Slant

by Greg Bear

  “I don’t need explanations, Hans.”

  “I do. I’ve been feeling pretty rotten lately.”

  Mary passes on this opportunity.

  “I liked you better the way you were. That’s what… I’ve decided. I didn’t want you to change.”

  “Oh.” She’s going to let him do the talking; that’s obviously why he’s called.

  “You were beautiful. Really exotic. I don’t know why you want to change.”

  “I see where it can get confusing,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  Hans flashes. “Who are you, Mary, goddammit?”

  “I’m the same as I was, Hans.”

  “But who in hell is that?”

  Good question. For a time, she had hoped Hans might be able to help her discover the answer, but no; Hans is hooked on appearances. He liked her the way she was.

  “I mean,” he says; “I don’t know you at all. I’ve been thinking about what it must be like to become… what you are, and then to go back.”

  “You mean, what it says about me, personally.”

  “Who does that sort of thing? I’ve been sad the past few days, missing you.”

  Good.

  “But that person, that woman, isn’t around. You’re different from the person I miss.”

  “Oh,” Mary says.

  “The person I thought I was falling in love with isn’t there any more.”

  “No. Probably not.” Her tone is professionally sympathetic. She refuses to give him any more, show him anything deep.

  “Who are you, Mary Choy?”

  Her jaw muscles tense. She touches her cheek, pokes hard with a fingernail to prod a little relaxation. “I’m a hardworking woman with very little time to think about such things, Hans. I do what I think is best. I’m sorry you couldn’t stay on for the ride.”

  “No,” Hans says, quieter now. “You bucked me right off, Ms. Bronco.”

  “You knew what was happening. I started my reversal before I met you.”

  “I know,” Hans says, deflated completely “I just wanted to say good-bye and let you know that I’m suffering, at least a little. I wish I could understand.”

  “Thank you, Hans.” She stares steadily at the pad’s camera eye, giving nothing, hating him. Then, something makes her say, “If it’s any consolation, I miss you, too.”

  It’s time for her to leave to make her appointment. Still, she lets the camera observe, sitting in her chair with the pad unfolded on the table, a real paper napkin still tucked under one corner. Mary remembers the atavistic rough absorption of the napkin, and the feel of Hans’s lips on her own, a little dry, like the napkin, but strong and hungry.

  Hans looks down, lifts one hand, stares at the fingers nervously. “What are you doing now?”

  Mary sees no reason not to tell him. “I’m having lunch in a restaurant,” she says. “I’m going to give a talk soon.”

  “PD stuff?”

  “Yes. I’m reading while I eat.”

  “Lit? A book?”

  “Yes.” They had that much in common, an enjoyment of reading.

  “Which?”

  “Alive Contains a Lie,” she says.

  “Ah. The book for bitter lovers.”

  “It’s a little more than that,” she says, though in truth that’s what made her access it.

  “Mary. I don’t want you to…”

  Hans stops there, mouth open, but does not seem to know what more to add.

  “Good-bye,” he says.

  Mary nods. The touch ends and she closes her pad more forcefully than is necessary.

  The air itself seems freer and more natural to her; today it is crisp but not below freezing, and looking south down the wide crossing thoroughfare between the Cascade and Tillicum towers, she can see Mount Rainier, like a broad-shouldered and brawnier Fuji.

  The light on the street fairly sparkles and the mufflered puffy-coated pedestrians walk briskly with hands in pockets. Very few of them are obvious transforms. To Mary, this is all the more interesting, because the Corridor—and particularly Seattle—has assumed a leadership position over the past fifty years in the Rim and mid-continent economy. In Japan or Taiwan, fully half the Affected—those who are politically active, who bother to work and vote and believe they can change things, and who are tied in to temp agencies and employed in the hot and open marketplace—are transforms. In Los Angeles, nearly a third… And in San Francisco, almost two thirds.

  Here, a mere five percent.

  She reaches the gaping entrance of the Tillicum Tower. Winds swirl and Mary clutches her small gray hat as she passes into the orange and yellow and jungled warmth of the tower court. Several unlike globes hang over the broad indoor plaza. Tailored birds twitter and screech in the massive tropical trees that entwine the inner buttresses. She might be in a corporate vision of Amazon heaven, with glassed-in rivers to right and left, graceful plant-cabled bridges arching between the floors overhead, and everywhere the adwalls targeting their paid consumers, their messages barely aglimmer on the edge of Mary’s senses. She has never subscribed to adwalls, considers their presence an invitation to subtle slavery to those economic forces she has long since learned never to trust.

  The paid consumers, however, thrive, feel connected, bathed in information about everything they can imagine. They stand transfixed as new ads lock on and deluge them.

  Mary guesses at what one couple is experiencing, in the shadow of a huge spreading banyan. They are in their mid-twenties, pure comb sweethearts, contracted for pre-nups but definitely not life bonders, playing for the moment while they take LitVid eds and gain status with their temp agency. Both are likely clients to the same organization—Workers Inc, she judges from the cut of their frills. They are being hit by sophisticated material, dense and frenetic, catering to all the accepted vividities—sex within relationships, domesticity, corporate adventure, insider thrills. These they will admit to enjoying, and discuss, in public. The male of the pair, Mary specks, will secretly tune in to the massive TouchFlow SexYule celebration next week—and the female will likely stew in whole-life hormoaners for hours each day.

  Yox siphons twenty percent of the total economy, even here in her beloved Corridor. LitVid (more often in the last few years divided into Lit and Vid), older and more traditional, takes a mere and declining seventeen.

  She is up a helix lift, the broad steps resembling solid marble but reshaping with the fluidity of water; she climbs through the quaint delights of the farmers’ market on 4, spiraling up through the stacked circular substructures of the clubs and social circles of 5 and 6, above the tallest trees of the courtyard, and all around, coming in dizzying sweeps, the hundred-acre open spaces of the comb—a lake to the north, where children boat and swim, and adolescents skiing and riding slipperoos on slopes to the east where thick snow falls.

  Mary admires the architecture and feels her familiar protective warmth for the comb players, but she is not of them; she was not born of them, would not be considered acceptable social or sexual fodder, and is even handicapped by being new in the Corridor.

  That is the Corridor’s greatest failing: a deep and abiding suspicion of the outsiders who come to live and work here. This is not racism or even classism; it is pure provincialism, remarkable where so much data and money flows.

  The helix takes her above the open spaces, and she is within the inmost heart of the tower. Free community art here dances from the walls, lively and colorful, conservative enough that it appeals to Mary. Collages of flight, birds and free-form aerodynes, and on the opposite side, hundreds of smiling faces of children, all surrounding an astonishingly moving ideal of a Mother, with eyes half-closed in tender motherly ecstasy…

  She remembers E. Hassida’s portraits of women, equally moving but in different ways.

  Glassed-in floors pass, pierced by interior residential blocks, the cheapest of a very expensive selection, like milky rhomboid crystals glued to the walls of the shafts and sinks.

 
; Higher still, the civic function spaces and blocks take up the eastern flank of the tower at the two hundred meter level. She debarks from the helix and inspects herself in a gleaming porphyry column. The curve of the column makes Mary appear even taller and thinner than she actually is, but her clothing has kept itself in order, unwrinkled and fitted.

  She is about to enter the PD block when her neck hair bristles and she turns at the presence of a man a few feet behind her. She must appear startled and apprehensive, for Full First Ernie Nussbaum, chief investigator for her division, makes an apologetic face and holds up his hands.

  “Sorry, Choy!” he says as she takes a long step ahead.

  Mary shakes her head, forces a smile. “Sorry, sir. You surprised me.”

  “I didn’t mean to invade your space.”

  “My mind was elsewhere,” Mary says. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I’m on a jiltz and I thought you’d be useful. It’s not far from here, in this tower.”

  “I have a meeting,” she says, pointing to the translucent entrance of the civic hall.

  “I’ve reassigned that duty. I had hoped to catch you here… outside.”

  “An active jiltz, sir? I didn’t think I rated such confidence yet.”

  “You’ve done too many jiltzes in your career to be left cold so long. LA is a tough town.”

  “Thanks,” Mary says. She feels a sudden quickening of confidence; Nussbaum is not known to be a softy, yet he has singled her out for a criminal investigation.

  She falls in step with Nussbaum, gives him a side glance. He is not tall, but squat and strong, with a thick neck and fine whorls of brown-blond hair. His eyes are his best feature, meltingly brown and sensitive, but his mouth is straight and broad and comically serious, like Buster Keaton’s. The combination is striking enough to make him attractive. In LA, Mary thinks, he would be a true hit—with so many transforms and redos, a confident natural phys stands out.

  They turn and walk east through lunchtime throngs. Corp workers from Seattle Civic and the local flow offices on these levels are socializing at small eateries, slowing Nussbaum’s deliberate pace. This does not seem to bother him; apparently there is no rush.

  Mary checks herself for attitude, her day’s variation from status alertness (a sleepless night convinces her there’s probably some deficit here) and limberness. She wishes she could dytch now, perform a small exercise warmup and focus mind and muscles.

  “This isn’t a pleasant case,” Nussbaum says. “We don’t see this sort of thing often in the Corridor, but it happens. Actually, I thought you could provide some deep background. It’s right up your alley.”

  They stop before a tube lift. Mary knows this sector of the tower well enough to recognize that the lift will take them to top residential, between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet above sea level.

  “What’s it like to back down from a transform?” he asks as the lift curtain ripples aside.

  In the lift, accelerating rapidly, Mary says, “Not too difficult. I wasn’t too radical; not nearly as radical as the styles this year.”

  “I remember. Very dignified. A male public defender’s wet dream.”

  Mary inclines with an amused smile. “I didn’t know men your age still have wet dreams. Sir.”

  Nussbaum makes a face. “Still have your cop’s feet?”

  Mary hides a small irritation with a larger mock shock. “Sir, you’re embarrassing me.”

  “I like your feet, what can I say?” Nussbaum says. “Days I wish I had feet like that. Great walking-feet, never give out, no flats no strains, stand for hours. But my crowd—they’d definitely frown on that.”

  “Christian?” Mary asks levelly.

  “Old Northwest. Loggers and farmers… once.”

  “I kept my feet,” Mary confirms. “I’m mostly going back on skin color and my face. The rest… very convenient, actually.”

  “Who’s taking care of you?”

  “I’m on fibe with a doctor in LA,” Mary says. “But that’s probably enough talk about me, sir. Why would this, whatever this is, be up my alley?”

  Nussbaum pokes a thick, dry, expertly manicured finger at the lift controller and the elevator slows for their stop. “Choy, I am not a bigot. I just don’t approve of a lot of things happening today. But you’ve been through the procedure. I never have. What we’re going to see is hard enough to look at, even harder for me to understand.”

  They get off on a residential level, looking out over a vast view of Eastside, the Corridor’s extended sprawl, the Cascades and even into Eastern Washington. A huge curved wall of fortified glass blocks the high cold winds, and unseen heaters keep the air springtime warm. The stepped-back roof of the level accommodates the graceful curve of glass: more daring than anything Mary has seen in a tower or comb elsewhere.

  A street mocking black asphalt and paving brick stretches from the edge of a small grassy park through a residential block. Large single family frame-style houses are fronted by grass yards and real trees. The style is John Buchan, high nineteen-eighties and nineties, what some call the Sour Decades, replicated at extraordinary expense. It mocks a suburban neighborhood of the time, but the view of these old-fashioned sprawl homes is high-altitude, surreal.

  “Ever hear of Disneyland?” Nussbaum asks.

  “I grew up about fifteen miles from where it used to be.”

  “This is rich folks’ Disneyland, right?”

  Mary nods. She has never liked ostentation, never felt at ease in high comb culture, and she’s pretty sure Nussbaum isn’t comfortable, either:

  “You know, we give Southcoast hell for bad taste,” Nussbaum says. “But sometimes we really take the cake.”

  Mary sees no pedestrians, observes no delivery or arbeiter traffic on the road nor on the side streets that push back to the load-bearing wall of the tower behind this glassed-in suburban gallery. A hundred yards away, however, she observes two city property arbeiters and a man and woman in PD gray, standing before a three-story house whose mansard roof nearly reaches the arching curve of glass.

  Mary looks at the windows of the houses they pass, curtained and lighted but spookily uninhabited. “They’re all empty,” she says.

  “Lottery homes for corp execs,” Nussbaum says. “Finance’s finest deserve their rewards.”

  “So when’s the lottery?”

  “Metro vice shut the game down after some low managers confessed to a rig. They were paid half a million by each of the lottery winners. Fifty million total. The whole neighborhood’s in dispute now. You must not access metro vids.”

  “I’ve been concentrating on qualifying,” Mary says.

  “It’s all old black dust,” Nussbaum says. “We actually don’t see that sort of thing much up here. How about in LA?”

  “Not for a long time,” Mary says. “Fresh dust is Southcoast’s specialty.”

  “Yeah,” Nussbaum says. “They’re trendsetters” They approach the PD officers and arbeiters.

  “Good afternoon, First Nussbaum,” the female defender says. She nods to Mary. The defenders’ faces are grim. Mary feels a creeping shiver along her back and shoulders. She does not like this outlandish place.

  “Unlicensed psynthe lab, sir,” the woman explains to Nussbaum. “Worst I’ve seen. We’ve had it tombed and we have one man in custody. Apparently the block caretaker let them use this house.”

  Nussbaum shakes his head. “I thought therapy was supposed to clean us.” He looks steadily, appraisingly, at Mary, and asks, “Ready?”

  Mary lowers her head, glances at the woman. Her name is Francey Loach and she is a full Second, coming up on forty years of age. For Mary’s eyes only, Loach curls her lip and lifts her brows, warning Mary about what waits inside.

  The man is Stanley Broom. He is twitchy and unhappy. Loach and Broom. There’s really nothing inside. They’re going to laugh at me back at division.

  But Mary knows this is no joke. To get a domicile tombed, serious black
dust has to be involved.

  “Let’s suit up,” Nussbaum says. Within the large house’s brick entry alcove, a portable black and silver flap-tent has been erected. Nussbaum pushes through the flap and Mary follows. Even with the front door closed, guarded by a small PD arbeiter, she can feel the deep cold within.

  They don loose silver suits, cinch the seams and joints, and Nussbaum palms the top of the arbeiter. The little machine affirms his identity and the door opens. Frigid air pours out. Within is another tent, and beyond, milky fabric contains the deepest cold within the house. The suits warm instantly. They push through the second flap.

  No spiders have yet been mounted on the ceiling to survey. Small lights dot the rug every few feet, guiding them on paths that will not disturb important evidence. The suit feet are antistatic and clingfree, exerting pressure on the frosted tile floor, but no more.

  Mary looks up at the atrium. Compared to her apt, this place is a cathedral, a church of nineties ostentation.

  “Five thousand square feet, thirteen rooms, four bathrooms,” Nussbaum says, as if chanting a prayer to, the gods of the place. “Made for one family, plus guests. Don’t tell anybody, Choy, but I’m a temp man through and through. I hate corp side.” He distinctly pronounces it “corpse side.”

  “But the accused—they didn’t own this place, didn’t even rent it, right? Someone got illegal squat through the caretaker?”

  “That’s the allegation. No traffic up here, quiet and well-protected, they can do whatever they want.”

  The atrium leads into a grand dining hall, with balconies overlooking a huge frost-covered oak table. Real wood, and probably wild not farm. To the left, a hall leads to the first-floor rooms, including the entertainment and dataflow center and master bedroom. To the right, the kitchen, arbeiter storage, and then, in its own smaller glassed atrium, a three-level greenhouse.

  “It’s opulent, all right,” Mary says. Behind the dining room, hidden by a wall, stairs and a lift lead to the upper floors.

  “Ops,” Nussbaum murmurs. He precedes her up the stairs.

  “Operations, sir?”

  “Ops, goddess of wealth. Prurient opulence.”