‘Marija Mejic? No, she moved out a month ago. No, sorry, I’ve no idea where she’s gone.’
With more reluctance I tried another number.
‘Hello,’ came a familiar voice, fragile, artificially bright. ‘This is Ruth Simling, Little Rose…’
I opened my mouth to speak, but found I had nothing at all to say.
I put down the receiver.
58
‘Hey! Flower! We’re going down to level Nine, why don’t you come?’
Five figures stood on a giant scallop shell, floating in mid-air. They were beautiful, with brilliant hair billowing around their heads. Two were quite naked, the others wore marvellous shimmering garments whose colours were constantly changing.
‘Flower’ looked up at them. She was two metres tall with dazzling blue eyes. Her robes were decorated with a design of coloured birds that really moved, beating their wings and turning their heads as they flew round and round her body.
‘Oh no, not Nine. I’m tired of Nine. Why’s everybody always going there?’
‘Because that’s where everybody’s going, of course!’ laughed one of the naked ones. She looked like Botticelli’s Venus.
The scallop and its passengers disappeared and reappeared again, disappeared and reappeared, restlessly slipping in and out of the world.
‘Well, I’m not,’ sulked Flower, looking away from them into the distance, where another group of beautiful people were dancing around a enormous golden phoenix, its fierce beaked face glaring down at them from the midst of brilliant flames.
‘Alright, be like that,’ sniffed Venus. ‘Has anyone told you yet, Flower, that you’re no fun any more? You’re just…’
But the sentence was never finished because Venus, her scallop, and the rest of its crew all vanished from the world.
Flower sniffed, looked towards the phoenix and gave a little snort of impatience, then looked in the other direction, where a group of naked figures were gambolling in an enormous fountain. Then, with another sniff, she too vanished from the world.
Not far away stood Little Rose. She had a fine-looking body herself, but even in SenSpace, though you could chose any body you wanted, you still had to provide the animation, and it is animation that really makes a body seem beautiful. Even with her pretty face and nice figure, Little Rose seemed cowed and drab by comparison with the beautiful beings all around her.
She no longer liked the City without EndTM so she had taken to wandering the SenSpace worlds. This was Fantasia, where young Illyrians tended to gather when they accessed SenSpace from VR arcades. It was a show-off place, a place where SenSpace technology exploded in pyrotechnics of electronic virtuosity.
Little Rose sighed.
She crossed to another SenSpace world called Mountain, full of flower meadows and snow-capped peaks and extras in lederhosen singing and dancing by bubbling streams.
She crossed over again to a place called Alhambra, where there were endless fountains and cloisters and rectangular ponds full of colourful fish. She sat down to watch them gliding through the water, gold, red, white. There was a piebald one that always amused her. Some glitch must have crept into the program, because every hour this piebald fish leapt instantaneously from one side to the other of the pool.
A familiar figure appeared in the distance and came towards her.
‘Little Rose, where have you been?’
‘Oh it’s you Sol.’
‘Yes, it’s me. What’s the matter? Aren’t you going back that lovely home of yours?’
‘No, I’m not. I’m bored of that place.’
‘Oh well, I’m sure there’s somewhere else where you could feel at home. Maybe somewhere more rural, or…? But I don’t know. You tell me. You’ve been through a lot of worlds recently.’
Little Rose shrugged. ‘I don’t want to live in any of them.’
She laughed wryly, ‘George would be amazed to hear me say this, but I’m sick of SenSpace.’
‘Are you missing George?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’
Undetected by Little Rose, a new and senior welfare officer now took charge of the electronic projection called Sol Gladheim. The SenSpace Welfare Service was quite worried about Little Rose. There had been case conferences about her, and strategy meetings. Perhaps it was time, people had said, to take a firmer line?
‘Listen, my dear,’ said Mr Gladheim, sitting down beside her on a bench of electronic stone, ‘Perhaps it’s time you faced up to something. SenSpace is the only medium that you can live in. If you shut off from SenSpace, all you would have is a body that can’t move and can’t even see. All you would have would be darkness. I’m sorry but that’s how it is.’
He brightened. ‘You could hire a Vehicle though, walk around back in old IC for a bit and visit some old haunts.’
‘I do sometimes, as you know. That isn’t the same either.’
‘Well I’m afraid that and SenSpace are all your options now. It’s sad, but on the other hand it’s a lot better than what many folk have to put up with.’
Little Rose smiled.
‘Look! There he goes!’ she exclaimed. ‘That fish has discovered Discontinuous Motion!’
Mr Gladheim smiled non-committally, not having any idea what she was talking about.
‘I had a phone-call from Outside, just now,’ said Little Rose. ‘The first time for ages.’
‘Who was it?’
‘I’ve no idea. Whoever it was got cut off, or rang off. Wrong number I suppose.’
59
I was walking down a barren valley. The streambed was dry. Crickets rattled in abandoned fields. A column of black smoke spiralled into the blue sky from across the other side of the ridge. There was a smell of oil. And from time to time in the distance came a burst of machine-gun fire.
Then I heard a new sound. I had never heard such a sound before. It was a kind of droning, like the buzzing of flies. When I turned a corner it became much louder and I saw a huddle of people in the distance. I kept walking. No one took any notice of my approach. As I drew nearer I saw that all the figures were women and young girls. They were wailing – that was the source of the strange droning sound – and as they wailed, they were pawing at a pile of rags.
I got closer. No one looked up. No one paid any attention to me at all. All their attention was on the pile of rags.
It wasn’t rags. It was a pile of little boys. Their heads were dangling from their bodies. Every one of them had had his throat cut. The severed necks were black with flies.
No one turned to look at me, but they must have been aware of my presence all the same because indirectly they spoke to me, crying out their story in a kind of incantation.
‘The Muslim soldiers came and circumcised the boys.
‘They said if we became Muslims we needn’t die.’
‘We said we’d be Muslims then.
‘They circumcised the boys.
‘They made us say, “There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet”.
‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet!
‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet!
‘And then the Catholic soldiers came.
‘Oh yes, our boys, the good Catholic boys.
‘We told them we were Catholics too.
‘They laughed. They said they’d heard that before.
‘We recited the catechism.
‘We recited the Hail Mary.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!
‘They laughed. They said they’d fallen for that trick before as well.
‘They lined up all the boys and pulled down their pants.