by Geoff Ryman
Third was under her house when the Neighbors came. She was feeding the hens. In her language, hens were called Great Fat Ladies in White Bloomers. Third fed them slugs she had collected from the paddies. She counted their eggs and she knew which Ladies were fattest. She knew their future from their weight.
It was the first cloudless day. The old house above her sighed and shifted on its haunches. It fed on light. The borders of its shadow were sharply defined on the ground.
Suddenly there was a warbling. It was from the men on the hill, and the house stood up.
It lurched to its feet, swaying, and the wicker cages between its legs snapped and flew apart. There were crashes of falling crockery overhead. Third knew her second sister had been beside the charcoal stove. She heard her second sister scream. Third ran outside to see.
All along the valley, the houses began to hoot in panic. The flood warning, the warning for a flood, over and over. The hens scattered, in wavering lines.
Low overhead, and silently, came Sharks. Sharks, it was said, had been human once. Sunlight reflected on their humming wings, and they were long and sleek and freckled with big brown spots like old people get on their hands. Third saw their round and happy faces. She saw them smile. As they passed, wind whipped into her face, and she turned.
An attack. Third knew what to do in an attack. She was to hide in the deepest part of the house, and wrap herself in white blankets. But the porch of the house now towered above her head. Her sister stood on it, wailing, beet-red, scalded by the stove.
“Sister, get inside!” cried Third. The old house trumpeted with relief, and snatched Third up with its trunk. It thought there was a flood, thought it had to keep Third from trying to swim, from drowning, so it lifted her up high over its round and featureless head, and began to march for the higher ground. The ground was still moist. There was no dust. Third could see everything.
She saw the stampede of houses, as they gained speed, throwing their great feet forward into a lumbering trot, their heads bobbing with effort. She saw the fields beyond, the women running, but she could not see her mother, and she saw the Sharks. They puffed out their cheeks and they blew, and where they blew, everything died in a line, like a furrow.
The rice went brown, crumpling up like burning paper. A Great Fat Lady collapsed in a rumpled heap like a big balloon losing air, her feathers curling up, melting away. Third knew where the path of destruction was proceeding. She knew who was going to fall next, who was running to intercept the lines of death. She tried to call to them. “Madame Goh! Madame Goh! Stop running!” she piped, and heard the frailty of her own voice. She looked for her mother. She looked for her sister.
The old guns on the hill leapt forward and settled back, and there was a boom and batter that made Third scream and cover her ears. Parts of the opposite hillside were thrown up as chunks of rock and the spinning heads of trees. The Sharks whistled, cheering, as if at a football match, and swept low over the guns. After that, the guns were silent. The Sharks rose up in the sky, reflecting light like dragonflies. They were almost beautiful for a moment. Then they turned and descended on the village. As they leveled off, Third knew she was directly in their path.
Third’s eldest sister jumped down from her cousin’s house as it lumbered forward. She dodged between the houses on her long stick legs, in her red gingham dress.
“House,” she called as she ran. “Old house. Kneel down! Kneel down!”
She jogged backward beside it, jumping up and down, trying to reach Third. The house was too panicked to notice, and Third was clogged with terror. Third saw the faces of the Sharks, the row of smiles, the number of teeth. They batted their eyelashes at her, and giggled. They puffed out their cheeks like the Four Winds, and blew.
Third turned her head, and felt the withering blast of antilife pass her by. It scraped her ankle, and the flesh over the bone rose up in protest, bubbles of oil seething under a patch of skin. She felt the backwash of air as they passed. She felt a wing throb, almost gently for a moment, on the top of her head. There was tinkling, musical laughter, a sprinkle of notes that almost reassured Third Child. Then she looked down.
Her elder sister lay in a puddle. The gingham dress had gone orange. Her skin was a sickly, translucent yellow, puckered up and crinkled and soft. Her pigtails had gone altogether; strands of hair blew in the dust.
Overhead, the Sharks made a rude, farting sound. They sashayed in the air, bumping their middles from side to side, as if they had hips. They were mocking humankind.
The Neighbors followed soon after, in the cavernous bellies of winged transports. There were ninety of them, in three parties. They did not look different from the Unconquered People. They had the same sleek brown skin and they were not ugly. They wore green coolsuits against the heat, and had bands of metal strapped to their index fingers that spurted fire and light where they pointed. They also carried the ceremonial bayonets that were the mark of a true warrior. The Sharks hovered overhead holding the fluttering banners of the Neighbors in their teeth.
Third’s mother sat in the darkest part of the house, Third and her second sister on her lap. Rocking them, going “Sssh, Ssssh, Sssh,” to soothe them. The eldest sister still lay in the dust outside: the second sister wailed inconsolably. For Third everything was muffled, even the pain in her ankle. Third was silent. She must have gone for a drink of water, for at some point she was standing in front of the window by the tub. Through a wavering curtain of hot, rising air, she saw two village men being led out into the paddies. All the sound was muffled, too, except for the buzzing of flies.
One of the villagers was her cousin. He had a soft round face and a thick mustache. He wore a crisp plaid shirt that his mother would have beaten clean that morning, and the loose black leggings of the People. The trousers had an airy slit up the inside leg, and one of the Neighbors ran the blade of his bayonet up along it. Her cousin stepped back, scowling, too anxious to be angry. Third saw one of the Neighbors tell a joke, laughing, and flick his cigarette into the water.
Both men were pushed down onto their knees. The other villager, a wiry and nervous uncle, began to plead, jabbering. A Neighbor knelt on his shoulder, and pulled his head back, hard, by the hair. The uncle held up the thin palms of his hands against the bayonets.
Third’s cousin knelt, fists folded, calmly glancing over his shoulders at the familiar hills, as if he did not care about them, not yet sure, unable to believe, that he was going to die.
Third did not remember his murder. She remembered the face of the man who did it. He was tiny and thin and wretched, with outlines of gold around his tobacco-stained teeth. His cheeks were deeply scarred by pockmarks, and he was grinning a rictus grin. It took over the lower half of his face, and Third understood that he was grinning in order to frighten, because he felt evil, and he thought that this was what evil looked like, and that evil made him important.
Suddenly her cousin was on his side, his face still soft and confused. Once he and Third had gone out together to look at the stars, and he had lain on the ground like that. Third had fallen asleep with her head on his chest. Blood spread across his chest now, in the orderly patterns of the crisp plaid shirt.
He was the Accountant. No one else would know so well how the yarrow worked. Third’s mother eased her away from the window.
The Neighbors came for a visit. They took swigs of water from Third’s cup. “We are your friends,” they told Third’s mother, and requisitioned the rice she had not hidden. They told her to save her menstrual blood. Third’s mother dipped and bowed to them, hands high over head. She smiled. When they were gone, she pulled Third to her, and hugged her, and her hands were trembling. Third listened to the Neighbors under her house, chasing her White Ladies. They were taking them away.
“They are going to do something with our blood,” said Third’s mother. “They want to weaken the male power of our men.”
They slaughtered ten of the old houses. Third’s own house began to
make a new noise, a wheedling noise, tightly constrained. The walls shook delicately. Third’s mother risked looking out of the window, and saw them hacking at the carcass of their cousin’s house. The new little white house lay by its side. The Neighbors began to erect new, dead houses that could not walk to other valleys.
“There is nothing for us here,” said Third’s mother. In the night, she parceled up the stove, and a pot, and their rice, and she led her children away from the village.
They had to leave their old caring house behind. They tethered it to a stake. It knew it was being left, and couldn’t understand why. As they crept away it began to bellow after them, tugging at the line that held it. Deserted houses sometimes died of love.
“Go!” whispered Third’s mother, and pushed her, and gave her another nudge when Third turned around. “Keep going! Don’t look back even if I fall down.” They heard the Neighbors call to each other. They sounded like dogs barking. Third and her family flitted into the shadow of the trees and waited until their house fell silent. Then they moved on.
They went, like everyone else, to the city. Third’s mother carried them most of the way on her back.
There would have been flowers at the wedding of Third’s cousin. Years later, she still found herself looking forward to it. All the village girls would have been linked together by a chain of flowers. Third would have tended the bride.
The villagers grew the flowers, lotuses, along the borders of the rice paddies. The flowers were not picked, except for special occasions. In the mornings the lotuses would be open wide; by noon they would be shut. There had been a medium in the village who claimed she had the soul of a prince who was in turn possessed by the soul of a sorcerer. Third had once seen her eat a glass cup to prove it, crunching it in her mouth. Each house had a shrine to the Buddha, which was exchanged each month with a different house.
The People sang when they spoke. The language was tonal; melody carried meaning. The numbers sang too. The yarrow would be cast into patterns that were tones. They seemed to speak. They turned into songs.
They were feast songs, work songs, cooking songs, cast by the yarrow. Everyone sang them. Long afterward, Third would find herself humming them. She no longer knew what they meant. She had forgotten the words and the numbers. But they still murmured to her, like voices in memory.
Her name was a spell, a number, and Third’s mother only had to say it, to remember tigers. As they fled from the village, Third and her family were in terror of tigers. Where they slept, Third’s mother made a fire against them.
In the middle of the night, Third felt hot breath on her cheeks, and opened her eyes. Looming over her, as large as she was, was the face of the tiger. There was blood on its muzzle, and its great green eyes stared into her, piercing her like shafts, brushing, it seemed, her very soul, making it go hushed and cold. Third did not move. There was nothing she could do. The tiger snuffled her once more and then, having eaten already, silently padded away on its big orange feet. Third looked, and saw that her mother and sister were still alive.
Third couldn’t sleep after that, so she tried counting the stars. It was so slow. One. Two. Three.
Suddenly there was a great rising out of her of numbers. A rage of numbers, the old numbers, angry and dislocated. They reached up out of her for something, some answer, some reason. They almost seized it. The size of the world. The number of the People. Third felt her breath and heart constrict. The numbers withdrew like a flock of birds into the sky. She could almost hear them cawing. She saw the pattern they made. It was the pattern of the future, black wings and tiger stripes.
In the morning, she stood up when her mother did and told her nothing about it.
PART TWO
THE CEREMONY
The city of Saprang Song had paved streets, over two thousand of them, and plumbing, enough for a million people. By the time Third was an adult, eight million, half of the People, had crowded into it.
The old city was made of stone and steel: the new city was made of flesh. The Neighbors had introduced a new kind of mobile home. It was slow and stupid, a long beige tube, with ribs in its ceiling, and a single window, and a single door. When it was closed, the door looked like the bottom of a mushroom, all gills. When it opened, a flap of flesh came out like a tongue, steps to climb.
The houses were supposed to spread out, across the countryside. Instead, the refugees discovered that the houses could climb, on legs that looked like the cooked wings of chickens. They had long hairs like wires at the tip. The houses could cling to each other’s backs. As the refugees swarmed, the houses rose up in haphazard towers, tall lopsided heaps of housing, waves of it, with no streets between them. They looked like a piled mass of Conestoga wagons.
The People had to walk up and over each other’s houses to get to their own, or squeeze through narrow passageways past houses turned into tiny shops or brothels. They shouted at each other to be quiet, and fended off new, creeping houses with brooms. Lines of laundry, gray and faded, hung between the towers, and the air was always full of the smell of cooking and the hearty blare of media entertainment. Sometimes the ribs of the lowest houses would break from the weight, and the towers would collapse in a fleshy avalanche. In the monsoon rains, the water would drain down the towers in steps, like waterfalls, and flood the lowest layers. The houses would go very diseased, soft and bruised and seeping. The very poorest people dried the dead ones, and lived in the husks. Or they ate them.
They fought with municipal beasts that prowled the streets eating garbage and the unloved dead.
Third was going to sell her left eye. It was common practice. There were dealers. They would prize it out of her, without any drugs for the pain, and freeze it, and sell it for transplants or machinery. It was illegal, of course. The dealers had stalls in the markets that could be moved quickly when the Neighbors came.
There were many people waiting in line. The old woman in front of Third already had a puckered pouch of skin where one eye should have been. She was going to sell her second eye in order to buy her granddaughter a wedding coat. She was very calm and gracious and proud, in immaculate black. “You must not imagine I was always like this, oh no,” she said, smiling, wagging a finger. “I was a high lady in my village.” They all said that, but the gentle, precise way she spoke made Third believe her. “Now my granddaughter will be one as well. That is her mother, there, my daughter.” A woman in a glossy pink jacket stood well away from the line, pretending not to see them. “Isn’t she pretty? She is so embarrassed. Make sure she gets the money, please?”
“You. Next,” said the dealer, looking harassed and chubby in his white shorts and bright printed shirt. He led the old woman away with his young son to help. He drew a black drapery on rings, like a shower curtain, around her. When the old woman emerged, both eyes were closed, and her skin was white and greasy with sweat, and she reached out into the air for Third, and tried to speak, but the sound was slurred and distorted, like a tape at the wrong speed. She grabbed Third’s arm, and Third felt a jolt from her, like electricity, from the quaking of her bones.
Third fainted. She lacked food and blood, and she’d been standing for hours, and waves of nausea seemed to pour out of the old woman. When Third awoke, on asphalt, on crushed and sour cabbage, the woman was gone. A soldier, in the uniform of the Neighbors, was leaning over her.
“The Peace of God,” he said. He was of the People, from the country, and with country courtesy he bowed, his hands pressed together as in prayer, at the level of his mouth and chin. That meant the soldier considered Third to be his equal.
She plainly wasn’t. Third grunted and sat up. “Peace of God,” she murmured, and did not bother to bow. She tried to stand up, to regain her place in line. The soldier helped her to her feet, but kept a grip on her arm, and would not let her move back toward the dealer’s stall.
“Perhaps you would like something to eat?” he asked, grinning stupidly, with a battery of green, misshapen teeth. He
was very ugly, with no chin and a large Adam’s apple, and creases across his neck.
“Yes,” said Third, immediately, whatever it was he wanted from her, though she was still feeling queasy. “In there.” There was a small shop that sold dried insects in glass jars. Some of them were coated in sugar.
“No, no, you cannot eat there,” he said, and pulled her with him.
“But that is what I want,” she protested, looking wistfully back at the window full of insects. What sort of crazy man was this? Did he want a prostitute? She, Third, was no prostitute, he must see that. She was Dastang Tze-See, which meant Desperate Flies in Filth. Desperate Flies filled their wombs, as she did, with other forms of life. No man would go near them. There were silly, nasty stories of men finding Sharks in wait inside them. He had seen her in the line, he must know that. So what did he want?
He took her to a proper food wagon where families ate, with a sign and a man in an apron, and he bought her roast pork and bean sprouts and rice, and she nearly fainted again, from the smell, and from wonder.
She crammed her mouth full of it. The skin on the pork had actually been rubbed with salt, and it was crisp and moist with fat, and the bean sprouts were hot and fresh and clean tasting, and the rice was hefty and drenched in soy.
“Is it good?” the soldier asked.
Third shrugged with equivocation, her cheeks round and shiny with grease. It was not wise to appear too grateful. The soldier watched her as she ate, still smiling. If only, she thought, he would stop grinning and hide those teeth. Poor people should never smile. She was considering whether she had the strength to run away from him, when he said, “I have to go now.”
She looked at him, eyes slightly narrowed, still chewing.
“I must return to the barracks. Look, meet me here tomorrow, this time, and we will have another meal.”