Transcendence (78 page)

I and I and I pull out of the memory-moment, drift idly through artifact-space. Calm, the universe begins to grow calm, though the chunks of shattered concrete quiver. What is that standing in the center of Jonathan’s fortress wall?

érase appears from the mist, obscuring the construction I and I try to see; her face is tight and narrow, her eyes dark and darting, her hands cold and probing. We’re both so young, we don’t know any of the words, but we hold each other and I hold my breath, sure as the fucking sunset that some day she’ll be gone, she’ll leave me or be taken away; “I promise myself to you forever,” she says; she says as she drives herself hard and wet against me in our virtual home between city walls, her shirt sticking to my pubic hair and her pullover hooked on my ankles; “It takes me. . .” She breathes hard as she speaks, eyes closed tight, “so much more
. . .
to feel alive than it seems
. . .
to take everyone else. Except for you, Jon. We both need to feel.” “Yeah, I can’t sleepwalk,” I tell her later, during the quiet after when our heads throb from the blackfeed mind-chemical overload. We know it’s the same conversation. “Well, I can, but it catches up fast, it’s brutal to my mind, you know?”

And then she vanishes in a wave of laughter and Malfits kicking me for keeping something good from them, a wooden pallet that ceases being a Queen Anne bed, pebbles and screams.

A roar like the sound of the sea falling from the sky to its dry sandy bed—*What’s happening?*

“
Jonathan,” Captain Jackson says; he appears amid the chaos of emotion and debris, “you must fight down the hate or you’ll destroy yourself.”

Ha!
“Listen,” as the roar mounts and builds to an accompaniment of revmetal thrash and rumble. This is the music that makes me burn, sad and angry. Even so, it’s what I want to hear most.

“
You were right.”

The galaxy supernovas star by star beyond my and my reach, *What is he doing?* the force of this boy’s hatred is greater than our love, and his memories move too fast to capture.

“
This place makes you understand yourself. Wakes you up, here,” I tap the side of my skull, which overlays the whirling brick and mortar; and I am the ultimate graffiti, as big as the universe of hate and emptiness. Another wave lashes through the mess, picking up debris in its crest and hurling it into the dark lanes of the swirling Milky Way.

“
érase was my love and safety, like you two have now.” Flash of this morning’s lovemaking. “She gave me strength and confidence. I had hope for a future, and I didn’t need my crashed-out family—as if ever needing them meant anything! But when she died, I lost every fragment of what propped me up. What do I have now? Nooa! Ha! And don’t cry for me. I don’t want your pity.”

“
Stop it!” Pehr’s voice pulses opposite the waves radiating from the shattered core of the boy, growing in magnitude. The grandiose graffiti evaporates. Now I and I see the remnants of his innermost shell, small and fragile like a ceramic doll dropped on star-flecked, black tile. Tiny—his head hangs limp and polychromatic tears fall from his eyes, splashing open when they hit the tile into moments of his life.

*I’m sorry.* With a ripple of self-revulsion that cascades through the fractured doll, cracking it nearly to pumice.

“
Listen, boy,” I say, while Janus fills me with the strength I need to resist his collapse, to fight him back as if he were a black hole, yet uphold his inward spiral. “I promised you I’d always stay with you.”

*And I will, too—Pilot Librarse.*

The dollhead rises, wobbly and brittle, and two great eyes loom up at the man and woman whose bodies accumulate from dust and stone. I and I sit upon the disk of the galaxy and carefully reach out to the boy the way we held one another this morning.

“
I’m not worth your time,” I tell them.

*Stop it!*

“
No! Look!” Jonathan’s doll-self thundercracks wide open, but the smoke and fire that blast out are not his: Here is the pain and suffering of Pehr and Miru and Lonny and Janus and Pang, screaming at me and me; *Don’t you see I’m overwhelmed?*

Flash-flash-flash
, our lives machine-gun through us; the sea of memory appears around us, crashes and roars in the storm—only now it boils red and bubbling from beneath where Jonathan’s hatred for the human species seethes like a gash in the earth spewing magma. The sea boils away as I and I try to shelter ourselves from this interpretation of our memory-moments. Time passes, and we three live all the lives again, and ever so gradually the Jonathan moments explode and crack and split and finally just
merge with ours; the magma cools, volatiles evaporate, and the ocean finishes boiling away. Rain begins to fall. At the center of the dried sea, I and I glimpse a spaceport built
. . .
for me.

For my Captain
.

“
Look.” Janus scoops down into the sediment surrounding the spaceport. In the mess that coats her fingers, iridescent gold sparkles.

“
This is you, Jonathan. This is what remains after your shell shattered.”

Ah, the pearl. Captain Jackson smiles and nods once. Behind him roars the
Bounty
’s rocket, as in a subscription ad.

“
My pearls,” Jonathan says. He reaches tentatively for my hand and collects the treasures. He looks up and still his eyes are sad. “But now what?”

“
Now you are free. Time is now your partner. We don’t know what comes after, either, but we must try to find out.”

“
Nooa? Can you feed?” No response.

“
We didn’t think the Brain could stay in contact with us.”

“
Where is here?” ask I, Jonathan, while studying a sky filled with stars, the stars spiraling in a slow dance around a galactic black-hole core.

Faint tendrils start to grow from star to star, and we watch as the Milky Way shrinks; the Local Group of galaxies is the next leap in perspective, and each galaxy sprouts more of the glowing tendrils.
Veins
, one of us thinks; now a supercluster fills our pov, finally the whole universe; veins pulsate from star to star, cluster to cluster, especially dense within each galaxy but also stretching across the massive voids to its neighbor; tendrils span even the fathomless reaches between superclusters, though sparser. The sphere of our artifact-space looks like a model of the universe, only a universe represented as some kind of living thing made of fusion-powered organs—Miru is very close—and. . . .

The mirage collapses. Jonathan is gone.

I and I gaze up from our replenished sea at the stars. This time they suggest something more; they offer yet another mystery.

“
Did he survive?” Pehr asks. Janus dares not answer for fear the boy still lurks up there, amid the tangle of interstellar veins.

We draw a breath together and open our eyes to the hotel room.

“
That wasn’t quite what I expected,” Pehr said. Janus pressed her face against his chest, and he felt her face warm with tears. Automatically, his arms went around her naked back.

Life was complicated. Life was finally a place to live. Pehr held Janus tightly and felt alive.

Jonathan’s eyes flash open. His glimpse of a grand map fades until he can’t quite remember what it looked like or what it meant.
Where am I?

Beside him on the gelbed lies a young woman, knotted in stained sheets. Her long hair, stringy and smudged black, covers her face. They are in a cube-room, barely larger than the wide bed. Jonathan rises to his elbows and his nudity feels like a flare.

He recalls what just happened to him. He pieces together clues left by those who went before into the alien place. So many details, so many memories; his mind races and reels, his senses flood him with information. At sixteen he has lived several adult lives. Thoughts slide so smoothly through his mind now.

In his chest, his heart rattles fast and weak. He leans toward the girl, slowly untangling the hair from her face, afraid that he might be right. . . .

“
érase,” he says softly. “I thought you were dead. You were dead.” His back cramps with fear.

“
My name’s Cheri,” says a breathy voice. The girl’s eyes remain closed as she pulls back the soiled sheet and reveals an emaciated body. “Name your fantasy.”

“
Shut the fuck up!” Jonathan cries, shooting to his knees. His meat feels dizzy, starved, tired, but he won’t let that deter him.

“
This is Jonathan.” He emphasizes the name with a slap against his chest. “You remember me, érase. You have to!”

Her arms reach up, draw him down against her. He doesn’t resist, hoping she can see past whatever feed she’s taking. Her arms encircle him without touching, as if holding a 3VRD twice as wide as his body.

She begins to lay dry kisses along the side of his neck. Though érase is the only person he let himself love, though he’s shocked almost beyond thinking, her kisses feel obscene. On top of that, none of his old defenses work anymore: He kicks on the revmetal; he overlays CityNet, enhances it, then overlays ECoNet; on and on, piling feed and subscription upon one another, but still every memory he has acquired glistens as vividly as fresh blood on a clean sidewalk. And not just his own memories, but a whole slough of others’, some of which are so bad he feels his head is about to explode.

“
Fuck!” he shouts, clamping shut his eyes and gripping the bedsheets in his fists. In response, érase reaches for his shrunken penis and pulls it toward her.

“
No,” he says. He runs an ID on the girl.

She is dead
, he thinks. He discovers that Cheri—no middle or last name—appeared as a valid sub-Citizen three days after Blackjack informed Jonathan that érase died. They cut her brain sigs long enough for EarthCo to issue a death certification, he realizes. The bastards sold her as a slave, a pump.

Jonathan shudders with revulsion and hatred as érase’s—Cheri’s—legs wrap around his buttocks. The sides of her knees dig into his hipbones. She feels hot.

He recognizes that sensation from his own experience and identifies other symptoms. Not a single recollection evades him. “Brain chems.” His whisper is like a knife. “They’ve got you feedrapt on brain-chem stimfeed. I’ll burn ’em all.”

He shuts down his excess overlays but leaves the revmetal screaming and pounding between his ears. The building contains a powerful server array on every floor in addition to hundreds of personal-sized ones. He crawls into the short-range net, busts the simple blocks while skimming above trap-viruses like shadow snakes writhing around the neon passageways, and enters the server. It’s represented as a 3VRD checkerboard, only each square is a computerized vision of each room on the floor. Johns and pumps are at work in two of the rooms; in the rest, the girls’ and women’s cards are asleep. In one, a man is hunched over a cubist-looking representation of a sleeping woman.

Jonathan reaches out his amped, mental hand and finds the shutdown icon for the server.
Not enough
, he thinks, and injects a little program he got from Lucas a year ago. Colored dots cluster and begin to swirl, gathering at the powersource; when they gather so dense as to look pure white, a jolt of energy gushes through the AI. The computer crashes almost instantly. Jonathan’s heart throbs, his head pulses in waves.

érase begins to moan. Her legs fall limp to the gelbed and she lets go her grip on Jonathan’s flaccid penis. His anger redoubles. Still not enough.

He opens contact with the building’s other servers and moves along burning each and every one. He doesn’t care that he’s blasting pain and furious reality into the heads of those whom the servers are feeding. But his own comfort has been chipped away over the past few days—completely crashed with the Captain and Pilot Librarse in the alien-place. Before that, feedrapture treatment did a job on his coping skills.
If it didn’t kill me, it shouldn’t kill anyone else
.

“
Live and learn, boys and girls,” he 3-verds to all who might be feeding. “You gotta get hurt to learn.”

He shuts down the overlays of flickering checkerboards and lowers his eyes to the writhing girl beneath him. Suddenly, like water gushing into a storm sewer after a dam of trash has melted through, pity and sadness wash away the hatred. Small, animal sounds hiss and gurgle from deep within her. He cups her cheeks in his hands.

“
I’m sorry, érase. You’ll understand later. I love you, you know it. You’ve got to remember, don’t you? Let’s go.”

Jonathan steps off the bed and reaches into the draped shelving beside it. He shoves empty bottles of liquor and scented oils onto the jelly-soft floor and finds a pair of men’s pants, which he pulls on. He then pulls out a lacy thing that looks like a dress. Since it’s the most clothing-like item on the shelves except for the pants, he brings it to érase.