Cloud Atlas, Page 24

  He probed: Had I not ascended above my orientation?

  I said I would have to think about it.

  Did you xperience any negative reactions from consumers in the galleria? As a Sonmi outside Papa Song’s, I mean.

  No. Many other fabricants were there: porters, domestics, and cleaners, so I did not stand out so much. Then, when Hae-Joo went to the hygiener, a ruby-freckled woman with a teenage complexion but telltale older eyes apologized for disturbing me. “Look, I’m a media fashion scout,” she said, “call me Lily. I’ve been spying on you!” And she giggled. “But that’s what a woman of your flair, your prescience, my dear, must xpect.”

  I was very confused.

  She said I was the first consumer she’d seen to facescape fully like a well-known service fabricant. Lesser strata, she confided, may call my fashion statement brave, or even antistrata, but she called it genius. She asked if I would like to model for “an abhorrently chic 3-D magazine.” I’d be paid stratospherically, she assured me: my boyfriend’s friends would crawl with jealousy. And for us women, she added, jealousy in our men is as good as dollars in the Soul.

  I declined, thanking her and adding that fabricants do not have boyfriends. The mediawoman pretended to laugh at my imagined joke and xamined every contour on my face. She begged to know which facescaper had done me. “A craftsman like this, I have got to meet. Such a miniaturist!”

  After my wombtank and orientation, I said, my life had been spent behind a counter at Papa Song’s, and so I had never met my facescaper.

  Now the fashion editor’s laugh was droll but vexed.

  So she couldn’t believe you weren’t a pureblood?

  She gave me her card and urged me to reconsider, warning that opportunities like her do not happen ten days a week.

  When the taxi dropped me at Unanimity, Hae-Joo Im asked me to use his given name from then on. “Mr. Im” made him feel like he was in a seminar. Lastly, he asked if I might be free next ninthday. I did not want him to spend his valuable time on a professorial obligation, I said, but Hae-Joo insisted he had enjoyed my company. I said, well, then, I accept.

  So the xcursion helped dislodge your … sense of ennui?

  In a way, yes. It helped me understand how one’s environment is a key to one’s identity, but that my environment, Papa Song’s, was a lost key. I found myself wishing to revisit my x-dinery under Chongmyo Plaza. I could not fully xplain why, but an impulse can be both vaguely understood and strong.

  It could hardly be wise for an ascended server to visit a dinery?

  I do not claim it was wise, only necessary. Hae-Joo also worried that it might “unearth buried things.” I responded that I had buried too much of myself, so the postgrad agreed to accompany me, on condition that I went disguised as a consumer. The following ninthnite he showed me how to upswirl my hair and apply cosmetics. A silk neck scarf hid my collar, and in the elevator down to the taxi he fitted dark ambers on my face.

  On a busy fourthmonth evening, Chongmyo Plaza was not the litter-swarming wind tunnel I remembered from my release: it was a kaleidoscope of AdVs, consumers, xecs, and popsongs. Beloved Chairman’s monumental statue surveyed his swarming peoples with an xpression wise and benign. From the Plaza’s southeast rim, Papa Song’s arches drew into focus. Hae-Joo held my hand and reminded me we could turn back at any time. As we got in line for the elevator, he slipped a Soulring onto my finger.

  In case you got separated?

  For good luck, I thought: Hae-Joo had a superstitious streak. As the elevator descended, I grew very nervous. Suddenly, the doors were opening and hungry consumers riptided me into the dinery. As I was jostled, I was stunned at how misleading my memories of the place had been.

  In what ways?

  That spacious dome was so poky. Its glorious reds and yellows, so stark and vulgar. The wholesome air I remembered: now its greasy stench gagged me. After the silence on Taemosan, the dinery noise was like never-ending gunfire. Papa Song stood on His Plinth, greeting us. I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry: surely my Logoman would condemn his prodigal daughter.

  No. He winked at us, tugged himself skyward by his own nikestraps, sneezed, oopsied, and plummeted down to His Plinth. Children screamed with laughter. I realized, Papa Song was just a trick of lites. How had an inane hologram once inspired such awe in me?

  Hae-Joo went to find a table while I circummed the Hub. My sisters smiled under sugary toplites. How unflaggingly they worked! Here were Yoonas, here was Ma-Leu-Da108, her collar now boasting eleven stars. At my old counter on west was a fresh-faced Sonmi. Here was Kyelim889, Yoona’s replacement. I got in line at her teller, my nervousness growing acute as my turn approached. “Hi! Kyelim889 at your service! Mouthwatering, magical, Papa Song’s! Yes, madam? Your pleasure today?”

  I asked her if she knew me.

  Kyelim889 smiled xtra to dilute her confusion.

  I asked if she remembered Sonmi451, a server who worked beside her, who disappeared one morning.

  A blank smile: the verb remember is outside servers’ lexicons. “Hi! Kyelim889 at your service! Mouthwatering, magical, Papa Song’s! Your pleasure today?”

  I asked, Are you happy, Kyelim889?

  Enthusiasm lit her smile as she nodded. Happy is a word in the Second Catechism: “Proviso I obey the Catechisms, Papa Song loves me; proviso Papa Song loves me, I am happy.”

  A cruel compulsion brushed me. I asked the Kyelim, didn’t she want to live how purebloods live? Sit at dinery tables instead of wiping them?

  Kyelim889 wanted so badly to please, telling me, “Servers eat Soap!”

  Yes, I persisted, but didn’t she want to see Outside?

  She said, Servers don’t go Outside until Twelvestarred.

  A consumer girl with zinc-ringlets and plectrum nails jabbed me. “If you’ve got to taunt dumb fabricants, do it on firstday mornings. I need to get to the gallerias this side of curfew, okay?”

  Hastily, I ordered rosejuice and sharkgums from Kyelim889. I wished Hae-Joo was still with me. I was jumpy in case the Soulring malfunctioned and xposed me. The device worked, but my questions had marked me as a troublemaker. “Democratize your own fabricants!” A man glowered as I pushed by with my tray. “A bolitionist.” Other purebloods in the line glanced at me, worried, as if I carried a disease.

  Hae-Joo had found a free table in my old quarter. How many tens of thousands of times had I wiped this surface? Hae-Joo asked, gently, if I had discovered anything valuable.

  I whispered, “We are just slaves here for twelve years.”

  The Unanimity postgrad just scratched his ear and checked no one was eavesdropping: but his xpression told me he agreed. He sipped his rosejuice. We watched AdV for ten minutes, not speaking: a Juche Boardman was shown opening a newer, safer, nuclear reactor, grinning as if his strata depended on it. Kyelim889 cleared the table next to us; she had already forgotten me. My IQ may be higher, but she looked more content than I felt.

  So your visit to Papa Song’s was an … anticlimax? Did you find the “key” to your ascended self?

  Perhaps it was anticlimactic, yes. If there was a key, it was only that no key xisted. In Papa Song’s I had been a slave; at Taemosan I was a more privileged slave. One more thing occurred, however, as we headed back to the elevator. I recognized Mrs. Rhee, working at her sony. I spoke her name out loud.

  The immaculately dewdrugged woman smiled up with puzzled, luscious, remodeled lips. “I was Mrs. Rhee, but I’m Mrs. Ahn now. My late husband drowned in a sea-fishing accident last year.”

  I said that was just awful.

  Mrs. Ahn dabbed her eye with her sleeve and asked if I had known her late husband well. Lying is harder than purebloods make it look, and Mrs. Ahn repeated her question.

  “My wife was a qualities standardizer for the Corp before our marriage,” Hae-Joo xplained hastily, putting his hand on my shoulder and adding that Chongmyo Plaza was in her area and that Seer Rhee had been an xemplary corp man. Mrs. Ahn’s suspi
cions were aroused, however, and she asked xactly when that might have been. Now I knew what to say. “When his chief aide was a consumer named Cho.”

  Her smile changed its hue. “Ah, yes, Aide Cho. Sent north, somewhere, I believe, to learn about team spirit.”

  Hae-Joo took my arm, saying, “Well, ‘All for Papa Song, Papa Song for All.’ The gallerias beckon, darling. Mrs. Ahn is obviously a woman with no time to fritter.”

  Later, back in my quiet apartment, Hae-Joo paid me this compliment. “If I had ascended from server to prodigy in twelve straight months, my current address wouldn’t be a guest quarter in the Unanimity Faculty: I would be in a psych ward somewhere, seriously. These … xistential qualms you suffer, they just mean you’re truly human.”

  I asked how I might remedy them.

  “You don’t remedy them. You live thru them.”

  We played Go until curfew. Hae-Joo won the first game. I, the second.

  How many of these xcursions took place?

  Every ninthnite until Corpocracy Day. Familiarity bred esteem for Hae-Joo, and soon I shared Boardman Mephi’s high opinion of him. The professor never probed about our outings during our seminars; his protégé probably filed reports, but Mephi wished me to have at least the illusion of a private life. Board business demanded more of his time, and I saw him less regularly. The morning tests continued: a procession of courteous but unmemorable scientists.

  Hae-Joo had a Unanimityman’s fondness for campus intrigue. I learned how Taemosan was no united organism but a hillock of warring tribes and interest groups, much like the Juche itself. The Unanimity Faculty maintained a despised dominance. “Secrets are magic bullets,” Hae-Joo was fond of saying. But this dominance also xplains why trainee enforcers have few friends outside the faculty. Girls looking for husbands, Hae-Joo admitted, were attracted to his future status, but males of his own age eschewed getting drunk in his company.

  Archivist, my appointment in the Litehouse is approaching. Can we segue to my final nite on campus?

  Please do.

  A keen passion of Hae-Joo’s was disneys, and one perq of Professor Mephi’s mentorship was access to forbidden items in the security archives.

  You mean Union samizdat from the Production Zones?

  No. I mean a zone even more forbidden, the past, before the Skirmishes. Disneys were called “movies” in those days. Hae-Joo said the ancients had an artistry that 3-D and Corpocracy had long ob-solesced. As the only disneys I had ever seen were Boom-Sook’s pornsplatters, I was obliged to believe him. On sixthmonth’s final ninthnite, Hae-Joo arrived with a key to a disneyarium on campus, xplaining that a pretty Media student was currying favor with him. He spoke in a theatrical whisper. “I’ve got a disc of, seriously, one of the greatest movies ever made by any director, from any age.”

  Namely?

  A picaresque entitled The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, made before the foundation of Nea So Copros, in a long-deadlanded province of the European democracy. Have you ever seen film dating from the early twenty-first century, Archivist?

  Sweet Corpocracy, no! An eighth-stratum archivist wouldn’t get such security clearance in his wildest dreams! I’d be fired for even applying, and I’m shocked that even a Unanimity postgrad has access to such deviational material.

  Is that so? Well, the Juche’s stance on historical discourse is riddled with inconsistencies. On the one hand, if historical discourse were permitted, the downstrata could access a bank of human xperience that would rival, and sometimes contradict, that taught by Media. On the other hand, corpocracy funds your Ministry of Archivism, dedicated to preserving a historical record for future ages.

  Yes, but our xistence is kept from the downstrata.

  Xcept from those condemned to the Litehouse.

  Be that as it may, future ages will still be corpocratic ones. Corpocracy isn’t just another political system that will come and go—corpocracy is the natural order, in harmony with human nature. But we’re digressing. Why had Hae-Joo Im chosen to show you this Ghastly Ordeal?

  Perhaps Professor Mephi had instructed him. Perhaps Hae-Joo Im had no reason xcept a fondness for the disney. Whatever the reason, I was engrossed. The past is a world both indescribably different from and yet subtly similar to Nea So Copros. People sagged and uglified as they aged in those days: no dewdrugs. Elderly purebloods waited to die in prisons for the senile: no fixed-term life spans, no euthanasium. Dollars circulated as little sheets of paper and the only fabricants were sickly livestock. However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one’s skin.

  I can tell how fascinated you were …

  Certainly: the vacant disneyarium was a haunting frame for those lost, rainy landscapes. Giants strode the screen, lit by sunlite captured thru a lens when your grandfather’s grandfather, Archivist, was kicking in his natural womb. Time is the speed at which the past decays, but disneys enable a brief resurrection. Those since fallen buildings, those long-eroded faces: Your present, not we, is the true illusion, they seem to say. For fifty minutes, for the first time since my ascension, I forgot myself, utterly, ineluctably.

  Only fifty minutes?

  Hae-Joo’s handsony purred at a key scene, when the film’s eponymous book thief suffered some sort of seizure; his face, contorted above a plate of peas, froze. A panicky voice buzzed from Hae-Joo’s handsony; “It’s Xi-Li! I’m right outside! Let me in! A crisis!” Hae-Joo pressed the remo-key; a wedge of light slid over the empty seats as the disneyarium door opened. A student ran over, his face shiny with sweat, and saluted Hae-Joo. He delivered news that would unravel my life, again. Specifically, forty or fifty enforcers had stormed the Unanimity Faculty, arrested Professor Mephi, and were searching for us. Their orders were to capture Hae-Joo for interrogation and kill me on sight. Campus xits were manned by armed enforcers.

  Do you remember your thoughts on hearing that?

  No. I think, I did not think. My companion now xuded a grim authority that I realized had always been there. He glanced at his rolex and asked if Mr. Chang had been captured. Xi-Li, the messenger, reported that Mr. Chang was waiting in the basement ford park. The man I had known as Postgrad Hae-Joo Im, backdropped by a dead actor, playing a character scripted over a century ago, turned to me. “Sonmi451, I am not xactly who I said I am.”

  Old Georgie’s path an’ mine crossed more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryin’, an’ after I’m died, no sayin’ what that fangy devil won’t try an’ do to me … so gimme some mutton an’ I’ll tell you ’bout our first meetin’. A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o’ your burnt wafery off’rin’s …

  Adam, my bro, an’ Pa’n’me was trekkin’ back from Honokaa Market on miry roads with a busted cart axle in draggly clothesies. Evenin’ catched us up early, so we tented on the southly bank o’ Sloosha’s Crossin’, ’cos Waipio River was furyin’ with days o’ hard rain an’ swollen by a spring tide. Sloosha’s was friendsome ground tho’ marshy, no un lived in the Waipio Valley ’cept for a mil’yun birds, that’s why we din’t camo our tent or pull cart or nothin’. Pa sent me huntin’ for tinder’n’firewood while he’n’Adam tented up.

  Now, I’d got diresome hole-spew that day ’cos I’d ate a gammy dog leg in Honokaa, an’ I was squattin’ in a thicket o’ ironwood trees upgulch when sudd’nwise eyes on me, I felt ’em. “Who’s there?” I called, an’ the mufflin’ ferny swallowed my voice.

  Oh, a darky spot you’re in, boy, murmed the mufflin’ ferny.

  “Name y’self!” shouted I, tho’ not so loud. “I got my blade, I have!”

  Right ’bove my head someun whisped, Name y’self, boy, is it Zachry the Brave or Zachry the Cowardy? Up I looked an’ sure ‘nuff there was Old Georgie cross-leggin’ on a rottin’ ironwood tree, a slywise grinnin’ in his hungry eyes.

  “I ain’t’fraid o’ you!” I telled him, tho’ tell-it-true my voice was jus’ a duck fart in a hurrycane. Quakin’ inside I was when O
ld Georgie jumped off his branch an’ then what happened? He dis’peared in a blurry flurryin’, yay, b’hind me. Nothin’ there … ’cept for a plump lardbird snufflyin’ for grubs, jus’ askin’ for a pluckin’n’a spit! Well, I reck’ned Zachry the Brave’d faced down Old Georgie, yay, he’d gone off huntin’ cowardier vic’tries’n me. I wanted to tell Pa’n’Adam ’bout my eerie adventurin’, but a yarnin’ is more delish with broke-de-mouth grinds, so hushly-hushly up I hoicked my leggin’s an’ I crept up on that meatsome feathery buggah … an’ I dived.

  Mister Lardbird he slipped thru my fingers an’ skipped off, but I wasn’t givin’ up, nay, I chased him upstream thru bumpy’n’thorny thickets, spring-heelin’ dead branches’n’all, thorns scratched my face diresome, but see I’d got the chasin’ fever so I din’t notice the trees thinnin’ nor the Hiilawe Falls roarin’ nearer, not till I ran schnock into the pool clearin’ an’ giddied up a bunch o’ horses. Nay, not wild horses, these was horses decked in studded leather armor an’ on the Big Isle that means one thing only, yay, the Kona.

  Ten–twelve of them painted savages was ‘ready risin’n’reachin’ for their whips’n’blades, yellin’ war cries at me! Oh, now I legged it back downgulch the way I’d come, yay, the hunter was the hunted. The nearest Kona was runnin’ after me, others was leapin’ on their horses an’ laughin’ with the sport. Now panickin’ wings your foot but it muddies your thinkin’ too, so I rabbited back to Pa. I was only a niner so I jus’ followed my instinct without thinkin’ thru what’d happen.

  I never got back to our tentin’ tho’, or I’d not be sittin’ here yarnin’ to you. Over a ropy root—Georgie’s foot maybe—I tripped’n’tumblied into a pit o’ dead leaves what hid me from the Kona hoofs thunderin’ over me. I stayed there, hearin’ them jagged shouts goin’ by, jus’ yards away runnin’ thru them trees … straight t’ward Sloosha’s. To Pa’n’Adam.

  I creeped slywise’n’speedy, but late I was, yay, way too late. The Kona was circlin’ our camp, their bullwhips crackin’. Pa he’d got his ax swingin’ an’ my bro’d got his spiker, but the Kona was jus’ toyin’ with ’em. I stayed at the lip o’ the clearin’, see fear was pissin’ in my blood an’ I cudn’t go on. Crack! went a whip, an’ Pa’n’Adam was top-sied an’ lay wrigglyin’ like eels on the sand. The Kona chief, one sharky buggah, he got off his horse an’ walked splishin’ thru the shallows to Pa, smilin’ back at his painted bros, got out his blade an’ opened Pa’s throat ear to ear.