by Simon Ings
A white tiled wall stretched forever in every direction. At its centre, right in front of him, was a baby’s mouth.
A beautiful, smiling baby’s mouth, set right into the wall. Toothless gums, pink tongue, everything. It opened wide. It was about half a mile across.
A great wind seized him. He spun in, borne by the intaken breath like a spore. Beyond the epiglottis, he now saw, there were lights. He wondered vaguely what they were.
Behind him, the lips swung wetly shut. All at once he was enveloped in a foul, slimy wet sponge and lifted up so fast spots danced before his eyes. He was scraped back and forth across a wet, ribbed ceiling the consistency of tyre rubber. In the act of passing out, he wondered what he tasted like.
He came to in darkness.
Muddily, as through thin walls, came strange sounds. He tried to make sense of them: chrome forests, perhaps, dripping with artificial life.
He tried to move. He couldn’t. He said, ‘Hello?’
Above him (belatedly, he registered the presence of gravity) something clicked and stirred.
‘Hello?’ he said again. He was seized by an absurd notion: that somehow he’d ended up in a strange hotel. A second-rate hotel in a foreign country.
‘Hello?’ he said yet again, fighting back a smile. ‘Who is it?’
A door opened in the ceiling letting in a little light. The bird swooped in, wings folded. Before he could blink it had pecked out his eye.
Weeks went by. Rage swept over her again and again, buffeting her. It seemed to come from everywhere; from inside herself and from the walls around her. She was a tender membrane, stretched all ways by contrary tides.
What had happened to her equilibrium?
That day, she told herself, for she knew the answer well enough. The rape of snakes. The infinitude of sharp-toothed women. The nursing pig. Her sister, elevated beyond touch. These things had thrown all out of gear inside her.
Her routines collapsed. She neglected the hunt. She did not care so well for the nursing pig. Sometimes she spent all day in bed, weeping continually. Other days she was full of fierce, rebellious energy. On those days she stalked Elle like a cur, weak but malignant, muttering cruel jibes and taunts just out of range.
Then, wearying at last, she wandered home, disconsolate, leaving Elle sucking oblivious at the nursing pig’s tits. Why was she blaming Elle for her loneliness and lower rank? It was Ma had made them incompatible; Ma who’d made Rosa just strong enough to register Elle’s powers but too weak to withstand them.
It was Ma she should be cursing – but how could she curse her home? This home which nourished her and kept her warm, however unfeelingly? Nor could she curse a mother she could not comprehend.
If only I had friends! she thought.
She had sisters enough, after all. Mute and malformed, they and their remains littered the whole station. Why were none kept back for her? Of all the many hundreds, was it too much to ask that one might keep her company?
She let herself into her bedroom. The snakes were starting to smell. She hadn’t up till now worked out what to do with them. She had simply wrapped them up in the bloody bed sheet, knotted it up and thrown it into a corner of the room. But she was going to have to do something with them.
She couldn’t just throw them away. There was no such thing as waste here, no trash can anywhere. All was re-used. She thought: Feed them to the pig? No. She shuddered. To drink them in, days hence! The thought revolted her. She wondered where to dump them. Whatever place she chose would be polluted in her mind, perhaps forever. Burn them? No. That risked too much. Mother was wild-wired and quick to catch. Then why not—
Forbidden thoughts trickled sweetly in.
Why not give them back to Ma?
While Elle was safely suckling, Ma’s crypts lay unguarded. Her workshops. Her slabs and vaults. Her storehouses of flesh. In these places Ma made and unmade all manner of creatures. Only Ma could change the snakes, unpollute and make them fine!
Rosa slung the bloody parcel over her shoulder.
And why, she wondered proudly, should I not make a gift of them to Ma? Is she not my mother, too? I belong here, just as much as my sister – well then! She opened the door. But one glance into the corridor was enough to remind her that, however much she thought herself her sister’s equal, their mother had other ideas. Rosa took in with a sinking heart the mass of cracked stucco, shattered lights, tangled wires, old prints, cobwebs, dusty lenses, rotten panels, broken armchairs, and purplish screens that were her home.
Elle’s halls were limned with gold, but these dusty passages bespoke a terminal neglect. There could be no doubt.
Ma’s forgetting me. Rosa laughed – shaky bravura – and said: ‘I’ll roam you, Mother! This thought of yours won’t die. I’ll hunt your body as I’ve always done, and question everything!’ She felt crazed and strong. Madness, a little voice insisted, Hysteria and fright! She didn’t know what to trust, her customary timidity or this delicious, irresistible rage now coursing through her veins in place of blood.
She compromised and crept like a stranger along the winding mirrored halls until at last she came upon her sister’s oaken doors.
They opened smoothly at her touch.
‘Snow!’ he cried. His single eye ached, unable to make sense of the creature engulfing him. Golden arms, glass teeth, drills, swabs. Cameras everywhere. ‘Have pity! Snow!’
In the corner of the room his protective golden suit weaved about, pinned by suction to an exhaust vent half-hidden in a nest of plumbing.
Around him, inch-wide video screens dangled from fine red wires. They floated in and out of his field of vision, taunting him with images of himself bound, bloody, vivisected. His black skin was grey now, wrinkled and dying. He was scarred everywhere. The silver bird had sampled him thoroughly in his sleep. First an eye, then a tooth, then a testicle.
Every few hours a hatch slid open in the ceiling and the bird dived in at him, talons extended. No – not talons, scalpels. Indeed the creature, with its eye of deep blue glass and its mouthparts scraping against each other constantly, was not much like a bird at all. Nor was it really separate from the other machines ensnaring him; what he likened to a tail was a hydraulic arm, reaching all the way back into the roof.
But the creature’s chainsaw beak held a saving hint of animation. Thanks to the beak, the savagery of its peck, the blood limned round its maw, Ajay could almost believe, as his life ebbed away, that the bird was alive . . .
He was caught in a prison of mirrors, chained to a mirrored wall. Chrome amulets bound his hands and feet. Metal tubes sucked at his toes and fingers, cat-like and pornographic. A kevlar choker wound itself tighter and tighter round his neck. A crown of steel thorns pinned his head immobile to the slab. Only his jaw was free. Screaming was about the only thing left to him.
So he screamed.
If any evidence were required of Elle’s supremacy then it lay here, in the gold-plated splendour beyond the giant doors. The screens and cameras in Elle’s apartment were hung not, as elsewhere, scattered anyhow, but ranked and serried. Pictures did not blurt from them, reflected endlessly, but filed by in strict order at a stately pace. Here Mother’s mind was at its most reasonable.
Rosa sank her toes into the plush red-swirling carpet. Around her paintings changed their spots while wall-paints swirled, sometimes revealing and sometimes concealing magic doors. Sounds of battle, love, debate and joy jostled in her head. All collided: not rudely – as they sometimes did outside when wires crossed or signals interfered – but musically. It was as though every channel, thought, scent, note and furnishing were part of a single celestial harmony.
She thought, My sister’s magic kingdom, but reminded herself, slipping sprite-like under pearly, frescoed ceilings, She is alone, too.
Mother’s most precocious progeny lay behind these ornate doors, bound in darkened cells. No mere foetuses, no commonplace cadavers. Here nothing was dissected, decanted or pickled. These were whol
e, unbreached, testaments to their mother’s genius.
Rosa opened the first door.
In a cage of golden wire lay a mummified angel. Her wings, once iridescent, carried a patina of dust. Loose feathers lay all about the bottom of the cage. Rosa reached through and picked one up. She licked her hand, rubbed it across the waxless hairs. They glinted, green and gold a moment, then dulled again. Rosa pushed the feather back into the cage.
The angel lay face down. Her smooth, shapely legs were crossed awkwardly, the skin puckered and goose pimpled. One wing was tucked underneath her. The other was propped at an awkward angle against the side of the cage, the feathers poking through.
Her head was turned to one side, facing Rosa. Rosa stared into her lightless eye sockets. Nobody home. She longed to touch the angel’s shrunken lips and stroke her long red hair. ‘Hair like mine,’ she whispered.
She opened the second door.
In the centre of the next room was a sand pit. In the pit was a ball five feet high made of fused ribs. Probes, wires and dripfeeds were still embedded in its elephantine hide. Dusty screens lined the walls of the room, live but empty: waiting for data. The ball had long since died. A terrible stench filled the room. The wavering hum of overburdened air-conditioning rattled the medical glassware mounted above the ball, a ghastly tooth-grating harmonic.
Rosa put down her sack of snakes, swung under the handrail and jumped down into the pit. The stink issued from a fracture in the ball’s side. Gases of putrefaction had breached it from the inside. Its perfect symmetry breached, the structure had weakened and sagged. With every day that passed, the crack grew wider. Rosa held her breath against the vile odour, and peered inside. All within had festered. Nameless things squirmed within creamy, bloated sacs. Blankets of steeped moss entangled tresses Rosa guessed were red. No fancy like the angel this, no thing of beauty. It was hard to imagine Mother’s purpose in creating it.
Enclosed in itself, its vestigial limbs fused to the inside wall, it had no means of communicating with the outside world. A perfect cleistogam: self-renewing, permanently closed. Perhaps Mother meant it to survive the burning wastelands between stars. Itself its own spaceship, then.
And what of me? Rosa wondered, climbing out the pit. She took up her bloody bundle, closed the doors behind her, and headed down the thick-rugged hall toward Ma’s labs. Am I like these? My mother’s whim? A dream she may one day forget?
Were she a dream, then she was of no moment. Death impended. It was inevitable.
She looked up at the ceiling, at the serried cameras of Elle’s apartment. Mother’s eyes. ‘I am not your subject!’
No reply. In all her life, not one reply. And it was not surprising.
Though she walked beneath Ma’s watchful eyes, that didn’t mean Ma saw her. There was no brain behind her many lenses: the lenses were her brain. Ma could not see her, any more than she could see a thought. Rosa sank to her knees on the rich red-swirling carpet and put her hands over her face, hands that stank of the dead cleistogam. Her mother could no more reply to her than Rosa could reply to one of her own dreams. ‘I am too small,’ she sighed, despairing—
—and, quite suddenly, it all made sense.
Her dissatisfaction.
The snakes’ betrayal.
The mouse’s hatred.
The terrible heads.
She thought, I am an old thought. A rogue cell.
These events weren’t accidents. They were meant. They signalled something.
What?
Rosa let the pieces of the puzzle move slowly around in her mind. She thought of bacteria and ulcers, tumours and metastasis. Illness. Was this what she’d become? Too small to address her mother’s brain, had she instead inflamed it? Was Ma sick with reflecting (on) her? If so – she shuddered as the truth hit home – Ma wanted her to die.
The chamber grew dim. A mechanical evening suffused the room with mellow, various light. Chrome became gold, and blood flecks turned to spilled wine. A good light under which to die.
Chained still to his mirrored slab, Ajay convulsed.
Silence.
Evening.
Peace.
Nothing stirred.
Nothing to warm the coldness in his belly.
He missed the bird, its vengeful eye, even its surgery.
‘I cheated them,’ he said.
Another convulsion wracked him.
‘And then I had nowhere to go. Too weak for Haag, too wired for the world. Your co-ordinates bought refuge in Brazil. First Paulo, then Rio. Cities that think. Cities that desire.
He wondered at what point he had stopped talking. It worried him. He tried to say his name; could not. Too weak.
It got darker.
He shivered.
Come back—
Then: Let me in.
So cold out here . . .
He dreamed of what might lie beyond his cell. A fleshy forest dripping blood, perhaps.
A womb for him.
A second chance.
Rusty racks and worktops smeared with pus, damp vitrines bursting with dead techniq, dusty incubators, china mazes smooth and swollen like the chambers of the ear and heart: these were her mother’s playgrounds.
Ceiling cameras swung back and forth, confounded by what they saw.
Bell-jarred embryos.
Organs pinned out.
Limbs pierced by cybernetic racks.
Screeching, obscene and interminable, Ma’s worktops knew no rest but probed slick quivering prey with restive prosthetic limbs. From here Rosa herself had sprung, thirteen years past.
Rabbit-skinned wire-stuck and vile, all Ma’s daughters took shape here. Her latest thoughts. Her dears.
Rosa threw the bloody bundle into a hopper, closed the lid and pressed the button. The hopper disappeared into the wall. Rosa crossed to a nearby porthole and watched as mother’s guts sucked the day’s excrement into powerful detergent sprays, enzyme baths, bacterial tanks. Nothing was unmade but served to feed some new experiment, a recent thought.
Little jellies swept by. Eyes – green, like hers – trailing connective tissue. Trunks, skeletal heads, internal organs, lengths of undifferentiated tissue, bones of human and bestial shape and sometimes no organic shape at all, but formed like hinges, brackets, frames, even the motive parts of engines.
Cartons of failed techniq whipped by, some broken open in the flood, their contents all disgorged.
Paper products.
Starches.
Soap.
Rolls of reddish cloth wheeled past, bumping against the sides of the corridor. One roll thumped the window right under Rosa’s nose. Instinctively she shied away. When she looked back the window was red.
Not the swirling landscape-at-a-glance red of her mother’s magic pallet. Not blood-red even. Another shade entirely. Quite unmistakable. Her hair’s own colour.
The tunnel behind the porthole was filled with her hair. It wheeled by, tress after tress of it, cloud after cloud. Dark with ginger lights. Warm. Sensual.
Her hair.
Minutes passed. How much had Mother swallowed down? How much had she chewed to dust already with her abundant teeth? A mile, two miles of it? What size of sister must have grown that hair? What giant cousin lay hidden behind Mother’s secret doors, weeping at such cruel shearing? Tears from such a monster might flood whole rooms . . .
Once the bulk of it was gone, stray curls followed. They weaved in the air like autumn leaves. Rosa pressed her hands to the glass, desperate to save something from the destruction. One tress should be enough!
She rubbed her forehead against the glass, bewildered, not understanding her distress. Before, what she had seen through this window had always amused her: great shoals of eyes; loose legs scissoring the air, chained ankle to ankle with elastic bands; bags of skin; bags of fingernails; clear plastic drums of nerve and artery; translucent, bluish vessels which had never tasted blood. Her mother’s ingenuity was unstoppable, her fecundity overwhelming.
<
br /> What was there to distress her now who’d once been so proud of her mother’s work?
She sighed. One tress, she thought, a single curl! A hair, even. A mere hair would be sufficient. For nothing to remain seemed appalling.
After all, she thought, it’s my hair.
She hesitated: my hair?
The thought had dropped into her mind from some foreign place. It did not seem to belong to her.
Not just ‘hair like mine’: my hair.
‘It’s mine,’ she said, aloud, so she could hear the thought, judge it for herself. ‘A part of me.’
But the tunnel was empty. Not a lock, not a strand of her hair was left.
They are all mine, she thought. Tresses and contours of bone and skin. They are all me. Even Elle. Made of me. Drawn from some part. Sickened by the thought, she turned away.
Ma’s latest creations were pinned out on tables receding in rows as far as the eye could see. They shivered and squawked as she walked by them. Not knowing the look of her inside parts, she could only guess that these things were hers. Her spleen, copied and cancered to grow little teeth. Her lungs like balloons hung from a drip-stand by thin plastic cord. Her eyes—
No.
She looked closer.
Not her eyes.
She leaned across the slab for a better look.
These were brown eyes. A trayful of them. She’d never seen eyes like this before. Hers were green. Elle’s were purest gold. These eyes were brown: not flat mud-brown, but a rich, various sheen. She picked one up. It slid about in her fingers, escaped and fell to the floor. It burst. Rosa glanced around. Fearing Elle might find the scrap and guess that she’d been here, Rosa bent down and shoveled the shattered jelly into her mouth. It was salty-sweet, tough – fibrous even – but not unpleasant.
Nearer to the exit ramp were stranger items still. Black wool. Rolls of black skin. What new experiment did Ma intend?
A faint keening made her turn. Was Elle done with the pig? Had she returned?
The sound came again. Not a wasp’s buzz, but a keening. A voice.
A stranger’s voice!
It seemed to come from the ramp. But when she stood there she saw nothing, and the voice seemed to travel up through her feet. She found a manhole, opened it and peered down. A well-lit shaft descended to a passage she did not know. She lowered herself in. The corridor extended as far as she could see in both directions, curving up at each end in line with the hull.
