And it isn’t even direct light. It’s late, the sun is over on the other side of the house, it’s reflecting from the white back wall of the house block across the alley, behind me.
It’s not a bookcase, it has no back or sides, it’s a bookshelf, a cheap one made from steel rails and particle board to hold all my books and let me double stack them. The wall is plainly visible through the shelves.
There’s a barred reflected square bisected by the crease where the ceiling joins the wall up to my right, and almost transparent shadows of leaves of the untended and exuberant back rose bushes keep blowing silently into the square from the right, in a north wind. The wall is an abstract nougat slab.
There’s a cinematic line where the shadow of the shelf stands just below the rail, projected on the wall. Someone who can’t move also has a shadow on the wall, that looks like a smirch of dust or smoke half on the books and half on the wall. What’s going to happen to the books?
Later, the shadow on the wall has grown.
It is thicker now. So it can move, with the planet.
The line of light on the reflector wall behind me is creeping up toward the roof as this part of the Earth turns away from the sun, starting on its turn back.
The walls of the room are greying.
More and more grey.
When night falls, I’ll still be sitting here in the dark, just like this.
The dark will turn colors and begin to separate.
Everything will turn blue.
Then the sun will rise behind me, pouring in, unless it’s cloudy, on the back of my broken head, or it won’t because I’m too slumped down.
Sun is in the sky, sun is out of the sky, I’m still here,
sun in,
sun out,
me here.
*
The remaining Professor Long returns to Shanghai and begins contacting everyone on her list of academics, writers, or other headworker contacts, over a hundred names, with the idea of starting up a publishing company. They will release written and electronic materials in several different Chinese languages as well as in Arabic, English, Hindi, and Spanish, with more languages to be added. The company will be called Unrelated Books and the logo will consist of two arrows pointing away from each other. Their books will be published in China with a sister printing facility and editorial staff in Los Angeles. They will publish books presenting scholarly ideas about current events in poetic and fantastic forms and their first volume will be an expanded edition of Animal Money, with cover art and interior illustrations by a group of artists and eye and brain experts, designed to induce abstract hallucinations.
She finds the streets of Shanghai jammed with people pouring in from rural areas, their faces tense, seeking, anxious, angry. Violent protests increase, and there have been mass prison breaks. A curfew is imposed in Shanghai. A visit from the General Administration of Press and Publication, which works with the Central Propaganda Department, would seem to be in order, but weeks turn into months and neither the remaining Professor Long nor anyone working with her has received so much as a sour look from the direction of the government. The Los Angeles faction too is puzzled by the absence of any gnarliness from the authorities or the media. The remaining Professor Long has apprehensions—are they building up to something ...? Are they forgoing the ordinary procedure, the pressure to conform gradually applied in methodical steps, preparing instead to ...? Or are we really ...?
She was sitting on her sofa reviewing manuscripts when the invitation to Chaglesis Chuseh arrived. She became suddenly aware of a rose perfume, which seemed to flood into her matchbox Shanghai apartment from around the front door. She was looking at the door when a shadow interrupted the bar of light beneath, and a blank red envelope skidded across the floor and turned slightly as it stopped. Look up—shadow gone, odor faded. She sat just there, not thinking, not moving, doing nothing, for a long time. She stared at the envelope as night fell and very soon she could no longer see it. This roused her to turn on the light that hung over the sofa. Then she sat with the light coming down on top of her, still looking at that envelope. The shadow outside the door had not swung into the bar of light from the side as it should have, it had ballooned out from the middle of the bar and spread, then contracted again.
Finally, she approached the letter and squatted to look at it. A plain white—white? hadn’t it been red?—envelope, still smelling like roses faintly, with her name neatly printed on it. She lifted it by one corner. Heavy paper. She stood up and held it in both hands. For no intelligible reason there was something in the contact and heft of the letter, its various features, that reassured her. If she hesitated to tear it open, it was not fear but decorum that restrained her. She opened the letter with a scissor blade, being very careful to cut only along the fold at the top. It was her invitation. She was being offered an opportunity, in her capacity as the Editor in Chief of Unrelated Books, to interview Unsu-se Illion, Grand Rachnan of Chaglesis Chuseh ...
The island had appeared in the Pacific overnight. Heavy cloud cover screened it from the satellites; no one saw it come, unheralded by earthquake or tidal wave. Without a sound, the island was there, waves lapping its tranquilly impossible lagoons as if this piece of an alien world were somehow more Earthlike than Earth, primordially ancient, fern covered, buzzing with condor-sized dragonflies. Investigators learn to their cost that the island is screened with a rest field. Aircraft, ships, and submersibles approaching the island will decelerate at a point a mile out from the coast and will, if they keep coming, freeze in place. At the half mile point, the island is girdled by motionless ships and aircraft, tentatively haloed in streaks of powdered-sugar light. Animals don’t seem to be affected, but cameras attached to birds do however stop working when they cross the line. The turbulence that normally interferes with flights over Uhuyjhn cities also cloaks the island from above. Every now and then a swarm of apparently unmanned Uhuyjhn airships will sail out to the perimeter to retrieve what paralyzed vehicles have accumulated there and fly them to one of several different islands in the vicinity. These collectors carry their burdens inside relative rest fields and leave them carefully on the ground. Shortly after the collectors were discovered there were attempts to force one down or to shoot them. Whatever was fired at them stopped abruptly a few feet short of the skin of its target and stayed there, held in place by a rest field like a dart stuck in a dartboard. The collectors would complete their tasks without even seeming to notice the clumsy interference, dropping trapped missiles and bullets straight to the ground or sea below with a sort of aerial shrug.
What is known about the island comes to the world from the islanders themselves, and is confirmed by observations with ultra long range optics. The island has an area of about 29,000 square miles and one very large city, Chaglesis Chuseh. After a few weeks, it is clear that human beings have been migrating there, although as yet it is not known how, since nobody has ever been observed coming or going.
The remaining Professor Long is instructed by her invitation to expect to be away no less than ten days, although she may stay as long as she likes. Pack lightly, it says; most of what she needs or wants will be provided for her free of charge on the island. Her contact will approach her in the quarry at the Shanghai botanical garden, date and time provided.
Her contact turns out to be a sprightly teenaged girl, who greets her effusively, baring both rows of her braces. Singing out and extending her arms above her head, the girl sweeps in for a weightless hug.
“I am your contact. Treat me like a prized former student.”
The voice in her ear is level and businesslike. The face that pulls back into view again is vapid and grinning. Together, they enter the steel box that leads to the deep observing pool. The box is empty when they arrive. Moments later, it is empty again, although they have not been seen leaving it.
*
Inhabitants call the island Dagashe Yuteh. The phrase has an elusive meaning like a phrase from a dream, i
nclining now this way and now that inside a ring of meanings. The remaining Professor Long arrives with no recollection of the journey there, her last memory being of the steel box at the quarry garden in Shanghai. Now she and her contact are at the top of a tower on the outskirts of Chaglesis Chuseh, waiting to be picked up. From these heights, she can see for miles out over the rolling green landscape of the island, misty in the brilliant sun. Here and there she can see vortices of white creatures climbing into the air on thermals. Gigantic Theems stride across the open spaces, looking like vast burning haystacks on Sequoyah legs. The “smoke” that streams from them is actually a long train of ribbons that trawls nutrients out of the air. Theems are colony animals made up of millions of tightly interwoven eels, and their winged young surround the Theem in an undulating cloak of shoaling forms. The whole island was brought here from outer space, another planet, and the air is redolent with a vegetable smell entirely new to her. Almost like the aroma of raw tobacco, and something else a little like rubber cement. Chaglesis Chuseh rises in the other direction, looking like a cotton candy citadel of transparent pink and chartreuse balloon buildings.
They are picked up by a Vietnamese woman in a trajectory capsule. It looks like a car inside, with seats and so on, but it’s actually a rocket. They travel so rapidly that the remaining Professor Long has no chance to look at the city streaking by.
The capsule is brought in by a rest beam. The effect would be appalling if it were any less brief. It brings her immediately back to a time last year when she was running to catch a bus, tripped on a piece of broken New York and fell flat on her face at full speed. There’s the jolt, and then the body outrage that leaves her flushed with indignation and sadness. A spasm of petulance makes her want to refuse to get out of the capsule, but then she thinks, since the driver is not getting out of her seat, perhaps the capsule is about to go off again. She frees herself from her restraints and climbs out. Her contact is there, waiting for her.
“Are you feeling all right?”
“Yes, fine.”
She catches a glimpse of herself and her disconcerted expression in the polished golden wax of the wall in front of her, and then searches the face of her contact for any sign of pity or amusement. No sign.
They go through an acute archway that curves with the concavity of the wall, down a sort of chute; they emerge into a pink glass cathedral space humming with low voices. Her contact leads her along one side and through a series of narrow passages. Stepping over the high lintel of the door, the remaining Professor Long knows instantly that her voyage is over. This is the place.
The building is plainly round, and she is in a sort of intestinal ring that goes around the outside of the inner chamber. The ring is more than 15 meters tall at is rounded apex, and the room inside is much higher. While it is plainly a thick slab of solid stone, the floor shudders with heavy beats beneath her. It smells like a zoo.
Her contact leads her to a long basin set in the inner wall of the intestine. Following her example, the remaining Professor Long washes her face and hands carefully. Now her contact leads her around the wall and into the main room.
The chamber must be over forty meters high at the top of the dome, and eighty across. Part of the ceiling is sectioned and seems able to fold back like an observatory roof. There are dozens of people in the chamber, keeping mostly around the edges like wallflowers.
Unsu-se Illion is a gargantuan white spider, veiled in strands of webbing like a ragged bride. Her enormous abdomen rises nearly to the top of the dome, which visually echoes her shape. For such a colossal animal, the spider is very active, whizzing this way and that, its legs hum through the air and land on the stone floor with a wooden thunk. Every day it must build the great trawl net that it will let out into the sky at night to capture aerial krill. The web is anchored to enormous bollards of blue jade and carefully unfurled at dusk, when she flings it aloft into the wind coming off the sea. Some time before dawn she hauls it back in again, running it through her sieving mouth parts to nibble off the krill. She spends the day refurbishing the web.
Staring in astonishment, the remaining Professor Long absently paws at her breast pocket and then, in an absent, sleep-talker’s voice, asks her contact if she has a cigarette. She does. The remaining Professor Long backs onto a seat and her knees fold under her, cigarette dangling from the center of her lower lip and smokes it down to the filter, staring at the spider and dribbling ashes down the front of her sweater.
Presently, her contact taps her firmly on the shoulder.
“Let’s go,” she says, showing her first indications of impatience. She leads the remaining Professor Long to a white porcelain dock or podium and holds her hand as she climbs up into it. The spider, Unsu-se Illion, stops fussing with its nets and comes over to her. Watching this massive animal approach, with its many enormous legs moving, is wildly alarming, but she remains where she is, holding on to the smooth rim of the dock. The spider gives off a strong aroma of fresh milk and roses. There are eight deep green crystal eyes, a transparent shadow inside each one, like eight radiant green aquariums. Those eyes are gazing at her, and each of them is bigger than her head. Every monstrous disproportion of the encounter is focussed in the meeting of her small gaze with its vast gaze, like having a personal encounter with a sunset. The mouth parts are geometrically regular polyhedrons of translucent chitin; ceaseless in their motion, their distinct facets glisten with transparent slime. Her contact has climbed into the dock beside her and holds up a slender glass tube. Unsu-se Illion leans forward and for a panicked moment she thinks it’s going to mouth her with its parts. Instead, a thin stream of saliva pours into the tube. The young woman collects it carefully. Then the spider steps back away from the dock, and, with a whirl of its tunic of fine web fragments, it wheels in place and strides off, to resume work on its web again.
The contact leads her down off the dock and a bit away, toward the inner wall. The remaining Professor Long follows with dread pooling inside her.
Her contact hands her the glass tube, which is still warm. There are about two grams of saliva in it, quivering viscously, clear, with a few small bubbles trapped in it.
“Unsu-se Illion can’t speak, but she can communicate with us through the effects of her saliva. Drink it.”
The remaining Professor Long hears a rushing in her ears, feeling with loathing the warm thickness of the fluid through the glass. The saliva has a slightly meaty odor. Her contact is looking her collectedly in the face, comprehending everything, not in the least withdrawing. She will wait.
Something that might be pride keeps her from refusing. Time passes, and her contact has adopted a standing posture that indicates she is prepared to go on standing there, go on waiting. Even the idea of asking for something, a cigarette, a mint, makes her stomach flip. She imagines shouting: “Why did you let me see where it comes from?!”
A sudden impulse steels her and she thrusts the glass at her mouth, opening her jaws as if she were making some other gesture unconnected to what her hands were doing.
“I think I am going to faint,” she says.
Then a kind of blanket rises up inside her nervous zone, and a moment later, with a long, soft “oooh,” she does faint.
She comes to a moment later on the ground. Her contact helps her to her feet and, holding her shoulders, steers her toward a reclining white seat, all made of shining ceramic like a giant tooth. Her contact’s face seems nevertheless to recede into a boundless distance, the hand on her shoulder and the shoulder itself whirling away into space as if she were turning into a growing empty glass figurine. In a convulsive flash of memory she sees herself drink the saliva and gags, shrinking. Chills sluice down her body rinsing away her strength. The girl gets her lying down on the seat and the moment she is relieved of the effort of getting somewhere the full horror of her weakness alights on her savagely. Her body is a brittle husk surrounding a boneless interior of clammy, pulsating mucus. A thin cry emerges from her tensed mo
uth, the sound of a sleeper trying to scream in a nightmare. She keeps rubbing her face, drawing up her knees and then flexing her back to get them away from her. The feeling of any part of her body touching any other part is intolerable.
Now she is calmer. The idea of her recovered calm comes over her only after an indefinite period of terrifying inner disruption of self and writhing weakness. Her body is going numb, and a light without temperature is breaking through into her, into her abdomen, from the direction of the spine, and pushing up and down along the backbone. It’s a kind of energy that belongs in her body but which is being amplified from outside. A bowed string, a physical sensation of her own existence, independented from any other particulars.
She holds. She imagines filling with avid larvae but the image has no emotion for her, she can look on it calmly because it’s only a picture of fear devoid of reality or reference to reality. She knows the image isn’t going to come true. She knows almost nothing, but what few things she does know at the moment, things she can’t enumerate or call to mind, she knows with oracular certainty. She holds. She contains. She asks. Ridgy brown flames tiger-striped with black shadows are standing up all over her, like butterfly wings or gills of fungus, motionless flames.
Looking around without using her eyes, her head, any organ, she relates things together in a certain way. The sounds are unsettlings of a vapor veil. There is a pounding like her heartbeat were being projected into her from an external organ.
It is dark and the room is dim when she struggles to her feet again. She stares at the dream image of a giant white spider hurling huge crescents of web up into the sky, perched half in and half out of the roof aperture. The web’s purlings and scrollings are slow and weightless. There are almost no people left in the room. She sees a man lying on another one of the porcelain couches and wonders if he drank, too. Without knowing what she’s doing, she wanders out into the ring intestine. It occurs to her to rinse out her mouth at the faucet, but her mouth is so dry she simply sucks up the water madly, feeling the cold splash in her stomach. She is outside on the street before her contact manages to catch up with her, watching the people on the moving glass sidewalks, the Uhuyjhns, like huge dry jellyfish, floating in the air along the skin of the coral reef high rises. The planters along the pavements are filled with luminous plants like giant sea anemones, brilliantly red, yellow, purple, and what appear to be living things like stone posts that look like ginger roots sculpted out of pink chalcedony, like taffy candies with peppermint ribbons.
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