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Nalo Hopkinson: Midnight Robber

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Nalo Hopkinson Midnight Robber

Midnight Robber: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Maybe all that done now? How it could done?

Antonio tapped the music off. Under his breath, he ordered his earbug to punch up his home. It bleeped a confirmation at him in nannysong, and his eshu appeared in his mind’s eye.

“Hot day, Master,” grumbled the house eshu.

Today the a.i. had chosen to show itself as a dancing skeleton. Its bones clicked together as it jigged, an image the eshu was writing onto Antonio’s optic nerve. It sweated robustly, drops the size of fists rolling down its body to splash praps! on the “ground” then disappear. “What I could do for you?” The eshu made a ridiculously huge black lace fan appear in one hand and waved it at its own death’s head face.

“Where Ione?”

“Mistress taking siesta. You want to leave a message?”

“Backside. No, never mind. Out.” Antonio flicked the music station on again, then nearly went flying from his seat as the pedicab hit a rut in the road.

“Sorry, Compère,” laughed the runner. “But I guess you is big mayor, you could get that hole fill up in no time, ain’t?”

Runners didn’t respect nobody, not even their own mother-rass mayor. “Turn left here so,” Antonio said. “That road will take we to the side entrance.” And it was usually deserted too. He didn’t feel like playing the skin-teeth grinning game today with any of his constituents he might run into: Afternoon, Brer Pompous, how the ugly wife, how the runny-nose little pickney-them? What, Brer Pompous, Brer Boasty, Brer Halitosis? Performance at the Arawak Theatre last night? A disgrace, you say? Community standards? Must surely be some explanation, Brer Prudish, Brer Prune-face. Promise I go look into it, call you back soon. No, Antonio had no patience for none of that today.

Slap-slap of the runner’s feet. Quashee-Ione. Jangling quattro music in the air. Quashee-Ione, eh-eh.

Too many hard feelings between him and Ione, oui? Too much silence. When she had gotten pregnant, it had helped for a little while, stilled some of her restlessness. And his. He had been delighted to know he would have a child soon. Someone who would listen to him, look up to him. Like Ione when she’d been a green young woman. When little Tan-Tan had arrived, she’d been everything Antonio could have wished for.

In a hard-crack voice, the runner broke into a raucous song about a skittish woman and the lizard that had run up her leg. Antonio clenched his teeth into a smile. “Compère!” he shouted. She didn’t reply. Blasted woman heard him easy enough when it suited her. “Compère!”

“Yes, Compère?” Sweety-sweety voice like molasses dripping.

“Please. Keep it quiet, nuh?”

The woman laughed sarcastically.

“Well, at least when we get closer to my home? Uh… my wife sleeping.”

“Of course, Compère. Wouldn’t want she for hear you creeping home so early in the day.”

Bitch. Antonio stared hard at her wide, rippling back, but only said, “Thank you.”

Antonio knew full well that his work as mayor was making him unpopular to certain people in this little town behind God back. Like this pedicab operator right here.

And like she’d read his mind, the blasted woman nuh start for chat? “Compère, me must tell you, it warm my heart to know important man like you does take pedicab.”

“Thank you, Compère,” Antonio said smoothly. He knew where this was going. Let her work up to it, though.

“Pedicab is a conscious way to travel, you see? A good-minded way. All like how the cab open to the air, you could see your neighbours and them could see you. You could greet people, seen?”

“Seen,” Antonio agreed. The runner flashed a puzzled look at him over her shoulder. She made a misstep, but caught herself in the pedicab’s traces. “Careful, Compère,” Antonio said solicitously. “You all right?”

“Yes, man.” She continued running. Antonio leaned forward so she could hear him better.

“A-true what you say. Is exactly that I forever telling Palaver House,” he said in his warmest voice. “In a pedicab, you does be part of your community, not sealed away in a closed car. I tired telling Palaver House allyou is one of the most important services to the town.”

The runner turned right around in her traces and started jogging backwards. She frowned at him. “So if we so important, why the rass you taxing away we livelihood? We have to have license and thing now.” Her betel-red teeth were fascinating. “I working ten more hours a week to pay your new tariff. Sometimes I don’t see my pickney-them for days; sleeping when I leave home, sleeping when I come back. My baby father and my woman-them complaining how I don’t spend time with them no more. Why you do this thing, Antonio?”

Work, he was forever working. And the blasted woman making herself such a freeness with his name, not even a proper “Compère.” Antonio ignored her rudeness, put on his concerned face. “I feel for you and your family, sister, but what you want me do? Higglers paying their share, masque camps paying theirs, pleasure workers and rum shops paying theirs. Why pedicab runners should be any different?”

She had her head turned slightly backwards; one eye on him, one on the road. He saw the impatient eye-roll on the half of her face that she presented. “Them does only pay a pittance compared to we. Let we stop with the party line, all right?”

“But…”

“Hold on.” She wasn’t listening, was jogging smartly backwards to the road’s median to avoid a boulderstone. Her feet slapped: Quashee-Ione. Quashee-Ione? She pulled the pedicab back into the lane, turned her back to him, picked up speed. Over her shoulder: “Truth to tell, we come to understand allyou. The taxes is because of the pedicabs, ain’t?”

Antonio noted how businesslike her voice had become, how “me” had multiplied into “we.” Guardedly he asked her, “How you mean, sister?”

“Is because we don’t use a.i.’s in the pedicabs.”

An autocar passed in the opposite direction. The woman reclining inside it looked up from her book long enough to acknowledge Antonio with a dip of her head. He gave a gracious wave back. Took a breath. Said to the runner, “Is a labour tax. For the way allyou insist on using people when a a.i. could run a cab like this. You know how it does bother citizens to see allyou doing manual labor so. Back-break ain’t for people.” Blasted luddites.

“Honest work is for people. Work you could see, could measure. Pedicab runners, we know how much weight we could pull, how many kilometres we done travel.”

“Then…” Antonio shrugged his shoulders. What for do? A-so them want it, a-so it going to stay.

The woman ran a few more steps, feet slip-slapping Ione? Ione? An autocar zoomed past them. The four people inside it had their seats turned to face one another over a table set for afternoon tea. Antonio briefly smelt cocoa, and roast breadfruit. He barely had time to notice the runner give a little hop in the traces. Then with a jolt and a shudder the pedicab clattered through another pothole. Antonio grabbed for the armrests. “What the rass…?”

“Sorry, Compère, so sorry.”

“You deliberately…”

“You all right, Compère? Let me just climb up and see.”

“No…” But the woman was already in the cab beside him. She smelt strongly of sweat. She hummed something that sounded like nannysong, but fast, so fast, a snatch of notes that hemidemisemiquavered into tones he couldn’t distinguish. Then Antonio heard static in his ear. It faded to an almost inaudible crackle. He tapped his earbug. Dead. He chirped a query to his eshu. No answer. He’d been taken offline? How the rass had she done that? So many times he’d wished he could.

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