“Well, sweetheart…” McNihil took another draw on the brackish liquid in the cup. “That’s what they do, all right. They stuff whole worlds in there.” He returned a fragment of the smile she’d given him. “They even put you in there.”
The rest of the smile had faded away. “I don’t understand.” She drew back apprehensively. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mr. Travelt didn’t have anything like that.”
“That’s because…” McNihil set his cup down on the table. “He was a smarter man than I am. Though it doesn’t seem to have done him much good.”
She didn’t seem to hear the last comment. “Why would you do something like that?” An appalled fascination narrowed her gaze. “Let them do that to you?”
“‘Let them?’” McNihil laughed. “Shit, I paid for it. Didn’t come cheap, either. It was a while back, when I was doing rather better than I am now.” He gestured toward the shabby apartment encasing them. “I could afford to be in at the beginning of a product-introduction cycle.”
“What happened?”
“I came down in the world.” In this one and the other, he thought but didn’t say aloud.
“No,” said the cube bunny, “I mean with the operation. And your eyes. It must’ve gone wrong, huh? I heard they do that. And then you’re… you know… not right.”
“If I am-” One finger tapped the side of the cup in front of McNihil. “It’s not because of my eyes.” He picked the ersatz coffee up and drank. “Besides,” he said, leaning back, “what do you know about it? I wouldn’t have thought there were things like that back in Kansas.”
“There ain’t shit in Kansas.” A little cloud of unsunned memory passed across the cube bunny’s face.
“That’s where you’re from? I was just guessing.” McNihil felt sorry for her. On the other side of the reality line, in that world he’d glimpsed in the wet reflection of the chrome percolator, she had all that other world’s pretty genetics, a child’s face grafted by survival-oriented evolution onto an adult’s body, one that hadn’t needed to be surgically pumped up to achieve its Blakean lineaments of desire. Born that way, thought McNihil. They came out of the rusting wastelands at the center of the continent, boys and girls together, walking the dead roads of Kansas and Ohio all the way to the Pacific Rim cities, True Los Angeles and all around the Gloss to Vladivostok and the Chinese and Southeast Asian zones. Where they had something to selclass="underline" themselves and their sheer prettiness, the exact combinations of size of eye, distance between, angle of nose and space to the perfect upper lip. The infantile kink, the baby-sex lure, was seemingly programmed right into the human nervous system. It lodged right down at the base of the spine, where some kundalinic serpent with icy pederast gaze uncoiled and went either wet or stiff at the sight of its prey. Even in his own, he had to admit. Before the vision had faded on the side of the coffeepot, a needle-eyed weasel had smiled at the center of his brain.
Maybe that’s why, thought McNihil. I’d rather see her this way. Safer emotionally, no matter whatever else might happen. He was still a married man, even though his wife was technically dead.
“Mr. Travelt told me about them.” The cube bunny slid past the question about where she’d come from, the dry zone before she’d hit the Gloss. “He knew all about them. In the company he worked for… Dyna-something…”
“Zauber,” said McNihil. “DynaZauber. Like the song.”
That produced a frown. “What song?”
“You know. Beethoven. The Ninth. About how it’s all going to bind uns wieder.”
The cube bunny shook her head. “I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Just as well. The only reason those people want to do any bind-ing is so they can get into our pockets easier. Just another word for connecting.”
A little flinch; the girl he saw in his eyes was probably more sensitive to dirty words than the cube bunny underneath. After a moment, she nodded. “Anyway, he used to work in the division that made that stuff. That’s in your eyes. But that was before he got promoted.”
“Too bad he’s dead, then. Maybe he could’ve told me why my debits keep coming back.” Every month, he wrote out an actual hard-copy paper check, payment for the firmness-overlay maintenance, and every month it came bouncing back with a form letter about the service having been discontinued, thanks for your patronage, be sure and try our other fine enhanced experiential products, blah and more blah.
“Oh?” Mentioning something about money had perked up the cube bunny’s interest.
“This late in the game,” groused McNihil, “you’d think companies could get their billing straight.” He shook his head. “For a while there, I was putting the money away in another account, until I finally figured, screw it, might as well spend it.” That’d been right after he’d gotten bounced off the Collection Agency’s operatives list, and things had gotten tight as an anaconda’s rectum before he’d lined up another paying gig. “They sort it out and want their money, they can come and get it. Fat chance, though.”
The girl didn’t know what he was talking about. She was still fascinated, childlike, by his eyes, peering into them and trying to see what she couldn’t.
“When you look at me,” said the cube bunny after a moment. “What do you see?”
“Another world.”
If not a better one, then at least more to his liking. I’ve gotten used to it, McNihil told himself. Like a dream that you know you’re dreaming, but don’t want to wake up from.
For a few seconds, he let the limits of his vision expand beyond the girl sitting in front of him-the tough little, soft little Lupino clone, one of the compensating gifts that his eyes bestowed on him-and out past the gray walls of the shabby apartment. Past the unlit hallways and the faint smells of dog-bottle alcohol and sweating bedsheets that seeped out from under the doors, and out into the night’s alleys and cracked sidewalks, with their pools of streetlamp glow that didn’t reach from one to the other, that left patches of darkness stitched with buzzing neon above the steps of basement gin mills that you descended like marching into one’s grave.
The world in the shabby apartment, that smelled like burnt coffee and suspicion, and the one outside that McNihil saw-it was real enough for him. That the cube bunny, and everyone else, didn’t see it made no difference.
“You kinda see me, though,” decided the cube bunny. “I mean, I’m real-I’m really here-and you can see that. So that’s a help.”
“Sure is.” That was the difference between what he’d had done and all those old-fashioned total-environment simulations, that unsubtle virtual bunk that simply substituted one gross set of cooked-up sensory feed for what came in unassisted from the real world. The problem with those sim arrangements, and the reason they’d died a quick, merciful death on the consumer market even before the bandwidth and nerve-receptor bugs could be worked out, was that nobody could get any work done with them. Not in the real world, at least.
Whereas the thin-film insertion surgery that he’d paid for-and gotten; McNihil still didn’t regret it-was basically a businessman’s product. He supposed that some of the execs that had been standing around the corpse probably had accessible over-layers inside their own eyes. Controlled by the muscles of the eye socket, the interplay of the rectus lateralis and the superior and inferior oblique muscles, pulling and distorting the spheres of aqueous humor-not to focusing on nearer or farther objects, but activating one inserted layer or another, switching the perceived world into translucent spreadsheets or databases floating above the hard objects of people and other real things.
“That’s how it works for them,” said McNihil. He’d told the cube bunny all about it, as he’d gotten up and poured himself the remainder of the coffee in the pot. He stood leaning against the side of the kitchen doorway, sipping the lukewarm, kerosenelike fluid. “Strictly business.” It was a big reason why he had such an aversion to executive types, like that DZ bunch with Harrisch at their head. “You can be talking to them,” he mused aloud, “and you’ll be looking at them, right in the face, and they’re looking back at you. And then you see the eyes shifting, like they’re looking past you into the distance, or at some place just past their noses. And you know they’re not really looking at you, they’re reading some market-update numbers that’d just crawled in over the wire.” McNihil shrugged. “I’ve always just found that kind of offensive.”