Professor Malik Solanka felt his stomach tighten. “Jack’s a member of this S & M thing?” he asked. “But aren’t these the men …”—“He’s not a member yet,” she butted in, driven by her need to share her terrible burden. “But he’s hammering on the door, begging to be let in, the stupid bastard. And that’s after the evil shit in the press. Once I knew that, I couldn’t stay with him. I’ll tell you something that wasn’t in any of the papers,” she added, dropping her voice even further. “Those three dead girls? They weren’t raped, they weren’t robbed, right? But something was done to them, and that’s what really links the three crimes, only the police don’t want it in the papers because of the copycat problem.” Solanka was beginning to be genuinely frightened. “What happened to them?” he asked weakly. Neela covered her eyes with her hands. “They were scalped,” she whispered, and wept.
To be scalped was to remain a trophy even in death. And because rarity created value, a dead girl’s scalp in your pocket—O most gruesome of mysteries!—might actually possess greater cachet than would be conferred by the same girl, alive and breathing, on your arm at a glamorous ball, or even as a willing partner in whatever sexual antics you cared to devise. The scalp was a signifier of domination, and to remove it, to see such a relic as desirable, was to value the signifier above the signified. The girls, Solanka in his revolted horror began to understand, had actually been worth more to their murderers dead than alive.
Neela was convinced of the three boyfriends’ guilt; convinced, too, that Jack knew a great deal more than he was telling anyone, even her. “It’s like heroin,” she said, drying her eyes. “He’s in so deep he doesn’t know how to get out, doesn’t want to get out, even though staying in there will destroy him. My worry is, what is he ready to do, and who is he ready to do it to? Was I being lined up for those assholes’ delectation, or what? As for the killings, who knows why? Maybe their little sex games went too far. Maybe it’s some insane sex and power thing those rich boys have. Some blood-brother manhood shit. Fuck the girl and kill her, and do it so damn cleverly that you get away with it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just expressing class resentment here. Maybe I’ve just watched too many movies. Compulsion. Rope. You know? ‘Why do such a thing?’ ‘Because we can.’ Because they want to prove what little Caesars they are. How above and beyond they are, how exalted, godlike. The law can’t touch them. It’s such murderous crap, but Mr. Lapdog Rhinehart just goes on being loyal. ‘You don’t know jack shit about them, Neela, they’re decent enough young men.’ Bullshit. He’s so blind, he can’t see that they’ll take him down with them when they go, or, worse still, maybe they’re setting him up. He’ll take the fall for them and go to the chair singing their praises. Jack Shit. Good name for that weak little fuck. Right at this moment, that’s about what he means to me.”
“Why are you so sure of this?” Solanka asked her. “I’m sorry, but you’re sounding a little wild yourself. Those three men were questioned, but they haven’t been arrested. And as I understand it, each of them has a solid alibi for the time his girlfriend died. Witnesses, et cetera. One was seen in a bar, and so on, I forget.” His heart was beating hard. For what felt like forever, he had been accusing himself of these crimes. Knowing the disorder in his own heart, the bubbling incoherent storm, he had linked it to the disorder of the city, and come close to declaring himself guilty. Now, it seemed, exoneration was at hand, but the price of his innocence just might be his good friend’s guilt. A great turbulence was churning in his stomach, making him nauseous. “And the scalping business,” he forced himself to ask. “Where on earth did you hear a thing like that?”
“Oh God,” she wailed, letting the worst thing come out into the open at last. “I was tidying his fucking wardrobe. God knows why. I never do chores like that for a man. Get a housekeeper, you know? That’s not what I’m for. I really dug him, I guess for about five minutes there I allowed myself … so anyway, I was clearing up for him, and I found, I found.” Tears again. Solanka put his hand on her arm now, and she moved against him, hugged him hard, and sobbed. “Goofy,” she said. “I found all three of them. The fucking man-sized fancy-dress costumes. Goofy and Robin Hood and Buzz.”
She had confronted Rhinehart and he had blustered, badly. Yes, for a joke, Marsalis, Andriessen, and Medford would dress up in these outfits and spy on their girlfriends from a distance. Okay, yes, maybe it was a joke in poor taste, but it didn’t make them killers. And they hadn’t worn the outfits on the nights of the murders, that was nonsense: garbled reporting. But they were afraid, wouldn’t you be, and had asked Jack to help. “He went on and on protesting their innocence, denying that his precious club is a front organization for the lewd practices of the privileged class.” Neela had refused to let the subject drop. “I set out everything I knew, half knew, intuited, and suspected, piled it all up in front of him and told him I wasn’t going to let up until he’d said what there was to say.” Finally he’d panicked and cried out, “You think I’m the kind of man who goes out at night and cuts off the tops of women’s heads?” When she’d asked him what that meant, he’d looked scared to death, and claimed he’d read it in the paper. The swish of the tomahawk. The victorious warrior’s taking of the spoils. But she had gone on-line to examine the archives of every paper in the Manhattan area, and she knew. “It’s not there.”
Neela had dressed for beauty, not for warmth, and the afternoon had lost its glow. Solanka took off his coat and put it over her trembling shoulders. All around them in the park the colors were fading. The world became a place of blacks and grays. Women’s clothes—unusually for New York, it had been a season of bright colors—faded to monochrome. Under a gunmetal sky, the green leached out of the spreading trees. Neela needed to get out of this suddenly ghostly environment. “Let’s get a drink,” she proposed, getting up, and in the same instant was off in long strides. “There’s a hotel bar that’s okay on Seventy-seventh,” and Solanka hurried after her, ignoring the now familiar shocks and catastrophes she was leaving, like hurricane damage, in her wake.
She had been born “in the mid-seventies” in Mildendo, the capital of Lilliput-Blefuscu, where her family still lived. They were girmityas, descendants of one of the original migrants—her great-grandfather—who had signed an indenture agreement, a girmit, back in 1834, the year after the abolition of slavery. Biju Mahendra, from the little Indian village of Titlipur, had traveled with his brothers all the way to this double speck in the remote South Pacific. The Mahendras had gone to work in Blefuscu, the more fertile of the two islands, and the center of the sugar industry. “As an Indo-Lilly,” she said over her second cosmopolitan, “my childhood bogeyman was the Coolumber, who was big and white and spoke not in words but in numbers and would eat little girls at night if they didn’t do their homework and wash their private parts. As I grew up I learned that the ‘coolumbers’ were the sugarcane laborers’ overseers. The particular one in my family’s story was a white man called Mr. Huge—Hughes, really, I suppose—who was ‘a devil from Tasmania,’ and to whom my great-grandfather and great-uncles were no more than numbers on the list he read out every morning. My ancestors were numbers, the children of numbers. Only the indigenous Elbees were called by their true last names. It took us three generations to retrieve our family names from this numerical tyranny. By then, obviously, things between the Elbees and us had gone badly wrong. ‘We eat veggies,’ my grandmother used to say, ‘but those Elbee fatsos eat human meat.’ In fact there is a history of cannibalism in Lilliput-Blefuscu. They are offended when you point this out, but it’s just so. And for us the very presence of meat in the kitchen was a defilement. Long pork sounded like the devil’s own food.”
Words for drink played a distressingly big part in her back-story. In the matter of grog, yaqona, kava, beer, as in little else, the Indo-Lilliputians and Elbees were as one; both communities suffered from alcoholism and the problems associated with it. Her own father was a big boozer, and she had been glad to escape him
. There were very few scholarships to America available in Lilliput-Blefuscu, but she won one of them, and fell for New York at once, as did everybody who needed, and found here, a home away from home among other wanderers who needed exactly the same thing: a haven in which to spread their wings. Yet her roots pulled at her, and she suffered badly from what she called “the guilt of relief.” She had escaped her drunkard of a father, but her mother and sisters had not. And to her community’s cause, too, she remained passionately attached. “The parades are on Sunday,” she said, ordering a third cosmopolitan. “Will you come with me?” And Solanka—it was Thursday already—inevitably agreed.
“The Elbees say we are greedy and want everything and will chase them out of their own land. We say they are lazy and if it wasn’t for us they would sit around doing nothing and starve. They say that the only end of a soft-boiled egg to break is the little one. Whereas we—or at least those of us who eat eggs—are the Big Endians, from Big Endia.” She cackled again, tickled by her own joke. “Trouble is coming soon.” It was a question, as so many things were, of the land. Even though the Indo-Lilliputians on Blefuscu now did all the farming, were responsible for most of the country’s exports, and therefore earned most of the foreign exchange; even though they had prospered and cared for their own, building their own schools and hospitals, still the land on which all this stood was owned by the “indigenous” Elbees. “I hate that word, ‘indigenous,’” Neela cried. “I’m fourth-generation Indo-Lilly. So I’m indigenous too.” The Elbees feared a coup—a revolutionary land grab by the Indo-Lillys, to whom the Elbee constitution still denied the right to own real estate on either island; the Big Endians, for their part, feared the same thing in reverse. They were afraid that when their hundred-year leases expired in the course of the coming decade, the Elbees would simply take back the now valuable farmland for themselves, leaving the Indians, who had developed it, with nothing.
But there was a complication, which Neela, in spite of her ethnic loyalty and three quick cosmopolitans, was honest enough to admit. “This isn’t just a question of ethnic antagonism or even of who owns what,” she said. “The Elbee culture really is different, and I can see why they are afraid. They’re collectivists. The land isn’t held by individual landowners but by the Elbee chiefs in trust for the whole Elbee people. And then we Big Endia-wallahs come along with our good business practice, entrepreneurial acumen, free-market mercantilism, and profit mentality. And the world speaks our language now, not theirs. It is the age of numbers, isn’t it? So we are numbers and the Elbees are words. We are mathematics and they are poetry. We are winning and they are losing: and so of course they’re afraid of us, it’s like the struggle inside human nature itself, between what’s mechanical and utilitarian in us and the part that loves and dreams. We all fear that the cold, machinelike thing in human nature will destroy our magic and song. So the battle between the Indo-Lillys and the Elbees is also the battle of the human spirit and, damnit, with my heart I’m probably on the other side. But my people are my people and justice is justice and after you’ve worked your butts off for four generations and you’re still treated like second-class citizens, you’ve got a right to be angry. If it comes to it I’ll go back. I’ll fight alongside them if I have to, shoulder to shoulder. I’m not kidding, I really will.” He believed her. And was thinking: how is it that, in the company of this impassioned woman I barely know, I feel so completely at ease?
The scar was the legacy of a bad car accident on the interstate near Albany; she had almost lost her arm. Neela by her own admission drove “like a maharani.” It was up to other road users to keep out of her imperious, supra-legal way. In areas where she and her car became known—Blefuscu, or the environs of her smart New England college—motorists, when they saw Neela Mahendra coming, would often abandon their vehicles and run. After a series of small dings and near misses, she experienced the very unfunny Big One. Her survival was a miracle (and a close thing); the preservation of her heartbreaking beauty was an even greater astonishment. “I’ll take the scar,” she said. “I’m lucky to have it. And it’s a reminder of something I shouldn’t forget.”
In New York, fortunately, it was unnecessary for her to drive. Her regal attitude—“my mother always told me I was a queen, and I believed her”—meant she preferred to be driven anyway, although she was also a terrible backseat driver, full of yelps and gasps. Her rapid success in television production enabled her to afford a car service, whose drivers quickly grew used to her frequent cries of fear. She had no sense of direction, either, and so—remarkably for a New Yorker—never knew where anything was. Her favorite stores, her preferred restaurants and nightclubs, the location of the recording studios and cutting rooms she regularly used: they could have been anywhere. “Where the car stops is where they are,” she told Solanka over the fourth cocktail, all wide-eyed innocence. “It’s amazing. They’re always right there. Right outside the door.”
Pleasure is the sweetest drug. Neela Mahendra leaned into him in their black leather booth and said, “I’m having so much fun. I never realized how easy it would be around you, you looked like such a stuffed shirt at Jack’s place, watching that stupid game.” Her head tilted toward his shoulder. Her hair was down now, and from where he was sitting it veiled much of her face. She let the back of her right hand move slowly against the back of his left hand. “Sometimes, when I drink too much, she comes out to play, the other one, and then there’s nothing I can do. She takes charge and that’s that.” Solanka was lost. She took his hand in hers and kissed the fingertips, sealing their unspoken compact. “You have scars, too,” she said, “but you never talk about them. I tell you all my secrets and you don’t say one single word. I think, why does this man never talk about his child? Yes, of course Jack told me, you think I didn’t ask? Asmaan, Eleanor, that much I know. If I had a little boy, I’d talk about him all the time. You apparently don’t even carry his photograph. I think, this man left his wife of many years, the mother of his son, and even his friend doesn’t know why. I think, he looks like a good man, a kind man, not a brute, so there must be a good reason, maybe if I open up to him he’ll tell me, but, baba, you just keep mum. And then I think, here is this Indian man, Indian from India, not Indo-Lilly like me, a son of the mother country, but apparently that also is a forbidden topic. Born in Bombay, but on the place of his birth he is silent. What are his family circumstances? Brothers, sisters? Parents dead or alive? Nobody knows. Does he ever go back to visit? Seems like not. No interest. Why? The answer must be: more scars. Malik, I think you’ve been in more accidents than me, and maybe you were even more badly hurt somewhere along the line. But if you don’t talk, what can I do? I have nothing to say to you. I can only say, here I am, and if human beings can’t save you then nothing can. That’s all I’m saying. Talk, don’t talk, it’s up to you. I’m having a good time and anyway now the other one is here, so shut up, I don’t know why men always have to talk so much when it’s obvious that words are not the thing required. Not required right now at all.”
12
LET THE FITTEST SURVIVE:
THE COMING OF THE PUPPET KINGS
Akasz Kronos, the great, cynical cyberneticist of the Rijk, created the Puppet Kings in response to the terminal crisis of the Rijk civilization, but on account of the flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the general good, he used them to guarantee nobody’s survival or fortune but his own. In those days the polar ice-caps of Galileo-1, the Rijk’s home planet, were in the last stages of melting (a large stretch of open sea had been sighted at the North Pole) and no matter how high the dikes were built, the moment was not far off when the glory of the Rijk, that highest of cultures set in the lowest of lands, which was just then enjoying the richest and most prolonged golden age in its history, would be washed away.
The Rijk fell into decline. Their artists put down their brushes for good, for how could art—which relied, like good wine, on the judgment of posterity—be created onc
e posterity had been canceled? Science failed the challenge as well. The Galileo solar system lay in a “dark quadrant” near the rim of our own galaxy, a mysterious area in which few other suns burned, and in spite of their high level of technological achievement, the Rijk had never succeeded in locating an alternative home planet. A cross-section of Rijk society was dispatched, cryogenically frozen, in the Max-H, a computer-controlled spacecraft programmed to wake its precious cargo if a suitable planet came within range of its sensors. When this spacecraft malfunctioned and exploded a few thousand miles into space, people lost heart. In that most open, broad-minded, and reasonable of societies there now arose a number of fire-and-brimstone preachers, who blamed the coming catastrophe on the godlessness of Rijk culture. Many citizens fell under the spell of these new, narrow men. Meanwhile the sea continued to rise. When a dike sprang a leak, the water pushed through with such violence that whole counties were sometimes flooded before repairs were complete. The economy collapsed. Lawlessness increased. People stayed home and waited for the end.
The sole surviving portrait of Akasz Kronos shows a man with a full head of long silver hair framing a soft, round, surprisingly boyish face dominated by a wine-dark Cupid’s bow of a mouth. He wears a floor-length gray tunic, with gold embroidery at the cuffs and neckline, over a frilled white high-collared shirt: the very picture of the dignified genius. But the eyes are mad. As we peer into the darkness around him, we make out fine white filaments floating from his fingertips. Only after much study do we notice the small bronze-colored figure of a puppet man at the bottom left of the picture, and even then it takes a while before we realize that the puppet has broken free of the puppeteer’s control. The homunculus turns its back on its maker and sets off to forge its own destiny, while Kronos, the abandoned creator, takes leave not only of his creation but of his senses, too.