News from the Squares

by Robert Llewellyn

  We passed many people on the steps as we made our way down the side of the mountainous city, most of them greeted us and shouted my name, well, my public name, ‘man from the cloud’.

  Having these distractions while I was also trying to take in the incredible architecture in Rio was a recipe for a memorable and intense journey. My vague impression of this city from back in 2011 was that it was divided into a small enclave for the ultra rich along the beach, surrounded by millions of ultra poor up on the steep mountains. If that was the case back then, it was a very different city I was walking through that evening.

  We eventually turned off what seemed like an endless flight of steps down the side of the mountain and into a delightful little courtyard surrounded by a series of low buildings.

  ‘This is a Senate guest house,’ said Nkoyo as we arrived in front of a rather old-looking building, it was bathed in the soft sun of late in the evening. ‘We have been given two rooms here for the duration.’

  ‘That’s very nice of them,’ I said as we entered the refreshingly cool interior, although it was late in the day the temperature outside was still stiflingly hot.

  Nkoyo seemed to know her way around the little house so I just followed her down a dimly lit corridor and into a very charming sitting room with a view onto a small garden.

  ‘Wow, this is a beautiful place,’ I said. I flopped down on a low chair overlooking the garden and let my head rest back. I knew at once that the house had been built in 2083 as part of the original Senate construction. It was designed by an architect called Martha Rodriguez who had studied in London and was very determined to introduce zero energy homes into Rio. The house I was in was part of a complex which used many breakthrough technologies as they were seen at the time, graphene solar absorbing paint, geothermal heating and cooling and inbuilt water capture and storage. It all sounded very clever to me.

  The resulting building was very much on a human scale, not some massive, overpowering edifice but a gentle, softly shaped and homely residence. The furnishings were comfortable and gentle on the eye, the whole place had a restful quality to it.

  Although the cities I’d seen up to that point, London and Lagos, were both built on grids around large squares, Rio was very different. I suppose due to the mountains it was built on, it had a far more dramatic aspect; huge towers on top of huge mountains, terraced banks of buildings on either side of the mountain range and many long shady streets joining them together. It was a very exciting place to be, there seemed to be music everywhere, something that I hadn’t really considered when I was in London; music and very, very bright colours. It made London look a bit dowdy and dull. Rio was spectacular in every sense. Therefore the arrival in the Senate guest house came as something of a relief, it was quiet, dark and very peaceful. I took a deep breath and relaxed. I may even have nodded off for a while, I’m not sure, but when I came around I looked over to Nkoyo who was standing by the door to the garden.

  ‘So, the Senate? What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘The Senate,’ said Nkoyo, she turned and looked at me. ‘We’re in Rio.’

  ‘I know we’re in Rio, it’s pretty obvious even to a cave man from the dark times but that doesn’t explain much.’

  Nkoyo’s normally perfect brow furrowed. ‘I’m sorry, I assumed you would have accessed the information when we were on-board the Yin Qui.’

  ‘What information?’ I asked pleading like a teenager confronted with a huge pile of homework. ‘What have I got to access now?’

  ‘The political structure and institutions of the world, small topic,’ said Nkoyo with a refreshing attempt at humour.

  ‘Oh right, but I thought the place where I got questioned in Lagos was the parliament type of thing.’

  ‘That is the Congress.’

  ‘The one that moves about?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Nkoyo as she passed me a metal water container. I took a few gulps.

  ‘So the Senate is in Rio,’ I said. Nkoyo nodded. ‘And does that move about too?’

  ‘No, this is, effectively the seat of government.’

  ‘For the whole world?’

  ‘Well,’ she hesitated for a moment. ‘Everywhere except Pyongyang, what you would have known as North Korea.’

  ‘What! North Korea is still a pariah state?’

  ‘Well, they have nothing to do with the rest of the world, no. The ruler of Pyongyang is still a man, it’s the only place in the world where that is the case.’

  I couldn’t help laughing when she told me that.

  ‘That is amazing. I mean you have to take your hat off to them. They were bang out of order two hundred years ago, how on earth have they managed to stay the same? Impressive.’

  ‘It’s a great tragedy for the people there. We have to deal with refugees from Pyongyang all the time, all women. From what we can tell the population there is about eighty per cent male, quite the opposite to the rest of the world.’

  ‘It’s all so difficult to take in,’ I said. ‘When I was in Gardenia, the other world that does or does not exist, I went to New York and learned there was a wall around an area they called “Midwest” and no one seemed to know what went on inside, they didn’t want to know and it all sounded rather unpleasant.’

  This time, Nkoyo looked intrigued. ‘That is fascinating,’ she said eventually. ‘Thankfully that’s not the case here, the area you would have known as North America is now a very important part of the global organisation of City States.’

  ‘And all run by women?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nkoyo, she sat opposite me. ‘Tomorrow you will see the Senate in action and don’t worry.’ She held her hand up to emphasise your point. ‘You won’t be asked to speak.’

  ‘So what’s going on tomorrow?’

  ‘There is a very important bill up for a vote. It’s essentially a bill supported by an affiliation of radical groups, the most prominent being the Weavers.’

  ‘This is a bill to let them kill all the men, I take it.’

  ‘No, it’s not quite like that,’ said Nkoyo calmly. ’It’s designed to allow the male half of the species to die out naturally. We don’t kill people any more, that’s what used to happen.’

  ‘You mean that’s what used to happen when men were the dominant rulers in the world?’

  Nkoyo just smiled. ‘Nothing is ever quite that simple.’

  ‘Okay so you don’t kill people, you just don’t let them be born if they might have a willy.’

  ‘A willy?’

  ‘A penis,’ I said.

  ‘Ahh, I’m not familiar with that term,’ she said with a gentle smile. ‘It makes it sound very harmless.’

  I drank some more water while staring at Nkoyo and wondering if there was subtext to what she was saying. If the word ‘willy’ made the penis sound harmless, did she really mean that it was in reality harmful, like a gun, in the sense that if you call a gun a peacekeeper that makes it sound more reasonable? I don’t know, I couldn’t tell, I wasn’t proficient enough with my kidonge to be able to read her thoughts. I know I wanted to continue that conversation, I wanted to understand the difference between the Weaver women and, well, the rest of the world. I couldn’t judge the difference, it really did seem like all the women of the world were very happy with the status quo that existed. I hadn’t met any men who seemed to violently disagree with it, although there had been a hint of disquiet from Judd, the Tudor costume-loving student I met in the Museum of Human History. However, I didn’t get the chance to find out anything as that’s when the guards came in.

  They didn’t smash the doors down and fire a tear gas grenade into the room, they weren’t covered in protective suits with masks on, but they did look a little threatening.

  I didn’t understand what was being said, it was all very sudden and I couldn’t relax enough to
allow me to access the Portuguese to English translation system. Nkoyo had no trouble speaking Portuguese but she didn’t look happy. She turned to me in alarm.

  ‘Is this true?’

  ‘Is what true?’ I asked, now completely baffled. One of the guards stood behind me and put a powerful hand on my shoulder.

  ‘The recording of what you said to Anne Hempstead?’

  ‘A recording? What recording?’

  28

  The Recording

  I came here from 2011, I planned it, time travel is possible. I’m a man, I believe in patriarchy, it’s my right to rape women, I want to crush women back to the dark times, I want to be the dominant master race, I think women are second class citizens who should live their lives barefoot and pregnant at the kitchen sink.’

  There was no question, it was me saying it. It was my voice and it was incredibly clear, not like a hissing cassette tape or a compressed mp3, it sounded like I was in the room saying these dreadful things to myself.

  ‘It’s been changed!’ I pleaded. It was glaringly obvious to me, not quite so obvious to Officer Velasquez who was looking at me across the big table.

  The big table was in a huge room in a vast building. I’m not sure exactly where the building was as we left the peaceful confines of the Senate guest house and used another subterranean transport system, not cars or buses, this was more like a train.

  We travelled, I assume, from one part of the city to another although it only took about three minutes.

  Nkoyo travelled with us but I was clearly in the control of a handful of very muscular women, the leader of whom I knew to be Officer Velasquez. Martha Velasquez was thirty-seven but looked to be about eighteen, startlingly beautiful and on the surface at least, fairly friendly.

  Once we arrived at our destination, I emerged into a large underground area where I saw many more women dressed in a similar way to the guards I was being escorted by.

  I didn’t have much time, or indeed desire, to study the intricacies of the transportation system I’d just used, it was very long, dark grey and went very fast along some kind of imperceptibly smooth surface inside some kind of smooth bore tunnel.

  We ascended in a room-sized lift with seats around the edge, it was almost full of women and I felt increasingly out of place. That many women all together in a confined space was nothing other than properly spooky, I realised that I’d never actually thought what a world exclusively inhabited by women would be like until that moment. I’ll say now without hesitation, it didn’t strike me as a good idea.

  I was escorted into the big room and one of the guard type women gestured toward me and indicated a seat at the table. I sat down and Nkoyo stood by one wall with a couple of the guards, she looked properly worried.

  That was when Officer Velasquez played the recording, well, she didn’t press a button or anything, she sat down next to me, said something in Portuguese and the recording played instantly.

  It was chilling to the extent that it felt like a death sentence. It was chilling in the fact that I could hear it so clearly and there was no doubt it was my voice. It didn’t sound edited, it sounded like me saying it, there weren’t any barely audible clicks and pops or words that didn’t quite finish correctly. The human ear is very tuned to the human voice, little adjustments to a recording like that jump out. We’re so used to hearing natural speech that we can pick up on slight discrepancies. There were no discrepancies, slight or otherwise.

  ‘So you claim you did not say this,’ said Officer Velasquez in English after the third time of playing the recording. Listening to myself saying such outrageous and offensive things in a room full of some of the toughest, hard-assed women I’ve ever seen did not make for comfortable listening.

  I stared at Officer Velasquez as the recording played for the third time. She had her eyes shut as she listened, I couldn’t read a reaction on her perfect face. When the recording stopped playing she opened her eyes and looked at me, her stare was so intense I felt a shock go through me. She was nothing other than magazine model stunning. Dark hair swept back and tied neatly in a bun, long neck, unbelievable lips and incredible dark eyes. It wasn’t like being questioned by some overweight, out of condition, chain-smoking cop with thinning hair, Officer Velasquez’s outrageous, un-enhanced beauty made living through this whole experience much harder for me.

  ‘I do claim that,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘If I remember correctly this was part of a conversation I had with a woman called—’

  ‘—Anne Hempstead,’ interrupted Nkoyo. ‘A Weaver worder.’

  Officer Velasquez nodded her understanding without glancing at Nkoyo saying. ‘And where did this conversation take place?’

  ‘In a library, at a place in London called the Erotic Museum.’

  Even as I was describing the venue my heart began to sink. The Erotic Museum sounded so seedy, like I’d gone there out of some uncontrollable kinky need.

  ‘The Erotic Museum,’ repeated Officer Velasquez. The way she said it made it sound incredibly appealing rather than seedy, I could have listened to her saying ‘Erotic Museum’ all day, it was her soft S, it was the way she said erotic, it sounded like ‘errodhick’ and the way her lips moved as she spoke. I was finding it very difficult to concentrate.

  ‘Yes, she called me in the car, you know, the phone thing in the car,’ I glanced up at Nkoyo who gave me a barely perceptible nod. ‘It was just after I’d spoken to Nkoyo about my plane, and suddenly I got a call from this woman Anne Hempstead, I’d never met her, I didn’t know who she was but I was, well, she told me to meet her at the Erotic Museum so I did.’

  I realised as I was saying this that I got the call from this vile woman when I was in a particularly bad mood, when I’d just discovered my plane was hanging up in the damn Museum of Human History. Something told me not to divulge too much, not to explain I was really angry as that might lead them to think I had a reason to say such vile things. I glanced back to Nkoyo who still looked very anxious, I shrugged, I didn’t know how else to react.

  Officer Velasquez removed a small sheet of material from her belt pocket and put it on the table. She moved her hands over the surface of the sheet as soon as it had settled and studied the complex graphics that I couldn’t quite make out as they were upside down to me.

  ‘Was this on the fourth of last month?’

  I tried to work it out. My grasp of time since I’d landed in London was more than a little hazy. ‘I would think so,’ I said.

  Nkoyo moved in toward the table. ‘Yes, the day he’s referring to was the fourth,’ she confirmed.

  ‘So tell me what happened, Mister Meckler. You went to the Erotic Museum, you met this woman Anne Hempstead, then what?’

  ‘She led me upstairs, I mean I followed her up a few flights of stairs, she wasn’t forcing me or dragging me, I don’t mean that. I also want to point out that I didn’t follow her because, well, because I found her attractive in any way. She had a very odd manner and I didn’t find her in the least attractive. Not that I’m saying this has any bearing on the matter.’

  I could hear myself babbling on. I knew it was because I was nervous, they would be more than capable of seeing that but they might misinterpret why I was nervous. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Anyway, I followed her up the stairs and into what I assumed was a library. She then asked me to sit down and pretend to read a book in case anyone came in, she also said she was using a blocker, a small black case,’ I gestured the size with my hands. ‘I don’t know if that was what it really was, I don’t know what a blocker might be, it may have been a voice recorder.’

  Officer Velasquez pushed the sheet across the table toward Nkoyo.

  ‘Break in the timeline at fifteen twenty-five on the fourth. She was using a blocker.’

  I was looking at Officer Vel
asquez’s mouth all the time she was speaking, I’d never seen a mouth like it. There was something about this woman that was utterly captivating, I closed my eyes tightly and rubbed my face.

  ‘Are you okay Mister Meckler?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m fine, just utterly confused about this, why would she go to all this trouble?’

  ‘That is what we intend to find out,’ said Officer Velasquez. ‘In the meantime, would you like to explain to me what you were saying, would you like to explain what you think you did say at this time. I am assuming you accept that this recording is your own voice?’

  ‘Yes, it’s my voice.’

  ‘So you must have said something a little similar to this?’

  ‘Yes, well, no. I mean I said exactly the opposite. She started accusing me of being a rapist and a man from the dark times sent here to reinstate patriarchy or something, I didn’t even understand half of what she was on about. She’s a very angry person, she was quite aggressive. I was trying to point out that men from my time, most men from my time were not like that, I said I’m not a rapist, I don’t think women are second class citizens, I don’t think all the things the recording sounds like I do think.’

  The room went quiet, it was clear the women didn’t quite know what to do. Nkoyo stood at the other side of the table, both her hands to her face. She looked as if she was thinking a lot of thoughts. There was no chance of me being able to listen, guess or even entertain the notion of understanding what she might be thinking. I was so tense there was no way I could access any kind of information. It would have been useful if I could, I would like to have known about the people in the room with me, what their position was, if they were police or some kind of security force, if they had the death penalty for being a sexist idiot in Rio, any tiny bit of information about my position would have been useful. I could sense nothing.