The Best of Electric Velocipede

by John Klima

  The art disease.

  Merriweather was terminal with it, and the Trish woman as well.

  Wallace Stevens. Of course he’d read Wallace Stevens. Who hadn’t? He wasn’t about to admit it to her. They mustn’t know. Not yet.

  Everyone had a little blanket now. Trish handed you one as you came in. “Welcome aboard,” she said. No wonder you couldn’t get them on planes anymore. Paul Throne of the Internal Revenue Service traveled a lot for his job, tracking down fraudulent claims. He specialized in phony churches, and this one was as phony as they come, and yet, there was something authentic about it he couldn’t figure out at first—or maybe he hadn’t wanted to figure it out. Maybe he wanted to come here like this, expose himself to what was clearly a particularly virulent, visionary strain of the art disease, obviously highly contagious.

  The place was filling up with them, one diseased soul after another. Two women in particular were besotted, passing around big cookies with what looked like Sharky the Snowman nailed to the cross by his flippers. His youngest liked Sharky. He used to sing “Sharks Like Christmas Too!” to her. It was okay to sing to your kids, wasn’t it? Now she was thirteen. She had hardened her heart against Sharky. He thought it would make a terrific musical.

  He’d interviewed several members of the congregation, milling about expectantly, like they were waiting for Warhol or Jesus. The place smelled like one of the clubs his band used to play but without the liquor. Any outburst of art would be received here as an offering to the gods, even if it came from Paul Throne of the Internal Revenue Service. He took a discreet pull from a half pint of brandy he bought on the way to the church. Loosens up the throat, the soul, the nerve. He breathed deeply. He took the cookie as a sign, a request.

  He knelt upon the blue blankie, bowed his head, and ate his cookie, as Captain Derek ascended a rolling stairway as if he were going to hand his boarding pass to the Lamb of God. Flying men on trapeze swooped back and forth, tossing Trish from one to the other above Paul’s head. The sound of the swings seemed to count off the beat. He looked into the skewed eyes of God and rose, bursting into song.

  “Sharks swim in the ocean

  “Big and wide and blue!

  “But I like to be a snowman,

  “And I tell you why that’s true:

  “Sharks might bite!

  “And sharks might fight!

  “But sharks like Christmas too!”

  Everyone joined in. Well, not everyone. The guy who hates everything held back. He had his eye on Derek, who wasn’t singing either.

  *

  Derek was afraid of heights. He’d forgotten that. It hadn’t seemed so high when they planned it. This had been Trish’s idea, that he be snatched from this high perch—which felt higher than fifteen feet to him—by the outstretched hands of one of her troupe, then swung down and deposited in the congregation, one of them, on the humble rag that was the original blanket the whole nonsense came swaddled in, a mere mortal, but a guide from above. It had sounded totally visionary and not so high up, but standing here was scary as shit.

  He only had one try, when Otto swept by. That was the guy’s name whose hands he was to leap for, Otto. He had every muscle you could name. Derek couldn’t name more than two or three. He tried to imagine leaping into the air to catch those unnamed muscles. No. But he had to. Everyone was kneeling on their little blankets munching cookie, staring at him, perfectly positioned beneath the shaft of the bright sun beaming down into the sanctuary through the hole in the roof. Some shielded their eyes from the glare, others clasped hands in prayer.

  And then the Throne nut started singing. Sharky? Where did the Sharky thing come from? Sharky cookies? Emily claimed different, but she was all pissed about Trish and probably into something with Sofía, though they had brought Sofía’s sister and all her friends in from the burbs. They all belted out the Sharky tune with Throne like they were maybe a little drunk. It was inspirational. Derek felt like a fucking megachurch.

  The feeling was fleeting. Pride goeth before the Fall. He missed Otto’s outstretched hands, watched them sweeping away down below him, too late to be caught, just as the last strains of Throne’s baritone faded to hushed, anticipatory silence. He’d just break his neck if he dove for Otto now.

  So it all came down to this. This moment of truth. Was he a real artist or not? To fall was to fail. The stairway led nowhere. There was no plane to board. Cornered by his art, it would take a miracle to get himself out of this one. He should’ve seen it coming. Don’t things always go this way? You can’t just keep giving people visions when what they want is miracles.

  He shrugged his shoulders, looked up into the blinding light. There was nothing for it. He spread his arms and began to rise, passing before the plywood-faced lamb, past the stunned cock-eyed gaze of Jesus, wafted on the collective gasp of his congregation, all the way to the rafters, which he hoped would be miraculous enough. The roof was going to cost enough without punching a hole in it to ascend any further. You had to leave a little something for the next performance. He landed in the choir loft knocking over a huddle of music stands no one wanted. The clatter echoed through the sanctuary like the clash of thunder. He leaned out over his flock and took a bow, expecting applause, but they were all kneeling on their little blue blankets—witnesses to a miracle—their faces, their lives, utterly transformed—hands lifted to the sky wanting more—even the guy who hates everything, even Paul Throne.

  Even Emily.

  Now he’d done it. He’d given all for art and could give no more. He had cured himself of the art disease. He would forevermore be mired in mere miracle. Alas.

  He had become as one of the gods.

  Heaven Under Earth

  Aliette de Bodard

  Husband’s new spouse is brought home in a hovering palanquin decked with red lanterns, its curtains displaying images of mandarin ducks and kingfishers—the symbols of a happy marriage.

  First Spouse Liang Pao has gathered the whole household by the high gate, from the stewards to the cooks, from the lower spouses to their valets. He’s standing slightly behind Husband, with his head held high, with pins of platinum holding his immaculate topknot in place—in spite of the fact that he’s been unable to sleep all night. The baby wouldn’t stop kicking within his womb, and the regulators in his blood disgorged a steady stream of yin-humours to calm him down. He’s slightly nauseous, as when he’s had too much rice wine to drink—and he wonders why they never get easier, these carryings.

  The palanquin stops, lowers itself gracefully as the steward cuts off the dragon-breath fields. The scarlet curtains sway, twisting out of shape the characters for good luck and long life.

  Husband steps out first, holding out his hand to the spouse inside—he’s wearing his best clothes, white live-worm silk preserved since the days of the colonist ancestors, a family heirloom reserved for grand events.

  And the spouse . . .

  When she steps out of the palanquin, Liang Pao cannot help a slight gesture of recoil. He wasn’t expecting . . .

  Behind him, the servants and the lower spouses are whispering in disbelief. Liang Pao turns, slightly, to throw them a cutting glance—and the whispers cease, but they don’t erase the facts.

  The new spouse is unmistakably a woman—not a caihe like Liang Pao and the others, a woman with a live womb and eggs of her own. Except . . . Except that it’s obvious how Husband could afford to bring a woman home even though he’s not a High Official: her calm, stately face under the white makeup is older than it should be. She’s in her late fifties, at best—and her childbearing years are, if not over, very near their end. By the time her seclusion has ended, she’ll be useless.

  Husband turns around, presenting her to the household, and Liang Pao’s ingrained reflexes take over from his shock.

  From a faraway place, as distant as the heights of Mount Xu, he walks to her and bows, slightly—as befitting a superior to an inferior. “My Lady,” he says. “We wish you a pr
osperous marriage.” He hesitates for a fraction of a second, but still he completes the traditional blessing. “May you have the Dragon’s Nine Sons, every one of them with their own strength and successes.”

  Pointless. She won’t have any sons, or any daughters for that matter.

  “First Spouse,” Husband says, equally formally. “This insignificant person by my side is Qin Daiyu, and she humbly begs you to enter the house as a lawfully wedded spouse.”

  Liang Pao blesses formalities—the only thing he can hold onto, steady and unvarying and as surely ingrained in his mind as Master Kong’s Classics. “She is welcome under this roof, for the term of her seclusion and for the term of her marriage. May Heaven bestow on both of you a thousand years of happiness.”

  All this, of course, does nothing to quell the acrid taste in his mouth, and nothing to answer his question—the endless “Why?” swirling in his head like a trapped bird.

  *

  As manager of the household, Liang Pao is the one who assigns Fourth Spouse her quarters and servants of her own. The best thing for her would have been caihes, but he cannot very well ask one of the two other spouses to wait on her, when she’s still the youngest member of the household—in seniority if not in age.

  Liang Pao selects the only two neutered valets he has, and takes them to help Fourth Spouse unpack her bridal things: three heavy lacquered coffers, antiquities predating the Arrival. If these could be sold, they’d fetch a price even higher than Husband’s silk robes.

  Where under Heaven did Husband find her?

  Fourth Spouse watches him the whole time, with a frank look of appraisal he finds disturbing—she’s neither as meek nor as demure as a woman should be.

  But then, he knows so little of women.

  When the servants have left, Fourth Spouse doesn’t move. She only bows her head, with a stately gesture that looks correct—but that sends a tingle down Liang Pao’s spine, a hint of wrongness. She says, “Thank you.”

  “It’s my place.” He knows he should stay with the prescribed topics, wish her again health and happiness, but his curiosity is too great. “It’s unusual for our household to . . . welcome such a guest.”

  “I have no doubt,” she says, then offers a mocking smile.

  No opening, then, and he’s unsure of why he’s ever hoped there would be one. Ritual assigns each of them their place: to him, the running of the household, including that of her quarters; to her, the seclusion and the regular visits from the Embroidered Guards, the taking of her last few eggs to pay the tax on female marriages.

  After a last bow, he’s preparing to leave, when she does speak.

  “The stars have shifted their course to bring me here from the willow-and-flower house,” she says. Her formal speech is at odds with the frank gaze she trains on him.

  Liang Pao stops, frozen in the doorframe. A willow-and-flower. A courtesan. That’s where Husband found her, then, in a high-class brothel—one that can afford a few women from the Ministry of Rites, in addition to their usual fare of caihes and boys.

  “So that’s why he could afford you.” He doesn’t even attempt the usual courtesies; but he doubts she’ll be shocked by this breach. That’s why her gaze was assessing him then—as a potential client, even though the idea of a caihe sleeping with a woman is ludicrous.

  She shrugs. Her robe slides down her shoulders as she does so, revealing skin the color of the moon, and tight, round breasts that he could hold in one hand. And, as he thinks of that, the same deep sense of wrongness tightens in his womb.

  There’s a smell in the air—blossoming on the edge of perception, a mixture of flowers and sweat and Buddha knows what. Liang Pao’s breath quickens. He knows what it has to be: spring-scents, tailored to arouse her clients. But he’s not one of them. He’s not even a man. It can’t be working on him.

  “You’ve never seen a woman before,” Fourth Spouse says, as blunt as he is.

  He shakes his head. “I was born the normal way,” he says. In an automated incubator, after his father filled out the necessary forms at the Ministry of Rites.

  “I see.” Her lips curl—she’s amused, and bitter, though he doesn’t know why. “You were born a man.”

  Liang Pao shrugs. It seems such a long time ago, when he was still a boy and still dreaming of being head of his own household, fantasizing over how many spouses he’d be allowed to take—long before he failed the exams, long before knives and needles cut into his flesh, before regulators moulded him into something else. Now it’s a faded memory, blunted and harmless. He’s caihe now—has always been so.

  Fourth Spouse draws herself up, her chest jutting out in what looks like a practised pose. But the ease with which she does it belies that. It’s a reflex, as ingrained within her as politeness and courtesies are within Liang Pao.

  His heartbeat has quickened; but underneath is the familiar languor caused by his regulators releasing new yin-humours, and within a few moments his breath grows calm again, his heartbeat steady once more.

  He shouldn’t be here. Anything out of the ordinary could endanger the pregnancy; and though Husband’s post as a fifth-rank civil servant entitles him to nine transfers, he doesn’t want to be the one to spoil a perfectly good egg. “I’ll leave you alone,” he says.

  The look of veiled contempt she gives him sears him to the bone. “You’re less than a man, then. Unable to give voice to your desires.”

  He doesn’t understand. “I have no desires.”

  “Not anymore, I guess.”

  Liang Pao rubs his hand against the bulge of his belly—feeling the child twist and turn within him, wondering if the heartbeat he hears is his own or the baby’s. “I’m carrying.”

  “I can see that,” she says, again. “Husband’s child by—”

  He shrugs. She knows the ritual as well as he does: Husband donated the sperm, and one of the thousand thousand eggs in the huge vaults of the Ministry of Rites was unfrozen, fertilized—and transferred into him. That’s the way it works, with caihes.

  Wives, of course, are different, and the transfer is much easier. Natural, one of his teachers at the Ministry said, once, in an unguarded moment—before closing his eyes and forcefully changing the subject. For most of New Zhongguo, wives are an unattainable dream: sold for fortunes by the Ministry of Rites, and all but reserved to High Officials.

  Fourth Spouse laughs, a quiet, pleasant sound, the tinkle of a chime over a waterfall. “Carrying or not, you can’t change the fact that you’re a man.”

  “You’re mistaken,” he says, calmly, carefully, in the same tone mandarins use to explain things to off-worlders. “I’m not a man.”

  Fourth Spouse smiles, shaking her head in disdain.

  This is ridiculous. He’s First Spouse of the household, carrying Husband’s child within him—and here she is, all but flirting with him, taunting him for what he is not. “I would seem to be disturbing you,” he says, as stiff and as formal as he can manage. “I will leave you to your rest.”

  He goes away: walking as quickly as he can, feeling the languor in every fibre of his being, the regulators struggling to keep up with the quickening of his breath, with the tight feeling in his chest.

  Caihe, he is caihe, he has to remember that.

  *

  Liang Pao never goes into her room, after that. He has his life and she has hers, and he won’t think on her words or of the images she’s conjured in him: memories of a distant childhood when he flew steel-yarn kites just like his own children are doing in the courtyard—just like the boy in his womb will do some day.

  Still, he wakes up every night, in the privacy of his quarters—his heart beating madly for a few, interminable seconds before the yin-humours kick in and he sinks back into sleep again. In his dreams, in the waking world, he aches with a desire he can’t place, a need that seeks to supersede even the pregnancy.

  Fourth Day comes round again: the moment of his moonly examination. The doctor arrives at the gates of the hous
ehold, prim and on time, and is shown into the examination room, where Liang Pao sits hidden behind a chromed screen. The doctor takes his place near the entrance of the room. His caihe assistant goes back and forth behind the screen, observing Liang Pao’s symptoms and reporting to the doctor. As the cool, capable hands rest on his wrists and on his throat, taking one by one the twelve pulses of the heart, Liang Pao remembers other hands against him—wielding knives and injectors, gently pressing their blades until the skin broke and blood pearled with the first prickling of pain. He remembers the first yin-humours within him, the sickening taste in his mouth and the unfamiliar languor, as constricting as the cangue restricting a prisoner’s arms . . .

  He comes to with a start. The caihe assistant has finished; behind the screen, the doctor is busy reporting. He’s been droning on for a while, about the rate of metal-humours and wood-humours in the body—nothing out of the ordinary, it would seem. Everything is going as well as expected, and within a few moons Husband will have a young, healthy boy.

  Then he’s gone, but Liang Pao doesn’t move for a long while—not until the memories fade into harmlessness, and his hands stop shaking.

  He’s never had dreams like those before; but then he has never been so close to a woman before. He’s been taught to be a good caihe: to sing and recite poetry; to walk in fast, mincing steps that make it look as though he’s swaying; to play soulful songs on the qin until his fingers are numbed to the pain from the strings. But he has never been taught what he should do with a woman—or what to do when his yin-humours struggle to keep up with the pregnancy.

  Carrying or not, you can’t change the fact that you’re a man.

  Is that all there is to it?

  On a whim, he rises and walks to the freezer, and orders it to open. In the first drawer is a beaker engraved with phoenixes and dragons sporting among clouds—and within, hanging suspended in nitrogen, is a single egg, due to be transferred into Second Spouse’s womb at the next Moon Festival.