Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  Mary caught his expression and laughed.

  “What are you so worried about? No one will be watching us. We’re both invisible. Both invisible. Fact of life. Fact of our lives, I should say.”

  At that she took hold of her green skirt by the hem and pulled it right up so the tops of her thighs were exposed.

  “Stop it,” muttered Constantine.

  “Why?” Mary asked, pulling her skirt up still further to show the faded pink daisy-printed panties she wore beneath. “See what I mean?” she said. “No one’s looking at us, are they? Are they? Are they looking at us? No.”

  Constantine turned his back on the two hotel porters, who were now looking in any direction but his. He took hold of Mary’s skirt and pulled it back down.

  “For goodness’ sake, stop it. What do you want?”

  “I want you to acknowledge me for who I am. I want you to speak to me. And I want to do you a favor. I might know something to your advantage. Yes. To everyone’s advantage. Listen to me and you could become a big man. The savior of Stonebreak, they’ll call you.”

  Constantine paused, listening to his inner voices.

  —She certainly believes that what she’s saying is the truth, said the Red intelligence.

  —If you go along with her for the moment, she will at least stop drawing attention to you, said Blue.

  —I have nothing to add, said White.

  Constantine and the others waited for a moment for the last intelligence, the Grey one, to speak, but as always it remained silent. Constantine gave a shrug. He turned to Mary.

  “Okay. I’ll listen, but no more drawing attention to us.”

  Mary gave a delighted smile. “Good. You won’t regret this. Come on. This way. We’re going up to the top of the city.”

  She linked her arm through Constantine’s and began to walk along the side of the canal.

  “You still haven’t told me your name.”

  “Ben D’Roza,” said Constantine.

  “Ben? I don’t think so. That was the name on your train ticket, and it will be the name on your hotel reservation, I’m sure, but it’s not your real name, is it?”

  Constantine sighed.

  “Okay. It’s Constantine,” he said. “Constantine Storey.”

  “Constantine,” said Mary carefully, as if practicing the name. “Constantine. I like that. And have you ever been to Stonebreak before, Constantine?”

  “Yes. Several times.”

  “Business or pleasure? Business, I bet, since you’ve got the face of someone who couldn’t have fun in a brothel with a platinum e-card tied to his dick. Have you ever been a tourist here in Stonebreak, Constantine?”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “Then let me show you around. I’ll show you something that will interest you.”

  She slipped her hand down Constantine’s arm and took hold of his left hand, squeezing it tightly with her fat fingers so that his wedding ring dug painfully into his flesh.

  They walked along a typical Stonebreak street. A wide, shallow, canal ran parallel to the narrow road, separated from it by a series of wide, tree-planted lawns. The whole was bordered by short rows of one- or two-story shops and houses, intercut with narrow alleyways accessible only to pedestrians. Chairs and tables had spilled from the cafes and bars out onto the lawns and were now slowly filling with the evening trade. A young woman walked by, hanging onto the arm of a tanned young man. She was dressed in the latest fashion: a simple white shift, her neck and arms wrapped in exotically curved bangles of silver and gold. She smiled prettily at Constantine and Mary as they passed, heading in the opposite direction.

  The smell of the evening grass, the gentle splash of the water, the sheer prettiness of the cool narrow alleys, all these had helped Constantine relax sufficiently to return the young woman’s smile, though he was still confused.

  “On nights like this, you wonder why they call Stonebreak a design failure,” said Mary.

  They passed a cafe done up in period style: glass tables, bent beech chairs, and white linen. From its wide windows, light shone across the darkening lawns, illuminating the customers sipping beer and wine at tables arranged in a circle around an enormous lime tree.

  “Where are we going?” asked Constantine, eventually.

  “Relax,” said Mary. “Do you see any other people around here looking tense? No. They’re all out for a pleasant evening’s stroll and a drink. Do you want to be noticed? I don’t think so. So just hold my hand and try to look as if you’re enjoying yourself.”

  Constantine had been enjoying himself. Now he suddenly realized how incredibly out of place he appeared in his business suit. He wished he’d had time to change into the same cool, loose-fitting dress the locals adopted.

  “Now,” said Mary, “at the moment we’re on the second level of Stonebreak. Residential and leisure: medium-density housing and shopping. We’re going to head to the center, the fourth level: cultural quarter and Source. Stonebreak, as you should know, is built as four concentric circles, each raised above the last. Beneath us lies a thin layer of maintenance ducts and so on, and beneath that, the main support structure, and beneath that again the transport system and I-train terminus.”

  “Thank you for the travelogue. Is there a reason for it?” asked Constantine.

  Mary shook her head. “Just being friendly. It’s nice to have someone to speak to. Talking’s nice, don’t you think? It’s nice to have a conversation.”

  Constantine muttered something in reply. Mary chatted away happily.

  “When I first started out I had a comfort family set up for me in Brazil. I did a lot of work in Brazil. I was there a lot of the year. Hans, that was my husband…well, he thought he was anyway. You know how it is. Two kids. Ellie and Gerhardt. It was somewhere to go and have a decent meal and just chat with someone…”

  Her voice tailed off as she strolled on, lost in thought. Constantine glanced at her and felt a sudden stab of pity. She was obviously living in much reduced circumstances now. The shabbiness of what had been an expensive suit and her once exercise-honed body running to alcohol-fueled fat suggested someone who had been high up within a company hierarchy. This physical manifestation of failure walking alongside him reminded Constantine of the pressure to succeed he himself was under. He turned his face from the narrow alley squeezed between two yellow stone cottages. A silver strand of nothingness showed at its end.

  The gap beneath the sky was spreading. He was going mad.

  Mary seemed to rouse herself.

  “What about you, then?” she said. “Do you have a comfort family?”

  “Me? No,” said Constantine, his mind still elsewhere.

  Mary gave a knowing laugh. “Of course not,” she said, a note of bitterness creeping into her voice. “I forgot. It’s different for men, isn’t it? I bet you’ve got a string of skinny, unwitting twenty-year-old girls lined up from here to Alaska. All their details looked up from your company database and a script worked out so you can flatter your way into their apartments and their panties. I remember what it used to be like. It feels more moral to you than using a brothel, doesn’t it? And you don’t get your dinner cooked in a brothel, or your shirts ironed, or someone sitting up at night watching football with you, or slicing lemons when you have a cold, or—”

  “I’m married.”

  Mary stopped dead, her hand pulling Constantine backward. She opened her mouth wide in disbelief and began to laugh.

  “Married? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “It means something to me,” said Constantine simply. Mary brought her face close and breathed a sweet, alcohol breath over Constantine. She looked up into his eyes.

  “I don’t believe it. You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

  She turned around again, took his hand, and began to drag him back along the street.

  “Come on. We’re going to be late.”

  Night shadows were spreading. White light shone from the spherica
l paper lanterns strung in looping lines between the chestnuts and limes that marched up the central lawn. A white barge came gliding down the canal, elderly people enjoying their pre-dinner drinks on the deck; the smell of prawns being fried in garlic and butter wafted from the open windows of the galley below.

  —This is taking too long, said Blue, his voice seeming too loud in the stillness that was settling with the evening.—Are we being led into a trap?

  —I can’t see anything around us, answered Red.—Besides, I trust her. Her body language backs up her words. I don’t think she’s keeping anything from us.

  —I…agree, said Blue,—but I can’t help thinking that someone with the ability to train as a ghost might have enough skill to conceal her motives, even from us.

  “Be quiet,” muttered Constantine, concealing his mouth with his hand and pretending to cough. “She’s watching me. She knows I’m listening to you. You’re supposed to be a secret, remember?”

  Mary was gazing up at him again, her eyes full of cool appraisal. Constantine nodded toward the barge.

  “That smells delicious, doesn’t it?” he said.

  A pair of tramlines emerged from a side street to their left and swept round to follow the axis of the central strip of grass. The line of trees now moved to one side to make way for it. They walked on in silence for a while. Presently a tram came bumping along, an ancient construction of wood and metal that clanked and rattled as it trundled down the rails. It slowed sufficiently for Mary and Constantine to climb on board and then grumbled to itself as it sped up again. The pair sat down on a bench of varnished wooden slats. Constantine rubbed his fingers approvingly across the warm wood.

  “When Stonebreak was set to build itself, they wanted the best of all worlds,” said Mary. “The Australian and Southeast Asian government wanted it to be both ultra modern and ultra traditional. That’s why you can still see the VNM bodies in the I-station, and that’s why the tramlines zigzag around this level. Some thought trams were too modern to be ultra traditional, so it was decided that no line should run the entire length of any street. It will be a twisty journey from here to the locks.”

  “Fine,” said Constantine, surprised to realize how relaxed he was becoming. If it hadn’t been for his encounter with Mary, he would have gone straight to his hotel and would now be worrying about tomorrow’s business. Instead, he was seeing the sights of Stonebreak. Even the mystery of his guide’s purpose and identity was giving him something else to think about for a while. It helped that Mary did not seem threatening in any way.

  “You can feel it, can’t you?” said Mary.

  “What?”

  “A sense of freedom. I can see it in your face. Everyone thinks that being a ghost means you can do what you want, whenever you want, but they don’t get it, do they? They don’t know what it’s like to be regularly exposed to indifference. Most people think it would be good to get out from under the noses of Social Care, but you miss it once it’s gone. What if you fall ill, and there’s no one there to see it? That’s when you regret the millions of credits worth of software constantly combing the world’s databases and removing each and every trace and reference to you. What if you were drunk and fell from this tram into the canal? There would be no record of your destination or your point of origin. Every computer sensor you’ve passed has been deliberately turned the other way as soon as they detected your bio signature. No one is waiting up for you somewhere because your employers want it that way, so no one would even know that you were splashing feebly in the water down there in an alcoholic haze.”

  She sighed and leaned back in her chair.

  “And that’s not the worst part, is it? It’s the loneliness.”

  She wiped a fat hand across the corners of her eyes and sighed, then she sat up and forced a smile.

  “Still. It could be worse. Maybe it’s not so bad for you. You’ve got the voices in your head for company, after all.”

  “Voices?” Constantine forced a puzzled expression onto his face.

  Mary put a hand to her mouth and raised one shoulder a little. “Oops. Sorry. Silly me. They’re supposed to be a secret, aren’t they? Pretend I didn’t say anything. Nothing about voices.”

  She giggled and nudged him in the ribs.

  “Still, I’ll tell you something. You want to be careful when those voices that don’t exist are speaking to you. Your whole face relaxes and it makes you look really stupid. I suppose they don’t think to control your expression. You should tell them that. Oh, sorry, I mean, if they really existed, you should.”

  She giggled again, then sighed.

  “I wish this tram would get a move on.”

  They reached the inner perimeter of the second level. Just beyond the stone streets, a glass cliff rose into the sky, marking the border between the old and the new. Through this transparent wall Constantine could see the skeleton of the land: silver-grey bodies of VNMs in thick-plaited strands, rising in smooth curves and waves to support the next level up. The scene reminded Constantine of a mangrove swamp, a tangle of short-trunked trees with wide-spreading roots and intertwining branches, holding up the roof of the world. Staring at the greyish tangled trunks before him, Constantine had his first sudden inkling of the sheer size of Stonebreak, and the huge effort that had gone into its construction. He felt quite humbled.

  Mary yawned loudly and began to scratch her side.

  “They left the walls transparent so that people could see the roots of the city. Back then they were just showing off; now that VNMs build everything, it’s more of an embarrassment. The base is solid and there’s no room for the modification or organic growth that you get in modern arcologies. Stonebreak is lodged firmly in the past. It was defunct the day they built it. Some day they’re going to have to tear it down and start again.”

  She gave a little sigh. “It can’t come soon enough for me. Come on, onwards and upwards.”

  There were elevators set into the base of the soaring wall. Perfectly transparent, they rode its inside as invisible as a sheet of glass in water. As they ascended, Constantine looked out over Stonebreak: at the low-rise streets, light reflecting from the black water of the canals, and beyond that to the darkened outer area that held the expansive gardens and arboretums, the playing fields and farmland situated on the first level, and then, finally, to the empty wilderness of the Nullarbor plain.

  He felt as if he was walking through a dream. The bustle of the I-station and the awakening nightlife of the second level seemed to belong to another world.

  Am I drugged? he suddenly asked the intelligences in his head.

  There was a pause before they answered.

  —I don’t think so, said Red.

  Another, longer pause.

  —No. I can’t see anything, but I know what you mean. Things seem strange.

  —I agree. Go carefully.

  From the fourth intelligence, as always, there came no word.

  Mary took his arm and pointed to their left. Water was falling in a twisting tube down the inside of the wall, a liquid tornado, except moving with none of the violence and energy; instead, it seemed to splash and play like a merry stream. Hidden lights shone on the torrent, sending rainbows spinning and flashing and dancing around the inside of the glass walls in a fairy display.

  “That’s the water that feeds the canals. It passes through the water features and fountains of the business quarter on its way from the evaporators at the center of Stonebreak. They say if the water flow ever ceased, we’d all be dead within twenty-four hours. They built this city on one of the most inhospitable terrains on Earth.”

  She sighed. “I’ll tell you what, though. I like it. I like the way it looks. I think it’s pretty, you know? Everything else within the wall is about power and size and strength, but that waterfall, it’s just about making something for pleasure.”

  Constantine frowned. “Oh, come on Mary, all of the second level looks nice. All those streets and canals. I’ve been in far w
orse places. Many people would like to live there, given the choice.”

  Mary shook her head and laughed.

  “Oh, Constantine. How can you be so naïve? Being a ghost, obviously a trusted man within your organization, you should be able to look more deeply into the reasons for things, and yet you accept this at face value? Stonebreak wasn’t about providing a nice environment to live and work, Stonebreak was all about telling the world that the Australian and Southeast Asian coalition had come of age and that they weren’t prepared to be fucked with. When they raised this arcology, they were taking out their big dicks and slamming them on the table, saying ‘Look at these! How about these for prime Australian beef, you fuckers.’”

  Constantine smiled weakly at Mary’s imagery. The elevator slid to a halt and the doors opened, but Mary stayed where she was, warming to her theme.

  “But it all backfired. They moved too soon. Now they’re left with this huge white elephant and they stand in awe and envy of those other organizations that stayed their hand. Now they look to Toronto and Lake Baikal and Atlantis and they wonder what to do next, but they’re worried. A deeper crisis is unfolding, one that goes to the heart of Stonebreak, one that must remain a secret…And then a ghost arrives…”

  She looked knowingly at Constantine, who kept his face carefully blank, but all the time waves of relief were washing through him. She didn’t know. She didn’t realize that he was here on a far larger mission, one whose roots went back to long before the building of Stonebreak. The very thought of it made Constantine shiver. Sometimes he forgot for a few minutes the importance of his task, but the memory soon returned, weighing down upon him. No wonder he was stressed. No wonder he was seeing things. Or not, as the case may be.

  “…but you’ve got to ask yourself, is it worth it?” she continued, oblivious to his thoughts. “I was involved in the building of this place, and what did it get me? A nervous breakdown.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re feeling the pressure too, aren’t you? No need to answer me. I can tell.”