The yellow-gold star of her lighter is reflected in the glass, a transparent mask of dusky orange light, her face, just above it like a nebula perforated by eyes, nostrils ... The darkness outside abruptly deepens, but that’s typical here.
Assiyeh has already adapted to Koskon Kanona conditions sufficiently well to think about resuming her research. The planet is much larger than earth, but significantly less dense, being only basically solid enough for human activity to go on in the usual way without requiring any special measures. However, while it is superficially no different from terra firma it is actually slightly gaseous in its overall composition, an ultracompressed gas planet in fact. The solid crust is a bit like the skin of a balloon. The soil and rock of the surface are weirdly friable. You can send a colossal boulder tumbling along level ground with a stiff slap of the hand. The atmosphere is a cocktail of practically every known gas, mixed in proportions that are constantly and drastically changing. Every inhabitant has to memorize a long list of different four-letter codes transmitted from gas measuring stations to personal indicators and public information boards, to know which gas suppositories to insert into themselves that day.
The streets of Buzzati, the largest of the planet’s cities, are lined with booths, bolt holes, kiosks, shelters, all manner of structures that pedestrians can duck into when one of the dozens of different atmospheric alert signals is sounded. Assiyeh notices that her moods follow the changes, and that this is commonly true of most citizens here. Sometimes everyone you see is sitting on benches that line the incredibly wide white boulevards, black shapes slumped and motionless, throwing black shadows in the hard, pale Marienbad daylight of Koskon Kanona. The air is hard to breathe then. It fills the lungs as light as lead and it leaves a musky aftertaste behind. Then, in a moment, the air is suddenly fizzing like champagne—everyone leaps up zooming around like fireworks, laughing and chattering. Adjusting to this volatility has meant that most citizens are cool, deliberate, undemonstrative, and tolerant. Getting along with them is easy and getting to know them is impossible. The walls here are very thick and very tall.
Koskon Kanona’s rotation is punctuated, not continuous. Instead of gliding smoothly across the sky every day, Koskon Kanona’s sun stays in one spot for an hour, then slides further toward the west for three seconds and stops for another hour. Assiyeh simply cannot get used to it. She’ll be sitting in her room reading when suddenly the daylight falling steadily on the floor beside her crawls up her face, as if the sun were bending down to peer in through the windows. The impression this gives, namely that the planet has suddenly broken loose and is about to plunge howling into space, brings her heart up her throat every time it happens. Dawn and dusk are bizarre here—a soft blue light in the early morning hours ... and then the sun suddenly jumps up above the horizon and is all there in the sky, the day exploding all at once. There are no splendid sunsets—one minute it’s getting dark, then the sun dives below the horizon like a gopher ducking into its burrow and wham, it’s night. The stars, too, stay put for an hour at a time, and then veer all together. It’s an unreal sight.
Something of this incrementality of motion infects the planet’s human inhabitants with its peculiar haltingness; they move like figures in a film running backward, going from motion to rest with a kind of positive absence of momentum. She noticed this right away, when she was taking her leave of the Izallu Imeph. Instead of sending shuttles, Koskon Kanona instead convoyed together flocks of huge concrete tubes that remain in orbit for this purpose. They assemble into a spinal column crooked down toward the surface. Assiyeh watched a platform loaded with passengers floating up from the surface through one of these tubes; she was looking down at the tops of their heads. The platform was operated by a group of officials in suits who were chanting, drumming, clapping, and bowing their heads mechanically. Assiyeh decided to disembark here on impulse. Without looking up at her, the woman supervising the officials, who were mopping their brows and drinking water from canteens, said, “You can do as you like, but I don’t want to see any naked bodies, so make sure and get your clothes on before you board.”
When they were ready to depart, the officials resumed their chanting. Their eyes rolled back and their drumming and clapping took on a clockwork regularity. Through the latticework in the sides of the tubes, Assiyeh watched the dimly glowing night side of Koskon Kanona swell to collect her from the nightlessly perfect night of space. Overhead, her view of the Izallu Imeph was blocked, so she could only make out a vague luminescence up there. There was a rush that nearly blew her off her feet when they plunged into the atmosphere, but the ride continued smoothly all the way down to the surface.
On her arrival she became obsessed with the convulsions of civilization back on earth. Hideous faces, brandishing and sneering; neutered rationalism in ominously spectral conversations somehow taking place and already in the past at once. Most of the other planets find this stream of news intolerably depressing and the far flung children of Earth turn sadly away from this picture feeling banished and despondent. Perhaps this was the intended result, Assiyeh thought—make things on Earth appear so hopeless that we on the outside will stop ourselves from interfering.
“I wonder,” she thinks, “if there really isn’t anything we can do.”
She gulps and grabs hold of the arms of her seat as the sun abruptly rolls forward to its next station in the sky.
“That’s what they back on earth are afraid of—one of many things. They’re afraid we exiles will come back and overthrow them just to save our interplanetary self respect.”
—Gazing out at the ocean now. A light wind frisks her hair. The ocean on Koskon Kanona moves stop and start, just like the sky. A wave will suddenly bulge up and stop in the middle of the water like a huge jade axeblade pushing up through gleaming slate blue satin. It just stands there, the crisp edge just starting to crumble into foam, and webs of foam sliding down the slope. Then, after an interval of several minutes, a roar swells up into the air and the wave bows. It rolls forward and stops again, coiled into a tube. Then again the roar and the dash of the wave as it spreads its countless little hands patting and fingering the beach. When the water has reached the limit of its inland reach, it pauses again, forming a transparent skin of frothy water and fixed shadows inside. Only then does it fall back. Assiyeh watches the water tumble back on itself, layers slipping under layers like drawers, and behind her she can hear, cutting in through the gaps in the wind, faint voices calling from the towers, rasping, inhuman, impassive, urgent, musical, echoing through the tall boulevards of the city like verbal searchlights. Not everyone can hear them.
Assiyeh brought her bathing suit, but it’s too cold to swim today.
Thafeefa standing there crying.
Every so often a pang—Thafeefa. Gardens. Wading naked in a cloud-shadowed green landscape with mountains of lavender stone rising in the distance. She belonged to the Izallu Imeph and couldn’t come to Koskon Kanona with her. She didn’t seem to understand why Assiyeh insisted on going, why the Izallu Imeph, itself a whole world, could be less than enough, although she did not make the mistake of thinking that it was she, and not the ship, that wasn’t enough. That would have been a mistake. The real answer, which Assiyeh had not been able to put into words, was that Assiyeh was the one who was not enough, and diminishing in capacity all the time she was caught up in the whirl of engagements and novelties. She’d had to make so many adjustments so quickly, only to alter them all over again. The discovery of her resources for becoming was thrilling as long as she was able to stay out far enough ahead or remain high enough above the changes. In those moments, it was like she had picked up a whole new wardrobe or drastically changed her hairstyle; the changes were big enough but still manageable. The changes grew no larger as they went on; she just got tired of making them. Going through all those changes only inclined her toward the generic, something so basic she could afford to forget it again. She imagined coming up with a simple, reliable diet, or
laying in a supply of one or another essential; she toyed with ideas for an all-purpose wardrobe with a handful of options coordinated across three modes, casual, formal, heavy duty. Finally she had to realize that she was still too firmly self-possessed to be radically changed by all the travel and adventure. When an athlete really throw him or herself into training, it can sometimes seem as if the motive was actually self-hostile, the training a siege layed against the self, and the point is to break the body, so that you would think they’d be relieved to get an injury. Force majeur, nothing to be done about it. If she really wanted to break herself by losing herself in a blizzard of transformations brought on by travelling nonstop—that was hard to say, but anyway she turned out to be a hard nut to crack. So she left the ship and Thafeefa, joining the human beings of Koskon Kanona. She could not continue her experiments in such a bewildering, distracting place, and those experiments were her raison d’etre. It was only the truth, but she was using it as if it were an excuse.
Glassimov the glass man is off somewhere examining the contents of the tidal pools. He’ll pick up every last crab or urchin and hold it up to the light, scrutinizing it with resonant gurgles of its cerebral vortex as if it had to name them all individually. He’s pretty crummy company all told. He just talks that glass talk, no matter how many hours of language lessons she puts him through.
Assiyeh strolls a little along the beach, thinking. She has so many pent up experiments she wants to try she doesn’t know where or how to start. Now that she’s here, the time has come, the opportunity is staring at her expectantly. Turning abruptly to undo a snag in her skirt, she notices a figure up the beach. It isn’t the glass man. It isn’t anyone she knows. A motionless figure, a hundred or more meters away, watching her without making the slightest motion. Like something out of M. R. James. The longer she watches its watchful motionlessness, the more likely it seems to leap the distance and thrust a nightmare face into her own.
“If I turn my back,” she thinks, “and then right away look again it will be right behind me.”
She turns her back and then turns around again with a quick twist. The figure is gone.
It’s still behind her. Right behind her. She knows it instantly. Without looking, she throws an elbow into space and connects with something soft, and sand brushes her calf as if someone had kicked it up in a sudden spray. She hears a gurgle and turns to face the glass man, who points at her accusingly.
“I thought you were someone else,” she says, grimacing in disgust. “Why don’t you ever say anything instead of sneaking up on me all the time?!”
“glub arbl ull worb ugnlb,” he says.
“You do so sneak up!” she snaps, then waves him away.
No sign of that other. She walks a little, hands behind her back, thinking. Finally she reaches the spot where the figure must have been standing. There are numerous footprints here, but only two marks could possibly have been made by the feet of person standing in this spot looking back in her direction. Assiyeh kneels and brushes the surface of the loose sand with outspread fingers. She scans tactilely like a dowser and then her fingers close on something. It’s a single strand of wool, dyed a dark color. Nothing on Koskon Kanona makes wool, it all has to be imported because, as a voluble customs agent explained to her when she inquired about the high tariff on her wool jacket, the actinic plant growth that covers much of the planet’s surface is toxic to all known species of ruminant, and the soil is too sour for imported grazing plants. Her Jamesian observer was from Earth.
“So, they won’t let me go,” she thinks, visualizing the earth reaching out across space with thick-fingered cartoon hands, groping blindly for her among the stars, rummaging planets like old wardrobes and bureaus. A curious smile spreads across her face, kindling a familiar old glow behind her features.
“Come on, my enemy!” she thinks with an inward leap of welcome.
For an instant she detects on the breeze a faint aroma of tobacco smoke, perhaps from a pipe or cigar. It came from inland, of course, but there is no sign of anyone in the dunes. Maybe a discarded butt, smouldering back there. There—a motion. One movement. Back behind the dunes, at the very back. She is sure she saw it, but all she gleans from a review of the sight is an impression of something fairly long and fairly flat and basically but not completely black, perhaps tipped with white or with a pale line along its length, and, too, a suggestion of a red spot or stain, like a dull red flower perhaps, all this arrangement moving in a swing parallel to the ground, just clearing the upper edge of the remotest dunes, back where the sand grows more level and becomes roadside. It might have been an arm, or a wing.
She glances back at the glass man. He’s kneeling in the sand, silica in one form and another—is that why he finds it so interesting? Maybe he sees himself in this panoply of sand and ceaselessly sloshing fluids the way a human being might see a less complex version of himself in a cat or a dog. Right now he has picked a rock up and scrutinizes its underside, flicking away grains of sand and shreds of some kind of plant life.
“Let’s get back,” she says. “Move your glass.”
Riding the capsule back into the city she is contacted by an element of the specialitat, the vertical meniscus snapping around her. It’s like being absorbed by a giant droplet. The contrast of the visual field intensifies, or at least the blacks do, so the already vivid shadows of Koskon Kanona become inky windows into the void. Only an instant or so into this impression she is joined by a special, who takes the seat facing hers. Her companion keeps up his routine investigation of his hallucinations, head tilting and turning like a bird’s; he doesn’t appear to be included in this exchange.
A special is unmistakeable; always something self-conscious about the dress, whether it is pointedly formal or informal, and the same steady, motionless eye. An air of being at the center of countless tasks at varying stages of completeness. Specials never fail to remind you: a document you need to file, an application deadline that you thought was later than it is, an annual physical, a permit about to expire. They are the natural bureaucrats of Koskon Kanona, and in a sense they were here first, before mankind, although they are mostly human. When humans first arrived on Koskon Kanona, they discovered a bureaucracy already in place, even though the planet had no intelligent life, now or ever, indigenous or imported. The bureaucracy was simply there, like the space of a skyscraper without the mass, the relationships of piece to piece without the pieces themselves, yet still palpable and enduring as a kind of slope or grain that made itself felt whenever anyone exerted any energy against that grain. It was possible, but extravagantly difficult, to go “uphill,” just as it is possible but needlessly difficult to build on earth in defiance of earth’s gravity field. The pattern asserted itself in urban planning, in the structure of government, and in the development of human beings. Certain unpredictable individuals would bureaucratize and become specials, meaning that the inherent bureaucracy field of Koskon Kanona had exerted the ascendant among the various forces contributing to their makeup. The specialitat is the combined nimbus emanated by all the specials together—education, law, cultural ministers, resource ministers, economists, security, religion, and so on. Assiyeh feels it holding her like a marble between its lips. A special with poached-egg eyes sits opposite her on the capsule. The necktie or kerchief tumbles down his front, the large, veiny hands are folded in the lap, the grey head, the massive body ... Without moving, they take her in ... still fifteen, thanks to her rejuvenation experiment, with her chewing gum, her pimples, her headphones whispering top ten pop songs, her notebook grudgingly plastered with stickers of cats and colorless human hearts.
They want her to write up a series of reports about a man back on earth. There’s a lot of information about him, too much, and it’s all over the place. Eighteen possible names, seven possible ages, thirteen possible nations of origin, and so on. What can be said with assurance is that this man is a man, male, older than 27, with obvious African heritage and virtually certa
in Hispanic background too, fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Achrizoguaylan Labasporspan, of no fixed abode, a political activist under the nom de guerre “SuperAesop.” She is shown a series of images which are transferred directly to her optic nerve by a sonic fan emitted from a socket in the middle of the special’s forehead. The first is a passport photo of a man with feverish eyes, a drawn, aquiline face, slight underbite, short locks, not quite looking at the camera. Throughout the succeeding images that preoccupied look is typically there more often than not. Here he is smiling, sitting in a circle of people outdoors, there’s a fire in the background, smoke coming from his teeth, caught making a gesture with both hands as if he were lifting an invisible bundle. The specialitat wants her to write him up for them, with some supplementals on a few of his associates, also generally identified by nicknames: Gloominous, Bump’eyewreckie, Noughzeddd, Tenure.
SuperAesop’s friends. There was the one who would get angry at the crowds and the street noise. Then he would try reasoning with himself: it wasn’t personal, no one was out to get him in particular, the noise would be there whether he were there to hear it or not, and so on, but he grew only more angry not so much because he felt slighted that this racket was not being made to destroy his noble person but as a matter of course, more so because it angered him to have the reason for his anger undermined. He didn’t want to reason himself out of being angry, actually, but to find reasons to justify complaining.
Tenure pronounced like Manure. He once imposed a sort of black nationalist play on me, probably on everyone he knew, with an invitation we couldn’t refuse. I don’t remember much about it, it wasn’t all that clear. I remember a photo of him in the amazingly high quality color program, showing him lying down bare chested, holding a yellow box with some African stuff in it. Damn, I thought, that’s him without his sunglasses, dude is serious! The play had something to do with love potions and there was a lot of sparkling outfits and people sitting on the floor. There was a sulky wizard character who grumbled about rain getting into his love potions and neutralizing them. “There must have been some rain in that water,” he said, and all the strings on his lute went slack at once. The black superman main character philosophized with him about it, saying something like, “Rain falls on all, brother.” And one of the female characters wanted to know how all those Germans and Italians got it on when Europe was raining all the time. She didn’t get an answer, which was actually pretty good, I thought. The whole thing was African mish-mash and Ashamba-the-Wave is a dancing girl and she asks Bumpy Deuterdahomaga what the spider dance is on the dewdrop. Corny as hell. I liked it, though, anyway. It felt kind of nice. Tenure was fruit and nuts. Strictly water, with tea on special occasions. He got twenty five years for possession and an illegal gun with police fingerprints. I managed to talk to him once, not about much of anything, early on, but then I was homeless again and keeping up with anybody became a mystery.
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