Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

“Tell me, Steven,” you said in your ‘worried uncle’ voice. “Have you talked to your mother?”

  “No. I haven’t been able to.” She’d say all the right encouraging, understanding things. But she had a mind of the sort that had been passed down from mother to daughter for generations: let your son be a professional (doctor-lawyer-accountant), and therefore secure in a field she understood. Thanks to all our technological advances, mothers were having more and more trouble understanding what their children did for a living.

  “Do you want me to talk to her?”

  I shook my head. I shouldn’t accept such help. I shouldn’t need it. “I don’t want to disappoint her. But I don’t imagine she’d mind that much.” I reached over to the living room side-table, and held up the laminated issue of Fortune you always had prominently displayed on it: the one with your picture on the cover holding a chrome diamond-shaped blow-up model of the o-chip you’d designed. Your claim to fame. “After all,” I said, “I won’t be the first pure-researcher in the family.”

  “No.” You laughed, and your potbelly lurched. “‘Its roots in Earth, its branches in Heaven.’”

  “What?”

  “A line from a poem by Barry Geller. ‘Tree of Life.’” From there we moved on to a discussion of (lecture on) post-Zionist poetry, the Universalist movement, African neosocialism…. I might as well go into space, I thought; it would be little different from trying to cope with your intellectual flights.

  Kelly led the count, and engaged in sadistic tricks to delay informing me of her results. She’d hint at a conclusion then deny she’d completed her work; it was like our “Did you bring me anything?” games when I was a child. “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” you’d say, although you invariably had an iceball or an addition to my collection of ‘NetSpy’ merchandise.

  “Come on,” I said. “Tell me what you’re getting.”

  Kelly smiled up at me. “Uh uhh. Impatience killed the cat.”

  “No it didn’t.”

  “Hey, it’s my cat. I’ll talk when I’m good and ready.”

  Kelly teased until our third official Team Meeting after the mummy was discovered. She announced there was a preponderance of rods, though not a very solid majority. “In addition, there is a fovea centralis, which is considered evidence of an advanced species; furthermore, it’s packed with cones.”

  Now I had my corroborating evidence, and it flew in the face of everything we’d learned about the Castormondians so far. You see, a large number of rods suggests nocturnal habits, and the pupil size and shape said nocturnal, too. But the structures we saw in the eye, particularly that fovea, implied sharp vision and something we already knew from the presence of wall paintings in the tomb where we’d found the mummy: colour vision.

  So why the evidence for nocturnal habits? We talked about it and came up with a dubious theory: the rods were vestigial. Maybe the Castormondians had once been nocturnal, had hunted for the land corals by ‘smell’ or something like it. Perhaps with their rear appendages — more vestiges, then, of a non-light-based mode of life? But over time the competition with other, similar creatures over the same source of food caused them to become diurnal, and their eyes adapted accordingly….

  On Earth, creatures went the other way around, from diurnal to nocturnal. It proved harder than I thought to accept something so radically different from — in fact, contradicted — what I’d been taught on Earth. I wanted to be able to leave that logic behind, adapt (myself) to new conditions, move forward as I’d always wanted to do unfettered by the strictures of tradition and convention. Let my mind run free, the way yours had roved over the whole of Jewish thought from the Judges and the Prophets to the economists and the designers of new AI components. But I found myself hoping I’d discover something to disprove the theory. Why did my imagination resist the conclusion so much?

  What I most wanted to know was where the nerve fibres went, where they ended up in the brain and how they got there. That would tell me something, I thought. I suppose I was hoping for a different kind of accommodation: not the sort that adjusts for objects at different distances, but the sort that would adjust Castormond once again to my mind and experience. In both cases there would be greater clarity, but in the second greater comfort, too.

  I entered Johns Hopkins on a research scholarship and so I could no longer pay my weekly visits to you. On holidays, though, I’d return to New York to see Ma, and I think I was nearly as anxious to see you. Your lectures became part of my background, a kind of retinal ghost. Persistent image. I found you in the new house you’d bought with the prize money you won for designing a zero-degree environment for your o-chip. In the deep-freeze the chip functioned flawlessly and virtually instantaneously. You’d stopped colouring your hair by then, and it hung silver by your eyes, the few remaining black strands like vestigial cells themselves, a holdover of a long-gone previous stage of development. Your foyer was lined with the books I knew so well: Eban’s history of the Jews, Buber, Einstein, Kaplan — the pantheon of secular Judaism — alongside the Talmudic studies in their tall brown volumes with gold Hebrew lettering.

  Once I was settled into the rose-printed couch, next to the table on which your wedding picture stood guard over photos of your son and his brood, you asked me questions like an examiner at Rabbinical College. They came fast and furious, and I hoped I would pass the test.

  “What are you working on? How far have you gotten? Is it what you’ve been wanting to do?”

  We talked about Ma; I told you how shocked I’d been at seeing how old she looked now. The turkey neck and the thickening middle were new to me, or maybe I’d just never noticed them before. What did you once say about denial being the human animal’s most vital defence mechanism?

  “Is she okay?” I asked, expecting to hear the truth from you. I expected no less from you and no better than reassuring lies from Ma.

  “Yeah, she’s fine, but she misses you something awful.”

  “Was I such a great son?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I know.” Through a door down the hall I saw inside your workroom, where you’d set up your own private chip factory. This man who could manoeuvre his way through the most intricate ceramic pseudoneurons had been my guide to Babylonian economics. “I guess you’re keeping busy.”

  “Not as much as I’d like. Although more than I should, at my age, I suppose.”

  I told you I was being trained on company money but wasn’t really looking forward to company indenture, and you laughed. You knew that the term was real — not a clever metaphor — but you also knew how much it sounded like me.

  “Moving on, then?”

  “Yeah. European General Technologies has some exciting projects ongoing, and I’d like to get in on them.” Bev had told me she would wait; I wanted to believe her, although my doubts didn’t keep me from going.

  “Reach for the sky, Steven. ‘Roots in Earth.’”

  “What?” I didn’t remember the poem.

  “Say hi to your mother.”

  That night Ma and I talked money: how she should handle things now that Dad had passed away (a heart attack while waiting for a Glasgow bus!) and had left her a few things over his new wife’s objections. I wanted to ask my mother about her own life — did she socialize, have activities? She told me she was thinking about joining a Torah-study class run by a Hassid, and I feared she was about to turn Orthodox.

  We mapped the Castormondian eye’s internal structure as far as we could, then aimed our intellectual and technological guns at the sclera and the nerves streaming from it towards the brain. We got good pictures from our scans; the fil-optics and MPI imagers saved us the need to be very invasive. Kelly, meanwhile, was doing detailed studies of phototransduction: the presence of calcium in the land corals told us the Castormondians would have an endless supply to keep
their rods and cones at peak efficiency, if not downright overloaded. These were beings, in other words, with very good eyesight — and they would have needed it to find those corals in the dense underbrush where they grew — till the Castormondians began cultivating them, as we theorized they did. The corals were well hidden and not sufficiently distinguished by colour to be located by inferior eyes, while the appendages were probably used later for feeding on spores rather than sniffing out the corals themselves.

  We gathered our pictures of the sclera and formed a conclusive neural map — conclusive in the sense that it was the best we could do. As I looked at it I found myself denying its implications; I ordered so many retries, reconfigurations, program checks that my people were beginning to think I’d lost my mind, or my faith in them.

  Normally (I mean Earth-normally), about half the nerves in the eyeball of a highly evolved creature decussate: that is, cross over and end up in the opposite side of the brain. Half stay on their own side of the head. But here was total crossover; every nerve went to the opposite side. You only saw that sort of thing in lizards and other lower forms, where the eyes are set widely apart and there’s no or reduced binocular vision. I sat there running the implications through my mind.

  At the next Team Meeting I called up a magnified image of the eyeballs and their wiring over our table. I wanted someone to show me where I’d gone astray, or interpret the picture differently from what was beginning to look inevitable. What I got instead from the gathered researchers and technicians was astonishment, amazed silence.

  “Electrostimulation experiments confirm it,” I said. “Total decussation. No ipsilateral nerves. They all cross over to the opposite side of the hypothetical visual neocortex.”

  I’d seen how far apart the eyes appeared to be; it was no illusion. If you put it all together, what it meant was that these beings had an amazingly wide field of vision, along with a very narrow field of binocular vision; most of what they saw was two-dimensional. Practically speaking, it meant they could catch glimpses of land corals on either side of them, discern them clearly with their sharp eyes, turn their heads to confirm the sighting, and be assured of food. The control of their irises, and therefore of their pupils, meant they could adjust instantly and repeatedly for changes in lighting caused by the planet’s sudden weather changes: a cloudless sky one minute, storm clouds making noon dark as night the next.

  But more than that: how would such a being think? Uncle Martin, the Castormondians weren’t subintelligent fish or lizards; they were tool-using beings who had created a modest civilization. How would their minds work? They would have to be able to perceive, assimilate, interpret, and react to different things coming from different sides of their heads. We look at and focus (barely) on one thing at a time. They did that for two things at a time instinctually and, we can presume, consciously.

  There’s an ecopsychologist here now, someone who is trying to find out how a being living on this planet would see its world. She keeps pestering me for my data, because she needs to know how they perceived to know how they thought. I keep putting her off because, frankly, I think her ‘science’ is a bunch of speculative crap. But on top of that, I think I’d have a hard time telling her what I think I’ve learned. I understood the Castormondians intellectually, but I couldn’t really grasp them, because their way of thinking was so vastly different from mine. The passage of time between the Castormondians and us, the strangeness of the almost inescapable conclusions we drew from the circumstantial evidence, made it all so much more difficult to maintain imaginatively. I’ll report our findings in the journals and make myself and my team famous for our insights (if you will). But I think something in the back of my mind will keep saying, “No, that can’t be right.”

  The last time I saw you was about five months before you passed away. You were living in one of the orbital habs, where part of you (about half, I suppose) always wanted to be. I was on my way to my first planet, Eridanus III, to seek fame, fortune, and patents. I recognized your sharp, wrinkled elbows, and the bulbous paunch that stretched the knit fabric of your T-shirt, but not your entirely white hair, now trimmed in proper space fashion. You could spend your whole day looking down on the Earth if you chose to, and maybe see it as an overgrown chip you could micro-ize and win an award for.

  “I’m glad to see you,” you said, and for the first time you hugged me — not for long, not hard, but enough to embarrass us delightfully.

  “Same here. It’s been too long.”

  “Company rule, eh?” You lowered yourself onto the semi-circular pulldown in the cramped chamber. “High-class slavery.”

  I shrugged. “Survival. Teach me something.”

  You told me about Genesis that day, told me about the geography of the Middle East and where Creation began according to the myth-makers. How far away it seemed then. “Your mother?” you asked at one point. “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine. She’s in a club. ‘Single Septagenarians’ or some such nonsense.” I knew then, without really believing it, that I might not see her again. For some reason, the same thought never occurred to me about you. “She cried when I left.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  We talked about the universe for a while, then you saw me to my ship. I caught sight of you waving as the dock released us, and I sailed off to find God, the primordial Adam, or whatever else it was that we and your philosophers had never seen.

  After the meeting I went into the tent where we were keeping the mummy. I looked into the eye we’d studied so assiduously. And then I understood you, Uncle Martin. My mother stood squarely on the Earth, devoted to her absurd but essential heritage when the rest of her universe split asunder like Ari’s pot, thanks to Dad’s departure. I was ready to reach for the sky, even for Heaven if I could find it in a company store. You stood between us; or rather, you stood with us in the past and the future, you’d learned how to hold the two together in your mind, and wanted to make sure I knew where my feet were before I stretched too high and fell on my face. You offered me the books of Moses with one hand and those of Einstein with the other. Thanks for teaching me how to look ahead and behind no matter how far I might go, how to see both Heaven and Earth.

  Wings to Fly

  by Sylvie Bérard

  translated by Sheryl Curtis

  Scylla Seaside Colony, 12-06-2251

  Dear Brijjie,

  I wanted to take off, Brijjie. I wanted to be carried away by the sheer joy of it. I didn’t want to go terribly high, just drift for a long time. That’s why I constantly traveled between space and the planet. When the spacecraft took off, I would flatten myself against my seat, knowing full well that gravity would desert me. Time and space would stand still while the shuttle appeared to come to a stop. It was as if a bubble of pleasure burst in my belly. That’s most likely why these trips are so expensive. I’m sure you realize, of course, that if the swarming masses on Earth and in the production colonies could experience this abandon, who knows how long the powers that be could resist…

  They loved my performances, Brijjie. I made them all salivate. My body, suspended between everything and nothing, my limbs twisted at improbable angles, my sweat pearling on my skin, bubbles of my blood scattering from my veins, opened in offering. They clamoured for it and that, perhaps, made us equals for a brief moment — they, in the golden harnesses of their luxury voyages to stellar riches, me, a precious object embodying the cosmic void, delivered up to them, shameless, yet controlling every second of their pleasure.

  I made a mistake, Brijjie. I allowed myself to get carried away. I wanted to believe that the laws of our world had no weight. I gashed my body too deeply; I threw myself to the lions; I splattered them with my substance. I crossed through the intangible window that should have kept me at a distance. Weightless, I touched them. They fell as a mass, red with my blood.

  I’m stuck on
the ground, Brijjie, cooped up. I’m no longer permitted to make the crossing; my performance is now worthless. I wander about in the colony that shuns me, yet will not let me leave. Every day, I go to the port, begging a seat on a departing shuttle, knowing full well that a single trip will never suffice. My wings have been clipped, Brijjie, and I cannot bear my own weight.

  S.

  Final Thoughts

  by Nalo Hopkinson

  The flea on the back of the elephant has a dilemma; where does she stop, and where does the elephant start? Which is insect, and which is pachyderm? Since she takes some sustenance from the larger animal’s blood, does that not make them sisters in truth? Under the skin, even? Or perhaps they really are essentially different in nature. The flea ponders these questions often. The elephant is probably oblivious, though perhaps occasionally itchy where the flea makes her gustatory intrusions.

  Canadian science fiction spends a lot of time trying to decide what makes it Canadian, as opposed to, um, elephantine. By now, many of us could recite the list of tropes that we’ve decided make us us: stories that privilege community over individual heroics; stories about open space(s), alienation, isolation; about the rare and precious coming together of isolated bodies to comfort each other in the dark and cold before separating once more … didn’t know Leonard Cohen was a science fiction writer, didja?

  But reading for this volume of Tesseracts Nine, I discovered an element of Canadian science fiction and fantasy that doesn’t appear on the familiar list of tropes.

  Humour.

  Canadian science fiction and fantasy writers are funny! It’s all here: the dry humours of satire, wit, irony and sarcasm; the damp humours of farce, buffoonery, parody, slapstick; there’s high camp, there are comedies simple and convoluted, and of course, there’s the bitter tonic of the cosmic joke — many of the serious stories in Tesseracts Nine have a quinine soupçon of wry. As good storytellers know, humour can humanize like nothing else, except perhaps death. So perhaps the thing to be said about Canadian SF is that it is human, and is ultimately about a very human dilemma: what does it mean that we exist, and that we are aware that we exist? The flea may ask herself all kinds of important questions about the nature of her identity, but this much is sure; for a certain space of time, she is.