The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  Johansen took the helm of the launch while Parry loosed the mooring ropes. It took about a quarter of a minute, from the moment Johansen turned the ignition key, for the comp-res power cell to achieve full output. A duotone whine from beneath the engine housing grew louder as the power cell’s pair of crystals were exposed to each other and a charge accumulated between them. The same system, on a considerably vaster scale, operated in the mainland hum farms that supplied the city’s electricity – power born of mutual excitation.

  There was no earthly reason, at least none that any terrestrial physicist had been able to ascertain, why complementary resonance should work – why two crystals, vibrating out of sync, should generate energy, spontaneously, out of nothing, with apparently no undesirable by-products and without being subject to the laws of entropy. Like crystech, comp-res was an inexplicable miracle in everyday use, and Parry was not alone in regarding it with a kind of superstitious awe. He believed – and he knew it was wholly irrational, but since when had that stopped anyone holding a belief? – that to question how comp-res operated was to risk causing it to cease functioning, in the same way that a gambler, the moment he begins to ask himself why he is on a winning streak, may find Lady Luck turning her back on him. It was better, in the Foreign era, simply to accept some things for what they were. Including, of course, Foreigners themselves.

  When the output indicator light glowed green on the dashboard display, Johansen engaged the throttle. Pausing to let a taxi-gondola go past, he steered away from the jetty and began threading the launch through the interstices of the Sea-Hive, aiming for the nearest main thoroughfare, the Second Canal.

  “Well, boss?” he said over his shoulder to Parry. “Waste of time, or did you get something useful out of that?”

  Parry seesawed a hand in mid-air. “What’s your opinion of her?”

  “With all due respect to the lady, I think she’s – as you would say – barking mad.”

  “You think she made the whole thing up?”

  “She probably believes she hung out with the same Foreigner time and time again, but it could have been a dozen different ones.”

  “And all these other people who got in touch with her?”

  “Again, barking mad. All of them. Woof woof!”

  Parry nodded. He knew Johansen was probably right. The trouble was, in spite of Viola’s manifestly neurotic traits, he had found her strangely plausible.

  “Listen, Pål,” he said, “would you mind pulling up at the next public jetty we come to?”

  “Sure,” said Johansen, puzzled.

  A minute later he brought the launch in to a gliding halt behind a tethered private cruiser.

  Parry stepped out onto the jetty. “You go on back to HQ. Anyone asks where I am, tell them I’m, I don’t know, making further enquiries or something.”

  “Right. What are you doing?”

  “Going for a wander. I need to think, and walking usually helps.”

  “Oh. OK.” Johansen grinned amenably, offered his captain a non-regulation salute, and reversed the launch into the centre of the canal, a liquid blister of backwash welling at the boat’s stern. “See you later, then.”

  Parry waved him off and started walking.

  The sun-starved backwaters of the Sea-Hive were soon behind him and he was once more in the embrace of New Venice proper, the New Venice of the brochures and the television adverts, the New Venice of bright, open spaces, of walkways and bridges and tiered hotels and shopping arcades and outdoor restaurants and ambling, perambulating tourists. As though a tourist himself, he strolled without direction, his only criterion being that, on this typically blazing-hot afternoon, he remain in shade as much as possible. This was not difficult, since wherever he went there was shelter of some sort to pass under: an awning, a parade of palms, an avenue of stone arches thatched between with vines, the cantilevered overhang of a balcony, a chessboard arrangement of large pyramidal parasols. New Venice had been designed so that pedestrians could avoid the sun if they chose to. It was a nice touch, courteous and pragmatic, typical of the city’s creators.

  They, a team of Italy’s most prominent architects, had intended that their Venice be in every respect a worthy successor to the home of Casanova and Canaletto. To this end they had drafted and crafted a city where humans and Foreigners alike could find beauty and refinement and repose. Originally their plans had called for New Venice to be sited a kilometre off the Tuscan coast, in the Ligurian Sea (and not far from the port of Livorno, which had its own area called Venezia Nuova – hence the Anglicised name, to avoid confusion). Shortly before the first crystech foundation could be seeded in the ocean bed, however, the architects discovered that the finance for building the city was not in place. Owing to egregious bureaucratic mismanagement, the funds they had been promised by their nation’s government did not exist, and when this became public knowledge a political scandal ensued that saw whole of Italy up in arms, the people, the Mafia (then wheezing its last), even the Vatican, all decrying the incompetence of the country’s elected officials and all offering different and contradictory suggestions for rectifying the problem. There were resignations and re-elections and recriminations, but by the time the dust had settled, the architects were long gone, having stormed off in disgust and sold their blueprints to the North African Countries Alliance. Italy’s loss was NACA’s gain, as New Venice – the name, at the behest of its creators, retained – arose from the southern Mediterranean, swiftly and ably erected by a workforce only too eager to bring into being this source of prestige and income for their homelands. Since then Italy had made a number of further attempts at constructing its own resort-city, to be called either New Venice II or, even more clumsily, New New Venice, but so far each of these projects had collapsed in ignominious failure. For this Parry was glad. In his opinion New Venice was, and should remain, unique. It was not the first ever resort-city (that was Gaijin Hello Friendly Island, erected on top of Japan’s enormous coastal reefs of consumer waste), nor was it the largest (that honour went to Bridgeville, which sprawlingly straddled the remnants of the Florida Keys). It was, however, the most elegant. Everything about it had been put together with an eye for the over-all composition. Even the spaces between buildings, those empty polygons of sky, seemed to have a structural and aesthetic purpose. No shape was random. Nothing stood that did not complement something else. All was in harmony. A city of light and air and order that had transcended its chaotic genesis to emerge supreme, redeemed – what better emblem of the Foreign era could there be?

  It would have been nice to think that New Venice’s architectural majesty was somehow conducive to bringing out the best in its inhabitants and visitors, and on the whole perhaps it was. But as he walked, choosing his turns on impulse, drifting, diverting, doubling back, going wherever the whim took him, all around him Parry saw – possibly because he was in a mood to notice such things – little instances of disagreement and misunderstanding that seemed somehow all the more unsightly for being set against such a splendid backdrop.

  He walked and he saw a tourist couple arguing with a restaurant waiter over an error on their bill. The tourists – snowy-haired Americans, their matching pastel-and-tartan leisurewear outfits marking them out as irremediably wedlocked – addressed the waiter in loud bullying voices, repeating themselves incessantly, taking it in turns to harangue him, tag-team intimidation. “But surely you realise...?” “But couldn’t you tell...?” “But what kind of idiot...?” “But what sort of math do they teach at...?” In return the waiter, a gawky North African post-adolescent, kept nodding and writhing and saying sorry in English and wringing APOLOGY from his hands. His contrition was acute, but the American couple kept up their verbal barrage regardless. A disproportionate amount of discomfort had to be inflicted before they could consider the matter settled to their satisfaction.

  He walked on and he saw a Jehovah’s Witness standing at the confluence of three avenues, silent and imperious beneath a banner th
at read, “Sing to the Lord a New Song”. In the man’s hand was a copy of the latest edition of The Watch Tower, in which, if previous issues Parry had read were anything to go by, resort-cities were described as Babylons, Sirens as whores, and Foreigners as harbingers of the Last Days, an omen of the onset of End-Time. The Jehovah’s Witness was entitled to stage his protest on condition that he talked to no one and did not force his magazine on passers-by but rather let people take copies from him if they wanted to. Accordingly, while the fervent blaze in his eyes spoke volumes, his lips stayed firmly sealed.

  Parry walked on and he saw a Foreigner, wandering on its own, being approached by a young woman who, without warning, burst into song, leaning seductively towards the golden giant as she trilled questing, exploratory arpeggios. The Foreigner appeared taken aback and, with an awkward, flustered inclination of its head, formed the hand-symbol for REJECTION, rapidly following it with GRATITUDE. The Siren immediately stopped singing, signed APOLOGY, and backed away. The Foreigner, having taken a moment to compose itself, continued on its journey. Had the woman persisted with her attempt to hook the golden giant, Parry would have intervened and requested her to desist.

  He walked on and he saw a vagrant being accosted by two of his fellow FPP officers (he was in another captain’s district, so he knew the officers’ faces but not their names). The vagrant was a Berber, dressed in a vivid blue woollen cloak and a short white conical hat, his face as arid and lined as a desert, his limbs skinny like tree branches. Obviously, in common with many on the mainland who begged for a living, the Berber saw nothing wrong in hopping aboard the commuter ferry to New Venice and trying his luck here, where money flowed in abundance, hoping that a tourist would take pity on him and donate a nearly extinct IC card, perhaps, or a tiny fleck of Foreign currency. He offered no resistance when the FPP officers took him by the elbows and helped him to his feet. Murmuring docilely in Riffian, he allowed himself to be escorted to a waiting launch. He would be kept in a holding chamber at HQ and returned to the mainland later that day.

  Parry walked on and he saw a shop window that had been broken either by a vandal or, more likely, by someone accidentally falling against it. Cracks radiated from a point of impact at shoulder-height, and over this a crystech patch like a smooth puddle of ice had been applied so that no shards would fall out. Behind the damaged glass there was a display of novelty merchandise: ornamental swords, New Venice snowstorm globes, Foreigner bean-toys in velvety golden plush, T-shirts with the faces of famous composers printed on them, ikons of St Cecilia. It was from a shop such as this that Parry had bought the fake Foreign statuette that had so underwhelmed his nephew and niece.

  He walked on and he saw other such vignettes of life in New Venice, other tiny human blemishes that in most cities would have passed unnoticed but here stood out like coffee-stains on a white damask tablecloth, and all the while he thought of Anna, and of Viola d’Indy, and of dead Daryl Henderson. He thought of language, and how words could sometimes convey less than silence. He thought of music, and how, with or without lyrics, it could often convey more than language. He thought of the myriad daily misunderstandings that occurred between people as the cogs of communication hiccuped and juddered and mismeshed and occasionally whirled free, turning nothing except themselves. He thought of hand-symbols, which the Foreigners had taught the world so that they and humans could converse, and which humans had adopted in order to converse with each other – the closest thing to a pan-global vocabulary since the Tower of Babel fell, more widespread and successful than Interlingua or Interglossa or Esperanto had ever been, and yet, with a repertoire of only ninety-six terms, still basic, a toddler’s tongue. He thought of the purity of emotional connection that both Professor Franchetti and Viola d’Indy had described when talking about singing, and he tried to imagine Henderson moaning love and sorrow to his Foreigner, the charmer charmed, the handsome youth who could have had any woman (or perhaps man) he wanted but who, it appeared, had fallen hopelessly, helplessly, for a non-human entity.

  Parry walked until, almost to his surprise, he found himself at Crystal Beach on the westernmost limits of the city. Blinking as though coming round from a trance, he saw that the sun was on the wane, losing its shape a few degrees above the horizon, sagging and turning red from the effort of shining all day. According to his watch, the time was a few minutes short of half-past five. Incredibly, he had wandered, deep in thought, for nearly four hours.

  Hungry, he bought a lamb pitta sandwich from a vendor’s stall on the promenade and descended steps to the beach’s long, gently-shelving slope. The crystalline surface underfoot was milled and grained so as to provide traction, its texture not unlike that of corduroy. Here and there sections of the beach were elevated to horizontal, creating platforms for deckchairs and sun-loungers. Parry made his way towards the waterline. Halting a metre or so from the sloshing breakers, he removed his jacket, folded it to form a neat cushion, and sat on it. Elbows propped on knees, he munched the sandwich, pausing every so often to wipe a dribble of mint dressing from his chin.

  Bathers yelped and frolicked in the glittering shallows, and beyond the buoys of the shark-nets windsurfers exploited what little late-afternoon wind there was, yanking on their sails while their boards splashed sedately across the waves. Pleasure yachts bobbed at anchor in the middle distance, while far off, where sea ended and sky began, chrome-tinged cloud banks were amassing. On the beach itself hundreds of sunbathers basked, prone or supine or sitting upright or lying on their sides reading, their bronzed skins glistening with oils, and there were people strolling, languid in the deepening light, and there were Foreigners about, too, picking their way around and among the mobile and immobile humans. It was rare to find a Foreigner standing still. Always, when out in the open,golden giants seemed to be on their way to somewhere, peering around them with their masks’ empty eyes as they went, somehow seeing, or at least appearing to see. These ones gazed at the sunbathers and the sea-bathers and the ocean and the sky and the gloaming fade of the day, all with equal fascination. They steered clear of the water, and sometimes clustered together in groups of two or three to share a few silent moments of travelling companionship before dispersing and going their separate ways again. It struck Parry that, here on the beach, they were turning fewer heads than usual, and he wondered why, till the answer, an obvious one, occurred to him. Most of the people around him had sunglasses on and so could stare without appearing to stare. They looked as sightless as the Foreigners, but from behind their blank black lenses could see just as much.

  When his sandwich was finished and its greaseproof-paper wrapper had been wadded up and tucked into his shirt pocket for later disposal, Parry licked his lips and closed his eyes and listened for a while to the cream and purl of the surf. He may have nodded off briefly. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the sun was bloated, old now, very low, ripe for immersion. It was time to make a decision. Quesnel needed an explanation for the death of Daryl Henderson and the loss of the Foreigner with him. She needed something to give to the media, something for the newspapers and TV networks and internetworks to disseminate, something that was straightforward and reassuring and readily digestible. She needed to let everyone know that all was well in New Venice. It was not enough that the world was running on a more-or-less even keel these days. It must be seen to be doing so.

  He could tell her that he thought the deaths were murders, and she could say so on air, and what then? Uproar. NACA would demand action. The FPP would be under pressure to find the culprit or culprits, and of course its officers would do their best, but the FPP was largely a symbolic organisation, bound by strict rules and protocols, there to reassure more by its presence than by anything it could do. Hampered by the measures of the Constitution and hamstrung by the lack of evidence pertaining to the incident, the FPP would flounder around, much to the delight of its opponents, Xenophobes in particular, who would not hesitate to make political capital out of its misfortunes. Meanw
hile there would be consternation in the city, perhaps even panic, not least among Sirens, seeing as it was one of their number who was dead. Sirens were the direct interface between humans and Foreigners. If they were alarmed, their alarm would be conveyed, inadvertently or otherwise, to the Foreigners they sang for. So far the golden giants appeared unaware of – or, if aware, unconcerned by – the loss at the Amadeus. He doubted they would remain so calm if the Sirens they hired had their minds on other things and gave vocal performances that were anxious and preoccupied and anything less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic.

  On the other hand, there was the shinju theory. It was credible and to a certain extent comprehensible. Love was so broad and fundamental an emotion, encompassing so many extremes, that almost anything could be and had been committed in its name. Love was a motive everyone was familiar with, even if everyone might not always understand or sympathise with it.

  He considered what the reaction might be. Naturally there would be those who would not take kindly to the idea of a human and a Foreigner falling in love, and not just falling in love but killing themselves for love. Anthropocentric moralists, religious extremists, Xenophobes – they would all feel the need to voice their discontent and disapproval, and their grumbles would be patiently heard out. However, within and outside New Venice the vast majority of people would, he believed, he hoped, respond to the content of Quesnel’s statement with a tolerant shrug. These things happened, they would say. Ç’est la vie. Que sera sera. Mai pen rai. So it goes.

  Murder or suicide? The latter was, in so many ways, the lesser of two evils.

  He had distinct reservations about offering Quesnel what was still essentially a guess rather than a solid, tested, testified fact. All he had to back up the shinju theory was anecdotal and circumstantial evidence, and that made him uneasy. The copper in him, the Hendon-trained boy in blue, wanted eyewitness testimonial, signed statements, corroboration, previous, form. In the absence of those he felt edgy and adrift.