by Exurb1a
“That’s fascinating,” Lyra said.
“And this one is called Ephemeral Intangible Phenomena. It is a beacon of hope for all who are looking for solace. Notice the highly intentional frenetic folding on the left to signify the folds within us all.”
Lyra took a picture of the picture and showed it to Jodie. Jodie nodded in approval.
Adam took out his cigarettes, checked his pocket for his lighter.
“Oh darling, please don’t,” Jodie said.
In his pocket he found not his lighter, but a piece of paper. It read: STAY CALM and SHIT OUTSIDE OCCASIONALLY.
Laura Arendt had sent him a message. Perhaps she’d even given it to him while he was wearing the fake band that day in the EM room.
Beneath the table he pushed the pin into his leg.
But he could not help think of Laura Arendt, could not help think of her sad face.
Lyra and Jodie and Todd crowded in front of the picture of the crumpled tissue. Jodie said, “Take a photo of us, Adam.” They all smiled, their eyebrows unraised, the skin around their eyes unraised.
Todd said, “Come on, show us some of that technical know-how. You spend all day pressing buttons anyway, don’t you?”
Adam took Jodie’s pad and pointed it. He made several shots. He made several more.
He launched the pad through the window, smashing the glass as it went.
Everyone was very quiet.
He located his lighter in his trouser pocket and lit his cigarette. He said, “I don't think taking photos of crumpled tissues is very clever. I don't think taking photos of yourself with minor celebrities makes you an interesting person. I don't want to look at more photos of crumpled tissues or minor celebrities. Maybe I'm uncultured. I spend all day pushing buttons after all. But something has gone awful, awful wrong. Pictures just remind you of taking them. I'm really not interested in seeing more, thank you, not of minor celebrities, not of used tissues. So I’d like to invite you to go home now. Go home to your collection of photos of candy wrappers with three-page explanations about the existential plight of the artist. Go home to your no doubt immaculate apartment and spotless mirrors.” He picked up his chair and launched that through the now open window.
Todd shrieked.
Adam turned to him. “I do not want to take any more photos. I don’t like photos. I don’t want to remember any of this horseshit. What the fuck are we doing with all this? Trying to make celebrities of ourselves, everyone screaming down everyone’s throat and no one stopping to shut up. I don’t like photos. I don’t want any more taken of me.” He grabbed Todd’s pad and launched that through the window. Todd squeaked.
“Go home and write me, tell me how it was, leave a review. Go home, you bunch of absolute, absolute oxygen thieves.”
Lyra and Todd exited quickly. Jodie stood by the dormant wallscreen, hand over her mouth, eyes on the floor. “Oh,” she said. “Oh…”
“Someone died today,” Adam said. “I watched someone die today. Right there in the square. I watched them injecting her with something and then she died. What is all this?”
Jodie remained still a while, then went into the kitchen and fetched another pad. She pointed it at the mess, at the broken window.
“What are you doing?” Adam said.
The pseudo-shutter sound of the photo app clicked again and again.
Adam took the fake band from his pocket and put it on.
The sense of time passing.
The fake band was in his hand again. He was outside. The air was cool and fresh. The sky was clear. He was on a ledge of some kind; yes, that spot near Mornington Station, his favourite place to view Gumption.
“Now just come back in,” someone said. “Come back in slowly, Adam.”
He turned about. Several security men were reaching their hands for him. One said, “Come back in now, Adam. It’s all right.”
“What?” Adam whispered.
“You really don’t have to do this.”
There was a crowd gathered on the street behind.
“What?” Adam said again.
A policeman said, “I’ve spoken with the Office of Oversight myself. They say everything’s fine. There might be a bit of a small penalty for that violent outburst, but the rest is going to be fine. So come back in now, all right?”
He reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small sheet of paper. On it was written: DON’T LISTEN TO THEM. JUMP.
He turned ahead again. Below was the wilderness. Beyond that was Gumption, its distant chimneys billowing wood smoke.
The fall was at least three hundred feet.
Adam said, “What the hell is going on? Am I in trouble?”
The security man said, “Yes Adam, but it’s nothing we can’t fix.”
He thought of Laura Arendt. He thought of the syringe and the blackness inside the syringe.
God, he thought. What’s better, nothing for lunch, or water? At least with nothing you know you’re starving. They give you water though and what’s the point?
“Adam,” the security man said.
He stepped off of the ledge.
He was as a no-thing for the fall.
He felt the wind in his face, yes.
He felt the acceleration, yes.
There was a letting go.
He was sitting upright in a chair. Perhaps ten others were sat around him. A woman at the front was intoning in a sombre voice about something. He started up, but a man next to him put a gentle hand on his shoulder and sat him back down. “Just a moment,” the man said.
The woman was reading from a large, elegantly bound book. “…that he should so choose to take his own life in such a fashion. We commit his carbon to the firmament.”
She closed the book and set it on what Adam now saw to be a coffin. She doused the coffin in a clear fluid from a canister. She struck a match and up the coffin and the book went.
Someone raised Adam to his feet and said, “Come along then,” and led him over to the coffin. He looked inside. The face was clearly his own, though bruised and bloody. The face was shot through with paraffin flames.
“What…” he said.
The funeral party watched the body and the coffin burning and there was nothing for Adam to do but watch it too, the thing converting from form into dust, the wood and the flesh and the velvet. Soon the struts collapsed under the coffin, and the woman poured more paraffin on the thing and the flames went up so high and thick that it was only flames then.
The flames died down. Ash.
Wine was served and Adam was given a glass. The funeral party stood and gently lured Adam away from the chairs and the remains and into the desert beside them. Someone patted him on the back.
The faces were not old but not young. Many appeared worn. The clothes were inexpensive, some closer to rags. The woman who had been reading the funeral rites came to him and said, “Well then, it’s done. Are you all right?” Adam could only stare. She said, “We find it’s best, psychologically speaking, to begin with the end. There was your end then.”
In the distance he spied a high cliff. Atop the cliff was a glistening citadel of steel and chrome and industry: his city.
He said, “Is this Gumption?”
“Yes,” the woman said.
He turned back to the chairs and saw that, like the folk here, they were higgledy assemblies of random parts. So too was the shanty town nearby, planks and girders.
The woman said, “We took the liberty of remaking you. We’re plugged into enough of the city’s streams to steal band data. We think we got enough of yours to reconstruct your memories and such. Do you feel yourself?”
“I think so.”
“The body is easy to recreate. The mind not so much. If you feel a little off, let us know. We can tweak most things.”
He glanced about the crowd. There was Laura Arendt watching him with a smile. She nodded. He nodded back. “What is this place?” he said.
“Gumption, silly,” the woman said.<
br />
“Am I dead?”
“You were, certainly. It’s very difficult getting out alive, you see. Everyone got here by doing themselves in or being done in. If you like, consider this the afterlife. The rules are quite simple. No going back to the city and no reproductions.”
“Reproductions?”
“No exploiting the moment, no photos, no videos, no recording brain streams. No bands.”
“I think I can manage that.”
She slapped him on the back. “Excellent.”
The party was quiet. They all drank their wine. The woman said, “It’s going to take a few days to get used to your new skin. We're using a stolen topology caster. It's old but it does the trick. If you want to leave, you can. There’s a spaceport a few miles away, can take you straight to the empire. Or stay here, that’s fine too.”
“What do you all do?” Adam said.
“Whatever we like, really. Long as it doesn’t harm anyone.” She called out behind. “Martin, would you?” And a man came then with a dog, with Adam’s dog, and gave the lead to Adam. The woman said, “They even give animals bands these days. He wasn’t so difficult to reconstruct.” The dog licked at Adam and he rubbed the animal’s ears.
The woman said, “I know I said no reproductions, but we make an exception for living things. If the city isn’t using them, that’s fine. The city wasn’t using you anymore. So what the hell?”
He looked about again. It was not squalor here, but it certainly wasn’t opulence either. Beer cans and old plates and rags were lying around all about the place. Dead campfires were smouldering.
He thought of Jodie. He wondered if she was thinking of him.
On the other side of the party he spied Alba Lamm.
“I’m so confused,” he said.
The sun was beginning to set, turning the city and the cliff and the desert a smoggish pink. And here came the moons, riding faithfully behind, ready to rule the night for a while.
He said, “Do I still have a band?”
The woman chuckled. “Of course not.”
“No one’s reading me?”
“No one's reading you.”
“All right. I think I want to paint. I can’t, but I want to try.”
“That’s fine, we have lots of paint and lots of painters to teach you. Or if you want to write we have writers. And dancers and musicians and astronomers and thinkers and carpenters.”
He looked back to the city.
Now, what will I be?
He picked the dog up and it went pliant in his arms and watched him like a baby.
“All right,” he said. “All right.”
The Girl and the Pit
Ushko was the leading astroarcheologist for several million light-years. He had been educated on Yeshua, done his initial training on Ek, and even been allowed to visit the dying Sol system for a few weeks. His groundbreaking work was an academic piece called: “Exotics and Natives: How to differentiate between extraterr remains and altered human remains.”
While simple, the idea had catapulted Ushko to the status of galactic celebrity. He was invited to take positions at numerous universities and offered countless hands in marriage. He politely declined on both counts.
Instead he used his newfound influence to secure passage to the planet Katarsina.
Ushko had a complex relationship with Katarsina. It was rumoured to be the birthplace of the protos, the oldest known extraterr race. They were extinct now of course, all extraterr civilisations were. The one thing all the dead extraterrs had in common, however, was that their literature spoke of the protos, revered them.
If both a loser and a victor agree on a thing, we can suppose it was the case. All accounts suggested that the protos were a wise and powerful civilisation, that they had mastered technology far in advance of anything else the galaxy was capable of. Then quite suddenly they had vanished, leaving only ruins behind. And not many.
Katarsina, it was said, was where the Foundational Arts were perfected—that is, the true sciences, those derived from the ground up, from hard logic and demiform: a system of notation even more powerful than mathematics.
Still, the protos went to bed.
Later, millions of years later in fact, the other civilisations would go the same way. Man would evolve a little after that and turn his gaze outwards to find himself in a derelict galaxy.
Ushko's parents had been archaeologists, and while they didn't necessarily intend the same occupation for their boy, they certainly weren't disappointed when he began to show interest in the field at an early age. He accompanied them on expeditions, fetched their tools, watched as great extraterr monuments were uncovered from sand and dirt.
One morning on New Pleven his mother unearthed a gigantic fin of unfamiliar metal. It shone blue in the sun and if struck with a chisel rang for minutes. By the end of the day his parents were certain it was the stabiliser of a proto craft.
Back at camp that night Ushko waited until the fire was lit and dinner was over, then asked his parents who exactly the protos were.
His parents exchanged a glance, then fixed the compass needle of Ushko's life. They told him everything.
Back in his tent Ushko saw a wondrous scene before him, of great shining blue pyramids, of enormous spheres in orbit, of a culture that had solved nature's conundrums and learned to live in harmony with their biology and environment.
Then all of it was promptly snuffed to nothing.
Where had the protos gone and had they gone there by choice? If not, what could kill off the most advanced civilisation the galaxy had ever known?
Ushko continued travelling with his parents until his eighteenth year when he inevitably undertook his degree in extraterr archaeology.
Two years later while on a caving expedition, his father contracted some kind of fungal flu and died. Ushko's mother took the death gracefully but hung up her slacks and returned to Yeshua to live quietly by the family orchard and wait until her time came too.
Ushko visited her occasionally in between expeditions, but interstell travel is as dangerous as it is costly. Go about in the heavens, his mother told him, and don't think of me so often.
And once he graduated he did so; planet to planet, site to site, he scoured the old archaeological testing grounds, Ek, Ruthia, Sand Folly, never staying too long, never committing.
Every year he submitted a proposal to the Katarsinian Embassy to set up digs on the planet; the original home of the proto civilisation. Every year he was rejected. Every year the reason for the rejection was new. At first it was a lack of experience. Then as his reputation improved it became a lack of openings. Then a shortage of funding. Then simply a polite refusal.
So when his now-famous paper pushed him into the galactic limelight, he wrote once again to the embassy. If the offer was refused this time, he said, he would take the matter to the Marquis himself.
Several weeks elapsed, then the reply came that he would be allowed a Standard Year on the planet, but with a long list of stipulations, including but not limited to: total confidentiality, no ownership of finds, and absolute adherence to the wishes of the Katarsinian government.
They could have demanded that Ushko be naked at all times and smear himself in jam and yes would still be the answer.
He signed off on the current dig, packed his few possessions into a travelling sack, and boarded the voidskipper.
From above, Katarsina really wasn't much to look at, a slight sulphuric yellow tint to the atmosphere perhaps. The ferry dropped him in Amalga Town, the capital, and officials met him in the arrivals lounge. From Amalga Town it was a three-hour train ride to his allocated dig site, a small farm town. There it was beyond the train window: Katarsina. Rice paddies smeared by; lakes, tributaries, villages. It looked little different to Ek or Yeshua. But below those rice paddies and lakes and tributaries and villages, Ushko knew, was a mystery in plain sight. The secrets of the proto civilisation slept quietly in ruin and all it would take to discover th
em was a trowel and a steady hand.
He arrived in the village of Inica, a small gathering of circular canvas-like structures. There was little bad weather on Katarsina and homes appeared designed to tolerate small storms and not much else.
A local met Ushko at the station exit, a short man called Matthew who spoke Galactic Standard with an accent so thick it was practically pidgin. He showed Ushko around the village—an exercise that took nothing upwards of forty minutes. He explained that Ushko would be sleeping in a structure on the outskirts owned by the government, and would he like to join Matthew and his wife for dinner? Ushko was desperate to get set up but knew the importance of keeping the locals happy when one was intending to dig up their ground.
Matthew's tent was sparsely decorated; an aesthetic Ushko suspected was commonplace on Katarsina. His wife was already busy making something on an electric stove and she embraced Ushko when he entered as one might an old friend.
“Well met,” she said. “I am Marla.”
“Well met,” Ushko said, a greeting that had not been used in Galactic Standard for perhaps four hundred years.
They ate a meal of soup, then some kind of spiced animal, then Matthew prepared a fire at the centre of the tent and rolled down the roof so they might see the stars. There was no obligation to talk, Ushko noticed. What a blessing.
An archaeologist was exposed to more cultures than most. Some traditions were steeped in politeness and folk would talk for hours only to prove that they were good people. Others were more interested in communication, and anyone who had thought the matter over for more than a minute knew that conversation and communication have very little to do with each other. In any case, what with the long journey and the stress of voidskipping, Ushko was glad of the silence.
They drank some kind of Katarsinian whisky. Ushko watched Marla across the fire. She was beautiful in a way he hadn't seen before, pale and knowing. Matthew had the same complexion, though with handsome edges thrown in.
Finally Marla said, “What are you wanting with Katarsina, Ushko?”
