She entered a luma canyon and passed tentkits dotting the supersurface luma like splotches of paint. Translucent blocks of luma fluoresced in the coming night, keened softly in the wind. Very slowly, they were changing shape. She passed someone walking across one of these blocks, picking a slippery path, head down against the wind and rain.
Kalypso flexed her thigh muscles, thought about walking, and then about running, and then about roads, and then about bus stations. Vermilion fingers of some version of v.aa traveled down the sides of the canyon like squadrons of . . . damn. Like squadrons of Marcsson’s ants.
She got to First and dragged herself back to Unit 4, preparing herself for a scolding by Tehar. But he wasn’t alone: they were all sitting there, sharing a meal. Sharia leaped to her feet when Kalypso came in and grabbed her hand.
“Where were you? We were so worried . . .”
Kalypso ignored her, as usual.
“I need a favor,” she said, looking at Ahmed. He glared at her for a long moment, reaching over to cuff X, who was giggling and poking him in the ribs. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
“What?”
So here she was, with Ahmed.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. She helped him draw in the rope and coil it on the bottom of the boat. “I Dreamed one time that I was having tea with my projections. It was a little house, with stuffed armchairs. Outside the windows you could see all this” — she gestured to the Wild—“re-forming itself. In the room were all these little tables with those white lace things on them, what d’you call them—”
“Doilies, I think.”
“Yeah. So we’re all drinking tea and my projections are talking way over my head about a lot of stuff, and I know they’re explaining what’s going on outside the windows but I can’t make sense of it. So I’m looking around for something else to do and I see this roly-poly cat sitting on the back of a couch, making little chattery noises and staring at this brass birdcage in the corner. There’s a parrot inside. Too big for the cage, really. And the parrot is scat-singing. I go, ‘Nigel?’ and the parrot stops singing and says in a very correct tone, ‘Azamat.’ Then it starts singing again. And the whole time, the cat is just sitting there, watching, and the tip of its tail is twitching.”
She paused. Ahmed was giving her a blank look.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Are we there yet?”
He pointed off to starboard, and she saw the other boat. One person was standing in it, the other sitting.
“I wonder what it’s been like for Neko,” Ahmed mused. “To be out here alone with him, all these months.”
Kalypso had not seen Neko since the day Marcsson had stolen her from the Dead woman. Initially Tehar had smuggled Marcsson away from Oxygen 2 as a means to prevent anybody from disturbing the development of the Ganesh System, as he called it—for the brouhaha over resources and rights had continued for many days before settling down to a dull roar as the transformation of First began to dictate everybody’s actions. Neko had turned up some time later and offered to relieve the T’nane-born caretakers who had been assigned to protect Marcsson. It was a job they had been only too glad to relinquish.
Neko must have spotted their boat as well. Her low vessel turned in its own channel and began to come toward them, slicing through the gelatinous luma. Ahmed squeezed Kalypso’s shoulder and accelerated slightly. Kalypso didn’t respond to him. She was thinking about the luma System and wondering whether bits of Ganesh-logic had traveled this far yet; whether that accounted for the increased growth of algaics here. In the wake of her boat she could see the disturbed liquid swirling, revealing every now and then a snatch of light generated by the flagrare far below. If Ganesh had been colonized by the System, the System had also been colonized by Ganesh. Down there, deep in the luma’s structure, Earth logic was mating with System logic. Maybe someday she would truly interface with the Wild.
She recalled the tiger chasing Marcsson off the end of the bridge and thought warily: then again, maybe not.
Ahmed had quickly grown fluent in the special Sign of the Dead. Kalypso waited while he explained to Neko, trying not to look into Neko’s eyes as the Dead woman stepped across into their boat. Instead Kalypso addressed Ahmed.
“I need time,” she said anxiously. “But not too much time. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” said Ahmed. Kalypso crossed into Neko’s boat. Suddenly she lost her resolve and glanced at Neko.
“He is what they used to call a vegetable,” Neko signed to her. The luminous Wild silhouetted every gesture as the two boats glided in tandem along a broad channel of cooled luma. “He cannot attend to even his most basic physical needs. He is as passive as Sieng, and as good company.”
Marcsson was sitting in the very spot where Teres had kept Sieng in the luma tank. He looked harmless and dull. He was interfaced, of course. He didn’t look up.
“Does he never speak?” she asked.
“Does a vegetable speak?” Neko said. “No.”
Kalypso coughed nervously, trying to hide her disappointment. She gestured for them to go, and Ahmed turned his craft and drew off to some distance; but he didn’t leave altogether.
They’re afraid for me, she thought. Of me.
She blinked in the ashen wind, which was finally dying down. They were floating in the same super-colony of photosynthetic algaics where she and Neko had paused briefly to inhale the bare air of T’nane, that day during her captivity, so long ago. The colony had grown exponentially since then. Green cells flared with the light generated by the flagrare below; the glow reached even into the mahogany sky. The air smelled sulfurous, but it was breathable. She took Marcsson’s breathing gear off for him as well, so that she could see his face.
If you counted the time he’d spent sleeping during the Crossing, Azamat would be in his eighties by now, just like all the Earthborn. She’d never thought he looked old before now. Maybe it was the interface shielding his eyes which made the rest of his face seem grave. The lines to either side of his mouth were slightly deeper, the cheekbones more pronounced. Otherwise, he appeared unchanged. He gave no indication that he noticed her presence, which was a reassuringly familiar kind of behavior. His statement to her in the Dreamer, I am Ganesh now, seemed a little absurd. This was also reassuring. She began to relax.
“I brought you something,” she said. “I won a bet against the Dead, but it’s really thanks to you, so . . .” She unwrapped a cigar and put it in his blunt hand, which did not react. She passed it under his nose.
“Mmm. Cuban, Azamat. They have ants in Cuba? Oh, that was Costa Rica, right? Whatever.”
It took three tries before she managed to light his cigar. She put it between his lips and it fell out right away, burning his bare thigh. He didn’t flinch. She picked it up.
“Come on, now. You can do this.”
In the end she prised his jaws open, slid the cigar between his teeth, and sat back. She lit her own and waited, wondering if there would be any reaction.
After a couple of seconds he inhaled slightly. His lips closed around the cigar, which blazed as he took a long pull. The interface continued to flicker with activity, uninterrupted.
Kalypso smiled anyway and took an inaugural puff of her own. She thought about the distance the cigar had traveled and what it was supposed to mean, and for a second she tried to imagine Cuba— but only for a second. She closed her eyes as the smoke filled her senses.
They both started coughing at the same time.
Thank you . . .
Ella Fitzgerald
Peter Gabriel
Miles
Meredith Monk
Paganini
Me’shell Ndegeocello
Dmitri S. and Keith Jarrett
Midnight Oil
Radiohead
Béla Bartók
Public Enemy
György Ligeti
Soundgarden Soundgarden
Soundgarden
and John Grado, who made the headphones
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TRICIA SULLIVAN is also the author of Lethe and Someone to Watch Over Me. She is a twenty-nine-year-old American living in London, where she studies Toudi Kempo and suffers for lack of decent bagels.
Dreaming in Smoke Page 31
