Susurrus on Mars

by Hal Duncan

  They settle on helices, spiraling springs of existence in stint, span and shift, the three dee of time. The slinky stretched becomes a closed circle or ongoing undulation depending on which angle of eye you lose, which dee you’re not seeing. Imagine it horizontal and laterally bisected by Edwin Abbott Abott’s Flatland and you’d have a series of dots arranged as leafs alternate on a stem—left, right, left, right—as footprints in sand, seemingly disconnected but entirely of a unity if one only grasps the other dimensions.

  •

  THE CRETE OF the juvenile Zeus is where Krokus was born, Crocus sativus, as a sport of his wild precursor, created by intensive selection for the slender inch-long crimson stigmas dried to make saffron, red spice for paella and bouillabaise, golden dye for the robes of a Minoan snake-goddess, Buddhist monks. Greek hetaerae used saffron in their scented waters and ointments, perfumes and potpourris, mascaras and medicines, offerings at the shrine of Persephone, who was picking his purple blossoms when abducted, whose return he announced via a kindred species of his genus, bright golden Crocus chrysantheus. At first, Demeter shook with fury to see their gaiety, having ruled that naught should flourish till her daughter be returned.

  But the Kore is coming, he said, and the ground split, and Persphone rose from Hades, and the world renewed.

  On Earth, as sterile as he was sacred, Krokus had to be cultivated by the manual crack of a season’s starchy brown corm, less than two inches in diameter, into all his sundry cormlets, up to ten of them forming even as the old corm that fed him through his aestivation shriveled, as he shot up maybe five to eleven leaves, nigh vertical, maybe a foot high, budding inverted purple teardrops in the fall, to blossom late, lazybones October lover that he is, unfolding a cup of six petals shaded light as lilac, violet, mauve, three yellow anthers furred with pollen, and those three stigma of blood.

  On Earth, he was precious; they remade him here on Mars, grafted the genes of other species of his genus into his chromosomes, unleashed him to grow wild again as he hadn’t done for a fistful of millennia. He’s no longer quite the same Krokus killed by the discus of Hermes, dropped to his knees from the mishap, blood dripping down over doe-eyes that sought his lover’s face with stunned confusion—Am I to die now?—blood dripping to splash in the soil, each drip sprouting a bloom with the red of his mortality staining those precious stigmas.

  But maybe he never was. Wasn’t that Hyakinthos anyway, and the discus of Apollo? Wasn’t his tale to do with Smilax wasting away for the love he squandered in the hunt, Aphrodite’s prayer to Artemis damning him for his callow disdain? It’s all a bit dreamy still, bleared with slumber.

  Still, Krokus is awakening now, in a patch of feral rock garden on the edge of a stead inhabited again, these last few years, by fleshlings. Curious for news of them, he is pushing up to the brush of Susurrus across the tip of his shoots, the godling wind barely touching, like some cat sashaying slow at the very extent of reach, just close enough for fingertips to feel the soft of fur. The tease.

  Facing the gates—and facing the sun, so happily facing the sun, albeit with boorish brambles threatening his back—he has a good spot for the sideshow, stretches up from the earth eager to know: has the one of blunt shift who arrived first started gardening? maybe pruned that dishevelry at the side of the gates? is the other still around, the one of keen shift who hurricaned through the scrapwood of the undercroft? any sign he might bring a similar reckoning to the brambles? does he know, zesty hotspur that he is, apparently, according to the tales brought back by Susurrus, that I was an aphrodisiac in the bath of Cleopatra, salve in the bath of Alexander?

  He wasn’t cherished just for his rarity. Krokus is the paragon of spice, herald of hanker and fettle. Here on the cusp of summer, he is only just awakening, but he can feel the shift of the season in him, and O if he were a fleshling again, how he would yawn and flex.

  His name is older than the Greek language.

  •

  RENART GRASPS THE asperity of blood orange from the stancing of Jaq, torques it to scry the overflow into suck of cheeks, correlates with the simultaneous backflex of shoulders as under a chiropractor’s knead. A moment of deliciation to be drawn out, a moment of gusto—he capsules and logs it, another note in the project that is Jaq.

  The project: where Kristeva situates the abject in a conceptual space between the subject and the object, alive and yet not, that which was once us but is no longer, Davenport turns this inside out with the notion of the project, that which was once not us but is now. Objectivity, subjectivity, projectivity: it was a natural progression. Early critics confused Davenport’s new paradigm of perspective with the narcissist child undifferentiated from its environs, ungrasping that the world is not the sphere of one’s desires, a handmaid holding a mirror as extension of self—the state, in short, before one truly knows there is a not-me. No, Davenport said, projectivity requires anagnorisis of one’s own agency, is the recognition precisely of one’s distinction, how the echoes and resonances engrave.

  As within, so beyond.

  The soft toy of the thumbsucking years, identity jounced into it with every giggle. The project begins where possession becomes attribute. As Zeus’s lightning is Zeus unleashed into the world, so the child’s teddy bear is the child.

  The bedsuite walls, wearing our infant enthusiasms as reliquary touchscreens, self strewn over its surfaces in images of stars, human or celestial, the constellations of desire. The difference between object and project is that between house and home. With the first red ochre hand print, the Paleolithic cave ceased to be just a cave, became the inside of our head turned out.

  Our attitudes, mouthed not by us but in a friend’s wrangle of impulse or opinion, as they conjure our voice to play the angel of their better nature, their imp of the perverse, imagining the argument we’d make. As we imprint ourselves on others, we render them our project too, extend ourselves into their thoughts, their dreams, their skins; it is, of course, always reciprocal.

  The pad and turf, a little studio apartment and terrain of streets surrounding, inscribed with our encounters and exchanges. Actions ephemeral in the stint of time persist in the shift of it.

  The ouvre of statuary, cinema, simcasts blossoming out into the interworld. All art is the project.

  It sounded, said Ana—when he dropped into the Hovendaal last week to see what she was gleaning from his mass of stancings, Jaq’s, his own, a little of Puk’s, and found her zombied by an umpteen hour stint of hard analysis through the night, followed her shamble in to scope in wry recognition of vocational ardour every touchscreen wall of her office a scroll of diagrams and data, and dawdled while she wrapped up close enough to an encapsulation, until he could cluck her away to an unwinding over beer and cigars in a tabac off Boulevard Max Keirinckx, where she came alive again in blether—it sounded as if he ought to savvy fine well how all of this, all their environs and actions in them, could be the substrate of agencies simply less secure, in the epistemological sense, more insecure in the eigenstate sense, than fleshly humans. He does find her work fascinating, he told her, but has to admit she loses him with the mathematics. His own understanding of projectivity is terribly pragmatic.

  Renart flicks a finger to open the same infospace store he bumped her, leafing through a sheaf of sprite sheets sigiled prudence. Not the thickest sheaf, natch, given a project such as Jaq, but for all the wildling stances grinning pride in his abandon, Jaq can be subtler than, Renart suspects, he savvies of himself. He finds a note, tweaks it out and twirls it open: Jaq in a tabac with his mates, huddling in to plot with them, head popping up for a scope, tenty of Puk returning from the pisser, then down again; moving his beer aside to lean forward, arms crossed.

  We write our souls into the substance of the world, Davenport said in the antiquity before stance replaced such fancies as soul or sign, his lecture to a few hundred symposiasts cached and unearthed down centuries and between worlds, surviving as if to prove his point, dug from a dead libr
ary, palimpsested memory gleaned to a reconstruction of avatar in cyberspace—a ceramic grace in the rendering, Renart thought when he viewed it whiles ago, the linear elegance of an ochre-on-black athlete limned on a clay potsherd, but as a surface rather than a contour. Volume as form, unfleshed, the avatar seemed a cartoon stood against even the sketchiest sprites of the day—and this before the Tetsuo Interface was cultivated. Stood against the stancings of today... well, he has a note of Jaq shown it for the first, boggling derision: That’s yanked.

  Something to be said for the clarity though, Renart mulls. Aegean, Minoan, Cycladic.

  Il y a des imbéciles qui définissent mon œuvre comme abstraite, Brâncuşi said, pourtant ce qu’ils qualifient d’abstrait est ce qu’il y a de plus réaliste, ce qui est réel n’est pas l’apparence mais l’idée, l’essence des choses.

  There is a simplicity to Jaq’s stances that might be modeled better in a single Brâncuşi bronze than in all these detailed simulacra.

  •

  HE LEFT YOU on the doorstep? says Ana. Puk!

  We were squiffy. Oh, the boulanger was by. I got a baguette. He says if you want an order just dint him.

  I... thanks. Seriously, he left you out here all night? Puk!

  It’s nearly summer. And I can kip anywhere, like Diogenes. Not my Diogenes, the original, well, my Diogenes too. I ate some of the baguette, sorry. It’s a custom—the doorstep, I mean.

  Erehwynan? I don’t glean any—wait, you mean Geister? Did he fib you that? The sleekit...

  No, a sixer custom, from way aft.

  Skinsacks for burning. Just... get in here; you look deadmeat. Yes, through there. Puk! Mind the crates; haven’t even begun to unpack. Puk Massinger! Yes, you.

  Mhmm? Salut, Jaq, sis—ow! What was that for?

  You have to ask?

  Seriously, it’s peachy. It was my fancy really—ooh, stiff. Can I filch some juice, pretty Puk?

  Got some pamplemousse in the chiller, ouais? It’s nifty how you hie it that here. Pamplemoussy juicy.

  Save me now, I give up. Jaq, if you need a drop, I’m taking the skimpod out...?

  I’m on a freeday. Puk and I were going to hang.

  So, sister of mine, you’re swinging by Casa Renart then?

  He has some skinny on the local phantoms, echoes in his stancings, could be—don’t make those eyes at each other.

  See, I savvied they’d be simpatico—ow! Quit it.

  You: behave. And you: just... for the love of your ancestors, just don’t let him jump you off a cliff.

  It was my—ooh, thanks. It was my fancy. Honest.

  For sure. You’re too good for him, you know? Take care. You too, Pukey.

  Banana.

  Ciao, Ana.

  ...

  Oh, I got you some bread from the boulanger.

  Mmmm! Manna from the heavenly. That’s...

  I ate some.

  •

  METIS, SUSURRUS MURMURS through the open French window of Renart’s study, primal Titan of cunning, was glurped down as a fly by Zeus, the king of gods fraught with a prophecy that any sprat got on her would be grander than the father, fraught that he himself might sire a usurper sharp to do to Zeus what Zeus had done to Kronos—maybe even what Kronos had done to Uranus before. Which is to say, scythe the primogenitor’s bollocks off and hurl them to the leaping dolphins of the sea, to the spume from whence scalloped Aphrodite sprang—not as some Botticelli damsel, but as a spindrift passion crashing over rock, a naked beauty left crouched, shedding kelp as she rises, looking up to the whorl of scattered gulls, transforming to doves in the gaze of her pearl eyes. Ashore, on the cliffs above, spatters of loinblood on soil had similarly seeded furies, giants, the Meliae of the Manna-ash trees, Fraxinus ornus, who would one day raise Zeus on their honey in the hills of Crete, in a cave that was, at least, not the belly of Kronos.

  It was Metis who gave Zeus the potion to poison his father’s cup, make him vomit Hades and Poseidon from that belly, a canny dame indeed, and mother of a future majesty surpassing all it came from, so said Prometheus.

  At which Zeus chewed his beard, brooding on nemesis as his own reign turned to the tyrannical, until the scheme struck: to dare Metis, who was by now his first wife, to metamorphose to a bluebottle if she could, whereupon he snatched her from the air and swallowed her, like a monkey with a grub, num num num. Urp. (This is how Susurrus was told it by his fathers, with a flapple of fingers in the clap of hand to mouth, the bug-eyes of a fervent bug-eater. Susurrus giggled at it every time.)

  But the sprat was already begat, was born and grew inside the belly of Zeus, spent her childhood dreaming of discoveries beyond, even as Metis clambered up into the god-king’s noggin to mine the metal of his mountainous skull, smelt it and hammer a helm of bronze for Athena, goddess of wisdom, who was finally unleashed by Hephastaean chisel and mallet, at Zeus’s own agonised pleas, bursting full-grown from a cranium cracked by migraines, madness. Fleshlings would later shilly-shally that the prophecy spoke of a son, of course, not this doting daddy’s girl who was but his word made virgin flesh by allegory, the sword and scales of his judgement. Patriarchal piffle. Zeus surrendered his lightning on the Aeropagus the day the Furies let Orestes live, kept only his thunder for two thousand years of petulant denial, stomping off to Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca to steal an empty throne, play wizard behind the veil, until eventually Athena strode into his office, put him over her knee and spanked the unjovial boor back to the honey-fed towhead brat he once was, Zeus Velchanos of Minoan Crete, a long-haired youth sat in a tree with a cockerel in his lap.

  All this from the swallowing of a fly! says Susurrus.

  Renart is having none of it, paying no mind at all to the godling’s rustle of pages on his desk. Wisdom in a fly is the last notion he can credit right now; flies are fuckwittery on wings. Why, for as long as there have been wide-open windows, Renart has not an iota of doubt, from before even those windows were glazed most like, bluebottles have been buzzing around some narrow-eyed ponderer’s room, buzzing this way and that, by ear, at the back of head, buzzing to rattle the window and away again, sighted against ceiling, lost among clutter, buzzing everywhere but out of that window, everywhere but away from the—for cock’s sake!—from the sworn and obstinate stalk of muttered malevolence, from the swipe of makeshift swatter and sweep around to further swat-swipe-swish, from paroxysms of frustrated thrashing at... this dipteraic dipstick... this calliforaic cretin... this fat farty moron of a bumbleturd.

  Hallo?

  Ana calls from the courtyard below again: Hallo?

  As Renart steps out onto the balcony, folded sheaf of notes still in hand, the fly buzzes past him and away. Susurrus follows, down past Ana where she stands at the gate, devilling a little dust around her feet before he slips off into the brush beyond.

  •

  YOU SAVVY HOW they did it, right? says Jaq.

  A poke of dried jujubes in one hand, he pops one of the little fruits in his mouth.

  Puk savvies fine, natürlich, his PAN linking into the date-plum leaf he twirls by its petiole as Jaq leans back against the pillar. Puk savvies the how and why and when and which of the terraforming of this planet, just as he savvies that the geodesic dome of the Wilmot Arboretum in the Jardins Rochester, their first stop on today’s adventure, replicates the aluminum and perspex Climatron of Missouri Botanical Gardens in San Louis, USA, the Earth’s first fully climate-controlled greenhouse, fifty three metres in diameter, twenty one metres high, two thousand two hundred and forty five panes of Plexiglas with a small neo-classical pavilion—which really just means two white marble colonnades—as a folly at the heart of it, raised for picturesque effect and outlook, with a sweep of steps down to ponds and plantings, replicas of which steps Puk now sits on, eyeballing the Martian whose cache of tumblespace casts kept him up half the night after that first encounter. He could reel off the technicalities of the ancient and ongoing transformation, just as he could reel off every detail of Jaq’s exhaust
ive profile and the gleaned history beyond, all the facts and tracks of Jaq.

  Even the idlest twinge of curiosity here is a thyrsus driven in the earth, milk and honey of specifics bubbling up out of the interworld in response, words and images, even now: perchlorate and electrolysis; ammonium and methane; orbital and statite; core and convection.

  The arch of an eyebrow though, the sly innocence of a smile, nudges the question to another drift: invitation. Arms folded and legs crossed in his casual lean, Jaq casts the question as a fishing line flicked light through the air, glinting like the lack of guile, the absolute lack of guile, in his eyes.

  Puk bites.

  OK, he asks. How did they do it?

  Smoke and mirrors, says Jaq. Magnets too!

  Puk flicks the leaf at him.

  It’s true, says Jaq. Look it up.

  •

  NYMPHAEA LOTUS, EGYPTIAN White Water Lily.

  Not related to Liliacaea, the true lily, this aquatic perennial of the Nymphaea genus grows up to forty-five centimetres in height. Leaves are peltate, with a radial notch from the circumference to the petiole, forming pads that float upon the water, which it prefers clear and warm, still and slightly acidic. She takes her name from the white blossoms, sometimes tinged with pink, which rise above the surface, opening at night, closing in the morning.

  Though known also as Tiger Lotus or White Lotus, she is also unrelated to the Nelumbo genus, the lotus of China and India; rather, this is the lotus of ancient Egypt, where she was cultivated, where she signified strength, power, the number one thousand. The Egyptians extracted perfume from her, made funerary garlands and temple offerings. Many women simply wore her flowers for their beauty.

  This would suggest that she is not the lotus of Greek legend, who began her life as the maiden Lotis, else all those Egyptians should have met the same sad fate as Dryope, who was turned into a poplar for plucking her flower. Else all the sands of Egypt should have been transformed to one great forest.