Kalifornia

by Marc Laidlaw

  All that time, while he thought she was humoring some old biddy, she’d actually been watching HV, seeing God knows what.

  What had really gone on in there? Why hadn’t she said a thing about it?

  Bad feelings. Very pale ideas were coming to him now, like the bloated white bellies of dead fish bobbing to the surface of his mind after some explosion or poisoning in the depths.

  The message that had summoned them here was no madwoman’s fan letter. It was the work of someone devious. Someone who knew both Poppy and Clarry, and how their minds worked.

  Clarry had heard of a new special-effects device, a reality synthesizer, that could do something like this, but it was in the prototype stage—nobody in his circles had ever even seen one. Whoever sent the message to Poppy had inside power—in Ho-wood or its R&D labs.

  Only one person had all that and the baby.

  That old bitch in black.

  What sort of game was she pulling now? Double-cross, turnbacks, screwing with her own plot the way she’d screwed with Clarry’s head.

  She’d blackmailed him, now she was turning him in. He knew he was right. She was setting him up.

  He’d better to talk to Poppy, find out exactly what she’d seen, even if it meant (God!) confessing his own role. If he confessed, then he might gain some kind of protection when the bitch in black forked him over to the cops.

  He had to find out what she knew. To do that, he might have to tell her everything.

  Clarry didn’t bother to switch off the deck. He went straight back to his room to calm himself with a tranq. As he choked it down, he glanced at the portable deck and saw that Poppy was still on-line, not actively recording but simply running a current through the master deck. Standard operating procedure: the deck stayed tuned in to her constantly, in case anything happened that was worthy of the show.

  He shrugged off his normal professional qualms about getting inside her without permission. Just a peek, to figure out where she was at so he could work out the best way to approach her.

  Predictably enough, she was rolling around in bed, weeping.

  Keeping wired to her, in RO mode, he went down the hall to her door and pounded on it, hearing the knocking through both sets of ears. Poppy pulled the pillow over her head and incidentally over his own. He tried mentally to push her off the bed, as if he could jerk her around by her wires. It was an exercise in pure frustration.

  “Hey, Poppy,” he said, pitching his voice low, confidential. “Come out here a sec, would you?”

  She lay still, and he lay there inside her, frozen by the sound of his voice. She was afraid of him; her muscles felt rigid.

  “Poppy, it’s me. I’ve got to ask you something. Come on, wake up, this is important.”

  He was about to give up on it, ready to convince the manager to let him in—“I think she overdosed in there”—when he felt her stir and get unsteadily to her feet. She’d been hitting the vial again; her temples burned where she’d held the twist halves in place too long. Woozy. No wonder she wasn’t moving in a hurry. It made him feel a little better; maybe she wasn’t really avoiding him. Maybe she was only twisted.

  The door opened. He stood face-to-face with himself. He blinked out of her eyes an instant before feedback kicked in, the blossoming nerve-scream cut off long before it peaked. He took her by the elbow.

  “Come on, we gotta talk.”

  She tried pulling away. “Wha—”

  “Outside, Poppy. Seriously, we have to talk. It’s more private outside.”

  She wore only a thin gown, but the night was warm. He hurried her toward the van, and in bare feet she kept stumbling. “Clarry, stop it, you’re hurting me.”

  He let go. She moved away, wide awake now, watching him distrustfully.

  She knows, he realized. That look of hers says everything.

  Somehow, in that dome, she had learned the truth.

  “Poppy,” he said, and stopped short. What came next? The words didn’t exactly flow from this point onward.

  “I’m going back to bed.”

  He flipped into her, felt gravel digging into her heels, the wind streaming around her legs. A truck thundered past.

  “Poppy, I know what happened in the dome.”

  She stiffened. Backed off.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t run—we gotta talk.”

  “Stay away from me!”

  Again he wasted effort trying to control her, to mentally push or pull her toward him. He couldn’t help it—he had confused their bodies. But his desperation seemed to have the opposite effect. She moved away. Turned to run.

  “Poppy! Tell me what happened!”

  Goddamn it.

  He headed after her, caught between her form and his. She was in pain, but her fear—which he couldn’t touch through the wires—must have been far stronger. She ran like hell, past the van, out of the motel lot, along the roadside. Monster trucks howled past as if the night were a hungry throat sucking them down, taillights dwindling, dopplered sirens stretching out thin in the distance.

  Through her eyes it all came on as a blur. She was crying.

  “Poppy, come back! We gotta talk! I’ll try to explain—I’ll tell you everything, I swear. Just tell me what you know!”

  Through her wires, he couldn’t hear himself anymore. The traffic was too loud. She was getting away from him, except for her wires.

  He told himself that he could catch her, hold her, make her listen. He had shoes, after all, and she was barefoot.

  He took off running.

  Just ahead, she seemed to be dodging in and out of the shifting lights—but that was an illusion. It was the lights that moved, not Poppy. She stood still now, a calm silhouette. He couldn’t tell which way she faced until he saw himself come running toward her out of the night, caught in the glare of headlights. Then, superimposed on that, he saw her face from his own eyes.

  “Poppy,” he said.

  He felt her gasp, heard the intake of breath.

  He reached—

  She darted away, spinning into a gap, finding a momentary vacancy in the steady traffic. She traversed one lane in poised stillness, like a dancer. Three more broad lanes to go, all of them dark and empty for the moment, deep as valleys.

  Then lights came roaring up. The darkness turned into a deadly river, a lightstream that carried them both away. The bright mountain came roaring out of nowhere, out of everywhere, and the merest corner of it snagged her, but that was enough.

  Clarry felt everything, every brutal bit of the impact. It drew him in even as it wiped her out. He was one facet of a three-lobed scream, sharing it with Poppy and the brakes of the truck. He heard the storm of sound through two sets of ears . . . and then through only one pair, because Poppy’s had failed. Her polynerves were senseless. In the van, on the masterdeck, the needles fell still, the wires went dead. The river of traffic stopped in midstream—but only for Poppy.

  As for Clarry, he kept walking on down the dark road that started where the wires ended. Walked and wondered if he’d ever find his way back to the place where Poppy lay in brightness and in blood.

  S01E07. Trauma in Tinsel-Town

  The advantage of alcohol, however old-fashioned, over other drugs was its excellence for suppressing conscious awareness of the constant seethe of wire shows. With enough of it ingested, even the basic subconscious processes could be poisoned and sabotaged sufficiently so that no part of one’s anatomy remained attuned to the wires.

  Sandy had not quite reached that point, or else he had passed it and was on his way back to bodily sentience. Whatever the cause, he found himself regaining consciousness in a muddle of Poppies. He grumbled and turned away from her faces wherever they appeared. He didn’t wish to be disturbed by any member of his family in his present state. But she kept pressing in: Poppy with the Newsbodies, Poppy in old clips with the family, Poppy in ever present and increasing danger, Poppy in . . . the hospital? He didn’t remember that episode: it must be a late de
velopment in “Poppy on the Run.” That stupid, tawdry show. If only he could shut it off, shut down the signals completely—shut the mouth that was thundering his name.

  He woke, then, in the shallows of Thaxter Halfjest’s palatial carp pond. He could still hear ominous echoes of his name, following him from wasted sleep. He lifted his head from a pebbly shore and gazed across a shimmer of lily pads and colored aquatic lights to find Cornelius, shirtless, sitting up to his distinctly human nipples in the center of the pool. The sealman’s whiskers moved rhythmically as he sang a seal’s lullaby. A floating snifter bobbed beside him, anchored to a fountainhead; it was filled to the waterline with Drambuie.

  Suddenly Cornelius’s hands plunged forward and engaged in a brief, silent struggle beneath the waters. An instant later he brought a fat blue-spotted koi into the air. Fish and sealman regarded one another with strikingly similar expressions: both pop-eyed and bewhiskered, both with gaping mouths. Cornelius bared his pin-sharp teeth, preparing to bite the carp in two.

  “Corny, no!”

  Startled, Cornelius dropped the koi. He blinked at Sandy, vaguely perturbed, and dragged a wet wrist across his mouth.

  “We’re guests here,” Sandy said.

  “It’s a great help with a hangover, sir.”

  “Aw, Corny. Oh, Christ.” Sandy’s own hangover, in its inimitable way, made its presence known. If he’d thought biting a live carp would stop the pain, he might have considered it. He sank back down with a moan and stared up at the moss-bearded chandeliers. “How did I get here?”

  “I carried you. I thought you would find fresh water refreshing.”

  He sloshed some of the tepid stuff over his face and soaked clothes. “Did you hear someone calling my name or was that a dream?”

  Cornelius gestured at a speaker above the pool. “I believe the Reverend Governor summoned you.”

  “I wonder what he wants.” Sandy scratched his belly through his shirt. “Corny, when was the last time I slept in a bed?”

  “Actually slept?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “As opposed to sharing a mattress or other, slightly padded surface for the purpose of sexual congress?”

  “Jeez, now I know you were hatched in a tube.”

  “You haven’t actually slept in a bed since we left the seascraper—which was one week ago. May I remind you that I have relinquished my own nocturnal comfort to accompany you on this reckless descent into debauch.”

  “No one forced you.”

  “No, I did it for my own peace of mind. You are my friend, and I would be remiss to leave you to your own devices.”

  “Admit it, you’re getting royally tanned.”

  Cornelius considered this and eventually gave a reluctant nod. “It is preferable to the cramped schedules of the seascraper, being an existence perhaps more akin to the lazy sun-worshiping lifestyle of my sealie ancestors.”

  Sandy shook his head. “The workaday world is not for us, Corny. We must take it as we find it. Ride the lurchy surf of reality. Ooh . . . my head.”

  He rose unsteadily and extended a hand to his companion. “Come on, Corny, sushi time.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stick with oatmeal this morning. Since I can’t have fish that’s truly fresh . . . ”

  “There must be a lobster tank around somewhere.”

  Footsteps rang suddenly in the marble corridors near the poolside. Thaxter Halfjest appeared, hurrying toward the water’s edge with his arms spread wide. The greeting was his usual, but his face was weirdly pale and drawn. “Sandy, my boy! There you are! I wasn’t sure if you were still with us. Someone said they had sex with you last night, but you know the stories people tell.”

  “What’s up, Thax?”

  The RevGov let his arms fall.

  “I have terrible news. Poppy is at Welby-Kildare in intensive care. Your father’s hiring a professional care staff to bring her home, but that will take time. You really should get down there, Sandy.”

  Sandy walked dripping from the pool, remembering his “dreams.” “My God. That’s why her face is plastered all over the wires. What happened?”

  “I’ll get the car,” said Cornelius. He rushed from the room, leaving wet footprints on the slick floor.

  “An accident, I gather. You’d better put on dry clothes. I’ll have a bundle sent out to the garage, if you’ll tell me your size.”

  But Sandy’s discomfort seemed trivial to him now. Even his headache receded. “No thanks, Thax, I’ll dry on the way. Hey, Corny! Wait for me!”

  ***

  Sandy hadn’t been home in over a year but Hollywood was the same as ever, the whole foul bowl of humanity swimming in a psychedelic rainbow soup. Smog-scrubbing aerophytes, released in the ‘Teens to metabolize the Basin’s lethal hydrocarbons, had scoured the sky cleaner than a dog’s dish; but their byproducts had also covered the region with a multicolored film that never completely washed away, lending new accuracy to the old nicknomen Tinsel-Town. Everywhere you looked, toxic glitter and sequins sparkled in the afternoon sun. The fine sheen of gilt tended to flake off in one’s hand, filling the streets and powdering clothes with polychromatic dandruff, getting all over everything. In a windstorm, the LA Basin resembled a decorative paperweight—shaken, not stirred.

  Cornelius steered above hills dry and wrinkled as a crone’s backside, passing over teetering quondotels dwarfed and shadowed by perilously stacked freeways. He circled over the spiny khaki expanse of the Princess Zsa Zsa Memorial Cactus Preserve, finally becoming involved in a jet jam just east of the Beverly Canyon.

  In an area as congested as the Basin, local traffic controls and personal aircar anticollision devices led to an annoying condition best known as Puppy Magnet Syndrome. It was virtually impossible to collide with another jet, thanks to the many safeguards in effect; midair fender-plunges were a thing of the past. Two cars flying straight at each other would swerve automatically just before collision, like the north poles of two magnets brought together (as demonstrated by the antics of the traditional black-and-white magnetized Scotty-dog pups that have thrilled so many generations of children). With three or more cars involved, the ballet of avoidance became more complex. And when hundreds or thousands or even dozens of cars converged on a single destination, an enormous bubble of canceled confusion—spherical gridlock—was the result, a sphere of empty territory from which all cars repelled each other simultaneously, so that none could enter the desired zone. The only thing to do in such an instance was to sit and wait and let the computers sort it out.

  The more popular the attraction, the longer the wait. And today the Welby-Kildare Hospital—under the sponsorship of Dr. McNguyen—was extremely busy. Siren-packing ambulances took priority, sending repulsed cars spinning from their path as they zigzagged in and down to the emergency roosts.

  As he orbited in abeyance, awaiting an opening, Sandy regarded the smoky abyss of the Beverly Canyon, a gift from the San Andreas Fault line to real estate developers of the twenty-first century. The Canyon’s polished inner walls were glitzy with windows, balconies, hanging gardens. The Figueroa home, several miles up the crack, sat on the most exclusive stretch of the famous verge, invisible from here, mainly because it was blocked by floating advertisements.

  A huge, luminous fly-through hologram billboard materialized ahead of them. Sandy stared at it first in annoyance, then in envy.

  The image showed seven people, each representing a different race, and of widely varying ages. Bold titles flickered around them, sending loud synchronized blasts of sound into Sandy’s wires:

  Forget About Ozzie and Harriet!

  Brush Off the Bradys!

  Who Needs the Bundys?

  Screw All Murgatroyds and Figueroas!

  None of Them Had a Seventh of What We’ve Got!

  The First Family That Really Represents You!

  Folks You Can Count On!

  And We’re Coming Right Now . . .

&n
bsp; To Work Our Magic—

  THE MAGYK 7

  Our replacements, Sandy thought bitterly. They keep trying to fill that void. After a suitable period of mourning—thirty days—Hollywood had started right up again trying to re-create the formula. They were still trying, but so far it had never quite worked out.

  He almost missed the tag line:

  We Can’t Promise Some of Us Won’t Die—

  We’re Not Immortal!

  But We Won’t Give Up the Show

  And Let You Down!

  Sandy saw Corny’s fingers tighten on the wheel, and was positive the sealman tried to aim the car right at the middle of the big dad’s head; but the computer had just given them clearance, and they were heading down.

  The hospital lobbies and corridors were crammed with scads of Poppy-fen, mobs of women (and not a few men) in hysterics, their orange-implanted eyes blurry with tears, their faces torn and devastated. Unfortunately, most of them recognized Sandy and Cornelius, and came rushing: “Sandy! Oh my brother! Corny, help me! Help me! I’m cut off—I’m dying—where am I?—My baby—where’s my baby—please—please—an autograph . . . ?”

  Fortunately, a troop of security guards spotted the problem and moved between Sandy and the faux Poppies.

  “She’s this way, Mr. Figueroa, in the Daktari-Howser Wing,” said one young fellow. “It’s a plesh to accompany you. I lost my virginity to Dyad through you, sir. Nice piece, that. I think you handled her just as I would have, only . . . well . . . I’d have liked it immensely if you could have held off ejaculating just a wee bit longer. Always wanted to tell you that, sir. But this really is a ple—AACK—!”

  “Thanks, Corny,” Sandy said.