by M M Buckner
“Jolie, don’t be afraid for me. Look at the risks you take, yes? I’m not afraid for you.”
“You’ll be alone with that monster!”
“Judith? I thought you liked the good doctor. You introduced us.”
I opened my mouth in astonishment. Odd, I hadn’t considered that point before. In my dawning comprehension, I felt muscle-weak.
“Jin, please reconsider. The woman can’t be trusted. At least, take someone to watch over you.”
“Father will receive updates.”
With my face nuzzled against his chest, I couldn’t see his expression, but I heard the bitterness. What was going on between Jin and his father? I embraced him tighter and kissed his salty skin. Ignorance made me powerless even to guess at motivations. It was maddening.
“Send me the updates, too,” I said on impulse. Why did I stammer on, committing myself without thinking? “If something goes wrong, I’ll come get you.”
A promise. It was a thing I didn’t like, a thing I had vowed never to give to anyone. But already I’d broken that vow for Luc Viollett, and for others. Truth to tell, I wasn’t half so aloof from people as I wanted to believe. And there it was, lying between Jin and me like a thrown gauntlet, my promise of help.
“Hmm.” He drew back and gazed at me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t read. Then he kissed me gently on the forehead. “You’re my good angel, Jolie.”
“Jin.” I didn’t mean to whimper. It just came out that way.
He turned toward the southwest, and I looked past him toward the east. In the distance, among the efficient white air compressors, I saw a tiny puff of black smoke, an explosion. A filtration unit flew apart in jagged pieces. That seemed odd.
“Very well.” Jin’s words broke my reverie. “You’ll have the updates, too, pretty pet. You’ll be my witness.”
5
Like a Kid Again
LITTLE DID WE realize, as Jin and I made love once more in our artificial tower, that the city below was fragmenting. That puff of smoke I’d seen among the compressors had been the first faint signal. Terrorists had penetrated Greenland.Com. The world had changed.
Toward evening, Jin walked me to the hotel lobby, but a squad of police had blocked the exits. They were scanning everyone. Jin made a scene. “Let her through. She’s with me.” He flashed his autograph ring and offered bribes, but the police ignored him. I grabbed his fingers as a cop ran a scanner wand over my body. Jin fumed. “Don’t worry, pet. This is a farce.”
Jin didn’t know the universal ID chip in my signet ring was counterfeit. The chip tagged me as a free agent with Transkei credentials. Usually, I could travel through Com protectorates without hassle. I prayed the forgery would pass muster now. But the cop with the scanner barked an order, and they took me into custody.
I lost sight of Jin when two orange-suited guards marched me toward a rail bus with a lot of other terrified foreign tourists. Someone shoved me in and slammed the door. For two days I paced a jail cell, getting out only for toilet breaks. They fed me tube-goo and synthetic coffee, and they wouldn’t even talk to me. When they finally said I could leave, it was a lie.
Oh yeah, the guards escorted me out of the security complex, but by the time I made it back to my lodge and found Luc, no sanctioned transport of any description was leaving Godthaab. What’s more, they’d locked up my credit account. The smart chip in my signet ring had gone dead. I couldn’t pay the lodge bill or access the Net. I couldn’t call Jin’s hotel. I couldn’t even buy a cola from the vending machine. We were stuck.
Thank the Laws, I’m a resourceful girl. I always carry a few extra signet rings with alternative IDs. And I know better than to store the bulk of my money in a public Net account. Maybe I never attended an edu, but you learn a lot growing up in the Paris tunnels.
Armed with a new ID, I sent an encrypted call to Jin. His hotel took a while to answer, and they couldn’t locate him at first. Finally, they patched me through to his wrist Net node.
“La Sauvage, my angel. Isn’t the world hilarious?”
I could tell he’d been drinking again, and I heard someone else in the room with him. I didn’t want to see who, and yet I strained to hear if the voice was female. He must have recognized my suspicion, because he leaned close to his node’s little cam-eye so his face filled my screen.
“You’re still my angel?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Sweet Jolie. I don’t deserve you. Stay where you are. Godthaab is dangerous now. I’m working on something for you. We’ll talk later.” And he terminated the link.
He was right about the dangerous part. The city corridors had turned malevolent. All the downtown sections were empty—an unsettling sight And there was a smell. Godthaab usually cleaned its air with electrostatic microfilters. It never smelted, not like other human places. Paris had its own perfume of yeasty musk. Sydney smelted like fruit. Even on the surface, you could smell a distinctive burnt-sweat aroma in your surf suit. But Godthaab had always been too sterile for anything as human as smell. Until now.
And the temperature was rising. Somewhere a refrigeration plant must have failed. In the wee hours, Luc and I stole out of our lodge with just what we could carry. I wanted to go find Jin, but Luc cautioned against it. I knew he was right. Jin could take care of himself, and anyway, I didn’t want to find him with some other woman. So Luc and I took off through a labyrinth of dark, narrow maintenance corridors, heading toward the seaport.
We couldn’t even get close. At least four kilometers out, we ran into a pack of terrified Greenland protes using the same route. They had children and baggage, and the ones we could see were caught up in mob mind, shoving and crushing each other in unleashed panic. We heard wailing ahead. Luc and I backed up fast and got away.
As usual, I didn’t have a plan so much as an urge to survive, and I was willing to try anything. So when Luc found a hatch leading into a public corridor, we climbed through. The corridor was deserted. I’d never seen an empty pedestrian belt before. Those wide gray belts had always been packed with commuters. We passed barred shop windows, locked residences. That smell gave me the jitters. We sprinted through the corridor in eerie silence.
“Jolie.” Luc pointed up. A surveillance camera pivoted on its mount to watch us, and a red laser beam shot out. It was scanning our signet rings, identifying us. I had one ring on my finger and two more in my boot. The scanner would read them all. Somewhere in the distance, we heard the mud of heavy footsteps coming our way. No wonder the corridors were empty.
“Let’s go!” I shouted, racing on, scouting urgently for any kind of opening to duck into.
Luc saw it first, an electrical service shaft with a voice-recognition lock. “Voilà!” he said.
I ripped my handy piton gun from my belt and shot titanium bolts at the hinges. Luc used his fingernails. Alarms went off, but we got the lightweight little hatch open and shimmied inside. A ladder ran straight down, and we let ourselves drop.
For most of the afternoon, we wormed through the tight-fitting electrical service conduits. We went deep—so deep our GPS locators stopped working. With no sense of direction, we kept descending. Finally, when we were too tired to go on, we collapsed against each other and waited. We slept. After a while we woke up, and Luc fished some liquid nutrient tubes out of his backpack.
“Just like Paris, eh, chérie? Shall we dine?” Luc’s cheek dimpled. He was enjoying the adventure.
“Yum, my favorite cuisine! Give me the chocolate one,” I said.
“Naturellement! I would never stand between you and your chocolate.”
When we’d sucked the tubes flat Luc grinned at me. “Share your secrets, chérie. What’s he like, Le Magicien?”
I knew who Luc meant. The Magician was Jin’s most popular movie role, a cult favorite. I fluttered my eyelashes. “Aren’t you dying to know!”
“Don’t play coy, ma soeur. You slept with him. Oui, you’re blushing. You can tell your petit frèr
e Luc. Is his cock like a piston?”
I gave him a rough shove that sent him sprawling. “Luc, you’re wicked!”
“Mais oui!” He sat up and dusted himself off. “But truly, chérie, why are you mixing with this aristo trash? He is handsome, but dangerous for you.”
“Oh Luc, it was just one night”
Luc gazed at me with his intelligent gray eyes. He had the sweet impish face of a child, but those eyes never missed a thing.
I said, “Luc, he’s already found his next lover. He was with someone when I called. Mes dieux, Jin Sura’s a world-famous celebrity. I’m nothing to him, I know that”
“Do you, chérie? You’re heart is fragile. Sometimes you don’t take very good care of it.”
“It was just one night, Luc. It’s over.”
He nodded slowly, studying my face. When he wore that expression, he put me in mind of some wise old monk on the History Channel. I didn’t dare tell Luc about the promise I’d made—to come if Jin called. Luc thought I was tough as iron. The idea of disappointing him, of letting him see my weak side, well it made me cringe.
“Let’s move,” I said, shoving stuff in my pack. So we took another ladder down.
Luc and I spent a month in Godthaab. We tracked the time on our chronometers, and for eighteen days, we scrambled through a dozen levels of automated machinery, playing hide-and-seek with the cops. Robotic equipment pounded above and below us till our very cells vibrated to the rhythm. It reminded me of the Paris tunnels. I felt like a kid again.
In fact, Godthaab’s underworks looked almost exactly like Paris. The same brands of automated machinery converted solar and wind energy from the surface into power to clean and refrigerate the city’s air, to distill water from the rain, to illuminate the nutrient vats, and to pump electricity into the citywide grid. And the same brands of robotic repair drogues stalked though like ghosts, fixing what was broken.
Luc and I tapped the nutrient pipes and bled off all the food we could drink. We opened water valves and treated ourselves to marvelous showers. We pulled insulation foam out of the heat sinks and built nests. Ça va, we could have survived down there for years. But then we met the locals.
Four of them. At gunpoint. Two grown men, a woman, and a young boy. Their eyes glinted with suspicion. Luc immediately went into his charm routine and offered chocolate bars. To me, he whispered, “Smile, chérie. You look like the angel of wrath. You’re scaring them.”
I did my best to warm up my expression, but they were having none of it. The boy slapped the chocolate bars out of Luc’s hands and growled. They were small people, with ice white skin and hair the color of dry chalk—like mine. The boy’s eyes were pink, and the woman was balding. And all four of them had long thick yellowish fingernails. Way weird. These people obviously lived deep underground in the absence of wide-spectrum light Runaway protes, criminals, terrorists? We didn’t ask, and they didn’t say.
So I tried the universal language. I waved a wad of cash.
The woman muttered a patois I didn’t understand, and the two men grabbed us. With handheld electric torches, they led us deeper into the underworks, so far down my ears hurt from the pressure. The air tasted like metal. After a long, tense hike, we entered a warren of rusting ducts and air exchange tanks. The seams had been caulked with luminous plastic. It looked as if a child had been scribbling on the walls with lavender glow-foam.
Many people were living there. We passed small domestic scenes, three old men huddled around a stone brazier, a young woman teaching children some game involving stones. Everyone turned to stare at us. Villagers popped up through hatches and slid down chutes to gather around us in a tight, curious circle. They wore a motley mix of prote uniforms and designer fashions stolen from the Godthaab shops. Luc and I nonchalantly fingered our piton guns.
The woman, our hostess, grunted in monosyllables and scrawled numerals on the gritty floor with her finger. The two men stripped us of our piton guns, our cash, our gear belts, our signet rings—including the ones in my boot—and all of Luc’s silver jewelry. Cher Luc was a bit vain about his jewelry, and he took that hard.
Afterward, they seemed to expect us to join them. The woman conveyed with gestures and a few words of Net English that our valuables would be added to the common treasury. In other words, these renegades had organized themselves like a Transkei health church, sans the exercise equipment and nutrition counselors.
After her little speech, they clamped old-fashioned steel shackles around our ankles—just as a sort of “welcome to the commune” ritual I guess. About then, I noticed some of the men ogling Luc and me and licking their lips. I knew what they were thinking. Scuzz that.
Luc whispered, “Smile, chérie. Stay calm. We still have resources.”
When the village people started picking through our gear, an argument broke out. So much for communal possession. While they were occupied, Luc nudged me and winked. We quietly edged into the shadows. Luc still had one tiny silver pin piercing the only spot on his body the villagers hadn’t searched. He used that to pick the locks of our shackles. The villagers didn’t even notice when we slipped away.
Silent as thieves, we belly-crawled out of the warren, past the glowing seams of plastic caulk into the safety of darkness. Then we huddled in a cranny, and I suggested that the best escape route would be straight up. The villagers wouldn’t expect that. Maybe the Greenland cops had forgotten us by now. Maybe we could get to the seaport. Maybe should have been my middle name. See, I’m a girl who always keeps hoping. What I’ve learned is, when in doubt, make the boldest leap you can think of, and you’ll usually land safe. Not everyone agrees with that, I know. It takes resolve.
Luc didn’t like it, but he finally agreed with me. He always does, eventually. The villagers had taken our chronometers, so I don’t know how many hours we spent working our way back up through the factory levels to where we’d first played merry-go-round with the cops. When we were maybe four levels below Godthaab’s public corridors, we started searching for recognizable landmarks. We needed to get our bearings and find the seaport, but everything looked the same. Mazes of oily blue machinery clanking and whirring, compressing liquids and gases, throwing off heat.
We’d fled the village people with just the clothes on our backs, and we didn’t have a single tool between us to open the food or water pipes. So we dined on black mold, and we drank from oily pools where steam had condensed under the machines—just like when we were kids. But it wasn’t enough. Mes dieux, but I craved a cool drink of water.
In desperation, Luc finally starting yanking at a small plastic water line just where it connected to a pump. When I realized what he was doing, I joined in. We hauled and hauled at it, using our body weight to pull it loose. After several minutes of struggle, the gasket let go, and water blasted out of that little hose like a geyser. I swear by Newton himself, no drink ever tasted better. We were laughing and spraying each other when all of a sudden, we heard a voice. Machine-made. A cyborg.
“Mademoiselle Sauvage?”
Luc and I froze. The plastic water line lashed around on the floor blasting spray, and the machinery kept clanging. “Mademoiselle Sauvage?” the mechanical voice vibrated again.
I looked over my shoulder, and there stood a copper-colored cyborg wearing the uniform of a Greenland cop. Luc bounded to his feet, then slipped in the water and nearly fell. I sprang up and caught his arm.
“Do not fear me,” the cyborg said. “I am Ras. I serve Jin Sura.”
“You—what?”
“To avoid electrocution, please move one meter left,” it said.
Luc and I gawked at the cyborg with open mouths. We were standing in water up to our ankles like a pair of goofy statues. The cyborg pointed, and we looked down to see where the water was just about to spill into an electrical fuse box. As one unit, Luc and I leaped up to a dry platform a meter to the left. A second later, the box scritched and smoked and arced white lightning as water sizzled through its f
uses. Close one.
“Jin Sura has sent me to help you,” the cyborg said.
If I had to pick the exact moment when I fell in love, that would be it.
The cyborg explained how Jin had deployed him to find us on the very day we disappeared. Ras had been searching ever since, starting at our lodge and doggedly following our trail. He’d tracked us using a DNA scan based on a few hairs I’d left on Jin’s pillow.
He—Ras, that is—carried a Net node, cash, two fake signet rings, eight liters of water and a supply of those nutrient caps that taste like melted plasticene. He also carried a message, recorded in Jin’s own voice.
“Take care, pretty Jolie. Remember, you’re my witness. I’ll be in touch.”
Ras led us to the seaport through crawl spaces under the factory floors. Four hours of crawling, two hours of sleep, on and off for more cycles than I care to remember. The seaport turned out to be a preter-vicious long way. When we reached the docks, Ras interfaced with a cyborg shipping clerk, who promptly issued us a pair of surfsuits and stowed us away on a hover freighter bound for the south. Five days later, Luc and I were sitting in a public Net stall in Palmertown, Antarctica, breathing the air of freedom.
6
Jets and Jellyfish
FEBRUARY IS THE hottest month is the Antarctic summer, and even though the Palmertown city engineers had all their refrigeration units turned full max, the air reeked with salty human sweat. Laws, that place smelted good to me.
About the first thing I did after we arrived was to download some tracer software to locate Jin. While we waited for the results at a public Net stall, Luc and I surfed the news. And stared at each other in disbelief. The unthinkable had come to pass. Full-out civil war.
Throughout the crowded underground cities of the northern hemisphere, protected workers had risen against their masters. Rebel cells long concealed had blossomed overnight. Bombs exploded in Euro, setting off subterranean fires that raged out of control. Greenland.Com had declared martial law. In the Manhattan Protectorates, production lines had been sabotaged. Looters in Asia prowled the corridors, ransacking without restraint. Nome.Com had released nerve gas in the Alaskan worker dorms. Only the Transkei Free States clustering around the southern pole remained stable.