He realized there was no question of “breaking Kaoru’s bubble.” If it had been expedient to explain that nobody remembered anything about a secret spaceship: how would they dare?
Rajath admired the dangerous future in his own scribble, quite unmoved by Kaoru’s horrible hints. They were still very alike!
Kaoru printed SPOT sheets. “These won’t be up to date,” he apologized. “That’s the price one pays for genuine isolation. But a matter of weeks makes little difference, unless some natural catastrophe intervenes. This planet is like a mouth of old teeth, all the tinkering does no more than just rearrange the damage.”
“Oh, I know exactly what you mean!”
Rajath did not. How could teeth be “old”? He was making a joke.
The ex-Japanese smiled.
“Mr. Kaoru,” cried Clavel. “Revenge is so embarrassing, afterward. Your good times will come again, and then you’ll feel so stupid. Maybe it was nobody’s fault Why don’t you wait. Everything will turn out right.”
The old gentleman rustled around to the front of the desk, on his knees. to present the sheets, beautifully bound and sealed in clear plastic. He patted the air near Clavel’s cheek, as if petting a favorite grandchild.
“Little American.”
“Why have you lived on so long, so alone? Old age is hateful.”
Kaoru retreated. His eyes twinkled.
“On the contrary, I find it’s like coming out of prison. An old person like me can do.” He paused, savoring,” just about anything he likes.” He considered. “You are aware, I presume, that your trading partners consider themselves to have been seriously injured in their turn, and may be uncooperative. Have you made plans to cover that aspect of the situation?”
They shrugged: of course.
Kaoru smiled. “I wonder how you will justify your actions.”
“Self-defense,” answered Clavel promptly. “We have been attacked by the very people we trusted. We are few and vulnerable, it’s natural we should make a show of strength.” His nasal contracted wryly. “There are always justifications. We assume they’ll have their own moves.”
“Quite so. But it is often better to reply first. Will you be needing transport?”
Since Clavel’s idea about “faster than light travel” had come into play, Kumbva had declared the landers must vanish. The engineer said that anyone with talent like his own would be able to see exactly what they were.
“Yes, please.”
They retrieved their shoes from Kaoru’s tiny porch. Clavel helped the door to close. It would have closed itself, the gesture was mere good taste. Rajath forgot to be irritated by this poetical over-sensitivity. He acknowledged that he couldn’t have managed the interview alone. The garden was hot and bright and still. Clavel screwed up his eyes and thrust his fists to his temples.
Rajath regarded him with amused sympathy.
Rajath shrugged agreement.
He followed Rajath back to the house, stepping in his faint prints over the laminate emerald turf. If the world were to fall apart, one would know it had never been whole in the first place. But it does not. An atom is the smallest material unit of Self. False: the division is unreal, a necessary fiction. The world remains indivisible, though we can only think of it in pieces. Therefore the wise among us, those we call our dependents, spend as little time as possible playing the nonsense game of finished thought, of formal language.
Clavel felt like someone trying to look into his own eyes: pull them out on wet strings and turn them to face each other. The image was sufficiently painful.
The sunlight touched his hair, the feathery plantings called “bamboo” whispered. The plaited fiber of doorframe and door spoke faintly, faintly of human affect. Nothing awake out here: every blade of grass was lifeless, separate, empty. How did they do that? Up ahead, Rajath laughed. It was impossible to alienate him or disgust him, how ever hard they both tried to dislike each other. It is one’s own mind that one argues with, grumbles at, reproaches. The whole is inescapable.
Inescapable, he promised. Indivisible. And shivered.
They left the valley in one of the supply helicopters, and transferred in the hills above to the pride of Kaoru’s fleet. It delivered them, in the middle of the night, to a very cold airstrip that seemed folded in solid darkness. This was called Butan, the tilt pilot told them. Mr. Kaoru had once kept a house here for the young people, who enjoyed the winter sports. The Aleutians wore borrowed great coats. The pilot of the jet brought out a tripod, set it up and stood back.
“I am sorry about the cold,” said Kaoru, from the land of the dead. “Another penalty of retirement: this is my only long haul plane. To purchase another, or to bring this one to Uji, must have caused comment.”
They bowed. Clavel had schooled Rajath and Lugha. “We humbly thank you for your honorable support!”
Kaoru vanished. The pilot bowed to the box, wrapped it in black silk and tucked it inside his jacket. He folded the tripod.
“There are mountains behind you,” he said, “six thousand meters high.”
Rajath and Clavel nodded. They might have known there would be mountains. Deep: they heard, not high. Lugha went to the jet, reached up and tapped its metal flank.
“It seems very…dead.” His teeth were chattering.
“Get inside, you dangerous character. We have a lot to do.”
The Uji-watchers sat around in deadspace in the proudly named Conference Facility of their hotel in Karen, staring at Kaoru’s exquisitely presented document. The team from that fateful day had stayed up here, waiting. KT had achieved, so far, media-silence on the Sarah Brown disaster. Poonsuk had been furious at being dragged into an affair of confiscated material, silenced journalists, but she’d held the line.
“This doesn’t go near the net,” said Ellen Kershaw briskly. “I’ll talk to Rajath. Kaoru has misunderstood him—” She saw Kaoru as the villain. They all did. The crazy old spider had been manipulating events for his own ends, all along.
Someone ran in from the studio next door.
“Come quickly! The pirate’s in the Multiphon!”
Each of them flew to a desk, all of them selecting English because Thai was the only other option. The chamber must have been half empty when this started. It was bursting out in faces: but there was only one voice. Rajath spoke from the Multiphon taboo-room at Uji. He had blown the Sarah Brown story already. Printed précis ran up their subscreens.
They were bewildered. Aleutians didn’t understand the Multiphon, hated it; wouldn’t go near it. But Rajath was handling the screen like a veteran. His personality leapt out at them, entirely present.
“No! Don’t imagine you can apologies and forget it. You have pretended to trust us. You trust no one. You are all of you liars, cheats, thieves. Do you think we don’t know this? We know the truth about each of you, about all your kind. None better. You declare war while pretending peace, building weapons in secret when you know it is against the law. Why do you only speak to each other through the dead? Why else but because you fear to be found out in your lies. All right, if that’s the way you want it. In ten days from now those areas we have designated must be handed over, evacuated and sterilized for our use. Remember, we have undreamed of powers. We shall punish cruelty, and reward obedience!”
His figure seemed to grow, dominating the whole chamber. The idealized turning globe, which closed a major speech, struggled under his outstretched hands. The dais screen went blank.
“That’s Kaoru,
Kaoru put him up to that,” muttered Ellen. Her voice was shaking.
There were no scheduled flights to the USSA from Thailand. It took Douglas Milne five days to get to Washington, painfully guilty all the way. He belonged to the generation that had abandoned jet transport. He had traveled to KT by boat, under clean solar power and sail. He felt he was sinking back into the filth.
The geophysical catastrophe of ’04, that had wiped the Japanese islands from the sea, had also marked the point for the USA where the slide from unlimited prosperity to decline turned into an avalanche. Japanese enclaves had sprung up all over the world, but the China with Japan effect was a phenomenon or a different order. Japan and China became one, an entity with no great friendship for the US; and the hungry giant began to call in some debts. Economic and environmental disasters had worked together Not instantly, but in a couple of decades. Johnny Guglioli, the Petrovirus scapegoat, was just one of the many, post holocaust babies, who had no conception of the horrified loss that benumbed his elders. He had lived in a walled citadel, and accepted the badlands outside as natural. He’d worked for a limited good, a better deal from his feudal lady, without beginning to imagine rebirthing a nation. There’d been others, with bigger ideas.
In ’24 a Hispano-African lady called Maria-Jesus, a motel cleaner, took one of the rich to court for “illegal domestic surveillance.” She didn’t do it on her own. The image of this poor woman, neither young nor pretty, being spied on as she brushed her teeth or changed her sanitary tampon in her miserable little rooms, was supposed to push buttons. She did.
“Illegal” surveillance was an accepted fact of life, and an irrational sticking-point for a nation addicted to subscriber soap. No matter. The case grew, until there were millions out on the streets shouting for Maria-Jesus. There was a lot of flailing around at the end, when things finally got violent. Ironically, relatively, the final flipover had been a right-wing coup. But that piece of trivia was already lost. Socialism (of an American kind) had triumphed.
It would have been the story of the century, if the aliens had not arrived.
Rajath’s speech devastated everyone who heard it. The superbeing had spoken at last, de haut en bas, as they had been longing for him to do. He opened up vast pits of guilt and fear. Robin Lloyd-Price recorded that he remembered the feeling from prep-school. The relief at having been found out, the desperate longing to be punished. By the time Douglas Milne reached the President, most of the world had seen the pirate’s speech, and the punishment had begun.
The first thing he saw when he walked into the Oval Office was a huge painting, in oils, of Daniel Ortega on his white horse. Carlotta stood beneath it. She was heavier than when he’d last seen her, much woman in a ribbed maroon silk suit and magisterial heels. Her dark hair was combed back, held at the nape with a clasp of silver. The parrot perched on her shoulder, she was feeding it with sunflower seeds.
“What’s that? Some kind of memento mori?”
“If you like. Can you live with it?”
She was the age that people are when they stop being young and before they hit the wall, so long as they can afford healthcare. Impossible to say closer than that. He remembered her differently: young in anger, old in poverty.
“No,” she said. “I will not be looking for excuses, in a few years’ time, to put the gilt braid on my cap and groom my grandchildren for stardom. I begin as I mean to be remembered: a colorful figurehead. Don’t you know, Douglas, the successful revolution (she pronounced it the European way, soft in the middle) is when afterwards everything is almost the same as before. Only a little notch better.”
She touched the parrot’s feet: it waddled down her arm.
“Pirate, put the shells in the bin, please.”
“Okay, sister. Anything to oblige my sweetheart.”
Douglas hated that bird. It made him (he was aware of the subtext) feel redundant. Carlotta walked around the desk and he sat—collapsed—facing her.
“What’s going on?” he asked, piteously. “Is there a, a body count? I’ve seen nothing, only the tabloids on the plane: obviously doctored stuff, horror movies.”
Carlotta looked at him wryly. “I wouldn’t be too sure. No, there’s no body count. The thing’s too random, too many panic reports.”
Three days after Rajath’s speech there had been an accident in the UK, on infill work beside one of the old freeways—a minor news item snatched by the tabloids and blown up as a horrific freak occurrence. It was juicy stuff, delicious cuts of rampaging bulldozers, earthmovers with bloody teeth; mangled human limbs. The world’s lowest form of newslife used no human sources. They grabbed health-and-safety records of bloody accidents, police incident reports; they doctored brawls and accidents and turned them into horror-shorts. This was well known. It was twelve hours, perhaps, a long time, anyway, before the world understood that the tabloids were showing unenhanced reality…and connected it with the alien’s promise of retribution.
In England, a team of smart civil engineering machines turned on their supervisors, and hapless bystanders. In France, there was mayhem in one wing of a large modern hospital. In Pakistan, a refrigerator factory had come to life and killed its whole complement of machine minders. That one was recognized as perhaps the first outbreak, it had been happening as Rajath spoke. Others came to light; and it was still going on. Mainly in South Asia, but, as Carlotta said, it was difficult to sort out a clear pattern.
The incidents themselves were nothing, in terms of the numbers of dead. Nothing, to the mortal dread they inspired.
“You had to come back in person?”
“I’m not a telepath. Rajath convinced me not to rely for long on any kind of communication Aleutians don’t like. So I came home.”
“Well, you were wrong. The videophones are still working. So far it looks as if we’re clean, this side of the ocean.”
Douglas put his face in his hands and groaned.
“Coralin!”
On the day (as they later discovered) that the aliens had announced themselves in Alaska, there’d been mysterious failures in USAF information systems. The collapse traced back to the Francistown base. The timing of the damage was such that its extent would never be known. A lot of data had been destroyed, mangled or mislaid in those last most turbulent days of revolution. Plus, the failure involved coralin, so it had been treated with special secrecy. No party in the struggle wanted a new QV-infection stink. It was after things calmed down, that people had realized the obvious connection with the aliens.
In the nascent USSA the Aleutians were widely regarded as real, supernatural angels, and the Big Machines were revered with an intense religiosity. The revolutionaries, when they understood their dilemma, had taken a calculated risk. The story they’d allowed to escape was that the “genius child” alien had understood in an instant how to use an earthling computer terminal. Nothing about a trail of damage. There had been no proof.
“This is our baby, Carlotta. We knew what they could do, and we said nothing—”
“We said nothing because we knew there was nothing to be done. Did you hear about the French hospital? Seems the Aleutians don’t like sick people anymore than they like tv.”
She examined an imaginary blemish on one wine-dark nail.
“Maybe they can fuck with anything. Maybe transistors will die screaming, maybe not a screwdriver is safe. But I tell you this as a friend, Dougie. If you have money in the Blue Clay, in my country, get it out now.”
They can turn the machines against us. What are we without intelligent machines? Douglas knew what kind of hospital it had been. Gene therapy, longevity and fertility. Robotics and refrigerators. The aliens were attacking the sham of the slowdown. They were attacking the fakery that was still destroying the living world, despite the most hellish of warnings.
He thought of something that had happened when the Alaskans and the Africans arrived at Uji. They had casualties with them, injured in the crossing. They were put in a room by themsel
ves. Medical aid was declined. No one saw them again. Milne had been foremost among the non-interventionists. “If they know how to die,” he remembered telling the team, “I hope they can teach us.” So now the teaching had begun. He shuddered.
Stop that.
“If we could cut through the panic,” Carlotta was saying. “The smarts for the English road-plant were newly air-freighted from South China, a short jet-plane ride from Thailand.”
Doug grimaced. Air-freighted robotics. There it was again, crime and punishment.
Carlotta scowled at him. “Oh, come on, Dougie. This isn’t deathrays from the Overmind. They got out of Uji and they did something. If we could trace a South East Asian connection for all the, you know, the metastasizing, at least we might cut them down to size.”
“Oh, God. What are we going to do?”
“Douglas, how would I know? You tell me.”
She stared at him. “Do you know we’re about to go to war?” Her hands with their blood red nails spread on the desk top, a gesture of strength. In her eyes a sweet, bleak tenderness: mother to the world. “It’s going to be ugly, ugly. I am proud of that. I am proud to know that the boys of our United Socialist States will make terrible soldiers. They can’t cope with that role, they hate it.”
The fast editing didn’t repulse him. He admired her. Most likely nobody would lift the room’s record of this hour, most likely the war with Canada didn’t mean a thing anymore. But she would go on until the end: honing her phrases, polishing her gestures, her whole internal life one speech-writing session; one eye always on the monitor in her head. Good for Carlotta, if she could die in harness, governing from under the red light. The people get to watch us, we don’t get to watch them. That was the right way.
The last time he’d been in this room there’d been sleeping bags scuffed about, a microwave on the floor surrounded by spilling cartons of food debris. Things had changed. He noticed suddenly that most signs of Big Machine presence had departed along with the frost. That had been one of their aims: to slacken off an unhealthy obsession. They’d had so many other good purposes. It had been working, too. Beginning to work. But he had given it all up gladly to go to Uji. Regret, regret, such a feeling of loss. If Carlotta could read his mind right now, she’d think he was crazy. Or hypnotized, possessed.
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