The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  This is my replacement.

  “Mr. Gansevoort,” a voice called, disrupting his preoccupation. The voice came from behind the sliding rice paper screens. “Come in, sit down.” He stepped out of the elevator car. “Ah, your shoes, if you would.” He took them off, leaving them beside the stranger’s expensive ones. His right blue sock had a small hole in it over the big toe, and he cringed. How much could they see?

  He chose a cushion this side of the cactus, away from the other man but not so far away as to appear intimidated—at least, that was his rationale in selecting it. He was sure he lacked the flexibility to adopt the position the other man sat in, but he folded up his right leg to hide the hole in his sock.

  The voice asked him if he wanted some tea but he declined. Tea went straight through him, and he didn’t want to have to raise his hand and excuse himself in the middle of a meeting as important as this. His body prickled with renewed sweating.

  The voice said, “Mr. Gansevoort, we want to introduce you to Mr. Mingo.” He leaned out past the cacti to see if they meant the other man. Expressionless, the blond Mingo nodded slightly to him.

  “Mr. Mingo is a troubleshooter for the company, specializing in Human Resource problems.”

  Oh, Christ, thought Gansevoort, here it comes.

  “It was our original intention to say nothing of his arrival to you, but Mingo insisted we bring you in, as you will be—technically at least—his acting superior.”

  Gansevoort leaned forward again and took another look at the other’s sharp, supercilious profile.

  “In reality, of course, he’s answerable only to us, and we anticipate you won’t even know he’s in place most of the time, which is the way someone in Mingo’s position prefers it.”

  “He’s an efficiency expert? You’re planning to make cuts in personnel?”

  “As few as possible,” replied the voice. He thought he overheard a soft chuckle. He wondered which one of the males this was, which mask matched the voice. “However, he may require of you some staff; in fact he does already need—what?—half a dozen?—security people, for a small operation on SC Plaza level.”

  “Ah, well, that should be no problem. We have lots of idle security people.” He could hardly keep from trembling with excitement. They weren’t going to fire him, they were singling him out for a special assignment!

  “No problem, you say. Glad to hear it. There, you see, Mingo was right. Should point out—yes, I should—that your salary will be raised a full six percent to compensate you for any extra work you might have to do. It’s in the nature of Mingo’s explorations that he may conceivably need your assistance, or intervention, at inconvenient hours. You understand?”

  “Oh, certainly, sir. Anything.” He meant it, too. Not only not fired, but promoted! “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say that we can rely on you completely as we have for so long.”

  He jumped to his feet. “Sir, you can!”

  “Well, good. Fine.”

  Wouldn’t everyone be buying him drinks tonight? The whole office would want to hear the details of this meeting. But, hold on, maybe that wasn’t such a hot idea. If Mingo were scoping out personnel, he wouldn’t do himself any good by spreading stories to that effect, even true ones. If it got back to Mingo … He would have to say something, though, if he wanted to keep speculation from spreading. The call-up was too extraordinary to dismiss out of hand without all sorts of remonstrations from disgruntled co-workers. Just tell about the promotion, sure. Make himself sound important. He’d been doing such a terrific job that they’d wanted to tell him personally—

  “Mr. Gansevoort!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “If you would sit down, there’s a further related matter we must discuss with you.” He sat and the voice asked, “What do you know of Xau Dâu?”

  He hesitated to answer while he tried to guess how much he was supposed to know versus what gossip had passed through his office. Guardedly, he replied, “I suppose, what everyone knows. Does this … involve them?”

  A new voice broke in. It was the woman, Rajcevich. “The subject is not his concern.”

  “We agreed Jean—”

  “We did not, unless my opinion counts for nothing. How do we know he won’t spread what he hears to everyone. We’ve never used him before. I haven’t even studied his file yet.”

  “You won’t, will you, Gansevoort?”

  “No, never,” he said. He almost drew an “X” over his heart but stopped himself.

  “See? Thoroughly reliable.”

  “Oh, Kosinus, you’re preposterous. Who is this man? A middle manager, for God’s sake—his life’s ambition is to keep his weight down! I’m telling you, this breach of protocol will come back upon us.”

  “Madame thinks her name is Cassandra,” observed a third, accented voice, which opened the floor to competitive bickering.

  “People in the colony are already suspicious, Huston—”

  “—Bickham and Ichiban-Plokazhopski wait like two mountains—”

  “—we’ll surpass all competition when this is over. The angel—”

  “I tell you, Jean, he’s completely reliable.”

  “—knows nothing!”

  In the midst of it, Gansevoort sensed more than saw Mingo unfold himself and rise to his feet. He stepped to the cactus arrangement and snapped a particularly long needle off the tallest succulent. He smiled apologetically at Gansevoort, as if the bickering were somehow his responsibility. He had the palest blue eyes, and curving white lashes like the spines of a flytrap. Swinging about, he took two quick steps to the nearest sliding screen. His arm whipped across it. The caterwauling ceased, immediately replaced by squeals and shouts. One of the males shouted, “Mingo!” as a large polygon of rice paper uncurled from the center of the screen and fluttered to the ground. Through the hole Gansevoort saw hulking shadows against an intaglioed ceiling. A moment later a new screen slammed into place behind the hole.

  Mingo dropped the cactus needle.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He seated himself again on the squeaky black cushion and poured himself a cup of tea. After taking a sip, he spoke as if into the cup: “Making a point.”

  From behind the screens came muttered sibilance, a hot, whispered debate, followed by a long pause.

  Then the voice of Kosinus addressed Gansevoort again. “Mr. Gansevoort, please pay no heed to our petty squabble. It happens all the time. Mr. Mingo will be in contact with you about those security arrangements,” Kosinus told him. “That’s all, dear fellow, you may go now. ”

  Nonplussed, Gansevoort got up, stealing one final glance at Mingo, seated contemplatively, like a gecko on a branch. “Thank you,” Gansevoort said, although he wasn’t sure who among them he was supposed to be thanking. “I’ll put together a team for you right away.”

  “Nothing to it. Thank you for agreeing to see us.” As if he’d been offered a choice.

  But I didn’t see you at all, he thought as the lift door opened. Before it had closed, the arguing began again; the man Mingo had turned back into statuary.

  Gansevoort stood in the silent lift, his head swimming with open-ended implications and a feeling that he’d just stepped through a mirror. Something very strange was going on. He had been stuffed into the middle of it—led into a very real lion’s den and come out the other side miraculously intact. For the moment that was cause to celebrate.

  Later, in his apartment across the plaza, the worrying would begin, followed by a fatalistic certainty that everything, including the carrot of a promotion, was a heinous trick of some sort perpetrated upon him by the four Invisible Gods.

  Good news always preceded disaster, didn’t it?

  Chapter Four: A New Assignment

  “The best model we have for explaining the effects of Orbitol derives from a theory of wholeness more than half a century old,” said the mustachioed man on the TV cubes. “But in fact, it’s about the only m
odel we have so far that fits.”

  Rick Nebergall sat in a large, converted walk-in closet. He wore a flannel shirt with rips in the shoulder seams, black denims, and gray point-toed boots that he had propped on the CG shelf. A multi-purpose keyboard lay in his lap, allowing him to shift through the effects spectrum from character generation to resolution pegging. Twenty-one small, high-resolution TV monitor cubes surrounded him. Fewer than half—a large cluster in the center grouped around a single, larger screen—displayed the face of the speaker. The remainder offered Nebergall still frames of altogether different images, most of them moody and dark, in the piece he was editing; as the speaker continued, the various stills kicked into motion one at a time, threading smoothly into the final mix.

  Nebergall watched the various displays, nodding at the time-counter as each bit of footage began. Each part intersected with the next fixed moment, which had gone into motion, fading up into the master disk, which played on the central monitor. It was all pre-timed; nevertheless, he toggled between them, stopping and backing up when he didn’t like where or how a segment came in, seeking ways to F/X the fade up—allowing specific visual elements to rise first or dropping them into place in jarring contrast to what had come before, the quick cut timed to a key word. He paused, backed up and launched the recordings again and again, lasers turning light into bits of speech that he would hear a thousand times before he’d finished. Images would burn like woodcuts into his synapses.

  He rewound to where the speaker’s face was on the main screen, the face vaguely sad, the eyes hollow, tired, absolutely sincere; then he recited the man’s name and credentials aloud. The CG located the words, which manifested in blue across the recording: Doctor Matthew Mussari, Research Chemist, Ichiban-Plokazhopski. Using the keyboard trackball, Nebergall captured and moved the words to where he wanted them, considered the color a moment, and opted for an off-white instead. Satisfied, he faded the lines of type down and let the recording run again. On his signal, the words magically re-appeared. Nebergall grunted.

  “If we consider ourselves as individual expressions in four knowable dimensions,” said Dr. Mussari, “which are derived of a universal cloth, then we can theorize that in some way Orbitol-affected tissues are shrugging off that fabric for one we’ve never seen. In other words, the body tissues in question have changed into matter we can’t see or feel, but which still exists somewhere, and which the poor bugger of an Orbiter continues to sense in some way, much as an amputee receives ghost data from his lost limb.

  “As for the world described by some of the final-stage addicts, this is very likely hallucination, a common property of the drug expressing itself, rather than actual reportage of what the new fabric might look like. I mean, blue trees and crystalline landscapes. It’s too much pulp fantasy—the Alien News Network is more believable, and that’s pure bunk. There’s plenty of data to support this—studies of the drug phencyclidine in the last century pointed up a commonality amongst hallucinations.”

  He paused the disk, backed it up again. Nebergall had been editing without a break for more than forty-eight hours. Once he got started on a final edit, he found it nearly impossible to quit before the piece was complete. The closet smelled like an ashtray in a litter box.

  Under the best of conditions, two people could not fit comfortably in Nebergall’s icy workroom (he jokingly referred to it as his “edit suite”), and Thomasina Lyell could only imagine what the best of conditions might have been. So much debris littered the space beneath the rails on which his chair rode—cables, old CDs, scripts, cigarette butts, Coca-Cola bulbs and wrappers from creme-filled cupcakes (Neeb’s favorite), even a few ancient magnetic tape cartridges—that the trash had become the floor. With Nebergall stretched half the length of the room, all Lyell could do was prop herself in the open doorway and watch. His two cats, Gargantua and Badebec, slept on the small bed behind her.

  One by one as the screens went dark, they reflected her. He knew she was there, but he would not acknowledge her until he’d finished the sequence. It could go on for hours; it had, before. He tilted to the left, comparing numbers logged into his keyboard against those displayed on one of the screens.

  Dr. Mussari went into motion again. “Each of us, then, can be viewed as a subtotal of the collective implicate expression, the same as a subtotal on a grocery bill. Carry the analogy out, and Orbitol is just changing the price of one or two items, so that the subtotal changes. No other substance has ever done this, so far as we know. The final effect and impact cannot be estimated yet. Frankly, we’ve no idea how many people have simply vanished into this unknown ‘twelve-space,’ or if their transformation in some way destabilizes the fabric of our reality. That’s why my colleagues here and at Bickham International have petitioned hard for a ban on Orbitol’s manufacture. Naturally, ScumberCorp is fighting us on this, but there is a sincere concern that we might wake up some morning to find half the world missing, or time out of joint, or something unimaginably worse.”

  Three colorful corporate logos shared the screen briefly as he spoke, like the pennants of opposing sports teams; then the scientist’s face returned in close-up.

  “It has nothing to do with our contempt for ScumberCorp as a business entity, or its pernicious subsidiary, Stercus Pharmaceuticals. I freely admit to such contempt in light of what we suspect. This petition, however, has to do with the untold loss of life among the lowest of the underclass that’s occurring as I speak. By some estimates, because of Orbitol’s remarkably addictive properties, at least one entire stratum of society will be obliterated within the decade. Human beings, I fear, have finally made the endangered species list.”

  The image froze, then slowly zeroed into the black pupil of his right eye. Nebergall typed in codes to identify and protect the composite master. Lyell knew he would look at it again later and be dissatisfied with something that no one else could see, and start over from scratch. It was no time to voice an opinion.

  When he was finished, he hung the flexible keyboard on the left arm of the chair. He unclipped what looked like a knobby black ocarina from his shirt, began clicking the top of it with his thumb. His legs drew back in increments with each click. He groaned as his knees bent for the first time in hours. Clamping the ocarina between his teeth, he loosened the strap around his middle and then quickly grabbed the arms of the chair, taking the weight of his body upon his wrists so that he could swing his folded legs down. His boot heels slid into place on the footplates. He took the control again in the palm of his hand and tapped two of the raised knobs. His mechanized chair glided forward on its track to give Lyell a little more breathing room. “Close the door, there, will you?” he said. “Don’t want all the A/C to leak out and contaminate the pure Philly air.”

  Lyell closed the closet door behind her. Then she leaned over him and set three video disks on the desk where his feet had been.

  “Nice to have you back. How’d we make out?” he asked.

  “You’re now the proud owner of a couple hours worth of jiggly stock exercise footage should you ever have cause to take a poke at obesity.”

  He craned his head back and looked at her upside down. His graying blond hair needed shampooing, and darker stubble graced his chin. His blue eyes had gone mostly red. “I wasn’t planning to make any sitcoms. No story, huh? That’s too bad. Now and then you’re gonna get that kinda job, you know that.” He leaned forward and picked up the disks. “You found the Tamiami kid, at least. You haven’t lost your skill there. Have you told the client?”

  “No, only you. I’m meeting with Mr. Trayle this afternoon.”

  “He’s gonna be real happy. Promise me you won’t beat him up in public.”

  “What a funny joke. Listen, Neeb, I want you to take a look at the number three disk for a minute. Go in about two-forty.”

  Nebergall selected the disk. He ejected one small drive, and replaced its contents with Lyell’s. Leaning back, he scratched his head with the keyboard, then typed a few s
trokes. The twenty-one screens lit up with a single image—a still of the Geoplatform bar ceiling with a large, distorted semi-circle at the bottom of the frame. “How many times I got to tell you to keep your head straight?”

  “I was in the middle of taking a drink. It gets better.”

  He gave her a skeptical look, then started the video. Blue on-screen numbers began running through sequence. Three figures walked past. “You want speakers on?”

  “Not for this. He doesn’t say anything, anyway.”

  “Who?”

  “The middle one.”

  Nebergall typed a few more commands. The picture froze and a dotted square closed over the torso and head of the middle figure at the bar. The bottom three monitors filled with that segment of the picture, and continued tracking the image as he let the action continue. “What’s he got on his head?” Nebergall asked. “Looks like a swim-cap.”

  The camera rose up and approached the bar. It focused on the bartender, but abruptly turned, filling the screen with the nearest man, then swinging back to look past him, capturing the other two faces in profile.

  “There,” Lyell said.

  Nebergall marked the spot, and glanced at the bottom row of images. He straightened up, leaned forward. The screen showed a tanned or a dark face, one sharp cheek with maybe a trace of acne in the hollow, a prominent nose emerging from beneath the headgear. “Spanish or Arabic,” he guessed. “Some women like that kind of dark, raw-boned look, don’t they? Been in an accident. From his expression and that bypass gear, I’d bet on major brain damage, too. Hmm.” He lowered his head in thought for a moment before releasing the freeze frame.

  The third man—a redhead—stared hard at the camera. He snarled a few choice words.

  “Not exactly Athos, Aramis, and Porthos, are they?” commented Nebergall. “What’d you do to piss them off so fast?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Just asked a few questions about the Moon.”