Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (12 page)

And is she having joy. To waken out of the nightmare of being P. Burke and find herself a peri, a star-girl? On a yacht in paradise with no more to do than adorn herself and play with toys and attend revels and greet her friends—her, P. Burke, having friends!—and turn the right way for the holocams? Joy!

And it shows. One look at Delphi and the viewers know: DREAMS CAN COME TRUE.

Look at her riding pillion on Davy’s sea-bike, carrying an apoplectic macaw in a silver hoop. Oh,
Morton, let’s go there this winter!
Or learning the Japanese chinchona from that Kobe group, in a dress that looks like a blowtorch rising from one knee, and which should sell big in Texas.
Morton, is that real fire?
Happy, happy little girl!

And Davy. He’s her pet and her baby, and she loves to help him fix his red-gold hair. (P. Burke marveling, running Delphi’s fingers through the curls.) Of course Davy is one of Matt’s boys—not impotent exactly, but very
very
low drive. (Nobody knows exactly what Matt does with his bitty budget, but the boys are useful and one or two have made names.) He’s perfect for Delphi; in fact the psychomed lets her take him to bed, two kittens in a basket. Davy doesn’t mind the fact that Delphi “sleeps” like the dead. That’s when P. Burke is out of the body-waldo up at Carbondale, attending to her own depressing needs.

A funny thing about that. Most of her sleepy-time Delphi’s just a gently ticking lush little vegetable waiting for P. Burke to get back on the controls. But now and again Delphi all by herself smiles a bit or stirs in her “sleep.” Once she breathed a sound: “Yes.”

Under Carbondale P. Burke knows nothing. She’s asleep too, dreaming of Delphi, what else? But if the bushy Dr. Tesla had heard that single syllable, his bush would have turned snow white. Because Delphi is TURNED OFF.

He doesn’t. Davy is too dim to notice, and Delphi’s staff boss, Hopkins, wasn’t monitoring.

And they’ve all got something else to think about now, because the cold-fire dress sells half a million copies, and not only in Texas. The GTX computers already know it. When they correlate a minor demand for macaws in Alaska the problem comes to human attention: Delphi is something special.

It’s a problem, see, because Delphi is targeted on a limited consumer bracket. Now it turns out she has mass-pop potential—those macaws in
Fairbanks
, man!—it’s like trying to shoot mice with an ABM. A whole new ball game. Dr. Tesla and the fatherly Mr. Cantle start going around in headquarters circles and buddy-lunching together when they can get away from a seventh-level weasel boy who scares them both.

In the end it’s decided to ship Delphi down to the GTX holocam enclave in Chile to try a spot on one of the mainstream shows. (Never mind why an Infanta takes up acting.) The holocam complex occupies a couple of mountains where an observatory once used the clean air. Holocam total-environment shells are very expensive and electronically superstable. Inside them actors can move freely without going off-register, and the whole scene or any selected part will show up in the viewer’s home in complete three-di, so real you can look up their noses and much denser than you get from mobile rigs. You can blow a tit ten feet tall when there’s no molecular skiffle around.

The enclave looks—well, take everything you know about Hollywood-Burbank and throw it away. What Delphi sees coming down is a neat giant mushroom-farm, domes of all sizes up to monsters for the big games and stuff. It’s orderly. The idea that art thrives on creative flamboyance has long been torpedoed by proof that what art needs is computers. Because this showbiz has something TV and Hollywood never had—
automated inbuilt viewer feedback.
Samples, ratings, critics, polls? Forget it. With that carrier field you can get real-time response-sensor readouts from every receiver in the world, served up at your console. That started as a thingie to give the public more influence on content.

Yes.

Try it, man. You’re at the console. Slice to the sex-age-educ-econ-ethno-cetera audience of your choice and start. You can’t miss. Where the feedback warms up, give ‘em more of that. Warm—warmer—
hot!
You’ve hit it—the secret itch under those hides, the dream in those hearts. You don’t need to know its name. With your hand controlling all the input and your eye reading all the response, you can make them a god . . . and somebody’ll do the same for you.

But Delphi just sees rainbows, when she gets through the degaussing ports and the field relay and takes her first look at the insides of those shells. The next thing she sees is a team of shapers and technicians descending on her, and millisecond timers everywhere. The tropical leisure is finished. She’s in gigabuck mainstream now, at the funnel maw of the unceasing hose that’s pumping the sight and sound and flesh and blood and sobs and laughs and dreams of
reality
into the world’s happy head. Little Delphi is going plonk into a zillion homes in prime time and nothing is left to chance. Work!

And again Delphi proves apt. Of course it’s really P. Burke down under Carbondale who’s doing it, but who remembers that carcass? Certainly not P. Burke, she hasn’t spoken through her own mouth for months. Delphi doesn’t even recall dreaming of her when she wakes up.

As for the show itself, don’t bother. It’s gone on so long no living soul could unscramble the plotline. Delphi’s trial spot has something to do with a widow and her dead husband’s brother’s amnesia.

The flap comes after Delphi’s spots begin to flash out along the world-hose and the feedback appears. You’ve guessed it, of course. Sensational! As you’d say, they IDENTIFY.

The report actually says something like InskinEmp with a string of percentages, meaning that Delphi not only has it for anybody with a Y chromosome, but also for women and everything in between. It’s the sweet supernatural jackpot, the million-to-one.

Remember your Harlow? A sexpot, sure. But why did bitter hausfraus in Gary and Memphis know that the vanilla-ice-cream goddess with the white hair and crazy eyebrows was
their baby girl?
And write loving letters to Jean warning her that their husbands weren’t good enough for her? Why? The GTX analysts don’t know either, but they know what to do with it when it happens.

(Back in his bird sanctuary the old Infante spots it without benefit of computers and gazes thoughtfully at his bride in widow’s weeds. It might, he feels, be well to accelerate the completion of his studies.)

The excitement reaches down to the burrow under Carbondale where P. Burke gets two medical exams in a week and a chronically inflamed electrode is replaced. Nurse Fleming also gets an assistant who doesn’t do much nursing but is very interested in access doors and identity tabs.

And in Chile, little Delphi is promoted to a new home up among the stars’ residential spreads and a private jitney to carry her to work. For Hopkins there’s a new computer terminal and a full-time schedule man. What is the schedule crowded with?

Things.

And here begins the trouble. You probably saw that coming too.

“What does she think she is, a goddamn
consumer rep?
” Mr. Cantle’s fatherly face in Carbondale contorts.

“The girl’s upset,” Miss Fleming says stubbornly. “She
believes
that, what you told her about helping people and good new products.”

“They are good products,” Mr. Cantle snaps automatically, but his anger is under control. He hasn’t got where he is by irrelevant reactions.

“She says the plastic gave her a rash and the glo-pills made her dizzy.”

“Good god, she shouldn’t swallow them,” Dr. Tesla puts in agitatedly.

“You told her she’d use them,” persists Miss Fleming.

Mr. Cantle is busy figuring how to ease this problem to the feral-faced young man. What, was it a goose that lays golden eggs?

Whatever he says to Level Seven, down in Chile the offending products vanish. And a symbol goes into Delphi’s tank matrix, one that means roughly
Balance unit resistance against PR index.

This means that Delphi’s complaints will be endured as long as her Pop Response stays above a certain level. (What happens when it sinks need not concern us.) And to compensate, the price of her exposure-time rises again. She’s a regular on the show now and response is still climbing.

See her under the sizzling lasers, in a holocam shell set up as a walkway accident. (The show is guesting an acupuncture school shill.)

“I don’t think this new body-lift is safe,” Delphi’s saying. “It’s made a funny blue spot on me—look, Mr. Vere.”

She wiggles to show where the mini-gray pak that imparts a delicious sense of weightlessness is attached.

“So don’t leave it
on
, Dee. With your meat—watch that deckspot, it’s starting to synch.”

“But if I don’t wear it it isn’t honest. They should insulate it more or something, don’t you see?”

The show’s beloved old father, who is the casualty, gives a senile snigger.

“I’ll tell them,” Mr. Vere mutters. “Look now, as you step back bend like this so it just shows, see? And hold two beats.”

Obediently Delphi turns, and through the dazzle her eyes connect with a pair of strange dark ones. She squints. A quite young man is lounging alone by the port, apparently waiting to use the chamber.

Delphi’s used by now to young men looking at her with many peculiar expressions, but she isn’t used to what she gets here. A jolt of something somber and knowing.
Secrets.

“Eyes! Eyes, Dee!”

She moves through the routine, stealing peeks at the stranger. He stares back. He knows something.

When they let her go she comes shyly to him.

“Living wild, kitten.” Cool voice, hot underneath.

“What do you mean?”

“Dumping on the product. You trying to get dead?”

“But it isn’t right,” she tells him. “They don’t know, but I do, I’ve been wearing it.”

His cool is jolted.

“You’re out of your head.”

“Oh, they’ll see I’m right when they check it,” she explains. “They’re just so busy. When I tell them—”

He is staring down at little flower-face. His mouth opens, closes. “What are you doing in this sewer anyway? Who are you?”

Bewilderedly she says, “I’m Delphi.”

“Holy Zen.”

“What’s wrong? Who are you, please?”

Her people are moving her out now, nodding at him.

“Sorry we ran over, Mr. Uhunh,” the script girl says.

He mutters something, but it’s lost as her convoy bustles her toward the flower-decked jitney.

(Hear the click of an invisible ignition-train being armed?)

“Who was he?” Delphi asks her hairman.

The hairman is bending up and down from his knees as he works.

“Paul. Isham. Three,” he says and puts a comb in his mouth.

“Who’s that? I can’t see.”

He mumbles around the comb, meaning, “Are you jiving?” Because she has to be, in the middle of the GTX enclave.

Next day there’s a darkly smoldering face under a turban-towel when Delphi and the show’s paraplegic go to use the carbonated pool.

She looks.

He looks.

And the next day, too.

(Hear the automatic sequencer cutting in? The system couples, the fuels begin to travel.)

Poor old Isham senior. You have to feel sorry for a man who values order: when he begets young, genetic information is still transmitted in the old ape way. One minute it’s a happy midget with a rubber duck—look around and here’s this huge healthy stranger, opaquely emotional, running with god knows who. Questions are heard where there’s nothing to question, and eruptions claiming to be moral outrage. When this is called to Papa’s attention—it may take time, in that boardroom—Papa does what he can, but without immortality-juice the problem is worrisome.

And young Paul Isham is a bear. He’s bright and articulate and tender-souled and incessantly active, and he and his friends are choking with appallment at the world their fathers made. And it hasn’t taken Paul long to discover that
his
father’s house has many mansions and even the GTX computers can’t relate everything to everything else. He noses out a decaying project which adds up to something like, Sponsoring Marginal Creativity (the free-lance team that “discovered” Delphi was one such grantee). And from there it turns out that an agile lad named Isham can get his hands on a viable packet of GTX holocam facilities.

So here he is with his little band, way down the mushroom-farm mountain, busily spooling a show which has no relation to Delphi’s. It’s built on bizarre techniques and unsettling distortions pregnant with social protest. An
underground
expression to you.

All this isn’t unknown to his father, of course, but so far it has done nothing more than deepen Isham senior’s apprehensive frown.

Until Paul connects with Delphi.

And by the time Papa learns this, those invisible hypergolics have exploded, the energy-shells are rushing out. For Paul, you see, is the genuine article. He’s serious. He dreams. He even reads—for example,
Green Mansions
—and he wept fiercely when those fiends burned Rima alive.

When he hears that some new GTX pussy is making it big, he sneers and forgets it. He’s busy. He never connects the name with this little girl making her idiotic, doomed protest in the holocam chamber. This strangely simple little girl.

And she comes and looks up at him and he sees Rima, lost Rima the enchanted bird girl, and his unwired human heart goes twang.

And Rima turns out to be Delphi.

Do you need a map? The angry puzzlement. The rejection of the dissonance Rima-hustling-for-GTX-My-Father. Garbage, cannot be. The loitering around the pool to confirm the swindle . . . dark eyes hitting on blue wonder, jerky words exchanged in a peculiar stillness . . . the dreadful reorganization of the image into Rima-Delphi
in my Father’s tentacles—

You don’t need a map.

Nor for Delphi either, the girl who loved her gods. She’s seen their divine flesh close now, heard their unamplified voices call her name. She’s played their god-games, worn their garlands. She’s even become a goddess herself, though she doesn’t believe it. She’s not disenchanted, don’t think that. She’s still full of love. It’s just that some crazy kind of
hope
hasn’t—