“A new landscape. A change . . .”
“No. You are farther from Sankhara than you have ever been right now,” he said, enjoying my discomfort as I stared at him.
“What?”
“This is another universe. As far from the Sidebar as the Solar Envelope. But inside Sankhara . . . a bubble in the fishbowl. Do you understand?”
I couldn’t get it. Why would the Engine make such a thing? “Why not just part of Sankhara?”
“Why indeed,” he said and I could tell that he had an idea he wasn’t prepared to share yet. “It has been here since Metropolis was destroyed.”
I stared openly at him, my mouth agape. “Exactly?”
“Give or take a few minutes. And I didn’t even find it myself until yesterday,” he said. “Then I found the records of its spawning in the Engine logfiles . . . no warning, no clue. It is a secret of the Engine. Such things are . . .” He shrugged.
“Rare?” I guessed.
“Not possible,” he said. “I know everything the Engine makes. I give it everything it gets . . . but I didn’t give it this.” He bit his nails compulsively and I saw the ragged fear that ran him.
In silence I gave him his fifty honour points, touching the back of my hand to his where our Tabs lay beneath the skin. “Have you looked any farther?” I nodded out beyond our tiny shelter.
“Yes,” he said. “But I won’t go in there now.” He shrugged awkwardly to show that he didn’t enjoy being afraid. “The master is not at home, and it seems that when that happens then the wildlife gets very, very aggro. We wouldn’t make it to the house.”
“There’s a house?” I couldn’t see anything but the dour gloom of the road.
“Palace, actually. Big. Massive. Lovely things. But ooh, very sharp nasty things all waiting long before you get there.” He made a pouncing action with his hands. “So, I’ll take you, with permission. Which I’ve yet to get. Though I will. I will. When he’s here. If he comes back.”
“Who is this ‘master’?” I asked him, observing his clear discomfort.
“Hard to say.”
“You must know,” I objected. “All Stuff things . . .”
“He isn’t Stuff. Well, he’s like it, but different. Come on. Let’s go.”
I stared at him, the cold forgotten. “Different?”
“As in not the same. Similar. Probably. Can’t actually tell. Let’s go.”
“No way,” I said, hardly able to believe him. “We have to see more than this, right now.”
“You can if you like,” Damien said, “but give me your money and points because you won’t be needing them much longer.” He held out his long-fingered hand, palm up. I saw that his arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow. Blue-green elfin blood leaked to the surface of it. He raised his eyebrows at me, daring me.
“What do you mean you’ll get permission?” I said.
He dropped his hand. “Not sure exactly. I’ll know when things stop attacking me the moment I step through the gate.”
“Do we need . . . ?” I racked my brains. “Offerings?”
He shook his head. “None that you’d understand. Just wait. I’ll figure it out.”
“How big is it? Whose is it?”
“His. Don’t know. At least as big as Sank, probably. Maybe bigger. Hidden from You Know What . . .” He wouldn’t even say the name Unity.
My mind went blank. There was no such thing as a thing that hid from Unity. Especially when it was made out of Unity . . . like everything in Sankhara.
Damien shrugged. “More things in heaven and earth?” He grinned at me.
No matter what I said or offered, he refused to be drawn anymore. He left me standing there alone in the freezing rain and ran off with his newly honoured status intact.
It was then that I realized the depth of silence around me, above and below the ordinary noises of the world. There was no Guide here. There was nothing. No connection. Every frequency polled only cosmic activity. Not one wavelength of any kind of broadcast at all. Nothing.
I stepped back nervously and was back on Crisscross Street, its late-afternoon gleam a sudden withering heat against my face. SankhaGuide started running diagnostics to ferret out the glitch that had caused my temporary absence from its awareness. I told it I had no idea what had happened. It rumbled unhappily and asked me not to cut it off without warning in the future.
In my room at home I replayed the recording of those few minutes in the hidden world. I started to put together some plans for going back and only stopped when my alarm chimed to tell me I had promised to go out.
I went to the Foundation at eight o’clock, leaving my efforts to understand Damien’s claims at home. Katy answered my knock and let me in.
The first room was a mess of coats, boots and rucksacks like an explosion in a luggage depot—a pitiful collection that was dwarfed by the anteroom’s graceful proportions and beautiful eau-de-nil washed walls. There was a weaving pathway left among the rubble. Katy led me along it, through a meeting room where groups were seated on the floor and on cushions, talking fifteen to the dozen. They all ignored me apart from the odd curious glance. They knew me and I knew them and we didn’t have much to say to one another. Some of the easier ones gave me a smile, one or two not even forced.
I looked past them out of the tiered square panes of the Georgian windows. It was raining in a real summer downpour.
Ludo held court in the next chamber—we passed through, our feet sounding unnaturally loud on the hardwood floor, interrupting his speech about the sound genetic basis for kindness. The last four rooms we skirted were all living areas. Camp beds were lined up as though it was an army barracks, with two shin lengths between them. People lay or sat and read on them. Some played quiet games. One girl I saw in the last room, in the corner. She stood out like a ray of sunlight coming through heavy curtains.
With the strange recognition you get when you see yourself outdone by the next latest model I saw that she was one or two generations younger than I was. Even Pure Line Unevolved like myself—ordinary humans who have never had the dubious benefit of gengineering in their line—counted in generations these days. We lived a long time, but she was still in her teens, I thought, whereas I wouldn’t see thirty-five again and some more years after that as well.
She was definitely Genie—a heavily engineered but ordinary model human, not Forged. There was an odd familiarity about the way she was made—athletic and good-looking. But this attractive mediocrity was totally at odds with the way she held herself. I couldn’t put my finger on it until we were almost up to her, then I managed to find the perfect word when the lamplight caught her hair as she moved her head back and forth, playing with the zip of her parka by running her chin across it, opening the collar, then catching the zip tongue with her teeth and dragging it back up again.
She burned.
She was playing with one of the Love Foundation’s lilac card decks, her head with its careful screen of amber-coloured hair bent over her hands where she held a fan of them, the suits pointing outward so that the backs, each with its own homily or remedy on it, faced her. She was picking them out with her free hand at random. After she read she would let her eyes roll upwards until only the white showed, then she’d say quietly, “Crap,” and flick the card with a snappy wrist action so that it spun and flew like a Frisbee across to the bunk opposite. She had good aim. All but two cards were on the bed.
“Francine,” Katy said with a ring of authority I could tell she enjoyed. “I’ve brought a friend of mine to meet you.”
Friend. That’s nice.
Francine looked up at me with the most curious stare I’d ever been subjected to. It took me in, chewed me up and tasted me through in about half a second or less, and I was surprised to see her smile. All the sharp, canny calculation of the first instant melted into a completely charming softness in the second. She liked me.
Such instants are all it takes to move from one universe to another. I was so god
damned gratified I couldn’t bring myself to wonder why. Her toughness and intensity had been attractive, but her sudden acceptance was devastating. It must all be because I felt so raw from the day’s previous agonizing, I thought, as I stepped forward with my meet-the-nice-Professor smile on, my hand out.
“This is Greg.” Katy introduced me. “He’s a teacher at the University. He lives here while he’s documenting the Sidebar.”
Francine’s large grey eyes ate me up as if Katy had said I were water and Francine was the desert.
“Greg, this is Francine. She’s joined us from the Beach Community. One of the underground people a little down on her luck and been here quite a while now. I thought she might help you out if you can fit her in to your Cataloguing Programme. She’s very academic, very bright, and she wants to know more about the ’Bar. I said you were just the person.”
Ah, now I get it. I am going to help Katy’s next big project, to wit, Francine from the Beach Community.
Francine lifted her head, chin bright red from all the zip tugging, and held the card deck out to me. “Pick one.”
I saw that her nails were all bitten down. She was thin and her skin was almost translucent with the telltale sign of malnutrition fed for a long time only on water. Her expression was impish.
I took the five of clubs. She nodded at me, indicating the legend on the back.
Katy watched with her arms folded, a smile on her face, not as patronizing as it might have been. I read, “The search for love should be approached with rational organization and determination. An ordered mind brings a quiet heart.”
“Well?” Francine said. She glanced at Katy, a challenging gaze that Katy herself was probably immune to. I’d always liked her thick skin.
Katy looked at me, one eyebrow raised. I really walked into this one, I thought. I glanced at Francine and guessed she wanted to see if I was going to tell her what I thought or fob her off with what I thought she should hear.
“Speaking as the freshly rationalized, it’s difficult to make a judgement on that one.” I offered the card back to her.
Francine took it and nodded. “Crap,” she said and flicked it onto the distant bed without looking. She bent the remainder of the deck in her hand between her fingers and thumb and sprayed them all out, over the foot of her bed and on the carpet, flicking the last one away from her.
Katy didn’t twitch a hair. “Would you like something to drink, tea maybe?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay,” Francine said. “Do I have to make it?”
“No, I’ll get it.” Katy gave us a meaningful look as she walked away, meaning we should Talk with a capital T.
Francine seemed to catch my thoughts. “We should all be praying to the Engine for plumbing in this freaking place, instead of compassionate and undifferentiated kindness.”
“It doesn’t respond to prayers,” I said reflexively. The Engine built Sankhara at our bidding, allegedly, but it doesn’t do requests of the kind that Francine was thinking about.
“Well duh. Anyone on the beach can tell you that.”
“Is this better than the beach?”
“It has a roof and there’s food,” she said. “On the other hand, there’s Ludo and Miss Tolerance and everyone here is an idiot or too nice for their own good, or both. They’re all hopeless. It’s good they stick together, they need each other.” She drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them. “Katy left you to come here. She left you for this. That must sting.”
I was so taken aback that she knew and thinking about how she knew and what that meant that I struggled for a few seconds, all my surprise and dismay clearly showing. “You could say.”
“You seem okay to me.”
“Thanks.”
“So, what’s the deal with you?” She glanced up and around at the room we were in. Her eyes were bright and they moved fast before sticking on me with the same abject hunger I’d noticed before. It was deeply unnerving.
“I document Sankhara, for study purposes. Try to mine it for recognizable story fragments, anomalies, new mutations on old themes . . .” I explained it to her as briefly as I could. I had never been so unsettled as I felt talking to her. It reduced me to the level of speech she seemed to prefer: excessively casual, a little bit coy.
“It’s okay,” she said when I’d finished, ducking her head back to her zip. She spoke around the metal tongue as she held on to it with her teeth again, very quietly. “To ask questions, to want to know things. That’s okay.” She was speaking to herself.
Katy returned.
Francine sat up and took one steaming mug from Katy with great care.
I was glad for the distraction when I took mine.
“So what have you guys been talking about?” Katy asked.
Francine and I shared a glance and I felt a curious, charming thrill as we decided we didn’t want to say. “Francine’s going to be coming round helping me,” I said, not even knowing I was going to until the words came airily out, as though it was a well-crafted plan. “From tomorrow she’ll be my assistant and we’re going to enrol her in some courses.” I finished and risked looking at Francine, trying to imply by my gaze—well, this is what you wanted, isn’t it?
“I got a job today,” Francine said, apropos of nothing apparently, switching her gaze to Katy, her eyes widening into the look of innocence.
“Paid employment?” Katy repeated. “You mean within the criminal fraternity as an unprotected illegal, do you?”
“Have to start somewhere,” Francine said, giving me a hard stare and a sweet smile that told me she’d be even with me for dropping her into so much scheduled responsibility. “Greg said he could put a word in for me and get me something safer if it didn’t work out.”
“Did he?” Katy didn’t bother hiding her surprise and scorn. “Well, you amaze me. I didn’t know he knew the first thing about the underground. But of course, he knows so much about everything.”
“He was only being nice,” Francine said, giving Katy an innocent look. “You shouldn’t be a bitch about it, especially since you just dumped him. How is that feeling his pain? More like adding to it.”
Katy and I both stared at her.
“I’m just saying.” Francine shrugged and turned away from us to stare through the steam coming out of her cup. Her face had a strong, classically beautiful catalogue profile. Francine did not have grandeur; however, she had sadness and uncomfortable vulnerability. I had that intuition that comes out of nowhere with the conviction of perfect knowledge—she would come with me to Damien’s strange bubble. She was the key to understanding it.
6 / Francine
I was supposed to be working, but there wasn’t much to do so I faced the grim reality of having to think about the state I’d got myself into. Think, Francine, think about the cash that will get you out of the Foundation forever . . . money, money, money. . . .
First though I admired all the makeup on the dressing tables as I flicked my duster over it. They didn’t spare any money here, they bought the best, most expensive stuff. And all the best brushes, real animal hair. Everything was a mess, pots upturned (I righted them), brushes scattered (I washed and replaced them), powder everywhere (get that with the static-charge cloth).
I didn’t like the people who used these rooms. They never noticed me except to complain that I was late, shouldn’t I have gone by now? And they didn’t like to look at me because I reminded them of some who-knew-what that made them twitchy. I looked at them sometimes and my failure to be ambitious in the way that they were cut like a dull knife.
I could see time clicking by on the wall clock.
It is reported by schoolbooks that time isn’t a thing that goes, only a state of relationships changing in space, the movement of 3-dimensional objects through the fourth dimension. Today it went slithering by, shedding the seconds like skins, and I watched it going. I wondered when Marion, the cleaning commando, would come into the dressing rooms, thinking I should be
nearly finished. I tried to care.
I tidied things up, wiped them down, put them back, pretending that I was the salesgirl on the big counter at Aelf 1’s huge wandering trade show, the Embargo, where they still employ actual staff. It was difficult though, because I didn’t look like a shop girl and thinking about it made me think about SankhaGuide waving to me through the masseuse in the window. Good-bye. Instead, I pretended that I worked here and that Marion, transformed into the agent of criminal and corporate evil, was going to come and drag me off to have sex with a rich guy for money because I was a rare and fragile Unevolved beauty and worth a lot of money.
Correction. My degradation is worth money.
How this pretty-woman thing got to be a romantic prospect is tough on the imagination. Maybe the point is that I will be saved from a terrible fate, but it clearly already happened to me, so that might not be it. Okay, I’ll be saved from the continuance of a terrible fate.
I’m poor. I have only my looks. I’m a sort of Cinderella, and the john will be a handsome charmer, a roisterer in town on business who’s used to the high life and is looking for something out of the ordinary to stimulate his dulled appetites. There’ll be some slightly implausible scenes where he falls in love with me because I’m so special and sweet-hearted (aha, I’m beginning to get how it’s romantic, although this is really worse crap than the Foundation manages to come up with), then I’d leave him and take his cash. He’d be really sad I was gone and try to find me, but not because of the money, because he was in love with me.
Again, the romance comes in on the no-ball.
Anyway, I couldn’t leave him permanently if he really was sorry, because I don’t like to make people sorry. I’d probably go back to him and spend years being miserably married in a gilded cage, making the stupid schmuck’s life hell.
But before that charming story can unfold into being there’s still today, and the next hour, and the waiting . . . as I’m always waiting, longing for an event out of the ordinary in which my ordinariness is transformed. In that moment all life’s meaning would be revealed to me and be accompanied by a happiness like none I’ve ever known, and this happiness would last forever. But I know the way that stories go—first there’s the sordid beginning to live through, and that’s now.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 6