"We certainly benefited from the result." Laux shook hands with Del. "Good luck, son. I listened to the vid your publicist sent over, and I must say, I enjoyed it."
Del smiled, pleasantly surprised. "Thanks."
After Del left the studio, he walked out into a hall of the building and ran smack into a man striding past the door. The man jolted to a stop and regarded Del. He spoke with a cultured accent. "Excuse me, but are you Jack Mayer?"
"Uh, no." Del knew that accent. This man came from the Skolian world Metropoli.
"My apologies." The man looked distracted and harried. "I'm late for our meeting. I've only met him once, last week. You looked familiar."
Sweat beaded on Del's temples. As far as he knew, the meshes had no likeness of him as a Skolian; until just recently, he had always kept his image private. It had been easy given that he lived on a world no one could visit. Surely this man couldn't recognize him as a Ruby prince.
"I'm a singer," Del said. Then, because hope burned eternal, he said, "Maybe you saw my vid."
"Perhaps." The man nodded absently as he looked around. He obviously hadn't recognized Del from any vid.
"Oh!" Del said. "I remember. That party a few weeks ago. You're Staver Aunchild, aren't you? The Skolian exec."
Staver brought his attention back to Del, looking pleased by his recognition. "Party? Ah, yes, the one Centauri Music put on. Quite a scene, eh?" He regarded Del with new interest. "Are you one of their acts?"
"Not Centauri. Prime-Nova. I work with Ricki Varento."
"Varento! Of course." Staver took a box out of his jacket and removed a cube. "Here's my contact info." He handed Del the cube. "Have one of your people send me your vid. I buy for Metropoli Interstellar. It's a Skolian entertainment conglomerate."
"Thanks," Del said, flattered. He hadn't realized Ricki's name could open doors so easily. He doubted Staver would want to license his music when he saw the lackluster sales of the Jewels Suite, but it was worth a try.
"I'll do that," Del said.
"Good." Staver nodded, the Skolian equivalent of good-bye. "Nice meeting you." He was looking up the hallway behind Del.
Glancing around, Del saw a man walking toward them. Del turned to tell Staver good-bye, but the exec was already going to meet the other fellow. So Del went on his way, thinking. He knew the chances of Staver licensing his work were minimal. But wouldn't that be a scream if his music sold to the Skolians? His family would have collective heart failure seeing one of their own immortalized as—of all the unseemly occupations—a rock star.
XI: Virtland
Del couldn't resist looking for his vid in a music kiosk. Why people called the mega-store a "kiosk," he had no clue. It went on forever, aisle after aisle of racks, displays, and booths where customers could try out virts. Laser lights flashed and morphed everywhere, from the vaulted ceiling high overhead to the glowing purple floor. Music was playing, some orchestrated version of a stellar-fusion song. Del loved the place. He had no clue how to find anything, though.
The store actually did have kiosks that sold music in unusual forms. He gaped at the slick ads for virts that cost thousands of renormalized dollars and would connect you to entire mesh worlds populated by thousands, even millions of people. On the other end of the reality spectrum, he found "sheet music," which musicians supposedly used to read songs from weird little marks on bars. He couldn't fathom why anyone would do something so convoluted when they could have a ticker play, record, and edit whatever they needed. Del wasn't the only one on his world who couldn't read; the people on Lyshriol had no written language. Music passed from artist to artist through the voice, a malleable, ever-changing process that Del felt certain would be ruined if it were codified by marks on a sheet.
He sleuthed out the holo-rock section. Cubes filled its racks, hundreds, thousands. He stood surrounded by a wealth of music, thoroughly confused. Mind Mix, golden-haired Jenny Summerland, and the simmering Conquistadors were everywhere. He recognized them only from the big holos above the racks, because he couldn't read a single flipping cube. He could have asked an AI for help, but he didn't want to look stupid. Why he cared how he "looked" to an AI, he had no idea, but it didn't change his gut reaction.
Del didn't see his vid anywhere. Surely the store had it. This morning, in its fifth week, "Sapphire Clouds" was number one hundred seventy-six on the North American holo-rock chart, which sort of almost put it within range of being a minor hit. Prime-Nova probably wouldn't be happy, though, unless it made the Continental Hundred, the chart of the most popular music of any kind in North America. So far, Del's work had been scarcer on that chart than a Prime-Nova exec without an attitude.
"That is him," a girl said in a low voice. "Look at his eyelashes. They glint, like they have nano-sized laser studs."
Del's face heated. He only knew one person with eyelashes that glinted. Turning around, he saw two girls a few paces away. When they realized he had noticed them, they reddened and looked as if they didn't know whether to back away or come closer.
"Hi," Del said.
"Hi," one answered. She was pretty, with blond hair and big eyes, purple eyes, a color so vivid it practically vibrated. The other girl was curved and sexy, somehow audacious just standing there. Her black hair had purple streaks that glowed, and a flashing purple laser-stud pierced her skin where her shoulder met her neck. She matched the store.
"Are you Del Arden?" the girl with yellow hair asked shyly.
Hah! They did recognize him. He sauntered over. "That's me. Who are you beautiful young ladies?"
The laser-light girl looked him over with approval. "I'm Kendra." She indicated her shy friend. "This is Talia."
"Kendra and Talia." Del smiled. "Those are gorgeous names. I've never heard anything like them."
They both laughed, Talia self-conscious and Kendra as if she thought Del was teasing.
"Are you here to sign cubes?" Talia asked. "I didn't see an ad for it."
"No, I just came to look around." Del motioned at the rack of cubes. Holos popped and whizzed above them, shooting up to the ceiling far above their heads. "It's all so new to me."
Kendra gaped as if he had announced his arrival from another dimension. "You've never been in a kiosk before?"
"I grew up on a farm. We never went anywhere like this."
"That's so sweet," Talia said.
Del wasn't sure farming qualified as "sweet," at least not when he was sweaty and exhausted from hacking bagger-bubble plants all day. But she looked so charming saying it, he would have farmed anything for her.
"Will you sign your cube?" Talia asked.
Ah, hell. He stopped feeling cocky. He would die rather than admit to these lovely girls that he didn't know how to sign his name. So he said, "Sure."
"That's great!" Kendra beamed at him. "We'll get your virt, too." Mischief flashed in her gaze. "You could share it with us."
That sounded interesting. Del had never done a session with real people. He was learning to program his Jewels Suite virt, but it couldn't do much. In a session with real people, though, they could interact however they wanted.
"I could give you a tour," Del said, and both girls laughed. He felt good. Even a few weeks ago, he wouldn't have understood that reference to his virtual self, who offered tours of the virt like Rex had done in the Mind Mix virt. Now the joke rolled off his tongue. They even thought he was funny.
"I'd like that," Kendra said in her sultry voice. She turned to the closest rack and flicked a tiger holo scampering across the rail. A red light flashed in a laser-stud on her index finger.
"The Jewels Suite, by Del Arden," she said.
The rack jolted into motion. Line after line of cubes rolled past, the boxes snapping up, flashing in the light, then snicking down to let new cubes roll up. The whir of motion blurred, then stopped as suddenly as it began.
Kendra tapped two boxes, her fingertip glowing. She handed one to Talia. "Here's yours." She took another and offered it to Del
with a smile.
Sweat broke out on Del's palms. But before he could respond, Talia frowned at Kendra, somehow making the expression pretty.
"We have to pay first," Talia told her friend.
"I did. For us both. With this." Kendra wiggled her finger with the laser-stud at Talia. Then she tapped her virt box, and it snapped open. Holos of Del glowed above its inner surfaces. He reddened, still finding it hard to believe that he threw his head back that way when he sang, with his hips tilted and his eyes half open. He tended to avoid images of himself singing because they made him self-conscious when he performed.
"Could you sign here?" Talia touched a silver triangle on the inside of the box.
He took the cube from her. "I don't have an, uh—" He wasn't even sure how someone signed a virt.
"You can use mine." She rummaged in the purse slung over her shoulder and pulled out a blue stylus with flashing purple lights zinging around the stem. "Here."
"Thanks." Del took the stylus, determined not to look stupid. He touched its end the way he had seen people do, and was rewarded by a point of light flaring on its tip. Hah! When he pressed the tip against the silver triangle, it left a purple mark.
Okay. He had made it this far. He knew his name started with "D" in English, and that a D was half a circle. He drew a semi-circle on the silver, followed by a squiggle. It looked nothing like his Skolian signature, which had taken him years to learn. Mac said he should never use his real signature, though, to avoid forgers. With a smile, he handed the box back to Talia. He didn't know why she would want his squiggle defacing her property, but she glowed as if he had given her something of value.
"Ooh." Kendra pouted. "She got to go first." She handed him her cube and lowered her lashes. "Saved the best for last."
"Oh, stop," Talia said, laughing. "He saved the brassiest for last."
Brassiest. Del supposed it was slang, but people really could be brassy, designing their appearance however they wanted. Kendra looked softer and warmer than brass. Much softer.
Del snapped open her virt, looked at the silver triangle—and froze. He didn't remember how he had drawn his signature for Talia. He couldn't make the one for Kendra identical. It was impossible to be that exact. He couldn't do it.
Del took a breath. Cut it out, he told himself. Just make the damn squiggle.
He signed her box with a fake signature, just like every signature he wrote was fake, because they all looked different, and he didn't care how many times anyone said it didn't matter. He knew. Every time he signed his name, he fractured himself into smaller pieces, creating more bits of Del, none of which were him.
A plain of reeds rippled from where Del stood with Talia and Kendra all the way to the distant blue-green mountains. The peaks bore no resemblance to the Backbone Mountains of his home, but the plain looked a little better. Although the bubbles that tipped the reeds didn't have the iridescent sheen of the real ones on Lyshriol, they were close.
The colors were mixed up, though. The clouds were white instead of blue, and the sky was blue instead of lavender. No one at Prime-Nova knew anything about Lyshriol, and Del hadn't told them, so they based the virt on Earth. How could anyone know Lyshriol? The first people to land there in modern times had been the resort planners from Texas, and they had christened the planet Skyfall. They had showed up after the Texan government fined them for "creative" business practices on Earth, and they snuck offworld, searching for less protected real estate to exploit. As soon as they stumbled across idyllic Lyshriol, they went about setting up hotels and gambling houses.
Eventually the Skolians kicked them off the planet. The name Skyfall stuck, though. The pollen that saturated the biosphere turned the water blue, so snowfall covered the ground in a blue carpet. The planners had thought it looked as if the sky had fallen. Now everyone in three empires knew about the world Skyfall—because it was home to the Ruby Dynasty.
Del found the whole business hilarious. In his language, the word Lyshriol meant, "the clouds have come to the ground." Every time he told someone here that Lyshriol was his home, he was saying he came from Skyfall. And no one had a clue. The top brass in the military knew, of course, but they weren't telling anyone. Lyshrioli natives rarely traveled offworld, and the Ruby Dynasty kept their home world confidential.
"This is pretty," Talia said, gazing across the plain. Reeds swayed around her knees and thighs.
Kendra took a step and sent a cloud of bubbles into the air. "Hey!" she said, laughing. "Who thought this all up?"
"I did," Del said, pleased that they liked his home.
A man was walking toward them across the plain. Del focused on him, and the figure was suddenly in front of them—a man with wine-red curls, violet eyes, and eyelashes that glinted.
"Hello." The man smiled. "Would you like a tour?"
"Hey!" Del said. "You're me."
His virtual self looked him over. "There does seem to be a resemblance. I don't have an accent, though."
Del scowled at him. "I know. Zachary nixed it." It was one of the few times Del had summoned the courage to disagree with the tech-mech king. It hadn't done any good. Del had eventually gritted his teeth and acquiesced, but he dug in his heels when Zachary suggested he hire someone to help him "lose the accent" in real life. Ricki had actually sided with Del, telling Zachary his accent had "sex appeal."
However, Ricki hadn't supported Del when Zachary had the hinge edited out of Del's hand in his vids and virts. The way Zachary talked, Del would have thought the hinge was some weird mutation. It bothered him a lot, but it would have bothered him even more if they had dropped production of his vid.
"I prefer the real Del," Kendra told the fake Del. "He's going to give us the tour."
"Would you like me to leave?" the unaccented Del asked.
"Sorry," Kendra said. "But, yeah, scram."
"Enjoy yourselves," Psuedo-Del said. Then he vanished.
"That was definitely weird," Talia said.
Laughing, Del said, "It's not every day I meet myself."
Kendra gave him a sultry grin. "I like the way you talk better. Especially that chime in your voice."
Del grinned and spun around with his arms extended. "I used to run and run across these plains. Come on!" Then he took off.
"Wait up!" Kendra called. She and Talia were suddenly next to him with that instantaneous jump virts allowed. As they ran, the wind streamed through their hair and "Sapphire Clouds" played:
Running through the sphere-tipped reeds
Suns like gold and amber beads
Jumping over blue-winged bees
Don't catch me, please
Running, running, running
Del stopped abruptly, on purpose, and Kendra and Talia piled into him. They collapsed into the reeds, laughing in a tangle of limbs. He filled his arms with Kendra's voluptuous body. Rolling over in the reeds, he kissed her soundly. She pulled him closer, her arms around his waist and Talia lay along their side, sliding her palm over his hips.
Del lifted his head and murmured. "I'm a lucky man today."
Talia hesitated. "I'm surprised you don't, well, you know."
He leaned over and kissed her, still holding Kendra in his arms. "Don't what, beautiful?"
"Have a girlfriend," Talia said. "The hum in the m-verse is that a Prime-Nova top gun owns you."
Del's smile vanished. No one owned him. He wasn't property. Ricki didn't want him, anyway; she wanted some creation Prime-Nova had concocted and called "Del Arden." They didn't have a real relationship. She kept him around for enjoyment, as if he were some sex toy.
Thinking of Ricki, however, prodded the part of Del's brain that his hormones tended to turn off. He regarded Kendra, and she looked up at him, her eyes half-closed, her soft lips inviting.
"We don't have to stay in the virt," she murmured. "My bedroom is just as comfortable. And it's real."
"I would love to," Del said. More than she knew. "But, um—"
Her eyes opened a
ll the way. "What's wrong?"
"Uh—how old are you two?" Del asked.
Kendra caught her lower lip with her teeth. When she didn't answer, Del looked at Talia.
"I'm eighteen," Talia said. "Kendra is nineteen."
Well, damn. No matter how overprotective Del might consider their culture, he had to obey its laws. He took a breath, then lifted himself off Kendra and sat cross-legged next to her. "I wish—" His voice trailed off.
Kendra sat up, smoothing her tousled hair, and glared at Talia. "You didn't have to tell him."
"He could get in trouble," Talia said.
"You're lovely," Del said. "Both of you. I can't believe two such incredible girls want me." This holo-rock thing had perks he hadn't expected, but he needed to get things straight with Ricki before he played. He might be innocent by the standards of the music industry, but he wasn't stupid. He didn't want to be on the same planet as his illustrious producer if he pissed her off.
"I just can't," he finished. "I'm really sorry."
Talia touched his cheek. "You're sweet."
Del reddened. If they did the corn-fed farm boy bit, he was going to dig under the reeds and hide. He wondered what people would think if they knew his farm grew big leathery bubbles. He had never even tasted corn.
Del stood up and offered one hand each to Kendra and Talia. "Come on. Let's go real, and I'll take you to dinner." He didn't really have the money, but he liked their company, and he didn't just want to leave things on this abrupt note.
Kendra jumped up and took his arm. "Come on, handsome." She waited while Talia took the other. "Let's go."
Talia dimpled at him. "Dinner with a famous singer. All our friends will wish it was them."
Del had his doubts about that, given how few of their friends were buying his vid, but what the hell. It would be fun.
He felt an odd pang at ending the session; it was becoming more and more difficult to leave the fantasy worlds he created.
In its seventh week on the holo-rock charts, "Sapphire Clouds" hit one hundred and twenty-two; in week nine, it was one hundred and three; in week ten it crept up to one hundred and one. That same week, "Diamond Star" entered the holo-rock chart at number three hundred and three.