Cloud Atlas (47 page)

Who would work factory lines? Process sewage? Feed fish farms? Xtract oil and coal? Stoke reactors? Construct buildings? Serve in dineries? Xtinguish fires? Man the cordon? Fill exxon tanks? Lift, dig, pull, push? Sow, harvest? Now do you begin to see? Purebloods no longer possess these core skills upon which our corpocracy, or any society, rests. The real question is, what damage could 6 million ascensions
not
inflict, in combination with cordonlanders and downstrata purebloods such as those in Huamdonggil with nothing to lose?

Unanimity would maintain order. Enforcers aren’t all Union agents
.

Even Yoona
939 chose death over slavery.

And your role in this … proposed rebellion?

My first role was to provide proof that Suleiman’s ascension catalyst worked. This I had done, and still do, simply by not degenerating. The requisite neurochemicals were being synthesized in underground factories thruout the Twelve Cities.

“Your second role,” Hae-Joo informed me that morning, “would be ambassadorial.” General Apis wished me to act as an interlocutor between Union and the ascending fabricants. To help mobilize them as revolutionaries.

How did you feel about being a figurehead for terrorists?

Trepidation: I was not genomed to alter history, I told my fellow fugitive. Hae-Joo countered that no revolutionary ever was. All Union was asking for now, he urged, was that I did not reject Apis’s proposal out of hand.

Weren’t you curious about Union’s blueprint for the briter tomorrow? How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?

You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: “An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”

We’re circling a contentious core, Sonmi. Let’s return to your journey
.

We reached Suanbo Plain around hour eleven, via minor routes. Cropdusters strewed clouds of saffron fertilizer, blanking the horizons. Xposure to EyeSats worried Hae-Joo, so we took a Timber-Corp plantation track. It had rained during the nite, so pools bogged the dirt track and progress was slow, but we saw no other vehicle. The Norfolk pine–rubberwood hybrids were planted in rank and file and created the illusion that trees were marching past our ford in a billion-strong regiment. I got out only once, when Hae-Joo refilled the exxon tank from a can. The plain had been brite, but inside the plantation even noon was dank, hushed dusk. The sole sound was a sterile wind swishing blunted needles. The trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds, so the stagnant air stunk of insecticide.

The forest left as abruptly as it had arrived, and the topography grew hillier. We traveled east, the Woraksan Range to our south and Ch’ungju Lake spreading north. The lake water stunk of effluent from its salmon net ponds. Crosswater hills displayed mighty corp logos. A malachite statue of Prophet Malthus surveyed a dust bowl. Our track underpassed the Ch’ungju-Taegu-Pusan xpress-way Hae-Joo said we could be in Pusan within two hours if he dared join it, but a slow crawl thru backcountry was safer. Our pot-holed but Eyeless road switchbacked up into the Sobaeksan Mountains.

Hae-Joo Im wasn’t trying to get to Pusan in one day?

No. At approx hour seventeen, he hid the ford in an abandoned lumberyard, and we struck out on foot. My first mountain hike fascinated me as much as my first drive thru Seoul. Limestone bulges oozed lichen; fir saplings and mountain ash grew from clefts; clouds scrolled; the breeze was fragrant with natural pollen; once genomed moths spun around our heads, electronlike. Their wings’ logos had mutated over generations into a chance syllabary: a small victory of nature over corpocracy On an xposed rock shelf, Hae-Joo pointed across a gulf. “See him?”

Who? I saw only a rock face.

Keep looking, he said, and from the mountainside emerged the carved features of a cross-legged giant. One slender hand was raised in a gesture of grace. Weaponry and elements had strafed, ravaged, and cracked his features, but his outline was discernible if you knew where to look. I said the giant reminded me of Timothy Cavendish, making Hae-Joo Im smile for the first time in a long while. He said the giant was a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth, and perhaps the cracked stonework still possessed a lingering divinity. Only the inanimate can be so alive. I suppose QuarryCorp will destroy him when they get around to processing those mountains.

Why did Im take you on this field trip to the middle of nowhere?

Every nowhere is somewhere, Archivist. Past the cross-legged giant and over the ridge we came upon a modest grain bed in a clearing, clothes drying on bushes, vegetable plots, a crude irrigation system of bamboo, a cemetery. A thirsty cataract. Hae-Joo led me thru a narrow cleft into a courtyard, walled by ornate buildings unlike any I ever saw. A very recent xplosion had cratered the flagstones, blown away timbers, and collapsed a tiled roof. One pagoda had succumbed to a typhoon and fallen on its twin. Ivy more than joinery kept the latter upright. This was to be our lodging for the nite, Hae-Joo told me. An abbey had stood there for fifteen centuries, until corpocracy dissolved the pre-consumer religions after the Skirmishes. Now the site serves to shelter dispossessed purebloods who prefer scraping a life from the mountainside to downstrata conurb life.

So Union hid its interlocutor, its … messiah, in a colony of recidivists?

Messiah: what a grandiose title for a Papa Song server. Behind us, a creased, sun-scorched peasant woman, as visibly aged as a senior from Cavendish’s time, limped into the courtyard, leaning on an enceph-scarred boy. The boy, a mute, smiled shyly at Hae-Joo, and the woman hugged Hae-Joo affectionately as a mother. I was introduced to the Abbess as Ms. Yoo. One eye was milk-blind, her other brite and watchful. She clasped my hands in hers in a charming gesture. “You are welcome here,” she told me, “most welcome.”

Hae-Joo asked about the bomb crater.

The Abbess replied that a local Unanimity regiment was using them for teething. An aero appeared last month and launched a shell without warning. One man died, and several colonists were badly injured. An act of malice, the Abbess speculated sadly, or a bored pilot, or perhaps a developer had seen potential in the site as a healthspa hotel for xecs and wanted the site cleared.

My companion promised to find out.

Who were these “colonists” xactly? Squatters? Terrorists? Union?

Each colonist had a different story. I was introduced to Uyghur dissidents, dust-bowled farmers from Ho Chi Minh Delta, once respectable conurb dwellers who had fallen foul of corp politics, unemployable deviants, those undollared by mental illness. Of the seventy-five colonists, the youngest was nine weeks old; the oldest, the Abbess, was sixty-eight, though if she had claimed to be three hundred years of age I would still have believed her, such gravitas she had.

But … how could people there survive without franchises and gallerias? What did they eat? Drink? How about electricity? Entertainment? What about enforcers and order? How did they impose hierarchy?

Go visit them, Archivist. You can tell the Abbess I sent you. No? Well, their food came from the forest and gardens, water from the cataract. Scavenge trips to landfills yielded plastics and metals for tools. Their “school” sony was powered by a water turbine. Solar nitelamps recharged during daylite hours. Their entertainment was themselves; consumers cannot xist without 3-D and AdV, but humans once did and still can. Enforcement? Problems arose, no doubt, even crises from time to time. But no crisis is insuperable if people cooperate.

What about the mountain winters?

They survived as fifteen centuries of nuns had before them: by planning, thrift, and fortitude. The monastery was built over a cave, xtended by bandits during the Japanese annexation. These tunnels gave sufficient shelter from winter and Unanimity aeros. Oh, such a life is no bucolic Utopia. Yes, winters are severe; rainy seasons are relentless; crops fall prey to disease; their medicine is sorely limited. Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata. I slept soundly that nite against a backdrop of gossip, music, complaints, and laughter, feeling safe for the first time since my dormroom in Papa Song’s.

So what was Union’s interest in the colony?

Simple: Union provides hardware, such as their solars; in return, the colony provides a safe house, kilometers from the nearest Eye. I woke in my dorm tunnel just before dawn and crept to the temple mouth. The guard was a middle-aged woman nursing a colt and a stimulin brew; she lifted the mosquito net for me but warned me about coyotes scavenging below the monastery walls. I promised to stay in earshot, skirted the courtyard, and squeezed between the narrow rocks to the balcony of blacks and grays.

The mountain dropped away; an updraft rose from the valley, carrying animal cries, calls, growls, and snuffles. I could not identify even one; for all my knowledge of censored arcana, I felt impoverished. And such a sky of stars! Ah, mountain stars are not these apologetic pinpricks over conurb skies; hanging plump they drip lite. A boulder stirred, just a meter away. “Ah, Ms. Yoo,” said the Abbess, “an early riser.”

I wished her a good morning.

The younger colonists, the old woman confided, worry about her wandering around before sunup, in case she fell off the edge. She produced a pipe from her sleeve, stuffed its bowl, and lit it. A raw local leaf, she admitted, but she had lost the taste for refined marlboros years ago. The smoke smelled of aromatic leather and dried dung.

I asked about the stone figure in the escarpment across the gulf.

Siddhartha had other names, she told me, mostly lost now. Her predecessors knew all the stories and sermons, but the old Abbess and senior nuns were sentenced to the Litehouse when non-consumer religions were criminalized. The present Abbess had been a novice back then, so Unanimity judged her young enough for reorientation. She was raised in an orphans’ bloc in Pearl City Conurb, but she said, she had never left her abbey spiritually. She returned years later and founded the present colony in the wreckage.

I asked if Siddhartha was indeed a god.

Many called him so, the Abbess agreed, but Siddhartha does not influence fortune or weather or perform many of a divinity’s traditional functions. Rather, Siddhartha is a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one’s future reincarnations. “But I pray to the ideal.” She indicated the meditating giant. “Early, so he knows I’m serious.”

I said I hoped that Siddhartha would reincarnate me in her colony.

Lite from the coming day defined the world more clearly now. The Abbess asked why I hoped so.

It took a little time to form my answer. I said how all purebloods have a hunger, a dissatisfaction in their eyes, xcept for the colonists I had met.

The Abbess nodded. If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she xtemporized, corpocracy would be finished. Thus, Media is keen to scorn colonies such as hers, comparing them to tapeworms; accusing them of stealing rainwater from WaterCorp, royalties from VegCorp patent holders, oxygen from Air-Corp. The Abbess feared that, should the day ever come when the Board decided they were a viable alternative to corpocratic ideology, “the ’tapeworms’ will be renamed ’terrorists,’ smart bombs will rain, and our tunnels flood with fire.”

I suggested the colony must prosper invisibly, in obscurity.

“Xactly.” Her voice hushed. “A balancing act as demanding as impersonating a pureblood, I imagine.”

She knew you weren’t pureblood all along? How?

It seemed tactless to ask. Maybe a spyhole in our quarters had captured me imbibing Soap. My host informed me that xperience had taught the colonists to keep a friendly eye on their guests, even Unionmen. The Abbess herself disliked such a violation of the old abbey’s hospitality codes, but the younger colonists were adamant that close surveillance be maintained. She revealed her intelligence only to bid me luck in my future enterprises, for of all corpocracy’s crimes against the downstrata, the Abbess stated, “nothing is more heinous than the enslavement of your tribe.”

I presume she meant fabricants? But was she speaking in specific terms—servers in dineries—or general terms—every fabricant in Nea So Copros?

I did not know, and did not learn that until the following nite in Pusan. But by now breakfast pans were banging in the courtyard. The Abbess looked at the cleft to the courtyard and changed her tone. “And who might this young coyote be?”