Part 12 (1/2)

”And?” she insisted. ”What is your point?”

”Well, it was no simulation. The movie was made before computers could turn any single image into some endless quilt. We were really see-ing this vast deserted housing project, high-rise after high-rise with the windows boarded up. The abandoned ruins of some ultra-modern city. it existed, but until that movie n.o.body knew about it. It makes you think.”

”It doesn't make me think.”

There was no way, at this moment, they were going to have s.e.x. Anyhow, it probably wouldn't have been safe. The boat would capsize and they would drown.

A sunless sea It was as though the whole beach received its light from a few candles. A dim, dim light evenly diffused, and a breeze wafting up from the water with an unrelenting coolness, as at some theater where the air-conditioning cannot be turned off. They huddled within the coc.o.o.n of a single beach towel, thighs pressed together, arms crisscrossed behind their backs in a chaste hug, trying to keep warm. The chill in the air was the first less than agreeable physical sensation he'd known in Xanadu, but it did not impart that zip of challenge that comes with October weather. Rather, it suggested his own mortal diminishment. A plug had been pulled somewhere, and all forms of radiant energy were dwindling synchronously, light, warmth, intelligence, desire.There were tears on Debora's cheek, and little sculptures of sea foam in the s.h.i.+ngle about them. And very faint, the scent of nutmeg, the last lingering trace of some long-ago lotion or deodorant. The ocean gray as aluminum.

the wailing Here were the high-rises from the movie, but in twilight now, and without musical accompaniment, though no less portentous for that. He glided past empty benches and leaf-strewn flower beds like a cameraman on roller skates, until he entered one of the buildings, pa.s.sing immaterially through its plate-gla.s.s door. Then there was, in a slower pan than the helicopter's but rhyming to it, a smooth iambic progression past the doors along the first-floor corridor.

He came to a stop before the tenth door, which stood ajar. Within he could hear a stifled sobbing-a wailing, rather. He knew he was expected to go inside, to discover the source of this sorrow. But he could not summon the will to do so. Wasn't his own sorrow sufficient? Wasn't the loss of a world enough?

A man appeared at the end of the corridor in the brown uniform of United Parcel Service. His footsteps were inaudible as he approached.

”I have a delivery for Cook, Fran,” the UPS man announced, hold- ing out a white envelope.

At the same time he was offered, once again, the familiar, forlorn choice between Okay and Cancel.

He clicked on Cancel. There was a trembling, and the smallest flicker of darkness, but then the corridor rea.s.serted itself, and the wailing behind the door. The UPS man was gone, but the envelope remained in his hand. It bore the return address in Quebec of Disney-Mitsubis.h.i.+.

There was no longer a Cancel to click on. He had to read the letter.

Dear [Name]: The staff and management of Xanadu International regret to inform you that as o/ [date] all services in connection with your contract [Number] will be canceled due to new restrictions in the creation and maintenance of posthumous intelligence. We hope that we will be able to resolve all outstanding differences with the government of Quebec and restore the services contracted for by the heirs of your estate, but in the absence of other communications you must expect the imminent closure of your account. It has been a pleasure to serve you. We hope you have enjoyed your time in Xanadu.

The law of the sovereign state of Quebec requires us to advise you that in terminating this contract we are not implying any alteration in the spiritual condition of [Name] or of his immortal soul. The services of Xanadu International are to be considered an esthetic product offered for entertainment purposes only.

When he had read it, the words of the letter slowly faded from the page, like the smile of the Ches.h.i.+re cat.

The wailing behind the door had stopped, but he still stood in the empty corridor, scarce daring to breathe. Any moment, he thought, might be his last. In an eyeblink the world might cease.

But it didn't. If anything the world seemed solider than heretofore. People who have had a brush with death often report the same sensation.

He reversed his path along the corridor, wondering if anyone lived behind any of them, or if they were just a facade, a Potemkin corridor in a high-rise in the realm of faerie.

As though to answer his question Debora was waiting for him when he went outside. She was wearing a stylishly tailored suit in a kind of brown tweed, and her hair was swept up in a way that made her look like a French movie star of the 1940s.

As they kissed, the orchestra reintroduced their love theme. The music swelled. The world came to an end.

PART TWO.

xanadu But then, just the way that the movie will start all over again after The End, if you just stay in your seat, or even if you go out to the lobby for more popcorn, he found himself back at the beginning, with the same pop-up screen welcoming him to Xanadu and then a choice of Okay or Cancel. But there wasalso, this time, a further choice: a blue banner that pulsed at the upper edge of consciousness and asked him if he wanted expanded memory and quicker responses. He most definitely did, so with his mental mouse he accepted the terms being offered without bothering to scroll through them.

He checked off a series of Yeses and Continues, and so, without his knowing it, he had become, by the time he was off the greased slide, a citizen of the sovereign state of Quebec, an employee of Disney-Mitsubis.h.i.+ Temps E-Gal, and-cruelest of his new disadvantages-a girl.

A face glimmered before him in the blue gloaming. At first he thought it might be Debora, for it had the same tentative reality that she did, like a character at the beginning of some old French movie about railroads and murderers, who may be the star or only an extra on hand to show that this is a world with people in it. It was still too early in the movie to tell. Only as he turned sideways did he realize (the sound track made a samisen-like Tw.a.n.g! of recognition) that he had been looking in a mirror, and that the face that had been coalescing before him-the rouged cheeks, the plump lips, the fake lashes, the mournful gaze-had been his own! Or rather, now, her own.

As so many other women had realized at a similar point in their lives, it was already too late and nothing could be done to correct the mistake that Fate, and Disney-Mitsubis.h.i.+, had made. Maybe he'd always been a woman. [Cook, Fran] was a s.e.xually ambiguous name. Perhaps his earlier a.s.sumption that he was male was simply a function of thinking in English, where one may be mistaken about his own ident.i.ty (but not about hers). I think; therefore I am a guy.

He searched through his expanded memory for some convincing evidence of his gender history.

Correction: her gender history. Her-story, as feminists would have it. Oh, dear-would he be one of them now, always thinking in italics, a grievance committee of one in perpetual session?

But look on the bright side (she told herself). There might be advantages in such a change of address. Multiple o.r.g.a.s.ms. Nicer clothes (though she couldn't remember ever wanting to dress like a woman when she was a man). Someone else paying for dinner, a.s.suming that the protocols of hospitality still worked the same way here in Xanadu as they had back in reality. This was supposed to be heaven and already she was feeling nostalgic for a life she couldn't remember, an ident.i.ty she had shed.

Then the loudspeaker above her head emitted a dull Dong!, and she woke up in the Women's Dormitory of State Pleasure-Dome 2. ”All right, girls!” said the amplified voice of the matron. ”Time to rise and s.h.i.+ne. Le temps s'en va, mesdames,le temps s'en va.”

state pleasure-dome 2 ”La vie,” philosophized Chantal, ”est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulagons toutes les seize heures. C'est un palliative. La morte est un remede.” She flicked the drooping ash from the end of her cigarette and made a moue of chic despair. Fran could understand what she'd said quite as well as if she'd been speaking English: Life is a disease from which sleep offers relief every sixteen hours. Sleep is a palliative-death a remedy.

They were sitting before big empty cups of cafe au lait in the employee lounge, dressed in their black E-Gal minis, crisp white ap.r.o.ns, and fishnet hose. Fran felt a positive fever of chagrin to be seen in such a costume, but she felt nothing otherwise, really, about her entire female body, especially the b.r.e.a.s.t.s bulging out of their casings, b.r.e.a.s.t.s that quivered visibly at her least motion. It was like wearing a T-s.h.i.+rt with some dumb innuendo on it, or a blatant s.e.xual invitation. Did every girl have to go through the same torment of shame at p.u.b.erty? Was there any way to get over it except to get into it?

”Mon bonheur,” declared Chantal earnestly, ”est d'augmenter celle des autres.” Her happiness lay in increasing that of others. A doubtful proposition in most circ.u.mstances, but not perhaps for Chantal, who, as an E-Gal was part geisha, part rock star, and part a working theorem in moral calculus, an embodiment of Francis Hutcheson's notion that that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. There were times-Thursdays, in the early evening-when Chantal's bedside/Website was frequented by as many as two thousand admirers, their o.r.g.a.s.ms all bissfully synchronized with the reels and ditties she performed on her dulcimer, sometimes a.s.sisted by Fran (an apprentice in the art) but usually all on her own. At such times (she'd confided to Fran) she felt as she imagined a great conductor must feel conducting some choral extravaganza, the Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony.

Except that the dulcimer gave the whole thing a tinge and tw.a.n.g of hillbilly, as of Tammy Wynette singing ”I'm just a geisha from the bayou.” Of course, the actual Tammy Wynette had died ages ago and could sing that song only in simulation, but still it was hard to imagine it engineered with any other voice-print: habit makes the things we love seem inevitable as arithmetic.”Encore?” Chantal asked, lifting her empty cup, and then, when Fran had nodded, signaling to the waiter.

Coffee, cigarettes, a song on the jukebox. Simple pleasures, but doubled and quadrupled and raised to some astronomical power, the stuff that industries and gross national products are made of. Fran imagined a long reverse zoom away from their table at the cafe, away from the swarming hive of the city, to where each soul and automobile was a mere pixel on the vast monitor of eternity.

The coffees came, and Chantal began to sing, ”Le bonheur de la femme n'est pas dans la liberte, mais dans l'acceptation d'un devoir.”

A woman's happiness lies not in liberty, but in the acceptance of a duty.

And what was that duty? Fran wondered. What could it be but love?

in a vision once I saw There were no mirrors in Xanadu, and yet every vista seemed to be framed as by those tinted looking gla.s.ses of the eighteenth century that turned everything into a Claude Lorrain. Look too long or too closely into someone else's face, and it became your own. Chantal would tilt her head back, a flower bending to the breeze, and she would morph into Fran's friend of his earlier afterlife, Debora. Debora, whose hand had caressed his vanished s.e.x, whose wit had entertained him with Cartesian doubts.

They were the captives (it was explained, when Fran summoned Help) of pirates, and must yield to the desires of their captors in all things. That they were in the thrall of copyright pirates, not authentic old-fas.h.i.+oned buccaneers, was an epistomological quibble. Subjectively their captors could exercise the same cruel authority as any Captain Kidd or Hannibal Lecter. Toes and nipples don't know the difference between a knife and an algorithm. Pirates of whatever sort are in charge of pain and its delivery, and that reduces all history, all consciousness, to a simple system of pluses and minuses, do's and don'ts. Suck my d.i.c.k or walk the plank. That (the terrible simplicity) was the downside of living in a pleasure-dome.

”Though, if you think about it,” said Debora, with her hand resting atop the strings of her dulcimer, as though it might otherwise interrupt what she had to say, ”every polity is ultimately based upon some calculus of pleasure, of apportioning rapture and meting out pain. The jukebox and the slot machine, what are they but emblems of the Pavlovian bargain we all must make with that great dealer high in the sky?”

She lifted a little silver hammer and bonked her dulcimer a triple bonk of do-sol-do.

”The uncanny thing is how easily we can be programmed to regard mere symbols-” Another do-sol-do. ”-as rewards. A bell is rung somewhere, and something within us resonates. And music becomes one of the necessities of life. Even such a life as this, an ersatz afterlife.”

”Is there some way to escape?” Fran asked.

Debora gave an almost imperceptible shrug, which her dulcimer responded to as though she were a breeze and it a wind chime hanging from the kitchen ceiling. ”There are rumors of escapees-E-Men, as they're called. But no one I've ever known has escaped, or at least they've never spoken of it. Perhaps they do, and get caught, and then the memory of having done so is blotted out. Our memories are not exactly ours to command, are they?”

The dulcimer hyperventilated.

Debora silenced it with a glance and continued: ”Some days I'll flash on some long-ago golden oldie, and a whole bygone existence will come flooding back. A whole one-pound box of madeleines, and I will be absolutely convinced by it that I did have a life once upon a time, where there were coffee breaks with doughnuts bought at actual bakeries and rain that made the pavements speckled and a whole immense sensorium, always in flux, which I can remember now only in involuntary blips of recall. And maybe it really was like that once, how can we know, but whether we could get back to it, that I somehow can't believe.”

”I've tried to think what it would be like to be back there, where we got started.” Fran gazed into the misty distance, as though her earlier life might be seen there, as in an old home video. ”But it's like trying to imagine what it would be like in the thirteenth century, when people all believed in miracles and stuff. It's beyond me.”

”Don't you believe in miracles, then?” The dulcimer tw.a.n.ged a tw.a.n.g of simple faith. ”I do. I just don't suppose they're for us. Miracles are for people who pay full price. For us there's just Basic Tier programming- eternal time and infinite s.p.a.ce.””And those may be no more than special effects.”

Debora nodded. ”But even so ...” ”Even so?” Fran prompted.