by Brendan Ball
He took another drink.
“Me, man, I play the part. Do the minimum I can, get my liquor nice and legal, watch my movies, read their news - least they think I do, fact some shit’s on my screen don’t mean I’m reading it. So when they pull up my bank card or tablet, everything checks out like they expect. But you, man, you just ask for it like you never had no attention. Breaking them rocks like you got a ideology or something, never arguing back, reading them fancy-ass books without even encryption - what you trying to prove? Who you want them think you are - Castro?”
A group of Russians blundered laughing back into their suits and staggered out through the airlock towards the buggy rental. Monroe folded his arms in a way he had that concealed the number on his hand.
“Now they already on your back, you better make with the wellness. And easy on them books till you get some encryption.”
Across the bar the Irish were arguing - one of them I recognised as an Alpha from the work gang - about politics and the English and Rivendale.
I said, “What makes you so keen to fit in? You don’t seem the nervous type.”
He finished his drink and poured us both another. Two buggies of drunk Russians careened past the window.
“I got three more years to serve,” he said. “I can do them here or do them there. Here I can get a drink and a little relaxation, and no leg irons or stun chips because there ain’t nowhere to run. Why you think any of these guys came?”
We drank our baijiu. The Irishmen’s argument boiled over into urging each other outside. Two fumbled their helmets back on and, once beyond the airlock and into our view, began clubbing one another and trying to tear them off. They were not even distracted when one of the buggies torpedoed past them and fireballed into the side of the rental centre, at which the other made off over the horizon and has never since been found. Whether the less lucky man passed out from drink or failed to fasten his helmet no one can know. Someone should have stopped them or tied them to the building. The opponent, thinking it pretence, beckoned him back in fury as the suited staff of the rental centre bounded out in zero-gravity slowness to the carnage. We inside the window, more sober by the moment, saw it all.
“Maybe we fucked up nature, man,” said Monroe with a sigh, “but we still got natural selection.”
He said it like something I needed to remember. The man floated away into the stars, a vanished speck in eternity.
*
We lived barely a mile apart - she walked on from her stop, I back from mine. I told her so of course, and contrived to be in conversation when the next evening’s moment came. I rose with her and said I could walk as it was only a few minutes more; she seemed pleased enough, so by three or four repetitions I established the routine.
It was turning colder, and we happened to wonder whether the trees would shed their leaves before the snow came or again get split down the middle, when she announced:
“My fiancé is in the Environment Corps.”
They were a bunch of UN-sponsored eternal students masquerading as action men.
“Saving the world?”
I thought she would catch the note of rancour but she only shrugged.
“Perhaps,” she said, “if they’d started fifty years ago. He’s abroad most of the time...”
I asked how long they had been together.
“Oh, ages,” she said, looking away. “Since I was a kid.”
At the I, not we, I imagined some self-satisfied mediocrity impressing a near-child by advantage of years. It did not knock me as flat as it might have: I was versed by then in every mood or inflection of her eyes and voice and smile, in the thousand thousand nuances of the way she held her head - my mind reached out for her on waking as my arms did in sleeping - and I knew she was not in love with him and probably never had been.
“He was here last weekend,” she said, and I did not understand why her face darkened till I remembered the injury and crutch.
She changed the subject, stopping on the pavement of the residence zone to turn with the wind in her hair and look up at me - she was short but wore low shoes, not trying to be taller.
“I’d have liked to see things from the old days,” she said. “The Slow Age books I want to read are above my Wén 5.”
I had not detailed what I did for a living, and was still piqued by the image of the girl-beating world-saver.
“You should have told me before,” I said. “I can get you anything like that.”
*
“Wellness stands before you,” said the woman on the lecture hall podium, stern and earnest in white kaftan and Rivendale sash, spreading wide her arms, “if only you have the will...”
I had been woken by the promised alarm to find a mailbox of new followers with strange netnames. The profile photos were of smiling young women, or men with slicked hair and sharp suits projecting wellness and success. Pictures of animals - a kitten scrambling up a wall, a colony of ants dragging a twig - bore captions like Believe In Yourself and Sad Is Bad and Divided We Are Drops But Together We Are An Ocean.
“You will all take your first step to wellness here and now...”
A security guard walked through the rows giving out blank cards, one per attendee.
“...by writing on this paper whatever in the world is troubling you most.”
As information mining went I thought it subtle as a sledgehammer, but most of the others began writing. The ceiling cameras circled. My neck chip tingled, as if straining under the clasp of the locket. I drew a flower whose genus only I could know.
“Now fold or roll up the slips.”
The guard walked the rows again with a metal bucket. The sight of them all in there made me think of clinical swabs, except an origami dollar sign. Under her supervision he stood beside the podium, disabled the smoke alarm by remote control, and lit them. The flame burst up and spat in blackness as the papers shrivelled and died. With her own device she brought up on the screen the view from an outside camera.
“Watch.”
She opened the chute in the back wall, threw in the remnants and flushed. In a few seconds they were vomited out of the biosphere into space.
“Behold,” she said, “the end of your troubles. Feel your wellness welling up within you...”
The chip tingled again. People around me sighed. From the locket on my chest a warmth swelled out - I knew then there was a power in it - waking me again to acuity. I looked up; lights flickered on the cameras. As those ashes floated dissolving away we were meant to feel some kind of healing, but I just thought of that poor drunk Irishman, one more speck out there in eternity never more to trouble our wellness.
*
With the door of her building an ineffable end point, the walks home could only grow outward - into stops for groceries, into slow detours through the park even when it rained (I never minded rain and I miss it where I am now), and finally into the noodle bar on the corner of her street. We would eat there together in the blood-red glow of the hieroglyphed lanterns, whispering of whichever books I had smuggled out for her - Plato, Confucius, The Testaments, Hagakure, Descartes, Karamazov - while she used the chopsticks with a grace that made of each dish a dance, the noodles swaying down from them like the strings of a puppet. But then as we parted into solitude for the night I would sicken and ache inside, knowing the puppet was me.
And then one day she was not there.
At times when she had to work late or leave early, she would mention it in advance. We never exchanged netmails or numbers. When she stayed home sick I would divine it in retrospect from the last sight of her, for I knew her face that well. But her absence one hot evening from the sweating stuffiness of the monorail carriage I knew at once to be different, and it sowed in me the germ of desolation: every couple on the bright glaring pavements stuck gritlike in my eye, a portent, indelible. Was she with him, was she safe there, and was she sharing those books along with, willing or unwilling, herself
?
That night I lay awake till morning; the next, when she did not appear, I drank myself to sleep. It availed nothing but to grant me the first vision of her, a fluid sylphlike being adrift beyond my reach among the stars. I woke knowing I could no longer keep away.
After eight hours at the Ministry staring blind into a screen I left early - knowing they would fine me - to be at the stop for the monorail before ours, then ours, then the one after. The next I got on, so pale and feverish with missed sleep and misery that no one sat near me in case I had plague. I made myself go home (what a word for it) and force down some food while I waited, like a thief, for the dark.
*
It was one morning in my inbox among the glut of wellness that I first heard of Lunar Seas. The gold lettering was hard to miss, the map showing the site between the Sea of Serenity and the Sea of Tranquillity picked out by Rivendale for their flagship complex, the offices to be adjoined by a luxury hotel and spa. I read the piece aloud to Monroe, who was going out for lunch with a girl who worked a desk in the PortHotel.
“What you expect?” He straightened his jacket in the mirror, dusting off his looks of charm and sincerity. “When they bring out relatives they trying to impress and people they trying to recruit and investors they trying to milk, where you think they put ’em - Basement 5? And breaking rocks and breaking our backs for somewhere we be shot if we try to get into - that’s part of our education, make us understand who we are.”
He tried a few poses, variations on themes - warm smiles, numbered hand in pocket, arms folded, humming his Red River Valley. Also among the inbox junk was an announcement of council elections. Eligible to stand and to vote were all holders of residence status. I had not seen any residents.
“Sure you have,” said Monroe. “You seen Rivendale. They got families.”
“So they’re the only ones voting?”
“Man,” he said, breaking satisfied from the mirror to slip on his shoes. “I worry about you. I hope you convincing them with that wellness shit. You got yourself encryption yet for them books?”
He swiped his card and the door opened.
“Monroe, what did you do?”
He knew what I meant - how he got the numbers.
From the hallway he turned and said, “I killed guys who asked bad questions.”
The door slid closed. I was more sure with every passing day that he too had worked inside the system. That was fine. What bothered me was the odds against mere chance pairing us together.
*
I slunk through the yards of the residences with my collar drawn up against the pale cones of the streetlights, unsleeping and beyond my own control. The coolness of night air was always a home to me - that is how the Sisters found me, basketed on the steps of the Involuntary Mothers’ Union all those years ago in the time of the purges - but it was little relief.
I shivered on the bench of the children’s playground a stone’s throw from her building before the high mosaic of flickering lights. After counting the windows high and wide I drew out the grid on my tablet, then whenever I saw a light go on I filled in the square: barring ambulances or police or plague vans, a full house made her alive and well.
The hours passed slower than I thought.
To the haunting whisper of the distant monorail I circled the yard for warmth, keeping the entrance and mosaic in sight, while moving shadows huddled in the blind spots of the cameras with whatever fire or sleep they were selling. I was ridiculous even to myself, but to give up and go would change nothing. At last as I sat there the lights blurred, my head dropped and I fell asleep to the chattering of my teeth.
That was when I saw the second vision. Again she was above me, again among the stars, naked as the night itself and reaching down to me with petalscent in her long red hair.
“Roland.”
I woke. She stood over me in the shriek of dawn, face a mask of horror.
*
“Scream!” The woman in the Rivendale kaftan above the Scream Therapy sign on the lectern adjusted her ear protection and leaned down into the microphone to be heard above it all. “Scream, scream, scream, scream, scream.”
Only she and the security guards had ear protection; the group near me, in the Green Cheese till a few hours before, were suffering.
“Unblock your inner wellness! Set free your inner child!”
The ceiling cameras zoomed in and out, flashing, and the uniformed guards moved among the rows removing screamers at the woman’s pointed direction and escorting them away. I shouted enough to keep the neck chip quiet, and the guards passed me by. When about half of us remained, she let us stop.
“You who are left,” she said, “are chosen for reparenting. Many among you have no parents even back on Earth. Think now of Rivendale as your Ideal Father and Protective Mother.”
I had a tingling lightheadedness, from either the screaming or the relief at its end; the room shimmered and blurred amid shooting stars of camera-flash; the locket throbbed and burned.
“Our adoption of you is a corrective emotional experience. You will learn in time to reparent yourselves with your rearranged inner blueprint. Training exercises and more information will be mailed to you with your Power Breathing schedule. Remember: be worthy, for you are the chosen...”
I got back to find Monroe sat before the videwindow with a bitterness in his eyes.
“They done had their election,” he said. “And done some unnatural selection.”
I took up my tablet. The first decision of the new council was to fund Lunar Seas and the housing around it with a loan from the treasury of the colony, to be recouped as tax from anyone of temporary status and above. That included us, and meant we would never get beyond the labour residences. That dream, for any who had it, was over, a sacrifice to the tone of the neighbourhoods.
I said, “They tell me I’m one of their chosen.”
“For what?”
“They didn’t say. For screaming.”
Monroe stared on out, his look unchanging.
He said, “There be more screaming here real soon.”
*
She stood over me against the residence blocks of the mist-grey dawn, horror turning to grief. I hauled myself up.
“I was just worried about you - foolish, I know...”
The road to hell is probably lined with people trying to make a joke of it. The breeze blew her autumn-leaf hair across her marble face in which nothing moved, her eyes in amaze of sadness and pity and revulsion.
“My fiancé came with a few days’ leave - we went to the coast.” The suitcase materialised at her feet - she must have just sent away the taxi. “Go home, Roland.”
She made it sound as if it were for my own sake. And perhaps it even was. But - for I knew her so well, not her biography but the language of her eyes and movements and even her breathing - she was unhappy not merely with me but deep inside herself.
I spent the worst weekend of my life on a sleepless bed sweating and shivering and not caring if it were plague, the cracks in the ceiling polymorphed to serpentine hallucinations of blood and death and torment and then at the end of it all the vision of her again: from the moon itself she called to me, blended with it, beckoning to forgiveness and a cool sweet oblivion.
No one called from the Ministry when I missed work on the Saturday. But they would get the automated message from the door system and none from any hospital or gaol, so my records and hard drive would be pulled up and checked and my book smuggling discovered. Dismissal was the best that could follow.
I knew from the vision what I had to do, but on the Monday morning I went in as usual: I could not let that terrible dawn be the last she ever saw of me.
*
The Green Cheese opened the next day as the Lunar Ticks, with a sign showing sleek gorged parasites sucking blood out of the moon. In an hour the inspectors arrived and shut it down citing three hygiene violations and a possible murder - that
same poor Irishman unmissed until then. (The buggy rental, who gave VIP tours to Rivendale executives in working hours when we unwashed were safely occupied, never had to answer or even bother searching for those Russians.) If Rivendale meant it as a warning, thinking to let them reopen once a deal had been reached, it was a slip. The numbered hands were not primed for politicking, and the bar near the PortHotel with the armed security and alcohol limits was not primed for them.
The first I knew was the wail of the alarms. Monroe and I ambled out together - I from eating and he from one of his films - assuming fires or air leaks. The lifts were in shutdown so with the alarms getting louder we took the stairs. At the ground floor a unit in riot gear ran past and pointed tasers back at us.
“Stay in your residence until permitted to leave.”
They turned again and ran on. We stood a while with some others near the staircase, not talking much over the unceasing alarms, and soon in twos and threes and sixes came the stragglers in search of the medical bay, bent and broken, scared and shocked, bleeding from limbs or head, muttering of destruction and arrests.
“Man, we should go.”
Monroe sounded tired.
“Is this what you meant by screaming?” I said as we headed back.
“I reckon tomorrow that bar be open.” There was no satisfaction or amusement in his voice. “But I know who pay the check.”
We woke the next morning to shouting in the corridor. I had for some reason been dreaming of the Iliad and thought they were crying “Hey Zeus”. Monroe went out to see; I heard Spanish, fast and choked and bitter, and then his steps returning. He came and stood bearlike in the door of my tiny room.
“They from the flamenco band at that bar,” he said. “Just got released.”
“So why the shouting now?”
“The kid who sang.”