Hedon

by Jason Werbeloff

  Anand nodded. “We didn’t know what to do.”

  Her breath slower now, Anand lifted her to stand. “Ah,” she said, looking out at the ghetto. There, about five hundred yards from the Wall, was the district heap, as high as she remembered it. Higher even than where they stood now. Sprawled around it, lapping at its edges, was the shanty-town. And beyond that, almost too far to see, were the farmlands. They glowed green and pink in the nuclear dawn. The sun was rising to the east, splintering its way across the zinc plane. Her heart leapt at the sight. This was her home.

  “Do you know where to go?” asked Milton.

  Anand said nothing, but Cyan nodded. “There’s always place in the ghetto,” she said.

  “That there is, g-g-girl.” Milton peered at her stomach. “But if you need, my wife lives on a farm beyond the shacks. Ask around for The Olive Branch.”

  “Thank you,” said Cyan. “You don’t even know our names. I’m –”

  Milton raised a hand, and stopped her short. “The less I know the better.”

  Anand looked ten years old standing in the corner of the turret. He hugged himself in the blustery morning, and gazed back toward the city. He’d lived his whole life among those black spires. The ghetto, to him, must be terrifying. Cyan placed an arm around his waist, and kissed him lightly on the neck. She would be going home, but he was entering a place that he’d been taught was worse than the hell realms.

  “You don’t have to come,” she said, before she knew she’d said it.

  She saw relief flicker across his face. Her heart sank.

  Anand swung his gaze, first to the city, and then to the ghetto.

  “I am a father now,” he said, his shoulders square against the wind. “A Breeder.” He seemed to taste the word before he continued. “I belong in the ghetto, with you.”

  Milton wound up the ladder, and released it on the other side of the Wall.

  It was decided.

  Cyan was grateful to find her pink sneakers on the ground after negotiating the rickety ladder. She recognized the area in the growing light. They were about three miles from the gates, on the edge of the business district of the township.

  “Where can we go?” asked Anand, his hands clenched.

  “I know a place,” said Cyan. “Come.”

  With the weight of her, Cyan couldn’t match Anand’s pace. But she walked with purpose and direction, and Anand seemed to calm after a few minutes. He fell into step beside her.

  “You lived in the ghetto all your life?” he asked.

  “Until I won the lottery three months ago.”

  How little he knew about her, she thought.

  They walked through the central street of the ghetto. Shop owners were unlocking their doors, placing their wares on the pavement. There was the old money-lender, bent in half over his walking-stick as his swaying hand found the door-handle. And there was the butchery, its wide, painted windows just as she remembered them. Just as they’d been when Gemini had worked there.

  Gemini …

  “What’s it like? Do the Breeders really do the things Master Dzogo says they do?” Anand’s voice quavered in the cold morning.

  “What things?” she replied, an eyebrow raised.

  “Uh, you know …”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “Master Dzogo says that Breeders –”

  She cut him short. “Don’t use that word here.”

  Anand’s cheeks flushed.

  “Where are you taking us?” he asked eventually.

  “My mother,” she said.

  They walked in silence, through the business district, and into the shanty-town. Beyond the shacks lay the old factory, and in its shadow, her home.

  While the ghetto had slept, Anand had felt safe. Or safer. But now the ghetto’s inhabitants were waking, building fires outside their shacks, chatting and making ready for the day. They glowered at him. At his clothing. And he thought he noticed their eyes harden at the sight of the gap in the hair on the back of his head.

  He didn’t notice it at first. But when he did, the realization hit him like a bus-load of soldiers looking for a good time at BIGS. Nobody was wearing hedometers. Not the children. Not the adults. Nobody. They were walking around, trading, talking and laughing. And none of them had machines in their heads.

  He heard a child laugh, and then its mother coo in a language he hadn’t heard. Or, no. He had. It was the language Mr. Goldstein had used while his wife had been dragged away to the Embryology Van. He’d been shouting then, desperation lining his voice. But the woman who spoke the language now was warm, and relaxed. She touched the child’s face, tracing shapes along its forehead, down its cheeks. And the child laughed, and laughed.

  “They are the seed of suffering,” Master Dzogo would say. “Children and the mothers who bear them.”

  He watched the joy on the child’s bulbous cheeks mirrored in its mother’s eyes, and he wondered whether Master Dzogo could have been wrong.

  He waved to the woman, and she waved back. He smiled.

  Cyan put an arm around him as they walked. The touch felt right. But he sensed the fetus in her, and all that meant. Each step he took with her was a step away from everything he knew and thought he wanted. He was never truly happy in Shangri. The pleasures he gave at the bathhouse, and the pleasures he received from cooking were enough to sustain him. But what was happiness, really?

  “How much further?” he asked, his heart beating its arrhythmia. He could never speak that pain in his chest. Speak of illness or disease in Shangri, and euthanasia will find you.

  “Not far,” said Cyan.

  Maybe it was the strangeness of the place, or a hallucination spat from his exhausted brain. Maybe. But at that moment, a memory found Anand, and it felt as real. A woman with gray-brown skin stood over him, a smile bathing her face. She looked down at him, while she did something with her hands. She was … changing his nappy. And as she worked, she sang. He couldn’t remember the words. But the syllables were soft and long. They hovered in the air above his feet, tickling his toes.

  He didn’t know he had this memory. He tried to think of another time he’d seen the woman’s face. But he couldn’t. All he could remember from his childhood was the orphanage. Master Dzogo at school. Master Dzogo in the meditation hall. Master Dzogo checking that their beds were made every morning. Master Dzogo everywhere, watching.

  There were many Master Dzogos, but they all shared something in their slanted eyes, in the wrinkles around their mouths. A hardness. A readiness to cut with their tongues. But the memory of that woman, his mother, of her face, was different. Master Dzogo never wore her smile –

  “There it is,” said Cyan.

  As she approached the pink-tin shack, Cyan’s footsteps quickened. There was the vegetable patch, neat as always. It was spring, so she knew what she’d find. Marrows and peas nestled in the corners closest to the house. Spinach, strawberries, corn and broccoli dotted the rest of the garden. And there was her mother, out at first light as always, kneading the ground with her knobbly fingers, hard at work in the earth.

  The old woman must have heard them coming, because she lifted her sun-kissed face, and sheltered her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Cyan?”

  “Yes Ma, it’s me.” She ran to her mother, and held her tight as she dared. The old woman was bones, but she returned the embrace, strong as ever.

  “I thought you would never come back.” A tear carved a path down her mother’s dusty cheek. Her earthy fingers found her daughter’s shoulders, and she squeezed. “I wished you wouldn’t – that you would make a life for yourself out there.” She looked toward the Wall.

  “I know, Ma.”

  She pushed Cyan back a step, and swatted away a tear. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re …”

  “Hello,” said Anand, who’d been standing patiently behind Cyan.

  “Aha,” said her mother, not giving him another look. “And where is Gemini?”

&
nbsp; Cyan and Anand stared at the ground. “Aha,” her mother said again, and shook her head. “Oh dear. Well, don’t stand around. Come inside now.”

  Cyan followed her mother, but Anand stayed where he was. He was staring at the vegetables, his eyes bright.

  “Yes, you can come too,” Cyan’s mother said. She sighed. “Men.”

  Chapter 12

  So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life’s a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.

  – Marilyn Monroe

  Ten hours after Cyan and Anand alighted from the ladder into the ghetto, Donys stepped through the gates. He didn’t know exactly how long it had been since Anand and Cyan had fled to the ghetto, but The Tax Man had told him it was less than a day. He didn’t know where to start. He was in a strange land, but he would find them. And then he would return to Shangri, a free man.

  How hard could it be, he thought. He would ask around. Flash the badge The Tax Man had given him. He was an agent of Shangri now. A Brownie. He had power. They would look at him the way people looked at The Tax Man. They would fear him. Respect him. And they would answer his questions.

  Donys thought he’d start at a ramshackle pub that he found about a hundred paces into the ghetto. The sun had set not long ago, and he hadn’t had a drink since this morning with Blayze. After the events of the last 12 hours, he thought he deserved one. His mouth ached from the missing tooth, and the alcohol might help numb the pain. At the same time, he might be able to get some intel on Cyan and Anand.

  In every bar he’d ever visited, which was to say every bar in Shangri, a man had bought him a drink within five minutes of his arrival. So he sat at the bar, and waited. The pub was packed with men (and women – he wasn’t used to women, Breeder women), but ten minutes later, he still didn’t have that drink.

  Donys sashayed to the bathroom, giving the lads further opportunity to check out his perfectly sculpted rear. Not a single pair of eyes found his. Kwan-yin, he thought, the ghetto folk obviously didn’t have good taste.

  The urinals were … he couldn’t look. They were in a state unfit for human use. He flicked back his hair, turned on his heel, and marched back to the bar.

  “Bartender!” he yelled over the revolting music.

  A man almost double his height, and as wide as he was tall, flapped his lips, and a throaty voice gurgled, “What’ll ya’ have?”

  “Your lavatory is in a state of disrepair,” Donys said.

  “Huh?” The barman had a roadmap of wrinkles in his fleshy forehead, complete with dust and sand.

  “Your toilets. They’re filthy!” Donys removed an elbow from his ribcage, and swatted away a hand in his face from another patron. “Kindly, clean them.”

  The bartender’s lips widened and lifted as he turned around. He bent down, seeming to look for something on the ground. Hopefully a mop, thought Donys. But before he stood, he dropped his pants and screeched in a parody of Donys’s accent, as if from his now bare, continentally-sized ass, “Kindly, clean this.”

  The pub roared its laughter as Donys’s cheeks burnt darker than the wooden bar-top. His lips curled into a polite smile. And he still didn’t have a drink.

  After the barman had pulled his pants back over his burgeoning buttocks, and found his way to standing (which took some time), he asked Donys again, “What’ll ya have?” He could barely hear the ogre’s filthy voice over the merriment of the patrons.

  Donys dropped his head in shame at the thought of having to order his own drink. “A house beer,” he said.

  He drank it without hesitating. Long, thick gulps of the awful stuff travelled down his gullet. It tasted like sewerage smelled, but it was strong, and he felt calmer for it. He reached into his pocket, and removed the badge The Tax Man had given him. Two thin silver cartridges fell to the floor. He hadn’t noticed them before. They must have been tacked to the badge. He picked them up, and held them to the light. He pressed the button on the end of one, and a gorgeous face formed in the air above the cartridge. He knew that face. Those chiseled cheek-bones. Perfect skin. Yes … he was a serviceman at BIGS. That’s right. Donys’s cock throbbed as he remembered the way the young man had sucked him off. Done a proper job of it too.

  Made sense now. A serviceman on the run with a woman. They were notoriously heterosexual, at least according to Evelynn. “Never trust a serviceman,” she’d say. “When they’re not being Bred, they Breed. That’s why they serve. To hide their nature.” Donys smiled inwardly. He felt like a detective now. Badge and all.

  “Have you seen this man?” he asked the bartender.

  The barman didn’t hesitate. “Fuck off.”

  Donys’s short-lived pride shrank. He thrust the badge into the barman’s face. “That is no way to talk to an officer of Shangri.” Donys stood to his full height, which wasn’t tall compared with the brute behind the counter.

  A wave of silence rippled through pub. First those around him at the bar, and then in widening arcs, all the rest. “Shhhh,” whispered someone by the door, “I want to hear.”

  That’s better, Donys thought. Some respect.

  “Yes,” he continued, his voice hollowing into what he thought was an authoritative twang, “I am an officer of Shangri, sent here to find these people.” He lowered the badge, and lifted both holo-images high in the air. “Anand Nair and Cyan Rustikov. They are wanted by The Law.”

  Donys repeated those last words silently. “The Law.” The phrase rolled off his tongue with such ease.

  “This should be good,” a voice whispered. “Some guts this Brownie ‘as,” said another.

  “Well I say,” said the barman, in that high-pitched parody he used earlier, “what have they done, officer?”

  Donys ignored the mocking tone. He knew he was in charge. The barman knew it. They all did. After all, he was an officer of Shangri. But he didn’t really know how to answer the question.

  “Breeding,” he said eventually. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  The pub erupted in bellows of indignation.

  “That’s right,” Donys shouted. “They are wanted for the crime of Breeding.”

  Except the indignation wasn’t at the “crime” of Breeding. The expletives and shouts and barks weren’t aimed at Anand and Cyan. They were targeting him.

  “You come in here,” shrieked an old woman whose quivering lower lip swallowed her upper as she cried, “and talk about Breeding as if it’s a sin.”

  “You brown-bellied cocksssucker,” hollered a furious voice behind him.

  “Get him!” yelled the barman, lifting a beer bottle.

  Fingernails gouged his cheeks; his eyes. A knee thumped his groin, and he was on the floor. His ribs snapped. But before the pain arrived, he felt a dull, gray knock to his temple. The world shrank to a prick of light, and disappeared.

  The sunlight woke him. The sunlight, and the acrid stench of beer and piss.

  One after another, cuts, broken bones and bruises registered in his consciousness. His head felt like it had been smashed in by a hover-train. And his chest crinkled in an accordion of pain when he tried and failed to lift himself off the ground. Something dark and crusty came away from his forehead in large, satisfying flecks.

  Donys was lying outside the pub, which had closed hours ago. He felt his pockets. Touched his shirt. His Brownie badge was gone, but the cellphone was in his right-trouser pocket. He checked the display. A week’s battery remained. “06:55”, it shone.

  His stomach groaned as he tried again to sit upright. He’d last eaten almost a day ago. Peanuts at BIGS, before Blayze had taken him to see TBone. The back of his mouth was sandy and sticky. He swallowed. A ball of phlegm and beer and blood travelled down his gullet. It tasted like expired Soylent. Long expired.

  A woman hobbled by, her tattered skirt trailing behind her in the morning breeze. She dragged her slops along the dusty road. “Excuse me,” he tried to say. But all he managed was a throa
ty grunt. She didn’t notice him at all.

  “’Scuse me,” he said again, and reached out a hand as a young man, skin caked with dirt, ambled past. The youth squinted at him, his nose wrinkling at the sight. He took a step to the side, avoiding Donys’s outstretched arm. A memory flashed through his heart. The passage at BIGS where so many youths just like this one disappeared past him in their starched towels, entreating him with their hungry stares. The way he would feign interest in something other than them, averting his gaze as he shoved past them, untouchable.

  Tears burned behind his throbbing eyes, but he blinked them away. Swallowed again. Tried to clear his mind. He was in the ghetto. And his only way out was to find them. Anand and Cyan. He would find them. He had to.

  An old man shuffled toward him, his gaunt legs wobbling in and out of one another. The old man reached into his pocket, seemed to sort through it, and withdrew something that caught the sunrise. He never looked at Donys as he flicked the coin at him.

  Donys had never seen a coin before. Of course, he thought, this was the ghetto. His hedons were useless here. They still used money, as they did before the Collapse. Coins and notes – dollars. He thumbed the rough edge of the coin, and the pattern on its front and back. How much could one coin buy? A drink? A meal? In Shangri, or the Shangri he knew, he could show his hedometer, and anything he desired was his. Cost wasn’t a thought.

  It took him a good minute, but he managed to stand, propping himself up with one arm, cradling his ribs with the other. The pit of his stomach was raw, folding over itself as he limped down the street.

  “How much for the apple juice?” He lifted the dusty carton to the hawker’s narrow eyes. The man’s eyebrows were bigger than his face.

  “Four dollars.”

  “And how much is this worth?” Donys showed his coin.

  “One dollar.”

  Donys’s throat protested as he returned the juice carton to the shelf. “What can I get for a dollar?”