He spent the rest of the night wandering the streets of Dreamtown. ZZ-74 was different . . . a new place. Around dawn, he returned to the library. It was locked for the night and he sat on the steps. What had happened during the last twelve hours? He recalled a phrase from a book called
Ascent to the Absolute
, " . . . of some of our packed thoughts it is as proper to say that they are very rich in distinct items as that they are wholly void of any distinct items at all . . . " What
was
ZZ-74? What was anything? That night, Vernor Maxwell became an Angel.
He spent the next day recuperating, and the day after he went in for his test. The Angels' operation had expanded to include a whole building, christened the Experimental Metaphysics, or EM, building. It was not that a building's worth of technicians, secretaries, data analysts, standing committees, etc. was in any way necessary for the Angels' activities. It was just that so little was happening in the Drones' lives that they came hungrily buzzing around when there was a scent of real action.
At the EM building, Vernor found a few other young Dreamers applying for membership in the Angels. Only one besides Vernor made it through the initial screening to be sent upstairs for a machine test. She was a pretty woman, and they rode up in the elevator together.
Vernor looked at her hungrily. They might both be dead in an hour. Sadly he compared their healthy young bodies, imagining the delights they could give each other. He was practically a virgin . . . he'd had his share of playful romps, but never a real liaison. He could make out the shape of her privates through the taut fabric of her pants. He moaned softly.
"Are you scared?" she asked suddenly. He raised his eyes from her crotch to her face. She was looking at him pleasantly, openly. "Because I am," she continued. "I'm not going to do it. I just decided."
"You're not . . . " he said, breaking the eye contact. "Oh, I'll do it. I met Andy Silver. He told me it would be easy for me." As he said these words they sounded false to him. At the advice of a madman he was going to plug his brain into the world's biggest machine?
"You met him?" The girl was interested, "What was he like?" The elevator was coasting to a stop.
"Weird. We got high and he gave me some ZZ-74." Saying the name of the magic drug worked like a charm on Vernor. Suddenly his confidence returned and he stepped from the elevator. "What's your name?" he said, holding the door.
"Alice," she said. "Alice Gajary."
He hesitated a moment longer. "And you're going back down?" She nodded. "If I make it can I come see you tonight?" She nodded again, and as the elevator doors closed she told him her address.
"32 Mao Street. Come for supper." And then she was gone.
A white-coated lady beckoned to Vernor and he followed the coat down the hall. The guide nodded at the various rooms they passed, explaining their functions. The artificial intelligence laboratory caught his eye, it was a whole roomful of marvelous looking technical devices. A man was sitting at a bench cutting a thick sheet of plastic with a heavy-duty industrial laser. Safety precautions seemed to be minimal here.
"And here," the guide was suddenly saying, "is where you . . . drool or fly." She opened a door and he entered to find two men waiting for him. One was a technician bent over a bank of dials, the other was a Japanese man wearing street clothes.
"My name is Moto-O," the latter said, stepping forward. "I am newest Angel and will supervise test." No smiles.
Vernor sat down in the chair they indicated. He started violently when the technician slipped a plug into the socket at the base of his skull, but Moto-O gestured reassuringly.
"Phizwhiz not turned on, Mr. Maxwell," Moto-O said. "You decide when." He indicated a rheostat dial on the panel in front of Vernor. "You make it to five, and you are Angel," he added, finally smiling.
The switch was a dial with the numbers zero through five on it. At present it was set at zero. Moto-O and the technician moved away from Vernor, and he was alone with the machine. Clearly the idea was to inch up to five, hang on for a minute, and whip back to zero.
Cautiously, Vernor turned the dial just the tiniest bit towards one, and then, feeling only a slight tickle, jumped it to two. He closed his eyes to savor his impressions. "A garden of light," Andy had said, and that wasn't far wrong.
Patterns formed and dissolved faster than Vernor could objectify them. That is, he would
experience
a certain train of thought with its concomitant association blocks, but the whole mental structure would turn into a new one before he could step outside of it and
record
it. As yet, however, the thoughts did not feel much different from his ordinary thoughts, though it was hard to be sure. It felt pretty good, actually.
He felt light-headed, reckless. He reached out and turned the dial up to five with one motion. Only after they unplugged him ten minutes later did he have time to try to form a description of what full brain interlock with Phizwhiz felt like.
As he told Alice at supper that night, it was like suddenly having your brain become thousands of times larger. Our normal thoughts consist of association blocks woven together to form a network pattern which changes as time goes on. When Vernor was plugged into Phizwhiz, the association blocks became larger, and the networks more complex. He recalled, for instance, having thought fleetingly of his hand on the control switch. As soon as the concept
hand
formed in his mind, Phizwhiz had internally displayed every scrap of information in his memory banks related to the key-word
hand
. All the literary allusions to, all the physiological studies of, all the known uses for
hands
were simultaneously held in the Vernor-Phizwhiz joint consciousness. All this as well as images of all the paintings, photographs, X-rays, Hollows, etc. of
hands
which were stored in Phizwhiz's memory bank. And this was just a part of one association block involved in one thought network.
The thought networks were of such a fabulous richness and complexity that it would have been physically impossible to fit any of them into Vernor's unplugged brain. Once Moto-O disconnected him, they were gone.
"Wait," Vernor cried, "I was just about to get the whole picture." He had a feeling that some transcendent revelation had been cut short.
Moto-O laughed in delight, "You were almost gone to
be
whole picture. One more minute and . . . wearing the Happy Cloak."
Suddenly Vernor remembered that this had been a test. "I'm an Angel now?"
"Oh yes," Moto-O replied, "I welcome you." He shook Vernor's hand.
The technician looked up from a bank of dials and nodded at Vernor. "The system is definitely energized, Mr. Maxwell. You do good work."
"That's what I don't get," Alice asked after Vernor related the experience to her over the supper she had prepared. "If you have so much better associations and so much more complicated thoughts when you're plugged in to Phizwhiz, why does he even need
you
? I mean it's not like you're adding a whole lot of brain space to the machine."
"It's not my memory or switching circuits that Phizwhiz needs," Vernor responded. "It's my consciousness . . . my ability to discriminate. Inside Phizwhiz it's like a sea of information. The whole time I was in there I was picking out pieces and putting them together into patterns. It was sort of like listening to static until you hear voices."
"Can't Phizwhiz form patterns of his own?" Alice asked.
"Only the ones which follow logically from his initial program," Vernor explained, then added, "actually he can pick out
random
patterns as well. But he can't do what a person can do . . . put together thoughts which are neither so predictable as to be boring nor so random as to be nonsensical."
"So he just needs your good taste?" Alice was smiling warmly. "
I
taste pretty good, you know."
Vernor knelt by her chair and began kissing her open face.
Vernor moved in with Alice and began working with the Angels. Once a week he would go in for brain interlock with Phizwhiz. The next few days would be spent in trying to remember what had happened, and then he would start preparing for the next session.
As far as Phizwhiz was concerned, no preparation on Vernor's part was necessary—all that was needed from Vernor was his ability to form thoughts. Vernor, however, liked to try to use the sessions to work on his math and science.
The first few times he went in to the EM building, he had prepared a mental structure of facts and speculation, a perfectly built fire awaiting the kindling sparks of ZZ-74 and brain interlock. Since, however, he remembered so little of these mental conflagrations, Vernor's preparations became increasingly desultory.
At first he spent most of his extra time doing things with Alice . . . going to museums, youth orgies, outdoor Hollows, or just wandering around the City . . . but as the months wore on he began spending the larger part of his time getting high at the Angels' hang-out, Waxy's Travel Lounge.
One place Alice loved to go was to the City's Inquarium. On the six-month anniversary of their meeting, Vernor pulled himself together and took her there. Their relationship had begun slowly to erode, and it seemed important to have a good time on this outing.
They paid at the Inquarium's entrance and left their clothes in the dressing room. Vernor wore rented swimfins, but Alice had her own custom-made fins, yellow with red stripes and long trailing edges.
"I want to look like a guppy," Alice explained, fastening yellow and red streamers to herself. Mesmerized, Vernor reached towards the streamers.
"No,
no
," Alice said, dancing away and flipping into the tank. Vernor jumped in after. The Inquarium was a huge tank, some thirty feet deep and three hundred feet square. The tank was filled with salt water and stocked with fish of every type and description. It was possible to rest on the bottom of the tank watching the fish and dallying with your mermaid, since breathing masks were bubbling at the ends of their hoses all over the tank's bottom.
Under the water Vernor looked around. His vision was clear, as he was wearing special full-eye contact lenses. The breathing masks were like a field of dandelions gone to seed, far below him. Alice was kicking down past a large grouper and through a school of parrot-fish. The streamers from her body flowed back like fins, luring Vernor closer, delicately tugging at her in a way that he longed to emulate.
Before he could catch up with her, down at the bottom with the air masks, he realized hadn't taken a big enough breath. He shot up to the surface, gasped a full lungful and dove again.
Without Alice nearby, Vernor paid more attention to the full tank's appearance. It was as if he had shrunk to a few inches in size and jumped into a twenty-gallon home aquarium. There were kelp plants the size of trees. Dolphins whizzed to and fro, filling Vernor's ears with their squeaks and clicks. Schools of smaller fish darted and wheeled like multi-celled organisms. A large, pug-nosed fish seemed rather too interested in Vernor's swim fins.
With a last mighty kick, he scared off the fish and reached the bottom. He grabbed a foaming air mask and pressed it to his face. Pure oxygen with perhaps a hint of nitrous oxide. Exhilarating! Hanging on to a convenient coral branch, Vernor looked around for Alice.
Soon he was rewarded with the sight of yellow and red swirls behind a nearby reef. He pushed off and swam over to find lovely Alice lazing there, her breasts floating, and a school of fishies darting in her lap. She took a hit from her air mask and passed it to Vernor, her lips parted in a slowly bubbling smile. He followed her streamers forward.
Passing the mask back and forth, and with fishies swarming between their legs, they had sex down there, the pleasure enhanced by nudges and occasional nips from the tiny fish. The bubbles from their breathing mingled to form a silver curtain around their heads. At the last instant, Alice pushed Vernor away and he came into the water, his sperm jelling into an opalescent, gauzy network.
They swam up, dressed and went out on the street again, Alice pausing to pick up something at the entrance desk.
"What's that?" Vernor asked.
"It's a Hollow infocube of us doing it down there," Alice giggled. "I wanted to have some nice pictures of us, so I phoned ahead to arrange it."
"And that's why you pulled back so I'd come in the water?" Vernor asked, "So that your grandchildren would know it wasn't a fake?"
"Oh, Vernor, don't be like that. I just felt like giving you a shove. For fun," She looked at him warmly. "We can watch it in bed tonight."
They walked along in comfortable silence for a few minutes, not a thought in their heads. Soon, however, Vernor felt the familiar boredom coming back. He wanted to consume.
"You want to get something to eat?" he asked Alice.
She smiled and shook her head.
"How about going over to Waxy's?" That would be good. Some weed and a few beers.
"And watch you get stoned out of your mind as usual? No thanks."
"Aw come on, Alice, I just want to see my friends."
"I'm your friend, aren't I?"
"Look, Alice, we've talked about this before. I can't spend my whole life with you." How he longed to be in the pleasant darkness of Waxy's. "Look, I just remembered, I told Mick I'd meet him to work on some new ideas." This was bullshit, and Alice could tell. Hopelessly, Vernor continued. "You better not wait up for me."
Alice stopped walking. "Again?" she asked angrily. "Why can't you and your addict friends do something serious? I thought you wanted to be a scientist, Vernor. But now you just get stoned and let that horrible machine suck out your energy. You think you're a genius, but geniuses
do
something with their lives."
This line of attack had become overly familiar to Vernor over the last few weeks. It was especially annoying to hear since he knew that what she was saying was basically true.