Kite ordered a formal socializing suit and asked them to deliver it to a cover address. Shrug declined to purchase anything. We were heading out the door when the clerk called to us, “Oh! Excuse me — I almost forgot. Free tickets to Circus Mind for customers… and their friends.”
Kite accepted the tickets and handed them to us. He stuffed his in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Are we all going?” he asked.
“What is it?” Orianna asked.
“Ori doesn’t know something!” Shrug exclaimed, amused.
“It must be really new,” she said, irritated.
“Oh, it is,” the clerk said. “Very drive.”
“Power live sim,” Kite said. “It’s abso fresh. All free until it draws a nightly crowd. Would you like to try, Casseia?”
“It could be too much,” Orianna cautioned.
I took that as a challenge. Although tired and a little depressed from my meeting with Muir, I wasn’t about to look less than drive — certainly not to Kite.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Kite handed us our tickets. I stared at mine. “Chew,” he said. “Checks you out, sees if you’re clear for the experience, and you print up a pass on the back of your hand.”
I inserted the ticket slowly and chewed. It tasted like the scent of a sun-warmed flower garden, with a tickle in the nose. I sneezed.
The clerk smiled. “Have fun,” he said cheerfully.
Circus Mind occupied the fifth and sixth floors of a twentieth-century skyscraper, the Empire State Building . I consulted my slate and learned that I was not far from Penn Station — in case I wanted to escape and my friends were locked in their amusements. Kite took my arm and Orianna ran interference with a group of LitVid arbeiters looking for society interest. Kite projected a confusion around me — multiple images, all false, as if four or five women accompanied him — and we made it through to the front desk. A thin black woman over two and a half meters tall, her auburn hair brushing the star-patterned ceiling, checked our hands for passes and we entered the waiting area.
“Next flight, five minutes,” a sepulchral voice announced. Cartoonish faces popped out of the walls, leering at us — lurid villains from a pop LitVid.
“Abso brain neg,” Shrug commented. “I was hoping for a challenge.”
“I’ve been here twice,” said a woman with skin of flexible coppery plates. “It’s strong inside.”
Orianna glanced at me, Okay?
I nodded, but I was not happy. Kite, I noticed, had assumed a blank air, neither expectant nor bored. After a five-minute wait, the faces on the walls looked sad and vanished, a door opened, and we entered a wide, open dance floor, already covered with patrons.
Projectors in the ceiling and floor created a hall of mirrors. The floor controller decided Kite and I were a couple and isolated us between our own reflections. We could not see Shrug or Orianna or any of the other patrons, though I heard them faintly. Kite grinned at me. “Maybe this replaces murder,” he said.
I had no idea what he meant. I felt more than a little apprehensive.
But that, I decided — and I squared my shoulders to physically strengthen my resolve — was simple backwater fright. This was nothing more than a mental roller coaster.
A slender golden man appeared on a stage a few steps away. “Friends, I need your help,” he said earnestly. “A million years from now, something will go drastically wrong, and the human race will be extinguished. What you do here and now can save the planet and the Solar System against forces too vast to precisely describe. Will you accompany me into the near future?”
“Sure,” Kite said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
The golden man and the hall of mirrors vanished. We floated in starry space. The golden man’s voice preceded us. “Please prepare for transit.”
Kite let go of my shoulder and took my hand. The stars zipped past in the expected way, and Earth rastered into view in front of us. Background information flooded into my head.
In this future, all instrumentality is controlled by deep molecular Chakras, beings installed in every human at birth as guardians and teachers. Your first Chakra is a good friend, but there has been a malicious error — an evolvon has been loosed in the child-treatment centers. A malicious Chakra has invaded an entire generation. You have been isolated from your high birthright, cut loose of energy and nutrition. A generation lives in the midst of plenty, yet starves. You must now find a Natural Rebirth Clinic on an Earth filled with menace, eliminate all Chakras, find the roots of your new soul, and prevent those controlled by their Evil Masters from forcing the sun to go super-nova.
“Sounds pretty lame,” I whispered to Kite.
“Wait a bit,” he said.
I learned more about this future Earth than I wanted to. There were no cities, as such — expanses of wilderness covered the continents. This, I knew, was because I could not call forth my Chakra of instrumentality.
Somewhere is your teacher, in the Natural Rebirth Clinic. You do not know what he or she or it looks like — it might even be a flower or a tree. But it contains your clue to regaining control…
I could hardly have been more bored. I wanted to smile at Kite and reassure him, this was nothing, not even so bad as Orianna’s potboiler sim.
Then my mind jerked. I filled with fear and deep loathing — for the evil Chakra, for loss of my birthright, for the impending end of everything. And mixed with the fear was a primal urge to join forces in every way possible — with Kite, with whoever might be present.
Hack plot, to say the least, but I had never experienced such vivid washes of imposed emotion, even in Orianna’s sim. They played my mind like a keyboard.
“I think I know what’s going to happen next,” Kite said.
“Oh?”
Everyone on the Circus Mind floor appeared around us, floating in space.
“It’s very drive,” Kite assured me.
The golden man faded into view, in the center of our empyrean of several hundred souls. “At last, we have all arrived, and we have a sufficiency,” he said. ‘Teams must join and become families, and trust implicitly. Are we prepared?“
Everybody gave their assent, including me. I had been expertly prepared — my nerves sang with excitement and anticipation.
“Let us join as families.”
The golden man encircled groups of twenty with broad glowing red halos. Our clothes vanished. Transforms reshaped to their natural forms, or at least what the controller — a thinker, I presumed, with considerable resources — imagined their natural forms might be. Other than being naked, Kite and I did not change.
We linked arms, floating in a circle, skydivers in freefall.
“The first step,” the golden man said, “is to unite. And the best way to do that is to dance, to join your natural energies, your natural sexualities.”
It was an orgy.
I had been prepared so well — and part of me truly did want to couple, especially with Kite — that I did not object. The controller played on our sexual instincts expertly, and this time the sex — unlike what I had experienced in Orianna’s sim — felt real. My body believed I was having sex, although a disclaimer — discreetly making itself known to my inner self — informed me I was not actually having sex.
The experience grew into something larger, all of our minds working together. The sim prompted us to move our bodies on the floor in a dance that echoed our emotions. While deeply involved in the alternate reality, we were at once aware of the dance, and of our own personal artistry responding. I’ve never considered myself a dancer, but that didn’t matter — I fit. The dance felt lovely.