Tea From an Empty Cup (19 page)

‘Are you kidding here?’ The man looked pained. ‘What the hell kind of a thing is
that
to do to people on
billable time?
’

Konstantin gave what she hoped was a disgusted and haughty laugh. ‘If you couldn’t stand the tab, pilgrim, why the hell did you get on this ride? Anything worth paying for is worth over-paying for. That’s the Shopper’s Credo. You’re dismissed.’

The man melted away, still looking shocked. A moment later, she was back in the subway, in the midst of the people who weren’t aware of her. Strangely enough, she didn’t see the man she had just been talking to. Perhaps he had run out of billable time. Whatever his absence meant, she hoped it also signified that her bluff had worked.

She considered the others, moving among them and feeling like a live person at a ghosts’ convention. Or should that have been a ghost at a live persons’ convention?

Her gaze caught on the guitar-player. He was still in the same place, and it looked as if he were still playing as well, though it was impossible to hear anything except the smash-clang everyone around her was dancing to. She made her way through the group over to where he sat. Here the platform was about as high as her nose. She tried boosting herself up but somehow she couldn’t get enough leverage.

‘Stay,’ said the guitar-player, eyes closed. ‘I can see and hear you fine where you are.’

‘Good,’ Konstantin said doubtfully. ‘Tell me, are you really here? And if you’re not, which one of us is? And are you going to turn into someone else?’

‘It’s all in what you can perceive,’ he said, smiling. He morphed from a plump, balding young guy to an angular middle-aged man with very long straight, steel-grey hair. He still didn’t open his eyes. ‘You’d be surprised how few turns of the morphing dial that took.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘Do you know Body Sativa?’

‘
Know
her, or know of her?’

‘
Know
her. Personally. Intimately, or casually.’ She paused. ‘And have you seen her in here recently?’

‘
In
here or
around
here?’

‘Yes,’ Konstantin snapped impatiently.

He tilted his head, his closed eyes moving back and forth beneath his eyelids, as if he were dreaming, while his fingers played over guitar strings that appeared no thicker than spider silk. Konstantin realized that though she couldn’t exactly hear the music, she could feel it pass through her. ‘I was a dolphin in a previous incarnation,’ he said, after a bit.

‘Why did you change?’

‘We all have to, sooner or later. I would have thought you’d know that as well as anyone. What were you before you passed on to your present manifestation?’

Konstantin barely hesitated. ‘A homicide detective.’

‘Ah. That accounts for the interrogation.’ He chuckled. ‘You know, the idea is to go on to something different, not just do the same thing behind a new mask.’

Words to live by, Konstantin thought. Perhaps she could print them on a card and send it to her ex. ‘That’s pretty good for a guitar-playing ex-dolphin.’

He stopped playing and pulled something out of the hole in the center of the instrument. ‘Here,’ he said, leaning forward and holding it out to her; it looked like a playing card. ‘You’re not necessarily smarter than the last one who had your face, but the quality of your ignorance is an improvement.’

‘It is? How?’ Konstantin asked, straining on tiptoe to take the card from him.

‘
You
might actually learn something.’

She studied the card, trying to see it clearly, except the image on it kept shifting, melting, changing. It might have been an Oriental ideogram. ‘What’s this?’

‘Cab fare.’

‘Cab fare? In a subway station?’

‘Trains aren’t running tonight. Or didn’t you notice?’

She looked down at her map again. The display still hadn’t changed. ‘I was supposed to find somebody I needed here. My map says she’s still here.’

The guitar player shook his head. ‘Sorry, you misunderstood. There’s a locator utility here, for help finding someone in the Sitty. That’s what your map says is here.’ He shrugged. ‘There are locator utilities in all the subway stations.’

Konstantin managed not to groan. ‘Where?’

‘It’s all in what you perceive.’

‘You’re a
big
help.’

‘Thank you, I’m supposed to be. If you get it figured, you have cab fare to get to wherever it is you need to go.’

Cab fare, Konstantin thought. Cab fare. Did it include the tip, she wondered, or was that what the coin was for? She looked down at it in her other hand.

The man stopped playing again. ‘When did you get that?’

‘Just now. Upstairs, on my way in.’ She closed her fist around it again. ‘Why?’

‘Because even in here, certain things are perishable. Like milk. Or cut flowers.’

‘Or people with cut throats?’

He smiled. ‘No, you may have noticed that death doesn’t have to put a crimp in your plans for the evening. On the other hand, it’s not generally an accepted practice to start out dead. If you want to be dead, custom dictates that you die here.’

‘Here in the subway, you mean, or here in AR?’

‘It’s all in what you perceive.’

He was going to say that once too often, Konstantin thought unhappily. ‘What about this coin?’ she asked. ‘Were you telling me just now that it’s going to expire?’

‘Conditions,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s the conditions under which it would be …
effective
. Conditions don’t last.’

‘More words to live by,’ Konstantin muttered to herself. ‘I want to find the locator utility. How do I do that?’

‘You have only to ask.’

‘Who do I ask?’

‘Me.’

Konstantin hesitated. ‘All right. How do I find the locator utility?’

‘You have only to ask,’ he said again serenely, fingers picking at the strings of the guitar again.

‘I just
did
,’ Konstantin said testily. ‘How –’ She cut off as understanding flooded through her. ‘
Where
is Body Sativa?’

Eyes still closed, the guitar-player jerked his chin at her. ‘Hail a cab, and when you’re asked where you want to go, answer, “To Body Sativa,” and give the driver that.’

Konstantin looked at the card again. The ideogram was still shifting. Suddenly she was very tired and bored. ‘Are you sure this’ll do it?’

‘Oh, yeah. Take you right to her.’

‘That simple.’

The guitar-player nodded. ‘That simple.’

‘How strange. Nothing else here seems to be.’

The guitar-player smiled. ‘What you want is simple. All you had to do was state it in the proper place at the proper moment. In the proper form, of course. That’s just elementary programming.’

‘Programming,’ Konstantin said, giving a short, not terribly merry laugh. ‘I should have known. You’re the locator utility
and
the help utility, aren’t you?’

‘Avatar of both, but yeah, that’s about what it comes down to,’ he said agreeably.

‘And I had only to ask.’

‘Because what you want is simple. You just want to meet up with another player, so I gave you a tracer. Obviously you’re not the usual Shantih Love, or even a usual player. The usual players don’t want anything so simple. The usual players come down here to look for the secret subroutine to the Next Big Scene, or even the mythical Out Door. Then my job becomes something different. Then my job is to give them something that will stimulate a little thrill here and there, play to their curiosities and their fondest wishes and desires, without actually promising anything impossible to deliver.’

‘But still making them spend more billable hours.’

‘The more hours people spend in here doing complicated things, the more interesting the Sitty becomes. For everyone.’

‘Why don’t you just tell people that, then? Instead of playing to their wish-fulfillment fantasies about finding the egress on the secret subroutine to post-Apocalyptic Peoria, or wherever?’

‘It’s not my job to explain the business plan. It’s my job to answer questions. I can only answer with what I know. I don’t know there’s an egress – but I don’t know that there
isn’t
. I can’t prove there isn’t. I’m a utility avatar, I wasn’t created to determine whether my universe is finite or not.’

I’m talking philosophy with a utility
, Konstantin thought, unsure whether to be amazed or disgusted. ‘But surely you know whether there are secret subroutines?’

‘If they’re secret, they certainly wouldn’t tell
me
. I would tell anyone who asked. That’s my job. Then they wouldn’t be secret anymore.’

‘All right.’ Konstantin took a slow breath, trying to think. ‘Have there ever been any secret subroutines in the Sitty that you’ve found out about? Or been
told
about?’ she added quickly.

‘Some players claimed to have accessed them.’

‘Were they telling the truth?’

‘I’m not a lie detector.’

‘Wouldn’t matter if you were, would it? Because it’s all lies in here. Or all truth. Or all in what you perceive.’

He went on playing, eyes still closed. Konstantin supposed he was the AR version of blind justice – blind information. Which was probably much more accurate, all told.

‘Have you ever met Shantih Love before?’ she asked, and then added quickly, ‘I mean, have you ever met a player named Shantih Love before I came in here?’

‘I don’t really
meet
anyone. I have everyone’s name.’

‘Then has anyone else ever asked you to locate Body Sativa?’

‘I don’t remember.’

Konstantin was nonplussed. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t have to. There’s no reason to.

‘But if you can put a tracer on someone’s location for another player, isn’t there some record of that? Some, uh, trace?’

‘Only while the tracer’s active. But that record would be kept elsewhere in the system. You know, if you’re so interested, there are schools you can go to to learn all about how AR works.’

‘I thought you didn’t volunteer information,’ Konstantin said suspiciously.

‘You call
that
information?’

She laughed in spite of herself. ‘You’re right. Thanks for the cab fare.’ She started to walk away and then paused. ‘Where’s the best place to get a cab in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘All right, then, where’s the nearest cab?’

‘I don’t know.’ His smile widened. ‘Cabs aren’t players.’

Sighing in resignation, Konstantin nodded. She should have known.

‘It’s the risk you run with any amphetamine-based drug,’ the woman was saying reasonably. There was something wrong with her, but Yuki couldn’t tell if it was the woman herself or a problem with her own vision. Her sight was distorted, but so was the woman. She was too big in some places, too small in others. Either that, or too close here and too far there. But then, Yuki thought, that was what you got when you crouched in a far corner of the ceiling and spied on people.

She didn’t know how she had managed to get herself up in the far corner of the ceiling, and she didn’t know how – or if – she would manage to get down again. At the moment, she wasn’t sure that she even wanted to. Being up in the corner of the ceiling like this felt good. A light, tingly sensation was dancing all over her, as if she were immersed in an effervescent bath of lighter-than-air champagne. Whoever had managed to package this feeling and deliver it through a hot-suit deserved to get rich, she thought.

‘If you have amphetamines, you have a big potential for paranoia,’ the woman said, ‘and paranoia will escalate in a remarkably short period of time anyway. Put it on fast-forward the way you do and before you know it, Kennedy’s dead and Marilyn’s on the moon.’

A second woman, just out of her range of vision, made a small, throaty noise that might have been intended to indicate amusement. ‘Does everyone in your profession have such colorful turns of phrase?’

Yuki knew that voice. That was Joy Flower. Joy Flower, who didn’t have a very good sense of humor. Yuki tried to look in her direction and found her vision going in and out of focus before it finally picked her out of a jumble of background noise. Which couldn’t make sense anywhere but up here in this corner of the ceiling.

Joy Flower’s mouth was moving and various kinds of things were coming out of it, things she could
almost
see but not quite. Sounds, Yuki thought, sounds that had to have been coded as something else to reach her way up where she was, but that had missed being decoded. If she had access to the decoding device, she would no doubt be able to see what the shapes were before hearing them. Now, that was some
real
synesthesia. Ash had bragged about getting hold of some drug that let him smell music and hear rainbows but she could blow him away with this one.
Hey, Ash
, she could say,
did you ever
see
what somebody’s laugh looked like?
She could get him with that one the next time he showed up in the saucer –

She began to feel very tired and drowsy. Now what? she wondered uncertainly. Would she fall down from the ceiling and land on the floor with a thump, alerting Joy Flower and the woman talking to her that she had been eavesdropping – literally? Or could Joy Flower have put her up there deliberately, did they think she was unconscious or incapable of understanding?

She tried to feel her body and couldn’t. Was that because she wasn’t sleeping naked, or because she was? Her drowsiness receded a little as she tried to spread her awareness out to where her fingers and toes might be. Start by wiggling a finger, trace the feeling back. Try to remember what it felt like to decide to move your foot.

Nothing happened. No sense of her body would come to her in any way.

Breathe
, she commanded herself.
Breathe in. Breathe out
.

If her chest was rising and falling, if her lungs were filling and emptying somewhere, she had somehow been cut off from the feeling.

They cut off my head and it floated up to the ceiling like a balloon. Because they only wanted me for my body
.