Kalifornia (14 page)

“And . . . and what happens to the baby?”
Clarry asked when she was finished explaining the crime.

“That’s none of your concern.”

“No? And what about Poppy Figueroa?”

“What do you care? You don’t know her any better than you knew the
one in here.” She taped the black cube, still in the deck.

“What makes you think she’ll go for it?”

“I believe she will, if you pitch the proposal as I instruct. She’s
an actress. An out-of-work actress, too young to believe her career is over,
despite the recent trauma in her life. She’ll jump for the part.”

“And how do you know
I’ll
go for
it?”

The black hand reached out once again and switched on the Sens8.
Clarry stiffened, moaned, his eyes popping.

“I think I can convince you,” said the voice.

The generic prismascreen in the quondo hut went dark.

Poppy waited for another sign, something else from the holoset.
She thought of Clarry sitting in the van watching this exchange through her
eyes. Why hadn’t he come running long ago?

Oh. Yes. Now she remembered. Her signal was jammed. He’d been
getting nothing but static since she came inside. But that alone should have
drawn him minutes ago. Maybe he was lost among the domes. Maybe he was right
behind her.

The thought drove her out of the dome in a panic. She didn’t want
him to see the holovision. She didn’t want him asking what she’d seen.

She stood bathed in sunlight, her back to the door, trembling.
When she thought she could support herself, she stumbled away through the
shadows of silos and factory buildings. She thought she was heading away from
the office and the men, toward what remained of the desert, but suddenly she
came out of the shadows and saw the van ahead of her. Clarry, behind the smoked
glass, was just sitting there.

Sitting and watching. And knowing all the time where her baby had
gone.

Seeing her, he opened the side door and leaned out. “What a bust,
huh? Doubt we can use much of that.”

Her feet carried her forward unintentionally.

The bloodred palms seemed to wobble, melting upward in the heat.
Poppy didn’t say a thing. She knew—as if the woman in black had told her
directly—that she must not speak a word of what she had seen. But that would be
easy. The silence of the desert was immense; how simple to join herself to it.
Far away she heard a grim pounding, as of huge hammers falling against the
earth. She hardly recognized her heartbeat.

She touched the hot metal side of the van, felt the caked dust
beneath her fingers, all at a great distance. The palm shadows crabbed at her
own; she pulled free of their dim ectoplasm, walking out into sunlight again,
past the van, away from Clarry and the things he knew or didn’t know. Wondering
if the whole show was an illusion; wondering what illusion Clarry had seen. It
might have been lies, all of it. But she would never dare ask him if it were true
or real—would she?

Sunlight crashed on green water in the quarry below. Scummy
fingers tugged at her wires. Drowned things called her name.

“Poppy?”

A hand on her shoulder.

“Get away from there, it’s dangerous. The cliff could crumble
right out from under you.”

She blinked at Clarry but couldn’t quite see him. His eyes were
blotted out by afterimages of the sun.

“Dizzy,” she murmured.

“It’s hotter than it’s been all day. Let’s get back to the van. It’s
cooler.”

Not as cool as the green brine full of fingers, she thought.

She shrugged his hand from her shoulder.

Getting back into the van with him was perhaps the hardest thing
she’d ever done.

***

After they ate dinner at a Lo/Ox Health-Junk Shak, Clarry decided
to stay in the desert for the night. He took three rooms in a motel on old
Interstate 40—the 40-Winx—giving Poppy and Chick Woola their own rooms and
taking one for himself where he could set up his portable editor with a link to
the central Sens8 deck in the van. Poppy was distant all through dinner. He
looked up a few times to see her watching him, but when he asked what was on
her mind, she only shrugged. She said she was tired and went into her room
without adding anything more.

He supposed the whole thing with the baby still bothered her. For
him, it was hard to imagine why, and her continuing grief often caught him by
surprise. It wasn’t like she’d gotten a chance to know it; there was no one to
miss or mourn for. The episode was months behind them now. But then women were
funny that way. And today it had all been dug up fresh again, leading to
enormous disappointment.

For himself, he felt mainly relief.

Clarry called up the afternoon’s recording, reentering the dark
interior of the dome at Bleeding Palms. His concentration sharpened to a
single point: the hyperaware trance he always entered when he edited, the
closest thing to the edgy, focused buzz he’d used to derive from the drugs that
had made him such a perfect, soulless wireman for the Ho-Wood horror masters.
But better than a drug high, it was reliable and rewarding. He hardly chewed
rope when the work went well.

The clustered tumbleweeds rasped his hands, the old woman with
skin white as bleach sang her feeble song. There wasn’t much he could do to
salvage the scene except trim it into a short, smooth segment made up of the
best bits of conversation.

To his sharpened senses, the recording quality seemed really
poor, as if he had a bad link with the central deck. He punched it up again,
trying a new line, but it wasn’t any better.

Which meant . . .

It wasn’t a bad connection, it was the recording itself. The whole
scene in the dome had a thin, grainy feel, like a cheap bootleg copied and
recopied so many times that bits and pieces of the flow had started dropping
out, leaving holes in sound and smell, glitches that undermined the impression
of reality, plateaus where there should have been sharp peaks. Less than
subliminal snatches of other recordings leaked in at odd moments, creating a
bad-tasting synesthesia.

But that didn’t make any sense. There weren’t any recordings
under this one. He was working direct from the master, a fresh cube.

It must be the link after all.

He decided to go out to the van and work on the regular deck,
where he could at least run a diagnostic to pin down the source of the fuzz.

He knocked on Chick’s door. Woola opened it slowly and peered out.
A strange blond kid lay unconscious on the bed, silver vial halves in his
hands, his makeup smeared, his temples bruised. Clarry vaguely remembered him
hanging out in the parking lot.

“I’m going out,” Clarry said. “Sorry to bother you.”

The van sat in a lot alongside the road. At night, heavy surface
traffic roared through the desert, mainly trucktrains rushing freight through
the Franchise. The little van shook in the turbulent slipstream of every
leviathan that passed. He felt less safe than usual in his editor’s womb.

He fired up the Sens8 masterdeck and phased himself into the
editing channels, holding on to a few at once, separate strings to be spliced
or woven at will. It was best working with a few POVs to give the audience a
choice of conduits. But today’s session featured only Poppy. It was tediously
simple. So why all the distortion?

He checked the cube. It was clean and shiny. He cleaned the slot
and started the player again. Then he set off walking through the noonday heat,
away from the shade of the corroded metal wall where Poppy had leaned for a
minute or so, thinking about God knows what. Here came the dome. Quality was
fine. It looked like the problem was with the link, all right. Then she stepped
inside.

“Tumbling . . .”

There it went again, instant fuzz, right in the master.

Now that he thought about it, there had been a kind of thin
strangeness to the whole event, even at the time. During real time it seemed
insignificant; but when he slowed it for editing and examined every instant,
the poor quality became obvious. It eroded his sense of reality.

In the dome now, he heard the whimsical old windbag and Poppy’s
hellos.

“Back up,” he said, and the Sens8 complied.

Poppy backed out the door.

“Freeze it.”

There. The instant the signal quality deteriorated matched
perfectly with her step across the threshold.

Coincidence?

He hung in the moment, hung with one foot in midair, halfway into
the dome. Behind Poppy was desert, hot and clear, as real as though he were
living it himself. Ahead of her was haze. A veil. Like a bad, an amateurish
splicing job.

He backed up still farther, pressing a thin, translucent wedge of
time between Poppy and the dome’s interior. He could see into the room quite
clearly now; it was no more than a flash in Poppy’s eyes, but that was enough.

The dome was empty.

No tumbleweeds. No cackling hag.

Empty except for a table and a holovision set.

“Twisted shit,” he muttered.

He slipped his grip on time and advanced slowly, watching the veil
fall, watching tumbleweeds emerging from the gloom along with the old hag. Once
you caught on, it all looked incredibly fake. He couldn’t believe he’d fallen
for it. But then, he’d been concentrating on other things, hoping to see
something like this . . . a false lead that would let him
sigh with relief. He’d been lulled, suckered by wishfulness as much as by
special effects. Shit.

All that time, while he thought she was humoring some old biddy,
she’d actually been watching HV, seeing God knows what.

What had really gone on in there? Why hadn’t she said a thing
about it?

Bad feelings. Very pale ideas were coming to him now, like the
bloated white bellies of dead fish bobbing to the surface of his mind after
some explosion or poisoning in the depths.

The message that had summoned them here was no madwoman’s fan
letter. It was the work of someone devious. Someone who knew both Poppy and
Clarry, and how their minds worked.

Clarry had heard of a new special-effects device, a reality synthesizer,
that could do something like this, but it was in the prototype stage—nobody in
his circles had ever even seen one. Whoever sent the message to Poppy had
inside power—in Ho-wood or its R&D labs.

Only one person had all that
and
the
baby.

That old bitch in black.

What sort of game was she pulling now? Double-cross, turnbacks,
screwing with her own plot the way she’d screwed with Clarry’s head.

She’d blackmailed him, now she was turning him in. He knew he was
right. She was setting him up.

He’d better to talk to Poppy, find out exactly what she’d seen,
even if it meant (God!) confessing his own role. If he confessed, then he might
gain some kind of protection when the bitch in black forked him over to the
cops.

He had to find out what she knew. To do that, he might have to
tell her everything.

Clarry didn’t bother to switch off the deck. He went straight back
to his room to calm himself with a tranq. As he choked it down, he glanced at
the portable deck and saw that Poppy was still on-line, not actively recording
but simply running a current through the master deck. Standard operating
procedure: the deck stayed tuned in to her constantly, in case anything
happened that was worthy of the show.

He shrugged off his normal professional qualms about getting
inside her without permission. Just a peek, to figure out where she was at so
he could work out the best way to approach her.

Predictably enough, she was rolling around in bed, weeping.

Keeping wired to her, in RO mode, he went down the hall to her
door and pounded on it, hearing the knocking through both sets of ears. Poppy
pulled the pillow over her head and incidentally over his own. He tried mentally
to push her off the bed, as if he could jerk her around by her wires. It was an
exercise in pure frustration.