Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106

by Sam J. Miller

  The shock in court was as nothing, however, to the fury of the Company: his employer, and mine. I want to be clear: I had been briefed to defend Nic in court, and that only. I made this point forcefully after the event. My brief had been courtroom and legal, not to act as his minder, or to prevent him from boarding a skyhop to Milan (it turned out) in order immediately to board another skyhop to—nobody was quite sure where. “If you’d wanted a minder you should have hired a minder,” I said. I was assertive, not aggressive.

  The court pronounced in absentia, and it went hard on Nic’s fortune. But this did not flush him out.

  His disappearance hurt me. I was sent to a dozen separate meetings in a dozen different global locations within one week; and in the same timeframe I had twenty or so further virtual meetings. Flying over Holland, where robotically tended fields shone greener than jade, and the hedges are all twenty feet tall, and the glimmering blue rivers sined their paths towards the sea.

  At Denver airport I saw a man with Parkinsonism—not old, no more than forty—sitting in the café and trying to eat a biscuit. He looked as though he was trying to shake hands with his own mouth.

  The news was as full of people starving, as it always is. Images of a huge holding zone in Sri Lanka where people were simply sitting around waiting to die. That look of the starving: hunger has placed its leech-maw upon their heel and sucked all their fluid and solidity out, down to the bones. The skin tautly concave everywhere. The eyes big as manga, the aching face.

  On Channel 9 the famine clock, bottom left corner, rolled its numbers over and over. A blur of numbers.

  I flew to Iceland.

  I flew back to Denver,

  I was acutely aware that Neocles’ vanishment put my own career at risk. Had I always lived amongst wealth, as he had, I might have floated free above the anxiety of this. It’s easy for the wealthy to believe that something will turn up. But I had experienced what a non-medinsure, hardscrabble life was like, and I did not want to go back to it.

  He’s gone rogue, I was told. Why didn’t you stop him? The Company, which had been (to me) a dozen or so points of human contact, suddenly swelled and grew monstrously octopoid. A hundred, or more, Company people wanted to speak to me directly. This is serious, I was told.

  He has the patent information on a dozen billion-euro applications, I was told. You want to guarantee the company’s financial losses should he try and pirate-license those? I thought not.

  I thought not.

  Not everybody scapegoated me. Some departments recognized the injustice in trying to pin Nic’s disappearance on me. Embryology, for instance; a department more likely than most to require expert legal advice, of the sort I had proved myself in the past capable of providing. Optics also assured me of their support, though they did so off the record. But it would have required a self-belief stronger than the one with which providence has provided me to think my career—my twenty-year career—as staff legal counsel for the Company was going to last more than a month. As it was, the elegant bee-dance of mutual corporate espionage continued to report that none of our competitors had, yet, magically acquired any of the intellectual property Nic had in his power to dispose. I had a meeting at Cambridge, in the UK, where late winter was bone-white and ducks on the river looked in astonishment at their own legs. I flew to Rio where the summer ocean was immensely clear and beautiful: sitting on the balcony of our offices it was possible, without needing optical enhancement, to make out extraordinary levels of detail in the sunken buildings and streets, right down to cars wedged in doorways, and individual letters painted on the tarmac.

  I flew to Alaska. I flew to Sydney, where the airport was a chaos of children—a flash mob protest about the cutbacks in youth dole.

  In the midst of all this I somehow found time to begin, discreetly, to make plans for a post-Company life. My ex-wife was more understanding than I might have expected, more concerned to maintain medinsure for our two children than for herself. I scouted, gingerly, secretly, for other employment; but even with the most optimistic assessment it was going to be hard to carry five lots of medinsure on my new salary. I could not of course deprive the children, and I did not wish to deprive Kate. That left my ex-wife and myself, and—truthfully—I decided to give up coverage for myself and leave my ex’s in place.

  Then, from the blue, news: Neocles had gone native in Mumbai, of all places. I was called once again to Denver and briefed face-to-face by Alamillo himself, the Company enforcer and bruiser and general bully-fellow. It was not a pleasant tete-a-tete. At this meeting, emphasis was placed on the very lastness of this, my last chance. The word last as conventionally used was insufficient to convey just how absolutely last this last chance was, how micron-close to the abyss I found myself, how very terminal my opportunity.

  The very severity of this interview reassured me. Had they not needed me very badly they would not have worked so hard to bully me. For the first time since Nic had so thoughtlessly trotted off—putting at risk, the fucker, not only his own assets but my entire family’s well-being—I felt the warmth of possible redemption touch the chill of my heart.

  “My last chance,” I said. “I understand.”

  “You go to him,” said Alamillo. “You have a fucking word, yes?”

  I understood then that they were sending me because I was a friend, not because I was a lawyer. They already knew that money was no longer going to provide them with any leverage with Nic—that he had renounced money. He was easing himself into his new role as Jesus Christ, the redeemer of the starving. What can you do to a person who won’t listen to money? What else does Power have, in this world of ours?

  “I’ll talk to him. And?”

  “What does and mean?”

  “I mean: what else?”

  “Nothing else,” said Amarillo, vehemently.

  “Bring him home?”

  “No, that’s not what we’re sending you to do. Listen the fuck to me. I don’t give a fucking pin—just, just. Look. We’re sending you to talk to him.”

  4

  I was flown out on a gelderm plane, its skin stiffening with the frictive heat of a high-inset aerial trajectory. I ate little medallions of liquorish bread, with shark caviar and Russian cheese pâté; and then authentic sausages lacquered with honey, and then spears of dwarf asparagus, and then chocolate pellets that frothed deliciously inside the mouth. I drank white wine; a Kenyan vintage. The toilet cubicle of this plane offered seven different sorts of hygiene wipes, including a plain one, one that analyzed your stool as you wiped to check for digestive irregularities, and several that imparted different varieties of dotTech to your lower intestine to various ends.

  I watched a film about a frolicsome young couple overcoming the obstacles placed in the way of their love. I watched the news. I watched another film, a long one this time—fifteen minutes, or more—based on the historical events of the French Revolution.

  The tipping point of our beginning our descent registered in my viscera, like a Christmas-eve tingle of excitement.

  We plummeted to Mumbai.

  Arriving at Chatrapati Shivaji was like travelling back half a century in time: the smell; the litter; the station building’s silver-painted curved ceilings on their scythe-shaped supports. An all-metal train, running on all-metal rails, trundled me from the terminal to the departure room. Then it was a short hop in a Company flicker to Jogeshwari beachfront—seconds, actually: a brief elevation over the peninsular sprawl of the city, its bonsai skyscrapers like stacked dishes, the taller curves and spires further south. The sky was outrageously blue, and the sea bristled with light. And, really, in a matter of seconds we came down again. I could have walked from airport to seafront, is how close it was. But better to arrive in a flitter, of course. When I’d called Nic he’d been gracious if laid-back in reply: no Company men, just you, old friend. Of course, of course.

  Of course.

  There was a flitter park on the Juhu dyke, and I left the car, and drive
r, there, and started walking. Forty degrees of heat—mild, I was told, for the season. The sky blue like a gemlike flame. The sun poured heat down upon the world. The air smelled of several things at once: savory smells and decaying smells, and the worn-out, salt-odor of the ocean.

  I don’t know what I expected. I think I expected, knowing Nic, to find him gone hippy; dropped-out; or a holy hermit chanting Japa. I pictured him surfing. But as I walked I noticed there was no surf. The bay harbored the poking-up tops and roofs of many inundated towers, scattered across the water like the nine queens in the chessboard problem, preventing the build-up of rideable waves. These upper floors of the drowned buildings were still inhabited; for the poor will live where they can, however insalubrious. Various lines and cables were strung in sweeping droops from roofs to shore. People swam, or kicked and splashed through the shallower water. On the new mud beach a few sepia-colored palm trees waved their heavy feathers in the breeze. There were people everywhere: a rather startling profusion of humanity, lolling, walking, rushing, going in and out, talking, singing, praying. It was an enormous crush. The sound of several incompatible varieties of music wrestled in the background: beats locking and then disentangling, simple harmonic melodies twisting about one another in atonal and banshee interaction. Everybody was thin. Some were starvation thin. It was easy enough to pick out these latter, because they were much stiller: standing or sitting with studied motionlessness. It was those who could still afford to eat who moved about.

  Sweat wept down my back.

  And then, as arranged, there was Nic: lying on the flank of the groin with his great length of hair fanned out on the ground behind him. The first surprise: he was dressed soberly, in black. The second: he was accompanied by armed guards.

  I sat beside my friend. It was so very hot. “I think I was expecting beach bummery.”

  “I saw your plane come over,” he said. “Made quite a racket.”

  “Airbraking.” Like I knew anything about that.

  “I’m glad you’ve come, though,” he said, getting up on his haunches. His guards fidgeted, leaning their elbows on their slung rifles. They were wearing, I noticed, Marathi National Guard uniforms. “Good of you to come,” he clarified.

  “People in Denver are pretty pissed.”

  “There’s not many I’d trust,” he said. He meant that he did, at least, trust me.

  “These boys work for you?” I asked.

  “Soldiers. They do. The Marathi authorities and I have come to an understanding.” Nic hopped to his feet. “They get my hairstyle, and with it they get the popular support. Of the poor. I get a legal government to shelter me. And I get a compound.”

  “Compound?” I asked, meaning: chemical compound? Or barracks? The answer, though, was the latter, because he said:

  “Up in Bhiwandi. All the wealth has moved from the city, up to the mountains, up East in Navi Mumbai. The wealthy don’t believe the sea has stopped coming. They think it’ll likely come on a little more. The wealthy are a cautious lot.”

  “The wealthy,” I said.

  “So you can come along,” he said. “Come along.”

  I got to my feet. “Where?”

  “My flitter’s back here.”

  “Are you allowed to park a flitter down here? I was told flitters had to be parked in the official park, back,” I looked around, vaguely. “Back up there somewhere.”

  “I have,” he said, flashing me a smile, “special privileges.”

  5

  “What is it we do?” he asked me, a few minutes later, as the flitter whisked the two of us, and Nic’s two soldiers, north-east over the Mumbai sprawl. He had to raise his voice. It was noisy as a helicopter.

  “Speaking for myself,” I said, “I work for the Company. I do this to earn enough to keep the people I love safe and healthy. I include you in that category, by the way, you fucker.”

  “And,” he said, smiling slyly, “how is Kate?”

  I’ll insert a word, here, about Kate. It is not precisely germane, but I want to say something. To try, at any rate. I love her, you see. I’m aware of the prejudice, but I believe it goes without saying that she is as much a human as anybody. She has a vocabulary of nine hundred words, and a whole range of phrases and sayings. She has a genuine and sweet nature. She has hair the color of holly berries. You’d expect me to say this, and I will say this: it is a particularly strange irony that if the same people who sneer at her personhood post treatment had encountered her before treatment, it would never occur to them to deny that she was a human being. In those circumstances they would have gone out of their way to be nice to her. And if before, why not afterwards? Kate is happier now than she ever was before. She is learning the piano. Of all the people I have met in this life, she is the most genuine.

  I don’t intend to defend my love to you.

  “She is very well,” I said, perhaps more loudly than I needed to. “Which is more than I can say for your portfolio.”

  “A bunch of houses and cars and shit,” he shouted, making a flowing gesture with his right hand as if discarding it all. His was, despite this theatricality, an utterly unstudied insouciance. That’s what a lifetime of never wanting for money does for you.

  “We could have saved more than half of it,” I said, “if you hadn’t absented from the court the way you did.”

  “All those possessions,” he said. “They were possessing me.”

  “Oh,” I said. I could not convey to him how fatuously this struck me. “How very Brother Brother.”

  He grinned. “Shit it’s good to see you again.”

  “Now, now, this hair thing of yours,” I asked him, guessing it was some nanopeptide technology or other that he had developed. “Is that a Company patent?”

  “You know?” he said, his eyes twinkling and his pupils doing that peculiar cycling moon-thing that they do, “it wouldn’t matter if it were. But, no, as it happens, no. As it happens.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s something.”

  He was the hairstyle man, the savior of the world’s poor. “I’m a benefactor now,” he boomed. “I’m a revolutionary. I shall be remembered as the greatest benefactor in human history. In a year I’ll be able to put the whole Company in my fucking pocket.”

  The flitter landed: a little series of bunny hops before coming to rest, that tell-tale of an inexperienced chauffeur. This was Mumbai after all, not Stockholm.

  We were inside his compound: a pentagon of walls clustered about with brambles of barbed wire. A central tower shaped like an oil derrick with a big gun at the top—impressive looking to a pedestrian, but like a cardboard castle to any force armed with modern munitions. It was spacious inside the walls, but it was enormously crowded nonetheless; and everybody there without exception—men women and children—had long, ink-black hair. People were lying flat on the floor, or lolling upon the low roofs, or sitting in chairs, all of them sunbathing, and all with their hair spread and fanned out. Nic led me along a walkway alongside the central atrium, and the ground was carpeted with supine humanity. They were so motionless that I even wondered whether they might be dead: except that every now and then one would pat their face to dislodge a fly, or breathe in and out.

  “Sunbathers,” I said.

  And then, just before we went in, Nic stopped and turned to me with a characteristically boyish sudden spurt of enthusiasm. “Hey, I tell you what I learned the other day?”

  “What?”

  “Crazy that I never knew this before, given all the work I’ve done. Discovered it quite by chance. Peptides—I mean the word, peptides—is from the Greek πεπτίδια and that means little snacks. There’s something you never knew. Means nuts, crisps, olives stuffed with little shards of sundried fucking tomato. Peptides means scoobysnacks.”

  “Extraordinary,” I deadpanned. “And you with your Greek heritage,” I said, knowing full well that he possessed no Greek language at all.

  At this he became once again solemn. “I’m
a citizen of the world, now,” he said.

  We went through: up a slope and into a seminar room. Inside was a horseshoe-seating grid with room for perhaps sixty people. The space was empty except for us two. The room put a single light on the front of the room when we came in.

  I sat myself in a front row seat. Nic stood before the screen, fiddling with his hair, running fingers through it and pulling it. “Why do you think you’re here?” he asked, without looking at me.

  “Just to talk, Nic,” I said. “I have no orders. Except to talk. Man, we really ought to talk. About the future.”

  “Hey,” he said, as if galvanized by that word. He flapped his arm at the room sensor and the screen lit behind him: the opening image was the Federal flag of India. “OK,” he announced.

  The image morphed into diagrams of the chemical structures of self-assembling peptides, filling the screen: insectile wriggles of angular disjunction wielding hexagonic benzene rings like boxing gloves.

  “Wait,” said Nic, looking behind him. “That’s not right.” He clicked his fingers. More snaps of his molecular tools-in-trade faded in, faded out.

  “They go for this sort of Barnum-Bailey, in this part of the world, do they?”

  “Calmodulin rendered in 3D,” he said. “I always think they look like party streamers. Although, in Zoorlandic iteration, they look like a starmap. There’s just so much empty space at the molecular level; our representational codes tend to obscure that fact. There, that there’s lysine.” He danced on the spot, jiggling his feet. “Lysine. A lot of that in your hair. NH2 sending down a lightning-jag of line to the H and H2N link, and O and OH looking on with their mouths open.” Images flicked by. “One of the broken-down forms of lysine is called cadaverine, you know that? The molecule of fucking decay and death, of putrefying corpses. Putrescine. Cadaverine. Who names these things?”