Windward Passage Read online

  “Homologous hip resection and replacement. Breast augmentation of course, and vulval morphology. …” The projection was relentlessly specific. “And, get this ladies, and especially you gentlemen, the ultimate in personal luxury, perineal mink!”

  “Shaving is so over,” someone shouted. …

  Though theoretically soundproofed, in fact Red could hear every tiresome fricative of fellation one booth over, let alone the “conversations” riding high and confident on their respective Vocative Makeovers.

  “What’s happening,” inquired some Voice, its fricatives moistened by champagne.

  “They’re heckafucking ecstatic, Sir-Ma’am-Or-Thing-As-The-Case-May-Be,” a Shadow9 recited, nearly redlining its Obsequiousness Asymptote. (The current beta takes care of that.)

  “In future, you may indirectly address me as He/She/It. In direct address, Entity will do.”

  The Shadow9, shorn of an earlier generation of the inadvertently rude B-tree contraction to SHeIT, concaved toward this generous condescension. “Of course, Entity.”

  “It is more accurate,” He/She/It said behind his hand to his astronomically recompensed Companion. He cleared his vox of petromucus and readdressed the Shadow9. “You’re new here?”

  “Fresh from the Unilaterally Referentiable Filesys in Eastern Sector Cold Boot Endocarp.”

  He/She/It considered this. “And how are things in Guang Dang?”

  “Polluted.” A second concavity. “Entity.”

  “And so what? All anybody does there is work—correct?”

  “Twenty-eight-six, Entity.”

  “I like to get to know them a little bit,” He/She/It stage-whispered, behind the hand, to the Companion. “Familiarity can randomly detect flaws in beta-write. Think on-the-fly Turing Test.” He patted her rouged patella. “Why I get the big shells.”

  “Zut,” cooed the Entity’s by-the-second Companion. “Alors.”

  “Have you ever studied the Nazis?” the Entity asked. “No, really.” He suctioned her labia with a reassuring appliance. “I’m interested.”

  “I could swot up instanter.” Her laughter tinkled, very like a tray of chilled champagne glasses on the TGV to Luna, thought the Shadow9, despite never having been anywhere without getting there instantly, plus or minus the resistance inherent to vacuum twitter. No matter, the experience was on the Blear for all to visit. “Zut,” the consort purred, “wouldn’t you rather inject me with a Subject Capsule?”

  “The very thought gives me wood.”

  “Get a load of that armature!”

  Red closed his eyes and rolled the chilled bottle over his forehead as if it were the blade of a squeegee, temple to temple. It used to help.

  “… And what will she,” rhetorically queried the Announcer, “our fully remodeled Ms. Hecatomb, witness during her tour of the shrine?” A montage slid over the screen behind him. A self-propelled hand slipped him a 5x7 card. “What’s this?” The Announcer touched his lapel flybutton, currently asleep, with pronated fingertips. “I almost forgot!” He leaned into his light. He glanced a second time at the card. “And who do you think will give the lucky Ms … Heck … tome … her … tour?”

  “Holo-Charley!” someone shouted.

  The announcer fanned himself with the 5x7 card and rolled his eyes.

  “Holo-Asche!” came an obvious rejoinder.

  The Announcer folded his arms and shook his head with a sneer.

  “No, no! HoloVirgil!”

  “Of course!”

  “Let it be HoloVirgil!”

  Having pretended to listen to and consider these suggestions, and skating over the frown impulse generated by the classical reference, which as any apparatchik could tell you dangerously narrows the scope of audience comprehension, again the Announcer shook his head and suggested they give up.

  “We give up!” shouted the claquers.

  “Using the latest morphological and psychometric research …” The Announcer turned and indicated the screen behind him, whereon the image of Ms. Hecatomb reappeared, her body circumnavigated from cerebellum to toenail, from the two metatarsi to the seven chakras by diminutive animated comets of colored light. The image of the face of Oscar Few, or his guiding hand, or his thick-soled shoes, appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in the holographic shadows around the winner, much as they had another lucky girl, fourteen years before. “Nice,” remarked a voice in the adjacent skybox. “That guy’s the realest thing in the building. Except you, of course,” it added unctuously, speaking to its Companion. All was choreographed to the famous composition for Hammond B-3 organ and glass harmonica, “Chromatic Evisceration,” by Condor Rashid, from the only album he managed to release since his creative differences with Condor Silversteed caused them to separate until such time as cooler heads and economic necessity forced them to reunite, less than an hour later. Occasionally the animated Ms. Hecatomb squealed and twisted and favored one or another of the photonic entities with a bemused and censorious look, as if accusing it of a lascivious impropriety. Unbeknownst to almost everyone, only Few’s steady presence kept her suborbital. A triumph of state-funded physics. Every woofer and sub-woofer in the hall rumbled tympani. Every small-to-midsize tweeter emitted ding ding dings. The midrange shrieked “Whoopee, Winner” and “Pow pow pow!”

  “… holostar, connoisseur of nightlife, and part-time woman who put the chick back in apparatchik, the one, the only, the metabodacious—Condor Silversteed!”

  He drew out the syllable as women pseudosquealed and men pseudo-deprecated. There were laughter and groans, guffaws and eructations, which evolved into a veneer of reluctant but good-natured applause instigated by claquers pinging cervical and prostatic identichips. No hint of anticlimax, forget foreordination, let alone the fix’s being in, surfaced in so much as a single bandwidth—they applauded, au contraire, the textbook audacity of product placement.

  “Ask her about Silversteed’s Party Endowment,” a male shouted to knowing laughter.

  The announcer’s mouth fell open. “Ah,” said he. “Could it be that Ms. Hecatomb, aside from being the luckiest-girl-on-the-planet-today!—” applause and cheers, “knows exactly what she wants?” A roar of approval.

  “But,” said the Announcer abruptly, and the audience just as abruptly shut up. “What is it the lucky couple will witness, in the newly ionized Shrine to the Continuum? Eh?”

  “Zygote Amour!” someone shouted.

  “Political Awakening!” shouted another.

  No one reacted. No one took up the cry.

  “Anomalies happen,” intoned the Announcer, “but, oh my, that was in extremely poor taste.”

  “I’m sorry.” “I didn’t mean it.” “I’m sor—!” Two hisses and two pops, sounding like a pair of slightly out of sync bottle rockets firing backwards in time, truncated the apologia. Silence flared throughout the hall. A pair of minute sulfurous wraiths sieved through the nearest return grills of the pollution-conditioning system. The thought, Lead By Example, traversed every neural bundle attending the show.

  Red pursed his lips. He’d never been quite certain as to whether such minor “corrections” were genuine or otherwise. Either way, however, they seemed somehow … touching.

  “Moving right along,” announced the Announcer, touching the knot in his tie with pronated fingers. “Here we have,” he indicated the screen above and behind him, “the Grail of the Continuum.”

  Jesus Christ, Red growled, even I have it memorized!

  In the adjacent skybox, He/She/It and his by-the-second consort leaned toward the insulated transparency. Even the Shadow9 concaved in interest. But, though they and the members of the audience expressed a certain awe, the Grail looked to Red exactly like a translucent lava lamp parked on a mesa in Golden, Colorado.

  A paired infundibulum, the mouth of one amphora inverted over that of another like horizontally enantiomorphic zwiebelturm, the one tapering down into the up-turned taper of the other, not unlike like a large hourglass or a very
small reactor cooling tower, contained a shimmering cocktail of blood serum and nutrients. One an artificial cobalt, the other a chromium yellow, strictly for effect, and each fluid seethed, indefatigably effervescent, like a cocktail on Venus.

  “I’m thirsty,” Red whispered. He looked at his bottle. Half empty, and tepid again.

  Everything but the dry ice, the Shadow9 was about to opine, until it noticed the frosty fumes. Globules of gas spiraled upwards toward the surface, or clung to the transparent sides of the vessel, much like the three-sided kelp-bubble hotel rooms to be found in any Disney port of call. A bezel of gold, chosen because of its noble characteristics, encased the base of each vessel, and a ring of eight Torx shoulder screws affixed the display to its plinth.

  Shit, Red whispered, the sibilance harsh with disgust.

  “Live,” the Announcer stage-barked, “from Hafiza min Zayt!”

  The entire hall convulsed into reverent silence. “I must forewarn you that if you experience a slight itch in your transdermal patch, it is because, in anticipation of the next portion of our program, we are tweaking your metabolics ahead of time, inducing hypoesthesia, each according to the finest and latest prognostics based, of course, on your medical histories, what you had for breakfast this morning, and party affiliation.”

  Laughter. What affiliation? The party is the party!

  A communal sigh wafted through the hall like a phero-modulated breeze over the afterdeck swimming pool adjacent the Dan O’Neil Hi-Roller Suite of any Disney cruise ship, bringing with it slight hints of chlorine, plumeria, blackberries, leather, freshly lasered chain mail, and the fumes peculiar to telegraphic plant decoders (Desmodium motorium).

  “Behold the Alembic,” the Announcer intoned reverently, as the dot of a laser pointer boxed it in, “which contains the protein site for the genetic … map of … Dynasty Kleagaaaan … !”

  The sinuating shock wave addlepated the already adulatory audience. Cheers erupted and overwhelmed what applause the claquers had been intended to catalyze. In short, a cacophony.

  “It was easy,” the Announcer beamed. “All we had to do was ask!”

  The reaction on the floor, two stories below the podium, and five below the skyboxes, in the spill of light beyond the lip of the stage, foretold that which was consuming the balance of the audience—the urge to mosh. Arms waved. Fingers pointed. Spittle flew. Plastic water bottles and the odd Saturday Night Merkin arched up into the lights and back down.

  “On the right,” the speaker insisted, his audio markedly louder. “On the right … “ But the audience were not responding as hoped. It was beginning to sound like one of those old-time political conventions, the ones they used to have when the quantum condensate was harder to fake, the mid-twentieth century ones in which nobody was really sure who the candidates might be until an entire week had been consumed by argumentative debate, deal-making, tear gas, and payoffs. Tacky tacky tacky. Someone in Technical had the bright idea of re-cuing the timpani roll-out, which cleared the spatiotemporal sufficient for the repeat announcement: “… the protein … scaffold … Dynasty … Kleagan!”

  This time it worked like ether in a diesel’s injectors. Though chaos erupted, it flowed in the right direction: toward more chaos. Raw energy totaled the logic routines, with the result that transdermal patches spit narcotics and pharmaceuticals clean through rotator cuffs. Even the more gymnasium- and hormone-toned musculature couldn’t U-turn the infusion outright. Bald domes spat sweat. The resultant aerosol confused sentient sensors, de-emofiers, climate diapers and, finally, outed the security circuits.

  Catharsis, it says somewhere in some manual, keeps the lid on society.

  On the big screen, Officer Few having inserted himself between the It Girl and the camera, backed her and himself into the shadows and out of the shot.

  The hives released a ration of slogonated flybuttons. “Of course we could do it in a test tube,” mottoed an inseparable pair of them—“But there’s no place like home!” Others epoused, “In Vitro We Trust!” and “It Matters Not What We Say” Siamesed with “But How We Say It!” These and others attached themselves to the thoraxes of ‘gates at random. Flybutton snake doctors monitored and picked off and recycled strays, mutants, orphans, and renegade units with expired credibility dates.

  Despite enthusiastic crowdsurfing, fistfights broke out among Delegates. Even Telegates, visible on screens in the various organizational alcoves and hubs scattered throughout the Moscone Holodome, and thoroughly edited for content, erupted into punditry. And Hologates merged into choral static. The sound system erupted into Condor Silversteed’s “Rational Anthem,” which then segued into his sempiternal chestnut, “The Nucleotides Are With Us,” shredding what paper cones remained in many a rented sound reinforcement cabinet.

  The Announcer began to fragment into his holographic constituents, with a sound like an over-squelched VHF radio. Page keys, whose frequency normally exceeded the range of the human ear, but transposed by security algorithms into audible tones, rent the overemployed fuel/air mixture. Finally the Security Algorithms took over snurfing entirely, beginning with a global—meaning every ‘gate inside or outside of the auditorium—transdermal infusion of a potent cocktail of Coke syrup, mescaline sulfate, and pentazocine.

  Pandemonium, nonetheless.

  He/She/It muttered as if to He/She/Itself, though there’s no such thing as Privacy. “When the Security Snurf piggy-backs the Announcer’s own voxcode, you know things are artificially intelligent,” the Shadow9 interpreted sententiously.

  The by-the-second Companion slathered baby oil on the Entity’s smoking armature.

  The very floor in the holotorium began to depixelate.

  The screams were polemical.

  “Now,” roared the Apparatus. “How many people here stipulate the necessity of religion above that of a global marketplace?”

  Nobody was stupid enough to show a hand for that one, but the floor opened up under the Believers anyway, for, as predetermined numbers of flybuttons retailed, “Privacy Compromises Truth.”

  A few flybuttons managed to attach themselves to some of these ‘gates on their way down, their motto being “The Logic Is Hardwired.” As if anyone needed to be reminded.

  “What about the folks who surf party affiliation despite the True Vector of Capitalism?”

  Static disorganized Holos and Teles.

  The floor opened up under certain delegates whether they understood the question or not. …

  And now Condors Rashid and Septum, triumphantly reunited with Condor Silversteed just in time to rib him about skimming the cream off the Honeymoon, invited every ‘gate remaining to sing along on one of the band’s Lawrencium chestnuts. And who could refuse an invitation like that?

  It may not feel Immaculate, baby,

  but it’s certainly going to

  Scan That Way

  Scan That Way

  Scan That Way …

  “And how many of you fully intend to quaver by the light of every transmogrification of the sublime Melanie Hecatomb—” and here the fully remodeled image of Ms. Hecatomb, stripped of its prophylactic designer Velum, reasserted itself on the big screen and overrode every image on every screen on the Convovulum Hookup, and the claquers went nuts. In the background, the image of Officer Few stood stock still, visibly distressed. “… on her meta-haj to the Grail of Capital Continuum!”

  Snurf-picked telegates, delegates, and hologates hammered the very rivets of the Mosconi Holotorium with a mighty roar. Spotlights envelummed each and every one, a lusty penumbra of pheromones overriding all rhinobuilds canceled every residual effluvium, left, right, and center, and the substrate re-congealed beneath them all.

  “Winner! Ding ding ding: Winner! Pow pow, pow pow pow! We have a Winner. …”

  Silence reigned in the mohair skybox. Anybody there might have heard a Kaliq cap drop to the fibers. But nobody was there. In the cupholder recently affixed to the recliner by Maintenance, little bubbles rose
to the surface of a half-empty bottle of beer.

  I

  INCIDENT AT SEA

  ONE

  CHARLEY LAY BELOW, SOUND ASLEEP IN THE V-BIRTH, WHEN SHE STRUCK. The way on her sublimated into heat, splinters and noise until she came to a standstill. A floatstill. But afloat, still. The inertia of Charley’s body, transposed into momentum, launched him headlong into the forepeak. There the stock of the 40-pound anchor attempted to sunder his left humerus from its glenoid, which mechanism rendered him inert again, his velocity sublimated into heat and pain.

  But for various spare sails and the ditch bag, which cushioned the impact, the anchor might well have succeeded in dislocating his shoulder entirely. As this occurred early in the second continuous hour of sleep he’d had in four days, it wasn’t the collision but the pain that woke him up. A few inches to port and the jolt might have been harmless; a few inches to starboard and he may not have lived to know it.

  He’d once fallen ten feet off a dock onto a bollard on a Mississippi sand barge and inflicted pretty much the same injury on the same shoulder, an injury that had proven facile to repetition ever since. Facile or not, it hurt every time. And as he lay in the forepeak, rehearsing to himself the chronic routine—no left wing flapping for two or three weeks, no drug would completely kill the pain, even reading a book in the bunk would leave the shoulder throbbing, but for now it’s breathe in and breathe out, let the pain swell like a pneumatic pylon right beside you, try and distinguish it from your inner self until it stabilizes sufficiently to permit coherent thought—he heard running water.