Out on Blue Six (5 page)

(Deep down under the rain and the clouds, down in the sleep-pod in the heart of the great city of Yu, Courtney Hall felt two large salt tears trace down her face.)

On she flew, through the place of the spirit powers, which, in their wisdom or their folly, had stooped low to touch the earth and bring the Compassionate Society out of the chaos of the Break. And then she saw it, glimpsed through the flickerings and phasings of the Celestials, something so remote that she knew it must be of stupendous size to be visible from the edge of heaven. A line of black that reached out seemingly to infinity, yet which closed behind her, a border of black circling the world. The edge. On she flew, and drawing closer, she saw that the line of black reached both outward and upward; high, she reasoned, but not so high that it had no upper boundary. Closer yet, and she saw that it was a wall of black bricks clean and smooth as obsidian, perfectly adamantine, perfectly untouchable. “Up we go, up we go,” she whistled to herself, and as she did, she noticed how the light caught the obsidian bricks at just such an angle that each brick seemed to have a face carved upon it. A wall of souls. “Up we go, up we go, up we go!” she shouted, and up she went, up beyond even the place of the gods, up and up and up until the breath was exploding in her lungs and the muscles in her legs blazed with cramps. With her last breath and final erg of energy she topped the wall (sharp-edged as the razor of wisdom) and saw what lay beyond.

Then a wind came tearing out of that place beyond and sent her spinning, plummeting toward the clouds. Blackness—she had lost consciousness of both her hallucinatory and earth-bound self. Out of the panic she somehow found the key to sanity and opened the door into the light. She found herself once more pedaling the silver flapping machine through the chasms and abysses of Yu. Over her shoulder was a sack, as if she were Siddhi Befana, Patroness of the Winter Solstice and bestower of gifts upon the worthy, and as she swooped above the upturned faces of the manswarm (look, oh look at her, isn’t it wonderful, magical, marvelous?) she seized great handfuls of paper and Stardust from her sack and sent them showering down upon the rain-weary heads of the citizens. And people of every caste and subcaste and sept and clan scrambled to grab some Stardust and paper, and what they found in their clutching hands sent them to their knees in joy and sadness. On each twinkling scrap of paper Courtney Hall had drawn what she had glimpsed in that instant of the things that lay beyond the wall, the things the Compassionate Society had pushed away and abandoned and forgotten, the old things, the things of wonder and terror and joy and pain.

And she was back.

Early-morning rain dripped from the corroded girders of the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel. She heard it tip-tap-tip on the skin of her sleep-pod. And she heard another thing, the engine-thunder of a Love Police pantycar dopplering in low over the pantiles of Old Toltethren, chasing something bright and blue-silver and elusive as the reflection of a song through the edge of morning.

Doubting ended. Faith restored. What to do, how it must be done, and why; clear and unambiguous as the whisper of an archangel. Rebirth from the womb of a synthetic sleep-pod. Courtney Hall grinned.

The Enchanted Unicorn chocolate shop was perched on a stone ledge halfway up the artificial ravine that was Chrysanthemum of Heavenly Rest Mall. Courtney Hall sat at a table for one and watched gossamer-frail myke-lytes turning lazily in the gulf between the bustling, shop-lined walls. Her fingers, she discovered, were moving of their own accord, a sinister alliance of subconscious with motor reflexes, drawing with fiberpen on a paper napkin. Her fingers had felt naked without a fiberpen between them ever since she had left Armitage-Weir, and the first shop she had visited in Heavenly Rest Mall had been an artists’ supplier. And what was it pen and fingers had drawn? What else.

Wee Wendy Waif. As she could be. As she should be. As she would be. Now. Courtney Hall’s smile was as bitter as her chocolate. She paid the little anachronist girl (Marie Antoinette) on the till and went in search of Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard.

Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard, Scorpio, had been early into his year out on blue six (the compulsory yearlong
wanderjahr
all young Scorpios undertook before returning to their keeps and employment for life with the TAOS Consortium) when Courtney Hall first came searching for his spun-glass cocoon that hung—surprising fruit—from one of the tendrils of the giant geneform clematis covering the east end of the Mall. Once you knew where to look, Yu was full of little nests and hideaways where the Scorpio young spent their time out in the city. She’d been in need of background material for a time-travel fantasy sequence that wafted Wee Wendy Waif to the mid-twenty-first century Gregorian when society finally, and relievedly, fell apart in the upheavals of the Break. Such information could only be accessed through application to the Ministry of Pain Prehistoric Records Division, but as usual, her deadline had come and gone for the third, fourth, fifth time, so she was forced to employ less orthodox tactics. It had taken twelve seconds for the Scorpio’s brain lynked into the city-wide datanet to pull her fish out of the ocean of tellix codes, accesses, files, Lares and Penates nets, and the lofty, luminous ziggurats of the Polytheon. Now, almost three seasons later, the Cap’n’s preparations to return to Chapter and Keep were complete. Still he seemed glad to be performing one final service for Courtney Hall before turning the cocoon’s units over to his successor.

“So, whazzit dis time, cizzen? More old movies?” As a caste, Scorpios possessed remarkable memories, even without the assistance of the memory chips they wore braided into their dreadlocks.

“Something different this time. Something a little more … challenging.”

“Say what?” A true craftsman, Cap’n Black Lightnin’ performed his services for love of his skill, a sentiment with which Courtney Hall could sympathize.

“I’d like you to locate the access codes to the Armitage-Weir compositing system”—he was grinning already—“and slip this in, in place of the regular Wee Wendy Waif cartoon.”

“Cizzen, you make my twilight days bright.” Lean bone fingers flexed and cracked to address themselves to the quest. Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard, summoned his holographic familiars and was taken up in the cybertrance that wheeled his consciousness out along each of the million billion axons of Yu’s nervous system.

They say the whole city is alive, aware, at a level of consciousness totally alien to any we can know, Courtney Hall mused. Spooky.

Cap’n Black Lightnin’ gave a shuddering sigh, dismissed his communicants with a wave of his ectomorphic arms. “Got it.” The cybertrance had lasted forty-four seconds. He ran the cartoon through the scanner. “Neh, what is it about this cartoon’s special, neh? Art?” Courtney Hall felt deeply disappointed. Most Scorpios were functional illiterates but that was no excuse. Some of her biggest fans had been Scorpios. He returned the scanned cartoon, already worming its way through the Armitage-Weir computer system toward the laser printers of tomorrow’s newsstands. “There you go, cizzen. Many thankings.”

Back into the manswarm again.

The door startled her. It startled her because it was her door, 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West arcology. Damned absentmindedness and old engrained habit. Wonder what it’s like, have they started work yet, go on, one teeny tiny peek.

Rain and rust and ruin. Carpetgrass dead slime. That made her very sad. Maybe it hadn’t matched Marcus Forde’s, but she had loved her carpetgrass. So had Dario; then; once. Walls still frozen in dull, dumb buff. Dripping concrete, corroded tear-tracks where acid rain had cried down exposed metal. The stench from Benji Dog’s decomposing biocircuitry was really rather sad.

If she had had a new famulus, or even this poor old smashed famulus, or any famulus at all, she might have never done what she had just done. She could not decide whether that was a good or bad thing.

She spent that night out on the Nightwalk, down on street zero with the wet, monsoon-bedraggled zooks and zillies, splashing through the neon puddles to the hot, smoking lure of the next Salsa Salon or Jazz-Hot Klub, down along the Marilenastrasse where the paper lanterns swayed in the warm wind and on every street corner and in every window wingers waited in sexual ambush for each other; and in the still, small hours when the teams of street cleaners came whining and vacuuming over the cobbles, wiping away another day’s empty noodle cartons and foamstyrene chocolate cups and discarded tram tickets, she went underground to ride the booming shunting tunnels of the
pneumatique municipal
. She looked at the faces of the off-shifting workers, gray and featureless as paper handkerchiefs. She could not go back. To the Transients’ Hostel. To Kilimanjaro West, her home. To Armitage-Weir and her warm, friendly office. Home. She sat, crushed by a sense of looming inevitability ponderous as a falling moon. She tried to summon the sixteen-o’clock dream, but out of its time and element, it failed to materialize. What dreams she had were grinding things of towers and canyon-deep streets and a shadow tall as all the world looming over them, the shadow of the Ministry of Pain and the great black cube called West One that was its semilegendary Department of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. West One, where the PainCriminals went … and came out as someone else. Where Grissom Bunt, Category Twelve PainCriminal, whoever he was, had gone. From which Grissom Bunt would never emerge again. Not as Grissom Bunt. She pictured a shaved naked skull crisscrossed with blue-ridged suture lines, heard a voice saying, “I wouldn’t hurt a fly, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t hurt a fly …” And then the skull opened up like sections of an orange along the fissure lines, and black things like vile bats came flocking up into her face …

She woke with a scream to find it was morning. She left the
pneumatique
at the next stop and went to see what she had done to the world.

Whatever she had started started small. Small moues of facial angst in the lines for the newssheet booths. Small twitches of puzzlement in the faces of prollets lined up at the municipal tram halts; small smiles of delight on the faces of a group of tlakhs gathered by a poster-pillar; small, but growing, spreading like ripples into circles of pleasure and confusion and anger that impinged upon and interfered with each other to form new patterns of emotion as people turned to their neighbors in the cablecar line and pedicab rank to question, to talk, to argue, to console, and to draw together into eddies of opinion, whirlpools of controversy. Defying all customs of caste and creed, citizens gravitated to each other to debate significance, express consternation, throw newssheets fresh from the vendor’s printer to the cobbles and trample them underfoot. The workaday hum of Clarksgrad Plaza swelled to a hubbub, a bedlam as newssheets were snatched from readers’ hands, snatched back; there were arguments—arguments!—waving arms, red faces, an anarchy of shouting voices. The wet wind took up the shredded papers and plastered them like accusations on the wooden shrine of the plaza’s presiding spirit. As Courtney Hall passed through the streets of Great Yu, it was repeated at every tram halt, every public breakfast stall, every Food Corps costermonger’s barrow, anger and confusion and shouting voices, a ball of confusion gathering a thousand, ten thousand, a million, ten million souls into itself as it rolled behind Courtney Hall through the boulevards of Yu. And passing down Heavenly Harmony Boulevard, she saw the hot-noodle stalls and the shrines and the public confessoriums and the chocolate carts and the scribes’ booths—all empty; she saw people who could not even read thrust arms, hands, fingers through the press of bodies around the news-vendors’ machines to tear a sheet fresh off the printer and struggle to understand just what it was in those squiggling lines that was standing the world on its head.

Amazing how a simple satire on satire could have such an effect. Courtney Hall nodded to her old rival, the TAOS girl, performing her rituals and observances unseen above all the bowed heads. “How is it, O wonderful TAOS girl,” declaimed Courtney Hall, “that this best possible world of happiness and painlessness is so fragile that one little nip at its ankles by one woman, one yulp, one cartoonist, can set the whole thing teetering and tottering?”

Wickedly pleased, she continued on her way, sowing demon seeds of anarchy and confusion, and she came in time to the yellow-brick terrazzo between the twin frustra of her old home, Kilimanjaro West and Kilimanjaro East arcologies. She turned to the mobbing people. “Ladies and gentlemen, cizzens, I give you—satire!” No one heard her.

And then she saw it. Like one of the angels of the Panegyrist Creation Song, it fell from the clouds, a thing all black and silver. And dreadfully familiar. Courtney Hall watched it fall from the clouds and ram itself through the window of level 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West. Which the file-toothed bowlerboy, the trog in the strength-amplifying cyberharness, and the migro with the bean-paste sandwiches from Environmental Maintenance had just finished repairing. Causing said file-toothed bowlerboy, trog in cyberharness, and migro with luncheon problem to, physically as well as metaphorically, soil their vestments as they were invited to examine, at close range, the emission heads of nine Love Police luvguns.

“Citizen Courtney Hall of the yulp caste, in the name of the Compassionate Society, you are under arrest for a Category Eight PainCrime violation; namely that you did, at or about twenty-thirty of the previous day, unlawfully gain access to, and utilize, a restricted security code, and through use of same, did with full cognizance and malice aforethought cause the general publication of Material Detrimental to the General Populace as specified under Section 29C, Paragraph 12, subsection 6, of the Social Responsibility (Publications and Mass Media) Act: Satire, Irony, and Associated Nonconstructive Criticism. Have you anything to say for yourself?”

“Sergeant …”

“Have you anything to say for yourself?”

“Sergeant …”