Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  She slowed down. By the side of the road, on the Arab side, stood a robotnik. It was in bad shape—large patches of rust, a missing eye, one leg dangling uselessly—the robotnik’s still-human single eye looked at her, but whether in mute appeal, or indifference, she couldn’t tell. It was broadcasting on a wide band, mechanically, helplessly—on a blanket on the ground by its side was a small pile of spare parts, a near-empty gasoline can—solar didn’t do much for robotniks.

  No, she couldn’t stop, she mustn’t. It made her apprehensive. She cycled away but kept looking back, passersby ignoring the robotnik as though it wasn’t there, the sun rising fast, it was going to be another hot day. She found his node, sent a small donation, more for her own ease than for him. Robotniks, the lost soldiers of the lost wars of the Jews—mechanized and sent to fight and then, later, when the wars ended, abandoned as they were, left to fend for themselves on the streets, begging for the parts that kept them alive . . .

  She knew many of them had emigrated off-world, gone to Tong Yun on Mars. Others were based in Jerusalem, living in the Russian Compound made theirs by long occupation. Beggars. You never paid much attention to them.

  And they were old. Some of them had fought in wars that didn’t even have names anymore.

  She cycled away, up Salame, heading to the station.

  Tonight, she thought. Under the eaves. Tonight, she thought; and her heart like a solar kite fluttered in anticipation, waiting to be set free.

  Over the course of the day the sun rose behind the space port and traced an arc across it before landing at last in the sea.

  Isobel worked inside Central Station and usually didn’t see the sun at all.

  The Level Three concourse offered a mixture of food courts, drone battle-zones, game-worlds pod-hives and Louis Wu emporiums, nakamals and smoke bars, truflesh and virtual sex-work establishments, and a faith bazaar.

  Isobel had heard the greatest faith bazaar was in Tong Yun City on Mars. The one they had on Level Three here was a low-key affair—a Church of Robot mission house, a Gorean temple, an Elronite Centre for the Advancement of Humankind, a Baha’i temple, a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic church, an Armenian church, an Ogko shrine, and a Theravada Buddhist temple.

  On her way to work Isobel went to church. She had been raised Catholic, her mother’s family, themselves Chinese immigrants to the Philippines, having adopted that religion in another era, another time. Yet she could find no comfort in the hushed quietude of the spacious church, the smell of the candles, the dim light and the painted glass and the sorrowful look of the crucified Jesus.

  The church forbids it, she thought, suddenly horrified. The quiet of the church seemed oppressive, the air too still. It was as if every item in the room was looking at her, was aware of her. She turned on her heels.

  Outside, not looking, she almost bumped into Brother Patch-It.

  “Daughter, you are shaking,” R. Patch-It said, compassion in his voice. She knew R. Patch-It slightly, the robot had been a fixture of Central Station (both space port and neighbourhood) her entire life, and the part-time moyel for the Jewish residents in the event of the birth of a baby boy.

  “I’m fine, really,” Isobel said. The robot looked at her with his expressionless face. “Robot” was male in Hebrew, a gendered language. And most robots had been fashioned without genitalia or breasts, making them appear vaguely male. They had been a mistake, of sort. No one had produced robots for a very long time. They were a missing link, an awkward evolutionary step between human and Other.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” the robot said. “Perhaps cake? Sugar helps human distress, I am told.” Somehow R. Patch-It managed to look abashed.

  “I’m fine, really,” Isobel said again. Then, on an impulse: “Do you believe that . . . can robots . . . I mean to say—”

  She faltered. The robot regarded her with his old, expressionless face. A rust scar ran down one cheek, from his left eye to the corner of his mouth. “You can ask me anything,” the robot said, gently. Isobel wondered what dead human’s voice had been used to synthesise the robot’s own.

  “Do robots feel love?” she said.

  The robot’s mouth moved. Perhaps it was meant as a smile. “We feel nothing but love,” the robot said.

  “How can that be? How can you . . . how can you feel?” she was almost shouting. But this was Third Level, no one paid any attention.

  “We’re anthropomorphised,” R. Patch-It said, gently. “We were fashioned human, given physicality, senses. It is the tin man’s burden.” His voice was sad. “Do you know that poem?”

  “No,” Isobel said. Then, “What about . . . what about Others?”

  The robot shook his head. “Who can tell,” he said. “For us, it is unimaginable, to exist as a pure digital entity, to not know physicality. And yet, at the same time, we seek to escape our physical existence, to achieve heaven, knowing it does not exist, that it must be built, the world fixed and patched . . . but what is it really that you ask me, Isobel daughter of Irina?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, and she realised her face was wet. “The church—” her head inching, slightly, at the Catholic church behind them. The robot nodded, as if it understood.

  “Youth feels so strongly,” the robot said. His voice was gentle. “Don’t be afraid, Isobel. Allow yourself to love.”

  “I don’t know,” Isobel said. “I don’t know.”

  “Wait—”

  But she had turned away from Brother Patch-It. Blinking back the tears—she didn’t know where they came from—she walked away, she was late for work.

  Tonight, she thought. Tonight, under the eaves. She wiped away the tears.

  With dusk a welcome coolness settled over Central Station. In Mama Jones’ Shebeen candles were lit and, across the road, the No-Name Nakamal was preparing the evening’s kava, and the strong, earthy smell of it—the roots peeled and chopped, the flesh minced and mixed with water, squeezed repeatedly to release its very essence, the kavalactones in the plant—the smell filled the paved street that was the very heart of the neighbourhood.

  On the green, robotniks huddled together around a makeshift fire in an upturned drum. Flames reflected in their faces, metal and human mixed artlessly, the still-living debris of long-gone wars. They spoke amidst themselves in that curious Battle Yiddish that had been imprinted on them by some well-meaning army developer—a hushed and secret language no one spoke anymore.

  Inside Central Station the passengers dined and drank and played and worked and waited—Lunar traders, Martian Chinese on an Earth holiday package tour, Jews from the asteroid-kibbutzim in the Belt, the hurly burly of a humanity for whom Earth was no longer enough and yet was the centre of the universe, around which all planets and moons and habitats rotated, an Aristotelian model of the world superseding its one-time victor, Copernicus. On Level Three Isobel was embedded inside her work pod, existing simultaneously, like a Schrödinger’s Cat, in physical space and the equally real virtuality of the Guilds of Ashkelon universe, where—

  She was the Isobel Chow, captain of the Nine-Tailed Cat, a starship thousands of years old, upgraded and refashioned with each Universal Cycle, a salvage operation she, Isobel, was captain and commander of, hunting for precious gamesworld artefacts to sell on the Exchange—

  Orbiting Black Betty, a Guilds of Ashkelon universal singularity, where a dead alien race had left behind enigmatic ruins, floating in space in broken rocks, airless asteroids of a once-great galactic empire—

  Success there translating to food and water and rent here—

  But what is here, what is there—

  Isobel, Schrödingering, in the real and the virtual—or in the GoA and in what they call Universe-One—and she was working.

  Night fell over Central Station. Lights came alive around the neighbourhood then, floating spheres casting a festive glow. Night was when Central Station came alive. . . .

  Florists packing for the day in the wide sprawling mar
ket, and the boy Kranki playing by himself, stems on the ground and wilting dark Lunar roses, hydroponics grown, and none came too close to him, the boy was strange. . . .

  Asteroid Pidgin around him as he played, making stems rise and dance before him, black rose heads opening and closing in a silent, graceless dance before the boy. The boy had nakaimas, he had the black magic, he had the quantum curse. Conversation flowing around him, traders closing for the day or opening for the night, the market changing faces, never shutting, people sleeping under their stands or having dinner, and from the food stalls the smells of frying fish, of chilli in vinegar, of soy and garlic frying, of cumin and turmeric and the fine purple powder of sumac, so called because it looks like a blush. The boy played, as boys would. The flowers danced, mutely.

  —Yu stap go wea? Where are you going?

  —Mi stap go bak haos. I am going home.

  — Yu no save stap smoltaem, dring smolsmol bia? Won’t you stop for a small beer?

  Laughter. Then—

  — Si, mi save stap smoltaem. Yes, I could stop for a little while.

  Music playing, on numerous feeds and live, too—a young kathoey backpacker from Thailand on an old acoustic guitar, singing, while down the road a tentacle-junkie was beating time on multiple drums, adding distortions in real-time and broadcasting, a small voice weaving itself into the complex unending pattern of the Conversation.

  —Mi lafem yu!

  —Awo, yu drong!

  Laughter, I love you— You’re drunk!—a kiss, the two men walk away together, holding hands—

  — Wan dei bae mi go long spes, bae mi go lukluk olbaot long ol star.

  — Yu kranki we! One day I will go to space, I will go look around all the planets— You’re crazy !

  Laughter, and someone dropping in from the virtuality, blinking sleepy eyes, readjusting, someone turns a fish over on the grill, someone yawns, someone smiles, a fight breaks out, lovers meet, the moon on the horizon rises, the shadows of the moving spiders flicker on the surface of the moon.

  Under the eaves. Under the eaves. Where it’s always dry where it’s always dark, under the eaves.

  There, under the eaves of Central Station, around the great edifice, was a buffer zone, a separator between space port and neighbourhood. You could buy anything at Central Station and what you couldn’t buy you could get there, in the shadows.

  Isobel had finished work, she had come back to Universe-One, had left behind captainhood and ship and crew, climbed out of the pod, and on her feet, the sound of her blood in her ears, and when she touched her wrist she felt the blood pulsing there, too, the heart wants what the heart wants, reminding us that we are human, and frail, and weak.

  Through a service tunnel she went, between floors, and came out on the northeast corner of the port, facing the Kibbutz Galuyot road and the old interchange.

  It was quiet there, and dark, few shops, an unkosher pork butcher and a book binder and warehouses left from days gone by, now turned into sound-proofed clubs and gene clinics and synth emporiums. She waited in the shadow of the port, hugging the walls, they felt warm, the station always felt alive, on heat, the station like a heart, beating. She waited, her embedded node scanning for intruders, for digital signatures and heat, for motion—Isobel was a Central Station girl, she could take care of herself, she had a knife, she was cautious but not afraid of the shadows.

  She waited, waited for him to come.

  “You waited.”

  She pressed against him. He was warm, she didn’t know where the metal of him finished and the organic of him began.

  He said, “You came,” and there was wonder in the words.

  “I had to. I had to see you again.”

  “I was afraid.” His voice was not above a whisper. His hand on her cheek, she turned her head, kissed it, tasting rust like blood.

  “We are beggars,” he said. “My kind. We are broken machines.”

  She looked at him, this old abandoned soldier. She knew he had died, that he had been remade, a human mind cyborged onto an alienated body, sent out to fight, and to die, again and again. That now he lived on scraps, depending on the charity of others. . . .

  Robotnik. That old word, meaning worker.

  But said like a curse.

  She looked into his eyes. His eyes were almost human.

  “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember who I was, before.”

  “But you are . . . you are still . . . you are!” she said, as though finding truth, suddenly, and she laughed, she was giddy with laughter and happiness and he leaned in and kissed her, gently at first and then harder, their shared need melding them, joining them almost like a human is bonded to an Other.

  In his strange obsolete Battle Yiddish he said, “Ich lieba dich.”

  In Asteroid Pidgin she replied.

  — Mi lafem yu.

  His finger on her cheek, hot, metallic, his smell of machine oil and gasoline and human sweat. She held him close, there against the wall of Central Station, in the shadows, as a plane high overhead, adorned in light, came in to land from some other and faraway place.

  THREE: The Smell of Orange Groves

  High overhead, on the rooftop, Boris was awake. He thought he saw, under the awnings of the station, two furtive figures break apart; but his mind was elsewhere.

  It had been strange running into Miriam; she’d both changed and hadn’t. She must have known why he’d come back, but she didn’t pry, leaving him to his own secret sorrow.

  On the roof the solar panels were folded in on themselves, still asleep, yet uneasily stirring, as though they could sense the imminent coming of the sun. The building’s residents, his father’s neighbours, had, over the years, planted and expanded an assortment of plants, in pots of clay and aluminium and wood, across the roof, turning it into a high-rise tropical garden.

  It was quiet up there and, for the moment, still cool. He loved the smell of late-blooming jasmine, it crept along the walls of the building, climbing tenaciously high, spreading out all over the old neighbourhood that surrounded Central Station. He took a deep breath of night air and released it slowly, haltingly, watching the lights of the space port, moving stars tracing jewelled flight paths in the skies.

  He loved the smell of this place, this city. The smell of the sea to the west, that wild scent of salt and open water, seaweed and tar, of suntan lotion and people. Loved the smell of cold conditioned air leaking out of windows, of basil when you rubbed it between your fingers, loved the smell of shawarma rising from street level with its heady mix of spices, loved the smell of vanished orange groves from far beyond the urban blocks of Tel Aviv or Jaffa.

  Once it had all been orange groves. He stared out at the old neighbourhood, the peeling paint, boxlike apartment blocks in old-style Soviet architecture crowded in with magnificent early twentieth-century Bauhaus constructions, buildings made to look like ships, with long curving graceful balconies, small round windows, flat roofs like decks, like the one he stood on—

  Mixed amongst the old buildings were newer constructions, Martian-style co-op buildings with drop-chutes for lifts, and small rooms divided and subdivided inside, many without any windows—

  Laundry hanging as it had for hundreds of years, off wash lines and windows, faded blouses and shorts blowing in the wind, gently. Lanterns floated in the streets down below, dimming now, and Boris realised the night was receding, saw a blush of pink and red on the edge of the horizon, and he knew the sun was coming.

  He had spent the night keeping vigil for his father. Vlad Chong, son of Weiwei Zhong (Zhong Weiwei in the Chinese manner) and of Yulia Chong, née Rabinovich. In the tradition of the family Boris, too, was given a Russian name. In another of the family’s traditions, he was also given a second, Jewish name. He smiled wryly, thinking about it. Boris Aharon Chong, the heritage and weight of three shared and ancient histories pressing down heavily on his slim, no longer young shoulders.

  It had not been an easy night.


  Once it had all been orange groves . . . he took a deep breath, that smell of old asphalt and combustion-engine exhaust fumes, gone now like the oranges yet still, somehow, lingering, a memory-scent.

  He’d tried to leave it behind. The family’s memory, what they sometimes called the Curse of the Family Chong: what they called Weiwei’s Folly.

  He could still remember it. Of course he could. A day so long ago, that Boris Aharon Chong himself was not yet an idea, an I-loop that hadn’t yet been formed. . . .

  It was in Jaffa, in the Old City on top of the hill, above the harbour. The home of the Others.

  Zhong Weiwei cycled up the hill, sweating in the heat. He mistrusted these narrow winding streets, both of the Old City itself and of Ajami, the neighbourhood that had at last reclaimed its heritage. Weiwei understood this place’s conflicts very well. There were Arabs and Jews and they wanted the same land and so they fought. Weiwei understood land, and how you were willing to die for it.

  But he also knew the concept of land had changed. That land was a concept less of a physicality now, and more of the mind. Recently, he had invested some of his money in an entire planetary system in the Guilds of Ashkelon gamesworld. Soon he would have children—Yulia was in her third trimester already—and then grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so on down the generations, and they would remember Weiwei, their progenitor. They would thank him for what he’ d done, for the real estate both real and virtual, and for what he was hoping to achieve today.

  He, Zhong Weiwei, would begin a dynasty, here in this divided land. For he had understood the most basic of aspects, he alone saw the relevance of that foreign enclave that was Central Station. Jews to the north (and his children, too, would be Jewish, which was a strange and unsettling thought), Arabs to the south, now they have returned, reclaimed Ajami and Menashiya, and were building New Jaffa, a city towering into the sky in steel and stone and glass. Divided cities, like Akko, and Haifa, in the north, and the new cities sprouting in the desert, in the Negev and the Arava.