Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (26 page)

“It’s a bit of Trinaline,” he told them in a hoarse voice, still gasping a little. “A neuronal stimulant. To wake up the rest of my brain. It ends up a bit sluggish.”

The boy stood beside him, and the Mathematician leaned on his shoulder and with an effort got up off the bunk. It was a well-rehearsed piece of choreography, a movement they’d no doubt repeated many times. The man was very thin and quite tall. With a body that ought to have looked like Deuil’s but which had been destroyed by life. When he was standing, his back curved painfully, like a sunflower in the late afternoon. Using the boy as a crutch, he walked across the room to a door in the wall at the back, opened it, and went into another, smaller room, which looked like a supermarket storeroom. It was crammed with bottles of water, tinned food, crates of potatoes, drums of oil, packing boxes, and blankets. In the middle of all the chaos there was an old desk with an armchair and a couple of other chairs. Mikael the Mathematician dropped into the armchair. The others remained standing.

“Right. Tell me what you want.”

“We want to go to Pori.”

“Okay. Three safe-conduct passes.”

“And we need transportation to get there. I understand it’s one hundred and eleven kilometers from here,” Bruna added.

“That’s easy. I can get you on an army truck. That’s to say, it’s easy if you’ve got money.”

“They have it,” said the boy.

“Three safe-conduct passes and transportation will be . . . seven thousand gaias.”

Bruna worried that they were going through Marlagorka’s money too quickly.

“Yes, we’ve got it. As long as those safe-conduct passes will do for the return journey as well.”

“They will, assuming you return.”

“Thanks for the encouragement,” said Clara sarcastically.

“Your reason for wanting to go to Pori is of no interest to me, and I don’t want to know, but I’m not sure you understand where you’re going. We’re at war. The government of the United States of the Earth doesn’t say it, doesn’t recognize it, tries to cover it up, but we are at war. It’s a dirty, confused, desperate war. Ultranationalist and ultrareligious groups are setting fire to the planet with their desire to recreate a thousand little nations. It’s a fierce and discriminatory dream. They wrap themselves in those colored bits of cloth they call flags and cut each other’s throats, as if they find their identities precisely in their ability to hate someone. They’re irrational and retrograde, but I understand them, because I share their disenchantment with this planetary government, with this universal nation of the United States of the Earth, so hypocritical, so corrupt, so ignorant of the real needs of people. The difference is that I don’t believe the solution lies in going back to being primitive tribes.”

“So what’s the solution?” asked Bruna, caught up despite herself in the speech of this surprising character, capable of transmuting himself from a human rag doll into an orator in five minutes.

Mikael the Mathematician shrugged and said, “If there is one, I suppose it would lie within the USE. Within its democratic system, because it’s the only one that allows self-criticism, demolition, and reconstruction. But here it’s very difficult to believe in anything. The USE is a young, fragile, frightened nation. It controls its center, but the system is collapsing at the edges. And then it lies, pretends there aren’t any problems, censures information, hides the extremist factions. I was the president of the university here. When the war started in 2097, just after the Unification, I refused to accept the code of silence that was imposed on us. For state security, they said! Because of the extremely contagious nature of ultranationalism! But I was the president of the university. I was a scientist. How was I going to lie in such an indecent manner to my students? I refused to collaborate. So they fired me. It didn’t matter in the end. Last year they closed the university. Too subversive apparently.”

“There are other solutions, there are other ways,” said Deuil abruptly, almost aggressively. “You said it yourself: the USE is full of hypocrites, cynics, liars, materialists. We have to return to purity. We have to recover faith. We have to believe in the spirit.”

“Ah! A believer,” said Mikael, looking at Deuil, his bloodshot eyes half-closed. “A seeker of answers. Very good. I’ve always been frightened by those who have more answers than they have questions. But maybe that’s a scientific distortion. Forgive the lecture I’ve just delivered. It’s the long-standing habit of a professor, and in this place, as you’ll appreciate, I have very few opportunities to converse.”

Control yourself, Bruna,
the rep told herself.
What does it matter to you? You’re never going to see him again.
But somehow the old man reminded her of Yiannis, and she couldn’t help herself.

“Why do you depend on the injecting den, Mathematician? You’ve got a brain, you’ve got knowledge. You could live instead of vegetating.”

“What do you know about my life, replicant? It’s not what you have that’s important. You long for what’s fucked up. Give me the seven thousand. You’ll have your safe-conduct passes tomorrow at noon. The boy will give them to you. By then I’ll already have taken refuge inside my mind. And I’ll be happy.”

37

T
he boy had told them to be at the central market at 14:00 and ask for Sergeant Fajardois. When they got there at 13:30, an enormous throng was crowded around the main entrance, which was guarded by combat reps. Bruna asked them about the sergeant.

“He hasn’t arrived yet,” one of them told her hurriedly, and then started shouting at the crowd, “Right, attention! I want an orderly line right now! No line, no purchases!”

When the formidable line finally organized itself after ten minutes of pushing and arguments, it curled around the corner. Bruna, Clara, and Deuil stood waiting to one side of the door, discreetly out of the way but under fire from the fiercely suspicious looks of those waiting in line, perhaps fearful that they were going to push in. Finally, at about 14:10 a long line of army trucks appeared. Big armor-plated, caterpillar-tracked personnel carriers. Ten of them. Despair and indignation ran through the crowd.

“So many? It’s an outrage! There’ll be nothing left!”

The trucks parked at an angle on one side of the square, and the soldiers got down and went into the market. As usual the majority of foot soldiers were technos, and all the officers and NCOs were human. Bruna approached the human standing beside the entrance giving the orders.

“Sergeant Fajardois?”

“That’s me. Ah. You must be the Mathematician’s people. Let me see your safe-conduct passes.”

The rep handed them over. They were ancient plasticized cards with an information chip embedded in them. The sergeant scanned the chips with the scanner on his mobile.

“Fine. Get in the back of the third truck. Get in now. We’ll be leaving right away.”

The third truck, full of long benches, was a troop transporter. It was empty, because all the soldiers were filling the other trucks with box after box of food from the market. The people in line were getting more and more agitated, and their shouts were getting louder.

“Wretches! They want to starve us to death! There’ll be nothing left! We’ve been here since 6:00 in the morning!”

The truck began to fill up with soldiers; the loading was done. The engines started, and the vehicles shot off, while the reps guarding the market strained to contain the wave of furious people. Although theirs was the third truck, they were the last to leave, no doubt so that the troops could protect the convoy’s rear. When they’d put some distance between themselves and the market, the soldiers heaved a sigh of relief and relaxed. That was when they got around to checking out the three newcomers.

“Hey, you two. You belong to that lot, right?” asked a human sergeant.

“Yes, we do,” Bruna answered grudgingly.

“Yes, sir, yes, sir. Very similar.”

But to Bruna’s relief, that was all he said. They were out of the city quickly, and the soldiers tensed up again.
It’s not going to be an easy journey,
thought Bruna.

They hadn’t been going more than twenty minutes when they stopped.

“Damned border,” muttered a rep with beautiful violet eyes sitting next to Bruna. “It gets closer to Tampere every day.”

A human NCO climbed into the back of the truck, checked the soldiers’ IDs and the three safe-conduct passes. Then he got out and they continued on their way. It was at that point that Bruna heard it for the first time. She pricked up her ears.
Yes.
She remembered that boom from her time in the military at Potosí.

“You can hear it, can’t you?” said the rep with the beautiful eyes. “The artillery fire. Humans are lucky to be half-deaf. There’s no way we don’t hear it.”

Boom, boom, boom. Louder each time, and closer each time. The humans would shortly hear it, too. The rep with violet eyes had a bionic hand. She must have spent less than two years at the front and they’d already blown off her hand. Bad luck. The prosthesis looked like a good one, but it wasn’t cosmetic; the metal had a bluish tinge to it. They’d probably cover it with biosilicone when she was discharged.

Out the back of the truck they could see destroyed fields with bomb craters full of water. Now and again for a few hundred meters there’d be sections of pleasant green fields that would have given rise to dreams of a better life were it not for the distant thunder of the guns. Bruna spotted a little media drone hovering above them.
Well, well. Maybe they’re finally going to provide some news about what’s happening in these border zones.

“Drone! Drone at twelve minus ten! Dro-o-o-o-ne!”

The soldiers suddenly started to yell like maniacs and, grabbing hold of their plasma guns, fired at the drone. But before they could hit it, the little tele-directed plane nose-dived into the truck in front of them.
Bo-o-o-o-m.
They were momentarily blinded and deafened by the explosion, which hit them with a blast of solid air. The truck they were in left the road, ran up a slope, and got stuck in the mud. Coughing and with their eyes watering, they clambered out of the back of the truck into black, fiery smoke. The truck that had been traveling in front of them was on its side, ripped open, on fire. Luckily, the four soldiers who had been riding in it seemed to be only slightly singed and bruised.

With everyone’s help they managed to get their truck out of the mud and back on the road. The wounded soldiers got in the troop carrier truck, making for cramped quarters.

“Watch your weapons,” snarled an NCO. “We don’t want an accident.”

The soldiers kept their weapons pointed at the roof.

Bruna’s left side was embedded in the solid hip of the rep with the beautiful eyes and her right side in Deuil’s lightweight bones. She tried not to think about the fact that he in turn was glued to Clara’s butt.

“Those bastards, those cowards,” hissed one of the injured soldiers, a human, as he gently cradled one arm, probably broken. “Always killing furtively from far away.”

“Who would it have been?” asked another soldier.

“The greens, the reds, the browns—they’re all the same. May they all meet a similar fate.”

“It’s a really dirty war,” the rep with the bionic hand quietly explained to Bruna. “A guerilla war. Ambushes, drone bombs, snipers. They never come at you directly. You hardly ever see them, except occasionally in the distance. Small groups waving their colored flags. Their flags and their gods turn them into maniacs. They kill each other as well. But never enough, because they often also form alliances to attack us. If they catch you alive, you’re really fucked.” The techno raised her metallic hand. “They burned it with acid,” she said morosely. “If you want me to be honest, I don’t think there’s a single person in this truck who has the faintest idea as to what the fuck we’re doing here.”

38

P
ori was a ruin. Over half the buildings had been bombed. Entire streets were destroyed, and mounds of trash were everywhere, like extensive lava flows. The military convoy left them in what had once been the city center and was now a mountain of rubble, through which children and starving dogs were digging. The ruins often smelled of putrefaction because there weren’t enough living people to dig out the trapped bodies. It was a desolate place that looked more like an unplace. Not only would they have to find the Black Arrow and a Mai Burún but a place to sleep and something to eat. None of that would be easy. It was 17:00. In three hours it would be dark, and judging by the shattered streetlights there wasn’t going to be much light once the sun went down.

“At least the guns have stopped,” said Deuil.

They’d stopped thundering a few minutes earlier. It was a small relief. There was a ruined building in front of them. Just two walls remained, forming an angle. It must have been a library, because those two walls were covered with bookshelves still full of books, old paper books. A man and a woman—both humans, both middle-aged—were precariously balanced on top of a mound of rubbish caused by the collapse of the roof. They’d removed a book each and were reading with delighted concentration, totally immune to the small apocalypse surrounding them. Bruna clambered up the rubble and went over to them.

“Hi! Forgive me for bothering you. We’ve just arrived in Pori. We don’t know where to find accommodation or food. Can you suggest anything?”

The humans raised their eyes from their books as if they were emerging from a dream, but they didn’t show any surprise at the question or at the unusual presence of two identical reps and a man with a samurai topknot. They were probably beyond surprise.

“Almost all of us survivors are living in the Aalto Tower. You know, the one built by Sofi Aalto,” the man explained with exquisite politeness.

“Wasn’t that the tallest building in the world?”

“Exactly. Was and is,” said the woman, smiling radiantly with pride as if she were handing out tourist information, as if she weren’t in the middle of a world smashed to pieces.

How profound, how persistent the tribal fixation when it comes to native soil,
thought Bruna.

“It has three hundred floors and is fifteen hundred meters tall.”

“Sofi Aalto invented a new material, a synthetic basalt,” said the man. “Very light and very resistant. She invented it in order to erect the world’s tallest building, but it turns out to be so resistant that bombs don’t destroy it. So now we’re almost all living in it. It’s like a vertical city. And it’s got everything. Well, I mean, what little we have left. It’s that building.” He gestured toward a point in the sky.

Bruna, Clara, and Deuil turned around. In the background, above the ruins, the columns of smoke, and the chaos, a black never-ending tower seemed to be rushing up into the clouds.

“The Black Arrow,” said the woman ecstatically. “It’s still beautiful, isn’t it?”

So that was the Black Arrow! They thanked the two humans and, trying to contain their excitement, set off for the tower. Night shadows were falling quickly. A military patrol stopped them but after studying their safe-conduct passes let them continue. The streets were almost empty now, except for the small children moving through the ruins like rats, who hid when they passed by. They were getting close to the tower when they heard the whistle of a plasma gun being fired. Clara and Bruna instantly threw themselves to the ground, and Deuil followed their lead.

“Where did that come from?” whispered Bruna.

“Over there I think,” said Clara, pointing to some dark blown-out windows.

They waited a few minutes, but it looked like the attack wasn’t going to be repeated.

“A sniper,” said Bruna. “They warned us about them. He’s sure to have moved on.”

Just to be certain they took the precaution of walking to the base of the building from which they thought the shot had come and used the wall as protection as they continued on their way to the tower. Then a few meters away, in the middle of the square, they saw the broken body of the victim lying on top of the rubble. A boy of nine or ten with half his head volatilized by the plasma.

“A curse on all sentients! Why did that bastard shoot a child?” bellowed Clara.

“Out of cruelty. Out of hatred. To sow terror,” answered Bruna in a calm, unemotional voice. “There’s always a thousand reasons.”

But she was thinking about Gabi, and about the kind of life that Gabi must have scraped out for herself in her border zone.

“The old man in the injecting den was saying the solution had to be with the USE. Well, then. Welcome to your magnificent United States of the Earth!” said Deuil, his voice harsh with sarcasm.

Bruna felt strangely irritated by his words, a surprising reaction because she shared his opinion. “Right. You said there were other ways. Such as?”

“If you want me to be honest, even the Floating Worlds seem better to me than this.”

“What? Daniel, you and I have been there. You have seen what Labari represents.”

“Is it any worse than this? We need to believe in a spiritual life. We need something transcendent that gives meaning to the chaos in the world.”

“Are we going to stand here talking drivel until another sniper comes along and blows us away?” asked Clara, and that put an end to the argument.

Close up, the Black Arrow was in bad shape. The artificial basalt was covered in layers of dust and grime, most of the windows were broken, and in many cases the missing glass had been replaced by boards or sheets of duroplast. At the entrance a combat rep with a private security guard badge asked to see their identification.

“Where can we eat and find accommodation?” asked Bruna.

“If you’ve got money, in the shopping centers.”

“Where are they?”

“There’s one in each neighborhood. Every twenty floors, more or less.”

“Does Mai Burún mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“How about the word
tranquillity
?”

“Not much of that around here,” replied the rep jokingly as he gave them back their safe-conduct passes. “In you go.”

They entered a huge, dirty, chaotic lobby full of people lying on sleeping bags or filthy mattresses, or sitting on the floor around small campfires. They looked like homeless people—the homeless people of the vertical city. Bruna, Clara, and Deuil negotiated their way around the groups and were walking toward the elevators on the back wall when a penetrating whistle rang out behind them.

“Hey, rookies! Take the stairs. There’s no electricity,” shouted the rep guard at the front entrance, laughing his head off.

So they headed for the stairs. Bruna looked up the stairwell; it disappeared into the shadows. Three hundred floors. Not bad.

Boom, boom, boom. The artillery fire had started up again. It sounded very close. The ground occasionally shook from the explosions. The floors were identical and as chaotic and dirty as the lobby. Some of the doors of what must once have been offices or apartments were open; others were shut and reinforced with locks or metal bars. People went in and out of the living spaces, up and down the stairs. They could hear laughter, conversations, children crying, shouts. There was a character selling water in one of the corridors. He announced his wares with a monotonous call: “Drinking water, ten Gs a liter. Drinking water, ten Gs a liter.”

It was already almost too dark to see, and there was a little oil lamp glowing at his feet. They turned on the lights of their mobiles, and the staircase lit up with a bluish glow. The people they met looked at them with interest: despite the very long battery life of their mobiles, few people must have allowed themselves the luxury of using the lights, afraid they wouldn’t be able to recharge them. Some men and women seemed to act as taxis and went up and down the stairs carrying people on their backs, who were sitting on small boards that hung from the shoulders of their porter. They also crossed paths with a sort of sedan chair adapted to the stairs and carried by two people. As always necessity was the mother of invention.

On Level 21 they encountered a big fluorescent sign on the wall that read, “Shopping Center.” They went in through the first open door. It was like a general store, with food and various tools and equipment. There was a small counter illuminated by a spotlight plugged into a hand-cranked battery. A small man was reading something on his mobile.

“Ah. Good evening. New to the city? How can I help you?” he asked in a friendly voice when he noticed them.

“We’re looking for food, water, and accommodation.”

“Perfect. I have it all.”

Just then two humans came in, a boy and a girl aged about eleven.

“Excuse me a moment,” said the man. “I’ll be through with them in a minute. What are you bringing me?”

The children opened their backpacks, took out six boxes of various types of medication, and placed them on the counter.

“Let’s have a look. Hmm. Something to stop diarrhea, something else for diarrhea, vitamin C, more vitamins. And a box of subcutaneous Panadol! That’s the best one. Not bad. Wasn’t there anything else?”

“We’ll go and look for more tomorrow,” said the girl. “They were in the ruins of a pharmacy. But it got dark.”

“Very good. Here,” said the man, and he gave them two cartons of soy milk and two tins of preserved jellyfish. “I’ll be here waiting for you.”

The children smiled and walked out contented.

“What they brought me isn’t worth that much, but what else can you do? I feel sorry for them,” said the man with a sigh. “Now, let’s get back to where we were.”

A shell exploded so close by that the explosion lit up the store, and everything shook. The reps and the tactile ducked instinctively. The man continued unperturbed.

“Don’t worry. The Arrow resists. There’s no cannon that can destroy her. Sometimes shrapnel comes in through the windows, but I’ve got mine covered with a very thick steel net. You’ll get used to it. I can either sell you some food here or you can eat in the restaurant. It’s mine, too, two doors down. And I can rent you . . . how many rooms? One, two, three?”

“Three,” said Deuil.

Bruna looked at him. It was absurd to waste money on three rooms. Naturally, she would have wanted to ask for two rooms, and then slept with him. But if he was asking for three, it was because he didn’t want to sleep with her. Or maybe he wanted to sleep with Clara. Why wasn’t Clara saying that it was a waste to ask for so many rooms? A combat rep accustomed to barracks. By the great Morlay, she lived in a damned microapartment!
The two of them have agreed to see each other for sure.
Bruna clenched her fists, disgusted with her own paranoia, her obsession, her stupidity.

“We’ll eat in the restaurant,” she said.

“Right. So, three rooms and three dinners comes to . . . nine hundred gaias. Paid in advance.”

“That’s expensive.”

“There’s not much on offer,” the man replied.

The rep peeled off the money and gave it to him, continuing to feel like an idiot.

“One more thing: Does
Mai Burún
ring any bells?”

“To be honest, yes it does,” said the man, scratching his cheek. “But I don’t know why.”

“And the word
tranquillity
?”

“No, that doesn’t, but the other—”

“Please try to remember. It’s important.”

“I’ll ask the other shopping centers in the Tower. We have a network and help each other out,” he said, touching his mobile and speaking to the screen. “It’s Chirousse from Twenty-One. Chirousse from Twenty-One. Does
Mai Burún
ring a bell with any of you? I repeat,
Mai Burún
. Does it ring a bell?”

There was a moment’s silence, and then they heard a woman’s voice.

“Hi, Chirousse, Ramírez here from One-Five-Nine. Mai Burún is the woman with the children. She lives on Level One Hundred Sixty-Three.”

“Of course, the woman with the children. She dedicates herself to collecting street kids. That’s what rang a bell.”

It was 20:10. Bruna glanced quickly at the other two and saw they were all thinking the same thing.

“How late can we eat?” she asked.

“Till 2:00 in the morning, or even later. The restaurant also doubles as a cabaret.”

So they decided to climb the stairs without losing any more time. It took more than thirty minutes at a good pace to do the one hundred forty-two floors that separated them from Level 163. When Bruna and Clara got there, Deuil was only at 158. While they did him the favor of waiting, they checked out their surroundings. They’d noticed that the state of the building improved as they went up. There were fewer broken doors, fewer people lying in the corridors. Level 163 was very quiet. So quiet there was nobody in sight and they had to knock on a door.

“What do you want?” asked a woman from inside.

“We’re looking for Mai Burún.”