by Ian McDonald
“We looked at your proposals. The entire editorial and directorial board studied them all carefully; and yes, we all agree, the plotlines are excellent, the new characters are wonderful, and the standard of the artwork is the finest we’ve ever seen from you since you joined us. However … satire is not a thing the Compassionate Society has a need for anymore. It’s good, it’s clever, damn it, it’s funny, but it’s not Socially Responsible.” She could hear the capitals slamming into place like steel teeth. There was a tight singing in her ears she had not heard since her childhood days in the community crèche: the tight singing noise you hear when you are trying not to cry. “It’s all very clever, all very droll, it may even be true, it may even be deserved, but it’s still criticism. Do you think those folk down there really want to know that the Seven Servants are nothing but a pack of computer-run, money-grabbing, capitalist leftovers from an unhappier age; that the Polytheon is nothing but a jumble of corporate-personality simulation programs that got out of hand; that their beloved Elector is just a crazy athleto who got pulled out of a gym one night and stuck on the Salamander Throne; that the Ministry of Pain is run by professional incompetents who got promoted beyond their natural ability because the Compassionate Society wants everyone to do the job which makes them happiest, irrespective of whether they are any good at it? You think that would make them any happier, no matter how funny you make the faces or the walks or the words?” Courtney Hall began to feel curiously threatened by this sweaty, naked man, though she topped him by at least twenty centimeters and outweighed him by a similar number of kilograms. “To take away those people’s faith in their Compassionate Society; the faith that the Ministry of Pain, the Seven Servants, the Polytheon, care for them as individuals and want nothing more than their individual happinesses; you think this will make them happy? Tell me this, then, what are you giving them that the Compassionate Society cannot? Questions? Doubt? Uncertainty? Criticism, cynicism, sneering cheap laughs? Hurt? Pain? You must be some kind of arrogant creature if you think that just because something is true for you it must be true for everyone. What right have you to tell them, ‘Sorry, it’s all false, all an illusion’?”
Courtney Hall rallied under the stunning attack.
“Even if it is?”
“Even if it is. The Compassionate Society isn’t perfect, I’m not naive enough to believe that it is, but it’s the most perfect we’ve got. What right have you to try and take away happiness, false or not, illusory or not?”
“Because I believe there must be something more important than happiness. Accountability. Quality. Satire.”
“Not in the Compassionate Society.”
“And it would seem, not at Armitage-Weir.”
Lightning flickered nearer, white-hot bolts frozen in the dark spaces of her pupils. Courtney Hall looked out through the looming clouds and the warm, driving monsoon rain sweeping through the corporate canyonlands, across Heavenly Harmony Boulevard, to the face of the girl in the forty-story videowall advertisement for the TAOS Consortium. Turn, smile, dissolve, disintegrate into a forty-story rendition of the TAOS lozenge-with-T logo, freeze again, hold final dissolve, and then hello hello hello, look who’s back again; forty stories of the Seven Servants’ epitome of citizenship.
“Marcus, tell me, don’t you ever feel oppressed by her? Doesn’t it ever bother her how perfect she is; perfect hands, perfect nails, perfect face, perfect skin, never too tall, never overweight, just lovely in every detail; does that not make you feel kind of inadequate, having to work across the street from someone as perfect as that? It would me.”
Marcus Forde waited. The TAOS girl performed her rigidly choreographed moves, over and over and over. When he spoke, he chose his words with the deliberation of a master mason from some long-defunct caste of manual laborers.
“No, not at Armitage-Weir. Courtney, leave the art to the tlakhs and the witnesses; you’re a yulp, a professional, remember that.”
“A professional who can draw, who can think up funny cartoons that make a third of a billion people laugh. You know something about yulps? We were originally a caste of lawyers. That’s right. All my friends are lawyers. I go to dinner with them and they sit about and talk about their jobs and their careers and their positions in the company or the department or the Ministry, and I think, what the fug am I doing here? Just what Yu needs, another caste with a membership of one: the Hallites, the yulps who think they’re tlakhs.”
“Courtney, please, I know you’ll take this in the right way when I say that your job here is secure until you make it insecure.”
“I understand you completely, Marcus. Absolutely.”
She was halfway to Tixxi Teshvalenku’s desk when the voice came chasing her from the office-jungle: “We can’t have blatant PainCrime on the front page of the city’s most important newssheet!”
“Newssheet shug!” Courtney Hall shouted. “There hasn’t been any news in this city for years. For centuries!”
Tixxi Teshvalenku opened her carmine lips, ready to spew something inane.
“And shug you, too, Tixxi!” said Courtney Hall. She took a malevolent delight in the way Tixxi’s chromed fingers formed an immediate nona dolorosa, the hurt-me-not, the sign of personal aggravation. “Good-bye, Tixxi,” she added in parting. “I am going home. Good-bye.”
All the way down in the elevator to the level-forty cablecar junction, her famulus lectured her from her bag. “That really wasn’t very Socially Harmonious of you, Courtney, that was a Category Three PainCrime and I feel I must also remind you that you are leaving your work two full hours ahead of your optimum psychofiled quitting time as prepared for you by the Department of Personpower Services … in fact, coupled with your performance in the office, which I monitored through the Lares and Penates system, I really think you should consider meeting with a Social Harmony counselor for a course of therapy—”
“And you shut the fug up, too,” said Courtney Hall as the high-line cablecar came clanging and swinging in billows of wind and warm rain into the stop.
Hands automatically reached for steadying straps as the cablecar lurched out into the monsoon. Lightning turned the sky white; only two hippopotamuses, the storm was almost on top of them. Ten times a week for the past five years Courtney Hall had made the long swing from the level-one-hundred high-line junction at Kilimanjaro West arcology where Courtney Hall had been assigned an apt by SHELTER via Lam Tandy South interchange to the Armitage-Weir spur on Heavenly Harmony Boulevard. And back. Faces, places … such and such a face appeared at such and such a place, such and such a face disappeared at such and such a place, such and such a face was always in the third seat from the left when she got on, such and such a face was always hanging from the strap by the door when she got off … same faces, same places. But not today! Today those faces are two hours behind Courtney Hall, it’s different faces today, let’s have a look at them, what do we see?
An athleto in a smelly green weight-suit immersed in Volleyball Today. A neo–Iron Age anachronist with a web of blue lines radiating out from her hypothetical spirit-eye in the center of her forehead—the Iron Age was never like this. … Three identical, plastic-dull prollet workers in blue coveralls with the yellow sunburst of Universal Power and Light on their breasts, all poring over personal dataunits. A radiantly beautiful george in a lace one-piece whispering to his/her famulus. A little starry-eyed yulp girl by the door studiously studying her Observer’s Guide to Castes and Subcastes (“trogs: bestial appearance, prominent canine teeth, pointed ears; customarily un- or partially clad, extremely hirsute, with prehensile, hairless tail …”). All separate, independent nation states bristling behind borders one centimeter greater than the surface area of their skins. Never talking. Never ever talking: privacy infringement, caste-breaking, SoulCrime, PainCrime, help! call the Love Police!
The fragile glass bauble of lives dipped down toward the streets, spinning its way down from Angleby Heights into the luminous canyons. Faces, different;
places? The same. The lights. Everywhere, light. The cablecar descended between the window-studded walls of arcologies and co-habs, between blinking aerial navigation lights, between clashing, rampaging videowalls, between cascades of neons and fluorescents, between darting lasers painting the Ninefold Virtues of Social Compassion across the faces of the arcologies, across the clouds, across municipal dirigibles, across the descending cablecar, every soul aboard transfixed with ruby beams like medieval saints, across a Courtney Hall immersed in lines and grids and squares and pyramids and cubes and double helices and every possible Euclidean and non-Euclidean permutation of lights; ten thousand lights, ten million lights, the ten billion lights of Great Yu, each one a voice calling, “I is what I am! Notice me! Notice me!”
Beneath her feet now, through the glass floor, the manswarm, the never-resting polymorphic organism whose domain was the streets of Yu and whose constituent cells were the trams and pedicabs and yellow Ministry of Pain jitneys, and the chocolate vendors and the public shrines and the confessoriums and the fortune-tellers and the hot-noodle stalls and the scribes booths and the shoe-shines and the barbers and the waxmen and the umbrella salespersons and the Food Corps concessionaires and the lotto sellers and the street balladeers, and the trogs and the wingers and the yulps and the Scorpios and the bowlerboys and the georges and the migros and the didakoi and the soulbrothers and the prollets and the tlakhs and the anachronists and the witnesses and the white brothers and the skorskis and every single one of the castes and subcastes of Great Yu, all jammed, slammed, crammed together together into the great mass beast that is the manswarm of Yu, the only truly immortal creature, for cells may join and cells may leave and cells may be born and cells may die, but the general dance goes on forever. …
She tried to summon the sixteen-o’clock dream. She called it the sixteen-o’clock dream because on any other day, she would just be nodding off as the cablecar pulled away from Lam Tandy South. She loved her dream, because in the midst of the lifeswarm, it was one thing that was hers and hers alone, her dream of flying. Just … flying. Never to, or from, anywhere, for every time she was about to see how, why, where she was flying, Benji Dog woke her with a beep to tell her it was coming up on Kilimanjaro West, time to get off, CeeHaitch. She hoped the time difference would not dissuade the dream. …
Something black and silver and roaring tore across her dream. Courtney Hall woke up in time to see the blue taillights and jet-glow of a pantycar scoring across the jade-pearl features of the Venus de Milo (Venus de Beauty) Cosmetika girl in video on twenty stories of the local SHELTER headquarters. The black and silver thing gave an arrogant flip of its taillights and vanished into the clouds. The Love Police, vigilant and valiant defenders of …
Of what?
Mediocrity? Benign Incompetence? One and a half billion people for whom nothing was more important than their own happiness?
It wasn’t enough. Not anymore. There had to be more to life than being put in the job that was most satisfying for you, living in the home that made you most comfortable, visiting the friends with whom you never fell out because it was impossible to disagree with them, marrying the partner who was totally compatible with you in every way, being happy in everything because happiness was compulsory. …
She had never really known why the Ministry of Pain called its aerial slouch-craft “pantycars.” Maybe in certain lights, from certain angles, they did look like jet-propelled underwear. She suspected the truth was that no one really knew.
“Kilimanjaro West arcology!” announced Benji Dog from her workbag. “Home again, home again, jiggity jig!”
She had always been wary of organized religion: the greater the degree of disorganization, the greater the true essence of the divine, she maintained on those rare occasions when her friends pressed her on such matters. That the computers watched over her, guided her, kept her safe and warm and healthy, from the household Lares and Penates units to the massive systems that governed the Seven Servants, the self-proclaimed Celestials; of course she believed in them; what she did not believe was that they were, in every possible way, gods. Yet today she waited for the crowds pressing off the cablecar into the level-one-hundred station to clear before she went up to the shrine to Phaniel, Miriel, and Phesque, the Triune Patronesses of Cablecar, Tram, and Pneumatique Municipal. She clapped her hands to draw the attention of the goddesses, three-in-one poised in an unlikely one-footed pirouette amidst the plastic squabble of minor saints and santrels.
“Answer me, Enlightened One, Empowered One, Mother of Velocity.” She had learned the formula from other, more superstitious, travelers. “Tell me, how is it that Courtney Hall can have all her life mapped out for her from beginning to end for the maximum personal happiness and satisfaction and still be neither happy nor satisfied? Tell me, Mother of Velocity, Transport of Delight.”
The nine hands raised in perpetual benison were still, the lotus masks just that, masks, concealing nothing. Courtney Hall said, “I thought so,” and walked away down the corridor. Behind her, lightning struck down at the city of the Compassionate Society and the thunder bawled.
She was still playing the game with all the faces from Corridor 33/Red—the pallid yulp couple who were too shy to speak to her; Mindy the zillie who was always, always, always calling at exactly the wrong time because her psychofile said she loved to visit people, and so she did; the pair of furtive wingers she occasionally saw flitting down to the elevator in modesty bodices and street cloaks—are they, will they be, have they ever been truly happy?
Good question.
She opened the apt door with her word. Home at last. Scenting her mood the moment she entered the vestibule, the Lares and Penates had turned the walls a soothing cissed green and a slightly spicy, slightly sexy sandalwood scent was wafting from the butsudan.
“Hi, honey, I’m home!” she shouted. The furniture stared at her. Her own sour little joke ever since the Ministry of Pain Department of Interpersonal Relationships had decided it was best for her to annul her five-year relationship with Dario Sanducci, a yulp counselor in the Department of Housing and Welfare.
Benji Dog always complained about her sour little jokes. She flung him bag and complaining and all into the corner by the window wall. As the famulus grumbled and tried to pry open the fastening with soft paddy-paws, she draped herself over a floform and watched the window lights of Kilimanjaro East, three vertical kilometers of windows and lights and terraces and platforms, with the gray, dirty rain pounding down upon it all. She wondered if someone was sitting in the opposite apt, looking out at her, wondering if someone was in the opposite apt, looking out … Speculation was pointless; she tried instead to summon up the sixteen-o’clock dream.
Something flying. Dashing, darting, weaving between the concrete behemoths of the arcologies and co-habs … she closed her eyes, tried to persuade her imagination into creating a flying something that might complete her fragment of a dream.
And the window wall of her thirty-third-level apartment exploded. Through the shatter of splintered glass and tortured aluminum and spinning shards of concrete came something huge, something black and silver and inexorable as death, wedging itself into the hole it had smashed for itself, grinding, heaving across the floor until two thirds of its black and silver bulk had jammed itself into Courtney Hall’s apt. The remaining one third of the thing thrust into a solid kilometer of air and rain. Dust snowed down as the alien bulk settled on the “greengene” carpetgrass. The walls rioted color and finally lapsed into anonymous buff, the controlling spirits overwhelmed. Benji Dog, trapped in her stuffbag, was a pathetic smear of green organic circuitry and matted synthetic fur. The black and silver thing steamed and hissed.
Courtney Hall, cartoonist by disappointment, sat phantom-white where reflex and shock had thrown her against the far wall.
Doors gull-winged open with a blast of compressed air. Courtney Hall gave a little scream. Alien insect-figures in leather uniforms boiled into the apt and fo
rmed a semicircle of bulbous goggle-eyes and black, pointing, menacing things.
“Citizen Grissom Bunt of the yulp caste, in the name of the Compassionate Society you are under arrest for a Category Twelve PainCrime and LifeRight Violation; namely that you did, on or about sixteen-thirty this day, unlawfully and with malice aforethought, violate the LifeRight of your partner Evangeline Bunt by driving a twenty-centimeter nail, improperly purchased from de La Farge’s Hobby Hardware Shop, through her forehead; said nail penetrating skull, frontal cerebral lobe, corpus callosum, and upper cerebellum, resulting in the immediate termination of said partner’s life functions, in your apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro East Arcology. Have you anything to say for yourself?”
“Sergeant.”
“Have you anything to say for yourself?”
“Sergeant …”
“In a moment, Constable, after the formalities have been completed. Have you anything to say for yourself?”
“East, Sergeant. Kilimanjaro East.”
“In one moment, Constable.”
“This is West, Sergeant.”
“Come again?”
“Kilimanjaro West, Sergeant.”
“Well, snug …”
And the room was suddenly, stunningly empty as the black and silver leather men boiled back through their gull-wing doors, which blasted shut as the black and silver thing on the floor shook itself free from Courtney Hall’s apartment (bringing more concrete and steel clunking down), turned in the kilometer-deep, rain-filled canyon between Kilimanjaro West and Kilimanjaro East (main drive jets sending a maelstrom of sketches, drawings, and tear-off paper prayers from a pad halfheartedly dedicated to Galimantang, Siddhi of Graphic Inspiration, cawing and flapping about the wreck of the apartment), and in the twinkling of an eye was no more than a score and slash of main drive glow across the face of Kilimanjaro East arcology.
The door whispered a visitor, opened a crack, and died.
“Whee! I think I’m going to wet myself!” screamed Mindy Mikaelovich, paying one of her unwelcome and unnecessary visits. “Just what happened here, neh?” she bellowed in Courtney Hall’s ear. A zillie, Mindy never employed a whisper where a shout would suffice. A little aerodynamic anomaly was sucking seven years of Wee Wendy Waif sketches out into the monsoon. Exposed to warm acid rain, the manicured “greengene” carpetgrass was withering and dying of overexposure to reality, blade by blade until Courtney Hall was marooned on a small island of living green against the wall.