A little mist, on the sun; the color of the sky changes; and my speed changes; less light: I slow down, a little; leaves, shadows, clouds, insects: a little bit faster; I could almost see the bee’s wings moving. A slow day, perhaps? Slow days, for me, the days of soft sun, of mist or clouds, passing: I charge up more slowly, I live, and die, more slowly.
The first passers-by, at the back of the alley, in a few centuries, will walk in front of me, will stop. Tourists, it’s summer, always nice, in here anyhow: the South, warm, just enough wind, in summer, to break up the mist. Sometimes very humid, all that hovering water, invisible, ghost of the melted ice, far away at the poles. Sometimes it rains, I drink, head tilted up, don’t need to, but it’s nice. Glinting gravel, after the rain, puddles in alleys, kids splashing about, the birds, bathing, in slow motion, droplets, wavelets, glimmerings, soon dry, those waters, tides of the sky. Elsewhere, more rains, I know, but here, sometimes, you can forget, the other tides, everywhere, eating at the earth. Not me: I stand in the main alley, at the highest point of the Park, facing the Seaside Promenade, I see them, from up here, the tides.
I see them, I look at them, from time to time. My inward clock always knows. This decade: one minute outside, in the slow world, this year one second, I know, exactly. When I am facing in the right direction, I look at the sea, every five minutes, I must parcel out time in order to see: the ocean, swelling up, an unending breath, rising, past the ancient marks, on the pier, the blue, the red lines. The black line, would never get past it, they thought: on a rebuilt cliff, fifty meters high, the city. And there it is: vanished, the black line. Heaving, overflowing the sculpted stone parapets, through their interlacing design, the sea, draped on the Promenade, a shimmering of heat, around the trees, mercury under the sun. It rolls, trembling, under the feet of the passers-by, behind the wheels of the horse-drawn buggies, suspended droplets clinging to the raised hooves, the sea inside the city, slow, irresistible.
More passers-by, not only tourists: the regulars, at this hour. You like to go to the Park, on the heights, far from the sea, turning your back on it, walking up to me. You spread slowly between the statues, you fold up, sitting down in the grass, on the benches, endlessly, almost statues yourselves, if I don’t perceive you for too long: The Bird Lover, The Dog Lady; several dogs, not necessarily hers, The Dog Walker? The Lovers: just The Girl Student, The Philosopher, alone, then the encounter, the month-long first sentence, the week-long first smile, then seeing them leave, together, throughout a century, and come back, another century, their hands, seeking each other, sea anemones, in a magnetic current. A few hours, another title: The Kiss. Are going to change again: their bodies move differently, the space they inhabit together, not the same anymore, their eyes, elsewhere. The Break-Up, perhaps?
The mist is gone, the sun revolves, unmoving, in the sky. Tropism, I move too, don’t see the Promenade any longer, but The Sleeper’s bench, real statue, that is, blue dress, crossed legs, her cheek against her hand. Today, next to her, a youngster, a true human, skin the color of light tobacco, eyes closed, no shirt. Soaking up some sun, but what difference? Doesn’t move either for me, or so little, a breath every hour.
I see elsewhere, clouds, shadows, leaves, other passers-by ambling on, imperceptibly, for several eternities. Or I close my eyes, to see the crackling energy, behind my lids, flashing through, life in my cells, death.
Eyes open again, bench vanished: the Hummingbirds’ Dome now, the great central lawn; less ardent light; longer shadows; the color of the sky changes faster; the hummingbirds’ wings vibrate; behind the transparent dome, I am beginning to see them move, from flower to flower; in the trees, the free birds’ symphony wells up again to higher notes; where soon the song of this or that bird stands out, that I recognize; you go on walking, gracefully swimming along the alleys, buoyant; the sun’s orb sinks behind the leaves fluttering in the breeze as in a river. This endless day is coming to an end. Inside me the energy pulse slows down, gets lighter, fades away. There is a very brief moment when everything stops, when I feel as if suspended, time for the symbols to reverse, for the fluxes to reorganize, for other instructions to move me.
Sunset is coming, a time for questions. Your questions.
But first let me enjoy my newfound body. Let me yawn hugely and turn my head, this way, that way, to uncrick my neck. Fold my wings, unfold them again, stand up and stretch – front claws gripping the edge of the pedestal, back arched, hindquarters up in the air, braced on my back legs, tail lashing. And then adopt the posture in which I will answer you. Sitting back, wings folded, tail coiled around the haunches, the human head very straight between the animal shoulders, the chest very obvious with its two little round breasts just above the place where the pelt begins. This posture is disturbing to some of you, it took me a long time to understand one of the reasons why: too much woman. They prefer me in a recumbent posture, head on the front legs, either lying at length on my belly or curled upon myself. And eyes shut. But this is not appropriate, I can feel it, and in the end I always answer you sitting straight. Thus my face is at the same height as yours when you stand. Perhaps this is what disturbs you, who walk by averting your eyes or feigning not to see me.
You don’t ask many questions, nowadays. You never did ask many questions. Mainly at first, when I was a novelty. Or at least something to be outraged about, since talking statues had been made before, in the very beginning, fifty years earlier. But to make one just when bio-sculpture was on the verge of being outlawed, only Angkaar could pull that off and stay unpunished. He was famous, a subject for controversy for so long that it was now a routine. And he was old, dying, everybody knew. He had friends in high places: they let him make his last statue, and then they passed the law.
His face is in my first memory, and in the one after that, and in all the others until he put me to sleep and I woke up on that pedestal in the Park, in front of a wondering, shocked crowd. He let no one interfere with his ultimate creation: advances in the technology allowed it. But when I opened my eyes for the very first time, there was only his face, an ivory parchment, finely engraved with lines, stretched taut on a delicate bony architecture, the wide rounded forehead, the mouth, sinuous and weary, and eyes like carbuncles, their fire too dark in a face too white. His voice, throaty, always a little breathless.
I remember all the learning – you say «programming», you say «conditioning». He wanted to me to remember it, to remember him. He wanted me to know what I was, and how I had come to be. An artefact. A living sculpture. An artificial creature, a harmonious meeting of the organic and the electronic. My body, my brain, their development, their assembling: artificial, but organic. My movements, my reflexes, my memory, the algorithms of my thought: programmed. My thoughts themselves? Yes, some of them. There begins the uncertainty which is Angkaar’s gift to me.
There are very narrow physical limits to what I can do on my pedestal, besides the independent movement of each of my limbs: sit up, lie down in two different postures, stand up on all fours, beat my wings, move my head and torso. I cannot «jump down». Those terms have no physical referent for me, neither my joints nor my muscles hold them in memory. Of course, I feel no need to do those things. The few movements available to me are satisfying enough, and even more, they give me an intense pleasure, as do all my sensations.
In the beginning, I thought there were also limits to my thoughts. Then I slowly understood that those were more limits to my emotions. Your questions made me aware of it. And my answers. At first, I never knew what I was going to say. After all, you have to enter my perceptual field for me to answer you; you must be inside the magic circle, about four meters in diameter, materialized on the ground around my pedestal by small black triangular tiles. Beyond that limit, I don’t perceive you well enough; your expressions, your body language, yes, but not your electrical and chemical language, the emotions that surround you like an aura only I can perceive: I need that to answer you. Thus, in the beginning, I was w
aiting for my own words, my oracles, just as you were, believing just as you did that all my brief responses were programmed. But with time I was able to see that they never repeat. That since they evolve they take into account everything I have learned during these nearly ten years of my existence. And I concluded that somehow they must fit themselves to your questions. That in a more obscure fashion they must even answer them. I cannot say whether I am the only one speaking, however. No doubt there is also my creator, a residual echo slowly fading inside me. I have learned to know him better that way, through the gaps: in what I cannot feel although I can think it, in the distance between your curiosity and my enigmas. Between my questions and the answers you are not giving me, too.
But sunset is the time for your questions, not mine. Our respective speeds mesh for such short periods, no wonder Angkaar programmed me to be laconic. It was also in accord with his project, my nature, the title inscribed on my pedestal and that I have never read. I had never seen myself, either. I don’t know if that was my creator’s intention. He told me what I was, and I have in memory everything there is to know about sphinxes, but he never held out a mirror to me during my learning period, and I find in myself no desire to see my countenance.
When I did see myself, however …
The painter arrived in the morning and he revolved as I did, for I saw him each time I opened my eyes or looked back from the limits of the Park, the far stretches of the city or the heights of the sky. I knew him: I had seen him several times with Angkaar. First at my unveiling. (Memories: Angkaar had hidden me under an opaque thermosensitive glaze, the fading light of the sunset dissolved its chemical bounds as I was awakened.)
Then I saw the painter on strolls through the Park with a rapidly weakening Angkaar, the last few times in an electric wheelchair. Angkaar loved to go to the Park during his last weeks, no doubt because it showed several works of his. “There will be others”, he had cryptically told the media on the eve of my unveiling. No one had understood then. Neither had I.
He used to come at sunset, of course. He stopped in front of me. He listened to the questions people asked. He never asked any. For a long time I believed it was because he already knew all the answers. I now know it was because he didn’t. The painter (was he already a painter then? Perhaps) never asked anything either. He just held Angkaar’s hand, or his arm, later the back of the wheelchair. He was the younger man, hardly past his thirties, very dark, very slender, with the anxious expression of one who always expects to be rejected. Angkaar was very pleasant with him, though, or was it merely indifference? They never entered my perceptual circle. Alex. His name was Alex. And one day Alex came back alone. At sunset. He stayed before me, just outside the circle, for a long time, looking hard at me with an expression I didn’t understand (later, I learned that it was hatred). Then he said: “He’s dead.” Since it was not a question, there was no answer. He stayed there until the Park lights came up, then he turned away abruptly and was gone.
I saw him again two years later; he had an easel and a canvas – there was a revival of archaic techniques at that time; the Park was full of would-be landscape painters. He always arrived when the sun was rising in the east, always went when the sun slid down through the trees in the west: he wanted no words between us. He was doing sketches. After four days, he vanished. A week later he came back. He waited for the last painters to pack up and leave, then he took his canvas – a big thing almost a square meter wide – and he came up to me. With faltering steps, almost. Stopped just inside the circle. Placed the canvas so that I could see it. He was afraid. He was hurt.
It was a hyperrealist kind of painting, with every color shifted to shades of red. The winged silhouette was chained to the pedestal, supine, but with the torso rearing up. The left wing was dangling, broken. The right wing was half-unfolded. Blood had dripped from the shoulder to the left breast, was dripping from the parted lips. The head was slightly tilted to one side, as though the embroidered headdress was too heavy, or as though the rage that had caused the creature to tear at her own flesh had exhausted itself. The face was that of an ageless woman, with great, slanted amber eyes, a short, slightly hooked nose, wide, high cheekbones.
After a while, Alex asked: “Who is it?”
I heard myself answer: “Yourself.”
He stiffened, then seemed to crumple. Without a word, he turned away and left with his canvas. I availed myself of the absence of other questioners to ponder the complex feeling that had filled me at the sight of the picture. Despite my answer to Alex’s question, I had immediately assumed, through logical processing, that it was my image. Or at least an approximate likeness, since I have no broken wing. It was not really me … and it was me nevertheless. Why was I so sure of it, beyond all logic? Angkaar had never shown me any pictures corresponding to the purely verbal description present in my memory. A creature with the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle, but a human face and torso, and female. Lion, eagle, woman, I had already seen them, separately. But not their fusion. Sphinx. Do words correspond to some vast pool of intangible but eternal images, which I would have accessed? That was a curiously pleasant idea. The other component of my feeling, then, was it also pleasure? Alex’s painting was appalling, full of both cruelty and despair. But at the same time … beautiful. Did that mean I was beautiful? Or merely that Alex saw me thus, in spite of his pain, or perhaps because of it? Then what I felt was not pleasure, it was curiosity. And yet, indeed, pleasure of a sort: to discover questions I had never asked myself yet. Not who I was, but how you saw me: who I was, what I was, for you.
And this strange idea, also new to me, that perhaps you never saw me at all, really. That I was your mirror.
I believed I knew what you thought of me, though, what you felt in front of me. I heard you; I still do when you talk while passing by me, or stopping, when our times are in synch. That’s how I completed the education provided by Angkaar. At first you were admiring, the more secretly pleased for being officially shocked. Then, just after artefacts were outlawed, you took to censoring me in a more or less sincere tone; there were a few protests, even; far less fierce than at the beginning of bio-sculpture about sixty years ago: no one tried to blow me up; not even one graffiti. There were doubts as to the exact nature of my programmation, I gather: Angkaar was known for not being very tolerant of vandals; perhaps he had seen to my defensive capacities. On the other hand, you seem not to have much energy left to waste in symbolic gestures anymore; you apparently exhausted it in building dams and new cities that would protect you against the rising oceans – but the tides go on nibbling at them as if the sea did not care. No one even tried to shoot me from a distance. Perhaps they thought I was bullet-proof. There were only some protesters with placards: STOP THE SACRILEGE.
You kept on coming to see me, actually, because I was the one and only talking artefact that was semi-mobile, but also because I was the oldest artefact known to be still «functioning» (you never say «living»): five years, an amazing longevity. Then, later, the Sleeper in Blue walked into the Park and turned to stone on her bench, and Angkaar’s statement became clear: there were others. Among you, artefacts, perfectly humanoid ones that you never even suspected were not human: inorganic matter could go on existing much longer than official scientists had let on. You came to see me in bigger crowds, then – perhaps reassured by my honestly non-human appearance, and my so limited mobility. And you asked me questions, the questions you didn’t ask in the beginning because I was too new.
But since the functioning of artefacts had briefly came back into fashion, I expected you to ask them. I had studied enough inner traces of Angkaar in myself, made enough correlations with what I had learned from you without your knowledge. I know that you fear death, that time is still for you an unresolved enigma. “What walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon and on three in the evening?” someone asked me once, thinking he was clever. I heard myself answer: “An animal victimized by civilization.” I chalked
that one up to Angkaar’s opinion about humanity; he’d chosen to turn the legend on itself, which was telling enough in itself. He’d taught me Oedipus’s answer to the Greek Sphinx, of course; perhaps, at that time, humans had more answers.
Someone enters my field of vision. I know her: she walked by a moment ago, in full sunlight. She is not one of the regulars. Neither is she a tourist. I can see her much better now – paradoxically, when I go fast and you are slow, I see you for too long and in too much detail; I can’t get a good impression of you. Self-confidence, strength, a supple gait, an athletic build despite the aristocratic, cheetah-like slenderness. Beautiful, you’d say. Perhaps too self-composed? She doesn’t enter the circle. She doesn’t really stop in front of me, she merely slows down for a few seconds, she looks at me, turning her head toward me as she walks by, thoughtful, then she is gone, without asking me anything. Green eyes, golden skin, short light hair: one more human, one more image, one more mystery. The Park is emptying. My time is over. The shadows are almost touching me. No one asked me a question today.
You asked me once; after much dithering; talking circles around the word «death»; which would have been acknowledging my being alive; asked me whether I knew when I was to end, and why. And in my equally convoluted way; because of my programming then; not of any discomfort; I made you understand; yes, I know I am limited in time; yes, the artorganic matter of my body ages at an accelerated rate; a little faster by day; a little slower by night. “Do you know how you will end?” you asked then; I waited with interest for my answer: did I know? Had Angkaar given me that knowledge? I’d heard you before; talking about his previous biosculptures; he had never been at pain; to give them a spectacular ending. Protracted fireworks? Lightning-fast sublimation? The Sleeper in Blue had not yet come; to stop forever on her bench; at that time; I didn’t know; I could have added that: metamorphosis; into a real statue. I heard myself say: “All comes in time to those who are prepared”; you seemed disappointed; I could understand: a mere variant; on a tired old proverb; really, Angkaar! Only later did I understand; its appropriateness; come to think of it; you die so badly; most of you; surprised, furious, or reluctant; no insistence on esthetics.
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women Page 22