“My son didn’t mean to be rude,” Rupert muttered.
“Your son displayed his ignorance and did not care if he was rude or not,” the snake charmer replied. “He has spoiled my performance, and thanks to him I will have no money to take home.”
“Let me pay you!” Rupert took out his wallet and produced a fifty-dirham note. He didn’t seem to notice that this was hardly very generous. Fifty dirham was less than seven dollars.
“Say sorry to the man, Charles,” Noreen suggested. She was rather hoping that the cobra would rise up and dance again. Her camera was still poised between her fingers.
“I won’t say sorry, because it’s true,” Charles insisted. “I saw it on the Discovery Channel. It’s all just a trick.”
“You should be careful how you speak to me, child,” the snake charmer muttered, and for the first time he looked angry. His eyes had narrowed and he was regarding Charles with the same quiet malice as the cobra itself. “You are a visitor to my country, so you should be respectful of its customs. And there are some things that even your television channels do not understand. Magic, for example, has a way of sneaking up on you and biting in ways that you may not expect.”
“I don’t believe in magic,” Charles retorted. But some of the confidence had gone out of his voice.
“Let’s get back to the riad,” Noreen suggested. She gave the snake charmer a wobbly smile. “It was a pleasure meeting you,” she wavered. “In fact, it was charming!”
The three of them turned and walked away, but Charles couldn’t resist having the last word—or at least what passed as a word. Neither of his parents was watching. They were already searching for the passage that would lead them back to the riad. Charles dropped slightly behind, then twisted around and raised his middle finger, a universal symbol that he was sure the old man would understand. Sure enough, the snake charmer recoiled as if he had been slapped across the face. Then he composed himself and nodded slowly, twice. Once again, his jet-black eyes settled on the boy, and despite the heat of the evening, Charles couldn’t avoid a small shiver of cold. But then his father called out to him. “Come on, Charles. It’s this way.” And a moment later they were out of the main square and making their way back through the souq.
By dinnertime, the whole incident had been forgotten.
The meal was served once again on the roof, and this time there were belly dancers performing to the wail and beat of a small band of musicians all dressed in brilliant white. The guests loved it and—to Charles’s embarrassment—his parents insisted on joining in. His father was a large, well-built man, and the sight of him waving his arms in the air while shaking his stomach around was something that Charles felt would damage him for life. In the end he crept away and went to bed.
It was about eleven o’clock when he turned out the light. His parents were still upstairs, probably telling rude jokes by now—which is what they always did when they’d had too much to drink. Charles was fed up. The heat of Marrakesh wore him out and he was in dire need of a large plate of French fries. As far as he was concerned, the vacation couldn’t end a day too soon. Five minutes later, he was asleep. His last, comforting thought was that at least when he woke up there would only be another three days to go.
But in fact, he was woken suddenly in the middle of the night. The room was not quite dark. Four windows looked out onto the courtyard and the moon was slanting in, washing everything a pale white. He turned his head and saw his watch, propped up against a lamp. It showed half past three. What was it that had disturbed him?
The sound came again, sliding underneath the door or through the window, and although Charles didn’t understand why, it sent a shiver all the way down his spine. Music. The shimmering wail of a pipe. It was the snake charmer . . . it had to be. Charles recognized the sound from the main square. The old man must be somewhere outside the riad—although surely that wasn’t possible, as he was fairly sure that his room didn’t back onto the street. And yet he sounded so close! It was almost as if he were right inside the room.
Something moved.
Charles didn’t see it, but he knew it was there. As the hairs stood up, one after another, along the back of his neck, he heard its body, heavy and soft, sliding across the tiled floor. It was heading for the bed—but how had it gotten into the room? The door wasn’t open. The windows were barred. His first thought was that it must be some sort of huge insect that had somehow slipped through a crack in the plasterwork, but he knew that wasn’t true. The music told him exactly what it was, and sure enough, a moment later it rose up at the foot of the bed—inches from his feet—silhouetted dark green against the moonlight, its little eyes blinking malevolently, its tongue flickering, its hood stretched wide. Charles could imagine its body curled up beneath it.
The cobra.
It was there, with him, in the room.
For a few seconds it swayed from side to side as if unsure what to do. Then the music stopped. There was a sudden silence. It was the signal the snake had been waiting for. At once, it lunged toward him.
All the beds at the riad had duvets rather than sheets and blankets, and the snake had aimed for the gap between the soft material above and the mattress below. Charles knew at once that it had entered the bed with him and he tried to pull his legs back, tried to roll out of bed and hurl himself onto the floor. But his body wouldn’t obey him. It was doing things it had never done before. His heart was heaving. His eyes were bulging. He seemed to have swallowed his own tongue. There were tears coursing down the sides of his face. He screamed for help, but only the tiniest of whispers came out.
Charles was lying on his back with his legs slightly apart. He was wearing pajama bottoms but no top, and he could feel the sweat sliding over his stomach. The music had begun again, so close now that the piper could have been sitting right next to the bed with the pipe beside his ear. Desperately, he looked down. He could just make out the bulge beneath the duvet as the cobra slithered first one way, then the other. It was climbing up between his legs, and he realized exactly where it was going to bite him.
Oh, God! He could imagine its fangs, perhaps as much as half an inch long. They were like hypodermic needles. He remembered that from the Discovery Channel too. When the cobra struck, it would inject him with a venom that would paralyze his nervous system. His muscles would dissolve. He would die slowly, unable to breathe, and when his parents came in the next morning, they would hardly recognize him. He would be a shriveled mummy, wrapped in pain.
The music stopped again. And in this second silence everything happened. The cobra struck. Charles felt its bite and screamed—and this time his voice came out loud and hopeless. At the same moment, his hands grasped the duvet and he threw it one way even as he threw himself the other, rolling off the bed and crashing onto the cold tiled floor. In the distance he heard voices, raised in alarm. Footsteps echoed across the courtyard. And then the door flew open, the lights went on and there were Rupert and Noreen, his father in pajamas, his mother in a nightgown with moisturizer all over her face.
“Charlie, darling? What is it?” she squealed.
“The s-s-s . . .” Charles was lying on the floor, trembling violently. He was almost hissing like a snake himself, but he couldn’t get the word out.
“The what? What is it?”
“There’s a snake!” The tears flowed more heavily. Charles knew that his parents had come too late. He had already been bitten. The agony would start soon.
“I don’t see a snake,” Noreen said.
“You’ve wet the bed,” his father observed.
Charles looked down between his legs. Sure enough, there was a large damp patch on his pajamas, but there was no sign of any bite mark, no cut or tear in the fabric. As he began to recover, he had to admit that he wasn’t feeling any pain after all. Meanwhile, his parents had moved into the room. His mother was picking up the duvet. His father was vaguely searching around the bed. Both of them looked embarrassed.
?
??There’s nothing here,” Rupert said.
“Come on, darling. Let me help you change out of those pajamas.” Noreen took a fresh pair out of the cupboard and went over to her son. She was talking to him as if he were six years old.
“I heard music,” Charles insisted. “It was the man from the square. He was outside the room.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Rupert muttered.
Noreen nodded. “You know what a light sleeper your father is,” she said. “If there had been someone playing music, he’d have heard it.” She sighed. “You must have had a bad dream.”
“He was outside!” Charles insisted. “I heard him. And there was a snake. I saw it!”
“I’m going back to bed,” Rupert growled.
He turned and walked out of the room, leaving Charles alone with his mother. By now Charles was beginning to accept that his parents must be right. The music had stopped. There was no sign of any snake. He hadn’t, after all, been bitten. Now his face was bright red with embarrassment. He just wanted the night to be over so that he could forget all about it.
“Do you want me to run a bath?” his mother asked.
“No. I’ll do it,” Charles replied sulkily.
“Well, I’ll stay until you’re tucked up again.” Noreen had already taken off the bottom sheet. She was examining the mattress in dismay. “We’ll have to turn this over,” she said. “Maybe I’d better call room service.”
“Just leave me alone.”
“Are you sure, dear?”
“Go away.”
She did. Charles went into the bathroom, showered and changed into clean pajamas. Then he went back to bed, laying himself down on the very edge and covering himself with a spare blanket that he had found in a cupboard. He still wasn’t sure what had happened. A dream? It had been too real. He was old enough to know the difference between being awake and being asleep. And yet . . .
Somehow he nodded off once again. And the next time he opened his eyes, he was relieved to see daylight on the other side of the windows. Another day had begun.
He was a little sheepish when he joined his parents for breakfast on the roof, but for once they seemed to be behaving sensibly, for neither of them mentioned the events of the night before. Like everything at the Riad El Fenn, breakfast was an elaborate affair with croissants and coffee, pancakes dipped in honey, yogurt and fruit and delicious omelets for those who still had enough room. There were at least a dozen guests still at the table and Charles ignored them all as he plumped himself down on a cushion between Noreen and Rupert.
“We thought we’d visit the El-Badi Palace,” his father said. He already had his guidebook open at the right place.
“And there’s a wonderful garden,” his mother added.
“I’m not staying here one minute longer,” Charles replied. “I want to go home.”
He had made the decision as he got dressed. All he wanted was to get out of Marrakesh. And his parents couldn’t keep him here. He would scream if he had to. He would run away, grab a taxi and force them to put him on a plane. He should never have come here in the first place, and from now on he wasn’t going to let anyone tell him what to do. If they wanted to go on vacation in the future, they could go without him. Otherwise it would be Disneyland and no argument! He had made up his mind.
“Well, I don’t know . . . ,” his father began.
Outside on the street, a pipe began to play.
It was the same music that they had heard in the main square—and this time there could be no doubt that it really existed. The other guests heard it and began to smile. Somehow the sound captured everything that was ancient and mysterious about a city that had been there for almost a thousand years.
Charles jerked upright in his seat.
“Charlie . . . ?” His mother quavered.
He was sweating. His eyes were distant and unfocused.
“What is it?” his father asked.
Charles got to his feet. He didn’t want to but he couldn’t stop himself. The music continued, louder, more insistent. “No . . .” He whispered the word and nobody heard it except him. His teeth were locked together. The other guests were watching. The music played.
And slowly, helplessly, Charles Atchley began to dance.
ROBO-NANNY
Later on, they would blame each other. It didn’t matter which one of them you asked. They would both say that it had never been their idea to buy Robo-Nanny.
But it had seemed sensible enough at the time. After all, they were busy people—Sanjiv Mahal, international director of the world’s second largest Internet bank, and his wife, Nicole, designer and photographer, in constant demand both on Earth and on the moon. Their days were crammed full of clients, meetings and reports. They were invited to dinner parties five times a week. They spent their entire lives traveling thousands of miles for meetings in Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow and Antarctica and seldom seemed to be on one continent—or even one planet—at the same time.
The Mahals had been married for fifteen years and had two children: Sebastian, age eleven, and Cameron, who was nine. And that was the problem. Everyone agreed that the boys were delightful—good-looking, intelligent and, for the most part, well-behaved. But like all boys they were noisy and demanded attention, whether it was Sebastian kicking a football around the house and playing his nano-guitar at full volume or Cameron drawing all over his bedroom wall or singing opera with a hologram of the complete London Symphony Orchestra while he was in the bath. Although there were two years between them, they could have been twins. Both were rather thin and small for their age, with brown hair that they never brushed, wide smiles and very dark eyes. Put them in the same soccer jersey (they both supported Chelski) and it would be hard to tell them apart.
The family lived in Kensington Fortress, which was one of the most exclusive areas of London and one with no drugs or knife crime . . . if only because it was surrounded by its own force field and nobody could get in or out without showing their ID cards to the local private police force. They had recently moved into a new home, which Nicole had designed herself. She had always wanted to live somewhere old-fashioned, with a sense of history, so she had modeled it on a twenty-first century mews house with shutters, window boxes and a proper staircase connecting the three floors. Of course, the red bricks and gray slate roof tiles concealed every luxury that the twenty-second century had to offer, including solar heating, a miniature hydroelectric generator in the kitchen, holo-TV in all the rooms and everything computer-controlled, right down to the bathwater. Even the staircase moved, at the touch of a button. The house was amazingly large. Anyone who walked in would know at once that the Mahals had to be seriously wealthy. They didn’t have a garden—private gardens in London had long since disappeared—but they did have a small patio with a micro-BBQ and a vertical swimming fountain. They were a happy, successful family. All that was about to change.
Sanjiv Mahal was spending more and more time in China. Nicole Mahal had just accepted a commission to design sixteen holiday-pods in the Sahara Desert. The question was, who was going to look after Cam and Seb if the parents happened to be away at the same time? They would be at school every morning for three hours, but this didn’t even involve getting out of bed as they both went to Hill House, an exclusive virtual school that they could plug into where they lay. And what would they do after that? There were local teen centers and exercise areas. Both children could dive into one of the thousands of Internet streams or turn on their PlayStation 207. But they still needed someone to cook and clean, to make sure they were washed and dressed, to stop them from fighting, to look after them if they became sick.
And one day, over breakfast, they found the answer. It was beamed down to them during a news scan.
“New—from Cyber-Life Industries,” the voice announced. In the background, hypno-music was playing quietly to make the product seem even more fantastic. “Our new line of Robo-Nannys is now ready for immediate delivery. The model T-199 is o
ur most advanced yet, with completely lifelike appearance and full range of face and voice types (our deluxe models include Australian, Eastern European and Welsh). The T-199 is programmed to deal with infants and children up to any age, and our new Emotional Self-Learning Software means that the nanny will quickly adapt to become a treasured part of your family. Kids giving you a hard time? Won’t eat their genetically modified greens? Turn up the Severity Control™ and they’ll quickly learn that nanny knows best! Firm friend or loving companion, the T-199 is the next step forward in modern child care.”
“That’s the answer!” Sanjiv exclaimed. He was a dark, handsome man, smartly dressed even at the breakfast table, the sort who made his decisions very quickly, although in this instance he would later swear that he was only responding to what his wife had suggested. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before. A Robo-Nanny!” He reached into his pocket and took out his Chinese Express credit card. “I’ll call them now.”
“I’m not so sure . . . ,” Nicole began.
“What’s the matter?”
“I just think we ought to talk about it, that’s all,” Nicole said. “I’ve always looked after the boys myself. I’m not sure I’m ready to hand them over to some machine that you’ve seen on a news scan.”
“It’s Cyber-Life Industries. They’ve got a terrific reputation.”
“I’m sure they have.” Nicole was uneasy without quite knowing why. “But it is very expensive,” she blurted out. “Look at the price. Two million IY.” The International Yen had been the world currency for half a century now. “Are you sure we can afford it?”