by Simon Ings
‘Mouth?’ Shama insisted.
‘Her tongue.’
‘Go on.’
He stared silently out the window.
He remembered, the surgeons threw what they didn’t use away, severed ruin, box and all.
‘Her tongue? What about her tongue?’
Merda, most like. But what if not?
‘Ajay? Tell me!’
‘She bit it off.’
He looked out the window and imagined a black river, hurtling into the earth.
‘I’m serious,’ said Herazo the next day, picking at his mayor’s medallion. It was impossible to imagine Herazo without his chain of office. When people got pissed at him he flicked nervously at the links like they were prayer-beads. Ajay heard them clink, but he couldn’t see them. Sunshine through toughened French windows silhouetted the mayor, sitting in state behind a desk lined with plant pots. Dwarf cereals – his own hybrids – waved their ears to and fro. ‘It takes a three-man ground crew, the telemetry’s low bandwidth. They’ll think it’s a fire-cracker.’
‘It is a fucking fire-cracker.’
Herazo barked. He prided himself on his sense of humour. Why shouldn’t he? – the gag went – he’d drained enough public funds for it. Behind him, out the window, the Sugarloaf swam about in a polluted mist. The fog was so thick today, the mountain appeared to impend over the city, ready to crush it more thoroughly than Moonwolf ever had.
‘Haag’s scopes will spot a Clipper in an instant,’ Ajay protested. ‘It’s radar-visible, for Christ’s sake.’
Herazo made out he was examining the papers on his desk. ‘Let’s see that,’ he muttered, sagely. ‘Epoxy. Graphite fibre.’ His lower half, meanwhile, was slithering around in his chair like an eel: one of his bitches, working him under the desk. A melamine panel indented with a coloured relief of the Cristo Redentor hid her butt from view, but his barley-ears were shaking to an unmistakable rhythm.
‘You want me to wing Moonwolf techniq, you tell me what it’s for.’
‘I’ve told!’ Herazo sighed, exasperated. ‘They’ll never spot . . .’ and so on, the same tired spiel.
Herazo wasn’t big. Nor was his desk. Who was it under there? Some dwarf with rubber dentures? ‘Never mind the means,’ Ajay broke in. ‘I mean the end. Why up-well me? What am I looking for? Spill out!’
The desk spluttered and giggled.
Muttering an oath, Herazo pushed himself away, chair-casters squealing. He adjusted himself, stood up and turned in profile to the window. ‘We’re hungry for Haag’s secret tech,’ he announced, self-conscious, grave. His trousers were tented at the crotch. He meant for Ajay to see: gang machismo. ‘Birthing stuff. Eugenics. Incarnation. Data into meat.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh come on, Ajay. You know what it is we do.’ He gestured at his pot plants.
‘You’re the Roughage King already,’ Ajay reminded him. ‘Dayus Ram’s no wheat lab.’
‘Not those words here!’
‘So pull her out,’ said Ajay, kicking the painted Cristo lightly in the teeth, ‘if she’s not cleared to listen.’
‘She’s deaf,’ Herazo said, unfazed, ‘and strapped there. Leave her be.’
Pure macho fancy, that. More likely she was family – some niece from Belo Horizonte on the make. The point carried, nonetheless: ‘Who’s listening, if not her?’
‘Even these windows shake,’ Herazo hissed. ‘Our voices carry on their tremor!’
‘To whose ears? Rio’s?’
‘Shush!’ Herazo yelped. His city was growing sentient and he feared to speak against it. He turned his back to the window, silhouetted once again. ‘It was a mistake to bring you here. We’re not secure. Come with me. I’ll explain all elsewhere.’
The rainstorm broke as they approached the Maracanã, forcing even the self-styled parking attendants to flee for shelter, leaving the street corners around the stadium entirely unguarded.
‘Where in hell’s name is he?’ Herazo fretted. Out from under the grey-suits, the advisers, the various hangers-on, he was as confused and upset as Ajay by the chaos and unpredictability of the city. The lack of the usual attendant was enough to set him off; he hardly counted as a Carioca any more. Ajay surprised a feeling of sympathy in himself. Power had made Herazo a filet mignon.
They waited in the car until the downpour eased. Water inches deep swept the road around them. Gutters bubbled. Beneath a pewter sky, girls in drenched Fluminense football shirts danced about the swimming streets, swaying to a massed drum beat already building muddily within the stadium, a quarter mile away.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun; but the clouds weren’t spent and hung there solid and unbroken, tinged with green as evening approached. Under cloud like this and sodden, Rio looked nothing, a mere concrete shell. It was above all a city of surfaces. Deprive it of light and it lost its healthy bloom. Tanned flesh looked scorched, marble lost its glow and showed its stains and cracks, dazzling glass facades revealed their smears, and all looked wrecked and drab. Rio’s aesthetic was unbending. If the sun didn’t shine, then it wasn’t really Rio.
Ajay traipsed the dank streets after the mayor. Herazo was wearing his ‘anonymous’ outfit: a nasty gabardine and a trilby, no watch, dark glasses, plastic shoes. Typically for Herazo, this undercover costume attracted curious stares wherever he went. Ajay too looked inconspicuous, but more from habit than design. His usual jeans and T-shirt. A good choice for the Maracanã, which was never the safest place; but even were they dealing in some office, Ajay would have worn the same. Outside TV and fashionable boardrooms there was no dress code here, and though for a while silk ties and turned-up collars were the fashion in Downtown, after Moonwolf all that preppy, Northern nonsense went the way of foreign money. All was laid-back now. It pleased him. Wearing suits reminded him of police uniform, the years of work he hated, the slow warping of what he’d been into what he was . . .
They ascended a wide concrete ramp to the terraces. Herazo led Ajay round the oval a while and picked a tunnel at random. It brought them out on the fringes of the Vasco crowd. The place was nearly empty. Barely twenty thousand people clustered in opposing camps across a stadium built for one hundred and fifty thousand. A rare visitor at best, Ajay still found the scale of the place daunting.
Two moats encircled the playing field, one around the turf, and one between the stands and covered seating. Herazo had led them to the level above the seats, where raked concrete stairs, marked out in yellow paint, doubled as seats, as in some monstrous amphitheatre.
It was less a place to spectate than a town in its own right, complete with trades and laws and occupations. The poorest of the city’s poor might find a living here, roasting chestnuts in ovens made out of old catering tins, or selling coffee from steel water heaters strapped across their chests.
Children hawked bagfuls of unpleasant foamy crisps, or collected cans for recycling: every ten cans bought a fifth of a loaf of bread.
This was Herazo’s element. It was here he’d taken his first steps to power. However legitimate his current post, Herazo remained a bicheiro at heart, tending the traditional herd of illegal and semi-legal businesses: football, the jogo do bicho gambling game, samba, Carnival, certain drugs and, most recently, access to pirate, pornographic regions of DreamBrasil.
The greenish sky grew steadily more jewel-like as the light failed. The stadium lights came on around the canopy, and dragonflies sparked and wheeled in the glare.
‘Haag’s in the clutches of that Queen-Bitch, Snow,’ Herazo murmured, as the players ran onto the field. ‘No Massive’s built in Europe but speaks in Snow’s tongue. And her tongue isn’t Rio’s, to be sure. We’d lose all identity, if Snow ran our government the way she runs Paris, Milan and all the rest.’
‘Delhi,’ Ajay recited, with a certain grim relish. ‘Pnom Penh. New York.’
‘New York, even! Europe retakes America! That nightmare keeps Brazil awake at night.’
‘As often s
aid,’ Ajay concurred.
‘If this were all political, I’d know better what to do,’ Herazo complained. Rare indeed that he should admit himself stumped. ‘But nothing cuts so clear these days. What sort of threat is it breaks into people’s dreams?’
Ajay, whose training in Cuba had long since put him off VR, P-casting and the rest, knew only indirectly what Herazo meant. Snow’s homoncule had, virus-like, foxed DreamBrasil’s auto-immunes, infesting key addresses in the system. Virtual board meetings found her sitting in the chairman’s seat. Young girls stealing time on mother’s pornware found brand-name lovers losing hardness, cock first, then collapsing like wet paper bags . . . and Snow, white-haired, wraithlike and needle-toothed, crouched lapping at their dream-smooth genitals. More disturbing than these mischievous presences, though, was the speed with which she was spreading through the motor-afferent system. Last week the street lights in Recife all blinked in a strobe pattern, making, from the air, a perfect pixellated mirage. Snow, of course, laughing her head off.
‘We must fight fire with fire. Teach Rio how to think at super-human scale and so support our struggle for autonomy.’
Ajay tensed. The risks of going up against HOTOL’s monopoly in Artificial Intelligence – and thereby challenging first Haag, and then by implication HOTOL, and therefore HOTOL’s top brain and éminence grise, Snow herself – were fearsome. There was nothing ‘virtual’ about a full-blown data war. Logic bombs crashed planes, chilled cities, poisoned drinking water . . .
‘Rio’s not a Massive yet,’ Ajay objected. ‘There’s no guarantees it’ll ever be sentient, let alone a match for HOTOL tech. Why rely so heavily on something not yet born?’
‘Rio’s waking up all right,’ Herazo hissed, against the sound of drums and flares and football songs, ‘and in a strange way, too.’ His voice was high-pitched, mouse-in-the-wainscot. ‘It’s hungry for heat. It longs to wake awash with blood!’
Ajay wondered how Herazo knew this: Rio was still far from addressable, a mere concatenation of DreamBrasilian ganglia. A virtual place, not a cybernetic person.
‘Boundaries of scale are hard to break,’ Herazo conceded, perhaps guessing Ajay’s doubts. ‘We draw this news, vague as it is, from what few hints we get.’ He gestured at the Fluminense crowd, shooting flares into the night. ‘Not virtual traffic alone, but how the city itself is behaving. Movements of people. Sales of consumer goods. The spread of rumours. Class attendance, football scores, the works. Modern haruspices and auspices: it scares shit out of me, watching those pastel suits at work.’
A great weariness swept over Ajay. It seemed this was all the world ever cared for these days: matters of scale. We’re like fleas, he thought, trying to second-guess their dog.
‘They assure me Rio’s every thought is sexual.’ He leaned in closer. ‘Between you and me,’ he confided, ‘the way they described it was kind of disgusting.’
But Ajay was weary of this gimcrack prophecy. He dragged the talk back to the deal in hand. ‘Dayus Ram? Where does that come in?’
‘You said yourself it’s where Snow lives.’
‘A version of Snow,’ Ajay corrected him. ‘An old one, admitted—’
‘The one that talked to Massives first. Who found a way to make and keep them sane.’ He was reciting Ajay’s first approach to him. Lucia’s information. His meal ticket.
‘Perhaps,’ Ajay conceded, uneasy.
‘Then don’t fuck around. Who better than Snow – that version of Snow – to teach us how to make Rio Massive?’
‘You want Rio to be like Europe?’
‘I want Rio to be itself.’
‘You involve Snow-Dayus Ram in Rio’s development, Snow will muscle in herself, like it or not.’
‘You’re talking like Snow was one thing,’ Herazo complained. ‘She’s not. There’s multiple versions of her, and every version behaves differently.’
‘And you’re talking like Snow was this handy monkey wrench you can use then discard. Suppose you’re right. Suppose Snow-Dayus Ram is different to Snow-Europe. What then? What makes you think she’ll work for you? And even if she does, remember the Snow that worked for the US Navy at Presidio? Snow-Presidio commandeered and silenced the entire military establishment! You want that? You think something like that will help you fight off the European competition?’
‘I’m not sending you to fucking San Francisco, am I?’
‘The point is, you put Snow into Rio, who’s to say it won’t do a Presidio? Who’s to say it won’t lock up or encyst?’
‘You mistake the purpose of all this,’ said Herazo. ‘It’s not a Massive we need. Rio’s becoming Massive all on its own. We don’t need personality. Snow’s or anyone’s. You’re just to fetch what Rio wants to help it on its way, no more.’
‘Which is?’
Even in the gloom, Ajay sensed Herazo’s shudder. ‘The auguries are unmistakable.’ A fresh tremor passed through him. ‘Rio wants to be made human.’
‘Human?’
‘So it might father gods,’ Herazo hissed. ‘No less will slake it, grown divine!’
Fluminense scored.
A sign, perhaps.
The medical centre’s emptiness dwarfed and engulfed her.
Rosa’s mother did not care for the hospital. She had graced it with no breath of self, no colour or scent. Cold, chromed, impoverished, this was the shell itself as its builders knew it.
Reception.
NMR.
Isolation.
Each room was a brute fact. A huge, toothless mouth.
None of them had flavour. Every carpet prickled her feet the same way.
Nervously, Rosa ran her fingers over the trophies tied round her waist on a length of wire. They rolled and clicked against each other, cold against her skin.
Something skipped by at the corner of her vision. She wheeled round and chased the shape through an open door – into Isolation.
Neon lights flickered behind discoloured plastic sheeting. Shadows trembled in the corners of the room like shameful ghosts. Shards of brittle brownish plastic littered the floor like fallen leaves: remains of the slick, supple quarantine screens which once bubbled each bed. The beds, naked now, were ranked against the walls. Above each there was a name plate. Rosa read the ones nearest her.
Iain Lennox.
Victor Seebaran.
Judith Foley.
Malise Arnim.
She rolled the names around her mouth. They wouldn’t come right. Soldiers in a long-forgotten war. Moonwolf: an enemy long dead, much superseded.
Rosa closed the door behind her. She sank to her hands and knees and bent forward till her chin touched the floor. She looked around. Her prey had hidden itself well. She crossed the room slowly, brushing away the rubbish in her path: bubble wrap, paper collars, rolls of micropore, plastic wrappers, record cards. Handwriting. A signature: Chinua Nouronihar.
A name, an incantation, or a blessing for the dead?
She moved forward: hand-heel, ball-of-foot, hand-heel. The wire round her waist slipped up under her rib-cage. Her trophies swung back and forth, tapping her ribs. She swung her head this way and that. Her long red hair, loosely braided, swept the floor beside her.
She reached the furthest bed. Above the headboard a faded green label read: Thomas Aubusson. Beside it, on a trolley, a blue perspex vase held a bunch of washable cloth-and-wire geraniums. They were so old they’d faded and browned and wilted and dropped; more flower-like now than when they were new. She looked under the bed, saw something curled up in front of the socket board, frozen and grey. It looked like a balled-up dressing—
It could smell the heads looped round her waist. It knew it was cornered. Its nose twitched.
Rosa stroked her fingers across the mummified heads and found the cutting cloth, knotted loosely round the wire.
She undid it, shook it out. It recognised her and began to stiffen. She squeezed one corner, making a handle. The rest hardened straight and sharp, its edges serrated, f
ollowing the weave of the cloth.
The bed had no legs. A pneumatic pillar, ball-jointed to the centre of the bed frame, rose out the floor. She stretched, took hold of the frame and pulled herself under the bed.
‘Stop it,’ yelled the mouse. ‘Unhand me, you brute!’
Rosa lunged. The mouse dodged. ‘Begone!’ it screamed.
She swung round after it, caught its rump with the cloth. It rolled out from under the bed. She scrambled after it and cracked her forehead on the lifting pedal. The bed whined horribly, shuddered and fell to one side. She scrambled out the way. Servo-motors screeched and cackled as they tried to right the bed. It shuddered like a dying thing. The mouse lay writhing inches from her, too damaged to escape. ‘Fortunes told! Fortunes told!’ it wailed.
She sat up cross-legged and played with the mouse a while, batting it from hand to hand. Behind her, the bed sighed and slumped.
‘Luck-line broken!’ wailed the mouse. ‘Life-line long! Love-line—’
Her heart missed a beat. ‘Love-line?’
‘Tall dark stranger,’ squeaked the mouse. ‘Tall dark stranger all for you!’
Playing for time, she told herself. Life here in Ma had taught her not to hope. She retrieved her cloth from under the bed.
‘Wait!’
Rosa hesitated.
‘Wait, huntress. Strangeness afoot.’
Such direct address surprised her. ‘What did you say?’
‘See the door?’ the mouse whispered. ‘To your right. There.’
‘Where?’
‘To your right. See it? Yes.’
‘Yes,’ she said at last, amazed. ‘I see it.’ In the centre of the far wall was a door she had never seen before. It was not dead, like the other doors of the hospital. It just did not know what colour to be. It fluctuated, like static on a television.
‘Tell me, Lady, what it is. Go tell me what it is. Yes. Lady? I’m afraid.’
