The Tourist

by Robert Dickinson

  Picon takes his place on the sofa next to his collection of phones and controls. “You had questions.”

  “Regarding my client,” I say.

  “You haven’t found her yet? I’ve given up.”

  “So she hasn’t been in touch?”

  “Since yesterday? No. She hasn’t called. She hasn’t turned up at my door to apologise. Like I said, I’ve given up. She’s your client, after all. She was never my responsibility.”

  Li sits next to the woman and says something I don’t catch. The woman is surprised, as if she’s not used to Picon’s guests talking to her. This makes Picon uncomfortable. “We may need to talk to your friends,” I say. “They may know something about our client.”

  “They wouldn’t talk to you.”

  “Why not?”

  Li and the woman have started a whispered conversation. He watches Li carefully. I wonder if he’s trying to lip-read. “Because they don’t like dealing with the authorities.”

  “Because they’re criminals.”

  “That’s going too far. We may be marginal people here but we’re not that marginal. We can’t afford to break the law.”

  “So how does it work? How do you pay your couriers?”

  “I don’t.” He’s casual. “About a year ago I had a visitor, a work colleague. She was fed up with her position and wanted to start a new life. She decided that one day she’d like to live here. So we came to an agreement. She finds people who are prepared to carry tonin and pays for their time here. And every time I receive a delivery I put some credit aside for her. It’s like any other banking system: two sets of ledgers and trust. When she’s able to leave she’ll have enough to be comfortable here.”

  “Like you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Won’t Geneva give her credit?”

  “Not enough to live on. Not comfortably. Does that answer your question?”

  Li and the woman are still talking. Li asks long questions; the woman gives short answers. She laughs at one of Li’s remarks. Picon tries to maintain his relaxed/bored posture but the tension is obvious.

  “Can I ask why you became an extemp?”

  The question surprises him. He opens his mouth but it’s several seconds before he can speak. “The usual reason.” He tries to sound casual. “Freedom. We might complain about all the prohibitions and the protocols we have here, but they’re nothing compared to where I lived before. Every aspect of life was monitored, controlled. You’re younger. You can’t imagine what that kind of society was like. Everything was a test, and everything was set up so you would fail.” He warms to the subject, as if he’s only just realised how much he wanted to talk about this. He even forgets the other conversation in the room. “Everything we’re told is a half-truth. You’ve realised that, haven’t you? One of the tests is how well you can pretend to believe in it. The pretence all the time, the acting—it was exhausting. I played the part for as long as I could and as soon as I saw a chance to escape I came here. It was like being reborn. I wouldn’t want to endanger that.”

  The woman stares at him, speechless. I wonder if it’s because she understands Modern or she’s just not used to hearing him speak.

  “I see,” I say. “Do you know a local called Alexander Metzger?”

  He slumps back against the sofa. “No. What is he?”

  “An academic. Greek lyric poetry.”

  “Not my scene.”

  “An organisation called the EPP?”

  “I’ve heard of them. Politics. They’re the sort of people who think DomeWatch is too accommodating. The fringe of the fringe. Do you think your client’s involved with them?”

  “I just wanted your perspective.”

  “Glad to be of help. Any other irrelevant questions you’d like to ask?”

  “Just one. Do you know an extemp called Ivan Ho?”

  “I used to.” Picon grimaces. “We had a disagreement.”

  “What about?”

  “He denied he’d stolen money from me.” Picon relaxes: Ivan is a safe subject. We’re not asking him to blab about a friend. “Cash, some local currency I was holding. I wouldn’t waste time talking to him. He’s a liar, a fantasist.” Meaning: don’t believe anything he tells you about me.

  “Do you know where we might find him?”

  “Not around here.” He smiles. “Stand in the street and whisper tonin three times. That should make him appear. There’s a native pub you can try. He used to go there a lot, I remember. Or he used to talk about it a lot. Is there anything else you want to ask? Because I am expecting guests.”

  Out on the street Li says, “That wasn’t quite what I expected.”

  “Did the woman tell you anything?”

  “She’s taken tonin, but didn’t know about anything else. She hasn’t been there long. She said I should ask the other girls. All she knows is that he lets them sit around in his big house and take tonin. He doesn’t talk to them much. She thought he thought they were stupid.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I felt like contacting DomeWatch. Did you notice his accent? When he did his big speech it changed. I’ve heard the accent before. When I was growing up some refugees were settled in my quarter. Unskilled workers, so of course they sent them to Three North. They learned the language quickly enough but there was always still a trace. You don’t forget it. I think he’s from City Two East.”

  “Really?” Depending on who you ask City Two East is either a joke or a threat. It’s closed, uncooperative and one of the reasons I had military training. “Two East doesn’t have extemps. They don’t travel. According to his records he’s from One West.”

  “Did he sound like he was describing One West to you? And he had the accent. It was faint, but it was there.”

  “Maybe he was one of those refugees.”

  “Refugees didn’t become regional resource manager. Not in his generation. And they don’t have names like Delrosso.”

  “He could have changed his name. Worked his way up.” We head for the taxi rank. I wait for Hayek to tell me I’ve asked all the wrong questions but he’s silent. Perhaps I’m doing something right.

  Edge of the territory

  You’re suddenly awake. “How long was I asleep?”

  Riemann turns away. He was watching you. “Three hours.”

  “And you never sleep?”

  He shakes his head, looks pleased with himself. He’s young, of course. You remember how it felt: it felt like nothing. You wonder how he occupies himself on this journey. Perhaps he listens to music or one of those interminable dramas they seem to like. When you broke out of the room the local had been listening to music; that’s why you were able to hurt him. Riemann seems too careful for those distractions.

  “We’ll be at the perimeter soon,” he says.

  “Already?”

  “Yesterday you complained about how long it was taking.” He looks at you with something like concern. “Are you sure you’ll still know your way around?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He looks doubtful.

  When you reach the perimeter you’re allowed to walk in the open. It’s because there’s nothing to see except low clouds moving slowly in the direction you came. The land ahead is flat.

  Riemann leaves you to wait outside the vehicle while he makes arrangements for the last stretch of the journey. Or has the arrangements explained to him. He looks anxious, as if expecting a reprimand. When he walks away there’s an exaggerated swing to his step you recognise as bravado.

  You feel sorry for him.

  You’re at the edge of Number City territory. As a child you’d imagined there would be fortifications, a wall of some kind. When they talked about the Number Cities spreading you pictured a wall moving outwards, crushing everything in its path. Instead there are only the remains of a road and a few concrete blocks with weeds sprouting between them. The rest is scrubland, wild grass, dust and dirt. A few people walk from one building to another. They’
re wearing uniforms rather than protective suits. They ignore you.

  Before he left Riemann said, “This is your chance to run.” He knows you won’t. You’re still half a day’s drive from home. No food, no tools, no shelter if it rains. You walked home once but that was a long time ago and you carried a week’s provisions and a tent. Lately your only exercise has been to walk twice a day from your cell to Room Two. It isn’t enough preparation. Even looking at the flat road to the horizon makes you feel weak.

  And you begin to feel apprehensive about what you might find. Every time he asks you assure him you haven’t forgotten. How could you? But each time you try to remember, say, the route from the home to the school you have the sense you’ve missed something—a stretch of road, a building. You tell yourself you’ll recognise everything when you see it but what if you don’t? Home will have changed when the bombs fell, if they’d used bombs—you were already in captivity when it happened and were never given details. They used euphemisms, like all cowards. The action has been taken; the area has been cleared. You knew what they meant by clearance. As a girl you were shown the pictures: charred bodies stacked on open ground, corpses dragged from crude underground shelters. Clearance meant murder, Burn everything and hide the evidence. You were raised on stories of atrocities. Even now, you can feel an echo of the anger you felt as a child. You shouldn’t feel sorry for Riemann. He isn’t on your side.

  He returns alone. “They’ve found us a vehicle. The medical team arrive tomorrow. They’ll wait here until they receive our signal.” He looks tired, as if the meeting hadn’t gone as he expected. “The sooner we leave,” he says. He leads you to what looks like a smaller, dustier version of the vehicle you came in. A solar: it won’t be fast, but it’s sturdy. You’ll search during the day, sleep in the vehicle at night. It will shield you from some of the damage. He opens the back to show you how it’s divided into two compartments, one for supplies, and an inner one just large enough for a cot. “That’s where you’ll sleep.” Another cell. He’ll sleep in the cabin. You’ve been given protective suits in case the levels are dangerous but won’t have to put them on for another fifty miles, if at all. As long as you stay in the open for less than an hour at a time you’ll be safe. “We leave immediately.”

  “You know the direction?”

  “We follow the road. What’s left of it.”

  You climb into the cabin beside him. The landscape doesn’t change as the solar rolls east. After twenty minutes you fall asleep. When you wake up the landscape is still flat and unfamiliar. You close your eyes: perhaps when you open them you’ll find this is a dream and you’ll be back in the prison. You try to think of the cell and the image that comes is the safe house where you were sent after escaping from the shop. It puzzles you why you can picture this so clearly when you were there for only a few days—three or four; the exact number has gone. You remember the disposition of the rooms and the views from the windows. Three or four days, out of how many years? You try counting them up: your life started when you were brought to Kat. The time before that is lost. Ten years in Kat, five in Spad; two weeks in the 21st; everything that’s happened since, up to Riemann’s arrival at your prison. You add it up and somehow you seem to have missed at least a decade.

  You open your eyes. You’re driving along a straight, uneven road through a grassy plain. Riemann glances at you. Once again he looks concerned. You grope for a question to show you are in control. “These people you’re looking for, are they worth all this trouble?” It’s a question that’s been nagging you. Riemann doesn’t answer.

  Traditional native

  The pub where Picon thinks we’ll find Ivan is in a commercial area built around the middle of the last century, a precursor to their malls. The shops are closed but the street is still busy with natives, most of them young and already drunk, circulating around the dozen or so bars that are dark and raucous, as if, Li says, they can’t bear to look at or listen to each other. Ivan’s pub is traditional native: cluttered, uncomfortable, not quite as loud and selling drinks for which I may never acquire a taste. Ivan isn’t there. Li buys a pint of one of the drinks. “Try it,” she says. “You’ll have worse in the early 19th.” Everybody else in the pub is native. We attract the usual covert attention. “So,” she asks, “how do you feel about playing detective?”

  She uses the old word from this era’s entertainments. “It’s what Hayek wants.” I’ve told her about Hayek. Her resort has an equivalent: Oberon Petkov. Stays in his inner office, is rumoured to have had his entire alimentary tract replaced and to need no sleep. She’s never seen him. “How do you feel about playing sidekick?”

  “It’s better than dealing with the Shins. So you’re Safety now? Is this what you want to do?”

  “It’s an unofficial secondment.” I’d had one before, in the Tunnels, when supplies went missing. We were too far out for proper investigators to travel and, as the chief said when he assigned me, At least you can write a report. The people who worked the Tunnels were not sophisticated criminals. All I had to do was ask the obvious suspects, “Was it you?” until one of them said, “Yes.” It was the easiest promotion I ever earned. “Whatever she’s doing, she is my client.”

  “That’s a careful answer. And you think Ivan will tell you anything? What happened to the Anachronist connection?”

  “Ruled out.”

  “Shame. That might have made it interesting. You know, don’t you, that Ivan is going to lie.”

  “He’ll let something slip.”

  “Because you’re an experienced interrogator? You’re going to read between the lines? You should have brought Edda. I bet she’s had training. I bet she was top of her class—” She stops abruptly. “Here comes somebody.”

  It’s a native. He’s wearing a jacket that looks like one of our cast-offs from a few years ago, a real one, not a Domehead imitation. The fibres are starting to lose their lustre: the yellows have gone and the tonal range is a shifting blue-grey. It’s too big for him, but he’s rolled up the sleeves and wears it as a three-quarter-length coat. I’d say he was about fifty, but it’s hard to tell with natives. He could be thirty. He could be nineteen. He’s dark and has very black hair which he’s brushed so it stands straight up. He pulls a chair from the next table and joins us. There’s a swagger about the way he does it. “We don’t see many of you here.” His Modern is passable. “Are you friends of Ivan?”

  Li answers in This English. “We thought he might be here.”

  “He might be along later.” Natives look at us and see money. Already I can see this one asking himself: What can I make out of this? “Yes, Ivan comes here a lot. He says we’re helpful here. Very helpful.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes. We don’t see many people like you. Mind you, we had one the other day. She was asking about Ivan.”

  He stops there. I can see his ploy. He establishes he’s of value then waits for one of us to make an offer.

  Li doesn’t have the patience. “Another friend of his?”

  “Depends on what you mean by a friend.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Never seen her before.” He addresses Li. He hasn’t heard me speak yet. It’s possible he thinks I wouldn’t understand. “But then I’ve never seen you before.”

  Li is cool. “Ivan knows us.”

  “He likes to be careful.”

  “I’m sure he’d talk to us. Why don’t you ask him? Tell him it’s Li Tran.”

  “I’ll see.” He walks out of the pub. Either Ivan is waiting outside or the local doesn’t want to make the call in our presence.

  Li watches the door. “People looking for Ivan? Is that likely?”

  “It might happen. He must have some friends.”

  “Not in this era. People don’t look for Ivan. He looks for them.”

  The man re-enters. “Left him a message.” He sits down, and waits with the air of someone expecting payment.

  “So,” Li says more casuall
y than I could manage, “the one who was looking for Ivan, did she find him?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Did you tell her anything?”

  “Didn’t get a chance. She looked around, asked a few questions and left.”

  “Could you describe her?”

  He stares straight at Li. “She looked like you.”

  Not helpful. “Is that all you can tell us?”

  “She might have been a bit younger.” He turns out his palms. “And a bit taller. But that’s all. Apart from that, she was like you.”

  I take out my handheld and show him the client’s image. “Was this her?”

  The man stares. “It might be.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No. But it might be.”

  “You mean,” Li says, “we all look the same.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Thanks,” Li says. We’re not going to get any more out of him. “Get you a drink?”

  The man accepts glumly. Li takes him to the bar where he chooses a triple measure of the most expensive whisky on display. She pays in cash. He mumbles his thanks and drinks it alone, at another table without looking at us. First he sips it, as if he wants to make it last, then he seems to change his mind, gulps it down and leaves. The other customers manage to not quite ignore us. Perhaps they’re waiting to see who’ll talk to us next.

  “A person,” Li says, “looking like me. Or your client. You should have shown him a picture of Edda to see if he could tell the difference.”

  “I don’t have one. Besides, whoever was looking for him was an extemp. A civilian. If they were official they’d have tracked Ivan’s signature. They wouldn’t be asking around in places like this.”

  Li frowns. “So this extemp is what? Your client’s contact?”

  “No idea. It might have been the client herself. Ivan might be involved with whatever she’s doing. He must do something when he’s not bothering reps.”

  Ivan walks in. He notices us immediately, and looks carefully at the rest of the pub. His expression is serious, as it was on the night of the Bar Five fire. I’ve seen him intent, when he thinks there’s tonin to be had, and I’m familiar with his usual bonhomie, his glad-handing, back-slapping, effortful impression of cheerfulness. I’ve never seen him like this. In the second or so it takes him to peer round the room he’s almost thoughtful. Then, abruptly, the mask is back on, and he rolls towards us with his dancing walk, arms swinging just enough to suggest high spirits. His sleeves, I notice with relief, are rolled down.