Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  The flap opened again, and in the light I could see there was no guitar, only absurdly green camouflage canvas..

  “Hurry up!” the guitar voice said. “Oh … um, you stay right there and I’ll be back, okay? Just hang on.”

  It didn’t sound like anyone I knew. One of the young guys, maybe, the new recruits whose voices were changing as they grew up.

  I could hear voices outside the tent, this time in English.

  “An orange? And you … what did you get? Geez, the lot of you. We need instruments, things we can play.”

  “He could go back to sleep.” It was one of the small piping voices. “We could try again.”

  “It’s too late. The guitar’s gone and it won’t be back.”

  “He’s got lots of sand,” another voice said.

  “And what are we going to do with more sand?” asked guitar man. “There’s no end of sand and rock and earth. We need music.”

  There was a tense silence broken only by the shuffling sound of sandals on sand. Then a huge sigh and the voice of guitar man:

  “Go. Gogogogogo. Always ask for the instrument first, and if you can’t see one, ask for a tuba or a pipe organ. Or a piccolo. We need to round up a thousand piccolos. Now go!”

  Off they ran, screaming shrilly.

  He came into the tent, leaving the flap slightly open to the light. I squinted and rolled over so I could see him better. He looked like a boy I’d met once, on summer vacation in the middle of high school. His clothes were things my brother wore when he was a teenager: low-rise denim bellbottoms, a plaid shirt unbuttoned halfway to the navel, water buffalo sandals. Retro hippy chic. His face was still indistinct in the gloom of the tent.

  “Hi,” he said. I didn’t answer.

  “Sorry about the confusion. The kids hadn’t had a decent orange in a while. They’re just kids, you know? I was kinda hoping you’d have brought your guitar.” He looked toward the spot where I could have sworn the guitar had been, only I knew it wasn’t.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “not having the guitar isn’t the end of the universe or anything. You remember how to sing, right?” He stood at the end of the cot, and there was no brass anything between us. I could see that the bedclothes were flat below my knees, no sign of legs or feet.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Guitar man sighed, and the sound made him more concrete somehow. “I’m a talent scout. I need to put together a huge band to make an amazing noise, but no one seems to be travelling with their instruments these days. I sent the kids for your guitar but they took the oranges instead. Oranges,” he said with a chuckle in his voice, “make lousy instruments.”

  “You look like someone,” I ventured.

  “Yeah, I know. You got drunk and tried to have sex with me in your first semester at college.”

  Suddenly his features pulled into focus. He’d been a Jim Morrison clone: soft pouting lips, sexually charged, dangerous. I’d been the good kid: clean cut, law-abiding, and ripe for experience. The details of the party were hazy, but I remembered him coming on to me, pressing against me, and me wanting to know.

  Guitar man smiled. “Can’t remember my name, but you remember the rest of me quite well. Careful — I’m horny and it’s been a long time.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  He grinned. “Don’t worry, newbie. I’m not expecting a rematch. Not,” he quickly added, “that it wouldn’t be fun. As I said, I’m here to put together a mighty shout. And I’m hoping you’ll help. Come on.”

  There’s a nasty kind of dream you have when you come out of the anaesthetic on the field. It’s a dream that combines the memories of home with the reality of the battle. After they took the dangling bits of my legs off, the dreams were of the locker room at high school. All of us changing, laughing, running. And then huge explosions rocking the lockers, making them fall like dominoes. Dreams of the soccer field. Dreams of kicking the ball against the garage door forever.

  “They fixed your legs,” the guitar man said. “That’s why you’re feeling so woozy. They did another operation and fixed your legs. So let’s go!”

  I threw back the sheet, now a heavy grey striped wool like the ones we had in training, and there were my legs, just as I remembered them.

  “Let’s go let’s go let’s go!” he barked, a hippy parody of a drill sergeant. “Time is of the essence here. We have to get you singing.”

  I have no memory of getting dressed or of what I saw when we left the tent. My impression is that the day was hazy but not too hot. There wasn’t another soul in sight, and we were in the desert or the brown grassy fields closer to home. And we were walking and laughing as if we really knew each other. I expected at any moment for someone I knew to come around the corner or over the next rise: a buddy from my outfit, a dead relative, a spirit guide. But guitar man, all electricity and promise, propelled me along with his ease, his fitness for the new and changing world.

  “What’ll you sing?” he asked. “You’d better think of it now or everyone else will be singing and you’ll be mouthing the words.”

  It had been so long since I sang anything. Then, like a mirage slinking over the field, I could smell salt air and the sand was slippery and studded with bits of driftwood and broken shells. “Stairway to Heaven,” I whispered. “That’s what I’ll sing.”

  “I had hoped for something by Jim Morrison,” the man said, “but Stairway will do fine. It’s a strong memory.”

  I was sixteen and at the beach with a boombox and a bag of marshmallows, and a girl I had never seen before loaned me her lighter to start the fire. By 10:30 I had imagined our whole life together and was ready to propose, and “Stairway to Heaven” played and we danced in the sand.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa newbie!” guitar man called out. “You’re losing me! Stay with the program, okay?”

  He was ahead of me, running through the beach grass toward me, and the dunes were lit by bonfires and trash cans and burning buildings.

  “Sing! Let’s go! Singsingsing!”

  He put his arm around me and I could smell him the way I had smelled him that night, like every secret I would ever have was encrypted in his sweat. And we sang until the burning stopped and we collapsed on the sand, giddy with pleasure at being alive.

  I looked at him then, the memorized pores of his face, the huge hazel eyes, and I had the courage to ask:

  “Why didn’t the others come?”

  The face slackened, and with effort he spoke the words I could not. “I’m a wrangler. I am your purest memory of a person. Not the most important person,” he said quickly, “but the simplest, most direct memory. I will be clear longer than the rest, but not for long.”

  He got up, brushed off the sand and held out a hand. It was true. I could remember that hand, the surprise at finding his arms to be smooth and strong, the breathtaking energy and electricity of our drunken exploration.

  “Why did you want the guitar?” I asked, taking his hand and allowing him to pull me up.

  “We need a big noise, lots of harmonics. People remember how to play, remember their skills, but they forget their instruments early. Once in a while we get a techhead who remembers every bit of an amp system, but we can’t count on it.” He strode away, across the desert and toward the mountains.

  “Wait up,” I called. I ran after him, and we continued in near silence. He was humming snatches of Stairway, and I knew it was to keep it fresh in my mind.

  “So why did the guitar disappear?” I asked. “It was there, right?”

  “The oranges,” he sighed. “Those kids, the ones you remember from the peacekeeping mission, they sensed that you had a very strong fresh memory of oranges, and that’s what they wanted. Memories don’t last long once you’re dead. They have to be corralled quickly. Do you remember the kids?”<
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  They’d been there, in my tent. I tried to remember them, but nothing would come. The tent flap opening, a pressure on my heel, but nothing else.

  “That’s why I came. They were supposed to bring you and the guitar, but they got distracted. I’m the memory strong enough to get us to the meeting.”

  “Where I will sing Stairway to Heaven?”

  “Where everyone will sing, and anyone who brought their instruments will play, and we will raise a mighty noise…” Guitar man stopped. “A mighty noise, and we hope it is enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  He looked toward the mountains and took a deep breath. “Enough to wake God,” he said.

  I looked toward the mountains too, half expecting a shaft of white light and a booming voice to welcome me into heaven.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” guitar man said. “Where did you last meet God? Can you remember the place well enough to get us there?”

  The desert landscape shimmered and shook as I went through the various possibilities, memories dissolving as soon as I touched them. I had not met God on a golf course, as many claim to do. I had certainly called the name at moments when it seemed appropriate — often in my bedroom or the bedrooms of relative strangers — but namedropping isn’t the same as meeting. There were the children at play in the hot rubble. Yes, in a way I suppose I had glimpsed God from the top of a tank patrolling a war zone. I had met God in narrow laneways full of debris and splintered pieces of wood, God looking out from unglazed windows and scraping up a life from nothing, out of chaos.

  Then we were there. The two of us, the guitar man looking as relaxed and easy as he always had, and me in my fatigues, and there was a steeply rising curved pebbly passageway between the buildings, narrow enough to be slightly shaded from the near-noon sun.

  “Up there,” I whispered. “God is up there.”

  We walked up the path, the debris shifting in and out of focus. I remembered that dented can. I remembered a bleached chicken bone, a rusty bottlecap, a crushed cigarette pack. I knew with certainty that when we got to the top of the curve, we would come out into a plaza with an improbably intact fountain, not working but in one piece, and lines of white washing, like huge truce flags, hung out in the sun. In the fragile peace and the brilliant sun, the face of God would be shining.

  “It’s been harder and harder to keep God awake,” said the guitar man. “It’s a strain, paying attention all the time. Tiring. It takes more and more noise just to register. And when God falls asleep, the universe runs amok. It’s our job,” he said. I could hear his breath shallowing out as we ascended the path.

  “There are lots of newbies,” he continued. “No shortage, not these days. But they’re dumbstruck, so busy looking ahead for the damned light they’ve been told about that we can’t harness their memories, can’t ride ’em to a meet. It’s hard enough to keep God interested twenty-four seven without surrounding the Deity with slack-jawed sightseers.”

  Then, slowing down a bit to catch his breath, he sang.

  I joined in, still walking forward and up, seeing the sharp shadows of the sun on the battered buildings. I felt lighter, my legs felt stronger than they had been on the sands. Faces looked out of the windows, smiling faces, tired faces. There was a little girl with serious black eyes and a half-eaten orange in her grimy hands.

  The young man fell behind, but I heard him call out: “Thanks for the ride. Sing. Loud! And when you’re done, come ride the newbies!”

  I strode into the plaza, playing my guitar and singing at the top of my lungs, the sound bouncing off the walls and through the flapping white sheets and the young man faded into the stones. The wind brought the smell of oranges from the desert grove and the sound of singing, of a world singing and playing, and pulsing into the ear of God until we lost the memory of music, of language, of voice.

  Light Remembered

  by Daniel Sernine

  translated by Sheryl Curtis

  The sun … dazzling fragments on the River, beyond the reeds. Shards of light in ceaseless motion in the wakes of the skiffs.

  My brother Athep and I had gone to the River’s edge, well upstream from Bedrachein, to trap a genet. The birds’ nests, in the umbels of the papyrus, attracted them. Occasionally, they’d get so bold as to climb up the supple stems. With sticks and a net, we could hope to catch one alive, despite its sharp teeth and quick moves.

  We had taken two servants with us, boys scarcely older then we were, who occasionally shared in our games.

  I see the River in my mind’s eye, speckled with light. I smell the rich loam of the shores, warm and soft around our ankles, tepid water reaching to our calves, clouded by the silt. I hear the splashing, the laughter, the stifled exclamations when Athep or I fell ass backwards in the mud.

  A sudden movement; a brief cry. But just before that, a wet, powerful snap. Then more screaming, sharp cries of terror, and a segment of the river bank fleeing toward the River, Sep struggling. It was no island of mud, but the back of a crocodile, its powerful tail ploughing the purple marbled silt. Already the boy was beyond our reach. His arms flailed in the water, his white rimmed eyes staring at me, reproaching me for backing away. Then Athep’s voice, which had deepened only a few months earlier, once again high pitched, his finger pointing. There, two more lumpy backs converging where Sep’s head had gone under, diving in turn, water sprayed by the whipping of their tails, the River bubbling pink at the scene of their struggle. Sep surged up once more, one more terrible time, with a cry drowned in water. Sep, his head lacerated, his arm flailing, blood spurting from where his other arm should have been. Sep, snatched again so abruptly that a whirlpool formed where he was dragged below.

  All around, dozens of ibis took flight in a feathery commotion, disturbed by the turmoil.

  Gold… Only the uppermost portion of the walls caught the rays of the declining sun, taking on a pale golden hue. The garden, with its balsam trees, lay in shadow; exquisite blue lotus blossoms floated in basins. I was playing zente with my sister Nemout. She bent her shaved head, with its black, velvety fuzz, over the small checkerboard. Mother had the harpists practising for a reception the next day.

  I asked my mother questions about Sep, my servant. “And where did his ka go?”

  She looked at me seriously

  I insisted, “If the ka is the spiritual double of our body, as Amenhep teaches us, and if Sep’s body was torn into pieces and eaten, then where did his ka end up?”

  “He will never find rest, Neferkh. The body must be preserved after death or the ka no longer has a shelter.”

  That’s exactly what I had thought. I found it unfair. “Even mummies turn into dust one day,” I continued, after moving one of the cone-shaped pawns.

  “That’s why we place an effigy of the dead person in the serdab at the mastaba. When the ka no longer has a body to dwell in, it takes refuge in the statue.”

  “So we never die,” I concluded.

  “It’s not that simple. There’s the ba, your soul, and the khu, the divine spark…”

  “But we won’t die,” I insisted, “You’ll never die, will you, Mother?”

  Nemout looked up from the game, surprised by the ardour of my question — my protest. She knew nothing at all of the fears that kept me awake at night, that led me up to the roof to look out across the western desert.

  Mother smiled at me sadly and made an effort to reassure me, “No, Neferkh, we don’t die. Not absolutely.”

  On that day, I understood that one could die a little, yet not completely.

  Daylight, merciless daylight, the sun so strong it turned the sky white, above the bleached walls of the city. Men-nofer, limestone and alabaster…. The flaxen whiteness of the loincloths and robes of those in the procession in which my brother and I took part. I looked for my mother, but she was
with the princesses, and the din of the sistra and the drums added to my vertigo. The palm trees that bordered the sacred road, shading it, seemed terribly sparse to me.

  We carried a few spikes of barley, held together in a small spray. It weighed nothing at all, but we had to hold it chest high, with both hands. We were not taking a handful of fodder to an ass, but an offering to the God Sokari.

  In the city, the cortege had been delayed for quite a while because an elderly priest had chosen that morning to die suddenly. Now, it seemed to me that the cortege had left the city an eternity ago and yet Saqqarah lay only two miles to the west. The parasols, the heads and shoulders of the adults, blocked the pyramid from my view until we arrived at the scared enclosure.

  After the brilliance of the daylight, our walk through the gallery seemed like some nocturnal crossing to me. It was only near the end of the passageway that I could once again see well enough to make out the frescos on the walls. The image of Ptah was omnipresent, his shaved head, his silhouette wrapped as tight in the white linen as a mummy in its strips.

  Then back into the dazzling light, the vast courtyard where our squinting eyes turned once again to the pyramid, with its six titanic tiers under which King Djeser awaited our offerings. My cousin Thosis claimed that other pyramids, further north, stood at least twice as high. Since I hadn’t been to Gizeh yet, I protested. Surely, he must be lying!

  The procession stopped for a moment, for some problem or other at the head end. I was thirsty and I needed shade. Curious about everything, I glanced through a pillared aisle. A few temple attendants were waiting there for the procession to pass so that they could cross the courtyard in turn. I saw one drinking from a gourd. He noticed me watching him and I must have looked so pitiful that he beckoned to me. With a gesture, I asked if I could have a drink and, when he answered, I slipped out of the procession as Thosis and Athep were looking the other way, then climbed a few steps to the columns. It was only after drinking that I noticed the bundle they had laid down on the slabs; a long white package on a stretcher, a human silhouette swaddled in a shroud, legs bound tightly together, arms crossed over its chest, the shape of the nose and brow visible through the fabric.