Lethal kisses, p.14
Lethal Kisses, page 14
Well, that wasn’t necessarily remarkable, either; lots of wealthy eccentrics disappear into their own self-contained worlds sooner or later. And as Nelblu’s case showed, you didn’t even have to be all that wealthy. Being a dreamer made him eccentric enough.
I had the snoop make another pass through the Dream Maestro’s business history, just to make sure, but it came up the same – no transactions outside the small circle of regulars. Closed system? The arrangement looked funny no matter what symbols it was translated into. I decided to test it by sending for information on making an appointment to have a dream.
The answer was immediate: St Denis has achieved Stasis and will not be seeing any new clients in the foreseeable future.
Stasis? St Denis in Stasis. The image was arresting, dramatic, perfect. Ecological balance in a world designed by St Francis – no, wrong saint. St Francis had never been transfixed (in the soul business, you brush up on your hagiography or you could get lost fast).
Transfixed … the picture in my mind was of a man tied to a tree with arrows sticking out of his naked but otherwise perfect body. The expression on his face was not agony but a sort of hungry … satedness. I asked the translator for a retake, just to see if it could dredge anything further out of my own knowledge to convey meaning.
It gave me Elvis, onstage. For St Denis in Stasis? Obviously, some of the associations I was carrying around were too oblique even for me. I narrowed the context and asked for a new translation in terms of commerce.
I could feel the translator make the change, like someone sobering up on demand. The Dream Maestro had transformed his old dream-selling business into a private social club. You hear about this sort of thing happening from time to time – a group of people pool money and resources and have themselves declared a unit, which is a bit like a corporation without a product. If the money’s invested wisely, it can last as long as most of the people in the arrangement.
The motivation for people doing something like that is always some kind of emotional fulfillment. It had to be something especially significant in this case because all of the members were, like St Denis himself, comatose.
It’s a decadent society where you can be comatose by choice. Or aphasic, for that matter. As for people who choose to be comatose for the sake of someone like Nelblu – excuse me, St Denis – well, people will do for religious reasons things they would never consider for love or money.
Of course, if you were to add love or money to a religious motivation, you could end up with something akin to a force of nature, and about as unstoppable. St Denis’s little circle had hardly formed around a fortune, and I doubted money was driving Faith Arsenault – the disk she had thrown down on my desk had contained a holo of the man himself, not a spreadsheet. Which made her more dangerous than someone looking for a big money prize. Moneygrubbers can be bought off.
According to my billing system, Faith Arsenault was more likely to buy someone off than be bought off herself; her wealth was a combination of elements which included currency but had more to do with leverage and position, what she knew and who knew her. Being excluded from the great man’s little closed society must have wounded her like nothing else could. People like Faith Arsenault live on a crazy-angled plane, where they most want only what they can’t buy, and keep trying to buy it anyway, even though they wouldn’t want it any more if they could buy it. I’m not sure what they’d be more devastated by – the fact that everything did have a price after all, or that it didn’t. I don’t think even they know.
Even worse, though, was to have had it at one time and been helpless to prevent it from slipping away. Old billing records showed that Faith had once occupied a spot on the waiting list and later moved over – moved up? – to being a regular. At that time, no one but Nelblu had been comatose and he hadn’t used the St Denis part of his name, or title, or whatever he called it.
It had taken just about three years for Faith Arsenault to move from the waiting list to the regulars and back to the waiting list before being cut off completely. She hadn’t been the only person taken off the waiting list, and it was only a few months before the waiting list, too, was eliminated and the last of the chosen regulars taken into the group coma.
Coma was one of those things you had to have the temperament as well as the aptitude for. I could see why Faith Arsenault hadn’t made the final cut; she just couldn’t slow down enough. Well, some people don’t, but it made me wonder what Nelblu had found attractive about her in the first place, not to mention vice versa.
Whatever it was had been enough to keep them connected for three years. I thought it was too bad that someone hadn’t reminded old Faith that no matter how rough the ride is, any landing you can walk away from is a good one. But then, for some people, if it doesn’t leave a scar, it hasn’t happened.
On the other hand, the experience certainly had left its mark on her. Just how much of her soul did Nelblu have, as compared to how much she thought he had.
Nelblu might have had a good reason for locking Faith Arsenault out, and maybe I’d have done the same if it had been me. But that’s not what I’m paid to think about. Nothing personal. If Nelblu had got to me first with a like request – get him a piece of Faith Arsenault’s soul – I’d have just gone and done it. It would have been more difficult since she wasn’t in the mindplay industry, but I’d have managed to scrape up something.
Of course, technically, St Denis wasn’t in the mindplay business any more, either. I could have looked up some more of his ex-clientele but I had a feeling they’d all gone on to something else; otherwise, Faith Arsenault would have tried enlisting them in her crusade. She hadn’t even mentioned anyone else.
It occurred to me that she hadn’t even had the grace or sense to mention that he was comatose, alone or in a group. But she had to have known – had she thought it wouldn’t matter? The comatose don’t go around leaving traces and residue the way conscious people do, and dealing with a coma group is not the same as dealing with an individual. It seemed that things had a way of getting very complicated very quickly around Faith Arsenault. Which may have been why St Denis hadn’t invited her to stasis. But that wasn’t my concern, either. She was the one paying the bill and I was way too nosy to give her a refund and tell her to find another party to crash.
Sometimes it’s good not to be able to talk to people directly, because you always end up chasing them down and baldly asking for things. If you can get them to come after you, they’re so much more forthcoming. I sent the snoop out into the everywhere with a redesigned icon – St Elvis Sebastian, complete with arrows, but hanging from a cross of living wood, in the upside-down rapture of the Tarot’s Hanged Man.
The responses weren’t slow in coming. Most of them were requests for more details from people who wanted to meet the man pictured, but the last two were from St Denis insiders. One wanted to sell me self-help programs for achieving a stasis of my own. Figured; people who think they have all the answers are often only too happy to tell you what they are.
The other wanted to know how I knew Faith Arsenault.
Visiting the comatose below the consciousness barrier is – well, odd. The symbolism and the literalism are equally rampant and you can’t always tell them apart. You don’t always need to, but you won’t necessarily know when you do need to. It was a situation I felt pretty comfortable with. The aphasia kept me from dreaming lucidly, which meant I handled my dreams pretty much the way I handled my waking life, and vice versa. Which is to say, everything was equally absurd to me, so I was right at home with the comfortably comatose.
Elective coma is something like hibernation and something like hypnotic trance and nothing like anything you’ve ever felt before. Trance-coma is something entirely different – you find nuns and monks in it for religious purposes, usually trying to get through all nine billion names of the godhead so as to bring on the end of the world and the promised paradise to follow. You’d find that goal much more understandable if you really believed that was the only way you were ever going to have any sex.
Elective coma is far less structured. Ordinarily. I’ve heard it described as a random walk through chaos. It’s not as much like death as it is like the end of the world, single serving. Personally, I’m hard put to imagine how a personality wouldn’t disintegrate altogether, but it doesn’t. Chaos has its own structure and personality goes right to it – if it’s the right kind of personality.
‘Exactly right,’ said the construct. ‘In relation to all of the others in the mix, so that it can be in and of the phase space. Otherwise, the attractor cannot develop or be maintained.’
It was disconcerting to hear personality referred to as an it, especially by an it. The construct in contact with my left eye had made no effort even to suggest an artificially balanced androgyny. Sexless, raceless, faceless – an impossibly smooth, fluid, barely human outline. I wasn’t sure what bothered me most – its lack of human characteristics, or the fact that I could understand its communication better than anyone else’s, or that it didn’t much feel like the same … what? person? entity? that had asked me how I knew Faith Arsenault. This thing wasn’t given to curiosity. All its needs were taken care of. Maybe I was supposed to interpolate a soul from that.
Part of the advantage of being aphasic is never having to worry about expressing yourself coherently. I sent a sceptical pulse at the thing and waited to see how it would take that.
It paused; I could tell by the lingering aftertaste that I was on hold. While I waited, vision from my right eye began overlapping now and again, so that the sight of my office and the slowly twirling holo of Nelblu-the-man on my desktop melted in and out of the shadowy abstract I never bothered converting to a more standard environment. Lots of people will make an office or at least a room out of the join interface, but I don’t bother. I don’t stick a cable in my eye so I can be in a goddamn room.
Sometime later, the Hanged St Elvis Sebastian icon congealed out of the tints and shadows – first, the general outline of both cross and man, then the man. As I watched the image of the man become more distinct, he sprouted arrows in various parts of his body, but as if they were growing out of him rather than piercing him. He smiled, and the soft, sensual lips acquired a dimensionality they hadn’t had before. This was no longer an icon.
Is this easier for you? he asked. The entity registers your discomfort with the usual speaker. Also registered: absence of spoken language and presence of outside influence in this transaction.
The translator assured me that the communication really was that stilted. It figured – communication by committee, of course. I’ve seen plenty of weird, bizarre and outré things, but I think the most grotesque is a group of people who have combined their personalities to eradicate the barriers between them. How unhappy did you have to be to do that? Or was unhappy too simple?
I sent him a picture that indicated I wasn’t sure how many people I was meeting – him, several of them, or all of them.
There are no numbers here. Only the Blend and the Balance of the Marriage.
Marriage, my translator insisted, was the only word that fitted the concept, claiming my mind had assigned inaccurate or inadequate connotations to other terms. Maybe my translator really is capable of independent humour.
But then, I truly couldn’t remember very much of what I had once associated with marriage, the icon or the concept. Maybe I could blame the aphasia for that. Or thank it –
There was a sensation of being looked at: perhaps scanned was more like it. Some unmeasured time after that, a blank wall encircled us and began to rotate, displaying pertinent scenes from the Holy Stasis of St Denis.
Like I said, what people won’t do for love or money, they’ll do for religious reasons. The desire for salvation is stronger in some people than the drive to reproduce. Of course, that does beg some questions: salvation from what, to what?
The scenes on the wall gave the story in overlapping fits and starts and jump-cuts, the Grand Apotheosis, from Nelblu the Dreamer to St Denis. In his dreams, yes, the very place. Dream charisma, that’s what you have to have to persuade people to buy your dreams. Some have it, some are drawn to it, some are allergic to it. The sight of the holo twirling on my desk spilled over briefly and seemed to project itself among the images on the wall; then it was gone, though I could sense that the wall was echoing its movement.
The images that marked Faith Arsenault’s tenure lasted barely as long as an eyeblink, but it clunked, somehow, like something big that had fallen down a steep hill. Or been thrown.
This was her symbol. The hanging man glowed brightly and I understood that he – they? – meant the emotion, not that actual image. Her symbol, her desire. Not ours.
I re-ran the brief clunk of Faith Arsenault’s passage in the sacred story of St Denis. You didn’t exactly discourage her.
She persisted. When someone persists, there isn’t a question of allowing or discouraging. She persisted as she was: all of us persisted as we would become.
The symbols clicked along on the wall, as efficient and expressive as any words could have been. More so, actually; the translator gave me the full meanings, including the bits of truth that can be cut off when someone wants to shape a version of the truth. This gospel was no different from any other.
In every sacred story of salvation, there has to be at least one who doesn’t get salvation. Because if everybody makes it, how do you tell the difference?
There’s the real sacrifice, and it has a lot less to do with giving yourself up to some redeemer than it has with the unsuspecting offerings bedecked with jewels and flowers because they’re going to be slaughtered.
Or, as in Faith Arsenault’s case, burdened with everyone else’s failings and cast out. Not that she understood what was going on at the time. She’d thought she was buying dreams, after all. Dreams from the very exclusive Dream Maestro Raymond St Denis Nelblu, who was only too glad to be rid of all the individual ambitions and frustrations suffered by himself and his following; things that kept them divided, or would have if Faith Arsenault hadn’t come along to take them. And what great luck to find someone who could not only take them, but would pay for the privilege. Obviously a sign that their intentions would be blessed with success.
Old Faith had got it all completely wrong. She did have a piece of Nelblu’s soul, the piece he hadn’t wanted. And now he wasn’t Nelblu any more, and he had nothing, absolutely nothing, of her, except the memory of her having been there. She was what they had given up to reach this blend and balance, to exist as the pattern of St Denis. The Marriage.
And the flesh was made word, and we dwelt among it.
Technically, that was none of my business, no matter how distasteful I might have found it. The Hanged Elvis Sebastian almost seemed amused, picking that feeling up from me. It let me know that even if I had loved the idea, there was no room for me. The Marriage had achieved its final form. Over time, it would become set enough that the extra bodies now maintained in coma could be disposed of, little by little, until there was only one to continue driving the configuration, from there to whenever entropy might set in. Assuming Faith Arsenault didn’t hire someone to pull the plug first.
The hanging figure turned upright, plucked an arrow from its chest and held it out to me. It became a white rose. I didn’t reach for it; the man left it hanging in the space between us, twirling slowly.
Then give her this and let her believe she has a piece of the Marriage.
Blood welled up between the petals and ran down the stem, dripping on the thorns.
I added an arrow, putting it through the rose’s heart. Isn’t this more like it?
The Marriage’s response was a cross between an electric charge and the unrelenting grip of a vice, a stinging pressure that lasted for ever and was over in a flash. Somewhere in there, between the alpha and omega of the reaction, I saw the Marriage come apart.
It was less than a moment, but the members were all discrete. Then the spasm passed and it was the Marriage again, but in the aftermath, that moment-less-than-a-moment continued to exist. Not among them, but independently in the phase space they had built for their unity to exist in. It was a renegade spark, a comet on an unpredictable and irreversible path. Sooner or later, they would intersect with it again and there would be another shock, another separation. And then it would be gone, travelling away but bound to meet them again. Each impact would change things in that funny little reality until the time when it would hit them in just the right Way and send them all careening away from each other for good. No more Marriage and, if they insisted on discarding the bodies, no more life to go back to.
I hadn’t meant to do that; I didn’t even understand how I had. And then the rose turned so I could see that the head of the arrow had become Faith Arsenault’s head, features frozen in brittle triumph.
There was barely enough time to be shocked before the contract broke, and I found myself staring at the silent, rotating holo of Faith Arsenault’s loss.
In my left eye, the cable disengaged, retracting the needle, several centimetres long but only a few Angstroms thick, that had penetrated the pupil to connect to my optic nerve and put me into the system. No more eyeballs-out-cable-in for me; the new systems are cleaner, safer, less wearing.
Cross my heart and hope to die; stick a needle in my eye. Funny, the things that come to you right after you break a mind-to-mind contact. Not to mention the things that endure and the things that don’t. Pollution erosion did in Mt Rushmore, but kids’ ritual rhymes go on, an oral tradition as old as – well, never mind. Oral traditions are not exactly my forte any more. But that’s a funny thing, how history can get distorted, legends can blossom or wither, and auld acquaintance can be forgot until rudely brought to mind.
