“Caught in the act,” she said. “Or nearly so.”
Marian giggled and shrugged. “Sorry, Beck.”
The tableau froze just like that—hung, like a bad piece of spaghetti code. Reality.sys corrupted, read a tiny monitor in Beck’s head. Reboot universe, Y/N? Somewhere in the room, a persistent, rhythmic beeping started. The microwave, he thought. Who turned on the microwave?
Marian opened her mouth. “The time is seven A.M.,” she said. “The time is seven A.M. Coffee has been brewed. Instructions?”
The scene dissolved in a foggy special effect and Beck found himself staring at sunlight filtering in through the sliding glass door that gave onto the loft’s balcony. “The time is seven A.M.,” the house repeated. “Coffee has been brewed. Instructions?”
Beck sat up, the dream clinging to the inside of his head like mildew. He shook it. A futile gesture. “Where’s Marian?” he asked.
“Marian has left the house,” said the house.
Which meant she was still mad at him. He thought about calling her, but did not. He got up, showered, dressed, ate a meager breakfast and went to school. After his second lecture, when he realized he had forgotten to bring his computer core, his stomach tied itself in a double granny. He would not go home. Instead, he called the house from a terminal in his office at the school and asked it to turn on his desktop and download the files he needed. On the verge of breaking the connection, he hesitated. Skin clammy, stomach protesting, he asked, “House, where is Marian?”
“Marian is home,” said the house.
He hesitated long enough to have the house computer prompt him. “Instructions?”
“Is she alone?”
“No. Ruby Wilson is also in the house.”
He cut the connection, checked the time and left the campus. Obviously his dream was, if not prophetic, at least a subliminal message from himself to himself about the state of Marian’s relationship with Ruby. He, who confronted nothing that could be avoided, would confront them.
Marian’s minivan sat in the driveway, its nether regions full of carpet and drapery samples. He rounded the house and cut through the garden, gliding up the back steps and noiselessly opening the kitchen door. “I don’t believe it,” he said.
The two women were seated at the kitchen table, coffee in hand, poring over the flat display of an electronic drafting pad. Their heads came up in unison.
Marian frowned. “What’s wrong, Beck?”
“How can you ask me that?” He gestured with both hands. “The two of you… together… here.”
They exchanged a look.“And?” prompted Ruby. “What’s unusual about that?”
“Nothing, now that I think of it. Dear God, you’re always together like this. Why didn’t I see it?”
“See what?” asked Marian.
“You two are lovers.”
The two of them gaped at him, then Ruby threw back her head and laughed. When Marian joined her, Beckett turned and let himself out the way he’d come.
Beck, very pointedly, did not answer any communication from Marian for the rest of the day. He went downtown well in advance of his dinner appointment with Bourbon. To while away the hours, he availed himself of the hotel bar, got out a borrowed notebook computer and tried to write. He began drinking lattes around six, and had had four of them by the time Laurence Bourbon spotted him and came over to say hello. There was another man with him, a tall, thin fellow with an amazing tan and gleaming black hair, who he introduced as Zev Darren, an art director at Sefton.
They dined in Bourbon’s suite, and Darren captivated Beckett with talk of book covers. After dinner, the art director was called to his computer to answer some urgent e-mail. Beck turned over his signed contracts to Laurence Bourbon.
“No questions?” Bourbon asked.
Beck, lounging in a futurist’s idea of a recliner with a cup of cappuccino in hand, wagged his head, feeling remarkably relaxed considering the stress of the day and the sheer amount of caffeine he had consumed. “But I believe you had something to ask me.”
Bourbon smiled. “Indeed.” He leaned forward on his sofa. “This cyber-crook really has me baffled. Are there any traps I could lay for him—any lockouts I could devise—that would keep him from breaking and entering?”
Beck nodded and yawned. “I don’t know if I can explain them to you, though.”
Bourbon frowned. “Well, I am somewhat of a hacker, myself—an amateur, certainly, but I think I might understand. Still… could I record our conversation? What I don’t understand, I’m sure one of our programmers could.”
Beck agreed, and Bourbon got his recorder and popped in a tiny optical disk. He grinned in a way that belied his sophistication, the telltale hacker-gleam in his eye, and said, “I really appreciate this, Beckett.”
In that moment they achieved rapport. Laurence Bourbon asked questions, and Beck answered them enthusiastically. It was easy stuff, but it got Larry (Beck found it easy to think of him as “Larry” suddenly) sitting on the edge of his seat. Beck felt like doing the same, but no matter how much internal enthusiasm he generated for the subject matter, he couldn’t seem to get his body to reflect it. Zev Darren, he noticed, had no interest in hacker-babble. He had evidently finished with his e-mail and was immersed in a computer game, his face half hidden by a VR helm. Not unlike Marian, Beck thought, Darren obviously saw the computer as an entertainer. He leaned back in his chair and chattered on.
When he left the Sheraton sometime after midnight, Beck was tired but exhilarated. He had a contract in his pocket; his novel would be published within the next year. In the elevator, he paused to savor the signing, but found the memory imprecise and hazy. Despite the virgin daiquiris and cappuccinos, he’d come close to dozing several times during the evening; exhaustion had robbed him of his moment of glory. He blamed Marian, who, after all, had caused him to lose sleep.
Well, he’d sleep tonight—or rather, this morning. He checked his watch as he crossed the lobby: 12:22. Small wonder the place was subdued. He glanced toward the concierge. There was no one in attendance. There was no one in the lobby at all, in fact. He shrugged as the brass-and-glass doors slid open before him, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. It clacked back at him as if he wore taps on the heels of his shoes. He glanced down at his feet; the concrete gleamed a grooved black, like obsidian scored with a finetoothed comb. He looked up. Gone was the city street, the cars, the buildings, the street lamps, the painted curbing, the traffic signals. There were, in fact, no intersections for traffic signals to preside over. The glossy surface beneath him curved away to the right and left in a flat arc and, while the Sheraton s bulk still loomed comfortingly behind him, the rest of Boston had vanished.
Beck could have fled back into the hotel, but he didn’t; curiosity had gotten the better of more sensible fear. He moved forward, toward the center of the curving track and a circular red patch with a tall steel pole in the middle of it. As he crossed the odd tarmac toward the shaft, it occurred to him to wonder what light source allowed him to see either color or form. He could see none. The sky was an unrelieved, light-sucking black with not so much as a star to brighten it. Despite that, the shiny spindle gleamed sofdy in its field of bright, unambiguous red.
Heels in the black, toes in the red, Beck put hands on his knees and peered down. Letters stared back at him. The letters formed words and the words formed a recognizable phrase: THE PLANETS—Holst. The score, directionless, ambient, now oozed out at him from some unseen source.
Beckett Hodge straightened and gazed right and left. He was standing, he realized, on an immense record album. Not a CD or an OD, but a titanic, archaic, vinyl platter. He turned and made his way toward the outer edge of the record, discovering the source of the light. At the turntable’s rim, softly glowing walls rose into a haze of ambient light. As Beck tried to decide whether he should have noticed this feature of the place before, the turntable began to move.