Wit's End (32 page)

“I hate that road,” said Tilda, but Addison said it was better than it used to be. In the old days there were two hundred fifty serious accidents on the 17 every year. That number had been slashed by almost a hundred when the dividers were put in.

Rima left them arguing the merits of the dividers and went to her room. She tried to sleep, but was too tired to close her eyes. Her brain throbbed in her hread. So she got up, plugged in the phone line, and waited to pick up her e-mail.

She had a message from Martin. “You keep telling me I'm not allowed to dump my mother. So if I'm your little brother, then you're not allowed to dump me. You can't have it both ways. Either we're all family and nobody leaves, or we're not and nobody stays. Your choice,” he'd written. “Thanks for the lift.”

He was no Oliver. He was no Oliver, but Tilda loved him and Rima could see he had his good points. There weren't many people, she supposed, who would have pretended to be Maxwell Lane just because she asked. Cody, probably, and Scorch for sure, and probably that fan from the pizza parlor, but not many others. “Nobody leaves,” Rima wrote back, and it was so far past midnight that it was morning already, so she went ahead and sent it.

R
ima came back from a walk on the beach to find a box labeled “Ice City Papers” on the floor by her bed. Inside, among the notebooks, early drafts, false starts, rejected scenes, plot trees, and bits of research on Brother Isaiah and his immortals, was one more letter from Constance Wellington.

The way Rima had found out she was expected for Thanksgiving was that Tilda had asked if there was anyone she'd like to invite. At first Rima had thought this might be Tilda's way of asking her to ask Martin, but it turned out Tilda had already done that. Martin wasn't coming; he would be with his father and step-mother. Rima thought this was just as well. He'd told her he was ready to broach the Ice City bar scheme and Rima couldn't guess exactly what Addison's response would be, but it wouldn't sound like thanksgiving.

Rima e-mailed her aunts to say she was staying in Santa Cruz for the holiday, and their responses managed to be simultaneously shocked, hurt, disapproving, and relieved.

Scorch and Cody had also been asked, but Scorch had a family thing in Yosemite she couldn't get out of and Cody was going with her. One day at breakfast Scorch had gently let Rima know that she'd made her first appearance in the fanfic sex sites. “I'm sorry,” she said. “But they're pretty hot.”

“Tell me I'm not sleeping with Bim,” said Rima, and Scorch said of course she wasn't; that would be perverted. It was all Rima-Maxwell. It was all a meeting of wounded souls.

“Good stuff. Classy,” said Cody. “Not that I've looked.”

If Rima had wanted to see, she could have done so on the new second-floor computer. Addison had sprung for something state-of-the-art, memory and speed added, and a larger screen. She'd also had a new computer installed in the outback.

On Thanksgiving morning, while Tilda cooked, Addison told Rima she had something to show her. They went to the second floor, where Addison launched a program, logged in, and then got up so that Rima could sit down. She was on a You.2 island called The Murder Capital of the World.

The Santa Cruz boardwalk unfolded before her. There was Neptune's Kingdom, complete with sound and color, the beach, the ocean behind it.

Rima found the body downtown, on Pearl Alley. A well-dressed woman had been stabbed from behind and lay on the ground, the knife a few feet away, blood like a veil around her. A fly circled the knife and occasionally landed.

Rima zoomed out until she could see the Farmers Market, the Bad Ass coffee shop, the used-book store. Over on Cooper Street, Maxwell's office had replaced the Portuguese widow's rug shop. The Ice City bar was close by, on Pacific.

“It's the new dollhouse,” Addison said. “And the new book.” She was going to New York in a week to have lunch with her editor and explain how the new book was a website. A print version would follow, but not until a few months after the site went up, even though the Democrats were taking charge in January and Addison assumed that restoring habeas corpus would be their first priority. By February, at the latest, we'd have our rights back and the book could go to press.

The print version had already been written. Finished, in fact, more than a year ago. Writing the book had been the easy part.

Even the virtual world, with all its detail, hadn't taken more than six weeks. She'd hired a team—A Million Red Sheep—to put it all together. The mystery on the island and in the book would be the same, except one would be a linear narrative and the other wouldn't.

The hard part had been Maxwell Lane.

Where was he?

“Where do you think?” asked Addison.

Rima walked into Ice City. An old man sat at the bar. He turned and motioned to the stool next to him. His eyes were dark and his hair gray. He was handsome, not in a presidential way, but more lifelike.

“He's an AI—avatar interface,” Addison said, “connected to an advanced chatbot with a learning knowledge base. We've already uploaded all the novels. He knows those better than I do.”

Addison had been working on him most of the last two years, helped by her tech wizard, Ved Yamagata. The technology wasn't quite there yet, but Ved was doing his best. There were constant modifications. Someday when the world caught up to him, Maxwell Lane would walk and talk to visitors throughout the You.2 world. In the meantime, he was a collaborative project, something like Wikipedia. Parameters had been set. There were things he would not do; things he would not say. But anyone could enter Ice City and talk with him, and every interaction would potentially refine and deepen him.

A certain few, a very few (Rima was surprised and flattered to learn she was one of these), would be given a password that allowed them to train him. Someday he'd be as real as the character in the books.

Rima's password was “biggame.” The prompt “Suggest an improvement” appeared in the corner of the screen when she entered it.

Addison was called away to the phone. Rima's avatar took the stool next to Maxwell. “I thought you'd be younger,” she said. She typed this.

“Did you really?” he answered. His facial expressions changed when he talked, but not when he listened.

Rima clicked on “Suggest an improvement.” This opened a special text field into which Rima typed, “Come back in a few years and I might be.”

“Can I buy you a drink?” Maxwell asked.

“Thanks,” she said, and a bartender appeared at the far end of the bar, poured her something that foamed, and slowly disappeared.

She took a three-sixty look around her. The counter was a dark, polished wood with copper edgings. One of Picasso's Don Quixotes was on the wall. Rima faced Maxwell again. “Come here often?”

“I'm always here,” Maxwell said. “Tell me something about yourself. What's your name?”

“I'm Addison's goddaughter. Would you call me Irma?”

“I won't talk about Addison.”

She made a guess. “Politics?” she asked, and he offered to name every congressperson who had voted away the great writ if she wanted, but she said she already knew them.

Instead she typed in a long message about Oliver, and her mother and her mother's photos of train stations, and her father and how Addison and her father had once been close—“I won't talk about Addison,” Maxwell said—and then about Constance, who used to write him letters that Rima promised she'd read to him someday. One of these letters, Rima said, was about a man who maybe hanged himself or maybe was murdered in Holy City.

“The Santa Cruz cult,” Maxwell said. It was not a question. “Established by Father Riker in 1919.”

Rima told him about Pamela Price, trying to make him understand that she wasn't talking about the
Ice City
Pamela Price, but someone else she was sure he'd be meeting soon, though who knew what name she'd be using when that happened, maybe ConstantComment, maybe Hurricane Jane. Maybe LilLois. Who knew?

The door to the outside opened. The day was turning to dusk. A clown came in, dressed in pink and carrying a pink umbrella. He took a seat at the far end of the bar. Maxwell gave no sign of noticing, and Rima ignored him.

“Tell me more about the hanging, Irma,” Maxwell said.

She told him the little that she knew. He recognized the parts that came from
Ice City.
It was easy to solve, he said.

Constance had told Bim that Bogan was the firebug, and Bim had told Riker, who had Bogan killed. For starting the fires, if that wasn't all at Riker's instructions, or more likely because it
was
on Riker's instructions and now the word was out. Bim never meant for Bogan to die, Maxwell said. Though he blamed himself, of course.

Rima began to explain that Maxwell had confused the real Bim with the fictional one. She started to type this, but stopped, deleted it. What if?

What if Constance had given Bogan's name to Bim? What if Bim had taken it to Riker? Bim was in Holy City to get a story. He wouldn't be the first reporter making something happen just so he could write about it. He wouldn't be the only person to make the mistake of believing that since Riker was ridiculous he wasn't dangerous.

It made sense then that Constance would be so insistent about Bim's innocence. If he was innocent, so was she.

So Addison had picked up enough from Constance's letters to write the book just the way it had happened, without even knowing she'd done so. While Rima's father had read the book as a threat and a betrayal.

What if the rift hadn't been over the third murder, after all? What if it had been over the first? She should probably give more credence to Maxwell's opinion. He was the professional.

“Are you still there?” Maxwell asked.

“Yes,” said Rima.

And then she went ahead and told him that there were two Bim Lanisells and that one of them had been a good husband and a good father and a good man. Don't confuse Holy City with
Ice City,
Rima said. Her father had spent most of his adult life in the world's worst places. If he'd caused Bogan's death, then he'd never gotten over it.

Would you want to be remembered as you were or as better than you were?
her father had once asked her, and Rima chose as he would have wanted. She gave Maxwell the wise, brave, self-deprecating version that Bim had carefully crafted in his columns as if it were the whole truth. She clicked on “Suggest an improvement.” “I see how the Bim Lanisell who was your father couldn't have killed anyone,” she typed, and made Maxwell give it back to her.

“Do you know that I'm a little bit in love with you?” she asked. The foam had vanished from her beer, and the level of the liquid had gone down without her drinking it. The bartender refilled her glass with the exact motions he'd used to fill it, disappeared in exactly the same way. “There are places on the Web where we're having sex. Tender, healing sex.” Of course Rima didn't know this about the sex. It could be kinky and abandoned. She was being polite. “Only you're younger and I'm named Rima.”