3.: A Wolf at the Door/It Girl. Rag Doll.
(5/7/2112)
The Argyle Shoestring moves listlessly south, and Johnson has spent the past fifteen minutes gazing out a starboard porthole, towards the vast salt marshes cradling the ruins of Old Boston. His grandfather was a meteorologist who served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but, long ago back then, the IPCC’s direst predictions never went so high as seven goddamn meters of new ocean by the turn of the century. Surprise, motherfuckers. The air through the open porthole smells of the poisoned sea, and for one who’s spent too much of his life cowering among industrial squalor, it’s a welcome smell. A comforting smell. Out here, a citizen sailor on a village barge, a man can still be free, or he may at least manage to pretend he is still free. All this water is under the jurisdiction of the Far Shore Navy, expanded U.S. territory since a quarter century ago. But, this far north, mostly they have their hands too full up with contraband from the cross-Arctic smugglers out of Russia and the Northern European Union to spare much time for drifters. Ahmed says something, something that he makes sound urgent. Ahmed makes almost everything sound urgent. Johnson closes the brass hatch. The hinges squeak. There’s an undeniable melancholy to the skeletal remains of those distant, marsh-bound skyscrapers, only half visible through the haze. Melancholy, but hypnotic, and so it’s sort of a relief, whatever Ahmed’s on about.
Ahmed is sitting in front of one of the antique QD-LED monitors, data streaming down the screen like amber rain, bathing his face in amber light. Ahmed Andrushchenko is not a man who is well in the head, and lately his periods of lucidity have grown fewer and farther between. But Johnson doesn’t mind his company. Plus, the man’s obsessions with all the ways history might have gone, but didn’t, help to pass empty hours when the comfort of the sea and the village sounds drifting down from above and up from below, the motion of the barge on the waves, are not sufficient. Almost always, he’s harmless enough, is Ahmed Andrushchenko, and when he begins drifting towards the bad days, Johnson always manages to keep him from tearing up the cabin they share below the markets. Different rhythms soothe different people, and Ahmed says that Johnson’s voice soothes his tattered mind.
“It won’t last very long,” Johnson says, “before a backtrace snips you.”
“Fuck them,” barks Ahmed, without daring to take his eyes off the screen. These fleeting uplinks to one or another satellites are too precious to him.
“One day, they’ll trail you, and the entire village is gonna lose input and output, all because one man couldn’t keep his eyes on the now and tomorrow.” Johnson, whose first name is Bartleby, but no one’s called him that since he was a boy, sits down in his bunk and sighs. “You can be one selfish prick,” he says.
“And you can be a nearsighted cunt,” Ahmed says.
Johnson shakes his head and stares at the walls of the cabin, decorated with Ahmed’s collection of pinned lepidoptera, almost every one of these species extinct fifty years or more. He buys them off the merchant skiffs, or, more often, barters his mechanical and process skills for the butterflies. No questions ever asked, naturally, but Johnson knows most have been looted from the unreclaimed ruins of museums or stolen from other collectors’ private vaults.
These butterflies, at least, will never again flap their wings.
Today, Ahmed is chasing the twin, the one who proved dominant, the one who proved the force with which to be reckoned when push came to shove all the world off its foundations. He spends as much time chasing the albino as he spends mulling over the taxonomy of his bugs, picking through conspiracies printed on decades-old buckypages and Teslin sheets. As much time—more, really—than he spends muttering at inattentive Johnson about the Martian refugees and their dead air since the war, or the lights over Africa and Argentina, or the strategic excise bioweapons that are rumored to have been deployed against India when it withdrew from the Global Population Control Initiative two years ago.
“She’s here,” says Ahmed. “You have to read between the under-code, then filter that through a few archeo ElGamal and syncryption algorithms, but she’s here all over. Shitbirds didn’t think she could spin chess, but they were sorely mistaken, my skeptical friend.”
“I never said I was a skeptic,” Johnson mumbles, no matter how little of Ahmed’s absurdities he believes; he says it anyway.
“See, now that’s all middle game,” Ahmed says and taps on the screen. “You never get much of her middle game. Most of it’s sunk too deep in the sats. But, fuck me, this is only ’26, and she’s already got king safety down to an art. She’s hitting the internationals so hard even their material advantages have been pummeled into irrelevance. Oh, she’s moving to a very violent position. That strategy is beautiful.”
“Give the devil her due,” Johnson says.
“Goddamn right.”
“Well, be that as it may, you best spool and close it down now, Ahmed. I’m not kidding. I’m the one who’ll catch fuck and back if you get the ordinances on us.”
“My friend, you ought to see this. I wish you could appreciate—”
“C’mon, Ahmed. I’m not in the mood for this today.”
Ahmed’s fingers are dancing over the keys fast as a screw from a ten-penny whore, but Johnson’s been counting and he knows that Ahmed’s gone over the eight-second mark. Johnson might as well be a gust of wind seven miles away.
Ahmed calls out the moves, tongue almost as fast as his fingers.
“42.cxd4+ exd4 43.Kd3 Kb4 44 . . .”
“Okay,” Johnson says, getting up, crossing the cabin while Ahmed is still too caught up in the twin’s mythical corporate game of chess to see him coming. “I try to play nice, and you know that.” Johnson presses the downlink key, and the screen goes a solid wash of amber light. He braces himself for the full fury of Ahmed thwarted. The man’s brown eyes are, all at once, choked with anger.
“You don’t do that, Ahmed,” Johnson snarls. “You don’t even think it. How many teeth you got left you can afford to lose?”
And there’s a good argument. But the fire in Ahmed’s eyes begins to flicker out, and he just sits there, quietly fuming, staring at the monitor.
“I was getting close,” he says disconsolately.
“Yeah, you were. Getting close to buying the whole barge a pudgy good fine.” And Johnson pulls the cover down over the cabin’s wall unit. Then he goes back to his bunk.
“You think they don’t want us to think she was never real?” asks Ahmed.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Johnson asks back, even though he knows the answer perfectly well. This is their own game of chess, the one that these two men play every few days. Huge sea-wood fed with copper burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, in which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam. Isn’t that the way it goes? “What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?”
“They, you idiot. They.”
“Don’t call me an idiot, Ahmed. I don’t like it when you call me an idiot.”
“You think I am a lunatic.”
Johnson rubs his eyes. He didn’t know, until this moment, how tired he was.