by Larissa Lai
Her civility is the thinnest of veneers. She knows the world has radically changed since I was here with my mother double. If she were offered a womb bomb filled with Grist sisters for a good price, she would buy it and not bat an eyelash. I stop arguing.
Elzbieta orders dish after opulent dish, and wines and spirits made from all the herbs, fruits, and grains grown in the massive green domes of the New Origins Archive. Myra piles her plate and eats like she hasn’t seen food in a week. I am in no mood to eat or drink, not even when the beets and red mustards appear. Like a child, I play with my food, and excuse myself as soon as it is honourable to do so.
“You’ll stay long enough to celebrate Mid-Autumn with us, won’t you?” says Elzbieta before she’ll let me go.
“I hope to be on my way sooner than that.”
“Nonsense. Of course you’ll stay.”
39
THE DARK KITCHEN
KORA KO // NEW ORIGINS ARCHIVE
NODE: AUTUMN EQUINOX
DAY: 9
KORA DREAMS SHE’S FORAGING AS THE CORDOVA GIRLS HAVE TAUGHT her. She’s digging through earth so radioactive it glows. She uncovers the tar and stucco roof of some ancient supermarket, bashes at it with her shovel. It gives more easily than any roof she’s ever known in real life. She descends through the hole on coarse hemp rope, pulls out her jar of fireflies. Rows and rows of tuna cans, covered in the dust of ages but otherwise intact, reveal themselves in the pale light. She hears footsteps in another aisle. She should be afraid, she thinks. But she’s not. The footsteps are uneven in a familiar way. Papa Wai? Is that you?
Then a gentle knocking, knuckles on wood. There’s no wood among these ancient cans. Where am I? A jolt of fear bolts through her. Police? No, Kora, you’ve left Saltwater City. You are safe. Oh, the door. She gets up.
The knock at the door keeps coming. Kora attempts to put on the robe that’s been laid out for her, but its tie gets tangled in the intricate latticework of the chair on which it lies. By the time she untangles it and gets to the door, the person is gone. She hears their footsteps turn a corner. Rushes after them just in time to catch a glimpse of a familiar figure. Charlotte? She hears a familiar bleat. It cannot be … But this goat is alive and whole. “Ma-aaa-aaa-aaa.” Just like old times.
She hurries around the corner, chasing the sound of Charlotte’s footsteps and the bleating of the goat. Halfway down the hall, a blue door stands open. The goat’s bleat echoes as though it has entered a cavernous space. The footsteps that can’t be any but her mother’s echo strangely too. As Kora approaches the blue door, her feet begin to weigh heavy. She stands at the open entrance and stares down into the dark. That baleful bleat again. Kora knows it can’t be her own goat, but the tone of its bleat is exactly what she remembers. “Maaaaaa-aaaaaa-aaaaaaa.”
Kora puts her foot on the top step, and nearly trips over a single red beet lying there as a chemical candy smell engulfs her. N-lite. She could turn back now, before it’s too late. She pauses for a second, then stoops to pick up the beet. What does this mean?
“Ma-aaa-aaa-aaa.”
“I’m coming, Delphine!” She puts the beet in her pocket and steps onto the second step.
A rumbling dread fills her, a quiet, earthly dread, warm and dense. Her head fills with strange language, a chant she half recognizes:
eng low soul bowl
fool pool true who
low load new you
right brain crime scene
Her limbs weigh as though pulled by the gravity of a much larger planet. Madame taught her how to slide into dread when necessity calls. She settles into the rumbling darkness and prepares for whatever comes. Catches a whiff of something green and bitter. Charlotte’s footsteps echo in the hollow stairwell. It is truly dark now, a darker dark than Kora has ever known. Dark that smells of stone and damp and the low hum of the elemental force that sustains the earth itself.
She hears Myra’s voice in her inner ear, competing with the chant: Don’t you know you are the source of the tiger flu? If not for you, all our brothers, sons, fathers, and uncles would still be alive. If not for you, the ice caps would not have melted, there would be no disease, no war, no death. We would live in fields of abundance, with all the apples and rice, pork and fish we could possibly want. We would live in houses of glory on streets paved in renminbi. We would drive hummers so fast that departure and arrival would be the same moment. We would be happy, perfect, loving, magnanimous. Stories of our beauty and wealth would spread all over the world, and people would come from distant lands to pay tribute. If not for you, if not for you …
But beyond Myra’s voice—Charlotte’s footsteps and the goat’s gentle bleat.
The voices of the other Cordova sisters join Myra’s. The deep hum of the chant brain frame face drain clamours in Kora’s inner ear in dissonance with if not for you if not for you until she thinks she will go deaf. She feels them on her skin. They pinch her arms, her legs, her back, her face. And where they pinch, she feels infection stir. Now the pinchers are gone, but where they have dug their sharp nails into her flesh, great lesions bloom and fill with pus. They burst and a hot, noxious filth from inside her body gushes out. The pus oozes over the surface of her skin. What if she catches the flu down here, and dies of it, and no one ever finds her? It’s not too late to turn around and go back up the stairs. She glances over her shoulder at the light coming from the hallway above. She looks down into the velvet dark.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, spoiled girl, plague source, foul and revolting. If you cry, it’s all over. If you cry, it proves you did it, say the voices.
She bites her lip and listens for Charlotte’s distant footsteps. Her body weighs like a sack of rotten potatoes.
If only you would give us everything you are withholding. If only you were not so stingy, so selfish, so mean and uncaring. If only you had never been born, and your mother and father had never been born. If only your grandfathers and grandmothers had never been born. If only this world had never made the conditions to bring you into being. The tiger would not be free from its rug. The wine would not be free from its bones. The flu would not be free from the wine, and we, who are good, holy, and blessed by Our Mother, would be healthy, wealthy, and well.
The goat bleats loudly and so distinctly that Kora knows it can’t be any other than her own Delphine. Rain same main game.
She feels something sharp against her chest. In the next moment, a blade tears through her, sinks into her beating heart. In another moment, there’s a knife in her eye. Her skull opens, and the coils of her brain snake out and down her face, spongy, wet, and soft. She shrieks. A knife goes into her belly, slits her open from zip to zatch. Someone’s pulling, tugging at her organs. She feels them, coiling her intestines out, loop by loop. She screams and can’t stop screaming. She becomes the scream, the howl of a lost dog in the night, the scream of a decade past and the decade prior to that, the trail of tiger flu in reverse. She screams the emergence of the quarantine rings, the first epidemic, the tiger wine craze, the end of oil, the launch of Chang and Eng, the expulsion of the Grist sisters, their legalization for labour on Pacific Gyre Island, the discovery of Chan Ling’s genetic mutation, Chan Ling’s immigration from the United Middle Kingdom to Cascadia, the consolidation of the United Middle Kingdom from China and all the little Asian countries that surround it, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the birth of Chan Ling’s great-grandmother to a young Hakka woman in the village of Happy Valley in the early days of the British colonial administration, the Opium War, the fall of the Ming dynasty … She screams and screams and screams, and in her mind’s eye sees a sideways figure eight, the loop of infinity screaming the scream of her long history. The howl of the O of ooooooooooooooooooooo green dark and the earth and the blue dark beneath it. She howls the woooooooooooooooooo of the blue dark turning purple and groans the groan of the heavy wet earth, the hum and rumble of its darkest core, a sleeping tiger moaning nightmares to the world, burning burning
the infrared flame of immortal forest everything it longs to release but holds within only by the grace of Our Mother.
When Kora is sure that she is pure pain without a body, she feels an unexpected warmth in her new right hand, the only part of her that is real.
Charlotte.
“It’s all right, child. It’s okay. You made it.”
Her mother’s hand is the temperature of her own blood. The skin is soft and wrinkled.
“You’re alive.” Relief floods through her, followed by unbidden tears. As fast as it came on, the searing pain dissipates. “Oh, Charlotte. Oh, Mom.”
“Praise Isabelle, I am alive, though changed.”
“Changed how?”
“I’m an attendant of the great satellite Eng.”
Kora raises an eyebrow in the dark.
“Don’t be afraid. We will visit the underground sisters. We will visit the Dark Baths. You will have a dream that will show us how to proceed. You’ve found us now.”
The goat gently butts Kora’s left hand with its hard, rough head. She strokes it between the eyes. “Who are the underground sisters?”
“My subjects,” Charlotte says. “Some have been here since the last ice age. Some come from the end of oil. One is a Grist sister, like you and me.”
“We’re not … You never said …”
“Since my arrival I’ve wanted to meet them, but they will not speak to me. If they speak to you, it’s a sign you are meant to stay here with me, inherit the archive and everything in it.”
“I can’t … There’s not …”
“No reluctance,” Charlotte says. “You take the fate you are given. It’s the law of Our Mother. This archive is a good place, a place of memory. It holds the blueprints for everything animal, vegetable, and mineral that lived in the time before. If it is given to you, it is a gift you must accept with grace.”
The chant in Kora’s head grows low and slow as the darkness deepens:
face place grin fine
small game goon tool
soon rule soul bowl
kow tow know how
“I wasn’t sure if the you I saw that day at the Pacific Pearl was real.”
“I’m real now …”
Kora begins to shiver. “Cold …”
auld syne small game
main frame brain drain
old sign self same
true fool goon you
Charlotte pulls something out from the folds of what sounds, in the dark, like a heavy cloak, though Kora can see nothing. The something mewls, high and thin.
“Catcoat?” Joy wells up in the pit of her belly. She feels her belly. It is small but whole. She touches her head. It too is intact. She takes the catcoat and steps gratefully into it. Its contented warmth flows deliciously through her.
“We start at zero,” says Charlotte.
And even further down they go on the cold stone steps. As they descend, Kora begins to see again. A thin light glows from the deep earth itself. Phosphorescence, her geology memory scale tells her. Kora is tempted to look at Charlotte’s face but is afraid to.
At minus three they are met by a pale young woman with white hair and eyes. Her skin is so translucent the veins glow with blue-grey blood running beneath them. She speaks the same Salt Inglish as Kora and Charlotte but with a slightly earthy accent.
“At last you’ve brought the one who will care for us. We eat well here but require more root vegetables, especially more beets and purple carrots. There are seven of us who are willing to come to the surface in the daylight hours to work the root gardens, as long as we can return to our home at night. We sleep well, though we hear the archive’s construction noises sometimes, in the early morning.”
Kora stares at the young woman in pure astonishment. “Who …”
But Charlotte puts her index finger to her lips, gives the pale woman a polite nod. “Seen and heard, sister,” she says.
“Who are these women, and where are we?” Kora blurts before Charlotte can stop her. “Why did you agree to go take part in Marcus and K2’s terrible experiments? I hope it wasn’t to fund my education at the Cordova School. How did you end up with Isabelle?”
Charlotte gazes at her sorrowfully, as though she wants to say something. She opens her mouth, but no words come out. Again, she puts her finger to her lips.
Below minus six, the phosphorescence diminishes and the dark grows thick again. At minus nine, Kora senses a short stocky body moving in the dark. She hears the person sit down. Charlotte sits too and pulls Kora down beside her. Kora can receive only fragments of this earth sister’s croak.
“… neglected and … so alien so … your language … misunderstand … distraction from the truth …”
Charlotte explains as they descend farther into the dark. “I couldn’t get them to talk, but I can translate now that they are speaking. The sisters at minus nine want us to come down here more, to sit and be with them. They carry the history of the time before. That sister remembers the collapse of the dollar, the riots, the lootings, the genocides, and the Six Quakes—did your dancing teachers teach you about those? Most surface people cannot remember. The sisters at minus nine hold the horror for us. It is an important service. They eat mushrooms and earth fish. They want nothing from us but our time.”
Kora nods gravely, but she feels like she is going to burst. “Charlotte, I should never have left you. I’m sorry, Mom.”
That look again, but no words.
The sister who meets them at minus twelve does not attempt surface language at all. Charlotte hails and praises her, but she grunts dismissively, then groans as though in terrible agony. Kora thinks she sees eyes glitter in the darkness of the stairwell, but there is no light here. Her own eyes must be playing tricks. The groaning sister accompanies them to minus fifteen.
At minus fifteen, the sister who meets them towers over them in the dark. She is so tall, Kora can hear her head brushing against the ceiling. She takes Kora’s small mittened hand in her own earthy enormous one and leads them farther down into the dark.
The sister who meets them at minus eighteen is so silent they cannot even hear her feet on the stone steps. Her silence echoes the silence of the earth. Down and farther down they go, until, at minus thirty-six, the earth itself leaves them at the door of the Dark Baths. The warm, moist air reeks of sulphur. Kora feels as though she has acquired another language, one with much wisdom but no words. She wants words more than anything. Presses Charlotte one more time, but her mother will not respond to her questions. Instead, Charlotte guides her to the chamber that houses the Dark Baths and hands her a towel.
Kora sighs. “I’m sorry, Mom. I should have been a better daughter. I was a terrible daughter, wasn’t I?”
Charlotte gives her a sad little smile and pushes her towards the water.
Kora resists. The water’s darkness makes it look deep. What if there are living things in it?
“Go on, daughter. While the water is open to you.”
She takes a step forward. The damp air grows damper still, as though the pool were pulling her.
Kora surrenders. She slips out of her catcoat and into the water.
She arcs up onto her back and floats. No need to close her eyes. It is so dark that inside and outside have become one and the same. She hears voices. She closes her eyes and thinks she perceives brief flashes of light through her eyelids. She opens her eyes, and it is dark as ever. Something like sleep descends, and she surrenders to it. She sees a city of towers. The outside of every tower is lined with elevators going up and down, up and down, as day turns into night and night turns into day. Squid things from another dream, long ago, sit atop the towers, growing fatter and fatter as the elevators go up and down. All along, the voices of the Cordova girls echo in her head: If not for you, if not for you.
She wakes. You’ve arrived at Quay D’Espoir, the very first settlement Isabelle built for the travellers to Eng, says a new voice in her head.
The water of
the Dark Baths feels cold and smells unpleasantly of stale urine.
What are the Dark Baths? she thinks to the new voice.
brain frame face drain
rain same main game
pin time dream wine
crane brine sync line
Upload interface? Kora mouths.
Download.
SHE KICKS GENTLY TO PROPEL HERSELF TO THE STONE STEPS AND climbs out of the baths. Where she left the catcoat, someone has left a towel on the rail. She dries herself and dresses. A damp chill wafts off the surface of the water. A different, stonier chill emanates from the walls and with it a faint light that renders the shapes around her in shades of grey. It is strange to be awake down here, stranger, almost, than to be asleep and dreaming. Yet she can’t drum up the intention to leave. Where are Charlotte and the goat? Have they abandoned her?
“Delphine!” she wails, or tries to. No sounds comes out of her N-lite stoned throat.
She wanders back towards the hall. Instead of stairs, there is an elevator door. She presses the button and waits.
Presently, the elevator arrives, lit pink from within and full of root vegetables—beets, yams, sweet potatoes, lo bak, carrots, onions, garlic, ginger, and radishes—so many that, as the doors slide open, half of them tumble out, nearly crushing her. As though still in a dream, she begins to empty the elevator. To her surprise, a clutch of burly sisters with round, fleshy faces clomps in from one of the hallways behind her. They have wheelbarrows in which to put the vegetables. Within a matter of minutes, the elevator is empty. Kora takes a step forward to enter, but one of the sisters takes her hand.
“What did you do with Charlotte and the goat?” says Kora.
In the rosy dark, the sister shakes her head. She touches Kora’s mouth, and then her belly.
“Eat?” Kora says.
The sister pulls her hand.
She could become one of my people, if I become high priestess here. I have a responsibility. Where did that come from?
She allows herself to be led.
Deeper than the Dark Baths lies a Dark Kitchen. The sister now helps her sit in a pile of soft cushions that smell of rooty and rhizomey spices—ginger, turmeric, licorice. The dark is at its full velvety thickness again. Kora hears knives chop and grinders whirl. Liquids splash from bottles to bowls. Bowls and chopsticks clack against one another. There is a brief flash of light as a stove is lit, and for an instant, a dozen broad faces catch the light and wince. The cook covers the stove, and then it is dark again, though not quite as dark as it had been. There is just enough light coming from the cracks in the stove for Kora to see the dark shapes of the kitchen sisters moving around the cavernous room.
