Tea From an Empty Cup (15 page)

And it was as if her thought of Ash had flipped a switch somewhere because suddenly, there he was, just a little over an arm’s length away from her. She knew him immediately, there was no mistaking his appearance. Same old Ash – fancy eyes, a cloud of pale-gold, fairy-tale hair, clothes from one of the Romance designers, a fluffy shirt and satin trousers, soft boots. If you listened closely, you could probably hear hearts breaking all over the Sitty. It was the sort of thing that must have reinforced his vanity, to make him come here looking exactly as he did in –

But of course he looked just as he did out there. The realization was a wordless thump that she could not quite characterize as a shock, and yet felt like more than mere surprise to her. Ash looked like Ash because he
was
out there. He wasn’t in AR with her. He was at the actual, physical club and somehow, so was she. By projection, or something they wouldn’t call projection but probably was. Whoever
they
were.

She moved quickly to stand directly in front of him and understood right away that he couldn’t see her, was totally unaware of her presence. But obviously he could see the saucer – he was standing there and not only gazing up at it but waving both arms over his head, signaling, begging it to take him. Just like a lot of other club-goers, she saw.

So how the hell did this virtual club thing work? Was Waxx24 more of a level than a location in here? And how could she make contact with Ash, was it even possible?

She pulled out the catalog and removed one of the lottery tickets. It had electric pink question marks printed over a background of bright metallic blue, with a gold-flake circle in the center. ‘Tell me how to communicate with someone out there who is visible to me in here.’

The lottery ticket made a throat-clearing noise. ‘Must be in the form of a question,’ a male voice admonished her.

Yuki groaned. ‘How can I contact someone out there visible to me in here?’

There was a brief pause. ‘Touch the gold circle and see what you’ve won!’ said a different and much happier male voice.

She did so and a pink balloon sprang up in front of her like a severely overstuffed jack-in-the-box.

Saw someone you
LIKED?
Want to know
MORE?
Making contact is
SIMPLE, EASY,
and
FUN!!!!
First, signal your choice by placing one hand on your target’s shoulder, just as if you were going to turn her or him around to talk to you! You will see
A VERY SPECIAL EFFECT,
which alerts the
LUCKY TARGET
that she or he has been
CHOSEN BY ONE OF THE ELITE!!!!
There will follow a short wait while your target is prepared for contact, assuming consent has been given (and why wouldn’t it!!!!). You’ll meet your new friend in a
PRIVATE CHAT BOOTH
and what goes on in there is no concern of
ANYONE’S!!!!
We only urge you to observe
SAFE
practices and
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES GIVE ANYONE,
no matter how dreamy or attractive, your
PERSONAL ID CODE
or
YOUR PASSWORD!!!!
Right? Right!!!! Best of luck – and remember, book early and
EXTEND THE RUSH!!!!!

Yuki shook her head.
Wow!!!! Thanks!!!!
She moved closer to Ash and made to touch him on the shoulder.

She couldn’t feel him at all, but it didn’t matter. Evidently she had done it right. A long stream of what looked like a river, or footage of a river, shot out from his shoulder. Ash’s face lit up with a joy Yuki associated only with children or lunatics. Grinning ecstatically, he watched as it circled them once and shot upward to the saucer overhead. He raised his face to it and Yuki was startled to see there were tears in his eyes.
Thank you
, he mouthed, raising his arms like a gospel singer in full voice. Yuki wasn’t sure whether it was the proximity or the fact that Ash was her particular choice, but now she could feel the effect of the levitation ray or whatever it was plucking Ash off the ground and into the air. His dangling feet sailed past her virtual nose and she understood that whatever had ahold of him was highly stimulating in the pleasantest way. Waxx24 certainly looked after its elite custom. They were making sure her lucky chosen friend stayed feeling lucky, chosen, happy, and receptive.

‘Yuck,’ she said aloud, but quietly. Being a prude was, as she had been told again and again by various people, including Ash, not something she should advertise widely. Of course, the fact that she was at odds with everyone else, especially Ash, as to what constituted prudery was always skipped over, so she had given up, accepted the fact that by standards she couldn’t seem to escape or alter she was a raving, flaming prude and left it at that. But now she was going to have to deal with a highly stirred-up Ash, and she could only hope that the sight of Tom’s face, coupled with the revelation that
she
was behind the image would serve as a cold shower for him.

The person behind Ash, a tall, husky black woman in a very old-fashioned gangster-style zoot suit from the last century, looked up at the saucer and tipped her fedora as she, too, began to lift into the air. Yuki looked around; there was no one that she could see near the woman. The elite invisible to each other? Strange, she thought; also strange that there had been no sign of the VERY SPECIAL EFFECTS!!!! that had accompanied her choosing Ash. And while she was wondering this and that, why was she down on the street instead of up in the saucer? Was she going to be airlifted too? When? What the hell was going on? And if the elite really
were
invisible to each other, how was it she and Nick the Schick –

She was standing in a small room no larger than a closet, furnished with one small round table and two efficient padded chairs. She sat down and took out the map. A new overlay had been added to tell her that she was now on the saucer. Or that the saucer was now included on her level. The notations seemed to hint at both without confirming one way or the other. She put the map down on the table and ran her hands over the back of the chair. Lots of padding there; good, comfortable padding under smooth, cool cloth. Did they have virtual upholsterers in AR, she wondered, and if so, what kind of training did that require? And did they have virtual upholstery testers as well, people whose job it was to go around feeling the furniture, sitting on it, standing on it, using it any and every way imaginable to check for that authenticity of sensation that made every tactile impression more vivid than it could ever be out there, more real than real.

Ash would probably like that job. Or any job like it. AR designer, AR tester. Maybe tester more than designer. Like the sort of thing you dreamed about when you were a kid, consumer tester for Toyz U Krave, or whatever the company was called. Or not
like
it, really, the same thing
exactly
, just different props.

Sensations more real than real. She was beginning to understand why Ash and Tom spent so much time in AR. The more time you spent in a rig like this, the paler reality must seem when you came out of it. She had never spent a whole lot of time in AR in the past, other than the occasional amusement park expedition with friends. Ride a roller coaster – safely. Drive in a demolition derby – safely. Parachute out of an airplane – safely. Jump out of an airplane without a parachute and fly like a bird – safely. There were more constructive kinds of things, like overcoming phobias, but that was basically an amusement park installation with an enormous medical bill attached.

The sensations provided by the amusement park attractions were pretty authentic, vivid enough to fool you for a few seconds at least, and would certainly keep you amused for the whole time. But it wasn’t like this. This was under her skin. She could all but feel the nerve endings closest to the surface of her fingers responding to the stimuli, absorbing it all greedily and demanding more. Now there was some map text she could write:
You, too, can become a
SENSATION JUNKIE!!!!
in
LESS THAN ONE DAY!!!!
It’s so
EASY!!!!
you don’t even have to
TRY!!!!

‘Oh, for chrissakes.’

She looked up; Ash was sitting at the table, disgust large on his face.

‘Hello, Ash. I didn’t hear you come in. What took you so long?’

‘Don’t call me that, I’m rotating names now. What took me – well, hey, I ran all the way. So what the hell do you call this?’

‘Waxx24, the next dimension?’ she guessed.

‘I
know
that. I mean, what the hell are
you
doing here? They won’t let
me
in forever and when they finally do, it’s because
you
told them to? Shit. There is
no
God and this is the proof.’

‘Ash, this is not what you think –’

‘
Don’t
call me that.’

‘I don’t know what else
to
call you. Why’d you change your name?’

‘
Rotating
. I’m
rotating
names.’

‘
Why?
’

He leaned forward, as if that would actually make the conversation more private. ‘In case they have “Ash” on a permanent-exclude checklist.’

Yuki sighed. ‘Well, I’m not Tom,’ she said, slowly, trying to figure out how to phrase things. She had a sinking feeling that whatever she said was going to sound stupid or crazy or both.

‘You’re
not
Tom?’ Ash folded his arms on the table and scrutinized her through half-closed eyes. ‘If you’re not Tom, then who could you be, which up-to-now-hidden-from-public-knowledge, completely-pathetic-basket-case-of-misplaced-passion-and-wasteful-idolatry could you
possibly
be?’

Yuki hesitated. ‘I guess you don’t recognize me with my daikon radish characteristics all covered up.’

Ash seemed to freeze in place, like an old-fashioned cinematic that had jammed. A warning bell chimed in Yuki’s mind, but the moment passed even before she could start to think about what might be wrong. Ash unfroze and put his head in his hands. He seemed to be unaware of what had happened. Faulty transmission?

‘God, this is worse than I thought,’ he said. ‘No, I forgot, there
is
no God. Christ, woman, why?
Why?
Have you
no
pride?’

Still suspicious, Yuki reached over to touch him. Just at the moment when she remembered that she couldn’t touch him, her fingers brushed what was undeniably a warm human shoulder. Both of them jumped.

‘Don’t you go all gropey-dopey on me now,’ Ash warned, pushing back from the table. He looked as if he were about to get up and run. Yuki barely registered his revulsion; she stared first at her fingers and then at Ash, in an intense way Tom had always called her if-looks-could-drill stare.

‘How come I can touch you now?’ she said wonderingly.

‘For the same reason I can see you, of course,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve been pumped up and ’suited.’

‘What does
that
mean, “pumped up”?’

Ash gaped at her, frankly incredulous. Then he shook his head. ‘
And
you’re a waste of good drug, too.’ He pulled his chair back to the table. ‘Okay. Just tell me everything all at once so I can laugh or cry or have a rupture and be done with it. And do it before this stuff wears off, I’m hoping to get an evening out of it anyway.’

‘The drug,’ Yuki said thoughtfully, reaching again for the back of her neck. ‘A
drug
put us on the same level? That’s ridiculous, a drug can’t –’ She paused. ‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, “oh.”’ Ash leaned his elbows on the table and pushed his face at hers. ‘Yuki, if that’s really you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for spotting me and lifting me up out of the cattle pen. Now, do an old friend a good favor and give me a readmission token for my next trip in, or whatever I need to get into this side of Waxx24 and sit on your side of the table. Please?’

She frowned at him. ‘Is that all you care about?’

‘Oh,
Christ
,’ Ash said, rolling his eyes and turning away slightly. ‘She’s going to start.’

‘That
is
all you care about, being a VIP at some worthless club that isn’t even real, doing things that aren’t real with people who aren’t real, getting some status that isn’t real, for the –’

‘Yes, goddammit, that’s all I care about!’ Ash yelled suddenly, slapping the table. ‘When I’m in a club, that’s all I goddam care about! I don’t come here to do feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, or save the whales for the billionth time! What about it? Why is it so bad that I come here and
don’t
save the world?’

‘Nobody asked you to save the world,’ she said, irritated. ‘I didn’t say – I mean, look. Something’s happened to Tom, something bad. And I –’

‘Something bad happened to Tom
here
?’ Ash said, sounding skeptical.

‘I don’t
know
where. But it’s connected somehow to AR and Joy’s Boyz. I’m not sure about Waxx24.’

‘So you put on your Tom-suit and came charging in here to the rescue?’

‘Well, no. I got a job with Joy’s Boyz.’

Ash’s expression was flat. ‘
You’re
a Joy’s Boy?’

‘Not exactly. I’m her assistant. And when I went to my quarters to go to bed, I found this hotsuit. So I put it on –’

Ash was waving both hands in front of his face, palms toward her. ‘Stop, stop. If you’re hunting up new Boyz, I’m afraid I’m just too old. Ask her, she’ll tell you she likes them younger than me. I know this, everybody knows this.’

‘I’m not recruiting. I’m looking for Tom. He’s disappeared out there and now I can’t find him in here, either –’

‘And you think I can?’

Yuki shook her head sadly. ‘Why don’t you care?’

‘I care, deeply. About you, about Tom, about all the important stuff. Hell, you’d think that the two of us together like this might call him right to us? You know, in his Shantih Love suit?’

‘You know Shantih Love?’ Yuki asked sharply. ‘Tell me all about him. Or it, or whatever Tom’s supposed to be under that name. Tell me about the ca –’ she stopped as something that Ash had said earlier finally registered on her.
Yuki, if that’s really you …