Wetware

by Craig Nova

  Briggs stood where the blue light washed over Kay. She put her lips together, not so much trying to give him a kiss as making him a promise.

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER 1

  March 22, 2029, 2:14 A.M.

  KAY DISCOVERED that there were many words to choose from, but she found it hard to get used to this, particularly when she was looking for one that did the job better than any other. She and Jack stood in an alley, each of them wearing a jumpsuit with a zipper that ran from the crotch to the neck. Kay’s lips were blue.

  “I’m getting . . . cold,” she said to Jack.

  The lines of rain were tinted crimson by a red neon sign that ran from the top story of the building across the street to the ground floor, one letter for each floor.

  “I know what that sign means. It is a place to get an . . . accommodation,” said Kay.

  “Oh? Is that right? Okay,” said Jack.

  The hotel had been built a couple of hundred years before, and the iron of the fire escape suggested some antiquated and yet still dangerous object, like a bear trap. As Jack and Kay stood in the rain, they heard the buzzing of the neon tubes. Every now and then a woman in a clingy dress and fishnet stockings led a man up to the door of the place. Kay looked at these couples and said, “What are they . . . doing?”

  “F-f-f- . . . ” said Jack. “Sex.”

  “You think so?” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” he said.

  They crossed the street in the red and silver lines of rain, their feet disrupting the surface of the puddles tinted red by the neon.

  “You think you can do the talking?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll try.”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “I said I was going to try, all right? What more can I do than that?”

  She tried to speak, but her teeth chattered, and then she started shuddering. What she thought was that this would be fun, or could be fun, putting a word on everything, giving names to everything they saw, if she hadn’t been so cold.

  The desk clerk seemed to speak a language that Jack didn’t understand completely. What was an hourly rate? What was a daily rate? A checkout time? Jack had two hundred dollars in his pocket, although he hadn’t known exactly what the bills were. Funny paper with a little hologram in the corner.

  “That’s more like it,” said the clerk. “Why didn’t you tell me you had cash? That makes it easier. Here.”

  He pushed a card across the counter.

  “Fill this out,” said the clerk.

  They stood there for a moment. Kay was still shivering.

  “What’s wrong with her?” said the clerk. “The jones?”

  Jack shrugged.

  “She needs a blanket,” he said. “You know. Something to get her . . . heat.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said the clerk. “Hey, sister, are you all right? You miss a shot?”

  Kay shook her head.

  “Here’s a pen,” said the clerk to Jack.

  Jack reached out for the pen. What the hell was this, anyway? The flashing of the sign came in the window of the lobby, where a man sat with a wine bottle in a paper bag, taking a sip every ten flashes. Just like clockwork. Then Kay reached over and took the pen and the card and started writing. The script she made looked like something out of a penmanship book, each letter formed almost as though it had been printed. She wrote, Kay Remilard. Jack Portman. No address. No telephone number.

  The clerk looked from one to the other.

  “We want it for the . . . ” She looked out the window at the darkness. Storm? No. The opposite of light. “Night. Until . . . morning.”

  “Okay,” said the clerk. “You’re the boss.”

  He pushed the piece of plastic across the counter, like a credit card but used a lot, cracked. It had a little piece of adhesive tape on one side, and someone had written a number on the tape with a ballpoint pen.

  They took the elevator, which lurched on the way up, and Kay took Jack’s arm and hugged it, saying, “Why is it doing that?” Jack thought for a moment: it was a matter of the difference between fear and anxiety, right? Then he thought, What is fear? He tried to imagine the way this car worked: the cables dropping down in the dark, a system of pulleys. He guessed there was some mechanical advantage involved, if, as he suspected, work was equal to force times the distance over which it was applied.

  The hall was empty. Jack looked at the number on the first door and then the next. Yes. That’s the way they went. One to 100. Just keep adding zeros. It was easy. By the time they were at the end of the hall, Jack had thought of a way to solve quadratic equations by using a formula. It was pretty simple. If you put it in the basic form of a squared plus 2ab plus b squared, it was pretty easy.

  They opened the door. Mismatched curtains over the windows, but at least they were both white if not made of the same material. The red sign flashed on and off, and the curtains and the room were bathed in the crimson light. Kay shivered. She took off her clothes and got under the covers, pulling them up to her chin. Jack undressed too, and took her clothes and his and put them over the radiator. It was still warm. He guessed that there was some way of describing, with equations, the way in which heat was transferred from one object to another, or even to the air, but he wouldn’t worry about it until tomorrow. What he was concerned about was finding a damn . . . what was it called? A list of words with their meanings?

  He got into bed too, and lay down next to Kay. How nice to feel her hip against the small of his back. After a while she stopped shivering. Then he guessed that he wouldn’t be able to describe the way heat moved from one object to another with the quadratics, but something else, an estimate of the space under a curve. A calculus. He guessed it was possible if you started with a graph and worked from there. The thing would be to estimate the area under the graph, but to do so in a particular way.

  KAY WOKE just at dawn. She closed her eyes again to concentrate on the warmth under the covers. It was almost fluid in the way it moved, caressing her skin, seeping into every crevice. At first she ran her hands over Jack’s chest, and then down her stomach, lingering for a moment between her legs, and then going along her thighs. The touch on her fingertips was . . . she had the sensation of looking for a particular drop of water in a sea. Smooth. That was it.

  She turned on her side and looked at Jack. He was sleeping on his back, hands at his side. The light of the morning made everything look as though it were confined in gray webs, but as the room got brighter Jack seemed to emerge from them. At first there was nothing more than his silhouette against the window, but soon she saw the texture of his hair, the shape of the muscles in his arms and chest. She slowly pulled back the sheet until he was exposed. Then she got close to him, putting her nose just behind his ear, which she sniffed. His chest rose and fell as he breathed. She put her ear against him and heard the steady flub-dub, flub-dub of his heart. She ran her hand farther down his stomach and then between his legs, where she looked at what she found, turning it one way and then another. Jack continued to sleep. Then she got up and looked out the window at the deserted street.

  A taxi went by, its lights on. A man sat in the gutter, his head in his hands. Down the street was a gaming parlor, and young men and women were just coming out, into the first golden light of dawn. She watched the way the young women walked, and then she stood in front of the mirror and walked, swinging her naked hips a little. Well, she guessed she could do that. Was that what they wanted? What did she want? It might be fun, she thought, under the right circumstances.

  She looked out the window again, seeing the street in grays and blacks, the mirrorlike puddles, the occasional couple. It all took on the color of her own feelings. And what were they? She raised a hand to make a gesture. What was the word? Incomplete. This word came with a physical sensation, as though something had been torn from her, deep within her chest. She swallowed and tried not to cry. What goo
d would that do? It wouldn’t help her find a specific person. A man. She knew that. It wasn’t anything sexual, strictly speaking, although if she could do something more intense with him to add to the sensation of being closer, of being . . . together, she would do it in an instant. She knew that what she wanted was to see him approaching her, to recognize him, to smell his skin and hair, to see him smile. That would make her complete, or it would be the first step. But even then, she thought, I have to be careful.

  In the drawer of the bureau she found a pair of fishnet stockings and a tube. It was a gold tube that was supposed to look like metal, but she was pretty sure it was something else. Plastic, she guessed. The top came off with a little sucking sound and inside was a bullet-shaped substance that was very red. It smelled a little like roses, and something else, too, not a flower but . . . pears. Of fruit. She opened it up again and raised her arms and put a streak of red under each one.

  “I don’t think it goes there,” said Jack.

  “No?” she said. “What do you know? You’re a boy.”

  He shrugged.

  “Try your lips,” he said.

  Jack reached over and picked up the tattered plastic screen on the floor, which was a cheap digital entertainment magazine that came with the room. He ran his finger along the menu: under his touch he saw such titles as Teen Vixens, The Forbidden Zone, The Wild Side, and when he scrolled through them he saw images of men and women. He looked at the pink tissue, the glistening images, and then flipped by, onto something called Vogue. He found a woman’s face and held it out.

  “Like that,” he said.

  She glanced at it once and put the lipstick on. As though she had done it for years.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  She sat down next to him and he took the bedsheet to clean her underarms. She pulled on the stockings and stood there, wearing nothing else. The sun rose enough for a light, like a golden film, to fill the room. They both sat in it, feeling it on their faces.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, it is so warm. Warm.”

  “It’s the sun,” she said.

  “Like a . . . ” he said. He closed his eyes. “A caress . . . ”

  She got up, still wearing only the stockings, and went over to the bureau where there was a black object the size and shape of a small briefcase. The top of it was burned where people had left cigarettes on it. Even cheap rooms like this had a small computer. Kay looked it over. She smelled it and then opened it up. Inside was a small screen and a keyboard, and after she had fumbled around with it, the power came on. The glow of the screen reminded her of the infinite amount of time before she had been alive, which she imagined as a blue light. It was reassuring to see that light on the screen, but frightening too, since it was a glow that suggested some bigger presence.

  The instant she put her hands on the keys and felt the little bump under her fingers, she had the sense of . . .

  Kay searched for the word, and in her frustration she found that while she didn’t have the vocabulary she wanted, she nevertheless could swear. The words came out in a disconnected stream, the usual ones seen on a bathroom wall. Some of them worse than that. These words, she knew, arose in a part of the mind different from the one where ordinary vocabulary was kept. She said to Jack, over her shoulder, “What do you call it when you feel you have seen something before? When you know it?”

  “Rec . . . recognize,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”

  “It’s coming a little faster,” he said. “The words are coming a little faster. But I wish I had a dictionary.”

  “A what?” she said.

  “A list of all the words in a . . . ” He sat up. In a what? “What we use when we talk ... ”

  “A language,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He rolled over. She sat on the one chair in the room, her back nude, her legs in the stockings, her white skin reflected in the mirror in front of her as she looked at the screen. She typed a little. Hit a key, but nothing happened. Then she ran her finger across a device at the bottom of the screen, a little thing that moved an arrow, and then she hit a key. The screen changed. “Oh,” she said.

  “What?” he said.

  “The machine,” she said. “It’s how . . . you know . . . it has an organization . . . ”

  She scrolled down the directories, and she found, too, that she knew some commands. This knowledge was familiar, just like remembering how to ride a bike. The code for a program came up, the functions called and labeled in slashes on one side, and as she went through the loops, the input/output programming, she said, “Yes. That’s right. Oh. Of course. That’s the way it works. Sure.” After that, she typed now and then, nodding as though beating time or hearing music, and then recognizing the subdued and beautifully repeated theme.

  What was it Jack wanted? A dictionary?

  “What language?” she said.

  “The one we are speaking now,” he said.

  “What is it called?” she said.

  He licked his lips.

  “Brit—” he said. “No. That’s the place. Where it started. It’s the thing that came from Britain. It has some other languages in it. Latin. Or is it Roman?”

  “Latin,” she said. “Here’s a Latin dictionary.”

  “We don’t want that one,” he said.

  He tried to imagine what the clerk would think if he came downstairs and asked for a towel in Latin.

  “English,” she said. “It’s right here.”

  They looked at each page, their eyes moving from the top to the bottom, “abnormous, abomination, abyss . . .” Sometimes Jack scrolled to the next page before she was ready, and she said, “Hey, wait.”

  “What?” he said. “Can’t you keep up?”

  “I can keep up,” she said. “Let me have the keyboard. We’ll see who can keep up.”

  She started to control the pages and they both sat there, watching the flickering words, both hardly breathing: they stayed at it, increasing the pace, until Jack said, “Dihedral, dihedral, what a beautiful one. Hey, wait a minute.”

  “So,” she said. “Who’s giving me a hard time about going too fast?”

  “It was beautiful,” he said.

  “Well, so what?” she said. But she knew he was right. She slowed down, and they both went at it more carefully.

  “Sidereal,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Sidereal.” He rolled it on his tongue. They both turned and looked out the window where there was a morning star that lingered.

  The screen went through the pages to zariba.

  “What is a zariba?” she said.

  “A cattle enclosure in the Sudan,” he said.

  “Where is that?” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “I’m just getting started,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?” she said. “Do you think you learned anything?”

  “I picked up a few words,” he said.

  “All right,” she said. She got up and stood in the middle of the room, still wearing the stockings, her lips red from the lipstick. He sat on the bed, his chest covered with a gold film from the dawn. She pointed at the bureau.

  “A chest of drawers,” he said.

  “And this?” he said.

  “A sheet, a pillow,” she said.

  He took her hand.

  “And?” he said.

  “Fingernail, knuckle, wrist, skin, vein, down . . . ” she said.

  “Down,” he said.

  She put her hand on his chest.

  “Muscle, bone, skin, nipple,” he said. “But I can’t nurse. Can you?”

  He touched her breast, the nipple.

  “I don’t know,” she said, but then she blushed. She suspected that she could, although she didn’t know how she thought she could. It was bound up with her wanting to be close to someone she loved, and of being as intimate with each other as possible. Wasn’t that having a child together?

  T
hey stood at the window, applying the words, but the sensation was not of using the language so much as discovering it, of naming the objects they saw. As Kay worked at it, she said a word and then another to herself, putting her lips together as though the words had a taste or a texture that she could feel on her tongue or in the slight moisture of her mouth, or on her lips. Pear . . . this is a pear. This is a shoe. This is my . . . love. Love. As she chose a word, something definite coalesced out of the haze of almost infinite possibilities. This is my . . . love. For each word that gave definition to an ill-formed impulse, or to an object that seemed to exist in a conglomeration of things, the haze of possibilities lifted. Bit by bit she built up a sense of clarity, which had its own inertia, since it was exquisitely pleasurable to name something and to recognize it afterwards, each bit of pleasure driving the next. She was almost giddy, and then she came to some other words: my passion, my heart, the center of my existence, my sun. My stars. My darling. She shook her head, trying not to cry.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Didn’t you like naming things?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, what’s wrong?”

  She shrugged.

  “The words let you see what something really is,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with that?” he said.

  “It depends,” she said. Darling. Oh, my darling, why have you abandoned me?