Tea From an Empty Cup (3 page)

‘You’re having someone else’s visions already?’ said the Japanese guy skeptically.

‘Sure. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Somebody else’s life flashes before your eyes?’ The white guy laughed a little, but he looked funny.

The Japanese guy frowned, suspicious. ‘You got something in your blood already?’

‘No, no.’ The white guy shook his head. ‘Not even remotely. No.’ He was trying not to squirm under the Japanese guy’s gaze. ‘And anyway, it would be all cleared out now.’

The Japanese guy made a disdainful noise. ‘Don’t count on
that
, pilgrim. Some of that stuff, it digs in for good. You think you’re clean, you drop in a new dose and baboom – ten-point brainquake on the Richter scale, no survivors. Or maybe it’s not that bad,’ he added as the white guy rolled his eyes. ‘Maybe you drop into this fantastic erotic scene with the hotbody of your secret dreams and then you suddenly find out you got to spend the whole thing as a raccoon. Or the hotbody’s a raccoon and you’re an artichoke – and you
like
it that way. Even
after
you disconnect.’

‘Yeah, well, that happens sometimes. I ain’t afraid of what I’ll find out about myself. I know some losers that’ve found out a lot worse than that.’

‘So what’s all that losing your immortal soul stuff about?’

The white guy grabbed up the pouch and the gel cap. ‘Hell.’ He got to his feet, pushed a few bar-code tabs through the payment slot at the edge of the table, and saluted good-bye from the center of his forehead with his index finger. ‘See you somewhere, sometime,’ he said and made his way between the tables, heading for the exit.

‘Not if I can help it,’ the Japanese guy muttered, watching him go. Off to his next Big Bajoor, maybe, or hot score, or same old tired hustle. For all he knew, the white guy would sell the gel cap to the first sucker he bumped into on the street and just use the hotsuit for masturbation fantasies.

And so what if he did? He himself no longer cared, just as long as they were gone, out of his life, out of his world, all his worlds. And vice versa.

What the hell. The pale-ass might actually see something like the creation myth. Stranger things had happened.
Much
stranger things had happened, and some of them had happened to him.

Most of the people on the dance floor were Floating. Yuki slid between bodies, shouldering some of them aside. They moved for her unprotesting, glad of the extra stimulation. By brushing past, she had probably brought several dozen of them to orgasm. Call it the ripple effect, or the domino theory at work. Perhaps somewhere, someone was writing a scholarly treatise comparing the ripple effect with the domino theory as functions of current nostalgia for the drugs of a bygone era.
Yes, they called the actually quite primitive precursors ‘Xtacy’ in those days (click here for refs for ‘Extasy,’ ‘Ecstasy,’ and ‘E’). While we may consider that another example of late-twentieth-century hyperbole, we should also remember that if we had to live in the late twentieth century, we’d call Floating ‘ecstasy’ too
.

She should have gone into academia, she thought. Ash would have reacted to that idea by nodding gravely, pumping a fist up for emphasis, and having another dose. She wasn’t much for it herself. The hypersensitivity that most users found so sensual and arousing reminded her too much of artificial reality, with all of the artificial of a hotsuit, but without any reality to use it on.

Oh, what’s
that
supposed to mean anyway, ‘artificial reality
’? Tom used to say to her whenever she used the term.
If it’s
reality,
how can it
possibly
be artificial
? But that was Tom. Questions and answers, not necessarily in that order, not necessarily correct, or even matching.

Where are you, Tom?

That depends, Yuki. Do you believe in the hereafter?

What if I say I don’t know?

Then how can you know what you’re here after?

It should have been a groaner, but in the terse back-and-forth of emessaging, there had been no groans and no laughter, only the sound of her own voice alternating with a stranger’s. Somehow, after a lifetime of friendship, she had never managed to put a sample of his voice on her service, so his email came through in an impostor’s voice, a neutral contralto that refused to commit itself to male or female. It made everything seem more bizarre.

Not that Tom had ever been so terribly normal. He didn’t really know what normal was.

And
you
do
? She could hear Tom asking, but in the impostor voice of her emessage service, not his own.

Yes, I do. You don’t have to
be
normal to know it when you see it
. She emerged on the other side of the dance floor, facing the corral of tables where Ash had told her she would find Joy Flower sitting in her regular spot, scanning the crowd for likely prospects.

To be chosen as one of Joy’s Boyz was prestigious for the duration, if ultimately futile and empty. Joy Flower never kept a Boy forever, no matter how fond she might have become of him. Ex-Boyz who resurfaced in the general population were conspicuous by their exness, and also by the uniform refusal (
inability
, it was whispered) to discuss their tenure among the chosen, which made it all but impossible to find out what had happened to the ex-Boyz who didn’t reappear. Like Tom.

There were rumors of the usual kinky sex things, as well as the unusual. Joy Flower was sexually insatiable due to an experimental brain implant gone wrong. No, gone
right
. No, she was really just a celibate procurer for a cabal of rich and powerful perverts and the Boyz were the ones with the implants, to keep them able to perform on request; the same implants later prevented them from talking to the media.

Other things were hinted at in almost inaudible whispers, about the Boyz who had vanished. Dead in hideous ways. No,
worse
than dead, shut away in secret clinics and hospitals, braindead but maintained on life support as their bodies were parted out to rich and powerful invalids who needed new hearts, livers, lungs. No, they were installed in the world’s fanciest barn, pumped full of nutrients, massaged daily for a month, then butchered and roasted for the palates of a cabal of rich and powerful flesh eaters. And their pets, some of whom were Boyz, others the offspring of Boyz and mutant, almost-humans.

Rumors seemed to be clouding her vision as well as her thoughts. She realized she had been staring at a woman sitting at one of the back row tables farthest from the dance floor. The woman was gazing levelly back at her. She had thick, blue-black hair cut in an old-fashioned pageboy. Behind her right ear, a rose cycled from white to pink to shades of red, deepening progressively until it finally turned black. Then it reversed itself, black becoming deepest arterial red and then lightening, to pink and back to white. Her clothing, a stylistic variation on a suit, also old-fashioned, did not change colors, though the slightest move sent moiré patterns shimmering through the material.

Yuki felt nervous laughter threaten. People like this – whatever they were, rich, powerful, or just stone lucky – always seemed to be either deliberately making themselves ugly or just ridiculously obvious. Of course, it could have been some wannabe hoping to get mistaken for the genuine article, or a professional facsimile covering a scheduled appearance while the real person relaxed elsewhere, spared the ordeal of Being Seen without having to remain un-Seen.

Either way, the woman would expect to be treated as if she were Joy Flower, Celebrity Aristocrat. Yuki was annoyed. She wouldn’t know if she were persuading Joy Flower to listen to her in person or by proxy, or just shadow dancing with an unsanctioned impersonator.

Quickly she scanned the rest of the tables. There were eight or nine of them, all occupied. None of the other people looked anywhere near as promising as the shifting-color-rose lady. Bracing herself for the possibility of a harsh and embarrassing brush-off, she skirted around the outside of the seating area until she stood directly in front of the woman.

If she wasn’t Joy Flower, she was an awfully good simulation, down to the look of professional indifference on her flawless face, the look of someone used to rebuffing the overtures and petitions of common slobs. Yuki hesitated. What was she going to say, just come right out and ask her what the hell she had done with Tom Iguchi?

Come clean now, Ms. Flower, did you screw him, eat him, or just throw him away?
Surely Joy Flower would become so unnerved by the direct approach that she would collapse under Yuki’s scrutiny and confess to have done all three, although not in that order.

And not in this reality, either, Yuki thought ruefully.

Everyone has always moved in many worlds at once, Yukiko. But the Japanese were the first to recognize that
. Grandma Naoka; she had always been a strange mix of grande dame and Old Japan. She had donated her brain after death, Yuki remembered, to some kind of neural-net modeling experiment or something.

She remembered it had been a controversial thing at the time, the use of the brains of the dead for the organization and pathways, neurons, synapses – all sorts of things she didn’t understand. At first, she’d been surprised. She would not have thought that her grandmother would have been either interested or approving of such a thing. But after a while, she began to imagine her grandmother’s brain as the life of the neural-net party. Or maybe the afterlife, anyway.
I want to see if there is such a thing as the ghost in the machine
, she had told Yuki.

Naoka would have been able to get this woman to tell her almost anything she wanted to know without actually having to ask her any questions. Well, maybe one or two questions. Yuki smiled inwardly. Her parents had been rather careless people and she hadn’t felt terribly close to them; Naoka had been the one who had given her a sense of family. Not just family, but an intense kinship that seemed to come up from a level in herself too deep to reach. As if they were related not just in flesh and blood, but at the level of their molecules, their atoms.

It was all too easy to exaggerate her grandmother’s better qualities now that the old lady had progressed to the afterlife.

Try ‘dead.’ Or a softer term: ‘passed away. Or the current favorite, a nostalgic blast from the past: ‘recycled
.’ They all made it sound like there really was such a thing as an afterlife, where the thoughts and talents of the deceased could be accessed, perhaps even harnessed.

Her mother’s mother would have made amused noises at her.
It is not a matter of whether there is such a thing as an afterlife, but whether one has the capacity to
conceive
that there is
.

Which had nothing to do with this … did it? Yuki took a slow breath, uncertain whether to stay and try to talk to the woman or leave quickly. As if sensing her indecision, the woman smiled suddenly and pointed at the empty chair to her right. Yuki sat down before she could change her mind. But this couldn’t be the real Joy Flower – it just couldn’t be that easy to get her attention.

Could it?

An intense feeling of awkwardness bloomed inside of her. She must look like a bumpkin with her too-short, bristly, black hair and vending-machine overalls and jacket, a bumpkin having her first stumble around the big city. She stared down at the tabletop, wishing she had thought things out better instead of charging off into the night as if she already knew what she was doing.

The woman leaned forward; behind her ear, the rose’s color slid from pink to red. ‘I know what you want.’

Yuki looked up from under her brows without lifting her head. ‘You do?’

‘Of course. A thousand others have come to me for the same reason. Always that same look to all of you. Why wouldn’t I know?’ Joy Flower put her very white hand on the table and lifted her index finger, pointing it at Yuki. Surprisingly, her nails were unpainted. ‘But you, I like. You’re true Japanese.’

Yuki frowned. If this was a Joy Flower impersonator, she – or he – had a lot of bare face talking about true anything. So maybe it really
was
Joy Flower –

‘Aren’t you,’ the woman added patiently.

‘Well –’

‘Well, you’re hired.’ The woman pushed back her chair and stood up.

Yuki swallowed and rose slowly to her feet. ‘Hired.’

‘Yes. Hired. Come on.’ At once, she and Joy Flower were surrounded by tall thugs, male and female. They all looked oriental but Yuki could see that it was strictly cosmetic; beautiful work of its kind, but too finished to be anything but rendered by a human hand. She and Joy Flower, by comparison, had obviously been born to their features, although Joy Flower’s were a mixture of Mongol and Japanese, with a hint of a Siberian forebear. It was an unlikely combination, but authentic.

Naoka had told her about a time in the past when it had been the vogue among Japanese to have surgery to widen the eyes and eliminate the epicanthic fold so as to look
less
Oriental.
My parents had the operation
, Naoka had said, her soft face distant and unhappy.
Thought they were stupid. What did they want, to be less Japanese? But I was very young, and the very young seldom comprehend the world they live in
.

‘Where are we going?’ Yuki said as the woman and her entourage began herding her toward the exit.

‘To work, of course,’ the woman said briskly.

The bodyguards were all at least six inches taller than Yuki and she was starting to feel stirrings of claustrophobia. ‘What kind of work?’ She half hoped Joy Flower would find the question stupid enough to fire her as quickly as she had hired her.

‘You’re my new assistant.’

‘What happened to the old one?’ Yuki blurted.

Joy Flower didn’t bother to turn around. ‘Who says there was an old one?’ She pushed through the exit into a dank hallway lit just brightly enough to show the mold growing in the cracked cement walls and floor. ‘Vlad, get the car.’