“The mountings have been snipped, each one several clean cuts, like small shears.” Lupé’s face was creased up. “Like good tools used badly. Maybe it was him. Not our problem.” And most likely nobody’s problem any more. The Protein Complex should have died long before; would have done if it weren’t for this weird research that had come their way. A bunch of missing panels here made no difference.
“Unless it’s a symptom,” Hotep said, back in the ’Bug, “of a disease.” She had managed to speak briefly with Achouka, she said, pass on word to Attah or whoever else cared. Maybe someone would help.
As they left, Mao pulled up the rear camera view, half-expecting to see Okereke haunting the vehicle bay like his own ghost, but the complex kept its secrets, and soon it was lost to sight.
CHAPTER FOUR
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVE
BEYOND THE PROTEIN Complex the desert was trackless and vast, reaching south for miles of wasteland before encountering the receding hairline of the far side of human habitation, the desperate scratch-farms and mining claims where there was some residual ground water, or where water was worth bringing. Between here and there were all the bones of last generation’s final flourish of excess: the Estate and the grand homes that had surrounded it. An oasis maintained with all that money could buy by the grand plutocrats who had ordained the Ankara and the Grand Celeste, and who had gone up the cable to their own personal Ascension and rebirth. But even they had not been able to take it all with them, and what they had left behind was a wasteland of dead gardens; grand houses like bleached skulls; laboratory complexes in whose dry wells and cellars, by repute, failed experiments yet survived, somehow, when nothing else could.
And the solar fields that had once provided the colossal power to wrest comfortable living here in the heart of the dead land, now fed to Ankara Achouka—or they were supposed to. They could have been torn up and rebuilt to surround the Anchor Field, of course, but that would have meant cost and delay. Cost was something the sonko were used to laying out, but delay was the thing they would not tolerate. All those kilometres of sun-drinking black were left in place with their custodian robots, to weather the dust and the heat and the sheer neglect.
And they wouldn’t last forever, of course, as Hotep was happy to point out. They wouldn’t even last another generation; by the time Mao’s youngest kids were heading out into the desert themselves, most of it would have gone to ruin. But, from the point of view of the men who ordered those fields built, all that mattered was that they lasted long enough for the final guest of the Grand Celeste to take their one-way ticket out of the Roach Hotel.
The solar fields were vast; the desert was large enough to lose them a hundred times over. That meant Hotep got to navigate, and because it was something she was interested in doing, Mao knew he could rely on her to do the most exacting job possible, even if she kept up a constant rattle and drum on the dashboard as she did. Navigating south of the Ankara was a tricky business for most, but Hotep had a secret weapon and it was called the Grand Celeste. The vast spaceship docked up at the anchor cable had a full suite of instruments and subordinate satellites, and could give a band of Firewalkers the most precise GPS known to humankind, guiding them infallibly through the wastes to their desired destination. It wasn’t supposed to, of course. Hacking into and co-opting the liner’s systems was absolutely forbidden. But Hotep didn’t care. She considered it her birthright. She had been born within the Celeste’s gently curving walls, one of the first human children to take their first breath in the constant free-fall of orbit. Her people were rich beyond all the less important dreams of people like Mao’s family, labouring on the Earth beneath them. Hotep had learned all she knew of gravity from rotating sections and vitamin supplements. Her childhood playpark had been made of centrifuges and the eternally rising slope of the running track. She was going to be an astronaut when she grew up, and, of all the children in history who had claimed that, she was surely right.
Except that Hotep—Corey Dello as was—wasn’t right. She wasn’t within the narrow tolerances of her kind, up there. She drummed and fidgeted and never seemed to be paying attention, even if she could later recount lessons and conversations wholesale. She laughed at the wrong times, cried at the wrong things, took away the wrong message from jokes. She flicked switches and disassembled devices, and in a spaceship, that was frowned upon. And one day they had come and told her she wasn’t going to be an astronaut after all, nor was she going to stay aboard the Celeste, because the choice had either been to conform to the expectations of her parents and their peers, or fall. And so she fell.
Mao had heard it all before, in various permutations and levels of detail. Hard, honestly, to be that sympathetic for the sonko girl who was bitching about having to live in the world he was born to and would never escape, the world that was dying off, the dog’s corpse that the fattest of the fleas were abandoning. For now all that mattered was that Hotep carried a grudge bigger than the Grand Celeste itself and didn’t mind using it to help them find their way across the desert to the solar fields and the bones of the old manor houses.
He was driving, trying not to let Hotep’s fidgeting bug him. Lupé was asleep; soon enough it would be her turn at the wheel. The air conditioning whined like an overtired child, succeeding only in pushing oven-hot air around a bit, except he knew that outside it was ten degrees hotter and dry enough to turn his tongue into a withered strap of leather. When he sucked a mouthful of water from the pipe next to his head, it tasted faintly of chemicals that suggested the filtration plant at the back needed looking at. And he reckoned one of the big, fat, self-resealing tyres was low. And the solar panels up top needed scraping free of dust the moment the sun was down, because they didn’t have the power to keep going overnight as he’d have liked. All par for the course, for a Firewalker. All reminders that Firewalkers died, and that Firewalkers were young because almost none of them got old.
They’d been on the dust road for days now, Okereke’s plant far behind them. There had been a dead tree, the day before, and after that a great irregular depression stained with red and brown where some toxic spill of liquid had met its final end beneath the unyielding stare of the sun. Forests, he thought, remembering the pictures in M. Attah’s office. He always wondered that Lupé wasn’t as mad as Hotep about how things had got. Of all of them, this was her birthright, after all. Her long-back kin had lived in these parts, he knew: miners, city folk, artists, computer programmers, farmers, whatever the hell trades people had done back then. And had they brought the hammer of the sun down on their own heads? Not really, no more than anyone. But that hammer had come down and they’d scattered under its strike: north, south, because to stay here was death by drought and famine and carcinoma.
And then, generations later, some of them had come back, because there was work, and where the sonko needed work, there was food and shelter and water as well. They’d come back and mingled with Mao’s kin and the rest, and made a new people, just for a while. And who’d blame them for being mad about it, whetting a knife for every wabenzi who pushed them around on their own land? But Lupé didn’t have room in her for grudges. Lupé had a family who ate what she earned for them, skills people paid for, and she was dumb enough to say yes when some dangi Viet kid asked her to come Firewalking with him.
THEY PASSED THE first big house a day or so after that, just an immaculate shell covering the same sort of ground a neighbourhood would, back at the Ankara. Four levels, servants’ quarters, lifts and escalators, a helipad on the roof, and all still standing with metal shutters over the windows and doors. The inhabitants had gone to a better place, as they said, gone out of this world entirely, never to come back, but they still begrudged three lowlife kids any shelter from the noon sun, still maintained the old divisions of ours and not-ours as though they were going to put the place up for rent some day, a grand tenement on the sandy shores of hell. It took Lupé twenty minutes to crack their security and break in. They spen
t an hour fitfully reclining on upholstery so parched it was mummified. There was no power, and the interior of the building, stripped of its mod cons, was murderously hot, insanely badly designed.
Later they passed grand houses that had not been secured, and one that had fallen, undermined by soil contraction as subterranean aquifers had dried out. By then, though, they were seeing the problem. They were passing solar fields as well, or places that the Grand Celeste believed were solar fields. They were stripped, not just chessboard-patchwork like the one around the protein plant, but whole tracts gone entirely, torn up at the root, while beside them another field gleamed under the sun, scratched but intact. Mao wondered if this was old news, some turf war between the absurdly rich, fighting over who owned what piece of dust. That night, Lupé did a bit of investigating and reckoned the edges were too newly broken for that. Recent, she said. This was what was causing the brownouts at the Hotel, and likely they were only going to get worse.
“Turn back now?” she asked, but Mao reckoned they’d not earned their double-double yet.
“Something’s doing this,” he pointed out.
“Maybe we can…” He stopped before saying anything as dumb as ‘fix it,’ but he wanted to know. He wanted to have a solution, even if it wasn’t anything he himself could bring about, because that would keep him valuable, keep him on the payroll maybe.
“Celeste thinks this is all still fields,” Hotep muttered, snapping fingers and thumbs together like irritable lobster claws.
“Well, it’s supposed to be,” Mao said.
“No, Celeste looks down here, and still sees fields, solar your heart out,” Hotep told him. “Not updating the records up there. Fucking amateurs.” She’d do it better, of course. The way she told it, when they’d sent her down the line, the astronaut business had lost ninety per cent of its talent base.
A DAY AND a night after that revelation, through the weirdly piecemeal solar fields and the broken estates, and there was light ahead.
At first none of them understood what they were looking at. Hotep was asleep in back, and Lupé’s best guess was that it was a repair site, not too far off. They’d seen some of the automatic systems, robots slow-stepping or rolling around, sweeping dust, repairing connections. They’d come with the fields; they were going the same way. There had been a fair few by the road seized up and immobile, dead between one job and another. Mao felt a bitter kind of kinship with them. Always someone worse off than you are. At least he got to knock off for a bottle of Regab Plus Extra when he was home. No beer for robots.
But they kept driving, and the light was still off there, and Mao began to realise whatever they were looking at was further away, therefore way bigger than a couple of repair robots lighting up some panels to run diagnostics.
“Wake Hotep?” Lupé suggested.
“Wait.” Mao kept driving, running along between two untouched fields of panels now, that gleamed when the headlights caught them. The words It might be nothing turned up in his mouth and he spat them out unsaid because plainly it was something.
They got closer; it got bigger, the light condensing from a diffuse glow to the distinct squares of windows, doorways, a spread of wings: not avian but architectural, and no less fantastic for all that. Mao blinked and blinked, wanting to rub his eyes but not trusting his hands off the wheel.
“Fukme,” Lupé breathed. “Will you just look at that, chommie?”
“I am looking,” Mao confirmed. “Not believing, but looking. Reckon they know this is still out here?” But of course they didn’t, and serious money was obviously going into it, if what Hotep had said about the Celeste was true.
It was one of the big houses, one of the abandoned domains of the super-rich who’d come out here, a second colonial wave that could conquer even land held by the armies of sun and dust. But it wasn’t just a shell, either sealed or cracked or falling down. Every window shone with spendthrift light, and the exterior was lit up all around by lanterns and lamp-posts that looked like they came from some old drama where Queen Victoria met Jack the Ripper. And there were gardens. They weren’t perhaps the flower-garlanded wonders of times past, but someone had taken the hardiest gene-modded cacti and succulents and planted them in great rows, engineered them for different colours, even given them the old phosphorescent jellyfish treatment to have some of them glow in the dark. There must be buried pipes below, hauling water from some damn place, because otherwise even cacti wouldn’t last out here in the heat-death waistband of the world. Water, out here, in some private paradise. And Mao was still driving towards it, no matter how far someone had gone to keep it a secret, because he was a moth and this was the biggest flame in the world now the sun was past the horizon.
Behind him, Hotep sat up suddenly. “The fuck?” she exclaimed, bouncing like a little kid on the back seat. “The fuck? The actual fuck?” And for once her reactions to things were smack in the middle of normal as far as Mao was concerned.
They were getting close now, out of the solar fields, into the actual grounds, the bristling globes and fans of cacti on either side. Was that movement in the windows? The light was too bright to see properly, light that streamed to them from another time, flat and flickering as an ancient film.
“Is that… a pool?” Lupé asked in a quavering voice. Mao saw where she was looking and his hands jerked on the wheel involuntarily, ploughing them off the dust-buried path and crunching through a king’s ransom of genetically engineered peyote. Out there, there was water shimmering like a mirage and he was going to end up nose-diving the ’Bug right into it.
Then the ’Bug died, and simultaneously Hotep cried out in horror and agony. “Blind! I’m blind!”
And she began fighting them, or fighting the back seat of the ’Bug, or just fighting. Mao and Lupé piled the hell out as though the vehicle was going to go up in flames, because there was more than one broken nose back at Ankara Achouka to tell a story about restraining Hotep. She went berserk. She had been born for the untrammelled void of space, perhaps; being restricted to one body and a gravity well was almost more than she could take. Physically holding her down, well, you might as well just run face first into a wall and then hit yourself in the balls with a bat.
Eventually she calmed down and came out of the vehicle, and Mao stared. Her bandages were in disarray, as though she was moulting snakeskin, but more than that, for the first time in human history, her goggles were up. Hotep’s eyes were dark, more slanted than Mao had expected. The skin around them was, somehow, even paler than the rest of her fishbelly complexion.
“I’m not blind,” she said in a small voice. “The goggles don’t work anymore. Something shut them down.” Those horribly naked eyes flicked from one to the other, flinching.
Mao tried the ’Bug again, but it remained resolutely dead, which was going to be a problem as soon as the sun came up or the water in the filtration plant started to stagnate. “Some bastard’s put us on the plate,” he decided. “Because of this thing. So maybe they’ve got garages full of fancy cars. Maybe they’ve got a helicopter can take us all the way back to the Ankara.”
“Maybe they’re giving out bullets as free samples,” Lupé muttered, but right then seeing what the hell this place was about seemed irresistible. It wasn’t even the mission, exactly, although this secret sonko hideout must have been guzzling power. This was like a ghost, like a time machine. It was a thing they only ever heard of, an extinct beast or storied emperor. There weren’t supposed to be things like this in the world, still; not any part of the world they might get to see.
Whoever lived here had surely picked up the arrival of the ’Bug, but they went in all stealthy anyway, crouched low as they skirted the prickly fields of desert plants, things transplanted here from Arizona or the Australian outback, or things never born of nature anywhere.
Mao saw at least one shadow at the windows as they approached; he thought it was a man, broad-shouldered, staring out at the night. The ground all around the big w
hite-walled house was floodlit, the sand turned white, ranks of succulents and halophytes sending stark shadows across their neighbours. The three Firewalkers had been slowly curving their path as they approached, and Mao would have said it was because he was looking for an unobtrusive entrance, but in truth it was because of the pool, which was just drawing them in like the song of a siren.
It was indoors, of course, and even then it must have needed constant topping up to fight off the sheer evaporation. It was in a one-room, one-storey piece of the house that had glass walls, or maybe some super-thermoregulatory clear plastic like Mao had heard of, that they’d designed for the Celeste. It was all lit up, too, above and below the water, so the whole looked like a blue jewel the size of five family residences back in Achouka.
There were sliding doors thrown back, and they could see the steam of the water boiling out to mix with the muggy night. Insects made mad, swarming assaults on the outside lights, but none of them went near the doors themselves, warned off by ultrasound or anti-insect smells, or maybe there were tiny robots that went from bug to bug and served little cease-and-desist notices. Right about then, Mao would have believed anything. And then she came out, and his entire ability to distinguish the real from the made-up world of the Jo’burg sonko soaps just broke down like the ’Bug had done.
His mother and his grandmother and his aunt were mad-keen for those soaps, which all came out of the busy studios of the South African Republic, which were enjoying a febrile renaissance because there was skilled technical labour there and it was so damn cheap right now. There were about a dozen long-running shows, all set two generations back when these estates had been all bustle, telling the stories of those sonko dynasties of the super-rich, their loves and betrayals. Intellectually, Mao couldn’t fathom why the hell his dirt-poor family got so into the imagined lives of fictional rich people whose troubles and worries never involved not having enough to eat or dying of heatstroke. Emotionally, get him sitting in front of one of those shows and he’d never get up until it was done, and then he’d be wondering for the next day whether Ilena would find out that Jean-Sante had been unfaithful, or whether Klaas would get away with forging the will.
Firewalkers Page 5
