There were a number of calls, after Porphyre left. Her production crew, eager to say hello. »No more calls this afternoon,« she told the house. »I’ll run the Tally sequences upstairs.« She found a bottle of Corona at the rear of the fridge and took it to the master bedroom. The stim unit in the teak headboard was equipped with studio-grade trodes that hadn’t been there when she’d left for Jamaica. Net technicians periodically upgraded equipment in the house. She had a swig of beer, put the bottle on the bedside table, and lay down with the trodes across her forehead. »Okay,« she said, »hit me.« Into Tally-flesh, Tally-breath. How did I ever replace you? she wondered, overcome by the former star’s physical being. Do I give people this same pleasure? Tally-Angie looking out across a vine-hung chasm that was also a boulevard, glancing up to the inverse horizon, squares of distant tennis courts, Freeside’s »sun« an axial thread of brilliance overhead . . . »Fast forward,« she told the house. Into smooth-pumping muscle and a blur of concrete, Tally hurling her cycle around a low-grav velodrome . . . »Fast forward.« A dining scene, tension of velvet straps across her shoulders, the young man across the table leaning forward to pour more wine . . . »Fast forward.« Linen sheets, a hand between her legs, purple twilight through plate glass, sound of running water . . . »Reverse. The restaurant.« The red wine gurgling into her glass . . . »Little more. Hold it. There.« Tally’s eyes had been focused on the boy’s tanned wrist, not on the bottle. »I want a graphic of the visual,« she said, pulling off the trodes. She sat up and took a swallow of beer, which mingled weirdly with the ghost-flavor of Tally’s recorded wine. The printer downstairs chimed softly as it completed its task. She forced herself to take the stairs slowly, but when she reached the printer, in the kitchen, the image disappointed her. »Can you clear this up?« she asked the house. »I want to be able to read the label on the bottle.« »Justifying image,« the house said, »and rotating target object eight degrees.« The printer hummed softly as the new graphic was extruded. Angie found her treasure before the machine could chime, her dream-sigil in brown ink: T-A. They’d had their own vineyards, she thought. Tessier-Ashpool S.A. , the typeface regal and spidery. »Gotcha,« she whispered.
Texas Radio
Mona could see the sun through a couple of rips in the black plastic they kept taped over the window. She hated the squat too much to stay there when she was awake or straight, and now she was both. She got quietly out of bed, wincing when her bare heel brushed the floor, and fumbled for her plastic thongs. The place was dirty; you could probably get tetanus from leaning up against the wall. Made her skin crawl to think about it. Stuff like that didn’t seem to bother Eddy; he was too far gone in his schemes to notice his surroundings much. And he always managed to keep clean, somehow, like a cat. He was cat-clean, never a fleck of dirt under his polished nails. She figured he probably spent most of what she earned on his wardrobe, although it wouldn’t have occurred to her to question the fact. She was sixteen and SINless, Mona, and this older trick had told her once that that was a song, »Sixteen and SINless.« Meant she hadn’t been assigned a SIN when she was born, a Single Identification Number, so she’d grown up on the outside of most official systems. She knew that it was supposed to be possible to get a SIN, if you didn’t have one, but it stood to reason you’d have to go into a building somewhere and talk to a suit, and that was a long way from Mona’s idea of a good time or even normal behavior. She had a drill for getting dressed in the squat, and she could do it in the dark. You got your thongs on, after giving them a quick knock together to dislodge possible crawlies, and then you walked over to where you knew there was a roll of old fax on a Styrofoam crate beside the window. You peeled off about a meter of fax, maybe a day and a half of Asahi Shimbun , folded and creased it, put it down on the floor. Then you could stand on it, get the plastic bag from beside the crate, undo the twist of wire that held it shut, and find the clothes you wanted. When you stepped out of the thongs to put your pants on, you knew you’d be stepping on fresh fax. It was an article of faith with Mona that nothing was going to wander across the fax in the time it took her to step into a pair of jeans and get the thongs back on. You could put on a shirt or whatever, carefully reseal the bag, and get out of there. Makeup, when required, went on in the corridor outside; there was some mirror left, beside the derelict elevator, a Fuji biofluorescent strip glued above it. There was a strong piss smell beside the elevator this morning, so she decided to skip the makeup. You never saw anybody in the building, but you heard them sometimes; music through a closed door, or footsteps just gone around a corner at the far end of a corridor. Well, that made sense; Mona had no desire to meet her neighbors either. She took the stairs down three flights and into the gaping dark of the underground garage. She had her flashlight in her hand, found her way with six quick little blinks that steered her around stagnant puddles and dangling strands of dead optic cable, up the concrete steps and out into the alley. You could smell the beach, sometimes, in the alley, if the wind was right, but today it just smelled of garbage. The side of the squat towered away above her, so she moved fast, before some asshole decided to drop a bottle or worse. Once she was out on the Avenue, she slowed, but not too much; she was conscious of the cash in her pocket, and full of plans for spending it. Wouldn’t do to get taken off, not when it looked like Eddy had wrangled them some kind of ticket out. She alternated between telling herself it was a sure thing, that they were practically gone, and warning herself not to get her hopes up. She knew Eddy’s sure things: hadn’t Florida been one of them? How it was warm in Florida and the beaches were beautiful and it was full of cute guys with money, just the spot for a little working vacation that had already stretched into the longest month Mona could remember. Well, it was fucking hot in Florida, like a sauna. The only beaches that weren’t private were polluted, dead fish rolling belly-up in the shallows. Maybe the private stretches were the same, but you couldn’t see them, just the chainlink and the guards in shorts and cop shirts standing around. Eddy’d get excited by the weapons the guards carried and describe each one to her in numbing detail. He didn’t have a gun himself, though, not as far as she knew, and Mona figured that was a good thing. Sometimes you couldn’t even smell the dead fish, because there was another smell, a chlorine smell that burned the roof of your mouth, something from the factories up the coast. If there were cute guys, they were still tricks, and the ones down here weren’t exactly offering to pay double. About the only thing to like about Florida was drugs, which were easy to come by and cheap and mostly industrial strength. Sometimes she imagined the bleach smell was the smell of a million dope labs cooking some unthinkable cocktail, all those molecules thrashing their kinky little tails, hot for destiny and the street. She turned off the Avenue and walked down a line of unlicensed food stalls. Her stomach started growling at the smell, but she didn’t trust street food, not if she didn’t have to, and there were licensed places in the mall that would take cash. Somebody was playing a trumpet in the asphalt square that had been the parking lot, a rambling Cuban solo that bounced and distorted off the concrete walls, dying notes lost in the morning clatter of the market. A soapbox evangelist spread his arms high, a pale fuzzy Jesus copying the gesture in the air above him. The projection rig was in the box he stood on, but he wore a battered nylon pack with two speakers sticking over each shoulder like blank chrome heads. The evangelist frowned up at Jesus and adjusted something on the belt at his waist. Jesus strobed, turned green, and vanished. Mona laughed. The man’s eyes flashed God’s wrath, a muscle working in his seamed cheek. Mona turned left, between rows of fruit vendors stacking oranges and grapefruit in pyramids on their battered metal carts. She entered a low, cavernous building that housed aisles of more permanent businesses: sellers of fish and packaged foods, cheap household goods, counters serving a dozen kinds of hot food. It was cooler here in the shade, and a little quieter. She found a wonton place with six empty stools and took one. The Chinese cook spoke to her in Spanish; she ordered by pointing. He brought her soup in a plastic bowl; she paid him with the smallest of her bills, and he made change with eight greasy cardboard tokens. If Eddy meant it, about leaving, she wouldn’t be able to use them; if they stayed in Florida, she could always get some wonton. She shook her head. Gotta go, gotta. She shoved the worn yellow disks back across the painted plyboard counter. »You keep ’em.« The cook swept them out of sight, bland and expressionless, a blue plastic toothpick fixed at the corner of his mouth. She took chopsticks from the glass on the counter and fished a folded noodle from the bowl. There was a suit watching her from the aisle behind the cook’s pots and burners. A suit who was trying to look like something else, white sportshirt and sunglasses. More the way they stand than anything, she thought. But he had the teeth, too, and the haircut, except he had a beard. He was pretending to look around, like he was shopping, hands in his pockets, his mouth set in what he might have thought was an absent smile. He was pretty, the suit, what you could see of him behind the beard and the glasses. The smile wasn’t pretty, though; it was kind of rectangular, so you could see most of his teeth. She shifted a little on the stool, uneasy. Hooking was legal, but only if you did it right, got the tax chip and everything. She was suddenly aware of the cash in her pocket. She pretended to study the laminated foodhandling license taped to the counter; when she looked up again, he was gone.