“Moving this momentum into this friction, or changing this chemical energy into propulsion and all, traps you in Newton’s jail of equal opposing reactions. You want to get out of that jail. You want an engine that’s an actor, not a reactor. What I mean is, on both sides of the transaction of motion, instead of there being a deficit accruing on one side and a surplus on the other, if you could produce energy on one side that would be doubled on the other, instead of inverted or moved from one to the other, then you wouldn’t be stuck throwing energy into a bottomless pit of an endless acceleration that is in fact steadily diminishing, or gorging yourself to the bursting point trying to swallow an infinite amount of deceleration. You just decouple from this particularity and recouple at another.”
*
VOICE: Who recruited you?
—Juan Jesus.
VOICE: Which Juan Jesus?
—Juan Jesus of Nazarro.
VOICE: Who introduced you to him? Where?
—He introduced himself and I met him inside me.
VOICE: We are reverting to parallel session.
[They torture the witness.]
VOICE: We are recommencing prior session. We will begin again. This will be repeated as often as is made necessary by your refusal to cooperate. Who recruited you?
—(panting, choking)
VOICE: Who recruited you?
—Glub. Gulp.
VOICE: Can you answer the question?
—Glub. (spits) Yes ...
VOICE: The next parallel session ... the area of the face and mouth in particular, the voicebox area ... and the chest slash diaphragm area ... are to be avoided. Focus on extremities.
—I can tell you ...
VOICE: ... Yes?
—Who recr, recruited ...
VOICE: (murmuring) ... water? (louder) Water.
—(gulping, slurping, spitting)
VOICE; Can you speak now?
—Yes. I believe I can. Let me collect myself a little. You see, when it comes to my recruitment, from one end of the ship to the other there is a general clamor for Assiyeh’s time and before she knows it she is booked solid as far into the future as Thafeefa can plan. She travels incessantly, lecturing, teaching classes, supervising experiments. She is so busy she has no time to pursue her own research. The Izallu Imeph moves so fast that its passengers experience the speed like weather. On board, stillness is a sign of the greatest imaginable velocity and a rushing headlong feeling is a sign of slowing down. Assiyeh and Thafeefa see balmy tropical arcologies with beaches and palm trees, aromatic breezes, ocelots frolicking in the travelling glow of swift-moving constellations twisting apart through the indigo haze of the night cycle, gigantic luminous snakes and insects, living skeletons tumbling from one tree to another, dull-hued flying invertebrates that sing interminable songs of slow, lamentational chords, people with long feelers growing along their jawlines and down the sides of their necks, people with antlers that grow down over their faces like cages and through which they can suck up water or breathe air, bulbous aerial people who float along the ground like manatees, people made of nothing but fluff who can pull themselves apart and recombine in any way. They see bracing frostbound wolf-infested arcologies of whistling white winds and snow hills, ominous black pines and mineral spikes like rattlesnake fangs, poisonous sleet, earthquakes that pound the ground rather than shake it, massive sullen alcoholic animals shaggy and stoical, smoke-spouting forest whales that wind among the tree trunks like snakes, their huge jaws lined with little teeth can snap up a beast the size of a buffalo, gulping down deadwood to feed the bonfire that burns inside each one so that their mouths glow red, penguinlike people shaped like torpedoes who dive for their food under the ice heedless of cold, tall running people who traverse miles of countryside on their long legs belching methane that helps raise the temperature in spring and whose weekly orgies last for forty-eight hours to the music of captive birds and a vast microtuned orchestra of blind foetuses, blazing across a thousand adventure novels one by one and at top speed until the one living note of adventuring sings out above all the others. Haunted arcologies with crumbling ruins, yipping jackals invisible in the distance, vampires without bodies flapping through the air, werewolves and banshees scream beneath leprous rainbows, succulent curses, massive spiders with staring human eyes, antelope cloaked in cold green fire, will o’ the wisps luring people into quicksand marshes, rotting children blundering through numbly remembered games. There are deserts and plains, steppes, jungles, reefs, mountain ranges with blinking green guides and pack-carriers, lava lakes, geyseral landscapes, ice tropics, glaciers of living wood, fungus chapparal, living landscapes with migrating herds of boulders, cloudlands, orange amber caves populated by living dead thanatomes, seas of metal mesh and living fabric. There are ten foot tall people with double rows of teeth, oversexed golden pornstar people, suave cosmopolitan stick insects, chalk white people built like hatracks, censorious cobalt blue puritans who limit to the minimum all interaction with outsiders, people corresponding to all types known on earth living in mixed and unmixed groups, populations of people who are all completely alike, populations where no two people are even remotely similar to each other, countless languages, countless religions, countless political parties. Misunderstandings, intrigues, jealousies, liasons, countless adventures, countless, ever more daring escapes. Corpses in niches mummified by the vacuum, gazing out into the void, visited by utterly alien space nuclei that flap down from nothing to work some form of exchange; the most daring and strong willed trance mediums on board occasionally manage to contact the spirit of an Exposed One, and what comes through then is impossible to relate, and only shudderingly remembered afterwards. Time, on board the Izallu Imeph, doesn’t seem to move. Life seems impossible anywhere else. Assiyeh’s memories of Earth, of the physics conference, news reports, political spectacles, economics, can’t find coherence in this setting. It’s as if she had always been a guest on board this gargatuan spacecraft, even without having come from anywhere else. Throughout her travels, no matter where she goes, there’s that same dreamlike, disembodied feeling.
“Did I die in space?” she wonders. “Or before? Is this all my dreaming death?”
She imagines her naked corpse floating in space, perhaps plunging to earth, the plastic coating melts and peels away in cinders, her face chars, her hair crackles, and as it dies the brain whispers its last dream of rescue, the spacecraft, leaving the earth behind.
What is real is what presents itself. This is what presents itself, so she will deal with it and not waste time with what ifs. When Assiyeh finally does get time and opportunity to perform an experiment of her own, she thinks:
“When you start with the form and infuse life into it, you end up with a life struggling to inhabit a form that is more or less accidental to it, and that isn’t how life is. If you want to get closer to creating life, you have to make living material that shapes itself, I guess like a sort of plasm. The experiment itself would have to be alive, because the big problem to be overcome is the dividing up of a single simultaneous process into a series of steps.”
She begins with protein candy that can be woven in strands and hardens into a fabric. The candy is dropped from a dispenser as it forms, so the strands can turn this way and that as they contract and relax, like taffy. When the candy pulls free of the dispenser, it drops into water and floats, so it can take shape more independently and manage the extrusion and distribution of its own material as it forms. Deceleration was the key element to Assiyeh’s method of animation: inducing animation by decelerating the tissue and organs to the meet the burgeoning velocity of a hum of life force given off by time or a star. The organs slow into life, slow into participation, and the new monospecies will emerge. Failed forms and organs that are more trouble than they’re worth heap up in Assiyeh’s lab. There’s a kind of glass mouth that smacks and claps incessantly, gumming the container they are forced to keep it in. There are living neon light tubes coiled up like Arab
ic calligraphy and which give off such a high voltage field that they have to be stored in thick rubber crates to keep them from shocking. An enormous gland suddenly leapt from its nurture tray with an earsplitting roar, streaked across the floor and up the wall like a huge purple tongue. But one set of organs did independently coagulate into a floppy integer, a basically complete if lopsided thing resembling an immature bird but with a huge pair of glistening pink buttocks, and all it did was lie there muttering to itself, sighing, occasionally emitting a pink whoosh of flatulence laced with tiny pink larvae. The larvae got everywhere and raised a rash on Assiyeh and Thafeefa both. Assiyeh could wear protective clothing, but Thafeefa chafed if she had to wear even so much as a bracelet or a pair of sandals, and was miserable for as long as the farting thing clung, baffled, to its life.
Assiyeh invited the available luminaries of the Izallu Imeph to observe an experiment.
“The biocandy has adopted a great variety of organic functionalities, a few of which show the right characteristics for this experiment.”
She points to a mass that looks like a fibrous, transparent ear of corn, which is throwing off long trailers of silk that float and grope toward other organs.
“This one is especially eager to participate, I think. We have gathered them here under conditions we hope will prompt them to adopt an aleatory monoform. We will give them what they want, and see what happens. Please observe.”
With a wave of the hand, Assiyeh causes the transparent barriers separating the organs to be lifted, and at once the organs begin to sneak toward each other. Assiyeh operates a deceleration field around them which helps to bring them into common velocity with the filmy updrafts of vitality coming from space; the organs knit together with sprays of tacky biocandy. The procedure takes only a fraction of an hour, and when it is done, to her colossal disappointment, Assiyeh watches as a transparent human male lifts itself unsteadily to its feet within the experimental enclosure. The audience response is muted, polite, and they leave grumbling. They wanted to see something alien.
“Just another human ... All that build-up and what do you get ...”
Assiyeh contemplates the listing figure philosophically. Maybe it is alien. It’s full of mercury, or that’s what the stuff looks like anyway, sloshing around inside, streaming in rivulets up and down the torso, and there’s a whirlpool of it where ordinarily the brain would be.
What did she do with him?
She adopts him. He speaks by gurgling the liquid in his head. The whirlpool seems to have some knowledge in it already, but it is impossible to predict what the glass man will or will not happen to know. The first time Assiyeh falls asleep in his presence, he panics and pisses in her face, evidently in order to revive her. On the other hand, he doesn’t need to be told how to use doors or how to fool around with Thafeefa. Assiyeh gets jealous, and she’s alternately peevish and melancholy. His body moves as if its motion were projected onto it from outside. The glass man doesn’t eat, he recharges with enemas, sitting on a big clear bladder of mercury like a bean bag chair and letting the pressure drive the fluid up into him. From time to time, tiny balloons inflate from his eyes and drop like tears to the floor.
I finally decided the thing to do was to have a party in one of the million empty apartments back in San Toribio. This was years ago, in the pre-Tripi days. We would find our way to each other. Me, not being the host, would have to receive my own invitation from a third party. I took the idea from that other, better me that I can only dream about. The city’s absentee landlords are our unwitting hosts, and word went out by way of the spectre grapevine to everyone sitting in empty apartments—cells included. There are bare walls, and bare floors, the toilet is dry and the sinks are too, make yourself at home. There is a lavish spread of blankness. While we’re waiting on our musicians, you can groove to the whistling wind blowing through empty corridors, syncopated to the growling of the fluorescent lights and the whoops of the sirens, now with bonus bass, all of which should help to drown the shuffle of lifeless feet out there, the Novemberness of living in the unsustainable prolongation of the last generation’s dream, and the dead breathing of city traffic coughing up drones and helicopters. Assemble here in the blankroom while I sit on the rim of the tub, picking punctuation out of my nose in the dark.
We were all revolutionaries and we all still are, of the kind who get to talk about having been, and the problem with making revolution your religion is that you tend to worship what you can’t have and it ends up back there somewhere like it already happened, even though it never did. Or, I guess what I mean is that the revolution happens inside you first, and so that’s the revolution you end up thinking has happened. “I don’t understand how you can be so blind,” you say silently to everyone you pass. The world, nature, the stars in the sky are all already yours. Already. You can’t earn them and you don’t have to, all you have to do is live. Beauty isn’t ownable, it doesn’t linger—or rather you don’t. It flashes up, then next moment you’ve already left it behind and you spend the next chunk of your time trying to decelerate back to it again.
“You think you’re going to take all this away from them and there’s not going to be violence? They butcher them, they’ll butcher us too, they get off on it, massacres make them cum, they pay their whores to moan and call them master and emperor and sieg heil and they watch the death on the news while they get sucked off think they’re action heroes and Alexander and God just like back when it’s still cavemen, it’s still bullies in the schoolyard, it’s still the same sub-adult sub-monkey braindead slobber as back when and back when and back when again.
“Fuuuck ...
“... Half this shit isn’t even worth having. I mean is it worth dying for? Bunch of ugly cities, fucked up streets and roads and suburbs and—fucking sports stadiums and ... whatever—banks? Fucking banks? You want to die for a—actually it might be worth it to blow up the bank. Blow the fucking stadium up and the streets and the fucking companies and put in something worth having. But you’re going to have to blow all that up because they aren’t going to come around and give it to you. Not if it’s still worth two chunks of shit they won’t, fucking evil greedy ...”
I silence myself with a hand wave because I am hearing myself and I hate the way I sound. Like impotent, a failure, like someone off on the sidelines with no power, complaining. Talking that way used to make me feel better; now it makes me feel like I’m already dead. I’m just a phantom people walk through on the way to fucking work.
“Attention passengers. All our trains have crashed and all our stations have collapsed. At this time, you have all been crushed by falling rubble. There will never be any service ever again, but my words descend softly on your shapeless, broken corpses. Thank you for being killed by MTA, New York City Transit.”
All right. Now that you’re all here, it’s time for our experiment. Now none of your groaning! You all had your homework—so whip it out. Yes, it’s that kind of show, with full audience participation.
It’s a good crowd. One of those economists is here, the lanky, quiet one who’s always correcting himself. He says he’s been living under a paving stone and I believe him.
“I believe you,” I say. “You’re lucky you got it. Some people don’t even have that!”
Now that you’re ready, we got a completely dark room through there. No windows, no lights, nothing. The door has a skirt here and a rubber flange around it, so when you shut it, no light can seep in from outside. Complete darkness in there. Each one of you is going into that room alone and shutting the door. You’re going to take a few minutes to get used to it. Wait until all the afterimages and sparks have faded. Then, when you’re ready, I want you to make light. I don’t mean with your lighter. You go into the room with nothing. You have nothing, and in that cell there is nothing but darkness. You have to use magic to make light. You can make whatever gestures or sounds you think will help. Any kind of light, any color. Sun, moon, candle, camera flash, TV screen on sta
tic, snow reflected light, cat’s eye reflected light, whatever. Let him who has eyes to see do something about it.
A white pop in the darkness—who’s there?
Whose face do I see?
Assiyeh is a very straight, lean woman of middle height, with a cape of shoulder-length black hair and large dark eyes in a bright brown face, the eyebrows are two hard black crescents, the nose is small and hooked. The litany of description. The charactechism. She has a subtly expressive mouth; the lips rise in acute points. Her face is broad across the eyes. Her shoulders stand out from her spine like spars from a mast, making them seem wider than they are. Her mother was Greco-Tajik and her father was Franco-Mexican. A master of escape.
Back when I was homeless, I had a construction job laying supaslab and making sure the fire extinguishers were in their legally required locations, one at each grid intersection in the floorplan, so nobody had to run more than I think it was twenty five feet to get one. Half of them were empty, though. They weren’t paying overtime and they didn’t pay when Luis fell and hurt his back because they said he was drunk—I was there, the man was sober. Seeing as I was the one with no wife no known kids and going home to a car and taking showers at a gym, I had the least to lose in trying to organize the others. They didn’t want to hear me and one of the bigger ones, a man I had thought was basically well-disposed to me, shoved me against a wall one day and told me to shut my mouth.
I wanted to leave, but I was seeing Ndidi at the time even though she made a point of telling me when we were first alone together “I will never sleep with you” and she meant it and she was right, too. Why why why I asked her every time we were alone together. No no no was her answer every time I asked her. That wasn’t a yes or no question, I said every time we were alone together. Her smile would grow, and so would her “NO.” Maybe she knew that her no would hold me, but hold me for what? She didn’t need the amorous overtures of a derelict autochthonic automobile dweller to make herself feel better.
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