Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

“Thank you for the travelogue. Is there a reason for it?” asked Constantine.

Mary shook her head. “Just being friendly. It’s nice to have someone to speak to. Talking’s nice, don’t you think? It’s nice to have a conversation.”

Constantine muttered something in reply. Mary chatted away happily.

“When I first started out I had a comfort family set up for me in Brazil. I did a lot of work in Brazil. I was there a lot of the year. Hans, that was my husband…well, he thought he was anyway. You know how it is. Two kids. Ellie and Gerhardt. It was somewhere to go and have a decent meal and just chat with someone…”

Her voice tailed off as she strolled on, lost in thought. Constantine glanced at her and felt a sudden stab of pity. She was obviously living in much reduced circumstances now. The shabbiness of what had been an expensive suit and her once exercise-honed body running to alcohol-fueled fat suggested someone who had been high up within a company hierarchy. This physical manifestation of failure walking alongside him reminded Constantine of the pressure to succeed he himself was under. He turned his face from the narrow alley squeezed between two yellow stone cottages. A silver strand of nothingness showed at its end.

The gap beneath the sky was spreading. He was going mad.

Mary seemed to rouse herself.

“What about you, then?” she said. “Do you have a comfort family?”

“Me? No,” said Constantine, his mind still elsewhere.

Mary gave a knowing laugh. “Of course not,” she said, a note of bitterness creeping into her voice. “I forgot. It’s different for men, isn’t it? I bet you’ve got a string of skinny, unwitting twenty-year-old girls lined up from here to Alaska. All their details looked up from your company database and a script worked out so you can flatter your way into their apartments and their panties. I remember what it used to be like. It feels more moral to you than using a brothel, doesn’t it? And you don’t get your dinner cooked in a brothel, or your shirts ironed, or someone sitting up at night watching football with you, or slicing lemons when you have a cold, or-”

“I’m married.”

Mary stopped dead, her hand pulling Constantine backward. She opened her mouth wide in disbelief and began to laugh.

“Married? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It means something to me,” said Constantine simply. Mary brought her face close and breathed a sweet, alcohol breath over Constantine. She looked up into his eyes.

“I don’t believe it. You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

She turned around again, took his hand, and began to drag him back along the street.

“Come on. We’re going to be late.”

Night shadows were spreading. White light shone from the spherical paper lanterns strung in looping lines between the chestnuts and limes that marched up the central lawn. A white barge came gliding down the canal, elderly people enjoying their pre-dinner drinks on the deck; the smell of prawns being fried in garlic and butter wafted from the open windows of the galley below.

– This is taking too long, said Blue, his voice seeming too loud in the stillness that was settling with the evening.-Are we being led into a trap?

– I can’t see anything around us, answered Red.-Besides, I trust her. Her body language backs up her words. I don’t think she’s keeping anything from us.

– I…agree, said Blue, — but I can’t help thinking that someone with the ability to train as a ghost might have enough skill to conceal her motives, even from us.

“Be quiet,” muttered Constantine, concealing his mouth with his hand and pretending to cough. “She’s watching me. She knows I’m listening to you. You’re supposed to be a secret, remember?”

Mary was gazing up at him again, her eyes full of cool appraisal. Constantine nodded toward the barge.

“That smells delicious, doesn’t it?” he said.

A pair of tramlines emerged from a side street to their left and swept round to follow the axis of the central strip of grass. The line of trees now moved to one side to make way for it. They walked on in silence for a while. Presently a tram came bumping along, an ancient construction of wood and metal that clanked and rattled as it trundled down the rails. It slowed sufficiently for Mary and Constantine to climb on board and then grumbled to itself as it sped up again. The pair sat down on a bench of varnished wooden slats. Constantine rubbed his fingers approvingly across the warm wood.

“When Stonebreak was set to build itself, they wanted the best of all worlds,” said Mary. “The Australian and Southeast Asian government wanted it to be both ultra modern and ultra traditional. That’s why you can still see the VNM bodies in the I-station, and that’s why the tramlines zigzag around this level. Some thought trams were too modern to be ultra traditional, so it was decided that no line should run the entire length of any street. It will be a twisty journey from here to the locks.”

“Fine,” said Constantine, surprised to realize how relaxed he was becoming. If it hadn’t been for his encounter with Mary, he would have gone straight to his hotel and would now be worrying about tomorrow’s business. Instead, he was seeing the sights of Stonebreak. Even the mystery of his guide’s purpose and identity was giving him something else to think about for a while. It helped that Mary did not seem threatening in any way.

“You can feel it, can’t you?” said Mary.

“What?”

“A sense of freedom. I can see it in your face. Everyone thinks that being a ghost means you can do what you want, whenever you want, but they don’t get it, do they? They don’t know what it’s like to be regularly exposed to indifference. Most people think it would be good to get out from under the noses of Social Care, but you miss it once it’s gone. What if you fall ill, and there’s no one there to see it? That’s when you regret the millions of credits worth of software constantly combing the world’s databases and removing each and every trace and reference to you. What if you were drunk and fell from this tram into the canal? There would be no record of your destination or your point of origin. Every computer sensor you’ve passed has been deliberately turned the other way as soon as they detected your bio signature. No one is waiting up for you somewhere because your employers want it that way, so no one would even know that you were splashing feebly in the water down there in an alcoholic haze.”

She sighed and leaned back in her chair.

“And that’s not the worst part, is it? It’s the loneliness.”

She wiped a fat hand across the corners of her eyes and sighed, then she sat up and forced a smile.

“Still. It could be worse. Maybe it’s not so bad for you. You’ve got the voices in your head for company, after all.”

“Voices?” Constantine forced a puzzled expression onto his face.

Mary put a hand to her mouth and raised one shoulder a little. “Oops. Sorry. Silly me. They’re supposed to be a secret, aren’t they? Pretend I didn’t say anything. Nothing about voices.”

She giggled and nudged him in the ribs.

“Still, I’ll tell you something. You want to be careful when those voices that don’t exist are speaking to you. Your whole face relaxes and it makes you look really stupid. I suppose they don’t think to control your expression. You should tell them that. Oh, sorry, I mean, if they really existed, you should.”

She giggled again, then sighed.

“I wish this tram would get a move on.”

They reached the inner perimeter of the second level. Just beyond the stone streets, a glass cliff rose into the sky, marking the border between the old and the new. Through this transparent wall Constantine could see the skeleton of the land: silver-grey bodies of VNMs in thick-plaited strands, rising in smooth curves and waves to support the next level up. The scene reminded Constantine of a mangrove swamp, a tangle of short-trunked trees with wide-spreading roots and intertwining branches, holding up the roof of the world. Staring at the greyish tangled trunks before him, Constantine had his first sudden inkling of the sheer size of Stonebreak, and the huge effort that had gone into its construction. He felt quite humbled.