Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

It took hours for Leon to locate every relevant file, but even then he knew nothing more than he had read in the newspapers.

It was late at night when Leon descended the great marble stairs of the library. The stone facade was one of the few landmarks left of old New York. He wondered if there was some dive west of the theater district that wouldn’t demand his ID-chip. In the old days he could have shacked up with a prostitute, but since prostitution had been legalized on the island of Manhattan the first thing she or her pimp asked for was the chip.

Maybe he could go to one of the illegal boutiques. There were still things that the law said could not be sold. But he was more likely to be arrested in an Eros-Haus than if he just slept in some doorway on a lower avenue.

He was walking down Lower Forty-second Street at about midnight. There were hundreds of bicyclists on the street, which had been closed to cars, trucks, and busses for over twenty years. A woman approached him. She had dark skin and yellow eyes. Her eyebrows were striated and there was the symbol of a supernova tattooed upon her left cheek. She wore a long and close-fitting gray dress that flared out at the knee. She stopped and looked him in the eye. At the same time someone passed close behind him. A hand touched him as if someone passing closely wanted to steer them away from a collision. The prickle of electricity danced at his elbow. He felt drawn to the woman and then he felt as if he were falling toward her.

“Damn! He’s heavy,” she said as she caught him.

He awoke on the sandy floor of a single-story stone building. The sun blazed through a window that had no glass. The air was very hot. He had on a pair of loose cotton pants with no shirt or shoes. He felt exceptionally refreshed. Even sleeping on the hard floor had not been uncomfortable.

Leon stood up and looked out upon a long footpath constructed from buff stone. The path was lined with houses of the same material. Seeing the dark-skinned people in whites and bright colors, speaking in an Arabic dialect that he couldn’t place, told the history professor that he was somewhere in northern Africa.

But where? There were very few cities in the world still built from natural materials. Africa had taken to the inexpensive advantages of plasteel and Synthsteel like every other part of the world.

The sun was hot and Leon needed a toilet.

“So you’re up, Professor,” a woman said.

The yellow-eyed, dark-skinned woman stood in the doorway. Her beauty still charmed Leon in spite of the fact that she had obviously been party to his abduction.

“Where am I?” he demanded.

“In the north of Africa, as I am sure you have already realized, in the desert. That’s all you really need to know.”

“And why have you brought me here?”

“To complete the experiment.” Her smile was almost disarming. She wore a simple cotton dress that was nearly as yellow as her eyes.

“I do not wish to be a party to any experiments,” Leon said boldly. “And I demand that you take me home immediately.”

“I’m sorry, but we cannot stop the experiment, Professor Jones. It is much more important than any individual’s desires.”

“I have never willingly signed on to any experiment and I refuse to cooperate with anything you have in mind.”

“Would you like me to take you where you can freshen up and use the facilities?” the woman responded.

The toilet was a long barrackslike building with a bank of commodes across from a line of showers. A young boy showered at the opposite end from Leon. He was dark-skinned, Arabic, and very interested in Leon. He stole glances while he should have been washing.

“Hi,” Leon said, thinking that he needed friends and information. The boy smiled and said something that the professor did not understand.

“Where are we?” he asked the child.

He was answered by a grin and a nod.

Later that morning the same boy brought food to Leon’s room. It was a grainy flat bread with a creamy paste of grains and beans. There was sweet-tasting fruit juice that was yellowish and pulpy and figs that had been stewed in their own liquor.

“Talib,” the boy said, pointing at his own chest.

“Leon,” the professor replied, making the same gesture.

There were no guards. The yellow-eyed woman was gone. And so Leon went out to reconnoiter his prison.

The town was a curving street of small houses and shops, all constructed of the same light-colored stone. The women did not cover their faces. Neither were there any buildings that seemed to have a religious purpose. Leon tried to speak to a few shop owners but there was no one who spoke English. There was no communication booth or even a phone, or policemen, or a tourist service. People paid for food and other necessities with coins of various sizes. On vacation Leon would have marveled at a place that was so primitive that they didn’t use the universal credit system.

After an hour Leon was completely lost. The streets curved continually and rarely intersected. Buildings all looked the same. He had no idea if the town went on for miles or if it was just a few blocks that spiraled around. He might have walked past the building he awoke in many times because he couldn’t distinguish one doorway from another.

His head was hurting under the hot sun and he took a seat at what seemed to be an outside café. A woman wearing a lacy blue wraparound top and a deep scarlet skirt came out and put a ewer of water and a thick glass cup next to him. She smiled and disappeared back into the building.

Leon drank and then covered his eyes with his hands, hoping to block out the light that seemed to pierce his brain.

“You’re feeling poorly, Professor?” Axel Bel-Nan asked. He was sitting across the table, wearing the same white doctor’s smock.

“I was wondering if you’d be here.” Leon spoke softly to control the throbbing pain in his head.

“Have you had enough exercise?” the doctor said. “Because you know we have lots of work to do.”

“I don’t have any work with you.”

“You are mistaken, my friend. We have the soul to find. We have that river Styx to cross. We have a god to slay, a universe to conquer, and Father Time himself to visit in his highest tower.” Bel-Nan smiled his crooked smile.

“How did you find me at the library?”

“The frequency emitted by your microstitches. It’s fairly simple to monitor.”

Pain wrenched through the core of Leon’s head. He lost consciousness for a moment.

“Help him, won’t you?” Bel-Nan said.

Hands took Leon by his skinny arms and lifted him. They took him into a doorway. He could smell meat frying and was grateful for the darkness. When they stopped moving there came mechanical sounds and then the feeling of descent.

He opened his eyes just when the elevator had reached its destination. They entered a large room where many people, of all races, bustled back and forth. The center of the room was a depression at least thirty feet across. At the bottom of the depression were four operating tables. On each table lay a human cadaver. One skinless corpse had a spiderlike crown of gold and silver on its head. Whenever the woman sitting at the control panel next to the corpse moved her hand, it moved. When she brought both hands together like a conductor, the body stood up from the table and struck a rather debonair pose for a skinless cadaver.

Leon was dropped into a PAPPSI gravity chair and pushed down a long hall lit by painful fluorescence. He was taken into a room and left there. He was grateful that the light was dim and the air was cool. He didn’t get out of his floating chair or even look around. His pain and exhaustion were so deep that he was asleep almost immediately.