Glimmering (57 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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Leonard cocked his thumb at the dome. The stars had abruptly dimmed, and the moon. Jack saw the grid of glass and metal, and beyond it a churning whirlpool of purple and green and blue, speared by crimson lightning. Within it the seven dirigibles floated serenely, a pod of whales in a Satanic storm.
“They’re not going to do shit,
”
Leonard hissed. “What, you think this is
Star Wars
? You think you can save the fucking world by having it put on sunglasses? This is
terminal,
Jack. Goddamn cancer ward. The best we can hope for now is a good show. And good drugs.”
Jack stared at him, aghast. “Then why did you come here?”
“‘The sky is full of good and bad, but mortals never know.’”
“What’s that? Fucking Euripides?”
“Robert Plant. It’s a party
,
Jackie. ‘Here we are now, entertain us!’ Why the hell not? What else were you going to do? Sit up there in the family mausoleum and watch the river rise while you wait to die? I couldn’t let you do that. At least this way you got a night out
.
I mean, isn’t it better this way? Aren’t you happy, Jackie-boy?” He took Jack’s hand. “Aren’t you glad to be with me, Jackie? Here at the end of all things?”
“Fuck you.” Jack shoved his chair back. “Julie’s right, you’re a fucking psychotic.”
“Maybe. But Julie’s dead, and I’m not. I’m here, now. I’m
alive,
even if it’s just for another”—Leonard thrust his wrist out and perused the moon-phase Rolodex there. “Oh, another twenty-three minutes.”
“What happens in twenty-three minutes?”
“Last call, last dance. Closing time. Or nothing, maybe. The Fougas are scheduled to launch at 11:55. The fireworks start at midnight, all that ‘Auld Lang Syne’ shit. We’ll see what happens after that. My advice to you?” He attacked the lacquered box of Kobe beef that had appeared before him. “Finish your dinner. No one ever saved the world on an empty stomach.”
Jack speared a shred of beef speckled with dulse flakes. It tasted like the salmon had earlier, of petroleum and raw spirits. He set his chopsticks in the box and pushed it away, glanced at the entrance where he’d been admitted with Larry Muso. The security giant stood there with a dozen armed, uniformed men who might all have been cloned from the same linebacker. Jack grit his teeth, then poured more champagne.
All around him people ate and laughed. Leonard was listening to the man beside him, some kind of European investor.
“Security encryption devices for virtual private networks and intranets,” he explained as Leonard feigned interest.
Waiters brought green tea sorbet, pickled beets, scallops the size of pencil erasers. Roast pork with green apples, quail stuffed with unborn eggs, smoked domestic elk. Another sorbet, anise-flavored. Finally a flurry of desserts—profiteroles, something puffy and livid pink, like a jellyfish—and coffee,
real
coffee, greeted with hushed excitement; not even the very rich could find coffee anymore. Jack took a sip of his, trying not to show revulsion. It all tasted bad to him, almost poisonous.
“Well,” announced Leonard. “That wasn’t exactly Trimalchio’s feast, but—”
A soft voice cut him off, amplified from directly overhead.
“
My friends
—”
Jack turned with everyone else, to see the spare figure at the center of the head table standing, hands clasped against his stomach. His body mic gave the words an eerily hollow timbre. Behind him, bodyguards turned their heads back and forth, tracking something unseen.
“This is a moment I have awaited for a very long time.” Mr. Tatsumi paused, his expression somber. He blinked several times before continuing. “To be here in company with all of you, in such fine surroundings, on such an important day. On what may be the most important day in human history . . .”
Leonard made a face.
“. . . In the last eighteen months we have achieved quantum leaps in the areas of resource management and environmental reclamation, as well as breakthroughs in medical research that will affect every single person in this room. That may someday affect everyone on this planet.”
Enthusiastic applause.
“Hear that, Jackie?” said Leonard. “We’ll all be tan and rested in no time.” Leonard’s eyes narrowed as the chairman went on.
“We have made advances in entertainment technology that will change the way we see that world. Most importantly, in a few minutes you will all witness the moment when we move from making world history, to remaking the world itself, when we launch the SUNRA platform.”
Tumultuous clapping and cheers.
“Thank you. Thank you all very much.” Mr. Tatsumi bowed, first to his tablemates, then to the gathered diners. He raised a hand, looked to where the lone technician sat behind his banks of equipment. Jack heard a scatter of Japanese from the CEO’s body mic. In the seats beside him, men and women stared expectantly at the dance floor.
The applause died away. Across the table from Jack, people nodded happily at each other, flushed and well fed. Women reached for handbags, men stretched. Dinner was finished, coffee drunk. Everyone was anxious to leave. Everyone was ready to find the
real
party. For the first time since he’d entered the room, Jack heard a cresting wave of sound from outside the GFI area, cheers and shrieks and a voice bellowing from a loudspeaker.
“ARE YOU READY? ELEVEN MINUTES AND—”
Jack glanced at Mr. Tatsumi, still standing by himself. The CEO looked small and rather lost, and impatient. A few tentative notes wafted from where the sextet sat very straight in their folding chairs. Around the perimeter of the dining area, the lighttubes flickered from blue to soft lavender. People who had been standing quickly settled back into their seats. The room grew quiet as the strings’ scattered notes resolved into the opening bars of “The Blue Danube.”
At one end of the dance floor a single follow spot appeared. Mr. Tatsumi stared at it, frowning. Jack moved his chair to get a better view, the hairs on his arms prickling. The follow spot bloomed larger, brighter, resolved into a column of blazing white. The column pulsed and trembled: something was taking shape within it. Then the adamant brilliance grew still. Light coursed into the figure at its center, like quicksilver filling a glass. People gasped. Jack heard someone whisper a name.
On the dance floor stood a woman, radiance streaming around her like water. She was small, black-haired, with a white face and burning black eyes. She wore a fabulously elaborate kimono, iridescent as a diamond, and so much larger than the woman it seemed as though she were impaled upon it. The waltz strains faltered; Jack glanced at the sextet, saw them gazing awed as everyone else at the vision in white. Very slowly, with careful steps and head downcast, the luminous figure walked to the center of the dance floor.
“Holy Christ,” breathed Leonard. “It’s Michiko
.”
Jack shook his head. “Who?”
“His wife. The one who killed herself. Michiko Tatsumi. They made an icon of her.”
Jack looked for Mr. Tatsumi. The CEO was bent double, clutching the edge of the table in front of him. His eyes were fixed on the icon. Several men clustered at his side, Larry Muso among them, but Mr. Tatsumi motioned them away. The CEO straightened, and haltingly walked to the dance floor.
The woman stood, arms outstretched, the sleeves of her kimono spilling from her arms like wings. Her mouth parted in a rapturous smile. As the chairman approached, she moved her head slightly back and forth, as though struggling to see him in a darkened room. When he stopped in front of her she cocked her head and opened her arms to him. The waltz swept joyously on. For a moment they were absolutely still, the frail black-clad man staring down into that glorious nimbus of a face, the icon’s mouth fluttering as though she were trying to speak. With exquisite care, he took her in his arms, and they began to dance.
Jack wiped his eyes and glanced around furtively, to see who else was crying. At his table, everyone. With the exception of Leonard, whose expression shifted from wonder to amusement to something Jack couldn’t read. He turned, looked at Jack, then shook his head.
Enough,
Jack thought.
Leonard Thrope is rendered speechless.
The room was still, all eyes fixed on the dancing pair. As “The Blue Danube” ended and the strings swept into another waltz, a couple from the head table stood and walked to the dance floor. Another couple joined them, and another, a zephyr of flowing gowns and coattails, until the entire room flowed with dancers, men and women, men and men, women and women, Mr. Tatsumi and his luminous bride, whirling like gorgeous clockwork toys. Jack watched them, so enthralled that he jumped when someone tapped his shoulder.
“Jack?” Larry stood there, smiling. “Would you like to dance?”
Jack stared at him, then nodded. “Yes,” he said, getting to his feet. “Of course.”
There were so many waltzing couples that they could only move very slowly, and nowhere near the dance floor. Jack held Larry hesitantly, his hand poised upon the smaller man’s shoulder. Larry tilted his head and stared up at him with such naked joy that nothing mattered but this, that he was no longer alone; that he could still dance, hear music, feel the warmth of Larry Muso’s neck beneath his hand. They turned, clockwise, counterclockwise, first one leading and then the other. Jack glanced up to see other faces mirroring his own joy, women with their husbands, daughters with their fathers, lovers and businessmen, scientists and artists. Only Leonard Thrope seemed to be sitting it out, leaning back in his chair with legs crossed, watching with an expression at once wistful and satisfied: as though finally, after all these years, he had gotten what he’d paid for.
“Look,” murmured Larry. He tipped his head to stare upward. “It must be almost midnight.”
High above them the stars were gone. The dome seemed to have melted away as well; the grid of glass and metal had disappeared. Where it had been an aperture was an opening in the ceiling, a circle spiraling outward like a huge blinking eye, until it revealed the naked sky in all its livid glory, and within it the Fougas, blindingly lit. It was as though sunlight spilled onto the assembled waltzers, sun and the glimmering’s bacchic pennons streaming across the heavens. The sounds of the waltz grew faint as couples clutched each other and cried out in amazement. Jack heard an exultant roar as the Pyramid’s ten thousand invited guests looked upon this crack in the dying century’s defenses. From an even greater distance he heard the almost unimaginable thunder of the city’s trembling revelry; the world’s.
“They’re ready,” said Larry Muso. Jack could only nod, watching raptly as the Fougas began to move. A darkness blotted out the whirling sky, as though a cloud passed between the Pyramid and the heavens.
“That’s the platform.” Larry grabbed Jack’s hand. “That’s what it’ll look like again, soon—we’ll see the sky again! We’ll see the stars—”
“It’s—it’s amazing.” Jack was trembling, with fatigue and exhilaration and something he could only think of as rapture. “I mean, that they’re going to do it.”
Larry squeezed his hand. “
We’re
going to do it. All of us. We’re going to make it all right again.”
The music had stopped. There was a deafening wave of sound, but Jack could still hear the Fougas’ steady thrum. He stared into open sky, the icy air dispersing the scents of perfume and sweat and Viconix. The dirigibles with their heraldic gryphons began to drift in formation, the SUNRA platform a swath of darkness behind them. Jack’s eyes hurt, he saw once more those luciferian flashes of emerald green. He found himself shouting, one hand on Larry’s shoulder, the other pounding at the air; cheering on the fleet.
Beneath one Fouga there was a starburst of white and crimson, a Catherine wheel of orange flame. Everyone applauded wildly, and Jack laughed, exultant.
“Look!” he cried. “God,
look
at it!”
He glanced at Larry. His eyes were wide, his smile gone.
“No,” said Larry Muso. “That’s wrong, they’ve got the timing wrong.”
“What do you mean—”
And then Jack looked up at the sky and saw that it was not fireworks but a conflagration, the night on fire:
Blue Antelope had struck.
Horrified screams as flame rained down and metal joists, burning fuselage and liquid fire. Glass exploded everywhere, there were bodies flying as people ran blindly, trampling tables and chairs, bodies. The forest of lighttubes shattered into bolts of violet and green. Jack stood, too stunned to move. Something slashed his arm. He looked down and saw a piece of glass protruding above his wrist. As in a nightmare he plucked it out, staring as blood welled from the seam of flesh.
“Jack!
Jack
!” Oily black smoke stung his eyes as someone barreled past him. “
JACK!
”
“Larry!” Jack cried, and desperately searched until he saw him, sprawled on the floor. “Larry!”
The other man lifted his head, stumbling to his feet. His face was dead white, but as his eyes met Jack’s he nodded and raised his hand.
“I’m okay!” Larry shouted. “Go back to your house—wait for me there, Jack, I’ll meet you as soon as I can!”

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