Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He went back home. His tall, shy, crooked-nosed love saw him as she filled the water-skins, and came to meet him, smiling. He took the skins from her; she tucked her hand in his arm.

  “Where have you been?”

  “For a walk.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A rock. A shadow. A rainbow.”

  The Doorkeeper of Khaat

  There were Khaati everywhere in Theore, those days, refugees from the war on the other side of the planet. There were Meri in the city also, but Meri had been moving into Tatia for a hundred and fifty years. There were Datu, but the land the Tatians had civilized had been theirs once, anyway. Now they ran restaurants in one side of the city, and in the other, they stole transport parts or painted huge bright murals on tenement walls and called themselves artists. There had always been Tatians in Theore but not as many now, Kel noticed, as there used to be. As the Khaati and the Meri moved into the city, Tatians moved out to the country, to the northern cities, to the sea-colonies if they could afford it. For a while, before he decided to become a poet, Kel had lived in one of the tiny, white-domed spaces in a sea-colony. His father had bought the space for him as a reward for finishing his engineering studies. Kel spent afternoons swathed in light, swaying gently to the movements of tide, listening to words well up from some shadowy, unnamed river running through his brain, fit themselves together as neatly as molecules. One day he left the sea-colony full of golden faces like his own and went to live on the oldest street in the oldest city in Tatia.

  A hundred years ago, the street had been famous for its passionate, impoverished poets. Now it was populated mostly by Khaati. Kel, intoxicated by the past, saw pale, aqua-eyed faces so constantly that he forgot his own was different. The odd singsong language he heard on the street formed an undistracting background for thoughts. He drank their alcoholic teas, bought steaming, spicy fish from their shops, nibbled it as he walked down the street in the evenings. From behind paper curtains, he heard their odd, tuneless, meandering music that told of places no boat could sail to, of thresholds no shod foot could cross.

  There were rules on that street. He couldn’t remember learning them, he just knew them: rules his poet’s eye observed while he himself was doing nothing much. Do not look their maidens in the eye, the rules said. Do not compliment the babies or lay a hand on the young children’s heads. Never step on the shadows of the elderly. Do not whistle in their shops. Never point at anyone, you could lose a finger. Be careful what small, amusing, tourist trinket, pin, or jacket you buy—you might find yourself wearing the emblem of the latest street gang, and unlike Tatians, they did not discriminate. And don’t call them gangs. Clans, they were. Clans.

  He lived from hand to mouth there, from moment to moment, as a poet should live. Or at least as he understood them to have lived on that street in Theore a hundred years before. He tracked down their forgotten poems, read voraciously, and tried to imitate them in his writings. They had written of everything, they valued every word, for each word, each experience, was equally sacred, equally profane. His Tatian lover, who had come with him from the sea-colonies, bore with his obsession for a couple of months. Then she realized that he was absurdly content in that neighborhood among the Khaati, that he had no inclination to take a job from his father, live in the great light-filled high-rises mid-city that strove like gargantuan plants toward the sun. She left him, disappeared into the Tatian heart of the city. The shock of her leaving and for such reasons fueled much articulate and bitter poetry. Sometimes, sobering up and rereading his work, Kel felt almost grateful to her for the experience of pain.

  Around the time that brooding over his lost love was becoming habitual rather than unavoidable, Kel met Aika. He sat down beside her in a Khaati bar one afternoon. The scent of her mildly intoxicating tea wafted toward Kel as he chewed over his loss. Sometime during the next couple of hours, he found talking to Aika more interesting than getting drunk. She neither laughed nor sighed when he said he was a poet. She raised a thin white eyebrow and told him she was going to Khaat.

  “Khaat,” Kel said blankly. He had been wondering why her eyes—the same light, clear blue as every other Khaati he had ever seen—were so astonishingly beautiful. Then he blinked. “Khaat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Khaat is not a place. Khaat is a war.”

  “I was born in Khaat.” She sipped tea delicately; her fingers were long, tapering, ringed. “My parents escaped just after I was born. So I have lived in Tatia all my life. I know two languages, I have a Tatian education. But Khaat is still my country, even at war with itself. My heritage.”

  “Your heritage—the best of it—is on this street,” he argued. “There can’t be much left in Khaat. It’s been tearing itself apart for so long nobody remembers who’s fighting who or why.”

  She smiled after a moment, a thin-lipped, amused smile. “Just Blues fighting Blues in one of their interminable clan wars.”

  “No. Clan wars I understand. But Khaat seems intent on destroying itself. What do you think you’ll find there but a dying country with nothing left of it but a name?”

  Her level gaze did not falter at his glib bluntness, but her eyes seemed to grow enormous, luminous. She only said dryly, “You want to be a poet. Read Coru.”

  He sat up until dawn reading Aika’s copy of Coru’s poems, while she slept beside him. The poet-shaman had lived two thousand years before in a Khaat that Kel had not realized was so old. Coru had spent his life wandering down farm roads, through jungles, into villages, bringing both practical and mystical remedies for everything from hangnails to impotence. He wrote of everything: fish soup, morning dew, sex, starving children, clan battles, and white tigers. Words kept the world orderly, he believed, kept the past from vanishing.

  Soul, like butterfly, has no language.

  We who walk from moment to moment,

  Must say where we have been

  Moment to moment,

  Or we disappear.

  So, like rice pickers,

  We harvest words out of our mouths,

  To feed ourselves.

  Aika made an irritated movement in her sleep at Kel’s voice. He stopped reading, blinked gritty eyes at the dawn. Strange images prowled in his head like ghosts of somebody else’s relatives: the white tiger that appeared sometimes ahead of the poet to lead him to a place where he was needed; monkeys and teal-eyed birds screaming at one another in different languages; noon sun on a chalk-white road; the stout, broad-faced, sweaty farmer’s widow whose lovemaking Coru compared to every natural disaster he could think of; the Doorkeeper, the mysterious, many-faced woman who carried the keys to the Doorway of Death on her belt.

  “Yes, but,” Kel, his eyes closed, heard himself say, “that was two thousand years ago. The shelf-life of a country’s soul is two generations after the revolution that formed it.”

  Aika, waking, snorted sleepily. “You Tatians. How would you know? Everyone knows you are born lacking souls.”

  “Maybe. But whatever soul Khaat has, it’s tearing into bloody pieces now.”

  “Maybe,” she said softly, turning away from him, “that’s why I want to go.”

  If he didn’t talk about it, he figured later, maybe she would forget. He began to know her, the way her pale hair fell across her brows to snag her eyelashes, the way he could change her habitually brisk, humorless expression, the way her eyes caught light sometimes and turned so clear they held only the memory of color. Her white skin smelled of almonds; the perfume she sometimes wore smelled of apricots. She had a lovely laugh, like water running in a forest on a hot day, like distant bells of some unknown metal. He loved to hear her laugh. But no matter what he did to distract her, the thoughtful, distant look would return to her eyes, and at those times she would not hear him say her name.

  “But why?” he asked helplessly. “It would be like going into a burning house when it’s simply too late to rescue anything.”

  She sighed. “If there was a
child in the burning house?”

  “If it’s too dangerous even for that?”

  “Suppose this happened in Tatia—you had such a civil war. At what moment would Tatia no longer be Tatia? And you no longer be Tatian?”

  “That’s different. You want to go back and rescue something that might have existed in a poem. Tatia can be rebuilt. Tatians grow anywhere, like grass or mold. They don’t worry about carrying their souls with them.”

  She propped her chin on her hand, sighing. “Do you know what the Khaati word for Tatian is?”

  “I can guess.”

  “Cloud.”

  “What?”

  “You are cloud people, we reach right through you. You have no past.”

  “Sure we do,” he protested. “Everyone does.”

  “You have no gods, no magic. No myths, no shadows.”

  “We had myths. We never liked shadows.”

  “You don’t like secrets. You don’t like anything you can’t take apart, put back together. You explore everything, try to know everything. If you know everything, where is the shadow to rest in?”

  “What shadow?”

  “The shadow you need crossing the desert of knowing everything. The shadow behind the language.” But she was laughing at herself, now, or at whatever he had been doing to her.

  “I know enough,” he said, “to get along.”

  But her words clung to him; he considered them at odd moments. Past was only a way of getting to the present, myth and magic were a pair of shoes too small to walk in any longer. Learning everything was a busy-minded civilization’s way to survive. It was a road that increased in proportion to its traveled part. Still, he wondered, what in Tatian culture made its people seem like clouds? Insubstantial, always changing form... They were thinkers, creators, they built roads across deserts, they did not waste time sitting under shadows. They pushed back the night; it was busy with artificial lights blazing against the background of stars. They even counted stars, they were so busy. They counted everything: people, nuclear particles, cold viruses, board feet, time.

  You have no past.

  Sure we do, he thought, and it’s as bloody as everyone else’s.

  The shadow behind the language...

  Aika left him finally, as he knew she would. She did not ask him to come with her.

  He missed her sorely. He watched endless news-holos of the distant war, hoping and fearing for a glimpse of her face on some schoolteacher, soldier, nurse. Gradually the ache lessened, became bearable. He pursued his fragmented, kaleidoscope existence; he cooked soya-chili at a restaurant, tended bar at another; he cleaned floors at the Aquarium at night and watched the octopus brood. He drank wine sitting on the curbs with wizened Khaati grandmothers, who needed to get away from their bustling families. They taught him a few Khaati words, he taught them a little Tatian.

  Then he received an order from his father: Come home.

  Home was a city in the north full of Tatians, a structure of glass and steel and light, light everywhere, always. We landed in the desert, Kel thought, confused, as he stepped off the air-shuttle. But it was only the Tatian preference for sun in the chilly north. The golden, hairless faces, his own face, after a street filled with Khaati, startled him.

  “I’m dying,” his father said abruptly, when they were settled in the vast apartment overlooking out of all sides most of the north end of a continent. Kel took a large gulp of brandy, opened his mouth; his father continued without letting him speak. “It’s a congenital virus. My mother had one of the first known cases of it. There’s no cure yet, it hasn’t been around long enough. You show no signs of it in your system, I had them check. They would have found the virus in you by now, if you were going to get it.”

  “I—” Kel said, and coughed on brandy fumes.

  “Let me talk. You have this thing about being a poet.”

  “I—”

  “So you go and live on a street full of Khaati. I don’ know you too well, but you’re one of three people I trust, and the other two don’t have your connections. One’s dead anyway,” he added surprisedly. “There’s a drug the Khaati make. It’s lethal, but in my case it doesn’t matter. It will kill the pain, which does matter. They give it to their old people when they don’t want to live anymore. I want you to get me some. Will you?”

  Kel was still swallowing brandy fumes. “You want me—” His head finally cleared, along with his throat. “You want me to give it to you because you don’t want to live anymore.”

  “I do want to,” his father said. There was no expression in his big, stolid, golden face. None in his voice. All in his words. “I do,” he said again. “But I won’t. And this will give me some hours, days maybe, without pain. Then pouf. Finish.” He added, with a shade of amusement in his voice, “Anything else I take they can cure me of. But not this. That’s why it’s illegal. Do it for me? You can write a poem about if afterward, I don’t mind.”

  “If I don’t wind up in jail,” Kel said. He was regaining control; his hands were trembling but he kept them locked around the brandy glass. “How’d you know about that stuff anyway?”

  “Dr. Crena told me,” his father said. His face seemed more peaceful, less implacable, now that he knew Kel wouldn’t fuss, need things from him. He smiled slightly at Kel’s expression. “He’s known me since I first swore at him coming out of the womb. He has a right to advise me how to go back in. He knew I’d never betray him. And I know you won’t.”

  “I’m just surprised,” Kel said, and swallowed more brandy. “How does he know about it?”

  “It’s no secret, it’s just illegal. It’s not a street drug or a party drug, it’s what you take to die. There’s no popular demand for it.”

  Kel shifted. He felt, suddenly, intensely uncomfortable, as if his head were the wrong size, or his bones were trying to outgrow his skin. It was an idea forcing itself into him, he realized; he had to chew and swallow and make it part of himself. It was like trying to eat a stone.

  “How can you be so calm?” he burst out finally, furiously. Again the expressionless, tawny gaze, reticent, impersonal.

  “Don’t shout,” his father said mildly. “Doesn’t do any good. I know. I’ve told you what will help me. Will you help me?”

  Kel stared back at him. He could feel it then: shadow between his bones and his skin that had been there since the day he was born. “All right,” he said, thinking of clans, the Khaati grandmothers, the thin, thin secret paper walls. “All right.”

  Bu. That was what the drug was called. Just that. “Bu?” he said to one of the grandmothers or great-grandmothers who had come out in the night to get a moment’s peace, look up at the three stars showing above the city, smoke a cigarette smelling like ginger. She said nothing, stared at him as she drew in smoke, her cheeks hollowed. Her blue eyes looked sunken, pale. He repeated the word; the cigarette was replaced by a very old finger pressed against her lips. “For my father,” he explained. “Na babas.” But she was gone, she was a trail of smoke and a shadow, motionless, inside the open door.

  The next evening, as he walked late through the quiet streets after sweeping the Aquarium, he was jumped.

  He hit the pavement on his back, too surprised for a moment to realize what had happened. Then he saw the silver sun, looking like a demented sunflower, dangling from a chain in front of his nose. He saw the Khaati face above it. He felt the hard street pushing at his back, his skull.

  “You want Bu, Tatian?” the young man murmured. He had a drooping white mustache and a tic near one eye. Kel remembered seeing him pulling down the awnings at one of the shops. He slid one hand around the back of Kel’s neck, tightened his fingers. Stars, more than were ever seen in the night sky above the city, roared down around Kel. He tried to see, tried to scream, could do neither. Someone said something; the stars dulled, a thick night faded away like fog.

  “Aika knew him,” he heard. The name echoed: Aika, Aika. He could finally see. The fingers were still t
here, feather-light. The blood sang in his ears. Behind the Khaati bending over him, he saw others: one watching, smoking, one with three suns in one ear, one smiling a thin, crooked smile.

  “That’s the poet,” he heard and someone laughed. Poet, poet. He tried to speak; a thumb licked his throat slowly and the words froze.

  “Aika said he reads Coru.”