by Eric Brown
“You want chora, mister?”
He had weakened, and hated himself for doing so. But her mind was so sweet, reminded him so much of Holly’s. He told himself that he would talk to her briefly, just this once, and then never again.
“You’ve got chora on you?”
He’d used the drug back in Canada in a bid to blot out the emanations of everyone around him. The drug had worked, though at a cost. Since the first few days of using chora, he had felt not the slightest stirrings of sexual arousal. He considered it a small price to pay for the cessation of the mind-noise that had made his waking hours intolerable. He’d had few meaningful relationships in his life before becoming psi-boosted, and the loss of his libido served only to reinforce his voluntary isolation.
The girl beamed. “Tiger can get it!”
“How much a gram?”
“Hundred roops.”
“Fifty.”
Her pretty face pantomimed disappointment. “Eighty.”
“Okay. Eighty. I’ll be inside. Right at the back.”
Her big lips slipped out of alignment with a lopsided twist. “Tiger can’t. Nazruddin’s no-go.”
“It’ll be fine. I’ll talk to the boss, okay?”
He watched her hike herself off down the street, the stump of her right leg swinging.
Thirty minutes later he was eating dhal and rice and drinking beer in the booth he had made his own. Inefficient fans turned on the ceiling like the stalling propellers of ancient biplanes, stirring the sultry air above the long tables of packed diners. The raised gallery of booths that framed the floor on three sides were reserved for high caste members or those with significant baksheesh. As a foreigner Vaughan was untouchable, but rupees talked and the restaurateur, a fat Sikh called P.K. Nazruddin, listened.
When the girl stumped through the open door Nazruddin, all belly and belligerent walrus moustache, ran around the counter flicking his dusting cloth at her. “Chalo, chalo!”
“No problem, P.K.,” Vaughan called.
“A friend of yours?” The Sikh was sceptical.
“Ah-cha. No problem.”
The girl hobbled past the restaurateur, a smug expression on her face. She slipped into the booth, facing Vaughan, and he closed his eyes briefly as the music of her mind overcame him. She rolled a vial of blue powder across the table. His hands shaking, he opened the vial and tasted the powder on the tip of his finger. “Eighty roops?”
The girl’s gaze dropped from his face to the bowl of spiced lentils before him. “Eighty roops and meal for Tiger.”
“You drive a hard bargain.” He gestured to the waiter.
They ate in silence for the next thirty minutes. The effect of the powder, and the girl’s sweet mind cancelling the more frantic brain-vibes of the diners below, allowed him to relax.
When she scooped up the last of her rice, squashed it expertly into a ball and launched it into her mouth, Vaughan sensed her desire to leave. He was seized by a surging disappointment. More than just her mind reminded him of Holly. Her movements, the way she had of glancing at him quickly from the corners of her eyes...
She slipped away without a word and disappeared into the crowd outside.
A week later when Vaughan approached Nazruddin’s, washed out after a long shift, Tiger fell into awkward step beside him and tugged his sleeve.
His heart skipped at her reappearance. The melody of her mind was like a balm. He realised that for days he had been watching out for her.
“Chora, mister?”
“Could use a barrel load.”
They ate in his booth, Vaughan lacing his beer with a dose of the drug. The encroaching minds retreated; the world became a more tolerable place. Just Tiger’s humane mind-music remained, playing at the edge of his consciousness.
At one point Tiger looked up. “You ‘dicted?” she asked.
“Do you care?”
She frowned, eyes downcast, and shrugged her narrow shoulders.
He said, “I’m not addicted. I just use it from time to time.”
“You telepath?”
He stared at her.
“How the hell do you know that?”
She did her best to hide her smile. “Tiger knows people who know people. They see you working at the ‘port.”
“So I’m a telepath.” He regarded the girl. “Does it bother you?”
Tiger made a moue with her lips, considering. “Nope. Tiger got nothing to hide.”
After that, they ate together two or three times a week for the next five years. He sensed her need of him after the first few months, and for more than just the drug money, but he kept his emotional distance. He met her only at the restaurant and stayed with her only for an hour: by limiting physical proximity, he thought he could keep his emotional proximity in check, too. He feared giving too much of himself and receiving too much of her in return: most of all he feared the possibility of becoming so reliant on her as a source of affection that he would only suffer when she left.
Then, a year ago, she’d turned up at his apartment.
* * * *
“Mr. Jeff!” his guide’s call broke into his reverie.
Vaughan looked down. The kid had disappeared through a hatch in the wall of the column. The ladder continued downwards, diminishing in perspective. He tried to guess what level they might have arrived at, but admitted that he had no idea. He stepped off the ladder and squeezed through the hatch, then leaned against the column in the half-light to regain his breath.
“Hey...” he said to himself. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that they were standing in a vast, low chamber that seemed to spread for kilometres in every direction, empty but for a forest of supporting columns. He was mystified. So far as he knew, every level of the station was inhabited.
He made out shapes on the floor, outlines of what looked like buildings and roadways, like some great, life-sized blueprint of a city never built. On closer inspection he saw that the lines on the floor indicated where metal walls and bulkheads had once stood.
“Where the hell are we?”
“Level Twelve-b, between Level Twelve and Thirteen. Long time ago, this upper-deck. Then they built upwards. Took down all buildings and made this level strong with extra columns.”
Vaughan imagined the weight of the city above his head, another eight levels, many millions of people. “Is all this level deserted?”
“Not all. Some areas to east let out to engineering companies.”
The kid set off at a brisk walk into the shadows.
“I wouldn’t mind knowing where we’re going,” Vaughan called after him.
His guide turned. “We are going to see Tiger,” he said. “We are going home.”
A year ago, shortly after arriving back at his apartment from the ‘port, he heard a tiny knocking at the door. He was justifiably suspicious: he didn’t know his neighbours, and his few acquaintances never called. He peered through the spyhole, but the corridor was deserted. He returned to his bunk and the chora he had been about to take, and the knocking began again. This time he snatched open the door before the perpetrator could flee.
Tiger leaned against the door-frame, beneath the level of the spyhole, blood running from a gash above her right eye. He carried her across the room and sat her on the bed, then attended to the injury. She was dazed and unresponsive, her mind still in turmoil. He cleaned the wound and applied antiseptic cream, tore an old shirt into strips to make a bandage.
“What happened?” he asked, knotting the bandage above her ear.
In a small voice she told him that she’d had a fight with a boy called Prakesh, and that Dr. Rao had thrown her out.
“Dr. Rao?”
“He looks after us, makes sure we’re okay.”
“He threw you out with your head like that?”
“Nai. Later, some kids, they attack Tiger. They took money, chora. I was bringing you chora.”
She sat glumly on the edge of the bed, the out-sized dressing giving
her an appearance of woeful vulnerability.
Vaughan was torn by the urge to tell her to go, and to allow her to remain with him.
That night she slept next to him on the bed, the stump of her left leg warm against his thigh.
In the morning, before he left for the ‘port, he knelt before her and said, “Tiger, you can’t stay here. I’m sorry.” He paused, considering what had occurred to him last night, the plan he had evolved as a sop to his conscience. It would take a good chunk of his savings, but it was money he could afford. “I’m taking you to a surgeon, someone who can repair your leg, okay?”
On his way to the ‘port he took her to the nearest rehabilitation surgery. He had left a silent Tiger sitting on a seat in the waiting room, her fingers closed around a thousand credits.
He did not see her for a month after that. He scanned the gangs of kids in the streets of the upper-deck, but she was not among them. Then in the early hours of one night during Diwali, with firecrackers detonating outside Nazruddin’s, Tiger appeared.
The expression on her face as stoic as if carved in wood, she limped towards his booth and stood silently before him, leaning on her crutch. She held out a small hand. Vaughan accepted the vial of chora. She made to turn and go, but he stopped her, took her hand.
They ate in silence. He had never asked her what had happened to the credits, but for the next year, whenever she delivered his drug, she would refuse to take his payment.
* * * *
They arrived at a riveted bulkhead and the kid pulled open a hatch as thick as a furnace door. He jumped inside and crawled off. Vaughan squeezed his shoulders through the gap and found that the pipe was no wider than the entrance, and pitch-black. He crawled on hands and knees, taking deep breaths to extract oxygen from the humid soup that passed for air at this level. His mind raced with the possibilities of what might have happened to Tiger. He had last seen her at Nazruddin’s for their customary meal five days ago, and Tiger had been full of enthusiasm about the skyball game she was going to see the following night. She was a ‘ball fan, was never without the latest magazine. The game left Vaughan cold—all sports depressed him with their display of microcosmic futility—and he had viewed her fanaticism with amused tolerance. She had failed to turn up last night, but she had gone missing often in the past, and he had not worried himself at her absence.
Up ahead, light showed around the crawling form of his guide.
The pipe terminated abruptly. The kid climbed down, revealing a scene that stopped Vaughan in his tracks. They were looking down into a cavernous chamber, lit haphazardly by jury-rigged arc lights and stolen halogens that created a mosaic of silver light and yawning shadow. The chamber was draped and festooned with strange plants and growths, a phantasmagoria of anaemic horticulture. Great rafts of pale fungus grew from the walls like shelves, and etiolated vines garlanded struts and spars that criss-crossed the cavern. Vaughan found the display of sun-starved plant-life amazing enough, but as his eye was drawn to the centre of the chamber by the web of spars, like vectors indicating perspective, he was struck by the image of the voidship. A bulky freighter of antique design, it hung in the centre of the metallic web like some imprisoned insect.
He sensed the hum of minds emanating from the approximate direction of the ship.
The kid held out a hand. “Home,” he said.
Vaughan climbed down beside him.
He’d heard about the ship that had crash-landed on the Station fifty years ago. Rather than remove the wreckage, the authorities had considered it safer to leave the ship where it was, precariously balanced between decks, and weld it in position with girders. The overall effect, with the silver light, the colourless plants strangling the nexus of spars, and the ship as the centrepiece, suggested an optical illusion.
In explanation, his guide said, “Ship was carrying seeds from Speedwell. Cargo hold split and seed grew all over. This way.”
A bridge fashioned from rope and slats of metal spanned the gulf between the sheared pipe and the voidship. Vaughan held on to the rope rail and followed the kid, taking care to place his feet on the dead centre of the precarious walkway.
They passed into the freighter’s shadow. Vaughan looked up and saw a dozen urchins perched like observant monkeys on the great curved cowling of an engine nacelle.
The rope-bridge terminated at the entrance hatch of the ship’s hold. His guide hurried him inside and down a long corridor. They passed dozens of children sitting on the floor, playing games with stones or, if fortunate, expertly moving chessmen around boards painted on the deck. Others slept, bare limbs outstretched and vulnerable. Only when Vaughan saw a legless girl propelling herself down the corridor in a wheeled box, did he suddenly realise.
He stopped and turned to look back down the corridor. All the children were in some way deformed, paralysed, or handicapped. Most were missing arms and legs, some were blind, others facially disfigured.
He glanced at the boy who had brought him so far. His right hand ended in a white-bandaged stump.
“This way, Mr. Jeff.”
They turned right, and immediately confronted a Buddhist monk in saffron vestments standing sentry outside a sliding door. His eyes were closed, his lips moving in a silent mantra.
“In here,” the boy said, sliding back the door. Vaughan stepped inside. Two children scurried from the room. His guide said. “I will go and find Dr. Rao.” The door closed behind him and Vaughan found himself alone with Tiger.
* * * *
TWO
TIGER
Vaughan stood by the door, unable to move. Tiger lay on a narrow bunk that almost filled the room. She wore shorts and a shrunken T-shirt, her bare left foot stained with oil.
The music of her mind was faint, sweet as ever.
She was sixteen, but she looked about twelve. She had always been slim, but she was skeletal now. The waistband of her shorts hung between the jutting bones of her pelvis. To cool herself she had pulled up her shirt to expose her concave belly and fleshless ribcage. Her face was gaunt, cheekbones an angry chevron stretching jaundiced, sweat-soaked skin.
“Jeff...” Barely a whisper. It was all she could do to lift her hand a couple of centimetres off the bed and wave her fingers in greeting. “Knew you’d come.”
“Tiger.” He knelt by the bed and repeated her name, taking her hand and squeezing fingers. She winced, as if in pain, and then managed a smile.
“I’ve got to get you out of here, into a hospital.”
“Dr. Rao looking after Tiger,” she whispered.
“Where is he? I want to know what’s wrong—”
“Tiger was silly,” she whispered, and then laughed. The sound was tiny, cut short with a wince of pain.
“What happened?”
The words came, soft as her breath, “...was silly.”
“Tiger...” Something like desperation gripped him. Where the hell was Rao? “What did you do?”
She gathered her strength, said, “There, in pocket. “ She glanced towards the foot of the bed. A tiny pair of shorts hung from a hook on the wall. Vaughan grabbed them, squeezing the greasy material to locate the pocket.
He pulled out a clear plastic pouch full of crimson powder. He snapped the seal, sniffed. The stench brought tears to his eyes.
“You took this?”
Her lips made a downward curve that signalled assent and a terrible admission that she knew she had done wrong. She tried not to cry.
“Tiger, you must tell me. What is it? Where did you get this stuff?”
“Kid sold Tiger it. Tiger took too much. Dr. Rao say I very ill. Feel bad, Jeff.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get help.”
He pushed up his sleeve and punched the surgery code into his handset, a lightweight polycarbon device that enclosed his forearm like a splint.
A voice from behind him said, “I’m afraid you’d be wasting your time, Mr. Vaughan.”
A small, silver haired Indian, severely upright in a Neh
ru suit, stood in the doorway. He clutched a walking stick in arthritic fingers.
Vaughan regarded Dr. Rao, realising instantly that he did not like the signature of the man’s mind; it made a noise that Vaughan through long experience had learned to associate with xenophobia and suspicion.
He stood and hustled Rao into the corridor. “What the hell do you mean? Why aren’t you doing something for her?” He glanced back into the room. Tiger was staring up at the ceiling.