Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

by Cory Doctorow

opened it without checking thepeephole. It was Lil.

  She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A snideremark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her.

  She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her embrace.

  "No," he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down atthe Seven Seas Lagoon.

  "Dan's just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in acouple months," I said. "Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn'tit, Lil?"

  Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself. "I'lltake what I can get," she said.

  I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not Lil,whose loss upset me the most.

  Lil took Dan's hand and led him out of the room.

  _I guess I'll take what I can get, too_, I thought.

  ========= CHAPTER 6 =========

  Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan,I pondered the possibility that I was nuts.

  It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and eventhough there were cures, they weren't pleasant.

  I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I wasliving for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed.

  We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the famed low-gravitysybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but atten to the neg eight, it's a blast. You don't stagger, you _bounce_, andwhen you're bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy,boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun.

  I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter,filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity,deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered the sphere's floor, andif you knew how to play, you'd snag one, tether it to you and startplaying. Others would pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunesvaried from terrific to awful, but they were always energetic.

  I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever Ithought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time in the sphereplaying it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new andinteresting lines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn't,playing an instrument was a fast track to intriguing an interesting,naked stranger.

  Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouseruns in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movement on acello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I came to adawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it wasreally _good_. I'm a sucker for musicians.

  We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously asspheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully intothe hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perpwho killed her partner.

  I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble.The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud.She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed for thehatch.

  I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperate toreach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving.

  "Hey!" I said. "That was great! I'm Julius! How're you doing?"

  She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unitsimultaneously -- not hard, you understand, but playfully. "Honk!" shesaid, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoningchub-on.

  I chased after her. "Wait," I called as she tumbled through the spoke ofthe station towards the gravity.

  She had a pianist's body -- re-engineered arms and hands that stretchedfor impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand's grace,vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as I couldon my freshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim ofthe station, she was gone.

  I didn't find her again until the next movement was done and I went tothe bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up whenshe passed through the hatch and tied off to the piano.

  This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her beforemoistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's top, lookingher in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 time and I-IV-Vprogressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rock to folk,teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled at me, I noodledback at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I managed asmidge of tuneful wit.

  She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red downyfur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style, suited to the climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was datingLil, another redhead, but Zed was my first.

  I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at thekeyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out aparticularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slowbridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as Icould. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the hatch.

  When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but Isummoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She calmlyuntied and floated over to me.

  I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I'd beenstaring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at theircorners and spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked backat me, then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint again.

  "You'll do," she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across thestation.

  We didn't sleep.

  #

  Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadbandconstellations that went up at the cusp of the world's ascent intoBitchunry. She'd been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and hadgenerally become pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with abewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyesthat saw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, doglegreversible knee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn'tprone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest ofus, like lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica andslipped discs.

  I thought I lived for fun, but I didn't have anything on Zed. She onlytalked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn't do,and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whimthat crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.

  I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangleher twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days,floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior.She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I waswatching. Or maybe she didn't, and she was making faces for anyone'sbenefit.

  But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and hereyes full of the stars she'd seen and her metallic skin cool with thebreath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through thestation, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid ofrice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher andshinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as weinterrupted a thousand acts of coitus.

  You'd have thought that we'd have followed it up with an act of our own,and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we started thegame I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfwaythrough, I'd lose track of carnal urges and return to a state ofchildlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and thegiggly feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageouscorner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazypair that's always zipping in and zipping away, like having your partycrashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers.

  When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live withme until the universe's mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked my noseand my willie and shouted, "YOU'LL _DO_!"

  I took her home to Toronto and we took up residence ten storiesunderground in overflow resi
dence for the University. Our Whuffie wasn'tso hot earthside, and the endless institutional corridors made her feelat home while affording her opportunities for mischief.

  But bit by bit, the mischief dwindled, and she started talking more. Atfirst, I admit I was relieved, glad that my strange, silent wife wasfinally acting normal, making nice with the neighbors instead ofpranking them with endless honks and fanny-kicks and squirt guns. Wegave up the steeplechase and she had the doglegs taken out, her furremoved, her eyes unsilvered to a hazel that was pretty and asfathomable as the silver had been inscrutable.

  We wore clothes. We entertained. I started to rehearse my symphony inlow-Whuffie halls and parks with any musicians I could drum up, and shecame out and didn't play, just sat to the side and smiled and smiledwith a smile that never went beyond her lips.

  She went