eXistenZ (8 page)

After another short search, he withdrew a small electronic device, covered in grease and smears, which looked a little like a carbon-fiber voltage meter. It had a metal feeler with a long sharp point, which Gas rubbed absentmindedly against the side of his overall pants. When he was done, he inspected the point against the light, licked his thumb and finger, and smeared the sharpest points. Then he rubbed them again.

He pulled on a pair of industrial shatterproof spectacles.

“We call this baby a stud-finder,” Gas said, peering at it through the thick lenses. “It uses a combination of sonar and laser to locate the spot on your spine where the
x
intersects with the
y.
We don’t want to be even a micron out of whack.” He took off the safety spectacles for a moment and blew away some specks of dirt that had built up on the lenses. “One micron off and you get troubles. Spinal damage, paralysis, spasms, uncontrollable pain, that sort of thing.”

Pikul briefly closed his eyes.

“But this little baby never goes wrong if you handle it right. It marks you with a special range-finding dye.”

“Never say dye,” Pikul said, but Gas didn’t appear to understand.

“Lift up your shirt,” he said humorlessly. “And turn around.”

Pikul reluctantly did as he was instructed. He moved forward onto a wingback chair next to one of the workbenches, and at Gas’s instruction, settled himself in an awkward kneeling position. He gritted his teeth and waited for the end of the world to begin.

In front of him was a small, grimy window, with a view out across the forecourt. Geller was there, game-pod still slung over her shoulder. She was wandering around in the night, looking about her in what seemed to be a state of awe. She lightly brushed her fingertips against anything she passed: from the rusty remains of broken automobiles to the high-tech Mobil gas pumps.

A stab of white fire entered his spine, and Pikul went rigid with pain.

“See, that didn’t hurt, did it?” Gas said.

Pikul tried to answer, but his voice came out as a gassy, high-pitched squeak. He coughed, cleared his throat, blinked away the tears.

“Just a little,” he said manfully.

“I told you.”

“All right . . . well, thanks for doing that.” Pikul moved down from his awkward kneeling position on the chair. He stretched and twisted. Everything began to feel all right again. “How much do I owe you?”

“I haven’t done it yet,” Gas said. “That was just the stud-finder. It puts a marking stain on your skin, in the exact place where the bioport has to go.”

Pikul bent backward, trying to see over his shoulder. He tried to feel with his hand.

“Don’t rub it!” Gas warned him. “One micron off . . . remember?”

He pulled the bioport insertion gun from another drawer. This was much larger than the stud-finder: it had two unpleasant-looking hydraulic levers clamped beside a deadly barrel, with a pump-up mechanism that made a deep-seated ratchet sound when Gas limbered it up.

He snapped something made of metal out of a vacuum-sealed pack and clicked it onto the end of the barrel.

“Back on the chair please, Pikul.”

He reluctantly complied. “This is the bit that hurts, right?” he said.

“I’ve never crippled anyone yet.”

“How many have you done?”

“Three,” Gas said. “Well, you’ll be the third.”

Geller walked as far as the Land Rover, then turned back to pass by the other pumps. The stars shone brightly overhead, and a warm wind blew from the west. She breathed the air deeply. For the first time since leaving the church, she was beginning to feel comparatively safe. Yes, the crazies were undoubtedly still out there somewhere looking for her, but it would take them a long time to narrow their search down to this particular filling station on this particular road.

As she glanced around, her attention was suddenly drawn by a movement on the gas pump at the far end. She went over to investigate.

An animal of some kind had crawled up on to the chrome-plated handle of the pump. It sat in the moonlight, twitching in the warm night. She bent down to look more closely.

It was a salamanderlike amphibian with six legs. Its feet were fat and splayed, giving a good grip on the shiny metal. It was constantly moving, twitching from side to side.

It had two heads.

Each head sat on its own neck, and each seemed to be striving for domination over the other. Both the tiny heads were swaying from side to side, banging into each other.

Geller reached down and gently took the tiny thing in her hand. Its little feet briefly clung more tightly to the glistening metal, but then came away with almost inaudible popping sounds. It rested on her palm, its legs spread wide. The heads continued to wave frantically about, causing the animal to stumble whenever it tried to move. It finally discovered the root of her thumb with its tail, and used this to stabilize itself.

She leaned down for a closer look. The little creature’s heads suddenly stopped waggling about and both looked back up at Geller through bulging, froglike eyes.

Then she heard a cry from within the workshop: “Geller, help!
Geller!”

[
8
]

Pikul had backed away to the far end of the filthy workshop and was holding a large wrench he’d seized from a rack. Gas stood before him, the bioport insertion gun raised for action. Both men were breathing menacingly at each other.

Geller rushed in from outside. “What’s going on, Gas?” she yelled.

He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Your friend is acting like I’m attacking him. People usually pay me to do this, you know.”

“Yeah, all two of them!” Pikul cried. “This character’s a fucking amateur, Geller. I’m not going ahead with the bioport just so’s he can get in some practice on me. That’s flat, and it’s final.”

“What’s this about two of them?” Geller said to Gas.

“My little joke,” he replied. “Just winding him up a little. Bedside manner, you know.”

“Pikul doesn’t have much of a sense of humor,” Geller said quietly, then pushed past him. She went straight up to Pikul. “No bioport, then?”

“No.”

She glanced back at Gas, judging the distance, then lowered her voice to a husky whisper. Her breath played lightly on Pikul’s cheek.

“This is it, Pikul, you see,” she said. “This is the cage I was talking about, the cage you make for yourself. It keeps you trapped inside, pacing about in the smallest possible space. Forever. You’ll never escape because you’ve forgotten, or you never knew, how you got inside in the first place. This is your chance, Pikul. Break out of your cage. Break out of it now.”

He stared back at her, breathing heavily.

“I don’t want to,” he said stubbornly.

She moved closer still.

“Think of the rewards, Pikul. Think of where we could go together.” She was leaning toward him. She plucked at the front of her T-shirt, pulling it forward, making a gap down which he could steal a glimpse. He stole a glimpse. She let go again.

“Everything can be yours,” she said. “That’s not a promise. It’s a prediction.”

Kneeling once more on the wingback chair, trembling and shuddering, Pikul waited for the impact. He heard Gas moving around behind him, he sensed something being adjusted, he heard again that deep ratchet sound. Something cold and metal touched his back.

Slam!

Pikul fell forward into the chair, while the agony screamed through his body. Nothing in his life had even approached the threshold of such pain, far less actually crossed it.

Then, remarkably fast, it began to fade.

Within a minute of the terrible impact the area of his lower back felt as if an extremely large and sensitive carbuncle had suddenly grown there, but the shattering, paralyzing pain had receded.

Pikul wondered if he should continue to lie in the humiliating facedown position in the chair awhile longer, to ram home his point about having to suffer, then decided against it. Slowly, he eased himself around. His eyes focused.

Gas and Geller were watching him. He fancied that Geller was watching him with concern and affection, but he couldn’t be too sure of that.

“Okay, Pikul,” Gas said. “You’re going to have a swelling there for a few hours, but by tomorrow you won’t even notice it.”

“I love it,” Pikul said. “Great.”

He tried to get up from the wingback chair but the moment he put weight on his legs he collapsed forward into the arms of Geller and Gas.

“What’s going on?” he cried in panic. “I can’t walk!”

Geller helped Gas ease him back into a sitting position in the chair.

“The bioport comes with its own epidural, like when you have a baby,” Gas said.

“I don’t have babies.”

“If you did, you’d be familiar with the feeling. Instant paralysis from the waist down.”

“Paralysis?” Pikul said, thinking of several important parts of his body from the waist down.

“Only temporary. You wouldn’t want to experience the full pain of invasive spinal tapping, would you? The epidural saves you from pain. It’ll wear off in no time.”

Pikul noticed that there were specks of fresh blood and tiny flecks of skin on Gas’s work gloves. A mist of tiny blood droplets lay on the lenses of his safety glasses.

“You look more like a butcher than a mechanic,” he said.

“Things do get kind of confused these days, don’t they?” Gas said, but he made no attempt to wipe off the stains. A smile formed on his mouth, beneath his cold, empty eyes. “I’m going to go wash up. You two make yourselves at home.”

He threw his gloves to one side and strode off in the direction of the washroom. He was emanating great waves of self-satisfaction.

Geller shifted the game-pod case from her shoulder and eased the pod out. She started attaching a Y-shaped two-player UmbyCord to it.

“What are you doing?” Pikul said.

“We don’t have to wait for the swelling to go down.”

“You’re going to port into me? While I’m still paralyzed?”

“Sure I am.”

“In this dump?” Pikul waved his hand helplessly in all directions, at the greasy chaos of the place.

“It doesn’t matter where we are in the real world. It’s the game that counts.”

“Yes, but—”

Geller paused in what she was doing and moved so she could look directly at him.

“You still want to play my game, don’t you?” she said.

“Yeah . . . I did and I do. But come on, Allegra. Play games here in this repair shop? Now? With God the Mechanic in the next room?”

“No time like the present, is there?”

She reached forward and lifted his unbuttoned shirt, peering behind him at the base of his spine.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

To Pikul’s amazement, she leaned over and began to caress the port with her face, rubbing her cheeks, lips, and hair over it, making satisfied grunting sounds deep inside her throat. Finally, with a quiet sucking noise, she took the port in her mouth.

Pikul felt almost none of this, because of the anesthetic effect of the epidural, but he heard it all and imagined the rest. If his below-the-belt responses hadn’t been temporarily wiped out of existence, he would have had an unequivocal below-the-belt response to this. He glanced down at Geller’s back, could just see her head bobbing sexily as she mouthed the port with her tongue and lips.

More embarrassed than aroused, Pikul waited until she was content. Then she leaned away from him, took out a tiny aerosol can of WD-40 from her game-pod case, and sprayed it on him.

“Ouch! That’s cold!”

“A new port is sometimes a bit tight. It’s difficult to get the connector in. I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

“How come a bioport . . . ?” Pikul began, having given this a little thought. “How come a bioport doesn’t get infected? I mean, it opens right into your body. Shouldn’t you be using antiseptic instead of that stuff?”

“Don’t be ludicrous.”

“Ludicrous?”

“Listen to what you’re saying, Pikul.”

“I listen to me,” he said. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who does. Look, Geller, I don’t mind admitting I’m kind of nervous about this. I’m here in this hellhole, great gobbets of filth and machine oil around me, a maniac with blood on his hands has just carried out spine surgery on me, now you want us to roll around on the floor together.”

“Get out of your cage, Pikul . . .”

“Don’t you think you could at least call me Ted?” he said. “You know, help me through all this?”

“Maybe later,” she said, absorbed in what she was doing.

Geller was gently working the connector of the UmbyCord into Pikul’s new bioport. He felt her tapping it reassuringly when it was properly seated, then she moved around to face him and looked intently into his eyes.

She reached down and squeezed her game-pod’s On teat.

Instantly, the pod convulsed! White flashes sparked and crackled around its body. Electronic smoke seeped from its crevices and a kind of bioelectronic fat sputtered from the many pores that pitted its surface.

“My God!” Geller cried in horror.

She leaped away from him and yanked her UmbyCord out of his bioport with such a force that it jerked him around in his chair. He felt no pain, just the sheer physical pulling of her frantic action.

“Shit, Pikul!” she said furiously. “I can’t believe this. I trusted you, and in return you blew my pod! You must have neurosurged.”

“I must have—what? What do you mean? Neurosurged . . . what’s that?”

“I jacked you into my pod,” she said, in a tone of despair. “You panicked and you neurosurged. Now the pod is totally fucked! You’ve no idea what a disaster this is going to be for me!”

“I was nervous . . . that’s right. I was real nervous. But I didn’t panic.”

“You blew my pod!”

“Your pod blew. Okay, I’m not arguing. But why blame me for it?”

“You were there,” Geller said, with cold reason. “It was jacked into you, and then it blew.”

“Couldn’t you get a new one?”

She looked at him with disbelief, and for a moment he thought she was going to burst out in some way: tears, hysterical laughter, great rage. Then she lowered her eyes and sadness briefly dwelled in her face.