The something had kissed me on the lower lip. It was Marena. She was in a sort of anthracite-gray, probably pashmina sort of top and a matching sort of bottom, with a sort of hairband thingie and a necklace with a hundred and eight garnet beads on it. Her face-it was a square, flat face, maybe too ethnic for a lot of howlies, but the sort of thing you really like if you like that sort of thing-her face was tanner, as expected, and it seemed more so because of big silver clustery Bucellati earrings that seemed clunky for her. She stepped back and sank to her normal height. She looked a little uncomfortable.
“Hi, that was nice,” I said. She said hi.
I looked at her. She looked at me. I looked away first.
“You’re looking really good,” she said.
“Thanks.” Damn, now if I tell her she looks good it’ll sound insincere. Instead I started to tell her how she looked tan.
“No, I mean you really look healthy and happy and everything,” she said. Really? I wondered. I’d thought I was moping, what with the Sic business and everything. “What’s up?”
“Up? Nothing.”
“Really?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You’ve been working out, right?”
“Well, I changed the fluidized bed filters in the sponge tanks.”
“No, really, you’re doing good, right?”
“Better never. I mean, never better.”
There was a pause. You know how they say that when you’re at a loss for words to talk about something that’s in the room? So I looked around the room. There was a huge monitor on a big wooden easel, like it was an oil painting, and there was a sketch on the monitor of a sort of Mayanesque city, and I indicated it.
“Did you do that freehand?” I asked. She said yes. I said that was really something. It was too. The girl really could sketch. “That’s what it’ll look like from the plaza,” she said.
“What will?”
“You know, Neo-Teo™.” That is, she didn’t pronounce the little ™ symbol, but I heard the name like it was there. “I mean, the analog version.”
“By analog you mean real, right?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, real life, full scale, inhabitable, the whole thing. I’m the first single person in charge of designing a city this large since, like, Peter the Great.”
“Cool,” I inarticulated. Marena talked fast sometimes, almost like she was from 1940s radio, and it could take one a second to digest what she’d said. I liked it about her, though. These days if you take a business-presentations class or whatever they always tell you to speak as slow as sloth shit, not just so the ’tards can keep up but because they’ve done studies where people think the same exact speech is more important if it takes two minutes instead of one minute. On the other hand, if you’ve ever been in, say, any software-development meetings of more than three people, you might have seen how there’ll be two or three people who figure the problem out right away, and they work it out together speaking really fast with all this heavy jargon, and then when they’ve solved the problem they’ll take a break and one of them will explain the solution to all the lesser minds. Marena was one of those two or three people. It’s like, whoa, Brain on Board.
“Check this out,” she said. She sort of pulled me around the desk area to a pair of low side tables. One of them was displaying a little crowd of vinyl dolls, or I guess you’re supposed to call them action figures, and when I got closer I could see they were vinyl Barbie-gauge Maya mythological characters, all in that trendy sort of Jesse Hernandez Urban-Ocelomeh style. Each had its name in raised gold on its little fauxstone base. But even without the labels, “Jun Raqan,” that is, Hurricane, would have been easy to recognize because of his single leg, and it wasn’t too hard to pick out “One Ocelot,” “1 Turquoise Ocelot,” “Mam” (who, since he still turned up sometimes these days under the name Maximon, sported a nineteenth-century hat and bolo tie over his Classic Maya gear), “Waterlily Jaguar,” “Ix Chel,” and “Star Rattler,” which was a long feathery snake with goo-goo-googly eyes and a lot of centipedalian legs. There was also a quartet of hunchbacked dwarfs in different colors, which they’d called “Northeast Chak,” “Northwest Chak,” and “Southwest Chak,” and then a gang of creepshowy types, obviously the nine Lords of Xibalba, the Maya underworld. They’d named the tallest one, the leader, “4 Jaguar Night,” and then his posse of eight henchmen all had names beginning with S — Scab, Skitters, Spine (a mastiff-sized fanged rabbit), Scald, Snatchbat, Scurf (a big disembodied head), Sarcoma, and Serpigo-who, to me anyway, looked more Cthuluish than Maya, but what do I know?
“Not those, this,” Marena said. She edged behind the other table. It was covered with what looked like stacks of aerogel building blocks. She found a remote and clicked it on. The blocks filled with light and shadow.
Whoa, I said, or tried to. Anyway, I’ve left off the inverted commas because I suspect I didn’t get it all the way out of my throat.
It was an architectural model of a futuristic Mayanesque city: pyramids, plazas, palaces, spires, towers, bartizans, barbicans, brattices, lattices, oubliettes, obalesques, clerestories, labyrinthories, minatourets, and zigzaggurats, all bathed in a late-afternoon glow and with the inhuman clarity of, say, a daguerreotype, or, to get flowery, something woven out of spun sugar by an army of tiny elves trained at the Ecole des Hoteliers Gastronomiques. The table was only about four feet square and the model didn’t even cover the whole thing, but every carved stone and enamel tile and copper-electroplated window stood out realer than real, so that there seemed to be more detail in it than you’d be able to see in a real city, from a good vantage point, on a clear day, with binoculars, and with the eyes you had as a ten-year-old. It really looked like something from the future. Although of course we’ve been living in the future for a while now, but still. And it wasn’t holographic-obviously, because of the color-and it wasn’t any kind of video, or-oh, right. I remembered. It had to be that new 3-D system they’d been talking about. They meaning Marena and her design team from Warren Entertainment. The Barbie Something.
“Have you seen it before?” Marena asked.
I think I still didn’t say anything.
“I mean, the DHI?”
“Sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”
“Doll House Interface.”
“Oh, right.”
“It’s these blocks of aerogel with all these layers of plasma video screens like, sandwiched into them,” she said. “So without the input it’s almost transparent. The consumer version’s still a few years away.”
“Right.”
“And then there’s also layers of reverse-polarizers, so that makes the shadows. And then there’s a lot of transparency, so you get color depth. And each little layer’s twenty-four hundred DPI.”
I mumbled how thrillingly advanced that all was.
There was a sense of movement somewhere inside the thing and when I squinted closer it turned out that the staircases on the pyramids were escalators. It sounds tacky, but the thing had such a what I guess you’d call a sense of unity that even that, and the neonish ersatz Maya gargoyles and animatronic caryatids and whatever, all seemed to be the right things in the right places.
“See, that’s the Hyperbowl,” she said. She picked up an oval block that was displaying a glass-and-titanium pyramidal shell and uncovered a playing field and tiers of seats.
“So, wait, you’re going to build all this on top of the Stake?” I asked. That is, on top of what was officially called the Belize Olympics Complex. A stake is a Mormon mission, which was what it was originally, so that was what everyone called it around the Warren Family of Caring Companies.
“Well, eventually, that’s the idea,” she said. She handed me the oval block. When I squinted close at it I could just make out nets of gold wires and a black chip the size of the letter M in six-point pica. “After the games the Morons want their own boutique country. Basically it’s a tax dodge.”
“Well, it’s always good to plan for the future.” End of Everything, I thought. Hell. Don’t think about it.
“Yeah. I guess, you know, now that they’ve prevented the end of the world, the Firm’s getting right back to trying to own it.”
“Right.” EOE, I thought again. Damn. It really felt like I was thinking it in that Stephen King echo-effect punctuation, you know, like:
