Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “Loera got a tour of the ranch, even the vault with the gold, the sight of which was usually a one-way ticket to the landfills, and the barn full of combat drones that Don Victor called his air force. Later, when they were drunk, they stumbled through the desert with their arms around each other toward a ruined outbuilding we were using as a death house.

  “I’d been watching from a distance but I faded in behind them as they went in through the door. My crew were there with a client, doing the long job. Loera turned white, started trembling and tried to leave, but my late employer held him by the shoulder and kept saying just a moment, my friend, just a moment more. Finally, the client’s blindfold fell off, and he saw Loera and recognized him. He started screaming, praising his art and his mercy, pleading for his intercession. Loera visibly composed himself and said, ‘Don Victor, please, as a personal favor to me, could you possibly spare this man?’ Don Victor was a fat bastard but his face looked like ancient stone as he said, ‘Don Antonio, I have the highest regard for you, and would never hurt a single hair on your head, but in this matter I regret I am unable to oblige you.’”

  Abruptly Hiro stands, seemingly drained, and turns off the TV. It’s like a door has closed as he says, “You should go back to your suite now.”

  * * *

  In the morning Kern wakes without knowing why and there’s Hiro sitting in the chair across from the bed, watching him, presumably, from behind his sunglasses, and he looks somehow inanimate, like he could have been sitting there all through the night. Hiro says, “Time to get up, boy. It’s your first assignment. You’re going to Delhi.”

  He leans over and hands Kern a burner tablet showing a picture, probably from an elevator’s security cam, of a deeply serious and somehow distracted-seeming woman who looks like money and has bangs and kind of a lot of jaw.

  Hiro says, “Her name’s Irina.”

  50

  Our Lady of Drones

  … and it’s like a koan, how the glyphs seethe and shimmer, interweaving and dissolving faster than he can follow, and the harder he tries the faster they slip away. He tries for a broader view, sees he’s had that thought before, that it punctuates the recent past like the poppies in a dense field of flowers, and he remembers the poppies in the vase by his bed in the St. Mark, their forms repeated infinitely down the fractions of the seconds, his opiated fog, how his mother sat by him and held his hand, how the shifting tensions in the muscles of her face encoded every shiver of feeling, and once again he wonders what ghosts are if not this sense of presence. Needing distraction, he looks inward, and it’s like a koan, how the glyphs seethe and shimmer, interweaving and dissolving faster than he can follow, and the harder he tries the faster they slip away …

  A jolt, and then he’s trying to read new glyphs, but they’re too simple, just dark blocky lumps on a ruby base, and he realizes he’s staring at the Persian rug on the office floor, that the tablet has fallen from his hand because the ground moved, is moving, it’s an earthquake, which he’s heard can happen in LA.

  He doesn’t know what to do—is he supposed to take cover in a doorframe?—and then the earth stills. He picks up the tablet, careful to keep his eyes averted from its screen, and shuts it down.

  He steps into the corridor. No sign of the surgeon. Got it! Meet you where? he texts Akemi. There’s a cyclical vitreous ringing from the direction of the lobby, which he finds abandoned, the receptionist gone from her desk. The noise is coming from one of the white vases with the blue Chinese dragons wobbling on its pedestal. He stills it with his palm, feeling the porcelain’s cool. The pendant lights are swaying. Outrageous but somehow typical that the clinic staff have fled.

  Out in the courtyard there’s a thick haze in the air and it smells like the sea, though the beach is at least a mile away. Late afternoon shadows on the shot-up town car and the minimalist garden; the sun glitters on the spent round where he threw it on the sand. His phone chimes—the text failed—network not found. No obvious way to open the gate, and no one to ask how. A trickle of black water seeps under it, darkens the asphalt, bleeds into the sand.

  He tries to go back into the clinic but now the glass doors won’t open, and the lights inside are off. Power failure, but shouldn’t there be an emergency generator? Peering into the shadows, he sees the Chinese vases are missing from their stands, but it’s too dark to see any fragments on the floor.

  The world buckles again, the town car swaying on its axles as the spent round dances on the miniature dunes forming spontaneously in the sand. A section of the high wall is leaning inward, and by the time it’s in his mind to dodge out of the way it’s collapsed, just like that, burying the town car, blinding him with dust.

  The earth is still again. He wipes his eyes, stares intently at the remainder of the wall. Could it be just slightly out of true? In any case it’s certain that the courtyard isn’t safe so he scrambles up the slope of new rubble.

  Nearing the top, he knows what he’s about to see and then does see that the street’s become a tide race. Tsunami, he thinks. The water running in the street comes up to the cars’ doors; it’s rapid, filthy, thick with debris. Most of the buildings are dark, their lower floors covered in mud and silt, their specificity washed away. As he wonders where the people went a body floats by.

  He drops down to a sandbar in the lee of an overturned truck. A library of objects washes past, a trash-can lid and a pink plastic doll and a phone and sodden plastic bags and all the nameless components of machines and cities. He listens to the water’s roar, its intricacy. This strikes him as an occasion for plucky self-reliance but no plan comes to mind and then he remembers tsunamis come in sequences.

  Cigarette smoke on the air—there’s a woman sitting on the roof of a half-drowned car. Her clothes and hair are dry. It’s the same woman who attacked his car, Our Lady of the Drones, the ragged woman’s more presentable twin.

  He wades toward her, the detritus in the water bumping him like inquisitive fish. Her eyes are closed, like she’s lost in thought, and a cigarette is burning in her hand. “Hey,” he says, “who are you?”

  She opens her eyes, looks down at him, smiles. “I’m a magician,” she says.

  He stares at her. Is she hurt, mad, in shock?

  “For real,” she says. “Want to see a trick?” Without waiting for an answer she reaches down and plunges her cigarette into the water. It hisses as it’s submerged, but when she pulls it out the ember is still burning.

  “How did you do that?”

  “It’s easy when you know the secrets of the universe. God, I missed these,” she says, dragging. “Never thought I’d have another. Come sit by me.” She pats the roof beside her.

  He clambers up, the car’s roof sagging under the added weight. The woman extends an empty hand which at first he thinks she wants him to shake but she makes a fist, unclenches it, and now on her palm there’s a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” she asks.

  Thales shakes his head. She has no obvious wounds, and is intact enough for remarkable sleights of hand, but there could be some more subtle trauma. “Are you all right? Did you send your drones for help?”

  “As for my health, I’m as well as can be expected,” she says. “But no drones, I’m afraid.” Something seems to occur to her; she looks abstracted and tense as dark water surges around the car, almost immersing it, and then she relaxes as the water goes down. “Okay,” she says. “That did it. We’ve got a little more time. Sorry about the water. It’s erasure made manifest. I can’t quite make it go away.”

  “Listen to me,” he says, feeling like he’s trying to get a distracted child to focus. “Tsunamis come in sequences. We need to get to high ground, then find a way out of the city.”

  She says, “Once I thought I’d go to another country, another shore. Find another city, better than this one, where all I try is doomed to fail, and my heart is buried like something moldering. But there will be no new city, no other shore. This city is my prison, and I’ll never leav
e its streets. There will be no ship for me, no road. I’ll waste my last minutes in this tiny corner of the world.” She seems to recollect herself, says, “Forgive me, I’m … So, to business. Let’s say you’re in a fairy tale. In a fairy tale, you might meet a djinni who grants wishes. Let’s say I’m that djinni, except I’m nicer and both more and less powerful. I’d like you to wish for whatever would make you happiest. I realize this seems strange, but please take it seriously. It matters, as much as anything, and there isn’t much time.”

  She seems earnest, and even kind, but is evidently even crazier than her twin. “Was that you, in the St. Mark?” he asks. “Or was that your sister?”

  The question seems to surprise her. “Sister. I didn’t know there were others. But of course there are. She must have known almost nothing, and been very afraid.”

  “Okay,” Thales says, sliding off the car into the water. “I have to go now. I think you should come with me, but I can’t talk anymore.”

  “Wait,” she says. “With the wishes. I wasn’t kidding. I know you think I’m crazy, but look.” She makes a fist, opens it, and a dozen dream-blue butterflies swarm out from her palm and flutter away.

  “Very impressive, but I need to find Akemi and get to high ground, so goodbye.”

  “Hearing is obedience,” says the woman, making a little bow with her hands pressed together. “It is granted. She isn’t far, and I’ll show you the way. Maybe I’m being literal-minded, but I suppose that’s traditional.”

  “You know Akemi?”

  “Pretty little thing. Must be part Japanese. An actress, or wanted to be. You found her in your mom’s house, and then later in your car. She didn’t know why she couldn’t seduce you. At first she thought you were gay, then decided you’re just quantitative.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Like I said, the secrets of the universe.”

  Not knowing where else to go, he follows her, and though he has many questions he’s certain she’d just evade them, and as they plod through the current he makes himself look up at the sky, which is just starting to darken, as it’s better than seeing the bodies in the garbage on the banks.

  They come to a building of many stories with firelight glowing through some of the lower broken windows, and looking up at it he feels an echo of the city in the waves.

  “Akemi’s here?”

  “And it’s high ground,” says the magician. “Follow me.”

  She leads him through the ruin of the lobby, up dripping, water-slick stairs. One of the landings reeks of marijuana—he gets a glimpse of figures standing around what must be a burning bale of it—and finally they come to a torchlit rooftop overbuilt with crude structures piled up like swallows’ nests, steep staircases zigzagging between them, like a hillside Aegean town. The buildings look blocky, like something from a child’s toy fabricator—he’s reminded of pictures of the earliest favelas—and there, in fact, is an old-timey builder drone, creeping painstakingly along as it lays down its little dabs of concrete. He wonders if obsolete drones are in fashion with bohemians.

  “Just a few minutes now,” says the magician.

  “Until?”

  “The end. I’m estimating. I made some edits, so I’m less worried than I would be,” she says. “If you want to talk to Akemi, you should do it now.”

  Something cracks underfoot. He’s crushed a piece of broken glass, probably from a beer bottle. Movement draws his gaze up toward the drone-built structures—he sees steam billowing up, dissolving in the wind—smoking mirror, he thinks, form erupting out of nothing—and behind the steam there’s what seems to be a copy of his mother’s house in the mountains.

  His mother was never really famous, her work known only to a few other architects—there’s no reason for anyone to have built this, and the coincidence of his having found it here, and now, is extraordinary, and requires an explanation, and the magician obviously knows more than she’s told him so he says, “My wish is, I want to know why that’s there.”

  “Why what’s there?” asks the magician, sounding flat and distracted, but then she looks up and when she sees the house her eyes narrow as her body tenses, and it sounds like the words are torn out of her as she says, “That’s a different node. There’s a line out,” and before he can ask what she means she’s pushed past him and is running up the stairs, and he’s wondering if he should follow when he sees Akemi sitting on the roof’s edge, her face shining in the red light of torches.

  51

  Never Really Have Happened

  As the plane descends toward Jeddah Irina looks out through the window at the rippled dunes in the abandoned streets, and it’s only when they’re a few hundred feet off the ground that she finally sees cars on black asphalt, rooftop solar cells, the bulbous domes of a mosque, the occasional blue pool.

  This was a rich country, once, and not so long ago, but it feels like the oil flowed in the days of Harun al Raschid. The last king, who is very old now, fled to London fifty years ago with the last of his bankrupt nation’s treasury; one freezing January night two decades past she and Philip had walked by his house in Chelsea at three in the morning, seen firelight glowing in a high mullioned window. Now the country is all but empty, and the mullahs rule piously over blank infernos of sand.

  She’s following the signs for the airport’s medical clinic to see about her jaw when it occurs to her that Corporal Boyd’s suit might have kept records exact enough for them to reconstruct her injury. She stops dead, imagining her MRI going off into the net, beyond her knowledge or control, and it’s not clear whether this is self-defeating paranoia or the caution that will avert the small mistake that would undo her.

  The airport is owned and operated by a Dutch firm, which is why she can buy a bikini for the sun deck and bask there sipping from a rum on ice. Impossible to hold onto tension in that stupefying heat. She’d been worried she’d feel exposed but her new touch-me-not movie-star sunglasses help and in any case she feels anonymous among all that bared flesh, as though the hard light washed away all individuality, making everyone into just another animal drowsing in the sun.

  She stares up into a sky like a sea and imagines she sees currents and depth-warped light. In six hours she’ll fly on to Delhi, which had seemed sufficiently random and far away from Patmos, then check in with her soldier and plan her next move. She wonders if she’ll have to do anything so egregious that she won’t be able to go back to the United States, but no matter, the only real country is the country of wealth, and many places would take her; in any case, she has her Greek passport.

  She closes her eyes, making the sky a blood-red glow, and lets herself drift.

  As sleep comes she’s glad that for a while she can forget all her strain but instead of disappearing she finds herself in a poorly lit boiler room full of the racket of distant machinery. This is a dream, she thinks, and a lucid one, but at the wrong time—REM sleep should only come after an interval of oblivion. Is the setting a metaphor, a sign that she’s somewhere in the basements of her mind, or could this be one of the implant’s utility programs? A screen on the wall playing a succession of scenes from the recent past—the ice in her drink refracting the light in the bar in the Athens airport, Fabienne’s composure as she shook her awake, the blue sea framed in the VTOL’s window. There’s a woman sitting on a section of pipe watching the screen and she looks just like Irina.

  Irina studies her twin, trying to decide whether she is, in fact, pretty, a question she ought to have resolved long ago. Others would probably say yes, she allows, in large part because, having bought off the years, she still has the glow of youth’s embers. Her twin looks moved, as though she might cry, which is somehow unseemly.

  “The Cartesian theater,” Irina says. “And here’s my double, bearing witness to my history. They’re interesting symbols, but what does it mean?”

  Her twin looks up at her, blinks and says, “Oh, fuck. Well, here we all are,” and her voice is Irina’s, not thin and
nasal like in recordings, but rich and mellifluous like it sounds in her head.

  “Are you my subconscious?” asks Irina. “My anima?”

  “I believe you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

  “So then you’re … what?”

  “I’m nothing, or nearly, barely even a ghost,” says her twin, who for no evident reason seems greatly moved to see her, but this must be accepted as part of the structure of the dream. “I’m also the only one who’s ever had all the information, and I’m going to be the one who makes everything right. But I’m so glad you’re okay—I wasn’t sure what had happened to you after Cloudbreaker. And poor Iliou. Fabienne was so sweet to you, in the aftermath, more than I’d have expected. She didn’t have to help.”

  “I like Fabienne,” Irina says. “She’s slight, but has a depth of kindness, even of courage, in her way. And of course her accusations are correct. Her father is dead because of me, and I doubt there’s anything I can do to make it right, though god knows I’ll try. It’s just that Cromwell stands too far above the law.”

  “What’s it worth to you to beat him?” asks her twin. “What would you risk for a chance to annihilate your enemies both known and hidden and then maybe live for a very long time?”

  “Everything.”

  “Would you manipulate yourself into doing what was necessary?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s what I thought, but I thought I should ask. It’s just I’m not myself these days.”

  “But how could I beat him? I attacked him before, and with powerful allies, and barely survived. He seems to have no weaknesses.”

  “Oh, he has weaknesses,” says her twin, and while they’ve been talking the boiler room has gotten dark and the machines have fallen silent, and now the only light is from the screen floating in the blackness where the wall was, showing Cromwell in his office holding Magda on his lap. “Magda is one. And you remember the strangers, his mysterious correspondents, from when you broke into his servers? They’re another. I’ve met them. They’re AIs, feral ones, running on hidden servers in the dark places of the world. I know where they are.” Now the screen shows a map of the world, the seas and continents fading out as though night were settling, dim stars emerging in Tokyo, LA, Sydney, what used to be Costa Rica. (For a moment she thinks there’s another one, and by far the brightest, near the equator, but it’s already gone from the screen and from her mind.) “Cromwell’s recently figured out what they are, and where, and he plans to leave them alone until their business is done, which is something else I can use. I’ve had about a minute to plan, but I think my plan will work. Which reminds me, I have something for you.” She presses something into Irina’s hands, a passport-sized document. “It’s a kind of security code, obtained with difficulty. Think of it as letters of transit—it will open doors for you. So listen—I need you to know I’ve done my best for you. I hope to god you win, but either way I won’t be around to see it, and now I ask your forgiveness for what I’m about to do.”