Kalifornia

by Marc Laidlaw

  “And where is that?” Poppy asked.

  “McBeth took her! His gods! Bad dogs—bad dogs! Shouldn’t talk like that to their masters. But you should have paid your taxes.”

  Clarry sighed, slumping over the board with relief.

  “Oh dear God,” Poppy murmured. “That’s the show, old woman. That was only a show—it wasn’t life.”

  “So? Not life? You think I don’t know what’s real?”

  “I’m sure you—”

  “I know what I know, you know!”

  Clarry withdrew almost completely from Poppy, monitoring the session with a fraction of his attention, ignoring the crone’s babble and Poppy’s polite responses. After coming all this way, she might as well talk to the hag. It would provide some light amusement once he pared it down to a few good lines.

  Relieved, he began to laugh at all his fears. Woola was laughing too, but for different reasons: because the old gal was whacked. She didn’t know the truth. Maybe only one person knew the whole truth.

  And it sure wasn’t Clarry.

  ***

  Poppy hesitated at the threshold as the cold pulse of the signal-jammer faded. Should she go back out, back into Clarry’s reach?

  What would he think, cut off abruptly? If there was any chance of danger to her, he’d come running within seconds.

  It occurred to her that whoever had brought her here had not, perhaps, wanted their encounter recorded. Clarry wouldn’t like that, though.

  Relaxing, she peered about at the dimness of the dome. It was empty, swept clean, unfurnished except for a small table in the center. On the table was a generic prismascreen holovision set, the cheapest kind imaginable. As she approached, it came to life, as though it had been waiting for her.

  She found herself looking at Clarry Starko inside the prism. He sat in what she recognized as the cluttered editing room in his Hollywood quondo, seated at his old Sens8 deck. He stared right at her, out of the screen. He looked different, his hair shorter than he kept it now, and he was wearing a moustache. This was Clarry as he’d looked when she first met him, when he’d approached her about doing the spin-off.

  That thought was painful. She’d been planning the pregnancy then, full of anticipation, seeing every offer that came her way as an omen of good fortune, bringing security for herself and the child.

  Well, she was no Seer, that much was proven.

  The POV camera moved toward Clarry, startling him. The end of a baccorish rope fell out of his mouth. “Who are you?” he said to the domed room, to her. “How’d you get in here?”

  The voice that answered, out of sight on the screen, was cool and refined, electronically smoothed until it retained no human edges, nothing to distinguish it: “That doesn’t matter, Mr. Starko. I’ve come to make you an offer.”

  Clarry gave his visitor—and incidentally the camera, the hut, Poppy—a long look before answering.

  “What kind of offer?” he said at last.

  “I want to stage a scene, with you producing. It will make your name and seal your fame.”

  “Yeah? One scene? How can you be so sure of that?”

  “The great directors take great risks—especially today, when every stunt has already been accomplished. The audience is bored. To partake of history, you must take part in history. I am offering you a chance to record a historic moment as it is happening. To participate in its creation, according to your abilities. You may not interfere with it as it takes shape, but you are free to do what you wish with the crystals you procure. I will manage everything except the production; that remains properly your jurisdiction.”

  Poppy bent closer to the screen. The hologram had perfect focus, infinite depth of field. The camera must have been worn as a pendant, small and inconspicuous. Such instruments were commonly used for filming the simultaneous flatscreen and holo versions of wire-show programs, so that the wired actors—and the audience living through them—did not have to avoid looking at cameras that might otherwise have shattered the reality of their programs. She examined the black glass windows behind Clarry, and in them she barely made out the invisible speaker’s reflections: a shape cloaked in blackness, faceless, tall. No wonder Clarry looked so baffled—his visitor was hardly even human.

  “You’re an actress, aren’t you?” Clarry said, turning on his enthusiasm now, but sarcastically. “Some old-timer. You want me to stage your comeback, like Gloria Swanson in that old strip-flicker, 77 Sunset Boulevard. You want to break into wires cause nobody watches flatscreen flicks these days. But why come to me?”

  “I have no desire to recapture my past, Mr. Starko. I wish only to change the future.”

  “Like how?”

  “First, let me show you how I intend to win your loyalty.”

  As the camera wearer approached Clarry’s editing board, the room swam and curved around the lens’s eye, dissolving at the edges. Poppy saw a black-gloved hand press the eject button on the Sens8 editor, and a cube of recording crystal slid out of the slot. The hand dropped a black ice cube into the player, then pressed the start button.

  Clarry’s room, and the desert hut, abruptly filled with screaming. Poppy clutched the fabric of her blouse, feeling feverish. In the prism, Clarry backed away from the deck, then lurched forward to shut it off; but the black-gloved hand stopped him. The signal was obviously feeding through his wires. Poppy couldn’t feel it at this remove—thank God for that—but his whole body shook with it.

  “What—where’d you get it?” Clarry gasped.

  The black hand relented and switched off the deck. “You recognize it?”

  “It’s a snuff cube. You—you could be executed just for carrying it!”

  “Yes, because it’s authentic. But how did you know? It’s quality snuff—you can feel yourself being sliced limb from limb, while at the same time you’re the one doing the slicing. It can be synthesized, fabricated legally, but not on a black-market snuff-cube’s zero budget. This is the real thing, the work of a talented but penniless wirist . . . as I’m sure you recall.”

  He was pale, his forehead beaded with sweat. “You had no right switching me in there without warning.”

  “It can’t be too surprising, Mr. Starko. You recognized it, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. He stared at her—stared straight at Poppy, it seemed—without speaking.

  “Why is it, Mr. Starko, that male artists feel obliged to spray blood everywhere, to bathe an audience in grue? Is it because you fear blood? Because you envy women the power of menstruation? Blood is the carrier of life and death, isn’t that it? Aren’t those the powers you wish you could master? The things that truly terrify you and make you feel helpless and weak?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about darkness and mystery . . . about death and blood and the grave, Mr. Starko. You have some familiarity with it, don’t you, acquired in the underworld of this little hell we call Hollywood? I know that’s where you came from, the source from which your roots perhaps still drink. You never studied in the studio schools; you weren’t born to rich snobs or wire stars. You had a practical schooling in the wires. Snuff shows. The blackest of black-market media. You’ve come a long way since then, Mr. Starko, but that is what got you where you are.”

  “What do you want?” His voice was hard now. He didn’t look frightened anymore; this was business. “If you’re thinking of blackmailing me with that crystal, you don’t know me like you think you do. I may work in Hollywood, but I’m not what you’d call rich. Go after the ones who make those snuffs if you want money—the ones who bring in street trash and twistheads—the ones who really excel at blackmail and threats to get people like me to work for them. Unless, that is, those kind of people make you nervous.”

  “I don’t want money, Mr. Starko. You’re forgetting what I said. I want your artistry, your help with a little scene I’ve cooked up. In return, no one has to know what name Clarry Starko went by when he made h
is little underground extravaganzas. No one has to know how he financed his first pop-rated wire shows.”

  Poppy had the feeling a long pause was cut here. Clarry’s face changed too abruptly.

  “A scene, huh?” he said. “What kind of scene?”

  The camera swam very close to him. The woman’s voice sounded abnormally loud for the whispering of confidences. The syllables ringing in Poppy’s head cleared it of misconceptions, hammering out her ignorance in a few short snatches of dialogue.

  As she listened, as a younger Clarry stared, the woman in black described the scene that Poppy was to play on the eve of the bicentennial. She described it in intimate detail, with a skilled grasp of exactly how and what the wires could carry; she described the scene almost precisely as it finally had been enacted.

  The mysterious station wagon.

  The kidnapping.

  Poppy stood unmoving in the empty desert dome, paralyzed by horror and the unwilling recognition that Clarry had always been her enemy.

  “And . . . and what happens to the baby?” Clarry asked when she was finished explaining the crime.

  “That’s none of your concern.”

  “No? And what about Poppy Figueroa?”

  “What do you care? You don’t know her any better than you knew the one in here.” She taped the black cube, still in the deck.

  “What makes you think she’ll go for it?”

  “I believe she will, if you pitch the proposal as I instruct. She’s an actress. An out-of-work actress, too young to believe her career is over, despite the recent trauma in her life. She’ll jump for the part.”

  “And how do you know I’ll go for it?”

  The black hand reached out once again and switched on the Sens8. Clarry stiffened, moaned, his eyes popping.

  “I think I can convince you,” said the voice.

  The generic prismascreen in the quondo hut went dark.

  Poppy waited for another sign, something else from the holoset. She thought of Clarry sitting in the van watching this exchange through her eyes. Why hadn’t he come running long ago?

  Oh. Yes. Now she remembered. Her signal was jammed. He’d been getting nothing but static since she came inside. But that alone should have drawn him minutes ago. Maybe he was lost among the domes. Maybe he was right behind her.

  The thought drove her out of the dome in a panic. She didn’t want him to see the holovision. She didn’t want him asking what she’d seen.

  She stood bathed in sunlight, her back to the door, trembling. When she thought she could support herself, she stumbled away through the shadows of silos and factory buildings. She thought she was heading away from the office and the men, toward what remained of the desert, but suddenly she came out of the shadows and saw the van ahead of her. Clarry, behind the smoked glass, was just sitting there.

  Sitting and watching. And knowing all the time where her baby had gone.

  Seeing her, he opened the side door and leaned out. “What a bust, huh? Doubt we can use much of that.”

  Her feet carried her forward unintentionally.

  The bloodred palms seemed to wobble, melting upward in the heat. Poppy didn’t say a thing. She knew—as if the woman in black had told her directly—that she must not speak a word of what she had seen. But that would be easy. The silence of the desert was immense; how simple to join herself to it. Far away she heard a grim pounding, as of huge hammers falling against the earth. She hardly recognized her heartbeat.

  She touched the hot metal side of the van, felt the caked dust beneath her fingers, all at a great distance. The palm shadows crabbed at her own; she pulled free of their dim ectoplasm, walking out into sunlight again, past the van, away from Clarry and the things he knew or didn’t know. Wondering if the whole show was an illusion; wondering what illusion Clarry had seen. It might have been lies, all of it. But she would never dare ask him if it were true or real—would she?

  Sunlight crashed on green water in the quarry below. Scummy fingers tugged at her wires. Drowned things called her name.

  “Poppy?”

  A hand on her shoulder.

  “Get away from there, it’s dangerous. The cliff could crumble right out from under you.”

  She blinked at Clarry but couldn’t quite see him. His eyes were blotted out by afterimages of the sun.

  “Dizzy,” she murmured.

  “It’s hotter than it’s been all day. Let’s get back to the van. It’s cooler.”

  Not as cool as the green brine full of fingers, she thought.

  She shrugged his hand from her shoulder.

  Getting back into the van with him was perhaps the hardest thing she’d ever done.

  ***

  After they ate dinner at a Lo/Ox Health-Junk Shak, Clarry decided to stay in the desert for the night. He took three rooms in a motel on old Interstate 40—the 40-Winx—giving Poppy and Chick Woola their own rooms and taking one for himself where he could set up his portable editor with a link to the central Sens8 deck in the van. Poppy was distant all through dinner. He looked up a few times to see her watching him, but when he asked what was on her mind, she only shrugged. She said she was tired and went into her room without adding anything more.

  He supposed the whole thing with the baby still bothered her. For him, it was hard to imagine why, and her continuing grief often caught him by surprise. It wasn’t like she’d gotten a chance to know it; there was no one to miss or mourn for. The episode was months behind them now. But then women were funny that way. And today it had all been dug up fresh again, leading to enormous disappointment.

  For himself, he felt mainly relief.

  Clarry called up the afternoon’s recording, reentering the dark interior of the dome at Bleeding Palms. His concentration sharpened to a single point: the hyperaware trance he always entered when he edited, the closest thing to the edgy, focused buzz he’d used to derive from the drugs that had made him such a perfect, soulless wireman for the Ho-Wood horror masters. But better than a drug high, it was reliable and rewarding. He hardly chewed rope when the work went well.

  The clustered tumbleweeds rasped his hands, the old woman with skin white as bleach sang her feeble song. There wasn’t much he could do to salvage the scene except trim it into a short, smooth segment made up of the best bits of conversation.

  To his sharpened senses, the recording quality seemed really poor, as if he had a bad link with the central deck. He punched it up again, trying a new line, but it wasn’t any better.

  Which meant . . .

  It wasn’t a bad connection, it was the recording itself. The whole scene in the dome had a thin, grainy feel, like a cheap bootleg copied and recopied so many times that bits and pieces of the flow had started dropping out, leaving holes in sound and smell, glitches that undermined the impression of reality, plateaus where there should have been sharp peaks. Less than subliminal snatches of other recordings leaked in at odd moments, creating a bad-tasting synesthesia.

  But that didn’t make any sense. There weren’t any recordings under this one. He was working direct from the master, a fresh cube.

  It must be the link after all.

  He decided to go out to the van and work on the regular deck, where he could at least run a diagnostic to pin down the source of the fuzz.

  He knocked on Chick’s door. Woola opened it slowly and peered out. A strange blond kid lay unconscious on the bed, silver vial halves in his hands, his makeup smeared, his temples bruised. Clarry vaguely remembered him hanging out in the parking lot.

  “I’m going out,” Clarry said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  The van sat in a lot alongside the road. At night, heavy surface traffic roared through the desert, mainly trucktrains rushing freight through the Franchise. The little van shook in the turbulent slipstream of every leviathan that passed. He felt less safe than usual in his editor’s womb.

  He fired up the Sens8 masterdeck and phased himself into the editing channels, holding on to a few at once, se
parate strings to be spliced or woven at will. It was best working with a few POVs to give the audience a choice of conduits. But today’s session featured only Poppy. It was tediously simple. So why all the distortion?

  He checked the cube. It was clean and shiny. He cleaned the slot and started the player again. Then he set off walking through the noonday heat, away from the shade of the corroded metal wall where Poppy had leaned for a minute or so, thinking about God knows what. Here came the dome. Quality was fine. It looked like the problem was with the link, all right. Then she stepped inside.

  “Tumbling . . .”

  There it went again, instant fuzz, right in the master.

  Now that he thought about it, there had been a kind of thin strangeness to the whole event, even at the time. During real time it seemed insignificant; but when he slowed it for editing and examined every instant, the poor quality became obvious. It eroded his sense of reality.

  In the dome now, he heard the whimsical old windbag and Poppy’s hellos.

  “Back up,” he said, and the Sens8 complied.

  Poppy backed out the door.

  “Freeze it.”

  There. The instant the signal quality deteriorated matched perfectly with her step across the threshold.

  Coincidence?

  He hung in the moment, hung with one foot in midair, halfway into the dome. Behind Poppy was desert, hot and clear, as real as though he were living it himself. Ahead of her was haze. A veil. Like a bad, an amateurish splicing job.

  He backed up still farther, pressing a thin, translucent wedge of time between Poppy and the dome’s interior. He could see into the room quite clearly now; it was no more than a flash in Poppy’s eyes, but that was enough.

  The dome was empty.

  No tumbleweeds. No cackling hag.

  Empty except for a table and a holovision set.

  “Twisted shit,” he muttered.

  He slipped his grip on time and advanced slowly, watching the veil fall, watching tumbleweeds emerging from the gloom along with the old hag. Once you caught on, it all looked incredibly fake. He couldn’t believe he’d fallen for it. But then, he’d been concentrating on other things, hoping to see something like this . . . a false lead that would let him sigh with relief. He’d been lulled, suckered by wishfulness as much as by special effects. Shit.