Authors: M. M. Buckner
“Who’s talking about Heaven? That’s a suicide zone,” I said.
“Well you know, Kat always wanted to do it. Why shouldn’t we? Just because it’s in outer space. How hard can that be?”
“Polar orbit, Win. Not outer space. But it’s totally off limits.”
“Right. Yeah. But that’s, like…But I bought this sleek new space suit”
Katherine the Grand presented herself a few days later. How had I endured living with Kat for so many years? Maybe because we were both short? Even with her empress heels and tall hairstyles, she never overtopped me. Yet despite her lofty hair weaves and numerous face-lifts, to me Kat still looked like an angry fox with large teeth. Strangers often remarked on her blushing beauty, but friends knew the cause of her blooming complexion: intractable high blood pressure. She’d already gone through four self-cloned hearts. Still, Kat had her charms.
“Katherine, do you remember how we used to wake up early and watch the dawn?”
“What are the servants feeding you, Nass? You look abysmal.” She yanked the fork from my hand and started chopping the blueberry waffles on my tray table. “Don’t tell me you eat this dreck. I’d rather starve.”
“You have to quit picking on Sheeba,” I said.
“That girl is laughing at you. She despises all of us.” Kat dropped the fork in my ice cream. “She thinks we’re dirty-minded old stiffs.”
Jealousy. Poor Kat’s irrational jealousy blinded her to Sheeba’s goodness. I didn’t respond to her ravings. “What’s this nonsense about surfing Heaven? You know it’s impossible.”
“Don’t be a total Fred. All we need is the right gear and—”
“Over my martyred body, Kat. The idea’s loco. No sane person would even think of surfing Heaven.”
Kat fanned her red cheeks. “You’re such a weenie.”
“And you’re such a birdbrain.”
“Candy pants.”
“Nudnik.”
She threw a waffle at me, and I spritzed her with syrup. Food fights were our favorite style of communication.
Sheeba visited most often. She played healing music disks, aligned my chakras, piqued my pressure points and fed me wonderful chocolate bars smuggled in from the southern pole. I didn’t bring up war surfing, and neither did she—not until the last night before my so-called “surprise” party.
That evening, I’d bought her a new set of aromatic massage oils, and she stayed longer than usual trying each one to see how they affected our moods. I’d forgotten a war surf was scheduled. Chad had set my screen on auto. The Agonists planned to buzz a zone in the Manhattan Protectorate where a few thousand ship builders were striking, and the employer, Trandent.Com, had brought in heavy energy guns. That night represented a rare treat, a war zone on Earth’s surface.
Not many worksites remained on Earth’s surface anymore. I don’t have to tell you how our planet’s fierce heat and pollution have driven most of humanity underground. But Trandent.Com’s shipyard operated under a sealed dome on the Atlantic seawall, which made for unique conditions. If those big e-guns blew out the dome, then everyone inside would be exposed to Earth’s malevolent atmosphere. For the Agonists, that meant wearing full hermetic surface suits. Glossy black Kevlax, tailor-made and bristling with gadgets. Molto sexy.
When Chad pinged me a reminder and the virtual screen automatically rastered at the foot of my bed, it caught me off guard.
“Do you have a show coming on?” Sheeba bounded onto my bed, giggling. “I hope it’s an old movie. Wanna snuggle and watch together?”
“Snuggle? Yes.” I breathed heavily. I moved toward the bed, ignoring the screen. Sheeba sat lotus style on top of the covers, hugging a pillow to her belly. With solemn restraint, I stretched out beside her and tested my hand on her bare knee. Her workout shorts were wrinkled and sweaty. They smelled ambrosial. My breath caught in my throat
Don’t let me lead you astray. Sheeba and I were not lovers, but every day I continued to hope. As the screen image sharpened, she wiggled her hips to make a nest among my pillows, and my face flushed with heat I sidled closer and rested my head against her hipbone. The angle felt awkward and voluptuous. We watched the Agonists suit up.
Grunze and Kat were coating their faces with wild streaks of camo paint—a ludicrous conceit since they’d be wearing full helmet visors.
“What is this show, Nass? A comedy?”
“It’s—” I eased my hand around her thigh and braced for rejection. “My friends are surfing a war tonight.”
Sheeba had been stuffing pillows behind her rump, but my words arrested her.
“Flip the channel,” I said. “You don’t like violence.”
“No, I want to see,” she said.
I fingered her warm inner thigh, smoother than natural silk. It seemed almost sacrilegious to touch that pure, swelling firmness. I buried my nose against her clothing and breathed nectar.
Meanwhile, she opened sidebars to browse everyone’s point-of-view video. She made a little gasp when the Agonists came under fire, and I glanced at the screen irritably. Reconnaissance mini-bots swarmed among the shipyard derricks, and plumes of smoke rose from the wrecked barricades. Spotlights glared like false suns. For an instant I imagined being mere. The intensity. The gunfire. The teleconference banter. All these weeks, I hadn’t even placed a bet
“Are they in danger?” Shee asked.
“Not really.” I watched my friends with one eye while my inflamed fingertips searched the delicate pocket behind Sheeba’s knee.
Surfers use a danger scale of One to Ten, and as zones go, the Trandent.Com shipyard would rank Class Six. Lots of booming thermal blasts. I nuzzled higher against Sheeba’s torso, till my eyelid fluttered against her spandex-covered breast. I struggled not to groan.
On screen, Verinne’s camera went in for the usual Reel close-ups in purple-and-gold metavision, bodies scattered in skewed positions, mostly male, not always intact. If Sheeba hadn’t been there, I would have turned that part off. Instead, I rolled sideways and burrowed under her armpit, nibbling her hollowed flesh.
“Silly beau, that tickles.” She pushed me away and continued watching with serious attention. The Reel seemed to magnetize her. When she glanced at me, three tiny furrows creased her perfect eyebrows.
Even with the audio muted, we could hear Kat cursing. Her royal grandness had just noticed a rip in her surface suit, and she wanted to quit playing. Verinne and Grunze got into an argument then, and Winston tried in his oblivious way to mediate. Kat walked off the game field in disgust. Then we saw the whole crew exit the dome through an airlock and climb into Verinne’s van, where Winston immediately uncorked the vodka. What a lame surf.
I killed the virtual screen and scowled. That zone had so much potential. Our crew could have played it for hours. Why did they pick tonight to go limp—just when Sheeba was watching? I eased toward her to snuggle again, but she moved away, bunching her luscious lips in a frown. I expected her to ask the usual newbie questions about gear and transportation, maybe risk factors.
Finally, she blurted, “Doesn’t it whiplash your mind?’
“Whiplash?”
She hugged her knees to her chest and pointed at the foot of the bed as if the screen were still there. “I mean, one minute you’re skipping through this gruesome battle where people are fighting for their lives. The next, you’re safe and cozy, drinking beverages. It’s gotta gnarl your psyche.”
I held back the smart remark. Sheeba often spouted nonsense, and I’d learned not to argue. My fingers traced the elegant hard curve of her anklebone.
“Sometimes I feel so—dumb,” she said, “I’ve never talked to an employee in my life. Why do they start these wars? They have guaranteed homes and incomes, right?”
As she pleated a crease in my blanket, I watched her hands move. Large soft knuckles, sparkling rings. If she’d been a little more mature and logical, I might have explained the numbers behind these employee rebellions. Twelve billion people on the planet, 2 percent annual population growth, 4 percent annual resource deficit. We senior execs did our level best to keep everyone employed. After the Crash, we rebuilt the economy brick by virtual brick, and we swore in blood never to let it fail again, but…
Instead of going into these details, I smiled and said, “Darling, don’t trouble your pretty head. It’s just a few agitators. We’ll weed ‘em out.”
She bit her lip. “I should just go.”
When she bounced off the bed and gathered her things to leave, I felt bereft. “Stay tonight. Please.”
“Aw, beau.” She zipped up her jacket. Then her expression softened, and she came back and sat on the edge of my bed. “We’ve talked about this before. You’re my best friend. We adore each other. We don’t want to demean mat with sex.”
“But—”
She rubbed her nose against mine. “C’mon, don’t act sad. Be my sweetie.”
It was always this way. Sheeba’s excuses wounded and mystified me. What didn’t she like? Most women found me boyishly attractive. Have I mentioned my poetic eyes? Then, too, I had money. A recent spine extension was my latest bid to win Sheeba’s love. I’d added eight excruciating centimeters to my height, but she still topped me by a head. Let me say it now: Sheeba had me
besotted
. I had not fallen this hard since my first youth.
“Stay just a little while. We’ll watch Cary Grant movies, and we won’t talk about war surfing. I know you hate it.”
‘That’s not true. I want to understand, but you won’t take me seriously.”
“Of course I do.”
She held my hand and played with my fingers, working them back and form. “It rattles me, beau. There’s so much I don’t understand. Sometimes, I feel like I’m living in a cage. A nice, clean, well-padded, completely accessorized cage.”
“But dear, I’ll buy you whatever you—”
“A CAGE!” she shouted, cutting me off. This wasn’t her normal cheery style at all. She’d worked herself into a temper. “Would you believe I’ve lived my whole life and never once been scared? Or dirty? Or hungry? I want to experience everything, Nass. I want to go outside. Into the dark.”
The dark. That was her latest spiritual healing craze. “But sweetness—”
“Why do you surf those war zones?” she demanded. “I saw you turn away from those dead bodies, but you still go there. Nass, you have too many soul layers to do this sport without a good reason.”
Her words caught me up short. She’d been observing more closely than I realized. Her contact lenses shimmered like painted porcelain saucers and made me wonder what lay behind them. I sat up straighter in the pillows. How painfully eager I was to impress her. “You really want to know about war surfing?”
Her eyes widened. “Yes.”
“Well…” I paused, gathering my thoughts. “The zone is unpredictable. So few things are. And when you’re on the mark, doing everything right, it’s like escape velocity.” I waved my hands, fanning up phrases. Talking about my sport was almost as much fun as doing it. “You ride the contingencies, react, think, improvise. You blast straight out of the mundane. Danger gives you no choice but to live, right here, right now, in the present moment.”
Sheeba winced. “Be here now. I’ve heard you say that.”
“Exactly.”
“Nass, you’re like me. You’re seeking the dark.”
Mystical fizz. I nodded and squeezed her hands. Discussing things with Sheeba often proved difficult. Age difference had its drawbacks.
“Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.”
-JEANNE MOUREAU
The next day saw the beginning of my “surprise” party, staged in my condo, with wine from my cellar, food from my kitchen, and entertainment charged to my account—all arranged by my dear friends, the Agonists—with mucho assistance from Chad. Winston supplied the psychotropic drugs, though of course I paid for them. About five hundred people stopped by. Sheeba wore pink.
‘To celebrate your recovery, beau.” She lifted her wrist and shook the heavy new diamond bracelet I’d just bought her. “Sparkly,” she said with a smile.
The bracelet didn’t seem to please her as much as that antique seashell. I made a mental note: Sheeba likes pearly pink things best.
She was craning her neck, scanning the crowd. “Mega-sublime party.”
“Buffet and drinks on even-numbered stories. Dancing on every terrace. Movies in the screening room. Foosball, minigolf, karaoke and gaming on floors thirty through fifty-five. And I think Chad hired a psychic. She’s on the ground floor channeling dead people. There’s a directory by the elevator. So what’ll you have, Shee?”
Sheeba flashed her starry smile. “I’ll have some of everything!”
She paraded among my guests in a cloud of wispy pink foam that parted like soap bubbles wherever anyone touched her. Beneath the cloud, her highly visible naked body gleamed a nonbiological shade of iridescent rose. She’d waxed her hair fuchsia—all of her hair—and her eyes were jet-black, which stirred me to speculate if that might be their natural color. Who exactly was this chameleon child, this Sheeba Zee?
Her nudity wasn’t the issue. Lots of people came to my party nude. I knew Sheeba sprang from minor executive lineage in some small American Com, that she’d earned top grades at a mediocre school, and that in her short career, she’d jumped from one health church to another almost as often as she’d changed her hair. She hadn’t lived long enough to have a past. But thanks to my recommendations, half the geezers in my condo now booked Sheeba’s physical therapy sessions. Did she snuggle and flirt with everyone the way she did with old Nasir? That doubt made me watch her all evening.
“To your health.” Verinne rested against a window wall, clutching one elbow and sipping an unctuous yellow cocktail. She was always sampling new vitamin drinks. Outside the window, a swarm of adversects bumped steadily against the glass like flies, unable to spray their promo jingles through my security field.
“I see we have the usual crowd.” She motioned with her drink toward a group of guests, and to my surprise, mere stood Robert Trencher, my former protege from Provendia.Com. Who had invited that creep? Not me. Two days ago, I’d demoted him for incompetence. Yet here he stood in his glossy white, patent-leather codpiece (padded, I’m sure), with his ashy eye shadow and body rings, his hairless skin the color of bruised lilies.
Verinne wasn’t pointing at Trencher, though. She meant the woman standing next to him, a buxom courtesan studded in light-emitting rhinestones. It was one of Winston’s ex-girlfriends, a notorious epicuress who surfed parties they way we Agonists surfed war zones. When the woman moved aside, I saw what she had in tow—a child!
I gasped and turned away. Flaunting her young in public. It was beneath contempt. Everyone knew children should be kept decently out of sight, but some execs would break any taboo for degenerate shock value. I stole another look. The child’s head seemed disproportionately large on its short, chubby body. With its slick white skin, half-formed features and popping eyes, it resembled a pale amphibious toad.
The woman didn’t look rich enough to afford a child. Private crèches charged molto deutsch to bring fetuses to term, and private schools charged even more to bring neonates to adulthood. Hardly anyone bothered cultivating heirs these days. Most executive young were gengineered by commercial DNA banks on spec, then saddled with nurture loans when they reached maturity. I had a feeling this rhinestone woman had “borrowed” her shocking accessory for the evening.
Verinne sipped her yellow cocktail. “Don’t act so straitlaced. You were a juvenile once yourself.”
“Not for ages,” I said, shuddering. “That time is deleted from my memory.”
“I doubt it.” Verinne wheezed with laughter. Her canted eyes, gray tights and pointy white collar made her look oddly like a Russian nun. “Do you know what, Nasir? Today is my birthday.”
“My dear Verinne, I’d forgotten. Let me order champagne. We’ll have a toast.”
“No.” She grabbed my arm** when I tried to signal a waiter. “I don’t celebrate anymore. Nasir, this will be the last one.”
The amusement had drained from her face. She gazed out the window wall, where Nordvik’s heavy evening traffic streamed in ragged air lanes among the towers. Reflections from their brake lights flickered against the underside of the white city dome.
I took her hand. “Cara mia, you’re sad. Birthdays are difficult, but they always pass. Put down your drink, and we’ll do a cha-cha, the way we used to.”
When I tried to steer her toward the dance floor, she pushed me away and nearly overturned a nearby sculpture. Verinne didn’t usually show so much emotion. But she was the oldest of our crew, over 270. No cosmetics could hide the tiny cracks stretching around her mouth.
“Nasir, I’m dying.”
“What? That’s nonsense, love. You need another treatment. Don’t—”
“I’m dying,” she said again.
Verinne was not one to exaggerate. Her dry eyes glittered huge in her sunken sockets.
“When?” I whispered.
She drained her glass. “Within a year. Don’t tell the others. Nasir, there’s one thing I want to do before I go.”
“Yes, cara. Anything.”
“I want to surf Heaven.”
“Oh.” I stepped back. “You don’t know what you’re saying. There are things about Heaven…things I can’t tell you.”
A group of drunken revelers stumbled against us and shoved us apart “Think about it.” Verinne raised her husky voice. “Heaven.”
“But you don’t understand—”
One of the guests caught me in a bear hug, separating me farther from Verinne. Next, the lot of them insisted on lifting me up on their shoulders and traipsing around the dance floor. I didn’t see Verinne again for hours.
Winston had ensconced himself in my library with an entourage of females and a steamer trunk of psychotropic diversions. I found him enthroned in an armchair like a high church deacon, dispensing pills, powders and skin patches to a line of supplicants. His wavy auburn hair framed his head like a lion’s mane. The sight struck me as hilarious because Winston had, in fact, once been a deacon in the Nordvik Church of Acute Oncology. During his long career as a physician, he’d racked up a fortune even larger than mine. But he lost most of his money somehow. Perhaps he forgot where he put it.
“Nasty Nass, name your poison. How would ya like to feel tonight?” Intoxication slurred his consonants and elongated his vowels.
I lifted my hands like a stagy tragedian. “I want to feel heroic.”
Winston grinned. “Uh-huh, yeah. Slip that under your tongue.” He handed me a glossy black capsule. “You’ll think you’re the risen Krishna.”
Time swirled in euphoric friezes after that, and I seem to recall riding up and down the elevator for hours. At some point, I discovered Kat binge-eating in my private pantry. She wore black fur, red skin dye and diamonds, and among her glittery choker necklaces dangled a silver key on a chain. The sight of that key half-eradicated my drug high. It was Kat’s heart key. Should she experience cardiac arrest, we were supposed to insert mat key in her chest port, turn it three-quarters clockwise and stand back. Preter-creepy.
But Kat didn’t seem in danger of heart attack at the moment Her tall lacquered hairdo had slipped to one side, and her face was smeared with chocolate sauce. “Darling.” She flung a frozen éclair at my head.
“Dearest, for me?” I snatched the pastry from the air and took a bite.
Kat hated to be caught in one of her secret feasting sessions. “These things are stale, Nass. You’re such a tightwad. When things get old, you should throw them out.”
“Katherine, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
She saw I didn’t intend to leave, so she tore open another box of frozen pastries and crammed her cheeks full. The sight reminded me of something dark and frightening, something from the distant past. Lychee nuts. Long ago in my youth, I remembered cramming my cheeks with handful after handful, until I nearly choked. For two months, I survived on nothing but lychee nuts canned in sweet juice. Quickly, I swallowed another mouthful of éclair to block the memory.
“We’re going to Heaven” Kat said through the half-masticated food.
“No we’re not.” I finished off the gooey éclair and took another.
“Don’t be a stupido. Of course we’re going. You’re a lot of things, Nass, but you’re no lily-liver.”
“Kat, don’t push it. There’s more to Heaven than you’ll find on the Net.”
She swallowed a gulp so large that it made her eyes water. ‘Tell me. Don’t be so freaking mysterious.”
I winked and drew a line across my lips, to rile her. Then I grabbed a couple more pastries and left her alone with her banquet.
“Where’s Sheeba?” I asked Chad.
He’d been keeping tabs on her with the house security cameras. “She’s in the thirty-third-floor library, boss. She’s talking with some of your younger guests.”
I decided to drop in. She and her friends had pushed my furniture aside to lounge on the floor, and for a while, I stood in the doorway, listening to their nonsense. Sheeba was giving them some kind of lesson about healing.
“The dark is barbarous. It’s the source of birth, pain, passion. It’s destructive and creative at the same time.” She sat cross-legged on a cushion, jouncing and frisking like a hyperactive pup, shedding far too many pink bubbles.
“Yeah, cosmic,” said one of her sophomoric disciples. “The primal wildness,” said another fool. They’d formed a circle with Shee at their center. Were they ogling her charms, or were these young turks actually paying attention to what she said?
She rocked with excitement. “We’ve been estranged from the dark, and we miss it. We need its healing violence to rip us apart and remake us.”
“So valid.” “I hear that.” They responded like a chorus.
“We have to find it again.” Her voice rose with mystical ardor. “The dark canal is the path.”
Juvenile fizz. One of her faith-healer gurus had probably cooked it up—that smarmy Father Daniel, for instance.
With a dramatic flair, Sheeba pulled an e-book from my library shelf and held it up:
Advanced Physiology
. Then she thumped it savagely against the floor. What the heck? My book!
“This is what scientists call enlightenment Vicious trash. It’s heinously askew.” She cracked the book’s electronic spine, and its indicator lights went dead. “These authors treat the human body like a machine. They totally miss the animating spirit”
“That’s an expensive book,” I said, but the cheers and clicking mini-lites from her audience drowned me out.
Then she dumped my valuable e-book in the waste can, threw her head back and sighed. “It doesn’t matter what they record in their books. Light can never touch darkness. It can only pass through.”
I decided to retire before I said something rude. After all, no one expects a delicious young girl to be rational.
Winston’s copious stock of drugs kept the party going well into the third day. When the uppers ran out, my guests either had themselves driven home or collapsed in comatose mounds on my carpet Shee fell asleep in the small bedroom—from exhaustion—she didn’t like drugs. I knew she was sleeping alone because Chad kept the security cameras trained on her bed and streamed the real-time images to my wrist-watch. I stole frequent glimpses of her curled pink body via the tiny screen.
Grunze sneaked up behind me and goosed me in the ribs, then leaned over my shoulder and grunted at the screen. “What’s with you and that cagey call girl?”
“Call girl? Sheeba’s a highly skilled physical therapist”
“She’s a hooker. She’s tricking you, Nass. I see her better than you do.”
“You’re wrong. Try her therapy sometime if you don’t believe me.”
Grunze rolled his shoulders and scoffed. He wore a white thong and body oil, and his skin looked like brown film shrink-wrapped over bulging muscles. For him, girls were a sideshow, a brief diversion from the main event. In our long years of friendship, sexual orientation was one of the few areas where we diverged. I didn’t take his words about Sheeba seriously.
“Have you heard Katherine’s latest nonsense?” I said. “She wants to surf Heaven. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s premenstrual.”
Grunzie’s good mood returned. “Kat’s a lunatic on the subject. Totally unzipped.” He loved taking potshots at Kat.
“Verinne wants to go, too,” I said sadly. “We have to talk them out of it.”
“Why? It might be a sleek surf. I never knew you to duck a little scary fun.”
I shook my head. “Help me, Grunze. We have to change their minds.”
He moved closer and bumped me with his hip. “What are you hiding, sweet-piss? You own that sugar factory.”
Grunze was right. I held a majority interest in Provendia.Com, the owner of the orbiting factory nicknamed Heaven. Not only did I sit on Provendia’s board, but thanks to my whopping investment, they’d elected me chairman emeritus. I knew all about Heaven. If Class One was a lazy stroll, and Class Ten was a death trip through hell, then Heaven was Class Twenty. But the details were too private to explain, even to my bosom pal Grunze.
I said, “Nondisclosure, Grunzie boy. My lips are zipped. But take my word, Heaven is the last place you want to be.”
He shrugged his massive shoulders and left to find the sauna.
Some uncounted hours later, only the Agonists stayed awake talking. Win had saved a private stash of Peps to keep our brains at the appropriate altitude, and we retreated to my observatory on the eightieth floor—the official Agonist clubhouse. The decor suggested a tree dwelling, a construct dimly recalled from my childhood. Lots of bio motifs, leaf patterns, green velvet and polished synthetic wood. Chad had been wanting to update this tree-house theme for years, but I didn’t like to keep changing things—it cost too much.