The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  The electric shuttle lifted her out of the old section in which Nebergall lived. Below the blue trestle, the convex south wall of the city slid past. Hundreds of people milled around the checkpoint. Maybe half of them would get work today—mostly on or around the market docks. Some—ones with craft skills, for example—would have permits and already be inside, many up in Overcity shops. An even luckier few would have maintenance jobs there. The people lining up below lived from one day to the next, some getting far enough ahead to buy a medical checkup or the fare to some other city where they might try their luck again. In the Midwest, out in the broad plains between urban centers, there were corporate-free zones—independent county-clusters where people grew their own crops, produced their own power with wind and water and recycled manure. A skilled craftsman or guild member was generally welcome, so she’d heard. It would be a subsistence existence, but more dignified than knifing your neighbors for a promise of work or, at best, work of limited duration. These people outside the wall were better off than those who lived on the ground inside, who had effectively been sealed in, but just barely: they had sanitation, running water, electricity, and homes. They’d been born into that middle stratum of inherited debt that could almost never be conquered, just passed down to the next generation.

  The shuttle took her to Market Tower Station. From there, breezing through security, she entered the Overcity of Philadelphia—two million people, their whole lives lived in a hive of towers between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers.

  Before the slide of the fossil fuel industries, the city had sprawled far and wide. Now it was condensed, its constituent parts drawn in as if to a magnetic core. The older city remained, like the ruins of Troy and Londinium upon which the modern world had set down, referred to disparagingly as the Undercity, and within the walls as the Box City. Like the encampment of a besieging army, it appeared to be completely cut off from the airy fortress towers she now strode through, which were accessible through skywalks, and all but sealed up at ground level.

  From experience she knew that the two halves were still connected, and not just in the way that the Alien News Network and Happy Burger represented. Revelations did filter down over the wall. To Nebergall, to others like him. Robin Hood nowadays stole information from the rich. She was such a connection—a live wire between the upper and lower strata, a covert line of communication. Spawn of the INRE. She figured it would have made her father proud.

  Chapter Six: Wearing Disguises

  The dark man lay back on a tangle of blankets inside his prestigious plastic box, his digs, and idly rolled one tip of his mustache between his fingers. He was tall enough that his head touched the rear wall and his feet the moth-eaten yellow blanket that served as a door. He passed the time in leisurely fashion by listening to the squawking of his neighbors. From the containers fronting both sides of the narrow alley—the alleys like canyons in miniature—conversations intertwined on the breeze.

  At the moment, right across the way, Mad John and Celine were balling hard enough to thrash the adjacent boxes, their neighbors stirred up like hornets and bellowing every foul word and threat they could think of. The tall dark man just grinned at the sound.

  The digs consisted of opaque seaweed-plastic sheeting stitched together over uprights into a two-and-a-half-meter cube with an opening at each end—a comparatively high-rent box. He couldn’t stand upright inside it, but the blankets made reclining quite comfortable. He’d brought the blankets along upon moving in rather than trust the former tenant’s bedding, which at the very least had been lice-ridden.

  What really made the digs prestigious was its location. It butted right up against the Liberty Bell enclosure; specifically, the rear wall of the box pressed against the low marble wall in back of the little building.

  The Bell had become both symbolically and physically the heart of Box City. Only a handful of lucky Boxers could look at it whenever they pleased; it was the equivalent of a title, a knighthood—presuming anyone other than the dark man still remembered what a knighthood was.

  The Liberty Bell was hardly the only historical site overtaken by the underclass. Congress Hall and Independence Hall—the white bell tower and cupola were visible from the alley outside—had been engulfed by hovels. So had the First Bank, the Second Bank, Library Hall, and Carpenters’ Hall. A veritable Sargasso Sea of tiny domiciles stretched from the Vine Street wall at the north end of the Mall all the way to Penn’s Landing, where the southern and the Delaware river walls met.

  A few scattered boxes stood as much as three levels high, like scale model trinities, but most were no larger, sturdier or more elaborate than Lobly’s digs. At night, through plastic-foam walls, a thousand little tv screens flickered like fires, most of them hooked up to nothing and hissing with white noise, but curiously comforting somehow, like a memory of the womb. The electricity was stolen.

  ScumberCorp would have liked to reclaim the monuments of Independence National Historical Park, if only to have them on hand as corporate iconography. The Liberty Bell would have looked great in the lobby beside the logo case containing the CEOs’ heads. However, the company did not dare try to take back the buildings for two simple reasons. First, any attempt to wrestle the Bell away from the Boxers would have been met by fierce resistance and followed by riots throughout the Undercity and maybe even (in the worst-case scenarios) storming into the towers. It had happened once before—the charred ruins of the Westphilly Conflagration of ’31 could still be seen across the river as a reminder of what the dispossessed could do if they got out of hand. People who might ignore the subtle clipping of their civil rights one by one would scream and go raving, foaming mad over some ridiculous bit of filched iconography: a bell, a flag.

  The second reason SC left the Bell alone was fear of the inevitable outcry that would follow close upon the heels of the riots as all their competitors aligned against them. Even the Odie U.S. government might be pressured to take a stand against the company. So ScumberCorp pretended that the icon of liberty wasn’t that important; they maintained the opinion that the whole thing was a myth among the underclass; and they went ahead with an end run around the filthy beggars in the form of Orbitol.

  As things stood, anyone who dared ask would be escorted through the confines of Box City to view the Bell. For a small fee, even people from the towers could visit it; they were not molested or harrassed in any way as long as they maintained the proper air of respect, which was more than any “Over” could say about treatment at the tower checkpoints. The Bell had about it something reverential, almost mystical. No one would have dared to interfere with another’s time inside the enclosure. Such action would have resulted in quick banishment to the Snake Pit, or worse. The dark man, who went by the name of Aswad Lobly, had already seen that happen.

  ***

  Of contrary parts, Aswad Lobly was: a curiosity in an encampment full of oddities. So tall as to be almost hulking, at the same time he evinced grace and balance—an almost feline agility. He had chocolate skin and curly black hair plaited into something like a bound cylinder off the back of his head. His mustache was thick, and he kept the tips oiled to points like barbs. Above the right nostril he wore a large jeweled nose-ring, and in one ear, six hoops of silver. His voice was milky soft, nasal if you listened closely; the accent in his speech would have been hard to pin down. He disappeared sometimes for days on end.

  When he wasn’t around, Lobly’s neighbors speculated that he was maybe homosexual and selling himself to clientele in the towers, or a pederast, or a procurer for pederasts, none of which was uncommon in Box City. He claimed to have arrived from the North, fleeing some trouble there that he refused to specify. No one had to ask about that. He wore layers of loose robes, red sneaker-boots, and either a tarboosh or a turban on any given day.

  What none of Aswad Lobly’s neighbors remotely suspected—as he intended—was that he was a woman. Thomasina Lyell, to be exact.

  ***

  Lyell
made no attempt to check the gossip about her alter-ego; conflicting stories served to act like an extra layer of camouflage to protect her. All that was known about Lobly was that he might have been an Orbiter once but had taken the cure before he suffered any obvious tissue damage. Maybe he’d lost a couple toes, maybe not—the stories varied because she never spelled out anything. Lobly could discourse quite knowledgeably about the effects of the drug, and that was really all the proof anyone needed. The Boxers’ inherent reticence to talk about their former lives or the families they’d fled, deserted, or slain helped her in this. Past lives didn’t exist down here. Box life was timeless.

  The knowledge of Orbitol and some of Lobly’s appearance Lyell had borrowed from a lifer she’d met while serving time on Corson’s Isle. The lifer’s name was Poleby.

  At some date prior to his incarceration on the prison island, Poleby had mixed up his drugs with volatile, even suicidal, abandon. He had mistakenly assumed that site-specific drugs couldn’t conflict with one another. The result of Poleby’s experiments was a permanent, degenerative rewiring of his salivary glands.

  In the cell he shared with Lyell, he spent most of his time with a bucket between his knees to catch the waterfall of drool that ran ceaselessly down his face. It dripped from the tips of his mustache and out of the cleft in his chin. Poleby kept a two-liter pitcher of water on a table beside him to keep from dehydrating in the night, and slept with a plastic tube hooked over his lip. The first few weeks, the sucking and trickling sounds had nearly driven Lyell crazy.

  The supply of the drugs in the prison astonished even Lyell. From Poleby’s stories, she figured out soon enough that as many as five dozen pharmaceutical companies were using the prisoners on Corson’s Isle as test subjects for experimental substances and practices. According to Poleby, the first unnatural effects of Orbitol had come to light there.

  “It was a girl, one a their first users. (Slurp.) Her toes, you know, went away. When she refused to take any more a the shit, they strapped her into her cell and shot it into her—bang, bang bang! (Slurp.) Well, ya know—after awhile she’s begging for it, can’t stand to be without it, and she didn’t care no more that she didn’t have no legs or hands.” He paused dramatically to spit. “Didn’t matter to her half so much as gettin’ fucked up. She let the bastids do anything just so she got fixed. They gouged samples outen her, trying to see what what goin’ on, and every day there’s less and less of her. One day she just faded right out from under ’em—they’s so fuckin’ dumb they thought she’d escaped. And they’s right, too, ya know.” He laughed, but self-consciously glanced at his empty sleeve as he sucked saliva. “Now, ain’t I a fine one to talk?”

  One night, while he flew high on Orbitol, Poleby described quite lucidly for Lyell the vision he had of another reality. According to him, it was a vision he shared with all other Orbiters.

  “It doesn’t come every time right at first, ya know, like gettin’ a signal from a pirate satellite or somepun,” he said, “but when it comes, it’s a message from God. Glimpse a heaven, gettin’ stronger with each visit. That’s why I come back to it—why that girl did, why they all do—get another peek at it, ’nother look at God. Ya don’t know that it’s got its hooks in ya till it’s happened. And then you’re the fish and the other world just reelin’ you in.

  “It’s a place where everything sparkles like that little jewel in your nose,” Poleby said, tapping her nostril, the disconnected lens system.

  He’d never possessed the least imagination, never once hallucinated anything coherent, and so he concluded that the drug had transported him to a real place. He speculated that it was Mars-to-be—the terraformed Mars that ScumberCorp’s ads referred to. “Not this generation but someday soon,” went the motto that even President Odie had been known to recite. “A new world is about to open to us that will return mankind to greatness.” The ad ran ceaselessly on Knewsday and ANN, and the images of Mars in the ad looked so much like his vision that he figured the artist must have been an Orbiter, too. He swore there were thousands of addicts in the upper strata of society all across the world. One of the drug testers monitoring him had said so. Lyell remembered wondering at the time if SC’s whole Martian colony might be nothing more than a widespread hallucination. How could anyone be sure?

  Poleby believed the world he saw was real. He had a theory that he told Lyell, “God, ya see, finds His recreation in creating variety. That’s what my ma used to say.” He slurped, spitting. “She was a Hindu, had all kinds a notions about God an’ stuff the old man couldn’t tolerate. He was starch-stiff Catholic. I mean stiff. He had a miter on the head a his dick. Don’t know why in the hell the little prick married her, either. I figure they was doing battle to see who could convert who. If she’d’a had a snake, she woulda put it in his bed, but she didn’t. He’d go to confession, then a tavern, then come home broke and beat the shit outen her. She finally run away.”

  A few years later Poleby had killed the old man himself with a screwdriver. “Carpenter’s lobotomy,” he called it, lopsidedly grinning with his chin bright and wet. His laughter had gone swirling into the bucket.

  ***

  Lyell forged a lot of connections to get her Box City digs. The box was one of a number of locations she frequented in the hopes she might pick up information about any of SC’s unusual offers. She’d acquired it, to Nebergall’s joy, by trading pairs of shoes.

  The location of the box played a crucial role because information flowing through the Box City tended to cluster in pockets around The Bell and the cooking fires. The fires burned to the north, up on Judge Lewis Quadrangle. Lobly had become a familiar sight there, too, always supplied with extra food to share and always willing to listen to any story.

  It was while seated at a cooking fire that Lyell had learned about ScumberCorp’s food-testing programs. The first time she’d heard it, she doubted the story. Free food was rare enough, but free food from ScumberCorp was a holy miracle. However, when she mentioned the giveaway, she found too many people attesting to it, and solid details filling in.

  From time to time, SC’s subsidiaries—Happy Burgers in particular—invited some Boxers to a private party. This inevitably involved free food or drugs. The exact purpose of any event was not revealed to the participants, but they were always rewarded, sometimes with coins that they could use for barter, but often as not with other drugs. Occasionally, some of the participants didn’t return. A few times, none of them had. That might have scared off new participants, except that there were always Boxers who hadn’t managed to find a meal or who had been robbed by a gang.

  A legend had evolved that the lost Boxers had been awarded special positions up in the towers. The fervor with which the people she spoke to embraced this nonsense, was testimony to their ability to deny reality utterly. She knew better. If people from the Undercity were living fulltime in the Overcity, they were doing it in an urn.

  She would have compiled a terrific story for Nebergall if he hadn’t turned off the tap. It burned her that she couldn’t use it. She couldn’t have imagined the unprecedented turn the story was about to take.

  The sounds of Mad John and Celine’s sex act had degenerated into groans, followed by silence. Background conversations drifted like body odors along the narrow alley—people debating the best way to get rid of head-lice, somebody else claiming that Knewsday had pictures of the sea creatures that were coming ashore to rape women in Italy. The weird mixture always surprised her.

  The dull murmurous voices lulled her brain and combined with the warm, confined air to send her drifting into a light doze.

  She jerked awake as there came a rap on the roof of the box next to hers. She leaned up on her elbows and listened to a conversation in hushed tones.

  “Ya ready to go, Pete?”

  “Jist lemme git on my boots.”

  “Naw problem.”

  “Hamany you figure you can eat?”

  “Fuck do you care how many? What you d
on’t, I’m eating. Bet on that. I axed Bucca and he said it’s gonna be a major feast, like hundreds of burgers an’ stuff.”

  “Oh, man.”

  When their voices drifted away, she counted to five, then ducked out under the blanket. Mad John’s foot protruded beneath Celine’s curtain. He’d managed to keep on one dirty sock.

  The two speakers—her neighbor, Pete, and the other—were heading along the nearest east-west aisle. Pressing her elbow, she strolled after them, disking the sights and sounds of box life. Only the smells eluded posterity, which was a pity in its way.

  The two men led her far up Market Street and around City Hall to an office plaza of broken concrete pavement and the skeletons of dead trees in big, poured stone pots. Blocks of pink granite lay here and there as if spilled by some giant infant. She counted three dozen Box City dwellers milling about aimlessly, and more arriving. Word had gotten around.

  Lyell hung back at the edge of one building. The two men she’d followed went up to a short fireplug of a character and began chatting with him.

  She recognized some of the people from the fires up on the quadrangle. Among the Boxers there were a few deranged characters. Tended by friends, these examples of untreated madness were settled on the granite blocks, where some immediately engaged in conversation with invisible companions or made faces at nothing. Many of them had open sores, and most wore one or more meals like embroidered designs down the front of their clothes. A bald man, with suppurating stigmata at his temples and invisible bare feet, crawled upon one of the blocks and began castigating everybody around him. His cause could not be fathomed and no one but the other “mads” paid him any mind.

  Through a slit in two buildings, Lyell glimpsed the statue of William Penn atop the gothic City Hall building, but almost at once turned her attention overhead, where the others were looking and pointing.