The way I tell it to Lil, I noticed her and then I noticed the Mansion, but to tell the truth it was the other way around.
The first couple rides through, I was just glad of the aggressive air conditioning and the delicious sensation of sweat drying on my skin. But on the third pass, I started to notice just how goddamn cool the thing was. There wasn't a single bit of tech more advanced than a film-loop projector in the whole place, but it was all so cunningly contrived that the illusion of a haunted house was perfect: the ghosts that whirled through the ballroom were
I never would have made it into the Liberty Square ad-hoc on my own. Lil made it happen for me, long before we started sleeping together. I'd assumed that her folks would be my best allies in the process of joining up, but they were too jaded, too ready to take the long sleep to pay much attention to a newcomer like me.
Lil took me under her wing, inviting me to after-work parties, talking me up to her cronies, quietly passing around copies of my thesis-work. And she did the same in reverse, sincerely extolling the virtues of the others I met, so that I knew what there was to respect about them and couldn't help but treat them as individuals.
In the years since, I'd lost that respect. Mostly, I palled around with Lil, and once he arrived, Dan, and with net-friends around the world. The ad-hocs that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesy but not much friendliness.
I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, they were a faceless, passive-aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchy world of consensus-building to ever do much of anything.
Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for address lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe, spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of course, their Whuffie.
"That's weird," I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was using-my systems were back offline. They'd been sputtering up and down for a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, but I'd never gotten 'round to it. Periodically, I'd get a jolt of urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence.
"Huh?" he said.
I tapped the display. "See these?" It was a fan-site, displaying a collection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part of a giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to build an accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I'd used those meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.
"Those are terrific," Dan said. "That guy must be a total
"Who's the author?" Dan asked. "Do we have him on our list yet?"
I scrolled down to display the credits. "I'll be damned," Dan breathed.
The author was Tim, Debra's elfin crony. He'd submitted the designs a week before my assassination.
"What do you think it means?" I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas on the subject myself.
"Tim's a Mansion nut," Dan said. "I knew that."
"You knew?"
He looked a little defensive. "Sure. I told you, back when you had me hanging out with Debra's gang."
Had I asked him to hang out with Debra? As I remembered it, it had been his suggestion. Too much to think about.
"But what does it mean, Dan? Is he an ally? Should we try to recruit him? Or is he the one that'd convinced Debra she needs to take over the Mansion?"
Dan shook his head. "I'm not even sure that she wants to take over the Mansion. I know Debra, all she wants to do is turn ideas into things, as fast and as copiously as possible. She picks her projects carefully. She's acquisitive, sure, but she's cautious. She had a great idea for Presidents, and so she took over. I never heard her talk about the Mansion."
"Of course you didn't. She's cagey. Did you hear her talk about the Hall of Presidents?"
Dan fumbled. "Not really. … mean, not in so many words, but-"
"But nothing," I said. "She's after the Mansion, she's after the Magic Kingdom, she's after the Park. She's taking over, goddamn it, and I'm the only one who seems to have noticed."
***
I came clean to Lil about my systems that night, as we were fighting. Fighting had become our regular evening pastime, and Dan had taken to sleeping at one of the hotels on-site rather than endure it.
I'd started it, of course. "We're going to get killed if we don't get off our asses and start the rehab," I said, slamming myself down on the sofa and kicking at the scratched coffee table. I heard the hysteria and unreason in my voice and it just made me madder. I was frustrated by not being able to check in on Suneep and Dan, and, as usual, it was too late at night to call anyone and do anything about it. By the morning, I'd have forgotten again.
From the kitchen, Lil barked back, "I'm doing what I can, Jules. If you've got a better way, I'd love to hear about it."
"Oh, bullshit. I'm doing what I can, planning the thing out. I'm ready to
"Jesus, you're a nag."
"I wouldn't nag if you'd only fucking make it happen. What are you doing all day, anyway? Working shifts at the Mansion? Rearranging deck chairs on the Great Titanic Adventure?"
"I'm working my fucking
"Sure," I hollered at the kitchen. "Sure you have."
"Don't take my word for it, then. Check my fucking phone logs."
She waited.
"Well? Check them!"
"I'll check them later," I said, dreading where this was going.
"Oh, no you don't ," she said, stalking into the room, fuming. "You can't call me a liar and then refuse to look at the evidence." She planted her hands on her slim little hips and glared at me. She'd gone pale and I could count every freckle on her face, her throat, her collarbones, the swell of her cleavage in the old vee-neck shirt I'd given her on a day-trip to Nassau.
"Well?" she asked. She looked ready to wring my neck.
"I can't," I admitted, not meeting her eyes.
"Yes you can-here, I'll dump it to your public directory."
Her expression shifted to one of puzzlement when she failed to locate me on her network. "What's going on?"
So I told her. Offline, outcast, malfunctioning.
"Well, why haven't you gone to the doctor? I mean, it's been
Chapter 6
Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts.
It wasn't unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though there were cures, they weren't pleasant.
I was once married to a crazy person. We were both about 70, and I was living for nothing but joy. Her name was Zoya, and I called her Zed.
We met in orbit, where I'd gone to experience the famed low-gravity sybarites. Getting staggering drunk is not much fun at one gee, but at ten to the neg eight, it's a blast. You don't stagger, you
I was bouncing around inside a clear sphere that was a mile in diameter, filled with smaller spheres in which one could procure bulbs of fruity, deadly concoctions. Musical instruments littered the sphere's floor, and if you knew how to play, you'd snag one, tether it to you and start playing. Others would pick up their own axes and jam along. The tunes varied from terrific to awful, but they were always energetic.
I had been working on my third symphony on and off, and whenever I thought I had a nice bit nailed, I'd spend some time in the sphere playing it. Sometimes, the strangers who jammed in gave me new and interesting lines of inquiry, and that was good. Even when they didn't, playing an instrument was a fast track to intriguing an interesting, naked stranger.
Which is how we met. She snagged a piano and pounded out barrelhouse runs in quirky time as I carried the main thread of the movement on a cello. At first it was irritating, but after a short while I came to a dawning comprehension of what she was doing to my music, and it was really
I collapsed dramatically as the last note crashed through the bubble. The singles, couples and groups stopped in midflight coitus to applaud. She took a bow, untethered herself from the Steinway, and headed for the hatch.
I coiled my legs up and did a fast burn through the sphere, desperate to reach the hatch before she did. I caught her as she was leaving.
"Hey!" I said. "That was great! I'm Julius! How're you doing?"
She reached out with both hands and squeezed my nose and my unit simultaneously-not hard, you understand, but playfully. "Honk!" she said, and squirmed through the hatch while I gaped at my burgeoning chub-on.
I chased after her. "Wait," I called as she tumbled through the spoke of the station towards the gravity.
She had a pianist's body-re-engineered arms and hands that stretched for impossible lengths, and she used them with a spacehand's grace, vaulting herself forward at speed. I bumbled after her best as I could on my freshman spacelegs, but by the time I reached the half-gee rim of the station, she was gone.
I didn't find her again until the next movement was done and I went to the bubble to try it out on an oboe. I was just getting warmed up when she passed through the hatch and tied off to the piano.
This time, I clamped the oboe under my arm and bopped over to her before moistening the reed and blowing. I hovered over the piano's top, looking her in the eye as we jammed. Her mood that day was 4/4 time and I-IV-V progressions, in a feel that swung around from blues to rock to folk, teasing at the edge of my own melodies. She noodled at me, I noodled back at her, and her eyes crinkled charmingly whenever I managed a smidge of tuneful wit.
She was almost completely flatchested, and covered in a fine, red downy fur, like a chipmunk. It was a jaunter's style, suited to the climate-controlled, soft-edged life in space. Fifty years later, I was dating Lil, another redhead, but Zed was my first.
I played and played, entranced by the fluidity of her movements at the keyboard, her comical moues of concentration when picking out a particularly kicky little riff. When I got tired, I took it to a slow bridge or gave her a solo. I was going to make this last as long as I could. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my way between her and the hatch.