Body of Glass (40 page)

“Love is many things, Joseph. You can travel farther than Eretz Israel and still know only a little of love.” She smiles into his eyes, and he knows she is not offended or laughing at him, but tender. She is his friend. “Now the day begins when we find out whether we live or whether our blood runs again on the stones of the street.”

Joseph stands. “While we wait, I have a weapon I want to make for myself ― something I saw. But I need a good stout piece of wood.”

“You know that any scrap of wood in the ghetto, somebody burns to keep warm. Why not look by the river?”

“Tell the Maharal I’ll be back soon.” He looks forward to reporting, for this night he did not kill but only bound. The Maharal will be pleased with him. Judah’s look will not be heavy and fierce with judgement.

thirty-four

Shira

The world interested Nili more than Gadi did; he was not accustomed to that order of business. It kept him edgy, trying constantly to prove he was fascinating, knowledgeable. Nili viewed them all as along on sufferance, unconvinced that they wouldn’t get in her way on this venture into the Glop. They were piggybacking, on the instructions Riva had given only to Nili about how to make contact with the alleged rebel organization.

To Shira’s surprise, Nili, who carried almost no clothing, had a standard black cover-up. Shira had borrowed Malkah’s for Yod. Gadi had his own. The cover-ups went over everything, including the backpacks they were all wearing. The hunched-back look of cover-up over pack was common enough in the Glop. They moved in a band, keeping an eye out for trouble.

Yod and Nili were particularly tense. The Glop was new to them; neither had ever been in a place as crowded, as fetid with human smells and the overwhelming stench of pollution and decay. Yod offered ongoing analyses of the toxic properties of the air ― they wore filter masks, of course ― until Gadi requested that he stop.

In parts of the Glop, domes had been constructed. In other parts, the outdoors were unprotected, and people tried to stay inside, while the lively street life simmered underground. Here, where the old dome was in place although filthy, giving the streets an air of perpetual half-twilight, they walked what had been a wide avenue, back when there were cars. A strip was kept open in the middle for fast tanks and motocabs, but the walkways on either side ran between rows of tents and stalls hung with bright rags and banners, signs that glittered and beckoned, the smell of cooking sausage, probably dog. Here people did not wear masks, so they lowered theirs. The rule in the Glop was never hesitate and never stand out.

“Alio, Duke, you want nice fresh molly? Ten-year-olds, younger.”

“Rod, the latest earbos.” Earrings that played music. “Tomas Raffia’s last stim.”

“Damn,” Gadi said. “They pirate them before they’re out. I worked on that, and I haven’t even seen the final cut.”

“Raw stickers, splatters. Slab your noids. Keep safe.”

“Pings and pongs and every joy and toy. Want to go up, go down, want to feel the fires of desire, want to burn like a nova — come on, Duke, I bet you’re the nervebright type.”

“Off it forever.” Gadi walked faster.

“Come on, amie, you want it. You want it bad. You can feel it giving you that rush like nothing else can.”

The first time the band passed a gang beating a man to death, Gadi and Shira could scarcely restrain Nili and Yod from interfering. “Look,” Gadi said. “This is Ram Blaster turf. If you stop a group of them, you have to fight the whole gang. For all you know, they’re administering justice. As they explained to me once, they believe in justice being fun. Unless you’re prepared to take over this sector and run it, stay out of the way.”

“How do we travel?” Nili asked. They had released the float car at the edge of the Glop. First they had travelled through the tunnels of the old subway warren; now they used the surface.

“Depends on where we’re going, Tigress. What have you in mind?”

Nili recited to him the coordinates she had been given. They all squatted in the shade of a building while Gadi and Nili managed to translate the grid reading into a sector they could head for.

In the cracked mud by the building ― it looked as if it had been a public building, perhaps a department store, but now it was housing where hundreds squatted ― Shira noticed two small desiccated bodies, that of an animal, perhaps a cat, and that of a child. The bodies had been well chewed by local scavengers. There they had died huddled together, and dogs or rats had eaten them. Two little lives, accounted no price. Right across from them, a woman dressed in an unusual red cover-up was diagnosing illness by reading electrical impulses and a drop of blood. In the next stall, a short figure was selling stolen and expired medicines ― patches, pills, elixirs, implants. Obviously the two were working in tandem. Nobody read by the woman failed to stop to buy something from the short dealer in pharmaceuticals. A troupe of fire dancers was setting up at the end of the block, blowing a horn Gadi remarked was based on the sound of twentieth-century fire engines.

The committee had reached agreement, and they stood to leave, but they had loitered too long. From the building a phalanx of gang members marched, wearing the Ram Blasters’ brass-and-red body armour and carrying an assortment of knives, clubs, guns, laser rifles; one girl dragged a cannon that shot trash, broken cement. The people bargaining in the street scattered.

“I told you we should keep moving,” Gadi said. “Now let me see if I can negotiate passage.”

“Never mind. Put these in.” Nili handed out cold little blue jellies. “Put them in your ears, now!” She touched something on her wrist, and nothing at all happened that Shira, still pondering the strange sensation of the cold wet jellies boring into her eardrums, could feel. What she saw was simply that the Ram Blasters all became very tired and lay down. The warriors dressed in the brass-and-red body armour fell asleep sprawling on the cracked mud with its patches of remaining asphalt and its clumps of sumac. But the girl pulling the cannon did not fall down. She looked around, puzzled, then dropped to aim the cannon at them. Yod was on her in five great bounds. He picked her up, gave her a gentle toss on the pile of bodies. Then he smashed the barrel of the cannon.

Nili was motioning wildly for them to follow her, mimicking removing the jellies. Shira obeyed. Her ears still stung as if with great cold. They trotted together out of the square, just as people ran from the building to help the Ram Blasters, and others ran equally fast to rob them. “What happened to them?” Behind the would-be rescuers and the would-be thieves were fighting hand to hand.

“Sonic stun,” Nili said. “More powerful than the one your house uses. They’ll be on their feet in ten minutes, so let’s move it. I repeat, how do we get where we’re going?”

“We flag down a cab. Until we see one, we just keep heading south and west,” Gadi answered.

Public transportation in the Glop had long ago disintegrated. Below the cities were long tunnels, but people lived in the ones that hadn’t flooded when the ocean rose. The way you travelled, except for the few rich enough to have their own fast tanks, was by bargaining with cabs to take you inside their sector. To cross between sectors, you had to change cabs. Unless there was an agreement between neighbouring gangs, cabs couldn’t cross a sector barrier.

Most were small tracked vehicles that could move quickly over the uneven terrain that had once been streets, and that was the sort Gadi flagged down, painted with the brass-and-red colours of the Ram Blasters.

Gadi carried out the negotiations in Glop patois, language rich and gamy with constantly changing slang.

Gadi waved his palm. “I got a raw betty — I wouldn’t jack you.”

“Lots of done betties around this days. You a grud?”

“In stimmies, but loose now. Still, I can cover it easy.”

“Who all’s going? They your meat?” The driver nodded at the others, hovering on the edge of the opaque conversation.

“Just my dokes. Four of us. Cuanto?”

Once they got in and were crouching in the belly facing each other, Yod played his recording of the exchange, requesting Gadi to define all the strange vocabulary and teach them the language.

Betty — credit card or chit

Rod — man

Nook — woman

Splatter — weapon, gun, laser

Sticker — any form of knife or razor

Ping — up drug

Pong — down drug

Bat — attractive partner of either sex

Molly — boy or man willing to be fucked by other men

Cheese — any young human sold or rented for sexual use

Duke — a man or woman with money or credit

Meat — a woman available for sexual use, usually but not necessarily for money

Hook — where you live or squat

Grab —
(noun)
any job, any way of making a living

Slab —
(noun)
a corpse;
(verb)
to kill

Stuff — sexual intercourse

Barb — sexual intercourse

Rock — sexual intercourse or music

Jack — sexual intercourse

Duffel — one’s usual sexual partner

Amie (pronounced to rhyme with Sammy) — friend, partner, comrade

Doke — friend, member of the same gang

Pop — someone superior to you in the gang (used for either sex)

Niño — someone below you in the gang (used for either sex)

Noids — the enemy, other gangs

Grud —
(singular or plural)
people who have sold themselves to multis

Cooker — a place where any drug is manufactured

Wire — a person equipped to interface directly with machine memory

Raw — very good, desirable

Done — bad, undesirable, unattractive

Roach —
(verb)
to steal, to pirate, to hijack

Nut — loot, something desirable to attain, riches, money

“What’s the use of trying to empty my mind of vocabulary?” Gadi demanded finally. “You may know the definitions, but you can’t sing the song.”

“At least we can understand your conversations,” Yod said pleasantly.

“You don’t trust me!” Gadi rolled his eyes high into his head.

Why not say we’re all more comfortable when we know what’s happening to us,” Shira said. “This place is scary enough.”

“I have seen more people today than in all my previous life,” Nili said, watching through the slits in the armour.

“This is only a little piece of the Glop,” Shira said. “It stretches fourteen hundred kilometres to the south and two hundred to the west. It’s hot enough here, but down at the southern end, it’s tropical. They grow grapefruit and oranges near what was Atlanta.”

“I cannot begin to imagine that many humans.”

“Less than there were, don’t forget. Before the kisrami plague of ‘22, the population was twice what it is now,” Shira said. She did not look out the slits. She was too afraid of being shot in the eye with a dart or hit with some chemical spray.

Actually the kisrami virus was only responsible for 8,472,338 deaths in what was then still the United States,” Yod said gently. “The Great Famine of ‘31 was responsible directly or indirectly for twice that many deaths, and the so-called parrot plagues that occurred in the third year of the famine had a far more lethal effect. The lowering of the birth rate through pesticides, toxic waste accumulations and radiation stockpiled in the groundwater and the food chain also bears on the population drop.”

There was a long silence after Yod’s lecture. No one could think of anything to say. They lurched along. Occasionally some kid threw a rock at the cab or shot a firestick at it ― a little toy rocket that exploded. The Glop was full of kids missing fingers or hands or other body parts from the damned things. Y-S manufactured them, but they were forbidden in the enclave ― and in Tikva too. Most of the gangs sold what they called a license to Y-S for their barrio, meaning that they got a fee. It was the same with the stimmie broadcasts, which theoretically could be blocked ― if any gang was stupid enough to deny them to their people. Still, Uni-Par paid every gang a fee. The multis liked stable gang leadership in the Glop. It was good for business.

The cab screeched to a halt. “Border crossing,” the driver called. “Noid land. All you rods out. Okay, Duke. Here’s the rough.”

Gadi paid. When the driver looked at his screen ― Gadi placed his palm on the dial and the machine recognized him after accessing the Net — he swore. “Stuff me like a cheese if I ever guessed. This is one big cooler. Nobody’s going to believe me back at my hook. Wait a minute, I want a holo with you. Strip your cover-up a minute. Come on, Gadi.”

The driver pulled a cheap little holo camera from a dashboard compartment and handed it to Yod. “Hey, Rodney, do us. Make it raw.”

Yod examined the camera briefly, raised it and took a holo of Gadi, who had obediently removed his cover-up and stood all in silver beside the driver, who wore under his own cover-up a winking eye-dazzling djellaba of Ram Blaster colours. The driver mugged for the camera, dancing around Gadi. Then they both put on their cover-ups, the driver jolted off in his fast tank, and they all filed through the checkpoint into Coyote barrio.

There were several small motocabs waiting at the checkpoint, but only one vehicle big enough to hold all of them, another fast tank. Gadi negotiated with the new driver to take them to the coordinates Nili had been given. They ground off in the can, with the familiar jolting and jouncing.

Gadi called attention to his usefulness. “None of you can even begin to talk to these people. You’d be lost without me. Besides, I’m a hero here.”

“If they understood, they’d kill you,” Nili said. “Your multi sells them sensation in place of knowledge — somebody else’s sensations. An animal can learn from sensations, at least what to go for and what to avoid, but only if they’re authentic. You replace real knowledge with false sensory data.”

“What has life got to offer them? If they go for stimmies and even if they get into spikes, it’s escape. If you had to live here, what would you want but escape? I help make hard lives bearable.”

They passed a street carnival: more fire dancers; performing horses and dogs and a mangy tiger; a belly dancer; a couple of cheap virons, one of dancers and jungles, one of the old wild West, sputtering gunfire and whooping Indians; a strong smell of barbecued something and burnt caramel.

They were turning through a maze of narrow streets, past a row of shops that repaired and cannibalized all kinds of machines, from floaters and fast-tanks to stimmie players and laser splatters. Then, with a great shuddering thump, the fast tank came to an abrupt and violent halt, tossing them against the metal walls. Yod reacted instantaneously, throwing his arms around Shira to keep her from injury. Nili was probably protected by the light body armour she was wearing. Gadi was the worst shaken and bruised. Yod knelt to peer through the slats. We are caught in a metal net. Aluminium alloy.”