by M M Buckner
Sheeba helped Geraldine suit up. “Nass, this place is mesmic. Do you sense the dark energy? It’s got my aura streaming, like, ultraviolet.” Shee wasn’t naked anymore. She’d dressed in a gray prote uniform, cut off at the elbows and knees.
Only when Geraldine stretched out her short brawny arms to admire the black piping on my suit did I realize how they had violated me. Hot blood rose to my cheeks. “Sheeba,” I sputtered, misting her face with saliva, “this satellite’s about to rupture. We’ll be killed.”
Sheeba whistled through her teem. “Be here now, Nass.” Then she waved a cheery good-bye and galloped after Geraldine toward the ladder well.
“Wait. I’ve come to save you. Don’t leave me.” In my eagerness, I momentarily forgot about the Coriolis effect, leaned in the wrong direction and smacked against the wall. “You said we would talk.”
But she didn’t hear me. Her bare, sooty feet disappeared down the corridor. I remembered kissing each one of those dimpled toes.
“Sir, would you like something to eat?” said a soft girlish voice.
I barely heard. I was watching the corridor where Sheeba had vanished. A strange new Sheeba. Transfigured by the zone.
“I cooking a meal, sir. Will you come?”
Kaioko waited some distance away, and her Asian eyes rested on me with a look of profound distrust. She’d arranged her white head rag in a more becoming fashion, and she touched it self-consciously. For the first time, I noticed her delicate nub of a nose and her small lips. The pointed chin shaped her face like a heart. Too bad her eyes were so small and squinty. She got to her feet and moved down the hall, glancing over her shoulder to see that I was following.
“Are we going to sick-ward?” I asked.
‘To the galley,” she said.
“Is that where Sheeba went?” I asked hopefully. The last place I wanted to see was sick-ward. Lurid video of Heaven’s afflicted workers flashed across my mental screen. I really did not want to see those faces.
Kaioko tiptoed close to the wall, bending forward at the waist to see around the curve. She seemed fearful of running into some obstacle. No little toads blocked our way, and this gave Deck Three an air of vacancy. “Where are all the brats?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. At the galley door, she motioned for me to pass ahead, and as I came near, she flattened herself against the wall. Did she mink I would bite?
My injured leg still ached, but I could tell from the way it moved that my bones had healed. Amazingly, my orthopedic NEMs had not waited for doctors’ orders. The smart little buggers had figured a way to act on their own. If I’d had Net access, the NEMs would have mended the fractures in an hour. But I couldn’t complain. The glass man had finally done his job. I stomped past the stiff-lipped Kaioko, entered the galley and found it empty. No Sheeba. I flopped down in a chair.
A chair. An actual piece of furniture designed to hold the human form. This was the first comfortable seat Heaven had offered me. The galley turned out to be yet another miniscule wedge-shaped closet. Besides the delightful molded plastic chair, it held a tiny stainless-steel table, a small work counter, two cabinets, an infinitesimal sink and a stack of microwave ovens. Like everything in Heaven, these items were heavily bolted and secured to the floor. On the wall hung an old-fashioned clock. It had the face of a large-eared cartoon bunny with whiskers for clock hands.
“So Where’s Sheeba?” I asked.
Kaioko rolled up her long sleeves, climbed onto a stepstool and began struggling over a huge can of Chili Diablo that was set out on the counter. She used a hand-operated opener with a crank turn that seemed to require all her strength. What a production she made of it, bending her small body over that ten-liter can.
I relinquished my cozy chair with a sigh. “All right, give it here.”
When I took the can, she jerked backward and rolled down her sleeves to cover her hands. Then she explained the complicated can opener. It had a coin-sized wheel that fit down over the can’s rim, and when applied with a clamp, it sliced into the steel lid and cut neatly all the way around by the force of the hand-turned crank.
I was just remarking on its clever design when, without warning, Provendia’s noisemakers drummed the hull, and Kaioko threw herself against me. Her frail arms clutched my waist like pliers, and she buried her head against my ribs. I’d never had such intimate contact with an employee before. Hesitantly, I patted her shoulder. The walls groaned and popped, and I held my breath, waiting for the next hull breach. But the barrage didn’t last long. When it ended, Kaioko jerked away as if my touch burned her. Then with a show of mutual nonchalance, we finished opening the can.
You may find it odd that I would calmly help Kaioko heat stew when Sheeba had gone missing again and at any moment the satellite’s creaky old hull might blow to pieces. If so, you have forgotten the violence of human hunger. Too many hours had passed since my last meal, and my NEMs had devoured my blood sugar. “Chili Diablo.” Those words set off my taste receptors like a call from the gods, and though the cartoon bunny face said four o’clock, my biorhythms roared, “Dinnertime!”
Four o’clock. I gazed at the bunny face while Kaioko put away her utensils, locked the drawers and bins and waited for the microwave to beep. Exactly how many hours had passed since I checked the time and date in my helmet display? That was just before the blowout “What day is this, Kaioko?”
“What day?” She stopped scrubbing the counter and screwed up her wide-set little eyes.
“Sunday, Monday, Tuesday? You know, what day?”
Slowly, her fingertips searched the folds of her head scarf. “Sun day?”
“Okay, what day of the month? Surely you have months. The moon’s, right outside.”
She continued to fondle her head scarf, squinching up her eyes. Then her fingers closed on something tucked in one of the folds. A small dried flower. “I’ve heard of the moon. When it come close, it pull our blood.”
What gibberish. “Forget the moon. I just want to know how long I’ve been here.”
She resumed her scrubbing with a look of satisfaction. “You want to know how many orbits.”
“That’s a start,” I said, “How many?”
“I don’t know. We lost our senses.”
She said this with such deadpan sincerity mat for a moment I simply gawped. Then she blinked her beady eyes and gave me mat resentful look.
Laboring to keep a straight face, I said, “Explain that again.”
She pursed her lips and scoured the cabinet doors. “The commies took our senses.”
Sensors, she meant I couldn’t help but chuckle as she flayed a layer of plastic off the countertop. Then I went and tapped the bunny face clock with my fingernail. “What about this?”
Impudent child, she refused to look my way—until I started moving the bunny’s second-hand whisker. That caught her interest and she watched in silence. Next, I touched the hour-hand whisker. “Since I came here, how many times has this short whisker gone around?”
Very hesitantly, she stepped closer, stood on tiptoes and pushed the minute-hand whisker. When it budged a centimeter clockwise, she said, “Ah.” Then she screwed up her little eyes and pushed the hour hand from four to five. Her long sleeve fell back, revealing her dainty white forearm crosshatched with fresh knife wounds. The sight stunned me, but Kaioko didn’t realize I’d seen it. She spoke with gentle eagerness. “I didn’t know his nose hairs would move.”
“You’ve never seen them move?”
“No one touched them before.”
In other words, the clock was dead. I dropped back into my chair and slumped over the table. The microwave was taking an eon, and the girl’s wounded arm lingered unpleasantly in my memory. “Kaioko, do you understand the concept of time?”
“What is time?” she said with forced politeness.
‘Time? Well, it’s the past, present and future. Every event happens in time.”
She polished the sink, and her sleeves trailed in th
e soap lather. “You asked how many orbits. Orbits happen in space.”
“No, no, time is different from space.”
I glanced around the galley, searching for some way to make myself understood. My head buzzed from hunger and lack of sleep. And Kaioko was just an illiterate child. Why was I wasting my—ha—time? Probably, my ego was involved. The microwave buzzed, and Kaioko lifted out two bowls of steaming protein stew, using her long sleeves as mitts. When she placed them on the table, I studied the anonymous brown chunks floating in red sauce.
“Okay, here’s a concrete example. This stew was cold when you set it in the oven. Then a period of waiting passed, and voila! Now it’s hot. That period of waiting was time.”
“Time is heat” Her black eyes gleamed.
“No, not heat.” I tugged at my hair, but by now, I was determined to prove how coherent I could be. Kaioko sat down and blew softly on a spoonful of stew, reminding me of my own ravening hunger. I gulped a scalding mouthful and wiped the juice from my chin. Spicy. What a sting!
“Think of a lifetime,” I said, chewing. “You’ve heard that word, lifetime?”
Her eyebrows rose, watching me eat. Perhaps I slurped.
“You’re born. You grow old. Then you die,” I said. “The length of your life is measured in years. That’s time.”
“What’s a year?” She sipped delicately from her spoon.
Easy question. I tilted my bowl to drink the red sauce, then said, “A year’s how long it takes the Earth to make one revolution around the sun.”
“So it’s space.” She stuck out her pointed chin and smiled, awfully pleased with herself.
What could I do but laugh and surrender? “Is there any more stew?”
We fixed a tray for the others, and as she was setting out bowls, she said, “May I go ask a question?”
I was beginning to realize her stiff courtesy arose from shyness. She wasn’t used to strangers. I sloshed hot stew into the row of bowls and said, “Fire away.”
She wiped up my spills and squeezed out her rag. “Liam told us about the people here before we came. He said they old. What is old? Is that like time?”
“You mean the adult workers. I can’t believe they’re all sick.”
“I didn’t know them. They gone before I remember.”
“Nonsense. Two months ago, this factory still had sixty productive workers.”
“Sixty?”
“Surely you know how to count,” I said.
“I’m learning. Vlad teaching me.”
Great gobs of gilders, this child couldn’t count? No wonder time confused her. Kaioko had to be in her late teens, and she seemed intelligent enough. Had she never entered a classroom? Well no, she hadn’t. Factory profits were too low to cover dependent education. She gazed at my gleaming false fingernails. Her nails were chewed to the quick.
Suddenly, the galley felt too small add crowded. I lifted the tray of bloodied stew and lurched into the corridor.
“Please,” she said, following, “tell me what old means.”
“It means learning not to ask foolish questions.”
At least the Coriolis effect no longer plagued me. With a certain gratification, I adjusted my lean and reeled down the corridor with almost all the dinner tray intact.
“You know about old,” Kaioko persisted. “They say Earth has many such types. How they different from us?”
I was pleased that she included me in the set of youth. One or two wisecracks popped into my mind, but the child’s eyebrows rose so earnestly that I held them back. After a few more steps, 1 set down the heavy tray to rest. Now that my stomach was full, my body cried out for sleep.
“In the pictures, their skin wrinkles.” She pointed at the crayon drawings along the baseboard. The scribbles were everywhere in Heaven, along the bottoms of all the walls. I’d almost stopped seeing them.
“My brother Nobi draw these.” She knelt and pointed to a couple of human figures, white-haired and stooped with age. “See, they puckered like melons falling off the vine.”
This vivid description made me grin, and Kaioko giggled, covering her mourn with both hands. Her laughter startled me. Could it be she was warming up to me a little? As she studied the crayon man, I noticed her dried flower coming loose from her scarf, so I tucked it back in.
“You’ve never seen an old person in this factory?” I asked.
“No one. But Liam and Vlad told us stories. And Nobi put them in his pictures.”
“Nobi, your brother?” Exhaustion fuzzed my faculties, but her words posed a riddle. If Heaven’s oldest workers died before Kaioko could remember, that was nearly eighteen years ago. Had the malady been active that long? If so, our site manager had covered it up with elaborate cunning. Well, that’s what we paid him for. But all those years, how had he kept the product flowing? He must have put more juveniles to work than we realized.
“I not asking about the puckers.” Kaioko touched the crayon man’s face, then she touched her head scarf. “Chit-side doesn’t matter. How are old people different inside?”
“What a question.” Visions of clogged arteries and diseased livers waltzed through my drowsy mind, but Kaioko didn’t mean that Her question upset me. I’d spent so many years and deutsch trying to prove there was no difference at all. As long as you kept healthy, it was the same as being young. At 248, 1 felt as fresh and energetic as ever. Right, fresh and energetic. See me slumped in the corridor, ready to nod off. An icon blinked on my thumbnail, but I was too tired to read it. Hell, what did I care if this impertinent prote girl warmed up to me?
“Maybe…” the girl timidly began.
“Maybe what?” The kid needled me.
“Maybe since old people make more orbits, they think longer, and so…”
“Please tell me your brilliant theory on aging,” I said.
“So they less afraid to die?’
“Not bloody likely.”
Less afraid of oblivion? Less afraid to have your name dropped from invitation lists, your stocks redistributed, and your gear auctioned on the Net? Ye gilded icons, age only increased the dread. Didn’t I tell you before, life is an addiction. The more you get, the more you want…though the pleasure dwindles.
I pushed back my mop of curls—curls I had suffered acute pain to have embedded in my scalp. Every passing year felt like a page ripped savagely from my diary, and every time the docs diagnosed me with a new ailment, I donated more funds to medical science and sent Chad to search the Net for new bioNEMs. At 248, I had every right to expect another fifty years of life, but what then? The idea that age would make a person less afraid of death—why, it was ludicrous. Then Sheeba’s words wafted through my memory.
“What are you looking for in those war zones?”
Death. That’s what Shee thought. I closed my eyes, and there was my mother standing in our living room in a blue sari. I hadn’t thought about my mother in decades. She died nearly two centuries ago, but I could still smell the perfume caught in the folds of her dress. “Nasir, come practice your verbs.” My mother’s voice no longer echoed anywhere on Earth, and the grief caught me again, as fresh as a new wound.
And there stood Prashka, my first true love, waving from the porch of our summerhouse in the Andaman Islands. And shimmering in the background, our sailboat, the Durga. Gone now, house and boat, along with Prashka’s beautiful body, crushed and drowned in the horrific storm of 2057, when the entire population of Calcutta tried to evacuate in one day.
Loss. Depletion. Holes torn in my life that no NEMs would heal. I couldn’t reach Prashka in time. I was trapped in Lahore that day. How cruelly fresh the memories keep. Those first savage months barricaded in the warehouse, the faces pressing through barred windows, the inhuman voices. And the taste of lychee juice. No, forget that. What was I saying? Let me rephrase.
I remember Sayeed, my first business partner. We met in ‘62, after the worst was over. What days and nights we shared, scavenging the wasteland for technicia
ns. We traveled by sea kayak and bicycle, evangelists of the new economy, and we rebuilt the Asian Internet. Sayeed drafted anyone with a metric screwdriver and a head for code, and I made payroll with stock options printed on old beer boxes.
Ha, I remembered Mustafa’s Bar, where Sayeed and I hatched our best ideas. There was a green couch and an espresso machine that made too much noise. Gone now. All gone. Sayeed died in a car crash—ironic after all we survived.
And Nasir Deepra? A few days earlier, I would have called my life rich and satisfying. Yet here in Heaven, facing this inquisitive girl, my existence seemed to fray like a tissue of gaping voids, held together by nothing more solid than a latticework of glass.
“What are you looking for in those war zones?” Sheeba kept asking. “Nasir, you’re seeking the dark.”
Kaioko watched me from a distance, as if my expression alarmed her. I felt weary beyond measure, but I straightened up and tried to speak in a normal voice. “Everyone’s afraid of death.” Then I picked up my tray, leaned into the spin and tilted down the corridor.
We found Sheeba at last, sitting with Juani on the floor of a machinery closet—no comfortable chairs in sight. I staggered to Sheeba’s side, nearly upsetting the bowls on my tray.
“Have some food, dear. You must be famished,” I said.
She glanced up with the same overexcited expression as before—a mixture of sleep deprivation, tense muscles and pure hyper adrenaline. War surfer’s bliss. She was deep in the moment. “Look at me! I’m helping Juani fix the generator!”
I placed the tray beside her on the floor and nearly toppled over. Juani was glad to lay down his tools and dig into the gory stew, but Sheeba hopped up and dusted off her bum.
“Rest your leg, Nass. I’ll take this food up to Vlad in sick-ward.” She balanced the tray on her fingertips and started to leave.
“Sick-ward? Sheeba, don’t go there. Stay with me.”
She made a funny face and stuck out her tongue. “You baby me too much. I’m a big girl.”
I stumbled against her and made her spill the stew. “Please don’t go there.”
