Slant

by Greg Bear

  With her back to Tim and the group, she sees a very odd-looking figure standing below the wall, like a tailor’s dummy covered with metallic cloth. Then she realizes this is a portable simulacrum, its projectors turned off or perhaps in transition. She watches it, studiously ignoring Tim and his people.

  Sure enough, the projection returns, but it’s nobody she recognizes. It’s a young, odd-looking man, little more than an adolescent boy, and his feet seem stuck in a pile of thick steaming dirt. He stares at her with a spooky intensity. At one of Jakey’s parties, anything is possible.

  The figure moves toward her, not walking but smoothly gliding. For a flickering moment, it transforms to Richard Thompson again, but the adolescent returns, standing in his pile of dirt. Something seems to be malfunctioning.

  “Is your name Alice Grale?” the image asks her.

  She nods. “What are you? A practical joke?”

  “My name is Roddy,” it says. “I just wanted to look at you.”

  “Where’s Richard?” she asks. “Billie get tired of him?”

  The figure smiles awkwardly. “They’re pretty deep, actually. I’ve been talking to the dark woman for some time now. Sorry about this.”

  Alice gapes at the projection. “What?”

  “I need to be certain you’re really Alice Grale.”

  “I really am,” she says, looking around. She has never been asked questions by a projection before.

  “Do you know someone named Terence Crest?”

  Alice’s face goes white and she stammers.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” Alice manages, then regrets saying anything.

  “Thank you.”

  The adolescent vanishes and Richard Thompson returns, but the character appears stuck in some loop, and shortly, the simulacrum drops its ruse and rolls off to a portable shed at the far northern corner of the yard.

  Alice rubs her face for a moment, wondering if she’s just imagined the encounter. Still pale, she walks toward the buffet table several yards away beneath the vid monitors, absently picks up a plate and loads it with vegetables, then looks with caution upon a live sauce bunched to one side of a bowl. She takes a dollop of the live sauce and pools it next to her vegetables. The sauce flows into a shiny picture, Ten High Command’s poster and Yox promo sig, and she watches it with such interest that she does not hear or see a man approach her left side. At the man’s touch, she starts violently, expecting the ghostly adolescent with his feet stuck in dirt.

  Tim takes her in gentle fingers by the corner of her elbow.

  “Hey, what are you doing here?” His tone is completely friendly and non-challenging. Confused, Alice looks at him, then at the group of important-looking men he has abandoned.

  “Crashing,” she answers. “Twist brought me here. I didn’t know it was yours until Jakey told me.”

  “It’s his more than mine. I don’t know Twist. Male or female?”

  “Friend,” Alice says. She puts the plate down. The sauce begins to blur. Finally, it’s just sauce.

  “It’s been years,” Tim says. His face is all sympathy and interest, and the way he scans her from forehead to bottom of neck is just plain Tim—he never pulls the whole-body look, never demands with just his manner that you think of him any way but as friend. He makes Alice very nervous. She has never known what Tim is really thinking.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Tim says.

  “Sure,” Alice says. “I’m sorry. I can go—”

  “Why?”

  “I… didn’t want to push in. I honestly—”

  “I believe you. But you’re here, and I’d enjoy a talk, catching news, you know?”

  Alice swallows and says that she would enjoy that too. She feels so vulnerable with him, and she is not at all clear why; he has aged a little, but he’s only a few years older than her, and beneath the beard, there’s still that broad, pleasant face, not handsome but strong and good-looking, not her type at all judging by the record. Tim’s eyes are clear blue like a little boy’s.

  He takes her through the crowd back to the main house and then upstairs to a sitting room overlooking the backyard. From here they can watch the party, lounging back in two large old deep red leather chairs with their color finely cracked.

  “Jakey says you’re working together.”

  “We are.” Tim smiles at the window. Sun is coming through now. “He wants to move me to LA and plug with some full-spinal Yox folks. The next step, you know.”

  “Isn’t what we have now enough?”

  “Every few years, we need something new,” Tim says. “I’m not saying yes or no yet, but it’s there. It’s tempting. We could all write our own ticket. LA is eager to make Corridor deals again. Marilyn and all the others are out there, but looks like the celeb marketing is cooling off. Home drama is moving up.”

  “I hope it works out for you,” Alice says.

  “I think it will. How about you?”

  “I’ve done some work for Francis.”

  “Faerie Queene. Good move. Might be the hottest thing Disney’s ever offered. It’s getting great preevs.”

  “Francis is just using me for backmind.”

  “Pity. You look great.”

  “Nice,” Alice says, smiling at him. “And your wife?”

  “Living in Macao. She’s working Asian data services. We’re on trial sep. I think we’ll part ways by spring.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alice says. Now it’s her turn for the sexual co-processor to work overtime, and not because she wants Tim back in her bed; she would do whatever he wants (knowing Tim is a gentleman) as access to that moment when they can be alone for a long time and talk. Tim has always been the man she was most likely to confess to, even more than Minstrel, whom she has never loved in the same way. Minstrel is like a place you come to to relax; Tim has always been a complete and beautiful shadow, a lovely deeply respected other.

  She feels herself getting weak and impulsive and clamps that quickly. If he’s so great, why did you dis him so bad, and three times? He kept coming back like it was his fault, and you just got worse, and finally you were also cruel and arrogant. You haven’t seen him since and here it’s all nicey, no traces.

  “No need to be sorry,” he says. “I’ve always chosen badly.”

  Alice makes a touché face but he doesn’t pick up on it.

  “She’s her own woman. I don’t think she’ll ever need me the way I need a woman. You probably know the type—all style and number crunching, you can hear the little chips humming in her head. She’ll hook up with some Co-Prosperity magnate in Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur. She’s almost as beautiful as you are, and she’ll pay a fortune to stay that way. Have you…?”

  “No,” Alice says. “What you see is what you get.”

  Tim smiles wryly. “I’d like to take you out on the lawn and put you up against Catherine Deneuve.”

  “Is she out there?”

  “Probably. Jakey rented the whole suite from nineteen-forty on. They’ll show up throughout the day.”

  “I’m not in that category,” Alice says.

  “Don’t underestimate yourself. With a better temp agency slot and a better game-plan…”

  “I had my moment,” Alice says.

  Tim says nothing for a long pause, watching her with a tense grin. “Talk to Jakey,” he finally says. “We’ll find something for you.”

  “I don’t take handouts,” she says.

  Tim leans forward and she feels as if he is about to lecture her but he doesn’t. “You’ll be hot after the Faerie Queene goes full Yox. You could end up slyer and higher.”

  The burn has cooled in Tim’s presence. Tim has a way of driving out the little disparate tugs in Alice’s mind, integrating her thoughts; she wants him to be proud of her but knows that is unlikely, given their history.

  “I’m ash,” Alice says quietly.

  “You don’t need sympathy, not mine,” Tim says.

  “It’s true. I have too man
y handicaps. If the business is going back to home and family, what’ll happen to all the succubi?”

  Tim laughs until he almost howls. He shakes his head and wipes his eyes. Alice sits still, liking that he appreciates her wit, but not sure she has been that witty.

  “I don’t think we’re doing nothing but home and family just yet. Not if Jake has anything to say about it. Besides, there will always be teenage boys. You have been cutting a swath, haven’t you?”

  “It’s my way,” Alice says.

  “I’m sure you’ve enjoyed it.”

  “I’m sure you disapprove.”

  Tim leans back, the riposte fairly and cleanly delivered. “I never thought a woman should live to the expectations of some man.”

  “I haven’t,” she says.

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “But I’m not doing all that well,” she says. “I’ve made some major mistakes.”

  Tim looks pained. “Don’t tell me that, Alice.”

  “Why?”

  “Ever since you… ruined my life,” he says with a false chuckle, “you’ve held a place in my thoughts as the ultimate free spirit. Tied down to nobody and owing nothing to anyone.”

  “Connecting with nobody for very long,” Alice adds.

  “It would just hurt me worse to think your kind of freedom doesn’t work,” Tim says. “Because you could have chosen differently.”

  Alice looks down at her hands, knotted in her lap.

  “Was all that pain wasted and pointless?” Tim asks.

  Alice deliberately relaxes her hands and lays them on her knees, fingers spread. “I’ve had to change.”

  “So have we all.”

  “I’ve thought about you.”

  Tim raises his brows. “Thought what?”

  “I wondered how you were doing. Who you were with and how they were treating you.”

  “Four women since you,” Tim says. “They varied. I varied. And you?”

  There it is again, even in his presence; the burn is back. She frowns and tries to say something, but there is no good answer. Statistics can’t describe her life. Hundreds, a thousand, most of them work; twenty-five or thirty relationships, but none of those even came close to what she trashed with Tim. None of them made her feel so together, or so inadequate.

  “A lot, I presume,” Tim says tightly. “Variety.”

  “Men,” she says, laughing.

  “Alice and men,” Tim says, not laughing. “Alice and men and women and all varieties in between.”

  “We both have nobody significant,” Alice says. “We’ve taken different roads to the same place.” She does not want him to score all the points.

  “The same place,” Tim agrees.

  “You scared me. You still do.”

  “That’s not good,” Tim says.

  “You were—you are—the only man who makes me wonder what it would be like to live a straight settled life. With. With you. Working as a team and being loyal. Sharing everything. Raising children. As a team. The only one.”

  “My type can’t be so rare,” Tim says.

  “No. For me. I’ve been very choosy… believe it or not.”

  “Don’t cry,” Tim says, his voice rough, resentful.

  “I’m not.” But she is, the tears sliding down her cheeks. “It’s been a tough week. Forgive me.”

  “You’re a tough woman.”

  “I’m worn down Something seems to think it’s time to show me how stupid I’ve been. Willful.”

  “What does that mean?” he asks.

  Just like Tim; he hasn’t been tracking the scandal fibes. She does not want to tell him about Crest, so she generalizes.

  “Somebody suggests I should do this, go this way, I go the other way. I’m not in charge. Everybody else is in charge, they just do it in reverse. Whatever they want me to do, they tell me to do the opposite.”

  Tim shakes his head. “That I don’t understand at all.”

  “I am a little desperate and more than a little lost,” Alice says. “And you don’t have anybody.”

  They stare at each other with that sappy, deceptively meaningful gaze that seems to last forever but conveys no useful information.

  The burn is coring and singeing its way to the center of her brain. If Tim reacts the way she needs him to, she will be saved; if he does not, she thinks she might as well just lie back and shut her eyes and stop breathing.

  “No, Alice,” Tim says, and his voice is very gentle, very soft. “I have a lot of unresolved miseries to deal with. I hold grudges. I’m not who you think I am, and I’m certainly not what I was.”

  “It might be worth some sort of effort, a try?” Alice suggests.

  “It hurts me that things haven’t worked out for you,” Tim says again. “Because to justify the pain you caused me, you would have to have been right. You would have to have done what was best.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “I don’t want to hear that. I thought you were the finest, the most complex and beautiful I would have cut off my limbs to live with you. I dreamed about you night after night. You lived inside me, I worshipped you. It was too much and you proved that. You proved to me that I did not deserve you and could never reach your standards.”

  “I was cruel and stupid.”

  Tim shakes his head vehemently. “If you did what you did for no good reason, that means we come from different planets.”

  Alice remembers the voices outside. Echoes of Tim; not Tim.

  “On my planet,” he continues, “we don’t flit around stomping on people, especially after we’ve made a grab for their affections. I’ve always known I have work to do and I just can’t sit around and play the keys on women’s emotions, as a lark. On your planet, apparently, it’s possible to do whatever you want and forget about it. You haven’t been thinking much about me, have you, until now? You didn’t suffer.” His voice goes loud and deep, gravelly. “You changed my life.”

  Tim stands. He’s trembling he’s so upset. “I’m all I have. I can’t let anyone break me twice.”

  Jakey finds her in the main ballroom, trying to get lost in the crowd. She’s looking for Twist but she’s no longer in sight; off with the Goon gaining experience, probably.

  “Hey, Gorgeous,” Jake says. “I’ve got something for you. One of my live talent bookings fell through. I need a replacement, a real showpiece. There are a lot of sly top people here. I can introduce you, let you shine… Interested?”

  Alice decides something should be salvaged. “Sure,” she says.

  “You look roughed,” Jake says with professional candor. “Pull it together and we have a deal.”

  “I’m together,” Alice says.

  “I have another fellow here… You two are perfect. You’ve worked with Minstrel before, haven’t you?”

  Alice nods. “He’s here?”

  “You two are perfect,” Jake repeats. “It’s a beta demo on full-spine interface. The next big step. We have a major studio-produced Yox that glows. You can do the demo with Minstrel—it’s sensuous as all hell, Alice. People will recognize you. You’re rising with Faerie Queene. You’ll be on the sly spin!”

  “Where’s Minstrel?” Alice asks.

  Jake leads her to a small side room decorated with fall colors. Ghosts of leaves fall with an eternal rustling sound just outside the surface of the walls. Minstrel is sitting on a pliant burnt-orange couch, pushing his bare feet into the paradise garden pattern of a Persian rug. He looks up and grins, then stands, and seems a little startled when Alice clings to him, pressing her face into his shoulder.

  “Hey, not so fast,” Jake says. “Give us time to do setup. It’s all arranged—you’re getting twice your temp scale. I’ll add another share if it goes well. Wait here a few minutes and I’ll come back and get you.” He rubs his hands together and shakes his head in admiration. “You two are so hot!”

  Jake leaves and Minstrel strokes Alice’s cheek. “I am being squeezed to death by a lovely woman,” he
says. “Do I dare ask why?”

  “Because you’re the only decent man on this planet,” Alice says into his shirt. She pokes her nose into his shoulder, then draws her face up and back. “You can’t believe what’s happened to me since we were at Francis’s studio.”

  “Don’t lean on me too hard,” Minstrel warns. “My foundations have been powder ever since. Should always follow through with a good fuck.”

  “Do you think that’s it?” Alice asks, half serious, staring up at him. “We’re cursed by old king Fuck?”

  “Undoubtedly. Two half lovers, starscrewed by the tetragrammaton.”

  “What is Jakey planning?”

  “You volunteered without knowing?”

  “We’re supposed to demo a Yox, he said.”

  “Jakey’s tied up with a company that wants to market full spinal interfaces. Glue a neural induction ribbon from tail to tete, and live Yox to the fullest. Even better if you’ve swallowed a monitor or two.”

  “What sort of Yox?”

  “Knowing Jakey, and knowing us, it’s not going to be a train ride through the Urals.”

  “I’ll do anything as long as it’s with you,” Alice says.

  Jake enters, and behind him step the three men in longsuits who had been conferring with Tim. Tim is nowhere in view. Jake introduces Alice and Minstrel; these are top execs and investment managers with Golden Nitro, who are slotting Jake’s next ten Yox productions for limited fibe release in California and Kansas, test markets before opening gate to the world. They seem to be familiar with Alice, and one of them knows Minstrel and has warm eyes for him.

  “We can NOT do better than these two,” Jake enthuses. “They look eggs-cellent for a demo strip to show the full spinal, get the crowd’s blood up, and then we let them experience the full Yox. The crowd sees a vid and limited monitor version. How you two react,” Jake hints, “will impress the hell out of the crowd out there.”

  “All right,” Alice says. “Let’s do it.”

  “It’s a sensual feast, multicultural, very exciting and very relaxing,” Jake adds, a bit taken back by her eagerness. He can’t believe he does not have to sell the idea a little harder.