VOICE: You are not answering—
Yes I am just wait a minute I am answering because the plan is put into effect and no one identifies the body which arrives in a shipment of cadavers from New York untagged as is not uncommon and so there is a token attempt to identify it but meanwhile the body enters normal processing and is stowed in a refrigerated transport container that is shipped to one of the various spaceports when it gets full in this case going to the Kinshasa Space Whisker (breath) so just prior to the launch, she pulls up alongside the container in a van and extracts her body strips naked and she has given herself scars and similar markings exactly matching those on the body checks the corpse for any new bruises or discolorations and matches them with make up then she takes the catatonia drug entering the death trance and her father seals her entire body inside a microscopically thin perfectly transparent envelope designed to protect her from the vacuum and gently fills her lungs with a hyperoxygenated liquid which at her lowered metabolic rate, should last her a very long time perhaps days then carefully seals her nose and mouth while an antifreeze compound mixed into her corpse make up is slowly absorbed by her skin and distributed in her bloodstream and he dusts her hair with a bag full of microscopic transmitters each smaller than a grain of sand which will exhibit a signature discernible at long ranges once exposed to vacuum so that he can find her body in space then he places her cautiously on the heap of bodies inside the container, and drives away leaving the van in a garage and the false corpse melting in a barrel of acid in a corner—what? What?
VOICE: If you will not cooperate ...
No no no no no no no no no no wait a minute wait wait wait the container’s contents—you’ll SEE! you’ll SEE!—the container’s contents are tipped onto a belt that loads them into one of the huge cargo pods on the back of a shuttle shaped like a huge turtle with protuberances varying from twenty to a hundred feet tall all over its white shell and which does not fly into space but instead rides the great uncoiling tongue of the Kinshasa Space Whisker consisting of a massive bundled cable curled against the earth like the rolled up tongue of a butterfly operating on the principle of the party favor SUCH THAT the whisker sucks in air and stiffens like a huge erection unfurling upwards into the sky while its other end is deeply anchored in the earth’s crust and the shuttle travels along the whisker all the way into space stabilizing itself with numerous akimbo chameleon legs about a quarter of a mile down from the gigantic unfolding wheel of cable leaving the whisker only to visit one of the innumerable orbiting penal research or surveillance arcologies before returning to earth by rejoining the whisker and riding down it again and Assiyeh lies in a heap of corpses like mannikins in storage while the rising shuttle which is the size of about four city blocks jolts and shudders as the whisker undulates in air currents and the air whistles gradually out of the cargo hold and the bodies begin to float eerily around and distort as the air pressure subsides so they are trailing ice crystals in the dark and the hold is thickly black traversed with intense beams of light shining in through the gaps around the door while cadavers float through these beams burgeoning with special forms of decay known only in space so their heads sprout wattles and long gnarled horns of carmine matter like a sold dribble of melted candle wax and growths push out their mouths and anuses—this is establishing the credibility of what I’m trying to tell you don’t you see that?!—these details!—bodies collide a numb lifeless coitus in space and the intestines push out the navel and the eyes trail from the sockets and they shrivel they shrivel they shrivel like like like like snow white raisins and lichenous structures build out from the body to form a plumage of transparent insect wings of ice and mold and only a few of the corpses plus Assiyeh fail to exhibit these signs and and then a door opens abruptly at one end of the hold and a huge fat man in a sloppy space suit steps in he steps in gingerly and he swats a button or not a button a control on the the the wall and the side of the hold drops into a slot and the whole earth is out there with its atmosphere like a white nest and the pellucid blackness of space and and the fat man walks along a special sticky strip grabbing bodies as they float near and tossing them out the side into space one by one one by one one by one the distorted and stiff human forms fall against the blue white and black some plunging straight out staring back at the ship or forwards toward wherever they are going but most spin some fast some slowly and then it’s Assiyeh’s turn and her body is seized by one rigidly bent arm and one thigh and the fat man’s grip slips and he grabs her arm and leg again and then she is thrown out into space with the rest of them ...
VOICE: We will resume in half an hour. Be prepared to answer then.
...
I think they’re gone.
... Assiyeh is terrified of heights.
I can’t breathe.
... Even looking at a photograph of the earth taken from space, with the earth’s slope filling one corner of the picture, and space above it, causes the fear. Her knees go weak and she feels cold flashes sucking the strength out of her body. This experience might have cured her, but the thought of being adrift in space, naked and immobilized, was too much for her, and she went to great lengths to insure that she would be entirely unconscious.
Jesus ... Jesus ... I think they ... burned it.
... All the same, during loading, her eyes were jostled slightly ajar within the sealant, luckily still intact. That’s good. That’s vivid.
Now she is remotely aware of a gigantic, luminous presence, like an inconceivably monumental snowdrift ablaze with chill sunlight, a snowdrift with a blue heart. And there is also a boundless, brilliant night that is not a void, and is not a cornucopia of endless being, but that is like an infinite threshold, across which she is looking, with a dreamy, barely open eye, steadily, ever more deeply, with ever greater numb unfelt fear and sense of disappearing. The look plumbs without finding anything but itself, and plumbs into both looking and into this encountered moment that is not looking or doing anything, that is not her opposite or the opposite of action or opposed to anything, and that is at the same time both absolutely alien to her and absolutely accepting her into its un-embrace.
She dreams about a man in a cell. An interrogation cell. A terrified and horrified man, who is in physical pain and who thinks he might really be alone just for a moment and so he’s taking a chance and allowing himself to sob as quietly as he can, while the science-fiction story about her he’s been telling them keeps opening up in his mind and he is escaping into that opening. She opens her eyes and there is a blonde Arab leaning over her. She is aware of the edges of a what she lies upright in, like the sides of a bathtub. The man is bare-chested and his body hair is as pale blonde as the hair on his head, and his beard. He is leaning in at an angle that means he is not on top of her but next to her, and there is a shadowy ceiling up there that she can’t see because dim lights shine between her and the ceiling. She can’t feel her body, but she can hear a surging pulsation and ringing in her ears that tells her she is alive. The man murmurs something. She’s looking almost right up his nose, and his eyes are on something across from her; there must be someone else there. Looking out into space, a neverending opening and the infinite opposite of prison.
*
“My criminal record?”
The charming elderly gentleman pauses midway between standing and sitting, turning to look back at the pair of stern faces.
“All right,” he says. He has a gentle voice, gentle gestures.
He finishes sitting down gently.
“Won’t you sit down? ... No? ... There, well. It’s not necessary that we be so formal. I’ll tell you whatever you like, even if you want to hear ancient history like that.”
“Oh yes? Renewed activity? An organizing conspiracy, is that right? It sounds interesting. Organizing how? You don’t know? I see. I’m sure that’s quite right. Who? No, I don’t think so. Could you repeat the name? My hearing isn’t what it was, you see. It doesn’t ring a bell. Did they? If you say so; I don’t
remember things so well these days. I daresay I probably have met dozens of people without having the faintest recollection of it. What’s that? Have I met him on other occasions? No, I don’t think so, but then again I recall so badly ... Yes, that does look like me. Is that him? Oh, it is. You know that’s funny—all this time I thought you were talking about someone else! Yes, of course I know him. Is he in any trouble? Yes, I’ve met him several times, I think. I can’t say how many. Just to talk, conversation, you know. At my age, conversation replaces certain other pleasures, it becomes more important. My what? I would hardly call her my girlfriend, I’m afraid. No, those days are in the past for me. She said what? That’s a surprise. That’s very interesting. Could you repeat the question? You know, that reminds me, from what I hear, it turns out Assiyeh’s father is going to goof and materialize on the wrong side of the earth. He won’t find her. Assiyeh will float by chance into the beam of a communications laser that will push her out of earth orbit. She will die in her trance somewhere on the way to Mars, or that is what might have happened, but she will instead be retrieved three days later by the barqot Mays just departing the Moon for Jupiter.
Once they find out who she is, the crew of the Mays will gather around and stare at her in awe. To them, she is the Assiyeh Melachalos, originator of the Photic Revolution and Pioneer of Restech.
The Mays is set to rendezvous with its spousecraft, the Izallu Imeph, which will then leave earth’s solar system for a planet called Koskon Kanona, which is home to a sizable human colony.
You see, Carolina, unknown to all but a few down here, human beings have secretly established
themselves on about ten other Earthlike planets and have contacted life on all of them. Mutations and crossbreeding with non-terrestrials is going on out of control all over the place, and on some planets the descendants of the first human visitors from earth have already become unrecognizeable. Enormous spacecraft fly back and forth between worlds at more than relativistic speeds using a variety of different propulsion techniques, and one of the most frequently-used is an application Restech based on Assiyeh’s research. These engines slow the spacecraft, bringing it steadily closer and closer to Absolute Rest; as the vessel slows, the motion of matter in space will overtake it, so that, in effect, the ship stands still, and its destination comes to it. Assiyeh immediately begins to inspect plans of these engines, noting improvements to be made and coming up with new experiments.
In the past, space travel was too expensive, and high prices held mankind on the earth. The development of zoophotic currency will be what makes it economically possible—forgive me the tense creep, but this kind of time-travel stuff is hard to keep straight. Assiyeh’s name is often connected with them ... the ... uh ...
(Grabbing a copy of Animal Money from under the car seat, shifting his glance from the cover to the road and back, reading the names at random.)
Long Min-Yin, Sulekh Budshah, Ronald Crest, Warren Aughbui, Vincent Long. Animal money and the Color Shift, that’s what opened the escape path to space. Nobody can believe Assiyeh went out with Long, and the crew is divinely transported to gossip heaven when they find out.
For days the dialogue between the crew of the Mays and the Izallu Imeph goes on nonstop and so does Assiyeh’s grilling. Between sex and questions she’s barely able to do any real thinking or to attack the mounds of knowledge inaccessible on earth.
The crew are all really beautiful people, all different kinds. They wear no clothing, but paint their bodies instead.
When human beings start heading out into space for real, the governments down here on the ground set up all these ad hoc prohibitions that develop into a quarantine, keeping the earth isolated artificially. Assiyeh has—she will not ever have heard yet about the Horizontal Forests on Koskon Kanona and the composite flying tape-bundle inhabitants of Gliese Labzaatz and the beings who inhabit a region of trellised atmosphere in the dark matter honeycombs between galaxies and the earliest reports of the first expedition to the ring of quasars that spans both the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. There are ruined cities of water on a planet named A-Dnuirm; the people of Kepler 22-b have an alternate mathematics that causes any human who uses it to undergo a spontaneous sex change; the first generation of human children, born on HD 85512-b will live by sonosynthesis. Stuff like that. Are you still tripping?
So, Assiyeh will be given a position of honor directly in front of the massive forward window to observe the rendezvous with the Izallu Imeph. Here’s the scene: tiger-striped Jupiter spins in the distance, two moons sailing past, the farther one custardy and yellow on the left, and the closer one is turquoise and more to the right. A tray of minute, greenish-white motes and threads appears behind the yellow moon. A spacecraft the size of California shoots out from around the yellow moon, coming right at them, seeming more to expand than to approach. Its little shadow swings and plunges over the curvature of the turquoise moon, rippling with surface irregularities as it goes. In less than a minute it slides itself beneath the Mays like a gargantuan floor, and they are zooming among titan hood ornaments, stylized and generic naked human figures six or seven kilometers tall, striking intrepid poses. All the crew are naked all the time, by the way. Did I mention that? Maybe you’re one of them? Well, they put on space suits of course, when they have to go outside, and they have protective gear to do stuff inside the ship, but most of the hazardous work is done by non-anthropomorphic robots.
Well, so, behind these heroic monuments the top of the ship looks like a cracked plain of some dark, ablative material, studded with arcology domes of all sizes, from tiny, luminous beads, to diamond blisters hundreds of kilometers across. Within these domes, Assiyeh can see whole landscapes, with mountains, forests, clouds, towns and cities, herds of animals, rivers, billowing snowstorms, flickering thunderstorms, seas like flashing shields ... Living dioramas. There are dark, uninhabited expanses here and there, separating what look like phosphorescent cities of greenish white and pale yellow filaments and specks and a luminous mycelium sprouting phantasmagoric structures whose weird outlines are robbed of impressive power by the even weirder and more impressive scale of the whole artifact. The captain of the Mays points to the mobile lights, the ferries and transports that convey people and supplies among the arcologies, and then to the glowing bloodstream of surface-travelling modules. The captain explains that the Mays is actually accelerating wildly to keep up with the Izallu Imeph.
So now the rear of the ship rises up ahead like a tower and behind that are the engines—these are three spheres, each as big as an asteroid, with a long sail-like pennant streaming behind each sphere off into the distance so that she can’t see the ends of them. They aren’t Restech. These spheres roll to and fro behind the ship, altering position like shells in a shell game, and send ripples that are kilometers and kilometers across down the pennants, so that the Izallu Imeph actually swims through space like a carp in a pond.
“The ship propels itself through space mechanically?”
“Sure,” the captain answers. “It is no problem.”
“How is that possible?”
“It is easily all possible because blah blah blah.”
“What sort of power plant does it use?”
“All kinds. Hundreds of them. New plants are being devised and installed all the time, as the old ones wear out. I’m sure they’d be interested in any new ideas related to photic power, if you would like to talk to them.”
As they descend to its surface, the horizon of the massive spacecraft rises comfortingly all around them. Without the slightest bump or jostle, the Mays glides to rest, slipping under a protruding structure that folds down on itself like a candy cane. They rise up within the structure to meet a brake of air turbulence that makes the silent barqot suddenly whoosh with a sound like a distant waterfall. She disembarks along a smooth stone esophagous and emerges into a fragrant, softly-lit night, a garden. A sizeable party of naked dignitaries gathered from all over the Izallu Imeph is there t
o welcome Assiyeh aboard, and, in a mercifully brief ceremony she is presented with an insignia of honor, formed entirely of blured light, which floats a few inches before her sternum.
“We have prepared several different residences for you, Professor,” says a devilish-looking man wearing nothing but a coat of red paint, with a white square hovering a few centimeters out from his right ear. “All quite conveniently nearby. But there are no restrictions on you. Travel wherever you like. There are limitless possibilities for exploration on board.”
Eventually she settles on a chamber at the heart of a group of tall hedges and sheltered under palm trees. The trees are aware of her and able to respond to commands to open or close, affording different views of the sky. A spring burbles out of from a heap of smooth marble boulders and the water gathers in a pool. There’s an all-purpose waste pit decorously concealed behind some high ferns and covered by a single leaf like an elephant ear, which rises or descends at verbal commands. Alien flowers grow on top of the hedge walls and in a central planter. There’s an attendant, too; a biological AI named Thafeefa who jumps up from inside the ground when called, a naked yellow-gold woman of less than middle height with a heavy mantle of smooth, glossy scarlet hair that turns in evenly at the ends all around like a mushroom cap. The upper half of her face is painted in finely shaded blue tints that lighten up toward her hairline. Assiyeh keeps her chattering merrily away for hours, describing the ship with visuals she produces by blowing bubbles out her mouth. Each bubble she takes in her two hands and holds out for Assiyeh to see while continuing to explain in a voice that remains distinct even with the membrane between her lips. When they are both nodding, Thafeefa embraces her, and Assiyeh falls immediately asleep.
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