Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

They had separated after the terms of the wager had been settled. Tournament rules. The first to take three sets was the winner. If Kismet was victorious Akwande would move his family to Atlantis and agree to have at least twelve dinners and twelve lunches a year with the king, whom he would refer to as sire. Additionally, he would agree to work for the off-planet colonization project, which he had never heard of before that day. It would be his job to recruit colonists to sign away their lives on Earth in order to assure the future of the race.

“The human race,” Kismet said with heavy emphasis.

Akwande wondered for the ninth time whether he should simply take Kismet up on his original offer. Generations of political struggle hadn’t been enough to fully liberate his people. The weight of poverty, the failure of justice, came down on the heads of dark people around the globe. Capitalism along with technology had assured a perpetual white upper class. Maybe by infiltrating the MacroCode infrastructure he could bring about change. If he took the job he could ensure the safety and future of his children. Maybe he could create an off-planet black colony. Maybe he could build a support station in the Sahara.

For the ninth time Akwande rejected Kismet’s offer. XX Y, the radical co-chair of RadCon6, had spoken the truth when he declared that “the purpose of our war is victory, not peace, not compromise.”

For his part, if Kismet lost he would give complete rights to his faux-petro project to the sovereign nation of Mali. He would not attempt a hostile takeover and he would protect that nation against other corporate aggressors.

“And if I lose, Doctor—”

“You will.”

“—what if I refuse to uphold my part of the bargain?”

“Do you know of Bjornn Svengaard?” asked Kismet.

Akwande did know of the Swedish explorer. His daughter, it was said, had been taken to the land of Home after Kismet proved to have a greater knowledge of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs than her father.

Some months later, Svengaard had been found dead in a hotel room in Jakarta. The death seemed natural, except that the baby finger of his left hand had been surgically removed.

“No,” Akwande said. “Who is he?”

Kismet smiled. “If you don’t know of him my point would be lost.”

When a lion roared Akwande jumped up from his grass mat. His heart was thumping. He could feel his muscles straining across bone.

He’s trying to waste me before the game, Akwande thought. With this realization came a smile. He allowed himself to fall into the deep patterns of his concentration meditation. The image of a man thrown from a ship in the middle of the ocean came to mind. He was swimming minute by minute, year after year. Swimming toward an alien shore or home, he knew not which. He swam over a deep slumber — exhausted, relaxed, and reprieved all in one.

The next morning, the hairless and naked black woman from the day before came to his room and informed him that they would be driving to the Blue Zone. She waited for him to dress and then drove him in an electric cart down a paved road through a palm forest.

“What’s your name?”

“Eye.”

“The pronoun?”

“The organ.”

“Why do you humiliate yourself for this rich white man?” Akwande asked, certain that his question would disconcert and embarrass the woman.

“It is you who feel humiliation,” she said, eyes on the road, more calm, Akwande thought, than stone.

“It’s not me,” he said, “stripped naked, all my hair shaved off. What am I supposed to think when a woman sits next to me like that? Out here?”

“If you want there’s time before the game.”

“You offer me your body just like that and you say you haven’t debased yourself.”

Eye stopped the cart and turned her perfect body toward Akwande.

“In the beginning, there was nothing but cosmic dust,” she recited from Beginnings, the first book in the Infochurch bible. “This dust led unerringly to the multiplicity of God.”

“I know his party line, sister.”

“But do you know the sister?” she asked. “Did you know the Ugandan child whose parents survived the chemical baths rained down in the U.S. — Sudan wars? The child who was born eyeless and legless, with no hair and only stumps for hands? The child set out on a tiny wheeled wagon and made to beg from wealthy black American tourists? The child who prayed every night into the fiber line that goes to the great Idaho transmitter that sends our pleas to Infinity, God’s fifth child?”

This was Kismet’s genius. A direct link to God. A telephone to eternity. Actually, RadCon agents had learned, every prayer and confession was recorded and logged into what was called the Database of Hope.

“He did this for you?” Akwande asked, looking into her passionate and empty eyes.

“Yes.”

“Then drive on.”

“When do we get to the Blue Zone?” Akwande asked Eye after some minutes.

“We are there.”

“But the color—”

“Is an illusion,” she said, finishing his sentence.

They came to a stop at a stand of bamboo.

A man in a scarlet robe was waiting for them. He was short, white, and rather stocky. He had also been trans-capped. The top of his skull had been removed and replaced with a transparent Synthsteel dome. His brain was visible. Even small vessels pumping blood were discernible. Trans-caps contained electrodes and transistors that could deliver impulses to the nervous system. They could also read electronic emanations. Transcappers could actually send and receive messages in a manner that could only be called telepathy.

“I am Tristan the First,” the robed man said in a mild tone. “Dominar of the Blue Zone.”

“Don’t you think that title sounds kinda ridiculous? I mean, my nine-year-old would say something like that after reading a comic vid.”

“Follow me.”

Akwande followed Tristan and was followed by Eye down a slender path of crushed white stone through the thick bamboo forest. The radical leader regretted his bravado, but it was an unavoidable side effect of his mental preparations to play. A silent mantra of rage and restraint sang at the back of each thought.

A few minutes more and they came to a large clearing that contained two professional-size tennis courts, one grass and the other clay. Behind the courts stood a large wall that seemed to be made from solid gold. But this, too, Akwande realized, was an illusion. Mayan hieroglyphs appeared in dark brown relief at various places upon the screen. These hieroglyphs came to life and took on the characteristics of their totems. They traveled the screen fighting, fornicating, or simply passing through one another.

“Good morning, citizen,” Dr. Kismet said, rising from a chair at the foot of the giant screen. “Grass or clay?”

“It’s up to you, Doctor,” Akwande said, suppressing the urge to add, you motherfucking bastard.

“But you are my guest.”

“But you are my elder.”

Akwande did have a preference, but he wanted to give his opponent a sense of control.

You could never beat him under normal circumstances, John Robinson, his coach, told him. But if you play to his weakness...

“Clay, then,” Kismet said. “Last night I sent a representative to your home and asked your wife for this.”

Eye came up with Akwande’s college tennis racket.

“I had it restrung,” Kismet said. “Test it to see if it is to your liking.”

Eye proffered a basket of bright orange tennis balls.

Akwande hit a few balls and nodded his satisfaction.

“What did Aja say, Eye?” Kismet asked.

“Tell Fayez that I hope he wins,” Eye reported.