Terry Bisson: The Fifth Element

Smiling, Mactilburgh pressed a button and a camera swiveled toward the chamber. A flash went off and the girl jumped backward, startled.

Her green eyes edged in black darted around the tab. She looked at the broken handle clutched in her fingers.

“Oucra cocha o dayodomo binay ouacra mo cocha ferji akba ligounai makta keratapla,” she said. “Tokemata tokemata! Seno santonoiaypa! Monoi ay Cheba! Givamana seno!”

“What’s she saying?” asked Munro, his hand once again hovering over the self-destruct button.

Mactilburgh edged Munro’s hand away. “Activate the phonic detector,” he said to his assistant.

The girl was kicking the glass side of the chamber.

Mactilburgh’s assistant rolled out a speaker assembly festooned with more lights than a Russian has medals.

The girl was still kicking the glass.

“Give her a light sedative.”

The assistant threw a switch. A hissing sound was heard, and a mist swirled through the chamber.

“And give her something to wear…”

Another switch—and a pile of bright clothing fell into the chamber from above.

The girl snatched the clothes up and looked at them, frowning.

“Teno akta chtaman aasi n ometka!” she said as she began to put the clothes on, unhurriedly and without embarrassment.

Munro moved closer. Some how the sight of the beautiful girl slipping into a knit-and-plastic skintight tunic was even more exciting than seeing her nude, or almost nude.

“This thing solid?” he asked Mactilburgh.

“Unbreakable,” said the scientist.

Munro smiled at the girl, who frowned back at him while she struggled with her clothes.

“If you want to get out, you’re going to have to develop those communication skills,” Munro taunted.

He was answered by a fist—the girl’s, rammed straight through the glass.

She leaned out of the chamber, still only half dressed, and grabbed Munro by the front of his military tunic, picking him up so that his medals rattled.

AaaoooGGGGaaa! An alarm went off.

The girl banged Munro against the side of the chamber and then dropped him onto the floor.

She reached around the side of the chamber and unlocked it, then stepped out, still slightly wobbly on her long and shapely legs.

AaaoooGGGGaaa!

Two burly security guards burst into the lab.

The girl sent them flying, each toward an opposite wail.

Mactilburgh and his assistant backed into the corner. Mactilburgh’s face showed terror mixed with admiration. His assistant’s, terror only.

A phalanx of ten security guards with plastic shields and stun guns rushed into the lab.

They surrounded the girl. She studied them for a moment, then backed up.

One step, two.

The guards moved forward. The girl was trapped in the far comer of the lab.

Then she turned and jumped through the wall, as if it were made of paper.

“Perfect!” breathed Mactilburgh, undismayed by the near total destruction of his laboratory.

It was public money, after all.

“Do we have Deadly Force Authorization?” one of the security guards asked as he sprinted down a corridor.

His partner laughed. It was a joke. DFA was standard operating procedure for any unauthorized activity in the Central Laboratories. Or anywhere in Manhattan, for that matter.

Which was why, when the girl burst into view at

“AFTER HER!” CRIED THE CHIEF OF SECURITY. IT WAS HIS JOB AT stake, after all.

He sent his men in teams of two through the hole in the wall, directing them up to search every comer of the floor.

It was only a matter of time, he knew. The girl—or whatever she was—was trapped. He had shut down the elevators and the Central Lab was on the 450th floor.

the end of the corridor, neither guard hesitated before opening fire.

Bratabratabratabrat!

Bratabratabratabrat!

Dodging the bullets, the girl looked up. A grille covered a ventilation duct in the ceiling. Bratabratabratabrat!

She jumped up, grabbed the grille and flung it at the guards.

They ducked, firing wildly.

Bratabratabratabrat!

When they opened their eyes, she was gone.

“Got her!”

“No you didn’t. I got her!”

“Neither of us did. She’s gone!”

The guards peered up into the ventilation duct. They saw a scurry of movement at the far end of the shaft.

“After you,” said one.

“No, after you,” said the other.

Just then the Chief of Security arrived on the scene. Looking up, he saw immediately what was happening.

“You two! Come with me,” he said, pulling himself up into the open shaft.

“After you.”

“No, after you.”

“Come on, dammit—move!”

As swiftly and surely as a cat, the red-haired girl (if indeed she was a girl) scurried through the vent shaft, looking for a way out.

Even though she moved at lightning speed, her face showed no sign of panic.

Her green eyes were clear. Her ruby lips were parted in a slight smile.

Behind her could be heard the clumsy scraping and kicking of the security guards, getting closer and closer.

The narrow shaft turned right, then left.

Turned up, then down.

With each turn the duct got smaller, until the girl was on all fours, and then crawling on her belly.

She was as fast on her belly as she had been on her feet!

Then she reached the end.

Punto. Finito. Period. A barred steel grille.

Through it she could see blue sky.

She smiled and kicked out the grille.

It spun off into empty space.

She slipped through the hole, and stepped out onto a narrow ledge.

The ledge was eleven inches wide. It went around the 454th floor of the Central Technologies Building, which took up an entire block on 55th Street in Manhattan.

The girl looked down.

Below, she could see hovering swarms of air cars and taxis, scooting between the towers.

And far below them, the detritus and litter that was the “midden” of modern post-industrial society, the uncollected trash of five hundred years that was easier to build on than to move or collect.

There was a rattle and scraping in the duct; footsteps and out-of-breath voices.

The girl moved a few steps farther out on the ledge.

She walked easily, as if she had no fear of heights. Her green eyes flashed as she took in the spectacular view of mid-millennial Manhattan.

The subways now ran vertically as well as horizontally, trains of cars supplementing and connecting the antiquated elevators.

The office buildings were interspersed with the skeletons of the “racktowers,” where space was rented for the modular apartments that could be unplugged and moved at the owner’s wish. The higher you lived, the more you paid.

The street was just a smudge, far, far below. No one lived there except the homeless and the outlaws who crept through the garbage, feeding on the trash and debris that fell from above.

The trickle-down theory at work.

If the scene was new to the girl, she didn’t show it. She hardly seemed to notice. She reached into one of the pockets on her skimpy outfit and pulled out the broken handle. She looked at it and shook her head, then put it back.

Bratabratabratabrat!

Shots ricocheted off the wall and the ledge, and the girl crept around the comer of the building, out of the line of fire.

A head stuck out of the shaft.

It was the Chief of Security. He looked out, then down—then turned pale and pulled his head back in.

He turned to the two men right behind him.

“Follow her!”

A security guard stuck his head out. A hand and foot followed. He took one step out onto the narrow ledge, then turned and clambered back into the ventilation shaft.