by Tiffany Tsao
Mildred could understand the impulse. When she was growing up, she’d seen it in her father, who worked hard and saved up and kept his former life back in the old country wrapped in dark secrecy. But understanding didn’t make it more pleasant to be around. And just as she had always disliked interacting with her father, so now she disliked interacting with the people of Flee Town and couldn’t wait to leave.
“Remarkable.”
Mildred gave a little jump of surprise. She had completely forgotten that the One was sitting next to her.
“Remarkable,” the One murmured again, more to herself than to Mildred. She too was looking out at the very same landscape—the pink sky, the red grass and trees. And it occurred to Mildred that, at the very same time she had been contemplating how horrible Cambodia-Abscond was, the One had been sitting next to her, on the very same porch, thinking how marvellous it all was.
How the One could still find the Territory “remarkable” was a wonder in itself, and not just because they’d been sitting in that same spot almost continuously for half a month. Cambodia-Abscond was discovered in the 1940s, and the One must have already visited the place several dozen times at least.
And yet: “Absolutely remarkable,” the One declared, adjusting the heavy shawl around her tiny shoulders and settling back into her chair. Her face was a portrait of complete satisfaction.
The happiness that the One was obviously experiencing, coupled with the shame Mildred felt at her own disgruntlement, sent her mind drifting towards the positive. (Her erstwhile therapist would have been pleased.) So what if she didn’t like it here? So what if the people rubbed her the wrong way and the redness of her surroundings gave her a migraine? So what if she didn’t derive the same pleasure from the distinctive characteristics of the Territory in the same way that she might if she were “into nature” like the One or so many of her other Questian colleagues? She hadn’t joined the Quest to make friends or enjoy herself. She’d joined because it was a cause she believed in with all her heart.
She knew the Quest wasn’t out to help people or save the environment like the charitable foundations and nonprofits she’d worked for in the past. But in its single-minded drive to explore every nook and cranny, every crease and crevice on the planet, and then to disseminate that knowledge among the population at large, Mildred had found a mission that resonated with her as nothing ever had. When boiled down to its barest essence, the Quest was about truth: finding it and spreading it far and wide. And insofar as Mildred had any idealism left, she believed that the truth was important.
She wasn’t sure why she held this conviction. Learning the truth rarely changed anything, and when it did, it often caused great pain—this had been the case in her life, at least. When she had learned at school that there was a name for what her father did to her mother, her two younger brothers, and her—abuse—she had hurled the word at him, only to be rewarded with the worst beating of her life. Then, during her college days, she had gotten involved in various volunteering and social-justice activities and was overwhelmed with anguish when she learned how much suffering there was in the world, how much violence. The truth was no kinder to her in her romantic affairs, which weren’t romantic so much as recurrent exercises in complicit self-torture. In this area of her life, it seemed as if Truth were the host of some twisted dating game show, revealing the terrifying true nature of each boyfriend only after he had affixed himself firmly, and leechlike, to her heart.
And yet she persisted in her conviction—a holdover, perhaps, from that brief phase in her teenage years when she had gone to youth Bible-study sessions in the basement of her aunt’s church and thought she had faith in God. Those words, from the book of John: “And the truth shall set you free.” The truth wasn’t always pleasant, but it was liberating, refreshing—the sting of antiseptic on an open cut, the first stage of a healing process. This she believed with every fibre of her being, and neither her logical powers (which were considerable) nor her cynicism (also considerable) could budge her from it.
Hence, the Quest. And hence, that fateful day when she had seen it advertised and subsequently dedicated herself to spreading the truth about the world and how much of it there really was.
Her latest disaster of a boyfriend, Greg, had moved out of her apartment that morning. “For real, this time,” he’d said, and she hoped he was right, because if he returned, as he had all the other times, she would take him back, and she was tired of taking him back.
She told him as much as she sat on the edge of the futon couch in her pyjamas, still weary from the screaming match the night before and exhausted from a night of fitful sleep. “For real,” she echoed, pleading almost. “I’m sick of all this.”
Greg smirked. “Maybe I shouldn’t go after all. You’re so pathetic, I feel guilty.” And then, weedy arms cradling the cardboard box containing the last of his possessions, he left.
After she heard the elevator doors close, Mildred walked to the kitchen. She opened the fridge. She hurled the dozen eggs she’d bought the day before into the sink, one by one. Then she changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants and went to sit at a café.
It wasn’t her favourite café, and technically it was more of a deli, but she always went there. The problem with her favourite café was that everyone else liked it too, and she lacked the energy that morning to do battle with the yuppies of the Brooklyn Saturday brunch set. Also, her favourite café was pricey. So there she was, at her usual spot instead, nursing bad coffee in a Styrofoam cup and nibbling a bloated blueberry muffin—the kind that came in plastic-wrapped packs of twenty-four from the bakery section at Costco. The owners were a middle-aged Korean couple, and they reminded her of her own parents, but nicer and happier. She greeted them in respectful Korean whenever she came in, and this made them smile. Occasionally they gave her a free banana. That day, the husband asked her whether she was okay. She said she was, but then he pressed two bananas into her hands and urged her to look after her health.
As she sat on a stool near the window and leafed through a month-old copy of an abandoned alt-weekly, she thought about how much she was looking forward to Monday, when she could go to work and live the part of her life that was going well. She liked her workplace—a charitable foundation dedicated to improving water sanitation in the developing world. She’d just been promoted to head of marketing. Her coworkers thought she was brilliant, capable, and practical, which, in the office, she was.
It was then that the ad caught her eye—a rectangular block of text.
The More Known World awaits.
THE QUEST +62 811 434 1256
Why that ad snagged her attention, and not its neighbour, “We buy junk at good prices,” or “Pelvis for sale, Elvis not included” three ads down, she couldn’t say. Perhaps it was the international phone number. But snagged she was, and she dialled the number later that night over dinner, which was microwaveable instant rice and kimchi straight from the jar.
In hindsight, it was a miracle that she’d persisted. No one answered, so she left a voice message. Several weeks later, someone called Mildred back to arrange a meeting—a man with an accent she couldn’t place. When they met at the Starbucks near her workplace (she’d had to choose the time and location), he wolfed down three bagels with cream cheese, her treat, and proceeded to say nothing at all. She only managed to glean any information from him by asking a series of questions, each of which he answered only after removing his glasses, wiping them with a blue handkerchief, putting them back on, and peering at her for a long time, as if trying to jog his memory about who she was and why they were there at all.
The interrogation session lasted a little more than two hours. And though what she was learning was exciting, thrilling even, the effort of extracting this information was so enervating that Mildred could be only dimly aware of how astounding it all was without actually being astounded in the moment itself. Only when Mildred slumped back in her chair, exhausted from her exertions, did the man speak of
his own accord.
“You’re a Sumfit,” he declared, awkwardly.
“A what?”
“A Sumfit,” he repeated. Then, looking at his thumbs, which were tapping a mysterious arrhythmic beat on the tabletop, he added, “See, 99.5 percent of the Worlds’ population are Sumfits. And 0.2 percent are Stucks.”
“And what are you?” Mildred asked.
“The remaining 0.3 percent,” he answered. He reached for his glasses, and Mildred cringed. But instead of removing them and getting out his handkerchief, he pushed them up the bridge of his nose. “I’m an Oddfit. Most Questians are.”
“So?”
“You—you said you wanted to join the Quest,” he stammered. “Sumfits can’t explore new Territories like Oddfits can.”
“Why not?”
A shrug. “Physically speaking, it’s impossible. Transferring between Territories is very taxing on the Sumfit system.” He peered at her intently. “It’s biological. That’s all we know.”
There was a lengthy pause. “So you’re saying I can’t join the Quest?” Mildred said.
“No, you can. But if you do, it can’t be in an exploration capacity. You’d have to help with cataloguing. Or dissemination.”
“What’s cataloguing?”
“What I do. We take new information about Territories and add it to the Compendium, where we keep everything we know about the More Known World.”
“And what’s dissemination?”
“This,” he said. Then, sorrowfully: “I hate dissemination.”
Christian. She knew his name now. A meticulous, bookish young man of Nigerian extraction who preferred to spend his days in the depths of the Compendium, reading expedition reports and copying new information by hand onto index cards, which he filed away by Territory, which in turn were arranged in alphabetical order. But because all other Questians hated dissemination as well, everyone was required to help out with it as much as possible, to prevent the burden from falling on a few unlucky shoulders. Luckily, not much action was required: the occasional inexpensive advertisement (the Quest ran on a tight budget), the sporadic leafleting (and rummaging through nearby garbage bins so they could reuse the leaflets people had thrown away), the rare meeting when anything did transpire (unlikely, since only a tiny percentage of Sumfits were capable of registering any information about the More Known World).
It hadn’t always been this way. From what Mildred had learned since joining the Quest, dissemination had once been not only a priority, but a passion. That enthusiasm was long gone, worn down by decades of fighting the odds and failing. Yet one and a half years later, looking back at the whole experience from that porch in Flee Town, Cambodia-Abscond, Mildred wondered if it had all been just as well. She remembered being shocked by the ineptitude with which the More Known World and the Quest had been presented to her, but she also remembered being, perversely enough, intrigued by it. By the time her meeting with Christian had ended—“I have to go,” he’d suddenly muttered, glancing at his watch and vanishing seconds before his chair burst into flames—a familiar energy was stirring in her, whispering as it whipped about. Change is around the corner. If not you, who? It was the whisper that made her a soaring success at work. It was the whisper that made her a pitiable wreck in her dating life. This time, it was the whisper that compelled her to call the number and leave another message, insisting that she did want to join the Quest and help, specifically, with dissemination. After fifteen days, someone had called her back with instructions. She packed a clean pair of underwear and a toothbrush. On a malicious whim, she called several friends to leave panicked-sounding voice messages about how she was worried Greg was going to kill her. Then she had disappeared.
Mildred hadn’t pressed for change straight away. She’d waited a few weeks to get a feel for the whole operation first, to become acquainted with what exactly the Quest was doing, and to ascertain whether her own experience with Christian had been an anomaly or the norm. Her initial impressions proved correct. The work the Quest was doing in terms of revealing and detailing the truth about the Worlds was utterly marvellous, absolutely awe inspiring. But the way in which this information was being communicated to the Known World was depressingly inadequate. Inadequate was one way of putting it. Shit was another. Though Mildred privately thought the latter, she tactfully opted to use the former term when she met with the One and the Other to make the case for reform.
“The More Known World is a big deal,” Mildred had said, eyes ablaze, her clear voice striking the word big as if it were a gong. “You of all people know this. It deserves a big push.”
These were the closing words of Mildred’s four-minute presentation, which she gave on the moss-covered steps of the Compendium, in Bolivia-Aspersion—the Territory where she and the vast majority of other Sumfit Questians had chosen to make their abode. Four minutes exactly. She had timed it when she was rehearsing. Any shorter, and the One wouldn’t think she was serious. Any longer, and the Other would lose interest. Sure enough, she had barely concluded when the Other sprang up, exclaimed, “You’re right!” and ran into the woods in hot pursuit of a scurrying striped creature with bobbly antennae and a flashing ovipositor.
“Yes, you are,” the One said grudgingly as the Other’s shouts of excitement faded into the distance. From the minute Mildred had contacted her to arrange a meeting, the One had been sceptical. The woman was a new recruit, after all—what did she know? But by the time Mildred had finished, the One admitted she had a point. When it came to dissemination, the Quest could certainly use a facelift, if not heavy-duty plastic surgery. More importantly, the young woman was obviously very capable. The observations she’d made were informed and incisive. The changes she proposed were well considered and intriguing. She was surprised by Mildred’s aggressiveness—it was unusual for a new Questian to be so brash, so critical—but then again, she acknowledged that this kind of attitude was necessary if an overhaul were indeed to take place. Here was a woman full of vim and vigour, raring to spread the good news about the More Known World in a way that the More Known World deserved, and to cap it all off, she seemed to have the outlines of a definite, plausible plan.
The One folded her arms and nodded. “Tell me more.”
First, Mildred would immerse herself in learning about the Quest and the More Known World to the furthest extent possible. She understood that this was a well-nigh impossible task for an Oddfit, much less a Sumfit with severely limited transferring abilities, but it wasn’t so much about quantity as it was about quality. She didn’t have to memorize or experience the entirety of every single Territory on record. Rather, she wanted to internalize the Quest’s ethos and vision, and gain a comprehensive knowledge of a handful of select Territories.
Then, in conjunction with the Quest’s cataloguers and a team of individuals handpicked by her, she would oversee the launch of a new publicity campaign, making use of a Known World technology called the Internet.
“Inter-net?” the One had repeated, her brow furrowed. Like all Oddfits who had lived too long in the More Known World, she never visited the Known World anymore. A trip to the Known World would trigger an instantaneous allergic reaction from its immune system. Her last trip to the Known World had been in 1993, for five seconds, when she had narrowly escaped being swallowed up by a spontaneously occurring sinkhole. Needless to say, she hadn’t had time to catch up on the latest news in technology.
Mildred explained the Internet—its uses, its role in contemporary society, the extent of its reach. Then she described how the Quest’s dissemination division, under her supervision, would use it. Knowledge about the More Known World and the Quest was to be spread via a “website” that would be accessible to people around the world.
“Like a book?” the One asked, with regard to the website.
“But better,” Mildred replied. Then, seeing the hesitation flicker across the One’s face, she added hastily, “Or rather, different. A book would cost a lot to print. It woul
d be difficult to get a publisher. Distribution would be a nightmare. And it just wouldn’t be as appealing. People would have to get their hands on a copy. They’d have to read the whole thing. On the website, they could just click around. Sorry. By ‘click around’ I mean—”
“‘Skim.’ I gathered as much from context. But surely, you’re underestimating people’s attention spans. It only takes an hour at most to read . . . what, four hundred pages? I’m sure we could come up with something concise that would be four hundred pages.”
Mildred cleared her throat. “With all due respect, One, most people don’t read as fast as you. Plus, we can do a lot more with graphics on a website. There are some amazing sketches on file in the Compendium. If we did a print book, illustrations would cost a fortune. Uploading them, on the other hand? Easy as pie.”
The furrows in the older woman’s brow grew deeper, and Mildred braced herself for the worst. But then the very opposite of the worst happened.
“Just imagine,” the One murmured, “if people could see the More Known World for themselves. The iridescent canopies of Japan-Alloy. The composition of platypusine under a microscope. And those lovely sketches of extruded skeet-beetle genitalia that Carl finished in watercolour last month . . .”
“Exactly,” Mildred said.
“And you say it would cost very little?”
“Yes, if we’re careful. We’ll start with a very basic site design using ready-made templates. It won’t be fancy, but we’ll keep it professional looking. We can look into making further improvements once we have sufficient interest from the public.”
“Sufficient interest?” the One asked. “I wouldn’t expect any. Only a small fraction of—”
