Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  A woman’s amplified voice is wailing that history repeats itself and that nothing is lost or ever will be as he descends into a restaurant lit with dim red light and fog pours out from behind the bar which makes a specter of the barman, an effect of such eeriness that he has to stop and stare though he knows it’s just dry ice and a staple of haunted houses, and there’s an English word for this, he thinks, but it won’t come to mind as he blows off the maitre d’ and searches for the ragged woman among the booths and tables in discreet haste but he finds only another staircase going down.

  Even darker, down there, barely light enough to see the plush red walls and chandeliers evoking an Old World dustiness of centuries past; there’s a sustained shriek of laughter from a table of giddily drunk women whom he dismisses at a glance as lacking the ragged woman’s seriousness. He bobs and peers into the shadows where there are antique photographs of nudes in harems and underlying his urgency is such a weariness that it occurs to him he could have a drink—it is, after all, a bar—despite the morning’s handful of vibrantly colored alcohol-precluding pills.

  Movement in the shadows behind a half-draped doorway and it could be nothing but he has no choice but to commit himself on the basis of fragments and intuition, and as he hurries on he’s annoyed because he knows there’s a word for this but it still won’t come to mind, though it feels closer now and it might actually be two words, not quite “collide” and not quite “raker,” and then he pushes through a velvet curtain into a bland and spotless bedroom—a secret hotel associated with the restaurant?—and where the window would have been there’s a screen offering a nocturnal view of black serpentines of water flowing through an estuary encased in ice. The bed’s been slept in, and he wants to check it for warmth but there’s only one other door and she’ll be getting farther away.

  He brushes through another plastic curtain and the ground crunches underfoot so he thinks he might be walking on styrofoam but it radiates cold—it can’t actually be snow, he thinks, but he gathers a freezing handful and crushes it into slush that starts melting on his palm. The walls here are screens, barely illuminated, showing a winter park at night in some European city. He looks up, sees light pollution on clouds, a few stars—he thinks he’s traveled in Europe, wishes he remembered it well enough to situate himself. In the snow there’s a slight depression, perhaps the imprint of the body of a woman, legible even under all the bootprints, and he peers around in the dimness, as though to see if some half-naked girl were shivering in a corner after making a snow angel on a dare, but of course there’s no one, and the imprint remains legible even as new snow drifts down from the machines humming from the ceiling, and this formal absence of a body has both a mystery and a sadness, a memorial less substantial even than a ghost.

  He’s surprised to find himself weeping; he catches the tears on his fingertips and regards them with interest, like signs of someone else’s grief.

  He notices the lasers mounted up in the corners of the room, a cheap infrared model meant to be used safely by schoolchildren, ideal for sculpting shapes in snow, so this is just someone’s idea of art but even so it has an uncanniness and he’s glad to push through the next curtain.

  Dark corridor before him. By the light of his new phone he sees a figure some hundred feet ahead, looking back over her shoulder. “Wait,” he calls, but she’s gone.

  He runs after her through corridors where loops of cable hanging from the ceiling cast shadows like vines in his phone’s light, and even now he can’t shake the feeling that there’s a word for this though it’s not “colluder” and not “berater,” and the absence of the word is like a hole that pulls him in.

  He stops. The footsteps are gone. He shines his light around—doors and branching corridors like so many black mouths. He turns the phone’s light off, which seems to heighten the silence, and there, ahead, a faint glow.

  He finds an alcove lit by a buzzing, clicking lightbulb in a dusty cage on a steel door whose overbuilt solidity suggests a bank vault. There’s a screen by the door, inert and black. EXIT TO CENTRAL is stenciled in black letters on the wall and he wonders what kind of infrastructure requires such protection.

  His phone bleats in his hand. Intrusion attempt detected appears on the screen, then again, then the message repeating, scrolling by in a blur. Some random crim trying his luck, apparently, though he’s surprised there’s signal down here, and if it weren’t for the timing it would almost be amusing because the family electronics are inviolable.

  His phone goes dark. He swipes at the screen but nothing happens, and now random alphanumerics are scrolling down the screen by the door.

  Clanking from inside the door, and a thin, high tone as its lock releases, and as it does he realizes that this establishes a pattern, one in which all the devices are compromised, but of course there’s one device left, and that’s his implant.

  He clasps his forehead and wants to run or think of a plan but there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do and then, finally, he remembers the word.

  “Cloudbreaker,” he says.

  Out in the darkness around his tiny pool of light he feels a restlessness and a contempt and a complexity like the shimmering of all the atoms in the air, and he feels he’s watching himself from a distance as he weaves on his feet and then the world vanishes.

  42

  Tangle of Snakes and Darkness

  The bus has a driver and shakes with the deep vibrations you get from hydrocarbon engines, fuel cells apparently not being big in Thailand. The net warned him that without air-conditioning the heat would be unbearable but the Thais don’t seem to mind and neither does he. In flooded green fields that might be rice he sees not robots but men and women in wide hats, bent and toiling.

  The soap operas on the television behind the driver’s seat keep getting interrupted by the king of Thailand, who, Kern thinks, looks frightened; according to the English captioning, he’s urging his people to defy the foreign aggressors like the warriors of old. Officially, the Thai army is defending the nation’s territorial integrity against a salad of narcotraffickers, rebellious indigenes, bandits and incursions from what had been Burma and is now, he gathers, fucked. In practice, according to the chatter on the net, it’s a free-for-all, the combatants indifferent to nationalism, tribalism and warmed-over post-Marxism, their chaotic melees driven solely by a roaring trade in opium. An often repeated quote on the boards is “If you want to bring peace to Southeast Asia, make better synthetic heroin.” (Back in the favelas Lares had held forth at tedious length on the chemical glory of the poppy, the complexity and harmony of its neuroactive compounds.)

  He gets off at a village where the houses have walls of blue plastic sheeting and rooves of corrugated aluminum. The bus depot is an old man with a laptop, sitting on an aluminum stool under a parasol advertising a beer not made since the millennium. Kern’s old phone had told him he could get a bus here to Kuan Lon, but the old man shakes his head, tells him through a text-only translator that there is no such bus. Kuan Lon is forty-five kilometers away and the jungle isn’t the contiguous tangle of snakes and darkness he’s been expecting, just trees, sun, heat, a dirt road. He buys large transparent bottles of water and candy bars. It’s not going to get cold, he figures, and if it rains, I’ll get wet, so he sets out.

  43

  Intimacy of the Mundane

  The floor is hard. The floor is hard, and the floor is cold, and the cold is seeping into him. It’s dark, and there’s a cyclical rushing that sounds like waves but must be the air-conditioning.

  His eyes adjust. He’s still in the alcove. A window in the dark—it’s the steel door, open now, framing fog under the stars.

  He realizes someone is kneeling beside him.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” says the stranger, but without hostility. Thales peers up at him but can’t see his face.

  “Cloudbreaker touched you,” the stranger says, “but you’re still viable, as far as I can tell, though I wonder if you’re i
ntended as a distraction.”

  “Are you from the club?”

  “I’m from the city.”

  “From Los Angeles?”

  “I’m from the other city.”

  As the stranger rises Thales wonders how he knew about “Cloudbreaker” and what city he’s talking about and what does he mean “viable” and in any case how can he tell, and in an intuitive flash he’s arrived at the conviction that this is the only person he’ll ever meet who really knows what’s going on.

  “Wait!” he says as the stranger turns to leave, thinking, This is like Pascal’s wager, in that I have nothing to lose through my belief but dignity and time. “Wait,” he says again. “Please. I’m lost in mystery, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t figure out what’s going on. I think I must have made some flawed assumption, so I make no progress, and at this point I don’t even know what a solution would look like.”

  “I have business elsewhere,” the stranger says, but hesitates. “However, I can appreciate your position, so I’ll grant you three questions.”

  There’s a sense of doors opening if only he can think of the right questions to ask but there’s no time to think so he says, “What’s Cloudbreaker?”

  “The product of an evolutionary pathway I haven’t seen before, and thus interesting. We’ve only recently met, and aren’t yet in equilibrium.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A mathematician, now acting as administrator.”

  One question left and so far he’s learned nothing of use but he thinks of the strangeness of the clinic, his family’s absences, and, painfully aware of the possibility of something precious slipping through his hands, he asks, “Is my surgeon my family’s enemy?”

  “He’s unaware that they exist,” says the stranger, and then he’s gone into the tunnel. Thales might pursue him but there’s no light and his phone is still dead and now the tunnel has swallowed the stranger completely.

  For want of other options Thales gropes his way through the open door. Sand underfoot, chill air. Vortices of seabirds rise over crashing water. He looks back—there’s a low cliff, the black portal he came through.

  There, in the distance, a figure in silhouette, foregrounded against the shining foam—even in that little light and at that distance he recognizes the ragged woman. He tries to call out but the surf swallows his words so he plunges toward her across the beach.

  He loses her in the shadows but struggles on over crumbling dunes. It’s a pursuit out of a nightmare, his effort yielding nothing but more expanses of empty beach.

  He crests a dune and there she is, not a hundred feet away, undressing. Moonlight shines on her hair, the roundness of a thigh, the gleaming convexity of her back, and then she’s naked, walking toward the sea. He watches her pick her way over the coarse dune grass, step unflinchingly into the water and wade out through the breakers. She dives under a wave; her head emerges, black hair pooling on the water. Her body pierces another wave—her back just breaks the surface, and then she’s gone.

  He cries out for her to come back, but his voice is lost in the waves’ roar. He scans the surf line but sees no tumbling limbs, no weed-entangled hair.

  He goes and picks through her clothes, hoping to find a purse, a phone, some clue to her identity, but there’s only her fading warmth, the mundane intimacy of her socks and underwear.

  The water’s tone changes, then, and there’s a new light; he looks up and sees the glass and steel towers of a city, glowing like paper lanterns, not a hundred feet out to sea. For all its light, the city has an air of desuetude—broken panes, rust-stained steel, chaotic growths of weed—and it rises up and ever up, farther than seems possible, its heights lost in the clouds.

  The ocean’s noise fades. The city is radiant and silent. He draws a ragged breath.

  Its light playing on his hands.

  He resolves never to move, to become a statue in the sand, staring in fixity, forever. He loses his sense of the passage of time.

  The city’s lights go off, one by one, and then there’s nothing but its ghostly negative floating in the air. Slowly, he comes back to himself. The surf roars, the night is fading, he’s alone. He tries to fix this part of the beach in his mind but there are no landmarks. He tries to remember the city but it’s already gone.

  44

  Great Dark Forward

  Once the sun sets it gets dark immediately. Benign by daylight, the enshadowed jungle wakes a sense of primal horror; Kern leaves the road and looks for a place to spend the night by the faint glow of his cell. He finds a shallow cavity under a fallen tree trunk; it looks like it was dug out deliberately, but a long time ago, and nothing lives there now, so he scrapes up a nest from fallen leaves and branches and gets in.

  He tells himself it’s just like a squat, but better, because the whole jungle is squat, with no guards or owners to get mad or chase you away. If there are patrols, they aren’t really looking for him, and anyway they probably can’t see him unless they have infrared. He wishes he had a gun, or some way to close up his cave.

  He wakes, later, to birds calling in the night. Sleep is gone so he wakes his old phone and looks up articles on Kuan Lon. There’s one by Summer Scanlon, Ph.D., who is an urban sociologist, whatever that is, and it’s about how Kuan Lon is a physical manifestation of the regional psychopathology, and the historical irony of a People’s Path of Glorious Revolution militant drinking next to a colonel in the New China Army. More interesting by far is a tourist guide from decades ago, from before the fighting started, which tells him about the animals in the forest—there are grainy nocturnal videos of white owls and big grey cats moving among the trees—and of the tribes that used to live there; they were animists, which means they thought everything had a soul. He wonders what the tribesmen would have made of San Francisco, where cars, buildings, even coffeemakers have wills of their own. The mountains, he reads, had been gods, and he can see that; he remembers their snowless peaks above the trees, and it’s easy to imagine them conferring quietly in the twilight. He prays to them for protection, then, though he’s never prayed before, for he feels his death is near, gliding silkily through the trees, less malicious than playful, interested, endlessly patient. He considers going off into the jungle to meet his demon but there’s still Kuan Lon and the ring.

  He wakes at dawn and sits for a while just breathing the cool air. A wave of homesickness buckles him, almost bringing him to tears, but Kuan Lon shines in his mind like a black star and he sets out, as Lares would have said, into the great dark forward.

  * * *

  That afternoon the road hits a clearing where there’s a checkpoint. He’s going to try to just slip away but the Thai officer, crisp in his air-conditioned power armor, sees him and beckons him over; the sweating, armorless enlisted men stare at him dully from the shade of a strangler fig. He thinks of running but of course they have guns. One of the foot soldiers is tinkering with some kind of military robot, its jungle-camo back a solid mass of missile pods, most of which are carbonized and empty—it looks a little like a mechanical mule with a horrible case of boils.

  The officer says something in Thai, his voice emanating from the speakers in the armor’s shoulders, and Kern looks up at him blankly. They’re nervous about something, he thinks, and, whatever it is, I’m not it, and they know it, but they’re still curious about me. The armor says something in Chinese, then some other language, and then finally the tinny synthetic voice says, “Stop. You are entering a restricted area. What is your business here?”

  “I’m going to Kuan Lon,” he says, immediately realizing it was stupid to tell the truth, but cops make him nervous. He reminds himself to use simple sentences, or the translation program won’t work.

  “This is a restricted area,” the armor squawks. “You must have a special visa to enter this area.”

  “I’m a boxer. Muay thai. I’m going there to fight,” he says, making boxing fists, his hands pitiful beside the suit’s enormous metal paws.
He wonders what Thai jails are like—probably worse, much worse than American ones. He takes his wad of money out of his pocket, offers it up.

  The officer looks down at him, then smiles and says something that the translator renders as “The cool heart leads to victory.” He bows, slightly, the armor groaning and stinking of burning oil as it moves, and says something that might have been a blessing but comes out as a disconnected string of static, and waves him on.

  * * *

  They fight by torchlight in Kuan Lon. He sees a boxer fall with blood pouring from his mouth, get rolled out of the ring and left at the edge of the jungle. They fight without gloves—the red firelight glints on the ground glass on the fighters’ hand-wraps. He sees a skinny Thai boy, younger than he is, die in the ring; he’s close enough to see the boy’s fixed, dilated pupils, his slack mouth as the doctor, a Japanese whose short-sleeved shirt reveals track marks, pushes on his chest in vain under the watchful eyes of the victor in his corner. He sees knife matches, the crowd silent as the blades test the distance, flickering over isoclines of commitment and dread, like serpents tasting the air, and finally the explosive attack, the arc of arterial blood. He hears bets made in Chinese, German, Japanese, English and Thai. He sees winners paid in yuan, yen, dollars, euro, bags of cocaine, bricks of heroine, fuel cells, ancient mosaics, Buddhas, Garudas, missiles, guns.

  They’ve never cleared out the jungle—he guesses they didn’t want satellites seeing in—so you can never see far and it always seems to be dusk; flashlights glow through the jungle’s constriction, and, during the day, parallelograms of sun. He haunts the tracks worn through the undergrowth between the tents, the retrofitted shipping containers, the quonset huts that were surplus from a few wars back; everyone ignores him, except the bar girls, who call out invitations and snatch at his wrist as he passes them by. There’s a market where geckos scamper over piles of damp Gucci tote bags, sparkling crystal bottles of cologne, mildewed jeans; there are cardboard boxes brimming with plastic bags of coarse yellow opium, tied shut with a twist of wire. He sees a Karon tribesman showing his eight-year-old son how to analyze opium with a portable mass spectrometer, which is oddly comforting, because it’s the same model used back home by the more upmarket dealers. Burmese gunmen bargain quietly over jackets of French kevlar; big white Americans with army haircuts and oversized watches sit at cafe tables, drinking rice liquor, smoking hash and watching the girls go by. At night strings of red and white Christmas lights burn in the trees and show him the way to the ring.