'It's totally stupid in reality, too,' Miles said. 'I watched it the other day, just out of curiosity. But I could look into the lawsuit angle. You never know.'
'No, Miles, you were right the first time. Dataplex are looking to predict what will be successful. They're running experiments to try to find a method of knowing in advance what horse to bet on. That's what my debriefings have been about. That's what they're using me for.'
'And what about Cookie Starfishes?'
'I think Leroy's like me. He connected with the Grid, too. Maybe it was through that song that was on the tape that I saw and he heard. The song that also turned out to be a surprise hit. It was a hit because it connects to something bigger, and that's why it inspired Leroy. See, Dataplex are trying to tap something. They are tapping something. But they don't know what it is. The connection between me and Leroy isn't Dataplex. It's the Grid.'
'The who?'
I tried to explain. I told him about the Grid, which led me into Machine Front and their Third Wave of MFeels. He knew vaguely about the golems from things I'd let drop before, but I told him about Serge's daughters and how they were one person spread over several bodies. I told him about the scent language of the Grid.
But it didn't go down very well. I had never acually confided in anyone what went on when I flew. It was top-secret information: I was only supposed to talk about it to Gunther when he debriefed me. And I had always believed Gunther understood and respected what I was saying. Telling Miles about the Grid felt like taking my clothes off in public.
'A luminous web? You mean like in Tron?' Miles said, perplexed.
I sighed.
'I wish I had your brains, Miles. Or I wish you had my imagination. Because the way things are, I don't know how we're going to put this together.'
'I don't wish I had your imagination,' Miles said darkly. 'Cookie, this Grid, whatever it is, isn't real. You know that, right?'
Is the stock market real? Is Winnie the Pooh real?'
'Yes, and no, respectively You shouldn't have to ask me these kinds of questions, Cookie.'
Miles wanted to hang out and argue some more, but I had to be at the dojo. Today was the last practice session before tomorrow's tournament and my first demonstration, and it was also going to be Miss Cooper's test for nidan. She wasn't the only one taking a test; half the dojo was up for promotion, but most of us would be tested in a large group. Miss Cooper would perform solo, and she would have to spar with all the other black belts in the dojo – including some of the Okinawans.
When I entered the dressing room she and Gloria were both there. Miss Cooper was tying her dishevelled blonde hair back into a fresh ponytail.
'God, it's hot,' she said. 'I could drink a lake.'
'How's it going?'
'Oh, man, it's awesome. I've never been so tired in my whole life, but also, like, so inspired? Sensei Masunobu is the best. Look at my arms.'
She showed me her forearms. They were covered with black and blue contusions.
'Knocking-hands drill,' she said. 'It's a Chinese practice. Cool, huh?'
'What happened to your knuckles?' I said. They were completely skinned, bloody – a wreck.
'Makiwara. They do a lot more makiwara than we do.'
Gloria tut-tutted. 'You better be careful, hon. You can get calcium deposits from that, it's not good for your joints. Plus you could get an infection in there.'
'Pfff!' said Miss Cooper. 'This is real training. I've learned more in the past week than I learned in the past two years.'
Gloria sniffed. 'Yeah, well, just look at the Okinawans and then look at our great master.' Her voice dripped with sarcasm. 'Did you see him doing Sanchin this morning? He was wilting. He kept sneaking off to drink Sprite in his office. Did you see his belly? That man looks like a giant adenoid.'
'Shh!' Miss Cooper started to reprimand us, but Gloria and I were giggling so much that she let up with her posing. 'Actually, you have a point. I wish I could go train in Okinawa. They really teach you. Masunobu showed me a whole bunch of applications for Sanseiru – we never learned those.'
'I saw,’ said Gloria tartly. 'They mostly seemed to involve dumping you on your ass and laughing.'
'They do laugh a lot,' Miss Cooper said.
'Yeah, they laugh at us,' countered Gloria. 'See what you missed, Cookie? Where you been, anyway?'
'I. . . uh. . . I didn't know there was anything going on this morning. I thought it was afternoon and evening, today.'
'Shihan mentioned it last night. I thought you knew.'
'Am I in trouble?'
'I doubt he even noticed you weren't here. He's too busy worrying about being demoted. Apparently the Okinawans don't like it that he's a seventh dan. He might have to take a test, too. I hope he does. He probably couldn't pass a black-belt test. He's an embarrassment.'
I had never heard this kind of talk before, and I didn't know what to make of it. What about all the secret techniques? What about all Shihan Norman's experience and knowledge and wisdom? I found myself wanting to defend him.
'I'm not sure about these Okinawans,' I said. 'They keep talking about propagating the system and spreading the word – they make it sound like a religion.'
'Maybe to them it is,' said Miss Cooper. 'Karate is very big on Okinawa. Shihan Hideki is a highly respected community leader.'
'Yeah, but he can party,' Gloria snorted. 'Did you see him last night?'
Apparently, after I'd left some of the Okinawans had come to Tony's looking for entertainment and Gloria and Miss Cooper had taken them out to a club. Miss Cooper cracked up, telling me.
'Master Hideki was wearing this sharkskin suit, and he got out on the dance floor and started boogying like John Travolta.'
'I saw you and Masunobu slow-dancing,' teased Gloria, elbowing Miss Cooper. 'You know he has a wife, right?'
'Of course I do! He's, like, at least forty. He showed me pictures of his kids. He's really sweet.'
'When he's not dumping you on the floor and giggling at your bruises.'
'They open doors for you,' defended Miss Cooper. 'They don't let you sit down without pulling out your chair. And they're high-level masters. It's really strange.'
Gloria said, 'I wonder how high-level Masunobu was when he had his face in your tits last night on the dance floor!'
We all cracked up.
'Come on, he's not that short!' Miss Cooper protested.
One of the Okinawans barked something in Japanese from the training floor and we all dashed out, bowed, and scurried into position on the floor. We were about to be put through our paces again.
What stands out in my mind about that day was the way Miss Cooper performed her naginata kata during the test. In the sparring, she was more or less humiliated by the Okinawans. Whenever she tried to punch one of them, the guy would just ignore the punch, pick her up and toss her, then laugh. There wasn't much that she could do. She only weighs about 115 pounds, tops. She'd bow, stand up, be allowed to try again. I knew she could kick Masunobu in the head if she felt like it – she had a lightning-fast roundhouse – and at least score some kind of point, but she wasn't allowed to. The Okinawans frown on kicks higher than knee level as being too unrealistic and risky, and they don't allow them in sparring. She wasn't helped by the fact that the dojo floor was swimming in sweat and she kept slipping. Her opponents never seemed to slip because they never seemed to move. They just stood rooted to the spot and waited for her to try something. Every time she had to block one of their punches I could see the pain she was in from her ruined forearms. She had to fight one black belt after the other without a break, and by the end of it she could hardly get herself off the floor.
Still, after she was excused to change into her naginata costume, she returned looking really excellent with a white headband tied across her forehead and those wide-legged black pants on her legs, carrying the ancient weapon. Her kata was amazing, the best I'd ever seen her do, and Masunobu Hideki nodded his approval at the end. All
of us broke out cheering, only to be shushed censoriously by Shihan Norman, who looked angry about something. Immediately after the session he disappeared into his office. The Okinawans ignored him. They seemed to think he was some kind of joke – which, frankly, he was.
Afterward a whole pile of us, Americans and Okinawans together, stormed Pizza Hut and pretty much destroyed every scrap of food they had. I use the term 'we' loosely. I ate some fruit I'd brought with me, and I nibbled some of Gloria's garlic bread. I couldn't face anything more substantial.
'I'm really proud of you,' said Gloria. 'You've stuck with the pact.'
'Yeah, too bad I can't afford a new car now,' I said glumly. I looked at the pizza, wishing I could remember how much I used to like it because now I'd just as soon have eaten a rat.
'Things will pick up,' Gloria said. 'Gunther's going to come to his senses any day now. He's not exactly batting a thousand without you.'
I didn't pursue it. I was afraid I'd start crying and tell Gloria everything. Maybe she even knew. She probably did. They all thought I was a cuckoo bird.
After Pizza Hut we went to the Hilton Hotel where the Okinawans were staying and drank in the hotel bar. It was noisy and crowded, but the air-conditioning was powerful and it was nice to sit in the cool darkness and pretend I didn't have to go back to the Grid.
Troy and Gloria left together; Troy was tanked and Gloria was going to drive him home. 'You got to come in and tell Diane it was your fault,' he slurred at Gloria.
'Yeah, sure, I pried your mouth open and poured eight beers down it, tough guy.'
Miss Cooper waded across from the bar to me. She had a drink in her hand and a huge smile on her face. Just looking at her bloody, skinned knuckles made me wince.
'Are you coming up to Masunobu's room? It's getting too crowded here and the prices are ridiculous.'
I pretended to yawn.
'I'm really whacked. I want to be on form for tomorrow, so I'm gonna go. Don't drink too much, OK? We're going pocketbook-and-broom, not the Fifty-two Steps of the Drunken Monk.'
'I'm not drinking at all,' Miss Cooper said. 'This is tonic water. Don't you want to come up for a little while? It's only ten o'clock.'
I looked at the scene. Most of our group had left. Masunobu Hideki and about five or six black belts, most of them from other dojos around the country, were getting ready to repair to Masunobu's room with a boom box and a case of beer. Masunobu was snapping his fingers to Van Halen and the Americans were laughing and playing air guitar. I felt no urge to stay. How much time can you stand to spend with a bunch of drunk white guys who think Eddie Van Halen is a musical god but Prince is just some weirdo in eyeliner?
'I'll see you tomorrow,' I said.
'Are you sure? It'll be fun – come on, Cookie!'
Miss Cooper's eyes sparkled. She was excited, in her element. I hated to let her down.
'You did great today,' I said. 'Congratulations on your test.'
She laughed nervously. 'I don't know if I passed yet.'
'You deserve the promotion. Everybody's really proud of you. Now go have fun. I got to drag my big old butt home and get into a lukewarm bath.'
I went out into stifling heat, a barrage of cricket music and the smell of car exhaust off Route 23. Every muscle in my body was heavy and dragging, but my head was strangely alive.
I knew I wouldn't get into a lukewarm bath. I might not even sleep.
follow the yellow brick road
It takes Joanne Klaski three days to follow the yellow brick road of dead Grid to N-Ridge, and during that time she encounters not one single golem. That fact in itself is spooky. Klaski is an easy target. She does not move fast. Although she is using the structured area that borders the dead zone to guide her, she's climbing through an extremely high region in the Grid because she's desperate for radio contact with . . .well, with anybody. The upper Grid is a place of storms and visual incoherence, and she's not a swift mover even at the best of times. Still: there are no golems to be seen.
Presumably they have all gone to destroy Major Galante's party. Not a cheery thought.
The Swatch works some of the time, but Galante's receiver is set to messaging only and Machine Front merely confirm Major Galante's orders that Klaski is to go to N-Ridge. The Swatch responds to queries about war status and golem movements with channel-clogging quantities of statistics that Klaski doesn't know how to interpret. As a lowly lieutenant, she doesn't qualify to have a Dante-equivalent in her Swatch, and without Dante's personality and higher-reasoning components. Machine Front is about as interactive as a brick wall. So Klaski doctors Gossamer religiously, charges her in the Grid, and asks her to fly. Gossamer cannot travel more than a few yards before pancaking onto the canopy or spiraling out of control.
You are wanting to give up. Piggybacking a good-as-dead soldier on a futile mission is a form of torture. It's all you can do to stay on the nex, and you only do it out of hope that one day Gossamer will be able to fly for real, leave Klaski behind, and . . . well, you don't really know what you will do then. You just know that you are slipping into a depression because you can't do anything for yourself.
Then Klaski comes to the crest of the ridge, finds a high, strong branch that isn't dangerously charged, and takes a look around.
You can hear a little rattle in Klaski's chest when she flattens herself and lets her weight go into the Grid. She lowers her belly against the branch and dangles her arms and legs, a would-be puma in the jungle. She sets her cheek down. The Grid is vibrating like a bass amp. The sound fills the spaces where Klaski's lumbar spine articulates. It sets the jelly of her flesh trembling.
When her head goes down on the branch, you can see what's up ahead.
There is the dead zone of the Grid, scoring the luminescence of the Grid like a slash made with a graphite pencil. It can be seen stretching away into the distance.
And just ahead, instead of terminating in wild Grid, it ends in a man-made wall.
'Oh God,' Klaski breathes. 'l hope you're not jerking me around here.'
The logic mines lie there in front of you: no well, no electricity, no tangle of visual confusion. Just a rough gray pit, slaggy and wasted. There is a retaining wall, looks like a mixture of barbed wire and Play-Doh, with orange and blue wires protruding at intervals where they connect to rusty towers in the exact shape of giant D batteries. The nearest of these oozes something black from its positive terminal and gives off a zingy, ionic odor. The Grid doesn't cross this wall.
Judging by the gross creatures that tend to come up out of the well, not to mention its nasty organic smell, you would expect the well to be all sumpy and sludgy after it was drained. You'd expect to find bones and colorful, maggoty lumps of half-digested things down there. And the mine-pit is nothing more or less than what's left after the Grid has been shorn away and the well drained. But there is nothing lifelike about the pit. It's ashen-gray, a tumbled rubblescape of irregular crevices and mounds, bereft of geometry and aesthetic continuity. It's ugly in a pointless kind of way.
There is some kind of pumping station on the other side of the pit. It consists of pipes and walkways and smokestacks, all cobbled together out of flimsy aluminum and plastic. It looks like something out of that Pink Floyd movie, the one you walked out of leaving Jim Szabo alone with a bucket of popcorn and a hard-on, the one where people went into meat grinders.
Various other buildings huddle in a rough circle around the sealed pit. But there is no activity across the wall at all. No dust, no noise, no flashing lights. No voices. And, to judge by Klaski's fruitless efforts to communicate with N-Ridge via Swatch, no signal, either.
Strange. You know Major Galante well enough to expect that, in the absence of a stockpile of logic bullets, her first priority would be to get the mines operational again in case the missing logic was never found and the work had to start over. But nothing moves here.
Major Galante is still incommunicado. Klaski calls X and informs them that the mines are silent. Ev
entually, Machine Front routes her to an actual person in the control tower. There is no image – too much interference – but, judging from the voice, Klaski is talking to a male.
'We're having the same problem,' he says. 'We lost contact two days ago.'
'How do I get in, then?'
'Do you see any golems on the inside? We can't pick up anything, but naturally golems don't show up on satellite.'
'None that I can see,' answered Klaski.
'OK, well, can you point your flier at it and send us pictures?'
So you find yourself being used as a kind of Polaroid camera, and you don't like it. Klaski holds you up and asks you to send the images. The control officer starts yakking monotonously, something about processing and analyzing the footage. Klaski breaks in.
'Listen, I need help. When are you going to send help?'
'There is no more human help to be sent. I'm sitting up here on a stack of hardware waiting for Major Galante to get the logic bullets, and I can't send her to the mines because we already know the logic isn't there. She's going on a sweep south of you.'
'That's crazy! She should come get me! I'm the one she wants.'
'Calm down, Lieutenant. You might have to sit tight for a while. All the fliers have been recalled for reprocessing for the Third Wave. However, we have a large contingent of new weaponry waiting at X.'
'How's that going to help me?'
'As soon as Major Galante has completed her mission, we can use MaxFacts to detonate the N-valley area specified by Captain Serge in her final orders. Once that's cleared of Grid we—'
Klaski is starting to panic. 'No! That detonation zone is where I am, you idiots! You have to tell Major Galante to come and get me now. She wouldn't listen to me. She's got it all wrong!'
Double Vision Page 25
