Circuit Of Heaven (5 page)

“Mighty pretty girl,” Lawrence said in his Texan voice.

“She’s going into the Bin,” Nemo said.

“She’s still mighty pretty.”

THE
VISITOR’S
CENTER
WAS
PRACTICALLY
DESERTED
. IT looked exactly the same as it always did. The same powder-blue carpet with sensory enhancers so that it felt as if you were walking on blue marshmallows, even though, if you looked down at your feet, they weren’t really sinking at all. The same murals of farmlands that glowed just after a rain, mountains that pierced the clouds, and cities that looked like a fleet of rocket ships ready to blast off. The waiting room for heaven.

The only person there was Victor, the same security guard who was always there—a Construct with feline features whose skin glowed like neon. He nodded at Lawrence as he passed, loping back and forth year after year like an animal in a pen.

They stepped into the two closest VIMs—Visitor Interface Modules, called coffins since they looked like streamlined caskets—and settled back into the soft cushions as the lids whirred closed automatically and the coffins slowly rotated to a horizontal position. The orientation tape droned the same assurances of safety and warnings about visiting too long that it’d been droning for thirty-one years, and then everything vibrated like a tuning fork. Nemo felt as if he’d fallen a mile in three seconds. The coffin rotated to a vertical position, and the lid swung open, and there he was, in the Bin, though it looked as if he hadn’t gone anywhere. The same carpet, the same murals, the same everything. He got out, knowing his body, his real body, hadn’t moved at all.

Not that you could tell the difference. There were people who claimed they could tell—detect a blur if they moved too fast, or taste the difference between a real steak and a virtual one. They were kidding themselves. That was exactly what was wrong with the Bin—you couldn’t tell the difference. You were so many electrons blissfully bashing around inside of acres of silicon, and you didn’t know the difference.

From Pentagon Station in the Bin, they caught a train to Front Royal. There wasn’t a real train to Front Royal. It was an invention of the Bin—time marching on and all that. Nemo had always figured they could just zap people around in the Bin anywhere they wanted without the fiction of trains or planes. But that wouldn’t be real, and reality was what the Bin was all about—reality, only better. They’d found that people needed space and time and the illusion of a body moving through both, or they’d often go crazy. It was only death they wanted to do without, death and the many forms of dying. Physical death, at least.

The Metro in the Bin was exactly like the real one, but free of graffiti and packed with people. They were all talking and laughing without a care in the world. Everyone had a place in the Bin. They could work or not. Travel, stay put. Eat, sleep, make love. Watching their smug faces, Nemo wanted to tear their hearts out. But he couldn’t have, even if he’d been the type. You couldn’t murder anyone in the Bin. The only true violence allowed was suicide. Everyone, Nemo’s government teacher had intoned, has the right to die, if they so chose.

The couple in front of him, young and pretty and tanned, were planning a vacation to the Rockies. Nothing had changed in here. Try going to the Rockies in the real world, Nemo wanted to say to them. Highways shot to hell. No gas anyway. The mountains full of gun-toting survivalist crazies training for an invasion from space or something. But these people didn’t have to worry about that. They had the world they’d been used to—consensual reality, they called it—but all fixed up with no crime or disease or death. You’d have to a be a fool to turn down a deal like that, wouldn’t you? That’s what everybody said. Every fucking body. By the time he reached his parents’ house, Nemo had gotten himself so worked up he wanted to turn around and go back home.

“I CAN’T DO
THIS
,
LAWRENCE
.”
THEY
WERE
STANDING
AT the end of his parents’ front walk—a winding stone pathway through lush vegetation that might’ve been the yellow brick road, only it was slate. The house, set off by weeping willows and wisteria, was a Tudorbethan monstrosity, complete with window boxes and a thatch roof. His parents had ordered it out of a catalogue. It was called “The Shakespeare.” It had edged out “The Cleopatra” and, Dad’s favorite, “The Donna Reed.”

“What, precisely, is ‘this’?” Lawrence asked, his hands on his hips.

Nemo winced. He was up against the nanny.

“You know damn well what I mean—‘precisely.’ I know what they’re going to say before they do.”

“That’s what families are for, Nemo. Now, come along. Let’s not keep them waiting, shall we? If you don’t see them, they’ll only beseech us to persuade you to come at some future date, and frankly, we’re weary of being beseeched.” Lawrence and his parents still maintained the fiction that Lawrence was their employee, and Lawrence reported to them on their son’s progress from time to time.

“Tell them to bugger off.”

“A spirited suggestion, but rather your responsibility, don’t you think? Perhaps you can offer it to them over dinner.” He made a sweeping gesture like a maître d‘.

“If they start nagging me to come into the Bin, I’ll walk.”

“They have promised not to breathe a word on the subject.”

THE
DOOR
WAS
A
MASSIVE
,
DEEPLY
SCARRED
AFFAIR
, AS IF a batallion of crazed soldiers had flung themselves against it in full armor to lend an appropriately ancient ambiance. The doorway was wreathed with English ivy that never changed. The line Nemo had traced with a black marker seven years before around one of the tendrils was still visible as if he’d only just done it. His mom had explained that they could’ve ordered growing ivy, but that struck her as an unnecessary bother. She had her hands full, she said, with the yard and the garden. The door knocker was a roaring lion’s head, the tarnish worn away where countless visitors would grasp it to a shine—on the snout, the fangs, and the fringes of the mane—but dark everywhere else. Its eyes and mouth and ears were dull black pits. Nemo stuck his forefinger down the thing’s throat, lifted, and let it fall with an impressive clunk.

Uncle Winston answered the door, drink in hand. He was tall, but not too tall, and good-looking in a statesmanlike way, with silver hair and broad shoulders and a posture like a pine tree. He smiled as if for a camera, holding it even as he spoke. “Newman!” he exclaimed, clapping his hand on Nemo’s shoulder. “Happy Birthday!”

“Nemo,” Nemo said, shrugging off Winston’s hand. “Don’t call me Newman.”

Uncle Winston looked vaguely hurt for a moment, but recovered himself after two beats, wagging his head with the exaggerated tolerance of a politician. “You young people have such notions. You should be proud of your name. You are named after a Great Man.”

Nemo loathed it. Millions of boys were named after Newman Rogers, Inventor of the Bin. His picture was everywhere—a short dweeby guy with owllike eyes and ears that stuck out like stubby wings. “I’m proud of Nemo,” he said.

“A crazed character in some old science fiction movie, your mother tells me. What sort of model is that for a young man?” He sighed, setting aside his superior wisdom. “But this is your party. I’ll call you whatever you wish.” He held up his glass. “Have a drink? Everyone’s out in the garden.” He gave his regular-guy, good-natured chuckle. “I’m afraid we’re a couple ahead of you.”

“I’ll have scotch, and since you asked, Lawrence will have bourbon.”

Winston gave Lawrence a thin smile. “Certainly. And how are you this evening, Lawrence?”

“Very well, Senator, thank you. Nemo, by the way, was originally a character in a Jules Verne novel of the late nineteenth century. The film adaptation came much later, of course. He commanded a submarine, waging a oneman war against the evils of his day.”

“How interesting,” Uncle Winston said, his smile thinner still, so that he looked like he was about to bare fangs—one of the senator’s faces that never made it into the news. Nemo wished he were a paparazzi. But Uncle Winston recovered quickly and spread his arms wide to take in the beautiful house—all the beautiful houses throughout the Bin—and smiled his best heartfelt smile. “We have no wars here!” he said.

“But you sure as hell have evil,” Lawrence drawled, and walked past Winston to the bar to make their drinks.

THEY
FOLLOWED
WINSTON
OUT
INTO
THE
GARDEN
,
DRINKS
in hand. It smelled of fresh-mown grass and cherry blossoms. A thunderstorm was piling up on the horizon, but it wouldn’t be here for hours. Nemo’s parents were in front of the grape arbor talking to a tall, slender woman in a black knit dress. Her almost-white blond hair blew across her face, and she reached up and pulled it back from her eyes just as she caught sight of Nemo. She smiled, and without thinking where he was, he smiled back. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said, and for a moment it was as if they were the only two there. Her features were in sharp focus, while everything else dissolved into the background.

Uncle Winston’s hand clapped down on Nemo’s shoulder. “Nemo, I’d like you to meet Justine. She’s my…uh…dinner companion for the evening.”

Nemo saw her cut a look at his uncle as he was trying to figure out what to call her. She didn’t look like the bimbos he usually had on his arm. She was younger, about Nemo’s age, and she looked intelligent. He stuck out his hand. “Glad to meet you.”

She smiled at him again and took his hand. Nemo gestured to Lawrence with a toss of his head as he shook her hand. “This is my…uh…dinner companion, Lawrence.”

She laughed, her eyes crinkling almost shut, and squeezed Nemo’s hand before letting it go. It was a warm, infectious laugh. Nemo found himself beaming like an idiot.

She shook Lawrence’s hand firmly, apparently not minding that it was covered with scales. Lawrence’s lipless smile was like a crescent moon.

“Mighty pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said.

Her eyes brightened. “You’re from Texas!”

Lawrence laughed, the slow Texas chuckle. “You might say that. You too?”

She smiled and nodded. “Dallas.”

Mom and Dad had been standing back, watching the introductions, their faces long and worried. Nemo’s visits always made them nervous. They’re trying to do the right thing, Lawrence often told him. We all are, Nemo thought.

“Son!” Mom gushed and lurched toward Nemo, as he knew she would, already in tears, her arms outspread, a handkerchief waving in one hand. He put his arms around her and let her cry against his chest. It always got to him, to hold her again, like he was a little kid and nothing had changed. She felt the same, soft and slightly pudgy. Her tiny hand clutching the handkerchief might’ve been a little girl’s. She hadn’t aged in ten years. At least she hadn’t gotten “plastic surgery” so she could live out eternity in her twenties. He was the one who’d changed.

“Happy Birthday!” Dad said with forced joviality, bobbing up and down nervously. “You can see you need to visit your mother more often.”

“Maybe so,” Nemo mumbled, holding her tight. “Too bad she can’t visit me.”

Mom started crying even harder, and Dad gave Nemo a murderous look. “What a thoughtless thing to say.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it. It just came out.”

“‘It just came out,’” Winston mimicked, shaking his head.

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” Justine said, and they all turned to stare at her. “It is too bad, isn’t it?” She blushed and gave them all an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.” She looked down at the ground, then up at Nemo with a steady, friendly gaze.

Mom raised her head from Nemo’s chest and stared at this strange young woman in her garden, then up at Nemo, a stunned look in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said quietly, and for a moment there was silence.

“Let’s go into dinner, shall we?” Uncle Winston announced, taking his sister by the shoulders, pulling her out of Nemo’s arms, and guiding her back toward the house as if she were on wheels.

“Perhaps I misunderstood you,” Dad said, and followed them toward the house, each foot landing precisely on the flagstones. Unaccountably, Lawrence followed after him without a word, leaving Justine and Nemo standing in the empty garden.

“I’m sorry for butting in,” she said.

“You weren’t,” he said, and shrugged. “Well, maybe you were, but I didn’t mind.”

He knew they should go into the house, but he just wanted to stand there with her a little longer. Listen to the fountain. Smell the cherry blossoms. Look at her. But he didn’t know what to say. She looked at him as if she knew what he was thinking anyway. It probably wasn’t too hard to figure out the way he kept staring at her. Her dress was cut low in front, the wind still tossed her hair around, her green eyes were clear and bright. He wanted to run his hands up and down her bare arms and shoulders, hold her in his arms, kiss her where the fabric stopped, just above her breasts. He stuck his hands in his back pockets.

“You ever meet a Construct like Lawrence before?” he asked abruptly, as if he were accusing her of something.

“No,” she said. “He seems nice.”

“He is. Most people won’t touch him, treat him like he’s not human, but he is. The scales are just a gene splice. He’s cloned from an athlete, his personalities are human—all of them better than most people I know. It’s him who should be treating us like we’ve got the plague instead of the other way around. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“You’re lucky to have such a good friend,” she said. He sensed in her tone that she had no such friends.

A bird started singing close by, and they both looked off toward the sound, trying to catch sight of it. Everything had been uploaded. Nemo wondered what it was like to be a bird or a rat or a butterfly and find yourself living forever. He wondered if any of them ever killed themselves. “Your folks live in Dallas?” he asked her.