Devil in the Dollhouse Read online

  His team had laid out the array of nanoassemblers all around the island, sixty-four sets in all. This was Barnett's favorite moment on any project—the hush before the storm, before the assemblers began consuming everything in the area, rearranging their molecules and creating something new. Barnett's nanomachines would eat rubble and shit out a city. It was a wondrous thing, and right now, before he hit the switch to begin the process, it was a perfect moment, ripe with hope, beauty and possibility.

  Of course, Barnett knew the reality of cities. When the people returned to Manhattan, things would be the same as they always had been. The litter. The noise. The stink of drunks pissing in doorways. The loneliness of the place, most of all.

  Helena didn't love him. She never would. Barnett was over the initial devastation and had entered a kind of slowly throbbing blankness. He wasn't angry with her. He couldn't be. He loved her. And he was well aware of his long history of bad decisions where love was concerned. Moments missed. Possibilities lost. Opportunities squandered.

  Helena would never love him, but Barnett would still have her. The certainty of it thrilled him as he'd dismissed his crew to make the final equipment inspections on his own. The feeling was with him now as he stood at south end of the island in Battery Park, looking out into the harbor. Barnett's radio crackled. Someone was asking when he was leaving the island. Barnett turned off the noise. He was utterly alone.

  Then he pulled the remote from his jacket and pressed the button. A buzzing filled the air. One minute later, a billion billion nanobots erupted from the assemblers around the island, like swarms off locusts, and began to eat the remains of the city.

  Helena had lodged herself, like a perfumed blade, in his heart. Barnett would never let her out, and he'd make sure she'd never want to leave him. The nanobots settled on his skin, systematically dismantling his flesh and bones, rearranging Barnett's molecules into pavement, street lights, sewage tunnels, electrical conduits, elevator shafts, the glass skin slowly wrapping itself around new-born skyscrapers, the stone wall circumscribing the resurrected Central Park.

  Barnett knew he'd mangled his life and could never rebuild it to his satisfaction. But he could build a city, a perfect place, a home where families would live and children would play, business would flourish, art would thrive and life would begin again. And when Helena walked down his streets and slept within walls made from his blood and muscles, she would love him.

  The last part of Barnett that the nanobots took was his face. His smile vanished into the air, like the Cheshire Cat's.

  THE END

  Herzog's Benediction

  Herzog's media empire had made him rich and his wealth had made him the biggest landowner in Nevada. His building project lasted for years, and the vast, networked device he was creating spread across millions of desert acres like a Biblical plague. When Herzog threw the switch to power up his new machine, a hundred million prayer wheels began spinning in unison, sending his good wishes to Heaven, smoothing the way for the death that even his fortune, he knew, couldn't postpone forever.

  To Herzog's surprise, his prayers were answered. He'd only hoped that his gesture would buy him some goodwill when he finally reached the pearly gates. Imagine Herzog's surprise when he looked into the sky one morning and saw dozens of angels holding up trumpets, flowers and fiery swords, circling his desert home. The sheer weight of his mechanical prayers had hit Heaven like a tsunami and the angels had come to take him away immediately, an unexpected saint of the machine age.

  Though he protested that he was no saint, the angels simply smiled at his modesty, crowning him with flowers and lifting him on their wings to take him to the special region of Heaven reserved for mortals so saintly that they'd been called up before death. Of course, Herzog was no saint. He was already a sick man, and Heaven's thin air and high altitude, combined with a steady diet of wine and sweet ambrosia, killed him in just over two weeks. The alarmed angels did their best to save him, even sealing his soul inside his decaying body so that it wouldn't get loose and wander off while they worked out what had gone wrong. All Herzog could do was lie there and watch through dead eyes as the angels discussed his fate. Gradually he could see their attitude toward him change, as it began to dawn on them that they'd been tricked by a mortal.

  One evening, the angels flew out of the palace all at once. Through the windows, Herzog could see souls flooding into Heaven. He knew immediately what was happening: Armageddon. The furious angels were killing off the human race because of Herzog's treachery. He watched the end of the world through foggy, cataracted eyes.

  When they were done, the angels took Herzog's desiccated corpse, propped him up in a storage room, and forgot about him. Years went by. Herzog waited for the final judgement and his inevitable damnation to Hell. But nothing happened. Angels came and went, retrieving jars of wine, replacing shields, stacking the room with old furniture. Herzog wondered if he'd already entered Hell or if he'd been forgotten by both God and Satan, and which possibility he dreaded more.

  THE END

  Horse Latitudes

  Fame is just schizophrenia with money.

  I died on a Sunday, when the new century was no more than four or five hours old. Midnight would have been a more elegant moment (and a genuine headline grabber), but we were still on stage, and I thought that suicide, like masturbation, might lose something when experienced with more than 100,000 close, personal friends.

  I don't recall exactly when I accepted the New Year's Eve gig at Madison Square Garden, the band had never played one before, but it became inextricably tied in with my decision to kill myself. Somehow I couldn't bear the idea of a twenty-first century. Whenever I thought of it, I was overwhelmed by a memory: flying in a chartered plane over the Antarctic ice fields on my thirtieth birthday. A brilliant whiteness tinged with freezing blue swept away in all directions. It was an unfillable emptiness. It was death. It could never be fed or satisfied—neither the ice sheet nor the new century- -at least, not by me.

  No one suspected, of course. Throughout this crisis of faith, I always remained true to fame. I acted out the excesses that were expected of me. I denied rumors that I had invented. I spat at photographers, and managed to double my press coverage.

  The suicide itself was a simple, dull, anticlimactic affair. The police had closed the show quickly when the audience piled up their seats and started a bonfire during our extended "Auld Lang Syne." Back in my room at the Pierre I swallowed a bottle of pills and vodka. I felt stupid and disembodied, like some character who had been written out of a Tennessee Williams play—Blanche Dubois' spoiled little brother. I found out later that it was Kumiko, my manager, who found me swimming in my own vomit, and got me to the hospital. When I awoke, I was in Oregon, tucked away in the Point Mariposa Recovery Center, where the movie stars come to dry out. There wasn't even a fence, just an endless expanse of lizard green lawn. Picture a cemetery. Or a country club with thorazine.

  I left the sanitarium three weeks later, without telling anyone. I went out for my evening walk and just kept on walking. The Center was housed in a converted mansion built on a bluff over a contaminated beach near Oceanside. I had, until recently, been an avid rock climber. Inching your way across a sheer rock face suspended by nothing but your own chalky fingers is the only high comparable to being on stage (death, spiritual or physical, being the only possible outcome of a wrong or false move in either place). It took me nearly an hour to work my way down the granite wall to a dead beach dotted with Health Department warning signs and washed-up medical waste. I checked to see that my lithium hadn't fallen out on the climb down. Then, squatting among plastic bags emblazoned with biohazard stickers, and scrawny gulls holding empty syringes in their beaks, I picked up a rusty scalpel and slit the cuffs of my robe. Two thousand dollars in twenties and fifties spilled out onto the gray sand.

  I left my robe on the sand, following the freeway shoulder in sweat pants and a t-shirt. In Cannon Beach I bought a coat and a ticke
t on a boat going down the coast to Los Angeles. My ticket only took me as far as San Francisco. We reached the city two days later, in the dark hours of the early morning. As we sailed in under the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco was aglow like some art nouveau foundry, anesthetized beneath dense layers of sea fog. Far across the bay, on the Oakland side, I could just make out the tangle of mangrove swamp fronting the wall of impenetrable green that was the northernmost tip of the rainforest.

  Six weeks later, I left my apartment in the Sunset District and headed for a south of Market Street bar called Cafe Juju. A jumble of mossy surface roots, like cords from God's own patchbay, had tangled themselves in the undercarriages of abandoned cars on the broad avenue that ran along Golden Gate Park. Here and there hundred foot palms and kapoks jutted up from the main body of the parkland, spreading their branches, stealing light and moisture from the smaller native trees. The Parks Department had a given up trying to weed out the invading plant species, and concentrated instead on keeping the museums open and the playgrounds clear for the tourists who never came any more.

  Downtown, the corners buzzed with street musicians beating out jittery sambas on stolen guitars, improvised sidewalk markets catering to the diverse tastes of refugees from Rio, Mexico City, and Los Angeles. Trappers from Oakland hawked marmosets and brightly plumed jungle birds that screamed like scalded children. In the side streets, where the lights were mostly dead, golden-eyed jaguars hunted stray dogs.

  Overhead, you could look up and watch the turning of the new constellation: Fer-De-Lance, made up of a cluster of geosynchronous satellites. Most belonged to NASA and the U.N., but the Army and the DEA were up there too, watching the progress of the jungle and refugees northward.

  I was walking to a club called Cafe Juju.

  Inside, a few heads turned in my direction. There was some tentative whispering around the bar, but not enough to be alarming. I was thinner than when I'd left the band. I'd let my beard grow, and since I had stopped bleaching my hair, it had darkened to its natural and unremarkable brown. As I threaded my way through the crowd, a crew-cut blonde pretended to bump into me. I ignored her when she said my name, and settled at a table in the back, far away from the band. "Mister Ryder," said the man sitting across from me. "Glad you could make it."

  I shook the gloved hand he offered. "Since you called me that name so gleefully, I assume you got it?" I said.

  He smiled. "How about a drink?"

  "I like to drink at home. Preferably alone."

  "Got to have a drink," he said. "It's a bar. You don't drink, you attract attention."

  "All right, I'll have a Screwdriver."

  "A health nut, right? Getting into that California lifestyle? Got to have your Vitamin C." He hailed a waitress and ordered us drinks. The waitress was thin, with close-cropped black hair and an elegantly hooked nose sporting a single gold ring. She barely noticed me.

  "So, did you get it?" I asked.

  Virilio rummaged through the inner recesses of his battered Army trenchcoat. He wore it with the sleeves rolled up; his forearms, where I could see them, were a solid mass of snakeskin tattoos. I couldn't be sure where the tattoos ended because his hands were covered in skin-tight black kid gloves. He looked younger than he probably was, had the eager and restless countenance of a bird of prey. He pulled a creased white envelope from an inside pocket and handed it to me. Inside was a birth certificate and a passport.

  "They look real," I said.

  "They are real," Virilio said. "If you don't believe me, take those down to any DMV and apply for a drivers license. I guarantee they'll check out as legit."

  "It makes me nervous. It seems too easy."

  "Don't be a schmuck. The moment you told me your bank accounts were set up with names from the Times obituaries, I knew we were in business. I checked outall the names you gave me. In terms of age and looks, this guy is the closest match to you."

  "And you just sent to New York for this?"

  "Yeah," Virilio said, delighted by his own cleverness. "There's no agency that checks birth certificates against death records. Then, I took your photo and this perfectly legal birth certificate to the passport office, pulled a few strings, and got it pushed through fast." =46rom the stage, the guitar cut loose with a wailing Stratocaster solo, like alley cats and razor blades at a million decibels over a dense batucada backbeat. I closed my eyes as turquoise fireballs went off in my head. "You never told me why you needed this," said Virilio.

  "I had a scrape with the law a few years ago," I told him. "Bringing in rare birds and snakes from south of the border. Department of Fish and Game seized my passport."

  Virilio's smile split the lower part of his face into a big toothy crescent moon. "That's funny. That's fucking hysterical. I guess these weird walking forests put your ass out of business."

  "Guess so," I said.

  The waitress with the nose brought our drinks and Virilio said, "Can you catch this round?" As I counted out the bills, Virilio slid his arm around the waitress's hips. Either she knew him or took him for just another wasted homeboy because she did not react at all. "Frida here plays music," said Virilio. "You ought to hear her tapes, she's real good. You ever play in a band, Ryder?"

  "No," I said. "Always wanted to, but never found the time to learn an instrument." I looked at Frida the waitress and handed her the money. From this new angle I saw that along with her nose ring, =46rida's left earlobe was studded with a half-dozen or so tiny jewelled studs. There were more gold rings just above her left eyebrow, which was in the process of arching. Her not unattractive lips held a suppressed smirk that could only mean that she had noticed me noticing her.

  "That's interesting," Virilio said. "I thought everybody your age had a little high school dance band or something."

  "Sorry."

  Frida folded the bills and dropped them into a pocket of her apron. "They're playing some of my stuff before the Yanomam=F6 Boys set on Wednesday. Come by, if you're downtown," she said. I nodded and said "Thanks." As she moved back to the bar, I saw Virilio shaking his head. "Freaking Frida," he said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "Frida was okay. Used to sing in some bands; picked up session work. Now she's into this new shit." Virilio rolled his eyes. "She sort of wigged out a few months ago. Started hauling her tape recorder over to Marin and down south into the jungle. Wants to digitize it or something. Says she looking for the Music of Jungles. Says it just like that, with capital letters." He shrugged and sipped his drink. "I've heard some of this stuff. Sounds like a movie soundtrack, 'Attack =46rom the Planet Whacko,' if you know what I mean."

  "You ever been into the rainforest?" I asked.

  "Sure. I've been all up and down the coast. They keep 101 between here and L.A. pretty clear."

  "L.A.'s as far south as you can get?"

  "No, but after that, you start running into government defoliant stations, rubber tappers, and these monster dope farms cut right into the jungle. Those farms are scary. Mostly white guys running them, with Mexicans and Indians pulling the labor. And they are hardcore. Bloody you up and throw your ass to the crocodiles just for laughs."

  "I may need you to do your name trick again. I have some money in Chicago-"

  "Not anymore you don't. Not for two or three months. Nothing but monkeys, snakes and malaria out that way, from Galveston to Detroit. If you have any swamp land in Florida, congratulations. It's really a swamp." The kid took a sip of his beer. "Of course, I could always do a data search, see where the Feds reassigned the assets of your bank."

  "No never mind," I said, deciding I didn't particularly want this kid bird-dogging me through every database he could get to. "It's not that important."

  Virilio shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said, and shook his head wearily at the bare-breasted young woman who bumped drunkenly into our table. "Run, honey," he told her. "The fashion police are hot on your trail," as she staggered over to her friends at the bar. The local scene-makers had taken the he
at as their cue to go frantically native; the majority of them were dressed in Japanese-imported imitations of Brazilian Indian gear. It was like some grotesque acid trip combining the worst of Dante with a Club Med brochure for Rio: young white kids, the girls wearing nothing but body paints or simple Lacandon hipils they had seen in some high school slide show; the boys in loin cloths, showing off their bowl-style haircuts, mimicking those worn by Amazonian tribesmen.

  "The Santeros say that this shit, the jungle, the animals, all the craziness, it's all revenge. Amazonia getting back at all the stupid, greedy bastards who've been raping it for all these years."

  "That's a pretty harsh judgement," I said. "Are you always so Old Testament?"

  "You've got me all wrong. I'm thrilled. L.A.'s gone. They finally got something besides TV executives and mass murderers to grow in that goddamed desert." Virilio smiled. "Of course, I don't really buy all that mystical shit. The FBI are covering up for the people who are really responsible."

  "The FBI?" I asked.

  "It's true," Virilio said. "They hushed it up—same branch that iced Kennedy and ran the Warren Commission.

  "A couple of geneticists who'd been cut loose from Stanford were working for the Brazilian government, cooking up a kind of extra fast-grow plants to re-seed all the burned-up land in the Amazon. Supposedly, these plants were locked on fast forward— they'd grow quick and die quick, stabilizing the soil so natural plants could come in. Only the bastards wouldn't die. They kept on multiplying, and choked out everything else. Six weeks after they planted the first batch, Rio was gone. It's all true. I know somebody that has copies of the FBI reports."

  The band finished their set and left the stage to distracted applause. I stood and dropped a jiffy bag on Virilio's side of the table. "I've got go now. Thanks for the ID," I said. Virilio slipped some of the bills from the end of the bag and riffled through them. "Non- sequential twenties," I said, "just like you wanted."