Hunters & Collectors

by M. Suddain

  I quickly gave up on picking the lock. Impossible. I remembered a maxim a woman called Gladys had taught me: ‘Never pick if you can kick.’ I hung from a strut and swung up to smash my heels against the lock. It took five or six goes, but I got the grille open just as the pod went under. The vortex from the heavy container took me down some distance. The water was incredibly cold. I followed the ribbons of bubbles back to the surface. My ribs were broken, I could tell. But the gash in my head wasn’t deep. Anyway, this part of the story is fairly mundane. I drifted through the fog until I smelled tropical fruit. I found an island, survived there for a day or two, was finally rescued by a group of sponge divers, one of whom saved my life by pulling the cactus thorns from my midriff and sucking out the powerful psychotropic poison with her toothless mouth. The sponge divers put me on a boat which took me to a giant floating mall where I’ve spent the last week or two in hospital.

  The point I’m trying to make with this story, Sanjaya, is that all human rituals, from birth to death, are rooted in primeval violence. Love is the conquest of the heart and body of another while submitting to that same conquest. Food is the farming, hunting, killing, cutting, searing and devouring of organic materials. It is the rape of the very energy of life. All art is the beautiful communing with the grotesque. And the more we dress it up, the more we shine a light on its barbarity. And frankly, Sanjaya, the idea that a lavish meal might conclude with similar kinds of violence being performed on me only enhances the experience. This is a war. I have my pen; they have their electrical tape and craft knives and kitchen cleavers and maps to my hotel. So. Do I have any advice for someone who wants to become a forensic gastronomer? Yes. Don’t. My advice is to get yourself a simple, rewarding job that won’t drive you insane. Or settle down with someone nice while you still have a clunge full of eggs and an ounce of tenderness to offer. And if you decide to ignore this, then my advice is to pack light for longer journeys, and bring a gun. But you’re only eleven, Sanjaya. I wouldn’t expect you to understand any of this yet.

  … It was a fairly hopeless situation, Nanše. I sheltered on the beach on that island for a day. I’d die soon, I knew. From thirst, infection or exposure. But I was content. Finally alone. No tour groups here. No mobs of dead-eyed trolls in anoraks. No shrill voices from the next table. Only soft nocturnal calls from the jungle. I decided I had to leave the beach and climb up through the jungle to a clifftop to make a signal fire. The jungle was a dark and wild place. I had no business being there. But as dawn finally broke I was astonished to wander from the morass onto the clifftop and find a group of elderly women enjoying their breakfast. The ancient, crooked shapes were gathered around a fire, and I saw there was a stormproofed hut at the edge of the clearing. I knew they must be sponge divers, and that I must be on Haggistatti. These women have been diving here for more than three thousand years. Some of them looked like they might have been there from the start. They didn’t even notice me when I came into their camp. It was like they were in a dream. One of them did look up, and smiled toothlessly at my blood-streaked face, my prickled abdomen. Without a word she led me to the hut, made me lie on the bed, brought me water and a hot, salty soup, and set about pulling the needles from my side.

  … I had wild dreams. I was at the hotel, in that lounge of mirrors. But the mirrors went on and on. How many times have I dreamed this? There were faces all around me; faces I knew, but many I didn’t. The couple in the photo were there. I was in a jungle of colour and movement. There were jewels exploding from pale arms and throats; shoes of many colours hopping by like birds; delicate tattoos; gems surgically implanted into slender wrists and temples, the décolletage, punched into the skin of the arm, or between hard gleaming eyes; so many eyes, suffused with pleasure, or rippling with an addict’s lust, or heaped upon silver trays. I found myself in a room filled with stuffed beasts. A lone attendant was loading dead shoes onto a baggage cart – a Winchester. I said, ‘Gods, is that a Winchester?’ They don’t make them any more. The boy looked up and said: ‘You were born under a bad sign, sir.’ I remember finding myself awake and holding out the photo to a gummy, smiling face and shouting, ‘Just tell me if it’s real!’ But I lost the photo, so that couldn’t have happened. They were smiling and pushing me back on the bed.

  … I woke up again an hour later, or fifty hours later, to find my arm in a kind of sling, lumps of sea sponge strapped to the wounds on my torso and head. It was agonising to move, but I managed to get up and go out. I saw a body leave the clifftop, just as another, slick with water, came clambering up over the ledge, the pouch around her belly stuffed full, the air around us madly filled with the scent of the sea and the forest. Within minutes of arriving here I’d wondered: ‘How can people live like this?’ Now I wondered: ‘How can they not?’ These women didn’t know who I was, or what was going on in the cities floating above them. East and West mean nothing to them. They are above the world while being far below it. They are free. They fall into the darkness below and feel around for soft shapes. This is the very edge of the continental shelf. Below them is an abyss almost thirty miles deep. The Battles. A domain whose silently churning vents throw up more strange life than deep space ever has. They dive into these alien waters, to the margins of death. If a man with problems dove down there he’d come back with answers. Even if the answer was to never come back. I felt a hand against my naked chest. I’d wandered to the edge in my underwear, ready to make my dive. The women kindly ushered me back to the hut. Probably a good thing. I couldn’t become one of them. Their truth is something you have to be born into.

  … But sponges are miraculous things. They seem inanimate, but in fact they sense the world. When they sense the presence of the divers they contract, and it’s much harder to tear them from the rocks. And when they are torn away, other sponges grow on the rocks from the roots left behind.

  … I was taken down from the cliffs to a small bay with a wooden dock where boats arrive once a week to pick up the sponges the women have collected. The boat took me to the Mall of the World. The Mall is a 30,000-square-mile artificial island in Zoraster Seas where people can go to live out their consumer fantasies. They also have a pretty amazing hospital. The doctors there are pleasant, and have access to state-of-the-art pharmaceuticals. They put me on a brand-new painkiller, and a trauma-containment drug called Eradinax. I had no trauma, but I took it anyway. And it made going out and exploring the oppressively vast Mall almost pleasant. The whole place is an abstraction of the real world. The Mall’s gimmick is to ironically expose the signifiers normally hidden in marketing messages. Thus, a home-security store is called Fear of Death, and a bookstore is called Dead Medium. There’s a high-end fashion store called Shame Blanket. Moving catwalks carry the soft-bellied forms through chrome-plated tunnels. They even have a recorded message at the end of the catwalk to remind people to start using their legs again.

  … The Mall has a ninety-square-mile food plaza called Ingurgitation Annexe. Its Grand Atrium is decorated with a one-thousand-foot mural to our emergence from the dark muds of creation: back when we foraged for grubs, and died from collecting the wrong berries, or crossing the wrong beast, or standing on the wrong side of a falling tree. Today most of our food is made in factories. We still eat grubs, obviously. Except now they’re called ‘organic tree shrimp’ and they are sold in artisan jars in this very plaza, in a small food emporium named ‘Let’s Call Them Organic Tree Shrimp’, which you’ll find between a boutique liquor vendor – Comfortably Numb – and a cake store called Ye Olde Self Loathing Shoppe.

  … The point is, I should probably take the hint and stop looking for this hotel. But I can’t. Who can bear to leave a thing unfinished? I handed in my copy on Monsterat’s. It goes live tomorrow at ten. You’ll love it!

  Samson. You don’t know what you’ve done. Correction, you know exactly what you’ve done, you just don’t know the consequences. But I do. So know this: I will crush you. For what you’ve done, and the life you’ve ru
ined. Correction, two lives. You’ve ruined mine, also. Three, really, because you’ve also ruined your own. Because here’s what I plan to do: I plan to ruin you twice. I’ll make it my mission to almost destroy you. Your life, your career, your happiness, and everything you cherish. I will take you to the brink of destruction, then stop, let the blossoms of hope push up through the crags of your ruined existence, let spring flourish briefly in the wasteland of your life. Then I will crush you again.

  Best regards to Nadine.

  … Beast. Destroy him. I will give you whatever resources you need to make sure there’s not a piece of him left on the map.

  … Nanše, Nanše, Nanše.

  I just need to know where you are, friend, and if you’re OK. Samson mixed up my review. Maybe on purpose. He’s come to despise me, even though I’ve made him rich. I know you’ll believe me, because you know me better than anyone. I would never write those things about Monsterat’s. We can contain this. Beast is on it. We learn to accept where life takes us. But I can’t accept what’s happened here.

  Please write me back when you can. This breaks my dumb heart, Nanše. You’re the last real thing I know in the whole world.

  My ninth Tour ends where they all started: in the Sundowner Lounge, on the East Balcony of the Grand Pacific: White Nebula, with a cold drink and an emptied heart. The famous view from this most famous balcony has been transformed by a new construction. Infinicon: Worlds’ Fair of Science, Industry & Human Endeavour, a floating tourist paradise the size of an average city, built to stay open all day, all night, for a hundred years or more. They’ve sent me – from the future, apparently – a lavishly produced catalogue. The Perisphere. The Arcades of Tomorrow. The Funhouse of the Future.

  ‘Rapid Systems for Future Happiness.’

  ‘A Vision of a Brighter Tomorrow.’

  ‘Connecting this World to the Next.’

  ‘From your Sleep-pod to your Work-pod in Under Thirty Minutes.’

  ‘Your Magna-shuttle deports you at an air-conditioned docking bay. You step out to see the towering Gate to Tomorrow, and framed between those gates is a highway, the Avenue of the Gods, a perfect inverted V crowned by the gleaming silver Perisphere. An automated kiosk, sensing if you’re man or woman, says, “Tickets please, sir,” or, “Tickets please, madam,” and then you’re free to pass through the gates and enter the World of Tomorrow.’

  … This is a joint venture between East and West. The Great Butcher herself will be sailing to Infinicon to help unveil a peace monument. Of all things. This is the woman who executed almost a billion people during the first stage of her revolution alone. Who declared herself ‘Ruler for Life’ and ‘Enlightened Disciple of the People’ and ‘The Genius of All Professors’ and ‘Eye-dog of the Revolution’. Who believed her Revolution was ordained during a summit between the gods of every major faith, who each agreed that her rule over all humanity was inevitable and blessed. Who sketched one thousand pieces of impossible architecture on hotel stationery and then ordered them all to be built at the state’s expense. Who had several thousand architects, along with scores of other enemies, put in a coliseum and then executed to the tune of ‘Those Were the Days’.

  … The Garden of Gastronomy will house more than 135,000 culinary exhibits. Displays of artificial tongues and noses. A ‘Critics Nook’. The catering baron, Tyro, has designed a ‘mechanised hyper-restaurant’ in an eighteen-hundred-foot-tall tower, all in honour of forensic gastronomer and nine times international blind-tasting champion Eliö Lebaubátain. The unwitting diner takes an aperitif at a circular table on the ground floor, is accelerated vertically in her chair by hydraulic pistons to the next level, and the next course, for thirty-eight bewildering plates, until she finds herself abandoned on a viewing platform at the top, eating her dessert with trembling hands, and/or vomiting/weeping copiously.

  And if that isn’t the metaphor for our age I don’t know what is.

  God, how I hate the future. It’s a cult. A tyranny of progress. And anyone who speaks against it is shunned. But all tyrannies must efficiently erase the past if they’re to work. I like the past. The past was solid, simple, and real. The rooms were large, the food was good, and we knew who our enemies were. I feel misty for old tyrannies. The ones which beat you, enslaved you, tried to break your spirit, and in doing so gave your life the only enhancement it really needs: a sense of purpose. The tyranny of the future doesn’t take away our choices; it swamps us in them. It doesn’t curb our freedoms; it tube-feeds us with them until we rupture like neglected factory geese.

  … This world has left me behind. Where do I go from here? Not home. That’s far too depressing. And not to Infinicon. This is the closest I’ll ever willingly get to that gleaming shit-palace: gazing at it from the Grand East Balcony of the Central Park West: White Nebula, with a cold heart and a nearly emptied drink.

  In the meantime there’s a young couple near the rail. They look happy. I might befriend them. Take them each to the edge of an imagined other future, then abandon them. It passes the time.

  Jonathan. U don’t need to b sad. B happy. Life is good. I’m good. Think about all the good things in the world. The river travels where it travels. If u fight against the current yul just get exhausted and drown. I was thinking the other day good memories about the days when u were finally big enuf to put me on your shoulders, and we’d get high things down from the shelves for Pop while he was working, and he’d laugh, and ur folks would joke about how we’d get married, and ud be big enough and I’d still be small enough so I could ride around on ur shoulders, and we’d get into the best places by pretending to be 1 tall person!

  I loved ur story about sponge divers. U can’t be sad when life is that absurd. U have to have happiness, because the only option is to be happinessless. Please don’t worry about me. I know u didn’t write the review like that. And anyway, it was my creditors who shut me down, not you. And anyway, I think it’s kind of funny the idea that after everything U would give me a bad write up. And ANYway, I’m freeeeeee! It’s exhilarating. I have a new job with a catering company. My creditors are paid. I have some money from selling the cafe. All is well. So don’t go round the place with that look on ur face. Enjoy the next stop, the next meal. Forget about that dum hotel. But don’t forget to breathe. Try to be happy. N.x.

  … I’m trying to be more positive. I’m trying to remember to breathe. I’m trying to remember why I started this adventure. I’m trying to see the world through a child’s eyes again. Doctor Mirshabak’s voice is very calming. He teaches us, quietly, that our universe is a connected whole, not a drifting cloud of broken pieces. It is integrated, interconnected and harmonised at every scale. He teaches us to put ourselves in a calm, happy place. To imagine how our insignificant affairs would seem to some immeasurably significant mind from another galaxy. Then we can experience the particulate of our problems vanishing within the ocean of existence. So I do. I put myself in a calm, happy place. In my silent cabin, on my long voyages among the floating cities of humanity, I contemplate the blissful image of their deaths. I can see the lakes of fire. I can smell ample human flesh merrily broiling in this merry little kitchen of destruction. I can smell cheap canvas anoraks and walking poles melting in the sulphurous heat. I can see humanity reduced to a smoking, drifting cloud of broken pieces. Armageddon is my happy place. I feel no sadness at the idea of our extinction. To me the greatest possible horror is not that humanity might end, but that our Empire of Stupidity might last forever.

  … Then to Heliogabulus, a hedonist’s suicide: pickled hare foetuses; snails fed on milk; seabird brains; wild songbird blinded, then drowned in strong port, eaten whole; dormice raised in ceramic jars and force-fed until they’re balls of butter, killed without ever seeing daylight, dipped in poppy seeds, served on feathers. Coffee. This is how the dead eat when they tire of life.

  The Tomahawk packed light for the Fair. He didn’t need much, because when he arrived he had it all: fame, money, respect, and �
�� at least before his visit to Infinicon – a priceless anonymity. He is the Cloud’s most famous arbiter. Over the years he has amassed billions of adoring fans. This is an achievement for someone who writes about food, and who has never shown his face. He uses tradecraft not dissimilar to an intelligence service agent to infiltrate venues anonymously, and leave with all his fingers. He uses decoys, disguises, false documents, encrypted messaging, and even rudimentary hand-to-hand combat skills in the course of his work reviewing the Cloud’s most prestigious eateries. He keeps a low profile. So everyone was surprised when the advertisements started. In the build-up to the Fair his new publisher conducted a mega-scale media bombardment. They took out full-page ads in all the major dailies: ‘The Tomahawk is Going to the Fair.’ Miles high, floating billboards showed a man in a mask above the banner: ‘Who is the Tomahawk?’

  Now everyone knows who the Tomahawk is. He is Jonathan Salvador Tamberlain, the gustatory wonderkid born in a fishing village on Solidad, above a famous cafe called Monsterat’s. (Famous, largely, because his parents frequented it. They are the prominent art collector and author Esmeralda Salvador, and the poet Earnest W. Tamberlain.) His supplied bio paints a picture of a comfortable upbringing. In fact, his parents come from humble backgrounds. Earnest worked on cargo boats and wrote poems about the sea. He met Esmeralda at a boxing match while in port on Solidad. The rumours about John Tamberlain are plentiful and often contradictory.