“But it is, it is,” Fift said. “This is the time.”
Ze grabbed Emim’s robes, Morinti’s robes. “Sit. Sit! You there—Meroc? The spoon is in your hand.”
Meroc blinked, bewildered, then sank to the dockyard floor. Fift sat lightly, balanced, spine straight. The others followed, the Vails shifting outward to give them room.
“What are they—” one Vail said.
“Shut up,” Bojum said. “Keep your eyes outwards. Stand fast.”
The Peaceables were a bodylength away, raising their staves.
“‘The spoon is in my hand,’” Meroc said.
Morinti’s voice quavered. “‘Space bends like a dancer, and everything is in motion.’”
“‘But we, with our words, here,’” Emim said, “‘are the still center.’”
A bodylength from [Embracing Fift and Shria], the Peaceables paused.
“Don’t move,” Bojum told the other Vails. “None of you fucking move!”
“Siblings,” Fift said, “let us begin.”
“Fift!” Ellix said, gaping. “For Kumru’s sake, you can’t just hold the Long Conversation in—”
“Then let them stop me,” Fift said. “Let them break that circle with their bopperstaves. Let them silence those words.”
Meroc’s hand tightened on the spoon. Ze licked zir lips. “We are told, ‘In the years after zir Temptation, when Minth’s trial was long resolved, zir heart was like a stone.’”
Fift’s own heart clenched, squeezed zir eyes shut. Ze forced zirself to open them again. For the Episode’s first recitative, it was a bitter one. In the end, Minth lost Abador, zir Vail beloved—just as Fift would lose Shria.
“From this,” Morinti said, “Epiul teaches that Abador must have forsaken Minth, ‘and zir heart was unpermeated and unmoved, lonely and still.’”
“This is a travesty, Fift,” Ellix said. “And it won’t protect you. Stand up from there—”
“Ranhulo did it,” Fift said.
Squell was watching zir, vir eyes wide.
The Peaceables had fully encircled them. Their faces were calm, carefully held blank, but as they looked from one to another, there were signs of stress: a twitch of eyebrow here, a creased forehead there.
The Vails held the outer circle, gripping each other’s hands.
“I don’t care what Ranhulo did,” Ellix said. “This is a direct challenge to the Midwives. You can’t imagine that they’ll . . .” Ze shook zir head.
“‘And if Minth’s heart was a stone,’ Marolu taught”—it was another Staid speaking, Episti Ism Magali of name registry Blue Peninsula 6—“‘Abador’s was a veil.’”
“But what is a stone?” Emim said, in a voice as thin and small as a green twig in a surface forest.
A bopperstaff swung: Honti Pikipo of name registry Nameless Desert 3 collapsed. Ve’d been holding Bojum’s hand. Bojum yanked vir body outwards so it fell away from the sitting Staids; then ve reached across the gap, taking the hand of the next Vail, closing the circle. “Hold your ground,” ve said.
Another Vail fell, on the other side of the circle. But some of the Peaceables were holding back, glancing at one another. A twitch at the temple of one, the lips of another, betrayed what must be a furious conversation over the send.
“What—what is a stone?” Emim said. “Iyebi said, ‘this stone in which we dig our burrows.’ For the world is a stone in flight.”
Fift’s eyebrows rose. That was deft, even beautiful. Despite the thundering of zir heart, despite the rough saw of despair tearing through zir abdomen, Fift found ze was curious where Emim was going with this. It didn’t seem likely they’d have time to find out.
Two more Vails fell, one of them crumpling against Morinti’s shoulder. Morinti kept zir eyes on Fift.
The world is a stone in flight. Minth’s heart was a stone, after ze lost Abador. But what is a stone? The world is a stone in flight.
“And if the world is a stone,” Fift said, “then a heart may be a world.”
Another Vail fell. Now the gap was too big for the other Vails to reach across; they stood, a ragged semicircle, eyes out, shoulders square.
A Peaceable stepped into the gap, raising zir bopperstaff. Ze hesitated, zir staff above Morinti’s head.
“Elsewhere,” Morinti said, hoarsely, “we are told of a concavity in a stone, which Esro inhabited . . .”
{Apologies are extended for the delay in acquiring consensus.} Fift’s context advisory agent sent. {Unfortunately, your social nuance, feed-navigation, send-management, and diachronic-synthetic agents are no longer available for service. But the remainder of your agents have elected to support your current course, and to acknowledge your de facto majority.}
{Can you show me Shria?} Fift sent.
The Peaceable stood above Morinti. The tip of zir bopperstaff wavered, and ze glanced behind zir—
Shria, doublebodied, vir heads and shoulders out of the stoppergoo. Ve was alert, vir face intense, leaning over towards Stogma, saying something—
“. . . in, in the days,” Morinti said, “when Marolu the Lesser gathered consensus in Unprism.”
{And Dobroc?}
Dobroc was in a crowd, marching. There were banners there, and singing. Staids in white robes, and Vails in velvet and tinsel . . .
A second Peaceable shoved the first roughly aside—zir face was a mask of rage—and clubbed Morinti.
Ellix frowned. “Ze shouldn’t have done that,” ze said.
Morinti slumped. Emim’s eyes widened in terror. Episti swallowed.
“Ze’s vowed,” Ellix said, a frown buckling zir forehead, bunching zir mouth. “Ze shouldn’t have struck in anger.”
It was Episti’s turn, but ze was frozen watching the Peaceable who’d lost control, like a lapine caught without cover.
Esro. What had Oplops said of Esro? “‘The concavity of the stone,’” Fift said, zir voice rough and strained, “‘encloses and does not define.’”
The Peaceable looked down at Morinti.
Thirteen billion viewers saw zir drop zir bopperstaff. It fell to the floor beside Morinti’s unconscious body.
“Fift!” Dobroc shouted, somewhere in Temereen, among the marchers.
“Kumru,” Ellix said. “This is bad.”
Fift took the spoon. It was cool and slick in zir hand. The dock smelled of the yeasty enzymatic engines of bats, and the ozone sting of bopperstaves, and the sweat of fear and hope. There was a light breeze, the far-off yelling of the crowd, the hum of whales, and a distant noise that might be the march in Temereen. Emim’s mouth was opening to speak. Fift felt zir heart pounding, and the sweat on zir neck, and the fabric of zir shift sticking to zir knees and thighs and shoulders, and the subtle pull of Foo’s rotation in zir inner ear, and the solidity of zir muscles and bones and tendons and flesh, and the soft prickle of zir skin, and the gentle feathery peristalsis of zir intestines, and the electric thunder of zir brain.
And then all that was ripped away.
20
Fift screamed.
Double-throated, the air wrenched from two sets of lungs, ringing through what had been Iraxis apartment.
Throat one, throat two:
and nothing. No third throat.
The Midwives had cut the dockyards’ polysomatic network. In the apartment, doublebodied, Fift couldn’t feel zir body at the docks. Ze’d been torn asunder.
One hand clawing at zir scalp. A second hand caught in zir robes. A third and fourth hand braced on the anteroom floor . . .
Zir mind scrabbled vainly for zir other two hands, searching for missing fingers, trying to bend missing knuckles, to stretch missing palms, to thrust missing fingertips into anything at all. Panic ballooned in zir throats.
Where was ze? Where was zir body?
The absence, the missing third body, was nothing like the heavy, murky solidity of a body in sleep. It was a brute subtraction of the world: a knife, an unbeing, a bloody arterial spurting stump of self . . .
/>
And it hurt. It hurt like every cell of zir bodies was being ripped from its sibling, boiling itself in toxic feedback. Because it was.
Ellix was trying to hold one of Fift’s bodies, which was bucking, writhing, kicking. Ellix’s heavy body bore zir to the ground, trapping zir limbs.
In zir other body, only other body, only void-spurned sisterless other body, ze leapt on Ellix’s back, fingers digging into zir robes, driven by a hysterical urgency: ze needed to dig through Ellix’s body, like a lapine burrows through dirt, to get to zirself—
Squell hauled zir off Ellix and threw zir on zir back. “Fift!” ve shouted. “Listen to me!”
Ze was still screaming. But the sound, the tearing in the throat, the blood engorging the face—they seemed to have nothing to do with Fift at all. They seemed to belong to the apartment, simply furniture.
Squell’s inward, suffering look was gone. Vir eyes were clear. The silver spikes in vir scalp gleamed as ve pinned Fift. “Fift, what’s happening to you now, I’ve been through it! I’ve endured body separation! When you’re working in the asteroids, all it takes is a solar flare at perihelion, or a router getting destroyed in a collision, and you get ripped apart . . .” Tears sprung to vir eyes.
The feed—the feed was a muddle. Fift’s feed-navigation agent was gone—had resigned—had abandoned zir. Zir mind tore an erratic path through a cloud of images. Dobroc chanting, orange stoppergoo, a confused angle of stomping feet, skywhales serene in flight—but where were the docks, where was zir body?
“Listen to me, Fift!” Squell’s voice was soft but clear beneath the sound of screaming. “You can master this. Take the terror, take the absence, and use it to fill the gap. Make a body out of that, just for now. Fift, listen. Listen! The pain is good—”
Ze had to find zir body. Ze blundered through the feed, trying to find the docks manually, agentless. The docks . . . no, not the Temereen docks, not the central Foo docks, no, no, for Kumru’s sake, please, where . . .
The pain was like fire—like a frenzied skywhale crashing into a habitation, splintering spires, crushing bone and gristle, Fift’s joints ripped apart, flesh torn—
Squell shook zir. “The pain shows you where the rest of you is. Your other body, it’s still there. It’s not dead, it’s not hurt, you have minutes and minutes before the separation becomes permanent. You want to know where it is? You want to find it?”
To find it, to find it, where—
“It’s right where the pain is. Fift, you know how you push your bodies away from each other sometimes, you damp the connection? I know you still do that! This is the same. You’re still there on the other side of the wall of pain!”
The body was where the pain was. As if ze’d turned away from zirself, dimmed the connection, gotten lost behind the wall of pain. Make a body out of that. Ze tried reaching out, but the panic was a tsunami, ze was abandoned, shattered . . .
“Bring zir back,” Ellix muttered, zir chin pressed into Fift’s shoulder, zir limbs locked around Fift’s, keeping zir down. “Kumru forsake you all, bring zir back . . .”
Then the gut-wrenching slam of self into self:
They’d turned the network back on.
Hands! The feeling of them, bruised and grasping, knuckles scraping the dockyard floor, fingertips clawing cloth. Six hands—
The smell of the docks flooded into Fift’s mind. Zir vision blurred and stretched as zir brains, zir eyes, found one another. Squell’s face—Squell’s inward, suffering look was gone, vir eyes were clear!; a jumble of bodies on the dockyard floor—
Back, back all together, oh Kumru! Necks, backs, ankles, knees—
Zir memories were a scramble. Being alone on the dockyard floor, abandoned, one-bodied. Screaming two-bodied in the apartment. Emim’s face, contorted in a scream, superimposed on Ellix’s. Searching for missing fingers, to bend missing knuckles. Bojum falling to the dockyard floor, struggling to rise, the Peaceables screaming, heads in hands. The screaming had been like furniture, like some trivial and static fixture crammed within the walls of Iraxis apartment. But no, no that was wrong, it had been so much bigger, so much more terrible, coming from a thousand throats.
The ozone sting of bopperstaves, the enzymatic tang of engines.
Who was Fift? What had ze lost, just now? Had ze lost it forever? Zir bodies felt strange, estranged. Ze’d had no idea what was happening at the dockyards. Ze’d had no idea what was happening in the apartment. As if zir bodies had been borrowed by strangers and returned used, damaged, with pieces missing.
Exhaustion bit into zir muscles with ragged teeth.
But the screaming was over.
“Thank Kumru,” Ellix said. Ze eased Fift’s head to the ground and extricated zirself. Ze stood.
The dockyard floor was strewn with bodies. Episti was crumpled against Fift’s legs, and one of the Vails was pressed up against zir back. A Peaceable was curled into a ball half a bodylength away.
The Staids’ breathing was a heavy, ragged jumble. The Vails were still sobbing. Maybe not just the Vails.
“It’s okay now,” Ellix said. “Just stay down.”
Fift was so tired. Ze sucked in breath in unison across Foo. Each time zir lungs filled, a tightness at the top of them stung zir chests, sent little shockwaves of echoed pain down zir body. One elbow ached—ze must have slammed it into something harder than the dockyard floor, maybe someone’s skull. Ze didn’t remember.
“It’s all right,” Ellix said. Ze hefted zir satchel, smoothed zir robes. “You can rest. It’s over now.”
Over. Next would be the arrest, and then the Pole.
At the docks, no one had risen. Emim, who’d quoted Ranhulo—Emim, who was not a liaison, who only took the meeting minutes—Emim turned onto zir side and looked at Fift. Wincing with effort, ze reached across the robes of a fallen Peaceable and took Fift’s hand.
Shria in Wallacomp: chest-deep in stoppergoo, saying something, vir mouth moving. Not to Stogma—ve was shouting something into the air. At Fift. But Fift couldn’t find the sound. Somehow ze’d managed to twist zir feed access around so that the sounds and images and smells were not aligned.
Fift had had that feed-navigation agent zir whole life; ze’d never had another. It had been enmeshed in zir as an infant. Ze’d never even heard of agents just abandoning a child . . . well, not outside of the Long Conversation. Epiul’s agents had abandoned zir, of course, “like trashrats exiting a collapsing habitation.”
“Ve’s waiting for you,” Emim whispered.
The nearest Peaceable groaned and raised zir head.
Ve’s waiting—?
Shria stood on the docks at Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions. Ve was dressed in vir work clothes, a refracting shift that left vir arms and shoulders bare and fell to vir ankles, glistening in oily rainbows. Ve still had bruises from the riot, yellow smudges on vir lavender skin, and vir face had a dark, haggard exhaustion. But ve stood tall, vir fiery red hair loose and flowing down vir back, vir orange eyebrows curled like flames.
There were bats docking at Stiffwaddle. The gates of Pom Politigus’s emporium were open, and there was a party going on: the glitterati, the fashionable and powerful, Pom’s finest clients shining like jewels.
How much could the Midwives get away with? How deep did their power go? Could they turn people’s deepest bindings of self into a weapon without effect on their own ratings? Demand that Peaceables betray the Long Conversation, to keep their stranglehold on consensus?
Maybe they could brutalize a dockyard full of refugees and drifters. But could they cut Pom Politigus’s polysomatic network, leave zir fashionable guests’ elegantly crafted new bodies writhing and screaming on the ground, and still emerge as Younger Sibling? Cut the network along a bat’s whole flight path between Foo and Stiffwaddle, plunging habitation after habitation into chaos?
Fift squeezed Emim’s hand, let go, and rolled over onto zir hands and knees.
On the docks of Stiffwaddle, Shria’s eyes
widened.
Fift looked back at Emim, feeling a stab of guilt. If Fift got up and ran, the Midwives would certainly cut the network here again. To stop zir from reaching that bat, they’d rip the bodies apart, tear Emim and Bojum and Morinti to pieces . . .
Emim, still watching, raised zir eyebrows. A mischievous smile. Ze winked.
Fift tottered to zir feet, leapt over the groaning Peaceable, and ran.
Ellix’s broad face went slack. “Fift, for Kum
And nothing else.
No more Ellix, no Squell, no bodies. The shrieking began again, and the pain. That shard, that scrap, that fragment of Fift, went down to one knee on the dockyard floor, screaming.
But didn’t fall.
Make bodies out of the pain. Like Squell said. The pain points the way. The pain is a desert, a sea, a void, endless in its sweep. Somewhere on the other side of it is the rest of Fift. A trillion bodylengths away: Fift’s hands, eyes, hearts.
Adrift in a terrible void. What had Thavé said in the pavilion where they drank mangareme fluffies before the lights had first gone out? Star-ships. Like a star-ship setting off to dig new burrows, burrows into other stones, circling other stars . . . launching, leaving, setting off, never to return.
The scrap of Fift, the remnant—not Fift, never Fift, Fift was gone, asunder—this broken piece launched itself up onto its two feet, and ran. Screaming, shaking, it ran around the flailing bodies, towards the bat at the upper spars.
There was nothing else. No other place, no past or future, no self, no Fift. Only stumbling, running, falling, rising, staggering. Like a little scrap of world far from every light, far from every gravitic haven, in the cold between the stars; on beetly wings soft-kissed, in swift unflight, for flight requires a gravity well . . .
Fifty billion viewers.
At the end of the voyage, if you were incredibly lucky, you might have a world again. A world pretty much like what you already had in the first place.
The thing that had once been part of Fift crawled into the robot bat. The door squeezed shut behind it and it collapsed. There was a pull in the gut as the bat took flight. Then the bat was in the air over countless habitations and neighborhoods, and the polysomatic network took hold again.
The Unraveling Page 28