wonder, if the rumors about your brawls were even half true! How were the Philippines?”
Hae-Joo’s voice had changed again. I checked, involuntarily, so hard-scoured was his accent now; it was still him at my side. “Sinking, Mrs. Lim, sinking fast. You haven’t gone subletting my room, now, have you?”
“Oh, I keep a reliable house, don’t worry about that!” She faked offense but warned she would need a fresh blip of dollars if his next voyage lasted as long as his last. The portcullis rose, and she glanced at me. “Say, Nun- Hel, if your fluffball stays over a week, single apartments get charged as doubles. House rules. Like it or lump it. All the same to me.”
Nun-Hel Han the sailor said I would stay for only a nite or two.
“In every port”—the landlady leered—“it’s true, then.”
Was she Union?
No. Flophouse landladies judas their own mothers for a dollar; judasing a Unionman would fetch a far higher price. But, as Hae-Joo told me, they also discourage the idly inquisitive. Inside, a pocked stairwell echoed with arguments and 3-Ds. I was, at last, getting used to stairs. On the ninth floor a woodworm corridor led us to a scraped door. Hae-Joo retrieved a pre-placed match stump from its hinge, noting the management had succumbed to a nasty rash of honesty.
Nun-Hel’s floproom had a sour mattress, a tidy kitchenette, a closet of clothes for varying climates, a blurred foto of naked Caucasian prostitutes straddling a group of sailors, souvenirs from the Twelve Conurbs and minor ports, and of course, a framed kodak of the Beloved Chairman. A lipsticked marlboro was left teetered on a beer can. The window was shuttered.
Hae-Joo showered and changed. He told me he had to attend a Union cell meeting and warned me to keep the window shutter down and not to answer the door or fone unless it was him or Apis with this crypto: he wrote the words “These are the tears of things” on a scrap of paper, which he then burned in the ashtray. He put a small supply of Soap in the fridge, and promised to return in the morning, soon after curfew.
Surely, such a distinguished defector as yourself deserved a rather grander reception?
Grand receptions draw attention. I passed some hours studying Pusan’s geography on the sony before showering and imbibing my Soap. I woke late, I think, after hour six. Hae-Joo returned xhausted, holding a bag of pungent
I obeyed. The rusty shutter uprolled. Hae-Joo commanded, “Don’t look .?.?. don’t look .?.?. now, open your eyes.”
A swarm of roofs, thruways, commuter hives, AdVs, concrete .?.?. and there, in the background, the brite spring sky’s sediment had sunk to a dark band of blue. Ah, it mesmerized me .?.?. like the snow had done. All the woe of the words “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully.
Hae-Joo announced, “The ocean.”
You’d never seen it before?
Only on Papa Song’s 3-Ds of life in Xultation. Never the real thing with my own eyes. I yearned to go and touch it and walk by it, but Hae-Joo thought it safest to stay hidden during daylite until we were requartered somewhere more remote. Then he lay on the mattress and within a minute began snoring.
Hours passed; in ocean slots between buildings, I watched freighters and naval vessels. Downstrata housewives aired worn linen on nearby rooftops. Later the weather grew overcast, and armored aeros rumbled thru low clouds. I studied. It rained. Hae-Joo, still asleep, rolled over, slurred “No, only a friend of a friend,” and fell silent again. Drool slid from his mouth, wetting his pillow. I thought about Professor Mephi. In our last seminar he had spoken of his estrangement from his family and confessed he spent more time educating me than teaching his own daughter. Now he was dead, because of his belief in Union. I felt gratitude, guilt, and other emotions too.
Hae-Joo woke midafternoon, showered, and brewed ginseng tea. How I envy purebloods your rainbow cuisine, Archivist. Before my ascension, Soap seemed the most delicious substance imaginable, but now it tastes bland and gray. I suffer nausea if I so much as taste pureblood food, however, and vomiting later. Hae-Joo downshuttered the window. “Time to liaise,” he told me. Then he unhooked the Beloved Chairman’s kodak and placed it facedown on the low table. Hae-Joo inplugged his sony to a socket concealed in the blemished frame.
An illegal transceiver? Hidden in a kodak of Nea’s architect?
The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane. A 3-D of an old man clarified britely; he looked like an inxpensively healed burn victim. His lips out of sync with his words, he congratulated me on my safe arrival in Pusan and asked who had the prettier face, him or the carp?
I replied honestly: the carp.
An-Kor Apis’s laugh became a cough. “This is my true face, whatever that means these days.” His sickly appearance suited him well, he said, because casual enforcers worried that he might be contagious. He asked if I had enjoyed my journey across our beloved motherland.
Hae-Joo Im had looked after me well, I answered.
General Apis asked if I understood the role Union wished me to assume in their struggle to ascend fabricants into citizens. Yes, I began, but I did not have the chance to declare my indecision. “We want to xpose you to a .?.?. sight, a formative xperience, here in Pusan, before you decide, Sonmi.” He warned it would not be pleasant but was imperative. “To allow for an informed decision regarding your future. If you agree, Hae-Joo can take you now.”
I said I would go, certainly.
“Then we’ll speak again, very soon,” promised Apis, disconnecting his imager. Hae-Joo produced a pair of technic uniforms and semi-visors from his closet. We dressed in these, then over-cloaked for the landlady’s benefit. Outside was cold, and I was grateful for the double layers. We rode the metro to the port terminal and took a conveyor down to the waterfront berths, passing the vast oceangoing vessels. The nite sea was oily black and the ships similarly austere, but one brite vessel pulsed golden arches and resembled an undersea palace. I had seen it before, in a previous life. “Papa Song’s Golden Ark,” I xclaimed, telling Hae-Joo what he already knew, that it conveyed the Twelvestarred east across the ocean to Xultation.
Hae-Joo confirmed Papa’s Golden Ark was our destination.
Security on the gangway was minimal: a bleary-eyed pureblood with his feet on the desk, watching fabricant gladiators slay each other in the Shanghai Colosseum on 3-D. “And you are?”
Hae-Joo blinked his Soul on his Eye. “Fifth-stratum technic man—Shik Gang.” He checked his handsony and reported we had been sent to recalibrate busted thermostats on deck seven.
“Seven?” The guard smirked. “Hope you haven’t just eaten.” Then he looked at me. I looked at the floor. “Who’s this verbal marathonette, Technic Gang?”
“My new aide. Technic Aide Yoo.”
“That so? Is tonite your maiden visit to our pleasuredome?”
I nodded yes, it was.
The guard said there was no time like the first time. He waved us by with a lazy twitch of his foot.
Gaining access to a corp ship was so simple?
Papa Song’s Golden Ark is not xactly a magnet for illegal boarders, Archivist. Crew, aides, and various technics bustled in the main gangways, too intent on their own business to notice us. The service side shafts were empty, so we descended to the Ark’s underbelly unmet. Our nikes clanged on the metal stairs. A giant motor drummed. I thought I heard singing but told myself my ears must be mistaken. Hae-Joo consulted his deck plan, unlatched an access hatch, and I remember him pausing, as if to tell me something. But he changed his mind, clambered in, helped me thru, then locked the hatch behind us.
I found myself on all fours on a cramped hangway suspended from the roof of a sizable holding chamber. The hangway’s far end was concealed by flaps, but thru its gridded floor I could see some two hundred Twelvestarred Papa Song servers, lining up in a paddock of turnstiles whose single direction was onward. Yoonas, Hwa-Soons, Ma-Leu-Das, Sonmis, and some stem-types unused in Chongmyo Plaza Dinery, all in the familiar gold-and-scarlet uniform. How dreamlike to see my x-sisters, outside the context of a Papa Song dome. They sang Papa Song’s
