Vernor moved in with Alice and began working with the Angels. Once a week he would go in for brain interlock with Phizwhiz. The next few days would be spent in trying to remember what had happened, and then he would start preparing for the next session.
As far as Phizwhiz was concerned, no preparation on Vernor's part was necessary—all that was needed from Vernor was his ability to form thoughts. Vernor, however, liked to try to use the sessions to work on his math and science.
The first few times he went in to the EM building, he had prepared a mental structure of facts and speculation, a perfectly built fire awaiting the kindling sparks of ZZ-74 and brain interlock. Since, however, he remembered so little of these mental conflagrations, Vernor's preparations became increasingly desultory.
At first he spent most of his extra time doing things with Alice . . . going to museums, youth orgies, outdoor Hollows, or just wandering around the City . . . but as the months wore on he began spending the larger part of his time getting high at the Angels' hang-out, Waxy's Travel Lounge.
One place Alice loved to go was to the City's Inquarium. On the six-month anniversary of their meeting, Vernor pulled himself together and took her there. Their relationship had begun slowly to erode, and it seemed important to have a good time on this outing.
They paid at the Inquarium's entrance and left their clothes in the dressing room. Vernor wore rented swimfins, but Alice had her own custom-made fins, yellow with red stripes and long trailing edges.
"I want to look like a guppy," Alice explained, fastening yellow and red streamers to herself. Mesmerized, Vernor reached towards the streamers.
"No, no," Alice said, dancing away and flipping into the tank. Vernor jumped in after. The Inquarium was a huge tank, some thirty feet deep and three hundred feet square. The tank was filled with salt water and stocked with fish of every type and description. It was possible to rest on the bottom of the tank watching the fish and dallying with your mermaid, since breathing masks were bubbling at the ends of their hoses all over the tank's bottom.
Under the water Vernor looked around. His vision was clear, as he was wearing special full-eye contact lenses. The breathing masks were like a field of dandelions gone to seed, far below him. Alice was kicking down past a large grouper and through a school of parrot-fish. The streamers from her body flowed back like fins, luring Vernor closer, delicately tugging at her in a way that he longed to emulate.
Before he could catch up with her, down at the bottom with the air masks, he realized hadn't taken a big enough breath. He shot up to the surface, gasped a full lungful and dove again.
Without Alice nearby, Vernor paid more attention to the full tank's appearance. It was as if he had shrunk to a few inches in size and jumped into a twenty-gallon home aquarium. There were kelp plants the size of trees. Dolphins whizzed to and fro, filling Vernor's ears with their squeaks and clicks. Schools of smaller fish darted and wheeled like multi-celled organisms. A large, pug-nosed fish seemed rather too interested in Vernor's swim fins.
With a last mighty kick, he scared off the fish and reached the bottom. He grabbed a foaming air mask and pressed it to his face. Pure oxygen with perhaps a hint of nitrous oxide. Exhilarating! Hanging on to a convenient coral branch, Vernor looked around for Alice.
Soon he was rewarded with the sight of yellow and red swirls behind a nearby reef. He pushed off and swam over to find lovely Alice lazing there, her breasts floating, and a school of fishies darting in her lap. She took a hit from her air mask and passed it to Vernor, her lips parted in a slowly bubbling smile. He followed her streamers forward.
Passing the mask back and forth, and with fishies swarming between their legs, they had sex down there, the pleasure enhanced by nudges and occasional nips from the tiny fish. The bubbles from their breathing mingled to form a silver curtain around their heads. At the last instant, Alice pushed Vernor away and he came into the water, his sperm jelling into an opalescent, gauzy network.
They swam up, dressed and went out on the street again, Alice pausing to pick up something at the entrance desk.
"What's that?" Vernor asked.
"It's a Hollow infocube of us doing it down there," Alice giggled. "I wanted to have some nice pictures of us, so I phoned ahead to arrange it."
"And that's why you pulled back so I'd come in the water?" Vernor asked, "So that your grandchildren would know it wasn't a fake?"
"Oh, Vernor, don't be like that. I just felt like giving you a shove. For fun," She looked at him warmly. "We can watch it in bed tonight."
They walked along in comfortable silence for a few minutes, not a thought in their heads. Soon, however, Vernor felt the familiar boredom coming back. He wanted to consume.
"You want to get something to eat?" he asked Alice.
She smiled and shook her head.
"How about going over to Waxy's?" That would be good. Some weed and a few beers.
"And watch you get stoned out of your mind as usual? No thanks."
"Aw come on, Alice, I just want to see my friends."
"I'm your friend, aren't I?"
"Look, Alice, we've talked about this before. I can't spend my whole life with you." How he longed to be in the pleasant darkness of Waxy's. "Look, I just remembered, I told Mick I'd meet him to work on some new ideas." This was bullshit, and Alice could tell. Hopelessly, Vernor continued. "You better not wait up for me."
Alice stopped walking. "Again?" she asked angrily. "Why can't you and your addict friends do something serious? I thought you wanted to be a scientist, Vernor. But now you just get stoned and let that horrible machine suck out your energy. You think you're a genius, but geniuses do something with their lives."
This line of attack had become overly familiar to Vernor over the last few weeks. It was especially annoying to hear since he knew that what she was saying was basically true.
"What is matter? What is mind?" Alice said, mimicking Vernor. When he had started out as an Angel he had thought that his sessions with Phizwhiz would help him to answer these questions, and had often bragged about this to Alice.
He still discussed these questions with the other Angels, and there were times when it seemed that they had arrived at genuine answers . . . but the "answers" they found were always a little unsatisfying when he wasn't stoned in one way or another. Doing the actual hard grinding work necessary for really scientific investigations no longer seemed possible to Vernor, now that he was plugging in to Phizwhiz once a week. Why break your ass working out the field equations for a hypothetical energy configuration when you could plug in and do the problem in your head in seconds. The drawback of this procedure was that once you unplugged from the computer, you weren't likely to remember the specific mathematical solutions which you had obtained with the machine's aid. It was not merely that the solution was too complex to remember, it was that it would have been obtained so rapidly that it was never permanently fixed in the mind.
So Vernor had the feeling of great mental prowess without having anything concrete to show in the way of achievement. He knew that he wasn't really getting anywhere, with science, with philosophy, with Alice, and when she reminded him of this again on the street near the Inquarium it was too much to take.
"Go to hell, Alice," he said, wanting to stop as soon as he began. "I've had enough crap from you, you stupid bitch." Why was he saying this? He wanted to apologize, take it back, but already her lost face was miles away from him, untouchable. Her move.
"Goodbye, Vernor." She started to say something else, then choked back tears, gave him a terrible smile and hurried ahead.
"Alice," he was suddenly shouting, running to catch up. "Alice, I didn't mean that!"
She turned, all grief refined to bitterness. "You don't know what you're doing anymore, Vernor. I don't want to be part of it. It's too sad. You're not the same person." Again she hurried off, and this time Vernor watched her go. He looked at his watch. Five thirty. Might as well go over to Waxy's.
The last conversation with Alice played over and over in his mind as he walked. She was right, sure, but she wasn't an Angel, not even a head, really. He smoked a stick of weed on the way over, bringing his thoughts away from the past and into his surroundings.
Dreamtown. Nobody working, but everyone with a little money in their pocket. Street action was picking up as the evening drew on. Dope dealers ambled along the sidewalks, unloading the night's supply. Hemispherical robots glided along the curbs cleaning up the day's refuse. There were homeshops selling tawdry pieces of plastic furniture equipped with small Hollowcasters to cover them with an image of luxury, restaurants selling Dreamfood molded and dyed to look like old style food, and stores selling pornographic Hollow infocubes. Illusions were the stock in trade.
Vernor stopped to watch a street magician, an intense man with a cable leading from his head socket to a Hollowcaster at his feet. The magician kept a constant play of images dancing in a ten-foot radius about him. Most were abstract . . . clouds and stripes of color . . . but some of the images were more realistic. Donald Duck paced glumly around the magician, wearing a trench into the ground while black smoke issued from his ears. Daisy Duck beaked softly between the magician's legs.
A fire-breathing lizard came scampering up to Vernor, rearing up on its hind legs to display a bright blue erection. As Vernor watched, the erection swelled and the lizard shrank . . . until the erection had turned into a large piggy bank.
The slit of the piggy bank moved and said, "Got a penny for the old guy?"
Unpleasantly surprised, Vernor kicked at the Hollow, but there was nothing really there to kick. His foot passed through the image and emerged covered with blood. Lightening bolts shot towards him from the magician's head and a voice of thunder said, "Let's have that donation, buddy."
All of his bad feelings from the fight with Alice came welling back up and he walked up to the magician, addressing him directly. "You're fucking with an Angel, douchebag."
The magician grinned at Vernor, sizing him up. A red, rubber douchebag appeared and swatted at Vernor's face. "I can take you," the magician said. "Duel?"
Dreamer duels were not uncommon. The idea was something like plugging in to a girl's socket while you made love. Only in this case the goal was not ecstatic union, but rather the annihilation of your partner. The magician snapped a cable into his neck and handed Vernor the free end.
Vernor snapped the plug into his socket and stood glaring at the magician, who slowly dissolved along with the rest of the street scene. Animals and energy patterns came at him, clichés easily avoided and shunted aside. It was nothing compared to plugging into Phizwhiz. Vernor began flashing a series of images, connected in unusual ways to form a pattern of unpleasant strangeness. The corny lightning bolts and leaping tigers from the magician's brain began to look confused. Vernor stepped up the assault. It was easy, too easy, to take his present mood of despair and loneliness and project it out at this man; to show him that everything was nothing.
Suddenly the circuit broke. The magician had unplugged. He looked at Vernor with frightened eyes. "You win, Angel." Vernor unplugged, nodded, and walked on. At least he could do something right.