Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  So Union hid its interlocutor, its … messiah, in a colony of recidivists?

  Messiah: what a grandiose title for a Papa Song server. Behind us, a creased, sun-scorched peasant woman, as visibly aged as a senior from Cavendish’s time, limped into the courtyard, leaning on an enceph-scarred boy. The boy, a mute, smiled shyly at Hae-Joo, and the woman hugged Hae-Joo affectionately as a mother. I was introduced to the Abbess as Ms. Yoo. One eye was milk-blind, her other brite and watchful. She clasped my hands in hers in a charming gesture. “You are welcome here,” she told me, “most welcome.”

  Hae-Joo asked about the bomb crater.

  The Abbess replied that a local Unanimity regiment was using them for teething. An aero appeared last month and launched a shell without warning. One man died, and several colonists were badly injured. An act of malice, the Abbess speculated sadly, or a bored pilot, or perhaps a developer had seen potential in the site as a healthspa hotel for xecs and wanted the site cleared.

  My companion promised to find out.

  Who were these “colonists” xactly? Squatters? Terrorists? Union?

  Each colonist had a different story. I was introduced to Uyghur dissidents, dust-bowled farmers from Ho Chi Minh Delta, once respectable conurb dwellers who had fallen foul of corp politics, unemployable deviants, those undollared by mental illness. Of the seventy-five colonists, the youngest was nine weeks old; the oldest, the Abbess, was sixty-eight, though if she had claimed to be three hundred years of age I would still have believed her, such gravitas she had.

  But … how could people there survive without franchises and gallerias? What did they eat? Drink? How about electricity? Entertainment? What about enforcers and order? How did they impose hierarchy?

  Go visit them, Archivist. You can tell the Abbess I sent you. No? Well, their food came from the forest and gardens, water from the cataract. Scavenge trips to landfills yielded plastics and metals for tools. Their “school” sony was powered by a water turbine. Solar nitelamps recharged during daylite hours. Their entertainment was themselves; consumers cannot xist without 3-D and AdV, but humans once did and still can. Enforcement? Problems arose, no doubt, even crises from time to time. But no crisis is insuperable if people cooperate.

  What about the mountain winters?

  They survived as fifteen centuries of nuns had before them: by planning, thrift, and fortitude. The monastery was built over a cave, xtended by bandits during the Japanese annexation. These tunnels gave sufficient shelter from winter and Unanimity aeros. Oh, such a life is no bucolic Utopia. Yes, winters are severe; rainy seasons are relentless; crops fall prey to disease; their medicine is sorely limited. Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata. I slept soundly that nite against a backdrop of gossip, music, complaints, and laughter, feeling safe for the first time since my dormroom in Papa Song’s.

  So what was Union’s interest in the colony?

  Simple: Union provides hardware, such as their solars; in return, the colony provides a safe house, kilometers from the nearest Eye. I woke in my dorm tunnel just before dawn and crept to the temple mouth. The guard was a middle-aged woman nursing a colt and a stimulin brew; she lifted the mosquito net for me but warned me about coyotes scavenging below the monastery walls. I promised to stay in earshot, skirted the courtyard, and squeezed between the narrow rocks to the balcony of blacks and grays.

  The mountain dropped away; an updraft rose from the valley, carrying animal cries, calls, growls, and snuffles. I could not identify even one; for all my knowledge of censored arcana, I felt impoverished. And such a sky of stars! Ah, mountain stars are not these apologetic pinpricks over conurb skies; hanging plump they drip lite. A boulder stirred, just a meter away. “Ah, Ms. Yoo,” said the Abbess, “an early riser.”

  I wished her a good morning.

  The younger colonists, the old woman confided, worry about her wandering around before sunup, in case she fell off the edge. She produced a pipe from her sleeve, stuffed its bowl, and lit it. A raw local leaf, she admitted, but she had lost the taste for refined marlboros years ago. The smoke smelled of aromatic leather and dried dung.

  I asked about the stone figure in the escarpment across the gulf.

  Siddhartha had other names, she told me, mostly lost now. Her predecessors knew all the stories and sermons, but the old Abbess and senior nuns were sentenced to the Litehouse when non-consumer religions were criminalized. The present Abbess had been a novice back then, so Unanimity judged her young enough for reorientation. She was raised in an orphans’ bloc in Pearl City Conurb, but she said, she had never left her abbey spiritually. She returned years later and founded the present colony in the wreckage.

  I asked if Siddhartha was indeed a god.

  Many called him so, the Abbess agreed, but Siddhartha does not influence fortune or weather or perform many of a divinity’s traditional functions. Rather, Siddhartha is a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one’s future reincarnations. “But I pray to the ideal.” She indicated the meditating giant. “Early, so he knows I’m serious.”

  I said I hoped that Siddhartha would reincarnate me in her colony.

  Lite from the coming day defined the world more clearly now. The Abbess asked why I hoped so.

  It took a little time to form my answer. I said how all purebloods have a hunger, a dissatisfaction in their eyes, xcept for the colonists I had met.

  The Abbess nodded. If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she xtemporized, corpocracy would be finished. Thus, Media is keen to scorn colonies such as hers, comparing them to tapeworms; accusing them of stealing rainwater from WaterCorp, royalties from VegCorp patent holders, oxygen from Air-Corp. The Abbess feared that, should the day ever come when the Board decided they were a viable alternative to corpocratic ideology, “the ’tapeworms’ will be renamed ’terrorists,’ smart bombs will rain, and our tunnels flood with fire.”

  I suggested the colony must prosper invisibly, in obscurity.

  “Xactly.” Her voice hushed. “A balancing act as demanding as impersonating a pureblood, I imagine.”

  She knew you weren’t pureblood all along? How?

  It seemed tactless to ask. Maybe a spyhole in our quarters had captured me imbibing Soap. My host informed me that xperience had taught the colonists to keep a friendly eye on their guests, even Unionmen. The Abbess herself disliked such a violation of the old abbey’s hospitality codes, but the younger colonists were adamant that close surveillance be maintained. She revealed her intelligence only to bid me luck in my future enterprises, for of all corpocracy’s crimes against the downstrata, the Abbess stated, “nothing is more heinous than the enslavement of your tribe.”

  I presume she meant fabricants? But was she speaking in specific terms—servers in dineries—or general terms—every fabricant in Nea So Copros?

  I did not know, and did not learn that until the following nite in Pusan. But by now breakfast pans were banging in the courtyard. The Abbess looked at the cleft to the courtyard and changed her tone. “And who might this young coyote be?”

  The mute boy padded over and sat by the Abbess’s feet. Sunlite bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.

  So day two as a fugitive got under way.

  Yes. Hae-Joo breakfasted on potato cakes and fig honey; unlike the previous nite, no one pressed me to eat the pureblood food. As we said our farewells, two or three of the teenage girls, tearful to see Hae-Joo depart, shot me hateful glances, much to my guide’s amusement. Hae-Joo had to behave like a hard-bitten revolutionary, but he was still a boy in some respects. As she embraced me, the Abbess whispered in my ear, “I shall ask Siddhartha to grant your wish.” Under his gaze we left that rarefied height and hiked down through the noisy forest, where we found ou
r ford, untouched.

  Progress toward Yōngju was fair. We passed upbound timber rigs driven by burly same-stem fabricants. But the rice plain north of Andongho Lake is laced with xposed timber tracks, so we stayed inside the ford most of the day, hidden from EyeSats until hour fifteen or so.

  Crossing an old suspension bridge above Chuwangsan River, we got out to stretch our legs. Hae-Joo apologized for his pureblood bladder and pissed into the trees two hundred meters below. Over the other side, I studied the monochrome parrots who roost there on guano-stained chasm ledges; their flapping and honking reminded me of Boom-Sook Kim and his xec friends. A ravine wound upstream; downstream, the Chuwangsan River was channeled thru leveled hills before disappearing under Ūlsōng’s canopy for sewage duty. Aeros clustered over the conurb: black-and-silver dots.

  The bridge cables groaned under the strain of a gleaming xec ford, without warning. It was an xpensive auto to encounter on such a rustic road, suspiciously so. Hae-Joo reached into our ford for his colt. He returned to me, hand in his jacket pocket, murmuring, “Let me do any talking, and get ready to dive down.”

  Sure enough, the xec ford slowed to a stop. A stocky man with a facescaped sheen swiveled out from the driver’s seat with a friendly nod. “Beautiful afternoon.”

  Hae-Joo nodded back, observing it was not too sultry.

  A pureblood woman unfolded her legs from the passenger door. Her thick wraparounds revealed only a pixie nose and sensual lips. She leaned on the opposite railing, with her back to us, and lit a marlboro. The driver opened the ford trunk and lifted out an airbox, one suitable for transporting a medium-size dog. He unlocked its clickers and lifted out a striking, perfectly formed, but tiny female form, about thirty centimeters in height; she mewled, terrified, and tried to wriggle free. When she caught sight of us her miniature, wordless scream became imploring.

  Before we could do or say anything, the man swung her off the bridge, by her hair, and watched her fall. He made a plopping noise with his tongue when she hit the rocks below and chuckled. “Cheap riddance”—he grinned at us—”to very xpensive trash.”

  I forced myself to remain silent. Sensing the effort this cost, Hae-Joo touched my arm. One scene from the Cavendish disney, when a pureblood gets thrown off a balcony by a criminal, replayed itself in my head.

  I presume he had discarded a fabricant living doll.

  Yes. The xec was keen to tell us all about it. “The Zizzi Hikaru Doll was the must-have the Sextet before last. My daughter didn’t give me a moment’s rest. Of course, my official wife”—he nodded at the woman on the other side of the bridge—”put her all in, morning, noon, and nite. ’How am I supposed to look our neighbors in their faces if our daughter is the only girl in our carousel to not have a Zizzi?’ You got to admire the marketers of these things. One junky toy fabricant, but genome it like some glitzy antique idol and up goes its price by fifty thousand; that’s before you shell out for designer-ware, dollhouse, accessories. So what did I do? I paid for the damn thing, just to shut the women up! Four months later, what happens? Teencool surfs on and Marilyn Monroe dethrones poor, passé Zizzi.” He told us, digustedly, that a registered fabricant xpirer cost three thousand dollars, but—the man jerked a thumb over the railing—an accidental plunge comes free. So why chuck good dollars after bad? “Pity”—he winked at Hae-Joo—”divorces aren’t as hitchless, eh?”

  “I heard that, Fat-Ass!” His wife still did not deign to face us. “You should have taken the doll back to the franchise and had your Soul redollared. Our Zizzi was defective. It couldn’t even sing. The damn thing bit me.”

  Fat-Ass replied, sweetly, “Can’t imagine why that didn’t kill it, darlingest.” His wife muttered a casual obscenity while her husband ran his eyes over my body and asked Hae-Joo if we were vacationing near that remote spot or passing thru on business.

  “Ok-Kyun Pyo, sir, at your service.” Hae-Joo gave a slite bow and introduced himself as a fifth-stratum aide in Eagle Accountancy Franchise, a minor corp division.

  The xec’s curiosity died. “That so? I manage the Golf Coast between P’yōnghae and Yōngdōk. You are a golfer, Pyo? No? No? Golf isn’t just a game y’ know, golf is a career advantage!” The Paegam course, he promised, has an all-weather fifty-four holer, lickable greens, lake features like the Beloved Chairman’s famous water gardens. “We outbid the local downstrata for the aquifer. Normally you can’t get membership for love nor money unless you’re a seer, but I like you, Pyo, so just mention my name to our membership people: Seer Kwon.”

  Ok-Kyun Pyo gushed gratitude.

  Pleased, Seer Kwon began telling his xec life story, but his wife tossed her marlboro after the Zizzi Hikaru, climbed into the ford, and kept her hand on the horn for ten seconds. Zebra-feathered parrots cannonaded skyward. The xec gave Hae-Joo a rueful grin and advised him to pay the xtra dollars to conceive a son when he gets married. As he drove off I wished for his ford to plunge off the bridge.

  You considered him a murderer?

  Of course. One so shallow, moreover, he did not even know it.

  But hate men like Seer Kwon, and you hate the whole world.

  Not the whole world, Archivist, only the corpocratic pyramid that permits fabricants to be killed so wantonly, casually.

  When did you finally reach Pusan?

  Nitefall. Hae-Joo pointed at exxon clouds from Pusan refinery, turning melon pink to anthracite gray, and told me we had arrived. We entered Pusan’s northern rim on an unEyed farmtrack. Hae-Joo deposited the ford at a lockup in Sōmyōn suburb, and we took the metro to Ch’oryang Square. It was smaller than Chongmyo Plaza but as busy, and strange after the silent emptiness of the mountains. Fabricant nannies scooted after their xec charges; swanning couples assessed couples swanning; corp-sponsored 3-Ds competed to outdazzle all the others. In a tatty back-galleria an old-style festival was taking place where hawkers sold palm-size curios, “friends for life”: toothless crocs, monkey chicklets, jonahwhales in jars. Hae-Joo told me these pets are an old cheapjack’s ruse; they die forty-eight hours after you get them home, invariably. A circusman was touting for business through a megaphone: “Marvel at the Two-Headed Schizoid Man! Gaze upon Madame Matryoshka and Her Pregnant Embryo! Gasp in Horror at the Real, Live Merican—but don’t poke your fingers into his cage!” Pureblood sailors from all over Nea So Copros sat in frontless bars, flirting with topless comforters, under the scrutiny of PimpCorp men: leathery Himalayans, Han Chinese, pale-hued hairy Baikalese, bearded Uzbeks, wiry Aleutians, coppery Viets and Thais. Comfort houses’ AdVs promised satisfaction for every peccadillo a hungry pureblood could imagine. “If Seoul is a Boardman’s faithful spouse,” said Hae-Joo, “Pusan is his no-pantied mistress.”

  Backstreets grew narrower. A funneled wind bowled bottles and cans along, and hooded figures hurried by. Hae-Joo led me through a surreptitious doorway, up a glimlit tunnel to a portcullised entrance. KUKJE MANSIONS was inscribed over a side window. Hae-Joo pressed a buzzer. Dogs barked, the blind upzipped, and a pair of identical saber-tooths slavered at the glass. An unshaven woman hauled them aside and peered at us. Her gemwarted face lit with recognition at Hae-Joo and xclaimed: “Nun-Hel Han! It’s been nearly twelve months! Little wonder, if the rumors about your brawls were even half true! How were the Philippines?”

  Hae-Joo’s voice had changed again. I checked, involuntarily, so hard-scoured was his accent now; it was still him at my side. “Sinking, Mrs. Lim, sinking fast. You haven’t gone subletting my room, now, have you?”

  “Oh, I keep a reliable house, don’t worry about that!” She faked offense but warned she would need a fresh blip of dollars if his next voyage lasted as long as his last. The portcullis rose, and she glanced at me. “Say, Nun-Hel, if your fluffball stays over a week, single apartments get charged as doubles. House rules. Like it or lump it. All the same to me.”

  Nun-Hel Han the sailor said I would stay for only a nite or two.

  “In every port”—the landlady leered—”it’s t
rue, then.”

  Was she Union?

  No. Flophouse landladies judas their own mothers for a dollar; judasing a Unionman would fetch a far higher price. But, as Hae-Joo told me, they also discourage the idly inquisitive. Inside, a pocked stairwell echoed with arguments and 3-Ds. I was, at last, getting used to stairs. On the ninth floor a woodworm corridor led us to a scraped door. Hae-Joo retrieved a pre-placed match stump from its hinge, noting the management had succumbed to a nasty rash of honesty.

  Nun-Hel’s floproom had a sour mattress, a tidy kitchenette, a closet of clothes for varying climates, a blurred foto of naked Caucasian prostitutes straddling a group of sailors, souvenirs from the Twelve Conurbs and minor ports, and of course, a framed kodak of the Beloved Chairman. A lipsticked marlboro was left teetered on a beer can. The window was shuttered.

  Hae-Joo showered and changed. He told me he had to attend a Union cell meeting and warned me to keep the window shutter down and not to answer the door or fone unless it was him or Apis with this crypto: he wrote the words “These are the tears of things” on a scrap of paper, which he then burned in the ashtray. He put a small supply of Soap in the fridge, and promised to return in the morning, soon after curfew.

  Surely, such a distinguished defector as yourself deserved a rather grander reception?

  Grand receptions draw attention. I passed some hours studying Pusan’s geography on the sony before showering and imbibing my Soap. I woke late, I think, after hour six. Hae-Joo returned xhausted, holding a bag of pungent ttōkbukgi. I made him a cup of starbuck, which he drank gratefully, then ate his breakfast. “Okay, Sonmi—stand by the window and cover your eyes.”