Chapter 7
The hip was leading her astray. She hadn’t been much in the Fish but her map told her she wasn’t heading towards any of the major hip coops. Possibly it was a smaller one, unknown—they moved around enough—or her map could’ve been fried in the hack, or maybe it was just a secret entrance, but she didn’t think so. It smelled like a trap, or a hidden purpose at least. The terrain told her nothing—sinkhole streets with sewer-pipe bones and burning gas lines. Crumbling warehouses and factories, glimpses of gardens poking through—what were they growing? Corn? She was impressed with their horticulture, forcing green up out of ashy basements and asphalt fields.
She studied the hip, scanning for signs of deceit. He seemed relaxed enough—did he limp before or was that her handiwork?—not tensed, not glancing around for signs of compatriots. The shotgun he carried was an ancient Harrier model, more likely to blow up in his face than kick out a bullet, and she doubted any of the munitions he’d managed to scavenge or nick would put much oomph against the micromesh woven into her clothes. Still, he could get lucky and stick a pellet in her eye. Or a friend of his could drop a brick on her head. She sped up a little to walk by his side. He smiled and nodded at her. For the first time she really looked at him and saw he was good to look at, with kind green eyes, and younger than he’d appeared, though his beard had streaks of gray. He was dirty, but not filthy, and skin surprisingly free of blemish, boils, cuts, or disease. This wasn’t some wretch—he was a healthy man in his prime.
It bothered her, somehow, that her judgment had been so off. She thought she knew about the hips—what was there to know? They didn’t have jobs, didn’t have homes, half of them weren’t registered and they kept to themselves. She felt suddenly tired, incredibly tired, tired of thinking, and having her notions challenged. Why couldn’t things be easy? She let her mind drift—ambush be damned—to straight lines and right angles, a city of walls and sharp divides, clean separations between good and evil, person and object, worthy and unfit to live.
For the thousandth time she thought of skipping town, taking her five hundred thousand buckaroos and hopping the first jet outta this joint. She’d have to head to another zone, another Net, across the ocean maybe with the Eurocrats or the Sinomer or even the Xing-2 if she got desperate. It was a pipe dream, of course. The Gaespora would never let her skip town, order unfulfilled. They’d slap an injustice lien on her and in ten seconds flat every roly-poly would-be hero with a gun would be on her ass, lickin’ for the bounty. More and more she realized how stupid, how empty, how useless all this money was. Every bill had a string attached. Ten million. What would she do with it? She had no idea. It was just a number, a big, bold, impressive-sounding number that even the dumbest math reject could understand would make her rich. Friar, he was a thinking man—now haunting her for some reason (was that part of the hack or just her memory toilet coming unclogged while some bastard poked around in her skull?) He knew exactly where every dollar would go, what kind of instruments it would buy and how many fifty-foot holes he could secretly drill into the sewers. He had taken calculated risks until his sanity was worth more than a buck or two—and still lost in the end. She, she had just seen a fat piece of meat hanging from a tree and yanked, missing the bear trap underneath.
“You’re a detective.”
It was so quiet in this part of town that his voice startled her. Her Betty leapt halfway from the holster, drawn to her hand by twitchy nerves and custom magne-plants in her palm and trigger finger. He noticed the bustle at her side, like she had an angry pigeon in her pocket, but didn’t comment. She cursed that dimwit saw jockey but really it was her fault. She’d dialed the twitch response up about as high as it would go—better to shoot first and scamper—but now she saw it was a liability, showing off all her secrets before she got a chance to tease. Had he seen the gun? Did he know the ball buster in the barrel would rip a hole in him the size of a beach ball, hockey pads or no? She sent a command to the holster, switching out the ammo for flashers. They’d make a fuck of a noise and were bright as the Fourth of July, but they wouldn’t leave anyone in pieces.
“How do you know?” she said. How did he know?
“Saw you on the feed. You solved a mystery. Found a lost kid.”
“I thought you hips didn’t watch the feeds.”
“We watch them on a screen, as God intended. Nothing in our brains. Our thoughts are our own.”
“Sounds inconvenient.”
“There are more important things in life than convenience.”
“So, where are you taking me?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“For who?”
“For the both of us. I mean you no harm…though by God’s teaching you had given me the justice to raise a hand, you did ask forgiveness and I gave.”
That wasn’t strictly true, but whatever you want buddy. Somehow she trusted him. She got on the Net (already slow as hell here) and browsed information on the hips. There wasn’t a whole lot to go on—who wanted to study the homeless anyway? They had an organization, of sorts, or at least principles handed down by their God. The damnedest thing was that they seemed to follow them. She tracked through all the police reports and couldn’t find any incidences of hip aggression. There’d been posers, other homeless and vagabonds not taken by the Book, but it didn’t seem like the real hips had so much as slapped an ass without permission. There were plenty of accounts of vandalism though, massive amounts actually, almost all against Net fixtures—power stations, routing stations, security spikes, and the underground pipelines. Shit, they’d even launched rockets at satellite dishes and antennae. It was a war on modern society. She understood now why Vericast was lobbying for a population cull—round ‘em all up, fix ‘em with a plee collar, and stick ‘em in a factory gutting fish or folding sheets.
“What do you have against the Net—wait, no, what’s your name?” There we go, manners.
“My name is Ibrahim. But many of us take old names, and there are only so many to go around, so you may call me Hemu.”
“Delighted, I’m Saru.” They shook hands, sort of. He went in for some strange sort of grip greeting but she gripped tighter and forced it into a strong American handshake.
“Saru is an unusual name.”
“They told me it comes from another zone. My mom was a Eurocrat, Gaulian or one of those strange places, but I never knew her.”
“Your father?”
“An asshole. I grew up in the HMH, Hathaway Morning House. Won the lottery or something and got an education—not that it stuck.”
Yeah, the lottery for sure. Backwoods farm bitch to big-city boarding slut. Should’ve been a reporter, should’ve written a book on that place, blown it open. She oughta go back right now guns blazing and blow a hole in the wall, hold off the guards while the kids ran to freedom. She wondered how many got out, how many were right now filing their shitty plastic cafeteria knives into shanks, planning to slice the hall guard’s Achilles tendon and steal his keys.
“What about you?” she asked, not really caring. This talk was boring. The past was the past and nothing fixed that so it didn’t make no difference. Hemu seemed genuine in his requests so she’d given him more than a kick in the nuts, but all this talk was stupid. Who cared about families and parents and childhood tales? What the hell did that have to do with anything? Hemu started talking about his life, his parents growing up in the Fish…being cooks in the Walnut Coop, his great triumph stripping copper from an old subway car and trading it to buy long underwear for the whole coop. A hero. She switched on a comedy feed and watched two fat men run around slapping people with their cocks. She set her body to follow Hemu and her head to nod and her mouth to make a huh or noise of interest now and then.
Her instincts pulled her out of the feed—the system worked. It wasn’t danger but curiosity. They’d come to a building, a chapel, surrounded by a maze of massive brick warehouses and factories. Up in the darkening sky—how long had they been walking?—she could make out an artificial canopy of steel girders, rope nets, and carefully placed debris. Their location was hidden from surveillance, aerial and satellite, and nested in the middle of an industrial jungle. The chapel was pressed, squeezed between the walls of an alley, small, like a double-decker bus. It seemed ancient, carved of stone, gargoyles and monsters, and…fish? leaping out in master-crafted detail, stained-glass windows—real glass, real art, not a screen that switched to ads every thirty seconds—depicting…what did they depict? It seemed abstract, but the more she stared—was that a person? An ocean? A planet? What was this place?
She felt a hand on her shoulder, Hemu, and somehow it was reassuring. There was that feeling here, that tingle in her tits and hair along her spine, that something just shy of the natural was at work. Hemu was looking at her, and his face was serious.
“It was a risk, bringing you here,” he said. “You are connected to the Net, and the dark God that hungers, but my God said to me it must be so.”
“Oh did he?” she said, trying to sound wry but she was rattled. It was so quiet here, so strange, all these dead buildings with no noise. This wasn’t a city; it was a forest. She saw the plants—so many plants, growing from the cracks in the building, the grime between the bricks, the vines crawling over everything and the flowers, the white flowers like tiny bells everywhere. Where had they all come from? Were they native? She’d never seen them anywhere else.
“Come,” Hemu said. He led her inside, through the carved wooden doors into the warmth and light. There were pews, and hips, heads bowed, lips moving in quiet prayer. The floor was marble. Yes, this had been a chapel, McChristian maybe, but so old? Where had it come from? She tried to scan the Net but found a signal error. She was cut off, in a dead zone. At the far end where she guessed an altar would normally be was a large white statue. What was that girl the McChristians worshipped? Mara? Susan? Whatever, at some point it might have been her, but the face had been carved out, roughly, leaving an empty scoop in the head. Saru didn’t like the statue. She could tell that it was the source of the bullshit, that it was the thing making her hair go all staticky and running the thrill-sex touch up and down her skin.
“What am I doing here?” she asked, loudly, causing the hips to look up. She should be at a bar, drinking to keep her mind scrambled, chasing leads, checking on Lou, hunting down the bastards that had hacked her—pornographers, maybe, trying to rip out her sex life and sell it? Ha, bad luck buddies. This was a waste of time.
“You’re looking for a girl,” Hemu said, bluntly, feeding her back her own get-to-it tone. “A girl with blue eyes. We know her. We can find her.”
Well, that got her attention.
“You know her, her, specifically?” Wait, how? “Hey, how did you know I was looking for her?”
He gestured to the statue. “God told us.”
“Oh.” Goddamnit, what a waste of time. Hemu nodded at her, as if reading her thoughts.
“There are no dogs in the city,” he said.
“So?” She was ten seconds away from desecrating this place and laughing her ass back to civilization. “There aren’t many cats either, or—” but that wasn’t true, she realized. She’d seen cats, not many, but a few. So what? They were harder to catch than dogs; they could climb trees and scurry better. And they weren’t so dependent on handouts.
“So what?” she said.
“The other, the Blue God that follows the girl. It likes dogs. It wants to be a wolf.”
That was something. The other…he was talking about the alien. He knew about that. But to him it was all mixed up in religion. To the Gaespora it was a marketing gimmick. To Friar it was science. To this poor bastard it was divine intervention. And to her it was all just a fat pain in the ass.
“So you know about the…others?”
He nodded. “We have known about them longer than anyone. We follow the First. The Slow God who knows time and waits. She came when the skies lost their blue and told us how we could live in a world of dark. From Her we have learned peace. We have learned simplicity. We have learned to trust one another, and above all to turn from the Hunger. She knows the Blue God, has seen him in other worlds beyond ours. They are not the same but they know how to live without destroying one another. The Hunger does not know this. It knows only Hunger.”
“And what about the…” Shit, what would this nutcase call the Gaespora? The Green God? The Rich God? The Annoying God? Ah screw it; she couldn’t play this game. “What about the Gaespora? You know, the plant people.”
“They are like the Hunger though they are not. They seek to grow, to become Gods of Gods, but through kinder means. The Slow God neither gives nor takes from the Sad Gods. She pities them, for they have lost much, and chastens them, for they have not learned. Of all the Gods, their end is least certain.”
“Oh, okay. So, where’s this girl? The Blue God’s escort.”
She noticed that all the hips in the joint were now watching them, staring almost reverently at her. There were at least thirty of them, and she saw they were armed with guns, knives and—was that a sword? She slapped herself mentally for letting down her guard. Lame as they may be they could still dog pile her and chop off her head. And she hadn’t quite realized how nutty these guys were. They really believed this shit.
“We will help you, but you must help us.”
“Ah, a capitalist God. I like that.”
“We would not ask. We would help you freely, but we are desperate.”
Desperate. That was something she could understand, that could make a body do some twisted shit. And if she said no? Awfully tempting, seeing as they seemed to be relying on voodoo just like everyone else. Would they beat her senseless and crucify her if she flipped them the bird and bounced? Although…Hemu had been sincere enough, and really what she needed was thousands of slaves to keep an eye out for all the blue-eyed girls in the Fish. That was almost exactly what Hemu could give her, if he wasn’t bullshitting.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I will show you.”
It was a tricky climb to the top of the warehouse, but the view was breathtaking. The city was a wall of lights and crawling ads, spilling into Jersey across the Hathaway Bridge. She’d never seen Philly like this before, the panorama of light, almost as far as you could see in any direction. It was like a fantasy world, a magical kingdom—it almost looked like a place where you would want to be. Above it all, a massive steel erection jutting from the wall of light, the Vericast building, illuminated by a bluish beam of what she could only suppose was moonlight, a symbol of absolute might. She got the odd sense that they could see her up in the Gaespora forest, that ElilE was still there on his rock, that he hadn’t moved since their meeting, and that he was seeing through the miles of air and dark to warn her: time was running out.
But that wasn’t what Hemu had brought her up here to see. He was pointing at something below, and shouting something—they had to shout the wind was so loud. She didn’t like the wind. The heights she could handle, sort of, but all this blowing, whipping her hair in her eyes and chilling her through her coat; it seemed to be pushing her towards the edge, urging her to jump, calling her a pussy if she didn’t make a try at flying. What was Hemu pointing at? It was a building, maybe, large, almost a quarter of a city block, illuminated by slow-blinking lights. It almost looked like a refinery. Oh speak up you mild-mannered twat. She grabbed his head, and brought it closer to hers, almost so their foreheads touched. She was pleasantly surprised that his breath didn’t reek—was that peppermint?
“What. Are. You. Saying?”
“It’s a fab dozer,” he said, pointing at the building. “It’s coming this way.”
“So?”
“It will destroy the church, the Place of Communion.”
“So? Build another one.”
He shook his head.
“The Slow God cannot be in all places. This place is close to Her. This place is dear.”
She thought back to what ElilE had said about similarity—what had he said, similarity margins? Margarine?—well, similarity. And this God, or alien, or inspired con artist preferred this particular spot.
“What will happen if it’s destroyed?”
He shook his head again.
“It will be bad. She brings us peace.”
The thought hit her hard—peace. That was the word. The quiet, the calm around the area, the green things growing everywhere and the flowers. And she hadn’t seen an elzi in hours. She could believe that there was something here, a God, a gas leak, a fluke of topography that made it desirable real estate.
She activated her binoculars and night vision. She could see the fab dozer now, a box frame on bus-sized treads with wrecking balls, heat rays, grinders, chemical recyclers, auto-assemblers, and three-dimensional printers. She could see the line of apartments it had shit out behind it—nice, two-story buildings with brick facades, for the young techies and embyays. It was a billion-dollar automated development device—it had to be automated to keep Hathaway’s hands clean in case an elzi or a hip got caught in the blender—and Hemu was asking her to destroy it, because she would have to destroy it. It was doubtful she could get a sharp enough program to reroute the thing, and even if she did they would eventually catch the error and fix it. This would carry a terrorism charge at the least and you couldn’t buy your way out of that. The feds’d strap her to a metal cross and rip out her fingernails, peel off her nipples, rape her with cattle prods and snap her bones, one by one until she confessed. There was no way.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t. I mean, I don’t even know how, and even if I did—they’d catch me. That thing is a fortress. I’m sorry but no go.”
He stared at the fab dozer, face unchanged.
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I think I understand alright.”
“It is not you who can do this. It is the girl. When you find her, you must bring her here. She will destroy the machine.”
“I can’t do that. I have to bring her to the Gaes—the Sad Gods.”
“Do you know why they seek this girl?”
“They want to protect her. There are men trying to find her, trying to kill her.”
“Yes. Let us go below.”
They climbed down three stories of dilapidated stairs and rickety ladders. The building was occupied in the lower floors, ruined but clean, and with the green vines everywhere with the white flowers—maybe that was the only thing keeping the building up. They stopped on the thirtieth floor—fuck that had been a climb—where a heavy scent of cooking vegetables filled the air. The smell made her mouth water; all she’d had was that stick of Chew 20 and half a liter of bourbon. Her stomach growled. Hemu lead her to a line of scraggly-looking men and women and handed her a bowl carved of wood. They followed the line to a huge pot, repurposed from an industrial container of some sort, full of bubbling stew. They were served by baggy old women and then found a place alone in a corner by a window. It was dark and hard to see without night vision, but the hips didn’t seem to have a problem. There were fires, which seemed like a terrible idea, but they were careful to contain them in drums and piles of rocks, and the whole wide floor flickered between light and shadow. Peace. It was peaceful. There were no city sounds and the people hardly spoke. There was a moan, some couple having sex in the shadows somewhere. She sipped at the broth of the stew—not bad, needed salt. Her poison sniffer said it was fine.
“You must spend the night,” Hemu said. “You will be safe here.”
“Okay,” she said. Strangely she was in no hurry to leave. Sheltered from the wind it wasn’t too cold and she still had a fine view of the city. Her brain was acting funny, all sober now, and she felt she might actually get a full night of natural sleep.
“In the morning, we will help you,” Hemu said. How did he know? Was he the leader? He hadn’t talked to anyone but her this whole time. But she realized that didn’t matter. No one talked here, in the Communion Place, but they communed. The decisions were made in conference with the Slow God. They were all together here, protected. She could feel it, just a little, in the corner of her mind. It was a nice feeling, but it made her sad.
“When you find the girl, you must decide. You must bring her to us or bring her to the Sad Gods.”
“You were waiting for me,” she said. Of course. That’s why he was there.
“Not me. All of us. I found you.”
“And the girl, is she one of you?”
“She is what you would call hip to mean she has no home and she relies on others like her. But she does not follow the Slow God. We are not many.”
“But you control the hips?”
“We give as we can. The Slow God gives freely to man and we take all we can and give to others. But our understanding is small.”
She felt very strange. This peace shit was getting to her. It was…relaxing. She felt all the disconnected strands of her brain, plugged into all the feeds, all the processes of checking her back and scanning for threats and searching, always searching—they all wound together and for what seemed like the first time she was living as a whole, focused, present, part of a moment. And the moment was shared. She reached out and held Hemu’s hand, furious at both her need and her embarrassment. He took her hand and held it gently, and they stayed that way until she drifted off to sleep.