by Rosa Montero
“Wait...wait...my precious savage. Take your time,” he whispered hoarsely.
And in that position, holding her trapped by his weight, Lizard calmly removed the last of his clothes while the rep trembled between his legs and watched him undressing for the first time, taking pleasure in that glorious, wonderful moment when a lover’s body is revealed. Both of them were now naked, and slowly, while their bodies were connecting and their skin communicated of its own accord, Paul leaned over her and opened her lips with his own.
For Bruna, sex was a strange and incomprehensible thing. When it was a matter of an occasional lover, when she only wanted to warm her body, it was sharp, loud, and simple. But when her partner was also warming her heart, as was the case with Lizard, then sex became something deep and complex, and the mere act of kissing was like beginning to fall into each other.
They separated briefly to catch their breath; they moved apart to look at each other, to confirm the wonder of being together. Lizard’s body was robust, not fat, the skin a little worn with age. How Bruna loved that mature skin, she who would never reach old age. In the middle of his chest, and stretching upward from his pubis, there were two handfuls of hair—surprising in an era when all men completely waxed their bodies. The rep buried her face in the tight curls of the man’s sex, enjoying the scratchy feel of that soft undergrowth and the woody smell of his body. She needed to possess all of Paul, to become acquainted with every inch of his skin, kiss his small marks and scars, run her tongue over those hidden folds. That was what the rep was doing—smelling and licking and exploring that warm, marvelous territory—when Paul grabbed her by the arms and, lying on top her, slowly penetrated her. We’re blending our kuammil, thought Bruna unexpectedly, feeling round, huge, and complete, totally filled by Lizard. And she pulled herself tightly against him until she had succeeded in touching his heart and killing death.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
When Bruna arrived at the Bear Pavilion, Nopal was already there. He was gazing at the glass wall of the tank in a melancholy fashion. Tons of shimmering blue water, still and empty, were pressing against the glass. Melba was nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t have any luck with that wretched bear. I never manage to see her. Are you sure she exists?” asked Pablo by way of a greeting.
“Positive.”
She sat down on the bench next to the memorist without really knowing how to behave. Nopal had called her that morning—after Lizard had gone, luckily. He supposedly wanted to give her back the netsuke that he had kept when they’d had to remove her clothes at the Forensic Anatomy Institute. Bruna was still in bed when he rang, protected by the smell of Paul, by the traces of Paul’s fingers, and by the memory of the warmth of his body, and when Nopal suggested that they meet, the idea seemed like a good one to the rep. In fact, she was so receptive to the idea that she was the one who picked the pavilion as their meeting place.
Now that she was seeing the memorist face to face, however, the rep was feeling bewildered and uncomfortable. What am I doing here? she asked herself. And then, concerned, she thought she’d made a serious mistake in coming. There were too many unspoken issues between them, and now they were cramming the android’s mouth and leaving her mute.
“Here. Your necklace.”
Bruna took it. The little man with his sack. The image of a mother, the smell of her perfume, the rustle of her dress; the fleeting farewell kiss on party nights immediately switched on in her mind. She felt a mild unease.
“It belonged to your mother, didn’t it? All that business of the kiss at night...It was your mother.”
“Yes.”
The unease grew. Not only was her memory a complete lie, but on top of that she was also now certain that it was another’s memory: Nopal’s. And the knowledge that her false memory was someone else’s reality turned that falsehood into something much more harmful and grotesque, in the same way that knowing some reps might have more years to live intensified the anguish of dying.
“Keep your damned necklace. I don’t want it,” said Bruna, throwing the netsuke onto the bench.
Nopal didn’t touch it.
“I gave you the best I had, Bruna,” he said calmly.
“And also the worst. All that pain—for what? The death of my father—why? The evil and the suffering. None of that makes any sense.”
“You have three times as many scenes as other technos. You’re much more complex. You know about melancholy and longing. And the emotion that beautiful music or a word or a picture inspire. What I mean is that I gave you beauty, Bruna. And beauty is the only eternity possible.”
They looked at the tank of water in silence for a few minutes. That blue, hypnotic wall. Then it was true that she was different. What she’d always felt was now being confirmed. And for some reason, that certainty reassured her. Four years, three months, and eight days. She bit her lip, annoyed by her instinctive counting. Now, each time that obsessive countdown fired off inside her head, Bruna recalled Copa Square’s words with a sudden bitterness: Wouldn’t you be capable of doing anything in exchange for living even one year longer? he’d asked. No, said the rep to herself. Not anything. Or that’s what she hoped.
Everything had changed these past few days; everything was so confusing. Beginning with the unlikely fact that she was sitting next to her memorist. She sneaked a peek at him, amazed that she wasn’t feeling more terrified. Bruna had always believed that she’d be horrified to meet her writer, that she’d hate him for having given her such a painful existence. And yet...The android was unable to define exactly what it was she felt for Nopal. There was resentment, but fascination, too. And something resembling love. And gratitude. But why gratitude? For having created an identity for her? For making her distinct and proud? For designing her to be like him? But on the other hand, if Pablo Nopal had made her in his image and likeness, then had she also inherited his killer instincts? All those times when she’d killed—weren’t they just the result of her genetic conditioning? Thinking about all that made her hair stand on end.
“You killed Habib, but you saved my life. I suppose I ought to thank you.”
“Your life is very important to me, because I gave it to you. But I didn’t kill anyone.”
“You’re lying.”
“How would I have known that you were in the Reina Sofía Hospital? Or that Habib was going to attack you?”
“True, those are good questions. How did you find out?”
Nopal smiled.
“Let me tell you something, Bruna. I’m innocent. Innocent. And so are you.”
He picked up the necklace from the bench and stood up. Stepping up to her, he placed it around her neck. It was such a natural act that Bruna didn’t object. She simply remained seated where she was, like an idiot, looking at him. The memorist bent over and kissed her on the cheek.
“Be good,” he said.
And he walked away.
Seconds later, the bear appeared, swimming majestically in the intense blue, her spongy fur waving around her body like sea anemones. The last of her species, that oh-so-solitary Melba. Then Bruna did what she’d spent several days thinking about doing, and punched a number into her mobile. Natvel’s moon-face filled the screen. The tattooist looked at the android impassively and merely asked, “Now?”
“Now. Please.”
“A bear. You’re a bear, Bruna.”
The words of the essentialist didn’t surprise her at all. If the rep had come to the pavilion today, it was because she had intuited the tattooist’s reply. There is nothing magical about it at all, Bruna told herself skeptically. It was nothing more than a consequence of the nexin, that experimental enzyme that boosted her ability to empathize. She had undoubtedly picked up Natvel’s thoughts during their last encounter. But despite her intense dislike of the esoteric, the rep felt strangely moved. She got up from the bench and walked over to the glass. Melba was looking at her from the other side, eyes like black buttons. Bruna pressed her palms up a
gainst the glass, sensing the weight and push of the water, the turbulent power of that other life. And for an instant, she saw herself next to the bear, the two of them floating in the blue of time, in the same way that Bruna had floated in the night and the rain nearly two years ago, next to the dying Merlín; floating on that bed like a piece of flotsam in the midst of a shipwreck. All of which was very painful but very beautiful, too. And beauty is eternity.
“You’re Husky! Aren’t you? You’re Bruna Husky!”
Someone was tugging at her arm, dragging her out of the never-ending blue. She turned around. Three adolescent humans, two boys and a girl, seemed tremendously excited to see her.
“You’re Husky. What luck! Can we make a rep-video of you?”
The young people pointed their mobiles at her, recording her from every angle.
“Hey, what are you doing? Cool it. Leave me alone!” she growled.
Bruna was accustomed to inspiring fear in humans even when she was smiling, and terror if she was angry. But now, despite her growls, the kids continued to leap around her without batting an eyelid. She literally had to run to escape from their enthusiasm, and when she had raced out through the main doors of the Bear Pavilion and reached the avenue, she could already see the recording the kids had just made playing on the public screen.
“By all the damned species!”
She started to walk up the street, paying attention to the screens and seeing herself on many of them. Some were images that had been displayed earlier, when they were looking for her as an assassin: Bruna as Annie Heart, and Bruna as herself, going into the Majestic or into the HSP headquarters. But there were many more. She even saw the data on her own ID tag. And now they weren’t accusing her of anything—quite the opposite. Now the public screens were gushing with an exaggerated tale of heroism. At grave risk to her own life, Bruna Husky the technohuman had managed, on her own, to dismantle an extremely dangerous conspiracy. Technohumans were very good. Supremacists were very bad. And the Labarians and the Cosmics were extremely bad, always conspiring from on high to take control of Earth. Astonished, she connected to the news on her mobile, usually somewhat more reliable than the public screens, although only by a little. The conspiracy had collapsed like a house of cards. Various police officials, a horde of extremist heavies, several lawyers, a judge, and two people high up in the Central Archive, had been arrested. Chem Conés, the acting president of the region, was declaring emphatically that, with the invaluable assistance of technohumans—loyal colleagues in the government and on the planet—he would get to the very bottom of this repugnant supremacist plot. It made Bruna ill to listen to all that fake waffle, that lying tale of a happy world, being trumpeted aloud with such effrontery by one of the most vicious of racists. Conés was going to save his own neck and his position, like so many other fanatics. Of course, foiling the conspiracy wasn’t going to put an end to supremacism, nor to the tension among the species, nor to the devious underground activities of Cosmos and Labari, always keen to destabilize the United States of the Earth and extend their power and influence over the planet. But at least it’s a battle that has been won, sighed Bruna. A breathing space. A reprieve.
The news was so exciting that the rep felt an impulse to call Lizard to talk over what was happening, but she held back. He hadn’t gotten in touch with her either. As she thought about the inspector, a small knot of unease lodged itself in her breast. Lizard had woken up very late; he’d had to leave in a hurry; they hadn’t made any arrangements. She didn’t even know for sure that they would see each other again. But then again, wasn’t she a bear? A solitary animal, just as the psych-guide had said. The one that didn’t live in a group or even with a partner.
“Better that way,” she said out loud. “Less possibility of confusion and making a fool of yourself.”
Four years, three months, and eight days.
Or maybe eight years, three months, and four days.
Bruna knew she was going to die, but perhaps she no longer knew the exact date.
She tried to contact Yiannis again. He still wasn’t answering. She had tried to get in touch with him a few times since she’d been released from jail. He never answered. At first, she hadn’t persisted. She assumed he was hiding, ashamed, and she herself was a bit annoyed with him for being such a bigmouth. But now the lack of any news of the archivist was starting to concern her. She decided to stop by his apartment.
She crossed Madrid with growing discomfort, because everyone was looking at her and pointing her out. She tried to take a cab, but because there was another sky-tram strike, all the cabs were taken. The world had gone back to being full of reps, as if they had emerged from under the rocks where they’d been hiding, and many of them greeted her like a long-lost friend as she went by. She began to feel really irritated.
Someone was moving out of Yiannis’s building. A busy crew of robot-movers was transporting boxes and furniture into a truck. She went up in the elevator with one of the robots, and they stopped on the same floor. Bruna had a terrible feeling. She went out onto the landing with the squeaking, metallic machine behind her and did, indeed, find Yiannis’s front door open and the apartment half-emptied. In the entry hall there was a blonde human wearing overalls, loading up the robots as they arrived. The one that had come up with the rep was given a small tower of stacked chairs.
“What’s going on here?”
The blonde looked at her as if she were an idiot.
“What do you think? A moving company, transport robots. And the answer to today’s mystery question is...” she said sarcastically, using the patter from a popular competition.
“What I mean is, I know the tenant, Yiannis Liberopoulos. I didn’t know he was moving. Where is he?”
“No idea.”
“Where’s the furniture going?”
“Nowhere. It’s not actually a move. It’s a sale. He’s sold the entire contents of his apartment. We’re emptying it.”
“What? But...that’s not possible.”
Her consternation was so obvious that the blonde softened and set about consulting the job information stored on her mobile. Four robots were lined up in front of her waiting to be loaded, making a slight tinkling sound as they idled.
“Here it is...Yes, Yiannis Liberopoulos. Just as I told you. Sale of entire contents. How odd...There’s no address for him, no information about him. There is a contact person, a Bruna Husky. She’s the one who’s to be paid the money for the contents.”
“What?!”
The rep grabbed the woman’s hand and, giving it a tug, checked the screen of the mobile for herself.
“Hey!” protested the blonde.
Yes indeed, there was her name. The sole beneficiary of the sale. Bruna turned around and raced off. She thought she knew where Yiannis would be.
“You’re welcome, lady, you’re welcome!” she heard the blonde complaining behind her.
By the great Morlay, let me get there in time, please; let me get there in time, the rep kept murmuring as she ran. She decided not to take the travelators because they were so congested that they’d slow her down, so she covered the distance as quickly as she could on foot. It was a punishing forty-minute run, and when she entered the Finis Building, she was out of breath. She headed for the reception desk in the middle of the lobby but spotted Yiannis before she reached it. He was sitting in one of the armchairs in the waiting room, gloomy and lost in thought. She went up to him and dropped down into the chair beside him.
“What are you doing here?” she panted.
The archivist jumped and gave her a startled look.
“Ah, Bruna...Well...I’m sorry...So...you see...”
And he gestured vaguely around him: the spacious, pretty waiting area done up in soft green colors, with intimate, indirect lighting, and peaceful music. A dozen other people—some on their own, some in couples—were scattered throughout the space, but apart from the background music, silence and an air of devotion reigned, as if t
he waiting area were a church. Finis was the biggest euthanasia company in the USE, and the only one operating in Madrid.
“Yes, I see. But the question is, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Well, that’s obvious. I’m no use for anything. I don’t like life. And I’m already very old.”
“Rubbish. You’re useful to me. I need you. Come on, let’s go. We’ll talk about it calmly, but outside. This place terrifies me.”
“It’s not true. I’m no use to you. They almost killed you because of me. I’m an old imbecile. I should have made this decision long ago.”
“Do you know what Merlín would have given to be able to go on living, damn it?!” Bruna howled in outrage.
Her shout reverberated around the lobby, and everyone stared at her. Two security guards rapidly headed her way.
“You have to leave right now. You’re disturbing the peace in this place.”
They were two solid combat reps. Bruna stood up calmly, feeling a barbaric, self-destructive joy.
“This is going to be amusing,” she muttered fiercely.
“No, no. Keep still. Calm down, please,” begged Yiannis, grabbing her arm.
And then, turning toward the guards, he said, “We’re going. We’re on our way right now.”
And so they were. They left Finis, walking side by side like two zombies, too agitated to talk. A few hundred feet farther along there was a tiny urban park, barely the size of a traffic circle. They headed toward it without thinking and sat down on a bench underneath a young birch tree. The tree was full of shoots. It was a lovely morning. February was one of the best months of the year; after that the heat started to become oppressive.
“See what a lovely day it is. It’s bad taste to want to kill yourself on such a beautiful day,” grumbled Bruna.
“I have nothing. I’ve given up my apartment. I’ve sold my furniture.”