by Ian McDonald
“Mindy, would you go away please?”
“Like, whee! CeeHaitch, can I like, ask a little favor, could I like, bring my friends to look? Like they’ve never seen anyone’s apt get cosmicked by the Love Police before …” Courtney Hall’s hand, her left hand, her drawing hand, darted. There was an outraged wail and the door slammed. A clod of half-dead “greengene” carpetgrass had caught Mindy Mikaelovich right in the ever open mouth.
Nameless
… COLD.
“Cold,” he said, and understood. Cold was the meaning for his shivering body, the steaming billows of his breath, the trickleways of water down the windows, the pinching, unfamiliar assault upon his skin.
“I am cold,” he said. The three words shattered. Before them he had not known that he could speak, that there even existed a thing called speech. “I am cold, and I can speak,” he said. The words sounded good to him. Wrapping his long arms about him for … “warmth!” he went in search of other words he might speak.
So many names in this … “place.”
“Window,” he said. Tracing the condensation drops with his forefinger, he marveled at that word that had come to his lips out of nothing. “Water, forefinger.” The words were coming fast now, tumbling, streaming out of that noplace where the names of all things waited to be used. “I am cold, I can speak, and I am tracing this water down this window with my forefinger.” More than names, abstract relations also waited in the dark, the thing that made the window “this,” the forefinger “my.” He shivered and it was a good shiver. Like birds came the names: “Walls, floor, ceiling: room.” His naming released a wave of crystallization across the small and tightly bounded universe. Sights, sounds, smells, sensations, the whole profusion of anarchic impressions fell into ordered patterns around the geometrical entities of their names. And the names drew about themselves a nimbus of quality, of good and bad and color and weight and hardness, a state of existence to come, a state of existence that was and a state of existence that had been. Time entered the small and tightly bounded universe and gave all things a past out of which they had come, a present through which they were passing, and a future toward which they were progressing. All things. Except himself. He had only present. There was no past to direct him toward a future. There was no remembering of a time before. Before? Before the streaming walls, the damp, sprung boards, the splintered ceiling, its lathes bared like broken bones through the rotted plaster. That they possessed a past was evident. Why then had he no past before he found the word cold in his mouth? He squatted down on the poor warped floorboards, shivering, rubbing himself for warmth, trying to remember. For a long time he squatted like a bird, for birds have no past or future but only an eternal present.
Voices.
—You will lose everything. Everything. Everything.
—Is this what you really wish? To lose everything you have ever been?
—The choice is yours.
“And I took it!” he cried to the streaming walls. “I took it!” But he could not remember what it was he had chosen.
—He has chosen.
He remembered questions swarming like flocks of birds, voices filled with consternation, some soft, some sibilant, some somber, some shrill. He remembered that all the questions had been directed at him and that he had answered each and every questioning voice. But he did not know what he had answered.
—You will forget, was his final memory. There his history ended, without a future, without a name.
Perhaps not without a future. His future would be a future of questions, of remembering all that he had forgotten. And perhaps that was all the future he needed, the act of asking was an end in itself.
He crossed to the window. He drew slow, wide fingertracks in the beads of condensation. He pressed his face to the glass. His breath fogged the glass almost immediately, but through the rents his fingertips had torn in the edge of the world, he saw what he had suspected, what he had hoped, that his search for a past and a future was not confined to the small and tightly bounded universe into which he had been born; that there was a new universe of huge, possibly infinite, extent beyond, in which an infinity of questions might be asked.
Communing With the Rain
MINIPAIN EDUSERVE CLIMATOS: AN interactive variable response environmental/meteorological educational program for age groups 10–16, conceptual levels 4 through 6 Breeden Compensated Scale, Literacy Ratings 1a to 7b illiterate.
LOAD
RUN
CLIMATOS: Hello, I’m CLIMATOS; your domestic education program has accessed me because you have some queries about the environment. Please key in, or recite, your psychofile code number, name, and caste, so I can help you.
STUDENT: 103@5/B*4X7/26A26D£19: Lux Jonathon Eternuum, Soulchild of the Chone Michiganseng Chapter of the Sygmati.
CLIMATOS: Thank you … Lux Jonathon. If you’ll just wait a second while I adjust my program parameters for your caste, illiteracy level, and religious affiliation … there.
STUDENT: Hold on, I won’t have to read anything, will I? I’m not allowed to look at words, reading’s sinful.
CLIMATOS: No worries, Lux Jonathon. I’ve taken care of everything. You can trust the MiniPain Eduserve to respect your religious doctrines. So, what is it you want to know?
STUDENT: Well, what I really want to know is why it rains so much.
CLIMATOS: That’s a good question, Lux Jonathon. A lot of people ask me that one. Well, as with most things environmental and climatological, the answer’s kind of complicated and has its roots way deep in the past. So, I’d like you to settle back into the Logrus position and open your Third Eye to the Panversal Radiance and we’ll go back together. Back to the world at the time of the Break. Don’t be afraid, it won’t hurt you, and I’ll be with you all the time. What I want you to do is imagine the way the world was back then, with big companies and corporations and state monopolies, all fighting each other, tearing the mother earth open to loot her precious treasures so they could make more, sell more, make more, sell more, and so destroy their enemies. Imagine their factories, imagine kilometer after kilometer of great dark machines working away in the darkness, imagine the roaring furnaces, the burning tail-gases flaring into the night, imagine the chimneys billowing smoke. Concentrate on those chimneys, can you see them?
STUDENT: I can see them.
CLIMATOS: Now, multiply them a thousand times, a million times, ten million times. Imagine the smoke, pluming up into the sky, a great pall of smoke, so thick it hides the sun.
STUDENT: Smoke, choking smoke, smothering smoke, smoke, smoke …
CLIMATOS: And why is there so much smoke? Because in those days people had to burn things to make energy. They burned nonrenewable fuels, like coal, and oil, burned them as if they were going to last forever, which of course they couldn’t, and didn’t. So today we don’t have any coal or oil, Lux Jonathon, and a good thing, too. But we’re getting a little off the subject. As well as smoke, the combustion of these fossil fuels gave off immense amounts of a gas called carbon dioxide. Imagine that, if you can, a dense, invisible blanket spreading over the earth, year by year growing bigger and bigger, and thicker and thicker. Got it in your head?
STUDENT: Sort of like fog?
CLIMATOS: That will do, even though, strictly speaking, carbon dioxide gas is invisible. Invisible to your eyes, invisible to the light spectrum that enables you to see. But not so invisible to infrared light, or, to put it another, more familiar way, heat waves, all of which are …
STUDENT: I know, I know, all facets of the Panversal Radiance Herself.
CLIMATOS: Precisely, Lux Jonathon. Imagine the beams of the Panversal Radiance striking the earth as you’ve been taught in Contemplation and Presence Class. Imagine these infrared waves striking the clouds. Some of their heat is absorbed, some bounced back into space again. Some penetrates all the way to the surface of the earth before it is reflected back again. But this heat that is reflected back is trapped by the carbon diox
ide, and it can’t escape, it can never return to the Plasmic Void of Lightlessness from which it came. It stays trapped.
STUDENT: And what does that do to the earth?
CLIMATOS: Well, if you think about it, the heat will eventually build up and up and up, won’t it? And the earth will get warmer and warmer and warmer, won’t it? Now, I want you to imagine something else, and you may find this very hard to picture, but at one time the earth had snow and ice at its poles!
STUDENT: You mean, like ice in the icebox?
CLIMATOS: Exactly, Lux Jonathon, only you must imagine it much much thicker, kilometers thick, in some places.
STUDENT: Wow! How could that be?
CLIMATOS: It had built up over thousands and thousands of years. You must understand that at the time of the Break, the earth was a very much cooler and drier place than it is now. This part of Yu where your Chapter lives used to have ice and snow every winter, before the Break.
STUDENT: Snow?
CLIMATOS: Frozen water vapor. Soft and cold. A little like ice cream.
STUDENT: Wow!
CLIMATOS: And some parts, up at the poles, were so cold it used to stay beneath the freezing point of water all year round. So the ice never melted and it just built up year after year after year. Now, you have to imagine what happens when the earth gets warmer. Imagine all that snow and ice melting, all the millions of millions of tons of ice turning back into water, running into the sea. There was so much water locked up in the polar ice caps, Lux Jonathon, that when it melted, the oceans rose by almost a hundred meters all over the world. Can you imagine the water reaching a third the way up the side of this People House? That is how much the sea rose. Cities were drowned, whole tracts of land submerged, coastlines radically altered. The people who escaped the flood could hardly believe how much the world had changed.
STUDENT: Was this the Great Flood from which we were all saved by the light beams of Sygma?
CLIMATOS: It is, Lux Jonathon.
STUDENT: Shee. I always thought it was all made up by grown-ups. So it really happened.
CLIMATOS: It really did. And there were other effects of the global heating. As the world changed from cool and moist to warm and wet, all the established weather patterns changed, too. You may find this a bit hard to understand, but they had all been based on the polar ice caps and their pressure barriers, and when the poles vanished, the high pressure zones vanished, too. There were terrible storms, hurricanes and lightnings and droughts and downpours as the weather was all chopped and changed about. Deserts became jungles, farmlands became swamps, winds reversed direction, ocean currents switched about, rains failed, there were crop failures, people starved.
STUDENT: What’s that?
CLIMATOS: It means that people died because they had no food.
STUDENT: What?
CLIMATOS: Yes, incredible as it may seem, they had nothing to eat, and there was no one who could give them any because in the end the big international food producers and sellers that had once been so rich and evil found themselves with nothing to give.
STUDENT: So, what happened?
CLIMATOS: We happened. The Compassionate Society happened. It took all the big, selfish corporations and monopolies and transformed them into the Seven Servants so that instead of serving themselves, from then on they served everyone by making sure that everyone had what they needed to make them completely happy.
STUDENT: So, that’s why it rains so much.
CLIMATOS: Yes. Because of the greed and wickedness of selfish and hurtful people.
STUDENT: I never knew that. Thank you, computer.
CLIMATOS: Thank you for accessing me. My pleasure. Always at your service, Lux Jonathon.
Chapter 2
THE SLEEP-POD WAS NOTHING more than a pay-by-the-day biotech coffin so small she had to crawl out through the entrance iris to turn around. It was wedged up on the twelfth level of the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel, which was nothing more than a two-hundred-meter cube of girders, sleep-pods, and corrugated tubeways that offered temporary shelter to some six and a half thousand migros. And one yulp, Courtney Hall, thanks to the Ministry of Pain’s Emergency Shelter Section. The migros were not a caste that Courtney Hall had ever encountered even in the mixed-caste environment of Kilimanjaro Complex, though she recalled dimly from her social anthropology lessons that they were a caste of migratory laborers who drifted across the city in and out of casual employment. The harassed-looking yulp who had handled her case at the Department of Housing had assured her that her personal compatibility ratings, though not ecstatic, were higher with migros than with any of the other castes offering available accommodation in that locality at the time. Woken once again from fitful sleep by the voices from the adjacent pod where an entire family of mother, temporary father, grandmother, and two children and one fosterling lived in conditions of near-to-collapsar density, she wondered just how low those personal compatibility ratings had been.
She hated migros.
She hated their clattering, angular music that blasted from their angular radios. She hated the loud angular voices outside in the warren of tubeways as workers came off-shift from their water-processing plants and underground agrariums. Even more, she hated their conspicuous silences because when she could not hear them, she knew they were talking about her, muttering words like “transcaster” and “castebreaker” even though the harassed woman from the Department had made it quite clear that Cizzen Courtney Hall was resident with the full cognizance and approval of the Ministry of Pain until such time as the Environmental Maintenance Unit restored her home to habitability. She hated the way the tiny, wire-thin children stared at her every time she heaved herself like some fat mollusk out of the sleep-pod so she could lie with her feet where her head had been. She hated the continuous urinous smell from the sleep-pod waste-digester, and the thought of having to excrete where she lay outraged her yulp sensitivities almost as much as did the soft, muscular vibration of the quasi-living sleep-pod against her skin. She loathed remaining cocooned but loathed to go out more. So she remained a hermit in her pod, waiting for tomorrow when, for the first time, she could look forward to going to work, wondering when the Environmental Maintenance Unit would get round to patching up the hole the Love Police had blasted in her apartment wall. She thumbed in vain across the video spectrum in search of some channel that was not limited to wholly migro entertainment (almost exclusively long and exceedingly complex dramas drawn around the migro’s transitory plug-in, plug-out social order)—flick flick flick: same faces, places, races—until she came to the conclusion that migro entertainment was the only entertainment that the Celestial Flower of Heavenly Radiance Transients’ Hostel Lares and Penates system was sanctioned to narrowcast.
She wished she had Benji Dog back. At least he would have been something to talk to. No famulus. She felt very naked, as if she had slipped through the sustaining fingers of the Compassionate Society and had not been missed.
She tried once again to sleep, only to be woken by the vaguely obscene sensation of the sleep-pod’s synthetic flesh molding itself to her body contours. Her screaming fit woke the migro family next-pod and brought them peering in through the iris muttering in their all-but-incomprehensible dialect of City-ese and making all-too-comprehensible nona dolorosas with their fingers.
Sleep denied, wakefulness impossible, Courtney Hall found her mind escaping into a third state, a hallucinatory half-awareness where she remained conscious that her body was cocooned in the sleep-pod, while at the same time she hovered over the rooftops and streets like the omnipresent spirit of some Celestial. And from this altered state she passed onward into a kind of dreaming unlike any she had ever before known, in which she was utterly certain of her own self-awareness, so that everything that happened in this was, in a real and personal sense, actual, true.
In this dream she dreamed the sixteen-o’clock dream once more, but in this heightened state of awareness all those imag
es and symbols that had so far evaded her now came flocking to her fingers like singing birds, and they lifted her, by her fingertips, and she flew with them.
In the sixteen-o’clock dream it was an impossible mongrel of bicycle and ornithopter, but it flew, oh, yes, it flew, banking and swooping between the thunderous gray monoliths of the arcologies and co-habs; oh, it flew. Huge, slow-beating wings feathered the air as she looked down into the rain-washed streets aswarm with faces. And in the sixteen-o’clock dream the faces looked up as she bicycled overhead, looked up from their rained-on lives to say, look, oh look, look at her, isn’t it wonderful, magical, marvelous, and as she flashed blue-silver over the sea of upturned faces she would wave a leather-gauntleted hand to all the rained-on lives, and then, flash! she would be gone, a streak of blue-silver splashing across the forty-story face of the TAOS girl, pedaling hard up the big, big gravity hill, steel wings laboring, silver pinions clawing handfuls of air, gray tears of warm monsoon rain streaming down her leather flying-helmet, down her goggles, but the white silk scarf streamed and snapped out behind her like purity. Striving, straining for the clouds, she could hear the voices in the manswarm below shouting, “Never do it, never make it, too far, too high, too much,” and she shouted down to them, “Of course I can, of course I will, watch me, watch me!” and up she went, up she went, straining, striving, yearning, up we go, up we go, into the clouds, the soft, wet, gray clouds, silver wings shredding the soft, wet grayness, swallowed, swaddled, smothered in softness, grayness, wetness, but still straining, striving, yearning, leaning on those pedals, up we go, up we go, up we go, until she burst from the stifling, swallowing clouds in a shout, an ecstasy, of wings, beating blue-silver in the sun as she skimmed the white cloud-tops, banking slowly, lazily, between the cloud-piercing summits of the arcologies, her wings angel-bright in the light of the naked sun. She flew up and up and up and up until even the clouds were reduced to a vague silver carpet some unfathomable distance beneath her, up and up and up and up into a realm of ion-blue where planes of light and shafts of luminescence shifted in and out of being and the tintinnabula of the angels chimed.