Virtual Light

35. The republic of desire

Rydell would be up closer to the entrance, molding these grids of green light around a frame he’d 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 Desire’s 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 wasn’t 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 weren’t 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 company’s 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 wasn’t 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 don’t have a third the bandwidth you need” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re 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.

“Don’t bother” said the dinosaur. “I don’t 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 he’d always gone on about what that had used to mean, and what it meant now.

“Name and number” said the mountain, “or we’re gone.”

“Rydell, Stephen Berry” and then the string of digits. He’d barely gotten the last one out when the dinosaur said ‘Former policeman, I see.”

“Oh dear” said the mountain, who kept reminding Rydell of something.

“Well” said the dinosaur, “pretty permanently former, by the look of it. Worked for IntenSecure after that.”

“A sting” said the mountain, and brought a hand up to point at Rydell, except it was this giant granite lobster-claw, crusted with lichen. It seemed to fill half the sky, like the side of a space ship. “The narrow end of the wedge?”

“They don’t come much narrower, if you ask me” the storm of television said. “You seem to have gotten our Lowell’s undivided attention, Rydell. And he wouldn’t even tell us what your name was.”

“Doesn’t know it” Rydell said.

“Don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, hee haw” said the mountain, lowering the claw, its voice a sampled parody of Rydell’s. Rydell tried to get a good look at its eyes; got a flash of still blue pools, waving ferns, some kind of tan rodent hopping away, before the focus slipped. “People like Lowell imagine we need them more than they need us.”

“State your business, Stephen Berry” said the dinosaur.

“There was something happened, up Benedict Canyon—”

“Yes, yes” said the dinosaur, “you were the driver. What does it have to do with us?”

That was when it dawned on Rydell that the dinosaur, or all of them, could probably see all the records there were on him, right then, anywhere. It gave him a funny feeling. “You’re looking at all my stuff” he said.

“And it’s not very interesting” said the dinosaur. “Benedict Canyon?”

“You did that” Rydell said.

The mountain raised its eyebrows. Windblown scrub shifting, rocks tumbling down. But just on the edge of Rydell’s vision. “For what it’s worth, that was not us, not exactly. We would’ve gone a more elegant route.”

“But why did YOU do it?”

“Well” said the dinosaur, “to the extent that anyone did it, or caused it to be done, I imagine you might look to the lady’s husband, who I see has since filed for divorce. On very solid grounds, it seems.”

“Like he set her up? With the gardener and everything?”

“Lowell has some serious explaining to do, I think” the mountain said.

“You haven’t told us what it is you want, Mr. Rydell.” This from the television-thing.

“A job like that. Done. I need you to do one of those. For me.”

“Lowell” the mountain said, and shook its dreadlocked head. Cascades of shale in Rydell’s peripheral vision. Dust rising on a distant slope.

“That sort of thing is dangerous” the dinosaur said. “Dangerous things are very expensive. You don’t have any money, Rydell.”

“How about if Lowell pays you for it?”

“Lowell” from that vast blank face twisting with images, “owes us.”

“Okay” Rydell said, “I hear you. And I think I know somebody else might pay you.” He wasn’t even sure if that was bullshit or not. “But you’re going to have to listen to me. Hear the story.”

“No” the mountain said, and Rydell remembered who it was he figured the thing was supposed to look like, that guy you saw on the history shows sometimes, the one who’d invented eyephones or something, “and if Lowell thinks he’s the only pimp out there, he might have to think again.”

And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.

“Wait” he said. “Any of you live in San Francisco?”

The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?”

“Well” Rydell said, “do you like it?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.”

“Tokyo?” The television-storm, coming back now as this big ball, like that hologram in Cognitive Dissidents. “Who told you that?”

Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…”

“Tell us” the dinosaur said.

So Rydell did.

She had the hat back on, when he took the helmet off, but she was holding those sunglasses in her hand. Just looking at him.

“I don’t think I made sense of much of that” she said. She’d only been able to hear his side of it, but it had been mostly him talking, there at the end. “But I think you’re flat fucking crazy.”

“I probably am” he said.

Then he got the time and charges on the call. It came to just about all the money he had left.

“I don’t see why they had to put the damn thing through Paris” he said.

She just put those glasses back on and slowly shook her head.