“Pyrosomes,” Charlie said, waving a hand to the stern, where the cleared water churned with thousands of writhing, severed tubular shapes, like broken cups and lengths of spongy pipe, and a viscous, iridescent sheen. “Look upon my wake, ye mighty.”
“What are they?”
“Kids call them sea dildoes. Because, I mean, damn, look at the thing. It’s basically a plankton colony, they form these gel tubes and graze on smaller organisms. A floating city, consuming all. Anyway, we’re here.”
Charlie brought us in carefully through a denuded shallows to a dusty shoreline of glacial till and crushed oyster shell. Slabs of driftwood piled together where the tide had left them, tangled like dead Pompeian lovers, grey and immobile. A hatchwork of the fallen and drowned, abandoned to the sky. The cove itself was small, barely half a click in length. In the distance, against the light of the steadily warming sun, I saw a dark, ruffled shape worrying at something red pinned between the wood. I pointed to it as we beached the Zodiac.
“Is that what I think it is?”
Charlie nodded as she tied off the craft to a massive chunk of dead wood above the tide line. “Consider yourself lucky. Not many eagles left around here.”
The bird was at its breakfast, beak like a hook into the steaming flesh. I couldn’t tell what, exactly. In the mist, it could have been furred, or scaled, or something else entirely.
“I didn’t know there were still conservation efforts happening,” I said.
“Oh, there aren’t. Least not officially.” Charlie passed me a small pack. “The eagle makes it hard. Stupid bird.”
“Aren’t they a totem animal for...” I hesitated, unsure of how to proceed.
“For my people? Sure. Which is fine as far as that goes. But there’s the totem, and then there’s the animal itself. And that animal is stupid as they come.”
“Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your feed, Charlie. Explain?”
We sat on the log she’d tied off on to observe. Charlie pulled a small pair of binoculars from her pack and we passed them back and forth as she talked. “Okay, but I’m not making a documentary here. Agreed?”
“Sure.”
“Check out the talons,” she began. “Locking mechanism there. You’d think it would be the talon going into the meat that kills the prey but it’s the shock of impact that does it. Predator like that, that size and weight, dropping down from the sky like a missile? Nothing survives a hit like that. The talons digging in are an afterthought, but! They lock on impact, and only unlock once the eagle has something firm to press against, pry them open again.
“Which is fine, so long as its famously keen eyes aren’t too big for its stomach, and that happens a lot more than people know. It’s gotta eat, it’s got chicks three hundred feet up in a cedar somewhere, of course it’s going to take a risk now and again, but the cost is high if they misjudge. Like, let’s say it spots a salmon from on high and seconds later those talons are in and locked and shit, that fish is bigger than it thought. Heavier. And the dumb bird can’t lift off again. Ever seen an eagle swimming?”
“This is the first eagle I’ve ever seen.”
“And probably your last, sorry to tell you. Well, it’s pathetic. And I’ve seen more swimming eagles than I’d like, plowing away at the water with their wings, some massive coho or spring shining in the depths beneath, dragging it down. They usually drown. Get pulled up in nets all the time.”
“Damn.”
“Don’t even get me started on the way eagles fuck, man. It’s messed up. Seriously stupid bird.”
“Okay, I won’t.” She gave me a wry look. “Don’t get me wrong, I want to ask now. Like, desperately. But...”
“Course of wisdom,” she said as she took back the binoculars. “Speaking of which, let’s hike. The elders await.”
The fog had turned bright in the sun. There’d be no penetration, no stray beams piercing through the grey, but the light was strong enough to give the atmosphere a kind of lambent, internal glow. The sketch of a trail Charlie led me down pulsed with the overhead light. Salal bushes shook anxious green leaves at our shoulders as we passed and everywhere the jaundiced spruce trees swayed, creaking solemnly, though there was no wind to move them. Or at least, no wind that I could perceive. Needles scratched on needles, audible even over my laboured breath. The ancient wood groaned, sighed, hissed. It was like listening to someone talk in their sleep, in a language not your own. Which I suppose it was, after a fashion.
The trail inland wasn’t steep, but I suffered from a lifetime of conditioning by flat, manicured surfaces. Roots rose up through layers of black muck to engage my feet in interesting ways. I swore a few times, and came close to falling more than that. Charlie chuckled.
“If I tell you there used to be a boardwalk here, will you hate me?” she said after a particularly ugly piece of trail. Mud to just below the knees. Weekends in the Sierra Madre had not prepared me for the savage mistforest.
“Oh, I started hating you long before now.”
“The elders had it dismantled. Discourages tourism.”
“As I’m finding out, yeah.”
“Not much further.”
The old village was, of course, much further. It was long past noon when we arrived at the site. Charlie had to announce it when we did; the place had been given over to the forest to a degree that anyone else would have missed it and walked on through.
We’d entered what might have been a clearing in the past, but new growth was in the process of obscuring all sign that humans had ever lived here. There was the suggestion of a massive wall, still erect, deeper in the trees, and I pointed to this.
“Longhouse,” Charlie said, then raised a hand and swept it in a circle around us, listing off other structures as she passed them, each of them nearly indistinguishable from the moss that covered everything. “Smokehouse. Carving house. I don’t know what that one was. It’s pretty much all post and beam construction.”
“It’s all gone. Gone or going.” I was feeling a kind of shock. “I don’t know what I expected. More than this?”
“This,” she countered, “is what you get when you build with the same stuff that’s around you. Camouflage, then assimilation. You wouldn’t see a lot of this south. Well, maybe not.”
“Give it time.”
“Sure.” Charlie paused, ran a hand across a thick slab of moss that coated a longhouse plank. “Alternatively, it might have already happened in your neck but then how could you tell? Right. I mean if it was perfect.”
“The camouflage, you mean.”
“Sure.”
“But that only happens in the natural world.”
She gave me a long sideways look that I had trouble interpreting. I thought of the fox taking a dump in the Numpty up north, oblivious to the phenomenon. I thought of the almost scathing transparency of my home life, the social universe. TFW you in the noönet. I shook myself, fighting off a chill.
“Are the totems around here?”
Charlie smiled. “Very close indeed. You ready?”
I nodded and she plunged ahead of me into the green. The leaves parted like water for her and I was hard pressed to stay at her back. No trail beneath my feet was paradoxically easier than trail, as the churned mud disappeared and roots were well covered, but of course I couldn’t actually see where I was going, so my progress evened out: I was still slow, and had to call out for her to wait several times. Before long, though, the brush thinned out, and we found ourselves in another clearing.
I’d seen pictures. Anthropological museum-quality pieces on display in Los Angeles and Seattle. Modern work, too, mostly virtual. None of which could have possibly prepared me for the strangeness of the literal originals in this environment.
Charlie stepped forward into the space. Her movements were casual yet reverential somehow, too. She’d place a hand on the weathered smooth face of a carving, and her fingers would crook just a little, cupping the wood or something in the wo
od before flattening, bringing her warm palm to the surface. When she moved away, she’d let the hand linger behind for half a second, the fingers brushing the fibres in retreat.
“It’s funny. I don’t get the feeling that I’m looking at masks with these, y’know?”
“Yeah?”
“More like I’m seeing things with the skin off. Clearly. Probably because these were made through removal. Nothing added on to a base, right. The wood was cleared away and here’s this being underneath. There’s an x-ray quality to the work here.”
“You sound like a gallery owner. Museum curator.”
“I guess I could own that,” I said. “Were we in a museum.”
Charlie laughed at that, tossed her hair over a shoulder and crossed her arms. “What makes you think we’re not?”
“I don’t follow.”
“All the authentic stuff was moved. Like, decades ago. The early ocean risings verged on cataclysmic. No one knew how high the tideline was going to get, or when, and when they did rise what predictions we had were way off. The elders made the call, and any artifacts still extant on the islands were packed up and shipped off to grace the hollow halls of what’s left of academia. Vancouver. Toronto. Seattle and London.”
I looked around me, at the decaying longhouse walls, the weathered poles, all of it merging like mist with the trees and bracken in their deciduous tangle of rot and new growth. Literal originals, I’d been thinking only a few minutes before.
“Well, shit. What is this place, then?”
“An art installation. A museum.” Charlie gave me an appraising look, her eyes growing wider. “You mean to tell me you can’t tell the difference between real wood and the artificial stuff?”
“You’re kidding.” I stepped up to the pole she’d been touching, placed the flat of my palm against the soft, rough surface. The fibres were warm to the touch, heated by the sun. A wet smell of moss and insect husks, of time and process, was in the air. I pressed my hand into the pole, felt the wood give and grip at my fingers simultaneously. If this was fake, it was incredible, and I said as much.
“There’s a decent print foundry back in town,” she said. “Second largest on the coast. Does most of the printing around here for construction and solar and so on. The industrial stuff. The elder council had the originals scanned and these were made, installed.”
“Fake wood.”
“Polymer resin. With a nanomesh coating for repair, and to simulate weathering, odour, texture. Here, watch this...” Charlie removed a multitool from a jacket pocket, pulled out the knife blade. “I can take a decent chunk out of it, even. There.” She gouged at a thick, crescent-shaped eyebrow belonging to one of the creatures on the pole, then handed me the piece of imitation wood. It felt heavy and cool in my hand. “We could come back in a week and never know there’d been any damage done. These things will last forever here, looking exactly as they do now.”
“I know this isn’t my culture, Charlie,” I started, then stopped, unsure of how to proceed. The realization that I didn’t know what I was looking at, that I was losing something in translation, was hitting me hard. “I don’t know. You approached that pole just now with such reverence. And then the knife? Can the sacred be artificial? Are you, like, okay doing that?”
Charlie screwed up her nose and sniffed, narrowed her eyes at me. “What do you know about the sacred, anyway. You think these were ever sacred?”
“I guess?”
“They’re just representations, Den. They’re not the thing in and of itself.” She kicked at the pole with a knobby boot, left an impression there. “Shit. What is? That’s not Wolf I just kicked in the shins. That’s not Raven up top there. Wood or polymer, makes no difference. Only nothing is sacred, I’ve heard.”
Something about her wording irritated me, then. I know what it is now, but at the time I was too flustered by her behaviour to figure it out. She saw my distress and came over to where I was standing, fidgeting. Charlie brought her hands to my shoulders, gripped and pressed there, made brushing motions downward.
“Calm yourself, man,” she laughed. “Yikes. You’ve got a conservative streak, don’t you?”
“Yeah, a bit,” I admitted.
“Look, don’t get yourself worked up too much. Way I figure it, the originals were no more special than these copies. It’s all just a way to approach something that’s felt on another level, you know? The carvings, the dances, the ritual. We work with what we have, hoping to replicate what we feel as closely as possible.”
“What do you feel?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Are you and Wolf here close? Any special fondness for Raven or...who’s that one, there, with the tongue?”
“Frog. And no. I don’t feel much of anything for these stories. Once, maybe? When I was small and my náan would tell me the old stories. But I think that’s everybody. It’s the culture. Making up stories about the world is what we do. You don’t analyze it too much.”
“I guess.”
“I mean, you could analyze it? But that’s for someone else to do. It’s not my job. It’s not relevant.”
It was possibly relevant to me, I realized then. If my gig with New Heretic had an official job description, that might have been part of it. Analysis, but as entertainment. A wind was picking up, hot and dry, but I couldn’t shake a chill that had settled in along my spine. Was I making the classic error of approaching Charlie and her culture through a benign but essentially racist lens? Was I harbouring some unconscious and long outmoded idea of the Noble Savage, physically and spiritually enfolded with her environment? Charlie Mack was a linguist, an archivist, an explorer pushing into a possible future where her people’s language was intact and healthy, growing. It was work, and hard work, too. She didn’t necessarily need to reverence the past to honour it. I hadn’t realized it, but I’d placed the palm of my hand on the pole, on the broad cheek of the Frog carving.
“Aww, Den.” Charlie was looking at me with something like compassion. “Relax. It’s not your problem.”
“Right.” A spear of sunlight split the weakening fog and gleamed for a moment on the fake totem pole. I took my hand away. A splinter came with it and I scratched at the spot where it hung, lightly, from the skin. “Thanks for bringing me here, Charlie.”
“Yeah? You’re welcome, man. Hope it hasn’t been too disappointing.”
“It is what it is? I guess.”
Charlie stooped to pick up her backpack, swung it over her shoulders in a single, casual motion. “Let’s head back to the longhouse clearing. We can access the recall party there, if you still want to.”
“Sure, but why not here?”
“With these guys looking over our shoulders the whole time? No, thanks.”
“You are a mass of contradictions.”
“Yessir!” She pulled out two finger guns and blasted me. “It’s cultural.” Then she laughed and for the first time since we’d met, Charlie Mack sounded tired. “Come on.”
I followed her back to the structure, leaning into the forest in its deliberate state of inauthentic collapse. It would stay this way always, poised between a functionality it never had and a uselessness that would never arrive. The thought of sitting beneath the damp planks of its 3D-printed roof to commune with the Xaayda-Kil elders made me nervous. Everything in the glade wielded a knife-edge feeling of dislocation, each leaf and stone subtly off and out of true, threatening.
Charlie knelt and rummaged around in her backpack. “You hungry? I brought snacks.” I accepted a bottle of water and a stack of kelp chips wrapped in a thin square of beeswax. Charlie emptied a tube of cashews into her mouth, clapped her hands and settled in. “There’s not much in there, to start. These náans like to keep it simple. Coffee and a chat, basically. Ready?”
I sat down in the moss and tangled grasses, suddenly looking forward to getting back into the noönet. “The dust in the corner and the heavenly firmament? Yeah. After you.”
“Wher
e’s that from?” she asked. I thought about it and with a mild struggle realized I didn’t know. Only that it was something someone had said about the deceptively casual talk of old women in the kitchen. Whether it was something my own mother had said, or an off-hand remark by someone at the crèche, or a phrase I’d absorbed from time in the noönet, I couldn’t recall.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “Could be anything. It’s cultural.”
“Well, I like it,” she laughed. “Come on in...”
Charlie had not been kidding. The chatroom features were as bare bones as they come, and the overlay on the environment of the longhouse itself was minimal. Were it not for the soft glow of the personal tags over their left shoulders, I could have fooled myself into thinking the two Xaayda-Kil grandmothers and the young white man were right there with us. We sat down, forming the fourth and fifth points in a rough circle on the ground. Charlie greeted them all in English.
“This is Den Secord. Den, Thelma Kessler, and Justice Ruth. And this is Ray Trace, with the Applied Memetics Lab out of the East Anglia Archipelago.”
“You’re a bit out of your area, Ray.”
“Am I? Charlie’s been doing interesting work and we like to keep tabs on development as it happens. We’ve started modelling some of the Archipelago spaces after it, actually. I log in regularly. Adore the space here, me. Find it relaxing. Connecting.” Either his feed was weak, or Trace was a mumbler, because his voice seemed to float away from his projection and cluster up in the corners of the longhouse. He wasn’t especially interested in what I was there for, so I didn’t press for more. Trace and people like him were everywhere, after all, scouring the meme shoals for that certified fresh.
The two grandmothers were nodding, almost imperceptibly. Thelma, the obviously older of the two, spoke to the room, but in Xaayda-Kil. Soft syllables like a slow tide pulling away from the shore, sound issuing from the back of the throat, her lips barely moving. Charlie answered the same way, then turned to me.
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