Cautiously I sank to my hands and knees and extended one palm over the specimen. The hideous insect tentatively twitched and squeaked. Then it rushed at me, a sickening scrambling concentration of vitality. I crushed it under my glove. The crunch was deafening.
Luckily for purposes of documentation, the cicada’s head escaped mangling. Its beady eyes glared at me while it died. I lifted my hand, and it hung from the underside, glued there by its own ichor, weakly waving its legs. Then it fell to the floor. I stuffed the corpse into a sandwich bag. The cicadas under the floor went on singing.
I had to simplify the floor plan. I went to my van for a crowbar. The sun was up, and the gravel was wet. A street scrubber drove slowly north along Stone, past the Presbyterian church and Madelaine’s Beauty College.
Mrs. Everson might come home today. But she couldn’t stay here. I intended to make life very unpleasant for those cicadas.
The best thing would’ve been to burn the fucking house down.
BERSERKERBERSERKERBERSERKERBERSERK
I went back indoors and punched the fucking water heater right through the fucking bedroom wall. Then I tore out the bathroom sink and rammed that into the fucking attic. Just to show the fucking cicadas I meant business.
Then I walked around the house screaming insults at them. Just the normal kind of things you scream at a time like that. “Come out of there, you yellow little pukes!” “I know you’re in there, you slimy faggots!” That sort of thing.
Then I looked for them. I looked in the oven and pried the back off the television and pulled the stuffing out of the cushions. I wished that I could see through walls. That way I could’ve seen the bugs, snug in their cozy dens, warbling their miserable songs. I could’ve mapped their demographics and charted their social organization. Then I could’ve wiped them out—crushed their eggs, burned their larvae, tortured their drones for strategic information.
But since I couldn’t do any of that, I contented myself with pounding a crowbar through Mrs. Everson’s flocked pastel wallpaper, again and again and again.
BREAKTIMEBREAKTIMEBREAKTIMEBREAK
I took a break. I felt I was entitled. I sat down in Mrs. Everson’s bathtub with the television set on my lap. I watched Saturday morning cartoons for a couple of hours.
One of the cartoons concerned a magpie that wanted to eat a worm. Another involved a wolf who wanted to eat some sheep. I enjoyed the jokes, but it bothered me that the worm and the sheep never got eaten. I think that a story should be realistic.
VANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVAN
Just then my van made a noise on the tightbeam. It wanted to alert me regarding a Threat to Vehicular Security that was developing in the alley. Apparently a couple of suspicious-looking Mexican kids were hanging around, sitting with their backs against the storm fence. One youth had a shaved head and was picking her teeth with a screwdriver. The other had purple tattoos on her face and wore a necklace of spark plugs. The van thought that they were talking about him. He suspected the youths of being car strippers. I thought he was being an alarmist.
“Alex,” I told him, “you’re overreacting. Alex? Do you copy?”
But I received no response.
—
HOWEVERHOWEVERHOWEVERHOWEVERH
However, as I stood up in the bathtub, I knocked my head against the rod of the shower curtain. Flying into a rage, I tore the ugly fucking thing right out of the fucking wall—curtains, brackets, and all. Half the bathroom wall fell into the tub with me. And there I stood in the trembling dust, curtain rod in hand, gazing into the wall.
Gazing into the wall. My wish had come true. Here was the plumbing. There were the studs. And over in the shadows, a pale pod hung in a hammock of filaments. Within the pod, myriad milky larvae wriggled or slept. It was a nest of baby cicadas. Adults stuck their heads from crannies, squeaking in alarm.
The adults rushed to the pod and tore it open. Each stuffed a few of the infants under its belly and scrambled away. But they were bailing out a lifeboat with a thimble. I had them where I wanted them. By merely reaching out my glove and clenching my fist, I could turn their nursery into a slaughterhouse. I could fry their grubs in peanut oil and dip them in hot sauce and sell them door to door. How could they prevent me?
VANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVANVAN
My van went completely paranoid. One of the Mexican kids stood up, and it rammed the kid into the storm fence. It was convinced that they were car strippers. I couldn’t talk to it.
“This will break some bones,” it kept saying. “Come on out here, Alex. Don’t you want to see me break some bones?”
—
ANYWAYANYWAYANYWAYANYWAYANYWA
Anyway I was reaching into the wall for a handful of larvae when Mrs. Everson tapped me on my shoulder.
“This place looks so much better,” she told me. “I’m very grateful to you. And do you know what? At my sister’s house, I spoke with a nice young social worker. And she’s had me relocated. I’m very happy where I live now. They fix our lunches for us and give us free drugs. I have my own waterbed and my own VCR, and I watch pornography all day. It’s wonderful. You go ahead with your work, young man. And thank you so much for strangling that parakeet. I never liked it. It was a gift.”
She made a move for the door, but I was too fast for her. I wasn’t going to let her get away that easy. She still had to sign for the spraying. I put a sofa on top of her and sat down on it.
But she wouldn’t stop breathing, so I went to the kitchen for my spray gun. I’d make her sign the receipt, then finish her off. I understood my mission for the City. To kill pests. Including any excess citizens who got in my way. Discreetly. Without appearing to. I was a chemical weapon. Whereas Mrs. Everson was old and in the way. Should I have suffered her to live? Old and useless as she was?
Sitting on the sofa, loading the spray gun, my legs began to itch. Impossible, but they did itch. I had no legs, only trousers and metal stilts. Yet they itched. It was like something from a previous life.
LONGAGOLONGAGOLONGAGOLONGAGOLO
Long ago in a previous life, I had been a man built of flesh. For a year or so, I lived in a rainy city in a clammy basement. The fleas there became a problem, because they liked me. As food. I scratched my flea bites until they bled. When the blood dried, I scratched my scabs. Finally I went to the pet section of a supermarket and bought some flea powder and a couple of the flea collars for cats. I sprinkled the powder on my bed and my sofa. The collars, I wore around my ankles under my socks. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Unfortunately the collars were designed for an animal with fur.
I slept in the collars and woke the next morning with big black fleas hopping on and off of me as usual, and angry red water blisters that ran all round my ankles. With trembling hands I unbuckled the plastic shackles from my insulted flesh.
For days I lay on the sofa with my feet up on the backrest, while my puffy yellow ankles wept salty tears down my legs. Suffering for my stupidity, I underwent epiphanies of self-disgust. That’s what happens when you don’t read labels.
—
MEANWHILEMEANWHILEMEANWHILEME
It was a good thing for me that I wasn’t flesh anymore. Flesh could be stung by bugs or even eaten. Plus, if I were flesh, I’d have asphyxiated myself by now. I’d be dead or delirious. Whereas I was reasoning with perfect clarity.
My van wasn’t faring so well. The car strippers had removed all its tires and pried loose its engine cover. A tire iron had shattered its windows. Pebbles of auto glass littered the driver’s seat. The strippers applied hacksaws from the van’s own tool kit. The van exploded in slow motion, like a carburetor schematic, clusters of parts floating in midair. There went the alternator. There went the batteries.
What if they find the silica wafers of my brain, Alex? What then? Where are my car keys, Alex? For the love of mercy, help me!
—
NOCTURNENOCTURNENOCTURNENOCTUR
An old woman was sleeping under a sof
a. A robot sat on top of the sofa. Neither of us were breathing. It was dark outside. A siren wailed, across town somewhere.
I climbed down from the sofa and paced the living room. All the faucets in the house were running. Mrs. Everson’s dresses were stuffed down the drains and into the cracks under the doors. The water lay an inch deep on the floor. All escape routes were blocked. I paced the room, waiting for the water to rise, slipping on loose tiles and place mats—half indoors, half out, half crazy, half dead.
I told myself: Don’t panic. Whatever happened, I mustn’t panic. If I could continue to reason with perfect clarity, all would be well.
A deep dark well. With three sisters at the bottom, eating treacle and feeling ill. A deep dark ill.
I stood beside a blacked-out window in the dead of night. Everything seemed to be shrinking. The walls shrank from the floors. The alley gravel shrank from the patio bricks. Tire tread shrank from asphalt, billboards from the sky, and the stars from the earth. Women shrank from men, and men from one another. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t make sense of anything.
Somewhere in the neighborhood a mariachi band was playing—accordion and trumpets. It sounded like a party.
The earth spun under my boots. The stars circled Mrs. Everson’s roof. I had burned all her magazines. Something was chewing on my leg.
—
AFTERMATHAFTERMATHAFTERMATHAFT
Time passed. The water company shut off the water. The power company cut the power. Batteries emptied, I shared the ruined house with my friends, the bugs. The moon-scorched skeleton of my van stood in the alley, corroding in the winter downpours.
On the day they cut the power, the picture on the TV screen contracted to a white dot and blinked out. Sometimes children threw rocks through the windows, but I ignored them. The cicadas would take care of them. The cicadas had driven the red ants from Tucson, and were eating the last of the citizens.
I lay on my back with my head in a broom closet. A mop handle and some gallon bottles of ginger ale kept me company. I kept forgetting things. I forgot what I was doing. (Flooding the house.) I forgot what I’d done. (Lost my car keys.) I forgot what I’d planned. (Someday the roof of the house would cave in, and the sun would bleach my optical sockets.) All my vital parts had been pried loose and carried off.
I told jokes to the cicadas. I said, Stop me if you’ve heard this. The cicadas brought me food and taught me things. I couldn’t eat the food, but I learned quite a lot. Things about families and about deserts and about soul murder.
I can’t eat this, I kept telling them. They thought I was joking.
During mating season, the male cicadas turned blue and began to glow. They crept around the ceiling like winking constellations. I wondered whether insects were machines, and whether machines were insects. Certain insects can fly, but not every insect, and the same is true of machines. Flying machines can kill people, but so can insects. Everything had converged to a single dot, but it wouldn’t blink out.
In spring, the male cicadas grew wings and buzzed around me. They dove at my face and whizzed away again. They dug tunnels into my chest and sharpened their mandibles on my servos. When I told them to stop, they said, Make us stop! Corpses can’t give orders!
Then I told them that I would make them stop. They squealed with glee and rolled around inside me, kicking their legs.
I stood up and found a bucket and a length of hose. I kicked down the kitchen door and tramped out to the alley. The moon was full. It was bright as day. Pellets of glass crunched beneath my boots. I siphoned some methanol from the tank of the van and poured it over my head. I went indoors again for a match.
Soon I was blazing away like a pudding in brandy. The drapes caught fire as well. Roasted cicadas clambered from my armpits and my crotch and fell, smoking, to the floor. Shrieking elated bug shrieks they fell, dying happy bug deaths, like mad airmen abandoning a burning bomber.
From all directions, from below and above, a delighted stridulation sprang up. The cicadas pranced in circles around my feet, cheering me on. My black vinyl face was dripping. The drops trailed blue flame and made funny noises. The bugs turned cartwheels, laughing wildly.
Sparks flew from my optics. Brown smoke filled the house. I turned into a tottering scarecrow of silver sticks and black rags. But I was glad, because the bugs were entertained. I fell to the floor. The flames guttered. The cicadas climbed up onto my wreckage in droves, to celebrate. Papa cicadas in blue overalls and mama cicadas in hoopskirts and petticoats waltzed on my chest. Cicada kids rushed to the final fires of my face, with tiny marshmallows on toothpicks. Nursemaid cicadas in starched white bonnets pushed larvae in strollers up and down my legs. Eventually they raised a tent on my torso and performed circus acts on tiny unicycles and tiny trapezes.
Personally I don’t attach a lot of importance to nightmares. Anyone can have a bad dream. Even machines get them. They’re a form of torture testing. You go on to the next thing. And the next. And the next.
The object of this game is to shoot down the Enemy Memory Ships before they can sink your Dream Boat. Are you ready? Are you set? Are you trapped in a toy truck in a toy chest in a hole at the bottom of the sea? Do you think you escape before you suffocate? What do you think, Alex? Can you get out of there? Can you get out?
—
SANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONSANI
I was sitting in the cab of the van, one afternoon in spring. We were parked behind a Chinese restaurant that was having some trouble with roaches. I opened the glove compartment and reached inside for a tire gauge.
My glove closed around a plastic bag that squished. I pulled it out, and what do you think was in it? A cream cheese and jelly sandwich on white bread. Which was crawling with maggots. I tossed it out the window.
But I could never figure out how it got there. I mean, who would put a sandwich of all things in my glove compartment? And leave it there to rot? Who would do that?
I could never account for it.
The Poetry Cloud
CIXIN LIU
Translated by Chi-yin Ip and Cheuk Wong
Cixin Liu (1963– ) is a Hugo Award–winning, highly influential Chinese writer of science fiction. Liu continues to work as a senior engineer at the Niangziguan power plant for the China Power Investment Corporation and has had a career as an engineer since graduating from the North China Institute of Water Power and Hydroelectric Engineering. His best-known novels in China include The Three-Body Trilogy (2006, 2007, 2010), Era of the Supernova (1999), Lightning Ball (2005), and short stories such as “The Wandering Earth” (2000) and “The Village Schoolteacher” (2001). An English-language collection of his short stories, The Wandering Earth, appeared in 2013 but does not represent the true depth and breadth of the author’s work. The English translations of The Three-Body Problem (2014) and its sequel, The Dark Forest (2015), do a better job of being representative but still do not fully encompass the scope of his work.
Liu began writing in 1989, according to an essay by Kun Kun in Peregrine 2 (2011), while a computer programmer. “I was in my early twenties and had just graduated from university. I lived in single dorms and didn’t have a girlfriend. I had nothing to do in the evenings apart from playing cards and mahjong. In one night I lost a month’s wages—800 yuan. That was the moment I suppose. I thought—I can’t go on like this. I had to find something to fill the evenings. If I couldn’t make money at least I shouldn’t lose any. Then I thought of writing a science-fiction novel.”
Also according to Peregrine, “in the early 1990s Cixin Liu wrote a software program in which each intelligent civilization in the universe was simplified into a single point. At its height, he programmed 350,000 civilizations within a radius of one hundred thousand light years and made his 286 computer work for hours to calculate the evolution of these civilizations. Although the final conclusion of the program was somewhat naïve, it formed the basis and shape of his world view.”
In China, his works have frequently a
ppeared in a variety of newspapers and journals. He has also repeatedly topped bestseller lists. One of his book signings, at the Chengdu Book Tower, had to be ended prematurely because too many people had come to see him and the bookshelves were stripped bare of his novels. Liu was even invited by the editor in chief of People’s Literature to submit a short story to that magazine, the first time in over twenty years that it had published science fiction.
Liu is a nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award, which is the most prestigious prize for science fiction writing in China, and also the World Chinese Science Fiction Association’s Xingyun (Nebula) Award for best writer. The Three-Body Problem, originally published in Chinese in 2007, reached the shortlists for numerous major English-language awards in 2015, including the Nebula Award, and won the Hugo Award—a first for a Chinese writer, or, for that matter, any Asian writer.
An essay in the journal Renditions 77/78 noted that Liu’s fiction is “filled with grand majestic scenery and vivid imagination, combining abstract fantasy with concrete modern technology to highlight the beauty and significance of science.” That is certainly true of “The Poetry Cloud,” which is one of the most brilliant and inventive stories in this anthology. In it, Liu performs the nearly impossible feat of combining and reinventing several science fiction tropes in a joyful, kinetic, and genius-level narrative performance.
THE POETRY CLOUD
Cixin Liu
Translated by Chi-yin Ip and Cheuk Wong
They are on a yacht, Yiyi and two others, sailing across the south Pacific Ocean on a poetry composition cruise. Their destination, the South Pole. If all goes well, they will arrive in a couple of days’ time and then pierce through the Earth’s crust to see the Poetry Cloud.
The sky and ocean are crystal clear today, much too clear for poetry composition. The American continent that’s usually hidden from view can now be observed plainly floating above in the sky, forming a dark patch on the eastern hemisphere that envelops the world like a giant dome. The continent looks not much different from a patch of wall left exposed when the sheathing has fallen off….
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 203