by Ian McDonald
Do you want me to mute them?
‘Mute them all.’
After that the rules were clear. Robson was never troubled as long as he kept his part of the social contract by playing the role of outsider.
Different colloquium, same rules. Haider was in Dolorite, Theophilus’s other colloquium, come in from Hypatia with care givers Max and Arjun. Haider didn’t have the name, hadn’t fallen from the top of a city so didn’t carry a reputation to have broken. He certainly didn’t have the moves. Six days on and he was still covering the deeper bruises with foundation. Dolorite Colloquium always had the tougher reputation. He settled into a routine of class pariah, but never that of outcast. There had to be someone else out there, in Theophilus’s one hundred and twelve. The path was clear and simple. He followed the hate posts, and found Robson Corta.
They sit in their booth in El Gato Encantado on the slightly-too-high banquette, sipping their horchatas. They could not be more different.
Robson is brown, wiry, confident; loves sport and activity, assured in what he can do with his body.
Haider is pale, skinny, shy; loves stories and music, uncertain in his body and what is happening to it.
They are inseparable.
Jianyu brings a woman in dust-smeared workwear over to the booth.
‘Show her that thing.’ He points to Robson.
‘What thing?’
‘That thing with the cards.’
Word has passed quickly around El Gato Encantado that the kid with the big hair can also work cards. Robson pulls his half deck of cards from the pocket of his shorts, shuffles one-handed. That’s usually enough to impress but Jianyu nods: more. Robson’s adapted his tricks to work with the half deck. The other half he gave to a friend, in another city; a city that no longer exists, smelted to slag in the dust of the Oceanus Procellarum. In another life; a life that no longer exists, cut to bones by blades.
He’ll work a simple gravity-force. Quick, fast and always bamboozles. Show the pack, turn it over, note a card – the force card – and cut it a couple of times. Move the force card to the bottom of the deck. Square it up. He slides the force card under the top card, fans the deck. Gravity makes sure the force card is still on the bottom.
This is the work of two, maybe three seconds. The trick of the trick is done. Everything else is selling – the theatre, the patter, the disguising. The trick of the trick of the trick is that it is never where the mark thinks it is.
‘Okay now, touch a card. Any card you like.’
Robson’s deck is grubby, foxed at the corners and skewed to the aristocracy: high on court cards, diamond and hearts. The luck of the split. Darius Mackenzie, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, has the low clubs.
‘Now, I’m going to show you that card.’ As he patters, Robson splits the deck and squares the two halves, sliding the force card under the chosen card. He shows duster-woman the half deck, force card on the bottom. ‘Now, look at this card for five seconds. I need you to do it for that time because that’s how long it takes to imprint on your eye. Because what I’m going to do is read it right off your retina. Okay?’
The woman may be a vacuum-hardened, radiation-tanned veteran, but she nods, uncertain, nervous. This is all part of the working of the trick: the sell. Robson closes up the deck again and looks into her eyes. One two three four five.
‘I’m reading the Queen of Diamonds,’ he says.
Of course it’s the Queen of Diamonds.
‘Isn’t that the damnedest thing?’ Jianyu says. ‘The damnedest thing?’
‘How did you do it?’ the duster asks.
‘That’s the first rule of magic,’ Haider says. ‘Never ask a magician how the trick is done.’
The duster sends over two horchatas, and cookies. The two friends eat and drink and swing their gangly, skinny legs.
SEVEN
Alexia has never before seen a zabbaleen. But here is a squad of them outside her apartment door and one of them, a young woman in baggy khaki shorts, heavy boots and sleeveless tank top, holding her hand up to Alexia.
‘You can’t go in there.’
‘That’s my apartment.’
The zabbaleen woman bears a shock of dreads, ribbons and beads woven between the locks, scraped back from her face and fastened with a barette. Bangles and beads, swag upon swag. Her familiar is a jewelled skull.
‘It’s not safe, amigo. There’s been an infestation.’
‘A what?’ Alexia says, then a co-worker – a moon-tall young man in similar rogue’s raiment – comes out of the street door of her balcony towing a small powered cart. His familiar is a skull studded with long spikes.
‘We’re clear now.’
‘What the fuck were you doing in my apartment…’ Alexia begins. Then she sees what lies in the little waggon. Birds; hundreds of them, stiff and hard as bullets. Bright plumaged in green and gold, a stab of red.
‘You killed the parakeets,’ Alexia shouts. The four zabbaleen in the squad are sincerely nonplussed.
‘Policy, señora,’ waggon-kid says.
‘Unmonitored resource misappropriation,’ the dread-haired zabbaleen says.
‘There’s a push to clamp down on it,’ a third zabbaleen says, a very dark-skinned third-gen kid with scarifications along his arms and under his eyes. His familiar: a flaming skull.
Must be a zabbaleen thing.
‘If you wouldn’t mind standing back,’ the last zabbaleen says, a red-haired, freckled man in late middle age, his hair stubbled white with radiation damage, his freckles studded with the black moles of early melanomas. He opens a titanium case. The air hazes, then thickens. Smoke wreathes about his head then pours into his case. ‘We’ve all got immunity codes, but you can get the odd soft fail. Wouldn’t kill a human but it does hurt like Christ.’ He closes the lid on a seething, buzzing puddle of liquid black. Not smoke. Bots. They hunted down the parakeets with thousands of insect-sized hunter drones.
‘A blessed day to you, señora,’ dread-head says. Merrily the zabbaleen swing off down the street.
‘Birdie!’ Alexia shouts through her tiny rooms. ‘Birdie!’ She finds some spoiling fruit in her cooler and puts it out on the balcony. She sits with tea, watching the overripe guava. No flash of colour, no glimpsed flick of wings out among the buttresses, no chatter in the middle air.
‘Fuckers,’ Alexia Corta says
* * *
Alexia takes one note from the zabbaleen: their approach to style. The printer squeezes it out into the hopper. So good after that fussy, tight 1940s stuff she has to wear as Iron Hand. Shorts, boots, tank top, not too clingy. The kind of thing she wore back home, when she was Queen of Pipes.
Also, a fine disguise.
The LMA has issued an advisory against ascent above Level Seventy, Maninho says as she waits for the passengers to exit the elevator. People glance at her she as she enters the elevator car. Zabbaleen style. Today you stare, next week you’ll be wearing it.
Who knows how these things appear?
There are personal safety issues.
Level Forty-Two. Passengers leave, fewer enter. Doors closing.
The situation in Bairro Alto has deteriorated recently. There has been widespread water and bandwidth theft and hacking attacks on public printers.
She doesn’t know what happened to the suffocating man who begged her for breath in this same elevator, but she meets him in dreams: doors closing on him as he reaches out a hand, speaking breath-starved words she can never make out.
I’m sorry, I’m new, I don’t know what to do, she said.
Not even worth air we breathe, he had gasped.
She had not known what he meant. Now she must find out.
Level Sixty-Five.
Alexia, I must strongly advise you against this, Maninho says. I can hire private security.
Above Level Sixty-Eight she is the only passenger.
Level Seventy-Five. Her boots ring on mesh decking. Attention snagged by the sound, she l
ooks down. Alexia has grown up on rooftops, balconies, gantries, but the drop beneath her boot soles makes her breath flutter. It’s half a kilometre sheer between power conduits to the next deck. She puts a hand out to steady herself. There is nothing to hold on to.
Don’t look down. Never look down.
She makes it to a staircase spiralling around a gurgling water main – the familiar song of moving liquid beneath her hand as she rests it on the pipe – and up three flights to a small mirador.
Look out.
This is not breath catching; this is a gasp of naked wonder.
She sees Meridian as she has never seen it before. The hub is a colossal drum, strung and restrung with bridges, catwalks, cableways. Elevators run up and down the curved face of this drum; the moonloop surpasses all of them. She watches a glowing passenger capsule rise from the ground station towards the lock. Beyond the first airlock is two hundred metres of protecting rock, and the second lock to the Meridian launch tower. She is deep underground.
The three main prospekts, each the axis of one of Meridian’s quadras, radiate from her. She sees them not as boulevards but canyons deeper than any on Earth. Vistas filled with lights, hazy with dust. Kondakova Prospekt stretches before her, she can see the deeper perspectives where Orion Quadra’s other four prospekts radiate away from the hub. The trees that line the great prospekts, taller than any rainforest tree she ever saw, are like pollen grains. To her right, Antares Quadra is darkening, to the far left, dawn is filling up Aquarius Quadra. For the first time Alexia appreciates Meridian’s design: three five-pointed stars, linked at the centre. The canyonlands of Meridian is one of the wonders of the solar system.
This close to the top of the world, the illusion of the sunline breaks up. From the ground, from her balcony, even from the height of the LMA office, Alexia can believe that she is under a sky, sometimes clear, sometimes clouded. She has heard that it even rains from time to time, to sweep the dust from the air. She would like to see that. That would be a feat of water engineering. Here she can see the joins between the panels, the grain of the light cells that project the sky. There is a roof on the world.
Looking up, shading her eyes with her hand, Alexia sees the shanties. Cubes of foam panels leaning against an air duct. Tents of sheeting and stolen wrapping slung from swags of cables. Pavilions of plastic pallets painstakingly wedged into gaps in the infrastructure. Bivouacs, lean-tos, shacks. The more Alexia looks, the more Bairro Alto reveals itself; every crevice and cranny of the high city is packed with improvised homes. She thinks of the nests of insects, or hummingbirds, woven around the contours of the human world.
She thinks of the favelas of old Rio. Cidade de Deus, Mangueira, Complexo do Alemão, Great Rocinha. Solutions to the primal human need for shelter.
Everywhere in Rio was favela now.
As Alexia sees Meridian whole, she understands that Meridian is much more than the space it encloses. Streets and housing units dig deep into rock, the city’s infrastructure digs deeper: conduits and crawlways, tunnels and ducts, cable-runs and ancillary systems dark in the stone. Remote power stations, the surface solar and communications arrays, the wires, the roots reach for hundreds of kilometres. She sees Meridian as it is: not a city: a machine. A machine for living, its humans scurrying around in the spaces between its workings.
She climbs higher. Two levels up and every pipe, every stanchion and girder is hung with what look like silvery spider webs. She touches one and pulls back a wet hand. The plastic web glistens with dew.
Condensation traps. The Queen of Pipes appreciates the clever design. She didn’t know that Meridian had a cloud layer.
‘Unmonitored resource misappropriation,’ Alexia says aloud.
Yes, egregiously, Maninho says. Alexia learned within two minutes of having the lens fitted to her eye and connected to the network that familiars have no notion of irony.
‘I’m going to switch you off, Maninho,’ Alexia interrupts. She has seen a face, a woman’s face. A short, unwelcoming stare, then gone in the shadows between the machines. The woman could have been watching her since she stepped off the elevator. There could be dozens of them, in the shadows, watching. Dozens more on the girders, in the stairwells, in the crevices.
This is not her city.
Movement. There. Darting across the stair-head.
Alexia turns to go back down to the elevator. People on the landing. Alexia turns back. People on the upstairs turn.
Women and men of all ages, some children. They wear a panoply of fashions; the current 1940s, the outgoing 1980s, a 2020s style blouse here, 2050s leggings and hoodies there: whatever was the mode when they were forced up to Bairro Alto. None carry familiars.
‘Unmonitored resource misappropriation,’ a child’s voice says.
They step closer.
Alexia has never been so afraid, not even when the Gulartes declared war on the Queen of Pipes by assaulting Caio. And she sees the way out.
‘I’m a water engineer!’ she shouts. ‘I can show you how to get twenty per cent more from those dew traps. I can show you how to build a distribution and purification system!’
‘Well, I don’t know about you, mates, but I’d like to see that,’ a voice says from above. Australian accented. A head appears over the railing two flights up. ‘It would earn our undying thanks.’ A young white man, dark-eyed, strong cheekbones, a tumble of black, curled hair. He vaults the rail and drops five metres to land poised in front of Alexia. He wears pleated pants rolled up to high ankle, a white shirt, sleeves rolled to elbows. No socks. Alexia reads the contours of knife holsters beneath the high waistband. ‘That was a good answer you gave there. That answer saved your life.’ He sits on a step and regards Alexia. She notices the tip of his left smallest finger is missing. ‘Like your wardrobe choice. Now, my mates here, they tend to judge by immediate appearances but I look beneath the immediate. On the surface you dress like a zabbaleen. My mates don’t like zabbaleen. I don’t like zabbaleen. But you don’t wear a zabbaleen familiar. You don’t wear any familiar. That interests me. And from your general physique, you’re a Jo Moonbeam. Zabbaleens don’t employ Moonbeams. How long you been here, Moonbeam? Two, three lunes?’
‘Two lunes.’
‘Two lunes, that says LMA to me. And if my mates don’t like zabbaleens, they really hate LMA. But the fact that you’ve come up here without a guard, that’s either buck stupid or interesting.’ The man drapes his hands over his knees. ‘I’m giving you an opportunity to bargain for your life here.’
He has her. She has no defence. She is all those things. Only idiocy or honesty can save her.
‘I work for the LMA,’ Alexia says. A murmur from the ring of up-and-outs. The Australian lifts a finger and there is silence. ‘I was in the elevator to the office and I saw a man stop breathing. He asked me for help, he begged me for breath, he asked me to credit his account. I didn’t know how to do that. There was nothing I could do. I walked away.’ Another growl of discontent. ‘Today I saw the zabbaleen killing all the parakeets on my street. One of them said “Unmonitored resource misappropriation”. I wanted to know what was going on. So I rode the elevator up where the man who couldn’t breathe went.’
‘And what were you going to do, LMA?’ the Australian asks.
‘See it. Try and understand it. Try and fix it, if what I think is going on up here is true.’
‘And what do you think is going on up here?’
‘I think the LMA has been systematically foreclosing non-viable accounts.’
‘Foreclosing?’ the Australian asks.
‘Liquidating the economically non-viable.’
A rumble of anger.
‘Liquidating?’
‘Killing.’
‘Economically non-viable?’
‘People. You.’
‘Your theory is interesting,’ the Australian says. ‘It’s also correct.’
‘That’s…’ Alexia says.
‘Not just Meridian. Everywh
ere. Queen, St Olga. All over Nearside. Can’t pay? Won’t breathe. Zabbaleen used to leave us alone, now they smash up our humpies, tear down our water catchers, rip out our tanks, snatch the fucking breath from our lungs.’ The Australian lifts a hand, gestures for the Bairro people to sit. Alexia stands, the performer, the pleader. ‘You said you could help us with our water supply, LMA. Can you?’
‘Like I said, I can.’
‘Next question. Will you?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘What’s your name, LMA?’
‘Lê.’ Alexia is wary of lying, but more wary of too much truth.
‘Lê. Sounds like a made-up name,’ the Australian says. ‘Like an apelido. They call me the Jack of Blades.’
There is wariness and there is the time for the gratuitous move.
‘That’s fucking ridiculous,’ Alexia says. The Bairristas draw breath. The Australian fixes Alexia with eyes of black obsidian. Then he laughs. He laughs long and hard. The Bairristas, taking his cue, laugh with him. Alexia notices the Australian has a gold tooth.
‘Yes it is fucking ridiculous but it does stroke my considerable vanity. If it makes any difference, I didn’t choose it. What kind of Brasil are you, Lê?’
‘Carioca,’ Alexia says.
‘Cariocas and I have a contentious history. But there are cariocas up here, Brasilians, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Malay, Enzies, Germans, Nepalese, Arabs. Every nation on Earth. So: Lê: water engineer, LMA functionary. That’s a career arc.’
‘Before I was anything on the moon, I was Queen of Pipes of Barra de Tijuca,’ Ariel says and by the last of those words she has them. Grandmother Senona had the skill to bind with a story; to settle children, to silence an argument, to spin a lamp-lit hour waiting for the power to come back on. Stories are a strong narcotic. Alexia doesn’t mind that she is the only one standing now. Before she was the accused. Now she is the performer.