The restaurant is expensive and trendy, one of the new kind that re-creates ancient culinary styles. This one emulates old-Japan, which I gather Auntie Yaha selected in deference to Ueda-sama. He wears a curious expression when we remove our shoes and step inside. It’s as if someone has jostled the reflecting pool. For a moment, I can discern the miles beneath the surface but none of the detail. I only know that he seems sad and happy and nostalgic and in physical pain all at once. There’s a word for that, as Enki would say.
“Do you have saudade in Japanese?” I ask.
Ueda-sama freezes like a figure in a holo, halfway to kneeling at the table. He blinks, and the ripples get wider. “Natsukashii comes closest,” he says. “But no, not really. There’s a good reason you use it in so many of your songs.”
I squat on my ankles and wonder how long it will take before my feet completely fall asleep. If they really used to eat like this in old-Japan, I don’t know how anyone ever walked.
Auntie Yaha, her expression bland enough to match Ueda-sama’s reflecting pool, just laughs and turns the conversation deftly to the differences between old and new Portuguese. I tune her out. Ueda-sama is interesting, I decide. And not unattractive, for all that he’s ancient. From a certain angle, he looks like someone with special knowledge. Someone you want to befriend because of the off chance of hearing his stories. He’s not the first person I’ve met from another city, but he’s the first from so far away. He’s the first who knows what happens to human societies when they don’t put limits on technology.
The first course arrives, carried in by a quiet woman in a silk robe. The tiny ceramic plates are arrayed with delicate strips of fish. Ueda-sama tastes his first. He closes his eyes with the first bite. He groans, though so softly only Auntie Yaha and I can hear it.
He opens his eyes as if startled to find us still there. He clears his throat. “My apologies. I forgot myself. It’s been much too long since I’ve been able to enjoy such food.”
I put a piece in my mouth. The raw fish tastes good, though I’m not sure why it made Ueda-sama groan as if he’d asked Enki to whip him.
“You don’t have old-Japan food in Tokyo 10?” Auntie Yaha asks, and I think she must truly be surprised, because she almost never admits lacking any cultural knowledge.
Ueda-sama smiles, smooth and reflective once more. “We used to. Not very much need of it, these days, given all the changes. The ones like me — grandes, if you will, June — are not so many to warrant it.”
His given all the changes feels charged, at once glib and all-encompassing, the same way Principal Ieyascu talks about the nuclear cold or first-wave immigration. I glance at Auntie Yaha, but she just nods in sympathy. I put down my chopsticks and struggle to remember all I ever learned about Tokyo 10 and their notorious mods. I’m once again struck by how strange it is for the ambassador from such an infamous place to look so … normal. Completely human. Even Enki has more mods.
“Why are you here?” I ask, suddenly.
Auntie Yaha gives my thigh a warning squeeze. “June …”
“I wanted to meet you. To apologize, frankly, for my role in that spectacle last month.”
I wave them both away. “No, I don’t mean that. There’s nothing you could have done about that. I mean why are you here, in Palmares Três? In a, well, a real human body. Why can’t you connect to the city with your brain or see a holo in your retinas or just download yourself?”
Auntie Yaha sighs and lifts another piece of the fish to her mouth. Ueda-sama gets that look again, that saudade.
“Because I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
He shrugs. “There are some people whose bodies can’t take the mods, for whatever reason. In my case, I’m simply too old. To someone like me, Tokyo 10 can feel like a ghost city. Millions and millions of people live as data streams in the cloud, but barely a hundred thousand of us have kept our bodies. We’re the only ones who can travel to see the rest of the world, though. We’re the only ones who can taste perfectly prepared sashimi and shake hands and …”
I remember what Enki said: The first night, he asked me to whip him. And I understand, more completely than I like, how one can crave sensation itself, no matter how unpleasant. I wonder how he feels about having his unusual preferences exposed to public scrutiny.
“So you became an ambassador,” I say.
“It seemed preferable to hara-kiri, at the time.”
I recognize the foreign word, though it takes me a moment to realize why. We have it too, in a shortened form: kiri. We must have taken it from the Japanese-Brazilian immigrants who first came here from São Paulo.
“How old are you, Ueda-sama?”
“Three hundred and four, at the end of winter.”
I feel my eyes widen. They must have found a new treatment in Tokyo 10, because I’ve never heard of even the oldest grande making it past two hundred and fifty.
“Does Enki know?”
He laughs. “Do you know what he said to me, right after we first met? ‘You can’t recapture your youth, but would you like to screw it?’”
Auntie Yaha chokes on her fish. I thump her back and smile, because I love how Enki looks when he says things he knows are outrageous. I’m frightened of the way he dares the world, but I love it too. Maybe that’s what Gil meant when he said I could keep him safe? In deference to Auntie Yaha’s stricken sensibilities (and the server coming within easy earshot), we return the conversation to the banal for the rest of the night. The food is light, but there’s enough of it that I feel satisfied in the end.
We walk back to the platform in relative silence, but it’s companionable, not tense. I like Ueda-sama, a connection that surprises me. And between him and Enki, I’m beginning to think the Aunties might have a point about the dangers of too much tech.
“A pleasure,” he says, bowing to me again when his pod arrives. He nods at Auntie Yaha. “I owe you a debt for arranging this,” he says.
Auntie Yaha, who has clearly had more than enough unexpected social breaches in one night, does not even bother with a polite denial. They exchange smiles, each other’s perfect mirror.
“Ueda,” I say just as he steps into his pod. He pauses and turns around.
“Yes?”
“You and Enki understand each other, don’t you?”
This time, at least, his smile is certainly genuine. “I think so, June.”
The first thing I remember is a song. It vibrates, deep and wide, in my mamãe’s chest. I am on her back, half asleep. The song is familiar, a popular street tune from Salvador that bloco amarelo turned into a summer hit five or six years ago. I danced to it then, when everyone but me had forgotten where it came from.
I liked it that way.
My mamãe wasn’t singing to me. In the memory, I somehow know this. She thinks I’m asleep. She thinks I’m too young to understand. She’s singing for herself. For her memories of her own mamãe, and the world they lived in before militias tore it apart. She’s singing for her future, and maybe for the lover who fathered me, though I heard no more than three words about him growing up (“Better off gone,” and I always wondered if she meant for him, or for us). But the song is filled with love, and I know it holds me tight as the linen cloth pressing me to her spine. The noises of Palmares Três wash over me as they always have: the waves pounding against the pylons, the susurrus of pods shunting through transport tunnels above, the shrieking of children, the complaints of their parents, the creak of algae vats rocking in the breeze.
I am in love. With my mamãe, who doesn’t think of me. With the city, who will hate me.
With my life, which one day I will choose to end.
The stencils start going up a week after the party on A Quarentena. Or maybe they started earlier, everything’s a rumor, but I first notice it painted on a window on the eastern side of our school building. It’s Enki and it’s me in silhouette, our hair tangling and merging in the middle. My hand is raised, shooting out lig
ht. Enki’s mouth is open; he’s sucking in the world around him, while his own hands fade into a pixelated glow. There aren’t any words.
We all know what it means anyway.
Everyone whispers in school. Bebel makes a point of putting her arm around me at lunch, and I don’t understand why until I overhear the tail end of the conversation she’s trying to distract me from.
“Why is she even here? Why doesn’t she download herself already —”
“You know I heard Enki gave her mods? I swear I saw her eyes glowing earlier today. And I voted for him too.”
“Pasqual was so much better.”
Bebel’s hands are warm on my cheeks; she makes me look at her. “They don’t know you,” she says. “I don’t care what side you’re on; you’re still my friend.”
What side I’m on? Friend? I don’t understand anything, but I find myself nodding anyway. “You too,” I say, and then I feel better.
Here’s the trouble: The spider bot rotting in the bay has made it impossible for the Aunties to ignore the issue of outside technology any longer. And you’d think that wakas would be all for awesome new mods, but it turns out almost everyone from the high tiers is wary of the extreme technology pioneered in Tokyo 10. The verde, on the other hand, is a technophile stronghold, though I doubt I would have understood why before Enki.
Ueda-sama has kept conspicuously silent on the subject of trade between our cities, though he’s been hounded by the top-tier news casters about it. I haven’t said a word. I didn’t think anyone would care what I thought, but it turns out that someone does. I think back to that simple, brilliant image stenciled on the side of the school building. I’ve become an icon, like it or not. Not for the isolationists, where my sympathies mostly lie. For the technophiles.
Gil skipped school, but he comes in time for the evening bell to catch me before I leave. We both like school these days, since it’s the one place we can be sure we won’t be caught by cameras.
“They’re everywhere,” he says, pulling me into an empty meeting room. I don’t see him until he grabs my hand, but I’m not afraid. I recognize Gil just by the feel of his skin.
I’m confused, though. “Camera bots? Of course they are, Gil.”
He shakes his head. “The graffiti. The stencils. There’s one on the side of the school building, didn’t you see it?”
“The thing with me and Enki?”
“It’s everywhere. They’re saying you designed it. They’re saying that you’re the new icon of the technophiles. Is it …”
After a moment, I understand. “You believe them?”
“How would I know, June? You’ve done crazier things without asking my permission.”
This makes me want to cry, but I laugh instead. “I’d tell you if I were planning anything like this. You know that, right?”
“I know that,” he says, but it’s almost a question.
“And I didn’t design that stencil.”
“Don’t know why I thought you had,” he says. His fingers trace my lights. “It’s too good for you not to brag about.”
I hit him lightly on the arm. “I never brag. I only accept fully justified praise.”
“Well, in that case.”
We’re silent for a while, sitting side by side on the floor. Eventually Gil rests his head on my shoulder, I wrap my arms around his waist.
“The mods, and Ueda-sama and, you know, all of that stuff about the city’s systems failing, June, it’s okay if you think … I mean, about the tech …”
He trails off, eyes closed, but his throat works as if he hopes I might take the words from him. And I do.
“I see what they’re doing to him as well as you do, Gil. I don’t want us to turn into Tokyo 10.”
Gil’s shoulders sag in relief. I can’t think of anyone less suited for mods than Gil. He’s so very physical and human — I try to imagine him in a data stream, without the slick of his sweat after a dance, that pungent musk of earth and youth. A disembodied collection of data can dance forever, but how much would that be worth without the tension of pushing up against the limits of a body?
And yet.
“But the Aunties are wrong to close us off so much,” I find myself saying. “We’re still using technology that’s more than a century old to run the city. It’s dangerous.”
“That’s very pragmatic,” Gil says after a moment. He opens his eyes. “Much too levelheaded for a waka.”
“You know,” I say, “sometimes I don’t feel very much like a waka these days.”
Sebastião is short, with snow-white hair, though he’s only sixty, and a smile that always makes you feel like you’re in on a joke. He’s notorious for his ability to elicit confessions in interviews and yet generally remain well-liked among the crowd that cares about these sorts of things. He’s a gossip caster, not really into news, but what with Enki’s role in parliament and the escalating tensions between isolationists and technophiles, the line between gossip and news has become a matter of attitude.
Which I suppose is why he’s asking me for my opinion on the recently proposed bill that would allow limited access to new technology from foreign cities.
“Too little, too late?” says Sebastião, leaning forward, smiling as though he finds the whole situation slightly ridiculous and knows I do too. “After all,” he continues, “the bill gives the Queen complete discretion over what technology is actually allowed in. And there’s as yet no clause about how the new technology will make the city herself safer.”
This isn’t my first interview, but it feels like it. “Well, Enki has a connection with the city —”
Sebastião waves his hand. “That works until September, but what then?”
I think I’m going to choke, right here on a live feed with the one gossip caster even the Aunties care about, with half the city overanalyzing my every public move and the other half hating me on principle. My hands curl into fists. My lights are strobing like some ancient call for help. It’s the fall already, and there’s so much we still haven’t done together, and I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want to remember what it is to be a summer king, what it means to be left behind. I don’t understand how Sebastião — who is so unapologetic about his love for Enki — can speak of it so casually.
But then, he’s a grande, and Enki is only his latest in a long line of dead boys.
“I …”
He waits expectantly. I force air into my lungs. If Enki can do what he does, I can certainly manage an interview.
“I think we can learn from what he’s done with the city’s natural AI. Some part of the city knew it was in danger from the spider bot. If technology from other cities can help us integrate her consciousness in a better way, then I don’t see how that’s a problem.”
Sebastião nods thoughtfully. My hands unclench. “So, we hear there’s trouble in paradise.”
“What?”
He chuckles and shakes his head, as though he’s caught me doing something naughty. “Poor Gil is an isolationist to his core. That can’t be easy for Enki. And now you coming between them — maybe a daring young artist like you can understand our prince better than the beautiful Gil?”
I try not to look as dowdy as I feel, when he puts it like that. Of course I could never compete with Gil for looks, but it’s never occurred to me that I have to. “I’m not coming between anyone,” I say as calmly as I can. “Enki and I don’t have that kind of relationship.”
I’m not lying, though part of me wishes I were. He hasn’t touched me since our kiss on the water. And I haven’t dared touch him.
“So you always say.” Sebastião’s smile makes me wonder just how much my expression revealed. “Well, then, at least tell us which side you come down on? Technophiles or isolationists? Enki or Gil?”
And I don’t know. I want to be like I was with Gil: pragmatic, seeing the points on both sides. But I know that this debate will never work like that. The Aunties have been so hard-line on technology
because they knew they could never stop a trickle from becoming a flood. Sure, I can say that some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, but no one wants to hear that, and mostly they’re right.
Eventually you have to make a decision. Eventually you need to pick a side.
Enki or Gil.
“You can’t samba in a data stream,” I hear myself saying, and remember that Enki loves to dance too.
Enki pokes his head over my garden wall, and I shriek before I recognize him. He’s wearing his nanohook gloves and boots, and he grins like a trickster god.
“You couldn’t have pinged me?” I say, heart racing.
He drops into my mother’s gardenias, crushing a few before sprawling into the carefully demarcated path. “This seemed like more fun,” he says, and his voice sounds lucid and mod-free for the first time in days, a river bursting through a dam.
I put down my latest sheets of drawing paper and crawl over to where he lies. His eyes scan some point between the fall clouds and their reflected image on the glass. I touch his hand.
“Aren’t you cold?” The last traces of summer have surrendered to early-evening chills and gray rains, but Enki still wears short pants and a sleeveless shirt with a hole by the collar, as if it’s January in the verde.
He giggles and pushes his fingers between mine, hard against the soft webbing. I bite my cheek.
“Warm, right?” he says, and it takes me minutes, years to decipher syllables to speech to meaning. But he’s right, his skin is so hot it would be uncomfortable if I hadn’t already been shivering with autumn chill.
I let our hands rest on his chest and lie down beside him. Water from the dirt path seeps into my clothes; I don’t care.
“Which one?” I say.
He turns so his nose is less than an inch from mine. “Technophile or isolationist?” he says, and I snort with involuntary laughter.
“The mods. Which one heats you up?”
The Summer Prince Page 16