by Lavie Tidhar
Ibrahim was forced to laugh. “You sound like a Re-Born,” he said. Noah grinned, then shrugged. “The Re-Born believe in a past that never was,” he said. “They dig for virtual fossils.”
Ibrahim had lost his smile. “Whereas?” he said, prompting.
“Whereas what the children represent is a future,” Noah said. “Not, perhaps, the future, but a future. The present fragments. We can both feel it. Futures branch out like the growths from a tree.”
“How many?” Ibrahim said, uneasily. Noah shrugged.
“Children?”
Ibrahim nodded. Noah said, “Ask the man in the birthing clinics,” and stood up, stiffly. “I’d better go,” he said. “Ophelia will be waiting for me.”
Ibrahim remained alone in the junkyard. It felt as though the city was preparing for a crusade. He still remembered the messiah, a genuine descendant of King David, genetically certified, arriving in Jerusalem on a white donkey, all the portents there and present. Not the End of Days, but an End of Days. Then someone took him out with a sniper rifle.
One messiah down.
This part of the world had always needed a messiah. So did others. There had been rumours . . . the Singularity Jesus project in Laos. The Black Monks. On Mars, they said, on New Israel, they were preparing a vast virtuality in which the Holocaust never took place. Six million ghosts multiplying. They said the Zion asteroid was heading out of the solar system altogether, following the beamed dream of an alien god. Ibrahim was old. He had been around when there were still oranges. Steamers once docked at Jaffa and camels brought the shamouti oranges to the harbour, and small boats carried them to the waiting ships. It had always been a hub in a global network. The oranges went to England, to the ports of Manchester and Southampton and Plymouth, people there still remembered the Jaffa orange.
But Central Station was new, he thought. It was a new hub on a new network. Somewhere in that microcosm of alienation new religions were born, messiahs hatched. He wanted normality for the boy. But normality had never been a given, it was a consensus illusion and the boy with the trademarked eyes could see clear through most.
The children had been birthed. Someone had planned their emergence. One day the boy would change, but what he would grow into Ibrahim did not yet know.
That night, after the funeral, as he was sitting in the Palace of Discarded Things, Ismail came back from the beach. His small wiry body still glistened from the saltwater, and his eyes were bright, and he was laughing. Ibrahim, who never had children of his own, hugged the boy. “Baba!” the boy said. “Look what I found!”
Love was anxiety and pride, intermingled. Ibrahim watched as the boy went out of the yard and came back with a puppy, a small black dog with a white nose who licked the back of his hand. “I’m going to call him Suleiman,” he said.
Ibrahim laughed. “You’ll have to feed him,” he warned.
“I know,” the boy said, “I’ll look after him. You’ll see.”
Ismail ran across the junkyard and the dog ran behind him, tongue lolling. Ibrahim watched them both go, and worried.
That night he had a dream. In the dream the two boys stood by the fire burning in an open drum nearby. Even though he knew Ismail was asleep, and his friend, Kranki, was far away in Central Station, nevertheless he felt that the dream had a strange reality about it. The two boys spoke; their lips moved; but no sound emerged, and Ibrahim could not understand what they were saying. He woke abruptly, his heart racing, his Other awake in his mind.
She’s coming, the Other said. She’s coming.
He sensed the Other’s confusion. The words must have come from the dream.
But who was coming, and why, and for what purpose, they didn’t know.
FIVE: Strigoi
On a day in spring, a strigoi came to Central Station. A shambleau. Her hair was done in a style then popular in Tong Yun: long dreadlocks woven with thin, flexible metal wires that corresponded to an invisible charge, and moved like water snakes, in the air about the girl’s head, extending lazily from her skull.
She had vat-grown violet eyes, her hair was reddish-brown and woven with gold that caught the sun.
Her name was Carmel.
A patch of new skin on the soft lower flesh of her left arm could have once been a tattoo. That tattoo could have testified that she had been previously captured and accordingly marked. She stepped out of the general transport suborbital on the rooftop of Central Station, disembarking with the other passengers, and stopped, and breathed in the rare air of Earth.
You who have never been to Manhome! Remember the words of the poet Bashō, who wrote:
Sip blong spes
Planet Es hemia!
Ea blong hem i no semak
Ol narafala ples
Translated roughly as “ship of space / Earth it is! / Its air is unlike / that of any other place.”
Though the term Manhome has fallen from favour, and a more proper designation would have been Humanity Prime or, as the Others sometimes called it, the Core.
Regardless.
The Shambleau called Carmel came to Central Station in spring, when the smell in the air truly is intoxicating. It is a smell of the sea, and of the sweat of so many bodies, their heat and their warmth, and it is the smell of humanity’s spices and the cool scent of its many machines; and it is the scent of the resin or sap that sometimes drips from a cut in the eternally renewing adaptoplant neighbourhoods, and of ancient asphalt heating in the sun, and of vanished oranges, and of freshly cut lemongrass: it is the smell of Humanity Prime, that richest and most concentrated of smells; there is nothing like it in the outer worlds.
And on the roof of Central Station the girl, Carmel, stood, for a long moment, her eyes closed, taking it all in: the strange and unfamiliar gravity, the relentless push of the sun, the gentle, modulated pulling of the wind, the whole thing surprising, unpredictable, a planet-wide atmospheric system that wasn’t even digital.
The pulse and surf of the Conversation hit her then. On the way over—on those slow months from Tong Yun on Mars, all the way at last to Gateway, there in Earth Orbit—she had done well filtering the Conversation to a minimum, near starving herself. She had travelled on the Gel Blong Mota, that most ancient of cargo craft traversing the solar system. Quiet was what she had wanted.
But now the Conversation exploded around her, almost overwhelming her. Ever more concentrated, here on Earth. Different, too. Odd, archaic protocols intermingled with the intensity of the toktok blong narawan. Here, the part of the Conversation to come from the Outer System—from Jettisoned and the Oort cloud and Titan and the Galilean Republics—was faint, diluted. The Belt twinkled with dozens of loose strands. Mars was a quiet murmur. Lunar Port was a cry in the night. But Earth!
She had never imagined the Conversation as she experienced it just then—the nearness and yet the distance of it, the compressedness of it all. Billions of humans, uncounted billions of digitals and machines, all talking, chattering, sharing at once. Images, text, voice, recordings, all-immersive memcordist media, gamesworlds spill-over—it came on her at once, and she reeled against it.
“Are you all right, dear?” a kindly voice said. It was a Chinese-Martian woman, with bright, alive green (natural?—a quick scan did not reveal a patented signature) eyes. “Is it the gravity? It can be hard to adjust, the first time.”
She lent Carmel her arm, to lean on. Carmel gratefully accepted, though she was afraid. She shielded the woman out as much as she could. Being this close to a human’s node was a temptation she was afraid to follow. Her hunger, her weakened state, did not help. She needed to feed, and soon.
And Earth was like an all-you-can-eat Tong Yun City twenty-four-hour buffet.
“Thank you,” she said. The woman smiled and they walked down the marked path, to Disembarkation. Carmel tensed, but only a little, as the gateway systems scanned her. Her internal networks pretending she was something she was not.
A ping on her internal node: Approve
d. She let out a breath. Carmel and the woman rode the elevators down to the lower levels.
“This is my third time on Earth,” the woman said. She spoke easily, taking Carmel into her confidence as if she did that every day of her life. Red Chinese, but not Tong Yun; one of the innumerable communes that had sprouted up over the centuries in the Valles Marineris, in the shadow of Olympus Mons. “This is my third time on Earth, isn’t it wonderful? Of course it is an expensive trip but my ancestors are here, in Central Station.” She smiled a quick delighted smile. “Yes, isn’t it strange? They came from China and from the Philippines, to work for the Jews of Tel Aviv at that time, and stayed. Here. The old neighbourhood. I still have relatives here. My name’s Magdalena Wu, but I am of the Chongs of Central Station. It is strange . . . I grew up on Mars. We farm tomatoes, water melons, medical marijuana, waetbun kabij . . . our greenhouses spread out for miles underground, there is a joy you don’t expect, perhaps, in tending to all that greenery. They say Mars is red but when I think of it, when I think of home, I always think of it as green. Is that strange?”
Carmel, perhaps overwhelmed, perhaps at ease with this chatty, older woman, said nothing. Magdalena nodded.
“So much demand for waetbun,” she said. Waetbun kabij— Asteroid Pidgin for garden-variety cabbage. “My family emigrated in the Century of Dragon—” That meant, Carmel knew, the century when Dragon first established his/their/its strange colony on Hydra. Momentary images, by reflex, poured over her: public images of Dragon’s World, the endless, termite-built warrens, the thousands of disposable dolls moving through it on their unknown purposes, each a node linking the whole into something greater than its parts, the Other known as Dragon, a digital entity with a strange fascination with the physicality, with Universe-One. “We grew—not rich, but comfortable, on the cabbage trade. Such a useful plant! It is a great source of vitamin C and indole-three-carbinol. It is used in nearly every kitchen. A neighbour started a kimchi factory, then married into the family.” She shrugged. “We make do,” she said. “Enough for me to travel here twice before. To see where it began. From Central Station, we went to the stars. Isn’t that something? It’s strange, their outdoors don’t feel quite real, don’t you think? Oh, you haven’t felt them, yet. But their outside feels smaller than the inside of our greenhouses. All those miles . . . I love to walk them.”
They had reached a level within the giant space port. The doors opened. They both stepped out. “Level Three,” the woman said. “It’s like a miniature version of the Level Three Concourse of Tong Yun City, don’t you think? It’s so quaint.”
Carmel remembered Level Three. The Multifaith Bazaar. The gamesworlds nodes. The droid arenas. She had . . . she had roamed there, for a time. So many churches, and so many of the righteous took it upon themselves to hunt Strigoi.
They had almost caught her once. A crowd had gathered. She had been drunk on feed. Shambleau! they cried. Pointed. Jeered. Awed and repulsed. Then casting stones. Worse. Denial of Service attacks, crude, but effective. Blocking her from the Conversation. Cutting her off from her feed.
“Do you go to Tel Aviv?” Magdalena said. Seeing Carmel’s confused expression—“Jaffa? No? Farther away?”
“Here,” Carmel said. Speaking felt strange. She had not spoken in all her time on the ship. “Just . . . here,” she said.
“Outside?”
Carmel just shrugged. She didn’t know.
As if taking pity on her, Magdalena nodded, took her hand, gently, in hers. “There is a small shrine here,” she said. “It’s for Ogko, but . . . we could go there together, if you like. Where do you need to go? Do you know?”
“I . . .” The thing that drove her across space and to this foreign, alienating place, for a moment eluded her.
“You don’t talk much, do you,” Magdalena said. Carmel smiled; she hadn’t expected to. Magdalena smiled back. “Let’s go see Ogko,” she said. “Then we’ll see what we can do about you.”
Arm in arm, they walked across the vast concourse, towards the Multifaith Arcade.
There is a shrine to Ogko in most places nowadays. Though Ogko did not approve of shrines. He was the most cantankerous of deities, a reluctant messiah. If you subscribe to the Alien Theory of Spiritual Beings, which was briefly popular around the time of the Shangri-La Affair, Ogko would be considered, alongside Jesus, Mohammed, Uri Geller and L. Ron Hubbard, as an alien entity. It was the answer to Fermi’s famous paradox. The reason we don’t see aliens out there, reasoned the proponents of the AToSB, is because they’re here. They walk—and preach— among us.
In The Book of Ogko, a man tells the story of having encountered an alien being, an energy creature called Ogko. “I made him up,” he wrote. “I took his shape and form from water and leaf, from the damp earth of the Mekong and from the flight patterns of the wild battle drones of the Golden Triangle. He isn’t real. Neither am I.”
Ogko, he cheerfully admitted, was a liar. Yet his philosophy-of-no-philosophy, his strangely delighted view of an insignificant humanity, “A shower of bright sparks against a vast darkness,” as he once put it, in one of his more flowery moments of language, somehow took hold.
He endured. His message—“We don’t matter—only to ourselves”—strangely resonated. And little shrines, to this fictive, playful entity, if it had existed at all, kept springing up in odd places, on street corners and plantations, in the Exodus ships and in the underground warrens of Mars, on the lone mining ships of the asteroids and in the gamesworlds and virtualities of the Conversation.
In Central Station, tucked alongside an Elronite Temple and a Catholic church, there was indeed a small shrine. Potted plants were left there, in a profusion of colours and scents, flowers and vines, and on a small pedestal sticks of incense burned, and candles in various stages of depletion stood, some burning, some extinguished. Magdalena lit a small candle, then called to her hand-luggage. A suitcase promptly appeared in the distance, racing on tiny wheels towards the shrine. When it arrived, Magdalena patted it absent-mindedly before extracting from it a small parcel. She left it alongside a pot of geraniums and a half-starved Venusian Fly Trap. Growing in Magdalena’s pot was, of course, a small, white bone-coloured cabbage.
Carmel watched the Venusian Fly Trap in horrified fascination. It was like staring at a mirror. The thing was starved of feed. And thinking of feed, which it was impossible not to, the presence of this Martian woman, Magdalena, was becoming increasingly more difficult: her node’s pathetic protection meant nothing to Carmel, she kept getting snatches of images, data packets, random noise coming off from the woman, like the scent of baking bread, making her mouth water. It would be so easy to. . . .
Unthinkingly, she took a step back. Magdalena, turning round, said, “Are you all right?’
“I should go,” Carmel said. Speaking quickly. Panic rose through her like tiny bubbles. All the noise, the sound of the Conversation she had been keeping out, burst in on her. “I have to—” She didn’t finish the thought.
“Wait!” the older woman said—but Carmel was already turning, running, across the vast hall of Level Three, seeking a way out; seeking escape.
Nighttime in Polyport, Titan. Beyond the dome, purples fought with reds as a storm raged. Inside Polyphemus Port itself the air felt hot, humid. She walked down the narrow, twisting streets, avoiding the entrances into the underworld as she stalked the shadows.
Feed on Titan was more diffuse. The local networks thronged and signals were broadcast and captured through the strings of hubs floating out in solar space, but they were fainter here. And anyway what she needed was more immediate. What she needed was a lot more intimate.
Polyport built of ragged stone, foreign flora everywhere, thick vines climbing the one and two storey buildings. She had come here a runaway, hitchhiking on a cargo ship that passed through the Belt, on its way to the Outer System. That’s when it had happened to her.
No one is born shambleau.
It was a dirty old
ship, the Emaciated Saviour: a mile-long, rock-and-metal, trans-solar transport, hacked out of space rock in the docks of Mars orbit, centuries before, its hull pockmarked with countless impacts, its corridors dank; the lights often didn’t work, the recycled air never smelled fresh, the hydroponics gardens were fitfully maintained.
A jungle grew in the belly of the ship. Ancient servitors tried and failed to control its growth. There were rats there, too, an Earth breed that had since spread everywhere, and fire ants, tiny organisms whose bite burned like a flame and could not be eased.
Cargo came from everywhere. In space, cargo was a religion all by itself. It came from Earth, shipped up to orbit, to the massive habitat called Gateway. It came from Lunar Port, and it came from the Belt, from Ceres and Vesta where the wealth of the Belt poured. It came from Tong Yun City and from across Mars: inner system cargo, en route to the outer worlds.
Everything had been fine until that long voyage, that crossing of space. After the Belt, stopping only at a few undistinguished rings and habitats, they made the long journey to Jupiter’s moons, and from there the even longer crossing to the second gas giant, Saturn. When they had arrived at Ganymede she had been too frightened to get off, the Galilean Republics had tight immigration controls and she was already infected.
They finally booted her off the ship on Titan.
She had hitchhiked the ride on the Emaciated Saviour. Room there was aplenty, and the crewman who picked her up was decent enough, he was a Martian Re-born, four-armed in the manner of the Followers of the Way, and did not demand she follow his faith. His name was Moses. She had gotten used to his smell, oil and soil and sweat, to his soft voice, his gentle manners. He was sexually undemanding. Most of the time she wandered the ship, explored the maze of corridors, ventured into the hydroponics jungle. After a Belt childhood the ship felt immense: a whole self-contained world.