Explosions, gunfire and sirens sounded above the chatter of people filling the street and was sporadically submerged by the music spilling from the hundreds of bars and multifarious entertainment venues lining the Street. The air was full of half-strange, half-familiar, entirely enticing smells and wild pheremonic effects understandably banned everywhere else on Tier.
Genar-Hofoen strolled down the middle of the Street, a large glass of Tier 9050 in one hand, a cloud cane in the other and a small puff-creant nestling on one shoulder of his immaculately presented ownskin jacket. The 9050 was a cocktail which notoriously involved about three hundred separate processes to make, many of them involving unlikely and even unpleasant combinations-of plants, animals and substances. The end result was an acceptable if strong-tasting drink composed largely of alcohol, no more, but you didn’t really drink it for the internal effect, you drank it to show you could afford to; they put it in a special crystal field-goblet so you could show that you could. The name was meant to imply that after sinking a few you were ninety per cent certain to get laid and fifty per cent assured of ending up in legal trouble (or it may have been the other way round – Genar-Hofoen could never remember).
The cloud cane was a walking stick burning compressed pellets of a mildly and brief-acting psychotropic mixture; taking a suck on its pierced top cap was like sliding two distorting lenses in front of your eyes, sticking your head underwater and shoving a chemical factory up your nose while standing in a shifting gravity field.
The puff-creant was a small symbiont, half animal half vegetable, which you paid to squat on your shoulder and cough up your nose every time you turned your face towards it. The cough contained spores that could do any one of about thirty different and interesting things to your perceptions and moods.
Genar-Hofoen was particularly pleased with his new suit. It was made of his own skin, genetically altered in various subtle ways, specially vat-grown and carefully tailored to his exact specifications. He’d donated a few skin cells to – and left the order and payment with – a gene-tailor here on Tier two and a half years earlier when he was on his way to God’shole habitat. It had been a whim after a drinking session (as had an animated obscene tattoo he’d removed a month later). He hadn’t really expected to pick the suit up for a while. Fortunately long-term fashions hadn’t changed too much in the interim. The suit and its accompanying cloak looked terrific. He felt great. spa’dassins digladiate; ziffidae and xebecs contend! gol-iard dunking!
Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning ‘scapes and scenes played out in sensorium bubbles bulging out into the centre of the street, putting you instantly into bedrooms, feast-halls, arenae, harems, seaships, fair rides, space battles, states of temporary ecstasy; tempting, prompting, suggesting, offering, providing entrance, stimulating appetites, prompting desires; suggesting, propositioning, pandering.
RHYPAROGRAPHY! KELOIDAL ANAMNESIS! IVRESSE!
Genar-Hofoen walked through it all, soaking it all in, refusing all the offers and suggestions, politely turning down the overtures and come-ons, the recommendations and invitations.
ZUFULOS! ORPHARIONS! RASTRAE! NAUMACHIA HOURLY!
For now, he was content just to be here, walking, promenading, watching and being watched, sizing up and – with any luck – being sized up. It was evening – real evening – in this level of Tier, the time when Night City started to become busy; everywhere was open, nowhere was full, everybody wanted your custom, but nobody was really settling on a venue yet; just cruising, grazing, petting. Genar-Hofoen was happy to be part of that general drift; he loved this, he gloried in it. This was where he felt most himself. For now, there was simply no better place to be, and he believed in entering into the experience with all due and respectful intensity; these were his sort of people, here was where his sort of thing happened and this was his sort of place.
PILIOUS OMADHAUNS INVITE RASURE! LAGOPHTHALMISCITY GUARANTEED WHEN YOU SEE THE JEISTIECORS AND LORICAS OF OUR MARTICHORASTIC MINIKINS!
He saw her outside a Sublimer sekos set under the rotundly swollen bulk of a building shaped like a giant resistor. The entrance to the cult’s sacred place was a brightly shining loop, like a thick but tiny rainbow layered in different shades of white. Young Sublimers stood outside the enclosure, clad in glowing white robes. The Sublimers – each tall and thin – glowed, too; their skin glowed gently, pallid to the point of unhealthy-looking bloodlessness. Their eyes shone, soft light spilling from the wide, open whites, while the same half-silvery light was projected from their teeth when they smiled. They smiled all the time, even when they were talking. The woman was standing looking at the pair of enthusiastically gesticulating Sublimers with an expression of amused disdain.
She was tall, tawny-skinned. Her face was broad, her nose thin and almost parallel with the planes of her cheeks; her arms were crossed, her body tilted back from the two young people, her weight taken on one black-booted heel as she looked down that long nose at the shining Sublimers. Her eyes and her hair looked as dark as the featureless shadowrobe which hid the rest of her frame.
He stopped in the middle of the street and watched her arguing with the two Sublimers for a few moments. Her gestures and the way she held her body were different but the face was very similar to the way he remembered her looking, forty years ago; just a little older, perhaps. He had always wondered how much she’d changed.
But it couldn’t be her. Tishlin had said she was still on board the Sleeper. They’d have mentioned if she’d left, wouldn’t they?
He let a group of squatly chortling Bystlians pass him, then sauntered a little way back up the street, studying the architecture of the giant valve bulging over it from the opposite pavement and sniffing from his cloud cane in a vague, bored manner while watching a line of dark bombs flit out of the darkness above to fall and detonate somewhere beyond the line of barrel-like resistors that formed the other side of the street; bright yellow-orange explosions lit up the sky and debris rose slowly and fell. Further up the avenue, some sort of commotion surrounded a large animal.
He turned and looked back down the crowded street. At that moment a giant blue-gold shape slid under his feet, rushing silently along within the mercury stream beneath the diamond plate. The girl arguing with the Sublimers turned, glancing at the street as the blob went gliding past. As she looked back to the two young glowing people she caught sight of him watching her. Her gaze settled on him for a moment and the flicker of an expression – a glimmer of recognition? – passed briefly over her face before she started talking to the Sublimers again. He hadn’t had time to look away even if he’d wanted to.
He was wondering whether he ought to go over to her now, wait and see if she stepped back into the thoroughfare and maybe approach her then, or just walk away, when a tall girl in a glowing gown stepped up to him and said, ‘May I help you, sir? You seem taken with our place of exaltation. Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Is there anything I can do to enlighten you?’
He turned to the Sublimer. She was almost as tall as he; her face was pretty but somehow vacuous, though he knew that might have been prejudice on his part.
Sublimers had turned what was a normal but generally optional part of a species’ choice of fate into a religion. Sublimers believed that everybody ought to Sublime, that every human, every animal, every machine and Mind ought to head straight for ultimate transcendence, leaving the mundane life behind and setting as direct a course as possible for nirvana.
People who joined the cult spent a year trying to persuade others of this before they Sublimed themselves, joining one of the sect’s group-minds to contemplate irreality. The few drones, other AIs and Minds that became persuaded of the merit of this course of action through the arguments of the Sublimers tended to do what any other machine did on such occasions and disappear in the direction of the nearest Sublimed Entity, though one or two stuck around in a pre-Sublimed state long enough to help the cause. In general, though, the cult was regarded as rather a pointless one. Subliming was seen as something that usually happened to entire societies, and more as a practical lifestyle alteration than a religious commitment; more like moving house than entering a sacred order.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Genar-Hofoen said, sounding wary. ‘What exactly do you people believe in again?’