That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (28 page)

My avatar was a thrown
-together collage of tattoos, liquids and volcanic light in a loosely humanoid form. It had stars in its eyes, tiny suns and meteors dancing around like tadpoles in the oozy pupils. I didn’t tell her I was only seventeen. I assumed my youth was obvious.

‘
I’d like to,’ I said. In the absence of a mouth to smile with I made my face do a coruscating shimmy.

She handed me a mandala
-shaped passkey and faded out of the V-lounge.

When I visited her in her tower beside the tropical, madly turquoise sea that was also hers, I wore a new avatar that was basically me as I am in the flesh, tweaked to be a little more athletic of build and chiselled of profile than me au naturel. I liked the way it looked in the maroon pleated slacks and white open-collared shirt I’d chosen for a costume, but I was less happy with the face. With my tourist-class moodware – even though I’d forked out for the Artiface extension – I wasn’t able to achieve a really lifelike quality of expression.

Apart from wardrobe switches between classy outfits, Melusine
’s avatar never changed. She looked more like a real human than anyone I’d ever met in V. One day I got around to telling her this. Our avatars had been lovers for a few weeks, and I was starting to love more than just the sensations of being with her. We were sitting in cane armchairs in the circular space she called the tea room, though we never drank tea there. A drone in a white caftan brought us gin and tonics and panatelas out of a carved humidor. The room was decorated with old prints and dwarf palms in African pots. Big windows faced the sea, where dhows and a couple of sailing schooners were drifting around in a world of sun-ignited blue. You could hear the sea and the murmur of the town below the tower.

‘
Well, the server plays a part,’ Melusine said, looking out at her world. ‘But it isn’t only that. Reality comes with age. A sapling isn’t a tree, a caterpillar isn’t a butterfly. Until you get there, you can only fake it. No matter what we do, the soul shows its stuff, even in here. Perhaps especially in here.’

I raised an eyebrow.
‘If you don’t think I exist every bit as much as you do, just because I’m young, then you’d better ditch me for an ageing lothario.’

‘
My dear Zack, I
am
an ageing lothario. Anyhow, I was complimenting you. Young people are stage magicians, and for that I like you. If I were so fond of reality, would I have had myself lifted? I doubt the poor old carcass is worth much of a look these days.’

She claimed to have been one of the very first migrants out of the flesh:
‘When there were great beasts on the earth, Zack. When many a marvel existed in the world, I also existed.’

After a pause in which she drained her glass, she said,
‘For crying out loud, don’t listen when I talk through my hat. Or do listen, but notice the hat.’ Then she changed the subject. ‘Shall we go and see what the trade winds have brought in?’

‘
Sure,’ I said.

Technically, we didn
’t have to walk down the stairs. We could have just jumped out of the window, but then we’d have missed all the glass and mosaic and gold and silver treasures Melusine kept in niches on the staircase. It was all clip art, she’d confided to me – but she had good taste.

In this phase of her life she was a collector, she said
– ‘but only of bargains.’ Beachcombing was one way she could get something for nothing. Queuing in the soup kitchen of art, she called it. Her crying poor was obviously an affectation. Poor people didn’t get lifted.

At the bottom of the stairs we went through a blue door with a fanlight, out into the garden of palms and oleanders. A walk under the trees took us down to the sunny, weathered town of whitewashed houses that followed a relaxed maze of streets. Dark
-skinned drones simulated a bustling population. The slightly breezy warmth of the air and its salty ocean smell were particularly well done.

The weather was
the same whenever I’d been there. ‘Really it ought to be hotter than this,’ Melusine had said. ‘But this is my perfect day.’

She had told me she was born in Zanzibar and that the town was based on the island
’s old capital, Stone Town. Many of the houses had the carved doors the real Stone Town was famous for. However, from other conversations we’d had it was obvious that she placed Zanzibar on the wrong side of Africa, off the coast of Gabon.

Though it could have been that she had simply forgotten the real world
’s geography, I wondered if she had never known where Zanzibar was, and had made up the story about her origins. I didn’t mind. Who ever tells the truth in V? Besides, when half the veebooters you meet are pretending to be vampires and ETs, a not-quite-Zanzibar seems a modest fiction. And perhaps she had deliberately put her Zanzibar in the wrong place.

We went down to the beach via a stair between walls covered in scarlet bougainvillea. It was your smooth white sand and coconut palms kind of beach, with lulling, sparkling wavelets, and parrots and gulls for colour and noise. Efficient shark programs patrolled the water. I
’d never seen a single porn bottle or other spam object on the sand. Melusine used the beach as the portal for an open art gallery she subscribed to. A lot of rubbish washed ashore, as you’d expect, but so did beautiful and intriguing pieces. She took what she liked, including some of the rubbish, and put it in a room at the top of her tower.

I followed her down to the cove where the daily quota of offerings came in. Several dozen items lay in a bed of seaweed on the damp sand. I stored my shoes and sat down with my feet in the waves while Melusine looked through it all. I was always interested to see what took her fancy
.

Today she set aside a dramatic photo of sunrise on a Mars base, a barrel of cartoon monkeys that performed acrobatics when you poured them out, and a short film, in a framed screen, of a young man lying nude on a sofa, sleeping fitfully and sometimes waking and speaking to the camera. But her find of the day was a rosewood cane with an ivory tiger
’s head for a knob. She gave a low whistle when she noticed it, and lifted it out of the seaweed with a look of delight. She pointed out the realism of the materials and the fine detail in the carving, and handed it to me so that I could feel the weight and texture of it for myself. It was heavier than I had expected. I could imagine swinging it in a brawl and cracking the kneecaps and skulls of the less well equipped. The ivory beast was roaring, showing its teeth and a long dark throat. Its expression was more than ferocious; it was horrid. I handed the cane back to Melusine.

‘
I think he’s a man-eater, don’t you, Zack?’ She jiggled the tiger’s head at me.

‘
What an evil thing. He certainly looks annoyed about something.’

‘
He is angry because he doesn’t exist, except here. An angry ghost.’

At that moment, in her avatar
’s subtly changed expression, I saw things I didn’t remotely understand. I was almost frightened. I wondered whether the human race had changed a great deal since her day.

‘
The maker’s muse must have been some hooligan or loony he met on a dark night,’ she said. ‘I like that idea.’

‘
He or she,’ I said.

I thought she probably liked it for much the same reasons that I liked her, but
I felt too shy to say such a thing. She took the cane and the other three offerings and left the rest. The sea would take them back. I played porter, carrying the items of secondary interest, while Melusine carried the cane like a royal sceptre. She stopped once in the street on the way back and flung her arms wide, pointing the cane towards her tower. She cried:

‘
I am the Boss of Zanzibar! Tribute is sent to me from far lands and my desires are the law!’

She only just managed to finish this pronouncement before we both started laughing.

‘The drones ought to be cheering,’ I said, looking at the faces in the street, some of which had turned towards us.

‘
They’re not programmed to care much about what I do,’ she said.

‘
Well, I’ll cheer you then. Hip, hip, hooray!’

Her smile stiffened in place and I realised her mood had changed.

She was happy again by the time we returned to the tower.

In the highest room, which she called the Lost and Found, there was a great amount of stuff from the beach, all in disorder. Much more was in storage, represented by boxes and suitcases. She did a bit of filing while I was there, and put her new acquisitions on display, except for the cane, which she took with her as we descended to the tea room. My time warning plughole gurgled.

Melusine sat with the cane across her lap.

‘Tell me honestly, do you really believe a person accrues reality as they age?’ I asked her over a final drink.

‘
It is my opinion,’ she said, ‘that in a young person the soul projects itself out onto the world, casting about for receptive surfaces. The half-formed identity needs to see itself in order to check on its progress. Every day it hopes to glimpse the mysterious telos towards which it senses itself travelling. The soul comes to the face and leaves signs of itself there first of all. To read the soul in the face requires a mirror, of course, which is why youth is forever peering into the looking-glass: natural curiosity, rather than vanity, is the reason. If the hand becomes involved it writes graffiti. Generally speaking, everything a young person writes is graffiti. Ochre handprints on a cave wall.’

I tried not to feel insulted.

‘I think some people really do see that glimpse in the mirror,’ she went on, ‘and then they know who they are and what they’re going to do, and they do it. But not everyone gets the glimpse, and when the years go by without it there’s just a gradual process of becoming used to one’s uncertain self. Perhaps I could say that the soul goes native. The territory of one’s own identity never ceases being strange, but it ceases being exotic. It’s then that you stop seeking your own reflection so obsessively. Then a wonderful thing will happen. The soul begins to turn its focus around, until it has swung a hundred and eighty degrees. When this state is achieved, you’re finally seeing the world. You become receptive. Not receptive like a child; children are simply programmed to be sponges, and they can’t help it. I mean that you stop insisting on working, doing, giving, making, teaching, nourishing. You’re glad to stand at the other end. You stop wanting to make an impression on the world and start hoping the world will make an impression on you. And the world obliges. It soaks into you. It puts its weight and history into you. It makes you real in a way that you, standing heroically by yourself, cannot hope to do.’

I smiled slightly.
‘I guess I’ll have to wait and see what happens.’

‘
You will.’ She thrust the cane at me and roared – a big cat’s roar she’d pulled out of a sound library. I jumped in my seat, which made her laugh.

‘
I have to go,’ I said.

‘
See you again, Zack.’

She waved, and I faded myself out.

Next time I visited, we went flying. Melusine had a birdflight program, but I preferred to just float, so that was what we did. We drifted over an archipelago of islands that extended beneath us as we rose higher through mild, gauzy wind currents. Bird calls and snatches of sea shanties peppered the air.

We returned to a mattress on a wooden balcony halfway up the tower. The midday call to prayer was rising from the town. Melusine had shut her eyes against the sun.

‘
I’m tired of most people,’ she said, ‘but not of my gigolo. Do you mind me calling you that? You’d be my gigolo in the real world.’

‘
You’re a dreadful old woman.’

‘
I am,’ she agreed. ‘A dreadful old woman who lives in a dreadful town of golems and likes dreadful things.’

‘
Except for me. I’m nice, and you like me, I hope.’