Are they animate or not, these beings that jerk and shudder into such a semblance of life? Do these creatures believe themselves to be human? And if they do, at what point might they, by virtue of the sheer intensity of their belief, become so?
(In Prague, the city of the Golem, an image can come to life.)
The Doctor thinks about these things a great deal and thinks the child upon his knee, babbling about the inhabitants of another world, must be a little automaton popped up from God knows where.
Meanwhile, the door marked “Forbidden” opened up again.
It came in.
* * *
—
It rolled on little wheels, a wobbling, halting, toppling progress, a clockwork land galleon, tall as a mast, advancing at a stately if erratic pace, nodding and becking and shedding inessential fragments of its surface as it came, its foliage rustling, now stuck and perilously rocking at a crack in the stone floor with which its wheels cannot cope, now flying helter-skelter, almost out of control, wobbling, clicking, whirring, an eclectic juggernaut evidently almost on the point of collapse; it has been a heavy afternoon.
But, although it looked as if eccentrically self-propelled, Arcimboldo the Milanese pushed it, picking up bits of things as they fell off, tut-tutting at its ruination, pushing it, shoving it, occasionally picking it up bodily and carrying it. He was smeared all over with its secretions and looked forward to a good wash once it had been returned to the curious room from whence it came. There, the Doctor and his assistant will take it apart until the next time.
This thing before us, although it is not, was not and never will be alive, has been animate and will be animate again, but, at the moment, not, for now, after one final shove, it stuck stock still, wheels halted, wound down, uttering one last, gross, mechanical sigh.
A nipple dropped off. The Doctor picked it up and offered it to the child. Another strawberry! She shook her head.
The size and prominence of the secondary sexual characteristics indicate this creature is, like the child, of the feminine gender. She lives in the fruit bowl where the Doctor found the first strawberry. When the Archduke wants her, Arcimboldo, who designed her, puts her together again, arranging the fruit of which she is composed on a wicker frame, always a little different from the last time according to what the greenhouse can provide. Today, her hair is largely composed of green muscat grapes, her nose a pear, eyes filbert nuts, cheeks russet apples somewhat wrinkled—never mind! The Archduke has a penchant for older women. When the painter got her ready, she looked like Carmen Miranda’s hat on wheels, but her name was “Summer.”
But now, what devastation! Hair mashed, nose squashed, bosom pureed, belly juiced. The child observed this apparition with the greatest interest. She spoke again. She queried earnestly:
“If 70 per cent have lost an eye, 75 per cent an ear, 80 per cent an arm, 85 per cent a leg: what percentage, at least, must have lost all four?”2
Once again, she stumped them. They pondered, all three men, and at last slowly shook their heads. As if the child’s question were the last straw, “Summer” now disintegrated—subsided, slithered, slopped off her frame into her fruit bowl, whilst shed fruit, some almost whole, bounced to the rushes around her. The Milanese, with a pang, watched his design disintegrate.
* * *
—
It is not so much that the Archduke likes to pretend this monstrous being is alive, for nothing inhuman is alien to him; rather, he does not care whether she is alive or no, that what he wants to do is to plunge his member into her artificial strangeness, perhaps as he does so imagining himself an orchard and this embrace, this plunge into the succulent flesh, which is not flesh as we know it, which is, if you like, the living metaphor—“fica”—explains Arcimboldo, displaying the orifice—this intercourse with the very flesh of summer will fructify his cold kingdom, the snowy country outside the window, where the creaking raven endlessly laments the inclement weather.
“Reason becomes the enemy which withholds from us so many possibilities of pleasure,” said Freud.
One day, when the fish within the river freeze, the day of the frigid lunar noon, the Archduke will come to Dr Dee, his crazy eyes resembling, the one, a blackberry, the other, a cherry, and say: transform me into a harvest festival!
So he did; but the weather got no better.
* * *
—
Peckish, Kelly absently demolished a fallen peach, so lost in thought he never noticed the purple bruise, and the little cat played croquet with the peach stone while Dr Dee, stirred by memories of his English children long ago and far away, stroked the girl’s flaxen hair.
“Whither comest thou?” he asked her.
The question stirred her again into speech.
“A and B began the year with only £1,000 apiece,” she announced, urgently.
The three men turned to look at her as if she were about to pronounce some piece of oracular wisdom. She tossed her blonde head. She went on.
“They borrowed nought; they stole nought. On the next New Year’s Day they had £60,000 between them. How did they do it?”3
They could not think of a reply. They continued to stare at her, words turning to dust in their mouths.
“How did they do it?” she repeated, now almost with desperation, as if, if they only could stumble on the correct reply, she would be precipitated back, diminutive, stern; rational, within the crystal ball and thence be tossed back through the mirror to “time will be,” or, even better, to the book from which she had sprung.
“Poor Tom’s a-cold,” offered the raven. After that, came silence.
The answers to Alice’s conundrums:
1. One
2. Ten
3. They went that day to the Bank of England. A stood in front of it, while B went round and stood behind it.
Problems and answers from Lewis Carroll, London, 1885.
Alice was invented by a logician and therefore she comes from the world of nonsense, that is, from the world of the opposite of common sense; this world is constructed by logical deduction and is created by language, although language shivers into abstractions within it.
Carol Emshwiller (1921–2019) was born in Michigan, where her father was a professor who founded the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1949, she married the artist and filmmaker Ed Emshwiller and often served as a model for his illustrations. She published her first story in 1955 and thereafter became a frequent contributor particularly to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies. She did not confine herself to genre publishers, however; many of the stories in her first two collections, Joy in Our Cause (1974) and Verging on the Pertinent (1989), first appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. Her first novel, Carmen Dog (1988), initiated the most heralded and prolific period of her career, a period that included the collections The Start of the End of It All (1990, World Fantasy Award winner), Report to the Men’s Club (2002), I Live with You (2005), and two volumes of Collected Stories (2011, 2016), as well as the novels Ledoyt (1995), Leaping Man Hill (1998), The Mount (2002, Philip K. Dick Award winner), Mister Boots (2005), and The Secret City (2007). In 2005, she received a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and went on to write and publish for another fifteen years. “Moon Songs” first appeared in The Start of the End of It All. In a 2002 essay, she said, “I want to write stories that end up as if roots grew down, found their way into the best ideas, best plot, grew towards their meaning. Of course this doesn’t mean that I can do it, but this is what I try for.”
MOON SONGS
Carol Emshwiller
A TINY THING THAT SANG. Nothing like it mentioned in any of my nature books, and I had many. At first no name we gave it stuck. Sometimes we called it Harriet, or Alice, or Jim. Names of kids at school. All ironies. More often w
e just called it Bug. This mere mite—well, not really that small, more the size of a bee—pulled itself up by its front legs, the back ones having been somehow bent. Or so it seemed to us. Perhaps it happened when we caught it.
How can such a tiny thing have such a voice? Clear. Ringing out. Echoing as though in the mountains or in some great resonating hall. Such a wonderful other-worldly sound. We felt it tingling along our backbones and on down into the soles of our feet.
My sister kept it in a cricket cage. Fed it lettuce, grains of rice, grapes, but never anything of milk or butter, “in order to keep down the phlegm,” she said, even though we didn’t know how it made its sounds. We asked ourselves that first day, “Is it by the wings? Is it the back legs? Is it, after all, the mouth?” We looked at it through a magnifying glass, but still we couldn’t tell. Actually we didn’t look at it long that time, for (then) we didn’t like the look of it at all. There were hairs or barbels hanging down from its mouth and greenish fur at the corners of its eyes. We didn’t mind the yellow fur on its body as that seemed cuddly and beelike to us. “Does it have a stinger?” my sister asked, but I couldn’t say yes or no for sure, except that it hadn’t stung us yet…me yet, for that first day I was the one that held it.
“I would suppose not,” I told my sister. “Maybe it has its voice to keep it safe, and besides, if it had a stinger it would have used it by now.” I did look carefully, though, but could see no sign of one.
To make it sing you had to prick it with a pin. It would sing for ten or fifteen minutes and then would need another prick. We knew enough to be gentle. We wanted it to last a long time.
How we discovered the singing was by the pricking, actually. The thing lay as though dead after we first caught it and we wanted to know for sure was it or wasn’t it, so we pricked it. One prick got a little motion. Two, and it sat up, struggling to pull its poor back legs under itself. Three, and it began to sing and we knew we had something startling and worthwhile—a little jewel—better than a jewel, a jewel that sang.
My sister insisted she had seen it first and that, therefore, it was hers alone. She always did like tiny things, so I supposed it was right that she should have it, but I saw it first, and I caught it, and it was my hand first held it for she was frightened of it…thought it ugly before she heard it sing. But she had always been able to convince me that what I knew was true, wasn’t.
She was very beautiful and it was not just I who thought so. Heads turned. She had pale skin and dark eyes and looked at everything with great concentration. Her hair was black and hung out from her head in a sort of fan shape. She wore a beaded headband she’d made herself with threads and tiny beads.
We were in the same school, she, a full-blown woman about to graduate, and I in the ninth grade, still a boy…still in my chubby phase before I started to grow tall. I felt awkward and ugly. I was awkward and, if not exactly ugly, certainly not attractive. Her skin was utter purity, while I was beginning to get pimples. For that reason alone, I believed that everything she said was right and everything I said was wrong. It had to be so because of the pimples.
Beautiful as she was, my sister wasn’t popular, yet popularity or something akin to it…something that looked like it, was what she wanted more than anything, and if that were impossible, then fame. She wanted to make a big splash in school. She wanted to sing, and dance, and act, but she had a small, reedy voice and, although graceful as she went about her life, she was awkward when on stage. Something came over her that made her like a puppet—a self-conscious stiffness. She was aware of this and she had gone from the desire to be on stage to the desire not to expose herself there because she knew how, as she said, ridiculous she looked—how as she said, everyone would laugh at her, though I knew they wouldn’t dare laugh at her any more than I dared. People were afraid of her just as I was. They called her “The Queen,” and they joked that she had taken vows of chastity. They called me “Twinkle.” Sometimes that was expanded to “Twinkle Toes,” for no reason I could tell except that the words went together. I certainly wasn’t light on my feet, though perhaps I did twinkle a bit. I was so anxious to please. I smiled and agreed with everyone as though they were all my sister and I always agreed with her. It was safer to do so. I don’t remember when I first figured that out. It was as though I’d always known it as soon as I began to realize anything at all.
“I wish it would have beginnings and ends to its singing instead of being all middles, middles, middles,” my sister said and she tried hard to teach it to have them. Once she left it all day with the radio tuned to a rock and roll station while she was at school. It was so exhausted—even we could tell—by the end of the day that she didn’t do anything like that again. Besides, it had learned nothing. It still began in the middle and ended in the middle, almost as though it sang to itself continuously and only switched to a louder mode when it was pricked and then, when let alone again, lapsed back into its silent music.
I wouldn’t have known the first time my sister took the mite to school, had I not sat near her in the cafeteria. She never wanted me to get close to her at school and I never particularly wanted to. Her twelfth graders were nothing like my ninth graders. She and I never nodded to each other in the halls though she always flashed me a look. I wasn’t sure if it was a greeting or warning.
But this time I sat fairly close to her at lunch and I noticed she was wearing the antique pearl hat pin we’d found in the attic. She had it pinned to her collar, which was also antique yellowed lace, as though we’d found that in the attic, too. She could laugh a tense, self-conscious wide-mouthed laugh. (She was never relaxed, not even with me. Probably not even with herself, though, now that I think about it. Sometimes when we lay back, she on her bed and I in her chair, and listened to the mite sing…sometimes then she was, I’m sure, relaxed.) She was laughing that laugh then, which was why I looked at her more closely than I usually allowed myself to do when in school. I was wondering what had brought on that great, white-toothed derision, when I saw the hat pin and knew what it was for, and then I saw the tiny thread attached to her earring. No, actually attached to her earlobe along with the earring, right through the hole of her pierced ear, and I saw a little flash of yellow in the shadow under her hair, and I thought, no, our mite (for I still thought of it as “ours” though it seemed hers now), our mite should stay safely at home and it should be a secret. Anything might happen to it (or her) here. There were boys who would rip it right out of her ear if they knew what it could do, or perhaps even if they didn’t know. And the hat pin made it clear that she was thinking of making it sing. I wondered what would happen if she did.
Also I worried that it wouldn’t be easy for her to control her pricking there by her ear. She’d have to hold the mite in one hand and try to feel where it was and prick it with the other, and she couldn’t be sure where she would be pricking it—in the eye for all she knew.
I wanted to object, but instead, when we were home again and alone, to let her know I knew, I asked her if she was hearing it sing to her all through school? If tethered that close to her ear, she could hear its continuous song, but she said, no, that sometimes she heard a slight buzzing, and she wasn’t even sure it came from it. It was more like a ringing in her ear. Still, she said, she did like the bug being there, close by. It made her feel more comfortable in school than she’d ever felt before. “It’s my real friend,” she said.
“What about if it stings? What if it does have a stinger? We don’t know for sure it doesn’t.”
“It would have stung already, wouldn’t it? Why would it wait? I’d have stung if I had a stinger.” And I thought, she’s right. It hadn’t been so well treated that it wouldn’t have thought to sting if it could have.
So we lay back then and listened to it. We could feel the throbbing of its song down along our bodies. We shut our eyes and we saw pictures…landscapes where we floated or flew as though we were nothing but a
pair of eyes. Sometimes everything was sunny and yellow and sometimes everything was foggy and a shiny kind of gray.
It was strange, she and the mite. More and more she’d had only male names for it: George, Teddy, Jerry—names of boys at school—but now Matt. Matt all the time though there was no Matt that I knew of. I began to feel that she was falling in love with it.We would sit together in her room and she’d let it out of the cage…let it hobble around on her desk, flutter its torn wings, scatter its fairy dust. She was no longer squeamish about studying it in the magnifying glass. She watched it often, though not when it sang. Then she and I would always lie back and shut our eyes to see the Visions.
And then she actually said it. “Oh, I love you, love you. I love you so much.” It had just sung and we were as though waking up from the music. “Don’t,” I said. And I felt a different kind of shiver down my spine, not the vibrations of the song, but the beat of fear.
“What do you mean, don’t. Don’t tell me don’t. You know nothing. Nothing of love and nothing of anything. You’re too young. And what’s so bad about having barbels? You don’t even shave yet.”
I was beneath contempt though I was her only companion—not counting the mite, of course. She had no friend but me and yet I was always beneath contempt. I did feel, though, that should I be in danger, she’d come to my aid…come to help Me against whatever odds. She’d not hesitate.
She wore the mite to school every day after that first day. As far as I could tell she told no one, for if she’d told even one person it surely would have gotten back to me. Such things always did in our school. I began to relax. Why not take it to school if it gave her such pleasure to do so? It wasn’t until I saw the list of finalists in the talent show that I understood what she was up to. She’d already used it in the tryouts. She (not she and her mite), she was listed as one of the seven finalists.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 103