Chronic City (43 page)

Two years later three million souls worldwide, a number doubling every six months, conducted some part of their daily lives in the elaborate and infinitely expansible realm that had sprung from Linus Carter’s generous parameters, this pixel paraphrase of reality which welcomed role-players, entrepreneurs, sexual trollers, whatever. You could play by Linus’s rules or write your own, invent a self unlike yourself, invent a nation for yourself and your friends: Yet Another World made room for it all. A separate economy, originating
within the game, had leaked out into the wider world, as players seeking to accumulate in-game wealth and sway by shortcut rather than diligence began hoarding and trading on the small number of unique and unduplicable treasure items Linus had ingeniously tucked into the corners of his world. In a system where any kind of artifact, six-dimensional, invisible, antigravitational, whatever its designer could imagine, was not only possible but replicable ad nauseam, these scattered few objets d’art, known as
chaldrons
, were capable of driving players insane with acquisitive frenzy. For all the anarchy Linus loosed, he’d kept this one means of playing God: a monopoly on the local equivalent of a short supply of Holy Grails. To protect his symbolic economy from inflation, Linus also designed a few expert subroutines for rooting out and destroying any counterfeits put into circulation, a NetBot goon squad.

So the chaldron quickly became the supreme symbol of the game’s elite. To know someone who could get you access to a chaldron wasn’t bad, so you could spend time communing with the thing, but to own one was far better. The items, fundamentally imaginary though they might be, had begun trading in the “real” world for hundreds then thousands of dollars. No one had yet determined what the ceiling might be, since the hordes of new players arriving every day drove the ratio of chaldron-to-player scarcity continually through the roof. Among players without so much disposable income the objects had nearly a religious aspect, and in some precincts of Yet Another World a community of caretakers, often calling themselves “knights,” had united around the cause of protecting and honoring a single chaldron, forming consortiums of purpose out of what had been a polymorphous libertarian playground.

Linus’s cartel needless to say added a layer of menacing mystique to his legend as the game’s creator. His subsequent fear of irrational chaldron fetishists who might think of him as Chapman did
Lennon drove him deeper into seclusion. That, in turn, fueled rumors of his death and secret replacement by a corporate clone, or of his fictional existence from the start. Poor Linus had never been terribly comfortable on the outer side of a computer’s screen to begin with, and now, despite a phenomenal success as others would quantify it, he was miserable. Claire was his lifeline and even she didn’t know what he did with most of his days, though she’d had some reports he wandered his own invented landscape hidden inside an anonymous and humble avatar, perversely dedicating himself to trying to persuade other players of the unimportance of chaldrons in a universe where anything else was as free as oxygen and daylight. As a thank-you to Claire for all she’d done (putting aside the argument that by helping him incorporate she’d wrecked him), Linus had presented her with the hologram that had attracted Perkus’s interest, as well as, inside the realm of Yet Another World, a treasury of ten chaldrons of surpassing quality, hidden in a high and impregnable redoubt. She’d visited this castle and checked her priceless stash once or twice, though, really, she was sorry to say, virtual reality just wasn’t her cup of tea. So her virtual treasures sat gathering virtual dust. The way things were going, she’d be able to put future kids through college on the things.

“Is Linus by any chance a client of an acupuncturist named Strabo Blandiana?” Perkus interrupted. He’d been reminded of that framed poster, Blandiana’s gift from a patient.

“Yes,” said Claire Carter, looking mildly surprised. “I sent him there. I’ve been visiting Strabo for a couple of years. Why do you ask?”

“I met him at the party last night,” said Perkus, hedging.

“Everyone knows Strabo.”

“I guess. Miss Carter, may I ask you why you’re telling me all
this?” Perkus had a theory on this subject, actually: he figured he reminded Claire Carter of her brother. Under her glossy surface she had a soft spot for helpless brainy boys. That was to say, too, that despite the gulf between her yuppieish dress-for-success manner and Perkus’s bohemian shambles, she identified with Perkus herself. Being a human being, she sought vindication for the choices that had made her lonely: hence the effort spent to convince him she wasn’t just one of those moneyed Dalton kids. No matter how it looked now, she was an outsider. Claire Carter, Perkus recognized, was from the we-nerds-run-the-universe school, and wanted Perkus to flash the secret hand signals back to her.
Square Pegs
indeed. Perkus had known this vibe before—the rock critics, always asking him to recite the pledge of allegiance of the Elite Despised. He’d tended to decline politely, just as he now didn’t mention to Claire Carter that he’d never been able to rouse his sympathy for anyone who’d gone to Dalton no matter how sulky they felt about it.

The other possibility, that she was wildly lying to divert him, would seem to have been shut down completely with the blinking off of that laser. Perkus had thrown a lot of himself, too much, down a rabbit hole leading into no Wonderland whatsoever. He’d been pathetically chasing video-game booty. The exhaustion of it was only beginning to set in, along with the cluster headache. He’d sucked the dregs of his cappuccino, uselessly—hoping for that fey foamy beverage to do anything to thwart his massive impending migraine was like bringing a poodle to the beach and siccing it on Melville’s great white whale. Perkus’s vertiginous sexual interest had vanished, too, somewhere in the course of Claire Carter’s narration. He remembered now where he’d heard her name before: Richard Abneg hated this woman, saw her as the symbol of the destruction of the city’s soul. She was certainly an ace disenchanter.

Her reply gave no nod to his theories. “The actor’s got a lot of
fans around here,” she said, reverting to her special robotic bluntness, totally unsentimental once the topic migrated from her Seymour Glassian brother. “We’re aware you’re a favorite of Insteadman’s. His story keeps a lot of people enthralled, you know. This is a difficult time in the city.”

So, it was all about Chase Insteadman after all. And: everything Perkus suspected was true. Perkus had suspected so much, so extensively, for so long. But it was different to have a thing confirmed. “I’m not so sure Chase realizes it’s a story.” Perkus could barely believe he’d said this aloud. Again, he experienced the conviction he was dreaming, only Claire Carter was the least dreamlike gorgon he’d ever encountered.

“Well, we all get lost in our roles sometimes. Mr. Tooth, you’ll have to excuse me. I see you’ve finished your coffee, and I do have to get to work.”

So, was this how it happened? When you finally penetrated the highest chambers of power and gazed into corruption’s face, was it neither beautiful nor terrifying, but merely—Claire Carter’s? Apparently so. And her attempt to enlist his consent was so paltry, so half-assed, that it seemed she assumed she’d gained it in advance.

“Chase Insteadman is my friend,” he said weakly. He wondered what there was left to defend or protect. Nothing, most likely.

“Yes,” she allowed.

“That much is real.” Even as he said it, he felt the foolishness of turning to this woman for confirmation of what was or wasn’t real. Now the white whale of his headache broke to the surface and swallowed him completely. Around the penumbra of his blind spot he saw that a man had joined them in the room, a valet or Secret Service agent of some kind—needless to say, Claire Carter hadn’t relied on luck or goodwill to protect her in the town house alone with a party-crashing weirdo; how ludicrous to imagine she would. Maybe
he was the one who’d pored over the security tapes and spotted him entering the party with Chase. Now he carried Perkus’s overcoat and hat, holding them at arm’s length as if about to burn contaminated items in a bonfire. Perkus accepted the garments and staggered from the kitchen, toward the foyer. With cluster in full blossom, he had nothing further to fear from the glare of the fresh snow. He was even curious to see the extent of the storm that had, so far as he could tell, completely silenced the city. Claire Carter didn’t escort him out.

He’d have walked the twenty blocks home in any event, since the migraine nausea would have made a cab ride unbearable, but there wasn’t any choice. The streets were free of cabs and any other traffic. Some of the larger, better-managed buildings had had their walks laboriously cleared and salted, the snow pushed to mounds covering hydrants and newspaper boxes, but elsewhere Perkus had to climb into drifts that had barely been traversed, fitting his poor shoes into boot prints that had punched deep as his knees. His pants were quickly soaked, and his sleeves as well, since between semi-blindness and poor footing he stumbled to his hands and knees several times before even getting to Second Avenue. Under other circumstances he’d have been pitied, perhaps offered aid, or possibly arrested by the quality-of-life police for public drunkenness, but on streets the blizzard had remade there was no one to observe him apart from a cross-country skier who stared pitilessly from behind solar goggles, then a few dads here and there dragging a kid or two on a sled. If they saw him at all they probably thought he was out playing, too. Nobody would have any other reason to be making their way along impassible streets so early the day after. Not a single shop was open, their entrances buried in drifts.

When he met the barricade at the corner of Eighty-fourth, he
at first tried to bluster his way past, thinking the cop had misunderstood—
of course
they were letting through the residents of the buildings on the block, even if other pedestrians had to make their way the long way around. But no. His building was one of three the tiger had undermined, and the snowstorm had finished the job. He talked with neighbors he hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years of dwelling on the same floor, though gripped in the vise of his cluster headache he barely heard a word they said, and he couldn’t have made too good an impression.
You need to find someplace to sleep tonight
, that was a fragment that got through to him.
They might let you in for your stuff later, but not now. You can call this number
… but the number he missed. Then, as Perkus teetered away:
Get yourself indoors, young man
. And:
Pity about that one
.

Now, as he made his way through the snow to he knew not where, what engulfed Perkus Tooth, as completely as the headache engulfed his brain and the snow the city, was the sense of cumulative and devastating losses in the last twelve hours, since he’d allowed himself to be lured to the mayor’s party, by Chase Insteadman, and upstairs, to see the hologram, by Russ Grinspoon. All of it felt terribly coherent and scripted, down to the last sequence, when Claire Carter, if that was even her real name, had spun out her story just long enough to allow the cluster migraine to eclipse him totally, only then booting him out into the streets to find his apartment barred. For she’d surely known. The tiger was a city operative, hadn’t Abneg confirmed it? Perkus couldn’t think straight, but you didn’t need to think straight to put such simple facts together. Claire Carter and the forces for which she was a mere spokesperson, a bland front, had evidently meant to smash him, and she’d chosen to flaunt the fact by how she toyed with him for the last hour or so. She was, he saw now, a member of the we-nerds-will-destroy-you-so-thoroughly-it-will-leave-you-gasping school. Under the power pantsuits, she was part of that
inexplicable generation subsequent to his, the Trench Coat Mafia. Arnheim probably surrounded himself with them, autistic revengers, like Howard Hughes insulating himself with Mormons. Seeing him in the teeth of his ruination, Claire Carter had even told him the whole plot, like Goldfinger with Bond strapped to the death ray.