The Dervish House (7 page)
Authors: Ian Mcdonald
She went to Sub-Aunt Kevser, Grand Vizier of the Gültaşlis, who called Leyla’s mother in Demre. The two women talked for an hour. It was decided. Leyla could share an apartment with suitable girls, provided she report to Sub-Aunt Kevser every Friday. No boys of course. There was a respectable girl from Antalya at the Business College who had a place, very central, very good value, in Beyoğlu. So Leyla entered the dervish house and discovered that it was central because it was tatty, sorrowful Eskiköy and good value because the apartment had not been renovated since the declaration of the Republic a century ago. Among three Marketing and Business students, Leyla had even less peace than she ever knew in Honda kitchen. They still called her Little Tomato. She liked it from the girls. Sub-Aunt Kevser called faithfully every Friday. Leyla answered as conscientiously. After two years she graduated with honours. Her parents came up on the bus for her graduation. The Istanbul branch moved family members around rooms like tiles in some plastic game to find space for the Demre tomato-growers in Runway View Apartments. Her mother clung to her father throughout the event at the campus. They gave her gold and had their eyes closed in every single photograph.
So: these four girls from the south who shared a small smelly apartment in Adem Dede tekke. They all graduated from Marmara Business College on the same day. Then one went to Frankfurt to work in an investment bank. One moved out to a Big Box start-up on a bare hill outside Ankara. Five weeks ago Zehra announced she was moving back to Antalya to marry a hitherto-unsuspected boyfriend and Leyla was left friendless cashless and jobless in the crumbling old dervish house, the only one not to have secured some shape of future. Istanbul was over-commodified with bright young girls with diplomas in marketing. Day by day, bill by bill, the money was running down but one thing was sure. She was never moving back to that apartment full of screaming lives and jet engines.
Leyla’s counting the steps: thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three. The lie of the streets is familiar: there’s the end of Vermilion-Maker Lane. She’s within a couple of hundred metres of home. She could slip back for comfortable shoes. Twelve minutes. If she can get up on to Inönü Cadessi there are buses and dolmuşes and even, though they would consume the last of her cash, taxis, but it all has to connect sweet and this is Istanbul. Her fingers shake from exertion. There is a humming in her ears. God she is so unfit. Too many nights in front of the television because it is voices and lives in the apartment. Then Leyla realizes it’s not the thrum of her own body. This is something outside her. She is fogged in a cloud of mosquitoes. She waves her hand at the swarm - shoo, evil things. The bulge of black sways away from her hand and thickens into a hovering dragonfly. Her breath catches in fear. Even Leyla Gütaşli has heard of these things. Up and down Vermilion-Maker Lane morning people stand in place while the dragonfly bots ascertain identities. The machine hovers on its ducted-fan wings. Hurry up hurry up hurry up. She’s got an interview in ten minutes, minutes
ten
. Leyla could crush the thing in her hand and be on her way but it scares her. Soldiers you can flash eyes at, flirt a little to make their day and they’ll nod you on. Soldiers are men. These things carry poison darts, she’s heard, evil little nanotechnology stings. Defy them at your peril. But it’s slow slow slow and she’s late late late. She blinks at a wink of laser light: the security drone is reading her iris. The dragonfly bot lifts on its wings then blows into a puff of mites. On your way now. Up and down the stairs, along Vermilion-Maker Lane, the dragonflies evaporate into smart smoke. She’s passed but she is horribly hideously fatally late.
ten
. Leyla could crush the thing in her hand and be on her way but it scares her. Soldiers you can flash eyes at, flirt a little to make their day and they’ll nod you on. Soldiers are men. These things carry poison darts, she’s heard, evil little nanotechnology stings. Defy them at your peril. But it’s slow slow slow and she’s late late late. She blinks at a wink of laser light: the security drone is reading her iris. The dragonfly bot lifts on its wings then blows into a puff of mites. On your way now. Up and down the stairs, along Vermilion-Maker Lane, the dragonflies evaporate into smart smoke. She’s passed but she is horribly hideously fatally late.
All the traffic that has been diverted from the bomb blast has been pushed on to Inönü Cadessi. Leyla wails at the immobile mass of vehicles, nose to tail, door to door. Horns blare constantly. She squeezes between the stationary cars. A little bubble citicar comes to a sudden stop and Leyla shimmies in front of it. The driver beats his hand on the horn but she sashays away with a cheeky wave of the hand. There’s a bus there’s a bus there’s a bus. She dances a deadly bullfighter’s dance through the pressing traffic, closer, ever closer to the bus. The line of passengers is getting shorter. The doors are closing. Damn these stupid shoes, what possessed her to put them on? Men never look at shoes. The bus is pulling away from the stop but she can make it she can make it. Leyla beats on the door. Two schoolboys leer at her. She runs alongside the crawling bus, banging on the side. ‘Stop stop stop stop!’ Then a gap opens in front of it and it surges away from her in an aromatic waft of biodiesel. Leyla stands and curses, the traffic steering around her; good, long, southern tomato-grower curses.
Dolmuş dolmuş dolmuş. There’s a cluster of them, slope-backed minibuses huddling together like pious women but they’re too far down the street, too distant from the stop and even if she could hail one it would have to travel at the speed of light to get there on time. Faster. Not even the Prophet on Burak could get to Gençler Toys in time for the interview. Leyla wails, throws up her arms in despair in the middle of gridlocked Inönü Cadessi. Her ceptep alert chimes to reinforce her failure. Out of time. Over. No point even calling. Istanbul is too too full of Leyla Gültaşlis.
‘I could do that job!’ she shouts to the street. ‘I could do that job easy!’
She’s sick to her stomach, sick in her suddenly-stupid and vain suit and shoes, her cheap knock-off bag. She needs that job, she needs that money, she needs not to go back to Runway View Apartments but most of all she needs never again to see the sun glinting from the endless kilometres of plastic roof over the fields and gardens of Demre and breathe in the cloying, narcotic perfume of tomatoes. Leyla is very close to crying in the middle of traffic-clogged Inönü Cadessi. This won’t do. She can’t be seen like this. Go home. Tomorrow you can pick yourself up and smarten yourself and get out there again and show them you’re good. Today, rage and cry and kick things around where no one can see you. Why why why did this have to be the day that a suicide bomber decided to blow himself up to God? It’s so selfish, like any suicide.
She is halfway down the steps to Adem Dede Square when her ceptep calls. Sub-Aunt Kevser. The last person she needs to talk to. Her thumb hovers over the reject icon. She can’t. You are always available. The mantra was drummed into her at business school.
‘You took your time.’ As ever when she talks with Leyla, she looks like a school-teacher.
‘I was just doing something.’
‘Doing?’ There’s always been the assumption that Leyla’s aspirations are dispensable. The women drop everything for the family, it was the way down in Demre, it’s the way up in Istanbul.
‘It’s all right, nothing much.’
‘Good good good. Remind me, what was that course you did?’
You know full well what I do
, Leyla thinks.
I can’t see her, but Great-Aunt Sezen is behind you directing this from her chair.
, Leyla thinks.
I can’t see her, but Great-Aunt Sezen is behind you directing this from her chair.
‘Marketing.’
‘Would that include raising finance and finding backers?’
‘It does.’
‘Hmm.’
Just tell me, you bad old crow
.
.
Sub-Aunt Kevser continues, ‘Did you ever meet Yaşar Ceylan?’
‘Who’s he?’
‘He’d be your second cousin. Smart boy. University educated.’
Rub it in
,
sterile spinster. Yes, I only went to a business college
. ‘He’s set up this new business start-up thing over in Fenerbahçe with some boy he did his doctorate with. I’ve no idea what it is; some new technology thing. Anyway, they’re very smart, very clever but useless at anything practical. Yaşar wants to expand but doesn’t know how to get to the people with the money. He needs someone to get him to the money men.’
Rub it in
,
sterile spinster. Yes, I only went to a business college
. ‘He’s set up this new business start-up thing over in Fenerbahçe with some boy he did his doctorate with. I’ve no idea what it is; some new technology thing. Anyway, they’re very smart, very clever but useless at anything practical. Yaşar wants to expand but doesn’t know how to get to the people with the money. He needs someone to get him to the money men.’
You see, you knew all the time.
‘When does he need someone?’
‘Right away. But you said you were doing something, so I don’t know . . .’
‘Has he got any money?’ Ever the drawback to working with family.
‘He’ll pay you. So you’ll do it?’
‘I’ll do it. Give me his number.’ Sub-Aunt Kevser’s face is replaced by a ceptep number. Leyla stores it quickly. God God thank you God. Sometimes family is your friend. She almost skips down the last few steps into Adem Dede Square. From desolation to ludicrous exultation in seven steps. Fenerbahçe. Business start-up. New tech. Fresh university graduates. It all means only one thing. The big one, the one that promises to build the future and change the world, the one where you can really make your name.
Nanotechnology.
2
The alien robot is an ungainly spider thing concealed among the graphics of the Commerzbank. Can observes it from his hiding place in the shadows of Allianz Insurance. An ugly boxy yellow industrial unit; a Xu-Hsi, or maybe a customized General Robotics. Licence number covered up with gaffer tape. An inspection machine would carry warning chevrons and flashers. Can Durukan knows his robots like other kids know cars or footballers or Chinese comics. An industrial bot wouldn’t pay a wink of interest even if the world were ending down there. What else could it be? On his adventures high above Eskiköy Can has encountered photodrones: machines set wandering on month-long journeys across the city by art students to capture the random and spontaneous. Those pause, shoot, stalk on. He has also met unofficial press bots upon the rooftops: stealthy, secretive surveillers used by investigative journalists and photographers looking for the news behind the press releases. Ghost machines that can flash-burn their memories to slag if detected by the state and its agents. Everything deniable. If this is a press drone, the photographer’s timing is brilliant. Too brilliant. And then there are the black drones: the ones they like to mutter about on the conspiracy sites. Invisible to official police bots, surveilling the surveillers. If this clunky chunk of yellow plastic is a legendary black drone, it’s in some very deep cover altogether. And then hide the licence number? This is none of these. This is proper mystery. Can’s monkey creeps closer, hand by careful hand, prehensile tail coiling and uncoiling, trying to see better without being seen. The mystery bot is scanning the bomb victims inside the police cordon. Its sensory arrays, clusters of fly-eyes lenses, rotate and refocus from survivor to survivor. Click whir click whir. That woman with blood speckled all over her face like freckles. Those shivering children in blue with schoolbags so big they could fold themselves inside. That dazed-looking businessman clutching his briefcase. That man, wandering away from the main group, between the ambulances, not wanting to be seen. Can watches Rat-Face, the guy from the tekke garden, move slowly, mingle subtly, merge with the crowd beyond the Do Not Cross lines. So intently does Can watch, so tightly does he hold his breath in excitement, that he almost misses the ninja robot detach itself from its roost and slowly, subtly, with no sudden movements to catch the attention of the police bots, work its way up the stanchions to the roof of the Commerzbank building. He sees a flash of anonymized yellow vanish over the parapet. Hissing in frustration, Can wills Monkey up on to the roof of the Allianz building. There: the mystery surveiller is working along the building tops, following Necatibey Cadessi. Slowly, stealthily, Can follows. His eyes are wide, his tongue rolled in concentration, his heart loud with excitement. This is mystery. This is adventure. This is what every boy and his robot want.
‘Aie!’ Can stifles the involuntary cry of excitement. Too loud too loud; it’s far too easy to be too loud when the world is reduced to a whisper. But it’s a huge huge discovery. Mystery bot is following Necdet, stoner-boy. Up in the balcony Can almost gibbers at the excitement. This isn’t just curiosity, or even a mystery any more. This is a case. He is Can: Boy Detective now. The case is afoot!
Carefully carefully, with one half of his eyes on the stalker, the other half on the crazed, reeling guy down in the street, Can creeps across the rooftops of Beyoğlu. Release a hand here, take a grip there. It is following him. Necdet, stoner-boy. Of all people to follow. Like the lizard stalking the hunting mantis feels the shadow of the hawk; it’s only Can’s over-compensating secondary senses, that instinctive knowing before knowing that makes his hand stab out and make Monkey roll forward, out of the pincer jaws that would have fried his BitBot circuitry with EMP.
As he was the follower, he too was followed. He reconfigures his eyes as he gallops away from the attacker. Another anonymous hack-drone. He has stumbled into the surveillance range of another watcher and triggered an alert. It’s big and it’s fast and it’s strong. It can take Can’s BitBots to pieces. It’s behind him and Can’s power management panel is telling him he is down to two-thirds battery power. He has to bring Monkey back, but it will lead the pursuer straight to him.
Run robot run. Monkey leap, monkey scuttle. Behind him, half a roof away, comes the destroyer. Can gasps in mental exertion and flexes his hand to send his monkey up a wall in two bounds, over a parapet and across a sheltered green-painted garden where morning washing hangs limply in the heat-weary air. The hunter follows. It’s bigger, faster and even closer. Can flicks a glance at the battery meter. Half charge now, and at this rate of exertion Monkey eats power. And
leap
. Even as Monkey is in mid-air Can reconfigures him into a ball. The BitBot hits and rolls, bounding from the air-conditioning fans and photosynth panels to crash hard against the further parapet. The hunter bounds after him, crossing the roof in a few strides but the BitBot has morphed back into Monkey mode and is hand-overhanding it down the fire escape for the leap to the roof of the adjoining building. Can has stolen a few dozen metres.
leap
. Even as Monkey is in mid-air Can reconfigures him into a ball. The BitBot hits and rolls, bounding from the air-conditioning fans and photosynth panels to crash hard against the further parapet. The hunter bounds after him, crossing the roof in a few strides but the BitBot has morphed back into Monkey mode and is hand-overhanding it down the fire escape for the leap to the roof of the adjoining building. Can has stolen a few dozen metres.
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