Philippine Speculative Fiction (17 page)

Kate Osias has won three Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Gig Book Contest, Canvas Story Writing Contest and the 10th Romeo Forbes
Children’s Sotrywriting Competition. She has earned a citation in the international
Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
for her story “The Riverstone Heart of Maria dela Rosa”
(Serendipity, 2007).

Her latest works appear in
LONTAR: Journal of Southeast Asian
Speculative Fiction
(edited by Jason Erik Lundberg),
Philippine Speculative Fiction vol. 8
(edited by Dean Alfar and Nikki Alfar), and
Horror: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults
(Dean Alfar and Kenneth Yu). Her updated bibliography can be found on her
Facebook timeline
. She co-edited the sixth and seventh volumes of
Philippine Speculative Fiction
,
the latter with Alex Osias. Kate is a proud founding member of the LitCritters, a writing and literary discussion group.

Occasionally, she ventures out into the real world to shop for shoes.

THE FOUR OF us found each other in the Facultad de Ciencias
;
four so very different people in our approach to scientific exploration, and yet the core of our passions
so very much the same, that we bonded quickly and irrevocably.

There was Cristan, a gastronomist, with his distinctive arsenal of flavors made unique by the
quintaesencia
of nontraditional materials
.
There was Maren, a machinist, with her
coiled toroid constructions which simplified and amplified the flow power in the
galleon de cielos
that adorned the skies. There was Hustino, a pianist
,
who sought elaborate
melodic solutions to the mathematical theories embodied in the Cancion del Universo. And then there was me, a dancer, who aspired to defy the prescribed laws of
fisica
through
self-augmentation and movement.

We were considered prodigies of our generation, young stars set on a trajectory to become greater than the esteemed
catedraticos
of the
colonia
, and thus we were accorded
favors that our less-accomplished peers could only dream about, from workshops equipped with tools of our craft,
casas
that protected us from the prying eyes of contemporaries, to
indulgent allowances for our sometimes volatile eccentricities. By day we would study and experiment and teach and learn and rail (against the finite nature of time, against the limitations of
flesh, against the vast swaths of knowledge we had yet to conquer despite our superior intellect). At night, we would spend our remaining stores of energy in a mesh of limbs and tongues and moans,
a careless prayer to motion and taste and sound and interlocking parts combining to become whole.

We pretended to comply with the conventions of the common, but beneath the glamour of our triumphs, inside a hidden sanctum where censorious eyes could not find us, we rebelled against the
strictures imposed on us by the sons and daughters of la Madre Patria. And in our foolishness, we even gave our clandestine relationship a name: Cuadro Amoroso
.

“Oh, Zolen. Could we have not selected something more sophisticated?” the ghost of Maren asks, as she drifts beside me on my right, appearing like a dark-skinned Madonna with her
long, flowing hair.

“Nothing wrong with the name,” the specter of Cristan says, as he floats to my left, the scent of spiced bread settling about him like a fragrant fog. “By twisting a popular
idiom, we imply a question which is answered by the nomenclature itself.”

“Says the man who convinced us to take it on in the first place.” But Maren is laughing and Cristan laughs as well, as he has become less solemn in the afterlife, and they continue
to talk and tease each other about names and choices and the questions we never really asked ourselves because it did not matter in the greater landscape of our emotions.

With deliberate strokes, I dab and smear and blend paint on my face, my focus seemingly centered on my reflection. But as Cristan and Maren punctuate their banter with laughter and flirtatious
caresses, my copper-springed heart cannot help but rejoice, cannot help but break a little more. I hear them, but they are not truly there. They are wisps of memory, mere phantoms conjured to give
me courage for what I have to do, for what I will do.

The glimmer of Hustino comes just as I complete my mask of pigment and dye, the pulsing lines beneath my skin well-concealed. Maren and Cristan welcome him with smiles, easily folding him into
the embrace of their conversation. Despite my resolutions to ignore the apparitions, I take an unnecessary pause. When Hustino puts his hands on my shoulders, I close my eyes. Intoxicated by the
smells and sounds of the past, I let myself sink deeper into the illusion of his fingers, his clever, elegant fingers, tapping a familiar sonata on my skin.

“Come, Zolen,” he says, his voice resounding from deep within me. “It is time.”

Soon,
I say by leaning back against thin air, deeper into the mirage-Hustino’s embrace.
Let me finish this,
as I draw Hustino’s ghostly hands over the flesh that
shields my copper-springed heart.
For us.

I linger for one more moment. Then, I stand up and walk out the door to my final performance.

OUR END BEGAN not with the unwitting discovery of our secret, but with music.

Hustino had just committed himself to unlocking the 27th movement of the Cancion del Universo, a year after his debut performance of the Cancion’s 32
^nd
. The rest of us only had
a fledgling understanding of the mathematics involved, but what we knew, what everyone knew, was that maestros spent entire lifetimes attempting to recreate a single part of the Great Song. Few
succeeded; fewer still emerged triumphant with two movements under their belt. No one but the first Maestro Matematico—whose archaic musical notation was the basis for all modern
interpretations of the Cancion—has been known to execute the impossibly complex piece in its entirety, and even then, the retellings of his performance had the sheen of myth rather than the
clarity of fact.

Still, Hustino was Hustino. At eighteen, he had succeeded in solving the mathematical mysteries of the 32
^nd
movement in front of the colonia’s elite which included the
Gobernador-General
,
her coterie of paramours and advisors and her small legion of
guardia sibil
; the
embajadors
of Tsina, Hindustan, Inglatera and Mejico, and their
respective babel of translators; high-ranking doctors of faith from the rival Facultad de Certeza
;
and us, Cristan, Maren and myself, under the guise of like-minded peers to appease
narrow-minded conservatives. The performance was widely acclaimed not just because of Hustino’s age – although certainly that, in itself, was already a noteworthy
accomplishment—but also because he had caused a rare and sought-after effect: the
alma parpadear
.

At the climactic crescendo (after the lengthy introductions, after several opening sonatas, after one loud cantata) every one of us who was then present—from the lowliest starch-collared
bureaucrat to the bejeweled, acting sovereign of the colonia—felt a sharp shift in the ground beneath us, an internal trembling so intense that it seemed as if our hearts had ceased to beat
and our minds had conceded all rational thought while our souls, our traitorous souls, in sublime accord, laid bare our most guarded, our most terrible of secrets to unite us with the music as it
surged and swelled and assaulted and claimed and sundered and soothed and triumphed and faded and thundered again. When Hustino’s performance finally ended—as it had to,
eventually—we all were left feeling raw but cleansed.

An alma parpadear is a consequence of the Cancion done right, but no maestro, and especially not an aspiring one born in one of the colonias, would have attempted to affect so large a crowd.
Hustino, being Hustino, explained the science afterward, when we had sufficiently recovered, when he had begun conversing again, when he had stopped wielding his genius through melody and when we,
his audience, had been mollified by the realization that we remembered very little—and certainly none of the details—of our unwitting mathematics-driven confessionals.

“Resonant frequency, nothing more,” he said, obviously pleased with the destruction he had wrought to our inner workings. “We all have our own unique internal frequency, but
like all sound, it can be calibrated, adjusted, reset. The Cancion was written to unite people in a single wave. Theoretically, if you solve it and play it correctly, the music will create an
encompassing language that is bereft of deceit and subterfuge; a language free of bias; a language to bind us all into one thought, one voice, one sound.”

The carefully-worded invitations—written in florid script and invoking the beauty of the universe as preordained by the Arquitecto Sagrado—arrived shortly after Hustino announced his
intention to work on the 27th movement.

Hustino, as was his wont, ignored them. Sound was an unforgiving mistress, and most of his days were spent analyzing velocity vectors, even going as far as abandoning his other fields of
study
.
The
catedraticos
were lenient because of what Hustino had accomplished, even without the titular designation of maestro.

The missives, however, were less merciful, more insistent, as unrelenting as a noonday sun. With each letter unanswered, there was a proportionate increase in the rumors of heresy practiced
within the walls of the Ciencias. Everyone knew the supplicants of Certeza perpetuated these false tales. Everyone knew that the malicious gossip would not stop until Hustino agreed to meet the
doctors of faith.

It was an exceptionally humid night, the air thick with the promise of rains that would not come, when Cristan finally spoke out.

“Hustino. Can you not spare the time to meet with these self-aggrandizing fools? Perhaps they merely want you to play them a minuet; perhaps they merely want to congratulate you on your
success. As it is now, they are taking your refusal as an insult to not just the healing arts, but also to the faith.” Cristan stretched out past Maren to stroke Hustino’s bare thigh,
his fingertips grazing the sensitive inner part in a slow caress to take the sting out of his words. “Hearing them out can help relieve the tension.”

We had just been reborn from the encompassing consumption of lovemaking, our skins gleaming with sweat, our eyes heavy-lidded. Despite our bodies’ relaxed states, tension was quick to
bloom, then twist out from Hustino. Connected as we were in a complex embrace, it was difficult to miss the pianist’s discomfort.

“Now, now, my love, none of that,” Maren said, smiling against Hustino’s skin. “You know an encounter with the odious healers would be inevitable after your incredible
success with the 32
^nd
.”

I concurred by letting my legs tangle with his, executing a gentler version of
enganche
to articulate my support while still arguing for the only rational course of action.

After a moment, Hustino laughed, effectively dispelling the awkward moment with his good-humored surrender. “Who am I to go against the will of the Cuadro Amoroso?” Then he turned to
accept Cristan’s open-mouthed kiss and I saw, from the way he shifted his shoulders to the way his muscles contracted, that he was no longer thinking about doctors and inconvenient
invitations. No other discussion of the coherent sort occurred again that evening.

And so it was that Hustino took time away from calculating fractions of octaves to meet with the doctors of faith from the Facultad de Certeza
.
When he returned, he was irritably
upset.

“They want to use the Cancion’s alma parpadear to make sheep!” Hustino all but shouted. “The bastards are claiming the Arquitecto Sagrado wills it so. The
fools.”

Hustino plunged himself deeper into his craft, rebuffing all further requests from the good doctors, turning a deaf ear to the increasingly violent altercations that erupted between the students
of science and faith. When he was not in his workshop testing the tonality of string, he was translating musical notations, transposing keys, trying out solutions that sounded bitter and dissonant.
It was obvious to us that he was distressed, that there was an unpleasant aftertaste he was trying to wash out of his system with his work. Often, his raging emotions came out as furious,
wood-breaking, paper-crumpling frustration; sometimes, it came out as genius, as he made considerable headway with the 27th by exploring musical avenues that he would have disregarded in more
pleasant times.

Cristan, Maren, and I dealt with Hustino’s ill-temper in our own inimitable ways. Cristan worked on constructing a modified ash-furnace that could distill not just ordinary ingredients,
but metals as well, reflecting Hustino’s determined efforts to build a set of ivory keys with perfect tonality. Maren, on the other hand, adjusted and dissected and tinkered with the coupling
gaps of coiled transformers, as though Hustino’s manic compulsions to measure and re-measure amplitude against frequency fed her own. While I, who trafficked in the unspoken, who was
fascinated by the pianist’s frenetic grace, attempted to interpret Hustino’s motions by adjusting the kinematic chains on my arms and legs, loosening certain joints for a certain degree
of freedom, imposing a slider where it was unexpected, to better mimic abrupt movement.

Before Hustino’s encounter with the doctors could blend into a harmless, blurred memory, colorfully-attired dignitaries of various origins began to visit, carrying with them their strange
accents and their strange smells and their strange tributes, tainting the quality of the air in Hustino’s workshop even long after they had left and their offerings been thrown away. Hustino
refused to meet with any of the
embajadors,
regardless of their representatives’ nuanced greetings or the exquisite detail of their gifts. During this period, the import and export
of goods with the colonia’s neighbors became more restrictive, more bureaucratic. Everyone believed that the so-called friends of la Madre Patria were the cause of the sudden difficulty in
trade. Everyone believed that Hustino alone had the power to appease.