring in street trash and twistheads—the ones who
really excel at blackmail and threats to get people like me to work for them.
Unless, that is, those kind of people make you nervous.”

“I don’t want money, Mr. Starko. You’re forgetting what I said. I
want your artistry, your help with a little scene I’ve cooked up. In return, no
one has to know what name Clarry Starko went by when he made his little
underground extravaganzas. No one has to know how he financed his first pop-rated
wire shows.”

Poppy had the feeling a long pause was cut here. Clarry’s face
changed too abruptly.

“A scene, huh?” he said. “What kind of scene?”

The camera swam very close to him. The woman’s voice sounded
abnormally loud for the whispering of confidences. The syllables ringing in
Poppy’s head cleared it of misconceptions, hammering out her ignorance in a
few short snatches of dialogue.

As she listened, as a younger Clarry stared, the woman in black
described the scene that Poppy was to play on the eve of the bicentennial. She
described it in intimate detail, with a skilled grasp of exactly how and what
the wires could carry; she described the scene almost precisely as it finally
had been enacted.

The mysterious station wagon.

The kidnapping.

Poppy stood unmoving in the empty desert dome, paralyzed by
horror and the unwilling recognition that Clarry had always been her enemy.