Firewalkers

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And there was a lot of sex in those shows—or not actual sex, because Grandma wouldn’t stand for that, but a lot of almost-sex, where beautiful people were plainly going at it like rabbits just off camera. And there was always this scene—there was a pool, like this one, and some elegant, perfect rich girl would turn up in a tiny bikini for a midnight swim. Like this.

  Mao felt his jaw just drop open and hang there. He had never seen anything like it, not in all his days. Even the actresses of the Jo’burg soaps couldn’t compare. She was close on his own age, and breath-taking: not just that she was stunningly lovely in and of herself, but that she’d had a life of good food and no childhood diseases—or, if all else failed, she’d had surgeons on hand to correct any imperfections. She stepped out to the poolside and dived right in, into all that wealth of water that lay there for no other reason than it might divert her a little, on a hot night when she couldn’t sleep.

  She was golden-skinned, and she seemed to glow as she kicked off from the side, as though there were extra invisible lamps just for her. He reckoned that part of it was just that she was so flawless, no cancer-marks, no worm-scars, none of the accumulated detritus of slum living on her, so that every piece of skin shone like stained glass with a light behind it. And part of it was probably his own libido because, Firewalker or not, he was a man of a certain age.

  “Hey.” Lupé was staring too, but she had enough possession to elbow him in the ribs, a pain he took gratefully. “We do what, now, exactly?” The three of them had advanced almost to the doorway. The artificial light washed about them, so painfully bright it seemed to exert almost a physical pressure. Hotep looked like she was squinting into the heart of the sun.

  Mao watched the girl’s glossy black hair stream behind her as she coursed most of a length underwater. Past the amazement and the semi-erection that was giving him a second reason for his stealthy hunched posture, he felt unutterably sad. He was nineteen and a Firewalker, and he knew damn well this wasn’t going to be that scene in the soap where the rich young daughter falls for the handsome, husky gardener’s boy.

  “We find a vehicle. We go,” Hotep said, sounding as though she was trying to keep from eroding, just ablating away in the light.

  Someone coughed politely and the three of them virtually leapt into each others’ arms. Mao was imagining guards, machine guns, because those things belonged in his world. What belonged in that made-up soap opera world, of course, was servants. Servants who coughed politely, even though they didn’t need to; who bowed perfectly, even though no amount of money could quite keep them in the immaculate condition their masters would surely have preferred.

  “If you would follow me, sir, mesdames.” The voice was rich, pleasant and speaking goat, as the saying went. Meaning European, French in this case, and Mao’s grasp of it was rusty enough that Lupé had to translate. The servant—and Mao’s memory of the soaps furnished the word butler—had a pleasant, avuncular face, simultaneously dark and bright. Dark, because that had been the fashion back then, or so the soaps said; not as dark as Lupé but a lot darker than the swimming girl. Bright, because it was an image, projected on the front of a featureless head of plastic. The butler was a humanoid robot, and Mao had heard about such extravagances from Hotep because the Grand Celeste had hot and cold running automata in every room. He’d never seen one, not even in the soaps.

  Its posture wasn’t as human as the shape they’d given it, too stiff, except maybe that was fine for a butler. Possibly it was capable of superhuman feats of mayhem. Possibly it was packed with weapons. Possibly it had an off button behind its ear and they could lump it back to the Ankara and sell it for a fortune.

  “Follow you where?” Lupé asked.

  The plastic head cocked slightly, the face staticking out of focus for a brief second before re-establishing itself, one eyebrow quizzically raised. “Why, M. Fontaine is keen to meet his guests.”

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got a mechanic robot can get our car working?” Lupé asked warily.

  “I’m sure the staff can accommodate you,” the robot butler replied. Now it had spoken three times, its tones seemed very repetitive, precisely the same minimal rise and fall, but perhaps that was de rigeur for butlers as well.

  “Lead on,” Hotep told it, and it inclined slightly and then turned, striding off.

  “Dzam,” Hotep said appreciatively, “look at the balance. I swear that thing’s walking better than the bots up on the Celeste. What the fuck is this place?”

  Mao glanced back, as they set off. The girl was propping her elbows up on the poolside, watching him go. He felt a shock of contact as she met his eyes, something that skewered into his chest like a harpoon, leaving a cord connecting them, no matter how far he might walk. Or that was what it felt like to him. She smiled as Lupé hauled him off, and waved at him.

  The butler led them into the house, into the cool wash of top-quality air conditioning, discreetly keeping the residual mugginess of the night out just like the butler itself might turn away unwanted callers. The place was bright, unsleeping, every bulb a-glow in its gilded sconce or crystal chandelier. There were paintings of mad things on the walls: great ships under full sail against louring grey seas; cityscapes of white walls and blue roofs over black sand beaches; oddly-proportioned, fantastically-dressed men and women on horseback, chasing a white beast with a spiralling golden horn. There were vases of translucent porcelain inked in blue with intricate scenes of rice farms and clouds and writhing serpents. There was furniture of black wood carved like foliage, like lions, in eye-twisting arabesques. The butler led them past it as though it was commonplace, and each piece of excess and wealth and beauty was lit too brightly, as though there were suns hidden in the heart of every artwork. Mao felt himself reeling inside, as though the very air in this place was too rarefied to keep his brain on the level.

  Then they were in one more huge room, where a man was finishing his dinner. He was pale, though not pasty like Hotep; the sun had at least a nodding acquaintance with him. He had a moustache that might almost have been drawn on, a narrow dart of beard at his chin. His forehead was high, his hair flecked with grey above the ears—but artfully, as though he had a master painter apply a few years to him each morning after rising. When he saw the three scruffy Firewalkers he actually smiled, and it was such a pleasant, warming smile that Mao had to work hard not to instantly start liking him. At his shoulder, having apparently eaten already, was a slender woman, her lustrous dark hair pinned back in spiralling coils, her face substituting a certain rigidity for the conventional tells of age. She looked Chinese, Mao reckoned. Even as the butler turned side-on, able to address both parties, the girl from the pool was entering from another door, already dry and with a silk gown thrown over her bikini, thin enough that Mao’s imagination wasn’t taxed overmuch. The two women stood either side of the man in a tableau simultaneously relaxed and too contrived to be natural.

  “Sir, your guests,” the butler announced. “M. Nguyễn Sun Mao, Mlle. Mutunbo Lupé, Mlle. Cory Dello. Ladies and gentleman, M. Bastien Fontaine, Mme. Li, Mlle. Juān.” Mao had to shake himself, because he’d seen this scene a dozen times in those soaps, and surely it wasn’t how people really made introductions, cramming all those names in for the benefit of an audience, except apparently it was. Or maybe the butler spent his nights off watching the self-same Jo’burg trash dramas.

  The others had twitched, at hearing their names from those insubstantial lips, but to Mao it seemed entirely natural because he was already in some mad dreamworld.

  Bastien Fontaine pincered a sliver of some dark meat with his chopsticks and gestured for them to sit with his off hand. There was no room, in that economical gesture, for refusal. Mao had lived his whole life with authority, the people who you played extra nice with because it was their gift whether you worked, whether you ate. Fontaine oozed it from his pores in place of the sweat he was apparently too good for. Mao sat down meekly at the table, raising a cloud of dust
from the chair, which looked padded as hell but was surprisingly hard on the backside. A moment later, Juān had sat beside him, elbows casually on the table, smiling.

  “So, M. Nguyễn,” she said softly. “Why don’t you tell us something about yourself?”

  Lupé was sitting down on the other side of the big table, turning her chair backwards so that if things kicked off, she could kick off with them. Hotep was looking about, skin tight about panicky eyes, and Mao wondered if that was situation-specific or if she always looked like that under the goggles.

  But then Juān was leaning in, the gown falling open just a little at the décolletage, and who knew, maybe those soaps had got it right about the welcome a rough kid might receive from a bored debutante stuck out here on the last big house still working?

  MAO WASN’T MUCH use after that, and what happened next behind his back, he had to rely on Lupé to tell him after. Mostly, Lupé was suspicious as hell and it was plain that Mao could give rocks, right now, about their actual job, and Hotep was twitchy as a cockroach on a griddle. Which left her.

  Fontaine was still eating, and his petite wife Li stood at his shoulder as though needing permission to sit down. The admittedly eye-catching girl was leaning in to Mao, her shoulder not-quite-touching his. Lupé heard herself give a string of monosyllabic replies to the pleasantries being tossed her way. Just this once, she wanted Hotep to do something unforgivably gauche, make a scene to break through the slender conversational ties that seemed to lie on her like iron wires. The girl looked terrified, though; like she was drawing on a well of mental restraint she’d sure as hell kept hidden through all their months of acquaintance up till now. Right in the middle of getting seriously pissed at her, Lupé suddenly realised that all this, here, must be too much like home for Hotep. She knew the girl had got kicked out of the family hard enough that she fell all the way to Earth, but how had it gone up until that point? Plenty of slaps and shouting behind closed doors, no doubt. Plenty of Just behave like all the other kids, Cory, from furious mother and father, and their defective girl trying and trying, fighting down the thing inside her that was her true self, trying to be a mirror to all those other perfect sonko boys and girls. And failing, always, eventually, but she’d kept trying. Lupé could see, from how she was right now, just how hard she’d tried.

  “M. Fontaine,” she said, in her best polite speak-to-the-wabenzi voice. “My friend and I, we’re vai tired, been driving a long time.” And hungry, and surely it was basic politeness to feed your guests, but apparently only the man of the house got to eat tonight. “We’d like to get something from the car and then bed down, if that’s okay?”

  There was a pause where Fontaine just looked blank but then he smiled again, that win-you-over expression, those perfect white teeth gleaming like they were lit up under UV. “Of course. Castille will escort you.”

  Castille was the robobutler, apparently, snapping into motion at the sound of its name. Lupé didn’t much like leaving Mao in the house, liked even less having the mechanical presence at her elbow. Its face gleamed out like a torch, lighting the way with its superior expression. Behind them, Hotep hopped from foot to foot like she was trying to shake the crazy off before she had to go back inside.

  Lupé snagged some chewies and filled a half-dozen canteens from the filtration reservoir, because better that than it all go sour in the tank without power. The air around the garden lights had insects like a broken screen had static. Lupé didn’t know how that weight of bugs could even survive out here with so little water, but they sure as hell did, between naturally economical metabolisms and the genetic engineering work that got loose in the wild. And that made her think of the Protein Complex and the whole what-the-fuckery that had gone down there on M. Okereke’s watch. Was that Fontaine? Can I make that his fault, somehow? But there was no link between them save that both were inexplicable.

  “Bastien Fontaine,” Hotep told the interior of the ’Bug, her stiff shoulders telling Lupé just how aware she was of the robot standing a few feet away.

  “That’s what the man said, chommie,” Lupé agreed.

  “Name doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  “Should it?”

  Hotep’s face twisted with at least three emotions at once. “He was one of the big backers for the Anchor project and the Celeste. And not just idle sonko money, either. He was like my folks. Made his fortune on the tech markets, revolutionised personal connectivity. They taught him in school, what he’d done. Genius, they called him.”

  “Called, past tense?”

  “They all think he’s dead,” Hotep said, soft as breathing. “He never got to the Celeste, anyway. Supposed to have died just before the Ankara got going or he’d have been on the first car up the line, surely. And I thought… they did something to him. Some falling out, some clash over who got to wear the big hat, up the line.”

  “They taught you that?” Lupé asked sceptically.

  “Fuck, no, but I always thought. He was like my… patron saint, you know. Easy to like someone who got elbowed out, who’s supposed to be safely dead.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m not sure I like him anymore. And I want my fucking goggles back.”

  Back inside, Lupé turned brightly to Castille’s projected face and said, “Hey, before we turn in, how about you give us a tour of the place? We’re both vai excited to be here, you know.” She tried to look full of girlish enthusiasm, which was presumably something she’d been some time ago, before she turned twelve or so. Castille halted entirely and his face fuzzed out for a second, which was nasty, but then it was back, smiling with that perfect mesh of politeness and bemusement that someone had obviously thought a butler should have, and he was nodding, new instructions received.

  “I would be delighted to show you the house,” said the thing that couldn’t really be delighted at anything. “We get so few visitors. M. Fontaine would love you to see it all.”

  A half-hour later, she and Hotep were in the guest bedroom, staring at beds the size of apartments, a portrait of a Fontaine-looking old man on the wall, a full-length mirror across from it.

  Hotep tore into a chewie, heedless of what flavour its wrapper claimed. “The fuck?” she said when she’d choked down the first mouthful.

  Lupé looked at herself in the mirror, connections already reaching towards each other in her head like the fingers of God and Adam. She looked good, in that mirror. She looked fine, no dust from the road on her, like the expensive cleanliness of the house had sucked it all off. Until she looked down at herself and saw it all there in the creases of her overalls. But in the mirror she looked like she’d been polished. And if she hadn’t been looking for the discrepancies, she might have bought into it. But she saw the joins, now. She could see how every part of her had been tweaked by an aesthetic not her own: eyes, hair, waist, hips. And it might have been the lighting, but she could hold up a hand, and her reflection in the mirror brought up its twin that was a good few shades lighter, the fuckers.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked Hotep.

  Cory was halfway through guzzling an entire bottle of beer. Lupé was impressed. She hadn’t seen the girl take anything from the ’Bug but now there were two more bottles standing on an antique mahogany sideboard, waiting their turn.

  “I’m thinking,” Lupé soldiered on, “that our man Castille just went right past one door on the ground floor, didn’t even acknowledge it was there. So I want to see what’s in it.”

  Hotep drained the bottle but didn’t reach for the next one. “You’re on,” she said.

  Fontaine was right outside their door when they opened it. Just… standing there. Despite herself, Lupé squeaked when she saw him, luminous in a white blazer. The house lights were dimmer now, gradually fading as the sky outside greyed with pre-dawn. Soon they’d get to test out how good the AC was in here.

  “I’m sorry,” she said hurriedly. “We were… not as tired as we thought, M. Fontaine. We
were going for a walk, maybe. This is such an exciting house you have. We’ve not seen anything like it, where we’re from.” She was trying hard for childish innocence, all big eyes and wonder, and hoping it wasn’t coming over as flirting.

  He smiled at her, though for a moment she wasn’t entirely sure he saw her. “I can have Castille show you around, of course.”

  “Oh, he’s already given us the tour,” Hotep broke in. “Look, M’sieur, we’re from Ankara Achouka. You never wanted to go there?”

  “I have all I want right here, child.” That same winning smile, so exactingly repeated it was like a facial tic.

  “You don’t think your work would be easier,” Hotep pushed, “if you were on the actual ship you designed, where your computers are?”

  “My work? All done now. All behind me. Let others shoulder the burden. I would rather spend time with my family.”

  Lupé had been sidling in the direction of the offending door, but Fontaine was apparently along for the ride, striding along his corridors, occasionally introducing them to some piece of art or other, a whole catalogue of provenance at his finger-tips for anything and everything in the house, as though they were getting led through an eclectic museum. His newly-pressed blazer was so crisply bright it seemed to light their way as much as the ebbing lamps.

  The thought hit Lupé then, when it was too late to ask Hotep discreetly. After all, Fontaine was to have been first up the line from the Anchor Field. Which put him in her grandfather’s generation at the very latest, and likely earlier. Of course, the very rich had means to stave off time and age for a while.