Food appears from time to time, dropped in my lap from someplace: weird pastes that feel clammy in my mouth but warm in my stomach; roots; and, once or twice, some freeze-dried rations from the Mothership, still edible after so long. I sleep a lot, on a makeshift bed of old survival gear.
At last some Gelet come and herd me into a cavernous space, whose dimensions I only discern because of the echoes of my own stumbles. Every time I move, I almost topple. One of these Gelet puts her pincer around my face, the first time they’ve done this since I came inside the city, and shows me what they plan to do: an array of dark spikes going into soft flesh, and a cradle of bone being pried apart with great care. I see things that look like worms and blobs of fat being stuffed inside a cavity that wasn’t meant to hold them. Skin being reshaped.
I understand: This will be painful. This will be impossible to undo. They’ll need to take me apart and reassemble me, and they cannot guarantee mastery.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. Do it. I want that. Please. Yes.”
They can’t tell that I’m agreeing, so I spread my arms as wide as I can, indicating openness.
“I’m ready. I want to be able to speak to you. I want to be part of your society. Let’s do this.”
I keep broadcasting eagerness, as loud as I can. I can’t contemplate that kind of pain, let alone the disfigurement, without going stiff with fear. But I know for sure, this is what I came here for.
Even when they take me into the chamber and remove all my clothing, exposing me to a chill, leavened by heat from deep-running springs, I don’t flinch. When they offer some sedatives from some old human medi-kit, I take them eagerly. In a half doze, I have inklings that they’re opening me up and taking away pieces, somewhere below my floating head. The drugs help me not to mind, but I don’t mind in any case. They can take anything, as long as they give me what they promised.
When they finish remaking me, they seal up my insides, while one of them envelopes my forehead in her pincer, tenderly, showing me a comforting memory (dream?) of a snowdrift being rearranged, slowly, by a languid wind that moves tons of loose powder in ornate whorls. Kilometers of bright lace, in constant motion.
mouth
Mouth sat in one of the Gelet’s weird sticky hammocks and heard their limbs scuttling in the trails going up and down outside the room where she was resting up. They had left a stack of old human books in here, and she’d read a couple of them in the meager illumination. Mouth didn’t think she was a prisoner, exactly, but if she wandered out into the Gelet city, she’d just get lost, or wind up in total darkness. And the thought of exploring this hive filled Mouth with dread. The Citizens had been fond of dread, which they’d viewed as a profound spiritual rapture that suffused your whole body, even to the hairs on your skin and the arches of your feet. Dread lasted longer, and went deeper, than awe or joy.
Mouth couldn’t force her mind to accept that she was in this alien place, with its hissing turbines and its swarming creatures. Instead, she tried to picture Alyssa sitting down here with her, and to guess what Alyssa would say about all this.
Maybe Mouth and Alyssa had never seen each other clearly. Mouth had always thought of Alyssa as a fully formed person who had already made all her big choices. But really, Alyssa had been a kid when they’d first met, and Mouth had only lately known Alyssa as an adult. She’d been trying to step up and become a boss for ages, but her relationship with Mouth had remained stuck in their old dynamic. And maybe she’d always cling to the impression of Mouth that she had formed as a wild-eyed girl with messy hair, leaving home for the first time.
Two pairs of snapping pincers appeared next to Mouth’s hammock, and a tentacle brushed her skin. She flinched but didn’t try to pull away. Up close, without the deafening wind, she could hear the teeth clicking in the wide mouth, and see the oily secretion glistening on the grubs in between the pincers. The Gelet smelled like damp cloth and fresh-baked bread, and they didn’t have “heads” at all. Instead, these protrusions rose over their front legs, like your thumb climbs out of your wrist, and culminated in those two big indentations that seemed to change shape, looking sad or wistful or mirthful as the light shifted.
The Gelet guided Mouth out of the hammock and gave her something to wear: a kind of dry moss or algae that hugged her body wherever she wrapped it around herself, and kept her warm and comfortable. Then they led her into a maze of shadows.
Mouth had lost her night-vision helmet along with the rest of her gear, and she saw nothing but depthless chasms and knife edges everywhere. The tentacles steadied her but also wore away at her calm, with their soft cilia and thick flesh. In the occasional flickering from distant foundries and bioluminescent growths, Mouth glimpsed segmented bodies moving in the dark, and she jumped each time. She had no reserves of bloody-mindedness left. She lost track of how many turns they took, or how many paces, and she started to believe she’d never see again.
They arrived at a large space, one of those high vaults with a number of galleries or balconies coming off at regular intervals, all the way up to the black pinprick of sky. Light came from far ahead, pale yellow and red. Four or five Gelet stood together, with all of their pincers turned sideways and open wide, to allow all of their tendrils to connect in some group conversation. Their gaping pincers, all interlocking, looked like those thistles that were overrunning the shore of the Sea of Murder. Their hind legs flexed. Mouth turned away by instinct, then forced herself to look, and saw that one of these Gelet was not a Gelet at all.
Sophie disengaged herself from the group and walked toward Mouth, who almost didn’t recognize her. She walked taller, with her head raised, and she had a blissful smile on her face, even amid all the gloom. Mouth was so distracted by her new posture and attitude she almost didn’t notice the tentacles rising up from Sophie’s back, or the wormy flesh wriggling on her chest, below the collarbone.
Then, once Mouth saw those things, she couldn’t see anything else. She felt sick to her stomach.
“There you are,” Sophie said, then shook her head. “It feels strange to speak aloud now.” She guided Mouth until they were sitting on a kind of bench that was lit by a greenish glow from some living flesh hanging over their heads.
“So you … wow. So you did it. You went ahead and became … this,” Mouth said. “They never even thought of making a law against what you’ve done, but you’re still the greatest outlaw in history.”
“Coming from you, that’s a compliment. Right?”
Mouth didn’t know what to say. She sat on her hands and stammered, without making any syllables. She knew what would happen now: Sophie would want to slime her so she could communicate without words. Maybe she’d force Mouth to experience her memories of witnessing all of Mouth’s selfish behavior, when they’d first met and Mouth had been tricking Bianca, and this would be the final strike to Mouth’s heart.
But Sophie didn’t come any closer. “You’ll get used to it,” she said in a near-inaudible voice that sounded like the old Sophie again.
“I’m sure I will,” Mouth said.
Mouth could hear the husky sound of Sophie’s new appendages rubbing together in distress.
“You know, you don’t have to be alone,” Sophie said after they had sat for a while. “This pain you’re holding inside yourself, all the memories of your dead nomads. You could share it with everyone here, if you became like me. You just form the memory in your head, and anyone you touched could remember it too, and share it. You don’t know how light it feels.”
“I can’t do what you’ve done,” Mouth said. “I really can’t. I used to be brave, but…” Even thinking about the deaths of the Citizens, too, brought a desolation, like the whole of the road was wound around the inside of her frame. Mouth didn’t want to share that anguish, to make it common property. She didn’t want consolation, or a sponge to soak up her grief.
But then, on some weird light-starved impulse, Mouth said: “But I can tell you about it, and you can share the
memory of me telling you with your friends, if you want.”
Sophie nodded.
Mouth talked until she tasted salt and bile. She told Sophie how she’d heard the voices in the distance, and then seen these blue creatures filling all the spaces around and between the Citizens. The chopping and whirring of a million pairs of wings, the whole encampment turned to a blue haze. The Priors, the helpers, the old people, the children, all singing with pain, until they went silent. Mouth running on her awkward child legs, fresh from a growth spurt, toward an orchard of skeletons with blue petals clinging. And then the shiny wings were gone, leaving just bones in the dirt. Mouth had painstakingly collected every one of those bones, even the smallest, even the ones that crumbled in her hand, and piled them in one spot. Then she’d fumbled with a tinderbox, trying to turn all the tiny wheels and open the valves, but only succeeded in burning her own fingers. At last she got a spark but the bones wouldn’t catch until she’d baled dead grass from a kilometer away and spread it, and then the flame near took her face off.
Mouth had almost lost the power of speech by the time she got to the part where she’d walked away from the still-burning pyre and gotten lost, going in circles, even though the night was right there and the day on the other side, and you could see the plume of smoke. Her eyes stung, her heart beat louder and louder.
She had no strength left when she finished telling the story, and this was the most she had ever told anyone about what had happened, even Barney.
“I am going to be walking away from that fire for the rest of my life,” she said, and this was something she had never admitted to herself before. “My hair could turn to white silk, my skin could turn to dry leaves, and I would still be walking with my back to the flames that consumed what was left of my people. I’m not ever going to be Argelan, or Xiosphanti, or Gelet, or any other nationality.”
Mouth risked looking at Sophie. The girl’s human eyes had a layer of moisture in them and around them, and her face was trembling. The thicket of fingers coming out of her upper rib cage wriggled, but the human face showed sadness, kindness, helplessness. Sophie rose, and without saying a word she went to share Mouth’s testimonial with the Gelet.
* * *
Mouth sat alone, in a split-wall chamber that seemed dimmer than ever. She stared past the opening in the wall, into a superstructure of swaying material that looked like coral or limestone. The city’s motors sounded like submerged avalanches.
Gelet came to fetch Mouth, three of them with their tentacles spread in a gesture that looked like sheltering, or guarding. Mouth had almost gotten used to not seeing, except for when a shape appeared nearby and startled her. They seemed to handle her with more care this time, after getting her story from Sophie, and the gentle nudges and enveloping tentacles only made Mouth angrier, because she was not some injured child. She pushed the Gelet off her, and made her own way.
She was so intent on brushing off her escort she marched right into a Gelet’s waiting tendrils.
As soon as the slippery digits made contact, Mouth was somewhere else. She had known this was coming, had tried to prepare so she wouldn’t lose her mind again. No fear, just stillness. But this Gelet vision was even more vivid than before—but also easier to understand, instead of the jumble of images they had dumped on her last time.
Mouth stood on the edge of the night, observing the road with inhuman senses. A mob of people walked from place to place, carrying everything on their backs or in a few carriages, straying into places that humans had never invaded before.
The Citizens became bolder as their numbers grew, and they even started going into Mount Abacus, the great rocky fist on the other side of the world from Xiosphant and Argelo. From the Gelet’s vantage point, Mouth watched the Citizens climbing into the mountain that straddled the road, exploring every crack until they found this miraculous substance: a dry, chalky bloom that glowed in the dark and crumbled as they pulled it out of the caves. Mouth remembered the acrid smell of that stuff, the way the Citizens would smear it on their faces for some of their rituals, how they would gather every last bit, because it had a million uses. The Citizens had called that substance nightfire, because of the way it glowed in the dark.
Gelet had spent lifetimes cultivating this bloom. Mouth felt their terror and shock as it was stripped away, as the root system deep inside the vents began to wither and collapse. These plants laced throughout the world, collecting heat energy on the day side and redirecting it to the night, exhaling gases that calmed the skies. Over several visits, the Citizens ripped out every piece of nightfire they could find, until the sky changed. The clouds whirled until they ripped at the ice sheets and created brand-new mountains, as big as Mount Abacus, that moved through the night with the force of a million harpoon guns firing over and over.
A walking mountain of ice, with caustic liquid falling inside it—just like the downpour that had left burn scars on Mouth’s scalp and hands—came upon a Gelet nest full of untold thousands of newborns. The protective layers of rock and coral collapsed, turning to sharp fragments, and then the rain burned everything that had been exposed to the air. These fresh infants screamed as they suffocated and starved, no way to save them.
As they struggled to save their young, the Gelet saw the Citizens going back to harvest another batch of the nightfire.
Mouth knew what was coming next, and she tried to pull away from these tendrils. But the Gelet held her fast. The blue swarm, a last resort, something the Gelet had created long ago to deal with a species of pests coming in from the road. She felt their remorse as the blue knives took wing from a hatchery deep under the ice and flew to the nearest food source in the warm twilight.
Mouth was screaming and pushing the Gelet with her hands and feet. She begged for release. She bit her own tongue and kept barking. She wailed and thrashed. The emptiness inside her was worse than ten thousand bones burnt to ash. When they let go, she fell on her hands and face, watering the dirt and clawing at her own scars.
She threw up on the floor and her own knees, the remains of some meal supplements the Gelet had rescued from a human transport coming in ugly pieces. The puke in her mouth only reminded her of the noxious rainfall that had flooded the Gelet’s nest and destroyed their children.
“Please,” Mouth said over and over, as if she could petition some authority to take away the ugliness.
The Gelet waited until she had stopped writhing and making sounds, and then they reached out, lightly, as if she could still lash out or fall to pieces. They helped her to her feet and led her back to the chamber with the hammock, the old books, and the bags of freeze-dried survival rations from some doomed ancient expedition into the night.
SOPHIE
You can go to the fifth central hub, downtown, and get these boiled chestnuts from a chef who gets them direct from the source, a chestnut patch buried under the thickest part of the night. Jean told me about it. The chestnuts melt against the roof of my mouth—so rich, after a diet of ancient human field rations. And once you’ve had enough chestnuts, you can go down the side chute and find yourself in a party where the “music” is made by an orchestra of countless tiny trumpets, which pressurize and depressurize the air around me in subtle fluctuations that human ears couldn’t even register. Here in the midnight city, there’s always a gathering, a celebration, someplace. I explore until my feet hurt, and I keep coming across another marvel. Like a school, where children, whose pincers look more like beaks, learn science and math from a teacher whose pincer encompasses all five of their tiny foreheads at once. (Their math begins with geometric shapes, and builds to patterns that remind me of the hangings on Ahmad’s walls.) And just up the street, there’s a theater where a dozen Gelet hang from stone ledges, and lean in to wrap all their pincers around a great tangle of flesh descending from the ceiling, which imparts a story to all of them at the same time. At another spot, a wide chamber with a low ceiling, the Gelet play a sport involving ice crystals and pressure-sensitive
pads.
I navigate the city and almost don’t care when I walk in total darkness, except when I suddenly notice, and I heave with terror for a moment. I still get too scared to move from time to time, thinking of cops forcing me up a mountain, or a bloodbath under toxic rain, or being trapped in the Command Vehicle. But I’ve shared all of those memories with the Gelet, in as much detail as I could stand—and in the process I’ve learned to look at each terror, to peel it apart into tiny moments, and to place it alongside the countless generations of their memories that I’ve been absorbing. I’ve joined a family whose firsthand experience traces back to before humans even had a concept of history.
I haven’t seen what my new shape looks like, not with my eyes anyway, but my whole sense of my boundaries and my personal space has changed. I can “see” things happening far away, and “hear” the shape of the walls, thanks to my tentacles, which are smaller than a normal Gelet’s. I don’t always know exactly what I’m sensing, but it gets easier over time.
Nobody tries to stop me from roaming, now that I’m healed enough to move without feeling a million hacksaws tearing into me with every step. Everywhere I go, they’re curious, but polite. When someone does stop me to ask a question, it’s more along the lines of “How are you enjoying your stay?” or “Is there anything you need?” I’m the first foreigner among them in countless generations, maybe since the woman in that video, but they know me already.
When someone asks how I’m enjoying my stay, it comes not as words, but as a set of images and memory fragments that somehow evoke the concept of a solicitous host. When I reply, I babble. I share a memory of when I first arrived in Argelo, and I was scared to be in this crazy stormy city, and Ahmad taught me to make this fish bread that they all eat there. And I share another memory of Argelo, the first time I went to the Pit on my own, not to look for Bianca but because I craved those vapors. And how I felt, seeing people who celebrated having ancestors from Nagpur, for the first time. Then a flash of all the kindness I’ve received thus far, here in the midnight city.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 31
