Cloud Atlas, Page 34

  “A paragraph in the history of the struggle against corpocracy,” said Hae-Joo.

  “Wow, thanks, brother,” replied the implanter. “A whole paragraph.” This surgery was swift also. The man laid my right palm on a cloth, sprayed coag and anesthetic onto my index fingerpad, made an incision less than a centimeter, inserted a Soul, and applied cutane. This time his cynicism betrayed a core of sincerity. “May your Soul bring you fortune in your promised land, Sister Yun-Ah Yoo.”

  I thanked him. I had all but forgotten Ma Arak Na watching from her ceiling hatch, but now she spoke. “Sister Yoo best get a new face for her new Soul, or some awkward questions’ll crop up between here and the promised land.”

  So I suppose your next destination was the facescaper?

  It was. The doorman escorted us as far as T’oegyero Street, Huamdonggil’s boundary with its nearest semirespectable neighborhood. We metroed to a once fashionable galleria in Shinch’on and escalatored up thru chiming chandeliers. They took us to a warrenlike precinct on canopy level, frequented only by consumers quite sure of their destination. Twists and turns were lined with discreet entrances and cryptic nameplates; down a dead end, a tiger lily bloomed in a niche by a plain door. “Don’t speak,” Hae-Joo warned me, “this woman’s prickles need cosseting.” He rang the bell.

  The tiger lily striped brite; it asked us what we wanted.

  Hae-Joo said we had an appointment with Madam Ovid.

  The flower flexed to peer at us and told us to wait.

  The door slid open. “I am Madam Ovid,” announced a bone-white pureblood. Dewdrugs had frozen her harsh beauty in its mid-twenties, long ago; her voice was a buzz saw. “You have no appointment, whoever you are. This is an upstrata establishment. My biocosmeticians accept only recommendations. Try a ’maskgrafter’ on one of the lower floors.”

  The door shut in our faces.

  Hae-Joo cleared his throat and spoke into the tiger lily. “Kindly inform the estimable Madam Ovid that Lady Heem-Young sends her earnest, cordial regards.”

  A pause ensued. The tiger lily blushed and asked if we had traveled far.

  Hae-Joo completed the code. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”

  The door opened, but Madam Ovid’s disdain remained. “Who can argue with Lady Heem-Young?” She ordered us to follow, no dawdling. After a minute of curtained corridors tiled with lite-and-sound absorbers, a silent male assistant joined us from thin air, and a door opened into a briter studio. Our voices returned. Tools of the facescaper’s trade gleamed in the sterile solar. Madam Ovid asked me to unhood. Like Madam Ma Arak Na, she did not evince surprise; I doubt a lady of her stratum had ever set foot in a Papa Song dinery. Madam Ovid asked how long the treatment was to last. When Hae-Joo told her we had to leave in ninety minutes, our hostess lost her needle-sharp sangfroid. “Why not do the job yourself with gum and lipstick? Does Lady Heem-Young take Tiger Lily for a discount troweler’s with before-and-after kodaks in the window?”

  Hae-Joo hastened to xplain we were not xpecting the full morph, only cosmetic adapts to fool an Eye or a casual glance. He admitted ninety minutes was a ludicrously short time, hence Lady Heem-Young needed the best of the best. The proud facescaper saw his flattery but was not immune. “It is true,” she boasted, “that nobody, nobody, sees the face within the face as I do.” Madam Ovid angled my jaw, saying she could alter my skin, color, hair, lids, and brows. “Eyes we must dye a pureblood color.” Dimples could be punched in, and my cheekbones muted. She promised to make the best of our eighty-nine precious minutes.

  So what happened to Madam Ovid’s artistry? You look like a Sonmi fresh from the wombtank.

  Unanimity refaced me for my peaktime courtroom appearances. A star actress must look the part. But I assure you, when I xited the Tiger Lily, buzzing with face-ache, not even Seer Rhee would have known me. My ivory irises were hazeled, my eyes lengthened, my follicles ebonized. Consult the kodaks taken at my arrest if you are curious.

  Madam Ovid did not say good-bye. Outside, a golden boy with a red balloon waited by the escalator. We followed him to a busy ford park below the galleria. The boy had disappeared, but the balloon was strung on the wiper of a cross-country vehicle. This we drove down Thruway One for the East Gate One.

  East Gate One? The Union leader—Apis—had ordered you west.

  Yes, but the leader had also suffixed his orders with “reflect well upon what had been advised,” meaning “invert these orders.” Thus, west meant east, north meant south, “travel in a convoy” meant “travel alone.”

  That’s a dangerously simple crypto, it seems to me.

  Meticulous brains will overlook the simple. As we sped along the thruway, I asked my companion if Hae-Joo Im was a real name or false. The Unionman responded that no names were real for individuals of his calling. The xitway downcurved to the tollgates, and we slowed to a crawl; ahead, each driver in line reached thru the ford window to Eye his Soul. Enforcers were stopping fords for random questioning, worryingly for us. “One in thirty, approx,” Hae-Joo muttered, “pretty long odds.” Our turn at the scanner came. Hae-Joo placed his index on the Eye; a shrill alarm sounded, and the barrier shot down. Fords around us prevented any hope of escape. Hae-Joo hissed at me: “Keep smiling, act vapid!”

  An enforcer strode up, jerking his thumb. “Out.”

  Hae-Joo obeyed, grinning boyishly.

  The enforcer demanded a name and destination.

  “Oh, uh, Ok-Kyun Pyo.” Even Hae-Joo’s voice had changed. “Officer. We’re, uh, driving to a motel in an outer conurb.” Hae-Joo glanced around and did a hand gesture whose lewd meaning I had learned from Boom-Sook and his friends. How far was this motel, the enforcer demanded. Didn’t he know it was already past hour twenty-three?

  “Motel BangBangYou’reDead, in Yōju.” Hae-Joo adopted an idiotic, conspiratorial tone. “Snug place, reasonable rates, they’d probably let an enforcer sample the facilities gratis. Only thirty minutes in the fast lane, eastbound xit ten.” He promised we could be there before curfew with time to spare.

  “What happened to your index finger?”

  “Oh, is that why the Eye blinked?” Hae-Joo did a stage groan and rambled; he had cut it destoning a natural avocado at his aunt’s house; blood everywhere, only stoneless avocados for him from now on, nature was more trouble than it was worth.

  The enforcer peered into the ford and ordered me to unhood.

  I hoped my fear would come over as coyness.

  He asked if my boyfriend talked this much all the time.

  I nodded, shyly.

  Was that why I never spoke?

  “Yes, sir,” I said, sure he would recognize me as a Sonmi, “yes, Officer.”

  The enforcer told Hae-Joo girls are obedient and demure until they have you married, then they start yacking and never shut up. “Get going,” he said.

  Where did you really curfew that nite? Not a seedy motel?

  No. We xited the overway at xit two, then forked onto an unlit country lane. A dike of thorned pines hid an industrial field of a hundred-plus units. So close to curfew, our ford was the only vehicle in motion. We parked and crossed a windy forecourt to a concrete bloc signed HYDRA NURSERY CORP. Hae-Joo’s Soul blinked the rollerdoor open.

  Inside was not a horticulture unit but a redlit ark, roofing giant tanks. The air was uncomfortably warm and moist. The tangled, stringy broth I saw through the tanks’ viewing windows concealed their contents, for a moment. Then individual limbs and hands came into focus, nascent, identical faces.

  Wombtanks?

  Yes. We were in a genomics unit. I watched the clusters of embryo fabricants suspended in uterine gel; I was witnessing my own origin, remember. Some slept, some sucked thumbs, some scurried a hand or foot as if digging or running. I asked Hae-Joo, had I been cultivated in that place? Hae-Joo said no, Papa Song’s nursery in Kwangju is five times bigger. The embryos I was looking at had been designed to labor in uranium tunnels under the Yellow Sea. Their saucerlike
eyes were genomed for darkness. In fact, they go insane if xposed to brite unfiltered daylite.

  The heat soon had Hae-Joo shiny with sweat. “You must need Soap, Sonmi. Our penthouse is this way.”

  A penthouse? In a fabricant nursery?

  The Unionman was fond of irony. Our “penthouse” was a niteman’s sparse room, a concrete-walled space containing only a water shower, a single cot, a desk, a stack of chairs, a choked aircon, and a broken ping-pong table. Fat pipes throbbed hot across the ceiling. A sonypanel monitored the wombtanks, and a window overlooked the nursery. Hae-Joo suggested I take a shower now as he could not guarantee one tomorrow nite. He strung up a tarp for privacy and built a bed from chairs for himself while I washed my body. A sac of Soap was waiting on the cot with a set of new clothes.

  You didn’t feel vulnerable, sleeping in the middle of nowhere without even knowing Hae-Joo Im’s true name?

  I was too toxed. Fabricants stay awake for over twenty hours thanks to Soap, then we drop.

  When I woke a few hours later, Hae-Joo was snoring on his cloak. I studied a scab of clotted blood on his cheek, scratched as we fled Taemosan. Pureblood skin is so delicate compared to ours. His eyeballs gyred behind their lids; nothing else in the room moved. He may have said Xi-Li’s name, or perhaps it was just noise. I wondered which “I” he was when he dreamed. Then I blinked my Soul on Hae-Joo’s handsony to learn about my own alias, Yun-Ah Yoo. I was a student genomicist, born Secondmonth 30th in Naju during the Year of the Horse. Father was a Papa Song’s aide; Mother a housewife; no siblings … the data onscrolled for tens of pages, hundreds. The curfew faded away. Hae-Joo woke, massaging his temples. “Ok-Kyun Pyo would love a strong cup of starbuck.”

  I decided the time had come to ask the question that had seized me in the disneyarium. Why had Union paid such a crippling price to protect one xperimental fabricant?

  “Ah.” Hae-Joo mumbled and picked sleep from his eyes. “Long answer, long journey.”

  More evasion?

  No. He answered as we drove deeper into the country. I shall précis it for your orison, Archivist. Nea So Copros is poisoning itself to death. Its soil is polluted, its rivers lifeless, its air toxloaded, its food supplies riddled with rogue genes. The downstrata cannot buy drugs to counter these privations. Melanoma and malaria belts advance northward at forty kilometers per year. Those Production Zones of Africa and Indonesia that supply Consumer Zones are now 60-plus percent uninhabitable. Corpocracy’s legitimacy, its wealth, is drying up. The Juche’s rounds of new Enrichment Statutes are sticking band-aids on hemorrhages and amputations. Corpocracy’s only strategy is that long favored by bankrupt ideologies: denial. Downstrata purebloods fall into untermensch sinks. Xecs merely watch, parroting Catechism Seven: “A Soul’s value is the dollars therein.”

  But what would be the logic in allowing downstrata purebloods to … end in places like Huamdonggil? As a class? What could replace their labor?

  Us. Fabricants. We cost almost nothing to manufacture and have no awkward hankerings for a better, freer life. We conveniently xpire after forty-eight hours without a specialized Soap and so cannot run away. We are perfect organic machinery. Do you still maintain there are no slaves in Nea So Copros?

  And how did Union aim to xtract these … alleged “ills” of our state?

  Revolution.

  But as the Boardman’s anthem says, Nea So Copros is the world’s only rising sun! Pre-Skirmish East Asia was the same chaos of sickly democracies, democidal autocracies, and rampant deadlands that the rest of the world still is! If the Juche had not unified and cordonized the region, we would have backslid to barbarism with the rest of the globe! How can any rational organization embrace a creed that opposes corpocracy? Not only is it terrorism but it would be suicide.

  All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility.

  Well, you seem to have embraced Union propaganda wholeheartedly, Sonmi451.

  And I might observe that you have embraced corpocracy propaganda wholeheartedly, Archivist.

  Did your new friends mention xactly how Union plans to overthrow a state with a standing pureblood army of 2 million backed by a further 2 million fabricant troops?

  Yes. By engineering the simultaneous ascension of 6 million fabricants.

  Fantasy. Lunacy.

  All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

  How could Union possibly achieve this “simultaneous ascension”?

  The battlefield, you see, is neuromolecular. A few hundred Unionmen in wombtank and Soap plants could trigger these vast numbers of ascensions by adding Suleiman’s catalyst into key streams.

  What damage could even 10 million—say—ascended fabricants inflict on the most stable state pyramid in the history of civilization?

  Who would work factory lines? Process sewage? Feed fish farms? Xtract oil and coal? Stoke reactors? Construct buildings? Serve in dineries? Xtinguish fires? Man the cordon? Fill exxon tanks? Lift, dig, pull, push? Sow, harvest? Now do you begin to see? Purebloods no longer possess these core skills upon which our corpocracy, or any society, rests. The real question is, what damage could 6 million ascensions not inflict, in combination with cordonlanders and downstrata purebloods such as those in Huamdonggil with nothing to lose?

  Unanimity would maintain order. Enforcers aren’t all Union agents.

  Even Yoona939 chose death over slavery.

  And your role in this … proposed rebellion?

  My first role was to provide proof that Suleiman’s ascension catalyst worked. This I had done, and still do, simply by not degenerating. The requisite neurochemicals were being synthesized in underground factories thruout the Twelve Cities.

  “Your second role,” Hae-Joo informed me that morning, “would be ambassadorial.” General Apis wished me to act as an interlocutor between Union and the ascending fabricants. To help mobilize them as revolutionaries.

  How did you feel about being a figurehead for terrorists?

  Trepidation: I was not genomed to alter history, I told my fellow fugitive. Hae-Joo countered that no revolutionary ever was. All Union was asking for now, he urged, was that I did not reject Apis’s proposal out of hand.

  Weren’t you curious about Union’s blueprint for the briter tomorrow? How could you know the new order would not give birth to a tyranny worse than the one it xpired? Think of the Bolshevik and Saudi Arabian Revolutions. Think of the disastrous Pentecostalist Coup of North America. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed?

  You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: “An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”

  We’re circling a contentious core, Sonmi. Let’s return to your journey.

  We reached Suanbo Plain around hour eleven, via minor routes. Cropdusters strewed clouds of saffron fertilizer, blanking the horizons. Xposure to EyeSats worried Hae-Joo, so we took a Timber-Corp plantation track. It had rained during the nite, so pools bogged the dirt track and progress was slow, but we saw no other vehicle. The Norfolk pine–rubberwood hybrids were planted in rank and file and created the illusion that trees were marching past our ford in a billion-strong regiment. I got out only once, when Hae-Joo refilled the exxon tank from a can. The plain had been brite, but inside the plantation even noon was dank, hushed dusk. The sole sound was a sterile wind swishing blunted needles. The trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds, so the stagnant air stunk of insecticide.

  The forest left as abruptly as it had arrived, and the topography grew hillier. We traveled east, the Woraksan Range to our south and Ch’ungju Lake spreading north. The lake water stunk of effluent from its salmon net ponds. Crosswater hills displayed mighty corp logos. A malachite statue of Prophet Malthus surveyed a dust bowl. Our track underpassed the Ch’ungju-Taegu-Pusan xpress-way Hae-Joo said we could be in Pusan within two hours if he d
ared join it, but a slow crawl thru backcountry was safer. Our pot-holed but Eyeless road switchbacked up into the Sobaeksan Mountains.

  Hae-Joo Im wasn’t trying to get to Pusan in one day?

  No. At approx hour seventeen, he hid the ford in an abandoned lumberyard, and we struck out on foot. My first mountain hike fascinated me as much as my first drive thru Seoul. Limestone bulges oozed lichen; fir saplings and mountain ash grew from clefts; clouds scrolled; the breeze was fragrant with natural pollen; once genomed moths spun around our heads, electronlike. Their wings’ logos had mutated over generations into a chance syllabary: a small victory of nature over corpocracy On an xposed rock shelf, Hae-Joo pointed across a gulf. “See him?”

  Who? I saw only a rock face.

  Keep looking, he said, and from the mountainside emerged the carved features of a cross-legged giant. One slender hand was raised in a gesture of grace. Weaponry and elements had strafed, ravaged, and cracked his features, but his outline was discernible if you knew where to look. I said the giant reminded me of Timothy Cavendish, making Hae-Joo Im smile for the first time in a long while. He said the giant was a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth, and perhaps the cracked stonework still possessed a lingering divinity. Only the inanimate can be so alive. I suppose QuarryCorp will destroy him when they get around to processing those mountains.

  Why did Im take you on this field trip to the middle of nowhere?

  Every nowhere is somewhere, Archivist. Past the cross-legged giant and over the ridge we came upon a modest grain bed in a clearing, clothes drying on bushes, vegetable plots, a crude irrigation system of bamboo, a cemetery. A thirsty cataract. Hae-Joo led me thru a narrow cleft into a courtyard, walled by ornate buildings unlike any I ever saw. A very recent xplosion had cratered the flagstones, blown away timbers, and collapsed a tiled roof. One pagoda had succumbed to a typhoon and fallen on its twin. Ivy more than joinery kept the latter upright. This was to be our lodging for the nite, Hae-Joo told me. An abbey had stood there for fifteen centuries, until corpocracy dissolved the pre-consumer religions after the Skirmishes. Now the site serves to shelter dispossessed purebloods who prefer scraping a life from the mountainside to downstrata conurb life.