The Unraveling

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

  My agents say twenty billion people are in temporary emergency housing.

  I guess people don’t feel as hopeful as they did in those first days. Things have gotten complicated. But I still believe in Fift and Shria.

  In those first months after we moved, when Umis was out rioting and I was mostly hiding in my room, I tried to get into making clip-ops, like the famous ones, but I wasn’t any good at it.

  Then I got into storytelling.

  I don’t know how much you know about storytelling. Some people’s agents don’t seem very well informed about the topic. Some people think it’s just “lying about strangers” and find it shocking.

  Storytelling is like a clip-op or show of famous people . . . but a clip-op of things that never happened, and instead of feed-footage, you have words. Like, you tell a story of what the famous people would do or could have done, but you’re just making it up.

  People do it in the secret spaces in the world-of-ideas that rogue feedgardeners have started setting up.

  Here’s the thing: for kids my age, one of our biggest early memories is the feed going down. And we live in a time when you never know when the feed will go out . . . maybe for an hour, maybe for a week; maybe just in your habitation, maybe all over the world. This is a big trauma for us kids, and a big way we’re different than older people. It’s affected us in a way older people will never really understand, because they had the feed their whole lives, until recently. For them, it’s a big problem when the feed goes out, and it freaks them out completely . . . but they also all believe it’s a temporary problem. They’re sure someone will fix it and things will go back to normal soon.

  But for us, it is normal. Maybe it will get fixed for a while . . . but not forever. We can’t count on the feed. We feel like sooner or later it will go back to broken.

  When the feed is out, and someone tells you something they see in another body, you have no way of checking for yourself. They could be lying; you just have to trust them. It could be true, or not. Anything could be real.

  That’s life for us. Kids my age know that “the truth” is always just a story someone’s telling you.

  So, while I hid in my room, and the world fell apart, I started posting to the world-of-ideas with stories about Fift and Shria.

  Now, I think it is important to address the topic of romance in storytelling. This is one big thing people get mad about.

  There are different kinds of topics in storytelling, and not all involve romance. There are political stories, friendship stories, funny stories, and trip-to-the-surface stories. Textile stories are very popular. Some people like to change time around and have stories where Shria and Hrotrun save each other during the Age of the Towers, or where Bluey and Emim are among the First Diggers. Some of the stories are totally unrealistic, with giant trashrats controlled by decoherent agents destroying habitations and Panaximandra saving the day with laser eyes. Lots of different kinds of stories.

  But there are three tricky topics that you have to watch out for, and they are: fighting, sex, and Staid matters. You can’t show any of these directly. You can imply them, and sometimes you can skirt the edges. You can show a kiss, or some Vails disappearing through a door to a mat room; or imply a riot is happening around the corner; or have two Staids look at each other knowingly, and the audience gets that it’s some kind of allusion to Staid matters.

  But you can’t go farther than that if you don’t want your whole section of the world-of-ideas to get shut down. Feedgardeners still have some standards, even when they’re distracted by fighting with each other. If you’re too blatant, you’ll just ruin things for everybody.

  Romance is different. For some reason, the feedgardeners will allow it even if it’s not so appropriate. I don’t know why. Some people say the feed-sentinel agents like romance. I don’t know if that’s true. Other people say it’s about political compromises and giving people a place to vent their feelings. All I know is, you can have a lot of stories where people are longing for each other and burning to hold each other and as long as it doesn’t go beyond an embrace and a kiss, they will probably leave the story up. Even if the match makes no sense in real life. I mean Shria and Hrotrun? Yuck.

  If you write stories with romance it is called mancing, and you are called a mancer. Different storytellers are fans of different mances, and they often compete with each other. For instance, there was a feud between Shria-Bluey-Vvonda mancers and Shria-Bluey-Bojum mancers that almost escalated to a real riot . . . ! And that is saying something, because most storytellers are stay-at-home types.

  Personally, I am mostly a Fift-Emim mancer. I know, it’s a little strange for a Vail to be obsessed with a Staid match. That is just me. Also, Fift-Emim can be a little edgy, because of course they met on the docks that day, sat in a circle, and did SOMETHING I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT. (I sure hope this essay’s really confidential.) Of course, I don’t write directly about Staid matters. But I admit there’s a little thrill when they lock eyes and someone absentmindedly strokes a spoon.

  Now, there is one group of mancers I cannot stand. I am almost ashamed to write about them in this essay, but you did ask me for my thoughts and feelings, and I have strong feelings about this! Should I say it? Okay . . . well, it’s Fift-Shria mancers! Yes, that is a real thing!

  I know, I can’t believe it! It’s so unfair to Fift and Shria. These are children we’re talking about!

  I will admit that I understand the impulse, though. It’s true (I really HOPE this essay is confidential) that you sometimes see a spark between them, okay? I’ve had this argument so many times, and Fift-Shria mancers have sent me feed-footage, like at some conference or rally when Shria comes out in some amazing outfit and Fift blushes and looks away or whatever. And then zoom, zoom, replay, replay, dragging out that moment of blush-and-look-away, until your own heart is racing and they’ve half convinced you it’s the truth. Or some footage where they’re singing together in some marching crowd, shoulder to shoulder, and an electric look passes between them. Or where they are caught unawares at the end of a feed outage, at the edge of some habitation, laughing and fooling around, almost roughhousing like two Vails, or sitting quietly leaning against each other like two Staids . . . looking so free and connected.

  So maybe they do have some feelings for each other! SO WHAT. Feelings are feelings and everybody has weird feelings sometimes, and no one should be ashamed. That’s part of what they are fighting for! Part of why there is marching in the streets . . . why people are so sick of ratings judging everyone and making our lives small. “Joy built on honest foundations,” right? Break the stranglehold of consensus!

  But IT IS A FRIENDSHIP, OKAY? Even if they DO occasionally have an impulse to be more . . . And I’m not saying that Fift-Shria mancers’ fantasies are real, but even if they WERE on to something, if that urge WAS really there . . . that would make it even worse to put those stories out into the world WHERE FIFT AND SHRIA COULD FIND THEM. It would make it that much harder for them to resist!

  So even though Fift-Shria mancers claim to love them the MOST, the fact is that they are making their lives harder! They’re saying the exact same thing orderist, repressionist, vailarch, gender-reactionary bodycut-apologists say (these are all words I learned because of mancing, by the way, so it is very educational!). Those flowblocking chaots love to imply that Fift is a toadclown and Shria is a despoiler of innocence, a rattler of the balance. The Fift-Shria mancers are just giving them more thread to weave cloth with!

  And it hurts the movement! It hurts what Fift and Shria are trying to do. Because at the end of the day, storytelling is just storytelling. I mean, I love it, and it’s brought me a lot of joy . . . but if it starts to interfere with the real work of changing the world . . . well, that’s where I draw the line.

  Fift and Shria are best friends, and their friendship is something pure that people can believe in. The Midwives claimed for so long to be the only true guardians of balance
between the genders . . . but they do it with rigid rules and suffering. When you watch Fift and Shria, you believe another kind of balance between Staid and Vail is possible, one that could get us out of this mess.

  But not if those mancers ruin it.

  LEAVE THEM ALONE, Fift-Shria mancers!

  In conclusion, the Unraveling is a big topic and has had many implications for me, my family, and society. Sometimes I wish it had never happened and that everything was the way it was when I was little. But other times I feel like the world is moving forward in a new way.

  The feed just went out again so I am writing this in cached memory. I will submit it when the feed is back on. It’s that familiar empty feeling of the great big world suddenly gone invisible, and everything shrunk down to just my apartment. I know things are happening out there even if I can’t see them. Umis is outside in all vir bodies. I hope ve doesn’t get mixed up in anything. I hope we don’t have to move again.

  Fift and Shria are out there, too. They have been under a lot of pressure lately, and some people claim they are arguing. I hope everything is all right.

  Now, in case you are curious, I am going to work on something new for storytelling. It’s about Emim traveling to see Tusha, Shria’s abandoned sibling, and how ze tries to help heal the rift between Tusha and Shria. I was really sad when Fnax cohort was disbanded after fighting so hard to stay together. I wanted to imagine a happy ending. I just wish it could come true in real life, too. I’ve done a lot of research for it, and I can’t wait to get started.

  Book Two

  Afterwards

  Thirty Years After the Unraveling

  1

  within the sweet juicy heart of the stream

   Fift could smell

    the pungent figgy electric autumn

   hear

    the windmoan

   see

    the swept-winged shape

     of the scatterhulk of it ascending scatterhulk.

  Enmeshed there with zir:

          zir fellows.

  Guliu’s mind was there, noticing the tongue-ness of the shape and wanting it

   and Furis and Majendra resisting the tongue-ness of the shape

  —plane it down? Curve

   it over?

  Horis loving the hiss at the edge of the moan, Jenian

   fairly bouncing with eagerness.

  Every hand on the tiller,

   the vessel rises up against the wave,

    for we believe it has a destination, and that we can bring it home.

  Hours and hours

   expectation, tension, quickening, aperture

    hours and hours

     in the sweet juicy heart of the stream.

  But the body tires; it’s time to go home:

   Fift pulls away . . .

  . . . and was suddenly aware of zir hands clenched on the rail of the reactant’s station before zir. Ze relaxed them, stretched zir neck to one side, then the other, and stood. Wobbled slightly and caught the rail again. Took a moment to collect zir bearings. Guliu, Jenian, Furis, Majendra, and Horis sat at their stations, eyes closed. Out of the stream, the shared flow of perception and intention that the others were still immersed in, the windmoan sounded tinny and hollow in the large room (it had been a domestic mat room once, back when this was all a habitation called Temereen). The figgy smell was the same, though it seemed emptier, less meaningful, smelling it with zir own mind alone.

  On the way out ze put a hand on Jenian’s shoulder, and ve reached up, absently, eyes still closed, and squeezed it.

  Vines grew on trellises around the entrance to the reactants’ hall, heavy with sweet yellow fruit. Fift’s woven robe had the same colors: dark green, bright yellow.

  Above the towers of what had once been Temereen habitation and was now Windswept Sheltering, two bright sun-stars burned in an indigo sky. Fift stood for a moment looking at that sky. Ze still wasn’t used to it; even after three years, it made zir nervous.

  Ze’d been against the antique kitschiness of papering the Sheltering’s shell with active displays; nor had ze understood why it had to be this Far Historical setting instead of their own world’s soupy-green surface sky. But by the time Windswept Sheltering was picking out wallpaper, it had twenty thousand residents, and since they didn’t want ratings or consensus frameworks inside their borders, that meant big unruly meetings for deciding such things. Fift had skipped the one about the dome.

  But the new sky had grown on zir, some. It did make Windswept feel more like an escape: somewhere different, somewhere new. And it was beautiful; the endless subtle shaded blues and purples, the hugeness.

  Still, it made zir nervous: a creature out of its burrow, exposed to a sky.

  Home wasn’t far; just across the waysweep, a little ways under that strange blue dome, and down three flights of stairs. Ze started walking.

  At home, ze was asleep in the nest room, and ze was smearing mangareme paste on a broibel in the dining nook.

  Dobroc looked up from zir soup. “Oh, good,” ze said, “you’re done at the reactancy.”

  Fift smiled, scooped up more paste. “Am I really so bad when I’m in there?”

  “Not bad,” Dobroc said. “Just distracted.”

  Dobroc only had one body in the Sheltering at the moment. The rest were invisible to Fift—they were out beyond the Sheltering’s Gates in the rest of the world, with all its troubles. Fift put down the smearer, reached zir hand across the table, and took Dobroc’s hand, feeling the ridges and grottoes and channels of zir palm. Dobroc still had the same intricate topography of skin, that adolescent folly of somatic design. Fift treasured it. “How’s it going out there?”

  Dobroc shrugged. “I don’t know why I even still do this.”

  “That bad?”

  Dobroc took a deep breath. “Oh, you know. It could be worse. It’s progress; in some sense, this is the smoothest region-level Episode of the Conversation since—well, since the Unraveling, really! Even five years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to gather this group together, never mind generate a coherent flow. It’s just that . . . it’s still so polarized. There are four speakers from various Shelterings, and two who are middle-of-the-road liberationists or maybe post-liberationists. The rest are, well, you know. They’re not exactly neo-repressionists, or they’d be boycotting the whole thing. But they’re . . . they can’t help but see us as a threat. Why do we shut ourselves up in these secret places? What are we hiding? Why do we think we’re too good for the rest of the world?”

  “They say all that?” Fift had crossed the waysweep; ze entered the stairwell.

  “Well, not directly.” Dobroc smiled. “This is the Conversation, after all. Lots of citations from the metacommentaries of the eighth work of the tenth cycle . . .”

  “Ah,” Fift said, “Ranhulo.”

  “Oh, they don’t dare bring out Ranhulo,” Dobroc said. “Higgis and Mathus, mostly, those grumbling pedants. Ranhulo would have gotten it. Ranhulo saw zir own prejudices and crystallized them. If you quote zir out of context, ze can seem anti-Vail, but ze wasn’t. Ze transcended zir own—” Dobroc stopped and grinned. “But why am I telling you this? None of us would be here if not for your new reading of Ranhulo!”

  Fift smiled shyly and looked down.

  “Anyway,” Dobroc said, “they tried Ranhulo once last year, and Morinti stuffed the elegiac sixth subsection of zir second metacommentary on the eighth work down their throats.” Ze grinned, a grin with a rueful edge.

  “Morinti?” Fift asked. “Morinti Bob Elarus of name registry Selfish Turkey 12? Our old comrade-in-arms?”

  Dobroc laughed. “No, a different Morinti. Morinti Frangle Polor of name registry . . . um . . .”

  “I wonder what happened to Morinti Bob.”

  “Well if you want to know, you’re going to have to walk to a Gate, because I’m not ferrying the feed back in here one answer at a time!”
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  Fift smiled. “I like wondering.”

  On the wall above the couch-pit, a small yellow light glowed—the only narrow tendril through which the vast whirlwind feed outside was permitted to request the attention of this household. Yellow was its color for Fift, and it was bright.

  “. . . but it looks like I should check my messages anyway.”

  Dobroc looked back at the wall. “Oh—yes, you should.” Ze smiled. “And your timing is very good. Let me see . . . yes! What if you go now?”

  “Now?” Fift blinked.

  “Yes, now. To the Amber Gate!”

  “Dobroc,” Fift said, “hold on. What is this about?” Outside, ze was descending the last stairway.

  “Most illuminated and heart-held Fift, allow me my little game. The fact that you happened to think of fetching messages now is too Kumru-sent an opportunity to squander. Go!”

  Fift knew that ze could probably ask Cemerid, the third of their triad, what Dobroc was up to. All four of Cemerid’s bodies were in the Sheltering: one asleep downstairs across the couch-floor from Fift, two playing rumcaddy in the lower arena, one at the Violet Gate working with a Far Historical generalysis team in Tearless.

  “Oh, come on,” Dobroc said.

  “Fine,” Fift said, grumpily. Ze let go of Dobroc’s hand, took a bite of the broibel, and stood up. Zir other body had reached the apartment door, so ze came in. Ze briefly made eye contact with zirself, then looked away in each body. Ze’d made zir skin lavender a while ago, an unfortunate choice ze kept not getting around to undoing. Ze got up and stood side by side with zirself in the doorway. Why would Dobroc want to send zir to . . .

  “Dobroc,” ze said.

  Dobroc looked up from zir soup, innocent as an ungendered babe. “Hmm?”

  “It’s Shria, isn’t it?”

  Dobroc didn’t look away. Zir brown-brown eyes held Fift’s calmly. “You’re too insightful, Fift. Yes, it’s Shria. Ve’s coming to train with me, and ve wants to see . . . us. This place. And I thought you’d like to welcome vem.”