Hae-Joo asked about the bomb crater.
The Abbess replied that a local Unanimity regiment was using them for teething. An aero appeared last month and launched a shell without warning. One man died, and several colonists were badly injured. An act of malice, the Abbess speculated sadly, or a bored pilot, or perhaps a developer had seen potential in the site as a healthspa hotel for xecs and wanted the site cleared.
My companion promised to find out.
Who were these “colonists” xactly? Squatters? Terrorists? Union?
Each colonist had a different story. I was introduced to Uyghur dissidents, dust-bowled farmers from Ho Chi Minh Delta, once respectable conurb dwellers who had fallen foul of corp politics, unemployable deviants, those undollared by mental illness. Of the seventy-five colonists, the youngest was nine weeks old; the oldest, the Abbess, was sixty-eight, though if she had claimed to be three hundred years of age I would still have believed her, such gravitas she had.
But . . . how could people there survive without franchises and gallerias? What did they eat? Drink? How about electricity? Entertainment? What about enforcers and order? How did they impose hierarchy?
Go visit them, Archivist. You can tell the Abbess I sent you. No? Well, their food came from the forest and gardens, water from the cataract. Scavenge trips to landfills yielded plastics and metals for tools. Their “school” sony was powered by a water turbine. Solar nitelamps recharged during daylite hours. Their entertainment was themselves; consumers cannot xist without 3-D and AdV, but humans once did and still can. Enforcement? Problems arose, no doubt, even crises from time to time. But no crisis is insuperable if people cooperate.
What about the mountain winters?
They survived as fifteen centuries of nuns had before them: by planning, thrift, and fortitude. The monastery was built over a cave, xtended by bandits during the Japanese annexation. These tunnels gave sufficient shelter from winter and Unanimity aeros. Oh, such a life is no bucolic Utopia. Yes, winters are severe; rainy seasons are relentless; crops fall prey to disease; their medicine is sorely limited. Few colonists live as long as upstrata consumers. They bicker, blame, and grieve as people will, but at least they do it in a community, and companionship is a fine medicine in itself. Nea So Copros has no communities now, only mutually suspicious substrata. I slept soundly that nite against a backdrop of gossip, music, complaints, and laughter, feeling safe for the first time since my dormroom in Papa Song’s.
So what was Union’s interest in the colony?
Simple: Union provides hardware, such as their solars; in return, the colony provides a safe house, kilometers from the nearest Eye. I woke in my dorm tunnel just before dawn and crept to the temple mouth. The guard was a middle-aged woman nursing a colt and a stimulin brew; she lifted the mosquito net for me but warned me about coyotes scavenging below the monastery walls. I promised to stay in earshot, skirted the courtyard, and squeezed between the narrow rocks to the balcony of blacks and grays.
The mountain dropped away; an updraft rose from the valley, carrying animal cries, calls, growls, and snuffles. I could not identify even one; for all my knowledge of censored arcana, I felt impoverished. And such a sky of stars! Ah, mountain stars are not these apologetic pinpricks over conurb skies; hanging plump they drip lite. A boulder stirred, just a meter away. “Ah, Ms. Yoo,” said the Abbess, “an early riser.”
I wished her a good morning.
The younger colonists, the old woman confided, worry about her wandering around before sunup, in case she fell off the edge. She produced a pipe from her sleeve, stuffed its bowl, and lit it. A raw local leaf, she admitted, but she had lost the taste for refined marlboros years ago. The smoke smelled of aromatic leather and dried dung.
I asked about the stone figure in the escarpment across the gulf.
Siddhartha had other names, she told me, mostly lost now. Her predecessors knew all the stories and sermons, but the old Abbess and senior nuns were sentenced to the Litehouse when non-consumer religions were criminalized. The present Abbess had been a novice back then, so Unanimity judged her young enough for reorientation. She was raised in an orphans’ bloc in Pearl City Conurb, but she said, she had never left her abbey spiritually. She returned years later and founded the present colony in the wreckage.
I asked if Siddhartha was indeed a god.
Many called him so, the Abbess agreed, but Siddhartha does not influence fortune or weather or perform many of a divinity’s traditional functions. Rather, Siddhartha is a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one’s future reincarnations. “But I pray to the ideal.” She indicated the meditating giant. “Early, so he knows I’m serious.”
I said I hoped that Siddhartha would reincarnate me in her colony.
Lite from the coming day defined the world more clearly now. The Abbess asked why I hoped so.
It took a little time to form my answer. I said how all purebloods have a hunger, a dissatisfaction in their eyes, xcept for the colonists I had met.
The Abbess nodded. If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she xtemporized, corpocracy would be finished. Thus, Media is keen to scorn colonies such as hers, comparing them to tapeworms; accusing them of stealing rainwater from WaterCorp, royalties from VegCorp patent holders, oxygen from AirCorp. The Abbess feared that, should the day ever come when the Board decided they were a viable alternative to corpocratic ideology, “the ‘tapeworms’ will be renamed ‘terrorists,’ smart bombs will rain, and our tunnels flood with fire.”
I suggested the colony must prosper invisibly, in obscurity.
“Xactly.” Her voice hushed. “A balancing act as demanding as impersonating a pureblood, I imagine.”
She knew you weren’t pureblood all along? How?
It seemed tactless to ask. Maybe a spyhole in our quarters had captured me imbibing Soap. My host informed me that xperience had taught the colonists to keep a friendly eye on their guests, even Unionmen. The Abbess herself disliked such a violation of the old abbey’s hospitality codes, but the younger colonists were adamant that close surveillance be maintained. She revealed her intelligence only to bid me luck in my future enterprises, for of all corpocracy’s crimes against the downstrata, the Abbess stated, “nothing is more heinous than the enslavement of your tribe.”
I presume she meant fabricants? But was she speaking in specific terms—servers in dineries—or general terms—every fabricant in Nea So Copros?
I did not know, and did not learn that until the following nite in Pusan. But by now breakfast pans were banging in the courtyard. The Abbess looked at the cleft to the courtyard and changed her tone. “And who might this young coyote be?”
The mute boy padded over and sat by the Abbess’s feet. Sunlite bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.
So day two as a fugitive got under way.
Yes. Hae-Joo breakfasted on potato cakes and fig honey; unlike the previous nite, no one pressed me to eat the pureblood food. As we said our farewells, two or three of the teenage girls, tearful to see Hae-Joo depart, shot me hateful glances, much to my guide’s amusement. Hae-Joo had to behave like a hard-bitten revolutionary, but he was still a boy in some respects. As she embraced me, the Abbess whispered in my ear, “I shall ask Siddhartha to grant your wish.” Under his gaze we left that rarefied height and hiked down through the noisy forest, where we found our ford, untouched.