Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  “Would there be a problem?” said Felix.

  “Yes there would!” said Portillo. “There might be rather less of a problem if my associates here could search your apartment.” Portillo offered up a handheld screen. “A young woman named Batool Kadivar? Would we be recognizing Miss Batool Kadivar?”

  “I can’t even pronounce that,” Felix said. “But I guess you’d better come in,” for Agent Portillo’s associates were already well on their way. Men of their ilk were not prepared to take no for an answer. They shoved past him and headed at once for the bedroom.

  “Who are those guys? They’re not American.”

  “They’re Iranian allies. The Iranians were totally nuts for a while, and then they were sort of okay, and then they became our new friends, and then the enemies of our friends became our friends.… Do you ever watch TV news, Mr. Hernandez? Secular uprisings, people seizing embassies? Ground war in the holy city of Qom, that sort of thing?”

  “It’s hard to miss,” Felix admitted.

  “There are a billion Moslems. If they want to turn the whole planet into Israel, we don’t get a choice about that. You know something? I used to be an accountant!” Portillo sighed theatrically. “‘Homeland Security.’ Why’d they have to stick me with that chicken outfit? Hombre, we’re twenty years old and we don’t even have our own budget yet. Did you see those gorillas I’ve got on my hands? Do you think these guys ever listen to sense? Geneva Convention? US Constitution? Come on.”

  “They’re not gonna find any terrorists in here.”

  Portillo sighed again. “Look, Mr. Hernandez. You’re a young man with a clean record, so I want to do you a favor.” He adjusted his handheld and it showed a new screen. “These are cellphone records. Thirty, forty calls a day, to and from your number. Then look at this screen. This is the good part. Check out her call records. That would be her aunt in Yerevan, and her little sister in Teheran, and five or six of her teenage girlfriends, still living back in purdah.… Who do you think is gonna pay that phone bill? Did that ever cross your mind?”

  Felix said nothing.

  “I can understand this, Mr. Hernandez. You lucked out. You’re a young, red-blooded guy, and that is a very pretty girl. But she’s a minor, and an illegal alien. Her father’s family has got political connections like nobody’s business, and I would mean nobody, and I would also mean business.”

  “Not my business,” Felix said.

  “You’re being a sap, Mr. Hernandez. You may not be interested in war, but war is plenty interested in you.”

  There were loud crashing, sacking, and looting noises coming from his bedroom.

  “You are sunk, hermano. There is video at the Lebanese grocery store. There is video hidden in the traffic lights. You’re a free American citizen, sir. You are free to go anywhere you want, and we’re free to watch all the backup tapes. That would be the big story I’m relating here. Would we be catching on yet?”

  “That’s some kind of story,” Felix said.

  “You don’t know the half of it. You don’t know the tenth.”

  The two goons reappeared. There was a brief exchange of notes. They had to use their computers.

  “My friends here are disappointed,” said Agent Portillo. “Because there is no girl in your residence, even though there is an extensive selection of makeup and perfume. They want me to arrest you for abduction, and obstruction of justice, and probably ten or twelve other things. But I would be asking myself: why? Why should this young taxpayer with a steady job want to have his life ruined? What I’m thinking is: there must be another story. A better story. The flighty girl ran off, and she spent the last two weeks in a convent. It was just an impulse thing for her. She got frightened and upset by America, and then she came back to her people. Everything diplomatic.”

  “That’s diplomacy?”

  “Diplomacy is the art of avoiding extensive unpleasantness for all the parties concerned. The United Coalition, as it were.”

  “They’ll chop her hands off and beat her like a dog!”

  “Well, that would depend, Mr. Hernandez. That would depend entirely on whether the girl herself tells that story. Somebody would have to get her up to speed on all that. A trusted friend. You see?”

  After the departure of the three security men, Felix thought through his situation. He realized there was nothing whatsoever in it for him but shame, humiliation, impotence, and a crushing and lasting unhappiness. He then fetched up the reposada tequila from beneath his sink.

  Some time later he felt the dull stinging of a series of slaps to his head. When she saw that she had his attention, she poured the tequila onto the floor, accenting this gesture with an eye-opening Persian harangue.

  Felix staggered into the bathroom, threw up, and returned to find a fresh cup of coffee. She had raised the volume and was still going strong. He’d never had her pick a lover’s quarrel with him, though he’d always known it was in her somewhere. It was magnificent. It was washing over him in a musical torrent of absolute nonsense. It was operatic, and he found it quite beautiful. Like sitting through a rainstorm without getting wet: trees straining, leaves flying, dark, windy, torrential. Majestic.

  Her idea of coffee was basically wet grounds, so it brought him around in short order. “You’re right, I’m wrong, and I’m sorry,” he admitted tangentially, knowing she didn’t understand a word, “so come on and help me,” and he opened the sink cabinet, where he had hidden all his bottles when he’d noticed the earlier disapproving glances. He then decanted them down the drain: vodka, Southern Comfort, the gin, the party jug of tequila, even the last two inches of his favorite single-malt. Moslems didn’t drink, and really, how wrong could any billion people be?

  He gulped a couple of aspirin and picked up the phone. “The police were here. They know about us. I got upset. I drank too much.”

  “Did they beat you?”

  “Uh, no. They’re not big fans of beating over here: they’ve got better methods. They’ll be back. We are in big trouble.”

  She folded her arms. “Then we’ll run away.”

  “You know, we have a proverb for that in America: ‘you can run, but you can’t hide.’”

  “Darling, I love your poetry, but when the police come to the house, it’s serious.”

  “Yes. It’s very serious. It’s serious as cancer. You’ve got no ID. You have no passport. You can’t get on any plane to get away. Even the trains and lousy bus stations have facial recognition. My car is useless too. They’d read my license plate a hundred times before we hit city limits. I can’t rent another car without leaving credit records. The cops have got my number.”

  “We’ll steal a fast car and go very fast.”

  “You can’t outrun them! That is not possible! They’ve all got phones like we do, so they’re always ahead of us, waiting.”

  “I’m a rebel! I’ll never surrender!” She lifted her chin. “Let’s get married.”

  “I’d love to, but we can’t. We have no license. We have no blood test.”

  “Then we’ll marry in some place where they have all the blood they want. Beirut, that would be good.” She placed her free hand against her chest. “We were married in my heart the first time we ever made love.”

  This artless confession blew through him like a summer breeze. “They do have rings for cash at a pawnbroker’s.… But I’m a Catholic. There must be somebody who does this sort of thing. Maybe some heretic mullah. Maybe a Santeria guy?”

  “If we’re husband and wife, what can they do to us? We haven’t done anything wrong. I’ll get a green card. I’ll beg them, I’ll beg for mercy. I’ll beg political asylum.”

  Agent Portillo conspicuously cleared his throat. “Mr. Hernandez, please! This would not be the conversation you two need to be having.”

  “I forgot to mention the worst part,” Felix said. “They know about our phones.”

  “Miss Kadivar, can you also understand me?”

  “Who are you? I hate you.
Get off this line and let me talk to him.”

  “Salaam aleikum to you, too,” Poitillo concluded. “It’s a sad commentary on federal procurement when a mullah’s daughter has a fancy translator and I can’t even talk live with my own fellow agents. By the way, those two gentlemen from the new regime in Teheran are staking out your apartment. How they failed to recognize your girlfriend on her way in, that I’ll never know. But if you two listen to me, I think I can walk you out of this very dangerous situation.”

  “I don’t want to leave my beloved,” she said.

  “Over my dead body,” Felix declared. “Come and get me. Bring a gun.”

  “Okay, Miss Kadivar, you would seem to be the more rational of the two parties, so let me talk sense to you. You have no future with this man. What kind of wicked man seduces a decent girl with phone pranks? He’s an aayash, he’s a playboy. America has a fifty percent divorce rate. He would never ask your father honorably for your hand. What would your mother say?”

  “Who is this awful man?” she said, shaken. “He knows everything!”

  “He’s a snake!” Felix said. “He’s the devil!”

  “You still don’t get it, compadre. I’m not the Great Satan. Really, I’m not. I’m the good guy. I’m your guardian angel, dude. I’m trying really hard to give you back a normal life.”

  “Okay cop, you had your say, now listen to me. I love her body and soul, and even if you kill me dead for that, the flames from my heart will set my coffin on fire.”

  She burst into tears. “Oh God, my God, that’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me!”

  “You kids are sick, okay?” Portillo snapped. “This would be mental illness that I’m eavesdropping on here! You two don’t even speak each other’s language. You had every fair warning. Just remember, when it happens, you made me do it. Now try this one on for size, Romeo and Juliet.” The phones went dead.

  Felix put his dead phone on the tabletop. “Okay. Situation report. We’ve got no phones, no passports, no ID, and two different intelligence agencies are after us. We can’t fly, we can’t drive, we can’t take a train or a bus. My credit cards are useless now, my bank cards will just track me down, and I guess I’ve lost my job now. I can’t even walk out my own front door.… And wow, you don’t understand a single word I’m saying. I can tell from that look in your eye. You are completely thrilled.”

  She put her finger to her lips. Then she took him by the hand.

  Apparently, she had a new plan. It involved walking. She wanted to walk to Los Angeles. She knew the words “Los Angeles,” and maybe there was someone there that she knew. This trek would involve crossing half the American continent on foot, but Felix was at peace with that ambition. He really thought he could do it. A lot of people had done it just for the sake of gold nuggets, back in 1849. Women had walked to California just to meet a guy with gold nuggets.

  The beautiful part of this scheme was that, after creeping out the window, they really had vanished. The feds might be all over the airports, over everything that mattered, but they didn’t care about what didn’t matter. Nobody was looking out for dangerous interstate pedestrians.

  To pass the time as they walked, she taught him elementary Farsi. The day’s first lesson was body parts, because that was all they had handy for pointing. That suited Felix just fine. If anything, this expanded their passionate communion. He was perfectly willing to starve for that, fight for that and die for that. Every form of intercourse between man and woman was fraught with illusion, and the bigger, the better. Every hour that passed was an hour they had not been parted.

  They had to sleep rough. Their clothes became filthy. Then, on the tenth day, they got arrested.

  She was, of course, an illegal alien, and he had the good sense to talk only Spanish, so of course, he became one as well. The Immigration cops piled them into the bus for the border, but they got two seats together and were able to kiss and hold hands. The other deported wretches even smiled at them.

  He realized now that he was sacrificing everything for her: his identity, his citizenship, flag, church, habits, money.… Everything, and good riddance. He bit thoughtfully into his wax-papered cheese sandwich. That was the federal bounty delivered to every refugee on the bus, along with an apple, a small carton of homogenized milk, and some carrot chips.

  When the protein hit his famished stomach Felix realized that he had gone delirious with joy. He was growing by this experience. It had broken every stifling limit within him. His dusty, savage, squalid world was widening drastically.

  Giving alms, for instance—before his abject poverty, he’d never understood that alms were holy. Alms were indeed very holy. From now on—as soon as he found a place to sleep, some place that was so torn, so wrecked, so bleeding, that it never asked uncomfortable questions about a plumber—as soon as he became a plumber again, then he’d be giving some alms.

  She ate her food, licked her fingers, then fell asleep against him, in the moving bus. He brushed the free hair from her dirty face. She was twenty days older now. “This a pearl,” he said aloud. “This is a pearl by far too rare to be contained within the shell of time and space.”

  Why had those lines come to him, in such a rush? Had he read them somewhere? Or were those lines his own?

  The Blemmye’s Strategem

  A messenger flew above the alleys of Tyre, skirting the torn green heads of the tallest palm trees. With a flutter of wings, it settled high on a stony ledge. The pigeon was quickly seized by a maiden within the tower. She gratefully kissed the bird’s sleek gray head.

  Sir Roger of Edessa, the maiden’s lover, roamed the Holy Land on his knight errantry. Thanks to the maiden herself, Sir Roger possessed one precious cage of homing pigeons. Roger’s words winged it to her, straight to her tender hands, soaring over every obstacle in a Holy Land aflame. The birds flapped over drum-pounding, horn-blaring Seljuk marauders, and evil mamelukes with faces masked in chainmail. They flitted over Ismaili fedayeen bent on murder and utterly careless of life.

  An entire, busy network of messenger pigeons moved over the unknowing populace. These birds carried news through Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, and Beirut. They flitted over cavaliers from every cranny of Christendom, armed pilgrims who were starving, sweating, flea-bitten and consumed with poxes. Birds laden with script flew over sunburned, axe-wielding Vikings. Over fanatical Templars and cruel, black-clad Teutonic Knights, baking like armored lobsters in the blazing sun. Over a scum of Greek peltasts and a scrim of Italian condottiere.

  With trembling, ink-stained fingers, the maiden untied the tidy scroll from the bird’s pink leg. There was a pounding ache within her bosom. Would it be another poem? She often swooned on reading Roger’s poems.

  No. This bird had not come from Roger of Edessa. She had been cruelly misled by her own false hopes. The messenger bird was just another tiresome commercial bird. It carried nothing but a sordid rush of text.

  Salt. Ivory. Tortoiseshell. Saffron. Rice. Frankincense. Iron. Copper. Tin. Lead. Coral. Topaz. Storax. Glass. Realgar. Antimony. Gold. Silver. Honey. Spikenard. Costus. Agate. Carnelian. Lycium. Cotton. Silk. Mallow. Pepper. Malabathrum. Pearls. Diamonds. Rubies. Sapphires.

  Every good in this extensive list was followed by its price.

  The girl locked the pigeon into its labeled wooden cage, along with dozens of other birds, her fellow captives within the gloomy tower. Using cuttlefish ink and a razor-trimmed feather, the girl copied the message into an enormous dusty ledger. If she ever failed in her duty to record, oh the woe she would receive at the hands of the Mother Superior. Bread and water. Endless kneeling, many rosaries.

  The pigeon clerk rubbed at her watery eyes, harshly afflicted by fine print and bad lighting. She returned to lean her silken elbows on the cool, freckled stone, to contemplate the sparkling Mediterranean and a black swarm of profiteering Italian galleys. Perhaps Sir Roger of Edessa was dead. Poor Roger had been slain by a cruel Moslem champion, or else he was dead
of some plague. Roger would never write a poem to her again. At the age of seventeen, she was abandoned to her desolate fate.

  How likely all this seemed. Her doom was so total and utter. If Roger failed to rescue her from this miserable life tending pigeons, she would be forced to take unwelcome vows.

  She would have to join the Little Sisters of the Hospitallers below the tower of birds, in that ever-swelling crowd of the Holy Land’s black widows, another loveless wretch of a girl amid that pitiful host of husbandless crones and fatherless orphans, all of them bottled up behind tall, rocky walls, hopelessly trapped without any lands or dowries.

  The pale brides of Christ, moody and distracted, waiting in itchy torment for some fatal pagan horde of dark-eyed Moslem fiends to conquer Tyre and ravage their fortress of chastity.

  Another bird appeared in flight. The maiden’s heart rose to beat in her throat. This was a strong bird, a swift one. When he arrived, his legs were clasped by two delicate bands of gold. His feathers smelled of incense.

  The writing, though very tiny, was the most beautiful the girl had ever seen. The ink was blood-red, and it glittered.

  DEAREST HUDEGAR

  With the tip of my brush I give you the honey of good news

  Our Silent Master has summoned us both

  So prepare yourself quickly

  For I hasten to you with a caravan of many strong men to take you to his Paradise

  (signed) THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN

  The maiden began to weep, for her name was not Hudegar. She had never heard of any woman named Hudegar.

  Whether Christian or Moslem, hamlets in the Holy Land were always much the same: a huddle of dusty cottages around a well, a mill, and an oven. The Abbess Hildegart rode demurely into the plundered village, escorted by the heavily armed caravan of the Grand Assassin.

  This hapless little village had been crushed with particular gusto. Vengeful marauders had hacked down the olive groves, set fire to the vineyard, and poisoned the well. Since they were still close to Tyre, the strongest city yet held by the reeling Crusader forces, Hildegart rather suspected the work of Hospitallers.