Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  She sits there, rapt in the image, hugging her knees to her chest, scarcely breathing. The stillness is broken only by the Doppler rush of distant trains. The flux in air pressure looses a fine grit that floats down through her high beam as though she were in an undersea abyss. The fugue comes and goes as the light moves with the tremor of her hand; the graffito is a flawed image, but behind the errors, the limited resolution of narrow-gauge spray cans and epoxy pens, the glyphs are discernible, and it has nothing to do with theorem or proof or the AIs’ usual concerns but is something like a story. Her other memory flickers with images of wastelands as she takes in the graffito inch by inch, careful not to touch it. She shines the light up and down the pitch-black tunnel, looking for some context or explanation, but besides a tiny line drawing of stylized abstract clouds there’s only the bedrock’s lunar surface.

  It’s the voice of the girl, the one on the road, the one who was the focus of the AI’s concern—it has to be. She tries out various translations, still bemused to find it translatable, turning and polishing sentences until she gets it right:

  … and the last night, driving through the desert. Empty, there, nothing but the cone of light before me, the dust in the light. Deaf to engine’s roar, my velocity such that I felt like I was floating. I was out of money, so I didn’t look at the fuel gauge, just floored it, red-lining. No one cares what you do, out there. It was like waking, when I rounded that bend, saw the city open up below me, just like that, with the lights of all its highways, right there, finally real, in all its possibility. At sunset, I’d heard, if the light’s just right, you can see the reefs, the old city’s outline under the water. The car’s windows were open, the air-conditioning having died before my boyfriend stole it, my ex-boyfriend by then, I guess, since I’d left with his car, but it hardly mattered, since I wasn’t going back. As the road fell toward the light the air changed, sage and dust giving way to something burned, chemical, notes of salt and maybe ether, and I knew that this would be the smell of home. There was moon enough to reflect palely on the loops of road incising the miles of hillside below me, and it was like gravity and momentum were drawing me in, welcoming me, would carry me the rest of the way, like the city wanted me.

  I thought of my mother then, the gin empties like votive offerings around the TV, always tuned to the channel of Loving Christ Victorious, and her week-long stupors, and her hysterical prayers. The dust-occluded, fire-colored skies, out there, the shattered skylights in the endlessly branching terminals that used to be an airport. Making love on the cracked tarmac, in backseats, on the floors of boys’ squats, once even in the middle of the street, the broken windows of vacant houses staring blindly.

  I steered into the first turn and the emptiness, which had always been there, rose up in me, pressing against my skin, burning where it touched, but there was nothing to go back to, and it was the next thing or nothing at all …

  * * *

  She emerges from a service corridor into the disinfectant reek of Powell Street Station, joining the damp and dark-coated throng around the escalator, trying to present a semblance of composure. It’s raining, outside, and harder than ever—it must be the monsoon.

  What, she wonders, is Cromwell’s interest in this strangest of artworks, and what, if anything, does it have to do with her? In her preoccupation she almost walks into a cab, one with a driver who gesticulates and abuses her in Arabic as he peels away in a fantail of water.

  Dazed, she stops at a window display of Japanese prints, tries to collect herself. Peasants in wide hats bent under their loads, struggling over cold shingle through driving diagonals of rain. A fisherman and his son haul on a taut net, Fuji looming across the water. Hokusai, she thinks; the prints’ names and histories, glimpsed once in a book, flashing to the surface, drifting away. There’s an erotic print—shunga, they’re called—showing a samurai grappling with a lady-in-waiting, their kimono fallen open. Another print shows the face of a woman, probably a geisha, white-cheeked and doll-pretty, her black hair precisely coiffed.

  A light clicks off inside, the prints disappearing, leaving the reflection of a woman peering in, her hair glinting wetly; behind her the passersby are bent against the wind, the sporadic diagonals of rain. She squints, and the image becomes as abstract as a floating world print. As always, helplessly, she tries to find a loveliness in her own image, and when she does to believe it’s unillusory. In Hokusai’s time, the season of beauty would be passing, would have passed long since, but now, with the Mayo, there’s no telling, for her money will get her time, is the key to the kingdom of life and death. She once met a regenerative surgeon, drunk in the bar of the Chelsea Hotel, who’d insisted he was an artist, literally an artist, volubly scorning the mid-market hacks in the strip-mall plastic surgeries; there’s always an elegance, he’d said, in the givens of bone structure, cartilage, the chemistry of skin, one that he, and here his hand had brushed hers, would not let fade.

  A flash of dread, sudden and staggering, for no reason she can see. She looks back at the last few seconds, and there it is, in the reflection in the window, the lights of a hovering drone, and then another, and her adrenaline spikes as she sees the wet gleam of their lenses, focusing on her, and they then shot up and away, and now an unmarked van with tinted windows is pulling up beside her.

  18

  Essential Hardness

  Vast and sheer, the glass facades of downtown’s canyons, reflecting the blue of the evening, enclosing him like a trap.

  Kern cringes as drones whip by overhead. Glimpses of men in suits seen through windows, a doorman standing before a gilded multistory mural of the hills. He has the sense that life is flowing out of the city, leaving it to its essential dull hardness. His reflection in the glass wall of a darkened lobby is a stranger staring back at him. “Relax,” says the ghost. “You look like you’re waiting to be arrested.”

  The bank doesn’t even have a sign—there’s just a hand scanner by an armored white door in an otherwise blank concrete wall.

  “Are you sure this is it?” he asks.

  “This is it. It’s a branch of Crédit Nuage Cantonale de Genève. Very discreet, Nuage. There’s never any signage.”

  “Are you a client?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I’m sure not.”

  “That’s less of a problem than you’d think. For one thing, your new look is consistent with family money—you look like you could be slumming it to piss off your dad. For another, the point of Nuage is it’s a numbered-account bank—if you’ve got the account number and the passcode, which I’ll give you, they don’t care who you are. So if they don’t think you’re a rich brat they’ll think you’re running errands for someone important. Put your hand on the scanner and let’s go on in.”

  “Won’t that make me findable?”

  “Elsewhere, maybe. Here, no. And there’s no other option, unless you want to do hits for pocket change until they catch you, which I’m guessing would take about a day.”

  The surface of the scanner is cool under his palm. A woman’s voice, the accent maybe German, asks for the first eight digits of his account number, which the ghost whispers in his ear.

  “I don’t see any security,” he murmurs, stepping into a wall of cold air, the odor of leather from the glossy black couches, a faint floral perfume. “It’s hidden,” the ghost says as the door locks behind him, sealing off the evening and its melancholy.

  He clenches his fists in his jacket pockets, wonders if the bank people have gone home, or if they made him and he should run for it, but then a tall woman in a pale suit emerges from a corridor and from the way she looks past him it seems she must have other business but she says, “This way please, sir”—sir?—in the same voice as the scanner and leads him into a tiny high-ceilinged room with cinder-block walls and not much light and the air conditioner’s roaring is so loud that it’s hard to hear her as she leans across the table and with absolute seriousness says, “This room i
s secure. Do you wish to make a withdrawal?”

  19

  No True Security

  Irina, at the insistence of her insurer, had attended a two-day class on kidnap prevention. Her teacher, a retired army sergeant, had prosthetic legs and, as he’d told her with a kind of schoolboy relish, a lower intestine that came out of a tissue printer. She remembers the chaw on his breath as he explained how most kidnapers tracked their victims with drones in order to find “the random moment of purest vulnerability,” a phrase that had struck her as having a certain poetry, and even as she thinks this she’s started running.

  Faces whip by, eyeblink flashes of dismay, indifference, surprise, and she weaves around bystanders to occlude the lines of sight and fire, and she’s grateful once again for never really having aged. Keep moving, the sergeant had said. Don’t be predictable, find a strong point to retreat to, all of it obvious, none of it useful, and now here she is completely on her own.

  As she runs she tells herself there’s still time to act, doesn’t let herself panic, and obliges herself to think of the city, and what it has that she can use. She could try ducking into a bank or a good hotel, but their doors will be locked and it might be seconds before they buzz her in, and the Marine with whom she had her moment is now too far away. There are drones overhead—she could turn on her wireless, seize a few and use them to run interference or, if they’re armed, shoot down her pursuers, though she’d thought her days of intrusions were done.

  She corners hard, slipping a little, and sprints down the block, aware of the fear in her wake, how the brighter and more careful people are scattering, and then she sees hard-hatted workmen supervising a segmented drone the size of a van, dodecapodal and safety yellow, its nimble forward appendages pulling fiber-optic cables up through the incisions in the asphalt of the street, all under the eye of a trio of cops. One of them, leaning against a parked car in his green slicker, registers her speed and starts to raise his gun as he scans the street behind her.

  Maybe she should find cover but she needs to know what’s going to happen so she turns, sees the damp pedestrians, the headlights of the cars going by at a rush-hour crawl—no camera drones, no van, no obvious pursuers. The cop is glaring down his rifle-sights now, aiming back the way she came, panning left to right, right to left, but, finding no targets, he lowers his rifle as he turns to her with a look of inquiry. It looks like no one’s coming, and in decency she should talk to him and explain but instead she ducks into a cafe.

  Inside, she peers out through the raindrops on the windows at the blurred passersby. The cop across the street stares after her, then loses interest—worse things happen all the time.

  Her mouth is dry so she orders a sparkling water though she finds it’s difficult to look away from the windows. The barista is friendly but his hair is sculpted into planes and spines that suggest nothing so much as a lionfish, and she feels old because instead of implying some extraordinarily specific cultural fealty his hair just reads as an elaborate waste of time.

  She tells herself it was nothing, just another false alarm. Vans are legal, and camera drones are nothing special, especially this close to the favelas—they’re probably searching for illegal construction. She’s often seen jackbooted cops hassling refugees with their cheap little construction drones, and pitied them, though she’s also seen the claustrophobic Piranesi webwork that Jakarta has become, favela clotting all its parks and alleyways and public spaces—she remembers the masses of concrete filling the rail yards, the shadows and confinement of the narrow tunnels over the tracks, grey dust raining down as the trains roared through.

  Find a strong point, the sergeant said. On her phone she searches for hotels with five-star security—the nearest is the Doric, seven blocks away. Finalizing her booking, she wonders how she’ll get there—it seems far away, and traffic is almost at a standstill, and she doesn’t want to walk on the street.

  She startles when her phone rings; the hipster programmer at the next table looks like he’s going to ask if she’s all right but he sees her face and turns back to his computer.

  When she picks up Maya says, “I hope you feel like making money tonight, because Herr Cromwell wants to see you.”

  “Does he.”

  “Hey, are you all right? You sound like your puppy died.”

  “No. Yes. I’m fine,” she says, unable to bring her voice to life.

  “Why don’t you tell Auntie Maya what’s wrong.”

  “The afternoon has gotten strange.” She wonders if the line is secure, then wonders about the physics of parabolic microphones, if they work through glass. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “What kind of nothing? Whatever it is, I can probably help. The agency has lawyers, coders, contractors, what have you. I think there’s even a masseur now.”

  “In this context, contractor means mercenary, right? Like a hired soldier?”

  “Shit, really? You in bad trouble, hon?” Her voice is almost squeaky, like a pubescent boy’s. “Do you need some help right away?”

  “I might.” She feels like crying but she’d lose her self-respect.

  “In Northern California we usually work with Parthenon Associates. They’re mostly British ex–special forces,” Maya says, and Irina is aware that she’s trying not to show how much she wants to ask exactly what the trouble is. “They’re very good. Pulled any number of client asses out of fires, and they’re extremely discreet. Would that help?”

  “Yes.”

  Sound of typing as Maya says, “Soooo … You now have an account with Parthenon, and as of two seconds ago they’ve dispatched a contractor to your current location. Any charges go on your tab with us but as of now you’re officially their client, so their obligation is to you, and the agency is out of the loop. I just pushed their contact info to your phone. I might add that they have strong ties of reciprocity, as they say, with the state and city powers-that-be, so they’re in a position to clean up their own messes, or for that matter most any mess at all.”

  “Thanks,” Irina says, feeling a little better, though part of her questions the wisdom of bringing in shooters when it’s not at all yet clear who, if anyone, needs to be shot.

  “So anyway. The reason I called. Cromwell wants to have dinner with you tonight at this restaurant, Maison Dernière. Apparently he has an offer for you and wants to make it in person. And since it’s short notice and you’ll actually be doing something for Water and Power, even if it’s just eating breadsticks and listening to him talk about his many achievements, they’re offering quadruple time.”

  The hourly seems high, almost desperately so, but she’s not going to blow off one of her few friends of long standing, so she says, “I have plans tonight.”

  “Philip, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell him I said I love him to death but if he wants his company to grow he has to stop being such a little priss about using me and my people, and accept the reality of TMP’s market power. Actually, maybe you could phrase that in a nicer way? And tell him I said I love his tie, because I think he wears them now. Anyhow: Cromwell’s people thought you might be busy, but they say it’s urgent, and that he really wants to talk tonight, so he’s available when you are, and after dinner is fine. I kind of suspect he doesn’t sleep much—hell, I don’t sleep much and I’m less than half his age. I know you must be tired, and there’s whatever else is going on, but money-money-money, you know? So are you down?”

  “Sure,” says Irina, though the night seems far away.

  “Great. And are you absolutely sure you don’t want to tell me what’s up?”

  “I’m fine,” she lies, sounding annoyed.

  “Okay. Well, great, then. Call me if something comes up. Bye, sweetie. Good luck. You’ve got my number.”

  At the table beside her is a boy with a bowl haircut, ethnically Korean, wearing a glossy black sweatsuit, rapt in his laptop, and surreptitiously looking over his shoulder she sees he’s playing a first-person sho
oter, though no guns or adversaries are in evidence, and he seems only to be wandering through a dark mansion, going up and down stairs and stopping before locked doors and passing in and out of shadows, and she wonders what the point is, if whatever nameless evil implied by the endless eerie corridors will reveal itself in the end or if finally the game is about boredom and dread and long, fruitless searching.

  She stopped playing video games years ago—they’re too easy a way to annul her emotions, and there’s no getting away from computers—but now she envies his absorption.

  A tall rangy boy in a black hoodie comes into the cafe, head down and hands in pockets. He doesn’t look posh enough for the neighborhood, but maybe he has a job here, and she’s wondering what’s keeping Parthenon when the boy stops in front of her, and her momentary terror dissolves when he lifts his eyes and she sees that he’s a man—she’d been fooled by the clothes and the body language—blue-eyed, windburned, smiling down at her.

  “Parthenon?” she asks, and feels foolish.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says, his voice Scottish, sounding at the same time like he’s making a joke and reporting for duty.

  “Good. So. Thanks for coming out. I won’t need you to come very far with me today.”

  Out on the street on the way to the Doric he seems not to mind the rain and she isn’t sure if they’re supposed to make conversation. You know you’re truly rich, she thinks, if you’re used to dealing with private soldiers.

  Finally she says, “So is one of you enough to deal with … whatever arises?”

  “Probably,” he says. “I’m wearing armor, so I’m more durable than I look, and in addition to my sidearm I’ve got a collapsible long gun under the hoodie, which is more firepower than nonmilitary personnel are really supposed to have. And if I fire a shot, or shots are fired near me, then reinforcements come at a run—armed drones arrive in under one minute, and a squad in five, and if at that point there’s still a problem, then, well, the escalation is ridiculous, but Parthenon isn’t in the business of losing fights.” He’s both grave and cheerful, and she wonders how he manages such sangfroid in the face of the violence of his profession.