“Hello, Texas girl,” I said, “Eight-Nine-Nine. I believe we've met before.”
“Ah.” Half a gasp of surprise, half an expression of guilt at being found out, very contrite. She stepped backwards and lowered her offered palm a few inches. The movie HughIes had finally made their impression on me and Roy's mother had provided the last necessary prompt. I had finally figured out the secret of the great Plant #41 escape.
I lurched forward impatiently and made a grab at her hand, hauling my stiff bones upright with her help.
“Ugh,” I said, exaggerating the effort. “Where have you been?”
“Anjuli,” she said, as a beginning to some round of explanations or excuses she abruptly decided were obviously unnecessary. “Waiting here—for you. I thought you'd never come.”
“I've been calling that goddamned number you left me,” I said, rightly annoyed. “You were never there.”
“Yes, that didn't go as planned. I'm sorry.” She stood hesitantly in her blue ski outfit and made an apologetic face. “And about Ajay and Oggie—I'd just no idea. There was nothing I could do. It was all such a mess. I'm so sorry…” Her voice rose to an anguished pitch.
I cut her off with a bear hug. After a second she hugged back. We staggered, clutched together. “You lied to me,” I said. “You let me believe lies.”
“It was the only way,” she muttered happily into my ear. “Roy and I worked it out many times. Anything else was even riskier, even more likely to go badly wrong.”
“I hate you,” I told her. “I absolutely hate you. Now, what's on in this useless flick joint? You have got the key?”
“I have.” We let each other go, slightly embarrassed, and she fished in her pocket for a round brass coin, showing it to me with a shy grin.
She put the coin into the slot and we heard it clatter through the mechanism, rolling and falling, rolling and falling until it tripped some wire and the monkey ground jerkily into action, accompanied by a wheezy tune on an invisible piano organ. It leaned forward and pretended to pick out tickets from its dispenser, then pressed a painted button on its panel and the gilded doors opened into the dimly lit mausoleum.
There were three seats in plush velvet. One for Augustine as well as the ones for us. Lula moved awkwardly to the end of the single row and I sat next to her. She didn't have to say anything. To the sides, the house lights were glowing—impressive torches with living flame held in disembodied hands that stuck out of the wall.
“He never did have any taste,” I admitted, looking around.
In front of us was one of those automated personal dispensers so beloved of the luxury modern film houses. As we watched the screen light up and begin to show an old-fashioned trailer sequence, it came on and the smell of popcorn began to filter up with the warm air streams now circulating around our feet.
My stomach growled noisily.
Then we both quieted as Roy's last message beamed itself from the tiny projection unit in the wall behind us. There was a fuzz of green, a flash of light, and there he was on the screen, as large as life, sitting in the cubby of his office in the Core, looking nervously into the lens and playing cat's cradle with some rubber bands on his fingers.
“Anjuli, Lula, Oggie my boy,” he said and flashed a grin. “If you're watching this then I must be dead. Sorry to have put you through all the trouble. Won't happen again.” He gave a little laugh and then checked himself, twining his fingers in knots. One of the bands snapped and he flinched. In the momentary lapse of concentration it caused, I could see that he was sad, close to tears perhaps.
But then his face brightened. “Bet you're all glad to know that 899 made it out. I should be showing The Great Escape, I suppose, but you know me—no sense of occasion or anything like that…Anyway, I just wanted to say—” he looked up from his wringing, face twisted with the effort of not showing upset, and showing it very clearly “—’bye. Sorry.” He paused and leaned towards the camera, clearly ready to switch it off. The picture dissolved into his lime-green jumper and there was a last, muffled, “’Bye.”
I let my breath out in a slow, controlled way. There was a pain in my chest. Along with that rubber band, all the tension in me had snapped.
Roy had done it for love and for his dreams of machine independence. Augustine's condition was an accidental product of too many uncontrollable factors, and his own pride and my weakness. Ajay was the unforeseen: a sudden lash of anger that could have hit a dozen targets, but found him first. And Lula was here, the product of nanoengineering and of the staged breakout in which the tiny things had built her and given her 899’s AI capacity and persona—my closest friend with her long-kept secret, whom I'd betrayed constantly in her ordinary form by always taking her for granted and letting her come last. My big theory about the unknowable divide looked pretty damn shaky right now.
She took hold of my quivering hand and shook it. “What happened?”
“Psychological bleed-through from the suit AI,” I said. “It won't stop.”
The film began to run. We watched the line of fleeing refugees spread across the map towards Casablanca—a tortuous route to safety through one of the most corrupt places on earth. She squeezed my hand in hers and held onto it,
“I would have come to his funeral,” she said, meaning Ajay, “but the Company is still looking for me. They want to prosecute me for stealing. I had to find a safe place before I could go anywhere.”
“Well, no point going to my house,” I said. “They've got that, too, for the time being.”
We watched a little more.
“You can come live with me,” she said. “If you like.”
“Thanks.”
And we watched the rest of it in silence, pausing only to take our bucket of buttered popcorn from the dispenser and eat it by the handful.
When it was over, we walked outside, taking the refuse with us and making sure the doors were locked behind us. I half expected that Jane might show her face and cloud things up, but she was obviously not playing to character today. Lula paused to wipe the urchins’ greasy handprints off Roy's beautiful tomb, blowing on the marks and rubbing them away with a handkerchief from her pocket.
She stepped back to admire her work, and said, “There's a nice Italian in town. Well, not Italian—Sardinian. They do great pasta.”
“And tiramisu?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said, starting to walk back to the path, and throwing me a smile over her shoulder.
“You know,” I said, stooping to pick up my rucksack, “I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“The beginning!” she cried, outraged.
JUSTINA ROBSON is an author from Leeds in Yorkshire, England. She has been writing since she was a child in the 1970s, and her first novel, Silver Screen, was published in August 1999. Her short stories have appeared in various magazines in the United Kingdom and the United States. Silver Screen was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 1999 and the British Science Fiction Association Best Novel Award. Her second novel, Mappa Mundi, together with Silver Screen won the Amazon.co.uk Writer's Bursary 2000 and was also shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2001. Natural History, a far future novel, was published on April 18, 2003. The novel placed second for the 2004 John W. Campbell Award and was shortlisted for the Best Novel of 2003 in the British Science Fiction Association Awards. You can visit her online at www.justinarobson.com.
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