The Future Is Blue

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Third Terrace: The Envious

  Sixty-six days later, Pietta steps out of her room for the first time. No one has come for her. She has heard no footsteps in the long hall beyond her door. But a kind of rootless fear like thin pale mold forked slowly through her limbs and she could not bring herself to move.

  She measures out the time in bears and glass. Each morning, Pietta places a shard of colored glass on her windowsill. They split the candlelight into harlequin grapeshot, firing volleys of scarlet, cobalt, emerald toward the mountain outside. She has developed a kind of semaphore with the smoke-eaters on those icy slopes; at least, when she moves her arms, they move theirs. But perhaps Pietta is the only one who imagines an alphabet.

  Each evening, she watches the bears come in across the mud plain and snuggle against the city for warmth. She does not know where they come in from, only that they do, hundreds of them, and that they are not very like the bears she remembers, though the act of remembering now is like reading a Greek manuscript—slow, laborious, full of transcription errors, clarity coming late and seldom. It is possible bears have always looked like the beasts who rub their enormous flanks against the pockmarked burgundy stone of the city walls as the red stars hiss up in the dusk. But Pietta does not think bears ever had such long stone-silver fur, or that they wore that fur in braids, or that they had a circlet of so many eyes round their heads, or that they had tusks quite so inlaid with gold.

  So passes sixty-six days. Glass. Arms. Smoke. Bears.

  She gathers together her only belongings and secrets them in the slits and knots of her clothes. Beyond the door of the room belonging to Pietta she finds a hall that splits like a vein into a snarl of staircases. Will she be able to find her way back? The fearful mold begins to grow again, but she stifles it. Burns it out. Descends a black iron spiral stair down, down, to another hall, under an arch into which some skilled hand has carved PENURIES, under which some rather less skilled hand has painted FOR A GOOD TIME FIND BEATRICE. Pietta looks back in the direction she has come. The other side of the stone arch reads TAEDIUM. She will try to remember that she lives in Taedium. Pietta passes beneath Contempt us Mundi and Beatrice’s come-hither into a courtyard under the open sky.

  The courtyard thrums with people and forbidding candles standing as tall and thick as fir trees, barked in the globs and drips and wind-spatters of their yellow wax. There is a stone bowl near the yawning edge of the terrace, filled with burnt knobs of ancient wood and volcanic rock. People like her move between the tallow monoliths and the stone bowl, wrapped tight in complex charcoal-blue rags and falcon-hoods, but not like her, for they chatter together as though they belong here, as though the harness of here is no surprise to them. They huddle around beaten copper rain barrels, looking up anxiously at the spinning scarlet stars. They pass objects furtively from one hand to the next. They stare out at the constant vastness of the mountain pricked with lantern light before plunging their hands into the bowl and devouring the charred and ashen joints of wood.

  Pietta is noticed. A middle-aged man with an unusual nose and arthritic hands pulls her urgently behind one of the cathedral-column candles. She can see blue eyes beneath the mesh of his blinders.

  “What did you bring?” he whispers.

  Pietta remembers the feeling of a husband she did not want. She answers: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Because she doesn’t. She has nothing.

  The man sighs and tries again, more kindly, holding her less tightly. “In your bindle. What did you carry with you to Nowhere? Don’t be afraid. It’s important, my dear, that’s all. It is everything.”

  Fourth Terrace: The Gluttonous

  Detective Belacqua navigated the night-crowded halls of the Temeritatis Precinct with ease. The locals parted into ragged blue waves to let him pass. Some held their hands to their mouths, some fell to their knees—but Belacqua knew the difference between awe and reflex. They genuflected because they thought they should. They thought it might help.

  The crowd around the automat is thin. Humans didn’t eat at the finer establishments. They had no currency. The wonderful glass wall of cool plates and steaming bowls was for the comfort of the strigils, a small luxury in this rather undistinguished outpost. Behind the bank of windows set into two feet of dark abbey stone, Belacqua saw a woman with the head of an osprey move with mindful grace, clearing the old dishes, bringing in the new. Her black and white feathers shone in the kitchen lights.

  “What have you got in the way of savory, tonight, Giacama? I’m in the mood for salt.”

  Giacama pushed aside the little window on an empty compartment of the automat. Her mild seabird eyes floated in the glass as though they were the night special.

  “Good evening, Detective. I’ve got a lovely rind of cheese from the gluttons’ farms. It’s all yours.”

  “Detective Inspector soon,” Belacqua said with a flush of pride. He took his crescent of cheese from the window. Only then did he see the young girl staring up at him through the blinders of her falcon-hood, rubbing anxiously at the backs of her hands.

  “Are you a demon?” she whispered. “Are you an angel?”

  “Naw,” Belacqua answered around a mouthful of white cheese. “I work for a living.”

  The child might have said more, but a commotion disturbed the evening throngs. A strapping man with a raven’s grand face strode toward Detective Belacqua, out of breath, trembling in his black finery. Sergeant Tomek—but in all the aeons of known existence Belacqua had only known his sergeant to be a calm and rather cold sort.

  Sergeant Tomek clasped his hand roughly, his raven’s face handsome and dark and puffed with excitement or terror. His black ruff bristled.

  “Sir, I hate to trouble you at this hour and I know you hate to be interrupted when you’re…working…but something terrible’s happened. Something dreadful. You must come.”

  Detective Belacqua tightened his long grey scarf and smoothed back his own rumpled feathers.

  “Calm down, Tomek. You’ll spook the poor creatures. Just present the facts of the case and we’ll see to it with a quickness. What can possibly have you in such a state?”

  Sergeant Tomek stared at the wine-dark flagstone floor. He swallowed several times before whispering wretchedly:

  “A body, Sir.”

  “Well, that’s hardly cause for all this upset, Sergeant. We’re nothing but bodies round here. Bodies, bodies everywhere, and hardly one can think. Go home and get some sleep, man, we’ll see to it in the morning.”

  The raven-headed sergeant sighed and tried again, more miserably and more quietly than before.

  “A dead body, Sir. A corpse.”

  Detective Belacqua blinked. “Don’t be stupid, Tomek.”

  “Sir. I know how it sounds.” Tomek glanced around at the passing folk, but most gave the policemen a wide berth. “But there is a dead woman lying face down with her throat cut and there’s blood everywhere and things on her back and she is very, very dead.”

  Detective Belacqua grimaced with embarrassment. “Sergeant Tomek,” he hissed, “they can’t die. It’s not possible. They steal, they cheat, they vandalize, they fornicate, they lie, they curse God, but they do not kill and they do not die. That’s not how it works. That’s the whole point.”

  But the raven would only say: “Come see.”

  Detective Belacqua thought of his novel and his dry red wine waiting safe and warm for him in the watchtower. They called to him. But he knew what duty was, even if he did not know how to begin his opus. “Where is she?”

  Sergeant Tomek trilled unhappily. He ran his hand along the black blade of his beak.

  “Outside.”

  Fifth Terrace: The Covetous

  Pietta follows the man with the unusual nose. They have exchanged names. His is Savonarola. He spits the syllables of himself as though he hates their taste. He leads her through a door marked CONTEMPTUS MUNDI.

  “My home,” he sighs, “such as it is.”

 
“I live in Taedium,” Pietta answers, and it is such a relief that she has remembered it, that the information was there when she reached for it, solid, heavy, cold to the touch. She almost stumbles with the sweetness of it. Savonarola grunts in sympathy.

  “Too bad for you. You’ll find no fraternity among your neighbors, then. They keep to themselves in Taedium. They do not come to cloister, they do not trade, they do not attend the rainstorms. They don’t even take Christmas with the rest of us. But perhaps that’s to your taste. Taedium, Taedium, so close to Te Deum, you know. What passes for cleverness around here.”

  Pietta remembers the feeling of longing for something lost before she ever had it. “I have made friends with a man on the mountain. He moves his arms. I move mine. We are up to the letter G. But there is no G in my name, so he cannot know me. I am…I am lonely. I thought someone would come for me.”

  “No one on the mountain is your friend, girl,” snaps Savonarola, and they emerge into a wide piazza full of long tables with thick legs and glass lanterns the size of parish churches shining out into the mist of the night. Wind pulls at them like a beggar pleading. The tables are full of handkerchiefs unknotted, their contents laid out lovingly, more men and women in charcoal-blue rags closely guarding each little clutch of junk.

  Savonarola introduces her to a small, dark woman with a beautiful, delicate mouth. The woman is called Awo. She has an extraneous thumb on her left hand, small and withered and purpled. Pietta touches the objects on Awo’s handkerchief, running her hands over them gently. They awake feelings in her that do not belong to her: a drinking cup, a set of sewing needles, a red brick, a pot of white paint, several ballpoint pens, and a length of faded paisley fabric. When Pietta touches the sewing needles, she remembers the feeling of embroidering her daughter’s wedding dress. But Pietta had only sons, and they are babies yet.

  “You have lovely things,” Pietta whispers.

  “Oh, they aren’t mine,” Awo says. The wind off of the mountain dampens all their voices. “I long ago traded away the objects I brought with me into this place. And traded what I got in return, and traded that again, and so on and so forth and again and again. Everything in the world, it turns out, is escapable except economy. Those objects which were once so dear to me I can no longer even name. Did I come with a cup? A belt? A signet ring? I cannot say. Now, what will you give me for my fabric? Savonarola says you have scissors.”

  Pietta touches her ribs, where she hid the shears. She looks away, into the crystal doors of a massive lantern and the flames within. “But what are these things? What is this place? Why do I have this pair of scissors in this city at this moment?”

  Savonarola and Awo glance at one another.

  “They are your last belongings,” Savonarola says. “The things you lingered over on your last day.”

  Rain comes to the city. It falls from every dark cloud and splashes against the lanterns, the tables, the buyers and the sellers. Everyone runs for their rain barrels, dragging them into the piazza, the copper bottoms scraping the stone. The rain that falls is not water but wine, red and strong.

  Pietta remembers the feeling of dying alone.

  Sixth Terrace: The Wrathful

  Detective Belacqua stood over the woman’s body. He let a long, low whistle out of his beak and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Sergeant Tomek opened his black jaws; a ball of blue flame floated on his tongue. Belacqua lit his wrinkled, broken stump of tobacco and breathed deep.

  “Isn’t there someone else we can hand this off to? Someone higher up. Someone…better?”

  Tomek stared down at the corpse as it lay face down on the slick blue-black cobblestones of the road that connects the city and the mountain. The blue of the gas lamps made her congealing blood look like cold ink.

  “You had the watch, Detective Inspector,” he said, emphasizing his soon-to-come promotion. But they both knew this woman, the very fact of her, made all ranks and systems irrelevant.

  Belacqua scratched the longer feathers at the nape of his neck. The clouds boiled and swam above them, raveling, unraveling, spooling grey into grey. He could not remember the last time he’d set foot outside the city. Probably sometime around the invention of music. The air smelled of crackling pre-lightning ozone and, bizarrely, nutmeg fruits, when they are wet and new and look like nothing so much as black, bleeding hearts.

  “Is she going to…rot, do you think?” Sergeant Tomek mused.

  “Well, I don’t bloody well know, do I?” the man with the heron’s head snapped back. Detective Belacqua had closed thousands of cases in his infinite career. The Nowhere locals got up to all manner of nonsense and he didn’t blame them in the least. On the contrary, he felt deeply for the poor blasted things, and when it fell to him to hand out punishments, he was as lenient as the rules allowed. He was a creature of rules, was Belacqua. But the vast majority of his experience lay in vandalism, petty theft, minor assault, and public drunkenness. Every so often something spicier came his way: attempted desertion, adultery, assaults upon the person of a strigil. But never this. Of course never this. This was against the rules. The first rule. The foundational rule. So foundational that until tonight he had not even thought to call it a rule at all.

  Detective Belacqua knelt to examine the body. He suspected that was the sort of thing to do. Just pretend it was a bit of burglary. Nothing out of the ordinary. Scene of the crime and all that. Good. First step. Go on, then.

  “Right. Erm. The deceased? Should we say deceased? Are you writing this down, Tomek? For God’s sake. The, em, re-deceased is female, approximately twenty-odd-something years of age. Is that right? It’s so hard to tell with people. I don’t mean to be insensitive, of course—”

  “Oh, certainly not, sir.”

  “It’s just that they all look a little alike, don’t they, Sergeant?”

  Tomek looked distinctly uncomfortable. His dark ruff bristled. “About forty, I should say, Detective Inspector.”

  “Ah, yes, thank you. Forty years of age, brunette, olive complected, quite tall, nearly six foot as I reckon it. Her hood seems to have gone missing and her clothes are…well, there’s not much left of them, is there? Just write ‘in disarray.’ Spare her some dignity.” Now that he’d begun, Belacqua found he could hardly stop. It came so naturally, like a song. “Cause of death appears to be a lateral cut across the throat and exsanguination, though where she got all that blood I can’t begin to think. Bruises, well, everywhere, really. But particularly bad on her belly and the backs of her thighs. And there’s the…markings. Do you think that happened before or, well, I mean to say, after, Tomek?”

  The raven-sergeant’s black eyes flickered helplessly between the corpse and the detective. “Sir,” he swallowed finally, “how can we possibly tell?”

  Belacqua remembered the book he’d devoured so greedily in that sad little vandal’s cell, the book without a cover and yellow-stained pages, a book in which many people had died and gotten their dead selves puzzled over.

  “I’ve an idea about that, Sergeant,” he said finally. “Write down that she’s got patience carved into her back in Greek—not too neatly, either, it looks like someone went at her with a pair of scissors—then get the boys to carry her up to my office before anyone else decides to have a look out their window and starts ringing up a panic. Carefully! Don’t…don’t damage her any more than she already is.” Belacqua gazed up at the great mountain that faced his city, into the wind and the lantern lights and the constant oncoming night. “Poor lamb,” he sighed, and when the patrolmen came to lift her up, he pressed his feathered cheek against hers for a moment, his belly full of something he very well thought might be grief.

  Seventh Terrace: The Excommunicate

  Savonarola, Awo, and Pietta sit around a brimming rain barrel. The storm has passed. The sky is, for once, almost clear, barnacled with fiery stars. They drink with their hands, cupping fingers and dipping into the silky red wine, slurping without shame. The dead know how t
o savor as the living never can. The wine is heavy but dry. Much debate has filled the halls of Nowhere over the centuries—is it a Beaujolais? Montrachet? Plain Chianti? Savonarola is firmly in the Montrachet camp. Awo thinks it is most certainly an Algerian Carignan. Pietta thinks it is soft, and sour, and kind.

  “Memory is a bad houseguest in this place,” Savonarola says softly. Red raindrops streak his face like a statue of a saint weeping blood. “For you, the worst of it will come in twenty years or so. Dying is the blow, memory is the bruise. It takes time to develop, to reach a full and purple lividity. Around eighty years in Nowhere, give or take. Then the pain will take you and it will not give you back again for autumns upon winters. You will know everything you were, and everything you lost. But the bruise of having lived will fade, too, and your time in Nowhere will dwarf your time in the world such that all life will seem to be a letter you wrote as a child, addressed to a stranger, and never delivered.”

  Awo sucks the wine from her brown, slender fingers. “Awo Alive feels to me like a character in a film I saw when I was young and loved. Awo and her husband Kofi who wore glasses and her three daughters and seven grandchildren and her degree in electrical engineering and the day she saw Accra for the first time, Accra and the sea. I am fond of all of them, but I see them now from very far away. If I remember anything, if I tilt my head or say a word as she would have done, it is like quoting from that film, not like being Awo.”

  “I went to the noose long before such things as moving pictures could be imagined,” Savonarola admits.

  Pietta thinks for a long while, watching herself in the reflection of the wine. “And what of the mountain? What of the men and women there? Very well, I am dead. Where is Paradise? Where is Hell? Where is the fire or the clouds? Is this Purgatory?”

  Awo touches Pietta’s cheek. “Me broni ba, that mountain out there is Purgatory. Someday, maybe, we’ll go there and start our long hitchhike of the soul up, up, up into the sea of glass and the singing and the rings of eyes and the eternal surrealist discotheque of the saved. Nowhere is for us sad sacks who died too quick to repent, or naughties like Savonarola, who was so stuck up himself that he got excommunicated. And here we sit, with nothing to do but drink the rain, for three hundred times our living years.”