Authors: Ian McDonald
“He’s in conference.” Tixxi Teshvalenku, his personal assistant, had informed her in between painting golden stripes down the center of each five-centimeter-long nail. “Say, Courtney, what do you think of my noo dress, neat, neh?” A black silk frill, all lace and roses, that went right up at the sides and over each shoulder … “Isn’t it just wheeeee, neh? Like I only got it this lunchtime from my designer, she says it’s the latest fashion, so I had to wear it before everyone else gets one.”
“I’ll show myself in if you don’t mind, Tixxi,” Courtney Hall had said. She knew better than to be drawn into talking fashion with a zillie.
That had been twenty minutes ago. In the intervening time, Courtney Hall had, despite a long-term allergy, made the acquaintance of each of the four and twenty cushioncats with which Marcus Forde adorned his private jungle. From seal-point Siamese to collapsar black, he had built them all from kits, as he had indeed built his entire office, from the panelwoods and flowering vines that formed the walls through the livewood floform desk unit to the carpetgrass—his personal tour de force, it being green, soft as moss, and four centimeters deep. Marcus Forde’s sexual partners (of which he had many, being a member of a caste given over almost entirely to the exploration of sexual pleasure) were regularly invited up to his penthouse rather than his apt in an all-winger co-hab over in Ranves. Given his twin proclivities, Courtney Hall did not doubt that biotoys of a more sinister and intimate nature lurked pulsing and tumescent among the blossoms. She wiped sour sweat from her brow onto the sleeve of her best business three-piece. Her designer had assured her she looked every millimeter the professional yulp (but to be a yulp was to be a professional, a caste of professionals), but she was not convinced.
“You know, Benji, I am definitely experiencing severe distress.”
“If you want, I can have a mild tranquilizer dispensed from the office Lares and Penates system,” replied the rather stifled voice of her famulus. She considered the offer.
“No. Thanks, Benji.” But she did take the cuddly toy-dog puppet out of her workbag and slipped it onto her drawing hand. She flexed her fingers and the famulus came to life: Benji Dog, her famulus, her watch, her ward, her jiminy-cricket conscience since she had joined Armitage-Weir five years ago to produce Wee Wendy Waif, Nobody’s Child, the vicariously adoptive daughter of the almost third of a billion readers of Armitage-Weir’s daily newssheet.
“Oh, what is keeping him.”
“You are keeping him, CeeHaitch.” Sometimes she wished she hadn’t been given a famulus with a voice like an idiot on a children’s cartoon show. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t been given a famulus that looked like a flock glove puppet. But the Ministry of Pain, in its omniscience …
“And I also have to inform you, CeeHaitch, that I am still not happy about your decision to press ahead independently with these ideas for revamping Wee Wendy Waif, Nobody’s Child; you should have gone through the proper channels, the Department of Arts and Crafts, the Bureau of Media Affairs, the Office of Socially Responsible Literature … they are there to help you, you know.”
“One more Socially Responsible cheep out of you, doggy, and it’s back in the workbag for the rest of the afternoon.”
“And I feel I have to remind you,” the famulus continued in its high-pitched squeaking, “that it is technically a Category Two SoulCrime to remove or conceal a Ministry of Pain–assigned famulus from your immediate person.”
Lightning flared again as, muttering and mouthing, Benji Dog was stuffed back into Courtney Hall’s bag. For an instant the stupendous hulks of the arcologies were backlit brilliant, stark white. The horizon crawled with fire. One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus, four hippopotamus … thunder bawled. Four and twenty cushioncats howled.
The door opened. In rushed Marcus Forde, Courtney Hall’s editor, slipping out of the paper modesty robe he wore for conferences into the casual nudity he maintained for the office.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Did you tell them about me? Did you put my plans on the table, did you show the board my sketches, the new plotlines and characters, did you show them my storyboards, what did they think of my new idea?”
“I showed them.”
Her editor sat down behind his desk; the floform seat molded wood to flesh.
“And?”
“Ah.”
She was not certain whether it was the room’s heartbeat she was hearing, or her own.
“Would you like to sit down?”
Her voice sounded as if coming from kilometers away as she said, “No. Thank you.”
Marcus Forde was absentmindedly stroking his famulus, a soft fabric pouch on a string around his neck containing herbs, dried semen, pubic hair, bioprocessors, and speech synthesizers, in that way he tended to when he was once again ever so nicely asking Courtney Hall just
when
she thought she was going to have the next week’s storyboards ready.
“We looked at your proposals. The entire editorial and directorial board studied them all carefully; and yes, we all agree, the plotlines are excellent, the new characters are wonderful, and the standard of the artwork is the finest we’ve ever seen from you since you joined us. However … satire is not a thing the Compassionate Society has a need for anymore. It’s good, it’s clever, damn it, it’s funny, but it’s not Socially Responsible.” She could hear the capitals slamming into place like steel teeth. There was a tight singing in her ears she had not heard since her childhood days in the community crèche: the tight singing noise you hear when you are trying not to cry. “It’s all very clever, all very droll, it may even be true, it may even be deserved, but it’s still criticism. Do you think those folk down there really want to know that the Seven Servants are nothing but a pack of computer-run, money-grabbing, capitalist leftovers from an unhappier age; that the Polytheon is nothing but a jumble of corporate-personality simulation programs that got out of hand; that their beloved Elector is just a crazy athleto who got pulled out of a gym one night and stuck on the Salamander Throne; that the Ministry of Pain is run by professional incompetents who got promoted beyond their natural ability because the Compassionate Society wants everyone to do the job which makes them happiest, irrespective of whether they are any good at it? You think that would make them any happier, no matter how funny you make the faces or the walks or the words?” Courtney Hall began to feel curiously threatened by this sweaty, naked man, though she topped him by at least twenty centimeters and outweighed him by a similar number of kilograms. “To take away those people’s faith in their Compassionate Society; the faith that the Ministry of Pain, the Seven Servants, the Polytheon, care for them as individuals and want nothing more than their individual happinesses; you think this will make them happy? Tell me this, then, what are you giving them that the Compassionate Society cannot? Questions? Doubt? Uncertainty? Criticism, cynicism, sneering cheap laughs? Hurt? Pain? You must be some kind of arrogant creature if you think that just because something is true for you it must be true for everyone. What right have you to tell them, ‘Sorry, it’s all false, all an illusion’?”
Courtney Hall rallied under the stunning attack.
“Even if it is?”
“Even if it is. The Compassionate Society isn’t perfect, I’m not naive enough to believe that it is, but it’s the most perfect we’ve got. What right have you to try and take away happiness, false or not, illusory or not?”
“Because I believe there must be something more important than happiness. Accountability. Quality.
Satire
.”
“Not in the Compassionate Society.”
“And it would seem, not at Armitage-Weir.”
Lightning flickered nearer, white-hot bolts frozen in the dark spaces of her pupils. Courtney Hall looked out through the looming clouds and the warm, driving monsoon rain sweeping through the corporate canyonlands, across Heavenly Harmony Boulevard, to the face of the girl in the forty-story videowall advertisement for the TAOS Consortium. Turn, smile, dissolve, disintegrate into a forty-story rendition of the TAOS lozenge-with-T logo, freeze again, hold final dissolve, and then hello hello hello, look who’s back
again
; forty stories of the Seven Servants’ epitome of citizenship.
“Marcus, tell me, don’t you ever feel oppressed by her? Doesn’t it ever bother her how perfect she is; perfect hands, perfect nails, perfect face, perfect skin, never too tall, never overweight, just lovely in every detail; does that not make you feel kind of inadequate, having to work across the street from someone as perfect as that? It would me.”
Marcus Forde waited. The TAOS girl performed her rigidly choreographed moves, over and over and over. When he spoke, he chose his words with the deliberation of a master mason from some long-defunct caste of manual laborers.
“No, not at Armitage-Weir. Courtney, leave the art to the tlakhs and the witnesses; you’re a yulp, a professional, remember that.”
“A professional who can draw, who can think up funny cartoons that make a third of a billion people laugh. You know something about yulps? We were originally a caste of lawyers. That’s right. All my friends are lawyers. I go to dinner with them and they sit about and talk about their jobs and their careers and their positions in the company or the department or the Ministry, and I think, what the fug am I doing here? Just what Yu needs, another caste with a membership of one: the Hallites, the yulps who think they’re tlakhs.”
“Courtney, please, I know you’ll take this in the right way when I say that your job here is secure until you make it insecure.”
“I understand you completely, Marcus. Absolutely.”
She was halfway to Tixxi Teshvalenku’s desk when the voice came chasing her from the office-jungle: “We can’t have blatant PainCrime on the front page of the city’s most important newssheet!”
“Newssheet shug!” Courtney Hall shouted. “There hasn’t been any news in this city for years. For centuries!”
Tixxi Teshvalenku opened her carmine lips, ready to spew something inane.
“And shug you, too, Tixxi!” said Courtney Hall. She took a malevolent delight in the way Tixxi’s chromed fingers formed an immediate
nona dolorosa
, the hurt-me-not, the sign of personal aggravation. “Good-bye, Tixxi,” she added in parting. “I am going home. Good-bye.”
All the way down in the elevator to the level-forty cablecar junction, her famulus lectured her from her bag. “That really wasn’t very Socially Harmonious of you, Courtney, that was a Category Three PainCrime and I feel I must also remind you that you are leaving your work two full hours ahead of your optimum psychofiled quitting time as prepared for you by the Department of Personpower Services … in fact, coupled with your performance in the office, which I monitored through the Lares and Penates system, I really think you should consider meeting with a Social Harmony counselor for a course of therapy—”
“And you shut the fug up, too,” said Courtney Hall as the high-line cablecar came clanging and swinging in billows of wind and warm rain into the stop.
Hands automatically reached for steadying straps as the cablecar lurched out into the monsoon. Lightning turned the sky white; only two hippopotamuses, the storm was almost on top of them. Ten times a week for the past five years Courtney Hall had made the long swing from the level-one-hundred high-line junction at Kilimanjaro West arcology where Courtney Hall had been assigned an apt by
SHELTER
via Lam Tandy South interchange to the Armitage-Weir spur on Heavenly Harmony Boulevard. And back. Faces, places … such and such a face appeared at such and such a place, such and such a face disappeared at such and such a place, such and such a face was always in the third seat from the left when she got on, such and such a face was always hanging from the strap by the door when she got off … same faces, same places. But not today! Today those faces are two hours behind Courtney Hall, it’s different faces today, let’s have a look at them, what do we see?
An athleto in a smelly green weight-suit immersed in
Volleyball Today
. A neo–Iron Age anachronist with a web of blue lines radiating out from her hypothetical spirit-eye in the center of her forehead—the Iron Age was never like this. … Three identical, plastic-dull prollet workers in blue coveralls with the yellow sunburst 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. …