by Lou Anders
There's a fence and a gate too. In the gatehouse there is a person. Where there is a person, there is an easy way in.
The Girl Hero says she is selling virtual real estate. She shows the guard her mirror and, as he peers at this strange kind of identification, she knocks him unconscious. He crumples without a sound.
Close by two monsters in the forest clash foreheads in a dominance fight, and the air is split by a crack like thunder. If the animals assaulted the shield they could get through it easily, but the shock of sudden pain has always prevented them from making this discovery. As they stumble about, stunned but undaunted by mortal combat, they avoid its gossamer shimmer at all costs. The Girl Hero shakes her head at them.
As she frisks pockets for codes, keys, cards, or whatever the Girl Hero is overcome by a sense of déjà vu. It is one of those nasty moments where, certain this is not a memory, because she has never been here before, she understands it is an omen. She hesitates and feels the man's still-beating heart under her hand. Her hand forms the shape of a crane's bill and delivers a rapid, extreme strike. It does not break the bone, but it doesn't have to. The shock is sufficient.
She could not have let him live, of course. He would have woken up sooner or later, and she does not know how long she has to be here. She feels mildly surprised at her action, and faintly sad that this is all she feels. Her finger stings her. She looks down and finds she has broken a nail. She spends a moment fixing it with her little kit of glue and tape, packed neatly into a thimble. She has the shakes, however, and her mend does not hold. She tapes the thimble onto the end of her finger instead. It is made of gold and once was the barque of a fairy queen, or so she likes to imagine. The Girl Hero wonders if it will defeat the power of her strike, but she doesn't take it off.
The Girl Hero locates the keys to the inner house and gets into the armored golf cart, which takes her through the fence territory of the dogs. It has sealed sides. The dogs run and bark alongside the cart. The whine of the electric motor is inappropriately cheerful. Insects whirl and scream around in the light, involuntary and designed carriers of diseases to change the mind—they are indistinguishable from the real things. The sun crests over the forest's edge, and a flight of red-winged insectivores takes to the air, flocking in the rising heat in a way that makes the air look syrupy. The Girl Hero takes out her mirror and adjusts her lip gloss. She thinks about what to order from the takeaway and decides she will have a Chinese.
At the end of the golf cart's route she is let into the house by machines who do not care that she is here to kill the master. Like so many of his kind he has run short of henchpersons whose instincts might favor him and now relies on mechanicals. Not popular, thinks the Girl Hero, and frowns a tiny frown to go with her tiny pang of sorrow. On the polished wood of the hallway her boots make hollow sounds.
There is a cook, a person doing some menial tasks, and a man who throws carcasses to the dogs. None of them are interested in stopping her when they see her coming, so the Girl Hero wearily locks them into the storeroom. She makes a note to herself on her mobile, so she does not forget to call help for them once she has left the scene. Lying on the kitchen counter is a plate of cream cakes, freshly defrosted, their chocolate iced tops coated in condensation sweat. She would like to eat them all. With the ease of a lifetime of denial, she barely registers the desire.
The bad man is in the living room, enjoying a glass of juice. His heavy frame is silhouetted against the rapacious sky as he looks out over a balcony towards the thin blue veil of the Sphere and beyond. Whatever he has loaded, it would naturally include a lot of processors to bypass any fear he might feel at her arrival. She feels that this is possibly a meeting of equals, her legally enhanced mind against his self-made one. There is a kind of honor code to be observed.
The Girl Hero puts her handbag on the table. He turns around at the small sound. His eyes begin to measure the distance to the door, but they falter halfway. He has recognized her and that an attempt to escape will be futile. She watches him relax as resignation takes the place of fear in his look. Perhaps it is genuine, but no reaction could be taken at face value in the circumstances. They are already too far along the road of combat.
“Would you like a drink?” he asks. He is wearing some kind of Japanese robe and looks like he has led a full life, she thinks. His short legs are planted firmly. He has no intention of running. Perhaps he will not put up a fight. Her stomach rumbles and she feels a slight pain there. She shakes her head—no. She can't do anything distracting to her, even if she thinks it would be safe—and for some reason she does feel safe now.
He is a long way across the room. She starts to walk.
“Do you know why you are here?”
She assumes he means does she know what he has done. She's not really interested. She shakes her head.
“Do you know why you are?”
The Girl Hero hesitates. He has deployed the Defense of Existential Crisis and she should ignore it boldly, defeat it with a witty and humorous line, but recently she hasn't thought of any of these. She only thinks of them later, long after the person who should have been rebuked is dead. It is her biggest weakness. She has read books of aphorisms, but A lot of knowledge fits an empty head seems inappropriate and is the only thing that comes to mind.
“I am a poet,” he says.
It seems unlikely, she thinks. Why would anyone want to kill a poet? But, then again, why not? “Was your verse offensive?” she asks. Why did she engage? The only sensible thing to do is to break his neck and leave. What is she talking for? She adds quickly, “It isn't important. You are on the list.”
“Do you know your masters and their ideas, Girl?” he asks, backing away rapidly as she advances with a firm, librarian's tread. His voice gets a bit higher, but it remains steady. “Do you know why you don't want to know?”
“It's not my place,” she says, and unaccountably finds she has stopped walking. She does know why. She has chosen not to know.
There are two sides to this war of memes: the side of the Directive, which advocates managed and secure social design for the safety and well-being of all, and the side of the Cartomancers, which wants anarchy at any cost, a free market without limits. Both of them have to contend with the Wild in which Mappaware and Mappacode have become attached to the genetic strands not only of their original carriers, the viruses, but also of bacteria. There is no doubt it will soon spread (if it hasn't already) into the DNA of larger species. The Girl Hero never had gotten her head quite around the science or the politics of it. It's not a Hero's business to do all the thinking about the rights and wrongs. Her remit is much smaller. Justice for the wrongdoer and safety for the calm world of Perky Waitresses, Secretaries, and peach pie. And whiskery skittery rats.
The Bad Man takes a nervous sip of juice. The scream and murder of the jungle increases as the full circle of the sun appears clear of the trees. What a dreadful place, thinks the Girl Hero. She realizes she has reached a kind of stalemate but doesn't understand why she can't break it. She watches the Bad Man drink and set down his glass carefully on a coaster on a nice, smooth table.
“What's your name?”
She didn't expect this question even though an effort to become more intimate with an attacker who is more powerful is an obvious tactic. She opens her mouth, determined to answer, but nothing comes out. She looks to the inside of her wrist. She shouldn't tell him, so she keeps her mouth shut. “Rebecca” rings no bells for her. It could be a barcode for all it means. Her stomach starts to gnaw at her.
“I'm Khalid,” he says, and nods with a faint, social smile. He glances at her wrist, and a moment of pity firms his lips.
A vicious streak of envy cuts across her mouth like the taste of lemon. Suddenly she wants the reassurance of the mirror, that tonight is not the night, but she left her bag on the table. It gets in the way and drags her arm when she has to punch.
“Wouldn't you like to understand what happened to you?”
>
“What is this, exam night?” She is determined not to be distracted by flimsy philosophizing. She doesn't care about the answers to his tiresome inquiries, but for some reason she thinks about the books, snickering behind her back. She wants to go home, get duck in plum sauce, get a shower, give her mother a cup of tea, and go to bed. In the morning she has work again because it is still three days until the weekend. Besides, the answer to his question is surely obvious. She says it without knowing she's going to until she starts, “I caught a bad purge. That's all. No big. Look.” She flashes her wrist at him.
“Everything in the world and the Wild is written, Rebecca, just like your name,” he says. He keeps a close watch on her, and she on him, in case he runs away, in case she doesn't.
Damn, she sees he has reached the wall. His free hand darts with the speed of desperation towards a control hidden there. He fumbles. She darts across the gap, jumps and kicks. Her skirt rips. Her boots are too tight. She knocks him aside but lands on her ass. Some kind of alarm is sounding like a bleating goat. Angry with herself she glares at him.
“The Sphere control,” he says with satisfaction. “In a minute it will vanish and the Wild will come in.” His face is pasty under its smooth olive plumpness, but triumphant.
She sees clearly that a lot now stands between her and the evening she had planned. She looks out, to where her car is hidden, beyond the cleared land. One minute? “But my mirror says you're not the one,” she tells him firmly. Suddenly her belief in the mirror is wavering.
She looks into the eyes of the bad man. He looks back at her, without attempting to move. She says, “If you reset the device I will let you live.” She tells herself she does not mean it. She hasn't made a mistake. She wouldn't betray the contract. A Hero would do what it takes to save the world.
“I think you will not,” says the bad man, becoming amused.
“Don't just lie there,” she says, lying there.
“Why not?” he asks. “I can see up your skirt from here. Nice underwear.”
“I mean it,” she says, meaning it to her own surprise. “I will let you live.”
“Ah, thanks, “he says, “but if it wasn't you, it would just be some other Girl Hero coming along in a day or two, and I've done my time. There's nothing left I want to do I haven't done, and I'm not much for repeats. The Directive has no real defense against the Cartomancy, and neither have a chance against the Wild, not in the end. The life of ideas is already a literal thing. We used to transmit them inadequately with words, and soon they will transmit themselves through nature, through biology, in ways that bypass what small shred of choice may ever have existed. So, I think I'll just stay here, if it's all the same to you. It's a bit more satisfying if you die along with me than if you get to escape, and I wish I was a bit different but I was free of the Map all my life and I have to bow to my taste for justice in my own way. I hope you can understand that.”
“But I want to live!” the Girl Hero says.
“I don't think so,” Khalid observes. His voice is mild. “I knew when you walked in and hesitated that you were the one.”
The bleat alarm goes off. Without it the mindless fury beyond the Sphere seems twice as loud. The Girl Hero leaps to her feet and tries the device by the window. She cannot make it work. The blue tissue of force begins to fade. The blazing ruddy glare of beyond starts to color it a deep purple. The Girl Hero thinks about the cakes on the counter, the innocent dogs, the people in the storeroom, her mother.
She glares down at him. “Why didn't they stop the Wild a long time ago?”
He shrugs. She sees that he does not know. “The day it was discovered there was a faster way to change people's minds than simply by talk or the gun, then it was already decided. If you were hoping for a final insight into human nature…” He trails off and looks distracted as the color of the room changes from a soft shadowy umber to bright yellow. The Sphere has gone.
The Girl Hero makes a dive and slides the length of the table. She picks up her handbag and takes out her mirror. She no longer has the gray, flat feeling of Heroism, and she wants to see if that has changed her face.
It has. The incipient wrinkles at the edges of her eyes and between her brows have gone. She is as smooth and pretty as she was the first day she took up office. On the other side of the mirror the pixie looks out towards the clear edge of the forest where it seems that a starving, boiling mass of vegetable and animal is slowly billowing towards them.
“Oh my,” says the mirror. “Look out! He's getting away.”
The Girl Hero feels a surge of desperation and anger quite unusual for her. She spins around just in time to catch sight of Khalid slithering through the narrow black gap of a secret doorway he has opened in the paneling. She is after him like a shot, but her muddy feet slip a little and she can't grab hold of him as she intended. She makes it through the gap anyway and runs through the narrow, wooden corridor after him, her skirt seam ripping a bit more up the thigh with every furious stride. How could she fall for a distraction? How could she have entertained the idea that he was telling the truth about never having acquired the Map? Just look at this ridiculous compound with its guards and gates and dogs and cook. Listen to him give his Villainous Speech. She and he are both products of Stock Narrative 101, however many upgrades and individual variations they may have acquired…and now her rage is like hell itself.
The corridor winds and slopes down. Khalid skids and loses a shoe. The escape chute opens to a broad decking with an escape car tethered to it, its air-bladder fully primed with helium. The engine ticks over, its rotors whir softly in the thick and humid air. Khalid is forced to pause, hand fighting his pocket for the key. The Girl Hero cocks her arm and throws the mirror in a dead flat spin. It strikes him on the back of the head and he falls to his knees. Around him the broken bright pieces scatter, fragments of sky.
“I want to see what's real!” she screams. “Why did you have to be a liar?” She is crying. This is impossible. She needs the mirror, and rushes up to him. She tries to pick up the pieces, but behind the glass all the circuitry is broken. There should be some word for what she feels when she looks at him, a word not like “fuchsia” or “madder” or “carmine” or “rose” or “sugar” or “candy.” It should be a word for rats turning and scuttling back with red eyes, teeth bared, tails like little ramrods. Maybe the word is “Rebecca.”
Khalid blinks at her with panic beginning to make him sweat. “What did you expect?” He has located the key.
The car door opens as a wave of warm air, full of thunder, ripples slowly across them. Rain starts to fall and there comes the screeching and shrilling of agony, the sputter of electrical things and burning fur as creatures test the weakening perimeter fence. Khalid snatches a mask from his pocket and wraps it across his face with his free hand as he scrabbles to his feet. He makes a lunge for the door. The Girl Hero watches him with the Rebecca feeling and jumps after. She makes the sill and he attempts to push her out backwards, but he's weak, a big soft geek type who's all brain and no brawn. She kicks him in the chest and slams the door after them.
“Take me with you,” she says. “They'll send other Heroes. You need me.”
He looks up from the floor and croaks, “I did okay so far…”
“You were dead when I walked in the door. And if you say no, you still are,” the Girl Hero assures him, picking him up by the shirtfront and hauling him to the passenger seat of the little craft. “Shit,” she says, safe, for now. “What about your people? Can't leave them…”
“Have to leave them,” he gasps, still winded. “No time.”
No Hero would ever leave them.
Khalid slams a hand to the controls, and the car begins to lift off. “Anyway, why should you care? Killed enough for a lifetime….”
She opens her mouth to protest, but the breath she took doesn't go anywhere, just leaves her inflated. As she delays the aircar rises smoothly into the sky above the treetops. From the windshiel
d she can see the dogs running back and forth in their prison, barking.
“You should let them out,” she said, sitting down slowly in the pilot's seat. “It's cruel to keep dogs that way.” They fly for a time in silence, avoiding the Directive Patrols but with no other plan.
“Can you ever get rid of it?” Rebecca asks in a quiet voice. “Mappaware? Ever?”
“You can tell it not to work,” Khalid says. “That's all.” He hands over a small black box shaped like a cigarette pack with a single button on it. “We use them a lot. When you get too much infestation, you go unstable. This clears it. Then you start again.”
Rebecca remembers him fumbling in his pockets. Zap. Not the door. Her. “You got me.”
Khalid nodded. “And me. Works in a range.”
Rebecca presses the button, over and over. Nothing happens. “Now what? Why aren't I different then?”
“That takes time,” he says, sighing wearily. “Lots of time. Have to grow, think, do things…take more code or not…left alone you'll change on your own.”
“Like in the old days.” She puts the box into her own pocket, which is almost too small. She wishes she had not forgotten her bag. For a moment she thinks about Chinese food and her home, all the stuffed animals in a row, her mother's scent…. “Where to?”
Khalid shrugs. “I wait until I pick up a beacon. Most likely spot is still over the Congo area somewhere. Just follow the river.”
“And then?”
“Set down, make new friends in the Cartomancy, carry on…. Write something, test it, purge it. Try to figure out how to create antimemes against the worst plagues…not much.”
Rebecca nods. It's not much, but it is enough.
One of the most exciting authors currently making a splash in the short story scene, Paolo Bacigalupi recently took the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for his novelette “The Calorie Man.” I'm indebted to Gordon Van Gelder for introducing me to Paolo, who proved to be as wonderful a person as he is a wordsmith, and to Paolo himself for agreeing to constrict his talent into this short tale so that he could fit into an already bloated book. Not always for the squeamish, Paolo often shows us near futures that are as convincing as they are unsettling. The following tale is no exception.
