“Let me introduce my niece Quy to you,” Second Uncle said, in Galactic, to the man beside him.
“Quy,” the man said, his immerser perfectly taking up the nuances of her name in Rong. He was everything she’d expected; tall, with only a thin layer of avatar, a little something that narrowed his chin and eyes, and made his chest slightly larger. Cosmetic enhancements: he was good-looking for a Galactic, all things considered. He went on, in Galactic, “My name is Galen Santos. Pleased to meet you. This is my wife, Agnes.”
Agnes. Quy turned, and looked at the woman for the first time – and flinched. There was no one here: just a thick layer of avatar, so dense and so complex that she couldn’t even guess at the body hidden within.
“Pleased to meet you.” On a hunch, Quy bowed, from younger to elder, with both hands brought together – Rong-style, not Galactic – and saw a shudder run through Agnes’s body, barely perceptible; but Quy was observant, she’d always been. Her immerser was screaming at her, telling her to hold out both hands, palms up, in the Galactic fashion. She tuned it out: she was still at the stage where she could tell the difference between her thoughts and the immerser’s thoughts.
Second Uncle was talking again – his own avatar was light, a paler version of him. “I understand you’re looking for a venue for a banquet.”
“We are, yes.” Galen pulled a chair to him, sank into it. They all followed suit, though not with the same fluid, arrogant ease. When Agnes sat, Quy saw her flinch, as though she’d just remembered something unpleasant. “We’ll be celebrating our fifth marriage anniversary, and we both felt we wanted to mark the occasion with something suitable.”
Second Uncle nodded. “I see,” he said, scratching his chin. “My congratulations to you.”
Galen nodded. “We thought—’’ he paused, threw a glance at his wife that Quy couldn’t quite interpret – her immerser came up blank, but there was something oddly familiar about it, something she ought to have been able to name. “Something Rong,” he said at last. “A large banquet for 100 people, with the traditional dishes.”
Quy could almost feel Second Uncle’s satisfaction. A banquet of that size would be awful logistics, but it would keep the restaurant afloat for a year or more, if they could get the price right. But something was wrong – something—
“What did you have in mind?” Quy asked, not to Galen, but to his wife. The wife – Agnes, which probably wasn’t the name she’d been born with – who wore a thick avatar, and didn’t seem to be answering or ever speaking up. An awful picture was coming together in Quy’s mind.
Agnes didn’t answer. Predictable.
Second Uncle took over, smoothing over the moment of awkwardness with expansive hand gestures. “The whole hog, yes?” Second Uncle said. He rubbed his hands, an odd gesture that Quy had never seen from him – a Galactic expression of satisfaction. “Bitter melon soup, Dragon-Phoenix plates, Roast Pig, Jade Under the Mountain …” He was citing all the traditional dishes for a wedding banquet – unsure of how far the foreigner wanted to take it. He left out the odder stuff, like Shark Fin or Sweet Red Bean Soup.
“Yes, that’s what we would like. Wouldn’t we, darling?” Galen’s wife neither moved nor spoke. Galen’s head turned towards her, and Quy caught his expression at last. She’d thought it would be contempt, or hatred; but no, it was anguish. He genuinely loved her, and he couldn’t understand what was going on.
Galactics. Couldn’t he recognize an immerser junkie when he saw one? But then Galactics, as Tam said, seldom had the problem – they didn’t put on the immersers for more than a few days, on low settings, if they ever went that far. Most were flat-out convinced Galactic would get them anywhere.
Second Uncle and Galen were haggling, arguing prices and features; Second Uncle sounding more and more like a Galactic tourist as the conversation went on, more and more aggressive for lower and lower gains. Quy didn’t care anymore: she watched Agnes. Watched the impenetrable avatar – a red-headed woman in the latest style from Prime, with freckles on her skin and a hint of a star-tan on her face. But that wasn’t what she was, inside; what the immerser had dug deep into. That wasn’t who she was at all.
Tam was right; all immersers should be taken apart, and did it matter if they exploded? They’d done enough harm as it was.
Quy wanted to get up, to tear away her own immerser, but she couldn’t, not in the middle of the negotiation. Instead, she rose, and walked closer to Agnes; the two men barely glanced at her, too busy agreeing on a price. “You’re not alone,” she said, in Rong, low enough that it didn’t carry.
Again, that odd, disjointed flash. “You have to take it off,” Quy said, but got no further response. As an impulse, she grabbed the other woman’s arm; felt her hands go right through the immerser’s avatar, connect with warm, solid flesh.
You hear them negotiating, in the background – it’s tough going, because the Rong man sticks to his guns stubbornly, refusing to give ground to Galen’s onslaught. It’s all very distant, a subject of intellectual study; the immerser reminds you from time to time, interpreting this and that body cue, nudging you this way and that – you must sit straight and silent, and support your husband – and so you smile through a mouth that feels gummed together.
You feel, all the while, the Rong girl’s gaze on you, burning like ice water, like the gaze of a dragon. She won’t move away from you; and her hand rests on you, gripping your arm with a strength you didn’t think she had in her body. Her avatar is but a thin layer, and you can see her beneath it: a round, moon-shaped face with skin the color of cinnamon – no, not spices, not chocolate, but simply a color you’ve seen all your life.
“You have to take it off,” she says. You don’t move; but you wonder what she’s talking about.
Take it off. Take it off. Take what off?
The immerser.
Abruptly, you remember – a dinner with Galen’s friends, when they laughed at jokes that had gone by too fast for you to understand. You came home battling tears; and found yourself reaching for the immerser on your bedside table, feeling its cool weight in your hands. You thought it would please Galen if you spoke his language; that he would be less ashamed of how uncultured you sounded to his friends. And then you found out that everything was fine, as long as you kept the settings on maximum and didn’t remove it. And then … and then you walked with it and slept with it, and showed the world nothing but the avatar it had designed – saw nothing it hadn’t tagged and labelled for you. Then …
Then it all slid down, didn’t it? You couldn’t program the network anymore, couldn’t look at the guts of machines; you lost your job with the tech company, and came to Galen’s compartment, wandering in the room like a hollow shell, a ghost of yourself – as if you’d already died, far away from home and all that it means to you. Then – then the immerser wouldn’t come off, anymore.
“What do you think you’re doing, young woman?”
Second Uncle had risen, turning towards Quy – his avatar flushed with anger, the pale skin mottled with an unsightly red. “We adults are in the middle of negotiating something very important, if you don’t mind.” It might have made Quy quail in other circumstances, but his voice and his body language were wholly Galactic; and he sounded like a stranger to her – an angry foreigner whose food order she’d misunderstood – whom she’d mock later, sitting in Tam’s room with a cup of tea in her lap, and the familiar patter of her sister’s musings.
“I apologize,” Quy said, meaning none of it.
“That’s all right,” Galen said. “I didn’t mean to—” he paused, looked at his wife. “I shouldn’t have brought her here.”
“You should take her to see a physician,” Quy said, surprised at her own boldness.
“Do you think I haven’t tried?” His voice was bitter. “I’ve even taken her to the best hospitals on Prime. They look at her, and say they can’t take it off. That the shock of it would kill her. And even if it didn’t …” He spread
his hands, letting air fall between them like specks of dust. “Who knows if she’d come back?”
Quy felt herself blush. “I’m sorry.” And she meant it this time.
Galen waved her away, negligently, airily, but she could see the pain he was struggling to hide. Galactics didn’t think tears were manly, she remembered. “So we’re agreed?” Galen asked Second Uncle. “For a million credits?”
Quy thought of the banquet; of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavors. “I’m sorry,” she said, again, but no one was listening; and she turned away from Agnes with rage in her heart – with the growing feeling that it had all been for nothing in the end.
“I’m sorry,” the girl says – she stands, removing her hand from your arm, and you feel like a tearing inside, as if something within you was struggling to claw free from your body. Don’t go, you want to say. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here.
But they’re all shaking hands, smiling, pleased at a deal they’ve struck – like sharks, you think, like tigers. Even the Rong girl has turned away from you, giving you up as hopeless. She and her uncle are walking away, taking separate paths back to the inner areas of the restaurant, back to their home.
Please don’t go.
It’s as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn’t know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant’s main room, back into the hubbub and the tantalizing smells of food – of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make – you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly, and from a distance; and then running, so that no one will stop you. She’s walking fast – you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room, and you follow her inside.
They’re watching you, both girls; the one you followed in, and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at – both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.
In that one moment – staring at each other, suspended in time – you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools, the dismantled machines, and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.
This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind – every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms, that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this, and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic; they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.
Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.
You raise a hand – it feels like moving through honey. You speak – struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.
“I know about this,” you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. “Let me help you, younger sisters.”
To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this.
DOWN THE WALL
Greer Gilman
Stilt-legs scissoring, snip-snap! the bird gods dance. Old craney-crows, a skulk of powers. How they strut and ogle with their long eyes, knowing. How they serpentine their necks. And stalking, how they flirt their tails, insouciant as Groucho. Fugue and counter-fugue, the music jigs and sneaks. On tiptoe, solemnly, they hop and flap; they whirl and whet their long curved clever bills. A sly dance, a wry dance, miching mallecho. Pavane. They peacock, but their drab is eyeless, black as mourners, black as mutes. They are clownish, they are sinister, in their insatiable invention, their unending. Like the frieze in a Pharaoh’s nursery, like the knot-work in a chthonic gospel. In and out, untiring as wire, they weave a thorny hedge of selves, and in their eddering, enlace their eggs, their moonish precious eggs. They gloat. And they go on. Like viruses, mere self engendering more self, they replicate. They tangle genesis in their inexorable braid.
The birds are phosphor in a box. They sift and sift across the screen; they whisper. They are endless snow or soot, the ashes of the old world burning. Elsewhere fire. The hailbox whispers, whispers. There is no way to turn it off. No other channel but the gods. All day and night it snows grey phosphor, sifting in the corners of the air. The earth is grey with ash.
The children watch the box, they sprawl and gaze. They’re bored, locked in so many endless days. Mewed up. Where’s out? they ask. When’s never? Why? Their mam clouts and pinches, slaps and spells and grumbles, twisting bacca in a screw of paper. She’s a wad of it, torn leaf by leaf away. Time sometime to get another book, ward and spell to steal it. Smoke it. Time enough. See, paper’s upworld. Outwall. Paper swirls about the open streets, abandoned to the gods, all scrawled with stick-dance; paper’s layered, scrap on gaudy scrap, on upworld walls. It’s slagheaps in the towers of the burning world, the Outwith, where the Old Crows breed. And their nests are sticks and souls.
They take souls fool enough to wander outwall, under sky. The sots that stumble from the trances of the underground. The wardless and unwary. Blink, blunder and they’re snatched. Like her awd man. Kids’ father. “Blind drunk,” she tells them, scornful. “Pissing out a window.”
She twitches at the curtains, net on net against the talons of the numinous. Their seine is grey with ashes, hung with toys: green headless army men and dolls’ eyes, wired, blue. The window is brick. “Bad enough here, down t’Wall,” she says. “Living here. Gettin in wi’ this lot.” Mouth snecked and her eyes like iodine.
Boy’s mazy.
She takes the girl to dancing class, up Mrs. Mallecho’s. And pays good brass for it. Smoke. Spellcards. Takes her both ways, proper, through the twisting maze of ginnels, and locks to do, undo, at every trance. Quells beggars with a look. In the cloakroom, in among the downy girls, she plucks at her daughter’s bits of swans-down, pluming out her tawdry dress. Tufts at her shoulderblades. Gosslyn. She’ll do. Girl dances lovely, well she’ll give her that. Not like that Dowsa Fligger, silk stockins til her arse, and all them gilty bits ont never never. They says. Off her auntie’s bed, more like. Dancin on her back. Oh, she’s fly, is Mrs. Theek. Gosslyn’s mam clamps down a round comb, fanged and feathery, to crown her daughter’s hair; she screws her handkerchief and spits and scrubs.
Girl’s fratchety.
The mothers watch from the margins, fierce, aspiring, appraising: their arms crossed, bags clutched, their mouths like paper cuts. They acknowledge haughtily with lifted chins: so much, no more.
“Mrs. Leathy.”
“Mrs. Fligger.”
“Mrs. Fligger.”
“Mrs. Theek.”
The hatchlings dance.
At home, behind the jaded couch, her children whisper. They have doorsteps and dark jam to munch; they have a bulwark of pillows. They have stubs of crayons and the wall. From behind them, they can hear the godbox and the skulking music. Lunar tunes. And rising keening over that, a melancholy roar and drone, a pibroch with the fear note in it. Their mam’s doing Wednesday, she feeds the Oover north-northwest: three fag ends, a catseye marble, tea leaves. Widdershins: a doll’s shoe, a snarl of hairpins. East: a coin. It molochs them all up. West by south: she ties, unties her pinny, back to front, the
old one with the faded poppies.
“Black,” the boy says. “They must be black. And shriking.”
The girl is twirling a plastic ball on her palms, full of heavy water, bright plastic fish. The water whorls and rights itself. “Black’s used up.” She thinks. “There’s holes there. Outwall.” She swirls the ball; the fish dither.
“There’s rain,” he says.
The girl’s heard tell of it, old Pudfoot with his bottle, muttering. Like slanting wires, he says: but not a cage, like music someways. Or a dancer in nailed boots, she says: they’ve heard it on the tin-roofed trances, hurried by. Sometimes it sleeks in at the corners, seeking with its slow tongues, twining. And they’re not to touch it, and it chokes on dust.
“There’s turnings,” says the girl.
Slowly their drawing grows, cracked eyries and a maze of faces. The wallpaper’s scrawly like the godbox, but brown: all over and over, all the same. Crawlies and blotches. They’ve turned them into strange things: winged cats, birdheaded women. Owls with horns. Upworld things. A leafgirl by a hedge of bones, tossing up a golden ball. A hurchin boy, astride a cockerel. All pictures from their mother’s stash, all smoke.
Down the wall, down the end shop. The boy waits until the Mrs. sees him, sleeving on the glass case that his breath has clouded. Fly cakes. Bacca. There’s a babby in there, under glass. Goss says. She says it’s Outwith, it can talk and fly. The boy rubs and peers. The black comes off in wrinkles. Ghostly, he can see his own face, in among the things to sell. Tin birds. Cards of hook-and-eyes. Pale buns. The ladies talk.
“Mrs. Spugget.”
“Mrs. Pithy.”
Her shop smells of sour milk and smoke and bacca, drowsy sweet; of mops and cabbages and fennel-at-the-door. And mice. There’s holes down there. Worn lino, brown like her toffee, on the sour splintery boards. He once found a birdsweet in a crack in a corner. Dusty licorice.
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women Page 43