The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (111 page)

Laundry hanging as it had for hundreds of years, off wash lines and windows, faded blouses and shorts blowing in the wind, gently. Balls of lights floated in the streets down below, dimming now, and Boris realized the night was receding, saw a blush of pink and red on the edge of the horizon and knew the sun was coming.

He had spent the night keeping vigil with his father. Vlad Chong, son of Weiwei Zhong (Zhong Weiwei in the Chinese manner of putting the family name first) and of Yulia Chong, née Rabinovich. In the tradition of the family Boris, too, was given a Russian name. In another of the family’s traditions, he was also given a second, Jewish name. He smiled wryly, thinking about it. Boris Aaron Chong, the heritage and weight of three shared and ancient histories pressing down heavily on his slim, no longer young shoulders.

It had not been an easy night.

Once it had all been orange groves . . .
He took a deep breath, that smell of old asphalt and lingering combustion-engine exhaust fumes, gone now like the oranges yet still, somehow, lingering, a memory-scent.

He’d tried to leave it behind. The family’s memory, what he sometimes, privately, called the Curse of the Family Chong, or Weiwei’s Folly.

He could still remember it. Of course he could. A day so long ago, that Boris Aaron Chong himself was not yet an idea, an I-loop that hasn’t yet been formed . . .

It was in Jaffa, in the Old City on top of the hill, above the harbour. The home of the Others.

Zhong Weiwei cycled up the hill, sweating in the heat. He mistrusted these narrow winding streets, both of the Old City itself and of Ajami, the neighbourhood that had at last reclaimed its heritage. Weiwei understood this place’s conflicts very well. There were Arabs and Jews and they wanted the same land and so they fought. Weiwei understood land, and how you were willing to die for it.

But he also knew the concept of land had changed. That
land
was a concept less of a physicality now, and more of the mind. Recently, he had invested some of his money in an entire planetary system in the Guilds of Ashkelon games-universe. Soon he would have children – Yulia was in her third trimester already – and then grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so on down the generations, and they would remember Weiwei, their progenitor. They would thank him for what he’d done, for the real estate both real and virtual, and for what he was hoping to achieve today.

He, Zhong Weiwei, would begin a dynasty, here in this divided land. For he had understood the most basic of aspects, he alone saw the relevance of that foreign enclave that was Central Station. Jews to the north (and his children, too, would be Jewish, which was a strange and unsettling thought), Arabs to the south, now they have returned, reclaimed Ajami and Menashiya, and were building New Jaffa, a city towering into the sky in steel and stone and glass. Divided cities, like Akko, and Haifa, in the north, and the new cities sprouting in the desert, in the Negev and the Arava.

Arab or Jew, they needed their immigrants, their foreign workers, their Thai and Filipino and Chinese, Somali and Nigerian. And they needed their buffer, that in-between-zone that was Central Station, old South Tel Aviv, a poor place, a vibrant place – most of all, a liminal place.

And he would make it his home. His, and his children’s, and his children’s children. The Jews and the Arabs understood family, at least. In that they were like the Chinese – so different to the Anglos, with their nuclear families, strained relations, all living separately, alone . . . This, Weiwei swore, would not happen to his children.

At the top of the hill he stopped, and wiped the sweat from his brow with the cloth handkerchief he kept for that purpose. Cars went past him, and the sound of construction was everywhere. He himself worked on one of the buildings they were erecting here, a diasporic construction crew, small Vietnamese and tall Nigerians and pale solid Transylvanians, communicating by hand signals and Asteroid Pidgin (though that had not yet been in widespread use at that time) and automatic translators through their nodes. Weiwei himself worked the exoskeleton suits, climbing up the tower blocks with spider-like grips, watching the city far down below and looking out to sea, and distant ships . . .

But today was his day off. He had saved money – some to send, every month, to his family back in Chengdu, some for his soon-to-be growing family here. And the rest for this, for the favour to be asked of the Others.

Folding the handkerchief neatly away, he pushed the bike along the road and into the maze of alleyways that was the Old City of Jaffa. The remains of an ancient Egyptian fort could still be seen there, the gate had been re fashioned a century before, and the hanging orange tree still hung by chains, planted within a heavy, egg-shaped stone basket, in the shade of the walls. Weiwei didn’t stop, but kept going until he reached, at last, the place of the Oracle.

Boris looked at the rising sun. He felt tired, drained. He kept his father company throughout the night. His father, Vlad, hardly slept anymore, he sat for hours in his armchair, a thing worn and full of holes, dragged one day, years ago (the memory crystal clear in Boris’s mind) with great effort and pride from Jaffa’s flea market. Vlad’s hands moved through the air, moving and rearranging invisible objects. He would not give Boris access into his visual feed. He barely communicated anymore. Boris suspected the objects were memories, that Vlad was trying to somehow fit them back together again. But he couldn’t tell for sure.

Like Weiwei, Vlad had been a construction worker. He had been one of the people who had built Central Station, climbing up the unfinished gigantic structure, this space port that was now an entity unto itself, a miniature mall-nation to which neither Tel Aviv nor Jaffa could lay complete claim.

But that had been long ago. Humans lived longer now, but the mind grew old just the same, and Vlad’s mind was older than his body. Boris, on the roof, went to the corner by the door. It was shaded by a miniature palm tree, and now the solar panels, too, were opening out, extending delicate wings, the better to catch the rising sun and provide shade and shelter to the plants.

Long ago, the resident association had installed a communal table and a samovar there, and each week a different flat took turns to supply the tea and the coffee and the sugar. Boris gently plucked leaves off the potted mint plant nearby, and made himself a cup of tea. The sound of boiling water pouring into the mug was soothing, and the smell of the mint spread in the air, fresh and clean, waking him up. He waited as the mint brewed; took the mug with him back to the edge of the roof. Looking down, Central Station – never truly asleep – was noisily waking up.

He sipped his tea, and thought of the Oracle.

The Oracle’s name had once been Cohen, and rumour had it that she was a relation of St. Cohen of the Others, though no one could tell for certain. Few people today knew this. For three generations she had resided in the Old City, in that dark and quiet stone house, her and her Other alone.

The Other’s name, or ident tag, was not known, which was not unusual, with Others.

Regardless of possible familial links, outside the stone house there stood a small shrine to St. Cohen. It was a modest thing, with random items of golden colour placed on it, and old, broken circuits and the like, and candles burning at all hours. Weiwei, when he came to the door, paused for a moment before the shrine, and lit a candle, and placed an offering – a defunct computer chip from the old days, purchased at great expense in the flea market down the hill.

Help me achieve my goal today
, he thought,
help me unify my family and let them share my mind when I am gone
.

There was no wind in the Old City, but the old stone walls radiated a comforting coolness. Weiwei, who had only recently had a node installed, pinged the door and, a moment later, it opened. He went inside.

Boris remembered that moment as a stillness and at the same time, paradoxically, as a
shifting
, a sudden inexplicable change of perspective. His grandfather’s memory glinted in the mind. For all his posturing, Weiwei was like an explorer in an unknown land, feeling his way by touch and instinct. He had not grown up with a node; he found it difficult to follow the Conversation, that endless chatter of human and machine feeds a modern human would feel deaf and blind without; yet he was a man who could sense the future as instinctively as a chrysalis can sense adulthood. He knew his children would be different, and their children different in their turn, but he equally knew there can be no future without a past—

“Zhong Weiwei,” the Oracle said. Weiwei bowed. The Oracle was surprisingly young, or young-looking at any rate. She had short black hair and unremarkable features and pale skin and a golden prosthetic for a thumb, which made Weiwei shiver without warning: it was her Other.

“I seek a boon,” Weiwei said. He hesitated, then extended forwards the small box. “Chocolates,” he said, and – or was it just his imagination? – the Oracle smiled.

It was quiet in the room. It took him a moment to realize it was the Conversation, ceasing. The room was blocked to mundane network traffic. It was a safe-haven, and he knew it was protected by the high-level encryption engines of the Others. The Oracle took the box from him and opened it, selecting one particular piece with care and putting it in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully for a moment and indicated approval by inching her head. Weiwei bowed again.

“Please,” the Oracle said. “Sit down.”

Weiwei sat down. The chair was high-backed and old and worn – from the flea market, he thought, and the thought made him feel strange, the idea of the Oracle shopping in the stalls, almost as though she were human. But of course, she
was
human. It should have made him feel more at ease, but somehow it didn’t.

Then the Oracle’s eyes subtly changed colour, and her voice, when it came, was different, rougher, a little lower than it’s been, and Weiwei swallowed again. “What is it you wish to ask of us, Zhong Weiwei?”

It was her Other, speaking now. The Other, shotgun-riding on the human body, joined with the Oracle, quantum processors running within that golden thumb . . . Weiwei, gathering his courage, said, “I seek a bridge.”

The Other nodded, indicating for him to proceed.

“A bridge between past and future,” Weiwei said. “A . . . continuity.”

“Immortality,” the Other said. It sighed. Its hand rose and scratched its chin, the golden thumb digging into the woman’s pale flesh. “All humans want is immortality.”

Weiwei shook his head, though he could not deny it. The idea of death, of dying, terrified him. He lacked faith, he knew. Many believed; belief was what kept humanity going. Reincarnation or the afterlife, or the mythical Upload, what they called being Translated – they were the same, they required a belief he did not possess, much as he may long for it. He knew that when he died, that would be it. The I-loop with the ident tag of Zhong Weiwei would cease to exist, simply and without fuss, and the universe would continue just as it always had. It was a terrible thing to contemplate, one’s insignificance. For human I-loops, they were the universe’s focal point, the object around which everything revolved. Reality was subjective. And yet that was an illusion, just as an I was, the human personality a composite machine compiled out of billions of neurons, delicate networks operating semi-independently in the grey matter of a human brain. Machines augmented it, but they could not preserve it, not forever. So yes, Weiwei thought. The thing that he was seeking was a vain thing, but it was also a
practical
thing. He took a deep breath and said, “I want my children to remember me.”

Boris watched Central Station. The sun was rising now, behind the space port, and down below robotniks moved into position, spreading out blankets and crude, handwritten signs asking for donations, of spare parts or gasoline or vodka, poor creatures, the remnants of forgotten wars, humans cyborged and then discarded when they were no longer needed.

He saw Brother R. Patch-It, of the Church of Robot, doing his rounds – the Church tried to look after the robotniks, as it did after its small flock of humans. Robots were a strange missing link between human and Other, not fitting in either world – digital beings shaped by physicality, by bodies, many refusing the Upload in favour of their own, strange faith . . . Boris remembered Brother Patch-It, from childhood – the robot doubled-up as a
moyel
, circumcising the Jewish boys of the neighbourhood on the eighth day of their birth. The question of Who is a Jew had been asked not just about the Chong family, but of the robots too, and was settled long ago. Boris had fragmented memories, from the matrilineal side, predating Weiwei – the protests in Jerusalem, Matt Cohen’s labs and the first, primitive Breeding Grounds, where digital entities evolved in ruthless evolutionary cycles.

Plaques waving on King George Street, a mass demonstration:
No to Slavery!
and
Destroy the Concentration Camp!
and so on, an angry mass of humanity coming together to protest the perceived enslavement of those first, fragile Others in their locked-down networks, Matt Cohen’s laboratories under siege, his ragtag team of scientists, kicked out from one country after another before settling, at long last, in Jerusalem—

St. Cohen of the Others, they called him now. Boris lifted the mug to his lips and discovered it was empty. He put it down, rubbed his eyes. He should have slept. He was no longer young, could not go days without sleep, powered by stimulants and restless, youthful energy. The days when he and Miriam hid on this very same roof, holding each other, making promises they knew, even then, they couldn’t keep . . .