I changed tapes hurriedly with one eye on the figures passing that open door. Suddenly among the humans I caught a glimpse of two sleek scarlet shapes. My first real aliens! I snapped the recorder shut and ran to squeeze in behind them.
THE GIRL WHO WAS PLUGGED IN
LISTEN, ZOMBIE. BELIEVE me. What I could tell you—you with your silly hands leaking sweat on your growth-stocks portfolio. One-ten lousy hacks of AT&T on twenty-point margin and you think you’re Evel Knievel. AT&T? You doubleknit dummy, how I’d love to show you something.
Look, dead daddy, I’d say. See for instance that rotten girl?
In the crowd over there, that one gaping at her gods. One rotten girl in the city of the future (That’s what I said.) Watch.
She’s jammed among bodies, craning and peering with her soul yearning out of her eyeballs. Love! Oo-ooh, love them! Her gods are coming out of a store called Body East. Three youngbloods, larking along loverly. Dressed like simple street-people but . . . smashing. See their great eyes swivel above their nosefilters, their hands lift shyly, their inhumanly tender lips melt? The crowd moans. Love! This whole boiling megacity, this whole fun future world loves its gods.
You don’t believe gods, dad? Wait. Whatever turns you on, there’s a god in the future for you, custom-made. Listen to this mob. “I touched his foot! Ow-oow, I TOUCHED Him!”
Even the people in the GTX tower up there love the gods—in their own way and for their own reasons.
The funky girl on the street, she just loves. Grooving on their beautiful lives, their mysterioso problems. No one ever told her about mortals who love a god and end up as a tree or a sighing sound. In a million years it’d never occur to her that her gods might love her back.
She’s squashed against the wall now as the godlings come by. They move in a clear space. A holocam bobs above, but its shadow never falls on them. The store display-screens are magically clear of bodies as the gods glance in and a beggar underfoot is suddenly alone. They give him a token. “Aaaaah!” goes the crowd.
Now one of them flashes some wild new kind of timer and they all trot to catch a shuttle, just like people. The shuttle stops for them—more magic. The crowd sighs, closing back. The gods are gone.
(In a room far from—but not unconnected to—the GTX tower a molecular flipflop closes too, and three account tapes spin.)
Our girl is still stuck by the wall while guards and holocam equipment pull away. The adoration’s fading from her face. That’s good, because now you can see she’s the ugly of the world. A tall monument to pituitary dystrophy. No surgeon would touch her. When she smiles, her jaw—it’s half purple—almost bites her left eye out. She’s also quite young, but who could care?
The crowd is pushing her along now, treating you to glimpses of her jumbled torso, her mismatched legs. At the corner she strains to send one last fond spasm after the godlings’ shuttle. Then her face reverts to its usual expression of dim pain and she lurches onto the moving walkway, stumbling into people. The walkway junctions with another. She crosses, trips and collides with the casualty rail. Finally she comes out into a little bare place called a park. The sportshow is working, a basketball game in three-di is going on right overhead. But all she does is squeeze onto a bench and huddle there while a ghostly free-throw goes by her ear.
After that nothing at all happens except a few furtive handmouth gestures which don’t even interest her bench mates. But you’re curious about the city? So ordinary after all, in the FUTURE?
Ah, there’s plenty to swing with here—and it’s not all that far in the future, dad. But pass up the sci-fi stuff for now, like for instance the holovision technology that’s put TV and radio in museums. Or the worldwide carrier field bouncing down from satellites, controlling communication and transport systems all over the globe. That was a spin-off from asteroid mining, pass it by. We’re watching that girl.
I’ll give you just one goodie. Maybe you noticed on the sportshow or the streets? No commercials. No ads.
That’s right. NO ADS. An eyeballer for you.
Look around. Not a billboard, sign, slogan, jingle, sky-write, blurb, sublimflash, in this whole fun world. Brand names? Only in those ticky little peep-screens on the stores, and you could hardly call that advertising. How does that finger you?
Think about it. That girl is still sitting there.
She’s parked right under the base of the GTX tower, as a matter of fact. Look way up and you can see the sparkles from the bubble on top, up there among the domes of godland. Inside that bubble is a boardroom. Neat bronze shield on the door: Global Transmissions Corporation—not that that means anything.
I happen to know there are six people in that room. Five of them technically male, and the sixth isn’t easily thought of as a mother. They are absolutely unremarkable. Those faces were seen once at their nuptials and will show again in their obituaries and impress nobody either time. If you’re looking for the secret Big Blue Meanies of the world, forget it. I know. Zen, do I know! Flesh? Power? Glory? You’d horrify them.
What they do like up there is to have things orderly, especially their communications. You could say they’ve dedicated their lives to that, to freeing the world from garble. Their nightmares are about hemorrhages of information; channels screwed up, plans misimplemented, garble creeping in. Their gigantic wealth only worries them, it keeps opening new vistas of disorder. Luxury? They wear what their tailors put on them, eat what their cooks serve them. See that old boy there—his name is Isham—he’s sipping water and frowning as he listens to a databall. The water was prescribed by his medistaff. It tastes awful. The databall also contains a disquieting message about his son, Paul.
But it’s time to go back down, far below to our girl. Look!
She’s toppled over sprawling on the ground.
A tepid commotion ensues among the bystanders. The consensus is she’s dead, which she disproves by bubbling a little. And presently she’s taken away by one of the superb ambulances of the future, which are a real improvement over ours when one happens to be around.
At the local bellevue the usual things are done by the usual team of clowns aided by a saintly mop-pusher. Our girl revives enough to answer the questionnaire without which you can’t die, even in the future. Finally she’s cast up, a pumped-out hulk on a cot in the long, dim ward.
Again nothing happens for a while except that her eyes leak a little from the understandable disappointment of finding herself still alive.
But somewhere one GTX computer has been tickling another, and toward midnight something does happen. First comes an attendant who pulls screens around her. Then a man in a business doublet comes daintily down the ward. He motions the attendant to strip off the sheet and go.
The groggy girl-brute heaves up, big hands clutching at bodyparts you’d pay not to see.
“Burke? P. Burke, is that your name?”
“Y-yes.” Croak. “Are you . . . policeman?”
“No. They’ll be along shortly, I expect. Public suicide’s a felony.”
“. . . I’m sorry.”
He has a ‘corder in his hand. “No family, right?”
“No.”
“You’re seventeen. One year city college. What did you study?”
“La—languages.”
“H’mm. Say something.”
Unintelligible rasp.
He studies her. Seen close, he’s not so elegant. Errand-boy type.
“Why did you try to kill yourself?”
She stares at him with dead-rat dignity, hauling up the gray sheet. Give him a point, he doesn’t ask twice.
“Tell me, did you see Breath this afternoon?”
Dead as she nearly is, that ghastly love-look wells up. Breath is the three young gods, a loser’s cult. Give the man another point, he interprets her expression.
“How would you like to meet them?”
The girl’s eyes bug out grotesquely.
“I have a job for someone like you. It’s hard work. If you did well
you’d be meeting Breath and stars like that all the time.”
Is he insane? She’s deciding she really did die.
“But it means you never see anybody you know again. Never, ever. You will be legally dead. Even the police won’t know. Do you want to try?”
It all has to be repeated while her great jaw slowly sets. Show me the fire I walk through. Finally P. Burke’s prints are in his ‘corder, the man holding up the big rancid girl-body without a sign of distaste. It makes you wonder what else he does.
And then—THE MAGIC. Sudden silent trot of litterbearers tucking P. Burke into something quite different from a bellevue stretcher, the oiled slide into the daddy of all luxury ambulances—real flowers in that holder!—and the long jarless rush to nowhere. Nowhere is warm and gleaming and kind with nurses. (Where did you hear that money can’t buy genuine kindness?) And clean clouds folding P. Burke into bewildered sleep.
. . . Sleep which merges into feedings and washings and more sleeps, into drowsy moments of afternoon where midnight should be, and gentle businesslike voices and friendly (but very few) faces, and endless painless hyposprays and peculiar numbnesses. And later comes the steadying rhythm of days and nights, and a quickening which P. Burke doesn’t identify as health, but only knows that the fungus place in her armpit is gone. And then she’s up and following those few new faces with growing trust, first tottering, then walking strongly, all better now, clumping down the short hall to the tests, tests, tests, and the other things.
And here is our girl, looking—
If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)
The disimprovement in her looks comes from the electrode jacks peeping out of her sparse hair, and there are other meldings of flesh and metal. On the other hand, that collar and spinal plate are really an asset; you won’t miss seeing that neck.
P. Burke is ready for training in her new job.
The training takes place in her suite and is exactly what you’d call a charm course. How to walk, sit, eat, speak, blow her nose, how to stumble, to urinate, to hiccup—DELICIOUSLY. How to make each nose-blow or shrug delightfully, subtly, different from any ever spooled before. As the man said, it’s hard work.
But P. Burke proves apt. Somewhere in that horrible body is a gazelle, a houri, who would have been buried forever without this crazy chance. See the ugly duckling go!
Only it isn’t precisely P. Burke who’s stepping, laughing, shaking out her shining hair. How could it be? P. Burke is doing it all right, but she’s doing it through something. The something is to all appearances a live girl. (You were warned, this is the FUTURE.)
When they first open the big cryocase and show her her new body, she says just one word. Staring, gulping, “How?”
Simple, really. Watch P. Burke in her sack and scuffs stump down the hall beside Joe, the man who supervises the technical part of her training. Joe doesn’t mind P. Burke’s looks, he hasn’t noticed them. To Joe, system matrices are beautiful.
They go into a dim room containing a huge cabinet like a one-man sauna and a console for Joe. The room has a glass wall that’s all dark now. And just for your information, the whole shebang is five hundred feet underground near what used to be Carbondale, Pa.
Joe opens the sauna cabinet like a big clamshell standing on end with a lot of funny business inside. Our girl shucks her shift and walks into it bare, totally unembarrassed. Eager. She settles in face-forward, butting jacks into sockets. Joe closes it carefully onto her humpback. Clunk. She can’t see in there or hear or move. She hates this minute. But how she loves what comes next!
Joe’s at his console, and the lights on the other side of the glass wall come up. A room is on the other side, all fluff and kicky bits, a girly bedroom. In the bed is a small mound of silk with a rope of yellow hair hanging out.
The sheet stirs and gets whammed back flat.
Sitting up in the bed is the darlingest girl child you’ve EVER seen. She quivers—porno for angels. She sticks both her little arms straight up, flips her hair, looks around full of sleepy pazazz. Then she can’t resist rubbing her hands down over her minibreasts and belly. Because, you see, it’s the god-awful P. Burke who is sitting there hugging her perfect girl-body, looking at you out of delighted eyes.
Then the kitten hops out of bed and crashes flat on the floor.
From the sauna in the dim room comes a strangled noise. P. Burke, trying to rub her wired-up elbow, is suddenly smothered in two bodies, electrodes jerking in her flesh. Joe juggles inputs, crooning into his mike. The flurry passes; it’s all right.
In the lighted room the elf gets up, casts a cute glare at the glass wall, and goes into a transparent cubicle. A bathroom, what else? She’s a live girl, and live girls have to go to the bathroom after a night’s sleep even if their brains are in a sauna cabinet in the next room. And P. Burke isn’t in that cabinet, she’s in the bathroom. Perfectly simple, if you have the glue for that closed training circuit that’s letting her run her neural system by remote control.
Now let’s get one thing clear. P. Burke does not feel her brain is in the sauna room, she feels she’s in that sweet little body. When you wash your hands, do you feel the water is running on your brain? Of course not. You feel the water on your hand, although the “feeling” is actually a potential-pattern flickering over the electrochemical jelly between your ears. And it’s delivered there via the long circuits from your hands. Just so, P. Burke’s brain in the cabinet feels the water on her hands in the bathroom. The fact that the signals have jumped across space on the way in makes no difference at all. If you want the jargon, it’s known as eccentric projection or sensory reference and you’ve done it all your life. Clear?
Time to leave the honeypot to her toilet training—she’s made a booboo with the toothbrush, because P. Burke can’t get used to what she sees in the mirror—
But wait, you say. Where did that girl-body come from?
P. Burke asks that too, dragging out the words.
“They grow ‘em,” Joe tells her. He couldn’t care less about the flesh department. “PDs. Placental decanters. Modified embryos, see? Fit the control implants in later. Without a Remote Operator it’s just a vegetable. Look at the feet—no callus at all.” (He knows because they told him.)
“Oh . . . oh, she’s incredible. . . .”
“Yeah, a neat job. Want to try walking-talking mode today? You’re coming on fast.”
And she is. Joe’s reports and the reports from the nurse and the doctor and style man go to a bushy man upstairs who is some kind of medical cybertech but mostly a project administrator. His reports in turn go—to the GTX boardroom? Certainly not, did you think this is a big thing? His reports just go up. The point is, they’re green, very green. P. Burke promises well.
So the bushy man—Dr. Tesla—has procedures to initiate. The little kitten’s dossier in the Central Data Bank, for instance. Purely routine. And the phase-in schedule which will put her on the scene. This is simple: a small exposure in an off-network holoshow.
Next he has to line out the event which will fund and target her. That takes budget meetings, clearances, coordinations. The Burke project begins to recruit and grow. And there’s the messy business of the name, which always gives Dr. Tesla an acute pain in the bush.
The name comes out weird, when it’s suddenly discovered that Burke’s “P.” stands for “Philadelphia.” Philadelphia? The astrologer grooves on it. Joe thinks it would help identification. The semantics girl references brotherly love, Liberty Bell, main line, low teratogenesis, blah-blah. Nicknames Philly? Pala? Pooty? Delphi? Is it good, bad? Finally “Delphi” is gingerly declared goodo. (“Burke” is replaced by something nobody remembers.)
Coming along now. We’re at the official checkout down in the underground suite, which is as far as the training circuits reach. The bushy Dr. Tesla is there, braced by two budgetary types and a quiet fatherly man whom he handles like hot plasma.
Joe swings
the door wide and she steps shyly in.
Their little Delphi, fifteen and flawless.
Tesla introduces her around. She’s child-solemn, a beautiful baby to whom something so wonderful has happened you can feel the tingles. She doesn’t smile, she . . . brims. That brimming joy is all that shows of P. Burke, the forgotten hulk in the sauna next door. But P. Burke doesn’t know she’s alive—it’s Delphi who lives, every warm inch of her.
One of the budget types lets go a libidinous snuffle and freezes. The fatherly man, whose name is Mr. Cantle, clears his throat.
“Well, young lady, are you ready to go to work?”
“Yes, sir,” gravely from the elf.
“We’ll see. Has anybody told you what you’re going to do for us?”
“No, sir.” Joe and Tesla exhale quietly.
“Good.” He eyes her, probing for the blind brain in the room next door.
“Do you know what advertising is?”
He’s talking dirty, hitting to shock. Delphi’s eyes widen and her little chin goes up. Joe is in ecstasy at the complex expressions P. Burke is getting through. Mr. Cantle waits.
“It’s, well, it’s when they used to tell people to buy things.” She swallows. “It’s not allowed.”
“That’s right.” Mr. Cantle leans back, grave. “Advertising as it used to be is against the law. A display other than the legitimate use of the product, intended to promote its sale. In former times every manufacturer was free to tout his wares any way, place, or time he could afford. All the media and most of the landscape was taken up with extravagant competing displays. The thing became uneconomic. The public rebelled. Since the so-called Huckster Act sellers have been restrained to, I quote, displays in or on the product itself, visible during its legitimate use or in on-premise sales.” Mr. Cantle leans forward. “Now tell me, Delphi, why do people buy one product rather than another?”
“Well . . .” Enchanting puzzlement from Delphi. “They, um, they see them and like them, or they hear about them from somebody?” (Touch of P. Burke there; she didn’t say, from a friend.)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Page 7
