The Adapter

Saturday, 9:52 AM. The porticoes of Via dell’Indipendenza.

The man who called himself Sandro Moser followed the yellow suit for three hundred metres and then lost it inside a building that was not a building.

That was the problem with Bologna. He had read about the porticoes before he came. He had read that there were sixty-two kilometres of them, that they had kept the rain off scholars and merchants for eight hundred years, that an agency of the United Nations protected them. He had admired them in pictures. He had not understood, until this morning, that they were a trap.

A portico was a street with a ceiling. The ceiling was brick. The walls were brick. The pillars, every four metres, were brick. And brick, old brick, the red brick of this city, made his tracker blind.

He looked at the tracker now. It was a flat black object the size of a playing card. On any other planet he had worked, it would have shown him the Core as a small bright point, with distance and direction and a soft sound like a bell. Here, under the arches of Via dell’Indipendenza, it showed him grey static, shifting gently, like snow on an old television.

The yellow suit had gone left. Or right. He had turned under an arch into a side portico, and that portico had turned into another one, and that one had opened onto a small square with a church in it, and then more arches, and more arches.

Sandro walked quickly, without running. Running drew the eye. He went left, then right, then left. He passed a pharmacy, a bank, a shop that sold only hats, a shop that sold only buttons.

He came out into a small square with a church in it.

It was the same square. It was the same church. In front of the church stood a group of twenty tourists in matching orange caps, eating gelato at ten in the morning, and in front of them a guide was counting them with her finger.

“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty,” said the guide. She looked at Sandro. “Twenty-one?”

“No,” said Sandro. “Thank you.”

“Are you sure? We’re going to the towers next.”

“I am sure.”

He turned around. He went back under the arches. He took a different turn this time, a better one, calculated. He walked for four minutes. He came out into a small square with a church in it.

“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty,” said the guide. “Oh. Hello again.”

Sandro looked at the tracker. The static was still there. Below it, a small number he had not been watching had changed colour. It was red now. It said 11%.

Where Sandro came from, there were no porticoes, and no brick, and no rain. There was also no food, in the sense that this city meant it. There was a grey paste that came from a wall, and it contained everything a body needed, and it tasted of nothing, and you ate it standing up in about forty seconds. He had eaten it every day of his life.

Then, eleven years ago, on a long and boring job on a quiet planet, he had found an old transmission from this one. A cooking programme. A woman in a small kitchen in Bologna, in a blue apron, showing the camera how to roll pasta dough with a pin as long as her arm until it was so thin you could read a newspaper through it.

He had watched it four hundred times.

He had learned the words. Tagliatelle. Tortellini. Ragù. Mortadella. He had learned that the ragù was written down in law, that the tortellini had a brotherhood, that the pasta should be as wide as a certain fraction of the height of a certain tower. He had learned that the people of this city ate slowly, at tables, together, for two or three hours, talking the whole time. He had not understood that part. He had wanted very badly to understand it.

When the job came up, a Core loose on this world, a retrieval in Bologna of all the places in the galaxy, he had taken it at half his usual price.

The tracker said 10%.

He needed power. His power bank was in his backpack, and it was empty. He had used the last of it in the storm, finding this city in the dark. What he needed now was a wall.

He found a bar on the corner of a side street. It had a zinc counter, three small tables, and an old man drying a cup with a cloth. On the wall beside the door, under a calendar from 1998, was a socket.

It was a very small socket. It had two small round holes, close together, set in a cream-coloured plastic that had gone yellow with age. Sandro took out his charger. His charger had a large round plug with two thick pins and two metal clips on the side, designed for the modern sockets of northern Europe, which his documents said he was nearly from.

It did not fit. It was not close to fitting.

“Excuse me,” said Sandro. “Do you have an adapter?”

The old man dried the cup.

“For this socket,” said Sandro. “For my plug. A small plastic adapter. I will pay for it.”

“I have one.”

“Thank you. May I—”

“It’s for customers.”

“I will be a customer.” Sandro looked at the empty counter. “I would like a coffee.”

“A coffee is not a customer. A coffee is a man standing in my bar.” The old man put down the cup. He put down the cloth. He pointed at a small blackboard on the wall behind him. It said, in chalk: LUNCH. First course, second course, side, dessert. 15 euros. “A customer has lunch.”

“It is ten o’clock.”

“Lunch is at half past twelve. You order now, you pay now, you sit, I give you the adapter, and at half past twelve I give you lunch.”

Sandro looked at the blackboard. Under the words, smaller, someone had written the dishes for today. Tagliatelle with ragù. Meatballs in tomato. Peas. Rice cake.

He had seen that tagliatelle four hundred times, in a blue apron, on a quiet planet.

He looked at the tracker. 9%.

“I will have lunch,” he said.

He paid fifteen euros. The old man opened a drawer and took out a small, grubby, white plastic adapter, and held it up between two fingers as if it were a key to a city, and put it in Sandro’s hand.

It fit. The tracker made a small, grateful sound.

Sandro sat at the table nearest the socket, with his knees against the underside because the table was built for smaller people. At the next table sat an old woman in a black cardigan with a coffee and a slice of yellow cake on a plate. She looked at him for a while.

“You’re very tall,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re very thin.”

“Yes.”

She cut her cake in half with the side of her fork and pushed the plate across the gap between the tables.

“Rice cake,” she said. “My recipe. He steals it.” She nodded at the old man behind the counter. “Eat.”

Sandro looked at the cake. It was pale gold and dense, and it smelled of lemon and almond and something dark and sweet at the edges. He had read about it.

The tracker said 14%. And the grey static on its screen was clearing. Out of the snow, a small bright point was forming, north and west of here, beside a thin blue line.

“I cannot,” said Sandro. “Thank you. I am so sorry. I cannot.”

“Why not?”

“I am working.”

The old woman made a face that he would remember for a long time.

The bright point settled. The tracker read the distance, and the street, and the building. Via Piella. Beside the point, the blue line was water. A canal, running open between the houses, under a window that was open to the sky.

He unplugged the tracker. He put it in his pocket. He left the adapter on the table, where it belonged, and on top of it he left a fifty-euro note.

“Your lunch,” said the old man. “Half past twelve.”

“I know,” said Sandro, and it was the saddest thing he had said in years, and he went out into the arches.