Light

5 Uncle Zip the Tailor

Much of the halo is burnt-out stuff, litter from the galaxy’s early evolution. Young suns are at a premium, but you can find them. Still running on hydrogen, they welcome the human visitor with an easy warmth, like the mythic hostelries of Ancient Earth. Two days later, the White Cat popped out next to one of them, switched off her dynaflow drivers, and parked herself demurely above its fourth planet, which had been named, in honour of its generous facilities, Motel Splendido.

Motel Splendido was as old, in terms of human habitation, as any other rock on that quarter of the Beach. It had a tidy climate, oceans, and air no one had fucked up yet. There were spaceports on both its continents, some of them public, others less so. It had seen its share of expeditions, fitted out, kitted up and despatched under the deracinating glare of the Kefahuchi Tract, which roared across the night sky like an aurora. It had seen, and still saw, its share of heroes. Gold diggers of 2400AD, they risked everything on a throw of the dice. They thought of themselves as scientists, they thought of themselves as investigators, but they were really thieves, speculators, intellectual cowboys. Theirs was the heritage of science as it had defined itself four hundred years before. They were beachcombers. They went out one morning with their lives all washed up and returned in the evening corporate CEOs heavy with patents: that was the typical trajectory on Motel Splendido: that was the direction of things. As a result it was a good planet for money. One or two puzzling artefacts lay quarantined in its deserts, which had themselves not been deserts until the escape forty years before of a two-million-year-old gene-patching programme someone had picked up on a derelict less than two lights along the Beach. That had been the big discovery of its generation.

Big discoveries were the thing on Motel Splendido. Every day, in any bar, you could hear about the latest one. Someone had found something among all that alien junk which would turn physics, or cosmology, or the universe itself, on its head. But the real secrets, the long secrets, were in the Tract if they were anywhere, and no one had ever returned from there.

No one ever would.

Most people came to Motel Splendido to make their fortune, or their name; Seria Mau Genlicher came to find a clue. She came to make a deal with Uncle Zip the tailor. She talked to him by fetch, from the parking orbit, but not before the shadow operators had tried to persuade her to go down to the surface in person.

“The surface?” she said, laughing rather wildly. “Moi?”

“But you would enjoy it so. Look!”

“Leave this alone,” she warned them: but they showed her how much fun it would be, all the same, down where Carmody, a seaport long before it was a spaceport, was opening its sticky, fragrant wings against the coming night . . .

The lights had gone on in those ridiculous glass towers which spring up wherever the human male does business. The streets of the port below were filled with a warm pleasant smoky twilight, through which all intelligent life in Carmody was drifting, along Moneytown and the Corniche, towards the steam of the noodle bars on Free Key Avenue. Cultivars and high-end chimerae of every size and type—huge and tusked or dwarfed and tinted, with cocks the size of an elephant’s, the wings of dragonflies or swans, bare chests patched according to fashion with live tattoos of treasure maps—swaggered the pavements, eyeing one another’s smart piercings. Rickshaw girls, calves and quadriceps modified to have the long-twitch muscle fibre of a mare and the ATP transport protocols of a speeding cheetah, sprinted here and there between them, comforted by local opium, strung out on café électrique. Shadow boys were everywhere, of course, faster than you could see, flickering in corners, materialising in alleys, whispering their ceaseless invitation:

We can get you what you want.

The code parlours, the tattoo parlours—all run by one-eyed poets sixty years old, loaded on Carmody Rose bourbon—the storefront tailor operations and chop joints, their tiny show windows stuffed with animated designs like postage stamps or campaign badges from imaginary wars or bags of innocent-coloured candy, were already crowded with customers; while from the corporate enclaves terraced above the Corniche, men and women in designer clothes sauntered confidently towards the harbour restaurants, lifting their heads in anticipation of Earth cuisine, harbour lights on the wine-dark sea, then a late-night trip to Moneytown—wealth creators, prosperity makers, a little too good for it all by their own account, yet mysteriously energised by everything cheap and tasteless. Voices rose. Laughter rose above them. Music was everywhere, transformation dub bruising the ear, you could hear its confrontational basslines twenty miles out to sea. Above this clamour rose the sharp, urgent pheromone of human expectation—a scent compounded less of sex or greed or aggression than of substance abuse, cheap falafel and expensive perfume.

Seria Mau knew smells, just as she knew sights and sounds.

“You act as if I don’t know anything about this,” she told the shadow operators. “But I do. Rickshaw girls and tattoo boys. Bodies! I’ve been there and done that. I saw it all and I didn’t want it.”

“You could at least run yourself in a cultivar. You would look so nice.”

They brought out a cultivar for her. It was herself, seven years old. They had decorated its little pale hands with intricate henna spirals then put it in a floor-length frock of white satin, sprigged with muslin bows and draped with cream lace. It stared shyly at its own feet and whispered: “What was relinquished returns.”

Seria Mau drove the shadow operators away.

“I don’t want a body,” she screamed at them. “I don’t want to look nice. I don’t want those feelings a body has.”

The cultivar fell back against a bulkhead and slid down onto the deck looking puzzled. “Don’t you want me?” it said. It kept glancing up and then down again, wiping compulsively at its face. “I’m not sure where I am,” it said, before its eyes closed tiredly and it stopped moving. At that the shadow operators put their thin paws over their faces and retreated into the corners, making a noise like “Zzh zzh zzh.”

“Open me a line to Uncle Zip,” said Seria Mau.

Uncle Zip the tailor ran his operation from a parlour on Henry Street down by the Harbour Mole. He had been famous in his day, his cuts franchised in every major port. A fat, driven man with protuberant china-blue eyes, inflated white cheeks, rosebud lips, and a belly as hard as a wax pear, he claimed to have discovered the origins of life, coded in fossil proteins on a system in Radio Bay less than twenty lights from the edge of the Tract itself. Whether you believed that depended on how well you knew him. He had shipped out talented and come back focused, that was certain. Whatever codes he found, they made him only as rich as any other good tailor: Uncle Zip wanted nothing more, or so he said. He and his family lived above the business, in some ceremony. His wife wore bright red flamenco skirts. All his children were girls.

When Seria Mau fetched up in the middle of the parlour floor, Uncle Zip was entertaining.

“This is just a few friends,” he said, when he saw her at his feet. “You can stay and learn a thing or two. Or you can come back later.”

He had got himself up in a white dress shirt and black trousers the waist of which came up to his armpits, and he was playing the piano accordion. A round, rosy patch of blusher on each chalk-white cheek made him look like a huge porcelain doll, glazed with sweat. His instrument, an elaborate antique with ivory keys and glittering chromium buttons, flashed and flickered in the Carmody neon. As he played, he stamped from side to side to keep the beat. When he sang, it was in a pure, explosive countertenor. If you couldn’t see him you didn’t know immediately whether you were listening to a woman or a boy. Only later did the barely controlled aggression of it convince you this voice belonged to a human male. His audience, three or four thin, dark-skinned men in tight pants, lurex shirts and jet-black pompadour haircuts, drank and talked without seeming to pay him much attention, although they gave thin smiles of approval when he hit his high, raging vibrato. Occasionally two or three children came to the open parlour door and egged him on, clapping and calling him Papa. Uncle Zip stamped and played and shook the sweat off his china brow.

In his own good time he dismissed his audience—who vanished with a polite sly hipster grace into the Moneytown night as if they had never been there at all—and sat down on a stool, breathing heavily. Then he shook one of his fat fingers at Seria Mau Genlicher.

“Hey,” he said. “You come in down here in a fetch?”

“Spare me,” said Seria Mau. “I get enough of that at home.”

Seria Mau’s fetch looked like a cat. It was a low-end model which came in colours you could change according to your mood. Otherwise it resembled one of the domestic cats of Ancient Earth—small, nervous, pointy-faced, and with a tendency to rub the side of its head on things.

“It’s an insult to the cutter, a fetch. Come to Uncle Zip in person or not at all.” He mopped his forehead with a huge white handkerchief, laughed his high, pleasant laugh. “You want to be a cat,” he advised, “I make you into one no trouble.” He leaned over and put his hand several times through the hologram. “What’s this? A ghost, young lady. Without a body you’re a photino, you’re a weak reactor to this world. I can’t even offer you a drink.”

“I already have a body, Uncle,” Seria Mau reminded him quietly.

“So why did you come back here?”

“The package doesn’t work. It won’t talk to me. It won’t even admit what it’s for.”

“I told you this is complex stuff. I said there might be problems.”

“You didn’t say it wasn’t yours.”

Faint disagreeable lines appeared on Uncle Zip’s white forehead.

“I said I owned it,” he was ready to acknowledge. “But I didn’t say I built it. In fact, it was passed to me by Billy Anker. The guy said he thought it was modern. He thought it was K-tech. He thought it was military.” He shrugged. “Some of those people, they don’t care what they say—” he shook his head and pursed his little lips judicially “—though this guy Billy is usually very acute, very dependable.” The thought leading him nowhere, he shrugged. “He got it in Radio Bay, but he couldn’t work out what it did.”

“Could you?”

“I didn’t recognise the cutter’s hand.” Uncle Zip spread his own hands and examined them. “But I saw through the cut in a day.” He was proud of his plump fingers and their clean, spatulate nails, as proud of his touch as if he cut the genes directly, like a cobbler at a last. “Right through and out the other side. It’s what you need all right: no trouble.”

“Then why won’t it work?”

“You should bring it back. Maybe I take another look.”

“It keeps asking me for Dr. Haends.”