by Larissa Lai
The Salty leans to the time-before machine and turns a dial. Blue and green lights flicker hideously. The music grows louder and stranger.
My body surrenders to the nightmare dance.
I dance the dance of the grannies’ expulsion. I dance the dance of Chang and Eng at their mythic launch. A rocket blasts skyward in my mind’s eye.
“Stop,” I croak. “I don’t want to see.”
I dance the dance of nuclear fission, of oil, of coal, of wood and straw. I dance for wheels and automobiles, when they were like living creatures drunk on the rotted bodies of species long dead. I dance for the tiger flu, for Ebola, for AIDS, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, Black Plague, and death. I dance for stem cells, devilled eggs, cloning, and mutation. All the long path of chance and science, money and murder that Old Glorybind taught me was my messy legacy. Although I can’t say I understand it, I know its songs, its oranges and lemons, its ring around the rosy. My body knows something that my mind can’t refuse.
Shimmy, shake, hop, and leap, I fall into a movement I never knew, feel the feel of all the old ones living and dying and living again, back way back in the gist of mist, the time of rhymes, the how of now. I can’t control my laughter. It ripples from my throat like the hoot and holler of a moony coyote. Sweat runs from my pores, my brow, my armpits, my stinky lady crotch, and still I can’t stop the dance, young and sweet only seventeen. All the songs Old Glorybind taught me from her raw memory burst from the drumbeat, the trumpets, the saxophones, the violins, lutes, harps, zithers, and guitars of the time past, the time present, all pumping humping volume, itchi gitchi ya ya here, voulez-vous coucher avec moi?
Then, as suddenly as it erupted from the ponderosas and sagebrush, it grinds to a halt, mwah waaaaaaaaaaaaa.
“There goes my battery,” says the Salty. “But come back to Saltwater City. You can listen to music every day. You don’t know what this machine is, do you? Not your fault. It’s really old. We haven’t used a CD player for a hundred years. But you can have the music. All you need is a scale. It goes right into your head, a little pinprick, just like the ones you gave me, and then you can have it anytime you want. You don’t know what a scale is either, do you? Never mind, ha ha ha …” And then its laugh becomes a cough, and it coughs and coughs and coughs and coughs, and it can’t stop until Mother Glory gets it a glass of water.
We all come to our senses then.
“It bewitched us, Mother Glory.”
My mother double slowly becomes her old self. “Astonishing, strange. And not right, not right at all.”
“You better go,” I say to the thing. “But you need your tea first.”
“No,” says Mother Glory. “We need a cell scraping and a blood sample.”
Peristrophe Halliana begins to cough. She coughs and coughs and cannot stop. I knew it. That Salty came to infect us.
“Out! Get out!” I yell, awake now to the truth of our situation. “We don’t want your devil music and we don’t want you!”
Glorybind Groundsel wraps Peristrophe Halliana in a blanket.
I’m still yelling. “Out, out, out, out, out! We don’t want your dirty blood, your dirty biomatter.”
“It needs its forgetting tea or they’ll be upon us before the day is out,” says Mother Glory.
“It would be easier just to kill it,” I observe. “And better.”
The Salty dives for the door. I lunge, grab it by its strange red hair. It screams bloody murder, but I won’t let go. I yank it towards me and pull it into a headlock.
“Gentle, Kiri,” says my compassionate mother double. “You must learn. I don’t have so many days left to teach you.”
I wrestle the Salty to the floor, try to do so gently, though it’s not really possible. My mother double goes to get the teapot.
I hold the Salty down and pry its jaw open. Mother Glory pours the forgetting tea in, and I pinch its nose shut until it swallows. Twice more. Mother Glorybind administers the needles of sleep. We put the Salty in our rusty old wheelbarrow and wheel it into the valley where we first caught sight of it and dump it unceremoniously in the dirt.
When we get back, Peristrophe has clear symptoms of the flu—a runny nose, weepy eyes, and a temperature of 102. I’ll give that Salty a painful death if it ever comes back.
I make a strong ganoderma broth from my best mushrooms and feed it to her spoonful by agonizing spoonful.
“How is she?” Old Glorybind asks when Peristrophe is asleep and I’m out in the living room by the fire, drinking what remains of the broth.
“I don’t know, Mother,” I say.
“If we lose her—” she begins.
“Don’t say it, Mother Glory. I just can’t.”
“All right, Kirilow, all right.” She reaches into the folds of her robe and pulls out something moist and purple. It’s the hand that I severed from the Salty’s wrist. She lays it on the table and we stare at it in wonder.
“I hope I never see that Salty again,” I say.
Mother Glorybind is circumspect. “It was a starfish.”
“I don’t care. It was a killer.”
“I hope your tea took,” she says. “Otherwise, it could tell its friends about us.”
“The tea took. My teas are excellent teas.”
“They are that, my child. Whatever your flaws, you have your gifts.”
11
PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME
KORA KO // SALTWATER FLATS
NODE: KERNELS PLUMP
DAY: 4
SHE WAKES UP THIRSTY AND LIGHT-HEADED. ARE THERE ANY MOLECULES of Delphine still in her? She wants to be sick again, but her stomach is empty and dry. It heaves, reminding her of her betrayal. She drinks a little water from the cloudy glass on the nightstand.
She’s still furious with Charlotte, and with Wai for not stopping Charlotte from slaughtering Delphine. And she’s famished. She lingers in bed for as long as she can bear it, then goes to the kitchen hoping for a bowl of potato soup.
K2, Charlotte, and Uncle Wai are there at the beautiful teak table they salvaged from an abandoned apartment on Level 22. Uncle Wai is so pale, as though he’s already got a foot in the next world. If he’s upset with her for making him chase her, he doesn’t express it. But he’s got a proposition. He wants to send Kora to the Cordova Dancing School for Girls.
“I don’t want to go,” Kora says. “I want Delphine back. Murderers.”
“I want her back too,” Uncle Wai says, eyeing Charlotte with simmering rage. “But that has nothing to do with the Cordova School.”
“Those girls are all so stuck-up. Besides, who will help you take care of the rooftop gardens?”
“Don’t go,” Charlotte whispers, so soft they can barely hear her. “Don’t leave me alone. I cannot weather the grief by myself.”
“You killed Delphine. If I go, it’ll be to get away from you,” Kora says. If she could be meaner, she would.
Uncle Wai says, “Don’t be so selfish, Charlotte. And Kora, it’s your duty to go. One of us must make it in the world that is coming.”
K2 says, “Uncle Wai is right, sis. Young women don’t get the flu as much, it’s true. But what will you do when we’re all gone? Old Madame Dearborn is willing to take you. It’s the best chance you’ve got.”
The ancient Woodward’s Building shifts on its foundations. Its concrete rumbles fearsomely.
“Those girls are not nice girls,” Kora says, picking at her moon phase scale. It is slightly infected, and the infection threatens to spread along the path of the halo. Did that come from sticking spit, sand, and who knows what germs from the altar in her head last night? She has no renminbi for the alcohol solution you’re supposed to rub on it. “Last night you were trying to protect me from them. Now you want me to live with them? They despise us.”
“That isn’t true,” Uncle Wai says. “Some of them are very kind. Don’t they bring us cans from the time before sometimes? And firewood when we can’t collect enough of our own?”
“They have to charge,” says K2. “Cans are getting scarcer.”
“I don’t want to go,” Kora says.
Uncle Wai says, “In times like these we put aside our individual desires, Kora. In favour of the larger collective. In favour of survival. You are fifteen now. Old enough to accept duty when it calls to you. You’ve had a formal invitation.”
He lays the open scale on the table and turns it on. The invitation flashes up in pink and silver. It bears the three-dimensional chop of the Cordova Dancing School for Girls’ venerable matron, Madame Aurelia Dearborn.
“I don’t want to …” Kora whines.
“It’s a prestigious invitation,” says Uncle Wai. “And it is time.” He begins to cough, and then spits a clot of bloody phlegm into his handkerchief.
Kora bows her head, ashamed.
“Please don’t go. Don’t leave me,” Charlotte whispers in a thin sad voice. She puts her hands over her face then, so they all know she’s crying.
12
THE LAST STARFISH
KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // GRIST VILLAGE
NODE: GRAIN IN BEARD
DAY: 3
PERISTROPHE HALLIANA’S COUGH HAS MOVED INTO HER LUNGS. WHEN I place my hand on her chest, I can feel the mucous trapped in the spaces where only air should go. Little gooey globules of rot move deep within the flesh, worm their way into the crevices where my needles can’t do any good. She coughs now, she hacks. Thin spittle runs from her lips. Our Mother curse that slimy Salty and its black hand. May all Salties go to the hottest and most agonizing reaches of the hell they dream for us.
Peristrophe Halliana says, “If anything happens to me—”
“Best beloved, nothing is going to happen. Drink your ganoderma tea and sleep some more. Rest is what will help you now.”
“I’ve rested enough, dear one. There is only so much you can do. You have to accept it.”
“I refuse to let you go.”
“You’re a good groom, Kiri.” Her new eyes have grown in ever so slightly, and she gazes at me now with a sad maturity that no one our age should have gained yet. “But you know that in the end, only Our Mother has power over life and death.” Her gaze moves skyward to where Eng rises once again.
“I have power,” I tell her.
“Great power, dearest. But not the ultimate power. I know you understand me.”
I drop my head into my hands.
“If I don’t make it, you must go to Saltwater City. Many of our sisters still live there—in captivity, to be sure, serving the scale factories of HöST. Find a new starfish and a new doubler and bring them back.”
“A new doubler, yes. Half a dozen of them. But we don’t need a new starfish. We have you.”
“You must see the truth, my love,” rasps Peristrophe Halliana, squinting at me now through her barely developed eyebuds.
“You have a good eighty years ahead of you,” I tell her. I try to look at her, but the tears rush up and I have to turn away.
When she is asleep again, I go outside to rail at Eng.
Our Mother of bread and roses
Our Mother of dirt
Our Mother of loaves and fishes
Our Mother of love
Please keep Peristrophe Halliana in stable health
Until the salt flu passes
Bless and water
All the sisters of the Grist
In their meagre variety
In the guise of the good guys
Now more than weather
A slice of forever
I make my prayers up as I go. Will Eng, with all the knowledge she holds, hear me? The old world is long gone, and in this brave new one we must make everything all over again.
NODE: GRAIN IN BEARD
DAY: 4
I GET UP EARLY TO CHECK ON PERISTROPHE HALLIANA. SHE SLEEPS so silent heavy. My gut muscles quiver with worry, but I leave her to rest.
When Chang is halfway up the western sky on his second ascent of the day, I go to wake her. She lies very still. She doesn’t budge when I call her name.
“Peristrophe Halliana. Dearest beloved.” I take her arm. It is warm, but not as warm as it should be. My gut turns over. I move my hand down to her wrist, search it for a reassuring sign of life. Her wrist is thin, and cooler than the rest of her.
“Peristrophe.”
Her pulse kicks so, so faintly. “Kiri, my love.”
“Please, my only star.”
“You were a good groom to me.” Her pulse is fading.
“No, please—”
“In Saltwater City, you’ll find—” She speaks so softly I can barely hear her.
“No, Peri—”
“Listen, you must do as I ask.”
Her pulse is so faint, I can no longer feel it. “Peri, please. Please no.”
“Find—another—”
“No. You have to try harder. There will never be another.”
“St-sta-star—”
“No. Don’t leave.”
“—love—”
I press my thumb in deeper. Nothing. I place my hand over her heart. Stopped as an unwound watch.
My brain understands that she is gone, but no other part of me accepts it. My hand remains over her heart for a long time.
My mother double comes to pull me away. “Kirilow.”
I take my beloved’s dead hand, though she won’t squeeze mine back.
“Kirilow, don’t cling or you will fall into the other world with her.”
“So be it. I don’t care.”
I can feel her concerned eyes bore into my back. “Daughter, it is not your time.”
I refuse to move. I stare at her with the eyes of the dead.
“If you won’t think of yourself, think of your gifts and your duty to the Grist.” She strokes my hair.
“I can’t.”
“You must. You are needed.” Tugs my arm insistently.
I pretend I don’t hear.
“I need you.”
I allow my mother double to pull me away.
“Bonfire night is coming,” she says, as if she imagines I might find this comforting. She leads me to the fireplace. “We can send Peristrophe Halliana and Radix Bupleuri to Our Mother together.”
“The beauty and the despot,” I say. “Blasphemy. I won’t go.”
“It would do you good to cry,” my mother double says, pulling me into a fierce hug.
The emotion that takes me is not sorrow but rage. I push her away, run out into the forest to that place along the bluff above the clearing where we first saw that dirty Salty. Just two days ago, though it seems a hundred years. There I sit for the rest of the day, stewing in a vengeful hatred of all the Salties in the world.
13
CORDOVA DANCING SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
KORA KO // SALTWATER FLATS
NODE: GRAIN IN BEARD
DAY: 2
THE NIGHT KORA ARRIVES, THE CORDOVA GIRLS ARE HAVING A STEW called “bourgignon,” made from an animal called “beef.” It smells so good, Kora almost can’t bear it. She stands in the foyer, fairly swooning.
A girl of seven or eight comes to bring her up to the hall. She introduces herself as Velma. “We’ve just started. You’re lucky it’s a heist day. Myra and Tania broke into a HöST supermarket and got us real beef. You know that fancy one, what’s it called … Gupta-Anderson … And bananas too, from the time before. For banana cream pie. Have you ever had bananas before? They’re extinct, you know. And only Jemini can make them again, if and when they decide to. Heist day, feast day, heist day, feast day!” she chants merrily. “Myra and Tania were wearing Madame Dearborn’s catcoats.”
“What’s a catcoat?”
“Catcoat, thinskin, catcoat, thinkskin, catcoat, slink in!” chants young Velma. “You’ll see, Kora. By Our Mother, you’re on easy street now. Was your uncle
very sick? Tania says you didn’t want to come, but your family will be dead soon and so you have no choice. Myra says you should be grateful to be here. So, are you grateful?”
She leads Kora up the creaking stairs of the old Cordova Dancing School for Girls. It was a theatre once, and before that, a firehall. Even more than the Woodward’s Building, the ground on which it has been standing for the last 200 years has shifted. Everything slants east now. Kora really notices it in the stairwell.
At the top of the building, in a wide hall, the girls are seated at long narrow tables. The air is thick with the delicious smell of beef bourgignon.
“Come on,” says Velma. “You can sit with me.” She points to an empty space between two other small girls. All the little ones sit together. If Kora sits, she’ll be an awkward potato jar among a cluster of germination pots.
“Maybe I should sit over there,” she says, moving towards a table of girls her own age.
The girl at the head of that table lifts her head from her stew, and Kora recognizes her from the market stall two weeks ago. Her hair is black and matted, and her eyes are rimmed with so much kohl that she looks like she’s stepped straight from the steaming guts of hell. “DON’T … YOU … DARE!” the girl hisses.
“You better not, Kora,” says Velma. “That’s Myra, and this is her heist feast. You better just do what she says.”
Kora backs away and sits at the table of younger, smaller girls. One of them scoops her a bowl of stew. It tastes a bit like Delphine. Knobs of slippery mushroom and onion swim among the chunks of meat. Unfamiliar spices tickle her taste buds, too spicy and oddly floral. She huddles with the seven-year-olds and tries her best to enjoy what is, in spite of its unfamiliarity, a really good meal.
