Growing up in Tier 3000, page 10
Jonas stirs in his chaise, the gladiator grunts, and the pale woman sighs. The Elder traces the foliage and compost decades, the hybridization of lifeforms, the mutants and the recessives, and the organic cycles which yielded carbonized gems and metals. Then the obsolescence of supply and demand ratios, the extinction of the work ethic, the homogeneity of economic systems.
And now. “And now,” the Elder’s voice rises, “we find ourselves in life-settings much like those of our predecessors—alike in that we are destined to live for awhile on this planet, riding a spinning sphere through the ethers…and then, to die.”
Jonas thinks back to Carol, her smooth face and ripe mouth, the hedonism of their life styles, and wonders why he has been assigned to a dreary evolutionary lecture. Almost in direct reply, the Elder explains the timebinding, cultural heritage concept, and the need for a select sample of peers to know the entire story—to have full-saturate experiential imprinting. Jonas feels a probe vector and turns to the Sumoglad, who smiles, revealing rows of squared incisors, behind slick, rubbery lips.
“You and me wattage peers,” the Sumo grunts, and Jonas quickly reads the massive humanoid at centile 87. The man nods over Jonas’s shoulder, and he turns to see the young woman smiling at him. “And I am your new peer also. Welcome.”
Jonas turns again and the Elder’s eyes are on him. He stands, as if commanded, and sees about a dozen other people stand. “Welcome, new peers,” the Elder says, and Jonas feels the charismatic flood of approbation from the group, the rich vectors of warmth and empathy.
“There is an ancient saying,” the pale woman says, embracing Jonas gently, “that a person may not have his cake and eat it too. You, me, all of us here, are exceptions to that. We have certain destinies, because we are cognitively superior—certain responsibilities, say.
But your life in your own home region is quite another matter. Do whatever you like, and you will find limitations entirely appropriate to your exploratory drives. You will come very close to living in the best of all possible worlds.” The woman vectors in an autoworth flare that Jonas feels like a thoracic orgasm, and the Sumo claps a hand on his shoulder.
I am to be a Peer of the Realm, Jonas thinks, and the subvocal swellings of accord ring through him.
“Yes, welcome, new, young peer…
XVII
“However did you get here so quickly?” Carol asks Jonas, berthing the puce flitter, and struggling with some cubes, “come, help me with these.”
“You’ll be pleased to know that I have a new implant,” Jonas says, “and—and, it is a medium-range teleporter.”
“How wonderful, darling,” Carol replies, but a shimmer of something maladaptive comes through, like a little hurt.
“What’s with the new cubes, and how did it go at the Geisha thing?”
“The monthly trivid gimcracks, you know, bigger and better hedonistic kicks. And the Geisha School was midway between a drag and a musty anthropologic excursion.”
“I am to be a Peer of the Realm,” Jonas says, with non-contextual playfulness.
“You are to be a goddam what?”
“A big fucking Realm-Peer!”
“Well, fuse my fissures, my own little Jonas,” Carol cries, but her emoradiates register envy, and her facies read tic-like ambivalence. Jonas picks up the cues immediately.
“Aren’t you pleased?” he asks, and her silence puzzles him.
“Pleasure derives from egocentric reinforcement, not from deferrence to superior organismic achievement. I would be pleased if I had a new teleport implant—especially a medium-range one—”
“Well, pardon the hell out of me—”
“Oh, don’t start protesting innocence.”
“I cannot do otherwise. But, the concept of innocence need not be introduced. I mean, what the hell has that to do with me? Or with anything at the moment?”
“I don’t feel like talking to you.”
“Your feelings are maladaptive.”
“Who the fuck says so?”
“Well, first, your emosensors are flaring like hot irons, and the semantic monitor readings are far into the tail of the curve. In short, sweet Caroline, you are talking and acting and feeling like a dumb-ass split-tail bitch.”
“Now, who’s semantic monitor reading is piss-poor?” Carol says, feeling some indignation.- “And what has being split-tail got to do with anything?”
“It’s almost as if some important intellective insights are mediated by the dick. And you, of course, do not have a dick.”
“I abhor appurtenances. I should mightily object to a spongy shaft growing in my pubic thatch. I have my very own sweet-scented cathedral entrance, thank you.”
“It is very sweet,” Jonas says, slipping is arm around Carol, “and I love it, and I love you.” Carol’s face quivers and she looks into Jonas’s bright deep eyes.
“We’ve been quarreling again,” she says, dropping her head on his chest, “I just can’t be strong and adaptive every day. It’s not natural.”
“Be anything you can, baby,” Jonas says quietly. “Be kittenish or be an unabashed tigress. Be strong or be dependent. Lean on me, or push me—but stay with me”
“I want to regress. At least for a little while,” Carol begins to sob. “I want you to hold me,” and Jonas folds her in his arms. “And I want to sleep for just a tiny while with you. Come, I want to sleep in the amnio-pod.” They climb into a wall niche and lie in ventral-dorsal spoon postures. Jonas holds Carol gently, and codes in a short-primed coma-nap for her, and medial quiessence for him. “You’ll feel better when you wake up,” he coos to her as she drops into sleep.
He looks through the shield at the room, through the vesicle at the far end, and out at the horizon. He notches his vision to 20X and finds his magnification and X-ray abilities are far better than before. Voyeurism, he muses, as he zones in on fat Danny, watching the trivids, and little Mark Stitt trying to climb over his three year-old sister.
A routine check, Jonas rationalizes, and zooms in on neighborhood scenes. Gray Mall is asleep on a very hard pallet, her geriatric wheezings easy to minotor, and old Grace is dozing, her dental plates grinning at her from a bedside stand. Sue is picking at the patches of acne on her cheeks and chin and nose, and Dave is fighting with his provobot, as usual. Indian June is carping at her consort, and, deep in the sub-basement of his rococco reprod, Dr. Stevens is doing his vivisection experiments on children. Jonas steels himself as he zooms in on the scene, but the sight floods him with empathic revulsion. Carol stirs, and reaches for him, and he feels protective, holding the small form.
I’d like to carve that sadistic old bastard into cubes. But then Jonas thinks of his own eclectic feelings about sadism in general.
What a really fucked up society, he muses, but typical, actuarially normal. People everywhere held together by reciprocal hostility and protective forcefields. Better take a shit in a bag, so you won’t have to bare your ass over a commode with a municipal duct—somebody might just blast you off the seat. Keep your protective isos on, forcefields at all ingress-egress ports, flit in coded flight patterns, and watch out for geriatric roverpaks. Only inside one’s homeplace is there true safety, and this is only when there are no offspring around to mature in six tiers and start sizing you up for zilching.
My psychopathy index must be changing, Jonas thinks. Perhaps being a Peer is going to change me. But then, they told me to do anything I wanted, and that the limitations would manifest themselves. …
“Come, little one,” he whispers to Carol, “wake up—we’re going to a grand ball tonight.”
The children stand in the sonic shower, holding hands, naked, except for genital pods. “Taking a bath used to be fun,” Carol says, “I remember onyx tubs on raised dais, bubbles, steam, perfume—”
“Stretch a little,” Jonas says, “I’ll dial you some hedonistic salts that will surpass any tactile blast you’ve ever had.” Jonas dials glycerol crystals and ambergris extract, and the sonic cone pouring down on the children is like butter and sand—light, clear oils, and billions of tiny cubes abrasing the ripe epithelium, skip-bombing the tender surface.
“Hey, the jet streams of the world are whistling right through me,” Carol cries, stretching luxuriously.
“We are itchy neural sieves, baby—matter and antimatter, prime tissue and hot myelin.”
“It feels so good. So good.”
“What are you going to wear to the ball?” Jonas asks.
“Whatever the time-warp suggests,” Carol replies, airily, “or we can do the simultaneity bit, and flux off and on, depending on what the group does.”
“I dig that,” Jonas says, vaulting into a mirrorsphere and coding on some costume alternates. The mirrors revolve, changing angles, the trivid camera projecting Jonas’s image from different angles and distances. The costumes change on autovector impulses: a riding habit, a zoot suit. “Hey, zoot suit with a reat pleat and a drape shape!”
Carol sits primly on a valve-stem chair and watches, amused, interested. A stiff sailor suit materializes, and Jonas pipes an air from Pinafore. A coarse-weave caftan follows, then a kimono, and a poncho; finally, a clawhammer coat, cutaway and wing-collar, doublet, frock coat, monkey jacket…
“Elegance, Jonas!” Carol applauds. “Try some elegance!”
Jonas codes in a Prince Albert, spiketail coat, swallowtails and ruped dickey and flying wing.
“There!” Carol applauds again. “Hurrah for the sartorial tiger!”
Jonas watches the hosiery alternates flick through changes: anklets, boothose, knee socks, trunk hose, shears, diamonds, then spatterdashes, chaps, gambados.
“Funny fun-fun!” Carol squeals, “let me try.” She pops next to Jonas and codes some trials. “Looky-look!” she points. Costumes swirl onto her small body, then whisk off, replacing themselves, as if by magic: crinoline, farthingale, muumuu, pannier, sarong, chapeau bras, Dutch cap, picture hat, sola topee…
“Furs!” Jonas yells, coding a category, and Carol watches herself covered with sable, leopard, marten, chinchilla, tiger. Jonas dials a Parisian boulevard scene on the wall and snaps an absinthe blatter into his forearm.
“Forbidden nectar,” Carol teases, rolling into a series of soft somersaults, luxuriating, hugging herself. “Where is this grand ball?”
“At a chateau reprod about halfway to the California fault,” Jonas says, an excitatory edge in his voice, “a 60 room manor house, 28 ornate baths, basement, subbasement, tunnels, catacombs, all 18th century nostal-giajazz, you’ll love it.”
The isochronon hums toward the dusk hour as the children cavort and tumble with each other. The trivid deck swarms with ballet dancers, the olfactory spumes smell heliotrope, and the audioports sift out symmetric sonatinas. Half a continent away, the huge chateau is glowing with hundreds of tapers in carved sconces, as the charbots ready the structure for the ball.
XVIII
“I met a tenured peer today,” Jonas says, perkily, jockeying the flitter through the commuter flightpath, “who has—are you ready?—a global teleporter.”
“Absolute zounds and incredulos!” Carol says, puffing on a Maduro stogie-pencil and watching a Watusi troupe on the panel trivid. “He must be at the asymptote of everything.”
“An artist-physiognomist,” Jonas replies, “and you’re right. He is at three organismic standard deevs, and plusses past most ninety-ninth centiles.”
“Rare. Unreal—”
“He pops to, say, Manhattan Slab, flits off to the Sears Obelisk, then—zap—maybe to Peking or Old London or Atlantis Megalop, to Everest or the Matterhorn.”
“Do you know anybody with an interplanetary rig?”
“Just the bullshit artists at the blatterpub.”
“What’s your…uh…our new teleport range?” Carol asks, a whisker of tentativeness coming through.
“Ours is right,” Jonas says, “and, I think it is about 2000 miles, or whatever the curvilinear equivalences are.”
“Could we blast straight up, altitudinally?” Jonas’s visual analogies crystallize, fade, synthesize. “Yes, little concubine, but that figures to about fen million feet. What would we do up there?”
“Enjoy the view. And fuck.”
“Naughty, delicious child!” Jonas crows, planing the flitter into the continental corridor and leaning back. “It’s about ten minutes to the teleport station, then a soaring, swooning blast to the party from there.”
Beneath the corridor, the skimmers and transporters zip and flit in square, cross-hatched flight matrices, like hundreds of close-set reinforcing rods in seas of plasti-crete. Vapor trails boom out from stacks and jets and ports, sucked up by the lumbering, rust-colored asepsis satellites. The flitter clips along the base of the corridor-funnel like a fat hornet scudding through a culvert.
“Almost there,” Carol says, examining her luminescent fingernails, “I wonder what the girls will be wearing.”
“Nudity is always stylish,” Jonas answers, “and laminated things, like layers of flower petals.” The flitter banks into the teleport station, a tall gray spire, the lattice niches filled with flits and skims and transporters. Just above the berth, a gnarled quasi-homo pouts in his flitseat, his thumbprint voucher rejected by Credit Control. Below, a black drone preens an UltraCauc Anglo-sax official, the powerful lampblack hands flowing over the hirsute form.
“Some really weird cats get issued teleport implants,” Carol says, looking both ways, “pecking orders are so scrambled, so that you never know the players except by digging the scorecard.”
“Can you probe the UltraCauc in the drabfiit?”
“Affirm. He’s a sixth-tier reincarn, stuffed with transplants and prosthetes. His goddam exoskeleton is soybean-based. I’m picking up almost nothing organic.”
“And we, young tigers that we are, are organic from cover to core.”
“Well, what do we have to do before the trip? vouchers? azimuth? release forms?”
“All done, baby. Coded and reciprocated. Want to hold hands? Or sit on me?”
“I used to be afraid of teleporting. I’m not anymore, but I still want to hold you.” The children hold hands as the isochronon flicks through a countdown: seven, six, five…
“Hold tight,” Jonas says. “I always wonder if I’ll feel the wind in my ears,” Carol says, four, three, two, one.
The children shimmer and fade quickly, and materialize in one soft pop 1500 miles away. They stand on a small dais in the entrance foyer of the huge chateau, a smoky cone of light falling around them. Jonas brushes his velvet lapels, a bit affectedly, sets a firmer jawline, and takes Carol by the arm, stepping onto the stone floor. Two eight year-olds appear on the dais, looking like plump mannikins. They blink into the lights and the darkness and step from the dais. Butler clones and housebots move about in life-simulation, bowing and smiling, carrying trays of blatters and fluid cannisters.
Jonas and Carol move through the receiving line, getting uniformly warm emovectors from the hosts, a tiny vivacious couple from Upper Montclair, the Mountbatten clones from England Volcano Slope, two sociometry programmers from Peoria Trench, and several beautiful Ava Gardner clones. Jonas realizes that the guests notice the Peer medallion on his forehead, glittering red and gold—their response is. deterrent, smiling and ever so slight bows. Jonas and Carol move into a large central hall, high-ceilinged, vaulted, stressed with carved beams. A massive chandelier descends from the secret darkness, -lighted tapers burning. The guests move gracefully, fluidly, around tables burgeoning with parfait derivatives and wines.
The guests vary in age and size and appearance, from six-tier neophytes to geriatric reincarns. Many guests wear facade-masks: beaming bald Eisenhowers, handsome Kennedy stereotypes, lush Cleopatras, Jean Harlows.
Jonas and Carol are exchanging conjugal emovectors with a tall geriatric couple when the music begins in the main ball room. Hanging-standing at eye level in the graviton field, the children feel routine sociometic equity. The programmers keep the sociometry optimum: absolutely no isolates, no stars (or very few stars), and no dominance-submission pairings. The orchestra eases into a Strauss waltz and the couples flow onto the floor, circling, rotating like flowers in a whirlpool. The music builds in volume and compositor coverage, and Jonas feels that he himself is producing the music—symmetric music, thesis and antithesis, call and answer, thrust and parry, implicit antiphonality—the effect tailored for flowing movement and opulent settings. The sitar is for a Hindu temple, he thinks, a Flentrop organ for a reverberent stone church, a big band for a hotel roof, and a jazz trio for a cognoscenti club.
“Anybody naked yet?” Carol asks.
“Party’s barely started,” Jonas says, his eyes sweeping the vistas of dancers, “the waltz is tame and introductory—”
“Strauss is savage, sensual, lustful,” Carol says in lilting bell-tones, “nothing is more amorous or flirtatious than Der Rosencavalier.”
