Cloud Atlas (33 page)

What was your first lecture?

Swanti’s
Biomathematics;
however, its real lesson was humiliation. I walked to the lecture hall across dirty slush, hooded and unnoticed. But when I took off my cloak in the corridor, my Sonmi features provoked surprise, then unease. In the lecture hall, my entry detonated resentful silence.

It didn’t last. “Oy!” a boy yelled. “One hot ginseng, two dog-burgers!” and the entire theater laughed. I am not genomed to blush, but my pulse rose. I took a seat in the second row, occupied by girls. Their leader had emeralded teeth. “This is
our
row,” she said. “Go to the back. You stink of mayo.” I obeyed, meekly. A paper dart hit my face. “We don’t vend burgers in your dinery, fabricant,” someone called, “why’re you taking up space in our lecture?” I was about to leave when spidery Dr. Chu’an tripped onto the stage and dropped her notes. I did my best to concentrate on the lecture that followed, but after a while, Dr. Chu’an’s eyes roamed her audience, saw me; she stopped midsentence. The audience, laughing, realized why. Dr. Chu’an forced herself to continue. I forced myself to stay but lacked the courage to ask questions at the end. Outside I endured a barrage of aggressive snideries.

Did Professor Mephi know about the students’ unfriendliness?

I think so. At our seminar, the professor asked if my lecture had been fruitful; I chose the word
informative
and asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, “What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?”

I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy.

Mephi seemed delited. “Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror.”

I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.

Mephi replied, “History suggests, not until they are
made
to.”

When, I asked, would that happen?

The professor spun his antique globe and answered merely: “Dr. Chu’an’s lecture continues tomorrow.”

It must have taken courage to return
.

Not really: an enforcer escorted me, so at least no one flung insults at me. The enforcer addressed the second row of girls with courteous malice. “This is
our
row. Go to the back.” The girls melted away, but I felt no triumph. It was the girls’ fear of Unanimity, not their acceptance of me, that prevailed. Dr. Chu’an was so flustered by the enforcer that she mumbled her entire lecture without once looking at her audience. Prejudice is permafrost.

Did you brave any more lectures?

One, on Lööw’s
Fundaments
. By request I went unescorted, preferring insults to xternal armor. I arrived early, took a side seat, and kept a visor on as the lecture hall filled. I was recognized nonetheless. The students regarded me with mistrust, but no paper missiles were launched. Two boys in front turned around: they had honest faces and rural accents. One asked if I really was some sort of artificial genius.

Genius
is not a word to bandy so casually, I suggested.

Hearing a server talk made the pair marvel. “It must be hell,” said the second, “to have an intelligent mind trapped in a body genomed for service.”

I had grown as attached to my body as he had to his, I responded.

The lecture proceeded without event, but when I left the hall, a small riot of questions, miked walkmans, and flash nikons was waiting for me. Which Papa Song’s had I come from? Who had enrolled me at Taemosan? Were there more of me? What were my views on the Yoona
939 Atrocity? How many weeks did I have before my ascension degenerated? Was I an Abolitionist? What was my favorite color? Did I have a boyfriend?

Media? On a corpocratic campus?

No, but Media had offered rewards for features on the Sonmi of Taemosan. I hooded and tried to elbow my way back to the Unanimity Faculty, but the crush was so thick, my visor was knocked off and I was floored and badly bruised before two plainclothes enforcers could xtricate me. Boardman Mephi met me in the Unanimity lobby and escorted me back to my quarters, muttering that I was too valuable to xpose myself to the prurient mob. He rotated his rainstone ring vigorously: a habit when tense. We agreed, from then on my lectures should be dijied to my sony.

What about the xperiments you were obliged to undergo?

Ah, yes, a daily reminder of my true status. They depressed my spirits. What was knowledge for, I would ask myself, if I could not use it to better my xistence? How would I fit in on Xultation nine years and nine stars later with my superior knowledge? Could amnesiads erase the knowledge I had acquired? Did I want that to happen? Would I be happier? Fourthmonth arrived, bringing my first anniversary as a specimen freak on Taemosan, but spring did not bring me the gladness it brings the world. My curiosity is dying, I told Professor Mephi one pleasant day, during a seminar on Thomas Paine. I remember the sounds of a baseball game drifting thru his open window. My mentor said we had to identify the source of this malady, and urgently. I said something about reading not being knowledge, about knowledge without xperience being food without sustenance.

“You need to get out more,” remarked the professor.

Out where? Out to lectures? Out on the campus? Outings?

Next ninthnite, a young Unanimity postgrad named Hae-Joo Im elevatored to my apartment. Addressing me as Miss Sonmi, he xplained that Professor Mephi had asked him to “come and cheer you up.” Professor Mephi held the power of life and death over his future, he said, so here he was. “That was a joke,” he added, edgily, then he asked if I remembered him.

I did. His black hair was crewcut maroon now, and his eyebrows on-offed where they had been unadorned; but I recognized Boom-Sook’s x-classmate who had brought the news of Wing
027’s death at the hands of Min-Sic. My visitor looked around my living space, enviously. “Well, this beats Boom-Sook Kim’s poky nest, doesn’t it? Big enough to swallow my family’s entire apartment.”

I agreed, the apartment was very spacious indeed. A silence inflated. Hae-Joo Im offered to stay inside the elevator until I wanted him to leave. Once again, I apologized for my lack of social grace and invited him in.

He took his nikes off, saying “No,
I
apologize for
my
lack of social grace. I talk too much when I get nervous, and say stupid things. Here I go again. Can I try out your maglev chaise longue?”

Yes, I said and asked why I made him nervous.

I looked like any Sonmi in any old dinery, he answered, but when I opened my mouth I became a doctor of philosophy. The postgrad sat cross-legged on the chaise longue and swung, wonderingly, passing his hand through the magnetic field. He confessed, “A little voice in my head is saying, ’Remember, this girl—woman, I mean—I mean, person—is a landmark in the history of science. The first stable ascendee! Ascendant, rather. Watch what you say, Im! Make it profound!’ That’s why I’m just, uh, spouting rubbishy nothings.”

I assured him I felt more like a specimen than like a landmark.

Hae-Joo shrugged and told me the professor had said I could use a nite out downtown, and he waved a Soulring. “Unanimity xpenses! Sky’s the limit. So what’s your idea of fun?”

I had no idea of fun.

Well, Hae-Joo probed, what did I do to relax?

I play Go against my sony, I said.

“To
relax?”
he responded, incredulous. “Who wins, you or the sony?”

The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve?

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

“Sweet Corpocracy”—Hae-Joo Im puffed—”let’s go downtown and spend some dollars.”

Didn’t he irritate you a little?

Initially, he irritated me a lot, but I reminded myself that he was Professor Mephi’s prescription for my malaise. Also, Hae-Joo had paid me the compliment of referring to me as a “person.” I asked him what he normally did on ninthnites, when not coerced into looking after prize specimens.

He told me with a diplomatic lowered smile how men of Mephi’s stratum never coerce, only imply. He might go to a dinery or bar with classmates or, if he lucked out, go clubbing with a girl. I was not a classmate and not xactly a girl, so he suggested a galleria, to “sample the fruits of Nea So Copros.”

Would he not be embarrassed, I asked, to be seen with a Sonmi? I could wear a hat and wraparounds.

Hae-Joo Im instead proposed a stick-on wizardly beard and a pair of reindeer antlers. I apologized: I had none. The young man smiled, apologized for another stupid joke, and told me to wear whatever I felt comfortable in, assuring me that I would blend in much better downtown than in a lecture hall. A taxi was downstairs, and he would wait for me in the lobby.

Were you nervous about leaving Taemosan?

Slitely, yes. Hae-Joo distracted me by siteseeing talk. He directed the taxi via the Memorial to the Fallen Plutocrats, around Kyōng-bokkung Palace, down the Avenue of Nine Thousand AdVs. The driver was a pureblood Indian with a sharp nose for fat fares from xpense accounts. “An ideal nite for Moon Tower, sir,” he happened to mention. “Very clear.” Hae-Joo agreed on the spot. The helter-way ascended the gigantic pyramid, high, high, high above the canopies, above everything xcept the corp monoliths. Have you been up Moon Tower by nite, Archivist?

No, not even by day. We citizens leave the Tower for the tourists, mostly
.

You should go. From the 234th story, the conurb was a carpet of xenon and neon and motion and carbdiox and canopies. But for the glass dome, Hae-Joo told me, the wind at this altitude would fling us into orbit, like satellites. He indicated various humpbacks and landmarks: some I had heard of or seen on 3-D, some not. Chongmyo Plaza was hidden behind a monolith, but its dayblue stadium was visible. SeedCorp was the lunar sponsor that nite. The immense lunar projector on far-off Fuji beamed AdV after AdV onto the moon’s face: tomatoes big as babies, creamy cauliflower cubes, holeless lotus roots. Speech bubbles ballooned from Seed-Corp’s logoman’s juicy mouth, guaranteeing that his products were 100 percent genomically modified.

Descending, the elderly taxi driver spoke of his boyhood in a distant conurb called Mumbai, now deadlanded, when the moon was always naked. Hae-Joo said an AdVless moon would freak him out.

Which galleria did you go to?

Wangshimni Orchard: what an encyclopedia of consumables! For hours, I pointed at items for Hae-Joo to identify: bronze masks, instant bird’s nest soup, fabricant toys, golden suzukis, air filters, acidproof skeins, oraculars of the Beloved Chairman and statuettes of the Immanent Chairman, jewel-powder perfumes, pearlsilk scarves, realtime maps, deadland artifacts, programmable violins. A pharmacy: packets of pills for cancer, aids, alzheimers, lead-tox; for corpulence, anorexia, baldness, hairiness, exuberance, glumness, dewdrugs, drugs for overindulgence in dewdrugs. Hour twenty-one chimed, yet we had not advanced beyond a single precinct. How the consumers seethed to buy, buy, buy! Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.

Hae-Joo led me to a stylish café platform where he bought a styro of starbuck for himself and an aqua for me. He xplained that under the Enrichment Statutes, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime. I knew this already but did not interrupt. He said his mum feels intimidated by modern gallerias, so Hae-Joo usually works through the quota.

I asked him to tell me how it feels to be in a family.

The postgrad smiled and frowned at the same time. “A necessary drag,” he confided. “Mum’s hobby is collecting minor ailments and drugs to cure them. Dad works at the Ministry of Statistics and sleeps in front of 3-D with his head in a bucket.” Both parents were random conceptions, he confessed, who sold a second child quota to get Hae-Joo genomed properly. This let him aim for his cherished career: to be a Unanimityman had been his ambition since the disneys of his boyhood. Kicking down doors for money looked like a fine life.