The Summer Prince (23 page)

I wave them both away. “No, I don’t mean that. There’s nothing you could have done about that. I mean why are
you
here, in Palmares Três? In a, well, a real human body. Why can’t you connect to the city with your brain or see a holo in your retinas or just download yourself?”

Auntie Yaha sighs and lifts another piece of the fish to her mouth. Ueda-sama gets that look again, that saudade.

“Because I can’t.”

“You can’t?”

He shrugs. “There are some people whose bodies can’t take the mods, for whatever reason. In my case, I’m simply too old. To someone like me, Tokyo 10 can feel like a ghost city. Millions and millions of people live as data streams in the cloud, but barely a hundred thousand of us have kept our bodies. We’re the only ones who can travel to see the rest of the world, though. We’re the only ones who can taste perfectly prepared sashimi and shake hands and …”

I remember what Enki said:
The first night, he asked me to whip him.
And I understand, more completely than I like, how one can crave sensation itself, no matter how unpleasant. I wonder how he feels about having his unusual preferences exposed to public scrutiny.

“So you became an ambassador,” I say.

“It seemed preferable to
hara-kiri
, at the time.”

I recognize the foreign word, though it takes me a moment to realize why. We have it too, in a shortened form:
kiri
. We must have taken it from the Japanese-Brazilian immigrants who first came here from São Paulo.

“How old are you, Ueda-sama?”

“Three hundred and four, at the end of winter.”

I feel my eyes widen. They must have found a new treatment in Tokyo 10, because I’ve never heard of even the oldest grande making it past two hundred and fifty.

“Does Enki know?”

He laughs. “Do you know what he said to me, right after we first met? ‘You can’t recapture your youth, but would you like to screw it?’”

Auntie Yaha chokes on her fish. I thump her back and smile, because I love how Enki looks when he says things he knows are outrageous. I’m frightened of the way he dares the world, but I love it too. Maybe that’s what Gil meant when he said I could keep him safe? In deference to Auntie Yaha’s stricken sensibilities (and the server coming within easy earshot), we return the conversation to the banal for the
rest of the night. The food is light, but there’s enough of it that I feel satisfied in the end.

We walk back to the platform in relative silence, but it’s companionable, not tense. I like Ueda-sama, a connection that surprises me. And between him and Enki, I’m beginning to think the Aunties might have a point about the dangers of too much tech.

“A pleasure,” he says, bowing to me again when his pod arrives. He nods at Auntie Yaha. “I owe you a debt for arranging this,” he says.

Auntie Yaha, who has clearly had more than enough unexpected social breaches in one night, does not even bother with a polite denial. They exchange smiles, each other’s perfect mirror.

“Ueda,” I say just as he steps into his pod. He pauses and turns around.

“Yes?”

“You and Enki understand each other, don’t you?”

This time, at least, his smile is certainly genuine. “I think so, June.”

The first thing I remember is a song. It vibrates, deep and wide, in my mamãe’s chest. I am on her back, half asleep. The song is familiar, a popular street tune from Salvador that bloco amarelo turned into a summer hit five or six years ago. I danced to it then, when everyone but me had forgotten where it came from.

I liked it that way.

My mamãe wasn’t singing to me. In the memory, I somehow know this. She thinks I’m asleep. She thinks I’m too young to understand. She’s singing for herself. For her memories of her own mamãe, and the world they lived in before militias tore it apart. She’s singing for her future, and maybe for the lover who fathered me, though I heard no more than three words about him growing up (“Better off gone,” and I always wondered if she meant for him, or for us). But the song is filled with love, and I know it holds me tight as the linen cloth pressing me to her spine. The noises of Palmares Três wash over me as they always
have: the waves pounding against the pylons, the susurrus of pods shunting through transport tunnels above, the shrieking of children, the complaints of their parents, the creak of algae vats rocking in the breeze.

I am in love. With my mamãe, who doesn’t think of me. With the city, who will hate me.

With my life, which one day I will choose to end.

The stencils start going up a week after the party on A Quarentena. Or maybe they started earlier, everything’s a rumor, but I first notice it painted on a window on the eastern side of our school building. It’s Enki and it’s me in silhouette, our hair tangling and merging in the middle. My hand is raised, shooting out light. Enki’s mouth is open; he’s sucking in the world around him, while his own hands fade into a pixelated glow. There aren’t any words.

We all know what it means anyway.

Everyone whispers in school. Bebel makes a point of putting her arm around me at lunch, and I don’t understand why until I overhear the tail end of the conversation she’s trying to distract me from.

“Why is she even here? Why doesn’t she download herself already —”

“You know I heard Enki gave her mods? I swear I saw her eyes glowing earlier today. And I voted for him too.”

“Pasqual was so much better.”

Bebel’s hands are warm on my cheeks; she makes me look at her. “They don’t know you,” she says. “I don’t care what side you’re on; you’re still my friend.”

What side I’m on? Friend?
I don’t understand anything, but I find myself nodding anyway. “You too,” I say, and then I feel better.

Here’s the trouble: The spider bot rotting in the bay has made it impossible for the Aunties to ignore the issue of outside technology any longer. And you’d think that wakas would be all for awesome new mods, but it turns out almost everyone from the high tiers is wary of
the extreme technology pioneered in Tokyo 10. The verde, on the other hand, is a technophile stronghold, though I doubt I would have understood why before Enki.

Ueda-sama has kept conspicuously silent on the subject of trade between our cities, though he’s been hounded by the top-tier news casters about it. I haven’t said a word. I didn’t think anyone would care what I thought, but it turns out that someone does. I think back to that simple, brilliant image stenciled on the side of the school building. I’ve become an icon, like it or not. Not for the isolationists, where my sympathies mostly lie. For the technophiles.

Gil skipped school, but he comes in time for the evening bell to catch me before I leave. We both like school these days, since it’s the one place we can be sure we won’t be caught by cameras.

“They’re everywhere,” he says, pulling me into an empty meeting room. I don’t see him until he grabs my hand, but I’m not afraid. I recognize Gil just by the feel of his skin.

I’m confused, though. “Camera bots? Of course they are, Gil.”

He shakes his head. “The graffiti. The stencils. There’s one on the side of the school building, didn’t you see it?”

“The thing with me and Enki?”

“It’s
everywhere
. They’re saying you designed it. They’re saying that you’re the new icon of the technophiles. Is it …”

After a moment, I understand. “You believe them?”

“How would I know, June? You’ve done crazier things without asking my permission.”

This makes me want to cry, but I laugh instead. “I’d tell you if I were planning anything like this. You know that, right?”

“I know that,” he says, but it’s almost a question.

“And I didn’t design that stencil.”

“Don’t know why I thought you had,” he says. His fingers trace my lights. “It’s too good for you not to brag about.”

I hit him lightly on the arm. “I never brag. I only accept fully justified praise.”

“Well, in that case.”

We’re silent for a while, sitting side by side on the floor. Eventually Gil rests his head on my shoulder, I wrap my arms around his waist.

“The mods, and Ueda-sama and, you know, all of that stuff about the city’s systems failing, June, it’s okay if you think … I mean, about the tech …”

He trails off, eyes closed, but his throat works as if he hopes I might take the words from him. And I do.

“I see what they’re doing to him as well as you do, Gil. I don’t want us to turn into Tokyo 10.”

Gil’s shoulders sag in relief. I can’t think of anyone less suited for mods than Gil. He’s so very physical and human — I try to imagine him in a data stream, without the slick of his sweat after a dance, that pungent musk of earth and youth. A disembodied collection of data can dance forever, but how much would that be worth without the tension of pushing up against the limits of a body?

And yet.

“But the Aunties are wrong to close us off so much,” I find myself saying. “We’re still using technology that’s more than a century old to run the city. It’s dangerous.”

“That’s very pragmatic,” Gil says after a moment. He opens his eyes. “Much too levelheaded for a waka.”

“You know,” I say, “sometimes I don’t feel very much like a waka these days.”

Sebastião is short, with snow-white hair, though he’s only sixty, and a smile that always makes you feel like you’re in on a joke. He’s notorious for his ability to elicit confessions in interviews and yet generally remain well-liked among the crowd that cares about these sorts of things. He’s a gossip caster, not really into news, but what with Enki’s role in parliament and the escalating tensions between isolationists
and technophiles, the line between gossip and news has become a matter of attitude.

Which I suppose is why he’s asking me for my opinion on the recently proposed bill that would allow limited access to new technology from foreign cities.

“Too little, too late?” says Sebastião, leaning forward, smiling as though he finds the whole situation slightly ridiculous and knows I do too. “After all,” he continues, “the bill gives the Queen complete discretion over what technology is actually allowed in. And there’s as yet no clause about how the new technology will make the city herself safer.”

This isn’t my first interview, but it feels like it. “Well, Enki has a connection with the city —”

Sebastião waves his hand. “That works until September, but what then?”

I think I’m going to choke, right here on a live feed with the one gossip caster even the Aunties care about, with half the city overanalyzing my every public move and the other half hating me on principle. My hands curl into fists. My lights are strobing like some ancient call for help. It’s the fall already, and there’s so much we still haven’t done together, and I don’t want to think about this, I don’t want to remember what it is to be a summer king, what it means to be left behind. I don’t understand how Sebastião — who is so unapologetic about his love for Enki — can speak of it so casually.

But then, he’s a grande, and Enki is only his latest in a long line of dead boys.

“I …”

He waits expectantly. I force air into my lungs. If Enki can do what he does, I can certainly manage an interview.