The Future Is Blue

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Savonarola cracks his gnarled knuckles. “I admit, if some man in Florence had discovered a way to film the moon rising over the ripples of the Arno, or the building of Brunelleschi’s ridiculous dome, or even one of my own sermons—and I was very good, in my day—I would have set fire to the reels with all the rest, and I would have rejoiced. All in which the eye longs to revel is vanity, vanity. Only now do I long for such things, for something to see besides this stone, something to touch besides the dead, something to hear besides talk, talk, talk. What I would not give in this moment for one glimpse of Botticelli’s pornography, one vulgar passage of lecherous Boccaccio, one beautiful deck of gambling cards. God, I think, is irony.”

  “I will go mad,” Pietta whispers.

  “Yes,” agrees Awo.

  Pietta pleads: “But it will pass? It will pass and I will go to the mountain and take up a lantern and begin to climb. It will pass and we will go—we will go on, up, out. Progress.”

  Savonarola pinches his nose between his fingers and smiles softly. He has never been a man given to smiling. He had only done it ten or eleven times in total. But all in secret, Girolamo Savonarola possesses one of the loveliest and kindest smiles in all the long history of joy.

  “Do the math, my child. Three hundred times the span of a human life we must rattle the stones of Nowhere—since the death of Solomon and the invention of the alphabet, no one yet has gotten out.”

  Eighth Terrace: The Ambitious

  In the city called Nowhere, a man with the head of a heron sat comfortably in the topmost room of the policemen’s tower, watching a corpse rot.

  It was slow going.

  In all honesty, Detective Belacqua had no real idea what to expect. He only recalled from his penny paperback that human bodies did, indeed, under normal circumstances, rot, and they did it according to a set of rules, at a regular, repeatable, measurable rate, and from that you could reason out a lot of other things that mattered in a murder investigation. Since he had run face-first into a circumstance well beyond normal, Belacqua could not rely on the niceties of rigor mortis, even if he understood them, thus, he now devised a method to discover the rules of decomposition in Nowhere.

  Sergeant Tomek humbly asked to be allowed to stay after the patrolmen returned to their posts. The detective agreed, but sent him for coffee straightaway so that he could gather his thoughts without the raven-boy fretting all over him. Belacqua lifted the corpse easily—they never did weigh very much in Nowhere. He laid her out on three desks pushed together, and, though he felt rather silly about it afterward, folded her hands over her chest and arranged her long, dark hair tenderly, as though it mattered. And it did matter to him, very much, though he couldn’t think why. He dipped a rough cloth into the wash basin in the officers bathroom and cleaned the worst of the grime and blood out of her wounds, going back and forth from the basin with a steady rhythm that calmed his nerves and arranged the furniture of his mind in a contemplative configuration. After all this was done, he drew a pair of scissors from the watchman’s desk and plunged them quickly between the dead woman’s ribs on the left side of her torso. When he pulled them out again, red pearls seeped from the wound, falling to the flagstones with a terrible clatter.

  “Huh,” said Sergeant Tomek. He stood in the doorway, holding a cup of scalding coffee in each hand.

  And then, the policemen waited. Sergeant Tomek waited at the window, transfixed. Detective Belacqua waited at his typewriter, ready to record any changes in the body. To write the novel of this woman’s putrefaction, chapter by chapter.

  It was a quiet night in Nowhere.

  Days and nights knocked at the door and went away unanswered. The corpse remained the same for a very long time. Tomek gave up over and over, crying out that it was too sad to be borne, too miserable a thing to stare at, and Nowhere too timeless a place to ever tolerate decay. But he always returned, with coffee or tea or hot buttered toast, and the two strigils resumed their longest watch.

  By the next Sabbath, it had begun. On the first day, the edges of the woman’s wounds flushed the color of opium flowers. On the second day, her hair turned to snow. On the third day, the stench began, and the watch-room filled intolerably with the smell of frankincense, and then wild honey, and finally a deep and endless forest, loamy and ancient. On the fourth day, Belacqua held his ear to her mouth and heard the sound of gulls crying. On the fifth day, her wounds turned ultramarine and began to seep golden ink. On the sixth day, her sternum cracked and a white lizard with blue eyes crawled out of her, which Tomek caught and trapped in a wine bottle. And on the seventh day, a small tree bloomed and broke out of her mouth, which gave a single silver fruit. This, Belacqua harvested and placed in his coffee cup for further study. By the morning of the eighth day, all that remained of her were bones, hard and clear and faceted as if the skeleton had been hacked out of a single diamond.

  Belacqua typed and typed and typed. Finally, he spoke, on the day they saw the dead woman’s skull emerge like new land rising from the sea.

  “Sergeant Tomek, I believe we can safely say that she received the markings on her back pre-mortem. Time of death could not have been sooner than six days before you discovered her.”

  “And how do you know this, Detective Inspector?”

  “If she had been killed later, we would have found the poor girl already turning orange at the edges, or worse. I detected then no discoloration nor any scent nor a lizard nor the sound of seagulls. Unfortunately for us, it could have been any number of days greater than six and we would not know it unless we could somehow kill something else and record its progress. Also when I cut into her, the body produced a quantity of pearls, whereas no pearls were found beside her on the road to Nowhere. Additionally, the gore of my cut shows a distinctly different shade of ultramarine than the carving on her back. Someone wrote patience on her while she yet lived, Tomek, and listened to her anguish, and did not stop.”

  “It is dreadfully morbid,” the sergeant sighed. He laid a reverent hand on the delicate foot-bones of the body.

  “On the contrary, my boy, it is science, and we have done it! Nothing could be more exciting than discovering, as we have done, that a set of rules lay in place of all eternity without us suspecting them. I assure you these are not the stages of mortal decomposition.” Belacqua hurried on before Tomek could wonder how he knew anything about living corpses, and uncover his illicit pursuit of fiction. “This is new. It is ours. It is native to Nowhere. No one else in all the yawning pit of time has ever known what you and I know now. We are, finally, unique. And now we two unique fellows must proceed further on, farther in, and re-compose this woman. Her name, her history, her associates, her enemies. What happened to her a fortnight ago, and how?” The detective frowned. “Perhaps we ought to interrogate the lizard.”

  In its green glass bottle, the pale reptile hissed. It stuck out its blue tongue. The glass fogged with its breath. It said one word, and then steamed away like water.

  Virtue.

  Ninth Terrace: The Incurious

  Pietta has become a birdwatcher. She leaves Awo and Savonarola often to trail silently after the strigils as they move through the city. They are so unlike her. They wear clothes of many colors; they are always busy; they eat. They live in a different Nowhere than she does, one with automats and social clubs and places to be. She makes a study of them. This would be easier if she could bring herself to trade her colored glass or her belt or her scissors for one of Awo’s pens or the paper a tall man with very clean teeth wants to sell her, but she cannot. She does not know yet why they are precious, but she knows she doesn’t want to give them away, to let them become separate from her forever. She is not ready. So she must try to remember the birds she sees. Osprey. Oriole. Peregrine. Sparrow. Sandpiper. Ibis. Pelican. Starling. Raven. Heron. They are beautiful and they do not see her. To them, she is not Pietta. She is no one. She is blue, like the others, and blindered, like the others, and the only thing she can ever do to ca
tch their attention, to bring their eyes down onto her, is to sin, to commit a crime, to err. When the man with clean teeth tries to steal her glass, the birds come. They smell, absurdly, like expensive perfume, like the counter in a fashionable shop. Their feathers rustle when they move like pages turning. They have no irises. Their voices are very nearly human. A woman with the head of an owl cuts away the sleeve of the man’s robe. Now everyone will know he is bad. Pietta is fascinated. But she is afraid to do anything very bad herself.

  She meets Awo and Savonarola in a cloister fifteen years after they first drank wine together out of a barrel. It is a round room in the Largitio Quarter, with a high, domed ceiling, full of grand, tall tables set with empty bowls, safe from the wind and the slow, trudging lights on the mountain. Pietta longs to eat. She is never hungry, but she remembers the feeling of eating. Of tasting. A few dozen blue-ragged souls pool their objects on a table, picking and sorting. They are trying to assemble a chess set, though fights have broken out already over whether a pepper pot or a bone whistle or pocket Slovakian dictionary makes a better king. Nothing in Nowhere is important, so nothing is more important than the pepper pot and the whistle and the dictionary. Pietta watches them and imagines the players as birds. She hates chess. Savonarola agrees, though he plays anyway.

  “Chess allows the frivolous to pretend their toys have deep meaning. The only honest game is tag,” he grouses, while taking an exquisitely-chinned teenaged girl’s queen. Both the sleeves have been torn from her dress.

  “What are the strigils?” Pietta asks.

  Savonarola snorts. “Where I come from they’re dull blades you use to scrape the sweat and grime from your back in a bath-house. Not that I ever used a bath-house, a seething puddle of greased sin. Not that I haven’t scoured the breadth of Nowhere for a damned bath.”

  Awo has enough sewing needles to man her entire side, pawns and all. She sticks them upright in the soft wood of the table, two neat silver rows. “He can’t tell you. His theology was far too prim and tidy to contain bird-headed men in trenchcoats. I can’t tell you either. But if you suppose there are demons in one place and angels in the other, wouldn’t you also suppose something has to live here? Something has to be natural to Nowhere.”

  “They came when the first people arrived,” says the girl with the lovely chin. She moves her knight (a mechanical library stamp). “And Nowhere was only an empty plain without a city. They are meant to make this place somewhat less than a Hell, and to keep us from making a Heaven of it.”

  “How do you know that?” Savonarola snaps.

  The girl shrugs. “I asked one. When I got arrested for writing my name a thousand times over the entrance to Benevolentia Sector. She had a wren’s face. She said they were formed not from clay like us nor fire nor light but from the stuff of the void on the face of the world, and they had not the breath of life but the heat of life and the fluid of it, and they had a beginning but no end, an alpha and an ellipsis, and then she drank my wine and said I was pretty and the truth was she didn’t remember very much more about being born than I did and she read all that off a historical plaque on the upper levels, but strigils have to keep up appearances, and they wouldn’t be worth much if we thought they were stuck here just like us only they didn’t even know how it happened to them, only what they had to do, so if you ask me, talking to a strigil is not so useful as you’d expect, and they drink a lot. Checkmate.”

  That night, Pietta goes to be with Savonarola, because everything is the same and everything is nothing and what is the point of not doing anything now?

  Tenth Terrace: The Merciless

  Detective Belacqua stood in a hexagonal stone cell like all the other hexagonal stone cells. He looked out an arched window like all the other arched windows. He picked up and put down several meaningless objects: a brass key, a cracked, worn belt, a stone figure of a child seated in a chair, shards of colored glass. Sergeant Tomek assured him this was the dead woman’s room, but it told him nothing—how could it? She would have traded away anything authentically her own long ago. What remained was simply someone else’s rubbish. They had a name, and only that by process of elimination. Quite simply: who was missing? It had taken weeks of interrogation, more contact with the locals than Belacqua had ever suffered before, their fearful whispers, their purposeless glazed eyes, their way of drifting off mid-sentence as though they’d forgotten language. But they got their name, from the old furioso Savonarola, who actually wept when Tomek asked whether he had lost anyone of late.

  What was he supposed to do now? Everyone in the policemen’s union expected he could find some simple solution to it all. But the thing of it was, in his paperback, discovering the identity of the corpse opened other doors, doors within doors, obvious rivers of inquiry to dive into, personal histories to unearth, secrets, secrets everywhere. But her name gave him nothing but this room, and this room was a dry river and a closed door.

  “Who was she?” Sergeant Tomek demanded of Savonarola, who sat below a great candle, staring at his open hands. “Who did she love? Who did she hate? What was she in life? What did she do to pass the time?”

  But the old friar just closed his hands and opened them again. Closed. Open. “She loved me and Awo. She hated chess. She invented a semaphore alphabet with a man climbing the mountain, though I’m reasonably sure he’s not in on the scheme. If she remembered her life, she never told it to me. She’s so new, you know. Like a baby. When I look at her I see the plainness of white linen, being without vanity.”

  “Everyone has vanity,” said Sergeant Tomek. “Everyone here.”

  The old man looked up cannily at the strigils. Behind his blinders, his eyes shone. “Do you?”

  Detective Belacqua squatted down on his heels. He had a suspicion, and he knew how to work on friars. You had to awe them. Morning picked at the stitches of dark. If there had been any true songbirds in Nowhere, they would have sung. Belacqua fixed his black heron’s eyes on the hooded soul before him. “Do you remember the founding of Florence, Girolamo? That is where you lived, is it not?”

  “Don’t be absurd. Florence was old when I was young.”

  “Quite so. Yet I do remember the founding of Nowhere. Did you know that? Some of us do, some of us don’t, it’s a funny old thing, like whether or not someone like you remembers losing his baby teeth. A toss of the cognitive dice. But I remember. Lucky me! You see, the plain, the plain is the thing. The mud flat going on and on out there forever. The handful of trees—as few and as far between as living planets in empty space. The old riverbeds. Somewhere out beyond the road and the mountain there’s a black salt flat a light year across. The clouds. The stars. And people didn’t come right away. It wasn’t like you’d imagine—nothing, and then hordes all at once. People just died like dogs or fish or dinosaurs until, I don’t know, what would you say, Tomek? Around the time they started painting ibexes on cave walls?”

  The sergeant nodded his dark head.

  “Well, my friend, you can just imagine what a mess it all was in the beginning. No system. No rules. Some people could go up the mountain as quick as you like, and some couldn’t, and some could go down into the coal pits, and some couldn’t, and some just milled around like cows down here, and if they tried to go on up, they found themselves turned right back around facing the infinite floodplain with not an inch gained, but no one really had a bead on the whys and wherefores of the whole business. Cosmology just sort of happened to you, on you get. And the people down here in the mud, they just sat there or laid there or stood there for ages, really, proper ages, with nothing to do. That’s the worst thing for a person. To get crushed under the weight of endless useless days. Between you and me, I don’t think anyone really thought it through. I bet you’d rather have a fellow spearing you with a flaming trident every hour on the hour—at least then, something would happen. Am I right? I believe I am. So these poor souls fought and fucked and screamed for awhile, because those’re pretty good ways to stop yourself thi
nking about the existential chasm of time. But they didn’t bleed and they didn’t come and nobody answered them, so eventually, they started digging in the mud with whatever they’d brought in their bindles, which back then, was mostly stone tools. They pulled up the stones of the moral universe and put them one on top of the other, and I’ll tell you a secret, Giro. For awhile, I think this was a happier place than Heaven, when they were putting down those rocks. But happiness isn’t the point. Not here. If we’d let you keep on with it, your lot would have built city after city, an empire of the dead, and it would look just like the world out here, only filled with legions of the mediocre and the stalled out and the unrepentant and whatever you’re supposed to be. So we got called up, me and the sergeant here and all the other strigils. Hatched out of an egg of ice, I’m told, though that sort of insider talk is above my pay grade. And we came bearing order, Girolamo. We came with rules in our beaks. We built Nowhere together, strigils and humans, the dead and the divine.” Detective Belacqua put one hand on his chest and the other over Savonarola’s withered heart. “Me and you. A closed system. A city on the hill. And I think it’s beautiful. But you don’t, do you? You hate it, like you hated everything you ever clapped your eyes on. Except her. So here’s what I think, friend. I think you found a way to get her out. God only knows what. But you did it to her and now she’s gone and if you tell me what happened, no one will be angry—we quite literally cannot be angry. Who could blame you? It’s the nature of love, I should imagine.”