The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  Diamonds? It was a stupid cover, but good enough for the spur of the moment. Out here, a coralin plant was worth more than a truck load of gems. If the masses who lived outside the citadels could build themselves some modern data-processing they could hook up into the city networks. They’d be up and running again, and the elite who lived indoors would be running scared. The amazing thing was that more of the masses didn’t try. They accepted, with chilling calm, that a certain way of life was over. They had their own world with its own rules, and the cities were on another planet.

  Johnny made tape, describing how it really was a coralin plant, and the journey he’d made to find it. He walked the aisles, the 360-cam on his headset taking in every angle. Cambridge stayed off camera. She didn’t want to wave to the public.

  He finished. They faced each other: two nodes of a diffuse molecular machine, linked by the lock and key action of certain key phrases hoicked out of the romance of molecular technology. The living meaning, not like the old technology, change yourself to fit what’s coming at you. Johnny was uneasy. He had not deceived her, not actively. But she was deceived, and it was making him uncomfortable.

  “You’re a union activist, aren’t you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” He laughed nervously. “A cellar unionist.”

  She had been tough and worldly wise to his soft city-boy, a rough diamond. Down at the deep-end, in the pallid glow of the drained pool, the balance between them was reversed.

  “You came out here to find us. What can I say? I feel…found. Like a toy left out in the rain, that thought the kids would never come back to look for her. I feel rescued.”

  Johnny chewed his lip. Bella wriggled and muttered. One of her knees started butting him in the ribs. She couldn’t get comfortable and she was going to wake. She weighed a ton.

  “D’you ever hear about the phylloxera aphid?” he said. “It’s a similar story. It’s a kind of bug; it spreads like a virus. Once upon a time, all the good wine came from France. They had the vines. The quality, wonderful ancient-lineaged plants. Then someone accidentally shipped in some phylloxera bugs, and the whole of French viticulture was devastated. They had to rip the lot out and start again… with vines from North America, where the bug was endemic and the native vines had natural resistance. In a generation nobody could tell the difference. The wine-drinking public forgot it had ever happened.”

  “Phylloxera proof telephones,” said Cambridge. “Knowing what’s happening in the next state. Bank credit. No more of that fucking censored cable tv. God. I can’t believe it.”

  Johnny registered something moving behind him. The lights were off at the shallow end, but the 360 showed Gustave coming down the steps. Johnny controlled himself with an enormous effort. Among these people you must not show fear.

  “Micane’s guys are here,” he told her softly.

  Cambridge didn’t make a fuss. She eased past Johnny and walked up between the workbenches, raising more lights with the remote in her hand. The bikers, Samuel and Ernesto, emerged into brilliance. Donny-Gustave stared around him in disbelief.

  “What the fuck is this place?”

  The clerk held up her remote as if it was a weapon, and carefully tossed it down.

  “What’s goin’ on, Cams?”

  “Nothin’. Just a little private interview with the eejay.”

  This God’s rule had some tinge of humanity. In other places, behavior as aberrant as this would have got them their heads blown away, straight off. But Gustave didn’t open fire.

  “You expect me to believe that? You’re crazy.”

  He jerked his shotgun for Johnny and Cambridge to go up the steps ahead. When he registered Bella, he started as if someone had dropped ice down his neck.

  “Fuck!”

  He pulled the headset from Johnny, carefully so’s not to disturb the child. He smashed it, conclusively, against the tiled wall of the stair, and handed it back with a defiant glare.

  That was bad. Out in the wasteland gun-waving was endemic, male display behavior, not so dangerous as it looks. But the engineer-journalist was sacred; his tools even more so. He was the only link with the rest of the world. Johnny’s calm left him; fear plummeted through him…

  “Fucking weirdos.”

  The tow truck was outside. Johnny got Bella on his knees. She woke up and began to cry. Ernesto crouched on the flatbed, the muzzle of his shotgun through the glassless rear window of the cab. It pressed against Johnny’s neck. Samuel’s bike roared in escort. Young Gustave drove with one hand, the other awkwardly stabbing his gun into Cambridge’s ribs. His eyes were wild with anger and humiliation: he’d been taken in completely. Worse (Johnny read), he feared that his God had been taken in too.

  “Fucking diamond mine!” he wailed. “What the fuck you growing back there Cams? Illegal drugs?”

  Cambridge kept her eyes front. Through his own blank-brain panic Johnny could feel her arm and side against him, rigid with terror. But for Donny-Gustave she sneered the way she’d sneered when he was six and she was ten.

  “Nah. Mutants, Donny. Cannibal mutant babies. And they’re coming for you. Not tonight, maybe not tomorrow night —”

  “Fucking shut up.” His face in the driver’s mirror was a darkly crumpled rectangle of hurt. “I never would’ve believed an eejay would be into drugs…”

  Bella’s loud and violent sobbing — so rare and devastating, this child’s crying — was like a wall around them both. Johnny held her tight and vowed that he was going to get Bella out of this alive. There was no betrayal he would not gladly embrace — if only, please God, he was given the chance.

  “Shut the kid up!”

  Cambridge yelled back indignantly. “Are you kidding? How are we going to do that? She’s terrified!”

  Her courage was like a lifeline. He dropped into character… “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong, we weren’t doing anything wrong, we wanted to be private, kind of get to know each other. Would we be doing anything dirty with the kid there?” He babbled, injecting innocent panic into the real thing. He hunched himself forward, arms and head between Bella and the guns. She could feel that he was back in control — throat-chokingly, fearfully sweet the way she suddenly obeyed his shushing and went silent: her small hands clutching his collar, her wet face against his neck…

  Gustave/Donny looked around with a bitter scowl.

  “You and Cams was just holding hands? What about all that stuff? Looked like some kind of heroin still to me.”

  The tow truck bucketed, its mean yellow lights barely cutting the darkness. Cambridge ducked her head and made herself small between the men, fists burrowed in her jacket pockets, letting them fight it out. Johnny couldn’t remember his next line. Gustave was going to crash the damn truck. He thought he was going to pass out, the situation was so consummately awful — when slam, the shotgun muzzle behind his ear suddenly dealt a numbing, stinging blow to the corner of his jaw.

  He yelled, sure he was dying. There was another explosion, unbelievably close. The truck slewed. Bella whimpered. Cold outdoor air belched into the cab. Johnny lifted his ringing head. A mess of dark movement resolved itself into Cambridge, hanging onto the wheel and wrestling with something flailing and heavy at the flown open door.

  “Take the wheel!” she screamed.

  Johnny grabbed, and shoved Bella — dead silent — in her carrier into the well in front of the bench.

  “Keep your head down, baby.”

  She ducked. The top of her dark head was all his eyes could see. He grappled blindly — the dumb-animal feel of the ancient machine piling in with the heavy scuffle going on beside him, a blur of confusion. Donny’s body fell out into the night. Cambridge hauled the door shut. Johnny slid over. She drove the truck. The road was dark and empty, no sign of the second biker.

  “Who shot him?”

  “Who’d’you think?”

  He looked over his shoulder. The second of Micane’s guys was a slumped heap.

  “God. Wh
o shot him?”

  “I didn’t go out to the plant with you alone, what did you think? Donny drove into an ambush. Don’t look so fucking shocked, eejay. Why didn’t the stupid bastard frisk me, if he wanted to stay alive?”

  “Is he dead? Are they dead?”

  “I hope so.” Her teeth were chattering.

  A mile or so down the road she pulled in. There were no lights, no houses visible in a strange out-doors darkness, faintly tinged with starlight. The three of them got down. Johnny at last could tug Bella out of the sling and hug her properly. Her eyes were huge and black in her dim face. A little child sometimes seems like a machine. Switch off, switch on: no memory, each event fresh and untainted. She leaned back and stared.

  “Stars!”

  He hadn’t known she knew what that word meant, not clearly enough to apply it out here.

  The man on the back of the truck made no sound. Somewhere on the road another two human beings lay: Gustave and Samuel. Johnny wanted to go to the man on the flatbed, but the silence of that huddled thing was intimidating. Johnny’s responses were from another planet. He didn’t know what Cambridge was thinking. Maybe simply breathing, standing there and breathing. She’d shot someone. How could Johnny imagine the afterburn of that?

  He thought of the desk clerk’s life, and how her spunky intelligence had won her a place with the boys, but only on condition she played by their rules. And only till she got pregnant, or fell in love. Then she’d be one of those gap-toothed horny-skinned women, “married” to some junior male: property to be abused. She’d have a string of sickly kids, her whole life the struggle to keep one or two of them alive to adulthood. The bad clothes looked ethnic and interesting on the others. On Cambridge they were shameful. She was a real human person. She shouldn’t be here, she should have a future.

  “I hope…” The clerk shuddered. “I hope Donny’s… I didn’t shoot to kill. Look, don’t blame yourself, eejay. You wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t been sending out our own signals, well as we could. We knew we couldn’t keep what was going on from Micane much longer. We need some support. After what’s happened tonight we’ll need it more. But Micane’s on the slide. With help, we can take over… I’m real sorry about the cam.”

  She looked at the child. “Is having her some kind of cover? Or do you honest to God look after her? I mean, like a woman?”

  “No,” said Johnny, painfully aware of the truth. “I look after her like a man. It’s a start. I do my best.”

  He held Bella like a shield. Cambridge’s movement toward him went unfinished. She touched Bel, awkwardly patting the little girl’s head.

  “Stay here. Someone will bring your car.”

  When she was gone, Johnny and Bella walked around a little: admiring the stars and bumping into a few trees. She’d soiled herself. This didn’t generally happen anymore at night, but he could hardly blame her. He managed to change her, Bella standing holding onto him with the crotch of her night suit dangling between her knees. He hugged her in a daze of gratitude. “You and me against the world, Bel,” he whispered. He gave her some dried snack fruit, and she asked him when they were going home.

  He hoped the desk clerk’s story was the truth. He didn’t want to blame himself for three murders. But the black man’s dominance must have been threatened for a long time, if his rivals had been able to set up a coralin plant under his nose. Since power couldn’t change hands out here without violence, it wasn’t Johnny’s fault. If it hadn’t been over the plant, it would have been something else.

  He thought of setting off into this savage utter wilderness. But he didn’t have a spare diaper any more, and the prospect of hitchhiking, even in daylight, was not appealing. An hour passed. His global-mobile was in his pocket. He didn’t feel like calling anyone. No more signals… The coralin chip in its heart, like the processor in his cam, was practically sterile. But you weren’t supposed to take any chances.

  He thought of the starter that Cams’ cadre had got hold of. They were no biochemists, they didn’t build it from scratch. He imagined a brother eejay dead out here, or stripped of his magic and too ashamed ever to come home…

  Bella, he found, was happier on his back. He walked her, holding hands over his shoulder, singing nursery rhymes. She didn’t say a thing about guns, or shooting, or bad guys. Which didn’t mean this adventure hadn’t scarred her for life. He writhed to think of the debriefing he’d have to go through with Izzy.

  When he heard the car he hid until he was sure it was his own, and the driver was Cambridge, and there was no one else with her. She handed over a sliver of plastic card — his key. It was good to have that safely back in his hand.

  They stood by the car. Johnny put the sidelights on dim, so he could see her face a little.

  Boondock episodes were always incredibly charged: vows of eternal friendship, exchange of instant pictures that would be kept for a few months — until they lost all meaning. This one had only been more spectacular; the configuration was the same. Johnny told himself his picture was already fading in her purse. But he wanted to give her something real.

  “How’s Donny?”

  She shook her head. Don’t ask.

  “About that ride —”

  She thought he was joking. “Another time,” she said. “You get back and send us some reinforcement. I don’t ask what form it’s going to take, you guys know best. But make it soon, okay?”

  He settled Bella in the backseat, with her beloved plastic tilt-rotor and her herbal bunny-pillow. He got into the car, opened the window wide.

  “Cambridge, there’s nothing for you in that town. Don’t go back. Get in, come with us. I can fix everything.”

  He’d thought it out in a split second. He could hack the problems involved: what’s gilded youthfulness for? His mistake was that he’d forgotten, for a moment, who he was supposed to be. In the dim light he saw her eyes narrow.

  “Me? Leave the cadre? Wait a minute. Why shouldn’t I go back?”

  He stared over the dash, “I’m an eejay ma’am. I don’t take sides. I just made the tape that just went on the news.”

  At no point had she told him he mustn’t make live transmission. It had occurred to him (the Wizard of Oz) that she might not know what he was doing. The 360 looked unimpressive. But he was a journalist, and she hadn’t asked. The coralin plant could have survived. The legal status of pirated coralin wasn’t sewn up completely. There were ways, angles: there were lawyers on the side of the people. Johnny had genuinely been helping, getting them publicity. It wasn’t his fault that violence had then exploded, on prime-time news.

  It would have taken the police no time to get a precise fix. They were entitled to deal swift and hard with armed conspiracy involving information technology. They would be here very soon… No one should get hurt. They’d stun-gas the site and haul the bodies out before they burned the plant.

  “Okay.” She gripped the rim of the window. “Okay, fine. You faked your unionist rap. You took your pictures and sent them straight to the bastards in power. Okay, I was a fool. But you thought I’d come with you? I don’t want to escape from here. I want ‘here’ to escape from being the way it is. I thought a guy who was in the Union was someone I could trust. You were only interested in getting a story. Well fuck you, Mr. Eejay. Let them do their worst. You can’t shut us out forever. Shit — the arrogance. Any day now there’s going to be a revolution. And you’re going to find yourself sitting right in the middle, Mr. Fucking Neutral Observer.”

  “That’s where I belong,” said Johnny. “I’m a journalist.”

  Cambridge looked down at him, as from a great height. He saw the blighted skin, every mark picked out by the upward light. The contempt in smart, clear eyes. She would have liked to be an eejay. Maybe she had the makings, who could tell? Johnny did not go for the idea, though it was widely accepted, that there were no genes left out here worth worrying about.

  “Violence is never going to solve anything.”

 
; She curled her lip. “What kind of violence? The bureaucratic kind or the personal kind? I don’t make that distinction.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” said the desk clerk. “No. You’re not sorry, Johnny.”

  She let go of the rim and walked away.

  Johnny drove around lumpy roads, helpless, until the computer suddenly recovered its bearings and he was on his way home. He thought about the cold fenland town that he had visited once. (It would be a mistake to let anyone out here know you’d actually left the continent, that would be too much.) He thought about the European solution to the big problem. No citadels there. The countryside was empty. Everyone lived in the cities, cheek by jowl. In England the wasted people were called the poor. You stepped over them as you went into your hotel. He didn’t believe it was any worse to let them have their own world, with its own rules. He thought about the phylloxera bug. He hadn’t finished that story. How the plague came back in the next century and laid California’s vines to waste…because people forgot to take care. Because greed drowned the warnings. It isn’t the coralin, he thought. The technology is helpless to save the world. It’s what goes on between people that fucks things up.

  Johnny truly was in the union, which made him a radical and dangerous character, by many standards; inside. But you can be opposed to some of the laws, and still believe in law and order. You can be on the side of the Indians, and still think it’s a bad idea to sell them guns and firewater. He wished he could explain. One day the citadel of civilization would spread out the way it used to and cover the whole continent. But that would not get a chance to happen if you let the wolves into the sleigh. You couldn’t let yourself be distracted by the fact that the wolves had human faces. He couldn’t regret his decisions. But he was glad, as the road jolted away, that his mask had slipped at the end. It would have been worse to leave Cambridge believing that she’d met her urban-guerilla savior. He had given her something real after all: a creep to despise. Maybe it evened the balance, a little.