Tea From an Empty Cup (28 page)

Maybe it was just called shoddy police work from lazy investigators, she thought as the last moments of Tomoyuki Iguchi congealed around her.

Lying on the ground, under the everlasting night sky, the creature preparing her for slaughter. Against her will, her neck stretched and she felt something pressing against her windpipe, something with an edge.

Under the night sky, the knife came down. In the stale, smelly cubicle, the kid voided himself in terror as his hands went up, pressed against the outside of the monitor and shoved it impossibly hard, the bottom edge sharp against the sensitive flesh of his neck. Konstantin’s skin was stinging, burning, ripping, tearing. The edge of the monitor, sharp but not nearly so sharp as a knife, sawing away at the kid’s windpipe, while the kid held on and pushed and pulled and pushed and pulled until his windpipe had been completely severed.

She was going to have words with the coroner.

Konstantin wanted to pass out but the drugs refused her even that minor bit of solace. Both drugs, this one and the other, that all eight victims had taken along with the accelerant, thinking that they were being given some kind of biochemical key to a super-exclusive club. What it actually had been, as far as Konstantin could tell, was a bizarre formula of hallucinogen and hyper-alertness; somewhere else on-line, clients of a certain very bent madam waited until the drug took effect and activated a special sort of hotsuit, one that enabled them to wear, in effect, other people. The attraction of such a thing escaped Konstantin. Perhaps it was the hyper-alertness of having what amounted to one body moving inside another – perhaps the stimulation was the height of pleasure.

Unless, of course, you were the one being slipped onto someone else like a glove. There you were, thinking you were going to get into AR’s most exclusive club and instead, something got into
you
. Maybe your body rebelled before anything important could happen, maybe you discovered the hard way that you were allergic to certain substances and being on accelerant besides didn’t help matters. Or maybe the sensation of something under your skin was too much to bear and you’d do anything to make it stop, even stab yourself to let whatever it was out.

Sometimes, however, the pervert wearing your body decided to take it over altogether after enjoying the sensation of you sawing through your own throat. Konstantin could see where that sort of person would think it was an extra special thrill, to walk off with the virtual body afterward.

Shantih Love’s book had recorded it all, not because Shantih Love had wanted a handy record but because he’d been sure it would never be found and he had to keep track of how much of this drug there was and who it had gone to. The catalog itself had recorded the fate of each of his customers – exactly why, Konstantin wasn’t sure, and she doubted that Shantih Love even knew it had done so. Possibly because it wasn’t actually Shantih Love’s catalog in the same way the catalog she had had on-line was her catalog. This seemed to have a great deal more in it, pages and pages of undecipherable symbols, many of them Japanese ideograms. Others seemed to be far more ancient, though she couldn’t have said how she knew. An old memory of hieroglyphics, maybe, or cuneiform, or something else entirely.

Whatever else it might be, it was big and dense and too much for one person. And now that it had told her what she had wanted to know, it refused to be investigated any further. She could hold on to it, but it refused to open for her, refused to respond, refused to do anything except sit in her hands like a book-shaped rock.

She would wait it out, she decided. Sooner or later, someone was going to want it, would look for it, ask for it.

After a while, she got the distinct impression of movement, her and the book together moving toward some definite destination. Was that because the accelerant was wearing off and she was going more slowly now, or because everyone else was going that much faster?

The darkness began to lift; the surrounding shadows became less formless, more patterned. She thought she could hear some kind of regular noise, a thumping combined with human voices chanting. The sounds became louder, or came closer, she wasn’t sure which, and now she could feel an answering pulse from the book, as if it were alive and its heart had been jarred into life again.

The light came up some more and she could just make out what seemed to be a gathering of people around some kind of big rock formation. Konstantin pressed the book between her hands, letting the pulse inside run up both her arms. Eventually she could feel it in her torso as well, and the light grew brighter and brighter until finally she saw them, an enormous group of Japanese gathered around a puppet being manipulated by three robed and hooded puppeteers.

Konstantin drew closer. The beat seemed to penetrate more deeply into her body, stirring feelings that would have embarrassed her had she not been holding on to the book.

The puppet, she realized, was leading them. Even though the puppeteers were in plain sight, it was easy to forget they were there, at least in their capacity as puppeteers. It was as though they were assisting the puppet rather than manipulating it.

Something was going to happen. Konstantin could feel it building around her in the very substance of AR as well as deep inside of herself. She looked over the heads of the gathering, past the puppet to the black mouth of the cave behind. An Out Door? Or was it the Door In for something else entirely?

Suddenly she was terrified that that was exactly what it was, that they were going to let something come in from somewhere else, something strange and new and, before now, completely unknown, and then everything would change, be changed, whether you wanted it or not. She stepped forward, holding the catalog in one hand and raising the other. ‘Don’t –’ she started to say, but it was too late.

Even as the feeling took hold of her and shook her like a rag doll, she understood what it was and let go with a shout of laughter, both kinds of relief. And then she couldn’t stop laughing, she was literally rolling on the ground, clutching the book to her front and laughing, laughing, laughing. Laughing for the joy of being alive. Laughing in the face of darkness and death. Laughing for pleasure, laughing against pain, laughing because it made her shake all over and that made her want to laugh some more. And she laughed, too, because apparently she wasn’t the only one who felt that way, that the entire gathering of people there were laughing just as loudly as she was, no doubt for many of the same reasons. They laughed and howled and laughed some more and it began to sound almost like a chorus of singing, everyone laughing together.

Breathless, still laughing a little, Konstantin sat up and looked over at the puppet to see how the puppeteers were taking it. The puppet was facing the cave where a bewildered-looking Japanese guy had appeared, blinking in the light. His gaze moved from the puppet to the people gathered around the cave and then finally came to rest on her.

His face twisted in shock and anger and she remembered belatedly that she was wearing the Shantih Love character. Or maybe it was the book he was upset about. He gave a shout and lunged toward her. The people around him caught him and held him tight.

The puppet had become a human woman. She stood alone now, staring at Konstantin, her face wary, and then reached out one hand.

‘Shantih Love,’ she said.

The book lifted easily out of Konstantin’s hands and went directly to her. Konstantin started to shrug, suppressed the movement, and looked over at the Japanese guy, still in the firm hold of several of the crowd. She felt as if they were waiting for her to say something, so she said the only thing she could think of.

‘Tom Iguchi, you’re under arrest as an accessory before and after the fact in the murders of Sally Lefkow, Emilio Torres, March Kuykendall, Lydia Stang …’

‘… Lydia Stang, Flo …’

As the newcomer spoke, holo pictures of each person named sprang out of the book in Yuki’s hands and hung in the air, as if to prove the accusations. She knew none of them until the stranger came to the last.

‘… and an individual also known at his death as Tomoyuki Iguchi.’

‘Ash!’ Yuki clapped a hand over her mouth and then looked at Tom, horrified.

He tried to stare back at her and then dropped his gaze.

And then Body Sativa was there beside her, gesturing for the people holding Tom to let him go. ‘Don’t misunderstand,’ she said to the stranger, ‘but you’ll have to find him first.’

The stranger nodded, shoulders slumping resignedly. ‘If he’s here, he’s got to be somewhere.’

‘Perhaps Joy Flower can help you out.’

‘Oh, God,’ Yuki said. ‘Joy Flower. I’m –’

She turned to Body Sativa. ‘Can you – is there nothing …
nothing?
’

Body Sativa’s face was sad as she held out her arms. ‘Nothing, as long as they have you.’ Something unraveled around the outline of her body and her entire appearance, face and all, slid away like a costume. Underneath was a grand lady in traditional Japanese dress, holding a strangely shaped musical instrument. ‘Now the threads are loosened and I am no longer Body Sativa but Benten, goddess of the arts.’

‘You still look like my grandmother, a little,’ Yuki said. The book that had come to her hands from the stranger vanished and reappeared in Benten’s hand. ‘So you’re Benten now. What does that make me? Besides screwed, I mean?’

The new goddess’s face was compassionate but set. ‘Somebody has to be Boddhisattva.’

Yuki’s mouth dropped open.

Suddenly there was a one-second sensation of being held down on a bed by many strong hands and someone was kneeling on her left, pulling her up and forward with one hand and holding a needle gun at the ready in the other. Only one second, but very clear, incredibly clear and so real. Yuki tried to shout and then twist away. They let her move and then the person with the needle gun was kneeling on her lower back.

‘…
faster they go, the faster it wears off … told you be ready f –
’

‘…
arger dose …’

Someone shoved her head down and forward and suddenly she couldn’t move at all, not even to breathe. The panic burst on her full force and then was gone, but she still couldn’t move though she could breathe again.

Concentrating, she could feel her forehead resting on something hard. A hand on her shoulder pulled her back and a woman that might have been Joy Flower looked into her face, searching. She was so close that Yuki could see her twin reflections in the woman’s eyes, as if they were actually etched directly onto the corneas.

Two tiny Tom Iguchis raised their fingers to their lips in unison, warning her not to say anything.

Where am I?

Yuki jumped back, turned and tried to get up and run, but something clouted her on the back of her neck and she fell forward.

When she opened her eyes, she was still falling.

Below her, she saw an enormous expanse of nighttime city, a multitude of colored lights glittering against the darkness. She wanted to cry with relief; the long fall
would
end,
had
to end, and then there would be peace, at the very least, peace. No Tom, but, well, she had tried and she no longer cared. Maybe he was watching her plunge into this city nightscape from some hiding place, some mirror, even someone’s eyes. Maybe if she had a mirror to reflect her own eyes, she would see him in there, twin miniatures –

Abruptly, she realized she wasn’t as high up over the city as she had been, and she could see the lights more clearly now, flashing, twinkling patterns that resolved themselves into gargantuan signs flashing words, flashing pictures, flashing
kanji
as if in a long and complex display for what universe there might be out there in the dark, to deliver, over and over, the message:
Japan lives!

Yes, Japan lives
. She closed her eyes again and waited for Japan to take the offering of herself.

‘What is it?’ Taliaferro asked her from where he stood in the cubicle doorway.

Konstantin was standing with the headmount in her hands as if she couldn’t decide whether to take everything off, or put it back on and go back in. ‘I had the strangest … time,’ Konstantin said.

‘Yeah? What was so funny?’

Konstantin smiled, staring past him. ‘Life. Everything. That and the fact that for several hours in a row, I didn’t once think about my ex.’ She took a breath and exhaled heartily ‘Do we have any intelligence on someone named Joy Flower?’

She woke on a futon in a pleasant though austere room with paper walls framed in bamboo and the slightly astringent aroma of green tea in the air.

A little later, someone helped her sit up so she could drink the tea. Though it smelled even more strongly now, it didn’t have much taste at first, though the more she drank, the stronger the taste of it on her tongue became. And it must have been a much larger cup than she had thought, for it seemed as if she drank forever before stopping, and yet she still had not finished the tea. The aroma remained, stronger than ever.

She lay back and found herself staring at another person also lying on a futon, somehow suspended on the ceiling. Or perhaps
she
was the one on the ceiling and the other person was the normal one, lying on the floor. There was actually no way to tell which of them was up and which was down, no matter how long she stared, or how much she thought about it. The person always mimicked her actions, as if this were an exercise in dance mirroring. But sometimes, when her attention wandered, she thought she saw the other person make a furtive move that had nothing to do with her. She waited for someone else to come and tell her about this peculiar situation.

Eventually someone else did come. A woman stood over her and, taking no notice whatsoever of the person on the overhead futon, told her she was actually a young man named Iguchi Tomoyuki who had been lost in a strange country for a long time. And for another long time, Yuki found no reason to doubt her.