by Ian McDonald
Moonface was the leader, the spokesperson, the car thief, the one by dint of his deformities freest to venture abroad in the night city.
Lami was a beautiful, beautiful girl of about twenty. Enye could not understand the nature of her deformity until the shadows among the cardboard hovels stirred and she saw that from the twelfth rib down she wore the form of a flesh-coloured snake. Chattering inanely, she busied herself making coffee over a small camping gas stove. She wore a cut-off T-shirt bearing the legend “SunMed Capo Blanco” and a short denim jacket laden with costume jewellery. Silver bangles jingled softly on her wrists as she busied herself with coffee.
Sumobaby might once have been a man. Once. Now he was a massive wedge of blubber, taller squatting naked and sweating by the fire than Enye was standing. Tiny, Thalidomidesque arms waved uselessly; he did indeed resemble some fat-farm hybrid of sumo wrestler and blue-eyed baby.
Fingers had the body of a woman. In place of her head was a giant hand. When Enye was introduced, the fingers of that hand uncurled from the fist into which they had been clenched to reveal two round blue eyes in the centre of the palm. Two eyes, long eyelashed, blinking. Nothing more. Fingers breathed through a flapping tracheotomy lesion in her throat.
“Lami was a med student,” Moonface explained, which was no explanation at all.
Of the six, Cello’s deformities were the most horrifying. Whatever transforming power had touched the others had changed him (or her—gender had been swept away in the wave of transformation) into something that, as the name suggested, was nothing other than a cello shaped from human flesh, with a single arm for a fingerboard, a hand for a tuning head, and strung with its own vocal cords. Breath soughed from the F-holes; the strings hummed and whispered, shaping the still air beneath the viaduct into a memory of human speech.
Of the six, Wolfwere seemed the least affected by the changes: a moon-pale, green-eyed girl crouching by the fire in a blanket, never speaking, never looking up, moving only from time to time to lick at her belly and armpits. Then Moonface explained that before the Transforming, she had been his dog. Now she was an inverted were-creature—dog by day, by night a human, with the mind and intellect of a dog. Indeed, all the Midnight Children’s terrible deformities were a type of lycanthropy—by day they were young men and women, and dogs, grubbing what living they could from the fringes of society, cars, shoplifting, petty burglary, dope dealing. When the sun set behind the shunting sheds, they reverted to their midnight incarnations.
“Don’t confuse the woman,” the one called Sumobaby said, jelly-blubber jowls quivering. “None of this will make sense without the archive.” Lami nodded. Fingers hissed through her breath hole. Cello’s strings seemed to sob in agreement. From a place of safekeeping behind loose bricks in the viaduct wall, Moonface handed a blue Ziploc document folder over the embers to Enye. Manila files, envelopes, loose papers paper-clipped together. The Midnight Children sat drinking their coffee from their black-cat mugs while Enye riffled through the papers. Fingers lifted up the mug to armless Sumobaby’s lips.
“This was what Dr. Rooke referred to in his videotape.”
“We were the place of safekeeping,” said Moonface. “After the murder, we removed the material, according to his instructions.”
“So you torched the house.”
“No. They did. They hoped to destroy the archive, and so keep themselves safe.”
“The phaguses?”
“Some of them.”
“Let her read,” said Sumobaby. “It will not make sense until she does.”
Lami passed joints around the fire. Sumobaby and Fingers shared one, between lips and trach hole.
Pick at random. Inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Enye pulled a manila envelope from the plastic file, began reading. In the background, all-night radio played, wired into a car battery, all the oldies, all the favourites, the ones that make your day when Mistah DeeJay plays them on the radio.
The Mygmus may be viewed not so much as a place, a spatio-temporal relationship, a quasi-Euclidean geometrical domain, but as a state. The concept is a familiar one in modern quantum physics, in which time is not considered a dynamic process, but a succession of recurring stales eternally coexistent. Such thinking liberates us from our essentially linear concepts of time, with past, present, and future abacus beads sliding along an infinitely long rail. It enables us to see past and future as states, and our concept of “present” the zone of transition between these two states. The analogy here is the constriction of an hourglass, with the disordered potential events of the future being given order and apparent sequence by the constriction before they pass once again into disorder and timelessness. In both future and past, all events exist together, eternally and atemporally. Everything that is past is past, be it a thousand millennia or a millisecond ago. It is all equally inaccessible—everything that is to come is in the future, whether that be the next minute or the next millennium.
But how then is it that we perceive an ordered flow of events from future state to past state? Why, to be flippant, is Tuesday October 8, 1958 not followed by Friday, November 9, 1989, or Monday, July 10, 663? The answer, I feel, lies in the word perceive. Certainly both future and past, as states, potential domains, are contained within the present: all possible events await selection, and are mathematically equally likely. What selects these events and parades them before us in the temporal order we understand of future to present to past, in a continuous and ordered flow, must be nothing other than human consciousness. Consciousness itself may be nothing more than a veil that filters future from present from past, that shuts out the inconceivable anarchy of all possible events and reduces it to our familiar linear time sense.
If, then, the present is a function of our consciousness, therefore the past must also, in a sense, be a figment of our imaginations. By selecting an order for events, we select therefore also the order in which they pass from present state to past state.
Common to every people is this concept of a timeless time: the Dreamtime, the Age of Gold, the Ginnungagap—a state of timelessness and changelessness which endures (if endure is a valid word to use in the context of something essentially nontimebound) eternally, or would have endured eternally save that some event, usually, the creation of humanity, and human consciousness, caused change in the changelessness and unleashed the concept of directed time.
(Pencilled underneath in faint 3H)… could be that mythoconsciousness predates chronoconsciousness, that our distant ancestors were not what we would define as sentient. They perceived their universe with naked understanding, in a time when the gods, their future selves, what they would one day become, waiting in the potential state of future events, literally walked the earth.
“What does this mean?”
“Read on, sister.”
Being subconscious creations, phaguses are beyond, or rather, beneath such upper-brain distinctions as ethical or moral discrimination. This makes them, as faerykind has ever been, both delightful and dangerous, beyond good and evil, and utterly unpredictable. Their sole ethic is that they be true to the subconscious desire (or dread) that created them and shaped their character. They can be both one’s stoutest ally and most deadly enemy.
The concept of the Mygmus as a state in which all past events are equidistant and simultaneous strips a little of the mystique from the process of phagus creation.
The symbol-store of the Mygmus is constantly being imprinted with information from the human imagination. What the mytho-creative individual does is remove the “past-tense” tag from an event or person or concept or imagining in the Mygmus, thus making it present-state, and actual.
“Certain individuals have a genetically determined ability to interact with this Mygmus state, and manipulate it according to the terrain of their subconscious mind. Dr. Rooke called this ability mythoconsciousness.”
A coldness had seeped from the brick, the concrete, the subdawn chill, deep into the fibre of her chi, her spirit.
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“And I am one such individual.”
Or was it the cold of the un-place, the timeless state of the Mygmus?
The one called Cello emitted a sudden, strident discord. The Midnight Children looked in alarm to the sky.
“Soon, Moonface.”
“You will have to leave, lady.”
“I’ve hardly even begun…”
“Please. We are placing ourselves in considerable danger by allying ourselves openly with you. There is a very real danger that in associating with you, we may attract the attentions of the Nimrod, or worse. It was able to pick out the glow of your emergent mythoconsciousness, as were we—that was how I was able to find you, and in the nick of time, too. It may now be able to discern our presence within the network of mythlines. Our day selves are invisible to the Adversary, unless, that is, you make them known to her. That is why we decided we must hide them from you. Please understand.”
“Can I at least take the file?”
Eyes conferred. Fingers closed her hand-head twice, three times.
“I think that would be all right. We’ll be here, every night, after darkness has fallen. Please, don’t try to look for us by daylight. We will teach you what you need to know to master your ability. Go. Now. Please…”
She looked back, of course—as people caught up in legends always do—but there was not one soul to be seen in the cardboard city as the first vagrant light of the cold cold day stole into the shadows under the railroad arch.
A green bus with an advertisement for the Prudential Savings Society she had designed herself came along the road between the shunting yards and the echoing fastnesses of the port authority. There was no stop here but the driver stopped anyway. She had just enough money in the patch-pocket of her Reeboks for the fare. The only other passenger, an all-night drunk, stared and stared and stared at her naked swords.
Of the many, many things she likes about Jaypee Kinsella, the thing that goes to Number One in her Personal Top Ten is that he can invite her to a party, for a drink, for dinner, to the movies, to the opera, to view his collection of early twentieth century plastics, without there ever being a Question of Anything Between Them. They are friends—best friends in a way she can never be best friends with Saul. She tells Jaypee things about Saul she would never never tell Saul about Jaypee. You think it is odd for a man and a woman to be friends like that. You think, there must be something; you cannot see how creatures as alien as a man and a woman can be so close without sexual attraction, and when you see that there is Never Any Question of Anything Like That, then you begin to think it is a strange and unnatural relationship. There must be something wrong if they don’t feel something for each other. Maybe he is gay, maybe she is, you know, a lesbian. You think it is improper because these people enjoy a closeness and intimacy of relationship without the need for sexual attraction that is missing from your relationships where sex is the only closeness and intimacy you understand. And you are jealous.
But even in the heart of this intimacy lies a shadow.
“Most days you look serious,” says Jaypee, vapourizing Mrs. O’Verall with a meson blast from the hyperphazosonic plasmobuster pistol, batteries not included, Enye brought him from a day she had at the seaside with Saul. “Today you are looking exceptionally serious. Crucially serious. Is that man of yours giving you trouble again?” He blows imaginary smoke from the LED nozzle. Mrs. O’Verall, reduced by the beam of coruscating force to an indescribable sphere of radiance suffusing all circumambient space with incandescence, continues on her rounds with her pots of hot water and sachets of assorted herbals and decafs.
“My life is kind of… complex,” Enye pleads.
And he knows she is hiding the truth within the shadows of her heart, and she knows that he knows, and he knows that she knows that he knows, but the truth stays hidden, in the shadows of her heart.
Putting station idents and pixcels and quantels and fractals and all the televisual bestiary of the Computer Aided Design Unit behind them, Jaypee takes Enye for a prime-time pint in an advertising bar close by where people with names like Natasha and Jeremy hold conversation totally in CAPITALS or Initials, or A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.S. and junior copywriters whisper furtively about the Great National Novels they have tucked away in the bottom drawers of their desks.
Jaypee sets two cream-capped jars of the Great National Beverage on the mock Art Deco table.
“To quote the immortal Flann O’Brien, ‘A pint of plain is your only man!’” he says by way of toast and invitation to pour it out let it run and plume and splash onto the floor, run out the door and into the streets, fill them with its torrential onrushing, down to the sea, the sea, and forgetfulness. And suddenly she wants more than anything to say it, say it out, say it now. Be free of it; her albatross.
“Jaypee?”
“What?”
“Jaypee, I have something I have to tell you.”
“Please remember that you are in licensed premises and may not legally, much less morally and ethically, be responsible for anything you might say.”
“No, Jaypee, I have to tell you this. You’re my oldest, dearest friend; nobody else knows this, not even Saul.”
“I tremble in anticipation.”
The words come. In a rush. In a storm. Like many, many birds. They come to the edge of her lips, the tip of her tongue.
And will not go any farther.
“My life is kind of… complex.”
The shadow.
He knows it. She knows he knows it. He knows she knows he knows it. And as if it is the sign and seal of her isolation, it comes to her: the wrongness, like a throbbing pressure, like a sore about to burst and spew black pus. She excuses herself, makes for the mock Art Deco Ladies’ Room, where she cries aloud from the pressure in her head and heart. She excuses herself, apologises: a migraine. Jaypee comments that she has been getting a lot of those lately. Pressure of work, she tells him. He looks at her in a way that says many things at once, none of them capable of being spoken aloud. She goes home to wait for night. The city is dark. In the darkness of her apartment she pops a tab of Shekinah. She pulls on her black zip-up one-piece. She ties her hair back from her face. She laces her red shoes onto her feet. She pulls on a short brocaded jacket and an embroidered Moroccan hat Jaypee brought her from one of his many and wide-ranging travels. She goes to the rack in her living room, bows respectfully, lifts the swords, and puts them in the back of the car.
She is afraid. Every time, she is afraid. As she drives, the fear is so intense it is almost sexual. This time she may not be able to defeat whatever is waiting for her. This time whatever waits for her may destroy her. Impelled by the vertiginous swoop of Mygmus energies on the edge of her perceptions, Enye MacColl drives out of the two A.M. city to the corrugated steel hulks of a recession-struck industrial estate close by the threshold lights of the airport. The location does not surprise her. They tend to be attracted to places with which she has associations. She stops at a closed-down factory unit. A hoarding inside the perimeter wire directs interested parties to a city centre real estate company. The light in the small glass and plywood booth is the security guard. He is reading a horror novel by an American author. A car at this hour does not concern him. It is a popular area for couples. Enye should know. Under the scream of back-throttling Boeings she cuts the wire with a pair of bolt cutters she keeps in the back of the car. She has quite a respectable little house-breaking kit in there. She gains entry to the vacant unit and there does battle with an Iron Age warrior armed with a spear that unfolds into a rosette of barbs. They battle across the concrete floor, striking sparks from the steel pillars, while the big jets come and go in thunder and light. The warrior goes down before her fire-and-stones cut. She slips out the way she came in, under the wire, into her car; drives off. The night watchman is listening to his radio now.
A police car stops her on the way home. She tells the incredibly young policeman she is coming from a party. The incredibly young policem
an shines his torch over her; looks into her face for signs of drink, drugs; checks her license; and salutes as he wishes her a good night, remember to drive carefully. During the entire encounter the incredibly young policeman’s overweight, middle-aged partner sat chewing at the edges of a hamburger while the prowl car radio crackled and spat night-static.
When she is sure they are not behind her, she stops the car and shivers spastically for the best part of half an hour from nervous tension.
She opens the door of number twenty-seven L’Esperanza Street to find Ewan watching the late news and drinking her coffee. There have been mass resignations in Eastern Europe, apparently, and bomb warnings to American airlines. A delegation of twelve European Muslims has failed to lift the death sentence for blasphemy imposed upon a prize-winning author. The star of an Australian soap opera is to appear in a pornographic movie.
She is furious. And afraid. There are things he should not see all around him.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Your landlord let me in. Said you wouldn’t be long. What time do you call this?”
“Is my brother my keeper? Just what do you want?”
“What do you think?”
“Our mother. Our sacred, virginal mother.”
“She’s been to the doctors. They say there’s nothing wrong with her—nothing medical, that is. They say she’s as fit as a flea, but she’s going downhill, Enye. Downhill. You should see her—she’s lost pounds, she’s listless, she has no energy, no enthusiasm, won’t eat, won’t talk, won’t go out. She’s sick. She’s a sick woman. She’s a woman who has made herself sick. She’s a woman who is being eaten from within because her own daughter will not forgive her for what she did to her father.”
“Well, let me tell you why this daughter will not forgive her mother. Because her mother lied to her. Not once, not twice, not three times, or ten times, but repeatedly, constantly, for fourteen years. She tied to me, to us, to both of us, Ewan, never forget that, about why our father left. She has never told us the truth, she never will. I know she lied. I was here, at the time of the Christmas tree.”
