Later on, another cigarette, made of tasteless Koskon Kanonan tobacco mist caught in a thread that revaporizes as it untwists at the heart of a clear glass cigarette, then time for clothes. She lays out the day’s ensemble, dresses, and goes out just as the sun veers to its next station in the sky and all the shadows lean over. This is hard to get used to; she wants to brace herself whenever it happens, as if the planet were a ship on a rolling sea. It is.
The air here is cool, dry, and smells like some kind of aromatic chemical. It’s almost never an odor she can name. Sometimes it’s a little like the old book smell and sometimes like medicine; the only familiar smell is woodsmoke, which is actually the smell given off by the buildings and the soil after it rains. The streets are kept clean by caterpillar-shaped machines that undulate up and down absorbing dirt.
People in the street are courteous but remote. Buzzati was once a violent frontier town and people learned to be very clear in their etiquette; a person with an inadvertently insulting manner wouldn’t have lasted long. The manners are all that remain of that time now. Buzzatins take pride in being discreet, but in a sort of indiscreet way; they like nothing better than a nimble display of delicacy when it comes to saving face for someone else, so at one and the same time they both try to cover for someone else while making themselves conspicuous in the act, and ending up causing mischief of another kind. That said, Buzzatins regard the unheralded act of reputation-rescue, of covering for someone, as particularly noble. The whole of their society works on the basis of merits accumulated in defense of each other’s good name. So a man practically throws his wife at her lover in public, announcing, with a carefully cultivated offhandedness, that he will be away on business on such and such days, and encouraging her to visit friends, to do entirely as she pleases. Everyone can tell that this is really a public accusation; the wife knows that anyone seeing her in company with that other man will assume infidelity. The lover has been challenged, and now he must inform the husband, within earshot of everyone, that he too is going away for a time and regrets he cannot attend on the lady.
Assiyeh has an appointment with her advisor, to discuss the possibility of getting Thafeefa assigned to her, or, failing that, having a copy made. She was the best assistant Assiyeh ever had; Assiyeh can’t stop thinking about her. Thafeefa standing there when they had to say goodbye, her fists in her eyes, crying. Thafeefa’s sobs echo back to her every single day, heralding a wave of fierce tenderness that leaves Assiyeh aching to hold her. Has she forgotten her? Been assigned to someone else? Assiyeh sighs. Or is she missing her, lonely, sad and bored? Pining?
What will happen if it works out? Buzzatins all live alone; the housing committee took forever to confirm her application for the apartment she’s living in, since the glass man is neither an individual person in the usual sense nor an appliance or piece of property either. Assiyeh told them she hardly ever removed him from his closet charging station, and that seems to have done it. It was a good thing they didn’t ask to see the so-called “charging station.” It was all bullshit. The glass man didn’t sleep in her bed, but then he didn’t sleep at all. While she slept, he would go out for walks, explore the town, come up with reports of new and interesting places to go, things like that. But Thafeefa, as a biological creature who eats and sleeps, would by law have to have her own place. They would have to find their two places side by side.
Public transportation is much the same. The cable cars look like long strings of big, clear beads, each of which is a single-occupancy car. Only the older trams, which swing precariously through space on skinny, suspended tracks, listing crazily now, have the usual kind of cars. People sit apart anyway, gazing at their hands folded in their laps, or at the floor, or at the aphorisms engraved in chrome panels set into the polished brown bakelite mouldings, or out the windows. Buzzatins carry no personal electronics of any kind; they wear mechanical watches. The static electricity in the air would fry any ordinary electric device, and so far no one has been able to devise a form of insulation that does not mysteriously disintegrate after a few days of exposure to the open. The trams and cable cars are all run by reeling spools, lit by faint, chemical illumination that glows soft greens and oranges. There’s an avid silence out in public. Everyone lives alone, but everyone is expected to be involved with at least one other person. Public displays of affection are icily received, but this is because it’s taken for granted that one peck on the cheek, one light embrace, must explode in passion. Anyone capable of holding back after even the slightest physical overture is considered impotent. The intense privateness of the Koskon Kanonans extends to sexual practices and nothing consensual is forbidden, but this means that speculation about each other’s sex lives is intense. It’s a hallmark of friendship, and considered in the light of an enjoyable pastime, trying to imagine what the people you know get up to. Marriage is unknown, largely because Koskon Kanonan property is distributed bureaucratically. Most Koskon Kanonans are entangled in webs of confused relationships. There are over seventy different kinds of officially registered sexual relationships. This means that most Koskon Kanonans make general assumptions about others—most commonly, that everyone is bisexual and involved with at least one person of each gender and then possibly a few constructs. Whether or not this is actually the case is something known only partially, only to certain bureaucrats, and kept secret from the general population at their own request, so they would not be deprived of the pleasure of speculating.
The bureaucracy field that surrounds everything that happens on the planet functions exactly like magic, the bureaucrats are the wizards, and the paperwork are spells. Send a form here, and people gather there, erect a house, fill it with furniture. Assiyeh is looking for the right form for a love spell that will reunite her with Thafeefa. Her absence is too painful and distracting. The bureaucracy is ubiquitous and centerless, unlike the government, which is housed in offices with pebble glass doors and cracked leather chairs. Koskon Kanonan politicians are all like private eyes and amateur detectives. Sam Spades, Philip Marlowes, Miss Marples, Hercule Poirots, Sherlock Holmses. They are constantly in motion, interviewing people, irritating the police with their questions and alternate interpretations of events, figuring things out on the fly. They never meet formally; instead, their dedicated chroniclers, secretaries, Watsons, boon companions, record their aphorisms and observations, then draw on these to formulate proposals that they circulate among themselves. The proposal that has survived by the end of these punishing rounds of criticism is then implemented by the bureaucrats. There are no elections; anyone can go to any of the detective politicians, anyone can try their hand at that particular sort of detective work. Those who haven’t got the knack usually drift out of it into something else, maybe becoming companions, maybe plumbers. Plumbers are very highly respected on Koskon Kanona—watching plumbers, electricians, skilled craftsman at work is one of the chief forms of entertainment, occupying the place of athletics in other societies. Plumbers et al are ranked on a planetary basis, and the top ten global plumbers are role models, culture heroes, and get profiled on trading cards.
Another glance aside, into the crystal ball vortex of the glass man’s head—Assiyeh sees herself walking with swift purposeful steps into the crystal darkness beneath massive low Roman arches, her dark olive face underlit by the soft glow of her white blouse. She climbs a flight of shallow stone steps up to a cathedral-like portico with many pairs of broad, featureless rectangular doors.
The interior is a void, though not so dark that its great depth and spaciousness could be mistaken. Dim lights reach out to her from remote constellations, shining on doors lining corridors without walls or ceilings. Walking between these modernistic doors, she finds herself flanked by a silent escort of two bald old giants with thick tufts of unkempt hair sprouting above around and from their ears, to steer her to SII33.
They pass through a series of sets, each from a different, nameless film, or painting. There’s a nineteenth-century
storeroom of bare boards, packing crates, no lights, everything grayed out in the glare from two white windows. Now she’s crossing a round rumpus room with white filligree skylights and a shag-carpeted conversation pit around a raised hearth with a white trumpet-shaped flue, like a 1970’s jumpsuit future ski lodge. Now they’re in a torchlit grotto with classical and Egyptian statuary. A Chinese scholar’s house, with chairs and low desks and carved screens and water feature serenities and pungent lacquer and rustling heavy silks.
The scene finally resolves and Assiyeh is in there alone. The lumbering giants who brought her here just melt away when the time is right. The room seems to be projecting out into space high up in the mountains. The whole of one side is angled like a big windowbox; slatey mountains in the distance under a dark lid of clouds, all in sharp telephoto focus. Lightning flashes out there, in between the mountains, silhouetting the nearer ones and lighting up the more distant ones.
The room has small tables scattered all over, like the aftermath of a very tidy cocktail party. A swarm of fireflies dance above the hearth. The walls are covered in busy wallpaper whose chief color is orange, with green and white and yellow and pink and sky blue dingbats and ribbons. There are comparably elaborate rugs. Assiyeh crouches in front of the fireplace and peers at the luminous motes. A shadow crosses the room behind her. It might have stirred up a little draft as it went by, because she turns quickly to look. The shadow is an incomplete figure, colorless and transparent, but as it turns near the window the daylight illuminates its heart, which is dark blue with chalk red vessels. Assiyeh homes in on the heart like a falcon sighting a mouse. She says something to the figure, but her voice is drowned out somehow. I tune my hearing until it registers: a steady rumble, as of vast telluric forces stirring and whirring, shakes the air. The hearted shadow goes on moving around the room, straightening pictures on the wall, adjusting and dusting the bric-a-brac. Assiyeh varies the tone of her voice, trying to find a frequency that will get through the vibration.
“What’s that booming?” she asks, again and again.
The shadow pauses. Judging from the rotation of the heart and the rusty outline, the shadow has turned toward her, like someone who thinks they’ve just heard a ghost. A woman who looks like Kodak Shirley enters the room from behind a secret panel in the bookshelf at the same moment, crosses to where the shadow is, and, watching where she steps, she puts her feet right in the footprints of the shadow, and vanishes. Now the shadow has a solid, opaque appearance, the hairless silhouette of a hermaphrodite who seems to have a serpent coiled around its neck.
“That hum is the geobureaucratism of Koskon Kanona,” the shadow whines. Its voice is like pure shortwave distortion; it has particular tonal attributes, none of which can she clearly associate with anything like gender or age. “I am surprised that you have not learned by now to recognize it.”
The shadow steps between Assiyeh and the mountains.
“The vibration is what gives these windows, and a fortiori the scene they open onto, their special clarity.”
“You wanted to see me?” Assiyeh says. “SII33?”
The shadow appears to stiffen, as if it has taken offense at being addressed abruptly.
“Who are you?” it asks, as if it were asking, who do you think you are?
“Assiyeh Melachalos.”
“Ah,” the shadow says, and perambulates around the room, avoiding the center, leaving the floor and slithering along the walls instead, up to the ceiling, then down again, talking quietly all the time.
“Here, evolution developed in a bureaucratic way ... most efficient of ways ...” the voice murmurs distractedly, automatically. “Instead of survival of the fittest, here plants and animals survived because they could wait in line, get just the right protein in just the right spot, produce a reference from the right fungus. All of life here grew in locks and keys ...”
This sounds to me like patter. Assiyeh turns in place, watching the shadow slither down over the pane of the big window, like a paper doll cut from a dingy shower curtain. As the light passes through its membrane, a badge with the words MANAGING CENSOR becomes visible, hiding the heart.
“I understand,” the voice says with sudden sharpness, “that you have petitioned our department for a copy of a biological computer human analogue?”
“Yes,” Assiyeh says.
“The original of which belongs to the Izallu Imeph?”
“Yes.”
“And that original is named ...?”
“Thafeefa.”
The outline floats out just under the ceiling, all dark again. The snake around its neck arches itself down and the giant member dangles, making parentheses around the Managing Censor’s hand gestures.
“You will have to fill out an extraordinary form.”
This sounds ominous.
“Who do I give this to?” Assiyeh asks, pulling out the form she brought with her.
The shadow pivots in midair, swinging itself head downwards.
“Let me see!”
It snatches the paper away and reads it over with its finger tips like braille. It sighs.
“No,” it says, sounding a little disgusted. “This is not for me. You must send that ... thing to the Censoring Councillor in 19CGT.”
The shadow drops the form and something like a red rat or weasel grabs the form and twists out of sight. It had a little badge over its heart, too. The potted fern has a badge. So does the figure in the gloomy painting over the fireflyplace.
Now that I notice, even the furniture is wearing badges.
It transpires that the fillout on an “extraordinary form” involves Assiyeh getting into a bulky canvas suit that stands on a metal frame behind a curtain over there, and then climbing out the window into that forlorn landscape. She’s going to have to cross the desolate plain and climb that high mountain far off in the dim distance. The form can only be found at its base, and can only be filled and submitted at its peak. The shadow suggests Assiyeh take a look first through a pair of opera glasses. Evidently there’s a line of people waiting at the base of the mountain, long enough to be seen from here. Assiyeh climbs into the suit grumpily.
“Anything else?” she asks, once she has it on. The collar is a metal gorget. She looks like she’s sticking her head up out of a manhole.
The shadow points impressively to a spear standing in the corner behind the metal frame. Assiyeh picks it up and hefts it while the shadow throws the window open. A blast of air fills the room sending papers and the lighter knick-knacks flying. Assiyeh doesn’t need to be shown the metal rings down the front of the suit, but slides the spear into them. The butt end is going to wag around her face. She climbs down the rope ladder that the shadow has just tossed over the sill.
Assiyeh climbs down a hundred feet from the high window sill, the rope ladder swinging in space before a sheer rock wall. The moment she alights on the ground, the ladder lifts away. Assiyeh begins to walk directly toward the mountain. Her feet kick up sputters of static and green sparks that rise in swaying streaks and disappear. The canvas suit protects her against electrocution by the ground’s latent electrical charge. As she makes her way down a short slope to the level of the plain, a nozzle in the neck of her suit begins to smoke out a little shimmery plume of chemistry, breaking ozone down into regular oxygen.
It’s as dead out here as a giant parking lot. Something is making a sound like crickets, but nothing obviously living can be seen. There’s just the sound.
There’s no wind, but there are big inflated things of all different shapes and sizes rolling about the land. What happened to that intense wind through the window, she wonders irrelevantly. Many of the inflatables have windows in them, and even little lights on inside, like balloon houses. Assiyeh goes up to one and it tumbles toward her, gathering speed. She tries to get out of the way, but the thing swerves with her. Then she remembers the spear—that’s the right move. She jabs awkwardly at the thing, punching holes in it, and the released gas jets it
away from her and out of range of her static attraction. I don’t know if it’s alive. It has an organic appearance.
Now Assiyeh has to keep that spear working constantly to make any progress at all, and she pretty soon realizes she can’t stick to the straight path to the mountain. The big tumblers threaten to bowl her over, maybe plant themselves on top of her. If that happens, she’s liable to be pinned and stuck in her bulky attire. The little ones pose the same threat if enough of them can pile on top of her. Assiyeh starts zig-zagging, connecting the dots of the little piles of stones and slightly elevated places, where she seems to be less at risk from the tumblers. Up ahead there are patches thick with tumblers she’ll have to avoid. She plots out a path, pausing now and then to crush a microtumbler under her boot. Sweat drips from her nose and her eyes are watering, but she can’t touch them with her rough gloves or sleeve. And her staticky hair is starting to stand on end. Assiyeh sets her jaw. She grabs one of the metal rings used to hold the spear in place and rips it from her suit with a great effort, then pulls her hair back through and around it. So that’s that taken care of.
I’ll be back after lunch.
*
I’m back.
She’s still plodding along. No food or water. The mountain looks about as far away as it did when I left. The sky is the same, like the ocean upside down. The only noise is Assiyeh’s heavy breathing, the cricket sound, the jingle of the empty spear loops, the buzz and sputter of her staticky feet, and the occasional hollow boom of a tumbler as she pokes it away ...
...
This just keeps going on the same way, so I’ll check in tomorrow at breakfast.
*
It’s tomorrow. No change. Assiyeh looks like hell. She’s stumbling, gasping, her jaw is hanging, there’s iron filings all over the inside of her mouth, and her eyes are glazed. Whenever a tumbler comes near, anguish twists her face, and the effort to jab it away is so great she nearly falls flat making it. She can’t lie down—the tumblers will bury her in minutes.
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