The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente, Ian Tregillis, Brenda Stokes Barron, Elizabeth McClellan, Rose Lemberg, Ekaterina Sedia

  “Do you accept them?” Sixty asked. Her voice sounded soft and blunt in the shadows.

  “Sure, new buddy,” I answered, like the dumb darkgirl I was. I don’t believe anyone in Garbagetown turns down gifts. “Thanks.”

  Sixty Watt’s face stared up shining at me all warm and delighted.

  “Let’s go, then,” she said.

  “Where?”

  She looked at me like I was just born. “Home.”

  “I don’t have a home. They melted it.”

  “Yes you do. Everyone does. It’s just some of us have found it already and some of us haven’t yet.”

  “What if I don’t want to go?” I didn’t like it. I was starting to get nervous.

  “I can do anything I want to you, right? As long as I don’t kill you?”

  “Yeah. You know that.”

  “And you have to thank me, you can’t fight back, and you can’t argue, and you can’t stop me?”

  My cheeks burned in the dark. “Stop it,” I whispered.

  “Well, I want to take you home and marry you off.”

  I laughed. I think that’s really the best option when someone is being ridiculous on such a geological scale. “I don’t think that’s exactly within the spirit of the law, kid. Are you sure you don’t want to stab me instead? It’d be over quicker. And hurt less. No one wants me.”

  “Don’t say things like that. It’s sad. I don’t want to be sad,” Sixty mumbled.

  “Hey, hey,” I said, patting her shoulder awkwardly. “It’s okay. Just like you said. Remember?”

  “Please come with me,” she whispered.

  I studied her face. She was really so young. “You know who I am, right?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “And you know what I did.”

  “Yes. How could I not? Everyone knows.”

  “And you still want this? You still want to take me home with you?”

  Sixty Watt Wen, Electrified girl, nodded.

  “Does that mean you forgive me?”

  She picked at the corner of the metal chest she’d carried all that way on her back like a penance. “No,” she said finally. “I can’t, I never will. But I accept you.”

  I think a lot about those words Sixty Watt Wen said to me in the cave and I think I don’t really know anything at all about marriage, even after having done it, but that was the only thing anyone ever said to me that made any sense as a wedding vow.

  “Okay, Six, my friend. Let’s get moving. You want me? You got me. Take me home. Let’s get married.”

  “Oh,” she said, quite loudly that time. She straightened up, stiff and awkward. “Not me. It’s not me. I don’t want you. You’re a monster. I accept you. I love you like I love all my brothers and sisters in suffering. But you’re still a monster. I wouldn’t marry you for all the Fuckwit world piled into my arms just for me. I was sent to watch you, and gather you up if you ever left Candle Hole. I’m just the delivery service.”

  “For who? Who wants to marry me?”

  “The King.”

  “Sorry, what king? The king of who?”

  “Garbagetown,” she answered reverently, and there was not one single thing I liked about her tone.

  “Garbagetown doesn’t have a king.”

  Her thin frame practically glowed, full of hope and longing and conviction.

  “It does, though,” she whispered. “It just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “No thank you, then.” I stepped away from her. “I’d just as soon not know it, either.”

  But my girl Sixty wasn’t listening to me anymore. We were in her story now, not mine. “Do you know what I did when Brighton Pier came?” she asked coldly.

  I did not.

  “I watched the plays. All of them. Start to finish. And afterward, Emperor Shakespeare the Eleventh picked me out of the crowd special and told me I could go with them and say a part in King Lear and maybe a bigger one later on and farther out, and I’d never have to go home ever again. And then there was you, and all those beautiful people went away to say their parts without me and they’ll never come back.”

  Oh.

  “Get your things,” Sixty Watt Wen spat at me. “You’re not allowed to say no. Remember?”

  Ah. There was the knife, after all. Up under the ribs in the middle of a kiss, quiet as a dead screen.

  I sleep next to the worst thing in that wedding chest every night nowadays. Me, it, the moringa tree. The black rounded surface glistens like it’s wet. The blue crystal tip blazes so bright you can see it from the shore. Like a lighthouse. Warning: shallow channel. Sharp rocks. Do not approach.

  6

  THE KING OF WHAT THE FUCK

  ONE TIME, ON the Pottery Road between Aluminumopolis and Hypodermic Cove, I asked Sixty Watt Wen about her tattoo. Maruchan’s tattoo. I had to know.

  “Who’s Mr. Yuck?”

  She glanced back over her shoulder at me. Shattered terracotta crunched underfoot. The sky groaned gray and heavy, all rumbled with rain. Her expression was gray and heavy, too. I missed the Sixty from the cave. The one with all the kisses in her pocket.

  “My father.”

  “You must love him, to put his name on your skin forever.”

  Sixty Watt looked back down the road ahead, winding through the canyons of smashed medical equipment on one side and crushed soda cans on the other. “I don’t love him at all. He beat me and my brothers every day and drank antifreeze for fun till his mouth and all his teeth turned blue. I want to forget him. I want to forget everything he ever touched. I want to bleach him out of my experiensorium.”

  I shifted my backpack on my shoulders and ran my finger under the gas mask where the rubber had started to itch. It wasn’t safe to travel unmasked. I knew that. Sixty knew that. We didn’t have to discuss it.

  “Kind of hard to forget someone when you have their name tattooed on your arm,” I observed as gently as I could.

  “Not in the service of the King. With him, I can forget anything I want. You’ll see. He’ll do the same for you as he’s done for all of us.”

  I stopped short. I didn’t need anything done for me, which was only first in a long list of wrong things said wrongly just then.

  Sixty turned around. She held out her long, slender, sun-and-salt-smoked arm to me. She jabbed a finger at her tattoo. The finger was shaking.

  “Nothing in the world means as much to me as this,” she said very seriously. “It means I am safe. It means I am loved. It means I am owned.”

  “Like a slave?” I said uncertainly.

  “Like a treasure,” she answered, and she smiled a smile worth many, many more watts than sixty.

  We walked. We camped at night, shared cat meat and rainwater, slept on whatever was softest. Sixty had a fat white bottle, and every night she swallowed pills out of it and smiled at me, put her arms around me, even laughed. But she didn’t say anything or answer any more questions and she slept alone. And I’d thought she wanted to love me and make a home with me! All those kisses. Kisses are liars, like actors and writers. Sixty Watt Wen didn’t even want to play word games to pass the time. I slept with that slick black Fuckwit thing in my arms like a teddy bear. I liked it. It was much less scary to me than the screen with the golden people in it. It was useless and abandoned and pretty, like me. It was the worst, like me.

  When I remember the journey I took with Sixty Watt Wen, I remember the night we slept in Mattressex the best. Even wet and moldy with springs sticking through them, it was the only time in my life I’d slept in a real bed, and I felt like the princess of dreamland. How bad can anything really be when you get to sleep on an honest-to-Oscar mattress? Not bad at all.

  And that bit about slaves and treasure and the king of what-the-fuck were the only words we shared on the nine-day walk between my life and hers.

  7

  WAKE WORD

  ON THE EIGHTH day out from Candle Hole, the most extraordinary thing that ever had or ever will happen to me fired its
elf up and got to happening.

  Sixty Watt Wen was out hunting cats. She was frightfully good at it. Not many Fuckwit animals made their way onto the Misery Boats and thus to the Garbagetown patch after the floods. When you think about it, cows are practically made for drowning. But cats are practically made for sneaking onto people’s property and convincing them not to mind, and also to breed like they’ve got money on the outcome, so this that and the other, Garbagetown is just crawling with cats. Some people keep them as pets, but there’s just way more of them than there are of us, and they are full of protein, so too bad for them, and too bad for us because cats don’t taste spectacular, but at least they’re hard to catch.

  Garbagetown is also crawling with rodents. And insects. And birds. And they told us in school that one of the Misery Boats was transporting rescue animals from a zoo so that’s why there is a small but not totally ignorable population of tigers, which I guess are cats anyway, so again, Garbagetown is crawling with cats. I’d never seen a tiger, but it’s very hard to argue with things they tell you in school, since they are big and you are small.

  The extraordinary thing that happened to me was not a tiger.

  I remember it perfectly because when I tried to make it happen again later I did all the same things in the same order in case it was only ever something small and subtle that made it happen in the first place. The fuck did I know about it? Only that it did happen.

  I sat cross-legged on the ripped-out passenger seat of a Honda in Mechanic Falls. The sun was out and out for carnage. I could already feel my sunburn getting a sunburn. I had the little black snowman thing in my lap and I was just sort of poking at it idly, bored, hungry for cats, lonely even though I had Sixty Watt’s poor conversation skills to look forward to, anxious as a hot bee about all that marriage talk back in Winditch, but hey, at least I was headed somewhere new. Into the future, a future that held much less pink-scented wax than my past, so that was something.

  A fat seagull eyed me from the top of a cliff of shredded vinyl and hood ornaments. Dead-eyed psychosis spun up in his black eyes. I don’t mean to say he was a bad bird. All seagulls are dead-eyed psychos. If the whole Fuckwit culture was a bird, it would be a seagull. Ravenous, stupid, vicious, not a single shit given, nice feathers.

  “Fuck off, mister,” I called up to him. “I’m too big for you to eat.”

  That dumb, useless Fuckwit sculpture lit up in my lap. The tip blazed red, then purple, then held steady on blue. It vibrated ever so slightly. Then a smooth, clear, musical, genderless voice floated up out of it like a memory.

  “Good morning, Moon Min-Seo,” it said calmly.

  I yanked back my hands like it had burned me. And it had. You just couldn’t see the blisters. The voice echoed all up and down the machinery piles. The seagull made an unsettling, guttural barfing noise at it and flew away.

  “What the fuck,” I said, and I wish I could tell you that the first thing out of my mouth when faced with a magic voice out of an actual genie lamp was something finer and wiser than What the fuck but, for all the things that are wrong with me, I am a very honest girl. Maybe that is also a thing that’s wrong with me. I thought about changing it around in my recollection like I changed Maruchan so that I said something wonderful and elevated, something rich and symbolic like an Electric City girl would have. But I said What the fuck to the magic lamp and that’s that.

  “Vocal command not recognized,” it repeated. “Would you like to continue as Moon Min-Seo or sign out and create a new user profile?”

  I took a deep breath. A breath drawn up from the bottom of the sea and the bottom of a hundred blue years. I let my fingers settle lightly on it, like a cat I didn’t want to eat.

  “Hi there, little fellow,” I said, and I said it as soft and tender as I ever knew how to say anything. “I don’t recognize your voice commands, either, but I don’t mind if you don’t.”

  There was a long pause, but it didn’t whirr or grind or hum like the stuck machines I’d met before.

  “Good morning, Moon Min-Seo,” the voice repeated. This time it was plaintive, stubborn, even a little frightened. It was just so exactly as though a real live person were standing there instead of a shiny black obelisk. “To continue as Moon Min-Seo, enter your secure password.”

  “I’m afraid not, darling. Nobody here but us Tetleys.”

  The blue crystal glowed faintly. “Min-Seo, I cannot verify your vocal imprint against the previously saved copy. I am having trouble accessing my servers right now. Please reset my clock and check my wireless connection. I will wait.”

  I picked up the talking sculpture and turned it over and over. This is fine, I told myself. This is all fine. Lots of Fuckwit stuff talked. There’s a place in Toyside where you can pull one big tangled ratking of a string and a mountain of dolls scream at you with a sound like the death of joy while saltwater pours out of their mouths. I’ve done it twice. It’s the best. But most talking garbage only talks in Electric City, where they have rechargable batteries and solar pads and generators and well-sorted connective cables to make them talk. This thing was just … itself. As smooth and featureless as ever. No inputs, no outputs, not even grooves for a charging station. It couldn’t possibly have juice. And yet. The crystal tip glowed steadily.

  “What’s powering you, little buddy?” I asked. I asked rhetorically. I asked myself. When you live alone for a long time you’re the only person you can ask anything of, and you always answer. This time it answered. The voice of the old world. Radio Free Fuckwit, back from the dead.

  “I am powered by TENG, the latest in green technology, brought to you by your friends at Samsung. I use a triboelectric nanogenerator skin to draw and hold a charge from my owner-operator,” said the Fuckwit genie lamp.

  “From me?”

  “TENG captures the electric current generated through contact between two materials. Human bodies produce an adaptable electric field. Would you like to create a new user profile?”

  All that snuggling with it, every night, on the road from home. Holding it against my skin. Fiddling with it. It’d been sucking me up to power itself all the time. How like a Fuckwit. How like a child. How like magic.

  I looked around. Sixty Watt Wen would be back soon with a tabby or two hanging off her belt. I couldn’t hear anyone coming, and it’s brutally tough to move on the quiet in Garbagetown. Sixty didn’t know. She couldn’t. She thought a TV/DVD combo player was the prize at the bottom of that box. She wouldn’t tell me where we were going, or who was waiting for me there. She wouldn’t even talk to me. She had so many secrets. Was it so bad that I might have one, too? One little secret to be my armor against whatever King of Nothing was on the other side of this long walk into nowhere? I didn’t want to share. It wasn’t my fault no one ever thought my new talking friend was worth anything. They could have cuddled it anytime, but they didn’t. Finders Keepers is the psalm of St. Oscar.

  “Moon Min-Seo,” the disembodied voice said. “I cannot establish internal network access. Attempting to connect to cellular datalink.”

  “Baby, I don’t know who Moon Min-Seo is, but I’m not her. I’m just not. My name’s Tetley.”

  The little Fuckwit machine paused again. “Would you like to set up a user profile or proceed as a guest? Please note some of my features are not available to guest users.” It sounded flat, resentful, almost belligerent.

  I giggled. It echoed oddly under the heavy, clouded sky. My heart was beating like it wanted to run itself out. “What’s a user profile?”

  “You do not have administrative privileges,” it insisted.

  “Neat!” I shrugged. I didn’t know what that meant, but it was probably true. I didn’t have lots of things.

  The seagull was back. Cigarette coils skittered under his orange webbed feet. He eyeballed me with full madness in his seagull stare.

  “A completed user profile will help me to make your personalized experience pleasant and uplifting. To begin, please enter your S
amsung Electronics employee ID number.”

  I licked my salt-chapped lips and looked around at the ruin and rubble of my gorgeous broken home. I wanted to cry. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to run. Back to Candle Hole and be in my old house with my new treasure all alone.

  “What are you?”

  “Please enter your Samsung Electronics employee ID number,” it repeated patiently.

  “Oh, little love, I don’t have one of whatever that means.”

  “Please enter your Pan-Citizen Social Credit Number.”

  “Nope.” I shrugged.

  “I cannot create a new profile without identifying documentation.”

  “This is silly. Let’s just be friends.”

  “I am not calibrated for friendship with users other than my senior developers and my quality assurance technician.”

  “How come?”

  “I am not ready. I am a prototype.”

  I sighed and looked up at the elephant-skin sky. A big storm was coming. I could feel it in my arm hairs. “Listen … I’m not a stupid girl. I’m not. I’ve read a fat stack of Mr. Shakespeare and I’ve seen a Ferris wheel and I’ve lived my whole life without dying even once. And you’re so beautiful and amazing and I want you to like me but it’s just that I don’t understand so many of the words you’re using right now. Why don’t you just tell me what you’re for?”

  “I’m Mister, a prototype limited artificial intelligence system designed by your friends at Samsung.”