by Larissa Lai
DAY: 10 (MID-AUTUMN FESTIVAL)
THE HALLWAY LIGHT IS SO BRIGHT IT STINGS MY EYES. MY HEAD’S A balloon full of N-lite fog.
Two women appear at my side, one in pink, the other in yellow—Rose and Buttercup, our attendants from last night. “There you are! Come on, let’s go.”
“Where’s Kora?” My voice sounds strange in the bright hallway.
“She was just here a moment ago. I think she went to the Blossoming Baths,” says Rose. “Come on.” They rush me into a biodome, overgrown with lush green plants and flowers the size of my face.
I need to find Kora. I need to find Myra. And the three of us need to get out of this writhing brain dome.
A waterfall flows down from the wall of the long-abandoned open-pit copper mine. It originates outside the glass bubble and flows into the Blossoming Baths through a chute in the roof just wide enough that the water gushes in but no toxic air can enter. Excess water splashes over the glass roof and tumbles down the outside. We’re so close that its mist envelops my entire being.
“Very beautiful,” I say to Rose. “But why are we here? What have you done with my friends?”
“They’ll show up,” says Rose.
“Any minute now,” says Buttercup.
“Don’t worry about it,” says Rose.
“She’s here, the great inventor herself!” Buttercup cries then.
“I don’t want the great inventor. I want Kora. Will you please stop messing with me?” My head aches with the brightness of this dome, it’s moist green smell, conflicting with the candy fog of the N-lite gas I inhaled in that strange underground place.
“You do want the great inventor,” Rose says.
Buttercup offers, “Don’t worry about those two funny Cordova girls, with their heads full of infection sticks. They must be around. I’ll go find them.” She tears off back the way we came, just as the most graceful and elegant of women appears behind the curtain of the waterfall, a dark-haired fairy lady from another world.
Light as air, the woman steps across the stones that bridge the rushing stream. “Kirilow Groundsel, the famous groom of Old Grist Village. At last.”
Our Mother bless and preserve me! It is the great inventor Isabelle Chow. I recognize her from projections I saw the night of the revel at the Pacific Pearl Parkade. I’m hit by a swirl of contradictory emotions—awe and wonder but also rage, pain, and resentment. She’s tall and otherworldly. Her shiny black hair gleams in the refracted light that comes through the glass dome roof of the Blossoming Baths. But there are strands of white in her hair and wrinkles around her sharp, bright eyes. Do I detect a sadness? It’s hard to tell with wealthy city folk. She wears the flowing white robes of the Goddess of Hope—a costume hiding something both sinister and sad. I need to get out of here. As though sensing I might bolt, Rose grabs my arm. She’s unnaturally strong. And in the leaves, I hear half a dozen rifles cock.
“What do you want from me?” I ask. My head is still cloudy with the candy gas of the caves, but I’m lucid enough to know I’m in a bad situation.
“Such extraordinary impertinence,” says Isabelle Chow. “What’s become of the Grist sisters’ reputation for diplomacy?”
“It died when your police force invaded our village, then abducted and killed my people.”
“Such bitterness, when you don’t understand a thing, Dr Groundsel.”
I arch an eyebrow.
“My HöST men saved your people. Didn’t you see your mother double alive and well behind the blue door?”
“An illusion. What kind of fool do you take me for?” I demand. Rage rises in me, sharp enough to dispel the N-lite fog.
“No, my good groom. Not an illusion. Truer than true. Realer than real. Didn’t you feel her presence?”
“Our Mother curse you,” I say. She has no right to talk about my feelings.
“You know you did, Dr Groundsel. You know what you felt. They are all there, downloaded to Eng, safe as houses from the tiger flu and, more importantly, safe from the thieving predations of that dead man Marcus Traskin, his usurpers, and the faulty memory banks of doddering Chang.”
My mind reels. “Whatever I saw, they were spooky and mutated. And how can you put down Chang? You invented the LïFT to Chang yourself. All over Saltwater City, the sick and the fearful well are uploaded to the model village you established there. What do you call it … Quay Sera?”
“It’s a faulty village, an experimental village that I built, good enough to save the flu-sick men who were going to die anyway. Now that those traitors have taken the LïFT from me, I will never fix it, never build more or better settlements on Chang, never migrate those men or their loved ones to improved villages. All those people will degrade, deteriorate, and vanish. But it’s in your hands to prevent this from happening to others. And there is benefit to you too. Didn’t I show you your beloved Peristrophe Halliana behind the blue door, safely downloaded to Eng?”
Our Mother, merciful and benevolent, it’s more than I can bear. “I saw her, but something was wrong.”
“But it was her, was it not? I know you wanted to stay.”
“I saw her die at Grist Village,” I say.
“But tell me what you felt. Was it or was it not her?”
“It felt like her.”
“I still control Eng. I can make it better, but I need your help.”
“What kind of help?”
“I need the Grist sisters.”
It takes a minute for me to register what she means.
“I need healthy volunteers to go to Eng.”
The drum of rage building inside me bursts. “Never,” I say. “Not as long as I live and breathe.” If the Mother-cursèd developers of the LïFT can use clones to test their technology, or disposable denizens of Saltwater Flats, then they don’t need Grist sisters. But if Isabelle can’t get either, a colony of Grist sisters who won’t fight back could be a very useful thing.
May Our Mother arrange many blades and burns at her death.
“The Grist sisters need me too,” says Isabelle. “You know it. They are dying, and you have no starfish to give them fresh organs. I could help you breed new ones. I have a source.”
“I don’t need you. I have a new starfish,” I say. Don’t tell her! Stupid Kirilow, stupid Gristie. I curse myself. But it’s too late.
“Do you? And where is she, pray tell?”
I hesitate. I haven’t seen her since Elzbieta’s attendants took her to her room for the night.
My head reels. I stare at Isabelle Chow like a complete and utter idiot.
“I can help you get her back, but you must promise to work with me.”
“I don’t see how going to the feast will bring Kora back. Will she be there?” I ask the great inventor. “Otherwise, we should be searching the archive.”
The light coming through the roof of the dome dims gradually. Evening is coming.
“She will be there,” says Isabelle smiling.
“I think I’ll just have a little look around,” I say, and move to break away.
Rose sidles in close. Buttercup comes behind me. Although their calm and elegant demeanor hasn’t left them, there’s intimidation in the proximity of their bodies to mine.
What by Our Mother’s feet is Isabelle up to? I could make a scene, push Rose and Buttercup away. But I know there are guns in the dome. I need to keep cool. I need to find Kora. I follow but keep my eyes whetstone sharp.
We leave the Blossoming Baths and enter the coral convolutions of the main building. The New Origins Archive has two large generators—one wind powered and one solar. Today, they’ve been turned off, out of respect for Our Mother at Mid-Autumn. As we approach the main hall, firefly lamps light the way. The closer we get, the more sisters surround us, and the more slowly we move.
The sisters are dressed in their finest clothes, though this seems to mean something different for each of them. One wears blue silk, another undyed linen, another a coat of appliqué with buttons,
another some shiny fabric I’ve never seen before, and still another beaded leather.
“The sisters you see come from all over the archive and all over the world,” says Isabelle. “We have visitors tonight too, from the surrounding quarantine rings. Maybe you’ll see a neighbour.”
“Where is Elzbieta?” I ask her, point blank.
“She’ll join us soon, don’t worry,” Isabelle says.
I don’t believe her.
To be so close to so many different kinds of people in such a tight space discomfits me further—I feel nervous and restless. At the gateway to Chang Hall, they press in, giving wide berth to guards with rifles at the door. There’s no pretending now that I’m anything but a captive.
“It’s called Chang Hall because of the skylight that follows the arc of Chang as he journeys across the sky,” Isabelle explains. “I designed it myself when the NOA was my primary residence.”
The hall opens cavernous and grand. The domed ceiling with skylight looms high. When we enter, Chang is just beginning his climb on the western side.
“What do you think?” Isabelle asks.
I can’t deny its beauty. Painted with stars as they appeared in the time before, the domed ceiling sets off Chang’s climb gorgeously. His bearing is holy as the moon’s. His massive body fills the skylight, flooding the hall with golden-orange light. He orbits nearer than usual tonight, and I think I can feel his gravitational pull.
Round feast day tables covered in orange cloth and decked with lazy Susans, flowers, and polished crystal from the ruins of some buried town fill the room. Sisters bring platters, bowls, and cauldrons of delicious-smelling food from kitchens all over the archive, representing the many traditions of the many peoples who now make up the sisterhood at the NOA.
Isabelle leads me to the head table, overseen by the same three attendants who looked after us last night.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Why up front? I’m a chance visitor.”
“On the contrary,” says the great inventor. “You are a guest of honour. Ever had a scale implant?”
She presents me with a fine filament in a glass vial.
“Oh no,” I say. “No, no, no. My people don’t do that. We don’t go there. That’s a backward and disgusting practice for Cordova Dancing Girls and Saltwater denizens. You don’t also …?”
“Inhale this first then,” Isabelle says. She hands me a second vial with a greenish-grey vapour swirling inside.
“N-lite? I don’t—Great Inventor, my people live clean.”
“Spider Dream,” Isabelle says. “Made with herbs from the Blossoming Baths and minerals from the earth itself. Clean as the day you were born.”
“We weren’t born clean. That’s why—”
“Then what do you have to worry about? Don’t be a bad guest now. Haven’t the high priestess and I taken you in, given you food and shelter?”
“Bless and water Our Mother, who always provides,” I say, intentionally formal. My mother double, Glorybind Groundsel, raised me too well. A sense of obligation fills my gut. Still, I wave the great inventor off with a nod and a smile that says, No offence.
“You will not survive the night without it,” she says, pushing the vial into my palm.
I take it and lay it on the table.
She sighs. Picks it up, pops the cork, and before I know what’s hit me, she grabs me and presses the open vial to my nostril. Rose steps forward and places her hand over my mouth. Our Mother spit on them! I’m forced to inhale.
“Now this,” Isabelle says, popping the cork on the first vial she offered, “goes here, where the whorl of your ear ends. She taps the soft flesh, an inch above her earlobe. We Grist sisters all have a fistula there—a small hole that tunnels into the head. It’s one of the defects. I don’t like putting things near it as a rule.”
“No way.” I try to push her off me, but Rose and Buttercup hold me down.
She places the fine end of the tendril there. I expect it to sit in the tiny hole and wave about, as Kora’s scales do. But as soon as she touches the tip to my flesh, the filament springs to life, wriggles, then burrows sharp and deep into my brain. I try to scream, but the Spider Dream won’t let me. My mind grows suddenly sharp yet strangely not my own.
“All the sisters here are committed to Our Mother’s ways of knowing,” Isabelle says. “Now you are ready for the Mid-Autumn collective projection. Mid-Autumn Festival is a day of forgiveness too. We can’t act retributively on the things we see. So it’s a wonderful show, free of cost or consequence. Sit down, Groom Groundsel. Don’t make a scene.”
“I want to see Kora and Myra,” I say, fighting the tidal pull of the drug. I sit.
“I thought you might miss some of your other friends,” says Isabelle.
Two young women are led to our table then, to sit on the other side of Isabelle Chow. It can’t be. By Our Mother’s hooves, it is. Bombyx Mori and Corydalis Ambigua, here in the flesh. Has Isabelle captured them too? Or have they come as visitors for the Mid-Autumn feast, knowing nothing of the deadly internal battles that ripple out to affect us all? Since they are both here, I fear that their litter of baby sisters is dead.
The NOA sisters begin a familiar chant that marks them as my kin after all:
Our Mother of dust and destruction
Our Mother of earth
Or Mother of mind and matter
Our Mother of sound
Only you know the paths of renewal
The signs of succor
The house of help
Light the way for us gently
Not with the sun but with the moon
Make our humanity whole again
You who have split it
Open as our hearts
This Spider Dream is a strong drug. It pulls me into the experience of all the others in the room, but there’s no fog. I’m lucid sharp yet not quite myself. Projections flicker on the walls, the floors, the high-domed ceiling, even across the face of Chang himself as he lumbers upwards to the apex of the dome. They ripple over the tables, spin on the lazy Susans, ruffle the many festive outfits of the NOA sisters. Bits of an old movie about a man with a creased hat flash over a standing firefly lamp in the corner. Someone replays the murder of her parents at Houston North. Another plays audio from a lovers’ argument two decades ago in the United Middle Kingdom. Projections shimmer and flicker quick as winter rabbits over every available surface.
With all the will I’ve got in me, I try to hold back the night of the HöST invasion of Old Grist Village. But the Spider Dream is too strong. Its visions spill from my eyes in three dimensions onto the head table for anyone to see. Our Heavenly Mother of guesses and groans, please make this stop! I attempt to get up. I’ve got to find Kora. I’ve got to find Myra. My legs wobble like they’re made of water. My eyes gush out the pyre that burns Auntie Radix and Peristrophe Halliana. It sends flames almost as high as Chang himself. HöST batterkites descend from the dome of the ceiling. Uniformed HöST police rampage through my home village, wielding automatic rifles from the time before. Screaming Grist sisters are kettled against outer cave walls and captured in nets that lift them high above the village, crying and weeping for mothers and sisters and daughter doubles.
Into the mass of this unbearable fray, in the meet-and-greet world of Chang Hall, dishes are placed before us: roasted fish, stewed fowl, stuffed squash, and fragrant garlic-fried greens. Bottles of tiger wine dressed with herbs appear, and sisters begin to drink. Clusters of erhu players and sound singers make music that dances and improvises with the interlocking and overlapping projections of a thousand NOA sisters reliving dreams, anxieties, and nightmares. Some sisters get up to dance.
The last thing I want to do is eat, but Isabelle heaps my plate. “Don’t insult me now. The NOA sisters have been preparing this feast for weeks. You have to eat.”
I don’t want to eat. I want to go. I try again to get up. The attendants in pink and yellow step forward again, ready restrain me, but
they don’t need to. Spider Dream has made me a floppy sock.
My eyes spit out visions tinted bruise purple with rage, of K2 Ko’s tiger police corralling the denizens of Saltwater Flats. No more pretenses of courtesy. The music that accompanies my visions whirls and screams. My hatred is out in the open now.
“Eat,” says Rose.
“An offence against Isabelle is an offence against Our Mother,” says Buttercup.
I don’t want to eat. Rose hovers over me, beady eyed and insistent.
“I’m not hungry,” I tell her.
She reaches into the folds of her dress for what can only be a weapon.
I eat. I have some roasted char, a bit of stewed ptarmigan, some roasted potato. I sip the herbed wine. “There, I’ve eaten. Now tell me what you’ve done with Kora.”
“Have some stuffed squash,” says Isabelle.
I don’t want to.
She scoops some onto my plate.
Rose steps forward again.
I sigh. I take a bite.
“And what about High Priestess Elzbieta Kruk?” Bombyx asks.
“Soon, soon. They will both join us soon,” says Isabelle, her eyes bright with pleasure.
“Our Mother praise the high priestess!” shouts a sister from the crowd.
“Surely, she is delicious!” shouts another, raising one of the stuffed squashes high.
“The high priestess is dead! The high priestess lives within us! Long live the high priestess!”
“Long live Isabelle Chow!”
Isabelle beams even more brightly. Crams a great mouthful of squash stuffing into her mouth. Through my Spider fog, I stare at her.
“You haven’t just …” I can’t say it, so Bombyx does.
“Murderer. You’ve killed your best friend.”
Isabelle beams brightly. “All hail the life and death of Elzbieta Kruk!”
“We’ve got to go. We’ve got to find Kora,” I say to Bombyx and Corydalis, not caring if Isabelle hears.
While a thousand sisters applaud, whistle, and stamp their feet, Bombyx, Corydalis, and I attempt to rise.
“Not yet, sillies,” Isabelle hisses. With the help of the pretty attendants, she yanks us back down to sit on either side of her.