He, She and It (7 page)

“Hey, duke, hard times, eh? Flat, blat like a squashed cat. You sound como young meat. I run a good clean cheese shop—”

She slid the knife into the deep seam of her sleeve and strode on. Hot, it was hot, it was hot. Her brain was melting with the toxic fumes. She was both hungry and thirsty. She still had some water, and that would have to last her. She had no idea what diseases were running through the Glop at the moment, but there were always new types of typhoid and hepatitis, new viral scourges still colonizing from the tropics. She would simply have to endure her hunger. It did not do to imagine what the burgers or sushi were made of, animal, vegetable, mineral. Whether they had been alive in their previous incarnations or
not, they were now surely swarming with local protozoa and bacteria. The smells of the cooking made her salivate, but she never slowed her pace. Walk fast but never trot. Old street rule. Some of the food was being charbroiled on hibachis or barbecue grills, some was being cooked on laser burners, some was simply turning over a fire built on the floor of the ancient building complex, the tunnels that had once been a subway system. Parts of the old system were flooded; the rest was occupied.

Most of the vendors, too, squatted in black cover-ups, although gang members distinguished themselves by their uniforms, paint, tattoos, by daring to show their arms, their legs, their faces and chests. They wore weapons visibly, everything from knives to laser rifles; officially weapons were outlawed, but the only laws that held here were turf laws of the gangs who controlled a piece of the Glop. The gangs met in raids, in treaty powwows, uneasily in public markets and common areas such as the tube stations, the clinics.

Sharp smell of urine and shit. A body. No, he was still alive. Around the body with its chest torn open and the arterial blood spurting out, stood a chanting circle of gang niños, all wearing cutoff jackets in purple and gold with a snarling rat emblazoned on the back, lightning shooting from his eyes, body pulsating, in constant movement caught in midleap, over and over again. They were chanting their killing song. She paused, kept moving. She could be lying there five minutes later. Everywhere the signs of two gangs warred, lasered into the pavement, splashed on the walls. Disputed turf was dangerous territory, a war zone.

She saw a stairway ahead. A toll had been set up across it, manned by a group dressed like the downed kid. They had an old jury-rigged hand box, and the line shuffled past it. She read off the stairway tolls and passed through their security, paid and climbed out into the raw. Parts of the Glop were under domes, but the system had not been completed before government stopped functioning. There were still elections, every two years, but they were just highly bet-on sporting events. All politicians did was run for office. Every quadrant was managed by the remains of the old UN, the eco-police. After the two billion died in the Great Famine and the plagues, they had authority over earth, water, air outside domes and wraps. Otherwise the multis ruled their enclaves, the free towns defended themselves as they could, and the Glop rotted under the poisonous sky, ruled by feuding gangs and overlords.

Outside, she adjusted her goggles and looked for transport.
Short-distance pedicabs would not get her out of the Glop. She was near the northern fade-out. She needed a float car for hire. She heard a warning high pitch and threw herself into a building mouth before the flotilla of dust riders came tearing through the plaza in a blur of speed and flashing metal. Not everyone was quick enough. Blood sprayed out of the dust cloud. When they had passed, parts of two bodies were strewn across the broken pavement. She made her way past a gang fight of dogs quarreling over the flesh, toward the float cars tethered at the north end of the plaza. A cargo hold had pulled up on the east end of the plaza, and a recorded voice was calling for harvesters and vat boys. Out of the crumbling buildings, densely occupied to the last cubicle, a crowd of unemployed pushed toward the hold.

At the float car enclosure she put her hand into the box, and the monitor let her enter. The car boss set the coordinates. If she tried to change them, the car would simply land. When she arrived, it would automatically return. She paid in advance. Her credit was running low, but she hoped to be home in an hour. The float car ran on a cushion of air, following the old broken roads. It could fly for brief periods at a low altitude, frequently necessary to cross a river or a ravine where a bridge had collapsed. It was solar powered, quiet and not particularly fast. It could also move over water, which was important because when you had not taken a route in a while, you never knew how the ocean and estuaries might have advanced over the land, flooding low-lying sections. What had been terra firma three years before might be under the waves, for with the polar caps rapidly melting, the oceans rose and rose. Float cars were vehicles of the multi gruds and the free towns. Fast tanks moved as well over broken terrain, and they were armored. Corporate travel was usually by zip.

Driving a hired float car was undemanding. She need not do anything except steer it around or over obstacles. It had the coordinates of her destination and proceeded on its own. Overhead a vast helix of vultures circled. They had evolved to withstand UV radiation. They could live in the raw, as could most bugs, as could gulls and rats and raccoons. Not people. Not songbirds, all dead, so the insects flourished and moved in waves over the land, eating the hills to desert. The hills were deeply eroded. Scrub trees like pitch pine, wild cherry and bear oak had replaced sugar maples and white pines. Brambles and multiflora rose grew in impenetrable thickets she detoured around.

The car automatically cut east, toward the ocean, to miss the near corner of the Cybernaut enclave. Multis did not permit private or hired cars to pass through. Once the car had detoured the enclave with its green parklands under the dome, its coruscating city, she came into the area of free towns bordering the ocean. The road she was following ran straight into the sea, for low-lying coastal towns had been destroyed in the Great Hurricane of ’29. The wrap on St. Marystown glistened under the amber sun. She was close enough to the waves to smell petroleum and salt. Now she could see rising from the waters the hill on which her own town, Tikva, was built, its wrap floating over it on its supports like a shining cloud. She steered the car ashore and up the hill toward Tikva. She put down before the gate that faced the sea, got out and let the car turn and veer off.

She stood with her pack outside the gate and only then remembered to take off the black cover-up. Nothing remained but to return where she had been nurtured as a child. Would it serve as a safe haven? Gadi might still be here. They were friends by electronic transmission, but Gadi in the flesh was more than she wanted to face. She could probably slip into town, as she used to do with Gadi when she was growing up, but she had no reason to. Slowly she approached the monitor. Would it still recognize her hand print? It did. The male voice that was the town computer greeted her by name. “Shira, Malkah Shipman expects you. Avram Stein expects you. Welcome.”

She was embarrassed to find her eyes flushed with tears as she stuffed the cover-up into her shoulder pack. She was glad a moment later she had not tried to slip in, because she met two young people on guard duty. As official security, they bore dart guns with paralyzing capability. They had heard the monitor greet her and nodded her by. This must be a tense period, for there to be human guards on the perimeter. The free towns were not supposed to be able to buy laser weapons, although from the black market they sometimes did. They relied on shock or tranquilizers mostly, or on sonic weapons.

Walking under a wrap was different from being under a dome. The wrap was more permeable to light and weather; basically it shielded from UV. Inside temperature was only a little higher than outside. The perimeters were monitored by computer; a person crossing the barrier would set off an alarm. The gates, with recognition plates, faced each cardinal direction. When a hurricane struck, as it often did nowadays, the
wrap could be furled to protect it. Basically the free towns had sprung up along the ocean because such a location was vulnerable and considered dangerous; no multi would risk inundation. The free towns flourished on that unclaimed margin.

Shira loitered through the streets. The buildings were all different, although none could be higher than four stories here. Some houses were made of wood, some of brick, some of the new resins, some of polymers, some of stone. She was tickled by the consonances and dissonances—little Spanish haciendas, stern Greek Revival houses, shingled saltboxes, an imitation of Fernandez’ famous dancing house on its pedestal, jostled shoulders on the same block. After the uniformity of the Y-S enclave, the colors, the textures, the sounds and smells provoked her into a state of ecstasy until she found herself walking more and more slowly, her head whipping around like an idiot. Why had she ever left?

It was strange, too, to see things that were old, cracked, worn, houses that needed paint, a boarded-up window, a broken railing. People here carried out their own repairs in their own good time. Anarchic little plots of tulips and baby tomato plants, bean seedlings about to mount their poles lined the streets. At fourteen-thirty, almost everyone was at work. A robot cleaner puttered along the street, picking up the occasional bit of trash and sweeping madly. The sound of someone practicing violin, playing over and over a passage of Wieniawski, came through an open window. She wondered why that seemed startling until she realized that in Y-S, windows were not usually opened. The occasional passerby was casually dressed: open-throated shirts, pants, a full skirt, shorts, for the day was seasonably mild. She felt like a freak in her standard Y-S suit, now streaked with grime and soot. A couple passed her arguing loudly about somebody’s mother, their voices raised unself-consciously. Behind a hedge, a dog was barking at a rabbit in a hutch. In little yards, chickens were stalking about, and in one, speckled turkeys strutted. Ari would be crazy with excitement to see live animals. The smells assaulted her: animal smells, vegetable smells, the scent of yellow tulips, the heavier scent of narcissus, cooking odors, a tang of manure, the salty breath of the sea. Everything felt … unregulated. How unstimulated her senses had been all those Y-S years. How cold and inert that corporate Shira seemed as she felt herself loosening.

The house of her childhood: from the street a stolid square clapboard house, two stories offering a row of large multipaned
windows. It hid its secret, that it was built around a courtyard like the synagogue she had always gone to, the one called the Synagogue of Water. No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. Shira had been born since the Famine, after the rising oceans had drowned much of the rice and breadbaskets of the world, after the rising temperatures had shifted the ocean and air currents, leaving former farmlands scrubland or desert, after the end of abundant oil had finished agribusiness on land; yet the consequences and tales of the Famine had shaped her childhood too.

Malkah was waiting in the courtyard. “Ah, Shira, you’re home at last.”

“Since Ari was born, I’ve wanted to bring him here and let you get to know each other. Here I am but without my son. What good is it?”

“Time for you to come home. But it’s dangerous here. We’re under siege. We’ll talk about it later. Now come and let me hold you.”

Malkah felt smaller to her, far more fragile, and yet solid enough. The yellow rose still twined on the wall, the courtyard was still planted with peach and plum trees, grapevines and cosmos and tulips, squash and tomato vines, a garden of almost Eden. Shira held Malkah close, feeling a sense at once of her grandmother’s strength and age. Malkah had always seemed old to Shira, because Malkah was Bubeh and grandmothers were old, but Shira recognized in retrospect that Malkah had been a young and extremely vigorous grandmother. Malkah was born in 1987, so she would be seventy-two now.

Shira felt a lightening all through her as if tension so longstanding she had not even recognized it as tension had eased suddenly, a high-pitched background whine of machinery suddenly cutting off so that a blessed and startlingly rich inner silence flowed through her. This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn.

FIVE

Fifteen Years Before: The Day of Alef

At thirteen, Shira loved passionately and secretively and was loved in return. However, she also knew this to be a state outlawed and demeaned by everyone except Gadi and herself.

She did not love Gadi alone, only most fiercely. She also loved her grandmother Malkah and her big sleek brown cat, Hermes. Hermes had been hers since she had found him as a kitten abandoned in the raw, where he would have died, for he was not adapted to survive out there. He was valuable, because the town was plagued with mice. Mice and mosquitoes liked life under the wrap. He was precious to her because he loved her uncritically, undemandingly, unendingly. Malkah’s love was strong but abrasive, scrubbing her clean. Gadi’s love bore both roses and thorns, like the immense climber outside her bedroom window, swarming all the way up the courtyard wall.