by Tim Kindberg
And in the meantime, I feel something that occurs only every two hundred years or so to our kind: I grow fecund. With my tonguing I am ready to implant in mortal mind a new vodu.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hotel Royal
“Room 71, please.” This was code for where the girls of the Royal awaited their customers. David proceeded, barely waiting for the bodai desk clerk’s nod. A corridor led him from a corner by the desk. Room 71 did not exist as such. The highest number on a door at the Royal, three flights up, was 68. He knocked on a door marked Hotel Staff Only.
The door swung open as if automatically. As he knew from previous visits, a bodai stood to the side, out of view, and opened it. It was a curious protocol, designed perhaps to leave customers at their ease as long as possible in their incipient act – to get them through the door without having to face even a bodai at first.
The sex workers mostly sat or lay on chairs and settees in an atmosphere somewhere between boredom and nervous anticipation, reflecting the presence of both seasoned occupants and ingenues.
The desultory conversation petered out as they regarded the customer. They were all female. If he had wanted a male he would have asked for room 72, further down the corridor.
David knew many of the faces by now. They gave a glimmer of recognition in return: just enough, not to a degree that might lead him to reject their over-familiarity. Some he had seen on many occasions but had never used; they turned away as soon as they saw him. Either they did not attract him, or there was something about them that triggered a suspicion in the ID cop – an unnecessary risk. He did not want to have to take any of these girls to a copnode. Not that the network cared who he consorted with. It was the shame he would feel that deterred him.
After his eyes had traced a few of the familiars, he allowed them to alight on someone relatively new who had been present on his last two visits. She was tall, the only one leaning against a wall, and a scar like a tear trail in flesh down her left cheek only added to the beauty of her eyes. She was trouble, he was pretty sure.
The part of David that did not want to be there at all nagged at him. A small, bullying facet of himself – or the vodu? – had dragged him to the Royal. Once there, he wanted no complications. But she was fascinating. He allowed himself to stare at her. She held her gaze to the floor while his eyes were upon her. For a moment he imagined having her. He told himself not to be so stupid.
The girl he chose instead, with a nod, led him to her appointed room by a service staircase. Unlike the new arrival, he knew where he was with her. After they had had fleeting sex he remained a few minutes, against his usual instinct to leave immediately, lying beside her on the bed.
“Have you spoken to the new girl? I haven’t seen her before.”
“Who?” She was distracted like all the others, sensa playing like tiny telepathic projections on the edge of her consciousness.
“Tall, in the black-and-white dress, hair tied up. She was standing.”
“Oh. Her. Yes. No. Not really.”
“Don’t you get to know one another?”
“Not when they’re not interested in you.” The sensa seemed to have subsided temporarily. She was looking at him, although without interest.
“But” – she was fully attending to the room around her now, with its dismal business-class trappings, the curtains closed – “she doesn’t fuck.”
“She doesn’t what?”
“They say she takes them – you – to a room and has their bytecoins off them, but she doesn’t fuck them.”
David pictured her again, the newcomer, with her facial jewellery and the elaborate braiding and the structure of her hair which she had changed since the last time he had seen her. He guessed that she had marked him too, knew what he was.
As he left he decided he would choose her next.
David, Breakage and Dirac sat uncomfortably together in a speeding module. Gone were the days of flashing lights and sirens. Algorithms diverted or halted all other traffic as the module transited the near-above.
Soon they arrived at a warespace: a hangar in which flesh and bodais were everywhere, all wearing blue overalls. The bodais had faces and bodies from the same mould, like spanners or screwdrivers. Their uniformity seemed to emphasise the variety of faces and shapes of the flesh amongst them, their characters. But the consciousness of the fleshren conferred no advantage. On the contrary, the bodais were issuing orders to them, albeit in tones of suggestion, and the flesh moved from machine to machine, tending them and looking at screens. It was not at all clear what enterprise they were engaged in or for which multinat.
“Dirac,” said David, “you’ve brought us here for what? Do you know for sure C15 is here?” David was not sure he liked the way Dirac had seemed evasive in the module, apparently keeping some of his findings to himself.
Dirac shrugged. “He’s here according to Big Mind.”
“Yes, but you and I know that that is meaningless. His network profile has been hacked. Is he really here? What evidence do you have?”
“We’ll see.” Dirac showed an image of C15 to a woman who was shuffling reluctantly between consoles, her performance tracked by the network as she went about her work. Something weighed on her; her face was careworn and her head was stooped. It was like waking someone from a dream.
“Have you seen him?” Dirac asked.
She looked back at him as though he were talking a foreign language. Perhaps he was.
“Have a good look. Have you seen him?”
“No,” she replied. “Do you imagine I see everyone who works here?”
They moved through the warespace, stopping to show the image to flesh who all reluctantly gave similar negative responses.
“How easy would it be to hide here?” David asked Breakage, who had become one of the warespace bodais on temporary assignment and had acquired the fixed facial expression of those cheap, utilitarian models. Breakage ran a calculation of fleshly capabilities against a mathematical model of the warespace.
“Hiding impossible,” he said. “All is known.”
David wasn’t so sure. “Warespace?” he said, addressing the building. “Is C15 here?” He sent the suspect’s profile through his beads.
“Present.”
“Identify.”
The warespace delegated a bodai who led them to an individual looking nothing like C15. He was not C15 in data, either. After a few questions it became clear that he was an innocent whose ID had been appropriated, and knew nothing.
“Hackery,” said David. “Not bad hackery. But then I expected nothing less. It might be a more subtle play than it seems. Maybe we’re supposed to go away now, and not look anymore.”
“Then we’d better try another tack,” said Dirac.
David looked upwards to the roof of the warespace, to platforms and walkways which were supposed to be unused.
“What’s up there? I think we’d better find out. With some help.”
They sent for dogs. A team of them soon arrived, pushing their snouts through the partly open windows of their dispatch module. The working flesh stood aghast; the slavering pack caused considerable sheepish excitement. The warespace bodais ignored the spectacle, which was beyond them, and tried to draw the flesh back to work.
David, Dirac and Breakage climbed back into their module with the dogs. As they rose to the disused upper levels, the dogs yelped with the excitement of a chase. Slowly they traced along the old maintenance platforms, the dogs sniffing out of the module’s windows. They searched, hovering wherever David and Dirac saw a place that flesh could climb to. David felt a primitive urge to hunt, trawling with dogs for someone whose network identity had been obfuscated. The search was between flesh – breathing, watchful flesh, the blood pumping through their arteries – a search for someone unknown in the network. And his vodu, also an unknown, responded, squatting inside his mind as he moved around; it was like a monstrous cuckoo, looking through his eyes as though they were window
s to a world it was hungry for.
David and Dirac peered from either side of the craft, the dogs panting beside them. Beams, buttresses and walkways stretched to and from the platforms they skirted through.
The dogs suddenly yelped furiously. “Over there!” cried David. He steered towards a figure clambering precariously along a buttress towards a platform.
They caught up, seeing the fear in the man’s eyes as they neared, and dismounted onto the platform. It wasn’t C15.
“Who are you?” said David.
“You got beads, don’t you? Cop.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“No one.”
“You have an ID.”
“It’s not mine. I don’t recognise its validity. It doesn’t represent who I am. The truth is offline.” The man assumed an aggressive, defiant look. Breakage, with his completely blank expression, took a step towards him, the ID police bodai regaining his purpose.
Breakage said, “Arrest. ID statute 14A.”
“Can it, Breakage. What’s his journey like?”
“Journey clean. Breakage does not understand confession.”
“He’s been mixed,” said Dirac. “His journey’s been mixed with that of C15 in Big Mind.”
“Not in reality?” asked David.
“I couldn’t possibly comment on anything other than an identical relationship between Big Mind and reality. But you might ask him about that.”
“Tell us where you’ve been and who you’ve been with in the past few days.”
“I don’t talk to cops.”
“Did you hear that, Dirac? We’ve got ourselves a rebel. Hankering for the anarchy after the Disruption. But my gut tells me he’s been caught up in something he knows nothing about, like the other one below. Breakage, let him go for now.” The bodai stood back.
“You can make your own way down,” David said.
“Fuck you, cop.”
They reboarded the hovering module and left, the dogs lying down at their feet. David saw fresh graffiti among the I&I signs as they transited the near-above: Last Few Days.
“We have to find another way of searching,” he said. He could think of none. But somewhere deep inside, the excitement of the chase remained with him. Was there something in all of this to bring him back to Yaa?
I, Pempamsie, returned to the Royal after the day’s fruitless search for whoever knew of vodus and Super Mare. My questions about vodus were always met with incomprehension; mention of Super Mare provoked recognition but equally incredulity that I should ask about it.
Because of what I was about to put myself through, I stood awhile at the hotel’s threshold. The city hummed and whined behind me. The white sky in UK.land burned us all.
The Nkonsonkonso in UK.land was broken in many places. Flesh dissembled. Flesh had forgotten true flesh: unlike our Accra.city, with its artists; the rivers of us; our towers; our striving, restless energies. In Westaf our beads hummed together, but they blocked the sensa from outside, from Big Mind.
In Avonmouth.city, IANI held sway. I took a deep breath and entered the Royal.
The robot at the desk was receiving a client who had entered past me, directing him to room 71, where I would put myself on sale – but not be sold – with the other women. We all had our own rooms just for ourselves, where I would retire later, and a pool of rooms to use with the clients. Few bona fide guests stayed in the hotel. It was a sex work node.
Some of the women were robots, others flesh. They engaged in a ritual re-enactment of love-making. I sensed that little true love was made in UK.land, even outside the walls of the Royal. Not that I, Pempamsie, knew this love.
I told the robot at reception about my availability and walked to the room.
The clients entered. They barely remembered why they came, a spasmic urge. In their bright outfits, with haunted faces, they were ghosts. I searched their faces for the man who knew of vodus. It was he I had to find.
And there he was. My senses told me so.
I took him in silence to my own room, where I kept the painting. I could see as we walked that he understood the significance: not to use one of the sex work rooms. We were met inside by a searing beam of sunlight that had broken through the heavy white sheet of cloud, past the buttresses, monorails and towering node clusters of the near-above, all silent behind the windows.
I, Pempamsie, would be I again. I would remember my mother and father. I would lose the other that trammelled me.
“Why don’t you lie on the bed?” I said.
He had barely entered the room. Sunglasses. Suit. He remained standing. He was examining me.
“Take off your jacket.”
Sweat.
“I know what you are,” I said. “An ID officer.”
He did not reply. I walked over and helped him out of his jacket, started to unbutton his shirt, but he stopped me. Sweat.
“Relax. I won’t hurt you.”
Wouldn’t I? I felt him through his shirt.
The arms: veins like cables under the skin. As have I. Inhabitance, a sign. Nsoroma was wise to send me here.
Unlike the others, for him I took off my blouse. Showed him veins like cables under the skin. He saw, and understood.
Next, his sunglasses. It was as though he wanted to stop me but couldn’t, mesmerised. Eyes. Ordinary flesh eyes. Staring at my arms, then looking into my eyes with fear on his face. Back at my arms, and my eyes again. Consternation. Then he relaxed, as though he had not found what he feared.
“We must make chemistry,” I said.
“I’m going to have to arrest you,” he said. Was this foreplay? “Afterwards,” he said. A UK.land joke?
The mirror held the two of us. Like twins, despite our skin colour: with twins inside.
“No,” I said. “We won’t be doing that.”
But I wanted to.
“Then, what?”
I took out the painting from its case. Above: Osrane ne nsoroma, the moon and star. Below: Pempamsie. Behind her: the vampire, she who would unmind me.
He touched the oils, the paint thick and cresting like a sea of colour.
For many years, I guessed, he had hidden all. Even the eyes, whereas I saw nothing there to hide.
It wasn’t a bad face.
Our beads like atoms in a crystal, as though nothing were amiss. One flesh, two flesh. And inhabitance. I traced his forehead with my finger, as though it could be said to hold his soul, Sunsum. And the other.
He let my fingers drift. A pulse at his temple. He touched my cheek.
“Room,” I said. “How many?”
“Two present,” it said.
We both smiled.
He looked back at the painting. “It’s you,” he said, but he was looking at her.
“Do you know her?” I asked.
“We took her into custody. But I had to let her go.”
“Had to?”
He told me of a ship, the Mekhanik Pustoshnyy, which had landed out of the blue. Not long after I arrived, I realised. They must have found my destination quickly; Nsoroma must have been forced to tell them.
He told me of the sixteen crew: one vampire – she – and fifteen men. He told me of her dollings, as he called them. But he did not say why he had let such a creature go.
What had he seen in my eyes that caused him to trust me, to tell me all of this? Had he been waiting for me, as I had been looking for him?
“Fourteen souls taken from their owners,” he said. “And fourteen beads.”
“What beads?”
“We don’t know, exactly. We found only that they were missing, just like their minds.”
“And who were they, these crew?” I asked.
“Merely carriers,” he replied.
I, Pempamsie, recognised at once, without completely understanding. Afuntummireku denkyemmireku: the plural-headed crocodile with a single stomach. The assembly of a malfeasant contraption.
“And what I want to know,” he said, “is not only the
whereabouts of the fifteenth crew member but why she, the mind-sucking vampire, appears with you in your painting.”
His face remained inscrutable. He was withdrawing, becoming the detective again.
“You think I am her accomplice,” I said.
“Why should I trust you any further, just because of our mutual condition? After all, we share a related condition with her, too.”
“Inhabitance. But it seems to have several forms. Anyway, you don’t have to trust me, any more than I am bound to trust you. But I sense yours is a problem, like mine, even though it appears not to have control over you. Not at this moment, at least. We have something to gain from one another, perhaps. What is your name?”
He hesitated. “David. It seems there is another problem – Obayifa, the one in your painting.”
“Obayifa.” A name for her at last. I had to say it out loud. “I am Pempamsie. As two, perhaps we can liberate ourselves from our inhabitance.” Never before has Pempamsie uttered those words: “as two”.
“Before she consumes our minds?”
“Wouldn’t she have done that to you by now, when you had her in custody? She’s not interested in you.” In fact, Nsoroma had said two vodus could not touch in the same mind. Did this man know that? Nsoroma had said, too, that the vampire knew a way to remove mine. Was this what she was constructing with the beads – the crocodile with many heads?
“I believe I am immune to her while I am inhabited,” he said. “But according to that painting she is interested in you, whether or not she can doll you. You must be very special. To merit whatever it is they’ve gone to so much trouble for, sending her after you. If indeed she is here for you – and I’m going to assume, now that I’ve seen that painting of yours, that she is – I think I should keep away from you. That would be my best bet. You’re trouble.”
“No, I can help you.”
“Tell me how.”
“I do not know. Yet. But I want to.” I, Pempamsie, was feeling a curious attraction. Was it I who felt it for him? Or my inhabitant for his?
This David seemed perturbed by my offer. “I’ll come back for you.” He closed the door behind him.