Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (9 page)

"Good morning, citizen," Dr. Kismet said, rising from a chair at the foot of the giant screen. "Grass or clay?"

"It's up to you, Doctor," Akwande said, suppressing the urge to add,
you motherfucking bastard.

"But you are my guest."

"But you are my elder."

Akwande did have a preference, but he wanted to give his opponent a sense of control.
You could never beat him under normal circumstances,
John Robinson, his coach, told him.
But if
you play to his weakness . . .

"Clay, then," Kismet said. "Last night I sent a representative to your home and asked your wife for this." Eye came up with Akwande's college tennis racket.

"I had it restrung," Kismet said. "Test it to see if it is to your liking." Eye proffered a basket of bright orange tennis balls.

Akwande hit a few balls and nodded his satisfaction.

"What did Aja say, Eye?" Kismet asked.

"Tell Fayez that I hope he wins," Eye reported.

Akwande wondered if the hairless beauty had gone to his home.

"Are you ready to lose, citizen?" Kismet smiled.

"Never, Ivan." The chemically enhanced glands of Akwande's body were beginning their strength cycle. It was all he could do to restrain himself from attacking Kismet physically.

"Scores will appear on the board," the Dominar announced loudly as if there were an audience. "Top and bottom of the screen will reflect the players' positions. When the game is over the winner's name will appear on top."

__________

After winning the toss of a coin Kismet took the first four games on the strength of his serve. Another man might have lost heart, but Fayez Akwande, in the depths of his walking meditation, was aware only of the ball and of Kismet's legs. He managed to return a serve for the first time in the fifth game. A volley ensued and the radical leader fell into the hours of training he had gone through. He returned the ball to the opposite end and watched Kismet's easy gait on the returns. The absolute monarch was playing with him, but he didn't mind.

Akwande lost the first set in straight games. He lost the second set winning only one. But one game into the third set Kismet stumbled. He was moving for an easy return toward the front of the court when his right leg seemed to jam or stiffen.

Akwande put the next ball to Kismet's right side. Again he had trouble with the leg. Like a boxer going for a cut eye, Akwande made Kismet work his right side. Through the third set he won his serve. Kismet came back strong, compensating for a slight limp. The doctor lost that set seven to nine. Kismet took the first three games of the fourth set, but that was his last hurrah. Akwande kept the ball a step away on the dictator's right side. The stiff leg turned into a slight limp; the limp soon became a stumble.

Akwande took every game of the fifth and final set. He tired badly in the last two, but by then Kismet was all but lame. Eye and the Dominar witnessed their master's humiliation. Akwande wondered if there was some sharpshooter in the woods who might kill him before the last point could be registered. Kismet was trembling when they shook hands.

"You've beaten me," he said with equal parts of surprise and malice.

"Surprise," Akwande said, "is the secret to survival."
3

In less than thirty-six hours the electronic media around the world were reporting on FauxPetro, the new fuel oil developed by Blue Zone Enterprises, a division of MacroCode International. The most surprising development was the fact that MacroCode allowed Mali exclusive rights to production of the new fuel oil without any conditions.

"He could have bought into the British Parliament with a cash cow like this," Letter Philips said on that evening's
Last Words.

__________

One morning, a week later, Fayez Akwande bought his daily carrot/apple/ginger juice at the Good Grocer chain store near RadCon's Jersey City office. By noon he felt ill. Not sick, but utterly exhausted. It was only on the second day that he had returned to work at the headquarters of RadCon6.

"You look like hell," Rhonda Joll, his executive aide, said.

"Is that a way to talk to the man who saved western Africa, M Joll?"

"We still got north, south, and east to go," the unrepentant grandmother replied. "I'll get Malik to drive you home."

"Maybe you'd better. It must be the letdown from all that work getting ready."

"Is Aja there?"

"No. She was called away on that new job for Ocean Farms."

"Then maybe I should go--"

"No, Rhonda. No. I'd rather sleep alone."

"I wasn't saying . . ." the woman sputtered.

"Don't you get my jokes yet?" Fayez said. He found it difficult to sit up straight in his chair. __________

By the time he was standing naked next to his bed, Fayez Akwande feared that he was dying.

"Vid on," he said.

The small monitor next to the bed winked on and a man's voice said, "Vid ready." But by that time Fayez was unconscious on the bed. A short while later the vid said, "Three minutes has elapsed. Vid off."

__________

When Fayez Akwande awoke it was nighttime. He was lying on his back, dressed in a full-length silk Ghanaian burial gown, his hands folded over his chest. The air smelled like the savannah. He stood up feeling both refreshed and afraid. There was a lit candle on his writing desk. Next to that was a handwritten letter.

There was an electric tingle when Fayez first picked up the note, but that faded.

Dear Fayez,

You have defeated me. This is a rare thing. "As rare as dinosaurs," I usually say, because I frequently terminate those who thwart me in personal or business matters. I suppose that you think me a monster. I suppose I am. But be that as it may, you have given me one of the rarest gifts for my collection--the memory of a terrific con game. You beat me on my own ground, turning my greatest strength against me. For this lesson I will let you live. In the right-hand pocket of your burial gown you will find a relic of another one who challenged me. He did not fare as well.

K.

Immediately that he finished the note, as if it could somehow detect that he was done reading, the paper crumbled into ash.

In his right-hand pocket Akwande found an ochre-colored envelope. Its contents were three small bones that once made up a human finger.

4

"But why, man?" XX Y, the burly madman from Alabama, said in an atypically high whine. "Why?"

"I thought you'd be happy to hear that I'm leaving. Now you can make the Seventh Congress the war council," M Akwande replied.

"I'm the one they want out," XX Y opined. "Everybody wants you, the man who saved Africa." The RadCon6 co-chair ran his powerful fingers through a full mane of coarse blue-gray hair, hair that was combed straight back and down to shoulder length. XX Y, chairman of the board, radical separatist, would rather have seen the world burn than give one inch to compromise. His eyes were holocausts of four hundred years of black suffering; their only promise was vengeance.

"Why?" he asked again.

"This world was set when they dragged the first African into a slave ship," Akwande intoned. "Like the child who sees his mother and father slain by devils wearing white faces. Like the girl raped by her imbecile brother in the playhouse next to her dolls. The heart," he said and paused, "the heart is rotten."

"Is it the bones?" XX Y asked. He had never liked Akwande and his diplomacy. He never followed the Go master, he never would.

"No, I'm not afraid. That was a crash I walked away from. No, I'm not afraid. But after I woke up and found those bones I went to the Infochurch that they put up in Newark. You ever been there?"

"No," the Lion sneered. "Never."

"There's five hundred workstations and service twenty-four hours a day. The hologram minister, Dominar of the Blue Zone, blesses and instructs the people on the usage of the terminals in deciphering God's secrets."

"That's a bunch'a shit and you know it."

Fayez ignored the quip. "Almost all of the parishioners are black," he said. "Those who aren't are Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and poor whites. A couple'a people recognized me but they didn't speak. They just stared at their monitors. They spoke and the computer remembered them and started the lesson where it left off. Lessons in science."

"What lessons?"

"The force of gravity. The bending of light. The path of the living cell through evolution. Infinity and black holes--"

"If it's black then that must be the devil," XX Y interrupted.

"Yes, yes. Black for them is evil or random or unknown. Black robs the mind of sight. It is the collapse of the whole universe."

"And you don't want to fight against that? You don't get so mad that you wanna get a gun and let loose?"

"Oh absolutely I do, Brother X. I felt your arguments in there. I wanted to short out those lessons. I wanted to go back to Home and gut that Dominar. All of those black people kneeling in front of computer screens. Confessing their secrets, robbed of their greatest commodities, their minds."

"Then why leave?"

"Because. . . because I can't change it." Akwande was thinking of Eye. Her genetically crafted body, her soulless orbs. Her life for his, Kismet's. "And so I'm taking my family to Mars."

"Says which?"

"I've been to the master's home. I've been to the master's church. I live on his plantation. I begged him to feed Mali, to give them freedom. They took his money but it didn't buy their freedom. They just joined the International Economic Congress and put mercenaries at their borders."

"But you ended the famine," XX Y said. "You gave them the strength to make their own way."

"They will refuse our embassy," Akwande said.

"You don't know that."

"NGOs are banned by the IEC from any official capacity. You know that, brother."

"But even if it's true, even if they turn their backs on us, what the hell do you accomplish by flying off to Mars?"

"On Mars there will be fewer people. There will be a new world. Maybe we can have something there. Maybe."

"You just runnin' away."

"But I'm leaving the guns with you, brother," Akwande said, laying his hand on the revolutionary's shoulder. "And I leave you my blessings, too."

Angel's Island

1

Six naked men walked into the weak circle of light in a corner of the great chamber. They weren't manacled or restrained in any way but their hands hung down at their sides and there was no escape or rebellion in their eyes. Each man had a bulky sack of iridescent blue-green material wrapped around his upper right biceps. The sacks writhed sluggishly, resembling serpents slowly digesting their prey. There was something hard and particular in each sack.

"This is the new meat," Lieutenant L. Johnson said to the assembly of men. They gave no response. They might have all been deaf as far as Bits knew.

"Vortex 'Bits' Arnold," the lieutenant continued. "He will be number seven in your cell from now on."

"No more Logan?" a young black man with highly defined muscles spoke up.

"Vortex," the lieutenant replied harshly.

The young convict, who was completely hairless and who had no scars that Bits could see, lowered his eyes.

"And as long as you can't keep quiet, Jerry, maybe you won't mind taking him to the center for a fitting," the guard said as he punched something into the palm screen attached to his gloved hand.

"Yes, Lieutenant," the specimen of perfection said meekly.

L. Johnson was not large or strong, and as far as Bits could see, he wasn't armed either. None of the guards he had seen was armed. Bits didn't understand why six full-grown men were docile beside this paunchy and arrogant sublife of a white man. The only reason Bits didn't jump on him was because he was bound hand and foot and floating in a gravity chair.

"Get him to ChemSys," Johnson said to Jerry. "The rest of you get up to the plantation. We need the whole upper tier harvested before the typhoon hits." Again Johnson punched information into his palm screen.

Of the prisoners, four were Negro, one was brown and Asian--a Pacific Islander, Bits thought--and one was white. The oldest of the group, a lanky black man somewhere in his forties, showed distaste when Johnson ordered the harvest. The light of anger shone in his eyes. But fast on the heels of that anger came the jab of sudden pain, and then there was nothing--no anger or will of any kind, just resignation as he joined the herd of five moving back across the huge darkened chamber.

Trussed up as he was in the floating chair, Bits watched the men cross into the room. Before them, on the floor, ran a bright green line which they followed until they finally faded into darkness. Bits was reminded that he hadn't seen the sun since his conviction for antisocial behavior. It was only his second conviction but the court nevertheless used its prerogative to have him sentenced to a licensing facility that would hold him until it was
scientifically proven
that he was no longer a threat to society. They tried him in a Manhattan subbasement, had him transferred at night to the tube train that sped through its mile-deep Synthsteel tunnel at over six hundred miles an hour from New York to the East Indian Ocean. He arrived at night also and was delivered in bonds to the tender mercies of L. Johnson, orientation officer of Angel's Island, the first and most feared nonnational private prison. Bits twisted around to see what the orientation officer was doing but he too was gone. It was only Bits and Jerry there in the weak light.

"Got a cig, Jerry?"

The big man grabbed hold of the handle at the back of the chair, which resembled an oversized fancy plastic scoop, and began pushing Bits ahead of him.

"Jerry, did you hear me?"

"No talk in the halls. Follow the pathway given and speak only when spoken to by authority." Jerry's words weren't the soulless mouthings of the zombie he resembled but soft warnings that chilled Bits into hushed tones.

"They got mikes on us?" Bits asked.

Jerry did not respond. He walked along just behind Bits's left side. The gravity chair, a product of PAPPSI--Polar/Anti-Polar Power Systems Inc.--floated silently down the gloomy hall. The strangeness of the interiors that Bits had seen so far had been due to a trick the architects had come up with. Only things that were meant to be seen received lighting. Doorways, signs, and long baseboard directional lights indicated where you might go and when you got somewhere. Everything else was black as space. The walls and ceiling, even the floors, were coated with a completely nonreflective material that made the inside of the prison seem like the deep of starless space. Every step taken was a step of faith. You'd never see a hole or wall that wasn't marked. Your feet fell on nothingness. People shone in the darkness as did any object not treated with the nonreflective material.