* * * *
At last! I have devised an end to the chaos which blights my citizenry.
My scientists have developed a means of imprinting memories and eliciting emotions that may be interchanged, swapped out, and added upon with seemingly infinite variety. My consorts may oppose each other and mate with promiscuity, all without garnering rivals or blood feuds.
I have set my scientists to generate these oversoul masks in copious quantity and in wondrous variety.
This must work.
All is well. The activities of my children are once more in accord with my desiring, and eternity's river holds no more uncertainties.
There was a minor dilemma, but I have solved even that. It seems that I am not immune to the effect of the masks. I thought my royal will would safeguard my identity, but it is becoming a strain, sorting reality from fabrication.
I have had an oversoul commissioned. It will be a lasting record of all the tribulations I have confronted and my efforts to remedy them. This mask shall be sealed beneath my palace in a chamber secured by steel, and my blood shall be the only key that unlocks it.
* * * *
I take off the mask of diamonds. Pena watches me, her lips parted.
I tumble out of the chair and fall to my knees. “I am your servant, First Queen."
Pena's eyes widen, and she laughs. “Oh, no, no.” She is at my side and hauls me up. “I'm not the First Queen."
"But your blood opened the door."
"Don't you get it? We're all of her blood, each of us descended from the First Queen. Some joke on her, huh?"
I stay silent.
"Come,” she says. “We need to get back before the hour of unmasking. If we're seen on the streets after, the gendarmes will take us."
I straggle after her, lost in my thoughts. I don't try to keep track of the red-lit corridors and notice only when we are among the fabrics and dyes of the storage room.
"Hsst.” Pena gestures.
"What is it?"
Without warning, she shoves me, and I tumble into a closeted hole. Bolts of velvet and felt topple upon me. She flings an oversized bottle of jasmine oil after, engulfing me in cloying sweetness.
Then there is confusion. The red light extinguishes, and white beams flash in the darkness. They catch and glint off white metal—glittering eyes, gleaming brows—the silver masks of the gendarmes.
Hidden in my cubby, my scent as obscured as my body, they do not detect me. They converge on a single spot, Pena, huddled between shelves.
"By order of the queen, you are hereby accused and convicted of treason,” one gendarme says.
I cannot smell anything over the sickening jasmine, but I can see the terror on her face. She glances at me, and there is a beseeching in her eyes, and a question, but she looks away before I can understand it.
"The penalty for treason is death, citizen,” a gendarme, perhaps the same one, says. “Do you wish to repent? Identify your co-conspirators, and we will allow you to return to the way of the mask."
Pena lifts her head. “Never."
They don't ask again. They activate their loops, and I'm reminded of the day of the saffron mask. I'm ashamed of the gladness I felt then.
They don't skin her, but this is as gruesome, if swifter. A gendarme kneels over her as she is pinioned on her back by bands of blue. Bracing himself, he staves in her face with his fist. I want to look away. It is an obscene violation, a perverse defilement to damage a citizen there—to do any violence which might cause harm to a mask. But Pena isn't wearing a mask, and I don't look away.
He strikes again and again until there is nothing left of the front of her head but a wreckage of bone and pulped wetness.
* * * *
9. The last mask.
The gendarmes are as efficient in disposing of Pena's body as they were in dispatching her. When they have gone, the red light comes on, and I dare to creep out. As I untangle myself from a length of burgundy velvet, my hand falls upon an unmistakable shape—Pena's green and toffee mask. The sight of it, so soon after the atrocity of her execution, unhinges me. I start crying, and I cannot stop. But it doesn't matter, because her mask will hide my tears.
Somehow, I make it to Center at Corridor and the familiar confines of my quarters. Safe.
But I am not safe. I cannot forget the First Queen's memories, which the gendarmes would surely kill me for having, and more, I cannot erase the beseeching question in Pena's eyes.
I tear off her mask. It's not the unmasking hour, but I don't care. I'm weary of masks, even a blameless one without an oversoul. Pena's death burdens me with shame and guilt—like being flayed again, but with the pain inside.
I am surrounded by masks. Each is a player in some fabricated theater—artist, victim, rake, entrepreneur, lover, spouse, friend. None of them is real, but I can put them on and escape these feelings.
But I won't.
One after the other, I destroy my masks. The ones that shatter are the easiest. I hurl them at the floor and shards spill across the tile. The ones that burn, I commit to fire. But the metal ones I must work at, smashing one upon another until they are twisted out of all recognition.
I save the sable mask for last out of a sense of propriety. Although it is metal, it is oddly malleable, and it crumbles between my hands. The lenses fall out of the eyeholes and tumble among the broken bits of ceramic and glass on my floor.
I stand amidst the debris that was my life and don the only mask I spared, Pena's green and toffee one.
* * * *
My lover glances at me in her cerulean-with-voile mask, and lets me in. She thinks I am her servant girl.
"Where did you go?” she demands. “Do you know how long I've been waiting for you? And where is my suitor?"
Her quarters are much like mine, much like every citizen's. There is a mask room, a kitchen, and a bedchamber. I brush past her, and she follows, continuing to scold as we enter her kitchen. I find what I need in one of the drawers: a tenderizer mallet, heavy and solid. Even when I turn with it upraised, she doesn't relent.
"Are you ignoring me, you slut?” she shouts. “How dare you!"
Only when I yank off her mask does she become afraid, and by then, it's too late.
I smash the mallet into her face. She stumbles, and I ride her as she goes down, hammering the metal tool into her face over and over. Bones and flesh mash together into pulp, and still I persist. I must be thorough.
Pena did not have time to teach me the secrets of her league of named. But through her, I have learned enough. I have seen how the gendarmes kill. I do not have their loops or their strength, but I know how to murder so that my victims will not wake.
Pena also taught me to know who I am.
I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen's eternal river.
Copyright © 2009 Eugie Foster
[Back to Table of Contents]
AFTER EVERYTHING WOKE UP—Rudy Rucker
* * * *
* * * *
Illustrated by Rudy Rucker
* * * *
'After Everything Woke Up’ will form part of Rudy Rucker's next novel, Hylozoic, which will be published by Tor Books this spring. For more about Rudy's fiction and artwork, and much else besides, visit him at rudyrucker.com.
* * * *
Jayjay awoke beside Thuy; comfortably he molded himself against her. Early sunlight filtered in through the redwoods. The newlyweds were in sleeping bags on the forest floor beneath a tree. They'd teleported here to install their home. It was the first of May.
A big blue Steller's Jay perched on a jiggly thin branch overhead, cocking his head. Jayjay teeped stealthily into the bird's mind. He savored the gentle jouncing of the branch, the minute adjustments of the jay's strong claws, the breeze in his comfortable plumage; he chirped contentedly, chook-chook-chook-chook, then inhaled through the nostrils of his fine black beak, relishing the smells of fruit and flesh, studying
the promising scraps on the ground, assessing the large creatures beside the mound of goods; but now, kwaawk kwaawk kwaawk, one of the big animals moved her limbs. The jay released the branch, glided free and flapped to the next tree. Kwaawk kwaawk.
"Kwaawk,” echoed Thuy. “That's his name."
"All the others have that name too?” said Jayjay.
"Yeah, but each of them says it differently.” Thuy turned to face Jayjay, giving him a kiss. “I can't believe we own this piece of land. What does that even mean? We handed over our money so that a record somewhere says ‘Property of Jorge Jimenez and Thuy Nguyen'. But there's so many plants and animals already living here, and if you count the other silps too—it's an empire."
"I hope they don't resent us."
"Those nice smooth rocks by the stream like us fine,” said Thuy. “Teep into them. See how eager they are to be in our foundation walls? They like the idea of being mortared together, and of rising above the ground. Beating gravity is a big deal for a rock!"
"You're my big deal,” said Jayjay, teeping Thuy teeping him teeping her. The first few times that they'd telepathically mirrored each other, they'd felt themselves tobogganing towards the point-attractor of a cerebral seizure. Fortunately you could always shut off your telepathy. With practice, Jayjay and Thuy had learned to skate around the singular zones, enjoying the bright, ragged layers of feedback—well, Jayjay enjoyed this more than Thuy. Not too long ago, he'd been addicted to merging with the planetary mind called the Big Pig. He liked head trips.
After a little more mind play, Thuy gently pushed Jayjay away. She was smiling, with her eyebrows optimistically arched. Her longish black hair hung loose, her pink lips were delicately curved. Hanging a few feet above her was a Stank Shampoo ad. Thuy and Jayjay made their living as round-the-clock members of a reality show called Founders. But they'd learned to ignore the ad icons and—above all—the vast worldwide audience. If you were doing something really private, you could always turn off your teep. But fewer and fewer things seemed private enough to bother hiding.
"You really think we can teleport a whole house this far?” asked Thuy.
"Sure,” said Jayjay. “Working alone, you and I can't teek much more than couple of hundred kilograms at a time. But with a dozen of our friends pitching in, for sure we can move our little house here from San Francisco. We'll build the foundation today, and this evening—alley-oop!—we drop our cozy nest into place. Housewarming party!"
They'd already brought bags of sand and cement for the foundation, also a big flat pan for mixing the mortar, a mortar hoe to mix it with, plus a pair of mortarboards and trowels. Jayjay liked tools, and had managed to borrow these via the human mindweb. The silps in the tools were stoked about the coming job.
"It's gonna be hard moving all those stones for the foundation,” grumbled Thuy. “It's so peaceful here in the woods. I feel like lying around and thinking up a beautiful scene for my new metanovel. Or teeping with animals. Isn't this supposed to be our honeymoon?"
"We can teleport the stones instead of carrying them. Teek ‘em."
"That's work, too. When I reach out and remotely teleport a rock I bet my brain-wattage shoots up to a thousand."
"It isn't just your brain that does the teeking,” said Jayjay. “We think with our whole bodies. Consciousness is everywhere."
"Whatever,” said Thuy. “I'm just not ready to move hundreds of stones."
"Aw, come on, Thuy,” said Jayjay. “When we were in high-school, you were always the goody-goody, not me. You're the ant and I'm the grasshopper. And the grasshopper's rarin’ to go! Leap!"
"Put that stale rap away,” said Thuy. “It's been a long time since I was an ant. I'm all grown up now. I'm every bit as wild a kiq as you.” She rolled towards her knapsack and dug out some dried fruit. “It's too bad the rocks can't teleport themselves. Then we could just, like, teep out invitations and they'd all show up."
"Actually we're lucky that animals and plants and objects can't teleport,” said Jayjay.
"I guess so,” said Thuy. “Otherwise Kwaawk the blue jay would be eating these raisins instead of me. And if flames could teleport? They'd eat the whole world. I wonder if Gaia is actively preventing the lower orders from teleporting."
"I don't think it's Gaia's doing,” said Jayjay. He'd been one of the first to figure out teleportation, and he liked to hold forth about it. “The ability to teleport is peculiar to the human mind. Rats and roaches are too carefree to fuzz out and teleport. Over the millennia, we humans have evolved towards thinking ourselves into spots where we're not. It's all about remorse, doubt and fear. As for intelligent objects—sure the silps can talk, but they don't have our rich heritage of hang-ups: our regrets about the past, our unease about the present, our anxiety about the future. Humans are used to spreading themselves across a zillion worlds of downer what-if. That's why we can teleport."
"Depresso mongo,” said Thuy. “Remorse, doubt and fear? That's all you see in your life? How about gratitude for the things that worked out—like, ahem, marrying me! What about curiosity? What about hope for a sunny tomorrow? Happy what-ifs."
"Let's get back to the rocks,” said Jayjay, in retreat. “Even though they can't teleport, they can tell us about their balance points. And whether they're a good match for their neighbors."
"I can just hear them,” said Thuy. “Lay me now, mortar-forker!” She liked speaking extravagantly. It was a way of rebelling against her prim upbringing. “Trowel my crack!” She got to her feet to rummage deeper in her backpack, then pulled on her striped tights and a long-sleeved yellow T-shirt.
A great shaft of sun slanted into their woodsy glen, with gnats and dust motes hovering in the light. A friendly breeze caressed the newlyweds and stirred the needles on the trees. Kwaawk the blue jay squawked.
"Everything sees us,” marveled Jayjay, putting on his baggy black pants and his green T-shirt. “Everything is alive. I like seeing inside Kwaawk's head. I think—if I wasn't a human—maybe I'd be a jay, or, no, I'd be a crow. They're so smart and tough."
"I'd be a dragon,” said Thuy, filling her mouth full of nuts and chocolate. She kept on talking via teep. “Dragons are one thing my parents talked about that I really loved. The Vietnamese dragons aren't fat fire-breathers you know. They're skinny crocodiles with snaky curves, and fringed all over. Punk dragons. I'd be a dragon playing heavy rock and roll.” Thuy paused to swallow her food. “I just noticed that a water spirit here doesn't like us. The silp in this stretch of the creek."
The mind within the narrow, burbling stream was what earlier generations would have called a genius loci, or spirit of place. Far from being a superstition-spawned fantasy, the silp was quite real. Silps were emergent intelligences based upon chaotic natural computations as enhanced by the ubiquitous memory storage available via the recently unfurled eighth dimension. Silps were everywhere now.
Jayjay wasn't quite sure how to address the unfriendly spirit of the stream. But Thuy plowed right ahead.
"Hi Gloob,” she said, eating another handful of gorp. “What if my husband and I build you a tiny little dam? You'll get a nice waterfall at the downstream edge, with some brook trout in the pool. We can bathe there."
"Gloob?” said Jayjay, smiling at Thuy. “Husband? You're like Eve in Eden. Naming the creatures."
"Gloob really is his name,” said Thuy. “You just have to listen. Like this.” She teeped him a mental maneuver she'd invented for converting a silp's self-image to an English name.
Jayjay listened inwardly to the crabby spirit of the stream, and, yes, Thuy was right, his name was Gloob. Gloob overlaid an image upon his eddies and lines of flow, the visage of a stern old man with trembling cheeks and curly beard. He didn't like the idea of a dam.
The friendly rocks at the stream's edge had names too: Clack, Bonk, Rollie, and Harvey. And the redwood overhead—her name was Grew. Unlike Gloob, Grew was happy to have Jayjay and Thuy as neighbors. Mammals were good for fertilizing her roots.
Intrigued by his newly-learned ability to name the silps, Jayjay teeped into the aethereal chorus of atoms that made up his body. Each of his ten octillion atomic silps had its own distinct timbre. If he'd had the patience, he could have started converting the timbres into names to be stored in his lazy eight memory. But there were still practical limits to the sizes of mental feats that a person could do. An octillion steps was at the very edge of what you could expect to carry out in your head, even if you were as obsessive as their young friend Chu.
Teeping a bit higher up the great chain of being, Jayjay perceived the names of his organs and muscles. Larry Liver. Ben Bone. They'd still be talking after he died. At least for awhile.
Gloob's scowling ropy face kept hovering in his mind's eye. Jayjay walked over and took a pee near the stream, not right into it, but close enough to show Gloob who was boss. The little crests of the stream's riffles writhed. On the telepathic plane, Gloob was gibbering in fury. Jayjay pinched shut the channel connecting him to the angry silp. Bye, Gloob. That was one of the things that made lazy eight telepathy bearable. You could firewall things out.
"I say we build our foundation right here,” Thuy said, scratching lines in the dirt with a shovel. She was telepathically comparing her marks to the dimensions of the two-room wooden cottage that she and Jayjay had put together in San Francisco.
Jayjay picked up a shovel of his own. “Perfect spot,” he told Thuy. “It's flat, the light's good, and it's not too close to—to the stream. We'll scrape out little trenches for the cement mudsills."
Teeping into the Gaian overmind, Jayjay and Thuy viewed Earth's gravitational field as wiggly orange lines growing out of the ground. Helpful Gaia marked off equal elevation points on the lines, making it easy to see when the ditches were level and true.
"I'll mix the mortar!” said Thuy when the digging was done. “You get the stones."
Jayjay teeped one of stones he'd noticed before: Harvey. Harvey was the size and shape of a flattened cantaloupe. It would have been easy enough to walk over and pick him up. But Jayjay wanted to show off.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #220 Page 8
