Paradox

by John Meaney

  Later, he lay on the floor, half sleeping, while she shared her bed with one of the neighbours who stopped, suddenly, as she asked him outright for money.

  “Understanding boyfriend you got,” said the man, tugging on his trews.

  Not me. Tom turned his face to the wall.

  He left when she went to the public washroom at the corridor’s end.

  “Look, officer.” Talking to an astymonia patrol, but it should be safe. No-one would be looking for Lord Corcorigan down here. “I just want a place to work, somewhere to clean up—”

  “And get a new paint-job, sir?”

  The other trooper laughed—I forgot about the face-paint—as they booked him for vagrancy.

  He spent overnight in a cell, ate three meals the next day, and finally was taken out to see a magistrate in the late evening. His head felt fuzzy, but he was thinking more clearly than he had for a while, and as he stood before the bench he felt almost grateful.

  The options were a three-tenday work detail or exile downstratum.

  No choice at all.

  It all flowed together.

  Cold and heat, light and dark. Brief fumblings with yellow-toothed women. Jars of fiery liquid passed round grudgingly.

  Always sleeping in the hours of brightness: the nights were dangerous. Without the drink, he would never have slept; but sometimes the migraines took the place of sleep, and kept him going.

  Sometimes, when he awoke, there would be low-denomination cred-slivers lying beside him, dropped by charitable passers-by.

  There was a period of lucidity. A scribe, astonished that Tom could even read, gave him brief employment as a clerk. But the other assistants, sensing Tom’s abilities, did their best to damage his reputation. When a small sum was missing at the end of the second tenday, it was obvious that the last person to join would be blamed.

  When he demanded his wages, the security guards came, and his tacware manifested itself as a sickening series of blurred red flashes while they beat him. The sound of his ribs breaking was a distant crunch.

  This time, his descent was not even conscious. He awoke beneath a ceiling hatch, paralysed with pain, and assumed they had thrown him down.

  Had anyone asked him to recount how he survived, he could not have answered. He lost count of the number of times he came to in strange places, body aching with new injuries or with recurring damage which never quite healed.

  And the pain over his left eye sometimes blinded him.

  Dead girl. . .

  Once, he tried to calculate how long he had been wandering, and realized that whole chunks must be missing from his memory: his matted beard reached to his chest, entangled with his long, unwashed hair.

  None of it mattered.

  An old woman took him to her alcove, shared her booze—synthetic leth’aqua—and then her bed, but he could not satisfy her there so she kicked him out, cursing, and he walked out into a main tunnel, lay down in the middle of it, and fell asleep.

  Broken ground, smoke-blackened ceiling. Shambles of human figures, huddled here and there: as derelict as he was.

  Jerking awake.

  A strange woman was sleeping-—grey/black-toothed mouth open, snoring—with her head in his lap. Off to one side a wizened man— but how old? older than me?—dropped his trews and defecated on the smashed flagstones.

  Disgusted, he pushed the protesting woman off him and stumbled towards the nearest hatch. No-one followed him.

  They never did.

  Screeches of torn metal, but finally it opened.

  Another trip down.

  He was tracing patterns with his fingertip on green-yellow rock, sitting cross-legged. Someone tossed him a cred-sliver and he stared at it, wondering what it was for.

  Not bad.

  This one opened smoothly. Descending, it was hard to keep his balance, but he liked the smooth feel of the rail beneath his grime-encrusted hand.

  When it closed above him, it snicked softly into place.

  Cleaner than he had expected, this tunnel. He found a dark alcove and slept.

  Smooth black floor, polished to a shine. He passed a booth selling trinkets he could not focus on.

  Something odd . . .

  Pale and dark blues mixed in the next section, where the corridor curved and widened, and the smell of baking pies made his mouth ache, and he ran his hand—long, blackened nails, thick coating of grime—across his weakly protruding stomach. Where his sleeve was torn, he could see that his upper arm was white, emaciated.

  Wavering . . .

  Green/gold; orange/black.

  Hard to focus oh the tricon—why do they make them so small?—but eventually he deduced its meaning: Snake . . . no, Tiger-Year, Shyed’mday, fortieth of Jyu. Tiger 280. That meant . . .

  Walk.

  Halting steps, shuffling.

  Leaving the café behind, then a jeweller’s, he continued because he could think of nothing else to do.

  Trying to work out what the date meant.

  Corridor opening out, becoming a green-paved boulevard beneath titanic natural caverns. The path curved, but he continued in a straight line, descending—painfully slowly—the arced shallow steps.

  With quivering hand, he pulled open his tunic: saw the blackened patches of grime, the sickly white skin, the big purple-red carbuncles growing across his torso. His whiskers covered his mouth, and smelled of old food, booze and vomit.

  Lapping, very gently . . .

  There were children laughing at the sea’s edge.

  Tiger-Year.

  He had been wandering for over six hundred days.

  Cathedral-high caverns, with their vast natural pillars, receding for ever across the calm, flat-surfaced sea. Glowfungus sparked pyrites highlights from the rock, the gentle waves; the air smelled fresh and clean.

  Slowly, Tom turned his head, looking along the shore-hugging boulevard, then back the way he came. He knew what the strange thing was, but it took a while for the concept to coalesce in his mind, to achieve reality.

  No floor hatches.

  He had been wandering for two Standard Years, and he was at the edge of an underground sea which washed amid an endless forest of pillars, and he could descend no farther, for he had achieved the lowest stratum.

  A child’s giggle carried through the still air.

  Slowly—incredibly slowly—he lowered himself to the smooth floor and sat there, watching the placid waves, the cool, clean waters, for an endless time.

  Then, softly, he began to weep.

  ~ * ~

  59

  NULAPEIRON AD 3416

  Children singing.

  There was a clean white pavilion, standing out among the cool waves, joined by a slender footbridge to the shore. The pure, crystalline voices came from there.

  Tom pulled himself upright on the smooth stone. Had he actually slept without dreaming?

  “Hello.” Child’s voice.

  “Er…” Tom’s throat could only produce a croak.

  The little girl looked at him wide-eyed. “Hello hello hello,” she said, then popped her thumb in her mouth.

  Don’t be frightened—

  But she backed off as he reached out his grime-blackened hand. Then she turned and scampered away, pigtails bouncing as she went.

  Warm pies.

  It was the liquid, mouth-tingling aroma that drew him back to the row of shops along the dark blue, polished corridor. The café was close to the curve where the corridor opened out, and had a nice view of the sea and the boulevard which ran along its shore.

  What am I going to do?

  Swaying, he stood there, looking at the shelves of pies and cakes in the clear display cases.

  A big, chunky woman with cropped white hair and broad forearms carried a tray out from the rear of the café. She set the pie-laden tray down on a marble-topped table, then stopped, hands on hips, and stared at Tom.

  “We’re not open yet.”

  “I’m—” Croak. Have to do better
than that. “Looking for ... a job.”

  Gaze swept across his blackened, tattered clothes. Small nose wrinkled. Could she smell him from that far away?

  “I can program”-—forcing himself not to stoop, to stand upright— “a procblock.”

  Upturned grin. “Not many of those around here.”

  She turned away, then began loading display-case shelves from her tray.

  Tom could only stand watching, swaying but unable to stop, not knowing what else to do.

  Over her brawny shoulder: “Not many charity cases here, either.”

  “I really”—closing his eyes, as his balance began to go—”need a job.”

  Then her big hands were on his shoulders, grabbing him.

  No …

  “Sit down.”

  Forcing him onto a bench-seat.

  “I . . .”

  Pushing a pie into his hand: warm and golden, pastry flaking beneath his touch. “Consider this an advance against salary.”

  Flavour bursting in his mouth.

  Closed eyes, savouring the moment.

  “That’s enough,” she said, when he had eaten a third of it.

  He set the remaining pie down on the table, and thought he was going to cry. Instead, he painfully, arm trembling, pushed himself up to a standing position and began to shuffle out of the café.

  “No, no.” Wrapping the pie in a cloth, she put it in his hand. “I meant, don’t eat it too quickly.”

  It was true, he shouldn’t: already his stomach was grumbling, with twinges of pain, unused to good food.

  A grey-haired man in a long, elegant surcoat paused at the café’s entrance, then continued walking.

  “That’s all right,” muttered the woman. “Don’t like having you in here, anyway.”

  Oh, Fate.

  “I’m not a thief.”

  “What?” She looked at the tattered flap of his abbreviated left sleeve. “Oh. Good. All right, come on. Bring the pie with you.”

  She led him through the rear of the café, past the entrance to the small, clean kitchen, to a workroom. A short passage, curtained off at both ends, led to the washing facilities.

  “I’m Vosie,” she said.

  “Tom.”

  “Well, Tom. Take as long as you like.”

  He lost count of the number of times he scrubbed, from face down to dirty feet, as pale-blue jets of recycling cleanser washed over him.

  At some point Vosie called out to him above the shower’s roar; when he looked out, his stinking clothes had gone, and there were a straight razor and a white towel lying on a stool.

  Hair and beard were one long, tangled mess, now sopping wet. He massaged cleanser into the knotted mass, but those knots seemed solid.

  There was clean-gel, but Tom was filthy: the long-unused cycle-shower, once used to hose down work drones, was what he needed and deserved.

  Washed and rinsed again, while the grime was sluiced away into the drains. Carbuncles and cuts were sore when he scrubbed, but he cleaned them out regardless.

  Then, feeling wobbly on his pitifully thin, white legs, he reached past the curtain and found the razor; before—two years ago—he had used only depil-gel.

  Harder work than he thought.

  The old-fashioned vibroblade was sharp, and he hacked off great chunks of beard, trimming it first, then scraping it away in patches. Bathing in cleanser. But the hair atop his head was equally problematic, so he continued the shaving process, starting at the temples and cutting back. A huge wet mass of hair grew in one corner of the cubicle.

  When he looked around the curtain again, there were a disposable bag and nail clippers and, farther along the wall, clean trews and tunic hanging from a hook. Sandals on the floor.

  He waved the shower jets off and wrestled with the hair, getting it into the bag. His nails were still grimy; he worked on his toes sitting down on the cubicle’s wet floor. He thought he was going to have to ask for help to do his fingernails—more used to autocutter or shed-ding-fluid—but he finally worked out how he could jam the manual clippers in his left armpit and operate them with his stump.

  His flesh tingled painfully as he showered for the final time, using the razor again to scrape away at the last stubble patches until his scalp and chin were smooth-skinned and clean.

  Finally, he slapped clean-gel on his chest; it spread across his skin, cleansing, disinfecting his sores. After a short while, it sloughed off, flowing back into its container, leaving a faint woody scent.

  Then Tom dressed in the clean, simple clothes and headed for the kitchen.

  A beefy young man was slicing vat-grown vegetables with a lattice blade. Silently, he indicated the dirty dishes stacked by the tiny clean-beam; Tom nodded and started work.

  Vosie had a small office. After thumbprint-locking the cabinets, she said Tom could sleep there until he found some place better.

  His bedroll was made up of discarded towels: tattered but clean.

  The first tenday passed like a warm dream. He worked every day in the kitchen, alongside the burly young man whose name, it turned out, was Gérard. He was Vosie’s nephew, and amiable enough once he had accepted Tom’s presence.

  If Tom still dreamed of the other Gérard, he no longer remembered it on waking.

  On the fourth day Vosie let him serve in the shop, when it was quiet. He fetched a cheese-and-herb omelette for the grey-haired man who had refused to come in on that first morning, confronting the filthy, stinking apparition which had been Tom.

  No hint of recognition in the man’s eyes.

  Tom kept his face shaved clean, as clean stubble developed on his scalp. Every evening, work over, he took a long, slow walk along the edge of the placid sea. The boulevard was kept constantly spotless by civic cleaning-crews. Everyone he passed nodded a greeting or said hello.

  Morning and evening he ate well in the kitchen. On the ninth day, Vosie handed over his wages, including a one-off “welcoming bonus” which he tried to give back; Vosie made him keep it.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “is your day off.”

  A community noticeboard listed available dwellings. In a small, white-painted corridor, a lean-faced man accepted Tom’s advance payment and showed him the dwelling-alcove. The washroom was communal, shared among a dozen small chambers, but everything was clean and well-kept.

  His own room. Bed, table, stool. Shelf: nothing yet to put on it.

  Late evening. He took a tunnel at right angles to the boulevard, exploring. Holoflames danced along the walls. Laughter drifted out of membrane-fronted chambers: taverns.

  He stopped in the doorway of the nearest. The ganja scents were subdued. Behind the bar, crystal flasks of all colours beckoned.

  Tom felt the dragon stirring inside, but forced it back into its shadowed cave. He turned around and walked back home.

  “Can I keep these?”

  Gérard shrugged. “If you like.”

  The old trews had been discarded, lying among the cupboard’s cleaning-rags; wearable, though not really presentable.

  “Thanks. Can I help you with that?”

  That night, Tom washed the trews in the communal facilities near his chamber.

  He woke up very early next morning, as always. Putting on the old trews and nothing else, he padded on bare feet out of his dwelling— careful not to waken the still-sleeping families—and headed for the shore.

  Even the mildest stretching was painful. How could his muscles be so weak and yet so tight? He paid special attention to his calves and Achilles tendons.

  Slowly—very slowly—he began to jog.

  That first morning, he managed only a few minutes along the sea’s edge before he had to stop and walk, chest wheezing, back to his chamber.

  But he tried again the next day, and the next, bare feet slapping against the gold-flecked stone as he jogged—later, ran—a little farther each time out.

  On the fourth tenday, having saved sufficient, he purchased a pair of good trews. Two tendays lat
er, a cheap pair of training-slippers.