Woman On The Edge Of Time (42 page)

“We used to have windows, everybody did. It was just glass so light could come in.”

“Light? How? From outside? Oh, I guess when you get up high enough. This is just the hundred twenty-sixth floor. But even up on the sun plaza what’s to see except the sun and you can only look straight at that for a while before you begin to see funny spots—maybe five or ten minutes. The sky’s nice when you get used to it—it’s that gorgeous pale gray color. Once in a while some real weather clouds. I can ride into them, really—they give me a boost. But if you gape too much, flacks think you’re lower. You have to pretend to take it for granite.”

“Can’t you see the city?”

“You can make out some other towers in this plex. But you can’t see down or any farther. How could you? It’s thick. It’s air. How could you see through air?”

“Where’s your kitchen?”

“Huh?”

“Where you cook food?”

“Cook it?” Gildina led her to a corner by the outside door, which looked like a bank vault’s. There was nothing in the corner she could identify as a refrigerator or a stove. A drawer opened automatically when a button was pressed, to dispense transparent packets Gildina demonstrated for her. She opened one with a hiss of inrushing air that seemed slowly to soak through the mass inside. She was surprised to see it begin steaming.

At Gildina’s invitation she tasted the food on a thin shiny
plate. The food was heavily spiced but ultimately tasteless and gummy. “What is it?”

“Vito-goodies ham dinner.”

“This is supposed to be ham?”

“What’s ham? That’s the name of the flavor.”

“But it doesn’t taste anything like ham.”

“Ham?” Gildina made a face of incomprehension. “Everything comes in packets. It’s made from coal and algae and wood by-products.”

“You’re vegetarians?”

“What’s that?”

“You eat only vegetables?”

“Who’s a vegables?” Gildina swished out of the corner in annoyance. “You’re only a dud slot, so don’t high-top me.”

“Things that grow in plants. You know. Like carrots and peas. Beans. Corn.”

Gildina shrugged, waving her hand with its inch-long mauve-and-yellow nails. “I know the richies eat queer things, sort of … raw. Stuff from, you know, live things. They practically eat them alive. I can’t suppose that’s good for you, our stomachs aren’t made of Cybernall. I never had any of that … strange stuff. You trying to tell me you had that richie food? That live stuff?”

“Sure. Poor people couldn’t buy a lot of it, but everybody had it sometimes.”

“We got enough troubles. I got chronic colonic malachosis myself and Cash has ulceric tumors. I can’t imagine how the richies survive. I heard they eat animal tissue even. The idea makes me dizzy. I mean except as a sexy idea. I mean I seen it on the Sense-all, but it doesn’t float me.”

“Well, where does your food come from?”

Gildina shrugged. “Out in the Roughlands, big corporate factory-farms. They mine it, you subscribe, and it gets delivered every week.” Gildina took the plate and plasticware from her and put them into a box in the wall, where they promptly disappeared.

“Where did they go?”

“How would I suppose on that?” Gildina looked shocked. “It’s a service. All middle-flack plexes have platos. You take the clean stuff out and you put the dirty stuff in. Look, I’ll show
you.” She opened another sliding door. But nothing happened. She pressed a button on the wall again. “Double stymie. It’s broke again. I hope they get it fixed by the time Cash comes home, that’s all I can say. Oh, well, I’ll get him to take me to the mutual on the floor. Or even upstairs, maybe, if he’s in the spending slot.”

“A restaurant? Like a place everybody eats?”

Gildina nodded. “But if I decide to do that I got to start prepping.”

“What time does he get home?”

“Not for two hours, but it takes that long, for display. The painting is what counts.”

“You mean making up your face?”

“No, leg painting. It costs a heart and a kidney, but if you try to do it yourself, you look like a joke. You have to go to a real artiste. There’s a fem on this floor who’ll do me even at the last minute. I’ll flash her a transie.”

“How come she’ll do you?”

“She owes me … . I know a few things about her. She skipped on a contract. She’s in the crazy slot, she even paints her walls, but she does a good job cheapo with no appoint. So I should turn her in to the organ banks? It’s no silc off my ass! They say the richies take the ones who are real good for the platforms.”

“Gildina, the richies—who are they, really?”

“The same as in your time—the Rockemellons, the Morganfords, the Duke-Ponts. They’re ancient. I mean some of them were alive in your time, I suppose, if you’re for real. Wait till Cash gapes you. He’ll figure it out.” Gildina paraded past, smirking. “He’s had SC, did you suppose on that?”

“What’s escee?”

“Sharpened control, reallike. He’s been through mind control. He turns off fear and pain and fatigue and sleep, like he’s got a switch. He’s like a Cybo, almost! He can control the fibers in his spinal cord, control his body temperature. He’s a fighting machine, like they say. I mean not really like a Cybo, but as good as you can get without genetic engineering or organ replacement. He’s still a woolie—that’s what the richies and the Cybos call us, who are still animal tissue. But he’s real
improved. He has those superneurotransmitters ready to be released in his brain that turn him into just about an Assassin. I mean not really, he’s fourth level, but he’s in that direction, if you gape.”

“Remember, I’m just a dud from the past. They haven’t told me a lot of this stuff yet.”

“Yeah, the Age of Uprisings and all that stuff. Before they automated the boondocks—the old UD countries, when they had all those useless animals and wild plants and dumb people and stuff.”

“But who are Assassins?”

“Sha! You don’t talk about them.” Gildina looked around. “Of course we’re monitored like everybody else, so SG knows I’m talking to you. So like if I’m doing anything wrong, they’ll stop us.”

“Monitored?”

“From the Securcenter here, what else? For versive acts and talks. They pull you in and put a scanner on you so they can tell what you’re thinking to the questions, even if you don’t talk. From the electrical impulses in your brain. You can’t lie to them, unless you’re a trained SD man or an Assassin. Assassins work for the richies. That’s how they deal with each other when they’re at odds. Every richie clan and all the multies have armies of genetically engineered fighters. Instead of sex drive, they have a basic killer drive and obey center. You can’t tell exactly what they are—some are woolies genetically specialized. Some are real Cybos. No animal issue. Entirely improved.”

The door opened suddenly with a swoosh, and a man barged in. He was close to seven feet tall, completely hairless as far as she could see. He wore a shiny gray-blue uniform and his voice as he barked at her was extremely deep, beyond the ordinary human range, with strange overtones in it that made her stomach clutch. Fear gripped her through the belly. She had to do the easercises Luciente had taught her, she had to become conscious of her breathing and relax. “Who are you? Remain still. Answer correctly.”

“My name is Connie and I’m time traveling. I guess you were listening to us?”

“There is no such thing as time travel. You will be scanned. And
you
will be sealed in here again,” the man said to Gildina. “We’ll deal with you later. She’s a dud, but you talked with her for one hour.”

Gildina began to blubber. “Well, how could she get in here if you didn’t let her? I thought it was a special project. Everybody before the great split, they were all duds and woolies. Everybody knows that! How could she get in if you didn’t let her in?”

“That’s not your problem. You’re for the organ bank now,” he said with savage glee in his strange, artificially deep voice. “You, come.” His hand bruised Connie’s arm, biting in.

“I can only stay here through her. Gildina has a special mental power, even if she doesn’t know it.”

“Incorrect. She was born a dud. She’s just a built-up contracty. All duds have brain deficiencies from protein scarcity in fetus and early childhood. Their IRP’s are negative forty to negative fifteen. Her psych scan tests show negative twenty-five. She has no more mental capacity than a genetically improved ape.”

“She’s still receptive. I guess you don’t measure that! I homed in on her. Break my contact with her and I disappear.” It was wonderful to feel so confident facing a sort of cop. That’s what he was, supercop, with a weapons belt on his waist and one hand modified into a weapon-tool itself.

“When we get done playing with you, you will wish you could disappear. And then you will.” A grin of bright enamel teeth, whiter than scrubbed bathroom tiles. “She’s just a chica, exactly like you look to be. Cosmetically fixed for sex use. Like you find in any knockshop.”

“How would you know?” Gildina drew herself up in fussy, impotent fury. “What would you do in a knockshop? You don’t even have the equipment.”

“No appendix either.” The guard grinned his mirthless flashing white smile. “That’s why we don’t need many of you useless cunts now-on. Nothing inessential. Pure, functional, reliable. We embody the ideal. We can be destroyed—not by you duds—but never verted, never deflected, never distracted. None of us has ever been disloyal to the multi that owns us.”

Connie asked, “What’s a multi?”

He looked shocked now, serious. “The multi is everything.”

“What does ‘multi’ stand for?”

“For what is,” he said hollowly.

“Like states, countries?”

“That was before,” Gildina said. “Multis own everybody—”

“Was irrational,” the guard said. “Overlapping jurisdictions. Now we all belong to a corporate body. Multis. Like that contracty soon to be dismantled into the organ bank, I belong to Chase-World-TT. The multi that owns us.” He bowed his head briefly. Then his head jerked upright, his eyes narrowed. “Why are you not afraid?”

She was trying to work her arm loose without success. His metal grip dug into her skin. “How do you know I’m not scared?”

“My sensing devices monitor your outputs. I reg adrenaline but no sympathetic nervous system involvement. You feel anger but not fear?” The hand squeezed harder. “A dud could not react so, after coring and behavior mod. You have no monitor implant. Are you on a drug I cannot scan? Not acetylcholine. Something is wrong. You look me in the eyes, unlike a fem. All duds are brain damaged and modded. Therefore you’re only disguised as a dud!” His other hand groped toward his belt.

She decided she’d better vanish. Shutting her eyes, she let go of Gildina and tried to shove off. But his grip still ate into her arm. Come on, come on! She pushed with her mind, pushed against the metal grip. She fixed her mind on her own bed—that she should ever call a hospital bed her own! She thrust herself roughly back, and the grip began to fade.

Dizzy, sweating from every pore, she lay on her back in bed. Sybil, Tina, and Valente were leaning over her. Her arm hurt. Her head ached horribly. She was being punished for the anger she had felt; that thing in her head was punishing her with sharp pain and spurts of dulling drug. She felt her head was going to break open like a coconut struck with a hammer. She could feel the line where her skull was about to split.

She would not answer them, but seeing she was conscious, Valente left. She winked at Sybil and Tina then, who stared at
her, puzzled but relieved. Connie had to lie back, breathe deeply, relax herself. So that was the other world that might come to be. That was Luciente’s war, and she was enlisted in it.

Connie was an object. She went where placed and stayed there. She caught the phrase “passive aggressive” from Acker to his girlfriend Miss Moynihan. Exactly, she thought. You got it, Waggle-Beard—now run with it. She would not get up until gotten up. She ate only if fed. She sat in a chair when placed there and got up when hauled up.

Although she was proud of time traveling on her own, she was afraid to try again. She did not want to end up in that other future. All the time the drug leaking into her head was clogging her, slowing her, and whenever she got angry, her head turned her off. Something hurt in her then; a dreadful anxiety out of nowhere beset her with a small seizure and she had to remain still. Covertly she watched the ward and learned what she could about the hospital.

She felt distanced from her own life, as if it had ended with the implantation of the dialytrode. She could not resume her life, Therefore Connie was no more. Yet she lived on. Detached, wakeful, brooding inside the heaviness of the drug, she kept still. She had given up smoking. For the first time in her life she stopped smoking. The craving for a cigarette was a left-over itch from being Connie. At least it kicked up sand on the desert of the hours, that old itch.

She could never guess when Dolly would appear. A couple of times her niece promised she was coming and never showed up, and then without warning she sailed in, bright as a parakeet, sharply dressed in something new with her hair that gaudy red, her sunglasses on, her hands wet with the perspiration
of speed. The staff encouraged Dolly to come because Connie talked to her. Dolly slipped her money but would not bring Nita. When she asked about Nita, Dolly’s answers were vague. “She’s doing all right, all right. Just fine.”

Nita’s birthday approached, the fifteenth of October. Connie begged Dolly to buy a present for her. Something preciosa. Pretty little slippers with bunnies, a soft animal with plush fur. Dolly promised, but Connie had no way to pin her down. The next time Dolly flashed in, she said Nita had had a lovely birthday. Mamá had given her a party with a cake with candles and ice cream. So Carmel still had Nita.

Connie’s tongue spoke before she could stop herself. “Dolly, it’s you who needs Nita. Sure, your mamá takes good care. But you need her with you. Without her, you don’t love yourself. You use yourself like a rag to wipe up the streets. You turn your body to money, and the money to the buzzing of death in your head.”

“I’m doing fine, Connie, real fine. Listen, Daddy and Adele say they’re coming to see you. How about that?”