The Pure Cold Light (23 page)

“Okay, I think that’s enough
virtual
for you today,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. I should have a bath, anyway, a real bath before Lyell comes back.”

The next moment she was gone. Angel waited for the hayloft to disappear. When it didn’t, he grew uneasy. He realized that if anything happened to her, he could not get out of the program. He called, “Chikako?” He got to his feet and padded across the dusty boards to the open hay doors.

The view was of a western town, nestled against purple hills beneath dark scudding clouds. There was a windmill spinning slowly to one side. While he watched it, the wooden tower and spinning wheel warped sideways. The legs bent as if the top half were toppling onto its side. Angel took a step back.

The clouds behind the tower bent the same way, and he could distinguish the features of a face poking into relief. A face carved out of non-reality.

“You hear me?” it asked as softly as a breeze. “
Oigame
.”

He did not understand the word, but knew the voice. It was the same one that had spoken to him in ICS-IV.

“Yes.”

“They mean to kill you.”

“They tried and failed.”

“No, it isn’t done. Others continue it.” The face loomed larger. The edges of the “blocks” that made up the virtual world in transition appeared, as though the program were about to transform. The view behind the jutting face looked as if it were being projected on a brick wall. The face stretched the virtual fabric further. Angel stepped back, and it snaked in through the hayloft door.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“You,” it echoed.

 
He wished that he had closed the doors to the loft, as if that could have kept the head out. A pressure like that thrown off by Chikako’s dominatrix persona encapsulated him. The room contracted toward him from all sides, the illusive world collapsing all around the face. Unperturbed, it asked, “Who is on your side? Who can be trusted?”

“This woman with me, Chikako Peat. And Lyell, Thomasina Lyell. She’s—I don’t know what she is. Listen, you’ve got to back away or you’re going to destroy me.”

“For just one moment, let me in,
por favor
,” it begged.

He tried to relax, to deny the fragmenting false world spinning like a disk behind the head. He dared to close his eyes, relinquishing control. Nausea thrust into his throat. The room ripped loose from its moorings, snaring him as it collapsed down to a single point like the universe regressing through all of time in a split second. He spun into the face, dropping between bright pixels toward a wine-dark ocean that he could never reach in a million years of falling. “Come back,” called the voice above him.

Invisible hands slid over him again, tearing at him. They wanted to rip him apart.

“Angel! Angel!” called the Sirens from the rocks below. The dizzy endless fall stopped.

He sat on the floor of a bare gray room. Chikako Peat, naked and drenched with perspiration, knelt on top of him, cradling his head, holding the
virtual
hood in her hand. Terror twisted her features.

“It’s really you?” he asked, and she nodded, just as she might have done in false reality. He could not keep from scanning the room behind her for the invasive face. For the moment he could distinguish reality only in terms of expectation and the appearance of certain body parts.

Some aspect of that other, intruding persona had remigrated with him. He could almost see it—a swimmer under the surface, a shadow broken by the ripples in his consciousness. When he focused on Chikako, the swimmer sounded for a moment. Surreptitiously, it slipped into control.

His hand reached up to touch the beads of sweat on her cheek. His fingers curled around her neck, slid into her hair, and he heard himself say her name as if the word ached. He pulled her to him and kissed her. He had no idea where his actions were leading—he was the teacher in the background again, distanced by a program that steered itself. His body obeyed new instructions, and arousal flooded through him like a new injection. Chikako, for her part, reacted chemically, if no less instinctively. “Let’s get you out of the suit first,” she said.

***

She made love to him a second time in a green sunken tub. The bathroom alone was as large as the
virtual
room. Chikako explained that the bathroom represented reality’s last hold on virtual sex; there were all sorts of water sports in virtual reality but none that compensated by actually making anyone clean.

Mallee walked in on them at one point, set down a covered tray, and walked out again without a word, just a penetrating look at Angel. Peat seemed not to notice her presence. He would have been embarrassed except that he was too bound up in his own continued arousal.

He soaped and kneaded her breasts while she rode him, and she leaned down and licked salty sweat from his shoulder above the wound that he had quite forgotten. The shoulder was a little swollen, and warm to the touch. They were careful to keep the bandage out of the sudsy water, but that hardly restricted their passion. They moved together with feral fluidity. He sat forward on a submerged ledge, and wrapped his arms up around her back; she hooked her ankles carefully over his shoulders. The water buoyed her. He concentrated on her body and avoided looking into the bathwater around her, where the swimmer in his mind might appear, bending reality again, proving this experience to be another mirage, another layer of deception. He wondered if he could ever entirely trust reality again.

She had, he saw, a curious tattoo on her left buttock—a small block of six straight and broken lines. He wished to ask her about it but didn’t want to stop moving.

Finally, he came, in one great, agonized shudder that made him cry out. Afterward Chikako clung tightly to him, letting him shrink inside her before she eased off. He lay back with his head resting on the lip of the tub, almost in a light doze, the fearsome alterego forgotten for the moment. He was barely aware of her leaning over the edge of the tub, surprised when her fingers slipped around his mouth with something slick and cold. He jerked away instinctively, opened his eyes to find her offering him a green chunk of melon. He let her feed it to him. The juice dripped over his chin.

Next she came up with an antique shaving mug and a brush. He stared at it, clearly unaware of what it was, and she laughed.

“It extends across the board, doesn’t it, this memory block of yours,” she said. “Or maybe you only used electric razors in your previous incarnations.” After swirling the brush in the mug, she raised it, covered with thick foam, and began to soap his jaw. Quite carelessly, she asked, “What happened to you after I left
virtual
?”

He recalled the sound of the wind. “Someone else came in.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. It said it was me.”

They traded a look, trust passing in motes between them. She broke the tableau to finish lathering him. “Something more happened. You’re different now.”

“I am. That is, I was.”

“It’s gone, you mean.”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t know what it was while it was happening. When I looked at you there was nothing else in the world. After all that fantasy, you were real.”

She smiled edgily. The direction he was headed made her nervous. “You’re the most dangerous kind of customer,” she said, “the one looking for the real thing. It’s fantasies we sell here, remember.” She reached for the razor. “Don’t hand me any future dreams, okay? You can’t even tell me who you’ll turn out to be. Now, what else happened?”

He shook his head. “The image collapsed and I was falling into a kind of void.”

“What about now? Do you still sense it there?”

He tensed. In her relentless pursuit of the face behind the mask, she had no idea what she was asking of him. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know, I have to … to look.”

His eyelids fluttered closed. He waited, silencing the fear that welled up like the roar of blood in his ears. When nothing came, he pushed a little to recall his life. A new smell blossomed: corruption, something rotten right under his nose. The smell opened up his vision: he saw a narrow alley behind a cantina kitchen, discarded food decaying in mulching bins all around him. It was the first glimpse he’d ever had of his life before the Moon.

The memory slammed shut, and he was tilting off-balance, the chasm yawning below.

Chikako’s weight doubled, tripled. She spread out, smothering his face. She would drown him! He fought to fling her off, kicking and splashing wildly.

“
Angel
!” she shouted.

He opened his eyes.

Chikako sat naked upon the lip of the tub, nowhere near him. Foam like a milky tear slid down the side of the brown shaving mug; it clung desperately to the bottom, then plunged into the bathwater where it spread out in rings.

She eased back into the tub. “They really did a job on you, darling,” she said.

He pressed his face to her breasts and made himself breathe slowly, calmly, banishing all but the here and now, inhaling the clean and wonderful smell of her. The alley’s stench lingered somewhere across the room. “I just remembered a place,” he confided. “I don’t know where it was, or what exactly, but I know it was from my life before. Who did the job on me, what did you mean?”

“ScumberCorp, Angel.” She clinked the mug against the crab unit. “
This
is no accident. You’ve been programmed. They’ve used this to curtail your memory. Every time you try to access it, the
crab
overrides you.

“I just watched the numbers racing on this little panel on the side while you were thrashing around. You triggered it.
Virtual
must have found a chink in the armor, until the processor recovered and shut it out. Medical technology misapplied.”

“They don’t
want
me to remember who I am?”

“Put simply.”

“Then, why did they ask me all the time to try? Why?”

***

She stared at the brush in her hand. It was becoming kaleidoscopic, courtesy of the
ibogaine
. This was not the time for serious talk.
Ibogaine
augmented spontaneity, rebelled against linearity. She was losing her grip on the conversation. “I should shave you so we can eat.”

“Chikako?
Please
.”

“They were testing you. They had to make certain your programming took. If you remember suddenly now, there’s nothing they can do about it. Then again, maybe this thing has an alarm in it, to signal them if that happens.” She set down the mug and brush. She was thinking,
Maybe it detonates automatically
. She kept this to herself. The conversation was making her queasy. “Whatever it is, they don’t want you coming to it on your own.”

“Why?”

“That,” she replied edgily, “is the big secret. We can’t get the answer without Thomasina, so we should wait till she gets back. I predict this thing”— she tapped his head —“comes off when it happens.”
 

He shook his head. “No. The voice that speaks to me—I know it’s not me, despite what it says.”

He tried to get up but she held him down with surprising strength. “Okay, Joan of Arc. It’s something else. Let Thomasina find out. She’ll be back when she has answers. For now …” She twirled a gold safety razor. “Don’t move.” Slipping in close, she began carefully to shave him. The foamy stubble had a pearlescent sheen to it. “I believe,” she said softly, “when she gets back, the heat will be turned way up on all of us. Maybe there won’t be any more time for you and me alone. When you’re hungry, Angel, you should eat. And you’re a cornucopia. I know you don’t know what that is, either, but you don’t need to.” Smiling, she set down the razor, then turned and kissed him hard. Underwater, anatomies shifted . Chikako sat back with a foamy mustache of her own and laughed. “I’m absolutely famished. That’s a way I know I’m alive.”

***

Nebergall rolled in late. He drove his chair through the hallway of his apartment like an Indy 500 racer from out of his childhood. He had been only eleven the last year the race was held, and he had witnessed the end of an era. His parents had brought him all the way from Lexington because they thought it was important. In one sense it was—it was the strongest memory he retained of what it had been like to walk on his own two feet.

After banging along one wall, he suddenly swung across and clipped the opposite corner. A neighbor, Mrs. Rhozdetsvensky, the clairvoyant, looked out into the hall.

“You are all right, Mr. Neighbor-gall?”

“Jes’ a li’l inebriated, darlin’. Don’t fret it.” He laughed to himself. Mrs. Rhozdetsvensky claimed to have seen him in a future where he was no longer out of work. She had seen him selling fruit-flavored water ice.

He drove up to and unlocked his door, wheeled around to give her a wide smile the way Hopalong Cassidy might have done while his horse reared back and he waved his hat, then zoomed inside in reverse.

Thomasina Lyell lay stretched out on his unmade bed. A cat slept against her hip. A bath towel almost covered her.

“Tommie,” he said. He shook her arm. “Your wake-up call’s here.”

She stretched. “I’m already awake due to some seismic activity out in the foyer.”

“You mean me.”

“Did you know there’s moss growing on the north side of your bathroom?”

“You mean that old saw’s for real?” He laughed and belched.

She winced at the smell of his breath. “I wish corsairs took a tiny bit more care with their appearance. Everyone you ever introduced me to had bad skin, greasy hair, green teeth, or body odor—usually in combination. By the way, you’re drunk, Nebergall.”

He nodded solemnly at her pronouncement. “If I’m not, then I wasted a ton of pub time. Had to change the pee-pee bottle twice. What a pain. People don’t appreciate.”

“Why did you get drunk? I need you sober.”

“Hell, I’m clearheaded enough. But I had to wait, same as you, ’cept I was outside in the heat. I didn’t get to nap like some tired-out old
pijin
.”

“I changed your pillowcases, too.”

“You’re too good to me, Tommie.”

“That’s true, and I expect a reward.”