Necropolis (34 page)

I hated taking this risk, but we didn’t have much choice. Maggie had been unable to convince Jakob to come to us, and it was dangerous to talk by uplink. So here we were, en route to his place disguised as exotic electrons.

Maggie’s heart rested on my belly. My mind drifted back to the extraordinary sensations of being “inside” her in that lab hallway: the half-coalescent awareness of thoughts and feelings. The intimacy stirred a chiaroscuro of fear and comfort. I knew two things: I’d never be able to tolerate so complete a fusion again. And I would forever be smaller and more alone without it.

As I was ruminating on this, Maggie materialized in the crate, half-wrapped around me, her leg thrown across my knees, her left arm resting on my chest, like lovers snuggling after an afternoon tryst. “Cozy,” she said.

“Cramped.” I tried to neutralize my face as I looked into those limpid epicanthic peepers.

“I had something important to tell you.” She played with a button on my shirt.

“Something that couldn’t wait until we got there?” I thought about slapping her hand away. For some reason I didn’t.

“Nope, sorry.”

She smiled. She had me trapped. Too close to even fidget. “What did you need to tell me?” I asked.

“Hmm. I forgot.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So. Whatcha thinking about?”

I hesitated. “Us,” I said.

She stiffened a little. “Care to fill me in?”

“Wish I could, Mag. It’s pretty confusing.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. I felt her breath on my cheek. Another mechanical illusion, to simulate humanity?
 

I drove the thought away. Down that path lay madness. She lay there, looking into my eyes, all pretense gone, and I suddenly wondered how long I was going to spin my wheels. Who’s really ready for what happens next, anyway?
 

Her lips felt the way I knew they would. I crushed her to me, savoring her warmth, the softness of her skin. She was as real as anyone could ever want. I heard her moan against my mouth.

“Everything okay back there?” said the driver over the intercom. “The temperature just jumped five degrees in your box.”

Maggie pulled back, her face flushed. “Watch the road.”
 

***

“You’re being emotional,” Jakob said.

Maggie’s face fell.

A mentor was the closest thing to a parent that a smarty had. Because of their rapid maturation, the relationship usually only lasted six to eight months. But Jakob had maintained a fatherly interest in Maggie. And Daddy had just found out his little cupcake was a radical. He wasn’t taking the news well.

“The Cadre! Of all the groups to get involved with! You know our way,” he said, his voice gruff and judgmental. “We don’t get involved in human affairs.”

“We’re intimately involved in human affairs every single day.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

He ran a hand through a tangle of graying, shoulder-length hair. Jakob had chosen the well-trod look of an Ivy League professor, a man too distracted by great thoughts to focus on his appearance. His jaw hid behind a thicket of beard. A cute pot belly jutted from his cardigan. I’d lay money on the fact that he’d been too preoccupied this morning to manifest matching socks.

The crinkled eyes that peered at us, however, were as unerring as the crosshairs of a plasma rifle. The man had undoubtedly vaporized many a protégé’s rebuttal with that withering stare. The academic impression was further enhanced by his library. We were surrounded on all sides by books. Thousands of volumes, reaching to the ceiling, three stories of stories. Balconies and ladders provided access to the upper reaches. The overflow was stacked in piles across the floors, next to high-backed reading chairs, on broad oak tables or propped up on window ledges.

The sight and smell of leather and manuscript made me think of my father’s paperbacks. He’d been voracious, tearing through three or four a week. It exasperated my mother because he absolutely refused to part with any of them. Good or bad, pulp escapism or highbrow masterwork, he kept every one. Who knows, maybe to him they were evidence that he had something more going on upstairs than the average civil servant. But up and up they piled, despite my mom’s regular fits of ranting, until they filled our little Brooklyn home.

Until that day. The day when the world caved in. The day I got my first glimpse of the obsidian void that lurks beneath the sunlight.

“A smarty anarchist,” Jakob proclaimed, bringing me back to them.

“I’m not an anarchist, and you know it,” she objected. “There’s a difference.”

“Not to
them
,” he said, pointing to the world beyond his library. “All they see is black and white. Order and chaos, fear and security. There are no distinctions beyond that anymore.”

“Exactly!” she said. “That’s how they get away with it! Remind us how scary and complex the world can be! Intone our need for security! When the latest revelations about corruption or torture or surveillance surfaces, replay the Footage, trot out the Horrible Images! Watch the critics subside into grumbles. They can’t
afford
to have a backbone, not against all that empty patriotism!”

“Our existence depends on our neutrality,” he said. “Who are you to risk that?”

“Who do I have to be, Jakob?” she said. “I won’t be paralyzed by the fear of some terrible, hypothetical future. The present is terrible enough.”

He threw his hands in the air and turned away. There was a moment where we listened to the metronomic ticks of a case clock in the corner.
 

Maggie looked heartbroken. But her eyes still held their mettle. Elise had possessed that same resoluteness of will…
 

Elise…
 

All at once I was struggling to control surges of guilt that were like trumpet blasts in my head. I cleared my throat, testing the steadiness of my voice. “Can I ask a question?” I said. “Why the books? When you can get everything instantly on the Conch?”

He pivoted, his eyes lustrous with enthusiasm. His annoyance vanished.
Uh-oh.
I’d hit upon a pet topic.

“Instantly, yes. We’re so efficient nowadays, aren’t we? We get from one place to the next so quickly. Information is plucked from the ether, effortless and immediate. But what’s the trade-off? Once, we had to walk. Many roads, many steps, many hills. It took more time and effort. Everything moved slower. But we passed homes and stores, said hello to the shop owners or people on their porches, inquired about their families. Noticed the new buds on the trees. Isn’t that important information, too?”

I felt myself kindle to the man. I knew where Maggie got her rebellious streak. He was as much a misanthrope as she was.
 

“Once we had to read. I mean, really read. Oh, the Conch will give me the words to
Oliver Twist
. But would I see how the volume was bound? Which typeface the printer had carefully chosen? What about the way the previous owner had loved and cared for the book, or how she’d worn down the edges with frequent readings, or how she’d left a chocolate fingerprint right at the point when the Artful Dodger lifts the gentleman’s pocketbook?” He picked up the nearest volume. “Would it really be the same if I didn’t feel the weight of it in my hand, the smoothness of the paper? Oh, the glorious, smooth paper! Like the inside of a lover’s thigh. And its weight—that, my boy, critical information! It conveys the labor that went into its creation. The effort of filling each page, word by word, thought by thought.” His face beamed, his cheeks two shiny apples. He lifted a data pebble and rolled it around in his palm. “This piece of gravel contains the complete works of Shakespeare. Doesn’t seem like much of an achievement.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I murmured.
 

He smiled. “You’re a reader, Mr. Donner!”

“Once,” I said. “My job left little time.”

“But you came from a family of readers?”

“My father, when he was alive. My parents were killed when I was nine.” That brought a chorus of raised eyebrows. I cleared my throat. “Drunk driver. They were coming to see my basketball game. I was raised in foster care.”

Shock reverberated from Maggie. Her expression said:
Why didn’t you tell me
?

Jakob shook his head sadly. “Terrible, terrible,” he said.

Their eyes were suddenly intrusive, trying to excavate my pain. I fired back an angry look, in default mode, using the mask-shield of rage I’d forged in all those foster homes. Until age sixteen, that is. When I’d bolted again and Children’s Services, worn down, hadn’t bothered to look for me anymore.
 

Bart’s voice echoed in my head: “Do you know what it’s like to lose all your landmarks in a day?” I knew. I knew the gray tension stitched through the fabric of the world. The dread that comes with the night. The noises that turn a child’s young mind into a cornered animal.
 

“Were you… well-treated?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I counted to ten, willing my muscles to uncoil. Maggie and Jakob waited for me, as though they understood. Which they never could.

“Let’s talk about the Lifetaker,” was what I said.

“The Life—!” Jakob went ballistic. To Maggie: “Are you insane, to tell a human of this?”

“I had no choice, Jakob,” she said stoically. “He’s returned to Necropolis.”

“Impossible!”

“It’s true!”

“Even if it were, it would still not be for human ears!”

“We’re beyond all that, goddamn it! He’s killing Surazal scientists. Do you understand? He’s raised the stakes, not us. His existence won’t remain hidden much longer, no matter how desperately you desire it.”

Jakob stroked his beard furiously, pacing. “He can’t be back. Oh God!”
 

“Tell me what you know.” I said.

The room thickened with his anxiety. “I was part of the group that… took action… when his crimes became known to us.” If Jakob had been human, the beard would’ve come away in clumps.
 

“The banishment?” said Maggie.

“We couldn’t destroy him. That would make us as bad as he was. So we changed him. We changed him so that he could not survive contact with sentient beings in any way. If he couldn’t be near them, he couldn’t destroy them.”

“Including us?” asked Maggie. “Oh god, you banished him from smarties as well?”

“We feared he could pollute us somehow with his deviancy.”

Outcast
.
Unclean
. The smarty reaction hadn’t been much different from humans. “How did you change him?” I asked.
 

“A fail-safe program in his core DNA. Proximity to another person would create a complete cascade failure,” Jakob said. “His mind would fragment, he’d break down and die. To survive, he must remain alone. He cannot even communicate from a distance.”

I saw Maggie shudder. Total isolation.
 

“He killed people!” said Jakob. “For the dark pleasure of it! He was an abomination!”
 

“Where was he banished to?” I asked.

“The Blasted Heath.”

“The wasteland surrounding Necropolis,” Maggie explained.

“I remember.”

“A corny name, true,” said Jakob. “Who would spot a reference to H. P. Lovecraft?”

“Or Shakespeare,” I said. They looked at me. “
Macbeth.
‘Upon this blasted heath you stop our way.’”

“Where on earth did you find this man?” Jakob said to Maggie.

“I know.”

“Extraordinary.”

“I know.”
 

“I’m right
here
,” I said.

“Pretentious or not,” said Jakob, “it captures the soulless quality of the place.”

“What was that poem?” asked Maggie. “Remember? About the Lifetaker? The one you used to recite when I was a kid?”
 

Jakob nodded, and his eyes went distant.
 

“Upon the scorched and blasted heath

He stands his post of endless hate

A pallid stain of what’s beneath

When Death lays claim to hope and fate.

His cloak of shimmer and of rain

Flows wild in the bleached-out skies

He howls his song of rage and pain

And chaos pours from out his eyes.

Alone he’ll stand until you’re dust

And laugh aloud at love’s dark rot.

He’ll watch the turn of worms and rust

For he is one whom Time knows not.

He needs no warmth, he needs no lair
 

For he is one whose power lies

In every creature’s bleak despair
 

As chaos pours from out his eyes.

Love will rise, and so will fall

He’ll gnaw its bones with sharpened teeth

And stand his post as Time claims all

Upon the scorched and blasted heath.”

“Delightful,” I said.

“He can’t have returned,” Jakob repeated. “It’d be suicide.”