“So what are you doing, then?” Fift said. “You’re a Vail, you’re vir friend, why aren’t you going to help vem?”
“I am, you stupid . . . slug!” Vvonda said, vir face magenta. “Bluey and I and Stogma and the rest of Shria, eight bodies, total—we’re trying to get there! We forced our way onto the first sluice, but we have to go around the second. We’re going to use the slide-grove off Bittersting. When we get there, those sisterless rent-a-body-wearing siblingfuckers are going to be sorry. Plus, my mom and I came to this party to try to get a bat, and now you’re interrupting. Look, no one is going to hit a Staid. Just get yourself the fuck out of that crowd and go home!”
“We were trying to get home before—”
Vvonda made a noise of disgust in vir throat. “You can’t even handle that yourself? Then just get to the end of the byway and wait for us.”
I’m scared, though, Fift wanted to say, but couldn’t. It occurred to zir belatedly that ze was doing this all wrong, contesting the wrong transaction. Ze sounded angry, worried, demanding—like a four-year-old who’d never learned enough self-control to sit through zir first Long Conversation. Like a baby. It just confirmed Vvonda’s opinion of zir as a useless, helpless burden.
Of course ve could curse and complain and demand—that was different. In a Vail, it was passion. In Fift, it was just weakness.
Ze knew what Father Grobbard would do. Incorruptible and emotionless as the void, immune to Vvonda’s insults and scorn, ze would calmly interrogate vem, coolly entertain vir opinions and rash statements, expose the flaws in vir reasoning. Gradually Vvonda would seem more and more ridiculous until, flushed and petulant, ve’d submit to zir logic.
(At the thought of zirself in this role, of Vvonda supplanted and yielding to zir cool, efficient intellect, ze experienced an absurd little erotic thrill. What if Vvonda were the one to feel helpless . . . to feel overpowered, overcome, awed by Fift, caught and carried along in zir wake . . . ? Ze remembered zir hand, struggling in Shria’s blue forest . . . )
But ze didn’t know what logic that would be, or what words to say.
Ze was sure, though, that if ze could produce even Father Grobbard’s tone of clinical, dispassionate certainty (or Mother Pip’s tone, for that matter, certainty mixed with charm and bombast), Vvonda’s swagger would vanish again. Forced to fight on Staid territory, ve’d go stiff, defensive, guilty . . .
Fift couldn’t, though.
The rhythm got louder:
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
A pause spread through the riot like an infection, one body after another. The grappling slowed. Heads lowered, resting for a moment on the shoulders of those they strove against; heads rose, listening.
Father Squell was crying softly. The sound mixed, in Fift’s tired brains, with the chiggity-whuppity rhythm . . .
“Our time together,” Panaximandra said, “is coming to an end, my sistren. For now. You have work ahead: difficult, dangerous work. Hardest of all will be the work of remembering why this matters—of remembering that you can be free.”
Vvonda stared at Fift as if waiting for more. Then ve nodded once, turned, and sauntered away.
At the table, Fift opened zir eyes. Father Grobbard, eyes still closed, looked tired, peaceful, still, absent: a premonition of death.
The rhythm was as loud now as a stage whisper at the other end of the breakfast table:
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
“They will try to make you ashamed,” Panaximandra said. “They will tell you you are behaving like children. They will explain to you why this is already—”
“Vvonda,” Fift said.
“—the best of all possible worlds. They will not see you or your grievances. And if you force them to see, they will pretend to find you ridiculous. And if you shock them out of their laughter—”
Vvonda turned back, flinging a hand up in what-is-it-now? exasperation.
“—they will pretend to find you shameful. And if you refuse to be ashamed, they will call you evil—”
Fift said, “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“—and if you are unafraid to be evil, they will banish you to an Idyll. They will say they want to help you, so they can silence you. And if they cannot mock you from your goal, and they cannot frighten you, and they cannot trick you—”
“What?” Vvonda asked, vir eyes hardening dangerously.
“—then they will pretend to become reasonable. They will give you some scraps from their table, and they will say it is dangerous and extraordinary and cause for celebration that they have given you these scraps—”
In the pausing, quieting press of red and black and blue bodies, it was easier to move. Fift crept, slid, ducked under arms, squeezed between bodies. No one struck zir.
“This. Everything falling apart,” Fift told Vvonda. “This revolution, this unraveling. You like it. It’s made for you.”
“—and they will warn you that you must be content with them. Do not be content, my siblings. You are human beings. They have supplanted you in your own minds—”
Vvonda paused, frowned. Fift could see vem rein in vir first, incredulous, angry reaction, stop, and consider zir question.
“—making you grateful for your slavery, making you believe you owe them your lives. You do not.”
As loud as running footsteps in a corridor beyond a closed door, the rhythm came up behind Panaximandra’s words. The anonymized Vails around Fift turned, seeking its source.
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM!
“You’re right in one sense,” Vvonda said. “I like a challenge. We’ve been under-challenged, Fift, haven’t you noticed?”
“You owe them nothing,” Panaximandra said.
And there was Shria. Five rent-a-bodies—three red, two blue—encircled vem. One of the blue ones towered above the others. Instead of the usual shallow indentations for eyes, mouth, and ears, it had real features: startling white orbs of eyes with orange irises and long lashes, orange lips, fleshy whorls of ear—shockingly incongruous in the featureless expanse of skin-fabric.
The Vails had stepped away from Shria, turned to face the growing rhythm:
BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity.
BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM!
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
Shria was lying on the ground, face down. Vir clothes were ripped, jagged slashes of vir lavender skin revealed between the red and blue fabric, lacerated and beginning to flush the deeper purple of bruises.
They’d been kicking vem.
“I see vem,” ze gasped, to Vvonda.
“I see Shria,” ze told Father Grobbard, whose eyes opened.
“You’re still there?” Vvonda said. “You haven’t listened to a word I said, have you?”
Fift tried to imitate Father Grobbard’s expression exactly. “It’s not as if you offered me any clear arguments,” ze said to Vvonda. “You simply asserted it was no place for me, among a flurry of insults. There was little information content, and none new.” Zir throat was dry, and ze cleared it, twice, hoping that didn’t ruin the effect.
Shria heaved vemself to vir knees and paused, vir neck craned down, vir red hair covering vir face.
“Ve’s telling you to go away,” Vvonda hissed. “That’s the new information. Ve wants you to leave.”
“Goodbye, my friends, my siblings, my lovers,” Panaximandra said. “Until we meet again, remember: do not listen to their lies. Remember who you are!”
Fift took a step forward; two steps. The blue body with the startlingly real eyes and ears glanced at zir, then looked back towards Panaximandra.
“True,” Fift said to Vvonda. “That is new information. I thank you for it.”
>
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
Vvonda snorted. “Sure, kid. Whatever.” There was a hint of uncertainty in vir voice.
Fift slipped into the ring of rent-a-bodies and sat, cross-legged, a pace away from Shria.
“Enjoy your playtime,” Fift said, zir face impassive.
A flash of anger passed over Vvonda’s broad face.
Grobbard’s lips relaxed slightly; zir version of a smile. “So,” ze said. “The Clowns arrive at last, while the ordering parents of the world are still nowhere to be seen.”
Shria opened vir eyes. And, seeing Fift, widened them.
The music was as loud, now, as nearby thunder—
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM!
—and over the drumming, ze heard the whistling, grinding, tweedling, sweet, discordant music of the pipes:
Hhrang, hrrang, de-da-de hhrang, hhrang woodledy woodledy-de,
Hhrang woodledy woodledy-de, hhrang, hhrang . . .
Shria was bloody and bruised, vir eyes swollen, blood staining vir lips. Ve was trembling.
Fift forced the muscles of zir face to relax. Ze’d had a plan. Ze was going to say, formal and calm, “Greetings, Shria. May I observe?” or something like that. Something to reassure vem that ze wasn’t trying to save vem. Something staidish and grown-up and not ridiculous. And then ze’d just sit in the middle of the riot as if it were the Long Conversation, and ve’d forgive zir.
But that plan was ruined, because it was too loud for Shria to hear zir. Ze wanted to send vem another note, but it might not go through, and ze didn’t want to stop and compose it now, not with vem watching zir expression with blank intensity. Ze nodded at vem, trying to show vem: I won’t interfere anymore. I am here for you, but I will let you do this thing you have to do, whatever it is. I trust you, Shria.
Fift saw flickers of color and movement from beyond the press of rent-a-bodies. Ze checked the feed, and, yes, a few more views of the byway were now flickering in . . . and there they were, in lines of marchers fifty bodies wide: the Clowns.
9
The first line of Clowns had enormous bulbous heads and ball-like eyes the size of small canids, each eye reflecting in funhouse distortion a different world that wasn’t there: gas giants, fancily decorated house interiors, beaches, battle scenes; each alive and correlated with the waving of the distorted heads. The line of them, Vails and Staids intermingled, spread across the whole breadth of the byway. They had great peaked noses, great rubbery lips, and small round bellies supporting metal drums. And on these, the clawed hands of the Clowns beat with long, long bones:
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
The second line had trees for heads, drums in all the branches, and wheels for feet, which spat sparks of all colors. The third line were dancers without heads, each dancer a cluster of arms and legs which met in a center knot, and the dancers sprang and grappled and rebounded in a hypnotic gyre which was both tumultuous and rigidly restrained. The fourth line had wireframe models of habitation structures, adorned with tiny sluices and flywheels and bounceroos and tessellations and anedrals, where their bodies should have been, with hats on top of them and squat arms and legs attached at the sides, and they were drumming the same tattoo.
Then came the flautists, a line of rather ordinary-looking Staids in white, until you noticed that all fifty of them were identical and moving in identical lockstep, as if they were one fifty-bodied person, which made that line the most gasp inducingly miraculous of all.
And the flautists played:
Woodle-deedly-deedly-dee, woodle-deedly-dee,
Woodle-doodly-deedly-dee, deedly-doodly-doo.
And after them pipers, all Vails, their naked bodies painted in gaudy gold and orange and bedecked in glittering bangles, their powerful arms compressing the groaning air sacks that drove the pipes:
Hhrang, hrrang, de-da-de hhrang, hhrang dada-dooda-dee,
Hhrang dada-dooda-dee, hhrang, hhrang.
And after them more Clowns, and more: cavernous carrion birds and hovering swarms of light, bestial rompers and stilt-tall fire dancers; and behind them, a crowd of revelers and hangers-on and wannabes, and vendors pushing carts of comestibles, and bookies’ barkers calling out bets, and freelance serendipity coordinators, and matchmakers and balloon-sellers and portraitists, and commemorative body-garden architects, and rowdies, and reactants, and impromptu school outings with teachers in tow, all following the Clowns.
BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM!
Fift heard all of this with zir own ears on the byway; but ze saw it through the (jerky, intermittent) feed. Zir eyes were on Shria, who had raised vir bloody face to see the Clowns.
This was not the only such parade; the sound there on the byway was deafening, but through the flickering feed, in the quiet of zir parental cohort’s breakfast room in Foo, ze could hear the discordant thrum and jangle of parades throughout Fullbelly, a storm of sound loud enough to overcome the noise inhibitors strewn through the invisibly cobwebbed interspace.
“What I find so strange,” Tigan Melitox Farina of name registry Blue Piggyback Dentition 5 was saying at Fift’s elbow, “is not being able to tell what people are thinking. I mean, it’s so ironic: the biggest news since ever, and no public opinion reacting to it!”
Tigan’s name-cousin, Pom Filigrous Tyrox, sniffed. “I’ll tell you my opinion . . .”
Shria surged to vir feet and lunged at the huge blue rent-a-body with the strangely real eyes. Fift flinched but controlled zir breathing. At the party, ze gasped “No—” and the two Blue Piggyback Dentition name-cousins looked uneasily over at zir.
Grobbard’s eyes were closed; the apartment was deathly still. The contrast with the chaos of sound on the byway—
Hhrang, hrrang.
BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity,
Feedly-doodly-doo.
—was eerie.
Shria threw an elbow into the gut of the blue rent-a-body as the Clowns reached the edge of the riot. The rent-a-body went down.
With another cautious glance at Fift, Tigan Melitox Farina turned back to Pom Filigrous Tyrox. “You can talk all you like, but you won’t be able to find those words tomorrow, will you? No memory, no weighting, no filtering, and our agents asleep—so what good is your opinion, honestly? What is it for?”
The rioters, who had stopped fighting to gape, now shuffled out of the way of the advancing columns of Clowns. Shria stumbled back; the other Vail’s real-eyed rent-a-body struggled to its knees. One bulbous-headed drummer Clown (huge and ugly and sure of step, its drumstick bones blurring on the metal drum) marched between them, and then another. The rent-a-body Vail stood, and ve and Shria looked at each other across the gap. The drumming was an unbearable roar; it soaked into their bones.
Fift had to get to zir feet and move when the drum-tree-headed Clowns rolled through, spitting sparks. Ze took a few steps toward Shria. The rent-a-bodies around zir were helping each other up.
“It’s sort of terrifying, isn’t it?” Pom Filigrous Tyrox said.
“Yes,” zir name-cousin said. “It is. Also, if there’s anything scandalous you want to do, you should probably do it now, while this lasts.”
“Good thinking,” Pom Filigrous Tyrox said. And they wandered off into the crowd.
Shria stared at the anonybody with the real orange eyes. The many-limbed dancers bounded between them, the architectural-model Clowns drummed through, and then the anonybody was gone.
Shria sagged, and spat on the byway.
Fift went to vem. Shria reached out and took Fift into vir arms. Fift’s cheek was pressed into the hollow between vir two middle breasts. The drums were too loud for zir to hear vem crying, but ze felt the small explosions of sobs beneath vir breastbone.
“Good day for a festival,
” Grobbard said drily.
The eerily identical flautists (or flautist? But it must be a trick, no one could manage fifty bodies! Where was lookup?) passed. The pipers passed.
Someone cleared their throat behind Fift; it took a moment to figure out where.
It was at the party. Fift was staring at the bric-a-brac pyramids above where Father Frill was no longer dancing.
Ze turned around.
Mother Pip was there, looking grim and amused. Frill and Smistria stood a pace behind zir. They looked aggrieved.
“We have a bat,” Pip said. “We’re going to fetch your body from the byway. Stay where you are.”
“The Clowns—” Fift began.
“Just stay,” growled Pip, “where you are.”
The cavernous carrion birds passed them, then the hovering swarms of light, the bestial rompers, the stilt-tall fire dancers; the revelers, the hangers-on, the wannabes, and the vendors; followed by the bookies’ barkers, freelance serendipity coordinators, matchmakers, balloon-sellers, portraitists, commemorative body-garden architects, rowdies, reactants, and school outings with their teachers in tow; and the blue and red and black rent-a-bodies holding hands, the ones with mouths eating sourspun fluffity from a vendor’s cart.
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
Baaa-RUMP, ba-chiggity-chiggity-whuppity-chiggity-chiggity-BOOM!
Hhrang, hrrang, de-da-de hhrang, hhrang dada-dooda-de,
Woodle-deedly, woodle-deedly, woodle-deedle, hhrang!
Interlude
Insider’s Market Report
HELLO and welcome to ZANGO JANGO’s little corner of the world-of-ideas! THANKS FOR VISITING, because NOT MANY DO, may Groon regret it! But that’s THEIR LOSS and YOUR GAIN because—say it with me, my puppies—THE BEST DIRT IS THE DIRT LEAST SEEN!
The Unraveling Page 13
