Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (3 page)

Kai did not ask about what.

__________

Chill was gone for six weeks. The first ten days he called every evening. Ptolemy traced the call on his illegal Internet connection and told Kai and Misty that he was in Panama City. After the third week, they received only one faxgram.

Dear Mama, Ptolemy, and Kai,

I'm out in the backcountry down here and so I can't call. I'm fine and I will be home as soon as I can. Just a little more work and I'll have enough money to pay for Ptolemy's home education and we don't have to worry about what anybody else wants to say. Take care of your grandmother and Kai, Ptolemy. I'll be home soon.

Chill

"Thill din't write nuthin' like that," Misty Bent said after Kai had read it out loud to both her and Ptolemy.

"Sure didn't," Popo agreed. "Chilly never say no Ptolemy when he talkin' t' me."

"He must have had somebody write it for him. Maybe he dictated it over some kind of radio system," Kai said to allay the family's fears. She wasn't worried whether the faxgram came from Chill. What bothered her was how the ex-convict intended to make so much money in Panama.

The Vietnamese nurse had found a home in southern Mississippi. She loved the land and the people more than her native Hanoi, and more than Princeton, where she'd spent so many years going to school. The people reminded her of the stories that her grandmother told. The great jungles and the wild forests. By 2010 Vietnam was divided into twelve highly developed corporate micro-states that produced technical and biological hardware for various Euro-corps. Gone were the farms and rice paddies. The back roads were paved with Duraplas, and the giant cobra was extinct. Kai reveled in the Mississippi heavy air and the meandering back roads, the thick drawl on the English words and the life that sprang from every tree and rock and stream.

And then there was the child who listened to God. Kai had only lived in Hazel's house since Chill had been gone, sleeping on the Bents' couch, but she had felt that that house was her home since the day she'd crossed the threshold.

__________

Six weeks after Chill had gone a private ambulance drove up the Bents' dirt driveway. The attendants were from New Orleans, as was the van. The two white men rolled Chill into the house on the wheeled stretcher.

Chill was there under a thin sheet. His head was shaven and his eyes were covered with bandaged gauze. The form his legs made under the sheet was straight and motionless.

"Where should we bring 'im, ma'am?" one of the attendants asked Kai Lin.

"What's happened to him?"

"Uncle Chilly!" Ptolemy screamed in dismay.

"Don't know nuthin' 'bout that, ma'am," the second paramedic said. "We just picked him up from the airport with instructions to brang 'im here."

"Am I in the livin' room?" Chill asked.

"Yeah," the paramedic replied.

"Chilly!" Ptolemy yelled again. He hid behind Kai Lin's red silk dress, afraid of the white men, the chrome stretcher, and Chill's decimated form.

"Then leave me here. Kai?"

"Yes?"

"Give these men fifty dollars each. I'll pay you back later on." The white men were surprised at the generosity of the black paraplegic. They both thanked him, gave their apologies to Kai Lin, and left.

__________

"There's a clinic in the hills," Chill was saying. They had wheeled him into his mother's room and cranked his cot until he could sit up too.

"What have they done to my baby?" Misty cried. But when Chill smiled in a way that Misty hadn't seen since he was a child, her tears subsided.

". . . up there they cain't be bothered and so they can operate with no problem. They wanted my eyes--"

"And you give 'em up?" Misty said, louder than she had spoken in years.

"That was one million seven hundred an' fi'ty thousand," Chill said. "My eyes were a perfect fit for a Swiss banker's son who lost his in a ski accident. But when I was there they had a emergency. It was a Russian general needed the nerve in the spine where he could use his legs. They offered two million for that. I figgered that if I cain't see then I really don't need to walk. One thing led to another and I got outta there wit' six million. They transferred the whole thing into my name 'fore I went under the knife."

"Why you do that, Uncle Chilly?" Ptolemy asked.

Chill put his hands up in front of him and found his nephew's face.

"I was worried that I couldn't keep on payin' for the house, baby boy. You know mama's social security an' disability been payin' for me, so now my disability be payin' for her."

"Thill, no," Misty cried.

"It's okay, Mama. You know I been lost outside'a the house anyway. Anytime I ain't here I just wanna come back an' hear you laughin' or Popo readin' an' playin' his radio. Don't worry, Mama. Everything's fine now."

5

That night, when Misty and Ptolemy were asleep in their beds, Kai and Chill had their talk.

"I want you to marry me," Chill said, his empty eye sockets staring at the ceiling.

"What?"

"I cain't see. I cain't walk. I got the money to p'otect Popo but I cain't move to block a thing if they wanna come in here and take him away from us. But if you marry me, and move wit' us to Jackson, we could get a big house and a Prime Com Link for Popo's education. You could have boyfriends and free time, just look after Mama and Popo like you been doin'. Just do that an' we can share the money in style."

Chill could have told no more about what she was thinking even if he still had eyes. Kai's face was impassive, even hard.

She blinked once and fifteen seconds passed.

She blinked again.

"Okay," she whispered. "I accept."

"You do?"

"Of course. It's a trust. It's holy."

"There's one thing I gotta tell ya," Chill said.

"What's that?"

"I sold my manhood too. With no legs I knew I wouldn't be able to function no way. So you wouldn't be marryin' a man at all."

"Oh yes I will be," she said. She took his hand in hers and hummed a song she'd once heard on the radio and thought that she'd forgotten.

6

No one believed the lie about a fall at work that left Chill Bent paralyzed, blind, and rich from the insurance he got. They all knew that poor men and women often sold pieces of themselves to the rich in order to give their children a chance. Hazel Bernard tried to get the marriage between Chill and Kai annulled but failed. At the age of nine, in 2030, Ptolemy Bent joined the Jesse Jackson Gymnasium for Advanced Learners so he would have a social life among other children. But his education came from tutors and texts provided by the Prime Com Link. He worked hard on his radio receiver, which he never discussed outside of home, and one day he convinced Kai to buy him a $300,000 transmitter, the state of the art in amateur radio communications.

__________

"Chilly, you awake?"

"Is that you, Popo?" The ex-convict put out a hand to gently caress his nephew's face.

"Uh-huh."

"You got peach fuzz on your chin."

"You always say that. When you gonna call it a beard?"

"Peach fuzz," Chill said behind a chuckle.

"I made contact, Chilly."

"You did?"

"Uh-huh. An' I told 'im 'bout you."

"You think the big man'd have somethin' better t' do than worry 'bout a blind an' crippled thief."

"You the best man in the world, Uncle Chilly. He said he wanna meet you, you'n Gramma Misty."

"Really? He said that? Damn. Well I guess it won't be too much longer anyways. Kai said that the doctor said that my kidneys wouldn't get a nickel down in Panama."

"You don't have to die, Chilly," Ptolemy said, his voice wavering between high and low adolescent tones.

"I'm'a just put some wires on your head. You and Grandma."

"You there, Mama?" Chill called out.

"Yeth, baby. Popo gonna make uth out a ethperiment. He thure look fine." Misty's ancient voice was weaker. Chill knew that time was short for both of them.

"I bet he do, Mama."

After what seemed like hours of preparation, Ptolemy said, "Ready?" Then came a white-hot flash at Chill's temples and then the feeling of electric fingers going up under his skull and into the brain. Suddenly he could see again. Ptolemy was sitting there looking at another Chill lying on the bed. The boy, almost a man, wearing a lavender andro-suit with no shirt, had hair that made him look like the king of lions. He was still skinny, and darker than he had been.
From brown to black,
Chill thought, and then he was gone forever from the Earth. First his thoughts were elsewhere, and then slowly, electron by electron, the matter of his soul was transported. Somewhere there were bursts of stars and lines of reality that connected uncounted voices.

God,
Chill thought. But there was no answer to his assertion. A halo of winking lights radiated next to him, mingled with him, and he knew in some new language that this was his mother. The word
freedom
occurred to Chill, but the meaning faded with the clarity of his light. So much he knew that he was unaware of. So much beyond him even then.

It's like I'm a breath,
he wanted to say.

Yes,
Misty's new form replied.

__________

Ptolemy Bent was arrested and tried for the euthanasia killing of his uncle and grandmother. He was sentenced to twelve years to life in a private prison run by the Randac Corporation of Madagascar. At the trial God was ruled an improbability.

"He is aware that he disintegrated their brain tissues," claimed Morton Tremble, the prosecution's expert psychiatrist, "by using feedback from a powerful radio transmitter. Maybe he thought, consciously, that he was sending their souls to God or whatever. But in truth he only did this because both were so close to death already, as he himself has testified. He admitted that he knew their bodies, including their nervous systems, would die. This is a classic case of mercy killing. And Ptolemy Bent was completely aware that euthanasia is against the law."

Kai Lin, who was by Ptolemy's side every day of the trial, stored his radio equipment in her basement. She never visited her husband's grave.

The Greatest

1

"Ladies and gentlemen!" veteran ring announcer L.Z. Scappelli proclaimed. "Now you're in for a treat. For the first time anywhere the Universal Boxing Authority has sanctioned a pro heavyweight bout between the sexes."

A whole tier of seats taken up by women rose in loud acclaim in the vast underground complex of Manhattan's Madison Stadium. So boisterous was their cheering that the boos and hisses from elsewhere around the arena were drowned out. Women hooted and screamed; they rose to their feet and pounded the plastic backs of their chairs.

__________

"It's quite a scene tonight, isn't it, Billy?" said audiovid announcer Chet Atkinson. The fight was blacked out in the Twelve Fiefs of New York City because the main event--Brigham versus Zeletski--hadn't sold out the 120,000-stadium seats by fight time.

"You better believe it," Billy "the Eclipse" Bonner, onetime UBA lightweight champion, replied. Each word seemed to roll around on a bed of marbles before leaving his mouth. "The ladies want to see blood."

"What do you think about Fera Jones stepping into the ring against a man, Champ?"

"Well, Chet, I'm old-fashioned. I don't like to see ladies with the gloves on. I mean, even the WUBA is too much for me to watch sometimes. But there's no denying that women have been becoming more competitive. They hit harder and move faster every year."

"So do you think she has a chance tonight?"

"I don't think she'll get hurt too bad," Bonner replied. "Jellyroll is more of an act than he is a fighter. They set him up with opponents that have no chance against him. I mean, the crowd loves it, I do too, but Jellyroll tipped the scale at almost three-eighty at weigh-in, and he doesn't have a knockout punch."

"Three-eighty," Chet agreed. "And six seven. But Fera Jones weighs an impressive two-sixty and stands six foot nine. She has the reach, age, and height advantage over Jellyroll. And she looks like she was molded from iron. I mean, just look at the muscle definition on those legs."

"Nice legs, I'll agree with that, Chet. But this is a brutal sport. Man is the warrior. I don't care how much the Radical Feminist Separatist movement wants to play with genetics, a man will always come out on top in one of these wars."

__________

It was never proven that Fera Jones was the product of SepFem-G, an outlawed genetics program that came out of the feminist studies department at Smith College. Actually, there was evidence to the contrary. Fera lived with, and was managed and trained by, her father, Leon Jones, a onetime history professor at U. Mass. Not that there weren't lots of questions about them. Leon was Negro, medium brown with thick, kinky hair, generous lips, and a broad nose. Fera was a natural, if dirty, blond, with skin too dark to be Caucasian but not exactly the right coloring for Negro, either. Her mother was unknown to the public. Fera claimed that she didn't know anything about her mother.

"Your father must have known who she was," a woman's magazine journalist once suggested in an interview.

"If I bring it up I can see the hurt in him," Fera replied. It was the most she ever said about her mother publicly.

There were plenty of questions about Fera Jones. She was tall enough to play men's basketball and strong enough to compete in a strongman contest. She'd run through the Women's Universal Boxing Association's list of contenders in one year--all wins by knockout. In twenty-four fights she'd gone to the second round only once. That was against Slippery WandaJoe Williams. WandaJoe managed to avoid Fera's haymakers for the first three minutes, but ninety-one seconds into round two she caught a fist that was what Fera called her tooth decay preventative.

"If the tooth is out it can't get decay," she joked with Billy Bonner after the bout. Fera was so proficient that many said she was actually a man trying to make it by pretending to be a woman. The WUBA had performed DNA tests proving Fera's gender (also disproving the theory that she was the product of a separatist test tube). But the public was not convinced by computer graphs and petri dishes. So Fera went on the X-rated people's access vid show
Behind Sammy Rosen's Blue Door
. Sammy's usual guests were porn performers who had special talents and fan clubs, marital aids to hawk, or a performance schedule that needed advertising. Fera had only one thing to prove on Sammy's show. When he tried to kiss her she pushed him to the floor and held him down with her bare foot. Then she pulled off her dress and told the vidder to get close-ups of her breasts and genitals.