Tea From an Empty Cup (25 page)

‘You explode like a bomb made of flesh and bone,’ said Ash. ‘Bone shards fly out with such force that they could kill someone standing nearby. How’s that for shrapnel? Your blood turns to mist. Doesn’t that bother you? I mean, come on, Yuki, doesn’t it
hurt?
’

She looked at him and tried to say something but her mouth was completely dry.

‘What?’ he said. ‘I can’t hear you. I –’ He let go of her left wrist to cup his hand around his ear and then pretended to look shocked as she dangled by one arm. ‘Oops! I really goofed up that time, didn’t –’

The wind tore her away from him and she tumbled end over end, going faster than ever. She concentrated, willing herself to go even faster than that, instinctively tucking her legs in and hugging her knees.
Faster
, she thought,
faster, faster, faster –

She couldn’t fall faster, she realized, but she could tumble faster
within
the fall. Sky and earth began to flicker again, and then the flickering began to pick up momentum. After a while, she saw that the ground wasn’t any closer; it was as if she were cannonballing along the wind, moving across more than down. Had they noticed, was Ash watching?

The flickering became a flickering gleam, a glimmer, a twinkle that grew from a pinpoint to a ball so big that it crowded out both earth and sky. She fell into it like a comet falling into the face of the sun.

After a time, the light died down, from blinding to something softer, something on the order of the warm golden glow from an antique lamp. Yuki became aware slowly that she was no longer falling, had not been falling for some time. Her eyes were closed and she had no sense of her position – had she passed out? Was she still unconscious and dreaming?

She opened her eyes and jumped, startled. She was sitting in an enormous leather chair like the one in Joy Flower’s office but this one had been pulled up to a large, round, dark wood meeting table. There was a touch on her arm and she turned to find her grandmother sitting at her left.

‘Grandmother?’

‘Body,’ the woman said.

‘Whose?’ asked Yuki, bewildered.

Her grandmother looked patient. ‘Body Sativa. Don’t tell me you don’t know the name.’

‘You look and talk just like my grandmother.’ Yuki drew back suspiciously. ‘Is this how they use you in the afterlife? They keep your brain running to generate post-Apocalyptic AR cities?’

‘If I am your grandmother, I’m dead, I’m past caring why they keep my brain running.’ The woman smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter what they intended, anyway. Something else is happening, something they didn’t bargain for.’

Yuki felt an echo of the weariness that had caused her to sit down in the middle of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty in the first place. ‘It’s all just AR. Right now, I’m moving so fast they can’t track me, but eventually I’ll start to lose momentum and they’ll find me again.’

‘Actually, they’d rather find you
before
you lose momentum,’ Body Sativa said, leaning over to look at the center of the table. Yuki followed her gaze but saw nothing other than a vague area that might have been a spot that a dustcloth had missed. ‘They’ve been trying to get up this high for a while now. Only one or two managed it in the past – accelerant combined with high adrenaline, nature’s own speed cocktail. They want to follow you up. They know there’s something here and they want it.’

‘What?’ Yuki said skeptically, tensing a little in spite of herself.

‘Old Japan.’

Yuki laughed without humor. ‘Oh, yeah. Post-Apocalyptic Tokyo, the hottest thing yet. Please. Save the sales pitch. I don’t do AR. I wouldn’t be here now except I’m, uh, looking for someone.’

‘No. Not a cheap amusement park. The
real
Old Japan. And I know who you’re looking for.’ There was a pause. ‘Iguchi Tomoyuki tried to sell his birthright. The one who purchased it was set upon by a demon, who killed him.’

‘Sorry, I don’t believe in demons,’ Yuki said sourly.

‘Ask Tom, then, when you find him, if he believes in demons.’

Yuki looked down at the highly polished tabletop. Did her reflection just frown at her and give its head a barely perceptible shake no, or was she imagining it? A chill swept up her back to her neck.
Faster?
Faster
still?

‘If you had him here, how did you lose him?’ she asked.

Body Sativa’s face became a cold mask. ‘He became greedy. He took the catalog, he decided he would sell the high-level accesses for money, to anyone, non-Japanese as well as Japanese. Greed is a very old, very unoriginal scenario, so boring. If we could recover the catalog, the accesses to the higher levels –’

‘If Tom’s still in here,’ Yuki said, careful to keep her voice even, ‘why can’t you find him? Or do you already have him – out there – and he just won’t talk?’

‘– we would forgive him, we would make him part of
bunraku
. As you are.’

‘
Bunraku
,’ Yuki repeated, mystified. She looked down at her reflection again. It was staring up at her with an urgent, worried look. Casually she put her forearms on the table and folded her hands like a studious schoolgirl, making a roughly circular area of the tabletop that she hoped only she could see.

‘The method by which Old Japan will be remade –
awakened
– for good. The real, the true Old Japan. We were bringing it to fruition, we were nurturing it with the life of our blood and tissue and the afterlife of our souls when Joy Flower came looking for us.’

‘How? She’s not Japanese,’ Yuki said.

‘Many of her Boyz were, and are. Tom is. You are. We know. Your tissue was sampled when you were injected. We tasted you.’

Yuki felt another chill, what Ash had always referred to as the goose walking over your grave. ‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Just a group of Japanese who missed our homeland. We wanted to go home.’

‘But –’ Yuki felt a wave of dizziness. ‘Wait. With a name like Body Sativa?’

‘It is not yet time to loosen the threads of this appearance and reveal the one underneath.’

Yuki frowned, not understanding the reference. ‘The number who remember Japan like that must be shrinking all the time. Am I
not
Japanese just because the physical islands were destroyed?’

‘All peoples have a source,’ said Body Sativa. ‘We are re-constructing ours, not in soil and rock and ocean, but in flesh and blood, nerve and synapse. Can’t you feel it?’

Something rippled through her, like a sensation from someone else’s body, as if someone else were sharing the suit with her by some remote access. Except this time, it didn’t feel hideously obscene, like being invaded by a stranger from within.

There was a gentle touch on her shoulder and she looked up to see a large doll-woman in traditional Japanese costume floating in front of her on the table. It bowed and began to move slowly and precisely, with as much grace as a living person.

Not a doll. A puppet, with several living persons behind its movements.
Her
movements.
Bunraku
. Japanese puppet theater. Not a children’s diversion but the classic puppet theater of Old Japan, as serious as Noh and Kabuki, a demonstration of skill and grace, control and cooperation. Now she could see the outlines of the people moving the puppet if not their faces. See them and feel them –

She held up both her hands, looking at them in wonder. ‘Tom?’ she whispered, rubbing her hands together, trying to sense the presence of any others, all the others whose hands moved and felt with her own.

‘You won’t find Iguchi in there,’ Body Sativa told her. ‘He broke the chain. He didn’t believe Old Japan could be revived. He believed in amusement parks. People can believe in the most absurd things, like Out Doors, or that Joy Flower’s whores do not mind that people put on their sensations like hot suits, for the pleasure of feeling powerful. Or that the Japanese would
want
a post-Apocalyptic city open only to us. We’ve had that, thank you. You’re not the ignorant
sansei
that Tom is, that you didn’t know, are you?’

Yuki leaned back as far as she could, trying to reduce the feel of being pulled into the woman’s gaze. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘Do you know the art of filling an empty cup with tea when you have no tea?’

She shook her head silently.

‘I should have said the art of producing Iguchi Tomoyuki where there supposedly is none. Find him for us, and through him, recover the catalog, with so many of the arts of Old Japan.
Bunraku
, for one. So that we can know again what it is to be one people.’

‘You want whipped cream on that?’ Yuki said dryly.

Body Sativa smiled benevolently. ‘The catalog alone will do, if Iguchi Tomoyuki doesn’t want to rejoin us.’

‘Why me?’

‘You’re wearing his appearance. Joy Flower set you out in it to snag him. You can snag him for us as easily as for her.’

Yuki nodded a bit reluctantly. ‘There’s just one other problem, though. I’m in the process of falling from an airplane –’

‘I know,’ said Body Sativa. ‘And you must hurry, so you can finish before you hit the ground again.’

‘I’m in a bad mood,’ Konstantin said, massaging the palm of her hand with her thumb. She was still getting spontaneous cramping in her hands, feet, and calf muscles.

‘Well, I can’t blame you.’ Sitting on the other side of the desk in the manager’s office, Tim Mezzer yawned. ‘It was probably foolish for you to go in cold like that. Some of the people who come in, they warm up like athletes beforehand. But you don’t have to take it all out on me, you know.’

‘Yeah, I do.’ Konstantin flexed her hand. Tension
is our friend
. ‘Because I know that you’re the one supplying the drug to the custom smart enough to ask for it. I just don’t know which of the other two is in on it with you – Mank or Pleshette.’

Tim Mezzer became marginally less bored for a few moments as he seemed think something over. He shrugged. ‘Pleshette. You always get the manager on your side if you can. Mank doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t even know what planet he’s on.’

‘Innocence is a fragile thing. Don’t tell him.’ Konstantin glowered at him. ‘The other thing I don’t know is why you sent me to Body Sativa when you knew she’d tell me about the drug.’

‘I didn’t think she’d tell you we were using it at the parlor,’ Mezzer said, irritated as well as bored. ‘Or who was supplying it.’

‘It wasn’t all that hard to figure out,’ Konstantin said, getting angry. ‘I only had to guess who the supplier was. I had a one-in-three chance of being right. How stupid do you think people are out here?’

Mezzer shrugged again and spread his hands helplessly. ‘Is that a rhetorical question?’ he asked through a yawn.

‘No,’ replied Konstantin with exaggerated patience. ‘I’m just Nature’s way of telling you that you’ve spent so much time all cranked up
in there
that you’re under the erroneous impression that life
out here
is slow and stupid. Not to mention boring.’

‘Sorry, but it
is
boring,’ Tim Mezzer said. ‘It
is
.’

‘That kid died
out here
,’ said Konstantin, ‘and he wasn’t bored to death.’

Guilfoyle Pleshette was not bored, and neither was her lawyer. She had traded her kimono for a long, formal-looking black garment that was more than a dress but less than a coat. The lawyer was another member of the Church of Small-Is-Beautiful, an older man named Carl Rosario who managed to sit cross-legged in a suit on the desk without looking ridiculous. He also used a pen that wrote in broad, dark strokes and a pad instead of an archiver. Konstantin found she was attracted to him, which put her in an even worse temper.

‘We had nothing to do with Tom Iguchi’s death,’ Rosario said agreeably, ‘and we have many witnesses who can testify to our presence at the check-in desk with Miles Mank during the time Iguchi was murdered. We’re not going to talk about drugs because you’re not drugs, you’re homicide. I think that covers everything. Any questions?’

‘Can we talk about the general day-to-day operation of the video parlor?’ Konstantin asked stonily.

Rosario shrugged. ‘Can we have this conversation in a more reasonable location, one with coffee and perhaps something to eat?’

‘
No
,’ Konstantin growled. ‘
Nobody
leaves here till I have what I need to conduct this murder investigation effectively.’

The lawyer looked at her with distaste. ‘If I might point out, lieutenant, you have already kept my client, as well as several other people, well past their usual quitting times while you did god knows what in an artificial reality scenario from which you could not possibly obtain any evidence whatsoever –’

‘But only because I wasn’t going fast enough,’ Konstantin snapped. ‘Isn’t that right, Guilfoyle?’

Pleshette winced at Konstantin’s use of her first name but refused to look at her. ‘What am I supposed to do, get a blood sample from every blowfish who walks in here? Or search them? Most of them come in with stuff and don’t take it till they’re all ’suited up and ready to go. If somebody wants to ride all fucked up, there’s not much you can do to stop them.’

‘But there’s plenty you can do to help them. Right?’ Konstantin lunged forward over the desk and put her face in Pleshette’s without touching her. ‘How do you get a highspeed connection here? Is it cheaper if you buy the drug here, too, is that some kind of special package deal? Didn’t you say you couldn’t get high speed here, or am I remembering wrong?’

Rosario tapped her shoulder, trying to get her to move back away from Pleshette. ‘Stop showing off, lieutenant. We know you’re tough.’

‘Yeah. Sure.’ Konstantin sat down again. ‘But that’s no distinction around here.
Everybody’s
tough in AR. Gotta be tough to hold your own in those post-Apocalyptic Gang Wars, right, Guilfoyle? Tough is a must. Tough and fast is better, though, isn’t it? And the faster you go, the tougher you get and the tougher
it
gets, right? And then things get a little crazy – no, a lot crazier than usual, and then a whole lot crazier than they ought to be.’