Ze looked up at them, frowning, then ze stared off across the pavilion. No one said anything.
“But with a culture like yours, the more mature it gets, the greater the anxiety. When your subcultures meet, they don’t set up a pattern of domination and resistance that leaves nuggets of the smaller culture intact. They tend to just calmly blur together into one amalgamation. Fashions sweep across a whole world. Bangles for Vails one year, flanges the next . . . across a world of a trillion people. A single economic system manages all your social tensions—you don’t have separate, parallel systems for emotions, exchanged possessions, social status, reserve capital, heritage, or prestige, for instance. Just one kind of wealth. It all works smoothly . . . until, maybe, one day it doesn’t. One day there’s a flaw I—or we, you and I together—haven’t foreseen. An edge case. Something virulent that spreads through the culture and takes it down. It doesn’t necessarily happen in an eyeblink, not like in a . . .” Ze put another purple strip in zir mouth and chewed. “Not like in some kinds of cultures. But it might be unstoppable. When a culture like yours falls, it falls hard. And there are few warning signs.”
Fift swallowed. It occurred to zir that zir Fathers were probably still watching zir, and ze wondered what they would say about this. Ze could picture Fathers Smistria and Frill objecting; they loved to argue about history. Though how could you argue with this strange five-hundred-thousand-year-old Staid?
But even Father Smistria would be too polite to message in the middle of such a conversation. Fift queried the surround for how many people were currently observing, figuring ze’d see maybe seven or eight of zir Fathers, and a few of Shria’s.
There were 1,875,203 observers, with more piling in. The pavilion had already put in a bid for reactants to formally confirm its spike in status from hosting the conversation.
Thavé smiled a small, grim smile.
Of course, Fift realized, there would be Cirque-fans following all the Ticket Holders, looking for when the performance would break. And of course there must be scholars who had automated agents tracking Thavé’s movements and behaviors. And somehow that must have been enough of a nucleus that when the alien started talking about the end of the world, the audience boomed.
Fift swallowed, reminding zirself that, even if this was a lot more attention than ze usually got, it was a very small crowd by the standards of real celebrities in Fullbelly. Ze recalled zir classroom lessons in instant-fame comportment: the trick of it was to remember how short attention spans and memories were, not to confuse an anomalous spike with a real change, and to act with dignity and humility, ignoring the crowd.
“Kumru’s feces,” Shria said, vir lavender face blanching to cream-blue. “Fift, did you see the audience we’ve got?”
Fift tried to ignore vem. “So what do we do?” ze asked Thavé, zir voice tight.
“Well,” Thavé said, and sighed. “I’ve been saying for a while that you ought to diversify. You need to start loosening the stranglehold of consensus. You need a little more . . . room. But I’m not always listened to.” Ze looked at them carefully. “Indeed, the tighter the consensus, the less effect my advice has. I’d also like to see you cultivate more physical displacement—to spread yourselves out a little. Frankly, I would love for you to start building star-ships . . . though your objections to them are eminently logical, Shria. You could at least be expanding more within your own solar system . . . but I don’t seem to be making much headway there, either. Lately it seems like I’m not making much headway anywhere.”
Fift didn’t know what to say to that.
“Sorry,” Thavé smiled. “I’m being maudlin. I don’t want to ruin your outing.” Ze patted zir pocket again. “You’re here to see a show.”
“Is that what you’re here for?” Fift asked, relieved. “I mean here in this pavilion, today? The show? Like us?”
“Certainly,” Thavé said. “And then I’m on my way to visit a friend, another alien. Maybe ve’ll have some ideas.”
“Another alien?” Shria said. “How many of you are there? Are you just . . . traveling beyond the world all the time? Where do you go?”
“Are you leaving the world?” Fift asked. The thought made zir queasy.
“Oh no, no,” Thavé said. “My friend is here, in an Idyll. Good place for those of us who can’t entirely . . . adapt to your ways of doing things. There aren’t many of us at all, I’m afraid. Just a few artifacts of Far Technology rattling around your planet, of whom I am—if I do say so myself—by far the easiest to talk to. And we don’t usually go anywhere; nowadays, traveling between stars means spending a few hundred years cramped into a very old, very fast machine, exposed to a lot of radiation, and without anything to eat. Or breathe. Arduous.”
Fift was still trying to grasp the notion that there might be other worlds, with other people on them, to go to. Not just abstractions in Far History, or ancient sources of incomprehensible Far Technology and obscure allusions in the Long Conversation’s oldest passages, but worlds that existed now. Were there? Was that what Thavé was implying: people . . . if you could even call them people? . . . living somewhere else . . . somewhere Fift couldn’t see, totally unconnected to this world and its inhabitants, its conversations, its ideas? People who couldn’t affect zir no matter what they did; and nothing ze did could affect them. People so separate, so cut off, that there was no way to reach them at all. It was an eerie thought. Part of zir wanted to ask about those other worlds, but the queasy sense of disorientation got stronger as ze contemplated it. Ze hoped Shria wouldn’t go there.
“And you could do that? Survive that kind of trip?” Shria asked Thavé.
“Not in this body. But yes.”
“And are you planning to? Not right now, but . . . later?”
“No, no I’m not.Not if I can avoid it. I don’t intend to lose another world. I want to stay here. I want . . . this.” Ze swung zir arm up, describing the visible arc of habitation structures above them: the beams, vaults, spiral staircases, fountains, arches, byways, slipthreads, whirligigs, crenelated arcs, polypenetrations, hyperbolic stepsurfaces, stickywalls, goopfields, bounceroos, waysweep-vistas, abandonages, wigglewharfs, playglobes, interdecks, jumptubes, sluices, flywheels, and bauble cascades strewn throughout the volume of Fullbelly; connected, supported, and nourished by the invisible web of tiny strands filling the interspace and lit by the great network of glowtubes beneath them, which separated the upper habitation region of Fullbelly from the production regions below.
It was second afternoon here, so the glowtubes’ light was shading now from vaguely pinkish-purple to vaguely violet-indigo, in a spectral diffusion they could see stretching across Fullbelly above. Foo and the below and beyond were just in the middle of that range, bathed in a pure violet light.
“What about—” Shria began.
Then the lights went out.
6
The whole of Fullbelly was plunged into darkness.
There were screams, then shouts of surprise. Then a beat of silence. Then cacophony: a clatter of forks and spoons and food platters and syringes falling to the floor; bodies slamming into tables and each other; laughter, cursing, angry argument.
It was the glowtubes that had gone suddenly dark. Thousands of tiny light sources still moved through the space between the habitations, illuminating edges in yellow or green or blue, casting strange dim shadows over half-seen surfaces. It looked like a night sky on the surface, if the stars had been parti-colored, wandering, and strewn among strange blocky clouds.
At home, Fift bolted from the empty hallway near the study-pit. Ze turned a corner and ducked into the sleeping alcove to where ze lay, struggling out of bed. Ze helped zirself up and ran, doublebodied, downstairs to the breakfast room.
Ze almost fell off the stairs. Ze righted zirself and ran on, slammed zir shoulder into the wall on the left, and stopped. Something was wrong. Something was—
Foo had stopped rotating. Ze was compensating for a motio
n that was no longer there.
More than the lights, this filled zir with panic.
“Foo stopped,” ze said to Shria. They were looking up at the strange dancing stars. Most of them were slowing to a halt.
“I know,” ve said. Ve took zir hand, vir cool palm filling the space Thavé’s warm one had left.
Four of Fift’s parents were sitting around the table, and Father Smistria was pacing. They looked up as ze clattered down the stairs. Squell and Nupolo and Grobbard held out their arms. Fift came and sat among them, nestled in their embraces. Their eyes were all distant, engrossed in what their other bodies saw.
“What is it?” said Shria. “Is it the Cirque?”
Fift turned to Thavé, but the alien was gone, zir eating tines still lying on the table, piercing one of the strips. Zir hat was gone, too. Lookup showed only four public positions for zir twelve bodies, all of them far away.
There was a sudden gasp from many throats, and a few sharp cries. Fift looked up.
Bright streaks of light were moving through the darkness, impossibly fast. They spun loops around Foo and Stiffwaddle and Undersnort and Wallacomp habitations, leaving trails of brilliant white that faded behind them. They swung through the space of Fullbelly, dodging elevator-strands, sluice-cables, and lonely, still whirligigs, illuminating them into incandescence, casting weird flickering shadows on the faces of bounceroos and stickywalls and polypenetrations. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight. Eight blazing somethings whooshing through Fullbelly’s space; terrifying, like dangerously gifted creatures from some forgotten mythology.
Then all eight objects, scattered through Fullbelly, flipped or turned or spun and headed back, dodging and weaving through the structures, heading towards one another, heading for a collision.
Shria pulled Fift to vem; ze stumbled from zir chair and held vem. Ze tensed in Shria’s arms, in Nupolo’s, in Squell’s (and nestled, loosening, in Grobbard’s).
The eight terrifying speeding things crashed into one another in one enormous flash of light, sending up a shower of sparks which tore through Fullbelly and disappeared.
At the next table, two doublebodied, obviously latterborn Vails—one lanky and almost naked, the other with emaciated, etched muscles, one pair of blue wings, and one pair of red wings—began to applaud.
People stared at them. “Don’t you get it?” the winged one said. “It’s the Cirque!”
“We have Tickets!” the almost naked one said.
A sharp-nosed, lonebodied Staid at the table beyond theirs stood up. Ze wore a disheveled smock and the aggrieved expression of a first child, but for the moment ze was enriched by wrath. “I can’t believe you,” ze said. “Do you think this is a game? If the Cirque is responsible for this—this behavior—”
“Oh, hey,” said the winged Vail, “I hear your little sister’s taking a nap; why don’t you go see if Mommy has some time for you?”
The Staid made a choking noise, and the singlebodied Vail at zir table—plain-looking, with earlobes distended in the fashion of three years ago—stood up. “You squandering waster gnatlings—!”
And then a voice spoke.
“Stalwarts and Expressives!”
It came from the place where the eight streaks of light had collided. When Fift looked more closely, ze realized the space wasn’t empty. The bright sparks had flown away, but there was a dark, shifting, vibrating mass still in its center. And from that mass, the voice was speaking.
“Children of all ages! People of Fullbelly and Hardwon and Tearless and Spoon and the Manysmall! Have you wondered if this is the world for you?”
“OK, it is the Cirque,” Shria said. “Kumru!”
“Vails! Have you wished you could be quiet and small like a stone? Staids! Have you wished you could soar and dance like a splendid bird? Nostalgists! Have you wished to forget? Devvies! Have you wished we could just stop developing? In your heart of hearts, your mind of minds, have you wondered what was behind that door—that door—that you never open?”
The pavilion was silent now, every face staring up into the dimness.
“Holy Kumru!” Father Nupolo said.
“Ssh!” said Father Frill.
“Adults of all stages!” cried the voice. “Where are your great deeds? No, not your petty duels, not the adjudications that you won, after many years, over who gets to keep the pet wormfish. Not your new designs for genitals or flowerpots—”
“Hey!” Shria said.
“—Not your poems about optimal flow-cycle distribution, not your retabulations of cross-references of things that ceased to matter long ago. Not your obsessions with details only the detail-obsessed would notice. Not your worrying and scurrying!”
Even for the Cirque, this was outrageous.
They’d stopped the world. Turned out the lights. Frozen Foo in place. Was that even allowed?
“Where are your great deeds?”
Fift sent zir agents searching and they came back with instant confirmation. There’d been no consensus about cutting the lights. If the Clowns had done it, no one knew how.
“Your parents dug nations from the bedrock! Your grandparents and their grandparents fought in the Age of War! Once, Towers fell! Once Kumru traveled through time to impregnate zirself—or did ve? Ha! Once we wept blood tears of rage, arguing about whether ve did!”
If the Cirque could manage that, what else could they do?
Would the Midwives really allow this? Maybe they’d destroy the Cirque.
“But now we are too polite to mention all that! Where are your great deeds, you stifled Stalwarts, you erratic Expressives? Why, we are bringing them to you! The Cirque Fantabulous is proud to present . . . a spectacle in the midst of life . . .
“Unraveling: A Revolution!”
The voice fell silent and the glowtubes lit again, flooding the world with bright light tinged in violet.
With a lurch, Foo started to turn again.
Interlude
Personal Memory Pop Quiz
“Background of Current Events”
brought to you by the automated agents of the Slow-as-Molasses/Bountiful-Blank Neighborhood Schooling Interdependency
No research agents allowed! Good luck!
The worldwide information interdependency we know as “the feed” crystallized out of a variety of other cybernetic systems during the Age of Roads and Doors.
Discuss the various parts of “the feed,” such as “the visual feed,” “the send,” and “the world-of-ideas.”
What can you not find on the feed?
Is your apartment feed-opaque? Feed-transparent? Feed-translucent? How about your bedroom? Are you sure? Name three “privacy areas” in Foo that are outside someone’s personal apartments and rate their effectiveness.
What is the effect of “general mutual total surveillance” on behavior? In ancient times, there was an entire dramatic literature centered on logically determining “who” had taken certain gruesome actions (such as killing another person’s sole body while unobserved).
What would you do, if you could “get away with it”?
“Critical infrastructure systems” require deep levels of consensus to override. The feed is a “critical infrastructure system.” So are the glowtubes. So are nutrient flow, airflow, and intersomatic communication. Give three examples from history of someone circumventing consensus with an “exploit” to subvert “critical infrastructure systems.”
Which would you prefer: an insurrection masquerading as an artwork, or an artwork masquerading as an insurrection?
Are you somewhere safe? Do you need anything? Should someone come and get you? What is “safety”?
Thanks for taking the quiz!! The next in-person class session meets Greenday morning, location to be announced.
7
They tried three elevators that would take them back to Foo, and there were jostling crowds in front of all of them. Onl
y one elevator, the first, even seemed to be working. Its operator—grim-faced, an adjudicator standing at zir elbow—was letting people board almost indiscriminately; still, people were joining the back of the throng far faster than they were departing. There was no getting through that press of bodies. At the second elevator, the operator had vanished. The third elevator was blocked by an even bigger crowd, and there was shouting at the front, but they couldn’t see what it was, because by then there was something wrong with the feed.
First there were just missing bits—Shria had wanted to see where vir eldersibling Tusha was, and couldn’t find vem, the kind of thing you could blame on some overeager piece of anti-surveil, gone awry and taking out all the feed pickups in a whole block. But the blankness grew, until more and more of the world had been swallowed. With zir own eyes, Fift could see the byway where ze walked with Shria through the milling crowds. With zir own eyes, ze could see the breakfast room where zir parents were arguing. The rest was a fabric ripped to shreds.
It was worse than the lights going out. Fift had seen the darkness of full night before, when camping on the surface. It was eerie seeing it under Fullbelly’s roof, but also stunning—as if a black velvet cloth, adorned with resplendent jewels, had been thrown over the jumble of habitations. But there was nothing entertaining about this.
Lookup was broken, too. Ze’d ask about some passing stranger, and nothing would come . . . then hundreds of heartbeats later, when the body had long since passed, the answer would flickeringly, haltingly emerge. It was like the lost hour at Stiffwaddle Somatic Fashions, turned inside out: instead of Fift being hidden from the world, the world was hidden from zir. The crowds thronging the elevators, the people trudging home along the byways or arguing in courtyards—they were unidentified bodies, nameless, unknowable.
They tried to get their agents to plot them a reasonable route home, but the agents were muddled, recalcitrant: they kept changing their minds. Finally, Fift and Shria set off on a byway heading away from Foo . . . but at least it took them toward a long unbroken stretch of upward staircase that seemed clear. Fift held Shria’s hand.
The Unraveling Page 9
