Growing up in Tier 3000, page 11
“Swooning, soaring, ingratiating,” Jonas agrees. As the music swells, the couples levitate, moving like ice-skaters on a huge carousel. The sounds soar, hang precariously in golden acoustic space, then resolve in a prolonged crescendo. A flaring major chord ends in ten seconds of reverberation, and the dancers applaud and bow. A tableau follows.
A Flagstaff clone sings lieder selections, and the concept of woman as a “tender, warm, smiling divinity” is emovectored to the guests in Mozart samples. A Carmen condensation projects its sex-infusion, some Debussy fairly sighs with sensuality, and the pathetic frustration of love comes through in Petrouchka. Soul-moving, apotheotic, carnal love scenes blossom on the compositor as Tristan and Isolde excerpts are played.
“Our own hearts beating close, one upon the other,” Carol whispers, squeezing Jonas’s hand.
Jonas yields to the emotionality of the moment, as samples of Cole Porter and Gershwin and Rodgers flow from the orchestral pit. The performance moves on to South American rhythms, Storeyville jazz with Jelly Roll and Fats, the instrumental virtuosity of Benny Goodman, and an interesting flashback of sticky, frog-like sexuality in a Shostakovitch excerpt. The evolutionary tableau ends with samples of Sarah Vaughn, Peggy Lee (“amorous, meaningful pout”), Lena Horne, and the romantic operettas of Herbert, Lehar, Romberg, and Friml. The guests applaud and cheer and throw flowers. The sociometric programmers sit in wall-boxes, like chaperones, beaming in changing vectors, and the dancing resumes.
“I suppose we’ll get some brand of action tonight,” Carol says lightly, sitting with Jonas, a Negroid couple, and two geriats.’
“The same old aggression bit, I should say,” the geriat woman says, sipping port, “or perhaps we’ll see something truly innovative.”
“I dug the Leda and the Swan show at the L.A. ruins,” the black man says, leering at his consort. Jonas sips torpedo juice and citric acid and reaches for the program cube. He places it in the center of the table and it activates, glowing like a huge, faceted diamond. The six people lean in and watch as the reading appears: OLFACTORY REGIMEN.
“Hey, the smellies!” the black man says.
“The odor of my beloved,” his consort sighs, making slow panther-like movements, then lowering her head to his lap.
“The dog is aroused by the smell of the bitch,” Carol says, playfully.
“Pity the fellow who leaves no scent,” the geriat man says, lifting his glass.
“Fecal perfume!” Jonas says.
“Naughty microsmatic stud!” Carol sings, “and anyway, scatological dynamics are old hat.”
“Childish fixation. Olfactory masochism,” the geriat man says.
“Hyperbole,” Jonas says, “I’m just joshing.”
“Josh on, man,” the black says, “you’re beginning to talk my primordial smell-jazz.”
“A possible clue to analinctus,” the geriat wife says, her comment incongruent with her dried-leaf appearance.
“Really, my dear—” the husband says.
“Inhibitions, inhibitions,” Carol teases, patting the man’s bony thigh.
“Henry Miller writes of the smell of fresh cunt,” Jonas says.
“Orificial nectar,” Carol coos.
“Well, leave a kiss within the cup…
The olfactory cues befim in, and the dance floor half fills with cake-walkers in flapper costumes, the band blaring out Chicago jazz. A very young Fatha Hines clone smiles from a white piano as he prowls the bass keys in widespread walking tenths.
A sociometric shift, and Jonas and Carol are at another table, beside several children about their age. The talk is first light and ritualistic, complimentary, playful, then intellectually probing, communicatively incremental, cumulative, exponential. Carol and a tiny blonde girl chat about desserts, heroines, and pelvic implants. Jonas finds himself in a bothersome antagonistic pairing with an aesthenic boy. He knows cognitively that the pairing is purposive, has sociometric rationale, but his emosensors begin to flare at the boy’s baitings, infinite regress questions, and verbal tours de force.
“I hate seeing you sit so close to Carol,” the boy says, a one-sided smile on his flat face, “you’re so existential you don’t care what anybody says about you.”
“Why do you let him talk to you that way?” a dark child asks Jonas.
“Oh, let him free-associate,” Jonas replies, leaning back in his chaise.
“It’s just because the boy is skinny,” another observes.
“If I were you, I’d regress, and bust his ass,” a barrel-torsoed boy whispers.
“We could use some new socioprogrammers,” Carol says, her voice calm and subtle in encouraging Jonas to dislodge the skinny boy.
The thin boy looks unruffled by the comments, looks away casually at the dancers, positioning himself to block Jonas’s view.
“Would you alter the angle of your regal head just ever so?” Jonas says, placing his hands on the boy’s head, like a barber.
The boy cringes affectedly, like a Brahmin being touched by a Pariah. “I am advising you to remove your spuriously elite and grubby little hands,” he says in measured, taunting tones.
“How’d you like to step outside?” Jonas whispers. The girls talk louder and the band plays Rosetta.
“Your teleporter or mine?”
“Tandem. On the veranda.”
Jonas removes his hands and the skinny boy adjusts his wing-collar. Carol cuts a knowing look at the socioprogrammers. “Hurry back,” she tells Jonas, her casual tone flicked by anxiety.
Outside, the two six year-olds face each other, looking like boys getting ready to swap marbles. “This will be a stand-off, you know,” Jonas says, “and in one way or another, you must defer to my peer status.”
“You’re just stuffed with more gimcracks than I am,” the boy waves Jonas off, “anyway, I don’t care about you or your status. I want Carol. That’s the whole bit. I’m applying for conjugational access to her.”
“She doesn’t dig pimply-faced kids,” Jonas says, feeling an edge of jealousy.
“Come on, monogamy of any sort is corny. We all can have each other—unless you’re some kind of neurotic maladapt. You know that.”
“Don’t you have a consort, little man?”
“Three,” the boy leans in to Jonas, “plus a homoboy and a nympho-ewe.”
“Little-ass tomcat, aren’t you,” Jonas says, “I think you’re out of your little league, though. You’ll probably have to stay in your own quad. Unless you can outrank me or shortcut the conjugational matrix.”
“Let’s have Carol decide,? the boy says, “have her pop on out here.”
“You know that all this was set up by the programmers, don’t you?” Jonas says, vectoring in beneficent despotism.
The boy counters with an emosignal of anarchy and scorn. “They’ve set it up to see if you can cope with me, and I don’t think you can.”
“Do you agree that it would be stupid to fight?”
“I don’t care. I’m a bull and I want your cow.”
“It’s obvious that you are a maladapt.”
“Are you backing down?”
“From what, little puppy?”
“From meeeee!” the boy flares, snapping to a spread-stance, arms akimbo. Jonas tenses, probing the mocking eyes, the skinny nose, the curling thin lips.
“You’re in over your head. Back off while you’re fairly even in the game. Intrapeer group aggression is foolishly maladaptive. You’ll need all your resources to fight off your wards, not to mention the geriat rovers—” Jonas starts as the boy winks into nothingness.
A sociometric mechovoice beams in:
YOUR COGNIZANCE OF INTRAPEER GROUP
AGGRESSION AS MALADAPTIVE IN THIS
SAMPLE OF CONFLICT REINFORCES YOUR
STATUS. YOU MAY RETURN TO YOUR
CONSORT.
Jonas looks out past the hemlock creepers and the giant plantain stalks to the distant plain, shimmering in the colors of the clustered moons. The foliage rustles with tiny marmots, and tawny gnarled birds lumber through the cypress groves. A steamyacht boils across the plain, its bow glowing red, and the stern billowing thunderheads of beautiful steam clouds. The reverie pops like a bubble and Carol is beside Jonas.
“Where’s the little creep?” she asks.
“Zapped back by the programmers, I think,” Jonas says, absently, “how’s the party going?”
“Fine. Good enough. Coming back?”
“Do we have to?” Jonas bites into the moment, feeling his strengths focalize, like chrome pistons and diamond drill-points held in glistening abeyance.
“You’re reading my estrovectors, darling,” Carol says with a kind of sweet urgency. “I want to make love more than I want to live.”
The children embrace arid their clothing defluxes, revealing bodies glowing with the ventral contact, like marble turning to rosy flesh, two statues coming to life.
Pure tactile and somesthetic cues flood their sensoria, the blood drawn inexorably downward to the sacral bowls.
By a wall laced with heavy ivy, the children secure locktight coupling, Jonas feeling his pikestaff swell grandly in the downy uterine folds. Little lovemaking sounds mix with implant sounds: hypothalamic suckings, fulcrum clicks, neuronal buzzing, pressurized sluicing and whirring. An electric aura-sphere forms around them and the stars begin a slow distant chiming. Jonas cries out to the heavens and a hundred thousand meteorites blast from him in shuddering paroxysms.
Carol grasps his shoulders and her eyes bum with luminescence. Fleshy cilia beat in her sacral labyrinths and her sheath constricts on the shaft like a velvet pump-sleeve. She turns the teleoport bezel for 1000 feet vertical, and she and Jonas float in wispy moist clouds. Jonas stiffens as a second crystal-clear orgasm germinates, buds, and flowers at the base of his spinal chord, all geysers, throbbing pelvic floors, and swimming strabismus. Carol sobs as the third, and implantational paroxsym welds them together.
Deep in the uterine cosmos, the glistening head of a meteorite buries itself in custard ovular epithelia, and a new life bursts into being. A serene glow spreads over Carol. “We’ve done it, Jonas,” she says softly, “we’ll have a little one soon.”
They beam up a flitter and drift over the tree tops, holding each other with new wonder and tenderness. The moon cluster sets and the two small children fly into the rosy dawn toward the teleport station.
XIX
“We’ve had our little fling, haven’t we?” Carol teases Jonas, lowering a fat koala bear clone on his glowing trig puzzle. “Old before our time, square putative parents at age six yet.”
Jonas deactivates the puzzle and strokes the bear. “The little monster—no, the darling cherub—won’t be here for another two months, and we’ll have another six years before we really have to be wary of it.”
“It’s going to be a little stud-boy,” Carol says, a whisk of scorn in her pride.
“You know that already?”
“The readouts came from materno-central today. There’s no nucleolar satellite in the chromosomal matrix. That equals masculinity. And the tiny bundle already has a genital tubercle, testis cords, and primitive kidneys.”
“A solid implant then?”
“120,000 count, my lusty implanter, and one wriggler beat out all the rest.”
“You know, this is an untestable hypothesis, but do you realize what- the odds were against you and me being conceived at all? We are both winners in a race with at least 100,000 losers. We are both distinctive, as well as big fat potential zeroes-1—”
“Fruitless hindsight speculation. You and I are real real real—”
“And a flicker away from zilchood. I damn near got gunned down today by a geriat roverpak.”
“Aren’t we high on the invincibility rankings?”
“Centile 92 and still a little to go.”
“Do you have all the Peer Status implants?”
“Very nearly all. I’m requisitioning extra kva for the teleporter, and minimizing the combative gimcracks. I’d rather be able to pop away than have to trade stun-bolts with some overcompensatory stud.”
“Come see the tiny thing,” Carol says, defluxing her sheath, her body like alabaster tinted with dark sunlight. Jonas X-rays the slightly swollen abdomen and looks in at the fetus: spinal vertebrae, the head beginning to form, a heart, a tail, extremity nubs.
“The face will be complete in a few days,” Carol says. “Do you think he will be handsome?”
Jonas kisses the soft distended belly. “He’ll be a dandy boy—hey, you’re giving off beautiful raw smells, you lovely child.”
“They go straight to your pikestaff, don’t they?”
“Yummy, yes,” Jonas says, sniffing and nuzzling the velvet skin.
“Life has to go beyond orgasms, doesn’t it, Jonas?” Carol says, reflectively.
Jonas feels the aversive emovector and adjusts his tumescence downward. He kisses Carol’s forehead. “Life has pinnacles, nadirs, and vast goddam blocks of fuzzy nondescriptness,” Jonas sighs. “If we get canalized on the structure and function of our lives, we can get compressed into dialogues of despair. Except for intellective flexing, and maybe fattening our info banks yet a little more, speculating on life is maladaptive.”
“I guess I’m sobered by the pregnancy,” Carol says, stroking her stomach. “The little thing already seems to be tough and predatory. If I am the biologic host, this tiny angel is the ultimate parasite.”
“You need some happy gas, baby,” Jonas says, palming on the trivid newscast. Frank Blair, a personality from the days of 2-d television, had died at age 208, a longevity record; the methane trenches at Wheeling had caught fire again; and the Chicago Robot Sox were winners of the World Series of plasmaball.
Carol palms her trivid to the distaff channel: on one facet, a fresh, delicate Millay holobot is reading Renascence and a white mink show is on another. Carol pops an amphet blatter into her forearm and begins to sing in trills and warbles. She dials a Himalayan cat and hugs it. Jonas smiles as she dials another, then five, ten, twenty cats, their mews and purrings filling the air.
“Suppose I dial just one giant mastiff?” Jonas laughs.
“Oh, don’t, dear—”
“Of course I won’t—you make a lovely picture.” He crawls into the furry mass and Carol squeals with delight. The children hug each other, and the cats pad around and over and under them. The air smells of incense, freon, and tanned leather. Outside, a provobot sled notches into the pneumolock and the ingress chime sounds.
Carol suddenly looks alarmed. “Whoever could that be?” she asks, getting up and toggling the monitor, “goddam provobots—”
“Routine, I suppose,” Jonas says, walking toward the port.
“No, wait,” Carol says, “can you read them?”
“They’re deputies,” Jonas replies.
“What locus?”
“Quasoids. Mechanical messenger boys,” Jonas says lightly. “What’s wrong?”
“They couldn’t extradite us, could they?” A flicker of alarm registers deep in Jonas’s memory banks—the clone Carol left of herself at her putpars’ quarters. So that was it. Somebody knew that Carol was not dead.
“Be casual,” Jonas says, “play with the cats, and get by an airshaft. If you have to, pop somewhere, and beam me later.” Jonas walks to the ingress port as the chime sounds again. He irises the vesicle open and faces two mesomorphic forms. Their physiogs are like welders’ masks, and their slate-gray uniforms seem painted on their wooden-doll bodies. Shock-sticks sprout from their ball-socketed extremities.
“Civil census deputies, sir,” one says in neutral mechotones. “May I check your identity cube?” Jonas extracts a small crystalline cube from a mastoid niche and snaps it in the bot’s thoracic slot. A dim red visobar glows and the cub pops out. Jonas refits it behind his ear, emovectoring conformity and peer-level superordinacy…
“Is your consort in?” the bot asks.
“She is ill-disposed,” Jonas says, “in the pregnancy regimen. She is asleep.” The second bot’s visual agates scan the room. Carol is lying by a lift-tube. She is in an amniotic somnobag, tucked in a fetal curl. “We have some double readings on your consort’s identocube, coinciding with some readings on a pediat decedent. Kindly code in verificatory data as specified in this mandate.” The bot hands Jonas a cube.
“Can this wait until she awakens?” he asks, striving for emocontrol in his voice.
“Specified time limit two hours,” the bot answers, “such matters are not without precedent, and are within routine investigatory limits.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Jonas says. The bots spin on castered podiatric bearings and move off. The port closes, and Jonas stands there, looking at the smooth verticality of the panel.
“What do we do now?” Carol vectors across the room.
“The archival cameras may be on,” Jonas vectors back, “feign somnolence for awhile, or take a blinko shot. I need some time to think.”
“Christ, I just blatted in an amphet.”
“Well, cool it as best you can till I check the archival circuits.” Jonas walks to the central console and scans the panels: energy, heat, refrigeration, illumination, water, foodstuffs, garmentage, transportation, trivids, holography, data storage…
“The archival circuits are off,” he says, “I think the only time they come on automatically is when life systems stop.”
“Well good,” Carol sighs, “the damn thing came out on the roof when we zilched Jason. It could be anywhere—do you think we’re being taped?”
“I don’t think so, but our retinographs could be used in any case, if we get in trouble with the Synod.” Carol defluxes the somnobag, and it collapses, compressing into a tiny packet. “The baby feels restive,” she says, walking slowly along the curved walls, looking out at the megalop spires in the distance. “So, we have two horns to do something.”
“Do you want to stay with me?” Jonas asks, looking away.
“Of course I do,” Carol says softly, an almost conjugal warmth-tone in her voice.
