by Rich Horton
“I thought we knew her,” said Kol. “I hired her.”
“Don’t the quenny find it strange that this sitcom has real rre and humans and egenu?” said Yip-Goru.
“Makeup, digital effects,” said Mr. Arun Sliver. “You can make anyone look like anyone else. A man is a man.”
“Arun,” said Mrs. James Chen, using the familiar register. “Yip-Goru. I know you two don’t care much for the Extension. But I’m guessing the Captain and Kol hate the Fist of Joy about the same amount. And perhaps you care about your good names.
“This is an opportunity. We can make our own video. The blockade will integrate it into their propaganda rotation. If we could just get Yip-Goru to say a few words in character.”
“Why me?” said Yip-Goru.
“You are the closest thing Extension Navy has to a sympathetic alien character,” said Mrs. James Chen. “You can make the video we wanted Terequale Bitty to make. Kol is a drunk, the Captain’s an incompetent windbag. . . . ”
“It’s water!” said Kol. “Egenu need water! I can’t go to the kitchen twenty times a shift. This show is racist.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mrs. James Chen. “I know the truth, we all know the truth. I’m giving you a chance to let your audience know the truth.”
“Quick question, Mrs. James Chen: is Extension Navy legitimately popular on Quennet?” The Captain twitched a finger and played a bit of video at normal speed: Terequale Bitty’s point-of-view stumbling down the exit corridor of a space station, carrying an unconscious Yip-Goru in her arms, pursued by Extension customs agents. “Or is it played to captive audiences, on military bases and in waiting rooms?” She sped the video back up to a blur. Terequale Bitty was always present, but never in shot. Always a surrogate for the audience.
“It cleans up with the student demographics,” said Mrs. James Chen. “We have no idea why; the whole point of the show is that nobody respects the quenny. But they do watch it, and we can use that.”
“Captain, you can’t be seriously . . . ,” said Kol.
“Kol,” said the Captain carefully, “stop showing off your bruise and help me out. Watch this video through the eyes of a space-epic fan.” Episodes on the Captain’s 2-screen were flashing by in seconds: Terequale Bitty on the bridge, in the engine room, in the cargo hold. “Do you see what I see? Do you notice something conspicuously missing?”
“Our consent?” said Kol. “Our seemingly genuine friendship with Terequale Bitty?”
The Captain stopped her playback. “We will produce a video,” she told Mrs. James Chen. “We will produce our own video, not whatever the Extension scripted for Yip-Goru. You will broadcast it using . . . however you do that sort of thing.”
“Make the video,” said Mrs. James Chen, “and we’ll see.”
“Hi. This is the cargo ship Sour Candy, and I am her Captain. It is a real, civilian, spaceship, not a broadcast set, and I’m an alien, not a quenny in makeup. This is my private office.”
The Captain was wearing a shiny purple dress. It had been fashionable once, but not within the Captain’s lifetime. Probably an heirloom, stored in a locker as a reminder of her previous life. Kol had never seen the Captain wear anything but the grey jumpsuit and the black vinyl jacket.
“I apologize if the camera work is shakier than what you’re used to,” said the Captain. She was speaking Mirret, memorized phonetically. “Our regular camerawoman, Terequale Bitty, passed away in an accident a few shifts ago. It was a senseless death, and among other things, I’m afraid it means the end of the series.
“I won’t pretend we haven’t had our differences with the broadcaster, but I’m sure you agree that Terequale Bitty’s character was the moral center of the show. She is irreplaceable. It doesn’t make sense to go on without her.”
Mr. Arun Sliver was running the 3-camera, a heavy red pile of milspec designed for human hands and provided by Mrs. James Chen. Kol and Yip-Goru flanked the Captain, hands folded, like at a funeral.
“I want to show you something before we sign off. Something the broadcaster kept cutting out of the show.” The Captain waved Mr. Arun Sliver forward, towards the large porthole above her desk. Mr. Arun Sliver manoeuvred the camera into the recessed glass of the porthole. A stark green crescent filled the viewfinder.
“This is the establishing shot,” said the Captain. “It sets the scene, tells you where we are in space. Right now, we’re in orbit around a planet. It’s your planet. This is Quennet. This is you.”
“Problem with the focal length,” said Mr. Arun Sliver.
“Switch to a 2-shot,” said the Captain, in Trade Standard D.
“Not sure how.”
The Captain reached into the recessed porthole and blocked one lens of the camera with three thick fingers. On the viewfinder, Quennet became a thin green blur and then slowly came back into focus.
“Sour Candy is an old ship,” said the Captain. “It’s ugly, it’s falling apart. There’s a lot of space for cargo and not much for people. But when it gets too much to bear, we can just look out a porthole and we’re surrounded by this stark, majestic beauty. We all look out the porthole to recharge. Terequale Bitty looked out all the time, but the broadcaster cut it out. I think you should ask yourself why your government systematically cut the most striking footage produced for this show.
“Listen. In this line of work, we say there are four kinds of cargo. There’s goods to be delivered, junk to be disposed of, information to be transmitted. And there’s the cargo you don’t need to deliver, because it’s addressed to you. The experience of being out here in the middle of all this beauty. That’s the most valuable cargo of all.
“People of Quennet, you deserve to see everything Terequale Bitty saw. You deserve to see your own beautiful planet from above. You deserve to come out here, share your work and your culture with the rest of the universe, and then come back home. Think about this.”
Mrs. James Chen the Extension spy stepped out of the shadows and slowly, repeatedly clapped her hands together.
“Nice speech,” she said.
“Mrs. James Chen,” said the Captain. “You’re fired. Take this video back to your handlers.”
“With pleasure.” The spy delivered a crisp Extension-style salute. “It’s been an honour serving with you.”
“Heh, you think I’m crazy,” the Captain told Kol after Mrs. James Chen had left and the others had gone below. She parodied the spy’s salute. “The hell was that? Military shitweed.”
“The fourth kind of cargo is baggage,” said Kol.
“Sorry?”
“It’s not valuable. It doesn’t ‘come addressed to you.’ It’s the stuff you can’t get rid of. It’s whatever you’re running away from. So that you end up living in a metal deathtrap, smuggling benzene to the planet where they get high on benzene.”
The Captain made a pensive face. “Yeah, well,” she said. “I think Sour Candy has given the quenny enough depressing news for one shift. Let’s end the show on a positive note.”
Light spiked through the porthole above the Captain’s desk. The ship’s radiation alert went off. The blockade was heating up.
“Time to leave,” said Kol, and pulled the drapes. “Sit out the war in a forest.”
“Oh, but now they’re distracted!” said the Captain. She rubbed stubby hands together. “Now we can run the blockade. We’ll drop off the body, find some roe donors to cover our expenses.”
“We’re back down to—okay, sure! Why the hell not? What’s the worst that can happen? Let’s go.”
The Captain punched Kol in the arm again. “Kol, you are a lousy XO,” she said. “But I seem to remember you used to be a pretty good sysadmin.”
Down on Quennet, near a beach, there’s a big house bought with government money. An old couple lives there, retired; they do some gardening, watch a lot of broadcast video. Once in a while a government priest comes down from the city and spends an afternoon. There are bedrooms for the kids and their families,
when they come to visit; and a little room set aside for Terequale Bitty, the kid who left home and never came back.
Terequale Bitty just came back. She landed with a shockwave that uprooted the garden and scared her mother half to death. She came back in a box with her skull cut open, but that’s more than the government priest said would ever come back. It’s her. It really is her.
She didn’t want to come back. She hated it here. But here she is.
Elementals
Ursula K. Le Guin
I. Airlings
No one knows how many airlings there are, most likely not a great many, whatever a great many means. They inhabit the atmosphere, generally between a hundred and ten or twelve thousand feet above the ground, seldom clearly visible to human eyes, and leaving almost no trace of their presence. They swim in air as we do in water, but with far more ease, air being their native element. Slight motions of the whole body and the arms and legs move them gracefully through their three dimensions.
We breathe air, but a very different element, the earth, gives us support. This might explain the apparent duality of human nature. Airlings, like fish or fetuses, are supported by what they breathe, and so to them flesh and spirit may be more nearly, more simply one.
Airlings live off the warmth of the sun: they calorisynthesize, as plants photosynthesize. They eat heat. The highest, faintest stratocirrus clouds are believed to be their waste matter, their ethereal sewage, drifting upward to evaporate.
The airlings’ small, slight, cool bodies are almost transparent. Only with old age do they begin to turn cloudy, verging on translucency. Infants are as clear as glass.
If they ever did, the airlings no longer frequent the air near centers of human habitation. As we swarm thicker and thicker on the earth, the airlings have scattered ever higher into the atmosphere above the oceans, the largest deserts, tundras, and high mountain ranges. Many of them go south for the sumer, to Antarctica, where in the endless sunlight above the blizzards they can fly as freely as they used to do.
Our ever-increasing air traffic is evidently a problem or danger to them, but they avoid the routes and altitudes commonly used by airplanes; and they do not register on cameras or radar.
Their voices are extremely soft, but their hearing is acute, and if the wind is not strong a pair of airlings can carry on a long conversation while flying a half-mile apart. Several human studies of their language or languages exist, and even some partial glossaries, but all of them are based on the most fragmentary evidence and, like the nineteenth-century treatises demonstrating that the languages of the North American Indians were derived from Welsh, consist mostly of wishful thinking.
Airlings have no gender, or share a single gender, as you please. Young adults pair off on brief, warm, summer nights in the higher latitudes above the sea; the couples play in the air together, meeting, at the end of intricate and rapid configurations of flight, for a long, close kiss. Down in the tropics some seven months later, each one of the couple, attended closely by friends and relatives, may bear a child in mid-air.
Careful and affectionate parents, the airlings carry their newborns out of every passing cloud or cloud-shadow to bathe and be nourished by the flooding heat of the sun. The babies can fly within a day or two. They sleep in the parent’s arms for a year or so. Even when it has learned to sleep on the wing, the child stays close to its parent for two or three years more. Then the little airling begins to make exploratory flights on its own, and before long the parent will guide it near a school, and soon will see it plunge into the throng without a backward look.
In the school—dozens or hundreds of youngsters flying together—the children live, learn, and play together for ten years or more, till, nearing maturity, one by one they leave the group, going off on their own on world-encircling voyages, each alone in the vast ocean of the air.
They meet and meet again, maintaining long-lasting relationships of consanguinity, friendship, and love, and carrying on their soft, far-ranging conversations; but airlings never stay together permanently, nor, once out of school, do they ever gather in large groups.
Death comes to the airling as a sensation of ever-increasing warmth and lightness, as if they were afire, and gravity were letting go its hold. They begin to fly higher than they have ever flown before, seeking cold, rising into ever thinner air. One day, somewhere alone, almost in the stratosphere, the airling will suddenly combust and vanish in one slight, bright, all-consuming flare.
Nothing of an airling ever falls to the ground.
Airlings pay little heed to other creatures, but have been reported to tease hummingbirds, and sometimes they follow skylarks upward, imitating their song. In early spring and late autumn they often join the great migration routes, spending the long, dark, hungry night nestled on the back of a wild goose or Arctic tern or sandhill crane, half asleep in the feathers between the powerful, slow-beating wings. The bird pays no attention to its almost invisible, almost weightless passenger.
II. Booklets
There is a movement to declare booklets an endangered species. I believe this is unnecessary; their adaptability will save them, as it did through the cataclysmic changes from clay to papyrus to vellum to paper in the West, and from scroll to bound book in both the Orient and Occident. The Romans, after all, knew them as volumenuli—scrollets. Perhaps the Babylonians had a word for them—cuneideformers?
Of course many people would applaud the extinction of the whole species. They regard booklets as mere noxious pests, ignoring the indisputable evidence of intelligent, though obscure, purpose in their behavior, and an arguable degree of literacy. “Cockroaches are damn clever too,” one man said to me. I unwisely retorted, “Roaches can’t read,” and his perfectly rational reply was, “Thank God!”
Actually, we can’t say with certainty that booklets read. All we know is that they respond to written or printed words, as words, in some way. Their most persistent and annoying behavior, interference with the order of letters and words, seldom seems meaningful, to us. I know a poet who leaves his notebook on shelves he believes to be particularly booklet-infested, hoping to find they have made wonderful or inspiring changes in his words, but I think him foolish. For one thing, they clearly prefer print to handwriting. Now that the only natural enemy of the booklet, the proof-reader, is a genuinely endangered species, the poet should simply print his poems and confidently expected to find typos, whether enlightening or not.
There is no doubt that booklets multiplied in proportion as print replaced manuscript. Medieval copyists complained, of course, of the membranae pediculi (vellum lice) that transposed letters, altered words, and made nonsense out of whole passages in their work (particularly when the light was poor and they were sleepy.) But only countless millions of booklets working, as they seem to do, in mysterious harmony of purpose, can account for the ever-increasing number of typos, transpositions, misspellings, and random garble we see in print these days. The absence of proof-readers can only explain part of it.
Is booklet activity mere mischief, malice, as some believe? Do booklets so despise or envy us, or our books, to the point that they try to destroy them? Are they possibly trying to correct us—to point out, subtly, by making some of it meaningless, the inherent meaninglessness, the existential error, in all we write? Or are they quite indifferent to us and what we write except in using our symbols as a code to transmit an entirely different order of meaning, opaque to us? Jopper’s Codex of Common Typos is a massive but unconvincing attempt to “translate” this supposed code or cipher.
Whatever their purposes, I think it very likely that booklets are in fact quite indifferent to our purposes. Do they perceive us at all? To us they are invisible and imperceptible, except to people experiencing certain types of migraine aura.
These witnesses universally report them as being about the size of a comma, the color of the page, and intensely active. In 1923, Mrs. Dora Brown wrote a vivid description for her opthamologist: “A quivering, scu
ttling busy-ness. All over the page—every page. They’re in constant motion, almost vibrating—mostly gathered around the lines of print, pulling and pushing at letters. A lot of them will do it all at once, so that a whole word shivers, or moves, or jumps a little. And the letters seem to blur. The words aren’t quite solid and definite any more, as printed words ought to be. They’ve been un-stabilised (is that a word?).”
To me, this description brings to mind a phenomenon Mrs Brown had never seen: a page of text on an early computer screen. The technology has improved, so that the text that I am typing right now into my computer, and that you may be reading on another computer, looks substantial, steady, clear, and stable. But it isn’t. The whole thing could vanish in a moment, or I could change every word in it again and again and leave no trace of what was there to begin with; if you don’t have a locked copy, so can you. I think the computer—which many thought would save us from the annoying tricks of booklets and render the species obsolete—is turning out to be their ideal ecological niche.
We know they are adaptable. Probably they breed very frequently, like fruit flies. They must have undergone great change in the past twenty years in order to operate electronically as they did corporeally—for a booklet to become an ebooklet. But perhaps those changes lay in the direction their nature had always tended: just as, when he was needed, a kind of human being appeared who had never existed, because his capacity, his nature had never before been called upon, the computer nerd.
Ebooklets, which many people carelessly refer to as “bugs,” totally avoid copiers, but they infested scanners at once and copiously. What the future may hold for them in the reproduction and dissemination of computer texts, who can say? Arbitrary alteration, omission and elimination, reversals and misplacement, introduced elements, and garbling—all these devices and strategies are infinitely easier to execute in electronic text. The instability for which Mrs. Brown sought the word in 1923 has been achieved. The pirating of incomplete and corrupted texts, the practice of “mashing” disparate and unrelated texts, the indifference to error, are good evidence of the essential instability of the electronic word. My guess is that ebooklets are eagerly abetting and feasting upon the activities of e-pirates, corporations dealing in information, paranoid governments, and human lazy-mindedness, towards the creation of a Universal Library in which information, misinformation, and disinformation are indistinguishable, a literature in which all texts are corrupt and there is no unaltered original by which to discover the nature and extent of the corruption.
