Tea From an Empty Cup (14 page)

She turned to say something to the kid but he was gone. Down at the end of the street, where it opened onto the defunct road, she could see a burning clump of wreckage and a lot of foot traffic, not all of it human, or even humanoid. She moved down the alley, willing herself to stroll casually, as if she did this all the time. A little ways from the corner, some movement on her right caught her eye. She dared a quick glance and then jumped, startled.

Across the street, her reflection in the grimy, streaked store window stared back at her. Or rather, Tom’s reflection. She didn’t think she would ever get used to seeing someone else’s reflection. Even the expression on the face was all wrong; it didn’t look anywhere near as frightened as she actually felt.

Reflection? She moved one hand toward her lapel. In the filthy glass, one hand also moved toward the lapel except that it didn’t do it quite at the same moment. It wasn’t much of a delay. Less than a second. Less than half a second, less than half a half a second, and probably even less than that. Yes, she was very sure it was less than a mere one-sixteenth of one second. In the outside world where she would have much preferred to be at the moment, a delay so minuscule would have gone completely unnoticed. But she was in here now and something had pumped up her senses to a range several levels of magnitude beyond what should have been possible.
Even in here
, she realized with a minor chill.

She turned to face the glass directly, drew herself up, and made a formal bow. The reflection did exactly the same in the fast glimpse she had as she bent forward. At the lowest point of the bow, she lifted her head very slightly and looked. The image in the window was also sneaking a look, with the difference that the face was grinning broadly at her.

Yuki jumped back with a cry. It was as if a giant, cold fist had clutched her stomach. Tom’s reflection laughed and shook its head, moving both hands in front of itself in a negating gesture. Telling her not to be afraid, she supposed, feeling foolish but at the same time, still shaky. Images, she kept telling herself, all images, light dancing on the retina, producing illusions with the help of that unregenerate old collaborator the brain. Easy to say, even easy to think, but it didn’t make certain things any less startling to see before you, even when you knew the mechanics of everything that was going on.

Tom’s reflection was still laughing as it straightened up and walked toward her.

If it walks out of the glass into the street
, Yuki thought,
I’ll drop down dead
.

But the image went only as far as it would have been able to go if it had been a real person standing on the other side of a window. It beckoned to her, the grin turning sheepish. Yuki looked around to see if anyone else was catching this, but she was still alone. Cautiously, she approached the glass, still watching for some sign that the image could burst out of its medium, and stopped a yard away, ready to run.

‘Oh, for cryin’
out
,’ said Tom’s image. ‘What’s your snarl?’

‘Who are you?’ she asked him.

‘Now, who do I look like?’

‘Nobody,’ she snapped.

Tom’s image put a hand over its heart. Or heart area. ‘You cut me with that one, Yuki. You cut me
bad
. And after all we’ve meant to each other.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Tom Iguchi is missing and presumed dead. In here.’

‘But not in
here
, not through the old looking-glass.’ The image gestured behind him. ‘And for that matter, not where you are, either.
You’re
Tom now.’

‘Not really. Everyone who knows him knows I’m not. Who are
you?
’

The image moved an inch or two closer to the glass. ‘It’s me, Yuki. It
is
me, it’s Tom.’

The voice had sobered, the teasing note gone from it. ‘Really?’ she asked, warily.

He nodded. ‘Well, not
really
. But it
is
me.’

Yuki glowered at him. ‘I’ll take a hammer to this thing. Then where will you be?’

‘You don’t have a hammer. The best you can do is a travel icon and a couple of lottery tickets. Listen to me, I don’t have much time here. I’m piggy-backing for the moment and it won’t be long before someone notices the extra energy expenditure isn’t balanced.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ Yuki asked. ‘And where are you?’

‘I don’t know exactly.’

Yuki was exasperated. ‘How can you not know?’

‘I don’t know that, either. But I need your help to get out of here all the same.’

‘But you don’t know where it is. Where
you
are.’

‘No.’

She blew out a breath of mock relief. ‘Okay. I was just checking. For a minute I was afraid that it might make
sense
.’

‘Do you know anything about Old Japan?’ Tom asked her suddenly, all but blurting it out. ‘True Japan, I mean.’

Yuki looked up briefly. The stretch of dark sky above her was completely devoid of stars. Of course. ‘What has
that
got to do with anything?’

‘They’re bringing Japan back. That’s what they
say
they’re doing, anyway.’

She laughed. ‘Who’s “they”? Any relation to “them”?’

Tom’s hands pressed hard against the glass; his palms whitened. ‘I swear, if I could reach you, I’d shake you till your brains rattled, even if you do look like me on a good day.’

Yuki brushed imaginary lint off her shoulder. ‘I’m sure that would help a lot.’

‘Just listen. I have a catalog hidden under the name Shantih Love.’

‘Is that the name of the catalog?’ Yuki asked him.

‘No. It’s one of my avatars in here.’

She laughed again. ‘And what
are
you in here, some kind of Bombay elephant demigod?’

‘It’s the name I had when I was murdered.’

‘You haven’t been murdered. You’re here, with me. Like me and my shadow.’

Tom beckoned to her and she moved closer to the glass. ‘
Listen
, will you? Things got serious. It was just supposed to be a game, that’s all it was ever supposed to be. The tokens, the icons, that was all supposed to be just status crap, like having someone on the door of one of those clubs Ash is always going to –’

‘They have them in here, too,’ Yuki said.

He seemed not to have heard her. ‘– just game stuff, that’s all. Performance art at the
very
most. Flash the icons, claim you’re fast, claim you’re the new buzz and you can show them how to shoot the curl. And they let you, because it’s all true and they’re never gonna let you out. Someone’s gotten to like it there, and it isn’t you.’ He stopped and shrugged. ‘I sold Shantih Love off. I scraped up enough residue so the buyer could get my name and wear it under the Shantih Love form. It got him killed. In here
and
out there.’

Yuki sighed. ‘Are you plundering old scenarios and trying to sell them to cinemas again?’

‘I’m not telling you a scenario, this isn’t cinema. It’s
real
, goddammit.’

‘Big talk for a
reflection
.’

‘
Stop it
. You don’t know. You’re running around in here on high speed and you don’t have the faintest idea of what you’ve flashed into.’

‘Why don’t you tell me, then?’ She crossed her arms – his arms? – and in the glass, she saw Tom start to follow her movement. Then he caught himself and pushed his arms straight down by his sides, looking annoyed.

‘You don’t know how fast you’re going, do you? You’re running real hot, Yuki, and I got to tell you, you can’t do that forever. It ages you. You can age twenty years here in one night. They let you have my appearance because they know you’re full Japanese.
She
sent you in here –’

‘She who?’ asked Yuki.

‘Joy Flower. Who else?’ Tom’s mouth curved down bitterly and she felt her own mouth copy his expression without her willing it, and without her being able to stop it. ‘You want to know all about that, the world’s best kept secret? Yes, I was one of Joy’s Boyz, and yes, I liked it, and yes, she used me. Because I was full Japanese.’

‘Really,’ Yuki said. ‘I thought she used you because you were
male
.’

He laughed. ‘In here, you can get better than
anything
out there. Nobody really cares about sex anymore, Yuki –’

Speak for yourself
, she thought bitterly.

‘– no one cares about ecstasy, drugs, or going to heaven. But everyone –
every-fucking-body-and-soul
– wants god-hood.’

Yuki shook her head slightly, puzzled.

‘Power, dammit.
Power
. Power
to do
. Power
over
. Over ideas, over thoughts, over all living things.’

Yuki waited. ‘And?’ she prompted finally.

‘What do you mean,
and?
’ he fairly shouted. ‘And the sun set slowly in the west. And the Red Death held sway over all. And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat. Except people like you and me, we get –’

In the next moment, Tom was gone and she was staring at a regular-style reflection. Or as regular-style as a reflection in Artificial Reality could be, considering it wasn’t really a reflection of something that wasn’t really there in the first place. Or was it? Maybe reflections were sort-of reflections, subroutines dumbed-clown to the point of the AR version of an autonomic reflex –

She shook her head again. Sometimes thinking was like struggling through a briar patch, getting caught on every little sticker and thorn, and having to disengage each one individually. Curbing her impatience, she stood in front of the glass and tried to will Tom to come back. Could he still see her from where he was now? Or had he not actually left and was just mimicking her movements with an almost supernatural precision?

She moved closer so that her nose would have been pressed against the glass, or nearly so, and looked herself in the eyes. Or looked Tom’s eyes in the eyes. Artificial eyes; after staring into them for almost a minute, she stepped back. The longer she gazed into them, the more lifeless they seemed, as if the humanity were draining out. But draining out of
what?
The reflection? The illusion that was causing the reflection? Or the person observing it – namely, herself?

Maybe she shouldn’t try to know that one if she wanted to remain intact, she thought uneasily.

She became aware, then, that a strange silence had fallen over her, as if all sound had been damped down and obliterated. Someone listening? She looked up.

An enormous chrome flying saucer was hovering above the alley. Yuki’s mouth dropped open. Now she could sense something that she could describe to herself only as the opposite of sound waves, and it was definitely coming from the thing overhead. As she stared at it, a ring of bright lights lit up in a circle around the bottom centerpoint of the saucer. The lights moved separately, sending long cones of light in all directions. Yuki watched, wondering if this was only more Sitty flash or some other traveler’s idea of a tour bus.

The silence seemed to suck hard at her and then it was gone. The saucer was moving on, toward the trafficway, where people were shouting and screaming in delight at the thing’s approach. Some impulse made Yuki trot along under it, pacing it, and one of the spotlights moved with her, lighting the area directly in front of her.

Coming out of the alley, she could see that the UFO was larger than she had thought. The crowd that had gathered, stretching up and down the trafficway as far as the eye could see, spilling onto the beach and into the water, covered nearly as much area on the ground as the saucer did in the air. The chrome hull reflected far fewer people than appeared on the street, however. Was there really that much filler on the street, or were only the elite reflected in a flying saucer hull? If so, what kind of elite did you have to be?

Yuki walked in a slow zigzag, trying to see if the saucer reflected her, too, but she just couldn’t seem to find herself – or Tom’s image, rather – anywhere along the chrome. Maybe the distortion was too extreme for her to see herself. And if she did, would she see Tom signal her, as she had seen him do before? Or did his abrupt disappearance mean that he couldn’t appear safely even as a reflection?

But come on, how safe or unsafe was AR in the first place? What kind of danger could anyone possibly be in? Aside from suffering from racing thoughts –

She concentrated on moving farther into the crowd, making her way through the virtual bodies and trying to keep an eye on the saucer. She had a sense of something about to happen. The atmosphere seemed to thrum with it.

Nice effect – wonder how they do it
, she thought, and then tried to be at least slightly abashed at her own cynicism. Tom used to tell her she was far too cynical to enjoy the illusions of AR even as mere entertainment.

I feel sorry for you cynics
, he would say.
Because cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing
.

Maybe so, Tom, but if you don’t know your
own
price, how can you be sure of your values?
She would always laugh when she said it, so he wouldn’t know how much that price-of-everything-value-of-nothing crack stung her.

There was a sudden roar on the other side of the crowd; a large midnight-blue woman was levitating toward the saucer. No, not levitating – the saucer was pulling her up to it. She spread her arms and shook her overdone mass of white hair joyfully. When she reached the saucer, she passed directly through the chrome and vanished.

Yuki waited, standing perfectly still, for one of the spotlights to fall on her. If they were looking for her, or Tom, or both, then she would make it as easy as possible for them and get it over with.

But no pull came, even though the spotlights swept over her and even paused on her upturned face briefly, not just once but several times. After a bit, she got bored and turned away to try forging a path out of the crowd and on to somewhere else. Wasn’t she supposed to be in Waxx24 anyway? If this was it, it was neither clever nor exciting. She would have to tell Ash that he wasn’t missing anything, that he was better off frequenting the real club. At least there you could buy drinks.