“It’s from a poem, I think. Old one. Maybe Shakespeare?” she told him.
“So… bug Shakespeare, is what you’re saying?” Mao remembered some actors, from when he was really young. Shakespeare had mostly been people shouting and stabbing each other while dressed funny. He hadn’t gotten it.
But his mind was working: something had been behind the show at the mansion, and it hadn’t really been a show for the Firewalkers’ benefit, but played out for the amusement of the puppeteer. Or its frustration, because the puppets had kept on cutting their own strings, apparently, made too well to live within their limits. Something had sent the locusts, and had preserved the ’Bug when it could plainly have ordered the vehicle stripped to its bare chassis, and its occupants to their bones. Something knew they were coming, and wasn’t exactly quaking in its insect shoes.
He had a vision of himself, Lupé and Hotep, holograms all, going round and round saying the sort of things some insect god thought they might say, and occasionally becoming aware enough of their dreadful existence to will themselves into oblivion like Fontaine had done. And then to be conjured back into being to perform the same tortured rote again. Just as well Lupé was driving, right then, or he’d have turned the ’Bug round and gone home, and to hell with the money. Lupé was a woman with a mission, though. Lupé was going to find out what the hell was going on.
“IT’S THE ESTATE,” Hotep decided, after they’d been travelling a few hours, gunning over barren ground; wallowing through dust-slicks that the ballooning tyres practically floated on; weaving around more picked bones of fancy houses that the rich had built and briefly occupied before moving on to a higher calling.
She still couldn’t give them any distance on the origin of the signal, but the course matched their last readings. They were heading for the Heart of Brightness, as Hotep said: the research facility they’d built out here so nobody could steal their super-secret space designs. The place where geniuses like Fontaine had gone to plan out a bespoke future for them and theirs in orbit and amongst the stars. All done, all finished two generations back, and they were long gone, up the wire and living in artificial comfort on the Celeste even as it was being built. The Estate itself was supposed to have been shut down and cleaned out. It was not supposed to be, for example, a cyborg insect hive. Mao was pretty sure that hadn’t been in the design specs.
Except there weren’t supposed to be things like Fontaine’s revenant household either, especially hidden so completely from any overhead surveillance. Mao considered, not for the first time, just how empty the land out here really was. Aside from those expensive oases of the rich, nobody had lived out here for the best part of a century - it just hadn’t been possible. The people who once called these lands home had left to follow the retreating water table. The wealthy had come and poured money into the dry earth to make their exclusive little prisons, and then they had left behind only the inorganic inhabiting the inorganic: the solar farms, the empty shells.
And something else. Something had been abandoned in their exodus or moved in to fill their vacuum, or evolved out of the ruins.
Lupé must be right about the newness of the locust swarm, and how it had grown. If such a thing had been around for even a decade, people would know about it. And perhaps it would keep growing. Perhaps the world would belong to the locusts. He raised the cheery thought when it was his turn to drive. Lupé was sleeping in the shotgun seat, but Hotep stopped her fidgeting and leant forwards, goggle lenses glinting in the corner of Mao’s vision.
“You think they planned it that way?”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Mao asked her.
“The people who lived out here. Fontaine’s people. The people who ran the Estate.” A pause. “My folks, you know. My loving family.”
Mao digested that. “Do I think they planned it so a swarm of giant robot insects would turn up and eat the world? No, I do not.”
“Makes sense, though.”
“How the fuck does it make sense?”
Hotep snickered unpleasantly. “Because they don’t care about you, you poor skommer. Worse than that, you’re inconvenient. Maybe they can come and make the world fit to live in for them and theirs, if you and yours are all devoured by locusts. Because that’s the sort of people they are, chommie. My family, ladies and gentlemen.”
“Look, I know you’ve got problems—”
“It’s not me!” Hotep fairly yelled, making Lupé leap up in her seat and bang her head against the ceiling with a curse. “You think this is because they kicked me down to Earth, and that’s it? You think that’s why I’m calling them out for the selfish bastards they all are, up there?”
That was exactly what Mao thought, but Hotep got like this occasionally, like at the church in Saint Genevieve, and best to just let her get it out of her system.
“You know where my family comes from? You know where they all come from, all of them living it up on the Celeste?” Hotep was practically shrieking now, emotional nought-to-sixty in three seconds, except she’d been silently accelerating inside her head for a while, no doubt. “Oil money, industry money, bottled water magnates, fossil fuel tycoons, and all the politicos who made sure they kept on fucking the world over. And then they get to live above it all and go someplace cool for the summer, like space. Because they’d rather throw their money at taking them and theirs to another planet than try to fix this one. And everyone left here? Well you can all fucking fry! Or you can take their dollars to fix their fucking AC before they grab it all and leave for good.”
That was apparently too much for Lupé. “And where do you fit, exactly? Because I’m hearing a lot of ‘them’ and ‘you’ from you, but no ‘me’ and ‘us.’”
Mao wouldn’t have put money on Hotep even hearing the words, but apparently she did and they struck her silent for a moment. He risked a glance back and saw only that blank mask: goggle eyes, scarf mouth, bandage brow. No way to know what the girl was thinking.
“I don’t fit anywhere,” was her eventual response, but it came a little too late, a little too TV-drama hand-to-forehead tragic. Not that it wasn’t true, but what Mao reckoned was that all of that rail-against-the-dying-of-the-light stuff was painted over Hotep’s longstanding grievance that she had been cast down from Heaven. She was supposed to be an astronaut, that was the thing. She’d been stripped of her wings because she didn’t fit the angel mould. And she had a right to be mad, maybe, but that didn’t make her the avenging champion of the world either. Too much like those bad old films where the sonko hero turned up in someone else’s backyard and solved all their problems by being better than they were.
“What’s that ahead?”
Mao started at Lupé’s words, peering into the distance. “Dust storm?” he hazarded, although the dark band at the horizon seemed too low to the ground. “Locust storm?” he added, uneasily. “Are we there?”
“Pull up a moment,” she told him, and he let the ’Bug grind to a halt. The terrain here was hilly and rough, with the yawning maw of an open-cast mine swallowing up the land to the right of them. Here and there were solar fields, or at least the scars of them. Some plots of panels remained untouched, perhaps still feeding power north so the locust-master could maintain the illusion of normality as it built its forces.
Whatever the darkness was on the horizon, it wasn’t a storm. Now they were still, they could see that it was stationary too. Mao imagined buildings, a tent city, a great crawling carpet of enormous beetles. Nothing fit, and in the end he just put his foot down again because only a closer look would do.
They began to see movement in the sky soon after, not the great swarm but individual insects bustling on their inscrutable business. Mao would have thought that their presence would have monopolised his attention, but the world wasn’t done with kicking him in his expectations just yet.
Eventually he had to stop the ’Bug again, drawing it to a rolling halt on a knuckle of higher ground so they could look over the land ahead. In the
distance, they could see the curved walls of the Estate itself, but only as a white gleam half-hidden. Between there and here lay a forest.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HEART OF BRIGHTNESS
THE VICE OF noonday pressed down on them; the ’Bug’s interior was a dry, oppressive heat even with the AC full on. When they stopped, the whining of the fans was the loudest sound in the world, and nobody much fancied getting out to have a look. Still, it was plain somebody had to, and Mao decided to make a command decision and volunteer himself. Lupé passed him their only camel pack: a bag of unfiltered water to sit between his shoulder blades and a pump to move it around enough to cool him a little. He goggled and masked and put on a peaked cap until he looked like Hotep’s second cousin. The furnace blast of the outside air washed over them all when he swung the door open, and he slipped out as quickly as possible.
Hotep might talk about being an astronaut, but it was Mao who had most experience walking on the surface of an alien world, even if it was Earth. In the midday heat, the ground crunched lifeless beneath his feet, the sky through his dark lenses was the colour of bronze, the sun the head of a white hot rivet just driven in by some celestial smith. This was Firewalker business, the work they sent the kids to do, coming out into the valley of death. Back in the Ankara it got as hot as this—hotter even—but nobody braved it. People stayed indoors, an enforced siesta in a township whose nightlife chased a fugitive breath of cool air well past midnight. Besides, the whole town was shade for someone, even the worst shacks that were twenty to a room.
Long-ways north, long-ways south, he knew there were nations that had once been merely balmy and were now tropical, while beyond those, the temperate zones of Europe, northern China and southern Russia were as Egypt and Morocco had once been. Dry heat, wet heat, lashed by the chaos of storms as the Earth shifted and writhed under its transformations. But this was the eye of that storm—this was the future, this dead land. Walking out here, sucking up water from the tube sewn into his mask, feeling his body fight shock, sweating itself dry, Mao felt almost proprietary. This was Firewalker country. And Mao could have parked up and waited ’til night, but that was more lost time, more strain on the car’s cooling system, and besides, his curiosity burned hotter even than the sun. Because his land had changed again, when he’d thought death was the final stage in its life cycle.
“‘Breeding lilacs out of the dead land,’” came a voice in his earpiece. Bastien Fontaine’s voice.
“Say what? Say again?”
“Didn’t say anything, chommie.” Lupé’s voice, infinitely preferable. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.” Covering his ass in case it was just him going crazy.
And now he was at the trees. He had a whole library of expletives at his fingertips, and any combination of them would have seemed like understatement.
Closest to him were little stalks reaching out of the parched earth, twining about each other to form braided trunks reaching straight up. They were of copper, or some alloy that looked like it. His boots kicked through them and they bent aside and then sprang vertical again. Standing on them, he felt their pressure, desperate to claw for the sun.
Further in, they were taller, ten, fifteen feet, and they branched out. He was seeing every stage of their growth, the march of their ecosystem. Now he was amongst burnished metal skeletons, not quite made like trees but following the same dendritic logic, fashioned of interwoven red-orange strands, extending fingers at the sky. Further still, they had leaves.
He understood, then. The leaves were black, flat, roughly diamond-shaped. They gleamed where the sun caught them, but only obliquely. Full on, they were midnight black as they drank down the light, harvesting it. They were sections of panel, clipped into shape and placed at the end of every branch, and as he watched they angled slightly to match the sun’s stagnant progress, all of them shifting their positioning in a shimmer like heat haze.
The forest went on as far as he could see, all the way to the horizon where the white dome of the Estate sat.
“Run!” Lupé said suddenly in his ear, and he turned and made to leg it without needing to question her. The insects were already dropping from the clear sky, the same huge locusts as before, carrying their cargo of shards. He ran through them, covering his head, feeling blundering bodies strike him like sacks of machine parts, sharp-edged legs sawing at his clothes and shards of solar panel drawing brief flashes of blood. When he burst out of their swarming industry he fell over, bending the copper saplings every which way, still swatting at an enemy that was no longer there and had never been interested in him. He rolled on his back and stared, watching the mad frenzy of activity.
He had heard about some film, some time long-back, from some place they had seasons and trees, and the trees lost their leaves when it got cold. He couldn’t imagine it, but he’d heard about it. They’d been filming when it was cold, but the scene had been meant to look like it was warm, and so they’d had to go to all the trees and glue fake leaves on to fool the audience. Now he watched as a workforce of locusts brought leaves to the metal forest, buzzing madly about the branches, weighing the trunks down to the ground with their bodies, grinding fragments of panel into shape and attaching them, or else holding them while the coppery strands reached out and took possession. Then the bugs would all leap into the air, battering at each other, veering off like drunkards, and the tree sprang erect fully clad with dark, hungry foliage.
His camel pack was giving him only heat, by then, and he felt his head begin to swim. He lurched for the car and Lupé kicked the door open and hauled him inside. He distantly realised she had been telling him to come back for some time.
They hunkered down for a couple of hours, then, listening to the pitch of the struggling fans climb and shudder but never quite fail them. Mao needed that long to get his head together and his body temperature down. He had a feeling he’d probably done quite a lot of long-term harm to himself, pushing the excursion so far. He kept deciding that maybe it was all a hallucination, then looking outside and seeing the forest right there, that much closer now the insects had been and gone.
“So what’s the plan?” Lupé asked. “I mean, I guess we’ve found the problem.” It was precisely true and entirely useless, because they couldn’t even start to guess at cause.
“Someone’s still in the Estate,” Hotep pronounced.
“Your goggles tell you that?” Mao asked her. “The Celeste tell you that?”
“What else,” she demanded archly, “is it going to be?”
“Some mad scientist?”
“Why ‘mad’?” Hotep was gazing out at the forest, and her tone spoke all of the wonder her mask hid.
“Mad because they went and pissed on the Roach Hotel,” Lupé said. “We can’t exactly uproot all these trees. So what do we do?”
“The bugs have had two chances to eat us and haven’t,” Hotep pointed out. “So maybe we go make our visit, right?”
“Give them a third go at us, you mean,” Mao muttered. He was trying to calculate odds: they go back home with what they had, what was the chance of getting paid in full? Not quite good enough to trust. Firewalkers were supposed to solve problems. One more step, then.
“Rest up, for now,” he got out. “Get the tent up.” The ’Bug was equipped with a roll of silvery foil they could peg down, to beat back the worst of the heat. “When the sun’s low, sure. Your turn to drive.”
THEY RESTED UP some, and then some more, because Lupé took the last few hours of light to tune the cooling and filtration systems, sitting cross-legged in the vehicle’s lengthening shadow with parts all over. She didn’t like the way it sounded.
Mao said he hadn’t liked the idea of being stuck without water while she took the system apart, but it was only for form. He knew well enough that if Lupé said it was a problem, then it was a problem. By the time everything was in place, the engineer was tightening the last screws with a headlamp torch to light her way, the sun’s last fire
dying on the western horizon. The great expanse of artificial trees had tracked it slowly, and were now leaning slightly westwards in an attitude he could only characterise as yearning. The giant bug swarm had, thankfully, not made a reappearance.
The car’s paint was like a second armour skin in and of itself, corrosion-resistant and designed to cling on through the worst dust-storms. The artificial forest was too much for it, though. Their progress was a constant screech and scrape as metal branches and silicon leaves drew their ragged nails down the side of the car. Whole trees went under the wheels, raked the undercarriage and sprang miraculously back into place behind as though they were mounted on springs. Mao pictured how this place must look when the storms came, the entire expanse of ersatz vegetation bowing and rippling like real live reeds before the force of the wind.
Hotep, in the driving seat, was having issues with the audible chaos. She took to slapping away at the steering wheel like it had jilted her at the altar, her voice raised in an off-key rendition of a song that had been popular the year before around Achouka. On the basis that if you couldn’t beat them, join them, Mao and Lupé ended up singing along, discovering that they all remembered the lyrics differently, but that all their versions fit together to make a weird comedy. Mao and Lupé both thought it was some kind of one-sided slanging match from the abandoned artist, alternatively demanding a lover’s return and cursing her out for leaving, except Lupé knew a whole extra verse that was fantastically obscene which had somehow evaded Mao entirely. Hotep’s version was about a truck, and she made it sound like the theme tune to some surreal kid’s cartoon while changing remarkably few of the words. Their resulting infantile giggling seemed to stave off the alien landscape outside, as much as drown out the damage it was doing to their paintwork.
Then Hotep hit the brakes and they battered to a halt when the curved wall of the Estate appeared through the trees, a pale ghost of former glories where the moon touched it. Mao’s revelation, then, was that the radio had been trying to talk to them, but they’d drowned it out with their own racket, and so whatever supervillain megalomania or poetic stuffiness it had intended had been entirely lost. All he heard before it fell silent was, “‘Who was once as tall and handsome as you,’” and by now they all got that whatever had spoken to them was fond of poems, or maybe just one poem, or maybe it was all secret code words for industrial espionage spy stuff. Mao didn’t much care.
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