Animal Money

by Michael Cisco

  She’s sitting beside me, the car wind in her hair, maybe listening.

  There are so many moments when I feel the profundity of life becoming visible. My eyes open in the depths of life without trying to, as if they were under a spell. I go a little way along in the vision and then, I can’t help it, I can’t hold on to the profundity—I have to clown around, make faces, talk in funny voices. Why am I never closer to clowning than when I am thinking my most serious thoughts? It’s like pity or fear or pain or something forces me to ruin everything, and I duck the responsibility that beauty and meaning lay on me. It’s more than being afraid of failing to live up to something, it’s fear of the call, a cry so loud it can reach all the way to here, reach you, anywhere. See why they call me what they call me? But am I wrong when I tell you what you get for all your suffering is a life?

  There are no signs out here, but there are these whatchacall jests, indications, like more and more graffiti on the rocks, and shoes with the laces tied together thrown up into trees, and litter all over the desert. Now I can see where the shoreline rocks open out, and there’s a yellow haze in the air despite the ocean breeze; it’s way up there, but that has to be Etsimen. I point it out to Carolina, and she nods without turning her eyes to me, methodically dosing herself. A lone streetlight shines down on sawhorses and barrels, where the highway begins. The paved road plunges beneath our car with a crash.

  *

  VOICE: You are not explaining how you—

  I’m getting to it! It all has to do with that color change she produced in the atmosphere with her experiment. Eighty years after the Color Shift, rice will grow in the Sahara, the midwestern United States will produce nothing but sorghum, naturally unaffected by blured light. Cattle will shrink to the size of calves and sheep will develop long legs and necks, turning into fleecy little giraffes. The oceans will be choked with radioactive blured plankton that produce unaccountable mutations in sea life, so that the flesh of most fish and marine mammals is neurotoxic, instantly fatal to humans; edible coral, however, will sprout thickly in the mountains, and a nutritious clay will appear, mounding up in the froth that gathers along crumbling seaboards. The population will flee inland from encroaching armies of marauding, omnivorous, amphibious blobs of slime from the bottom of the sea, who will eat anything organic except that nutritious, acrid clay. Sunset and sunrise will become pyrotechnic displays of fulminating kaleidoscopic effects, like the title cards of a psychedelic movie. The stars at night will be magnified, dappling the ground with multicolored rays. The moon will seem to adopt an endless variety of irregular shapes and colors. Semi-invisible, intermittently phosphorescent living things, ranging in size from the nearly imperceptible to elephantine proportions, will coalesce out of windborne protoplasm and float weightlessly through the air, contaminating every unfortunate human they touch with degenerative brain diseases. Whole treasuries will vanish in futile attempts to reverse the experiment’s effects. A Congolese resonator will manage to reverse the shift by 49%, but the effects will not last. After a few weeks, the skies will once again be electric blue, and the natural colors of the earth fluoresce with saturated intensity.

  Assiyeh will disappear shortly after the success of her experiment. Observers in the know will gradually come to the realization that Assiyeh is still at large, and not in secret custody somewhere, but no one seems to be able to trace her. What will she be doing all this time? As she grows older and older, she will pursue experiments intended to decelerate or reverse aging, returning to the abandoned line of inquiry she had pursued when trying to prolong the lives of her parents. There will be injections and operations carried out by machines, gland replacements and so on, a special diet, long fasting. She will nearly kill herself with a year and a half of chronic mumps and hiccups that will end only after a therapeutic induced coma, a period of quasi-vampirism during which she will be compelled to consume human milk, an episode of gigantism that will take months to fix. Eventually, she will be transformed into a teenager again. Volatility and foolishness, and on the other hand, additional time, new energy, and an entirely unforeseeable appearance. Fortunately, the antlers will drop off about a week after the experiment, making an odd surgery unnecessary.

  Assiyeh will make the international villain list because the Color Shift, in addition to giving a weird luster and exaggerated hue to daylight and everything it shone on, will transform the characteristics of that light, making it possible to store light cheaply and easily. Stored light will revolutionize technology and economic activity, drastically reduce the cost of energy, and lead to new forms of energy production. Over the course of decades—and it will take as long as that, mainly due to the resistance of the well-heeled—conventional money will be superseded by light money, pieces of blured sunlight in glass chips. When an empty chip is exposed to a radiant one, the empty chip will acquire equivalent radiance, so transactions will involve simply putting chips together. All devices will operate on chip power; the larger the device, the larger the chip it will take to run it, meaning all large devices will be run on big community chips, the largest of which are like the rai stones of the Micronesians. Blured light does not reflect; rather it produces more of itself on contact. The development of photic money will be hampered by brutal violence and disgusting propaganda, but its spread will prove too expensive and hazardous to contain. The photic system will be especially successful in the exploration of space and the generation of science fiction conditions, or SFC. It might be imagined that Assiyeh would be celebrated as the Messiah of this new “photic world,” but, as a target for the stagnating rage of the Misled, she will be excoriated as a witch and a criminal and a terrorist-sociopath and a pitiful megalomaniac.

  Assiyeh will not give up the freedom to make mistakes, freedom from adulation. Under the names of rival scientists and other naysayers, she will publish papers on photic behaviorism that mark the birth of a whole new branch of physics, made possible by the empirical opportunities brought about by the Color Shift. She will enjoy the spectacle of authorities squirming; people who will have done nothing but attack her ideas suddenly feted as converts and geniuses by wings of the scientific community for which they will have had nothing but finger-flicking disdain, swamped with letters of praise and congratulations on their wise recantation of former anti-photism, their thoroughgoing understanding of the science, their courage, their insight. It will be fun to see how many will play along, accept the offered positions, the grants, the speaking engagements.

  Enough about this Assiyeh person. You are going to give us, right now, the names of all your associates in the organization conspiracy.

  Assiyeh looks O’W in the eye and grins.

  “Are you feeling better now?” she asks pertly, and is slapped. O’W slaps her. Assiyeh looks her in the eye again right away, eyes brighten through touseled hair, still smiling.

  “Let’s go,” O’W says, her voice tense. “In.”

  Assiyeh doesn’t move. She is looking intently at O’W with a curious smile, and no sign of hostility.

  “Get in I said!” O’W shouts, raising her hand.

  Assiyeh does not respond; just the little smile, the alert watchfulness. Then she gracefully draws her knees and ankles up together, as if she were a snake or mermaid drawing her tail in, and pivots to face forward in the passenger seat of O’W’s supercar. O’W slams the door and stalks around to the front, gets in and tells the car to go home. The she swivels her seat around to face Assiyeh; glaring at her for a long moment.

  “I finally got you.”

  The words slip out, and she regrets them. She should sit there like a block of ice, as if she were alone, negating Assiyeh absolutely. Sharing this moment of vainglory, she has already humanized herself too much, and brought her too close to Assiyeh’s captive level. Assiyeh keeps her poise even cuffed in the back seat, still smiling. She wants to tell her to wipe that smile off, but manages to avoid that blunder, at least. There is something about this catch that feels off; she do
esn’t believe in it quite yet. She has her captive, but she’s not in the system and there are no witnesses. Only when the car has reeled them both in, will she feel satisfied.

  “Finally,” Assiyeh says.

  Her steady gaze is making O’W want to turn and face forward, but she should keep her in sight at all times. O’W artificially relaxes her face. She returns Assiyeh’s impertinent gaze stonily. A blood thread trickles from Assiyeh’s left nostril. It descends, stops, shifts direction, and descends again, making its way, like a new rivulet across parched ground, toward the corner of the smile, as the city streets flash by behind the face.

  The right half of that face gives that smile a violent tug and the features melt and twist. The head sinks and the bound hands cross and press to the chest as the knees come up. Assiyeh moans and lists toward the middle of the car. O’W stares at her, refusing to react. A blood cord drops straight from Assiyeh’s nose and lands with a hollow dribble on the seat. The car fills with the blood smell. The car rounds a corner and a liquid rake of blood reaches across the upholstery.

  “You’re not fooling me,” O’W says levelly.

  Assiyeh groans, hanging from her shoulderbelt. Her hands are grey. Tremors race up and down her body, she is shivering violently. Hoarse, bestial noises burst from her through chattering teeth. She’s beginning to choke; she coughs and gags, struggling for breath.

  “Go ahead and die you fucking shammer!” O’W snaps.

  Assiyeh chokes and gasps. She has curled up in the seat. The strap has slipped up around her throat.

  “God damn you!” O’W says furiously.

  She stops the car, gets out, opens Assiyeh’s door and seizes her in one fluid motion, props Assiyeh back into her seat, slaps her, grabs her throat and squeezes it.

  “You throw another one of those my dear and I’ll kill you!” O’W snarls, her face vicious, suddenly ugly.

  Everyone at the station crowds into the observation room to gawk at the great Assiyeh Melachalos, who sits at the table looking absurdly small, unimportant and defenseless. The blood has been imperfectly wiped away, leaving a few smears on her face.

  “What—you hit her?!”

  “No no ... Nosebleed,” O’W says.

  Now the sense of accomplishment blooms at last. History’s greatest criminal against property, right there on the other side of that glass. Congratulations from the chief, the district administration, and on up and up. She’s asked for quotes and told not to say anything, hold the story for sale, write a book.

  Maybe I should let her go and catch her again, she jokes, but there’s a spectral unease lurking behind that joke.

  Processing delays force them to wait a few days to begin interrogating the prisoner. They want all sorts of foolproof extra security, none of which is quite ready yet or yet or even yet. O’W is awarded the first crack at her. She meets Assiyeh in one of the interrogation cubicles at the Human Resources Optimal Data Facilitation Unit. O’W comes in all business, without a word. Assiyeh sits there already, naked, washed out, her face lined, her body slumped.

  “You are Assiyeh Melachalos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Also known as Assiyeh Nemekeseyah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Also known as Christine Minuit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You hold a PhD. in physics from ETH Zurich?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were responsible for the Color Shift?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father was Dr. Marco Chapu?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother was Dr. Paricheher Katsaros?”

  “Yes.”

  “You alone were responsible for the Color Shift?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are currently eighty-four years old?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is it that you look so much younger?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you cause the Color Shift?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you cause the Color Shift?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you the CEO of Narthex International Laboratories?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you knowingly defraud the United Properties Association of monies allocated to research and develop technologies to reverse the effects of the Color Shift?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever engaged in homosexual activities?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you be guilty of drugging and incapacitating a police officer in the Hotel Escudo in Lisbon, Portugal, five years from now, on August 15, 2084?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you then take that police officer’s uniform, and use it to impersonate that officer, in order to evade arrest on that date?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you sexually molest an Indian police detective on April 12, 2085, in Delhi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you be responsible for the extraction of the sword known as Durendal from the walls of Rocamadour?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the removal of that sword from that location?”

  “Yes.”

  “With the full awareness that it was a national treasure belonging to United Franconia Properties?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you willfully contaminate the water supply of the city of Osaka, Japan with depilatives, aphrodisiacs, and hallucinogens, on July 8th, 2085?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you illegally rejuvenated yourself, employing forbidden technology?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you responsible for the development of photic money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you refused to sell rights and application information about slowing technologies developed by you to all interested United Properties?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has your persistent stare during this examination begun to exert hyp- hyp- hyp-notic influence over me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you already exerted a similar influence over the detectives observing this interrogation through the two way mirror behind me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they paralyzed and unable to move, riveted in place by your hypnotic influence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I likewise increasingly falling under your direct control?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I now entirely at your command?”

  “Yes.”

  Assiyeh rises from her seat and holds out her handcuffs for O’W to unlock. O’W strips naked and lies on the table. Looking considerably fresher than she had a moment before, Assiyeh puts on O’W’s clothes and leaves the room.

  VOICE: And how, exactly, are photic money and animal money related? And for what organization does this O’W work?

  Well, you see, Assiyeh has been saving a faked death for just such an occasion. She—

  VOICE: Answer the question.

  She therefore clones herself as a corpse, complete with specially designed fatal injuries and autopsy signs and manages to substitute it for the cadaver of a property criminal of about her own age and appearance and finding a look-alike isn’t all that difficult considering the vast number of dead property criminals generated every day and interrogation casualties and those who ran afoul of automated killing manifolds and population subtractors and property security agents and you see these dead property criminals are disposed of in pseudo-secrecy because while they are criminals their deaths are not media approved and hence they are not supposed to be dead so rather than deal with the expense of discounting death claims substantiated with the actual remains of the deceased which are now harder than ever to destroy down to the last trace thanks to improvements in DNA detection and identification Gold Star Global Security Services dumps the corpses in space and the night sky is filled with the momentary flashes and streaks of re-entering dead property criminals and children may unwittingly wish for the return of a vanished parent or sibling on the incinera
ting corpse of that very person as it re-enters the atmosphere so of course this practice does not fail to arouse protest and there is a report from Environmental Extracts Incorporated that proves that the productive capacity of the earth is being reduced as the constituent elements of all those corpses are lost to outer space or vaporized in the atmosphere so as an alternative it is proposed that the bodies be thoroughly and enzymatically mulched to conserve precious life compounds but while the report is supposed to be secret it is not difficult to get a copy and it turns out to be an open secret like all secrets the kind you mainly keep from yourself and Assiyeh is relieved to see this mulching has gone nowhere officially because it’s harder to survive ...

  VOICE: Are you going to answer the question?

  I am answering see once she has her cadaver slated for dumping in space Assiyeh will surreptitiously take its place and be dumped in space instead whereupon her father the ghost since he can materialize at will within certain limits determined possibly by the fundamental nature of ghosts or perhaps they are simply reflections of his own personal shortcomings and it still took years of practice for him to be able to manifest himself in outer space and home in on specific objects floating in space although he never managed to get farther out than earth orbit so the plan is he will manifest himself on the nearest convenient numerous navigable semi-automated spacecraft that flit to and fro like little fish in a sargasso sea of high velocity space trash and great spreading schools of dead property criminals and then once aboard he will tamper with its orbital position signal so that no one on the ground will realize short of actually looking that the vessel is not behaving normally so he can pilot this spacecraft which can be operated manually or by computer as desired and go retrieve Assiyeh’s body so he can revive her if life support is available on the craft he happens to find but either way they will begin looking for the most convenient and ready of the various possible ways to get to the Moon since the Moon is neutral territory where earth administrators meet with representatives of other non-terrestrial civilizations primarily the other human or originally human ones and there are numerous support personnel on permanent assignment there as well as holdovers from an earlier settlement period and those who have managed by hook or by crook to get there on their own mainly with Uhuyjhn assistance—