“The pipe works?” I asked.
“Try it.”
I pushed up on the pipe, and rapidly grew through the ceiling of the ballroom. Outside the ballroom was raw black cyberspace with some things twinkling in the distance. I pushed the pipe down, and shrank back into the ballroom and on down and down to the size of a pissant. Dirk and the art meshes towered above me. I inched myself back up to standard size.
“This is great. Can we get out?”
“Sure.” We flew back into Dirk’s virtual office and took off our headsets.
Dirk tore open his quarter ounce and stuffed the bowl of a pipe.
“Uh, Dirk,” I said as he lit the pipe. “About that burn you and Mattel did. Did you ask the phreak to do anything besides scaring me? I mean-you weren’t involved in the release of the GoMotion ants, were you?”
Dirk shook his head no while holding his breath. He offered me the pipe, but it had already gone out.
“How do you want to get the tuxedo onto your system?” asked Dirk as he exhaled. “Ordinarily I’d say for you to just come through cyberspace and pick it up, but what with your legal situation-”
“Yeah, I’d much rather take it on disk and install it directly on my deck. The less of a trail I leave the better.”
“Agreed. I’ll put it on a disk with an install script.”
“Cool.”
We said our good-byes and I went outside. Without putting my headset on, I tapped three-one-four-one to turn on my deck. I opened the trunk and put the disk in the drive of my Pemex twelve. This was finally the golden age of system-independent plug’n‘play, so the deck knew that the disk was meant to be my tuxedo, and the disk knew what format my deck wanted, and they both could agree to run the tuxedo’s self-installing script.
I got in the driver’s seat of my car and put on my headset for a quick cybercruise to the Bay Area Netport rest room. In the mirror I was a black velvet crying clown with the pipe of “Bob” Dobbs. Bety Byte and her grrlfriends looked at me, but I was no weirder than a lot of the tuxedos going by. I flew out to a corner of the Netport and tested out the shrink and grow commands to my satisfaction. But now it was time to pick up Gretchen.
Just for kicks, I tapped five-nine-two-six for the reality pass-through. Stunglasses mode, Riscky had called it. Instead of the Netport, my headset now showed me a TV image of the view out my parked car’s windshield. Dirk’s driveway. I looked down at my hands and waggled them. There was no perceptible lag as the images came in through my headset’s small video cameras, traveled to the deck in the trunk, and made their way to the headset’s video screens. This was a very fast deck. I felt confident enough of it to pull out of Dirk’s driveway and drive down to Los Perros wearing stunglasses. The colors were so rich and the resolution so high that I could barely tell I was wearing a headset at all.
I parked in front of Welsh amp; Tayke, turned off my deck, and stashed my gloves and headset in the pouch behind my seat. I could see in through the front window-Susan Poker and Gretchen were still there. After what I’d just learned about Susan Poker from Riscky-that she was a professional who’d been in on my burn-well, I didn’t want to try to talk to her. I leaned on my horn. Gretchen saw me, grabbed her purse, and danced out laughing to hop in my car. She was glad to see me.
“I’m so sick of the office, Jerzy! It’s a beautiful warm day-I should be at the beach!”
“We can still go to the beach. Let’s go to Santa Cruz and have supper there. And maybe there’s some music happening in Santa Cruz tonight. Do you want to?”
“ Yeah, I do.” This funny emphasis of agreement was another new California speech habit. “My car’s parked over there; let’s regroup at my apartment.”
After parking her Porsche at her apartment, Gretchen changed clothes. I borrowed a baggy sweater from her for if it got cold later. We checked in the paper and, yes, there was music tonight; even though it was Tuesday, there was a World Music concert taking place in the Santa Cruz Civic Center at nine. Perfect-I drove us over the Santa Cruz mountains toward the sun.
We hung out on Its Beach near Steamer Lane. It was sunny and not too windy. Around six-thirty we went to an expensive restaurant looking out over Monterey Bay. We had lobster sausage for our appetizer and duck pizza for our main course. The lobster sausage was exquisitely toothsome, but the duck pizza was a disappointment. Duck was always a disappointment, but somehow I could never learn.
“Let’s stay at my place tonight,” I said over our cappucino. “I don’t want Susan Poker barging in on me again. I don’t trust her at all anymore. I found out today that she’s a cryp. She’s been lying to me. Did you know that, Gretchen?”
“Who told you she was a cryp?”
“Some phreak I met at the Night Watch. His name was Riscky Pharbeque. He sold me a hot new cyberspace deck for a thousand dollars.”
“You just can’t leave that stuff alone, can you, Jerzy?”
“So what about Susan Poker?” I demanded.
“Well, okay, it’s true that she’s a cryp. Welsh amp; Tayke uses her to get early information. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to scare you off.”
“I bet it was Susan Poker who called the cops on me.”
“I guess that’s possible. Even though Susan smiles a lot, she isn’t necessarily that nice a person. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up getting stuck with her as a friend. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Jerzy. I was scared you’d blame me for what she does.”
“Is somebody paying her to watch me?”
“I don’t know.” Gretchen stared out the window, then smiled brightly at me and changed the subject. “Do you think you’ll win your trial?”
“I sure hope so. Part of my being fired from West West means that they revoke my bail next week. That three million dollars they put up? With that gone, I’ll be sitting in jail.”
“Poor Jerzy. Hey! It’s time for the concert.”
“Can you put this meal on your credit card, Gretchen? I’m a little short on cash.”
“Because you spent all your money on another stupid computer? I’ll charge it, but you have to pay me back. All of it. You asked me out for dinner, so it’s your treat.”
“Okay, okay. But don’t worry, at least I’ve got enough cash for the tickets.”
We drove over to the Santa Cruz Civic Center, a small old hall the size of a basketball court with concrete bleachers all around. The first group was a band from Uganda. They had a midget who played an instrument made of a gourd with key chains all around it. In the crowd I lit one of my joints and passed it to Gretchen. She took a long deep drag, held her breath, and exhaled an upward plume of smoke. She stuck her tongue out and wagged her head back and forth like: I’m feeling wild. I got close to her and enjoyed her smell and the fanning of the air that her body motions made.
When I passed the joint back to her the second time, she stuck out her tongue and made her marijuana- smoking-wild-girl face again: I’m high and I like it. I loved Gretchen’s tongue-faces so much. She’d made a come- hither tongue-face at me the very first time I’d seen her-at Coffee Roasting. That time her tongue had bent up over her upper lip, but for the wild-girl tongue-face at the Santa Cruz concert, Gretchen’s tongue went down over her lower lip. She fascinated me.
After the concert, we went back to my room at Queue’s and fucked. Queue and Keith weren’t home, so we fucked loud and hard and had a great time, up there in my airy room in the redwooded Santa Cruz mountains. Pretty soon Gretchen dropped off to sleep.
I’d brought my new gloves and headset up from the car with me; they were lying on the floor next to the bed. Lying cozy in my Gretchenful bed, I pulled on the gloves, donned the headset, and tapped into cyberspace.
You know at the end of the classic Beatles song, “Day In The Life,” how it ends on a big chord, like: BAAAAOOOUUUUMMM? That’s the sound Riscky’s deck made in my earphones, welcoming me in.
I flew across the Netport to the node of the Magic Shell Mall. In the mall, I flew to the vacant lot between Total Video and Gibb amp; Gibb. I walked to the same old vertex and pushed down on my pipe. The scene around me expanded smoothly, and then I was the size of a pissant and I was standing next to a big round off error hole in the corner. I crawled through the hole.
At first it was all black, but then I saw an odd shape in front of me; a drifting piece of geometry with faces that swung crazily through each other, faces that appeared and disappeared in no logical order-it was a piece of
