Tea From an Empty Cup (20 page)

She imagined her balloon head bobbing gently against the ceiling, pushed by faint air currents from the ventilation system. Her vision swung down sharply and she found her body directly below her, spread out on a futon. In the hotsuit, the form Ash had likened to a daikon radish looked more naked to her than it would have had it been completely nude. She felt a surge of affection for it, for all the pleasure she had taken for granted and recognized now as being part of corporeal existence. If she and her body were ever reunited, she would tear Ash a new one – a new Ash-hole, she thought with a mental chuckle – for speaking of her body as being less than beautiful.
I have done the best I could with what talents and skills and good intentions I had, Mr Beautiful. You can tell me I’m mistaken about some things, or that I’m wasting my time over Tom. But
don’t
tell me I’m the wrong shape
.

Okay, but you
have
lost your head
.

Well,
that
was true. Where her head should have been was some kind of shiny, vaguely head-shaped machine trailing a lot of wires into a sort of cupboard on the futon frame. It must have been taking care of her body while her head was away, she thought. That made sense. Only …

Only what was taking care of her head in lieu of her body?

‘It’s finished purging her blood,’ Joy Flower said. ‘All clean, ready to start over.’

‘Already? That didn’t take long.’

‘She’s a very small person. Physically. Also very clean to begin with.’ Joy Flower gave a small, genteel laugh. ‘You’re used to those big bruisers of mine, with two liters worth of drug in every liter of blood.’

Yuki thought about her very small, very clean body, wondered if it would ever move again. There was a faint rustling noise.

‘She’s not conscious?’

‘If she is, she won’t remember,’ Joy Flower said. ‘I’m putting her back in, as of right now. Injection –’

If her head had been a balloon before, now it was a stone. It plummeted toward her body, toward the machine connected to her body, in a fall so long, she fell asleep waiting for the impact.

‘They’ve got no shortage of people who want to wear,’ said Tom. ‘But there just aren’t enough people who want to be worn. As a sensation, it’s pretty horrible. You’ll do anything to get rid of it, right?’

She was trying to wake up but sleep kept pulling her down into its comfortable depths. If she had known AR was this sensual, she’d have dived in long ago, she thought. There was no such thing as a minor sensation in AR; every feeling was realized in a way that was utterly complete, no aspect neglected. Because it was customized, measured out to order for
your
senses alone, in
your
hotsuit.

‘Well, maybe not your senses
alone
,’ Tom said. ‘Did you ever know someone who really
hated
their body?
Their
body. Not too grammatical, but then, the situation’s not too grammatical, either. Some people do, they hate their bodies.’

She was sitting by the side of a long, gently winding highway that disappeared into vague countryside in either direction. Across from her stood every person who had ever ventured into AR for any period of time, pioneers and mere fad-followers alike, and all of them wearing Tom’s appearance so that it seemed to be only a special effect lining the side of the highway. Spectacular, to be sure, all these Toms as far as the eye could see, and even farther than that. But strictly ornamental. Right, Tom?

They all gave her the okay sign. She nodded. Yes, okay. Now, which shell
was
the pea under? She squinted in the sunlight. His lovely white ice-cream suit glowed so brightly under the bare sun that she was having a hard time seeing the expression on his face. Or their face.

‘You’re not supposed to feel anything,’ a million Tom voices said, speaking softly and gently so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed and washed away by a deluge of sound. ‘But there’s some kind of bounce or echo. Or maybe it’s just that there’s no such thing as an intelligent suit of clothes.’

‘If there were,’ she said lazily, ‘it wouldn’t let anyone put it on.’

‘Exactly,’ the Toms said in harmonious unison. She had the idea that he or they wanted to speak more to her, but her eyes, or rather her vision, was getting heavy. She had thought she was
already
asleep. Could you get tired in a dream and sleep within your sleep? And if you did, what would you dream then?

‘
When you awake
,’ Tom whispered, ‘
you will remember everything
.’

The cyborg was at least eight feet tall. It had a frosted crystal skullcap and chrome filament eyebrows. One eye was more or less normal; the other was steel mesh, punctuated here and there by tiny capacitors or sensors like multicolored Indian beads. There were areas on the high cheekbones where the skin and muscle had been excised to allow the metal skull to show and a window in its chest for the anatomically fascinated to watch the innards at work. One lung had been collapsed, or possibly removed altogether, so that the heart could be viewed more easily. Yuki thought it looked sloppy and a bit out of rhythm. The problem was that human organs just never appeared as efficient and neat as machinery did.

She looked around to see if there were any other cyborgs on the pier tonight, or whenever this was. It was always night in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, so she wasn’t sure if it was ever a different night, or whether all nights remained one night. Whatever the case, the cyborgs were out in force, and no two were alike. She looked down at herself, afraid she would see that she, too, was part metal, but she was still wearing Tom’s appearance, at least on the parts she could see.
I probably make a better Tom than he does
, she thought.

‘You’re lost, aren’t you?’ said the cyborg.

Yuki recoiled from a passing individual who was wearing all of the internal organs on the outside of a plastic-and-metal frame. ‘Isn’t the brine and humidity bad for you guys?’

‘Oh. You may be much more lost than I can help you with.’ The cyborg sounded alarmed.

‘Relax,’ Yuki said. ‘I was trying to make a joke.’

‘So was I.’

‘Oh.’ She laughed a little. ‘Sorry. I hadn’t expected subtlety here.’

‘What
were
you expecting?’ The cyborg sounded genuinely interested.

Yuki thought for a moment. ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’

‘Ah, but will
it
know
you?
What are you doing here, anyway? This is the Cyborg Club.’

‘Really.’ Cyborgs were gathering on the pier like seagulls anticipating the arrival of a fishing fleet. Expectation all but hummed in the air. ‘I thought I was in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty.’

The cyborg buffed his stainless-steel left hand on his left buttock and admired the result. Yuki wondered if that was why he was wearing chamois trousers. ‘Well, yes. This is the post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty chapter of the Cyborg Club.’

‘Oh. Well, I was looking for Waxx24.’ She watched two cyborgs comparing eyes and then deciding to trade. It gave her a sympathetic pain in her own corresponding eye socket.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ the cyborg said, starting to sound impatient. ‘We’re the post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty chapter of Waxx24’s Cyborg Club.’

‘
Oh
. And I used to think doing all that set and subset homework in math was a silly waste of time.’ She was starting to get that surreal feeling again.

‘So, does this mean that you don’t want to join?’ He actually sounded a little bit sad.

‘You could say that,’ she said. ‘I really don’t understand how I ended up here.’

‘And I suppose that means an organ donation is out of the question.’

‘You could have my tonsils,’ Yuki offered. ‘Or my appendix. I never throw anything away.’

‘Those aren’t organs. The club could use some good liver stock, or kidneys. Lungs. Stuff like that.’

Yuki shook her head. ‘Try again.’

‘Well, we wouldn’t
take
them. We’d
clone
them. Then you could keep yours and we’d get something new.’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ Yuki said, frowning. ‘But why don’t you just – well, you know, order this stuff from inventory?’

‘Now, what fun is that?’ said the cyborg in a kindly, jocular tone. ‘Just ordering from inventory is too easy. We like a challenge here.’

‘That’s a big challenge, waiting for someone to take a wrong turn onto your part of the Sitty and then trying to talk them out of an organ or two.’

‘Oh, this is just where we gather before we spread out on our nightly scavenger hunt. Maybe I’ll see you on whatever level you like to call your own. If you happen to see anything hydraulic with gears attached, think of me.’ He pushed his hip at her and gave it a slap with his shiny hand. ‘I need a new one of these. I’ll make it worth your while.’

‘How?’ asked Yuki skeptically. ‘I’m not a cyborg and I don’t want any liver.’

The cyborg stepped back and gave her a thoughtful up-and-down. ‘And that’s just how I’d describe you, too. But some things have universal appeal,
n’est ce-pas?
’

‘
N’est ce-pas
,’ she agreed, and enjoyed seeing him wince. ‘If I were to find a hip worthy of you, how do I let you know?’

He produced a business card. ‘Any telephone should accept it. Provided you’re in a place where they allow phones.’

She took the card from him, hiding her reluctance. It was a plain chrome rectangle, a pocket mirror, but when she looked at it, she saw the cyborg’s face instead of her own. She could tell that it was his turn to enjoy seeing her wince, but she tucked it up her sleeve, figuring it would find its way to her catalog. ‘What will happen if I call you?’ she asked, but he was moving away from her, ambling down the pier. He didn’t look as if he really needed a new hip, and she couldn’t figure out why a cyborg or anyone else would need such a thing in AR. Maybe it was some kind of weird parts one-upmanship.

As she stood there watching the cyborgs drift around each other, the population increased at least threefold – suddenly, there were many more people all around her, all over the pier and around it, wading in the water or walking on the surface.
Show-offs
, she thought. She could still see the cyborgs among them, and only some seemed aware of the crowds of noncyborgs; most weren’t.

At the same time, her mind rearranged; it was as if every thought, every idea, every concept had shattered and reassembled in the space of some impossibly short fraction of a second, and the new structures were superior, at least for the purpose of her thought process, which was more focused. And faster.

Definitely faster, she thought, turning away from the pier, and looked up at the night sky, wondering if the saucer would be showing up again.

Wondering if Tom would be showing up again.

Her mind seemed to stumble. She had all but forgotten him, at least for a few minutes. Hard to see how she could, though, seeing as how she
was
him. On the outside, that was. Perhaps she should get business cards like the cyborg’s:
Have you seen me lately? Do I turn up in places you wouldn’t expect to find me – like your mirror? If so, call me immediately!

Across the road, beyond the burning piles of wreckage – vehicles of some kind, they looked like teepees set on fire – the windows of the closed and vacant shops or whatever they had once been reflected the streetlife through a veil of grime. She hurried across to them, clambering over a barrier dividing the trafficway in half and shaking off the imploring hands of someone who seemed to have been a refugee from a mummy case.

She stood in front of a dirty, cracked window, staring at herself. Or rather, at Tom’s likeness. She could see it quite well in spite of the reflected glare of the fire just behind her. Tom’s face was expectant, almost hopeful. She studied the eyes, waiting to see an awareness in them that didn’t belong to her, but they remained her own gaze and no one else’s.

No one
else’s?

The memory spilled over her like hot liquid from an overturned cup, that sensation of having someone else’s hand inside of her own, as if it – as if she herself – were somebody else’s clothing. There was a cold, uncomfortable knot at the top of her stomach, a panic bomb setting itself to go off at the first sign that she wasn’t alone in her – Tom’s – body. She waited in front of the glass, afraid to look at the reflection, afraid not to.

As if on cue, there was a movement behind the glass. She yelled and jumped back, but her panic stalled, becoming mere startlement. The movement really
was
behind the glass, something actually on the other side (
virtually
actually, her mind corrected her, some part of her needing to emphasize the absurdity). While she was still trying to catch her breath, a figure stepped through the glass as if it were a veil of gelatin and faced her on the sidewalk, a humanish creature with shiny black hair flowing down beyond waist level, velvet skin the color of concord grapes, and animal eyes. It was the velvet skin more than the eyes or hair that fascinated her.
Velvet
skin, and only a loincloth to keep out the cold, as if whoever was underneath craved to be a tactile magnet for everyone else.

‘Well, are you coming in or
aren’t
you?’ The voice was aural velvet, musical, and unmistakably Ash. Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed her wrist in a velvet-steel grip and pulled her through the window after him.

‘Go ahead,’ he said, offering her his arm. ‘Pet me. Rub me. You know you want to.’

Yuki stroked his arm twice, just to be polite. They were standing in the middle of an area Ash said was the post-Apocalyptic version of Times Square. There were as many lights here as in the real place, possibly more, but the vehicular traffic comprised mostly cobbled-together machines, most of them without roofs or any other kind of enclosing element, to make it easier for the occupants to jump out on short notice. They had to; the gangs here sported strange metal wings that let them glide if not actually fly, though the trajectories and the speeds seemed to be fudged, at least to Yuki’s eye. Like an old film, the kind where a fall from ten feet up never hurt you, the hero could punch a dozen people, one after another, and never suffer broken bones, or even pain and swelling, and guns fired a million shots in succession and never needed reloading. Which was the whole point, of course.