The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (124 page)

“So what does the hair—” I asked. “What does. Does it, like, photosynthesise?”

“Something like that,” he said.

His avatar, frozen with his smiling mouth half-open, like a twenty-foot-tall village idiot, lowered over us both.

“And you – what do you do, then? I mean what does one. You lie in the sun?”

“The energy you previously got from the food you eat. Well you get that from the sun.” He did a little twirl. “It’s a clever thing,” he said. “Actually the hair less so: that’s easy enough to engineer. Peptide sculptors generating photoreceptive structures in the hair, and spinning conductors down to the roots. The clever stuff is in the way the energy is transferred into the – look I don’t want to get into the details. That’s not important.”

I looked up at giant 2D Nic’s goofy face. I looked at human-sized 3D Nic’s earnest expression and fidgeting hands. “You don’t need to eat?”

“No.”

“But you can?”

“Of course you can, if you want to. But you don’t need to. Not once I’ve fitted the . . . fitted the . . . and I’m giving that away free.”

I tried to imagine it. All those supine bodies, laid like pavingstones across Nic’s courtyard outside. “Lying all day in the sun?”

“Not all day. Not at these latitudes. Three hours a day does most people.”

“And what about, say, Reykjavik?”

“The sunlight’s pretty weak up there,” he said. “You’d be better off in the tropics. But that’s where most of the world’s poor are.”

“But,” I said. “Vital amines?”

“Water, more to the point. You still need to drink, obviously. Ideally you’ll drink water with trace metals, flavoursome water. Or gobble a little clean mud from time to time. But vitamins, vitamins, well the tech can synthesise those. Sugars, for the muscles to work. You’d be surprised by how much energy three hours sunbathing with my hair generates. I mean, it’s a lot.”

“Phew,” I said. The vertiginous ambition of the idea had gone through my soul like a sword. “You’re not kidding.” This was no question.

“Imagine, in a few years,” he said, “imagine this: all the world’s poor gifted with a technology that frees them from food. Frees them from the need to devote their lives to shiteating jobs to scrape together the money to eat.”

“But they still can eat?” I repeated. I don’t know why this stuck in my head the way it did.

“Of course they can, if they want to. They still have,” very disdainfully inflected tone of voice, “fucking stomachs. But if they don’t eat they don’t starve. Contemplate that sentence and what it means. Don’t you see? All the life that has ever lived on this planet has lived until this precariously balanced axe, all its life. Eat or die. I shall take that axe away. No more famines. No more starvation.”

“Jesus,” I said. I was going to add: I can see why the Marathi authorities would seize on such an idea as a means of galvanizing political support amongst the mass. I understood the guards, the compound. And from Nic’s point of view too: I could see why he might want this over a position as well-paid Company gene monkey.

“Why am I here, Nic?” I asked.

“I need a lawyer,” he said, simply. “Things are going to change for me in a pretty fucking big way. I will need a team I can trust. I’m going to be moving in some pretty highpowered circles. Finding a lawyer I can trust – that’s easier said than done.”

This, I had not expected. “You’re offering me a job?”

“If you like. Put it like that, OK.”

“What – what. To come here? To come and live here? To work in Mumbai?”

“Sure.”

“You’re serious?”

“Why not?

I didn’t say: because in three weeks’ time, the army of the Greater Kashmiri Republic is going to come crashing in here with stormtroopers and military flitters and crabtanks and many many bullets, to seize this extraordinary asset that the Marathi junta has somehow acquired. I didn’t say what, come and work here and get very literally caught in the crossfire? I didn’t say that. Instead I said: “bring Kate?”

He assumed a serious expression, rather too obviously deliberately suppressing a mocking smile. “I’ve always had a soft spot for Kate.”

“The kids?”

“Surely. The ex too, if you like.”

“I can’t bring the kids here. I can’t bring Kate here.”

He caught sight of his onscreen image from the corner of his eye. He turned, flapped a hand as if waving at himself, and the screen went blank. Then he turned back and blinked to see me sitting there. “Well,” he said, vaguely. “Think about it.”

Later, as he escorted me back across that courtyard, so unnervingly full of motionless bodies, he said, “It’s not about my ego, you know.” Oh but it was. It was always about Nic’s ego.

VI

It’s just being. It is not striving. Striving is the opposite of being. It is not restless fighting and earnest labor and testing and retesting and making.

Things moved slowly at first. I flew back to the US and reported. The Company did not send me again; fearful, I daresay, that I would defect. But neither did they fire me. I picked up my new contracts and got back to work. Kate was deliciously pleased to see me. She’d picked up a new phrase: long time no see! She had learned the first portion of a Mozart sonata, and played it to me. I applauded. “Long time no see,” she said, hugging me.

“I missed you,” I told her. I tickled her feet.

“Long see, long time!”

Things were volatile in Western India. The Federal assembly broke up in acrimonious disharmony. That was hardly news. But I didn’t have much time free for idle speculation.

There was a good deal of militia hurly-burly, and then the Southern Indian Alliance launched a proper, no-messing invasion. The news full of images of armored troops dodging from doorway to street corner, firing their baton-rifles. Old-style tanks, with those conveyor-belt wheel arrangements, scootling across scrub and drawing megaphones of dust behind them. Planes spraying Mumbai harbor, passing and repassing at great danger to themselves from ground fire, so as to lay a gelskin over the water thick enough to allow foot-soldiers to advance. Then it was all over, and the old government was gone, and a new one installed, and when things settled the news was that Nic had managed to absent himself in all the chaos.

Footage of people lolling in the sun with their hair fanned and spread behind them. In the first instances it was a case of reporting a new religious cult. The New Ascetics. The Followers. Suneaters. It took a while for the outlets to realize they weren’t dealing with a religion at all; not least because many of the new hair-wearers adopted spiritual or mystical attitudes when interviewed.

The rumor was then that he’d reappeared in the south east of the subcontinent.

His followers went about the whole Federation – and went into the further East, and went up into the Stans – disseminating his technology. He himself was posted on a million slots; although never very cannily viralled, which meant either he could not afford to hire the best viral seed people, or else he was too forgetful to do so. Or conceivably he disdained to do so; because the content of these casts were increasingly clumsily preachy: the authenticity and validity of Poverty. Wealth had wrecked the world; poverty would save it. The rich would retreat to virtual lands, or hide away in materially moated and gated maison-kingdoms. The poor, freed from the shackles of their hunger, would sweep – peacefully but inevitably as the tide – away the rich and finally inherit the Earth. There was a good deal more in this vein. Sometimes I detected the authentic tang of Nic’s rhetoric in this, but more often than not it was evidently revolutionary boilerplate, projected on a screen for him to read by whichever government or organization was sheltering him – or, latterly, holding him captive. He was in Africa, or he was in China, or he was far beyond the pale horizon, someplace near the desert sands. God knows I loved him, as a friend loves a true friend, but I could hardly bear to watch any of it.

I rationed myself, to preserve my sanity. I had him at the top of my feed, and before settling down to my work in the morning I would take half an hour to catch-up on all the stories posted that concerned him. At the end of the day, before I left to go home to Kate (“home again home again,” she sang, “splitted alick”) I’d run through anything new that came up.

One week he was one oddball new story amongst many. Here his disciples, the natural ascetic skinnies like a drumskin stretched on a coat-rack. Some of his followers were very political, and some were wholly unpolitical, interested only in being able to emulate Jesus’s forty-day fast without dying.

Then another week went by and suddenly he was Big News. My feed could no longer keep up with it. And, another week, and I no longer needed a feed, because he was all over the majors. Everyone was taking notice. His followers, interviewed now, seemed less like the flotsam and jetsam of a cruel world, and more like a core new class of people. Homo superior. The numbers were growing across southern Asia. Nic sang the superman, and the superman was going to overcome us. He was in Morocco (“north Africa” was the most we knew), but then he was seized by an Equatorial States strike force in a daring operation that left forty dead. He was held against his will, but seemed – in interview – perfectly blithe. “I have a new vision of the world,” said his face. “The world will change.” He said that more and more real people – code for “the poor” – were taking to his treatment. He said it was becoming an unstoppable force.

When word got out that the Equatorial States were trying to ransom him back to the USA for a huge sum of money there were riots. He was broken out of the building in which he was being held – a few minutes of jittery footage of him, his face bloody, being carried bobbing across a sea of humanity, and grinning, and grinning – and disappeared. He later reappeared in Malaysia, an official guest of the Malay Republic.

I watched the feed when Foss was flown out, and put through all the rigmarole of secrecy, to interview him. It really seemed to me the old Nic was trying to break out of what must have been an increasingly rigid carapace of popular, proletarian expectation. He cracked jokes. He talked about his plans. “This is the future,” he said, in a twinkly-eye voice. “I’ll tell you. My technology is going to set humanity free from their starvation. I’ll tell you what will happen. The poor will migrate; there will be a mass migration, to the tropics – to those parts of the world where sunlight is plentiful, but where food is hard to come by. Some governments will be overwhelmed by this new exodus, but governments like the, eh,” and he had to glance down at his thumbback screen to remind himself which radical government’s hospitality he was currently enjoying, “People’s Islamic-Democratic Republic of Malaysia, will welcome the coming of a new age of popular empowerment.”

“What about the rest of the world?” Foss asked.

“The rich can have the rest of the world. The cold and sunless northern and southern bands. The rich don’t need sunlight. They have money for food. The whole global demographic will change – a new pulsing heart will bring life and culture and prosperity to the tropics. Over time the north and the south will become increasingly irrelevant. The central zone will be everything – a great population of real people, sitting in the sun for three hours a day, using the remaining twenty-one creating greatness for humanity.”

VII

But what can I say? It was a fire, and fire, being a combustion, is always in the process of rendering itself inert. I did consider whether I needed to include, in this account, material about my motivation for betraying my friend. But I think that should be clear from what I have written here.

The Company persuaded me. A message was conveyed that I wanted to meet him again. A meeting was arranged. I flatter myself the there were very few human beings on the planet for whom he would have agreed this.

I had to pretend I had taken up dotsnuff. This involved me actually practising snorting the stuff, though I hated it. But the dotsnuff was a necessary part of the seizure strategy. It identified where I was; and more to the point it was programmed with Nic’s deener-tag (of course the Company had that on file) That would separate us out from all other people in whichever room or space we found ourselves in – let’s say, soldiers, guards, captors, terrorists, whomsoever – and in which the snuff would roil about like smoke. When the capture team came crashing in with furious suddenness their guns would know which people to shoot and which not to shoot.

He was back in the Indian Federation now: somewhere near Delhi.

I was flown direct to Delhi international. And we landed at noon. And I was fizzing with nerves.

From the airpot I took a taxi to an arranged spot, and there met a man who told me to take a taxi to another spot. At that place I was collected by three other men and put into a large car. It was not a pleasant drive. I was bitter with nerves; my mind rendered frangible by terror. It was insanely hot; migraine weather, forty five, fifty, and the car seemed to have no air conditioning. We drove past a succession of orchards, the trunks of the trees blipping past my window like a barcode. Then we turned up a road that stretched straight as a thermometer line, towards the horizon. And up we raced until it ended before a huge gate. Men with rifles stood about. I could see four dogs, tongues like untucked shirttails. And then the gate was opened and we drove inside.

I was shown to a room, and in it I stayed for several hours. My luggage was taken away.