The voice was a conversation at another table. Or was it in her own head? She wasn't sure.
Maybe you should eat your food,” said Jesus. She had ordered the breakfast sushi platter, thinking it would be good for her. She was bored without Fatima, who was sleeping late in the apartment due to headaches. She needed her, even though she doubted that Fatima felt the same way about her.
“It’s not important for me anymore to know if there really is a God in the skies, but it is important to know that there are marks in the soul, marks of God, archetypes. If you want more, you have to tell them...“
The voice ranted on, and she realized someone at the table beside her was tuned in with an artifex to an old Frederick Fargo Radio Hour broadcast, an interview with her father, Frans Dimitrievsky, catalogued and uploaded to the Augment.
“Wow, I’m not hungry suddenly,” said Ludmilla. Hearing her father had robbed her of the desire to eat.
“You're acting rather strange, Lulu,” said Antwine.
“Yeah. When was the last time you had your connections cleaned?” asked Jesus.
“I have a total synaptic cleanse every two weeks with Fiona Larue."
"What does she use?"
"Only the best. Ionized hydrogen metal oxide.” She thought that might have sounded pompous and had her belated self-awareness validated by Jesus’s sneer.
“It’s just. I feel bowled over by causality at the moment. Do you never get that way, Jesus?”
“Me? Do I look like someone who believes? My parents named me Jesus for a reason. I’m immune to that bullshit, Ludmilla. But if you could explain your feelings, maybe we can help. Has Fatima laid a hurt on your head? We need to make a trip, if that's the case. Travel is the greatest balm.”
“Don’t patronize me. That’s not the point at all.”
“Oh, don’t be such a tough bitch. You can relax around us. We’re not judging you. That’s why we’re your friends. You do remember friends, right? The Augment hasn’t gone that stale.”
“Everything is fine. I’m just a little perplexed by Chagnon’s sudden disappearance. It’s not like him, and now everything feels strange. He is such a uniquely placed person. Sometimes I feel like the whole network may hinge on the flimsiest mental activity.”
“It’s pretty robust, despite all the rumors, isn’t it? I mean I always feel very secure in my guided choices. Even when it leads to an awkward result. Like that time last year I was telling you about when I took a pass at an invite from Gordon Branwhole to host the annual Chicago Hot Taco Invitational to stay home and work on my plated corn salad palettes. Not as popular a dish, but they got rave reviews from the Food Hub.”
Yes, the self-uploaded variety, thought Ludmilla with a quick, prim-mouthed nod to Antwine. They habitually overlooked Jesus’s self-promotion, especially since it stemmed from his not-so-secret feeling of being unrecognized as a gourmand relative to where he thought he’d be by now. The food entertainment industry was so hard, with every wannabee chef from the Repho trade schools now competing for the same limited number of server spots in the upscale private restaurants as there had been twenty years ago. But the opportunities for the top chefs were practically limitless. Like every sector, the top producers were highly rewarded and the lower stratum kept just hanging on. Jesus approached his cooking as a hobby, keeping his underpaid teaching job in the Chicago charter school system while he sought fame, entering his creations into the open category of the summer contests in the Midwest. Ludmilla kept quiet. As one of the Repho’s young power brokers, with standing in the INN keys and an inherited spot on the governance boards, she sometimes felt estranged from her friends by her growing insights into the way their personal career arcs intersected with the needs of the Augment’s harmonization.
“Yes, it is. We shouldn’t fear a thing,” said Ludmilla. “Let’s take a boat ride and do something fun. Don’t you think, guys?”
“Just the thing,” said Antwine.
Jesus wanted to pay the bill, showing off his new paycard from the Evanston Unified Arts Program where he was an adjunct in the comparative cultures program. His area of expertise was the rise of the serial killer as a figure of horror in the blogging world of the early Internet. His paycard reflected the purple bar code of a temporary worker, but it was better than the ULW pinks, the basic wage stubs that he used to print out at the Atreid offices when Ludmilla had worked in Chicago. Still, she wished he didn’t feel the need to have to prove himself. It only added to her depressing sense of sinking into the mire on this endless morning. She picked up the bill on the Exe-Pad and dispatched it with a quick wave of her artifex.
They left the restaurant, joking and laughing in forced hilarity about the big, plastic door and the heavily moustached valet. At one time, in their early twenties, they had enjoyed the bizarre nature of the things they would come across at nightspots in the Chicago suburbs or on the zipbike rides run by the Ayn Rand Society out to farm stands and prisoner craft fairs in Joliet. But now, ten or so years later, there was a sense that they might be laughing at nothing, at the void -- not-so-young, young Americans in a weirdly stylish and self-possessed setting of decrepitude.
Outside, a ball of pale yellow light tried to break through the grey, cloud-covered sky. Blank-faced, drab pedestrians braved the traffic, walking down the sidewalks on their way to and from shifts in the CUA forensic labs and research facilities. Split was such a dull place during the day. The valet stepped out on the sidewalk, and a driverless portercab came to a silent stop. As they sped through the city streets on their way to the wharves of the old port, the crowds of people on their rounds, the backdrop of the ancient city, and the feeling that their old friendship was something out of the past combined to create a silence that none of them dared to break. Ludmilla whispered with Fatima on the artifex, holding it up to the side of her head for some privacy. She rarely remembered that feature, the cone of silence, but in this situation, with her new feeling of vulnerability to forces she did not quite understand, she made use of it. Jesus and Antwine were disappointing in their lack of distractions. But maybe it was her. The social discomfort was another sign that the Augment was losing efficacy. She wished Chagnon were around for some insight and the steady sense he always gave of control and strength.
“You need to come down to the waterfront. It’s not the same without you, Fatima.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to explain. Maybe we’re just getting older. I don’t know what to do with them. We’re going for a boat ride.”
“I’ll be free in the afternoon. I can’t skip the meeting with Redmond.”
“Hasn’t he called yet?”
“No, no. He’s probably still asleep. He doesn’t get up until noon most days.”
“Rough life.”
“He’s got a strange schedule. Some weeks he’s on day shift. But most of the time he’s on night shift.”
“Why?”
“He likes it. Most of the interesting fluxes happen at night. He’s gotten really good at spotting trends. Seat-of-the-pants kind of work. That’s what he likes. He’s not really a numbers cruncher.”
“Yes, but he’s ambitious. We like that. Poor Antwine got screwed on the deal with Sandelsky.”
“Redmon thinks Sandelsky made a mistake on that. There’s not much upside to it.”
“Well, he’s a creative flux spotter, not a metrics guy. You said so yourself. Yes, Sandelsky has been hit or miss since Samael left the chairmanship.”
“Twenty years ago?”
“That’s right. Twenty two.”
“You’re so lucky. Working with the head of the INN. What a place you are at now, Lulu.”
“Yes, but I’m worried. He’s disappeared. It’s not like him.”
“Go to Security. Let them know you’re anxious.”
“Unwarranted fear. Not good. Shows an unstable connection. You know what that would mean for me, Fatima. In my position it would be political suicide. My enemies wo
uld pounce on that.”
“You probably shouldn’t be discussing this over an artifex, Lulu.”
“You’re right. Boredom has led me to worse decision-making in the past. When will you be free?”
“Later. I’m loving your view. Just let me get Redmond out of the way and I’ll hook up with you and the boys.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.”
She felt better after that. Fatima was like a shot of mental clarity, which is why she needed her around always.
Ludmilla felt that human connections had been absent during her early childhood. The Repho’s Augment program had always been envisioned as an attempt to provide such a connection, universally and at all times, to build a personal link to the stream of consciousness of the species at the level of each unit of mental activity. This need for affiliation, considered a human right under the Democravian Federation, had been taken up by the Republican Homeland and written into law under the first structuring of the Repho's Universal Augment program. But it was still only truly possible when she was with a very few people. She could count them on the fingers of one hand, and now, after the disastrous meal at the Si SenIor and this ride so far, there might be even fewer she could count on for that same feeling. What was going wrong? The mental effort required to come up with an answer was beyond her. She looked around desperately. Jesus and Antwine were alternately staring passively out the windows at the passing view, plugged into music or the latest deadly pictorial series on Artflix.
When they got to the Split wharves, Ludmilla directed the driverbot, speaking into the mic in the dashboard, to the rear of the port’s brand new main terminal, bypassing the crowds lining up on the front of the building for the ferries across the Adriatic and down the Dalmatian coast as far as Brindisi and Tirana. She pressed the left palm with the INN identification number tattooed across the thenar eminence into the reader in the dashboard, and the gate swung open. They all piled out and walked the few steps across the macadam to the glass wall, which slid open and let them inside the VIP lounge. Potted ornamental palms and oak-panelled walls led their eyes to the bar area, a glass and steel fronted structure lit by low hanging neon fixtures to mimic the Las Vegas strip circa 2020.
“Nice,” said Jesus.
“How do they afford the uh, infrastructure projects?” asked Antwine.
“There’s a huge buildout here in reclamation, research and governance,” answered Ludmilla.
The real answers, three of them, were seated at the bar, pointedly ignoring their entrance. The Sunni princes, identifiable by their plain desert keffiyehs and the gold-braided agals, were speaking in Oxford accented English interspersed with rapid-fire, guttural Arabic. Ludmilla, who had studied classical Arabic for two years with a private tutor during her adolescent years in Geneva, understood only wathanni, or heathen.
The three Americans sat at the end of the bar. The bartender, a middle aged man who resembled Vittorio Luciano, the Italian director of the space opera series Indigo, took their orders without betraying a single flicker of emotion. This was the VIP lounge of the Old World, no chumminess, pure private thoughts and emotions on all sides of every transaction. Ludmilla suggested a half bottle of Spumanti to take the edge off the morning, and her friends agreed. But Jesus wanted an espresso also, and so they all had side cups of espresso along with the half bottle of Spumanti. Of course they would need the ham and cheese croissants that sat in their neat little rows fresh in the bakery display behind the Luciano look-alike. He meandered and kept himself busy getting things. The next hoverboat cruise out to the island of Vis and the temple of Marinja Zemlje was leaving in about forty minutes, so they didn’t have that much time, only enough to get settled in and have a ham and cheese croissant and a drink. But fortunately, Jesus and Antwine began to joke and drown out the conversation between the Sunni princes, which for Ludmilla was a welcome distraction from her own thoughts.
Jesus and Antwine were good sports, behaving excitedly as if they were setting off on a grand adventure. On the boat ride, they congregated at the bow while the Sunni princes stood at the stern watching behind them at the mainland and the view of their skyscrapers in the hills behind the remains of the old port sticking out of the water. There were complimentary bottled drinks made available by the bot steward from a rolling cart that traversed both the lower and upper decks. There were no other passengers. The Sunnis stayed mostly to themselves and flashed dazzling smiles getting on and off the gangplank.
The temples were stone enclosures on the hill with just the hint of a ritual past, including an almost intact amphitheater that faced out at circling terns. Flocks of feral sheep wandered in the remnants of the old olive groves. They watched the Arab princes on the beach pick up stones and toss them with strange sidearm motions that looked weirdly inefficient and sinister and caused their keffiyehs to flutter behind them, as if they were used to handling munitions rather than baseballs. The princes almost slipped and fell on the rocks, and the tide seemed to be coming in at them abruptly.
Ludmilla pressed them all forward, striving for a moment of intimacy, of something, anything really, rather than the dull, excruciatingly awkward efforts they all were making to come together in some meaningful way. They sat in the stone amphitheater. Jesus and Antwine tried to circumvent Ludmilla’s growing anxiety.
“No, it doesn’t mean anything. The fact that you’ve been feeling stressed is perfectly normal. Sometimes life is stressful,” said Jesus.
“I know, but I still feel like you all are not there for me. You’re missing in action,” said Ludmilla.
“What?” said Antwine, feigning shock.
“No, she’s being honest,” said Jesus, grabbing Antwine by the upper arm. “That’s good, you’re being honest. I mean if we can’t be honest with each other then what the fuck?”
“I hate when people say that,” said Antwine.
On the ride back to the wharves, in the distance, they could see the floating factory farms growing kholrabi, greens and salmon for export to the mainland European urban centers. One of the Sunni princes pointed out the irony to Ludmilla, who approached them in the stern of the boat on her roaming about, (she was sick and tired of not being curious about her surroundings), of people in the interior of the country who sometimes lacked greens because of the poor springs in the last two decades that had washed away the agricultural soils in the valleys out to sea. The reversal of the Gulf Stream had been foreseen by the Arab world’s great scholars, but their warnings had been ignored. Ludmilla disagreed that this was a major problem.
“You in the West have no regard for the details,” said the prince. His face was bloated from late nights and the good life. The Sunnis were famous for their lavish parties in the penthouses of Split, in their cascading heated pools.
“We may be overlooking some discrepancies, okay? So what? Do you have a problem with your own success? Do you have guilt?”
“The man who does not feel guilty is not truly alive to possibility.”
“Look, you can’t say that.”
“I can say that and I do say that,” said the prince. Ludmilla could see that this was a point of no compromise for both of them. She repeated his words and waited.
“I can say that and I do say that,” she said, spitting out the words as if sour.
The hovercraft made to dock, reversing the propulsion blasts and spinning them around so Ludmilla and the princes faced towards the dock. The only movement was a tall, thin man in a baseball cap who sighted at them through a laser scanner.
“They only do that if there’s a problem,” said the prince.
“It’s not a problem,” said Ludmilla. “They know where I am. I have my location chip on the artifex. I suppose it’s fine.”
“Well. someone needs to know where someone is. Otherwise, why the scanner, right? Look, you do have a point. Sometimes we can be stuck in guilt and not see a path forward. That’s the problem with us.”
“But look what you’ve accomplished
in Europe,” said Ludmilla, accommodatingly.
“We’ve built Europe,” said the prince. “And large parts of the subcontinent. We get along well with people. We are a tolerant race.”
“A tolerant race,” repeated Ludmilla, pressing forward with this new conversational gambit as far as it would go.
“Look, you and your friends. We’d love to have you tonight. There’s a small gathering in honor of Mullah Akhbar.”
“That sounds very nice. Mullah Akhbar has done great things with the metals exchange.”
“Yes, for him the metals are an entire cosmology.”
“And lucrative.”
“Oh, yes. Everything the Mullah touches has to be lucrative.”
Mullah Ahkbar was an interesting man with very private views on the rare metals and their place in the political economy that were only accessible to a few intimates, the Prince was suggesting. And so Ludmilla had heard. She didn’t remember where that information was coming from. Again, the Augment was less than stellar when you needed it. It was surely to do with bandwidth. But she accepted the prince’s invitation with relish. Jesus and Antwine would have to be dressed appropriately, but those were minor details. Samael would have been a good contact on that point, the appropriate dress, but maybe that would be a good chance to broach his absence with the security detail. When they got back to Split she would look into it.
They said goodbye, on good terms with the princes, and stood outside the terminal waiting for the bot valet to hail the cab. For the boys, Jesus and Antwine, the bot was a major point of amusement. He seemed somehow off to them, very archaic in the way he moved, stilted and not at all as life-like as the American bots coming out of the independent maker-space houses. Ludmilla found it easier now, being with them, the old shared humor was coming back to her. She got back on the artifex and arranged to meet Fatima at the Erringbeck Galleria, which was showing some of the work of the Swabian steam punk era.
She walked with Jesus and Antwine into the Marjdan. They went to the desk together to inquire about renting formal wear. Indeed, the hotel had an arrangement with the clothiers from the Milan line of Moda Uomo Billy Logos. Antwine opened up the catalog from a link on the Marjdan website on his artifex and both Jesus and Ludmilla looked at it with him. They liked the light kevlar fall suits with the shiny shoulders, but that was unfortunate, she felt. Ludmilla wasn’t going to insist on something appropriate for a banker’s wedding.
The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 12
