News from Gardenia

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘Ain’t no farms here,’ said Mike. ‘Ain’t no livestock, just folks and gardens and some fishing.’

  ‘So you do eat fish?’

  ‘Sure, if we catch ’em, we eat ’em.’

  ‘And what about power?’

  ‘Power?’ asked Mike. He looked a little worried.

  ‘Electricity.’

  He smiled again. ‘Oh, I thought you meant power like government, like one man has power over another man. We don’t like that here. They do power in Midwest – it’s all about power over the wall. Sure, we have smart grid like in Gardenia. Geo- thermal, there’s a big house down south that makes all the power we need. I remember when that baby was built, they built it on top of a huge mound of rubble, all the buildings from down there. That’s a big house for sure.’

  ‘And tell me, Mike, are you married?’

  Mike laughed for the first time. ‘You sure have been away a long time,’ he said with a big grin. ‘No, I’m not married, but I loved just one woman for a long, long time. She was called Harriet. She died last year.’

  ‘Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. I’m sad about losing Harriet. She was a lovely woman – she come over from Gardenia many years back. We have a child who also sadly passed away when he was real young. Kind of broke both our hearts that did. So yeah, Harriet lived here, then she lived out West – you heard of California?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘She loved it there, told me all about it, then she came back here, then she lived in China, then she came back here. She always came back here until she was too tired to go another place, then she died. I loved Harriet big time, no doubt about it.’

  ‘That’s a lovely story,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, life is tough sometimes. I miss her every day,’ said Mike slowly.

  All the time we were standing in the garden, I was aware of Chan waiting for me a little way off.

  This truly was a flying visit – I didn’t have any way of sustaining myself in Manhattan. I couldn’t wait for the next pod; I had no idea when it would be due and I knew I was logged in to go on the next departure.

  I finally made my excuses and promised Mike I would visit for longer the next time I came to Manhattan.

  He stood outside his extraordinary blue home and waved at me as I walked toward Chan. In some ways Mike was the first obviously sad person I’d spoken to in the new world; he looked and sounded sad. He’d lived all those years and yet he missed someone he loved. I found that oddly reassuring.

  19

  By the time I landed in Beijing twenty-two minutes after Chan had dropped me off outside Grand Central station in Manhattan, I felt I was becoming a seasoned podder.

  This time the pod crewmember was a man, a Chinese man with whom I could only communicate when I was already strapped in. It seemed the pods had universal language translation. The Chinaman was a little brusque and I noticed with some amusement that his translation was in standard English, not Chinglish. As he moved around the small cabin making sure everyone was strapped in, I asked if I could look out of the porthole during the flight.

  ‘No, that is not possible,’ he said. It wasn’t an admonishment, it was just a simple statement of fact. Is it possible? No, it is not possible.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said with a sigh. I wasn’t really in a position to remonstrate with him, being cocooned in the tight elastic bandage sheet thing.

  ‘I’m sorry about that; some of the people who travel on the pods are not very kind.’

  The voice was right in my ear, perfect slightly American English, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I leaned forward and looked to my left. A Chinese woman was looking and smiling at me. Her lips moved and then I heard, ‘I am Xui Li, how are you?’

  ‘Oh, hello, I am Gavin. Nice to meet you. I’m fine.’

  ‘I am going to sleep on the journey, Gavin, but when we get to Beijing, I will be glad to help you find who you are looking for.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s very kind,’ I said, once again deeply puzzled. I didn’t know I was looking for anyone but clearly other people did.

  I too must have nodded off on this flight because I remember nothing until there was a slight jolt. I felt my feet firmly planted on the pod floor beneath me and knew we had come to a halt.

  My weird elastic bondage sheet loosened and I stepped out of the pod, and into China.

  I immediately recognised the world as I had once known it – the noise, the crowds, the huge towering buildings, the lights, the mass transportation systems and most surprisingly, the cars.

  Thousands upon thousands of cars crawled slowly along the street right outside the pod station. I stood in the doorway gulping from the bottle of juice I’d been given that same day, on the other side of the world. I put the remainder back in my bag and clutched it to me. I was looking out into the chaos of a late-evening Beijing street, experiencing something close to terror. In the few brief days I had been in the new world my eyes and ears had grown used to the peace and serenity that seemed so abundant. Suddenly, here was the absolute opposite.

  I then noticed a small Chinese woman standing next to me – Xui Li. She was tiny. She said something I didn’t understand, holding something forward and gesturing. ‘Babel, Babel,’ she kept saying and pointing to her ear. I took the small round ball she was holding and pushed it in my ear and suddenly she said, ‘That’s much better. Now you can understand me, am I correct?’

  ‘Yes, perfectly,’ I said. I could hear a very clear voice in my ear. ‘Can you understand me too?’

  This time the woman gave me a brief smile and a curt nod.

  I watched her speak, and through my right ear, in perfect Received Pronunciation I heard, ‘I can understand English – I just can’t speak well enough to express myself clearly. That is very frustrating, no?’

  I agreed it would be very frustrating.

  ‘Is this your first time in Beijing?’

  Although I had been to the city in the old days, nothing I was seeing was relevant, I may as well have come from another planet. Going on previous experience it seemed much better to present myself as entirely innocent.

  ‘Yes, and this is my first time in China too.’

  ‘I will take you to meet Mei, she will be waiting somewhere that allows you to see the city below you.’

  She started to walk along the crowded pavement and I stared in awe at the vehicles jammed in the street. The air smelled of food and perfume, not car fumes and there was no deafening rattle of endless internal combustion engines. I soon worked out that all the thousands of cars, trucks and busses crammed along the road as far as I could see were electric, silent, just the sound of cooling fans beneath the hubbub of the crowds of people.

  ‘This is overwhelming,’ I said. ‘How many people live in Beijing?’

  ‘At the last census it was forty-three million, but I believe the numbers are going down now. The property market has collapsed – you can buy a nice apartment for a bowl of rice.’ She glanced at me with a smile. ‘That was a joke, I’m saying that in case the translation didn’t make it clear. However, if you want to buy an apartment I can get you one very cheaply, in a nice part of the city.’

  ‘I don’t have any money,’ I said.

  ‘Of course, you are from the nonecon,’ said Xui Li.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am, well, I’m from Gardenia.’

  ‘You are not here long then?’ asked Xui Li with a look of alarm on her face.

  ‘No, only a few hours. Would it be a problem if I stayed longer?’ I asked.

  ‘I would not like to say,’ said Xui Li. ‘I don’t know how you would trade, you would become very hungry.’

  I was starting to understand why my visits to such far-flung corners of the world were necessarily brief. I
was starting to understand why I had been given a packed lunch. I had no way of paying my way outside Gardenia.

  ‘So, how many countries in the world are nonecons?’ I asked as we made our way along the crowded street.

  ‘The Bicoast, the Europe, the Middle East, the Antipodes, all nonecons.’

  ‘But everywhere else still has an economy?’ I asked.

  I saw Xui Li smiling. ‘Look around you. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s pretty intense,’ I said.

  ‘Pretty and intense. I like that – very appropriate, Gavin.’

  I followed Xui Li into a building. I did look up as we went in, but I couldn’t tell what size this building was, other than mind-numbingly huge.

  ‘You live in a small house, I expect,’ said Xui Li as we walked along a seemingly endless mall. It must have been twenty storeys high, massive escalators, layer after layer of brightly lit stores, advertising hoardings everywhere, glass lifts going up and down the walls. It was at once entirely familiar, but in scale and cultural flavour it was all very new and shocking.

  I saw brands advertised I’d never heard of; I was also surprised to see how much of the signage was in English. The whole thing was a blur of overstimulation and I started to long for the peace and quiet of Goldacre Hall, my lovely wood-panelled room and the calm I experienced with Grace.

  This almost caustic, electric bombardment was awakening a part of my brain that felt like it had gone to sleep. I felt my pulse rate rise. I was hungry for something, maybe food, maybe entertainment. I started to feel aroused, but not in a way I was happy about.

  ‘We’ll take the elevator; it’s impossible to have an idea of what Beijing is like without seeing it from a rooftop.’

  We entered a lift that was already crowded with Chinese people. They all looked healthy and well dressed, they smelt wonderful – a heady aroma of spicy perfume filled the large glass box. It certainly wasn’t a lift as we would have known one in the twenty-first century; the interior was the size of a bus. There were seats around the edge and poles to hold on to.

  Then my ear filled with chatter, my translator ear-bead Babel thing was picking up many conversations and translating them at a mind-numbing rate.

  ‘Don’t say long nose, he has a Babel,’ said a woman next to me. She smiled apologetically. She’d been admonishing a small child who was holding her hand. I smiled back.

  Then I heard a male voice. ‘I’m not going on Tuesday. I don’t care what she wants or feels is appropriate.’

  I looked around the lift to see who was saying this. A man stood with his back to the rest of the occupants; he seemed to be talking to himself, although I soon worked out he was using some kind of communication device, not that I could see anything.

  ‘We take this lift to one forty, then we change to the express,’ said Xui Li. She was standing right next to me, looking up with a lovely grin across her face.

  I thought for a moment then it dawned on me. ‘Wait, is that like floor one hundred and forty?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Xui Li. ‘The rooftop is pressurised; you can’t go outside that high up. We are travelling up to five eighty.’

  We got out of the first lift at one forty, but it wasn’t like some dull lift lobby – the whole place was teeming with people, shops, electric bicycles festooned with gadgets for sale. It was like a street, only a street hundreds of metres up in the air. I glanced in either direction and couldn’t see the end of the corridor, or street. Whatever it was, this place was huge beyond comprehension for my primitive brain.

  We waited a while next to another lift station.

  ‘What about Africa?’ I asked as we waited for a lift.

  ‘Africa? You mean U.S.A.?’ came the reply. It was hard to truly understand what she meant, the intonation seemed a bit quirky.

  ‘No, Africa,’ I said. ‘You know, the African Sub Continent.’

  ‘Yes, U.S.A.,’ said Xui Li. She was looking at me with an expression that can only be described as hostile, like she was offended at my stupidity. I took a deep breath, maybe this twenty-third century translation software was a bit rubbish.

  ‘Okay, wait, let’s try and understand each other. I think I’m talking about Africa, the continent which lies south of Europe, the continent where the human race started millions of years ago. You seem to be talking about America.’

  ‘United States of Africa, U.S.A.,’ said Xui Li. ‘I’m not talking about Merica.’

  I stood next to Xui Li and said nothing. I could glean from this that the continent of Africa, the place that through my entire life in the old world had been one huge problem that only ever seemed to get worse, had finally transformed into a unified country. At least that’s what it sounded like.

  ‘Is the, um, the U.S.A. in the nonecon?’ I asked eventually.

  Xui Li shot me a look. ‘What? No, of course not. You live in a little nonecon bubble in Gardenia. The U.S.A. is the richest economy in history. That is who we trade with the most. You must go and visit, but you will need money. Lots of money, the U.S.A. is a very expensive place to live, only the very rich live there.’

  The lift doors before us slid open and revealed a very crowded compartment. A few people got out and then Xui Li forced her way inside. I did the same, constantly apologising – I was so much bigger than most of the people in the lift. If the peoples of the nonecon had grown much taller, the people of China clearly hadn’t.

  The short and quite uncomfortable ride to five eighty was brief but brutal; I felt my weight increase and stay increased for thirty seconds, then I felt my stomach turn over as my feet almost left the floor. No one else seemed to mind but I found it fairly distressing, not to mention the pressure – my ears popped quite painfully. I yawned and swallowed; I saw Xui Li watching me. Her lips started to move and I could hear Chinese being spoken, soon interpreted by the Babel.

  ‘The lifts are pressurised but you will notice a drop in pressure. You’ll get used to it quickly.’

  There is no point denying that I was very relieved when I felt the lift finally come to a halt. The crush of people eased as everyone poured out of the door. I followed Xui Li into a huge atrium, where many hundreds of people were milling about, waiting for lifts. There was a huge kitchen to one side and row upon row of benches crowded with people eating, laughing, children running. It was chaos but not poverty – it was wealthy, well-fed chaos.

  ‘Come this way,’ said Xui Li and I followed her past the restaurants and cafés towards a huge window.

  I felt myself stop before we reached the glass. The view was so spectacular it was frightening. Although we were at a height I’d only ever previously experienced on board a passenger jet, the building I was standing in was clearly not the tallest. There were dozens of towers reaching far higher than the one I was standing in, but to call them towers gives the wrong impression. Massive monoliths, colossal, mammoth structures, they were as wide and deep as they were tall, essentially whole cities in one massive block of man-made monstrosity.

  In many ways what I saw out of that window was how people from my time had imagined the future: like cities we lived in, only bigger. Beijing was all of that, only more so. Not only was the night skyline a mass of well-lit towers, it was clear that they hadn’t finished building. The whole place seemed to be an enormous construction site. Everywhere I looked, huge cranes and half-completed buildings dotted the skyline. It was all on such a massive scale I couldn’t really take it in.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Xui Li. ‘It is very impressive on first sight, is it not?’

  I was standing with my head shaking; I couldn’t say anything.

  ‘I am very used to it but I always enjoy experiencing the reaction of people who have not seen such a city before.’

  ‘I just cannot believe my eyes,’ I managed to say eventually. I continued to
stare out of the huge window, trying to take in details of some of the technology I could see. ‘Please explain the pipes that are being supported by the cranes,’ I said. ‘I’ve not seen that before.’

  Xui Li pointed towards a massive crane-like structure on a nearby building – I say nearby, but it was very hard to tell how far away this building was, how tall it must have been and most important of all, how high it was going to be when it was finished. The structure was already higher than where we were standing and it was clearly unfinished.

  ‘You mean the pipes over there?’ she asked.

  I nodded with vigour.

  ‘Those are coming from the pumps, the material pumps. I’m not sure how you would understand…I’m hoping I can explain a little. I know the buildings use the same PMCG that will be used for construction in Gardenia.’

  ‘Sorry, what was that?’ I asked, pushing the little Babel thing deeper into my ear to make sure I could hear what she was saying.

  ‘PMCG, Protein mediated crystal growth: the material is pumped up and fed into position, then the protein bacteria form it into a super-strong crystal-based material along preordained design. Surely you have seen this – maybe on a smaller scale, but that is all that is happening. This building was grown in the same way.’

  ‘Wait, so the building is growing?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. How else would it get there?’

  I glanced at Xui Li and could see she looked a little concerned and alarmed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Of course I know what you mean, I’ve just never seen anything on this scale. Everything in Gardenia is very much smaller.’

  Xui Li smiled and bowed a little. I turned back to look at the massive construction, then something caught my eye. A moving light seemed to be approaching us. I was just about to ask what it was when suddenly something swooshed right past the window. It made me jump back and I heard Xui Li laugh.

  ‘Sorry, I should have warned you,’ she said. ‘That was a commuter transport.’