The Tiger Flu

by Larissa Lai

  “There is real, and there is real.”

  “Mama Glory, I don’t understand.”

  “We’re riding the dark frame Eng.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “The Dark Baths are a place of interface. Eventually, the pool drains your being and transfers it to Eng. But not always whole. Isabelle is working on the path to Eng as an experiment in sensation. She calls it the deep download. It’s designed to make us more real than we were before.”

  “But Peristrophe Halliana died, Mama, in my arms, at home …”

  “Eng accepts downloads, but Isabelle also makes retakes of her own with a scrap of DNA, a bit of code, and the essence of pure emotion concocted from our very own forget-me-do combined with distillates from other plants, animals, and minerals. Their being expands through the feelings of those who love them.”

  “So this Peristrophe Halliana was a fake?” I begin to blubber like the little child I promised her I would cease to be. “I’m sorry, I …”

  “There, there, my dearest little one …”

  “What about you? Are you a fake too? Or are you dead? How could I cut out Peristrophe’s heart if this is already a place of the dead? Am I dead too?”

  “I’m not dead, but I’m done.”

  “Downloaded to Eng.”

  “Yes. Alive of mind but heavy in the body.”

  “It feels so real down here …” I pull into the softness of the towel to confirm this.

  “Isabelle Chow is working hard on verisimilitude.”

  “And Peristrophe?”

  “Real and whole and true as you, my dearest one.”

  “So I cut out her heart for true and real. I killed her.”

  “Did you see her dead?”

  “We Grist sisters believe that body and mind exist together in harmonious balance. When one dies the person no longer exists.” I take my left arm in my right and pinch hard, afraid I might no longer be real. I’ve never been so relieved to feel pain. I’m cold too. I shiver.

  “We Grist sisters may have to get with Our Mother’s times,” says Glorybind.

  “No,” I say. “That’s not what you taught me. Who are you?”

  “I’m your mother double, Glorybind Groundsel. Just changed, ever so slightly.” Her voice wavers. Inside me, a door slams shut.

  “I have to find Kora Ko. And that troublemaker Myra Mao. I’m sure she came down here.” I find my old tunic, the one I took off in what seems like another lifetime, still hanging on the rail. I take it now and pull it on.

  My strange mother double follows me as I roam the barely lit halls of the Dark Baths looking for Kora. There are no rooms branching from the room with the pool, as I am sure there were when I arrived. Its walls are now smooth and closed as an unbroken egg. I need to get out of there. This is not a good place, not a good place at all.

  My dreaminess has fully left me, except for the memory of Peristrophe’s hot heart, pulsing in my hands. I shudder. I look at the ghost of Glorybind Groundsel. “Stairs,” I say.

  “No, Kirilow,” she says. “Don’t leave. Now that we are finally together again.”

  “Stairs.”

  The stairs reappear at the far end of the room. As they do, my legs grow heavy, and I hear a faint hiss. The air grows subtly green. I heave towards the escape like a dying mammoth. Dark shapes amass behind me, moan and whisper as they lumber through the moist dark.

  My legs weigh as I ascend. It takes every ounce of effort I’ve got to move them. I move like a rock returning from the dead. It takes hours to climb the hundred or so steps to the top. Above me, a familiar figure scrambles, lithe and light. Myra? She should be down here with me. There’s a flash of light as the blue door swings open for a second and a slam as it closes. I plod, groaning heavy, towards where I saw the flash.

  “I can’t come up into the light with you,” says the Eng version of my mother double. She grabs my hand, and it feels so much like her hand I think I will faint.

  I don’t want to feel this longing. I try to pull away. Although the sensation of her grip remains gentle and light, somehow, I can’t extract my hand.

  “Will you say goodbye?”

  I don’t look at her.

  “Child, I’m as real as I ever was.”

  “Please let go of my hand,” I say.

  With such reluctance, such grief, she lets go. Peristrophe Halliana appears beside her in the grey darkness, pale as a birch tree and bleeding from her open chest. Her eyes stream silently. The thin sheet of light that comes through the crack between the door and its frame above catches on a tear, and the tear glistens. Its light bounces off the passage wall into my eye and nearly blinds me.

  “Kirilow—”

  “Peri—”

  “Your best beloved …” says Glorybind.

  “I killed her. I cut out her heart. She wasn’t strong enough to root a new one. She is dead.”

  “My only groom, please don’t leave me,” the fake Peristrophe Halliana says.

  Deep inside my chest, I feel my own heart split right in two.

  “Kirilow …” she wails.

  “Dearest Peristrophe,” I whisper, so hoarsely it comes out a croak.

  “Look at me—”

  “I can’t. You know I can’t.”

  “My best and only groom … Kiri …”

  A frail cry escapes my throat.

  “Please, Kirilow, don’t leave me here.”

  I begin to turn my head, but then I think I hear Kora’s voice on the other side of the door. “Hurry up, come on. Don’t listen. Don’t let them take you.”

  Before my split heart can speak again, I turn the handle on the blue door. It won’t budge. From the other side come voices: “The handle moved! She’s back there.”

  “She’s gone over to Isabelle. The high priestess will be furious. Don’t let her out.”

  “She doesn’t know. She’s just a stupid Gristie. She won’t understand a thing she’s seen.”

  “She’s a doctor. She is smart …”

  “Let her through. Elzbieta wants everyone at the feast.”

  The door opens suddenly, and I tumble out into the light.

  41

  GOA SACRIFICIAL GOAT

  KORA KO // NEW ORIGINS ARCHIVE

  NODE: AUTUMN EQUINOX

  DAY: 10 (MID-AUTUMN FESTIVAL)

  KORA WAKES WITH A CHILL IN HER BONES. SHE’S LYING ON A HEAP OF soft but musty cushions. Someone has laid a tattered blanket over her and tucked it lovingly around her face. The Dark Kitchen is empty. She strokes her arm, and the catcoat hugs her tight, purring. She throws off the blanket and wanders out of the kitchen and down the faintly lit hallway.

  “Charlotte!” she calls. “Delphine!”

  The cocooning earth of the hallway warms her gently. But neither her mother nor her beloved goat are anywhere to be found. They felt so real. The heat radiating off the humusy hallway walls intensifies. She feels comfort. But beneath that comfort, anxiety, and a desire to see Kirilow. She’s got to find Kirilow.

  Here’s the elevator. She presses the button, and the doors open. Clumps of earth that must have fallen off last night’s root vegetables litter the elevator floor. As she steps in, the catcoat mewls. Kora presses the button marked 0. As she does, the cheap candy smell of N-lite makes her nose twitch. The elevator ascends. The catcoat embraces her more and more tightly, and the N-light smell intensifies. The elevator doors open, not far from her bedroom door on the main floor of the New Origins Archive. The catcoat squeezes and vibrates so intensely it gives her a headache. The green gas wafts about her thickly. Between the two, she can hardly breathe. She steps out into the hallway, and the catcoat lets go. She gasps for air. The catcoat is gone, and she’s standing there in her robe and nightie, blinking in the glaring lights.

  Crowds of New Origins sisters rush down the hallway. A dense pack of them come so fast and thick Kora is rushed along with them. The lights sting her eyes. She throws her pink right hand up to protect them.


  A young acolyte pushing a cart that overflows with pungent-smelling herbs nearly bumps right into her, only swerving at the last minute. “Watch where you’re going, damn ignorant Gristie!”

  “Not a Gristie …” Kora rasps. She turns, too N-lite slow to follow the whirl of the impatient acolyte. She finds herself instead face to face with a different New Origins sister pushing a cart full of roots.

  “Elzbieta thinks you Gristies are the future. Can you imagine anything more absurd? What is the world coming to?”

  “Not a Gristie,” blurts Kora, more clearly this time. She has got to find Kirilow. And they’ve got to get out of here.

  “Better get cleaned up,” says a kindly older nun, coming from the opposite direction carrying a bottle full of amber liquid. “You don’t want the high priestess to think you don’t care.”

  “Just an hour to go,” says a helpful acolyte she meets at the crossroad of two hallways.

  A non-goat, very human hand grabs her wrist. “Lost, Lady Kora? You have an appointment with the high priestess. Don’t you know? And you’re late. You better get going—you don’t want to get in trouble.” It’s the middle attendant from the night before, Vera, dressed in emerald green.

  “I have to find the Gristie doctor.”

  “Never mind. You can catch up with her later.”

  Kora’s mind is crawls through N-lite fog. Her eyes are full of mucus she can’t blink away. She would like to get out of this Mother-forsaken place, but she needs Kirilow to lead the way to New Grist Village. She allows herself to be pulled into one of the great biodomes, inside the convolutions of the NOA’s massive coral brain. The attendant pulls her into a bamboo thicket. Her feet don’t quite seem to reach the ground, and she walks as though flying, as though she could fall from the air at any moment. The attendant in green rushes through the lush foliage and supple, swaying limbs of bamboo so quickly that Kora finds herself chasing nothing but the violent shivering of leaves.

  At last, she finds herself in the courtyard of a small temple carved out of copper porphyry, deep in the grove.

  “It’s the first entrance to the mine that used to operate here,” Vera explains. “Way back in the time before. Come inside.”

  Light from the many gaps in the temple’s roof filters in and casts a flickering pattern of brightness and shadow on the gravel floor. There’s a statue embedded in the alcove at the end, a figure of Our Mother of a Thousand Hands. Each hand holds an object of ritual significance—a scale, a shoe, a rocket, a peach …

  The statue moves.

  Instinctively, Kora leaps into empty cat stance. N-lite doesn’t own her yet.

  The statue laughs and steps into the light. The arms were the backdrop of the altar, but the statue is a woman of flesh, with two arms. She is abnormally beautiful. With pale hair piled in an intricate knot atop her head, she is as lovely as Our Mother in her manifestation as the moon goddess Heng’e. Why does Kora think such things? Knowledge of Our Mother, if not fervency for her worship, must be rubbing off on her from spending so much time with Kirilow.

  Kora draws herself upright and brushes the waving tendril scales from her face.

  “Your Majesty,” she blurts cluelessly.

  She recognizes Elzbieta from the hour of their arrival, but this strange place accentuates their host’s aspect as high priestess of the New Origins Archive. She looms, imposing and holy. But her laugh tinkles and twinkles like a rope of silver bells.

  “Sister Elzbieta is fine,” she says. “Did you lose your companions?”

  Kora nods. “A while ago. Where are they?”

  “They’ve gone to the Speaking Waterfall, in all likelihood,” says Elzbieta.

  “In this biodome?”

  “Yes. Buttercup and Rose take all our guests there. If you throw a pebble in, Our Mother will disclose the future to you.”

  “I’m not a follower of Our Mother,” Kora says. “So I don’t believe in such things.”

  Elzbieta laughs her tinkling laugh again. “What do you believe in, Kora Ko?”

  Considering the beauty and abundance this place provides, Kora could be more gracious. But Kora’s head is still full of her strange experience in the Dark Baths. “I don’t know anymore. I saw my mother and my goat. Were they real?”

  “Did you now?” says Elzbieta. Her smile remains as benevolent as ever, but her eyes have grown dark.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Not at all, child, not at all.” Elzbieta’s displeasure is palpable.

  A bolt of fear zaps Kora’s gut. She’s betrayed someone without knowing who or what. Worse, she’s put herself in some unknown danger.

  The high priestess sees her fear, and her eyes light up again. “Perhaps you’ll sit with me at the Feast of Abundance tonight.

  Kora hesitates. The N-lite fog is lifting. “I don’t know …”

  “And one day, maybe, you’ll inherit the New Origins Archive in all its bounty. Wouldn’t that be better than going to New Grist Village with that dirty Gristie Kirilow Groundsel?” Her voice again silver sweet.

  “Well …”

  “Don’t play coy with me, tiger flu girl,” says Elzbieta. The silvery tinkle leaves her voice, and a hiss enters it. “I know that Isabelle has tempted you.”

  Kora takes a step back.

  “Are you already loyal to her? Hmm? Are you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’ve discovered the portal to Eng. You all but told me so yourself. It’s too late to play ignorant.” Her eyes blaze with rage.

  “Please,” Kora says, “I really don’t understand.”

  “So young and yet so sly. This is a war, Kora. A war.”

  “I don’t care about your shitty war.”

  “Do you care about your father?”

  Kora takes a great, croaking breath. She blinks hard, but the tears come anyway.

  Elzbieta smiles.

  “Oh,” she says. “Oh, there now. You miss your father. Of course. Of course you do. Would you like to see him again?

  Kora backs away, but Elzbieta steps forward. “You haven’t seen your father yet, have you? Because Isabelle doesn’t have him. What’s his name? Kai Wai …”

  “I saw him at the Pacific Pearl LïFT.”

  “That was just a tiny taster before they were fully transferred.”

  The attendant in green moves in and kindly takes Kora’s hand. “He didn’t make the transfer to Eng. But the upload to Chang is better anyway.”

  Elzbieta says, “More verisimilitude.”

  The attendant in green says, “That means more real, Priestess Kora.”

  Elzbieta beams too bright. “Come with me and I’ll show you.”

  Kora aches for her father. She would give anything to tell him she knows. And to ask him why he and Charlotte kept the secrets of her paternity and inheritance from her all these years. Her foggy brain is a cloud of emotions—rage at him for lying to her and for sacrificing himself without asking her if she wanted him to, but deeper than that a love and a longing that she’ll never be able to tell him about. She drags her pink right hand across her eyes, making a great smear of kohl and tears across her small unhealthy face. Vera takes her hand and squeezes it.

  “Come along, Priestess Kora!” Elzbieta calls. “If you want to see your father on Chang, you’ve got to be quick.” She walks out into the courtyard and then deeper into the thicket. In the distance, Kora hears the sound of rushing water.

  “Yes, hurry!” It cannot be. Kai Wai’s warm, embracing voice.

  She follows the high priestess and the attendant in green back through the Blossoming Baths. All round Kora and Elzbieta, sisters gather last-minute crops for the coming Mid-Autumn feast. Among them are nuns, acolytes, lay practitioners, and guests from the Third and Fourth Quarantine Rings. They heap carrots, parsley, mint, forget-me-do, and kabocha squash into large rattan baskets.

  “This way, this way,” says the high priestess.

&
nbsp; “Going to Mid-Autumn supper, Lady Kora?” An acolyte smiles brightly, but as soon as Kora passes, she hears her titter.

  “The sacrificial goat,” she hears another say.

  “Saltwater meat …”

  Something is very wrong.

  “Maybe I should wait until after the feast,” she says, as Elzbieta pulls her insistently forward. “A body can’t come down from Chang, right? I’d like to see Myra and Kirilow one last time …”

  “Kora!” calls her father from somewhere in the foliage of the Blossoming Baths.

  “You can message them from Chang,” says the high priestess. “The technology is almost there. But right now, we have to hurry.” She’s pulling so hard, Kora fears her arm might come right off. “It’s now or never, Lady Kora. After the feast, the lineups for the LïFT will be long, and Chang is running out of space. You don’t want to lose your chance, do you? Your father is waiting for you. Don’t you want to see him?”

  “Of course I do. I just …” Fear and longing knot together to form a massive lump in her throat.

  Three young acolytes huddle together at the next bend. They glance up at Kora and fall into a fit of giggles.

  “No time to waste,” says Elzbieta.

  At the back of the complex, they enter the LïFT sanctuary.

  “Are you sure he’s there?” Kora asks.

  “Of course. Come along now.”

  “It’s dark back here.”

  “It is the only way if you want to see him. You want to, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I want to see my father more than anything.”

  “Well, keep moving then. We don’t have—”

  Before Elzbieta can complete her sentence, a fine, sticky net falls over each of them. Kora shrieks. The net’s a sack with a strong drawstring. Someone yanks the string and Kora jackknifes into fetal position. “What the hell!”

  She can hear Elzbieta yelling too. “How dare you, demons, cursed for all eternity by the Great Mother of us all—”

  The candy stink of N-lite fills Kora’s nostrils, stronger than she’s ever smelled it. She blacks out.

  42

  CHANGE ENGINEERS

  KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // NEW ORIGINS ARCHIVE

  NODE: AUTUMN EQUINOX