Date: Fri, 22 Apr 1994 21:19:50 GMT
Shards of Peace
Copywrite 1994 by C. Lee Spencer
Part I
======
I looked over my shoulder at the Joeboys who had just
entered the Arcade. Grafted muscles and steroids made their skin look
paper thin in the red and gold neon lights. Where they moved, the crowd
parted in deference. They looked around the crowd, searching for
someone. Me. The Outsider.
The Underground University wanted me back. Of course Peace
would send Joeboys after me. It's her style. Sending Joeboys after me
is like killing a mosquito with an N-Bomb. It'll get the job done, but
the results'll be messy. Makes me wonder if she dries her hair with a
blowtorch.
Still, I had to try to escape. No one could say that the
Outsider gives up without a fight.
"Hey!" a young girl wearing a see-through shirt yelled at me
as I shoved past her on my way to the entry hall. A tactical mistake.
The two Joeboys turned towards the sound like bloodhounds to a scent.
I flipped them the finger as I dashed through the sliding doors and
into the Chinatown streets. A perfect place to blend for me. Even
though my family has lived in the States for over a hundred years,
they've stubbornly preserved the genetics of the homeland.
The crowd was thin. Even Chinatown gets sleepy at 4 in the
morning. I looked for the thickest concentration of people and ran
towards some Hound Dogs out drinking on a curb. They looked up at me
as I ran towards them, not too concerned.
The Joeboys burst out of the Arcade behind me, not waiting for the
doors to slide open. I looked over my shoulder and saw that one was cut
and bleeding in a dozen places from broken glass. When I turned to see
where I was going, the Hound Dogs had disappeared. I ran into a nearby
alley, the darkness of the shadows covered my form as I blended into the
wall pattern behind me.
The Joeboys appeared at the entrance of the alley. I could feel
their eyes on me. Yeah, they knew I was there. They seperated to cover
both sides of the alley as they approached. One part of my mind
wondered if they actually had orders to kill me.
Nah. Sending Joeboys out to murder someone is a chancy prospect.
The drugs they use to speed up and control their muscle growth makes
them very unstable assassins. A Joeboy tends to leave a lot of clues
when he murders someone. No, they were there to grab me with a minimum
of fuss.
"Hey, boy. Peace wants to talk to you," Joeboy A said.
"What if I don't want to talk to her?" Like I had a choice in the
matter.
Joeboy B took that moment to hit me from the right. His shoulder
hit my ribs and knocked me to the gorund. I lay on the cold concrete,
my face a road-rash from scraping along the pavement. A massive hand
descended to my hair and pulled me to my feet.
I screamed in pain and a hand covered my mouth.
"You are going to talk to Peace, boy. She's worried about you,"
Joeboy B said.
I nodded my head. The hand disappeared from my mouth, but before I
could say anything, I felt a sting in my neck and the world faded out.
Of course they'd drug me. Peace just loves to use her drugs.
* * *
Picture in your mind a cobweb. Now, add a touch of pastel green
and red. For style add plum. Put a woman in the center of the web, a
most perfect woman. Every curve carefully chiselled out of unblemished
obsidian. Perfect measurements. Her eyes are blue. Everyone in the
Underground University calls her Peace.
She plucked one of her cobweb strands and two helpers bring me to
her. It's as simple as that. And there I lay on a leather couch, with
her standing not five feet away. Naked, as always. Not that I minded
looking, but I didn't want to be there. Near her.
She turned to look at me and when she saw that I was awake, she
pointed to her breasts. "I firmed them up some more, and took another
inch off. What do you think?" she asked. She has a million dollar
body, literally.
"If you expect me to call them gorgeous, fine. They're gorgeous,"
I said.
She took no offence. "You need to finish your work. You know, the
one you destroyed. I'd like to see it through."
"Why don't you ask your new lover?"
She murmured something and the lights in the room lowered a notch.
"Is that what you need to finish the work? To make love to me?"
"We never made love. We fucked," I said. I don't like taunts.
She giggled. "Like there's a difference. No, my new lover is a
performance artist. Erotic dance. Oh, the University is just filled
with you artist types. Still, she is good, very good, at what she
does."
I began to feel like I was in one of those interactive soaps that
lonely women participate in when their man was away. I didn't want to
play. "If I do it, what then?"
"All I want is the work. You can go to hell for all I care."
And she could send me there, too. All she'd have to do is pluck a
strand of her web and I'd find myself down below. Power doesn't flow
from money any more. Money has no meaning here in the Underground
University. Her power is in her web of information gathering services
and those people that she chooses to currupt and blackmail.
She's the real power behind the Underground University movement.
"I don't trust you," I said.
"What's to trust. You promised me the piece. All I want is for
you to deliver," she replied.
"Okay, I'll do it. But after that we're done."
"You are a crazy little man."
II
==
I was on Dockside, hauling fish and cleaning a little boat by the
name of Haute Zaire when I found out about the UU. Whispers, mostly.
Guarded mentions in the hot-house atmosphere of the local coffee place.
All of us artsy types went there to spout poetry, show virtual art, or
just to smoke an illegal substance.
"What's the definition of the word poor," one of the artists asked
from the small platform in the middle of the room. He sat on a stool
and looked out into the dark corners of the coffee place, his long
blonde hair glowing faintly in the one lone spotlight hanging above him.
"Having no money!" someone yelled back.
"Wrong. Being poor is to have no power over your own destiny," he
said.
"Jeeeesus! They let anyone up on stage these days!" someone else
yelled.
"I'm from the Underground," the blonde-haired man said, and the
room fell silent. "That's all I have to say."
I was hooked. A person mentions the Underground University and the
whole room quiets. I wondered if he was real. Some people claim to be
from the Underground University just to be heard. Those people don't
last very long in coffee houses.
I took a chance and talked to the guy as he was leaving.
"What do you do?" he asked.
"Well, I work on this boat and..."
"Why are you interested in the UU, then?" he said, cutting me off.
"I, um, sculpt a little. I did this neat fish in some pink coral I
found. Even sold it for a few yen," I replied, a bit shaken.
"I'm no recruiter. Let me talk to Peace," he said and walked away.
A few days later, I was in. He found me in the coffee house and
took me to my first meeting with Peace.
Old style universities are passe. Virtual learning is it. If a
person cannot afford it, then he is out of luck. Period. The UU is for
people like me, or wireheads, or users of hallucinogens. We are the
modern fools and prophets, prancing about making statements about the
world. We learn. We teach. We are respected and shunned.
Artists and visionaries. And I am the Outsider.
I still remember getting that name. The blonde-haired man took me
to see Peace that night. She lived Uptown in LA, in a monoblock of
plastisteel and glass woven together in a loose jumble of Aristotlean
solids. I remember thinking at once that a madman must've designed the
place because it adhered to no style or form. The multi-polymer crystal
fibers manufactured in space have a tensile strength almost a hundred
times stronger than steel for about half the bulk.
An architect could go crazy with his designs when he has materials
stronger than any other in human history.
Inside was more impressive than the outside. The main lobby is all
crystal and light. Hundreds of thousands of miles of optical wire
must've been used to light up the m-p crystal fibers, creating a rainbow
of primary and secondary colors. Moving sculptures made of plastic and
metal dominated the center of the lobby. A kaliedescope of light and
motion, I thought to myself the first time I saw it.
My guide took me over to a bank of elevators and pressed a button.
I noticed that above me a camera pod moved slightly to focus in on me.
The doors snapped open, startling me. My guide motioned me out of the
elevator and onto a balcony hundreds of feet off the ground, at the very
top of an egg-like structure.
When I first saw Peace, my mind refused to recognise that she was
naked. Only after several seconds did I realize her state of undress.
She wore, however, a tapestry of tatoos. They covered almost all of her
body, even the eyelids. Her skin had been made pitch black, even her
eyelids. Tracing the outlines of her face, eyes, breasts, and hips were
thousands of stylized stars, with rays of light that sometimes stretched
for inches across her body.
When she turned to look at me, her dazzling blue eyes came to rest
on mine. "You are an artist."
"Um, yeah. Maybe," I stuttered, not knowing if she was asking a
question or making a statement.
She indicated her body. "Do you like it? An old lover did this
for me. I love his work. I hate his guts."
"It's...impressive," I said.
"Hm. The body, or the art?"
I hadn't even noticed that my guide had left us. When I turned to
look for him, he was gone. "I, er, both?"
"Good answer," she said. "Do you want to fuck me?"
"What?"
"Sorry, am I going too fast for you? I'll slow down. How about a
drink?" she asked, walking over to the balcony doors. When I didn't
follow, she turned around. "Don't you like women?"
"Yes."
"Good. I like men."
"I don't drink," I said, somewhat untruthfully, but things were
moving so rapidly that my head was spinning already.
"I've got lemonade," she said with a short laugh.
I walked with her to a huge wet-bar and watched her expertly make a
sake sweet for herself. I had to admire her body. Plastic surgeons
must've gotten rich off of her. She obviously aimed for perfection, and
got it. It made me wonder how old she actually was. Her age kept my
mind off of sex, so I wouldn't have to be embarassed by the hardon in my
pants.
"You don't drink. I bet you don't smoke. And your not in bed with
me right now. What are you, some sort of outsider?" she asked as she
put her arms around my shoulders and looked into my eyes. "You'll fit
in with the wirehead crowd and the other eunuchs in the Underground."
She reached down with her right hand and rubbed the crotch of my
pants. When she felt my arousal, she smiled up at me. "Oh, so you're
not a eunuch after all. You're just shy."
She led me to her bedroom. I was shaking so hard that I could hear
my teeth chatter. At the time, I was still a virgin.
The next morning, after I had dressed, the guide came and escorted
me out of the building. When we were on the street, he said, "See you
later, Outsider."
"How did you..." I began.
"Oh, I watched everything. I like watching. See ya." He turned
and stepped back into the building, leaving me alone in Uptown LA. My
head was still spinning, and I wondered what I had gotten myself into.
End Part II.
Please E-Mail me your comments. I won't bite if your comments are
negative! I want to improve my writing.
Thanks,
Chris
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