Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Part 8

Lil rolled her eyes. I knew better than to argue with her when she was tired, but this was too crucial to set aside for petulance. "You can back up that often if you want to, Julius, but don't tell me how to live my life, okay?"

"Come on, Lil -- it only takes a minute, and it'd make me feel a lot better. Please?" I hated the whine in my voice.

"No, Julius. No. Let's go home and get some sleep. I want to do some work on new merch for the Mansion -- some collectible stuff, maybe."

"For Christ's sake, is it really so much to ask? Fine. Wait while I back up, then, all right?"

Lil groaned and glared at me.

I approached the terminal and cued a backup. Nothing happened. Oh, yeah, right, I was offline. A cool sweat broke out all over my new body.

Lil grabbed the couch as soon as we got in, mumbling something about wanting to work on some revised merch ideas she'd had. I glared at her as she subvocalized and air-typed in the corner, shut away from me. I hadn't told her that I was offline yet -- it just seemed like insignificant personal b.i.t.c.hing relative to the crises she was coping with.

Besides, I'd been knocked offline before, though not in fifty years, and often as not the system righted itself after a good night's sleep. I could visit the doctor in the morning if things were still screwy.

So I crawled into bed, and when my bladder woke me in the night, I had to go into the kitchen to consult our old starburst clock to get the time. It was 3 a.m., and when the h.e.l.l had we expunged the house of all timepieces, anyway?

Lil was sacked out on the couch, and complained feebly when I tried to rouse her, so I covered her with a blanket and went back to bed, alone.

I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin. Vivid dreams of death and destruction slipped away as I sat up. I preferred to let my subconscious do its own thing, so I'd long ago programmed my systems to keep me asleep during REM cycles except in emergencies. The dream left a foul taste in my mind as I staggered into the kitchen, where Lil was fixing coffee.

"Why didn't you wake me up last night? I'm one big ache from sleeping on the couch," Lil said as I stumbled in.

She had the perky, jaunty quality of someone who could instruct her nervous system to manufacture endorphin and adrenaline at will. I felt like punching the wall.

"You wouldn't get up," I said, and slopped coffee in the general direction of a mug, then scalded my tongue with it.

"And why are you up so late? I was hoping you would cover a shift for me -- the merch ideas are really coming together and I wanted to hit the Imagineering shop and try some prototyping."

"Can't." I foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink. Dan had already eaten and gone, apparently.

"Really?" she said, and my blood started to boil in earnest. I slammed Dan's plate into the dishwasher and shoved bread into my maw.

"Yes. Really. It's your shift -- f.u.c.king work it or call in sick."

Lil reeled. Normally, I was the soul of sweetness in the morning, when I was hormonally enhanced, anyway. "What's wrong, honey?" she said, going into helpful castmember mode. Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall.

"Just leave me alone, all right? Go fiddle with f.u.c.king merch. I've got real work to do -- in case you haven't noticed, Debra's about to eat you and your little band of plucky adventurers and pick her teeth with the bones. For G.o.d's sake, Lil, don't you ever get f.u.c.king angry about anything? Don't you have any G.o.dd.a.m.ned pa.s.sion?"

Lil whitened and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. It was the worst thing I could possibly have said.

Lil and I met three years before, at a barbecue that some friends of her parents threw, a kind of castmember mixer. She'd been just 19 -- apparent and real -- and had a bubbly, flirty vibe that made me dismiss her, at first, as just another airhead castmember.

Her parents -- Tom and Rita -- on the other hand, were fascinating people, members of the original ad-hoc that had seized power in Walt Disney World, wresting control from a gang of wealthy former shareholders who'd been operating it as their private preserve. Rita was apparent 20 or so, but she radiated a maturity and a fiery devotion to the Park that threw her daughter's superficiality into sharp relief.

They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel and access the net without ha.s.sle, their wealth was more than sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over.

The conversation turned to the first day, when she and her pals had used a cutting torch on the turnstiles and poured in, wearing homemade costumes and name tags. They infiltrated the shops, the control centers, the rides, first by the hundred, then, as the hot July day ticked by, by the thousand. The shareholders' lackeys -- who worked the Park for the chance to be a part of the magic, even if they had no control over the management decisions -- put up a token resistance. Before the day was out, though, the majority had thrown in their lots with the raiders, handing over security codes and pitching in.

"But we knew the shareholders wouldn't give in as easy as that," Lil's mother said, sipping her lemonade. "We kept the Park running 24/7 for the next two weeks, never giving the shareholders a chance to fight back without doing it in front of the guests. We'd prearranged with a couple of airline ad-hocs to add extra routes to Orlando and the guests came pouring in." She smiled, remembering the moment, and her features in repose were Lil's almost identically. It was only when she was talking that her face changed, muscles tugging it into an expression decades older than the face that bore it.

"I spent most of the time running the merch stand at Madame Leota's outside the Mansion, gladhanding the guests while hissing nasties back and forth with the shareholders who kept trying to shove me out. I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the utilidor, with a couple dozen others, in three hour shifts. That was when I met this a.s.shole" -- she chucked her husband on the shoulder -- "he'd gotten the wrong sleeping bag by mistake and wouldn't budge when I came down to crash. I just crawled in next to him and the rest, as they say, is history."

Lil rolled her eyes and made gagging noises. "Jesus, Rita, no one needs to hear about that part of it."

Tom patted her arm. "Lil, you're an adult -- if you can't stomach hearing about your parents' courtship, you can either sit somewhere else or grin and bear it. But you don't get to dictate the topic of conversation."

Lil gave us adults a very youthful glare and flounced off. Rita shook her head at Lil's departing backside. "There's not much fire in that generation," she said. "Not a lot of pa.s.sion. It's our fault -- we thought that Disney World would be the best place to raise a child in the b.i.t.c.hun Society. Maybe it was, but. . ." She trailed off and rubbed her palms on her thighs, a gesture I'd come to know in Lil, by and by.

"I guess there aren't enough challenges for them these days. They're too cooperative." She laughed and her husband took her hand.

"We sound like our parents," Tom said. "'When we were growing up, we didn't have any of this newfangled life-extension stuff -- we took our chances with the cave bears and the dinosaurs!'" Tom wore himself older, apparent 50, with graying sidewalls and crinkled smile-lines, the better to present a non-threatening air of authority to the guests. It was a truism among the first-gen ad-hocs that women castmembers should wear themselves young, men old. "We're just a couple of b.i.t.c.hun fundamentalists, I guess."

Lil called over from a nearby conversation: "Are they telling you what a pack of milksops we are, Julius? When you get tired of that, why don't you come over here and have a smoke?" I noticed that she and her cohort were pa.s.sing a crack pipe.

"What's the use?" Lil's mother sighed.

"Oh, I don't know that it's as bad as all that," I said, virtually my first words of the afternoon. I was painfully conscious that I was only there by courtesy, just one of the legion of hopefuls who flocked to Orlando every year, aspiring to a place among the ruling cliques.

"They're pa.s.sionate about maintaining the Park, that's for sure. I made the mistake of lifting a queue-gate at the Jungleboat Cruise last week and I got a very earnest lecture about the smooth functioning of the Park from a castmember who couldn't have been more than 18. I think that they don't have the pa.s.sion for creating b.i.t.c.hunry that we have -- they don't need it -- but they've got plenty of drive to maintain it."

Lil's mother gave me a long, considering look that I didn't know what to make of. I couldn't tell if I had offended her or what.

"I mean, you can't be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you?

Didn't we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn't have to?"

"Funny you should say that," Tom said. He had the same considering look on his face. "Just yesterday we were talking about the very same thing.

We were talking --" he drew a breath and looked askance at his wife, who nodded -- "about deadheading. For a while, anyway. See if things changed much in fifty or a hundred years."

I felt a kind of shameful disappointment. Why was I wasting my time schmoozing with these two, when they wouldn't be around when the time came to vote me in? I banished the thought as quickly as it came -- I was talking to them because they were nice people. Not every conversation had to be strategically important.

"Really? Deadheading." I remember that I thought of Dan then, about his views on the cowardice of deadheading, on the bravery of ending it when you found yourself obsolete. He'd comforted me once, when my last living relative, my uncle, opted to go to sleep for three thousand years. My uncle had been born pre-b.i.t.c.hun, and had never quite gotten the hang of it. Still, he was my link to my family, to my first adulthood and my only childhood. Dan had taken me to Gananoque and we'd spent the day bounding around the countryside on seven-league boots, sailing high over the lakes of the Thousand Islands and the crazy fiery carpet of autumn leaves. We topped off the day at a dairy commune he knew where they still made cheese from cow's milk and there'd been a thousand smells and bottles of strong cider and a girl whose name I'd long since forgotten but whose exuberant laugh I'd remember forever. And it wasn't so important, then, my uncle going to sleep for three milliennia, because whatever happened, there were the leaves and the lakes and the crisp sunset the color of blood and the girl's laugh.

"Have you talked to Lil about it?"

Rita shook her head. "It's just a thought, really. We don't want to worry her. She's not good with hard decisions -- it's her generation."

They changed the subject not long thereafter, and I sensed discomfort, knew that they had told me too much, more than they'd intended. I drifted off and found Lil and her young pals, and we toked a little and cuddled a little.

Within a month, I was working at the Haunted Mansion, Tom and Rita were invested in Canopic jars in Kissimee with instructions not to be woken until their newsbots grabbed sufficient interesting material to make it worth their while, and Lil and I were a hot item.

Lil didn't deal well with her parents' decision to deadhead. For her, it was a slap in the face, a reproach to her and her generation of twittering Polyannic castmembers.

For G.o.d's sake, Lil, don't you ever get f.u.c.king angry about anything?

Don't you have any G.o.dd.a.m.ned pa.s.sion?

The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was saying them, and Lil, 15 percent of my age, young enough to be my great-granddaughter; Lil, my lover and best friend and sponsor to the Liberty Square ad-hocracy; Lil turned white as a sheet, turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen. She got in her runabout and went to the Park to take her shift.