Max found the agents for her, and a trio of awesomely slick junior partners Leared into YVR a day later. Lise wouldn’t come down to the Pilot to meet them, insisted we bring them up to Rubin’s, where she still slept. “Welcome to Couverville,” Rubin said as they edged in the door. His long face was smeared with grease, the fly of his ragged fatigue pants held more or less shut with a twisted paper clip. The boys grinned automatically, but there was something marginally more authentic about the girl’s smile. “Mr. Stark,” she said, “I was in London last week. I saw your installa- tion at the Tate.” “Marcello `s Battery Factory,” Rubin said. “They say it’s scatological, the Brits. . . .” He shrugged. “Brits. I mean, who knows?” “They’re right. It’s also very funny.” The boys were beaming like tabled-tanned light- houses, standing there in their suits. The demo had reached Los Angeles. They knew. “And you’re Lise,” she said, negotiating the path between Rubin’s heaped gomi. “You’re going to be a very famous person soon, Lise. We have a lot to dis- cuss. . And Lise just stood there, propped in polycarbon, and the look on her face was the one I’d seen that first night, in my condo, when she’d asked me if I wanted to go to bed. But if the junior agent lady saw it, she didn’t show it. She was a pro. I told myself that I was a pro, too. I told myself to relax.
Trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whip- ping their dark coats. Up in Fairview’s arty slum- tumble, someone’s laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheet standing out against the back- ground dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist’s eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates. Rubin clumps along in paint-spattered L. L. Bean gumshoes, his big head pulled down into an oversize fatigue jacket. Sometimes one of the hunched teens will point him out as we pass, the guy who builds all the crazy stuff, the robots and shit. “You know what your trouble is?” he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. “You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new tech- nology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise.” “She wasn’t the first.” Traffic drums past over- head. “No, but she’s sure as hell the first person you ever met who went and translated themself into a hardwired program. You lose any sleep when whatsisname did it, three-four years ago, the French kid, the writer?” “I didn’t really think about it, much. A gimmick. PR…” “He’s still writing. The weird thing is, he’s going to be writing, unless somebody blows up his main- frame.. . I wince, shake my head. “But it’s not him, is it? It’s just a program.” “Interesting point. Hard to say. With Lise, though, we find out. She’s not a writer.”
She had it all in there, Kings, locked up in her head the way her body was locked in that exoskeleton. The agents signed her with a label and brought in a production team from Tokyo. She told them she wanted me to edit. I said no; Max dragged me into his office and threatened to fire me on the spot. If I wasn’t in- volved, there was no reason to do the studio work at the Pilot. Vancouver was hardly the center of the world, and the agents wanted her in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of money to him, and it might put the Autonomic Pilot on the map. I couldn’t explain to him why I’d refused. It was too crazy, too personal; she was getting a final dig in. Or that’s what I thought then. But Max was serious. He really didn’t give me any choice. We both knew another job wasn’t going to crawl into my hand. I went back out with him and we told the agents that we’d worked it out: I was on. The agents showed us lots of teeth. Lise pulled out an inhaler full of wizz and took a huge hit. I thought I saw the agent lady raise one perfect eyebrow, but that was the extent of censure. After the papers were signed, Lise more or less did what she wanted. And Lise always knew what she wanted. We did Kings in three weeks, the basic recording. I found any number of reasons to avoid Rubin’s place, even believed some of them myself. She was still staying there, although the agents weren’t too happy with what they saw as a total lack of security. Rubin told me later that he’d had to have his agent call them up and raise hell, but after that they seemed to quit worrying. I hadn’t known that Rubin had an agent. It was always easy to forget that Rubin Stark was more famous, then, than anyone else I knew, certainly more famous than I thought Lise was ever likely to become. I knew we were working on something strong, but you never know how big anything’s liable to be. But the time I spent in the Pilot, I was on. Lise was amazing. It was like she was born to the form, even though the technology that made that form possible hadn’t even existed when she was born. You see something like that and you wonder how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the cen- tunes, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the cir- cuitry required to tap in…. I learned a few things about her, incidentals, from our time in the studio. That she was born in Windsor. That her father was American and served in Peru and came home crazy and half-blind. That whatever was wrong with her body was congenital. That she had those sores because she refused to remove the exoskeleton, ever, because she’d start to choke and die at the thought of that utter helplessness. That she was addicted to wizz and doing enough of it daily to wire a football team. Her agents brought in medics, who padded the polycarbon with foam and sealed the sores over with micropore dressings. They pumped her up with vitamins and tried to work on her diet, but nobody ever tried to take that inhaler away. They brought in hairdressers and makeup artists, too, and wardrobe people and image builders and ar- ticulate little PR hamsters, and she endured it with something that might almost have been a smile. And, right through those three weeks, we didn’t talk. Just studio talk, artist-editor stuff, very much a restricted code. Her imagery was so strong, so extreme, that she never really needed to explain a given effect to me. I took what she put out and worked with it, and jacked it back to her. She’d either say yes or no, and usually it was yes. The agents noted this and approved, and clapped Max Bell on the back and took him out to dinner, and my salary went up. And I was pro, all the way. Helpful and thorough and polite. I was determined not to crack again, and never thought about the night I cried, and I was also doing the best work I’d ever done, and knew it, and that’s a high in itself. And then, one morning, about six, after a long, long session when she’d first gotten that eerie cotillion sequence out, the one the kids call the Ghost Dance she spoke to me. One of the two agent boys had been there, showing teeth, but he was gone now and the Pilot was dead quiet, just the hum of a blower somewhere down by Max’s office. “Casey,” she said, her voice hoarse with the wizz, “sorry I hit on you so hard.” I thought for a minute she was telling me something about the recording we’d just made. I looked up and saw her there, and it struck me that we were alone, and hadn’t been alone since we’d made the demo. I had no idea at all what to say. Didn’t even know what I felt. Propped up in the exoskeleton, she was looking worse than she had that first night, at Rubin’s. The wizz was eating her, under the stuff the makeup team kept smoothing on, and sometimes it was like seeing a death’s-head surface beneath the face of a not very handsome teenager. I had no idea of’ her real age. Not old, not young. “The ramp effect,” I said, coiling a length of cable. “What’s that?” “Nature’s way of telling you to clean up your act. Sort of mathematical law, says you can only get off real good on a stimulant x number of times, even if you in- crease the doses. But you can’t ever get off as nice as you did the first few times. Or you shouldn’t be able to, anyway. That’s the trouble with designer drugs; they’re too clever. That stuff you’re doing has some tricky tail on one of its molecules, keeps you from turning the decomposed adrenaline into adrenochrome. If it didn’t, you’d be schizophrenic by now. You got any little prob- lems, Lise? Like apneia? Sometimes maybe you stop breathing if you go to sleep?” But I wasn’t even sure I felt the anger that I heard in my own voice. She stared at me with those pale gray eyes. The wardrobe people had replaced her thrift-shop jacket with a butter-tanned matte black blouson that did a bet- ter job of hiding the polycarbon ribs. She kept it zipped to the neck, always, even though it was too warm in the studio. The hairdressers had tried something new the day before, and it hadn’t worked out, her rough dark hair a lopsided explosion above that drawn, triangular face. She stared at me and I felt it again, her singleness of purpose. “I don’t sleep, Casey.” It wasn’t until later, much later, that I remembered she’d told me she was sorry. She never did again, and it was the only time I ever heard her say anything that seemed to be out of character.