Half the Day Is Night (23 page)

When she was fifteen, she thought she was maybe the only person at her school who had never been to the surface. It couldn't have been true, but she remembered it seemed that way.

As a girl she thought that she was really a surface person. She knew she would love weather. Wind; wind would be exciting, wind was like
Wuthering Heights,
she couldn't exactly explain how but it was. And once she got there she would be with her mother.

The sub was boring, Miami was strange. She had done five days of decompression in decomp at Port Authority and she was reacting to the change. It was night, but the lights in the terminal were too bright, the lights on poles outside even brighter. And the air smelled funny, organic: like food and garbage; potato and carrot scrapings. Plants. Grass. Nobody had ever told her that the surface smelled funny—even the ocean was loud and over the familiar briny smell it stank.

She landed in Barcelona jangled and tired. Her mother was waiting with Gabriel, her four-year-old half-brother, and her mother's second husband, Tito. Her mother's hair was blonde instead of brown and she spoke lisping Spanish to the four-year-old and the husband. Mayla understood a little Spanish, but not very much.

The sunlight was too bright, her head ached and her eyes watered. Barcelona was loud. They got on a tram and her half-brother stared at her with round black eyes, and her mother's husband smiled too much. She couldn't think of what to say. Every time she looked at her mother who was silhouetted against one of the blinding windows, she got afterimages when she turned away. The husband got off before they got home, he had to go to work. He worked in one of the blinding glass towers, unnervingly high. There was too much space, the sky was so blue, it seemed impossible that any stretch of space would be such an obvious, unnatural color.

She was afraid she'd get a sunburn. Food tasted strange, salt wasn't as salty and everything had a funny, metallic taste. It's just adjustment, her mother said. At dinner, her mother kept speaking in Spanish to Tito and Gabriel. Tito tried to talk to her, but she didn't understand him, even when he said things she knew the Spanish words for.

“Mayla,” her mother said, “I wanted to bring you here for so long, but Jimmy's mother—” her mother pursed her lips. Her mother wasn't going to talk about Gram. Mayla didn't talk about Gram either, but it made conversation oddly disjointed. Her mother kept saying, “Tell me about your life.” But after she had talked about school, Gram was in everything.

Her mother took her shopping, bought her expensive things, with collars of eyelet lace, a sleeveless silk top, a quilted jacket. She tried to play with her half-brother, but he made her nervous. He liked to be tickled and he liked to wrestle, but pretty quickly he got rough, hitting her leg with his fist and laughing, and she didn't know how to make him stop.

The third day she was there they went downtown again and shopped. They were on the bus coming back from the city, and for the first time since she had arrived, she felt as if she could look out at the street without her eyes watering. “It's cloudy,” her mother said. “You don't need your sunglasses, Mayla.”

But she liked them. “I can see better,” she said.

There were trees and they pulled in the wind. It was like the vid, watching the trees. Mayla felt as if she wanted to be outside in the wind. She felt afraid, but it was a good kind of afraid—excited. Water started dripping down from the roof of the bus, condensation maybe, streaking her window. Streaking all the windows. Darkening the street. It wasn't from the bus, she thought, it was rain.

“Oh no,” her mother said, “I don't have an umbrella. We'll have to run.” Her mother leaned forward and put her hand against the window. She looked excited. When they got to their stop, her mother took her hand, and pulled her down the steps, out into the rain, running.

The rain was pounding down, and just as they jumped to the ground there was a crack, like an explosion and she started because an explosion at home meant the sea was coming in, an explosion at home meant you were dead. Her mother pulled her, running. Mayla's face was wet and she was afraid to breathe in; the air was full of water, it was unnatural, it was cold and awful, she couldn't breathe, she felt that if she took a breath she would drown. Her mother dragged her, and she saw white sparks, things around her got black until she could only see what was in front of her. Her mother kept pulling and pulling, until they were under the overhang at her mother's house. She heard herself gasp and instead of just breathing she was crying in great, shaking sobs.

“Oh baby,” her mother said, “You'll be all right. I'm sorry baby, I'm sorry.” Her mother wanted her to stop crying, she could tell, but she was scared and she hated this place. It hurt her mother, her crying, but she didn't care, she didn't care at all, and she kept right on.

That was when she knew that she wasn't a surface person.

She looked back over her list. Owen, Tumipamba's successor at MaTE, got there before Polly. Of course, Polly would be late. He was the CFO, he could be as late as he wanted.

“What have you got?” Owen asked, and she passed the list over to him.

She watched him read. Owen was from the U.S., Pennsylvania or something. She wished she'd been born in the U.S., then she wouldn't have to worry about adapting.

Owen was still reading when Polly walked in. “Morning Mayla, how's it going?”

“Okay,” she said. “Oh, Polly, about that clinic loan, there's been some problems.” Her heart was beating hard.

“What's wrong?” Polly seemed genuine, not accusative. As if it didn't matter to him.

“There's a rider on the loan, with a partner. Normally I wouldn't have any trouble, you know…” she faltered.

Polly nodded.

“The partner. I can't work with the partner,” she said. “Nobody could work with the partner.”

“Oh,” Polly said, “I'm sorry to hear that. I'd hoped it would give First Hawaiian a little presence. But it's really pretty small anyway.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I'd have liked the business, for, you know, presence, like you said.” She took a deep breath. “But I can't. The partner … is a problem. I can't get around it. I can't do the loan.”

“Right,” he said. “Well, if anything else comes up, I'll try to steer it your way.”

It sounded all right. Even though Polly had sent Saad to meet her at the subport. Maybe Polly really didn't care about the loan, maybe he didn't even know about Saad's partner. Maybe he really had been trying to do her a favor.

Maybe it was all right. Maybe she really could still make the right banking decisions.

She wanted to escape. She wanted to go to Del Sud, get a flat, a pretty little flat, and live an orderly existence. Find a different world, a simpler place. Any world was better than this.

9

Virtual Weather

“Soldiers came right down the street,” Santos said. “My grandmother told my mama to buy rice so we bought twenty-five kilos of rice. And water, we bought a lot of water. You couldn't buy air. But it wasn't the same as a war. It wasn't the same because there was only one side. There was the soldiers and there was just people. And it was in the city, not on a real battlefield.” Santos was talking about the Liberation.

They were hunkered down in the high grass, watching for the other team. This time they were on patrol, waiting for an unnaturally accelerated twilight and darkness.

“You weren't born when it happened,” David said.

“Yeah, but I heard about it.” Santos' pirate face was old enough to remember the Liberation. “I know it wasn't like war.”

“Sometimes war is in cities,” David pointed out mildly.

“You can't have a real war in a city like Julia, there's not enough space. You know, no tanks, no planes,” Santos sounded nostalgic. Was nostalgia the right way to describe it? Nostalgia for a reality built from vids and films.

The sky had just started to darken. Around them stood yellow grass, waving a bit in the wind. It should have been scratchy and smelled like sweet straw but he couldn't even smell the helmet anymore. David put his hand out and felt a tickle across the palm of the glove that was not quite like reality.

Santos didn't know it was not quite like grass because Santos had never been in real grass. Just like Santos didn't know that all that had to happen for something to qualify as a war was for events to total a certain quantity of anarchy and death.

It would be maybe ten minutes until darkness. He hated to wait, he didn't like maneuvers in the dark. He was wasting money, sitting here in virtual grass, waiting to do something he wasn't going to enjoy. If he'd known they were going to be doing a run in the dark he would have begged off.

Something chirped in the grass. The sky was blackening perceptibly. They would start moving before it got dark, as soon as it got gray enough to blur the edges of things. Maybe he could get killed quick. “Santos,” he said, “when you are shot, is there a loud noise?”

“Yes?” Santos said, not understanding.

“When the bomb was dropped on me, there was a loud noise. When I get killed, last time. If you are shot and killed, there is this noise?”

“Sometimes,” Santos said.

Shit. Well, maybe after this he wouldn't play anymore, it wasn't worth it. Spending money to do something he didn't like, that was stupid.

There was a crack of lightning and he jumped.

“Fuck,” Santos said.

The twilight was plum colored, but David didn't know how much of that was storm. He hadn't known it was part of the scenario. “What is it?” he asked.

“Thunderstorm,” Santos said.

“I
know
it is a thunderstorm. Did we pick a thunderstorm?” He couldn't imagine why.

“No,” Santos said. “Sometimes the program just does it. You know, weather.”

If he had wanted weather, David thought, he would not be playing virtual wargames.

“I like it when it rains,” Santos said. “It's more real.” Santos had never been in the rain.

The rain came towards them. He could just see it as a darker curtain in the plum-colored darkness. It was like watching a vid, there was no heavy pre-storm calm, no shock wave of cold air riding before the rain, no pregnant scent of weather on the wind. He couldn't smell anything. He could feel the handlebars, feel the treadmill he was sitting on. And then it washed across them and the sound of rain was all around them and he could see nothing at all.

In the blackness he closed his eyes and concentrated on the treadmill, on the weight of the helmet on his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose. His hairnet was messed up by the strap around the back of his head. He was sitting on a treadmill in a cubicle, listening to the rain drum all around him while he himself remained curiously dry. The shapes on his eyelids were green at first, then red Rorschach blots, random retinal firings.

He could pull off the helmet. He could quit. He could get up off the treadmill and walk away. Meph was waiting in the room. David would find a job, waiting tables, unloading skids, something. Earn a little money instead of spending it, like a teenaged boy, on pseudo-experience. Santos had never seen anything but a virtual construct called Lezard, and if they met on the street, Santos wouldn't know him and he wouldn't know Santos. “He purged,” Santos would say, “we were just sitting there and he just cleared the tanks, you know? Gone. Nothing. Me and the fucking rain.”

He felt Santos' hand close around his wrist and his glove pulled slightly. “It'll give us cover!” Santos shouted in his ear.

The treadmill jerked and shuddered. It was a little like walking on slick ground, but not much. The ground wouldn't really have been wet yet anyway. He couldn't see. They could walk right through the enemy's camp and not even know it in the darkness. This was foolish. They couldn't even use the mine sweep to watch for mines, they couldn't read it in this rain. Did they even have mines in this game? Well, they had the sweep, and mines scared him to death, so he supposed they did.

Lightning, and the landscape flashed around them, overexposed. It was gone before he got a sense of anything and the thunder was a painful crack that jolted him so much he went to his knees. The treadmill stopped for a moment and he heard, below the sound of the rain, his own ragged breathing.

Santos pulled on his hand, a phantom tug without real weight behind it. “Come
on.
”

Fuck. He got to his feet carefully, not trusting the treadmill. Night goggles. Why didn't they have night goggles? In real fighting everybody used them. But at least the rain seemed to be slowing down, it was less noisy although he still couldn't see anything. Nothing made sense, they should have been waiting for the rain to stop. They couldn't see anything, they were stupid to be moving in weather like this. If they had been moving against a real enemy, that enemy would have been on his home ground and they would be blundering around in the rain and dark. He thought he could make out shapes, a bluff to his left, or maybe a big piece of equipment. He strained to make out the shape, maybe the turret of a tank? He should be able to see the gun—

Lightning again and the left fell away down a gentle slope, no bluff, no tank, but farther away black hump-shapes hunched in the rain—

He crouched and pulled on Santos' hand. He thought the shapes were tents, tents or vehicles. “What?” Santos said. The rain was less, Santos didn't have to shout.

“Wait,” David hissed.

They waited for the lightning. He wanted to quit, he wanted to go home. How long had he been here? Not more than thirty minutes, that meant they had better than an hour, maybe ninety minutes left. The darkness was making him crazy and he was getting a headache. Had someone from the tents/trucks seen them outlined in the lightning? He was pretty sure it was a camp. If it was, Santos would alert the rest of the group with a remote and then would they sit in the dark and wait? This was not like real weather at all. If it were like real weather then there would have been more lightning by now.