“I’m here,” he calls to her. “I came early.”
He’s had plenty of sleep, but for some reason feels exhausted.
Rest, he thinks, rubbing his stubbled jaw. I need rest.
Rima totters, without answering, out to meet him. Maybe she’s just skinny and not actually a junkie, but when you want to hate someone it’s easy to find reasons. She glances at the vertical steel rails that hold private vehicles like the mismatched carriages of a war-time locomotive, scanning for his vintage hovercraft but not finding it.
He doesn’t tell her that he had to sell it. And not because he saw one just like it, one time, crashed into the ocean with him, dead, inside, when he accidentally looked into the Collision. He needed the money. He’s not too proud to catch a bus.
“Nice rib-bones, Rima,” he says instead. They, and a smattering of bruises, are clearly visible around the edges of her flimsy, windblown shirt. She stands next to him but her eyes stay downcast. He adjusts his hat with exaggerated hand movements but he can’t make her look at him. Or maybe she’s trying to look up but the sheer weight of mascara is holding her lids down.
“I’m not talking to you,” she says eventually, “until our lawyers come.”
He laughs at that, and she joins in, nervously. He guesses they’re allowed to laugh together. Until their lawyers come.
Mutt comes through the door frame, huffing like a boar that’s eaten another boar for breakfast and can’t breathe. His angry presence oppresses them both. There are no walls, yet, but Mutt obviously couldn’t help himself. He had to come through the place where the grand entrance will be. The black-coated lawyers behind him choose the easier path, trying to keep their shiny shoes out of grey cement dust.
Reinforced concrete is what they’ve returned to using, now. Ever since the disaster with the sentient nanotech that was supposed to close the geological fault line. No earthquakes ever again! the advertising brochures had promised. The best way to safeguard your building investment forever!
Who could live within view of the Collision and not sign up for that? Three seconds of calm daylight on the sea. Three seconds of the moon over breaching pods of whales. Then three seconds of screams and falling towers. Lava over life-forms not yet evolved into humans. Tidal waves higher than the clouds, or aircraft carriers crushed and crumpled against a debris-strewn shore.
Here, an experiment with building in a second reality to increase real-estate square-footage led to a Collision of worlds. Yet it has always been the site of a collision of colossi, sitting square on the Dead Sea System that separates the giant Asian and African plates. Major earthquakes occur every three hundred years.
Who would build, here? With the Collision to remind them that from fiery birth to nano malfunction, this part of the world is never quiet for long? Who would try to make something last?
“Good morning, Uthman,” his lawyer says in her sweet, unruffled voice. “Hello, Rima. Hello, Abd-el-Mutif.”
They exchange niceties. Uthman is distracted by the feel of the Collision at his back. When their mother died and left the parcel of land to her three children in equal shares, Uthman accepted a smaller piece of the land, because his share would be closest to the view. Everyone around the world who came to stay in Saida came to gaze into the Collision, to marvel at the past or tremble in the face of all possible futures. They brought their cameras, to stretch those three seconds at a time into one thousand and five hundred frames, or they brought their soothsayers, to stare into the restless sea and work their fraudulent magic.
Only, Mutt and Rima knew before Mother’s death that the edge was unstable. They knew that the place where Uthman was to have built his little pig’s house of straw would collapse into the rest of the Collision, less than six months after they signed the agreement. Their surveyors and scientists had seen it.
Uthman hadn’t seen. He hadn’t paid for his own surveyors or scientists. He doesn’t like to look at the Collision, for all that he accepted the higher value of his slice. He lives two countries away; three hours on the fast train.
“I won’t sell it to you,” he tells Mutt. “I don’t care how much you’re willing to pay.”
“But Uthman,” his lawyer murmurs, “what other use is it to you? You can’t build an apartment block three metres wide at this end and half a metre wide at the other end. You can’t prove that he swindled you, and you don’t like it here, anyway. Why not take the money and go?”
Rest, the Collision whispers in Uthman’s ears with the salt-wind voice of the sea, interfering with what the lawyer is saying. I need rest.
Uthman shakes his head.
“I can build,” he tells his lawyer. “With an architect program and an old model fabricator, I can. Using nanotech for building above ground is not banned.”
Only trying to close fault lines was against the law.
Mutt’s ears, always sharp as a dog’s, pick up what Uthman is saying.
“A fabricator?” he explodes. “A fabricator, when I’m building in concrete and marble? You will devalue every property in the area. The government will never approve any such application!”
“The government already has,” Uthman says quietly. “I have the plans for the original block of units approved.”
“Two thirds of that hideous proposed disaster is inside the Collision. Anything you poke into it won’t last three seconds.”
“I won’t build those parts, then. But I have permission to build the parts that stand on land that’s still stable, and now that there’s no room for cranes or excavators, my only choice is a fabricator.”
Maybe this land isn’t stable, either. What else haven’t my charming siblings told me?
Uthman resists the urge to turn his head and stare into the mesmerizing, deadly screen of the Collision that takes up half the sky.
Rest. I need rest.
#
Fabrication takes almost no time.
Uthman watches them take the extruders away from the cut-off platform of the sixth floor of his new apartment block. It is ugly, as Mutt knew it would be, seamless and beige, except for the tinted window panes, black as holes, peppering the shorn-off platforms as though an earthquake really has ripped apart an older building.
The lawyers can’t approach the Collision side of the site. Uthman has left little more than a foot, barely room for a cat, between the Collision and the tall, wedge shaped excuse to block his brother’s views. The Grudge, the newscasters are calling it.
Uthman looks down at the bald spot on Mutt’s head. He has a crow’s nest view of their attempts to serve him papers. Those are still required for civil proceedings. The pack of them flows around to the rear door, away from the Collision, where none of their palms against the reader result in access.
Mutt glances up. Uthman doesn’t wave. He sips a tiny cup of coffee. Italian beans, his single indulgence. He hasn’t shaved. Once he leaves the building, they’ll ambush him with papers. He forgot his shaving kit and the extruders make only cerami-polymer and Smart-Tile. Fabricating at greater than 200 DPI can get the builders arrested. Currency is too easy to replicate and computers have never been less secure.
At the thin edge of the wedge, there’s barely room for his feet. Waist-high railings practically pinch him between them. Uthman shuffles his shoes and looks at last into the Collision. He could stretch out an arm, put his hand into it, but his hand might not be safely returned to him, or it might be returned older or younger than the rest. There are fences, but people die every day trying to get new body parts.
For three seconds, below him lie the golden sands of a beach, with an island just offshore covered in ancient ruins. Three children play there, laughing. They are Uthman, Rima and Mutt. Mother, squatting on a shelf of shale, is too busy gutting the fish to notice that the children are putting the fish guts down each other’s shirts.
The Collision darkens. Three seconds of sandaled warriors laying siege to the castle on the island, no
w connected by a stone bridge to the shore. Three seconds of summer noon stillness, a steel artificial harbour encircling the island. Then spacecraft wreckage, washed up on the beach.
A woman in an ankle-length black coat with her black braid coiled around her head, passing a screen to Mother for her to sign. The screen shows pictures of castle crenellations; no, Roman columns laid side by side; no, it’s the shapes of molecules, and Mother is signing the agreement to allow the seeding of nanotech in the fault line.
Uthman tries to stumble back and comes up against the second railing. The vision feels like it’s sucking at his face. He can’t take his eyes away. Three seconds have passed, and the scene hasn’t changed.
I made a mistake, he thinks in a panic. I built over the boundary. I’m in the Collision!
The Collision rarely shows a person their own alternate timelines. People subscribe to recording services in order to trawl for the chance of a glimpse of themselves. Uthman thought the hovercraft vision was the only one of himself or his family that he’d ever see, but now he’s seen himself with his siblings on the beach, and Mother with the woman in the ankle-length coat.
There’s grey in Mother’s wiry red curls but her back is straight and her eyes are not yet made opaque by cataracts. How can he see her so close up? She’s down on the beach, six storeys below.
“Rest,” she says sternly to Uthman, and now he knows he’s dead or crazy, because the Collision never makes sounds. “I need rest. Let her in, Uthman.”
He twists away. Retreats indoors. Sees his silent shoes on the beige cerami-polymer. Half a metre becomes three quarters and then one metre, wide enough for the walls to fall away from his shoulders when he faces north, towards the thick end of the wedge.
There, by the narrow spiral stair, a screen advises him that the palm pressed to the outer door below is DENIED.
“Go away!” he exclaims, but the face filmed hovering curiously above the letterbox isn’t Mutt’s face, or Rima’s. It’s the woman with the black coat and the coiled black braid.
Let her in, Uthman.
Uthman overrides the lock. The sound of her coat swishing against close-fitting walls rises up the spiral stairwell.
“Is the owner of this building home?” she calls.
“I’m here,” Uthman calls back, rubbing at his stubbled chin. She could be a killer or his future wife, a neighbour or another lawyer. He sees shapes in front of his eyes, in green and purple, as though he has stared at the sun and now must endure circles over everything.
The shapes aren’t circles, though. They’re alternating blocks, like battlements, and horizontal, fluted tunnels. Fallen temples, in reverse.
“I have to warn you,” Uthman says to the woman, without being able to see her because he’s rubbed his eyes too hard, “I think we’re too close to the Collision, here. I’ve made a mistake. You should go.”
“All the world is too close to the Collision,” the woman says softly. “Unless you help me to close it.”
#
Her name is Orla.
They breathe the fog of their loquat wine out of the space in the oversized plastic goblets that Uthman took from the aftermath of a wedding, one time.
“Can you believe that I had dreams about the Collision when I was a child, before it was made?”
Uthman squints at her. He sips. A scorpion crawls across the cracked white tiles and he stirs to crush it with a slipper. His couch smells of damp. It has cigarette-burn holes in its flower-patterned fabric. He looks at her again.
“You’re not much older than me,” he says.
“I was older. The Collision showed me that I was to walk into it and emerge, young again. When I went in, I was a painter. An artist. When I came out, I was an engineer, with all the knowledge that I needed. And still, I grew old before I could solve it. I made mistakes. I thought fusing the geologic fault lines would close the Collision, but I failed, and so I had to go in a second time for the gift of a third lifespan.”
Uthman shivers and says nothing.
“You don’t seem shocked. You must think I am lying. All other claims of visions and powers granted by the Collision have been proven false. You think I am like those attention seekers.”
He pours more wine and doesn’t disclose that the Collision has shown him things, too.
“I don’t think that,” he says. “I saw you on the beach. Where you tried to close the fault.”
She shakes her head.
“I do not know which timeline that was,” she murmurs. “I barely know which timeline I am in. The Collision has shown me myself, failing again and again. It tries to teach me but I am a slow learner. It wants to close.”
“It wants to close? It doesn’t want anything. It just is.”
She empties the goblet in a single, long swallow.
“It wants to close,” she says vehemently. “Human activity disturbs it. When it has opened before, and become self-aware, it has opened in space, or on dead planets, where the variations are manageable. There, the variations are few. Here, the variations are inexhaustible. The Collision is exhausted. That is why it is unstable. That is why it grows.”
Rest. I need rest.
“Woman,” Uthman says, stifling the urge to laugh hysterically. “If your destiny is failure and my destiny is death, what’s the use of us talking together?”
“Who says your destiny is death?”
Uthman’s hand on the stolen plastic rubbish trembles as he remembers his face covered in blood. The three awful seconds of the hovercraft vision replays in his mind. He’s inside the cabin with a head wound from the impact. No, he’s outside the craft and Mutt is the driver and the accident is no accident. No, the hovercraft is parked nearby and a building has fallen on him. It’s an earthquake. It’s the Collision, widening.
It’s the end.
“Stop doing that,” he cries, dropping the drink. “I sold it! It’s gone.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Orla protests.
“What are you doing here?”
“You invited me to your house. We took the train, together, from the Grudge at the Collision’s edge to this unit where you live.”
“No, I mean why did you come to The Grudge?”
“I had to talk to you. I’ve never seen the version with you, before. The Collision showed me your brother signing the consent, or your sister, but never you. Maybe that’s because it ends if I choose you.”
“What consent?”
She holds out her screen and it shows pictures of castle crenellations. No, Roman columns laid side by side. No, it’s the shapes of molecules, the graphic header on an agreement to allow the seeding of nanotech in the Collision. The absolution of risk. The understanding of unpredictable consequences.
Uthman ignores the orange stain spreading on the filthy couch.
“How can my consent mean anything? It’s the government that has to approve this sort of thing and they don’t want the Collision closed. They’ve never made so much money from tourism before. Not even the threat of death can keep people away.”
“It’s your land,” Orla says. “The law is clear. You can do what you want with nanotech on your land, as long as it doesn’t spread underground, and I have no intention of putting it in the ground. That railing where you stood will do just fine.”
“Are you sure that it wants to die? Are you sure you’re helping it and not harming it? What if you’re making it angry and that’s why it’s unstable? What if it’s going to kill me for helping you?”
Orla draws herself up stiffly, eyes cold.
“Have you no care for anyone else in this world? Friends? Family?”
“No,” he says at once. “To hell with them.”
“The Collision isn’t hell. Not exactly. But it’s close.”
“I don’t care.”
“Would you have done it to him, if your positions were reversed? If you knew that the land would eventually be useless, but A
bd-el-Mutif did not? Would you lure him in, would you give him the best land, the best position, the best view?”
“Of course not!”
“Yet you were willing to take it. You don’t live there. You don’t like it. Looking at it makes you shit your pants but you won’t sell it.”
“Look at me. Look where I am living.” He gestures furiously at the bullet holes in the broken walls from decades-old, abandoned conflicts, the torn posters showing beaches that cannot be seen, now, for longer than three seconds at a time, which paper over pits in the beige cerami-polymer. He cannot afford repairs. He cannot afford better. “They never visit me. It shames them to look at this, when they’re used to granite and gold leaf. Well, let them look at The Grudge from their fancy mansions. Let them think of me when their tenants complain that all they can see is the sky.”
“Your mother signed because she wanted you three to be safe. Her father told her stories about the ground coming alive and heaving, terracotta pots shooting from apartment windows like a clay-pigeon trap’s revenge. It wasn’t just you that she wanted to protect. She wanted Rima to be safe, and Abd-el-Mutif.”
“My mother never signed anything!”
“Not in this timeline. You’re right. I don’t think I met her, in this one.”
Uthman sucks air in through flared nostrils. Mother wanted to protect Mutt and Rima? She should have drowned them in a well at birth! If only she was alive to see how Mutt shovels eggs into his face like a reverse farm full of battery hens, or how Rima simpers for her bald and impotent parole officer so he won’t ask her for a urine sample to prove that she’s clean!
“Mothers will forgive anything,” he says.
“Even the end of the world? Are you sure about that?”
Angrily, he wipes his hands on his jeans. Then he stops caring about smearing her screen and presses his palm to the contract. It is signed.
“You had better be right this time, woman.”
“I am right,” Orla says perfunctorily. “This time, this place, I will not fail.”
#
Uthman stands uneasily on the footpath, hands in his pockets.
Genius Loci Page 3