The irises of Thafeefa’s eyes are like circular gauges, white within a dark ring, and striped with skinny bright red and yellow triangles that slide to and fro, vanish and reappear, around the pupil. Steadily enigmatic, they remain fixed on Assiyeh while she sleeps, seeming to weigh and measure her on thousands of indices, even as she smiles and flirts. Thafeefa lights up and exhales charts and graphs of smoke.
I remember when Marcilio saw me staring out the window once and told me not to listen to ghosts. I asked him which ghosts are the ghosts. I can’t tell. Out the window, down in the city tar pit you see a way of life called Wreckage Living. While the reich eats rocket crepes everyone else is pacing out each moment to step from one floor panel to the other as the whole edifice slowly collapses around their ears. The diners are calling for more. Watching those people talk to each other is like watching a conversation between two commercials, or like when a character from one sitcom visits another sitcom, the idiocy augmenting geometrically, not arithmetically. The servers rouse themselves with heavy slowbedience and sag through the kitchen door like sea bottom creatures that live under tons and tons of never-relieved pressure and who never see the sun or any light apart from what they manage to make themselves.
So that’s a metaphor. When you’re thinking critically, finding the right metaphor is much more than a clarification, let alone an ornamentation; it’s an act. What makes it an act? Because it changes something. After the right metaphor comes your way, you can never see its antecedent in the same way anymore.
Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit I can’t look, I can’t!
Everything is so—I can’t!
The misery—
ASSHOLES
—We’re on the main drag of a California town, a wide boulevard lined with one story shops that all have cute names like Yogurt Creations ... The Mane of Hair ... Dairy of a Mad Cow ... A Pane in the Glass.
—Hi, my name is Coastal Flood Statement, and what I have to say is that the main problem here is that you’re not entitled to have your own problems. Other people even own your problems, and thereby they transformitize you into another one of the homeless lords of the Teeming. Their sowhatathon leaving me behind a windswept barbarian. The devastation is continuous, so you have to invent some kind of scratch culture every day—the point of view is under nonstop assault, the flavor of time that emerges it. In every way, you are made to be on TV time, not knowing or caring about any other time species but that. When you bond yourself to suffering you can’t live without causing suffering—this way of life can’t survive without torture, murder, terror, war and what that gets you is just TV time and candidacy for the torture chamber too. We stopped in this phoney California town and there was nobody here. Everything is still under construction, like the road. So the town is already here, and all the people have to do is show up and start having something to do with it.
Back onto the road, turn on the radio, the news reporter says people have started robbing animals, harassing them, calling them derogatory names, beating them up, driving over cats or squirrels; the money they take off the animals they sometimes manage to exchange for acorns or other animal goods too well-hidden to steal. There are anti-animal hate groups forming. They put up posters and spray graffiti. In another story, there have been further reports of masked millionaires with long knives stalking the streets of major cities and small towns all over the world, pouncing on people in alleys, dragging their victims behind convenience stores.
Some of their intended victims do manage to escape, since they have to get to work. They slowbediently pile onto an absent bus and watch the city fall flat down all around them like dominos. Meanwhile, in the sewers, millionaires drift like crocodiles, baleful eyes above the waterline and all the rest below, burbling, masturbating ominously.
Were you aware that Professor Sulekh Budshah’s father sold ammunition? In fact, during a firefight that destroyed his village, he actually sold bullets to the men who were firing on his own home when their supply ran short? He called them while crouched behind his bullet-riddled refrigerator and sold the bullets to his enemies via PayPal. Since the killers checked off the next day delivery option, they received their truckload of fresh bullets within twenty four hours; the delivery drones bypassing roads choked with the charred carapaces of cars, and littered with the dead. Of course it’s true!
The radio says: Joan Incienzoa suffered a serious heart attack last night. The elections committee has consequently no choice but to postpone the run-off election until his condition stabilizes. Police were called upon in the early hours of the morning to protect AUP headquarters from a small group of angry protestors armed with bricks and improvised weaponry, who insisted that the story was a cover up, that Incienzoa had survived an assassination attempt, but an NFP official has called for calm, confirming the heart attack and citing Incienzoa’s prior medical history. For now, there is agonizing tension but no outright conflict, as the nation waits to see whether he will be able to pull through. Matild Onofreio-Atuan gave a brief address shortly after the incident, in which she wished her rival a swift and complete recovery. That’s all there is right now.
The captain, Carolina, of the Izallu Imeph has many names. So densely-packed is the captain’s daily schedule that there is little opportunity for socializing. Consequently, most of the more diplomatic duties are handled by a sub-captain, who also has many names. Assiyeh is introduced to him shortly before setting out to explore the ship. At a reception. Everyone is naked, but they wear paint, on the proposition that no natural human presents him or herself without adornment of some kind. The women put lace on their bodies and paint over it, then remove the lace. A lot of men paint themselves with one color, like red, then put yarn or string on themselves and paint over that with another color, thick. Then they pull out the string or whatever and that rips through the top coat, exposing the color beneath in strips and lines that are interesting because they’re kind of deep and raggedy. That’s the rugged masculine style.
Assiyeh? Yeah, she’s naked. She had Thafeefa do her paint. A black band, lacy, across uh the eyes like a blindfold, and a green one like a choker, around her throat. Black arms, from the hands all the way up to the shoulders. Huh? Yeah, she has sex with Thafeefa. Thafeefa loves it. All the other bio-AI’s are jealous because she’s consorting with this living legend. It’s hard to tell if she really cares, it’s hard to say what that means to an AI. But as far as behavior is concerned, yeah she dotes on Assiyeh. Assiyeh ... she’s trying not to develop feelings for Thafeefa, but it’s turning out to be surprisingly hard for her. Thafeefa makes it easy to feel like you have your fantasy. She isn’t a liar, either, it’s just that there are certain things that would normally be at stake for a, you know, regular woman, that don’t matter to her. And that makes her both more and less than what Assiyeh ... what would make Assiyeh happy, I guess. Although she is happy. I mean, Thafeefa makes her happy.
Sub-captain Plourd is an emaciated Arab or North African with high cheekbones, huge black eyes, black hair down to his shoulders and a moustache. Eyes, hair, and moustache all droop. He has a tapering face and hands like two rings of heavy keys. His ribs stand out distinctly and his buttocks are barely there; there are dark purple paint rings around his thorax and biceps, his arms and legs and red from the feet and hands up to the knees and elbows, so he seems to be wearing boots and gloves, and there is a white ceramic wafer up in one corner of his forehead. He steps out of a circle of officers and specialists to greet her with hand extended and a diagonal, half-distracted smile, without looking her in the eye. He has only half extricated himself from his sub-captain’s duties, not only speaking with her absently but standing as if he were half in and half out of a bathtub, leaning on a towel bar to keep from slipping. Within a few moments he is whisked away again, but not before he can invite her to join him at the captain’s table; it is only as he makes this invitation that she experiences the shock of eye contact with him. From the midst of this sham
bolic spray of uncoordinated gestures and endlessly displaced attention comes a key note of stability in deep black irises, lucid and self-possessed, and most importantly communicating to her an unmistakeable impression of having a time of their own.
The captain’s table is set up in an atrium. There is a bubbling fountain with an ornate mosaic design, and a sort of pagoda-cloister around it. The light is elegantly scattered by stone and wooden lattices. The guests sit on a couch that surrounds the round, sunken table.
Sub-captain Plourd stuns Assiyeh by greeting her in Tajik Farsi.
“I haven’t spoken Farsi since I was a girl!” she cries.
“That one phrase is all I know,” he says modestly.
At dinner, he recounts his journeyman years as a solitary colonist assigned to the “Mad Planet.” They called it that because it was so boring it drove you crazy. This planet, whose real name was Trylirt, was too promising a source of certain biologicals to drop off the list of candidate worlds, but not promising enough to prompt a full scale expedition, so it stagnated in the middle of the list, not denied resources or entirely ignored, but explored only with what was left over after the really important expeditions got their funding. Only one colonist per continent at a time, serving a stretch of what would be about four earth months, with no company but some old robots hibernating on standby in case anything went wrong. There were no robots to wake up and help you when your brain, starving for the least event, went wrong. A new region was explored by each colonist and every one of them reported exactly the same thing: low hills forever, covered in what looked like a completely dead forest of grey trees. These trees are actually quasi-animals that filter nutrients from the air and directly from the soil. Each consists of a pair of identical trunks sprouting from a cold cauldron of weak acid a meter or so beneath the surface, which is the “stomach.” Since they don’t grow leaves, there’s no leaf litter, no proper forest floor, no change of foliage, no rustling in the breeze, no spicy smell of decay. The ground is covered in flaky colorless mud and black, brown, white, or grey chips of a corklike stone laced with mica; and there’s this plush tan quasi-moss growing everywhere, and rocks rocks rocks. Some of these rocks, though, aren’t rocks, but proto-animals the explorers call “petrons.” They look just like rocks, but when you tip them up there’s froth underneath; the petron exudes this froth on whichever of its sides is touching soil, and the froth digests the moss and dirt, making a kind of gruel out of it. Then the petron sucks the nutritious parts up through tiny fissures. When a particular mosspatch is exhausted, the petron starts producing a slightly stiffer kind of froth, blowing meringue bubbles big and strong enough to tip it over onto another patch of moss. By tradition, every colonist goes out on his or her first day and selects a pet petron; you don’t know why until you get there and realize how precious is every and any source of distraction. You pick up a petron and put it down on some fresh moss near your shelter, then make it a part of your daily routine to tip little pete or patricia or patroclus or petomaine over, keep them feeding on fresh moss.
It’s a planet of washed-out colors, greys and other colors that are really just other greys. One of the few sources of visual relief is a kind of bushier moss that grows in spikes of a weirdly vivid brown, with a combover of long straw-colored fronds. During the long dusks, there is light without glare, and the faint color palate here takes on unwonted vividness, reminiscent of a hand-tinted sepia-base movie.
Life on this planet developed nearly no capacity for movement. Colonists are encouraged to build their shelters close to brooks rather than standing water, simply because a brook gives them something to look at that moves. The brook is a source of water; it is also a companion. There are no insects, no birds, no mammals, nothing moving, or singing, no creeping in the undergrowth, no sudden clashing of leaves telling you you’ve spooked something, no singing, no buzzing, no frogs peeping by the water, no patter of rain since rain doesn’t fall here, nothing but the inane chuckle of the brook that bubbles out of the ground somewhere up there, the wind rattling through the grey trunks, and, very rarely, the thumping of a petron as it tips over and tumbles down an incline ...
Every morning, the same weird, faded, flannelly, bottle-green sky. Virtually no weather to speak of. The planet had slightly less than Earth gravity; a running jump will bring you down about two feet further out than you would have expected, although you land with about as much of a jolt as you would get on earth. Jumping straight up can be an alarming experience. In the oceans, it is said, there are huge clouds of bacteria, a thousand kilometers or more across. And there is somewhere, toward the north pole, an open country, where creatures known as “anchorites” mouth the wind obscenely. The planet is either very young or very old.
“I was three quarters insane by the end,” he says. “Fortunately for me, the shuttle pilot sent to retrieve me was an old hand and knew just what to do when he’d landed and I hadn’t put in an appearance. He came and got me—pulled me right out of that hut by my ear. My left ear. It was hours, or was it days? One day at least, anyway. Before I could put together a cogent sentence again. And even the shuttle cabin was an overwhelming sensory experience for me, after those four months.”
After dinner, the sub-captain retires to a circular room ringed with a cushioned sofa and windows overlooking a black expanse dotted with the unreal half-moon orbs of the arcologies. Above the horizon, the “sky” is a weirdly lustrous blank, the light of the universe gathered in a halo more or less ahead of them. It reminds Assiyeh of the frail skein of froth or scum that sometimes appears in the middle surface of a tepid mug of tea. Assiyeh and the captain sit alone in this observation room. He sprawls with one arm flung along the top of the cushions, one knee up and leg resting on the seat, pensively smoking a little opiated candela. She likes his hangdog, passive charm. Assiyeh sits further along the angle, perched on the edge of her seat, looking from one window to another. In answer to his questions, which are few but pointed, she describes current earth conditions to him. He absorbs her answers thoughtfully. She imagines his weary melancholy dropping magically away from him, sees him rising to meet a crisis with cool decisiveness. Perhaps his authority comes from being a ready screen for everyone to project on.
He takes a long drag and lets his hand fall to his thigh, then ejects the smoke in two long nostril plumes that rise up and dissipate before they can reach the high windows.
“It sounds the same,” he says, his voice full of resignation and disappointment. Then, after a meditative pause, he changes the subject.
“Everyone is excited about your joining us,” he says. “People can’t believe it.”
“It does seem unreal to me, too.”
“How?”
“You’re living a fantasy here. Many people’s fantasy, anyway.”
The sub-captain smiles sadly.
“I seem to have lost the capacity for it,” he says. “My fantasy is to have fantasies again.”
“Well, why not quit?”
“It wouldn’t be a change,” he says. “I don’t have fantasies, but they’re there. I can feel them there, waiting. The problem is, they aren’t new fantasies, just the same old ones.”
“Is that bad?”
“If a fantasy ...” he has to pause and think a moment. “A fantasy that only reflects what you want, that only reflects the usual, the usual desires, let’s say, the status quo, it’s no different from reality then.”
The captain smiles sadly, again, a living quotation assembled piecemeal from dozens of forgotten books.
“You can quote me,” he says ruefully and looks exactly like Robert Louis Stevenson. His eyes lift past her.
“May I introduce you to the captain?”
She turns to look. A figure enshrouded in darkness is rolling toward her at a walking pace. It swings around and engulfs a chair, and sinks a little. Seating itself.
“Dr. Melachalos,” Mr. Plourd says.
“Welcome aboard,” the captain says.
; The sound draws Assiyeh up short. The captain’s voice is exactly like her own.
“That’s right,” the captain says. “Everyone hears their own voice when I speak.”
Assiyeh’s mind goes completely blank. She can’t think of a word to say to this vaguely anthropomorphic nebula. The darkness looks soft and somehow delicate, and there’s a fragrance too.
The conversation turns toward new technologies for ship propulsion. Assiyeh explains how achieving absolute rest would make universal travel possible; since an object absolutely at rest would stand in exactly the same relationship to all objects in the universe at the same time, it would have to be present throughout the universe once at rest. If the technology were developed, travel would no longer be necessary. Instead of trying to reach a distant destination by trying to go faster and faster, you reach it by stopping, then particularizing, then starting again in the new place. Once you stop, you are everywhere at once. All you have to do then is particularize yourself in some other part of space. Particularity would make travel obsolete.
“Energy is the biggest stumbling block,” Assiyeh explains. “Both acceleration and deceleration require a transfer of energy, which makes both of them finite. So trying to achieve absolute rest by slowing is as pointless as trying to reach the speed of light by hurrying. My slow technology only converts energy, reducing speed. What I want is rest technology, which eliminates transfer costs by doubling energy levels across the relation.”
Is this plausible? she thinks, looking at him. Will it work? Of course, science always works, always future tense it will work, don’t be stupid.
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