Dreaming Again

by Jack Dann

  Salim’s broker sits at a table at the rear.

  It is a creature from q1 Eridani. Nameless, a bull-male, it is one of a race of beings who are, as a species, an artwork created by a member of a still older race of beings.

  It has been said it is in the nature of art to be useless, but this is not so, for to be successful, a piece of art must perform the useful functions of generating admiration or money. Salim’s broker demonstrates this latter function well.

  Seeing Salim, the creature fans its crest — black lacquer and old leather, bony hinges as daintily evil as a bat’s wingbones. The body swells, greenpink and blueblack, shifting on its plinth. From deep in its chest comes an interrogative thunk.

  In response, Salim produces a small package. The broker takes and unwraps it with a knuckleless prosthesis the colour of lead. Within is a new Victorinox Swiss Army Knife stolen at great risk earlier that day.

  Eyelessly, the broker regards Salim.

  ‘Look,’ Salim says. Taking back the Swiss Army Knife, the boy’s small fingers pull out the implements, the little scissors, the nail-clippers, the cigar-trimmer, the can opener, the laser-pointer. Then: ‘Look, see, one of the attachments is another Swiss Army Knife.’

  Demonstrating, he unfolds the second Swiss Army Knife. It is half the size, but otherwise identical to the first. ‘And here, here is another.’ With a dirty fingernail, he prises a third Swiss Army Knife from the second. It is a quarter the size of the first.

  ‘This is as far as I can get without tools,’ he says. ‘I used watchmaker’s gear, microscopic pincers I stole a while back.’ (In Salim’s language — a street-patois of French, Moroccan Arabic and American English — the verb ‘to steal’ carries no disgrace, but rather connotes an almost Socialist scorn of private property: property is theft, is the implication, therefore theft is property.) ‘I got down to thirty-seven Swiss Army Knives with no sign of stopping,’ he says. ‘Perhaps it goes all the way down to nothing. Perhaps smaller.’

  The broker takes back the Infinite Swiss Army Knife. It regards it for a moment.

  Salim waits.

  Then the broker thunks in the affirmative. Salim holds out his hand for payment. He smiles to himself. He needs thirty dirhams to pay Uncle Baba, but the knife is worth far more. He will have plenty left over for food, perhaps even shoes.

  Instead of money, the broker gives him a fat tube of dark heavy-duty cardboard.

  Salim stares at the tube, unbelieving. ‘What is this?’ he says. ‘I cannot use this.’ He tries to hand it back.

  The broker thunks dully, refusing to take it.

  ‘No, I do not want this,’ Salim says. ‘Money. Dirhams. I need money.’

  But the broker is shutting down, fans and vanes and bony louvres folding away.

  ‘I need money,’ Salim says again, raising his voice, though he knows it is useless. The broker is gone, retreated into itself. As well argue with fate.

  Salim turns away. His stomach aches. He does not know what to do. He says a word he heard a man say once, the filthiest word he knows.

  Then he pockets the tube and makes for the door. On the way he passes a creature with a long intestinal body and a head studded with damp black snout-pits and a smattering of yellow concave eyes receptive not to light, but to misfortune.

  Seeing Salim, the creature flinches and squints as if shocked by a flash of lightning.

  A thousand metres overhead, lenses track the boy leaving the teahouse.

  Servos whine, telephotos zoom, optics switch to infrared, showing Michael Jackson the tube in one of the boy’s pockets.

  So the broker has fulfilled its part of the plan.

  But Michael Jackson does not relax. He knows from experience how quickly things can go wrong.

  He continues to watch.

  Salim walks a block then ducks into a sidestreet, pausing in the firelit darkness at the rear of a bathhouse. Boilers thunder behind him, their burners tended by a huge, ferociously moustachioed man in loincloth and fez.

  Salim squats in the shadows, studying the cardboard tube. It is unmarked and sealed at both ends with red wax. The wax is stamped with Arabic characters to guard against the entry of evil spirits.

  He cracks one of the seals — a salt smell. He upends the tube. A sin rolls out and plumps into his palm.

  His immediate urge is to hurl the thing disgustedly away. He resists, forces himself to inspect it. It is about the size of a pigeon egg, with loose parchmenty skin over a mass as soft and warm as fresh rice custard. A cord like a rat’s tail leads to a 50-pin 6.5 mm universal ribbon-connector for multiple data pore-splines.

  It is from the West, he knows. His mother warned him about such things. In Islam there are just a few sins, she told him, each adding its weight to the soul so that at last it must descend into Hell. Western sins, though more evil, are lighter, she said, which is why Westerners can have so many of them. Salim often sees the Western tourists walking about with them on open display, barnacling their spines and cancering the backs of their necks.

  It sits in his palm, emitting an intimate heat. He wants to tramp it into the dust with the heel of his foot.

  Instead, he carefully returns it to its container and moves on.

  Michael Jackson’s lenses shiver and frisk. The boy’s image blinks through the marketplace, strobing between awnings and ornate balconies.

  Where’s he going? In Michael Jackson’s headspace, projections run, proliferating, decision trees branch and rebranch. It’s dizzying. So many variables …

  Michael Jackson is confounded. It had never occurred to him the boy would not try the mod himself.

  As the boy continues along, a new, worrying possibility begins to coalesce.

  Anxiously, Michael Jackson watches its statistical likelihood mount. Inside his hull, a nervous actuator taps out a rhythm a music historian might have recognised as the bass-line of his hit single, ‘Blood on the Dance Floor’.

  He is starting to think he may have to act. Not yet, but soon.

  In preparation, he accesses the Tangier whitepages and scans for a number.

  The souk: Salim hurrying past beggars and vendors; gasohol generators clattering; intricate wickerwork windows; iron doors with medieval locks and hinges. He dodges a sick mule lying in the dust, its beautiful eyes reflecting the videoflare of old Wii games and VDU mosaics. He passes a goatherd whose animals are afflicted with an alien disease that has caused their horns to sprout leaves and soft goaty flowers. He rounds a sunfaded red canvas stall selling sandalwood-covered books of God’s Word alongside clapped out laptops and secondhand thinkingcaps, corroded electrodes swinging among plastic rosaries.

  He pushes on, past tourists, Western and alien (extraterrestrial and extraterritorial — for Salim there is little distinction): a brace of blue ghost-robots from Camelopardalis; a pod of Germans in identical pink skingloves, as turgid and glistening as Bratwursts; a bodiless creature from the Boote Void, its intelligence coded into the infinite busyness of the Medina, thoughts written into the transactions of the turtle-soup vendors and the cries of girls peddling disposable phones with call-to-prayer ringtones.

  At last, Salim arrives at a particular stall.

  Its sign, in Arabic and English and other scripts, advertises various types of sin — or mods, as the Westerners call them.

  They hang on racks, held in place with yellow plastic clothes pegs.

  They are dollopy podges of protein-coded programmable-RNA wrapped in a swaddle of datafat and rolypolymers.

  They are machines to make you change your mind.

  There are many types on offer here. Mood-mods and sex-mods and drug-mods; IQ-mods and EQ-mods and TLC-mods; a wide assortment of god-mods, traditionalist varieties to enhance understanding of the teachings of Mohammed (may Allah bless Him and grant Him peace), and more adventurous brands to devote you to, say, the beliefs of the Nineteenth Century Fourierites who predicted the End Days would come when the seas turned to lemonade … There are subtle mods to
give you the feeling of being seven years old on the first bright morning of your summer holidays; there are brash, loud mods to light your spinefuse and set greymatter bottlerockets abursting in the night of your brainpan …

  Salim understands little of this, of course. To him, trained by his mother and with the literalism of a child, they are sins, all wicked, ranging from venal to deadly.

  He spots the vendor, Tahar, a short, thin, precise man who does people the kindness of not pretending to be kind. Salim has had some dealings with him, making deliveries for Uncle Baba. The association worries him, but he hasn’t a choice.

  Currently, Tahar is haggling with a Bedouin woman. Her dowry coin headdress tinkles as she argues the price of a navigational-mod.

  Salim waits in the shadows. He is so hungry he no longer feels hungry.

  Tahar continues to haggle, the transaction running its slow course; ritualised gestures, shakes of the head, theatrical cries of dismay — protocols of negotiation as formalised as a ceremonial dance, adhered to until finally both parties are satisfied.

  The Bedouin woman pays, a flash of debit card in hennaed hands, then takes the mod and leaves.

  At which Tahar turns and looks straight at Salim. ‘Come out, boy. It makes me nervous to have you skulking there.’

  Surprised — he thought he was well hidden — Salim steps forward, unable to take his eyes from a platter of honey cakes by Tahar’s eftpos machine and old-fashioned phone.

  Tahar sighs. ‘Take one. You’ll only steal it otherwise.’

  Salim immediately shoves an entire cake the size of his fist in his mouth. His head fills with the flavours of filo and rosewater and honeyed walnuts.

  ‘Now, what do you want?’

  Salim’s mouth is too full to speak. Silently, he hands Tahar the sin.

  The man picks it up by its cord. ‘This is strange.’ He sockets an old jeweller’s loupe into his eye. ‘Good workmanship. But a cleanskin. I wonder why…’

  He turns it over, inspecting its underside. ‘By its look, I think it may be an addiction.’ He frowns. ‘I do not care for them myself, though there is a market. Some people find them useful.’ He regards Salim through the loupe. ‘Addictions and obsessions have a way of simplifying things.’

  Salim gulps hugely, clearing his mouth. ‘Fifty dinhar, mister.’

  Tahar smiles. ‘If you find out what it does, little one, you might find a buyer on the street. But not here.’

  ‘Forty-five. Forty.’

  Tahar shakes his head. Salim sees a fat sin under the man’s collar: a mod, though Salim does not know it, to boost the wearer’s left anterior middle temporal gyrus: the part of the brain that models hypotheses of others’ internal states. ‘I have seen you before, little one,’ Tahar says. ‘You are one of Uncle Baba’s. You thieve for him and sell stolen goods, giving him a portion of the proceeds.’ He pauses, allowing his mod to do its thing — not sympathy, but empathy, cold and razor-sharp. ‘Now he wants you to do a different kind of work. He says you do not have to do it if you do not want to, that you can leave him whenever you like. Sadly, however, if you do not pay him a small fee, he cannot protect you. He hates to think what might happen to you.’

  Salim does not answer. He wishes Tahar would offer him another cake.

  ‘You are a commodity without an owner, little one. A dangerous thing to be in Tangier. One way or another, the situation cannot last long. Your only hope is that whoever ends up your owner is one who takes care of his possessions.’

  ‘Thirty dinhar,’ Salim says. ‘Please, mister.’ He realises he’s crying.

  And suddenly Tahar wavers; Salim doesn’t need an empathy mod to see it. He knows Tahar is going to give him the money.

  Then, on the table in the stall, the telephone rings.

  Tahar picks up the heavy handset, goes to speak, is interrupted. Salim hears a voice on the other end, strange, soft and faltering. It speaks for a minute, and Tahar flushes, then nods once, silent. Then dialtone.

  Slowly, Tahar hangs up. He does not look at Salim. ‘Go, little one. Run away.’

  ‘But, mister…’

  Firmly, Tahar returns the mod. ‘I cannot buy an unmarked unit.’ When he looks at Salim, his expression is complicated: baffled, sad, amused, appalled …

  ‘Take it,’ he says. ‘Go.’ He turns away, pretending not to notice when Salim steals another cake before running off.

  Watching the boy running through the streets, Michael Jackson aches with feelings he cannot name. He wonders if his new body has brought with it a new set of emotions …

  The boy is so alone, so lost, made to live as an adult before he ever had a chance to be a child. Michael Jackson remembers his own childhood: forced to work from the age of seven; no friends; no school; a cruel and neglectful father …

  In retrospect, then, his final transformation should have come as no surprise. After all, he’d never been entirely of this world. He’d always sought escape through his art, through transformations abstract and real. All the surgery, all the cosmetic procedures, had been a legitimised form of self-harm — scalpels in place of razor blades, cautery probes in place of lit cigarettes — physical pain to help relieve the deeper pain.

  Over the years (how many years? — too many — he’d stopped counting birthdays after his hundredth), he’d become ever more streamlined, ever less human. He’d chiselled away at his body, pruning the superfluities, reducing himself by increments, paling into the background. And with time, the lifts and peels were succeeded by more experimental procedures, alterations and refinements, gerontological treatments to keep him a boyman, undecayed through the decades … then came procedures more experimental still.

  Others had done something similar, of course. Most who could afford it were altering themselves in some way or other these days; the transhumanists, the posthumanists. But he’d always been the first. Michael Jackson had been posthuman before there was a word for it.

  And now — now he’s post-posthuman: original body little more than a memory; limbs replaced with ailerons and other control surfaces; face flowered into a pallid little radio-telescope headgarden …

  Grub to butterfly, that’s what it feels like. Metamorphosis: painful, emancipating, beautiful. A delicious stretching of long-cramped wings.

  But as he continues to track the boy below, he knows he is still not entirely free. The paradox is not lost on him: for true liberty, one always needs the ties of love …

  He wonders if he might work the sentiment up into a song.

  Disconsolate, Salim slopes and ducks through the souk, the tight alleys of the Medina opening into the Boulevard Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdelah — the old city giving way to the hotel district; art deco palaces; the Idler’s Terrace; the El-Minzah with its dark lush courtyards; the Cafe Haffa zizzing with cocaine and Tangier jazz — Salim a bit of local colour here, an authentic ragamuffin on display for the edification of the tourists … He runs along the Rue Dar Dbagh, across the square to the Tangier Ville Station; and from there down an incline, through a hole in a chainlink fence, to his home under a rail bridge.

  A freight train kachunkachunks overhead. Soot rains down.

  Salim pushes through brocaded fabric into the little house he has made; a tepee assembled from his mother’s old clothing: scavenged bits of lumber supporting her kaftans and djellabas, her foulard scarves and embroidered pantaloons, shirts and wide ornate belts — the eyegrilles of her burqas forming slit-windows.

  It is a fantastic object, naive art, an unintentional masterpiece (and indeed, when Michael Jackson’s scouts first sent images of it to him a few weeks ago, he began to suspect Salim might be the boy for him).

  Inside, wrapped in the mothersmell, Salim flicks a stolen keychain LED to life. Its light glints from her jewellery, cheap amulets, charms, a khamsa pendant pinned to the fabric, its swinging eye warding off evil.

  The sin’s cord hangs slackly in his fingers. He considers what Tahar said, that Salim might sell it on the street if he coul
d discover what was in it…

  To hesitate would be to give the fear time to take hold. Quickly, he tugs down his collar and touches the connector to the back of his neck, as he’s seen the Westerners do.

  The pins wake at once — ultrafine, moist with local anaesthetic — reaching out to slip into his pores; deeper, under his skin — then deeper still.

  Suddenly he is sliding sideways into sleep. There’s just time to lay his head down …

  And he is dreaming about his mother. It is the dream he always has — that last night, in their rooms … and it is cold, so she tucks him into the blankets, and she, hacking, wheezing, the pneumonia in both lungs by then, wraps herself in a discarded swatch of lighter-than-air bubblewrap, helium blisters keeping her an inch or so above the rammed earth floor as she nods off, coughing, shivering, fading … And then, as it always does, the dream moves forward, hours later when he wakes to the realisation of silence — no more coughing, no more wheezing — and for a little while he enjoys the quiet.

  Then he realises what it means. He rises to find her, her corpse bobbing in the air by the closed door, like a pet wanting to be let out… this is the point at which the dream normally ends, leaving Salim awake and weeping.

  But now it does not end. The dream-Salim is surprised to find himself opening the door for her, and his mother’s smile is grateful, the smile he remembers, farewelling and forgiving her sinning boy as she begins her journey towards paradise. Jannah, the Home of Peace, where the righteous recline on green cushions in gardens with fountains and streams of clear running water, where the north wind sprays scent upon them and enhances their beauty … (and even in his sleep, even in the deepest parts of his dream, he can feel the mod, its soft incursions, its butterfly touches at the edges of his thoughts, a dust of scales in the mind’s eye … )

  He wakes. Midmorning sunlight streams through the eyegrille windows.

  He rises and pushes out into the world, strong and unafraid. He glances back at his tent, considering for the first time that he might sell a few of his mother’s effects, raise a bit of money that way. Somehow he’s sure she wouldn’t mind.