The Unraveling

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Fift asked, and Vvonda’s eyes hardened dangerously.

  Fift had been there. The world had unraveled around zir, and ze had endured.

  “This plenitude,” Panaximandra said, “has made you craven! What have you taken as yours? Be unsatisfied, be thirsty!”

  “This revolution, this unraveling,” Fift said. “You like it. It’s made for you.”

  The Cirque’s voice, thundering among the habitations: “Have you wondered if this is the world for you?”

  “Midwives and feedgardeners and adjudicators may hold things together,” Pom Politigus said, as Vvonda frowned, considering, reining in vir first, incredulous, angry reaction. “But to whom do we look to stir things up?”

  “You need to start loosening the stranglehold of consensus,” Thavé said.

  The world was still unraveling; the tumult was growing; the cage meant to hold Fift safely in place had come undone. But that moment—when the little rag of beige and white fell and flowed and emerged standing from that red-and-blue tumult—

  “I could burn this prison, and plant a garden!” Panaximandra roared.

  “I don’t intend to lose another world,” Thavé said.

  —it echoed in Fift’s mind.

  Fift and Shria locked in an embrace, amidst the riot, Fift’s forehead pressed into the crook of Shria’s neck as Shria began to sob—

  “Revolution,” Panaximandra said, “against this deadness—”

  Leaning back from zir mangareme fluffy, Fift was laughing, eyes closed, and Shria was looking at zir fondly, vir curling fiery eyebrows raised, sipping vir drink—

  Panaximandra: “—this confinement—”

  Streaks of white fog, rough silver bark glistening with dew; the redbird launched itself into the cold forest air. “Corpsemunching?” Fift said.

  Umlish had seemed so frightening then. Fift’s nine-year-old heart had been racing when ze said that.

  Shria giggled. Vir thin lavender face was smudged with bark and dirt. “That’s good! What’s that from? Yes, call me a ‘corpsemunching sisterloser,’ Umlish—”

  Panaximandra: “—means feeling alive—”

  “When a culture like yours falls,” Thavé said, “it falls hard. You need to start loosening—”

  Shria, sixteen, slowed to a stop an arm’s length from the crowd of anonybodies, and looked, uneasily, back at Fift—

  “—the stranglehold—”

  —and Fift came forward—

  “—of consensus.”

  “It is time,” Pip said, “to be what you are, Fift.”

  —and took vir hand.

  Four-year-old Shria, bouncing up, squealing with glee—

  “They have mangareme fluffies,” Shria said, and grinned, and took Fift’s hand. “Come on.”

  The display went blank.

  16

  Fift blinked. “That’s . . . that’s amazing.”

  “It’s just a clip-opera, it’s nothing that—” Dobroc said, then stopped as Fift took zir hand.

  It felt as rough and smooth and callused and soft and leathery and cool and warm as ze had imagined.

  After a moment, Fift exhaled.

  In the clasp of their hands, there was something of the still center—an expectant but unhurried calm. You could let go, in that calm; you could arrive. “To find, in the turbulent escalating gyre which tears all forms apart, the stable point”—so begins the very first discourse of the first work of the first cycle, Brenem’s meditation, which Uriz chose to place there as the entrance gate to the Long Conversation.

  A hand closed on Fift’s shoulder and ze stumbled to a halt. It was Pip’s hand, in the reactants’ hall—ze’d lost track of where ze was.

  A Vail reactant hunched over vir fabricator. You could tell how tall ve was, vir body absurdly, disproportionately muscled. Fift was no expert on somatic design, but even ze could tell that this was a hack job by someone with neither taste nor talent; the chafed red eczema on vir arms and neck and the random patches of black hair scattered over vir face and chest and back looked like side effects of poor hormonal engineering.

  And vir face: the startling white orbs of eyes with orange irises and long lashes; the orange lips; the fleshy whorls of ear . . .

  Fift swallowed hard.

  They were the eyes and lips and ears that strange anonybody in the riot had sported on its smooth blue head.

  As if this Vail (Predoria Ithigast of name registry Soiled Butterlung 14, according to lookup—233 years old) had had the body configured that way on purpose. As if ve’d wanted to get caught.

  {This one}, Pip sent, {kicked you in the head. Just explain it clearly and simply. Do not get carried away with emotion or indecision. Make the facts publicly clear, and this Vail will have to apologize or be dishonored. That is all there is to it.}

  Fift didn’t remember Predoria kicking zir; but ze remembered vem kicking Shria in the ribs as ve crouched on the byway. Of the Vails who’d mobbed Shria, Predoria was the last one to leave. Fift was glad this Vail was on the list: ze wasn’t tempted to feel sorry for vem.

  Predoria looked up, blankly, from vir fabricator.

  “You kicked me in the head, in an anonybody, in the middle of a riot two days ago,” Fift said.

  Predoria smiled. “That I did,” ve said.

  Fift hadn’t expected that reaction.

  “So,” Dobroc said, “I thought maybe I would share it. With others. Release it. Anonymously. If that’s all right with you—”

  “Sure,” Fift said. “But—”

  “Oh no,” Dobroc said. Zir hand pulled, slightly, away from Fift’s; the little gap of air between their palms was like a wound.

  “What?”

  “You said ‘sure, but,’” Dobroc said.

  “I . . . what?” Fift wanted to reach for zir hand again, to clasp it tight, but ze didn’t dare.

  “Just now. First you said ‘sure.’ And I—I thought that meant ‘yes,’ so I just . . . released it. But then you said ‘but’! So maybe you didn’t want me to?” Ze let Fift’s hand go entirely, and ran both hands through zir hair, pushing it up from zir scalp. “I’m so sorry. I was just so excited that . . . I mean, I can try and suppress it now . . . ? Maybe if—”

  “No, no,” Fift said, feeling queasy. “It’s okay . . .” Ze held zir own hands in zir lap, one curled in the other like sleeping bodies.

  Predoria had few connections, according to lookup. No cohort—ve had never even had a trial cohort, despite vir age. Ve had collected a few votes of condemnation, for sloth and misplaced aggression, from the most generic rating agencies; but in general, ve had lived vir life at the periphery, beyond the notice of almost everyone. Ve had standing challenges out to over a hundred totally inappropriate Vails of various stations, none of whom, apparently, had ever bothered to reply. Ve’d served as a fight reactant at the mats vemself, for a few brief periods, but vir ratings there were too low. So ve had ended up here, specializing in smelling lotions: vir sense of smell, apparently, was well developed, and smell was the hardest sense to engineer.

  No bookies bothered offering individual bets on Predoria; ve was aggregated in a couple of broad collective indexes of unattached socially peripheral Vails, and another of marginally rated industrial reactants.

  The question wasn’t whether such people would collapse, but how many, and by when.

  Audience was surging: eighty thousand, then ninety thousand people watching Fift gape at Predoria in the reactants’ hall.

  “And . . . and you apologize?” Fift asked Predoria.

  “No,” Predoria said, grinning wolfishly. “No, it was fun.” Vir fabricator pinged. Ve looked down, took out a small vial of lotion, and smeared it onto the back of vir hand.

  “You must be so worried about vem,” Dobroc said.

  Fift started. For a moment ze thought Dobroc meant Predoria—worried about the confrontation—but of course ze meant Shria. “I—I can’t watch vem. What’s happenin
g? Have the Peaceables come?”

  Dobroc frowned. “You’re not watching?”

  Fift swallowed, feeling a chill. Dobroc would be disappointed in zir; ze’d want Fift to be the noble, heroic friend who’d faced down Umlish and Vvonda for Shria, not someone so cowardly ze couldn’t even watch. “I’m . . . I can’t . . . ve told me to . . . Dobroc, I’ve done everything wrong. It’s not like it is in your wonderful”—ze waved at the display lying on the couch—“uh, artwork; I mean, I shamed vem, or something. Vvonda told me not to interfere, and I was too stubborn—”

  “During the riot? No, you listened to Vvonda!” Dobroc said. “You found Shria, you went to vem, and then you sat like Mundarn at the feast—joyful and fearful, letting go, giving vem only ‘room to fall and a heartfriend watching’—it was perfect, Fift!”

  Fift had to blink at the strange insistent burn of tears behind zir eyes; that was just what ze’d wanted to do, and Dobroc had seen it. Fift felt a physical yearning to pull zir closer, to snuggle into zir embrace, to let zir beating heart slow down with Dobroc’s.

  But could ze trust zir? Was it really Fift that Dobroc saw, or an idealized shadow ze could cast as zir clip-opera hero: the staidchild who talked to Thavé, a new Mundarn for an Unraveling age?

  {Ask vem}, Pip sent, {if ve is collapsing.}

  “Are you . . . collapsing?” Fift asked Predoria.

  Predoria closed vir eyes and sniffed the lotion coating the back of vir hand in long, slow snuffles. Ve opened vir eyes. “What if I am?”

  “It wasn’t perfect,” Fift said to Dobroc. “Maybe it was all right during the riot, I don’t know . . . but afterwards, when we were waiting for the bat . . . I said something, did something wrong—‘the still center eluded me like the willow wind!’” There was something delicately delightful about using Long Conversational allusions with Dobroc—something Fift couldn’t do with Shria or zir Vail Fathers, obviously, and which Pip scorned, and Grobbard took altogether too seriously. In fact, ze’d never felt this lightness, this naturalness, speaking in the old Staid way before. But Dobroc made zir feel like the Conversation had flowed out beyond its halls and proctors and was dancing in the world. “And now, well, ve sent me—oh, I’ll just forward it to you!”

  {If so,} Pip sent, {ve should report to an Idyll, before ve pisses away the final shreds of vir tenuous hold on a social identity.}

  “If you are,” Fift said, “why don’t you get to an Idyll . . . before you piss away the final shreds of . . . your social identity?”

  “My social identity,” Predoria mused. “My social identity.”

  Dobroc, receiving Shria’s letter, closed zir eyes.

  {What is up with this Vail?} Fift sent Pip. {Ve doesn’t act like someone with hardly any pride left.}

  Pip sent Fift zir lines: {Your position here in the reactants’ hall. Your ability to exchange minimal politenesses with strangers. Your ability to travel around Fullbelly.} Pip’s face was impassive; ze was looking up at the long hallway, up the rows of reactants, through the echoing, pinging space, as if ze were a reactant zirself . . . an architectural or social reactant, perhaps, letting zir feelings about the room seep into the feed.

  Dobroc’s hand found zirs again. Its grooves and whorls pressed against zir skin; it rested quiet and unmoving, neither heavy nor light. Ze opened zir eyes. “I see,” ze said.

  Predoria’s eyes bored into Fift’s: those pale orange irises in those white globes. Ve didn’t look like someone on vir last dregs of self-confidence. Ve looked, rather, like ve had boundless reserves. For a moment, Fift wondered if this was a setup, something by the Cirque, part of the show.

  “And since this note,” Dobroc said, “you won’t even watch vem? Like the visualization designer in the blue robe.” It was a passage every ten-year-old staidchild knew by heart, and Fift was shaken by its aptness (for the visualization designer in the blue robe isolates zirself for fear of being seen watching) and by its implied prediction of tragedy.

  Dobroc shook zir head.

  “Your, your position here in the reactants’ hall,” Fift said, not turning away from Predoria’s eyes. “Your ability to exchange minimal politenesses with strangers. Your ability to travel around Fullbelly . . .”

  Audience in the reactants’ hall kept surging. It should have slowed down by now, as the first flush of viewers wandered away—who wanted to hear Fift’s dull threats against this absurdly cocky peripheral Vail? Three hundred thousand active viewers did, apparently. Three hundred thousand! And growing.

  {All that can be taken away.} Pip sent patiently. {You gloat publicly about striking defenseless Staid children; do you expect strangers on the byways to smile at you? Do you expect sluice operators to welcome you?}

  Fift wished all zir bodies were under privacy cones, or in the apartment—thank holy Kumru’s ovaries and testicles no one was watching zir with Dobroc.

  “All that . . . can be taken away,” Fift said.

  “It can?” Predoria said. Ve looked amused, and hungry. “Are you sure?”

  Vir fabricator was humming again.

  “Fift, listen,” Dobroc said. “Shria didn’t banish you from vir life forever. And ve didn’t expect . . . this.”

  To be fighting in public again, exposed to the eyes of the world, losing everything.

  Fift took a deep breath. Chalky, industrial dust; the acrid, almost-human smell of the muscle-engines; freshly laundered cloth . . . and, faintly, Dobroc: a little like fresh-cut wood, a little like the spice-gnats in the supper garden, the sap in the vines.

  “You gloat publicly about, about striking defenseless Staid children. Do you—” Fift cleared zir throat, staring into Predoria’s striking orange eyes. “Do you expect . . . strangers . . . on the byways . . . to smile at you?”

  Fift glanced up at Dobroc and found no reproach in zir soft brown-on-brown eyes; no pity; only earnest intensity. It was still almost too much to take. “Is it . . . over?” ze said, looking away. “The fighting? Is Shria . . . did the Peaceables arrive? They must have arrived by now—”

  “No,” Dobroc said. “Or, yes. Well—sort of.” Zir face was grim.

  “Sort of?”

  “Must they?” Predoria said, and—seeing Fift start, confused—smirked. “Smile at me?”

  “Just look at vem, Fift,” Dobroc said. Ze squeezed Fift’s hand. “Ve would want that. I know you feel helpless. But ‘amid a myriad, one true witness nudges the shape of things . . .’”

  {Sluice operators.} Pip sent.

  {What? Oh . . .} Fift looked back at Predoria. “Do you expect . . . sluice operators . . . to welcome you?” ze managed.

  “I suppose it depends on the sluice operator,” Predoria said musingly.

  Fift found Shria on the feed.

  There were more bodies now. Not just Shria and Vvonda and Stogma and Bluey, and Hrotrun and vir cohort; there were others, too. Vails in working clothes, formal clothes, fighting gear—twenty or thirty additional bodies among the frilly brick-red hillocks and gullies of the abandonage by the goopfield. Some struggling, pushing, striking; some standing to the side and yelling; some dumbfounded; one weeping, face upturned to the ceiling.

  And, five paces from Shria, there was a Peaceable who had fallen to zir knees, zir bopperstaff lying in a gully at zir side. There was blood in zir hair, dripping down from zir bowed forehead in thin drizzles in front of zir.

  “What’s—what’s—”

  Fift couldn’t understand what ze was seeing—the press of bodies looked like a dance, a circus trick, some incoherent ritual. A Peaceable was there—and the fighting off the mats continued. The Peaceable was—something was wrong with zir, ze was bloody, ze’d been struck—it was inescapable, obscene.

  Fift’s stomach gripped with nausea. Not Shria. Ve wouldn’t—

  A Peaceable shrugged aside in fighting, wounded, down—

  (Fift sagged back down onto the bed, gathered the silken sleep-wraps in zir hands. Zir scalp crawled with cold. Predoria’s narrow-set orang
e eyes drilled into zir.)

  Something new was broken here.

  Ze turned to look at Mother Pip, who was watching Predoria.

  Pip chewed zir lip and sent nothing.

  Three more cold fists of fear balled in Fift’s stomachs. Why wasn’t Pip responding? Surely it wasn’t possible that—that this marginal, outcast, bizarre, cohortless industrial reactant could supplant—

  Fift shifted towards Dobroc, their hands entwined, their forearms touching under white fabric. “What’s going on, Dobroc? Are they all unraveling? Even a person in the middle of a collapse wouldn’t strike a Peaceable, would they? And Predoria . . . why is ve so . . .”

  Predoria’s eyes changed, their challenging intensity drifting through amusement to boredom. Ve turned back to vir fabricator.

  That flicker of hesitation in Pip’s eyes. Fift wondered, would Pip’s arrogance finally fail? Maybe ze’d feel what Fift had felt . . . humiliated and supplanted . . .

  Fift wanted to feel triumph, vindication, at that thought. But ze didn’t: ze felt cold. Ze didn’t want the smothering blanket of zir Mother’s remorseless competence yanked away.

  Pip’s eyes hardened again.

  The Peaceable heaved zirself to zir feet, and for a moment the combatants faltered; they took a step back.

  Then Hrotrun shrieked and charged the Peaceable.

  Fift jerked rigid, squeezing Dobroc’s hand. Ze reached out from under the covers and felt the wall of zir room, the rough scar under zir fingers—

  {Tell vem}, Pip sent, {to enjoy vir megalomaniac fantasies while ve can. Tell vem ve can continue}

  Shria tackled Hrotrun three paces from the Peaceable, bringing vem down.

  {to live in a lonely bubble of denial of the truth, a smaller and smaller social world}

  Shria heaved up, straddling Hrotrun, punched vem full in the face, before two other Vails—in three bodies—hauled vem off.

  {until there is nothing left, not even the honor of a sanctioned suicide. If that’s what ve wants, ve is beneath both our pity and our scorn.}

  The Peaceable, ignoring the Vails, took an unsteady step towards zir bopperstaff.

  “What’s—going on?” Fift asked Dobroc.