Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  “There is nothing to be sorry for.”

  “Perhaps humans, too, reincarnate,” the elevator said. “Perhaps you will be reborn with a node, or even as an Other?”

  “Perhaps,” Achimwene said, politely.

  “I could be Translated,” the elevator said. “Directly into the Conversation. Exist without physical form, like my cousins, the true Others. Or I could diminish, become a toilet on a spaceship, or a coffee maker in a co-op building on Mars. There is no shame in work.”

  “No,” Achimwene said.

  The doors pinged. “Level Five,” the elevator said. The floor settled. “It was nice talking to you, Achimwene,” the elevator said.

  “You too, I’m sure,” Achimwene said.

  “Please, come again soon.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doors opened. Carmel, without so much as a glance at Achimwene, went through. Achimwene hurried to follow.

  Level Five. It was a cargo level, stuck between the landing pad on the roof and the bars, hotels and gamesworlds emporiums deep down below. No people here. The light was dim. A long corridor led into the darkness. Closed warehouse doors on every side. Carmel moved fast. He followed and the sound of his footsteps was the only sound in the corridor. Where was she going?

  Down twisting and turning corridors, a maze of empty spaces. Achimwene’s breath was loud in his ears. Carmel was a shadow moving ahead. They reached a service door. Carmel put her hand to the lock and the door opened. She slid inside and Achimwene hurried to get in before the door closed again. Inside, the darkness swallowed him and for a moment he panicked, until the automatic lights came on. He blinked, feeling the beat of his heart loud in his ears.

  Carmel had disappeared.

  It was the silence that got to him. The silence of being inside Central Station. It was the silence of hidden generators, of elevators moving up and down behind the thick walls, of suborbital planes landing and taking off high on the roof, of robot cargo handlers carrying containers into warehouses through their secret tunnels, of passengers coming and going, of bars open at all hours, of hairdressers and shop keepers, an entire world unto itself. Hidden in that service tunnel, in that dark corridor, it was quiet, as quiet, as they said, as a tomb, and yet he could sense the hidden thrumming behind the walls, the hustle and bustle of a port that never slept. He was the detective, the archaeologist, the man who wasn’t there. He was the hero of his own story.

  Stories gave shape to Achimwene’s life. Narratives gave a series of random events meaning. And so he shaped this, too, as a story.

  A man wakes in the night and finds his lover gone. He follows her. Where does she go? Read one way this is a tale of everyday life, of love curdled, of quiet desperation. Read another and it is a detective story, the mystery of the lover’s disappearance needing to be solved, the hidden meanings of mystery put together.

  Read another way again and it is a horror story. The girl was a vampire, after all, sucking data out of living beings, feeding on their vulnerabilities. And he, Achimwene, was in a dark maze, and it would lead him, as surely as there were books, into a dark heart of mystery and dread, a scene from a pulp: it had the same inevitability as that of bread eventually growing mould.

  He followed. Down the service tunnel in the place behind the walls. Around and down, deep into the bowels of Central Station, the secret hidden places of the world.

  Until he came, at last, into a cavernous opening, a chasm flowering beneath his feet.

  Above his head the roof disappeared in the vast distance, down below the darkness spread.

  A disused warehouse, he thought, dazed. That’s all it was. He followed the path downwards, along the wall, until his feet touched the hard metal ground. There were dim lights in the distance, and a curious sound, such as a river makes when it laps against a rocky shore.

  Had he been the hero of one of the books he so avidly collected, he would have held a gun at this point. But Achimwene never learned to fight: a gun was as alien to him as a compliment.

  Slowly, he stepped forward. The curious sound rose, murmuring, all around him. There was something repulsive in that sound. He came closer, and closer still, until he saw.

  Carmel lay at the centre of the room as the children, like grotesque little rodents, lapped at her blood.

  She was motionless.

  She wore no clothes and he could see how slight she was, how vulnerable she seemed.

  He knew the children. They had grown up all around him, in the old neighbourhood of Central Station, the same kids who played hop scotch and hide and seek and catch me and got into trouble and tried to climb the floating lanterns and dared each other to go knock on Achimwene’s door and then ran away laughing—the same kids he often shouted at and for whom he inevitably bought presents at each family birthday. With a start he saw Kranki, his sister Miriam’s boy. He was on all fours and his small mouth was fastened on to Carmel’s left wrist, his small sharp teeth breaking Carmel’s skin.

  Blood stained Kranki’s mouth dark.

  What were the children doing, Achimwene thought, his heart wrenching like a chipped toy ship on the tide. He remembered going once, years ago, with Miriam, and his cousins, to the Yarkon River that ran through Tel Aviv like a cleaned-up sewer. The adults built a fire from wood and coals, and cooked pork chops and chickens, skewered, that had been marinating all night. He and his sister and Boris and the others played by the water. They had built ships out of paper and wood and set them to sail and the Yarkon took them and swallowed them up. It had seemed a mighty river to Achimwene then. But really it was just a brook.

  He stepped closer, cautiously.

  There was something sad about the scene, rather than horrific. It was beyond his comprehension. He was not stupid. He knew that, had he only had a node, he would have seen the world entirely differently. There were two worlds, the physical and the digital, overlaying each other. What seemed grotesque and incomprehensible in one would not necessarily seem so in the other.

  The children had glazed looks in their eyes. They seemed to flicker in and out of existence, which was strange to him, incomprehensible at first. And then he knew. It was the black magic within them.

  Infinitech.

  He’d always known, he supposed they all did, though no one ever spoke of it. It was the way they had come out of the birthing clinics. He was lame but not stupid. The children were different, he just never felt the need to remark on it, before.

  And now they were taking into themselves Carmel’s own illness. This ancient bioweapon, this strigoi.

  Was Carmel even aware of what was happening? Were the children?

  He had the irrational instinct to rush to Carmel’s aid. To fling the little roaches off her, one by one, to smash their tiny skulls, to throw them about, to gather Carmel in his arms and carry her away. But he knew, too, that there is more than one story in the world at a time; and that her story was not his.

  Their stories had entwined, but they had different trajectories, different conclusions. He could only hope the two stories would not separate. It was a strange sort of realisation: that he loved her. A simple love, for a simple man. Like a loaf of bread and a carafe of water and the touch of the sun on your face. A love that meant, sometimes, that you had to let it go.

  As he watched, one of the children detached himself from the prone body of Carmel and approached him. It was Kranki. The boy came to him without guile. His eyes were clear. “Uncle Achi!” he said.

  “Kranki,” Achimwene said, and reached out to the boy, to take him away from there, worry and concern turning to anger, “Wait until Miriam finds out about th—”

  Then the boy’s small fingers found Achimwene’s hand and Achimwene’s world tilted sideways and was gone; then Achimwene saw. He saw again, but in a way he had never seen before. He was everywhere at once, the shuddering elevators were his bone marrow, the floors of the station were the organs of his body, the movements of people were his blood. When he raised his hands, s
uborbitals flew away from him into space. When he lowered them they landed, discharging their passengers into his inside. He was Central Station, and he was alive. He had always been alive. How did he not know that? Achimwene felt water and sunlight, electricity and gravity, but most of all he felt love, so much love. It threatened to drown him. Central Station loved him, even though he himself was lame, even though he could not feel the station’s love. It took Kranki’s touch to anchor Achimwene, however momentarily, into the greater entity that was the station. He focused, his vision narrowing to one particular place, one particular time. Here, deep inside the secret places of its body, the children had congregated, heeding the call of the station. The children, its children, summoned unto it, those birthed in the clinics, not entirely human, not entirely Other, but something else, something greater than the sum of its parts. And he saw them, as bright nodes of light, and in their centre, at their core, a darkness: and he realised with a sort of fear that it was Carmel.

  She was a dark hub for this network of light, but as he watched he saw the darkness being leeched off and light suffusing it. There was something in Carmel, he realised, that the children needed, her rare strigoi strain: but did they need it as antibodies, or as something entirely different, he didn’t know. He felt the station’s love, for himself, for Carmel, for the children. It was healing them, and though he knew it could not—not yet!—include him in the Conversation, that nevertheless it loved him. Then Kranki let go and Achimwene was plunged back into his own body, but some of what he had felt remained with him, and for a few long moments he continued to see the scene not as he had seen it earlier, but awash with light.

  The children, one by one, winked out, and soon only Carmel was left in the room, and Achimwene, and he knelt beside her and took her hand in his. It felt warm, and dry, and when Carmel opened her eyes she smiled at him, without guile or guilt or fear: a true smile, and it made his chest ache, he wanted her to always smile at him that way.

  He helped her up.

  “Achi,” she said, “I had the strangest dream.”

  It was like a scene in a Bill Glimmung movie.

  Achimwene’s arm supported her as she stood. She felt so light under his arm. There had been so much light. That’s what he always remembered, afterwards. The light, and the lightness of it.

  He helped her as they walked slowly back toward the exit. And he thought then not of his pulp novels, but of the old Hebrew custom of Tu Be’av, when the unwed virgins of Jerusalem would dress, all in white, and go out into the vineyards, at the end of harvest, there to dance, and await the boys of the city to come and seek them out. And he thought of the words of Solomon, who wrote, By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city, in the streets and in the broad ways, I will seek him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but I found him not.

  But I found her, he thought. And all the thoughts were locked inside him; they had no way out; and so it was in silence that they made their slow way home.

  TWELVE: Vladimir Chong Chooses to Die

  The clinic was cool and calm, a pine-scented oasis in the heart of Central Station. Cool, calm white walls. Cool, calm air-conditioning humming, coolly and calmly. Vladimir Chong hated it immediately. He did not find it soothing. He did not find it calming. It was a white room; it resembled too much the inside of his own head.

  “Mr. Chong?” The nurse was a woman he recalled with exactness. Benevolence Jones, cousin of Miriam Jones who was his boy Boris’s childhood sweetheart. He remembered Benevolence as a child, with thin woven dreadlocks and a wicked smile, a few years younger than his own boy, trailing after her cousin Miriam in adoration. Now she was a matronly woman in starched white, and dreadlocks thicker and fewer. She smelled of soap.

  “The mortality consultant will see you now,” she said. Vlad nodded. He got up. There was nothing wrong with his motor functions. He followed her to the consultant’s office.

  Vlad could remember with perfect recall hundreds of such offices. They always looked the same. They could have easily been the same room, with the same person sitting behind the desk. He was not afraid of death. He could remember death. His father, Weiwei, had died at home. Vlad could remember it several ways. He could remember his father’s own dying moment—broken sentences forming in the brain, the touch of the pillow hurting strangely, the look in his boy’s eyes, a sense of wonder filling him, momentarily, then blackness, a slow encroachment that swallowed whatever last sentence he had meant to speak.

  He could remember it from his mother’s memories, though he seldom went into them, preferred to segment them separately, when he still could. She was sitting by the bed, not crying, then fetching tea, cookies, looking after the guests coming in and out, visiting the death bed of Weiwei. She spared time for her boy, for little Vlady, too, and her memories were all intermingled of the moment her husband died, her hand on Vlady’s short hair, her eyes on Weiwei who seemed to be struggling to say something, then stopped, and was very still.

  He could remember it his own way, though it was an early memory, and confused. Wetness. Lips moving like a fish’s, without sound. The smell of floor cleaner. Accidentally brushing against the cool metal leg of R. Brother Patch-It, the robo-priest, who stood by the bed and spoke the words of the Way of Robot, though Weiwei was not a practitioner of that, nor any other, religion.

  “Mr. Chong?”

  The mortality consultant was a tall, thin North Tel Aviv Jew. “I’m Dr. Graff,” he said.

  Vlad nodded politely. Dr. Graff gestured to a chair.

  “Please, sit down.”

  Vlad sat, remembering like an echo, like reflections multiplying between two mirrors. A universe of Chongs sitting down at doctors’ offices throughout the years. His mother when she sat down, and the doctor said, “I’m afraid the news is not good.” His father after a work injury when he had shattered his leg bones falling in his exoskeleton from the uncompleted fourth level of Central Station. Boris when he was five and his node infected by a hostile malware virus with rudimentary intelligence. His sister’s boy’s eldest when they took him to the hospital in Tel Aviv, worried about his heart. And on and on, though none, yet, in a life termination clinic. He, Vlad, son of Weiwei, father of Boris, was the first of the line to visit one of those.

  He’d been sitting in his flat when it happened. A moment of clarity. It felt like emerging out of a cold, bright sea. When he was submerged in that ocean he could see each individual drop of water, and each one was a disconnected memory, and it was drowning him. It was never meant to be this way.

  Weiwei’s Curse. Weiwei’s Folly. Vlad could remember Weiwei’s determination, his ambition, his human desire to be remembered, to continue to be a part of his family and their lives. Remembered the trip up the hill to the Old City of Jaffa, Weiwei cycling in the heat, parking the bicycle at last in the shade, against the cool old stones, and visiting the Oracle.

  What manner of thing it was he didn’t know, this lineage of memory, infecting like a virus the Chongs as a whole. It was the Oracle’s doing, and she was not human, or mostly not, for all that she wore a human frame.

  The memory bridge had served. In past times it had offered comfort, at times, remembering what others knew, what they had done. He remembered his father climbing into his exoskeleton, slowly climbing, like a crab, along the unfinished side of Central Station. Later he, too, worked on the building, two generations of Chongs it took to bring it to completion. Only to see his own son go up in the great elevators, a boy afraid of family, of sharing, a boy determined to escape, to follow a dream of the stars. He saw him climb up the elevators and to the great roof, saw him climb into the suborbital plane that took him to Gateway and, from there, to Mars and the Belt beyond. But still the link persisted, even from afar, the memories travelling, slow like light, between the worlds. Vlad had missed his boy. Missed the work on the space port, the easy camaraderie with the others. Missed his wife whose memory st
ill lived inside him, but whose name, like a cancer, had been eaten away.

  He remembered the smell of her, the taste of her sweat and the swell of her belly, when they were both young and the streets of Central Station smelled of late-blooming jasmine and mutton fat. Remembered her with Boris holding her hand, at five years old, walking through the same old streets, with the space port, completed, rising ahead of them, a hand pointing at the stars.

  Boris: “What is that, Daddy?”

  Vlad: “It’s Central Station, Boris.”

  Boris, gesturing around him at the old streets, the rundown apartment blocks: “And this?”

  “It’s Central Station, too.”

  Boris, laughing. Vlad joining him and she smiled, the woman who was gone now, whose ghost only remained, whose name he no longer knew.

  Looking back (but that was a thing he could no longer do) that should have given him warning. Her name disappeared, the way keys or socks do. Misplaced and, later, could not be found.

  Slowly, inexorably, the links that bound together memory, like RNA, began to weaken and break.

  “Mr. Chong?”

  “Doctor. Yes.”

  “Mr. Chong, we treat all our patients with complete confidentiality.”

  “Of course.”

  “We have a range of options available—” The doctor coughed politely. “I am bound to ask you, however—before we go over them—have you made, or wish to make, any post-mortal arrangements?”

  Vlad regarded the doctor for a moment. Silence had become a part of him in recent years. Slowly the memory boundaries tore, and recall, like shards of hard glass, fragmented and shattered in his mind. More and more he found himself sitting, for hours or days, in his flat, rocking in the ancient chair Weiwei once brought home from the Jaffa flea market, in triumph, raising it above his head, this short, wiry Chinese man in this land of Arabs and Jews. Vlad had loved Weiwei. Now he hated him almost as much he loved him. The ghost of Weiwei, his memory, still lived on in his ruined mind.