Paradise Tales (25 page)

I wade in, my legs reading the depth and flow.

Yep. Welp. Here it is.

The water may be delicious, but we’re using too much of it. Current and projected population; water usage average preferred and necessary all rattle past me.

Soon we won’t have enough water. Soon as in say five years.

Nothing is simple, except for reality. Reality is a tiny white stable dot in the middle of all this info. Everything else, all the talk, is piled up sky-high, prioritised, processed, and offered back.

Mr. Cranky, my old mean streak, would say that folks could just as easily test the water themselves. They could all take turns confirming.

Later Jinny, the real Jinny, connects to whisper that tomorrow she wants to join me on my Walk.

She shows up in reality. I see her coming and I can feel my arms tense up, specifically my arms for some reason. For her I’m wearing shorts, how old-fashioned. I worry about the creases age has made across my skinny stomach.

It’s cool dawn. The sunlight catches her sideways. Her skin has a perfect pink glow, her smile is ready on her face like she’s come back from a future where everything works. And she’s wearing serious shoes.

She says hi, I say hi. Our PAs do a quick exchange to look at the day’s tasks. If she was in any doubt before, Jinny will now know for sure that I’m the bottom of the social heap. Everybody sets Priorities together and I just check them out. I guess she wants to see what that’s like.

So she’s going to do air-quality analysis for me, and keep track of wind direction, humidity, acidity, all that stuff as it changes over time and distance. I’m going to do street semiology, traffic absence, and basic demographics. There’s numbers, and there’s graphs, but what counts is being able to say how all of this will land for people with very different Priorities. Oh, and here’s another thrill: I’m checking for termites.

Me, I’m a Dog man. Really, that’s what I’m now called. People with my nest of Priorities get called Dogs because we value faithfulness, trust, and constant grooming. We like repetition but we want to get to know things, too, so we like to go out sniffing and snooping. I’m in the perfect job.

Oops, I’ve been telling her all that. She nods, looking slightly glazed and distracted. “How’s your gout?”

She means the pains in my feet. She remembers stuff.

“Medication. Little critters are eating up those crystals.”

“You should have come to me for that!”

If she can’t love me, then maybe we can still be friends. I can use friends, too. I feel an idiot grin on my face, just to have her near me, and I can’t think of anything to say.

She’s not just a doctor. Naw, that wouldn’t occupy her. She runs a business on the side as a Bespoke Prioritiser. She probably needs a whole lake of homeopathic info to store her credits. I want to ask her dumb questions such as: Do you rank for anybody who’s well crucial? I don’t ask, but she answers anyway.

“Naw, not really. Most of mine are overseers needing to find balance. One of them wanted every single thing about the Buddha itemized, ranked, and prioritised around something “innovative.” He didn’t say what, just something, anything zazzie and chic. Do you know how complicated Buddhism is? All those different Ways? Minayana, Therevada, Zen …”

“Not as big as Hinduism.”

She laughs lazily, and I don’t know if it’s because what I said was charmingly irrelevant or not. I was, of course, being entirely serious. She touches my arm again, grooming. “I gave him a package centered on the need to keep records as the main criteria.” Maybe she sees her job as part of the same hazy joke. “Buddhism as an aid to bureaucracy.”

We’re alone outside, the streets press in close around us. It’s not a particularly nice day and the village is still asleep. Who walks except Walkers?

Our streets wind, houses close together, friendly, with shared doorways between them, rooftop pathways across them, and all around us on the slopes, turbines white as doves that turn in our arroyo winds. On some roofs, fleshsails catch the sun and make sugar.

Folks still have to have things in reality. Paint which adjusts to temperature and heats the rooms. The grafts which grow some of the houses, or the mud bricks baked in kilns, or the wires and circuits that also work like spiders to spin more wires and circuits. Some houses are made of flowers, growing. Some are made of laterite for people who love the miracle of mined dirt oxydizing into stone; others are stacked shitcakes dried and sterilized. Those match people who value self-sufficiency. Plenty of those still since the time of the troubles.

“Semiologizing,” Jinny says and chuckles.

“We’re about to metastasize,” I say. Our village will split, probably along Predator/Herbivore lines. I guess the Predators will make us poor Herbivores move again.

“Dogs aren’t Herbivores,” she reminds me. But there is a glow of agreement coming off her. Like me, she’s clocked this crowding of styles, the closely packed fabric of the town almost not quite on the edge of mismatch, conflict.

Partition they tell us is fun, good. New birth is always good. “Water’s the problem,” she says. And I wonder, how did she get hold of that?

“Didn’t you report that yesterday? We’re running out of water.”

We make our own sugar from the sun; our gut makes a lot of our protein. Our own bodies fuel the information which now lives as part of us. In the right climate, we could live without anything else, for a time at least. Except for water.

“Not run out so much as just that it will trigger the breakup.”

Our home. It will go.

We walk, I watch her. She’s not just confirming, she’s filtering, scanning her takes through all kinds of Priorities from government diaries to chaotic monitors. She’s making something interesting out of my boring job.

“This is fun,” she says. “It’s reassuring. It all works.” The movement of her hands takes in our settlement, the network as a whole, the desert landscape in cool morning. The soft pink light on the ridges, the deep kindly mauve in the canyons.

“For now,” I say.

She looks at the streets that coil about us. “I want to go inside the houses and swap with people.”

“You don’t need to go inside to do that.”

“I mean for real, one-to-one like us now.” She starts to giggle and footnote all kinds of sociologies. “Come on, keep up the semio.”

I riff. “Deeply social creatures needing each other for physical shelter and to keep at bay a sense of threat to their highly complex culture. Being dependent on weather, they are also frightened and resentful of it. Spaces are designed to minimize the impact of sun, wind, rain, cloud, night, day. Needlessly, in some ways, as they are actually more independent of the environment than at any point in human history. They love info, they value preservation of it, but they have a low Priority for actual experience, thus the low Priority for physical transport. Me, I want to walk through the Rockies. Beyond that, fearful of a loss of a single member, driving a mix of socialisation and isolation caused by the intimacies of info.”

“None of that footnotes.” She looks distracted. I feel inside her that a thesaurus of names from Saussure to Tamagocuchi is flurrying past with no matches.

“None of that was a quote.” She means it’s harder to put in a tree. She blurts out a chuckle. “I’ll just have to quote you!”

That’s why she likes me: because I say new things. I’m flattered.

On a flat roof, sunbathers. Jinny wants to eyeball them. She calls hello. Silence. They remain on their soft roof, naked, sleeping in sunlight.

“Conflicting Priorities for communication and independence,” I remind her. It’s a joke. She doesn’t laugh, she grimaces. She waves. She jumps up and down and calls. I just know she’s buzzing them with feelers. She sends them and me a gift of niche Priorities, a lovely lavender suggestion for emphasising open-plan living and geneswapping as a substitute for reproduction.

The people on the roof behave like plants. I mistake them for Herbivores. One of them finally says aloud, not looking up, “I’m not really here.”

“We’re Dolphins,” murmurs the other and they share a sarky smile. They are both identical, which means they’ve morphed. Into each other. Yuck.

“They’re Sharks,” Jinny says downturning her mouth quickly to mean, let’s get out of here. Sharks prioritize winning and making good use of you. This new astrology of Priority. It really works.

“What are you?” the two Predators ask in unison.

Jinny bursts out laughing and shakes her head. “I’m a Hamster!” The absurdity of a Hamster facing Sharks. “No, really. I prioritise …” She shakes her head cos it’s all too silly.

“Activity,” I say for her. I’m a bit surprised that she’s something, well, so humble and sweet.

“Running in circles,” she chuckles again. Already we are walking away from the Sharks and talking only for each other.

I list a few other Hamster priorities for her. “Functional feeding only. Clear goals.”

I have to admit it does sound slightly comic, this lean yet nourished looking woman taller than I am calling herself a Hamster. “Hamsters are harmless,” she says. “Harmless and delighted.”

So you like Dogs because we’re harmless too. I’m thinking that maybe Jinny likes old guys, tall lanky old guys because everybody else is round and soft. She’s done comfort, she’s done fast, she’s done young and handsome. She’s lonely. How did she end up lonely? Long story. I hope to hear it.

Next job, we confirm bacteria and virus levels and then spend the rest of the day counting numbers of beneficial insects and useful information retroviruses.
All’s Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque
… I actually start producing footnotes from Priorities of my own. I feel like I’m flying.

“We couldn’t do medicine without Walkers,” she says.

The next day and there’s nothing from her. I was expecting all kinds of links, packages, even conclusions. I was quite proud of some of the stuff I gave her. Shitcakes as a marker of independence, itself a marker of fear. I really had given of my best. Nothing came of it, apparently. She’d been smiling in order to keep a distance, was that it?
How nice he is and how desperately dull, really.

Again, it’s happening again.

My stomach sinks, I feel despair. There is no poetry that footnotes when really nice women don’t call back. Was she just pretending then, to be nice? The way you placate an embarrassing link-partner who runs out of material, or a genepooling that bellyflops?

I do get a call from Spotty Derek. He really is terribly spotty, something to do with his mitochondrial communications, but he’s deeply sweet. After all, we’re both Walkers. He’s skinny as a toothpick, though there’s something sheeplike in his gaze that makes him button-cute so that people forgive his being smart and an overseer at eighteen.

“Watchinit,” he twerps at me. “You landed one yesterday. FRD. QED. Whoa!” I think he means my date. If that is what it was. He looks pleased for me. I wait, because he’ll have a comment. He starts to chuckle. “Shitcakes as what? A bit tenuous.”

“I thought it was OK.”

“Yeah, but your job is to Confirm, not invent. Whose Priorities were those?”

Mine, I realize. My Priorities. Nobody gives a shit about those. My priorities might skew the measure. I’m not paid to confirm things that are important to me.

And what do I want to have confirmed?

That I have a heart, have a soul? I really thought she wanted to please me, I really thought she wanted me. Good at faking I guess. All that bedside-manner stuff, all that selling her gift priorities to the higher-ups, I guess it makes you professionally pleasant, effortlessly charming.

Derek is still chuckling, and gives me a hug by feeler. “You can move in with me if you like.” He doesn’t mean it. He’s very kind. And very bossy. The amount of understanding it takes to be like him takes my breath away and intimidates me a bit. His authority creeps up on you. You don’t notice it at first. He looks like Sam out of
Pickwick Papers,
and please keep the footnote.

He’s a Madonna. Priorities: power and nurturing. And yeah, I’d do a trans for him in a second and have his babies, which he knows, and likes, but will never do anything about, except to use that underlying warmth to make me like him and do what I’m told.

“You—uh—should reconfirm those figures on water,” he says. Before we all panic, he means. We’re all so low-key and calm.

“Yeah,” I say as if he’d said, weather’s nice today.

“Ahhh watchinit… ,” he says, all I get is a strong blast of something hearty, cheerful and dismissive. I give him a blast of something else.

“Just wait til it gets political. Just wait til you try to separate us by Priority, by info type. And you lose your wife, or your brother refuses to talk to you, or it all gets tense and nasty, and out of nowhere, suddenly nice-enough people become thugs. Very quiet, very smiling, neighbourly thugs, and if it’s not you who move out, it will be over your dead body. Not theirs!”

“Sorry,” he says and something gentle and distant like the sound of surf washes out from him.

“You weren’t there!” I relent a bit. “You’re too young.”

So I head out again to the creek. Today I’ll check downstream as well. But I’m all unwanted downloads, spam, reccies like wasps. Everybody else is scattered.
Water, we can’t do without water. Is that Walker nuts or something?
I just don’t care.

So I do what I promised myself I would not do. I send out feelers again to Jinny.

Where are you, what system you in? Did you enjoy reality? Nice Walk, wasn’t it? Did you think so? Did it measure up, or was it all a bit dull and lifeless?

Nothing.

Oh for heaven’s sake, I tell myself, give it a rest.

I really am a Dog, I really do need to be petted and stroked. I promised myself I’d let potential lovers come to me. Only if they wanted to and when they wanted to, so I would know they meant it. Just let someone else do the chasing and the chancing for a change.

But I really thought yesterday had been good. It felt so good to be with her, just to talk or not to talk, just to walk, see some bricks, taste some air and let her prattle on, dumping all this wonderful stuff. She’s fine for me. She’ll do. I don’t want anything else. I just want her to touch me back. I just want her to want me.

So I’m walking through the village and at that exact moment, I see her, outside for real. She’s on that flat roof. She’s huddled under a blanket with the two Sharks, smoking weed.

I’m angry.

I stomp on ahead. I project something-anything and for some reason all that comes out is: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds … What am I doing? Pony Express? Do I really have a major priority to make an idiot of myself?