And yet…
Then they were at the door, and she was looking anxiously about for Castille, but the automaton was presumably off bossing about the rest of the robot staff. Although, apart from a few gardener models, they hadn’t seen any others save the antiquated butler.
Lupé was going to indicate to Hotep, by complex signs and insinuations, that she should go take Fontaine off somewhere, talk to him about his illustrious achievements and how much of a goddamn genius he was or something, so she could get to work on the door.
Hotep had other ideas, though. “Where does this go?” she asked, right out, and Lupé cursed wearily. There went subtlety, pissed away on the floor.
But Fontaine just cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “Hmm?” he asked the girl. “Whatever do you mean?”
“This…?” But no matter how Hotep gestured to it, even rattled the handle, Fontaine’s eyes never rested on the door itself, just sliding off to the surrounding walls, the ceiling, anything.
“This was something we picked up in Cuélap,” he told them genially, indicating a blocky, toad-like sculpture on a plinth beside the door. “Peru, you know. It dates to several centuries before the conquest, some god forgotten even by the people the Spanish found there.”
“Get rid of him,” Lupé hissed. She had her tools palmed, ready to make an assault on the lock that she could see but Fontaine, apparently, could not.
Hotep glowered at her, but then she was pointing out something through a doorway, in a further room. “This piece, though,” she said, suddenly speaking goat like a native, all that drawling European talk that sounded so sneering and superior. Fontaine drifted after her, and Lupé was struck by how little he seemed like the master of this house. More like just another exhibit.
It took her a shade under two minutes to persuade the door to yield to her, unleashing a ghostly torrent of air so dry she could feel her eyes and throat withering. After that, she only needed another ten seconds’ glimpse inside before she had it shut again and was running to get the others.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE WASTE LAND
MAO WAS WELL aware that he’d been following along after Juān Fontaine like a lovesick dog. He told himself that, if he had to, he could break off from her in an instant, the consummate Firewalker without transition. Another part of him was intent on an entirely earthier sort of consummation, but he was almost surprised at himself how his dick was also only a minority party in the grand parliament of feelings and hormones currently chasing each other about his body. Something kicked in him, when Juān looked at him sidelong, when she gave him that small, uncertain smile. It wasn’t the polished sonko expression they put on like masks in the soaps when they were about to give each other big manly handshakes or kiss the air inches from either cheek, before going on to screw one another out of business deals that were spoken of in only the loosest terms. Because nobody involved in the shows really understood what the bizna had been like, back then between the super-rich.
She made him feel weak, in the head and at the knees; like putty she could have moulded any way she liked, and if she didn’t tell him to get the hell away from her, if she deigned to keep talking to him and smiling shyly, that represented a gift he could only stammer and accept. He was abject, in a way he had never felt before in all his long nineteen years, and it was a weirdly decadent, self-indulgent pleasure.
His hands itched for her, but he understood, without being told, what the rules were, and that looks and words were all he was getting right now. She led him through the house, and she asked questions, so many questions. She made his mean, hard life sound like something out of some crazy story, her wide-eyed curiosity an alchemy that transmuted the gangmasters and wabenzi and Firewalkers into dragons and ogres and flying wuxia heroes. And he knew it was all toss, really. He knew this was a bored rich girl with a diversion, and the instant he got dull then surely she’d have Robot Jeeves throw him out of the house. But the moment stretched on deliciously between them, with her hanging on his every word until he almost felt the glowing fiction she somehow heard was more real than the grimy truth he was telling her.
“I wish I could see it,” she told him wistfully, and he almost choked at the thought. The only way someone like her saw the Ankara township was when they got out of their fancy car to ditch a weight of wealth their luggage allowance wouldn’t permit. All carefully orchestrated cheering crowds, and no sign of necessary evils like teenage kids who got to go risk their lives to make sure the AC kept running.
And his next words were going to be the most puerile sort of nonsense and he knew it, but there was a script at work here and he was expected to make the gesture. “When the ’Bug’s working, you could come with us, maybe.” She was still speaking French, though he was remembering enough of it to follow. He spoke township patois back and somehow she had no difficulty understanding.
“I can’t leave the house,” she told him, sadness passing over her face like the clouds he’d never seen were said to cloak the sun. “Not ever.”
He actually reached out, then: not groping, not to pull her slender form into his rough embrace or however the writers of that kind of thing would have put it. Just to touch, just a moment’s solidarity, but there was no contact: she was effortlessly a step further away.
“Let’s go to the pool,” she told him. “It’ll be cool there, until the sun gets over the horizon.”
At that, the libido faction in Mao’s personal government tabled a motion, and he could only swallow and nod. Reaching a hand back to him, yet always a hair’s breadth out of reach of his fingers, she led him out to the glass-walled chamber where that wealth of water gleamed sapphire and silver.
She shucked out of her robe without a moment of self-consciousness and Mao jammed his hands into his pockets and hunched over a little, because the tabled motion had become a popular movement. Juān didn’t seem to notice, when she turned to him.
“Come on, then,” she said, and dived in sideways so she could look at him even as she knifed into the glittering water. When she surfaced, of course, he was still standing landlocked on the side.
“I… can’t swim.” Because when the hell would he have learned, precisely? Unless he’d taken that job with the brine shrimp, and the thought still brought him out in sweats.
She grinned delightedly—he thought it was mockery at first, but apparently it was just the joy of showing off. “You don’t need to,” she told him. “The water’s hypersaline. Anyone can float in it.”
Apparently rich people really could have anything.
Mao gave up then, and spent five awkward minutes fighting his way down to underwear that was probably not of the standard Juān Fontaine was really used to. He ended up standing awkwardly at the very edge of the water, toes curled about the pool’s lip, daring himself to jump in. He wasn’t entirely convinced he wouldn’t drown, but right then, with Juān treading water and smiling at him, it seemed a fair price. Apparently, a cocktail of young love and raw lust could even fight off incipient phobias.
He wasn’t exactly going to dive in like she had, but he could at least jump. She held up dripping arms to him, the electric light turning every droplet into a diamond.
He fell forwards, eyes closed.
Lupé got his shoulder just after he’d gone too far to pull himself back, and because he weighed more than she did, even mostly naked, there was a tense moment of wrestling before she managed to get the pair of them back on the level on dry land. Hotep, hanging back, was plainly not up to touching other human beings right then.
“What the fuck is this?” he exploded, rounding on the pair of them. “Can’t you see I’m… ha–”
“Oh, we see,” Hotep called unhelpfully from the doorway. Lupé stepped back, hands on hips.
“You’re welcome,” she told Mao flatly, without a trace of amusement. When he just goggled at her, she held up a screwdriver, some part of her multifarious toolkit. Without breaking eye contact, she tossed it into the water.
“Uh?” he asked, looking round for the source of the sound. Down through the azure glow of the water the screwdriver rolled in a little circle about its tip before coming to a halt.
Slowly, Mao knelt by the pool side and dipped a hand into the water. It was something he’d never thought to do, before, because the water was like the art on the walls around them: something unthinkably valuable that you didn’t touch.
And he didn’t touch it. His fingers drifted through the gleam of it without sensation, and were dry when he drew them out. He did it again, and again. There was nothing there, just thin air and light. Light.
“It’s a… projection?” He gaped.
“Best one I ever saw,” Hotep confirmed. “Now if I had my goggles, different story, but…”
Lupé stared at him for a moment, and he saw several angry words and insults bubble up and get sent right back where they’d come from. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “But we have a real problem to solve. We have a job, chommie.”
“But…” And Mao turned back to Juān as she idled in the pool, bobbing with her head and shoulders clear of the water. She smiled at him and he felt that kindred kick within him again, because she was so beautiful and perfect, and still she was sad, and that thread of unhappiness had given him a place where he could touch her world. If not her.
“What is it?” she asked.
He wondered if the screwdriver had cut through her on its uninterrupted path to the dry pool floor below.
HE WAS STILL reeling when they hauled him away from the pool that wasn’t a pool, just a pit with the glitter and lap of imagined water. There was a door, Lupé was saying. He’d understand if he only saw what was through the door. Except she didn’t sound like she understood it herself, not really. Perhaps she was hoping that the keen mind of Nguyễn Sun Mao would cut through the mystery like a latter-day Judge Bao, in which case he reckoned she was going to be sadly disappointed.
And when they reached the door, their arrival had been anticipated: Castille was already there, barring the way. The look on his fake face had real reproach on it.
“I’m afraid I cannot permit you to enter, M’sieur, Mesdemoiselles. Some parts of this house are private.”
“That right?” Lupé asked, and Mao saw her feet shift, bracing herself for violence. “Look, tin boy, we’re here with legal authority from the Ankara Achouka Independent Port Administration to go wherever the hell we damn please.” She said it with such bravado that Mao instantly assumed it was bullshit, and only remembered later that it was technically true.
He backed her up, going shoulder to shoulder, then shuffling left a bit, giving the robot two things to focus on. Except presumably the robot was no more than a puppet of the house’s systems, which looked as though they were capable of focusing on plenty things at once. “Just let us do our job, and then we’re gone,” he told that severe face. “This doesn’t need to get nasty.”
“These servant robots, they’re feisty?” Lupé asked, sotto voce, and Hotep shook her head.
“Talk like a human all day, but dumb as bricks when they’re out of their element,” the girl said. “We had a game, on the Celeste, see who could screw them up quickest with dumbass questions. I always won.”
“I bet you did,” Lupé said, then pointed dramatically past the robot’s shoulder. “Hey, look over there!” and she was lunging for it, open palm to just knock the thing over.
Castille shifted one foot back smoothly, dropping its centre of gravity and batting her strike aside with a forearm, reaching with the other hand to pincer her wrist. The whole sequence was so smooth as to become one motion, as though the robot had channelled an Aikido master for the two vital seconds it had needed before reverting to its formal self. Except it still had Lupé’s wrist—and with some force, given the expression on her face.
“I’m afraid I must ask you to leave the premises,” it informed them. “Your conduct has fallen below the minimum standard required.”
“But these are guests,” came a new voice and Mao almost hit the ceiling to find Bastien Fontaine standing right behind him, right in his personal space. The man’s urbane European features took in the scene with only the faintest quizzical creasing about the eyes. “Castille, this is most untoward. Explain yourself.”
The robot said nothing, and the three Firewalkers looked from it to the man, a silence that stretched until Mao ran out of self-control and just swished a hand through Fontaine’s insubstantial chest, the gleam of the man’s white jacket flickering across his arm.
“I cannot permit them to access this room, sir,” Castille said at last.
Fontaine stared. “There is no room.”
“That room,” Lupé told him. “That door—ach!” She was abruptly on her knees fighting to extract her wrist from the robot’s grip.
“Castille, this is unacceptable!” Fontaine snapped. “Report to my workroom immediately.”
The robot’s projected face, no less real than its master, ticked and spasmed briefly. Then it stepped away, releasing its victim. Lupé sat back against the wall, cradling her arm.
“This door! This one.” Hotep risked darting forwards to rap on it.
“But there is no door there,” Fontaine told her, with that exact pitch of kindly patronising that Hotep must have run into and then exhausted up on the Celeste.
“Papa, what is it?” And here was Juān, and the hidden projectors remembered to have her long hair coil in wet snakes about her bare shoulders, and reproduced damp footprints on the floor. Mao wondered where Madame Li was, or whether, when she wasn’t required, the house just turned her off.
Bastien Fontaine turned to his daughter with a slightly embarrassed smile. “Our guests seem to think there is a door here, a room they want to access, but I think I’d know if that was the case.”
Juān blinked at him. “But there is, Papa.”
In the resulting pause, Hotep’s “Huh” sounded very loud.
“Juān…?”
“There is a door there, to your office. Papa, why don’t you know where your own office is?” And she was worried, really worried, as if this was just the latest in a whole string of inconsistencies that were making her doubt the reality of her home here. Mao felt that kick inside him again, that sympathetic connection. She can’t be fake. She can’t just be a… thing, a show. He glanced at the other two Firewalkers and they were looking increasingly baffled, because who was this puppet show being staged for now?
Fontaine was humouring them when he turned back. “Well, if there is some secret door there, I suppose you had better open it.”
“Sir…” Castille had a hand half-raised, frozen between proprieties. “Please, sir…”
Lupé seized her chance and lunged for the handle. The robot twitched, another dramatic martial arts move stillborn under the gaze of its master, and then the door was swinging open, releasing a wave of cool, bone dry air.
There was a desk there, and enough computing peripherals to buy a neighbourhood in Achouka, even outdated models as they were. There were bookshelves, too, though some of the books had gone to join the dust that hung thickly on everything. And there was a body, lying across the desk. The pervasive, artificial dryness had presumably been introduced specifically to preserve it. It looked like the resurrected ancient Egyptian from that old movie that had given Hotep her nickname, minus the bandages, wearing a crisply ironed shirt and blazer, each turned to a different shade of yellow-ivory by the passage of time.
The face was hollowed out but still quite recognisable. As though in fulfilment of some absent coroner’s dream, a gun lay beside one leathery hand, barrel still roughly pointed at the hole punched in the corpse’s temple. Mao was almost surprised that there was no wisp of smoke arrested mid-exit from the aperture.
Fontaine regarded himself for a long moment. Mao expected denials, rages, questions, some sort of external crisis but, whatever made
the man go, it faced its demons internally, disconnected from the visible ghost the house was throwing up. Then, just as his daughter was reaching for him, he cocked his head back, staring somewhere about the ceiling.
“‘Here is no water, but only rock, rock and no water and the sandy road.’” His voice was ghastly, fitting for the thing on the desk and not the bright image he was, words intoned with the cadence of a ritual. “‘The road winding above among the mountains. And voices singing out of empty cisterns, and deserted wells.’” Mao was inexplicably certain the words hadn’t come from him, but from something else that had ridden him for just those few moments. Fontaine blinked and smiled then, though the expression was terrible, and turned to Juān as though to excuse himself, or give context for the words. Midway through the movement he stuttered and was gone, as though at the flick of a switch.
“Papa?” Juān asked. Her eyes met Mao’s and he saw only real fear there. He was already reaching out for her, pointless though it surely was. Before he could even fail to connect, she too was gone, and all around them parts of the house were shutting down. The art vanished from the walls, piece by piece. The lights were going out, whole banks of them at a time. Doubtless in the glass-sided annexe, the pool was dry again, its dazzle and glamour gone. What really got to Mao was how easily he’d been fooled. All those soaps had primed him for it, the gleaming world of the super-rich that looked realer than real, that shone, genuinely shone. And what shone more than light? Fontaine’s jacket had seemed luminous and Juān’s beauty had brightened the room, while that impossible hoard of water had shone sapphire across the walls. He had accepted it as their due, the rich, who were not human as he understood human, but like gods or spirits, and whose immunity to laws extended even to those of physics.
There was a sigh, and Mao started back because the robot was real, of course. In this suddenly shadowy little corridor, its face was the only bright thing remaining.
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