There was other movement in the area—one sandworm lay dormant two clicks away and deep underground, and a group of non-sentient but mobile unexploded ordnances was gathered in what looked like a Roman villa four clicks back towards Taba, but surprisingly there were no humans and no Abu-Ala as one would usually expect to find.
None, that is, but for the boy.
Elias shrugged, put the goggles back on so he could continue monitoring the immediate area, jumped out of the khan’s top deck and slid smoothly down one of the now-tentacular bases.
The boy crossed the road and came to the perimeter of the caravanserai and stopped.
Elias came and met him.
They looked at each other curiously.
“Hello?” the boy said, uncertainly.
“Yes?” Elias said. He knew it was unhelpful. But there were protocols in place. And this wasn’t it.
“I am Saleh,” the boy said.
“Yes,” Elias said, dubiously.
They stared at each other.
* * *
Saleh wasn’t going to let them intimidate him. Even though he was intimidated. Badly. Two tiny crawling robots came over the line and examined him with extended feelers.
The other boy said, “Try not to move.”
Saleh stood very still. He took a deep breath. He said, “My name is Saleh Mohammed Ishak Abu-Ala Al-Tirabin.”
At this the other boy looked more interested. “You are an Abu-Ala?”
“Yes.”
“You are not the designated contact,” the boy said.
“No.”
“So why are you here?”
Saleh was sweating, though the air was chilly. He said, “I have something.”
“So?”
“Something to trade.”
The boy looked interested again. “Is it valuable?” he said.
“I think so.”
The boy seemed to consider. “Still,” he said. “We deal with the tribe, not with individual scavengers. It makes everything easier. Safe.”
Saleh said, “There is only me.”
“Excuse me?”
Saleh swallowed.
“There is only me,” he said quietly.
And then he started to cry.
* * *
Saleh sat miserably on the mat while Elias brewed sage tea. Elias had had to bring him in, hadn’t he. The boy was no longer deemed a threat. Saleh accepted the tea gratefully. Elias brought out pistachios and hard biscuits. He set them on a plate and sat cross-legged across from Saleh.
“What happened to them?” he said. He tried to speak gently.
Saleh shrugged.
“We were excavating in Dahab,” he said. “It used to be a robotnik nest during the second, no, maybe the third war. You must have seen the satellite pictures of Dahab, right? It had a terrorartist attack in the fourth war and the whole place is suspended in a sort of still-ongoing explosion, but if you wear a null suit you can navigate through the temporality maze—anyway. We were digging. Dahab’s full of valuable old stuff, it’s just hard to get. Then, something… broke loose.” He blinked. “I don’t know what. A ghost.”
“A ghost?” Elias said.
Saleh shrugged again, helplessly. “One of the old Israeli robotniks, I think. It was still alive somehow, inside the explosion. Most power sources don’t work inside the terrorartist installation so we bring in portable fusion generators when we go in. I think my dad brushed too close to the old robotnik and somehow it drew power from the generator and—and it came alive. They were cyborgs, with biological brains but mostly machine otherwise. I don’t even know if it was alive in a real sense, only responding to what it saw as battle. So it came loose and it killed my father and the rest of… It killed everyone.”
“I am sorry,” Elias said. He looked at the boy in front of him. Two years back they had lost Manmour, the elephant, to tiny mechanical spider things that had swarmed out of one of the wadis. Only the skeleton remained and then the machines vanished again, and what they did with Manmour’s skin and flesh and blood nobody knew. The elephants grieved and the whole caravanserai grieved with them.
“Drink your tea,” Elias said compassionately.
* * *
Saleh closed his eyes. The teacup felt warm between his hands.
“Everyone else was away,” he said quietly. He had to get the words out. Had to tell Elias what happened. In a way it was a relief.
“Most of the tribe’s down in Sharm or St. Catherine’s. But I got it, you see.” He opened his eyes and stared at the other boy, this Elias, with his strange goggles and short-cropped hair and curious, interested gaze.
“You got it? What?” the boy said.
“The thing we were looking for.” Excitement quickened in him then. “My grandfather Ishak and my father, Mohammed, they kept looking. Even though it was dangerous. Even though it was hard. Every year the terrorartist bubble moves outwards just a little. It is still alive, the explosion still happening. You know much about terrorart?”
“A little. Rohini started it, didn’t they? The Jakarta Event.”
“Time-dilation bombs,” Saleh said. “Yes, Rohini. There were others. Mad Rucker who seeded the Boppers on Titan. Sandoval, who made the installation called Earthrise out of stolen minds on the moon. There were never many, thankfully. And they were mass murderers, every one. But the art, I know people are interested in it.”
“There are collectors,” Elias said. “Museums, too. What did you find?”
“This,” Saleh said, simply. He opened his bag and took out a small metal ball. It felt so light. “It’s the time-dilation bomb.”
Silent alarms must have gone off somewhere, because a moment later he had caravaners and drones both surround him. He never even heard them coming.
Elias let out a slow exhalation of breath.
“And how did we miss that?” he said.
“It’s empty,” Saleh said. “The explosion, Dahab, everything? It’s still going on. My father, my uncle, they’re still inside it. An endless death, still happening. The robotnik pulled them into the field. Only I got out.”
He didn’t dare move. The weapons were on him. Elias said, “May I see it?”
“Of course.”
Saleh gave it to the other boy.
* * *
Numbers danced behind Elias’s goggles. He nodded and the weapons around Saleh relaxed, if only a little.
Elias said, “It’s genuine. That’s a real find.”
Defiance in the other boy’s eyes. “I told you.”
“You speak for your tribe?” Elias said.
“I speak for myself.”
“And the Abu-Ala? Where do the rest of your people stand on this?” Elias said.
Saleh shook his head. Carefully. “This is mine,” he said. “It is all that is left. The others will appoint a new speaker in time.”
“What do you want for this?”
“I want enough,” Saleh said. He seemed desperate. “It’s priceless, an original terrorartist artefact.”
“That it is.” Elias turned it over in his hands. It felt so light. He said, “What do you need the money for?”
Saleh said, “There is nothing for me here. I want to go away. Far away. I thought… I could travel up the ’stalk to Gateway, get a ship out.”
“Mars? The moon?”
“Titan. I always wanted to see Titan.”
Elias felt sorry for him. “You can’t run away,” he said, as gently as he could. “Even in space, you’d still just be yourself. And lonelier than you could ever imagine.”
“Maybe. But I have to get out.”
“I’m sorry,” Elias said. And he really was. But this was business.
He said, “It’s rare. It’s valuable. There’s no question about it. But it’s just an empty bomb husk. Even with provenance. You’d have to find the right collector, and even then… it won’t get you to Mars. It would barely get you a one-way ticket on the ’stalk. We would buy it off you, of course. But
we are wholesalers, not collectors. I can’t offer you what you want and, even if you could somehow sell it at full price somewhere else, it won’t be as much as you’d hope.”
He saw the light die in Saleh’s eyes. Saw it, and felt terrible.
“My father, my uncle, my cousins, everyone…”
“Yes,” Elias said.
“All for nothing,” Saleh said.
“Not nothing,” Elias said.
* * *
Saleh barely heard him. He stared at that awful, empty husk. So many lives. And so many still caught in that outwardly expanding explosion, the final installation of a mad artist who took delight in destruction and death.
He could go back, he thought. Go find the rest of the Abu-Ala, follow the coast to Sharm.
He didn’t want to, he realised. Even before it all happened, he did not want to live his life this way. Scavenging old tech in the crumbling, rotting, endless maze of architecture on the Ghost Coast. Marrying, and having a family, so one day he’d have a son, so one day his name would pass on along with the tribe’s.
He wanted to see Al-Imtidad, he realised. He wanted to see the glitterball underwater cities of the Drift, the view of Earth as seen from the observation decks of Gateway, high in orbit. He wanted the moon. He wanted Mars.
Instead he was here.
He couldn’t, wouldn’t go back, he thought. He shook his head. He blinked back tears.
“Thank you,” he said, formally. He took back the find. The bomb. “I will find a buyer. I will go—”
“How will you go?” Elias said, ruthlessly.
Saleh felt trapped. “I will go,” he said. “I will find a way.”
“You could come with us.”
Saleh looked at Elias. The other boy was smiling.
“You could be useful,” Elias said. “And we can always use a steady set of hands.” He tapped his goggles, which must have connected him with the rest of the caravaners, Saleh realised. “It is already decided by quorum. If you would like to, that is.”
“Where do you go?” Saleh said.
Elias shrugged. “Along the coast, still, for a while. Then back through the desert before the summer comes. Perhaps to Bahrain.”
“Where the Emir of Restoring and Balancing sits on its throne?” Saleh had dreamed of visiting that island, too.
“There is a market there for antiques among both digitals and humans,” Elias told him. “You will come?”
“I…”
* * *
Elias removed his goggles. For a moment the world seemed lesser, disconnected. Then it resolved into its true shape and he saw Saleh as he really was, small, human, afraid.
He extended his hand to the other boy.
“Yes,” Saleh said. His hand was warm in Elias’s grip.
“Good,” Elias said simply. They rose together from the woven mat.
“Tell me,” Elias said, smiling. “Have you ever met an elephant?”
Saleh shook his head. He was smiling, too. “Then let me take you,” Elias said. “They’d love to meet you, you know.”
And together, the two boys left the khan, hand in hand, and wandered off into the enclave of the Green Caravanserai, where a herd of elephant were playing in the mud.
Anna Tambour
1.
JUST when you think you’ve killed them all, others impossibly wriggle over the wall. Or bore through it, some say. Or worse—though this might be another rumor—breed within.
As for the sounds, there’s lots of speculation, some of it pretty noisy itself. Are the sounds some new tactic to get rid of the orms? We in the corps have argued about that, most of us too scared to want to talk about it, or to want to hear it discussed; but (and it could be a pose) a few loudmouths insist on spouting daily assurances that the Sound, as they say it Capitalizedly, is the Newest Advance in our age. This might be convincing if they, the optimists, weren’t doing the mole act along with the rest of us, and running downstairs as fast as they can when the first sounds rumble in the distance every forsaken morning. They answer collateral damage, possible risks, someone will tell us, never you mind and the sun will come up sunny one day.
Today we got another report closer to home. An orm, a relative baby though thick as a man’s thigh, its dorsal fin tall as his waist, and its mane thick and coarse as cables. Just a block away, it was caught in the act of engorgement, two legs waving from its maw.
The story goes that a man in blue shot it with his harp-net. The orm’s tail wasn’t properly caught, and smashed the guy’s stomach to pulp, but the mib had already called the orm squad. The person in the orm (unknown sex) was already a lost cause. That orm would feed a hundred New Yorkers, maybe plenty more from outside. That’s what Julio says because he saw someone who saw the squad load it into their omni. All just speculation on my part. I’m not a knower, and I don’t know anyone who is.
The sounds and craters are something else. The sounds come always at dawn. In them are elements of rumble, drag, shear, and I would imagine earthquake, all in one indefinability, just the sound to make you wake shaking from a dream, though this isn’t one. Correction: wasn’t one before. The real has exceeded dreams—former dreams, that is.
The sounds have patterned our waking. We all run down to the drypit (though none of us has slept enough) and huddle there feeling the building tremble (or is it just us?) till the day calms, relatively.
* * *
It’s still raining. We passed the forty days and forty nights mark long ago, thankfully longer ago than anyone in our corps cares to harp about. No one left amongst us is the quoting type. I don’t remember the last time the moon shone.
Two levels of underground car park in our building are now nicely filled with water. So we don’t have that to worry about. Power could have been a problem but for our resident genius, an arrogant creep otherwise. Julio is the only person who can relate to the guy, but as long as Julio stays with us, we’re laughing. (Must keep Julio happy!)
Julio is a genius, too, but a different kind. He named us “The Indefatigables” but that is really he. He found it in a book, he says, in his self-effacing way, but he is the one. I have never been able to figure him out. I thought perhaps it was love, and of who else but Angela Tux? But she left almost at the beginning and Julio stays. He says we give him purpose and that he loves the Brevant, and maybe we do and he does. I certainly must give him purpose, as I don’t think I could live without what he’s done for us.
The Indefatigables, properly the coop of the Brevant Building, “the corps” as we call ourselves, would be happy as clams these days (no irony intended) if we could only get more dirt. George Maxwell goes out for it instead of just wishing we had more. He went all the way to 51st Street yesterday to find a dirtboy with real dirt.
He was so upset he didn’t mind the danger, he said. I think that he was so upset he didn’t think of the danger. I’ve never sought a dirtboy. Too frightened of being killed for my seeds. George, though, is a big guy, played varsity in Yale (people say it’s still around, where the knowers are). George is one of those guys whose muscles get more tough with age as does their stubbornness. We’ve got quite a collection here now in our little group, none as brave as George or useful as Julio, but we like to say each has something to offer. The building used to be filled with useless types—hysterical, catatonically morose, or verbally reminiscent—but they died out or disappeared. I’m proud and, I admit, lucky to be part of our corps now.
From Julio, the super, we hear rumors. He was the one who told us to fortify, though in the end, it was only him and George Maxwell who stuck broken glass and angle-edged picture frames and sharpened steel furniture bones into the outside wall, one man sticking, the other man guarding the sticker with a pitiful arsenal of sharpened steel. For the steel, it surprised us all how many of us had Van der Rohe chairs. I got mine at a ridiculously cheap price from a place in Trenton, though the delivery, by the time they were all installed in my apartment (I had to get three at the p
rice), was ridiculous. I was glad to donate the chairs. They had always seemed to unwelcome my sitting in them, and gloat when I left them alone. Until the defenses project, I had never been able to part with them, but the prospect of them being torn asunder into ugly scrap gave me the best day I could remember in this age.
So few diversions. The Wall now, you’ll want to know about. Walls, really, I don’t rightly remember when. Sometime in the first years of the age. The orms were only part of the reason then, but the part that motivated public pronouncements on the Wall project. Where the orms came from, we’ll never know. Norwegian cruise ships were blamed for dumping the “freshets,” as the spawned babies are called, with the ballast, in both Miami and New York. The Norwegians protested, saying these are not orms, and anyway, theirs are mythical (though plenty of Norwegians disputed that). But the mayors and the President said “orms” in their announcements, and so that is what we’ve called them since. It doesn’t matter about the name anymore anyway, nor how they got here, nor to us, how far they have traveled inland. There are rumors that they reached the Great Lakes long ago, and the Mississippi, and that they can travel overland for many miles before they need water. We used to speculate, but as George pointed out, why? We’re probably the safest in the country because we protected first, and we have the most organized (not to mention mechanized) protection force in the country, as far as we know, and also we still have both wall-workers (we hear) and men in blue.
The Wall. The first place of building was the hardest: New York Harbor. Then the Wall encompassed more and more of the boroughs, then out to formerly exclusive burbs. The greatest achievement of mankind—it can be seen from outer space. It had massive public support, and became a focus of both civic pride and hope. I remember the feeling.
The Navy sonared the sea to bejesus, both the harbor enclosed by the Wall, and out to three miles. Then the army electrified the Wall wherever it was land-based. We slept easy for it must have been close to a year.
Then the first orm was found inside. I remember the headlines in the old New York Times: “Mib loses fight to orm; Mayor vows to beef force.” Eleven feet long, it came up through a toilet in Flushing (yes, Flushing got in, though I don’t know why, but maybe it wasn’t Flushing but they said so because it is funny, and let’s face it, anything funny runs like a nose in November). By the time the orm was hacked to death with a broken plate-glass window stuck to a love seat (by the wife, a weightlifter, I remember, but again, I don’t know if this wasn’t any more true than Flushing) the orm had (supposedly) bitten through the middle of a tall and muscular dry-waller (but again, he could have been a flabby accountant). Whoever-it-was’s middle was found in the orm on occasion of the orm’s post-mortem (orms were not then eaten by anyone). The fact is, an orm killed in a safety zone.
Out of the Ruins Page 2
