Free Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World by Walter Mosley Page B

alien shore or home, he knew not which. He swam over a deep slumber--exhausted, relaxed, and reprieved all in one.
    __________

    The next morning, the hairless and naked black woman from the day before came to his room and informed him that they would be driving to the Blue Zone. She waited for him to dress and then drove him in an electric cart down a paved road through a palm forest.
    "What's your name?"
    "Eye."
    "The pronoun?"
    "The organ."
    "Why do you humiliate yourself for this rich white man?" Akwande asked, certain that his question would disconcert and embarrass the woman.
    "It is you who feel humiliation," she said, eyes on the road, more calm, Akwande thought, than stone.
    "It's not me," he said, "stripped naked, all my hair shaved off. What am I supposed to think when a woman sits next to me like that? Out here?"
    "If you want there's time before the game."
    "You offer me your body just like that and you say you haven't debased yourself." Eye stopped the cart and turned her perfect body toward Akwande.
    "In the beginning, there was nothing but cosmic dust," she recited from Beginnings, the first book in the Infochurch bible. "This dust led unerringly to the multiplicity of God."
    "I know his party line, sister."
    "But do you know the sister?" she asked. "Did you know the Ugandan child whose parents survived the chemical baths rained down in the U.S.--Sudan wars? The child who was born eyeless and legless, with no hair and only stumps for hands? The child set out on a tiny wheeled wagon and made to beg from wealthy black American tourists? The child who prayed every night into the fiber line that goes to the great Idaho transmitter that sends our pleas to Infinity, God's fifth child?" This was Kismet's genius. A direct link to God. A telephone to eternity. Actually, RadCon agents had learned, every prayer and confession was recorded and logged into what was called the Database of Hope.
    "He did this for you?" Akwande asked, looking into her passionate and empty eyes.
    "Yes."
    "Then drive on."
    __________

    "When do we get to the Blue Zone?" Akwande asked Eye after some minutes.
    "We are there."
    "But the color--"
    "Is an illusion," she said, finishing his sentence.
    They came to a stop at a stand of bamboo.
    A man in a scarlet robe was waiting for them. He was short, white, and rather stocky. He had also been transcapped. The top of his skull had been removed and replaced with a transparent Synthsteel dome. His brain was visible. Even small vessels pumping blood were discernible. Transcaps contained electrodes and transistors that could deliver impulses to the nervous system. They could also read electronic emanations. Transcappers could actually send and receive messages in a manner that could only be called telepathy.
    "I am Tristan the First," the robed man said in a mild tone. "Dominar of the Blue Zone."
    "Don't you think that title sounds kinda ridiculous? I mean, my nine-year-old would say something like that after reading a comic vid."
    "Follow me."
    Akwande followed Tristan and was followed by Eye down a slender path of crushed white stone through the thick bamboo forest. The radical leader regretted his bravado, but it was an unavoidable side effect of his mental preparations to play. A silent mantra of rage and restraint sang at the back of each thought. A few minutes more and they came to a large clearing that contained two professional-size tennis courts, one grass and the other clay. Behind the courts stood a large wall that seemed to be made from solid gold. But this, too, Akwande realized, was an illusion. Mayan hieroglyphs appeared in dark brown relief at various places upon the screen. These hieroglyphs came to life and took on the characteristics of their totems. They traveled the screen fighting, fornicating, or simply passing through one another.
    "Good morning, citizen," Dr. Kismet said, rising from a chair at the foot of the giant screen. "Grass or clay?"
    "It's up to you, Doctor," Akwande