by Jones, Raya
When I asked why he had made up the silly story, he protested, ‘I didn’t make it up. It’s a true story.’
‘A woman turned into a spider when she climbed from Luna to Earth on a rope?’
‘It wasn’t Luna yet. It was centuries before the first moon landing, get your facts right. I didn’t say it was true as in real life. It’s true in the sense that it really came from people called Inuit who used to live in the Arctic Circle. And it’s true in the way that all myths are.’
Seeing my sceptical expression, he grumbled that I had no imagination and perhaps he ought to shoot me. The gun was still in the room at the time.
He told me more yarns about the Council of Nine. I wasn’t sure what to make of his claim that Wye Stan 7 was the Grand Mage but I had no doubt that the President of Cyboratics was a most dangerous man.
Later, in the Western Rim, when my blood was running cold in the heat of the sun listening to Fred cataloguing Wye Stan’s heinous deeds, I remembered Fairweather’s dark sun. We fell silent watching the airbus land near the visitor centre far below us and a crowd of tourists spill out like tiny colourful ants.
It probably wasn’t the bus that brought her there.
We stood behind her in the flea market.
She was petite, in an expensive designer biosuit, an olive-and-black Kudo Sigma Fatigues, and seemed frail and alone. She wore a canary yellow Luciolite headscarf that covered her hair completely. The camera pin in her scarf recorded 360º sights and ambient sounds, and automatically transmitted those to a personal site. Luciolite specialised in hi-tech fashion accessories for rich youth who might decide on a whim that yellow is out of fashion, and throw away the scarf forgetting to download what’s on it. When I later accessed her Luciolite site, I saw how she first saw us: two tired men in shades of dust, our beige biosuits covered with ochre earth from the cliffs. Our faces were red from sun and sweat, haggard and unkempt, in need of a shave. She believed we were slums-dwellers. She dictated her impression to a draft letter that was never sent.
She didn’t notice us until I said, ‘Everything finds its use someday.’
At first she thought I meant the bric-a-brac she was buying, and she half-turned to me explaining that she was an artist and needed those broken old things. Our eyes met for a split second.
My heart missed a beat and the hairs stood on the back of my neck.
I was astonished to see how young she was and how pretty, like an exquisite porcelain doll. Her white face was as perfect as an android’s, except for the sudden panic in her blue eyes when our eyes met. There was something very dark and powerful about him. His slanted eyes narrowed like slits and his glance pierced right through me like a blinding flash. He’s the son of the dark sun, she’d tell in the unsent letter.
Next, she realised that I was speaking to Fred.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he responded, staring at the child’s toy.
She listened to us whilst paying the trader, her camera recording.
‘If I had cash on me I’d buy it again,’ Fred said. I protested, ‘That’s the lowest of the low even for you. You can’t take a toy from a child!’
The trader sold her a discarded cardboard box for carrying stuff. She began piling her purchases into it. Fred asked the trader about those local contacts. Noticing her struggling to lift the box, I grabbed it, offering to carry it for her. There were no android porters about. I too struggled with the box. When Fred gave up asking about people that nobody seemed to know, he gave me a hand to carry it.
She strolled aimlessly as if still shopping, but there wasn’t much more to the market. Soon she headed back to the main area of the visitor centre, which was heaving with afternoon tourists and hikers returning from the cliffs, the two of us following her like android porters. She privately wondered whether we’d kidnap her to live with our tribe, and how bad could that be considering the predicament she was in already (she wrote).
Fred and I talked between ourselves. Fred grumbled, ‘So much for your tribe being around when you need them.’
I said, ‘I don’t need them.’
‘So, tell me, how are you going to get us home with no ID or cash?’
‘I am home,’ said I.
‘Yeah, even your childhood toys are still around. I’ll come back with cash and buy it again.’
I protested again that he couldn’t snatch toys from little children. He argued, ‘But I’ll pay enough to buy a dozen new ones. This particular object has our story!’
The artist girl turned and offered to buy it for him.
‘Thank you, thank you so much. You are a kind-hearted woman,’ Fred said eagerly.
‘Are you gangsters?’ she asked.
Fred laughed. ‘If I were a gangster I’d have loads of cash on me. I’ll pay you back as soon as I get home.’
‘Money’s no problem. Wye Stan is paying,’ she said.
We almost dropped the box. We stared at her stunned, speechless for a second, and then asked simultaneously, ‘Which one?’
She replied, confused, ‘Wye Stan Pan is the president of Cyboratics. Everyone knows that.’
I insisted, ‘But which Wye Stan?’
She answered, agitated, ‘What’s the big deal? They’re all the same. Letting me go on this trip is the best they could do to keep me quiet.’
‘Wye Stan has sent you here?’ I asked.
‘No, it was my own idea and my therapist approved.’ She turned to walk on, but then turned back again, explaining, ‘When citizens say, “Wye Stan’s paying” it means a trip at the company’s expense.’
‘You are too young to have an expenses account,’ I pointed out. ‘How old are you? Are you even a citizen yet?’
‘I’m nineteen, I’m always nineteen. I’m not a citizen.’ She spoke rapidly, her voice rising and face getting flushed. ‘I don’t know what you are if you’re not gangsters, and I don’t care. I’m not going to tell anyone that you stole January suits if that’s what you’re worried about, although it beats me why anyone wants to wear a biosuit made for androids. It doesn’t have radiation filters and must be sweaty like hell.’
‘Tell me about it!’ Fred interjected. ‘This twat has made me climb the cliffs in this ridiculous garment.’
‘Beige is the wrong colour for you. Especially you,’ she told me without making eye contact, ‘you should be in a sleek black biosuit wearing a red headband. It’s a Luciolite interface. You are standing on a portable portal like a mat woven of cyan light.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ gasped Fred, his face creasing with silent laughter. ‘That’s him spot on. Except for the Luciolite. He uses XT-Pro. But you’ll be glad to know it’s red. And black is the only colour he wears by choice. But sleek, no, he goes for cheap uniforms from a surplus outlet. What about me, my dear?’
‘You keep changing like a kaleidoscope.’
‘That’s him spot on,’ I said, ‘but don’t you mean changing like a chameleon?’
‘I don’t mean anything,’ she said irritably. ‘Half the time I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m used to getting strange reactions from people. You are looking at me like I’m crazy, so I go on speaking my stream of consciousness and after a while you stop hearing anything I say.’
‘I’m hearing everything you’re saying,’ I told her.
Fred asked her to keep talking.
Flustered, she gave him the first image that came to her mind, a place that was a lot on her mind lately (her letter disclosed). ‘You are in a bright airy marble hall with a ceiling of opaque glass.’
Fred paled as if he knew that very place. I didn’t know it yet. ‘What kind of artist are you?’ he asked.
‘An extremely good one,’ I answered before she could say anything. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. ‘Have you always been nineteen?’
‘No. I’ve been nineteen for 21 years.’
She strode off as fast as she could.
When we caught up with her, she told us to ditch the box. She didn’t need any o
f that junk. She bought it only to waste Wye Stan’s money, she said, and quickly walked away.
We spotted her again in the central foyer.
The place was crowded. She stood as if unsure where to go, and didn’t notice me coming up close. Then the crowd parted and she could see the signpost to the buses. My hand was on her shoulder the moment she moved. She froze.
Removing my hand, I said as gently as I could, ‘Don’t be afraid of us.’
Fred too reached there. He smiled warmly. ‘Would Wye Stan’s allowance stretch to paying our bus fare to Phoenix-3, my dear?’
‘Are you terrorists?’ she asked.
‘No. I’m starved and tired and need a shave and a wash like never before in my life. I’m Freedom Cordova.’
‘But his tribal name is Fred,’ I said. ‘I’m Harvey.’
‘But his tribal name is Al,’ said Fred.
‘Harvey like the toy that child was playing with?’ she asked sceptically.
‘Exactly that rabbit. It has Harvey embroidered on it,’ I told her. ‘When I was a child growing up in the Edges, Fred gave it to my mother. She brought it home. I scanned it and used it as my avatar. That’s how Fred tracked me down when I was thirteen.’ I and stopped short of telling her that Fred didn’t actually find me until many years later. When analysing the moment as captured by her camera, I was amazed to observe the emotion in my voice and face.
She felt more relaxed now that my existence made sense. ‘You’re like my mother Ella. She too was kidnapped from some slums to please executives, and she’s had a very good life. She’s never regretted a moment of it.’
‘And you?’ I asked.
‘I’m not having a good life.’
‘What’s your name?’ asked Fred.
‘Mandala, I’m Mandala.’
‘We’ll call you Mandy and you can be in our tribe,’ I said, closely observing her reaction. She flinched.
Fred sighed dramatically, ‘Al, that’s pathetic. Why don’t you just ask her to have sex with you?’
I told Mandy, ‘He’s always like that.’
She said, ‘You can call me Mandy. But my professional name is Mandala. I have a gallery except that nobody visits it.’
‘I did,’ I told her.
‘You don’t have to lie. Like he said, you can just ask me and I’ll sleep with you. You can’t know my gallery. Do you know how many artists are called Mandala?’
‘One hundred thirty-two.’
Fred chuckled.
‘I know the gallery you mean,’ I insisted.
‘How can you possibly know?’
‘I’m Harvey…’
Fred: ‘He dances in cyberspace.’
‘Harvey Schmidt,’ I finished.
She ran like hell.
Fred asked me what was between that girl and me. I wouldn’t tell. When he pressed, I said only that it was a Harvey Schmidt case.
A taxi firm charged Fred dearly to scan his fingerprints and retina so as to verify his identity, and wouldn’t accept his vouching for me. I had no verifiable identity. Fred demanded that they contacted someone high in the Phoenix militia. ‘She’ll tell you who I am,’ he insisted. When the duty manager pointed out that they already verified his identity, Fred said in an uncompromising tone, ‘Do it!’ The call was made. Afterwards he was treated with fearful respect.
As soon as we arrived in his apartment, I retrieved my gear from storage and asked him to check me into an inn. It would take a few days to recover my bank links, and in the meantime I was broke. Fred agreed that we could both do with sleeping alone, but argued that I didn’t need to go so far. ‘There’s a spare room at the far end of this apartment, Al. You can lock the door.’ I pointed out that the inn downtown was reachable within seconds of teleporting, and I’d give him my room key. I didn’t need to lock doors from him. He sighed, ‘I understand. We have this father-and-son thing going: you need your own space and I’m paying.’
I assured him that I’d pay it back. He insisted, ‘No need, it’s on my hospitality account. Use my ID for anything you need. Food, wine, women, a nice biosuit. Just promise me we’ll stay on the same planet.’
I promised to be back for breakfast.
The inn room was the standard windowless cell with no furnishing, but it had a tiny bathroom instead of a hygiene unit, which felt like luxury. I worked into the early hours of the morning reconfiguring my resurrected networks. I found out what the Harvey sprite was up to. Discovering the image of Wye Stan standing in his marble hall, I realised that this was where Mandy’s stream of consciousness located Fred.
I retrieved the exchange between Schmidt and Dark Sun, and set it to play endlessly on mute. Lying on the bedroll I watched the ghostly brown frog do its animation in mid-air above the mat.
I watched it for a long time.
I knew every algorithm behind its anatomically correct performance. I had created it for Fairweather when I was ten years old. It won her a school prize.
No amount of medication stopped Mandy feeling sick to the pit of her stomach. Didn’t her mother Ella tell her that this will happen? One day when she least expects it, their ninja assassin will come for her. Mandy didn’t expect it to be so soon after arriving on Earth. It was only her second day.
On the first day, she didn’t leave the hotel. It was a resort hotel with all the commodities you could imagine and more. Because it was in the Phyfoamicals town, Phoenix-1, they gave free cosmetics. Because it was Earth, the hotel boasted natural sunlight in its swimming pools, tennis courts, and tropical gardens. With the harmful radiation filtered, it felt like artificial daylight in Olympia, Cyboratics’ city in Tao Ceti, where she had lived all her life. She wandered listlessly around the hotel’s amenities. An ET chief on vacation latched on to her, saying how pretty she was with her skin so white, her hair so golden, and eyes so blue. Mandy escaped to her room and had the wall display pictures of her mother Ella, whose African face was like ebony, her curly hair jet-black, and smiling eyes like ink pools.
Then Mandy took a virtual tour of Ground Zero. It was an upgrade of a tour that she’d taken years ago in Tao Ceti. But now she could say that she took it on the very spot where the Apocalypse hit Earth.
If she had anyone to say it to, that is. She started a letter addressed to nobody: Where are you? I need you. Can you help me with this?
People come from all over the galaxy to see this historic place, but her pilgrimage was an excuse. She had no intention of leaving the hotel. But after breakfast on the second day there was nothing new to do. She couldn’t even do her art because she’d been locked out of her own gallery. Searching the hotel menus for movies, she clicked by mistake on a tourist guide that advised on how safely to sightsee the crater. You take the Rim Direct bus that lands only in official tourist sites. Health risks are minimal if your biosuit has adequate radiation and pollution filters. It took her until lunch to make up her mind to go. She changed biosuits a few times, finally settling on the Kudo Sigma that didn’t clash with the Luciolite headscarf she wanted to wear.
Sitting down for lunch, she decided to leave the sightseeing for another time since half the day was gone. The ET chief who had pestered her the day before came in and sat down a few tables away, positioning her own chair so as to watch Mandy without potted palms in the way. Mandy pretended to be absorbed by the local news bulletin that scrolled above the saltcellar and peppermill. A computer-generated newscaster said it was a good day today. There wasn’t too much fighting in the Edges, public transport ran on schedule, and the sandstorm held off.
On impulse, Mandy left her lunch uneaten and set off to the bus terminal.
She didn’t teleport. It took her nearly an hour to descend the Levels by means of escalators and elevators, unerringly following a route highlighted on a town map projected like a small sphere in the palm of her hand. She reached the terminal to see the Rim Direct depart.
As soon as she made up her mind to return to the hotel, a chain of coincidences began.
/> The map in her hand flickered erratically and was cut off with a Fatal Error message. Getting back to the escalators, Mandy found out that they were the downward ones. There was no ‘up’ in sight.
The station was a bland chaos of banal adverts, logos, and signposts, androids touting for customers, and strangers seeking buses. A tanned brunette in a white biosuit offered to show Mandy the local fashion scene. ‘June,’ Mandy said, recognising the model. ‘Check your database. You should know that I don’t need a local fashion tour. Where’s the way up?’ All the while her camera pin recorded all-surround sights and sounds—including the signs to the upward exits that she failed to notice.
The andronet pointed out that with a pert you can teleport from anywhere, and inquired whether Mandy had one. Mandy took a standard pert out of her pocket. June brightly explained that the gadget had to be switched on. Mandy switched it to standby. ‘Would you like me to show you how to use it?’ offered June. Mandy replied that she knew how to do it. The andronet said cheerily, ‘Call me when you’d like an escort or a bodyguard.’
By now, the next Rim Direct was being announced. Mandy boarded it.
Most people alighted at the next stop, so she did too.
She saw the gigantic cliffs soar, towering forebodingly over the visitor centre, their midlevel crisscrossed with trails and platforms. Higher up on the slopes, climbers dangled on ropes like tiny colourful spiders. Much higher, dust clouds obscured the summit. Far below, the cliffs cast deep shadow on the sprawl of industrial ruins. Farther away, amidst traffic towers, communication masts, and teleport columns, the biodomes shone like bright silhouettes in hazy sunshine. The crater echoed with rambles of air traffic and explosions that could be gunfire. Mandy took one look at the outdoors, hating it, and rushed indoors to the safety of information kiosks, boutiques, and bars.
She missed the Rim Direct back because she started shopping.