The Tourist

by Robert Dickinson

  “I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy your time here. I’ve loved it. There are still so many things I want to see. And I’m sorry to leave you so suddenly but I really have to go.” She jumps to her feet. “I’m catching a train. To London!” She expects you to be impressed. “A train!” you say with appropriate awe. “I want to see the march,” she says as if she expects you to know what she’s talking about. “I would have missed it otherwise. I can’t thank you enough.” She backs away, and waves one last time when she reaches the door. You wait for the prescribed time, then leave.

  After that everything happens exactly as the woman said. You take a bus back to Resort Six. The other travellers crowd on, still talking about the trouble they’ve heard about or seen for themselves: broken windows, fires in the streets, police riding actual horses. They wonder about the cause: a new tax, politics. Do you think it could be us? Once in the resort you walk around the Entertainment Area until it’s time to enter the corridor that leads to their travel zone. You tell the Safety at the gate you think you dropped your mother’s kin ring when you arrived. Has anything been found? Do you mind if I look? Allowing you in is probably against their rules but the Number Cities are sentimental about kin. He waves you through with a smile and jokes about not spending too long. Number City people are usually reluctant to enter the corridor. You can’t understand why: you find it soothing. You break into a run as soon as you’re out of sight and keep running until you reach the zone. The barriers don’t fall, just as you’d been told. You cross the zone, throwing away the bracelet that identifies you as Arne Vasilis, and climb into the transport. It astonishes you that it’s left unattended, the door unlocked, as if a winding corridor is enough to protect it.

  You find the panel and carry out the memorised procedure. Twelve switches, a precise sequence. You strap yourself into a seat and promptly fall asleep. That’s the end of your first visit to the 21st.

  Millies

  Edda says, “He’s awake.”

  It’s true. I am.

  I’m looking at the ceiling of a medical room. I can move my head. Edda is on my left side, in her rep’s uniform. I wonder what I could have done to inspire such loyalty.

  There is nobody else in the room.

  Which means she’s here as a proxy, reporting back.

  She says, “What can you remember?” Her gaze is level, as if she’s been told to keep her head still.

  I say, “What happened to Riemann?”

  There’s a pause. “Who?”

  “The person who was in the corridor with me.”

  Another pause. “There was nobody with you.”

  “The Safety saw him. Spoke to him.”

  “You were the only person we found.”

  “And my client?”

  “It wasn’t your client.”

  “I saw her.”

  “You need to rest.”

  I break eye contact. You never get used to talking via proxies. I’m not even sure whether I’m talking to Hayek or Erquist in official mode or Resort Six’s equivalents, self-pitying Ban and the unsleeping Oberon Petkov. Now I’m no longer gazing into Edda’s eyes I look at the rest of the room. A standard medical bay of the kind I’ve seen twice before, both times to check up on clients who’d eaten the native food. I’m not, I’m relieved to notice, attached to any machines. Nothing seems to hurt. My arms are fine, I can’t feel any bandages on my face. There seems to be nothing wrong.

  I look down. My left foot is missing.

  I throw back the sheet to make sure. My left leg stops just above where the ankle should be. The wound has been dressed so the leg ends in a soft white stump. I look back at Edda. I can feel my foot. I can feel the toes flex. Except it isn’t there.

  “We’re very sorry.” Edda repeats an official condolence. “But you’re lucky to be alive.”

  “How long have I been unconscious?” Long enough for the wound to be treated. Long enough for Edda to have been recruited to her new role.

  “Three days.” Edda uses a different intonation. It means a different person is now speaking through her. “We tried waking you yesterday but you were incoherent.”

  “Three days,” I repeat numbly. Knight, it occurs to me, may already be dead from his gang-related activity. I feel sorry for him, though also relieved that I don’t kill him after all.

  “There was a translation.” Edda switches back to her first voice. “It’s being investigated. We don’t know if anybody was present.”

  “There must have been somebody.”

  “That’s being investigated.”

  “It was our client.”

  “The person who entered the tunnel was a guest of the resort. She returned yesterday via Resort Two. I’m sorry, Spens, but there’s no record of anybody else entering the approach.”

  “But the translation—”

  “Is being investigated.”

  It’s no use arguing. “So what now?”

  “Now? We apologise to two hundred and thirty-six Heritage clients for a delay in their homeward journey. And we report a technical failure leading to an unfortunate injury.”

  “My foot.”

  “We’re very sorry.”

  “And what happens to me?” Is this—finally—my breach of protocol?

  “You’ll stay in Resort Six until you’ve stabilised.” The second tone again. Edda distinguishes between the two voices well. She’s probably had dramatic training. She’ll go far in the Happiness Executive. “We’ve sourced a prosthetic design from one of our South American centres. We don’t, as a rule, see many amputees in resort medical bays. It will serve you until you get home. It won’t be ready until tomorrow afternoon. You should be free to leave the day after that.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll let you rest now. No, I don’t think more questions are appropriate.” Edda smiles. “Sorry, I wasn’t supposed to say that last part. They’re arguing among themselves. I’m going to disconnect.” There’s a pause. She seems to be listening for something. “They’ve gone.” She relaxes.

  “They’re probably still listening.”

  “Not through me.” She sits on the bed. “They’re probably monitoring this room anyway. But at least they’re out of my head.” She lowers her face close to mine and whispers, “I don’t know everything that’s happening, but all excursions have been cancelled. All the reps living outside have been ordered back to the resorts. There are rumours that extemps will be called back as well. The clients are being sent home early to make room.”

  “For what?”

  “There’s nothing official.” She kisses my cheek, a gentle smudge with her lips. “I’ll let Li know you’re conscious. She was concerned.”

  “Thanks.” She leaves. I try to think about what she said and immediately fall asleep.

  I wake up alone. The lights are dimmed. I lie on the bed, not moving, staring up at the blank ceiling screen, a black rectangle surrounded by dark grey. If I move my arm the lights should come on. I think about my foot. There was nothing in my record about losing a foot: I should have been told. It’s important information, more important than losing a job. I flex the toes under the sheet, rotate the ankle. I can feel every movement, and half expect it to be enough to turn on the lights. Except there’s no movement and nothing to move. I’m surprised at how detached I feel: I’d have expected to be more upset. One of my team in the Tunnels lost a hand after being bitten. He was never the same afterwards. I’m relieved the accident happened in a resort and that I didn’t wake up in one of the native hospitals. Instead I have modern treatment and medication that promotes a mood of calm acceptance. I wonder—abstractly—why I wasn’t sent home. Instead they’re bringing a prosthesis from halfway around the world.

  The thought of South America reminds me of Riemann. There was an entertainment when I was young about a team of adventurers who kept finding themselves in different periods of history: one week they’d be in 13th-century Spain, the next in 5th-century Byzantium. At the beginnin
g of each episode they would arrive somewhere and get separated from their transport. Their only way of getting back to it was to find out as much they could about wherever it was they’d crashed. Because they didn’t speak the language they usually spent a lot of time hiding. Each episode ended with them back in the transport and hoping that this time it would get them home. Schools liked the show because it was educational—you really did learn a lot about the different periods and there were usually actual images from the times in question. Older children liked it because it was fun to spot the same actors and extras turning up week after week—last week’s Martin Luther was this week’s unnamed boyar and the week before’s Mayan priest. There were, after all, only a limited number of performers short enough to play people from earlier periods. (Li claims her mother appeared in several episodes.) I remember the series fondly because of the episode in which the characters meet Brink and Nakamura—or actors pretending to be Brink and Nakamura. The series presented them as amusing eccentrics, but I thought there was something heroic about them. I was so impressed I mentioned it to a teacher who told me that Brink and Nakamura were real people whose archive—the account of their experiences and their recordings—had been recovered only a few years earlier. That entertainment, in a way, changed my life.

  The people who reliably didn’t like it were techs, for tech reasons: the depiction of travel was nonsense, their transport should have disintegrated after the crash, and even if you conceded it was a special experimental model that could generate its own energy the passengers would still have been torn to pieces. Some of those pieces might have been large enough to survive a second trip, but the attrition would have been deadly. Without proper medical intervention not one of the team would have survived the loss of their first limb.

  Riemann had stepped into the cordon. He was unlikely to have survived. He wasn’t stuck in the Cretaceous with only my foot for company.

  A shame. I’d liked him when he was ten. The loss seems remote, a theoretical sadness. It must be the medication.

  He’d mentioned Cantor in the approach. The next time you see my brother… If I see ever Cantor again it’ll be back in the 24th, when Riemann is still young and alive. It’s probably a good thing I’ve lost touch. I wouldn’t know what to say to either of them.

  My foot. I’ll have to get used to a prosthesis. Neith, who lost his hand in the Tunnels, never got used to his. Even after he was given the customised replacement he used to say it didn’t feel the same. He would find himself staring at it, waiting for it to move. On bad days, he said, he didn’t feel like himself any more. Even when performing ordinary actions—holding a cup, turning a key—he could never be entirely sure if it was what he wanted to do or what the hand had tricked him into doing. He’d lost his sense of agency.

  A foot shouldn’t be such a problem. What do you do with a foot? You walk on it, or stand on it. Occasionally you might run or kick with it, or dance. A prosthesis can manage all that. A foot is not a hand. It’s not in front of you the whole time. We don’t say: I know it like the sole of my foot. It’s possible to work with somebody for years without ever seeing their feet.

  But still. It’s gone. The part of you that was your contact with the ground has gone. Even when the prosthesis has been replaced, the nerve endings spliced into a cultivated mirror image of your remaining foot, a connection will have been lost. You’ll be walking on a simulacrum, indistinguishable from the real foot, but not the same. It will be a foot without history. (Neith kept his new hand gloved for the first week. When he removed the glove the skin was as pale and soft as a baby’s. He was told it would take years before it was properly conditioned.)

  Poor Neith. I hadn’t thought about him since reaching the 21st. I lost touch with him after I left the Tunnels and he signed on for another five years. It’s said if you don’t leave after your first term you never leave. I’d had enough. When I left I lost touch with all of them: Neith, Ansah, Joneson, Hindemith, Oyego… For me, the Tunnels had been a means to an end. For them, the Tunnels were the end. I feel a wave of nostalgia that probably owes more to painkillers than any fond memories. Fond memories are what we make later, when we’re at a safe distance.

  I sit up, which turns on the lights. I point at the screen. It remains blank. This is a medical bay: possibly it’s been set to ignore what might be involuntary movements. There must be a manual control somewhere. I look around for a box or a sensor. Nothing. Everything here is managed remotely. The patient is no more than a subject to be studied, a baby who can’t be trusted around elaborate machines. I swing out of the bed, intent for a moment on marching out to seek help, and stop when my foot—my remaining foot—touches the floor. I stop for what seems a long time. If I’m in a medical area then I’ll be between an Entertainment Area and the Safety Office. I calculate how far I could comfortably hop and swing back onto the bed. This time my stump starts to tingle. For the first time it feels like an end point. There is no ghostly presence beyond it, no illusion of normality. I lie back on the bed wondering if my movement has attracted any attention.

  It’s only a foot. We can replace feet. Brink had typhus. He never got home. He died, years later, in Moscow. Nakamura buried him, wrote the postscript to their joint memoir, concealed the archive and then disappears from the record. A foot is nothing.

  When I open my eyes the lights are still on. Edda is standing by the bed next to an older woman wearing the traditional whites. “One,” she says. She’s been counting down. “Welcome back. How do you feel?”

  I look down the bed. My foot has returned, or something that has the shape of a foot. My stump tingles. “How long was I asleep?” I twist my leg. The foot-thing moves.

  “Two days,” Edda says, smiling. This time she’s not connected.

  “Two days?” Asleep isn’t quite the word. “Why?”

  “It seemed the safest course.” The doctor doesn’t elaborate. “How does your foot feel?”

  “Which one?”

  “Is there any pain?”

  I move my leg again. “There’s no pain.” But there’s something, a shimmer of nerves, which might, without the drugs, eventually become pain.

  “Are you ready to try walking?”

  “Should I be?”

  As if in answer she throws back the sheet. The thing at the end of my leg is what a foot would look like if it was encased in a flesh-coloured plastic sock. It’s slightly darker than my leg, and narrower than my other foot. There’s a white strap at the join. When I move my leg it doesn’t fall off.

  “We had some trouble finding one that would take your weight,” the doctor says. “That should be adequate until you can get a proper replacement. If it had been my decision I would have sent you back. It would have been less trouble for everybody.”

  I sit up in the bed, turn to face them, and swing my feet onto the floor. Edda and the doctor move so they’re on each side of me, Edda on my right. She puts a hand gently on my shoulder. I wonder if she’s here because she wants to be here or because she’s following orders. It’s an unworthy thought. The room is already full of monitoring devices. She’s chosen this.

  I stand up, putting as much weight as possible on my right leg. It doesn’t hurt. There’s a sensation of pressure that doesn’t quite rise to pain. Slowly I shift more weight onto my other leg. The doctor watches me coldly. She’s seen this before. They don’t have many amputations in resorts: I wonder if she’s been brought in from outside, possibly from South America. I wonder if she ever met Riemann. The sensation of pressure changes, still without becoming pain. It’s pain at a distance.

  I ask Edda, “So what’s been happening while I was asleep?” I can’t quite believe another two days have passed. Unconsciousness is its own form of travel.

  “Worry about that later.” The doctor keeps glancing from my foot to my face. “Shift all of that weight. You’re doing very well.” Her tone suggests she’s used to working with children.

  “They don’t tell us what’s happe
ning,” Edda says. “But they’ve started sending back clients. Two transports a day.”

  “Is your weight evenly distributed?” The doctor steps back and waves at Edda to do the same. “Good. You can stand unassisted. Now try to take a step forward.”

  I move my right leg. For a split second all my weight is pressing down on my stump. It’s uncomfortable, but no more than wearing the wrong-sized shoes. I say, “What are they telling them?”

  “That it’s precautionary,” Edda says. “They’ll be compensated. There’s been a few complaints but most of the clients are pleased. They’ve seen as much as they want to see and they’ll get some of their money back.”

  The doctor ignores this. “Now try another step.”

  “Have there been any more incidents?” I step forward. Another five paces will take me to the door.

  Edda squeezes my shoulder. “Officially, nothing.”

  “Now try two steps. How does that feel?”

  It feels the same: not exactly painful. “Unofficially?”

  “We don’t go out. We can’t talk to the other resorts, and they’ve cut off the native feeds.”

  “Now turn and walk back to the bed.” The doctor doesn’t even look at Edda. “How is that?”

  “It feels odd.”

  “Of course it feels odd. You’re walking on a prosthetic foot. What matters is if you are in pain.”

  “There’s no pain.”

  “Good. Do you want to try walking along the corridor?”

  The corridor isn’t very long. It leads to a T-junction I take eight paces to reach. We are the only people about. With each step the sensation in my leg gains in intensity. It reminds me of an animated sequence about the birth of a star: particles slowly coalescing until they form a core. The doctor watches my face carefully. “Let me know when it hurts. There’s no point being brave.”

  I turn left at the junction. It’s familiar. I’ve walked down its counterpart in my own resort. It hadn’t looked so long then. I push on. It seems to get easier. The pain, if that’s what it is, levels out. Unless there’s a sudden spike I should be able to make it to the Entertainment Area; though, as I’m still in a hospital gown, I probably shouldn’t. It might upset the clients, if there are any left. Every few steps the doctor asks how I feel. “Remember you’ll have to walk back.”