by Moira Crone
But she sucked up the broth he offered, and said it was “incredible.”
This whole scene was incredible.
But there it was, and it was going to get worse.
IV
9:20 PM October 12, 2121
Mississippi I-Road
Far East De-Accessioned Gulf Territory, U.A. Protectorate
I woke in the front seat of Gepetto’s car. The shock of what I had gotten into, with these Outliars, spread over me—an electric stealthy chill. I wailed inwardly.
This was the part of the DE-AX everyone warned everybody about. The Far East—Heirs never went there.
When the fog lifted some, I could tell we were on a double road. The lanes on the outside were straight and the other road opposite just the same, across a little earthen divide. Every three or four miles, we had to stop and drive around some obstacle, or hole or ruin or crack or mound of garbage. That, I was used to, I’d had to drive a few times around the vicinity of the Wood Palace where the roads were abysmal—travel by boat was usually much easier around there. I was just not used to the long stretches, which reminded me of pictures in books of the way things had been once when things were connected to each other, before the Heirs had to keep safe from the rebels. When they used to have airplanes in the sky, large passenger boats with thousands in the waters, when the Broads and Nets were all connected, so everyone could communicate with everyone else, regardless of strat. And nobody was listening to every word. I could only imagine the chaos of all that. At one point, I saw motorcyclists in cone suits zooming on the opposite lanes, flipping out of the fog, and then into it again. Images from the far past, anachronisms.
“Good we are in this tank, in these parts. No Securitas out here,” Peet mumbled in the back.
Finally the good road broke down, and we bumped along on a detour with wretched little signs: “NEW OCEAN SPRINGS EX-ENCLAVE Of hOLE KNOWLiDGE STOP at TOLL!!”
“They tear up the roads like this for the revenue,” Peet said. “Make you stop.” We pulled up to a tiny shack which stood before what I could see was a wooden bridge under a single pinkish lamplight. We couldn’t go over it, though, because a portion of the bridge was hovering practically at a right angle up, leaving quite a gap. The sign said, “Caution Wolf River Drawbridge.”
In the car, as we waited, the fog came in heavy again, as if on cue.
“Hate these goddamn people, worse than Free Wheelers or gypsies. Bebum. Don’t let them get started,” Peet put in.
Serpenthead tapped me on the shoulder from the back seat—I had given up on objecting to this. “They aren’t many left. Real specimens. Relinquished their Charter. Turned in their Procreation Allotment. Went off every grid. Moved into the DE-AX on purpose, didn’t get stranded here. Strange beliefs.”
“Such as?”
“The sun and moon are conscious, we go to some sea island when we die, turtles have the big spirits, I think.”
“Bebum. Why are they even still living here? On what land?” Peet said. “This is all swamp.”
“I think they are about to so long out of existence. Harmless, though, I guess,” he whispered. Serpent seemed amused by all of this.
A man in a long shirt with a hood adorned with nubby deer horns, emerged from the hut and came towards us. Serpent continued, “They have the idea there is a way to go be a hermit in the pine forest and dance alone, and know something. Always going out to the islands, sitting alone in holes in the sand. Waiting for the throb they call it.”
Peet contradicted, “Bebum. There can’t be any more islands. Gulf ’s too high, rising seas.”
“There are the islands,” Serpent said. “We are going to one—”
The man took Gepetto’s bills, and started to talk.
“Always get a sermon with these,” Serpenthead said, rolling his eyes. Gepetto turned to me with great amusement.
The Ocean Springs Ex-Enclaver poked his head into the driver’s side, near Gepetto. His eyes’ whites were pure pink. He began his lecture in a growly shout, as if the intended audience were twenty feet away, not eight inches.
“In the beginning a Great Tortoise came up out of the water according to our founder, W.A. and he was made of gold and he saw the god in the trees and the god in the bushes and the god in our faces, and the crabs and the clouds, and he called them alive, and they woke, and when they woke, they knew they should abandon the dominant mode ashore. For they were not separate, they were one. Chapter One Verse 1 and 2.”
“Okay, enough,” Peet covered his ears, barked at the preacher. “We got the picture.”
“Chapters One Verses 3, 4, 5,” the horned fellow shouted on. “One is not divisible but is a singularity ….”
I looked over at the woman inside the shack, her eyes deep in her head—marbles at the bottoms of two wells. She was lit by an old cornosene lamp she held in her hand. Her long arm thin as a twig, a sickly yellow white. “Please, please,” I said to her.
She reached up to turn the large wheel that drove a crank that made the drawbridge slowly lower, and she called to her mate, “Come over here darling tell me! Don’t stay so far away!”
Gepetto said, smiling wide, “Far East DE-AX. M, I—crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, that’s what we used to say in the old days.”
“Bebum. Never know what will crawl out from under a rock out here,” Peet said, sitting back again when the car started to move.
Then we were rolling past the man with the hood—he seemed astonished we were leaving—the rhythmic chant of his poem beginning to fade, and eventually, we stopped being able to make out the words.
After the bridge, which we crept over at two miles an hour, Gepetto went forward at a pretty good clip under trees so thick they covered up the sky, so the darkness was almost total. Then the woods opened out a bit. Taller pines, then. Later still, we were going across a grassy marsh, the kind I was used to from the shore of the Sea of Pontchartrain.
Eventually, no trees at all.
The fog again, thick, so we couldn’t see anything. “Bebum. Chowder,” Peet called it. “Hate these roads, all kinds’ criminals out here—”
I was reminded of nights at the Wood Palace: I felt the same old uneasiness, the same sense of apprehension, or was it anticipation. Dread was part of it. And loneliness, another part. The incredible loneliness I’d felt there. I saw it, somehow, for what it was—and out of it, I’d promised things. Serious things. The gravity of my promises seized me then, made me almost want to weep.
I thought of what Vee said that night about lifting up an Heir: Sometimes there is something you always knew, but it never worked to know it—
Since, I have heard people say that important events ripple out in all directions, forward into the future, and even back into the time before they occur—they create waves, the way a pebble dropped into still water makes circles. If that is true, what I was feeling then—excitement, a strange clarity—was something of the before-effects of an event that had not arrived at me yet.
Now, I call it my alchemy.
V
December 28, 2120
Wood Palace on the Sea
Western Gulf De-Accessioned Territory, U.A. Protectorate
A few weeks after she started eating some of our food, Greenmore started asking us to “liberate” her—that was how she put it. She said Mimi knew how because she once worked in Memphis.
We protested, gave her every excuse. She became enraged, so we said we would, but we must postpone.
Finally, she said, if we wouldn’t do it, she’d hire people who would. She had her contacts.
We had a meeting. Mimi, Klamath, and I. Klamath said if others were called in, there could be reprisals. Arrests. We were better off doing what she had ordered ourselves. Later, we could undo it—this was the hope, at least. And we could keep it secret.
A few hours later, we filed into her suite together. Instinctively, Mimi closed all the blinds so that this secret thing would be done
in the dark.
“Look at you Malcolm,” Greenmore said. “So frightened. Calm down, I’m a doctor.”
“But why?” Klamath asked her. These things she was doing to herself, were an assault on him.
“I have my reasons. I have them, you must trust,” she said, closing her eyes for a second. “Now, leave if you don’t want to look. Mimi? Now.”
Klamath and I decided not to leave. We needed to see this. Face it. Deal with the consequences. Be there in case something went wrong.
“Madam Heir,” Mimi said, in a ritual I’d never seen. “Madam Heir, for your wishes to be fulfilled I must have contact.”
“I allow it.”
“Madam Heir, for your wishes to be fulfilled, I must have contact—” Mimi hated saying these words.
“I allow it, and I have my purification planned.”
“Madam Heir, for your wishes to be fulfilled, I must have contact—” At the third voicing of this same phrase, Mimi became visibly distraught.
“I allow it, and I have my purification planned, cover your hands, and shield yourself, speak not of it,” Greenmore said, with a kind of boredom. These were lies, she had no purification planned.
Mimi got down on her knees, put her forehead to the floor, then lifted her hands above her head. When she stood, she bowed a second time, and put on pink gloves, like rubber. Then she said, “I will do your will.” And she placed her hands on Greenmore’s sculpted heart-shaped face.
First, she removed Greenmore’s protective lenses, which shielded her whole true iris, and the white.
Immediately, Greenmore started blinking, and blinking, like a Nat. I hated this.
Her whites were really the yellow of dirty teeth, on a Yeared. That part was strange, and ugly, but the real irises were not: they were the very darkest brown, just like my own. I had always thought her eyes were that cat color, gold, wheat. To match her hair. Not true. Then Mimi took off her entire headjob, which, surprising to me, was all one piece, a great hard helmet, with her silken yellow hair falling out of it. Greenmore’s true hair was tiny white tufts, very scant. It would have been more dignified if she were really bald.
Next, Mimi found the two little seams, the sutures, behind her ears. If you took a certain special kind of pick, you could work your way in under the microscopic stitches, and begin the process.
Greenmore had something in her jewelry box. She made Mimi go get it.
Mimi returned with a y-shaped pin, and stood on a small stool from the closet. She said, “It’s going to hurt. I’m using some lubricant. Grapeseed oil.” She had it in a little dish. Mimi loosened the prodermis first with the pick, then with her fingers. She worked quickly, with precision—the gloves didn’t trouble her.
I saw the whole separating from her forehead, her neck. Mimi took hold of the prodermis and started peeling the face away, and then the front of the neck, then, the chest, shoulders, and down, and down, her torso, and down—
I was curious, but ashamed to be. I was looking at my future, after all. My future physical self. The prodermis was actually in three layers. Each was attached to the next by a moist gelatin, living glue called cartiliform. I had never seen this, only studied it on the screens in a short lecture called “Heir Physiology.” The layers had to be taken off separately, and then reassembled. I could tell by the ease with which Mimi handled them—they were, in fact, quite light. As Vee had revealed to me.
“Do you want privacy?” Mimi asked at a certain point, after the first layer was down around Greenmore’s shoulders, the other two loosened at her hair-line.
I was still a Nat, a man. I knew this. I was sorry about it. I stared.
Greenmore was looking directly back at me from behind the prodermis face, with her real face. I had never seen it. And I didn’t think of it as real. “Okay,” she said, to Mimi. Yeared, brown eyes. How very, very old, those raw eyes.
The process continued behind the screen. They took the entire envelope, three layers.
Now all I could see was Mimi reassembling the layers she brought out, and hanging them on hangers. “Eventually it will wither, Madam,” Mimi said. “I can’t keep it alive off of you for that long. You know this?”
“Of course,” Greenmore said. Her body had shrunken—I could see this in the silhouette behind the screen. But her voice was the same.
Then she came out.
We had been asked to flay her. We had done it. There had been the formalities, the permissions granted, the care taken, but in the end we had flayed her. How vulnerable she was, without the layers. She had lost an inch in height. Her grand head job sat over on a tray, all by itself. She had no curves or turns in her form. It was not horror I felt, I realized. It was tenderness.
It was as if I were witnessing the reverse of the world. I was disturbed in places within me I didn’t even know existed. Before us—no powerful, beautiful Heir, instead, a small, mineral-blue figure with a tiny waist, a white feathery pubis, a scant cloud of white on her head—our magnificent Greenmore pale, slight as a sea sprite.
The underbody, covered with the “real” skin, which had hardly an ounce of fat on it, was moist, sweet smelling, thin, blue-white, like scalp. The veins were visible, everywhere close to the surface.
For a moment I thought of those sterile tattooed girls, the way they were scribbled all over with tiny blue lines. I thought many terrible things, that she was an emaciated little child, a little stick of a blue goblin, that she was ugly.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. What was wrong? She was so exposed, and so slight, no more than fifty pounds, a starved, wiry one. Her curvy, slinky elongated figure separate from her, hanging over by the shuttered glass walls, a wilting corpse.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I lied.
“There is no shame here,” she rasped. “I gave permission.”
Klamath was as upset as I was. He picked up a sheet, but Mimi said that would chafe. “I’ll go to the barn, cheesecloth. Just hold that on her a while.” Mimi pressed past me saying, “You tend to her, help my husband. Don’t just stand there.”
I couldn’t move.
Greenmore said, to our further dismay, “I want the sun light.” Another being had stolen Greenmore’s voice. “Raise all the old blinds in the house.”
I just couldn’t keep in my mind that it was Greenmore. Her small bluish face, which came up to the height of Klamath’s heart.
He shook his head. He was very close, holding a sheet around her, not letting it touch.
“Do it,” she rasped again. She didn’t even seem to understand we were so astounded by her appearance we could hardly follow orders. “Klamath? Do it. I’m right here.” Her breath on his chest.
“Yes, Heir,” he said finally, reconstructing his old tone. “Will you take this?” he asked, and she nodded, and took the sheet out of his wide, competent hands. Then he walked off to the corner of the room and started turning the cranks that opened the blinds from inside.
“I have not looked at light with my eyes bare in seventy years,” she said.
“Your skin, you can burn—there is no re-generating it, you understand.” Klamath tried. But then he was done, and the sun pressed in, bouncing off the marshes, doubling the brightness. So everything was brilliant, searing.
She screamed at the light, cowered.
“Please, I’ll close them, now,” Klamath was still in the corner. “Let me.”
She shook her head. Then she wrapped the sheet round her, and tucked it, held her blue-white hands to her eyes, to form a visor and said, “I will get used to it. Malcolm, don’t look so forlorn—so upset, I’m still here—”
Mimi came back, then, with the netting, to swaddle her. Cheesecloth we used to strain herbs we were boiling in the barn, trying to extract their essence. Greenmore dropped the sheet and allowed Mimi to wrap her up like a blue baby, round and round, use a whole bolt of the feathery cloth.
“Sunglasses, perhaps,” Greenmore said when she was covered.
Mimi said she had
some. I knew they were one of her most valuable possessions—plastic, from Canada, she’d paid a weeks’ wages for them.
Greenmore didn’t know this—she just put them on, and looked in the long mirror.
Her silhouette: a small head, a long neck, a column of fabric, two sticks for arms.
I was thankful her eyes were hidden.
VI
9:55 PM October 12, 2121
Mississippi I-Road
Far East De-Accessioned Gulf Territory, U.A. Protectorate
In a flash, now, a roadway on pillars was rising up out of the marshes, and in the distance, there were several buildings high as mountains.
I had seen pictures of the huge towers that scraped the “sky,” in the fugue countries, heard that one nation was always trying to build one higher than the last, win the record. An example of the backwardness and idiocy of such societies.
The fog descended again, then lifted one more time and I could see the top of one of the buildings, and the letters which read,
N W R ENCY C SINO & RESORT
It was, like the others, growing out of mounds of white drifting sand.
The landscape became enormous. The moon was far far above. We were under stars. There was a glorious roar. Around us, in all directions, a huge swath of black satin pulling up and then pressing down, and then riding into the shore. At the sight of it I felt a strange desire to dive in.
A tap on my shoulder from behind. Serpenthead again was saying, “Hey Malc, okay? You coming in? Never seen the ocean?”
“Up there, that’s the entrance,” Peet was telling Gepetto. “Park, and park.”
We drove up to the hotel, but it didn’t seem to have a door. Then Peet found a pathway dug in sand, a tunnel. “That is the new entrance,” he said. “The old real entrance, with the marquee, all that is underground or under-sand ha-ha. Bebum. I played a gig here once, couple of years ago. Looked real different.”
“Well?” Serpent asked me as he opened the door of Gepetto’s transport. “You probably better off inside with us—”
