You can't answer Serge, you can only direct Goss as best you can. You move towards the location she transmits, but there's nothing immediately visible. Sat's got it wrong - but they're not wrong about the storm.The wind's already kicking up and the sky's gone black over your starboard side. Goss shivers, detecting small electrical disturbances.
Then you see it: a break in the Grid as clean and precise as if somebody has cut a hole in the planet's topography with scissors. In the same moment, sensory cross-mapping with Gossamer gives you a sickly-sweet taste in your mouth as
Gossamer's olfactories go into overdrive, trying to read all the scent messages the Grid's giving off.They hit you on an unconscious level, making you feel twitchy and out of control.
A flood of primary emotions floods your chest and guts. You don't have time to analyze or even name them fear, anger, elation, loneliness, hunger because they follow one another in such rapid succession. You let them run over and through you, like you learned in that book about Paul Atreides: Fear is the mind-killer, you tell yourself this. And your discipline kicks in. You are a conduit. You are not to get involved.
RECORD - URGENT TRANSMISSION - RECORD ALL
You start sending pictures, angling Gossamer carefully to catch as much of the new phenomenon as you can in one bloom of data. It looks like a good hundred vertical feet of the Grid have been shorn off, exposing its foundation and the gnarled, knotty bases of what had been an intricate and mathematically sophisticated structure. There is an implied violence about the sight, not least because on the perimeter of the event the Grid is dead.
Dead, like gray flesh around a wound. Without light, or color, or movement: dead. It's just a brittle skeleton. Deep in the gray pit, well-fluid still gleams.There is something else down there, too, but you can't make it out before Gossamer's pass is finished and you lose sight of the gap.
How did this happen? No machine could chop up the Grid on such a large scale - and you're nowhere near any of the roads that machines use, anyway. It can't be golems because they don't build things or even use tools. It's one of the ways everybody can be sure they're not like humans. They don't have to use tools: they don't need shelter any more than they need food or sleep. They're like mushrooms. They spring up full-grown, clad in the battle gear their progenitors died in, and they do it literally overnight. They disappear into the well again just as easily.
You bend all your effort to recording a clear and focused image despite the best efforts of the Grid to repel your sight. The storm's visible now, its wind bending the stalks of the upper Grid and sending petals and clouds of pollen your way. Gossamer doesn't like the smell. She's like a horse scenting cougar. She wants to get the heck out of here.
But there's something funny about the living Grid in the region around the hole, as well. You don't know if you're imagining it, but you'd swear there are the beginnings of a visible order within the seething mess. You think you can detect angular structures within the freeform.They probably wouldn't pass an ArtlQ test; but to your subjective eye, they are there. You lean hard on the nex and transmit:
URGENT. NOTE APPARENT STRUCTURES. AMPLIFY BANDWIDTH.
Here comes the storm. Gossamer has no bones to feel the weather in, but her primitive nervous system is screaming warnings; in a minute, she'll flee or risk being crumpled up like a used Kleenex and tossed away. Magnetic dirt blocks your transmission.You see everything, but Machine Front will get only fuzz.
All the same, you force Gossamer to come around for another pass, scanning for clues. Your prosthetic eyes record a few more anomalies in the Grid: rectangles where there should be parabolas, spaces where there should be form. Nothing you know how to interpret. You take Gossamer on a wider circle now and pass through a series of scent-phrases that hit Gossamer's olfactories like Pop Rocks hitting a kid's tongue, temporarily overriding your sense of taste and obscuring whatever hidden messages may lie beneath.
Gossamer makes a bid to surge upward - whether seeking to avoid the storm or the crackling and singing upper extremities of the Grid, you can't tell. You manage to keep control of her, but you figure: enough already. You get the hint: time to go home.
You turn Gossamer around and start going back. And just then, her eyes give you the prize.
Serge's lost soldier is sitting in the Grid, high up at the very edge of the mysterious gap, overlooking the well. Just like a little statue, except for the automated blinking flare on the back of her helmet that is meant to alert fliers to her position.
Can't leave now.
URGENT.TRANSMIT. HAVE SIGHTED MAJ GONZALEZ. REPEAT HAVE SIGHTED MAJ GONZALEZ. URGENT.
You can't do anything. Goss has no supplies and she couldn't carry a field mouse, much less a hundred-and-twenty-pound soldier plus full equipment. You note the coordinates and hope they're right - the Grid can mess with orientation and does, especially with the storm front doing its thing in your left eye - then you decide to try and signal Gonzalez. Your data strip offers a ‘stay/wait’ sequence that Gossamer can pulse on scent towards the soldier's position so that she won't be tempted to wander off and get herself more lost than she already is. You start to implement the command.
Gossamer is not interested in carrying out your instructions. She has never rebelled against you before, so either you've lost your touch, or the storm is worse than you are able to perceive and she's shutting down non-essential nervous activity.
You judge by the rush of body-electricity and concomitant bladder-dump that it's the latter. Goss's survival reflexes are kicking in bigtime. She executes a neat maneuver, literally turning on her tail, and flees the coming storm, dropping the nex.
You're nowhere. You're blind, deaf, gagging - choking, actually, and—
—’Cookie! Pizza!’
the department of
extraplanetary hauntings
Ah, sugar. I'm back.
I sat listening to my heartbeat for a few counts, getting accustomed to myself again. My feet were asleep. My hands, palms-down on the reception pad, were cold and sweating. The TV screen was blue. I smelled Old Spice.
‘Cookie? You out yet?’
‘Yes, Gunther,' I whispered.
‘Good. We'll debrief in five.’
He sounded crisp and impatient. I wondered if it was his fault I lost Goss. Why had he been calling me, anyway? I licked dry lips, about to turn in my cheap plastic chair and ask him what was going on, but I heard the door of my assignment room snick shut and knew he was gone.
Five minutes. I had just enough time to go to the bathroom and get a Coke from the machine. Popping open the can, I shuffled along to Gunther's office, feeling awkward and dislocated, like a sea mammal on dry land. The post-flying bad taste in my mouth was even worse than usual. It was a funeral taste, like orchids, or something that had died - or both. I sipped Coke but it only seemed to complicate the nastiness.
Gunther is singing along to Billy Joel's The Nylon Curtain and shooting baskets with a nerf ball. I'm a little out of breath and my upper lip is sweating so I sit down on his leather couch and pretend to be interested in his little performance.
‘You missed Gloria's birthday party,' Gunther said. ‘I think they saved you pizza and cake.’
I blinked. ‘What time is it?’
Outside Gunther's window I could see maple trees tossing in a warm breeze, and traffic passing on the Garden State Parkway, which runs right behind the Dataplex building. The traffic was heavy.
Gunther shrugged and fished in his desk for his watch. ‘Six ... eleven.’
I put my hand to my mouth. I had entered the nex at ten o'clock. ‘I had no idea ...’
‘Yeah, I know. I was hoping the pizza shout would get your attention.’
He grinned. Gunther's going bald but otherwise he's not bad-looking, he's not married, and he's not stupid. However, he has some work to do in the sensitivity department. He seems to think my weight problem is funny.
‘It was really rough out there today,' I said. Gunther didn't pay a
ny attention. He and Billy were singing something about Sesame Street.
‘Gunther, there's some kind of structured effect going on in the Grid on N-Ridge. Near the mines. I couldn't get Gossamer in for a close enough look, but from what I could see it was pretty weird stuff. The Grid was actually chopped off. I've never seen anything like it.’
Gunther went for a bank shot and screamed, ‘PRESSURE!’
‘Gunther! Don't you care? What kind of debriefing is this?’
He startled and dropped the nerf ball.
‘Sorry,' he said in a different tone. He switched off the boom box, cleared his throat and sat down, loosening his tie. He picked up a pencil and tapped the eraser on a legal pad. ‘OK, tell me everything.’
I opened my mouth to speak, but didn't. He was staring expectantly at me. I stared back.
‘The tape recorder, Gunther?’
‘Oh! Right. Yeah.’ He reached into his desk drawer and dragged out the tape recorder. He cued the tape and turned it on.
‘This is Gunther Stengel debriefing Karen Orbach on July 2,1984 at. . . six-thirteen p.m. Go ahead, Karen. What happened out there today?’
He assumed an attentive pose and maintained it throughout. The thing about Gunther is, he's so fake he's real. I used to hate him, then I liked him, and then I started to wonder if there was something, like, wrong with him. By now I've given up trying to understand what he's all about.
It took me a long time to tell my tale, but if he checked his watch I didn't see him do it. When I was finished, my face felt hot and I must have looked excited.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘Well!’
He sat back.
I added, ‘Serge thinks she can get Arla out of there. It's remarkable that she's still alive, but there are so many golems in that area that Serge could be walking into a trap. If I were advising her—’
‘You're not.’
‘What?’
‘You're not advising Serge.’
‘I was only saying.’
‘Don't. I'm telling you this for your own good, Cookie. Don't make it personal. That's what the Grid wants.’
I hate it when Gunther decides to play big brother with me. I said, ‘How do you know what the Grid wants?’
‘It's obvious, isn't it? It plays our own fears against us. It uses our own hardwiring to short-circuit us. We can't let ourselves be fooled by that.’
I knew he was right, in a technical sense. But: ‘My hardwiring, as you so unromantically put it, is all I have. If I can't trust my instincts, what am I doing in there?’
‘You are a set of eyes for Machine Front, no more, no less. Leave it there.’
I shrugged, trying not to act offended.
‘You want me to go back to N-Ridge, then?’
He picked up the nerf ball and stood up. ‘That's not up to me.’
In other words: I know my place, and so should you.
I stood up. Gunther took a jump shot with the nerf ball and while his back was turned I glanced at what he'd written on the legal pad. But there was no writing at all, just a drawing of Fred Flintstone.
‘The Grid has no respect for human life,’ Gunther said, retrieving the ball from behind his wastepaper basket. ‘Remember that.’
I left.
How could I argue? I never went to college. This job pays over forty grand a year and I don't have any other skills. I can't even type. I'm fat. I've never had a boyfriend. This is the one thing I can really do.
I couldn't find Gloria so I went into the break room and picked up a piece of cold pepperoni pizza. There was some RC cola left over, too, so I poured that in a paper cup, but I didn't sit down. Thinking:
Do I really want to keep doing this?
Then again, what choice do I have?
I started out as a police psychic but I was too good at that. I started getting death threats from some guy who got out of prison on parole and wanted revenge because my information had led to the discovery of one of his victims’ bodies. I tried to get police protection but even after all my help the police didn't want to do anything for me. I was a nervous wreck and in danger of losing my job as a file clerk. Around that same time I developed my TV allergy. I thought it was just stress. Then I answered the ad for DEH and found out that what I thought was an illness was actually a talent. So I came here.
The Department of Extraplanetary Hauntings is hidden within Dataplex Corp under the moniker Foreign Markets Research Division. Which is accurate enough in its way; I mean, how much more foreign can you get than another planet? We're at the back of the building next to Programming. All the geeks and weirdos in one pen. The programmers don't bother us and I don't think we even attract their notice.
I always said I would accept no money for my work because I am a real psychic and to profit from it would be greasy and uncool. But there are a few other factors in the equation. For one thing, all the other Fliers collect a paycheck. As far as I know they aren't psychics like me, they don't get premonitions or messages other than from The Grid, they're just spies. None of us trust each other, I guess, and anyway we're not allowed to exchange notes. But I've seen their faces after they come out of their assignment rooms and I know we're all in the same boat. And all of us have to live. As the war drags on we spend more and more time Flying. There comes a point when you realize that you deserve some compensation for the stress - and, in my case, the weight gain.
Gunther drives a BMW. I just have a Rabbit, but there are reasons for that aside from money, chief among them being my stupid pact with Gloria. I could get a better car if I wanted to.
Speaking of Gloria.
‘Hi, Cookie, what's up?’ She came into the break room in a cloud of Vanderbilt perfume.
I turned, swallowing a lump of congealed mozzarella. ‘Happy Birthday!’ I said thickly.
‘Thanks. And thanks for the present, you crazy woman.’
I smiled. ‘I expect you to learn how to use those.’
I had given her two pairs of nunchuks: expensive, heavy wooden ones covered with Japanese writing, and a light, foam-covered pair to actually practice with. Gloria and bruises do not mix.
‘What are you still doing here? Come on, we can walk out together.’
I'd only had time for two bites of pizza - it tasted like gardenias - but I put the food down and followed her. Gloria is very tiny and delicate, with gorgeously fluffy dark hair. She's always well dressed and neat-looking, and she wears lots of cute gold jewelry, charm bracelets and stuff like that. I lumbered after her down the corridor past a series of conference rooms. She had to stop at Maryann's desk to tell her about some message from a VP in the Milwaukee office.
‘Lexus,' came the voice of a man with a Southern accent from the nearest conference room. Another focus group. ‘Out of that name I get luxury, sex, and nexus.’
‘What's a nexus? Is that like solar plexus?’
‘No, I think it's like a locus.’
‘Plague of Lexusus.’
‘Focus, people, focus! Ha-ha.’
It's hot today. Even in the air-conditioning my thighs are sticking together under the silk skirt I got for forty percent off retail at Annie Sez on Route 46.
‘What about a swarm of women, you know, like locusts? Around some guy? A plague of sexy Lexuses?’
Gloria caught the expression on my face. ‘Shut up - Cookie, don't say it. Come on, let's go, I have to get ready for my big birthday dinner.’
We went outside, smacked by a hot pillow of air coming off the road and into our faces.
‘I'll think of you tonight when I'm eating my lobster thermidor and drinking Margueritas,’ she joked. ‘You are gonna sweat, that's for sure.’
‘I don't know, maybe ... I'm kind of tired and it's sooo hot...’
‘Hey!’ Gloria gave me a little shake. ‘You better train, Cookie. Whatever happened with Gunther, just take it out on the makiwara or something.’
We had reached her Lincoln Town Car, and she opened it and started rolling down electric windo
ws to let out the heat.
I said, ‘What did Gunther tell you?’
She made a face and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Nothing. But he's been acting all bitchy all day. I think the head office is giving him a hard time about his results.’
‘He didn't seem stressed to me. He seemed . . . out to lunch.’
‘You aren't thinking about leaving again, are you, Cookie?’
I shrugged. About a year ago I found out that the Dataplex branch in Milwaukee employs psychics to dream up new military technologies and to try to find out what the Soviets are up to. I sent over my resume and they called me for an interview, but before I could go Gunther got wind of it and dragged me into his office, where he shocked me by bursting into tears.
‘You CAN'T leave us,’ he wailed. ‘You're our BEST FLIER.’
I was flattered but I told him about the stress thing and the weight thing. He pulled out his checkbook and told Gloria to call the Jenny Craig Weight Loss Hotline. All the while he was saying things like, ‘They're useless bastards over at Military Telekinesis. All they've invented so far is a device that lets you reload your gun by mind control. Does that sound like something you want to be involved with, Cookie?’
Gunther knows that I don't like the idea of violence, but I couldn't really see how working for Military Telekinesis could be any worse than what I was already doing. But I pretended to agree. I felt I owed Gunther and anyway, I've never been too good at standing up to people. Every time I do, I end up losing my temper, and I don't like to lose my temper. So I stayed, and when I got bored of Jenny Craig microwave meals that weren't big enough to feed my cat, Gloria started dragging me to her karate class and made me sign the pact. For whatever good it's done.
‘Well, whatever Gunther's problem is, it's Gunther's problem. Right? Not yours.’ She pointed her finger at my nose. You! No ‘maybe’ about training. We have a pact, remember?’
‘OK, OK. I'll be there tonight. See you.’
I dragged myself over to the Rabbit and unlocked it. As soon as I was faced with the distressingly small space that I was supposed to sit in I remembered the pact all too well. I had to train four nights a week and I had to cut down on my eating, no matter how weird things got over the nex. I'd asked Gloria to enforce my decision. She leaped at the chance. She made me sign in blood.
Double Vision Page 2
