Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  This, she thought to herself, not without a certain incredulity, was a memory all her own: not the view (which was in the dreams of the man and the woman, and some of the other humans who lay sleeping in the Lifepod) but the two hands, and how the fingers had curled around in a circle.

  “Look through it!” she had said to someone, a boy who might have been her son. He had peered through the window of her fingers—she remembered glossy black hair that fell to his shoulders and was always getting in his eyes. He had long, brown legs; he liked to run, to chase the other children. He looked through the window and laughed, and ran off on those long legs. Did he understand how moving it was to her, to see that particular juxtaposition of those objects? The moon had been in just the right position for Half-Night, when its night side faced the planet instead of the endless field of stars. In that moment, at that time, the window told all: the sap rising in the green stem, the green leaf opening like a hand toward an alien light, against a partial backdrop of stars. She had been moved to tears.

  Remembering, she wasn’t sure what had brought her to the middle of the chamber. She had thought she had been sleeping in her life-sac, but here she was, floating in the middle of the Lifepod, surrounded by the other sacs with their sleepers. Their dreams lapped around the edges of her consciousness, but some other feeling was rising through her, overcoming the familiar mental background noise: fear, excitement. She realized that the Lifepod was talking to her—to her, after all this time, communicating something urgently. Between the thick, pillar-like sap-vessels of the Lifepod, a portion of the wall contracted, then expanded into a round window, filmed over with a translucent membrane that slowly cleared. She saw through the window a vista of stars, and a bright, spherical, gray object in the foreground. It had locked velocity with the Lifepod. Memory stirred. A human exploration vessel, a small one that may hold one to three people . . .

  So this was it, thought the Eavesdropper, suddenly light-headed, her heart thudding: this, the moment she had been waiting for all along. He had come, her son, against all odds, following the song of the Lifepod through space.

  “Bring me out!” she commanded the Lifepod, pushing off against a sap-vessel so that she bumped gently against the window. She felt herself encased in a thick film of mucosal secretions; a vast muscular contraction launched her out of the window onto the surface of the Lifepod.

  She struggled at first with the thick strands of film around her; she couldn’t see because the film was still opaque. A jolt of terror coursed through her and then subsided. The film was slowly hardening and clearing—she could breathe, she was atop the Lifepod, poised over a vertiginous emptiness speckled with stars.

  She felt it like a rush to the head, the music of the universe running through her as though she were a stream bed, a cup overflowing. Before, space had been nothing but darkness and stars, something to be crossed so one could get to one’s destination. But now she could sense the tachyonic pathways all around her, like fine lacework, like the tangled neural pathways, the guts of some vast beast. The Hidden One, said the alien, exulting, and she looked around for the alien but it wasn’t there. Only herself and that strange object motionless above her, round, like an opaque window against the stars.

  The rush faded. She saw the small humanoid figure in a space-suit detach from the side of the craft, attached to it with an umbilicus that reeled out slowly as the figure jetted toward her. The light from the craft spilled over her; she saw the surface of the Lifepod, fissured and full of knobs and warts. She remembered something, a fragment of memory that was not her own: a summer hot and breathless, sandy cliffs, and thousands, perhaps millions of the aliens in their summer sleep, their flightless single wings spread to take in the sunlight, to draw in the fuel they needed for the long winter-to-come. It was an image so strange and yet so familiar that she turned around again to see if the alien had somehow manifested in her little bubble, but it was not there. She pushed the image from her mind, stretched her arms out to the descending figure. “My son,” she said to herself, her voice catching. Then a jolt of memory: she was standing barefoot in the grass in a blue sari, setting out the washing. The boy was lying facedown on the ground, watching ants. It was a green and primitive place on a distant planet; he had been born there, some years before the trip to the barren moon of another world . . .

  But if that is who I am, she thought in sudden consternation, then the man who lies dreaming in the life-sac below my feet is my son. Then who is this?

  Or maybe, she thought desperately, the memory was not hers, just as that other memory—with the aliens stretched out like so many flies on a sand dune—that other memory was not hers. She looked up at the human figure in the spacesuit; he was getting closer and closer, decelerating. She could not see his face. Instead she saw the reflection of the Lifepod in the spacesuit’s headgear, all lit up by the spacecraft’s beacon, and the clear bubble in which she stood like a fly trapped in amber. And she saw what she was.

  A half-alien thing: the shape still human but the face so strange! Ovoid eyes, the bony skull-sheath jutting over her cheekbones. She held her small brown hands before her and saw the tips curving into hard pincers, transforming almost as she stood there, transfixed with horror and wonder. She looked down at herself in the hard, honest light and saw that the reflection was not false. What am I? she wondered, aghast.

  And the alien within answered her, not in words but in a swell of understanding that took her breath away. She remembered what it had proposed, what she had agreed to; the terrifying darkness within its body, her screams echoing in her ears as the thin tendrils inside it wrapped around her, penetrated her skin. After that, the chrysalid sleep as the new bridges between the two of them formed and hardened, as alien transforming organelles coursed through her body, as great, chemical swathes of emotion—pleasure and fear, hunger and sweet, nameless desire swept through her. Then she was lifted from the dead shell of the alien into a brief light, and into the life-sac which eased her once more into the sleep of forgetfulness . . .

  So the Eavesdropper stood before the stranger who might or might not be her son; she a creature not alien, not human, but a bridge, a thing that was new, the first of its kind. He (or was it she?) stood away from her, bumping gently against the Lifepod, the long umbilicus stretching out into the dark like a luminous, flexible bridge. The stranger’s hands were as yet empty, but the posture was wary, as though poised to activate the spacesuit’s weapons systems. She felt some ancient part of her cry out: Do you not know me, son? And something inside her gave way, crumbled like a mud wall before a flood.

  I must know, she said to herself. I must know if you are him. She stretched her arms toward him, slowly, saw him tense, then relax. Suddenly she wanted to enclose him in the dark, to exchange blood with blood, to share synapse with synapse, to know him cell by cell, and so become something new. The sharpness of her hunger took her breath away. In that brief moment she saw that the Lifepod itself was her kin, a hybrid of the original alien species and some gravid denizen of a distant ocean-world, and its mind was clear to her for the first time. Why couldn’t she know the stranger in the same way? No, she said, feeling or imagining the infant mouth straining to open in her chest. That was the alien within, as it had once been, remembering. There had to be some other way.

  She opened her hands to show him that they were empty. She put the palms together in the old Indic gesture of greeting, then moved the fingers to make a circle, a window through which she could see him against the Lifepod and the infinity of stars. Around her, along pathways invisible to human and alien, sang the tachyons, leaving ghost trails in space-time that the sleeping woman in the chamber under her feet could only imagine. Only the Eavesdropper could sense them, could see where they were leading, to the heart of the great galactic beast, the Hidden One. She saw for just a moment that she had been conceived and forged for a great purpose. But for now she was only a bridge in the darkness between ship and ship, being and being. Through the
window of her hands she watched the stranger come slowly toward her.

  Oblivion: A Journey

  Memory is a strange thing. I haven’t changed my sex in eighty-three years. I was born female, in a world of peace and quietude; yet I have an incomplete recollection of my childhood. Perhaps it is partly a failure of the imagination that it is so hard to believe (in this age of ours) that there was once such a place as green and slow as my world-shell, Ramasthal. It was the last of the great world-shells to fall, so any memory of childhood is contaminated with what came after: the deaths of all I loved, the burning of the cities, the slow, cancerous spread of Hirasor’s culture-machines that changed my birthplace beyond recognition.

  So instead of one seamless continuum of growing and learning to be in this world, my memory of my life is fragmentary. I remember my childhood name: Lilavati. I remember those great cybeasts, the hayathis, swaying down the streets in a procession, and their hot, vegetable-scented breath ruffling my hair. There are glimpses, as through a tattered veil, of steep, vertical gardens, cascading greenery, a familiar face looking out at me from a window hewn in a cliff—and in the background, the song of falling water. Then everything is obscured by smoke. I am in a room surrounded by pillars of fire, and through the haze I see the torn pages of the Ramayana floating in the air, burning, their edges crumpling like black lace. I am half-comatose with heat and smoke; my throat is parched and sore, my eyes sting—and then there are strange, metallic faces reaching out to me, the stuff of my nightmares. Behind them is a person all aflame, her arms outstretched, running toward me, but she falls and I am carried away through the smoke and the screaming. I still see the woman in my dreams and wonder if she was my mother.

  In my later life as a refugee, first on the world of Barana and after that everywhere and nowhere, there is nothing much worth recalling. Foster homes, poverty, my incarceration in some kind of soulless educational institution—the banality of the daily struggle to survive. But there are moments in my life that are seared into my mind forever: instants that were pivotal, life-changing, each a conspiracy of temporal nexuses, a concatenation of events that made me what I am. That is not an excuse—I could have chosen a different way to be. But I did not know, then, that I had a choice.

  This is the first of those moments: the last time I was a woman, some ninety years ago in my personal time frame. I was calling myself Ila, then, and doing some planet-hopping, working the cruisers and blowing the credits at each stop. I found myself on Planet Vilaasa, a rich and decadent world under the sway of the Samarin conglomerate. I was in one of those deep-city bars where it’s always night, where sunshine is like a childhood memory, where the air is thick with smoke, incipient violence, and bumblebees. I don’t remember who I was with, but the place was crowded with humans, native and off-world, as well as mutants and nakalchis. There was a bee buzzing in my ear, promising me seven kinds of bliss designed especially for my personality and physical type if only I’d agree to let the Samarin Corporate Entity take over half my brain. I swatted it; it fell into my plate and buzzed pathetically, antennae waving, before it became non-functional. Somehow I found this funny; I still remember throwing back my head and laughing.

  My fingers, slight and brown, curved around my glass. The drink half-drunk, a glutinous purple drop sliding down the outer surface. Reflected on the glass a confusion of lights and moving shapes, and the gleam, sudden and terrifying, of steel.

  There was a scream, and the sound of glass breaking that seemed to go on forever. This was no barroom brawl. The raiders were Harvesters. I remember getting up to run. I remember the terrified crowd pressing around me, and then I was falling, kicked and stepped upon in the stampede. Somehow I pushed myself to safety under a table next to a stranger, a pale woman with long, black hair and eyes like green fire. She looked at me with her mouth open, saying one word:

  “Nothen . . .”

  A Harvester got her. It put its metal hands around her throat and put its scissor-like mouth to her chest. As she bled and writhed, it rasped one long word, interspersed with a sequence of numbers.

  Her body turned rigid and still, her face twisted with horror. Her green eyes froze in a way that was simultaneously aware and locked in the moment of torment. It was then that I realized that she was a nakalchi, a bio-synthetic being spawned from a mother-machine.

  The name of the mother-machine is what pushes a nakalchi into the catatonic state that is Shunyath. When they enter Shunyath they re-live the moment when that name was spoken. Since the nakalchis are practically immortal, capable of dying only through accident or violence, Shunyath is their way of going to the next stage. Usually a nakalchi who has wearied of existence will go to one of their priests, who will put the candidate in a meditative state of absolute calm and surrender. Then the priest will utter the name of the mother-machine (such names being known only to the priests and guarded with their lives) so that the nakalchi may then contemplate eternity in peace.

  For first-generation nakalchis, Shunyath is not reversible.

  That is when I realized that this woman was one of the ancients, one of the nakalchis who had helped humankind find its way to the stars.

  So for her, frozen in the state of Shunyath, it would seem as though she was being strangled by the Harvester all the rest of her days. No wonder she had asked me for Nothen, for death. She had known the Harvesters had come for her; she had known what they would do. I remember thinking, in one of those apparently timeless moments that terror brings: somebody should kill the poor woman. She was obviously the target of the raid.

  But to my horrified surprise the Harvester turned from her to me, even as I was sliding away from under the table to a safer place. While the Harvester had me pinned to the floor, its long, flexible electrodes crawled all over my skin as it violated my humanness, my woman-ness, with its multiple limbs. Through the tears and blood I saw myriad reflections of myself in those dark, compound eyes, from which looked—not only the primitive consciousness of the Harvester, but the eyes of whoever manipulated it—the person or entity who, not content with finding their target, fed like a starving animal on the terror of a bystander. In those eyes I was a stranger, a non-person, a piece of meat that jerked and gibbered in pain. Then, for a moment, I thought I saw the burning woman from my memories of childhood, standing behind the Harvester. This is death, I said to myself, relieved. But the Harvester left me a few hair-breadths short of death and moved on to its next victim.

  I don’t know how many they killed or maimed that night. The nakalchi woman they took away. I remember thinking, through the long months of pain and nightmares that followed, that I wish I had died.

  But I lived. I took no joy in it. All that gave my mind some respite from its constant seething was a game I invented: I would find the identity of the person responsible for the Harvester raid and I would kill them. Find, and kill. I went through endless permutations of people and ways of killing in my head. Eventually it was no longer a game.

  I moved to another planet, changed my sex to one of the Betweens. Over the years I changed my body even further, ruthlessly replacing soft, yielding flesh with coralloid implants that grew me my own armor-plating. Other people shuddered when I walked by. I became an interplanetary investigator of small crime and fraud, solving trivial little cases for the rich and compromised, while biding my time.

  It was already suspected that the man responsible for the Harvester attacks that terrorized whole planets during the Samarin era was no other than the governing mind of the Samarin Corporate Entity, Hirasor. The proof took many years and great effort on the part of several people, including myself, but it came at last. Nothing could be done, however, because Hirasor was more powerful than any man alive. His icons were everywhere: dark, shoulder-length hair framing a lean, aristocratic face with hungry eyes; the embroidered silk collar, the rose in his buttonhole. It came out then that he had a private museum of first-generation nakalchis locked in Shunyath in various states of suffering. A conn
oisseur of pain, was Hirasor.

  But to me he was also Hirasor, destroyer of worlds. He had killed me once already by destroying my world-shell, Ramasthal. It was one of the epic world-shells, a chain of island satellites, natural and artificial, that ringed the star Agni. Here we learned, lived, and enacted our lives based on that ancient Indic epic, the Ramayana, one of those timeless stories that condense in their poetry the essence of what it means to be human. Then Samarin had infiltrated, attacking and destroying at first, then doing what they called “rebuilding”: substituting for the complexity and beauty of the Ramayana, an inanely simplified, sugary cultural matrix that drew on all the darkness and pettiness in human nature. Ramasthal broke up, dissolved by the monocultural machine that was Samarin. I suffered less than my fellow citizens—being a child, I could not contribute a brain-share to Samarin. I grew up a refugee, moving restlessly from one inhabited world to the next, trying and failing to find my center. Most of the ordinary citizens of these worlds had never heard of the Ramayana epic, or anything else that had been meaningful to me in that lost past life. In my unimaginable solitude my only defense was to act like them, to be what they considered normal. When the Harvesters invaded the bar, I had been living the fashionably disconnected life that Samarin-dominated cultures think is the only way to be.

  Hirasor was so powerful that among my people his nickname was Ravan-Ten-Heads, after the demon in the epic Ramayana. Near the end of the story, the hero, Ram, tries to kill Ravan by cutting off his heads, one by one, but the heads simply grow back. In a similar manner, if a rival corporation or a society of free citizens managed to destroy one Samarin conglomerate, another would spring up almost immediately in its place. It—and Hirasor—seemed almost mythic in their indestructibility.

  What I wanted to do was to find Hirasor’s secret vulnerability, as Ram does in the epic. “Shoot an arrow into Ravan’s navel,” he is told. The navel is the center of Ravan’s power. When Ram does so, the great demon dies at last.