“So what can we do? Keep on soldiering, right?”
“Sometimes I just want to kick somebody's head in,” said Ben, staring out the window.
“You can't do that anymore. We have Hera to think about,” said Corrag.
“Especially for her.”
“Come on. Grab your coffee.”
They were late. Corrag checked herself one more time in the mirror by the door as they went out. They were quiet in the elevator. She studied his profile when she thought he wasn’t aware of it. He was suddenly getting old. The skin around his eyes was beginning to fold into deltas and rivulets. His jaw was sagging and rounding into his neck. She wondered if his desire for escape was based on a male fear of losing virility. They were entering the downward spiral of mortality, an awkward and dangerous phase for unaugmented marriages, statistically speaking. They were both prone to desertion. The immortality of virtual consciousness was closed to them. The designation for the immortality program worked as a strong incentive towards fidelity, based on recommendations from the INN local select boards after enough DNA corruption had occurred to warrant a termination order. Statistically, marriage for the unaugmented was a fragile thing, and Corrag could vouch for that fact. Sometimes they both felt like tearing out of there instead of reporting for duty one more day.
The clump of currants by the fire entrance had been picked clean by the birds that flew off as they opened the door. The children exited the trailers screaming, as if fleeing from a vaguely amusing boogieman. In the distance, a cloud of tourists walked over the narrow footbridge that joined the western botanical quadrant with the southern meadows. Hera ran across the grass to them. Corrag hugged Hera. Ben put her on his shoulders.
Corrag thought she could pick out Zagarelli off in the distance behind the fountains of Belleza. It was unusual, Zagarelli making the rounds in the middle of the day to supplement the intelligence he received from his army of staff and paid informants among the permanent guests.
The theater troupe sat under a Brazilian acacia tree, in bloom despite the colder than usual weather. It hadn’t rained in several weeks. The desalination plants just a few miles away along the Gulf coast were working at full capacity. The sprinklers still went on at night for several hours. The floodlights went off in the early morning to allow migratory birds to readjust their Circadian clocks.
“I’d like to do a complete run-through of the first act,” said Fisher, standing clumsily for such a small man.
“Better make it good. Zagarelli’s out,” said Ben.
While the stage hands moved the platform and set up chairs, the Chinese tourists congregated along the footpaths, bunching up as if they were traffic gawkers on the highway after a zipbike went off kilter and its rider lay crumpled on the shoulder against the Tubid guard rails. Ben, Shelley and Harper Lee, who played Eustace’s father in the flashback scenes, rehearsed their lines on their own. Fisher cupped his copy of the script and called all of them together. The entire troupe entertained the tourist mob even as they fidgeted and adjusted themselves; they were so obviously out of sync compared to the sedated tourist bunches that ebbed and flowed along the footpaths or cruised along on aerial Segways twenty feet above ground like packs of pea-brained reptilians.
Fisher decided to hold off on rehearsal. Instead they broke into groups of jugglers and tumblers. The crew enjoyed the physicality and teamwork. Corrag, Ben and Hera did a slow, clownish somersaulting routine, mocking their aches and pains. The tourists loved it and flashed their artifexes, filming the comedy and hubbub. Hera did back flips off of Corrag’s shoulders into Ben’s hands and feet as he lay on his back on the ground. Then they juggled fluorescent balls facing the sun in the western quadrant. To the east, behind them, Zagarelli and several high-ranking staff of the hotel approached on Segways. They dismounted. Fisher called a halt. One ball fell from her hand as Corrag straightened. It rolled, and she fell to her knees to retrieve it. Zagarelli’s presence made them all nervous.
“You seem less than energized tonight,” said Zagarelli to none of them in particular.
“According to what data?” said Fisher.
“Instant polling,” said Zagarelli, sneering antagonistically.
“But we just started,” said Fisher, exasperated.
“These are long term trends.”
“Look, if you’re not happy with us, then let us go,” said Fisher, showing surprising backbone.
“On the contrary. You will have an influx in the next few weeks,” said Zagarelli. He walked around pulling at hands, checking cuticles for vitamin deficiencies. They were supposed to be eating cafeteria food, but many of them cooked on the outlets in the common rooms on each floor of the hotel, foregoing the nutritional value for a little sovereignty over their own lifestyles.
“What do you mean?” asked Fisher. His voice ratcheted up in alarm. He spoke for all of them, and Corrag wished he were less emotional. It was a sign of weakness to the augments.
Zagarelli was a former officer in the Border Rangers, and he held himself with the slouching demeanor of a man raised in the heartland, used to the bullying dominance of the settler people. Now his job in the Hilton was essentially overseeing the last holdouts on the reservation, volunteers internally exiled in a place that had once been a luxurious destination for the pampered wives of the Republican Homeland’s National Guard. Ben hated the sight of him, as did most of the troupe. Corrag feared Ben was about to give voice to their feelings and try to make a fool of the man. She gave him a quick warning glance, and as she looked back around she caught the eye of one of Zagarelli’s lieutenants.
Her heart sank. She had not seen him behind Zagarelli. The man sensed her fear and walked over to her. He gave a slow, smirking smile. She did not remember his name. About thirty, an augment in his prime, without a shred of doubt or self-reflection, his smile had a genuine, almost naive sort of narcissism in it. Corrag picked up Hera and stared into his eyes blankly, without quite making contact. Zagarelli was talking.
“There will be many more soon. The creative class will be clamoring for places in the hotel. And you as long-term residents will be expected to show them the ropes, break them in, as they say. Set the proper tone. Do I make myself clear?”
“Clear enough for most of us, I expect,” said Fisher.
Zagarelli’s man broke off the staring contest and reset his blank face with the placid demeanor of a boss. He performed a leisurely circuit around Corrag, frozen with Hera in her arms.
Zagarelli and his staff mounted back on the Segways and silently whirred away. Boland was his name. Zack Boland. The man was the last to set off. She remembered now, her mind unfreezing, as Ben walked angrily after them, picking up a stone and looking at it in his hand. He reared back and threw the stone futilely as the Segways vanished into the dusky light and long shadows of the eastern Parkway.
Corrag was instantly by his side as if she’d levitated. She was quick when she wanted still.
“What did you do that for?” She couldn't help it. She couldn't keep the anger out of her voice.
Ben said nothing. He looked away. He couldn’t look at her when she was like this.
“You risk everything. Do you know that? Termination of the contract, kicked out into the street like dogs. Is that what you want? You want all of us to be begging for food, homeless?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Ben, pale-faced.
“I don’t believe it,” said Corrag in disgust.
Fisher walked over to them.
“It’s fine. No harm in it. Letting off a little steam. We all need to do that,” said Fisher, judiciously.
“Not by throwing rocks at the hotel staff,” said Corrag.
“Did you see the way that dirty bastard was looking at you?” Ben shouted.
“Don’t be stupid, Ben. Keep it down,” said Corrag.
“Hey,” said Fisher. “We have two weeks until the holiday premiere. Let's try to keep that in mind.”
“I hate to break it to y
ou, Paul. There's not going to be a premiere. There’s something coming down from the Augment. Zagarelli just let us know that whatever it is, it’s the end of the Hilton as we know it,” said Ben, turning away.
His face had been momentarily lit by knowledge of something they couldn’t see. Despite her anger, Corrag’s focus turned. She backed down from her corner of self-righteousness. The world slowed. Ben was telling them something important. Sometimes his eyes looked out at the world from a strange place. His reports of its geography and mores could still beckon to her. He was there again.
Corrag, Hera and Ben were walking across the footbridge to the northern quadrangle, making their way towards the main arch of the hotel entrance. It was dark, the winter days shortened. Corrag observed in the dying light the way ice crystals formed on the bricks of the walkway, beginning to crack and shape places for new life to take hold. The planetary processes never slowed. Similar things were happening inside each one of them under the cloak of the seasons. Ben was talking about hotel staff he knew whom he would approach for information. There was a way forward that they would find in the name of survival, in the name of a future for Hera. Sometimes the old dreams of social perfection still beckoned, but mostly it was about survival in these troubled times for her and Ben. She stayed up on his shoulder, maintaining their spatial relationship despite his uncompromising stride. Hera was silent, asleep on his shoulders.
Suddenly, the ground gave way. A whistle of artillery rounds and rumbling explosions knocked Corrag to the ground. Ben and Hera disappeared into the distance.
All around her it was black. Her body refused to move. She grabbed onto an arm, but her hand slipped off the fabric as if it was ice. Someone was talking in her ear, telling her to get up and run, a Chinese face that she looked into in the moonlight. In the air, there were chimera bats flitting; she could sense their metal wings. The Chinese man fell, his throat slit.
She could hear the gurgle in his throat, the man's last, drowning gasp at the life leaving his body. He lay next to her, and she felt the warmth of his blood soaking against her leg. After a long while she stood.
She had no feelings either inside or out, just a sense of incomprehension at the finality of the scene before her. The carnage -- brains and guts, dismembered bodies spoiling in the warmish breeze of a freak thaw -- covered the surface of the earth. There was a brown haze at the top of the sky, squashing it down, pressurizing it so that her eardrums hurt. Then it began again, the explosions and fires. This time the drones flew sorties over the hotel and bombed the east and west wings into bits.
She cried out for Hera. The thought of her daughter’s anguish was too much to bear. Corrag fell and rounded into a fetal ball. She never gave up fear or hope. They were the same desperate thing. But she listened for the end, for a sign that it was all right finally.
The rain fell, and the ground softened. People came and silently took away the dead in some kind of rehearsed, orderly process. Corrag wondered whether they were augmented or not. She turned her head and tried to open her eyes just a crack, enough to let in some light. She heard her father’s voice, or maybe it was Al, her grandfather whom she’d never met.
“It’s over. This time has ended.”
Was the voice in her head merely reinforcing her own desires? She tried to think. Time itself stopped. What would that mean?
The quality of the light changed. It became brighter, and it hurt her eyes. She twisted her head around to get rid of the light. They said horses did the same when confronted with evil. Ben stroked her arm, fallen outside the sheet, and Hera stood there next to him, staring at her with large blue eyes that understood everything before it passed.
“What happened?” Corrag asked.
“Good. You’re okay. The hotel staff thinks you’ll need to be in bed for a couple of days. They’ve taken a swab,” said Ben.
“What is it?” she asked.
“They’re not sure," he said.
Hera hugged her, glad to have her back again.
“Hera. I saw you but I couldn’t get to you. It was horrible, Ben. We need to do something about it.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Ben.
“The terrible times ahead. I saw it.”
“A dream. Were we in it?” asked Ben.
“Yes. A war. Terrible destruction. They unleashed the drones on us. The bats at night. Augments and unaugments. Everyone together.”
“Well, don’t worry, Cor. We’re getting out of here before they shut the door for good. Fisher and Uko have already made plans. As soon as we can. Going on tour through Juarez and Monterrey down to Nuevo Leon and on to PV. They love us in PV,” he said, keeping his voice barely audible.
Ben hadn't lied. It was time now to leave. She had known it would arrive. Hera walked patiently beside her, a slight jumpiness in her steps betraying her excitement. They had the two rented portervans parked along Alameda around the corner from the hotel front entrance. In small groups, they left the Hilton under the pretext of an outing for Corrag.
Corrag and Ben went out the gate with Hera walking beside her. Corrag limped with a cane. Her muscular system was under attack from within, the doctors said. But she didn’t trust them. Whatever it was had no cure. Time was running out for her and for the planet, she felt. The staff watched with silent, unmoving heads. Soon they would discover that the theater troupe had run the curfew. They had to move quickly. Fisher had Ben drive the first one. Hera and Corrag piled in the back with Shelley and Harper Lee. Uko was driving the second portervan with more people. They went out on the highway parallel to the trolley tracks that still ran through the old Chinese and Mexican parts of town. Old augmented men, who once had been the spearhead of the working class, now monitored their quantum fluctuations to predict the end of the universe’s expansion. They sat on porches watching the sunset over the warehouses.
They drove on through the plains to the southwest. There was the ruined aqueduct from the first desalination plant built in the desert. Then scrub took over before the night fell in bands of purple and black, interspersed with the sprinkling of stars. Ben told the story of Corrag’s disease and timeslip. It morphed into the story of the Basin Wars of his youth with the Naguani and how he’d gone native and discovered the healing power of the Tree People that guarded the forests from the deceitful, imperialist extractors of Kiva. He kept talking as they drove, to nobody in particular. Fisher listened politely but then fell asleep. Only Hera kept listening to her father's stories. They matched the stars for her. She crawled into the middle and hung her head over the seatback to listen. Corrag heard the words, but she was dreaming of her father and mother. She had slipped time because of her illness. But Ben’s story foretold the death of time itself. They would really have to hurry.
The old border wall stretched for miles in crumbling mounds of concrete, nanofabric and old electric transmission wires. The idea of obstructing human migratory flows had fallen into disfavor with the advent of mass augmentation. The stream of cheap labor flowing to the North had dried up decades ago when it was no longer necessary or advantageous to the Repho elites or their clients in the subjugated nations to encourage it. The obsolete barrier had slowly disintegrated with time. Any monitoring of the old neglected crossings was done via satellite surveillance.
They waited until it was almost dark. They cut their headlights and moved slowly with Ben’s portervan in the lead. After driving over a jury-rigged bridge of steel beams and bolted planks left by the cartels, they rode on for about twenty miles. Ben spotted an empty lot with an unreadable sign swinging in the wind. It was eerily quiet in the light of the portervan’s high beams, as Corrag and Shelley set up a foldout table with some sandwiches and protein packs they had managed to sneak out with them from the hotel.
Corrag was not used to the lack of noise. She huddled in the portervan, and Hera stayed with her instead of seeking out the other children -- Uko’s adopted Russian twins Zeda and Volde. Hera tied her hair back alone with a bandan
a. Corrag gave Hera a cheese sandwich, and Shelley held out one for Ben by the door of the portervan. Corrag could barely see them through the windows in the light of the dashboard and the open door.
“To the driver,” Shelley said, and angled her head. Ben smiled and took a sandwich from her.
The night was upon them with a sudden intensity. They had been living such a long time in the artificially lit bounds of the Dallas Hilton that they were not used to the natural world and reacted somewhat like stunned animals released from long captivity. With no lights aside from the portervans, and those turned off to save energy for the drive ahead, Corrag just wanted to sleep. But Ben, Shelly and Uko and the two twins hunted for wood down by the riverbank. They were going to make a fire, they said.
Corrag tucked Hera into a sleeping bag in the back row of the portervan. She sat in the front seat and kept her daughter company. She could hardly keep her eyes open.
“Why don’t you tell me a story?” asked Hera.
“I can’t think of one,”said Corrag, feeling sorry for herself.
“You’re stressed,” said Hera.
“Yes, I am.”
“If you were augmented you wouldn’t be.”
“I know. It’s one of my problems.”
“Why don’t you go down and build a fire?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
"You don’t feel like joining the rest?” asked Hera, trying to be helpful.
“No.
Corrag observed Hera’s eyes. They seemed wide and calm in the dark. They absorbed the light in a strange way and almost gave off a glow. She seemed suddenly older, and Corrag realized she would soon need new clothes for school. She had outgrown last year’s, and the frock she was wearing was faded and colorless. How had she managed to miss all the signposts of the changes underway in her own daughter? Then she thought that she might be dead before the next school year started. Ben would have to buy Hera clothes, and he was useless, having never showed any interest in his daughter’s clothing preferences.
The water ran over rocks. It was running low. With the winter heat waves and no snowpack in the mountains, there was nothing reaching the ocean. At some point, the earth sucked it away into its thirsty, interior core. Corrag walked haltingly along the south bank. When she turned, she could hardly see the flicker of the fire. She was following a trail that ran along the bank. A pair of eyes stared at her up ahead, a desert wolf or perhaps a mountain lion. She would make an easy prey. Feeling self-pity was such a waste of time, but she needed some pity from somewhere. It was obviously better to supply it herself rather than have none from anybody else. But it was the worst time possible for the usual claustrophobic anxiety, the self-doubt and recriminations of a mind that could not see a way clear of the traps that life had seemed to set it. She told herself that it would get better soon, that panic was always the wrong response. But sometimes the monstrous, vengeful reptile of fear gained the upper hand and took away her breath. This was one of those times, she was certain. She stared at the black tops of the water and the barely discernible, boiling current. For so long the muddy river had marked the boundary between the rule of law and the merciless run of the outlaw. But now it was mostly ignored. Corrag felt the pull and mystery of the ceaseless water. There was a better life somewhere. But she doubted now that she would find her way to it. And she didn’t see Ben or anybody else getting there either. The future was drying up like the river. Soon there would be no option but to take matters into her own hands. Perhaps the time was now to return to the other side and put all of the misery of the past behind her.
The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 6