The Velocity of Revolution

by Marshall Ryan Maresca

  Two people came up to attend to each of them, washing their bodies with sponges and cold water. The attention felt respectful and reverent, not spiritless like the bath servants forced to wash High Captain Sengejú in front of Wenthi. No one was flexing power over anyone else, and Wenthi felt equal to the rest of the cell, to everyone in the room.

  Nália paced angrily about while the attendants dressed each of them in white robes of woven agave. Coarse and rough, the robes and Nália’s attitude. As they were led outside, through the back of the warehouse to an empty lot, Nália started shouting at every other person, screaming for them to notice her, hear her. No one reacted to that.

  Wenthi wondered why she didn’t try to take his body over, force her words from his mouth. Maybe because right in this moment, he was focused, calm. She couldn’t push through that.

  Hocnupec presented a mushroom to each of them. Not the dried powder, not the tea, but whole caps. Wenthi took it, and his thoughts were flooded with all the stories from the broadcasts and prop scopes of people who had their minds wrecked by the mushroom, and to see it here in such a pure form made those fears trickle up the base of his skull.

  Though he had been on the mushroom all this time. The government had ordered him to use it, to let Doctor Shebiruht—the monster behind the tyrant—use it on him. Was it all a lie? A story to hold people down, to keep them from finding connection or empathy?

  “Go on,” Nália taunted at him. “Maybe it will shred your brain—both our brains.”

  Wenthi tried to not pay her any mind, as his attention was far more on the strange thing in the middle of the lot. It was a great circular cage, perched on a gimbal of some sort. Chains led from the cage to three cycles.

  “What is this?” Ajiñe asked.

  “This is the induction. You will take the mushroom and take your place inside. And then we apply speed and signal. The rest will be what it will be.”

  “Speed and signal?” Fenito asked. “Meaning?”

  “We will spin you faster and faster,” Hocnupec said. “Intensifying your connection to us, to the mushroom, to everything. Then Varazina will come to you, as she does, through the signal of the radio.”

  “So she isn’t here,” Gabrána asserted. Despite all the openness they claimed, they were holding something back. Wenthi began to wonder if they even knew what they were holding back.

  “If you wish to back away, that is your choice,” Hocnupec said. “It will be honored.”

  Nicalla swallowed her mushroom and climbed up into the cage. Ajiñe looked to Wenthi for support.

  He nodded back to her and took his as she took hers. Then he took her hand and walked into the cage.

  Mensi was right behind them, and Fenito and Gabrána followed.

  In the cage, there were six rough mattresses in a circle, bolted to the floor, each with a radio bolted at the head of the mattress. Loud static poured out of each speaker.

  “Well, this seems pretty obvious,” Ajiñe said, lying down on one of the mattresses. Wenthi took a spot next to her, and soon the rest of the group were in position.

  Jendiscira came in, her face a picture of blissful calm. “I’m thrilled you’ve all come this far. I will be clear, this will be like nothing you’ve known before. I cannot tell you exactly what you will experience, only that your experience will be yours. But you will know each other, the land, everything, deeper and stronger than you’ve ever known before. May your spirits watch over you, and tell you what you need.”

  She stepped out, and Nália was there, right over Wenthi’s face.

  “That mushroom is already doing things, friend,” she whispered. “Do you feel that?”

  He felt his body spreading out beyond his fingertips, joining with Ajiñe and Mensi on either side of him, as their bodies spread out beyond their fingertips, and his sense of where he ended and they began melted into nothingness. Everything he was fell into the two of them, and then into Nicalla, Fenito, and Gabrána.

  And Nália. Dropped in the dark in the ice room. Deep and cold and nothing. As connected as he was to everything out here, he still felt her strongest of all, like an anchor keeping him down.

  Nália’s phantom hands enlaced with his, her hips grinding onto him.

  Then the cycles fired up and started riding, riding in a circle, and the cage began to spin.

  Spinning faster and faster, and as it spun, the static grew louder. Wenthi tried to see outside, but everything was just a blur of light and color as they went faster and faster, and the thing that was his own body became just a memory, his sense of self and identity all melting away and merging into his cell. He was Wenthi and Nália and Ajiñe and Mensi and Nicalla and Gabrána and Fenito and the static and the people outside the cage and the land beneath their feet and the tendrils of the mushroom curling and winding through the ground and deposits of iron and pools of oil and the grass and trees and the corn.

  And Renzi. He had to keep Renzi in the front. Hide Wenthi away, at the bottom of who he was, keep that deep and secret.

  “Bring him out,” Nália whispered in his ear. “Let them see the real you.”

  “Surrender to the truth,” Renzi whispered in his other ear.

  He looked up to see himself—except not him, fully Renzi Llionorco, the manifestation of the person he was pretending to be. As if the fiction he had created had taken form.

  “Surrender everything,” Nália said, and Renzi grabbed her face and started kissing her. Renzi and Nália’s hands caressed each other as they both mounted Wenthi, hands and mouths and everything until Wenthi was inside Nália while Renzi was inside him.

  “I hate you so much,” Nália whispered as she drove her hips against him.

  “And you hate yourself more,” Renzi said as he pushed deeper, biting Wenthi’s ear as he hissed at him.

  “Surrender,” Nália said.

  “Give yourself,” Renzi said.

  “Join us,” said another woman. The static took form around them.

  And there, in the center of the cage, which was racing in a spin of incredible velocity, but somehow completely still and quiet, stood a woman—tall, gracile, and wearing a crown and cape of living flowers.

  Varazina.

  Not just a woman but an ancient spirit, and ancestor to all of them, yet living and present and flesh in front of them.

  “Come to me,” she said. “Be one of all Zapisia, be true to your blood, and be free.”

  Despite Wenthi’s body being entwined in impossible phantom sex with Nália and himself, he stood—another impossibility in the racing, spinning cage—but yet he stood.

  Ajiñe and Mensi had stood as well, taking his hands. The six of them were all joined together, a ring of six bodies and one body at once, and they stepped forward as one, surrounding this magical, impossible woman.

  Somehow with only two hands she touched all six of them, and in an instant eternity, their worlds exploded.

  52

  It felt like the release of climax, but stronger and more intense than anything Wenthi had ever experienced.

  And it didn’t end.

  This must be how people lost their mind to the bliss, he managed to think in the small part of the back of his mind, that part he held closed off from everything else. This is more than anyone could handle alone.

  But he wasn’t alone. He was one with the rest of the crew, one with Nália—he was vaguely aware of sounds around her: machines beeping, concerned voices of nurses—one with Varazina and all the others around them.

  All the others—the rest of the Fists. They were all here, together in the cage.

  No, they were no longer in the cage, at least as far as he could tell. It was a stone chamber, decorated with thousands of flowers in every color. Green vines snaked across the ceiling, with more flowers growing there, and the floor—

  The floor beneath them w
as soft and pliant, but not quite dirt.

  Wenthi knelt down and touched it.

  The mushroom. Pulses of energy—beating like a hidden heart within the island—came into Wenthi through his hands and feet, and through everyone else there in the chamber.

  The chamber isn’t real, he thought.

  “We’re within the mushroom itself,” Nália whispered in reverent awe as her ghostly body shook on the ground in front of Wenthi. If the others could see her, could feel her, they gave no sign of it. “This is where all our minds come together.”

  “Feel it,” Varazina whispered. She was a radiant goddess, naked save for the cascade of flowers that covered her from every direction. “Listen to it all as it fills you.”

  A pulse washed up through them, and with it, memory. Dozens of generations ago, Zapisian ancestors with stone tools and animal skins. Burning the mushroom in sweet-smelling fires and breathing in the smoke. Communing with the spirits of their ancestors, living memory within the mushroom. Learning the stories, the secrets of the land.

  Another pulse.

  Time raced by. Temples to the ancestors built. Sages and holy ones climbing up the giant poles, ropes tied to their waists. They coiled the ropes around the top of the pole, and drank deeply of the mushroom brew, then let themselves fly off the pole. They spun through the air, faster and faster, their connections to each other building stronger.

  They would take the mushroom and run.

  They would take the mushroom and throw themselves off cliffs into the ocean.

  Anything, anything, to go faster.

  Stone tools became bronze, and bronze became iron.

  Cities rose, wars raged. Generations lived and loved and fought and fucked and built and bartered and became a people. Became a Zapisian nation.

  Then the Sehosians came.

  Another pulse. This one sharp and painful.

  They came with great sailed ships and pistols and steel and their hard boot came down on the Zapisian people. They forced the island, the cities, the people, into their image. They brought their laws, their language, their food, their disease, and pushed it all on the people. They scrubbed the temples of all their character, all their purpose, leaving a shadow of its memory behind.

  They made a home on the land, made the people into their servants, fucking them and claiming the children as their own.

  Then their empire fell. Sehosia couldn’t impose itself upon them anymore, though many of their children still lived on the island.

  Another pulse.

  For a moment, the Zapisian people, mixed and muddied as they were with Sehosian blood, started to find themselves again. They dug into the earth and found the mushroom again and remembered the spirits of their ancestors that used to guide them. They found iron in the ground and made it into steel. They found oil and made it into fire.

  And the cleverest ones made the engine. Engines of steam, engines of oil. They built the engines into trains and autos and cycles, and they would race.

  Faster and faster.

  Another pulse.

  It was more than Wenthi could handle. So much at once. He reached out and pulled whoever’s hand he found, bringing their body to him. Amid the memory and emotion and connection with the dozens and dozens of faithful Fists and Varazina and the crew, he needed to feel real flesh against his own. Something to anchor himself to his actual body.

  The Outhic people came. Reloumene and Hemish and more. They brought their rules and created castes and declared people as sullied or useless and forced them into camps and divided the city into senjas and . . .

  Another pulse.

  The wars came. First Transoceanic. Second Transoceanic. Great Noble. Zapisia was fought on. Zapisia was fought over. Bombs from the sky. The island split into two peoples. Fellaz, which would be free. Pinogoz, under the tyrant’s thumb.

  So many dead.

  All blamed for the wars they wanted no part of. Forced to pay a debt they never asked for.

  Another pulse.

  This one filled with love and joy and pleasure.

  A spark in Wenthi’s heart that ignited the engine of his soul.

  He pulled the bodies closer to him, as they clawed to be one with his flesh. Mouths on his mouth, his chest, his legs, everywhere. Some real, in the room with him. Others elsewhere, the echoes of their psyches joining in the throng of naked bodies grinding and pushing and kissing and exploding.

  Wenthi looked up to find Ajiñe’s eyes, her body on top of him, him inside of her, and he was as much her as she was him. And they both were each other and one and building toward waves and pulses of greater pleasure. Every body—bodies of people all across the city, secretly united through the network, through the sync of the mushroom, through the spirit of the people.

  Faster. And faster.

  Wenthi couldn’t hold anything back much longer. They were all giving him everything, everything, and there was nothing he couldn’t give, wouldn’t give to be fully with them.

  He looked up to find Nália’s eyes.

  They bore into him with hatred and ecstasy. As her body—she felt as real as any flesh he had ever felt—pushed against his, he pushed inside her, and her hands wrapped around his neck.

  “I hate you so much,” she said again through her heaving breaths, edging closer and closer to climax.

  He tried to push her off him, but his hands just found other bodies, and she rode harder and harder as her hands tightened around his throat. His body was fire, and nothing could keep it from exploding.

  Together, he and Nália went over the edge.

  And left his body behind.

  REFUEL: VISION

  Up.

  Beyond.

  Together, Nália and Wenthi were one consciousness without form or body. They flew out of the city, nothing but mind and vision.

  Across the wide sprawl of shattered land, dry and cracked where water once flowed, where corn grew.

  Smoke and steam belching out of great chimneys in the distance, they flew across the plains toward the horror.

  It was horror. Deep mines for iron, refineries for steel. People working the machines, digging with their bare hands, bloody and raw. Wearing only rags, with chains and steel collars on the people as they worked. Baniz people.

  Around them, soldiers—Reloumene soldiers, with heavy guns—forcing them to work. The butt of a rifle slammed against one woman’s face when she faltered. A boot driven into another man’s knee when he stumbled.

  “Get back to it,” an officer with a thick Reloumic accent said. “You’re behind the quota.”

  They reached to help the enslaved people, but instead they flew out again, farther to a farm. More baniz, sleeping in squalor, the bunkhouse overpacked with bodies and stinking of disease and raw filth. Rats and roaches crawled over them as they tried to sleep.

  And the soldiers came in, slamming on the lights. “To the fields, you worthless slugs! You’re behind on the harvest.”

  They had no fist to strike the soldiers, no hand to help the people up. They were nothing, nothing but pain and anger and shame as they flew across more of the wasted landscape, ruined by the Alliance bombs and the tyrant’s atrocities.

  The oil fields. Great metal derricks, pumping precious blood of the five sisters out of the holy land of Zapisia, while their children—the baniz people forced to work at gunpoint. The ones not working not even given the dignity of the bunkhouse, kept in literal cages, locked up like they were wild animals.

  “Why are you stopping?” a soldier demanded to a group of workers. “We can’t stop the drills!”

  “The machines are—” one man started.

  “Shut your fucking mouth!” the solider said, and he went over and flipped a switch.

  The drill started up, metal grinding on metal.

  A spark danced from the drill.


  Fire exploded from the ground.

  Fire burst forth, covering the soldiers and workers around the drill. All of them screamed in horror, pain, terror—which Wenthi and Nália felt every moment of.

  The fire spread. It would soon hit the other wells, spread out of control. To all the derricks.

  To the cages.

  To the people, trapped.

  FIFTH CIRCUIT:

  THE VOICE OF THE REVOLUTION

  53

  Nália slammed back into flesh, the weight and solidity of it making her gasp for air. She reached out and grabbed—she could reach and grab—the person nearest to her. Fenito, whose naked body was curled up against hers. She pulled him close, mostly out of instinct.

  “Where are we?” she shouted.

  Not her voice. His.

  Wenthi’s.

  “Renzi, easy,” Fenito said, pushing back on Wenthi’s bare chest. “You’re all right.”

  “No,” Nália said as she tried to find her bearings. She flexed Wenthi’s fingers, feeling the power of his muscular arms. Sweet air in his lungs. She had been feeling everything through his body since this nightmare began, but now it was different. She was in complete control. It felt like it was her own.

  They were still in the cage. It was hard to imagine that they had never really left it. Morning light was hanging overhead. Five of them were naked and clumped together in an exhausted mass where they had all fucked until completely spent. Nicalla sat apart from them, still in her robe, but with a similar blissful calm on her face. Around the cage, the rest of the Fists were strewn around the courtyard, all naked and dozing.

  She had seen it. The horror. The suffering. The fire. People were burning. Right now. It was happening right now.

  “Get up, get up. Did you see it?”

  “I saw it,” Nicalla whispered. “Varazina showed us the truth. Of the land, and the memory, and our connection. It was beautiful.”