Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  “The black birds did this?” I asked.

  “No.” The pencil woman laughed. “The birds maintain the city. They can use the mirrors to make copies of existing art, but they aren’t artists.”

  “Shall we take her to meet the artists?” the watercolor man asked, grinning at the pencil woman.

  “Him,” I corrected. “I’m more for painting than sketching, despite my pencil shape.”

  The watercolor man waved away my complaint. “Painter, sketcher, it makes little difference in the grand scheme of things what you call yourself.”

  I thought back to my mother’s insistence that I was a princess, and her demand that I learn to sketch despite my painty nature. “It matters to me.”

  The watercolor man stepped forward, but before he could say anything further the pencil woman interrupted. “The artists are drawing new residents for our city today, in the garden district. We could take him there.”

  On our way to the garden district, we passed a section of page that had been torn, like the twin rifts of my parents’ realm. Shockingly similar actually, both in the length of the rifts and in their position on the page. These weren’t similar rifts—they were the same rifts as seen from below. On this side of the page, there were no giant boulders to mark the ends of the torn page. Instead, the entire rift was patched with strips of clear film like the ones the birds had used to repair the slits I had cut along the edges of my door.

  The pencil woman caught me looking. “The page has always been torn. Even in the beginning, when all the page was white and empty, the tears were there.”

  “What is the film that you have used to repair the rifts?” I asked.

  “Tape.”

  We left the rifts behind, and soon found ourselves in a field of colorful wildflowers. I liked the garden district better than the city, for it reminded me more of my parents’ realm. There was a maze of rose bushes, a grassy lawn, even a little creek. Beside the creek, on a wide expanse of flat gray stone, an artist had set up an easel. Like me, the artist was both watercolors and pencils. Unlike me, the division was sharp—the artist was all pencils on one side, and all paint on the other. As though someone had chopped mother and father in half, and pasted one side of each together.

  On the easel was a picture of a creature, the same height as the artist, with two arms and two legs and all the same features. But it wasn’t made of pencils or paint. It reminded me of my mother’s soldiers, although this one did not look as fierce. It stepped away from the page.

  “Hello,” it said. It wore brightly-colored clothes, which reminded me of my father, but its skin did not have diagonal lines of color, and when it turned back to touch the blank page, its fingertips left no mark.

  “Aren’t they lovely?” the watercolor man gushed. “Residents for the city. We’ll have thousands, and each will be unique.”

  I looked out across the garden district. There were several artists here, all identical, all standing before their easels and creating subtle variations on the form of the resident. Tall residents and short ones, thin ones and fat ones. Many of the newly made residents touched the blank pages they were drawn from, but of course they left no mark. “How sad that they will never make art.”

  The watercolor man laughed. “A tree doesn’t make art. How is this any different?”

  The city bustled with residents, intricate pieces of art that harvested food from the gardens and lived in the mirror-glass buildings. I watched them for hours, and what the watercolor man had claimed was true—there were no two that were the same. The residents were individuals, just as artists were. They sang and danced and paired off into couples.

  I studied them, but I didn’t draw any of my own. It seemed wrong somehow, to create such lifelike things and yet not give them access to any tiny sliver of creation. I petitioned the first couple for a blank white apartment, which they granted me, and I sketch-painted it into stone walls and tapestries.

  I had hated home while I was there, but now that I was here I was homesick. I drew a door to go back and sliced the page with my heartblade. I didn’t open the door. Not yet. But I found it comforting to know it was there.

  One of the residents that lived in my building asked me to draw a rocking chair. It seemed a reasonable enough request, so I sketched the design and painted it in dark wood tones, a fine chair for a lazy summer afternoon. A while later the resident returned, asking this time for a tiny bed, a crib. I made this, too, and offered to help carry it back, curious to see what it was for.

  The resident’s apartment was decorated in the standard style with patterned-rug floors and paisley walls. The preferred designs of the first couple were standard in every non-artist apartment, as were the furnishings. It must have been tedious to paint so many identical rooms, and I wondered how the artists had managed it. Perhaps this was what the pencil woman had meant when she said the birds could use mirrors to copy art.

  We set the crib next to a larger bed. Another resident was there now, despite it being the middle of the day, a time when residents generally went about their business in the city. The bedridden resident was malformed, stretched out of shape in the middle.

  The resident who had come for the crib caught my stare and pulled me aside. “She’s pregnant. The little bed is for the child.”

  I heard the words, but it didn’t make any sense. I smiled and nodded, and went back to my apartment. Residents, being art, clearly did not understand how children were made. Like any creation, children come into the world full-sized and perfectly formed. They do not misshape the mothers, or make them ill. Something had clearly gone wrong with the art, and I went to find the first couple.

  I found them in the building that the residents had designated as a hospital, surrounded by a flock of black birds. The pencil woman came over to greet me, but the watercolor man stayed focused on the work he was doing.

  “Something is happening to the residents that live in the apartment next to mine,” I told her. “They’ve gone a little mad.”

  “Ah, so you know. I’ll give you some birds and you can help us mop up.”

  I slowly approached the watercolor man, barely listening to the pencil woman’s words. He stood over one of the hospital beds, where a resident slept. In a smaller bed was an odd bit of art, like a resident, but small and pudgy. “Did the resident make that? Is it art?”

  The watercolor man scowled. “It definitely isn’t art, and it’s ruining my vision.” With a wave of his hand the birds flocked down and erased both the resident and the misshapen little thing that it had made. I was sad to see it go. The tiny resident didn’t suit the city, but it had been interesting to look at.

  “I told him he could have some birds,” the pencil woman said. “Help us fix the problem before it gets out of hand.”

  The watercolor man had moved on to the next hospital room. “Fine,” he called out. “They mostly come here, but sometimes they make these little messes at home. He can clean out his building.”

  The pencil woman led me back outside. She screeched and a hundred black birds landed at our feet. They fanned their tails and bowed their heads. “Do as the artist bids you,” she told them. All at once the birds turned and stared at me with beady black eyes. The pencil woman went back inside the hospital.

  “Follow me home,” I told the birds. Then, remembering what the birds had done to the resident and its tiny creation, I added, “but not too close.”

  It didn’t seem right to wipe away the neighbors, even when the misshapen resident painted the bed with a mess of blood and made one of the odd little residents. It looked much the same as the one I’d seen in the hospital. Perhaps residents weren’t very creative. This one spent a lot of time screaming, but it stopped when the residents rocked it in the lovely chair I’d made.

  I didn’t erase the tiny resident. It wasn’t right to destroy something simply because it didn’t turn out the way you intended. The residents were only doing what their nature compelled them to do.

&n
bsp; “Don’t take the new resident out where the first couple might see it,” I warned them. “They don’t think the little ones are art, and they don’t fit with the aesthetic of the city.”

  They did their best to keep the little one inside, but the constant noise was irritating to their neighbors. It wouldn’t be long before someone complained and the first couple came, and they would be angry that I hadn’t used my birds to clear this smudge away from their artistic vision.

  I looked at the door that led back to my parents’ realm. I didn’t think the residents would be any better there. They were not soldiers, and the queen would force them to fight if I brought them to the realm. But if I could draw my way to a blank page, I could make them a safer world.

  I sharpened all my fingers and tossed the shavings out the window. The delicate curls of wood drifted down to the sidewalk. Birds fluttered down to erase them; tiny discarded pieces of me did not belong in such an orderly world as this. With newly shortened fingers, I drew myself a heartglass full of water, narrow enough to fit next to my heartblade. I sketched a scroll of white paper with a strap that let me wear it across my back.

  I wasn’t ready to go back home, not yet, but we could go to the next page of the sketchbook. I took two sheets of paper and used a strip of clear tape to bind them together along one edge. To go from the first page to the second page, I had cut through the page, but looking at my makeshift model of the sketchbook, I saw that it would not work to cut a door to the third page. Instead, we needed to leap across the binding, or draw ourselves a bridge.

  I called the neighbor-family over, and they followed me to the bound edge of the page. I drew a long plank of wood and tipped it until one end fell beyond the edge of the page. It didn’t slide down into the gap, so the far end of the plank must have landed on the next page.

  I walked across the bridge, and the residents followed.

  The Third Page of the Sketchbook

  Scribbles. Angry frustrated tangles of rage with gaping mouths full of pointy teeth. It is not safe here. Draw a door. Paint it quickly. Cut through the page. Escape.

  The Fourth Page of the Sketchbook

  Trio watched with two heads as a door appeared on the far wall of the laboratory, a door drawn by an artist they could not yet see. Their third head did not look up from their work, a delicate dissection they were conducting for the Multitude. Art often had unseen layers, inner workings that were only revealed through careful scientific study. Trio used their two heartblades to flay the pet open, and with two hands sketched each layer of anatomy onto a writing stone. These were things that should not be applied to paper, the gruesome and incomplete innards of an art-worthy whole.

  Only when the door swung open did Trio pause in their work.

  A singleton hurried through, followed by a pair of unchained pets. They slammed the door behind them. The singleton gave no commands to their pets and made no apology for their abrupt and unwelcome appearance. Something squirmed in the arms of one of the pets, and the Trio realized it was a third, smaller, pet. Intriguing.

  “The nature of your arrival is unusual,” Trio noted, speaking with all three voices in unison to emphasize their relatively greater status.

  The singleton stared at the partially dissected pet on the table, then gawked out the window, which boasted a sweeping view of the bluetree forest and the black-water river. Finally, the singleton spoke. “Are all of you in threes? I didn’t mean for you to stick together like that.”

  “You didn’t mean?” Trio laughed. “We are made in the image of the creator, mostly in twos and threes, but sometimes less and sometimes more. Our creator is not some lowly singleton, but an artist of infinite identities, a being that is vast beyond our comprehension.”

  “No,” the singleton insisted, “I drew this world—I painted the trees and the black river and the gemstone cities and the bright green fish.” The singleton crossed the room to stand before an easel and sharpened their fingers on their heartblade, leaving the shavings to clutter the laboratory floor. They drew a seedling bluetree, and it was in the same style as the world had been drawn.

  “A good imitation, for a singleton. But copying the work of the creator will not teach us the workings of the world. For that we must have science.”

  “Science?” one of the pets asked.

  Trio stared at the pet in surprise. “Your pet can speak.”

  “They are residents,” the singleton answered, “not pets.”

  Trio shrugged. The singleton could believe as they wished. They would not be the first to treat pets as though they were artists. “In any case, I do not think I have ever seen one with a mouth before. How very curious. May I dissect them?”

  The singleton considered the proposal. “Can you put it back together again afterwards?”

  Trio laughed and shook all three heads. “No, of course not. But I would give you paper to draw a replacement.”

  The pets, agitated by the conversation, edged back toward the door. “We don’t want to be dissected.”

  “But it is the will of the Creator that we study the internal workings of our art!” Trio insisted. “The Multitude has declared this truth!”

  The pets opened the door, and a raging beast came through, red and angry.

  It thrashed around the laboratory, knocking over equipment and absorbing art into itself through its gaping mouth. It latched onto the partially dissected pet like a leech and swallowed it off the page, and then it consumed the writing stone, covered in scientific notes. Trio was well studied in the sciences, but they had never heard of a creature such as this.

  Trio fled. The singleton and their pets followed.

  The heir followed the odd trio of artists through a winding maze of alleys, but the residents fell behind and the heir was reluctant to leave them alone in a place where someone might come along and cut them open. They quickly became lost. The heir had drawn the city, but they had done so from a distant vantage point. This new perspective was unfamiliar.

  The buildings were interspersed with trees that stretched impossibly high into a cloudless blue sky, a triumph of art or a failure of scale. Perhaps both. The trunks and branches were a pale silver-blue, and high above them broad purple leaves blocked the sun. Up in the canopy, the trees blurred together, with silvery branches linking one tree to the next and leaves forming a subtle quilt in shades of purple.

  The buildings were shaped like trees, too, smooth curves of ruby and sapphire, topaz and emerald, all spiraling around each other and stretching into the sky. The upper levels were connected by a maze of bridges. At the base of the buildings were doors decorated with delicate opal branches, woven together with swirling patterns of jade leaves.

  The city was densely populated with artists. As the trio had said, most of them were in twos and threes. Eventually, the heir found a singleton, patching a broken section of the city. It was simple work, demeaning for an artist—on the second page, the birds had done it.

  The singleton noticed the heir and smiled. “We don’t see a lot of other singles.”

  “Where I come from, everyone is single,” the heir said, “and some artists are only pencils or only paint.”

  “Not even whole,” the singleton said, amazed. “How do they make art?”

  “They work together in pairs.”

  The singleton stopped smiling. “It is the creator’s way, we suppose, that art should be made by the many, and not by the one.”

  After so much repair work, the singleton was in terrible shape. The erasers at the heir’s wrists and elbows were pink and unused, but the singleton had barely any joints left. Artists weren’t meant to spend their lives only repairing the work of others.

  “Come with us,” the heir said. “I am looking for a safe place for my residents.”

  “Residents?”

  The heir looked behind themself. The residents were gone.

  The heir searched the city, and the singleton helped. The tiny resident was so loud, it did not take long
to find where they had gone. They were in a courtyard surrounded by duos and trios of artists.

  “What are they doing?” the heir asked the singleton.

  “They are bidding,” the singleton answered. “Pets are very popular, and the small one is interesting. Did you make them?”

  “No, but I brought them with me to this page.”

  A vast artist came into the courtyard, stepping forward with dozens of colored pencil limbs and at least five heads that the heir could see. Many of the limbs were sharpened down to stubs. The heir called out, “Stop! Those pets belong to me!”

  The heir did not truly feel ownership for the residents, but they felt they had to at least try to help the poor creatures.

  “Bow before the Multitude,” the singleton whispered.

  The heir bowed their head.

  “Lower than that,” the singleton urged. “Flat on the ground because you’re a singleton, like us.”

  The heir deepened their bow slightly, but did not get down onto the ground. This world was their own creation, after all, and they were the equal of any number of artists.

  “This trio tells me that you have opened a door and let monsters onto our page,” the Multitude said.

  “The page before this one is filled with art-sucking leeches, and when I cut a door into this page, one of the monsters came through.”

  The Multitude scowled. “The words you speak are blasphemous. This is the first of all possible pages, brought into existence by our vast creator. The monsters on the page after this one are guarding the bliss of beyond, where our creator will reward us by drawing us into the infinity of all creation.”

  The heir quickly changed the subject, not wishing to anger the Multitude. “Please, those residents—you call them pets—will you return them to me?”