As I took off the headphones the woman exec in front of me said to the woman exec beside her, ‘I met that little Athena presenter at a multishuffle the other night.’
‘Any ooh-ooh?’
‘She said she only goes with Top Exec.’
‘You shouldn’t have told her you were Middle; with those upmobile frozen pizzas it’s better to come on as a wild card.’
‘How wild?’
‘Stop by for a drink and we’ll talk about it.’
We’d cleared the Corporation checkpoint and the Inner Executive Circle, where Stiggs and his friend got off. Shortly after Outer Executive we were over Oldtown Central. Down at ground level there were figures dancing in the rain in the rubbish and wreckage-choked streets around the burnt-out shells of Shopperama and the Credit Tower.
‘Prongs and Arseholes tonight,’ said the woman who’d been unsuccessful with the Athena presenter. ‘You betting?’
‘What’s to bet?’ said her friend. ‘Arseholes have been winning as long as I can remember.’ They both got out at the next stop, one of the newly executised parts of Oldtown.
The passengers in the car were mostly Corporation employees under forty-five. I was looking idly round as one does when I noticed a scruffy-looking man of seventy or so with a Ziggurat Maintenace shoulder patch on his jacket sitting opposite me one row back. He was holding a newsfax but not really reading it, and as our eyes met I thought he might be about to start a conversation with me. I hoped not. He was a failed-looking sort of man with dirty fingernails, the type who sits down next to you in a bar and has a long life-story to tell.
The short November day was almost gone and it was still raining as the wirecar approached the tower block where my downtime was. It was close to a Fungames complex in a neighbourhood catering for those minded to drink inexpensive wine and spirits, vomit on the pavement (no walkways here), see a porn film, contract a venereal disease, get tattooed, buy a flick knife, pawn a faxophone, and be mugged. My stop flashed, and as I left the wirecar the maintenance man was right behind me and followed me into the lift.
I hadn’t yet provided myself with a bottle wherewith to furnish the flat I was going to, so when I got into the lift I pushed STREET. The maintenance man and I were the only passengers and I avoided eye contact as we shook and rattled slowly down — I didn’t want to hear any long stories, not even my own. Several times he seemed about to speak but didn’t. When we got out at street level he followed me at a distance for a while, then I lost sight of him.
With one hand on the stunner in my pocket I went cautiously through streets glittering with broken glass, islanded with excrement, and odorous with nitrates. There were few people about and those few were all accompanied by large xenophagous-looking dogs, often in pairs. Eventually I saw a man with an introspectve-looking Irish wolfhound. When I approached to ask where I could find an off-licence the dog licked my hand and its master offered me his wallet. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take it — I haven’t got a watch or jewelry or anything like that.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for an off-licence.’
‘Down there,’ he said pointing while the dog sniffed my crotch. As I thanked him and walked away he said to the dog, ‘You don’t have to lick everybody’s goddam hand.’
After a while I found a Corporation off-licence and bought a bottle with a label that said WHISKY and nothing else. Being simply a MAN who was going to DRINK in a ROOM I liked that.
I went to the thirty-third floor of the crumbling tower block Deep Space Command had assigned me to, where I wandered for a while in dimly-lit urine-scented hallways with leprous walls and graffiti until I came to the number that was the same as the one on my key. From the door of the flat to the left of mine came screams and shouts and the sound of scuffling punctuated by thuds, thumps, and breaking glass.
As I unlocked my door I felt that little rush of despair that always hits me when I walk into a downtime and breathe in the pong of emptiness and the last occupant. It was a classically existential short-stay dwelling — even the dim grey dusk in it seemed to have been used by too many people. The walls were of course paper-thin, and from next door the sounds of discussion continued.
Without turning on the lights or looking at anything in the room I switched on the air cleaner, set it to HIGH, went to the viewbubble, sat down, and looked out into the rain and the twilight. I wanted to be very careful with the twilight, I wanted to be deep and silvery in it, wanted to hover quietly in the pinky-purple and the dove-grey of it, wanted to drink the Chopin of it and the yearning. The holes of bright emptiness grew small and twinkled in my vision like distant stars; if I held my head right I could lose them in the lights of Oldtown West 81 below me, its glimmers and its colours that flickered in the rainy dusk.
Holding the twilight in my mind I went back into the room. My locker had been delivered by DSC Speed One and was standing just outside the door; I opened it and took out the hologram box and the audio beam. I set up the hologram and keyed in Plate 77, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, JOHANNES VERMEER (1632–1675). ‘Thank you,’ I said as she ghosted into being on the insubstantial air. I was about to put on Chopin Mazurkas (Complete), the Ilse Bak recording made shortly before she died in 2032, the same one that Katya had, but I changed my mind and opened the little packet from Caroline. It was an audio crystaclass="underline" Dédales — Reconnaissances pour Orgue (Labyrinths — Recognitions for Organ) by Honoré Gislebertin, a contemporary composer I’d heard of but never paid much attention to. The work, performed by the composer on the organ of the church of St Lazarus at Autun, was in four parts: Les Pierres de la Nuit (The Stones of Night); La Terreur de Devenir (The Terror of Becoming); La Voie Obscure (The Dark Way); Le Jour Se Lève (The Dawn). Gislebertin, said the inlay, was born in 2032, four hundred years after Vermeer came into the world. There was no note from Caroline. I put Dédales on the audio beam, took the bottle to the viewbubble, sat down, and got some whisky inside me as the organ of St Lazarus came out of far, far away and the stones of night, came out of the frequencies of silence and the flicker at the heart of things where the Vermeer girl lived.
Sometimes the music roared like a blinded minotaur, sometimes it whispered like the ghost of its unborn self, sometimes it sidled crabwise through the shadows while I thought of the empty spaceport at Badr al-Budur and Pearl on her barren asteroid A3 73 speaking Rilke in my mother’s voice. And Caroline with her swift upward glance of fear and doubt.
I stopped Dédales and put on the Alain recording of The Art of Fugue. The Bach was definitely spookier than the Gislebertin; there was no mercy in its metaphysics and it asked for none, offering, for the greater glory of God, terror as the grand design of the universe. I remembered now how I had held on to that terror and the world when Clever Daughter disappeared. I stopped the Bach and went back to the uncertainty of Les Pierres de la Nuit. As I listened, the sickly-sweet reek of the Fungames complex drifted through the viewbubble filters. I heard the rumble and clatter and shriek of the rides and under them the constant uproar of yells and curses, whoops and screams and laughter, cries and groans. High above the streets the animated billboard advertised, under a scene of gang rape in primary colours, 5 BIG FUNSAT F ATUR S TONITE + NON-STOP P RNO REALO + SEXY PLAYATOME W/BIG PR Z S. To my left loomed the West Sector power ring with red lights winking on its towers; beyond it on the Fantasmo billboard (‘FANTASMO IMPLANTS FOR THE LIFESTYLE OF YOUR CHOICE’) a woman and a man, then two women, then two men, then a woman and two men, then a man and two women and so on undressed, performed a variety of sexual acts, dressed, undressed, and performed again in the lifestyle presumably chosen by the general population. ‘NO LIMIT TO THE ACTION!’ flashed the billboard. ‘IF YOU CAN’T IMAGINE IT WE CAN!’ The action sequence was followed by a huge smiling face, alternatively male and female, with a Fantasmo implant throbbing in its forehead. ‘NO STRANGERS, NO DANGERS — ’ spelled the yellow lights travelling across the unwrinkled brow, ‘IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND. FANTASMO IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY CORPORATION PERSONAL SERVICES PLC.’ Never before, I reflected, had so few been on the job for so many. Fantasmo is incompatible with flicker drive; flickerheads travel by oscillator but except for Pythia sessions we do our fantasies manually.