“The mayor’s been very generous in letting me occupy the in-law apartment downstairs.”
“Are you lovers?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.” She appeared unoffended, but regarded him with fresh curiosity, ticking the golden bowl cut of her head sideways like the second hand of an alert clock. Impressively, in meeting Perkus’s gaze she never once took the bait of tracking the wrong eye.
“I’ve got a question for him about… that vase up there.”
“The chaldron, you mean? Jules couldn’t tell you much about that.”
“You know what it is?”
“Sure. I gave it to him. I don’t think he’s glanced at it twice.”
She gratified each question with a little surplus of revelatory value for which he couldn’t have thought to ask. Yet the ease of this exchange felt slippery and corrupt, as though she were toying with him. He preferred to find the question that would make Claire Carter balk. “Where did you get it? Did you buy it on eBay?”
“My brother gave it to me. Do you want to have a look? I think you’ll be surprised.”
At last Perkus could quit trying to make an impression, or to calibrate the nature of this encounter, for he was surely still asleep on the stair, and dreaming. Or perhaps the dream had begun long before. “Who’s your brother?”
“Linus Carter, you may have heard of him. He’s the designer.”
“Designer of what-chaldrons?”
“That and all the rest of it, yes.”
“The rest of what?”
“Yet Another World.”
“I would very much like to see it, yes.”
He followed her through the door at the landing, to find himself surprised, if surprise were still possible, by a curved stair leading up inside what he’d taken for a thin outer wall. Deep-set windows in the turret allowed just slivers of blue above gouts of snow, evidence of the storm Perkus had nearly forgotten. They climbed the steep curled stair in single file, the ascent of her tiny, pear-shaped buttocks before him a transfixing vision, as though one by one a chaldron’s effects were transferring to Arnheim’s Girl Friday.
The room at the top was large enough for the two of them and a chair and small desk, nothing more, making with its single window a kind of lookout or observation room. Perkus thought it would be a spectacular place to get some clear thinking done, to write a broadside or two, but he’d no sooner entertained the thought than Claire Carter unbolted a midget-size door at the level of her waist, swinging it inward, to disclose how it backed to the high nook below which he’d thirsted and pined through the dark hours, before passing out. She reached in and slid the box containing the chaldron onto the floor between them, revealing, among other things, a small power cord, trailing off to a transformer plugged in a socket at the rear of the nook. The thing inside looked watery and nebulous, its glamour and force completely spent in the bright sunlight that suffused the little attic study. Perkus saw immediately that what stood at his feet wasn’t anything as definite as a ceramic, let alone one of some perfect and unearthly density, was less, in truth, than the photograph he’d admired in Strabo Blandiana’s office or the pixel-dense lures he’d ogled on eBay. This chaldron was a hologram, and when Claire Carter switched off the tiny laser at the bottom of the vitrine it blinked out completely. The vessel had appeared so ineffectual that this seemed nearly an act of mercy: last one out, please turn off the chaldron.
“Looks more impressive at night, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, yes, it does. Is there any chance I could get a cup of coffee?” Until the last possible instant Perkus had felt in the grip of an exalted confusion. Even as she debunked chaldrons, Perkus’s encounter with Claire Carter had taken on some of a chaldron’s strange ambiance. With the hologram’s switching off, though, deflation set in. Perkus had begun to recognize the first glimmerings of a cluster prodrome, the inevitable aura preceding a really major headache. Caffeine was his first line of defense, at least the first available-he couldn’t really ask whether any of Grinspoon’s roaches had happened to be still lying in the mayor’s marble ashtrays. The snow’s sideways glare that attacked him through the windows everywhere he turned was possibly implicated, bright-angled light being one of several typical migraine triggers, along with dark chocolate and Richard Abneg’s infernal red wines. Perkus kept his shades drawn low for a reason. There was nothing to do about it now but cope. He dreaded going out into that sunshine.
Linus Carter, though famously camera shy, was real, not, as rumored, just the name behind which some consortium of geniuses had hidden themselves. She should know, since she grew up with his brilliance overshadowing hers, Linus being three years older, though he was also so physically and emotionally immature that they were mistaken, and in some sense mistook themselves, for twins. Certainly they trusted each other more than anyone else, their parents, or the Dalton kids who treated them both a bit like freaks for their closeness, and for their lack of interest in the gossip and status games that defined the place. College divided them only a little, her Harvard, him MIT, and both places ones where they could shake themselves free of the unspoken expectations of the Manhattan castes they’d instinctively set themselves apart from. It was a matter of money, always money, and so when she came back to the city it was in the employ of media conglomerateer Arnheim, then several years from his run for the mayoralty, and if you’d mentioned that possibility it would have seemed a joke. Her first job, for which she found herself scouted before summa cum laude graduation, and working for Arnheim meant that money was never again going to divide Claire Carter from anything. It wasn’t even that he paid her so well, as that she’d put herself right up against money’s large and impassive flank, under its vast scaly wing. As a matter of fact, when some of the really hugely trust-funded kids who’d shit on her and Linus at Dalton resurfaced these days, spaced-out on boards of corporations they didn’t even know whether they owned, she was usually running rings around them, telling them what to do. And when Linus came back to the city with his big idea and needed capital investiture to get it started up, she could take care of him, too, introduce him to the right people.
She explained all this in the town house’s big kitchen, where they sat on stools at a marble counter, over coffee-cappuccinos from a machine that took a little cartridge of coffee under a lever and spat them out perfectly, brimming with foam on top. The device’s brief guttering productions shattered the dawn’s eerie silence. Perkus would have preferred for purposes of headache prevention a bottomless mug of traditional black, but was too polite to say anything. He sipped the hot foam and ignored the background of approaching migraine and listened to what Claire Carter appeared compelled to explain to him as his reward for camping out beneath the hologram. It seemed that her shy and kooky older brother had written all the design protocols for Yet Another World in secret, while working for a Menlo Park company whose contract claimed any idea he originated as their own, and so he’d quit and moved to their parents’ apartment, sleeping in his old room like the unsocialized loser he perhaps felt himself to be, and let five months tick by watching TV Land reruns of Square Pegs and Martyr & Pesty, only afterward whispering to Claire that he was sitting on a gold mine but couldn’t afford the tools to dig with. She set him up with investors, not Arnheim himself but a rich-beyond-rich pajama-wearing Hugh Hefner wannabe, no disrespect, named Rossmoor Danzig.
Two years later three million souls worldwide, a number doubling every six months, conducted some part of their daily lives in the elaborate and infinitely expansible realm that had sprung from Linus Carter’s generous parameters, this pixel paraphrase of reality which welcomed role-players, entrepreneurs, sexual trollers, whatever. You could play by Linus’s rules or write your own, invent a self unlike yourself, invent a nation for yourself and your friends: Yet Another World made room for it all. A separate economy, originating within the game, had leaked out into the wider world, as players seeking to accumulate in-game wealth and sway by shortcut rather than diligence began hoarding and trading on the small number of unique and unduplicable treasure items Linus had ingeniously tucked into the corners of his world. In a system where any kind of artifact, six-dimensional, invisible, antigravitational, whatever its designer could imagine, was not only possible but replicable ad nauseam, these scattered few objets d’art, known as chaldrons, were capable of driving players insane with acquisitive frenzy. For all the anarchy Linus loosed, he’d kept this one means of playing God: a monopoly on the local equivalent of a short supply of Holy Grails. To protect his symbolic economy from inflation, Linus also designed a few expert subroutines for rooting out and destroying any counterfeits put into circulation, a NetBot goon squad.