Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “Oh no,” her mother said, “I don’t have an umbrella. We’ll have to run.” Her mother leaned forward and put her hand against the window. She looked excited. When they got to their stop, her mother took her hand, and pulled her down the steps, out into the rain, running.

  The rain was pounding down, and just as they jumped to the ground there was a crack, like an explosion and she started because an explosion at home meant the sea was coming in, an explosion at home meant you were dead. Her mother pulled her, running. Mayla’s face was wet and she was afraid to breathe in; the air was full of water, it was unnatural, it was cold and awful, she couldn’t breathe, she felt that if she took a breath she would drown. Her mother dragged her, and she saw white sparks, things around her got black until she could only see what was in front of her. Her mother kept pulling and pulling, until they were under the overhang at her mother’s house. She heard herself gasp and instead of just breathing she was crying in great, shaking sobs.

  “Oh baby,” her mother said, “You’ll be all right. I’m sorry baby, I’m sorry.” Her mother wanted her to stop crying, she could tell, but she was scared and she hated this place. It hurt her mother, her crying, but she didn’t care, she didn’t care at all, and she kept right on.

  That was when she knew that she wasn’t a surface person.

  She looked back over her list. Owen, Tumipamba’s successor at MaTE, got there before Polly. Of course, Polly would be late. He was the CFO, he could be as late as he wanted.

  “What have you got?” Owen asked, and she passed the list over to him.

  She watched him read. Owen was from the U.S., Pennsylvania or something. She wished she’d been born in the U.S., then she wouldn’t have to worry about adapting.

  Owen was still reading when Polly walked in. “Morning Mayla, how’s it going?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Oh, Polly, about that clinic loan, there’s been some problems.” Her heart was beating hard.

  “What’s wrong?” Polly seemed genuine, not accusative. As if it didn’t matter to him.

  “There’s a rider on the loan, with a partner. Normally I wouldn’t have any trouble, you know…” she faltered.

  Polly nodded.

  “The partner. I can’t work with the partner,” she said. “Nobody could work with the partner.”

  “Oh,” Polly said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I’d hoped it would give First Hawaiian a little presence. But it’s really pretty small anyway.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I’d have liked the business, for, you know, presence, like you said.” She took a deep breath. “But I can’t. The partner … is a problem. I can’t get around it. I can’t do the loan.”

  “Right,” he said. “Well, if anything else comes up, I’ll try to steer it your way.”

  It sounded all right. Even though Polly had sent Saad to meet her at the subport. Maybe Polly really didn’t care about the loan, maybe he didn’t even know about Saad’s partner. Maybe he really had been trying to do her a favor.

  Maybe it was all right. Maybe she really could still make the right banking decisions.

  She wanted to escape. She wanted to go to Del Sud, get a flat, a pretty little flat, and live an orderly existence. Find a different world, a simpler place. Any world was better than this.

  9

  Virtual Weather

  “Soldiers came right down the street,” Santos said. “My grandmother told my mama to buy rice so we bought twenty-five kilos of rice. And water, we bought a lot of water. You couldn’t buy air. But it wasn’t the same as a war. It wasn’t the same because there was only one side. There was the soldiers and there was just people. And it was in the city, not on a real battlefield.” Santos was talking about the Liberation.

  They were hunkered down in the high grass, watching for the other team. This time they were on patrol, waiting for an unnaturally accelerated twilight and darkness.

  “You weren’t born when it happened,” David said.

  “Yeah, but I heard about it.” Santos’ pirate face was old enough to remember the Liberation. “I know it wasn’t like war.”

  “Sometimes war is in cities,” David pointed out mildly.

  “You can’t have a real war in a city like Julia, there’s not enough space. You know, no tanks, no planes,” Santos sounded nostalgic. Was nostalgia the right way to describe it? Nostalgia for a reality built from vids and films.

  The sky had just started to darken. Around them stood yellow grass, waving a bit in the wind. It should have been scratchy and smelled like sweet straw but he couldn’t even smell the helmet anymore. David put his hand out and felt a tickle across the palm of the glove that was not quite like reality.

  Santos didn’t know it was not quite like grass because Santos had never been in real grass. Just like Santos didn’t know that all that had to happen for something to qualify as a war was for events to total a certain quantity of anarchy and death.

  It would be maybe ten minutes until darkness. He hated to wait, he didn’t like maneuvers in the dark. He was wasting money, sitting here in virtual grass, waiting to do something he wasn’t going to enjoy. If he’d known they were going to be doing a run in the dark he would have begged off.

  Something chirped in the grass. The sky was blackening perceptibly. They would start moving before it got dark, as soon as it got gray enough to blur the edges of things. Maybe he could get killed quick. “Santos,” he said, “when you are shot, is there a loud noise?”

  “Yes?” Santos said, not understanding.

  “When the bomb was dropped on me, there was a loud noise. When I get killed, last time. If you are shot and killed, there is this noise?”

  “Sometimes,” Santos said.

  Shit. Well, maybe after this he wouldn’t play anymore, it wasn’t worth it. Spending money to do something he didn’t like, that was stupid.

  There was a crack of lightning and he jumped.

  “Fuck,” Santos said.

  The twilight was plum colored, but David didn’t know how much of that was storm. He hadn’t known it was part of the scenario. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Thunderstorm,” Santos said.

  “I know it is a thunderstorm. Did we pick a thunderstorm?” He couldn’t imagine why.

  “No,” Santos said. “Sometimes the program just does it. You know, weather.”

  If he had wanted weather, David thought, he would not be playing virtual wargames.

  “I like it when it rains,” Santos said. “It’s more real.” Santos had never been in the rain.

  The rain came towards them. He could just see it as a darker curtain in the plum-colored darkness. It was like watching a vid, there was no heavy pre-storm calm, no shock wave of cold air riding before the rain, no pregnant scent of weather on the wind. He couldn’t smell anything. He could feel the handlebars, feel the treadmill he was sitting on. And then it washed across them and the sound of rain was all around them and he could see nothing at all.

  In the blackness he closed his eyes and concentrated on the treadmill, on the weight of the helmet on his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose. His hairnet was messed up by the strap around the back of his head. He was sitting on a treadmill in a cubicle, listening to the rain drum all around him while he himself remained curiously dry. The shapes on his eyelids were green at first, then red Rorschach blots, random retinal firings.

  He could pull off the helmet. He could quit. He could get up off the treadmill and walk away. Meph was waiting in the room. David would find a job, waiting tables, unloading skids, something. Earn a little money instead of spending it, like a teenaged boy, on pseudo-experience. Santos had never seen anything but a virtual construct called Lezard, and if they met on the street, Santos wouldn’t know him and he wouldn’t know Santos. “He purged,” Santos would say, “we were just sitting there and he just cleared the tanks, you know? Gone. Nothing. Me and the fucking rain.”

  He felt Santos’ hand close around his wrist and his glove pulled
slightly. “It’ll give us cover!” Santos shouted in his ear.

  The treadmill jerked and shuddered. It was a little like walking on slick ground, but not much. The ground wouldn’t really have been wet yet anyway. He couldn’t see. They could walk right through the enemy’s camp and not even know it in the darkness. This was foolish. They couldn’t even use the mine sweep to watch for mines, they couldn’t read it in this rain. Did they even have mines in this game? Well, they had the sweep, and mines scared him to death, so he supposed they did.

  Lightning, and the landscape flashed around them, overexposed. It was gone before he got a sense of anything and the thunder was a painful crack that jolted him so much he went to his knees. The treadmill stopped for a moment and he heard, below the sound of the rain, his own ragged breathing.

  Santos pulled on his hand, a phantom tug without real weight behind it. “Come on.”

  Fuck. He got to his feet carefully, not trusting the treadmill. Night goggles. Why didn’t they have night goggles? In real fighting everybody used them. But at least the rain seemed to be slowing down, it was less noisy although he still couldn’t see anything. Nothing made sense, they should have been waiting for the rain to stop. They couldn’t see anything, they were stupid to be moving in weather like this. If they had been moving against a real enemy, that enemy would have been on his home ground and they would be blundering around in the rain and dark. He thought he could make out shapes, a bluff to his left, or maybe a big piece of equipment. He strained to make out the shape, maybe the turret of a tank? He should be able to see the gun—

  Lightning again and the left fell away down a gentle slope, no bluff, no tank, but farther away black hump-shapes hunched in the rain—

  He crouched and pulled on Santos’ hand. He thought the shapes were tents, tents or vehicles. “What?” Santos said. The rain was less, Santos didn’t have to shout.

  “Wait,” David hissed.

  They waited for the lightning. He wanted to quit, he wanted to go home. How long had he been here? Not more than thirty minutes, that meant they had better than an hour, maybe ninety minutes left. The darkness was making him crazy and he was getting a headache. Had someone from the tents/trucks seen them outlined in the lightning? He was pretty sure it was a camp. If it was, Santos would alert the rest of the group with a remote and then would they sit in the dark and wait? This was not like real weather at all. If it were like real weather then there would have been more lightning by now.

  His knees were aching so he eased into a sitting position. (It was hard to shake the feeling that he was going to sit on wet ground, but the treadmill was reassuringly dry.) If the enemy had seen them, they’d probably be crawling towards them now, coming up the slight rise. No lightning. Was the program monitoring? Maybe they weren’t getting lightning because they needed it? Maybe the weather programming was particularly sadistic?

  The sound of rain was less. It was much harder to keep track of virtual rain than of real rain. Santos sighed next to him and he wanted to shush him. If the enemy was crawling towards them they might hear.

  Kill me, he thought, kill me and get it over with. Santos didn’t know that fighting a war consisted of long periods of anxious boredom punctuated by intense short periods of terror.

  The rain, if it was still raining, was down to a fine mist. Now what were they supposed to do? It was still too dark to see, and now they wouldn’t even get lightning. And for all he knew, around them was enemy.

  The sky grayed a bit, suddenly faintly luminescent. Dawn? Already? There was the feeling of movement in the sky, of wind. Then he saw edges, illuminated pale, and the clouds seemed to tear. The moon shown through a rip in the clouds, bright and defined—not dawn but moonrise—and then disappeared. Then the tatters of cloud cleared the moon again and he could see an empty landscape that seemed positively flooded with light. Below them the black shapes of enemy tents, but no soldiers around them.

  His shoulders were aching with tension. Santos fumbled with the remote and David saw it blink red before Santos set it face down in the grass. Just a tiny thing, a little smaller than the palm of his hand.

  Santos leaned over so he was close to David’s ear. “Let’s take them.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait?” David whispered back.

  “Nah,” Santos said, pointing at the camp with his chin, “most of them will be NPC.” NPC: Non-Player-Characters. Great; even if they were fake people on automatic pilot they still outnumbered David and Santos.

  Santos slung his rifle around and David felt his irritation rising. Stupid kid, always in a hurry, not thinking. He had half a mind to let Santos go running in alone, get himself killed if he wanted to.

  It was a game, he told himself. They had been playing for almost half an hour without any combat. The point of this was to “go in.” He sighed, and reached back and tapped his shoulder so his weightless rifle would swing around. Once he had it in his hands it at least felt solid. No heft, just the solid feel of it. Maybe if they played some sort of space game then the weightlessness wouldn’t matter.

  In an hour and a half this would all be over. He could go home. Next time he would check whether the maneuvers were in daylight or at night and if they said night he’d claim he was busy.

  He was a grown man. This was a game. He could separate reality from game. He should be fair to Santos, let him have his fun.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Ready?” Santos said.

  Not exactly, but he nodded.

  Santos ran half-crouched towards the tents. Best would have been to wiggle through the grass, but that would have been stupid on a treadmill. David blindly grabbed the handlebar and tried to follow. He couldn’t run crouched the way Santos had because all this sitting and kneeling and falling had his knee aching, but he hunched.

  Santos lobbed a grenade and as the grenade launched through the air someone opened fire from the camp, a sharp ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat. David checked, cringing, waiting for something, and then made himself run. He was running heavily, he could feel his feet thumping on the treadmill. No element of surprise. Of course, the people in this camp had been sitting around in a thunderstorm for half an hour, waiting to be attacked.

  The lights went on, the grenade exploded, and Santos lobbed another one. David tapped his belt and then he had one. (The hardest part of this whole game was remembering the gestures that accessed his weapons.) He tapped the pin and lobbed it, grateful that he had the sense to activate it before throwing it. It was true, an overhand throw from training years ago that he didn’t know his arm remembered until he’d done it. The concussions were slightly staggering, but very satisfying.

  Soldiers came boiling out of tents. A woman soldier with a long tail of swinging hair came out of one tent, crackling faintly with a blue glow like St. Elmo’s fire. Some strange weapon from the game? A program glitch? He checked again, looked at Santos. Santos had seen her and turned his fire on her. “A PC!” he shouted.

  David was firing, and she was firing back at them. The air was full of noise and he wanted to fall but he was on the treadmill, so he was looking for cover, ducking behind tents as if canvas would protect him. The soldiers were all around, the NPCs, the program-generated people, they were like chaff. He aimed and sprayed, blindly firing and the three in front of him jerked and fell. So easy, he thought, not like people at all. They ran and shot and pointed and shouted but seemed ineffective. He aimed at one of them and squeezed the trigger (the trigger was a little soft on this thing) and the soldier fell, shots stitched in a seam across his chest. He ducked behind another tent, always moving, always keeping himself from being too much of a target.

  The woman crackling with faint blue fire (no brighter than a gas flame in sunlight) she seemed immune to their shooting. Maybe the blue was some sort of protection? Santos kept trained on her, so David worked on her too, ducking, firing, ducking. She turned and ran, evidently not trusting her own equipment and David kept trained on her, a steady stream of bullets, the
re was still firing around him but he ignored it, keeping his gun on the woman, it should have been heating up, he should have at least emptied the clip by now but it kept on firing, die, you goddamn bitch—

  Something huge lurched to his right, but it wasn’t anything, he had lost part of his view, he could only see out of his left eye. Stupid goddamn moment for the helmet to screw up. Cheap equipment. No maintenance. He fired, the world suddenly flatter. He couldn’t focus out of his left eye as well. The woman turned to fire, pausing, and he and Santos trained on her. She went down, finally, and he felt the rising surge of triumph, and the blue flickered all around her like lightning and was gone.

  Santos whooped, adrenaline joy.

  The rest were running, easily cut down. And then the little camp was in tatters. Bodies everywhere. It was an astounding amount of destruction for two people. Animated violence. “Great job,” Santos said, standing there, looking around. “We got to get out of here, they have reinforcements coming, you know?”

  Only seeing out of one eye was really annoying. He could hear out of both ears, all right. Maybe he should exit the game and see if he could get another cube? But how would he get back in the game?

  “We should go that way, I think,” Santos pointed and glanced back to confirm. “Oh shit, Lezard.”

  “What?” David said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were wounded?”

  “I am?” David said. Of course, he was penalized.

  “Can you see?”

  “With one eye.”

  “Cristo,” Santos said, “you have a medikit?”

  A medikit? It had never even dawned on him that they would use a medikit in virtual. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I got one, wait—” Santos fumbled a moment, tapped his pocket, didn’t like what came up and fumbled some more. Then he had a blue kit box in his hand. He peered at the cover in the moonlight. “Yeah, it’s still all right.”

  He opened the box but the gloves didn’t allow fine manipulation so he took out a packet and waved it in David’s face. The packet disappeared—used up, David assumed. “Okay,” Santos said, “now you won’t bleed to death or die of infection.”