by Tim Kindberg
“Obayifa.”
“I went to make some tea. They were chatting when I returned. Something wasn’t right, though; the scene was a little forced. She said she wanted to take him out. He looked at me and hesitated, but he went along with it.”
“And all this time, you say the carie had nothing on her. What about your beads?”
She laughed at him. “My beads, eh. You want to ask about my beads. Can’t you feel them, Mr Detective? Let’s just say they are a Westaf variety.”
“Where are you from?”
“East of there. Or Avonmouth city. It’s all the same, isn’t it? It’s all nodes in the Between. Who knows where they will dispatch me next.”
“Go back to that day in the carie. What did your beads tell you about her?”
“Come to think of it, I don’t believe I remember anything about her that way. There was nothing. But then I don’t make it my business to feel people around me. And I didn’t need my beads in order to know I didn’t trust her. But I couldn’t go against his wishes.”
“So she took him out. For how long?”
“For lunch, she said, but not long. Half an hour, maybe.”
“And she returned with him?”
“I’ve already told you. She brought him into the lobby but wouldn’t explain what had happened to him. She was smirking as she left. Had a module waiting. Flew off.”
“Tell me more about the state of Mr Charles.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. All the life sucked out of him. I couldn’t coax another word from his lips. Climbed onto the furniture with an empty look, as though even the pain was gone. Two days later, he was dead.”
She looked at him and he looked back at her. “Can I go now?” She stood up. “What is it with you? You’re so sad. Have you lost someone? Not Mr Charles – someone else?”
She eyed his forlorn uniform of suit and shades. The grief of his double loss passed like a heavy wave over him.
“Don’t go.”
“Excuse me?”
“Stay awhile.”
“Oh. Mr ID Detective wants to spend time with his next victim. Why don’t you get it over with?”
She thrust out her wrists, the beads lifeless on the left.
He looked up into his daughter’s face, then thought about the vodu. He was feeling faint. “I told you I’m not interested in you in that way. Go, why don’t you.”
A two-car swept up. She walked into it, stared down the platform while the doors swished shut in front of him and the two-car took her away.
CHAPTER TEN
Pempamsie
I continued to be an object of interest to the Chinese robots, who accosted me like dogs scenting a fracture in normality.
And they were not my only problem. I had to give the Ohen Tuos the slip many times. At least, I believed it was they. The thing inside warned me about them. It might equally have been telling them where I was. How else were the Ohen Tuos following me, I, an expert in losing tails? I looked at my beads – at what I used to think of as my beads. I was no longer in control of what emanated from them. If I were Swirling Suit, I would leave a means of re-appropriating my handiwork, should I need it. It takes madness or supreme confidence to default on payment to one such as he. I, Pempamsie, used to be supremely confident.
I resolved to seek Nsoroma, a child of the sky, in order to achieve Sankofa: undo my mistakes.
Not far from the Dame-Dame Towers, where I first met Swirling Suit, just off Oxford Street, was a painting house. Flesh created pictures there. It was off the track. A house of truth, from a distant age. Their brushes, their paints, their canvases and frames, were all procured from flesh far away in what used to be known as the Upper Volta. They painted pots, people, rivers, clouds. The paintings celebrated the fleshwork in finely cast brush strokes.
And in the painting house flesh survived, somehow. Their materials were purchased, the paintings disseminated, sold through a network; they flowed through our human rivers, our Nkonsonkonso.
I, Pempamsie, took a one-car tro-tro there to sit for a portrait. As I entered, pushing aside a beaded curtain, I saw a scene of industry. I went and sat with others queuing. We took in the light from windows in the ceiling, the resinous smell. One by one we were picked. A painter silently chose us. One by one the others in the queue followed their choosers to stations in the open space, where they were arranged for their portraits. The painting began, silent and assiduous.
No one seemed to notice me here. I was only one link in Nkonsonkonso.
Except that a boy entered the studio. I thought he too was to be a subject. But he took paints and brushes from a cupboard and walked up to me.
I followed him though the large studio floor, winding through painters and subjects, all sweating, good-natured, enjoying their mutual presence.
“Please, sit,” he said.
We were in a corner of the studio, opposite to where I had waited.
“To paint,” he said, “is to regain our true flesh selves.” He smiled, a boy of about sixteen, serious. Then he fell silent. He picked out the lines of me as he worked his brushes, dipping them in a palette of fat paints, applying them to the portrait with total concentration.
“What do you see?” I asked. The sun streamed around us.
“An unwelcome visitor. Who will not leave.”
“Yes.”
“And who feeds off his host, however small his appetite. A vodu.”
“A vodu? What is that?” I affected ignorance. No one around us appeared to be listening. It was as though he and I were dreaming together in one dream. He looked at me even more intently.
“We have a saying: clarity is everything.”
“I have lost my clarity,” I said.
“You wanted to. You entered the Divide.”
“I want my clarity back.”
“And the consequences?”
“Damn the consequences. I… I would be Pemp… I would be Pem…” I could not utter my name. I was strangled from inside. The vodu.
“There is one in UK land who may be able to help you. You would be Pempamsie again. You would be your own clarity: a tree that stands alone and reaches for the sky. I don’t know him, only the place where he lives. In Super Mare.”
“But what do you know about him?”
“He opposes.”
“Opposes what?”
“The order. Such a man may be able to help you.”
Hours passed. Evening gathered outside. He turned the canvas around. How could he have finished so quickly? But there I was, beneath Osrane ne nsoroma, the moon and star. A little way behind me stood a figure: a young woman whose face was lit with a searing stare.
“Who is she?”
“A vampire,” he said. “A triumph of mentalmagic; a case of complete vodu inhabitance.”
The boy explained that my squatter, injected by Swirling Suit, was nothing compared to her: a minor perturbation by comparison to her tidal wave of fuckery.
“What will she do to me?”
“You would be wrung of all psychic energy. But only if she can remove your vodu first.”
“How so?”
“Two vodus may not touch in the same mind.”
It was unlikely such a pursuer would be ignorant of my inhabitance; therefore she knew a way to remove my vodu, Nsoroma explained. Then she would enter me to steal my mind. She would take me with her. I would be absorbed by her, wanted purely for food and not for my identity. I, Pempamsie, would be absolutely lost.
“Find this man,” he said. “But do not go directly to Super Mare. Travel instead to nearby Avonmouth city. Ask for him there. Ask for guidance.”
“Ask who?”
“Another of our fleshren. He knows of vodus. Now, I have told you all I know. I wish you good fortune in finding Kerapa: that which removes evil.”
A few days later, Nsoroma entered the busy studio, whose smells of sweat and paint and canvas and whose light pouring in from huge panes in the roof filled him with lo
ve for flesh, for Nkonsonkonso, the chain of flesh pouring through the world.
He passed in front of those who were waiting, seated along one wall and watching the scene of artists and subjects, listening to their chatter and hoping to join them. Patience, patience. There was no booking system. You turned up and hoped that that day you would be blessed in oils, committed to returning for days if necessary until your portrait was complete. But you might never be picked in the first place.
Today there were many in the waiting line. Many parents accompanying their children. Nsoroma looked particularly at these young faces.
However, his eye was caught by the man in the last seat. This man was deemed important in some sense, for he was clearly under the protection of a bigger man next to him, a man wearing the Ohen Tuo symbol on his lapel. And, Nsoroma now realised, there had been another Ohen Tuo stationed across Oxford Street.
Nsoroma picked not the man but his henchman, beckoning him.
But it was his master who stood up. And it was he who followed Nsoroma to an empty place in the studio floor.
The suit of this man bore a scene of volcanic mountains, streams and cherry blossom. When he sat down the scenery began to shift, swirling around him. It was highly distracting.
“Could you switch that off, please, if I am to paint you? Not that I chose you, but you are here now.”
“Me c’yaan switch it off. Has a mind fi its own, ya seen. Must like young Mr Painter, wanna dance fi ’im.”
“Then I won’t be able to paint you after all. I didn’t pick you. Please ask your friend to come over instead.”
“Me tink ya bin paintin’ a friend o’ mine lately. A little hey nonny nonnee, hey nonny non. Wid a likkle someting speciahl a gwaan inside. Ya hear me, brudda?” The way this man talked, the violence that lay in his tone despite the childish words he sometimes used, made Nsoroma afraid.
“I don’t know who you mean.”
His henchman appeared beside him. A frail easel stood between Nsoroma and the two men.
“Me know you’s a lyin’ now.” The man in the swirling suit leaned and gently pushed the easel aside. “An me know ya a youth a da star, da likkle child o’ da sky. You da likkle man a nonny nonnee gone to fi advice. An ya gonna tell I what it is you run gone tell da hey nonny nonnee non. Seen?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
David
On his return to the labnode, David took a scrap of comfort from the innocence of the natural world around it. Gulls were still swooping and crying outside. The waves crashed like cymbals. He breathed in the sea air.
“The A/C is broken,” said Dirac when he greeted him at the door. “It’s stifling, I know, but we’ll just have to manage.”
“Breakage?” said David. The bodai was again in the form of an old woman, but as strong and dexterous as any other bodai. There was a pause as integers streamed through a multitude of algorithms in an attempt to devise a response. To no avail.
David, tense with accumulated frustration, closed his eyes and took a breath. His assistant’s obtusity sometimes became too much, however much he couldn’t help the limitations of all AIs.
He spelled it out. “Can. You. Fix. The. A/C?”
“No skillpack for A/C. All is known.”
David looked in vain for something on Dirac’s desk to fan himself with.
“Please excuse us,” he said, and took the bodai aside.
“Breakage, you’re no help to me here. I’d like you to look for the remaining crew of the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy.”
“Not necessary. All is known.”
“No. Not all is known. That’s why the ID police exist.”
“Found in Big Mind.”
“No. The two we found dolled were not where their online traces indicated and neither will the others be. They were fabbed, Breakage, despite police-issued IDs. They were flickering around Avonmouth city like Elizabethan light bulbs on the blink, and so will the others be. Remember who we are? We. Are. The. ID. Police. I’m instructing you to look. Physical search. In the fleshwork. The near-above. The down-below. Back to the Hotel Royal. Everywhere.”
“Task exceeds limits. Breakage incapable.”
“Breakage try.”
“Bod dispatch in thirty minutes.”
“Irrelevant. Just do it, Breakage. Compute the optimal points of search.”
The old woman walked out of the labnode, her age a notional artefact of clothes and wrinkled visage: the same uncanny swivelled walk of all bodais. David wondered how Breakage’s algorithms would cope with an open task. But protocol was for bodais to do something when instructed: the best match, algorithmically speaking, to the task. David pictured Breakage walking among the fleshwork, peering into nodes one by one, pattern-matching with his beads, scanning irises.
He returned to Dirac.
“Are you amused, Professor?”
“Not at all, Detective.” He was scornful, more like. David’s inclination to trust him, so far as it went, was partly because of that scorn. It was authentic.
“There’s been a development in the case I’m working on.” He told Dirac about the dollings: Mr Charles, two crew found in the Hotel Royal. About Obayifa, and that he presumed she was responsible in some way, although he did not reveal Mary’s testament in the case of Mr Charles. Mary was an ID felon, which wouldn’t look good. He’d worry about all of that later.
Dirac listened carefully, asked for clarifications. David sweated, loosened his tie. The heat pressed like the walls of a cell.
“So you suspect she’s taken their minds, Detective. Or, as you say, dolled them. Obviously, I would need to know much more about the particulars. But what you describe is psychic vampirism. And yes, I do take that seriously. I first studied these vampires a long time ago, as part of my research into the more exotic side of mental phenomena.”
“And I know of them too, from Westaf. A mind-sucker. Or should I say, mind-fucker.”
“If you really must put it that rather peculiar way. But indeed. Pleasure taken, energy absorbed.”
“The victim’s mind – vanished altogether?”
“No, Detective, she takes them with her. Every mind she has extracted will be laid out within her own consciousness, in so many mental sarcophagi existing in the eternal nightmare of her being. For feeding on.”
Dirac paused, considering. “Allow me to show you something. Come.”
The scientist walked stiffly through a door at the back of the office. David was more than uncomfortable now: disturbed at the turn the conversation had taken, which was too close to the horror of his own vodu. He followed Dirac.
A further door slid aside. They entered a conservatory at the back of the labnode, facing the sea. Dirac bade David to sit on a wicker chair, next to his own. A silent scape of dunes rolled down to the sea before them; the earth hung in its own searing heat. Inside, large-leaved plants thrived to either side of them. The air was moist and just bearably hot, for the glass was tinted and here the A/C worked, despite its failure in the office.
“Conservatory, more filter,” Dirac commanded, and observed the sun-throttling effect. “Still more.” Backlights turned on as the driving sunlight was finally thwarted. The space became a shadowy nest of plant life. The resultant intimacy increased David’s unease.
“Detective, I’d like you to experience some of the results of my experiments. I hope you don’t mind. I think you’ll find them relevant to the case.”
Dirac made no visible move, but David found himself suddenly subjected to a strong feeling of dread without any apparent cause. Dirac remained still, seated with his hands clasped upon his crossed legs, coolly regarding David’s seizure by an unknown mental force. David felt an awful shadow looming across his mind. His vodu was feeling it too, milling in a tight circle in its cage.
The shadow dissolved as suddenly as it had appeared. David was thunderstruck.
Dirac smiled, touching David’s knee. “It’s all right. It’s gone now. And you can tell your inhabitant the same
– I was going to say your ‘friend’, but I doubt he’s that. Except that perhaps you don’t need to tell him. He’s connected to the same manifold that you call your consciousness. He is listening, one with you and yet separate. Am I wrong, Detective?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve lived alone too long. Solitude has stoked your imagination.”
“Come now. I have instruments that can detect mental phenomena in the data that passes to and from my visitors. I built them for my research into psychblood. One proved to be especially sensitive.”
“Psychblood but not consciousness, Professor. It is merely an electro-chemical conductor between the brain and the network. All is known.” David pronounced the network’s mantra with a heavy irony.
“Consciousness and psychblood are intimately intertwined, as you know. After all, it’s how the network plays sensa into the genpop’s minds. And both times you have visited, I have picked up an extra reading.”
“I came to talk about the circuit of bones, and what we are agreeing is a mind-sucking vampire, Dirac. Now can we please stick to business?”
“Naturally. We will come to all of that in good time. First, I wanted only to let you know that you had a friend. In me, that is. I can’t tell much about what is squatting within you. Judging by my previous encounters, yours is remarkably well behaved. Or shackled. Wouldn’t you like to take off your sunglasses? It’s rather dark in here.”
“Stop. You have confessed to illicit instrumentation, to monitoring an officer of the ID police. I could haul you in—”
“And I could tell them what I know. About why you wear the sunglasses. Why you don’t expose your arms.” Dirac flashed a grotesque smile that was meant to be reassuring. “I should advise you that we are in a Faraday cage. Nothing, literally nothing, leaves my little conservatory here. And algorithmically speaking, it’s as though we were both still just outside it, having a pleasant chat. Not offline, in other words, as far as the network is concerned. So you don’t need to worry on that score.”