Cloud Atlas (48 page)

The mute boy padded over and sat by the Abbess’s feet. Sunlite bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.

So day two as a fugitive got under way
.

Yes. Hae-Joo breakfasted on potato cakes and fig honey; unlike the previous nite, no one pressed me to eat the pureblood food. As we said our farewells, two or three of the teenage girls, tearful to see Hae-Joo depart, shot me hateful glances, much to my guide’s amusement. Hae-Joo had to behave like a hard-bitten revolutionary, but he was still a boy in some respects. As she embraced me, the Abbess whispered in my ear, “I shall ask Siddhartha to grant your wish.” Under his gaze we left that rarefied height and hiked down through the noisy forest, where we found our ford, untouched.

Progress toward Yōngju was fair. We passed upbound timber rigs driven by burly same-stem fabricants. But the rice plain north of Andongho Lake is laced with xposed timber tracks, so we stayed inside the ford most of the day, hidden from EyeSats until hour fifteen or so.

Crossing an old suspension bridge above Chuwangsan River, we got out to stretch our legs. Hae-Joo apologized for his pureblood bladder and pissed into the trees two hundred meters below. Over the other side, I studied the monochrome parrots who roost there on guano-stained chasm ledges; their flapping and honking reminded me of Boom-Sook Kim and his xec friends. A ravine wound upstream; downstream, the Chuwangsan River was channeled thru leveled hills before disappearing under Ūlsōng’s canopy for sewage duty. Aeros clustered over the conurb: black-and-silver dots.

The bridge cables groaned under the strain of a gleaming xec ford, without warning. It was an xpensive auto to encounter on such a rustic road, suspiciously so. Hae-Joo reached into our ford for his colt. He returned to me, hand in his jacket pocket, murmuring, “Let me do any talking, and get ready to dive down.”

Sure enough, the xec ford slowed to a stop. A stocky man with a facescaped sheen swiveled out from the driver’s seat with a friendly nod. “Beautiful afternoon.”

Hae-Joo nodded back, observing it was not too sultry.

A pureblood woman unfolded her legs from the passenger door. Her thick wraparounds revealed only a pixie nose and sensual lips. She leaned on the opposite railing, with her back to us, and lit a marlboro. The driver opened the ford trunk and lifted out an airbox, one suitable for transporting a medium-size dog. He unlocked its clickers and lifted out a striking, perfectly formed, but tiny female form, about thirty centimeters in height; she mewled, terrified, and tried to wriggle free. When she caught sight of us her miniature, wordless scream became imploring.

Before we could do or say anything, the man swung her off the bridge, by her hair, and watched her fall. He made a plopping noise with his tongue when she hit the rocks below and chuckled. “Cheap riddance”—he grinned at us—”to
very
xpensive trash.”

I forced myself to remain silent. Sensing the effort this cost, Hae-Joo touched my arm. One scene from the Cavendish disney, when a pureblood gets thrown off a balcony by a criminal, replayed itself in my head.

I presume he had discarded a fabricant living doll
.

Yes. The xec was keen to tell us all about it. “The Zizzi Hikaru Doll was the
must-have
the Sextet before last. My daughter didn’t give me a
moment’s
rest. Of course, my official wife”—he nodded at the woman on the other side of the bridge—”put
her
all in, morning, noon, and nite. ’How am I supposed to look our neighbors in their faces if our daughter is the
only girl
in our carousel to
not
have a Zizzi?’ You got to admire the marketers of these things. One junky toy fabricant, but genome it like some glitzy antique idol and up goes its price
by fifty thousand;
that’s
before
you shell out for designer-ware, dollhouse, accessories. So what did I do? I paid for the damn thing, just to shut the women up! Four months later, what happens? Teencool surfs on and Marilyn Monroe dethrones poor, passé Zizzi.” He told us, digustedly, that a registered fabricant xpirer cost three thousand dollars, but—the man jerked a thumb over the railing—an accidental plunge comes free. So why chuck good dollars after bad? “Pity”—he winked at Hae-Joo—”divorces aren’t as hitchless, eh?”

“I heard that, Fat-Ass!” His wife still did not deign to face us. “You should have taken the doll back to the franchise and had your Soul redollared. Our Zizzi was defective. It couldn’t even sing. The damn thing bit me.”

Fat-Ass replied, sweetly, “Can’t imagine why
that
didn’t kill it, darlingest.” His wife muttered a casual obscenity while her husband ran his eyes over my body and asked Hae-Joo if we were vacationing near that remote spot or passing thru on business.

“Ok-Kyun Pyo, sir, at your service.” Hae-Joo gave a slite bow and introduced himself as a fifth-stratum aide in Eagle Accountancy Franchise, a minor corp division.

The xec’s curiosity died. “That so? I manage the Golf Coast between P’yōnghae and Yōngdōk. You are a golfer, Pyo? No?
No?
Golf isn’t just a game y’ know, golf is a career advantage!” The Paegam course, he promised, has an all-weather fifty-four holer, lickable greens, lake features like the Beloved Chairman’s famous water gardens. “We outbid the local downstrata for the aquifer. Normally you can’t get membership for love nor money unless you’re a seer, but I like you, Pyo, so just mention my name to our membership people: Seer Kwon.”

Ok-Kyun Pyo gushed gratitude.

Pleased, Seer Kwon began telling his xec life story, but his wife tossed her marlboro after the Zizzi Hikaru, climbed into the ford, and kept her hand on the horn for ten seconds. Zebra-feathered parrots cannonaded skyward. The xec gave Hae-Joo a rueful grin and advised him to pay the xtra dollars to conceive a son when he gets married. As he drove off I wished for his ford to plunge off the bridge.

You considered him a murderer?

Of course. One so shallow, moreover, he did not even know it.

But hate men like Seer Kwon, and you hate the whole world
.

Not the whole world, Archivist, only the corpocratic pyramid that permits fabricants to be killed so wantonly, casually.

When did you finally reach Pusan?

Nitefall. Hae-Joo pointed at exxon clouds from Pusan refinery, turning melon pink to anthracite gray, and told me we had arrived. We entered Pusan’s northern rim on an unEyed farmtrack. Hae-Joo deposited the ford at a lockup in Sōmyōn suburb, and we took the metro to Ch’oryang Square. It was smaller than Chongmyo Plaza but as busy, and strange after the silent emptiness of the mountains. Fabricant nannies scooted after their xec charges; swanning couples assessed couples swanning; corp-sponsored 3-Ds competed to outdazzle all the others. In a tatty back-galleria an old-style festival was taking place where hawkers sold palm-size curios, “friends for life”: toothless crocs, monkey chicklets, jonahwhales in jars. Hae-Joo told me these pets are an old cheapjack’s ruse; they die forty-eight hours after you get them home, invariably. A circusman was touting for business through a megaphone: “Marvel at the Two-Headed Schizoid Man! Gaze upon Madame Matryoshka and Her Pregnant Embryo! Gasp in Horror at the Real, Live Merican—but don’t poke your fingers into his cage!” Pureblood sailors from all over Nea So Copros sat in frontless bars, flirting with topless comforters, under the scrutiny of PimpCorp men: leathery Himalayans, Han Chinese, pale-hued hairy Baikalese, bearded Uzbeks, wiry Aleutians, coppery Viets and Thais. Comfort houses’ AdVs promised satisfaction for every peccadillo a hungry pureblood could imagine. “If Seoul is a Boardman’s faithful spouse,” said Hae-Joo, “Pusan is his no-pantied mistress.”

Backstreets grew narrower. A funneled wind bowled bottles and cans along, and hooded figures hurried by. Hae-Joo led me through a surreptitious doorway, up a glimlit tunnel to a portcullised entrance.
KUKJE MANSIONS
was inscribed over a side window. Hae-Joo pressed a buzzer. Dogs barked, the blind upzipped, and a pair of identical saber-tooths slavered at the glass. An unshaven woman hauled them aside and peered at us. Her gemwarted face lit with recognition at Hae-Joo and xclaimed: “Nun-Hel Han! It’s been nearly twelve months! Little wonder, if the rumors about your brawls were even half true! How were the Philippines?”

Hae-Joo’s voice had changed again. I checked, involuntarily, so hard-scoured was his accent now; it was still him at my side. “Sinking, Mrs. Lim, sinking fast. You haven’t gone subletting my room, now, have you?”

“Oh, I keep a reliable house, don’t worry about that!” She faked offense but warned she would need a fresh blip of dollars if his next voyage lasted as long as his last. The portcullis rose, and she glanced at me. “Say, Nun-Hel, if your fluffball stays over a week, single apartments get charged as doubles. House rules. Like it or lump it. All the same to me.”

Nun-Hel Han the sailor said I would stay for only a nite or two.

“In every port”—the landlady leered—”it’s true, then.”

Was she Union?

No. Flophouse landladies judas their own mothers for a dollar; judasing a Unionman would fetch a far higher price. But, as Hae-Joo told me, they also discourage the idly inquisitive. Inside, a pocked stairwell echoed with arguments and 3-Ds. I was, at last, getting used to stairs. On the ninth floor a woodworm corridor led us to a scraped door. Hae-Joo retrieved a pre-placed match stump from its hinge, noting the management had succumbed to a nasty rash of honesty.

Nun-Hel’s floproom had a sour mattress, a tidy kitchenette, a closet of clothes for varying climates, a blurred foto of naked Caucasian prostitutes straddling a group of sailors, souvenirs from the Twelve Conurbs and minor ports, and of course, a framed kodak of the Beloved Chairman. A lipsticked marlboro was left teetered on a beer can. The window was shuttered.

Hae-Joo showered and changed. He told me he had to attend a Union cell meeting and warned me to keep the window shutter down and not to answer the door or fone unless it was him or Apis with this crypto: he wrote the words “These are the tears of things” on a scrap of paper, which he then burned in the ashtray. He put a small supply of Soap in the fridge, and promised to return in the morning, soon after curfew.

Surely, such a distinguished defector as yourself deserved a rather grander reception?

Grand receptions draw attention. I passed some hours studying Pusan’s geography on the sony before showering and imbibing my Soap. I woke late, I think, after hour six. Hae-Joo returned xhausted, holding a bag of pungent
ttōkbukgi
. I made him a cup of starbuck, which he drank gratefully, then ate his breakfast. “Okay, Sonmi—stand by the window and cover your eyes.”

I obeyed. The rusty shutter uprolled. Hae-Joo commanded, “Don’t look … don’t look … now, open your eyes.”

A swarm of roofs, thruways, commuter hives, AdVs, concrete … and there, in the background, the brite spring sky’s sediment had sunk to a dark band of blue. Ah, it mesmerized me … like the snow had done. All the woe of the words “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully.

Hae-Joo announced, “The ocean.”

You’d never seen it before?

Only on Papa Song’s 3-Ds of life in Xultation. Never the real thing with my own eyes. I yearned to go and touch it and walk by it, but Hae-Joo thought it safest to stay hidden during daylite until we were requartered somewhere more remote. Then he lay on the mattress and within a minute began snoring.

Hours passed; in ocean slots between buildings, I watched freighters and naval vessels. Downstrata housewives aired worn linen on nearby rooftops. Later the weather grew overcast, and armored aeros rumbled thru low clouds. I studied. It rained. Hae-Joo, still asleep, rolled over, slurred “No, only a friend of a friend,” and fell silent again. Drool slid from his mouth, wetting his pillow. I thought about Professor Mephi. In our last seminar he had spoken of his estrangement from his family and confessed he spent more time educating me than teaching his own daughter. Now he was dead, because of his belief in Union. I felt gratitude, guilt, and other emotions too.

Hae-Joo woke midafternoon, showered, and brewed ginseng tea. How I envy purebloods your rainbow cuisine, Archivist. Before my ascension, Soap seemed the most delicious substance imaginable, but now it tastes bland and gray. I suffer nausea if I so much as taste pureblood food, however, and vomiting later. Hae-Joo downshuttered the window. “Time to liaise,” he told me. Then he unhooked the Beloved Chairman’s kodak and placed it facedown on the low table. Hae-Joo inplugged his sony to a socket concealed in the blemished frame.

An illegal transceiver? Hidden in a kodak of Nea’s architect?

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane. A 3-D of an old man clarified britely; he looked like an inxpensively healed burn victim. His lips out of sync with his words, he congratulated me on my safe arrival in Pusan and asked who had the prettier face, him or the carp?

I replied honestly: the carp.

An-Kor Apis’s laugh became a cough. “This is my true face, whatever that means these days.” His sickly appearance suited him well, he said, because casual enforcers worried that he might be contagious. He asked if I had enjoyed my journey across our beloved motherland.

Hae-Joo Im had looked after me well, I answered.

General Apis asked if I understood the role Union wished me to assume in their struggle to ascend fabricants into citizens. Yes, I began, but I did not have the chance to declare my indecision. “We want to xpose you to a … sight, a formative xperience, here in Pusan, before you decide, Sonmi.” He warned it would not be pleasant but was imperative. “To allow for an informed decision regarding your future. If you agree, Hae-Joo can take you now.”

I said I would go, certainly.

“Then we’ll speak again, very soon,” promised Apis, disconnecting his imager. Hae-Joo produced a pair of technic uniforms and semi-visors from his closet. We dressed in these, then over-cloaked for the landlady’s benefit. Outside was cold, and I was grateful for the double layers. We rode the metro to the port terminal and took a conveyor down to the waterfront berths, passing the vast oceangoing vessels. The nite sea was oily black and the ships similarly austere, but one brite vessel pulsed golden arches and resembled an undersea palace. I had seen it before, in a previous life. “Papa Song’s Golden Ark,” I xclaimed, telling Hae-Joo what he already knew, that it conveyed the Twelvestarred east across the ocean to Xultation.