Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  A piece of white fluff, like a tiny white feather no bigger than her little fingernail, floats up from behind her and lands on the ground. Observing the simple distance between herself and the fluff and the activity of its falling is what saves her: I am here, that is there. Not everything that happens is part of the nightmare. She sees the face of Professor Crest, but then realizes it’s only a peculiar concatenation of light and shadow on the wall nearby. The late Professor Long continues to sit in his desk chair; she can see him through an open doorway. There is a cryptic, smudged smile on his dead head. Smilebot scampers across the doorway, and Professor Budshah’s face breaks against venetian blinds. She glances down at the late Professor Long, seeing the top of his head, the charred wound, the long body slumped. There’s a movie showing on the computer screen—it’s the late Professor Long having sex with a woman whose voice resounds hollowly in the computer speakers.

  “Come along.”

  Through the venetian blinds and the horizontal stripes of light vanish in a sheltered void, although the vertical points of light, where the strings thread through the slats, are still visible like dangling links of different colors. The incense smell strengthens, becoming the syncopation of an impression that resembles but is not quite sound, organizing itself in a ring around her with each pulse answered by another on the opposite side of the ring. The sound is like the rolling of drums so far in the distance that the attack is inaudible and only the booms carry, in a complex but brief pattern. The patterning is at once a mechanism to elevate the two of them and also a quasi-telepathic conversation among their extraterrestrial allies.

  The spacecraft opens above them and they ascend into it, two figures standing at either side of the aperture, featureless human figures with upraised arms which turn out to be mannikins made of a matte white stuff, like coagulated flour, and the whole structure seems to be a wasps nest made of a similar material. The interior of the spacecraft is shaped like a conch or nautilus shell, in spiralling folds. Professor Budshah walks ahead of her and grows smaller faster than is warranted by his pace. The surfaces around her are white and coated with a thin layer of whitish smoke, actually microscopic, all-purpose particles which can be moulded into whatever is needed, then smoothed back into place again. The smoke has unaccountable depth for looking into; inside it there are endless black, red, and yellow ribbons of varying thicknesses drifting to and fro. These are the nerve communication command lines that operate the spacecraft and provide the passengers with useful information. No sign of their allies yet, apart from the continuous patterned drumming of their thoughts. The spacecraft is doing its various functions; she can tell this because the smoke is forming into graceful spikes and pinching off into floating disks like sand dollars which sail across the open space and collect in triangular piles without touching each other; above her and also at her right the smoke gathers in feathers, so that now the passage she is walking along is a down-lined esophagus and there is an immobile fall of smokeflakes in the air. Each flake trembles with frailty and yet, when she walks into one, it stretches fantastically across her body without breaking and stays there, in an elongated but whole version of its original shape. She is able to peel it off again and restore it to the air; the moment she removes it from her body, it gathers itself until it is as it was. For a moment, the diffuse light is gone, and she can see only a sunset orange-pink glow ahead of her, like a nacreous wall, and she remembers the late Professor Long again; the smokeflakes become translucent silhouettes and the walls around her are dark. The floor reflects the light and the walls don’t. Then the diffuse white light blooms as before, the wall is gone, and she walks, thinking to find Professor Budshah, but also thinking that she is travelling and so she has to walk. Her clothes have disappeared; she is currently wearing an opalescent spacesuit made in sections that are locked in place by embarrassingly large and garish gemstones. The effect seems vulgar to her, as if she were decked out in fistfulls of cheap costume jewelry, and she feels vaguely to blame. Her space suit reflects her soul, apparently, or the quality of her mind, something like that. Through a membraneous aperture in the smoke she catches a glimpse of Professor Aughbui, sitting at a table of congealed smoke, dressed as always in dandruffy tweed, counting the contents of a triangular pile of sand dollars by rapping the air with the end of his pen. He writes the tally in a cloth-bound ledger and then swings the pen in the air. The pile floats away and up like a ferris wheel car, and a new, identical pile swings into its place. When she looks directly at the pile of sand dollars, an intense desire for technical accomplishments washes over her; she wants to do complicated math problems or work out a thorny bit of translation, or in some way to undo fantastically complicated mental knots. Joined to this feeling is an intensification of her awareness of the pulsating drumbeats of disembodied thoughts. It seems to her as if her own thoughts are following that elaborate pattern of meshing polyrhythms and beginning to join with them. Professor Aughbui begins counting the sand dollars with obvious relish. Smilebot, she now sees, sits on the floor nearby, with its legs straight out in front of it and spread apart, amusing itself by fashioning abstract and elegant shapes out of the floor smoke with its little hands. The aperture closes. Professor Budshah is standing on the path ahead. Not much more than thirty feet away, he is as small as if he were twice as far off. An upright green streak whizzes through the white surfaces around her like a scratch in a film, and as it crosses by her she becomes instantly exhausted. Lightheaded, she staggers, and is caught and steadied by Professor Budshah. His head is topped with a diadem that burns with a colorless, soft intensity, and she can see it is held in place, directly above the center of his forehead, by a crown or wreath of vibrations that lightly dimple the air.

  “We’re just departing from the Earth’s area of gravity,” he explains.

  “Where are we ...?” she asks.

  “We are on a hypervelocity planet moving at relativistic speeds,” he says. “We call it Koskon Kanona.”

  It occurs to her that she asked him where they were going in Chinese, and she can’t identify the language he replied in.

  “Are we communicating telepathically?” she asks, deliberately trying to speak in Chinese but weirdly unable to be sure that she is, since she doesn’t really hear herself. The incense is doing something to her voice.

  “Not as such,” he says. “Are you better now?”

  She is able to stand.

  “I’m tired,” she says.

  “That is usual,” he says.

  “How not as such?” she asks.

  He leads her to one side—“out of the way”—and forms a bed for her from smoke by wafting his hands a few times. As he does this, he explains how they are not exactly communicating telepathically, and something about how the language is conveyed by means of the spacecraft which is also somehow language or is partly made of language, having a linguistic component or something, and something else she doesn’t catch. Eagerly she stretches herself on the smoke bed and floats.

  *

  “We want you to answer some questions about certain suspicious activities you were involved in ...”

  “Ah,” she says simply. Then she produces a white cigarette pack and holds it up. “May I? Thank you.”

  The pack is a little on the large side. She lights up.

  “I assume this is concerning ...?”

  “You know what concerns us.”

  “Ah,” she says again. “Well, just let me explain.”

  You see, Assiyeh Melachalos is so tenacious, so determined, you understand. That sort of person. Rejection after rejection elicits from Assiyeh nothing but application after application and while she is shot down by every major and minor research lab in the U.S. Asia and Europe she does get project approval from the UNASUR-funded physics initiative via the special topics program of the physics institute at Achrizoguayla University. She is determined to repeat her light-bending experiment, and has developed a new kind of generator that uses selective resting of i
onized particles to induce electron flow. Assisted by the naked silhouette of her father and by two graduate students, Baruch and Carolina, Assiyeh installs the generator, gets it working, and then assembles the elements of the light experiment. The results of the first run-through are promising, but the following weeks produce nothing. Baruch and Carolina return dutifully every day to help Assiyeh, who lives at the lab, working round the clock, sleeping on the floor of her office, bathing in a corner of the ladies’ bathroom. Baruch, a solidly built, jovial man of about thirty, brings the groceries and does some simple cooking. He seems to be losing interest in Assiyeh’s project. More and more often, he can be found at the fringes of more promising experiments being conducted at the center. He never flakes off his responsibilities, but there’s a sympathetic resignation in his eyes. Carolina is a sphinx. A very handsome, taciturn young woman with dark blonde hair and light brown skin.

  Then Assiyeh requests time in the main lab, recently vacated by a group of neutrino hunters whose noisy victory celebration had filled the corridors with the sound of music and snapping champagne corks. Using this lab, she is able to wire her generator directly into the center’s main line; her generator requires an external source of power to goose it up to full strength. With Baruch and Carolina running the two parallel control stations and her father’s ghost manning the generator, Assiyeh repeats her experiment. Once again, the ribbon of light bows, becoming a luminous parenthesis, but the braiding effect still withholds itself from the cameras. Fuming and swearing, Assiyeh repeats the experiment again and again into the night. Baruch contritely points to midnight on the clock and retires, but Carolina remains until an hour before daybreak.

  Assiyeh is dejectedly shampooing her hair in the sink when a new idea strikes her. She dashes back to the central lab, calling for her father, who steps immediately from the shadow behind the door, which is his chosen resting-place. Head wrapped in a towel, dripping, hair glued to her face, she starts the cameras and adjusts the light source so that it will generate as much light interference as possible. Rushing from station to station, she restarts the experiment. As the lateral slowing boom is rolled adjacent to the beam, the light dimples, the ribbon begins to flutter like a pennant waving in a strong wind. Then it tears in two, and the split ends shear apart in rags that dart straight up toward the ceiling, becoming invisible. When this invisible emanation rises above the lab, the sky instantly turns ruby red. Everyone awake within ten miles of the campus can see it; the morning becoming a cool red furnace, red all around them in two or three seconds. The light of the rising sun slows as it enters the field, bunching up against itself so that the sky becomes a tar pool of scarlet glare. Assiyeh watches as the smouldering light-ends bubble in vermillion jelly that slops viscously from the emitter and evaporates in a slowly-undulating invisible conical geyser. She wipes her smarting eyes and, glancing at the screen, sees where she’d typed the extra zero. After a quick look at the readings, and no further hesitation, Assiyeh adds another zero, and the red gush becomes a whorl of scarlet pollen that inverts itself around a plunging nautilus-shaped black radiation in space. Waves of heat billow from the generator and the other machinery, the air wriggles wildly and it’s difficult to tell what is an effect of heat distortion from what the light is doing. Streaked with sweat and the water running down from her sopping scalp, Assiyeh is doing all she can to magnify the effect. Her father’s ghost is trying to cool a generator by fanning it with his hands. The generator is starting to thump like an imbalanced washing machine.

  Another idea takes Assiyeh in midstride so she stops abruptly, slips on a puddle and falls to the floor with a splat. Instantly she scrabbles to her feet and makes the necessary adjustments. The black nautilus curves back to form a smoother, trombone-bell shape, and as the edges meet and blend, a sickening pale blue light falters through the red. Assiyeh climbs up onto a chair to watch. The light tube lifts itself, the blue and red turning blured, a new color on a parallel spectrum, while a scintillating or glistening black ball gathers plunging down into the center of the tube, plummeting without moving.

  The entire envelope of sunlight falling on the day side of the earth turns red, backing up the photons which bunch together under pressure, causing the sky to fluoresce blured planetwide.

  *

  Egyptian protests and careful Japanese demonstrations, a heavy tornado of violence gathers ominously over the US. Spain and Portugal are grinding to a stop; rightist coup seem imminent in Greece. Vague complaints from the American State Department, politicians and other media figures, and in the UN, about the public declaration of a time line for introducing the new currency—to be called not the Latino but the Bolivar, as it happens. This will disrupt the Pacific Trade Territory, won’t it? These complaints brushed casually aside by South American heads of state. Masses of people are camping out in Mexico City again. The remaining Professor Long wakes up sick in a tousled bed. The room is unfamiliar, but she has been in it for a long time. She feels queasy and hungry at once, and has a fierce need to urinate. There is a bathroom visible through a half-open door, and she staggers blindly into it. Sitting there, she takes in the plain, anonymous bathroom. There is still that faint incense smell. Her mouth tastes awful, as if she’d been sucking a lump of iron all night. She slurps water from the tap and washes her mouth out, then takes a long, desperate drink, feeling the cold aereated water pooling uncomfortably in her gut. Back to the bed. The room is still. She can hear the traffic yawn and sigh outside. Light comes in streaks through the venetian blinds and forms a rake on the white wall. She watches as it slides down the wall. A quivering sensation, faint, sick, and persistent, fills up her outline. It makes her breathe through her mouth and reject eating.

  Professor Budshah enters some time later. The rake of light is now half-bent against the floor.

  “Spend,” he says.

  “Lend,” she answers, after clearing her throat.

  He speaks to her for a while, asking a few innocuous questions.

  “Yesterday,” he says then, looking at her gravely, “I believe that you were drugged. A deliriant, obviously.”

  The word “yesterday” refuses to make sense. She is trying to remember life as a caterpillar. There isn’t enough space in that weird English word for the amount of experience it’s being called upon to hold.

  “You are now in an apartment owned by the University,” he says, evenly and slowly. “I brought you here yesterday. I told the panel that you had suddenly become violently ill and would not be able attend the hearing. They believed me—I think. In any case, they said they would reconvene at a later date, which they will determine in a few days’ time and communicate to you.”

  The remaining Professor Long has an abrupt vision of the woman at the conference table handing her a steaming and very strong cup of tea, and makes an incoherent sound of realization.

  Professor Budshah looks concerned and asks her if she’s all right. She nods.

  “That fucking tea. ... A woman gave me a cup of tea,” she says.

  “Who gave it you?”

  “I never saw her before. She had long white hair, and ...”

  Professor Budshah thinks for a moment.

  “Someone is plainly trying to discredit us,” he says. “You were to have been made a public spectacle, raving.”

  She nods.

  “Thank you,” she says feebly.

  He nods.

  “Ah,” he says. “Well.”

  His face doesn’t clear.

  “Something wrong? Still ...?”

  “I’m not certain,” he says. “I believe I am being watched. I assume I’m being watched. That’s why I decided to stay in this apartment, rather than at the campus as usual.”

  “... We should send the distress signal,” she says.

  “All right,” Professor Budshah says. He studies her face for a moment.

  “Are you up to it?”

  “I’m OK,” she says.

  They draw the circle on the bare f
loorboards with a bar of soap, kneel together inside the ring, both facing in the direction of the northern magnetic pole, chanting and performing a series of hand gestures. Their actions echo and respond to each other, instead of being identical for each. They rise to their feet and kneel back down, press their hands together and spread them apart, touch their heads, their chests, the floor, wave outlines in the air, chanting continuously, she in a low monotone and he in a high, clear, staccato. Footnotes molded into sunlight appear before them, and an asterisk opens between their eyes.

  The scene is a conference room, a vaulted stone chamber that some clue, too subtle to distinguish, indicates is deep underground. Naked economists leap and prance around a scaffold of giant crystals that have grown together to form a transparent, irregular column joining floor and ceiling. The economists dance with wild abandon, their breath pluming in the air, their flesh nearly rigid with cold. There are luminous golden things the size of young children hovering around the column like bees around a rose bush; humanoid silhouettes wrapped in radiant, floating gauze. Drummers, bagpipers, horn players, are clustered around natural docks formed by stalagmites and stalagmites. A potbellied economist flies in and out of view, pumping his arms and legs, awkwardly circling the central column, and from time to time some of the other economists also jump up aloft and start swimming through the air. Another group of economists in white robes, and wearing what look a little like flat-topped mitres, strides impressively across the chamber, and seem to direct the venerations of the others.

  Both Professor Budshah and the remaining Professor Long mentally fill out the distress form. The remaining Professor Long is starting to sweat and shiver with the effort, holding her breath and then letting it out in what sound like painful gasps.