by John Barnes
“Have they told you anything about what’s going to happen?”
“Not really. I can make a couple of guesses. Louie and Carla now have control of all the XV feed on the planet. And according to the President they’ve also got the physical resources and control of information to do anything else they want. I think the new order for the planet is going to announce itself here, using us, taking advantage of all those cheap XV sets that were dropped to stop the Global Riot.
“And it’s not a bad place for the purpose—almost the perfect setting for it. I was here a long time ago.
“Monte Alban is an old Zapotopec city—it was abandoned before the Spanish got here, so people don’t even know what its Indian name was. When I was here they’d just finished putting in live interactive holography—and a transuper massively parallel computer to run it.” She sighs. “That was my second assignment ever… it was a pretty strange time, Jesse.”
“I’ve got time if you want to tell me. I’m interested.”
“You and a billion listeners…”
“Is it personal?”
“Once half a billion people have experienced fucking you, and another half a billion have experienced having your vagina, ‘personal’ is a concept of limited utility, Jesse. No, I guess I was worried about boring them. But if anything important comes along, Louie or Carla can just break in, and if they’re bored, maybe they’ll turn it off and get into something real instead of this circus.”
“Your net won’t like you saying that.” He grins at her and slides his arm up onto her shoulder; she reaches up to pull his hand down so that it rests on her breast.
“No, but they haven’t gotten any paychecks to me lately, either, and once you tot up all the extra I’m going to make from working on my vacation, they’ll consider themselves lucky to get anything at all out of me.” She snuggles against him. “By the way, all you voyeurs, the biggest crisis in human history is going on and there are a lot of better places to get your information. It’ll be an hour till we get to Monte Alban. Why don’t you all go do something useful?” Then she adds to Jesse, “Not that they will,” and gets a strange, faraway look before adding, “Carla says about six million people just unplugged, so there may be some hope for the world yet. All right, anyone still want to hear Mary Ann’s Boring Reminiscences of the First Time Synthi Venture Went to Monte Alban?”
“On with the story,” Jesse says.
“Okay, Mommy tell wittle feller her story.” He tickles her for that one, and she shrieks and tickles back; they end up in a hug and kiss before going back to walking up the winding, muddy mountain road hand in hand. It’s a lot of fun, and it suddenly occurs to Jesse how, despite having experienced XV most of his life, it’s pretty rare to have encountered plain old spontaneous fun on it. He wonders if that’s a function of the medium, or the net companies, or that the things they put XV people through destroy the capacity for that kind of pleasure. Mary Ann doesn’t seem to have lost hers….
They take a moment to get their breath, and they slow the pace so Mary Ann can talk comfortably.
“Anyway,” she says, “it wasn’t anything awful, but it was sort of the first time I realized I had signed up for more than I had bargained for. What happened was that the Mexican government was really determined to promote tourism down here, so they paid a big load of cash to Passionet to get it built up. And I was still very new to the whole business, so in the first place I wasn’t used to the kind of beating your body takes to get sensations to come through for the audience—and therefore I was kind of unhappy about life in Oaxaca itself.
“The Presidente is a beautiful, beautiful hotel, you know, right on the Zócalo, and I’d never really traveled before, so here was this wonderful exotic place, and my first day here my new breasts and butt were so sore it was hard to walk.
“Then, too, the guy they assigned with me—he washed out shortly after—was not only rough with my body, but really stupid and selfcentered, so that it wasn’t any fun going anywhere with him. He was only interested in getting angles where the light was good for me to look at him—so there I’d be, looking around inside the Cathedral, and he’d be over posing in the sunlight and pouting if I didn’t look his way, or I’d be watching the way the sunlight fell against the white buildings and he’d be trying to line himself up for some kind of film noir shadows-on-the-face number.
“The point where I finally gave up on the stupid bastard was when we went up to the Paseo Juárez—a big beautiful open space with a great Spanish colonial fountain at its center and tall trees all around—and every time I’d back up to get a view down one of the sidewalks toward that fountain, he’d shove his chiseled face in front of me.
“But Passionet was not pissed at him; they were mad at me because I wasn’t staying on the basic script. Never mind that he was so stupid that they had to shut off the signal from him whenever he had to explain things to poor sweet big-titted Synthi, because all he could do was repeat what they said in his ear and even then they got it wrong. Never mind that he was acting like the place was a theme park. Never mind even that he obviously didn’t have the slightest idea how to be the kind of guy anybody could fall in love with.”
“Well, maybe they weren’t pissed, but you said they got rid of him,” Jesse reminds her.
Mary Ann scuffs at the mud, kicking a couple of rocks down the hillside. “Oh, no, it’s consistent. He just didn’t work out with the viewers. That’s an okay way to be; the net execs don’t understand why a shallow vain asshole with no brains doesn’t build up an audience, because most of them are shallow vain assholes with no brains themselves, and don’t understand how that could bother anyone. But when you do get someone who’s catching on with an audience—like me, for instance, and Synthi Venture was a blazing success right from the start if you just count audience draw—then it’s very important that she have a Great!—Big!—Huge!—Super!—Positive! —Big!—Smile!—Attitude!” She does a little cheerleader step and arm pump with each word, and Jesse catches a flash of the Mary Ann that never quite got over growing up in a mobile home court, where they raise pretty girls, but not homecoming queens or cheerleaders. He wonders a little if he missed something by not having anything to be permanently bitter about from his childhood; perhaps people will always think he’s a little lacking in depth because of it.
She snorts a little, and goes on. “See, when you have someone who’s really building up an audience, one of the things that’s happening is that a lot of the audience is getting to see the world the way the person they’re experiencing does. That’s what they pay for, after all. And the last thing you want them to do is to see the world in a cynical way, or in any way that doesn’t just love everything and everybody. I mean, if I started noticing that Lance Squarejaw, or whatever his name was—I can’t even remember it—was a well-packaged subhuman, then apart from getting off the script, there was this little matter that it called into question the whole idea of seeing the world as a romance novel. Maybe there really weren’t handsome lovers everywhere and maybe the most important thing about the news, or about Mexico, was not that it was a backdrop for that kind of story. Maybe it wasn’t just like everywhere else with different sets and costumes, and if it wasn’t, then just possibly it might be necessary to really know something about it. If I started rejecting the leading man, god knew where it was going to lead—maybe even to people starting to think that they might have to see and feel and think for themselves.”
She shakes her head, hard, smearing the water and hair back off her face with her hands. “Damn. I’m still mad about it because I didn’t let myself get mad about it in the first place.” Jesse notices for the millionth time that her eyes really are as huge as they seem on XV, but that it’s mostly because she has almost no fat in her face—diet or surgery, he’s not sure which, but she has the face of a starvation victim.
She sighs. “Anyway, the point of all that was, I was already in deep with Passionet management before I went out to Monte A
lban. They were watching me closely because they were afraid I’d screw them up by not taking the right attitude.
“So finally we got up to Monte Alban, and by pure accident it happened that the system was temporarily down—they’d had a lightning strike nearby and though there was no permanent damage, all the automatic shutdowns had tripped and it was taking a while to get everything back on line, checked out, and powered up.
“I don’t know what exactly I can tell you about it; maybe you’ll see it yourself. The first thing that happens when you walk into the city itself is you realize how terribly old it is. Of course there are sites in Europe, Asia, and Africa that are a lot older, and for that matter there are ones down in Yucatán that are a lot older… but it doesn’t matter. The weather up here on the mountain, plus the climate, plus the long time the city’s been abandoned, all combine to just overwhelm you—all that crumbling stone, all that feeling that people have been gone from here for a very long time. And from the city you feel like you can see a million miles—you look out over all this deep wet green land, and down across farms and towns and the city of Oaxaca, and you find yourself thinking about how long a century is and how many of them there have been, and that for centuries people stood here and looked down and thought—what? You’ll never know, but the land must have looked something like this.
“And too it’s quite a climb to get around on some parts of the ruins, and they’re sort of complicated, so you find that after a short while you’re starting to realize that there’s no way you can absorb all of this, that every building could take you a day just to get to know, that the whole thing is so rich and complex—and we know nothing about the people, really, just the bits of art and objects they left behind, and the few things found in the few tombs that weren’t robbed.
“I had gone to the museum down in Oaxaca, where they had those things—gold jewelry, and statues of jade and onyx, and so forth—and now I found myself turning my memories of those objects over and over in my head, trying to make them fit into this. And all this in the most perfect, clear sunlight, with the air scrubbed by the storm of the day before, and those deep, sharp shadows you get in the tropics etching the lines of the buildings at me…. There kept being delays and I kept exploring. Finally, when it became clear that it was going to be longer still, I climbed up on the Southern Pyramid and just sat there for an hour while they were getting everything together—Mr. Goodface didn’t have the energy to come up after me and pose—looking out over that place that had stood abandoned for centuries, after being occupied by human beings for something like two thousand years.
“I felt the whole set of disappointments and annoyances from Oaxaca washing off me; there just wasn’t much that could seem important against a backdrop of centuries.
“At that point I suppose they must have figured that they were finally getting the right attitude out of me. I didn’t care; god, it was so beautiful. This—and the money, of course—was what I’d signed on to be rebuilt for XV to get.”
She smiles at him, giving him a look from under the eyelashes that would have melted him even if he hadn’t been half in love with it through most of high school. “So I suppose you can guess what happened. They told me they were ready and I came down off the Southern Pyramid—it’s a huge thing, towers over everything else, and so as I was coming down there was a beautiful view of the whole valley, and my costar got the best visual he ever got from me, since he was part of that landscape.
“That was when I got into trouble. They ran the live holo overlay—supposedly it was archeological reconstruction. I suppose some of the people who had done it must have called themselves archeologists… but what happened was that all of a sudden we were looking at all these people in a mishmash of Aztec and Mayan and central-casting-barbarian outfits, doing all this stuff out of a Cecil B. DeMille epic. There was a little bit of ’Chariots of the Gods’ stuff, and for the Christers there were a lot of Quetzalcoatl-was-Jesus stuff, and for the New Agers there was crystals and shamanism, and a fair amount of mild orgy and human sacrifice, your basic sex and violence mix, for everyone else… and the trouble was, I’d been to the museum, I’d read up on all this, I knew how bogus what I was seeing was, and how little evidence of any kind there was, and that even with so little evidence what I was seeing couldn’t possibly have happened… it was all so Hollywood and so advo-hype and such a mixture of trendiness for different kinds of trendies…” Her voice trails off and she shakes her head, turning to throw a stone off into the brush. For a long time she just walks, a slow saunter that seems determined to enjoy the warm rain.
“So what happened?” Jesse finally asks.
“I started to laugh. Compared to what it was like without the holos, it was all just so pathetic and silly, so much a case of giving people the ‘amazing’ things they wanted to see instead of letting them face how incomprehensible and awesome it really was… well, the contrast was just funny, you’ll have to trust me.
“Turned out Mr. Handsome Stupid, beside me, had really been in awe of the holos. Until those came on, all he’d seen was a pile of rocks. I completely destroyed that mood of awe that they were shooting for, and it made him feel belittled—which on a romance channel like Passionet is the one thing that can never happen to leading men. Moreover, our core audience was exactly the kind of people who most want to feel like they’ve been places without ever having to encounter anything too unfamiliar—and the laughter hit a raw nerve there.” There’s a deep bitterness in her voice, as if she were still spitting out blobs of the nastiness.
“They didn’t fire you, though.”
“No, but they gave me one last chance. Do well on the next job or it was all over.”
“What was the next job?”
“They rented me to the Vice Channel, which put me in a whorehouse in Macao for three months. Under a different name—Passionet wanted to protect their investment in Synthi Venture—but that didn’t make much difference to Mary Ann Waterhouse. At the end of it, I was delighted to go back and just get slammed around by million-dollar faces with three-dollar brains, and to get to see something other than three bedrooms, two dungeons, and the dorm.”
Jesse’s not sure what to say. He’s been reminded, again, that Synthi is close to twice his age; hell, when she was his age, XV wasn’t quite online yet. So about the time he’d have been saying his first words—or riding on Di’s shoulders to a high school football game—Synthi was… well, it’s kind of hard to imagine, is all.
She reaches for his hand, and they slide into walking with their arms around each other’s waist. It makes them go more slowly, but Passionet can always run a few more commercials, or even some real news, if it gets dull.
The rain is very definitely beginning to slack off.
Embracing, touching each other through ten thousand antennas: Louie and Carla. They are feeling themselves, less and less, to “be” anywhere; the separation from the body is becoming more complete with each microsecond. Yet for reasons they cannot quite specify, for all their vast capabilities, Louie continues to reside mainly in the moon and 2026RU and Carla in the nets on Earth; they have decided to touch, but not to commingle.
During each second, Carla throws Louie more data, and she and Louie discuss endlessly, simulate outcomes, see what might work. There is more conversation between them in one second than a thousand biological people could have in a thousand years; the ideas they entertain for five seconds flower and become as elaborate, self-contradictory, present in as many forms and as epistemologically all-embracing, as Christianity, art, Japanese, or mathematics, and then are discarded or absorbed into others.
It is probably fair to say that they are still fond of each other—indeed, more than ever before, they are the only people for each other.
All the while, Louie idly does his original tasks. The wafers of ice hurtle down over the Pacific, leaving their streaks of ice crystals to block the sun; as the crystal clouds roll toward the terminator line, and it creeps toward them,
his masers flash, heating the crystals enough to dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen, leaving the lighter hydrogen to escape back into space.
It takes him a while to realize, but when he does, he begins to study himself. Somehow or other, throwing Frisbees is still fun. He would have thought that that was glandular, or at least in some pleasure center in the brain, and thus would be something he would not have anymore. But though he no longer feels the physical need for sex, or hunger, or satiation—he still has fun, and he’s still in love with Carla, and he’s still sad about the way some things in his life turned out.
The deepest mystery of all—he’s uploaded most of the available material from most libraries before he concludes that no one else knows any more than he does—is that he still laughs. In fact, the more he leams, the more he grows beyond mere human capacity, the more he laughs. He spends eight or nine seconds on that issue (the equivalent of a full conversation between the Athens of Pericles and Sevilla in the time of the great Caliphs, going on for a century) before he realizes it will not resolve, that it is beyond his understanding, and once he does, he laughs longer and harder than ever.
Carla interrupts his laughter, hears the joke, and laughs herself for a matter of some seconds. Then she fills him in on some of the scientific work she has been doing. After due study Carla has concluded that species loss due to the complete lack of ultraviolet light on the surface is unfortunate but not terribly large, that although many habitats have been destroyed and species lost with them, the extensive range of new habitats created will spawn a new panoply of species if only they are left undisturbed long enough. She has grabbed control of the planet’s banks, though they don’t know it yet, and she will move them toward the robot-based economy—one in which machines grind out what is necessary, and people make what it is good and healthy for them to make.
And she has decided quite definitely that the new wetlands, scour deserts, and mud plains will be left undisturbed.
