by Liz Grzyb
Across the boulevard, Gus stepped out of a transpod, which hummed away again on its maglev spheres.
Seong cleared his throat. “Sava can stay with me while his paperwork goes through. I’ll see you around.”
“Thanks, Cillian.” I dropped something onto his palm. He inspected the origami paper boat, the letters iou written on the hull.
“An excellent name for my next yacht,” he called over his shoulder as he and Sava left.
Gus jogged over and I wrapped my arms around him.
“I missed you,” I said.
“You have no idea.” Gus laughed as Paku nuzzled him impatiently. “Yes, you too.”
I waved over another transpod, my wireless ring blinking as it set the coordinates for home.
“Tell me everything,” I said. “How’s your project? How’s your mum?”
Gus took my hands, his voice catching slightly. “Lani, there’s something I have to tell you.”
* * *
Four weeks earlier, Esta Khansari had suffered a fall at her home. The robotic monitor had alerted the paramedics, but by the time Esta arrived at the hospital, she’d already slipped into a coma. She never woke up.
I watched Gus as he recounted the details, my heart tearing itself slowly into smaller and smaller pieces.
“You could have told me,” I said quietly. “I would have come back.”
“You’d have missed out on seeing your sensei—”
“I should have been here.”
Gus stared at the table, his hands shaking. “There was nothing you could have done. And I didn’t want you to worry. Oh, she left you a message.”
I waited for him to switch on the scope, but instead, he handed me a mint green envelope containing a handwritten note.
Dear Lani,
If you’re reading this, I’m gone, and Argus is probably a sentimental wreck. Be patient. Whatever the future brings, thank you for making my Argus happy. Long may you watch over each other.
With fond memories,
Esta Khansari
Tears dripped onto the letter, and in the sanctuary of our small kitchen, we held each other close. And I realised that these were the things that connected us across time and space: love, grief, memories, and the stories we wove together with our laughter and our tears.
* * *
I sat on the rooftop garden of Biophany Library, watching the sun dissolve behind stately eucalypts. Sava sat beside me, sketching squabbling cockatoos.
“My new guardians seem nice,” he said. “I start school next week, and I’ve decided I want to study Biomimetic Engineering at uni.”
“Gus says you have some interesting ideas for madragonfly-proof gliders.”
Sava shrugged. “If everyone had access to the cirrus, maybe we wouldn’t need mobile libraries.”
“Maybe. But sending someone an ebook isn’t the same as sharing a circle of firelight, feeling the tension and breath of people hearing the same tale. There’s a chemistry to nearness that can’t be simulated.”
Sava’s pencil scratched a little slower. “Doctor Seong says you’re leaving again in a month. North, this time.”
I twisted a strand of grass around my fingers. “Would you like me to stay?”
“Are you happy here?”
“I think so . . . ”
“But it’s not enough, is it?”
I loosed the curl of grass. “I once tried to leave Paku at the valley; I thought he’d be happier there. They say he was fine for a few days, and then he tried to swim out to find me. I think maybe I’m the same. Home is nice, but . . . ”
“ . . . not for too long. Not forever.”
Along the avenues, streetlamps glowed with the day’s captured light.
“What are you going to do?” said Sava.
I leaned back, watching the stars wink into life. My roots might never catch the earth, but it was past time I slowed long enough to tend to those dearest to me, so that their dreams might bear fruit and their boughs brush the sky. Time, at last, to do the responsible thing.
* * *
One year later
I flicked my final report for the year to Unbreakable Tech, and set my tag to autoreply. My fingers brushed against the photo framed on my desk: a man with grey hair, kind eyes, and a smile full of stories. It was the picture they’d used at Huiza’s funeral.
I pulled on my pack, the straps stiff from time in storage. Downstairs, Gus swept through crowded holographic charts while Sava finished vacuuming Paku.
“I think he’s more excited about leaving than you are,” said Sava.
Gus leaned over for a kiss. “Take care. The second wave of levigliders are being launched next week, so you might catch an extra signal or two on your trip.”
“Is Doctor Seong meeting you at the station?” said Sava.
“We’re only travelling part of the way together—”
“I’ll worry less if you’re not alone, even though it’s a short trip,” said Gus.
Sava took Paku’s reins and walked me outside, slowing to a stop beneath a bower of fig trees. “My story, there’s another part now. ‘When the fallen star led the boy home, safe and well, she told him she had to return to the sky. But she promised she’d come back for him. And so she journeyed away to spread her light across the firmament, and the boy waited.’”
I drew Sava into a hug, and felt his arms tighten around me.
In so many ways, intimacy—friendship—is the sharing of our stories, revealing the pages of our life for others to see. And through these acts of sharing, we come to understand the world, and our place within it.
“I can’t wait to hear the next part.”
* * ** * ** * *
The Radiolarian Violin
Adam Browne
Ines’ voice was a buzz in my headpiece. “Those who declare their surprise at the rebirth of Antonio Vivaldi reveal their ignorance of the composer’s history, in particular his former ‘rebirth’, in the sense of the rediscovery of his works.”
I knew the sentence by heart. It had been part of our initial tender. The question was why she felt the need to speak these words so long after our mission had been approved, now that we were actually setting off. Who was she trying to convince? Herself? The thought was shocking.
I watched as she descended ahead of me—Ines Abbracciabene PPS., D.Mus. (Hons), GcS, weighed down by the letters after her name.
If she no longer believed, I decided, I would believe for her.
The ‘anomalous sounds’ were first recorded by hydrophone array a year before—a dozen notes, sometimes longer, once an entire passage. There were those who denied it was music at all: it was crustal settling, whale vocalisations and so on . . . not explanations anyone actually believed, but place-markers for when the real explanation came along—something natural, something unsurprising . . .
Then there were those who accepted the truth, but quarrelled over provenance: the music was attributable to an emergent property of the new architectures, or to the creature they were pleased to call ‘Revivaldi’, or even to Vivaldi reborn . . . These considerations were unimportant.
Whatever the source, it was music, his music. It was part of the canon.
* * *
The Adriatic had been a single colossal roar, the waves’ upper reaches, ten and fifteen storeys high, flagged white in surrender to the living winds—draught animals, panicked and rolling-eyed, cruelly thrashed by the unremitting El Niño: ‘little boy’ no longer, but a wildman, unpredictable, ‘acting out’.
But down here . . . down here it was quiet. La Serenissima . . .
Our descent continued, Ines a dim shape before me, sliding down the clewline, her exhaled bubbles streaming into my faceplate so that I missed the moment when we entered the city.
“Ah!” Her exclamations were a buzz in my ears. “Here! Anne! Do you see?”
The bubbles cleared. My first glimpse of Venice was of a parking garage.
* * *
The maps id
entified it as the Yellow Gate ParkRite, in the Piazzale Roma.
The guiding philosophy of the chief architects, Elwert+Ippolito Gruppen, was clearly evident here.
Remove its function and even a parking lot becomes art.
Much of the structure was gone in favour of radiolarian-glass, bluegreen helices winding around the interior to represent the paths once described by automobiles, constellated with stars suggesting the three- and four-point turns with which they’d negotiated their parking spaces. Microtubules, micro no more, pulsed in mock of the old directional arrows and disabled parking signs . . .
“Chop-chop, Anna!” The professor’s buzz, “No time for sight-seeing!”
She was right. Our gear was rated for no more than two hours. So—deeper then, through the Piazzale Roma, moving swiftly, our back-mounted propulsive units whirring as we followed a former canal . . . but everything was canal now.
Over streets scraped with a thin light. Buildings coralline, calcareous, spongiform, façades pouting and delicate as the faces of children. Living-glass palazzi; an old rope-works, once preserved for the tourists; a church, its Franciscan austerity made extravagant by dully glittering icosahedra.
Submerged, the city had achieved a poetic state to which it had formerly only aspired.
Here it was. More than half alive, such of its masonry as remained held in place by huge, engineered radiolaria, single-celled animals distinguished by their intricate silicate skeletons, in which the creature itself was an afterthought, an excrescence pendent on symmetries of crystal.
In their original form, radiolaria had been collected by Victorian miniaturists, arranging them in mosaics—the kitsch typical of the times, differing from the shell-art of seaside giftshops only by virtue of their size. But some felt that radiolarians were themselves art. To the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, they’d represented an embodiment of a hidden aspect of the evolutionary process, indistinguishable from the artistic urge.
We crossed the Calle Fiubera, a place of lights and flares: construction underway; workers in heavy suits; gaunt waldos angled and clawed in answer to the arthropods that had once populated the sea floor. ‘Incipients’, as they were called, bobbed about the site at neutral buoyancy, plankton in the Venetian Gothic register: nascent villas of palladian crystal, tentacular snowflakes, larvae with organic balconies twisted like the mouths of stroke patients.
A woman in a yellow hardsuit approached as we drew near, her hands raised. Absurdly, her helmet was topped with a flashing light like those on emergency vehicles. She was all claws, all sensors, a halfdaughter to the crustacean machines around us. She snapped questions, which Ines fielded clumsily, her usually smooth manipulative techniques blunted by her mask and helmet: “No, no, we’re not part of the crew here . . . We don’t have design security clearance because we aren’t on the design team . . . We’re investigating the music, looking for the source. The music; you must have heard about it.”
Poor Ines. A lady of a certain type: almost elderly, breastless, thin by grim effort of will (no judgement here: I’m a big sloppy haystack of a woman). Perhaps there’d been lovers in her past, but now she was forever single; her passion was reserved for the composers, an aseptic eroticism manifesting in knowing precisely where the Easter Oratorio was situated in the Bach Catalogue, and when Beethoven’s heroic period had begun and ended.
There was some to-and-fro with an Elwert+Ippolito official on the surface, after which the security woman understood our purpose. When she allowed us to move on, her voice took on a now-I’ve-seen-everything tone.
But then, these days, everyone’s seen everything.
Twenty minutes gone. We accelerated, sailing over a bridge, also under construction—booms and shivers; sounds felt in the belly—then above the rooftops of the Merceria Orologio.
And the city opened out—it opened out—and here was the Piazza San Marco.
It was alive with the hyperbolic geometries of the aquatic grotesque.
Albino nudibranchs, proud of their bouncy egg-coils, flounced above a foundered shipping container, its contents unidentifiable beneath anemones and sea cucumbers.
Our lights were caught by the trailing gonads of giant medusae.
Colonies and fluthers, gelatinous glimmerers, spittle and living silk . . .
The sovereign jellyfish, dominant life form in the newly acidic oceans of the human age.
Once an early utopian visionary named Charles Fourier had predicted the world would end when the seas turned to lemonade.
Now, in the Anthropocene, the marine pH was approaching that of citric acid, and methane outgassing was producing a merry effervescence in the polar seas.
It didn’t feel like the end of the world to me even so.
I steered between the jellies, their bells giving way to clearer water.
We passed over the Basilica; an intervening palazzo.
And then—a sense of elation—there it was: the dell’Ospedale della Pietà.
I slowed, sight-seeing after all.
* * *
‘A fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape’—an observation from the novelist Doris Lessing—but remember that the fish is alive; it moves the water in ways that inform its own embodiment.
So, in Renaissance Venice, music and architecture had each shaped the other. Composers had written their music with the intention of it being performed in certain buildings, and certain buildings had been designed to accommodate the music of favoured composers.
This building—where Vivaldi spent twenty years of his life, where he’d taught violin to the orphans, where he’d written some of his greatest works—was also his musical instrument.
Elwert+Ippolito warnings showed in our faceplates as we approached.
We hardly needed them. The structure was clearly unsound. Only a small amount of preparatory work had been done. It was what submarine engineers called a moosh, a bricky mealiness retaining its form by accident of rot.
We settled to the seabed and began setting up our recording devices at a safe distance—the first of many such installations; our long-term goal was to distribute them through the city, but the ospedale was the obvious place to start.
Ines was silent as we worked. After ten minutes, I looked up to see her gazing at the ospedale.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I heard something,” she said.
* * *
I don’t blame her for what happened next.
Some thoughts enjoy a certain autonomy. Set down in childhood, sometimes later, they’re worn smooth as riverstones—reason streams over them almost unheeded, leaving no mark save to smooth them a little more. We shouldn’t be held responsible for them or what they make us do.
I watched, helpless, as she unhooked from the clewline and kicked away. Her propulsive unit whirred.
I shouted, far too late. I thought to trigger my EPIRB—a warning beacon—then gave chase.
Into the demarcated zone, warnings flashing; Ines wobbling in her course, then heading upwards, for the dome.
I can’t remember what I called to her. Something angry. “I heard him,” she called in reply, speaking half to herself. “He’s in—” then her signal faded as she entered through a fissure in the roof.
At last I understood why she’d quoted that passage from our proposal.
Her belief wasn’t too weak but too strong. Too literal.
I followed her: here the dome, here the rooftop, the lead sheets exposing a porous grey matter for which there is no name, nor should there be . . . and in, through a gap—the building around me in full sulk, ceiling frescoes in blue heroic sags.
I found Ines’ spotlights fifteen metres below.
“What are you doing?”
“Listen,” she said.
“Ines, they’ve been recording the ‘anomalous sounds’ for a year without locating the source. It’s ridiculous to think we—”
“Just listen!”
—then I heard. Very faint, but
unmistakable. It faltered, stopped, began again.
At once, Ines’ engine restarted. She left the chapel, into a hall that answered onto the conservatory.
Down then, after her, over ancient pews, the hallway, my lights pushing yellow cones through an excremental haze—the passage broadening, narrowing, describing an ‘S’; I was lost in the plumbing of her madness.
Even so—even so—the music grew.
No whale vocalisation, no crustal settling or icebergs grounding on the seabed. This was music, his music. It wasn’t one of the five-hundred works he’d composed in his lifetime, but it was his, nevertheless.
And then I rounded a corner, and there was the entrance to Vivaldi’s conservatory, Ines hanging before it, lit red.
The light came from an electric furnace.
It powered a steam engine at the heart of a radiolarian, spindle-shaped, huge—the largest I’ve ever seen, far too large to support its own life processes.
Its steam-assisted metabolic pathways chugged to the concerto being played by the man at the centre of it all.
The Red Priest. Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (1678–1741). It was he. Immediately recognisable from his portraits and contemporary accounts.
He saw us, and paused in his playing in order to favour me with a wink, and Ines with a saucy smile.
Then back to the music, plucking the radiolarian’s plangent heartstrings, the great animal shivering—a clockglass membrane glittering open.
A vacuole, an airlock. Ines accepted the invitation; the outer membrane closed behind her, the inner one opened.
She removed her helmet with middle-class grace.
Vivaldi gave a bow, still playing; she twinkled like a young woman, I saw this clearly; he smiled apologetically—soon, the smile said, he would be able to pay her the attention she deserved.
