Tea From an Empty Cup (27 page)

The plain white surface in Konstantin’s hands started to grow. She put it down and stepped back from it as it propped itself up in the sand and swelled to the size of a doorway. A blank, white doorway – the mouth had vanished. Konstantin edged forward and put her hand out to touch it. As she had thought, it was insubstantial. She would have to go through it to see anything. Right this way, ladies and gentlemen. This way to the egress –

She felt her heart give an alarmed thump, even though it was nonsense. She knew it was nonsense. Except it seemed so much easier to believe it was nonsense
out there
than it was to believe it
in here
. When you were
in here
, standing in mushy, thick sand up to your ankles and so doped up that you could feel it far more vividly than you had ever felt the real thing, all the
out there
stuff took on the paleness of the theoretical, of ideas she’d had once, pictures she’d seen somewhere, sometime.
In here
, it really was bigger than it looked from
out there
, and it wasn’t just what they – whoever ‘they’ were supposed to be – wanted you to believe, it was truer than most people imagined. Because most people seemed to imagine only amusement parks like post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty and if that was all they wanted, you couldn’t make them want more.

To someone like that, Konstantin thought, this could well look like an out door.

Holding her breath, she took a giant step into it.

She found herself standing at the railing in the park bordering the large body of water where she had seen the flying saucer – and where she had met the possibly fake child, she remembered uneasily, and turned around. She could hear a faint metallic creaking in the darkness, but that was all.

Gradually it became lighter; the sky was grey, overcast. In the dark water below, just a bit too far away for her to see clearly, creatures were playing in the water. Some of them seemed to be human. Others were human-like but almost certainly not. Konstantin waited, gripping the railing.

She saw it approach from the north, then, small in the distance although the way it flapped its wings hinted at its immensity. A dragon. Excuse me, an
evolved
dragon. How could you tell? Konstantin wondered. Larger-than-average brain case? Opposable thumbs? Advanced postgraduate degree?

As it came closer, she was glad that the day was overcast – full sunlight on the thing’s steel-colored metallic scales would have been too blinding to look at. It was easily the size of a small house, about the size you’d generally imagine for a dragon. The basic body structure was more reminiscent of a mammal than a reptile, however; it reminded her of a lion. The wings were a cross between a sail-plane and a bat. Konstantin had expected them to look leathery but now she could see that they were actually much lighter, actually translucent, showing an occasional rainbow pattern along the span, even under the diffused daylight.

She watched it circle overhead and then bring itself lower and lower so that she could see it more clearly. It was the face that gave away the fact that it was evolved, she decided. The eyes, though slit-pupiled and unmistakably reptilian, were positioned more like human eyes, at the front of the head and instead of the long crocodile-type jaws more usually associated with dragons, the nose and mouth were, again, more like a lion’s muzzle.

Then it was as if lightning had somehow flashed both in her brain and inside the evolved dragon face, illuminating the face beneath it: Sally Lefkow, the first suspicious death.

The dragon proceeded to lower itself down near the water, the great translucent wings beating the air to execute what should have been an impossible hover. It looked into her eyes, or rather she looked into its eyes – this was footage, she realized, and the dragon wasn’t really seeing her.

A moment later, she was seeing things from the dragon’s point of view, riding along in the footage. The experience was dizzying, almost incoherent – something about the dragon’s eyesight made it feel as if even the eyes of her mind were crossing. It was enhanced in some way but also strained, as if the dragon were under the influence of some drug –

She recognized the sensation of the accelerant, but there was something else as well, something that didn’t mix either with Sally Lefkow or the accelerant or both. The dragon soared crazily like a maddened bird of prey and Konstantin got the impression of itching all over, but from the inside.

Briefly the vitals readings became visible on the screen; the numbers meant nothing to Konstantin but she didn’t need them to feel the physical sensation of Sally Lefkow’s panic at sensing something alien moving inside her skin, handling her person, manipulating her body. The dragon thrashed in the air and then, in a desperate move to dislodge whatever it was – or just a desperate move, period – it plummeted straight into the ocean.

In the darkness, Konstantin felt Sally Lefkow fighting for air not because she was drowning in the water but because her throat had swollen closed. The flesh continued to swell, beyond the point usual for anaphylactic shock; the flesh swelled and as it swelled it hardened, dislocating her jaw, tearing ligament and cartilage, crushing her voice box.

Konstantin found herself lying on the pavement by the iron-pipe fence, coughing and gasping for breath. Her eyes were watering furiously and she could hear herself sobbing. She pulled herself to a sitting position, still coughing, looking out over the water. It was still day and still overcast, but the dragon was gone.

With an effort, she got to her feet and then was bent double by another fit of coughing that hurt her chest and her throat. The saliva in her mouth was thick and sour; she wondered what would happen if she tried to spit. Wet the inside of the headmount she was wearing, most likely.

She straightened up and saw a new figure waiting by the railing. Konstantin had not actually seen a picture of this particular character, but the features were distinct, impossible to confuse with anyone else. Marilyn Presley didn’t see her, wouldn’t have seen her anyway. Her face was lifted to something directly over her head. It wasn’t visible to Konstantin but she felt a pulling from the woman and knew that, very shortly, she would be seeing the flying saucer that had abducted Marilyn Presley just before Emilio Torres had overdosed on something.

So much physical sensation associated with states of mind, Konstantin thought marveling, as she ascended with Marilyn Presley toward the saucer. Most of the time you didn’t notice that you breathed a certain way in the grip of one emotion, differently in another, or that you assumed some postures so specifically to express certain emotions that later on, you would assume the posture not only when you felt that emotion, but when you
wanted
to feel it, or when you wanted someone else to feel that way.

And then there was the terrible, new feeling, the sensation of having been invaded, penetrated, and permeated by some force that intended to
use
you, from the inside out. Emilio Torres’s heart went wild as his bowels let go. Abruptly she was completely sightless but sensation remained and she knew that Torres had torn off his headmount and gone searching for something. For what?

For an antidote, she guessed. He must have thought he’d been poisoned and he’d tried to counter whatever it was with a remedy. Either that or he had just wanted to calm down so he could think what to do next. But whatever he had taken had hit him like a sledgehammer. It had stopped every organ, every cell, every tiny bit of him, stopped him and dropped him.

Konstantin’s knees buckled and she crumpled to the pavement. ‘Okay,’ she panted. ‘Okay, I get the idea, we can stop n –’

But the next victim, the panther man, was already bounding toward her over the grassy humps in the park, and it was getting dark again.

She moved in the darkness; was moved, and could feel that she wasn’t alone, even beyond the three
ningyo-zukai
flowing with her. There were many nisei out there in the darkness. Her sense of their presence waxed and waned with her movements. Sometimes she could feel how she and the three puppeteers got out of synch with each other and instead of moving together, moved at odds. At other times, the four of them might have melded into one entity, a creature that could only be the product of a certain kind of joining.

Was
that
Old Japan? Or just a method to bring Old Japan awake and alive again? She didn’t know. So many nisei of her age had been raised either by non-Japanese or thoroughly Western-assimilated Japanese. She knew the culture and history, though she had not been steeped in it the way her grandmother had, and the Japanese of her grandmother’s generation had taken that sort of thing very hard.
We are losing our young
, they would say, and Yuki, like many others her age, would think,
How can you lose us? We’re right here
.

She remembered when she had heard that her grandmother had consented to donate her brain after death to a neural-network organization. At the time, it had been a controversial thing, the use of the brains of the dead for the organization and pathways, neurons, synapses – all sorts of things she didn’t understand. She would not have thought that her grandmother would have been either interested or approving of such a thing.

I want to see if there is such a thing as the ghost in the machine
.

So perhaps there was. Perhaps?

She felt the
ningyo-zukai
stumble with her. This Body Sativa person hadn’t come right out and
said
she was her grandmother. What she knew about Yuki meant nothing – it was easy enough to find out everything you needed to know about someone on-line.

Yuki felt a sudden strong longing for her grandmother, a powerful wish that at least a simulacrum of the old woman existed somewhere in some form, something like a cross between a recording and a shrine. Perhaps if Old Japan could really be awakened, who knew what else could come to be?

Her movements became more rhythmic. She was performing a dance now, she and the puppeteers, except she couldn’t even really feel them anymore. She started to reach out her awareness for them and then thought better of it – in this
bunraku
, the puppet was not supposed to remain conscious of the puppeteers, but enter a state in which its life was the combination of the puppeteers’ movements and the audience willing to let it be alive in their eyes.

They were all around her now, clapping to the rhythm of the dance, beating it out on the ground with their feet. The ground; they were in a clearing in a forest, one of the places that had disappeared well before the legendary Ginza district had first come ablaze. This was a different legend entirely. Yuki remembered it now as she turned slowly, looking at all the Japanese faces, some pure nisei, some part, but all come together to wake Old Japan. Who had told her this story? Her grandmother? Or had it been Tom, of all people?

The story of how day had been returned to the world after a period of unbroken night – Amaterasu, sulking in a cave, angry over something her brother had done. She had refused to be moved, Yuki remembered, turning toward the dark mouth of the cave, even when all the other gods and goddesses came to plead with her. And so the Dread Female of Heaven had stepped up onto an overturned tub and begun to dance. Not the beautiful, stylized dance in silken kimonos to the thin, sharp notes of the shamisen but something primal. A type of dance that even a
sansei
who couldn’t even speak the language could perform.

But once again, the legend differed, for it was Tom in hiding, not Amaterasu, and he cared a lot less about things like unbroken night and waking Old Japan. Nor did he care a great deal about her.

Well, then, she would have to do all the caring, and she would have to get everyone gathered there with her to care also. Without realizing it, she had begun to chant his name; the crowd took it up, softly at first, letting it build.

The thing about pain in AR, Konstantin noticed, was that it took somewhat longer for the nerves to deaden, possibly because there was no physical impact to do any actual damage. You could go on tweaking a nerve via hotsuit stimulation for much longer than you could, say, beat it with a club or whip it with a seasoned strip of leather.

So what was it – had all the victims been kinky for pain to begin with? Or just obsessed with authenticity?

Or had the accelerant simply canceled out anything remotely like common sense?

Whatever it was, Konstantin felt sorry for the people who had suffered through it before dying. Although not quite as sorry as she was feeling for herself, just at this moment.

The panther man’s death had been all the more brutal for the way the survival instinct had been over-ridden or overwhelmed. No, no one in the parlor had heard or seen anything because they had all been buried alive in their own particular worlds, leaving March Kuykendall to bash his head repeatedly against the floor of his soundproofed cubicle in complete privacy. It took a while for Konstantin to realize she was still alive.

When she did, there was no time to try to escape, or even brace herself. In Denver, the wannabe gymnast Lydia Stang had ridden along helplessly in her body as it tried to execute some sort of midair tumbling twist on the run, and failed. Konstantin rode with her, and wasn’t sure which was worse – knowing what was going to happen, or having to hear, deep inside the illusory body, the grisly silent sound of her neck breaking.

Suffocating in a headmount wasn’t impossible – block the ventilation, seal the neck area, pass out. Flo the musician had slept through her death. Konstantin hadn’t.

Victims six and seven – oh, a special treat, dueling deaths, experienced together. Double slay-ride; somewhere, some pervert was in a seamless ecstasy bubble, re-living this one. Could you really stab yourself and make it look like someone else had done it? Or could you stab yourself so badly, slash and hack away at yourself in such a manner that no one would believe you’d done it? Which of course you hadn’t, because someone was wearing you like a glove, like a puppet –