by Laure Eve
‘You wouldn’t be the first to leave, you know,’ Frith remarked. ‘You wouldn’t even be the twentieth. Plenty of others have come before. From Germany, from URCI, any number of World countries. All over the place.’
There. A twitch on URCI. Frith smiled inwardly.
He sat on the other chair.
‘May we talk frankly?’ he said.
For a long moment, the Worlder was still. Then he nodded, once.
‘So. I’m wondering what your reason is for coming to Angle Tar. You must understand why I need to know. Foreigners don’t officially exist here. When they do, they are accepted for a reason, for a purpose. They can give us something that makes them valuable. What do you have that makes you valuable?’
‘Nothing,’ said the Worlder.
‘That’s not quite true, is it?’ said Frith. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Because you knew what would happen if you didn’t at least try to blend in a little better. You knew what would happen if we caught you.’
‘You did not catch me, I walked in.’
‘Yes, you did. By the rather surprising method of deliberately attacking a guard. I wonder why.’
The Worlder gazed at the table top, his mouth in a stubborn frown.
That was all right. He didn’t have to speak. His body talked for him.
‘You can relax,’ said Frith. ‘I’m not threatening you. I’m sure I don’t have anything I can do to you that’s worse than what you’ve already endured. Right? Prison, was it? I’ve heard they’re very good at torture in World prisons.’
The Worlder flinched.
Frith leaned back.
‘I’m going to make a guess about you now,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ll be suitably impressed. Would you like me to tell you something about yourself that I could not possibly know?’
‘Yes,’ said the Worlder.
Frith clasped his fingers together and stared at the tabletop for a moment, assembling his performance. Sometimes he did like to show off. It was a bit of a weakness. But in a situation like this, where he held all the power, it couldn’t do that much harm.
He’d known the Worlder’s secret within minutes of laying eyes on him. There was a good reason for being so desperate that he’d committed treason by leaving World. The boy obviously had a healthy distrust of authority, and a whole lake of arrogance in that silent face, which he clearly tried to use to cover his fear and his youth. A surging restlessness. More than that, though. The Worlder’s whole body thrummed with his secret, somehow. You couldn’t always see it as easily as that, but on this one it was obvious.
‘You,’ he said, pointing at the Worlder, who looked at his outstretched finger as if it were poisonous, ‘can do something. Something that is so frightening that some would like to lock you away for ever, and so valuable that others would like to study you for ever. And you were certain that here, in Angle Tar, you could use it as a bargaining chip to help you get what you want. Perhaps you thought you’d find only simple people here who’d believe that you were some sort of magician, rather than just an ordinary boy with an extraordinary talent.’
The Worlder closed his eyes.
Frith watched him patiently.
Silence pressed inwards, rolling around the room in slow, syrupy waves.
‘Well?’ said Frith, enjoying the game. ‘Am I right?’
I’ve got you. I’ve GOT you.
The Worlder pressed back into his seat, as if he was afraid. And then he disappeared.
No warning. No gathering of himself, no concentration on his face, nor momentum in his body structure. No signs to read.
Just a gentle pop, and a big load of nothingness where his shape had been.
Frith watched the place where he had been sitting for a few moments, as if it was patently obvious that the Worlder was just tricking him.
Oh brilliantly done, and who’s got the power now, yes, you showed me, yes, very good you little trickster, now come back and stay put. Come back.
Come back.
When he didn’t, Frith said a short, sharp, ‘Fuck.’
Frith never swore.
It was several hours later before White reappeared in the room.
Frith had gone, but the guard on duty completed an impressive full body jerk and stumbled back, hitting his elbow on the wall behind him.
They stared at each other.
‘Grad HANG me,’ the guard swore, his voice trembling angry. He opened the door and banged it shut after him, giving White a rapid backwards glance, as if to make sure that he was still there and the whole thing hadn’t been a hallucination.
White was left alone.
He sagged, sitting back on the same chair. He resisted the urge to clutch the table edge and rest his forehead against the splintered wood. He couldn’t afford to look weak, or show how afraid and tired and alone he really was. Not for one second. Not with this Frith man, who seemed to pick him apart as easily as breathing.
He stared at his dirty hands.
It had been three weeks.
No money. No change of clothes. No body gel or skin-suit.
Three weeks of misery on Parisette streets.
He was dirty.
He was humiliated by his own smell. He couldn’t wash. The best he had been able to manage was splashing himself with hurried cups of water from the ponds in the public gardens he slept in at night; but they were full of plants and fish, and often made him feel almost as grimy afterwards as before.
He was starving, too. He’d held out for two days; then, in desperation, resorted to Jumping into eating houses and shops at night to steal food. It was the first time he’d ever tried to move such short distances, but he found it easy enough. Sometimes he could be bitterly glad that at least his talent was not going to waste. But he still felt furtively guilty about stealing food, and did it as little as he could stand.
He had all the time in the world to think, on the streets. Seconds and minutes and hours rolling into days and for ever and ever. His brother’s face often flashed, unwanted, through his mind. He tried to imagine killing Jospen for what he had done, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. All he managed to feel was a dull, incredulous pain.
By day he wandered the city, achingly lonely, longing to talk to someone for more than a sentence or two. Longing for someone to do something to him, anything to make him feel like he was here and still a part of the real. When he grew too tired to keep moving, he would sneak into an abandoned building. There was a particular district that had more empty buildings than not. It was a haven for the homeless, but the buildings were regularly cleared out by groups of Parisette guards. He had learned to run when this happened. People here were afraid of the guard. Police were the same everywhere, it seemed.
His instinctive distrust of the other homeless he found himself bedding down next to made him feel ashamed. Some of the people who lived on the streets of Angle Tar were frightening; some were as sad and strange as ghosts. They mostly gave him a wide berth, caving into that natural fear of foreigners that everyone here seemed to have. Some of the older ones tried to speak to him sometimes, though, as if they were too desperate to care where he was from. But he couldn’t face them; just tightened up and turned his head until they stopped trying and left him alone. The guilt over it gnawed insistently at him.
Ideals were all very well when you had a warm place to live and enough food to make yourself sick on; but everything melted away in the face of this endless, dull nightmare. It wasn’t living. It was existing. He had no reason to be. No one wanted to notice him, so no one did. It felt like he was fading out of the fabric of the world.
So he made a decision.
It was the only way, and he knew what it would cost him. He didn’t agonise over it. Maybe that would come later, when he could afford it to. So he had gathered his courage, gone up to a Parisette guard, smiled at him, and then taken a wild swing at his face.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
The door opened.
White tried to sit upright.
Frith walked into the room, gave White a cursory glance, and folded his arms.
‘That was an over-dramatic little trick you pulled,’ he said, his voice pleasant.
White said nothing.
‘You look awful.’
‘It is very hard here,’ said White eventually.
‘You’ve only been gone six hours. What happened to you?’
White shook his head. He couldn’t explain it well. He’d had a sudden connection with Frith, a connection that had lasted an entire conversation. To have that taken away, just as suddenly and by his own doing, had been more than he could bear. He had planned to stay away for an entire day, or even two to show off, but hadn’t been able to face it.
‘Disconnection from Life takes its toll. I’ve seen it before. You should have prepared yourself for that before you decided to come here,’ Frith remarked, not unkindly.
‘That is not the problem,’ snapped White, before he could stop himself. ‘I have no addiction to Life.’
‘I understand completely,’ said Frith. ‘When you visited before, you always came with the knowledge that you could jack in, as you call it, and go back to that sea of voices and presence. Now you’ve made the decision to be here, and now you’re starting to realise that you will never have that again. Ever. You’ll now have to spend your time alone with yourself in your mind, feeling like you’re in a box that you can see out of, but no one can see into. Feeling that no one will be able to touch you, to know you, any more. Just like the rest of us poor Angle Tarain, in fact. What have you been up to the last few hours? Did you go back to World?’
‘I cannot,’ said White, dizzied by Frith’s change of gear. The speech had unnerved him completely. It was as if he had told Frith everything already, as if the man could pick him up and flick through him until he found the page he wanted, and read exactly what he needed to know. ‘They will know as soon as I am back in World.’
‘Yes, through your implant, I presume. But if your implant has told them of your previous visits to Angle Tar, why didn’t they arrest you earlier?’ said Frith.
‘How do you know that I have come here before?’ said White, his skin prickling. Did they have their own kind of tracking system here?
‘A guess. Tell me.’
‘Information from … the machines that track our implants … it takes time to be collected. They could not know I left World until I already came back. But they knew, after time. That I visited here. When I was in prison, they gave me a better implant. It tracks only a few people more accurately. People they want to watch. It will tell them to a minute when I go back to World. They will send people to find me.’
‘Do you still have your implant?’
‘Of course,’ White said impatiently. ‘I will die without it.’
‘No you won’t.’
White opened his mouth, and then shut it again.
‘You won’t,’ said Frith again, casually. ‘I’ve met Worlders who have had it removed and continue to live just fine. I’m afraid that’s just what you’re told. There are doctors in your nation that specialise in the removal of implants. Illegally, of course. But it can be done.’
‘You are lying.’
Frith spread his hands, a smile on his face. ‘For what possible reason?’
White couldn’t reply. But he had no reason to trust anything this stranger said.
He didn’t sound like he was lying, his treacherous mind whispered to him.
He tried to force calm, press it on himself like a plaster, covering up his wounds.
‘If you are nervous about the implant,’ White said, ‘I think it does not work outside of World. You have nothing here it can use to … power it.’
‘Good god, I know that,’ said Frith cheerfully. ‘You’re curiously persistent in believing that you’re one of the first from World to seek asylum here. The only reason I’m spending time with you is because, I’ll admit, you’re the first in my personal memory to offer something so useful to me.’
‘I can be useful. If it means you will let me stay here.’ White paused a moment, gathering his courage. ‘But I will not spy on World for you,’ he said. He had already anticipated where this might lead, and there was no way he was going to let himself be used for that.
‘That’s an interesting statement. Let me ask you something in return. What is the last bargaining chip you hold?’ said Frith. ‘In other words, what will prevent me from compelling you to do whatever I want?’
White felt his heart give a panicky leap.
‘If you make me a spy, I will go back to World,’ he said.
‘You just told me you can’t.’
‘There are people. They live outside Life systems, outside the city domes. I will go there.’
‘If you believe that removing your implant will kill you, you must also believe what your government says about no one being able to survive off grid.’
White clenched his jaw stubbornly.
‘I have heard of some who do,’ he said. ‘They hate Life. They say we are too dependent on machines. They live in the old cities, the ones abandoned when the dome cities were built.’
‘I presume you’re talking about Technophobes.’
The word sounded strange coming from an Angle Tarain mouth.
‘You needn’t look so surprised,’ said Frith, sounding almost reproachful. ‘I realise we seem a bit out of the way, but we do know things here.’ He shifted. ‘It must have been quite a hard life for you, growing up in such a place.’
White bit back a scoff. He needed no one’s fake pity. ‘Many people have hard lives,’ he said, contemptuous.
‘Still. They don’t like you because you can’t be controlled. Because you don’t need Life. You don’t need them.’
White was silent.
‘So they arrested you for no reason,’ came Frith’s soothing liquid voice. ‘What charge did they give?’
‘It was all lies. They wanted to know if I had been talking to Technophobes. That was all.’
He subsided. Frith was silent, watching him. Listening. No one had listened to White in a long, long time. He felt himself open up.
‘The charges said that we had ties to terrorists. People with my … ability, they say we help the Technophobes, because they think we hate Life.’
White searched, trying to force out his thoughts with unfamiliar words.
‘Life makes travel unnecessary. Makes exploration unnecessary. Yet I travel. I want to explore. I am dangerous, because I cannot be … kept in one place. They arrested me for no reason. I was doing nothing. I was hurting no one. But they kept me in prison. No one did anything about it. They starved me. They drugged me. Like. Like I was an animal.’
The room was silent. White felt a wave of tears threaten underneath his eyes and bit on the inside of his cheek sharply to will them away.
Another room; another prison. A sickening fear fluttered through his head; that his life would always be like this. That there would always be people finding ways to keep him penned. Controlled. Docile.
‘Let’s take a break. Would you like some food?’ said Frith.
White nodded. A treacherous tear escaped, tracking down his cheek, and he brushed it off angrily.
They ate together in the interrogation room. The meal was extremely good, but anything would have tasted incredible right now. The sensation of hot food sliding into him was a very obvious, natural one that he had craved in the last few weeks.
He felt watched, and studied. Guards stood at every corner, surrounding the two eating in the middle of the room at their rickety wooden table. Occasionally a pair of eyes would slide to him. He tried not to make any noise as he ate, and resisted the temptation to shovel everything into his mouth at once.
Frith speared a soft cream-coloured vegetable on his knife and mashed it on his plate with the flat of the blade.
‘How do you call that?’ said White.
‘A pomder, in Angle Ta
rain. In high speech it’s called pomme de terre; and high speech, for your information, is the one that no one speaks any more, except the most inbred of aristocrats. You have a tendency to slip into it, which won’t endear you to the common man in Angle Tar.’ Frith paused. ‘Though pointing out that Angle Tarain has more French words in it than anything else never goes down well, either.’
‘It is the way the Angle Tarain language package that I bought taught it to me,’ said White, fighting a sudden rush of embarrassment. ‘I do not speak correctly?’
Frith laid down his fork. ‘Actually, you speak extremely precisely. The way the old Empire of France would’ve had you speak, when they still ruled us. But things have changed. Now only rich people like to be reminded of those times, as it was only the rich that benefited from being part of the Empire. Nowadays, anything remotely French coming out of your mouth will get you a smile and an invite from the aristocrats, but a dirty look from everyone else. Let’s move on, anyway, and talk about what will happen next.’
White spiked a pomder from the dish and nibbled on it while his heart dropped to his feet. In a way, he was grateful to Frith for being so direct. It was the balance of power that he had come to understand in prison. Hating the person who had control of you, loving them when they were kind to you; hating yourself for doing it.
‘You’ll stay here in Capital,’ said Frith. ‘I will be directly responsible for you. Don’t worry, we’ll treat you well. You’ll have a place of your own to stay. Money. Food. Clothes. Not citizenship, of course. And there’s no need for you to spy for us, if in return you give us every piece of information you have on whatever we ask about World. I’m also going to enrol you in our Talent programme.’
‘What is this?’
Frith leaned back, wiping his mouth with a tissue. ‘Did you think we had no one with your ability here? Witness my lack of surprise at your little trick.’
‘So you already have many people here who can do what I do.’
‘No, we don’t. We have many people who may have something of it, but without training, no clue about the full extent of their capabilities. You’ll train with the other Talented. You’ll show us what you can do.’