In the Court of the Yellow King (10 page)

That was where the script ended.

Kathryn stood under the hot stage lights, glaring at the thing floating before her. It seemed diminished somehow, as if wilted by her refusal. She heard rustling and other little sounds in the darkness, and her attention shifted to the great, empty hall beyond the orchestra pit.

The theater was filled to capacity. Not a seat remained empty. As she stared, the applause began, at first sparse, then rising to a consuming thunder. People rose to their feet and began to shout. When she looked back toward the King, he was gone. Only the unmasked people of Hastur — these actors — surrounded her, radiating approval.

Her children — Jayda Rivera, Les Perrin, and Kenton Peach — came to her, smiling, and the two men took her arms, evidently to escort her offstage. But no; at the far end, on a dais, there was a throne. The original throne of Hastur, first occupied by King Aldones, before the beginning of time.
Not one of Broach’s
sets.
They led her to the throne and knelt as she ascended the dais and took her rightful place.

The child appeared and stood before her, its big blue eyes gazing at her, inquisitive, appraising. The eyes turned cold and black, mimicking those of the King in Yellow. Kathryn heard a series of metallic
snaps
, and a second later realized that manacles had closed around her wrists and ankles, binding her in the throne.

“What is this?”

She heard a clatter behind her and smelled something thick and pungent. From the shadows offstage, actors were carrying bundles of wood and piling them on the dais beneath and around the throne.

My god,
they were going to b
urn her.

“No,” she whispered to the child. “What are you doing? Why?”

The small creature laid one finger beside its nose and said, “Grandmother. Did you think to be human still?”

Jayda appeared, carrying a lit torch, her eyes reflecting the flames until they burned pure gold. From the painted stage backdrop, Kathryn detected movement, and — as in her dream — saw a smoking silhouette with glowing eyes drifting through an endless, star-filled sky.

“When all is done, Byakhee will feed,” Jayda said.

The child pointed to a blood red star above the Lake of Hali. “Adebaran.”

She could see Carcosa behind the rising moon, and as Jayda dropped the torch and flames began to rise around her, catching her skirt and enveloping her sleeves, she saw the distant spires glowing gold.

Before her screams became the only existing sound, she heard the child addressing the audience.

“This ends the story of
The King in
Yellow
, a tragedy told in fire and verse.”

The child danced its way off stage, while Kathryn and Carcosa burned together.

She awoke to a pair of blurry figures leaning over her and discovered she could not move. Something covered her face, something with slits for her eyes that barely permitted her to see out.

“Stay still. We just want to help you,” a young male voice said.

Paramedics.

“We need to try to get that off her face.”

“What is it?”

“Looks like some kind of mask.”

“No!” she cried, her voice muffled. “Don’t take it off.”

“What did she do?” another voice asked.

“She burned herself.”

“Oh, my god.”

“It’s bonded to her skin,” the second voice said. “We can’t remove it here.”

“Look at that pattern on her chest. Why is it
yellow
?”

“Who knows? Let’s get her in the ambulance.”

Kathryn closed her eyes. She felt no pain, felt
nothing
. As long as she wore the mask, she would never have to face the King again.

“How bad is it?” the first voice said.

“Bad. No one will ever recognize her.”

Ever.

And so, at last, Kathryn and Cassilda were free.

e loved the freedom most of all, a sense of liberation he couldn’t equate with anything in his life prior to the game. The game had an elaborate plotline that was admirably constructed, giving one the feel of an interactive movie or novel, introducing an array of fascinating comrades and enemies, sending the player on a seemingly endless string of exciting and challenging mini missions. And yet, in navigating around the virtual facsimile of the city of Punktown – in any variety of vehicles or on foot – Giff had discovered that he actually preferred random and directionless exploration to the confines of the plot, however sprawling that storyline was. He had strayed from his latest mini-mission several weeks ago, and hadn’t returned to the storyline’s path since. He wondered now if he ever would.

Giff had been introduced to the game
Grand Theft Hovercar
by Donny, a much younger coworker in the same department at Fukuda Bioforms. The two men, both of them born here on the planet Oasis as the descendants of colonists from Earth, worked in the “love organs” division, managing and shipping out inventory. Love organs were bioengineered pets that functioned as living sex toys, all but mindless and hence always willing to accommodate their owners. There were numerous varieties: some like a phallus, others with openings like a vagina or anus, others with a phallus on one end and orifice on the other, and in every skin tone from Kalian gray to Sinanese blue. Love organs could go a long time without being injected with sustenance, but not indefinitely, so Giff and Donny and the other worker in their area, Beau, had to be sure the inventory shipped out promptly. No customer wanted to open a cheerily colorful plastic box to find a rotting love organ inside.

When he had first started at Fukuda Bioforms Giff had thought the work might be fun, because of the whimsical products he dealt with, but like all the jobs he had worked at over nearly four decades it had proved tedious, dispiriting, and financially inadequate.

The day Donny first told him about
Grand The
ft Hovercar
, they had been busy in the early morning preparing several pallets for the robot lift to bring down to the shipping dock. The men had stacked the boxes – filled with patiently inert love organs – on the pallets themselves, rather than have the robot palletize them, more out of boredom than anything else. But later there was a long lull in filling new orders and investigating late orders, all the inventory reconciled for the time being, and so they had stood around talking while Beau slipped away early to the company gym.

“I’ve played a few games set in a VR Punktown before,” Giff told the enthusiastic young man, who had just related how caught up he was in this new game. “VR Miniosis and some Earth cities, too. Of course, that’s over ten years ago.”

“Oh come on, ten years ago... you should see
this
game! Like, you can pick up a candy wrapper off the ground... smooth it out and read the small print. You can
fee
l
the wrinkles in the plastic. You can
smell
the chocolate that was inside.”

“So,” Giff lowered his voice, smiling, lest any female coworkers nearby should overhear them, “the prosties... pretty real, huh?”

“Realer than real! But not just AI prosties; you can have sex with the avatars of other players, and man... ” Donny trailed off, grinning, his eyes gleaming feverishly. “But I’ll get to that, I’ll get to that. I want to tell you about the
world
, how
huge
it is. Bigger than any VR Punktown before. I mean, not only does it have every single location in Punktown right down to the most obscure utility chute in Subtown... the game lets players map their own apartments and add them to the game, so anyone can go inside. If the person doesn’t want to let you into their apartment, though, maybe you can find a way to break inside. I added my apartment, but I don’t live there; I hacked my way into a beautiful apartment in Beaumonde Square, when the owner was out, and I changed the code on his door so he can’t get back inside.” Donny laughed wildly. “And there are thousands and thousands of players in Punktown, so the places you can go... it’s like infinite in possibilities.”

Giff was very intrigued by that line. Infinite in possibilities. A sense of infinite possibilities would be a refreshing thing to experience, wouldn’t it? An intoxicating thing.

That night, in his own little cell-like apartment where he lived alone except for a love organ he had smuggled home from work a few months back, he pasted ultranet interface disks to his temples, connected with the site that produced
G
rand Theft Hovercar
, and paid for a connection to the game.

He connected every evening as soon as he’d had a bite to eat. Sometimes he skipped eating, in his anxiousness to get inside the virtual replica of the city nicknamed Punktown that he lived in. He’d eat something in the game, in some restaurant he couldn’t afford out here. His body would be tricked into feeling fulfilled. Later, before he went to bed for a few hours before another stultifying day at work, he’d throw together a quick snack of junk food.

He liked to wander in a different section of the city each night. One night he might explore the neighborhood he’d grown up in. Staring up at his old apartment building from the sidewalk, he’d almost expect to see younger versions of his mother or father come to the windows and look down at him in turn. He tried to revisit their old flat but found that it hadn’t been mapped and added to the game, though he could stand in the hallway right outside the door.

His father was dead, now, and his mother lived in a retirement community. He had no desire to go to its virtual equivalent. It was depressing enough in reality.

Another night he might venture into a section of the city he would never dare visit in real life, such as Warehouse Way with all its derelict factories and warehouses. In such a place, he would be attacked by AI muggers and mutants but also the avatars of other players, and he had acquired virtual weapons with which to defend himself.

Some hardcore players chose a game mode so immersive that they could even experience the sensation of physical pain in such altercations – though
Grand Theft Hovercar
set a limit on how much pain could be had in this way. Giff’s heart always beat madly and adrenaline flushed through him during any such violent encounter; in the back of his mind lurked the knowledge that occasionally people did die in reality from experiencing death in the ultranet – though only by suffering heart failure or an aneurysm, not via imaginary gunfire or illusory car crashes. He himself chose a setting that permitted him to feel only practical and pleasurable physical sensations. He didn’t care for pain.

Punktown was so vast a city that, though he had lived there fifty-odd years, there were parts of it he had never seen before the game. He might ride a hovertrain on its repulsor rails or a shunt on its overhead cable to some remote area to explore, but more likely he would steal a hovercar, riding low to the ground, or fly high above the streets in a helicar, speeding crazily between the city’s monolithic towers on a network of unseen navigation beams while other vehicles honked at him in alarm.

In real life he’d never owned a helicar. Tonight he had stolen a classic Icarus, aqua with chrome trim and big dual fans. But he kept sideswiping other helicars recklessly and scraping along the flanks of buildings, until he finally brought the poor thing down – dented and trailing smoke – on a rooftop landing pad and abandoned it there. Taking the elevator, he descended to street level to continue his meandering, aimless questing on foot.

He would stop to say hello to other people on the sidewalk; humans like himself, or other races who had also colonized Punktown, many far from human. From such brief interactions it was impossible to tell which were AI and which were players like himself. These people might greet him with surprising exuberance and warm smiles, such as one might not so readily encounter on the actual streets of Punktown, surprising Giff and making him feel oddly grateful (though these were probably the AI). He was always ready for the person who spoke rudely, though. That was why he said hello to so many strangers... to flush out such people, and react to them. It was a way to vent frustration after his long day at work.

When he emerged from the building he’d landed the helicar on, he saw a tall and attractive young woman with spiky black hair and glowing blue lipstick strutting past on the sidewalk in click-clacking high heels. In real life he would be too self-conscious of his age and shabby appearance to approach her, but he had designed his game avatar to resemble Marcel Valentin, a popular actor who often played gangsters. Thus, he strode after her and said in Marcel’s tough guy voice, “Hey, sweetness, where you off to in such a hurry?”

The woman stopped and turned to face him, pillow-like blue lips bunched distastefully. “
Ooh
... Marcel Valentin. How original.” Then she twirled away to continue click-clacking along the sidewalk. “Blast off, you sorry wanker.”

Giff figured her for a player, not AI. It was hard to synthesize such pure contempt. Into his hand popped a combat knife, and he skipped after the strutting woman to punch the blade once, all the way, into her lower back.

She fell forward onto the sidewalk, crying out shrilly, “Hey!”

Giff bolted, glancing back only once to see that she had rolled onto her side in pooling blood and was lifting her arm to call for the forcers on her tacky gem-encrusted wrist comp. Other pedestrians were reporting the attack on their wrist comps, too. If the avatar didn’t first die from her wound, she’d be taken to a hospital to be healed. If she did die before help came, the player would be signed out of the game and would have to log in again. Ha!

He ducked into an alley, found its far end blocked by a chain link fence. He scrambled up and over it, dropped to the other side in a lot that had once been occupied by a tenement building, since torn down and replaced with heaps of junk and trash as if the structure had exploded into this chaotic rubble. He ducked down close to the stripped and burnt shell of a hovercar, near the center of the lot, and waited as he heard sirens approach. He huddled so close to the car’s husk he could smell its scorched surface. Eventually, a black helicar floated by above, sweeping its spotlights below, probably sweeping invisible scanner beams as well, but they did it half-heartedly because most of the forcers in the game were AI, and even in real life forcers would be lackadaisical due to the sheer volume of crime in Punktown.

The black helicar drifted away soon enough, and Giff emerged from cover, continuing to the other side of the empty lot and entering another narrow alleyway, so as to make his way onto a major street again.

There was a pale yellow glow in this tight alley, radiating onto one wall from the wall opposite, almost like light from a curtained window, but there was no window in the alley. As he drew nearer, Giff saw it was graffiti, which was by no means remarkable in Punktown, sprayed in luminous yellow paint. Some type of glyph, which he assumed must be the identifying symbol for a gang... from the looks of it, a gang of beings from one of the other planets or dimensions who had made this gigantic metropolis their home.

Yet as common as graffiti was, Giff still found himself stopping to gaze at the symbol, as if its crooked ends had snagged his eyes like fishhooks. It was as he was staring at the glyph that a voice came to him from a heap of trash bags piled against the wall directly below the symbol.

The voice, sounding like something between croak and regurgitation, said, “You’ve found the Yellow Sign.”

Startled, Giff looked down to see those weren’t a jumble of trash bags, after all, but a bulky figure slumped against the wall, no doubt a homeless person or mutant addled by drugs or drink. A head covered in a floppy wide-brimmed hat lifted, and Giff saw a puffy white face beneath it. He had seen many a grotesque mutant in Punktown, so he didn’t know why this bloated bleached face should unnerve him so, but he immediately turned away from it and plunged out of the alley onto the street, like a drowning man bursting up into the air.