The Pure Cold Light (7 page)

In his peculiar way of dealing with such pressures, he channeled his frustrations into a story for his daughter. He’d been a storyteller to her ever since she could remember. He never used a book; either he knew a thousand and one tales by heart or else made them up with ease.

“Once upon a time,” said her father, “there grew a many-mouthed monster, separate from the rest of the race but living right along side us, called the Eating Press. You’ve heard of it, honey, ’cause its name is legion today.

“This big hydra had a million heads and every one of them spoke the language of entertainment. The Eating Press—we’ll call it the EAP—thrived in hotels and casinos; it interviewed the stars of nightclubs and rock concerts and videofilms. It acquired its name because the EAP heads gathered information over free meals—huge, fabulous after-the-show feasts to rival the bacchanalia of ancient Rome. None of the other hydra-headed press monsters paid the EAP any mind. They hadn’t any reason to. After all, its words described mere entertainment—wasn’t even real entertainment itself. The EAP told what the entertainment looked like, between bites. The heads’ language ran to hyperbole. Nothing they spoke of actually referred to any tangible part of our lives. It was a big fantasy, but this country, my dear, has always preferred its fantasies and fables. Christopher Columbus is more fun as a great explorer than as a man who tortured the natives for a little gold.

“Now, America, at the time, was pretending to be the stellar economy of
all
time, separate from and never co-dependent upon any supposed world economy. Everybody from the tiny grocer to the lead-assed Congress blissfully went about denying the possibility that things couldn’t continue much longer.

“Meanwhile, way down in the shadows, like a tiny mammal hiding out from the prowling carnivorous dinosaurs, a second creature, related to the EAP, languished in near-obscurity. This one was called the Investigative Reporter, the INRE. This much smaller hydra lived and wrote and spoke its words around political centers of the country and the world. It saw corruption and felt compelled to expose it. It located subversion of power and focused public attention like a spotlight. In earlier times, people had slept well knowing that the INRE was out there, like a costumed crime-fighter, doing battle against the evils of their society. But the more the population leaned hard away from reality in order to maintain their delusions, the less and less interest they had in seeing evil exposed, and the more interest in hearing fairy stories like those the EAP told, which made everything glittery and everyone beautiful and sexy like on TV.

“One president called the INRE puppets and laughed at them to dismiss what they said about him. A few years after him, the staff of another president began subtly to reshape the heads.

“Now, this particular president couldn’t tell the difference between the INRE and the EAP. He’d known the latter most of his adult life, which he’d spent in the entertainment field. To him, a hydra was a hydra. He made nice and fed them all.

“I guess the INRE didn’t really notice at first how it had been remodeled; some heads had been lopped off, but new ones always grew. Before long the important thing had ceased to be facts and information, issues and answers, and we had us a whole new mess of media heads jabbering endless speculations in the face of nothing. The new heads had turned out to be EAPs.
 

“The officials of the government now controlled the INRE. They threw the parties, after all, and they told the beast what they wanted it to know. The INRE then went out and told the world what it had learned, which made the people in power very happy. In this way, properly nurtured, the creature’s career could now float along amicably for decades, and only its wardrobe suffered.

“In the meantime, the political parties of our tired two-party system became like two big diet soft-drinks—indistinguishable from each other and without any substance. Their candidates evaded confronting all the issues anyway, replacing intelligent discourse with snappy bits of verbiage that
sounded
like something without being anything at all. They learned this from, of all places, the videofilm. Entertainment. The EAPs.

“The INRE maintained a dignified air of false objectivity as it reported every pat pre-masticated phrase. It still doesn’t know what happened to it. A party is a party, after all.” He sighed.

“I fear, my beautiful, wise daughter, that reality is lost for good this time. News shows are vaudeville. However old the act, there’s an audience for it. Stories about ugly little saucermen and children like you possessed by demons, and women who hate men who hate women who hate a basic food group, and people who tattoo their fannies and pierce their unspeakables are a thousand times more interesting than society’s
actual
ills.” He’d looked off in the distance and smiled then. “The trouble is, that’s the truth. You like your flying saucer stories and your music makers. I know. Even I know that, and I’m an old fart who thinks it all stopped at Miles Davis. The difference—I hope—between you and that purblind public out there is that while you’re loving such goofy things, you know your history. You know your truth. You know there are things that are important, that the EAP doesn’t touch, and they aren’t quiz shows or talk shows or spacemen or pixies. You know to question everything, even your old man. He would like to be, but he’s not perfect. Things do get past him from time to time.”
 

He had touched the tip of her nose then, the way he had since she was a little girl.
Things do get past him.
He had no idea how prophetic a comment that would turn out to be, she thought now as she rode across the city.

The electric shuttle lifted her out of the old section in which Nebergall lived. Below the blue trestle, the convex south wall of the city slid past. Hundreds of people milled around the checkpoint. Maybe half of them would get work today—mostly on or around the market docks. Some—ones with craft skills, for example—would have permits and already be inside, many up in Overcity shops. An even luckier few would have maintenance jobs there. The people lining up below lived from one day to the next, some getting far enough ahead to buy a medical checkup or the fare to some other city where they might try their luck again. In the Midwest, out in the broad plains between urban centers, there were corporate-free zones—independent county-clusters where people grew their own crops, produced their own power with wind and water and recycled manure. A skilled craftsman or guild member was generally welcome, so she’d heard. It would be a subsistence existence, but more dignified than knifing your neighbors for a promise of work or, at best, work of limited duration. These people outside the wall were better off than those who lived on the ground inside, who had effectively been sealed in, but just barely: they had sanitation, running water, electricity, and homes. They’d been born into that middle stratum of inherited debt that could almost never be conquered, just passed down to the next generation.
 

The shuttle took her to Market Tower Station. From there, breezing through security, she entered the Overcity of Philadelphia—two million people, their whole lives lived in a hive of towers between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers.

Before the slide of the fossil fuel industries, the city had sprawled far and wide. Now it was condensed, its constituent parts drawn in as if to a magnetic core. The older city remained, like the ruins of Troy and Londinium upon which the modern world had set down, referred to disparagingly as the Undercity, and within the walls as the Box City. Like the encampment of a besieging army, it appeared to be completely cut off from the airy fortress towers she now strode through, which were accessible through skywalks, and all but sealed up at ground level.

From experience she knew that the two halves were still connected, and not just in the way that the Alien News Network and Happy Burger represented. Revelations did filter down over the wall. To Nebergall, to others like him. Robin Hood nowadays stole information from the rich. She was such a connection—a live wire between the upper and lower strata, a covert line of communication. Spawn of the INRE. She figured it would have made her father proud.

Chapter Six: Wearing Disguises

The dark man lay back on a tangle of blankets inside his prestigious plastic box, his digs, and idly rolled one tip of his mustache between his fingers. He was tall enough that his head touched the rear wall and his feet the moth-eaten yellow blanket that served as a door. He passed the time in leisurely fashion by listening to the squawking of his neighbors. From the containers fronting both sides of the narrow alley—the alleys like canyons in miniature—conversations intertwined on the breeze.

At the moment, right across the way, Mad John and Celine were balling hard enough to thrash the adjacent boxes, their neighbors stirred up like hornets and bellowing every foul word and threat they could think of. The tall dark man just grinned at the sound.

The digs consisted of opaque seaweed-plastic sheeting stitched together over uprights into a two-and-a-half-meter cube with an opening at each end—a comparatively high-rent box. He couldn’t stand upright inside it, but the blankets made reclining quite comfortable. He’d brought the blankets along upon moving in rather than trust the former tenant’s bedding, which at the very least had been lice-ridden.

What really made the digs prestigious was its location. It butted right up against the Liberty Bell enclosure; specifically, the rear wall of the box pressed against the low marble wall in back of the little building.

The Bell had become both symbolically and physically the heart of Box City. Only a handful of lucky Boxers could look at it whenever they pleased; it was the equivalent of a title, a knighthood—presuming anyone other than the dark man still remembered what a knighthood was.

The Liberty Bell was hardly the only historical site overtaken by the underclass. Congress Hall and Independence Hall—the white bell tower and cupola were visible from the alley outside—had been engulfed by hovels. So had the First Bank, the Second Bank, Library Hall, and Carpenters’ Hall. A veritable Sargasso Sea of tiny domiciles stretched from the Vine Street wall at the north end of the Mall all the way to Penn’s Landing, where the southern and the Delaware river walls met.

A few scattered boxes stood as much as three levels high, like scale model trinities, but most were no larger, sturdier or more elaborate than Lobly’s digs. At night, through plastic-foam walls, a thousand little tv screens flickered like fires, most of them hooked up to nothing and hissing with white noise, but curiously comforting somehow, like a memory of the womb. The electricity was stolen.

ScumberCorp would have liked to reclaim the monuments of Independence National Historical Park, if only to have them on hand as corporate iconography. The Liberty Bell would have looked great in the lobby beside the logo case containing the CEOs’ heads. However, the company did not dare try to take back the buildings for two simple reasons. First, any attempt to wrestle the Bell away from the Boxers would have been met by fierce resistance and followed by riots throughout the Undercity and maybe even (in the worst-case scenarios) storming into the towers. It had happened once before—the charred ruins of the Westphilly Conflagration of ’31 could still be seen across the river as a reminder of what the dispossessed could do if they got out of hand. People who might ignore the subtle clipping of their civil rights one by one would scream and go raving, foaming mad over some ridiculous bit of filched iconography: a bell, a flag.
 

The second reason SC left the Bell alone was fear of the inevitable outcry that would follow close upon the heels of the riots as all their competitors aligned against them. Even the Odie U.S. government might be pressured to take a stand against the company. So ScumberCorp pretended that the icon of liberty wasn’t
that
important; they maintained the opinion that the whole thing was a myth among the underclass; and they went ahead with an end run around the filthy beggars in the form of Orbitol.

As things stood, anyone who dared ask would be escorted through the confines of Box City to view the Bell. For a small fee, even people from the towers could visit it; they were not molested or harrassed in any way as long as they maintained the proper air of respect, which was more than any “Over” could say about treatment at the tower checkpoints. The Bell had about it something reverential, almost mystical. No one would have dared to interfere with another’s time inside the enclosure. Such action would have resulted in quick banishment to the Snake Pit, or worse. The dark man, who went by the name of Aswad Lobly, had already seen that happen.

***

Of contrary parts, Aswad Lobly was: a curiosity in an encampment full of oddities. So tall as to be almost hulking, at the same time he evinced grace and balance—an almost feline agility. He had chocolate skin and curly black hair plaited into something like a bound cylinder off the back of his head. His mustache was thick, and he kept the tips oiled to points like barbs. Above the right nostril he wore a large jeweled nose-ring, and in one ear, six hoops of silver. His voice was milky soft, nasal if you listened closely; the accent in his speech would have been hard to pin down. He disappeared sometimes for days on end.

When he wasn’t around, Lobly’s neighbors speculated that he was maybe homosexual and selling himself to clientele in the towers, or a pederast, or a procurer for pederasts, none of which was uncommon in Box City. He claimed to have arrived from the North, fleeing some trouble there that he refused to specify. No one had to ask about that. He wore layers of loose robes, red sneaker-boots, and either a tarboosh or a turban on any given day.

What none of Aswad Lobly’s neighbors remotely suspected—as he intended—was that he was a woman. Thomasina Lyell, to be exact.

***

Lyell made no attempt to check the gossip about her alter-ego; conflicting stories served to act like an extra layer of camouflage to protect her. All that was known about Lobly was that he might have been an Orbiter once but had taken the cure before he suffered any obvious tissue damage. Maybe he’d lost a couple toes, maybe not—the stories varied because she never spelled out anything.
 
Lobly could discourse quite knowledgeably about the
effects
of the drug, and that was really all the proof anyone needed. The Boxers’ inherent reticence to talk about their former lives or the families they’d fled, deserted, or slain helped her in this. Past lives didn’t exist down here. Box life was timeless.