Alien Landscapes 2

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Chandler kneaded a lump of the sheets, as if afraid to touch her. “Celine and I are just friends. We were only lovers for a week, during that trip, and it didn’t work out between us. That was a year before you and I started seeing each other. What does it matter now?”

  Tara kept her voice low. “It wouldn’t matter, if you had told me. The fact that you kept it a secret means a hell of a lot.”

  He blinked at her in the wash of street light filtering through the blinds. His face passed through a sequence of emotions from confusion to stunned anger that reminded her uncomfortably of how he had looked when she had been charged with altering her Virtual University files. “I’m not the only one who’s ever kept secrets,” he said.

  Tara looked away, stung. “Touché.” Chandler squeezed her shoulder, and she was torn between the desire to mollify him and the desire to knock his hand away.

  Tara sighed and tried to find words for her emotions. “All right, Chandler. So we’ve peeked at each other’s skeletons in the closet. We’re even. But no more secrets, okay? We’re married. We exchanged vows, combined our lives, promised to share everything. I don’t like secrets. I want to be part of what you’re doing.”

  He climbed out of bed, standing naked in the dim yellowish reflection. “Okay, mea culpa. No more secrets. We share and share alike. Genuine partners, collaborators.” With slow, smooth motions, Chandler eased the straps of the sweat-soaked teddy off her shoulders and slid it down her body.

  When they made love, tentatively at first, salving the sore spots between them, all Tara could think about was the splitter in the other room. . .and how it would feel to share bodies while sharing the same mind.

  #

  Chandler licensed “The Grandest Canyon” to more than a dozen office complexes. His hazel eyes gleamed as he swept Tara toward the door of their apartment. “Kimba’s Steak House tonight,” he said, “for a celebration.”

  For the past two years, they had made a habit of feasting on rich red meat once a month, whether they could afford it or not. Tara enjoyed their special meals, the evenings away from his work, though sometimes their budget had allowed them only a small filet to divide between them. Splitting a steak with Chandler was doubly difficult, since he insisted on eating his meat bloody rare, and she preferred hers medium well; as a result, they settled for medium, leaving neither particularly satisfied.

  But tonight they were celebrating, and they would each have the meal of their choice. Tara sucked on a cholesterol-suppressant lozenge and handed one to Chandler as they boarded the transit tube and rode to the steak house.

  Chandler talked with her about possibilities as he strode along the sidewalk to Kimba’s. He gestured with his hands, walking straighter, more confidently. Tara thought of him slumped in his maroon chair not so long ago, jacked-in and blocked for ideas—she liked the change in him.

  They passed through the artificial bamboo gates of Kimba’s, next to the stuffed white lion mascot. The receptionist keyed up their reservations and led them to a narrow booth in the back near one of the shimmering fake fireplaces, under the stuffed head of an artificial ibex. Gaudy Zulu shields and long spears hung on the walls, and a soundtrack of throbbing drums and squawking birds came from microspeakers buried in the potted plants.

  They called up the familiar menu on the datapad set into the end of the table, punching in their selections. He picked a large Porterhouse, she chose a filet mignon. It felt extravagant to select what they wanted, rather than what they could afford.

  Chandler hunched over the lacquered table, resting his elbows on it as he reached out to her. “I want to show you something,” he said. He dipped a hand into his shirt pocket to pull out a deck of newly imprinted plastic wafers, business cards with a magnetic strip containing autodialer information. She recognized the basic logo, but he peeled off one of the wafers and slid it across the table to her.

  “I changed the company name from Chandler Damon, Worldbuilder, to Worldbuilders, Inc. I put your name on the ID strip, too.”

  He grinned at her, his pale, freckled face looking ruddier in the cast-off light from the imitation fire. She held the plastic card in her hands, rolling the edges against her fingertips, as if afraid they might turn into razors. “You put my name on it?”

  Chandler shrugged. “Well, you’re going to be a part of it from now on, aren’t you? Especially considering the new contract I got offered today—something really spectacular. We’re reconstructing ancient Egypt, an interactive diorama environment displaying the creation of the pyramids and the great sphinx. It’ll go in one of the top recreational floors in the financial center towers.”

  “You mean I can quit my other job?”

  He shrugged, as if not sure how she would take the news. “Well, you keep telling me how much you hate it.”

  Before she could find a way to express her delight, the server placed their meals in front of them. Chandler sliced into his dripping red Porterhouse, eyeing the meat as if he were a predator. Tara talked with her mouth full, tugging out details of the Egypt project as she let the excitement wash over her.

  The filet was delicious, perfectly cooked, but she had already received a far greater treat than the steak could ever be.

  #

  A hot sun baked the desert along the Nile. A simulated sky shimmered with the heat, refracted blue glinting off airbrush-smooth sands. Holographic slaves clad in dusty loincloths and rimed with sweat and mud constructed the monumental pyramids as Tara and Chandler worked at constructing the rest of the program.

  Chandler’s ghost image stood up a level on the pyramid adding details to the animated work crews. The slaves hauled enormous limestone blocks into place, sliding the chunks along mud-slick tree trunks. Chandler looked ridiculous in his guise as a slave driver: arms crossed at his bare chest, legs spread apart, bright white linen wrapped around his waist. He had added a dark Egyptian cast to his normally pale, freckled skin. His red-gold hair hid under a headdress. His lips pressed together as he concentrated, an expression she had not seen him wear before.

  He stared down at the work gangs roped together, sweating as they maneuvered their loads up ramps. Working with a palette grid he pulled out of the air, he adjusted their expressions and routines, altering the dirt and details of their rags.

  Tara’s ghost image walked up one of the slick ramps and clambered across a network of palm-trunk scaffolding to inspect the architectural details. Playing the game, she had dressed her image in the gaudy garb of a Pharoah’s wife, her eyes black and greasy from a layer of kohl, her neck burdened with a necklace of gold and lapis lazuli, her knuckles adorned with scarab rings.

  “Hey Chandler!” she said, raising her voice. Automatically the synthesized sounds of rumbling stone, cracking whips, and shouts of pain damped and faded into the background. “Do we have a revised estimate of the completion date? We’re ahead of schedule, aren’t we?”

  Chandler’s image nodded from the other side of the pyramid. His headdress wagged in the bright sun. “I want to emphasize the immensity of this construction, yet leave the impression that it’s perpetually in progress. A metaphor for life: constantly building—and no matter how large it gets, you’re never actually done. Like La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona.”

  Somehow Tara knew instantly what he meant, though she could not recall ever having heard of the architect Gaudi before. Deep in virtual Egypt, Tara had gotten better at interpreting mental messages from Chandler. They built upon each other’s ideas.

  The pyramids had gone up with amazing rapidity, with details as sharp as a new icepick. The work was not merely interesting, it was good. She could see things with a more artistic eye now, Chandler’s eyes.

  She turned her kohl-smeared eyes toward the work crews. In her years of knowing him, she had never felt so close to Chandler, had never felt so close to anyone. It was an immense relief, and something she had always wanted. She didn’t want the project to end.

  #


  The sharp knife in Chandler’s hand slashed down, dicing bok choy, Chinese eggplant, and celery on the wet cutting board. He chattered with Tara, distracted by his own excitement.

  In the hot wok, vegetables sizzled with the pungent smell of onions and garlic in sesame oil. On the tile counter beside the wok, soft sweaty masses of turkey breast glistened like damp skin.

  “I’ve already got future projects lined up,” Chandler said. “The pyramids were really a breakthrough, and my agent is searching for commissions appropriate to my—to our talents.”

  “Good,” Tara said, watching from the comfortable stool as he washed another jewel-purple eggplant under the tap and brought it glittering over to the cutting board where he chopped at it with short, stuttering strokes.

  She felt free now, with open doors ahead of her again since she had scraped away her unchallenging archtectural work, like mud off her shoe. Chandler didn’t care about the mistakes in her past; he let her be herself and help him.

  Chandler paused in his cutting, scooped the chunks of turkey and vegetables into the hissing hot oil, then reached for a green bell pepper. “I already told my agent that you and I would be taking projects jointly from now on.”

  She grinned at him. Chandler glanced at her with a shy smile as he automatically brought the blade down again, slicing his index finger.

  “Damn!” he cried, dropping the knife and looking at the blood welling from the gash. “Not again! This is the same finger I cut last year. I’ll probably need another three stitches.”

  Tara sprang to her feet, rushing around the counter to help him, but she froze halfway. “Chandler—I cut my finger last year, not you.”

  He held his cut under the cold running water and looked at her in confusion. She lifted her right hand, extending her index finger to show him the thin white line of her scar.

  Chandler turned pale. “That was you? But the memory in my head was so clear!” He removed his hand from the water, wrapped a dishrag around the cut and pressed hard.

  Tara went to the medicine cabinet to get gauze and tape. Her mind buzzed. More backwash from the splitter?

  She brought the medical supplies, and though her hands looked steady, she was shaking inside. “Maybe we should. . . back off a little,” she suggested. “Stop jacking together so often.”

  Chandler seemed preoccupied as he wrapped his cut. His lips pressed together as he concentrated in an expression she found endearing. For a moment he seemed convinced, but then his expression changed, like plaster-of-Paris setting in a mold, growing sharper and harder.

  “Let’s think about it,” Chandler said. “We’ve got a lot of opportunities, and we don’t need to rush into anything.”

  #

  Tara returned alone to Kimba’s Steak House. Chandler was off at a luncheon banquet to receive an award for his ‘Lost Rainforest’ environment, but she wanted some time alone, treading water in a vague ocean of dissatisfaction. Perhaps she had picked up some of her husband’s need for solitude.

  Or perhaps she was just depressed because she had learned that Fizzwilly had finally been caught, the last of her group of hacker friends. Her only remaining connection to that past existence had been severed. Tara decided she didn’t really want to go visit Fizzwilly and commiserate with him.

  Preoccupied, she found a table surrounded by the kitsch safari atmosphere. She sat under a stuffed zebra head this time, looking up at its placid face, striped black and white, as if a black horse and a white horse had somehow merged imperfectly. It reminded her of Chandler and herself.

  Resting her chin in her hand, she keyed in her order and stared at the gaudy decor, wondering if any of it was real, or if it had all been manufactured as props. She decided she didn’t care: with as much time as she spent jacked in with Chandler to a virtual universe, reality had earned a different meaning for her.

  Waiting for her food, Tara pondered how her life had changed, admitting how much more involved she was with Chandler now, an inextricable part of his work. Tara had dreamed about this . . . but she wasn’t sure this was what she had had in mind. She had grown together with him, but at the cost of part of herself.

  The server interrupted her reverie by bringing her meal. She cut into it with her steak knife, but stopped short when she saw blood pooling on the plate. She turned to the menu pad and called up her order, staring at the words she had keyed in. She looked at her steak again.

  The Porterhouse was grayish on the outside, and a rich, cold red at the center.

  #

  “—and then we’ll stop,” Chandler said, his eyes pleading.

  As Tara looked at him, she caught an image of the gaunt, middle-aged man again, riddled with self-doubt and the fear that he would be unable to complete the job he had taken on. “Just help me finish this one,” he said. “You’ll enjoy it. I promise.”

  Tara turned away, uneasy and afraid to meet his eyes. “Tell me again what’s wrong,” she said.

  Over the past week or so, she had refused to jack in at all. Spooked by the growing evidence of the crumbling barrier between their personalities, she had decided to back off, worried about the danger of using the prototype splitter.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with it!” Chandler lashed out on the verge of panic. His eyes glittered in a silent plea. She had never seen him look so helpless. “It’s missing something at the heart. Without your help it’s only a shell. I’m falling flat on my face.”

  He reached out in desperation and clung to her hand. He hadn’t done that in a long time. “Please?”

  As the refusal died in her throat, Tara realized how drastically their needs had changed, as if they had swapped insecurities. Chandler needed to become more a part of her, and she retreated, trying to build barriers and maintain her own soul.

  But as she looked at him grasping her hand and silently begging, she saw the man who had stood beside her when her bright future had been stripped from her, who had let her share in his growing success and giving her a new chance. She saw him redefining his company to include her, asking her to become his partner in everything.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll make this one our masterpiece, a final flash of glory. Then we’ll stop. You’ll be on your own from now on.”

  “Sure,” Chandler said with obvious relief. “It’s for a whole shopping mall. It’ll be really big.”

  Tara went to the wall jacks, wondering why he would think that the size of the implementation had anything to do with her decision to help him.

  She carefully mounted the viper fangs of the jack cable into the socket in the back of her head. Rushing and fumbling with his own socket, Chandler linked up. They plugged into the splitter, and both swam down into the virtual world.

  He took her to Mount Olympus.

  Chandler had chosen the assignment to pique her interest, since in her student days she had traveled through virtual Greece, visited the ruins of the Parthenon, the Acropolis, statues of Apollo and Athena.

  Tara looked around under the bleached-bright sky of Chandler’s land of the gods. Mount Olympus towered, reaching to the clouds, where Zeus and the other gods dwelled, working their mischief by playing games with mortal lives.

  Tara’s image had entered the world at the foot of the great volcano. On grassy hills stood weathered, half-fallen remains of Greek architecture, a random mix of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, small temples and larger structures scattered in no particular order, as if Chandler had captured their images from a mixed-bag database and pasted them to the slopes as the impulse struck him.

  Black obelisks of volcanic rock thrust out at the base of the mountain. Steam and sulfurous fumes curled from fissures, and a blistering glow rose from a large opening, accompanied by loud sounds of clanging metal, a sighing forge, and someone massive stirring.

  She saw no image of Chandler waiting for her. They had both jacked in, but he had gone to a different place. As Tara listened to the grunting, clanging sounds in the fire-filled cave, she k
new where to find him, where he wanted her to go. He was playing some sort of game with her.

  She stepped inside what she guessed would be the forge of Hephaestus. The sharp-edged cave walls reflected the burning-hot light rising from a river of incandescent lava that flowed, rumbled, growled through the chamber.

  On a flat rock in the midst of the lava stood the incarnation of Chandler—Hephaestus himself—his head a mass of wiry black hair matted with perspiration, a voluminous beard, eyebrows like feathers from a bird of prey, a face lumpy and ugly. He wore only a soot-stained loincloth. Sweat trickled down his bronzed and muscular frame. One of his feet was crushed and shriveled; Tara remembered the myth of an angered Zeus hurling Hephaestus from the top of Mount Olympus.

  He withdrew a sharp metal object from the lava—the glowing tip of a new trident for Poseidon. He looked up, his eyes flashing reflections from the fiery, molten rock. “How do you like it?” Chandler asked. His familiar voice sounded strange issuing from the vocal cords of a massive Greek god.

  Tara glanced down at herself to see her body a sculptured model of absolute beauty, pure alabaster, clad in sparkling white flowing robes. She felt luxurious tresses of hair draped between her shoulders. She rolled her eyes at the irony of being too lovely to touch—cool and aloof, unreachable. “Am I supposed to be playing Aphrodite to your Hephaestus?”

  “You’re my wife, aren’t you?” Chandler asked with an eloquent shrug. He began to hammer the smoking trident on an enormous, misshapen anvil; the sledge blows sent thunder reverberating through the grotto.

  She indicated the cave, the forge. “Well, the exterior of Mount Olympus needs work, but you’ve surpassed yourself here.”

  Chandler looked at her longingly, his large green-tan eyes glowing beneath the bristling brows. “That isn’t why I wanted to bring you here,” he said. He laid down the trident and stepped down into the flowing lava as if wading across a stream.