Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  He crossed the road, his feet leading him, they had their own memory, crossing the road from the grand doors of Central Station to the pedestrian street, the heart of the old neighbourhood, and it was so much smaller than he remembered, as a child it was a world and now it had shrunk—

  Crowds of people, solar tuk-tuks buzzing along the road, tourists gawking, a memcordist checking her feed stats as everything she saw and felt and smelled was broadcast live across the networks, capturing Boris in a glance that went out to millions of indifferent viewers across the solar system—

  Pickpockets, bored CS Security keeping an eye out, a begging robotnik with a missing eye and bad patches of rust on his chest, dark-suited Mormons sweating in the heat, handing out leaflets, while on the other side of the road Elronites did the same—

  Light rain, falling.

  From the nearby market the shouts of sellers promising the freshest pomegranates, melons, grapes, bananas, in a café ahead old men playing backgammon—R. Patch-It walking slowly amidst the chaos, the robot an oasis of calm in the mass of noisy, sweaty humanity—

  Looking, smelling, listening, remembering, so intensely he didn’t at first see them, the woman and the child, on the other side of the road, until he almost ran into them—

  Miriam, and the boy.

  He wanted to go to her now. The world was awake, and Boris was alone on the roof of the old apartment building, alone and free, but for the memories. He saw the old alte-zachen man, Ibrahim, go past on his cart in the street below; the Lord of Discarded Things, they used to call him; and Boris marvelled that he was still among the living. A boy sat beside him, a boy not unlike Kranki. Their patient horse pulled the cart along the road, and Boris followed their path until they went out of sight.

  He didn’t know what he would do about his father. He remembered holding his hand, once, when he was small, and Vlad had seemed so big, so confident and sure, and full of life. They had gone to the beach that day, it was a summer’s day and in Menashiya, Jews and Arabs and Filipinos all mingled together, the Muslim women in their long dark clothes and the children running shrieking in their underwear; Tel Aviv girls in tiny bikinis, sunbathing placidly; someone smoking a joint, and the strong smell of it wafting in the sea air; Ibrahim, the alte-zachen man, he was there then, too, passing along the road with his horse (a different one, then); the life guard in his tower calling out trilingual instructions—“Keep to the marked areas! Did anyone lose a child? Please come to the lifeguards now! You with the boat, head towards the Tel Aviv harbour and away from the swimming area!”—the words getting lost in the chatter, someone had parked their car and was blaring out beats from the stereo, Somali refugees were cooking a barbeque on the promenade’s grassy part, a dreadlocked white guy was playing a guitar; and Vlad held Boris’s hand as they went into the water, strong and safe, and Boris knew nothing would ever happen to him; that his father would always be there to protect him, no matter what happened.

  FOUR: The Lord of Discarded Things

  There were still alte-zachen men in Jaffa and Central Station in those days, as there always were, and chief amongst them was Ibrahim, he who was sometimes called the Lord of Discarded Things.

  There were still alte-zachen men in Jaffa in those days. There had always been junk gypsies, part Jew, part Arab, part something else again. It was not long after the Messiah Murder, of which you must have heard, of which the historian Elezra (himself a progenitor of Miriam Elezra, who with the Golda Meir automaton journeyed to ancient Mars-That-Never-Was, and changed the course of a planet) has written, “It was a time of fervour and uncertainty, a time of hate and peace, in which the messiah’s appearance and subsequent execution were almost incidental.”

  You must have seen him approach a thousand times. He appears in the background, always in the background, of tourist-taken images, of numerous feeds. The cart, first: a flat top carried on the four wheels of a liberated, ancient car. In Jaffa’s junkyards combustion engine-era vehicles proliferated, towers of them making a town of junk in which hid the city’s unfortunates. The cart pulled by one or two horses, city-bred and born: mismatched grey and white, these Palestinian horses, an intermingling of breeds, distant cousins to the noble Arabian strains. Small, strong and patient, they carried the cart overloaded with broken-down things, without complaint, on the weekends putting on bells and colourful garb and carrying small children along the seaside promenade for a price.

  The alte-zachen, like the ancient port’s porters in their days, had a lijana, a secret board of rulers—a legion chosen by dint of age and experience—of which the most prominent member was Ibrahim.

  Who was Ibrahim and how had he come to the city of Jaffa, by the blue sparkling waters of the Mediterranean Sea?

  The truth was, no one knew. He had always been there. The once and future king of the discarded. Rumour had it he was Other-cousin to the Oracle on the hill, for Ibrahim, too, was Joined, his thumb a golden prosthetic, an Other bonded into his node, human and digital minds commingled. No one knew the name of the Other. Perhaps both were called Ibrahim.

  His route seldom varied. Down the narrow passageways of ancient Ajami, the stone houses overlooking the sea and the harbour, away from the new high-rises of the returnees; down the hill to the ancient clock tower, right along Salame Road, calling out as he went: “Alte-zachen! Alte-zachen!”

  Junk accumulating on the cart. The discarded waste of centuries. People knew to wait for Ibrahim. Torn, stained mattresses, tables with broken legs, ancient Chinese mass-produced grandfather clocks of a sort popular in some nameless gone-by decade. Discarded automatons, Vietnamese battle-dolls used in some long-ago war. Paintings. Print books, moulding, shedding pages like leaves. Engines for giant fish refrigeration units. Faded Turkish rugs.

  Once, a baby.

  He had found the little thing on his rounds. It was early, the sun had barely risen yet. Ibrahim had travelled up Salame and turned to Central Station.

  Adaptoplant neighbourhoods high above moved in the breeze. They sprouted around Central Station like weeds. On the outskirts of the old neighbourhood, along the old abandoned highways of Tel Aviv they grew, ringing the immense structure of the space port rising high into the sky. Houses sprouted like trees, blooming, adaptoplant weeds feeding on rain and sun and digging roots into the sandy ground, breaking ancient asphalt. Adaptoplant neighbourhoods, seasonal, unstable, sprouting walls and doors and windows, half-open sewers hanging in the air, exposed bamboo pipes, apartments growing over and into each other, growing without order or sense, creating pavements suspended in midair, houses at crazy angles, shacks and huts with half-formed doors, windows like eyes—

  In autumn the neighbourhoods shed, doors drying, windows shrinking slowly, pipes drooping. Houses fell like leaves to the ground below and the road-cleaning machines murmured happily, eating up the shrunken leaves of former residencies. Above ground the tenants of those seasonal buoyant suburbs stepped cautiously, testing the ground with each step taken, to see if it would hold, migrating nervously across the skyline to other, fresher spurts of growth, new adaptoplant blooming delicately, windows opening like fruit—

  Discarded metal and plastic on the road down below. Ibrahim couldn’t tell what it had once been: cars and water bottles turned into abandoned sculpture, perhaps. Art sprouted like wildtech in Central Station.

  It lay nearby. It was a small package, he had not noticed it until it moved. Ibrahim went to it warily, things sometimes got loose in Central Station. Sometimes amidst the junk there had been snakes, still-living battle-dolls, adaptoplant furniture with hostile programming, old guns and ammunition, uberusercreated, virtual religious artefacts of uncertain powers—

  Ibrahim approached the package and it made a sound. The sound made him freeze. It was that kind of sound. Once there had been a wolf pup, smuggled in from Mongolia. It died in captivity. It had made that kind of sound.

  Ibrahim came closer nonetheless. Looked.

  A baby looked up at him. A
n ordinary baby such as one saw every day, everywhere: Jaffa and Central Station were filled with children. This one, however, was inside a shoebox.

  Ibrahim knelt next to the baby. The shoebox was for a cheap brand. The baby had clear sparkling green eyes, his skin was dark, his head was hairless. Ibrahim stared at the baby. There was no one around. The baby burped.

  Ibrahim reached for the boy—it was a boy—carefully, still wary. One never knew, in Central Station. The boy’s hand rose to meet his. Older than his years. As if he were shaking hands. Their fingers touched. A current, like high-bandwidth data, hit Ibrahim. Images crowded his mind. Impossible things. Views from the rings of Saturn. A battle of four-armed red-skinned Martian Re-Born in their virtual empire. A rabbi on a spaceship travelling to the Belt, praying in the field of asteroids, in a small dank room inside an ancient mining craft.

  In the touch of the boy there was the toktok blong narawan, the language of Others.

  Ibrahim’s Other woke up. Said, What the—

  Ibrahim’s mind couldn’t face the onslaught. The data-storm raged, diverting to his Other, which shut down as it tried to cope—

  One word hovering clear out of the maelstrom, making him cringe—

  Messiah—

  Pull your hand away!

  The light touch of the child imprisoned him. He fought—

  The baby burped and laughed. The contact broke.

  Ibrahim: Did you get all that?

  Nothing from his Other.

  Ibrahim: ??

  His Other, at last: !

  Ibrahim stared at the baby, and his Other, through Ibrahim’s eyes, did likewise.

  One thought in both of their minds:

  Not another one.

  Ibrahim could have put out a distress call. An alarm broadcast from his node, bouncing across the endless networks that crisscrossed this city, its planet, the human-inhabited space around it, planets and moons and rings and Exodus ships. Peace-keeping machines would have materialised, spiderlike, mecha-CSIs double-coded, for this was the buffer zone, Central Station separating Arab Jaffa from Jewish Tel Aviv. A high-encryption digital dispute over territory, analysis of the boy’s DNA—though with just the eye-colour (Bose trademark, hacked, several decades old but still fiercely protected by licensing laws) Ibrahim knew. The boy was vat-grown, it was a Central Station specialty.

  Messiah breeding programme? The Other inquired, recovering.

  “I don’t know.”

  He spoke aloud, but softly. The boy gurgled.

  Is this wise?

  “Do you have another idea?”

  I don’t like this.

  Communication speeding up, speech giving way to image codes, clouds of meanings. Ibrahim, cutting it off midflow, picked up the baby.

  “The boy,” he said, to no one in particular, memories of the Jerusalem killing still fresh in the mind, “deserves a different fate.”

  That had been years before. They named the boy Ismail. They brought him up as best they could.

  Ibrahim lived in the vast junkyard that straddled the border of Jaffa and what used to be the Jewish suburb of Bat Yam. Tiny semi-sentient machines lived there, and robotniks, all the homeless and the lost.

  The junkyard.

  The Palace of Discarded Things.

  It seemed appropriate for the boy.

  And so Ismail grew up speaking the Arabic of Ajami and the Battle Yiddish of the robotniks. He spoke Asteroid Pidgin, that Toktok blong Spes. He spoke the neighbouring city’s Hebrew. When he grew older he sometimes helped Ibrahim on his rounds.

  Through Ajami down to the clock tower, down Salame to Central Station . . . Ibrahim picked up wounded things, his robotniks had been discarded on the streets of Central Station, he had picked them up and fixed them and they gave him their loyalty, it was the only thing they had left to give. There were synth-flesh dolls, patched up, with mismatched organs, child-sized, their faces crudely drawn, some were refugees from the flesh pits, some were miniature soldiers in urban wars, all had been mass-imported from far-off factories and discarded when their usefulness ran out.

  Modified animals, Frankensteined by home-lab kid enthusiasts with a gene kit and an incubator. Ismail’s pet dragon, a sad creature adapted from a Canary Islands Lagarto Gigante de la Gomera, part-meched with fire breathing apparatus; the poor thing, coughing fire, had been nicknamed Chamudi by the boy, despite all evidence to the contrary, for there was nothing cute about it.

  The whole tribe of them living in the vast junkyard, centuries of buried layers, an archaeological site in which everything could be found, the remnants of the ages.

  The boy had . . . some disturbing habits.

  He could predict localised weather. Not so much predict, Ibrahim sometimes thought with unease, as make it happen.

  When he slept, his dreams materialised sometimes, above his head, cowboys and Indians chasing each other in a hazy grey bubble of dreamstuff forming out of condensation in the air, evaporating as REM sleep gave way to the deeper states of NREM.

  He had an affinity with machines. He had been, like all children, noded at birth. He was not Other Joined, not bonded, and yet, sometimes, Ibrahim and his Other had the distinct sense that the boy could hear them speak.

  You know what it is, of course, the Other said.

  Ibrahim nodded.

  They had been standing in the yard. The sun beat down, and beyond the stone houses of Ajami the sea lay flat as a mirror, solar surfers diving and rising on the winds above it.

  There are others, the Other said. Children born in the vat-labs of Central Station.

  “I know.”

  “We should speak to the Oracle—”

  Ibrahim knew her of old. Knew, even, her real name. No one was born an oracle . . . and they were blood-related, as well as Other-ken. He said, “No.”

  Ibrahim. . . .

  “No.”

  We are making a mistake.

  “The children will make their own way. In time.”

  “Baba!” the boy came running up to Ibrahim. “Can I come with you on the cart today?”

  “Not today,” Ibrahim said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  The boy’s face crumpled in disappointment. “You always say tomorrow,” he accused.

  It’s safe here, the Other said, silently. Here he is protected.

  “But he needs to be with children his own age.”

  “What’s that, Baba?”

  “Nothing, Ismail,” Ibrahim said. “It’s nothing.”

  But it was not nothing.

  Chamudi, the dragon, died a few months later. There had been a funeral, the grandest ever held at the Palace of Discarded Things. The dragon had an honour guard of patched-up battle-dolls and robotniks, people from the neighbourhood had turned out in solemn clothes despite the heat. Junkmen dug a hole in the ground, dislodging buried treasures, a rusting bicycle and a box of hand-carved chess pieces made of dark wood, and a metal skull. Noah the blind beggar, Ibrahim’s friend, stood beside him as the small coffin was lowered. A priest, a Martian Re-Born, follower of the Way, officiated, red skin glistening with sweat in the sun, four arms moving in complex forms as she wove words of bereavement and comfort, speaking of the Emperor of Time and his acceptance of this gift. Ismail stood to one side, his eyes dry now from tears.

  Noah the blind beggar, whose eyes were precious stones, watched the ceremony unfold through multiple nodal transmissions. Pym, the famous memcordist, was there, the funeral joined like a strand into his life-long Narrative. It was going out to Pym’s subscribers, their numbers fluctuated in the millions across the solar system. All in all it was a moving and dignified occasion.

  “Who is the boy beside Ismail?” Noah asked. Ibrahim looked and said, “What boy?”

  “The small, quiet one,” Noah said. Ibrahim frowned. His Other whispered in his mind. Ibrahim shifted, eyes could be deceiving. He looked at the scene the way Noah did, through the Conversation.

  He could see the boy now, but fragmented. In some
of the feeds he was missing entirely, in some he was just a shade. It was only Noah’s multifaceted view that gave, at last, the entire picture. The boy and Ismail didn’t speak and yet he got the sense that they were communicating rapidly.

  The boy had deep blue eyes. Armani, those eyes. Ibrahim wondered if he’d seen him before. One of the Central Station kids. The boy raised his eyes, seeming to somehow, impossibly, sense their attention. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  Earth covered the miniature dragon. The Re-Born priest intoned the final words of farewell. The guests sighed. Robotniks saluted, lethargically. It was a hot day.

  “Who is your friend?” Ibrahim said, later, when they were drinking cool lemonade in the shade of piled cars. The two boys smiled, mischievously, and the boy said, “Nem blong mi Kranki.”

  My name is Kranki.

  It was hard to see the boy. He kept shifting through visual feeds, a ghost in the crisscrossed networks.

  “Hello, Kranki,” Ibrahim said.

  “Mama is calling me,” the boy said, suddenly. His voice came from everywhere and nowhere. “I’d better go.”

  He faded away, and Ibrahim was troubled.

  “The messianic impulse is strongest when concentrated,” Noah said, philosophically. The funeral was over and Ismail was nowhere in sight. Ibrahim knew the boy had gone to the beach with some of the other children. Corporeal, this time. “This land of ours has always been a lode-stone for seekers of faith.”

  A lot remained unsaid between them. Ibrahim, speaking carefully, said, “I wanted for the boy a normal life.”

  Noah shrugged, and the precious stones that were his eyes glinted in the faint light. “What is normal?” he said. “You and I are relics of a distant past. Fossilised shells buried in the sands of time.”