by Lavie Tidhar
3/6
I’m having coffee in the little cabin on Åreskutan’s Summit. It’s a clear day, and I can see the mountain range undulating in the west, worn blunt by the ice ages. Mum once said that when she was a kid, there was a leathery old man who, every morning, hiked all the way up the mountain with a satchel full of coffee–thermoses and cinnamon rolls that he would sell in the cabin. This was before the cableway, somewhere in the 1950s. The old man had done that since time immemorial, even when my grandmother and her sister were kids and dragged baking troughs up the mountain to ride them down like sleds.
4/6
I went for a walk in the holiday village. I became a little obsessed with the thought of stuff you can do when nobody’s looking. Build a pillow fort outside cottage number six. Streak, howling, through the street. I was thinking specifically of howling when I spotted the pupas. They’re the size of my fist now. That was fast. I forgot to tell Brita. Of course, I had to touch one of them again. It felt warmer than my hand.
Went shopping in Kall, had a cup of coffee, bought the newspaper, went past Brita’s house. I told her about the pupas. Her reaction was pretty strange. She said something about the pupas sitting there in summer, and that I should leave them alone. That’s why she’d put me in the cottage outside the village, so that the pupas would be left in peace. Yes, yes, I said. I won’t do anything. Do promise you won’t do anything, said Brita, and suddenly she was pleading. They have nowhere else to go, she said; you’re family, I can trust you can’t I? Yes, yes, I said, I promise. I have no idea what she’s on about.
5/6
I dreamed that there was a scraping noise by the door. Someone was looking in through the little side window. It was human–shaped, but it sort of had no detail. It was waving at me with a fingerless paw. The door handle was jerking up and down. The creature on the other side said nothing. It just smiled and waved. The door handle bobbed up and down, up and down.
It’s five past ten. I’ve slept for almost ten hours.
I went into the village to check if the pupas had grown, but all that remains are some empty skins hanging under the eaves. So that’s that.
6/6
There’s a knock on the door and someone’s waving at me through the side window. It’s a middle–aged man. When I open the door, he presents himself as Sigvard and shakes my hand. He’s one of the groups of tourists who live here during the summer. They’ve rented all the cabins, and now they’re throwing a party, and they’ve seen me sitting alone in my cottage. Would I like to join them? There’s plenty of food for everyone. I’m very welcome.
The party takes place in the little assembly hall. People are strolling over there from the other cabins. They’re dressed up for a summer night’s party: the women in party dresses and lusekofte sweaters tied over their shoulders, the men in slacks and bright windbreakers. Inside, the assembly hall is decked with yellow lanterns, and a long buffet table lines one of the walls. The guests are of all ages and resemble each other. I ask Sigvard if they’re family, and Sigvard says yes, they are! It’s a big family meet–up, the Nilssons, and they stay here a few weeks every summer. And now it’s time to eat.
The buffet table is covered in dishes from every holiday of the year: steak, roast ham, tjälknul, hot cloudberries, new potatoes, pâtés, pickled herring, gravlax, lutfisk, seven kinds of cookies, cake. I’m starving. I go for second and third helpings. The food has no taste, but the texture is wonderful, especially the ice cream mingled with hot cloudberries. Everyone seems very interested in me. They want to know about my family. When I tell them that Brita is my great–aunt, they cheer and say that we’re related then; I belong to the Anders branch of the family. Dear Brita! They love her! I’ll always be welcome here. Everyone else here belongs to the Anna branch: Anna, Anders’ sister and the eldest daughter of the patriarch Mats Nilsson.
When we’re done eating, it’s time to dance. The raspy stereo plays dansband music: singers croon about smiling golden–brown eyes, accompanied by an innocent and sickly–sweet tune. Everyone takes to the dance floor. Sigvard asks me to dance. This is like a cliché of Swedish culture, I say without thinking. Yes, isn’t it, says Sigvard and smiles. He holds me close. Then I wake up.
8/6
I started writing again. Throwing the old stuff out worked. Something else has surfaced — it’s fairly incoherent, but it’s a story, and I’m not about to ruin it by looking too closely at it. It has nothing to do with teenage trouble at Hunddagis, or Lord of the Flies with kids in spaceships. It’s about my own family in Åre, a sort of pseudo–documentary. Some mixed memories of my grandmother’s and mother’s stories of life up here, woven together with my own fantasies to form a third story. Above all else, I’m having fun. I refuse to think about editing. I write and stare out over Kall Lake.
The dreams are a sign that things are happening — I keep dreaming about the same things, and it’s very clear, very detailed. It’s the same scenario as before, that is, Sigvard knocking on the door and taking me to the assembly hall. We eat enormous amounts of food and dance to dansband classics. I talk to all my relatives. They tell stories about Mats Nilsson’s eldest daughter and how she started the new branch of the family when she married and moved north from Åre. I don’t remember those stories when I wake up.
13/6
I started with Mother’s stories, continued with Gran’s generation, and am working my way back in time to form a sort of backwards history. I wrote about the war and how Great–Gran smuggled shoes and lard to occupied Norway. Then I wrote about how Gran met Grandpa and moved down to Stockholm. Right now Gran is a teenager, it’s the twenties, and she’s making her first bra out of two stocking heels because she can’t afford to buy a real one. She and her sister are getting ready to go to a dance in Järpen. It’s an hour’s bike ride. I’m looking forward to writing the story about my great–great–grandfather who built a church organ out of a kitchen sofa. Some things you can’t make up.
The dreams change a little each night. I’ve discovered that I have a fair amount of control of my actions. I wander around in the cabins and talk to the inhabitants. In true dream fashion, they all come from little villages with names that don’t exist like Höstvåla, Bräggne, Ovart; all located somewhere north of Åre, by the lakes that pool between the mountains.
Sigvard’s wife is called Ingrid. They have three teenage children.
15/6
I’m a little disgusted by the direction this is all taking. I don’t know how to interpret what’s going on. The front doors are always unlocked, I go where I wish. Last night and the night before last, it happened several times that I walked into a house and people were having sex. On all surfaces, like kitchen tables or sofas. They greet me politely when I open the door and then go back to, not making love, but fucking. Nobody seems particularly into it. They might as well be chopping onions or cleaning the floors. In and out and the flat smack of flesh on flesh. And it’s everyone on everyone: man and wife, father and daughter, mother and son, sister and brother. But always in heterosexual configurations. I asked Sigvard what they were doing. We’re multiplying, he said. That’s what people do.
20/6
It’s Midsummer. I’ve managed just over eighty pages. I’ve gotten as far back as Great–Great–Great–Grandfather Anders, son of Mats Nilsson, and if I want to get even further back I’ll have to do some research on Anders’ five siblings or just ramble out into fairy tale country. Not that making stuff up seems to be a problem. There’s no end to it. I’ve gone back to the start to fill in holes, like Mother and Gran’s siblings. No editing just yet, just more material. Brita asked me if I wanted to come with her to celebrate Midsummer. I declined. All I want to do is write. Besides, it’s freezing outside, and the gnats are out in full force. It’d be a good idea, research–wise, to see Brita, but I don’t feel like being around people.
21/6
Sigvard came knocking on my door. He was wearing a wreath of flowers and held a schnapps glass
in one hand. We danced to dansband music, the legendary Sven–Ingvars; we competed in sack racing and three–legged racing. Most of the women and girls had large, rounded bellies and moved awkwardly. When the dancing and playing was over, we ate new potatoes and pickled herring, little meatballs and sausages, fresh strawberries with cream, toasting each other with schnapps spiced with cumin and wormwood. It’ll get darker now, said Sigvard. He burst into tears. Yes, I replied. But why is that so terrible? It makes me think of death, he said.
1/7
150 pages! That’s an average of five pages a day. Very well done. The last ten days have been about putting more meat on the bones I finished building around Midsummer. In other words, embroidering what facts I had with more ideas of my own. Editing is going to take a lot longer, but I have a solid structure from beginning to end — no bothersome gaps or holes.
I decided to stop at Anders. I need to check the other siblings now, especially Anna. I’ve tried to talk to Brita, but she’s always busy whenever I come over. I’m done with this place, though. I’m homesick. I’ve booked a ticket to Stockholm for the sixth. I can go back home with a good conscience.
4/7
They’re weeping and wailing. They’re all dressed in black. They won’t say why. I’ve told them I’ll be leaving soon, but I don’t think that’s why they’re sad.
5/7
I finally caught Brita for a cup of coffee. She apologized for being so busy. I asked her about Mats Nilsson’s children, but she doesn’t know much outside our own branch. Still, I asked her if she knew anything about Anna, the eldest daughter. Not much, she said. But then there wasn’t much to know about her. She disappeared without a trace when she was twenty years old. The consensus was that she probably drowned herself in Kall Lake, or in one of the sinkholes in the quarry. In any case, she was never seen again.
6/7
I’m leaving on the night train. I cleaned out the cottage; all that’s left is to hand over the keys to Brita.
Sigvard knocked on the door in my dream. The whole village was crowding behind him. They looked aged and crumpled somehow, and they were weeping loudly. Some of them didn’t seem to be able to walk on their own — they were crawling around. Sigvard came in first; he dropped to his knees and flung his arms around my legs. I sat down on the floor. He put his head in my lap. My dear, he said. It was the best summer ever. We’re so grateful. Then he sighed, and lay still. The others came, one by one. They lay down around me and curled up. They sighed and lay still. I patted their heads. There, there, I said. Go to sleep now, go to sleep. Their bodies were like light shells. They collapsed in on themselves.
I was woken up just after seven by an ice–cold draft. The front door was open. I went for a last walk in the village. Clusters of tiny spheres hang under the eaves.
Regressions
Swapna Kishore
Swapna Kishore is an Indian author of short speculative fiction, and has written numerous books on such diverse topics as software, management and care–giving, the last of which she has widely blogged about.
When we are in a village, time flies by as I help the women in their chores — drawing water, milking cows, stoking cow–dung fires and stirring simmering pots of payasam pudding, or even braiding jasmines in the hair of the young girls. By night, I am tired and fall asleep almost immediately. But when we are traveling, I lie awake below the open, unpolluted skies staring at the full moon and I often think of my Ambapur, oh, so far away, a blur across time and space.
My last evening with Mother is the most vivid of my childhood memories. I was five years old, and supposed to join the Facility the next morning, and Mother and I stood in our dome’s viewing tower, looking at the moon, my small hand in hers.
“You will never be alone,” she told me, “because when we both look at the moon at night, we can imagine we are standing together.”
I wasn’t consoled. “Why can’t I come home for holidays?” I cried plaintively. “What exactly is a futurist?”
Mother’s face seemed all shadows and sharp angles, and her hand stiffened around mine, hurtful. I realized with a shock that she didn’t know the answer.
“Futurists improve the fate of women everywhere, not just women in Ambapur,” she said finally. “Kalpana, learn whatever they teach you, and don’t be impatient.”
I am not impatient now, Mother.
Sometimes I pace, the wet grass ticklish to my bare feet, and absorb the sweet fragrance of parijata flowers. And I wonder — is my past true, if the future will not hold it?
§
Futurists, I learned at the age of seven, operated in two streams, the researchers and the agents. Researchers provided data while agents changed the future. The glory lay with the agents, though we trainees weren’t told what they did. I couldn’t qualify as an agent; I failed the profile tests thrice despite my through–the–roof IQ and my ‘A’s in every subject. I’d have fudged my personality profile, but I spotted no pattern distinguishing the accepted girls from those rejected — no discriminating levels of IQ, extroversion, assertiveness, nothing.
The shame of my failure struck me fully the day I was moved to the research wing and knew I would never see the agent wing or interact with an agent. I buried myself in work, barely smiling at fellow researchers at meal times, avoiding evening gossip sessions in the common room. If I was doomed to be a researcher, I’d be the best.
Over time, my work began fascinating me. My assignments involved analysis of the complicated social causes and scientific breakthroughs that preceded the initiation of the Ambapur experiment. How did mythology, history, and culture influence the emergence of Swami Sarvadharmananda? What made his rants against Ambapur so popular? Would the Hindu Religious Resurgence have grown without Nava Manusmriti? What triggered India’s splintering into multiple countries with the largest, most prosperous states forming Swamiji’s dream Navabharata? To me, that century–old partition of India was particularly interesting because it transformed Ambapur from an experimental district into a country, howsoever small.
On some days, though, as I unraveled and scrutinized critical forks in history, I wondered at the futility of such intense study, because the applicability of lessons from ancient history was limited, wasn’t it? Then I’d tell myself that my honed abilities would be used later for complex, contemporary scenarios.
My life changed the day Seniormost’s voice boomed from my contact port, taut, curt. “Kalpana, report to Room 455 immediately.”
“Pardon?” My stomach crunched. Why would the country’s most powerful woman summon me?
“Hurry, Kalpana,” urged Seniormost. “This is an emergency.”
I raced down the corridors. Momentum and panic carried me through an open door, but I skidded to a halt before grim–faced senior women ringing a screen showing an abstract low–res animation — red, yellow, brown splotches, moved in weird patterns. Grainy and coarse and scary, though I could not understand why I felt so queasy.
“Kalpana?” Seniormost frowned at me. “We want you to replace an agent.”
“I’m not qualified,” I stuttered, embarrassed.
“You are the only Series K clone available right now. We need someone similar enough to Kavita to replace her at a critical gender fork.”
“Gender fork? But those happened in the past.” They were events that determined major trends in gender equations.
“Futurist agents,” she cut in, “change the past so that the future changes.”
Change the past? I stared at her, trying to comprehend her words. I’d always thought agents changed the future. “But…”
“Pay attention, we have only fifteen minutes,” Seniormost said. “You know how important Sita was in shaping gender roles, right?”
“Of course.” Sita was projected as the ideal woman in Swami Sarvadharmananda’s Nava Manusmriti, which ended up as the final reference on Hinduism for Navabharata; Swamiji used Sita to justify the strait–jacket gender laws binding millions of Navabharat
a women. I had often done what–if analyses of related mythology.
“Because the Ramayana of Nava Manusmriti is not based on a single story but is a melding of several candidate stories,” and Seniormost paused for a beat, “we have several potential intervention points. For our correcting nudges, we have selected the ten most significant scenarios. In this particular one, the Sita equivalent assists her husband in his trade, cures her grievously ill brother–in–law, and manages the house and finances during an extended business trip which will later be called an exile.”
“Sounds an improvement on the stereotypical Sita,” I said.
Seniormost waved me to silence. “They returned home and rumors started, as in all Ramayanas. The husband did not ignore them.” A muscle on her face twitched as her gaze snapped to the screen.
I swiveled to see the display, my uneasiness growing as I tried to understand what those strange red and orange splotches meant. “What is happening there?”
“Kavita’s fire–proofing failed.” Seniormost’s tone was heavy.
The import of her words sank slowly into my mind. That scarlet dance was an inferno, licks of flame, and sparks and embers — fire seen by someone burning inside it. A chill crawled up my spine.
“That’s Kavita?” I whispered hoarsely.
“They call her Vaidehi.”
Vaidehi, one of Sita’s names. This is what the fire had made me suspect. What I was seeing on the display was the agni pareeksha, the shameful episode present in each of the over eight–hundred versions of Ramayana. An Ambapur agent was being burned alive, and I was supposed to replace her.
“But Seniormost,” I whispered. “I am not trained. I am clueless… please, I am not sure…”