And perhaps it won’t be necessary after all.
The posset pot, if that’s what it was, saw me through the winter. I found an untapped off-licence closer to home and brewed up a variety of warming cocktails during the dark months. In my head, Ettrick and I went over and over the theories. I even read some of his books.
I went out at dawn this morning for the first time in ages. I don’t know why, it just felt right. Kelvingrove in the spring was always beautiful. Now, it is again. Beautiful, and strange. The craters are filled with grasses and flowers; the spider-spindle ruins of the buildings are cloaked with encroaching vines.
It’s like a different world.
Earlier, I stood in the middle of what I can barely now recognise as Kelvin Way. The air is warming, and it carries a scent. Something familiar. Sharp lemongrass, hot pepper.
I think of Elsewhere – and Elsewhen.
And I’m starting to hope. That all I have to do is wait until the bubbles return.
* * * * *
Neil Williamson’s stories have appeared in Interzone several times, but not for ages. You can find some of those stories in his collection The Ephemera, which also contains stories first published in TTA Press’s “legendary” debut magazine The Third Alternative. Neil has recently published his first novel, The Moon King (NewCon Press), reviewed in this issue’s Book Zone, where he is also interviewed.
THE MORTUARIES
KATHARINE E.K. DUCKETT
ILLUSTRATED BY WARWICK FRASER-COOMBE
Tem loved the mortuaries, though no one he knew was dead. Still he would beg to go, to grasp the hand of any adult willing to wind down those plush-carpeted stairways, past the sleek vaults, inviting and bright.
They wouldn’t let him push the buttons – they were too high for him, anyhow – but upon his request his uncle or aunt would, with a sigh, oblige, pressing the fingerprint-proof rectangle. Back the panel would slide, revealing the vault’s interior, protected by a pane of spotless glass.
Inside was a body in any variety of poses: some sat on couches in replicas of their living rooms; some stood beside loved ones or cradled children in their arms, standing on a set made to resemble a beach, a backyard, a jungle, long gone; some leapt or swung or slid, their limbs arrested midway through some athletic motion.
From a small speaker outside the vault played a recording: sometimes of the deceased, or their family members or friends. Sometimes only a song played, and Tem wondered if that meant the person had died alone, without anyone who cared to narrate, even briefly, his or her life.
Most recordings were breathy, uneven, but a few of them had been recorded by professional narrators, hired to tell the stories of the mortuary’s most important residents, of the luminaries from Estkos who had been interred in the tombs when the tower was still new. Tem learned more from these stories than he did in school: his teachers only spoke of ancient times or the present, and never of the recent past.
“Here stands Anika Zheng, inventor of ‘noot’, the revolutionary food substitute that ended hunger throughout the Coalition. With a pleasing, gelatinous texture, all the nutrients necessary for health, and recycled fiber for regular digestion, noot, in all its varieties, represents the biggest advancement in food production and consumption in human history.”
“Lucas Schoenjahn, the last president of the former United States, architect of Perestroika II, and pillar of strength during the energy and climate crises of Eurasia’s collapse, worked with the Coalition to redraw the outdated borders of the continent and continue the important work of reclaiming resources from destroyed, unsalvageable territories across the world, while resettling their citizens, remembering their histories, and preserving their rich languages and cultures.”
These narrations were dry, but Tem liked the whistling, twanging voice that told the story of the barrel-chested founder of Brixton’s, who stood at the helm of a drillship, fake crystals of ice clinging to his red mustache. “Born here in Andersenville to parents resettled from the submerged isle of England, Henry Gerald Brixton went on to conquer the Arctic during the oil booms, garner a fortune in the multi-trillions, and perfect the plastination process, first developed by Gunther von Hagens, that makes the displays you see in this mortuary possible. When stored and maintained properly, bodies retain the feel of living flesh, and will remain intact for a minimum of five billion years. Woo-ee! Brixton honored his small hometown by choosing it as the site of his most ambitious project, and we are mighty proud to call him our native son.”
Tem’s maternal grandmother, who had died before he was born, posed in a fake field on the fourteenth floor, her hands outstretched to caress its flimsy plastic wheat, her hair still as dark and curly as his mother’s. The luxury of the vaults had declined by the time she entered Brixton’s: though still polished, the newer tombs featured simpler scenes, with fewer bells and whistles than the tombs of those lucky enough to die during the final energy booms of Perestroika II.
His grandmother was the reason Tem’s family was allowed to visit Brixton’s, the pass that got them through the heavily guarded steel doors, through the retinal scanners and metal detectors. After the obligatory visit to his grandmother’s tomb, Tem pulled his chaperone by the hand to see his favorite vaults: often the ones that contained children his own age, who he liked to imagine would be his friends, if he were in the mortuary, too. He also liked the vaults that featured fantastical settings, like blooming gardens, or the fully automated kitchens his parents had used in their youths, when the world abounded with miraculous technological innovations.
The adults who indulged Tem’s fancy – relatives, mostly, never his mother and father – only brought him to Brixton’s, the larger of the mortuaries, more famous and respectable. He didn’t know then why they never went to Morton’s, even though it was next door: even though, when they reached the bottom of Brixton’s, he could see the entrance across the covered pavilion bridging the two mortuary towers. “Let’s go!” he’d say, tugging that chaperoning hand, but the refusal was immediate and firm.
All Tem glimpsed of Morton’s was the scarlet awning of its entrance, and sometimes a heavyset man, in rumpled suit and undone tie, slouching on a stool near the door, red-stubbled chin sinking into his neck. He winked at Tem when he caught him looking, and Tem always turned away, more curious than before.
* * *
The mortuaries stood twenty stories high: one red, one blue, shiny and twisting against the clouds. Around them stretched the low, flat town of Andersenville, occupying miles upon miles of what was once “prairie”, though Tem couldn’t grasp the meaning of the word. From the observation deck atop Brixton’s, not a patch of earth was left: microregions and stack flats crowded the land, nudging into the neighboring territories.
Emerging from the cool silence of Brixton’s foyer, the stench and sound of the living hit Tem before the mortuary doors clicked shut behind him. His chaperones flanked him as they progressed down Lykeway, the avenue leading from the mortuaries to the center of town, where Tem’s family – his quick-tongued mother, his silent father, his eight loudmouthed cousins, three aunts, two uncles, and one surviving grandparent, his father’s mother – lived in a small, featureless apartment on the second floor of a concrete stack flat. Tem ground his teeth as they plunged into Andersenville’s crowds, his eyes on his feet, aching inside their weathered sneakers. The crush of adults blocked out the sun: Tem wanted to cry, though he could not summon enough air for the act.
At school, Tem spent his days fantasizing about Brixton’s, about its floors of silent, dignified dead, about the silver elevator shooting to the tower’s top, about the serenity of the lobbies occupying the center of every floor. Often, he imagined he was king of his own tower, one rising up in the middle of his classroom. It would spring from the floor one day, treelike and sturdy, and Tem would sit inside, where it was quiet and dark. From inside, via a wide screen, he would view the children and teachers below, giving his answers to the questions they aske
d, and, when bored, turning to all the other pursuits available at his fingertips, the encyclopedias of extinct animals and celestial spheres, the 3D puzzles, the endless supply of pencils and papers and clay and paint and yarn and dirt and beads and copper and straw and crayons and silk he could use in any way that he pleased. He would never have to learn about textiles and plastics and the machines in the recycling plant again, which was all they talked about in school: he would learn how to make new things, not just recycle the old things the people before him had left behind.
He would be safe there, in his tower, writing and reading and exploring in peace. It was the way he’d always imagined school should be, the way he used to think of school before he was thrown into the noisy, dirty pit of it. His classroom was bursting, with sixty to seventy students shoved against the walls, using windowsills as chairs, sharing one beaten-up book between a dozen kids. Even bathroom breaks were taken in groups, with shifts of boys rotating in and out of the low stalls, where they all squatted in a line, their taunting cries echoing off the green cement walls, smeared with feces and chewed gum.
The push and shove of schoolyard survival reached a fever pitch when his class spilled outside, into the days that were getting hotter every year. Tem ducked and dodged his way through the crowd, sometimes reaching safety under a sagging playset fashioned from tires and splintering wood. More often, though, he found himself caught in the crush, harassed and teased for his small stature, for his high voice and quiet obsessions.
He was teased at home, too, by his older cousins, who ranged in age from eight to eighteen. Those on his mother’s side of the family tended to share her curly locks and olive skin, while fair hair and pale complexions marked those on his father’s: those features had come over with his grandmother from the country she fled, in the years before Perestroika II. She used to catch Tem’s wrist as he passed her chair, kneading his doughy hand with swollen fingers before he could pull it back. “This is what they want to take away! This whiteness! All these blacks and browns out there, they’re having babies! So many babies!” She peered at Tem, her eyes polished marbles in a sunken bird’s face. “Do you know what’s going to happen if we don’t have more babies? This whiteness—” she pressed her fingertips into Tem’s palm, her nails pressing into the flesh “—will disappear.”
His mother, too, cared about babies, though she could no longer have them. Her last few had come out twisted, his oldest cousin, Eli, claimed: deformed and pale, whiter even than Tem. Maybe they’d gone to Morton’s, his cousin said, making the name sound filthy. Maybe they were there now, all sitting in a row: Tem’s true brothers and sisters. Maybe, his cousin suggested, Tem should go there too.
At night, Tem dreamed of caskets: gorgeous, capacious, with ample room for the rolling of bones. He began to build small models, stacking them next to his cardboard airplanes and cats, themselves relics of a fairytale past. He stole time to log onto the archival network via his father’s computer, gazing at pictures of the sprawling, grassy cemeteries in which these fantastic objects had once rested, his daydreams growing more vivid still. All that land for the dead – it seemed like a crime. Now the graves rose high: no space remained for them below.
Lying in the dark in the bed he shared with his cousins Silas and Asher, in the room he shared with the rest of the kids, Tem thought of a family he knew in Brixton’s, one with no sound at all outside of their tomb. He had seen them often, when he visited the nineteenth floor: they all stood together before a cardboard fireplace, the children smiling mischievously while their parents posed behind them.
There was a girl, and then, at her shoulder, a boy, and then, rising just to the height of her knee, a baby, its arms outstretched and mouth wide, as if preparing to take a step. Tem wondered why they’d chosen to stand it on its own two feet, and how the family had died. The bodies could have been added to the tomb over a period of years, but they all looked too young for that, and none of them looked sad, which Tem thought you would be if you lost one of the four people in the world you loved most.
“How did they die?” he had asked his mother’s youngest sister, Edie, who sometimes told Tem the stories of the bodies in Brixton’s vaults. Edie slept in a room with all the other adults, but Tem often heard her standing out in the concrete yard of the apartment complex at night, listening to the portable radio she’d kept out of the hands of the recycling plant. The same station from Estkos, the megalopolis on the Atlantic and the only remaining center of power in the Coalition, always filtered up to Tem’s tiny window: women’s voices, talking about a storm that had drowned three dozen schools of children in Féle; an illness that felled half of Balmor; explosions and ensuing riots that claimed tens of thousands of lives in Nuyok. Tem squirmed as he heard these stories, but could not stop himself from listening, straining to hear the static-clouded voices over his cousins’ snores.
“Can’t say for sure. A lot of people took their own lives, after Perestroika II.” Edie pronounced the numeral as “di-vah”, from the language of a country Tem knew had disappeared long ago: the plan for restructuring had a different, official name once, but no one could remember what it was. “Could be they swallowed poison, gave it to the kids. Wouldn’t be unusual.”
Tem looked at the smiling face of the girl, who did not look as though she had minded drinking poison. If he had to die to become like the dead, he thought, that was the way he would choose to go.
Silas turned over in his sleep, snorting into Tem’s ear, bringing him out of his nocturnal visit to Brixton’s. The family on nineteen had the most children of any family in the mortuary, he realized. He didn’t know where the other children were, the ones who died in accidents or fires, who never could have stood in Brixton’s next to the quiet, contented dead.
Tem closed his eyes, resolving to ask his aunt. Edie, alone of the adults Tem knew, might tell him the truth. But the next morning when he awoke, he had forgotten the question completely.
* * *
Over time, Tem’s visits to the mortuaries grew fewer and fewer.
No one would take him down Lykeway anymore. What had been an endearing focus in childhood was now freakish; Tem, having lengthened into a lanky, pale-skinned adolescent of seventeen, was no longer considered an innocent. His mother didn’t understand Tem’s long silences, or odd daydreams, or his insistence on scribbling doodles on cardboard that would only end up at the recycling plant.
“You’re just like Edie, and look where she ended up,” she admonished him. “Do you really think anyone wants to look at anything you make, Tem? It’s all been done. Why waste the time?”
Time. Everyone felt it: everyone knew. They didn’t have much time left. The news from Estkos grew worse by the day, with stories of catastrophic storms and conflagrations, ones the overloaded city had no resources to fight. Critical mass, it was whispered, had been reached: the time when there were too many people on the planet, when there was simply no more space to live and breathe, much less eat, shit, and sleep. If Estkos went, the survivors would spill inland, filling every inch of earth until they reached the desert ruins of Calirado.
At school, the kids busted each others’ lips and spat blood at the teachers, pissed on the shoe-stamped grime of the stairs so that it dribbled down the steps, stampeded from the cafeteria hall, yelling and biting and bruising. The horde had suffocated three girls and a boy the month before, trampling them after something unknown sent the crowd running, pressing the teenagers into a lethal bottleneck at the doors of the hall.
Tem had been out of harm’s way when the mass started to roil, and had stayed still, watching the writhing tangle of kids burst into the yard, then the teachers, who ran in to begin dragging corpses from the pile. “They’ll go to Brixton’s,” he said aloud.
“Not him.” A ponytailed girl beside him was nodding at a boy whose gray eyes were open wide, his tawny hair now dark with fluids, the side of his skull a mess of pulp. “He’ll go to Morton’s for sure.”
“Morton’
s? Why?”
The girl’s pudgy face was smeared with sweat: she had pin-balled between the verge of the mob and the walls of the cafeteria during the stampede, her panic saving her from a fatal plunge into the swarm.
“My brother went to Morton’s.” Her pale eyes, veined through with pink, slid from the dead boy’s to Tem’s. “We never visit him.”
* * *
When they received word that fresh fires were consuming Estkos, Tem’s father stopped eating.
Tem was the first to notice; he and his father were always the quietest people in the room, and observed more than most. Perhaps this solidarity made Tem reluctant to betray his father’s secret, for he did not speak up as his father passed on the gummy tray of noot without taking his share, or secreted a square away beneath the table, replacing it on the tray as everyone began to clear away the remnants of the meal.
Tem’s father spent his days logging orders for the manure trade into the family’s computer, which was the only reason they hadn’t been forced to turn it in to the plant. His mother had once hoped to save lives, as a doctor. She now drove a truck that sucked the waste from communal outhouses when they filled to the brim, and delivered it for disposal at the plant. Tem did not know what, if anything, his father had dreamed of becoming: with his papery skin and thinning hair, he looked like a ghost thrown in among the living, weary of their company, ready to fade from their noisy world.
Tem watched as his father grew thinner and paler over the next month, until one day he stood from the table, a jellied square still clutched in his palm, and began to shake. Tem jumped from his seat to help him; it was not until his father plummeted, skull hitting the tabletop with a sharp crack, that the rest of the kitchen turned.
“Zach!” his mother cried, diving for the body. Tem knew somehow that even if his father was not dead yet, he would be within the day. He’d seen enough corpses to know.
Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014 Page 4
