The Pure Cold Light (8 page)

The knowledge of Orbitol and some of Lobly’s appearance Lyell had borrowed from a lifer she’d met while serving time on Corson’s Isle. The lifer’s name was Poleby.

At some date prior to his incarceration on the prison island, Poleby had mixed up his drugs with volatile, even suicidal, abandon. He had mistakenly assumed that site-specific drugs couldn’t conflict with one another. The result of Poleby’s experiments was a permanent, degenerative rewiring of his salivary glands.
 

In the cell he shared with Lyell, he spent most of his time with a bucket between his knees to catch the waterfall of drool that ran ceaselessly down his face. It dripped from the tips of his mustache and out of the cleft in his chin. Poleby kept a two-liter pitcher of water on a table beside him to keep from dehydrating in the night, and slept with a plastic tube hooked over his lip. The first few weeks, the sucking and trickling sounds had nearly driven Lyell crazy.

The supply of the drugs in the prison astonished even Lyell. From Poleby’s stories, she figured out soon enough that as many as five dozen pharmaceutical companies were using the prisoners on Corson’s Isle as test subjects for experimental substances and practices. According to Poleby, the first unnatural effects of Orbitol had come to light there.

“It was a girl, one a their first users. (Slurp.) Her toes, you know, went away. When she refused to take any more a the shit, they strapped her into her cell and shot it into her—bang, bang bang! (Slurp.) Well, ya know—after awhile she’s begging for it, can’t stand to be without it, and she didn’t care no more that she didn’t have no legs or hands.” He paused dramatically to spit. “Didn’t matter to her half so much as gettin’ fucked up. She let the bastids do anything just so she got fixed. They gouged samples outen her, trying to see what what goin’ on, and every day there’s less and less of her.
 
One day she just faded right out from under ’em—they’s so fuckin’ dumb they thought she’d escaped. And they’s
right
, too, ya know.” He laughed, but self-consciously glanced at his empty sleeve as he sucked saliva. “Now, ain’t I a fine one to talk?”
 

One night, while he flew high on Orbitol, Poleby described quite lucidly for Lyell the vision he had of another reality. According to him, it was a vision he shared with all other Orbiters.

“It doesn’t come every time right at first, ya know, like gettin’ a signal from a pirate satellite or somepun,” he said, “but when it comes, it’s a message from God. Glimpse a heaven, gettin’ stronger with each visit. That’s why I come back to it—why that girl did, why they
all
do—get another peek at it, ’nother look at God. Ya don’t know that it’s got its hooks in ya till it’s happened. And then you’re the fish and the other world just reelin’ you in.

“It’s a place where everything sparkles like that little jewel in your nose,” Poleby said, tapping her nostril, the disconnected lens system.

He’d never possessed the least imagination, never once hallucinated anything coherent, and so he concluded that the drug had transported him to a real place. He speculated that it was Mars-to-be—the terraformed Mars that ScumberCorp’s ads referred to. “
Not this generation but someday soon
,” went the motto that even President Odie had been known to recite. “
A new world is about to open to us that will return mankind to greatness
.” The ad ran ceaselessly on Knewsday and ANN, and the images of Mars in the ad looked so much like his vision that he figured the artist must have been an Orbiter, too. He swore there were thousands of addicts in the upper strata of society all across the world. One of the drug testers monitoring him had said so. Lyell remembered wondering at the time if SC’s whole Martian colony might be nothing more than a widespread hallucination. How could anyone be sure?

Poleby believed the world he saw was real. He had a theory that he told Lyell, “God, ya see, finds His recreation in creating variety. That’s what my ma used to say.” He slurped, spitting. “She was a Hindu, had all kinds a notions about God an’ stuff the old man couldn’t tolerate. He was starch-stiff Catholic. I mean
stiff
. He had a miter on the head a his dick. Don’t know why in the hell the little prick married her, either. I figure they was doing battle to see who could convert who. If she’d’a had a snake, she woulda put it in his bed, but she didn’t. He’d go to confession, then a tavern, then come home broke and beat the shit outen her. She finally run away.”

A few years later Poleby had killed the old man himself with a screwdriver. “Carpenter’s lobotomy,” he called it, lopsidedly grinning with his chin bright and wet.
 
His laughter had gone swirling into the bucket.

***

Lyell forged a lot of connections to get her Box City digs. The box was one of a number of locations she frequented in the hopes she might pick up information about any of SC’s unusual offers.
 
She’d acquired it, to Nebergall’s joy, by trading pairs of shoes.

The location of the box played a crucial role because information flowing through the Box City tended to cluster in pockets around The Bell and the cooking fires. The fires burned to the north, up on Judge Lewis Quadrangle. Lobly had become a familiar sight there, too, always supplied with extra food to share and always willing to listen to any story.

It was while seated at a cooking fire that Lyell had learned about ScumberCorp’s food-testing programs. The first time she’d heard it, she doubted the story. Free food was rare enough, but free food from ScumberCorp was a holy miracle. However, when she mentioned the giveaway, she found too many people attesting to it, and solid details filling in.

From time to time, SC’s subsidiaries—Happy Burgers in particular—invited some Boxers to a private party. This inevitably involved free food or drugs. The exact purpose of any event was not revealed to the participants, but they were always rewarded, sometimes with coins that they could use for barter, but often as not with other drugs. Occasionally, some of the participants didn’t return. A few times, none of them had. That might have scared off new participants, except that there were always Boxers who hadn’t managed to find a meal or who had been robbed by a gang.

A legend had evolved that the lost Boxers had been awarded special positions up in the towers. The fervor with which the people she spoke to embraced this nonsense, was testimony to their ability to deny reality utterly. She knew better. If people from the Undercity were living fulltime in the Overcity, they were doing it in an urn.

She would have compiled a terrific story for Nebergall if he hadn’t turned off the tap. It burned her that she couldn’t use it. She couldn’t have imagined the unprecedented turn the story was about to take.

The sounds of Mad John and Celine’s sex act had degenerated into groans, followed by silence. Background conversations drifted like body odors along the narrow alley—people debating the best way to get rid of head-lice, somebody else claiming that Knewsday had pictures of the sea creatures that were coming ashore to rape women in Italy. The weird mixture always surprised her.

The dull murmurous voices lulled her brain and combined with the warm, confined air to send her drifting into a light doze.

She jerked awake as there came a rap on the roof of the box next to hers. She leaned up on her elbows and listened to a conversation in hushed tones.

“Ya ready to go, Pete?”

“Jist lemme git on my boots.”

“Naw problem.”

“Hamany you figure you can eat?”

“Fuck do
you
care how many? What you don’t, I’m eating. Bet on that. I axed Bucca and he said it’s gonna be a major feast, like hundreds of burgers an’ stuff.”

“Oh,
man
.”

When their voices drifted away, she counted to five, then ducked out under the blanket. Mad John’s foot protruded beneath Celine’s curtain. He’d managed to keep on one dirty sock.

The two speakers—her neighbor, Pete, and the other—were heading along the nearest east-west aisle. Pressing her elbow, she strolled after them, disking the sights and sounds of box life. Only the smells eluded posterity, which was a pity in its way.

The two men led her far up Market Street and around City Hall to an office plaza of broken concrete pavement and the skeletons of dead trees in big, poured stone pots. Blocks of pink granite lay here and there as if spilled by some giant infant. She counted three dozen Box City dwellers milling about aimlessly, and more arriving. Word had gotten around.

Lyell hung back at the edge of one building. The two men she’d followed went up to a short fireplug of a character and began chatting with him.

She recognized some of the people from the fires up on the quadrangle. Among the Boxers there were a few deranged characters. Tended by friends, these examples of untreated madness were settled on the granite blocks, where some immediately engaged in conversation with invisible companions or made faces at nothing.
 
Many of them had open sores, and most wore one or more meals like embroidered designs down the front of their clothes. A bald man, with suppurating stigmata at his temples and invisible bare feet, crawled upon one of the blocks and began castigating everybody around him. His cause could not be fathomed and no one but the other “mads” paid him any mind.

Through a slit in two buildings, Lyell glimpsed the statue of William Penn atop the gothic City Hall building, but almost at once turned her attention overhead, where the others were looking and pointing.

Between the towers directly above, skywalks formed a dark cross against the gray clouds. Out of the center of the cross, a tube was descending. Lyell, who had never seen such an emergency exit in operation, was as transfixed as the derelicts by the telescoping vertical tube.

It touched down lightly, with barely a thump. A big, curved door revolved halfway around to one side. On their feet now, the beggars held back. Even the mad ones had fallen silent. Fearfully, they shifted from one foot to the other and twitched and flexed their hands, ready to stampede at the first sign of treachery.

Four armed guards emerged from the opening.

The wave of Boxers ebbed. Some wasted no time in deserting the square. Lyell pressed back against the wall as two characters came scurrying around past her. When she looked again, she found that the vast majority were hanging on at a distance, waiting to see how things went.

The guards set up a perimeter. They nudged the majority of the mob back further but ignored the truly demented, most of whom were left seated and incoherent on their slabs of granite. As the mob backed toward her, Lyell stepped into its midst and slipped through to the front ranks.

Five more people emerged from the tube, two of them pushing long carts piled high with Happy Burger foods: surimi rolls, Spuddies, burgers and malts. Her stomach, unfed so far this day, reacted to the smell of the hot food, even as her mind reminded her of the risks. The carts were positioned in a semi-circle. The four guards drew aside, effectively leaving the food unguarded. Too hungry not to take a chance, a few of the derelicts edged up to the carts. For a moment, faced with so much choice, they hesitated. Behind the table, men in shiny suits stood smiling. One of the derelicts heisted two burgers, while wary for the slightest response from the guards. No one batted an eye; the man behind the table, wearing dark glasses like the rest, nodded encouragingly. At this sign dozens of people sprang forward, pushing and shoving toward the carts. Lyell let herself be carried along, concentrating on smooth pans back and forth to capture the entire scene. Once he saw this performance, she figured, Nebergall would have to change his mind about the show.

In front of her, a derelict named Bindlestiff edged along the table, unwrapping and devouring his first burger while he stuffed another, along with bags of Spuddies and cha gio, into every pocket. She recorded it, savoring every detail: the blotchy ruin of a face offering a rapturous expression straight out of a Rubens painting; his eyes rolled back as he stuffed his mouth full of food. Stubby fingers grabbed, wriggling; wrappers rustled like a dozen crackling fires; the black plastic glasses of the guards sealed their eyes in obscurity above their carved smiles. She felt like Nebergall’s still-store machine, capturing one after the other remarkable frozen image in her retinas.

An advertising jingle danced through her head: “Why worry when you can eat Happy? So eat—
Happy Burgers
.” A cartoon family devoured the cartoon icon. How many times she’d heard it.

The mob became entangled in its feeding frenzy. Here and there, minor skirmishes arose. A fight broke out between two men over possession of a cherry soda, the contents of which had already exploded over both yanking contenders. One of the perimeter guards stepped in to intercede, and Lyell sidled in that direction to record the episode.
 
Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a tall figure emerge from the tube and move swiftly around the carts, into the thick of things. The guard stopped and returned to his position, and let the new man handle things.

He was thin, blond, leonine, with a smile so absolutely genuine and noble of character that she distrusted him instantly. He slid into the center of the fracas, between the two dripping contenders. “Now, now,” he said, “settle down, there’s plenty to go around. Take all you want, take some for your friends. No reason here to fight.” His tone reminded Lyell of a brother who ran St. Anthony’s Hospice—firm but friendly: admonishing. It was the voice of someone who expected something from you. The priest wanted penitence. What the smooth reptile in dark glasses before her wanted remained to be seen, but she had the feeling she was in for a conversion. The two opponents separated, one on either side of the blond man. He led them back to the carts and gave each his own drink.

Lyell snatched up a chocolate malt and some wrapped foods from the cart, then moved away from the table. She pulled herself up onto a stone block from which she could record everything in the plaza. She disked a few more images of the SC staff, noticing another corporate type, who hung back by the tube. He looked uncomfortable with the proceedings, maybe frightened by his nearness to these unholy creatures. He certainly wasn’t security.