Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  My frown, never free of my face, fell apart in complete bewilderment, as though the fragments might wash off with my tears, and I saw a fluttering in the dark behind her, as indistinct as, minutes ago, JoBonnot herself had been. A flicker: and what fluttered beneath, glimmered. It drifted forward, climbing the rock as she had climbed it, though it was certainly not human. I blinked, trying to judge its size, which is hard when you’re looking at something you’ve never seen before. It was membranous, hulking, liquefacious, and—I think—blue. Lights hovered in a constellation over it. As one part bobbled and lolloped forward and another flowed and flapped behind, I thought: any one of those movements, to the knowledgeable, might communicate friendship, interest, aggression, suspicion, or any number of alien stances no human could know. The lights circled above her, part, doubtless, of whatever forcefield allowed her to move and maintain shape over this unpressured ’scape.

  “But what…?” I pushed back. “I mean, is she really a…?”

  “Oh, I’d say, rather, he”—and JoBonnot adjusted her squat on the rock—“is my dear, dear friend—”

  Suddenly I stood, staggering with the surprise of delayed recognition. “But that’s not a XIv!” I rasped. “That’s a native of Nepiy! Your home world! I’ve seen one of her before, JoBonnot!” The alien began to recede into the dark, the lights above her dimming. “I’ve talked with women of her race before! I’ve even [worked.sub.1] for one! That’s no XIv, JoBonnot! How did you get here? And why did you bring her?”

  “Unlimited space fare? Surely you must have encountered the custom somewhere before. Besides, I merely asked if you wanted to see a XIv. I didn’t say I’d show you one. Here. Now. On this particular bit of barely habitable stone. I brought him because, well, Clym and I…” She paused. “I have a [job.sub.1] for you, Skynum Dyeth. Will you take it?” JoBonnot looked up at me, her forearms over her knees. Now she reached up. “Come home with me, Marq Dyeth. Come with us.” Her thin fingers, in their entirely different kind of vacuum protection, seized my great glove. “Come with us to my homeworld of Nepiy. I need you—we need you. Do this for me, for us, for Nepiy; if you do, there we will give you back your Rat.” She stood, now, before me; and, in her grip, I reeled. “Come home.”

  The sky was black as metal, sealed meters overhead. A row of lights marched off into darkness, their little glow here and there lighting bronzish rocks. We sat among columns strung with vines and great metal petals—alien sculptures of giant flowers.

  Whatever we sat on was desperately uncomfortable—like my own contour chair stalled eternally before its flex.

  Off in the distant dark came the faintest flicker of blue.

  Silence pulsed for three, four breaths.

  Then thunder, nearly dumb in its deeply muted growl.

  I said: “I’ve seen the lightning, grown blood red, whip and shatter the overhead fumes of Nepiy.”

  “Ah,” said JoBonnot. “Most likely you were much farther south—closer to the equator.”

  “Very filmy caves”—I frowned at the columns around us, the lights beyond us—“golden veils on the humans, as if they imitated the native women’s blue and rippling demeanor. At least that’s how I remember it.”

  “You must have been, yes, definitely you were”—9-K adjusted herself around the translator pole—“a third of the way—certainly more than a fourth—around to the east. Not the west, definitely. The east.”

  Again thunder rose, but only to the deepest hum—before it fell to silence.

  I said: “When I was on Nepiy before, fumes and lightning tore up the overhead gases and the land outside the powershields was rife with some catastrophe that threatened starvation for three whole urban complexes. Although this is only a simplified account, it had to do with the failure of a crop of beans. Almost all the women I talked to were afraid it might be Cultural Fugue.”

  “The Quintian Geosector Grouping.” JoBonnot tapped her fingertips together.

  “One of the smaller, if not the smallest of the Quintians.” 9-K drifted back till her pole was decidedly off-center. “Definitely the smallest of the Quintians. Wouldn’t you say?”

  JoBonnot nodded. “There are women all over Nepiy afraid of Cultural Fugue. Even here.” The nod took in the darkness around us, with its silence. JoBonnot looked as uncomfortable on her seat as I felt on mine. “Of course the situation around here is substantially worse than in the Quintians.”

  Once I looked at the blackness, listened to the silence, wondering what signs of what tragedies were sunk within them that I could not read.

  “Of course, this cassette does not show them,” JoBonnot said, as if realizing my thoughts. “It was recorded at a happier time.” She shifted. “Still, the Thants”—standing, her features became almost indistinguishable by her column—“have been called to Nepiy by Family sympathizers to be the Focus Unit for our world.”

  “I know that,” I said. “My nurture stream on Velm has entertained the Thants back home, at Dyethshome, at Morgre. Many times.”

  “Won’t do,” said the blobby blue woman, drawing in around her translation pole. (I had asked the ship’s GI for her name: and had been informed that Nepiy natives don’t use them at home, but I had been given a number I could refer to her by if I wanted: 9-K. But through some vestigial diplomatic sense it just didn’t feel right.) Somewhere above the vegetative webbing between the poles’ knobby heads, thunder rumbled again in that rippling sable. “Just won’t do. Human, all too human—you see? You understand, Marq Dyeth? Can you apprehend the problems of a woman such as I?”

  “Like Velm,” I said, squirming on something not quite stool, hassock, chair, or couch, “Nepiy has both an alien population and a human population, living largely in peace with one another. I learned that from my single visit to your world, back when I learned some of your Nepiyan fellows were worried about a possible Cultural Fugue condition.”

  “Like Velm,” JoBonnot said, from her column, “it is more complicated than that.”

  Burbling about her pole, the inhuman woman said: “Unlike Velm, Marq Dyeth, Nepiy has both ggggg and nnnn.” The two buzzes were on only slightly different pitches.

  I frowned.

  “Ggggg and nnnn,” JoBonnot repeated. “The two terms are so common among the Nepiy they have entered our human language.”

  “I don’t think I heard them when I was here—I mean there, on Nepiy. Of course I was only getting the most simplified of accounts.”

  “It would have to have been a very simplified account, very simplified indeed,” 9-K declared. “Myself, my translator hasn’t been able to deal with ‘beans’ at all. Beans? Beans, you say?”

  “Neither, apparently, could the women of the Smaller Quintians. They’re not native to your world,” and while I wondered if I should mention that these particular beans had come from mine, 9-K saved me the diplomatic embarrassment:

  “Ah!” She bulged forward again. “Well, then, no matter. Let’s get on with it. Go on, now. Go on.”

  “Ggggg are Nepiy’s highland plateaus. And nnnn are the lowland ribbons that wind between them, across much of the surface of our world. This cassette here”—JoBonnot gestured around us—“is set up to represent a rather romanticized section of nnnn. The lowlands. The cloud layer, up there, covers most or even all of the nnnn: often vast storms, vast rains, and always vast darkness.”

  “Yes, I remember it from my visit.”

  “Climb up the rocky slope, there, and you will break through the broiling mists and emerge, at last, on some ggggg rim.”

  “We women of Nepiy,” said the alien, through her pole, “have always lived along the bottom of the nnnn, underneath the clouds. Why, you ask, Marq Dyeth? What are our reasons? What is the functional answer in terms you can follow? Ah, it’s terribly difficult to express it simply; it involves chemistry, psychology, evolution— which, you understand, are normally concepts as alien to us as vfvfvfvfdk, rrrrmmmh, and gktqbtk are to you.” (That’s the best I can do with the humming buzz
es she uttered: and since they came from her pole, that meant they were already translations.) “But we have lives there; we live there; and we want to go on living.”

  “Up on the ggggg,” JoBonnot said, “only humans live. They have their urban complexes, their society, their industry. But the humans who do, tend to—how shall I say—forget that any other women share their planet with them. There is fear of Cultural Fugue—that terrible social condition in which worlds destroy themselves—from the depths of the nnnn to the centers of the most isolated ggggg. And it is very much the tension between ggggg and nnnn that is involved. The humans of the ggggg, at the urging of the Family, have decided to bring in a Focus Unit to help stabilize the cultural play.”

  “On my single visit to Nepiy,” I said, “the area I visited was certainly deep within a crisis. And in the lowlands… in the nnnn, I saw of the fear of Cultural Fugue. But women anywhere fighting real and pressing chaos tend to fear that, first thing. I’ve seen it on many worlds, JoBonnot—worlds that still swing quite whole and neatly in their orbits about the night. And on Nepiy there were no official Web parameters to suggest your world was heading anywhere near CF.”

  “Worlds are big places, Marq Dyeth,” said blue bubbly 9-K. “You could not have seen all of Nepiy. In the period you were there, you could only have gotten the most simplified picture.”

  “A Focus Unit must reflect and focus the concerns of a world,” JoBonnot said. “Consider, then, a world with two racial species, who imports a Focus Unit consisting only of one.”

  What could I say? I said, “I gather it’s rather moot just how much stabilizing a Focus Unit can do, anyway—but then, I was brought up under the Sygn, and we tend to look down on all traditional Family techniques. Do you mean to bring in the Sygn to help right the situation? Certainly on worlds where the women are divided between native and human, their dogma seems more geared to easing tensions and promoting peaceful coexistence.”

  “Once you are on a world, if the conflict between Family and Sygn becomes too heated, especially as the various precepts are taken up by hostile institutions with other names, it can lead a world even closer to Cultural Fugue, rather than resolve the turmoil.”

  I smiled. “That’s true.” At least it’s certainly what one hears as one slides along vague and variegated strands of the Web. “Yet there must always be some tension between them, if either is to avoid becoming the basis of some oppressive regime. And since worlds are, indeed, big places, most women, seeing a conflict in one local place that may, indeed, look huge, tend to give it more importance in world terms than it deserves. I’m a woman who has been to many worlds, JoBonnot.”

  “And I,” said the blue woman, puckering about her pole, “am a woman who has suffered very deeply on my own, Marq Dyeth.”

  To which, I’m afraid, there’s not much you can say.

  I said:

  “You’ve decided, then, that you’re not bringing in the Sygn…?”

  “What we would like to bring to Nepiy, Marq Dyeth, is you. And your Rat—oh, not for good! Only for the briefest of visits!” JoBonnot shifted about, looking suddenly as uncomfortable on her seat as I felt on mine. “We don’t want to make you our Focus Unit. We don’t want any Focus Unit at all. But among the range of human males, you are a very interesting woman, Marq Dyeth. So is Rat Korga. The two of you are especially interesting to women who are frightened of Cultural Fugue.”

  “Because Rat’s world was destroyed by Cultural Fugue?” I asked. “Or what may—”

  “—or may not—”

  “—have been Cultural Fugue?” I finished.

  “Interesting,” 9-K hummed. “Especially to women who fear it.”

  “The ambiguity simply sounds the note of anxiety which makes the fascination even richer, more resonant. Oh, it’s very interesting, the relation between you two. And to so many decimal places—”

  “Look, I—”

  “When a Focus Unit takes over on a world, it must be made an occasion of great interest,” 9-K burbled. “Great publicity! Vast amounts of information and misinformation, shuttled about the world! Public relations! Promotion! Hype and hyperbole! I imagine it can be quite interesting.”

  “So we are going to bring you to Nepiy with the Thants,” JoBonnot said. “And there we will join you with the Rat.”

  “And you’re hoping the… ‘interest’ we generate will upset the campaign to… to establish the Thants in their new position?” But the possibility, even as I spoke, was already hammering my heart hard enough to hurt my throat.

  Thunder rumbled. The blue woman came completely to pieces, splashed away in several directions over the rocks, then splashed back again to congeal about the pole. “Oh, she understands! She understands it! Ah, you were so right. She is, indeed, a very interesting woman!”

  “Only I don’t know if I want to be all that interesting—”

  “Do you want Rat Korga?” JoBonnot asked.

  I looked up at the clouds sealing off the rocks and gorges around us in this cassetted nnnn. “Yes.” And the lightning flashed: but, within those broiling darknesses, it was red and thin and only rouged the columned grotto. “I’m going back to ship normal for a while.” I stood up on the shaley ground.

  “As you wish, Sketu Dyeth,” JoBonnot said, looking triumphant.

  Paul Di Filippo

  AT the time I wish to write about, there were only five humans living on Earth. I say “humans,” but the ancient definition of that term must be considerably expanded to include us. Even if outwardly conforming to baseline humanity, we still deviated extremely from the old norm. Deviant by genome, both embedded and in the cloud, and by powers, both interior and exterior. But in any case, we were still the true inheritors of the old ape lineage.

  Sharing the planet, we five nonetheless all lived widely separated and isolated lives in our extensive redoubts, each of us busy with our own hobbies, concerns, crotchets, obsessions and projects. For reasons which I have since offloaded from my memory into backup, we had, during that interval, looked backwards some ten or twelve millennia and capriciously assigned ourselves the names of long-dead twentieth-century artists.

  Bilal, a dwarfish and dark-eyed fellow, lived on one of the southern continents and currently sought to learn all the secrets of the tricksy hyperspace machine elves.

  Waifish and haunted-looking, holed up in a fairytale castle in one of the vast northern forests, Doucet spent her hours guiding a chorus of dryads and treefrogs through more and more intricate arrangements of the choral songs of Beta Lyrae.

  Thin and attenuated as an eel, completely amphibian with scaly skin tinged pallid green and white, Giraud inhabited a submarine fortress in tropical waters, where he staged titanic fights between various leviathans.

  Maroh, a mostly naked, green-skinned, photosynthesizing giantess, whose curves mimicked swales, peaks and valleys, resided in a large ice palace at the southern pole, and employed her time cataloguing the infinite varieties of interstellar vacuum foraminifera with elaborate sensors and sampling engines.

  And then there was I, Crepax. Devilishly handsome, witty, constitutionally blithe. My own preoccupations at that time, indulged in my alpine lodge atop Earth’s highest artificial peak, rearing some twenty thousand meters toward the stratosphere, included sampling the many varieties of wine derived from the myco-vineyards of Alnilam VIII, and frolicking with an ever-changing bevy of ghost hetaerae from the Seventh Blue Limbo Dimension. And, oh yes, composing epic poetry on the themes of Waldeinsamkeit and Uitbuiken.

  So, as I believe you can see, our separate blisses were so divergent that there was little cause for the five of us ever to foregather. Even though we were the only sentients on the whole planet—other non-human sapients found the rewilded Earth a backwater bore, and, consequently, rarely visited—loneliness was not an issue.

  That is, we had no reason for close association until Bilal rediscovered the concept of “cities.”

  Bilal chose to introduce the notion fir
st to me, I am pleased to say, obviously relying on my famously catholic tastes to permit an unprejudiced assessment of his excitement.

  I became aware of my visitor when one of my house robots carried in a small frozen body, interrupting me in the midst of composing a stanza examining the proposition that a patch of moss ringed with toadstools could represent nirvana.

  Bilal was still dressed for the tropical clime of his home, bare-chested, barefoot and wearing just a colorful loincloth. Hardly the garb needful at the raw altitude of my home. Small icicles fringed his unseeing eyes, and crusted his nostrils, rendering his homely face even uglier than usual.

  “We found him some hundred meters from the front door, sir. His ship was parked at the edge of the defensive field with the airlock door open.”

  Plainly, Bilal had been in such an excited rush to see me that he had neglected all personal safety measures. I was intrigued.

  “Pop him in the revivifier, will you please? And then break out two glasses and a bottle of the Goliadic Enfumé. The hundred-year-old variety.”

  I confess to not waiting for Bilal to become fully cognizant again, with all his metabolic functions restored and self downloaded from the cloud, before I tapped the bottle. I was savoring my second glass of the delicious vintage when one of the robots ushered a re-souled Bilal in. He had the slightly befuddled air of the recently reinstantiated, but a few gulps of the Goliadic soon put him right.

  He and I took up lazy positions on two lounge chairs that contorted themselves for our maximum comfort.

  “Now, my small friend, what got you so worked up that you had to fly all the way here to see me in person, rather than just contact me over the quantum aether? Have the machine elves finally disclosed the secret to blending dark matter with baryonic matter to produce the fabled Cosmic Electrum?”