“When do the rest of you want to get the implants?” said the technician.
“Implants?” Morgan said.
“Control chips. That’s why your … the … you know,
he”—
he means Blue—“can access the system. We activated the locator chip they put in at the Atrium.”
Another conversation with the grey man, Morgan furious, Mr. Grey calm.
“How do you think we followed Blue here so fast?” he said. “Blue’s security is at stake. Really, the whole lot of you should have them. Then we can back off on the surveillance a little.”
“Not me. And I think Blue should have a choice, just like the rest of us.”
“Blue is not a citizen. The law is ambiguous.”
“Blue is a person who deserves respect. You all have the contempt of authority. That has to change.”
“Hey, I didn’t order the chip. And there are thousands, tens of thousands, of people using them to activate their smarthouses and virch. You people wouldn’t be experimental.”
“Those people don’t care if Big Brother can track their every move. I do. And I care on Blue’s behalf.”
“You need them to use the house system.”
“We can use an external chip and you know it.”
“Fine. I’ll tell the techs. You call a house meeting, and we’ll ask the others.”
“Incl—”
“Including Blue. Yes.”
So they do. Blue chose an external chip, as did Jakob, Russ, John, and Morgan. Delany chose an implant. “Where do I go, most of the time? And besides, I’m pretty easy to catch up with even if I did run away.”
“What’s wrong with you today?” Morgan said to Jakob, who was unfocusedly meandering around the kitchen.
“I drinks a bit,”
sang Jakob dreamily. He was washing his hands, and he raised one dripping and stared through the gleaming falling drops.
“Are you stoned?” she said sharply, forgetting the surveillance.
“Always, my dear Azalea Trailmaiden,” Jakob said in his bad imitation of a Southern-U.S. drawl. “This glittering world is unbearable otherly. And so the glitter meets the glitter.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit foolish under the circumstances?”
Jakob sharpened slightly, though he was still swaying slightly as he focused on her. “My dear landlady and friend,” he said, “if I cared a tinker’s damn about CSIS, that would be true. They know all about me. I’m a registered addict. I buy my stuff from the government lab.
“It’s the law, you know,” he added mockingly.
Morgan knew that. Detox facilities, especially for the new chemistry, were too expensive. Cutbacks over a decade ago had eliminated them completely except on a user-pay basis for the rich and connected. Instead, the courts ordered the health care system to license addicts and they were given theoretically nonfatal, non-addictive versions of the street chemistry.
“You should have told me,” Morgan said irritably.
“Chile, you
are
in a pet!” cried Jakob gaily, but he was fishing in his pockets and finally found a creased skin-tab, which he pressed to the inside of his elbow. “Evens me up,” he said. “Give me a minute.” Morgan sat down at the table, shaking her head, but indeed, in less than a minute, Jakob steadied and his gaze sharpened.
“I didn’t think you were a fundy,” he said.
“It’s not that.” Morgan said. “I just find this whole situation so perilous, and I’d like to know what the variables are. I wouldn’t have hassled you if I’d known you were licensed, but if I’d known, it might have made a difference somehow.”
“How?”
Morgan shook her head and grinned. “I can’t think of a single concrete reason—except if the press ever gets hold of this. Or John—now he has a streak of fundy a mile wide. I didn’t believe you at first—he seems so interesting. Well, he
is
interesting—but so conservative.”
“Where did you get him from?”
“A friend of his heard about the house, he said. I don’t quite know. He had pretty good references.”
“References?” Jakob laughed out loud.
“Yeah, honeylamb,
references
. Like from a financial institution, saying he could pay his rent? You know, rent?”
“Hey, I paid you!” Jakob said in mock hurt. Morgan laughed, but then turned her head back to the serious side of the conversation. “Look, sweetie, we had people in the hospital who had been on the program for too long. That stuff isn’t as harmless as they say it is. It grows stuff in you. You get weird. We saw some personality changes you wouldn’t believe, real scary stuff … .”
“Yeah,” said Jakob, “I know. But detox on your own is a bugger. I’ve tried a couple of times. Life’s a bit difficult for a dancer with muscle spasms and weakness.”
“Yeah, yeah, but there’s chem for that too. They say.”
“Other thing is, honeylamb, that I can’t imagine having to take the world straight up.”
“Sweetie, you don’t take
anything
straight!” It was an old joke, and a feeble line, and she grimaced an apology.
He shook his head. “I’m serious, girl. Things are mean in this world. When I was a kid, I was taught that mean wasn’t the default value, but it ain’t like that now, no-how. There’s too high a signal-to-noise ratio in the world for a dancing fag with dark skin and a belief in fairness. No, I
didn’t
say a belief in fairies!”
She laughed. “Badum-bum. So where
did
you come from, Southern belle? And why do you act broken when you’re smart, pretty, talented, and your dance vids sell?”
Jakob grinned. “You mean, like, get over it, bitch?”
“Not really. Just curious.”
“I trusted the wrong people when I was young. It was stupid. I lost faith in myself. That was stupider. And whatever I do, I can’t seem to get it back. For that, I blame society.” The last was a joke, and Morgan dutifully smiled, but she was not satisfied.
“How come you were so stoned today? I never saw you like that before.”
“I had a long night in the studio. I finished a vid and sent it out on the web. There’s always a reaction. I go down. It was get twice as stoned or kill myself. I figured stoned was less messy.”
“Goodness,” said Morgan reflexively, then snorted at the word. “Listen, you still at risk?”
“Honey, I’m
never
‘at risk’,” said Jakob. “I’m just more or less stupid. Never mind what I say when I’m stoned, or when I’ve just finished a dance, or when I’m between lovers.”
“That’d be about all the time, from what you say.”
“Honey, you got it.”
“Nevertheless, I don’t wanna have to clean out my attic if you off yourself.”
“Trust me, honey. If I ever
really
wanna do that, I’ll warn you and you can talk me out of it. ’Kay?”
“Fine. But if you have any other little secrets that might affect the gestalt around here, I’d appreciate if you’d tell me.”
“I don’t floss?”
“Any big secrets. I’m serious, you.”
“No more secrets, aside from the existential,” said Jakob, and Morgan went up to her new house terminal and called up his new vid.
It was tagged with the working title
Slow Glass:
an adagio suite danced to Rachmaninoff’s
Vespers
. By keeping to a glacially grave pace that was at times dreamy, at times sensual and at times agonizing, he had created a vocabulary of hesitation and, ultimately, repression that she hadn’t seen attempted since Baryshnikov’s beautiful riff on dissident music in that terrible old movie. And, Morgan thought, Jakob’s dance was better.
At first it seemed he had added little to the almost documentary quality of the fixed-viewpoint vid, but as the suite went on, she saw from the start a constant subtle transformation had been taking place, shifting from complete color replacements at the start to simpler and simpler light effects, until by the end the only alteration seemed to be the solarizing of the golden highlights the spotlights struck from his skin. Only watching it again did she see the rhythms and counterrhythms in the movement of the light, rhythms whose increasing dissidence created mounting subliminal unease and culminated in a sense of claustrophobic imprisonment.
After she watched it a third time, she went to ask Jakob if she could sit in on some of his studio time.
“Sure, chile,” he said in the phony drawl. “You-all been watchin’ vid-
ay
-oh?”
“Yeah. Why vid, anyway? Why not virch?”
He looked at her campily.
“Come on, I’m serious,” she insisted. “On vid it was fabulous, but in person it would have been—devastating. With virtual, you could pull people in so much further.”
“At first the problem was the cost to rig virch into this house’s archaic system,” Jakob said, “but your sweet little Grey guy took care of that. But that was just an excuse so people wouldn’t pry. These days it’s better to be flippant than idealistic …”
“Surprise. So your real reason …?”
“Well … there’s the little matter of social bandwidth.”
“Say what?”
“Okay, ten years ago virtual was everybody’s darling, wasn’t it? Media big. Everybody said it was the next big thing. Radio. TV. Different engine, so to speak. Internet. And now—
ta-DA!
—virtual reality springs us into the twenty-first century. But did it?”
She tipped her head to watch him. He was more still—and more focussed—than she had ever seen him.
This is where he really lives
, she thought.
Why doesn’t he spend more time here?
“Rhetorical, I assume,” she said.
“Yep. Fact is, economic slowdown, New Economy, whatever you call it: not enough people can afford virch. Those who can, by and large can’t create with it. That old fart Spielberg—a joke. And look at Gilbert Coffee or Scattered Norms. Couple of worldclass failures there. I decided that my stuff had to be accessible even to people with no more bandwidth than full-motion video. Twenty-year-old tech had to be able to play it. And not just real bandwidth, but some kinda social capability. The simple ability to relate. And it works. People net me in Nepal, for crying out loud. Hong Kong and Tibet. African splinter states. Ulan Bator, even: yak country.”
“You should be better known here too,” said Morgan.
“So. That means you thought it was okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “More than okay.” She didn’t tell him that the dance had made her cry, and though she had shaken the mood away quickly, she had felt something for a moment. She wasn’t sure she was ready to feel more—but she
had
asked him for permission to watch. That analytical self she could not repress thought:
Maybe there’s hope for me after all.
“Ulan Bator,” said the Boy Wonder scornfully to Mr. Grey, but later that day, when the grey man was leaving for lunch, he saw Rahim at a courtyard table with a young man, both of them bent intently over a hand terminal. Coming up behind them, he saw that they were netting Jakob Ngogaba’s
Slow Glass
vid. McKenzie had himself watched it only moments before.
“Good, isn’t it?” he said, and Rahim started, but his friend, a tall willowy young man with the most perfect light-brown skin the grey man had ever seen, looked up excitedly.
“It’s wonderful!” he said. “The vocabulary is astonishingly controlled. I’d love to ask him about—”
“Don’t get too carried away,” said Rahim, and didn’t introduce them. The grey man walked away thinking—grinning as he heard his own catty thought—
there’s
a new interpretation for Rahim’s perfect suits. He almost laughed aloud realizing how horrified Rahim would be if he heard such a suggestion. The lad must be a relative: Rahim had a huge family.
Despite how good she looked to the rest of them, and despite her successful bluff of the CSIS men, Morgan knew she was on shaky ground. Some initial premise was wrong. She knew that, yet felt she had had no choice but to believe in her past. The myths of her childhood, her family, were not so pernicious nor so false as some, and she couldn’t find the worm which in the night of soul’s darkness had lodged in the heart without unraveling the only images she had of her dead parents.
She was not ready to do that, not ready to be left without them completely, body
and
soul.
This inability to allow honesty to remove the last supports from a shaky past is the weakness that becomes depression. Morgan knew it. She knew it. She just could not allow the knowledge to surface. The old poem says “the energy needed to live / alone is so great,” but it is not living that takes the energy, but suppressing life. Why Jakob’s adagio dance left him sweating and the watcher exhausted with repression.
I have no choice
, thought Morgan whenever she got this far.
I must survive, and I don’t know any other way
.
Precious little justification, but all I have.
Russ and Morgan were peeling potatoes. Russ wore his silk shirt, sarong. His hands were comely and capable among the vegetables. The muscles of his shoulders were outlined by the shirt. Morgan thought,
for a bunch of asocial misfits, we are actually quite a houseful of attractive people. Even I could think I am attractive sometimes.
She chuckled. Blue, who seemed to have become hypnotized by the garlic press, looked up.