The Camps

THE ’CROSS-RIVER CURIO COLLECTOR bought the head from the café owner for sixty enns because he thought it would make an irresistible attraction to put in the window of his shop on the Avenue of Divine Succour.

The café owner sold the head to the ’cross-river curio collector because the customers complained that they could not drink their wine and eat their small eats in peace because of the noise it made.

The café owner’s partner, a kindly woman, and content to be fat, had put the head up on the shelf under the television because it would not stop singing in the street unless someone did take it in, and anyway, it had been raining for three days now.

The head was singing in the rain in the street because of the argument it had had with its granddaughter and crazy with exasperation she had left it there, in the rain, and the mud, on the steeply sloping street.

The granddaughter argued with the head because the head had refused to go with her up that steeply sloping muddy street through the tanglethorn barricades into the camp.

It had been a strange argument, the argument between the head and his granddaughter in the rain on the streaming, muddy street. A mute girl and a talking head; the night-shift workers going up the hill and the day-shift workers coming down the hill had stopped to see that one.

‘What are they arguing about?’

‘Seems he thinks it is a big mistake to have come here.’

‘Sensible him. What does she think?’

Shrug. ‘She must disagree with him.’

‘She is mad.’

And after the workers had gone, the streets filled with organicals coming and going on many legs, which were the workers from the camps who had no skills that were sought after and had hired themselves out by the day or week in organical service, and still they had argued, the mute girl and the voluble grandfather, but whatever their origin they were organicals now and could not understand that the girl was insisting that they must go on, go up to the camps and the head insisting that it was time to give up, time to call an end to the search, time to admit that she could search her whole life away and never find what she was looking for. Time to accept, time to grieve, time to move on like the river, time to look to herself instead of others. The girl in the silver jacket with the pictures on it had picked up the head and tried to carry it up to the checkpoint by main force but the head had started to sing and shriek and holler so that people came out of the shops and tiny two-table restaurants to see what the hell the din was all about. They had seen the girl then lift the pot with the head in it and smash it down, smash it to the ground and without a word storm off up the hill through the rain and the jostle of busy, many-legged organicals.

‘Holy shit she must be in some temper,’ they had said and then the head, its pot cracked, it rooticles writhing over the filthy cobbles, had started to sing, in the mud, in the street, in the pouring early winter rain.

Of course she came back. Guilt was as natural and inescapable a part of her as her heartbeat. With a hand-written card, she asked in every shop and two-table restaurant along Third Hill Street but by that time the head, doped up to the cerebral cortex with travel-sickness pills and stuffed into a sports bag so as not to arouse the interest of the customs officials, was within reach of the Empire shore.

Every day as he polished his wares, Mr Vrishna would say to the head that he hoped it would be bought by someone from above the fortieth level. One of the long-legged, big-breasted shaven-headed women he saw passing his street window in blue silver automobiles. Women, he maintained, had a more keenly developed sense of horror than men, and women from above the fortieth level had the finest sense of outrage of all. How fine the head would look as the centre-piece to one of their fortieth-level dinner parties, what a talking point it would make; that would be one dinner party they were sure never to forget. Yes, he hoped that today would be the day one of the streamlined blue silver cars that ghosted along the Avenue of Divine Succour stopped, and a long-legged big-breasted woman with an umbrella to keep the acid rain off her chrome-powdered scalp would step out, and look in the window of Vrishna and Company: International Objets D’Art, and giggle with silly, fortieth-level pleasure at the sight of the head in its slightly cracked pot. This would be the day when the door would open and the door chimes would ring and the high heels of the long-legged big-breasted shaven-headed fortieth-level woman would click and clack across his polished wood floor (not real wood, who could afford real wood these days, but the cellulose plastics were good ersatz) and her smartcard would glitter blue silver in the shop lights and his cardreader would glitter seductively in return and he would bow and thank her and present her with her unique novelty and her heels would click clack click back out of Vrishna and Company International Objets D’Art into the falling rain.

The head had been a feature of Mr Vrishna’s window only a few days, and its view of Capital life limited to a few hundred metres of shop-fronts, plastic awnings, cheap diners, greasy sidewalks, litter-clogged gutters, holo-ads for Five Hearts Beer (a thorn of nostalgia for the crampled, smelly apartment on Lantern Lane), splashing taxis and fuming omnibuses, but it had learned enough of the city to realise that the blue silver car would never come splashing up to the kerb, the long-legged big-breasted shaven-headed woman peer in through the window, her pupils dilated with a fine sense of outrage. For every night it would look up, past the smile tilt swig grin of the Five Hearts Beer Girl, up the diamond-studded perspectives of the towers to the place where they penetrated and shattered the perpetual clouds and made them glow with their lights and navigation beacons and in the dendrified circuits of its mind it would imagine the towers rising up beyond where it could see, sheer and slender and beautiful and silver in the moonlight, and the sheer, slender, beautiful moonlit, people who lived all their lives at dazzling altitude and it knew that they were as remote and untouchable as his beloved dead wife carried to the farthest edge of the universe by Saint-ships. Once they were up there, they never came down.

If the idea of being a dinner-table conversation piece five kilometres up in the stratosphere did not appeal to the head, neither did a future lived at ground zero in the window of Vrishna and Company International Objets D’Art, squeezed between a clockwork pantheon from the antipodes in which all the gods could be seen whirling in a kaleidoscopic heaven, and some stuffed extrasolar creature that smelled of formaldehyde. Back across that river were responsibilities and relationships sorely neglected. Back across that river, up that mud-covered hill, through those thorn gates, was his granddaughter, silent before the world. Even one step is a universe for a bodyless head.

The third night that the boy came spinning past, the head hailed him through the glass. Drunk, smashed out of his mind on consciousness-shattering drugs, tripped out on his own neuro-chemistry through illegal viruses, the boy in the dirty street-length waxed raincoat with the hood covered in badges had reeled back in disbelief. But when you dance with the devil in the pale moonlight nothing may harm you that you do not wish to harm you and he had crept from the gutter and placed his greasy palms on Mr Vrishna’s lovingly polished glass and steamed it up with his breath.

‘What kind of thing are you?’ In the darkness beneath his rain-streaming hood, his eyes shone with the unclean things. Virus in the iris.

‘Help me,’ the head said. ‘Get me out of here.’ The boy shook his head, grinned.

‘Oh no, this is great, this is the best one yet. Far and away, the best one yet.’ Head thrown back, laughing in the acid rain, he spun away down the Avenue of Divine Succour. In his wake purred street-cleaning robots, rearranging the detritus of yesterday into the litter of today.

He was back the next night and this time the light did not shine in his retinas so madly. The rain ran down the window and he said, ‘Jeez, you are real after all. What did you do to deserve this, brother?’

‘I lived,’ said the head. ‘That is all.’ The boy laughed but it was not the sour, flaying laugh of the night before, it was the bitter, painful laugh of solidarity.

‘You and me both, brother.’ And he was gone. But the head knew he had him now. He would come back that night to the window, and the night after, and the night after that, and with every night the head would move him a word or so closer.

‘You know you can get me out of here if you want to.’

‘But why would I want to, old man?’

‘I am a valuable commodity.’

‘Then why are you still sitting there in that stupid window?’

‘I have been a place no one else has ever been.’

‘Where is that, then?’

‘Death.’

‘Everyone goes there, old head.’

‘But none have ever come back again. I have. I have been into death, and I have returned. I know what it is like. Death, boy, death. That is the ultimate trip. Your drugs, your drink, your altered states of consciousness; they are nothing, boy, nothing. But what lies beyond that white light, I know, I have been there, I can tell you.’

Late night, early morning umbrellas huddled along the Avenue of Divine Succour; high above, lightning fretted, trapped between the towers like a hunted creature.

‘Jeez, I dunno old man.’ Halfway to the edge of the head’s field of vision, he turned, great waxed coat flapping in the chaos winds that blew through the streets of the Imperial capital. About to say something. About to speak. He waved his hand, shook his head. And was gone.

He did not return the next night, or the next night, or the night after. Then in the nightmare hour when the taxicabs ran scared in the rainslick streets, a roll of city thunder woke the head from its dreams of guilt and mud-covered streets that climbed up up up for ever. And the face looked into his, centimetres away behind the glass.

‘Death, old head.’

‘You want me to tell you? You want to know? I can tell you. All you want to know. The answer to the greatest question.’

‘I know you can,’ said the boy in the hooded coat. ‘Close your eyes.’ The heavy hammer shivered Mr Vrishna’s window into a hundred flying reflections. Alarms began to wail. The head felt itself lifted from its place between the clockwork pantheon and the extraplanetary creature. Hands took it. Hands hid it beneath the big waxed coat, in the body stink, the body heat, while feet beat the greasy streets, feet running, and running, and running.

His name was Ghundaleyo. He was a creature of junctions and intersections, formed by the casual collisions of chromosomes in some trash-lit corner of the Weekend World. Blown by the wind from the street, steered by the lodestone attraction of tangles and knots of human affairs. What you doing here, let me hear let me see let me touch let me in. But they would ever turn away with a smile and a tilt of the eyes in the neon light and the glitter of three a.m. lip-gloss from the polished streamlines of a chrome-pearl automobile. Life as an ever-breaking wave, a tumultuous high which, if you ever lose your surefootedness for a single moment, will drag you down and drown you. Inevitable that he should be drawn to such a place as the I-beam jungle that was his home. Where three elevated monorail lines crossed in webs of cantilevered steel, he had excavated a little nest among the girders, floored with plastic shelving from dead hypermarts, roofed with fluttering swags of ripped black garbage sack. Constantly shaken by suburban monorails and a terrifying whirling, flying storm of black polythene rags and streamers when the big winds blew from the west; it was den, home, womb, a place to curl your back against reality.

‘Jeez, what do I do with you?’ he asked for, sustained by his perpetual high, he stole not to meet his needs, but because there was something there stealable.

‘Feed me,’ the head said.

‘Feed you? You’re dead, how can you eat?’

‘If you do not feed me, I will be dead. Properly dead.’

He stole the head a bottle of house-plant food from a booth at the elevated monorail station.

‘Now tell me about death.’ He dripped five drips onto the rooticles. ‘Jeez, would you look at that. You are some gross shit, old head.’ The steel-girdered plastic tent rushed and boomed to the pressure-waves of accelerating suburban shuttles.

‘What is there to know about death? You boy, you will find out all about it soon enough if you do not watch yourself.’

‘Do not irritate me, old head. Or I will stick you out all day on the main beam and it will be pissing down with rain and maybe when the trains pass they will shake you off or maybe they will not but if they do you will fall way way down and crack into a hundred thousand pieces.’

Eager for a second step to quickly succeed this first step, the head restrained its criticism.

‘Death,’ the boy said the next night with the wind from the west blowing the ripped layers of garbage sack up in a frenzy of plastic stalactites.

‘I will tell you about death,’ said the head. ‘But first I want you to take me out. All day I sit here while you sleep and scratch, and all night you are out doing whatever the hell it is you do. Take me out with you. I am bored.’

‘Then you will tell me about death?’

‘Then I will tell you about death.’

Thunder rolled around the navigation beacons on the high towers and they rode through the streets and through the massive buttressed roots of the towers on white-lit, soft-hissing monorails. The head sat on the courtesy table looking out through the raindrop-streaked windows at the lights and the towers and the shapes that moved within the clouds.

‘Ride all night on one ticket,’ the boy said. ‘Ride until the morning light. You seen enough yet?’ The night girls in their stretch and strap costumes who worked the night trains sat down opposite Ghundaleyo and offered him sex money drink chemicals if they could play with the head but what they offered was nowhere he had not been before. They could not offer death.

‘Come on, tell me, what is it like?’ Lightning spoke from tower to tower, lightning replied from the monorail power grid, lighting their faces nightmare blue.

‘What do you imagine it is like?’

Holo-ads crowded overhead, a convocation of market-force angels.

‘I imagine there is a moment after the last heartbeat, after the last breath while the mind is still alive and aware when you know that your heart has stopped and will never start again and you know that you have breathed out and will never breathe in again. When I was a kid I used to try to imagine what it would be like, I used to hold my breath, and hold it and hold it and hold it until my head was bursting, until everything was red and black before my eyes, until my mind seemed on an edge where it could no longer hold on, and any moment would let go, when everything was roaring up in pain and fire and panic. And then I would breathe in, and I would live again. But I imagine that is what death is like; if you were never to breathe in again.’

‘You have it right,’ the head lied.

‘Dear God,’ the boy whispered.

He stole it steak. Real steak, dead-animal-meat; not the tank-grown slabs of flesh the food corporations called steak, that was copied from provincial biotecture patents.

‘Real good food, old head,’ he said, dropping snipped-up morsels among the rooticles.

‘Do you ever think of getting out of here?’ the head suggested. ‘Do you ever think maybe you could have a better life someplace else? This city is no place for people. This city eats people up, chews every last bit of good out of them, then sticks its fingers down its throat and pukes them up onto the street. You can do better than this place.’

‘Oh? So? Where?’

‘Go east. To the river. There are some good places there. Living is easy along the river. Maybe even go across the river.’

‘Live among the meatmen? Shit, why?’

But that night when the last of the late-night office workers had been monorailed back to their neat suburbs that went on and on and on and on and on and on around the Capital so that it seemed that the whole universe was made out of mass-market housing with neat lawns and two automobiles and a satellite dish, that night when the night-stick robots went stalking along the boulevards tranquillising narcos and drunks with neural darts and shepherding droves of them all linked by the brain to its central processor to the precinct for detoxing; that night when the night-sirens pulled on their stretch and strap suits and clicked into their heels and switched on the subdermal motors that plumpified and cutified and curvified and slimmified their anatomies into altogether more pneumatic, more curvaceous, more alluring contours; that night the boy and his head went out scavenging among the root buttresses of the tower piles. Night and day, day and night refuse drones and loaders shovelled garbage vented down the waste disposal shafts from the heights above. Megatons of trash nourished the roots of the stratoscrapers. Entire communities depended upon the trash, moving with its ebbs and flows on nomadic micro-migrations, digging and picking and sniffing and eating. Surrounded by geographies of garbage, the boy and his head stood under the multimillion-ton bulk of the arcology, beneath the funnel mouth of the vast central vent from which a blizzard of papers and wrappers and leaflets sifted down.

‘Goes all the way up to the top,’ the boy said, throwing his head back as if he might see all those kilometres up into the swirl of gently falling paper. ‘All the way.’ Then he crouched, in his greasy city coat, eye to eye with the head which he had set on the garbage.

‘Death, then.’

And the head knew that it could stall and feint and lie no longer.

‘Death is nothing.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘No. Truly. Death is nothing. No light. No dark. No space. No time. No feeling. No sensation. No lack of sensation. No consciousness. Nothing.’

‘But the white light…’

‘An illusion caused by oxygen deprivation of the visual centres of the brain.’

‘Beyond the white light?’

‘Nothing. No return. If you return, it is not death. Death is that from which you can never return.’

‘But you returned.’

‘Then I was never truly dead. You think that death is an instant thing. That is not so. Death is a slow thing, and there are many different kinds of death. Your heart may stop, your lungs cease breathing, you may cease all vital signs and be clinically dead, but your body may be brought back to life by the healers. Your physical body may die beyond hope of restoration but your brain may be maintained by organicals. That is my kind of death. Your brain also may die but your mind, your consciousness, may be maintained by an information network, such as our root matrix, which we call the Dreaming. Then there is the death of the body and the brain and the consciousness and that is the true death for it is the one from which no technology can revive you and from which no one has ever returned and of which no one can speak.’

‘You. Lying bastard!’

The boy stepped back. Leaf upon leaf, scraps and orts, the litter drifted down upon them from unimaginable height.

‘You lying bastard.’

Another step further away. And another, and another. And another.

‘You lying bastard.’

The cry came from further now; the boy in his fluttering waxed coat was almost an illusion behind the snow of falling paper.

‘You lying bastard.’ One final time, on the edge of hearing over the roar of the ventilators and the dumpster engines. And no more.

‘Boy!’

‘Kid!’

‘Ghundaleyo!’

No.

Then the head knew fear. For the first time since its physical death, it knew vulnerability. And it was a freezing, paralysing fear, to be vulnerable, to be afraid of the gentle snow of paper settling softly gently upon you, piling up and up and up and covering you over, clogging your mouth so that your cries go unheard, shutting out the light from your eyes. Burying you while you are still alive, for the trash is rich rich food for your rooticles.

It was the robot trash-shovellers the head feared the most. There is no arguing with a machine, no margin for error. They would never hear him, never see him as they ground up and down the piles of garbage on their rubber treads. And even if they did hear and see him, he would be just another piece of detritus to them to be shovelled and scooped and dropped into the grinding maw of a trash compactor, or the fiery furnace mouth of a trash incinerator. All night he watched the black and yellow chevroned machines whirr across the wasteland; red white and blue warning lights pulse-rotating, get out of our way get out of our way get out of our way. The long dark night of the soul.

Dawn in the Capital was a general suffusion of greyness into neon-lit night, like a persistent internal haemorrhage. Spirals of rain blew under the skirts of the stratoscraper. The scavenge line the head had been watching since first light pulled up their hoods and bent closer to the earth as they advanced up the hill towards it. The head studied the man who would be its saviour, tall, bent very low to the ground, sweeping his fingertips across the surface of the garbage as he worked his way up the hill. Every once in a while his fingers would pause over some treasure found in the mountains of paper, would touch it, turn it over, feel its every intimate pore, and then either slip it under his heavily hooded coat, or return it to corruption. Closer. The fingers worked closer. Metres now. Centimetres. Surely he must have seen the head by now?

The sweeping fingers brushed against the pot. Paused. Felt out the contours, the cracks, the cold hard glaze. A hand ran over its face; snatched back in horror.

‘Hey, what is the matter with you, you blind or something?’ the head said.

The searching fingers returned, more careful now, more intimate.

‘I thought I recognised the accent.’ Thumbs touched the head’s eyes. ‘Ah. Long time since I encountered one of these. The things the rich cast out. Is this a new fashion, imported heads from across the river?’

The fingers dabbled among the writhings of the rooticles.

‘Watch what you are doing,’ said the head. The face beneath the fold of waxed hood smiled.

‘I hope your command of the language is good enough to appreciate irony.’ The garbage scavenger stood tall against the grey sun and pushed back the hood of his shapeless waxed coat.

His eyes were two yellow, pustulent sockets, puckered almost shut under the ridges and blisters of purple flesh that covered the upper half of his head like roots.

‘Your countrymen, I am afraid. And I loved the place so; everything I touched seemed so alive, vital, brilliant; you can imagine how it would seem to a young soldier of the Emperor on his first tour of duty outside the capital. If only my blindness were beautiful too. I like to think I could bear it a little better, but I touched it once, when the bandages came off and I will never touch it again.’

The hood was pulled down over the destroyed face.

‘I am sorry. It is not for me to punish you. You were not responsible, and I am not one of those who believes that any man bears the guilt of his entire people. It was some form of biological weapon, I believe, an antipersonnel device that sprayed fungal spores. It was unfortunate that I had my visor up. Most unfortunate. But I have seen those things kill, and there is no death like the death they deal out. Consumed from without by fungal infestations. All that were eaten were my eyes. Ukerewe Prefecture; that was where we were patrolling. A very beautiful Prefecture, Ukerewe. I think it was the trees dazzled us; they cut you off from the world, those visors; make everything so much television. A local uprising. Some Ghost-Boy faction convinced it could deliver its land singlehandedly—with the aid of the Saints, of course—from the Imperial oppressor. Of course, they couldn’t. We crushed them. But it was not then like it is now; they did not do that tree-thing. God, that’s a terrible thing to do. Four thousand years since the Green Wave broke and you never invented a punishment like that. It takes the Empire to dream it up.

‘It must have been ten years ago. We play out the same old boys’ games over and over and over until we get the result that pleases us. Ten, twelve, maybe; one of the things that vanishes with sight is your sense of time. Days, nights, seasons, years; they cease to govern your life. That, I tell you, is a great liberation. There is no tyranny like the tyranny of the clock.

‘Then three, four years ago I lost my military pension—cutbacks, budget restrictions, public spending axes, means tests. I had sufficient savings to disqualify me but insufficient to support me. The trash-lands have always been waiting, I suspect.’ The blind soldier knelt on the rain-wet trash, let his fingers explore the head once again. ‘No, I do not think I would get much for you. I am sorry. But it was good to hear a friendly accent again.’

‘Wait.’

The sighted and the blind look at someone who is speaking in different ways. The sighted looks with his eyes. The blind looks with his ears.

‘I have an idea. A proposition.’

‘What proposition could you make that would be of interest to me?’

‘A partnership.’

‘Indeed? So?’

‘A true partnership, where each covers the other’s weakness. I will be your eyes, if you will be my body.’

The blind man laughed.

‘That is a fine proposition.’

‘Do you accept it?’ the head asked.

The blind man smiled the smile of the sightless, which is a smile of feeling rather than a smile of seeing.

‘As you say, in a good partnership each covers the other’s weaknesses. I accept.’

It was a fine partnership, and true. The blind man lived in a few small rooms in the middle of a flashing neon advertisement for facial cream and did not possess a single electric lightbulb. His few small rooms were decorated with treasures fallen from the heart of the stratoscrapers; astonishing things; silver statuettes of yearning women with their hair streamed back in the wind from space, panes of crystal that when you touched them filled you with grief and joy and dread and an ecstasy beside which any ecstasy you ever had with a woman or man was pale and winter-cold, metal eggs that beneath your hand became soft and prickly and hard and cold and hot and oozing and rotting and gritty and finally so exactly like a breast that you had to open your eyes to make sure it was still only a clever metal egg. Given that you had eyes to open. Most of what he found the blind man sold for food and rent; these few most exquisite he could not bear to part with, the discarded novelties of life at high altitude, lit in epilepsy violet and cerise courtesy of Lady Lysistra Facial Cream.

The head learned to live in the light of Lady Lysistra, day and night, unbounded by the ticking of the clock. At any time of the day or night the blind man would fix the head onto the webbing harness he had made to wear around his chest, pull on his street coat, and go out under the towers. The head opened a new dimension of salvage for the first time it found a pen sketch made in a bored moment by some fortieth-level woman of her girlfriend reclining naked and hairless on a divan.

‘This is good. This is worth something,’ said the head. ‘Turn it towards me, so I can see better…Oh God that is some woman.’

‘So much paper to me,’ said the blind man. ‘I will have to imagine the woman. I can remember women, it may surprise you to know.’

In the between times, they would talk, or play fili. The blind man was a very good player, as good as the Advocate Kalimuni had been on those long summer evening matches at a table under an umbrella tree on some secluded square in Chepsenyt. He played by touch, but more by memory. The head had learned the skill of playing by memory during his short time in the Dreaming; their matches were pleasureful and memorable. But talk was their chief recreation: the recollection of things past. Talk of the Land, always the Land. The blind man’s limited geography overlapped with the head’s: ‘Describe Ol Senok township to me,’ he would say, ‘I remember it in the fall of the year; tell me of it in the fall of the year,’ and the head would describe the glass-cobbled squares and the meandering streets shoulder to shoulder with houses turning gold and bronze with the turn of the season, and the trees and the gardens beyond, the fern-filled closes, the umbrella trees in the street cafés shedding their canopies that the first winter storm would send whirling over the rooftops, the trux and the traders and the traix, and after he had finished the blind man would sit silent, still, for hours at a time, exploring the streets and closes of his mental Ol Senok.

‘You could go back,’ the head said one day, a hard stone cast into the pool of reflection. ‘If you loved it so much, why not go back. It is at peace now.’

‘Oh, I do not know,’ said the blind man, smiling his sightless smile in the light of Lady Lysistra. ‘It is never the same when you go back.’

‘It is what you make it,’ the head said.

‘That is true,’ the blind man said. ‘And it is a temptation. But that is all it is: a temptation. Tell me now, do you know the road down across the prefecture boundary that runs through the hills from Kapsabale to Elembetet? I passed that way in winter with my company, tell me how it seems in winter, with the snow upon the forest.’

With the rain slanting across the window, the head told him about the way the snow lay like a fantastic white city upon the spires and fans and bubbles of the forest and the blind man seemed content.

One day as they were abroad on the rain-wet streets they came upon a crowd of people barring their way.

‘Give way, give way, blind wounded war veteran,’ cried the blind man who was not one to forsake his privileges. ‘War veteran blinded in the service of the Emperor.’

‘It is no use,’ said the head in its harness on his chest. ‘They are all along either side of the street. Thousands of them, as far as I can see.’

The blind man looked with his ears and heard the treble whisper of a cockle radio. He touched the young man who owned the radio on the shoulder: ‘Excuse me, what is happening, why are all these people here?’

‘Don’t you know?’ the young man said, shouting as people who wear cockle radios will. ‘The Emperor is coming.’

‘An Imperial progess,’ shouted a fat, turning-blousy woman with a great deal of hair on her upper lip and a mass-produced Imperial flag in her hand. ‘He is going to the shuttle port to meet someone from another planet. Look! Look! God save the Emperor! God bless, you, your Magnificence, God send you victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us!’

But it was a vanguard of street-cleaner robots siphoning and sucking their way along the Avenue of Light. All must be clean, all must be spotless and shitless and bloodless and pissless for the coming of an Emperor Happy and Glorious.

‘Please, please, let me through’, shouted the blind man over the growing murmur of the crowds. ‘Soldier wounded in the war, maimed in the service of his Emperor. Let me, through, please.’ The crowds, as ever, parted: who can resist moral blackmail?

‘The Emperor’, said the blind man to the head on his chest. ‘How glorious. Of course, you know that it is extremely rare for His Magnificence to leave the Jade City these days, he is an old man, even royalty are mortal. This must be an alien of some significance for the Emperor to have to come to him, rather than he to the Emperor.

‘This is wonderful indeed, rare, precious. Once before I saw the Emperor, in the flesh. I was very small at the time; he was on his way, then as now, to the starport: he was to make a peregrination among some of the nearer Daughter Worlds: a Saint-ship had been chartered, at ruinous expense. I could not have been more than four or five, but to this day, I can still see the glory of the Imperial passage. Marvellous! Wonderful! Glorious!’ A wave of excitement passed down the Avenue of Light. More intimately attuned to the dynamics of people, the blind man sensed it instantly.

‘What is happening? Is it he? Is he come now?’

‘Just the outriders, I think’, said the head. ‘Yes, the outriders.’

‘The outriders? Oh, tell me, are they as I remember? Are there fifty men in golden armour, running before him as they did in the most ancient of days, with golden halberds sloped across their shoulders? I am certain I can hear their running feet, tell me, is it them? The forerunners in golden armour?’ He turned so that the head could look along the Avenue of Light; two solid walls of humanity bristling with Imperial flags.

‘Yes,’ said the head. ‘It is him now. Here he comes.’

‘And are there horsemen, one hundred horsemen with swords and ancient flintlock muskets across their shoulders? I remember they followed the forerunners; they were the Paladineri, the body cavalry with red and white plumed helmets, and gleaming black breastplates polished so fine, so brilliant you could see the whole world reflected in the curve of them. Yes, I am certain I can hear horse hooves.

‘Then, after them will come the Imperial councillors in their palanquins, all robed in the finery of state with the rings of office on their fingers and the seals of office on their brows, each borne by twenty geneform eunuchs and preceded by a child with a gong. And then behind them comes the Emperor in his crystal carriage, veiled so that he may not be sullied by the gaze of common eyes. But I remember that I saw him, in the flesh, for at the moment the crystal carriage passed the Emperor sneaked back the corner of the veils and looked out for a glimpse at his subjects, and I saw him, I saw him face to face. I tell you, you do not forget a moment like that, when Emperor and subject come face to face. The wonder of that face, the splendour of his robes of office that he would wear onto the shuttle and then the Saint-ship and all around the Daughter Worlds; words cannot describe it.

‘Is he here yet? Is it him in his crystal carriage? I can’t hear anything over the roaring of the crowd; tell me, what do you see?’

The crowd made their noise and waved their mass-produced plastic Imperial flags. A young woman ripped off her tee-shirt with the Imperial crest and colours on it and waved it above her head. Her big big breasts jiggled and waggled in the steadily falling rain. The head watched while the blind soldier reminisced.

And the Emperor came.

First: fifteen policemen in black and silver uniforms with datavisors. They rode silent-running motorcycles.

Second: three automobiles with darkened windows. Men with radios and guns rode on the running boards and stood up in the back seats, looking all around them and talking constantly into their radios.

Third: a low, long limousine. Ruched silk covered the windows. In the back was a very very old man, so old he did not seem like a man any more. He seemed like an animal. Like an alien.

And after the Emperor came twenty more men on motorcycles.

The entourage sped past, was gone in less than five seconds.

‘It is all as you described it,’ said the head. ‘All. Everything. Perfect in every detail. Just as you said it would be.’

The white stones in the out-table were in jeopardy. The black stones had all the left-hand tables and two of three centre tables. An attack on the right-hand tables had been thwarted, but temporarily. The main thrust could not be long delayed now, and defeat for the head. In two moves the out-table would be overrun. And the blind man paused in mid-move, dropped his handful of stones onto the fili board. He sat unmoving, lit alternately violet and cerise by insane neon. Then he said, ‘I think we will go.’

‘Go?’ the head said.

‘Across the river. I think we will go across the river. I have some money saved up, it will be enough for the bus and the ferry. Living is cheap across the river.’

‘More expensive now than you remember.’

‘Everything is more expensive now than we remember. Yes, we will go. At the end of the week, I think. That would be a good time to go. I will make all the arrangements. Can you understand why I have decided to go now?’

‘I think so,’ said the head.

‘Maybe you would explain it to me, because I cannot,’ said the blind man. ‘There is no reason for it at all, except that it is what I want to do more than anything.’

‘You will find things changed from how you remember them,’ said the head.

‘Everything is changed from how we remember it,’ said the blind man. Stones rattled in the scooped-out wooden fili tables. ‘Double-jeopardy, against you, I believe.’

They crossed the river that was wide as the sea on a fast, sleek Imperial hydrofoil, cutting and weaving through the slower, heavier organical river traffic; intimidating fishing pirogues and slow-paddling amphibians with its triple horns and the snap and crack of the Imperial banner on its prow. Flaws of rain blew down from the north but the cold did not dissuade the blind man from going up on deck.

‘It is not as if you can actually see a damn thing,’ said the head who had learned that such comments were amusing to the blind man.

‘I can hear. I can smell. I can feel the wind. The rain feels good to me. It feels fresh. It does not dirty your skin like the rain of the capital. Tell me, are there riverboats abroad?’

‘We have just passed behind one, with a load of automobiles on its barges.’

‘I thought so. I could hear the sound of its stern wheel, I felt us bounce and skid over its wake, I could smell the distinctive musk of organicals. It has a smell like no other, your country. When I first went there, I was flown in a military transport, and then bussed with my company to Ukerewe, and all you smell in a plane and a bus is plastic and airconditioning. We arrived there in the night, and I stepped out of the bus and the smell struck me like a physical thing. The richness, the strangeness, the wildness, a smell that was a thousand smells at once but which in its totality was more; one thing, like the way the smell of a woman transcends its individual perfume and musks and becomes one thing. There is nothing like it; back in the capital, when I still had the pension, on idle days I would go past a perfumer’s on Glory Street—a very special perfumer’s, that imported exotic oils from across the river and used them as bases for their scents—just to inhale the smell. Of course, it was not the same, it was a dead, distilled smell, not a living smell, but it was as close as I could come. Tell me, am I stupid? I imagine that if I can strain my senses to their maximum—and one’s other senses do compensate when you lose sight—that I can smell that perfume even now, reaching out to me like fog rolling down off the land. Spices and musks and dark, green, growing rotting smells, essential oils and saps and fluids, fruit and flesh and shit that there, like nowhere else on the planet, is transformed into something wonderful, something that if you could take it and bottle it would sell for a thousand enns a gramme.

‘Tell me again, where is it we are going?’

‘Kilimambasa,’ said the head.

‘That is not a place I am familiar with. Why are we going there? Is it not quite far north? Are there not ferry ports further south, closer to Tannalewé and Ukerewe?’

‘They are still out of action from the War of Independence,’ said the head, who having started with just one lie, now found others followed naturally and inevitably. ‘Also, there is still much disease in the southern ports. In the final stage of the war, there was widespread use of biological weapons. It will be generations before Yembé is habitable again, and even if the ports along the Tannalewé coast are not as badly contaminated, still I do not think it would be safe for an Imperial to go there. You do not have the immunities we have.’

‘I see. Thank you,’ said the blind man and the head did not hate itself in the least, not the least part. Then the public address system announced ten minutes to Kilimambasa, ten minutes to Kilimambasa all vehicle drivers please return to your vehicles and the head said that they should go down below now but the blind man said no he wanted to stay just a while longer, until the hydrofoil emerged from the labyrinth of low islands and sandbars that choked the river at this high latitude so that the head could describe its first sight of the eastern shore. As the hydrofoil beat through the squalls and fits of rain, casting up white plumes of water from its wings, the head described the groves of trees in their autumnal colours that grew down to the water’s edge, and the fisherpeople’s homes along the waterline that looked like the shells of great molluscs and the terraces and the paddies tiering the low hills that rose up higher and higher until at the place where the rain and the aerial perspective dimmed the landscape into blue haze the full climax forest broke in waves of fan trees and coral spires and rafts of balloons sagging with moss and lichens.

Then the head described Kilimambasa town on its beautiful hillsides under its beautiful trees and its beautiful sunlit people coming and going in its beautiful streets that sloped down to the beautiful river and the beautiful ferry port and as the boat came down off its foils the blind man smiled at the thought of the beauty the head described for him and the head still did not feel guilty, not the least bit.

They stood on the quay after the trux and tractor-trailer combines had all revved and shunted away and the blind man was still smiling, the deep-down, heart smile of someone who has woken in the middle of a summer night’s dream to find that all the wonder and the strangeness is real and actual.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’re here. Where shall we go first?’ With the excitement of a child slipping his father’s hand and running dazzled towards the lights and music of the winter carnival.

‘First we must find a place to stay,’ said the head. ‘That is where we shall go first. There are many small hotels and travel-inns in a town like this.’

At each of the many small hotels and travel-inns the head spoke at length with the proprietor while the blind man took tea and listened to the television broadcasts hooked down from across the river by Empire-built satellite dishes.

‘That is Old Speech you are speaking,’ said the blind man as he carried the head through the beautiful streets to the next small hotel or travel-inn. ‘I can tell. It sounds like music. I have only a very few words of it left, when you give the language-plant back, it all goes. But I can recognise the sounds. Is this one full too?’

‘That one was full too,’ lied the head.

‘Perhaps the next one will not be so full,’ said the blind man. ‘I cannot take very much more tea, I must tell you.’

But the next one was full, and the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that.

‘So many visitors in such a small town,’ said the blind man, who, having been an officer in the service of the Emperor, was not a man to call anyone a liar. ‘So much talk. Would a simple “No Vacancies” sign not save us all a lot of effort?’

Then the head said, ‘I will admit that I have not been entirely truthful with you. The truth is that I have a relation in this town I am trying to find.’

‘This is this “Mathembe” you mention,’ said the blind man. ‘I still have a few words of Old Speech, as I said. You are looking for a relation, that is fine, but please, in this place I am quite dependent on your honesty and sincerity. Perhaps the next hotel will have a vacancy?’

It did.

And had the head found its relation?

It had.

At last.

At lunch, the head had a favour to ask.

‘That I will take you to meet this Mathembe? Certainly. But the Empire is an Empire of trade; as an Imperial, I would ask a favour in return. We have been so busy running about in search of your relation that I have not been able to enjoy the experience of being where I am. So, if I carry you, will you describe my surroundings for me?’

‘Not so loud about the Empire, here,’ said the head.

So they went up the gently sloping road where the head and Mathembe had quarrelled a season before, the road that went up through Kilimambasa to the camps.

‘The street is lined with cafés and restaurants,’ said the head. ‘They have taken in their street tables for the winter but inside there is still brightness and cheerfulness. People are playing fili or watching the sports channel on the television.’

‘The cafés, the restaurants, what do they look like?’

‘They look like living things look, curved and sculpted and rounded, running into each other, over each other; their walls are bright now with the last autumn colours,’ said the head. But the walls were scarred with bullet holes and blackened with fire and smeared with spray-paint graffiti promising swift and sure death to ‘Impie Bastards’.

And they went up past the cafés and restaurants.

‘Now there are houses, clustered together around courtyards and squares. Within their little walled gardens grow trees and shrubs and all kinds of useful living things. Radios and wine fermentories and thread. The gardens are very beautiful.’ But the houses were windowless, doorless, and falling apart into their component units and squatter women crouched in the empty doorways and glared malevolently as such women will and parasite-ridden children whipped chunks of organical through the streets and the gardens were dead and brown and clogged with shit and heaps of rotting plasm.

‘Listen, you can hear the children playing,’ said the head.

The blind man sniffed. ‘What is that I smell?’

‘That is the shit they use to fertilise the gardens.’

‘Such marvellous economy,’ said the blind man.

And they went up past the houses.

‘We are high now,’ said the head. ‘We are almost at the edge of the town. We are above the houses, out into the gardens and terraces and paddy fields. The hillsides are covered in low walls and walkways and terraces, in this season they are full of water so that they shine like a thousand pieces of mirror broken on the hillside.’

‘A broken mirror,’ said the blind man and the head could see how in his mind it was real and actual and for the first time the head knew guilt. For with each step up the sloping road the lie had grown and now it was total, for there were no gardens and orchards and paddies, no lagoons shining like a thousand pieces of broken mirror in the pale winter sun. They stood at the gateway to the camp, where the silver that shone in the pale winter sun was the silver of the emergency shelters and the thousand mirrors were the thousand plastic-roofed shacks and shanties gleaming with the swift, sudden winter rain, and the terraces were the walls of garbage plastered with red mud that the refugees had put up around their moribund attempts at gardens and the walkways were the trux-and-foot-churned quagmires between the dense-packed houses.

They stood where the road went up through the tanglethorn defences and the blind man flared his nostrils and frowned and said, ‘I cannot smell it. It is not how I remember. It is not the same. Tell me, is it very busy here? I can hear the sound of many many people.’

‘It is very busy,’ said the head as people and organicals went up and down through the gate. ‘Farmers preparing the fields for the winter seeding. Even in a biotechnical society like ours, there is still manual labour to be done.’

‘And I had thought that I could see out my days throned in plenty, with everything I needed within the reach of my two hands,’ said the blind man.

And they left the gateway behind, and went into the camp.

‘Your relation lives here?’ said the blind man.

‘Of course,’ said the head, now trapped by its lie. ‘This is a grand place to live.’ And they pushed forward, into the press of people and organicals that thronged the gate.

‘But why does it feel as if I am in a market?’ asked the blind man as they went along the muddy main boulevards past slow-moving trux and women with bundles on their backs suspended from brow-bands.

‘That is because it is a market,’ said the head. ‘They come from all around to put sheets down by the side of the road and sell.’

‘But why,’ asked the blind man as the head guided it off the main thoroughfares onto the footpaths and alleyways that ran like thieving boys between the shanty plots, ‘do I feel there are walls on either side of me?’

‘That is because there are tall trees all around us, tall trees, and so close together,’ said the head, who now knew nothing but the lie. And they found themselves in a small compound surrounded by plastic-roofed shanties. Children watched from low doorways, radios blared.

‘But why,’ said the blind man, ‘does what I feel, what I smell and what I hear, why do they all contradict what you are telling me? Why do I feel that every word you have been saying to me has been a lie? That every step you have led me has been a false step? Every description a false description? My God…’ the blind man’s voice rose, with his beautiful, cultured ’cross-river accent…‘my God, where am I? Where have you led me? What is this place?’ And he looked around with the yellow diseased sockets of his eyes but with all his will he could not force them to show him how deeply he had been deceived. ‘My God, my God, you have lied to me, every word has been a lie. How did you think you could get away with it?’ Hands released the catches of the webbing harness; the head fell with a cry onto the mud. Free, the blind man stumbled for a way out of the labyrinth of yards and alleys, arms outstretched.

And they were there. As they had always been, from the moment they left the small hotel that morning, shadowing every step up the long sloping cobbled road, past the restaurants and cafés and the abandoned houses and through the thorns into the camp. Only now they made themselves visible, for this was their place. The Ghost Boys. Some naked but for leather pouches, some tattooed, some dressed in straps and stretch fabric and hieroglyphed with Jantic symbols: all masked in jutting, terrifying, slashing pneuma masks. The Ghost Boys. From their crevices and doorways, out of the cracks and slits of camp culture, they swarmed down on the blind man. Hands seized his outstretched arms. Hands lifted the flailing, staring man. Hands clamped firm around him, stifling his cries. Hands carried him away. The head shouted. The head, half-stogged in the red mud, cried out no no leave him leave him alone he is harmless he is blind can you not see?

The hands carried him away. And the radios blared blared blared.

‘Old Grandfather, you got to realise, in this place, we are law.’

Hands wiped the red mud from the head’s eyes. Hands set him in his pot, tucked the wiggling rooticles neatly under.

‘Old Grandfather, you are a damn mess. I will take you back to my place. We will sort things out better there.’

‘The hell with you, you little bastard thug. Piss on you. Shit on you.’

‘Grandfather, I am shocked. What kind of example is that to set your only grandson?’

Where is it that I said that those who live long and close to idealism take on a sunlit, numinous aspect? I tell you now that the opposite is also true: that those who look too long and too lovingly at anger and bitterness take on its aspect, they become bleached and twisted like weathered roots, and hard like roots, tenacious, unyielding. The tree may be dead, white weathered wood, but the roots grip on. You have seen it, we have all seen it, in the face of the woman who for years has feasted on nothing but thoughts of revenge, in the face of the man who for years has given every spare moment to contemplating acts of infidelity against his wife, in the face of the child who for years has felt the lash of humiliation and the scorn of his peers: the twist of the root. It looks like many things. A light in the eye. A shadow in the memory. An unguarded look. A gnawed meagreness of frame. A tilt of the cheekbones. The bitter root.

As Hradu lifted the head, to carry it away through the labyrinth that he ruled, his Grandfather was able to study him closely, and was afraid. There are few creatures more terrifying than the child old before its time. The mind and shrewdness of a man; a man’s fears and responsibilities poured over the body and morality of a boy. Those many months while Unchunkolo had sailed the river of history had aged Hradu, but not enough to explain the brutal blankness of his face, or excuse the bioplastic dart-thrower in the skin holster strapped to his thigh.

He was dressed in a stretch-fabric battle suit cut off at mid-calf and shoulders. The chameleon camouflage systems had either failed or been switched off in mid-fade; swathes of purple and lilac spirals clashed with bold primary speckling and pure, wet-sheen black. Heavy boots, tops folded down. Latest fashion Imperial sports socks with all the correct corporate logos. Hair scraped back and tightly bound up in a leather trefoil knot. He did not look like a Ghost Boy any more. He looked like a Warrior of Destiny. He looked like Power. He looked like Law.

And, over the incessant blaring of radio and the cries of children, did the head hear, could it be certain? a single shot?

‘My friend. My blind man. What has happened to him? Is he all right?’

‘I should think,’ said Hradu in that measured, mock-lazy way that dangerous people affect, ‘that he is probably dead. In fact, almost certainly dead. I am sorry he was your friend. But we have a policy and we must keep it. Where would we be if we did not stick to our principles?’

‘And the principle is kill anyone who has a ’cross-river accent?’ shouted the head, crazy with guilt and anger and grief and confusion.

‘By and large,’ said Hradu, still slow, still half-lazy, pretending to look at something off to one side, as these dangerous people will. ‘We have to make examples. It is the way it is. We have a—’

‘I know,’ shouted the head. ‘God damn you you bastard, I know, I know, a policy. A principle.’

And with the smallest, briefest click! the plastic dart gun was out of its holster, muzzle pressing the head’s right eye.

‘So help me, I will send you back to the Dreaming and this time there will be no coming back,’ said Hradu. ‘Understand this. We are the power in the camps. Not the local councils. Not the government, not the relief agencies or the Bureau of Resettlement. Not the army, not the police. We are the power. What is done is done by our permit. We are the Law. Us. Me.

‘Unit commander now, Grandfather. Active Service Unit. Fighting the good fight. Taking it to the ancient enemy.’

‘There is no fight,’ said the head. ‘Not now. The fight is over. Over a long time.’

‘Mistake,’ said Hradu and his voice was a keen, fine whisper, like the edge of a blade. ‘Mistake, Grandfather of mine. Be pleased. Be proud. Youngest Active Service Unit commander this sector of the front.’

‘Is that what you call it, the front?’ said the head, but it saw the thinning of Hradu’s lips into the keen, sharp knife-edge again. ‘You look like a teenage fetishist’s boywhore,’ it said instead, lashing out in its anger and guilt and frustration. The briefest, smallest click! The needier was back next to Hradu’s lilac and purple thigh. Hradu howled with laughter but the head was afraid for it was not good laughter, but the dark laughter that goes howling out across the world until it finds something it can flay.

‘Manners, Grandfather. You are in company here, remember your manners.’

‘Mathembe,’ said the head. ‘You have seen Mathembe? You know where she is?’

‘I have seen Mathembe. I know where she is. In fact, I shall take you to her. Come.’ Which was needless, but the sort of thing people say who are Power, and Law.

She lay on an inflatable mattress in the back of a plastic bivouac so like the nest among the rapid-transit lines in the Imperial capital that it was too sick for even a divine joke. The constellation of biolights lit the low, wind-rattled room. Cheap cereal-packet holograms of the Ykondé Saints kept watch. She was naked but for vest top, panties and socks. Her skin had the papery dryness, the dusty nap under the fingers of fever. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, too fast, too shallow. A plastic airway tube held her mouth open. Her eyes were rolled up into her head.

Plastic cable grips bound hands and feet to metal stakes driven into the pounded earth floor of the shack. Wrists and ankles were raw bloody; as her Grandfather watched, she twisted and tugged at her bonds, worried a few more drops of blood from the wounds.

‘They pumped her so full of the stuff I was not certain she would ever come down.’ Hradu knelt on the pounded earth floor by his sister’s side. ‘She screamed and screamed when I brought her back. Three days and nights, she screamed. If we had not tied her, she would have torn herself apart with her own fingers.’

‘What did they put into her?’

‘Hallucinogenics,’ said Hradu, an angel by biolight. ‘Neurochemical boosters.’

‘How?’ asked the head. And then, ‘Who?’ And then, ‘Why?’

Then Hradu told his Grandfather what he knew of Mathembe’s story, but it was not all the story, for he did not know all the story, and anyway it was not his to tell.

Brothers are like that.

She was there again, at the table beneath the wall shrine, the dark-haired, snub-nosed girl who would have been as like her as her reflection in the mirror but for the unnatural pallor of her skin. She had been there, at that table in the Saint M’zan Bé Café (the saint to which the wall shrine beneath which she sat was dedicated), every day when Mathembe came in for her small cheap lunch and plastic can of wine. And every day she had smiled and raised her glass to Mathembe across the intervening tables, and every day would have greeted her but that Mathembe hurried out before any words that might be spoken were spoken, out and up that sloping, dirty road into the camps again.

Hurry was her ally. Busy-ness her friend. The search was everything, for if it faltered for even a moment she would have been crushed by the realisation of her immense isolation. For she was alone. And aloneness frightened her. For aloneness must never be confused with solitude. The solitude Mathembe had enjoyed as a child had been discretionary, there had always been people for those times when she wanted the backdrop of her life peopled. Here in Kilimambasa were faces. The faces of the hotel proprietors. The faces of the café owners, the faces of the Free State resettlement officials, the faces of the camps. Those faces more than any others, whose hardness was a confession of their utter vulnerability, whose constant watching, looking, watching, continuous alertness concealed a terminal boredom, those faces that pursed lips, that shook heads, that knew nothing when she went to them in her expensive silver jacket asking HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE, that would not have spoken had they even known (which they must have, at least one of the faces) because the camps were the camps.

And the face at the café table beneath the shrine to M’zan Bé, that was as like her own as her reflection in a mirror.

Mathembe went to the M’zan Bé because it was her last link with her Grandfather. The owner’s wife—kindly, fat but content—had apologised and apologised and apologised, she had not known, if she had known she would never, but it had made such a din, such a terrible racket, harassing the customers had they seen its granddaughter? You, she presumed, being the granddaughter. But the ’cross-river trader had offered such good money. Hard money. No, it was not likely he would be back, possibly never, not since the Warriors of Destiny began their campaign of killing Imperial citizens found on their side of the river to try and force the Emperor to relinquish God’s Country. I cannot see how they figure that she had said. He is gone, dear. I think you had better face up to it. That will be fifteen enns, dear. And the can of wine too; that is twenty-three.

Sunk in guilt. Guilt like an ever-rolling river, bears all our crimes away. God, where is he? somewhere across that rolling river; where are they? at the end of that row of tents that I was too tired to reach today, joining the end of that line as I left the head of it, passing out as I pass in, going down as I go up, always that moment too late, too early. They could be anywhere, anywhere along this straggling borderland, how can you ever hope to find them. He was right. Find your own life, lead your own life. Enough—more than enough—to be responsible for yourself alone.

In that moment, she would have walked away from them all, but for the needle, the needle of guilt that kept her hands pinned to that table in the M’zan Bé Café in Kilimambasa town.

‘No. I do not.’

She looked up. Her.

‘Know these people. But I like the jacket. That is a great jacket. I have been admiring it for some time.’

Preludes: ‘Those are Pee Jay shades, aren’t they? You must be off the boats; what with the economic war, boatpeople are the only ones can get shades like that.’

Again: ‘I see you a lot in here. You come in every day. Me, I come in every day too.’

Again: ‘You know, when I first saw you in here I was amazed, it was like I was seeing my reflection in a mirror. We could be sisters.’

Silence.

‘Oh well, I am sorry. Sorry to have embarrassed you. Just forget I ever spoke. I know, I should not be so forward with total strangers. I will just go back to my little table and die.’

A hand, outstretched. Stay. A chair pushed out: sit.

‘What is your name? Me, I am Matinde.’

A card, from one of the many pockets of the voluminous jacket.

MYNAME IS MATHEMBE FILELI.

‘Mathembe, Matinde, that is incredible, unbelievable, and us looking so alike and everything. The saints must have brought us together, what do they call it? a urucarai, where people who do not know each other get brought together by God to achieve some special purpose. Can you not talk, is that the problem? Oh shit I am sorry, I never realised. Well, that is all right, people say that I talk enough for two anyway. Something more to drink?’

Mathembe shook her head, pointed through the walls with their pin-up calendars of big-breasted women and naked men with wet hair, up the sloping street.

‘There? What do you want to go up there for? How do you like me, eh? Not even known you five seconds and already I am kicking the shit out of you. What a bitch I am.’

Against herself, against all that was right and decent and holy, Mathembe smiled.

‘You are mighty mighty pretty when you smile, Mathembe Fileli. Family, is that who you are looking for? I will bet you a month of lunches all you have got so far is folk sitting on their dumb asses looking at you like you are some kind of walking turd, no?’

Yes.

‘You are new here. You do not know the language, the signs, the moves. There is asking, and there is asking. You know what I mean? Now, if you go up with Matinde, you will get answers. You got a smartcard? Come on come on, show Matinde. I am not going to steal it on you. Much on it? That should be enough. You got to lubricate, you know what I mean? Like sex, you got to lubricate. Come on. I will show you.’

Matinde had defined their relationship quite unconsciously within the first five seconds. We could be sisters. As garrulous, all-knowing, loud, brash Matinde went about the camps greeting and hailing and helloing and playing fast and loose with Mathembe’s smartcard, Mathembe realised that here was the figure that was missing from her childhood, that she had grown up knowing she wanted but had never been able to articulate her loss. A sister. Someone to cry and fight and hope and pray and dream and drink and moan and rejoice with. Matinde offered sisterhood, Mathembe received it like bread on a winter journey. They swapped clothes; Matinde cute and gamine in Mathembe’s street wear, Mathembe dizzy and lovely in Matinde’s expensive skins and silks.

Between sisters, a shrug can mean where did you get these from?

‘Secret benefactors. I prostitute myself for big fat northern Proclaimers smuggled south across the border to enjoy the forbidden flesh of Confessor girls.’

And, when Mathembe showed Matinde the small, cheap card-slot sleep-pod hotel tucked behind the container port where she slept in an eight-foot cylinder of biotecture: ‘Okay, so it is nice to be surrounded by big smelly longshoremen with fantastic asses, but, Mathembe, I think you should move in with me. I got an apartment back of the New Sirikwa Hotel on Twelfth and Third Parallel. Too big for little Matinde, way too big. How much is that shit-pod, eight, ten, twelve enns a night? Twelve enns; that could go a long way to lubricate memories up behind the thorns, Mathembe.’

Between sisters, a cock of the eyebrows asks: And how does a punk like you afford an apartment at the back of the New Sirikwa Hotel?

‘Friends and influences, Mathembe. I know a lot of nice people. I think it would be good for you to meet them too.’

She moved in that night, into the three rooms at the back of the New Sirikwa Hotel. She had never seen such luxury. There was a spa unit in the bathroom. A spa unit.

‘You stay in that thing much longer there will be nothing left but one mighty big bathring.’

Between sisters, an orgy of sybaritic splashing can be all the answer that is necessary. Mathembe slept that night on a bed of soft plastic flesh, thickly furred, of such yielding comfort that she felt herself sinking into it as if into a deep womb-dream of secret oils and musky, thumping placentas.

The edge of the world was an hour beneath the moon when Matinde opened the bedroom door. She stood a minute, five minutes, ten minutes listening to the rhythm of the breathing, being sure, being sure. Light as a dream, she crossed to the big flesh bed where Mathembe Fileli lay uglily sprawled like something dropped from heaven and broken upon the earth, face screwed up in the soft fur, breathing noisily through her open mouth.

‘Pretty pretty kid,’ Matinde whispered. She knelt by the bed. Watching. Listening. Taking the pulse of the night. The planets turned in space, Saint-ships crossed the universe, and she sat, watching, listening. Mathembe turned. Mathembe heaved in her sleep. Mathembe muttered and growled deep down in the back of her brain. Her eyes rolled into dream-sleep.

Carefully carefully, Matinde rolled up her sleeves. Carefully, carefully, she tore at her right thumb-nail. An almond of fleshtone plastic flipped into the dark and was lost.

‘Shit.’

Metallised plastic glinted in the light from the street. The second thumbnail came more readily. Beneath: twin blades, glittering. Carefully, carefully, slowly, she cut around each wrist. She took the edge of flesh in her right hand, gritted her teeth, and in one swift movement, stripped off the skin. She worried the skin of her right wrist free with her teeth: with a small cry and sudden tears of pain, peeled it away.

Mathembe stirred.

Matinde froze, the obscene glove of skin in her teeth.

The eyes resumed their rapid movements.

Matinde brought her hands up into the winter moonlight that streamed through the window of the New Sirikwa Hotel. Black plastic fingers flexed, muscled and sinewed with synthetic flesh, glittering with hard Imperial machine technology. Needles slid from housings in the third fingers, IV tubes from the little fingers; first and second fingers terminated in brainplant interfacers. In the hollow metal wrists, bulbs and sacs of chemicals pulsed.

‘Dream on Mathembe Fileli. Dream well, dream good for Matinde. God, but you are too good a kid for this.’

The black artificial hands cradled Mathembe’s head. She hardly started at all as the needlefingers pierced her throat.

‘Shh. Shh. Just a little something to keep you out of it while Matinde does her work. Hush child, hush…’

Threadlike fibres grew from the tips of Matinde’s first and second fingers, effortlessly, painlessly penetrated the skin behind Mathembe’s ears, slipped under the edge of the skull into the brain. Matinde breathed heavily, closed her eyes.

‘Come on Mathembe, come on Mathembe, come on Mathembe, let me see what you got for sister Matinde.’

Airborne, flying, borne up by the spirit of blue blue heaven tumbling naked and rejoicing through millions of cubic kilometres of air falling free free-falling falling for ever until you might shatter yourself to atoms with the velocity of your fall yet with one thought, with one snap of the gossamer wings folded close to your body, with one moment’s thought to fan them and catch the air in them, you can soar, you can climb for ever through this limitless boundless forever blue you are master of gravity, conqueror of space and time, relativistic angel approaching closer closer ever closer to perfect velocity at which every point in the universe lies next to every other point and time and space are abolished faster faster what joy what pleasure to delight in your own silver flashing brilliance, your own beauty and skill there! flash yellow gold to your blue silver, him, he is there, stroking towards you on wings that blow the wind between the stars, him! the word is a scream of pleasure angelic love within the blue blue vault of heaven on the wing within the enfolding of each other’s wings falling at terminal velocity through the infinite blue blue: him!

Matinde withdrew her neural probes. The roots and fibres disengaged from Mathembe’s brain, molecule by molecule diffused out of her skin into Matinde’s fingers. A mental command: a recording slug oozed from her right wrist. Matinde tossed the gravid thing in the air, caught it playfully.

‘Jeez kid, I thought you would be good, but not this good. They are going to love this, Mathembe Fileli. You are going to make Matinde a rich girl.’

She went to the window. Pale dawnlight, cold and drear. While she looked out at the early shift coming and going on the long sloping street, liquid oozed from the artificial pores to cover her hands. Within minutes it had hardened into skin. Tints and hues flowed across the new hands as the synthetic flesh sought to match Matinde’s melanin. The discarded skins—limp, translucent, like the memory of some nocturnal reptile—the false nails—five minutes’ search for the one that got away—and the recorder slug went into her belt pouch.

Mathembe’s chest rose and fell in deep sleep.

‘Soon, sister. Soon.’

And then there came the lunchtime in the M’zan Bé Café when Mathembe looked ruefully at her smartcard, which, between sisters, between anyone, means only one thing: out, broke, bust, bombed, poor. Matinde paid the small bill with loose change.

‘Jeez Mathembe, what are you going to do now?’

Soon, sister, soon.

And then there came the time with the big winter rains streaming down the windows of the apartment at the back of the New Sirikwa Hotel when Mathembe had paced up and down all morning and had not been able to settle or concentrate or set her spirit at peace with anything which between sisters, between anyone, is the prelude to asking, Can you lend me money?

‘Jeez Mathembe, you know if I had money, I would, as much as you wanted, but it is like this, I have a lot of things, but I do not have any actual wealth. You understand? The folk who pay me, they pay me in things, not money. So I cannot lend you anything, because I have nothing to lend. Honest. Not a wooden enn.’

Soon, sister, soon.

And after that, the time when Mathembe went to the window with the big winter rain slanting down outside and pointed at the rainsoaked, streaming organicals and shiftworkers coming and going up the long sloping street which, between sisters, means I will get a job, I will make me some money with my hands.

‘Jeez Mathembe, you have been up there, you know what it is like, how many people there are going for every job. What chance do you think you have? All a kid like you would get is a half-year renewable contract for organical work as a ditch-digger or household cleaner or something like.’

Soon, sister, soon.

Matinde moistened her lips. The sound was very loud in the rain-lashed room.

‘There is a way to make money. Good money. Big money. Something you can sell.’

A twist of the spine, a hitch of the hip.

‘No. Not that. Nothing like that at all.’ She crossed the room that was filled with rain-shadows to gently touch Mathembe’s forehead. ‘Something in here. Your dreams. There is good money, big money for dreams.’ She swallowed; again, the sound was hugely loud in the room. ‘I know these men. Call them dealers in dreams. There are people out there who will pay a lot of money to taste someone else’s dreams. Rich people, bored people, people who are too afraid of life to live it, people whose own dreams have died and need the dreams of others. No one can live without dreams. You can give them those dreams. These men, these dealers, they can record your dreams onto special brain-plants and hire them out for a lot of money.’

Matinde saw that she had made a monstrous mistake of judgement. Mathembe would never be convinced. She had wanted to be gentle but the shadow of mistrust was abroad in the room and was growing with every word she spoke. What are you who are you why are you? She went to her, stood behind her, put her hands on her shoulders, her neck.

‘It will be all right. Trust me.’

But she felt the muscles beneath her fingers saying trust you? I do not even know who you are.

Now, sister, now.

Matinde winced as the needle flicked through the skin of her fingertip into Mathembe’s neck.

The pain of the needle was nothing to the pain of the betrayal, but it was only an instant, a flicker, nothing more for then the door to the room at the back of the New Sirikwa Hotel opened and the end of the world came through. Yes, definitely, the end of the world, in fire and glory, as she had read in her childhood religious stories. The hotel corridor was caught in mid-transubstantiation, dusty wall hangings and rugs worn nude from light-years of feet were exploding in coils and chaotic spirals of life, bursting ferns and vines and creepers from their woven patterns: tell me it is not the end of the world when the rugs and wall hangings come to life? No, it must be the end of the world, for here come the Ahleles themselves, huge as Saint-ships fallen into the sea sixty kilometres tall and sixty kilometres round—fat balls of blubber these Ahleles—two of them, coming into the room and in their wake the walls grew flowers and fruit dripped from the ceiling and the glo-globes burst in puffball detonations of sweet-scented pollen and tiny plastic gifts for all the family and she danced at the end of the world, she spun and wheeled at the end of the world, she giggled and grinned at the end of the world for the Ahleles were reaching for her with hands made out of articulated meat-sticks and their teeth that smiled back at her were white kernels of rice and the hairs on their heads which suddenly she could see in sub-microscopic detail were coils of genetic material it was the end of the world they had come to take her to heaven she leapt for their reaching sustaining uplifting arms but somehow she missed and was falling falling off the edge of the world past escape velocity and the webs of gravity into blackness into space into the time—space-freeness of ur-space where huge transtellar vessels quested…

The ape patted the girl on the ass as he slung her over his shoulder. Ape number two grinned.

‘You be good to her, you hear,’ said Matinde, angry at her own capacity for faithlessness. ‘She is a nice kid. A good kid. I hear you do those things with her, I will cut your dicks off. God, I hate my job.’

Which made the apes laugh all the more as they carried Mathembe into the corridor with its ragged rugs and dust-faded wall hangings depicting the twelve religious virtues.

Even in the darkest days of the War of Independence, the restaurant on the river wharf had defied gunboats, gunbattles, sieges, shelling and starvation and fed its patrons on pride and prayer-dog grilled over tubs of burning house-unit. Now in these days of renewed grandeur, prayer-dog à la maison was the linchpin of the menu. The upper room with its cool view of the river bend, its salting of islands and the twice-daily enthusiastic spume of the hydrofoil was Kilimambasa’s closest approach to sophistication.

‘They blew away two Imperial tourists just last week,’ Matinde said idly waving her empty cocktail glass in the direction of the wine waiter. ‘Between the rice course and the soup. Just walked in and opened up with geneguns. Still have not managed to disentangle the remains from the back wall.’

He was a small man, small-featured, with a small, balding head, and a small smile.

‘That was some rat-hole diner up on Fifteenth Street. The price you pay for not booking ahead. I read the papers you know. Anyway, they would not let them past the door here. Not without long trousers on.’

‘Piss on you. I want another one of these.’

‘You have had quite enough of “these”, whatever ghastly concoction they happen to be.’

‘I like them and I want another one. Seriously Dhav, the bloody Warriors are dangerous. They do not care who they blow away in the name of a united land.’

‘Your concern heartens me, but rest assured Matinde, neither I nor any of my colleagues are inclined towards unnecessary risks. We and the Warriors of Destiny, we understand each other; ultimately, we are all on the same side. Or had you not heard that they have started running protection in the border towns?’ A flex and snap of fingers achieved what Matinde’s waving of her empty, print-smeared glass could not. ‘Another of these for my friend, and I will have some herb tea, please. Really, it is remarkable how this place has kept going through the…ah, difficulties.’

With a flick of his small hand, the small man sent a small plastic cylinder rolling across the table.

‘Was it good then?’

He tapped his small fingers together, smiled. Smally.

‘It was good. You have more from this girl, what do you call her?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It seems to, to you.’

‘Mathembe Fileli.’

The concoction in the tall glass and the small, precise pot of herb tea arrived on the table. The waiter moved the cylinder containing the dream-ware to one side as he poured a steaming, aromatic jet.

‘Mathembe Fileli. Go deeper,’ said the small man. He lifted the tiny delicate bowl, breathed in the aroma. ‘Exquisite. Probe deeper. I feel that what we have seen so far is just the tip, the edge, the merest lift of the hem. Go deeper. A very particular kind of client pays a very particular kind of money for emotional anguish of this finesse. People are getting bored with steaming sex and violence. Emotional pain is what is exciting them now. And emotional pain, of a very high order, is what this Mathembe Fileli has. Consider it a form of extraction, Matinde. Psychic strip-mining. I ought to congratulate you on this one, you know, but it goes so to your head.’ Small, delicate sips of scalding tea. ‘Tell me, what was it about this one?’

‘She cannot speak.’

‘I thought speech was an inherited trait with you people, like left- and right-handedness and the way you can interact with genetic material.’

‘Not always.’

‘Sullen sullen little Matinde. I do believe you have the hots for this one.’ The small, neat hand darted forward, like a little bird, seized Matinde’s jaw. The small man smiled. ‘Matinde, just because I smile and banter and enjoy a cup of tea, a glass of wine, a pleasant meal in convivial surroundings, do not imagine that you can be insolent or familiar with me. You are pretty and witty but you are nothing, Matinde. Nothing. Just free-floating cells in a flesh nation, flesh we can shape, and control, and manipulate as the spirit moves us. Do you have that? Good. Now, drink your silly little drink and we will think no more of it.’

Whenever she went into the room now it seemed to be raining. Big winter rain, streaming down the windows. Big winter rain, casting rippling shadows on the dreamers on the beds; the fat one who dreamed of roaring, steaming sex, the thin one who dreamed of angry slashing violence, the big one curled up into a foetus full of the dreams of childhood, the one who mumbled constantly in her sleep and dreaming of flying and falling and running and being hunted by something vast and devouring and implacable that she could never see and never gave up the chase. Dreaming in the rain—light, arms stuck full of drip-feed needles, heads cradled in pulsing haloes of organicals. Rainshadows on their skins—as she passed, Matinde touched them with her trailing, talented hands. They were bare now, skinned, those hands the small man had sold her. No need to pretend now. The clicking black hands tucked a coil of hair, stroked a hand.

‘Some day, Mathembe.’ Rainshadows on her face as she knelt beside the mattress. ‘After we get money and I get my hands back. Ssh. Ssh. There sister. Something to make you dream good.’ Needlefinger flicked out, a slim steel erection. Fluid dripped from the tip. One more raindrop. She did not even cry out any more when Mr Needlefinger came to call. ‘Got to go deep, Mathembe. Sorry, but that is how they want it and what they want you have to get for them.’ She watched the rain raining down on all her hopes and tears and frowns. ‘Lucky lucky kid, dreaming your life away,’ she said, but it was only because of the rain, raining down on everything. ‘Some day I will buy myself a winter coat,’ she said as she sent her tendril fingers coiling through Mathembe’s skin up under the edge of her skull, past her dreams, into her memories. ‘I will save up for it, and buy it with my own money, and it will be all mine. So, what have you for me today?’

The rain, of course, the rain, arguing in the rain with a disembodied head in a cracked pot full of organicals outside the M’zan Bé Café.

Matinde whistled with her tongue through pursed lips as a beggar or a waiter will at an insulting tip. Deeper. Deeper.

Sex an aromatic musk, an itch in the atmosphere in the warm foetal enfolding of leaves and bracts, the close presence of an ugly, smiling boy.

‘Nice, sister, but Diyamé over there does it better. Pain Mathembe. Hurt me. I want to feel tears.’ Deeper deeper.

A click, and a splash. A headmaster’s monomolecular wire, a body rolled into the river, turned over by the current, carried hunched, headless, down to the Elder Sea. A necklace of severed heads draped around the blunt prows of riverboat barges, mouths open, rooticles fanning the water. Cries of children, the silence of mothers. The anger of the men emasculated by history, stronger, more sickening than any stench of shit and pus and hunger.

Matinde hissed through her teeth as the eidetic images welled up in her brain. Molecule by molecule the neural linkages infiltrated Mathembe’s spirit.

Fire. One hemisphere of the world ablaze. River water full of reflected flames. The cries of dying buildings. Helicopters chattering like old women over a funeral pyre. Running. Running. And the flames, running her, pacing her, racing her, leaping ahead of her, hurdling entire streets, crossing wide boulevards in a single bound, sprinting along the rooftops.

Deeper. Deeper.

A snow of ash falling on upturned faces. A parade of bones and stones and rags and pieces of broken helmet. A blond man in black screaming in another tongue. A black behemoth capsized against a gently plashing fountain. A blow and an embrace and a cracked mask. Gods fighting in the street, no better than Ghost-Boy hellions.

‘Nice sister, but not bloody enough. It has to hurt with the kind of hurt that almost destroys you, that burns you down to the roots and stubble, that strips the land so bare that it is years before anything will grow there again.’

A table overturned, covered in black hieroglyphs, falling spice jars and tea canisters suspended in mid-air, a man with hair falling into his eyes and big useless hands, beside him, a beautiful beautiful woman.

‘Who is this, Mathembe? Come on kid, go after him. Show me more.’

The blind soft tendrils twined.

‘Come on, Mathembe, show me the ones who hurt you, show me the ones that left you bloody and maimed. Show me heartache, show me heartbreak.’

Faces and memories, fluttering through her mind like prayer tickets on a wand. The image of a man standing on a starlit riverside corniche, hands behind head. Slur of drums, sinuous twist of guitars. A moment of perfection, the moment she first knew herself to be in love. Closing step by cautious step, Matinde willed down her emotional defences. After him, she whispered in the spaces of Mathembe’s skull.

The tiered bowl of a sports stadium. The central oval filled with trees. Searching, running, up and down, up and down; Matinde’s defence systems battled with powerful waves of dread and anticipation. Up and down, up and down; then, his shadow against the sunlight speckling through the leaves.

Back. Inward.

The memories soared away from the desecrated ballpark, high over forests and hills, alighted upon the edge of an escarpment that sheered away towards the rooftops of a neat provincial town. Why were the men on one side of the road and the women and young on the other? Why were the soldiers pushing them apart, pushing the men into the backs of the black troop carriers? Why was a small woman running recklessly down the hill towards the roof gardens of the neat provincial town? Why was the soldier kneeling, and what was he shouting?

Was that the hammering of her own heart, or Mathembe’s? She could not remember when last she had taken a breath. One by one she released her emotional buffers to taste the memory.

Mathembe, who is this?

Guilt: it struck Matinde like a drowning wave, overwhelmed her defences like a fist smashing her shattering her sending her spinning away through a kaleidoscope of memories. Burning trux running wild in the street. Rainy-day mornings in the warmth and shelter of a conservatory. Trees in the ballpark, row upon row upon row. A smiling man at some forest picnic lifting his plastic wine bottle in salutation to a comrade. Stinking, fear-filled darkness. Being carried on a man’s strong shoulders along forest paths as evening fell and a million biolights began to twinkle. A man standing over her bed, looking down, a voice—not his—do you think she will ever speak? the shake of his head. Thirty-seven trees standing in a row by a long fire-blackened wall. Thirty-seven trees. Thirty-seven trees. Thirty-seven trees.

Guilt. It roared, it tore at Matinde, she fought to disengage but her emotional defences were in tatters. She cried out in pain, tore her interfacers free from Mathembe’s skull. Thick yellow ichor trickled from the snapped stumps down her hands. The hurt of them was nothing to the hurt of the girl’s crushing guilt.

‘Jeez, Mathembe. Why do you do it to yourself?’ She winced, clenching and unclenching her torn hands. ‘I would absolve you, but I know these men who can use guilt like that. Sorry to have to do this. Maybe if I absolve you, would you absolve me?’ On her left hand, her Proclaimer hand, the other needlefinger caught the light, a milky tear at its tip. ‘Dream good, sister. Maybe if you dream good enough you will be able to forgive yourself.’ But she did not even believe it herself as the needle of dream-stuff slid in.

The rain rained on. In her plastic rain sheet Matinde went out to the shops and out with her belt-pouch of brainplants to the restaurant by the harbour where the small man with the big connections gave her some things. But mostly, she went out to the M’zan Bé Café, where she sat and sat and sat watching the winter rains from her table beneath the wall shrine and smoking the imported Imperial joints the small man gave her because she amused him. The apes who sat all day in the lobby of the New Sirikwa Hotel playing fili and grinning and laughing at the deejays on the radio passed comment upon her going out.

‘You away again?’

‘The rains, you know? All that rain, that damn rain, it gets to me, you know?’

The apes shrugged. They liked the rain. But then there was nothing in the room on the third floor for them to hide from in the furthest corner of the M’zan Bé Café. She could not bear to go into that room now. Even the proprietor had been heard to complain (decorously, if-you-please-ly, of course) about the noise from that room.

‘What you doing to that girl?’ the apes asked, full of prurient notions, and then wondered what they had said when they saw tears in Matinde’s eyes. When she did go into the room to administer the daily hallucinogen shots, change the drip-feeds, empty the bags and collect the brainplants from her stable of dreamers, she found she had to stand in the open door for some minutes, clever expensive hands clenched into black fists, pleading, ‘Please, please please stop it, just stop it, I am sorry, will you please stop crying.’ Once, she had taken a grass pillow in her clever little hands and placed it over the crying girl’s face. She had not known she was pressing down, pressing down, pressing down until the sobbing stopped and in the silence she saw what she was doing and terrified by her own capabilities, she had fled to her holy corner of the café. Even there, in the midnight hour as the proprietor went around prodding the lazy chairs to fold themselves away and the rainclouds hurtled across the face of the moon, she could hear the crying. It resonated through her trembling hands, along her nerve fibres, into the spirit of her. Those parts of herself she had left inside Mathembe Fileli were a conduit of the emotional energy she had awakened with Mr Needlefinger and his clever little psychotropic drugs. By day as she went on her small businesses about Kilimambasa, but especially at night in her comfortable apartment with the rain streaming down the windows, she was flayed by intolerable guilt.

‘The thing is, it is such an unprofitable emotion,’ said the small man sipping his herb tea at his table with its view of fishing boats bobbing on the hydrofoil wake. ‘In an operative, that is. As a merchantable commodity, very profitable indeed. Good, honest guilt is flavour of the season in the capital. It seems to provide them with some kind of expiation in the privacy of their dreams. Who can say?’ A small shrug: so. ‘No, I think we will have to press ahead with this one. Market trends come and go, we must maximise our profit while she is still marketable.’

He looked towards the plastic box on the table between them, the red box with the bioware stickers on it.

‘No, I really do not think we can accommodate you in this respect either, Matinde. You are much too valuable to us as you are.’ He flipped the lid shut on the pair of neatly amputated hands that rested there in a bath of nutrient gel.

When she saw him in the M’zan Bé Café that time, she knew she knew him but she did not know from where she knew him. She was careful not to let him see her staring, but not careful enough for he came over to her table with the confidence and charm a weapon in a thigh holster bestows, full of smiles and good manners (for the armed, as a rule, can afford to be mannerly).

Would she mind if he joined her?

Not at all. For one, as a rule, must be mannerly in return, to the armed.

Would she care to join him in a glass of wine?

That was most kind of him.

Was it not terrible weather they were having?

Terrible indeed. (Thinking those endless ziggurat-like thoughts about her thinking what he was thinking about what she was thinking about what he was thinking: yes, he did look kind of cute in his dazzle-coloured combats; street cute, tough, but vulnerable, and yes, there was a certain daring panache in sauntering in here with his buddies armed and dangerous in full view of the town authorities—do you see anyone trying to stop us?—but it was not for those reasons she was staring at him but she knew he did not know that.)

Not a great vintage. But then nothing has been the same since the war, has it?

No, she had tasted better. No, things had not been the same since Liberation.

Did she come here often?

Yes. Every day. (All the while: I know him, I know him, I know him.)

Might she be here tomorrow?

She was here most days at this time.

Would she do him the especial honour of having luncheon with him tomorrow?

(Unable to refuse anyone, no matter how nicely mannered, with a gun): Yes, she would be delighted.

Chatted up and dated by a fifteen-year-old. She was disgusted with herself. But she knew him. She knew him.

And suddenly by one of those feats of mental gymnastics by which you know how you know what you know when you know you know, she knew how she knew him.

The boy with the bad friends.

The boy sitting by the crazily canted fountain with a cracked mask in his hands.

The boy who lolled around on street corners until history came looking for him one night.

The boy bent double beneath the burden of shame humiliated on the streets of Ol Tok.

The boy who had had enough of words, who would fight his own battle his own way, work out his own salvation and damnation.

The boy on the expensive ’cross-river silver jacket. HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE?

Only in the night was the room quiet, though the rain streamed, still, down the windows and broke the lights from the street into riverine deltas and channels. Only in the night could she bear to enter the room, for in the night they slept, naked of dreams. She knelt by the mattress where Mathembe lay plugged into banks of organicals that fed her and scrubbed her blood and sucked away her shit and piss and opened up the dark lands of her mind to let an unceasing stream of unclean dreams come screaming forth and siphoned those dreams out of her head and onto brainplant recording units.

‘Sister.’

In a house down the street lovers argued to the sound of the night radio. It was the hour when every song sounds painful and good. She took Mathembe’s head in her hands, shook it from side to side while she thought about tears.

‘Sister. I am sorry. Oh, I am sorry. Went too deep. Left too much of myself in you, got too much of yourself into me. Guilt? You know, I think now I understand what I did to you. I am sorry. It is not a big enough word but it is the only word there is. A girl has to make a living? Sure. But there are livings and livings.’ She looked up, startled, suspicious. Some night noise on the edge of her domain. Since she had decided, every noise was suspicious. ‘You see, I cannot let them see it was me that organised it. They are quick to anger and slow to forgive, and they have power. And they have me. So,’ she addressed other sleepers, ‘please forgive me, but it is better that one be saved and the rest damned than all be damned together. If it is any consolation, I number myself among the damned.’

Then she went to her apartment and searched through her wardrobes of clothes the small man had bought her and found the very best, most expensive, most sexy outfit. She laid it on the bed and laid herself beside it and in the morning she put it on and went to have luncheon with Hradu Fileli.

Twelve thousand enns. That was how much the small man had paid the flesh engineers in Kuwera to build him a couple of bodyguards. Twelve thousand apiece. And they never even got out of their seats when the Third Kilimambasa Prefecture Active Service Unit came through the doors and windows of the New Sirikwa Hotel. Their superfast reflexes were at least thirty centimetres from the concealed holsters where they kept their appallingly powerful state-of-the-art handguns when the emission heads of two neural scramblers (apiece) were levelled at their pineal glands.

The only bad deal the small man ever made.

Bili Bi the proprietor, finger suspended, poised above the panic button, reckoned none of them could be a day over sixteen. Yet their leader, who looked youngest of all, came sweeping in off the street at the head of a small phalanx of armed teenagers and up the stairs with a chillingly adult efficiency. As if children, in their game-playing, had somehow distilled and concentrated the essence of adulthood in a grotesque parody.

‘My sister, where is she?’ Matinde had the needles retracted, the tubes pulled, the interfacers disconnected. At a flick of the finger, two Warriors lifted Mathembe. Again, the flick of command. Matinde was manhandled into the corridor. A third time, the flick of the finger. And the Warriors of Destiny went through the room from bed to bed to bed and casually shot the sex dreamer and the violence dreamer and the childhood innocence dreamer and the flying falling hunting chasing dreamer through the right eye.

The cry died aborted in Matinde’s throat. The cold black muzzle of the sexy/thrilling vulnerable/cute sidearm pressed hard, hard into her right eyesocket. Hradu Fileli looked long at her. Raised his right forefinger. Mind, now. And was gone, clattering down the stairs, gathering up his smiling scrambler-armed teenagers guarding the apes with a flick of the finger move up move up move out into the street into the rain—raindrops glistening fat on the barrels of their weapons—up the hill up the long sloping hill into the camp.

Hradu left the head, and one of his men—this is the way it ever is, that boys call themselves ‘the men’ and men call themselves ‘the boys’—to watch over his sister and with the rest went up killing across the border. The first snow of the winter was blowing down from the north country; it lingered in the air but the touch of mud and earth dissolved it away in a breath. Too pure for the streets and footways of Kilimambasa camp. The camouflage systems of their combat suits swarmed and flowed with fractal white as they picked their way up the hill through the huts and slush-laden shelters.

The man Hradu left was an acne-smitten fifteen-year-old, given to spitting and muttering through his barely broken vocal chords and making it quite clear that he would rather, much rather, be off across the border killing than nursemaiding a cold-turkeying ex-whore and her half-dead Grandfather. When he learned that the head had come across the river with the blind soldier, he took a small-spirited adolescent pleasure in detailing how he had dumped the body down at the edge of the camp, neatly piled so, limbs arranged so.

‘You,’ the head said, with the twice-futile fury of the truly helpless, ‘are the vilest little bastard I have ever met in all my long days. God forgive me for saying so, but it would give me great pleasure to see some fat Proclaimer militiaman blow your guts into your lap.’

He laughed much harder and longer than he should.

On the third day Mathembe groaned a long and desperate groan on her bed and though she tossed and tore at her ties for the rest of the day it was the beginning of it. On the third day also Hradu returned from his killing up in God’s Country. He sat so dark and dangerous with the snow melting from his shoulders that the head was afraid to tell him about Mathembe’s moan and that it thought that, like the darkest and deepest moment at which night runs into morning, she was turning around on her journey through the deep places of herself and starting on the way home. But then she moaned again and even Hradu sunk in his colossal self-absorption could hear in it that silent note that you hear when you are in an aircraft and it makes that subtle change of attitude from ascent to descent, or if you are in the depths of a Saint-ship, kilometres deep buried within its concentric shells of biotecture, but you know that between one instant and the next you have crossed a galaxy. The soundless sound penetrated him, pierced his cocoon of brooding that made him seem so much older and desperate than he was. In a silent coil of movement he had cut the plastic ties with his twistknife, was massaging life into Mathembe’s hands and feet.

‘Long long way to come yet.’ He looked at the head and the head, though it had died once and ought to fear nothing so greatly again, was very afraid. There is nothing fiercer than your own gone wild. ‘That boy, the one I left here. I can have him killed if you like.’

In the morning she was sitting up. By the afternoon she was signing with her hands again. By the evening she was capable of careful handhold-to-handhold explorations of the shanty. She was afraid to go to sleep that night, begged Hradu, the head, anyone, to keep watch with her, one hour, two, until morning. Hradu sat with her. He would not walk with her, for he was a Warrior, and vain, but he sat with her the watches of the night. They did not talk. They enjoyed profound and profitable silence. In silence Mathembe learned more about what her brother had made himself become than from any explanation of his. He was a thing that had lost its roots, its holdfast, it was flying by its own power now. Somewhere in the forest of his motivations, the jungle of private imagery, he had lost the simple anger and frustration that had exploded out of him, like seeds, like a million spores, that night when she had broken him on the rock of her silence. That night, when the city burned. That simple, righteous anger had become anger for anger’s sake; he went out killing because he was angry but he did not know what he was angry at any more. He was a frightening creature. Mathembe could not like him. She was not certain she could even love him. But in the end her silence was the stronger, as it had always been, and towards dawn as the head snored vilely in its pot and sleet blew in through the bivouac door and the night radio burbled to itself in a corner, he told her the things she could not know herself about what Matinde had done to her, with elisions, and omissions, and editorial discretions, for even though he by now knew that his sister did not like him, might no longer even love him, still he liked her, and wanted to be well thought of by her.

He knew that the drugs were burned out of her when the camp began to rouse itself with that sense of surprise at the quality of the light when snow had fallen, snow on snow, in the night and she took a pen and wrote on the translucent, scratched plastic sheeting on the roof, Matinde?

‘That bitch. You owe her nothing.’

A closed fist. Insistence.

‘Leave her. She is dirt. They were all dirt. Dirty bastard ’cross-river pimps. Parasites.’

Again, the closed fist. And then, a gesture that Hradu would never learn to translate: You are so different?

After only a day the men were impatient bored irritable, ready for more action, leaping like merry dogs for the weapons at the commanding flick of Hradu’s finger. They swaggered through the camp, looking mightily pleased when men older than they moved out of their way, when children splashed along through the slush beside them.

We are the law, that was what they said with every swaggering step. With our import fashion sports boots and teleshades and our tremendous weapons, we are the law, we are the ones you answer to in your every thought your every action, your every look and word and deed. Not the police. Not the army. Not the Bureau of Resettlement. We. Us. Ourselves, alone.

But Hradu did not swagger. He walked at the centre of his men, small and solitary even in a crowd and Mathembe had never seen him do a more frightening thing than walk that restrained, lonely walk. He did not speak as the Warriors burst the New Sirikwa Hotel’s newly regrown doors and windows. He did not speak as the two apes on the door were caught once again with their hands halfway to their shoulder holsters (twelve thousand apiece, and twice in one week, liabilities best disposed of in deep, deep water). He let one of his deputies ask the proprietor: Matinde. He did not even speak when they went up the stairs and along the corridor and found the small man with the taste for herbal tea waiting with some of his colleagues. State-of-the-art target-seekers faced neural scramblers and dart-throwers.

‘I take it this is not a social call,’ said the small man.

Hradu smiled like winter, tapped his thumbs together.

‘In this country it is the height of bad manners to call on friends empty-handed,’ Hradu said. ‘Matinde. We would like to see her. Have a few words with her. And then go on our way.’

‘Ah,’ said the small man. ‘I can foresee difficulties with that. Matinde, as you well know, proved an unreliable employee.’

‘I do hope that she is capable of receiving guests,’ said Hradu. ‘I would hate to have made a wasted journey.’

‘Oh, Matinde is alive and well. Very well. We have not terminated her employment, just moved her to, shall we say, a different department of our operations.’

‘My sister would very much like to see her.’

‘Your sister. Ah. The lady with the exquisite dreams. Certainly. You will forgive Matinde if she is a little less than her usual ebullient self.’

Mathembe pushed past the suave, small man, into the room.

It filled much of the room. In form it seemed most like a trumpet, a convolution of pipes and organical pulsings flaring into a long, flower-like bell. Of flesh. The thing was made of naked, sweat-beaded flesh. As Mathembe stared, she became aware. Of the skinny, useless arms, fingers splayed on the floor. Of the tiny, atrophied legs, like the wings of a winter-killed fledgling. Of the ruins of a face, nostrils smeared into long slits, ears tiny folds of gristle where the vestigial head joined the bulb of throbbing, veined flesh, mouth an intestinal knot of syrup processors. Of the eyes.

And as she became aware, she understood. She understood the thrill with which the men would enter the room and approach the thing, garment by garment shedding their clothes along with their understandings of right and wrong until they stood naked in body and spirit before it, how they would tremble as it opened its lips and with a thrill and rush of sexual abandonment let themselves be sucked deep into the pulsing vulva and be loved with a totality they could never dream from any other relationship. Sucked deep down into the enfolding warm dark of the womb, held there, sustained there, loved there.

The eyes beheld Mathembe.

Tears ran from the eyes.

Black, blood-hot rage burst within Mathembe. She hurled herself at the small, smiling man, hands hooked into eye-claws. The boy-hands of the Warriors of Destiny restrained her.

‘Your brother and I understand each other, you see, though he may have been a trifle rash in, shall we say, closing down my dreamware operatives,’ said the small man. ‘But I see now that he is a man with strong family loyalty, and I understand that. Understanding is the basis of all successful business relationships. Matinde has a debt to repay. And as she had no independent means of income with which to repay us, we restructured the debt. We will return her to herself when it is all settled, please understand, we are not barbarians. We are businessmen. That is all. Your brother appreciates that.’

Mathembe spat on him. A long, luxurious, creamy rope of spittle dripped down his face onto his exquisitely cut suit. He smiled, merely smiled, as Hradu and his men took Mathembe away.

All snows are one snow. Every grey whirling snow-day is one day; close and claustrophobic, lit by that yellow, uniform light peculiar to the snow. The fractal heart of the blizzard breaks time into a billion shards, all different, all unique, whirls us into no-time, those snow-days when we sit by the window blizzarded out of our skulls by the falling flakes, hypnotised by the truth that no two are ever alike. Then winter is your friend; there is nothing the other seasons can offer to match the silent mystery of the snow; you would sit at your window until darkness fell and then by the lights of your lamps watch the flakes still falling, and guess at how many others must be falling where you cannot see them, in the dark, unheard, unseen, falling across all the land, covering all the world and you know that whenever, however, wherever the course your life-path takes, that when you see the snow again, it will whirl you back to this moment of hushed, reverent joy, watching in silence with your friend the winter.

Shit.

You are warm, you are comfortable, there are thick windows between you and winter, there are lights and fires and a bottle, there is a roof over you, thick walls around you, the enfolding womb of your bed is but a few steps away. Pretty damn easy to call winter your friend then. Winter is no one’s friend. Those thick walls, that sheltering roof, take them away, replace them with folded plastic sheeting, leaking at the inexpertly welded seams. That quilted bed, with a warm body waiting there to share its heat with you; take instead a camp bed, or a mattress, or a quilt on the damp earth. Take away the lights, the fires, the cheering bottle: here it is always damp, always always damp, here the fire smokes and gives no heat, here the glo-globes are dim, and wan, metabolisms sluggish from the cold. Your window, by which you sit and test chaos theory: smash it, kick it in, break it into a billion whirling pieces, no two ever the same. Let the wind blow snow into your home let it melt and run across your floor, let the smell of piss and shit come through your ragged flap of a door.

Winter in the camps is no one’s friend.

Winter kills.

Hradu came alone to the east gate of the camp to see them off. No men. No guns. No swaggering. He pulled the flapping wings of an Imperial military polyweather coat tighter around him. The man he had killed for it had been several sizes larger than he. It struggled in the wind, the snow of the first great storm of winter found its way into the coat’s voluminous, wind-filled spaces. Above him, the wind rotors howled around and around.

‘You could stay, you know.’

Mathembe pulled the flaps of her hat down over her ears, tied the strings beneath her chin. Hradu knew enough of his sister to read it as contempt. Not with you, not with what you have made yourself into.

‘You should stay. At least until the weather breaks. At least until the roads get going again.’

Not one minute longer than I must said the set of her shoulders as she tied firmly around the head the weatherproof plastic dome she had improvised from wire and sheeting.

‘How far do you think you will get in this? God, sister, you are so stupid! You are going to kill both of you, and for what?’

She looked at him. She acknowledged him. For he had shown a knife’s-edge glitter of caring. She shouldered her pack. Here at the eastern edge of the camp, on the crown of the hill exposed to the prevailing wind, there were only a few half-hearted, wind-scoured attempts at garden plots, a few packing-case guard huts to watch over them and the slim ceramic towers of the wind generators. Rags and streamers of torn plastic raged and stormed, crucified on the thorns that protected the camp.

‘Do you even know where you are headed?’

A shrug. She hefted the head, cocooned in plastic, onto her shoulder-mount.

‘I am not going to say I am sorry, I am not going to apologise for what I have done, what I am. I am playing my part in the patriotic game. What proud thing will they say of you when the true history of the world is written?’

She walked away, down the slight slope from the high point of the camp, towards the boundary and the unguarded gate.

‘Go east.’

Five steps from the gate, she turned.

‘East. They went east. Faradje, her. They came through here four, five months ago. I was not here, but I heard. Everyone comes through here, and everyone who comes, I know about. They asked about me. Of course, no one would answer them. Security. Even if I had been here, I would not have seen them. I could not stand her scorn. You know what she was like. She would not have understood. You never understood. Only Grandfather even began to understand.

‘East. That is where they went. There are dozens of camps all along the borderline. If you tell them you have come from me, it will go a lot more easily for you. My name is known all along the borderline. Tell them you are the sister of Hradu Fileli, they will help you, tell you what they know.’

I would sooner eat my own shit, said Mathembe Fileli in the inarticulate speech of the heart. She raised a fist against her brother, clenched it tight, tight, so that he could not mistake what she felt for him, then slowly relaxed, let it fall open like a flower, let it slowly fall. Go, then, and play your own part in your patriotic game.

Then she turned her back to her brother and walked through the gate that opened onto the east.