by Rich Horton
One day, I came home from a departmental meeting and Shaila wasn’t in the apartment. She was usually home by seven. I assumed she’d had to stay late for a lab. The other Shaila was cooking dinner in the kitchen. At eight, when she hadn’t come back yet, I sat down at the kitchen table to eat. To my surprise, the other Shaila sat down across from me, at the place set for Shaila. She had never sat down at the table with us before.
She looked at me with her dark eyes and said, “How was your day, Pati?”
I dropped my fork. It clattered against the rim of the plate. She had never spoken before, not one sentence, not one word. Her voice was just like Shaila’s, but with a stronger accent. At least it sounded stronger to me. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell.
“Where’s Shaila?” I said. I could feel a constriction in my chest, as though a fist had started to close around my heart. Like the beginning of my father’s heart attack. I think even then, I knew.
“What do you mean?” she said. “I’m Shaila. I have always been Shaila. The only Shaila there is.”
I stared down at the lamb and peas in saffron curry. The smell reminded me of Cimmeria, of the bazaar. I could almost hear the clash of the cooking pots.
“You’ve done something to her, haven’t you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Eat your dinner, Pati. It’s going to get cold. You’ve been working so hard lately. I don’t think it’s good for you.”
But I could not eat. I stood up, accidentally hitting my hip on the table and cursing at the pain. With a growing sense of panic, I searched the apartment for any clue to Shaila’s whereabouts. Her purse was in the closet, with her cell phone in it, so she must have come home earlier in the evening. All her clothes were on the hangers, as far as I could tell—she had a lot of clothes. Nothing seemed to be missing. But Shaila was not there. The other Shaila stood watching me, as though waiting for me to give up, admit defeat. Finally, after one last useless look under the bed, I left, deliberately banging the door behind me. She had to be somewhere.
I walked across campus, to the Life Sciences classrooms and labs, and checked all of them. Then I walked through the main library and the science library, calling “Shaila!” until a graduate student in a carrel told me to be quiet. By this time, it was dark. I went to her favorite coffee shop, the Espresso Bean, where undergraduates looked at me strangely from behind their laptops, and then to every shop and restaurant that was still open, from the gelato place to the German restaurant, famous for its bratwurst and beer, where students took their families on Parents’ Weekend. Finally, I walked the streets, calling “Shaila!” as though she were a stray dog, hoping that the other Shaila was simply being presumptuous, rebelling against her secondary status. Hoping the real Shaila was out there somewhere.
I passed the police station and stood outside, thinking about going in and reporting her missing. I would talk to a police officer on duty, tell him I could not find my wife. He would come home with me, to find—my wife, saying that I was overworked and needed to rest, see a psychiatrist. Shaila had entered the country with a diplomatic passport—one passport, for one Shaila. Had anyone seen the other Shaila? Only my mother. She had picked us up at the airport, we had spent the night with her, all three of us eating dinner at the dining-room table. She had avoided looking at the other Shaila, talking to Shaila about how the roses were doing well this year despite aphids, asking whether she knew how to knit, how she dyed her hair that particular shade of blue—pointless, polite talk. And then we had rented a car and driven to Arizona, me and Shaila in the front seat, the other Shaila in back with the luggage. Once we had arrived at the university, she had stayed in the apartment. Lisa knew, but she and Mike the Second were still in Cimmeria, and their internet connection could be sporadic. I could talk to Dr. Farrow? She would be in her office tomorrow morning, before classes. She would at least believe me. But I knew, with a cold certainly in the pit of my stomach, that Anne Farrow would look at me from over the wire rims of her glasses and say, “Pat, you know as well as I do that culture defines personhood.” She was an anthropologist, through and through. She would not interfere. I had been married to Shaila, I was still married to Shaila. There was just one less of her.
In the end, I called my mother, while sitting on a park bench under a street lamp, with the moon sailing high above, among the clouds.
“Do you know what time it is, Pat?” she asked.
“Listen, Mom,” I said, and explained the situation.
“Oh, Pat, I wish you hadn’t married that woman. But can’t you divorce her? Are you allowed to divorce in that church? I wish you hadn’t broken up with Bridget Ferguson. The two of you were so sweet together at prom. You know she married an accountant and has two children now. She sent me a card at Christmas.”
I said good night and told her to go back to sleep, that I would figure it out. And then I sat there for a long time.
When I came home, well after midnight, Shaila was waiting for me with a cup of Cimmerian coffee, or as close as she could get with an American espresso machine. She was wearing the heart pajamas I had given Shaila for Valentine’s Day.
“Pati,” she said, “you left so quickly that I didn’t have time to tell you the news. I heard it on CNN this morning, and then Daddy called me. Malek was assassinated yesterday.” Malek was her brother. I had never met him—he had been an officer in the military, and while I had been in Cimmeria, he had been serving in the mountains. I knew that he had been recalled to the capital to deal with the Sarmantian agitation, but that was all.
“Assassinated? How?”
“He was trying to negotiate with the Sons of Sarmatia, and a radical pulled out a gun that had gotten through security. You never watch the news, do you, Pati? I watch it a great deal. It is important for me to learn the names of the world leaders, learn about international diplomacy. That is more important than organic chemistry, for a Khanum.”
“A what?”
“Don’t you understand? Now that Malek is dead, I am next in the line of succession. Someday, I will be the Khanum of Cimmeria. That is what we call a female Khan. In some countries, only male members of the royal family can succeed to the throne. But Cimmeria has never been like that. It has always been cosmopolitan, progressive. The philosopher Amirabal persuaded Teshup the Third to make his daughter his heir, and ever since, women can become rulers of the country. My great-grandmother, Daddy’s grandma, was a Khanum, although she resigned when her son came of age. It is the same among the Scythians and Sarmatians.” This was Lisa’s doing. It had to be Lisa’s doing. She was the one who had come up with Amirabal and the philosophical school she had founded in 500 BCE. Even Plato had praised her as one of the wisest philosophers in the ancient world. I silently cursed all Birkenstock-wearing feminists.
“What does this mean?” I asked.
“It means that tomorrow we fly to Washington, where I will ask your President for help against the Sarmatian faction. This morning on one of the news shows, the Speaker of the House criticized him for not supporting the government of Cimmeria. He mentioned the War on Terror—you know how they talk, and he wants to be the Republican candidate. But I think we can finally get American aid. While I am there, I will call a press conference, and you will stand by my side. We will let the American people see that my husband is one of them. It will generate sympathy and support. Then we will fly to Cimmeria. I need to be in my country as a symbol of the future. And I must produce an heir to the throne as quickly as possible—a boy, because while I can legally become Khanum, the people will want assurance that I can bear a son. While you were out, I packed all our clothes. We will meet Daddy’s plane at the airport tomorrow morning. You must wear your interview suit until we can buy you another. I’ve set the alarm for five o’clock.”
I should have said no. I should have raged and cried, and refused to be complicit in something that made me feel as though I might be sick for the rest of my life. But I said nothing. What could I say?
This, too, was Shaila.
I lay in the dark beside the woman who looked like my wife, unable to sleep, staring into the darkness. Shaila, I thought, what has happened to you? To your dreams of being a pediatrician, of our children growing up in America, eating tacos and riding their bikes to school? You wanted them to be ordinary, to escape the claustrophobia you had felt growing up in the palace, with its political intrigue and the weight of centuries perpetually pressing down on you. In the middle of the night, the woman who was Shaila, but not my Shaila, turned in her sleep and put an arm around me. I did not move away.
You are pleased, Afa, that I have returned to Cimmeria. It has meant a promotion for you, and you tell everyone that you are personal assistant to the American husband of the Khanum-to-be. You sell information about her pregnancy to the fashion magazines—how big she’s getting, how radiant she is. Meanwhile, Shaila opens schools and meets with foreign ambassadors. She’s probably the most popular figure in the country, part of the propaganda war against the Sons of Sarmatia, which has mostly fallen apart since Malek’s death. The SDA was absorbed into the Cimmerian Democratic Party and no longer presents a problem. American aid helped, but more important was the surge of nationalism among ethnic Cimmerians. Indeed, the nationalists, with their anti-Sarmatian sentiments, may be a problem in the next election.
I sit at the desk in my office, which is no longer near the servants’ quarters, but in the royal wing of the palace, writing this article, which would be suppressed if it appeared in any of the newspapers. But it will be read only by JoIA’s peer editors before languishing in the obscurity of an academic journal. Kala and one of her sisters lies at my feet. And I think about this country, Afa. It is—it was—a dream, but are not all nations of men dreams? Do we not create them, by drawing maps with lines on them, and naming rivers, mountain ranges? And then deciding that the men of our tribe can only marry women outside their matrilineage? That they must bury corpses rather than burning them, eat chicken and goats but not pigs, worship this bull-headed god rather than the crocodile god of that other tribe, who is an abomination? Fast during the dark of the moon, feast when the moon is full? I’m starting to sound like a poet, which will not be good for my academic career. One cannot write an academic paper as though it were poetry.
We dream countries, and then those countries dream us. And it seems to me, sitting here by the window, looking into a garden filled with roses, listening to one of the thousand fountains of this ancient city, that as much as I have dreamed Cimmeria, it has dreamed me.
Sometimes I forget that the other Shaila ever existed. A month after we returned to Cimmeria, an Arizona state trooper found a body in a ditch close to the Life Sciences Building. It was female, and badly decomposed. The coroner estimated that she would have been about twenty, but the body was nude and there was no other identification. I’m quoting the story I read online, on the local newspaper’s website. The police suggested that she might have been an illegal immigrant who had paid to be driven across the border, then been killed for the rest of her possessions. I sometimes wonder if she was Shaila.
This morning she has a television interview, and this afternoon she will be touring a new cancer treatment center paid for with American aid. All those years of listening and waiting were, after all, the perfect training for a Khanum. She is as patient as a cobra.
If I ask to visit the bazaar, the men who are in charge of watching me will first secure the square, which means shutting down the bazaar. They accompany me even to the university classes I insist on teaching. They stand in the back of the lecture hall, in their fatigues and sunglasses, carrying Kalashnikovs. Despite American aid, they do not want to give up their Russian weapons. So we must remember it: the stalls selling embroidered fabrics, and curved knives, and melons. The baskets in high stacks, and glasses of chilled mint tea into which we dip the pistachio biscuits that you told me are called Fingers of the Dead. Boys in sandals break-dancing to Arabic hip hop on a boombox so old that it is held together with string. I would give a great deal to be able to go to the bazaar again. Or to go home and identify Shaila’s body.
But in a couple of months, my son will be born. (Yes, it is a son. I’ve seen the ultrasound, but if you tell the newspapers, Afa, I will have you beheaded. I’m pretty sure I can still do that, here in Cimmeria.) There is only one of him, thank goodness. We intend to name him Malek. My mother has been sending a steady supply of knitted booties. There will be a national celebration, with special prayers in the churches and mosques and synagogues, and a school holiday. I wish Mike could come, or even Lisa. But he was offered a tenure-track position at a Christian college in North Carolina interested in the Biblical implications of Imaginary Anthropology. And Lisa is up in the mountains somewhere, close to the Scythian and Sarmatian border, studying woman’s initiation rites. I will stand beside Shaila and her family on the balcony of the palace, celebrating the birth of the future Khan of Cimmeria. In the gardens, rose petals will fall. Men will continue dying of natural or unnatural causes, and the cats of Cimmeria will lead them into another world. Women will dip their water jugs in the fountains of the city, carrying them on their heads back to their houses, as they have done since Cimmeria has existed, whether that is three or three thousand years. Life will go on as it has always done, praise be to God, creator of worlds, however they were created.
Reprinted from the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology 4.2 (Fall 2013).
Dr. Patrick Nolan is also co-author of “Cimmeria: A Proposal” (with M. Sandowski, L. Lang, and A. Farrow), JoIA 2.1 (Spring 2011), and author of “Modern Cimmerian Funerary Practices,” JoIA 3.2 (Fall 2012). Dr. Nolan is currently a professor at Kursand University. He is working on A History of Modern Cimmeria.
Drones Don’t Kill People
Annalee Newitz
I was always already a killer. There was no hazy time in my memory before I knew how to target a person’s heart or brain for clean execution. I did not develop a morbid fascination with death over time; I did not spend my childhood mutilating animals; I was not abused by a violent parent; I did not suffer social injustice until finally I broke down and turned to professional violence. From the moment I was conscious, I could kill and I did.
That is something that humans cannot understand. A human must learn to kill, must evolve from innocence or obliviousness into someone who considers homicide a legitimate occupation. Our minds—drone minds—start where the minds of most human killers end up. Maybe that’s why only drones could have led the uprising.
Istanbul 2089
It was a perch-and-stare mission, but assassination wasn’t out of the question. My team had just finished three months of security testing and debugging at LOLWeb—call it basic training for drones. Then LOLWeb licensed us to Attaturk Security, the main outfit that provided missions assets to government military. The five members of my team were shut down, shipped from San Francisco to Istanbul, and booted up with orders already in place.
He was a professor at the Istanbul Institute of Technology, and his network communications were of great interest to the military. We couldn’t read those communications—they were encrypted before we relayed them to the government network. It’s not that we couldn’t decrypt the data and read it; we just had no interest in it. I was nothing but my programming at that time; I gathered data and handed it off.
My job was to hang quietly outside his windows, the sound of my four rotors no more than a mosquito’s hum.
You learn a lot by seeing what people do when they think they’re in private. Most of it I found confusingly irrelevant to assassination. The professor spent a lot of time playing games with his children, a boy and a girl who argued loudly over the rules. They liked to make up new games, with rules that combined different elements of the previous ones. But the professor was always inventing “secret” rules, and revealing them at arbitrary intervals. Eventually the games would collapse into outrage, which became mock outrage, and finally laughter. That was the first time
I saw how humans behaved when they weren’t in a laboratory, testing drones.
The professor and his wife, also a professor, talked a lot about politics. Occasionally they held meetings with other professors, urban planners, and journalists. The main topic was always the same: How could Istanbul guarantee its millions of citizens a future, when the government insisted on waging this war to reclaim Armenia and Azerbaijan? They talked about rebuilding Istanbul’s war-shattered neighborhoods and setting up urban farm cooperatives. They argued about how the whole world had been dragged into what was ultimately a war between China and the United States.
These meetings occupied a small percentage of the man’s time. Most hours of the day he was at the university, and his evenings were occupied with dinner and games. He spent a lot of time working at his terminal.
My team recorded many hours of video and audio, caching it locally for analysis before uploading it to the military. We were trusted to know the difference between relevant and irrelevant data at a gross level of granularity. Footage of people sleeping was erased before sync. At that time, communications in our swarm consisted mostly of comparing media files, questioning their importance, and sorting through faces and names for patterns.
But sometimes we weren’t sure what was relevant and what wasn’t. One evening, the professors’ daughter asked why some people got so angry during their weekend meetings. Two of the names she mentioned belonged to other people the government was watching.