A snake maybe feels the same way about snake-charmers.
I searched for something to say to sidetrack the conversation, but I couldn’t find a thing. A blank mind. Jimmy Schell was so remote, in that moment, that he might have been one of those goddam knights-in-armor I’d been puppeting around for days—something that once existed but was no longer comprehensible, a figure carved out of matter but with no relativity. Like the girl in his commercial—a visual cue, a fiction of the holovisual image, pure simulation.
But he turned the conversation on his own, perhaps in search of a topic where we could establish some kind of rapport. He needed to feel comfortable. He was sensitive to mood and he knew he’d put me in a bad one. He wanted to soothe it over. That, I guess, is what Network calls talent.
“You lived in the stack for long?” he asked.
“Nearly twenty years,” I told him.
“You must’ve had a—lot of neighbors.”
“They come and they go.”
Caps are like cells in a honeycomb. For solitaries. Most people don’t stay solitary for long—not in a world where we all practice neurotic togetherness. People come to caps before, after and in between marriages. There are probably only ten or fifteen long-termers in a stack which houses six or eight hundred. I knew one or two in mine, but they were six or eight floors down, and we had nothing in common except staying power. The temps suited me—I had no use for anything enduring and permanent in the way of friendships.
“—Maybe you don’t generally make—friends,” he said—a weird sentence that could be anything from an indictment to an apology. The fact that he didn’t know what he was getting at himself was signaled by the double hitch.
I just shrugged.
The train came in to our station, braking hard all the way. We joined in the squirming contest. I got out easily, but he got stuck. That’s one of the penalties of being short and wide. Human bodies ought to be built for maneuverability in crowds. Evolution has no foresight. I waited for him, and then we flashed our cards and took the elevator down to the Street together.
Down below it was dim and dingy, though the sky was still dull gray and brown. Twilight comes early at ground level and lingers a hell of a long time. The real day only lasts as long as it takes the noonday sun to cross the gap between the highest ledges. We live in cliff faces, canyons and caves, men of the third Stone Age. But twilight lasts a long time, and we reckon we have durability.
“How long have you worked at—Network?” he wanted to know.
“The same twenty years,” I told him, exaggerating slightly. “Or damn near. Spares and stunts. Master of a million puppets.” Old troupers never die—they just fade out to violins. I let myself go on, to pass the time while we walked. Time was slower now and the world was hard and steady again. “If I had a five for every sim I’d driven to its death I’d be in Consie City,” I said, ruminatively. “I guess that’s my forte—dying. Going out with a splash and a rattle. You think it’s the hero and his fancy shooting gives the vamps that flash of satisfaction when the villain buys it, but it isn’t. It’s me. The feeler’s inside the hero’s head, but it’s watching me go out that fires his little burst of glory. It’s not just the winning—it’s the way that he wins.
“I go down screaming, like it’s a pleasure to kill me. We all need someone to look down on, someone to kick in the balls, someone to kill. That’s where the real kicks come from, so far as the vamps are concerned. That’s why it means something to them. They’re getting their own back on the cruel world, on the crowds that hustle them every moment of their lives. It’s the loser who gets the winner his big payoff. Life is a zero-sum game. Without me to go out like an exploding bogeyman there’d be nothing. You remember that when you’re feeding a billion vamps what they love. Remember the poor sod who’s handling your patsy.”
I shut up then, feeling just a little bit cruel, although he’d never realize it or know why. He wasn’t allowed to think like that, to be sarcastic about the sacred vocation. His mind had to remain pure. A feeler has to identify with the hero-situation all the way down the line. To him, the villain has to be so much filth to be swept up. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking about the guy handling the sim—he was supposed to believe in it as if it were all real, whether it was the super space patrol or knights in shiny armor.
But he didn’t mind me running off at the mouth. It was all the same to him. Just noise. Just something to talk at now his teddy bear was retired.
“You don’t—like it much, do you?” he said, experiencing a flash of real insight.
“It’s a living,” I said. “And it’s something I do damn well. I don’t expect much else. It’s an average kind of life. Never mind the quality, feel the width.”
And it was enough. There had been a time—but isn’t there always?
The dispensers in the lobby were half-full and working, which demonstrated that the supply company with the contract for the building was at least keeping pace with the local kids, whose mission in life was to get everything for nothing and bugger up the machines in the process. We both got supper packs, hanging around looking hungry while the microwaves got to work. I nodded at the building superintendent, who looked vaguely like a sheriff out of an antique movie. Then we took the elevator to the thirty-ninth, suspending the chat as we went. Nobody talks in elevators, even when they aren’t packed tight.
We exchanged dutiful smiles as we turned to haul out keys for our separate doors. We each muttered something inaudible.
Once inside, relaxing like a deflated balloon, I pulled the foil off the supper pack. I accidentally ran the edge along my little finger and slit it from the nail to the first joint. I started to curse, and just for a second the syllable stuck in my teeth. I didn’t know whether to laugh or try again until I got it right.
CHAPTER TWO
With the magnification turned up full the image filled the cap from the back wall to the central deck. I let the bed down and perched on it, with my legs folded under so I didn’t have to dangle my toes in the fringe of the image.
The window was behind me and the million multicolored eyes of the neighboring capstacks were staring at the back of my head. I didn’t bother with the screen. Sometimes, in between programs or when the chat got too banal to bear, I liked to turn over, make the bed into a bridge between the holo’s fantasy world and the all-too-real city. I liked to look down both ways—into the consumer dream, into the night-ridden street.
I wasn’t ever afraid of the height.
Living on the thirty-ninth floor for the best part of twenty years, in a capsule like a wormhole with one side all glass, is enough to cure anyone of acrophobia—or drive them mad. But I never had it. I liked the height. I guess I’m an acrophile, with no inborn fear of falling. I liked to be high up above the filthy street in 3912 Capstack 232, with the illusion of floating amid the towers of light, suspended in some kind of limbo, in the middle of it all and yet quite apart. Alone.
But for now, it was back to the world and eyes diving into the holo. The viewpoint was hovering over the ringside, looking down and across a neutral corner. The sim that Paul Herrera was running was, as usual, dark-skinned with silver trunks. The challenger, Angeli, wore the white skin and the royal blue gear.
Except for color, the two sims were identical. There was very little of the Negro about the features of the black body—they were the same neutral blend of racial characters as those of the white. The skin color differed only so you could tell the boxers apart with the utmost ease. Pound for pound, inch for inch, the bodies were matched dead equal. The fight was fair—as fair as computer programming and human ingenuity could make it. Even the rules were programmed into the simulation-pattern. Herrera and Angeli could make the sims do just about anything, so long as it was in the rules. If either of them tried to throw a foul punch or hang on when the break was called they would tie themselves in knots. It paid to stay legitimate—trying to make a sim do what it wasn’t programmed to do threw your mind