The Unraveling

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

  “But don’t you think . . .” Fift said. “I mean, my Father Grobbard seemed to think that it was planned that way. That ze wanted to say those things even before the performance started. That it was maybe even, well . . . part of the performance?”

  Dobroc frowned. “Who knows? I’ve heard that very theory advanced on the Thavé-watchers’ polylogues. But . . . no, I don’t think that conversation was planned. Maybe Thavé suspected that rogue feedgardeners would strike during the Cirque’s performance and take the feed down. That’s zir job, after all: foreseeing catastrophes. Maybe ze was worried about the consequences, if they did. Maybe ze was making a plan. But it’s quite possible that ze wouldn’t have said anything to anyone at all if you and Shria hadn’t come along. I think . . . I think Thavé takes zir cues from the world. I think if ze ever had a clear plan for us, we wandered off its track ten thousand years ago. That’s what I think, anyway . . .” Ze trailed off, looked down.

  At the end of the goopfield was a massive structure like a white tusk, curving gradually five hundred bodylengths into the air above them. A door was set in its base. Pip climbed out of the goop, shook zir robe clean, crossed to the door, and opened it.

  “Oh,” Fift said. “So then . . . is that—is that what you wanted to talk to me about? Thavé?”

  “Well, no. Or, yes. Or . . . no, not really,” Dobroc said. Ze pressed zir lips together.

  Fift was sitting on a couch peacefully talking about aliens with this person . . . this strange, kind staidkid, whose voice stroked its fingers down your spine. Fift was lying in bed, staring at the wall. Fift was following zir Mother into the reactants’ hall, an echoing space filled with dim, soft light from rows upon rows of knee-high fabricators, in tiers sloping upwards, ten thousand Vails and Staids crouching before them.

  While Shria was fighting in the streets of Wallacomp.

  Shria’s cohort would be broken up. Ve would be sent to the Pole after all . . . just as Fift had feared, on that long-ago day in the forest.

  In the reactants’ hall: a susurration of murmurs, an overwhelming arrhythmic pulse of pinging, all around, everywhere. When each reactant’s fabricator was done with its current cycle, it would emit a tiny bright sound, and the reactant would pull something out of it: a shift, a bangle, a doll, a spoon, a smack-club, a singing fruit, an idyll-rattle, a flute, a songstick, a prism, a dove . . .

  After each ping, a reactant would lift out whatever their fabricator had made, would taste or cradle or stroke or play or put on or dangle or pet or inspect the fabricated product . . . and then would sit, face slack, eyes closed, yielding up their reaction to the feed.

  Then they would dump whatever it was in the compost-sluice, or put it back into the fabricator, or release it to fly into the rafters. And the fabricator would begin the next iteration.

  There was no point in viewing Shria! Ze couldn’t help vem. Ze couldn’t rescue vem.

  {We’re looking for an industrial reactant?} Fift asked Pip.

  Mother Pip cocked an eyebrow, then took Fift by the shoulder, stopping zir. {Am I to take this stunningly clever deduction of the obvious as an expression of dismay? Are you now, at last, considering the social status of our cohort? And if so, do you think you could handle it yourself this time, following my instructions?}

  Fift pulled away. {Okay, okay.} ze sent.

  “For one thing,” Dobroc said, “I wanted to meet you.” Ze looked at the hem of Fift’s robe. There was room on the couch between them for one body. The labyrinth of Dobroc’s skin drew the eye; patternless, it seemed to hover on the verge of pattern, so that Fift’s eye, seeking pattern, traced zir cheek, jaw, throat.

  “Okay,” Fift said, “. . . and the other thing?”

  “I wanted to show you something,” Dobroc said. “Something I made.”

  Climbing up through the reactants’ hall, Fift and Pip had fifty thousand viewers; that was uncomfortably many, but it made sense, after Hrotrun. They must be convinced that the second confrontation was beginning.

  “You have to understand,” Dobroc said, “that some people think you’re part of the show. Of the Cirque’s show, the Unraveling. You, um . . .” Ze met Fift’s eyes. “You’re not working for the Cirque . . . on purpose . . . are you?”

  “No!”

  Dobroc nodded and looked down. “I didn’t think so. But it’s not . . . you wouldn’t necessarily know, right? Even the Cirque might not know, if it’s a stochastic piece. And the algorithmic agents—they’re predicting that you and Shria are key theatrical elements. They think that you’re part of the spectacle.”

  “What, really? You mean—more than other Ticket Holders? Us specifically?”

  Dobroc nodded again. Zir gaze met Fift’s, then retreated: fish skirting the shadows of a shallow pool. “Thavé and Panaximandra have already crystallized as key dramatic elements, and of course, First Childhood is always”—ze smirked—“terribly evocative for adults. And it’s not like there are many sixteen-year-old Ticket Holders, period. Sixteen-year-old Ticket Holders who met Thavé, and then Panaximandra, within the space of an afternoon?” Ze crooked an eyebrow. “One latterborn, the other an only child, from differently struggling cohorts? Very high thematic density.”

  “Uh,” Fift said. “I take it emergent dramaturgy is another hobby of yours?”

  Dobroc looked down at zir hands. One held the other in zir lap, like bodies sleeping curled together. Ze swallowed. “I just want to . . . do something. Make some kind of difference. Give the world a push.” Ze shrugged. “In a way, it’s the same hobby. Thavé-watching is all about emergent dramaturgy! It’s what Thavé does, when you burrow into the core of it. How ze influences the destiny of worlds.”

  This wasn’t what Fift had expected. No prissy, judgmental, overly formal Long Conversation specialist; no gushy, superficial, sentimental instant-fame infatuation. Dobroc had . . . weird ambitions. Fift shifted closer to zir on the couch, until the loose and hanging fabrics of their shifts were touching, white on white. Dobroc’s skin was ridges and swirls and furrows, but it smoothed to blankness at the wrists and knuckles, where zir hand bent. Fift wondered again what it would feel like to touch zir. “Dobroc,” ze said. “That was all by accident. We didn’t do anything . . . we just accidentally ran into them. There’s no meaning to it.”

  “Sure. Those coincidences are just a framework . . . on which something could be built. But it’s not really about that. It’s about . . . who you are, Fift. I don’t know if I can explain it without it sounding foolish.” Ze took a deep breath.

  “I’m not anyone special, Dobroc.”

  “Not for you, you’re not. And not objectively, either, not the way the world measures. But I’ve . . . I’m so surrounded by falseness, by rigidity . . . Everything is recitation, doing what you’re told. We sit on wooden floors, pass spoons, and recite the words of the great Sages, who once upon a time were free and truly alive, and it’s, it’s a grotesque parody. I’ve done what I was told for so long . . .”

  “So have I, Dobroc! I always do what I’m told. I’m no rebel—”

  “No great rebel, maybe. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been studying you so closely that I see it. Maybe it would be there in anyone if you looked closely enough. But there’s this great stubborn restlessness in you, just underneath the surface . . .”

  “Honestly, Dobroc, I think you’re talking about yourself more than me.”

  “Well,” Dobroc said, “maybe I should just show you.” Ze pulled a fabric display from zir shift and unrolled it. “I’d send it to you, but I’m . . . I was planning on releasing it anonymously. I mean, if you’re okay with that. And it’s better for you if it’s not in your chatlogs. First, okay, first look at this.”

  Fift took the display. Their hands didn’t touch.

  It was a cacophony of color and motion, stretched, darting, rippling across the stiff fabric. It seemed deeper than it should be, somehow, drawing the gaze in, a tangled skein of dimensions which slowed and skewed the world.


  “Okay,” Dobroc said. “That ought to puzzle your agents for a bit.”

  “What—seriously?” Fift caught zir breath. {Are you watching me?} ze asked zir agents.

  {Context is overdetermined.} zir context advisory agent responded. {Recursive exegesis offers no purchase for self-summation. All stances are provisional. Please allow for reassociation. Underway.}

  {This could be the best thing ever, or the worst thing, or somewhere in between.} the social nuance agent said. {Please act accordingly.}

  “You’re right, they’re useless again,” Fift said. “Kumru! How did you do that?”

  “It’s something that’s been going around,” Dobroc said. “You have to know where to look for these things. Your agents will be fine in a bit, but meanwhile, they won’t listen in. Okay . . . here’s my piece.” Ze cleared zir throat and balled both hands in the folds of zir shift. “I hope that you like . . . that is . . . well, anyway.”

  The display shifted:

  Four-year-old Fift on the surface of Foo, tubby and bald in a stiff new shift: “But what about Father Miskisk? Father Miskisk is sad—”

  A flicker of unease on Squell’s faces, of anger on Smistria’s, before they composed themselves for the feed.

  Grobbard’s gentle hand on Fift’s shoulder. “They’ll catch up, Fift. Clear your mind, please, and get ready.”

  Fift taking Squell’s hands, maneuvering to keep zir bodies as far away from each other as possible, as they set out through the gardens and gazebos. One body looking down at zir feet; the other, openmouthed, out across the immensity of Fullbelly. Of its own accord, the view narrowed, centering on Fift’s third face: zir tiny jaw set with determination, zir eyes staring ahead, imagining the First Gate of Logic.

  The view on the display was inviolate, flat; it didn’t respond at all to Fift’s attention, offered no lookup, no drilldown, no hook-ins, no interconnections; ze couldn’t pan, or change the angle, or even pause the action; it just went on, telling its own tale, image and sound alone—as if the feed were down again. And in a way it was: Dobroc had severed these sounds, these images, from the feed, placed them in their own isolated little universe.

  It made sense as a precaution: if Fift couldn’t interact with it, then there would be no way for anyone to tell that ze had seen it.

  Shria at four, a romping blur of color in some bouncegarden far from Foo; hurtling down, whooshing up from the bulge of a bounce-fungus, squealing with glee, vir eyes closed, vir little arms and legs flung out—

  The image softened into blank gray and words appeared in the display in an archaic static script, fixed letters hovering as if painted on the air:

  Fift and Shria

  “Wow,” Fift said. “That’s—”

  Dobroc’s nervous expression flickered toward delight. But Fift couldn’t pause, and the images continued, so ze had to look back at the display—

  Shria at nine, lavender skin and fiery red hair, orange eyebrows that curled like flames. Bony bare knees and elbows poking between the red-and-blue strips of vir ill-fitting suit. Tiny droplets of water, the mist of the surface morning, sparkling in vir hair.

  Ve crouched down, reaching for a mossy stick.

  Cacophony—almost too fast to take in—the turmoil of the riot, anonybodies roaring. Shria, sixteen, wrenching away from the red and blue hands grabbing vir arms, vir hair—

  Silence, deafeningly sudden. Moss dripping on the surface, light filtering through the mist.

  Fift’s voice, incongruous, speaking over the image of the empty forest: “Do you think there even is a show? Or is it like . . . a meta thing? Where looking for the show is the show?”

  Shria’s voice in answer in the background, while in the forest an unpurposed redbird alighted, fluttering, on a branch. “I think it’s going to be real. I think it’s going to be big.”

  Boots crunching in deep snow, sinking to mid-calf.

  Thavé’s face filled the screen, head tipped to one side, considering. Shria’s voice: “What do you think of us? Of all of us?”

  Thavé paused. “What a good question.”

  Fift and Shria on the other side of Thavé’s table in the pavilion. They looked bright, eager, heart-stoppingly young.

  Innocents, to whom nothing had ever happened.

  “You’ve been mostly at peace,” Thavé said, “for a long time.”

  The riot: roaring, leaping, chaos. An elbow cracked against Fift’s temple, and ze crumpled down—

  “Your economy has decent turnover. Economic class is bound to birth order—”

  The surface forest. Shria’s eyes, red from crying.

  Swirls of snow, dancing up, sliding across the crust as the boots broke through it . . .

  “So you’re latterborn again.” Umlish smirked. “We should congratulate you.” Ze took a step closer, and Shria, bony and cold and nine years old, quivered. “Your parents should have made sure you had the appropriate agents for a trip to the surface. They do seem very distracted. I wonder if they might still be a bit overburdened?”

  Panaximandra on vir pillar, in vir glimmering, glinting exoskeleton: “Who were those parents? Those lucky people, who were given the right to create life? Note that I say given! They did not take the right, as their due, as their inheritance, as their destiny as human beings—”

  Shria stood up, dropping a mossy stick. Vir jaw clamped down hard, suppressing vir quivering. Ve looked across the clearing at Perjes and Tomlest, and vir eyes blazed, daring them to laugh.

  “. . . hardly egalitarian,” Thavé said, “but at least it’s moderately anti-accumulative . . .”

  Umlish’s eyes were slightly narrow-set, and they burned with scorn. “Shria doesn’t want any Younger Siblings. Ve was glad to get rid of that little baby—”

  Shria, nine years old, shaded by purple songfronds, electric with pride, as vir parents placed vir baby sibling in vir arms. The tiny mottled red face, eyes scrunched closed, the tiny head resting in the crook of Shria’s elbow—

  “—weren’t you, Shria?”

  “. . . you’ve been pretty remarkable,” Thavé said, poking at zir food, “at finding new ways to make it more complicated to have a baby, without much help from me . . .”

  Roaring anonybodies. Panaximandra, gleaming: “Every one of you can be a Hero. Every one of you can be a Mother!”

  “FREEDOM! VALOR! CONQUEST! BABIES!”

  Panning up from the boots: a mass of figures trudging through deep snow, bundled in thick clothing . . .

  “We might be allowed to see,” Hrotrun snapped, teeth gritted in vir too-symmetrical face, “a child . . .” Vir voice broke. “Ooh, look, a child! Passing by . . .”

  “But with a culture like yours,” Thavé said, staring at zir eating tines, “the more mature it gets, the greater the anxiety . . .”

  Panaximandra slitted vir eyes in contempt. “You insects rearranged the furniture of the hive you live in, and rearranged it again.”

  Fift’s eyes widened. “You hit me . . . because I was a Staid.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Hrotrun snapped. “We don’t hit Staids!”

  An elbow cracked against Fift’s temple, and ze crumpled down—

  Fift shuddered involuntarily. Ze looked so pathetic, a little scrap of beige and white in that blue-and-red tumult, flopping down like a tossed-away rag . . .

  The view panned up from the boots, revealing bundled figures, trudging through the snow, and behind them: glittering airships, naked sky, a cold blue surface dawn. It was personal footage, a recording through the eyes of some single individual. Some orphan deportee’s furtive, smuggled footage of the Pole?

  Hrotrun. “We just clown for your amusement and service you sexually—”

  Panaximandra. “As if life was a beast you could master—”

  “One day,” Thavé said, zir voice heavy, “there’s a flaw I haven’t foreseen . . .”

  “They have supplanted you in your own minds, making you grateful for your slavery!” Panaximand
ra roared, tears streaming down vir face. “You owe them nothing! Give me a million barbarians with eighty-year lifespans—”

  Thavé stared out across the pavilion. “Something virulent . . .”

  A silver-armored hand, clutching a scrap of velvet. “Armed with clubs—”

  “. . . that spreads through the culture and takes it down . . .”

  “—and I could take this world and set it on fire!”

  The riot, the roar, and Fift curled up on the ground—

  —Vvonda’s voice, over the image: “You shouldn’t be there, staidkid. You shouldn’t have followed vem in.”

  —forehead against the byway, arms covering zir head, Shria gone.

  “You’re disgusting!” Umlish snarled.

  Vvonda’s icy eyes in vir flushed purple face. “You should get the airless all-sucking void out.”

  Elbow cracking into Fift’s temple, zir body crumpling down—

  “It’s no place for you.”

  But ze had been there. In the middle of that. Ze hadn’t run.

  —flowing down, chest to zir knees, knees back up, back onto zir feet—

  “Don’t spit all your poison today, Umlish,” Shria said. “You might run out, and then what are you going to do tomorrow?”

  “Vvonda,” Fift said, stepping out from beneath a purple crenelated privacy cone. There was a tiny, dark bruise on the side of zir head where the elbow had struck zir. Vvonda, towering and elegant, already about to push vir way through the partygoers, turned back, flinging up an exasperated hand.

  In the roiling, struggling sea of rioters, one of the Vails holding one of Shria’s arms yanked back an anonymized blue leg to kick vem. Fift’s leg flowed out, lightly, gently placing zir foot against the foot of the Vail. The Vail paused. Shria roared.

  “Your job,” Pip said, “is to think, to plan, and to order. Your job is to be the still center, the basis, the core.”