by Lavie Tidhar
She had met him in Tong Yun.
“Hello!” The voice startled her, coming at her unexpected and loud. She turned, shielding her eyes, and saw the Martian woman, Magdalena, waving from the doorway of a small shop with a sign above it that said, simply, Shebeen.
Magdalena came up to her, she was a soft filled-in woman, she put out warmth like a warhead or a sun. “You never told me your name,” she said, almost accusingly.
“It’s Carmel,” Carmel said, and the other woman beamed, and said, “What a beautiful name!”
“Thank you,” Carmel said, awkwardly. She was uncomfortable next to regular humans. Always feeling they should see her for what she was, what she had become. Always afraid of being discovered. But already Magdalena was pulling her with her, as if she, Carmel, were a loose space rock, caught in the gravitational force of a planet. Before she knew it she was at the entrance to the shebeen and then inside.
It was cool there and dark, a small, sparsely furnished room. Dusty bottles on shelves on the wall. Magdalena Wu pulled a chair for Carmel and sat down across from her. A third woman came over, from behind the bar, and she smiled, wiping her hands with a towel.
“Miriam,” Magdalena said, “this is Carmel.”
“Nice to meet you,” the woman said. Carmel said, “Likewise—” Liking this small, compact person, without quite knowing why.
“What can I get you?” Miriam said.
“Let’s have some lemonade,” Magdalena said. “It’s a hot day.”
“Yes,” Miriam agreed. She went around the bar, came back with a glass jug, frosted with ice. Miriam put down three glasses on the table and sat down, joining them.
“What brings you to Earth, Carmel?” she said. “I like your hair.”
Carmel’s dreads moved slowly in the air above her head, like snakes drugged by the heat. “Thank you. I’m . . . I hoped to find someone I used to know,” Carmel said.
“Here?” Miriam said. “In Central Station? Or . . .” she smiled. “Most people only pass through here,” she said. “Are you?”
“No. I mean, yes. Or, I don’t know.” Carmel took a sip from her lemonade, feeling exposed. Someone came into the shebeen then; a quiet, tall form, passed around them, laid a hand on Miriam’s shoulder, a gesture of affection, of closeness, and Miriam squeezed the man’s hand, said, “Boris.”
At the sound of the name Carmel felt her hands shake and she put down the glass with exaggerated care. She did not look up.
“Hello, Magda,” Boris said.
The Martian woman said, “Cousin,” warmth in her voice. “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Ca—”
“Carmel,” Boris said. Shock in his voice. Carmel raised her head at last. Her hair moved, agitated, a dark halo surrounding her face. “Boris,” she said. He was tall, thin, the Martian aug that was so much a part of him pulsated gently.
“Carmel, what are you doing here?”
She saw them all looking at her. Magdalena, and Miriam, and Boris, a range of emotions, concern, suspicion, mistrust, fear, bemusement, their nodes were broadcasting, Magdalena said, “Boris, you know this girl?” and Boris said, flatly, the words like blades cutting Carmel up, “She is no girl. She is strigoi.”
She had met Boris Aharon Chong two months after returning to Tong Yun.
Tong Yun City, Mars: the streets dirty and crowded together under the dome, but most of the city was underground, level under level leading at last to the Dark Sea, the Ocean of Refuge— Solwota blong Dak, or Solwota blong Doti. Carmel had been living in a hostel of sorts on Level Five, a dark, vast region of caves and tunnels where rent was cheap and questions were few. But she had gone up to the surface, on Julius Nyerere Avenue she had a milkshake in the shade and watched the trams go past and a robotnik, rusted with age, begging for spare parts on the street—his kind were ubiquitous on Mars.
Mars was not as she had expected it to be. She was afraid to leave the city, beyond Tong Yun and its space elevator the planet was a wild unknown, the Red Soviet and New Israel and the Chinese tunnel networks and the isolated homesteads and kibbutzim, places too small, where a strigoi would be all too easy to detect. She remained in the city, hiding in the crowd, feeding flittingly, at risk, though down in the lower levels people disappeared, and she was not the only hunter stalking the shadows. . . .
She just wasn’t very good at it, she thought. She had often wished that nameless Shambleau on board the Emaciated Saviour had picked someone—anyone—else. She, Carmel, had just wanted to leave home. She wanted to see what the rest of the worlds looked like. Instead she became sick before she ever got off the ship. And it was a sickness without a cure, an affliction the only way out of which was death.
There was a man sitting at a nearby table, sipping coconut juice, and she felt her eyes drawn to him, more and more, as she sat there. He was alone, he was a tall, pale man and wore an aug, a Martian lab-bred parasite. She could not look away. He turned, then, and saw her looking, and smiled, a small, private smile that made her like him. He did not come over. Neither did she. But when he paid and left she did the same, and she followed him that day through the streets of Tong Yun, down Nyerere and Ho Chi Minh and Mandela and down the smaller streets where forgotten rulers and leaders out of dusty history intermingled uneasily. The man she was following lived in a coop building, common to Tong Yun, a town where housing came at a premium. She had watched him go in and followed, the building’s meagre security no match to her cancerous internal network. She followed him up to the fourth floor of the building and entered his room after him, picking the lock.
He had turned. She remembered it vividly. He had turned, that look of quiet surprise on his face. He said nothing. Took her in, and there was pity in his eyes, somehow that was the worst thing about it. Her hair was cut short then, she did not have the dreads. He said, “Shambleau . . .” softly. She approached him. He did not back away. Her mind, her node, her senses went for him. The hunger welling inside her, so severely she imagined filaments pushing out of her skin like worms, wriggling in their eagerness to feed. He did not resist her. She sank her teeth into his neck, ready to feed, and—
Something rotten but not unpleasant, something dark without having shape. She could not understand it. She could not break into his mind, it was a locked prison surrounded by alien matter, no dopamine response, no wash of precious data over her, it was like biting cardboard rather than a man.
Almost gently, he pushed her away. Held her arms. She stared into his eyes, confused, shaking with the hunger. The Martian aug was pulsating on his neck. “I already have one parasite,” he said—almost, it seemed, apologetic.
“You know her,” Miriam said. Boris wouldn’t meet her eyes. Carmel looked from one to the other, afraid, angry. Miriam said, “You never told me . . .” There was wounded hurt in her voice.
“I have a past,” Boris said. Almost angry, Carmel thought. “We all do.”
“But your past followed you here,” Miriam said. Then, looking at Carmel. “Look at the poor girl. She’s shaking!”
“Shambleau?” Magdalena Wu looked at Carmel, looked at Boris, her cousin. “How could you—?” And seeing Miriam approach Carmel she said, in horror, “No! Don’t go near her, she could—”
“It’s a sickness, Magda,” Boris said. His voice was flat. “It’s not her fault.”
“No,” Magdalena said, “no . . .” She shook her head, pushed back the chair: it came crashing down on the floor with a bang. “I can’t. You must—”
“Then go,” Miriam said. “But don’t—” A look passed between them. Carmel could not decipher it. Then Magdalena was gone.
“She was nice to me,” Carmel said. Miriam put her hand on Carmel’s brow. It felt warm there, comforting. Miriam’s node was wide open, Carmel could have devoured her in an instant.
“How could you?” Miriam said, angry. “She is only a girl!”
They had gone to bed together, that first night. It felt so strange, to be this close, this physic
al, with someone, and yet be unable to get into their mind, to share who, what, they were. In that tiny apartment in Tong Yun, on Boris’s narrow bed, they made love.
She had to learn him from the outside, to piece together clues, hints, things he told her, things he didn’t. She could not read him, the aug was always between them. He was a doctor, he told her. He used to work in the birthing clinics, he had specialised in Progeny Design, but he wasn’t doing that anymore. He was from Earth, originally. From that region called the Middle East (but east of what? middle of where?), a place called Central Station. He was as exotic to her as she must have seemed to him, she studied him the old-fashioned way, with fingers, tongue, with taste and smell. They explored each other, fashioning maps. But he could not ease her hunger.
He sat opposite her now. His fingers on her jawline, lifting up her head, gently. “What am I going to do with you, Carmel?” he said. He sounded exasperated. He was patronising. She watched him silently, watched Miriam, that small compact woman, owner of this shebeen, could almost see, visually, the lines of affection and shared history that bound her and Boris together. And she felt jealous.
“Why did you come here?”
Wonder in his voice.
“Leave her be,” Miriam, like a mother, fussing over her. Made Carmel want to hiss, like a comical strigoi, like something out of that classic Phobos Studios production, Shambleau, where Elvis Mandela played the fearless strigoi hunter who ends up falling for the parasite he catches. There had been several sequels, and knockoffs and copies, but the films always ended the same way.
The strigoi had to die.
“Why?” the Shambleau says. This is the penultimate scene of the film. An unlikely set of circumstances sees Elvis Mandela first stalk and then capture the Shambleau, become addicted, flee from a group of silent assassins (headed by Shirkan Goodbye, who always played the villain in the Phobos productions), find shelter in a Church of Robot node, escape again, run into a group of Martian Re-Born and finally ubiked into the virtuality of ancient Mars-That-Never-Was, where the scene is set.
Mars-That-Never-Was. An ancient land of canals and steamy jungles, ruled over by the Emperor of Time; a construct of the Re-Born faith, facilitated by Others, a sophisticated digital universe, some said; a reality of which our own is but a shadow, the Re-Born said. In that penultimate scene, on the Grand Canal, Elvis Mandela holds the Shambleau in his arms as they watch the dying sun. “Why?” the Shambleau says.
Elvis Mandela draws the katana blade from its sheath. He strokes the Shambleau’s head, the protruding nodal filaments of her hair. “Because I have to,” he says.
Their affair was doomed, Carmel knew. She knew Boris was fascinated by her. Aroused by her difference. And his aug somehow protected him, it was an alien buffer her own cancerous nodal growths could not penetrate. Boris wanted to help her. To remake her. To study her. All the while knowing his own weakness, admitting to his sexual infatuation with her, this human kink that made them lust for strigoi, for the thing that could harm them.
It did not last long. Three, four months, always in his apartment, Carmel afraid of going out, Boris making love to her and drawing her blood and running diagnostics, until even he had to admit the wrong of what he was doing, this playing of doctor and patient, unethical, corrupting, wrong.
He never gave her up. Never betrayed her. But she left him, because she had to, because it was wrong, and because she was hungry.
She returned to Level Five and to hunting in the tunnels. Sometimes she even met other strigoi, but something in them mutually repelled each other, some glitch or built-in effect that ensured they did not hunt together, that they would remain always alone.
What prompted her to go to Earth? To undertake another space voyage, on board a ship where she might be discovered, past the network verification systems of old Earth, and to that strange land Boris had once come from? She knew he had gone home. She kept track of him, on and off, through the Conversation. Knew he had left Tong Yun, later, heard he had gone back to Earth.
But what was home? For her, that asteroid she came from? The longhouse, the multitude of relatives, the lone mine-ships and watching endless reruns of Chains of Assembly?
“Perhaps I just wanted to see Earth,” she said. “I don’t know anyone else on this planet.”
“How did you even get through?” he said. “The immigration systems should have picked you up, arrested you!”
“I bought an ident tag, a whole new being,” she said. “From a Conch called Shemesh, back in Tong Yun.”
Boris stood up. Paced. Miriam sat opposite Carmel. Looked at her. “So you’re . . . Shambleau?” she said. “I never met. . . .”
“We don’t belong here,” Carmel said. Squirmed. Miriam made her feel both welcome and uncomfortable. “We’re creatures of the spaceways.” A line from that Elvis Mandela picture. Even to her ears it sounded ridiculous.
“She can’t stay here,” Boris said. The aug pulsed on his neck. At that moment, Carmel hated him. It. Them. There was no man without the Martian growth. They were one, a single being, Joined.
Miriam said nothing. Just looked at Boris. And he turned back. No words between them. No data transfer, either. Just a look, speaking more than an encrypted message ever could.
“She’s dangerous,” Boris said. Already defeated.
“There are other ways of knowing,” Miriam said. “This is Manhome, they say, but they are wrong. This is Womanhome, the womb of humanity, and there are older, stranger powers here, Boris.”
“Like what?” he said. Bitter, suddenly. “God? Always your God!”
“You need to have faith,” Miriam said. But gently. “It is hard enough just being alive. You have to have a little faith.”
Boris shook his head. But Miriam had already dismissed him. She turned to Carmel, a wordless question in her eyes.
Would you like to stay?
Carmel didn’t know what to say.
The poet Bashō, who, it was rumoured, had met and fallen in love with a Shambleau near an Ogko shrine below Olympus Mons, had never told the tale of that affair. Did it end as it does in the film franchise from Phobos Studios? Or had it ended differently, with mutual love, with a recognition that a strigoi is no more predator than man is? Had Bashō fled, or was he propelled onwards, a restless spirit on a quest that had no goal beyond the road itself?
We do not, cannot, know. But this is Womanhome, Earth Prime, and there are other ways of knowing and of seeing, and greater mysteries, as we are yet to see. As for Bashō, our only clue is one final poem he wrote, though never published. It runs like this:
Sambelu.
Taem yu save lafem hem, hemi kilim yu. Sambelu. Awo! Sambelu,
Sambelu blong mi. Mi lafem yu. Mi lukluk yu. Yu kilim mi,
Mi kilim yu. Yu lafem mi, mi lafem yu. Sambelu. Sambelu.
Sambelu.
And translates, roughly, so: “Shambleau. / When you love her, she hurts you. Shambleau. Oh! Shambleau, / my Shambleau. I love you, I look at you. You hurt me / I hurt you. You love me, and I love you. Shambleau. Shambleau. / Shambleau.”
“Yes,” Carmel said.
SIX: Filaments
Reality,” said the robo-priest, “is a thin and fragile thing.”
R. Brother Patch-It watched its small congregation. Level Three Concourse, Central Station: this Church of Robot node. Few followed the true faith anymore. Robots alone, it sometimes seemed to R. Patch-It, still believed. Others, those strange, bodyless digital intelligences, had absconded belief for worlds of pure mathematics, an infinity of virtual possibilities. Whereas humans needed, sometimes craved, faith, but seldom knew which path to choose, and competition was fierce when one had Judaism alongside Roman Catholicism, Buddhism against Elronism, the Martian Re-Born alongside Islam.
And the Church of Robot was austere, robots saw themselves as metal shepherds, the awkward link between human physicality and Other transcendence. R. Brother Patch-It coughed with the voice of a long-dead man and
resumed the sermon. “Reality,” it said, and faltered. The congregation watched attentively. Missus Chong the Elder at the pews at the back, and her friend Esther, they were religion-shoppers, sampling each faith like connoisseurs, covering their bets the closer they got to old age. A group of disgruntled house appliances watched the sermon in the virtuality—coffee makers, cooling units, a couple of toilets—appliances, more than anyone else, needed the robots’ guidance, yet they were often wilful, bitter, prone to petty arguments, both with their owners and with themselves. There had never been that many robots. Humanoid, awkward, they belonged in neither world, the real or the irreal, and none had been made for a century or more. To make ends meet, R. Brother Patch-It doubled as a moyel for the Jews of Central Station. In that, at least, he was valued. He was a good moyel, and had been ordained, and could perform the delicate surgery of removing the foreskin, expertly, there had never been complaints. In his younger days R. Brother Patch-It had toyed with the idea of conversion. Becoming a robot Jew was not that far-fetched, there was a famous rabbi on Mars who was one of the first robots ever made. But it was not easy becoming a Jew. It was a faith that discouraged strangers.
“Consensus reality is like a cloth,” it started again. The congregation listened, there was the sound of dry rustling in the small, dark church, the smell of metal and pine resin. “It is made of many individual strands, each of which is a reality upon itself, a self-encoded world. We each have our own reality, a world made by our senses and our minds. The tapestry of consensus reality is therefore a group effort. It requires enough of us to agree on what reality is. To determine the shape of the tapestry, if you will.”
R. Brother Patch-It liked that last addition. If you will. It lent a certain weight to arguments. “If you will,” it said, savouring the words. “For reality to exist we must all will it into being. We dream—”