Beyond the Fantasmo billboard rose the illuminated minarets of the Central Mosque. Over them passed a Corporation peeper, its running lights poignant in the rain. Far away on the right the purple Ziggurat glowed dully. Above the city the golden windows of wirecars criss-crossed the lights of the service-level remotes. The West Sector newsboard flashed: CORPORATION SAYS MORE CUTS COMING; UNIONS BLACK TALKS — CLEVER DAUGHTER FAMILIES IN COMPENSATION APPEAL — ‘I HAD GAY SEX WITH TOP EXEC,’ SAYS ROBOT. The darkling desperate city, glimmering with lights and yearning and memories, touched my heart. Such a fragile and vulnerable idea, a city — such a huddling together in the November dusk.
Gislebertin had by now reached La Terreur de Devenir. Listening to the music I opened my mouth to the twilight and looked at the hologram of the girl with the pearl earring. Vermeer, born four centuries before Gislebertin, had like him noted the flicker at the heart of things; looking past the illusory continuity of image he had seen the alternating being and not-being of his model. Now, high above the clamour and reek of the Fungames she hovered in the dusky room and no matter how steadfastly I looked it was impossible to see her continuously: she was here and gone, here and gone, her questioning face, like the music I was hearing, always partly now and partly remembered.
That idea, the idea of something partly now and partly remembered, began to seem very important to me: I looked and looked at the Vermeer girl and I thought that if I could only grasp one image in its wholeness I could grasp everything, I could contain the world. Had I ever held in my mind one whole thing? One thing in its wholeness?
The hum of the power ring and the uproar of the Fungames were constant under the music; the sickly-sweet reek of the Fungames and the hot dry smell of the power ring were strong in my nostrils. A red glow lit the sky over the city; the gathering night was immense as the laserised replicant of Gislebertin sent his music into the terror of becoming.
As I sat in the viewbubble high up in the night and such twilight as remained in me I played back in my mind the scene with Albert Stiggs, wondering whether I’d seen the last of him. Then Stiggs faded out and I was listening back through the raindark and the ghosts for the sound of Pythia’s response to the face of Isodor Gorn. I was well aware that she was a circuitry of 23.7 billion photoneurons, an egg-shaped pixel-walled room, a body shell lined with sensors, and an electronically synthesised voice. But what a strange creature she was! The touch of her sensors was inseparable from the sound of her peculiarly intimate and erotic voice that was almost but not quite human in its timbre; it was low and husky and a little slurred and imprecise in its diction, perhaps even a bit sluttish and with a trace of foreignness; it was ever so slightly polyphonic and touchingly mechanical, and all of these characteristics combined to make it linger in the mind.
I went back into the room. This flat was like others I’d downtimed in — the upholstery and the drapes were always dark blue with overtones of greasy black; there were some frayed and faded cushions scattered around, somewhat crusted with petrified fragments of pizza and Chinese takeaway; the tables and the kitchen counters were scarred, stained, and palimpsested with permanently sticky circles, the TV was a very old model that smelled like a VMET with circuitry trouble, and the print on the wall was Womb of the Cosmos III by Lamia Quick. I put it in the cupboard. There was a bookshelf too, on which were the telephone and fax directories, the 2049 Corporation Yearbook, a three-year-old copy of Downtime in London, and some very old and tattered issues of Consenting Adults.
I went to the hologram box, ejected the Vermeer girl, and keyed in Plate 68 in my catalogue, BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKY REACTION; CHEMICAL SCROLL WAVES. The involute spirals sprang up in red, not green, and stared at me out of the darkness spiralised by Gislebertin. Plates 69, 70, 71, 72 and 73 showed successive stages of the reaction; 73 had the ringed eyes, the nodes of possibility, the archipelagos of being. Plate 74 was EYE IDOLS; ENGRAVED COW BONES, SPAIN, NEOLITHIC. The three bones appeared before me twice actual size and hung there in the dark. The three pairs of eyes, concentrated into masks by the underlining and overlining, replicated the stare of the chemical scroll waves. Plate 75 was The Sorcerer, the drawing, after Breuil, of the antlered dancing man from the cave of Les Trois Frères, his round eyes staring in astonishment or ecstasy out of the dark backward and abysm of time. Plate 76 was the photo of the smudged remains of the original drawing on the cave wall. Then the Vermeer girl again, Plate 77, then Plate 78, LOUGHCREW PASSAGE-TOMB CEMETERY; DECORATED STONE, CARNBANE EAST. The carved stone was like the body of a cephalopod marked all over with concentric circles with deep holes at their centres. Two of these arranged themselves as eyes and a third became a mouth in a snoutlike configuration; the eyes gazed sombrely out of darkness, the mouth was either open in a scream or closed. I returned the gaze of the eyes, watched the mouth, saw it open and screaming, saw it closed and silent. But the eyes — there were so many eyes everywhere, and out of all of them looked the great animal of the everything.
The ghostly voices of the organ of St Lazarus flickered in the dark, flickered through the centuries to the present moment and sent out La Terreur de Devenir high over the filthy streets and uncollected garbage of Oldtown West 81.1 wept for long-gone twilights, for music long silent and for all the voices, all the speaking breath of lovers long dead. I wept for the sickened earth huddled under its ruins and its rot and its shining new machines; I wept for all star-wanderers and deep-spacers for ever riding out to the blackness and back to the fading and broken green jewel of their birth. I wept for myself, afraid to ship out again.
16
Say, it’s only a paper moon,
Sailing over a cardboard sea,
But it wouldn’t be make-believe,
If you believed in me.
Katya’s place was on the fortieth floor of the Tech 7 residence complex between the Outer Executive Circle and the non-Corporation parts of Oldtown. She didn’t turn on any lamps when she opened the door; in the night beyond the viewbubble the Outer Executive Circle newsboard was insistent: ‘GAY ROBOT NOT A ROBOT’: TOP EXEC; SNG INVESTIGATION SCHEDULED — CORPORATION: NEW CUTS TO IMPROVE LOCAL SERVICES; DUSTMEN: ‘LOAD OF RUBBISH’. The light from outside picked shapes out of the dimness of the tiny room; the interior darkness annexed the night and the red glow in the sky to make the flat seem bigger than it was.
The place was dense with clutter: books, pictures, baskets of stones and bones and seashells, several teddy bears and a cloth frog in a condition of terminal belovedness, an MM/PN 800 Omnicom, various stacks and leafpiles of paper, and a hologram table over which glowed the image that was No. 69 in my catalogue, BELOUSOV-ZHABOTINSKY REACTION; CHEMICAL SCROLL WAVES.