The Future Is Blue

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Gudrun thought about it. She could have gone with: When are we going back to Baltimore? Or: Did my father love me even a little? Or: How do you say ‘if I have to stay in here with you every day I’ll murder you flat’ in Hungarian? But she knew smartass was rarely the right play with Ruby, whose ass was forever the smartest in the room. So she shrugged, sipped her cup of Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea, and said flatly:

  “What year did Manuel Komnenos ascend to the throne of the Byzantine Empire? What was the Black Pope of Avignon’s name? How many people died in Napoleon’s Russian campaign? Show me how to do a Riemann sum. How do you structure a villanelle?”

  Not since Minnesota wired her the money for Pemberley had she seen Ruby’s face so full of blood and hate and shame and pride. Gudrun felt awful immediately. The tea went cold in her mouth.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” she whispered. “I don’t want to go to school, anyway.”

  17. Birthday Girl Surprise

  Published 1958, Virago Books, 118 pages

  There were two dates circled on Gudrun’s Surfin’ Cats! calendar. Both were in November, under a photo of a somewhat-alarmed-looking Persian balanced precariously on a red and yellow board with half a coconut plopped on her head as a festive hat.

  The first was Gudrun’s fortieth birthday. The other, one day later, simply said:

  Snow Day.

  16. Love Robots from Planet XX

  Published 1954, Harem House Press, 106 pages

  Gudrun began working her way through Jack Oskander’s pornography collection before their suitcases were unpacked. She grabbed one off the shelf above the kitchen sink and read with one hand while stacking mugs with the other.

  Chet Hardtree ran his strong hands over the smooth titanium curves of the Adoratron Mark 5. She was built like a luxury rocketship, sleek lines designed for low resistance and high-speed maneuvers. In the darkness of the Reproduction Chamber, the red globes of her tits glowed as her arousal drives whirred into hypermax.

  “Full thrusters engaged, Commander Hardtree,” the Adoratron purred.

  “What the fuck is that, Gudrun?” Ruby snapped. Her infamous velvet voice sliced up the air between them like claws.

  “Nothing, Mama!”

  But Ruby was on top of her before she could stash Chet Hardtree and the Adoratron Mark 5 in her back jeans pocket. Those gorgeous blue eyes that once made senators swoon seared into her daughter, accusing, such a strange, dark shade of blue, like a lantern-fish’s deep-sea heart. Tears wavered in her dark lashes.

  “Baby, baby,” Ruby whispered, sobs hitching somewhere behind her words, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. Don’t cry, I don’t want to shame you, preciousness. Mumsy’s not looking to scar you for life. It’s only…sweetie…you just can’t stack the blue mugs with the red ones! The warm colors and the cool colors have to stay separate, they have to, or else, or else…the balance will be upset…the balance of space and time and you and me and goodness and badness…baby, it’s so important, you have to learn…here, honey, see? They go left to right, like a spectrum. See?”

  “I’ll learn, Mama,” Gudrun said softly, as her mother carefully re-arranged the universe, keeping ever her hands quarantined, left for reds and oranges and golds and bisques and pinks, right for blues and greens and blacks and purples and greys. And in between the two tottering ceramic columns of being and non-being, Ruby stacked three tins of Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea, a bulwark against contamination.

  15. The Gardener Plants His Seed

  Published 1927, Adonis Editions, 114 pages

  Murray staked his claim in the Pemberley gardens ten years exactly after Ruby died. He wasn’t a local bird—the wild fowl running around the Ko’olau Range were skinny and skittish and rarely came up to Gudrun altitude. Murray was a splendid tall fat fellow with a proud bronze chest as iridescent as a peacock, a brilliant blue face and a throat as red as a Russian spy. Gudrun stumbled out in her long johns to check the rain barrels and the bean runners and whack a guava off her tree for breakfast and there he sat like a fancy lord between the eggplants and the red cabbage, mist dappling his chest like silver armor. He looked like he could hardly move under the weight of his finery.

  The moment Murray saw Gudrun, love blossomed at Pemberley. He could move, and wonderfully. Murray puffed up his chest and sprang his thick fan of chocolate-colored tail feathers, his long neck flushed white, and he began to prance back and forth in front of her, dragging his grand speckled wings through the leek plants, telling her all he knew of turkey life. Not gobbling, as Gudrun thought all turkeys did and all they could do, but a barking, bellowing, drumming caw deep in his breast, a cry of desperate, loud, unlovely want that she recognized instantly, in her bones and her blood. If she had the anatomy for it, Gudrun would have made that sound at everyone she ever met. Please want me. Please know me. Please come with me and keep my eggs warm and secret and safe. Please don’t devour me. There is so little time left.

  14. The Serpent in Eve’s Eden

  Published 1933, Red Light Limiteds, 144 pages

  Eventually, the truth came out of Ruby like an infected organ.

  Gudrun couldn’t go to school because of the poisons, poisons everywhere, a toxicity so total that the two of them could only escape it by staying here, on the island, far away from the corrupted mainland. But that was not enough, not by half. The village was lost already. They had to make Pemberley a fortress, a haven, an outpost in a sea of infection. Up here, and only up here, they could stay safe. Didn’t Guddy see it was absurd and obscene to come all this way, then turn right around and send her from their cozy little bastion into the heart of miasma, into a swarm of germ-infested children and virulent teachers where Gudrun’s little body would be lashed with horrors? An invisible murderous horde waited down there: lead in the paint they use on pencils and plastic wrap and in water pipes and gasoline and lunch plates and gym walls, invisible radon gas seething from underground, fluoridated water to make the population docile, pesticides lacquering every scrap of food you didn’t grow yourself, bleach in the wheat and the milk, formaldehyde lathered on hormone-riddled hamburgers to make meat look fresh and injected in your arm to keep you fresh only then they called it vaccination, and the worst of it all, the radiation, radiation like a terrible golden rain everywhere, all the time, leftover from the bombs in Japan and the secret tests in the atolls, oozing from refrigerators and power lines and those new microwave ovens and planes overhead, from the radio waves pounding their heads constantly like the sea against the shore, and the sun, the broken, angry sun bleeding through holes in the sky no one could see but they’re there, Guddy, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it can’t kill you. Only Pemberley was safe, hoisted up above the venomous earth, beneath a thatched and metal-less roof, far from the soup of contagion that was other people and convenience and basic technology.

  Ruby grabbed her daughter’s hands as tight as steel screws. Her nails dug in.

  “Listen to me, baby. I know. Aggie told me everything one night years ago. We lay in a giant bed in the St. Francis Hotel and looked out over the San Francisco lights, down the rainy streets toward the Convention where Ike and ol’ Dickie were shaking their jowls and dodging balloons and he cried in my arms, Guddy. He said in thirty years, there’ll be nothing living on this planet but brine shrimp. Even the cockroaches will go. Every continent will be buried under irradiated human bones like snow. They can’t stop it. It’s already happening. They just don’t want people to panic. Let them enjoy their last days. But I know. I know the truth. And it’s not gonna get me. I’m gonna stick it out till the end. I’m gonna see the snow.”

  But she didn’t, because Ruby got cancer anyway, even though she never drank the tap water.

  13. Punishing the Teacher’s Pet

  Published 1940, French Letter Books, 150 pages

  Ruby proved to be no help at all. Her knowledge was enormous but haphazard, picked up discount from many flea markets of t
he mind, and useless to a twelve-year-old girl, unless she needed to understand how Russians had infiltrated the Manhattan Project or the CIA experiments with psychedelic drugs and astral projection. Besides, they had to get the garden in. The sooner they could stop relying on commercial products, the better for both of them.

  Gudrun took herself in hand. She slept with Jack’s O.E.D. under her head, the constant, dripping humidity having softened it to a serviceable pillow. She peeled quickly through the fairy tales and Communist philosophy, feeling strongly both that the witch in the candy hut was framed and that the tragedy of the commons was so much bullshit, lingered briefly on the detective novels before deciding that it was nearly always safe to say that whoever loved the dead most had killed them, and finally, plunged headfirst into the real meat of the Oskander library, afraid at any moment that Ruby would stop her and burn the lot for compost ash.

  She didn’t, but after the first week settling in, Ruby forbade her daughter to read two books together whose titles did not begin with adjoining letters of the alphabet. This would upset the balance of causality, just as a misalignment of the mugs would upset the balance of heat and cold.

  Gudrun ignored the rule completely, and many years later, would ask Murray if he thought that was why it all happened the way it did. Murray thought the chances were about 50/50.

  12. Cleopatra’s Chamber of Forbidden Love

  Published 1957, Blue Fairy Books, 188 pages

  There are worse educations than Gudrun’s. Enough pornography gathered together in one place constitutes a complete history of the world.

  She wedged herself into the snug space made by the triangle of Historical (Hetero), Historical (Homo), and Historical (Lesbian) sections, beginning with the incestuous passion of Egypt’s pharaohs and the flesh gardens of Babylon, then on to the lascivious sworn bands of Greece and the sweat-drenched bath houses of Rome, the perfumed harems and enticing eunuchs of Byzantium, the medieval world full of lusty wenches and protected princesses and tragic Jewesses and wicked Inquisitors, the Italian decadence of the Renaissance and the frantic, nihilistic love of the plague years, the dandies of the Restoration seizing their servants in unjust and unbridled lust, the restrained and suffocated libidos of the Regency, the sadism of French aristocrats on the eve of revolution, the starched Victorian bodies writhing in unmet needs, the love of lieutenants and enlisted men in the trenches of the First World War, on and on into the modern world of class war between the working class mechanic and the rich man’s wife, the international intrigue of the Soviet spy and the American virgin, the mathematical possibilities of wife swapping, the oppression of the black man and his white bride, the night nurses in secret love, the sailors who dare not give in to their longings, the heaving social unrest of such vast need, unspoken, unanswered, in a long unbroken chain down the endless ages of man.

  11. A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two Bushes

  Published 1962, Adonis Editions, 115 pages

  Murray was born in Texas. He never said anything about it to Gudrun, but sometimes, in the autumn, he still dreamt of the dry, crisping sun on the Rio Grande, the smell of smokefires and thirsty weeds. Nothing was ever thirsty here.

  Between 1961 and 1964, the United States Forestry Service rounded up four hundred turkeys from the deserts of central and southern Texas and released them on the Hawaiian Islands to encourage the development of a native population, and, presumably, the kind of curious but undeniable emotional attachment to eating turkey that afflicted the majority of Americans.

  Murray didn’t know about any of that. He only knew that sometimes, when Gudrun started up the Studebaker engine, the sound of it made him tremble, made him remember, if dimly, a terrible silver bird, so much larger than himself, than any bird could ever be, so vast and loud and monstrous it could be nothing but God, God incarnated and migrating from the Great All-Twig Paradise Nest, God coming for him, taking him, Murray, an ordinary tom, nothing special at all, into its fearsome clanging belly of blessings and flying, flying like death, flying forever until he passed out cold from sheer, shivering religious terror.

  When Murray awakened, God had left him, and everything smelled like rain.

  10. The Scotsman and the Shepardess

  Published 1921, Galatea Books, 156 pages

  Ruby’s rules lasted long after she died. But not forever. Gudrun did try. She knew how important it was to eat only what you could grow or kill yourself, to keep your body pure and free of toxins, to check monoxide and radon levels regularly, to never install a telephone no matter what anyone said, to trust in wholesome herbs and flowers instead of industrial poisons that only mask symptoms and lull you to complacency, to sleep with a Geiger counter and a gun close by in case of emergencies. Gudrun governed herself by these principles because Ruby couldn’t anymore.

  “If we’re careful, baby, we can live forever,” Ruby told her with black nebulas screaming out of her eye sockets, seeping blood and pus like miracle tears spattering a statue of the Virgin. “Or at least until they burn out the earth from under us twenty years from now. Death was invented by corporations to ensure a constant stream of new customers. We don’t need death. We don’t need anything they want to sell us. We just need each other and a patch of good earth.”

  “But Mama, you’re so sick…”

  Ruby sopped up her disintegrating eyes with a cloth soaked in red clover oil and Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea. “I started too late, Guddy, that’s all. I sucked up all the poison the bad old world had on tap and asked for more because I didn’t know better. By the time I got right with the cosmos, I was already rotting. But I got you out in time. I did that.”

  Gudrun sat back on her heels and watched her mother lying in her last bed. Maybe this was what happened to you if enough people threw you away. You just rotted to pieces at the bottom of the bin. Or maybe Ruby really was holding the entire starry universe together by the arrangement of her coffee mugs.

  “And you cheat,” she whispered, barely able to squeak it out.

  “Don’t be disrespectful,” Ruby sighed. She handed her daughter the washcloth to rinse and re-soak. Gudrun did it, but she didn’t stop talking. She hated herself for talking but she couldn’t undo it now.

  “There’s a pack of menthol Tareytons under the rain barrel outside and there’s always a pack of Tareytons under there and you’ve got a bag of Oh Boy! Oberto Teriyaki Jerky in your underwear drawer and those have sodium nitrite in them and I’m pretty sure whiskey is, like, its whole own kind of poison, so you cheat, even though I have to have carob instead of chocolate and no friends.”

  Ruby folded her hands in her lap like a little girl. Gudrun laid the fresh washcloth over her weeping eyes—real tears, now, turning the blood and pus and thready nameless black bile pale.

  “I’m just a person, Guddy,” she whimpered softly. “Mumsy’s pretty weak, when you add me up.”

  “It’s okay,” Gudrun answered, because it was the only answer.

  “I order my whiskey special,” Ruby offered, as apology, defense, defiance. “Small batches, no factory processing. Made by real Scottish people.”

  9. Lovepig

  Published 1961, Blue Fairy Books, 156 pages

  Gudrun was shaking the first time she changed her order with Mr. Abalone. She was twenty-four. She wanted to live forever. She wanted to be better than Ruby. She did. But she also remembered what hot dogs tasted like. And ketchup. And white sugar in her tea. They were part of a broken history that belonged to her but did not—dimly remembered hotels overflowing with room service, individually packaged sweeteners, creamers, condiments, convenience stores snuck to in the middle of the night, brown bag lunches left out in the sun.

  And Ruby couldn’t stop her anymore.

  Gudrun ate that first forbidden slice of fried spam with a cold, shining glob of red ketchup alone in the dark. She cried so hard her eyes burned and throbbed and all she could see on her plate was a swimming blackness.

  8. The Sword of L
ust

  Published 1950, Harem House Press, 199 pages

  Gudrun never had any kind of reaction to the Oskander Special Collection. No hives, no vomiting, no silver stains. For a long time, she didn’t understand it. You couldn’t say The Sin Pit or Confessions of a Rent Boy or The Butler Did Me were masterworks. They were certainly no better than The Curse of the Werewolf, which had, in the end, left her with a pale, watery scar on her forehead and down the hairline on the left side of her face. Jack’s dirty books were the definition of bad art. But she could curl up in the bathtub and listen to the rain and read The Sword of Lust over and over and feel nothing more than desire, despite its obvious failings:

  Vuvula, Queen of the Night Demons, sat upon the Throne of Desire, her jeweled bodice glittering in the light of the thousand golden candelabras that hung from the rafters of the Sacred Hall. Nubile slave girls dressed only in rose petals combed her raven tresses and moaned in ecstasy. Her emerald eyes flashed haughtily at the interloper.

  “Come forward, Sir Quicktongue, and kneel before me!” cried Vuvula, her breasts quivering with rage and secret yearning.

  “Nay, my Lady,” answered Sir Quicktongue, Knight of the Hidden Flower. “I am bound by my sacred oath to kneel only before she who can reforge my shattered sword with her own bare hands. This is the curse and the riddle that drives me from town to town, bed to bed, through forest and swamp, over mountain and sea, and I may not rest until it is satisfied!”