This is way too much information, but they just send back an image of a perfect ice crystal: a kind of smile.
I keep trying to understand what the Gelet believe in. What religion, what politics? They give vague answers, like images of rock faces being worn away by the wind, or huge power generators turning somewhere underground. I wonder if one of these Gelet is Rose, my friend from the Old Mother, but they’ve all shared those memories among themselves, so everyone seems to feel as though they personally were up there with me. Gelet don’t have names, like humans, but each newborn Gelet is given a kind of blessing, or hope for their future. So Jean’s personal blessing was something like “good learner, future genius,” and the part of my brain that still uses language decided to shorten that to “Jean.” I’m not even sure how I tell each individual Gelet apart, but it’s some combination of scent, variations in size and shape, and some kind of “hum” that my new senses can perceive.
* * *
Exhaustion has a sudden reach for toppling me off my heels and bringing back the pain from my surgeries. I’ll explore, sticking my head into every archway—there are no doors here—and thrill at the discovery of a shop floor where Gelet are toiling in a circle over a set of gears that they shape according to a design they are sharing via touch. Or, in the next opening, a great bath where hot springs rise up and the Gelet cleanse their bodies. And then, just as I’m feeling the hunger to discover more, I’ll teeter and fall. The cold seeps back into my bones, and I remember I’m trapped underground, in total darkness, and my head spins.
The first few times I grow weak and sleep-deprived, some Gelet lift me and take me back to the room with the bed, where I recovered from surgery. But after that, they find it easier to bring me to the place where they themselves rest.
In a great plaza, lined with brick and slabs of polished granite, Gelet throng, hundreds at a time, and pile themselves into slings and specially grown hammocks, which suspend their carapaces in a mist that feels warm and sweet. I bathe in the spray, which grows thicker and clings to my skin. The liquid fills the air until I float in a sensation of reassurance and acceptance, surrounded by all my friends.
Just as I slip into a dream, I remember the words that suicidal woman said in the hologram: they seem to regard geoengineering and bioengineering as the same thing. Of course, I think drowsily, of course they built a whole cave system where the vapors cause changes to their minds and soothe their bodies.
In my dream, I enter another level of the midnight city: a river of solid ice that encases but does not feel cold, rushing into a frozen reservoir under a sky full of stars. I’ve never seen stars, except once at the Sea of Murder, and these keep growing and shrinking, changing their position, flaring and subsiding. Time rolls backward, and tall cities emerge from the tundra, great gleaming fortresses that withstand storms and quakes for countless generations. These cities climb into the night, drawing energy from the relentless wind and the flows of water and lava under the surface, and then I see them being built piece by piece. A whole earlier Gelet civilization rises up in front of me, after I already saw it fall.
I witness the slow progress of history, the changing shape of Gelet society, long before humans arrived.
A huge presence comes among us sleepers, and I cannot tell if it’s inside the dream with us, or out in the plaza where our physical bodies are suspended in the solidified mist, which has formed sticky trails attached to my skin. One way or the other, this new arrival looms over all of us, much taller than a normal Gelet, with a pincer that looks large enough to encompass my entire body.
Somehow I can tell this is the leader, or more like the magistrate, of the Gelet, from the way all the other dreamers lower their pincers and focus their minds. This magistrate turns to each of us in turn, searching our hearts and examining our stories, with tendrils that slip past our skins and bones, and all of the walls we might have tried to build around our souls. When the magistrate comes to me, a powerful mind reaches all the way inside me and takes stock, and there’s a long, terrible pause. I start to worry—maybe I’ve failed, been found wanting, or made a mistake. I panic, even in my sleep, twitching and contorting. But the magistrate just reaches all the way inside me and pulls out a childish memory I half forgot, from grammar school. Back when Mark tried to snatch my hand and I ran away from him, and then I was startled by the freedom, the safety, of not being courted. I feel that memory rise to the surface, coming to define me, but also becoming known to the other Gelet through our shared sleep.
I still obsess about whether this magistrate approves of me, but then I realize: this leader, whoever she is, has been dead since long before my grandparents’ grandparents were born. This visitor is a shared memory, kept alive in all of us. I start to wonder if the entire government of the Gelet is made up of ghosts and dreams.
Most of my sleep is not so dramatic. I feel the motion of hot liquids underground, the cycles of water and lava and tectonics, and I sense the life of the planet, from deep underground to the high atmosphere, from beginning to end. At one point, I lie in the mesh, on an undulating hammock, and sense the motion of a glacier across the night: steady, unreasonable, pure.
I start to crave that experience of dozing on the hammock surrounded by Gelet, linked by sticky webs of shared memory, or secondhand fantasies.
For some reason, I keep thinking of all the Gelet as “she,” but I don’t know if they have any concept of male or female, or anything else. I’ve glimpsed how they reproduce, and they have many types of protrusions and openings, so everyone shares something and also takes something inside themselves. And then their babies start out as an unformed mass, inside a fungal mesh, although I’ve only glimpsed all this in their memories.
The spires of the midnight city soar hundreds of meters over the main plaza, made of some kind of crystal agate that sings, actually sings to my human ears, as the hot vapors come up from far below. Every time I go out into the city, I find something else that amazes me. A fountain channels water from some deep aquifer and makes it soar in two intersecting arcs that end in funnels that vanish inside the walls. A huge turbine spins in the depths, and powers a hundred ravenous machines. A ribbon of lava never stops streaming, close enough to singe me as I sidle past on the boulevard downtown.
When I’m not in the plaza, asleep among the Gelet, I visit the laboratory where they brew strains of amino acids that are designed to help them survive the latest unstable weather events, like these caustic rains. They’ve built a structure inside solid rock that I realize is a kind of centrifuge, in which specially grown shells whirl around too fast for even my new senses to encompass. When the circle stops spinning, a Gelet lifts one of these “vials” out delicately, aided by the fine motor control of her thousands of cilia.
I even find the hidden cul-de-sacs where the city’s vices happen—the deep pit where Gelet meet to consume the powder from drying and grinding up certain roots, which makes them dream of running away from their friends and just getting lost in the night alone. Or the tiny nooks where the Gelet disappear, when they think nobody can see them, to connect to memories and fantasies that are forbidden for one reason or another: things everyone agrees were better left behind. No matter how often I ask, I can never quite understand what they forbid, and how.
Soon, I know the streets of this city better than I ever knew Argelo. I know just where to turn to find the back passage that leads to a tiny workshop, and sometimes they’ve gotten some old computers working, so they can play a skein of sad music from my homeworld, the sounds of strings and drums teased by long-dead fingers, echoing through the ice and stone of the midnight city. I also know where to go to find an ice slide that carries me down forty or fifty meters, in a hair-raising glide path, straight into the middle of a festival where puppets reenact a famous scene: the arrival of humans on the bright edge of the day.
* * *
The humans emerged from their shuttles and landers, intent on striding onto the surface of this new p
lanet. And then they all fell on the ground, in pain. The higher gravity, the stinky air, the white light, all made them go fetal. They stayed down, moaning, for ages. Some of them never got up again. Many of the colonists who had survived the wars and accidents and atrocities onboard the Mothership died soon after arrival.
Far away, in the night, the Gelet set about trying to understand these people: how they lived, how they communicated, what they worked for. After some of the humans had tried to go into the night, and the Gelet had been forced to bring down their flying machines and wreck their lorries, the Gelet understood about speech. But even once they reproduced the vibrations, the Gelet couldn’t replicate them.
They couldn’t ask the magistrate for advice, because she had been dead for generations, and as far as she was concerned the dusk remained quiet, a clean buffer before the turbulence of the day.
People in Xiosphant never knew how close the city came to destruction. The Young Father is a dormant volcano, and the Gelet had a lot of experience controlling those. They couldn’t understand us, but they took our machines apart, and our technology told a story about people who never quit building and killing. They swapped ideas back and forth, of what could happen: humans invading the night in force, launching some extreme terraforming project, ordering the Mothership to drop meteorites on the midnight city. Plus if they waited, Xiosphant could become too well protected for them to destroy.
The city survived because the Gelet made a better assessment of humanity’s technical abilities. They saw we were losing touch with the Mothership, and we didn’t have the meta-materials we needed to keep building onboard control systems, weather shielding, and various other things. We showed lots of ingenuity in inventing new ways to produce food and handle our waste, and keep people alive in this environment, but most of our technology was sliding backward. But also, they saw us digging up metals from our mountains and the meteors we’d brought down—copper, bauxite, cobalt—and saw how we could be useful.
After many visits to the hammocks in the plaza, sharing the collective memory/dream, I realize that human civilization is based on forgetting. If I own a pair of shoes that used to belong to you, then my ownership relies on your forgetfulness. Humans are experts at storing knowledge and forgetting facts, which is why we saw this city from orbit and then pushed all the evidence into a hole. And I can’t help thinking of what Bianca said when I asked her about the Hydroponic Garden Massacre: that progress requires us to curate the past, to remove from history things that aren’t “constructive.” I don’t know if our power to forget makes humans stronger, more self-destructive, or maybe both.
The Mothership still has a store of ancient media from Earth, and when I find my way back to the bottle-shaped room with the computer I call up images and films of Nagpur. They called it the Winter Capital, but the holographic recordings show a red sky and people wearing light summer clothes in bright colors. They move along walkways and tramlines that look like filaments, strung high above the gleaming domes and stupas on the ground. There are films of people dancing in unison; doing a coming-of-age ritual that involves wrapping a thread around a boy about Ali’s age; building vast swarms of tiny robots that soar outside the weather-shield; sharing a meal of thick bread and vegetables that look like nothing I’ve seen before; sending probes deep inside the Earth to harvest geological energy. These clips have numbers at the bottom that start with things like “2439,” and I’m realizing this is some archaic calendar. Then I find a hologram stamped with “2527,” showing a family from Nagpur: mother, father, squirming giggling son, all wearing modified CoolSuits with an emblem on them. Someone I can’t see asks in Noölang, “Are you excited to be leaving home? What are your hopes for this long voyage?” The father jokes, “I just hope those Calgary idiots don’t make a mess of the sewers, or it’s going to be a long flight.” The mother slaps his arm, lightly, and looks straight ahead. “I hope Partha makes plenty of friends on the ship, and doesn’t end up mixing with the wrong kids. Peer pressure in an enclosed environment is always the worst.” Her husband rolls his eyes, but she ignores him. “Partha’s children, or maybe his grandchildren, will live to see this new planet. I hope they remember where they came from.” The image fades. I’ll never know what happened to Partha, though I can guess. But now that I’ve seen these things, I can share them with everyone, and they’ll never disappear, even after the Mothership’s systems fail.
* * *
Jean has a broken left tentacle that the Gelet could not fix, even with all their advanced biohacking. She can still lift small objects with her other tentacle, and can make adjustments to the great machines underground with her cilia. She worked some stints in the farms, the foundries, and the water-treatment canals, but the physical labor wore her out, and meanwhile she has a good personality for teaching and counseling. That’s why they encourage Jean to spend time with me. She shows me the memory of traveling across an ice floe in the middle of a violent snowfall, when a nearby outcropping broke just as she passed, sending sharp rocks cascading down. From her viewpoint, the snow grew teeth. She was trapped under the rock for a painful age until her friends could get her out, and her whole left side is still racked with chronic pain. She also shows me the rockfall from the viewpoint of a few others who witnessed it from a distance: the mountain crag coming apart, the boulders in free fall. By now, she remembers the disaster as much from far away as up close, because she and others have shared the distant vantage point so many times. Maybe that’s good for her recovery.
The Gelet work hard, without getting rewarded with food dollars or marks, or threatened with conscription. Instead, they just talk about work all the time. Everyone shares their memories of all the work they’ve done, and thus everybody knows just how hard everybody else has worked since the last time they’ve gotten together. Nobody ever lies, and I don’t know if they’re exactly capable of lying.
Jean still moves different from the others, and everybody knows her story. After her accident, Jean fell into a deep depression that nobody could shake her out of, according to another Gelet, whom I’ve started calling River. River and I are sitting in a sort of canteen, eating stewed roots that look odd but taste like roast pheasant, and her pincer is wide open so I can extend my tendrils and entangle them with hers. I’m still getting used to doing that.
According to River, Jean wasn’t depressed just because of the chronic pain, but because everybody treated her different. Every time they shared memories, even of unrelated things, the Gelet couldn’t help letting their worry about Jean, even their pity, leak through, and this made her flesh crawl underneath her carapace. Everyone talked among themselves about how to make Jean feel better, and then they couldn’t hide this from her. Their concern for Jean became an infestation that left sticky strands of poison through every thought and desire they shared, however benign.
This had happened before. Long before humans arrived on January, another Gelet was caught in a tectonic experiment that went awry. This scientist was unhurt physically, but she kept reliving the fear and pain, the feeling as the plate shifted and everything came unstuck. The moment when she realized everything was not under control after all, and then the rest of her team died. All the others revisited her memory of that instant when power gave way to powerlessness, but it was not their memory, it was hers. They all observed her sullenness since the accident, and they talked endlessly about how to cheer her up. So they showed her comforting memories of when someone else had survived a bison attack, or they shared with her their recollections of happy occasions. But the more they tried to help her, the more they reminded her of how bad she was feeling, and the worse she felt. This turned into a self-reinforcing spiral, and eventually she killed herself.
So everybody tried to handle Jean differently. They knew Jean was a gentle soul, with more patience than most, so they gave her a job working with the newborn children, just split off from the mass. They all had noticed those moments when Jean showed her gentleness, and everyone sh
ared them more and more. You’re the only one who can do this. Jean knew perfectly well that she was being handled, that they were all going out of their way to support her, but she decided to put up with it, and anyway she liked her new job.
But everybody still notices Jean’s injury, even when they try not to, and she hates the moments when they pause in her presence. The way their tentacles quiver as they try not to sense what’s right in front of them. That’s one thing Jean likes about spending time with me: her difference is nothing compared to mine. When the two of us walk around together, nobody even notices her.
* * *
I have no idea how long I’ve been in the midnight city, but my old life feels like a surreal dream. I’ve healed enough to start thinking about finding a job here. Like, I could help harvest roots or grubs from the deep crevices that a regular Gelet can’t get inside. Or I could help in one of the laboratories, because I’ve always loved science. Bianca used to say that Xiosphant’s only goal was to keep things the same and maintain our current level of technology, and that this forced Xiosphanti scientists into a contradiction—because the true goal of science is to make progress and discover new things. But Gelet science seems to be different, with experiments that have been in progress for generations, involving processes that move too slowly to observe in one lifetime. Plus, since the climate destabilized, their main goal has been to protect future generations. They can remember every disaster, the same way they remember every failed experiment from the past.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 32
