Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 169

by Neil Clarke

  She banged it a few times and then started at my ankles again. I sneezed a few more times for good measure.

  The prodder tickled the insides of my thighs and I could feel it even against the fauxskin. I had smeared on a sensor-cloaking cream over the flattened sacks of hidden ashes. Bought on black market and not completely unsure if it was effective or a dud. The person who sold it to me had a prodder, which she showed beeped for a sample of remains but then didn’t for the bags of my mom’s remains on top of which she lathered her product. It worked for the seller, but could’ve been a ploy. It was also pricey. Had I been conned?

  I was skeptical, but had few choices.

  This is for my mom, I thought. Hidden away into the secret compartments in me as she would’ve liked, like I was a walking puzzle box progeny. A puzzle box in which she could so comfortably nestle into after death. I sneezed a few times and the guard actually apologized, going faster.

  No beeps.

  When she got to my waist, I breathed a sigh of relief, still sneezing a few times for good measure.

  She let me out, giving me the “spell ritual vessel” and its case, not even bothering to put it back in its specialized packaging.

  “You’re free to go,” she said, whisking me away.

  Did I mention I hated security? I continued an occasional sneeze as I packed the urn away with a gentleness that they really should’ve shown. I grabbed my other bags, which were cleared. Under my patch of fauxskin, my real skin itched. Over that layer of my real skin, my mom’s ashes—culture embedded in lifeless things—lay flat, waiting for their arrival to the eventual burial site.

  I repacked my other bags. They made a mess of them, with some useless knickknacks gone, down into pockets to be exchanged by port hands.

  Security.

  I shook my head again. In the end, I tricked them and got away with it, so I really can’t complain. I should celebrate how ineffective they were.

  On the trip, I would slip away from my bunkmates and find a quiet space in the standing “lab cubicle”—just a tiny space with a ledge, or as they designated it, “lab table,” to be alone. I wondered what fool would try to set up an experiment here, given the unsteadiness of the ship’s movement and the complete lack of space, equipment, safety wear, and setup protocol. Maybe a thought experiment, I considered, laughing to myself. A thought experiment on how to conduct an experiment here in this tiny tease of a room, where even I barely fit.

  I tapped on the table.

  Nobody was here to share the joke. I thought that my mom, her ashes still hidden in my thigh, might’ve gotten the joke.

  It itched down there on my thigh. I had to move her elsewhere, but I couldn’t figure out where. The urn was completely out. She and her list of demands. It was so Yongli, but well, I couldn’t just say she was dead and not care. I couldn’t put her remains in until I got to the designated spot. It just wasn’t right to defy last wishes. Besides, I was curious what this was all about.

  I tuned the urn to the directions of Dr. Lee-way, as I’ve done every day since I received it.

  After tuning, I set the vessel on the table and pressed the pads of my fingers along the delicate cloisonné designs, watching holo after holo come alive. This had my mom written all over it. Things upon things coming to life, as if things had a spirit of their own moving them.

  The wok she so cherished banged in delight by itself against the stove, sending a musical of notes. I was glad for the soundproofing of the lab cubicle as I hummed along with the rhythmic beats it made against a holographic kitchen countertop.

  Experimental fuzzy fabric socks that wiggled its toe-area on its own. I had gotten them for her. They were supposed to be super toasty and cozy, but she said it was like lighting a fire on her foot. Too warm.

  The hovercar she called Shandian for its lightning speed. The door would jam and I was delighted the holoartists captured that detail for her in their projections.

  Jars and jars of cream spilling out. She was dermatologist and owner of her own cosmetics brand, always saying that she would crack the puzzle of wrinkles and old age. In the end, they got to her, after decades of staying wrinkle-free, a poster child for her creams and the best-selling point that could be, the last months of unchecked stress and poor health left her face as wrinkled as maps of hovercar routes.

  I stuck my hand through one of the holographic jars, remembering the cream. I felt almost nothing, only the slightest of tingles at my index finger. The other jars were hitting the wall, lighting up and warping, impeded by the contained small space of the “lab space.”

  Liquids were too heavy or else I would’ve brought a jar of the cream with me. I felt my own face, with creases starting to form.

  The holo fizzled away and the sound of the jingles for her brand receded. I wiped off a tear, patted my eyes so they wouldn’t look so puffy, and tapped on my cheeks to fluff them up a bit. There.

  I set the urn back against the cushioned case, pulled the top closed, and stepped out. There was a man with a goatee who held the door open for me. He had in his hand what looked like an old-school microscope case and a sack of what sounded like jangling transborosilicate.

  Really? Petri dishes here? Good luck with that.

  I couldn’t help but smile. My mom would’ve joined in on the joke.

  For all her interest in skin care, my mom had really little interest in people. Sure, she laughed at their personalities and listened to gossip, but when it came down to it, it was really what was on the surface. Her attention was scientific and focused on the epidermis, almost like a thing in and of itself, disconnected to the person. She said, it was more about lifting up humanity as a culture, bringing us to our most aesthetically pleasing state, like we were monuments. But, of what?

  Of ourselves. Of course.

  It didn’t make much sense to me, but it fit her worldview. It was like lawn care or trimming a hedge. Topiary-like.

  Like grooming the flame tree. I remember her holding laser saws, cutting off wayward branches, the seedpods falling like little blazing shooting stars, as she tried to achieve something akin to symmetry. She was smiling then, wide, like there was nothing more exhilarating than shaping them.

  “It’s about making a figure to eclipse the enigma within. You get this general shape, but think about all the nooks and crannies of the branches that get hidden away. In scavenger hunts, you exploit these hidden spots that others don’t see.” Her eyes twinkled.

  After arriving at the site of my fieldwork, Lancon, I asked all the right questions. The urn was now in its case nestled tightly in a local artisan traveling sack, slung across my shoulders. Light as a feather, as always. But, I was weighed down by the memories and the need to collect data. By then, I had moved my mom’s remains into hidden compartments in my knee-high liquid-proof field boots.

  I shoved aside thoughts of my mom as I gathered narratives about all kinds of plants, little tendrils that curled up to the skies, petals that glowed and changed colors, roots that crawled horizontally across towns.

  But like the roots, the memories would crawl back to me. I met an old woman and her three grandchildren as they mashed up roots. I drew sketches with my zex-quill, taking holoflash data to be converted by artists. With micro-tweezers, I collected samples and slipped them into specialized silvery sachets.

  I tripped over a few words, but was surprised how much of the dialect came back to me once at the site. As I conversed, I made the local girls laugh with imitations of the gloopy noises the roots were making. Sticking my fingers into the lifa root to prod out the clumpy parts, I couldn’t help but think of my mom’s force-feeding of ginseng paste that was supposed to help the skin. “It’s good for you,” her voice wormed into my ears as I spoke, the giggle of teenage girls surrounding me receded. “An antioxidant, antiaging, and promotes elasticity.” I remembered the bitter aftertaste that goopy ginseng concoction left in my mouth.

  I remember all the times I rebelled. Like some of the other teen
s I met at the swirl gardens who refused to participate in the trimming and instead hopscotched along the rocks lining the dirt. Their parents yelled at them to not run with scissors and they threw them across the stones in defiance. I took holoflashes of those instances, jotting down their slang, marking them as “youth at play; youth at defiance.”

  I took notes to myself on the language of religion—all the utterances and inscriptions. I wasn’t sanctioned by the funders to do that, but you can’t help a curious mind. Plus, after doing fieldwork for years, you realize that all these parts of culture are entangled and it doesn’t hurt to take notes. I saw how they honored the dead with words.

  There were new practices mixed in with the old. Besides burning holo incense and chanting, villagers dressed in drapes tied holographic fabric slips with words as a new custom alongside the age-old tradition of erecting funerary poles.

  They asked me to tie a fabric slip to the pole of a village chief I met years ago, who I was sad to learn had passed. I affixed the fabric to the pole. The silky fibers seared into the pole, as if grasping it. A spark activated and sent the words scrawled on the fabric shooting out in a bright crimson hologram, illuminating the skies. Projected in a curvy script with many slashes and dots as phonetic markers, I read the words in my slow comprehension:

  “In memory, you live in us.”

  The holo began to fizzle and flicker, accompanied by the sound of a prolonged sizzling “sssssss.”

  As the holo finally ran out of power, and the skies returned to an onyx adorned with stars, the slip of fabric detached and unfurled. It flew in the wind, tackling my arm for a moment and tickling my skin. It smelled like the heady aroma of holo incense. It settled onto the garden floor, where it would decay into nutrients for the plants.

  A shiver ran up my spine and goose bumps ran up my arm.

  There was a rhyming feature that I couldn’t capture in my translations, no matter how hard I tried. I found it poetic. I also thought my description in my notes of the fabric was lacking. Silky didn’t cut it. It was a satiny smooth that glided, like words slipping into and out of my ears. Just touching that slip of fabric was a full-body experience, sending tingles throughout my limbs.

  But, there was something else. A memory.

  The whole process reminded me of the many fortune cookie slivers of my mom, still awaiting my return home, sending me messages even after her death. Like prearranged clues into the puzzle of her afterlife.

  In grief, you start wondering the strangest of things. Did she even care about me at all? Was it always about things? My appearance, my skin? Was it about her? The cracking of her puzzles? The skin as the layer that matters most, the outer beauty that counts?

  A few days later in the village, a cute, lanky, ruffled-hair twelve year old ran into my sack with a firecracker. It was an ol’ analog kind, not holo, which surprised me. They looked like flame tree seedpods threaded together. They must have gotten these made locally since you can’t get them onto the Corps-approved trading ships. Probably got here through one of the “underground” skygliders. (My anthropologist brain liked to see how holdover words like “underground” to mean “subversive” or “illicit” still has meaning even when commodities are sent through the skies, high above ground.)

  I waved at him while he was holding the firecracker. Holding it was no problem. The problem was when it went off. He didn’t throw it across the gardens like he was supposed to.

  In catastrophic blasts, it exploded in sonic booms. Bang bang bang. Boom boom boom.

  I jumped back three feet, tripped over rocks, and fell, twisting. Something in me rattled. Maybe it was all my organs and more. The shock traveled through my arm to the ground. My eardrum pounded. My nose was in dirt, shivering. I smelled the earthy scent of this transplanted garden ground, my head swimming.

  I wiggled my fingers. My arms felt numb, broken even.

  The firecracker banged a few more times. It let out a long hiss and crackled.

  It was still hissing when I stood up, checked my arms (not broken), and let the wooziness subside.

  When I felt steady enough to walk, I went to check on the boy. He was knocked over, too. A ringing in my ear grew louder and louder. I checked his breathing and picked him up. He was half-conscious, mumbling something I couldn’t quite hear past the ringing as I carried him over my shoulders in a fireman carry. He was skinny and deceptively light for his lankiness. Not so heavy at all, I thought.

  I was still feeling the rattle within me, making what seemed like the longest walk I’ve taken to the infirmary, my legs trudging with a heavy step.

  The first thing the medic did was put the boy into a calm-inducing sleep, with a few spritzes of the composite serenity spray.

  They left me awake, with the ringing that transformed into a rippling sound in my ear. The medic gave me some bitter herbs to chew on, followed by a star-shaped cracker. I began to feel better, with the sound of the rippling receding. They put me against what I translated as a hug-all, a giant stuffed-animal-like pair of nurturing limbs made of synthetic fibers mixed with an organic cellulose-based fluff.

  The cracker left me with the aftertaste of citrus. Nestled in this cocoon, I felt soothed like being in my mom’s arms when I myself was twelve.

  It was only later, when I was tuning the urn, that I found the hairline crack in the cloisonné.

  I drew in my breath and held it. No.

  The urn was otherwise intact, but the petal of one flower was marred by this crack. I breathed out, thinking that the rattle within me all the while was also a rattle of the urn. The thought of its damage disoriented me. In carelessness, I had destroyed the beauty of it.

  No, it wasn’t destruction. Not even damage. Just a scratch. Get a hold of yourself. I breathed in and out.

  I just wanted everything to be perfect for my mom.

  I felt along the urn for a while, pressing and checking to see if the holos were affected.

  Most of the ones I had found projected their holos as they have in the past, with the same shimmery cinematic presentation.

  But, when I pressed on the trigger that I knew to unleash the rocking chair holo, I heard the tiniest sound of a creak and a panel of light shot out and receded as fast as it came. I tried pressing it a few more times, like a desperate child tackling the buttons of a slow hover-elevator.

  The rocking chair holo never projected in all its glory. At one point, there was a slight suggestion of the curved “skis” under rocking chair legs, but then nothing else materialized.

  I felt a numbness creep into me.

  I breathed out and stopped clicking on that rocking chair button. I moved on.

  After stroking and prodding the surface for some time, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t think it messed up the integrity of any of the other holos. Overall, I didn’t think it affected the mechanism for me to crack open the puzzle. I couldn’t say exactly how I knew that the integrity of the puzzle was intact, but after I calmed down, humming to myself an old Teresa Teng song my mom used to sing to me as a lullaby, I just had this feeling that it would be okay. Everything would work out, even if my rational mind told me that things went awry, people died, and there was no assurance in the world.

  I shut that rational mind out and focused on the present, humming louder.

  I remembered Dr. Lee-way’s advice and dug out the ubertape from my luggage. I moved my mom’s remains into my suitcase, no longer sure if my hidden boot compartments were a safe holding spot for her ashes. They was too exposed there to all my activities. Better safe in this room.

  I checked the seal on my locking device, affixed the verbal shutdown of the room. I hobbled over to the port (my legs still weak) and picked out some comparable slathers to the ones Dr. Lee-way suggested from the supply store. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but when I got back, I bandaged the patient, i.e. the to-be vessel for my mom, as directed, as gentle as lathering face cream on a kitten, my mom used to say, which made no sense to me then.
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  It seemed to make more sense to me now, as I did this quiet work.

  I wished I could tell her that.

  I brushed on the slather remover and tugged at the cloth. It resisted the peel. It felt like the reveal after cosmetic surgery—someone with a new face. Would I recognize her?

  When the cloth gave way, my eyes bore into the urn, right at that spot. Yes, it was there. Faint, but still there. The tiniest of fissures visible to the naked eye.

  Apropos, I thought. Like wrinkles blooming on my mom’s face as she neared the end of her term here in this universe.

  I wanted to maintain that supple beauty that my mom effortlessly strove to achieve. Okay, it wasn’t effortless. It was the constant application of creams and concoctions that she put together and sold, brushes slid against faces, incessantly making holo calls and presentations for her business, for investors and sales. She had a team under her, but she liked to be on the front lines, showing off how she cracked the puzzle of agelessness.

  In the end, agelessness wasn’t solved. It fell on her, too, taking her away from me.

  I pressed on the trigger for the rocking chair projection. The form came up in holographic light, but it was fainter than before. It faded away quick.

  I felt a pang of failure. Mom left me one last puzzle to figure out, one last enigma to share between us, and I botched it up. And above that, this vessel was her new skin, her carrying case that she would dwell in for the rest of eternity, and already it was marred.

  I heard a footstep. It was the twelve year old. He was walking along, no limp, no issues. Children heal fast.

  He came up, looked sheepish, and whispered a thanks. With deft fingers, he held up a thin strand of gold. It was thread, so thin, thinner than a strand of hair, it almost didn’t exist. Put it against the ambient light and squint and it almost looks like a translucent wisp of vapor floating in the sky. It was made of the same material as the fabric slips for the funerary poles, but spun into a nearly impossibly delicate width.

  He had tied some knots into it. It was an exceptional skill of manipulation for someone I had charged to be so clumsy.