Free The Pure Cold Light by Gregory Frost Page A

your nose,” Poleby said, tapping her nostril, the disconnected lens system.
    He’d never possessed the least imagination, never once hallucinated anything coherent, and so he concluded that the drug had transported him to a real place. He speculated that it was Mars-to-be—the terraformed Mars that ScumberCorp’s ads referred to. “ Not this generation but someday soon ,” went the motto that even President Odie had been known to recite. “ A new world is about to open to us that will return mankind to greatness .” The ad ran ceaselessly on Knewsday and ANN, and the images of Mars in the ad looked so much like his vision that he figured the artist must have been an Orbiter, too. He swore there were thousands of addicts in the upper strata of society all across the world. One of the drug testers monitoring him had said so. Lyell remembered wondering at the time if SC’s whole Martian colony might be nothing more than a widespread hallucination. How could anyone be sure?
    Poleby believed the world he saw was real. He had a theory that he told Lyell, “God, ya see, finds His recreation in creating variety. That’s what my ma used to say.” He slurped, spitting. “She was a Hindu, had all kinds a notions about God an’ stuff the old man couldn’t tolerate. He was starch-stiff Catholic. I mean stiff . He had a miter on the head a his dick. Don’t know why in the hell the little prick married her, either. I figure they was doing battle to see who could convert who. If she’d’a had a snake, she woulda put it in his bed, but she didn’t. He’d go to confession, then a tavern, then come home broke and beat the shit outen her. She finally run away.”
    A few years later Poleby had killed the old man himself with a screwdriver. “Carpenter’s lobotomy,” he called it, lopsidedly grinning with his chin bright and wet.   His laughter had gone swirling into the bucket.

    ***

    Lyell forged a lot of connections to get her Box City digs. The box was one of a number of locations she frequented in the hopes she might pick up information about any of SC’s unusual offers.   She’d acquired it, to Nebergall’s joy, by trading pairs of shoes.
    The location of the box played a crucial role because information flowing through the Box City tended to cluster in pockets around The Bell and the cooking fires. The fires burned to the north, up on Judge Lewis Quadrangle. Lobly had become a familiar sight there, too, always supplied with extra food to share and always willing to listen to any story.
    It was while seated at a cooking fire that Lyell had learned about ScumberCorp’s food-testing programs. The first time she’d heard it, she doubted the story. Free food was rare enough, but free food from ScumberCorp was a holy miracle. However, when she mentioned the giveaway, she found too many people attesting to it, and solid details filling in.
    From time to time, SC’s subsidiaries—Happy Burgers in particular—invited some Boxers to a private party. This inevitably involved free food or drugs. The exact purpose of any event was not revealed to the participants, but they were always rewarded, sometimes with coins that they could use for barter, but often as not with other drugs. Occasionally, some of the participants didn’t return. A few times, none of them had. That might have scared off new participants, except that there were always Boxers who hadn’t managed to find a meal or who had been robbed by a gang.
    A legend had evolved that the lost Boxers had been awarded special positions up in the towers. The fervor with which the people she spoke to embraced this nonsense, was testimony to their ability to deny reality utterly. She knew better. If people from the Undercity were living fulltime in the Overcity, they were doing it in an urn.
    She would have compiled a terrific story for Nebergall if he hadn’t turned off the tap. It burned her that she couldn’t use it. She couldn’t have imagined the