by Lavie Tidhar
The shelves inside were arranged by genre.
Romance.
Mystery.
Detection.
Adventure.
And so on.
Life wasn’t like that neat classification system, Achimwene had come to realise. Life was half-completed plots abandoned, heroes dying halfway along their quests, loves requited and un-, some fading inexplicably, some burning short and bright. There was a story of a man who fell in love with a vampire. . . .
Carmel was fascinated by him, but increasingly distant. She did not understand him. He had no taste to him, nothing she could sink her teeth into. She was a predator, she needed feed, and Achimwene could not provide it to her.
That first time, when she had come into his shop, had run her fingers along the spines of ancient books, fascinated, shy: “We had books, on the asteroid,” she admitted, embarrassed, it seemed, by the confession of a shared history. “On Nungai Merurun, we had a library of physical books, they had come in one of the ships, once, a great-uncle traded something for them—” leaving Achimwene with dreams of going into space, of visiting this Ng. Merurun, discovering a priceless treasure hidden away.
Lamely, he had offered her tea. He brewed it on the small primus stove, in a dented saucepan, with fresh mint leaves in the water. Stirred sugar into the glasses. She had looked at the tea in incomprehension, concentrating. It was only later he realised she was trying to communicate with him again.
She frowned, shook her head. She was shaking a little, he realised. “Please,” he said. “Drink.”
“I don’t,” she said. “You’re not.” She gave up.
Achimwene often wondered what the Conversation was like. He knew that, wherever he passed, nearly anything he saw or touched was noded. Humans, yes, but also plants, robots, appliances, walls, solar panels—nearly everything was connected, in an ever-expanding, organically growing Aristocratic Small World network, that spread out, across Central Station, across Tel Aviv and Jaffa, across the interwoven entity that was Palestine/Israel, across that region called the Middle East, across Earth, across trans-solar space and beyond, where the lone spiders sang to each other as they built more nodes and hubs, expanded farther and farther their intricate web. He knew a human was surrounded, every living moment, by the constant hum of other humans, other minds, an endless conversation going on in ways Achimwene could not conceive of. His own life was silent. He was a node of one. He moved his lips. Voice came. That was all. He said, “You are strigoi.”
“Yes.” Her lips twisted in that half-smile. “I am a monster.”
“Don’t say that.” His heart beat fast. He said, “You’re beautiful.”
Her smile disappeared. She came closer to him, the tea forgotten. She leaned into him. Put her lips against his skin, against his neck, he felt her breath, the lightness of her lips on his hot skin. Sudden pain bit into him. She had fastened her lips over the wound, her teeth piercing his skin. He sighed. “Nothing!” she said. She pulled away from him abruptly. “It is like . . . I don’t know!” She shook. He realised she was frightened. He touched the wound on his neck. He had felt nothing. “Always, to buy love, to buy obedience, to buy worship, I must feed,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I drain them of their precious data, bleed them for it, and pay them in dopamine, in ecstasy. But you have no storage, no broadcast, no firewall . . . there is nothing there. You are like a simulacra,” she said. The word pleased her. “A simulacra,” she repeated, softly. “You have the appearance of a man but there is nothing behind your eyes. You do not broadcast.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Achimwene said, anger flaring, suddenly. “I speak. You can hear me. I have a mind. I can express my—”
But she was only shaking her head, and shivering. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I need to feed.”
“Where do you come from?” he once asked her, as they lay on his narrow bed, the window open and the heat making them sweat, and she told him of Ng. Merurun, the tiny asteroid where she grew up, and how she ran away.
“And how did you come to be here?” he said, and sensed, almost before he spoke, her unease, her reluctance to answer. Jealousy flared in him then, and he could not say why.
His sister came to visit him. She walked into the bookshop as he sat behind the desk, typing. He was writing less and less, now; his new life seemed to him a kind of novel.
“Achimwene,” she said.
He raised his head. “Miriam,” he said, heavily.
They did not get along.
“The girl, Carmel. She is with you?”
“I let her stay,” he said, carefully.
“Oh, Achimwene, you are a fool!” she said.
Her boy was with her. “Hey, Kranki,” Achimwene said.
“Anggkel,” the boy said— uncle, in the pidgin. “Yu olsem wanem?”
“I gud,” Achimwene said.
How are you? I am well.
“Fren blong mi Ismail I stap aotside,” Kranki said. “I stret hemi kam insaed?”
My friend Ismail is outside. Is it ok if he comes in?
“I stret,” Achimwene said.
Miriam blinked. “Ismail,” she said. “Where did you come from?”
Kranki had turned, appeared, to all intents and purposes, to play with an invisible playmate. Achimwene said, carefully, “There is no one there.”
“Of course there is,” his sister snapped. “It’s Ismail, the Jaffa boy.”
Achimwene shook his head.
“Listen, Achimwene. The girl. Do you know why she came here?”
“No.”
“She followed Boris.”
“Boris,” Achimwene said. “Your Boris?”
“My Boris,” she said.
“She knew him before?”
“She knew him on Mars. In Tong Yun City.”
“I . . . see.”
“You see nothing, Achi. You are blind like a worm.”
Old words, still with the power to hurt him. They had never been close, somehow. He said, “What do you want, Miriam?”
Her face softened. “I do not want . . . I do not want her to hurt you.”
“I am a grown-up,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”
“Achi, like you ever could!”
Could that be affection in her voice? It sounded like frustration. Miriam said, “Is she here?”
“Kranki,” Achimwene said, “Who are you playing with?”
“Ismail,” Kranki said, pausing in the middle of telling a story to someone only he could see.
“He’s not here,” Achimwene said.
“Sure he is. He’s right there.”
Achimwene formed his lips into an O of understanding. “Is he virtual?” he said.
Kranki shrugged. “I guess,” he said. He clearly felt uncomfortable with—or didn’t understand—the question. Achimwene let it go.
His sister said, “I like the girl, Achi.”
It took him by surprise. “You’ve met her?”
“She has a sickness. She needs help.”
“I am helping her! I’m trying to!”
But his sister only shook her head.
“Go away, Miriam,” he said, feeling suddenly tired, depressed.
His sister said, “Is she here?”
“She is resting.”
Above his shop there was a tiny flat, accessible by narrow, twisting stairs. It wasn’t much but it was home. “Carmel?” his sister called. “Carmel!”
There was a sound above, as of someone moving. Then a lack of sound. Achimwene watched his sister standing impassively. Realised she was talking, in the way of other people, with Carmel. Communicating in a way that was barred to him. Then normal sound again, feet on the stairs, and Carmel came into the room.
“Hi,” she said, awkwardly. She came and stood closer to Achimwene, then took his hand in hers. The feel of her small, cold fingers in between his hands startled him and made pleasure spread throughout his body, like warmth in the blood. Nothing more was said. The physic
al action was itself an act of speaking.
Miriam nodded.
Then Kranki startled them all.
Carmel had spent the previous night feeding. There were willing victims, in Central Station. Being fed on gave pleasure. . . .
Achimwene told himself he didn’t mind. When Carmel came back she moved lethargically, and he knew she was drunk on data. She had tried to describe it to him once, but he didn’t really understand it, what it was like.
He had lain there on the narrow bed with her and watched the moon outside, and the floating lanterns with their rudimentary intelligence. He had his arm around the sleeping Carmel, and he had never felt happier.
Kranki turned and regarded Carmel. He whispered something to the air—to the place Ismail was standing, Achimwene guessed. He giggled at the reply and turned to Carmel.
“Are you a vampire?” he said.
“Kranki!”
At the horrified look on Miriam’s face, Achimwene wanted to laugh. Carmel said, “No, it’s all right—” in pidgin. I stret nomo.
But she was watching the boy intently. “Who is your friend?” she said, softly.
“It’s Ismail. He lives in Jaffa on the hill.”
“And what is he?” Carmel said. “What are you?”
The boy didn’t seem to understand the question. “He is him. I am me. We are . . .” he hesitated.
“Nakaimas . . .” Carmel whispered. The sound of her voice made Achimwene shiver. That same cold run of ice down his spine, like in the old books, like when Ringo the Gunslinger met a horror from beyond the grave out on the lonesome prairies.
He knew the word, though never understood the way people used it. He thought it meant to somehow, impossibly, transcend the Conversation.
“Kranki . . .” The warning tone in Miriam’s voice was unmistakable. But neither Kranki nor Carmel paid her any heed. “I could show you,” the boy said. His clear, blue eyes seemed curious, guileless. He stepped forward and stood directly in front of Carmel, reaching to her, trustingly. Carmel, momentarily, hesitated. Then she reached for his hot little hand.
It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives, by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes the master. A circle is completed. And so on.
It was the next morning that Achimwene’s story changed, for him. It had been a Romance, perhaps, of sorts. But now it became a Mystery.
Perhaps they chose it, by tacit agreement, as a way to bind them, to make this curious relationship, this joining of two ill-fitted individuals somehow work. Or perhaps it was curiosity that motivated them after all, that earliest of motives, the most human and the most suspect, the one that had led Adam to the Tree, in the dawn of Story.
The next morning Carmel came down the stairs. Achimwene had slept in the bookshop that night, curled up in a thin blanket on top of a mattress he had kept by the wall and which was normally laden with books. The books, pushed aside, formed an untidy wall around him as he slept, an alcove within an alcove.
Carmel came down. Her hair moved sluggishly around her skull. She wore a thin cotton shift; he could see how thin she was.
Achimwene said, “Tell me what happened yesterday.”
Carmel shrugged. “Is there any coffee?”
“You know where it is.”
He sat up, feeling self-conscious and angry. Pulling the blanket over his legs. Carmel went to the primus stove, filled the pot with water from the tap, added spoons of black coffee carelessly. Set it to cook.
“The boy is . . . a sort of strigoi,” she said. “Maybe. Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“What did he do?”
“He gave me something. He took something away. A memory. Mine or someone else’s. It’s no longer there.”
“What did he give you?”
“Knowledge. That he exists.”
“Nakaimas.”
“Yes.” She laughed, a sound as bitter as the coffee. “Black magic. Like me. Not like me.”
“You were a weapon,” he said. She turned, sharply. There were two coffee cups on the table. Glass on varnished wood. “What?”
“I read about it.”
“Always your books.”
He couldn’t tell by her tone how she meant it. He said, “There are silences in your Conversation. Holes.” Could not quite picture it, to him there was only a silence. Said, “The books have answers.”
She poured coffee, stirred sugar into the glasses. Came over and sat beside him, her side pressing into his. Passed him a cup. “Tell me,” she said.
He took a sip. The coffee burned his tongue. Sweet. He began to talk quickly. “I read up on the condition. Strigoi. Shambleau. There are references from the era of the Shangri-La virus, contemporary accounts. The Kunming Labs were working on genetic weapons, but the war ended before the strain could be deployed—they sold it off-world, it went loose, it spread. It never worked right. There are hints—I need access to a bigger library. There are only rumours. Cryptic footnotes.”
“Saying what?”
“Suggesting a deeper purpose. Or that Strigoi was but a side effect of something else. A secret purpose. . . .”
Perhaps they wanted to believe. Everyone needs a mystery.
She stirred beside him. Turned to face him. Smiled. It was perhaps the first time she ever truly smiled at him. Her teeth were long, and sharp.
“We could find out,” she said.
“Together,” he said. He drank his coffee, to hide his excitement. But he knew she could tell.
“We could be detectives.”
“Like Judge Dee,” he said.
“Who?”
“Some detective.”
“Book detective,” she said, dismissively.
“Like Bill Glimmung, then,” he said. Her face lit up. For a moment she looked very young. “I love those stories,” she said.
Even Achimwene had seen Glimmung features. They had been made in 2D, 3D, full-immersion, as scent narratives, as touch-tapestry—Martian Hardboiled, they called the genre, the Phobos Studios cranked out hundreds of them over decades if not centuries, Elvis Mandela had made the character his own.
“Like Bill Glimmung, then,” she said solemnly, and he laughed.
“Like Glimmung,” he said.
And so the lovers, by complicit agreement, became detectives.
“There was something else,” Carmel said.
Achimwene said, “What?”
They were walking together in the sideways of Central Station. Carmel said, “When I came in. Came down.” She shook her head in frustration and a solitary dreadlock snaked around her mouth, making her blow on it to move it away. “When I came to Earth.”
Those few words evoked in Achimwene a nameless longing. So much to infer, so much suggested, to a man who had never left his home town. Carmel said, “I bought a new identity in Tong Yun, before I came. The best you could. From a Conch—”
Looking at him to see if he understood. Achimwene did. A Conch was a human who had been ensconced, welded into a permanent pod-cum-exoskeleton. He was only part human, had become part digital by extension. It was not unsimilar, in some ways, to the eunuchs of old Earth. Achimwene said, “I see?”
Carmel said, “It worked. When I passed through Central Station security I was allowed through, with no problems. The . . . the digitals did not pick up on my . . . nature. The fake ident was accepted.”
“So?”
Carmel sighed, and a loose dreadlock tickled Achimwene’s neck, sending a warmth rushing through him. “So is that likely?” she said. She stopped walking then, when Achimwene stopped also, she started pacing. A floating lantern bobbed beside them for a few moments then, as though sensing their intensity, drifted away, leaving them in shadow. “There are no strigoi on Earth,” Carmel said.
“How do we know for sure?” Achimwene said.
“It’s
one of those things. Everyone knows it.”
Achimwene shrugged. “But you’re here,” he pointed out.
Carmel waved her finger; stuck it in his face. “And how likely is that?” she yelled, startling him. “I believed it worked, because I wanted to believe it. But surely they know! I am not human, Achi! My body is riddled with nodal filaments, exabytes of data, hostile protocols! You want to tell me they didn’t know?”
Achimwene shook his head. Reached for her, but she pulled away from him. “What are you saying?” he said.
“They let me through.” Her voice was matter of fact.
“Why?” Achimwene said. “Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Achimwene chewed his lip. Intuition made a leap in his mind, neurons singing to neurons. “You think it is because of those children,” he said.
Carmel stopped pacing. He saw how pale her face was, how delicate. “Yes,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you must ask a digital,” he said. “You must ask an Other.”
She glared at him. “Why would they talk to me?” she said.
Achimwene didn’t have an answer. “We can proceed the way we agreed,” he said, a little lamely. “We’ll get the answers. Sooner or later, we’ll figure it out, Carmel.”
“How?” she said.
He pulled her to him. She did not resist. The words from an old book rose into Achimwene’s mind, and with them the entire scene. “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said.
And so on a sweltering hot day, Achimwene and the strigoi Carmel left Central Station, on foot, and shortly thereafter crossed the invisible barrier that separated the old neighbourhood from the city of Tel Aviv proper. Achimwene walked slowly; an electronic cigarette dangled from his lips, another vintage affectation, and the fedora hat he wore shaded him from the sun even as his sweat drenched into the brim of the hat. Beside him Carmel was cool in a light blue dress. They came to Allenby Street and followed it towards the Carmel Market— “It’s like my name,” Carmel said, wonderingly.
“It is an old name,” Achimwene said. But his attention was elsewhere.
“Where are we going?” Carmel said. Achimwene smiled, white teeth around the metal casing of the cigarette. “Every detective,” he said, “needs an informant.”