Authors: Kameron Hurley
“You know what we do with the ash,
when we burned it all down? We used to gather it up in big containers, and they
shipped it down to the synthetics factories along the coast, and you know what
they did with it?”
“Threw it into the sea?” I said.
She laughed. “No. They condensed it
all down, mixed it with chemicals and wood char and made synthetic logs for the
living compounds around the factories.”
“Synthetic logs?” I said.
“Yes. I heard stories, not truth,
of course, just stories, that the workers out there, the keepers would let them
set the logs on fire, and they would dance around them. These naked, empty
texts. They would just dance!”
I remembered the dancers. The
orange flames leaping high in the air. I remembered how proud we all were of
watching that flame, that one bit of making we were able to perform while the
keepers owned our bodies. The smell of the black dust, the way it coated our
bodies.
“Don’t talk about burning things
anymore,” I said.
Our days were not to last, of
course. Contentment never does, does it? But then, would we remember it as
content if it was not prefaced and ended in darkness?
“I watched you always, Anish,” my
keeper told me the day it died. “I watched you and wanted to be you, and when I
could not be you, I wanted to unmake you. What we cannot have, we must destroy.
But then, you already know that, don’t you?”
My overseer approached me one morning
after Chiva and I had fought. Chiva said that my silencing of the texts was a
form of rebellion, of subversion. She said my body was not mine but hers, to
direct as she pleased. I was nothing, she said, just a dumb body, an empty
text.
My overseer waited outside my door.
“Come with me, Anish,” he said.
I did not ask where we were going.
Perhaps a part of me already expected this.
The overseer brought me to the
center of the labyrinthine archives. I knew I would not be able to find my way
back unaided. He palmed open a door and stepped into a domed room. At the
center of the room stood a large hexagonal structure. The air was much cooler
and drier than in the archives. The overseer walked up to the structure,
pressed his hand against it, and a section of the wall opened to admit us. We
stepped in.
We stood inside a perfect hexagon.
Lining the walls were row upon row of square gray panels, each no bigger than
my palm. All of them had one small light on the lower left hand side. There
must have been thousands of them, all up and down the walls, all around me.
They stretched upwards some twenty feet above me. Soft light illuminated the
room from panels on the ceiling, panels much like the ones in the archives;
only the light these ones emitted was less white, more orange. On these
thousands and thousands of squares, all of the small indicator lights were
dark; all but the ones on one solid bank of squares on my right, a collection
of perhaps a dozen yellow lights. I walked over to them.
“Is this all?” I said.
My overseer nodded. He went up to
the wall, selected a square situated at the far left corner of the roughly
circular pattern of lights, and pressed the panel. It clicked open.
I stared inside.
And was disappointed. All I saw was
a long tube of wire connected to the shiny black shell of the interior. The
overseer unwound the wire, asked me to come closer.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Adjusting you,” he said. “Your
communication hardware was fitted in the birthing centers, but never used. This
keeper wants to be linked to you. I have to attune your hardware to its
settings. Be still. It will not hurt.”
It hurt.
I tried to pull away from my
overseer, but he held me tight. The tubing in my ear sent a wave of pain
shooting through my ear canal and behind my eyes, and I heard a terrible
hissing sound that filled my head.
When my overseer released me, I
fell onto floor. I held my head in my hands and gasped.
“So this is Anish.”
My overseer had not spoken. I
looked up at him, at the tubing he held, and glanced up at the casing of the
keeper’s square.
“Yes, that’s mine,” the voice said.
Did the voice have a gender? I do not know. It simply existed. I call my keeper
he because my overseer was male. When I think of my keeper I think of the body
of the overseer -- his broad shoulders, broad face, narrow nose.
“What do you want with me?” I
asked.
Laughter. The laughter of keepers
is not a laughter you ever want to hear. It echoes in your head, over and again
until it feels that your head has been broken.
“You are so silly, Anish. Such a
lovely body, but full of silliness! Don’t you know, haven’t you guessed? Why
would I bring an archivist here?”
“You’re dying. You want me to write
your history.”
“Ah. You see. I knew all along you
were not a dumb body. I would not have chosen you otherwise.”
“But I’m not an archivist yet.”
“More intelligence. Perception.
Such quickness. Why aren’t all bodies so? Ah, yes, because my esteemed brethren
found them troublesome.”
“I can’t help you,” I said. “I
don’t know how to do proper dictation.”
“I have been watching you, Anish.
I’ve seen the way you touch the texts. You have a reverence for our truth,
don’t you?”
Did I? I wondered if the keeper
could read my thoughts, or if I had to say them out loud. I kept saying them
out loud. “It will be good to record your -”
“Do you want to know the body I’ve
chosen for you to dictate upon?” the keeper said.
My head ached. I already knew.
“I prefer the more educated
bodies,” my keeper said. “Best find one that comprehends truth and history, one
that appears dull and animalian because it is concealing its thoughts from me,
not blank and dull because it is empty. I experience too much emptiness in my
own kind now. Too much death. You see us dying, do you not, Anish? But that
will not save you from me. The absence of the future does not negate the past.”
“Please,” I said. “Choose another
text. She’s a good archivist, and she’ll be a better librarian, when she’s
finished learning.” If I unmade Chiva she would never be able to touch me
again.
The keeper started laughing again.
“Chiva?” he said. “You are such a
silly body, Anish! You thought I wanted Chiva? Oh no, oh no.” Laughter,
laughter, my head throbbing. “Haven’t you guessed, Anish? I want you to unmake
yourself
.”
The world the keepers created had
been falling apart throughout my life, but I had not noticed it. I did not
think forward, only back. That was the nature of my existence. Now, though,
none of my days were spent in causal silent observance, sprawling lazily in the
present while listening to the truth of the past. Now I was told stories,
stories I knew could not be truth, stories I could not silence.
The stories my keeper told me did
not match what all the texts narrated and illustrated.
“Exiled us?” my keeper said. “Oh,
pity no, that’s the old religious pull, you understand? The persecuted few?
Your people consumed it well the first few centuries. Oh, no, we went out on
our own, thought we were wonderfully special, thought we could leave our dead
bodies behind and live in the synthetic ones forever. Ha! All fools. The last
of the synthetic bodies gave out half a millennia after we crashed here. All
gone. No more bodies. At least we had enough time to indoctrinate and implant
you.”
The voice in my head had made me
nervous. I could not halt his stream of stories. I could not ask him to be
quiet, so I stole quietly back to my little room and lay down. I avoided Chiva.
My head always hurt.
“When will the sessions begin?” I
asked.
“Oh, soon enough, little Anish,” he
said. A long pause. Then, “Let us see Chiva.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I could make you.”
“I thought you were here to unmake
me.”
“Ah! I thought we’d bred the
cleverness out of you. Perhaps another day, then.”
But in the morning my overseer
waited for me again.
“It’s time for the sessions to
begin,” he said.
I tried to protest, but my keeper
grumbled, “Oh, it’s not me, Anish. It’s those ancient fools back there,
spouting off about mortality. They’re so old they’ve forgotten what it’s like
to have a body that’s yours. Well then, since it’s already scheduled…”
My overseer let me into the
dictation room. He shut the door. I gazed at the apparatus on the walls – the
needles, lasers, the skin grafting equipment, the row upon row of shiny
surgical tools, glass containers of narcotics.
“I can’t do this alone,” I said.
“Oh, I think you can,” my keeper
said. “I’ll not ruin you so terribly as the others. I’d like you to function as
I would, if I had such a delightful young body. Now sit on that stool and
listen. You’re not just here to tell
my
stories. The truth, as you call
it, the stories I liked best, were the ones I had when I owned my own body.
You’ve never seen mountains, have you? Lakes? River stones?”
I had never heard the terms before.
“I’m going to have your body
illustrate the real truth about our kind,” my keeper said, “I want you to be a
literal text. Not one of those useless globs. I want you to be able to walk and
spit and fuck. After all, what is the purpose of a body but to exert one’s
power over another?”
I wondered if he spoke of my power
or his own.
I spent our first three sessions
learning to draw symbols. My keeper was able to direct me through the motions;
he had a limited power over my body - enough so he could assist when I
misplaced a stroke of the stylus.
Each night, he asked after Chiva.
“Don’t you miss her terribly?” he
said.
“Yes,” I said, and thought, but you
do enough talking for all of us.
The fourth session, I began to
write. I can think of no other body but mine when I remember this session, this
memory of writing. The way the precise tool inscribed my already numbed flesh
in a long series of puckered marks that reddened or blackened as I pressed the
button that allowed the ink to flow into the wounds.
Afterward, I always closed my eyes.
When I closed my eyes I heard the words of the woman who called herself my
mother. I felt her clutch at me with her claws. “You are already our history,
yes?”
No, I thought. I am nothing. I am
an empty canvas being filled. I won’t be ugly any more.
By the fifth session the markings
covered my throat and shoulders. This will not be so terrible, I thought,
watching the curious red tattooed welts forming on my flesh.
I do not remember how long my
keeper and I spent in the dictation room.
One morning I awoke in my own room
and my door remained locked until well past midmorning. Another overseer
arrived to unlock the door.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“His keeper died,” the overseer
said. And nothing more.
With the death of that keeper came
yet another purging of the texts. Piles of bodies were carted out through the
corridors. I watched them with a dizzy sense of horror.
After that, I slept in the
dictation room.
Finally , the day came when I
stepped out of our dictation session, the one that I know now was our last, and
Chiva stood in wait for me. When she saw me, her eyes widened.
“It’s true,” she said.
“It must be,” I said.
“You don’t look like you,” she
said.
The markings now covered my torso
all the way down my right leg and up to the thigh on my left, but I had only
seen the black and red marks section by section, reflected back at me from a
small round magnification mirror that let me apply the tattoos with accuracy.
“It isn’t so terrible,” I said, but
as I watched her eyes move over me I felt a stab of fear. “I’m still the same,”
I said. “I’m not going to be in one of those niches. I’m not -”
“You’re just another used text,”
Chiva said. “You’ve lost your history and given it to a keeper. You’re just
another dead keeper’s writing.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You don’t
know anything about it. I’m beautiful.”
“You’re so stupid, Anish. Have you
looked at yourself? You said you were your mother’s text, our text. You’re just
another one of theirs now. Go look at yourself,” she said. She turned and
walked away from me, trailing after a trolley piled up with bodies.
I heard my keeper’s laughter.
“What did you do?” I said. I walked
back into the dictation room, pushed the small mirror back into the wall,
opened up the panel where the full-length mirror was. I had been too afraid to
look, before.
The body that stared back at me was
never mine. I had always known it was not mine. I belonged to the keepers from
birth, but it was my mother’s body I spilled from, my mother’s history I had
always been. But no longer.
“What did you make me write?” I
said. “What do these symbols mean?” Another question I had not asked during
dictation, a question I feared the answer to. They were unlike any marks on the
other texts.
“Words,” my keeper said. “Not
pictures of things, but symbols representing the sounds of the actual spoken
words, words so old I thought I’d forgotten how to form them.”
“What do they
say?
”
My keeper was silent.
“What do they say?”
“They negate all truth,” he said.
“What?”
“I wrote words that told an untrue
history. One different from all those others.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not? Are you a fool? There is
no truth, Anish. Only stories. Only things we wished had happened. Words unmade
the skin that formed so smooth and perfect in your mother’s body. And now we
will finish negating the existence of the texts and the existence of all your
bodies. We will finish unmaking history.”