David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Hae-Joo told me I could trust him or be dead in a matter of minutes.

I nodded assent: I would trust him.

But he had already lied to you about his ID—why believe him this time? How did you know for sure he wasn’t abducting you?

I did not know: I was not sure. My decision was based on character . I could only hope time would prove it well founded. We abandoned the ancient Cavendish to his fate and fled to our own: down corridors, thru fire doors, avoiding lites and people where possible. Hae-Joo carried me down flites of stairs: we could not wait for me to navigate them unaided.

In a subbasement Mr. Chang waited in a plain ford. There was no time for greetings. The vehicle screamed into life and accelerated thru tunnels and empty ford parks. Mr. Chang glanced at his sony, reporting that the slipway still appeared to be accessible. Hae-Joo ordered him to proceed there, then got a flickknife from his pouch and sliced off the tip of his left index, gouged, and xtracted a tiny metallic egg. He threw it out of the window and ordered me to discard my Soulring similarly. Xi-Li also xtracted his Soul.

Unionmen really cut out their own eternal Souls? I always thought it was an urban myth …

How else can a resistance movement elude Unanimity? They would risk detection whenever they passed a traffic lite otherwise. The ford rounded a ramp when a blizzard of phosphate fire shot in the windows; glass filled the air, metal panels groaned; the ford scraped along walls, jarring to an abrupt stop.

From my crouch I heard coltfire.

The ford wailed and sped into motion. A body thumped off the vehicle.

A human wailing, of unendurable pain, rose from the front seat: Hae-Joo held a handcolt against Xi-Li’s head and fired.

What? His own man? Why?

Unanimity dumdums combine kalodoxalyn and stimulin. Kalodoxalyn is a poison that fries the victim in agony, so his screams give his position away; stimulin prevents him from losing consciousness. Xi-Li slumped over into a fetal position. Hae-Joo Im the cheerful postgrad I had known was gone, so thoroly that I wondered now if he had ever really been there. Rain and wind blew in. Mr. Chang drove at hi speed down a garbage alley barely wider than the ford, ripping out drainpipes. He slowed as he joined the campus perimeter road. Ahead were red-and-blue flashes at the campus gates. A hovering aero thrashed the trees, sweeping the traffic with a searchlite; loudspeakers gave incoherent orders to who knew whom. Mr. Chang warned us to brace, killed the engine, and swerved off the road. The ford bucked; its roof whacked my head; somehow Hae-Joo wedged me under him. The ford gathered speed, weight, and weightlessness. The final drop shook free an earlier memory of blackness, inertia, gravity, of being trapped in another ford. Where was it? Who was it?

Bamboo splintered, metal tore, my ribs slammed the floor.

Silence, finally. The ford was dead. Next, I heard insect songs, rain on leaves, followed by urgent whispers drawing near. I was crushed under Hae-Joo; he stirred, groaning. I was bruised but unbroken. Needlelite hurt my eyes. An outside voice hissed, “Commander Im?”

Mr. Chang responded first: “Get this door open.”

Hands lifted us out. Xi-Li’s body was left where it lay. I glimpsed a succession of anxious faces, resolute faces, faces that rarely slept: a company of Unionmen. I was carried into a concrete shack and lowered down a manhole. “Don’t worry,” Hae-Joo told me, “I’m right here.” My hands gripped rusty rungs; my knees scraped along a short tunnel. More arms lifted me into a mechanic’s shop, then lowered me into a smart two-seater xec ford. I heard more orders issued, then Hae-Joo swung in and started the engine. Mr. Chang had disappeared once again. Ahead, garage doors jerked open. Next, I remember gentle rain, suburb back-lanes, then a jammed thruway. The fords around us held lonely commuters, couples on dates, small families, some placid, some rowdy. When Hae-Joo spoke, finally, his voice was cold. “If a dumdum ever scratches me, euthanaze me as quickly as I did Xi-Li.” I had no response. “You must have a hundred questions, Sonmi. I beg your patience a little longer—if we are captured now, believe me, the less you know the better. We have a busy nite ahead of us. First, we’re paying a visit to Huamdonggil.” Do you know that zone of the conurb, Archivist?

My ministry would xpel me if I were ever Eyed in that untermensch slum. But please describe it for my orison .

Huamdonggil is a noxious maze of low, crooked ramshacks, flophouses, pawnshops, drug bars, and comfort hives, covering perhaps five square miles southeast of Old Seoul Transit Station. Its streets are too narrow for fords to enter; its alleys reek of waste and sewage. ShitCorp goes nowhere near that quarter. Hae-Joo left the ford in a lockup and warned me to keep my head hooded: fabricants stolen here end up in brothels, made serviceable after clumsy surgery. Purebloods slumped in doorways, skin enflamed by prolonged xposure to the city’s scalding rain. One boy lapped water from a puddle on his hands and knees. “Migrants with enceph or leadlung,” Hae-Joo told me. “Hospitals drain their Souls until they’ve got only enough dollars for a euthanasia jab—or a ride to Huamdonggil. These poor bastards made the wrong choice.”

I could not understand why migrants fled Production Zones for such a squalid fate. Hae-Joo listed malaria, flooding, drought, rogue crop genomes, parasites, encroaching deadlands, and a natural desire to better the lives of their children. Papa Song Corp, he assured me, seems humane if compared to factories these migrants ran away from. Traffickers promise it rains dollars in the Twelve Cities, and migrants yearn to believe it; the truth never filters back, for traffickers operate only one way. Hae-Joo steered me away from a meowing two-headed rat. “They bite.”

I asked why the Juche tolerates this in its second capital.

Every conurb, my guide answered, has a chemical toilet where the city’s unwanted human waste disintegrates quietly, but not quite invisibly. It motivates the downstrata: “Work, spend, work,” say slums like Huamdonggil, “or you, too, will end your life here.” Moreover, entrepreneurs take advantage of the legal vaccuum to erect ghoulish pleasurezones for upstrata bored with more respectable quarters. Huamdonggil can thus pay its way in taxes and bribes. MediCorp opens a weekly clinic for dying untermensch to xchange any healthy body parts they may have for a sac of euthanaze. OrganiCorp has a lucrative contract with the city to send in a daily platoon of immune-genomed fabricants, similar to disastermen, to mop up the dead before the flies hatch. Hae-Joo then told me to stay silent; we had reached our destination.

Which was where xactly?

Xactly, I cannot say: Huamdonggil is not gridnumbered or charted. It was an overhanging mah-jongg house with a high lintel to keep the drainwater out, but I doubt I could identify the building again. Hae-Joo knocked on a reinforced door; an eyehole blinked, bolts unclacked, and a doorman opened up. The doorman’s bodyarmor was stained dark and his iron bar lethal looking; he grunted at us to wait for Ma Arak Na. I wondered if he wore a fabricant’s collar under his neckplate.

A smoky corridor bent out of view, walled with paper screens. I heard mah-jongg tiles, smelled feet, watched xotically clad pureblood servers carry trays of drinks. Their hassled xpressions morphed to girly delite every time they slid open a paper screen. I copied Hae-Joo’s xample and removed my nikes, dirtied by the Huamdonggil alleyways.

“Well, you wouldn’t be here if the news wasn’t bad.” The speaker addressed us from the ceiling hatch; whether her webbed lips, crescent eyes, and thorny voice were the results of genoming or mutation, I could not guess. Her gem-warted fingers gripped the hatch ridge.