Thirty seven & thirty eight, 7 July
Uncle Azevedo and the confusinator
Dronikus, a novel set on a burning planet called Earth.
Leilu, Nur
Chapter 37
Arno stood unmoving by the door to the passage as Zola wandered around the dark, ornate space of the lobby. He ran his fingers over the leaves of the bonsai plants, dozens of ancient specimens of which lined wooden benches below the windows. He slid his hands over the glass panes, staring out to the palm gardens. He put his nose up to the wooden architrave, smelling the polish deeply engrained after so many years of shining by so many hands down the generations. But he hardly registered the rich scents and his gaze was blank – his mind was far away.
He leaned back on a dark timber post, his face pulled tight – emotions, thoughts, and beliefs jumbled and bounced around inside him. His mind was on Panduan – a beautiful child and a stomach-turning, terrifying non-human beast. ‘I’ve got triangles, Uncle Zola.’
He took a few strides to the centre of the lobby and looked up at the point where the ribs of the roof vaulting joined above him. The sublime innocence carried in her voice: ‘Mama, Dada. Mama, Dada,’ but it was an innocence already lost to something else. ‘I’m 4 years, 7 months, 7 days and 13 hours.’ Her voice, her being – the ‘knower’ – stripped of wonder, of mystery, of the inscrutable. Networked imagery behind her eyelids and adult vocabularies on her tongue slashing through the pre-verbal forests of her humanity, like chainsaws ripping through jungles.
Zola fell onto a settee at the edge of the carpet and sat there unmoving. He thought of Enrike; he had never seen him like this. No longer the image of a dictator, or arch villain, but a man in love with a vision as it is embodied in this child, a scientist proving his theory, a mystic seeing the angel before him. It seemed that Enrike was even feeling some actual love for the child. Zola wondered.
He relaxed into the comfortable warmth of the feelings of Panduan leaping into his arms, Enrike’s ‘happy’ face, the lovely Yolanta, Aunt Nadja’s lounge, this lobby. And as he did so, he felt Leilu returning – not the Leilu of the hologram, but Wuwu – swelling up in memory, in sensations, in fragmentary images and comforting emotions. Before he knew it, it was the two of them (she probably 5 or 6 years old, he 7 or 8) rolling about on these elegant cushions, sliding across these polished floors, chasing and hiding, laughing and crying, just being, not knowing.
The joy and the pain of that lost time ran deep in him now. His beloved sister, she too would remember, she too held that past in her, their shared private universe. Or did she? His beloved sister. His beloved ‘half-sister,’ he said out loud and chuckled.
He lay back dreamily, his eyes closed. He sat upright suddenly in shock. He felt a movement beneath him, his ruminations instantly gone. He leant over and peered underneath him. He saw his Uncle Azvedo squeezing himself under the settee from the back.
Uncle Azvedo, seeing Zola peering down at him between his legs, put his finger to his lips: ‘Shhhh!’
‘Ok, shhhh…’
‘Shhhh! They’re coming.’
‘Who’s coming, Uncle?’ Zola whispered.
Uncle Azvedo’s face crinkled with fear. He pointed awkwardly – given the limited space under the settee – over his shoulder, but said nothing.
Zola looked up as he heard footsteps coming from a staircase landing just beyond the lobby. He leaned down again and called softly to Uncle Azvedo, ‘someone’s coming.’
Uncle Azvedo squeezed his eyes even tighter, his hands over his ears, and pulled his legs up to his chest, as best he could in the confined space.
Zola stood, thinking it best to vacate the area and leave Uncle Azvedo to his fate, but before he could take a step he felt a hand grab his ankle, tight as a vice, surprising for an old man. He sat back down again; Uncle Azvedo’s hand kept its grip.
Two nurse rators entered. They were in no great hurry, casually scanning the lobby before coming to the settee where they attempted to pull Uncle Azvedo out from his hiding place. But the old man gamely hung on to Zola’s ankle.
‘Sorry… er…’ Zola said.
The rators ignored him and one gently prised the old man’s fingers open. Uncle Azvedo gave a few manic screams but soon calmed down and let himself be dragged out from under the settee. When he was firmly in the hands of the rators, he looked at Zola and, as if nothing had happened, said happily, ‘lovely to see you Zola, my boy.’
The rators picked him up and, holding him high off the floor, carried him away, his legs swinging playfully, like a child between its parents on a pavement on a sunny afternoon walk. ‘Weee…’
Chapter 38
Arno whirred and beeped and folded down in its corner. The door clicked open and Nur came into Zola’s apartment. She wore a slinky silk robe and her hair was ruffled. ‘This had better be good.’
‘Has he gone?’ asked Zola.
‘What? Oh….’ She reached to her head and patted her hair, trying to give it some order. ‘Listen Zola,’ this had angered her, ‘my intimate life has nothing to do with you, OK?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Now what do you want?’
Even though Arno was ‘sleeping’ in the corner, Zola went up to her and whispered in her ear. ‘I am getting out of here. Will you come?’
Nur, spoke, not whispering, ‘how? when?’
‘With your help and soon – as soon as we can work out how to get out of here.’
‘Mmm…’ She pulled her dispenser from her small shoulder bag, opened it and ran the soft sponge across her tongue. ‘Do you have a plan? Even an idea of where you are going?’
‘It’s not very clear. And you?’
‘Yes, I want to get back to Elatus. Well away from this place.’
‘Well. Are you in? It’s a one-time offer. Say yes and we’ll start planning. Say no and we’re each on our own. Yes or no?’ said Zola.
‘Am I right in reading this as a significant moment?’
‘That’s quite dramatic.’
‘Answer me, Zola. It’s life and death. There would be no going back – for you or for me. Is that right?’
‘It is,’ said Zola. He was surprised when Nur tended her hand in a formal sealing of the arrangement.
‘Deal?’ she asked.
‘Deal,’ he said, as he shook her hand.
‘But there are some conditions. I’m not a RePO Girl like your deceased girlfriend, OK? I love this company and I’m here to save it. You got that? You are the only way forward for me at this point, just as I’m probably the only way forward for you.’
‘I got it. What about Meriti?’
‘He can’t save me or the company. Believe it or not he still loves me even if I, well, I don’t know if I still love him.’
‘I thought he had a mistress.’
‘Yeah, and so? I was fucking him while I still loved you.’
‘You don’t hold anything back, do you?’
‘You’re right, I don’t.’ She took another hit from her dispenser.
Zandy and Pero, with the help of Rose’s rator, were hard at work at one of the benches assembling the lasers onto gimbals. Rose herself was not present, trusting the care of the children to the rator. Zola and Arno worked at the lathe and on the benches, creating a metal structure with rails and channels in which they placed the laser-mounted gimbals.
Nur and her rator entered. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked Zola and the kids. Zandy and Pero proudly showed her their work.
‘We’re making a confusinator, Aunty Nur,’ said Pero.
‘Oh, okay,’ Nur said, nodding. ‘What’s a confusinator?’
‘It takes out dronikus in the sky.’
Later, after the kids and their rator had left, Nur and Zola sat at the terminals reprogramming their own rators. Arno stood next to them, zombie-like, wirelessly connected. Zola asked Arno to report on ‘Zola’s workshop’.
‘My name is Arno. I don’t recognise “Zola’s workshop”,’ said Arno.
Nur entered a new set of codes and Zola asked again.
‘Hi, my name is Shadrack. We are currently in Zola’s workshop. We are alone. There are many lasers on the workbench which Zola will use to make the confusinator.’
‘OK, that’s enough. Thanks Shadrack. You can get back to making the rails,’ Zola said. He pointed to Nur’s rator: ‘Call it “Mishack”. Leave their Shangdu identities on until we leave. Are you sure they won’t be able to track them?’
She dismissed Zola’s question with a shrug. ‘We have to do the car as well,’ she said.
‘Perfect. Call it Abednigo.’ Zola smiled.
Nur worked at the terminal in silence. ‘Hello Mishack. Do you know me?’ Nur said to her rator when she had finished.
‘You are Madame Nur. Pleased to meet you,’ said Mishack.
‘Hello Shadrack. Please introduce yourself.’
It stopped and turned to them. ‘Hello Madame Nur. Hello Zola. Hello Mishack. My name is Shadrack. We are in Zola’s workshop.’ It went back to the metal work.
‘Will Abednigo have same top-level authorisations as your car?’ asked Zola.
‘I’ll use Meriti’s codes. That will make it a lot harder to track. Also, it will confuse them and that should give us a little bit of extra time. But what the hell are you doing with all those lasers?’
‘I told you it’s a children’s game. But they could come in handy on our travels.’
‘No! You’re not bringing that stuff with us, are you?’
‘Maybe.’
She turned away from him and opened a bag that her rator had carried in. ‘You’ll have to change your clothes as they will have glo-slime or similar impregnated in yours to track you. These are Meriti’s old clothes. They should fit you.’
Zola laughed. ‘Meriti’s hand-me-downs…’
‘They’re still in very good condition,’ she said a little defensively.
‘I’m sure they are,’ said Zola.
Dronikus is a novel published in 2023, now being serialised here on Substack. You can read a chapter every week for free.
Liking what you’re reading? Don’t want to wait to see what happens next? You can read the full book now by purchasing a digital or print copy of Dronikus from:
AndAlso Books (print edition)
Amazon (epub), Smashwords (epub), Apple Books (epub), Barnes&Noble (epub)
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