Paradise Tales (35 page)

The worms seethe, the university pseudo-AI starts to improve the image. You see a Martian sky, slightly blue from the presence of water vapour; you see the congress.

AC: “They were trying to invent writing. They started with numbers. The Spiral was a debate about how to write numbers. Todd told me they couldn’t be intelligent, their whole body size would not allow the brain complexity. But what if they had some kind of neural interface when they touched?

“What if it started to go cold and dry? They knew they needed to measure that?”

And she starts to cry. It must be all that booze at work. “Deaf dumb blind. But they could feel the cold!”

JoyAnna says, “You don’t have to feel that we are like them.”

Two of the worms dance together, turning each other, kissing in spirals.

Then, with a soft click, all the lights go out. You can hear the blow heater die. The room is as dark as the inside of the brain. Assumpta’s physiome fluxes in panic. She yelps, stands up, thumps against furniture. She checks if the lifeblog was being saved.

JAH: “It’s all right, Assumpta, the Library has its own generators, it has saved all of this. It is saving it!”

A clumping of furniture. No light at all. Garments rustle and slither. A clatter in the dark, a fumbling, and finally a battery-operated torch snaps on. Assumpta now wears an overcoat.

Her front corridor is spotlit all around us. She steps outside her front door, and her breath is pulled out of her, making a noise like the counterstroke of a cello. The numbers for temperatures rattle through her eyes. She tries to call Tomas.

NO NETWORK COVERAGE.

The phone system is down.

Outside there is only driving snow, like stars shooting past at warp speed. They swallow up all the light; there is nothing beyond. Gasping for breath, Assumpta tries to advance, but the wind is extraordinary, pushing her back. From somewhere up the street, peoples’ voices echo, shouting. Assumpta tries to shout, too, but it is too cold; she can’t.

A voice echoing from down the street says, “The radio says to stay inside!”

Assumpta turns and the wind harries her back. Hinges squeal as the front door opens. They resist being closed against the gale. The lock won’t click shut. She rams her body against it. Her knee gives away and she cries aloud, but she falls against the door and it finally closes. On the floor, she pushes the welcome mat against the lower edge of the doorway and crawls along the corridor.

“Stupid!” She’d left the sitting room door ajar, and much of its saved heat will have been sucked up the staircase. As if praying, on her knees, she pushes the sitting room door shut behind her. She crawls across the floor onto the sofa and pulls the sofa cushions on top of herself, and curls up. To save the batteries, she turns off the flashlight.

The air outside growls like a wounded beast. She sits chill in the dark.

She calls Schelling again, gets his Turing again.

“Hello, Tomas. Things are pretty serious here; there really is the most terrible storm. All the lights and power are out, and of course I have no heating. Please call.”

She rings Bella, but her sister has put her on block.

She waits in the dark.

JoyAnna says, “How did your pretty little sister, the one everyone adored, the one you used to dress up, how did she get so mean? Maybe it’s better never to be adored, like us. Momma never called me pretty; I could see I wasn’t pretty. I’d go to the movies and pray for the lights to go down so that people wouldn’t see what a dump I was, and that I had to go to movies alone. I was too brainy, I brought in my files to the class and showed my favourite saved things: planets and starfish and Persepolis, and that popular girl tossed her hair and said what’s so interesting about all of that stuff? Papa said I would have to get by on my brains.”

Still no image, except for three glowing physiomes and lots of numbers, so many numbers and icons that they almost crowd out the world.

Her voice constrained, Assumpta calls up a number code and clearance information. She turns on the torch and points it into her eye, and the darkness disappears in light.

JAH: “You’ve just retinaed Mars. Can that work?”

Nine minutes to wait. The image of the worms comes back. The worms turn each other like corncobs, talking in a spiral.

Then they begin to make love.

JoyAnna murmurs, “You spent the last quarter century trying to find love. You believed in progress, too, I bet, the advancement of science. The world is folding in on itself. Your Martians died just as they invented culture.

“Our world isn’t dying, Assumpta. I know it feels like that now. Because of Gudu, your sister, your work, everything that’s on the news, but it isn’t the same as those little bits of brain on Mars. We already have writing and numbers; we have more than writing. We have wireless and blogging; we can reason; we didn’t fight a war, we won’t; we’re all still here, Assumpta.”

The flashlight snaps on. The temperature in the room is still above freezing. Assumpta opens a wooden cabinet, and gets out the whiskey, and starts to drink. Alcohol is a food. But it opens the circulation system near the skin and speeds freezing. Assumpta climbs back into her shelter of sofa cushions. She puts all her mailing list on autodial.

NO NETWORK CONNECTION
.

The power for the network is down. Only military channels are open now. You have those because of your contract: to the Rylands Library. To Mars.

JAH: “Assumpta, can you sense me in the future, sitting next to you, reading with you, drinking with you, hell, even peeing with you. You got love, Assumpta. Me.”

Wind batters the roof.

“You might still have been alive after I was born. I might have met you as a little girl. I could have sat on your lawn, or looked at your twenty-thousand books and said, ‘Why would anyone want so many books? Just keep ’em on your pod.’ I could have called you Aunty.”

Assumpta sits up again and reads out new parameters for her blog.

JAH: “She’s trying to make this last sequence have a wider distribution; it will be stored in a different inbox than usual. That’s one of the reasons it wasn’t noted. Also, nobody thought that anybody’s blog was saved with the power down. It’s the military channels.”

Assumpta says, to the lifeblog, her audience, her people, “The Spiral is a record of a process of invention. It was an attempt to turn a system of communication through touch into a system of writing. They photosynthesized but ate clay for mineral content. They wrote with their mouths. They did not finish developing their system of numbering and writing. The Spiral was a debate about how to record numbers and something like words. We now know climate change comes quickly. It tips. This change happened in four Martian years, as it is coming upon us.

“Record and post.”

ENTRY POSTED.

Ping.

And suddenly, there is a bronze plain, bronze sky. All three of you now stand on Mars, with the bot. Assumpta tells it, “Please show me the Spiral.”

Nine minutes to receive, nine minutes to answer. The image is frozen. Somewhere Handel plays.

All three of you sit and wait.

Assumpta says, “All my books are upstairs.”

Her physiome shows pains around her chest. There’s a burble, and she looks down; she’s coughed up whiskey.

JAH: “I bet it’s like this for angels. They just have to stand by and watch it happen as we make a mess of everything. Mouth useless, God’s love useless, freedom useless. Freedom is the enemy, it just lets us make mistakes. Love in a Changing Climate. Love without words. Love as angels love beyond comprehension, outside words, beyond hope or any objective correlative. You don’t know I’m here, but I’ll stay here and I’ll keep listening. I’ll keep watch.”

The cold sinks in. The physiome starts to shut down. Time rolls down, the numbers decrease.

“Your blog still keeps going on. Your eyes still get data. The blog’s still there. And me. For a while.”

Elsewhen, on Mars, JoyAnna when old has finished her tale, and is being buckled in. There is a jerk, and she is swept up, swung out over the dig. The Spiral opens its arms wide.

“Rendition,” she says, with the accent of Assumpta Ciges. The cameras blank and you, and me, and they and us, we hang with her in the very centre of the light.

The father brought his accordion. He played it in the reception area as they waited. Perhaps he was working. You know, busking.

They spoke a little Italian, but Serbian was their second language. I speak some Serbian, but not so well so Vesna did the talking.
No, no, no, you must go back to the centre and be interviewed separately, I’m sorry those are the rules.
That time the mother was the unhappy one. I never saw crying like it, her face calm, but tears constant and smeared all over her cheeks . Somehow we got her to understand what we meant, but she still said, “I go in with my daughter.”

Vesna said for me, “
Don’t be worried by this man here, he won’t be with us.
”

I said in my bad Serbian, “It will just be this lady and Servette.” So, after a while, the mother stayed outside.

Servette was twelve. She had huge black hair and a tiny sad face. Her sweater had a zip and collar and button-down pockets. It looked, you know, stylish, till you saw the little balls of wool all over it.

The story was that a gang of Albanians, 15 of them, held her down and raped her in front of her family. Before the interview, Servette looked composed and pretty, but also very fragile. You could see how big strong men away from home might want her.

I stayed with Mrs Paçaku,who sat in her head scarf, composed and silent, ankles crossed like she was waiting to catch a train The girl came back out after an hour, looking like one of those Polaroid photographs that melt. The mother started shouting at us her face fat and pink; I couldn’t tell what she was saying. Vesna stood there, hugging her stomach, looking away. We got the mother to go and I said nothing, just pointed to our office. As soon as we were inside, Vesna spun around and said, “That was terrible! The poor child didn’t want to say a thing. I just had to keep asking her over and over.” Then Vesna told me that the daughter said that the mother had been raped too.

So we had to interview Mrs Paçaku. In she came, and started just where she’d left off the previous day. Her eyes burned, she was furious. How could we ask such questions of a child!

I kept saying, “I’m sorry, this is a procedural necessity.”

Vesna said, “Please just tell us what happened and then this will be over.”

The mother said, “You have the truth, we told the truth, this is rape all over again!”

“We just need to make sure the stories match.” And so on.

Suddenly she told us, snap in a sentence. Yes, she’d been raped too, in front her husband.

So we had to ask the rest of the questions. Was the girl first or her? The girl was first. Good, thank heavens, the stories added up. How many were there?

She flared up at us again. “How many? What difference can it make, how many?”

“We need to know in case any charges can be brought.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek. Then she dismissed it, a trifle with the wave of her hand. “All fifteen.”

Military rape is about terror and subjugation; it’s about hollowing the heart out of an enemy people. It’s strategy, nothing more. But you have to wonder about the men who do it. OK, you rape a beautiful girl, but how can you keep it up, frankly, when it’s an old woman and your second time? What was going on inside their heads?

“Then they did the boy,” said the mother, with another snap, of the hand, the mouth. She looked defiant.

Vesna and I went very still, kept our faces and ran our fingers up and down the notes. Those beautiful notes we keep. Otherwise you know, they all bleed into each other. The boy? The son? Which son?

“Skender.” Alexander. A gypsy boy with an Albanian name.