Authors: Kameron Hurley
“You can’t tell lies on a body,” I
said. “You can’t –”
“And what does Chiva’s empty body
attest to, Anish? What truth does she tell? She is empty and free and when the
last of us dies she’ll burn you along with the rest of them, to be free of
you.”
“Shut up!” I said, and I slammed
the mirror panel shut and ran out of the dictation room. I saw again the vision
of my burning kin. “You can’t negate their bodies!” I said, and I ran down
through the corridors, my keeper’s laughter ringing in my head.
Other students and archivists
stared at me as I passed. I ran and ran, looking for the Hall of Unmaking. I
knew the route so well, that place where Chiva and I had touched truth. Down
this corridor, left here, another left, and –
A steel gate blocked my path. I
stopped. I stared at it.
“She likes to kill them, you know,”
my keeper said. “She likes to kill them because she’s afraid of them.”
“No,” I said.
“You think that word saves you? It
changes nothing. You think I can say no and go back to being an organic body?
You think I can say, `no’ and cease to be a swimming mass of synthetic fluid
and artificial synapses?” my keeper said. “That word cannot unmake what I
became. You want truth, Anish? We envy your bodies. Your beautiful smooth
bodies. We covet them. We have built not an archive but a shrine, not a world
of absolute truth but a world that records the stories we wish were ours. We
use flesh to fantasize about that which we can never be. You bodies are so
stupid. You lie about this place talking of how ugly you are, running around in
this artificial labyrinth of our making, your unmaking. You have not seen the
sun in years now, Anish. You lounge about here and squander your lives, and
when we’re dead you’ll still lie about here as your bodies waste away. You’ll
exist only to preserve the history of our death.”
“You’re lying,” I said. I pressed
my palms to the cold steel of the gate. “These are just stories.”
“But now I’ve had you write them on
your body, little Anish. Now they’re truth, aren’t they?”
I turned away from the gate and
began to run again through the halls. How long had we spent in dictation? How
much had things changed? I saw more gates. Corridors ended abruptly. Those
corridors still open had empty niches. What had happened to all the texts?
“How many keepers are left?” I
said. My legs hurt. My throat was raw. “How many have died?”
“There are five of us left. We die
in groups, you know. Just as we were made,” my keeper said.
I stopped and stood still in the
hall, breathing deep, gazing at the monstrous construction that enclosed us
all. When the keepers died, would we be trapped in here? Trapped inside this
hollow casing to die as the keepers died?
No. Where did Chiva take the texts
to be burned? Not inside. There had to be a way out. I remembered the way it
felt to dance in the dust. I remembered sun on my skin. How had I forgotten it?
I found Chiva with three archivists
and another trolley heaped up with bodies. When she saw me she looked away, but
I grabbed her by the shoulder. The other archivists stared at us. I did not
care.
“When you burn them, where do you
take them?”
“What?”
“Where do you burn them?”
“Outside, of course,” she said.
“What’s the matter with you? You never wanted to talk about it before. You
ignored –”
“Show me,” I said.
“We’re going there now.”
We ascended through a long narrow
hall, entered a cylindrical lift, and stepped out onto ground covered in
grayish ash.
I looked up and saw a blue sky
striated in white clouds. The sun was so bright it hurt my eyes, and for a
moment I was blinded. I looked back down to the yard. It was a broad, circular
pit. Surrounded by a wall fifty feet high.
I felt dizzy. I collapsed into the
grayish dust.
The archivists piled up the bodies,
wet them down with reddish fluid, opened up a bin of flares by the doorway. The
texts burned without making a sound. I watched the bodies flame, bubble, melt
and char.
The archivists did not even wait
for this batch of bodies to finish burning before they took the trolley back to
the lift.
“Chiva?” they called, but Chiva
stood in front of me. The bodies belched smoke behind her.
The lift closed.
“What’s wrong, Anish?” Chiva said.
I pressed my hands against my face,
covered my eyes. “I’m unmade,” I said. “There is no truth.”
She knelt beside me. “Don’t you
know?” she said. “There never was any truth. We’re just like these burned
things.”
I reached out to her, tried to hold
her body against mine. I had missed her so much. Having her close meant I was
not alone, trapped within these walls with a dying keeper.
I held her by the wrist. My grip
was firm.
She stared at me. She stared down
at my hand on her wrist. “Anish?”
I pulled her robe loose, pushed it
off. She fell back, grabbed at the robe, smacked me across the face. “Don’t
touch me. You’re a violent body!”
I grabbed her by the shoulders,
pressed her down into the gray ash. The dust puffed up around her, fell across
her skin. She tried to get up. I held her. I put a hand to her throat, just as
she had done to me, so long ago. She was strong, but I had put myself on top of
her. I pressed my body down upon her, pushed my robe out of the way, bit her
smooth flesh. Pleasure and fear and pain, they were all the same to me -
inseparable.
I had wanted so long to be within
her, to feel again as I did in the pens, my body slick with sweat and dust,
surrounded in moist flesh.
I forced myself inside her. She
screamed at me.
Someone was laughing in my head,
laughing, laughing.
I wanted to spill into her, and
more. I wanted her to tell me truth. I wanted to unmake her as I had been
unmade, to write on her as I had been written upon. I could not tell my keeper
no when he told me to write his lies. I would not allow her to be empty
anymore, empty and free as I once was.
Her body was tight, all her muscles
clenched, and her cries filled my head even more than my keeper’s laughter. My
sweat smeared her flesh. Dust and sweat, and the sun overhead.
I thought of the dancers, of our
fire, of the texts I fucked, the texts the keepers burned while I did nothing.
I did nothing but watch, nothing but witness a truth no one would ever record.
I wanted to silence Chiva as I had been silenced. But Chiva was not like me.
I released everything into her
body: all the anger, the loneliness, the pain, the pleasure, the fear, the
unmaking. I cried out because for one moment, I too felt empty. And beautiful.
An empty text. Belonging to no one.
Then Chiva punched me in the
throat, pulled away, and kneed me in the groin. I screamed at her and fell
over. She balled up her fists and struck my face, pummeled my head. I curled up
into a ball in the dust and tried to shield myself against her. Then the
beating stopped. I heard her walk away from me.
I looked up. I saw her walking
awkwardly to the bin of flares. She took one out and stumbled back toward me. I
saw the wetness on her face, the raised bite marks on the flesh of her throat,
her breasts. Along the inside of her thigh, there, a long dribble of reddish
fluid oozed downward; blood and semen, and her own body’s wetness.
Now she would burn me.
I lay huddled in the dust, watching
her approach.
She stood over me, the flare in her
hand. She had only to ignite it.
“You love them, don’t you?” she
said.
I did not know what she meant.
“Chiva, I—”
“You think you can control the
world by hurting me? I hate you. But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You
can’t do the rest. They unmade you. They ruined you, but you can’t hurt them
can you? You think you unmade me? You don’t know anything about unmaking. I’ll
show you how to unmake the world.”
She did not put on her robe. She
went back to the bin, collected more flares. I stared at her.
“What’s she doing?” my keeper
asked, very softly.
I had almost forgotten him, this
thing I could not silence.
Chiva walked to the lift with a
heap of flares in her arms. The lift closed.
And I knew what she was going to
do.
I ran to the lift. I descended back
into the archives.
I could already smell the burning
bodies. A part of me hoped I was only still smelling the burning flesh from the
yard. But then I saw the smoke. I heard the archivists screaming. I stared to
run. I passed niches where the bodies inside were already afire. I watched the
history of Chiva’s destruction of the past.
And then I saw her, heading back
toward me, smoke billowing in her wake, her arms empty.
“I need more flares,” she said, and
she strode past me on her long legs, and her eyes were dark, her face grim.
“Chiva, please…” I did not dare
touch her.
She walked away from me. The
archivists ran madly through the corridors. I saw some of them huddled up by
the niches, weeping.
“Do something,” I told my keeper.
“What? This is your creation,
Anish, not mine.”
I could do nothing. The keepers
were dying. The past was burning.
I could do nothing but help Chiva
with its destruction.
I went back out to the burning
yard. Chiva was there, piling flares into her robe. She glanced up at me. Her
face was dark, expressionless. She tossed me a flare. I took three more and a
container of flammable fluid.
We descended together.
We burned the world.
My mother was dead. Her history
undone. The bodies were lies. My body was a lie. The world was a lie. I had
hurt the one thing I knew to be real, to be true.
We parted in the individual history
corridor. I began to search for something else. She continued to burn.
“Why are you looking for us?” my
keeper said.
“Because it was always you and your
kind I wanted to silence. Just as you silenced my kin.”
“We’ll die soon enough. Let us
die.”
“You didn’t let us die,” I said.
“You used us. Destroyed us. Unmade us.”
“No, Anish. You did that yourself.”
I found the door. How I found it, I
do not know, not to this day. I had walked so long and so far that I could no
longer smell the smoke or hear the screaming. I pressed my hand against the
door, tried to open it. It did not open.
“Let me in,” I said.
“Just let me die,” my keeper said.
“No,” I said.
The door opened. I approached the
large structure of the hexagon. The sliding door of the central storage chamber
was already open.
I walked into the keepers’ room. I
stared at the last of the little glowing lights. Three. Just three little
lights. Three dying keepers left to rule the world.
“I thought you said no,” I said.
“I didn’t let you in,” my keeper
said. “They did. You’ve burned the texts in the corridors they oversaw. Their
overseers have run off. What do you expect them to do but die?”
I pressed open the panel of one of
the squares. I ripped out the tubing and gazed at the shiny black casing
inside. I found a little groove on the underside of the casing and pulled it
out. The whole black case came out smoothly, easily, as if it had been placed
inside the square just a moment ago. The whole black casing was rectangular,
about as long as my arm, as wide around as my palm. I could not see inside.
I brought the case to the doorway,
smashed it against the wall until the casing began to come loose. I sat down on
the floor and pulled at the casing until I succeeded in tearing it off. The
rectangle inside was transparent. I saw the red fluid inside, the long rows of
metal chips, spidery wires and tiny hair-like filaments. I set the keeper in
the center of the room and unpacked the second keeper. I set it next to the
first, then pulled out the last case.
My keeper.
When I sat staring into my keeper’s
translucent body resting there in my lap, I said, “How long have you been
watching me?”
“Forever,” he said.
“You saw my mother?”
“The recordings used to be stored,”
my keeper said, “when there were enough of us to oversee them. She was an
exceptionally violent body. I watched you birthed out of her death. I was
linked to the overseer that pulled you out.”
“You know everything about me.”
“Our observation of your compound
deteriorated just after I placed you there,” my keeper said. “I sent the empty
texts after you. They were going to burn everything, you know. But I knew you
were still there. I had their keepers tell them to bring you back.”
“Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just
let me burn with the others?” I saw that I was crying. My tears fell onto the
casing. I did not wipe them away.
“I watched you always, Anish. What
we cannot have we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”
I closed my eyes. Thought of Chiva.
I set my keeper’s casing on top of
the other two. I carefully placed three of the flares under the stack of
keepers. I poured the whole container of flammable fluid over the keepers. I
held the last flare, walked back into the doorway, away from the pool of
reddish liquid. I lit the flare. It glowed white in my hand. The heat was so
intense that I had to hold it away from my body for fear of setting myself on
fire.
“What will you do now?” my keeper
said.
“Tell stories,” I said.
I tossed the flare. The room
exploded in a wave of brilliant light. The flame roared up and out. The heat
knocked me out of the doorway. I felt the sensation of flight. My body smashed
against the far wall. The flame whirled above my head, curled back into the
room.
It was very beautiful.
I did not see Chiva. Most of the
students and archivists had escaped to the burning yard, and I found them
there. We climbed atop one another’s bodies to scale the wall. From the top of
the wall, I gazed out at the incredible maze of the archives, the great
hexagons-within-hexagons that wound out for almost as far as I could see.