Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  “What are you thinking, lady?” Alan asked.

  “I’m worried about Janine. I hate to leave her alone. But there’s nothing to be done about it. There’s something I’d like to show you. When I can.”

  “Something that happened today. Yeah. Shame that chopper went down when it did. Damned shame.”

  The look in Alan’s eyes said that he didn’t think the helo crash was pure accident.

  “I just might go to Lisbon,” Alan said.

  “Huh?”

  “You stretch out on this futon, here, and I’ll call Gulf Coast. They can have me a rig set up in Lisbon by the time I get there. There may be something in this aquaculture business for Gulf Coast to look at.”

  Signy hoped Alan would find something. It seemed he had friends that he cared about. Alan was another loyalty addict, like Signy. The poor bastard.

  “Thanks. For the chile.” Thansh, Signy heard herself say. The Scotch was getting to her tongue. The futon felt very soft. Signy let it take her weight, surprised by how many of her joints ached. Cold and tension had been at them. Sleep here, in the enemy’s lair? Yeah. Where else could she be safe? Here, even her sleep was recorded and transmitted to the Taos house, so that even if Signy Thomas died, the how and why would be documented. If anyone cared to look.

  “You’ll watch out for Janine?” Signy enunciated the words carefully, carefully.

  “Janine is my daughter’s age,” Alan said. “She only knows what she’s seen of me in the last few days, but she’s an engineer. I imagine we speak the same language, at least sometimes.”

  You can help her research some background about helicopters. About why they crash. Janine is so alone and Pilar could help but she won’t, but I have to explain that to you, don’t I, and I don’t think I …

  Sleep came up like black mist.

  * * *

  Alan was shaking her shoulder.

  “Signy? Signy, the plane is here. Time to wake up, hon.”

  Alan walked with her across the plastic matting, past the locked door of the Hotel California.

  * * *

  The limbs of the bare trees looked like screams. Charcoal screams, scratched across the geometries of white painted church steeples; the little hills rolled on forever. Signy had always felt claustrophobic in New England. She wanted horizons, distance. The sky was too low here, had always been too low.

  Brown grass lay naked on the lawns, freeze-drying in wan morning sunlight. Cruel land, to be so cold with no snow; Signy huddled inside her parka, climbing down the steep grade to the door of the house, hoping Paul hadn’t changed the locks.

  Hushed, dark, a feeling of nobody home. The smell of old garbage reached her on a wave of stifling heat.

  Signy heard, with a dull sense of inevitability, Jared’s voice, a quiet conversation, and Paul answering him.

  Jared spoke of Chaco Canyon, of a crumbling stone city and the quiet peace of a dry forgotten valley. Signy remembered when it was, Jared talking to Paul on an October evening when they had still lived in this house, a conversation in flesh-time and long past. Jared had described a network of ancient roads, and parrot feathers, bright against the sand, the living birds traded up from Central America to the high desert.

  Signy had listened from the kitchen; she was the cook for the week. The hell with cholesterol, she had marinated a good hunk of sauerbraten and it simmered, happily, while she made thin, lacy potato pancakes. There was applesauce from Macs Jared had picked, his face dappled in the leaf-shadow, climbing trees like an idiot adolescent. Throwing apples. Signy had rummaged around the kitchen until she found gingersnaps to blend into the spiced gravy.

  We all ate too much, Signy remembered.

  Feeling muscles bunch up in her shoulders, Signy opened the door into the study.

  A skeletal figure in skinthins and headset lay in a fetal curl beside the holo stage. Paul’s knees, his elbows, looked swollen and huge. He looked like a victim of some terrible arthritis—no, this was starvation, there was just so little flesh on his bones; the joints in his thin, thin hands were not swollen.

  Even while Signy watched, Paul’s fingers danced, quick as spiders, on the keyboard that he held between his knees. His chest moved in a placid, everyday rhythm. Paul wore about three days’ worth of beard, and that was oddly reassuring. It meant he’d been able to get up and walk, at least within the past week.

  Jared’s dead and it’s my fault. Is Paul going to die, too?

  We knew this was happening, Signy told herself. We knew it, all of us, and denied it; Paul has been alone here and we just wouldn’t interfere with him, because … because we needed to believe he was okay.

  The impulse to grab Paul, shake him, hold him, was almost overwhelming. Signy was afraid the shock of real-time touch would stop his heart.

  Paul was oblivious of her presence. Signy walked around him, considering. She pulled on her headset and entered the space that was Paul’s present reality.

  “Hello,” Signy said.

  “Signy! What the hell are you doing?”

  “Say hello, Paul. I’m home.”

  —Signy appeared from the kitchen, dressed in a red flannel shirt that she had forgotten she had ever owned. Younger; as he had made her, Signy could see her supple hands, the smooth flesh over her knuckles as she wiped them on a dishtowel. She looked up, not wanting to, at Jared, sprawled in one of the dark leather Queen Annes Paul kept near the fireplace. Jared’s shoulders, his heavy hair tied in its familiar knot, the cuff of his chamois shirt turned back on his wrist. Jared twisted to look at her and he grinned.

  Signy tried to find anger. Tried to find it in the stretch of Jared’s shirt across his shoulders, in his smile of amazement, as if he had never seen her before.

  Wanting to beg, Help me with Paul. Help me, Jared.

  Knowing she couldn’t ask that, not ever again.

  “Is dinner ready?” Jared asked.

  Paul could work so damned fast. He’d built this simulacrum in two days.

  Jared got up from the chair, kicked out his right knee, the one that tended to bother him, and was there, close to Signy as she stood frozen, her hands trapped in a virtual dishtowel so that she couldn’t reach Paul’s controls. Warm, solid, Jared’s arms around her, the soft feel of his chamois shirt against her cheek. Signy smelled his living scent, earthy loam, healthy male, musk.

  “Stop it, Paul!”

  “Paul needs this, Signy. For a while,” Jared said. Jared’s wistful look, his shy grin. “Death is a concept.” His voice made slight vibrations in his chest; Signy could sense them. Perfect. “Entropy, seen in the right perspective, is only a set of equations. My continued presence wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, I know. The aesthetics might prove bothersome to timid souls. But you aren’t timid. And I miss you.”

  Paul’s words. These were Paul’s words, mouthed in Jared’s voice, but Jared’s touch felt real, was unmistakable, Jared’s touch that she wanted so desperately.

  Ugly, ugly. Signy jerked her head back and fought her hands out of their imagined restraints. She found the controls, the reassuring touch of plastic keys, frantic, shuddering as she hurried through sequences, shutting down.

  Jared vanished, the virtual study vanished, leaving the real-time, dusty room, and Paul, sitting up now, his face still hidden behind his headset.

  Paul sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  He sat there, unresisting, while Signy lifted his headset away. His bloodshot eyes looked through her, looked past her.

  “Oh, Paul. It’s a bit sick, you know?”

  Paul blinked, and Signy left him there while she got to the bathroom, yanked back the slimy white plastic of the shower curtain, found a clean towel buried in the linen closet. She turned on the shower, hot, and went back to the study. She tugged Paul to his feet and helped him peel out of his skinthins.

  Paul had hollows between every rib, but there was some flesh on him, a little muscle, and his hands, holding Signy’s shoulders,
were strong.

  He didn’t protest. He even tried to help, a little. Signy shoved him into the shower.

  “There isn’t any soap,” Paul said.

  In the medicine chest, Signy found a hotel bar wrapped in yellowed paper.

  “Here.” She tossed it over the shower curtain, into the steam. “I’ll pack for you. We need to hurry, Paul.”

  She left him, listening to make sure that the shower still ran, that she could hear him. Signy plugged in the public line to Seattle.

  [Signy] I need help with Paul. I need you in Taos. Now.

  She sent the message and got back to the bathroom. Paul rolled a towel under his scrotum, standing full-faced to her, as unaware of her real presence as if she had been blind to him, as if she had been in virtual and far away.

  “You’re taking me to Taos.” Paul raised his arm and dried the dripping tangle of black hair under his armpit.

  “You got that right, buddy.”

  “I need…”

  “Whatever it is you need, you can pull it off the net.”

  * * *

  Not half as resistant as Signy had feared, even with a sort of bemused docility, Paul tolerated her leading him onto the flights west. He walked well enough. Signy had thought she might have to carry him. Paul followed her, meekly, through the crowds of vacant-faced travelers in the terminals. They didn’t seem to exist for him.

  Coming north from Albuquerque, Paul actually smiled, seeing for the first time in fleshtime the curve of the Rio Grande gorge, the gentle bulk of Taos Mountain sheltering the little town, chalky sunset pastels staining the wind-drifted snow on the mesa.

  * * *

  Signy got a couple of vitamin pills and a cup of sugared tea into Paul before he turned on the console, the one Jared usually used, and settled his headset on. Signy didn’t fight him about it.

  The house still felt like no one was home. Even with the fires lighted, the house was shadows, was empty space. Signy paced back and forth, searching aimlessly. She straightened the rumpled bedding in the big bedroom. The room smelled stale, old. Signy left it and closed the door.

  * * *

  Just watching, Signy sprawled on the banco in the virtual room, her hands around a cup of tea that grew cold. Just watching. Paul worked, his thin shoulders jerking as he fought some construct. He could tear down the whole edifice, destroy the Lisbon productions, bring up multiple ghosts of Jared to walk through this house. Join Paul, that was one answer. Climb in, create a Jared to please them both, a personality less frustrating than the living one had ever been. Signy could damned sure do a better job with Jared’s dialogue; Paul wasn’t half close to accuracy in phrasing or rhythm. Paul didn’t have the lilt of Jared’s voice quite right, the minute hesitations Jared used when he wanted to say something he thought was important. Signy knew she could make Jared’s speech get up and walk.

  Why the hell not?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Pilar and Jimmy walked past canyons of closed office buildings; they passed through the lighted spaces that marked the façades of bars, hotels, the faint stirs of nightlife in a city that had little use for it.

  A cabbie drowsed at his station in front of the Mariott, under a covered archway, the clean paving damp in spite of its shelter. Jimmy stood hunched against the cold, his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his parka. Pilar’s hand on the wet pocked chrome of the cab’s door handle, the cabbie lifting his head, waiting.

  “Are you coming?” Pilar asked.

  Jimmy said nothing.

  “You’re sure about this? Leaving with me, I mean?”

  Jimmy shook his head, once.

  Pilar opened the door. “Seatac?”

  The cabbie nodded, secure behind his armored windows.

  Pilar let her hand fall away from the door handle. “Neither am I.”

  Jimmy shrugged. The cabbie leaned back against his headrest again.

  “I’m cold,” Pilar said.

  “Let’s go home. Let’s go home, Pilar. I’ll warm you. If I can.”

  She was so sleepy, so tired, so tired. Pilar climbed into the cab, ran her credit card across the waiting slot and typed in her address. Jimmy settled in beside her. The cab pulled away, as silent as its driver, moving uphill on wet streets that shimmered with rare streaks of color in the gently lighted night city.

  Walking into the dark, quiet house, Pilar realized the cabbie wouldn’t need a recharge when he got back to the hotel. The route was all downhill from here. At least she had given him a good fare. It was the only thing she could think of that had come out right for a long, long time.

  They dropped their wet parkas in the hall. They didn’t look into the studio as they went past. Jimmy helped Pilar out of her boots, her skinthin. She stumbled into the shower and let it run hot. It wasn’t enough to warm her.

  Half-wet, in the chill room, Pilar sat on the side of the bed, amazed, for Jimmy stripped out of his skinthin, truly naked, his white, white skin nubbly with goose bumps. Jimmy sat down on the floor and matter-of-factly picked up one of Pilar’s bare feet. He kneaded it thoroughly. Then the other.

  Pilar sighed with the pleasure/pain of it, bones and tendons pressed, released, throbbed, a process that left relaxation and fatigue competing in odd ways.

  “Thank you,” Pilar said.

  Jimmy lifted her feet to the bed, smoothed the comforter around her, and padded away. Pilar heard water running in the bathroom; Jimmy washing up.

  She wasn’t that surprised when he slipped into bed beside her, moving cautiously, as if he feared to wake her. Pilar was far from sleep. She wasn’t that surprised that the gentle, skilled moves Jimmy had learned in porno virtuals served him well in fleshtime.

  * * *

  Janine sprawled on her hotel bed in Lisbon and traced the pattern of its brocade bedspread with her fingers. Her eyes felt sanded. Dry and sanded.

  “It wasn’t as if we were lovers, Signy.”

  Janine hadn’t said the rest of the words, the ones that she had wanted to say and didn’t because they choked in her throat, words with fangs and claws. She couldn’t let the hurt out even now, not with Signy as shook as she’d ever be likely to get, and off-line anyway on some commercial flight back toward home. There just wasn’t any reason to yell at Signy, no reason to start a fight.

  It wasn’t as if Janine had ever been Jared’s lover, damn it. Signy and Jared were a closed community when it came to lust. Signy and Jared. Signy and Paul. Pilar and Paul. Even though Jared wouldn’t leave anyone out, you know? So, yeah, he was good in bed, we’ll all of us miss that. He was gentle and rough, and polite. A fucking generous man, sharing the wealth, damn him anyway.

  But Pilar would disappear with Jared whenever he came to the house, and Janine always heard them, tried not to hear them, laughing and groaning and screaming for what seemed like hours.

  On the rough plaster ceiling, a fly traced a tiny pattern, circular, endless. The room was stifling, airless, sterile.

  Janine got up and checked, once again, that her notebook was ready to pick up any message from anyone. Then she grabbed her headset and lay back on the bed.

  —enclosed in white space, white noise. White, that after a time began to glow with colors, to whisper in busy small tongues. I am going home, Janine heard, a rolling whisper, a repeated loop. I am going home.

  Don’t know where that is, voice. You got any ideas?

  —Home, homes. Homesss. Sss. Sssss. Snow. Know.

  What the hell was Kazi planning, huddled with Tanaka in security Janine couldn’t break? What was Kazi hearing now from his quiet, thin boss in Kobe who said so little? A minimalist plan, maybe. We will all eat salt.

  —salt, tuh, tuh, tuh.

  The sound was the throbbing in Janine’s temples, the rush of blood in her ears.

  After a time, Janine got up and called up a view of the hotel lobby. Curled up on her side on the bed, she watched the living, the busy:

  The hotel began to fill again, with hurried, isolated, quie
t people, who didn’t want to be seen talking to each other. They wore closed faces and found excuses to be elsewhere, when on Friday they had been all smiles and chitchat. Some of the better-funded carried overnight luggage, coming back from quick trips for further instructions. Some of the delegates kept their gaze on the carpet, their pace determined, and Janine imagined them sitting in their locked rooms, transmitting information back to their respective countries and waiting until their bosses returned from weekend privacies, from days of rest.

  His shoulders hunched, wearing his silk raincoat and for God’s sake, shades, Kazi crossed the center carpets and turned behind one of the pillars. Two of his security people followed him, the woman with the big thighs and the man who doubled as an electronics tech, a muscular, fast-moving electronics tech.

  Sheesh, the guy looked like a chop-sockey hero. The woman acted like a mute.

  The woman had never said anything at all, not when Janine had been in the room with her. Janine wanted to hate her, hate both of them. They were typecast and far too predictable. Janine wanted to bug their rooms, if they had rooms, and see what they were like behind their smooth faces. Perhaps they had names, families, losses of their own.

  Kazi stopped and said something. The two guards left him.

  Coming here, was he? Janine wanted to see him, oh, yes, indeed. She wanted to punch Kazi in his nice hard middle, hard enough to hurt him, bad. And she wanted to hug him, and feel how warm he was. She had to talk to him, had to find out something, anything, had to learn where to go next.

  Janine climbed off the bed, pulled off her headset, and and jerked the door open, just as Kazi raised his hand to knock. Without makeup, her hair a tangle, wearing a skinthin and that was all. Kazi’s eyes widened.

  “Kazi, where do I go next?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “What happens to me?” Janine waved her hand to invite him in.

  Kazi walked to the center of the room, frowning at her. He looked older. His cheeks were shadowed and gaunt, as if he’d been fasting. “You remain as you are,” Kazi said. “We are happy with your work. I told you that.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell us what you were going to do?”