by Larissa Lai
Tania takes the red filigree scale upstairs. Velma trots after her.
“Bring that back! It doesn’t belong to you!” Kora yells.
But the other effect of the drink is a drowsiness she can’t fight off. She tumbles into a bottomless sleep. She wakes once after several slams of the main door, directly above the clinic, as Cordova girls head off to the party.
KORA WAKES SOME HOURS LATER. SHE LIES IN BED SURROUNDED BY images of Our Mother, with a large watercolour of Eng at her head. She’s groggy and confused. Her phantom hand itches like the dickens. What if the doctor is a Grist sister? One thing’s for sure—she’s not from Saltwater Flats, so she must have come from one of the quarantine rings beyond, or somewhere even farther afield and even stranger.
Eventually, she dozes again. She finds herself once more in Uncle Wai’s garden on the Woodward’s rooftop. She dreams of rows of jars brimful with fresh earth and potatoes glowing with life beneath the soil, so palpably she can almost hear them breathing. She grasps a jar to tip it out, but when she looks inside, she sees her uncle Wai lying curled there, dead or asleep, so fragile in his stillness. She wants to get him out, but the jar is large and heavy. She leans against it and pushes. The jar seems to have become even heavier. She stands on tiptoe and peers in the top. He seems so far down now, at the distant bottom of a well. She drops down to flat feet again and pushes, throws her weight into it, heaves with all her might. The jar will not budge. Then, just as she feels the slightest movement, she hears a plaintive mewl coming from the adjacent jar. She ignores it and continues to heave and shove. The mewling becomes a thin, persistent yowl. Still she ignores it, pushes harder, finally manages to give Uncle Wai’s jar a good jostle. From the mewling jar emerges a fearsome, unearthly croak. She stops and goes to look. A massive tiger leaps out, teeth sharp and glistening with saliva. It comes straight for her face.
She bolts awake. Her hand itches furiously. And a pitiful mewling really is coming from beneath the bed.
Although her arms and legs are still heavy, she can move them now, at least enough to climb off the bed and out from under the unsettling watch of the watercolour Eng and the many beatific gazes of Our Mother. She crouches on the floor and pushes aside the ruffled curtain that hides the doctor’s under-bed storage. Laid out neatly on top of packed boxes of medicine, needles, bedsheets, and who knows what else is the lost catcoat. It quivers when it perceives her presence, and the mouth part stretches into a wide, lazy yawn.
“You,” says Kora accusingly. “How did you get here?”
Pinned cruelly to its ear is a note that says, I dare you. Blood drips unseemly from the pinprick. Whoever did this is not very nice.
Kora contemplates the nature of the dare. Who has issued it? Velma, wanting her to come to the party? Myra, letting Kora know she knows? Or her misguided, clue-leaving brother? Although she thought she knew him like the back of her vanished hand, he’s jobless and sick with a death-dealing flu—and now part of a large group of men all suffering the same indignities. These are conditions that might have driven him to things he would never have considered before.
She picks up the catcoat. A little mangier than it was yesterday morning, it is nonetheless very much alive. It begins to keen. She seeks its seams and shoulders, gets it upright, lowers its feet to the floor, then steps in, and zips it up. Soothed by the companionable warmth of her body, the catcoat stops mewling, and begins to vibrate contentedly. Kora takes a deep inhale, lets it out, relaxes into the purr.
30
INVITATION
KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // SALTWATER FLATS
NODE: MINOR HEAT
DAY: 2
I’M OUT ON THE WIDE BOULEVARD FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE MY arrival. Although not a captive, I’ve been acting like one. I’m restless as river water aching for the sea. But the source I come from has been dammed with dirt, and I can never go back. If I’m really clever bright, I could make a new source. But I need to find my true sisters, the ones that were taken up, up, up in that hideous batterkite.
Two solar nodes—more than a full cycle of the moon—have passed since the death of my Peristrophe Halliana. Here I am, a stranger in alien territory, home of my grandmothers, though I feel as much at home as a fox would in a bear’s den. Could Madame Aurelia Dearborn really have been my long-lost auntie? The red hair was so foreign weird. My mother double told me there were other kinds of sisters, germinated by Jemini from the seeds of other individuals. I didn’t know what that meant. All the sisters I ever knew were part of me. But now I think I see. There are kinds of cousins that only seemed possible in dreams. Aurelia Dearborn was a dream come true.
That’s not what the expression means, Kirilow sweet, the mother double in my head says. One day, I will take you to Saltwater City and you will learn more.
Here I am, Mama, but not under conditions of my own choosing. Oh, you taught me well, from your dearest and most beloved head. But now I’m among them, and no Inglish could be more alien.
What a gutless fool I’ve been to stay trapped down there with these strange and terrifying Salties, as though they are the only kind of Salty that exists. I’m gripped now with the thrill of finding what other kinds there are. Because, Kirilow, they don’t double. They are all individuals. She told me this a hundred times, but my brain can’t grasp it.
Along the wide boulevard, durian trees grow. Right outside the door! At Grist Village, we cultivated them in cold frames, transplanted them outside when they were strong. We fed them good. With droppings of elk, bear, and sometimes even revived Caspian tiger, if an escaped one happened to roam through our beautiful forest. Here, the trees grow well, seemingly without assistance. Their trunks expand like the waists of well-fed Salties, like the two walking towards me in shimmering fabrics. How sleek and fat! Handsome in a barbaric way. The branches arch out, curve away from the trunks and sprout luxuriant leaves. And fruit! Already it’s time for the first flushing. They hang heavy from the branches, precious eggs for Our Mother’s babies.
Chang rides high in the sky like a ripe durian, begins his descent into his own night. Eng rises in the southeast, distant, slow, and round. Tonight is ceremony night, the night we would feast Auntie Radix on the richest roots, the darkest greens. There would be medicinal soup I simmered myself with the juiciest ptarmigan and a secret combination of fertility herbs that old Glorybind taught me before she became forgetful. We’d decorate Auntie Radix with precious leaves from our most fertile durian tree and feed her fruit of the first flushing, ripe and fragrant.
I wonder if the little groom Bombyx Mori carries these rites out tonight for Corydalis Ambigua at New Grist Village, in the clearing where I killed an elk last summer, deep in the mountains. I imagine Bombyx and Corydalis fixing up the caves and planting fresh gardens.
I pause where two roads called “Main” and “Hastings” cross. (My mother double taught me the Salty technology of text, at least enough to sound out simple words and read these worn signs.) Here, the biggest durian tree has burst up through the asphalt. It’s an old tree. I suppose it burst through many years ago, maybe even at the time of the great-grandmothers’ expulsion. Its trunk is thick as a house, and its branches curve so high they block the pink light that Eng sheds down on us. The limbs arch back to earth, cascading fruit. Many people stand to admire as tree priestesses gather the fruit. Spectators and officiators are mostly women. The flu keeps men indoors, I suppose. Or else they can’t stand the cat shit and lilac smell. It makes me homesick. I find a spot beneath a dense waterfall of leaves and fruit and draw the rich odour in, peer through the shivering blossoms at Eng’s distant glory.
I watch Eng chase Chang, though her orbit is so distant and wide now that she will never catch him. Chang, in his ruined orbit, dances away too fast on a different path. He is so close that I can see the ports where shuttles used to dock in the last days of oil. If the Cosmopolitan Earth Council won’t boost him back out with one of their rockets, it is only a matter of time before he crashes into
Earth and kills us all.
Eng pauses at her zenith, then swells, rounds, and tumbles towards the northwest horizon. The heavy odour of fruit permeates my brain and limbs. I walk like a drugged person back towards the Cordova School, dreaming of the aunties back home, and Saltwater City at the long-ago launch of Chang and Eng. Beneath a young durian tree stands a man with eyes bright green, like he’s drunk too many cups of forget-me-do.
It takes me a few seconds to realize the man has fallen in step beside me. “Do you mind if I walk with you?”
I become aware of my own beauty in a way I had never considered before. We Grist sisters come from the same DNA. Only our ages and the differences of scars, haircuts, or minor mutations mark us as distinct from one another. We don’t think about beauty, because there’s no competition to be had. I never thought about my looks until this particular man looked. Is that how it’s done in this decaying city?
I imagine two slugs slip-sliming over one another on a log. The rage I was born with, that I’ve worked so hard all my life to contain, rises in my throat. “No thanks.”
“I just want to talk to you.”
Old Glorybind taught me what women are. I know how humans doubled in the time before, how they still do in Saltwater City. Technically speaking, we Grist sisters have the same bodies they do. He touches my arm and an unexpected electricity runs through me.
“Go away, or I’ll hurt you.” I walk faster.
He follows me.
“I mean it. Go away.”
He keeps coming.
I turn, grab his arm, press my thumb hard into the meridian of vision. He yelps, claps his free hand over his eyes. I’ve seared him. I let go.
“It isn’t friendly if I don’t want your company,” I tell him. We pass a heavy-laden durian tree, and my head fills with its jasmine and vomit odour.
“Maybe you do,” he says. “Your sister is already at the party. You know, what’s her name … Alex Coady … or something … Black hair and purple dress?”
Calyx Kaki. Our Mother watch over us. “What have you done with her?”
“Interested now?” He presses something into my hand, then springs away into the darkest hour before dawn.
WHEN I GET BACK TO THE CLINIC, SURE ENOUGH, CALYX KAKI IS GONE. The girl with no right hand is also missing. From the head of the bed, the watercolour of Eng seems to beam at me knowingly.
I take out the green-eyed man’s gift—a small disk the size of a peach pit. There’s a little button on it. I push it. A vision in gold and yellow flashes up into the air. Two batterkites with long tendrils fly up from either side, and some text glimmers, wavers, then solidifies at the centre.
Deep Scale Commune
Pacific Pearl Parkade
Gallbladder Hour
2nd Day, Minor Heat
Wood Snake Year 2145
I sound the words out slowly, as old Glorybind taught me. I grab my hunting knife and a sleeve of all-purpose needles and hurry out into the night.
31
DEEP SCALE COMMUNE
KORA KO // SALTWATER FLATS
NODE: MINOR HEAT
DAY: 2
PROTECTED BY THE WARMTH OF THE CATCOAT, KORA GOES OUT INTO the cool evening. All along the road that leads to the entrance of the Pacific Pearl Parkade hawkers sell onion cakes, red bean buns, and chicken skewers from small carts with built-in burners for bamboo charcoal. There is a woman selling disposable clothing imported from the UMK, two years out of fashion by the time it arrives. And another from St’át’imc territory selling oolichan grease rumoured to have been traded down from Haisla shores. There’s a bicycle repairman with chains, pedals, gears, and pins, all from the time before, laid out on a blanket. The ubiquitous scale artists have set up satellite stalls with a selection of their wares. They will do minor installations on the street. There are touts to guide customers to flagship clinics for larger operations and greater choice. But more than half of the stalls flog a substance that Kora has heard of only in half whispers on the street late at night, a drug called N-lite.
“See the present as you’ve never seen it before,” shouts one seller. “You know you want to!”
“Life after life!” promises the next.
“After life after,” croons a third.
A fourth sings a little tune:
chang high day nigh
gang sang sky hang
up sup you glue
left brain sync same
The third sings back:
eng low soul bowl
fool pool true who
low load new you
right brain crime scene
And the second answers them both:
auld syne small game
main frame brain drain
old sign self same
true fool goon you
Kora’s heart fills with curiosity. Her phantom hand burns like white fire. She blocks it from her mind, as though it is separate from her, as though it doesn’t belong to her anymore, which of course it doesn’t. It belongs to that creepy doctor. She needs to concentrate. This is her one chance to find out what her brother did to Charlotte and Wai.
Near the entrance to the parkade, she comes across a contingent of girls from the Cordova School, dressed up in feathers and crinolines, masks and makeup.
“You have to take it, or you won’t experience a thing,” says Soraya.
“Isabelle Chow captures everyone on it and takes them away for medical experiments,” says Modesta.
“No,” says Mirabelle. “She uses it to kidnap you and sell you as a sex slave in the UMK.”
A young one called Anna says, “It’s nothing, people. It feels good. Just take it and enjoy the party.”
Kora squeezes past them.
The entrance to the parkade is a massive sculpture made of empty food cans from the time before, variously bolted, screwed, glued, welded, and strung together to form the shape of a giant tiger’s head with a gaping maw. Flashing back to her dream, Kora shudders. The tin-can head is bathed in a flickering yellow and orange light.
Kora’s hand throbs. I wonder if it takes away hand pain. She senses a presence beside her. Turns her head. Facing the other directly, she can see who it is. Myra, in her catcoat. “Found your old friend, I see,” she says, knowingly. “Don’t be so careless next time.”
“Did you—?”
Myra holds out a vial. “Take this, Lady Kora. In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Kora eyes Myra and thinks about what Tania said. That she’s not mean, only scared. Myra looks pretty mean to Kora. And Kora is suspicious of this drug. The Gristie doctor’s drugs were bad enough. But she’s also burning to find answers.
Myra’s dark eyes inside the catcoat turn and churn, deep as ocean tides pulled by the true moon. Kora hears voices behind the singing voice:
chang high day nigh
gang sang sky hang
up sup you glue
left brain sync same
Myra says, “If you don’t take the N-lite, the parkade is just a useless ruin from the time before. To see the truth of this place, to see the Pacific Pearl, you need the drug. It’s the first step of the upload.”
This idea is weirder than the N-lite sellers’ strange chant. But lots of weird things have been happening since she left home. Should she, or shouldn’t she?
“If you don’t take it, I’ll see everything and you’ll see nothing,” Myra says. “Is that what you want?”
Kora knows Myra is baiting her.
“How about I take half and you take half? The stuff is pretty strong anyway.” Myra pops the cork, raises the vial to her left nostril, and inhales deeply. Passes it to Kora. “Come on!” The green gas wafts out, escaping to the air. “Hurry, or it’s wasted!”
Against her better judgment, Kora takes the vial and holds it up to her nose. She and her catcoat draw the green vapour in. It has a powdery candy smell, a bit chemical. Kind of like the cream soda Uncle Wai gave her once as a New Year’s gift. Have the manufactu
rers accounted for one-handed girls in catcoats? she wonders. The green vapour goes straight to her head, three times as strong as any of the strange doctor’s teas. Her eyes cross and her brain floods with an alien consciousness that both is and is not her own. Our Mother which art artful. Remember? Forget? Remember, forget, yet yet yet …
The tin-can tiger gapes its maw, and its tin-can teeth rattle and shake above her like wind chimes from the world inside the world. Did she just think that? She grabs Myra’s hand. They enter the cavernous cathedral that was once the Pacific Pearl Parkade.
Men sick with tiger flu have lived here for a hundred years, since the first resuscitated Caspian tigers leapt their own extinction and burst from the DNA extracted from an old tiger-skin rug in the living room of a once revered and then denounced party official from the United Middle Kingdom, or whatever it was called before it expanded and swallowed all the smaller countries around it. The People’s Pub of … something. She had the scale, but traded it to K2 for one about medicine before the privatization of Chang and Eng. Now that the flu has intensified against human males, the tiger men have become insular to the point of reclusive. Other denizens of Saltwater City have not entered the parkade in a generation.
The tiger men have retained part of the original parkade structure, so it is still possible to follow the path of so many ancient automobiles to the parkade’s sky-piercing pinnacle. But they have also removed half of the ascending lanes, so from the foyer in the tin-can tiger’s throat Kora can look up up up, as though up to the spires of an ancient church and into the eye of a wrathful old god determined to damn all denizens to the very depths of an ancient, half-forgotten hell that for centuries ruled the actions of men—yes, men—through an even more ancient fear and brought the world to its knees.
Whoa, Kora thinks. This N-lite is one heavy drug. Its hell pulls, pulsing beneath the soles of her feet. It rumbles and shudders, hums with the deep glottal growl of an old tiger twice the size of the massive parkade, lying just below the surface of the earth, half-asleep but vibrating into wakefulness and waiting to pounce.
