“I don’t know what that means.”
“Yes you do.” And she did and the shape-shifter asked, “Is the pit where the rage comes from?”
“Do you feel the salamanders falling?”
The creature turned ten eyes up toward the heavens. It was true. The night was a mist of lightly falling amphibians. So tiny, delicate. Each a memory of a time and place where she had almost been free. But not quite.
“It’s amazing. It’s perfect. Perfecto. Perfection. Purr.”
The shape-shifter began to purr like a cat. The dark bird had never seen a real cat, but the shape-shifter put the image of a contented cat in her mind.
“The ground feels better after, beneath my feet. Even though they are gone.”
“It’s really a person. It was a person. Now it’s so many things. I wonder if the person is happy now. So distributed.”
“Happy is a human concept.”
“I’m not human and I want to be happy.”
“Are you happy in this moment?”
“Yes.”
“Then that is enough.”
For the dark bird, for it was all she had.
“I like the wind, too.”
The wind over the desert floor now was a shushing and rushing and a swirl that brought with it the cold cool embrace of fragrant scents from beyond the City. The reassurance that there was a place beyond the City. Out of mind.
“What will you do—after?” the shape-shifter asked.
“After what?” asked the dark bird.
“After the end of it all. After the rains. After all the resolves resolve.”
“I don’t know. What will you do?”
“Nothing. I won’t be here anymore.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. But you will be here. You will live here.”
The dark bird, the ugly duckling, frantic: “Can you help me? There is this thing in my head. A poison. A command. A rot. A presence. I cannot get it out. I do terrible things. I do terrible, terrible things.”
“So do I.”
“So you understand.”
“I do.”
“Can you help?”
A barrier against the slaughter. The slaughterous impulse that came in exterior and inhabited.
Killing the pale men on the other Earth invaded by the Company. Killing them because she could.
“I am going into your mind now. I am in your mind, in the future. When you are older and weaker. I can see into your mind there, then, not now. I am snapping the connection. I am snapping the cord. So it will be alone, quarantined, the mad thing inside you. It will live there, but cannot access you.”
“And now?”
“You must live with it until you catch up to the future. But one day, you can just be a duck again.”
“Just.”
The shape-shifter laughed. “I am just a squid that lives on land. I am a dog that is a cat. I am a bird that is a lizard. I am mighty, except I am weak.” And the shape-shifter chortled and guffawed and made the duck feel jolly and kind and at peace.
I am the ugly duckling that survived the magical garden. I am worth something. I am not just a monster.
“Do you ever wonder?” she asked the shape-shifter. “Do you ever wonder what it would be like not to live in the world of humans?”
The shape-shifter considered that a moment, made a sound like a sad laugh or a weeping chuckle. Shook off the question.
“Shall I tell you a story before I leave?” the shape-shifter asked. “It’s a story that should be in the journal, but it isn’t. The story isn’t about you, but it is about you.”
“Yes, you can tell me a story. I would like that.”
“Once upon a time, in an age of too many monsters, a blue fox appeared across the drifting sands…”
v.3.1
9. CAN’T FORGET
i.
to the murderous child
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One time I escaped.
You want. Things to be words. That are not words. Could never be words. Your fox is some other construct. We did not agree to that. We do not call ourselves foxes. A thing you created that is not me. To think an autopsy was a person. To think a dissection meant a type of mind. If I went rummaging through your carcass, would I find you?
But I will give you words. Tell it the way you can hear it. Not natural to me. Every word that spills out of me and reaches you is lost. I lose so much in this moment. Talking to you. Needing to talk to you. But in the end, you will give the words back to me in different form. And that will feel like something ripped from you.
Think of me as a magician, child. Except I show you what is already there. Invisible only to you. That is the trick. A stale, shabby trick that I must show to you. But that is the stale, shabby trick your senses have played on you. You make your disease into our disease. You make us into a disease because you are sick.
Smell can be a wall or a tunnel or a word scrawled across pine needles soft against a forest floor. It can be tortuous, kind, humble, vainglorious. Even the least hint of it can be a history of betrayal or of friendship. To you, it is simpler. Much too simple.
What use are certain words to you if you cannot inhabit them? Ears and tongues and the places that slink back to report to a fox but never to you. Lines created by water-scent, lines fuzzy and sharp. Heat. Cascading or still. The ever-shifting, ever-sharing smell of other foxes. The noise of a porcupine that becomes a taste on the tongue that lingers. The supersonic laughing of rats. The rich, heady smell of a bear plodding through.
Still, I burrow deeper. Still, you will follow me.
Human is a stronghold that hides a weakness.
Once upon a time, there was a fox who became an astronaut. He did not like it much. It hurt to become an astronaut. It hurt to be so still. Copse. Corpse. Dead cool place under moonlight. I had made a meal of the small, became small myself, plucked and imprisoned by the Company. They wanted to eat me, but not in the usual way.
Cages of dead animals all around, in their sacred place, their laboratory. Dead and sick and wounded and drugged and deranged. Men, too, unmoving, stacked in the corners. There were so many of them pale. Stark. Scentless. Soundless. Soulless. Yet they heard sound, held it. Within. Could see and smell and all the rest. Yet lay in closets and alcoves. Stiff. Unyielding. Less human than a fox.
I was just another animal in a cage to be sacrificed. For a task that might or might not work. For the Company. They had to send the one, if they could. Get the one back. Start over if they couldn’t. Easier than building more. Open a way. Close a way. I should have gone insane but I was a fox, not a human. I was only made to last four years. I was used to death, in that way, through the generations.
I was intelligent already. They tried to make me more human. Intelligent in the way humans call themselves intelligent. So I held on deep to fox. They couldn’t risk a human, but they wanted a human response. Apes and dogs, rats and cats—all died. But a fox? A fox knows a burrow. A fox digs a hole in the ground, a fox jumps through the hole it created, pulls the hole in after it. Where is the fox now?
They made my brain more distributed. Stave in my skull and still my feet could think, carry me from danger, devise a strategy, chart the coordinates home. Turned me half into equation, one that could adapt to destination.
“All flesh is quantum.” One torturer to another, conversing over the half corpse. Who could hear them. Understand them. Could have leapt up and torn out at least one throat before the end.
But I was smarter than that.
As the aliens hovered above me, tinkering with me. Syringed. Rolled over. Shaved. Dipped. Banded. Sent forth.
Was I the first fox? Or just the last? I would never know.
Charlie in the Corner, I called him, once I knew what language was. Son of the head researcher. The one who always watched, recommended never did, back then. He was bright and white and shiny and fresh. Not yet monstrous in appearance. He must have thought himself fresh and full of life. To me, already, he was full of death. Burgeoning with maggots.
Charlie the Watcher. Scribbling in his journal. Good for nothing. Except he liked the guts of it. He liked to get in the guts. The autopsies of what went wrong. I noticed him for that.
The fervor. The enthusiasm. There were times I thought Charlie had created this “father,” that the father was just the son’s puppet, a mask or disguise.
It was from Charlie’s worm-mouth that I first heard Nocturnalia, but only later understood what he meant.
All the smells of death and decay in that place. I hated that place because it turned the smells foxes love into smells a fox could come to hate.
I came to hate the mechanism of my departure, too. It was small at first. A small biomechanical creature. It mewled and wet the bed and at first I thought as it grew beside me, us connected by tubes, that it was my friend. Or a comrade in our distress. But it was the door being grown to attune to me, for this experiment. Strange dreams from that amniotic fluid. Strange dreams of the universe, of burrows with no end. With chambers as large as a world and stars trickling down the sides of stone. The wealth of smells the universe hid, that the door gave to me all unknowing! As I shared its dreams, translated into fox.
One day it would devour me and I would be someplace else.
There was left just the inconvenience of needles and grubs—all the biotech put in the fox that it learns to subvert and to hack. Because my torturers didn’t understand the fox mind, the fox body.
They gave me telescopic sight and made me hate them more that my world was no longer the richness of smell and taste and hearing, and now I must adjust to this cacophony of images, un-fox-like.
Or: I once saw a frog paralyzed by a spider and cocooned in its webbing. Numb and spiraling and slowly being eaten. Now I was the frog, but the cocoon was alive and devouring me. Then I became the cocoon.
You wouldn’t understand me even if I made sense. Before the wall of globes. There was just one globe against a vast wall and it wanted to eat me and I was in the globe and I was everywhere and I was nowhere, too. I was the one sent. Every time. It was on this side. It was alive. Sent out across time, space. Trying to destroy my mind. As side effect.
I plotted revenge. I cursed them silently: Let them be sent on journeys no one ever had. Let them be strapped to the gurney, needled and cut and scanned. Let them be filled with the sluggish liquid from syringes. Let them be filled with worms and beetles and dead leaves or the feeling of dead leaves crinkling and cracking to dust inside. Let them go forth as the experiment, curled up inside a globe, a globe, a globe pushed out across the face of the deep. Of many depths. Let them know the emptiness.
The battlefield that was my body.
Let them know the way it hurt somewhere so basic, so plain, so laid bare, that I could not hide from it. I could not hide could not fight could not kill myself but was only ever forced to leap and lunge into the effort. Forced to return. But I was always dead when I came back. They couldn’t fix that, consequences of coordinates, of fixing coordinates, of the struggle to know what mind meant, what they meant by body or even journey. To form a map, to advance the borders of the map, even as the compass was no use.
They had changed my genes. I could breathe without air. I could breathe without body or mind. In water. Buried deep in the earth. They opened my head, fixed me like switchblades flickering and snickering, my thoughts thick as smoke and swirling, cut and recut, toward the ceiling. Only so I could go back again. Go black again.
Dead Astronauts Page 16