Body of Glass (41 page)

“We’ve arrived,” Nili said with satisfaction, helping Gadi up. “Riva warned me. These people use many low-tech devices that are quite effective in ordinary defence. She thought I would find them interesting to study.”

Shira wondered again at how casually Nili could mention Riva. She herself tried not to speak of her. She had not assimilated either the facts of her mother’s life or the fact of her death. Shira felt as if she had taken a spiny ball into her body which remained in her tissues, giving an occasional sharp twinge.

“Okay, niños, out!” Someone was banging on the metal of the cab.

“Hey, pop,” the driver said. He had climbed out. The net was cranked off, since the cab was surrounded by armed warriors dressed in black. “Don’t beat on my track. Let the gruds pay me, and I’ll zip.”

Gadi again paid, and the cab shot off. Nili came forward and flung back the head of her cover-up. “I’ve come a long way to see Lazarus. The one you know as the grey pirate sent me. There are no trees in hell.”

“Not a bad-looking nook. Think I’ll barb you first. Take off that sack, and let me see if I should bother. …” The warrior had pulled a knife and moved forward, starting to slit the cover-up.

Nili swung the loose garment out over him. As the cover-up settled, she kicked his knife from his hand and then threw him. “You and five others. I came in good faith. I want to see Lazarus, and I think he wants to see me.”

Yod moved up to stand at her shoulder. “We’ll fight you if we have to, but we didn’t come to fight.”

One of the women warriors had communicated their arrival, for another phalanx of warriors marched out. “Lazarus says bring them in.”

They were paraded into a large storefront that Shira imagined from the mouldering decor had once been a restaurant. In the multi enclaves, restaurants still existed, but during the Great Famine, when the breadbaskets of the Great Plains and the Steppes had dried up and blown away, when temperate-zone regions that had grown grains became too arid to grow much but grass, when a hefty percentage of the rice-growing regions of Asia had been drowned by rising waters, restaurants disappeared from the Glop. They were replaced over time by vat-food dispensaries and food stalls that sold unregulated food at restaurant prices, all buying protection from the local gang.

On the crumbling stucco, happy peasants frolicked among giant representations of bunches of grapes. Someone had added some large spiders and pythons. Many of the grapes had faces. Some of the original tables remained, with an assortment of chairs, crates and stools. Along the old marble-top bar, some teenagers practised how to break and reassemble and clean laser rifles, how to load energy packs into them. On a trestle table, a crew seemed to be studying the manufacture of bombs. At a collection of the old wooden tables, a teacher worked with a mixed-age group on reading skills. On the far wall, a row of children sat plugged into computers under the new mural depicting Shango wielding the weapons of the lightning and standing astride the Glop on the shoulders of a small black man, rendered realistically. Most of the people were black-or brown-skinned, but almost every combination was represented: red hair, brown eyes and black skin; light skin, black hair, blue eyes; and other permutations. Most people in the Glop were of mixed race nowadays. Nili was noticing everything, as Shira was, and smiled broadly. Only Nili’s expressions could be seen, as the rest of them were still wearing their cover-ups. Shira was in no hurry to remove her own. It gave her a false feeling of security to have her body covered. She stayed close to Yod.

“You are armed,” a woman well over six feet tall and muscled like a bodybuilder said to Nili. “We don’t permit that.” She spoke formally, slowly and clearly, as if in a foreign language.

“We’re only stopping here. We need our arms to survive, and you haven’t been exactly friendly to us,” Nili said, standing poised as if for battle.

“You’ll disarm, or we’ll kill you now.” The woman blew on a whistle from around her neck, like a school coach. Everyone in the room dropped flat or crawled under tables. The warriors formed a square around the newcomers, laser rifles targeting each of them.

“I have my finger on the trigger of a sonic weapon. We’d be dead, but so would all of you. I have it set on kill,” Nili said. “I could have used it already, before your soldiers got into position, if we were enemies.”

“I am expendable,” the woman said. “You would not survive.”

“I have the capacity to cause an explosion that would remove most of this facility,” Yod said gently. “I have no desire to die, and I wish to protect my friends, but if I see no alternative ―”

“It’s raw, Leesha. Everybody up.” The man was small and dark, dressed in black without insignia, none of the mock epaulettes or metallic sashes or gaudy designs of the other gangs. He was the man in the mural. Take off your cover-ups and let us see you so we can match descriptions.”

They obeyed, watching him carefully.

“It’s them, Lazarus. I told you.” A woman’s voice. Riva’s voice, but it couldn’t be.

“I thought you might be here. Were you waiting for me?” Nili said, apparently without surprise. She strode forward to embrace the woman who came through the door.

“I never wait for anybody,” Riva said, “You know that. Welcome to the fortress of my amie Lazarus.”

“But you died! I saw you die,” Shira cried out. Yod was staring at the woman with a frown.

Riva dressed all in black here. She looked like an ordinary forty-five or fifty-year-old woman, not the old woman she had appeared to be in Tikva. She also looked fifty pounds lighter. Here she walked with a bit of a swagger but kept two paces behind Lazarus and to his left. “Oh, it takes more than a few noids to slab me. I’m still with the living.”

“It is the woman we knew as Riva, your mother,” Yod said.

“How could you make us think you died? We buried you. I said kaddish for you every day!”

“Now you can stop. Besides, it’s a nice prayer. Come on, Shira, you hardly know me. I surely didn’t make a great hole in your life with my passing. I’m more nuisance alive.”

“Does Malkah know?”

“No. You can tell her when you go back. But be sure no one else finds out. Be sure you’re secure.”

“That was unfair!”

Lazarus stepped between them. “Nooks, savage each other later. We have business to conduct. Who’s the leader? You the pop?” He looked at Yod.

“I am,” Nili said calmly. None of them contradicted her.

The woman who had greeted them said suddenly, “Hey, aren’t you Gadi? For real? Killer raw!”

The kids came crowding around, out of control. “Rod, you know Mala Tuni herself? Do you know her?”

“You’re an unruly bunch. You come in here, threaten my warriors, and now all the niños are crazy.” Lazarus shook his head, motioning to the woman and an armed man. “You’re trouble, and if I didn’t have the rawest op of this popanook here, the grey pirate, I’d slab you all. Now we zip upstairs to my hook, and then we parley. Who are you, who am I, the whole hopper. Move!”

Obediently they followed him through a food factory and upstairs, Riva coming behind them with the tall woman, Leesha. Shira walked close to Yod, still frightened and very confused, glad to hold his arm tight in her hand.

thirty-five

Shira

“Well, Shira, we decided it was a good time to kill me off officially.”

“But the Y-S troops all died. You forget, there was no one to report your death.”

“Didn’t you ever look up? They had one of their spy-eyes overhead to record what happened. That is, what was visible. The wrap was opaque to it.”

“That’s why we didn’t take it out,” Nili said. She was sprawled against the wall, cleaning a laser pistol. They had been fed and were now in storage, waiting for Lazarus to reappear.

Yod closed his eyes for a moment, presumably replaying the scene. Then his eyes flicked open. “I should have recognized the spy-eye. Its significance did not register on my consciousness. A lapse.”

“So who died?” Shira asked. She wished she could sound more gracious.

“We brought a body with us. We asked for a body of a woman around fifty who had died of anything that wouldn’t register at the cellular level. We knew the body would be cooked. We prepared beforehand.” Riva sounded as if she were describing preparations for a dinner party. “I was there long enough to register. We had blasted out a small underground chamber, shielded and safe for up to thirty-six hours. In fact I crawled out right after sundown. When the fighting heated up, I slipped in and Nili flung the body into the line of fire. I had to pry them off my case. I need more manoeuvring room than they were giving me.”

“And Malkah doesn’t know?”

“I thought you’d have a more convincing funeral that way.”

Shira found it intolerable that Malkah should be grieving at this moment. She longed to get out of this hideous place and rush back home to give Malkah the news that would lift the weight of mourning from her. But sensibly, she knew she could not return. They must conclude their business here, and then she had Yod’s promise that they would attempt to find and somehow carry off Ari, no matter what the danger to either of them.

Riva was never going to understand how disturbing her little drama of death had been. She was glad to see them, presumably especially glad to see Nili. Yet Shira felt as if there were more emotional communication going on between Yod and herself than between Nili and Riva. The tall dark woman Leesha was sitting against the far wall, her eyes never leaving Riva’s face. She looked at Riva as if Riva were the most beautiful and desirable creature in the world. Her eyes shone, her lips curled into a silly small smile, an inadvertent smirk of pleasure while she tried to look tough and mean.

Gadi was nervous. Of all of them, he had been most at ease, until the moment Riva had revealed herself. He was not his usual insouciant glittering self, asking with glee and persistence the questions that would most embarrass. He was watching. He stayed close to Nili. Not only did he fear the bond between Nili and Riva; Riva did not fit into his diagram of the social universe.

In his world, only poor women looked like Riva, and there were few enough of those. Cleaning robots did what such women would once have done for him and his colleagues. Old ladies still fitted costumes, carried out the delicate work done by hand — beading, embroidery — women who lived in the local equivalents of the Glop: the barrios, the slums, the Deek, for decayed quarter, the Casbah, Le Vieux Quartier. Here was somebody who looked as if she should sew fish skin into sheaths for Mala Tuni, at just enough an hour to keep her in vat food and a hook the size of a narrow bed and folding table. But Riva walked in like a general reviewing his best razors. She swaggered, she looked every man and woman straight on in the eyes. Here Gadi and the others were on sufferance. Riva was the reason they had not been killed. She was their passport into the stronghold of Lazarus. Riva enjoyed some kind of local celebrity, of the sort Gadi was accustomed to wherever he went.

Gadi’s discomfiture soothed Shira a little. She stayed close to Yod on the floor, feeling his presence, silent, alert and always, always aware of her and for her. She slid her hand towards him. After an instant his hand covered hers lightly, its dry warmth radiating into her. Her hand was cold with nervousness and fatigue. She was swept by a wish to be alone with him. It was a desire not for sex, except for the comfort and the warmth of the embrace, but for their own intimacy. Of late, she had grown used to real conversation. After she had left college and the friendship of her roommates and colleagues, she had not lived a life examined with accomplices.

Since coming home, she had grown used to chewing over the details of actions and reactions, first with Malkah and lately also with Yod. He was fascinated by human interactions. Much he did not understand, but he brought his full intelligence to bear on the problem of comprehending motive and feeling. The result made for an interesting companion. One who was not judgemental. Who took her as the measure of a woman and of all good things.

“Notice that they eat vat food here,” Riva said meaningfully.

“Everybody in the Glop eats sludge. What’s to notice?” Gadi smiled winningly at Riva.

“Other gang headquarters serve real food. It’s one of their perks. Lazarus eats what everybody eats. That’s what to notice.” Riva did not bother smiling back. “And they don’t buy it from a multi.”

Leesha took them on a tour and with pride pointed out the chambers where the algae were grown and the factory where it was processed into soup, imitation chops and burgers, sweets. “So we can never be starved into submission,” Leesha explained.

Shira only nibbled on supper. Y-S was not into algae farming, so she knew little of the process by which two multis fed much of the world ― poorly, carelessly, but at least with stuff that kept people alive and nourished. After the Famine, that seemed a great accomplishment. Starvation had killed so many in the decade of her birth that she had grown up into a world in which nobody, not even the multis, could take food for granted. So-called real food, food actually grown in soil or from the bodies of live animals, was precious and rare, a luxury like gold and cashmere and paintings, just for the upper echelons. Vat food grown in vast algae factories was what most people lived on. It came with many labels and in a variety of colours and flavourings, but it all had a similar texture in the mouth. Shira always imagined she could taste the seaweed under the chemicals that gave it the name strawberry or chicken or refried beans. But food had ceased to be a private matter before she had been born. She had read about people who were passionate about their choice of one cuisine or type of nutrition over another. Now people ate what was available in their enclave or their barrio or their town. When it was real, you appreciated it; when it was vat grown, you shovelled it in. “It’s touching,” Gadi said, “how proud they are of such miserable things. Those little cubicles for families they showed us.”

“Those little rooms are heated and safe,” Riva said. The children go to school here. The Coyotes are what we call a New Gang. They’re an autonomous political development just beginning to make connections.”

Lazarus came briskly in, followed by five lieutenants of varying colours and sizes, all taller than he was. “What do you make of me?” he asked Yod.

“In what sense?” Yod responded politely, rising.

“What am I?”

“Your guards are enhanced in various ways. You are not.”

“Just flesh,” Lazarus said bluntly, assuming a commanding position in dead centre of the room. “Now, the redheaded popanook is enhanced more than any of my warriors. And you’re so enhanced you burn out my instruments. Gadi is only fancied up — no use to all that cutting and pasting. And that bat there” - he led with his chin towards Shira ― “is like me, pretty much the way her mama made her. So we got two civvies and two warriors here, how I see it.”

“We come on a mission from our free town, Tikva, to see if we have goals in common and if we can work together, exchange information, anything that can help you and us to survive,” Shira said.

“I come from … farther away.” Nili rose gracefully to face Lazarus. “I can offer you nothing yet except my interest. If you’re attacked while I’m here, I’ll fight for you.”

“My old amie here, she say you come from the Black Zone.”

That was one of the common names for the interdicted zone, because on contemporary maps it was a uniform black, with no features shown at all.

“Maybe,” Nili said. She was not relaxed but poised on the tips of her toes, as if she considered attack possible at any moment.

“I guess if that’s your hook, you got to be raw armoured inside and out.”

Nili grinned at him. “But I come with good will and a keen curiosity about what you’re doing around here.”

“Surviving, just surviving. And looking to survive some more tomorrow.”

“More than that was going on downstairs,” Shira said.

“Surviving can be a tough business in the Glop. You wires in the towns, you got it easy. You’re mollies for the multis. So are we. All just movable slabs to them. But we do all the dirty grabs, while you do the clean ones.”

“We’ve lost seven people this year to direct attacks on our Base,” Shira said. “We had a firefight with Y-S outside the Cybernaut enclave.”

“We had a buzz of that. Rumour always stretches what it tells of. Says you slabbed nine of them, including four apes, two assassins and two high dukes.”

Gadi spoke up. “Pretty good eyes you got. You’re not leaning on rumour for that level of info.”

“We see everything their spy-eyes see. Film got to be processed. It’s automated, but always some rod got to touch it. Some lowlife rod tubed in and tubed out, not good enough to live in the enclave. Who comes home to the Glop.”

“We’re building our own net,” Riva said calmly. “Outside theirs, alongside theirs.”

“But the Net is public,” Shira said.

“So is ours,” Lazarus said. Different publics.”

“What do you want?” Nili asked. What are you trying to do?”

“Get some power into the Glop. Make my people less helpless. Give us the strength to take back a piece of the pie.” Lazarus took a step closer to Nili. What are
you
looking for?”

“We, too, want to survive, under far more extreme conditions than you have here. We want to know if we can find allies. We have developed different technologies, and we’re interested in trades — people to people. Information. This alternate net sounds useful.”

“You two. Your town sent you. Why?”

“Because of our little war with Y-S, we’re looking for allies. We didn’t know about you until Nili told us. We volunteered to come.”

“And silver man, what do you want?”

“I’m along for the ride. The Glop is who my virons are made for. My grab is Uni-Par, but I also work for you. And besides …” Gadi gave Lazarus a sly grin. “Warrior woman is my duffel of the mo. I watch my jack.”

Shira glanced at Riva, who was presumably finding this out. How would she react? She did not appear to be listening. She was deep in a silent conversation with Leesha and a male warrior, communicating in a sign language. A language of the deaf or some variation?

“That’s one tall bat. She’s yours, you must be more rod than you look, duke.” Lazarus knocked his fist against Gadi’s upper arm.

Nili seemed to have no reaction at all. She was not looking at Gadi or at Riva but kept her gaze fixed on Lazarus. However, every time a warrior moved, she observed, sharply. She never relaxed vigilance. Lazarus, too, noticed this. He seemed to approve.

“I have this idea by ‘n’ by, but I got to line up the other noid papas all in a row, or it won’t work. I got the idea that instead of a little payoff from the multis for our workers, we offer them as a block. What one’s paid, the other gets the same nut. All or none.”

“You’re talking about a union,” Shira said.

“A what?” Lazarus looked at her blankly.

“It’s history. You’re talking about what was called a labour union.”

“Did they work?”

“For about a century. When the multis moved the jobs out of the country, they were easy to break. The top got fat. They didn’t like to organize in places like the Glop. But for a long time they did work. I can send you lots of information on them.” She wondered if Lazarus could read. Most kids in the Glop went to work at ten, never having learned to read or write. The only history they knew was picked up from the stimmies, so Robin Hood, Zowie the Flying Dog and Napoleon were equally historical and all simultaneous.

“Raw,” Lazarus said, looking her in the eyes with a sweet warm smile. The man had charisma. He could charm. “We’ll set up channels.” He nodded at Gadi. “Duke, tell the niños here about the time Uni-Par tried to jack prices on the Bloodsuckers.”

Gadi paused a moment, then said simply, “The Bloodsuckers sent their own assassins in and took out three of the top administrators.”

“See, we’re all as good at that game as the multis. We got assassins badder, faster and just as maxed. We got troops, we got assassins, but we hungry for the techie lore. We can maybe trade.”

When Lazarus left them, it was close to midnight, and everybody except Yod was exhausted. Riva left with Lazarus and his warriors as if she were part of his party; since they had arrived, she had not behaved as if she were with Shira or Nili. Riva was about her own business. She did not seem to mind their presence nor judge it particularly important to her. Shira felt she would never understand the woman who had given birth to her.

A boy carried in a pile of futons and sheets. They had sleeping bags in their packs, even Yod, who had objected but was overruled. He had to pretend to need sleep when they were under observation. Shira drew Nili aside. “Riva hardly spoke to you. Is she angry with you because you’re with Gadi?”

Nili’s brows rose in surprise, her lips parted slightly. “Was she angry? I didn’t think so.”

“I don’t understand how it is between you two.”

“It isn’t a romantic relationship, Shira. We’re on the same side. We trust each other.”

“Obviously she trusts you more than she trusts her own mother or me.”

“She felt you had to think she was dead to behave convincingly. You want her to be jealous of Gadi?” Nili smiled, shaking her head. She put her hand on Shira’s shoulder. “What nonsense! If she wanted me to go along with her now, I’d send him home and go.”