Tea From an Empty Cup

Book 36: Gateway Essentials

by Pat Cadigan

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

"How can you drink tea from an empty cup?" That ancient Zen riddle holds the key to a baffling mystery; a young man found with his throat slashed while locked alone in a virtual reality parlor. The secret of this enigmatic death lies in an apocalyptic cyberspace shadow-world where nothing is certain, and even one's own identity can change in an instant.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 256

Sample

‘Now, why would anyone become a prostitute?’ the white guy asked, sipping his iced coffee through a long, skinny straw.

Across the table, the Japanese guy raised his eyebrows, making his guarded face into a mask of mild surprise. ‘You mean, somebody isn’t?’

The white guy’s laughter echoed in the mostly empty cafe. ‘Oh, man. Things must be really non-ruly on your planet.’

The Japanese guy eyed the tall glass of iced coffee sweating pretty beads of condensation as the white guy sipped at it. Retro beverages were so all-pervasive these days, it was impossible to tell whether anyone really liked iced coffee. According to rumor, most places just poured day-old crude over ice and disguised it with artificial flavors and ersatz cream. ‘That’s Nature for you. With some she’s into the red zone, with others, there isn’t even a meter. You goin’ my way?’

‘What kind of value do I get?’ asked the white guy, watching the other smooth the front of his Guinness T-shirt. Not sake, but Guinness, for chrissakes; what kind of an Oriental was he, anyway? He even turned up his nose at tea.

‘What kind of value you lookin’ for?’ Without waiting for an answer, the Japanese guy dug in the well-traveled bag parked on the seat beside him and came up with a pouch the white guy recognized as the carrying case for a very expensive model of hotsuit. Then he put his other fist on the table, paused as if trying to decide something and then opened his hand to reveal a sapphire-blue gel cap on his palm.

‘Christ.’ The white guy rolled his eyes. ‘What’d you do, put your brain under the pillow and you got that instead of a dime?’

‘Hey, it’s not what you think,’ the Japanese guy said. ‘There’s a creation myth in there. Among other things. And it’s all genuine.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I swear. Distilled from millennia of racial memory –’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I could show you the chromosome they stripped it offa,’ the Japanese guy said defensively. ‘One hundred purebreds got scraped for this. One hundred. In a hospital. This is pure pharmaceutical –’

‘So I take it and what? What’s the big myth?’

‘Lots of big myths. All the big myths you want. The big creation myth.’

‘So tell me about it.’

The troubled look on the Japanese guy’s face wasn’t one of his rehearsed expressions. ‘You don’t really want me to spoil it for you.’

‘If it’s so great, you can’t spoil it. Come on, let’s hear it. Just one.’

The Japanese guy hesitated for a long moment.

‘I just want to know what I’m getting,’ the white guy persisted. ‘That’s how we do things on my planet.’

‘Sure, but just telling it doesn’t do it justice.’

‘I believe you. All I want is just to know one thing to watch for. What if I think it looks boring and I skip it? I could do that, you know, I’m not Japanese. I might not know better.’

The Japanese guy let out a breath. ‘Okay. There were these two gods, Susanoo and Amaterasu. They were brother and sister –’

‘Susan?’ The white guy’s perfect features were scornful as he flicked the menu button to his right for another iced coffee. ‘You expect me to believe Susan is a Japanese name?’

‘Not Susan, you idiot, Susanoo. And that was the brother’s name, Amaterasu was the sister. You gonna let me tell this or not?’

The white guy waved carelessly with one hand. One of the wait staff materialized so suddenly, he almost hit her in the face. Seeming not to notice, she slid another iced coffee onto the table and removed the empty glass. The white guy took it, closed his thin Anglo lips around the fat, transparent straw and sucked hard, his cheeks hollowing. His blue eyes stared hard at the Japanese guy. ‘So?’ he said, taking his lips from the straw. ‘Tell!’

The Japanese guy nodded resignedly. ‘Susanoo was a one-god riot on wheels, tearing everything up,’ the Japanese guy said, watching the white guy continue to drink his day-old crude. Maybe it was true, what his foster father used to say years ago, that Westerners thought using garbage for culture was recycling. His foster father had been white, a minor bureaucrat named Clark who always wanted to be anything else but what he was. This guy seemed to suffer from the same ailment. ‘Party time was all the time, it was all really non-ruly, as someone I know would say.

‘So one day, Amaterasu, who was always real patient with this yabo, was weaving sacred garments with her sacred maidens and Susanoo tosses this dead, flayed horse into the room, just to hear all the sacred ladies scream. Which they do, and one of the sacred maidens even accidentally pricks her sacred genitals and dies.’

‘Oh, that could happen.’ The white guy grinned sarcastically. ‘I know lots of people with their good parts pierced and they’re all real alive, still.’

The Japanese guy stared back at him flatly. ‘Sure. If you call that living.’

‘Hey, if it’s not your idea of excitement, it’s not, but you can’t tell me there are no Japanese with pierced –’

‘Seiken shirazu,’ said the Japanese guy, putting his head in his hands for a moment. ‘Are you gonna let me tell this?’

‘Yeah-yeah. A sacred maiden takes a sacred prick in her sacred genitals and dies. So then what?’

The waiter who had brought the iced coffee set a cup of green tea in the middle of the table. The Japanese guy looked up, furious. ‘Get that outa here.’

‘I ordered that, thank you very much.’ The white guy pulled it over next to the iced coffee.

‘Amaterasu gets even more fed up with her yabo brother than I am with you,’ the Japanese guy went on, glowering at the tea, ‘and she goes into this cave to sulk. That’s it – the whole world goes dark.’

The white guy raised one skeptical eyebrow. ‘The whole world? Or just Japan?’

‘Back then, Japan was the whole world, manuke.’

‘You wish.’

‘No, you wish, all of you, you gaijin sheep –’

‘Whoo, gaijin, the man says!’ The white guy raised both hands and wiggled his fingers. ‘Sampling those Mishima breakbeats again, are we?’

The Japanese guy slipped the gel cap into a tiny pocket on his shirtsleeve and made getting-ready-to-get-up-and-leave motions.

‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Finish the story. Or was that it?’

‘All the other gods got together outside the cave and tried to get her to come out again, but she wouldn’t.’ The Japanese guy paused as if he were trying to decide if he really wanted to continue. ‘Then the Dread Female of Heaven –’

‘The who? Of what?’

‘The Dread Female. Of Heaven.’ The Japanese guy groaned. ‘Okay, what’s your problem now?’

‘What’s so dread about her?’

The Japanese guy’s smile was sly. ‘You’ll find out if you’re lucky. The Dread Female of Heaven started dancing and dancing and dancing, and she starts getting very aroused, and all the other gods start getting very aroused, because this is a very sexy dance. And at the hottest part, she does this really, really hot move, so hot that it makes everyone go off. Including her. So everyone’s laughing –’

‘Laughing?’ The white guy’s face was incredulous. ‘You guys laugh when you come?’

‘You could be the lucky winner who finds out,’ the Japanese guy said, unperturbed. ‘The gods laugh. Demons laugh. If they let you in on things, you’ll laugh too.’

‘I bet. So that’s it? Everybody comes and laughs, ha-ha, happy ending? Or do we get to ride up and down in the cave?’

‘What do you think this is, a theme park?’

‘Oh, hell, I can go to any club in the universe to see somebody dance –’

‘Not like the Dread Female,’ said the Japanese guy confidently.

‘No? Half a block from here, there’s this woman, she’s got six rings, all of them charged, inside –’

‘You’re right. I’d dread that, I’m surprised you don’t.’ The Japanese guy looked revolted. ‘What if it got fried in there? What if it got fried off?’ He shuddered. ‘Anyway, aren’t you married?’

‘Yeah, I’m married, but it’s nothing serious. It’s not like I told her my real name or anything.’ The white guy spread his hands. The backs were scarred, deliberately, but not very well. Home brew – someone had tried to brand over a scarification or vice versa. The resulting keloids weren’t decoration, just damage. The Japanese guy couldn’t stand the sight. ‘If I want to get my magic wand charged and polished, I can go anywhere. Hell, I can even go home. I thought you had something here, and you’re gonna give me a hard-on over some ass-shaker. Dread Female of Heaven, sure. Mistress Inga the Dominatrix can suck the marrow out of your bones without mussing her hair.’

‘If she saw Ama no Uzume’s sacred genitals, she’d fall down coming and laughing like a hyena.’ The Japanese guy put up a hand as the white guy started to say something. ‘Look, I guess I was wrong about you. You’re just too out here for this stuff –’

The white guy was halfway out of his seat. ‘You callin’ me a fuckin’ tourist? Shithead, do you know who I am?’

The Japanese guy smiled with half his mouth. ‘Everybody knows who you are. You’ve told everyone often enough about it. But even if you really did it –’

‘I got witnesses!’

Across the room, the person who had brought the tea paused in the act of resetting the fractals on one of the tabletops and stared at them with open and unabashed curiosity.

‘And I wasn’t that doped, either,’ the white guy added sulkily. ‘Tiny dose. Not even enough to convict me for possession.’

‘Hey, I don’t care if you were doped. This ain’t the Olympics. And who doesn’t have witnesses?’ said the Japanese guy, smiling at the waiter genially. ‘Big brother’s watching, little brother’s watching, big sister’s tapping the phone, little sister’s stalking your ass – or they all got bots to do it, which is pretty much like the same thing. You can’t do anything without an audience. Guy like you’ud probably kill himself if he didn’t have an audience. Sure, they all saw you go through the out door. And even if you really did it, you were doped and you only did it once. I think that’s all you can do it. Once. Only once. I think that no matter what, you still got to strip down and take it the old-fashioned way – by hand. Or your wife.’

‘So what are you, a fuckin’ priest of, what’s it called, Shintu? Hindo?’

‘Our priests don’t have to be celibate. I’m not saying I don’t have anything I want out here when the mood hits me. I’m saying you’re too out here to have stuff any other way.’

The white guy rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, and I suppose your body isn’t out here’

‘No, it isn’t,’ snapped the Japanese guy. ‘That’s the trouble with you people. Your body’s not really out here. Your body’s in here.’ He leaned forward over the table and tapped his head. ‘Your whole body is in here, and nowhere else. Your neck gets broken, the whole thing’s useless – but you can go in here and find it all again. You can get part of it cut off and taken away, but that part will still be in here.’

‘Oh, everybody’s heard about that stuff,’ said the white guy. ‘My mother used to talk about this ghost tooth she had like amputees got ghost limbs –’

‘Aitsu wa kusomitai! Now he’s tellin’ me about his mother’s fuckin’ ghost tooth,’ the Japanese guy told the startled waiter, who had moved on to adjust another tabletop.

‘How come we aren’t getting any fractal shit?’ The white guy rubbed the table surface as if friction might get the patterns started.

‘Fractal shit.’ The Japanese guy shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I’m wasting my time with you for, you won’t get it. None of you whites’ll get it, not the ones like you. You people, you lost your souls a long time ago, you sold them for a good parking space. You know every time a white person is born, a new franchise opens at the mall?’

‘Yeah?’ said the white guy evenly. ‘Well, every time some jerk-off cuts up a credit card, a sushi bar goes out of business.’

The Japanese guy blinked. ‘Now, that’s probably true.’ He took the gel cap out of his sleeve pocket and held it out to the white guy again. ‘So. You want it?’

The white guy picked it up off his palm and held it between two fingers. After a moment, he put it down. ‘Not enough.’

‘Not enough,’ the Japanese guy echoed.

‘Not enough.’

‘You’re saying it’s not enough?’

‘It’s not.’

The Japanese guy shook his head. ‘So what’s missing? The password’s in there. You put on your hard-hat – hell, I’m even throwing in my lucky hotsuit – you tune in, you give the password and –’

‘And there I am in Japanese Disneyland for, what – all of ten minutes?’ The white guy made a face. ‘Forget it. You can have this, you and the rest of the whores.’

‘Now, that I can’t help you with,’ the Japanese guy said sadly. He stared down at his hands on the table so intently, the white guy leaned forward to see if there was something going on, if he were somehow getting fractals on his side of the table while his own side remained blank. ‘That’s between you and your gods. I can give you the tools, the entrée, call it how you like. But I can’t give you the attention span, and I can’t correct for shortsightedness. You believe you’ll get a ten-minute entertainment, that’s exactly what you’ll get. But if you’re ready to go all the way to the red zone and then push past that – well, who knows? You just might find the out door again and this time you might just go all the way through it and out the other side. How’d you do it in the first place, by believing it was impossible?’

The white guy licked his thin, pale lips. ‘It doesn’t sound like enough. In the end, it’s all just story time.’

‘Hey, the myths don’t give themselves up that easy, you know. We got to work hard for them. The problem with you pale-asses is, you never really learn to live beyond your senses. When you go in, you got to have all going on for you. We use a hotsuit and a hard-hat to get the fire going. You guys use it instead of the fire. See? You’re all like that. Except maybe the Catholic Italians. The full ethnics raised in the faith, those troopers can fly without a plane.’

‘Orthodox Russians got it all over them,’ the white guy said. ‘And Caribes got it all over everyone. Voodoo –’

‘Yeah, well, Caribes aren’t pale-asses.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, why don’t you just give me a hint about how I’m supposed to prolong the experience. Am I supposed to say, “Hey, wait a minute,” to the Dread Heavenly Female?’

‘You got my ID, all my accounts. You can make your own contacts easy.’

The white guy wrinkled his nose. ‘And where does that leave you?’

‘Don’t tell me you’re worried for my welfare? How un-Gatsby-esque of you.’

‘Very funny –’

‘All right, how nonwhite, then.’

‘Now, look, willya? We’ve known each other a long time, and I let you get away with a lot of that white stereotyping shit because most of the time it’s pretty funny. But I’m tired of getting beat over the head with crimes committed by some fuckin’ urgly I never met and never got the benefits from, especially when you start sounding like you mean it. You wanna see my Japanese-couple-looking-for-an-apartment routine? I do it for Australians, they think it’s a fuckin’ hoot. It’s the one where the landlord finds out the couple have moved into his bathroom and they can’t stop talking about how spacious it is –’

The waiter, who was now at the next table, let out a half-strangled laugh and then tried to disguise it as a cough. They both stared at him for a moment before the white guy turned back to the Japanese guy and gave him a triumphant look.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘You see how you can get laughs with material other than the old shit about thud-stupid, blotchy white guys trying to pave over Brazil, using mahogany toothpicks, and stuffing themselves with roasted harp seal and chicken-fried peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches. There’s a whole bunch of white people never got to live like that and wouldn’t want to. Believe it or not, my parents didn’t push me out on the street when I was eight, they actually raised me till I left school.’

The Japanese guy pressed his lips together hard for a moment. ‘Wow, you didn’t have to walk the streets till you were twelve? You probably didn’t make much.’

‘Oh, very funny. Very funny. In case you really don’t know your history, Thailand was where they had the kiddie-sex holiday tour business all sewed up.’

The Japanese guy’s eyes were flat. ‘Japan was very far away from Thailand.’

‘Yeah, and Japan’s not even really there anymore, so it’s easy to make all kinds of claims. And denials. Isn’t it.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘Okay. The point: I’m sick and tired of the insensitive white asshole jokes, okay? Give it a rest.’

The Japanese guy shrugged. ‘Fine. Sorry. Didn’t know you had a problem with it.’

‘Well, now you do.’ The white guy folded his arms. ‘Where was I?’

‘I was saying how you were getting all my accounts and passwords and you suddenly wanted to know where that left me.’ The Japanese guy smiled with half his mouth again. ‘You were concerned for my welfare in a way I found, uh, uncharac – ah –’ He gave another shrug. ‘You were concerned.’

‘Yeah, of course. I don’t want to go down on some kinda weird fraud charge. You know, some night I’m on-line having a few laughs with Ms. Dreadful Heaven and suddenly, I fail the authentication because you decide to show up, too.’ He finished his tea in a gulp. ‘You get my date with Dready, I get canned for bootlegging.’

The Japanese guy started to laugh and then let it trail off. ‘Oh, yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Well, shit, you oughta.’

‘I was being facetious, you insensitive white asshole. It wouldn’t happen.’

‘Who says, you insensitive yellow asshole?’

‘I says. Because I’d be turning over the whole package to you. You get everything, including the stuff it took me years to layer on. All yours. All of it.’

The white guy opened his mouth to say something and then stopped. His eyes narrowed and he tilted his head first to one side and then the other, scrutinizing.

‘What?’ The Japanese guy drew back a little.

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why are you being so generous?’ The white guy put his elbows on the table. ‘What’s the take-up here? This is like one of those going-out-of-business sales, everything must go. You going out of business?’

The Japanese guy shrugged. ‘You can’t appreciate a deal when someone offers it to you, you got more problems than I do.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ The white kid stared from under his brows. ‘I think maybe you got more problems than anyone and you’re trying to dump them in a hurry. Who’s gonna kick in my door looking for you?’

‘No one,’ the Japanese kid said confidently.

‘Uh-huh. Not even, oh, some dreadlocked heavenly female?’

The Japanese guy laughed. ‘Only if you program it that way.’

The white guy laughed with him and started to get up. ‘Well? You gonna tell me to wait a minute, hold on? Something?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why not?’

The Japanese guy’s smile was wistful. ‘I’m tired. I’m a lover, not a salesman. I’m just gonna take this to someone more spiritual, someone who can appreciate what I’m offering and wants some good value. I’m looking to go into business for myself and I’m trying to raise some start-up. You’re in the mood to decline, it’s all right. Other people’s money spends as well as yours.’

‘Yeah?’ The white guy sat down again.

‘Yeah. I got a lot going for me. I got connections, I got favors to call in, I . . .