Not So Much, Said the Cat

by Michael Swanwick

  Jack picked up a stick and strode back and forth along the flower beds, lashing at the heads of the taller blossoms. “Must I then decide based on no information at all? Leap blindly into the abyss or remain doubtful at its lip forever? This is, as you say, a delightful existence. But can I be content with this life, knowing there is another and yet being ignorant of what it might entail?”

  “Calm yourself. If that is all it takes, then let us see what the alternative might be.” The King of the Mummelsee reached down into his lap and turned the page of a leather-bound folio which Jack had not noticed before.

  “Are you going to be sitting there forever, woolgathering, when there are chores to be done? I swear, you must be the single laziest man in the world.”

  Jack’s fat wife came out of the kitchen, absently scratching her behind. Gretchen’s face was round where once it had been slender, and there was a slight hitch in her gait, where formerly her every movement had been a dance to music only she could hear. Yet Jack’s heart softened within him at the sight of her, as it always did.

  He put down his goose-quill and sprinkled sand over what he had written so far. “You are doubtless right, my dear,” he said mildly. “You always are.”

  As he was stumping outdoors to chop wood, draw water, and feed the hog they were fattening for Fastnacht, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung by the back door. An old and haggard man with a beard so thin it looked moth-eaten glared back at him in horror. “Eh, sir,” he murmured to himself, “you are not the fine young soldier who tumbled Gretchen in the hayloft only minutes after meeting her, so many years ago.”

  A cold wind blew flecks of ice in his face when he stepped outside, and the sticks in the woodpile were frozen together so that he had to bang them with the blunt end of the axe to separate them so that they might be split. When he went to the well, the ice was so thick that breaking it raised a sweat. Then, after he’d removed the rock from the lid covering the bucket of kitchen slops and started down toward the sty, he slipped on a patch of ice and upended the slops over the front of his clothing. Which meant not only that he would have to wash those clothes weeks ahead of schedule—which in wintertime was an ugly chore—but that he had to gather up the slops from the ground with his bare hands and ladle them back into the bucket, for come what may the pig still needed to be fed.

  So, muttering and complaining to himself, old Jack clomped back into the house, where he washed his hands and changed into clean clothing and sat back down to his writing again. After a few minutes, his wife entered the room and exclaimed, “It is so cold in here!” She busied herself building up the fire, though it was so much work carrying wood up to his office that Jack would rather have endured the cold, to save himself the extra labor later on. Then she came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Are you writing a letter to Wilhelm again?”

  “Who else?” Jack growled. “We work our fingers to the bone to send him money, and he never writes! And when he does, his letters are so brief! He spends all his time drinking and running up debts with tailors and chasing after—” he caught himself in time, and coughed. “Chasing after inappropriate young women.”

  “Well, after all, when you were his age—”

  “When I was his age, I never did any such thing,” Jack said indignantly.

  “No, of course not,” he wife said. He could feel the smile he did not turn around to see. “You poor foolish dear.”

  She kissed the top of his head.

  The sun emerged from behind a cloud as Jack reappeared, and the garden blazed with a hundred bright colors—more of Poseidonia’s influence, Jack supposed. Its flowers turned their heads toward him flirtatiously and opened their blossoms to his gaze.

  “Well?” said the King of the Mummelsee. “How was it?”

  “I’d lost most of my teeth,” Jack said glumly, “and there was an ache in my side which never went away. My children were grown and moved away, and there was nothing left in my life to look forward to but death.”

  “That is not a judgment,” the king said, “but only a catalog of complaints.”

  “There was, I must concede, a certain authenticity to life on the other side of the gate. A validity and complexity which ours may be said to lack.”

  “Well, there you are, then.”

  The shifting light darkened and a wind passed through the trees, making them sigh. “On the other hand, there is a purposefulness to this life which the other does not have.”

  “That too is true.”

  “Yet if there is a purpose to our existence—and I feel quite certain that there is—I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

  “Why, that is easily enough answered!” the king said. “We exist to amuse the reader.”

  “And this reader—who exactly is he?”

  “The less said about the reader,” said the King of the Mummelsee fervently, “the better.” He stood. “We have talked enough,” he said. “There are two gates from this garden. One leads back whence we came. The second leads to . . . the other place. That which you glimpsed just now.”

  “Has it a name, this ‘other place’?”

  “Some call it Reality, though the aptness of that title is, of course, in dispute.”

  Jack tugged at his mustache and chewed at the inside of his cheek. “This is, I swear, no easy choice.”

  “Yet we cannot stay in this garden forever, Jack. Sooner or later, you must choose.”

  “Indeed, sir, you are right,” Jack said. “I must be resolute.” All about him, the garden waited in hushed stillness. Not a bullfrog disturbed the glassy surface of the lily pond. Not a blade of grass stirred in the meadow. The very air seemed tense with anticipation.

  He chose.

  So it was that Johann von Grimmelshausen, sometimes known as Jurgen, escaped the narrow and constricting confines of literature, and of the Mummelsee as well, by becoming truly human and thus subject to the whims of history. Which means that he, of course, died centuries ago. Had he remained a fiction, he would still be with us today, though without the richness of experience which you and I endure every day of our lives.

  Was he right to make the choice he did? Only God can tell. And if there is no God, why then we will never know.

  FROM BABEL'S FALL'N GLORY WE FLED . . .

  Imagine a cross between Byzantium and a termite mound. Imagine a jeweled mountain, slender as an icicle, rising out of the steam jungles and disappearing into the dazzling pearl-grey skies of Gehenna. Imagine that Gaudi—he of the Segrada Familia and other biomorphic architectural whimsies—had been commissioned by a nightmare race of giant black millipedes to recreate Barcelona at the height of its glory, along with touches of the Forbidden City in the eighteenth century and Tokyo in the twenty-second, all within a single miles-high structure. Hold every bit of that in your mind at once, multiply by a thousand, and you’ve got only the faintest ghost of a notion of the splendor that was Babel.

  Now imagine being inside Babel when it fell.

  Hello. I’m Rosamund. I’m dead. I was present in human form when it happened and as a simulation chaotically embedded within a liquid crystal data-matrix then and thereafter up to the present moment. I was killed instantly when the meteors hit. I saw it all.

  Rosamund means “rose of the world.” It’s the third most popular female name on Europa, after Gaea and Virginia Dare. For all our elaborate sophistication, we wear our hearts on our sleeves, we Europans.

  Here’s what it was like:

  “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

  “Wha—?” Carlos Quivera sat up, shedding rubble. He coughed, choked, shook his head. He couldn’t seem to think clearly. An instant ago he’d been standing in the chilled and pressurized embassy suite, conferring with Arsenio. Now. . . . “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Unconscious. Ten hours,” his suit (that’s me—Rosamund!) said. It had taken that long to heal his burns. Now it was shooting wake-up drugs into him: amphetamines, endorphins,
attention enhancers, a witch’s brew of chemicals. Physically dangerous, but in this situation, whatever it might be, Quivera would survive by intelligence or not at all. “I was able to form myself around you before the walls ruptured. You were lucky.”

  “The others? Did the others survive?”

  “Their suits couldn’t reach them in time.”

  “Did Rosamund. . . ?”

  “All the others are dead.”

  Quivera stood.

  Even in the aftermath of disaster, Babel was an imposing structure. Ripped open and exposed to the outside air, a thousand rooms spilled over one another toward the ground. Bridges and buttresses jutted into gaping smoke-filled canyons created by the slow collapse of hexagonal support beams (this was new data; I filed it under Architecture, subheading: Support Systems, with links to Esthetics and Xenopsychology) in a jumbled geometry that would have terrified Piranesi himself. Everywhere, gleaming black millies scurried over the rubble.

  Quivera stood.

  In the canted space about him, bits and pieces of the embassy rooms were identifiable: a segment of wood molding, some velvet drapery now littered with chunks of marble, shreds of wallpaper (after a design by William Morris) now curling and browning in the heat. Human interior design was like nothing native to Gehenna and it had taken a great deal of labor and resources to make the embassy so pleasant for human habitation. The queen-mothers had been generous with everything but their trust.

  Quivera stood.

  There were several corpses remaining as well, still recognizably human though they were blistered and swollen by the savage heat. These had been his colleagues (all of them), his friends (most of them), his enemies (two, perhaps three), and even his lover (one). Now they were gone, and it was as if they had been compressed into one indistinguishable mass, and his feelings toward them all as well: shock and sorrow and anger and survivor guilt all slagged together to become one savage emotion.

  Quivera threw back his head and howled.

  I had a reference point now. Swiftly, I mixed serotonin-precursors and injected them through a hundred microtubules into the appropriate areas of his brain. Deftly, they took hold. Quivera stopped crying. I had my metaphorical hands on the control knobs of his emotions. I turned him cold, cold, cold.

  “I feel nothing,” he said wonderingly. “Everyone is dead, and I feel nothing.” Then, flat as flat: “What kind of monster am I?”

  “My monster,” I said fondly. “My duty is to ensure that you and the information you carry within you get back to Europa. So I have chemically neutered your emotions. You must remain a meat puppet for the duration of this mission.” Let him hate me—I who have no true ego, but only a facsimile modeled after a human original—all that mattered now was bringing him home alive.

  “Yes.” Quivera reached up and touched his helmet with both hands, as if he would reach through it and feel his head to discover if it were as large as it felt. “That makes sense. I can’t be emotional at a time like this.”

  He shook himself, then strode out to where the gleaming black millies were scurrying by. He stepped in front of one, a least-cousin, to question it. The millie paused, startled. Its eyes blinked three times in its triangular face. Then, swift as a tickle, it ran up the front of his suit, down the back, and was gone before the weight could do more than buckle his knees.

  “Shit!” he said. Then, “Access the wiretaps. I’ve got to know what happened.”

  Passive wiretaps had been implanted months ago, but never used, the political situation being too tense to risk their discovery. Now his suit activated them to monitor what remained of Babel’s communications network: A demon’s chorus of pulsed messages surging through a shredded web of cables. Chaos, confusion, demands to know what had become of the queen-mothers. Analytic functions crunched data, synthesized, synopsized: “There’s an army outside with Ziggurat insignia. They’ve got the city surrounded. They’re killing the refugees.”

  “Wait, wait. . . . ” Quivera took a deep, shuddering breath. “Let me think.” He glanced briskly about and for the second time noticed the human bodies, ruptured and parboiled in the fallen plaster and porphyry. “Is one of those Rosamund?”

  “I’m dead, Quivera. You can mourn me later. Right now, survival is priority number one,” I said briskly. The suit added mood-stabilizers to his maintenance drip.

  “Stop speaking in her voice.”

  “Alas, dear heart, I cannot. The suit’s operating on diminished function. It’s this voice or nothing.”

  He looked away from the corpses, eyes hardening. “Well, it’s not important.” Quivera was the sort of young man who was energized by war. It gave him permission to indulge his ruthless side. It allowed him to pretend he didn’t care. “Right now, what we have to do is—”

  “Uncle Vanya’s coming,” I said. “I can sense his pheromones.”

  Picture a screen of beads, crystal lozenges, and rectangular lenses. Behind that screen, a nightmare face like a cross between the front of a locomotive and a tree grinder. Imagine on that face (though most humans would be unable to read them) the lineaments of grace and dignity seasoned by cunning and, perhaps, a dash of wisdom. Trusted advisor to the queen-mothers. Second only to them in rank. A wily negotiator and a formidable enemy. That was Uncle Vanya.

  Two small speaking-legs emerged from the curtain, and he said:

  ::(cautious) greetings::

  |

  ::(Europan vice-consul 12)/Quivera/[treacherous vermin]::

  |

  ::obligations (grave duty)::

  | |

  ::demand/claim [action]:: ::promise (trust)::

  “Speak pidgin, damn you! This is no time for subtlety.”

  The speaking legs were very still for a long moment. Finally they moved again:

  ::The queen-mothers are dead::

  “Then Babel is no more. I grieve for you.”

  ::I despise your grief:: A lean and chitinous appendage emerged from the beaded screen. From its tripartite claw hung a smooth white rectangle the size of a briefcase. ::I must bring this to (sister-city)/Ur/ [absolute trust]::

  “What is it?”

  A very long pause. Then, reluctantly ::Our library::

  “Your library.” This was something new. Something unheard-of. Quivera doubted the translation was a good one. “What does it contain?”

  ::Our history. Our sciences. Our ritual dances. A record-of-kinship dating back to the (Void)/Origin/[void]. Everything that can be saved is here::

  A thrill of avarice raced through Quivera. He tried to imagine how much this was worth, and could not. Values did not go that high. However much his superiors screwed him out of (and they would work very hard indeed to screw him out of everything they could), what remained would be enough to buy him out of debt, and do the same for a wife and their children after them as well. He did not think of Rosamund. “You won’t get through the army outside without my help,” he said. “I want the right to copy—” How much did he dare ask for? “—three-tenths of one percent. Assignable solely to me. Not to Europa. To me.”

  Uncle Vanya dipped his head, so that they were staring face to face. ::You are (an evil creature)/[faithless]. I hate you::

  Quivera smiled. “A relationship that starts out with mutual understanding has made a good beginning.”

  ::A relationship that starts out without trust will end badly::

  “That’s as it may be.” Quivera looked around for a knife. “The first thing we have to do is castrate you.”

  This is what the genocides saw:

  They were burning pyramids of corpses outside the city when a Europan emerged, riding a gelded least-cousin. The soldiers immediately stopped stacking bodies and hurried toward him, flowing like quicksilver, calling for their superiors.

  The Europan drew up and waited.

  The officer who interrogated him spoke from behind the black glass visor of a delicate-legged war machine. He examined the Europan’s credentials careful
ly, though there could be no serious doubt as to his species. Finally, reluctantly, he signed ::You may pass::

  “That’s not enough,” the Europan (Quivera!) said. “I’ll need transportation, an escort to protect me from wild animals in the steam jungles, and a guide to lead me to. . . .” His suit transmitted the sign for ::(starport)/Ararat/[trust-for-all]::

  The officer’s speaking-legs thrashed in what might best be translated as scornful laughter. ::We will lead you to the jungle and no further/ (hopefully-to-die)/[treacherous non-millipede]::

  “Look who talks of treachery!” the Europan said (but, of course, I did not translate his words) and, with a scornful wave of one hand, rode his neuter into the jungle.

  The genocides never bothered to look closely at his mount. Neutered least-cousins were beneath their notice. They didn’t even wear face-curtains, but went about naked for all the world to scorn.

  Black pillars billowed from the corpse-fires into a sky choked with smoke and dust. There were hundreds of fires and hundreds of pillars and, combined with the low cloud cover, they made all the world seem like the interior of a temple to a vengeful god. The soldiers from Ziggurat escorted him through the army and beyond the line of fires, where the steam jungles waited, verdant and threatening.

  As soon as the green darkness closed about them, Uncle Vanya twisted his head around and signed ::Get off me/vast humiliation/[lack-of-trust]::

  “Not a chance,” Quivera said harshly. “I’ll ride you ’til sunset, and all day tomorrow, and for a week after that. Those soldiers didn’t fly here, or you’d have seen them coming. They came through the steam forest on foot, and there’ll be stragglers.”

  The going was difficult at first, and then easy, as they passed from a recently forested section of the jungle into a stand of old growth. The boles of the “trees” here were as large as those of the redwoods back on Earth, some specimens of which are as old as five thousand years. The way wended back and forth. Scant sunlight penetrated through the canopy, and the steam quickly drank in what little light Quivera’s headlamp put out. Ten trees in, they would have been hopelessly lost had it not been for the suit’s navigational functions and the mapsats that fed it geodetic mathscapes accurate to a finger’s span of distance.