Authors: Ian McDonald
She tried to summon the sixteen-o’clock dream. She called it the sixteen-o’clock dream because on any other day, she would just be nodding off as the cablecar pulled away from Lam Tandy South. She loved her dream, because in the midst of the lifeswarm, it was one thing that was hers and hers alone, her dream of flying. Just … flying. Never to, or from, anywhere, for every time she was about to see how, why, where she was flying, Benji Dog woke her with a beep to tell her it was coming up on Kilimanjaro West, time to get off, CeeHaitch. She hoped the time difference would not dissuade the dream. …
Something black and silver and roaring tore across her dream. Courtney Hall woke up in time to see the blue taillights and jet-glow of a pantycar scoring across the jade-pearl features of the Venus de Milo (Venus de Beauty) Cosmetika girl in video on twenty stories of the local
SHELTER
headquarters. The black and silver thing gave an arrogant flip of its taillights and vanished into the clouds. The Love Police, vigilant and valiant defenders of …
Of what?
Mediocrity? Benign Incompetence? One and a half billion people for whom nothing was more important than their own happiness?
It wasn’t enough. Not anymore. There had to be more to life than being put in the job that was most satisfying for you, living in the home that made you most comfortable, visiting the friends with whom you never fell out because it was impossible to disagree with them, marrying the partner who was totally compatible with you in every way, being happy in everything because happiness was compulsory. …
She had never really known why the Ministry of Pain called its aerial slouch-craft “pantycars.” Maybe in certain lights, from certain angles, they did look like jet-propelled underwear. She suspected the truth was that no one really knew.
“Kilimanjaro West arcology!” announced Benji Dog from her workbag. “Home again, home again, jiggity jig!”
She had always been wary of organized religion: the greater the degree of disorganization, the greater the true essence of the divine, she maintained on those rare occasions when her friends pressed her on such matters. That the computers watched over her, guided her, kept her safe and warm and healthy, from the household Lares and Penates units to the massive systems that governed the Seven Servants, the self-proclaimed Celestials; of course she believed in them; what she did not believe was that they were, in every possible way, gods. Yet today she waited for the crowds pressing off the cablecar into the level-one-hundred station to clear before she went up to the shrine to Phaniel, Miriel, and Phesque, the Triune Patronesses of Cablecar, Tram, and
Pneumatique Municipal
. She clapped her hands to draw the attention of the goddesses, three-in-one poised in an unlikely one-footed pirouette amidst the plastic squabble of minor saints and santrels.
“Answer me, Enlightened One, Empowered One, Mother of Velocity.” She had learned the formula from other, more superstitious, travelers. “Tell me, how is it that Courtney Hall can have all her life mapped out for her from beginning to end for the maximum personal happiness and satisfaction and still be neither happy nor satisfied? Tell me, Mother of Velocity, Transport of Delight.”
The nine hands raised in perpetual benison were still, the lotus masks just that, masks, concealing nothing. Courtney Hall said, “I thought so,” and walked away down the corridor. Behind her, lightning struck down at the city of the Compassionate Society and the thunder bawled.
She was still playing the game with all the faces from Corridor 33/Red—the pallid yulp couple who were too shy to speak to her; Mindy the zillie who was always, always, always calling at exactly the wrong time because her psychofile said she loved to visit people, and so she did; the pair of furtive wingers she occasionally saw flitting down to the elevator in modesty bodices and street cloaks—are they, will they be, have they ever been truly happy?
Good question.
She opened the apt door with her word. Home at last. Scenting her mood the moment she entered the vestibule, the Lares and Penates had turned the walls a soothing cissed green and a slightly spicy, slightly sexy sandalwood scent was wafting from the butsudan.
“Hi, honey, I’m home!” she shouted. The furniture stared at her. Her own sour little joke ever since the Ministry of Pain Department of Interpersonal Relationships had decided it was best for her to annul her five-year relationship with Dario Sanducci, a yulp counselor in the Department of Housing and Welfare.
Benji Dog always complained about her sour little jokes. She flung him bag and complaining and all into the corner by the window wall. As the famulus grumbled and tried to pry open the fastening with soft paddy-paws, she draped herself over a floform and watched the window lights of Kilimanjaro East, three vertical kilometers of windows and lights and terraces and platforms, with the gray, dirty rain pounding down upon it all. She wondered if someone was sitting in the opposite apt, looking out at her, wondering if someone was in the opposite apt, looking out … Speculation was pointless; she tried instead to summon up the sixteen-o’clock dream.
Something flying. Dashing, darting, weaving between the concrete behemoths of the arcologies and co-habs … she closed her eyes, tried to persuade her imagination into creating a flying something that might complete her fragment of a dream.
And the window wall of her thirty-third-level apartment exploded. Through the shatter of splintered glass and tortured aluminum and spinning shards of concrete came something huge, something black and silver and inexorable as death, wedging itself into the hole it had smashed for itself, grinding, heaving across the floor until two thirds of its black and silver bulk had jammed itself into Courtney Hall’s apt. The remaining one third of the thing thrust into a solid kilometer of air and rain. Dust snowed down as the alien bulk settled on the “greengene” carpetgrass. The walls rioted color and finally lapsed into anonymous buff, the controlling spirits overwhelmed. Benji Dog, trapped in her stuffbag, was a pathetic smear of green organic circuitry and matted synthetic fur. The black and silver thing steamed and hissed.
Courtney Hall, cartoonist by disappointment, sat phantom-white where reflex and shock had thrown her against the far wall.
Doors gull-winged open with a blast of compressed air. Courtney Hall gave a little scream. Alien insect-figures in leather uniforms boiled into the apt and formed a semicircle of bulbous goggle-eyes and black, pointing, menacing things.
“Citizen Grissom Bunt of the yulp caste, in the name of the Compassionate Society you are under arrest for a Category Twelve PainCrime and LifeRight Violation; namely that you did, on or about sixteen-thirty this day, unlawfully and with malice aforethought, violate the LifeRight of your partner Evangeline Bunt by driving a twenty-centimeter nail, improperly purchased from de La Farge’s Hobby Hardware Shop, through her forehead; said nail penetrating skull, frontal cerebral lobe, corpus callosum, and upper cerebellum, resulting in the immediate termination of said partner’s life functions, in your apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro East Arcology. Have you anything to say for yourself?”
“Sergeant.”
“Have you anything to say for yourself?”
“Sergeant …”
“In a moment, Constable, after the formalities have been completed. Have you anything to say for yourself?”
“East, Sergeant. Kilimanjaro East.”
“In one moment, Constable.”
“This is West, Sergeant.”
“Come again?”
“Kilimanjaro West, Sergeant.”
“Well, snug …”
And the room was suddenly, stunningly empty as the black and silver leather men boiled back through their gull-wing doors, which blasted shut as the black and silver thing on the floor shook itself free from Courtney Hall’s apartment (bringing more concrete and steel clunking down), turned in the kilometer-deep, rain-filled canyon between Kilimanjaro West and Kilimanjaro East (main drive jets sending a maelstrom of sketches, drawings, and tear-off paper prayers from a pad halfheartedly dedicated to Galimantang, Siddhi of Graphic Inspiration, cawing and flapping about the wreck of the apartment), and in the twinkling of an eye was no more than a score and slash of main drive glow across the face of Kilimanjaro East arcology.
The door whispered a visitor, opened a crack, and died.
“Whee! I think I’m going to wet myself!” screamed Mindy Mikaelovich, paying one of her unwelcome and unnecessary visits. “Just what happened here, neh?” she bellowed in Courtney Hall’s ear. A zillie, Mindy never employed a whisper where a shout would suffice. A little aerodynamic anomaly was sucking seven years of Wee Wendy Waif sketches out into the monsoon. Exposed to warm acid rain, the manicured “greengene” carpetgrass was withering and dying of overexposure to reality, blade by blade until Courtney Hall was marooned on a small island of living green against the wall.
“Mindy, would you go away please?”
“Like, whee! CeeHaitch, can I like, ask a little favor, could I like, bring my friends to look? Like they’ve never seen anyone’s apt get cosmicked by the Love Police before …” Courtney Hall’s hand, her left hand, her drawing hand, darted. There was an outraged wail and the door slammed. A clod of half-dead “greengene” carpetgrass had caught Mindy Mikaelovich right in the ever open mouth.
…
C
OLD
.
“Cold,” he said, and understood.
Cold
was the meaning for his shivering body, the steaming billows of his breath, the trickleways of water down the windows, the pinching, unfamiliar assault upon his skin.
“I am cold,” he said. The three words shattered. Before them he had not known that he could speak, that there even existed a thing called speech. “I am cold, and I can speak,” he said. The words sounded good to him. Wrapping his long arms about him for … “warmth!” he went in search of other words he might speak.
So many names in this … “place.”
“Window,” he said. Tracing the condensation drops with his forefinger, he marveled at that word that had come to his lips out of nothing. “Water, forefinger.” The words were coming fast now, tumbling, streaming out of that noplace where the names of all things waited to be used. “I am cold, I can speak, and I am tracing this water down this window with my forefinger.” More than names, abstract relations also waited in the dark, the thing that made the window “this,” the forefinger “my.” He shivered and it was a good shiver. Like birds came the names: “Walls, floor, ceiling: room.” His naming released a wave of crystallization across the small and tightly bounded universe. Sights, sounds, smells, sensations, the whole profusion of anarchic impressions fell into ordered patterns around the geometrical entities of their names. And the names drew about themselves a nimbus of quality, of good and bad and color and weight and hardness, a state of existence to come, a state of existence that was and a state of existence that had been. Time entered the small and tightly bounded universe and gave all things a past out of which they had come, a present through which they were passing, and a future toward which they were progressing. All things. Except himself. He had only present. There was no past to direct him toward a future. There was no remembering of a time before. Before? Before the streaming walls, the damp, sprung boards, the splintered ceiling, its lathes bared like broken bones through the rotted plaster. That they possessed a past was evident. Why then had he no past before he found the word
cold
in his mouth? He squatted down on the poor warped floorboards, shivering, rubbing himself for warmth, trying to remember. For a long time he squatted like a bird, for birds have no past or future but only an eternal present.
Voices.
—You will lose everything. Everything. Everything.
—Is this what you really wish? To lose everything you have ever been?
—The choice is yours.
“And I took it!” he cried to the streaming walls. “I took it!” But he could not remember what it was he had chosen.
—He has chosen.
He remembered questions swarming like flocks of birds, voices filled with consternation, some soft, some sibilant, some somber, some shrill. He remembered that all the questions had been directed at him and that he had answered each and every questioning voice. But he did not know what he had answered.
—You will forget, was his final memory. There his history ended, without a future, without a name.
Perhaps not without a future. His future would be a future of questions, of remembering all that he had forgotten. And perhaps that was all the future he needed, the act of asking was an end in itself.
He crossed to the window. He drew slow, wide fingertracks in the beads of condensation. He pressed his face to the glass. His breath fogged the glass almost immediately, but through the rents his fingertips had torn in the edge of the world, he saw what he had suspected, what he had hoped, that his search for a past and a future was not confined to the small and tightly bounded universe into which he had been born; that there was a new universe of huge, possibly infinite, extent beyond, in which an infinity of questions might be asked.
M
INIPAIN EDUSERVE
C
LIMATOS
: AN
interactive variable response environmental/meteorological educational program for age groups 10–16, conceptual levels 4 through 6 Breeden Compensated Scale, Literacy Ratings 1a to 7b illiterate.
LOAD
RUN
CLIMATOS:
Hello, I’m
CLIMATOS
; your domestic education program has accessed me because you have some queries about the environment. Please key in, or recite, your psychofile code number, name, and caste, so I can help you.
STUDENT
: 103@5/B*4X7/26A26D£19: Lux Jonathon Eternuum, Soulchild of the Chone Michiganseng Chapter of the Sygmati.
CLIMATOS:
Thank you … Lux Jonathon. If you’ll just wait a second while I adjust my program parameters for your caste, illiteracy level, and religious affiliation … there.