Xenopath - [Bengal Station 02]

by Eric Brown

  She watched the animals for a while longer, then wandered along the boulevard and stared in at the other alien exhibits.

  The sun was going down over the ocean when she decided that she had seen enough for one day. She would return to the park, get something to eat and sleep on her bench—even though Abdul had said the park was not a safe place.

  As she was leaving the zoo, Khar decided to speak to her.

  Thank you , it said.

  “Khar—what was so important about seeing those animals?”

  It did not answer her question, but said instead: You have little money for food and other things. Listen to me when I speak.

  It said no more. Pham boarded a train heading north for Ketsuwan, and ten minutes later alighted at the station beside the park.

  Instead of entering the park—which is what she wanted to do—she found herself walking down a nearby street. Many stalls were set out here, selling food and trinkets and ornament for tourists. Pham elbowed her way through a crowd surrounding a small stall, and when she reached the front she saw a stick-thin Indian in a loincloth. He stood behind a small table, and had three cups placed upside-down before him. Under one of the cups was a small bronze model of Kali. He showed it to the audience, then clapped a cup over it and with lightning speed moved the cups around. Pham watched closely, sure that the figure of Kali was underneath the right-hand cup when the man finally brought them to rest.

  A Thai boy beside Pham, who had laid a ten baht note on the table, now pointed at the right-hand cup.

  Grinning and shrugging his shoulders as if in commiseration, the Indian lifted up the cup. Kali was not there. The Indian snatched the ten baht and lifted the cup on the left to reveal the bronze statuette.

  The crowd laughed and the Thai boy skulked away.

  The Indian beamed around at the watching crowd. “Ten baht—or even more! I’ll match it if you guess where Kali’s hiding! Come, do none of you trust your eyes?”

  Khar said: Take the fifty baht note from your pouch and put it on the table. Do as I say.

  Fifty baht, she thought.

  Do it!

  Hesitantly, wondering if she was acting wisely, she did as instructed. All around her the crowd laughed in derision.

  The old Indian smiled. “Aha! The little girl is braver than the rest of you.”

  “Or more foolish!” someone called out.

  The Indian winked at her. “Watch closely, little one. If you guess where Kali is hidden, I will match your fifty baht!”

  He dropped the central cup over Kali, then shuffled them around, slowly at first, then a little faster. Pham watched closely, her heart beating fast. She followed the cup under which she knew the figure was hidden.

  Suddenly, the old man’s thin brown claws stopped their movement.

  Pham smiled to herself. This was easy. The figure was under the cup to the left.

  The Indian said, “Well, little one, are your young eyes faster than my old hands?”

  She was about to point to the left-most cup—but Khar said: No! The central cup. The figure is beneath the central cup, Pham.

  She hesitated, her finger reaching out. She was so sure that Kali was sitting under the cup to the left. The Indian smiled, his eyes twinkling with greed.

  The central cup! Khar called in her head.

  At the very last second, just as she was about to indicate the left-hand cup, she moved her finger and pointed to the cup in the middle.

  The Indian’s expression turned to barely suppressed rage.

  The crowd roared. “Lift the cup! Lift the cup!”

  Grudgingly, with bad grace, the Indian snatched away the cup to real the figure of Kali.

  “Give her the money!” someone called out.

  The Indian muttered something in Hindi.

  A chorus went up, “Give the girl her money!”

  At last, with bad grace, the Indian slapped a fifty baht note next to Pham’s on the tabletop, and Pham, unable to meet his eyes, snatched the money and pushed her way back through the crowd amid much cheering.

  She hurried towards Ketsuwan Park. “How did you know?” she asked Khar.

  No response.

  She tried again. “Khar, tell me. How did you know where Kali was? Did you read the Indian’s mind?”

  At last it said: Do not worry yourself with that, Pham. Trust me. I will ensure that you come to no harm.

  She entered the park and hurried towards her bench. A young Indian girl was sitting there, shoving barfi into her mouth. She smiled at Pham when she approached.

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?” the girl said. “I haven’t seen you before.”

  Suddenly shy, Pham nodded. The Indian girl smiled. “Did you know that Raja, the stallholder by the eastern gate, gives away all the food he hasn’t sold by eight o’clock? If you’re quick, you’ll be able to eat for free tonight.”

  “Ah-cha,” Pham said. “Thank you.”

  She turned and hurried towards the eastern gate. She might have won fifty baht, but that didn’t mean she must miss the opportunity of free food. She had to think of the future, when she might need the money in an emergency.

  She found the stallholder, and sure enough he was handing out plastic plates of puri and deep-fried chillies. Pham lined up and received a big portion.

  She sat down beside the stall and began eating. The puri dripped with oil and the chilli peppers were good and hot.

  As she ate, she thought about what had happened to her since arriving on the upper decks, and something occurred to her.

  “Khar,” she said. “Why did the killer kill you?”

  Because, Khar replied, he thought he could kill me...

  Pham thought about that for a long time. It did make a kind of sense, she realised. The killer had killed the body of the man, but he hadn’t killed the man’s soul.

  She wondered what would happen to her, if the killer succeeded in killing her. Where would her soul fly away to?

  She tried to question Khar again, but he would not reply.

  * * * *

  ELEVEN

  LEVEL TWENTY

  In the old days, even dosed up on chora, the din of mind-noise had been like an incessant migraine, and the thought of descending to levels where he would be surrounded on all sides by a clamorous press of humanity had not appealed.

  Now Vaughan dropped through the levels with impunity, enveloped by total mind-silence. The knowledge that, at the tap of a few keys, he could access that mind-noise made the silence all the more wonderful.

  From the dropchute station on Chandi Road he plummeted five levels, and then caught a crowded shuttle train west to the nearest dropchute station. It was impossible to drop from Level One right down to Level Twenty. For one thing, it had never been economically viable to build a ‘chute accessing all levels, as few citizens had business on more than their immediate levels; for another, the Station had been built in stages, two or three levels at a time, and it had not always been expedient to extend existing ‘chutes to the new levels. If citizens should wish to travel the Station from top to bottom, they had to do so in series of tortuous steps involving vertical dropchutes and horizontal shuttle trains.

  Vaughan decided to check out the girl’s old workplace on Level Twenty first, and later have a look around Ketsuwan Park. It would make sense to check the park when there was more chance of finding the kid settling down for the night.

  All he had to go on were the pix in his wallet and the mental image of her he had gleaned from Abdul’s mind. The latter, as it happened, was clearer than the pix. It was as if Vaughan had met her himself, seen her laughing and joking, climbing with the agility of a chimp through the abandoned rides of the amusement park. Abdul had been a little in awe of the precocious slave-kid from Level Twenty, not least because she had escaped her employer and set out on an adventure he would never have contemplated himself. Also, she had shown an intelligence, quick-wittedness, and confidence he had never come across before in a girl so you
ng.

  Vaughan felt as though he knew her already—and her resemblance in both character and appearance to Sukara’s sister, Tiger, amazed him. Having her in his head like this—a vicarious recollection, as it were—brought back memories at once painful and wonderful, for had it not been for Tiger he would never have met Sukara.

  He left the shuttle on Level Five and dropped to Level Ten, taking the same ‘chute he had used every day on his way back from the spaceport. Strap-hanging in a press of tired Indian factory workers, he considered his apartment on Level Two, and Sukara’s manifest joy at no longer being buried in the Level Ten coffin. The thought of bringing up a child down here had worried him for months: what had Rao said about Pham, that she had never in all of her seven years seen the light of day?

  At least Li would have the opportunity of seeing the sun every day of her life.

  At Level Ten, he made the short walk to the dropchute station and fell to Level Thirteen.

  He had read that each level possessed its own unique character; its own identifiable atmosphere, much as land-based cities even within the same country varied in character and appearance. Certainly in his experience of the various levels he had visited and lived on, he knew this to be true. Levels One and Two were obviously affluent and, as a rule, less congested; Levels Three to Five were spacious but crowded, boasting parks and gardens created when the Station’s architects had assumed that the levels would rise no further. All these levels had about them a liberal, cosmopolitan air, an atmosphere of privilege, which manifested itself in the confident demeanour of the residents.

  From Levels Five to Ten, the standard of living corresponded to the appearance of the various areas. For one thing, the space between floor and ceiling was a mere six metres, far less than that of the levels higher up. The tunnels were narrower too, forever thronged with a noisy, elbowing press of humanity, and the individual buildings more cramped. The lighting this far down was poorer: although the halogen bulbs in the ceiling were spaced at the compulsory five-metre intervals, they radiated a paler light than those on the upper levels. Vaughan suspected that some cut-price company had greased palms for the commission to light the lower levels, and had done so with third-rate materials.

  He could only assume that the levels below Ten were even more impoverished, even more at the mercy of unscrupulous councils and maintenance departments: the citizens down here were, after all, by definition poor and therefore lacking in political influence.

  He squeezed from the cramped dropchute cage in a press of surging humanity, carried along involuntarily before elbowing his way free of the flow and gaining his bearings. The tunnels were amazingly confined down here—a mere four metres from wall to wall. The air of claustrophobia was not helped by stallholders who had set up shop along the length of the main thoroughfare to the next dropchute station. Vaughan passed a mixture of Thai and Indian entrepreneurs selling everything from miracle cures to outdated artificial limbs, their microprocessors long since worn out so that the limbs were no more useful than wooden legs or arms.

  As if the physical press of humanity was not daunting enough, the noise and stench was overpowering. Every stallholder yelled in a bid to out-do his neighbour, and the sickly sweet miasma of incense and dhoop filled the air, masking other, more noisome aromas: the waft of human excrement, sweat, and the gagging reek of bad meat peddled by illicit market traders.

  Vaughan made the dropchute station five minutes later and stepped into the cage with relief.

  He descended to Level Twenty, wondering what horrors of human endurance might greet him there. The cage itself, if a microcosm of the degradation below, was bad enough. A woman and three near-naked children were squatting in the corner; she had set up a gas-stove and was cooking puri on a griddle. While good sense told him that the cage could not be her home, he feared otherwise. Fellow travellers in the cage included a gaggle of holy men in loincloths and group of mendicants missing various limbs, returning home from a day’s begging on the rich upper levels.

  The cage came to a sudden, jarring halt. The gate clanked open and the travellers poured out. Vaughan eased himself from the crush and stood to one side of the exit, staring about him in appalled fascination.

  His initial impression was that he had strayed into the inspiration for a canvas by Bosch. Certainly the low, roseate lighting was appropriate—the furnaces of hell replaced here by the open fires of food-vendors and blacksmiths—as was the press of humanity going about their arcane and mysterious business; while tableaux of torture were absent, butchered beggars and citizens supported by crude crutches and wooden legs could easily have passed for models of the damned.

  Vaughan was assailed by a dozen varied scents, from cooking food to woodsmoke, hair oil to joss sticks. If the tunnels down here were not congested enough, the congestion was not helped by the occasional meandering, khaki-coloured cow, holy and sacrosanct and thus given the freedom of the level— where in the upper levels their freedom had been proscribed long ago.

  No sooner had he emerged from the dropchute station than he was jumped by half a dozen street-kids, tugging his sleeves and trousers and demanding either baksheesh or the right to furnish him with hotel rooms, drugs, or girls.

  Vaughan selected a scrawny boy in shorts and a soiled vest and pointed at him. “You,” he said in poor Hindi. “You others, challo. Go!”

  The boy advanced, hissing at the other kids to retreat.

  Vaughan said, “Can you take me to the Prakesh Quality Plastic Company?”

  The boy rocked his head from side to side. “Ah-cha. No problem, Babu. You come this way. Follow me.”

  Without waiting for Vaughan to follow, the street-kid set off at a trot. Vaughan pushed his way through the crowd in pursuit, helped by his greater physical stature than those around him. It was, he thought, an alien world down here; culturally Indian, it had developed its own unique atmosphere away from the sunlight and open spaces of the subcontinent: poverty ruled, and fatalism prevailed, creating a jungle culture where the ethos of the survival of the fittest was a given.

  He followed the boy through a maze of badly lit corridors. The odd thing was that, while Vaughan had expected the tunnels and thoroughfares down here to be even meaner and maze-like than those above, the reverse was true: the corridors were wide, even spacious. However, the enterprising mercantile mind of the Hindu had utilised the space to good effect: just as nature abhorred a vacuum, so businessmen down here abhorred the waste of valuable space. The margins of the byways were filled with the kiosks and stalls of food-vendors, restaurateurs, and even makeshift shacks housing destitute families, all piled two or three storeys high and accessed by precarious plastic ladders.

  He caught up with the boy, who gestured him along.

  At one point the kid saw Vaughan’s expression, and guessed right. He grinned. “Much space down here, no? You see, this Level One. First level, yes? So the builders, many years ago, they need space to store all material, you see? All the things they use to build up, up!”

  Ten minutes later they came to a polycarbon wall scabbed over with a rash of Hindi holo-movie posters. Among them, almost indiscernible amid the gallery of overweight action heroes, was the legend: R.J. Prakesh Quality Plastics Pty, Ltd— and below the ill-painted lettering a narrow doorway.

  The boy was beaming up at Vaughan and holding out his hand. “Ten baht, friend!”

  Vaughan slipped him a twenty baht note and the kid dashed off in delight.

  A buzzer was set into the wall, above a speaker. Over the door, staring at him, was the lens of a security camera.

  Vaughan thumbed the buzzer. Seconds later a querulous voice said, “Yes?”

  He leaned towards the speaker. “Vaughan, Kapinsky Investigations. I want to see R.J. Prakesh.” He hung his ID before the camera and waited.

  The door clicked and he pushed it open.

  He was hit by the adenoid-crunching stench of hot plastics and concentrated body odour. Gagging, he stepped inside, peerin
g into the gloom.

  He was in a narrow corridor lit by a flickering fluorescent above the door. At the far end of the corridor, a door opened and a skinny barefoot Indian in his twenties, wearing a dhoti and a vest, peered out at him. “Mr Prakesh, he very busy man,” he said. “But he will see you. Come this way, please.”

  Vaughan followed him through the door, into a longer corridor just as badly lighted. The door at the end of this corridor, however, opened onto a factory floor packed with machinery—plastic extrusion devices, Vaughan guessed—worked by a sweating army of boys and girls. If the stench was bad back at the entrance, it was overbearing here, and made worse by the incredible heat of the place. Most of the kids worked in their underpants, their thin brown bodies slick with sweat. No wonder Pham had elected to escape this hell for the uncertainties of the upper decks.