The Not Yet

by Moira Crone

“No respect?” Camille asked.

  “My brother hardly in the ground. You shut up. You sit down,” this Domino said.

  “They did nothing to you.”

  Serio’s rage rising. “What is your Lownat problem? We came here, giving you our business—?” Serio pulled away from Captain Domino’s grip, but in response, the bully threw him on the top of a table. “Take him, Charles,” he said to his big-toothed deputy, then turned to Camille: “I told Landry you were a whore.”

  She was shaking by then. Everyone looking on.

  I reached to strike him. He grabbed my wrist, and said, “Attempted assault on an officer.” They got me into cuffs.

  Serio ran, which made him guilty of “resisting arrest.” They rounded him up, marched us both off.

  *

  “Well I couldn’t live if I didn’t know my kin,” the amazingly ugly fellow, whose name tag read Lou Rae Ducorney, STEWARD, was saying to me a few hours later. He ran the Port Gramercy Jail. “What you got is that pile of money. That’s all you got. And Captain Domino said something’s hanging on it. Claiming it. WELLFI has everybody by the short hairs. You don’t know that? You think they gonna let anybody rise when they got the keys to the kingdom?”

  Outside, fireworks of the festival, people walking by, laughing drinking, talking. Boom boom fireworks, and accordions.

  “Starving the enclaves. That’s their strategy. Control our currency, keep us embargoed, restrict our exports to Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, put up the Broad Walls, fuck up the Net, make sure we can’t hardly breed—tied our balls up with all this Procreation Act baling wire—”

  “Nothing’s wrong with my Trust, that’s a mistake,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t respond at all.

  “I heard all kinds a stories about them busting people’s Trusts. Get right up to the threshold, they slam the door,” he said. “But let’s say for argument, you get through the eye of the needle,” he said. “What you going to do then? Who you going to be?”

  I wouldn’t tell him. I knew it: what I’d promised, what I wanted.

  Ducorney looked as though he was lowering his snout to sniff something. He said, “You don’t answer because you don’t know who that is. Where you from? Just say and do what they say, say and do?”

  I still didn’t answer.

  He stared at me. I wasn’t going to say a word, answer him, fight with him. He saw it. Why wasn’t he leaving? I suppose it was possible he was thinking. But I doubted it. Finally, he raised his head up again. “One more thing,” he said.

  Silence from me.

  “I got a bet going. You the first Nyet I’ve seen in a good while. You get a lotta fakers out there, you know. Imposses galore. Epidemic of all kinda freaks. But I think, in this matter you settle our question. You spent time with Heirs, working in them big outdoor operas? Captain D. told me you a star.”

  I still didn’t answer, though it was hard.

  His long face breathing thickly, scent of his oniony supper. “You tell anybody I asked you this I will kill you.” He looked down to the far end of the hall. “You get T-pussy? Heir snatch? How does it work?”

  “What?” I asked, blushing.

  “I knew it,” he said. Then he hollered down the hall, “Sy, you gotta get in here.”

  Sy, slumped, bloodshot eyes, shuffled up. “What is it Lou Rae?”

  “Come on, he going to tell us how it works,” Steward slapped his thigh. “I knew they put out. But do you take that off? That proderm what ever it is? Don’t that kill them? Tell us. We got a bet.”

  “I’ll tell you,” I said, breaking my silence, “if you let me get to your screens. All about it—you have no idea.”

  He asked, “How they like it?”

  “Show me the screens first.”

  When they took me, leg irons, to a small room off the front office, and turned on their ancient, moldy Broad screen, in complete shame over my predicament, I tried to send another message—who know how long I’d be here?

  Dear Lazarus, Glorious H. R., Guardian, I hope this note finds you well and that you are back from Memphis? I am detained in Port Gramercy, but I want to make sure you know there is a lien on my Trust? Some claim? Any? Please communicate. Do you have any idea—

  I sent that before the connection fizzled.

  Later, I told them things I knew, not everything. Caps. What the Venus Gaists told me. Or Jeremy, who talked about these advances when he explained to me how much better it all was than the “functions” I would perform with the little tattooed girls he hired. I didn’t tell them what was better. I didn’t really know. In fact, when I finally was allowed to leave them and their endless, pornographic questions, I listened to the Fest outside—people talking in the streets, calling out to one another, string music, horns, accordions—and I wished they would tell me something. If they had any idea, which probably they didn’t, but what was it like if you had a real Nat girl and she loved you, if she could love you? In that ordinary, old way? How would it be if you kissed her and she kissed you back all you wanted because she wanted to and it would make her happy, and you too, and it wasn’t forbidden—I wondered about all that, though I believed I’d never know it.

  Sy came to my cell at dawn and said, “Listen, I didn’t appreciate all those fibs about T’s. The caps and the dials and the elixirs, the probes, but on the bet, I won. He paid up. And he didn’t like losing. Said you were cheap Nyet slime, Outliar in truth, I’m saying get out of town. They said to release you, and you had better get. Fair warning.”

  Steward called my name, butchering it, “DeLazarai you piece of DE-AX crap. Landry Domino’s widow’s here for you.”

  *

  She was standing outside at the bottom of the long front staircase of the jail, shading her eyes, the sun was rising behind the building, wearing a long dark blue dress with sleeves to the wrists. I saw the wetness under her raised arm, which engendered within me a terrible kind of yearning. A desire for her temperature, somehow.

  “Free man, you liar,” Ducorney shoved me hard going out. I stumbled for a few steps. He threw my jacket after me. Camille said, “Oh! Malc!” And at that second, I found my balance.

  “That Lou Rae—psychopath. Your friend shouldn’t have ever run. Really pissed Ronny off. They hate Chef Menteurians on principle around here. I sprung you. Ronny’d be here with me to chaperone if he’d woke up yet. He’s still sleeping off the Fest. Why I came so early.”

  I asked, “Can I talk to Serio before I leave?”

  “You better get out,” she said. “You can’t wait for visiting hours, that is for sure. I made a deal—”

  Her hair was up, and falling down as well, the darker roots showing at the neck, I noticed. “Last night at the festival. We made a truce. He said you could go. I can talk to him.” She paused, looked down. “Sort of. And that’s the mess. He likes me.”

  “What’s the mess?” We were moving at a quick pace across the asphalt square to the gates. The town was quiet and littered after the Fest.

  “I don’t own my Procreation Certificate. It goes back to Landry’s family and that means, to Ronny, the only living brother. If I had my whole dowry, I might have bought it outright, instead of the Dominos getting it. He doesn’t have any sons. He’s going to use sex selection this time he says, even though it costs a year’s wages, you have to go to the lab in Upper Houston in the U.A. Planning to start trying on me soon, went to see my doctor without asking me.” She looked as if she were going to cry. “Landry said he wasn’t ready for a child. He wanted to get going on his welding, have more money. I said I was twenty-two and when was he going—” She broke off. “If I had got pregnant, this would be different.”

  A man in a t-shirt with a very graphic Free Wheel on it who was walking across the street, waved to her. She picked up her pace.

  “What is Ronny going to do?”

  “I have to be the mother of the child. He will have to make me his second wife to do this. He could cut me some slack, but he’s not—”

 
“What about his wife?”

  “She will just have to put up with it for the line. You never heard of Levirite marriage?”

  “What happens if you marry somebody else?”

  “Who is going to marry me?” she asked. “I have to get Ronny’s permission. And anyway, I can’t have anybody else’s child, just one in Landry’s line.”

  I was ignorant of this enclave arcana.

  I asked, “Are children the only reason to marry? Don’t people say it’s love?”

  She looked around—my question didn’t seem serious to her, or it was too serious. “Called me a whore like that in a public place. That’s so people turn against me. So if he marries me nobody thinks it’s unfair. I never was any kind of—you of all people should know—I am sorry you got pulled into this. And that Serio, he wasn’t—”

  “What’s Levirite?”

  “You heard of the Bible I guess.”

  “Lydia had a copy of it,” he said.

  “Well there you go. It’s Lydia?” She rolled her eyes. “I knew—”

  “No, no,” I said. But it was true, wasn’t it? Or it was going to be true. At that fact, I was desolate, suddenly.

  It was a cool, and sloppy day—threatening rain, or, possibly, worse—for October. Debris strewn around—beads, hand bills. Still dressed from last night, two girls in scant skirts stumbled by as if on their way to another party.

  “Why did you claim Ariel? Why did you say—? Why did you—”

  Stalk off? Tell Greenmore what for? Take the blame?

  I nodded.

  She stopped walking, looked at me. “You don’t have the slightest, do you?” She did that thing where she tightened her lips, bit down.

  I asked, “Why don’t you leave this place?”

  “I have thought about it. But you know what Closed Enclave means, don’t you? I could never come back, never see my kin.”

  Under the thick cloud cover the dismal little town seemed even more forlorn.

  “You still love all your rules.”

  “No.” Her pupils got big. She was mad. “No. Okay. I don’t like these. These are horrible rules. I hate Ronny. Landry hated him too. He’s a bully. I hate him. He doesn’t just want a baby from me. He wants to run my life, every aspect—”

  “What will you do?”

  “Like you care?”

  “Of course I do.” At that moment, I was willing to—I didn’t mind what Lazarus, what anyone, Lydia—I’d throw all that away if it could save her. At the same time, I knew what a fool I was. I said, almost inaudibly, “I do care.”

  She shook her head, as if to erase my words. “Well there is nothing to be done, now.” And she put her two hands around my neck, and kissed me softly on my mouth, warm.

  “Goodbye, Malcolm,” she said, pulling away, shaking her head again, slower. “Sorry it has to be like this. Sorry.” She handed me forty Port Gram Crowns. “The jail guards took all your money, didn’t they? Here. You gonna be an Heir. Get what you wanted. Good for you. You spent every hour of your life on it, didn’t you? So far? Come on—”

  “I am sorry, about Landry,” I said. “And my part—”

  “Go on Malc,” she said. Then she took me by the neck, again, kissed me another time. A shock went through my torso, down, bright, fast, tense. Lightening.

  I couldn’t let go of her. I never would. I knew it was wrong, but inside, I never would.

  *

  I had a long walk after I said goodbye to Camille.

  The money she gave me worked in one of the metered Broad Screens at the corner near Gramercy docks after I left the gates of the city. I wrote Klamath, to tell him about his son.

  “Heard from a lawyer already. And a bail bondsman,” was his reply.

  “We were pulled into a feud this woman is having.”

  “Well some looker I hope for this trouble. Lawyer has standing in the Free Wheel Syndicate Circuit. Said show up at the arraignment. You should be there too that would really help. Nine days from now, ten a.m. Serio says use his boat—he heard you were released.”

  The screen went blank. I put in a few more of Camille’s coins, but the machine had jammed.

  *

  I went for hours, seeing only salt water and bare shore. I needed water, started to feel faint. I found a trough at the marina where they cleaned fish, drank from the spigot like a dog. Despondent, I went back to the deck of Serio’s boat, and planned to sleep until the holiday was over, then try to persuade someone to go up to the jail, see Serio, ask for the key—

  When I woke, I heard a voice from above, two shadows pointing at me from the dock. “GET YOU GUN, SEE HIM DOWN THERE! Liar here for our women. Don’t let him get away with it.”

  A loud “brraack” and then another.

  Then, I heard a new voice, a melodious close-at-hand voice at the rear of my deck, and then from above, another, “I can hit him from here—”

  “Get down—what, with your rotten aim? Hiding in that little deck—see?”

  BRAACK, BRAACK, over my head, and then, “I GOT YOU COVERED,” and the boom.

  Part Three:

  The Gate in the Wall

  I

  1:50 PM October 13, 2121

  Somewhere North on the Mississippi I-Road

  Far East De-Accessioned Gulf Territory, U.A. Protectorate

  The two who had captured me took the sack off my head, so I had the benefit of my senses again. I was on the floor of a cave with high ceilings. The walls were jagged and moist. Mosses like carpet and some like tiny ferns were growing up the sides. I could see them close at hand, by my hurting head. On the wall about twenty-five feet away, a very old moving flat was projected—hardly more than Vee’s shadow plays. A group of raw, dirty, scrawny figures sitting on a thin wide mat were watching the film, in which a good-looking man by the antique standards was taking a shower with his boxy suit on. A very skinny woman—almost like an Heir in her elegant emaciation, her bird-like neck, was looking on, asking the handsome shadow of a man why he was soaping and soaking his suit and still wearing it. There was laughter. I saw that the watchers’ skins were wrinkled, rippled, grooved—stretched over sticks of bones. They laughed and fell back and sat up and laughed again, in unison, chained to one another. Occasionally one would look away, at what was going on in the rest of the cave, and his large toothy blue smile would, for a second, fade, until one of his cohorts or one of the guards—who were also the same, emaciated, scribbled with veins, sheathed in rags—would come toward the one out of line and slap him back to look at the ridiculous handsome man showering in his clothes. I saw that they did not blink. A shackled flock of flayed Heirs. I shuddered.

  “We saw you with that hideous Shade in Imposse disguise. You had him, bravo! But then you had mercy,” the shorter of the two who had captured me said. Both were gristled Yeareds, about fifty or sixty years old, burly fellows who smelled bad. The one who spoke was stocky, the other, tall, skinny with a pot belly that flapped over his belt.

  “That’s how we know who you are,” the shorter one went on. “On account of the mercy you showed.”

  “Just like his pictures,” the tall one said. “Even the lip.”

  “I never believed the lip,” the shorter one, whose hair was white-silver, with bangs. “And see, it isn’t quite.”

  “That’s what it looks like. That’s what it says. Shallow.”

  “Who are you?” I finally asked. “What what looks like?”

  “We ask the questions. Why was that one driving the transport? We know it was your transport. Why did you come into our territory? Were you looking for us? Someone by any chance send you this way?” the taller asked, his heavy wattle jiggling.

  “Who are you?” I asked again. “What someone?”

  “He’s pretending he’s surprised we exist,” Silver-hair said.

  Then a stocky woman came in, with hair shorter than that of either man, a denim shirt and black pants, her skin dark. “Well, Salamander,” she said. “At last. ”


  “Who?”

  “You,” she said. She turned to those I’d been talking to, her underlings. “Did you do this to his ear? Did you think that was a good idea? Intelligent? Did you hit him on the head?”

  “Only the hood on his head. Just the hood—we had to steal the car,” Silver said.

  The other added, “Ear was like that.”

  “Look at him, so unworn, so young,” she said, her hand coming to my cheek. “And oh, he’s hot.”

  I winced when she touched. I had been in pain, since I woke. Dry heat, a few small fires underneath, burning into the blanket.

  “Like his pictures,” Silver said. “Like his pictures.”

  “What about the top of his head?” the tall one with the wattle asked.

  “They say it’s tiny, take you all day to find it.”

  She glowered at them. “Shhh.” Then she asked me, “What is it? Do you think we are a myth?”

  “You should have seen him. One that was passing-down, a surly dandy mocked him, soon as Salamander took off, the filthy Shade, popped his body alarm.” Silver raised his arms, spread his fingers, to show how the WELLVAC copter had zeroed in upon Gepetto. They had been following me even then, but why?

  In the flat on the wall, at a distance, the skinny woman with a long neck and the man who washed in his suit were now on a representation of a boat, with a representation of bridges and building of old “Paris” passing by, in the background. I knew this because there was a facsimile of “Paris,” in one of the western Walled Urbs—river, cathedral, boats, islands, all of it. The chained figures watching it were rapt now, humming.

  The woman in charge continued, “A show like that, tickets to a deathbed. Pay a hundred million for ringside to a childbirth, like to see the woman’s parts open—didn’t think it possible, but they are getting worse.”

  “Who are they, watching that movie?” I asked.

  She said, “We take Bonesnake prisoners when we can.”

  “We use them for ransom,” Wattle said. Silver offered, “We flay them and keep them down, show them flats, pacify them—so they lose themselves.”

  “Did he do that to the Shade who was passing down?” the woman asked.