The Pure Cold Light (21 page)

In the Circus Supremus, such a move would have won him a standing ovation. In the law courts it won him a steamship voyage to Corson’s Penal Isle, where ICS had found him. In retrospect he liked his life in Philadelphia. He supposed now that he would be sent back to the prison. The ways of the world confounded The Mick as much as did his own stirring feelings about these two women. Impotent he might be, but also bedazzled. The one woman—never mind it was the wrong one—had touched him, tenderly. Her eyes had promised things. The memory of it made him sigh.

For her he would have abandoned his principles, if could have thought of any. For the two of them he would lay down his life.

At one-fifteen, having subdued virtually everyone else in the place, the security forces of ScumberCorp, led by the shadowy Mr. Mingo, charged into the principal’s offices. They found The Mick seated at the controls.

“Good work,” Mingo told him. “Way to go, Ace. We’ll take over the helm now.”

At which point, The Mick shot Mr. Mingo through the left thigh. He would have ventilated him, but the overused gun ran out of ammo with that first shot.

Perhaps in his simplicity, The Mick could see through Mingo’s false camaraderie. Or maybe it was the instinct of the ex-fighter that told him this man meant to murder his newfound love. Somehow, he’d put it all together where better minds were deceived.

The security team gaped at the insuperable Mingo rolling on the floor, clamping his fingers around the jetting femoral wound; considered with newfound respect the titanic red-headed bull behind the desk; and, without a moment’s hesitation, executed him by fusillade.

The Mick’s final, ennobling act, inadvertent though it may have been, was to smash the keypad with his forehead as he fell. Doors and gates throughout ICS-IV suddenly swung shut and magnetically bolted.

It would take Mingo an hour and a half just to get out of school. He left it in a stretcher, unconscious from the loss of blood.

Chapter Fifteen: Bordello

Thomasina Lyell had never visited the twenty-third floor of Rittenhouse Six. She’d heard of Grofé’s, of course; and her introduction to Chikako Peat had taken place in similar surroundings.

The exterior room resembled an 1890s restaurant, smugly steeped in fin de siècle atmosphere. There were imported mahogany tables clothed in the purest white linens that, like the draperies, were trimmed in silver embroidery. The walls were divided horizontally, with a pastel green upper half, and a dark, ornate tulip dado along the bottom. Thick carpets covered the floor. One could spend an afternoon in Grofé’s, eating and drinking in pleasant company, and never have the urge, or the suspicion, to penetrate further.

The maitre d’ appeared as they entered through the double doors. He wore a purple silk suit and had waxed the tips of his mustache. “Lunch—a table for three?” he asked, as though they were dressed with the utmost taste. Peat, whose attire came closest, took the helm.

“No,” she replied, “just
tea
.”
 

He bowed stiffly and directed them toward a set of crushed velvet curtains at the far side of the room.

A few heads turned as the three of them made their way across the carpet—a LifeMask was uncommon enough at these levels to attract some attention, but nothing compared to the stir the bypass would have caused. Reaching the far corner of the room, they slipped between the heavy curtains into one of the most popular tearooms in Philadelphia.

The intricate dado relief, in the second room, had been expanded to cover the walls in a dark green arabesque of swaying stems and tulip bulbs. Small palm trees in large, diagonally striped vases framed the doorway and shaded the various booths around the walls. The air was smoky and smelled of something sweet that wasn’t perfume. A few bright impressionistic paintings added to the decor, drawing the eye away from the booths.

At first glance, Lyell failed to notice the booths’ odd configuration. She focused on a man and woman sharing one. They were facing each other, but they were both lying on their sides. A low table separated them and an attendant seated on a stool in the middle was pouring cups of tea for them. Padded cushions supported the couple, concave pillows propped up their heads. The pillows and the reclining figures told her the rest. She looked then for the telltale pipes. One woman was smoking hers while an attendant kept the flame going beneath its pregnant bowl.
 

Scattered about the center of the room were larger tables on pedestals for parties of three or four at most, for those who merely wished to sip tea or an aperitif and enjoy the ambience of the den, the smell of the opium perhaps. It was a scene torn out of time, nothing at all like the dens she had visited in the Undercity.

A new headwaiter, dressed (by comparison with the maitre d’) for a funeral, asked “You will be dividing up?”

Peat said, “We’ve business with Mallee.”

“Ah, you’re
special
guests.” He flashed a broad smile.

“Old friends,” she corrected. “Tell her Chikako’s here.”

He nodded, muttered “Chicago” into a throat mike that he pressed, then nodded pleasantly again. “You’re expected.”

“It helps.”

“I’m Lalep,” he said, although no one had asked.

Beaming with bonhomie, Angel shook his hand. Lyell dragged him aside. “What did they give you downstairs?” she asked, “a joy-buzzer?”

“A lot of healing is attitude,” he told her. He looked drunk.

“You should be recovered in about ten minutes, then. Try to remember that we don’t want to stand out more than we have to, okay? Try not to plunge across somebody’s table.”

The mask face bobbed up and down.
 

Concealed behind a second set of heavy drapes, a long hall led off the tea room and into the bordello proper. Had they taken a seat at one of the tables in the smoking room, they would have been offered menus depending upon their predilections, listing a variety of proffered pleasures. Everything was discreet, tasteful. What transpired behind the closed doors was to remain a mystery  … or would have done if Angel hadn’t started his own inquiry.

They were walking along, calmly enough, and Lyell had enough on her mind that she did not at first hear the rattle of doors, Angel trying each one he passed; or maybe it was the wind chimes and birdcalls, reminding her of the Geoplatform fat farm, drowning out the noise. Had it really only been a matter of days since she’d been up there? It seemed like months had passed.

All of a sudden, a door behind her opened, and she turned to find Angel standing on the threshold, staring dumbly inside. She stepped back to where he stood and peered over his shoulder.

It was a large room, sparsely furnished in pseudoteahouse fashion, with a floor of tatami mats, various bamboo and rice paper screens standing about, and silk flowers in vases on low tables. In the middle of the room, eight people dressed in baggy, gray, one-piece outfits sat in two rows along benches fitted with curious saddles. Other benches before and behind them contained empty saddles.

The saddles encased their hips, their crotches. They each wore a pair of goggles that covered their ears as well and also plugged into the saddles. All eight people held their hands out in front of them and, as if performing some warming up exercise, rhythmically reached forward and drew back, reached forward and drew back, each bench in unison.

To the right, in a tokonoma alcove that would normally have displayed a lovely scroll, a man in what looked like a flight helmet sat in front of a thin monitor screen. He held an F/X control board on his lap but he was watching TV. On the screen was displayed the belly of a huge, ancient galley, replete with naked, underfed oarsmen. Flaming lamps rocked back and forth on chains not unlike those that secured the oarsmen to their seats and each other. A muscular woman in red leather trousers and nothing much else strode the deck between the slaves and flogged them mercilessly with a cat-o’ nine-tails. She spat on them and made threatening gestures. She might have spoken, but the speakers appeared to be turned off. It might have been a scene from a truly dreadful pirate film, except that the oarsmen on the screen and the people in the room were rowing in sync. And when the lashes bit into the backs of the poor wretches in the galley, goggled people in the baggy suits jerked and cried out.

Lyell closed the door. “Come on, Angel,” she said, “and don’t do that again. You might have to stay here a while, and the next group might notice you sticking your nose in.”

“What
was
that?”

“That was
virtual
—all the excitement and the pain without the risk. Just the expense. More than that, you don’t need to know. You don’t want to know.” A far cry from the Undercity teahouses she had been thinking of, where the patrons and the cockroaches shared paltry accommodations, and where the sheets—when there were sheets—didn’t get changed. She had never visited one of these places before. Probably it was because Knewsday and their ilk already ran too many shows on the virtues of virtual sex. It wasn’t, she told herself, because she wasn’t interested. She just tended to focus on the streets, that was all.

Certainly there was some client overlap between the two levels: the Overs enjoyed occasional slumming expeditions out of towers but inside the walls. The rakes still progressed, if that was the right term for it. Degressed? She shook her head. One of the reasons the walls had gone up where they had was to maintain a captive population which could imagine itself better off because it was inside something. People who were happy just to be indoors.

Orbitol pervaded the towers through places like this. Drugs of all sorts were included on the menu, along with the arts of pleasure; mostly opium, but also endorphin-triggers to induce pleasure. Orbitol wasn’t promoted nor, strictly speaking, was it supposed to be available here. It was on hand in case someone asked for it, like the dusty, expensive bottles of Lambic Framboise under the counter. Orbitol was for the masses. The dingy dens on the street had lost much of their trade to various engineered, site-specific substances over the years, but Orbitol was the worst. It had decimated their clientele, transporting its victims to a different Xanadu, transporting them literally. In order to survive, the dens had been forced to buy into Orbitol’s distribution. How ScumberCorp had finagled it all—an end run around every competitor—remained a corporate secret as closely guarded as the formula itself. Reported cases of Orbitol decay in the Undercity were a thousand percent higher than among the Overs, and climbing. Her story on fast foods had begun out of a theory that some of the foods had been laced with Orbitol, creating instant addicts and cementing a drug habit to specific foods, creating totally dependent customers at the trough, at least until they decayed. That picture didn’t seem to make economic sense, but she refused to give up on it entirely.
 

The hall stretched on forever. She wondered how many clients Grofé’s handled. Maybe this Mallee was someone she should interview once things quieted down. And Peat, who obviously knew things about ScumberCorp that no one else was likely to know. Like maybe even the sex fantasies of some of the Gang of Four. Now, that would make for interesting viewing.

Around a corner, Lyell and Angel caught up with Chikako. She waited just inside the open door of another large room, filled with exercise equipment. It reminded Lyell unpleasantly again of Stardance.

A nearly naked woman was working out on a small trampoline to one side. Lyell directed Angel to a bench and sat beside him. He fidgeted like a child who couldn’t hold still. Lyell scrutinized him quizzically. Peat walked over to the trampoline.

The jumper reduced her bouncing until she could safely spring to the mat, then performed a tight inverted twist, landing precisely on the balls of both feet. Her perfect, compact and tanned physique gleamed. She wore a formfitting bikini bottom and a bright red breastband. She had drawn her coppery hair back into a coil. She looked like a bull-dancer from Minos.

From another bench, she swept up a towel and mopped her face, then hung the towel around her neck as she approached Peat.

The two women embraced; everything about the casualness of the gesture told Lyell that they were indeed old friends. They said a few words, then laughed together, then chattered happily. Lyell rested her eyes, longing for a stimulant and a massage.

When she finally directed Mallee toward them, Peat was smiling and more relaxed than Lyell had yet seen her. Mallee’s presence had cracked the facade.

“So, this is the Angel,” Mallee said admiringly, and Angel crossed his arms, stroked his chin, looked down, and otherwise behaved embarrassedly.
 
She said, “Thomasina,” and nodded in greeting, then glanced back at Peat. “You say he’s got a
crab
unit under there? What’d he do, land on his head?”

“He can’t remember.”

Mallee pursed her lips. She had worked out a plan: they were to stay here until evening, when she would have a fully charged car ready for them. Then they would take the club’s private exit down to the skyway level, pile into the car, and travel to her Spring Mountain villa.

“I didn’t realize,” Lyell commented, “that a teahouse operator was in the class that affords villas.”

“Actually, it’s a perk of the job. Came with the title. Don’t ask me, ask Ichi-Plok’s subsidiary. It’s more for the executives than it is for me—I’m just another piece of furniture with a
virtual
license. At  least you’ll be out of the city and in a villa owned by a competitor, so you’re a lot less likely to be twigged by Scumbers. Meantime, I’ve got you a suite here—I already took it off the menu. Sorry there’s only the one room, but we’re busy today.”

“Yes, we saw the rowing team.”

Mallee smiled. “Would you believe me if I told you that program has a waiting list?”

“Probably.”

“We have sixteen
virtual
rooms, more than any other local tea house.” She spoke with obvious pride.

A buzzer sounded. Mallee walked to the bench where she had gotten the towel. She picked up a blue palm phone and spoke into it. After a moment, she pointed it at the wall. The paneling slid aside, revealing a portion of a larger screen. There was a small set beside it—an all-purpose, diskROM entertainment center. The phone doubled as a remote control.