Tea From an Empty Cup

by Cadigan, Pat

  The sensations provided by the amusement park attractions were pretty authentic, vivid enough to fool you for a few seconds at least, and would certainly keep you amused for the whole time. But it wasn’t like this. This was under her skin. She could all but feel the nerve endings closest to the surface of her fingers responding to the stimuli, absorbing it all greedily and demanding more. Now there was some map text she could write: You, too, can become a SENSATION JUNKIE!!!! in LESS THAN ONE DAY!!!! It’s so EASY!!!! you don’t even have to TRY!!!!

  ‘Oh, for chrissakes.’

  She looked up; Ash was sitting at the table, disgust large on his face.

  ‘Hello, Ash. I didn’t hear you come in. What took you so long?’

  ‘Don’t call me that, I’m rotating names now. What took me – well, hey, I ran all the way. So what the hell do you call this?’

  ‘Waxx24, the next dimension?’ she guessed.

  ‘I know that. I mean, what the hell are you doing here? They won’t let me in forever and when they finally do, it’s because you told them to? Shit. There is no God and this is the proof.’

  ‘Ash, this is not what you think –’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘I don’t know what else to call you. Why’d you change your name?’

  ‘Rotating. I’m rotating names.’

  ‘Why?’

  He leaned forward, as if that would actually make the conversation more private. ‘In case they have “Ash” on a permanent-exclude checklist.’

  Yuki sighed. ‘Well, I’m not Tom,’ she said, slowly, trying to figure out how to phrase things. She had a sinking feeling that whatever she said was going to sound stupid or crazy or both.

  ‘You’re not Tom?’ Ash folded his arms on the table and scrutinized her through half-closed eyes. ‘If you’re not Tom, then who could you be, which up-to-now-hidden-from-public-knowledge, completely-pathetic-basket-case-of-misplaced-passion-and-wasteful-idolatry could you possibly be?’

  Yuki hesitated. ‘I guess you don’t recognize me with my daikon radish characteristics all covered up.’

  Ash seemed to freeze in place, like an old-fashioned cinematic that had jammed. A warning bell chimed in Yuki’s mind, but the moment passed even before she could start to think about what might be wrong. Ash unfroze and put his head in his hands. He seemed to be unaware of what had happened. Faulty transmission?

  ‘God, this is worse than I thought,’ he said. ‘No, I forgot, there is no God. Christ, woman, why? Why? Have you no pride?’

  Still suspicious, Yuki reached over to touch him. Just at the moment when she remembered that she couldn’t touch him, her fingers brushed what was undeniably a warm human shoulder. Both of them jumped.

  ‘Don’t you go all gropey-dopey on me now,’ Ash warned, pushing back from the table. He looked as if he were about to get up and run. Yuki barely registered his revulsion; she stared first at her fingers and then at Ash, in an intense way Tom had always called her if-looks-could-drill stare.

  ‘How come I can touch you now?’ she said wonderingly.

  ‘For the same reason I can see you, of course,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve been pumped up and ’suited.’

  ‘What does that mean, “pumped up”?’

  Ash gaped at her, frankly incredulous. Then he shook his head. ‘And you’re a waste of good drug, too.’ He pulled his chair back to the table. ‘Okay. Just tell me everything all at once so I can laugh or cry or have a rupture and be done with it. And do it before this stuff wears off, I’m hoping to get an evening out of it anyway.’

  ‘The drug,’ Yuki said thoughtfully, reaching again for the back of her neck. ‘A drug put us on the same level? That’s ridiculous, a drug can’t –’ She paused. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah, “oh.”’ Ash leaned his elbows on the table and pushed his face at hers. ‘Yuki, if that’s really you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for spotting me and lifting me up out of the cattle pen. Now, do an old friend a good favor and give me a readmission token for my next trip in, or whatever I need to get into this side of Waxx24 and sit on your side of the table. Please?’

  She frowned at him. ‘Is that all you care about?’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Ash said, rolling his eyes and turning away slightly. ‘She’s going to start.’

  ‘That is all you care about, being a VIP at some worthless club that isn’t even real, doing things that aren’t real with people who aren’t real, getting some status that isn’t real, for the –’

  ‘Yes, goddammit, that’s all I care about!’ Ash yelled suddenly, slapping the table. ‘When I’m in a club, that’s all I goddam care about! I don’t come here to do feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, or save the whales for the billionth time! What about it? Why is it so bad that I come here and don’t save the world?’

  ‘Nobody asked you to save the world,’ she said, irritated. ‘I didn’t say – I mean, look. Something’s happened to Tom, something bad. And I –’

  ‘Something bad happened to Tom here?’ Ash said, sounding skeptical.

  ‘I don’t know where. But it’s connected somehow to AR and Joy’s Boyz. I’m not sure about Waxx24.’

  ‘So you put on your Tom-suit and came charging in here to the rescue?’

  ‘Well, no. I got a job with Joy’s Boyz.’

  Ash’s expression was flat. ‘You’re a Joy’s Boy?’

  ‘Not exactly. I’m her assistant. And when I went to my quarters to go to bed, I found this hotsuit. So I put it on –’

  Ash was waving both hands in front of his face, palms toward her. ‘Stop, stop. If you’re hunting up new Boyz, I’m afraid I’m just too old. Ask her, she’ll tell you she likes them younger than me. I know this, everybody knows this.’

  ‘I’m not recruiting. I’m looking for Tom. He’s disappeared out there and now I can’t find him in here, either –’

  ‘And you think I can?’

  Yuki shook her head sadly. ‘Why don’t you care?’

  ‘I care, deeply. About you, about Tom, about all the important stuff. Hell, you’d think that the two of us together like this might call him right to us? You know, in his Shantih Love suit?’

  ‘You know Shantih Love?’ Yuki asked sharply. ‘Tell me all about him. Or it, or whatever Tom’s supposed to be under that name. Tell me about the ca –’ she stopped as something that Ash had said earlier finally registered on her. Yuki, if that’s really you …

  Sure, it’s me, Ash. But is that you?

  ‘Come on, come on, Yuki. The meter’s running. Can’t you get that through your Tom-head?’ Ash gave a noisy sigh of supreme weariness. ‘Call me at home later, call me tomorrow. Right now, give me a token so I can stay on this level, and a second-admission icon so I can come back.’

  ‘I don’t have any tokens or icons or anything like that,’ Yuki said.

  ‘There should be a little drawer or something on your side of the table. Look underneath.’ He gestured with one hand and she looked. He was right; there was a drawer there, barely the thickness of a pencil. She slid it open and saw that it was divided into several small compartments about half the size of her palm. Or Tom’s palm. Each compartment had a different token or icon in it, but none of them meant anything to her. She looked up at Ash and shrugged.

  ‘Tell it what you want,’ he said with exaggerated patience.

  ‘Um, a token so my friend can stay here, and a, um – what else?’ she asked him.

  ‘Second-admission icon,’ he told the ceiling.

  ‘A token so my friend can stay on the level and a second-admission icon. Please,’ she added quickly, which made Ash give a short, harsh bark of laughter. Like that, they were on the table in front of her, something that seemed to be a clear plastic coin about the size of a monocle and a square of parchment with ADMIT ONE FOR FUN! inscribed on it in comically ornate lettering.

  ‘There,’ she said, and pushed them a few inches toward him on the table.

  ‘You have to hand them to me,’ Ash said, addressin
g the ceiling again. ‘I can’t touch them before you’ve activated the validity codes by touching them yourself.’

  Yuki scooped them up, grabbed Ash’s hand and slapped the items down on his palm. ‘There. Is that valid enough for you?’

  He was examining them closely. ‘Yeah, that’s great. You’re the queen, you’re the dream, you reign supreme.’ He made the token and icon disappear. ‘I’ll be going now. Unless you were actually planning to do something –’ he took a breath ‘– sexual.’

  She was about to tell him no, of course not, and then stopped, looking at him carefully. ‘Suppose I was?’

  ‘Have you really no pride at all?’ he asked her, looking pained.

  ‘You never used to ask me that,’ she said, forcing herself not to laugh. ‘You used to ask me why I was such a prude.’

  For a long moment, Ash didn’t move. This time, however, she could see he wasn’t frozen, at least not the way he had been before. He looked more as if she had caught him out at something. Then he threw up his hands. ‘All right. Now I know. Touché. Now let me out of here.’

  ‘Let him out of here,’ she said to the air, and Ash was gone. She waited for another moment, and then said, ‘Who was that?’

  There was no response. She remembered something about privacy laws for leisure-type activities. You couldn’t find out anything about someone in one of these places unless the person chose not to lie to you. Ha. Big fat hairy chance. Again, life imitates art, she thought. If you call this art.

  Or maybe this was now life, and what had been life was now art. Could she prove it one way or the other? Hardly. No more than she could prove the person she had been talking to had really been Ash.

  But why wouldn’t he be, she asked herself.

  Why would he be is the more logical question. You look like Tom and you’re not him, so why would someone who looked like Ash be Ash?

  He wouldn’t, she realized suddenly. Ash would never have worn his own appearance into an AR scenario. For Ash, the whole point was to be someone else. So who had that been? Some friend of Ash’s, some friend of hers?

  Tom?

  Suddenly, it was all too much to think about. She sat in the empty booth, waiting for something else to happen, but apparently nothing else was going to unless she asked for something specific. She took out the catalog and the map again and spread them out on the table. ‘I don’t suppose a glass of really nice red wine is possible, is it?’ she said to the air, expecting nothing.

  Immediately, the glass was sitting on the table in front of her. In spite of everything, Yuki burst out laughing. It figured, she thought, trying to catch her breath. Here she was in a place where almost anything was possible, and she was snagged on the almost part. Still, she fingered the elegant bowl of the glass, lifted it to look at the color. It certainly looked like red wine. The effect was so realistic she would have sworn that if she put the glass close to her face, there would be the unmistakable full-bodied, not-too-woodyish nose of a good, dry red.

  Then she did bring the glass to her face and there it was. Even as she inhaled the aroma, she knew it wasn’t possible. A trick played on her senses by the power of suggestion. Perhaps even one of Joy Flower’s henchmen kneeling next to the bed and holding a wine-soaked napkin to the vent at the top of her headmount. Why? Never mind why, this was how. It didn’t have to make sense, it just had to be possible.

  She knew then that she was going to drink, and when she did, she would not only taste wine but feel the liquid in her mouth, she would feel the bite of the alcohol on the tissues in her throat and the mild burn as it traveled down her esophagus to her stomach. And then she wasn’t sure what she would do after that, because sensations of eating and drinking just weren’t possible, they just weren’t.

  Even as she was thinking that, she had already drunk the wine, and another part of her mind was contemplating the taste as compared to the nose. Not quite as good as the nose had promised, but a very near miss.

  She closed her eyes, wondering if it were possible to drift out of the Sitty by way of apathy, to get it to disconnect for lack of activity, and then she could tear the whole damned rig off and throw it in Joy Flower’s face on her way out.

  Her hand moved on its own, but she refused to open her eyes. Somehow, with her eyes closed, she couldn’t tell exactly what her hand was doing, but if she concentrated hard enough, she would feel the source of the impulse to move. Like the sensation of the upholstery, it was under her skin, but in a much more profound way. It felt as someone was wearing her hand as a glove –

  Panic exploded inside her. Her eyes snapped open and she jumped out of the chair, brushing at herself, turning around and around, trying to catch someone molesting her, if that was the word. Molesting her hand. Molesting her gross motor movements.

  Of course, whoever it was might not be visible, she remembered suddenly, as she swung the arm with the wineglass in it in fast, wide arcs. Too bad she hadn’t managed to score a Schick, she thought.

  She paused then, panting a little, feeling her heart triphammer in her chest. Except that the triphammering didn’t really seem to arise from her panic or her exertions. It was just there, a fast heartbeat. Running hot. What the hell had they injected her with?

  Yuki looked down at her hand. There was no more moving without her but now she could sense that there was something else under the white glove besides her virtual body. It was trying to hide its presence by keeping perfectly still, but now that she knew it was there, she couldn’t not feel it.

  ‘Oily, oily, whatever-it-is-they-say,’ she whispered, and bit her lip. ‘I know you’re playing possum, because you’re not very good at it.’ Nothing happened.

  ‘All right. All right.’ Moving as slowly and smoothly as possible, she sat down at the table again and laid her hand down on it. ‘We’ll just see here.’

  Taking the glass in her other hand, she smashed it down on the edge of the table. The sound of breaking glass was perfect, she thought, picking up the largest shard, which had fallen right next to her foot on the carpet.

  ‘If you won’t come out,’ she said as she sliced along her heart line, ‘I’ll come in and get you. What do you think about that?’

  The flow of blood was also perfect, she thought, turning the shard so she could draw it down her lifeline. And there was that smell. That had to be the power of suggestion, she thought; had to be. Like the pain. Because her pain option was disabled, she was sure of that.

  Well, pretty sure.

  DEATH IN THE PROMISED LAND [III]

  Ten (billable) minutes later, Konstantin stepped through a doorway onto the street where she had first seen Shantih Love. The feel of the Love persona in her ’suit was pleasurable in a way that kept her on edge. Being Shantih Love was close to seductive, even with the sliced throat, something she had not taken into consideration.

  Real easy to go native in a Gang Wars module. The night manager’s words came back to her. None too helpfully, since this wasn’t a Gang Wars module. That she knew of.

  She was wondering now if she really knew anything at all. The piles of wreckage in the street were all aflame, burning in jewel tones, now and then sending sparks skyward, where they seemed to mingle with the stars. The glitter she had seen on the monitor looked somehow less gritty from the inside and more like delicate sprays of tiny lights, too exquisitely fragile not to shatter in even the slightest puff of a breeze, yet remaining, twinkling and shimmering against the black street, the pitted brick and the web-cracked glass of the buildings facing the burning wrecks, the cold-stone texture of the barrier between the street and the alien shore of the Hudson River.

  Konstantin went to the barrier and strolled along it in the direction Shantih Love had taken, looking around for anything like the figure of a shaggy beast that might be interested in killing her.

  Rather than anything approaching, however, Konstantin had a sense of things drawing away from her, many eyes watching with the knowledge that she was an impostor. And then a
gain, she thought suddenly, how would anyone know, if the Shantih Love persona had gone on for another four hours after Iguchi’s death? Maybe the only one who knew was the creature who had attacked and hijacked Shantih Love here in the first place.

  She paused, leaning on the barrier and looking toward where she estimated the party had been. It was long over now, or perhaps this was no longer one of the hot Sitty spots. But then, her purpose was not to find a party, nor to act as a decoy to attract a creature that might not even be real. Funny how easy it was to forget things, to forget to keep focused here. If she waited much longer, her concentration might dissolve altogether, just break into tiny fragments and float away up to the stars with the sparks from the burning wreckage.

  ‘Icon cat?’ she asked.

  It was there before her on the barrier, preening itself, smoothing its whiskers with its paws and lashing its tail in a sort of all-purpose warning – a classic tabby.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Konstantin groaned. ‘Not really.’

  The tabby looked up at her, offended. A moment later, it was a thick book, open to a page showing a flame within a halo; as she looked at it, it went from a drawing to a vivid holo. The word Enlightenment came out of the flame and rippled for a moment. More words appeared on the facing page: You have only to ask.

  Konstantin made a face, or thought she might have; there was no real feeling above her neck. ‘Is this a help file?’ she said aloud.

  Now there was a new message on the page opposite the flame: Help with? – Travel – Location – Contacts – Other

  After a moment’s thought, she touched – Contacts.

  Contact – Who – What? The page wanted to know.

  She pressed – Who. The question mark moved to the end of the word. ‘Body Sativa,’ she said aloud.

  A golden arrow pointing to her right materialized on the page. She turned it and found a map of the area with her own position highlighted. A dotted green line appeared, winding its way along the grid of streets to a location six blocks away; a green star flashed on and off.