Kalifornia (15 page)

“Hey, Poppy,” he said, pitching his voice low, confidential.
“Come out here a sec, would you?”

She lay still, and he lay there inside her, frozen by the sound of
his voice. She was afraid of him; her muscles felt rigid.

“Poppy, it’s me. I’ve got to ask you something. Come on, wake up,
this is important.”

He was about to give up on it, ready to convince the manager to
let him in—“I think she overdosed in there”—when he felt her stir and get
unsteadily to her feet. She’d been hitting the vial again; her temples burned
where she’d held the twist halves in place too long. Woozy. No wonder she wasn’t
moving in a hurry. It made him feel a little better; maybe she wasn’t really
avoiding him. Maybe she was only twisted.

The door opened. He stood face-to-face with himself. He blinked
out of her eyes an instant before feedback kicked in, the blossoming
nerve-scream cut off long before it peaked. He took her by the elbow.

“Come on, we gotta talk.”

She tried pulling away. “Wha—”

“Outside, Poppy. Seriously, we have to talk. It’s more private
outside.”

She wore only a thin gown, but the night was warm. He hurried her
toward the van, and in bare feet she kept stumbling. “Clarry, stop it, you’re
hurting me.”

He let go. She moved away, wide awake now, watching him
distrustfully.

She knows, he realized. That look of hers says everything.

Somehow, in that dome, she had learned the truth.

“Poppy,” he said, and stopped short. What came next? The words
didn’t exactly flow from this point onward.

“I’m going back to bed.”

He flipped into her, felt gravel digging into her heels, the wind
streaming around her legs. A truck thundered past.

“Poppy, I know what happened in the dome.”

She stiffened. Backed off.

“No,” he said. “Don’t run—we gotta talk.”

“Stay away from me!”

Again he wasted effort trying to control her, to mentally push or
pull her toward him. He couldn’t help it—he had confused their bodies. But his
desperation seemed to have the opposite effect. She moved away. Turned to run.

“Poppy! Tell me what happened!”

Goddamn it.

He headed after her, caught between her form and his. She was in
pain, but her fear—which he couldn’t touch through the wires—must have been far
stronger. She ran like hell, past the van, out of the motel lot, along the
roadside. Monster trucks howled past as if the night were a hungry throat
sucking them down, taillights dwindling, dopplered sirens stretching out thin
in the distance.

Through her eyes it all came on as a blur. She was crying.

“Poppy, come back! We gotta talk! I’ll try to explain—I’ll tell
you everything, I swear. Just tell me what you know!”

Through her wires, he couldn’t hear himself anymore. The traffic
was too loud. She was getting away from him, except for her wires.

He told himself that he could catch her, hold her, make her
listen. He had shoes, after all, and she was barefoot.

He took off running.

Just ahead, she seemed to be dodging in and out of the shifting
lights—but that was an illusion. It was the lights that moved, not Poppy. She
stood still now, a calm silhouette. He couldn’t tell which way she faced until
he saw himself come running toward her out of the night, caught in the glare of
headlights. Then, superimposed on that, he saw her face from his own eyes.

“Poppy,” he said.

He felt her gasp, heard the intake of breath.

He reached—

She darted away, spinning into a gap, finding a momentary vacancy
in the steady traffic. She traversed one lane in poised stillness, like a
dancer. Three more broad lanes to go, all of them dark and empty for the
moment, deep as valleys.

Then lights came roaring up. The darkness turned into a deadly
river, a lightstream that carried them both away. The bright mountain came
roaring out of nowhere, out of everywhere, and the merest corner of it snagged
her, but that was enough.

Clarry felt everything, every brutal bit of the impact. It drew
him in even as it wiped her out. He was one facet of a three-lobed scream,
sharing it with Poppy and the brakes of the truck. He heard the storm of sound
through two sets of ears . . . and then through only one
pair, because Poppy’s had failed. Her polynerves were senseless. In the van, on
the masterdeck, the needles fell still, the wires went dead. The river of
traffic stopped in midstream—but only for Poppy.

As for Clarry, he kept walking on down the dark road that started
where the wires ended. Walked and wondered if he’d ever find his way back to
the place where Poppy lay in brightness and in blood.

S01E07.
 
Trauma
 
in
 
Tinsel-Town

The advantage of alcohol, however old-fashioned, over other drugs
was its excellence for suppressing conscious awareness of the constant seethe
of wire shows. With enough of it ingested, even the basic subconscious
processes could be poisoned and sabotaged sufficiently so that no part of one’s
anatomy remained attuned to the wires.

Sandy
had not quite reached that point, or else he
had passed it and was on his way back to bodily sentience. Whatever the cause,
he found himself regaining consciousness in a muddle of Poppies. He grumbled
and turned away from her faces wherever they appeared. He didn’t wish to be
disturbed by any member of his family in his present state. But she kept
pressing in: Poppy with the Newsbodies, Poppy in old clips with the family,
Poppy in ever present and increasing danger, Poppy in . . . the
hospital? He didn’t remember that episode: it must be a late development in
“Poppy on the Run.” That stupid, tawdry show. If only he could shut it off,
shut down the signals completely—shut the mouth that was thundering his name.

He woke, then, in the shallows of Thaxter Halfjest’s palatial
carp pond. He could still hear ominous echoes of his name, following him from
wasted sleep. He lifted his head from a pebbly shore and gazed across a shimmer
of lily pads and colored aquatic lights to find Cornelius, shirtless, sitting
up to his distinctly human nipples in the center of the pool. The sealman’s
whiskers moved rhythmically as he sang a seal’s lullaby. A floating snifter
bobbed beside him, anchored to a fountainhead; it was filled to the waterline
with Drambuie.

Suddenly Cornelius’s hands plunged forward and engaged in a brief,
silent struggle beneath the waters. An instant later he brought a fat
blue-spotted koi into the air. Fish and sealman regarded one another with
strikingly similar expressions: both pop-eyed and bewhiskered, both with
gaping mouths. Cornelius bared his pin-sharp teeth, preparing to bite the carp
in two.

“Corny, no!”

Startled, Cornelius dropped the koi. He blinked at Sandy, vaguely perturbed, and dragged a wet wrist across his mouth.

“We’re guests here,” Sandy said.

“It’s a great help with a hangover, sir.”

“Aw, Corny. Oh, Christ.” Sandy’s own hangover, in its inimitable
way, made its presence known. If he’d thought biting a live carp would stop the
pain, he might have considered it. He sank back down with a moan and stared up
at the moss-bearded chandeliers. “How did I get here?”

“I carried you. I thought you would find fresh water refreshing.”

He sloshed some of the tepid stuff over his face and soaked
clothes. “Did you hear someone calling my name or was that a dream?”

Cornelius gestured at a speaker above the pool. “I believe the
Reverend Governor summoned you.”

“I wonder what he wants.” Sandy scratched his belly through his
shirt. “Corny, when was the last time I slept in a bed?”

“Actually slept?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“As opposed to sharing a mattress or other, slightly padded
surface for the purpose of sexual congress?”

“Jeez, now I
know
you
were hatched in a tube.”

“You haven’t actually
slept
in a
bed since we left the seascraper—which was one week ago. May I remind you that
I have relinquished my own nocturnal comfort to accompany you on this reckless
descent into debauch.”

“No one forced you.”

“No, I did it for my own peace of mind. You are my friend, and I
would be remiss to leave you to your own devices.”

“Admit it, you’re getting royally tanned.”

Cornelius considered this and eventually gave a reluctant nod. “It
is preferable to the cramped schedules of the seascraper, being an existence
perhaps more akin to the lazy sun-worshiping lifestyle of my sealie ancestors.”

Sandy
shook his head. “The workaday world is not for
us, Corny. We must take it as we find it. Ride the lurchy surf of reality. Ooh . . . my
head.”

He rose unsteadily and extended a hand to his companion. “Come on,
Corny, sushi time.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stick with oatmeal this
morning. Since I can’t have fish that’s truly fresh . . . ”

“There must be a lobster tank around somewhere.”

Footsteps rang suddenly in the marble corridors near the poolside.
Thaxter Halfjest appeared, hurrying toward the water’s edge with his arms
spread wide. The greeting was his usual, but his face was weirdly pale and
drawn. “Sandy, my boy! There you are! I wasn’t sure if you were still with us.
Someone
said
they had sex with you last
night, but you know the stories people tell.”

“What’s up, Thax?”

The RevGov let his arms fall.

“I have terrible news. Poppy is at Welby-Kildare in intensive
care. Your father’s hiring a professional care staff to bring her home, but
that will take time. You really should get down there, Sandy.”

Sandy
walked dripping from the pool, remembering his
“dreams.” “My God. That’s why her face is plastered all over the wires. What
happened?”

“I’ll get the car,” said Cornelius. He rushed from the room,
leaving wet footprints on the slick floor.

“An accident, I gather. You’d better put on dry clothes. I’ll have
a bundle sent out to the garage, if you’ll tell me your size.”

But Sandy’s discomfort seemed trivial to him now. Even his
headache receded. “No thanks, Thax, I’ll dry on the way. Hey, Corny! Wait for
me!”

***

Sandy
hadn’t been home in over a year but Hollywood was the same as ever, the whole foul bowl of humanity swimming in a psychedelic
rainbow soup. Smog-scrubbing aerophytes, released in the ‘Teens to metabolize
the Basin’s lethal hydrocarbons, had scoured the sky cleaner than a dog’s
dish; but their byproducts had also covered the region with a multicolored
film that never completely washed away, lending new accuracy to the old
nicknomen Tinsel-Town. Everywhere you looked, toxic glitter and sequins
sparkled in the afternoon sun. The fine sheen of gilt tended to flake off in
one’s hand, filling the streets and powdering clothes with polychromatic
dandruff, getting all over everything. In a windstorm, the LA Basin resembled a
decorative paperweight—shaken, not stirred.

Cornelius steered above hills dry and wrinkled as a crone’s
backside, passing over teetering quondotels dwarfed and shadowed by perilously
stacked freeways. He circled over the spiny khaki expanse of the Princess Zsa
Zsa Memorial Cactus Preserve, finally becoming involved in a jet jam just east
of the Beverly Canyon.

In an area as congested as the Basin, local traffic controls and
personal aircar anticollision devices led to an annoying condition best known
as Puppy Magnet Syndrome. It was virtually impossible to collide with another
jet, thanks to the many safeguards in effect; midair fender-plunges were a
thing of the past. Two cars flying straight at each other would swerve
automatically just before collision, like the north poles of two magnets
brought together (as demonstrated by the antics of the traditional black-and-white
magnetized Scotty-dog pups that have thrilled so many generations of children).
With three or more cars involved, the ballet of avoidance became more complex.
And when hundreds or thousands or even dozens of cars converged on a single
destination, an enormous bubble of canceled confusion—spherical gridlock—was
the result, a sphere of empty territory from which all cars repelled each other
simultaneously, so that none could enter the desired zone. The only thing to do
in such an instance was to sit and wait and let the computers sort it out.

The more popular the attraction, the longer the wait. And today
the Welby-Kildare Hospital—under the sponsorship of Dr. McNguyen—was extremely
busy. Siren-packing ambulances took priority, sending repulsed cars spinning
from their path as they zigzagged in and down to the emergency roosts.

As he orbited in abeyance, awaiting an opening, Sandy regarded the
smoky abyss of the Beverly Canyon, a gift from the San Andreas Fault line to
real estate developers of the twenty-first century. The Canyon’s polished inner
walls were glitzy with windows, balconies, hanging gardens. The Figueroa home,
several miles up the crack, sat on the most exclusive stretch of the famous
verge, invisible from here, mainly because it was blocked by floating
advertisements.

A huge, luminous fly-through hologram billboard materialized
ahead of them. Sandy stared at it first in annoyance, then in envy.

The image showed seven people, each representing a different
race, and of widely varying ages. Bold titles flickered around them, sending
loud synchronized blasts of sound into Sandy’s wires:

Forget About Ozzie and Harriet!

Brush Off the Bradys!

Who Needs the Bundys?

Screw All Murgatroyds and Figueroas!

None of Them Had a Seventh of What We’ve Got!

The First Family That Really Represents You!

Folks You Can Count On!

And We’re Coming Right Now . . .

To Work Our Magic—

THE MAGYK 7

Our replacements, Sandy thought bitterly. They keep trying to
fill that void. After a suitable period of mourning—thirty days—Hollywood had started right up again trying to re-create the formula. They were still
trying, but so far it had never quite worked out.

He almost missed the tag line:

We Can’t Promise Some of Us Won’t Die—

We’re Not Immortal!

But We Won’t Give Up the Show

And Let You Down!

Sandy
saw Corny’s fingers tighten on the wheel, and
was positive the sealman tried to aim the car right at the middle of the big
dad’s head; but the computer had just given them clearance, and they were
heading down.

The hospital lobbies and corridors were crammed with scads of
Poppy-fen, mobs of women (and not a few men) in hysterics, their
orange-implanted eyes blurry with tears, their faces torn and devastated.
Unfortunately, most of them recognized Sandy and Cornelius, and came rushing:
“Sandy! Oh my brother! Corny, help me! Help me! I’m cut off
—I’m
dying—where
am I?—My baby—where’s my baby—please—please—an autograph . . . ?”

Fortunately, a troop of security guards spotted the problem and
moved between Sandy and the faux Poppies.

“She’s this way, Mr. Figueroa, in the Daktari-Howser Wing,” said
one young fellow. “It’s a plesh to accompany you. I lost my virginity to Dyad
through you, sir. Nice piece, that. I think you handled her just as I would
have, only
 . . . well . . . 
I’d
have liked it immensely if you could have held off ejaculating just a wee bit
longer. Always wanted to tell you that, sir. But this really is a ple—AACK—!”

“Thanks, Corny,” Sandy said.

The Poppies were not the only wire-fen in evidence. One waiting
room they passed was filled with people saying in unison, “Go ahead, Dr.
McNguyen, you can level with me. It—it’s terminal, isn’t it?” They could have
been tuned to any number of shows—or commercials. A few young kids hopped by on
clumsy chicken-foot grafts, in emulation of the ever popular Rooster Man.

Intensive care proved to be a circular room with a perimeter of
sealed, sanitized transparent chambers surrounding it. Sandy pushed through a
crowd of doctors, nurses, and medical programmers, spotting his father in one
of the clear rooms. He rapped on the glass until Alfredo nodded for him to come
in.

A nurse stopped him at the airlock. “I’m sorry, we don’t allow
anyone but family members inside.”

“I’m her brother,” Sandy said.

“No.” She indicated Cornelius. “I meant him.”