Tears in Rain

by Rosa Montero

  “Did you notice? It was my idea. She bothers people a lot less like this,” said Yiannis.

  The advertising screens were taped over with various adhesive sheets of insulation.

  “It was absolute torture,” stressed the old man.

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman.

  But she said it with a smile.

  Without asking, Oli served everyone a beer and placed a platter of snacks on top of the counter.

  “I’ve just taken them out of the oven. Don’t let them get cold. And tell me, Husky, how’s it going out there?”

  “Looks bad.”

  A shadow passed over RoyRoy’s face.

  “They attacked a billboard-man, a techno colleague. They set him on fire and we don’t know if he’ll survive. The company has sent all the billboard-technos home. They say it’s for their own safety, but in reality it’s a mass layoff.”

  “Did you know Nabokov?” asked Yiannis.

  “Yes. And I saw her just before the attack. TTT had taken hold and she was dying and totally insane. She must have had a brain tumor.”

  “It’s a tragedy,” reflected Yiannis sadly.

  The screen in the bar showed the police charging the demonstrators surrounding the RRM. On the right of the screen stood Hericio, the leader of the Human Supremacist Party, who was being interviewed again.

  “And what’s unacceptable is that the police are protecting those monsters and attacking our boys, instead of protecting humans from those murderers who, at this stage—because there’s no question some of the wounded will die—have killed seven people, including three children.”

  Seven victims! Including three children! Bruna shuddered at the thought of the enormity of the act. Oh, Valo, Valo. What a terrible deed. And meanwhile, here was José Hericio again, appearing opportunely on the scene and taking advantage of the drama. She thought about Habib’s words and about Myriam’s intuition regarding the involvement of the leader of the HSP. Her suspicion didn’t seem so absurd now.

  “Those supremacists should be investigated. I have to find a way of getting close to them,” she said with her mouth full of a delicious little ersatz-partridge pie.

  “There’s...there’s a bar in Colón Square where I know they hang out,” said RoyRoy hesitantly. “As you know, I spend the whole day on the street thanks to these billboards. I once ran into problems at that bar and then I found out it was a supremacist hangout. In my line of work you really have to know where you can go, so I make myself a list of the good spots and the places to avoid. And that’s one of the ones to avoid. Here, I’ll give you the address. It’s called Saturn. But be careful. If you’re thinking of putting in an appearance over there now, who knows what could happen. They really scared me.”

  “And it’s precisely because people feel this lack of protection that the populace is arming itself and taking on its own defense. A legitimate and absolutely necessary attitude, given the total absence of the authorities,” railed Hericio emphatically from the screen.

  “Oli, please, I beg you, switch him off,” Bruna pleaded.

  The woman muttered something at the screen and the picture immediately changed to a soothing panoramic view of dolphins swimming in the ocean.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you like listening to home truths?” screeched a nervous, high-pitched voice.

  Silence spread through the bar like a bucket of spilled oil. Bruna kept chewing. Without moving, looking at him sideways from under her eyelashes, she studied the character who had just spoken. He was a small and fairly scrawny human. Possibly somewhat drunk. He was close to her, about three feet away.

  “Does it bother you to know that we’re sick of putting up with you? That we’re not going to let you go on taking advantage of us? And on top of that, what are you doing here? Haven’t you realized that you’re the only monster here?”

  It was true: she was the only rep in the bar. She bit into another canapé. The man was badly dressed and had the look of an unskilled laborer. When he spoke, he tensed his whole body and stood on his toes, as if he wanted to appear taller, more menacing. She almost felt sorry for him; she could knock him to the ground with one smack. But graveyards were full of people overly confident in their own strength, so the rep analyzed her options with all the caution of a professional. First, the exit. The guy was blocking her path to the door, but if push came to shove, she’d be able to jump over to the other side of the counter, which also offered her a perfect refuge. The most worrying thing, because of its very recklessness, was that a little man like this one would dare to confront a combat rep. Could he be armed? Maybe with a plasma gun? He didn’t look the type to be carrying something like that, and she couldn’t see a weapon anywhere on him. Or maybe he wasn’t alone. Could there be other henchmen in the bar? She did a quick sweep of the place and rejected that possibility too. She knew just about everyone by sight. No, he was just a poor, slightly drunk idiot.

  “Get lost, you revolting monster. Clear off, and don’t come back. We’re going to exterminate the lot of you, just like rats.”

  Yes, indeed, the most disturbing thing was that someone like him would feel confident and supported enough to insult someone like her. Bruna didn’t want to confront him, didn’t want to hurt him, didn’t want to humiliate him, because all of that would merely strengthen his paranoid delusions, his antitechno fury. She preferred to wait until he got bored and stopped talking. But the little man was getting redder and angrier by the minute. His own rage was inflaming him. Suddenly, he moved one step toward her and threw an awkward punch that the rep had no difficulty in avoiding. Damn, she thought, annoyed, I’m going to have no other option but to whack him.

  It wasn’t necessary. Suddenly a wall of flesh materialized next to them. It was Oli, who had come out from behind the bar and was now grabbing the guy from behind and lifting him off his feet as if he were a doll.

  “The only rat around here is you.”

  Fat Oli carried the little man—legs kicking—to the door and threw him out onto the street.

  “If you show your ugly snout around here again, I’ll split it in two,” she barked, raising a menacing, chubby forefinger.

  And then she turned around and looked defiantly at her clientele, like someone expecting a protest. But no one said a word, and people even seemed to agree with her on the whole. Oli relaxed, and a smile lit up her moon-face as she wobbled her way back to the counter. Bruna had never seen her away from the counter. She really was immense, colossal, considerably bigger in her lower extremities than in the majestic opulence on display above. A primitive goddess, a human whale. So gigantic, in fact, that Bruna wondered for the first time if she might not be a mutant, if that mountain of flesh was the product of atomic disorder.

  Scarcely had the prickly waves of concern that any incident gives rise to died down within the bar when they heard a racket of sorts outside. Initially, the rep thought it was some kind of maneuver on the part of the recently expelled little man, so she headed to the door of the bar to see what was happening. A few feet away, a redheaded woman was shrieking and wriggling in an attempt to free herself from the grip of a pair of tax police, the feared “blues.” A little girl, less than six years old, was observing the whole thing, wide-eyed with terror and clutching a grubby toy rabbit. A third “blue”, a woman, came up and grabbed her by the hand. It was an imperious gesture: she literally yanked the little girl by the wrist. The child began to cry and the redheaded woman softly followed suit, instantly abandoning her impulse to fight, as if the tears of the little girl—clearly her daughter—had been the signal to surrender. The police headed up the street with the two of them while the pedestrians kept watch out of the corners of their eyes, as if they were dealing with a slightly shameful scene, something it would be embarrassing to watch directly.

  “Moths. Poor things,” said Yiannis, beside her.

  Bruna nodded in agreement. Almost all the “moths” had young children; if they were running the risk of livin
g clandestinely in Clean Air Zones they couldn’t afford, it was for fear of the undeniable harm pollution caused to children. They illegally abandoned their contaminated cities with permanently gray skies and appeared, just like moths, attracted by the sunlight and the oxygen, only for the vast majority of them to go up in flames, because the tax police were incredibly efficient. The woman and the child wore the same shabby clothes as the little man who had insulted Bruna in the bar. Fanaticism and racism fed on the same social stratum of the dispossessed and the desperate.

  “First arrest, deportation, and a fine; if they offend again, up to six years in jail,” said Yiannis.

  “It’s revolting. It makes you ashamed to belong to Earth,” muttered Bruna.

  “Cuncta fessa,” murmured the archivist.

  “What?”

  “Octavius Augustus became the first Roman emperor because the republic granted him enormous powers. And why did the republic do that? Why did it commit suicide to make way for an empire? Tacitus explains it thus: Cuncta fessa. Which means ‘the whole world is tired.’ Weariness in the face of political and social insecurity is what led to Rome losing its rights and freedoms. Fear induces a hunger for authoritarianism in people. Fear is a really bad adviser. And now look around you, Bruna: everyone’s afraid. We’re living in critical times. Our democratic system is also on the verge of suicide. Sometimes nations opt to throw themselves into the abyss.”

  “A magnificent democratic system that poisons children who have no money.”

  “A disgusting democratic system, true, but the only one that exists in the universe. At least in the known universe. The Omaás, Gnés, and Balabís have aristocratic or dictatorial governments. As for Cosmos and Labari, they are both terrible totalitarian states. Our democracy, with all its flaws, is an incredible achievement for humanity, Bruna. The result of many centuries of struggle and suffering. Listen, the world moves on, society moves on, and the more democratic it is, the more progress there is and the greater society’s capacity for change. On Earth we’ve had a dreadful century. Unification happened only fourteen years ago; our state is young and complex. It’s the first planetary state; we’re inventing ourselves as we go...We can improve. But in order to do that, we have to believe in the possibilities of democracy and defend it and work to perfect it. Have faith.”

  Four years, three months, and eighteen days.

  “I don’t think that girl will see any changes before the air makes her irreversibly ill,” said Bruna, a knot of anguish tightening in her chest.

  And after a few seconds of heavy silence, she angrily repeated, “No, she won’t see them. And neither will I.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  An hour later the detective left the bar and paused briefly to check out the scene. It had stopped raining and the sun was trying to show its face between the clouds. It was six o’clock on a Monday evening but the streets were unusually empty and the few people to be seen, all humans, were walking too quickly. It wasn’t a day to be going for a walk. A vague foreboding of danger seemed to hang over the city.

  Bruna called Habib. The man’s troubled face appeared instantly.

  “How are things around the RRM?”

  “Better, I suppose. The police charged, so there are no supremacists outside the entrance anymore. But everything’s a mess.”

  “One question, Habib. Do your spies know a bar called Saturn?”

  “They certainly do. It’s a nest of vipers. The HSP headquarters are nearby and all the extremists gather there. Why?”

  “No reason. I was thinking about how I could get close to Hericio, as you were suggesting.”

  Yes, Saturn would be a good option. But be very careful. I’m not convinced it’s the best day to go over there.”

  “I know. Oh, yes, just one more thing: what did you say to Nabokov?”

  “Pardon?”

  “When I bumped into her, Nabokov kept repeating that you had told her something: ‘Habib told me that, Habib told me that.’ Clearly something that really upset her.”

  The man raised his eyebrows, bewildered.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t tell her anything. I don’t think I’ve even spoken to her since Myriam’s death. Everything’s been so chaotic lately! She must have been delirious. In the end, she was totally beside herself.”

  “Do we know anything from the autopsy?”

  “It’s still too soon. But the weird thing is that they haven’t taken Valo to the Forensic Anatomy Institute. We have no idea what the police have done with her body. Our lawyers are going to lodge a formal complaint.”

  “How strange.”

  “Yes, everything about this whole business is too strange,” said Habib, his voice choking.

  Bruna, uneasy, cut the link. Had they inserted an adulterated memory into the dying Valo as well? An induced-behavior program that included hallucinations, a supposed conversation with Habib, and the murderous idea of planting a bomb. Was that why she had mentioned the word revenge? And why the police were hiding her body?

  “Get out of Madrid, you rep shit!”

  The insult had come from a private car as it drove past her. She watched it speeding away and jumping the traffic lights at an intersection to avoid having to stop. The driver was yelling loudly, but he was undoubtedly frightened. Or maybe she should put it another way: he was undoubtedly yelling because he was frightened.

  Bruna sighed. She looked around one more time, checking for signs of Lizard. He was nowhere to be seen, but the detective was not convinced. Her failure to register that the inspector was following her still irritated her. Naturally, tailing her was easy for him; if truth be told, all he had to do was track the rep’s mobile computer. Totally prohibited for everyone else, of course, but apparently not for judicial inspectors. Legal trivialities happily ignored. Just in case, the detective switched off her mobile and removed the power source, which was the only way to prevent its being detected. Removing the locator chip was a crime, and that aside, the chip was installed in such a way as to make it very difficult to remove without destroying the computer. Next she walked around the block to see if anyone was following her and, in fact, she spotted a solidly built young woman who had “police” written all over her and who had to be one of Lizard’s bloodhounds.

  The android had various techniques for trying to lose a tail, and she opted for the subway one. Since she had to pay cash because her mobile was disconnected, her really dumb tail went through the entry control long before she did, so she had to wait on the other side, doing a bad job of hanging around until Bruna got her ticket out of the machine. Acting as if she were unaware of her tail’s presence, the rep headed for one of the platforms. They were in the Tres de Mayo Station, one of the most complex hubs in the Madrid underground network, with five intersecting subway lines. The android waited patiently for the train to arrive while the solidly built young woman faked one ostentatious yawn after another a few feet away from her. Yawning was one of the first things they taught you to do in the introductory How to Follow a Suspect course: yawning produces an instant feeling of lack of danger in the person being tailed, the instructor used to say. When the train arrived in the station with a screech of metal, the rep got in and parked herself at the end of the last car, leaning carelessly against the small connecting door that allowed passage between the cars and which, in this case, was locked because it was last car. The yawning woman was four cars away. As the train started to move, Bruna took out her pin decoder and, in a flash, had released the lock’s simple mechanism. The end of the train was just leaving the station when the rep opened the small door and leaped onto the tracks. She tried to push the door shut behind her, but in any case, even if she hadn’t managed to, by the time the policewoman reached the door she wouldn’t dare jump from the rapidly accelerating train. It would take incredible agility and training to land safely and avoid being incinerated by the high-voltage line. The android doubted that the human would have the necessary skills to do
that—unless she was a circus performer.

  While the train moved off into the darkness with a blast of hot air, Bruna headed back toward the Tres de Mayo Station and climbed up a ladder to the platform. A middle-aged human couple gave a start when they saw her emerging from the tunnel and launched into a pathetic little trot toward the exit. The android grunted in chagrin and considered the possibility of saying something to them: Don’t worry, there’s no reason why you should leave, I don’t pose any danger. But they were already too far away, and if she started to call out loudly to them and follow them, she might well cause them to have a fit of hysteria. So much fear in the air couldn’t lead to anything good.

  She switched lines, got into another car and emerged from the subway two stations farther along. The multicolored plastic domes of a circus were in front of her. She didn’t want to switch on her mobile, so she again had to pay cash to get in, mentally thanking the customary corruption of those governing Earth, which ensured that the paper money of yesteryear would continue to be legal tender and still used by everyone, precisely because its use lent itself brilliantly to anonymity and impunity. It was invisible money that left no trace in its wake, unlike electronic transactions.

  The show was halfway through and the tent was barely a quarter full. Bruna tiptoed in and sat down on one side, as close to the orchestra as she could. It was a dreadful spot with poor visibility, and all the seats around her were empty, so her arrival attracted attention. The violinist, who was the only woman in the group of six musicians, lowered her bow during a pause in the piece she was playing, looked attentively at the rep and then greeted her with a barely perceptible nod of her head. Bruna responded with a similar movement and settled patiently into her seat. She’d have to wait until the show was over. The acts followed one another with the boring repetition of their fake happiness. It was a mediocre circus, neither very good nor very bad—conventional and utterly forgettable. There was a human tamer of Gnés perrifants, those wretched alien animals the size of a horse that looked like greyhounds minus the ears, and had brains the size of a mosquito; but thanks to the different gravity on Earth they were able to turn the most astonishing somersaults. There was a troupe of reps with various biological implants: their stomachs were plasma screens and they could create holograms in the air with their hands—that is to say, with the microcameras surgically implanted into their fingertips. And there was the typical bloody act performed by the Kalinians, a sect of crazy sadomasochists who imitated the magicians of the classical circuses but without the tricks, because they were enamored of pain and exhibitionism. So for that reason, they really did cut their bodies with knives and pierce their cheeks with long needles. Bruna found the Kalinians revolting, but they were currently in fashion.