You dont believe that Rydell said.
Neither does Buddy Sublett said, but his daddyll whip his head around if he finds that VR stuff hes got under the bed.
Just call him up Rydell said, tell him what I told you. Two hundred dollars cash, plus the time and charges.
Peoplell see her Sublett said, his shy silver gaze bouncing in Chevettes direction, then back to Rydell.
What do you mean, see me?
Well, its your haircut Sublett said. Its too unusual for em, I can tell you that.
Now, Buddy Rydell said to the boy, Im going to give you these two hundred-dollar bills here. Now whend you say your fathers due back?
Not for another two hours Buddy said, his voice cracking with nervousness. He took the money like it might have something on it. Hes helping pour a new pad for the fuel cells theyre bringing from Phoenix on the Churchs bulk-lifter. Buddy kept looking at Chevette. She had on a straw sun-hat that belonged to Subletts mother, with a big floppy brim, and a pair of these really strange old-lady sunglasses with lemon-yellow frames and lenses that sort of swooped up at the side. Chevette tried smiling at him, but it didnt seem to help.
Youre friends of Joels, right? Buddy had a haircut that wasnt quite skin, some kind of gadget in his mouth to straighten his teeth, and an Adams apple ahout a third the size of his head. She watched it bob up and down. From L.A.?
Thats right Rydell said.
I I wanna g-go there Buddy said.
Good Rydell said. This is a step in the right direction, you just believe it. Now you wait out there like I said, and tell Chevette here if anybodys coming.
Buddy went out of his tiny bedroom, closing the door behind him. It didnt look to Chevette like anybody Buddys age lived there at all. Too neat, with these posters of Jesus and Fallon. She felt sorry for him. It was close and hot and she missed Subletts mothers air-conditioning. She took off that hat.
Okay Rydell said, picking up the plastic helmet, you sit on the bed here and pull the plug if we get interrupted. Buddy had already hooked up the jack for them. Rydell sat down on the floor and put the helmet on, so she couldnt see his eyes. Then he pulled on one of those gloves you use to dial with and move stuff around in there.
She watched his index finger, in that glove, peck out something on a pad that wasnt there. Then she listened to him talking to the telephone companys computer about getting the time and charges after he was done.
Then his hand came up again. Here goes he said, and started punching out this number he said Lowell had given him, his finger coming down on the empty air. When he was done, he made a fist, sort of wiggled it around, then lowered the gloved hand to his lap.
He just sat there for a few seconds, the helmet kind of swiveling around like he was looking at stuff, then it stopped moving.
Okay he said, his voice kind of funny, but not to her, but is there anybody here?
Chevette felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
Oh he said, the helmet turning, Jesus
Rydell had liked doing Dream Walls, when he was a kid in high school. It was this Japanese franchise operation they set up in different kinds of spaces, mostly in older malls; some were in places that had been movie theaters, some were in old department stores. Hed gone to one once that theyd put into an old bowling alley; made it real long and narrow and the stuff sort of distorted on you if you tried to move it too fast.
There were a lot of different ways you could play with it, the most popular one in Knoxville being gunfights, where you got these guns and shot at all kinds of bad guys, and they shot back and then you got the score. Sort of like FATSS at the Academy, but only about half the rez. And none of the, well, color.
But the one Rydell had liked most was where you just went in and sort of sculpted things out of nothing, out of that cloud of pixels or polygons or whatever they were, and you could see what other people were doing at the same time, and maybe even put your stuff together with theirs, if you both wanted to. Hed been kind of self-conscious about it, because it seemed like something that mostly girls did. And the girls were always doing these unicorns and rainbows and things, and Rydell liked to do cars, kind of dream-cars, like he was some designer in Japan somewhere and he could build anything he wanted. You could get these full-color printouts when you were done, or a cassette, if youd animated it. Thered always be a couple of girls down at the far end, doing plastic surgery on pictures of themselves, fiddling around with their faces and hair, and theyd get printouts of those if they did one they really liked.
35. The republic of desire
Rydell would be up closer to the entrance, molding these grids of green light around a frame hed drawn, and laying color and texture over that to see how different ones looked.
But what he remembered when he clicked into the Republic of Desires eyephone-space was the sense you got, doing that, of what the space around Dream Walls was like. And it was a weird thing, because if you looked up from what you were doing, there really wasnt anything there; nothing in particular, anyway. But when you were doing it, designing your car or whatever, you could get this funny sense that you were leaning out, over the edge of the world, and the space beyond that sort of fell away, forever.
And you felt like you werent standing on the floor of an old movie theater or a bowling alley, but on some kind of plain, or maybe a pane of glass, and you felt like it just stretched away behind you, miles and miles, with no real end.
So when he went from looking at the phone companys logo to being right out there on that glassy plain, he just said Oh, because he could see its edges, and see that it hung there, level, and around and above it this cloud or fog or sky that was no color and every color at once, just sort of seething.
And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain, so that Rydell got to feel like a bug, or a little toy.
One of them was a dinosaur, this sort of T. Rex job with the short front legs, except they ended in something a lot more like hands. One was a sort of statue, it looked like, or more like some freak natural formation, all shot through with cracks and fissures, but it was shaped like a wide-faced man with dreadlocks, the face relaxed and the lids half-closed. But all stone and moss, the dreadlocks somehow stacked from whole mountains of shale.
Then he looked and saw the third one there, and just said
Jesus.
This was a figure, too, and just as big, but all made up of television, these moving images winding and writhing together, and barely, it seemed, able to hold the form they took: something that might either have been a man or a woman. It hurt his eyes, to try to look too close at any one part of it. It was like trying to watch a million channels at once, and this noise was rushing off it like a waterfall off rocks, a sort of hiss that somehow wasnt a sound at all.
Welcome to the Republic said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman. It smiled, the ivory of its teeth carved into whole temples. Rydell tried to look at the carvings; they got really clear for a second, and then something happened.
You dont have a third the bandwidth you need the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what youd expect from a mountain. Youre in K-Tel space
We could turn off the emulator the thing made of television suggested, its voice modulating up out of the waterfall-hiss.
Dont bother said the dinosaur. I dont think this is going to be much of a conversation.
Your name said the mountain.
Rydell hesitated.
Social Security said the dinosaur, sounding bored, and for some reason Rydell thought about his father, how hed always gone on about what that had used to mean, and what it meant now.