Cloud Country Page 3

  One huge painting hung in a room all to its own, and curiosity forced Saru to investigate. The man in the painting looked like a fat baby with many chins and a red face, and he wore an expression of self-satisfaction that nearly brought her to punch the canvas. The caption read Paul Thomas Gibca Bush Hathaway, Fourth President of the United Estates of America. Something clicked in Saru’s mind, the name coming up from memory—wow! good old-fashioned brain cells, no implanted storage. Paul whatever Hathaway was a Founder, one of the Founders, the Founders of America. Saru recognized the face, remembered it staring up at little-kid Saru from a school screen with that same masturbatory smugness.

  His was the face of money—money beyond the most jealousy-or rage-provoking displays Saru had ever seen on any feed. Money beyond Eugene and Friar and even the Gaespora buying skyscrapers on a whim. It was the kind of money you needed new numbers to count, the kind of money that couldn’t ever be turned into enough cash or solids, the kind of money where your blood turned to holy water and your farts imploded the market, and vices turned to eccentricities, and laws became pigpens to keep the scum off your lawn. That woman on the flying carpet was a Hathaway, a great-grandchild or something of a Founder, and heiress to one of the American Estates. How much of the country was her personal property? Ten percent? Thirty percent? Fifty percent? More? The situation—already high in desperation—suddenly took on a whole new casting of hopelessness. This woman was literally a law unto herself. There was no appeal, no finding a player and calling Eugene, no bribes, no trials, no fucking the judge or death-threat technicalities.

  Idly, Saru wondered if she’d been hasty in carving out the brand (fuck it still hurt) and ditching the Gaesporan—her best friend in the whole world at the moment. She could play ball, accept her new life as an intern in, frankly, the nicest place she had ever seen in her entire life—way, way beyond what she could have guessed was possible in terms of niceness. There didn’t seem to be too much work involved, not much expected of the pretty people here other than to eat and drink and play and fuck—hell that was Saru’s end goal anyway. But it was a fantasy. She couldn’t take orders—even if the order was to drink and fuck—couldn’t play the part of a servant, couldn’t look down at the ground in subjugation, couldn’t mumble apologies, couldn’t take a whip lash without putting her heel in the slaver’s neck and laughing as he choked. She needed out, needed to get back to the real world that made some goddamn sense, where the people were ugly and pretty in depressing proportions, and chumps wore brands on their clothes and not their skin. A nice cage was still a cage, and what was comfort if she couldn’t choose to throw it away now and again?

  Saru wandered on—more rooms and hallways with paintings, and now there were objects on display, works of art, she guessed, that she was too dumb to appreciate. There was a big white marble man with his dick hanging out, and one whole wall with a painting in black and white with childish people and horses, and there was even a huge stone head that looked like a cartoon. Saru actually kind of liked the cartoon head, but it was trash, it was all trash, expensive trash, and nobody was even looking at it besides her. The most important thing there was a sword with a shiny blade and a bejeweled handle. She expected an alarm to go off when she grabbed the handle and swung it around—oh damn, it was heavy—but no alarm came. She waited, hidden, in a corner by the door for some guards to run by and have their heads cut off (maybe), but they never came, thank God. And then she realized it was fear that kept the servants away from these parts—or maybe some sort of electric fence in their implant brands—and so there was no need for an alarm.

  The wandering brought Saru to a door, the biggest door yet, a cathedral door of carved and painted wood, and brass knobs the size of her head. She touched a knob and then gave it a warm-up flick, and the doors both swung open, smooth and quiet like magic. The room beyond was dark except for a silver glow that she recognized as the useless, lying stars. She crept inside, sandals making a soft fuft shwip against the plushness of the carpet. All around were dark shapes, and through the transparent walls and ceiling was the sky, massive, and rather than her peering up at it, the sky seemed to peer down on her and judge. Saru found herself stepping forward to stand in the center of the room, feeling the presence of the ocean surrounding, hearing its gentle crash, far below.

  “John, is that you?”

  A voice, the voice of honey and wine, and ever-bored command. Saru darted left and then right in slapstick indecision, and then stood still where she was, crouched with the sword held before her, as the lights came on and she was exposed.

  The mistress lay on a bed of pillows, propped up, naked save for her golden rings, like a shard of night fallen to Earth. She looked regal, Godly, even, except for the expression of shock on her face, an expression never planned for by the armies of plastic surgeons and body modders that had sewn her beauty, and it looked like a mask, bad-fitting and ugly.

  “It was not summoned!” the mistress screeched, the voice too now broken, exploring new realms and registers of displeasure. “It will leave at once!”

  Saru allowed herself her own moment of shock, and then dropped the sword point to the carpet. She leaned on the sword a half second before nearly falling over.

  “Are you talking to me?” she asked, pointing a finger at herself.

  “John!” the mistress screeched. “John!”

  This was a surprise to Saru. The word she would have chosen was “Guards!” But it made a strange sort of sense. The woman was an heiress. She’d never in the whole of however many years she’d been alive had to do anything for herself. And now, faced with an unexpected inconvenience, she couldn’t even call for help herself.

  “John! John!” she screamed, and then, pointing a rage-shaking finger at Saru, “It will be whipped! It will be destroyed!”

  “Shut up!” Saru said. She stalked over to the mistress, who scrabbled back on the pillows. The mistress screamed and screamed, not even able to make words anymore, a little-girl, tantrum scream of demanded ponies and dropped ice cream. There was an echo of soft footsteps and the Gaesporan appeared in the doorway, huffing and sweating, feet bandaged, more human than ever. He tried to say something, but it was swallowed by a huff. The screaming continued, a dentist-drill sound in Saru’s ears, driving her mad, more torture than the carved-out brand.

  “Shut up!” Saru grabbed the mistress, hard, and the mistress flailed as though being murdered, and screamed louder. The screams rattled through Saru’s brain, caused her teeth to grind together and her breath to come in angry grunts. She shook and the screaming continued, supersonic now. Saru screamed back and raised her fist, and socked the bitch right in the cheek.

  It wasn’t a hard punch, as punches go, more of a tap, really, just something to get her attention. And it worked, too. The mistress shut up. The screaming stopped. It was quiet for a nice, long second. The mistress looked up at Saru with wide eyes, like she was newly born, seeing the world for the first time. Her eyes grew even wider, beyond shock, beyond surprise, like she was learning lessons in discomfort that most people draw in slowly over the course of a sad, hard life, all in a single instant. A tear trickled from her eye, and then another, and another, a waterfall of tears, and her mouth wiggled comically, and then opened as far as it would go in the shameless bawl of a child. Saru let go and stepped back, mesmerized. The cry continued, broken by a sucked-in breath, and then resumed, and the tears flowed free. Her hands balled into fists and pounded against the pillows. Her feet kicked up and down like she was swimming, and still she cried and cried.

  Saru felt a tickling at her brain like something magical was at work, the same tingly sensation of the Gaespora pulling one of their tricks or the hips singing to one another. It was faint, and metallic, and she felt that she was sensing the Net itself, the artificial connections between humans, mind to mind, and that here, within the Net of this estate, these cries were heard and felt by all. Saru stepped back again, and the Gaesporan, “John,” presumably, ste
pped forward, so they were side by side. He too stared at the crying woman pounding and flailing in her feather bed, his expression a new achievement in horror, a new personal best, blowing away his red-ribbon attempt hours earlier when Saru had mutilated herself. And amidst the horror, a disgust, like discovering his wife had herpes or his best friend was a pedophile. Saru glanced between the two of them, enjoying the lessons they seemed to be learning, and then made a decision.

  “Hey, hey!” Saru snapped her fingers in front John’s face. “We gotta get out of here.”

  “What?”

  “Getting me out of here? Remember?”

  John looked at her as though dazed, head drawn back to the crying mistress, not seeming aware of anything else.

  “Yes,” he said, vaguely, almost cheerfully, like a man with a brain injury being offered an ice-cream cone. “Yes,” he said again.

  “Well, come on!”

  Saru grabbed his hand and pulled him into the hallway, dragging him in a random direction until he anchored himself and switched their roles, guiding her straight to a furnished elevator the size of a small house. They stood in the elevator, not speaking, staring straight ahead, listening to a tropical melody. The doors opened on pandemonium, the garden turned to hell. Servants ran back and forth, screaming and whooping, slamming into walls and changing direction, or stopping suddenly to fall and cry and pound the ground with their fists. Fights erupted and ended and erupted again, kisses turned to bites and ripped-out tongues, hugs became chokes, the guards tore off their uniforms and danced about, bashing skulls at random with their clubs. Bands of men on flying carpets raced and collided with each other, and laughed as they tumbled to the ground dragging broken and twisted limbs, attacking each other with croquet mallets and tennis rackets. A fire burned in the distance, the great tree-house bar with the many swings now a torch, and the screams of horses rose even above the shrieks of the madmen as the horses galloped through the crowds and were tackled and ridden or tripped by giggling, crying, bellowing fools. Saru stood frozen in the elevator.

  “What. The. Fuck.”

  John watched the scene coolly, not the tick-tock, engine-idle cool of a Gaesporan, but a human cool, like he understood exactly what was happening and wasn’t impressed.

  “The brands,” he said, not turning his head to look at her when he spoke. “Everyone here is connected—connected to her.”

  His words swam by like fish in a tank, and then one by one they settled into the muddle of her consciousness and gave meaning. And she understood. The interns, all the men and women, and—oh God, was someone protecting the children?—were networked together and tied to the mistress through the Net. Saru hadn’t been able to figure it out—why have all these useless servants frolicking around your gardens? Why have them drunk on wine and fucking one another? Why put them in pleasure boats and carousels and stuff them with fine cheese and fruit? Was it patronage, philanthropy? Were these people just toys or pets that it tickled the mistress to pamper?

  No. All their joy and all their pleasure, all their orgasms and thrills flowed up through the Net to deliver themselves to the mistress like a drug, like an opium hose of ecstasy she could turn up and down at will. Saru had seen it done with two people, one person sharing the sensations of another—if you want to fuck your friend’s wife without her knowing. And she’d even seen it done with three people and thought it was mad, a risk and an expense far and beyond the reward of experiencing two whores licking each other out. But to network a whole town, a whole city of people and wire into their every carnal pleasure…it was beyond mad. Beyond indulgent. Beyond the whoring and stealing of crackheads, sky chasers murdering for one night’s taste, torture fetishists shoving pins up their cocks. It was beyond any form of fix seeking or depravation Saru had ever seen or could conceive of. Friar’s words came drifting back, when he had stood on the desert island in her mind and told her the UausuaU appeared as monsters only because that’s how they saw us. And in her mind’s eye, Saru saw the aliens a universe away, peering down at Earth through their alien telescopes, and watching this woman drag all the joy and thrills of others into a single needlepoint of personal bliss.

  John reached over and took Saru’s hand. He led her down a path, away from the madness and the fire and the screams. He was saying things, saying it all would end soon. She nodded off cue, missing his points. Vaguely, Saru noticed the ache in her thigh had dulled, and she wondered what would have happened if she had kept the brand. There was a rustle in the bushes. A woman leapt at them wielding a grapevine like a flail. John blocked the attack and knocked the woman out with a sewing-needle zip of fingers along her pressure points. The path widened and then took to the sea, rising on its own pier over the restless waters. Spray splashed like spit against Saru’s face, wind tangling her hair. The pier ended on a white, round perch, and on it sat a plane, a silver, winged drop of mercury. John ran a hand along its surface and lines appeared that became doors unfolding. He helped Saru inside and she let him. Inside, the walls were invisible, so they sat in lazy chairs above nothing, in silence with the sky above. John took the controls with sure hands and they lifted off, hovering slowly, and then zooming faster and faster towards the blurring sky, to burst through the electric beat of the cloud shear, and mingle among the stars.

  3. A Vertigo of Stars

  They flew above the roil of black smog, so high it seemed like on tippy toes the stars could just be touched. The color in the night sky had been a shock, and now too the motion, the twinkle and tear-drop flashes of shooting stars—rare and wondrous on the feeds, but now so common Saru had run out of things to wish for. There was music there in that sky, in those billion lights so still and frenzied at once, and she could hear the light as it sang out, each point with its own voice, some blue and clear, or low and red, and all in harmony. Looking down at the endless smear of gray, she saw the Earth was in a prison, cut off from the light, and motion, and music of the universe. And she wondered if it was a prison of fear, because the music was loud and there was so much, and though it was beautiful it was not nice or easy or catchy like a Pop40 tune. Or if it was a prison of laziness—smoke sent up to the heavens, infinite until they filled, and then there was no better place to put the smoke. Or if it was simply the natural way of things, that a planet wrapped itself in filth to hide from the rest, like a possum limping off to die alone.

  The plane had a bar, a luxurious bar with cute mini bottles that Saru suspected were made of real diamond, and the vodka within was so smooth and sweet it was like drinking diamonds themselves. Saru took a long gulp before confronting the Gaesporan, tilting back the bottle and emptying it, relishing those final drops of perfection. Her vision swam nicely.

  “Your name’s John?” Saru asked.

  “An interesting question,” the Gaesporan said. “It was John. Maybe it’s different now. But call me John.”

  This was off to a bad start.

  “Hi, John,” Saru said, lolling into a dumb smile. “I’m Maggie.”

  “You may conclude your deceit,” John said. “I know you are Saru Solan. You reek of violence.”

  “Oh?” Saru said. “You don’t smell so great yourself.” Her hand travelled to the hilt of the sword. John followed the movement out of the corner of his eye.

  “There is no need for that,” he said, archly. “I wish you no harm.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Saru said. “And the funny thing is afterwards I always wind up almost getting killed. So, John. How do you know my name?”

  “I belonged to the Gaespora,” John said.

  “And you think that’s an answer?”

  “Please,” John said. “You share a margin with a God. You know how we plumb their mysteries. I have dreamt of your face. I have heard your music in the stars. I know everything and nothing about you. The Gods speak plainly. But they speak in the language of Gods. It is the burden of mortals to divine their meaning.”

  “That’s some damn convenient bullshit,” Saru
hissed. “Did you see my name on a feed?”

  “No.”

  “My face?”

  “No.”

  “No mentions at all?”

  “I have seen you in no feeds, letters, telegrams, palimpsests, urns, icons, or facsimiles,” John said. “You are known to me as you are known to the shared consciousness of my erstwhile brethren, through the being that lives within you. I felt that you were a worshipper of SaialqlaiaS, the so-called Blue God, and I searched the shared memory of the Gaespora and found your name as it was remembered by the one who speaks for us in Philadelphia, whom you know as ElilE. I learned that you had dealt with the Gaespora before, and vexed them to no end.”

  “And what else did you learn, huh?”

  “Little else. You see, I am no longer of the Gaespora. You freed me.”

  “I freed you?” Saru said, liking this less and less.

  “In effect,” John said, evenly, flat voice, expression flat—and then he shivered with excitement like he was shaking out his heebie jeebies.

  “More precisely, you exiled me,” he said. “When you carved out the Hathaway brand.”

  John pointed at the makeshift bandage on her thigh. The red dot of blood had widened almost to the edges of the cloth.

  “That had nothing to do with you,” Saru said. “It was an implant. I didn’t want it inside of me.”

  “Your connection to SaialqlaiaS is strong,” John said, with a wince. “When you mutilated yourself I felt your pain, and your anger, and…many sensations…” he trailed off, wistfully. He shivered again, and then took a breath, and gathered himself into a semblance of control.