The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  “What was that?” I said, when she came back. I didn’t want her to think I was naive. “What are you selling? Maybe I want some.”

  She shook her head. “I hope not.”

  “C’mon. What was it?”

  “AZT.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh…” I felt gauche and confused. “Is…is that what you do? You ride up and down here handing out medical stuff? A kind of whores’ paramedic?”

  “Not exactly.” She sat down, hands deep in the pocket of that excellent coat, gazed into space for a moment, then gave a nod towards the girl who needed the AIDS drugs — who was leaving, getting back to the job. “How old, do you think?”

  “Um, sixteen?” I hazarded. Making her two years younger than me, and dying. Tough.

  “Perhaps, barely… Once upon a time, I was a teenage Jewish girl, engaged to an older man. I had no choice about the marriage. I mean, I was not forced: in my heart I had no choice. Our community, my community was important to me.” I nodded. I imagined how she might have felt, growing up Jewish in Communist Poland.

  “I got pregnant. He knew the baby wasn’t his, but he kept my secret. He also knew that the other guy, the baby’s father, was still in my life. He married me anyway, and brought up my kid. At first I was simply grateful for the food and shelter. Then, when I was getting almost old enough to talk to him, to know him, the bastard ran out on me. Heart attack. They say the good die young. It isn’t true. The good die middle-aged, they live just long enough to work themselves to death…”

  “What about the other guy, the baby’s father?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, he’s still around. Always will be. I’m part of his operation. He’s a kind of monster, but even when I don’t like what goes down in his operation, which is most of the time, I understand him. As much as I wish I didn’t. You know, giving me a child, with all the grief that that entailed, was the smallest part of what he did to me. What was much worse, though I didn’t work this out until a long time afterwards, was that he made me his partner. That’s what really stitched me up. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that I volunteered. How could I have volunteered? How could I have known? But it is true that I’m implicated. I also have blood on my hands.”

  It had been the same with the guys. If they chose to talk, they’d ramble away as if I were a dog or a cat or something, leaving out all the facts that would make sense of what they were saying. But with her I didn’t mind. My indignation had vanished the moment she started to explain. I wanted nothing better than to listen while she gave me glimpses of her complex and mysterious life. If she’d told me she was a straight-arrow charity worker I’d have been terribly disappointed. I wondered if she carried a gun, and should I call the police; and was I going to meet this monster, the Mr. Big from whom she couldn’t escape, my dark lady with the checkered past.

  “Being a whore is like a drug addiction,” she said, looking at the girls, not at me. “Everything contributes: friends, circumstances, the idleness, a certain fascination. Giving them medicine is something to gain their confidence; it doesn’t change anything. To get out, they have to vanish. I help them to do that, if they’ll let me. If it’s too late, then I help them any way I can.”

  I felt uncomfortable. “If you want to save the girls, why don’t you go after the guys?”

  “Ah!” She laughed, offered me a cigarette, and lit one for herself. Her long fingers were stained with nicotine and nervously beautiful. “And do what? Shoot them in the head? A person has to know he is sick, before he can be made well. The girls know they are sick, at least, by the time they come to me.”

  She sipped her cold coffee for a while, preoccupied.

  “Would you mind coming back with me to Pod Las now?”

  “Huh?”

  “The first place we stopped. It means, “Under the Forest.”

  So we went back. It was dusk, and getting very cold. We’d hit a slack moment; the room was nearly empty. Yellowish electric light glistened on the wooden walls. My friend spoke to the woman at the counter: who scowled and answered, “Tak.” Which means “yes,” but only if repeated about fifteen times in a swift staccato like a burst of machine-gun fire. Tak, tak tak…she said. The raggedy blonde my friend had talked with earlier was almost the only girl in the place.

  I got myself tea, this time, cheaper than coffee, and sat down, thinking about the dark lady with the checkered past. The blonde girl called Malga stood up. Her face was drawn and grey, her eyes blank. She headed for the door. I saw my friend straighten up sharply, as if someone had dropped ice down her back. She followed Malga.

  As she passed, she said quietly, “Stay here. Don’t follow us!”

  She went out. I sat for a few minutes. Then I started thinking, about the girl who had just walked by me: about the scene I’d witnessed here earlier and my mystery friend. Who liked to hang out with whores, but who had told me that her mission was to rid the world of girls who sell sex for a living. Soon I had myself completely terrified. I decided that I’d been riding around with a psychopath. The Jewish woman was the predator! It had to be. Now I understood why she’d asked me no questions. She knew everything she needed to know. I was alone, I was vulnerable, and the way we’d met had left her in no doubt that I was her rightful prey.

  The little diner was suddenly drained of romance. Everything changed shape and color. My American, the one in Budapest, had two little daughters. He didn’t tell me that, I looked in his wallet once while he was sleeping and found their pictures. I suppose when they grew up he wanted them to be dentists, or something. But when he met me, he thought it was okay that I should pay with sex for food and shelter. Was he right? I don’t know. He didn’t force me. But he didn’t march me to a telephone and stand over me while I called my terrified parents. He didn’t do anything to haul me back from the brink.

  What went through his head? Am I an adult? Am I my brother’s keeper?

  But it doesn’t matter how you got into the hole, when you’re in it… I was going hot and cold by turns. The withered faces of murdered girls stared at me from the wall. I was so frightened that I couldn’t see any way to resist. She would come back from whatever she did to Malga. She would come back and take me into the dark —

  The woman behind the counter was giving me strange looks. Finally she came over with a short man in a pork pie hat, one of her more prosperous customers. “Are you wanting a lift?” she asked. “This gentleman can help you.”

  “No thank you.”

  “You should take the lift,” said the proprietress of the Pod Las. I couldn’t ask about the Jewish-looking woman, because I couldn’t speak Polish. But from the way she spoke and the look in her eye, I knew that she was warning me to get away. She was right. The guy looked okay. I would do him and get him to drop me in a town, somewhere away from this damned road, where I would call my parents. Tomorrow or the next day I would call them. I would call them real soon. As soon I had a story worked out.

  We went out together. He slipped his arm around my waist. I was looking up and down for the raggedy blonde. I saw something big parked a few hundred meters along the road, no lights. I thought it was the jeep. Beside it, what looked like a struggle was going on. I shouted “Stop that!” and threw off the man’s arm. He yelled after me, something like it’s not our concern! I kept running, beside the stream of traffic, screaming “Leave her alone!”

  I reached the spot in time to see three men’s pale faces, flashing angry guilty glances over their shoulders, as they stooped around what looked like a bundle of dirty clothes. They left the bundle lying, leapt into their big car, slammed the doors; and it roared away.

  I stood there shaking.

  The angel of death that stalks girls like my raggedy blonde isn’t one horrible serial-killer. The monster has many faces: disease, neglect, accident, overdose. It’s only sometimes murder, and bodies can easily vanish when no one cares. I didn’t know if the girl was dead. I was going to go to her: but then someone else was there. It was t
he Jewish woman, my mysterious friend. The body lay in her arms, like that statue called the Pieta, of Jesus Christ lying dead, and Mary holding him. And then, where this image had been, there seemed to be a human shape cut out of clear darkness. What did I see? I still tremble when I remember, though it was over in an instant, a terrifying glimpse. I think I saw her as she really is. She is not the Jewish woman. She is no gentle, docile Madonna. She, impersonal and absolute, is what lies within and beyond all images of the dark lady. I saw the gateway between creation and the uncreated. I saw the immaculate void of all our desire, opening into my world, in that cold April night, with the traffic roaring by, the air smelling of exhaust fumes, headlights splashing like shoreline waves on the forest eaves.

  The man from the Pod Las came running up. He exclaimed and cried (I think) What a terrible thing! and that I mustn’t look! He led me back to the diner, and the proprietress called the police. There were sirens and lights, and they took the girl’s body away.

  I discovered that no one else had seen a Jewish-looking woman with a scarred cheek. I’d come into the Pod Las alone, once in the afternoon and then again in the evening. As soon as I understood, I didn’t insist on my version. They’d have thought I was crazy. When the police had found me a hotel for the night, I looked in my purse to see how much money I had left and discovered a wad of notes tucked into the back pocket, with a scrap of paper on which someone had written, in looping old-fashioned European handwriting: go home. It was enough for my air fare. I suppose my Polish friend must have put the money in there, when he decided to dump me at the Modern Bar Grill. I told you he was a decent enough kind of guy. The rest, the whole dark lady encounter, was my vivid imagination.

  So that was the end of my adventure. There were no terrible consequences, much as I deserved them. It was just a wild adolescent spree. But I kept the paper with the message I like to think she sent me (directly or indirectly); and I keep the picture of her I bought, up on my wall. I think of her often, the impossible She. I wonder, is she still driving up and down, between Czestochowa and Piotrkow Tryb, saving souls?

  And I think about going home.

  June 1997

  Collision

  Does size matter? You can build a particle accelerator on a desk top, but the Buonarotti Torus was huge, its internal dimensions dwarfing the two avatars who strolled, gazing about them like tourists in a virtual museum. Malin had heard that the scale was unnecessary; it was just meant to flatter the human passion for Big Dumb Objects: a startling thought, but maybe it was true. The Aleutians, the only aliens humanity had yet encountered, had never been very good at explaining themselves.

  Nobody would have been allowed to keep the Buonarotti on a desk top on Earth, anyway. The voters were afraid an Instantaneous Transit Collider might rend the fabric of reality and wanted it as far away as possible. So the aliens had created the Torus and set it afloat out here in the Kuiper Belt as a kind of goodbye present — when they’d tired of plundering planet Earth and had gone back from whence they came.

  Wherever that was.

  But the Aleutians had departed before Malin was born. The problem right now was the new, Traditionalist government of the World State. A fact-finding mission was soon to arrive at the Panhandle station, and the Torus scientists were scared. They were mostly Reformers, notionally, but politics wasn’t the issue. Nobody cared if flat-earthers were in charge at home, as long as they stayed at home. The issue was survival.

  Malin and Lou Tiresias, the Director of Torus Research, were using high-res medical avatars to check rad levels after a recent gamma burst. There was a gruesome fascination in watching the awesome tissue damage rack up on their eyeball screens… Luckily the beast needed little in-person, hands-on maintenance. Especially these days, when it was so rarely fired-up.

  No transiters would ever take any harm, either. They weren’t flesh and blood when they passed through this convoluted way-station.

  “At least the mission’s staffed by scientists,” said Lou. “My replacement, the Interim Director, is a high-flying, gold-medal neurophysicist and a media star.”

  “Huh. I bet she’s a flat-earther of the worst kind,” growled Malin. “What d’you think’s going to happen, Lou?”

  The world government was supposed to leave the Panhandle scientists alone. That was the deal. In return for past services the researchers would rather, it must be admitted, forget —

  “I’m afraid they’re going to shut us down, my child.”

  Lou gave a twirl and a crooked grin. Hir avatar wore a draped white gown, a blue-rinsed perm, rhinestone wingtip glasses, and a pantomime beard: an ensemble actually quite close to the Director’s real world appearance. Lou, the funky, reassuringly daft, all-purpose parent figure.

  “It’s a question of style,” he explained, ruefully.

  There were few of Malin’s colleagues who hadn’t fooled around most un-traditionally with their meat-bodies, and few who respected the boring notion of mere male or female sex.

  Malin digested the thought that Lou was to be replaced by some brutal, totalitarian, politicized stranger.

  “Will we be blacklisted?”

  “Not at all! They’ll send us home, that’s all.”

  Malin had glimpsed movement, on the edge of her screen: sensed a prick-eared scampering, a glint of bright eyes. Who was that, and in what playful form? People often came to the Torus: just to hang out in the gleaming, giant’s cavern, just to delight in the sheer improbability of it… They say deep space is cold and bare, but Malin lived in a wild wood, a rich coral reef, blossoming with endless, insouciant variety. It thrilled her. She loved to feel herself embedded in the ecology of information, set free from drab constraint: a droplet in the teeming ocean, a pebble on the endless shore —

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “This is home.”

  To the Deep Spacers, mainly asteroid miners, who used their sector of the Panhandle as an R&R station, the Torus was a dangerous slot machine that occasionally spit out big money. They didn’t care. The scientists were convinced their project was doomed and terrified they’d never work again once the IT Collider had been declared a staggering waste of money. The night before the Slingshot was due to dock they held a wake, in the big canteen full of greenery and living flowers, under the rippling banners that proclaimed the ideals of Reform, Liberté Egalité Amitié… They toasted each other with the Semillon they’d produced that season, and talked about the good times. It all became very emotional. Dr. Fortune, of the DARPA detector lab, inveterate gamer and curator of all their virtualities, had arrived already drunk, attired in full Three Kingdoms warrior regalia. He had to be carried out in the end, still wildly insisting that the Torus staff should make a last stand like the Spartans at Thermopylae and sobbing —

  An army of lovers cannot lose!

  Nobody blamed him. The DARPA bums (the lab teams were all nicknamed after ancient search engines) had switched off their circadians and worked flat out for the last 240 hours, gobbling glucose and creatine, trying to nail one of those elusive turnaround results that might save this small, beloved world; and they had failed.

  The “fact-finders” arrived and immediately retired to the visitors’ quarters, where they could enjoy stronger gravity and conduct their assessment without bothersome personal contact. The Interim Director herself, alas, was less tactful. The science sector was a 4-spaced environment, permeated by the digital: Dr. Caterina Marie Skodłodowska didn’t have to signal her approach by moving around in the flesh. You never knew when or where she would pop up — and her questions were casual, but merciless.

  She asked Lou could “he” envisage building another Torus. (Dr. Skodłodowska didn’t buy unisex pronouns.)

  “Of course! Eventually we’ll need a whole network.”

  Lou was wise, but s/he lacked cunning.

  “Eventually. Mm. But you’ve analyzed all those esoteric Aleutian materials, and you can synthesize? Strange that we haven’t been told.”
<
br />   “We don’t have to synthesize, we can clone the stuff. Like growing a cell culture, er, on a very large scale —”

  “So you don’t yet know what the T is made of?”

  “But we know it works! Hey, you use Aleutian gadgets you don’t understand all the time on Earth!”

  She asked Lemuel Reason, the fox-tailed, clever-pawed technical manager of the Yahoo lab, exactly how many lives had been lost?

  “Very few!” said Lemuel, glad to be on safe ground. “Er, relatively. We don’t fire-up unless we’re pretty sure the destination is safe.”

  The Deep Spacers were volunteer guinea pigs, in a lottery sanctioned and encouraged by the World Government. They could apply for rights to a sector of Local-Space and transit out there to see what they could find. Some went missing or returned in rather poor shape, but a respectable minority hit paydirt: an asteroid rich in gold or exotics; an exploitable brown dwarf. These sites couldn’t yet be exploited, but they were already worth big bucks on the Space Development futures market.

  “I was thinking of the so-called Damned, the political and Death Row prisoners shipped out here for so-called Transportation. I believe you’ll find the losses were 100 percent, and the numbers run into many hundreds.”

  Skodłodowska was referring to a sorry episode in the Panhandle’s history. The “Damned” had been dispatched to supposedly Earth-type habitable planets, the nearest of them thousands of light years “away” by conventional measure. They’d been told that their safe arrival would be monitored, but that had been a soothing lie, for only consciousness, the information that holds mind and body together, can “travel” by the Buonarotti method. Did Lemuel have to explain the laws of neurophysics?

  “The mass transits were recorded as successful!” cried the Yahoo.