Half the Day Is Night (19 page)

He ran completely through the males without finding any image he could imagine assuming and found himself in the female section looking at Denise Deren, the American VR star, who he admitted was very pretty with her green eyes and pale hair but who he also could not imagine wearing, so he pressed the caduceus.

A doctor looked at him out of an American-style surgical p-suit. “Normal human or other?” the doctor asked.

He didn't want to be chrome so he typed “yes” and for gender he typed male. Gave a height of 1.8 meters—hell, he might as well be tall. A weight, and a schematic of a generic male body appeared. He increased the weight by five kilos, decided that made the body look a little like the body builder on the first page and took it off. He was presented with a range of skin colors. He thought a moment, chose something dark. It would be nice to blend in. That meant curly black hair, close to the head. A presentation of eyes and noses and mouths and he chose pretty quickly. Then clothes and he just picked a sweater and tights. Normal, just look normal.

“Save this body as Lezard?”

“Okay,” he said. And he had a body. The gloves were gone.

“Continue browsing?”

He started to say no then thought of the zoo. That would be interesting.

The first page was a dragon, sea green with red eyes and huge wings. He laughed again. No, he did not want to be a dragon. Not a demon with a face like leather and bat-wings. Not a winged horse, either. A whale, a green-tailed mermaid, an angel (luminous and quite pretty in an androgynous way but certainly not him.) A tall elf with long silver hair and green eyes and pointed ears. Alien creatures, part human, part leopard, or lizard or horse. A snake with beautiful scales like bright green and copper glass. Funny figures, fat old men and Charlie Chaplin and cartoon people. Then traditional animals.

An animal, that was appealing. He would like to be an animal. Not a lizard, despite his choice of names. He paged through thoughtfully. An owl, a hawk, a bat, a gazelle, a lion, a horse, a number of kinds of dogs, a wolf, a cat.…

A cat. He had never really thought of himself as catlike, but maybe a cat. But then he would have no hands. Maybe not.

The next section was all machines: planes and tanks and cars. He did not want to be a car, either.

He sighed and closed the catalogue.

Now there was a door in the wall. He grabbed the handlebars and took a step, the treadmill activated with a slight lurch and he was walking towards the door. The door opened.

*   *   *

It had been a long time since he did anything like this, maybe since the militaire. He had done simulations in training, there, but most of those had either been at consoles or in body suits. It was a little strange remembering that if he turned the handlebars he
turned,
even though his feet kept going straight on the treadmill.

The door opened on a playground. It didn't look real, wasn't supposed to. Everything in it was geometric, smooth, perfect in silver and red, surrounded by water and plashing with fountains. The pillars reflected his image in curving chrome. It all looked dated, like something that had been popular when he was a kid.

It was crowded but places like this were always a little crowded. If there weren't enough people the system generated a crowd. He looked up and the top of the fountains were crowned with blue gas flames. He sighed.

Actually getting here was a lot less interesting than picking a persona. In picking a persona there was so much potential. Like getting dressed for a party.

He looked until he found the access portals in the pillars in the center of the playground. (They had huge red metal balls bouncing up and down on top of them.) He could probably leave now, he had only ducked in because of the police, who were not even looking for him. Paranoia. He could go back to the apartment and Meph.

And do what?

“Time available?” he asked.

42.27, 42.26, 42.25, 42.24, 42.23. The time left blinked in front of him for five seconds and then disappeared.

Might as well play a game or something. He started forward and the treadmill started under his feet. Strange sense of being two places at once, in the playground
and
in the cubicle wearing the visor and gloves.

The systems available were listed at the access portals and there were people standing there reading. He had to kind of peer around. Some of the titles were dark, he supposed those were either not up and running or required membership. Flight simulations, adventure games with wizards, romances, combat games, after the eco disaster games, mysteries, a pirate simulation/adventure that had been popular when he was a kid.…

“We need a sixth,” said a beautiful Latino woman with an eyepatch. The fact that she was beautiful didn't mean anything, anybody could be beautiful. “Is there anyone here interested in making a sixth?”

“Everything here is chaff,” said a tall blond American male with a distinct Caribbean accent.

“It all looks system generated,” the woman said.

It was easy to pick out the five users, once he knew there were five; besides the one-eyed woman and the American blond there was a tall, saturnine-looking fellow with an earring and an alligator tattoo on his arm, a woman with silk-white hair like fine egret feathers, and a fey-looking young man with copper hair and green eyes who probably spent too much time playing wizard adventure games. The copper-haired young man was looking at him. “He's not phantom,” Copper Hair said.

“Sure he is,” the one-eyed woman said.

“No he's not,” Copper Hair said. “You're not, are you? You want to play?”

David shrugged. “I do not know the games, and I only have forty more minutes left.”

“How the fuck you do that, Monode!” Alligator Tattoo said.

“He don't act like a phantom,” Copper Hair said. “Phantoms don't stand still when you look at them, they have to do something.”

“I'll pay for some extra time,” One-Eyed Woman said.

“I got change, too,” Alligator Tattoo said.

“It is not a problem,” David said, “I can pay. What do I say to get out?”

“System,” said Alligator Tattoo and flickered out of existence. In a second he was back. “‘Recommencer' will bring you right back to here.”

“System,” David said, and the world went black. He lifted the visor and went back out to the counter and bought two more hours. The five were still waiting when he came back.

They were in a virtual adventure league and they were playing a war-game simulation called
Zone of Fire.
Somebody hadn't shown up and if they hadn't found a sixth they'd have had to forfeit. “You don't have to do nothing, I mean, unless you want to,” said Alligator Tattoo. Alligator Tattoo was clearly much younger than his persona. They all called him Chaco, except for the copper-haired boy, who called him Santos.

The portal opened and they stepped into an arid landscape, a field of dry grass. Almost, but not quite, the landscape of the Transvaal. The light was bright and hard and under it he felt himself expand. “Where are we?” he asked.

“Argentina,” the one-eyed woman said.

Behind them were hills, in front of them was the long flat expanse of wheat he supposed was the pampas. The wind bent down the grass but he couldn't feel it. The light! The light was so wonderful. He blinked, his eyes watering. Driving out the darkness, the dimness of Caribe. He could sleep in a light such as this, he could live in a light such as this.

“Base camp is there,” the blond said. In the strong sunlight David could see that the blond was cyborged with a delicate tracery of chip at the temples, like a vid character in bad American science fiction. What was it supposed to do, make him faster? Make him see in the dark?

He thought of the look he had chosen and smiled to himself, he really did look plain.

The base camp was not what he had expected. There was a tent, a tank, a collapsed glider and enormous amounts of ordinance. No mess, nothing for living. It wasn't at all real. People knew what they were doing; the blond American clambered into the tank—he must have been sitting at a console rather than using a treadmill—and Alligator Tattoo started handing out rifles. The rifles looked familiar enough, AP30s, cousins to the rifle he had carried in Anzania. When he took the rifle the glove tried to simulate weight by locking up and contracting. It didn't really feel as if the rifle weighed anything. David wondered how he was supposed to shoot and keep one hand on the handlebars. He tried to shoot the bolt, but the action wasn't smooth.

Alligator Tattoo—what was his name? Santos?—said, “What are you doing?”

“Checking the,” how did you say it? “ah, the barrel.” He shrugged. “Just trying to do something.” He turned it over and looked at the clip. “How much ammunition?”

“I don't know,” Santos said. “You don't have to reload.”

“Ah,” David said, “that is convenient.”

“You ever shoot one before?”

“An AP30, only a couple of times. I have shot an AP15.”

“Yeah?” Strange but the look, the tattoos, the body language and voice and expressions all fit a man older than David but Santos sounded young, maybe eighteen or nineteen. “Were you in Brasil?”

“No,” David said.

Santos didn't know what to say. The one-eyed woman was looking at them, and the copper haired boy.

“I was in Anzania,” David said into the silence. He didn't know if they would believe him or not, he couldn't remember any Central or South American troops in Anzania. This was a mistake. He should not have done this. He was aware of standing on the treadmill, his knee was starting to ache a little.

On the other hand, these people didn't know who he was. There was no way they could ever find out what he looked liked. He was free to relax, to tell them the truth as long as he didn't tell them his real name. “I am Lezard,” he said. “You are Santos?”

Alligator Tattoo frowned, “Santos or Chaco. My call name here is Chaco. That's Monode—”

“Cobre,” the boy corrected.

“Si, Cobre or Monode, whichever. The chico who drives the tank is Jack Stomper, the sarge is Amazon Lil,” the woman with the eyepatch, “and that is Gin.” Gin shook back her egret hair and smiled.

There was a crunch and the landscape around them shook, although the feeling was not translated into sensation. “Ay, cabrón!” the blond said and yanked the hatch down. The one-eyed woman clicked on a communications port and called coordinates. The tank pivoted, treads reversing and churning up grass—that was a nice touch, David thought—and moving out.

“Lezard!” Santos shouted, “come with me! Touch that Kessler!”

David obediently touched the big Kessler gun and it rumbled to life.

“Follow me!” Santos said.

Santos' Kessler was following him like a big dog. As David followed, “his” Kessler trundled docilely behind him. He couldn't help it, he started to laugh.

Santos glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “Do like this,” he tapped his headset—where had he gotten a headset? David reached up and lo and behold, he was wearing a headset. When he tapped it suddenly he heard Amazon Lil talking in his ear, “Santos, you and Lezard head up around 14.5 and see if you can get a little mortar action on that ridge.” Talking like a movie, he thought. Around him he could see red digital readouts, like looking through a heads-up display.

This was nothing like a real battle, he thought. Thank goodness.

*   *   *

David called his Kessler “Fido.” Fido was behind him while he and Santos planned what kind of fire to lay down. They were “lying” behind cover. It didn't feel as if they were lying because he was still standing on the treadmill and his knee was aching enough that he couldn't forget it was there. Still, he was having a very good time.

“They are there, I think,” he told Santos. He didn't really know, but Amazon Lil thought that a team like him and Santos would be there. He picked over the land. He could make decisions about where they might be if this were real, but the restraints on the system made different things work.

“We'll lay down fire,” Santos said.

“Okay, you want we should elephant walk the shells?”

“¿Qué?”
Santos said.

“It is a pattern, better than just a grid, because it forces your enemy to fall back behind the fire. You lay a diagonal line of fire, and then another line behind it, and then another line behind it. See, they will go back, away from the line up towards 13.4, 13.3,” he pointed to the coordinates. “Then after they learn our pattern, say five, six rounds, we fire on their position, where we think they have run, where we gave them to run. Then if we have enough shells, we can do again.”

Santos nodded. “Okay. Okay. This, this is what they do in real war, right?”

“Yes,” David said. Of course, in a real battle he would probably prefer to set the gun emplacement and fall back, so when the firing started they would not be targeted. But that wouldn't work if Fido was going to follow him around. Santos told him that if they got up, the Kesslers would stop firing and follow them.

Santos showed him how to set the guns and key in the pattern.

“Once we shoot, they will shoot back at us, no?” David said.

“Si, they'll have our position.”

It was only a game. It didn't matter. Still, it made him uncomfortable, knowing he was going to be exposed. Maybe they would get lucky, take out the other team's guns. “Okay, Fido,” he said, “it's time.”

The sound from the Kesslers was startlingly loud. The sound deafened him and he closed his eyes, feeling the handlebars, the treadmill, the visor resting on his forehead. “Fuck,” he said to nothing in particular.

The krump krump krump krump of the mortars across the grassland was pretty realistic, too, he thought. But now the others had their range. His only hope was that they were too busy running to stop and fire. Krump krump krump krump. Krump krump krump krump. Elephant walking. He'd seen the fucking elephant, like the Australians said when someone got wounded or killed.