by Larissa Lai
A sudden rumble, low and deep.
What in Our Mother’s thousand names is that?
The rumble deepens, and the earth trembles.
Plaster begins to crumble off the northern wall. The roar is deafening. The floor cracks, and a whole sheet of plaster crumbles at once from the wall. Shiny, sleek, and spitting fire from its tail, a projectile arcs across the skylight. I can see the symbols on its side:
My wriggling scale tells me what it is. A rocket from the time before, with a special kind of bomb inside, one that splits atoms wide. My jaw drops and my eyes bug. Anxious minutes pass as the rocket ascends higher and higher. Smashes squarely into the lumbering body of Chang. There is a brilliant flash of light. I cover my eyes. Light sears the backs of my hands. When I look again, I see Chang fall backwards into the night—a massive, fiery beast sinking in the depths of the dark galaxy. A gargantuan mushroom of dust spills from the vast empty space where he was, fills the skylight, engulfs the archive.
Isabelle leans back in her chair, laughing the giddy, uncontrolled laugh of someone who’s lost her senses.
“There you go, lover! There you go, best and most adored sister! You can’t say I struck you first.”
The north wall of Chang Hall collapses, showering projections and dust and insulation over the Spider Dreaming NOA sisters.
Isabelle laughs and laughs and laughs. She holds her stomach and tears stream down her face. With no wall to hold it up, a massive cedar beam falls from right above our heads. I leap out of the way. Isabelle leaps too, but not quick enough. It thumps her head hard before rolling away. She collapses. Rose and Buttercup rush to her aid.
“Time to go, friends!” Bombyx shouts.
It’s now or never. We scurry out through the east door and run as fast as our Spider-heavy legs will carry us.
The NOA collapses around us as we run. Cedar beams, hunks of plaster, chunks of coral cement smash to the ground. The east wall looks none too stable. We are yards from it as it begins to fold. I grab Bombyx’s left hand with my right and Corydalis’s right hand with my left. We dive. Plaster and coral dust sprinkle our toes as we land face down on the other side of the wall that was. Just as I’m getting up a large jagged chunk of coral crashes down on the back of my calf. Cuts a deep gash. But I can still move.
We pause at the central atrium, from which hallways branch out in many directions.
“We have to find Kora,” I say.
“What does she look like?” Bombyx asks.
“Like you and me, only a bit paler.”
We hurry in the direction of the Blossoming Baths, even though it’s more than likely she died when the rocket went up. But New Grist Village will be nothing without her. I have to try.
We run along the east corridor. A massive hole in the earth looms deep and wide. The rocket has blown out the Dark Baths, the Blossoming Baths, and anyone and anything those biomes contained.
“It’s too late,” Corydalis says. “We’ve lost her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bombyx Mori says. “We’ll find her.”
I’m already skirting the burning hole, peering down into its smoking, steaming depths. We hurry back up to the atrium. The western hallway leading to Chang Hall is now a crumbled heap of debris. Bombyx takes the north hallway, Corydalis takes the northwest, and I go south.
I run, casting my eyes left, then right, then up, then down. If she’s hiding somewhere, I want to see her.
The hall is long, and other denizens of the archive push past me, also looking for loved ones, or just trying to escape. All around us, the building rumbles. To my left, a whole wall collapses.
In the distance, Bombyx calls me. “Groom Kirilow, I see her!”
I turn and run.
Bombyx continues to call me. “Hurry!”
I scramble down the hall fast as my aching leg will allow.
“Here!” Bombyx’s voice in the north corridor. My cut calf screams, but I ignore it and keep running. Against all odds, Kora runs towards us down the rapidly collapsing hallway. A true gift from Our Mother at last.
A beam falls behind me and whacks me in my already injured leg. I bite my lip and run run run. The distance closes between us. Almost there. A cedar beam collapses right in front of me, barely missing my Spider-fogged head.
Behind me, Bombyx gives a belated yelp of warning. “We can go under it,” she yells.
I test it first, to make sure it won’t fall on us as we’re crawling. And then there is another great crash.
We wriggle under the fallen cedar beam and hurry to where Kora lies pinned under a giant chunk of brain coral. Her entire torso is trapped, and her eyes bug wide. “Help me, Doctor Gristie.”
The chunk of coral is huge. Her feet stick out one end and her head the other. With all our might, we lift then roll the rough, spiky coral chunk away, as she howls in panicked pain. “Charlotte, Mom …”
Kora’s torso has been smashed flat. Blood pools around her in a wide circle.
“She’s not going to make it,” Bombyx says.
Corydalis says, “The LïFT is still there, on the far side of where the Blossoming Baths were.”
I say, “We can send her to—”
“Chang,” Corydalis finishes.
There is a second explosion then, far too close. Light and dust from nowhere and everywhere fill the hall.
“We saw Chang die, remember?” I say. None of us can really fathom a world without him.
A third thunderous crack, high above.
“I have an idea,” Bombyx says. “But she has to live long enough for us to get her in the LïFT.”
I gather Kora up in my arms, gently as I can. She whimpers in pain and fear.
Somehow, we work our way around the steaming hole that was the Blossoming Baths. The column that holds the LïFT is remarkably intact, give or take some cracked glass here, a burn scar there.
Bombyx presses the button.
It opens.
I lay Kora’s broken body on the elevator floor. She shivers in pain. “Papa Wai …”
Bombyx picks up a piece of brain coral and smashes the control panel open. Behind it lies a wall of flesh. “There’s a batterkite on the roof of this tower,” she says. “The one Isabelle arrived in. Can you coax it—?”
I stare at her. “I’ve never—”
“Isn’t it your great gift? The cutting and repairing of flesh?” She produces a scalpel from an inside pocket and hands it to me.
Deep in the folds of my brain, the wormy scale that the great inventor gave me wriggles an affirmation of Bombyx’s plan. I guess she’s not as thick as I once thought.
I know what to do. “Isabelle be praised,” I say, forgetting for a moment the terrible thing Isabelle has done. I begin to cut. Careful, so careful, as though the guts of this panel were the living flesh of my own beloved Peristrophe Halliana, I cut. I pull at muscle and vein. I nudge nerves. I detach and reattach. The wormy scale teaches my fingers something they didn’t know before. At last, I pull my bloody hands out from the meat of the LïFT. “Here goes nothing!”
Bombyx replaces the metal panel and presses the top button. I kneel and stroke the dying girl’s hair. “It’s going to be okay,” I tell her. “In just a few minutes, you will see.”
I duck out just before the doors slide shut. Follow my sisters to the back stairs and run up up up the cervical spine of the archive to its brainy top. Out of breath, we arrive.
Who should greet us but Myra Mao herself, grinning face wide as a shark’s. “Wooooweeeeeeee! We did it! We took that dirty bastard Chang down, and those twisted HöSTers with him!”
“Where have you been?”
“Exercising my mechanical skills, of course. Did you see the rocket go up? That was my doing! And the explosion? No one ever needs to be tempted by that dead man Marcus Traskin or sneaky Elzbieta Kruk or doddering Chang again. Or that silly K2 Ko. Am I good or what? Me, Tania, Isabelle, and the launch button at Cosmopolitan Earth, that is. Good thing these hand
s are handy.” She holds them up so we can all marvel.
I’m incredulous. “That was you?”
“Who else, Dr Gristie?”
“I can’t imagine.”
She looks at me expectantly.
“Well, you can’t come with us. You tried to send me and Kora to Eng. You made me dream I had to cut out Peristrophe Halliana’s heart.”
“Not my business what you dream down there. I sent you down so you could be with her. Safe from Chang and safe from Elzbieta. I thought it was what you wanted.”
“You threw us into Isabelle’s arms so she could use us to make a captive Grist sisterhood,” I say.
“Do you know how to fly a batterkite?”
I don’t. “How can I trust you?”
“I’m not going to fly it. I’m going to Cosmopolitan Earth.” She pulls a twig out of her head. “Here, take this. It’s better with a halo, but you do like needles.” She jams it into my skull before I can protest.
“Ow!”
“You’re welcome. Just wanted to make sure you sorry Gristies get where you need to go. That truck better still be there.”
In the foyer to the high priestess’s private quarters, the dial above the LïFT door swings left then right, then left again. It moves so erratically we’re afraid it might break. At last, the door opens. A giant fish lies there, silver and slippery, covered in long tendrilly scales, with a pink right fin. I gather it up, clutch its dead flesh to my chest.
Bombyx runs into Elzbieta’s lab. The moist, quivering brain she used to manage the archive takes up the bulk of the space. We squeeze past its spongy grey folds. At the back of the room is a small docking bay. A wet batterkite presents its closed but oozing mouth.
I chant:
Our Mother who art artful
Our Mother of light
The mouth opens. The batterkite accepts us.
I release the wet fish that was the body of Kora Ko to the floor.
“Do you know the latitude and longitude of New Grist Village?” Bombyx asks.
I search the worm in my head. I set the coordinates and grasp the batterkite’s wet lever. The kite lifts from the crumbling ruin of the New Origins Archive. From its mucus-covered window, I think I see a ghastly yet elegant figure lying dead in the exposed ruin of Chang Hall. Turkey vultures circle, closing in on their meal. Farther below, near the main entrance, a tiny figure climbs into the wheelbarrow that brought us here.
The sun is going down. It sends rays of light through water vapour, smoke, dust, and radiation from the death of Chang. It makes a cloud ocean of fabulous purple, mauve, silver, and gold. The batterkite dives into this dirty but miraculous beauty, free to glide us home.
PART V
CASCADIA YEAR: 269 TAO (TIME AFTER OIL)
UNITED MIDDLE KINGDOM CYCLE 83, YEAR 18 (METAL SNAKE YEAR)
GREGORIAN YEAR: 2301
43
THE STARFISH TREE
KORA KO // NEW GRIST VILLAGE
NODE: INSECTS AWAKEN
DAY: 1
IT’S BEEN A HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX YEARS SINCE I WAS THE GIRL you are asking about. The world has changed so much. I’ll do my best to remember, and to explain to you how it was in those days, but you have to understand—nothing is the same. When I was a girl, the possibility of doublers, starfish, and grooms did not even touch my consciousness. All I knew were boys and girls, men and women. Groom Elder Kirilow Groundsel was young at that time, tending her Peristrophe Halliana, while her mother double, Glorybind Groundsel, watched over them both. When she wakes up from her nap, you can ask her about it.
A cool, pleasant breeze blows through the alpine valley, and the ancient starfish tree shudders and sways.
What I know of the time before I got mostly from the man I thought was my uncle before he left us. But he was embarrassed to tell it, so I don’t really know what ‘lying together’ entails, though if you ask me, it sounds painful. You should be grateful you don’t have to do it to make a daughter double. You and me—we are alike. We fruit! I know how painful it will be for you, because Corydalis Ambigua birthed a whole litter of you right at the base of my trunk. Don’t snigger, Flos Syzygii. You were one of that litter, born beneath these very leaves. When you pluck your first replacement heart or liver from my branches, don’t you dare scoff. You must remember my pain, as I remember yours.
Flos Syzygii flushes bright red, and the Kora Tree turns a set of freshly sprouted eyes on her.
Hm. So slow to learn. The tree has no mouth. It vibrates language.
In the old days, after lying with a man, a woman would grow, as you do, like a giant sister egg, for the same forty terrible weeks that you will all one day endure. And all for what? Not a litter of daughter doubles but only one.
“Only one daughter double?” gasp the young Grist sisters.
“Groom Elder Bombyx says sometimes there were two, or even three,” says precocious Plumula Nelumbinis.
Yes, rumbles the Kora Tree. I’ve heard of that. But all the girls at my dancing school were born in litters of one.
“Tell more!” cries Flos Syzygii, rapt now.
When they were with child, the women were treated with gentleness and care by everyone around them, at least until the men got really sick, and then there were murders sometimes. Gruesome, angry ones that got more depraved as the men became fewer and fewer. You don’t want to know those stories. And I won’t tell them. You still get the tiger flu that consumed the men, you know. Everyone was susceptible, though women had better immunity. If your immunity was compromised, like Peristrophe Halliana’s, you could die. That is why you must drink Miracle Milk when Groom Elder Kirilow brews it for you. I know it tastes bad, but it’s better to drink it than to die of the flu.
Fanned out beneath the Kora Tree like synchronized swimmers from the time before, the young daughter doubles stare up through her leaves to the bright sky.
“No doublers?” says Solani Lyrati. “No grooms and no starfish trees? Did they at least have the old kind of starfish?”
Well, says the Kora Tree, they did, but they didn’t know it. I myself was one of the old kind of starfish, but I didn’t know. Can you imagine? Not knowing your own nature? But it was a time of information blackout. Everything they knew in the time before was stuck on Chang and Eng, and only the elites had access. Even now, our wisest Grist scholars don’t know everything they knew.”
Plumula Nelumbinis claps her hands. She’s heard this story before. “And you came and planted yourself at New Grist Village to save us all!”
I wasn’t quite as generous as that, says the Kora Tree. Not at first, anyway. I nearly died. I had to be uploaded to a batterkite and become its consciousness. And then we discovered that the tentacles of the kite doctored carefully and left to lie long enough atop fertile soil could become roots. Bombyx Mori and Kirilow Groundsel worked for many years to make me what I am and to seed the entire Starfish Orchard that nurtures the great Grist Garden.
The little doublers turn to admire the Starfish Orchard that surrounds them in a leafy, comforting dance of light and shadow.
“Are there gardens beyond Grist Garden?” asks Plumula Nelumbinis.
There was once a garden called Saltwater City, says the Kora Tree. It was a very dirty garden. And another called Cosmopolitan Earth. And more too, I think, but my memory is not what it was. Ask Groom Kirilow when she comes.
A fresh litter of younger sister doubles comes up the hillside then, to gather around the base of the Kora Tree.
“What did we miss?” asks little Iphigenia Bulb.
“Everything,” says Flos Syzygii.
Never mind, says the patient Kora Tree. I’ll start again from the beginning.
At the very top of her branches a little tendril lights up momentarily, calling out to no one. She wills it to dim.
DEEPER WITHIN THE ORCHARD, IN A CAVE IN THE SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN, the ancient groom elder Kirilow Groundsel rises from her bed and climbs into her rocking chair. She picks up the pipe
that once belonged to her mother double, Glorybind Groundsel, stuffs it with her own special blend of cannabis, sage, and forget-me-do, lights it, and takes a deep, satisfying draw. She looks up to the mantle at all the organic and inorganic oddities she’s collected over the years. Contemplates a wrinkled, blackened bit of matter that the weathered and creaking Bombyx Mori gave her the day before yesterday.
“Found it in your old medicine cabinet and thought you’d like it back,” Bombyx had said.
It looked like a dried mushroom, until Kirilow brought it close. The five fingers were still clearly distinct. “I wonder what that flu-sick Salty would think if she could see us now?”
Kirilow sits back in her chair, and smokes and rocks. Her eyelids droop. Just before she tumbles into sleep, a wistful thought rises up. Maybe today is the day I’ll set out for the ruin of the New Origins Archive. Maybe the blue door is still there. Behind it and down the stairs, maybe I’ll find my beloved Peristrophe Halliana, alive and well in the Dark Baths. Her eyelids drop down as the old pipe smoulders, then goes out in her hand.
Far beyond the earth, in the deepest reaches of space, the old communications satellite Eng lurches along her still-deepening orbit, a long ellipsis that will take her a thousand years to complete.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK HAD ITS START IN A WRITING GROUP THAT CONVENED OVER email in the mid-2000s. I’m so grateful to the whole group: Pamela Mordecai, Martin Mordecai, David Findlay, Jennifer Stevenson, Nalo Hopkinson, and Hiromi Goto. It was also supported by a generous residency in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. I’m grateful to Roy Miki, Sophie McCall, Steven Collis, Jeff Derksen, and especially David Chariandy, who gave up his office so that I would have a place to write. Further work was done through the generous support of a guest professorship at the University of Augsburg. Many thanks to Katja Sarkowsky, Rainer-Olaf Schultze, and Claudia Glöckner for their generous care during that time. I am also most appreciative of a writer-in-residence position I had at the University of Guelph. Thanks especially to Jade Ferguson, Helen Hoy, Thomas King, Smaro Kamboureli, Mark Fortier, Alan Filewood, and Michael Boterman. The wonderful Sophie Mayer published my short story “The Starfish Groom” in a special “Utopia” issue of the queer British literary journal Chroma, which was this novel’s inception.