Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 169

by Neil Clarke

  I finished the etched remarks with a slogan in Chinese: “Brighten your appearance. Give off a radiant glow. Feel forever young.”

  The urn was slipping in my hands, covered in streams of my tears and thin, tiny flecks of enamel.

  I pulled the laser back.

  I didn’t dare touch any of it. I didn’t dare press any triggers or release any holos. I’m not sure I know why. My hands shook and a part of me knew I just ruined it all. It was a rush of hypnotism or something. Maybe watching that macolan unfurl unleashed something in me that made me unfurl. I was too scared to do anything more to the urn.

  I took out the porto-vac to suck in the flecks of enamel stuck onto the urn with my tears. Kaspa shook his head and handed me his sensifabric cloth to wipe it. “Vacuums in space are bad luck,” he said.

  I looked at my porto-vac, no longer crying, but smiling. “How about toilets?”

  “That’s different,” he said.

  He laughed. I joined in.

  I managed to wipe the urn without crying.

  Kaspa took one of his version three strands, invaluable I’m sure, and tied it on the top of the urn. “A gift.”

  He made a series of knots with his clumsy hands. It wasn’t as elegant as his son’s but it amounted to a rudimentary message rather than the eloquence of a consolation note.

  “What’s that say?” I couldn’t recognize the words.

  “Take care,” Kaspa said. He took a moment to feel the words again with his fingers.

  “This is my son’s own invention. Words represented by a brand new knot-tying method. I only learned a few of these words. It was too difficult. He had so many languages in his head. I could only pick up a few phrases in each.”

  “Take care,” I said aloud, feeling the itty-bitty grooves of the knot. That was it. Brief.

  I promised him that we would keep in touch and I would visit his son. I would. I would visit my mom here anyhow and his son was along the way. Maybe I could take his ship, always coming here, his presence like a passage to my mom’s material self. Or her material remains, I should say. I didn’t know what the self was like after death. Does it even exist as self?

  I packed the urn. It had all the new engravings.

  As I walked to the designated spot, already worked out and paid in advance, all the funerary procedures handled by my mom who always believed in agelessness and yet somehow had planned out her own termination, I thought about the word engraving. It’s funny how in some languages the word engraving has grave in it. Engraving. Inscribing, as in digging deep. Making a lasting name. To permanently affix into memory. A small trench, a cave of wonders. Etymology was curious like that.

  It was the last moment, the end of the seventy days of the funerary rites.

  I sat down in front of the hole in the dirt. The cave of wonders. The engravement of the earth of this projection of the ancestral home. Not quite Earth, but somehow related in her configurations. It seemed fitting, for a people who have migrated and been displaced, to rest also in a space that was a projection of home, but not the home space of home exactly.

  I stared at the urn. My hands shook. I looked at the engravings I carved. I’m sure these words I inscribed did something to solve the puzzle. My senses sharpened at the thought. I could feel the tingling in my spine go up my fingers. A rustling in my ear I thought was a whisper that said, yes, it’s solved. It’s this Thres atmosphere, so full of crackle and electric discharge. There was something else there. A strange, unsettling prescience. The phrases I etched did something, I knew it.

  I clicked on the many holo triggers in succession so fast it was almost at once. The holos projected. The figures became clearer, luminous.

  Yes, I cracked it, I thought. Joy filled my chest. I held my breath.

  It was me.

  Me in the rocking chair; me pressing fortune cookies; me swinging from the flame tree; me holding onto the wok, flipping stir-fry.

  Were these her memories of me? The outburst of joy subsided. I let go of my breath. I felt odd, strange, dislocated. Was I burying her or myself? I played it again and again, over and over, watching this reel of film unfurl, watching these moments string together like some lifelong play about me.

  When I exhausted all my energy in focusing and watching, I sighed, took out the sachet that I had hidden in my boots once again. I felt it, so light, for such a strong, driven woman. This was all that was left of her. Just ashes.

  In a strange way, it reminded me of Rondi. So much will, but so light when I picked him up. Lanky, tall, and light. Maybe this was the irony of materials. The most intriguing puzzle of all. How can so much of us be contained in such little material? Such small mass for so much life?

  I pressed all the triggers again, letting the holos run. “I’m fulfilling your last wish,” I said. I used several tongues to say that. Then I switched to Chinese. I was never as fluent as her in it, even after years of practice, drills, and everyday usage.

  “I don’t know if this is breaking your puzzle. I’m not even sure if I cracked even a millionth of it. You’re not easy to crack. There’s too much of you. I don’t even know what it means to solve the ultimate puzzle of man . . .

  “Woman,” I corrected myself. “Aren’t we just layers and layers and layers? Aren’t we too much to figure out? There are secrets within secrets within secrets. More of you than I can ever discover, ever unveil.”

  I cried, twisting the urn lid, its once obstinate contours readily giving way. It creaked as it opened up. I set the urn lid aside. I reached within, giving it a sweep with my fingers.

  Nothing. It must have been the holos after all, that was the real prize. I couldn’t get their nostalgic glow out of my head.

  My hands moved mechanically, the contents of her spilling into the urn. The Teresa Teng song mixed with other songs and became a melancholic drone. A buzz filled my ear, reminding me of the fireworks. Bang bang bang. Boom. Was that a sonic boom? Or just in my ear?

  Between streaming tears, I stared in wonder. The urn shifted, surface plates moving. It creaked as new images lit up. It was like tectonic plates, piecing together something entirely new.

  She appeared there beside me. In every holo, she was there trying to speak in tongues that I knew. She had practiced them before she passed away, gathering the pieces she picked up throughout her life. It was her voice, sometimes singing in other languages. Sometimes repeating these platitudes of her agelessness and the beauty of skin. She had learned them or tried to. Some were not so smooth, tripping over words, sounding a bit silly. She never liked languages, at least I never thought she did, and I always thought her interest in people was only her way of selling things and propagating this surface beauty. The aesthetics over the substance of man . . . of woman.

  But, as I saw her singing, skipping over syllables—rocking in the chair with me, pressing down fortune cookies with me, mixing up creams with me, rolling up fuzzy socks with me, riding Shandian with me at lightning speeds, fixing up ceramics with me with kintsugi, bending draymetal with me into small loops for the enamel filling—her voice in my ear, confusing phonics of languages she tried to achieve for me, I knew it. The thing I cracked. It was her love for me. She tried to see more of people because she saw all of me.

  After the holo display, the bottom of the urn lid slid loose with a forceful scratching ceramic sound. It reminded me of the grinding groan of a sarcophagus in an ancient tomb being pulled open by archeologists, stone against stone, with the anticipatory hush that accompanied the near revelation of the invaluable contents within. I held my breath. Underneath the urn lid was a panel.

  Ah, so there it is, the puzzle coming together, the mystery unfurling. I had thought the holos was it, but no, my mom was full of layers, just like this urn.

  I was still reeling from the projected affection, all those images of me and my mom surging back to life. I was in such a daze, sad and giddy at once, I nearly dropped the urn lid. My hand was quicker than my mind. I caught the lid in my f
ingers. It was so light, like an illusion of matter.

  I breathed out a sigh of relief.

  I reached into the compartment in the lid and felt . . . a crinkly package of eco-cell wrap. Its scratchy texture surprised me. When I popped the wrapping, a fortune cookie fell into my palm. I cracked that open, letting the crumbs scatter over my hands and sleeves. I put the cracked cookie in my pocket.

  Inside was a slip of paper. I had it in my fingers for a while, feeling along its ridges, tears clouding my eyes, until I received a shock of searing pain and in my blurred vision saw a drop of red. I must’ve gotten a paper cut from it. I sucked on my acrid blood.

  There was no further higher tech, no holographs or flashes, generated by my touch. I took a sleeve to my eyes, wiped my vision clear, and read. The writing was tiny and in a meticulous script. It was mom’s own calligraphic handwriting. It was a conglomeration of various languages I knew that I never knew she had even tried learning. The mishmash of different tongues made the writing even more poetic, just looking at it appealed to me in a jarring way. It was an eclectic but strangely entrancing work of visual art.

  I tried to piece the significance together the best I could and came up with this interpretation:

  “You are my best fortune. The one written inside of me and coming into this life with a crack of delight. But, now you are in the world, paving your way—with your own slips of paper.

  “In particular branches, back in the day, you will find your thoughts come alight. There you will find an instrument, a stylus, for which you can compose your future—under the brilliant light of a thousand red lanterns.”

  I thought this was the end of the scavenger hunt. That my adventure was over. But, of course, this was mom and she would bring me back to where we started. To the flame tree.

  I already anticipated what I would find there. Some of her most prized possessions. Styluses, she called them. Scrawling in beauty.

  Her makeup brushes, to take over the small cosmetics empire she built for herself.

  But, as I reviewed the holos in my head and all the ways she cared for me, I thought, no, it could not be. It couldn’t be the cosmetic brushes.

  It had to be a simple maobi.

  It had to be the ink brush she used to write this fortune of language patchwork. I recalled that she had seen me use my zex-quill and complained on multiple occasions about its complexity, its removal of touch to its canvas. Caress in application is important, she said. Like spreading foundation on cheeks.

  Maybe she really did want me to forge my own path, write my own future. Even at this grave moment, I marveled at how my mom still wanted to engage with me, leaving me puzzled, in wonder.

  I grazed my hand over the inlay draymetal that I had bent, where I had manipulated the shape with my fingers. I was convinced that she knew me, and it would be a maobi, not a dictation of her path for me, but as she said, a means of composition. Words that I would write, a fortune I would create. I was so assured about this, I could see the brush there in my head, lodged between the bark. Maybe it would even be the one she alleged existed, made of my very own baby hair, from my first haircut. 胎毛笔. Taimaobi. The softest of brushes, she had once teased, ruffling my bangs. I never saw it. I always thought it was a joke.

  I felt it in my bones. It had to be a writing tool for undefined creation. Only a trip back would confirm or deny my conviction.

  I bit into the broken fortune cookie. It was as delightful as ever. Crisp and with a lively pomelo taste that danced on my tongue.

  I crunched, taking small bites, until the cookie was gone. I brushed off my hands, grains of the confection sprinkling onto the urn lid. I replaced the lid and lifted the urn up in its entirety. It dazzled in the ambient lunar light of three crescent moons.

  I tuned it one final time and ubertaped a dried macolan flower over the tuning hole, next to the signatures of the craft’s artisans. Her name was there, too. I had engraved it there, in many versions, translating Yongli, “Forever Beautiful” into multiple languages. I lowered her urn into the ground, her voice still buzzing in my ears.

  The holos faded, but they lay entrenched, engraved, in my memories—just as she lay to rest in her grave.

  From there, I had my own puzzle to solve, what my future lay for me—what words I should write in my own script on my own slivers of prognosis. I would take the maobi she left for me, the one I was so sure of, and stain my own path with pressed ink.

  I brushed myself off, took a look at her grave site, and set out toward the moonlight. Humming a Teresa Teng ballad I remixed and improvised, I hailed a ship. This time, I would take my time.

  In loving memory of my mom.

  About the Author

  D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Mithila Review, LONTAR, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, Deep Signal, Battling in All Her Finery, and Broad Knowledge.

  She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

  All Living Creation

  Xiu Xinyu, translated by Elizabeth Hanlon

  [1]

  Lying in bed, I reaffirm to myself that all is well.

  In some corner of the world, there is not another me, forced into life, sold, kept as a pet, tortured out of spite, assigned to a dirty, dangerous task. There’s only me. It’s lonely, but it’s a reassuring loneliness.

  That night I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of her, tongue jittering wildly in my mouth, heart sinking down toward someplace dark. At four in the morning, birds begin to twitter outside my window. At six, they arrive.

  Five of her, without even different uniforms to distinguish one from another. They’re maybe one or two years apart in age, but otherwise appear nearly identical. It creates a sort of illusion: I can’t shake the impression of shells sharing the same soul—if they have one at all. They wait politely at the door for me to come out. Keeping their heads slightly lowered, they flick their eyes upward every so often to observe me, seemingly on edge.

  Their worry is uncalled for. After all, I’m simply going to visit my dear little sister.

  Helen Zhang, rebellious in the way that all foolish young people are, left home eight years ago, after declaring to our parents, “Just forget you ever had a daughter!” That same year, she leaked her own genes and became the most popular commercial clone model ever.

  The last time I saw her was five years ago, at a riotous parade. Feverish fans were everywhere, men and women, old and young, jostling, cheering. There were bright streamers, balloons, confetti cannons, signs, protective membranes deliberately slit open—everything you would expect to see at a parade, plus a large police presence to maintain order.

  I gripped the handle of my briefcase tightly and watched as the flow of the crowd carried me farther and farther away from her.

  The law protects our natural human freedoms against infringement, and our predetermined genes against theft. We cover our fingers in protective membranes, and all household objects are rigorously sterilized immediately after use. We avoid all physical contact to ensure the security of our genes.

  Nearly everyone follows these precautions—everyone except my foolish little sister. Like Christ, she offered herself in sacrifice.

  But only Christ can save this world of sin.

  Outside, mechanical lenses swivel in my direction, soundlessly, the way vigilant birds might watch a predator. In a moment, I will appear on various news sites, not that it matters. The car that has c
ome to collect me has a spacious passenger compartment, and the windows are black and opaque. It’s a little unnerving.

  Two of the five women sit with me in the passenger compartment. Even without makeup, their features are bright and striking, eternally youthful. They keep silent, long lashes fluttering gently with each breath. In profile, with their prominent, pointed chins, their faces bear a faint resemblance to my own. My little sisters.

  I finally get to see her again.

  I can’t say I miss her. It doesn’t make sense, when in fact I see “her” almost every day. On the Internet, on TV, in the newspaper. At fast food joints, nightclubs, shopping malls. At noon, dusk, dawn. Too many of her to count. After she volunteered her genetic information, she became something of a free resource.

  Free, and thus much despised and degraded.

  [2]

  Thanks to advances in genetic engineering, it is theoretically possible to create a human with any given combination of traits.

  We’ve certainly tried. I’ve seen the man in textbooks: no bulging musculature, and yet more than capable of shattering any Olympic record, or working at depths of thirty meters without protection for twenty minutes. What the textbooks leave out is that he died, quickly and quietly, after just a few days.

  According to our instructor, it was a sudden heart attack. His heart couldn’t keep up with his body’s superhuman demand for blood. It was possible in theory, but not practice: blood oxygen content, hormone levels, muscular endurance . . . the variables involved were too numerous and complex.

  The rules that govern our genetic makeup are far more complicated than we imagine. The slightest change can dramatically alter the whole. Attempts to correct every “error” made during the genetic modification process will only be subsumed by an endless stream of errors.

  But it isn’t just the unpredictability of genetic engineering.

  As my undergraduate advisor put it, nature is not merely more complex than we think; its complexity is beyond human comprehension. The terrible thing about genetic modification is that you can’t help but want to compensate for errors. But humanity has managed to advance despite innumerable defects. Compensating for so-called minor errors inevitably leads to fatal problems.