The Future Is Blue

by Catherynne M. Valente

  This sort of very unsatisfactory thing was why Chancel only had acolytes and wives, not friends or companions. While he lived, whether or not the Amaranthine Bible was mean to be taken literally or was, in point of fact, the longest and least funny joke ever told by man or beast or man about a beast, was a subject of much debate. If Chancel were a comedian, even a dreadful one, he and his interminable shaggy dog story would be protected under the laws of the poor exploded king. If he were, however, practicing divine revelation on a freelance basis, both he and his book ought probably to be boilt for blasphemy. Death, however, has a way of making religion out of bad books. Death, and enough time.

  Those were not, however, his last words. In the last breath of his life, the great man looked out the window of his house onto the wide, dark streets of Öt, breathed in the scent of broiling sausage and old rainwater and rich women’s perfume, and whispered to the sternum of the first slaughtered mastodon: from the time of my youth I have dreamt of a wall I have never seen, the color of ginseng root, with moss growing upon the towers of it like snow, and little red flowers among the moss like blood. Do you think, perhaps, before the sun, and before the stone, before even the paprikas, there was this dream? I wish I had a whiskey, damn everything to hell.

  This was in reference to the most oft-repeated passage of the Amaranthine Bible: In the beginning of the world, only three things existed: the stone beneath our feet, the sun above our heads, and paprikas. When questioned, as he often was, as to how paprikas could exist before chickens, cows for the necessary sour cream, and hot red peppers growing in good brown earth, he answered: Does not the mortar come before the house? Do not the birch trees come before the wooden wheel? Do not the parts come before the wholes? So doth the parts that comprise a paprikas, before the wholes from whence they came. Whereupon his questioners walked away, initially satisfied, only to turn back in consternation and find Chancel having run off whilst their back was turned. Even in death, Chancel could find no comfort in anything he did not write himself.

  Perhaps the oddest thing in the whole long life of the cleverest man ever born in the universe was that he was right. He would never know it, except in the way men like Chancel always know they are right, without any real reason to think so. One moment the world did not exist. The next, there was stone, veined and cold. The next, there was a golden pearl hanging in the sky dripping life like organ meat hung up to cure. And the next, the very next moment, there was, upon the stone and beneath the sun, a white and purple porcelain bowl full of steaming paprikas, long before anyone existed to eat it.

  Chancel the Sophist would not live nearly long enough to meet the beginning of this tale which is named Vnuk, nor even seize with his own eyes the River Sz or Ognisko Square. But his grandson and granddaughter, who happened to be twins and therefore twice as bad and twice as good as their famous ancestor, would.

  Mother

  The diabolist who came to examine Vnuk and record her into the books of peerage, once she had lived through a few poxes and bad winters and seemed destined to survive at least the immediate future, despite having no visible heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, or liver, was known as Archfiend the Lesser. He was called this despite being a rather nice man with a closely-trimmed beard who hated clutter and bad manners but loved injured animals, stained glass windows, watercress soup with dollops of sour cream, going to bed early, and had been compelled to hide, from childhood, his passion for embroidery. Men of his profession were imagined to commit pyrotechnical sins of wrath and adultery and ambition, nothing so vile and degenerate as enjoying the work and company of women. Nevertheless, after the explosion of King Blancmange, the bishopry of ———— compelled all diabolists to take names that plainly and obviously announced their profession, so that no child might be seduced into thinking they were upstanding, jovial, worthy men they might want to grow up to be, like Istevan or Konrad or Milosh down the way. It was devoutly hoped that the occupation would shortly die out, and whatever the deconstructed king had done to ensure the longevity of his laws would be unspooled like so much loudly-colored thread and everyone could breathe a sigh of joy and release and go back to patting down the poor for pennies and tossing their extraneous daughters in the river like they’d always done.

  It did not have the intended effect. In fact, Archfiend the Lesser had been followed to the palace grounds from his cottage, over the Gyöngy Bridge on the River Sz, through the comedians’ district and Slatterncourt Row, past dismemberers taking elk and boar and lion apart like puzzles previously solved by God, through wide open nearly cosmopolitan Ognisko Square in the sun, by a veritable totentanz of children of every economic class and level of nutrition begging him to take them on as his apprentices, despite his protestations that diabolist was just a word, not to be taken literally any more than an alewife was actually married to a barrel of black beer, his knowledge of demons merely academic, not practical in the least, his work almost entirely medical, astrological, or algebraic, and the most dangerous thing he’d ever done had been to set the crown a sensible budget when he was a young and reckless man.

  The diabolist found Vnuk dressed in a gown of yellow and green chevrons trimmed in badger tails that buttoned all the way up to the tip of her chin. She sat, with a posture that could make a man believe in God, on a chair with a blue velvet cushion whose ivory back was carved to imitate the arches of the cathedral visible just outside the window of their allotted chambers, for at that time all members of the aristocracy lived within the walls of the palace and not on their own estates, where they could neither be trusted nor protected from the approaching army—and, one way or another, on horse or on foot, from the north or the west or the south, there was always an approaching army. It was what came of being situated so pleasantly as ————, between mountains, seas, generous growing seasons, and cross-hatching trade routes. The present horde, the king had shared in confidence, rode basilisks into battle, shot angels from the sky and cut them into rations for the infantry, spoke the language of silkworms, and was commanded by a woman-general without any single physical flaw. Why risk bodily autonomy on even the possibility of basilisks? And so they came into the fold, and were given rooms and gardens and plate in perfect proportion to what they had possessed out there in the sun-drenched lands beneath the wall, arrayed in just the same configuration, so that each lord retained his neighbors, and the palace became a microcosm of the kingdom itself.

  “May I?” asked Archfiend the Lesser, reaching for the freshwater pearl buttons of Vnuk’s gown with some hesitation of virtue.

  “Of course, of course,” snapped Vnuk’s father, waving his broad hand in the air. Lord Bittern wore his cynicism in his beard and his grief in his belly, as though he could give birth to it one day, and finally be rid of the thing. His coat-of-rank strained at its clasps, its velvet stretched, only just able to keep all that sadness in one place. “I shouldn’t think a man of your profession would be so bloody ecclesiastical. She has no shame, nor should you. I have a furious faith in searching out some slovenly little goodness in all hideous things, and in my personal tragedy it is this: My daughter alone is exempt from the sins of the primeval female. She has no stink of Eve about her, no inch of the Magdalene. You will find nothing to tempt the flesh beneath that dress. If not for the sniffing and clucking of your sort, I would let her run naked. She prefers it, you know. Her innocence is that extreme.”

  “It’s all right,” Vnuk whispered softly. “I don’t mind. The crown prince already kissed my belfry, so you can’t shock me. He said I had to let him, because, while the people are free of will and movement, all buildings in the kingdom belong to him. He said if I did not let him, he would charge me rent.”

  Archfiend the Lesser undressed the child and could not think of one single reason that his hands should tremble as they did, with each pearl button, with each dark flash of the body beneath. He harbored no clandestine love for children as some men of his profession did, nor did nakedness of any sort move him h
alf so much as a perfect passage of Greek. And yet he trembled.

  “This will require a new categorization,” said Archfiend the Lesser, very handsomely lit by shafts of late sunlight slashing through the room. He flipped through the pages of his book, illuminated with oxblood and emerald headers that read: Animalia, Missing or Additional Parts, Mineral Contamination, Disorders of the Blood, Skin, or Hair, Disorders of Doubling or Tripling, Disorders of Selfhood, and wrote, somewhat experimentally: Architectural.

  Vnuk watched him calmly as he wrote, her badger-lined gown laid open, her hands folded calmly in her lap, just below the great door of her tower. Although she, without a doubt, had bricks and mortar and portcullises and doors and windows where she should have had blood and skin and a chest and a stomach, she was an unsettlingly beautiful child. Her hair was dark, dark blue, the color of a whale’s shadow, but the viscount’s daughter had braids of such pure, hot light that they sheared them into two hundred lanterns at the beginning of winter every year. Her eyes were enormous, knowing, black as the inside of a winecask, with a pinprick of silver at the bottom of each iris like a tiny star, but the queen had no eyes at all and a pangolin’s tail so long it curled three times around the throne. Archfiend the Lesser had himself been born with three faces, the extraneous two clutched one in each fist as he entered the world. He kept them nowadays carefully rolled in a surveyor’s tube, and wore one for prayer, one for work, and one for passion, though having never experienced the third of these, he had yet to see the world through that last face.

  The child lifted her chin in an attitude of arrogant wisdom, but this was all due to the architecture of the tower. Vnuk could no more slouch than Archfiend the Lesser could fly without weeks of prayer and study. Her skin shone with all the milk-fed clarity of her cow-besotted ancestor, and where it joined the bricks of her chest, the seam was no seam at all, flesh simply flowed into stone as smoothly and naturally as earth slopes into a river. The architecture of Vnuk was an upset and flustered thing, a runaway cathedral caught out between the Gothic and the Baroque, having stolen significantly from the Romanesque, the Russian Revival, late Byzantine, and the Early Grand Duchy school of Finland. The materials of her were, at the extremities, ashen skin, thin meat, thick hair, long bone, the usual nacre of nail, and in the trunk, a kind of strange brick so smooth and without pock it might have been a flow of lava cooled by a sudden sea. Most of this brick was black, but here and there, the tower of her glinted: a red slab, a blue stone, a green or violet trio of blocks, like any child’s moles or freckles or portwine stains.

  Vnuk possessed thirteen black-bricked levels from pelvis to jawline, terminating in an octagonal market cross at the crest of her collarbone, cradling her skull as a finial at the joining of eight flying buttresses so cluttered with dark croquets they looked like the legs of a great and sinister insect, and where the hollow of her throat should have been, that part of the body which all in the country of ———— agreed was the most beautiful, rode a solemn silver silent bell. Each floor of her body was a pitched aesthetic and winnerless battle of ribbed vaults, secretive alcoves, long graceful galleries, nave arcades whose arches within arches within arches bristled with primeval faces and keystones wrought from unpolished gems, columns and capitals in every style painted in Turkish geometric patterns, French florals, Greek mosaics. Her ribcage unfolded into cloister walks and delicate balustrades whose railings curled like jet lily-vines, gargoyles and grotesques peering round every corner, and a multitude of mullioned windows, lancet, trefoil, reticulated tracery, Lucarne windows, rose windows, splayed and dormer windows, some as large as crabapples, some so tiny no human hand could open them without shattering them like ice over shallows, some papered, some crystal, some fitted with stained glass so fine that in later years, the glaziers of that country would take the name of their guild from Vnuk and make of her an informal patron saint. A wooden door of petrified grey walnut rode low in her belly, hinged in fresh iron, undecorated, dry as gasping, its slats born half-splintered. A scent emerged from the dark slats and gangplanks of her chest, a scent like African violets boiling in seawater.

  The royal architects, an occult and unpleasable lot, would ultimately declare the whole effect rather an unsightly mess, and express a hope that, perhaps, at the onset of puberty, the poor benighted child might develop some unity of style.

  Archfiend the Lesser put his thumb at the base of her chin and lifted slightly, peering through the dark archways to the other side of the room. He lifted his eyes; the buttresses flowed up into the skin of her face, and all else beneath the jawbone was smooth, flat, featureless skin, like a theatrical prop of a skull, unconnected to any part of the body. She should not have been able to speak or walk or live at all, her head having no method by which to discuss action or inaction with her limbs, and yet Vnuk was Vnuk, the fact of her in itself already proven. Archfiend the Lesser felt the great business of his life settle upon him. Presumably, behind these many doors and windows and arches, further cells and chambers and passageways lay as hidden and unseeable as the flora of the gut, connected by staircases of black proportions beyond mortal calculation, be their mathematics heavenly or infernal. A certainty set up its business in the base of his brain, that if he could know the map of her interior, he could know the map of everything.

  The diabolist put his ink-stained hand on the stone of her chest. He meant to ask the same questions he asked of all the nobly deformed children he had examined in his life: does it hurt when I do this, or perhaps this, can you count to ten, is your eyesight improved by this lens of glass or that, what can you do that I cannot, can you imagine for me a machine that might ease some little annoyance of your life in this body, even if it seems absurd and impossible? He did mean to. But what came to his lips unwilled was instead a crime, a humiliation, a horror not his to commit—the great question asked of all diabolists on their first day of their enclosure, when they are still only boys trying to look up the infinite skirt of the universe, a question which is itself an initiation, the beginning of knowledge.

  “What is the name of the Devil, my child?”

  On the eleventh level of Vnuk, in the eighth lancet window, a soft light came on, the color of turmeric.

  Autumn

  In October, the trees in the city of Tizenkét do not lose their leaves. Instead, a slick of blue-white fire licks along their bark and their branches, sketching an arboreal outline in a crackling ghostmoon flame. The aqueducts run green and hot, as sharp-bubbled as champagne, and no one can drink from them until the season is past. The University Proctors once commissioned a study to explain why no one could get a decent glass of water for weeks on end every year, (was civilization itself in vain?), and even brought Chancel the Sophist on a significant salary to answer for this phenomena. The scholars could not agree between three theories—that some sort of clam was deep in its mating season upstream, that people really ought to stop pouring the more liquid of their rubbish into the river, or that the masters of hell were offended by the indomitable virtue of the citizenry—and the group disbanded after one of the Clamites stabbed one of the Rubbishers between the eyes. Chancel ignored the aqueduct completely, and claimed to discern a pattern in the crackling of the blue-white light in the trees, but when pressed for a translation by the Dean of Linguistics, the great man blushed and said only that he was angry with himself for never thinking that the universe itself might also know lustful thoughts.

  That was where the matter rested for many hundreds of years. It is a fact simply accepted that in Tizenkét, October is for beer and palinka and slivovitz and kefir, not water.

  But October was also the time of the festival of St. Gremory-on-the-Stair, when the people poured out of their tall, narrow houses in the very corners of the night, chisels and buckets and knives and spiles and sewing needles and picnic blankets and wine bottles in all their merry hands. Look, there go Baldachin and Oriel, the best of friends since their seventh breaths, one a gravedigger like her father, eight mo
nths gone with her latest babe, the other a midwife like her mother, barren as sand in a glass, death and life, holding hands and drinking from the same bottle of yellow wine, wearing camels’ skulls tangled in wild speckled mushrooms and monkshood and maroon silk ribbons on their heads. Their grandmothers made them those Gremory caps, and in each knot there was both love and a grand, luxurious irritation with the youth of the world. They will lay out their down-stuffed blankets on the cobblestone streets with their neighbors, where all carriages, horses, and carts have been banned for the night. They will sing the old thirteen-part songs as they light their camel-tallow candles, as big around as a strong man’s ankle, and paint the little ones faces to look like wild camels and dragons, draft ponies and intricate glittering machines, all to commemorate the coming of St. Gremory when the world was new. Gablet the Fool will stare longingly at Baldachin, wishing the small soul in her nest were his, its future face his right to paint in the colors of a celestial camel, and braising in his bitterness, juggle cutting implements for coins. He is in secret the richest man in Tizenkét, all in small coins hidden away in his cellar and never let out to breathe.

  The feast blazes in the alleys and closes and on the high street, too, there is food enough for all and sandwiches in the morning. Here and there among the quilted blankets burns paraffin-soaked effigies of the Patron Saint of Man Civilized, woven in crosshatches of black barley and white gentian, crowned in geometric sulfur crystal, and his eyes, repeated up and down the boulevards like a stutter in the long poem of of autumn, are always knobs of old brown bone. All down the public ways work-wizened grandafathers tell the tale as it was put down by Cinquefoil the Rhymer in the age between bronze hammers and iron, of how, before either of those could be imagined to hide in the earth, when the people were mute and stupid and more kin to the insects than to the angels, a man came among them as tall as the morning, with the head of a camel, the wings of a dragon, and the legs of a draft horse, and taught them all things which could be made and not birthed, which he called by the name of technology and by the name of civilization, and this was St. Gremory. He helped them to gather the Thirteen Treasures of the Common Man, he taught them to decorate themselves with stones, he taught them fire and cookery and how to safeguard against plagues of earthquakes, he taught them agriculture and the founding of cities, he taught them to enjoy the company of others, to ferment vegetation and to devise games. And in exchange for all of this, for modernity entire, St. Gremory asked simply that a few certain laws be obeyed, and even that only for a term of seven hundred years, until he returned among their number to see what they had made of themselves.