by Larissa Lai
face place grin fine
small game goon tool
soon rule soul bowl
kow tow know how
“What is that?”
“Devil’s revel and memory share. That’s what the invite said. Didn’t you read it?” Myra responds.
Denizens of Saltwater Flats rush past them, feathers shaking, bells jingling. In their midst, tiger men also rush by, streaming long white hair and tendril scales, which writhe vigilantly above and behind them, three times the length of any Kora has seen in the streets. The press of bodies eager to get to the place from which the rumble rolls, expands, and deepens. Kora and Myra skirt its edges and so progress slightly faster than those at the thick, dense centre. Down to the rumbling, vibrating place they go, in a slow spiral.
P2A has been opened up to make a wide hall. At one end is a stage. On it, a large and ancient man sits on a stone dais, long white hair flowing all around him. A massive skull rack halo of the kind popular sixty years ago crowns his head like the antlers of a winter bull elk. Every terminal is jammed with scales. Some are the small sleek kind of a decade past; some are the fine, filigree kind so thin you can barely see them unless they catch the light as they writhe and wave. Scales flow from his thick white beard too, and his face and neck shimmer with the flat metallic type. His closed eyelids are covered with them, and in his slightly open mouth, Kora can make out neat rows of scales implanted on tongue and teeth. They extend beneath his algae-cellulose shirt too—it is likely that every nerve ending in his body has been tapped. He is like an old tree with scales for leaves and bark. Since HöST’s privatization of Chang and Eng, Marcus Traskin, lord and CEO of the Pacific Pearl, has become the largest public mainframe in Saltwater Flats.
brain frame face drain
rain same main game
pin time raw wine
crane brine sync line
A circle of initiates surround him. All sport a dense array of scales. Their heads, necks, and shoulders are matted with the kind that emit a flickering yellow and orange glow, more heat than light. But these are younger men, born after the tiger flu’s great third wave cull. Thin and ethereal, they look too much like Lewis Lai, whose seven fertile sons all but saved heterosexual reproduction in Saltwater Flats after the third wave.
The music quiets. The low rumbling sound of history itself intensifies and enters into the men through the massive dose of N-lite they took an hour ago.
blew through you who
flesh dress dross floss
brain boss cleave meat
fish dish kiss this
The men’s eyes project the vaporous green glow of their N-lite high. Deep within her fog, Kora understands something of the forget-me-do vision she projected in her sick room hours earlier. But the light the men pour out is infinitely denser and dead steady. The room sighs in collective wonder. The light gathers and coalesces in a viridescent haze that surrounds them and expands to a billowy cloud above. Everyone shudders. Their bodies jerk into the N-lite dream.
Kora sees in vivid detail the things her own poor scales teach her as flat information. She sees the launch of Chang and Eng on rockets trailing magnificent fire. She sees a tiger-skin rug, a UMK official in prison, an incubation jar with a tiger fetus inside, then millions of jars row on row, and the first of the new Caspian tiger kittens, cute and fluffy. Massive adult tigers prowl through the vapour and curl into sleep above their heads. Their fearsome purring makes the rumble of the past resonate deeply, below the level of audible sound. And then the slaughterhouse—a stadium-sized abattoir where dead tigers hang from their hind legs, bellies slit and bloody. She sees a crew of grim vintners pile roasted tiger bones into large earthenware jars, just like the kind in which Uncle Wai grew his potatoes. In her stoned haze, she seeks familiarity in the faces of these vintners. Is she really related to them? The images spiral and turn too quickly for her to see.
She sees the jars in red velvet rooms, with spigots at their bases to release the precious liquor. Happy revellers drink from crystal glasses at first, then later, mouth to spigot as addiction deepens. Then the same vintners and revellers waste away in overstuffed hospitals and clinics from Albuquerque to Seoul to Kinshasa to New York City.
The tigers pad softly into the night, and the room fills with the roar of another crumbling. Vast cliffs and towers of polar ice calve into the warming sea. A parade of long dead animals—wolves, mammoths, bear, and oxen—find their way into the wombs of their contemporary cousins. In white rooms, giant bellows expand and contract, to help those in the throes of the third wave breathe longer than they otherwise might. Oceans swell and rise to engulf whole cities. The denizens of Saltwater City construct a massive wall of earth to protect themselves. The earth’s angry maw gapes to swallow those outside. The wall falls, and the people build canals instead. The ocean swells through them, recedes, then swells again. The fourth wave of tiger flu comes. Men vomit and shrivel in dirty hospital beds, their bodies refusing to hold water. Lineups the length of city blocks for the Seven Houses of Lewis Lai, the last fertile men at Saltwater City, grow ever longer. Cassandra Chu, the four-breasted parthenogenic woman of Saltwater Flats, runs through fields of daisies, followed by an endless stream of little girls who look too much like her. Then, to Kora’s shock and horror, she sees a girl lifting cans of tuna and soup from a plague house on the edge of the Second Quarantine Ring. The girl turns her head, and Kora recognizes her own gaunt and pimply face. She inhales sharply. The catcoat suddenly feels much too thin. She releases her breath, and a dry mewl rushes from her lungs. She turns to look at Myra, who looks back, horrified. Kora glances around the room, not trusting the catcoat to keep her covered.
On the lightest of feet, she scurries from the thick of the crowd, back towards the wall, and then sidles towards the entrance. But then, at the far edge of the room—is it? Yes, it is! Her Mother-cursèd brother. He raises his hand like a traffic cop, seems to beckon her and Myra to follow him. Can he see them? Kora’s head swims with N-lite wooziness. How does he know they’re there? Because he knows. Will he help them? Trust him, says the drug. She takes a last glance towards the exit. Hears his wolf whistle. Myra grabs her arm and pulls her through the dancing, shivering crowd still watching the flow of images. They trail him as the parkade curves lower.
There is a thick press of tiger men blocking the way to the lower levels. Kora pulls her catcoat tight and squeezes through a gap, but just as she does, the guard nearest her takes a step backwards as he laughs at something another guard has said. He bumps right in to her.
“Hello?” He seems to look her right in the eye. “What the—?”
Her own eyes bug wide. It’s K2’s grabby friend Stash. She gasps, then darts out of the way. He reaches for the spot where she was but misses. As long as they don’t see her face to face, the catcoat works.
She scampers after her brother, who moves quickly now, down and still farther down seven layers of the old parkade, past the men’s sleeping stalls, past dark corners where rats and other rodents gather, squealing, chittering, fighting over empty cans and scraps of rotten meat. There are burn marks on the walls, and the hazy darkness reeks of ammonia, sweat, and rotten onions. Biological and chemical agents moulder together, the smell of an ancient police force that used to amass here, preparing to quell the terrified city above in the wake of the first wave of tiger plague. The vaporous green light that filled the upper hall intensifies the deeper they go. The smell of ammonia, sweat, and onions intensifies too, to the point where Kora, Myra, and their catcoats choke on it. Kora’s eyes water. She can hardly breathe. Was this a biochem weapons storage depot, rather than a staging area? Between the rank odour and the N-lite, she feels very woozy and not at all herself.
Seven spiralling floors below the great hall where Marcus Traskin, his men, and the crowd of revellers project the making of the new world from their eyes in green gas, Kora and Myra arrive in a very different kind of room. It is laid out like the lobby of an office buildin
g from the time before. A nice lobby, with white tile floors trimmed with a border of little black stars. There is a bank of elevators in front of them. Above each one a dial spins and flaps, running up and down a set of numbers, one to thirty-six.
Lined up in front of the elevators in a neatly cordoned zigzag are at least a hundred women, with identical glazed eyes, black hair, sharp faces. They are all around the same height, except a few who are clearly not yet fully grown.
“They look like you,” Myra whispers to Kora, her voice full of wonder.
At the front of the line, six tiger men usher a group of women into an empty elevator. Docile as sheep, eyes emitting green vapour, the women step unquestioning past the sliding doors. The doors reel shut behind them. The numbers of the little dial begin to ascend.
Then the doors of the elevator beside it slide open. The foul odour of ammonia, sweat, and rotten onions fills the room, and water gushes out the elevator doors. There is something in it. A writhing, flapping mass of fish, interspersed with clots of red. Blood? The water floods away into a deep gutter at the elevators’ edge.
“See that?” Myra whispers.
“Fish …” says Kora.
“Yes,” says Myra. “And?”
“And roses,” Kora says, astonished. Luscious blossoms glisten and shimmer among the bucking, desperate fish.
A crew of tiger men with wheelbarrows emerges from behind the bank of elevators. With practised hands, they gather the fish and roses and expediently cart them away. Did Myra nod at one of them? She’s got her hood off. What is she doing?
Kora watches the loading crew usher the next group of women into the empty elevator.
Myra is on her then. “She’s here!” Yanks the hood of Kora’s catcoat from her head, exposing her to plain view.
“Get your hands off me!”
It’s too late. The tiger men are there, pulling at the parts of Kora they can see, as Myra grips the catcoat, tears it at the shoulder, and peels the sleeve from Kora’s arm.
“Let go of me, you traitor!”
The catcoat yowls a terrible heart-wrenching yowl as its deformed body is torn asunder.
“You’re killing it!”
The coat emits an unearthly shriek. Kora shrieks with it, but to no avail. They pull her free of her cover. It howls like a thousand dead people, all rage and pain. A gunshot. Then silence.
Kora regains herself and begins to yell, “Murderers! Get off me!”
Someone slaps a hand over her mouth. It takes six tiger men to drag her towards the elevators.
“You get to jump the queue, lucky you,” one of them sneers.
They toss her in, all on her lonesome. In the moment it takes her to realize what has happened, the doors roll shut. She dashes for it way too late—just as the last inch closes. Thinks she hears her brother’s voice now, “This isn’t what you said …”
The elevator clocks its way smoothly up to who knows where. It smells faintly of fish and salt water. She should never have trusted Myra. That’s on her. But her brother. How could he betray her like this? She’s so mad she forgets to be scared. Her brain swims in N-lite waters.
The doors open. She steps out. It can’t be. She’s on the rooftop of the Woodward’s Building, in her uncle’s garden of earthen jars. The goat hangs by its hind legs from the roof of its shed, belly slit wide open. Blood drips from the exposed intestines to its straw bed, and flies buzz around the steaming cut.
Charlotte and Wai stand in front of the dead, swinging goat.
“How could you? She’s suffered enough!” shouts Charlotte.
“I should never have answered Father’s call. I could have had a happy life in the UMK!” Wai responds.
“You should never have betrayed your brother!”
“Father left the Jemini Group to me, but Kai Tak just took it. And because of you, I didn’t fight back. He even took Tiger Wine. Not that I care. I didn’t want it anyway, but I never owed him anything—”
“We are cursed for your father’s ridiculous project, as though he had a right to play God, release those baby tigers from that dead rug.”
From thin air, Charlotte produces a giant undulating fabric of orange and black, whirls it above her head, then throws it to the ground. It is an ancient tiger-skin rug full of moth holes and torn at the neck. The head hangs at an awkward, broken angle.
“Charlotte! Uncle Wai! Stop fighting. It’s me. I’m here.”
“Kora!” her uncle calls. “Don’t come out! Get back in the elevator now! Go! Everything we sacrificed—it’s not for you to end up here!”
“Leave us—go!” Charlotte yells.
The doors have slid more than halfway shut. Charlotte runs to them, jams her hand into the narrowing space.
“Charlotte, your hand!”
Charlotte pries the door open with sheer strength. Uncle Wai pushes Kora towards the door, and half lifts, half shoves her in.
Charlotte lets go, and the doors slide rapidly shut.
The elevator reeks of fish and vomit.
“Charlotte! Uncle Wai!” Kora screams, her druggy voice all thin and high.
The dial on the inside, identical to the one outside, a half moon with numbers rimming its edge like an aura, shows the elevator descending.
“Charlotte,” Kora sobs. “Uncle Wai—”
Before it gets to minus seven, the elevator bumps. Right at zero. Is she to be set free? Her tight heart leaps.
“Is there anyone there? Let me out!” She yells at the top of her lungs and thumps on the cold and heavy doors.
They slide open. In the doorway, wearing a gorgeous blue robe, stands an astonishingly tall and beautiful woman. It’s Isabelle Chow, chief executive officer of HöST Industries, the power behind the glass city, inventor of scale technology and the batterkite. And this strange elevator too? Isabelle seems to glow from within. Behind her, a thick darkness gathers. The air smells salty and damp.
“Did you see them, Kora Ko?” Isabelle’s eyes burn animal dark. Her voice is rich as oolichan grease.
“What?”
“Did you see them?”
“Who?”
“Your mother and father.”
Kora’s voice cracks and wavers. “I saw my mother and uncle.”
“Do you understand what you saw?”
“I don’t understand a thing.”
“They have left their bodies and are held captive.”
Kora’s mouth flaps open. “By that nasty Marcus Traskin? Is it about that plague house? Those cans I stole?”
“No, Priestess Kora, it is not.”
“Priestess?”
“A priestess of Our Mother of Light is what you will become, once you have done your duty. Our Mother does not care about cans or plague houses. Neither will last.”
“I’m a non-believer. Ask that weird Gristie doctor about Our Mother. My family is innocent. You’ve made a grave mistake.”
Isabelle Chow’s blue robe flutters in the salty breeze. “I never make mistakes, Priestess Kora. Your parents have uploaded to Quay D’Espoir, my little paradise on Eng. Marcus Traskin has taken Chang from me, and all the virtual cities I built there for people like you and your family. But don’t worry, your mother and father are safe.”
“Wai is my uncle,” says Kora.
“They remain under my guard at no cost to you. If you want them to stay there, you will do me the smallest of small favours, and then you can join them in the most beautiful place you have ever seen. Or live out the rest of your organic life here on this decaying Earth and join them just minutes before your natural time.”
The whispers of the vendors along the road to the parkade make fresh sense.
Life after life
After life after
Kora’s scales click and writhe to follow Isabelle Chow’s logic. Kora’s natural flesh trembles. “What favour?”
Isabelle smiles, revealing her small white teeth. “I thought you would never ask.”
The elevator doors shudder
, then begin to slide shut. Kora’s hand darts out, and the doors slide open again.
“You will remove Marcus Traskin for me,” Isabelle says.
“Remove?”
“Don’t they train you? As thief and assassin?”
“They teach us all the old dances,” Kora says. “Mambo, tango, cha-cha-cha.”
Isabelle waits. She knows better.
Kora stares. “All right. As a thief. But not an assassin.”
“You have killed before. You will find a way to again. Go back to the Cordova Dancing School when it is done,” says Isabelle Chow. “Make friends with the doctor from Grist Village.”
“That weirdo Gristie doctor? No way, no. She took my hand.”
Wind rushes behind Isabelle, and Kora can hear a large body of water surge. Is Isabelle even actually here? Or is she a drug effect, a projection? Kora reaches out to touch her, but the elevator doors begin to slide shut again. Kora pulls her hand back before she loses that one too.
The elevator descends again. It stops at minus three, and the doors slide open. There, just as Isabelle would want, stands that creepy Gristie doctor, the inimitable Kirilow Groundsel.
32
RED RIGHT HAND
KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // SALTWATER FLATS
NODE: MINOR HEAT
DAY: 3
THE ELEVATOR DOORS SLIDE OPEN, AND A GIRL STANDS THERE. HER scales make a moist rattling noise as they writhe and shudder. Her eyes emit a green gas, like she’s drunk six cups of forget-me-do in succession. Did these vile Salties sneak into our Grist gardens unbeknownst to us? Or perhaps this one was involved in that raid and fire in our forget-me fields last year. How can they call us witches when they go out in public looking like this? I smooth my hair as though it will help.
“Lady Kora?” I’m astonished to recognize her.
Her arms hang slack at her sides. The bandage over her stump is filthy brown and red. I could turn around and just leave her here. Who needs this mess?
I’ve been exploring the Pacific Pearl Parkade all night, seen things Our Mother would curse with pox and socks. No sign of my little Grist sister Calyx Kaki and no sign of my mother double, Glorybind Groundsel.