Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (12 page)

She held her mobile over the electronic ticket machine, and her energy propelled her inside the arcade. By the time she realized where she was, she was already in the main room. She stood still and looked around: she was surrounded by a dozen cubicles, each formed by three walls, like the side chapels in a Gothic cathedral. In some there was a single armchair; others had two; and the biggest, four. Film clips advertising some of the virtual trips available for purchase were playing on the walls of some of the cubicles; the general atmosphere was one of silence and darkness. Only four cubicles were occupied, and the rep carefully scrutinized the players. Although their helmets prevented her from seeing their faces, their body shapes made it clear that none of them was the Black Widow. Nopal was seated in one of the two-person alcoves, his arms crossed, a look of irritation on his face. Bruna walked over to him.

“My apologies for being late.”

“You can’t help it,” Nopal grunted. “I don’t know who you take after.”

There were times when the memorist made the same comments that a human father would. He had, after all, given her life, or at least
a
life. What was more, he’d handed her his own existence by copying his personal memories. But Pablo Nopal wasn’t her father. He was too attractive, too sexy, too young, too malevolent.

“Maybe my genetic engineer damaged some connection. Do you want us to travel somewhere?”

“Yes,” said Nopal, swiveling his armchair toward the wall and picking up the helmet hanging from the console. “Program twenty-three.”

“Wait a minute.”

The rep went back out to the main door, the only point of access to the place, and put a small, light electronic beeper on the floor at the threshold. The beeper would warn her if anyone was coming in, and she’d be able to quit the virtual voyage. Then she returned to the cubicle, sat down, and put on the integral helmet. It covered her entire face and gently adapted to the shape of her head, positioning the electrodes in the appropriate spots. She activated the machine, reclined against the back of the armchair, and placed her hands inside the dynamic gloves.

“Twenty-three,” she said out loud.

Instantly, she was in the scenario. Nopal was waiting there for her. It was an ancient tropical jungle, like none in existence today, apart from the ones on the exclusive estates of luxury hotels. There was a huge silverback gorilla nearby, delicately eating some round fruit. Bruna watched him with fascination. All the great apes—chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos—had been wiped out almost a century ago. There were a few hundred left on reserves, put there since they had finally been included in the new taxonomic category of sentient beings, which included reps, humans, aliens, great apes, and cetaceans. The reserves allowed few visitors, and the apes lived there in seclusion, protected but in a sense prisoners. At least there were still a few cetaceans at liberty in the open seas, but their survival was not made easy by the proliferation of jellyfish, which had finished off the krill and a goodly portion of other marine life.

“Bruna,” shouted the memorist.

The rep gave a start, and the movement provoked a virtual backflip through the air. She landed on her feet, stood up with some difficulty, and turned around. Nopal was sitting on some rocks covered with leaves and was patting a space beside him as he called her over. Bruna started walking clumsily; she wasn’t a devotee of virtual games, and controlling shifts in location using head, eyebrow, and eye movements was quite complicated. On top of that the technology in recreational arcades was somewhat rudimentary, and even the best players moved in a hesitant and rather unnatural way. She took too long to get to Nopal, and even longer to sit down comfortably beside the memorist, who was laughing uproariously at her efforts. But once she was settled in, she felt good. It was quite hot in this domesticated jungle, humid, but not to the point of being unpleasant. The place was really lovely. Here and there the sun just penetrated the thick vegetation; the light gave off a greenish shimmer. The rocks they were sitting on formed part of a small natural spring, orchids were growing in the trunks of the trees, tiny birds crisscrossed the air, and they had the company of the gorillas. Bruna could now see that an entire family was placidly eating among the foliage.

“Right, what was so urgent?” asked Nopal.

When she thought about it, this spot wasn’t such a bad choice: nobody could hear them, nobody could see their faces, they were communicating via their helmets, and ever since the famous trial of the singer David Peña, regarding the right to privacy, conversations could no longer be recorded anywhere. So Bruna made herself comfortable, tried not to be distracted by the iridescent cloud of butterflies surrounding them, and told the memorist what had happened and how she had recognized Yárnoz.

“Yes, Carlos Yárnoz. Of course we remember him,” said Nopal, speaking in the plural about their shared memory, a habit that profoundly irritated Bruna. “He was a friend of our parents.”

“Of
your
parents,” growled the rep.

She also found Nopal’s imperturbability annoying: no matter what you told him, everything always seemed so normal to him.

“He was an engineer, I think, or maybe a physicist. I don’t know. When I was little, he and my parents were good friends. He was always at our house. I called him Uncle Carlos. You should remember that, too.”

“Don’t talk about my memory please,” said the rep dryly.

“Well, the fact is he suddenly disappeared. When I was still quite young. Then there was the business of my father’s murder, the death of my mother.”

Bruna kept quiet. She knew all about this. All that pain was etched in every one of her cells. Although the memory Nopal shared with her was slightly milder; the memorist’s real life had been worse. Abuse both in the orphanage and later on in his life. Especially the abuse by his father’s brother, who’d adopted him and whom it was very likely Nopal murdered years later. He was tried for the crime but not sentenced, due to the suspicious contamination of some evidence. Nevertheless, almost everyone thought he was guilty. The government dispensed with his services as a memorist after that. Since then Nopal had dedicated his time to writing novels and plays. He was quite a famous author, but he didn’t need to work for a living; his uncle had not only been evil, he’d also been very rich, and all that money ended up in the bloodstained hands of Nopal.

“I lost track of him and forgot about him until much later, when I was already working as a memorist. I found out he’d been involved in some shady case of espionage.”

“He was a spy? For whom? What was he spying on?”

“He was high up in the Ministry of Industry. He was working for Labari.”

Labari! One of the two Floating Worlds, the gigantic artificial platforms that orbited Earth.

“In fact when he was found out, he managed to escape before they could arrest him, and it seems he went into exile on Labari. I didn’t know he’d returned to Earth.”

“That explains the long gray ponytail,” Bruna exclaimed. On Labari the upper classes set themselves apart by wearing their hair long, and their old-fashioned fanaticism prevented them from using dyes or color inducers in their hair.

A big male gorilla came up to inspect them. He planted himself in front of them—very close, very upright, a huge animal with a powerful chest—and gave them a hostile, intelligent look, a burning, honey-colored stare.

“Lower your head, Bruna. Don’t look directly into his eyes. He’s the dominant male in the troop. The proper thing is to show him respect,” said the memorist, burying his chin in his chest.

“By the great Morlay! It’s a virtual gorilla! What’s with this idiocy?”

“Do as I say. If you don’t, the program will give us grief for half an hour, and we won’t be able to go on talking,” Nopal insisted.

The simian’s beautiful eyes were filling with fury by the second. Bruna lowered her head, doubly aggrieved: she was annoyed that she couldn’t go on contemplating those disturbingly human eyes, and at the same time she felt like an idiot bowing her forehead to a mountain of pixels. The primate gave a few grunts, rocked back and forth on his short legs, and then turned around and moved off. The rep was left gazing at his broad silvery back as he disappeared into the foliage. The extermination of the big apes had been true genocide.

“Nopal, something strange is happening to me,” she blurted out suddenly.

“Oh yes? What?”

“I’m . . . I’m telling a story. I’m telling Gabi—you know, the little Russian girl—I’m telling her a story. It’s a story I don’t know. What I mean is, I’m making it up.”

“Do you mean that you’re telling her a lie?”

“I mean that I’m telling her a story! The story of the dwarf and the giant. My mother used to tell it to me. Your mother! But you didn’t give me the memory of the story, just its title. So I’m imagining the content. The words come into my mouth and . . . And the things I’m saying! I don’t know where they’re coming from.”

Nopal started to laugh. “The same thing happens to me when I’m writing my novels.”

“But I’m not a memorist, I’m a damned combat rep!”

“No. You aren’t just a combat rep. I gave you much more than that.”

Bruna ground her teeth.
Three years, ten months, and six days.

“You gave me a fear of dying,” she muttered in a strangled voice.

“It’s the gift of artists. Without fear there is no creation.”

“But what the devil do I create?”

“Calm down. Right now you’re creating a story for Gabi, aren’t you? That’s interesting. It confirms my theory. I’ve always believed that one becomes a writer out of loss. A work is born from the pain of loss, especially if that loss occurred in childhood. I’ve just finished reading an obscure author from two centuries ago, someone called F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he says something very similar. He says, ‘Well, three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children. I think I started then to be a writer.’ It’s good, isn’t it? I’ve given you all those painful memories, Bruna. My memories. What made me become a storyteller might work for you, too.”

Bruna, bewildered and confused, looked at Nopal. “But I’m using words I’ve never said before.”

“That’s not unusual. I also put an entire dictionary in your head, unlike what happens with other combat technos. Whether or not you use it is another matter altogether. If there’s no call on it, it doesn’t get used.”

In the distance a gorilla with a baby in her arms snuggled up beside the dominant male. The perfect family.

“Please tell me the story of the giant and the dwarf,” pleaded the rep. “You must know it. You definitely heard it from your mother.”

Nopal furrowed his brow. “I don’t recall it. Honest. If I knew it, I’d tell you. I think you’ll have to tell it to me.”

Distressed, Bruna lowered her head. Would she never get to know those words that seemed so tender? “You won’t like my story, Nopal. I’m sure.”

When she left the virtual games arcade, Bruna decided to walk home. It was still early and the sun was scorching, but the rep had too many things to think about, and her brain always worked better when her powerful body was in motion. So Yárnoz had been high up in the Ministry of Industry, Sustainable Development, and Energy. The same ministry into whose administrative black hole the nuclear protocol that the hospital had activated for Gabi had magically disappeared. And as background music, the radioactive contamination. Those incidents in the borderlands, that hidden war crazy Carnal had referred to. Could they have something to do with radiation? Dzerzhinsk, Gabi’s birthplace—could that be considered one of the borderlands? Bruna had discreetly questioned the child without telling her how critical her condition was in an attempt to find out about her recent activities and the possible source of her contamination, but the Russian was a mute, resistant little monster.

She headed up Gran Vía, hunting out any shade that would protect her from the sun. When she reached Potosí Square, she caught sight of the long neck of a chimney poking out above the cheap, ugly social-reintegration houses. Bruna had been past there many times, but she’d never noticed that chimney, which undoubtedly belonged to a moyano. Were it not for the activist rep’s insidious words, she would have ignored its presence yet again. But Carnal had an annoying ability to get inside Bruna’s head, like a bothersome insect.

Moved by curiosity, she crossed the square, prepared to search for the rep crematorium. This area of Madrid, which had been part of downtown a century ago, had suffered badly during the Robot Wars. The authorities had hurriedly erected poorly constructed buildings on top of the ruins to provide supposedly temporary housing for those who had been displaced by the violence, but those shockingly ugly houses ended up turning into the permanent, crowded homes of Madrid’s poorest inhabitants. It was the last resort for those who could only just afford to pay for the right to clean air. The next level down in the social scale was emigration to a more polluted zone. Bruna made her way along the narrow lanes clustered behind the square, and since she could no longer see the chimney from inside the labyrinth of hovels, it took her a few attempts to locate the building, which was an ugly rectangular monstrosity clad in fake stone, with a huge iron double-leafed door. There wasn’t a single window, and there was nothing to identify it for what it was, just “Moyano S. A.” in neon letters above the entrance. It looked like a warehouse.

The detective pushed open the metal door and cautiously stuck her head inside. She was hit by a blast of fresh air; the place was clearly air-conditioned but with what seemed to be a special cold, a dark, damp, tomblike cold. Husky went inside, and the door closed behind her, cutting off the sunlight. She was in a reasonably large rectangular space with two long counters to the right and the left. The interior was also clad in artificial stone, and the floor was covered with ugly green vinyl. The cold off-white lighting accentuated the unpleasantness of the place. There were half a dozen people working behind the counters, but apart from these employees, Bruna was the only other person there. She hesitated for a moment and then headed toward the right, where there was a human leaning his elbows on the fiberglass countertop, staring into space.