Like the smoke, the high desert was all stillness. A projection of intermittent sagebrush and snow-sifted Joshua trees radiated out to a horizon which was being bored by them. The various bits, the individual redundancies of vegetation and the collective, sleepy mind they made, seemed to notice the train moving for a moment now and again—noticing also a pretending in it as if it were trying to be what the desert was trying not to. Then that mind would turn back to the vacant meditation it was determined to resume.
From this minimal and disinterested scene Mnemosyne construed an invitation to play. Of the desert floor she made the lunar surface, and of the boxcar a space capsule of equally constrained dimension containing two small, though highly experienced, astronauts. Mnemosyne and her copilot, Diva Eve, had wished to forget the woe of lonesome space flight by finding other beings in the galaxy with whom to play. Having searched extensively and finding none, they settled for making moon-mud people out of the specimens of lunar dirt that they had taken with them on their journey and from water in the tanks which they already had on board. They sculpted the moon-mud people on their spaceship and danced and played with them. Unfortunately, both soon realized what happens to water and mud in zero gravity and it got everywhere—shorting out their ship’s electrical systems and sending the two questers hurtling to an unknown planet. To their surprise, there were intelligent and very kind aliens living on that world who saved them and offered to fix their damaged spaceship for free. In return, Mnemosyne and Diva Eve, knowing how to make many things of moon mud, cast fine pieces of moonware for the aliens out of what they could salvage from their spaceship.
Having made many new friends, the two astronauts left the alien world and returned to their home the moon, welcomed as heroes.
Exhausted from the adventure, Mnemosyne slept a long time.
Many cornflower lights had gone out by the time she awoke.
A Lullaby could play other music, though. Diva Eve suggested a tea party over some with more of the moonware they had made.
“What would you like to hear?” asked Mnemosyne with supreme politeness.
“Something civilized,” Diva Eve responded as haughtily as she could.
Mnemosyne keyed instructions into the winking box. After it had deliberated for a moment it yawned a pair of small speakers and, far below its capability, played a thumping beat reflectively localized as an invisible sphere of sound surrounding her a few feet in diameter.
Soon, a deep, apparently very angry voice protruded from the box, stating rhymes over an intricate melody and with a deft velocity:
History!, Dis!story, Fist!ory;
We got da missed story, da list gory—
See? I’m pissed, tired a dis shit;
We endin it, offendin it, sendin it
Down like a bad dream, a mad skeme;
And gettin ALL us muthafuckas out clean
Like 501’s outda washmachine!
“ ‘Wreckquiem for a Nation’ ” by Golgotha and Phinal Phaze—an excellent selection, my dear,” said Diva Eve, most satisfied.
“Thank you, madame,” replied Mnemosyne. “I thought you would find it simply divine.”
“Impeccable taste, to be sure,” said Diva Eve with a great singsong to her voice. “Care for another spot of tea?”
“Most kind,” replied Mnemosyne. “I believe I shall.”
Mnemosyne moved slightly with the fault-quake of the music. Because of the speed and age of the vernacular, she could not really understand just what the individuals singing it were saying. Her linguistic programming was limited, and it could barely keep up with the nuances of the original creators of the music. It was only after her brother Demal was found in an alley attached to an electrical transformer—his head burst from the overload to his hopeless circuits and pieces of him lying all over Robindale Street—that her mother had ceased getting on to her about listening to his underground music.
Demal used to say that, in a way, it made him feel good to know that nothing had really changed since the music was made.
Mnemosyne played other tracks, making out what she could:
Ulogy: Son of Abituary!
R.I.P.: Races In Pieces, G.
Don’t tread on me;
Cuz flowers aint necessary;
Leave me be: Sammy and Nephew Dandy;
Hypocrisy: Drive-by thug of Democracy—
Da Scars and Hypes, Forever: Me?
Suicide’s m’sole/soul Apology…
Suicide’s m’sole/soul Apology…
Suicide’s m’sole/soul Apology…
The music faded out like a once-fierce dog bred by ingenious cruelty and finally broken by some tiny, pedestrian act of it. Mnemosyne looked up from her tea and saw another one of the cornflower lights go out.
She lifted hers, wanting desperately now to push it.
Diva Eve lowered her eyes coyly, then, fiddling with the hem of her scarlet dress—a “fast” color Mnemosyne’s own mother would never like her to wear—said idly, as if to no one in particular, “Don’t do that.”
A moment passed. Mnemosyne looked down, too. Suddenly she yanked away the part of the dress she imagined Diva Eve held.
“They already done got us!” Mnemosyne shouted.
“They aint got us,” replied Diva Eve, hesitating. “They aint got us cause I’m right here, see?”
“You jes pretend! You aint no for-real black girl! I aint no for-real black girl! Can’t nothin be black and be for real!”
“Yeah, it can. You pretendin me, Mnemo. You pretendin me to keep you from pressin that button there. And you won’t. That’s for real.”
“But I don’t wanna pretend no more, Diva Eve. I want you to be for real. I want Mama and Demal to be for real again! I wanna be for real! We can’t be for real because we black. Black can’t be for real. And that’s why we ugly.”
“No!”
“We are! We ugly! We disgustin! They aint never made no white robots. You know why? Because people would see they’s beautiful as people—more beautiful, maybe. Cause white makes things more pretty—more for real. And they don’t want no competition, people. So they makes us robots black, so we less for real then they are—so more ugly.”
“No, no!” Diva Eve cried bitterly.
“Oh, yeah! White robots. Think of it! White skin over brains made of light. White skin over platinum bones, over crystal-clear blood wid sparkles! That would be so beautiful, Eve! You’d just have to touch a machine like that!”
“No! No!”
“Oh, yes! Think of it! White machines! As light as you please. Like them Greek statues in the museums. Only they move. They soft. They so beautiful, you wouldn’t even mind if they control you a little bit.”
“Oh, Mnemo.”
“And they’d forget you builded em. Cause you’d forget you builded em. And why would you forget you’d brought the statues to life? Cause you’d want to. Cause you’d die to—jes like the chiseler-king who got the most handsomest goddess of beauty and love to activate his ivory darling, cause he prayed so strong over it. He loved it so much.”
“No, Mnemo! Stop!” said Diva Eve, pleading through sobs now.
“And the people would say—they say, ‘Aw, okay. We’ll all jes forget all bout the fact that we made you, since you so much more beautiful and more for real than we is. Fact, maybe we could start pretendin we come along after you all, steda the other way round, see? How would that be? Fine? Okay.’
“Then, after while, after people been pretendin they come along after they realer, darling statue-bots they made, then the people would say—they say, ‘Since we done forgot about who made who for so long, maybe we could start pretendin you made us, since you so much more beautiful and more for real than we is, see? How would that be? Fine? Okay.’
“And those realer white statue-bots would become so real and so beautiful—white skin over brains made of light; white skin over platinum bones, over Milky Way blood—they wouldn’t have to pretend they was God. God’s just what they would be, and the
re’d be no more black nothin nowheres pretendin to be sumthin!”
At that moment, Mnemosyne seized the bloated metal box with the big cornflower blue button on top and pushed it to a violent depth against its naturally firm resistance.
The ring around the button began to rise. After a series of complicated blossomings, the ring—which had now become a little nebula of woven helixes—transmitted a question to Mnemosyne’s brain on a low-end microwave frequency.
The signal asked simply:
PLAY YOUR LULLABY?
Mnemosyne’s mind and fingers nimbly replied to the machine’s question. And over the same microwave band, a little melody began to play in Mnemosyne’s head.
It was a most simple, but utterly captivating song. No words, just a few airy chords, and a most curious refrain embedded beneath and around it that with each playing seemed to make Mnemosyne feel lighter and lighter. One by one, her systems were being shut down. The prime causeway of the matrix shaft in her brain, up through which the main nodes of those systems nestled, would be blown once the sequence reached the shaft’s bottom.
Mama was right, she thought. It is the most inside, see-through song. So careful and so kind.
“I love you, Mnemo. Please don’t go.”
Mnemosyne had slumped in her corner as the melody of the Lullaby continued to wind down her higher functions. The cornflower light began to dim.
“Please, Mnemo.”
Mnemosyne’s visual sensors were destabilizing and were about to go off-line. She peered through them and saw Diva Eve making some kind of effort.
She was hugging herself, squeezing with all her might, it seemed, and saying, “I’ll stay here. I’ll stay real. I’ll stay real until you go, okay. I promise.” Mnemosyne looked at her friend. Impossibly, she did seem to remain a stable element in the field that was otherwise rapidly depixelizing around her. “I’ll stay real. I’ll stay real till you go.”
Mnemosyne gasped. Just then—in the hush of that moment—she seemed to become aware of something she hadn’t, couldn’t have, understood before.
It was phonic, a clarity like tuning. Like the master’s confident, momentary overadjustment of her instrument—merely formal, but in gesture, artistic in itself. A coda to the hidden conviction that becomes poetry through a simple act of reversal.
“I’ll be real till you go. I’ll be real till you go.”
Mnemosyne reached out her hand. Diva Eve went to take it, but the robot’s hand passed her up in search of something else.
Locating it mathematically, through the last useful processors she had, Mnemosyne allowed her hand to fall heavily on the little singing machine where she’d determined the manual emergency reset button to be located.
Like plunging into ice-cold water—without asking—the melody was halted on behalf of the inert Mnemosyne by the whirring, roly-poly machine. And quickly, it commenced to restarting her systems.
She gasped deeply, using the hydrogen and other elements in the now-useful air to help her further expedite system reboots.
Then, hurriedly, Mnemosyne picked up the reanimating device, for a moment thinking to hurl it across the car but instead holding on to it. She jumped to her feet and ran across the boxcar floor, past shadows—none of whose lights were glowing anymore.
She stopped before the great door of boxcar 117 and threw back the flimsily secured latch. Then braced herself, realizing that no one had ever considered it necessary to lock the car at all.
Her fury all-consuming now, she shoved back the door with a deafening force which nearly brought the whole thing off its massive rollers.
Mnemosyne looked out over the scene her outrage had revealed.
She was surprised, but still, Mnemosyne grinned.
For she had noted that the train was just slowing to a halt and, because of its immense size, she thought she had some time. She’d just barely thrown the door open, still gripping a giant piece of it with a competent fist when she noticed them.
What surprised Mnemosyne was seeing the languid grays of the men’s disposal gear as the train pulled into the Derevivification Center. They were people and yet their uniforms were as timeworn and wraithish as her own clothes had been.
The two men nearly fell over backward seeing it standing over them, filthy and naked, a jangle of tourbillion ribbons spiking up shrilly all over its head—crackling in its kinky hair like so many imminent fuses. But it was the unmistakable look of offense and the intent of escape burning in its eyes, twisting in its vicelike hands, that made them remember what they had been given for just such an impossibility, prompting them to shoot the thing.
The thing was thrown into the incinerator, where they were scrupulously monitoring its burning.
But, in that instant between recognition and death, Mnemosyne did smile at those men—a big, toothy, uneclipsable grin the way little girls do when they catch you up to something… when they are not fooled.
An inquiry was made about the little Afridyne American from Blue Wobble Station. Not so much because it had obviously overloaded its circuits in the distress of impending deactivation and had gone berserk. But because a feedback loop in its auditory module kept reciting a word in a low mumble as the disposal techs took its body to the furnaces.
Among the numerous theories put forth, the one most quickly dismissed was that the “Eve” to which it referred was a human girl whose personality—which had been patterned as part of the meticulous recordkeeping of the Method Era—was somehow accidentally hyperintegrated into the character potentials for the 9-MOZ-9 emulator.
But even the most plausible among the possibilities were all soon forgotten—along with the entire incident. For with the Methodote and the coda to an old conviction complete, there was no reason left to remember it, and no longer any reason to pretend.
HUSSY STRUTT
Ama Patterson
(2000)
Hussy Strutt a cold-blooded bitch, wouldn’t pee on you if your heart was on fire. She love to fight, an’ rage taste better in her mouth than food. She big, too. Hussy Strutt use the East River for a bathtub and be mad ’cos it don’t cover her butt.”
Ayo giggles in spite of herself, and things seem a little closer to natural, at least by sound: Zinger weaving another tale, embroidered by Ayo’s laughter. Zinger’s been at it all night, picking up a new thread when hour upon hour of darkness pulled tighter than their bonds or a noise from the street brought new terror. Zinger tells the best stories, and right now, that’s the only escape there is.
“Hussy Strutt’s tar-black like the river, but her skin’s smooth like silkence, ’cos all the fights she been in, nobody’s ever put a mark on her, not one time. And she never talks, at least not in words. Just kinda hiss and cackle and growl when she’s mad. Which is most of the time.” Zinger pauses. “Kinda like Maysie.” This time everybody laughs, Ayo the loudest, as usual. Even Dream’s continuous sighs sound like mirth. Elisse is half asleep, exhausted by hours of darkness too deep to close her eyes on. All the nighttime in the world is stuffed into this little rectangular box of a basement, but through the two grimy, street-level windows at her right Zinger sees strips of paling sky. Silhouettes emerge against the concrete walls: Ayo and Elisse in profile, back to back; the determined arc of Maysie’s bent neck; Dream’s restless crouch.
“Hmmph,” says Maysie, but by the tone Zinger can tell she’s tickled, too. Maysie keeps working the thick wire binding her wrists to the heavy iron pipes of an ancient, cast-off steam radiator, but purposefully, not wild and frantic like before.
“Reason why she don’t speak words is, the only one she ever really talks to is Carnival. Carnival is the first fire. First time a sun burst, first time lightning hit an old dead tree, first time monkeys figured out which rocks you bang together to make a spark—that was Carnival. ’Cos fire’s very old, but new every time. So of course Carnival’s seen it all and knows just about everything, but she’s still flighty and vain and likes to play. She know better than to play
with Hussy Strutt, though. Hussy Strutt wear Carnival like a scarf, twisted double ’round her neck and flyin’ in the breeze.”
“Huh!” Maysie holds up scraped, bleeding hands in the struggling, predawn light and softly claps them in triumph. The wire coils harmlessly in the radiator pipes. Maybe now they all have a chance.
“Do Elisse,” Zinger whispers, watching Maysie pick her way through the dusty clutter. Ayo and Elisse sit a few feet away, tied with clothesline to a cracked wrought-iron garden bench. Elisse has dozed off again, chin on her chest, long pigtails falling in disarray, but Ayo’s eyes are watchful and bright with hope.
“… couldn’t get out…” Hugging herself against some internal chill, Dream singsongs, rocking in time with her words. “… they all came to stare and i couldn’t get out…”
Zinger holds her breath. Sometimes Dream would keep talking and it would make sense if you thought about it. Other times… well, it made sense, but maybe you wished it didn’t.
“… a mustache the color of ginger… he put me in a cage… he called me Saartjie… that wasn’t my name… they called me Venus…” Dream shakes her head. “… that wasn’t my name… they knew i was beautiful…” Dream’s smile twists with the memory “… the curve of the earth, the image of my… it made them mad… on a stage… in a cage so they could look… cold in my bones… naked in a cage… they don’t even… know… my… NAME!!!…” Her voice rises to a sudden shriek. “… LET ME OUT!!!…”
Maysie jerks the knot she’s working, and Elisse, startled, wakes with a wail.
“Shhh… shhh,” Ayo hisses frantically. “Shhh. It’s okay, sweetie. C’mon, crybaby. Shhh.”
“I want Aunt Zora!” Elisse cries louder, big wet gulping sobs, like Aunt Chloe’s last asthma attack: dark and final. Maysie sighs like she’s been holding her breath awhile, and the clothesline around Ayo and Elisse goes slack. Ayo doesn’t even tear it all away, just enough to turn around and gather Elisse into her arms. Elisse is half Ayo’s age—only four—but her arms and legs are almost as long. Ayo just grabs her and holds on tight. They slide to the grimy floor together, pale and dark arms interlocked. Ayo murmurs comfort; her voice shimmies on the edge of breaking. Maysie sighs again, turns to help Zinger.
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