War Surf (18 page)

“I not asking about the puckers.” Kaioko touched the crayon man’s face, then she touched her head scarf. “Chit-side doesn’t matter. How are old people different inside?”

“What a question.” Visions of clogged arteries and diseased livers waltzed through my drowsy mind, but Kaioko didn’t mean that Her question upset me. I’d spent so many years and deutsch trying to prove there was no difference at all. As long as you kept healthy, it was the same as being young. At 248, 1 felt as fresh and energetic as ever. Right, fresh and energetic. See me slumped in the corridor, ready to nod off. An icon blinked on my thumbnail, but I was too tired to read it. Hell, what did I care if this impertinent prote girl warmed up to me?

“Maybe…” the girl timidly began.

“Maybe what?” The kid needled me.

“Maybe since old people make more orbits, they think longer, and so…”

“Please tell me your brilliant theory on aging,” I said.

“So they less afraid to die?’

“Not bloody likely.”

Less afraid of oblivion? Less afraid to have your name dropped from invitation lists, your stocks redistributed, and your gear auctioned on the Net? Ye gilded icons, age only increased the dread. Didn’t I tell you before, life is an addiction. The more you get, the more you want…though the pleasure dwindles.

I pushed back my mop of curls—curls I had suffered acute pain to have embedded in my scalp. Every passing year felt like a page ripped savagely from my diary, and every time the docs diagnosed me with a new ailment, I donated more funds to medical science and sent Chad to search the Net for new bioNEMs. At 248, I had every right to expect another fifty years of life, but what then? The idea that age would make a person less afraid of death—why, it was ludicrous. Then Sheeba’s words wafted through my memory.

“What are you looking for in those war zones?”

Death. That’s what Shee thought. I closed my eyes, and there was my mother standing in our living room in a blue sari. I hadn’t thought about my mother in decades. She died nearly two centuries ago, but I could still smell the perfume caught in the folds of her dress. “Nasir, come practice your verbs.” My mother’s voice no longer echoed anywhere on Earth, and the grief caught me again, as fresh as a new wound.

And there stood Prashka, my first true love, waving from the porch of our summerhouse in the Andaman Islands. And shimmering in the background, our sailboat, the
Durga
. Gone now, house and boat, along with Prashka’s beautiful body, crushed and drowned in the horrific storm of 2057, when the entire population of Calcutta tried to evacuate in one day.

Loss. Depletion. Holes torn in my life that no NEMs would heal. I couldn’t reach Prashka in time. I was trapped in Lahore that day. How cruelly fresh the memories keep. Those first savage months barricaded in the warehouse, the faces pressing through barred windows, the inhuman voices. And the taste of lychee juice. No, forget that. What was I saying? Let me rephrase.

I remember Sayeed, my first business partner. We met in ‘62, after the worst was over. What days and nights we shared, scavenging the wasteland for technicians. We traveled by sea kayak and bicycle, evangelists of the new economy, and we rebuilt the Asian Internet. Sayeed drafted anyone with a metric screwdriver and a head for code, and I made payroll with stock options printed on old beer boxes.

Ha, I remembered Mustafa’s Bar, where Sayeed and I hatched our best ideas. There was a green couch and an espresso machine that made too much noise. Gone now. All gone. Sayeed died in a car crash—ironic after all we survived.

And Nasir Deepra? A few days earlier, I would have called my life rich and satisfying. Yet here in Heaven, facing this inquisitive girl, my existence seemed to fray like a tissue of gaping voids, held together by nothing more solid than a latticework of glass.

“What are you looking for in those war zones?” Sheeba kept asking. “Nasir, you’re seeking the dark.”

Kaioko watched me from a distance, as if my expression alarmed her. I felt weary beyond measure, but I straightened up and tried to speak in a normal voice. “Everyone’s afraid of death.” Then I picked up my tray, leaned into the spin and tilted down the corridor.

We found Sheeba at last, sitting with Juani on the floor of a machinery closet—no comfortable chairs in sight. I staggered to Sheeba’s side, nearly upsetting the bowls on my tray.

“Have some food, dear. You must be famished,” I said.

She glanced up with the same overexcited expression as before—a mixture of sleep deprivation, tense muscles and pure hyper adrenaline. War surfer’s bliss. She was deep in the moment. “Look at me! I’m helping Juani fix the generator!”

I placed the tray beside her on the floor and nearly toppled over. Juani was glad to lay down his tools and dig into the gory stew, but Sheeba hopped up and dusted off her bum.

“Rest your leg, Nass. I’ll take this food up to Vlad in sick-ward.” She balanced the tray on her fingertips and started to leave.

“Sick-ward? Sheeba, don’t go there. Stay with me.”

She made a funny face and stuck out her tongue. “You baby me too much. I’m a big girl.”

I stumbled against her and made her spill the stew. “Please don’t go there.”

“Take a breath, beau. You’re dead on your feet Sit down and recite your mantra. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Before I could respond, she skipped down the corridor, weaving and balancing the tray like an exuberant juggler.

I dogged after her, trying to think of something to say that would stop her. But I hadn’t concocted a plausible lie, and my mind reeled with fatigue. Zealous girl, if only she weren’t so damned compassionate.

“Sheeba, wait. Let me go instead.”

“You’ve been up too long,” she said as she climbed into the safety lock leading to Four. ‘Take a nap.”

I should have followed her. I even put my hand on the ladder. Then I halted in a stupor and watched her close the hatch in my face. The malady was everywhere, not just in sick-ward. Sheeba had a strong constitution. She couldn’t catch a prote ailment. Ye idols of gold, who was I fooling? I was afraid to go to sick-ward. That was the simple truth.

I slunk back to the machinery closet and sank to the floor. While Juani guzzled the last of his stew, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember that silly meditation mantra Shee taught me. Was it “baksheesh”? That didn’t sound right. As I breathed the word in and out, I thought of those bowls on her tray. “Baksheesh. Baksheesh.” Three white bowls. One for Shee. One for Vlad. One for Liam?

Something fell. It sounded distant, like tinkling porcelain. My eyes opened slowly, and I sat up with a grunt. My hand lay in something cold and repulsive. Ugh. Congealed stew. I jerked my fingers out of the bowl. I’d fallen asleep.

Juani sat nearby tinkering with the generator, and Kaioko handed him tools. I watched for a while, trying to remember the horrible dream I’d been having. The bowl reminded me of something.

“Where’s Liam?”

Juani pointed down. “The chief sealing cracks in Two so we can repress.”

My tongue tasted rancid, and I tried to clean it against the roof of my mouth. My dental NEMs had totally failed. Juani kept chattering away. He said Liam and Geraldine were repairing the blown-out door in Two’s segment of the ladder well. As soon as they made the well airtight, they would “repressed it,” by which he meant “repressurize.”

“People trapped on One and Two,” he said. “We gotta repress and get ‘em out.”

“What people?” I said.

“The people you saw.”

Oh. Not people. He meant the children.

He explained that Liam’s welding rig would soon need its batteries recharged, and he wanted to be ready. While he tapped away at an old keyboard balanced across his lap, he tried to teach me about his so-called thermionic generator. This was my payback for telling him about Earth. Juani said the thermionic device was mounted outside the hull to catch sunlight. He described it as a layer cake of semiconductors that transformed solar heat directly into electricity. It was an old model though, not very efficient, and Juani was trying to tweak its performance.

“How can I help?” I said. By that point, I’d put aside class differences. I was willing to lend a hand with anything that might ensure our survival.

Juani’s stubby fingers clicked rapidly over the keyboard, and he hunched forward to read the tiny screen. “What I wanna do, I wanna shut everything down for a little while and run all the power into my CAES.”

“Your case?”

“Those bottles you leaning against, they my CAES. Stands for compressed air ‘lectricity storage.”

I glanced at the row of squat titanium cylinders behind me. Although lashed to the wall with heavy steel cable, they bore the scars and dents of violent tumbling. “Is this our air supply?”

“No, blade, that where I store my ‘lectricity. See my compressor? He mash the air down inside the bottles. Then when I need the ‘lectricity back, the air spring out and spin my compressor backward, make it a turbine.”

If he thought this explanation made any kind of sense, he was mistaken. I glanced at the small compressor welded to the floor and didn’t ask for details. “What can I do?”

“You and Kai-Kai go around, turn off all the switches. When I power back up, I gonna do a black start, and I don’t wanna fry none of the devices.”

Black start. That sounded scary. I stood up and stretched. “You heard the man, Kai-Kai. Where do we find all the switches?”

The girl seemed eager to get going. “This way. We start here on Three.”

But at the entrance to the ladder well, she knelt and pressed her hand against the floor. Juani had done mat earlier, feeling for vibrations. Then I remembered Kaioko’s lover, Geraldine, was down below in the airless ladder well, helping Liam seal the cracks. I said, “You’re worried about your friend?”

Kaioko bid her hands in her sleeves and blushed. She got up and hurried along the corridor, keeping close to the wall as usual. At the first door, she stopped and tried to twist the wheel. But she weighed no more than a doll, so I eased her aside and took charge.

“Kaioko, your friend will be fine,” I said, turning the wheel. “She’s wearing a high-performance EVA suit. Molto expensive.”

Kaioko said nothing. We passed through the drying room, where the empty ovens gaped open, and she found the first bank of switches inside a recessed box in the wall. They were large and heavy, and when she showed me how to flip them, darkness closed around us like thick black ink. I heard clicks and fading drones as unseen motors cycled off.

Kaioko seized my shirttail. “I don’t like the dark,” she said.

“Me, neither. Let’s go back.”

“We can’t, sir. There more switchboxes ahead.”

Her little fist gripped my shirt, and she literally nestled against me. She hadn’t wanted to stand anywhere near me before, but now I could hear her panting softly in the darkness, just at my elbow. She was almost hyperventilating. Maybe I was, too. I flipped the switches back on.

When the lights came up and the motors whirred back to life, I said, “Let’s save these switches for last. How many other boxes?”

Kaioko’s relieved little eyes peered up at me with such gratitude, I felt embarrassed. She glanced around and counted on her fingers. And without warning, the noise-makers exploded again. They sounded close this time. A stray scatter must have ricocheted right outside our X wall. Kaioko and I clung together, and I shut my eyes, certain that this time, the ancient, eroded hull would shatter like a rusted can. The floor shook. The walls growled with stress. While the barrage lasted, Heaven vibrated like a broken bell.

When it was over, we drew apart slowly and caught our breams. Our glances met, and a silent understanding passed between us. Kaioko’s face looked damp and gray. I knew now why those noisemakers upset her so much.

“Where are the other switches?” I said to break the spell.

She gripped my undershirt with born hands. “Gee down there.”

Gee, her lover. A pair of glistening tears streaked her ashen face. I didn’t know how to respond. The best I could do was to pat her bony shoulder and pull her head scarf back into place. Finally, she released her death grip on my shirt, turned away and wiped her nose.

“We have to go finish these switches.” She pointed toward the ceiling. “Then sick-ward.”

One switchbox after another, Kaioko and I shut off the circuit breakers, spreading a wake of silent darkness. We’d left Juani tweaking his generator with only a flashlight. Soon we would finish Deck Three, then we’d have to climb the ladder to sick-ward.

Sheeba had gone there to deliver the food tray. A strange new Sheeba, a woman I barely recognized. But the difference was only cosmetic, I told myself. Her skin dye had faded, but Shee was still my golden beloved. At least, without a space suit, she couldn’t follow Liam into the un-pressurized ladder well. So for the moment, she was safe.

Safe? Sheeba was in sick-ward!

And where else would she be? My darling lived to succor the needy. She thrived on it Sheeba shared the same mission as my NEMs—a single-minded drive to heal. Can’t you see her chatting with the patients, recolorizing their auras, tuning their energy fields, rubbing their feet? I almost envied those stricken protes, feeling the touch of her potent hands. But I did not want to see their faces.

Ah, Sheeba had a million theories about healing. She jumped from one medical creed to another, always seeking the next big therapy. By contrast, I put my faith in one mainstream church—the Mayo Clinic. Mayo was the best. Why change? Hadn’t I spent months and years laid up in its hallowed halls, recovering from my self-cloned organ transplants, skin grafts, joint replacements, hair-growth procedures? Why, my medical records alone took a gigabyte of ROM. I hated clinics and doctors.

But the Mayo was Shangri-La compared to Heaven’s sick-ward. That surveillance video stayed with me. Malady, malaise, malignant despair—whatever name you might choose, Heaven’s affliction unmanned me. Those vacant eyes staring at the ceiling. Listless hands. Thin gray bodies too debilitated to eat or drink. How many ways had I tried to delete that video from my memory. But there it was, stuck in my head like a repeating loop of Reel.

As we climbed up the ladder to Four, dread of that place almost overwhelmed my compulsion to find Sheeba. What arrogant folly had led me to bring her here? The Reel didn’t repel her, it drew her like a pole star.

“You can’t resist the force of the dark canal,” she told me once. We’d gone to her apartment in Nordvik, a tiny place downtown near the airport—she refused to let me pay her rent. The walls were draped in cheap faux silk and tissue paper, turquoise, azure, veridian. She’d painted the ceiling black, and she’d disabled the lighting fixtures. The only piece of furniture in her living room was a holographic projection of a waterfall reflecting dappled fake sunlight.

“The dark canal is always there,” she went on, offering me a cup of instant tea. Dim watery flickers swam across the tissue walls. Aquamarine shadows danced. She placed a sugar bowl in the middle of the floor and gestured with her plastic spoon. “It’s like an urge, deep in your body. Like when things build up and make you want to scream. But you hold it in because you have to, and the feeling just ripples inside.”

“You mean orgasm,” I teased, feeling my way toward her through the dizzy light. “Your dark canal is your vagina, dear heart.”

When she sat on the floor, blue dust bunnies wafted up around her like froth. Did the child not own a cleaning bot?

“I’m trying to be honest, Nass. Don’t laugh at me. You of all people.”

Glittery blues and greens played over her splendid shoulders and legs. I lowered myself to her floor. “Why me of all people?”

“Because you have a multiplex soul,” she said.

“Like a cinema?’

“Exactly,” she said, leaving me without a clue. Hell’s bells, I adored her. Yes, I would brave Heaven’s sick-ward to find her.

“You don’t have to push, Kaioko.”

“Please hurry, sir.”

As I stumbled up the ladder, trying to stay focused on Sheeba, Heaven’s malady loomed above like a poison smog. This war began nine months ago, but the strange affliction had started earlier—two years earlier, so our site manager said. Now I suspected he had deceived us for years. Maybe the disorder infiltrated Heaven from the beginning, when the factory first came online three decades ago.

Our site manager was my own protege, Robert Trencher. Just two years back, his field reports showed nothing more than a few unexplained fatalities. A minor curiosity. He assured us there were no radiation leaks, diseases or toxins. Just people dying. At first, we took it as good news. A13’s population had grown bloated with dependent offspring, and costs were out of balance. This small death spike fell in our laps like a gift. It opened up new jobs for the older juves and helped lower our costs.

Kaioko bumped against me on the ladder, but all I could think about was how Trencher must have cynically falsified the numbers. Feeding us crap by the spoonful. Us. The directors. Only last year, when production plummeted, did he admit the truth—a major outbreak.

On that news, the markets might have come apart at the seams if we hadn’t reacted fast. What if this malady spread to other satellites? An epidemic like that could tear our patched-up economy to shreds. So with all due prudence, we locked down the satellite’s communications, sent it into high polar orbit and issued press releases full of smoke and mirrors—and warnings to keep off.

Then we started to look for the cause. And that’s precisely when Trencher turned tail and fled. Gutless liar, not a single one of his staff showed symptoms—our doctors swore their bioNEMs gave them immunity. But Trencher and his entourage evacuated en masse. What really chapped me was, I’d given Trencher his start. I’d trained him. Who knew he would be such a noodge? To save face, I personally had to demote him to junior management.

After Trencher abandoned his post, we were forced to send cyberdocs and robotic probes to study A13 remotely. The new surveillance equipment chewed up a lot of cash, and some of our directors grumbled. But I kept hoping for a solution, and despite a bad case of queasiness, I spent hours poring over the surveillance video. All the employees showed the typical consequences of living for years on a satellite. Weight loss, sleeplessness, chronic depression. But where were the warning signs of imminent death? I couldn’t see any. Not till they took to their beds did they begin to show symptoms.

Our remote probes crawled all over Heaven, scraping up dust and analyzing electromagnetic fields. For a while, Heaven’s production line limped along at 50 percent output, while we kept seeking the triggering agent. But after months of sampling and testing, our robots failed to find any hint of a cause for Heaven’s malady. And worse, our futile investigations were costing a freightload of deutsch.

How long could we keep tossing good money after bad? I held out the longest, believing our scientists needed more time for research, but in the end, I yielded. It wasn’t worth the expense. So nine months ago, we voted to shut down operations, euthanize the workers and reclaim the real estate. That’s what started the war.

That’s what I couldn’t admit to Grunze—how much money we’d wasted for nothing. We’d bollixed the whole situation. We probably should have dumped A13 on the World Health Org and let them figure it out Provendia’s balance sheet would have read a damn sight better if we had, but then the news might have leaked out and wrecked investor confidence. None of us was willing to risk a market meltdown. Another Crash was unthinkable. But still, the episode made us look like saps.

Somewhere, the hull creaked with a loud echo of warping steel. Kaioko grabbed my shirttail and bit down on the cloth. We halted together on the ladder till the noise died.

‘Tell me about the sick people,” I said, closing my hand over the little fist that still gripped my shirt. When facing danger, I’d found that it helped to visualize what was coming. “How many are up there now?”

Kaioko aimed her flashlight at the hatch just above my head. “Please climb, sir.”

“Are they very sick?” The surveillance video kept running instant replays through my head, but the images were only bit-map recollections of pixels rastered on a screen.

“Yes,” she said after a pause.

I loosened her fist from my undershirt and swung to the side of the ladder. “You go on. I’ll be there in a while.” Memories of that video were blunting my surfer’s edge. I had to forget that stuff and clear my mind. “Be here now,” I whispered.

“Please, sir.” Pitiful squeaky girl. She pawed at me with her puny hand, and her long sleeve accidentally fell back, revealing the cut marks on her arm. Were those cuts a sign of the malady? Was she beginning to die?

“You don’t look well. Maybe you’re dehydrated. Let’s go back to the galley and get some water.” I tried to pull her down the ladder.

But Kaioko wrapped her arms around the rungs and wouldn’t budge. “Sir, we have to shut off those switches. Juani’s waiting.”

I took a long breath and let it out slowly. It was their eyes I dreaded most, wide-open but not looking at anything, not accusing anyone. Like the faces in Lahore.

No, delete that last part Disconnect. Focus on the moment. I gripped the ladder in both hands. This used to be easier. What was happening to Nasir Deepra, the war surfer ace?

‘Tell me about those cuts on your arm, Kaioko.”

The girl reddened and tugged at her sleeves.

“You did that to yourself, didn’t you?”

She turned away and murmured so softly, I had to lean forward.

Then Provendia launched another barrage, and Kaioko nearly slipped off the ladder. When I caught her, she buried her head against my chest. Loud booms shuddered through the walls, and Kaioko’s keening wail seemed to teak out of her mouth like steam from a pressure vent. Finally, I understood what she was saying. “Geeeeee.”

“Geraldine will be fine. Let’s go back and check on her,” I said, grateful for any delay.

“Geeeee,” she kept whining.

I caught her wrists, and her sleeves fell back, revealing more scars. “Oh, child. Why would you cut yourself like that?”

She bit her trembling lower lip. Then she whispered, “It something Gee and I do. To let the hurting out”

“She’s your girlfriend, right?”

“My husband,” Kaioko chirruped, biting my shirt. “Gee and I married. I’m her wife.”

“Wife.” That word again. At any time, it would have sounded alien, but the incongruities in this context left me speechless. Geraldine and Kaioko were barely out of diapers, yet already they’d promised each other their lives? In dismay, I stroked Kaioko’s narrow shoulders and listened to the groaning walls. When the noisemakers grew louder, she gripped my torso and trembled. Then something Juani said came back to me. He said he was living fast.

As the noisemakers boomed and the ladder shook, I thought about employee life spans. Sixty, seventy, eighty years at most. Without NEM-inspired longevity, workers had to cram all their living into a few short decades. Maybe that’s why they could afford to promise each other eternity. These unfamiliar and strangely conflicting notions assaulted me as we mounted up the ladder.

At last, the volley of gunfire ended with Heaven still intact Cycling through the lock took far too little time, and when Kaioko opened the hatch to sick-ward, a vein in my neck started throbbing.

Four’s segment of the ladder well did not reek of medicinal disinfectant. It smelled—unearthly. With infinite slowness, I emerged from the lock and cast my flashlight around the cylindrical walls. The well dripped with space fungus.

Black mounds covered the floor like a sooty carpet and gave the walls a dark velvet sheen. Smoky ruffles festooned the ceiling, and dark, fluted sprays clustered around the ladder leading up to Five. Where the ladder met the hatch above, fibrous black stalactites swelled downward. Deck Five held the factory. Perhaps some of Heaven’s sugar had seeped down through the hatch to feed this fungal growth. In my flashlight beam, the fibers glittered like onyx.

And that scent! How can I describe the rainbow of deep, lusty aromas? Acrid, bittersweet and briny, too, like sea salt. It reminded me of Juani’s veggies, but more musky and concentrated, full of buttery nut-like essence. In an uncanny way, the smell attracted me.

On Four, the artificial gravity felt weaker still, and we bounced over the fungus with springy, muted steps. The silver D and U glimmered weakly in the flashlight beam. “Which way?” I asked.

“Up lead to the ‘pactor room. Switches already off in there.” She pointed to the D. “We go sick-ward.”

She pushed back her sleeves and struggled to open the Down door. Less gravity made it difficult for her to gain leverage on the wheel, but I held back and didn’t help. The door opened sluggishly. Then a stark greenish light flashed through the open door. With prickling neck hairs, I leaned to look inside.

The walls and surfaces strobed bright, then dark, then bright. A dying fluorescent tube buzzed off and on as if possessed by devils. But where were the rows of beds? I saw no moaning victims, only a small room, wedge-shaped like the others. The lime-green light intermittently revealed cabinets, work counter, a tiny sink. Plastic beaches filled one corner, suggesting a waiting area. This wasn’t sick-ward. This was just a check-in station—an anteroom.

Four light-globes winked from recesses in the low ceiling, but they were as dark as the bulbs in the ladder well. A dead surveillance camera tilted off center. Only the fluorescent tube seemed to be wired to Juani’s emergency generator. I stepped inside and inspected the anteroom more carefully.

A film of fungus covered everything, but there were indications that someone had tried to scrub it away. And unlike the galley where every loose item was stored in a bin, this room held a chaos of junk. Antique medical apparatus, glass jars, spoons and plastic tubing were flung about, as if recently engaged in some urgent experiment.

Supine on the steel table under the blinking light lay a partially dismantled cyberdoc. Evidently, someone had cannibalized its inner workings for lab equipment A rack of specimen vials occupied one end of the table, filled with various shades of pinkish fluid. There were also a nanoscope and something that looked obscurely like a centrifuge. More parts cluttered the work counter, and after a puzzled examination, I recognized the remains of one of my robotic probes.