Kalifornia (21 page)

“She’ll sleep for a while,” the High Priestess said. “In the
meantime, before she gets up, put this on. It interrupts her control of your
wires.”

She gave him a soft plastic object, contoured to fit behind one
ear, and helped him fit it into place.

“Shouldn’t you pull her out of that thing?” he asked, getting to
his feet.

The woman in black, apparently unruffled by Kali’s takeover,
nodded and bent over the robot. She drew apart the robes, unsnapped a panel in
the chest, opened the metal ribcage on silent hinges. Kali lay cradled within,
her tiny arms and legs fit snug inside motor-amp devices, a rubber socket
patched to her groin. As the High Priestess pulled out the jacks, Sandy gasped and bent closer.

“She—what is that?”

“Peripheral control cable.”

He sighed. “I thought for a minute that ‘she’ was a ‘he.’ ”

“A common mistake. You never saw her before, then? Not even in the
design stage?”

He shook his head. “No, my father never—”

Sandy
broke off, staring sideways at the High
Priestess. She lifted Kali out of the robot and laid her down in the cradle,
covering her with a black blanket.

“Who are you?” he said.

She chuckled, nodding. “Men are not allowed to gaze upon the
Daughters of Kali. At least, that’s the law. But I wrote the law, so what the
hell.”

She lifted her veil. In the dim room, it took him a moment to be
sure of what he saw, though he had already begun to suspect as much.

Her face was pale, worn, but full of strength and character. It
reminded him of Poppy, though sharpened and tempered by experience to an inner
hardness that Poppy lacked, and never would have wanted. It wasn’t Poppy’s
face, of course.

It was his mother’s.

He put out a hand, not quite daring to touch her.

“Hello, Santiago.” She caught his hand and pressed it to her
cheek. It was superficially a tender gesture, but her dark eyes remained cold
and dry. This was not a role she felt comfortable with. “I never expected to
see you again.”

***

There was one rerun that Sandy never relived, though the master
was an infinite loop forever playing in the back of his mind.

When he was seventeen . . .

With the Figueroa show at the peak of its popularity, the
scenarists had gone scraping the bottom of the dramatic barrel for situations,
mining myth and legend and pulp magazines. There was no setting or
circumstance they wouldn’t consider.

The family had dealt with almost every issue a family could face
and still remain popular. Birth. Incest. Celibacy. Drugs. Asceticism.
Schizophrenia. Holism. Failure. Success. Crime. Punishment. War. Peace.
Gluttony. Bulimia. Basic human nature was ransacked daily for sitcom
possibilities. Alfredo and Marjorie had decided to create the little Calafia to
provide a few new situations; but the technology was still uncertain, an R&D
dream. That was something for the future. While the family’s creative
consultants brainstormed, the Figueroas decided to take a vacation.

They enjoyed improv. Actually, it was what they did best. No
matter how elaborately contrived the scenarios, they tried to avoid scripts,
knowing that the best situations developed with the fluidity of reality and
couldn’t be forced or faked. Even so, they rarely invented a day from scratch,
improvising everything from breakfast to dessert. Now they had the chance to
create an entire month’s adventure.

Marjorie suggested the moon.

Mars was more scenic, but it took a week to get there; the moon
was a short hop away. Holo-brochures touted its world-class hotels,
cosmopolitan population, great ethnic food, duty-free shopping, and low-grav
recreation. It was all hype.

From the moment they landed, Sandy’s disappointment knew no
bounds—unlike the lunar living space. It was like a giant hamster warren, a
habimall without exit doors. They could have been almost anywhere on Earth;
even the reduced gravity, which was supposed to keep husbands from tiring while
wives shopped, only succeeded in making everyone constipated. There was no hint
of otherworldliness. The potentially awesome views from their hotel were
spoiled by the sprawl of tektite-processing plants and Bova-Burger restaurants
that surrounded the moonmall. Within three days, they exhausted the mall’s
possibilities. Sandy felt like a prisoner inside a vast J. C. Sears, a waking
nightmare rendered even more awful by the unshakable conviction that at any
moment he might float away.

Marjorie suggested a moonwalk. She hired a guide. Inside a day
they were all dressed up in vacuum suits, riding out of town on an open-vac
stumbler, an off-road vehicle named for its awkward manner of shifting between
fat tires and hydraulic legs. It took hours to get into wilderness; man had
been on the moon for nearly eighty years, after all—plenty of time to mess it
up. What little “virgin” lunar surface remained was strictly in the form of
limited preserves.

Once the industrial tracts fell behind, nothing marred the scenery
except the treadmarks of lunebuggies, which scarred every slope and eroded
every once-sharp crest in sight. No rain would ever fall to soften those
tracks, no wind would ever blur them; they were etched forever in the surface
of the moon, along with the usual graffiti, unless some tidy meteor might
happen along and wipe them out.

Finally the Figueroas dismounted, entering a mare that could
legally be traversed only on foot. At last, Sandy thought, they had found some
peace and isolation, beyond the crowded malls and factories.

Still, it was a busy weekend. Small cars were dropping all around
them, and other, more practiced campers—moon residents anticipating the
rush—had already grabbed the best spots. Wherever they went, someone had gotten
there ahead of them. And so they pressed on, Ferdinand and Miranda bounding
ahead, Alfredo and Marjorie strolling close together. Neither Poppy nor Sandy could pretend much enthusiasm. Sandy kept thinking that the moon looked better from
earth, and the earth did too. He tried to appreciate the rare view of his home
among the stars, but adsats for soft drinks and sexual aids kept eclipsing North America. He always remembered a board that floated past, advertising the premiere of
a local epic:
FRIDAY NOON MEANS FEAR FOR LUNA!

They finally made camp in the hollow of Ubehebe III, a tiny crater
that provided at least the illusion of lunar wilderness, if one discounted the
litter cluttered at the bottom. Sandy went to sleep wishing they had stayed at
home.

He woke to the sound of screaming.

It wasn’t a sound in the usual sense. It carried only through the
speakers in his helmet, and through his polynerves.

Disoriented at first, thinking it merely another complication in
his insecure dreams, he didn’t rise immediately. He found himself moving with
another body, looking through other eyes, feeling thunder all around and
through him. He started up with a shock, but this was no dream. He had tapped
into his mother’s wires and was feeling what she felt.

Marjorie huddled in a dark, narrow place, a thin wedge of stars
above her. The whole moon seemed to be shaking. She put out her hands and
touched rock on both sides. A cloud of black blotted out the stars, and a
crushing weight closed down on her—squeezing Sandy out of her body, sending him
bounding up the side of the crater, screaming.

His father reached the top of the bowl ahead of him, shouting for
his wife. The guide meanwhile leaped aboard the little flying wedge that
carried their luggage and rocketed out of the crater to a nearby scarp of steep
lunar rock. Rocks were still sliding down when Sandy first sighted the place.

Avalanche.

Like one in a dream, a floating nightmare, he tried to run but his
panic pushed him too hard. He fell, tumbled in dust, came up screaming. His
speakers carried sounds of wailing, the cries of his brother and sisters,
Alfredo’s shouting—but nothing from his mother. Marjorie’s wires were dead. Cut
off.

Afterward, they guessed she had gone for a solitary walk, sneaking
past the guide, who’d warned them never to travel alone. She’d been deep in a
narrow rock defile when some tremor—perhaps of her own making—had set off the
rock-slide that buried her. There was never the slightest hope of recovering
the body. They planted a marker and held a funeral in that spot. The last
episode of the Figueroa show was broadcast live from the foot of that talus
slope, relayed to earth.

The Figueroas had faced everything they could face as a broadcast
family. The death of pets and relatives.

But this death destroyed them—as an entertainment commodity, as a
public institution, as a family.

Sandy
still remembered feeling her die. He had never
doubted that she lay buried beneath those rocks. He had been
there,
inside
of her, in her wires, when it happened. He had tried to take comfort in the
fact that her death was instantaneous, probably painless, though that was no
real comfort at all.

He had felt all kinds of doubt in the last three years. Doubt of
himself, doubt of humanity, doubt of the worth of the universe.

But he had never doubted his mother’s death.

Now there was no doubt that she lived.

***

“It was a special effect,” she said. “When we set off the
avalanche, I was already miles away.”

“We?”

“I had help. I couldn’t have done that myself.”

“Who?”

She blushed. “Your father was unfaithful to me, Sandy. He’d had a
mistress—that Seer slut, you know—for years before I found anyone who . . . well . . . understood
me.”

“But why? Why did you want us to think you were dead?”

“I had my reasons. I needed secrecy to continue my real work. Alf
never dared to dream as I did. To him, Kali would be only a granddaughter. He
couldn’t—wouldn’t see the possibilities. He was dragging me down, and using
all of you to do it.”

Sandy
shook his head. He was numb. He felt as if he
were still controlled by something outside of himself, as if even now Kali had
some power over him. He looked over at the baby. Asleep, she looked purely
angelic.

“Amazing, isn’t she?” said Marjorie Figueroa. “A marvel of
programming. Growing fast, too.”

“You . . . you did it for her sake? You were
planning back then to kidnap her?”

“Santiago, there’s too much to explain. And I’m not going to tell
it to you anyway. You shouldn’t be involved in this.”

He wondered that he felt no urge to embrace her, no need to weep
or rejoice. Instead he found a coldness in his heart, matching the coldness he
knew must be in hers. This was his inheritance.

“I’m already involved,” he said. “We’re all in it. This was cruelest
to Poppy. She tried to kill herself because of it. No tricks that time, no
false broadcasts—she almost died. She may never recover from that.”

Marjorie’s head fell forward. “I heard about Poppy. I’m sorry. I
tried to let her know that the baby was all right. I was trying to warn her
away from that man, Clarence Starko. She should never have trusted him.
He
was
the one who betrayed her.”

“Clarry?”

“I bought him off myself. I used him to arrange the kidnapping.”

“And—and Poppy
knew
?”

“I tried to tell her. I thought it would help if she knew something
of the truth—though not all. Not nearly this much. How did you find me?”

“With Clarry’s help. We tracked you from the original recording of
the station wagon.”

She looked puzzled. “That image should have been altered. I was
told it had been.”

“My God, who’s working with you? That tape was changed when the
police had it.”

She turned away from him. “You shouldn’t be here. Who else knows
about this?”

He shrugged, knowing that he shouldn’t tell her.

“You’re not doing something foolish like broadcasting live, are
you?”

“Only to Clarry,” he said. “Not even Dad knows I’m here.”