by Matt Ruff
“Kite!” he said. “What are you doing here?”
She barked at him: “Get your ass on the back of this horse, Maxwell! Now!”
Maxwell stood on the stone lion’s head and swung himself onto the gelding, no easy feat given the clumsiness of his Leg and the lethargy that still paralyzed his arm. The spectators broke into applause; when the driver of the squad car tried to get out and help Powell, two women in hard hats, themselves former soldiers, held his door shut. Powell 617 kept on flailing his arms.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Surrender your weapon, free the horse, and you still have a chance to be a productive member of society. We have dedicated psychologists who can help you!”
Kite glanced over her shoulder. The traffic cop was moving up fast, shoving people aside; he had his baton and service revolver in hand. “No time for psychology today,” Kite said, snapping the reins. Powell 617 was forced to step out of the way.
“This sort of behavior undermines the entire community,” Powell warned. “But in the end you’re hurting yourselves most of all. Crime doesn’t pay.”
Maxwell tossed the handle of the Electric Carving Knife at Powell’s feet.
“Have a nice day, motherfucker,” he said.
The Tribe with Green Eyes
Seraphina Dufresne’s most valued possession was a Kazenstein Portable Knowledge Store, a breadbox-sized hunk of Electric Memory with a capacity for several libraries’ worth of information. Its durable exterior shell suggested a safe or safety-deposit box, for that was its purpose: to serve as a lasting container for as much African and African-American history as Seraphina could find to fill it. BRER Vole was the input device: with his slender tail jacked directly into the Memory core, he became a data conduit, voraciously devouring the information Seraphina supplied: books, taped oral histories, video and film documentaries, photographs, songs, and whatever other bits of the past she could borrow or steal. While the input cycle ran, Seraphina envisioned a bank vault of dark chromium slowly filling with diamonds and rubies; whether or when someone would come to retrieve the jewels she didn’t know, but at least the treasure was safe.
Morris said he was working on some applications for the accumulated Knowledge, but until he came up with a better idea Seraphina was content to use it for storytelling. She would link the Knowledge Store to a computer interpreter and link the interpreter to the BRERs, who would act out a pageant on whatever topic she selected. She made BRER Beaver play all the villains. Villains and heroes abounded in the pageants, in part because the interpreter made no effort to screen the source material for bias.
“I am John Mercier,” BRER Beaver began, looking silly with a serial cable jammed up under his tail. “I am the wicked overseer of the Slocum Plantation, the ugliest man in the world. I have crooked furry teeth and I stink like the back end of a hog.”
BRER Vole stepped forward; he held his tiny paws in front of him as if tugging on suspenders or the buttonholes of a fancy jacket. “I am Neptune Frost,” he said, “a freedman of Boston, a pupil of abolitionists, and a devoted admirer of John Brown and the honorable Miss Harriet Beecher Stowe. Late one night crossing the Boston Common I was accosted by a man who commented on the color of my eyes. Even as I stopped to speak with him I was struck over the head from behind. When I awoke I found myself bound and gagged in the belly of a ship, on my way to a slave’s life in North Carolina.”
BRER Squirrel came forward last. Morris hadn’t designed her to speak, so her squeaks and chitters went back through the interpreter to be translated. A plastic bead inserted in Seraphina’s ear whispered subtitles: My name is Carrie Slocum. I was stolen away to the Slocum Plantation from a far-off place whose name is lost. They tell me my eyes are haunted with the color of that far country.
BRER Beaver seized BRER Vole by the elbow. “Now I don’t want any trouble from you, ‘freedman.’ You cross me and I’ll whip the back off you. In fact, I might whip the back off you just to keep in practice.” He paused to study BRER Vole’s eyes. “Hmm . . . green eyes on a nigger. Where have I seen that before?” He looked across the desktop stage at BRER Squirrel, then hauled BRER Vole over to her. “Tomorrow you start work in the fields,” BRER Beaver said, giving BRER Vole a rude pat on the backside, “but tonight you have another job. That Gomer Van Wort at the Hayes Plantation is always bragging about his Mandingos, so you’re going to make me a tribe of green-eyed niggers to show him up. Get busy.” He stepped back; the computer mimicked the sound of a shed door being shut and padlocked from the outside.
The would-be parents of the tribe with green eyes gazed shyly at one another. BRER Vole spoke first: “I do not belong here,” he said, “and I am shocked by such a display of disrespect for our race and for womankind. But despite this, I must confess you have the most beautiful face I have ever seen; and I am moved in a way I have never felt before.”
You are puffed-up and over-proud, BRER Squirrel replied, like the peacocks at one of Missy Slocum’s lawn parties. You talk funny. But I am also moved by the sight of you. Much to my later sorrow.
A sound of distant cannonfire. BRER Beaver stood tall and stroked an invisible beard. “I am Master Abraham Lincoln,” he announced, “and I will rain lightning on the South until the scourge of slavery is ended. I call upon all decent men to rally to my cause.”
BRER Vole came to attention. “I will answer that call!” he cried. “Listen, Carrie Slocum: I will not make love to you as a slave. But I vow to escape and make my way north to join the Union Army, and when I return bearing freedom I will take you as my wife.”
Let me escape with you, BRER Squirrel said.
“No,” BRER Vole said. “Your life of ignorance and slavery has left you poorly equipped for such a journey; my chances will be better traveling alone. But I swear upon my life that I will return to you.”
Refusing to hear any argument, BRER Vole bowed and kissed her goodbye. Then he escaped. BRER Beaver cried out in his John Mercier voice: “Stop, nigger!” A single shot was fired, with a ricochet signifying a clean miss; simulated hoofbeats faded into the distance; BRER Beaver cursed. Quoted BRER Squirrel: I should be stoned for a fool. My heart has been stolen by a crazy nigger from the state of Bah-ston, and my life will never be the same again.
So began a long family chronicle, one that continued down seven generations to University of Pennsylvania student Flora Daris (brown-eyed herself but carrying a recessive gene like a pearl of great price), who would offer her Philadelphia hospitality to a bewildered black Amish named Philo. But Seraphina rarely watched the whole story at one sitting.
Neptune Frost reached Washington, D.C., safely and in due course joined the Union Army. His war adventures and his rise from firewood-fetcher to sergeant of a Negro platoon had been recorded by a Corporal Cato Spelman, a young ex-slave who saw in Neptune a much-desired father figure, and so BRER Vole acted out these segments of the tale with a maturity he’d lacked when Carrie Slocum had the point of view. Carrie did her own part for the war effort by conducting a systematic poisoning campaign against John Mercier, mixing ground glass and toxic herbs into his food. BRER Beaver strained and grunted in an imaginary outhouse, clutched a stomach ravaged by ulcers, and at one point begged death to release him from his suffering. But the overseer was still alive when Neptune Frost finally returned to the plantation in the winter of’64 (“Returned bearing fire and a sword,” Cato Spelman wrote; in her own recollection of that day, salvaged on reelto-reel audiotape by the Federal Writers’ Project, Carrie Slocum noted that soldiering had made Neptune more brash and prideful than ever . . . but she was still overjoyed to see him). In a fierce duel at the plantation gate, Neptune cut John Mercier in half with his saber. “Gaaaaah!” BRER Beaver cried, dying; BRER Vole rushed past the corpse to find his bride. The computer played a love theme as the couple reunited.
I’m going to have a son, BRER Squirrel predicted. From just this one night. A son with green eyes.
They embraced; the music swelled again, euphemisticall
y.
“Sergeant Frost!” shouted BRER Beaver, back on his feet in the role of the faithful Corporal Cato. “Wake up, Sergeant! Robert spotted soldiers in the woods just south!”
“Rebel soldiers?”
“Indian soldiers, Sergeant. Led by two white Reb officers. Robert said there weren’t but thirty men all told, and they don’t know we’re here.”
“We can ambush them, then.”
No! BRER Squirrel said. You can’t go! While we slept I dreamt you were killed by a white woman disguised as a soldier. You pulled off her arm, but she put silver on your eyes.
“It was only a dream.” BRER Vole told her. “Slavery is dead. There’s no more need for fear or superstition. Everything will be different now.”
Don’t . . .
“Cato brought a Bible. When I return from the ambush we can be married.”
“That’s enough for today,” Seraphina said.
Flowers from Harry
“Why is there a horse in the common room?” Joan Fine asked, when she got home that evening.
Kite was in the fifth-floor kitchenette she shared with Joan and three other tenants, trying to microwave an emu patty. Her fascination with technology did not extend to instruction manuals; she punched buttons at random and turned the meat gray.
“Progress,” Kite said, shaking her head. “I remember one of the last steady jobs I ever had, wrangling ostrich on a Texas farm just after the millennium. Saturday nights all the hands would sit out under the stars, drink, and roast three-foot drumsticks on an open grill—the only right way to do it. After the meal we’d share a smoke and try to come up with a name to sell the meat by, something more appetizing than ‘ostrich.’ Of course this was before the Australians stole the market with their own big birds and put us out of business.” She dropped the gray patty into the garbage disposal. “Why do you assume I know anything about a horse in the common room?”
“A hunch,” Joan said. “Maxwell again?”
“Maxwell,” Kite agreed. No further explanation was required; Joan said “Oh,” and Kite changed the subject by sniffing the rose bouquet Joan had brought home with her. “For me?”
“For me. From Harry. They were delivered to the hospital just as I was getting myself discharged.”
Kite raised an eyebrow. “So you had an exciting day too, I take it.”
“Three people got eaten, including this green backwoods kid who probably never should have left Maine, and I totted up a quarter million dollars’ worth of damage trying to kill the fish that did it. Only it turns out that I missed. The Post had it in a headline, misidentified as an alligator: KILLER REPTILE SURVIVES BLAST. I thought I was handling the shock pretty well, but when I read that on the subway I threw up. So tonight there’s a killer Carcharodon swimming around in a holding tank in Brooklyn somewhere and a commuter with vomit on his suit who hates me. Oh, and before I forget. . . .” She showed Kite the biomonitor cinched around her wrist. “The hospital agreed to let me go early if I promised to keep an eye on my vitals. If this starts wailing in the middle of the night it means I’ve caught a bug and I’m either burning up with fever or going into convulsions, so if you hear it I’d appreciate you calling 911. But you should probably get rid of the horse first.”
“Poor thing,” Kite said. “You need a cigarette, don’t you?”
“Desperately.”
They went up to the roof. The five-story Fine Bowery Sanctuary had started out as a regular hotel way back in 1870; in Joan’s bedroom a copper plaque warned guests not to blow out the lights without shutting off the gas. A rooftop greenhouse had been erected during World War I to grow a victory garden. Neighboring skyscraper construction and the loss of direct sunlight turned the greenhouse into a brownhouse in the mid-1940s, which it remained until Joan bought the building in 2018. She’d cleared out the refuse, put in full-spectrum lighting and some reclining chairs, and planted flowers.
It was in this small Eden that she and Kite took their frequent cigarette breaks. The dozen long-stemmed roses that Harry had sent were outnumbered by hundreds of live tulips, daffodils, gladioli, forget-me-nots, lupins, etc.; likewise Kite’s and Joan’s smoke was overpowered by the many mingled scents. A Revlon air purifier detected the presence of contaminants and began to work doubletime.
“Is horse theft still a capital crime?” Kite asked, curious.
“Florida’s the only state that still executes for anything. But I doubt horse theft has been decriminalized, even in Nevada.”
“I see,” Kite said, and once again changed the subject. “I applied for another job this morning.”
“As a jockey?”
“Very funny. Gant Construction, actually.”
Joan laughed. “You want to help Harry build New Babel?”
“Would that bother you?”
“No. But what did they say?”
“The usual. You tell people you’re a hundred and eighty-one years old and they don’t want to hire you. I tried to explain that mandatory retirement only makes sense if you die before you spend all your savings. No sympathy.”
“If you could get to Harry’s mother I bet she’d hire you. She used to be a Civil War buff.”
“You still think I’m as crazy as Maxwell, don’t you?”
“Not even my own mother was as crazy as Maxwell,” Joan said. “But a hundred and eighty-one is stretching longevity a bit, yes.”
“Go ahead, then. Ask me something.”
“All right. Who was vice president during Lincoln’s first term?”
Kite shrugged. “Who remembers vice presidents? It’s a silly question.”
“Well it’s the same question I always ask. You could look it up.”
“And discredit myself? My ignorance should be proof enough of my honesty.”
“You think so, huh?”
“Remember the Gospels, Joan. How do we know Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were honest men? Because their accounts of the life of Christ are inconsistent. Whereas if they agreed in every detail we’d have grounds to be suspicious.”
“So by the same token, if you had perfect recall of the 1860s, I’d know you were a fraud. The fact that you don’t means that you really were alive back then.”
“Precisely.”
“That’s good theology,” Joan said, lighting a fresh cigarette. “Have you thought about getting a phony I.D.? You could claim to be only sixty. A mature sixty.”
“I’d sooner go back to Texas. Or strap on a codpiece again, if all I had to hide was my sex. I earned these wrinkles.”
“How about helping me out, then?”
Kite shook her head. “I’ve tried the Department of Sewers already. Same problem.”
“As of this afternoon I don’t work in the sewers anymore,” Joan said. “I’m on assignment for Lexa.”
“This is Lexa who runs the newspaper?”
Joan nodded. “She asked me to do a little detective work for her. Possibly dangerous. You could be my backup.”
“What would we be detecting?”
“A conspiracy.”
“A conspiracy,” Kite marveled. “Well I haven’t been tangled up in one of those in altogether too long.”
“So you’re interested?”
The ancient soldier lit a cigarette, leaned closer, and said: “Tell me all about it, dear.”
5
Also, the whole problem of money is very different today from what it was in the Sixties. Economics are a big thing now; we didn’t have to deal with that as much. There was so much affluence in the Sixties, and if you had to get by on 40 dollars a week, that was fine. You all chipped in, got a crash pad, and just worked it out. . . .
—Abbie Hoffman at Rutgers University, 1988
1969: The Singular Excursion of the Anium Otter
In addition to charges of anarchy, treason, and wickedness on the high seas, Philo Dufresne had been accused by some of being anti-capitalist. While it was true he was opposed to the many abuses of capitalism, such as the halfhour
infomercial, he had nothing against private ownership or the profit motive per se. Even radical environmentalists expected to be paid for their efforts, after all; those saintly few with the means and determination to forgo monetary wages still benefited from the sense of a job well done, a virtuous mission accomplished. Spiritual capital was still capital, even if you couldn’t make rent with it.
Then too, there was the matter of the Yabba-Dabba-Doo. Not just its upkeep, which required more hard currency than any communist could ever have hoped to front, but its history: for however much Morris Kazenstein liked to pretend he’d built the submarine from scratch, the truth was that the Yabba-Dabba-Doo had originated as one of the most expensive practical jokes of the twentieth century. A capitalist practical joke.
Howard Hughes came up with the idea during the paranoid tailspin of his dying years. After seeing a documentary on cryptozoology, the study of animals that turn up in places where they don’t belong, Hughes concocted a scheme to secretly transplant a herd of kangaroos from Australia to the South Dakota badlands. He somehow convinced himself (years of codeine abuse may have played a role here) that the appearance of kangaroos outside of Rapid City would trigger an “international cryptozoological incident” that the U.S. government would have to spend millions of taxpayer dollars investigating, thereby draining the Treasury and forcing salary cuts at the Department of Internal Revenue. Hughes hated taxes, and the thought of I.R.S. staffers losing their Christmas bonuses over a bunch of marsupials made him happier than a bucket of cough syrup.
Early in 1968, Hughes telephoned Melvin Dummar (a friendly Utah gas station attendant who’d once picked him up hitchhiking in the desert) and confided his plan. Dummar agreed it was a stroke of genius but said it reminded him of a novel he’d heard of—not actually read, but heard of—in which Mormon sewer workers do battle with albino alligators beneath the streets of Salt Lake City. A novel? said Hughes, and in a few narcotic-assisted leaps of the imagination decided that the feds had foxed him somehow, figured out his intentions and rushed into print to taunt him with their foreknowledge. He asked Dummar who the book’s author was, and Dummar told him, sort of.