Cloud Atlas (35 page)

A consumer girl with zinc-ringlets and plectrum nails jabbed me. “If you’ve
got
to taunt dumb fabricants, do it on firstday mornings. I need to get to the gallerias
this
side of curfew, okay?”

Hastily, I ordered rosejuice and sharkgums from Kyelim
889. I wished Hae-Joo was still with me. I was jumpy in case the Soulring malfunctioned and xposed me. The device worked, but my questions had marked me as a troublemaker. “Democratize your
own
fabricants!” A man glowered as I pushed by with my tray.
“A bolitionist.”
Other purebloods in the line glanced at me, worried, as if I carried a disease.

Hae-Joo had found a free table in my old quarter. How many tens of thousands of times had I wiped this surface? Hae-Joo asked, gently, if I had discovered anything valuable.

I whispered, “We are just
slaves
here for twelve years.”

The Unanimity postgrad just scratched his ear and checked no one was eavesdropping: but his xpression told me he agreed. He sipped his rosejuice. We watched AdV for ten minutes, not speaking: a Juche Boardman was shown opening a newer, safer, nuclear reactor, grinning as if his strata depended on it. Kyelim
889 cleared the table next to us; she had already forgotten me. My IQ may be higher, but she looked more content than I felt.

So your visit to Papa Song’s was an … anticlimax? Did you find the “key” to your ascended self?

Perhaps it was anticlimactic, yes. If there was a key, it was only that no key xisted. In Papa Song’s I had been a slave; at Taemosan I was a more privileged slave. One more thing occurred, however, as we headed back to the elevator. I recognized Mrs. Rhee, working at her sony. I spoke her name out loud.

The immaculately dewdrugged woman smiled up with puzzled, luscious, remodeled lips. “I
was
Mrs. Rhee, but I’m Mrs. Ahn now. My late husband drowned in a sea-fishing accident last year.”

I said that was just awful.

Mrs. Ahn dabbed her eye with her sleeve and asked if I had known her late husband well. Lying is harder than purebloods make it look, and Mrs. Ahn repeated her question.

“My wife was a qualities standardizer for the Corp before our marriage,” Hae-Joo xplained hastily, putting his hand on my shoulder and adding that Chongmyo Plaza was in her area and that Seer Rhee had been an xemplary corp man. Mrs. Ahn’s suspicions were aroused, however, and she asked xactly when that might have been. Now I knew what to say. “When his chief aide was a consumer named Cho.”

Her smile changed its hue. “Ah, yes, Aide Cho. Sent north, somewhere, I believe, to learn about team spirit.”

Hae-Joo took my arm, saying, “Well, ‘All for Papa Song, Papa Song for All.’ The gallerias beckon, darling. Mrs. Ahn is obviously a woman with no time to fritter.”

Later, back in my quiet apartment, Hae-Joo paid me this compliment. “If
I
had ascended from server to prodigy in twelve straight months, my current address wouldn’t be a guest quarter in the Unanimity Faculty: I would be in a psych ward somewhere, seriously. These … xistential qualms you suffer, they just mean you’re truly human.”

I asked how I might remedy them.

“You don’t remedy them. You live thru them.”

We played Go until curfew. Hae-Joo won the first game. I, the second.

How many of these xcursions took place?

Every ninthnite until Corpocracy Day. Familiarity bred esteem for Hae-Joo, and soon I shared Boardman Mephi’s high opinion of him. The professor never probed about our outings during our seminars; his protégé probably filed reports, but Mephi wished me to have at least the illusion of a private life. Board business demanded more of his time, and I saw him less regularly. The morning tests continued: a procession of courteous but unmemorable scientists.

Hae-Joo had a Unanimityman’s fondness for campus intrigue. I learned how Taemosan was no united organism but a hillock of warring tribes and interest groups, much like the Juche itself. The Unanimity Faculty maintained a despised dominance. “Secrets are magic bullets,” Hae-Joo was fond of saying. But this dominance also xplains why trainee enforcers have few friends outside the faculty. Girls looking for husbands, Hae-Joo admitted, were attracted to his future status, but males of his own age eschewed getting drunk in his company.

Archivist, my appointment in the Litehouse is approaching. Can we segue to my final nite on campus?

Please do
.

A keen passion of Hae-Joo’s was disneys, and one perq of Professor Mephi’s mentorship was access to forbidden items in the security archives.

You mean Union samizdat from the Production Zones?

No. I mean a zone even more forbidden, the past, before the Skirmishes. Disneys were called “movies” in those days. Hae-Joo said the ancients had an artistry that 3-D and Corpocracy had long ob-solesced. As the only disneys I had ever seen were Boom-Sook’s pornsplatters, I was obliged to believe him. On sixthmonth’s final ninthnite, Hae-Joo arrived with a key to a disneyarium on campus, xplaining that a pretty Media student was currying favor with him. He spoke in a theatrical whisper. “I’ve got a disc of, seriously, one of the greatest movies ever made by any director, from any age.”

Namely?

A picaresque entitled
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish
, made before the foundation of Nea So Copros, in a long-deadlanded province of the European democracy. Have you ever seen film dating from the early twenty-first century, Archivist?

Sweet Corpocracy, no! An eighth-stratum archivist wouldn’t get such security clearance in his wildest dreams! I’d be fired for even applying, and I’m shocked that even a Unanimity postgrad has access to such deviational material
.

Is that so? Well, the Juche’s stance on historical discourse is riddled with inconsistencies. On the one hand, if historical discourse were permitted, the downstrata could access a bank of human xperience that would rival, and sometimes contradict, that taught by Media. On the other hand, corpocracy funds your Ministry of Archivism, dedicated to preserving a historical record for future ages.

Yes, but our xistence is kept from the downstrata
.

Xcept from those condemned to the Litehouse.

Be that as it may, future ages will still be corpocratic ones. Corpocracy isn’t just another political system that will come and go—corpocracy is the natural order, in harmony with human nature. But we’re digressing. Why had Hae-Joo Im chosen to show you this
Ghastly Ordeal
?

Perhaps Professor Mephi had instructed him. Perhaps Hae-Joo Im had no reason xcept a fondness for the disney. Whatever the reason, I was engrossed. The past is a world both indescribably different from and yet subtly similar to Nea So Copros. People sagged and uglified as they aged in those days: no dewdrugs. Elderly purebloods waited to die in prisons for the senile: no fixed-term life spans, no euthanasium. Dollars circulated as little sheets of paper and the only fabricants were sickly livestock. However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one’s skin.

I can tell how fascinated you were …

Certainly: the vacant disneyarium was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite captured thru a lens when your grandfather’s grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but disneys enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces: Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say. For fifty minutes, for the first time since my ascension, I forgot myself, utterly, ineluctably.

Only fifty minutes?

Hae-Joo’s handsony purred at a key scene, when the film’s eponymous book thief suffered some sort of seizure; his face, contorted above a plate of peas, froze. A panicky voice buzzed from Hae-Joo’s handsony; “It’s Xi-Li! I’m right outside! Let me in! A crisis!” Hae-Joo pressed the remo-key; a wedge of light slid over the empty seats as the disneyarium door opened. A student ran over, his face shiny with sweat, and saluted Hae-Joo. He delivered news that would unravel my life, again. Specifically, forty or fifty enforcers had stormed the Unanimity Faculty, arrested Professor Mephi, and were searching for us. Their orders were to capture Hae-Joo for interrogation and kill me on sight. Campus xits were manned by armed enforcers.

Do you remember your thoughts on hearing that?

No. I think, I did not think. My companion now xuded a grim authority that I realized had always been there. He glanced at his rolex and asked if Mr. Chang had been captured. Xi-Li, the messenger, reported that Mr. Chang was waiting in the basement ford park. The man I had known as Postgrad Hae-Joo Im, backdropped by a dead actor, playing a character scripted over a century ago, turned to me. “Sonmi
451, I am not xactly who I said I am.”

Old Georgie’s path an’ mine crossed more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryin’, an’ after I’m died, no sayin’ what that fangy devil won’t try an’ do to me … so gimme some mutton an’ I’ll tell you ’bout our first meetin’. A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o’ your burnt wafery off’rin’s …

Adam, my bro, an’ Pa’n’me was trekkin’ back from Honokaa Market on miry roads with a busted cart axle in draggly clothesies. Evenin’ catched us up early, so we tented on the southly bank o’ Sloosha’s Crossin’, ’cos Waipio River was furyin’ with days o’ hard rain an’ swollen by a spring tide. Sloosha’s was friendsome ground tho’ marshy, no un lived in the Waipio Valley ’cept for a mil’yun birds, that’s why we din’t camo our tent or pull cart or nothin’. Pa sent me huntin’ for tinder’n’firewood while he’n’Adam tented up.

Now, I’d got diresome hole-spew that day ’cos I’d ate a gammy dog leg in Honokaa, an’ I was squattin’ in a thicket o’ ironwood trees upgulch when sudd’nwise eyes on me, I felt ’em. “Who’s there?” I called, an’ the mufflin’ ferny swallowed my voice.

Oh, a darky spot you’re in, boy
, murmed the mufflin’ ferny.

“Name y’self!” shouted I, tho’ not so loud. “I got my blade, I have!”

Right ’bove my head someun whisped,
Name y’self, boy, is it Zachry the Brave or Zachry the Cowardy?
Up I looked an’ sure ‘nuff there was Old Georgie cross-leggin’ on a rottin’ ironwood tree, a slywise grinnin’ in his hungry eyes.

“I ain’t’fraid o’
you!”
I telled him, tho’ tell-it-true my voice was jus’ a duck fart in a hurrycane. Quakin’ inside I was when Old Georgie jumped off his branch an’ then what happened? He dis’peared in a blurry flurryin’, yay, b’hind me. Nothin’ there … ’cept for a plump lardbird snufflyin’ for grubs, jus’ askin’ for a pluckin’n’a spit! Well, I reck’ned Zachry the Brave’d faced down Old Georgie, yay, he’d gone off huntin’ cowardier vic’tries’n me. I wanted to tell Pa’n’Adam ’bout my eerie adventurin’, but a yarnin’ is more delish with broke-de-mouth grinds, so hushly-hushly up I hoicked my leggin’s an’ I crept up on that meatsome feathery buggah … an’ I dived.

Mister Lardbird he slipped thru my fingers an’ skipped off, but I wasn’t givin’ up, nay, I chased him upstream thru bumpy’n’thorny thickets, spring-heelin’ dead branches’n’all, thorns scratched my face diresome, but see I’d got the chasin’ fever so I din’t notice the trees thinnin’ nor the Hiilawe Falls roarin’ nearer, not till I ran schnock into the pool clearin’ an’ giddied up a bunch o’ horses. Nay, not wild horses, these was horses decked in studded leather armor an’ on the Big Isle that means one thing only, yay, the Kona.

Ten–twelve of them painted savages was ‘ready risin’n’reachin’ for their whips’n’blades, yellin’ war cries at me! Oh, now I legged it back downgulch the way I’d come, yay, the hunter was the hunted. The nearest Kona was runnin’ after me, others was leapin’ on their horses an’ laughin’ with the sport. Now panickin’ wings your foot but it muddies your thinkin’ too, so I rabbited back to Pa. I was only a niner so I jus’ followed my instinct without thinkin’ thru what’d happen.

I never got back to our tentin’ tho’, or I’d not be sittin’ here yarnin’ to you. Over a ropy root—Georgie’s foot maybe—I tripped’n’tumblied into a pit o’ dead leaves what hid me from the Kona hoofs thunderin’ over me. I stayed there, hearin’ them jagged shouts goin’ by, jus’ yards away runnin’ thru them trees … straight t’ward Sloosha’s. To Pa’n’Adam.

I creeped slywise’n’speedy, but late I was, yay, way too late. The Kona was circlin’ our camp, their bullwhips crackin’. Pa he’d got his ax swingin’ an’ my bro’d got his spiker, but the Kona was jus’ toyin’ with ’em. I stayed at the lip o’ the clearin’, see fear was pissin’ in my blood an’ I cudn’t go on.
Crack!
went a whip, an’ Pa’n’Adam was top-sied an’ lay wrigglyin’ like eels on the sand. The Kona chief, one sharky buggah, he got off his horse an’ walked splishin’ thru the shallows to Pa, smilin’ back at his painted bros, got out his blade an’ opened Pa’s throat ear to ear.

Nothin’ so ruby as Pa’s ribbonin’ blood I ever seen. The chief licked Pa’s blood off the steel.

Adam’d got the dead shock, his spunk was drained off. A painted buggah binded his heels’n’wrists an’ tossed my oldest bro over his saddle like a sack o’ taro, an’ others sivvied our camp for ironware’n’all an’ busted what they din’t take. The chief got back on his horse an’ turned’n’looked right at me … them eyes was Old Georgie’s eyes.
Zachry the Cowardy
, they said,
you was born to be mine, see, why even fight me?

Did I prove him wrong? Stay put an’ sink my blade into a Kona neck? Follow ’em back to their camp an’ try’n’free Adam? Nay, Zachry the Brave Niner he snaky-snuck up a leafy hideynick to snivel’n’pray to Sonmi he’d not be catched’n’slaved too. Yay, that’s all I did. Oh, if I’d been Sonmi list’nin’, I’d o’ shooked my head digustly an’ crushed me like a straw bug.

Pa was still lyin’n’bobbin’ in the salt shallows when I sneaked back after night’d fallen; see, the river was calmin’ down now an’ the weather clearin’. Pa, who’d micked’n’biffed’n’loved me. Slipp’ry as cave fish, heavy as a cow, cold as stones, ev’ry drop o’ blood sucked off by the river. I cudn’t grief prop’ly yet nor nothin’, ev’rythin’ was jus’ too shock’n’horrorsome, see. Now Sloosha’s was six–seven up’n’down miles from Bony Shore, so I built a mound for Pa where he was. I cudn’t mem’ry the Abbess’s holy words ’cept
Dear Sonmi, Who art amongst us, return this beloved soul to a valley womb, we beseech thee
. So I said ’em, forded the Waipio, an’ trogged up the switchblade thru the night forest.

An elf owl screeched at me,
Well fought, Zachry the Brave!
I yelled at the bird to shut up, but it screeched back,
Or else? You’ll bust me like you bust them Kona? Oh, for the sake o’ my chicky-chick-chicks do have mercy!
Up in the Kohala Mountains, dingos was howlin’,
Cowardyyy-yy-y Zachryyy-yy-y
. Lastly the moon she raised her face, but that cold lady din’t say nothin’ nay she din’t have to, I knowed what she thinked o’ me. Adam was lookin’ at that same moon, only two–three–four miles away, but for all I could help him, that could o’ been b’yonder Far Honolulu. I bust open an’ sobbed’n’sobbed’n’sobbed, yay, like a wind-knotted babbit.

An uphill mile later I got to Abel’s Dwellin’ an’ I hollered ’em up. Abel’s eldest Isaak let me in an’ I telled ’em what’d happened at Sloosha’s Crossin’, but … did I tell the hole true? Nay, wrapped in Abel’s blankies, warmed by their fire’n’grinds, the boy Zachry lied. I din’t ‘fess how I’d leaded the Kona to Pa’s camp, see, I said I’d just gone huntin’ a lardbird into the thicket, an’ when I got back … Pa was killed, Adam taken, an’ Kona hoofs in the mud ev’rywhere. Cudn’t do nothin’, not then, not now. Ten Kona bruisers could o’ slayed Abel’s kin jus’ as easy as slayin’ Pa.

Your faces are askin’ me. Why’d I lie?

In my new tellin’, see, I wasn’t Zachry the Stoopit nor Zachry the Cowardy, I was jus’ Zachry the Unlucky’n’Lucky. Lies are Old Georgie’s vultures what circle on high lookin’ down for a runty’n’weedy soul to plummet’n’sink their talons in, an’ that night at Abel’s Dwellin’, that runty’n’weedy soul, yay, it was me.

Now you people’re lookin’ at a wrinkly buggah, mukelung’s nibblin’ my breath away, an’ I won’t be seein’ many more winters out, nay, nay, I know it. I’m shoutin’ back more’n forty long years at myself, yay, at Zachry the Niner,
Oy, list’n! Times are you’re weak ‘gainst the world! Times are you can’t do nothin’! That ain’t your fault, it’s this busted world’s fault is all!
But no matter how loud I shout, Boy Zachry, he don’t hear me nor never will.

Goat tongue is a gift, you got it from the day you’re borned or you ain’t got it. If you got it, goats’ll heed your say-so, if you ain’t, they’ll jus’ trample you muddy an’ stand there scornin’. Ev’ry dawnin’ I’d milk the nannies an’ most days take the hole herd up the throat o’ Elepaio Valley, thru Vert’bry Pass to pasturin’ in the Kohala Peaks. I herded Aunt Bees’s goats too, they’d got fifteen–twenty goats, so all-telled I’d got fifty–sixty to mind’n’help their birthin’ an’ watch for sick uns. I loved them dumb beasts more’n I loved myself. When rain thundered I’d get soaked pluckin’ off their leeches, when sun burnt I’d crispen’n’brown, an’ if we was high up in the Kohalas times was I’d not go back down for three–four nights runnin’, nay. You’d got to keep your eyes beetlin’. Dingos scavved in the mountains an’ they’d try to pick off a wibbly newborn if you wasn’t mindin’ with your spiker. When my pa was a boy, savages from Mookini’d wander up from Leeward an’ rustler away a goat or two, but then the Kona slaved the Mookini all southly an’ their old dwellin’s in Hawi went to moss’n’ants. We goaters we knowed the Kohala Mountains like no un else, the crannies’n’streams’n’haunted places, steel trees what the old-time scavvers’d missed, an’ one–two–three Old Un buildin’s what no un knowed but us.

I planted my first babbit up Jayjo from Cutter Foot Dwellin’ under a lemon tree one a-sunny day. Leastways hers was the first what I knowed. Girls get so slywise ’bout who’n’when’n’all. I was twelve, Jayjo’d got a firm’n’eager body an’ laughed, twirly an’ crazy with love we both was, yay, jus’ like you two sittin’ here, so when Jayjo plummed up ripe we was talkin’ ’bout marryin’ so she’d come’n’live at Bailey’s Dwellin’. We’d got a lot o’ empty rooms, see. But then Jayjo’s waters busted moons too soon an’ Banjo fetched me to Cutter Foot, where she was laborin’. The babbit came out jus’ a few beats after I’d got there.

This ain’t a smilesome yarnie, but you asked ’bout my life on Big Island, an’ these is the mem’ries what are minnowin’ out. The babbit’d got no mouth, nay, no nose-holes neither, so it cudn’t breathe an’ was dyin’ from when Jayjo’s ma skissored the cord, poor little buggah. Its eyes never opened, it just felt the warm of its pa’s hands on its back, turned bad colors, stopped kickin’ an’ died.

Jayjo she was clammy’n’tallow an’ looked like dyin’ too. The women telled me to clear out an’ make space for the herb’list.

I took the died babbit wrapped in a woolsack to the Bony Shore. So lornsome I was, wond’rin’ if Jayjo’s seed was rotted or my seed was rotted or jus’ my luck was rotted. Slack mornin’ it was under the bloodflower bushes, waves lurched up the beach like sickly cows an’ fell over. Buildin’ the babbit’s mound din’t take as long as Pa’s. Bony Shore had the air o’ kelp an’ flesh’n’rottin’, old bones was lyin’ ’mongst the pebbles, an’ you din’t hang ’bout longer’n you needed to, ’cept you was borned a fly or a raven.

Jayjo she din’t die, nay, but she never laughed twirly like b’fore an’ we din’t marry, nay, you got to know your seeds’ll grow a purebirth or sumthin’ close, yay? Or who’ll scrape the moss off your roof an’ oil your icon ’gainst termites when you’re gone? So if I met Jayjo at a gath’rin’ or bart’rin’ she’d say,
Rainy mornin’ ain’t it?
an’ I’d answer,
Yay, rain till nightfall it will I reck’n
, an’ we’d pass by. She married a leather maker from Kane Valley three years after, but I din’t go to their marryin’ feast.

It was a boy. Our died no-name babbit. A boy.

Valleysmen only had one god an’ her name it was Sonmi. Savages on Big I norm’ly had more gods’n you could wave a spiker at. Down in Hilo they prayed to Sonmi if they’d the moodin’ but they’d got other gods too, shark gods, volcano gods, corn gods, sneeze gods, hairy-wart gods, oh, you name it, the Hilo’d birth a god for it. The Kona’d got a hole tribe o’ war gods an’ horse gods’n’all. But for Valleysmen savage gods weren’t worth knowin’, nay, only Sonmi was real.

She lived ’mongst us, minderin’ the Nine Folded Valleys. Most times we cudn’t see her, times was she was seen, an old crone with a stick, tho’ I sumtimes seen her as a shimm’rin’ girl. Sonmi helped sick uns, fixed busted luck, an’ when a truesome’n’civ’lized Valleysman died she’d take his soul an’ lead it back into a womb somewhere in the Valleys. Time was we mem’ried our gone lifes, times was we cudn’t, times was Sonmi telled Abbess who was who in a dreamin’, times was she din’t … but we knew we’d always be reborned as Valleysmen, an’ so death weren’t so scarysome for us, nay.

Unless Old Georgie got your soul, that is. See, if you b’haved savage-like an’ selfy an’ spurned the Civ’lize, or if Georgie tempted you into barb’rism an’ all, then your soul got heavy’n’jagged an’ weighed with stones. Sonmi cudn’t fit you into no womb then. Such crookit selfy people was called “stoned” an’ no fate was more dreadsome for a Valleysman.

The Icon’ry was the only buildin’ on Bony Shore ’tween Kane Valley an’ Honokaa Valley. There was no say-so ’bout keepin’ out, but no un went in idlesome ’cos it’d rot your luck if you din’t have no good reason to ’sturb that roofed night. Our icons, what we carved’n’polished’n’wrote words on durin’ our lifes, was stored there after we died. Thousands of ’em there was shelfed in my time, yay, each un a Valleysman like me borned’n’lived’n’reborned since the Flotilla what bringed our ancestors got to Big I to ’scape the Fall.

First time I went inside the Icon’ry was with Pa’n’Adam’n’Jonas when I was a sevener. Ma’d got a leakin’ malady birthin’ Catkin, an’ Pa took us to pray to Sonmi to fix her, ’cos the Icon’ry was a spesh holy place an’ Sonmi was norm’ly list’nin’ there. Watery dark it was inside. Wax’n’teak-oil’n’time was its smell. The icons lived in shelfs from floor to roof, how many there was I cudn’t tell, nay, you don’t go countin’ ’em like goats, but the gone-lifes outnumber the now-lifes like leafs outnumber trees. Pa’s voice spoke in the shadows, fam’liar it was but eerie too, askin’ Sonmi to halt Ma’s dyin’ an’ let her soul stay in that body for longer, an’ in my head I prayed the same, tho’ I knowed I been marked by Old Georgie at Sloosha’s Crossin’. An’ then we heard a sort o’ roaring underneath the silence, made o’ mil’yuns o’ whisp’rin’s like the ocean, only it wasn’t the ocean, nay, it was the icons, an’ we knew Sonmi was in there list’nin’ to us.