Boom-Sook’s voice wobbled: “Boardman, we—” No help was offered from Fang or Min-Sic. The Boardman pressed a crisp silk handkerchief against my ear, and told me to keep the pressure steady. He took a handsony from an inner pocket. “Mr. Chang?” he spoke into it. “First aid. Hurry, please.” Now I recognized the sleepy passenger who had accompanied me from Chongmyo Plaza eight months before.
Next, my rescuer stared at the postgrads: they dared not meet his gaze. “Well, gentlemen, we have made a very ominous start to the Year of the Snake.” Min-Sic and Fang would be notified by the disciplinary board of major debits, he promised, and dismissed them. Both bowed and hurried out. Min-Sic left his cloak steaming on the ondul but did not return. Boom-Sook looked inconsolable. Boardman Mephi let the postgrad suffer for some seconds before asking, “Are you planning to shoot at me with that thing, too?”
Boom-Sook Kim dropped the crossbow as if it were superheated. The Boardman looked around the messy lab, sniffing at the neck of the soju bottle. The octopoid rapine on 3-D distracted him. Boom-Sook fumbled with the remo, dropped it, picked it up, pressed stop, aimed it the right way, pressed stop. Boardman Mephi spoke, finally. He was now ready to hear Boom-Sook’s xplanation of why he was using his faculty’s xperimental fabricant for crossbow practice.
Yes, I’m curious to hear that, too.
Boom-Sook tried everything: he was inxcusably drunk for Sextet Eve; he had misprioritized, ignored stress symptoms, chosen friends unwisely, gotten overzealous while disciplining his specimen; it was all Fang’s fault. Then even he realized he had better shut up and wait for the ax to fall.
Mr. Chang arrived with a medicube, sprayed my ear, dabbed coag, applied a patch, and gave me my first friendly words since Wing~027. Boom-Sook asked if my ear would heal. Boardman Mephi’s abrupt answer was that it was none of Boom-Sook’s business as his doctorate was terminated. The x-postgrad blanked and whitened as he saw his future slide downstrata.
Mr. Chang held my hand and informed me my earlobe was torn off but promised a medic would replace it in the morning. I was too afraid of Boom-Sook’s recriminations to worry about my ear, but Mr. Chang added we would now leave with Boardman Mephi for my new quarters.
That must have been very welcome news.
Yes, xcept for the loss of my sony. How could I bring that along? No feasible plan came to mind. I just nodded, hoping I could retrieve it during Sextet Recess. The spiral stairs took up my attention; descents are more hazardous than ascents. In the lobby, Mr. Chang produced a hooded cloak for me and a pair of icenikes. The boardman complimented Mr. Chang on the latter’s choice of zebraskin design. Mr. Chang answered, zebra skin was de rigueur in Lhasa’s chicest streets this season.
What reason did the Boardman give for your timely rescue?
None, as yet. He told me I was being transferred to the Unanimity Faculty on the western lip of campus and apologized for letting “those three toxed xec tapeworms” play games with my life. The weather had prevented a timelier intervention. I forget what well-oriented, humble reply I gave.
The campus cloisters were festive with Sextet Eve crowds. Mr. Chang taught me to shuffle thru granular ice to gain traction. Snowflakes settled on my eyelashes and nostrils. Snowball fights ceasefired as Professor Mephi approached; combatants bowed. The sense of anonymity afforded by my hood was delicious. Passing thru cloisters, I heard music. Not AdV or popsong but naked, echoing waves of music. “A choir,” Boardman Mephi told me. “Corpocratic sapiens can be callous, petty, and malign,” he said, “but higher things, too, thank Chairman.” We listened for a minute. Looking up, I felt as if I was rushing upward.
Two enforcers guarding the Unanimity Faculty saluted and took our damp cloaks. This building’s interior was as opulent as the Psychogenomics Faculty had been spartan. Carpeted corridors were lined with Iljongian mirrors, urns of the Kings of Scilla, 3-Ds of Unanimity notables. The elevator had a chandelier; its voice recited corpocratic Catechisms, but Boardman Mephi told it to shut up, and to my surprise, it did. Once again, Mr. Chang held me steady as the elevator sped, then slowed.
We xited into a spacious, sunken apartment from an upstrata lifestyle AdV. A 3-D fire danced in the central hearth, surrounded by hovering maglev furniture. Glass walls afforded a dizzying view of the conurb by nite, obscured by the haze-brite snowfall. Paintings took up the inner walls. I asked Mephi if this was his office.
“My office is one story up,” he replied. “These are your quarters.”
Before I could even xpress surprise, Mr. Chang suggested I invite my distinguished guest to sit down. I begged Boardman Mephi’s pardon: I had never had a guest before, and my manners lacked polish.
The maglev sofa swung under the distinguished man’s weight. His daughter-in-law, he said, had redesigned my quarters with me in mind. The Rothko canvases, she hoped, I would find meditative. “Molecule-true original originals,” he assured me. “I approved. Rothko paints how the blind see.”
A bewildering evening—crossbolts one moment, art history the next . . .
Certainly. Next, the professor apologized for failing to recognize the xtent of my ascension on our first meeting. “I assumed you were yet another semi-ascended xperiment, doomed to mental disintegration in a week or two. If memory serves, I even dozed off—Mr. Chang, did I? The truth now.” From his post by the elevator, Mr. Chang recalled that his master had rested his eyes during the journey. Boardman Mephi smiled at his chauffeur’s tact. “You’re more than likely wondering what you did to bring yourself to my attention, Sonmi~451.”
His question was a handshake: Come out, I know you’re in there. Or, I feared, a trap. Still with a server’s wariness of acting too pureblood, I feigned polite incomprehension. Mephi’s xpression of complicity told me he understood. Taemosan University, he said, generates 2 million-plus library download requests per semester. The vast majority are course texts and related articles; the remainder relate to anything from real estate to stock prices, sportsfords to steinways, yoga to caged birds. “The point is, Sonmi, it takes a reader of truly eclectic habits for my friends the librarians to bother alerting me.” The professor switched on his handsony and read from my own list of download requests. Sixthmonth 18th, Epic of Gilgamesh; Seventhmonth 2nd, Ireneo Funes’s Remembrances; Ninthmonth 1st, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Mephi, bathed in mauve sonyglow, looked proud. “Here we go . . . Tenthmonth 11th, a brazen-as-you-please cross-search for references to that cancer in our beloved body corpocratic, Union! Speaking as a Unanimityman, such a—could I call it ‘lust’?—for creeds of other worlds alerts us to the presence of an inner émigré. It is idiomatic in my field that such émigrés make the finest Unanimity agents. I knew we had to meet.” He then xplained how he had identified the sony’s inquisitive owner as Nun Hel-Kwon, a geothermist from blizzard-prone Onsōng . . . who had died two winters before in a skiing accident. Boardman Mephi assigned a gifted graduate the old-fashioned detective’s task of tracing the thief. E-wave surveillance located the sony in Boom-Sook Kim’s lab. Imagining Boom-Sook reading Wittgenstein defied all credulity, however, so Mephi’s trusted student had implanted a microeye in every sony in the room during curfew six weeks ago. “Next day, we found our dissident-manqué was no pureblood but, apparently, science’s first stabilized ascendant and sister-server of the notorious Yoona~939. My work, Sonmi~451, can be taxing and hazardous, but dull? Never!”