Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

  “Are you sure, Dad?” Boris said.

  Vlad just nodded. He took in a deep breath of air. The smell of water and freshly cut grass. The smell of childhood.

  Together they looked on the park. There, a swimming pool glinting blue, where one could drown in peace and tranquillity. There, a massive, needle-like tower rising into the sky, for the jumpers, those who wanted to go out with one great rush of air. And there, at last, the thing that they had travelled all this way for. The Urbonas Ride.

  The Euthanasia Coaster.

  Named after its designer, Julijonas Urbonas, it was a thing of marvel and beautiful engineering. It began with an enormous climb, rising to half a kilometre above the ground. Then the drop. A five-hundred-metre drop, straight down, that led to a series of three-hundred-and-thirty-degree loops, one after the other in rapid succession. Vlad felt his heart beating faster just by looking at it. He remembered one morning when he had climbed up the space port in his exoskeleton. He had perched up there, on top of the unfinished building, and looked down, in the clear light, and felt as though the whole city, the whole world, were his.

  He could already feel the memories crowding in on him. Demanding that he take them, hold them, examine them, search amongst them for her name, but it was missing. He hugged his son again, and kissed his sister. “You old fool,” she said. He shook hands with the robo-priest. Miriam, next.

  “Look after him,” Vlad said, gesturing at his son.

  “I’ll try,” she said, doubtfully; though she smiled.

  Then Eliezer, and Ibrahim. Two old men. “One day I’ll go on one of these,” Eliezer said. “What a rush.”

  “Not me,” Ibrahim said. “It’s the sea for me. Only the sea.”

  They kissed on the cheeks, hugged, one last time. Ibrahim brought out a bottle. Eliezer had glasses. “We’ll drink to you,” Eliezer said.

  “You do that.”

  With that he left them. He was alone. The park waited for him, the machines heeding his steps. He went up to the roller coaster and sat down in the car and put on the safety belt carefully.

  The car began to move. Slowly it climbed, and climbed, and climbed. The desert down below, the park reduced to a tiny square of green. The Dead Sea in the distance, as smooth as a mirror, and he could almost think he could see Lot’s wife, who had been turned into a pillar of salt.

  The car reached the top and, for a moment, stayed there. It let him savour the moment. Taste the air on his tongue. And suddenly he remembered her name. It was Aliyah.

  The car dropped.

  Vlad felt the gravity crushing him down, taking the air from his lungs. His heart beat the fastest it had ever beat, the blood rushed to his face. The wind howled in his ears, against his face. He dropped and levelled and for a moment air rushed in and he cried out in exultation. The car shot away from the drop and onto the first of the loops, carrying him with it, shot like a bullet at three hundred and fifty-eight kilometres an hour. Vlad was propelled through loop after loop faster than he could think; until at last the enormous gravity, thus generated, claimed him.

  THIRTEEN: Births

  “He’s sleeping,” Miriam said. She stroked Kranki’s hair. Boris stood in the doorway and watched. A halo of light formed over Kranki’s sleeping head, projecting the boy’s dreams, fashioned out of water molecules and dust in the air.

  “Does he always do that?”

  “Since he was about three,” Miriam said.

  Were those the storm clouds of Titan in the boy’s dream?

  “I was not here when he was born.”

  “No.”

  “From the birthing clinics.”

  “Yes,” Miriam said. She looked at him, an unanswered question clear in her eyes. “Did you—?” she began. She left the rest of the question unasked.

  Did you know?

  “I left before he was born.”

  “I know that, Boris!”

  “Do you remember?” he said. A sudden nostalgia entwined in him, sickly and yet powerful. He moved closer to her. His aug pulsed against his skin. He stroked Miriam’s black hair. Her eyes softened.

  “I remember,” she said.

  It was summer. Perhaps it is always summer, when we are young.

  They parted laughing. The taste of her kiss was on his lips, hot and sweet like blackberries.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Miriam said. She looked up at him, her face held a laughter filled with challenge and he found his throat growing dry. She pulled him to her, effortlessly, and he held her in his arms, inhaling her scent. She was warm from the sun.

  “I have to,” he said; but he lacked conviction.

  When he left at last it was later and he was late, but he didn’t care. The sun was high in the sky and the heat was staggering but he didn’t mind that either. He knew everything would always be all right. He walked down the road and smiled at people and they smiled back. Everyone knew him. Boris Aharon Chong was a child of Central Station born.

  The birthing clinics took up a modest three-storey Bauhaus structure on the edge of the neighbourhood, on the abandoned highway that separated Central Station from Tel Aviv. Along the pockmarked roads solar-powered buses and personal vehicles still glided, on their way south to Jerusalem and Gaza, or north to Haifa and Lebanon. The building itself was old, held together by spit and hope and patchwork construction. It was shaped like a ship, its windows were like portholes. It had once been a classic of the Bauhaus school, its many artefacts still remaining in this part of the city, the signifiers of an earlier, stranger age. The hallway smelled of industrial cleaner.

  As he came in, the building’s system ident-tagged him. There were couples waiting at reception and he nodded to them, but cautiously, already assuming the professional mask he had to wear like an exoskeleton. He walked into the lab proper, up a flight of stairs. Inside, it was cool and clinical, with whitewashed walls and powerful air-con units that kept the air clean and sterile.

  The birthing chambers filled the room.

  They lined the walls, great vats like industrial washing machines. They were burnished chrome and glass, plastic and pipes. Boris walked past them, as he always did, checking the readings, making sure everything was as it should be, and looking at the foetuses as they took shape inside the vats.

  There is no magic to human reproduction. An ovum and a sperm cell—the gametes—join to form a zygote. Such a formation can be carried out naturally, of course, by intercourse, the way it has been and is and will be. Or it can be carried out in a lab—such as the one Boris worked in—the single sperm cell selected and analysed and inserted directly into the egg, fertilising it. The very genetic code of the zygote can then be read and programmed, allowed to grow, to form:

  Select the colour of the eyes from a list of trademarked hues; eliminate unhealthy genes, hereditary diseases. Do you want a boy or a girl? Eliminate premature balding; select the type of hair. Make them the best that they can be.

  And this is, after all, Central Station. What had Boris—the older Boris, the one who knew too well life’s disappointments, life’s unexpected turns, what had that Boris told Kranki, that day when he came down from the heavens and onto the Earth, outside the space port?

  “You had no parents,” he told him. “You were labbed, right here, hacked together out of public property genomes and bits of black market nodes.”

  They did not use proprietary stuff, in the labs. They used free public domain and knockoff code, reversed engineered elsewhere, and pirated bits.

  Sperm meets egg, forming a zygote. That is how traditional conception took place. But modern humans had a third component, as important as the other two gametes.

  The node seed.

  A human without a node was a cripple, disabled. Someone like Achimwene, Miriam’s brother, who could not take part in the Conversation. To not have a node . . . it was inconceivable. You may have heard of the artist, Sandoval, of Lunar Port, who tore out his own node in a backstreet m
ech lab. But he was mad. He had to be.

  Three gametes, then. Sperm, egg, and nodal seed. Merging together into a zygote. Growing, forming a heart, feet, hands, ears, growing, stretching, becoming an embryo housed in the growing vats. Now Boris went past each one, looking into the machines, his node reading out vital signs, projecting images onto the air before him, of the embryos as they turned and grew. “Who do we have today?” Boris said.

  “Mrs. Lepkovitz,” Shiri Chow said. She was around Boris’s age, the senior birth technician in the labs. She was sipping mint tea as she waited to come off shift. “Can you handle it?”

  “How many babies did I deliver?” Boris said. Shiri shrugged. “I can handle Mrs. Lepkovitz’s little one.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Shiri said. She went to the small sink and washed the cup. “I’ll see you later,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Boris said. He was only half-listening. A part of him was monitoring the birthing vats. Another was tuned in to a Martian station, watching Chains of Assembly. With a third of a mind he was monitoring the clinic’s internal communication, watching the waiting couples in the reception area, and Dr. Weiss, the initial consultant on duty, ushering a couple into his office to discuss beginning treatment. Egg harvesting was routine but time consuming. Sperm was easier to collect, all the man had to do was ejaculate. A woman still had to grow the eggs, be fed with hormones, operated on. The rest was done in the lab.

  “You all right, Weiss?” Boris said.

  “Fine, fine,” came back the subvocalized reply. “Remember, Boris—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

  An old joke, a tired one. Boris ignored him and walked past the rows of tumble-dryer birthing vats. The last but one, that would be Mrs. Lepkovitz’s. A boy, standard specs. Nothing to write home about, as they used to say. Mrs. Lepkovitz and her two husbands were waiting in the birth reception area, which had its own entrance. A simple enough job, incorporating the genes of two sperm with the woman’s egg and the nodal seed. There was always a small ceremony when a child was birthed. Boris went through the motions, thinking he should have been swimming in the sea or drinking a cool milkshake on the beach. Anywhere but here with that antiseptic smell. He silently initiated the birthing. The vat did most of the work. It opened with a hiss of compressed air. Boris reached inside and lifted the baby, who began to cry. He washed the tiny human thing carefully, wrapping him in a towel. The baby had that baby smell. It made the work worthwhile, Boris often thought. He wondered if one day he and Miriam would have children of their own. They would make them the old-fashioned way, if he knew Miriam. He lifted the baby up, about to take him to his parents. The baby gurgled and raised a tiny palm. Its finger pointed and Boris put his face close to the baby’s, making faces. The baby’s finger lightly touched Boris’s face.

  Boris was in the ur-space. In the nulliverse. A profound darkness had settled over Boris. He floated in a space that had no dimensions, no Conversation. He flailed and fought but there was nothing to fight against. Where was he? What was he?

  Light gradually resolved. He found himself floating in solar space. There were stars everywhere. Ahead of him, rising before his eyes like an enormous mirage, was Saturn. The planet rose ahead like a magnificent flying saucer from an old film. The rings shone like diamonds. Boris heard a sound that wasn’t sound. Suddenly the Conversation washed over him, a full-torrent of feeds converging from everywhere, overwhelming his sensory capacity. He blinked and he was on Mars, walking through the streets of Tong Yun; he blinked and was in MarsThat-Never-Was, where the canals were filled with water and four-armed warriors walked in the grasslands with their giant animals; he blinked and was in the GoA in the midst of a guild war, giant impossible spacecraft hovering in game-space, firing laser cannons at each other; blinked and he was on Jettisoned, with wildtech scavengers picking at a dead mecha’s body, stripping it apart; blinked and he was outside the dome of Lunar Port watching Earthrise; blinked and he was in the humid urban sprawl of Polyport, on Titan, with the storms raging beyond the dome; blinked and he was everywhere at once, his mind split and skewered, blinked and—

  The baby gurgled. Boris stood there stupidly staring at him. He shook his head. A problem with his node? he thought, dizzy. He’d have to go for a check-up. He nestled the baby against his chest and went through the exit to the birthing reception area. Three pairs of eyes looked up at him with hope and concern.

  “Mazel tov!” Boris said. “It’s a boy!”

  The traditional words. Into the room, now on public-access, beamed the proud parents’ relatives and “Mazel tov!” and “Congratulations!” and “Soon for you!” could be heard all about like a great big cloud of noise. Boris handed the child to the mother, who beamed at him, surrounded by the two fathers. Boris shook hands, said, “Congratulations,” and finally managed to escort the proud parents and their large virtual entourage out the door. He closed it behind him and leaned back against the wall.

  Already the images he saw were fading from his mind.

  That evening he met Miriam under the eaves of the station. They embraced, for a long moment; but, filled with that restless energy of the young in summer, they were soon running through half-abandoned streets, holding hands, laughing; as though laughter was a drug, like faith. Later, they snuck into the apartment building where Boris’s father lived. They climbed up onto the roof and there, amidst the plants and sleeping solar panes, made love.

  Somehow Boris had remembered that moment more than all others; had carried it, with him, across space, to the Up and Out, past Gateway, Tong Yun, the asteroids; and carried it back with him, to Earth, back to the old neighbourhood, the old streets, that same rooftop, parted by so many years. They had lain there, it was warm, and they looked up, and saw the station; everywhere you went, you could always look up and see the station. It rose into the clouds, a signpost and a promise of what lay beyond. They were together, they were entwined, bodies as well as future: and looking up he thought he could see the future, bright and shining down like a star; but perhaps it was just the light of the station.

  They watched the sleeping boy: they were older now, their limbs heavier, their bodies changed irrevocably by time. The aug pulsed on Boris’s neck, a living, alien thing. But Miriam was with him still, her body warm against his, and it was as if time was, momentarily, halted in its progress, as if they had come close to the edge of a black hole, and time stretched. . . .

  He did not understand the children who had been born, these children of the station, but that was not to say that they were not children still; and he remembered clearly, with a kind of aching loss, that experience of being a child: not clearly, but distantly, as through a fine haze on a hot summer day, when his father was tall and strong and the station rose up to the sky forever, it had no end.

  “We should go on a holiday,” he said, on an impulse. “Just the three of us.” Like a family, he thought, but didn’t say.

  Family wasn’t like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a “nuclear family”: it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relativesby-marriage and otherwise—it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going into the Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you, wherever you go.

  Coming back had felt like a weakness, a giving up, at first. But now with his arm around Miriam and the boy sleeping and that silence that comes from night falling, that hush, he felt things he could not articulate; but that were something like love.

  “Yes,” Miriam said. “We should.”

  That summer they had decided on a whim to leave the city for the day; and for that purpose did as city dwellers do, and hired a car.

  They drove out of Central Station. The solar car spread mayfly wings. They drove along the coast, with no exact destination in mind, Miriam driving, Boris beside her, Kranki in the back seat. Sometimes he spok
e to his friends. In a way, they were always there with him. All childhoods end, Miriam thought. But they did not have to end too soon.

  They drove and the sun followed them in a blue, cloudless sky, until the cities were left far behind them.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Miriam Jones—Central Station born and bred, of the Jones family who settled there in previous generations. Owner of Mama Jones’ Shebeen and adoptive mother of Kranki. She is a follower of St. Cohen of the Others, and a prominent member of the community.

  Kranki Jones—one of the children of Central Station, and home-grown in its labs. Adopted by Miriam on the death of the boy’s mother from Crucifixation. Mostly a normal boy.

  Achimwene Haile Selassie Jones—Miriam’s brother. Achimwene is disabled, having been born without a node. As such, he is deaf to the Conversation. He collects antique books and has an overactive imagination.

  Youssou Jones—a cousin. He lives in the adaptoplant neighbourhoods that ring the station. Engaged to Yan. Currently unemployed.

  Boris Aharon Chong—a shy, awkward boy who became a doctor. He left Central Station for Mars and elsewhere, but returned. Bonded with a Martian aug. Has issues.

  Vladimir Mordechai Chong—son of Weiwei. Like his father, he worked in construction, especially in the building of the space port where the old Central Bus Station used to stand. At the end of his life he was afflicted with a sort of memory cancer. He is Boris’s father.

  Weiwei Zhong—founder of the Chong dynasty. His visit to the Oracle resulted in the creation of Weiwei’s Folly, a shared group memory between all his descendants. A Chinese economic migrant to then-Israel who worked in construction and settled in South Tel Aviv.

  Tamara Chong / Missus Chong the Elder—sister of Vlad. Follower of the Way of Robot. Ancient and devout, she intends to be Translated into the Conversation and become pure machine intelligence when her time comes. Can be snippy.