Paradise Tales (33 page)

But it’s far too inflexible. It obliterates any chance for the more narrow strokes that follow.

So now Assumpta calls up a kind of pen with a soft tip. It flips bits of wet clay, which would account for the prickly-pear nodes that appear on the surface sometimes. She’s comparing them. Yes, there’s an approximate match.

And for the first time, she’s trying to imagine what might hold a pen. So, she’s finally begun to imagine aliens, if that’s what they are, and how they work. There’s a kind of mouth holding the cylinder still, and she’s pulling the image like taffy, to create a kind of tentacle that holds the pen.

And now she’s laughing at herself. She gives up and just shows a pair of hands. She knows she’s come up with a tool for two-handed bipeds. Us.

So she makes the corkscrew flexible. She shows it stretching, thinning, shortening, and fattening. How flexible does it have to be? In the end, she has to make it as flexible as mist, fitting the curlicues.

Assumpta makes it more solid, and it looks like a worm.

JoyAnna old: “This is as far as we’d known for certain that she got. I feel very strange. I really want her to get it, I want her to solve it. She deserves to. But not yet.”

Assumpta twists the worm and shows it grasping the cylinder at one end and turning it like a corn cob. The other end bites out a mark, then turns it, shifts, and bites out the next.

Assumpta turns off the CGI. She’s magnifying an image of a cylinder to microscopic scale.

You see the marks at almost nanoscale. The bites are smooth with gliding streaks in them, but nothing like tooth marks or cuts. It’s like they’ve been sucked out of the clay.

Assumpta calls up a CGI of a mouth, and she’s now making it fit the streaks and smears. She pulls back, and there we have it.

A worm with a mouth.

Assumpta’s turned off all imaging. Her physiome shows her bowing. She’s put her head in her hands. She says, “The possibility is that the marks are simply a trace of something eating the clay. The nodes left on the surface are probably just faeces.”

Assumpta tries to laugh. The sound seems to be coming out of the bottom of a well.

JoyAnna young almost shouts. “Except for the numbers! Assumpta! The numbers. She can’t hear me.”

Numbers flip up, tones bleep. That is Assumpta calling up a blog share. Access tells you that that is the Shelling’s blog ID. She’s calling him.

“Dear Tomas.”

She sounds as though she is sending condolences for a funeral.

“I will of course be writing a full report. But as you will see from readings and images attached, I am fairly certain that the marks are simply the result of something feeding on the clay cylinders, probably for the iron content. So the marks are repeated probably because they tended to scoop the clay in a limited number of ways. I wish I had something more satisfactory for you. But I think we can consider the consultancy at a close. As always, it has been a pleasure. I hope you won’t mind, but I will continue working on the problem, and if there is anything further, I will be sure to let you know. A hard copy will follow for your records, along with my last invoice and record of expenses, which in any case will not be large. Yours as ever, Assumpta Ciges.”

The cat mews, unseen, rain prickles windows, Assumpta stares. Her breath wreathes in the cold.

They were so isolated. They only had one self.

Blip.

And then all you see is a floor. Poured concrete, and a sleeping bag full of knees, and next to that a bowl.

Can you guess where you are? Look at the indicator, it says JAH, nothing else, so this is just one level of one blog. Look at the date: 2048. And Handel is playing.

JoyAnna is inside a sleeping bag, and venturing a chill hand out to a bowl of soy crisps. You hear them crunch and a mug goes up to her lips. If this were a modern blog you could at least taste it. From JA’s physiome, she’s drinking some kind of homemade hooch. Maybe she thinks being slightly tipsy is a good way to get into Ciges’s mindset. She looks up: a bare room, with what look like charcoal drawings direct onto a wall. There are windows, that at first glance look like pixelated screens. That odd popping sound is actually the clucking of hens.

JAH: “I’m freezing cold. Even with the sun out. They call this our summer. There’s a cloud of mosquitoes outside. They just kamikaze into my window screens.”

The windows have a fine mesh across them, and we can see mosquitoes swirling around outside. Some kind of alert flashes inside JoyAnna’s eyes.

“My cows’ lifeblogs are calling me. They need milking. Their virts usually herd them back from the park to my stable, but I think there’s a glitch in their eye receivers and they’re not being triggered to hook themselves up to the milking machines. That’s not such a huge problem. I just need to get up and walk to the stables. I need to feed my hens, too; the feed is in my backpack. I should just haul it over there and TCB. But I don’t want to.”

Her physiome shows a clear X state. JoyAnna in despair. She sits in silence. You look hungrily at the uneaten soycrisps, out of your reach by eighty years.

Then she says just one word. “Mystery.”

You’re probably thinking, well the young JoyAnna was such a little gold digger. She’ll just do a search, blip to the end, find the solution, and go off and make her fortune. You haven’t been paying attention.

No. She goes back inside, to be with Assumpta.

Blip.

She goes right back to the end of that phone call.

Assumpta strokes her cat and slowly finishes the chorizo.

“Yes, Bertie, yes, I shall feed you in moment.”

She heaves herself up from the table, finds the cat food, cuts off a slug of it, and lumps in onto a plate.

Then Assumpta thumps upstairs. Rain on the roof. Stockings peel off wearily. She rolls under the covers and finds her book.

JoyAnna young coughs to clear her throat. “The Professor Emeritus and ex-President of the British Academy spends her nights reading fanfic gardening slash.”

Young JoyAnna is content to read with her.

Love in a Changing Climate

Denim’s eyes were still fixed on her, as Julie squatted to feel in the soil for potatoes. She knew her jeans were too tight and rode down at the back. It was a bit shameless of her. In the cleft of her exposed butt, a tattoo spelled out the word in Samoan that only Denim could read: LOVE.

“Come on, you’re supposed to be helping me dig,” she said, and only then realized that it sounded like an innuendo.

Denim’s glossy, long black hair whisked against her cheek as he crouched beside her. His great thighs were as smooth as her own. She could smell him, a mixture of sweat and spice and something delicious all his own.

“Do you miss home?” Julie asked.

JoyAnna whispers, “My husband left me, too, Assumpta. I’ve got too many keys myself, all in my eyes, for the stables, the dispensary, my files, my grant ID. I don’t spend hours on the phone talking to friends like you do. We don’t have phones. And I’ve let your friends become my friends. I sometimes think they’re still with us. I want to know if your nephew got his scholarship or if your students found jobs. It’s like I could turn a corner, and find all the roadways painted white.”

She starts to read again. You’re the one who wants to blip now. You try to push Assumpta’s blog, can’t, then locate the right version of JoyAnna’s. OK we can blip.

It’s a rickety table in a forecourt on a sun-flecked day. Assumpta is lowering a tray full of cake and coffee. Her physiome is in an almost even gray: you feel as though she’s in a moment of respite from everything unlovely and harsh. Under her trousers, electric bandages filamented with wires keep her ligaments warm and give her muscles a neurological boost. The camera motion shows that she no longer limps.

At the table sits a much younger man: Asian, handsome, with black hair, black eyes. He is cherubically plump, and he moves like a little boy, shrugging with pleasure. “Assumpta, you are lovely. Lovely, lovely.” He tucks into his cake.

Assumpta sweeps into her chair and watches him eat. His cheeks bulge with cream. He swallows. She asks, “Now?”

Then everything swims unfocussed, and in your eyes physiomes line up—yours, JAH’s, Assumpta’s, and now the male’s. A report is offered. It flowers open, full of details.

JoyAnna says “They’ve just descraped privacy.”

His name is Gudu and he’s forty-two. And he will be able to see that Assumpta is sixty-eight, suffers from arthritis and a hereditary heart condition. She is of course no longer fertile. He on the other hand has what Access tells you is an extraordinarily high sperm count. A small article starts to explain: reduced pollution is improving male fertility. He has a slight predisposition to baldness. Self-cured of appendicitis and … what is this? Damage to the frontal lobe. All of your physiomes seem to thump in unison.

Gudu says, “Oh, all of that is lovely.”

JAH:, “I’m tempted to say of course he doesn’t want a child. I mean, he wouldn’t want a rival, would he?”

Numbers flow into a grid, and Gudu says, “Now this is my equivalent. An Indian horoscope.”

JAH: “He’s explaining, and I’m talking over him and I feel bad about that, but I can’t be bothered. Assumpta, I have to say, selfishly, that I’m dreading that I’ll have to spend the rest of our time together with this man. My mother’s lifeblog is just the same, full of an annoying twit online.”

The numbers boil down to a very high fraction.

“That means we are very compatible.” Gudu beams. “I remember when I was young my parents tried to marry me, though the incompatibility was high, and sure enough, we didn’t get on from the moment we met.”

Assumpta chuckles. “That is reassuring.”

The last of the cake crumbs pinched together, Gudu puts his hands down flat on the table.

“The Financial Advisers Guild needs to see that I have twenty thousand euros in my account before they will let me register. Would you be able to transfer that sum into my account?”

Assumpta’s physiome pulses once. It lights up, red blue yellow, and continues to coruscate.

JAH: “Don’t give it to him!”

“I will pay you right back the moment they see it.”

JoyAnna rails, “If he had a brain in his head, he would have waited six months until you couldn’t live without him. A brain in his head and he wouldn’t need the twenty thousand. And he wants to give people financial advice?”

The whole image seems to twist in harness, and Assumpta draws a deep breath. “It really is very difficult.” Her voice creaks like leather being stretched. “I really don’t have a spare twenty thousand.”

“Oh! You have time. You can think about it.” He’s still smiling and he waves everything else away. “Thank you.”

JAH: “It sounds like what he says to all the old women who turn him down. Old men as well, I reckon. You’ll recall, Assumpta, that he did like a finger up his arse.”

You live through Assumpta paying for the coffee, and kissing him on the cheek, and then the bus ride from the Northern Quarter. Would it be so very bad, you wonder. Buying someone? When you’re sixty-eight and alone?

White Manchester, green trees, bicycles, home.

JAH: “I want to hug you and I can’t.”

Assumpta gets home; she allows herself to limp and she goes straight back to that box of a computer. She takes down her dating profile. She enters codes and webcams her retina to the bank. She waits looking at her own reflection on the screen.

“You fool. You idiot.” The cat springs up onto her lap and hides his head under her forearm, as if sheltering from the overhead light.

Blip.

The lifeblog tells you this is summer, a year later. You see a marble floor. Assumpta has apparently twisted round her bare foot so that she can see the sole. It’s dusted with fine white powder.

Someone, another aged female you can’t see, says something in Spanish. Access tells you: Asumpta’s sister, Bella. This is Barcelona. Someone’s blog, yours or JoyAnna’s, translates. The voice has said, “I wish you would wear shoes! You’re not a child!”

Assumpta is humming a childish song; you’ve heard it before. She looks up to a sink full of water and plunges her hands into it. “This marble is beautiful. It really does cool down the house.”

The sister’s voice echoes, “Not if you keep opening windows.”

Assumpta still does not look at her. Instead she holds up a soup plate. Light reflects on its moulded edges, which are a faded green with gold. A bubble slides down it.

Up from Access comes an image of a Meridiani cylinder. Assumpta is thinking of work.

AC: “These beautiful plates.”

Bella says, “We need to talk about Mother’s legacy.”

AC: “Of course.”

Assumpta slots the plate into a rack full of crocks and cutlery. She shakes the water from her hands and walks out of the kitchen, looking at the pattern on the rug in the hall. She goes into a parlour or sitting room and strokes the polished surface of a mahogany table and admires heavy candlesticks with cherubim.

“Assumpta! Assumpta, where are you going?”

She limps across the room, opens the French windows, pushes back the shutters. Noise from the street floods in. Barcelona booms, crackles, wheezes, clatters. Summer solstice, thirty-two degrees, St. Joan’s Day. In the street below, children are setting off firecrackers. They’re crouching under long-needled pine trees that run straight down the middle of the medieval road.

“Assumpta, Assumpta, please! They’re setting off rockets! They fly in through the windows!”

Assumpta grunts.

Bella’s voice sounds querulous and old. “One of the apartments across the road was set on fire last year! This is too much, too much!”

The image jerks. The sister is perhaps trying to pull her back inside. Someone who may be JoyAnna makes a piteous sound. You glimpse Bella’s black trousers and shirt; you see Assumpta’s hands pushing her away.

AC: “All right! You close the shutters. I’ll watch from outside.”