Twinmaker (2 page)

“Booth’s ancient,” said Libby, circling it with a look of profound dissatisfaction. It was an outmoded model, square, with a single round-edged door opening out of each white face. Just four transits at a time. “It’d be a total bottleneck.”

“Could work in our favor—you know, make it feel exclusive?” said Clair, gazing up at thick iron girders and bulging rivets, and beyond all that, a high, domed ceiling. The floor below was empty, because industry was a thing of the past. Anything except people could be fabricated at will, as long as it had been through a d-mat booth or a fabber at some point in its existence.

“It’s freezing,” said Libby, hugging herself, “and the air’s thin.”

“We can fab heaters,” Clair said, peering through a window at the infinite quilt of mountains outside. “Oxygen, too, if people need it.”

“Because passing out is a definite buzzkill.”

“Doesn’t it give you a high if you breathe it pure?”

Libby shrugged. “Don’t forget the parkas,” she said. “They’re
always
sexy.”

Clair checked the Air for details on their location. They were in Switzerland, it turned out, and the amazing building around them wasn’t an old factory at all, but an abandoned astronomical research station, the Sphinx Observatory, just over two miles up on the top of a hollowed-out mountain, with an ice palace somewhere at the end of an old elevator shaft below and observation decks that had been sealed up for a decade. . . .

Clair read on with amazement. Was this place
real
?

“I’m getting a buzz,” she said. “Quick, take my picture.”

She opened her arms, and Libby stared hard for a second while her lenses worked.

“Got it, gorgeous girl. You want me to post it to the forum?”

“Worth a try.”

“You really think they’ll come?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Libby’s lenses flickered in the gloom, and when Clair checked the crashlander forum, she saw images of herself standing in the observatory spreading out into the world.

“How will we know if they like it?” Libby asked, worrying at her lip.

“They’ll just come, I guess.”

For five minutes, nothing happened. Libby kicked the floor in moody silence, hands plunged deep in the pockets of a thick woolen coat she had ordered through the booth, while Clair paced around the enormous space, refusing to give up hope. She was finding it harder, though, with every passing minute, as the cold seeped into her skin and she became aware of a faint dizziness from the thin air. Giving up, as Libby was clearly ready to do, would be a lot easier than persisting much longer. And the odds of talking to Zep were practically zero anyway, even if the party happened. . . .

The booth behind them clunked. They ran across the room to see. One of the four doors was closing. In quick succession, the remaining three closed too, and the echoing metal space was full of the hum of matter and energy spinning into new forms. Clair stopped pacing, barely able to breathe with anticipation. They were stranded, but only temporarily, and soon they wouldn’t be alone. She saw the same eager alertness on Libby’s face. Neither of them dared speak.

“Hey,” said the first person out, a lanky man in his twenties with a British accent and a swoop of yellow hair that completely covered half his face. He stared around him with one green eye wide and gleaming, and shivered. “This is savage.”

“You like it?” asked Libby.

“Maybe. Where’s the telescope?”

“Don’t know,” said Clair. “We haven’t looked yet.”

He wandered off to explore. The door he had come through was already closing, processing someone else.

The second door opened, admitting another young man in a thick, furred overcoat, who simply ran across the room to the nearest window and gasped with something that might have been excitement or alarm. It was hard to tell. The view through the window went a
long
way down.

Libby looked at Clair, who shrugged.

The third potential partygoer was a girl with Thai features and a South American accent.

“Are you Liberty Zeist?” she asked Clair.

“No, I am,” said Libby.

“And you want to be a crashlander.”

“Uh, obviously. We both do.”

“Haven’t you heard that all the good sites have been taken?”

Libby looked at Clair in frustration. Clair’s heart sank. All their jumping and standing around in the cold had been for nothing. If the crashlanders had already been here, that meant no ball and no Zep.

“Just messing with you,” said the woman with a grin. “This is a great find. Congratulations.”

She produced three beers from her backpack and tossed one each to Libby and Clair. The third she opened.

“What are you waiting for? It’s time to party.”

“But how do you know?” Libby asked. “Doesn’t there have to be a vote or something?”

“Democracy is
so
twentieth century. Besides, the queue for the booth is thirty deep already. I’d say the decision’s been made.” The woman grinned and raised her can in salute. “Xandra Nantakarn. Welcome to the crashlanders.”

Clair turned to Libby and saw the delight she felt mirrored on her best friend’s face. They whooped and high-fived and toasted each other’s brilliance with their gifted beers.

ANYONE IN THE world over fifteen years of age could solo jump. Anyone over eighteen could consume alcohol. For the crashlanders, and for seventeen-year-olds like Clair and Libby, that was a winning combination.

For the next hour, people arrived singly or in pairs, four times every three minutes—the fastest the old booth could cycle. Most brought supplies with them. Before long the cold metal space of the old observatory was transformed by inflatable couches, radiant heaters, multicolored spotlights, and even sparklers and other small fireworks. Food and drink flowed in ever-growing quantities. Eventually, someone brought a whole fabber through, so there was no more waiting for the old booth to cycle to see what came next.

Clair helped herself to a handful of warm roasted chickpeas and
another beer and followed Libby through the crowd, syncing her lenses and ear-rings to the media enjoyed by whatever cluster she was closest to. Two separate dance parties were forming at opposite ends of the cavernous space, one swaying to cruise music with a syncopated Spanish beat, the other jerking and twitching to harsh, atonal synth. Libby migrated from one to the other with willful unpredictability, drawn by the attention of those around her.

“Super crashlanding, Libby.”

“Outrageous space, Libby.”

“Libby, how did you
find
it?”

Sometimes they thought Clair was Libby because of the photo Libby had posted to the forum. Libby corrected them, then accepted their admiration. Not once did she say that it was Clair who had made her post the picture. The beer in Clair’s stomach soured slightly: Libby would have bailed on the site in a
second
. But what could Clair say? Besides, she wouldn’t have been there at all but for Libby’s insistence. They were both crashlanders now. It evened out, like their complexions.

There was no sign of Zep, even though Libby must have invited him: boyfriends or girlfriends were allowed, Clair had learned, whether they were officially crashlanders or not.

Then, ninety minutes into the ball, a metallic crash came from the booth. Both Libby and Clair spun around in alarm, fearing some kind of accident or breakdown that would bring the still-growing party to an end. The doors had opened on a delivery of
oxygen canisters that went right up to the booth’s ceiling. Canisters spilled out in a noisy silver flood across the floor, disgorging an achingly handsome young man from their midst.

Clair’s breath hitched in her throat.

“Zep!” Libby rushed forward to help him to his feet. He was long, lean, and tanned, wearing a translucent red-check shirt with a white wifebeater underneath and holding an oxygen bottle in each hand. His grin was infectious. People cheered, whether they knew him or not.

“For medicinal purposes
only
, now,” he said, taking a long pull on one of the bottles and handing the other to a random stranger. “If symptoms of altitude sickness persist, please see—oh, hey, Libs.”

Clair was excited to see him, but she averted her eyes as he and Libby locked lips. The way Libby pulled his blond head down to hers left no illusion as to who belonged to whom.

One of the bottles knocked against Clair’s left boot. She raised it to her mouth to take a hit of cool clarity. It didn’t help her light-headedness, though. It wasn’t oxygen she craved, and it didn’t ease the guilty ache in her heart at all. She turned her back on the tableau and moved away.

“Hey, Clair-bear,” Zep called after her. “Wait up—”

She wandered on her own for a bit, not going so far as to deliberately avoid the happy couple but enjoying being among people she didn’t know except as names and captions in her lenses. There
were day-trippers in feathery cloaks and gothic moonwalkers in black and silver—two migratory groups who never normally met, since they occupied different hemispheres, day and night. The crashlanders had united them, as the ball united all races, types, and sexual orientations. Clair flirted a bit, flattered and embarrassed at the same time by the men and women who approached her, but her heart wasn’t in it.

She moved on. It was getting crowded and increasingly hard to hear anything over the excited shouting and singing. There were a lot of nosebleeds from the altitude, but that didn’t seem to dent anyone’s desire to party. She wondered what would happen if someone got really hurt. Would the peacekeepers come to shut the ball down? Clair took some guilty comfort from the thought that if trouble
did
break out, Libby would get the blame, just like she took all the credit.

“Hey,” said someone, “I think that Zep guy is looking for you.”

“You mean Libby,” she said, beginning to get a little tired of her perpetually mistaken identity. “I’m Clair, the other one.”

“Oh, okay, sorry.”

She headed for the nearest lookout, which was colder but had a spectacular view. A pair of unexpectedly familiar faces stood out from the crowd—fashionably bespectacled Ronnie and blue-haired Tash, friends from school. The girls drew her into their corner, where they hugged and kissed her and danced with her to a song they had been sharing. Clair felt her mood bounce back. The emotional knock of seeing Zep with Lib
by couldn’t endure in the face of her friends’ determined good cheer. They were at a crashlander ball! What wasn’t exciting about that?

As the song wound down, Tash explained that they had scored invites when friends of friends responded sympathetically to their urgent need to attend. Libby’s Air-wide announcement that she and Clair had made it in had prompted a rush of interest from their high school. Ronnie and Tash were the lucky ones.

Then Libby joined them, bursting out of the crowd with her hair plastered across her forehead, darkened with sweat.

“This was a great idea,” Clair confessed to her, feeling flushed and sticky. “I’m glad we did it.”

“Told you I never let you down. Have you seen Zep?”

“No . . . but he’s looking for you.”

“Why don’t you bump him?” asked Ronnie.

“The Air’s so jammed in here,” Libby said. “I can’t get anyone.”

“Well, he won’t have gone home,” said Clair. “He’d never leave a scene like this.”

“Why would he?” Libby took a pull on Clair’s beer. “Everyone’s so totally gorgeous.”

“That guy over there in the purple suit,” said Tash, pointing surreptitiously, “he’s
someone
, isn’t he?”

“If he isn’t, he should be.” Ronnie pursed her lips in a silent whistle. “Oh, and look—he’s with that amazing redhead we spotted earlier.”

Clair glanced around and saw a couple leaning shoulder-to-shoulder in the nearest doorway. His eyes were perfect almonds, golden-irised like an owl’s. Her hair swept up to golden points in a fiery wave. Clair’s hands came up automatically to touch her thick curls.

“They’re too fantastic to be real,” she said. “Who are they?”

“Don’t know,” said Tash with yearning in her voice. “Their profiles are locked.”

“I put a trawler on their images,” said Ronnie, “but so far I’m just getting junk. Whoever they are, they’re hiding deep in the noise.”

“Who hides at a party like this?” asked Libby. Clair could only guess how often she’d checked her own popularity stats to see how high they’d risen.

“Spies?” suggested Tash.

“You’ve been watching old movies again,” said Ronnie.

“Terrorists?” asked Clair. “Art prankers? Spammers?”

“How many beautiful criminals do you know?”

“Maybe they’re advertising Improvement,” said Tash.

Ronnie laughed. “Why not? That makes as much sense as anything else.”

Clair didn’t get the joke.

“What’s Improvement?”

“A dumb new meme,” said Ronnie. “I got an invite this morning and deleted it immediately.”

“I got one this afternoon,” said Tash. “Check your infield,
Clair. You might have been ‘selected’ while you were here, you lucky thing, you.”

Clair did check, and found the message exactly where Tash had suggested. It had come forty-five minutes earlier. She read the opening lines:

“It does sound like spam,” she said.

“Read it all,” said Ronnie. “It’s a classic.”

Clair skimmed ahead. The idea was to write a series of code words on a piece of paper, of all things, with a description of what you wanted to change about yourself—height, intelligence, good looks, whatever; then you hid it under your clothes and took it with you through d-mat. Do this enough times, the invite said, and whatever you wish for will come true.

“Not even a sixth grader would fall for those last two lines, would they?” said Tash, adopting a fake voice. “‘No one but
you
is special enough to receive this message, which we probably sent to everyone in the whole world.’ Yeah, right.”