Out on Blue Six Read Free Page B

of Universal Power and Light on their breasts, all poring over personal dataunits. A radiantly beautiful george in a lace one-piece whispering to his/her famulus. A little starry-eyed yulp girl by the door studiously studying her Observer’s Guide to Castes and Subcastes (“trogs: bestial appearance, prominent canine teeth, pointed ears; customarily un- or partially clad, extremely hirsute, with prehensile, hairless tail …”). All separate, independent nation states bristling behind borders one centimeter greater than the surface area of their skins. Never talking. Never ever talking: privacy infringement, caste-breaking, SoulCrime, PainCrime, help! call the Love Police!
    The fragile glass bauble of lives dipped down toward the streets, spinning its way down from Angleby Heights into the luminous canyons. Faces, different; places? The same. The lights. Everywhere, light. The cablecar descended between the window-studded walls of arcologies and co-habs, between blinking aerial navigation lights, between clashing, rampaging videowalls, between cascades of neons and fluorescents, between darting lasers painting the Ninefold Virtues of Social Compassion across the faces of the arcologies, across the clouds, across municipal dirigibles, across the descending cablecar, every soul aboard transfixed with ruby beams like medieval saints, across a Courtney Hall immersed in lines and grids and squares and pyramids and cubes and double helices and every possible Euclidean and non-Euclidean permutation of lights ; ten thousand lights, ten million lights, the ten billion lights of Great Yu, each one a voice calling, “I is what I am! Notice me! Notice me!”
    Beneath her feet now, through the glass floor, the manswarm, the never-resting polymorphic organism whose domain was the streets of Yu and whose constituent cells were the trams and pedicabs and yellow Ministry of Pain jitneys, and the chocolate vendors and the public shrines and the confessoriums and the fortune-tellers and the hot-noodle stalls and the scribes booths and the shoe-shines and the barbers and the waxmen and the umbrella salespersons and the Food Corps concessionaires and the lotto sellers and the street balladeers, and the trogs and the wingers and the yulps and the Scorpios and the bowlerboys and the georges and the migros and the didakoi and the soulbrothers and the prollets and the tlakhs and the anachronists and the witnesses and the white brothers and the skorskis and every single one of the castes and subcastes of Great Yu, all jammed, slammed, crammed together together into the great mass beast that is the manswarm of Yu, the only truly immortal creature, for cells may join and cells may leave and cells may be born and cells may die, but the general dance goes on forever. …
    She tried to summon the sixteen-o’clock dream. She called it the sixteen-o’clock dream because on any other day, she would just be nodding off as the cablecar pulled away from Lam Tandy South. She loved her dream, because in the midst of the lifeswarm, it was one thing that was hers and hers alone, her dream of flying. Just … flying. Never to, or from, anywhere, for every time she was about to see how, why, where she was flying, Benji Dog woke her with a beep to tell her it was coming up on Kilimanjaro West, time to get off, CeeHaitch. She hoped the time difference would not dissuade the dream. …
    Something black and silver and roaring tore across her dream. Courtney Hall woke up in time to see the blue taillights and jet-glow of a pantycar scoring across the jade-pearl features of the Venus de Milo (Venus de Beauty) Cosmetika girl in video on twenty stories of the local SHELTER headquarters. The black and silver thing gave an arrogant flip of its taillights and vanished into the clouds. The Love Police, vigilant and valiant defenders of …
    Of what?
    Mediocrity? Benign Incompetence? One and a half billion people for whom nothing was more important than their own