by Dylan Fox
I could see the look of pity and agonised helplessness in his eyes.
“This can't be the first time this has happened,” I said. “It can't be. There's nothing special about me. Nothing unique. I didn't do anything to deserve this. What do I do, Dun?”
He took his pen between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, and the forefinger and thumb of his right. He slowly pushed one side to meet the other, reset the system, and did it again. He licked his lips.
“I don't know, Gal,” he said. “I sent this up, all the way up. The whitecoats pulled out everything they could find in the archive. This has never happened before. They've studied shards from inception in the tube, gestation, release, growth... all the way through to death. There's still so much they don't know. They're still struggling to find the right questions, let alone any answers.”
He licked his lips again. The body of the pen travelled through his fingers.
“They've, erm,” he started. His Rorschach stopped glowing. “They'd like to meet you, the whitecoats. This is... this is very exciting to them. They've always said that a shard is for life and, well, maybe it isn't.”
“The whitecoats want to see me?” I repeated.
“Mm,” Dun nodded. He put the pen down. “They want to really get their teeth into this problem of yours. Really pick it apart.”
I'd found my shard just after puberty, like almost everyone else. When I started secondary school, I'd been allowed out by myself. I'd walk to the perimeter pylons. I'd sit at the base of those vast, inhuman metal ribs which poked over a hundred feet into the air and I'd listened to the distant beat of the turbine blades. I sat in the rain and the darkness and stared out into the jungle, stared out into the perpetual crimson twilight we'd sealed ourselves off from. I'd sit and I'd stare, I'd feel the hot bite of the jungle air. I'd climb as far up the pylons as I dared and I'd reach through the fence because I wanted to know what that other world was like.
I watched the jungle because I knew it had something for me. Something that it needed to give to me. My passion, the core of my shard that had been with me since I was a foetus, was in that twilight.
One day a firefly came crawling out the jungle, awkwardly padding along on its spindly feet. My gut churned, that grotesque feeling of something alien and alive advancing on me. It crawled, as slow as a crippled man, waving its antenna around in-front of it. At the fence, it stopped and looked at me. My breath stuttered. Rumours told of construction workers lured into the jungle by fireflies dancing on motley flowers. Rumours told of the motleys singing and changing colour as the fireflies danced. I was young; I held rumours closer to my heart than truth.
The firefly moved its head, twilight sliding across its eyes as one antenna reached down and stroked the ground. We stood in two different worlds, incomparable to each other and just as incompatible.
And that's when I felt it, an orgasm that starts in the non-conscious and explodes throughout your entire space, that fills every inch with pleasure and understanding. I'd found the expression of my passion, the actions to articulate it. I stared up at the towers. I saw a rainbow bullet streak into the jungle. I saw myself pulling the trigger, protecting our world from the alien landscape outside. My expression mated with my passion and gave birth to my shard. I felt beautiful.
Dun stared at me across the desk, the brown skin on his face wrinkling in pity like I was a crippled animal he'd have to put out its misery.
I was almost glad the wound from losing my shard was still so fresh it was bleeding. Losing my hopes seemed small beside it.
“My teacher used to say that some questions will only be answered at the end of the world--“ Dun began before I slammed my palms down on his silly little desk and leaned forwards, growling and daring him to pity me for one more moment.
“They want to study me,” I said. “But not fix me?”
Dun looked up at me with his sad, pathetic eyes. He licked his lips and opened his mouth twice without saying anything.
“If you let the whitecoats--”
“Fuck the whitecoats,” I spat. I stood and my chair sprawled over the floor. “I'm dying, Dun. I'm not a fucking petri dish. I'm not a sample for them to collect. I'm a human being and I'm in pain. I'll find a way to fix it by myself. I’ll fix it my fucking self.”
~*~
The boat ploughed through water turned orange by the setting-sun glow of the arc lights above it. No wind disturbed the river's surface, just our bow wave hurrying away from us, new mountain ranges cut into the river's surface. We were three weeks away from civilisation, the city disappearing behind us like a bad dream. The wood of the hull creaked as if it could taste the dirt, as if it was remembering that it was once a tree and ached to sink its roots into the earth again.
The only other sounds were our feet against the deck, the insectile buzz of the jungle and the constant beating of the wind turbines. The thick, wet heat of the jungle, the smell of dirt and gently decaying organic matter had overtaken the city air saturated with particles of iron ore and rust and burnt carbon.
We made slow progress as the wind turned from friend to enemy to friend again. I could see the delta where the Kaleidoscope ran into the blood-red ocean, the waters wider and faster, more feral and angry. The pylons hugged the banks of the river tighter and tighter as the river came closer and closer to becoming the ocean. The pylons sank into the shifting silts of the delta, never knowing whether their feet were going to be in water or dirt from one wave to the next. And out on the horizon, breaking the line of the sea against the sky, were the vast off-shore turbines which supplied us with all the power we could ever need. They were alien and terrifying things, as much a part of the fearsome unknown as the rolling clouds above us and the twilight jungle around us. Deranged soldiers, shell-shocked infantry standing guard against the wild, sacrificing themselves so we could be safe.
I'd heard a kaleidoscope is an Earth toy, but I'd never seen one and I had no idea why the original settlers had named this river after it. But the name always seemed appropriate: everything collided on the river. It started deep in the mountains, deeper than the company had pushed in its quest for ore. It ran through the gardens of the executive houses in the foothills where the air was always fresh and new, where the houses were made of brick and mortar and left to the next generation. It joined with tributaries and ran through paved shopping district with its markets and strings of wood-and-glass fronted shops. It ran under bridges and through public courtyards, drove water wheels and hydro-power generators, became the soundtrack for courting lovers and cleansed naked bathers. It ran down to the wooden apartments with their iron roofs that sprawled over the settlement like a fungus, growing where ever they could, crowded homes and cheap shops and never-sleeping workshops and warehouses all held by identical blueprints that were quick and easy and cheap to build and tear down and rebuild somewhere else. It ran thick and fast through the acres of tall and silent factories, unmolested by their power generators and untainted by their outflow pipes.
The Kaleidoscope never finished. It spread out into the ocean, so thin that we couldn't see it but still there none-the-less. Every particle it had picked up from the factories and refineries and mills, every drop of spit and sweat and piss, every fleck of rust and shattered shard of concrete, every grain of shaved wood, every discarded, half-eaten meal careless people had thrown into it as they crossed from one side to the other, every drop of dirt that had been pounded by countless human feet, every careless word and secret whisper it over-heard, it all swept between the river’s banks, merged with the dust and dirt and pollen and discarded tree flesh of the ever-increasing jungle and flowed out into the ocean. We were out there, among the breaking waves and unexplored depths of the that vast and endless body of water. Everything that was Minas collided in the river, the human and the alien, the known and the unknown.
The last outpost of civilisation before Minas reclaimed the land for itself
were the shit-pickers who lived on the delta flats. The flats stretched for miles and miles, constantly changing and shifting. They were treacherous, dangerous, spiteful. The Kaleidoscope washed things of value over them, gold dust from the jewellery makers, steel bolts and the bent carcasses of things which used to have purpose, plastic this or that which could be recycled if the right buyer could be found. The pipes which were supposed to take all our waste far out into the ocean where it would be out of sight and out of mind didn't reach far enough into the nameless red of the water. So it washed back up, washed up over the delta silt flats. There was value in organic waste and the things that grew in it, if you could stomach it. The flats were ugly and disgusting and everything about ourselves we wanted to forget. They were the shame of humanity spread out on a canvas that occupied the entire horizon.
The shit-pickers were supposed to be out there to find and mark the sedimentary rock used in the blast furnaces. There was no limestone because this wasn't Earth, but there were dead carbon creatures whose bodies had been slowly crushed and buried over thousands of thousands of years, and those rocks seemed to fire in the furnaces just fine. Instead, the pickers spent most of their time picking through the detritus of our civilisation, recycling what they could and selling it on.
No one dreamed of being a shit-picker. No one left for the flats with a fond farewell and a class sad to see them go. One morning friends would visit them and find their house empty. Without them there to make new experiences and thoughts and dreams, without anyone willing to relive the memories of them, their friends slowly forgot them. Even if their shards hadn't broken, they must have learned to live without them. They must know what it's like to feel that constant, empty sound of having nothing inside that they could turn to.
The captain was quite happy to sail, so long as I paid him. He had bills to pay and food to buy and I never resented handing over my money. But every time the chit left my hands and went into his, I felt a physical stab in my temple as the knowledge that I was spending without earning drove itself through my conscious and non-conscious space like the spike of an oil well. I hated his glowing Rorschach, that softly bioluminescening blotch sprawling over his left forearm.
He sat with me on the edge of the boat. I sat and watched the jungle slowly pass. The trees spread their leaves wide enough to smother a grown man, branches and trunks twined together until the jungle became one single, knotted mass of tree limb and over and undergrowth. Even the motleys wound themselves into the morass, their flowers a disorganised collection of colours and smells. There were no guards on the boundary out here, no watchers keeping the fireflies to their side of the fence. They weren't welcome but they weren't stopped, not out here.
“Can you see it?” the captain said, running his finger over the splotches on his forearm. “You see here, here's the prow, and it comes up here. This bit here's the sail...”
I supposed I could, if I wanted to see it hard enough. Kay would sit and show me the rifle in his Rorschach. Dun showed me the large stick figure guiding and holding the hand of the smaller one, the old image from Earth of a father guiding his child, as alien to us on Minas as the blue skies and yellow sun of that planet, but the memory endured somewhere in our non-conscious space, a wilting relic like the eyes of the fireflies. Everyone thought they saw something in their own Rorschach. Everyone thought everyone else was full of shit about seeing something in theirs.
There was nothing in mine but a disorganised mess. Sometimes I thought I could see a rifle, or perhaps a fence, or maybe a firefly in there. Maybe, if I squinted and wanted to see it enough. But mostly it was just a subcutaneous mess of broken blood vessels spreading to no dictates other than those of physics, the path of least resistance offered by the geography of my under-flesh.
~*~
I sat opposite the shit-picker in the dank lodge she'd built on the silt. I'd watched her pull up saplings and re-purpose bent old iron poles to make an artificial hemisphere from the detritus. She'd covered it with the broad, too-green leaves from the jungle. I'd watched her make a fire circle in the silt nearby, throw dry wood on top of the smouldering kindling and then foot-sized stones on top of that. She told me to cut a channel from the fire pit to the lodge, and I'd done so, although I didn't know why. We'd sat and eaten in silence, we watched the flames and the waves, the thump-thump-thump of the turbines far out to sea making conversation pointless as they gestured at an understanding deeper than either of us could reach.
I'd tried not to breathe in as I ate, the smell of salt and decay as over-powering as the endless brown and beige of the flats, a sepia land with just the red streaks of the Kaleidoscope to make it real. The picker shovelled the red-hot rocks into that strange breast she'd built on the silt, stripped naked and climbed inside. Wanting answers, I'd done the same. She took a bowel of water and tipped it over the stones. Steam and the persistent hissing of a pain that can't be articulated.
And so we sat pressed against each other in the tiny space, darkness coddling us, sweat pouring out of every opening and soaking every inch of our naked skin, sticking the hair to our bodies and turning us into slick, slimy things, grotesque to touch and vile to smell, fitting residents of the delta silt flats.
“How do you do it?” I asked, my vision blurred by the heat and the sweat. “How do you survive without nursing your shard?”
My skin pressed against hers, two oily fish compressed together in a can that allowed no breathing space. I moved my foot, and moved it again. Where ever it rested, it was too close to the rocks. Too hot.
“What do you mean?” she asked. As she sweated, all the silt and sand and shit oozed out of her pours, carried in beads of salty water back to the flats.
“This can't be your expression,” I said. “Stuck out here, miles from anyone, shifting through the shit we throw away and even the ocean doesn't want.”
“Why the hell would I be out here if it wasn't my expression?” she said, like I was stupid or alien or both. “It's amazing out here. I have a freedom no one in the city can even dream of. How big’s your space, Gal? How dynamic is it? Do you ever see anything other than the same walls of your apartment, the same streets covered in the same rubbish, the same people saying the same things? My environment stretches all the way to the horizon. Every moment the clouds and the water and the flats are changing, every time I look I find something new. Every time I stand and watch, I am renewed. I find answers in the ocean and dreams in the clouds, my internal space bleeding seamlessly into them. The sky dreams for me, the ocean thinks for me, and the silts remember for me.
“You don't understand,” she said, and I could hear the same pity that I'd seen in Dun's eyes. “But how could you? Your space is so small.”
She stretched out her forearm, opened her lighter and ignited it. Her Rorschach simmered gently under her tawny skin.
“Here, you can see the delta...”
I declined her offer of sex, washed myself in the cold waters of the ocean, dressed and walked the mile back to where the boat waited in more consistent waters. The sky seemed endless and the flats a desert. I had gone to the end of the world and found no answers. What hope did I have now? Only the thump-thump-thump of the turbines broke the silence. The silt closed around the footprints I left behind, swallowed them entirely by the time I had laid down ten more. I was forgotten so quickly.
~*~
By the time I returned home, I'd been gone for over two months. People missed me, but they didn't find me.
I was a raindrop without a storm. I was apart from my society, a meaningless smudge without any definition. Things drifted into my space, and out again. I had no centre. I was a blank wall open for anyone to draw on, and every evening it would be wiped clean again. All I could do was lie in my bed, cover myself with the blanket and listen to the sound of the rain outside. Listen to the heavy thuds as it hit the roof, to explosions as the drops hurtled into the stone slabs of the
courtyard, to the startled cries as they punched the motley tree.
The flowers of all the motley trees we grew and cultivated were white and they hung off the thin branches like mushrooms on a rotten log. Their smell was delicate and sweet, like baking on a Sunday morning before the day started in earnest and before your infinite freedom is slowly eaten away by each and every choice you make.
When I sat on the platform and stared into that tangled welcome mat jungle, I saw flowers of every colour and some that were no colour at all. Transparent petals, ones that glowed in the night or the twilight which appeared as the sun progressed above the clouds, petals that changed colour as the raindrops hit them and changed colour again was the wind changed direction. It was no wonder the first settlers had called them motleys: a random and changeable collection of ever colour and scent under the clouds. But, when we grew them, the flowers were only ever a blank white.
On the fourth day I finally roused myself enough to walk out into the courtyard and stand naked in the falling rain. I stared at my motley tree.
I stared.
The flowers looked like someone had loaded a shotgun with every colour of paint and pumped out shells until the trigger had broken. Petals glowed like arc lights, rain ran down them and left streaks of colour, heat radiated from some and was eagerly snatched by others. And the smell was like a market where everything was ready to taste and buy, an assault of scents that overwhelmed you with sheer force of numbers. It smothered the courtyard, wrapped it in a blanket, coddled the small space like a just-released infant taking its first breath in the world.
On one of the divergences in the branches, sitting like a king among his subjects, I saw the glowing carapace of the firefly I'd rescued and not given another thought to. It turned its head to look at me, and its antenna pricked up. Suddenly it was a flurry of movement, its giant wings beating the air with a typhoon the turbines could only dream of. It dashed from branch to branch, from clump of flowers to clump of sprawling, disparate colours and smells and as the bug paused by each one they changed their shape, their colour, their smell.