Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (epub e ink reader .TXT) 📗
- Author: Cory Doctorow
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Lil had, by that time, figured out that I was back online, that their secret messaging had been discovered.
“Having fun, Lil?” I asked.
Lil shook her head and glared at me. “Just go, Julius. I’ll send your stuff to the hotel.”
“You want me to go, huh? So you can bang him till he limps?”
“This is my house, Julius. I’m asking you to get out of it. I’ll see you at work tomorrow—we’re having a general ad-hoc meeting to vote on the rehab.”
It was her house.
“Lil, Julius—” Dan began.
“This is between me and him,” Lil said. “Stay out of it.”
I dropped my papers—I wanted to throw them, but I dropped them, flump, and I turned on my heel and walked out, not bothering to close the door behind me.
Dan showed up at the hotel ten minutes after I did and rapped on my door. I was all-over numb as I opened the door. He had a bottle of tequila—my tequila, brought over from the house that I’d shared with Lil.
He sat down on the bed and stared at the logo-marked wallpaper. I took the bottle from him, got a couple glasses from the bathroom and poured.
“It’s my fault,” he said.
“I’m sure it is,” I said.
“We got to drinking a couple nights ago. She was really upset. Hadn’t seen you in days, and when she did see you, you freaked her out. Snapping at her. Arguing. Insulting her.”
“So you made her,” I said.
He shook his head, then nodded, took a drink. “I did. It’s been a long time since I …”
“You had sex with my girlfriend, in my house, while I was away, working.”
“Jules, I’m sorry. I did it, and I kept on doing it. I’m not much of a friend to either of you.
“She’s pretty broken up. She wanted me to come out here and tell you it was all a mistake, that you were just being paranoid.”
We sat in silence for a long time. I refilled his glass, then my own.
“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I’m worried about you. You haven’t been right, not for months. I don’t know what it is, but you should get to a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” I snapped. The liquor had melted the numbness and left burning anger and bile, my constant companions. “I need a friend who doesn’t fuck my girlfriend when my back is turned.”
I threw my glass at the wall. It bounced off, leaving tequila-stains on the wallpaper, and rolled under the bed. Dan started, but stayed seated. If he’d stood up, I would’ve hit him. Dan’s good at crises.
“If it’s any consolation, I expect to be dead pretty soon,” he said. He gave me a wry grin. “My Whuffie’s doing good. This rehab should take it up over the top. I’ll be ready to go.”
That stopped me. I’d somehow managed to forget that Dan, my good friend Dan, was going to kill himself.
“You’re going to do it,” I said, sitting down next to him. It hurt to think about it. I really liked the bastard. He might’ve been my best friend.
There was a knock at the door. I opened it without checking the peephole. It was Lil.
She looked younger than ever. Young and small and miserable. A snide remark died in my throat. I wanted to hold her.
She brushed past me and went to Dan, who squirmed out of her embrace.
“No,” he said, and stood up and sat on the windowsill, staring down at the Seven Seas Lagoon.
“Dan’s just been explaining to me that he plans on being dead in a couple months,” I said. “Puts a damper on the long-term plans, doesn’t it, Lil?”
Tears streamed down her face and she seemed to fold in on herself. “I’ll take what I can get,” she said.
I choked on a knob of misery, and I realized that it was Dan, not Lil, whose loss upset me the most.
Lil took Dan’s hand and led him out of the room.
I guess I’ll take what I can get, too, I thought.
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 bounce, and when you’re bouncing in a sphere full of other bouncing, happy, boisterous naked people, things get deeply fun.
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 good. I’m a sucker for musicians.
We brought the session to a crashing stop, me bowing furiously as spheres of perspiration beaded on my body and floated gracefully into the hydrotropic recyclers, she beating on the 88 like they were the perp who killed her partner.
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.
When I blew the last note, I was wrung out as a washcloth, but I summoned the energy to zip over to the hatch and block it. She calmly untied and floated over to me.
I looked in her eyes, silvered slanted cat-eyes, eyes that I’d been staring into all afternoon, and watched the smile that started at their corners and spread right down to her long, elegant toes. She looked back at me, then, at length, grabbed ahold of my joint again.
“You’ll do,” she said, and led me to her sleeping quarters, across the station.
We didn’t sleep.
Zoya had been an early network engineer for the geosynch broadband constellations that went up at the cusp of the world’s ascent into Bitchunry. She’d been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had generally become pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a bewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn’t prone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs.
I thought I lived for fun, but I didn’t have anything on Zed. She only talked when honking and whistling and grabbing and kissing wouldn’t do, and routinely slapped upgrades into herself on the basis of any whim that crossed her mind, like when she resolved to do a spacewalk bare-skinned and spent the afternoon getting tin-plated and iron-lunged.
I fell in love with her a hundred times a day, and wanted to strangle her twice as often. She stayed on her spacewalk for a couple of days, floating around the bubble, making crazy faces at its mirrored exterior. She had no way of knowing if I was inside, but she assumed that I was watching. Or maybe she didn’t, and she was making faces for anyone’s benefit.
But then she came back through the lock, strange and wordless and her eyes full of the stars she’d seen and her metallic skin cool with the breath of empty space, and she led me a merry game of tag through the station, the mess hall where we skidded sloppy through a wobbly ovoid of rice pudding, the greenhouses where she burrowed like a gopher and shinnied like a monkey, the living quarters and bubbles as we interrupted a thousand acts of coitus.
You’d have thought that we’d have followed it up with an act of our own, and truth be told, that was certainly my expectation when we started the game I came to think of as the steeplechase, but we never did. Halfway through, I’d lose track of carnal urges and return to a state of childlike innocence, living only for the thrill of the chase and the giggly feeling I got whenever she found some new, even-more-outrageous corner to turn. I think we became legendary on the station, that crazy pair that’s always zipping in and zipping away, like having your party crashed by two naked, coed Marx Brothers.
When I asked her to marry me, to return to Earth with me, to live with me until the universe’s mainspring unwound, she laughed, honked my nose and my willie and shouted,
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