Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 102

by Naim Kabir

  But Ibrahim, to Achimwene’s delight and incomprehension, waved him aside with a laugh. “Pay me the usual,” he said. “After all, it is only a box, and this is mere paper. It cost me nothing, and I have made my profit already. What extra value you place on it surely is a value of your own.”

  “But they are precious!” Achimwene said, shocked. “Collectors would pay—” imagination failed him. Ibrahim smiled, and his smile was gentle. “You are the only collector I know,” he said. “Can you afford what you think they’re worth?”

  “No,” Achimwene said—whispered.

  “Then pay only what I ask,” Ibrahim said and, with a shake of his head, as at the folly of his fellow man, steered the horse into action. The patient beast beat its flank with its tail, shoeing away flies, and ambled onwards. The boy, Ismail, remained there a moment longer, staring at the books. “Lots of old junk in the Vaults!” he said. He spread his arms wide to describe them. “I was there, I saw it! These . . . books?” he shot an uncertain look at Achimwene, then ploughed on—“and big flat square things called televisions, that we took for plastic scrap, and old guns, lots of old guns! But the Jews took those—why do you think they buried those things?” the boy said. His eyes, vat-grown haunting greens, stared at Achimwene. “So much junk,” the boy said, at last, with a note of finality, and then, laughing, ran after the cart, jumping up on it with youthful ease.

  Achimwene stared at the cart until it disappeared around the bend. Then, with the tenderness of a father picking up a new-born infant, he picked up the box of books and carried them the short way to his alcove.

  Achimwene’s life was about to change, but he did not yet know it. He spent the rest of the morning happily cataloguing, preserving and shelving the ancient books. Each lurid cover delighted him. He handled the books with only the tips of his fingers, turning the pages carefully, reverently. There were many faiths in Central Station, from Elronism to St. Cohen to followers of Ogko, mixed amidst the larger populations—Jews to the north, Muslims to the south, a hundred offshoots of Christianity dotted all about like potted plants—but only Achimwene’s faith called for this. The worship of old, obsolete books. The worship, he liked to think, of history itself.

  He spent the morning quite happily, therefore, with only one customer. For Achimwene was not alone in his—obsession? Fervor?

  Others were like him. Mostly men, and mostly, like himself, broken in some fundamental fashion. They came from all over, pilgrims taking hesitant steps through the unfamiliar streets of the old neighborhood, reaching at last Achimwene’s alcove, a shop which had no name. They needed no sign. They simply knew.

  There was an Armenian priest from Jerusalem who came once a month, a devotee of Hebrew pulps so obscure even Achimwene struggled with the conversation—romance chapbooks printed in twenty or thirty stapled pages at a time, filled with Zionist fervor and lovers’ longings, so rare and fragile few remained in the world. There was a rare woman, whose name was Nur, who came from Damascus once a year, and whose specialty was the works of obscure poet and science fiction writer Lior Tirosh. There was a man from Haifa who collected erotica, and a man from the Galilee collecting mysteries.

  “Achimwene? Shalom!”

  Achimwene straightened in his chair. He had sat at his desk for some half an hour, typing, on what was his pride and joy, a rare collectors’ item: a genuine, Hebrew typewriter. It was his peace and his escape, in the quiet times, to sit at his desk and pen, in the words of those old, vanished pulp writers, similarly exciting narratives of daring-do, rescues, and escapes.

  “Shalom, Gideon,” he said, sighing a little. The man, who hovered at the door, now came fully inside. He was a stooped figure, with long white hair, twinkling eyes, and a bottle of cheap arak held, like an offering, in one hand.

  “Got glasses?”

  “Sure . . . ”

  Achimwene brought out two glasses, neither too clean, and put them on the desk. The man, Gideon, motioned with his head at the typewriter. “Writing again?” he said.

  “You know,” Achimwene said.

  Hebrew was the language of his birth. The Joneses were once Nigerian immigrants. Some said they had come over on work visas, and stayed. Others that they had escaped some long-forgotten civil war, had crossed the border illegally from Egypt, and stayed. One way or the other, the Joneses, like the Chongs, had lived in Central Station for generations.

  Gideon opened the bottle, poured them both a drink. “Water?” Achimwene said.

  Gideon shook his head. Achimwene sighed again and Gideon raised the glass, the liquid clear. “L’chaim,” he said.

  They clinked glasses. Achimwene drank, the arak burning his throat, the anis flavor tickling his nose. Made him think of his sister’s shebeen. Said, “So, nu? What’s new with you, Gideon?”

  He’d decided, suddenly and with aching clarity, that he won’t share the new haul with Gideon. Will keep them to himself, a private secret, for just a little while longer. Later, perhaps, he’d sell one or two. But not yet. For the moment, they were his, and his alone.

  They chatted, whiling away an hour or two. Two men old before their time, in a dark alcove, sipping arak, reminiscing of books found and lost, of bargains struck and the ones that got away. At last Gideon left, having purchased a minor Western, in what is termed, in those circles, Good condition—that is, it was falling apart. Achimwene breathed out a sigh of relief, his head swimming from the arak, and returned to his typewriter. He punched an experimental heh, then a nun. He began to type.

  The g.

  The girl.

  The girl was in trouble.

  A crowd surrounded her. Excitable, their faces twisted in the light of their torches. They held stones, blades. They shouted a word, a name, like a curse. The girl looked at them, her delicate face frightened.

  “Won’t someone save me?” she cried. “A hero, a—”

  Achimwene frowned in irritation for, from the outside, a commotion was rising, the noise disturbing his concentration. He listened, but the noise only grew louder and, with a sigh of irritation, he pulled himself upwards and went to the door.

  Perhaps this is how lives change. A momentary decision, the toss of a coin. He could have returned to his desk, completed his sentence, or chosen to tidy up the shelves, or make a cup of coffee. He chose to open the door instead.

  They are dangerous things, doors, Ogko had once said. You never knew what you’d find on the other side of one.

  Achimwene opened the door and stepped outside.

  The g.

  The girl.

  The girl was in trouble.

  This much Achimwene saw, though for the moment, the why of it escaped him.

  This is what he saw:

  The crowd was composed of people Achimwene knew. Neighbors, cousins, acquaintances. He thought he saw young Yan there, and his fiancé, Youssou (who was Achimwene’s second cousin); the greengrocer from around the corner; some adaptoplant dwellers he knew by sight if not name; and others. They were just people. They were of Central Station.

  The girl wasn’t.

  Achimwene had never seen her before. She was slight of frame. She walked with a strange gait, as though unaccustomed to the gravity. Her face was narrow, indeed delicate. Her head had been done in some other-worldly fashion, it was woven into dreadlocks that moved slowly, even sluggishly, above her head, and an ancient name rose in Achimwene’s mind.

  Medusa.

  The girl’s panicked eyes turned, looking. For just a moment, they found his. But her look did not (as Medusa’s was said to) turn him to stone.

  She turned away.

  The crowd surrounded her in a semi-circle. Her back was to Achimwene. The crowd—the word mob flashed through Achimwene’s mind uneasily—was excited, restless. Some held stones in their hands, but uncertainly, as though they were not sure why, or what they were meant to do with them. A mood of ugly energy animated them. And now Achimwene could hear a shouted word, a name, rising and falling in different in
tonations as the girl turned, and turned, helplessly seeking escape.

  “Shambleau!”

  The word sent a shiver down Achimwene’s back (a sensation he had often read about in the pulps, yet seldom if ever experienced in real life). It arose in him vague, menacing images, desolate Martian landscapes, isolated kibbutzim on the Martian tundra, red sunsets, the color of blood.

  “Strigoi!”

  And there it was, that other word, a word conjuring, as though from thin air, images of brooding mountains, dark castles, bat-shaped shadows fleeting on the winds against a blood-red, setting sun . . . images of an ageless Count, of teeth elongating in a hungry skull, sinking to touch skin, to drain blood . . .

  “Shambleau!”

  “Get back! Get back to where you came from!”

  “Leave her alone!”

  The cry pierced the night. The mob milled, confused. The voice like a blade had cut through the day and the girl, startled and surprised, turned this way and that, searching for the source of that voice.

  Who said it?

  Who dared the wrath of the mob?

  With a sense of reality cleaving in half, Achimwene, almost with a slight frisson, a delicious shiver of recognition, realized that it was he, himself, who had spoken.

  Had, indeed, stepped forward from his door, a little hunched figure facing this mob of relatives and acquaintances and, even, perhaps, a few friends. “Leave her alone,” he said again, savoring the words, and for once, perhaps for the first time in his life, people listened to him. A silence had descended. The girl, caught between her tormentors and this mysterious new figure, seemed uncertain.

  “Oh, it’s Achimwene,” someone said, and somebody else suddenly, crudely laughed, breaking the silence.

  “She’s Shambleau,” someone else said, and the first speaker (he couldn’t quite see who it was) said, “Well, she’d be no harm to him.”

  That crude laughter again and then, as if by some unspoken agreement, or command, the crowd began, slowly, to disperse.

  Achimwene found that his heart was beating fast; that his palms sweated; that his eyes developed a sudden itch. He felt like sneezing. The girl, slowly, floated over to him. They were of the same height. She looked into his eyes. Her eyes were a deep clear blue, vat-grown. They regarded each other as the rest of the mob dispersed. Soon they were left alone, in that quiet street, with Achimwene’s back to the door of his shop.

  She regarded him quizzically; her lips moved without sound, her eyes flicked up and down, scanning him. She looked confused, then shocked. She took a step back.

  “No, wait!” he said.

  “You are . . . you are not . . . ”

  He realized she had been trying to communicate with him. His silence had baffled her. Repelled her, most likely. He was a cripple. He said, “I have no node.”

  “How is that . . . possible?”

  He laughed, though there was no humor in it. “It is not that unusual, here, on Earth,” he said.

  “You know I am not—” she said, and hesitated, and he said, “From here? I guessed. You are from Mars?”

  A smile twisted her lips, for just a moment. “The asteroids,” she admitted.

  “What is it like, in space?” Excitement animated him. She shrugged. “Olsem difren,” she said, in the pidgin of the asteroids.

  The same, but different.

  They stared at each other, two strangers, her vat-grown eyes against his natural-birth ones. “My name is Achimwene,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “And you are?”

  That same half-smile twisting her lips. He could tell she was bewildered by him. Repelled. Something inside him fluttered, like a caged bird dying of lack of oxygen.

  “Carmel,” she said, softly. “My name is Carmel.”

  He nodded. The bird was free, it was beating its wings inside him. “Would you like to come in?” he said. He gestured at his shop. The door, still standing half open.

  Decisions splitting quantum universes . . . she bit her lip. There was no blood. He noticed her canines, then. Long and sharp. Unease took him again. Truth in the old stories? A Shambleau? Here?

  “A cup of tea?” he said, desperately.

  She nodded, distractedly. She was still trying to speak to him, he realized She could not understand why he wasn’t replying.

  “I am un-noded,” he said again. Shrugged. “It is—”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, I would like to come in. For . . . tea.” She stepped closer to him. He could not read the look in her eyes. “Thank you,” she said, in her soft voice, that strange accent. “For . . . you know.”

  “Yes.” He grinned, suddenly, feeling bold, almost invincible. “It’s nothing.”

  “Not . . . nothing.” Her hand touched his shoulder, briefly, a light touch. Then she had gone past him and disappeared through the half-open door.

  The shelves inside were arranged by genre.

  Romance.

  Mystery.

  Detection.

  Adventure.

  And so on.

  Life wasn’t like that neat classification system, Achimwene had come to realize. Life was half-completed plots abandoned, heroes dying half-way along their quests, loves requited and un-, some fading inexplicably, some burning short and bright. There was a story of a man who fell in love with a vampire . . .

  Carmel was fascinated by him, but increasingly distant. She did not understand him. He had no taste to him, nothing she could sink her teeth into. Her fangs. She was a predator, she needed feed, and Achimwene could not provide it to her.

  That first time, when she had come into his shop, had run her fingers along the spines of ancient books, fascinated, shy: “We had books, on the asteroid,” she admitted, embarrassed, it seemed, by the confession of a shared history. “On Nungai Merurun, we had a library of physical books, they had come in one of the ships, once, a great-uncle traded something for them—” leaving Achimwene with dreams of going into space, of visiting this Ng. Merurun, discovering a priceless treasure hidden away.

  Lamely, he had offered her tea. He brewed it on the small primus stove, in a dented saucepan, with fresh mint leaves in the water. Stirred sugar into the glasses. She had looked at the tea in incomprehension, concentrating. It was only later he realized she was trying to communicate with him again.

  She frowned, shook her head. She was shaking a little, he realized “Please,” he said. “Drink.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “You’re not.” She gave up.

  Achimwene often wondered what the Conversation was like. He knew that, wherever he passed, nearly anything he saw or touched was noded. Humans, yes, but also plants, robots, appliances, walls, solar panels—nearly everything was connected, in an ever-expanding, organically growing Aristocratic Small World network, that spread out, across Central Station, across Tel Aviv and Jaffa, across the interwoven entity that was Palestine/Israel, across that region called the Middle East, across Earth, across trans-solar space and beyond, where the lone Spiders sang to each other as they built more nodes and hubs, expanded farther and farther their intricate web. He knew a human was surrounded, every living moment, by the constant hum of other humans, other minds, an endless conversation going on in ways Achimwene could not conceive of. His own life was silent. He was a node of one. He moved his lips. Voice came. That was all. He said, “You are strigoi.”

  “Yes.” Her lips twisted in that half-smile. “I am a monster.”

  “Don’t say that.” His heart beat fast. He said, “You’re beautiful.”

  Her smile disappeared. She came closer to him, the tea forgotten. She leaned into him. Put her lips against his skin, against his neck, he felt her breath, the lightness of her lips on his hot skin. Sudden pain bit into him. She had fastened her lips over the wound, her teeth piercing his skin. He sighed. “Nothing!” she said. She pulled away from him abruptly. “It is like . . . I don’t know!” She shook. He realized she was frig
htened. He touched the wound on his neck. He had felt nothing. “Always, to buy love, to buy obedience, to buy worship, I must feed,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I drain them of their precious data, bleed them for it, and pay them in dopamine, in ecstasy. But you have no storage, no broadcast, no firewall . . . there is nothing there. You are like a simulacra,” she said. The word pleased her. “A simulacra,” she repeated, softly. “You have the appearance of a man but there is nothing behind your eyes. You do not broadcast.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Achimwene said, anger flaring, suddenly. “I speak. You can hear me. I have a mind. I can express my—”

  But she was only shaking her head, and shivering. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I need to feed.”

  There were willing victims in Central Station. The bite of a strigoi gave pleasure. More—it conferred status on the victim, bragging rights. There had never been strigoi on Earth. It made Achimwene nervous.

  He found himself living in one of his old books. He was the one to arrange Carmel’s feeding, select her victims, who paid for the privilege. Achimwene, to his horror, discovered he had become a middleman. The bag man.

  There was something repulsive about it all, as well as a strange, shameful excitement. There was no sex: sex was not a part of it, although it could be. Carmel leeched knowledge—memories—stored sensations—anything—pure uncut data from her victims, her fangs fastening on their neck, injecting dopamine into their blood as her node broke their inadequate protections, smashed their firewalls and their security, and bled them dry.

  “Where do you come from?” he once asked her, as they lay on his narrow bed, the window open and the heat making them sweat, and she told him of Ng. Merurun, the tiny asteroid where she grew up, and how she ran away, on board the Emaciated Messiah, where a Shambleau attacked her, and passed on the virus, or the sickness, whatever it was.

  “And how did you come to be here?” he said, and sensed, almost before he spoke, her unease, her reluctance to answer. Jealousy flared in him then, and he could not say why.

  His sister came to visit him. She walked into the bookshop as he sat behind the desk, typing. He was writing less and less, now; his new life seemed to him a kind of novel.