TELL ME ALL YOU WISH TO TELL ME
As the cycle opens, Mic, attentive to her in what could be called a “human” way, sees Quiver awaken with a burden of sadness. He approaches her thoughtfully, asks “May I orbit you, Quiv? Just for a moment?”
Knowing this is the very thing he likes to do when feeling “close” to her, she nods. Around and around he goes, until coming to a full stop and taking care not to crowd her, he says, “Please, Quiv. Tell me all that you wish to tell me. Tell me everything you wish to share with me at this current quik in time. Tell me about the things I have not witnessed. Tell me something that is not on my Swift Wheel.”
“Ah, Mic,” Quiver sighs, caressing the top of what stands in for his head, “I woke up remembering something that happened Elsewhere after we had been established long enough for several generations of envelope children to have reached adolescence. At that time the atmosphere was stable—an extraordinary achievement. The air—identical to First World’s when it maintained galaxies of creatures interwoven. Now this seems unimaginable!”
“I can imagine it!” Mic spouts. “For I have seen the penguins in their multitudes and always dressed for the Oscars! The gorgeous megalithic cities of the termites— that immeasurable brain! The fox running with her young, the moat rats circumventing the Louvre in Paris in the light of the Moon! These have I seen on my Swift Wheel and more! The whole of Nature, those perishable shapes, the clouds alive with birds—”
“Yes,” Quiver sighs. Is silent.
“Please continue, Quiv!” Mic says apologetically. “I just get so excited!”
“The Department of Biotechnology and Deep Memory had been recurring lovely little insects named butterflies—”
“Yes! Yes! I have seen them! On my Swift Wheel! Upgleaming! I have seen them gestating—as you did, Quiv! Awakening from their heavy slumber with sudden wings! Unfolding like blossoms. Vibrating, Quiv, as they tasted the air for the first time! Aroused! Just as all the creatures— the parrot breaking from its shell, the wolf spilling from its womb—awoke aroused! So I have seen them kindled by the sun’s sweet fire. They are wet as they break free, and they quiver! Come to think of it, Quiv—this must be why they named you as they did! Quiver! Why are you crying?”
“I, too, have seen them, and often, in the Lights. But the Lights are no longer what they were. Everything has been reimagined—”
“I know! All the creatures are chibi! But—you were telling a story, Quiv, and I broke in, I forked up unbelievably and I am so sorry! How can you put up with me?”
Quiver barely hears this outburst, recalling all that had happened. “We were informed that a surprise Rekindling was to take place in the public square. Everything had been prepared in secrecy, and we did not know what to expect. There was music, an orchestra playing an updated version of one of Phys Chem’s groundbreaking hits.”
“Longitudinal List?”
Quiver ignores him, continues: “The butterflies were released in their many thousands, rivers of them, white and gold and green. The children had no idea what they were seeing. Overcome with terror they shouted out and, in their attempts to flee, struck out at one another. Some fell and were trampled. And some seized rocks and hurled them at the sky.”
SAILING FASTER
Sailing faster than light (yet in their Bubble they can still see the light!) and seemingly motionless, looking up into the eye of the Plonk Sidereal Atlas in silence, they sit back as in all directions bright things in the throes of darkest night, things made of shadow and light, things having succumbed to shadow, having resurged from seas of helium ashes, from forests of kinetic misfortune, having survived mournful wastelands of formaldehyde, perished in inclement estuaries of psychoactive salts, slide past. Something very like an errant brass doorknob rips through their Wobble faceside to backside too quickly to be detected. Briefly they are detained in an ocean of snaggletoothed string that, undulating, causes the fabric of space to billow, to rise to dizzying heights, to fold over them, tuck them in—so that they are snug and unaware of everything that transpires around them. In this way they proceed in safety, withstanding a shower of iron boulders each the size of a moon; make their way unscathed through galaxies that contain nothing but the highly abrasive cinders of stars; are oblivious to an attack of rockets the size of needles and as deadly as the stings of radioactive hornets; escape the embrace of a singularity circumvented by neon canisters; surf an ocean of diamonds served up with crushed ice; awaken on a helium porch studded with the frass of dead meteors to witness an electric storm so monumental its flashes of lightning illuminate an ongoing future moment. Yet, their curiosity was never quenched, even if they were both haunted by their origins, one the issue of an envelope and one made (yet, as was Quiver, of matter) on a palpable moon that if now gone, once mattered in the scheme of things.
LUCK
It begins to rain. Everything glistens, looks sticky. She runs the secondary loops. The redhead is nowhere to be seen. This running that gets her nowhere exasperates her.
She asks questions she has never asked. Is the redhead a virtual version of a real woman? An actress? Is she somehow iconic, animating virtual spaces throughout the galaxies, running with countless others? Is she an avatar of a player whose purpose is to disseminate confusion? Are their encounters the spin-off of a program intended to torment her? Or could they be the outcome of chance? Could they be—as she had imagined—lucky? Does this word—lucky— have a place in the Lights? Are their encounters random? Are they synchronized in ways that remain mysterious?
What does Quiver know of such encounters? Of hazard and luck? Once, wandering the hallways on the Moon, she ran into a cat. She called to it, spoke to it softly. She got down on her knees. The cat ran to her and rubbed against her, its little cries awakening something new within her. It rolled on its back as soon as she began to caress it, rocking from side to side, its feet in the air. Overcome with an exquisite feeling of torpor, she stroked its belly, and when she made to caress its neck, it gently took her finger between its teeth, gazing into her eyes and purring all the while. Now running in the illusion of rain and thinking back on this, she wonders again what it might have been like to live among the creatures. Mic’s Swift Wheel hints at a wealth of something essential that continues to elude her. The only first-hand evidence she has of the vanished world—aside from the book, the cat, and a smattering of meaningless things— has been crushed and melted.
There was a cigar-shaped asteroid that they had visited briefly, comprising the highly compressed remains of a mall devoted to horse gear, pets, sex bots, and a hardware. Before Burnout, sex bots, Mic explained, had replaced people in brothels and any number of things—marriages, offices, the army, sports teams. If you married one, it came with its own “ambiance,” music, and furniture. Many of these quickly became irrelevant, replaced by the Lights.
The cigar-shaped asteroid was a glassy granola studded with birdcages, cat trees, seed balls, sex bots, positioning cuffs, shock absorbers, restraints, bind cages, bondage bars, hot glue sticks, flexisnakes, and waterboards.
But the Swift Wheel. It revealed so much more. It implied something that had no name, yet mattered very much. Something that had everything to do with the tangible density of the incomprehensible. And yet, as precious as it was, the Swift Wheel was also reductive, was impoverished. All it offered was a way of knowing from afar. In its own way it was something like a mass of compressed objects in the shape of a cigar.
To comprehend Mic’s gigantic album of everything, to comprehend the Lights, it would take a lover. It would take a lover, Quiver thinks, to wander the city streets, the evening streets, the autumn paths, the summer gardens, the rubble of war—to understand them. And to ask the questions such as: In the streets, were the people safe among themselves? Did the streets ring out with laughter? Just what was it like to sit beneath the sky in a little green boat on a lake? Did the birds fly over the oceans? The mountains? The deserts? The seas? And what of luck? Is this
how people found one another? Because they were lucky?
THE BRIGHTER ERG COMPACTION
Feeling somewhat giddy, they penetrate the lesser-known ring of the Brighter Erg Compaction, where once the great Rimsy Grimes had vanished after a series of manic and incomprehensible bleats. The ring sparkled around them, causing a special mood. Mic, buoyant, entertained Quiver with a cascade of vanishing acts—now indistinguishable from Food Face, the overhead lumens, her hamok, the Lesser Thrusting Underbottom Retriever, its blocked girdle, Redding’s Afterthought, the forking Corner Cabinet, the Forward Brunt, Underwood’s Underhammer and Residue, the Babelocity Decipherment Coil. So taken up are they in this game they neglect Oversight Outlook and are surprised to see a swarm of bots the size of sublunar bees collecting what Quiver recognizes at once as Irradiated Radical Trilibitium that has pearled and adhered to the Plonk Sidereal Atlas Space Eye in quantity. The bots fill their scooter barrels so speedily that the Trilibitium is at once overtaken by the tiny bots in their trillions. The spectacle is mesmerizing. When prodded, Mic leaps into service, scrambling to the Zephyr Equipment Grid, scooping up the coupled disorganizer hose system, and vaporizing the bots with Wingbat’s Solvent, which—as the bots tumble into an accelerated backdraft—triggers the Dome Sucker. In under a quik, the hold is packed with neat bricks of precious Irradiated Radical Trilibitium and a scattering of the equally precious but lesser known Permeable Zinc Blasterite!
To celebrate, Quiver waxes Mic’s dexter tinplate—a thing not easy to do, but for which he is grateful. He, in return, and after much thought, and having meticulously explored each and every food vent and reflected upon the egg floss and brines, and in the guise of a beautiful geisha— the notorious Hell—serves Quiver a supper of what he assures her is yellowtail sashimi and a steaming bowl of udon noodles with fish cake. At first she is frightened of the noodles, having never seen them before. But when Mic lifts the chopsticks to her mouth and delicately places a noodle on her tongue, a noodle fragrant and slippery, sopping with a rich reconstructed seaweed broth, she sighs with pleasure. She thinks the redhead is like a delicious udon noodle—a savant coupling of atomic particles and inspired dreaming.
That night she will sleep like a child, will awaken to the sound of a cock crowing (Emu Park neighbors a small private farm), which stirs something very like a memory of a time when the lost world was awakened by its avian tribes—the cocks, the crows, the magpies’ inscrutable complaints, the symphonic songbirds speaking righteousness directly to the human heart.
(It was the cock’s crow that long ago had startled the infant Julio Cortázar in his crib, who—even before he had the words to say it—intuited an emblematic twinning between the cry of the cock and mortality. Upon hearing the crowing of the cock he recognized with a shudder his inevitable isolation and finitude, that he was his very own strange stranger—and growing stranger by the minute!)
QUIVER’S LONGING (AM LOCUS)
Gracefully folded into her hamok, Quiver says: “Mic. I am overcome with longing. I am longing for a sky that never stops moving. I am longing for cumulus clouds; I am longing for a buttermilk sky.
“I am longing for a clamor of children. Lamplight in a cabin by a river on a fall evening. To pick oranges from a tree. I am longing to see a freshly laid egg. A river of fresh water enter a salty ocean. The animals of Africa. Above all: A tiger! But also bees! Pollinating flowers! A beetle making its way across a bank of moss.
“I am longing for a small planet, a green planet, a blue planet. I could use some city congestion. I could use a cantaloupe, an artichoke, a microscope! If we had a microscope, we could, at the very least, watch things moving about!”
“I move about!” Mic says it defensively. “I may not ‘be alive’—but I am as alive as I was intended to be; I do my best, and—”
Admirably, Quiver unfolds, leisurely steps down from her hamok, languidly moves toward Mic, and, seductively, in human fashion, gently caressing what stands in for the top of his head, says: “Dearest Micosan. We have been through this a thousand times. You know how much I appreciate your bountiful—bountiful! Mic!—capacities. I am stir-crazy is all. I am needing to move about. I am not fed up with your company, but my own.”
“Ah,” says Mic, filling the sounds of Home Free with Habib Koité. “You need this.”
Together, they gaze up at the Plonk Sidereal Atlas. An abundant number of significant destinations litter the path forward. Far dexter a planet appears blinking. “What is it?” Quiver asks just as the Atlas pings, clears its sound box, and speaks:
You are swiftly approaching AM LOCUS, the jewel of a magnificent helical galaxy, the breathing shrapnel, lava, and rock of First Beginnings.
“Oh, forking delirious,” sighs Quiver.
AM LOCUS, the Atlas continues, is the very planet where the first seeds of extraterrestrial multigenesis—conceived and elaborated by Rosalind Von Pfeffertitz—were made manifest!
“Von Pfeffertitz!” Quiver mumbles. “I have heard of her!”
Who has not heard of Von Pfeffertitz! the Atlas continues. Her unprecedented collection of genetic variants survived terrestrial collapse. It is here, on AM LOCUS, that the process of multigenesis was not only perfected but also accelerated by Von Pfeffertitz’s brain after her demise!
Quiver winces. “Am I the only one in the universe who finds this drivel aggravating?” she asks Mic. “And look— see the date there? This drivel was imbedded ages ago—so who knows what’s ahead of us!” She gasps as the Atlas’s Space Eye is, in its entirety, overtaken by a virtual brain as wrinkled as the skin of what was once called a Shar-Pei— not that they could know it.
“This,” says Quiver decisively, “is not an option.” Mic, too, is not eager to get any closer. He, too, is stretched to his limits and out of sorts. His ferroelectric transducer barely glows, and he notices an alarming surge in the oxygen vacancy, a sudden decline in the Wobble’s dialectic permittivity.
“All systems are faltering!” Quiver shouts as, despite their best efforts, they are irresistibly drawn to AM LOCUS, its unwanted mysteries and dubious artifact—Von Pfeffertitz’s brain.
The Atlas’s high-resolution spectroradiometer compounds their frustration, for now they see every knurl, pock, cyst, and gyre of that troubled terrain and the grim towers of a campus built of extemporaneous and biologically modified (and they could not be uglier or more cheesy) printed potluck pavers, tiles, and bricks. So powerful is the planet’s magnetic attraction, Quiver’s cheeks, lips, and the lids of her eyes swell so badly that for a quik or two she looks like a fish (Mic). As for Mic, he is harassed by corporeal statik, his basal zipper perilously hot. All this settles down, however, as they approach the designated landing strip. A shiver, a shudder, a thump—and they come to a stop. Once hydrated, oiled, and suited, they step out into a manageable frost.
AM LOCUS has a fabricated atmosphere, humid and breathable, unexpectedly dense in the organic compounds of living things once there in profusion, but now long gone. Of the landscape, all that remains are deep creases and ridges gyring in all directions, with barely a trace of biological activity. They note what appear to be wormholes, the dens of small mammals, the sorrowful collapse of any number of greenhouses, an artificial lake in need of water, an array of what might well have been the mounds of disorderly—if innovative—termites.
Mic and Quiver now come to a dusty path that takes them to the abandoned campus directly—a pretentious edifice built of the detestable potluck (Mic), its grand front gates askew—and enter a lounge illumed by skylights and furnished with faded sofas, the upholstery overrun by the creatures of Von Pfeffertitz’s imagining—all hopelessly ama sugiru (Mic)—bushy tailed and smiling. The walls surge with sporadically functioning surface Lights all manifesting clusters of enriched transcriptomic motifs: flossy, fleecy, and google-eyed enough to trigger a hyperglycemic crisis.
A large virtual head now appears suspended in their path, sputtering in fits and starts before managing to cohere.
It is the head of Von Pfeffertitz: florid, rosy cheeked, and round as a beach ball. Welcome it says in any number of languages, known and unknown, imminent, inevitable, likely and unlikely. The welcome is apparently endless, and as they have examined the lights and the furniture, they move on to avoiding bloated descriptions of terrains and creatures that for a brief moment flit and soar, swim and surge, bushy tailed and smiling on AM LOCUS.
“Enjoy your stay!” the head calls after them. “Levitating” says Quiver, “like a forking blimp.”
“[§€]A~££§§§¥€|!>] Be sure to explore the greater org of Rosenblatt and WeiWeiSing—named after my two husbands, yes! The very husbands who invented and perfected pseudotemporal myeloids! And be sure not to miss the small chamber, its green door—to the dexter as you are leaving—for everything you are about to see began there.”
Like a silent and old-timey terrestrial firework display, the head appears to explode and then it is gone. It does not take much poking about before they locate the green door. At their approach it opens.
In the middle of a surprisingly generous space that smells— as does everything on AM LOCUS—of rotting potluck, they see a little table made of illuminated surgical crystal and its crystal balloon. Stashed within the balloon is Von Pfeffertitz’s brain. Its bathwater is foggy and the balloon’s nicatonium diodes are tarnished.
“There it is,” says Mic, “suspended in its spoiled soup, disembarrassed of all significant events.”
Quiver responds to this little speech by heaving into a virtual aquarium, further compromising the carpet.
Retracing their steps, they find themselves once more in a world expired.
Trafik Page 4
