Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (24 page)

“Wow! That TTT really is some shit. Lucky I’ve still got years to go.”

Bruna was surprised. She never would have said something like that. Her time never had seemed like enough. A life stolen from its very first moment.

“How much time have you got left?”

“Eight years,” Clara said. “I already told you I’ve just been discharged.”

“You don’t do the countdown of the number of days left before TTT?”

Clara looked at her in astonishment.

“The countdown?”

“Today I have three years, nine months, and twenty-five days left.”

“That’s barbaric, girl! You count down day by day? You’re like a damn computation rep.”

“And yet we’re the same. Why did you get that tattoo? Why do you shave your head?”

“I like it like this,” Clara said. “I prefer my tattoo to yours. The zipper is a real point scorer.”

Bruna studied Clara’s line carefully. “It’s true. The zip is better and very well done. It never occurred to me.”

“Or to me. I saw a guy with it, but he had it on just one arm, not around his body like us.”

Us.
The word
us
was left floating and vibrating in the air between them like an ectoplasm.

“A dozen,” grunted Bruna bitterly. “Like a dozen chairs or a dozen cars. We’re mass-produced. A curse on all humans.”

“They are bastards,” Clara said affectionately, “but to be honest, Bruna, I rather like the fact that you exist. We’re the closest thing to a genuine family that we can have, don’t you think?”

Bruna looked at her double, stunned. It was true.

“Besides, we’re not so similar,” said Clara. “The business of the countdown and so on. It must be a question of age. What you’ve experienced and I haven’t.”

“Did they murder your father?”

“Bruna, what a funny weirdo you are,” Clara said, cracking up. “We’re technos. We don’t have fathers.”

“I know that, stupid. In your artificial memory.” Bruna laughed, too. Her other self took everything so literally.

“Oh no, of course not. A murdered father? Who ever heard of that? They always give you happy, insipid memories. My fake parents loved me a lot, they gave me a dog for my tenth birthday, and on weekends we used to go for walks on the hill with the dog and my sister. That’s what I miss the most. My damn fake sister and my damn fake dog. Sometimes I remember them, and I get annoyed because I’ve lost them.”

When she was angry, Clara resembled Bruna even more. It was a rather freaky feeling. Moving but dizzying.

“You were saying you’re looking for work,” Bruna said.

“Yes. As a bodyguard, some rich person’s gorilla. Something like that.”

“I’m a private detective.”

“Sounds complicated. I’ve already had enough complications in the military,” said Clara, pointing to the scar across her neck. “I want something quiet, boring even. I’ll organize my own fun in my spare time.”

“Where did you get that scar?”

“In the North. In the damned North. Down here you have no idea what’s going on there. Hordes of flag-waving fanatics. The ones with different flags kill each other, but then they always end up getting together to kill you. I mean, to kill those of us belonging to the United States of the Earth. There are little groups like that everywhere. I was in the East before that, and it’s the same. They want to set up little independent nations. But it’s worse in the North.”

“Exactly which zone are you talking about?”

“The entire North. But they cut open my neck in the Scandinavian region. I had bioglue with me, which is why I didn’t bleed to death.”

Bioglue, a biological glue capable of sealing the edges of a hemorrhaging wound for several hours. It was part of a combat rep’s basic equipment, but you had to be desperate to use it, because it burned like hell and it also destroyed the tissues to which it was applied. They had to be surgically removed later. It wasn’t surprising that Clara’s scar looked so horrible.

“There’s a place in that region, Onkalo, in the former Finlandia, that might have something to do with the case I’m investigating.”

“You’d do better to investigate somewhere else. I don’t know where your Onkalo is, but that part of the world isn’t a good place to be, not even to die. And you’ve still got more than three years to live.”

33

Y
ou’re despicable.”

They’d arranged to meet, as they had many times before, in the Bear Pavilion—the bear being the symbol of Madrid. Melba—the polar bear genetically regenerated after all the others had drowned when the ice caps melted—was doing lazy underwater pirouettes in her enormous tank of blue water.

“You’re a swine.”

Unfazed, Pablo Nopal continued to watch Melba’s dance, giving no sign that he’d been even slightly wounded by her insults.

“You’re a son of a bitch, and I’m never going to speak to you again,” Bruna persisted, trying to appear more and more outraged, despite the fact that her rage was diminishing with each insult hurled.

But no, she didn’t want to make things too easy for her memorist. She’d already forgiven him too many things.

“You’re a . . .” She stopped, searching for something horrendous to say to him.

“Bruna, I couldn’t tell you. They force you to sign a serious nondisclosure agreement. Telling you would have meant spending ten years in jail. They consider a breach of the confidentiality as incitement to hatred between races.”

“What? What a nerve. They’re the ones inciting hatred. They treat us like objects! Pure merchandise. They’ve stolen our identities, even our individuality. How could you lend yourself to something like that? Forget the contract, forget confidentiality, forget everything! Nobody forces you to be a memorist. You’re as much a bastard as they are.”

“I’m not saying I’m not. But you—you specifically—you don’t have to worry about your identity. You are unique thanks to me.”

Bruna looked at Nopal in amazement. He was being serious. He was beaming and looking very pleased with himself.

“I have to thank you? For having provided me with your real memories? For giving me a murdered father and a miserable childhood? For making me a monster among monsters?”

“Weren’t you just talking about individuality? Didn’t you want to be different? Well, you are. Choose which part you want to complain about—being different or being the same. You can’t complain about both at once,” said Nopal mockingly.

“I’m not even sure I’m unique. How can I believe you after you lied to me? There are ten more Huskys out there, apart from Clara. One of them might have my memories—or rather, yours. Or it might not even be a Husky. Maybe it’s just any old techno.”

“Bruna, I swear it. I’ve only ever indulged in that madness once in my life. It would have been dangerous to do it again. The TriTon people might have found out,” Nopal said, gravely fixing his black eyes on Bruna’s tiger eyes. “And anyway I would have been cheapening my own memories, don’t you see? Please believe me. You’re the only one.”

Bruna did believe him, because it was impossible to speak with more sincerity. They were silent for a few minutes while they watched Melba frolicking. The obstinate shadow of distrust again began to spread inside the rep. Because there were people capable of making an art form of lying, like the ex-minister who had stolen nine hundred million gaias. During a televised interview just a few months before he was caught, he had bragged about his ethics and sworn with irresistible charm that nobody had ever tried to bribe him, because everyone knew that he couldn’t be bought. He was as modest and sincere as Nopal had been a moment ago. Bruna frowned and decided not to believe him and not to like him ever again.

“What’s she like?” asked Nopal.

“Clara?” Bruna said, feeling a stab of jealousy. “The same as me. But different. It’s curious. She also shaves her head, and she also has a tattoo that runs around her body exactly like mine, although hers is a zipper. It looks really good. And she also likes white wine and drinks too much of it. But then she’s—how can I put it? Much simpler. She’s not an idiot, quite the contrary. She says things that surprise me. But she’s healthier mentally, less anguished, less obsessive.”

“And more boring, less imaginative, less refined,” Nopal added.

The rep recalled one of Clara’s comments. Bruna had inferred that Clara’s microapartment was a transitionary arrangement, but Clara had replied that no, she was delighted with the place, she didn’t need anything bigger, and she saw herself living there all her life.
In that industrial windowless sarcophagus.
That had shocked Bruna.

“That’s interesting. The two of you are in fact a gold mine for scientists. Perfect clones who are only different in their memories. You two embody that old duality, nature versus nurture. What we were talking about the other day. Where does that tale you’re telling the Russian child come from? Do you imagine Clara is capable of inventing a story like that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You say she’s healthier mentally than you. So would you swap places with her?”

Bruna thought about that for a moment before saying, “No.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Nopal with a smile. “Although that doesn’t mean much either, because there’s a psychological principle to do with mental balance that states despite everything, we prefer to be who we are.”

“I don’t want to be who I am,” said Bruna resentfully.

“Neither do I often,” said Nopal flippantly. “I like this Clara Husky. You’ll have to introduce her to me.”

“Why? Are you thinking of sleeping with her?”

“Noooo,” Nopal said, giving Bruna a puzzled look. “Although Clara isn’t like you of course. What I mean is that the two of us sleeping together would be much worse. In our case it would be incestuous. The taboo isn’t as strong with Clara, but when all is said and done I did write her memory, too, even if it was only an ordinary professional memory. And then she’s too much like you. I’d feel uncomfortable.”

The rep pressed her lips together, trying not to reveal the satisfaction Nopal’s words gave her. It was the most affectionate thing the memorist had ever said to her. The most loving.

“Has it occurred to you that Merlín must be out there? Of course he wouldn’t be called Merlín. He’d have a name starting with
N
,” Nopal added.

His remark left Bruna breathless. It hadn’t occurred to her. Merlín, her beloved Merlín, with whom she had lived for two years and whom she’d watched die of TTT. He was also a product of TriTon. Somewhere in the world there had to be a computation rep who had been activated only two years ago and who was exactly like Merlín. A confusing fire of emotion swept through Bruna’s mind.
I’m going to dedicate the rest of my life to searching for him,
she thought.
I have to forget that he exists.
I don’t want to die.

Three years, nine months, and twenty-four days.

34

S
he was a wolf without a pack; more than that, she was a bear, as a tattooist had told her months earlier. A surly solitary bear, a creature who fled from contact with the rest. She was like Melba—the only one of her species, swimming in the vast emptiness of her tank of water.

Bruna contemplated dawn through the picture window of her apartment. It was almost 6:00, and above the black profile of the buildings a brilliant purple line was being drawn. The rep took a sip of her umpteenth glass of white wine. If she was like that, so unsociable, if she had the fugitive disregard of an errant comet, how was it possible that her life could now be so packed with people? Where had she gone wrong? Yiannis and his endorphin pump, the poor little wounded animal that was Gabi, cynical Nopal, the unsociable Lizard, and above all Deuil, whom she liked and found unsettling in equal parts. Deuil, who burst into her life full of passion and then mysteriously and abruptly disappeared, as if he wanted to make her pay for their intimacy. As if he wanted to show her that the intensity of their encounters meant nothing. And now to top it all off there was Clara. Clara Husky, her other, slippery self, her double, her other way of being herself. Bruna felt trapped.

A ball of stiff hair jumped into the rep’s arms and snuggled into her chest, unwittingly causing the glass of wine to fall to the floor. The glass shattered. The bubi gave her a frightened, guilty look.

“Brunitaaaaa! Bartolo beautiful, Bartolo good,” he babbled.

Bruna
didn’t know who’d had the malicious idea of teaching the greedy-guts to call her Brunita, but every time she heard the bubi use the diminutive she felt like throwing him out the window. The animal was attached to her like a limpet, and his stiff hair was scratching her neck.
Yes, and on top of everyone else there’s the greedy-guts.

She picked up the broken pieces of glass with one hand without letting go of Bartolo. All she needed now was for that stupid
bicho
to cut one of his paws. Once the floor was clear, she unceremoniously tossed the bubi onto his mattress. Bartolo let loose a small yelp of protest but stayed there, nervously chewing the nails on one of his paws. The techno poured herself a new glass of white wine and went back to her spot in front of the window, even though the serenity of that magic dawn moment had already disappeared. The sky was now a dirty-gray color, and the light was strengthening by the minute. The Black Widow had to be in some part of that cramped city she could see on the other side of the window. Bruna pictured her flying toward them from the North, a cloak of darkness at her back. She was worried that she hadn’t heard anything further about her. How was it possible that she hadn’t tried another attack? A professional like her. Maybe she’d found the diamond. Or maybe she was dead. Murderers had a fatal tendency toward winding up dead. True, it could also be that the Black Widow was no longer interested in attacking Bruna but in following her to discover the information Bruna had obtained. That was how she’d killed Nuyts. Bruna shivered. She couldn’t help feeling guilty.

A ray from the rising sun suddenly lit up the windows of the building opposite. Somewhere out in that world there was also a replicant like Merlín.

Just then the archivist’s image came floating into the middle of the room.

“Yiannis, it’s 6:30 in the morning. I’m going to cancel my permission for you to make hologram calls,” Bruna began, but the old man was looking at her in a very odd way. “What’s up?”

“I think I’ve deciphered the message. I’m very nervous.”

“Which message?”

“The painting,
The Scream
.”

“Be quiet! Don’t say another word,” Bruna said, jumping up. “I’m coming over to your place. Wait.”

She cut off, tossed out what was left of her wine, and rushed out of her apartment. She sprinted to the archivist’s place. Yiannis opened the door with the same expression he’d worn in the hologram—as if he’d swallowed a giant fur ball and was now on the point of vomiting it up. Bruna looked at him anxiously.

“Yiannis, you’re not wrong, are you? You’re not in some altered state because of that thing you have in your amygdala, are you?”

“Nooo, noooo! I disconnected the pump last night. I realized I wasn’t thinking properly with all those drugs in my head. No, no. Come in. Come on.”

The old man led the rep over to the home screen, on which were displayed the four versions of
The Scream
. Next to the screen there was a hyperrealistic copy of the picture.

“Look, your picture follows the model of Munch’s first picture from 1893. Well, it doesn’t actually follow it, it’s exactly the same. So identical that it must have been copied over a template. Identical in every one of the brushstrokes except, that is, for one section of the picture. In the middle section, as you can see, is the sea, which is dark blue on the right, and then in the center there’s this patch, which is wavy and luminous because of the reflection of the sun. Well, all this part is different. This sea is not just different from the one in the 1893 picture; it’s also different to the sea in the other three versions. This sea is unique. You don’t notice it at first, but when you focus on it, and especially if you keep in mind the precision of the rest of the picture, the difference becomes obvious.”

The archivist fell silent, perhaps to pique Bruna’s curiosity, or maybe to allow her to appreciate what he was saying. And he was right: the marine background showed some intricate undulations that seemed different.

“This is a blowup of that part,” said the archivist.

The fragment of blue background now filled the entire home screen. Hundreds of lines of diverse colors curved and bunched together like in a labyrinth.

“I was convinced the message had to be there, but I didn’t know how to tackle it. I spent hours last night looking at it. Hours. And then suddenly I saw something. Look at this zone, where the blue part meets the luminous part. There’s a little boat in the luminous bit. Forget about the whole picture; just look at this image. Squint your eyes, relax, and tell me the first thing it suggests to you.”

Bruna stared and tried not to think. She looked and tried to say the first thing that came into her head, as she did in her sessions with the psych-guide.

“It’s a coast. The blue part of the sea looks like land, not sea. The illuminated bit will be the water.”

“Exactly. It’s a map.” Yiannis leaned forward, touched the screen, and dragged a semitransparent contour map over the picture fragment. “Then I had a brain wave. Forgive my lack of modesty. It occurred to me to take a map of the west coast of Finland, where Onkalo is located. Of course the large map I downloaded from Terra Vision has a blank space of about forty square kilometers, which corresponds exactly to Onkalo and which, as you know, is a blind spot. Anyway, I spent a fair amount of time increasing and decreasing the scale of the map and searching for geographical landmarks that might match the profiles of the drawing, and I finally did it. Look.”

The archivist adjusted the size of the map and made it coincide exactly with the lines on the picture. The zone not included in the Terra Vision map was mapped in Nuyts’s picture. The blind spot. Yiannis zoomed in on that portion again.

“This is a map of Onkalo. Do you see? And look at this little boat. There are two boats in the original picture, not one. They’re farther away, and they’re much bigger. This little boat is part of the map. You have to take a boat to get there.”

“To get where?”

“I don’t know, but it’s here, in this swirl of lines on top of the Blue Zone. It looks like a very small island. See how all the lines converge here, as if it were the eye of a hurricane. That’s this map’s destination. It might be a uranium mine or the old nuclear power plant that used to be there.”

“I’ll have to go there,” Bruna said, staring at the storm of tortured lines.

“It will be dangerous, Bruna. You yourself said that maybe it was the entrance to hell.”

“Hell is here already, Yiannis,” said Bruna, thinking about the slow torturing of Loperena, the murdered Nuyts, and above all the barbarically violated Gabi. She had a suspicion that all the radiation episodes were connected. Untangling that mystery would be her way of avenging the little Russian.

“There’s something else. When I focused on the picture fragment and reduced the Onkalo Zone and its surroundings, I realized there were some messages written in Masonic code.”

“In what?”

“It’s a classic code used by the Society of Freemasons at the start of the eighteenth century to write letters in which no one could find out what they were saying. The letters of the alphabet are converted into lines, angles, and dots. When I’d worked out what it was, the code itself wasn’t hard to decipher. It’s a simple code. The challenge was being able to see it in the midst of the picture’s forest of lines. Well, as I was saying, there are two messages. The first one is right next to the whirlpool—in other words in the exact location of the destination—and it’s clearly the geographical coordinates of the place: 61.23513°N, 21.4821°E. The other message is here, look, in the visible part of the map, outside the blind-spot zone of Onkalo but very close to it. In the city of Pori to be precise. The phrase is written next to it: ‘Pori. The Black Arrow. Mai Burún. Tranquillity.’”

“What’s the business of Mai Burún?”

“A proper name? I don’t know.”

“The Black Arrow? Tranquillity?”

“The Sea of Tranquillity is the place on the Moon where humans landed for the first time. I don’t know. I have no idea.”

“Well, in any event it’s in Pori,” Bruna said. “So I have to go to that city and find out who are, or what is, the Black Arrow, Mai Burún, and Tranquillity. But right now I have to find enough money to do all that.”