Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project)

by John Barnes

  Each spring we all pile back onto the estate, of course, to help with pollination. Tinkerers all, we experiment sometimes with boxes of mechanical bees, imported at swingeing cost from Shenzhen or Macao. But nothing works as well as a chicken feather wielded by a practised hand. This is how Ned, the scion of our line, came to plummet from the topmost rung of his ladder. The sons he had been teaching screamed, and from where I sat, stirring drying pots on the kitchen table, the first thing that struck me was how they sounded just like girls.

  DAD LEADS ME in. Much fuss is made of me. The boys vie with each other to tell their little brothers about the day, the airfield, the mayor. While Dad’s women are cooing over them, I go through to the yard.

  Ned is sitting where he usually sits on sunny days like these, in the shelter of the main greenhouse, with a view of our plum trees. They, more than any other crop, have made our family rich, and it occurs to me with a lurch, seeing my brother slumped there in his chair under rugs, that it is not the sight of their fruit that has him enthralled. He is watching the walls. He is watching the gate. He is guarding our trees. There’s a gun by his side. A shotgun. We only ever fill the cartridges with rock salt. But still.

  Ned sees me and smiles and beckons me to the bench beside him. “It’s time,” he says.

  I knew this was coming.

  “I can’t pretend I can do this anymore. Look at me. Look.”

  I say what you have to say in these situations. Deep down, though, I can only assent. There’s a lump in my throat. “I haven’t earned this.”

  But Ned and I, we have always been close, and who else should he turn to, in his pain and disability and growing weakness? Who else should he hand the business to?

  The farm will be mine. Melissa. The boys. All of it mine. Everything I ever wanted, though it has never been my place to take a single pip. It is being given to me freely, now. A life. A family. As if I deserved it!

  “Think of the line,” says Ned, against my words of protest. “The sons I’ll never have.”

  We need sons, heaven knows. Young guns to hold our beachheads against the French. Keepers to protect our crop from night-stealing London boys. Swords to fight the feuds that, quite as much a marriage pacts, shape our living in this hungry world.

  It is no use. I have no head for politics. Try as I might, I cannot think of sons, but only of their making. Celia Johnson with a speck of grit in her eye. Underwear and a bed of dreams. May God forgive me, I am that depraved, my every thought is sex.

  Ned laughs. He knows, and has always known, of my weakness. My interest in women. It is, for all the changes our world’s been through, still not an easy thing, for men to turn their backs on all the prospects a wife affords.

  “Pick me a plum,” my brother says. So I go pick a plum. Men have been shot for less. With rock salt, yes. But still.

  I remember the night we chose, Ned and I, not to raid the larder of the poor, confused old woman who had burst into my room. Perhaps it was simply the strangeness of the day that stopped us. (We stole one jar and left the rest alone.) I would like to think, though, that our forbearance sprang from some simple, instinct of our own. Call it decency.

  It is hard, in such revolutionary times, always to feel good about oneself.

  “Here,” I say, returning to my crippled benefactor, the plum nursed in my hands.

  Ned’s look, as he pushes the fruit into his mouth, is the same look he gave me the night we tasted, ate, and finished entirely, that jar of priceless, finite honey. Pleasure. Mischief. God help us all: youth.

  Ten, twelve years on, Ned’s enjoying another one-time treat: he chews a plum. A fruit that might have decked the table of the mayor himself, and earned our boys a month of crusts. He spits the stone into the dust. Among our parsimonious lot, this amounts to a desperate display of power: Ned knows that he is dying.

  I wonder how it tastes, that plum—and Ned, being Ned, sees and knows it all: my shamefaced ambition. My inexcusable excitement. To know so much is to excuse so much, I guess, because he beckons me, my brother and my friend, and once I’m knelt before him, spits that heavy, sweet paste straight into my mouth. And makes me king.

  Interrogation: Narsis

  WHEN MY SUITS bring the wayward agents in, Lisha strips them naked, bare, except for a blinder of organic mesh – try to rip it off and you’ll rip off your own face. You put the agent inside a filter you tell them is set to disintegrate them. Make them squat on their haunches until the muscles of their bodies shudder, and they make those little mewling sounds, those hiccupping sobs of pre-language.

  This is interrogation, body politic. This is my job.

  I get names. Who took them off their meds, who turned them against Defense. Are you Opposition? Against organics? Who gave your orders?

  It’s always the same name.

  Keli.

  Keli is afraid of three things, they tell me:

  Needles, women and knives.

  But no one can find him.

  When I get back to my room in the barracks, step through my own filter, it cleans me of agents’ blood.

  Then I vomit into the sink.

  I vomit every time.

  I have more metal promotion loops in my ears than any of the other Suits. I’ve been on oral meds and injections for years. Helps with the job, Defense tells me. They bred me to do what I do, they say, and the meds are perfecting me for it, they say, but I don’t feel perfected to it. I feel obligated to it. There’s a difference.

  THEN ONE DAY we start losing our systems. Me, Flire, Mesta and three of the other Suits. All of our case files come up empty.

  Somebody calls in a click/agent pair to jack in and fix it. The click/agent pair – the agent dark and tall like a Suit, the click small and pale and too-thin – work for an hour. The agent jacks the click into my system and inserts his jack-in knife into one of the fleshy openings on the click’s wrist so he can translate for me. My system has crashed, he tells me; like a bird.

  The next day, all the interrogation systems are down too.

  Keli is having a laugh at us, I bet.

  I go back to the click/agent pair. The agent trembles when I override the filter that protects his doorway. He starts screaming even before I touch him. I tell Lisha to haul out this agent’s click from the Kettering compound.

  Interrogation. The only thing I know. When a new click jacks in and something else comes crashing down, someone needs to ask the questions.

  She gives me a four-letter name, the same name: Keli.

  I bleed the agent and her click across my boots.

  I go home. I don’t make it to the sink before I vomit.

  THE SUMMONS COMES after I interrogate the fourteenth of Keli’s turned agents.

  Defense puts me in a dark little conference room with the bubble-haze of another filter over it, programmed to allow only us in. There’s a ceiling of twisted blue glass, and glow worms pulse inside of it, shedding blue-filtered light. Inside the filter there’s only me and two Defense Suits.

  I sit at a square table dipped in chalk blue.

  They stand. They always stand. They’re bigger than even me, tall and broad-shouldered, black hair, black eyes. I can never tell them apart.

  “You have the name of the one causing these problems,” the one on the right says, “yet you have not located him.”

  “He’s outside the realm of my authority,” I say. Meaning he’s just a name. He could be anyone, anything, nothing.

  Right says, “We have someone whose authority he may be more familiar with.”

  Left pulls out a case file from the deep reaches of the black coat, sets the file at the center of the desk.

  I pull out the blank pages, press my palm to the first page, watch words bleed out.

  “We’ve acquired a click from the Liberation of Jabow,” Right says. “We emptied the prison camps and brought back one of theirs. Ready to work for us now.”

  I skim the text. He’s some genetic anomaly, splicing experimentatio
n, forced starvation, selective breeding, but no organic technologies. No weapons breeding.

  “I thought Jabow was a weapons-breeding compound,” I say. “I thought we were getting a hold of their weapons tech with that raid, not just some smart kid.”

  “His name is Jan,” Left says.

  “A click, then?” I say.

  I look up, into two pairs of black eyes.

  “I can find Keli on my own,” I say.

  Left and Right exchange black glances.

  Right says: “You have three days to find Keli. After three days, the Council will have an end to this. It ends with the purging of Keli. Or the purging of you. You understand.”

  I understand. I know all about spilling someone else’s blood to purge my own ghosts.

  Disinterred: Jan

  MY FACE IN the palm of my hand: I dream in chalky blues and red. I can’t eat, my throat won’t swallow, so they hook me up to tubing, drip drip drip.

  I can see the strings around us all now; they’re silky, wormy, organic, just like the rest of their tech. They call it tech. I call it slavery.

  I dream of cats, cats curling around me, warm, purring. Soothing me to sleep. I can eat again. Some soup. Suit soup. I like to say that out loud sometimes now, I don’t know why: a soup of Suits.

  The nurse helps me out of bed, and walks me in the garden. There’s a physical shield over the garden, she says, not an organic one, since their organics make me so sick. There’s a high wall around the garden. I can’t see over it. There are spikes at the top, long as my fingers, silver spikes. All of the plants are tall and big and leafy.

  The nurse is afraid of me. No one else comes into the house. They are still leaving me books, Opposition texts. They want me to do something for them, to do what I did in Jabow before they destroyed everything, before I was put into the hole. But I still tear out all of the pages. I eat them.

  I sleep, and my dreams are cats’ dreams. I sleep all day, twenty-eight hours, sleep and I’m still tired. They have cleaned out the bacteria from the water, all of the water, in the basin and tub and toilet. My rash is gone. The boils have scarred over.

  They are here.

  I wake up. I am shaking.

  I hear footsteps, a new voice.

  A figure turning into my doorway, black, all in black, with skin of burnished brown and black black hair and black black eyes. It’s one of them. The Suits. They will burn this place down again, burn it down and twist me open...

  The Suit looks at me. Her eyes are big, her body tense. “I’m licensed to interrogate you,” the Suit says. “Interrogation,” she says, louder.

  “You are the one who stirs the Suits,” I say.

  I see her hands shake. She puts them in her pockets. She is tall and broad like the men in Jabow who tried to destroy me, and her face is square and straight with lines at the eyes, there, just where they close. She has to close her eyes more than most people. I can see that.

  But she does not close her eyes at me.

  Systems: Narsis

  HE? IT? WAR criminal. Prison camps. How long they kept him there with the other prisoners in Jabow before they realized what he was, I don’t know. It wasn’t in the case file.

  I should have expected him to look like this, skin over bone, hollowed cheeks, shaved head – looks too big for his body, a bobbing melon on a stick. But it is the eyes that pull me. Big, blue-green, with long, black lashes. That pairing, big eyes and long lashes, is boyishly coy; alluring, attractive in this emaciated body of which nothing can be boyish or coy.

  “I am Jan,” he says.

  I want to touch him, to see if he’s really alive. Can you be that skinny and be alive? Where do you keep all of your internal organs?

  “Narsis,” I say.

  The too-big head bobs.

  Silence again.

  “I’m told that you were bred by the Opposition,” I say, finally. “You were bred to be an organic communications hub.”

  The lids close over the eyes, the lashes flutter. He looks at me again. I want him to keep looking at me.

  “I studied systems,” Jan says. “The cyclical nature of universal systems. When you look up at the stars, you’re only seeing systems, complex relationships between bodies of mass identical in make-up, mutation and construction to the smaller internal systems within the body.”

  I wanted to tell him he didn’t study systems, he was a system, but it was likely the Opposition never told him that.

  I think about blindfolds and Lisha and broken bones, bruised bodies. Interrogation will kill this little bird. And he’s mad, broken to pieces.

  “When you look out at the universe, all you see is yourself, looking in,” Jan says. “Cyclical systems. Abbreviated, simplified version. We were still working out the mathematics. And then they killed the cats.”

  “The cats,” I say.

  He is twisted up in his sheets so tightly I think he’s cutting off the circulation to all the limbs of his body.

  He leans toward me as far as he can in the bundle of sheets and says, “Ask them about the cats.”

  I am wasting my time. I turn to go, leave my back to him, stride to the doorway.

  “You vomit afterwards.”

  I stop. I wait until I’m sure he’s not going to say anything else. I turn. He’s staring at me, little hands still fisted in the sheets.

  “Ask them about the cats,” Jan says. He buries his head into the pillows.

  I walk out into the hall, still shaking, and I have to grab onto the edge of the kitchen table to catch my balance. The nurse is talking to me. I can hear her voice, but it’s muted, distant, and I’m breathing too fast. I vomit

  The nurse is grabbing me with her fleshy hands. She has a needle in her hand. I hate needles. She sits me down into a chair, and I’m still shaking. I ask for kaj, but when she gives me some I choke on it and spit it back into my palm, bloody red.

  Liberation: Narsis

  I SLEEP FOR twelve hours. All of my case files are on my crashed system, destroyed by the dirty click. So I chew enough kaj to numb all sense and go upstairs to ask for Defense. They give me two new Defense Suits and sit me down in the conference room.

  The haze of the filter makes me dizzy.

  “The cats,” I say.

  The new Left and Right look at one another.

  “They’re an unknown,” Left says. “We have yet to ascertain the exact nature of their function. The Liberation party found him with cats.”

  “How many?” I say.

  “Four,” Left says.

  Right says, “The Liberation party found him in a steel room built into the ground and sealed in by a steel escape hatch. Opposition put him there when their lines broke six months before, hoping to hide him until they could come back for him.”

  “Did he eat the cats?” I say.

  Right frowns at me. “Of course not.”

  “The Liberation party killed them,” Left says. “He wouldn’t leave without the cats. We’ll give you the relevant case file.”

  “My system’s down.”

  “Get a click to store them for you,” Left says.

  “I don’t work with clicks,” I say.

  “What do you think he is?” Left says. “He’s their version of click, a system on his own, without having to jack in. He’s connected to everything already, or he was supposed to be, before we broke Opposition’s lines and they withdrew from Jabow. There isn’t a security measure we’ve devised that can stop him. He’s brimming with data. The identity of your troublesome rebel should be easy, if he could sort it from the rest.”

  “But he doesn’t need an agent to direct and translate,” I say. “He’s both, then. Click and agent?”

  “He’s something else,” Right says, glaring over at Left. “We’ll consult on how much information can be released to you.”

  “We need you to take care of this,” Left says, slowly. “Your expertise in the area is... unmatched.”

  They release another file to me.
I don’t call in a click to store them for me. I take them to my room and spread them out on the bed. I press my palms to the pages, watch the text bleed out.

  Jan, in a hole in the ground for six months, lying stagnant, forgotten, with food and cats and running water and no organic tech. It was all mechanized: electric lighting, water piped in through some kind of pump system. I don’t understand much about Opposition tech. What I see is Jan described as they found him: sick-thin, maggot-pale, lying in the center of a metal floor, surrounded by cats. The food had run out two weeks before. The Liberation party tried to move him, but the cats attacked them. “Four big cats, about four or five kilos apiece,” the report says. Jan started screaming, and the Liberation party tasered the cats.

  Liberation put him into a holding cell with the rest of the prisoners of war for three years until Defense realized what he was and pulled him out for experiments; only a handful of sentences about this part have bled onto the page, bits about neural activity, and massive allergic reactions. Then they brought him to the Kettering compound, sealed him inside his own self-contained unit, and peeled all of the organic tech out of it to curb his violent allergies.

  They sealed him in and shut him up, deemed him ‘mentally and emotionally unstable for any relevant study until recovery.’

  I shake my head and push the files off the bed. I am chasing the words of a mad prisoner, and Keli is turning my agents, and Defense wants me purged if I can’t find out who he is. Three days. Not enough.

  I try to sleep, but the dreams are bad. I wake up sweating but cold, and I’m out of kaj. I lie in the center of my bed and nod off into a milky half-haze that passes for sleep.

  Lisha buzzes me. I sit up and he’s standing out in the hall, just outside the sheer filter over my door. I hit the admit switch and the filter light turns green. He walks in, already neatly dressed, black hair slicked back. I check the time. Still six hours until dawn.